Seven Modes of Uncertainty 9780674419674

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S E V E N M O D E S O F U N C E R TA I N T Y

S E V E N M O D E S O F U N C E RTA I N T Y

C. Namwali Serpell

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2014

Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Serpell, C. Namwali, 1980– Seven Modes of Uncertainty / C. Namwali Serpell. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-72909-4 (alk. paper) 1. Fiction—History and criticism. 2. Literature and morals. 3. Ethics in literature. 4. Literature—Aesthetics. I. Title. PN3347.S47 2014 809.3'9353—dc23 2013032892

For Papa

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

I. Mutual Exclusion / 41 1 Oscillation

45

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

2 Enfolding

79

Rereading Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001)

II. Multiplicity / 115 3 Adjacency

119

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

4 Accounting

153

Interreading William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Shirley Jackson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity” (1943), and Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003)

III. Repetition / 191 5 Vacuity Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991)

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Contents

6 Synchronicity

230

Metareading Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005)

7 Conclusion: Flippancy

269

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) Appendix 1: The Vagaries of the New Ethics

293

Appendix 2: Seven Modes of Uncertainty

303

Notes

305

Acknowledgments

379

Index

381

S E V E N M O D E S O F U N C E R TA I N T Y

INTRODUCTION

“Blind mouths!” —John Milton, “Lycidas” “A way of happening, a mouth” —W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”

Let’s begin with a beginning. Humbert Humbert’s first words in Lolita are famously, even infamously, incantatory: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”1 Because they come at the beginning of the novel, we cannot escape these lines, whether we find them gorgeous, allusive—Poe has already reared his head in the merest syllable cribbed from “Annabel Lee”—or merely purple.2 As we read on, Humbert’s poeticizing poses another problem: “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”3 Linking murder to style, the novel conjoins a question of morality to a question of form in an ecstatic paean to the beloved’s name. In this way Lolita’s opening sounds the three major notes of Seven Modes of Uncertainty—ethics, aesthetics, and affect—and holds them in resonant tension, like a hum. Vladimir Nabokov’s “dirty novel” will allow me to offer brief, loose definitions of these three aspects of the agonistic, participatory reading experience that I call a mode of uncertainty. Although aesthetics and 1

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Introduction

affect reverberate throughout these pages, Seven Modes of Uncertainty is in the key of ethics. I begin with Lolita because it beautifully illustrates how an intense, structured uncertainty can refract—rather than merely reflect—an ethical disturbance. Decoupling ethics from propositional content, the novel does not guide or imitate readers’ moral values; it unsettles them. Yet the uncertain experience that Lolita affords itself has ethical value. In this sense, the novel’s 1955 publication signals a transitional moment in the history of the relationship between literary uncertainty and ethics. Lolita thus lays the grounds for both the contemporary fictions and the ethical literary criticism that are my abiding concerns in this book. To telegraph my conception of the reading experience, one I would characterize as performative, I want to consider not what Humbert’s words say but what they do. If you would be so willing, please reread the lines above. I don’t know whether this just happened to you, but I have found that many readers have the impulse to taste Humbert’s delectating description, to say the name, to see just where the tip of the tongue taps. Perhaps we whisper or silently mouth “Lolita,” but our tendency is to do this just as our eyes scan the third denotation of the name, the one written as three short lines. The lines are constructed so that we say—as the book says, as Humbert says—“Lo. Lee. Ta.” I submit that this is a quiet scandal because Humbert, in effect, has put Lolita in your mouth. I am ventriloquized: complicity not of the mind but of the tongue. John Ray, Jr.’s preface has warned me, but curiosity trumps suspicion. As if enacting that eerie line from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, “I made no vows, but vows were then made for me,” Lolita’s opening seals us to the text via something akin to an unwitting performative utterance.4 How does this come about? Is it like what the narrator of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952) says of generalized dupery? “You’d walk up to a guy and say, ‘Here, hold this,’ and probably he’d pulled the same gag himself; he’d know you were handing him a horse turd or a prickly pear or a dead mouse. But if you pulled it fast enough, he’d do just what you told him.”5 Are we caught off guard? In Dreaming by the Book, Elaine Scarry argues that this imperativity—the capacity to make readers do things, imagine things—is characteristic of literature going back to Homer.6 Yes, we must just be used to it. Because if we dwell on it, the fact that fictions work on us—work us—this way is astonishing.

Introduction

The stark first words of Samuel Beckett’s Company describe even as they enact this trick: “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.” The literary command is usually implicit, however, as this phrase from later in Company suggests: “if there were a mouth to be seen he would not see it.”7 When Scarry describes a literary idiom of “instruction,” she emphasizes that it “consists of a steady stream of erased imperatives.” The text instructs us but effaces its instructiveness to convey “ ‘givenness,’ the sense of something received and simultaneously there for the taking.”8 This givenness is why the scandal at the start of Lolita is quiet. I will notice only later, perhaps on a rereading, that I let “Lolita” into my mouth long enough to dissolve—for three beats—the difference between me and Humbert. The effect is grounded in the imperativity of all literary instruction, yet it is heightened by the uncertain mingling of Lolita’s aesthetic, affective, and ethical energies. Let’s open with the aesthetic, the fancy prose style of which Humbert boasts. The aesthetic originally meant “relating to perception by the senses”; it is from the Greek aisthesthai, or “perceive.” The sense “concerned with beauty” with which we are familiar was coined in German and adopted into English in the nineteenth century. When I use the word aesthetic, I am more interested in the older question of perception by the senses (in cognition and appreciation) than in the newer, narrower one of beauty. How does literary form shape what we perceive? What can the aesthetic features of Nabokov’s lines tell us about their workings? To take the most obvious characteristic of the lines, alliteration, we might note that the letters being made to chime here are liquid els, sibilant esses, plosive pees, and dental tees. These consonants draw the reader’s attention to her lips, tongue, and teeth—that is, to the mouth within which she is to stage this miniature alveolar drama. Alliteration emphasizes sound and its embodiment; to use Scarry’s terms, the passage “enlists” features of reading aloud to help us bring it audibly to life, as if reciting a poem. A translator of poetry and a poet who was “never able to see any generic difference between poetry and artistic prose,” Nabokov suggested that in “plain prose there are also certain rhythmic patterns, the music of precise phrasing, the beat rendered by recurrent peculiarities of idiom and intonation.”9 Lolita’s opening lines tap a long literary history of impassioned addresses to the beloved—fire, loins, love—while rhythmically inducing a rapture of language.10 More prosaically, Nabokov spent many years as a language instructor. Sounding out syllables in lecture was a familiar

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pastime: “A Russian vowel is an orange, an English vowel is a lemon. When you speak Russian your mouth ought to distend laterally at the corners.”11 Despite an avowed tin ear for music, an abiding interest in pronunciation litters Nabokov’s oeuvre, and he took pains in interviews to correct how we say “Lolita”: “for the necessary effect of dreamy tenderness both ‘l’s and the ‘t’ and indeed the whole word should be iberized and not pronounced the American way with crushed ‘l’s, a coarse ‘t,’ and a long ‘o.’ ”12 In other words, Nabokov knew very well how to prompt readers to sound “Lolita,” and he used both poetic and pedagogic resources to construct a quite literally instructive opening. Even if the lesson is seductive, spelling out a word as though learning it for the first time enforces a certain vulnerability in us. Joan Didion calls writing “the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want . . . but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”13 Georges Poulet describes it from the other side: “It all happens, then, as though reading were the act by which a thought managed to bestow itself within me with a subject not myself. Whenever I read, I mentally pronounce an I, and yet the I which I pronounce is not myself.”14 Lolita makes us pronounce before anyone even says “I.” Note that “the tip of the tongue” belongs grammatically to no one; it could be the narrator’s, character’s, or reader’s tongue. This formal feature exposes the degree to which reading as such troubles the boundary between subject and object. Poulet says of reading literature, “You are inside it, it is inside you; there is no longer inside or outside.”15 This description of reading sounds sexy because it invokes an interpenetration, a slow dissolve, a loss of power that is itself a form of power. A true frenemy if ever there was one, Edmund Wilson wrote in his crushing review of Nabokov’s exacting translation of Eugene Onegin that “with his sadomasochistic . . . tendencies . . . he seeks to torture both the reader and himself.”16 Zadie Smith, in a recent, more laudatory essay, calls reading “limited, directed play” and goes on to say that “in Nabokov’s case, it’s more like S&M.”17 The reader of Lolita undergoes the pleasure of submission or, less outrageously, abandonment. The novel’s erotic name-calling thus relies for its performative effect on triggers I would call affective: desires, moods, feelings, emotions, sen-

Introduction

sations, attitudes. The term affect was coined in nineteenth-century German psychology from the Latin affectus, or “disposition,” which is from afficere, or “to influence.” I use the word affect because of this connotation of a two-way street: it is passive and active, a subjection to the world and an orientation toward it. The recent idea that affect is a “prepersonal” intensity of the body—in distinction to “social” emotions and “biographical” feelings—is intriguing in this context.18 If the uttering of Lolita’s name is blind in the way I’ve been suggesting, this may well exemplify the idea that affect is “a non-conscious experience of intensity . . . of unformed and unstructured potential.”19 But even seemingly autonomous affective responses are structured or mediated—from mediatus, in the middle—especially when it comes to art. Rather than placing affect inside or outside consciousness, I follow William James in treating it as a no-man’s-land: In the case of our affectional experiences we have no permanent and steadfast purpose that obliges us to be consistent, so we find it easy to let them float ambiguously, sometimes classing them with our feelings, sometimes with more physical realities. . . . [I]n practical life no urgent need has yet arisen for deciding whether to treat them as rigorously mental or as rigorously physical facts. So they remain equivocal; and, as the world goes, their equivocality is one of their great conveniences.20

My sense of affect in this book is pragmatic and liminal in this way: between subjects and objects, between bodies and minds, between consciousness and its absence.21 To be sure, the highly constructed opening to Lolita belies any supposition that affective intensities can be divorced from language, intention, or will.22 That is, the unwitting, pleasurable mouthing of Lolita is only effective (and affective) because—the masochist’s paradox—I first choose to submit to it. If I am tricked into speaking a name, it is a trick I asked for when I picked up the novel, which requires my willingness to submit to its instruction. Readers do not mouth Lolita out of nowhere. At some level, we elect to do so. The power that the text wields on us is always contingent on a set of rules and rituals that require the reader’s willfulness as well. Because if we are undergoing a process of instruction or submission, aren’t we also engaging in a process of enlivening and activating? We speak the text out of its paltry black and white clutter. This is why Poulet’s

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theory of readerly possession is foregrounded by the postulate that “these mental entities, in order to exist, need the shelter which I provide; they are dependent on my consciousness.”23 And so, in counterpoint to Beckett’s imperative “Imagine,” Humbert offers this craven plea: “Imagine me; for I shall not exist if you do not imagine me.”24 The reader must lend her breath to him and Lolita both. There is another version of readerly power we might consider: perhaps I say “Lolita” not under implicit direction but out of my own skepticism.25 What if I don’t trust the description of this anonymous tongue’s trips and taps? My act is then one not of compliance but of testing, or even contestation: a stronger version of sounding it out. This possibility suits Nabokov’s cheerfully agonistic model of reading: “I work hard, I work long, on a body of words until it grants me complete possession and pleasure. If the reader has to work in his turn—so much the better. Art is difficult.” In a slightly more supercilious mode, he says: “[An author] clashes with readerdom because he is his own ideal reader and those other readers are so often mere lip-moving ghosts and amnesiacs. On the other hand, a good reader is bound to make fierce efforts when wrestling with a difficult author, but those efforts can be most rewarding when the bright dust has settled.”26 The first sentences of Lolita prompt even the fiercest wrestler to move his lips. They thus give the lie to the oft-quoted, oft-misapplied line, “poetry makes nothing happen,” invoking instead what Auden says of poetry five lines later: “it survives / A way of happening, a mouth.”27 The question for Lolita is: Whose mouth? Who is in control—who has the power—in reading’s happening?28 This is where ethics comes in, not only at the level of the characters—much critical ink has been spilled over the question of Lolita’s “voice”—but also at the level of the reader’s willed and willing relation to the text. Jean-Paul Sartre describes this paradox of agency in his 1947 essay “What Is Literature?” Literature produces free choice: we have to decide what something means. But this free choice is forced on us by the text.29 This strongly resembles Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s much more recent conception of literary ethics in his 1999 Shadows of Ethics: The reader is free and autonomous, and responsible for his or her construction of the text; . . . they must submit to the text and try to understand it “on its own terms.” Readers thus construct the law of the text freely but construct it as the law of the text. The text binds the reader, who

Introduction binds the text. Where, then, is the law? In both, that is, in the relation between the two: the relation of reader to narrative text provides a compelling instance of the free submission of the subject to the law.30

Harpham’s use of the word “compelling” in his last sentence reinforces the ambivalence he is describing: is literature compelling or compulsory? I submit that this uncertainty about agency in reading is the wellspring of the roiling ethical experience that is Lolita. In the afterword to the novel, Nabokov claims that “Lolita has no moral in tow.”31 But whether they adduce to a single “moral,” there are plainly ethical stakes to having the reader play dummy to a self-declared murderer. Those stakes lie in the complex interaction between the moral questions in the novel’s story world and the agentive struggle that begins when we open it. Because ethical criticism is the main stage of this book’s critical intervention, I will dwell longer on this third note in the opening strains of Lolita. Given that the whole of Seven Modes of Uncertainty is in essence an exploration of the recesses of the word ethics, however, a provisional definition will do for now. Generally speaking, ethics is the branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles. Its Greek origin, ēthikē (tekhnē), means “(the science of) morals.” Though our idea of a “science” has obviously changed, I do wish to maintain the sense that, like aesthetics and affect, ethics is a conceptual rather than a descriptive term.32 Ethics does not impart morality; it parses morality. Ethical no more means good than aesthetic means pretty or than affective means pleasurable. Nabokov insists that literary art is irreducible to the truism that “reading is good for you”: “Art has been too often turned into a tool to convey ideas—whether political or moral—to influence, to teach, to improve and enlighten and what not. I am not telling you that art does not improve and enlighten the reader. But it does this in its own special way.”33 This special way is not didactic, but neither is it “art for art’s sake,” a “slogan” Nabokov despised.34 He forecasted that “one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel—and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.”35 The need for a reappraiser implies that such ethical imperatives require untangling from the weave.

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The afterword to Lolita offers, in contrast to a “moral in tow,” one such knotted version of art’s “special way”: “For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as if affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”36 While most readers pick up on the aesthetic emphasis, Nabokov commingles it with affect (bliss, ecstasy) and ethics (kindness, tenderness) in a heady, uncertain mix: “somehow, somewhere connected.” Lolita’s ethics lie not in an extractable moral but in a multidimensional experience over time. As the novel moves beyond its first words, we alternately collude and collide with Humbert’s mouthing—and blindness. Richard Rorty draws attention to an item in Nabokov’s list in the afterword of “the nerves of the novel . . . the secret points, the subliminal co-ordinates by means of which the book is plotted”: the Kasbeam barber.37 Humbert is so inattentive as the barber babbles on about his son that it comes “as a shock to realize . . . that the moustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years.” Rorty links Humbert’s incuriosity here to his dismissal of Charlotte Haze’s grief over the death of her baby boy: “it is left to the reader to make the connection. . . . This and the further fact that Humbert does not make the connection himself, is exactly the sort of thing Nabokov expects his ideal readers . . . to notice.”38 This kind of elusive (“secret,” “subliminal”) argument is perhaps why his less-than-ideal readers often complain of being deceived. But as Nabokov once said of a good chess problem: “The pleasant experience of the roundabout route . . . would amply reward [us] for the misery of the deceit.”39 What Seven Modes of Uncertainty contributes to this kind of argument about how ethics relates to uncertainty—in this case, to not knowing or not noticing—is a sense of the roundabout route. If Lolita’s beginning makes us delectate in a child’s incantatory nickname, the repetition and modulation of her name throughout the novel affords a symphonic reading that builds on the three beats with which it begins. This reading is as resonant and affecting as the “melody of children at play” Humbert hears at the end of the novel, noting the absence of Lolita’s “voice from that concord.”40 Yet the name’s recitation in the novel’s last line—“And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita”—is one in which we do not participate. By now, we know that the name is Humbert’s alone; she calls herself Dolly. The experiential arc of Lolita, its

Introduction

music—its mode—begins with a thrown voice, reverberates with an absent one, and ends in silence. This agonistic, unsettling experience over time is what I mean by literary uncertainty.41 I prefer the word uncertainty over its semantic siblings precisely because it captures the interactive, temporal, and experiential qualities to reading. While its kin terms (ambiguity, difficulty, indeterminacy) tend to get attributed solely to the literary object, uncertainty can refer to either the object or the cognitive state of the observer. It is the quality or “state of not being definitely known” or “the state or character of being uncertain in mind.” Drifting between reader and text, uncertainty invokes both. Yet containing even as it opposes “certainty,” uncertainty carries with it a whiff of the scientific (as in Werner Heisenberg’s principle) while keeping present the variable, relational basis of the literary. In short, uncertainty feels analyzable, an experience that emerges out of specific structures, rather than a mere overlay of obscurity or vagueness.42 Far from fuzzy, Lolita’s highly structured form molds the reading experience into the shifting, variable mode of uncertainty that sets aesthetics, affect, and ethics into an ongoing dance. This combination of measurable form and experiential dynamism suits both my method and my historical purview in this book. In the early twentieth century, radical experiments with literary form coincided with a rise in the analytical dissection of literary form. Shared between literature and criticism was a new conception of literary uncertainty, derived partially from the physical sciences and from the circulation of pseudo-scientific ideas in the public domain. I trace a small-scale version of this transformation in the concept of uncertainty at the close of this introduction, where I discuss the significance of William Empson—a mathematician by training—to my project. A lepidopterist whose research has recently gained more credence, Nabokov was equally attuned to the scientific and philosophical developments in the work of Heisenberg, Einstein, and Bohr. He liked to tell his students that “the best temperament for a reader to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one.”43 This novel’s uncertainty can also be seen as the coming into clarity of modernism’s legacy. In 1939, Samuel Beckett said of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “It is not to be read—or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.”44 In 1993, Toni Morrison presented an analogous epiphany about the elusive presence of race in William

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Faulkner’s work: “So the structure is the argument. Not what this one says, or that one says. It is the structure of the book.” Nabokov argues in his analysis of Eugene Onegin that “we are concerned only with the structure of a published work.”45 A wise reader, he advises, “must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.”46 These descriptions of literary form—that something itself, the structure is the argument, a castle of steel and glass—suggest not only that it has an ontology but also that it is no mere handmaiden to content. The recent Anglophone novels I consider in this book represent Lolita’s lineage in both their ethically disturbing content and their radically structured uncertainty. They include Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003), Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005).47 Their story lines respectively concern conspiracy, infanticide, rape, murder, kidnapping, and terrorism. The representation of the horrors of human existence is by no means new; Greek tragedy is an obvious precedent. And the experiments with form we can trace over the course of literary history are no less geared toward uncertainty than those enacted by these postmodern and contemporary texts. It is the copresence of these features in these novels that interests me from the point of view of ethics. In each case, the text does not merely use a broken form to reflect its often irresolvable dark ethical disturbance. Rather, formal uncertainty refracts and unsettles the diegesis, while making an experiential argument with its own ethical resonance. This makes the isolation of moral propositions from these texts utterly untenable. While some wear their ethical investments on their sleeves, so to speak (Beloved, Atonement, American Psycho), the moral dilemmas they recount in their story lines can be distinct from, or even counter to, the ethical resonance of their form. They present extreme test cases for the analysis of ethics and uncertainty—they work at the very limits of both but do not align them. Because their form and content do not just mirror one another, these post-Nabokovian texts work implosively. The fact that they are narratives makes the excision of moral propositions even more difficult: nov-

Introduction

els take time, developing a mode of uncertainty irreducible to a single encounter, moment, judgment, or tenet. Beyond grafting its scintillating skin, then, these contemporary texts seem to have inherited Lolita’s complex, chronic auto-immune disorder. To put it a little differently, the novels I consider in Seven Modes of Uncertainty operate within a cultural frame about the uses of uncertainty that Lolita made possible. Indeed, if Nabokov’s “dirty novel” set the stage for my fictional exempla, its reception set the terms for the ethical literary criticism with which I engage in this book. A glance back to Lolita’s moment of publication will show that, although literary uncertainty was hardly a new phenomenon, it was at midcentury being declared as the very source of literature’s ethical value.

The Debate Nabokov first appeared on television in 1958 on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s show Close-Up.48 The preeminent Canadian journalist of the day, Pierre Berton, conducted a “trialogue” with a stuttering Nabokov and a dry-witted, cigarette-smoking literary critic. Though Brian Boyd notes that “unlike all Nabokov’s later television interviews, this show was unscripted and live,” the interview still feels stagey. Sitting in a Radio City studio made up to look like his parlor, Nabokov holds note cards from which he reads, a technique he used because he hated speaking, as he put it, “off the Nabocuff.”49 His voice is rubbery and stilted; Nabokov often elided his r’s to disguise the grasseyement from his early training in French, leading to an ignominious Woger Wabbit effect.50 At one point, he abruptly walks over to a sofa and the other two men awkwardly follow, Berton forced to carry his chair over as he utters a lame transition. The argument seems scripted, too. Prompted by Berton’s leading questions, the author and the critic butt heads at various angles on exactly what Lolita is about. Nabokov says the novel is not a satire but a dream. The critic interrupts, “But there is an underlying tone of satire.” Nabokov, in typical style, will admit this only if the etymology of satire (“fruit salad”) is taken into account. With his mixture of nerdy and artsy myopia, the author offers his usual claim for the spine as the crucial affective locus of literary response: “I don’t wish to touch hearts, and I don’t even want to affect minds very much, what I want to produce is really that little sob in the spine of the artist-reader.”

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The critic confesses that he nonetheless found Lolita “deeply moving” and “shocking,” hastening to affirm: “I’m glad that it’s shocking, I read a lot of shocking books, I think we need to be shocked.” This guides the argument he lays out: Lolita is the latest love story in a romantic tradition that uses transgression to signify amorous passion. Gauging Nabokov’s visible skepticism about this claim, the critic protests: “You can’t trust a creative writer to say what he has done; he can say what he meant to do. And even then, we don’t have to believe him.” Sitting beside him, Nabokov grins like he’s been caught. In this battle between words and ideas, the warriors are well matched. Nabokov speaks with panache rather than reason. His attention to detail emerges in an irrepressible flair for diction: in his wife Vera’s favorite line, he defines philistines as “negligible generalities; users of covers and cosies; ready-made souls in plastic bags.” By contrast, the critic in the CBC debate is cogent and calm; his argument proceeds rationally, with great authority. It is apt—it forms a nice chiasmus—that the critic, Lionel Trilling, was a writer.51 That a conflict over a novel between “artistreaders” could be taken for granted suits the Cold War era’s insatiable appetite for debates and its treatment of art as a site of contention.52 If we take seriously Nabokov’s remarks about the ideal relation between author and reader, this contentiousness is what makes art valuable. Two previews of the CBC debate—one in person, one in print—suggest that this debate over Lolita was more than a staged event. The novel was published in France in 1955 by Olympia Press, which mostly put out what we might call literary smut. When Graham Greene included Lolita in his list of the three best novels of 1955, the novel took off among cognoscenti. Though it had not yet come out in the United States, breath was bated about what Trilling would say about Lolita, not least because his wife, Diana, had savaged Nabokov’s Bend Sinister in a Nation review. M. H. Abrams recounts their eventual encounter at a party he hosted at his home. Nabokov stood at one end of a living room, Trilling at the other: [I]t was time for the party to break up, and so they began simultaneously to drift to the door, each with his own entourage. I had introduced them before, but they had done no more than acknowledge the introduction. But now I took care to ensure that they would have to say something to each other. Nabokov remarked [with a smile as broad as the sun, another memoirist recalls], “I understand, Mr. Trilling, that you don’t like my little

Introduction Lolita.” And Trilling replied, “No that isn’t true. What I’ve said is that I’m putting off the rereading of it until this summer, when I have the time really to come to grips with it.”53

Nabokov would have appreciated this reply. He was no fan of pedantry, but he admired book reviewers who “are creative artists in their own right, such as, say, Trilling.”54 Unlike his alternately warm and heated friendship with Wilson, his gentlemanly quarrel with Trilling evidently possessed equanimity. No doubt Nabokov read Trilling’s review carefully when it came out in Griffin later that summer. It lays out at greater length the argument about Lolita’s place in a lineage of romance novels and concludes with a downright paean to—a groundbreaking advocacy for—ambiguity: One of the attractions of Lolita is its ambiguity of tone . . . and its ambiguity of intention, its ability to arouse uneasiness, to throw the reader off balance, to require him to change his stance and shift his position and move on. Lolita gives us no chance to settle and sink roots. Perhaps it is the curious moral mobility it urges on us that accounts for its remarkable ability to represent certain aspects of American life.55

In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth cited this as evidence of a new critical attitude: “when Lionel Trilling confessed recently his inability to decide, in reading Nabokov’s controversial Lolita, whether the narrator’s final indictment of his own immorality is to be taken seriously or ironically, he hastened to explain that this ambiguity made the novel better, not worse.” Ambiguity, Booth went on to lament—and this is the historical point I am drawing out of Lolita’s moment of publication—had become an unquestioned index of ethical value: The argument is clear. Our life is morally ambiguous; this book makes it seem even more so—it throws us even more off balance, presumably, than we were before—and hence its very lack of clarity is a virtue. In short we have looked for so long at foggy landscapes reflected in misty mirrors that we have come to like fog. Clarity and simplicity are suspect; irony reigns supreme.56

It is unsurprising that Booth took issue with the potential exculpation of Lolita on the grounds of ambiguity; Nabokov’s controversial novel was

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far more disturbing than the unreliable modernist novels Booth tended to admire. But for Trilling, despite his training in the same ArnoldianLeavisite school, it was precisely this ethical disturbance—“I’m glad it’s shocking”—stirred by its ambiguity “of tone . . . of intention” that gave Lolita its value. Trilling’s review of Lolita presented him with the opportunity to exemplify what he had argued five years earlier in The Liberal Imagination: “To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique relevance . . . because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.”57 Trilling’s belief in an agonistic ethos never dwindled, even as he began to rail against “modern criticism”: “Attributing to literature virtually angelic powers, it has passed the word to the readers of literature that the one thing you do not do when you meet an angel is wrestle with him.”58 The 1958 debate over Lolita—in parlor games real, staged, and printed—offers a triptych of the “wrestling” between artist-readers he and Nabokov both so admired. It also presents a key moment in the history of literary uncertainty. Thirty years before Lolita’s publication, T. S. Eliot had said poets “must be difficult” to reflect the “variety and complexity” of modern civilization; twenty years after, Wolfgang Iser would present this as an ethical value: “it is perhaps one of the chief values of literature that by its very indeterminacy it is able to transcend the restrictions of time and the written word and to give to people of all ages and backgrounds the chance to enter other worlds and so enrich their lives.”59 To be sure, this historical shift isn’t in degree or kind but in a perception of the purpose of literary uncertainty. A pervasive theme of social, literary, scientific, mathematical, and philosophical thought since the Greeks, uncertainty was now seen as not just endemic but also as both analyzable and valuable. We can see this view consolidating in the hubbub over Lolita, which flung out questions about what uncertainty signified, how we were to “grapple” with it, and why we should value it. The debate between Trilling and Nabokov thus presents a historical pivot—a sort of dialectics at a standstill—for how we still think about literary uncertainty and its relationship to ethics today.60 Nabokov’s insistence on towing no moral and Trilling’s praise for Lolita’s “ambiguity” of “tone and intention” and the “moral mobility it urges on us” present key features of the current discur-

Introduction

sive field of ethical criticism upon which Seven Modes of Uncertainty plays. I submit that their respective styles of argument even correspond to the two major sides of this field. If Trilling’s musings on literature’s variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty evince a thematic broadness commensurate with humanistic criticism, Nabokov’s runic ethos of particularity (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) resonates with ideas about literary alterity. Trilling derived his ideas from John Keats, for whose collected letters he wrote an introduction asserting the importance of “negative capability,” and from Matthew Arnold and E. M. Forster (Trilling wrote biographies of both).61 For Forster, Trilling argued, moral realism “is not the awareness of morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes, and dangers of living the moral life.”62 Trilling’s vision of the moral uses of ambiguity planted the seeds of the branch of ethical criticism often called “humanism” and epitomized by Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep and Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge. This version of ethical criticism is often contrasted with a branch influenced by continental theory and philosophy; these critics tend to delineate the impasses of an ethics of alterity or Otherness. Like Nabokov, they want to avoid extrapolating ideas from the literary, taking its eruptive uncertainty as a warning against “negligible generalities” and discursive regimes. If Forster’s 1910 “Only connect!” is the slogan of the humanists, Beckett’s 1983 “Fail better” might be the koan of the poststructuralists. But while metacritical overviews of ethical criticism still tend to divide it into these two axes, they have in common the belief in literary uncertainty as an index of ethical value, an idea that was solidifying at the time Nabokov and Trilling sat down to chat about Lolita.63 Dorothy Hale’s account of the “New Ethics” sees on both sides of the field a “free submission” to uncertainty: The novel reader’s experience of free submission . . . becomes, for these theorists, a necessary condition for the social achievement of diversity, a training in the honoring of Otherness, which is the defining ethical property of the novel. . . . What distinguishes this new theory of ethical choice from an older theory of the autonomous liberal subject is the selfconsciously unverifiable status of the alterity that the ethical subject seeks to produce—an unverifiability that retains the post-structuralist’s skepticism about knowledge as a tool of hegemony while bestowing upon epistemological uncertainty a positive ethical content.64

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Hale includes in her rubric of the New Ethics theorists as disparate as Geoffrey Galt Harpham, J. Hillis Miller, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Wayne Booth, and Martha Nussbaum.65 These theorists do not see literary ethics as a set of principles, tenets, or virtues. As Harpham notes, “ethics is not properly understood as an ultimately coherent set of concepts, rules, or principles . . . but rather it is best conceived as a factor of ‘imperativity’ immanent in, but not confined to, the practices of language, analysis, narrative, and creation.”66 The ethical substrate of reading for these theorists is said to subsist in what Harpham elsewhere pithily calls “the ought in thought.”67 The philosopher Bernard Williams offers an illuminating account of this transition from the old ethics to the New Ethics, so to speak: [T]he traditional idea that fiction can yield salutary exempla of virtue and vice . . . has been significantly transmuted from an earlier world of clear statements and plain exempla to one in which fictions display ambiguities, moral conflicts that are imperfectly resolvable, multiple ethical interpretations and so forth, and this alteration reveals not merely changes in ethical consciousness but a changed relation of fiction both to ethical life and to moral philosophy. In a world in which there are clear moral statements and plain exempla, the relation between the two will tend to be something like that of text to illustration, and the role of the fiction will be that of an efficient aid. Once a certain degree of ambiguity is reached, however, the fiction will come to do things that direct statement cannot do, and working through the fiction will itself represent an extension of ethical thought, and conceivably of ethical experience.68

Most critics now take it for granted that literary ethics, as Derek Attridge puts it, “is less a question of something we can learn than something that happens to us and through us as we read.”69 This shift of focus has been sharpened by the widespread adoption of British philosopher J. L. Austin’s theory of the “performative utterance” as a lens for literature.70 The poststructuralist application of performativity to reading inspires ethical critics like Hillis Miller, who asserts that “every sentence in a literary work is part of a chain of performative utterances opening out more and more of an imaginary realm initiated in the first sentence. . . . The performative dimension of the work’s words demands a response from the reader. Right reading is an active engagement.”71 A foregone equation between literary demand—imperative, performative—and ethics, however, raises the troubling possibility of an

Introduction

“ethical fallacy.” Our sense that reading is good for us (despite empirical evidence to the contrary) and that literary “difficulty” requires virtuous effort may simply be a projection of value onto the agonistic play of reading as such.72 One might conclude that we do not actually find ethical values in our experience of literature; rather, something in our ambivalently willed and willing relation to the text simulates a sense of value. Perhaps the agentive uncertainty at the heart of reading just mimics what William James described as morality’s ineffable sense of demand.73 In this case, the struggle of reading—the difficulty of grasping literature given its persistent slipperiness—conveys the feeling that we are grappling with another (or an Other), whose projected existence implies a will to which we are responsible. This is what makes the New Ethics both so compelling and so susceptible to critique: the unlocatable nature of an assumed and ever-present alterity presented in the guise of textual uncertainty. As Jane Adamson points out, to present ambiguity as a prescriptive ethical value is to render ambiguity unambiguous.74 Uncertainty has become such a familiar trope of ethical literary criticism that its various uses have been subsumed to the same upshot: a willing submission to Otherness. This is the case whether the critic isolates a plot moment, a character’s deliberation, or a piece of language: to zoom in like this will almost inevitably lead to the discovery of uncertainty. It is equally true when critics speak more broadly of a monolithic literary uncertainty, which then gives way to an undifferentiated Otherness. The New Ethics threatens to succumb in this way to the danger of conceptual exhaustion of which Trilling warned us: “with an entire genre of art—there may come a moment when it cannot satisfy one of our legitimate demands, which is that it shall surprise us.”75 Symptomatic of this taming of uncertainty into an unsurprising concept is the slow disappearance of affective variety in literary analysis. So crucial to Nabokov’s “sob at the base of the spine” and Trilling’s “shock,” affect has practically dropped out of the New Ethics. Or to be more precise, its affective possibilities have narrowed down to a species of humble-bragging: a deferential submission to the text’s alterity that elides, to say the least, the amusements and the frustrations of literary uncertainty. The uniformity of the New Ethics—which relies on literature’s uncertainty even as it reifies it into a universal value, making it certain—does not do justice to the different affects made available by uncertain reading, nor to the different orientations toward the world it can exhort.

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To be sure, a paradigm in which literary uncertainty can only demarcate the unknowable nature of Otherness runs counter to the pragmatic, imperative drives of ethical inquiry. On the one hand, in a vestigial version of a bygone paradigm, literature’s ambiguity is reduced to an old-fashioned mirror of the world. On the other hand, when criticism ascribes to literature an amorphous alterity, the argument for ethics becomes diffuse, unable to do more than assert uncertainty as a limit case or to recommend a suspension of judgment when we face its high walls. A case in point is New Ethicists’ shared propensity to follow Trilling in citing Keats’s negative capability—“being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”—as a literary ethos. It offers an admirable possibility of equanimity, but it seems that negative capability is one term about which readers are not very negatively capable. We cannot leave it alone. We irritably redefine and reapply it, turning it into both a “fact” and a “reason”—which begs the question of its own plausibility.76 We might do better to acknowledge the irritation and reaching spurred by uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. Uncertainty’s very vitality comes from a continually thwarted will to know. So, how do we talk about literary uncertainty without reducing it to a monolithic otherness and without promoting a paralyzed or suspended indeterminacy? I have banished to Appendix 1 of this book my critique of what I call the vagaries of the New Ethics, some problems of method that have lead us to these cul-de-sacs of abstraction and reified alterity: an overreliance on textual personae (the recourse to authorial authority or character study); a tendency toward self-validation (the circular thinking that finds what it seeks and leads to critical and authorial backpatting); a recourse to verisimilitude (the propensity to see the literary as a reflection of life, even if the mirror is uncertainty itself); and hypostatization (the reification of literary uncertainty and ethics both). Seven Modes of Uncertainty addresses these vagaries by way of contrast, often juxtaposing the interpretations that emerge from these standard methods in ethical criticism with those that my more rangy approach to literary uncertainty makes available. Given that I rely on the performative, experiential premise of reading and the value of uncertainty foregrounded by the New Ethics, however, my aim in this book is more to ramify—by which I mean both to intensify and to branch out from—than to rectify these vagaries. I propose that a commitment to variety in the canon, reading practices, and

Introduction

ethical questions we study will shake up the New Ethics, which doesn’t always practice the diversity it preaches. This is the simplest way that William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) inspires my method. The idea that we might consider many different structures that afford uncertainty works against the tendency to keep it unlocatable and unverifiable. It is to that end, too, that I look at contemporary novels (more than half published since 2000), many of which haven’t been considered in terms of ethics—or not very much yet. I have also opted for this book to shun that curious star of ethical criticism, Henry James, whose investments in particularity and obscurity have cast a pall over the field. Instead of taking the careful parsing of prose as the basis for ethical engagement with a text, my analyses take up as lenses the many ways that we already read within and outside the academy: close and distant reading, rereading, metareading, interreading, rapid reading (skimming or skipping). In this way, I pluralize each element of that common refrain: “the way we read now.” The modes of uncertainty I trace address disparate realms of ethical inquiry—the self/other dyad, the community, the ethics of the self—and evoke a wide range of theorists of experience, including Isocrates, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Buber, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jeremy Bentham, Bernard Williams, and Carl Jung. In this way, I take Richard Posner’s critique of ethical criticism as an opportunity rather than a goad: “if literature were really believed to be a source of ethical insight, the critic would examine and compare works of literature that reflected different ethical stances.”77 There is no reason that ethics should so often be limited to the virtue ethics of Aristotle or the alterity ethics of Emmanuel Lévinas. Nor should the conceptual word “ethics” always signify the beatific. If we wish to avoid what Williams teasingly calls the “good news” school of ethical criticism, we should be less afraid to argue for the darker, troubling modes—the risks and the threats—that literary uncertainty affords. Objectifying others can be troubling or necessary; epistemological complexity can be joyful or stifling; to laugh can entail cruelty or freedom. Literary uncertainty is too wily to be a guide for living or an allegory of what Paul de Man called “ethicity.” As its title suggests, Seven Modes of Uncertainty offers no one ethics of uncertainty. Another way to avoid reducing ethics and literary uncertainty to static, monolithic concepts on either side of an equal sign is to view them as experiences that change over time and that do not merely reflect each

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other. This is the case at a historical level: adaptations to and of uncertainty and ethics—how we have acclimated to and transformed them— enter into my analysis, as does their belatedness. At a local level, too, my method treats both literary uncertainty and ethics as dynamic, temporal, and accretive processes. Neither reading nor ethics can be reduced to a singular “moment” or “encounter”; they are relational processes that unfold over time. To maintain this phenomenological emphasis without dissolving into vagueness, I borrow a term from a well-known concept in cognitive psychology, affordance. Once set in motion, ethical and literary uncertainty no longer seem merely reflective; I argue instead for their resonance, a potent relation that works across aesthetics, affect, and ethics yet does not necessitate their total equivalence. In what follows, I describe this book’s method, argument, and contour in more detail, explaining how the term mode conjoins the critical investments adumbrated above: aesthetics, affect, ethics; the reading experience; a sense of diversity; an emphasis on time; and an argument for resonance. Ultimately, I will suggest that these ways of thinking about literary uncertainty all hearken back to the pragmatic method of Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. If the analysis of literary uncertainty has achieved a certain staticity and staleness in ethical criticism, Seven Modes of Uncertainty attempts to revivify it by going back to its very origins.78

Affordance, Modes, Resonance There are many theories of reading that describe it in phenomenological terms.79 Rita Felski’s 2008 book Uses of Literature “links up with a recent ethical turn in literary studies, an exhortation to look at, rather than through, the literary work, to attend to the act of saying rather than only the substance of what is said.” She advocates for a “neophenomenology,” an “impure or hybrid phenomenology” comprising “thick descriptions of experiential states” that evoke “a distinctive structure of thought or feeling.” Felski insists that her “modes” of textual engagement—recognition, enchantment, knowledge, shock—eschew the “doldrums” of literary uncertainty, our “single-minded fixation on the merits of irony, ambiguity, and indeterminacy.” But if we take up Felski’s own emphasis on experiential states, we can view literary uncertainty not as an end in itself but as a set of ongoing engagements that shift between knowing and not knowing.80

Introduction

To offer a specific vocabulary for my neo-phenomenology of reading in Seven Modes of Uncertainty, I borrow a concept from cognitive psychology: affordance.81 James J. Gibson coined this term in 1979 for how animals relate to an environment. The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. . . . [T]hey are in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings, which are often supposed to be subjective, phenomenal, and mental. But, actually, an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways to the environment and to the observer.82

Affordance has a fluidity that allows us to talk about the relations between subjects and objects in pragmatic terms.83 It is less a general theory than a flexible way of talking about how we experience the world and its objects. Donald Norman defines and exemplifies the term this way: “affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. A chair affords (‘is for’) support, and, therefore, affords sitting.”84 Analogously, a text has properties that suggest how it might be used.85 Indeed, Norman’s figure of the “chair” coincides with Paul de Man’s conceit for a text’s “structural intentionality” as an alternative to “authorial intention”: The structural intentionality determines the relationship between the components of the resulting object in all its parts, but the relationship of the particular state of mind of the person engaged in the act of structurization to the structured object is altogether contingent. The structure of the chair is determined in all its components by the fact that it is destined to be sat on, but this structure in no way depends on the state of mind of the carpenter who is in the process of assembling its parts.86

De Man’s analysis of New Criticism does not obviate the question of intention but rather subsumes it to a structural relation that acknowledges authoredness as a discernible feature. Bracketing the question of

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whether the carpentry analogy is sufficient, we might note that there are other, less intuitive affordances for a chair than sitting: we can use it to stand or climb; we can hang it on the wall à la Duchamp; we can break it down to make firewood or a weapon.87 One must recognize an object’s major affordances to resist them, however; minor alternative uses hover near or behind “sitting,” according to their degree of availability and interest. In her application of the theory to texts, Eleanor Gibson helpfully describes this as the “nesting” of affordances: “The structure of a text is nested, like events in the world.”88 Because of this nesting, the affordances of a holistic object like a chair are far easier to trace than those of a concatenated or prismatic one like a book. A book, like a chair, has potential uses as a physical object: flyswatter, doorstop, writing surface, paperweight, an object to regift.89 As a compilation of pages of legible text, a book can also afford information extraction: “A text may afford finding out how to bake a Genevoise cake, or the telephone number to call a broker in San Francisco, or words and music for singing a hymn.”90 A text can be a record of orthography, syntax, diction, and semiotics: it affords decipherment and knowledge. Finally, and this is my claim, a literary text affords aesthetic, affective, and ethical experiences as we read over time. Given this complexity, a better conceit for the reading experience might be architecture. Virginia Woolf posits that “the thirty-two chapters of a novel . . . are an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building.” We might say the beams of a building guide how its space is divided and how a body might move through it; the structure does not enforce movements but makes them available. Analogously, a textual structure affords ways of reading. Literary affordances, however, vary widely. Woolf goes on to say, “words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing.”91 The same textual structure can lead to wildly different experiences, especially if we account for recalcitrant and resistant readers. Just as the Guggenheim Museum in New York affords a spiral path that can be circumvented by taking the elevator or staying on the first floor, texts afford ways of reading we each take up differently. Is there a way to describe features this structured yet contingent? James Gibson’s theory posits that perceiving beings seek both the variants and invariants of an environment: “The environment normally manifests some things that persist and some that do not, some features that are invariant and some that are variant.”92 A text, too, has features,

Introduction

some invariant (chapter divisions), others seemingly too variable to measure (style, diction, diegetic content). There can be no “metric formula” for describing affordance.93 According to Gibson, we “do not have to . . . apply numbers to it, but only to give an exact mathematical description so that other experimenters can make it available to their observers.”94 Seven Modes of Uncertainty begins with narrative invariants to which I grant the plain name narrative structures.95 I take up Morrison’s claim that “the structure is the argument” and Nabokov’s exhortation to attend to the “structure” of a text; literary uncertainty in this sense relies on a certain structural clarity. The three narrative structures that constitute the backbone of this book—mutual exclusion, multiplicity, and repetition—are old and widely recognizable across literary history. They each afford operations we can reduce for expediency to processes of sameness and of difference. On the one hand, sameness—processes of identification, connection, correspondence—allows for the pattern making that Aristotle saw as a basic human skill. On the other hand, differentiation, distantiation, and disjunction are what permit us to divide things into groups, orders, concepts, and so on. The epistemological forces of these respective imperatives determine how we discern concepts, events, figures, and facts as we read. That is, sameness and difference structure readers’ relative degrees of certainty—from cernere, “to distinguish, decide, separate”— about a narrative’s happenings. Readerly uncertainty, I suggest, results from an imbalance, contortion, or disturbance of those proportions of sameness and difference that usually afford conceptual or narrative stability. Symmetry, separation, synthesis; fullness, variety, well-roundedness; consistency, steadiness, regularity: in uncertain texts, these sure, fixed, separable forms of knowledge get unsettled—momentarily or permanently—over the course of reading’s fluctuation. The narrative structures I consider will sometimes exaggerate and distort sameness and difference to confer uncertainty upon diegetic content. They afford an experience that is not consistently uncertain but rather shifts between knowing and not knowing. These structures can, however, intensify uncertainty to such a high degree—to the point of becoming irresolvable—that they result in a refusal of any ultimate (dis)closure and leave us puzzled or unsure about who exists, what takes place, and/or when. Mutual exclusion, an “either/or” structure, presents two opposed explanations for the same set of events, or two sets of contradictory events,

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neither of which is ultimately established as true or real. Multiplicity is the presence of several perspectives about an event, object, or person; it corresponds to a “both/and” grammar that, when ramified by number or time, precludes an objective view. Finally, while it often grounds the very act of narration, extreme repetition can eventually destabilize events and continuity; as a story accumulates parataxis (“and . . . and”) and recursion (“again”), the reader’s ability to trace meaning and sequence falters. Prefaces to each part of Seven Modes of Uncertainty detail some of the history and affordances of these narrative structures. In the two chapters that follow each preface, my analysis zooms in to describe how each structure manifests differently in specific works of narrative fiction (with their irreducible variants). In each reading, a necessarily static picture of the ontological narrative structure—its unavoidable, discernible form—is followed by a suggestive, phenomenological evocation of the aesthetic, affective, and ethical affordances of moving through that structure, what I call a mode. A favorite word of Empson’s, mode comes from the Latin modus, or measure. The mode has fixity, as evinced by its relationship to the model. But it also has flex, invoking modulation—change over time—as well as affective and grammatical moods. Tapping this last connotation, Adrian Piper defines “modal imagination” as “our capacity to envision what is possible in addition to what is actual,” suggesting that speculative operations extend “our conception of reality—and in particular, of human beings—beyond our immediate experience.”96 Author Tom McCarthy articulates the relationship between literary structure and experience this way: “one of the real structural understandings of great literature, from Greek tragedy to Beckett and Faulkner, is that it’s an event. It’s not something that you can contain and narrate, but it’s like this seismic set of ripples that goes on through time, backward and forward.”97 As this phenomenological account suggests, we can no longer take for granted that our movement through a textual structure will be a forward progression. Historically and currently, we practice understudied but ubiquitous versions of reading that subvert the familiar teleology of reading from beginning to end: rereading; interreading (reading with an eye to allusion); metareading (reading with an eye to a text’s selfawareness); and flipping. I occasionally apply these practices to my exempla to demonstrate how they modify literary uncertainty. That I subject only some texts to this does not mean that my other readings are

Introduction

“straight”—an impossibility, anyway—but rather that I present them under the fallible sign of linearity. For each narrative structure, then, I trace two possible modes of uncertainty, depending on how we read; my last chapter concerns a mode afforded by the co-presence of all three structures. My seven modes are thus made up of three sets of two, plus one: oscillation, enfolding (modes of mutual exclusion); adjacency, accounting (modes of multiplicity); synchronicity, vacuity (modes of repetition); and flippancy (a composite mode). The easiest way to grasp at a glance the organization of Seven Modes of Uncertainty is to look at the table in Appendix 2. As its modular frame suggests, there are many more modes of uncertainty than those that I trace in what follows. I offer these seven in the spirit of Barthesian structuralism—or Empsonian formalism—as a flexible, labile, and heuristic scheme, not as a comprehensive system to be adopted in its particulars. Far from taxonomic or exhaustive—or even memorable—my seven modes are meant to gesture to the many unique and diverse aesthetic, affective, and ethical experiences that literary uncertainty affords.98 While it might seem coldly scientific, Gibson’s notion of affordance attends to values of this kind, as well: The theory of affordances is a radical departure from existing theories of value and meaning. It begins with a new definition of what value and meaning are. The perceiving of an affordance is not a process of perceiving a value-free physical object to which meaning is somehow added in a way that no one has been able to agree upon; it is a process of perceiving a value-rich ecological object.99

Value is latent in all kinds of objects and environments, including a range of artistic ones. Narrative fiction, my primary source of exempla, is not more valuable than poetry or painting or nonfiction; it is differently valuable, as is each of its manifestations. While my choice of texts inevitably confers a kind of value on them, my effort is more to analyze than to laud the value systems that inhere in their structures. Narrative’s unavoidable structural, temporal, and peopled dimensions permit an analysis of the various values literary uncertainty affords, both positive and negative. My modes of literary uncertainty present a loose grammar that applies across dimensions of experience and across time. Its unfixed, variable coordination of aesthetics, affect, and

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ethics belies the idea that they map onto each other, as in the sort of argument whereby Henry James’s convoluted syntax = his characters’ romantic entanglements = ethical complexity. The musical overtones to a mode also allow us to eschew a prescriptive, descriptive, or reflective relation between literary modes and ethics. Instead we can describe them as resonant. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest: “Concepts are centers of vibrations, each in itself and every one in relation to all the others. This is why they all resonate rather than cohere or correspond with each other. There is no reason why concepts should cohere. As fragmentary totalities, concepts are not even pieces of a puzzle, for their irregular contours do not correspond to each other.”100 Meant to signify openness rather than vagueness, resonance is a musical and a scientific conceit for relation.101 It coordinates energies, intensities, and vibrations without restricting their direction, duration, limits, or degree. Its nature need not be fixed either: resonance can be dissonant or harmonious. Resonance puts things into relation without presuming that they are derivative, causal, or isomorphic.102 The idea that aesthetics, affect, and ethics are all experiential—rather than mimetic, representational, or emulative—grounds this resonance. Neither objective nor subjective, experience grounds knowledge but does not fix it, as Isaiah Berlin explains: “the sense of the general texture of experience . . . is itself not open to inductive or deductive reasoning: for both these methods rest upon it.”103 To be sure, there is no such thing as a pure or a real or a standard experience: aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions of experience are always mediated, indeed by one another—they mesh.104 In Art as Experience, John Dewey defines aesthetic experience as “appreciative, perceiving, and enjoying” and claims that “art, in its form, unites the very same relation of doing and undergoing, outgoing and incoming energy, that makes an experience . . . an experience.”105 Aesthetic engagement joins the realm of experience— becoming not what we know but what we have lived—where affect and ethics reside. There, they resonate. Nöel Carroll notes that the “acquaintance approach” of ethical criticism correlates the subjunctive experience of art with the “hypothetical knowledge” that is key to ethics: the “ ‘knowledge of what such and such is or would be like’ . . . is especially relevant for moral reasoning.”106 We can succinctly call this “know-how,” riffing on Gilbert Ryle’s philosophical term. Alice Crary explains Ryle’s idea: “A central theme of Ryle’s

Introduction

work—one that he develops in his famous discussion of ‘knowing-how’ and ‘knowing-that’—is that competence in a discursive practice invariably invokes certain responsive capacities and that training that cultivates such capacities can therefore as such be productive of ‘intelligent powers.’ ” This reorientation of ethics from actions to cognitive capacities that can be honed through artistic practice derives from a classical model: “Ryle ties this theme to what he regards as an Aristotelian thought to the effect that the habituation of feeling plays an essential role in the growth of moral understanding.”107 Nancy Sherman also offers a classical argument for the ethics of art that chimes with the musical tone of my terms mode and resonance: “Modes are said by Aristotle to be ethical (i.e. to convey character) . . . the learner’s mimetic enactment of them (through performance) is a way of coming to feel from the inside the relevant qualities of character and emotion. It is an emulative and empathic kind of identification. Together with the positive reinforcement that comes from pleasure music naturally gives, the mimetic enactment will constitute an habituation, an ethismos.”108 Despite their famously differing views on poetry, Plato and Aristotle both believed that musical modes bore on affective and ethical experience.109 Plato advised that soldiers listen to Dorian or Phrygian modes and thought a shift in the State’s music might cause social upheaval.110 In the Politics, Aristotle contends: “Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change.”111 In this classical model, ethical capacities are inextricable from affective and aesthetic dispositions. Aristotelian virtue ethics, inclining toward moderation and emulation, does not always account for the radical, unexpected experiences literature affords, however. Literary uncertainty prompts us to go beyond imitatio toward praxis: something more like inhabiting an experience, a way of happening. I am specifically interested in how the dynamic crosscurrents of sameness and difference I see in modes of literary uncertainty resonate with ethical relations like empathy (identification) and alterity (differentiation). David Palumbo-Liu’s The Deliverance of Others (2012) offers a historical frame for literary realism’s negotiation of these two imperatives in contemporary ethical inquiry. “The sameness requirement” is

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key to Aristotelian mimesis and Adam Smith’s social theory; it maps onto the humanist strain of the New Ethics. “The difference requirement” is modernism’s legacy and bolsters the alterity strain of the New Ethics. Palumbo-Liu suggests that in contemporary fiction, there is “a vacillating dynamic between empathy and critique.”112 This idea resembles just one of my modes of uncertainty, the oscillation afforded by Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Moving beyond the genre of realism with which critics like PalumboLiu engage, my project offers seven ways in which uncertain and often experimental literature negotiates between the imperatives of sameness (connection, empathy, likeness) and difference (distance, alterity, opposition). My terms (oscillation, enfolding, adjacency, accounting, synchronicity, vacuity, flippancy) might seem oddly neutral. Because they are at the center of a Venn diagram of aesthetics, affect, and ethics, these modes in fact afford shifting perceptions, appreciations, and orientations. Once we imagine each mode as value-rich and peopled (by characters, by readers), their resonance with ethics is clearer. Consider, for example, how an oscillation of feeling between a self and an other might reconfigure both empathy and alterity or how the adjacency of members in a community might resonate with the negotiation of proximity to and distance from the neighbor. Viewed this way, literary ethics is reducible neither to moral theme, authorial worldview, nor character action; it inheres rather in the rhythms of formal relation we undergo as we read over time. Given that art reception does not always entail public acts—novel reading seems especially private and consciousness-bound—it might not seem to resonate with how we really live. In The Sovereignty of Good (1970), Iris Murdoch proposes we shift our gaze from the world of outer action to the interior, ongoing struggles that comprise our quotidian ethical life. She contests the idea that ethics “can only be concerned with public acts” by presenting us with a “rival picture”: A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-in-law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him.

Introduction

Murdoch removes this novelistic dilemma from the public sphere: “Let us assume . . . that the mother, who is a very ‘correct’ person, behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, not allowing her real opinion to appear in any way. . . . [W]hatever is in question as happening happens entirely in M’s mind. . . . M’s outward behavior, beautiful from the start, in no way alters.” If “M observes D or at least reflects deliberately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters,” Murdoch argues, then any internal change ought to seem moral to us: “M has in the interim been active, she has been doing something, something which we approve of, something which is somehow worth doing in itself. M has been morally active in the interim.” We do not discover exactly how M’s vision changes, but the change itself is recognizably ethical. Murdoch’s thought experiment does not relegate ethics to thinking—affective and perceptual capacities are involved, too—but rather renders it experiential, and no less significant for its small scale.113 The modes of uncertainty I trace similarly do not afford the extrapolation of a categorical imperative or a set of laws or a series of public acts. Rather, they resonate with our quotidian, oblique, personal relationships. My highest aim is to serve as a kind of interdisciplinary translator between resonant modes of uncertainty in reading and in ethics, both of which I see as made up of small, everyday acts. Seven Modes of Uncertainty in this sense offers what Murdoch called “a new vocabulary of experience,” or what William Empson before her called “a machinery of description” and “a sensibility.”

Why Empson? An Empsonian critical ethos—its seed in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and some of the branches it sprouted in his later writings— informs my approach to literary uncertainty. As I discuss in my conclusion, the discipline of literary study has recently witnessed several selfdescribed turns: to aesthetics, form, “surface,” affect, and ethics. A return to Empson turns the screw of these aspects of literary value. I see him as the forefather to an eccentric line of literary scholars who have remained committed to describing the mutual entanglement of aesthetics, affect, and ethics in the reading experience, including theorists usually classified under the rubrics of formalism, structuralism, reader response, affect studies, and ethical criticism.114

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Empson is often disowned or disavowed because he is dismissed as either too eccentric or too tied to the New Criticism, the transatlantic critical movement that excised authorial intention and readerly affect from interpretation. Empson did stake claims for an “analytical” method and for literary ambiguity, both of which ideas subtend the New Critical approach to “the text itself.” But he despised New Critical dogma, renaming the intentional fallacy the “Wimsatt Law” in his volume with the pointed title Using Biography. Seven Types of Ambiguity in fact sits on the cusp of earlier methods— “appreciative” criticism and the “psychological” criticism spearheaded by Empson’s advisor, I. A. Richards—and a wave of quasi-scientific ideas about uncertainty. A hybrid of older value-based criticism and hyperanalytic forms of criticism to come, Seven Types of Ambiguity addresses both authorial intention and the reading experience in its investigation of “aesthetic constructions,” “emotional reverberation,” and “moral judgment” (245, 133, 40). This holistic attention to the manifold causes and effects of poetry is perhaps attributable to the fact that Empson was a poet as well as a critic. His poetry is dense, chockablock with puns and loaded figures, and often juxtaposes the quotidian and the metaphysical. An “artist-reader” in the vein of Nabokov and Trilling, he is a kind of synthetic back-formation of the dialectic evident in their debates over Lolita. As quirky, nonconformist, and idiosyncratic as Nabokov, Empson nevertheless sacrificed his delight in linguistic particularity for the sake of principle.115 For years, he taught and advocated for Basic English, and he worked as a propagandist for the BBC Far East service during World War II, telling a friend, “I thought the defeat of Hitler so important I could do nothing else.”116 Trilling’s admiring description of George Orwell, who worked with Empson at the BBC, also fits Empson well: “This quality may be described as a sort of moral centrality, a directness of relation to moral—and political—fact.”117 This forthrightness is evident in Empson’s baldly ideological criticism, which extrapolated a politics out of the pastoral and used Milton to rail against what he saw as Christianity’s moral abominations. Yet, even with a card-carrying communist for a wife, Empson remains difficult to place politically. He made of his intellectual vagrancy a virtue; of his eccentric self-contradictions, a principle. We glimpse this in a headmaster’s prescient, ambivalent assessment: “He has a good deal of originality and enterprise: I hope he is learning also to discipline his va-

Introduction

garies.”118 In essence, Empson’s version of discipline was to focus on vagaries—of language, literature, life—while holding a bracing commitment to uncertainty. In what follows, I revisit the beats of the description of my project above to delineate just how Empson’s eclectic, rambunctious, pragmatic spirit haunts the pages of Seven Modes of Uncertainty. It is a happy haunting: there are points of disagreement, no doubt, but I believe even those divergences would harmonize with Empson’s contrarian temperament. As he says in an essay from the posthumous collection titled Argufying, “if you attack a view in any detail that proves you to have some sympathy with it; there is already a conflict in you which mirrors the conflict in which you take part; that is why you understand sufficiently to take part in it.”119 The changes I make to Empson’s vocabulary tend to unearth latent sympathies rather than conflicts. My replacement of ambiguity with uncertainty, for example, captures his profound investment in what biographer John Haffenden calls the “revolutionary developments in our understanding of the nature of the physical world.” Empson began his career as a mathematician. At Cambridge, having aced Part I and barely passed Part II of the mathematical Tripos under A. S. Ramsay, he registered in 1928 for the English Tripos under I. A. Richards.120 It was in this transition, at the tender age of twenty-two, that Empson began to write Seven Types of Ambiguity. Haffenden recounts that “early on, he was concerned to formulate a definition of the power of mathematics under the rubric of aesthetic value.” Empson wrote in a journal: “The aesthetic value of a mathematical process lies in the handling of the complex logical forms so as to vary the most natural selection of conclusions; in this way the power of the mind appears to be enlarged, so as to have a logical grasp on situations of greater complexity.”121 He would soon reverse direction, applying his mathematical mind to the task of handling the “complex logical forms” of poetry. Katy Price argues that Empson’s own poetry—invoking astrophysics, biology, chemistry, and geometry, among other sciences—comprises a “profound humanistic enquiry into contemporary scientific knowledge.”122 Just as the metaphysical poets took up the Copernican revolution, “the new cosmology of Einstein and Eddington” required an overhaul of the premises of modern life.123 Empson once wrote that he “found the worldpicture of the scientists much more stimulating and useable than that of any ‘literary influence.’ ”124 He was characteristically ahead of his time

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in this regard. Allen Thiher notes that “the epistemological implications of these important developments in physics only gradually entered modernist consciousness.”125 Two concepts, however, were in circulation by the time Empson was developing his analytic method: epistemological pluralism, the idea that “any given phenomenon could . . . be described by an indefinite number of models”; and the uncertainty endemic to measurement of the physical world.126 In The Structure of Complex Words, he complains that the “idea that the theorist is not part of the world he examines is one of the deepest sources of error” and admits that the symbols he invents for feelings in a word “are no more mathematical than road-signs.”127 This articulation of the basic gist of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—“the act of observing changes the thing observed”—and the onus on utility (“road-signs”) both emerged from the New Physics’ revolutions in measurement.128 The eruption of scientific uncertainty in Empson’s formative years thus informed the proclivity for diversity and conflict not only in his criticism but also in his temperament: The poet-critic who is Romantic in thought but un-Romantic in mode is likewise torn, in caste and temperament, between an admiration for synaesthetic orders both mental and social, partly influenced by Richards and his own training in mathematics, and the acknowledgment, partly influenced by scientific speculation after Einstein and Heisenberg, that epistemologies which exclude chaos are not only unsympathetic to human bewilderment but actually naïve about the nature of things.

Paul Fry goes on to describe this as “most similar, oddly enough, to American pragmatism” and in Chapter 4, I root Empson’s pragmatism in the Benthamism he adapted from Richards.129 More generally, Empson’s wish to speak reasonably—with reason but also within reason—derived from the same developments in science and statistics that influenced pragmatism. As Louis Menand notes in The Metaphysical Club, “what science teaches is that the phenomenal world—the world we can see and touch—is characterized, through and through, by change, and that our knowledge of it is characterized, through and through, by uncertainty.”130 In Charles Peirce’s “pragmaticism,” knowledge “swims in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy.” Given this inexorable uncertainty, William James’s essay on

Introduction

pragmatism advises “looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and . . . towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts”; “theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas.”131 Similarly, in Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson describes “ambiguity” as “a solid tool” and as an “intellectual apparatus.” He evaluates his method more by its utility than its accuracy: “many of my explanations may be demonstrably wrong, and yet efficient for their purpose” (253). He compares the critic to “the scientist wishing to apply determinism to the world. It may not be valid everywhere; though it be valid everywhere it may not explain anything. . . . [H]e must assume it is valid where he is working” (17). Of the propensity to “allow a structure of associated meanings to be shown in a note,” he says, “as in recent atomic physics there is a shift in progress, which tends to attach the notion of a probability to the natural object rather than to the fallibility of the human mind” (81). Empson also applies to poetry the probabilistic shift of the New Physics, referring to the “weighting of probabilities” and “the notion of a potential” in a poet’s sense of a language. When we read a sentence, “a plausible grammar is picked up at the same time as the words it orders, but with a probability attached to it, and the less probable alternatives, ready, if necessary, to take its place, are in some way present at the back of your mind” (239). In sum, Empson’s pragmatic language of probability conveys scientific precision without a pretense to scientific objectivity. We can perhaps best illustrate Empson’s pragmatic attitude to the literary experience through his comments on authorial intention, that willo’-the-wisp of critical history:132 It might seem more reasonable, when dealing with obscure alternatives of syntax, to abandon the claim that you are explaining a thing communicated, to say either that you are showing what happened in the author’s mind (this should interest the biographer) or what was likely to happen in the reader’s mind (this should interest the poet). This might be more tidy, but, like many forms of doubt, it would itself claim to know too much; the rules as to what is conveyable are so much more mysterious even than the rules governing the effects of ambiguity, whether on the reader or the author, that it is better to talk about both parties at once, and be thankful if what you say is true about either. (243)

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Empson was cutting about the New Critics’ excision of intention from analysis, but not so dogmatic as to believe that intention could ever be established. He claimed that “intention is only known as it is shown,” while acknowledging its psychological draw and ethical necessity for us. On the one hand, “if critics are not to put up some pretence of understanding the feelings of the author in hand they must condemn themselves to contempt”; on the other, “critics have long been allowed to say that a poem may be something inspired which meant more than the poet knew” (xiii–xiv). I follow his lead in attending not only to extratextual data from authors and readers but also to discrepancies between them. In a 1971 Festschrifte, Graham Hough calls intention “The Eighth Ambiguity”; Empson makes pragmatic use of it: “I shall often use the ambiguity of ‘ambiguity,’ and pronouns like ‘one,’ to make statements covering both reader and author” (6).133 Less weighted with critical baggage than ambiguity—baggage which, of course, Empson packed in the first place—my terms uncertainty and mode have this semantic breadth as well, while they helpfully draw out his attunement to the dynamism of the literary experience. In general, Empson’s analyses are more generative and processual than he is often given credit for. Though he is often taken to task for his taxonomic tics, he was skeptical of the “skeleton of metaphysics” in the work of his mentor: “Mr. Richards distinguishes a poem into Sense, Feeling, Tone, and Intention; you may say an interpretation is not being done properly . . . unless these four are separated out into sub-headings and the shades of grammar that convey the contents of each sub-heading are then listed in turn. But the process of apprehension, both of the poem and of its analysis, is not at all like reading a list” (238). Empson offers an alternative view of the utility of theorizing without a general theory: Conscious theory may make an addition to sensibility even though it draws no (or no true) conclusion, formulates no general theory, in the scientific sense, which reconciles and makes quickly available the results which it describes. Such an advance in the machinery of description makes a reader feel stronger about his appreciations, more reliably able to distinguish the private or accidental from the critically important or repeatable, more confident of the reality (that is the transferability) of his experiences; adds, in short, in the mind of the reader to the things there to be described. (254)

Introduction

More than a list or a grand unified theory, Seven Types of Ambiguity is a “machinery of description,” suggesting an axis of affinity with recent interest in “surface reading” and “the descriptive turn.”134 Empson’s resistance to abstracted, fixed ideas reflects a keen eye for the temporal dimension of the literary experience, a sensibility that is lost when he is swept into the category of New Criticism, famed for its ahistorical vivisections. His readings are always offset by his awareness of the contingencies wrought by history: he compares Elizabethan and modern usages, for instance, teasing open a palimpsest of annotation and amendation in Shakespeare.135 At a smaller scale, too, he insists on a time-conscious analysis: “if one’s mind does not in some way run through the various meanings of a word, how can it arrive at the right one?” (64).136 His work evinces what Fry calls an “attention to local detail which is accretive rather than selective.”137 Empson says he wrote Seven Types of Ambiguity to explain to himself his feelings about poems by considering their meanings: “Yet these meanings when teased out . . . were too complicated to be remembered together as if in one glance of the eye; they had to be followed each in turn, as possible alternative reactions” (x). The idea of reactions subtends a later conceit that likens reading to chemistry and unfolds time in several directions: “As in a chemical reaction, there will have been reverse or subsidiary reactions, or small damped explosions, or slow widespread reactions, not giving out much heat, going on concurrently, and the final result may be complicated by preliminary stages in the main process, or after-effects from the products of the reaction. . . . [I]t is only at intervals that the strangeness of the process can be observed” (240). With this acknowledgment of time’s spread, Empson’s refusal to “fix” reading reactions evinces greater affinity for observing a process than for parsing a pattern. He was well aware that reading is a “feeling that involves facts and judgments; one cannot give or state the feeling directly, any more than the feeling of being able to ride a bicycle; it is the result of a capacity” (238). But how then is one to talk about “the cumulative way [a text] uses its words” (38)? Empson finds grammar a helpful precedent: “most people learn to talk, and they were talking grammar before grammarians existed” (xi). Grammar is a practical, retrospective “tool”; it describes how we already speak; Empson aims to do the same for literary ambiguity, however vain or flawed or clumsy the attempt. The ineluctable modality of uncertainty prompts Marcel Proust’s narrator to write: “it

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often happened that, in my spell of uncertainty . . . , I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope.”138 But we can both watch a horse or a bicycle run and delight in a series of photographs of the event. Seven Modes of Uncertainty, like its predecessor, aims to be a bioscope—or perhaps a Muybridgean zoopraxiscope—of uncertainty. Empson offers another, older conceit to explain the two temporalities— synchronic and diachronic—necessary for literary criticism: “a musical chord is a direct sensation, but not therefore unanalysable into its separate notes even at the moment of sensing. It can be either felt or thought; the two things are similar but different; and it requires practice to do both at once” (17). Music recurs often in Seven Types of Ambiguity as a figure for reading, invoking the “affective state,” “atmosphere,” or “emotional reverberation” in the “living matter” of literature: It may be read so as to convey, apparently in terms of the imagined movements of muscles, a statement of the stages of, a mode of feeling about, any prolonged endeavor; so that the reader is made to accept them all as alike in these particulars, and draw for his sympathy on any experience of the kind he may have had. In so far as the lines really act like this, by the way, they are much more ‘like’ music than are the releasing effects of open vowels which are usually given that praise. (120)139

Empson correlates this with the reader’s experience: “Whenever a receiver of poetry is seriously moved by an apparently simple line, what are moving in him are the traces of a great part of his past experience and of the structure of his past judgments” (xv). He offers no name for these “movements,” but they are clearly related to affect; what is key for Empson here and elsewhere is that literary feeling is inseparable from thought, from the process by which reading can enact the “shifts and blurred aggregates of thought by which men come to a practical decision” (68).140 My musically and grammatically inflected term mode captures this idea of an ongoing modulation of thought, while staying true to Empson’s frequent elision of the aesthetic, affective, and ethical energies of reading ambiguous literature. In fact, although this seems to have gone unnoticed, the word mode appears over forty times in Seven Types of Ambiguity, far more than the categorical title word type. A list of its

Introduction

phrasal variations in the book should suffice to display its richness for Empson: he refers to mode of sensation, mode of language, mode of being, mode of apprehension, mode of approach, mode of thought, mode of judgment, mode of feeling, mode of statement, mode of knowledge.141 While all of these aspects are relevant to my own conception of the literary experience, Empson’s repeated reference to “a mode of action of poetry” especially highlights our shared concern with the changes that time brings to bear on reading. The term mode uncovers the possibility latent in Empson of a grammar or vocabulary for uncertainty that is more oriented toward experience than the taxonomic type might allow. Modality is also a way to parse—and no doubt simplify— Wittgenstein’s claim in the Notebooks that “Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic. Ethics and aesthetics are one.”142 Empson was very taken with Wittgenstein when he was at Cambridge, though the two never met.143 A young Empson read the gloomy end of the Tractatus— “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent”—and then revised it: “Could Romeo not be written? Were the Songs and Sonnets what cannot be said? What philosophy cannot state, art lays open.”144 This reformulation suggests that for Empson, both art and philosophy are forms of experience; they just express the logic of the world differently. This idea grounds Empson’s sense that linguistic analysis can yield “a logical structure” with social and ethical implications. The effect of a piece of writing, he says, “can only have been produced by a curious but demonstrable process of interlocking and interacting structures of meaning. You may later get judgments of value from this line of approach, but it does not start with them.”145 Though many have castigated or dismissed Empson for his dogged, vehement charges against what he saw as the “disgusting” premises of Christianity, Haffenden suggests that Empson’s alternative quasi-Buddhistic theology offers “the conception of a divinity somehow ‘built into the structure of the universe.’ ”146 A trace of this logico-spiritual bent lingers in the one word of Empson’s first title that I have not yet addressed, the only key term that I keep: seven. Deborah Baker cuttingly remarks that it was only because he was an “aspiring mathematician” that “Empson set out to prove that there were, in fact, exactly seven varieties of linguistic ambiguity.”147 Stanley Fish complains of the “atomistic” quality to his method but recognizes

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in it the wish to “generate a sufficient number of categories to contain and at least keep physically separate the points you would like to make.” Roger Fowler and Peter Mercer suggest that “Empson’s categories are thrown off with a marvellous disbelieving panache—if there had been eight and not the magical seven we might have had to worry—but there are only as few or as many types as you want.” They describe his analyses as the “fragmented imitations of the many-dimensional poetic object.”148 Like his “road-signs” in Complex Words, Empson’s Seven Types are in effect less rigorously mathematical and more characteristic of his desire to see things “in the round.”149 Types of ambiguity, versions of pastoral, and structures of complex words all constitute, to reuse Empson’s own words, “an attempt . . . to include all possible attitudes, to turn upon a given situation every tool, however irrelevant or disconnected, of the contemporary mind.”150 By resisting division into symmetrical groups or binaries, the number seven offers this sweeping view, while connoting an ineluctable diversity. Fewer types would connote a unified principle; more would beg the question. Seven is a loose bracket, grasping at a theory but not quite able to hold it. According to cognitive science, seven (plus or minus two) is the upper limit of our working memory and our ability to differentiate between items.151 Empson tries to distinguish his types from “incidental” ambiguity, “incoherence,” and “confusion,” but even he admits that keeping his seven types straight is difficult. The nested organization of Seven Modes of Uncertainty—as evident in the table in Appendix 2—mitigates somewhat against this elision of distinctions, offering a limited portability in the three main narrative structures, while gesturing to myriad modes of uncertainty they afford. Our exempla also differ in genre and scope: mine are limited to prose, Empson’s to poetry and drama; he ranges across centuries of English literature while I consider recent Anglophone novels. This difference is attributable to the respective goals of our literary analyses. Empson needed to “pile up” as many short examples as possible to demonstrate poetry’s endemic ambiguity, the wide applicability of his analytical method, and the beauty of canonical texts. I look at recent narrative fiction because it interrupts the monolith that literary uncertainty has now become; these novels not only permit me to trace the modulation of uncertainty over a longer scale of time, but they also break us out of a calcified critical canon. Empson’s enumerative tendencies nevertheless inspire my ramification of texts, reading practices, and ethical theories.

Introduction

In this sense, we share an investment in different ways and effects of reading.152 This attention to literary diversity suggests a comprehensive view of human experience as well. As Empson had it, the “practical ethics of the human race” are “fantastically varied.”153 He was astonished that anyone might take “for granted there is only one right code of morals.”154 Mark Thompson argues that Empson rejected “ ‘moral monism,’ or the certainty of the possession of the exclusive truth about morals.”155 For Empson, the ethical relevance of literature was manifold: “the chief function of imaginative literature is to make you realise that other people are very various, many of them quite different from you, with different ‘systems of value’ as well.”156 These different systems of value can even be incommensurable. In “The Ideal of the Good,” Empson compares “the good in action and . . . the absolute good in peace,” concluding that these “two pictures of the good are both necessary; we cannot finally choose one and not the other.”157 In a dispute with John Sparrow over verbal fictions, Empson outlined this comprehensive “philosophy”: “The prime intellectual difficulty of our age is that true beliefs may make it impossible to act rightly; that we cannot think without verbal fictions; that they must not be taken for true beliefs, and yet must be taken seriously; that it is essential to analyse beauty; essential to accept it unanalysed; essential to believe that the universe is deterministic; essential to act as if it was not.”158 The semicolons connect and separate—they cleave—conflicting claims across realms of knowledge. Yet these conflicts of value give way neither to negative capability nor to dialectical synthesis, but rather afford an ongoing condition, a constant effort to be accountable to opposed forces or, as Empson put it, to “stand up between them.”159 As Fry argues, Empson founds “his liberal humanism on the very uncertainty principle which lurks, on his own showing, at the heart of reference.”160 My cultivation of an Empsonian ethos reveals one underlying assumption of my project. While uncertainty does not always afford virtuous, or even discernible ethics, I do see having many different experiences of uncertainty as in itself a good. This book, however, does not simply exhort liberal openness or moral capaciousness; it tries to change the way we look at ethics, infusing it with time, contradiction, disturbance, darkness. Empson once recommended books that “gratify our strong and crucial curiosity about alien modes of feeling, our need for the flying buttress of sympathy with systems other than our own.”161

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Seven Modes of Uncertainty evaluates how—and how well—recent works of literary uncertainty resonate with these diverse ethical capacities. It also hopes to be just that sort of book: a jaunt in which a strong and crucial curiosity about alien modes of feeling compels us to fly toward systems other than our own.

I M U T UA L E XC L U S I O N

Mutual exclusion is the narrative presentation of mutually exclusive sets of events or of mutually exclusive explanations for the same set of events. In logic, the term mutually exclusive describes when two events are equally possible but could not have both occurred, or when two propositions cannot logically be true at the same time. As with tossing a coin, only one outcome (heads) can be true; if it is, the other outcome (tails) cannot be true. In that example, the mutual exclusion is collectively exhaustive, meaning that either one or the other must happen. There are other forms—the rolling of dice, for instance—that yield several mutually exclusive outcomes, but I am largely interested in duality. Applied to narrative, mutual exclusion is an opposition between two explanations or sets of events, one tagged as real or true, the other as illusory or false. These respective attributions can alternate, but it is also a common trick of this kind of narrative to perform a last-minute reversal, to cast doubt on what has taken place. Mutual exclusion corresponds to an “either/or” grammar and is a close analogue to William Empson’s seventh type of ambiguity: “full contradiction.”1 It also has some affinity with Tsvetan Todorov’s theory of “the fantastic”: suspended between the marvelous and the strange, the fantastic compels the reader to “hesitate” between a “supernatural” and a “rational” explanation for a story, each equally likely.2 A familiar version of this structure has a character wake up at some point and ask, “Was it a dream?” Ghost stories, vision tales, insanity narratives, and hallucination stories are also representative. Mutual exclusion has become a very popular technique for uncertainty in contemporary narratives, especially films. A spate of movies at the turn of the twenty-first century deployed this structure to produce an effect of uncertainty about 41

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Mutual Exclusion

what is in the mind and what is outside it: David Fincher’s The Game (1997) and Fight Club (1999), M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001), Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), and Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001). Confronted with this structure, the reader/viewer does not just question the protagonist’s capacity or willingness to tell the truth but is utterly stymied about what exists and what actually happens. These binaries line up as follows: Ontology: Presence v. Absence Epistemology: Perception v. Delusion Hermeneutics: Meaning v. Nonsense Mutual exclusion is more than the average case of unreliable narration. Readers end up asking the most fundamental narrative questions: “Did this happen? Does this exist? Is it true?” This narrative structure allegorizes and enacts the question of radical difference in affect, ethics, and aesthetics. Mutual exclusion tends toward Manichean extremity and dialectical opposition. It incites intense affects like sublimity, hysteria (both comical and psychological), and what Philip Fisher calls “the vehement passions.”3 Mutual exclusion also offers a radical condensation of the ethical dyad par excellence: the self versus the other. I consider how this operates in novels that revolve around the ethical disturbance produced when extreme solipsism clashes with what philosophers call “the problem of other minds.” Grounded in opposition and extremity, mutual exclusion’s aesthetic invokes high contrast, such as a black and white or chiaroscuric palette. Common metafictional figures for mutual exclusion are the Janus face, the Möbius strip, the Escher painting, the computational binary, and the Gestalt machine. Over the course of reading, these fixed tropes of mutual exclusion get bestirred with movement: flip-flopping, switching, full turns, oscillation, enfolding. That is, while mutual exclusion may abstractly signify a locked paradox of radically opposed forces or persons, its experiential effects entail complex negotiations of radical difference over time. Maurice Merleau-Ponty notes that our initial perceptions of a situation, when proven illusory, “never revert to nothingness or to subjectivity as if they had never appeared, but are rather . . . ‘crossed out’ or ‘cancelled’ by the ‘new’ reality.”4 When an initial image or event is replaced or denied in reading, too, this effects a layering rather than an outright deletion. This

Mutual Exclusion

suggests that even if a narrative’s events are later deemed a hallucination, they still hang around in the reader’s mind, just under the sign of negation. A classic example of mutual exclusion is Henry James’s modernist novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898).5 Since Edmund Wilson’s 1934 Freudian analysis “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” the critical question has been: is the governess mad or are the ghosts real? As Wilson notes: “nowhere does James unequivocally give the thing away: almost everything from beginning to end can be read equally in either of two senses.”6 The thoroughness of its mutual exclusion dictates the terms of The Turn’s mammoth body of criticism, which divvied itself for half a century between the “apparitionists” and the “anti-apparitionists.” Christine Brooke-Rose maintains that “the text is structured on a poetic principle that functions in both hypotheses.”7 In The Concept of Ambiguity (1977), Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan narrows her titular term to mean the co-presence of mutually exclusive possibilities. Employing the figure of an Escher painting with interlocking patterns visible only in alternation, she shows in detail that almost every line of The Turn can be cited as evidence for either the existence of the ghosts or the delusion of the governess.8 J. Hillis Miller defines the “unreadability” of all of James’s fictions in terms akin to mutual exclusion: “two or more incompatible or contradictory meanings which imply one another or are intertwined with one another, but which may by no means be felt or named as a unified totality. ‘Unreadability’ names the discomfort of this perpetual lack of closure, like a Möbius strip which has two sides, but only one side, yet two sides still, interminably.”9 Miller distinguishes this structure from multiplicity—my next structure: “The multiple ambiguous readings of James’s fictions are not merely alternative possibilities. They are intertwined with one another in a system of unreadability, each possibility generating the others in an unstilled oscillation.”10 I elaborate the mode Miller mentions—an unstilled oscillation between mutually exclusive elements—in my first chapter on mutual exclusion. In Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 The Crying of Lot 49, the major interpretative puzzle is whether the heroine Oedipa Maas is mad or whether there is an elaborate postal conspiracy surrounding her. These opposed explanations afford a mode of oscillation: we move back and forth between these accounts, which are each given equal weight. I use Pynchon’s dynamic conceits—oscilloscopes, elongated mirror scenes, and projectile

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figures—to evoke the affective, aesthetic, and ethical affordances of an unending dialectic with no synthesis. Oscillation, as it accelerates, affords a vibrating, brimming, dilatory affective energy. I also consider the skepticism embedded in the text’s metafictional moments and the levity that it promotes as we laugh at failed moments of interpretation: this hysterical aesthetic swings between belief and disbelief, rather than merely suspending the latter. I argue that oscillation resonates with an extreme movement between empathy and alterity that I call an ethics of projection and that I align with Martin Buber’s philosophy in I and Thou.11 In the second chapter on this structure, I turn to the rather different mode afforded by this structure in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001). Instead of oscillating between narrative possibilities, McEwan’s novel presents one set of events over the course of most of the novel and then, at the last minute, counters it with another set of events. A romantic reunion between two characters is revealed to be an untrue happy ending (they died apart), concocted by another character, who turns out to have written the novel we’ve just read. While this induces a feeling of betrayal in first-time readers, rendered bereft of the happy ending they helped constitute, I suggest that rereading folds this novel back over itself. This layers its two mutually exclusive endings over each other as equally viable subjunctive possibilities. I coordinate the novel’s aesthetic with Gilles Deleuze’s articulation of a Leibnizian baroque in The Fold, arguing that Atonement is a spoiled baroque, riven and rotted within.12 Rereading the novel affords a mode of enfolding that cleaves us over time; the rereader—divided between first and second readings—is enfolded with a split protagonist, producing a dark, spoiled version of empathy: an ethics of complicity.

1 O S C I L L AT I O N

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

El Desheredado What does an author owe his work? Wayne Booth, in his comprehensive articulation of the various dimensions of literary ethics in The Company We Keep, asks and answers: What Are the Author’s Responsibilities to the Work of Art? The usual modern answer, good enough up to a point, is “to make it as good as can be.” . . . The “duty” here is indistinguishable from the pursuit of artistic success: skill, craft, technique, formal excellence, emotional power, self-expression. An ethical critic can simply reverse these terms . . . and think of the pursuit of excellence as itself a matter of duty or character: the true artist shows us that whatever is made ought to be made well.1

With its passive construction, Booth’s “ought to be made well” eludes the question of agency: who is to say the work has been made well, or that its author wished to make it well, or that historical conditions permitted its “wellness” to be received? The topic of this chapter, Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), seems to have been made well.2 It is often cited—and even more frequently taught—as “an exemplary postmodern text,” possessed of a wildly skeptical, paranoiac sensibility, 1960s revolutions of class and gender, and a zany compulsion toward pop culture shout-outs.3 But while we can take for granted that it is a critically monumental, canonical work of American literature, Lot 49 raises some problems for Booth’s answer to the question of authorial responsibility. One is that Pynchon, notoriously reclusive, has little to no impulse to reflect on his 45

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texts in the form of interviews or essays. The exceptions to this reticence pose another problem for Booth’s theory. Take the authorial disavowal of Lot 49 in this quotation from his introduction to his 1984 story collection, Slow Learner: “The next story I wrote was The Crying of Lot 49, which was marketed as a ‘novel,’ and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up until then.”4 It might seem obvious that an author’s belief that he has done his best would fulfill Booth’s requisite “duty” to literary responsibility. But if it is the author who decides, what do we do if he changes his mind? This question is further complicated by the psychological dynamics of Pynchon’s rejection of his earlier works. Pynchon seems especially irritated in his discussion of Lot 49 that what he considered “a story” was “marketed as a novel,” as though its overvaluation is somehow due to its having been perceived as physically or generically more substantial than it was meant to be. This disregard should not surprise us; many authors revile their former work and the former selves it embodies. Pynchon begins his introduction to Slow Learner by comparing the process of rereading his old stories to hanging out with his younger self: “how comfortable would I feel about lending him money, or for that matter even stepping down the street to have a beer and talk over old times?”5 The title of the collection itself bespeaks this charming self-deprecation. Of “The Secret Integration,” Pynchon remarks that “much of my feeling for this last story can be traced to ordinary nostalgia for this time in my life, for the writer who seemed then to be emerging, with his bad habits, dumb theories and occasional moments of productive silence in which he may have begun to get a glimpse of how it was done.”6 Yet, by denigrating the young writer he was with this tender tone, he spurs curiosity. The desire to disparage the stories collected in Slow Learner is dogged by an equally strong desire to market them. Pynchon only dismissed them with a pshaw and a shrug once literary and financial success were firmly in hand. Indeed, if we dig deeper into any text’s genesis to consider how “well” it was made, we might find spurious financial motivations, narrative constraints, the contingent genesis of literary innovation, and the imperative of generic expectations. To begin with that material bane of all writers, money, we might note that Lot 49 was first published serially in popular magazines. In 1965, the first two chapters appeared in the December issue of Esquire as “The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas), and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity.” In March of

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1966, the magazine Cavalier (“an odd combination of ’60s political rhetoric and nude pictorials”) published “The Shrink Flips,” which ended up as part of chapter 5.7 John K. Young argues that, despite the critical success of Pynchon’s first mammoth tome, V., he was strapped for cash when he sent Lot 49 off to the pulps: “It seems reasonable to assume that, simply put, Pynchon sold out. Not yet the celebrity (nor MacArthur Foundation recipient) he would become, Pynchon presumably turned to popular magazines for the same reason that . . . so many other American writers before him had: they paid well and they carried a certain cultural cachet.”8 A slight tweak to Booth’s ought to be made well yields ought to be paid well. Pynchon’s chapters in Esquire and Cavalier constitute an advertisement for a novel that would appear in bookstores within a few months; they were quite literally anticipatory. Whether or not it is motivated by penury, serialization also promotes a particular kind of reading, one premised on the deliberate, iterative postponement of the reading process. The text must refuse immediate closure but also promise future answers to the questions raised in the narrative. It is no accident that the gerundive “crying” of the novel’s title is a verb caught inside a noun— the text is propellant, a page-turner, perpetually in motion. It makes sense that the two pieces from Lot 49 that Pynchon published in Esquire revolve around suspenseful scenarios: respectively, the mysterious death of Oedipa’s ex-boyfriend Pierce Inverarity, which riffs on the history of California detective fiction; and her slow, elaborate, seduction by (and of) a lawyer, Metzger, in a game called Strip Botticelli. This second sequence would have well suited Esquire’s reputation as a canvas for pinup painters like George Petty and Alberto Vargas; Pynchon’s style, too, would have meshed well with the New Journalism screaming from the magazine’s pages. It is entirely possible that the necessity for inciting readerly expectation in these preview chapters determined, or at least influenced, the gripping, suspenseful shape that the entire text would take: a kind of synecdochic influence whereby serialized part governs ultimate whole. If this is so, is Pynchon responsible for his text’s success? Or are the conditions of publication to blame—or to praise? The infection of authorial intention by these variously material considerations—financial and pulpy, both—make trouble for author-based theories of literary ethics as presented by critics like Booth and Martha Nussbaum. Ever careful, Booth is far more attuned to these kinds of factors than Nussbaum, whose dependence on authorial intention in her

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claims for literary ethics is often assumed rather than argued. But even Booth’s idealization of authorial responsibility depends on a cleansing of history, one that gains purchase in his substitution of the infamously expedient “implied author” for the “flesh-and-blood author.” Booth defines the implied author as “an ideal, literary, created version of the real man; he is the sum of his own choices,” a fictional personage who obviates the “ ‘pointless and unverifiable talk’ about the authentic, true-tolife author.”9 In this view, what is important is not the author’s historical attitudes or values but rather what he chooses to embed in his text, assuming that the latter is more “verifiable.”10 The flesh-and-blood Pynchon can confess to all the authorial irresponsibility he wants in real life; Lot 49’s success with lay and critical readers alike can be attributed to the implied Pynchon. This comes to seem more specious when, in order to subtend his ethical vision of reading as a species of worthy friendship, Booth argues that the implied author is a better self than the real author. He often cites in this vein a letter Saul Bellow once sent describing revision as “cutting out those parts of myself that I don’t like.”11 It is telling that Booth’s evidence for the implied author’s better self comes from a letter from a real author. Nussbaum, too, deploys extratextual commentary to bolster her claim for authorial ethics, citing these lines from Henry James’s preface to The Golden Bowl: “ ‘To ‘put’ things is very exactly and responsibly and interminably to do them.’ The novelist is a moral agent; and the moral agent, to the extent to which she is good, shares in the abilities of the novelist.”12 These two examples hint at the extent to which real authors— or the idea of the “real,” because letters and prefaces are obviously constructed—tend to eclipse implied ones in practice. In lieu of convenient extratextual authorial commentary from Pynchon, Booth might suggest that we move into the text to find Pynchon’s better self. But we immediately find that Lot 49, told in a focalized third person, is incorrigibly heteroglossic. It incorporates, with catholic glee, bits and pieces of pop culture and high literature, from The Great Gatsby’s “chime held among the stars and struck lightly” to allusions to Lolita (149). The implied author has no single voice or single self, even in projected form; we cannot easily locate an implied Pynchon apart from his stylistic tics of syntax and diction, tics that he claimed to abjure. If we consider characters who might figure authoritative authorship, the prime candidate—Pierce Inverarity—is rather shady. Oedipa’s exboyfriend was twice her age and called himself “a founding father”; he

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promptly disappears from the text after a cameo in the form of a wildly polyvocal phone call (15). The only other trace of this absent father is textual and circulatory: “The letter was from the law firm of Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, of Los Angeles, and signed by somebody named Metzger. It said Pierce had died back in the spring, and they’d only just now found the will” (2). This piece of mail—the start of the Tristero’s “postal conspiracy”—informs Oedipa at once of Pierce’s death and his will. She can neither write nor fight back; the author figure confers authority through absence and the law. This ramified disavowal of authorship demonstrates the limits of analyzing ethics only in terms of writers or their avatars. Maurice Couturier aligns Lot 49 with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw on exactly this front: “You have good reasons to believe you will reach the safe port of a mind-resting dénouement at the end, but you don’t; the author discourteously slams a door in your face in the last sentence. . . . Its narrative discourse serves as an opaque screen between us and the author.”13 This presents a more perverse relation of (implied) readers to (implied) authors than either Booth’s “friendship” or Nussbaum’s “love” would (ahem) imply. This relation isn’t reducible to a bad friendship or an unrequited affair, because what is so compelling about Lot 49 is precisely the deliberateness of Pynchon’s refusal of responsibility, authority, plain courtesy. The basis for the plot, for whatever phenomena Oedipa confronts, seems to be a threefold disappearance (Pynchon, implied Pynchon, Pierce) that conjures the elusive specter of authority. The Tristero is at one point associated with a political subversive who mounts “a sub rosa campaign of obstruction, terror and depredation” along the Thurn and Taxis mail route (132). He names himself “El Desheredado,” or “the disinherited.” We might use the name for the text itself, whose author figures have cast it off, lending it a freedom that is also a vulnerability. To apply (reductively) the poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theories contemporaneous to Pynchon: the absence of a patriarchal center, a Law of the Father that would ideally ground meaning, leads to an endless lateral chain of signifiers. When master is away, the signs will play. It is evident in Pynchon’s ejaculatory writing style, a bursting of language as if from a vacuum; the authorial “nothing” in Lot 49 is of a peculiarly generative sort. In his disparaging description of the younger self that penned the novel, Pynchon privileges only those “occasional moments of productive silence.”14 As the enormous compendia of critical

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works on this text evinces, the authorial lacuna does not ironize or oppose interpretive play; it seems rather to spur it.15 As Roland Barthes would say, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”16

The Ethics of Paranoia The difficulties with pinpointing authorial authority that I have limned above compel a shift away from the embodiment of an ethics in an author figure and toward the reading experience his departure provokes, one shaped by the skeleton—the formal structure—he leaves behind. Within the diegetic world of the characters in The Crying of Lot 49, the prime figure for reading is Oedipa, a housewife, a nearly powerless and untethered protagonist. If Pierce is an absentee father, she is a kind of orphan figure, one we can take on and empower through our animation of her quest, which gains intensity and higher stakes as the text progresses. Despite the authoritarian flavor of the “executrix” title that Pierce bestows on her, Oedipa at first tries to fob the job off: “Can’t I get somebody to do it for me?” (10). Her laxity then gives way to an irrepressible obsession: soon enough she is fixated on figuring out what the Tristero is and means. And so are we, for her quest is ours as well: the search for meaning is what turns the pages of this classic of literary uncertainty. The text’s perspective (limited or focalized third person) seems to confine us to the mind of the protagonist. But the drive toward discovery that characterizes Lot 49 does not lead, as it usually does in detective stories, serialized stories, or quest tales, to epiphany. This short work simply stops short. In the last scene, Oedipa sits at an auction, waiting to hear “the crying of lot 49” (152). By all accounts, in adopting Oedipa’s lens for the duration of the hermeneutically driven narrative, the reader is subject to this thwarted mission. Her seeking, her frustration, and her ultimate failure to know are aligned with ours. There is no verifiable knowledge for the reader to attain, given the absence of any objective plane outside Oedipa’s circumscribed viewpoint from which to evaluate her perceptions or the events that happen to her, much less their ethical implications. This perhaps explains why efforts at analyzing the ethical form of this novel have generally subsumed it to the political.17 Part of the problem is that Lot 49 eschews what is often perceived as a foundational basis for ethics: the relation of one subject (a self) to other subjects (an other or several others). Lot 49 by contrast traces the relation of a troublingly

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self-contained Self—our heroine, Oedipa—to a shifting, amorphous, perhaps nonexistent community described as a “magical Other,” the Tristero (180). That relation itself does not seem to bear directional clarity or ethical substance. When Oedipa wonders whether she will be “assumed full circle into some paranoia,” she takes on at once a solipsism and a vulnerability that is dangerously tempting for the suspicious reader (182). We have to wonder: what would an ethics of paranoia look like? Emily Apter, in her recent analysis of the paranoid fiction of postmodernity, suggests that it would be a troubling one. Apter aligns a picture of “a delirious aesthetics of systematicity” with a neo-imperial globalism “held in place by the paranoid premise that ‘everything is connected.’ ”18 Apter is concerned with how the hyperperceptual, hyperinterpretive bent of postmodern American fiction has made it complicit with, if not a catalyst of, this culture of paranoia. The literary lineage she traces, beginning with “trailblazers” Pynchon and Don DeLillo, “is as much a symptom of this postwar paranoid culture as its literary archive.”19 A glance at the space Lot 49 inhabits on the Internet demonstrates how contagious this paranoia is. For Apter, it is an imposed cultural order, ethically empty, evincing a logic of privileged sight: Exhibiting a structural logic that is circular, auto-referential, internally selfverifying, and fixed by an Archimedean point both within and outside of its generic set, paranoia reinforces unipolar thought, specifically, a model of oneness as allness. If God is another name for intellectual unipolarity, the paranoid theorist will be God by devising a system of omniscience capable of binding everything into coherence, thereby rendering discrepant orders of signs mutually intelligible or pantranslatable.20

Apter’s conclusion that “theory is paranoia; an intellectual entrapment in logic that is mimetic of the object of analysis,” seems to find its perfect embodiment in Lot 49.21 The novel continually offers images for this paradigm of a deified self and a systematized world that contains it—a paradigm that inverts the moment it comes into clarity. Oedipa muses: “the saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth” (104–105). Before encounter-

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ing the Tristero, she recalls seeing a Remedios Varos painting—the first of three paintings that deftly render the confusion of inside and outside—on a trip to Mexico: In the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears. (11)22

To begin with the bathetic end of this ekphrasis: what could be a more damning portrait of ethical myopia than seeing the world through your own tear-tinted sadness? The implication is that the Tristero will be a tapestry that binds Oedipa even as she creates it: “everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Tristero” (64). Pynchon’s doubly framed image—a picture that is also an allusion—speaks to the character’s position, while also invoking our positions as readers locked inside the text that we think we are weaving. This Möbius portrait of solipsism—I am the world, the world is me— is strikingly similar to two “horrific” portraits that Martin Buber describes in his philosophical treatise, I and Thou (1923). Presented as false bromides for those “times when man is overcome by the horror of the alienation between I and world,” these pictures are “painted by thought” onto two walls on either side of an imagined subject:23 From the whirl of the stars emerges the small earth, from the teeming on earth emerges small man, and now history carries him forth through the ages, to persevere in rebuilding the anthills of the cultures that crumble under its steps. Beneath this series of pictures is written: “One and all.” On the other wall happens the soul. A female figure spins the orbits of all stars and the life of all creatures and the whole of world history; all is spun with a single thread and is no longer called stars and creatures and world but

Oscillation feelings and representations or even living experiences and states of the soul. And beneath this series of pictures is written: “One and all.”24

The wretched man, anxious over the breach between self and world, has only to glance up at one wall or the other: “whichever he sees, it does not matter, either the empty I is stuffed full of world or it is submerged in the flood of the world, and he calms down.”25 Buber shows this diptych to be an inadequate palliative, however, closing his ekphrasis with a prophecy: “the moment will come, and it is near, when man, overcome by horror, looks up and in a flash sees both pictures at once. And he is seized by a deeper horror.”26 This simultaneous gaze, which finds the terror lurking at the back of Walter Benjamin’s “dialectics at a standstill,” recognizes the futility of both pictures of “One and all.” Buber thus seems to bolster Apter’s claim that the paranoiac desire for “one-worldedness” is ethically horrific. Yet there is a parenthetical note in Buber’s description of these two “world pictures” that unwittingly resists the petrification evoked by his image: “Here is (or rather: happens, for the world pictures of thought are reliable motion pictures) the universe.”27 Buber’s recourse to filmic language highlights an experiential movement in time. This image telegraphs Buber’s solution to this alienated impasse, as I will discuss at the end of this chapter: the dialogic oscillation of I and Thou.28 If the terror of looking at both pictures derives from the flash, its “at once” simultaneity, we can break free of the double petrification of “one and all” by moving between them. Indeed, the very form of Buber’s treatise— dialogic, a motion picture of its own—undermines the stillness of the portrait it depicts. This ought to remind us that Oedipa and her oneworldedness, too, are represented in a narrative form with its own ethical stakes. To represent paranoia or one-worldedness is precisely to delineate a place from which it can be represented—a place outside it. The narrative depiction of self-enclosed or self-enclosing states implies positions beyond them; I may be locked in Oedipa’s perspective, but language grants me a double vision that allows me to see her and myself in tandem. The attention drawn to perception in the image of Oedipa’s glasses in the Mexico scene above, for example, offers the reader a measure of distance. In this sense, contra Apter, I would argue that while Lot 49 is about paranoia and solipsism, the text is not itself wholly paranoid. It can’t be. Oedipa continually questions whether the conspiracy is inside

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or outside, in her mind or in the world: “Either Trystero did exist, in its own right, or it was being presumed, perhaps fantasied by Oedipa, so hung up on and interpenetrated with the dead man’s estate” (88). Paranoia requires skepticism in order to exist; otherwise, we would just call it the way things are. The repeated hints at the potential delusion lurking in the protagonist’s mind do not negate her paranoia. They do, however, transform our reading experience, one that Apter’s analysis of paranoia elides. When she argues that a text’s style, structure, and perspective conform to a paradigm of readerly perception that can be evaluated in terms of a (negative) ethical vision of one-worldedness, her symptomatic reading underestimates the text’s self-consciousness and the reader’s intermittent recognition of it. Lot 49 does not induce paranoia but rather alternates between paranoia and its undoing. Penelope-like, we weave ourselves into the tapestry, only to “disentangle” it in the spirit, once again, of Roland Barthes: “everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and every level, but there is nothing underneath; the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning.”29

Binaries and Oscilloscopes If we begin to follow or range over or run the text, we find that the dialectic between paranoia and its denunciation in The Crying of Lot 49 emerges out of Pynchon’s use of the narrative structure I described in the preface to Part I. Mutual exclusion is the co-presence of two opposing explanations for the same set of events. Because of the fundamental opposition of the explanations for the diegetic events revolving around the mysterious, occult subterranean conspiracy network called the “Tristero” in Lot 49, we end up asking fundamental narrative questions: Is the Tristero real? Or is Oedipa paranoid? Criticism on Lot 49, especially during the heyday of poststructuralism, often frames it in mutually exclusive terms: “either postmodern playfulness or political engagement; either reified significance or meaninglessness; either paranoid community or the alienation of the individual. Something, Pynchon’s critics have argued in manifold ways, must lie between the ‘either’ and the ‘or’ of these conditions.”30

Oscillation

We see here governing the puzzle of Lot 49 the three categories I charted in my preface to Part I on mutual exclusion. One is the opposition between presence and absence, which we might put this way: existence versus nonexistence. At stake in this binary is diegetic ontology, whether or not something happens or exists. Two, we have the binary of accurate perception versus paranoiac delusion, a dilemma that derives from the circumscribed viewpoint of our “sensitive” protagonist. This opposition, which would make Oedipa either visionary or insane, pertains to epistemology: how does she come to have knowledge, and is that knowledge valid? And finally, there is a hermeneutic opposition between meaning and nonmeaning, a question of interpretive coherence or significance. As Frank Kermode argues, Pynchon situates his novel, his heroine, and his reader “on the slash between meaning and unmeaning.”31 In sum, Oedipa must determine whether the Tristero exists, whether it is about herself or the mysterious other, and whether it holds political or personal import. These oppositions are the reader’s as well as we grapple with the problem of interpretation: can we incorporate the signs Oedipa encounters into a coherent system of meaning, one that might exceed her understanding? It seems unlikely. Further, a retrospective analysis of the text reveals a braiding effect across ontology, epistemology, and hermeneutics, suggesting that it is the interlocking of mutually exclusive possibilities—their weave—that makes this text so radically uncertain. The ubiquity of mutual exclusion in the text manifests in an “either/ or” grammar to which Pynchon is prone at the level of the sentence, a syntactical tic he deploys for paragraphs at a time. We see this when he translates mutual exclusion into a handy, relatively modern conceit:32 It was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. . . . Ones and zeroes. So did the couples arrange themselves. . . . Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America. (150–151)

The fact that Oedipa is walking through this suspended computational binary—“the couples arranging themselves”—suggests the static

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limitation of common figures for mutual exclusion like the Escher painting. While the co-presence of opposed forces presents a structure of mutual exclusion, the movement between those forces affords a mode of uncertainty. If paranoia suggests an inward turn that lassoes the world into an order of madness, the experience of reading paranoia over time entails a continual turning back and forth between self and world. As a general term to encompass these various kinds of alternation, I will use the word oscillation. Oedipa hangs out with some aerospace workers; the name of their plant, Yoyodyne, is one figure for this kind of movement, the name of their favorite bar, The Scope, another. The bar’s name abbreviates “oscilloscope,” an instrument used for measuring electrical signals. The green neon sign outside The Scope is described as “the face of an oscilloscope tube, over which flowed an ever-changing dance of Lissajous figures” (34). Lissajous figures, produced by an oscilloscope, are derived from a parametric equation that combines a vertical periodic wave with a horizontal one; they resemble spinning spirals.33 The bar has a back room full of “audio oscillators, gunshot machines, contact mikes” for making music in case “you got the feeling and you want to swing with the rest of the cats” (34, emphasis mine).34 In a typical Pynchonian fluctuation of conceits, the rhythms of hard science and hard rock circulate within “The Scope.” A Yoyodyne employee later explains James Clerk Maxwell’s Demon to Oedipa: “The Demon could sit in a box among air molecules that were moving at all different random speeds, and sort out the fast molecules from the slow ones. . . . Since the Demon only sat and sorted, you wouldn’t have to put any real work into the system. So you would be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, getting something for nothing, causing perpetual motion” (68). We also discover that a professor named John Nefastis has built a machine that equates “two distinct kinds of . . . entropy. One having to do with heat-engines, the other to do with communication. The equation for one, back in the ’30’s, had looked very like the equation for the other. It was a coincidence. The two fields were entirely unconnected, except at one point: Maxwell’s Demon” (84). Converting the mental concentration of “sensitives” to a genuine sorting Demon, the machine operates according to the logic of a “verbally graceful, but also objectively true” “figure of speech”: the homonym “entropy” (85). Like the oscilloscopes at The Scope, the Nefastis Machine coordinates opposed forces—fast and slow molecules, meaningful and meaningless communication—into a vivid, dynamic en-

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ergy. Physical and mental states, thermodynamics, and language are all converted into perpetual motion—a relation that does not stick but moves. Referring to Oedipa’s failure to make this machine work, David Wills and Alec McHoul tap this quality of movement by arguing that her “prosthetic” reading model involves “a sort of perpetual motion between sensitivity and diabolism in which animate connects with inanimate to produce, or constitute sense. Or a perpetual switching between delirium and differential.”35 Their figure of the “prosthesis,” however, renders visual and static something that is an ongoing process and an experience in the novel. Wills and McHoul turn Pynchon’s oscilloscopic text into an idea about itself; they conclude with an argument about the novel’s unreadability, despite adamantly renouncing “an overview” or “codification” of uncertainty. Though they may gesture to it as a conceptual apparatus, few critics have dwelt on a mode of oscillation in aesthetic, affective, and ethical terms. What does oscillation afford as an experience in its own right? Neither a stalling nor a suspension nor even a mere waffling between alternatives, oscillation in Lot 49 entails a full extension in one direction and then another. It is also cyclical; the movement returns; the novel’s oscillations are local and recursive. As oscillation develops over time in Lot 49, it speeds up, in part to accommodate the reader’s acclimation, in part to keep both alternatives in the reader’s mind and heighten the contrastive frisson between them. Oscillation requires (at least) two points, but it eventually undermines the fixity and opposition of those points. In this sense, it eventually exceeds and reconfigures the mutually exclusive structure that affords it. Just as an oscillating thing will blur, the contrapuntal distinction between mutually exclusive options gives way to a motion that converts similarity and difference into a vibrating potentiality. Analogously, oscillation infuses movement into the self/other interaction, pointing to an ethical relation that moves beyond authorial presence (attenuated by Pynchon’s “irresponsibility”) or character viewpoint (distorted by Oedipa’s solipsism) alone. The ethics of reading Lot 49, I will argue, continually traverses back and forth across the diegetic line. The mode of uncertainty that Lot 49 affords, an ongoing oscillation, encompasses some interrelated effects. The movement back and forth between mutually exclusive alternatives spurs a vibrating oscillation in the intersubjective space, setting into motion a dialectical energy. This aspect of oscillation is both aesthetic—entailing a vividness of

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perception—and affective, insofar as it induces feelings akin to awe and sublimity. The text also proffers a wry skepticism about the possibility of fixed meaning or true revelation; the oscillation between meaning and nonmeaning loosens our grasp on significance and mocks our interpretive tenacity with jaunts into the absurd. Meaning becomes less portentous and more playful, less pretentious and more “let’s pretend!” By conjoining the features of a metafictional puzzle with a campy sense of humor, this facet of oscillation also imbricates aesthetics and affect. Finally, oscillation affords us a process of projective identification that has ethical resonance. Buber’s I and Thou will help me argue for an ethics of projection: the projectile force of an empathic excursion that is intensified (but also checked) by the differentiation of self and other with which it alternates. Critics from Judith Butler to Lynne Huffer to David Palumbo-Liu have recently posited that we might reconceive the ethics of reading as a form of oscillation between reading for life and reading “as if” for life; between identification and disidentification; between sameness and alterity.36 Addressing a text that not only self-consciously describes but also affords a distinctive aesthetic, affective, and ethical experience of oscillation, my analysis of Lot 49 augments this intuition about ethics and literature. The aesthetic and affective dimensions I turn to now— energy, levity, and projection—comprise an intense, vibrant mode of oscillation that resonates with a dynamic ethics: a flinging of the self toward the other that nevertheless recognizes its own futility and thus neither dissolves the self nor appropriates the other.

The Eye of Some Whirlwind Oedipa begins her journey toward the Tristero by driving to San Narciso, a city whose initial description exemplifies the hyperconscious textuality of the novel: “Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway” (13). She calls attention to the city’s immersion in signification and to its punning name, the first of many references to (Saint) Narcissus, which themselves form a “grouping” of psychoanalytic, religious, and classical concepts. As Amy Hungerford suggests more broadly of Pynchon’s postreligious texts, “whatever sort of transcendent meaning is to be had is incarnate in external pattern.”37

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Oedipa thinks Pierce’s storied history here ought to give San Narciso an “aura” of significance, but her first view of the city is inauspicious: “if there was any vital difference between it and the rest of Southern California, it was invisible on first glance,” which is to say, “[n]othing was happening” (14). But then, like a good reader, she soon discovers something: She thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken. (14)

San Narciso’s lack of distinction suddenly springs into a network of signification—hieroglyphs, patterns, words, revelation. “Nothing happening” becomes a replete “intent to communicate”; the movement between nothing and everything coalesces into a trembling invocation of both. It is not the overlay of absence and presence that imbues the instant with an “odd, religious” air; it is the oscillation between them. The very next moment—“as if a cloud had approached the sun or the smog thickened and so broken the ‘religious instant,’ whatever it might’ve been”— dispels Oedipa’s revelation with its subjunctive speculations (14–15). The oscillation between different registers and figures—between the transistor radio, the circuit card, ancient hieroglyphs, the weather, and spirituality—enacts the very energy being described here. The circuit board, with its alternating currents, is the clearest figure for the dynamism of oscillation, but even the slow whirlwind gets rendered in terms of heated skin and centrifugal coolness, as if to capitalize on the contrastive tactile possibilities available here. This is the first of the Tristero’s clues, each with “its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence,” and its concomitant elusive air (95). This

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combination of reticulated distinctness and vague obscurity recalls Benjamin’s first mention of aura in the context of early portrait photographs: “There was an aura around them . . . again the technical equivalent lay close at hand; it was the absolute continuum from brightest light to darkest shadow.”38 The interplay of darkness and light, analogizes, perhaps even causes, aura. One of Benjamin’s later definitions of aura is apposite for Oedipa’s telescopic zoom: “A strange web of time and space: the unique appearance of a distance, however close at hand. On a summer noon, resting, to follow the line of a mountain range on the horizon or a twig which throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or hour begins to be a part of its appearance—that is to breathe the aura of those mountains, that twig.”39 Like the twig, Oedipa’s circuit emerges sharply—“with astonishing clarity”—within the affective swell of chronotopic dilation. While her image maintains the distinctness of an etching or a shadow, the yawning expansion of time and crescendoing silence around her stir the moment of perception into a spiraling vacuum. Oscillation affords the fullest, most extreme forms of both nothing and something: the novel’s tenuous phenomena gain portentous significance from absence, and heightened vividness from presence. On the one hand, the possibility of the Tristero’s nonexistence is conveyed by its association with silence and death. Its symbol is a muted post horn; its vehicle is a trash can labeled W.A.S.T.E.; its motto is D.E.A.T.H. The pervasive atmosphere of stillness, silence, and absence imbues the Tristero with the dreamy grandeur of the void. On the other hand, sharply defined details, like the circuit of San Narciso, lend Oedipa’s visions lucidity and vivacity. The visibility of the Tristero’s signs is not in doubt. But their oscillation with absence seems to make them vibrate, glow, blur in a phenomenological sense. The clues in the novel shimmer with this subjunctive ontology, making the Tristero seem almost “diaphanous”: the alternation of absence and presence dilutes but also intensifies its quality of being. We might better refer to the Tristero, with its either/or ontology, as Oedipa’s dream rather than her vision. Oedipa says of her sleepless nights following her discovery of its possible existence: “she would have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed” (95). In Golden Gate Park she comes upon “a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering. But that the dream was really no different from being awake, because in the mornings when they got up

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they felt tired, as if they’d been up most of the night” (96). In “The Dream-Work,” Freud notes that dreams do not represent conjunctions like “if,” “because,” “as though,” or “although”: “The dream is altogether unable to express the alternative, ‘either-or’; it is in the habit of taking both members of this alternative into one context, as though they were equally privileged.”40 It is not the mutually exclusive structure of dream itself but the oscillation between either and or that creates what Oedipa calls a “voluptuous field” (95). Oscillation creates a meniscus of potentiality barely contained by the stillness and longueur of the dream. A moment midway through Lot 49 invokes this quivering potentiality. At a hotel where a conference of deaf-mutes is taking place, Oedipa gets dragged to a party by its drunk attendees: They swept her on into the ballroom, where she was seized about the waist by a handsome young man in a Harris tweed coat and waltzed round and round, through the rustling, shuffling hush, under a great unlit chandelier. Each couple on the floor danced whatever was in the fellow’s head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop. But how long, Oedipa thought, could it go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined. (107)

The deaf-mutes perform different dances to the music in their heads but never collide, a miracle for which Oedipa has “no name” (107). Again, this uncanny sense of possibility is accompanied by a dilation of time (“But how long . . . could it go on?”) and by a doubled silence, this time of deaf-muteness. Oedipa’s mind moves back and forth between anticipating collision and considering the “only alternative”—that there is a magical sense keeping the deaf-mute conference attendees safe. These mental movements reflect on and are reflected by the oscillations of the dancers in motion. This scene recalls the Lissajous figures outside The Scope and their “ever-changing dance” while foreshadowing the figure of the computational binaries, those “couples arrang[ing] themselves” (34, 107). The silent signs neither crash nor coalesce into epiphany, but their very movement, their “rustling, shuffling” dance, invokes the brimming energy of suspended revelation (107). We can foreshadow here how the dynamic frisson produced by oscillation might help us to reconceive the

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ethical dyad. Oedipa and her handsome tweed-clad partner are divided along several axes: male and female, able-bodied and disabled, they are utter strangers thrown together due to a contingency emphasized by the collisions and the choreography of their transient encounter. Most crucially, these two characters are divided by a breach that, in this novel brimming with words, might just epitomize the divide between self and other: they cannot verbally communicate with each other. And yet: they dance.

A Thrust at Truth and a Lie Like all that happens to Oedipa in The Crying of Lot 49, this episode of the deaf-mute dancers eventually comes to seem relevant to the Tristero, another sign within its vast, diffuse symbology. But the attribution of meaning to these signs is perpetually thwarted by the adamant metatextuality of the postal conspiracy, which is largely composed of letters (postal, linguistic) and “plots” (of land, of intrigue, of a play). This awareness of the flimsiness of representation casts a skeptical light on the whole enterprise of interpretation. Lot 49’s regress of literary history, its fairytale fancies, and its letters written on the pages of letters all suggest that we need not take literary uncertainty so seriously. The text keeps us from residing too long in the earnest realm of belief; its metafiction sends us back toward recognizing the flightiness of fiction. This, I suggest, lightens the load of literary uncertainty, lending levity to its experiential implications. Lot 49 continually affords excursions into fictional self-consciousness. A Jacobean revenge drama called The Courier’s Tragedy induces a fictional mise en abyme that reenacts and mocks our interpretive efforts. The play’s director, Driblette, warns Oedipa against trying to find meaning in signs: “You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth” (63). Of course, the fact that Driblette’s warning includes a reference to the Tristero (via the word “WASTE”) makes his advice harder to follow, as does an enigmatic couplet in the play: “No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, / Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero” (58). Driblette scoffs that the word Tristero “doesn’t mean anything,” but Oedipa, like any hyper-hermeneutist, refuses to quit until she finds that there is no authoritative version of the play: it is based on an inkblurred script, which is based on a paperback, which differs from the

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hardcover version and steals its line about Tristero from a pornographic version locked in the Vatican. Joseph Roach sees the staged performance in general as an effect of contradiction: “Theatrical performance and the social performances that resemble it consist of struggle, the simultaneous experience of mutually exclusive possibilities—truth and illusion, presence and absence, face and mask.”41 The theater (literally) dramatizes the uncertainty of mutual exclusion, effecting a haunting intensity enacted in the live performance of The Courier’s Tragedy that Oedipa watches: “things really get peculiar, and a gentle chill, an ambiguity, begins to creep in among the words. Heretofore the naming of names has gone on either literally or as metaphor. But now . . . a new mode of expression takes over. It can only be called a kind of ritual reluctance” (55). Neither literal nor metaphoric, this new mode of uncertain expression suffuses the performance with the eerie chronotope—“a gentle chill,” “ritual reluctance”—we saw in Oedipa’s circuit board epiphany and deaf-mute dance. This kind of time belongs as much to the fairy tale as to the stage, as in the enchanted suspension of “Sleeping Beauty.” The dreaming children Oedipa sees in Golden Gate Park prompt an oscillation between belief and doubt that relies on an unheimlich fairy-tale logic: They knew about the post horn, but nothing of the chalked game Oedipa had seen on the sidewalk. You used only one image and it was a jump-rope game, a little girl explained: you stepped alternately in the loop, the bell, and the mute, while your girlfriend sang: Tristoe, Tristoe, one, two, three, Turning taxi from across the sea . . . “Thurn and Taxis, you mean?” They’d never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them. (96)

Oedipa cons herself into the “Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair” (10). An amusing slapstick episode runs through her mind, during which her hair turns out to be a wig, Pierce lands on his ass, and he jimmies the door open with a credit card. These fairy-tale invocations highlight the fancifulness of fiction. A dearth of sense trips into happy nonsense.

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Glowing with this dark-light humor, the punning acronyms in the novel also infect the act of interpretation with levity.42 Oedipa learns about the abbreviation “dt” from a boyfriend in the midst of “the syncopated tonguing of a cavity”: it is “a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight” (105). Later, she senses delirium tremens in the limbs of a tattooed old sailor on the verge of death. Oedipa describes her mind’s far-flung metaphor to link the two acronyms—the dt with the DTs—as “a thrust at truth and a lie” (105). The projectile and sexual force of the verb “thrust” itself thrusts back and forth between the scientific register and erotic connotations. The cross-fire oscillation of likeness and disparity, of objective science and subjective relation, again affords a quivering traversal of time: “trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years” (105). The novel’s self-aware mockery of linguistic interpretation—here reduced to the level of aligning acronyms—casts continual doubt on all of the signs we read. These include not only the texts Oedipa reads but also the ones by which we read her. The rampant decoupling of signifiers and signifieds induces an eagerness to interpret matched by a sense of futility in the enterprise. These two imperatives are set in motion as we read. By contrast with E. M. Forster’s synthetic imperative, “Only connect!,” Pynchon calls Oedipa’s “act of metaphor” a “projectile . . . frozen in midflight.” Again, this metafictional attention to the movement of a literary device both glorifies Oedipa’s creativity and reminds us that we are only reading. We oscillate—or syncopate—between an earnest journey into the depths and a wild, amusing rampage through thin thickets of letters, between “a thrust at truth” and the nudge-wink of the word “thrust.” In this sense, there is indeed “a high magic to low puns” but also a low magic to high concepts (95). Incidental acronyms in the novel oscillate high and low in this way, too, even as they showcase the contingency and reversibility of meaning. Take the crude anagram in the name of the radio station where Mucho Maas works: KCUF. Pynchon also recodifies common acronyms, a teasing reconfiguration that asks the reader to unravel networks of semantic association. ACDC, usually an acronym for Alternating Current Direct Current in electrical circuits, comes to stand for Alameda County Death Cult (99).43 Oedipa’s friend, Jesús Arrabal, tells her about the CIA

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“standing not for the agency you think but for a clandestine Mexican outfit known as the Conjuración de los Insurgentes Anarquistas” (96). And then there are the acronyms that read as words: D.E.A.T.H. (“Don’t Ever Antagonize The Horn”), which Oedipa sees on a bus seat; W.A.S.T.E. (“We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire”); and N.A.D.A. (“National Automobile Dealers’ Association”), emblazoned across a metal sign at Mucho’s used car lot (98, 139, 118). These acronyms can signify random clusters of letters (the “undecipherable FSM’s, YAF’s, VDC’s” Oedipa sees on posters at Berkeley), words (if we see them as legible combinations of letters), or entire phrases (if we note the punctuational nails affixing them as acronyms) (83). This triple signification highlights the acronym’s fluid textuality, destabilizing the distinction between the random and the meaningful. As coincidental, trivial collocations, the acronyms mean nothing; as words, they mean something. But the something they mean turns out to be nothing: death, nada, waste. As David Sorfa notes, the acronyms function on “delirious principles. . . . They are markers, signals, of other meanings, but it is almost impossible to imagine what, if anything their other meanings might be: their import always seems to exceed any explanation (or decoding) of their literal meaning.”44 Their reemergence exacerbates what Mikhail Bakhtin attributes to the dialogized word as such: “the oscillation of possible meanings within it is not only not resolved, but must increase in complexity as it continues to live.”45 In their pseudo-significance, these acronyms are akin to the oftremarked-upon names in the novel.46 Debra Castillo claims that names in Lot 49 are “so comically overdetermined that, like the Tristero itself, they are atomized and exploded by their very semantic richness.”47 And yet, they are also radically underdetermined, as suggested by Pynchon’s mocking reply in the New York Times Book Review to a “Romain Gray,” who had accused the author of stealing a name from him: “I took the name Genghis Cohen from the name of Genghis Khan (1162–1227), the well-known Mongol warrior and statesman. If Mr. Gray really believes himself to be the only writer at present able to arrive at a play on words this trivial, that is another problem entirely, perhaps more psychiatric than literary, and I certainly hope he works it out.”48 In this unusual extratextual intervention, Pynchon glibly makes the problem of the literary name as such a problem of psychiatry and literary surface— a “trivial” “play on words.” Oscillations like these make his novel’s tone shift between an ominous, often maudlin yearning for meaning

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and a jabbering, ejaculatory celebration of the endless dissolution of meaning. If literary uncertainty threatens to make of the reader a dupe, the effects of dupery can move in two directions: there is a potential displeasure in being played, but there is pleasure in recognizing that we are being played. We find amusement in Lot 49’s teasing allegory of interpretation—Oedipa at the theater, Oedipa in the bookstore, Oedipa at Berkeley. The text makes fun of us, but we laugh with it. Insofar as “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” Pynchon’s linguistic tics and overall aesthetic seem to suit Susan Sontag’s definition.49 There is a spirited verve in these tonal diversions, a recognition of the levity necessary to grapple with uncertainty and with an ethical impasse: solipsistic Oedipa versus that “magical Other,” the Tristero. Humor serves as a force for connection even as it acknowledges difference, that necessary check to the absurd and impracticable idea of total understanding.

Shall I Project a World? The Crying of Lot 49 often represents the search for understanding as being more about the seeker than about the mystery. Another way to pose the central question of mutual exclusion in the novel is to ask whether what the heroine discovers is a monstrous conspiracy or her own monstrous consciousness. Pynchon sets critics up to pursue this question of self-revelation for his protagonist by naming her Oedipa. Oedipa’s male namesake in Greek mythology is a decipherer of a Sphinxian riddle but also a self-thwarted seeker of self-knowledge. Late in the novel, Oedipa drives with her eyes closed, a Pynchonian riff on Oedipus’s self-blinding, one which both puts the act in motion and makes it temporary. The visual logic of seeing as a form of knowledge gives way to a projection: both physically projectile and psychologically projective. In the psychoanalytic terms that are conjured by her name, Oedipa’s encounters with mirrors also provide recognition and misrecognition, self-identification and mystery. What more succinct symbol than a mirror for the relation between the self and the other? What better way to intimate that the other you seek to uncover might be you? After her dance with the deaf-mutes, Oedipa falls asleep in her hotel room but is interrupted by “a nightmare about something in the mirror, across from her

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bed . . . [n]othing specific, only a possibility, nothing she could see” (81). When she wakes up in the morning, she sits bolt upright, only to find herself “staring into the mirror at her own exhausted face,” a confrontation with herself that is also an encounter with a “nothing she could see” (81). Based on its description, the unnamed Remedios Varo reproduction that hangs on the same hotel room wall might be “Encuentro”: a woman in blue is seated at a table looking inside a small casket that she has evidently selected from a shelf behind her; her own face peeks out at her, framed by the same blue cloth that spills out of the casket and wraps around her.50 With these scenes, Pynchon does not represent the mirror as a static emblem but rather manipulates reflection to bestow mutual exclusion with movement. Lot 49 stretches mirroring, infusing it with time and motion, and encourages the reader to experience it as a visual and cognitive oscillation. At one point, Oedipa stumbles drunkenly into a bathroom: “she . . . tried to find her image in the mirror and couldn’t” (29). She is at first horrified, but then she remembers a hairspray can that was catapulting around the room earlier: “The can collided with a mirror and bounced away, leaving a silvery, reticulated bloom of glass to hang a second before it all fell jingling into the sink” (25). This image of the broken mirror hanging in the air, like the metaphor as “projectile frozen in midflight,” accentuates a dilation of time. Pynchon disposes of the usual immediacy of reflection, extending it so that its elements (memory, desire, terror) emerge in turn. In yet another pseudo-mirror scene, Oedipa arrives at the Echo Courts motel to meet her lawyer and soon-to-be lover, Metzger. She sees a magnified sign: “A representation in painted sheet metal of a nymph holding a white blossom towered thirty feet into the air. . . . The face of the nymph was much like Oedipa’s. . . . She was smiling a lipsticked and public smile, not quite a hooker’s but nowhere near that of any nymph pining away with love either” (16). Given the prominence of narcissistic images and sexual seduction in the novel, it is fitting that Oedipa sees herself in this “representation.”51 Later, we get an extended conceit: So began, for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of The Tristero. Or rather, her attendance at some unique performance, prolonged as if it were the last of the night, something a little extra for whoever’d stayed this late. As if the breakaway gowns, net bras, jeweled garters and G-strings of

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historical figuration that would fall away were layered dense as Oedipa’s own street-clothes in that game with Metzger in front of the Baby Igor movie; as if a plunge toward dawn indefinite black hours long would indeed be necessary before The Tristero could be revealed in its terrible nakedness. Would its smile, then, be coy, and would it flirt away harmlessly backstage, say good night with a Bourbon Street bow and leave her in peace? Or would it instead, the dance ended, come back down the runway, its luminous stare locked to Oedipa’s, smile gone malign and pitiless; bend to her alone among the desolate rows of seats and begin to speak words she never wanted to hear? (39–40)

Oedipa again sees herself in projected form, an erotic and estranged mirroring. This ultimate scene seems to present mutually exclusive options at once: the internal answer (the mind’s paranoia) and the external answer (Tristero) merge in analogical reflection. To read all three scenes across the text, however, we find that Oedipa sees a nymph who bears her face; then performs a striptease with Metzger; and finally metaphorizes the Tristero into a stripper. To read this elongated mirror scene is to alternate between identification and disidentification over several pages, shifting the subject with whom we identify and from whom we are distanced. She and the Tristero mirror each other via the transitive property, an ongoing relation of self and “magical Other” that affords the dialectical energy and the skeptical levity we have seen. To see the other is to see oneself in a belated or distorted form. To see the other is to encounter the self as a thing or as nothing. This is an uncanny relation, rife with gothic and paranoiac energies. I would describe it as an ethics of projection. I use “projection” to connote the projectile force of throwing oneself into the position of an other, while invoking the thinness of a representational or psychoanalytic projection. Forms of projection both filmic and Freudian emerge repeatedly in Lot 49. During the episode at Echo Courts, Oedipa watches a film with Metzger called Cashiered. As it turns out, the film features none other than a young Metzger, who used to be a child actor; Oedipa wryly conjectures that it is “about you and your mother” (19). Oedipa’s shrink, Dr. Hilarius, is a hysterical parody—he prescribes LSD, and when he succumbs to its hallucinations, he worries that he has not been “a good enough Freudian” (109). Dr. Hilarius confuses surface and depth, perception and reality. He believes that, as a former Nazi, he

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learned to make people go insane, or even harmed them bodily, by “making faces” at them. Projection becomes projectile, shattering that cliché of ethics: the face-to-face encounter. These forms of projection trouble the ethical ideal of empathic identification, imbuing it with ambivalence, temporality, violence. Projection is made an explicit image for interpersonal relation when Oedipa describes life before Pierce: “There had hung the sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix” (10). Who is this recalcitrant “projectionist”? This sounds more like a Freudian slur when Driblette describes his role as a director: “I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also” (62). But this deified manipulator is just another character, one who mocks his own power with a joke about holes. The power of projection shifts to Oedipa: “Under the symbol she’d copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into her memo book, she wrote Shall I project a world?” (64). A passive act of witness (Oedipa watching a  screen) becomes a projection of imagination (Oedipa projecting a world). The stakes of projection are higher than we might think because Lot 49 comes to insist that the Tristero is not just a conspiratorial world or a filmic fantasy but a peopled phenomenon as well. The postal network is accessible, and perhaps caters specifically, to Los Desheredados, the strays of society like those whom Oedipa glimpses on a night bus ride through San Francisco: A child roaming the night who missed the death before birth as certain outcasts do the dear lulling blankness of the community; a Negro woman with an intricately-marbled scar along the baby-fat of one cheek who kept going through rituals of miscarriage each for a different reason, deliberately as others might the ritual of birth, dedicated not to continuity but to some kind of interregnum; an aging night-watchman, nibbling at a bar of Ivory Soap. (100)

There is an ethical implication here that the Tristero exposes Oedipa, bourgeois housewife from Kinneret-Among-The-Pines, to outcasts, “others.” Presumably, readers, too, are to engage in a Dickensian sympathy

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for the lower strata of society. The risk, however, is that these minor characters are made into flimsy cartoons by the carnivalesque poetics of reversal; they become the means toward self-discovery for privileged subjects like Oedipa.

You’re It As we return to the question of the novel’s ethics, we might wonder whether projection as such entails the objectification of others, whether it renders them mere means to our personal ends. To project onto the other risks allowing an unwitting violence in the self (Freud’s id) to cast its monstrosity onto the other—Stephen King’s It. The “other” characters besides Oedipa can easily seem like signs and symbols, rather than human beings. They often verge on a realm of “objecthood,” through a kind of fungibility, through a destruction of personhood, and even through the rigidification of death. Reconsider Oedipa’s tweedy dancepartner. Despite the sympathetic touches to his portrait, Pynchon’s deafmute character raises a troubling tendency in Lot 49 to intensify the Tristero’s otherness through essentialist, quasi-mystical descriptions of its disenfranchised members. Even at the level of plot, every one of Oedipa’s personal relationships eventually devolves into literal death or insanity. The novel’s projective tendencies might inspire a reading in which Oedipa projects her desires, her class anxieties, and her loneliness onto the disinherited. Ethically, she slums. She uses others to achieve self-realization. In this light, we ought to consider the ethics of our own relationships to Lot 49’s characters—both the it-like protagonist, Oedipa, and the “others” she confronts—across the diegetic line. Leaving aside the question of how privileged the assumed reader is—Lot 49 is exceedingly popular beyond academia—the injustice of unconscious or conscious projection onto others is a well-established sin. The connotations of paranoiac and psychoanalytic projection are rightly negative, implying delusional egoism at its worst. Projection also threatens to reduce ipseity (selfhood) to quiddity (objecthood), that quintessential ethical problem to which Kant drew our attention. What is the ethical purchase of a projective identification with the object-like subjects of the text? In what follows, I will suggest that the oscillatory reading afforded by Lot 49’s mode of uncertainty affords a projection into others that nevertheless intermittently recalls that it is a projection onto them.52

Oscillation

Reading Lot 49 entails an oscillation between an immersion in an other’s consciousness and a self-awareness of the artifice of both that consciousness and that immersion. This equivocal identification is not a one-time event but an alternating recurrence. Immersion in Oedipa’s mind is absolutely vital to the uncertainty produced by the text. But the textually embedded doubts about the veracity of the picture of the world she sees send us fully in the opposite direction toward our own reality and toward skepticism about her view. Lot 49’s endemic uncertainty thus troubles identification as such. The epistemological instability afforded by mutual exclusion undermines both the “self” and the “other” as the subjects from which ethics radiates. Yet Lot 49’s mode of uncertainty goes even further than the denial of dialectical synthesis and stable knowledge that poststructural and deconstructive criticism presume to be ethically valuable. Specifically, the novel’s affordances put into interrelation two wellestablished views about what an adequate response to the other should entail. On the one hand, we have the familiar model of the ethics of reading as sympathy, stemming from thinkers like George Eliot and Adam Smith and highly influential among the humanistic strand of ethical literary criticism headlined by Nussbaum and Booth. This model posits immersion in another’s perspective as the pinnacle of ethical relation and the reason for art’s ethical relevance. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments makes claims for sympathy, or what he called “fellow-feeling,” as the foundational human emotion. What in Smith was the basis for political and economic theory was for Eliot inextricable from art and literature; as she wrote in a letter to Charles Bray: “If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.”53 This still trenchant view has long been dogged by the accusation of a self-validating solipsism that bolsters the subject, rather than attending to the other. We have, on the other hand, a more recent strand of ethical theory, deriving from the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, which asserts the impassable and arresting alterity of the other as the foundation for ethics. This is the basis, for example, of Judith Butler’s interpretation of Henry James’s Washington Square, in which she suggests that our uncertainty about the final act in the novel—and about whether to read it “as if” it were a fiction or a real life—cannot be resolved: “This suspension of judgment brings us closer to a different conception of ethics, one that honors what cannot be fully known or captured about the Other.”54 For ease of discussion, I will lend these divergent views on the proper

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relation of the self to the other the somewhat reductive labels of empathy and alterity, respectively. The critic David Parker argues that a kind of misrecognition plagues each of these two versions of ethical relation. Empathy, for one, can slide into imposition: “The universalizing act of putting myself in the other’s place carries the risk of projecting myself onto the other, of reducing the other to the same. At the root of this politics is the fear that Enlightenment or Judeo-Christian universalism is . . . ‘a particularism posing as a universal.’ ” Projection onto the other is a kind of misrecognition: “nonrecognition of difference within a universalizing discourse.” But we can also elevate alterity into an insurmountable obstacle, such that “the other is seen as merely other and different, altogether discontinuous from myself.” Parker attempts to counter both of these forms of misrecognition by arguing that “to avoid misrecognition of others I need to attend both to their otherness and to elements of human continuity between us.”55 Parker’s desire to present a balanced practice of empathy and alterity qualifies the profound potency of each, however, diffusing their energies into a liberal equanimity that is more abstract than experiential. We might say he turns the “either/or” into the “both/and.” An ethics of oscillation, as I understand it, does not negate empathy or alterity, but neither does it synthesize them. Rather, oscillation moves between them, thereby conceding the value of each, while heightening the ethical need for both.56 In such a mode, identification is unavoidable, then impossible, then necessary once more. It is the fling of the gesture toward the other and the swing back that approximates ethics. To move thus between empathy and alterity produces neither hesitation nor complacency. Rather, oscillation is both extreme and self-aware, a full-flung excursion into the world of the other, checked by an intermittent reminder of the temporal and ethical limitations of that identification. The deathless, dazzling, dizzying movements of Oedipa’s perceptions alternately conform to and work in counterpoint to the reader’s. We move in and out of identification—with characters, with their identifications—and come to experience identification as an extreme, error-prone, ongoing projection. The mode of uncertainty I call oscillation affords an ethics as intense but also as tenuous as bright light on a flimsy screen. Reconfiguring the dyadic structure of self and other as a movement allows us to attend to time as integral to ethics. Ethics, as I posited in my introduction, is a process rather than an isolable moment; it entails dy-

Oscillation

namic relations rather than a standing model. While critics like Adam Zachary Newton have focused on the aporetic suspension enforced by Lévinas’s encounter with the Other, a mode of oscillation may align better with Lévinas’s later philosophical thought, which moved toward an account of ethical relations as they shift over time.57 As Simon Critchley parses his work, Lévinas’s notions of the Saying and the Said correspond to the distinction I’ve been making between alterity and empathy. The Saying is “the sheer radicality of the event of being in relation with an Other,” while the Said is “a statement, assertion, or proposition” about the Other. According to Critchley’s account of Lévinas, “the ethical signifies through the oscillation, or alternation, of these orders.”58 I want to draw Lot 49 into relation with another thinker along these lines, however—the one whom I cited earlier and whose work makes this mode of oscillation explicit.

I and Thou and I and It Martin Buber’s most famous work of ethical philosophy, I and Thou, begins thus: “The world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold attitude. The attitude of man is twofold in accordance with the two basic words he can speak. The basic words are not single words but word pairs. One basic word is the word pair I-You. The other basic word is the word pair I-It; but this basic word is not changed when He or She takes the place of It.”59 The tragedy and the beauty of human existence is that the ethical I-You relation always falls into an I-It relation: “This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our world. However exclusively present it may have been in the direct relationship—as soon as the relationship has run its course or is permeated by means, the You becomes an object among objects, possibly the noblest one and yet one of them, assigned its measure and boundary.”60 Walter Kaufman notes that Buber’s embrace of the I-It relationship is not a revision of but a more precise adherence to Kant’s imperative against “using people”: “Kant told men always to treat humanity, in our person as well as that of others, as an end also and never only as a means. This is one way of setting off I-You from I-It. And when he is correctly quoted and the ‘also’ and the ‘only’ are not omitted, as they all too often are, one may well marvel at his moral wisdom.”61 Buber’s sense of the necessity of “It” brings to light the “also” in Kant, the acknowledgment

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that persons may be treated as means, may be subject to Buber’s mittel, which Kaufman ties to mediation, that is, to media, to art. Buber’s philosophy includes objects as well as people and puts them in dynamic relation. Contra the Lévinasian fixation on the human, Buber entertains the possibility of ethical encounters with things, too—a tree, a Doric column, even a fragment of mica.62 Indeed, Buber recognizes the impossibility of sustaining the intensity of a subject-to-subject relation. He calls the I-You relation “unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable, dangerous”; it makes the world heavy with meaning but also worry.63 The I-It experience comes to seem a respite from the overwhelming presence of the I-You relation. He applies his theory to three realms: nature (example: tree); humanity (example: person); and spirituality (example: art). In this way, Buber’s philosophy subsumes ontological categories within an ethical modality via an infusion of relational movement: “Basic words [I-You and I-It] do not state something that might exist outside them; by being spoken they establish a mode of existence.”64 We have spent so long resisting both the idealization of subjectivity and the objectification of others that we have forgotten to wonder, to laugh at the It within us all. In later chapters of this book, I pursue the question of why we might want to objectify persons as well as honoring them as subjects. For now, I offer the Buberian idea that ethics cannot elide the It but must continually return to It. I and Thou adopts a quasi-Socratic dialogic form, presenting questions from an invisible skeptic and thus apostrophizing the reader. This formal feature accords with the text’s shift from an ethical dyad to a mode. Buber revises the opening to the book of John (“In the beginning was the word”) with a rhetorical flourish that prefigures Lévinas’s “ethics before ontology” but infuses it with greater dynamism: “In the beginning is the relation.”65 Buber refuses to “affirm” or “deny” either side of the “essential and indissoluble antimonies” (I-You and I-It) that mark our lives; he refuses, too, to “relativize” or “settle” the conflict between them. Rather, “the situation . . . is to be lived in all its antimonies—only lived—and lived ever again, ever anew, unpredictably, without any possibility of anticipation or prescription.”66 This leitmotif of this oscillation between I-You and I-It, what Buber also calls “the lightning and counterlightning of encounter,” recurs throughout I and Thou:

Oscillation What confronts us comes and vanishes, relational events take shape and scatter. Mortal life is by its very nature an oscillation between You and It. Love itself cannot abide in a direct relation; it endures, but in the alternation of actuality and latency. Every You in the world is compelled by its nature to become a thing for us or at least to enter again and again into thing-hood. Life’s rhythm of pure relation [is] the alternation of actuality and a latency.67

Buber’s other metaphors speak to this movement as well. When he says, “here is the cradle of actual life,” one gets the sense that the rocking is as significant as the birth. The shift out of the I-You is figured as “drawing a breath,” and he dwells on the Judaic t’shuvah or return when he considers the ultimate You: God. Oscillation is presented as a ramified relation of relations, more complex than the twofold world from which it emerges: “it is not always as if these states took turns so neatly; often it is an intricately entangled series of events that is tortuously dual.”68 Buber’s evocations of ethics have a deep congruity with the scenes we’ve considered in Lot 49: “In this firm and wholesome chronicle [of the It-world] the You-moments appear as queer lyric-dramatic episodes. Their spell may be seductive, but they pull us dangerously to extremes, loosening the well-tried structure, leaving behind more doubt than satisfaction, shaking up our security—altogether uncanny.”69 Buber’s diction presses continually upon this uncanniness and thus achieves that odd dilation of time that Oedipa undergoes in the novel: The encounters do not order themselves to become a world, but each is for you a sign of the world order. . . . The world that appears to you in this way is unreliable, for it appears always new to you, and you cannot take it by its word. . . . It lacks density, for everything in it permeates everything else. It lacks duration, for it comes even when not called and vanishes even when you cling to it. It cannot be surveyed: if you try to make it surveyable, you lose it. It comes—comes to fetch you—and if it does not reach you or encounter you it vanishes, but it comes again, transformed. It does not stand outside you, it touches your ground. . . . You cannot come to an understanding about it with others; you are lonely with it; but it teaches you to encounter others and to stand your ground in such encounters; and

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through the grace of its advents and the melancholy of its departures it leads you to that You in which the lines of relation, though parallel, intersect.70

Note the resonance with Oedipa’s view of San Narciso, with the stillness imbued by the figure of Tristero as a stripteasing nymph and with the pre-revelatory leitmotif of her journey. We see here the permeative touch of one’s “ground,” the whirlwind time, the melancholy, and the loneliness that an encounter with the “magical Other” imposes, even as it intimates eternity. The queer light of Pynchon’s oscillating signs gleams in another of Buber’s descriptions: “the You-world radiated from the ground for the length of one glance, and now its light has died back into the It-world. . . . here morning and evening merged cruelly, the bright You appeared and vanished.”71 Buber is speaking in this last quotation about a house cat, suggesting how inclusive and quotidian his philosophy is. He finds spirituality in the everyday—just as Oedipa sees the post horn in bathroom stall graffiti—and offers in an image of a tree a precursor to Benjamin’s auratic shadow-casting twig: “the central actuality of an everyday hour on earth, with a streak of sunshine on a maple twig and an intimation of the eternal You.”72 As Buber’s counterlightning and streaks of sunshine and radiant flashes suggest, there is a powerful energy to this mode of oscillation. In Lot 49, this comes in the form of mechanical conceits rather than natural ones—computational binaries, The Scope, the Nefastis Machine. Oedipa imagines “daring squatters” who “spent the night up some pole in a lineman’s tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages” (149–150). An oscillation between messages and “dumb voltages” is a way to be part of a system without being systematic, to remain on the brink, flickering. This can be seen as an ethics to come, a projective conception of time akin to the asymptotic logic of Judeo-Christian spirituality. Buber’s Nietzschean disposition tempts him, like Pynchon, to speak subjunctively of realms beyond human knowledge and experience: “I can only point indirectly to certain scarcely describable events in human life where spirit was encountered.”73 This dovetails with the spirit world haunting the famously Pentecostal ending of Lot 49, the apex of the

Oscillation

novel’s swelling movement toward the hidden, divine Word yet to be revealed: “Passerine spread his arms in a gesture that seemed to belong to the priesthood of some remote culture; perhaps to a descending angel. The auctioneer cleared his throat. Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49” (152).74 For Buber, spirit is what animates works of art, including wordy ones, which we in turn enliven as we encounter them: “The form that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe; I can only actualize it.”75 This theory allows us to see Oedipa’s continual awaiting as a creative act—she actualizes the Tristero—perhaps granting her the saving grace so often bestowed upon her deadbeat literary dad. Now author, now reader, now mere character, Oedipa shifts—from she to shade to shadow— even beyond the novel’s closing pages. She leaps and returns, flitting within the thin pages that comprise her flimsy house of fiction, oscillating between self, thing, and other under our own fluctuating gaze. There is something counterintuitive about insisting that it is the uncertainty of a text that is ethical, rather than the sage message of its author or the moral development of its heroine—that it is not steadiness of purpose but wild oscillations of empathy and skepticism, of proximity and distance, that constitute ethics. In Book VI of The Republic, Plato says that the soul gains understanding and knowledge by fixing its gaze “upon an object irradiated by truth and reality.” In contrast, when the soul looks “towards that twilight world of things that come into existence and pass away, its sight is dim and it has only opinions and beliefs which shift to and fro, and now it seems like a thing that has no intelligence.”76 This latter denigrated form of seeing seems almost to conjure Oedipa as she drifts around San Francisco, her dim sight fixed on the reality of the Tristero as her thoughts tumble in alternation. Yet it is this transient world that approximates the obscurity, the difficulty of our dealings with other people. Shouldn’t other people, the ultimate “things that come into existence and pass away,” be the object of our gaze? Is it so surprising that our beliefs shift to and fro when we consider others, that we are sometimes acutely aware that we and they are things with no intelligence, more benighted than knightly? Lot 49 implies that our will to understand each other may be alternately “a thrust at truth and a lie” (105). But oscillation also lets us see the humor in that irrepressible itch, in that desire to know; skepticism provides levity about that “secular miracle,” communication. We take amusement in the story of our mutual misunderstanding; we find pleasure and humility

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in our far-flung projections. The energy of oscillation is perpetually in the making, producing the contrastive kinesis of similitude and difference in dynamic relation. Like the glow of the film projector or the intermittent light of a cloud-covered moon, the ethics of oscillation flickers through the gloom. As Wallace Stevens concludes his poem, “Re-statement of Romance”: “night is only the background of our selves, / Supremely true each to its separate self, / In the pale light that each upon the other throws.”77

2 ENFOLDING

Rereading Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001)

Spoiling “Don’t spoil!” we say indignantly, hands clamped to our ears, our tongues la-la-la-ing. Some cavalier traitor has launched into a description of a book or film we’ve heard of but haven’t yet experienced. While it seems ubiquitous now, this use of the word spoil is relatively recent, emerging from a pejoration—a linguistic spoiling—that took place in the seventeenth century. Before that, spoil was a verb of triumph: to strip an enemy of clothing or armor, as plunder. The word derives from the skinning of animals (spolium means skin or hide and the possible root spel- can mean to split, to break off, or to cleave: to separate and draw near at once); the signification “to render useless through damage” emerged in the 1560s. It did not apply to the overindulgence of children until the 1640s. It became intransitive in the 1690s—to rot or go bad— and the nineteenth century offered two slang uses, “spoilsport” and “spoiling for a fight.”1 Only in the middle of the twentieth century do we get the advent of “spoiling a story.”2 Contemporary reviewing discourse, as critic A. O. Scott has it, is now “marked by the ritualistic incantation of two words that may at this point be redundant: spoiler alert.”3 This use of spoiling seems particular to that category of information we call fictions—stories, novels, films. It’s hard to imagine exclaiming “No spoilers!” about a biography, a painting, or a juicy morsel of gossip. Part of our indignation comes from being told a story as if it were made of separable facts. We resist objective knowledge of a subjective experience; we wish to delectate over our fictions, our untruths, to move through them in order and under the sign of an imaginary order. We know a narrative only if we 79

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undergo it; the experience of a story over time is not reducible to paraphrase. Any true summary of Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel, Atonement, the subject of this second chapter on the uncertainty afforded by mutual exclusion, is necessarily a spoiler. A spoiled brat, Briony Tallis, spoils not only her sister’s love affair but also the reader’s romantic belief in that love affair’s happy ending; Briony then reaps the spoils of a successful literary career but spoils her chances for forgiveness.4 This description in its context—a monograph of literary criticism—should not impugn me: ruining the endings of novels is standard procedure in my line of work. Most academic literary critics assume a knowing reader who has already turned all the pages and perused their fine print. Curious, then, that academic articles as well as reviews on Atonement so often try to keep the novel’s plot a secret. James Harold’s 2005 Philosophy and Literature piece has this disclaimer: “I must begin with a warning. In this article, I give away the endings of two wonderful books: Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. If you haven’t read these books already, you may want to stop reading now: you’ll enjoy reading the books much more if you don’t know the details that I reveal below.”5 Blakey Vermeule’s discussion of Atonement in Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? includes a parenthetical qualification: “(what she did is unimportant from the point of view of this critique; the only thing a reader needs to know is that the young girl made a terrible—perhaps willful— mistake and ruined the couple’s lives for a time).”6 For a time?! If we are to believe the novel’s end, what Briony did may have led (spoiler alert!) to their deaths! Vermeule’s desire not to give the story away leads to inadvertent paralipsis, if not an outright distortion of the plot. The dilemma over whether to spoil that we see in Harold’s disclaimer and Vermeule’s aside speaks to this novel’s sense of an ending, to redeploy Frank Kermode’s commodious phrase.7 Brian Finney considers readers’ reactions to its two final disclosures: The few reviewers (largely British) who have voiced major reservations about the novel invariably focus on the concluding section in which it is revealed that Briony, who became a successful novelist, has been the author of the entire novel and has taken a novelist’s license to alter the facts to suit her artistic purposes. Despite the description Briony gives in Part Three of Robbie and Cecilia living together after his return from Dunkirk,

Enfolding we learn on the penultimate page that Robbie died before he could be evacuated from Dunkirk and that Cecilia was killed by a bomb three months later. Lulled by the long Part One (which occupies half the book) into the security associated with the classic realist novel, this minority of reviewers dismisses the final coda as an instance of postmodern gimmickry.8

In Finney’s list of negative responses, the most strident is Margaret Boerner’s: “The novel is, as the British term it, a ‘wind up,’ a straightfaced and increasingly discomfiting manipulation of a victim (in this case, the reader). . . . McEwan has gone wrong—very wrong, for in the last two of the book’s 351 pages he completely destroys everything that has gone before.”9 My rough survey of reviews, criticism, and student responses suggests that many take this narrative retraction to be a betrayal. One scholar calls it just that: “The feeling of betrayal I experienced when I first finished Atonement and realized that the whole was supposedly written by Briony.”10 James Phelan describes the end as an act of “pulling the rug out from under our emotional satisfaction,” “a cheap trick or cheat, one that delights in unfairly jerking its audience around.”11 Atonement spoils itself the moment it achieves its end, by describing events mutually exclusive with what we have read. This built-in scandalous spoiling—the way the narrative ruins its own romance—seems to be why not only reviewers but even scholars try not to spoil it for others. A pre-spoiled reading, I want to suggest, a rereading, is the only kind of reading that can do justice to Atonement. Attention to rereading redirects us from the epistemological uncertainty afforded by the structure of mutual exclusion in Atonement toward the phenomenological uncertainty that lingers beyond it. If a rereader has already discovered the twist—if the story is already spoiled—what is at stake here is how we experience the novel’s truths and untruths, rather than whether we distinguish them. My claim for rereading will be more than a caveat—“we all reread!”— but less stringent than the faddish use of “rereading” to signify the reprisal of an issue in scholarship. I mean to discuss it literally: to account for how rereading Atonement affords an affective, aesthetic, and ethical mode distinct from that ever elusive “first reading.”12 The catastrophic clash of mutually exclusive ends that characterizes our first reading of the novel gives way in a rereading to a softer layering of subjunctive possibilities, one that corresponds to the subjective striation of author and reader alike.

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It is not a new observation that rereading rends the reader’s consciousness in two, a present reading self and a past reading self. This tension between self-similarity and self-division plays out in Atonement’s folded things—thoughts, bodies, clothing, paper—and enfolded experiences: reflexive narrative levels, metafictional clues, iterations of rereading, and cleaved subjects. Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of “the fold” in his work on Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz bolsters my contention that Atonement is a spoiled baroque. In Dreaming by the Book, Elaine Scarry describes “floral supposition” as key to literary imagining, as if a story unfolds like a flower.13 Inflicting blight on this bloom, rereading Atonement allows us to experience the fascination of the inwardly roiling, self-eroding, eerily epidermal enfolding of a narrative blossom in decay. But before we watch it unfurl and rot, I want to establish the roots of the novel’s uncertainty in a brief plot summary (spoiler alert!). On the cusp of adolescence, part of a drooping aristocratic class, an intelligent, impulsive girl named Briony Tallis accuses a young man, Robbie Turner, of raping her cousin Lola. This accusation, followed by Robbie’s arrest, takes place at the end of Part I. It dramatically ties together three threads of the plot recounted in the novel’s initial pages by an omniscient thirdperson narrator, focalized through various characters by chapter. The first thread is Briony’s developing moral and writerly consciousness as she encounters sexual love and human fallibility for the first time. The second is the recognition and consummation of love between Briony’s older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie, the son of the Tallises’ charwoman. The third is the coincidence of visitors to the Tallis country estate: Paul Marshall, a friend of the eldest Tallis son, Leon; and three cousins, Lola, whose sexual precocity recalls her Nabokovian namesake, and her twin brothers, Pierrot and Jackson. On a summer day in 1935—war on the horizon—Briony prepares her cousins to perform the play she has written for her brother Leon’s homecoming, The Trials of Arabella. Recent Cambridge graduates Cecilia and Robbie float around each other, prickly with unfulfilled desire. They grapple over a vase that Cecilia is filling with water from a fountain; the vase drops and breaks, and an enraged Cecilia disrobes and dives into the fountain to fish out the broken pieces. Briony watches this scene through a nursery window, baffled by the intimacy she senses. Shortly thereafter, she serves as courier for a note Robbie pens confessing his love to Cecilia. Robbie realizes too late that he has accidentally sent the wrong draft, with

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the line, “In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt” (80). When Robbie hastens to apologize to Cecilia, she leads him to the family library, where they make love. Meanwhile, Briony reads the note and shares it with Lola, who finds in it evidence that Robbie is a “maniac.” Briony interrupts her sister and Robbie in the library, and primed by her earlier misreading, she misconstrues a scene of mature sexual love for a scene of violence: “an attack, a hand-to-hand fight” (116). An awkward family dinner follows, after which the family discovers that the twins have run away. As other members of the household search the grounds, Briony comes upon Lola being attacked. When the assailant runs into the darkness, Briony comforts Lola and prompts her with leading questions to identify Robbie as the rapist. The accusation is delivered to the authorities, along with the love letter, damning out of context. Robbie returns with the twins and is immediately arrested. The aftershocks comprise the rest of the novel. Part II, written in prose that suits the fragmented experience of war, follows Robbie, recruited to fight in World War II directly from prison, as he walks to the coast during the 1940 Dunkirk retreat. We learn through Robbie’s memories that he and Cecilia have stayed in touch and are still in love. Part III returns us to an adult Briony, who, like Cecilia, is a nurse. She has begun what will amount to a lifelong effort to inscribe her penitence in writing. Lola has married the man who actually raped her, Paul Marshall. When her letters go unanswered, Briony seeks out Cecilia and discovers that Robbie survived the war and that the lovers have reunited. Part III closes with Briony’s vow to retract her accusation in three forms: a novel, a letter to her parents, and a formal statement to the police.

Being Untrue Atonement thus revolves around the cause, utterance, and the terrible but seemingly mitigated effects of Briony’s untruth. I use this broad word because the novel equivocates on the question of intention, which is key in distinguishing between fictions and lies.14 Briony herself uses the word “crime” while Robbie’s mother projects intention on the bloodless mechanism of the law: “ ‘Liars! Liars! Liars!’ Mrs. Turner roared” (174). This word returns in Part III, tumbling from Cecilia’s mouth, then from Robbie’s. Briony’s reaction is rife with the irony of a wolf-crier: “Weak, stupid, confused, cowardly, evasive—she hated herself for everything she had been, but she had never thought of herself as a liar. . . . It was

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obvious and irrefutable. And yet, for a moment she even thought of defending herself. She hadn’t intended to mislead, she hadn’t acted out of malice. But who would believe that?” (318). The question of intention is muddled by the fallibility we see in both the naive girl pointing her finger and the woman still defending herself. I want to dwell for a moment on how Briony’s first untruth—her false accusation, “crime,” lie—comes into being. She has a hazy view of the incident: she “witnesses” her cousin being attacked in pitch darkness. Objects appear and vanish at a moment’s notice: “The building’s indistinct pallor shimmered in the dark. When she stared at it directly it dissolved completely” (153). Visual distortion combines with the overheated workings of her imagination: The bush that lay directly in her path . . . began to break up in front of her, or double itself, or waver, and then fork. It was changing its shape in a complicated way, thinning at the base as a vertical column rose five or six feet. She would have stopped immediately had she not been so completely bound to the notion that this was a bush, and that she was witnessing some trick of darkness and perspective. Another second or two, another couple of steps, and she saw that this was not so. Then she stopped. The vertical mass was a figure, a person who was now backing away from her and beginning to fade into the darker background of the trees. (154)

Perceptual warping frequently creeps into Atonement to exemplify the imprecision of human epistemology. In the visual abyss of the night, Briony cannot even interpret facial expressions: “the dark disk of Lola’s face showed nothing at all.” She moves toward the comfort of words: Suddenly, Briony wanted her to say his name. To seal the crime, frame it with the victim’s curse, close his fate with the magic of naming. . . . “It was Robbie, wasn’t it?” The maniac. She wanted to say the word. Lola said nothing and did not move. Briony said it again, this time without the trace of a question. It was a statement of fact. “It was Robbie.” (155–156)

This linguistic and literalist impulse is fitting: the word slides right into the narrative Briony has spent the last few hours writing in her head, one in which Robbie is a “maniac” who writes a perverse note to Cecilia and then attacks her in the library. The word “maniac,” like the word

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“cunt” that sparks it, seems to bespeak others: “[it] stirred the dust of other words around it—man, mad, ax, attack, accuse—and confirmed the diagnosis” (148). The filaments of connotation give weight to the word, lending heft to an accusation that soon has real enough consequences. Briony’s “magic of naming” can be seen as the divine power of bringing something to life with words, what she also calls “the magical process” of writing. It can also be seen in a more quotidian light as what J. L. Austin called “a performative utterance”: “if a person makes an utterance of this sort we should say that he is doing something rather than merely saying something.”15 The novel is littered with oaths, marriage vows, and legal statements. Briony’s utterance here is doubly performative: to say “Robbie” is both to name and to accuse. Further, it is both the beginning of an action and its end—“to seal the crime, frame it”—an act that closes upon the person it names, labels him as “maniac” does. His love note is what prompted Briony “to frame the opening paragraph of a story” (106). Surrounded by all this narrative, Robbie is framed in more than one sense. Atonement, however, also “frames” Briony’s framing of Robbie. There are two stories offered in Part I for what happened to Lola: what the narrative hints to us and what Briony tells the police. Briony seems to believe that she saw Robbie run into the darkness—“She had no doubt”— and that she has a responsibility to report him (155). But the novel’s tone makes it clear that Briony is unreliable, willful, and biased, inhabiting “an ill-defined transitional space between the nursery and adult worlds” (132). She is subject to flights of fancy: “Wasn’t writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?” (147). She has an irrepressible need to impose control over the world, as in her careful arrangement of toys; she has a “love of order,” “passion for tidiness,” and “passion for secrets” that she satisfies by writing stories full of coincidence and “principles of justice” (7, 5). Briony’s propensity for order spurs her accusation: “The truth was in the symmetry, which was to say, it was founded in common sense” (159). Her will to accuse Robbie shunts aside Lola’s perceptual and emotional confusion, “Briony’s certainty rising whenever her cousin appeared to doubt herself ” (157). The sharp reader, however, despite taking Briony to be the protagonist, doubts her. Because the novel is in the third person and its focalization floats between different characters in Part I, we receive information that conflicts with Briony’s account. We know, because we have access to the thoughts of those involved, that Briony has misread the love scenes at the

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fountain and in the library between Cecilia and Robbie. We also notice a flirty scene between Paul and Lola, as well as scratches on her arm before the rape. We have access to Robbie’s consciousness, and we know he is not a maniac but a lover, brimming with earnest excitement at the prospect of a future with Cecilia. Parts I, II, and III thus damn Briony’s childish certitude in “truth.” This dramatic irony about the auspices of her first untruth sets the necessary groundwork for us to recognize her second untruth, which is, in essence, the very novel we have been reading. The hints about Briony’s literary sensibility and ambitions we have encountered throughout the novel prepare us for what appears to be its final line: “BT, London 1999.” This authorial signature confirms what many will have suspected, that the novel Atonement we have just read (Parts I, II, and III) was penned by Briony. But the Atonement penned by Ian McEwan is not over yet. The last eighteen pages of the book— entitled “London, 1999,” marking continuity with the end of Briony’s final draft—appear to be excerpted from her diary. This coda is in the first person and confirms her surreptitious authorship.16 As in many “pseudo-third person” narratives, Briony the “she” becomes Briony the “I.”17 The reader learns that her novel, Atonement, is as yet unpublished and that she is old and dying. Most disconcertingly, we also discover that the novel we have just finished reading does not in fact recount “what happened”: It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. That I never saw them in that year. That my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and that a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister. That the letters the lovers wrote are in the archives of the War Museum. How could that constitute an ending? What sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? (350)

There are various terms from narrative theory for this process of taking back what a story has presented to us as factual or real. Gerald Prince

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coined the term “disnarration” to describe “events that, though referred to, remain unactualized in a text.”18 Brian Richardson later introduced the term “denarration” to describe what happens when a “narrator denies significant aspects of her narrative that had earlier been presented as given.”19 Robyn Warhol’s “unnarration” is when a narrator says “they cannot or will not tell what happened.”20 Briony’s journal entry compounds all these narrative negations. Not only does she allude to events that remain unactualized in the narrative—Robbie’s and Cecilia’s deaths—but she also denies or retracts earlier events in the narrative—Robbie and Cecilia’s reunion. Briony goes on to unnarrate by casting doubt on her capacity to tell: “I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining. I face an incoming tide of forgetting, and then oblivion” (350). Briony’s second untruth is, in essence, a poetical effort to correct her first one. Phelan notes that when she says “my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince,” Briony obliviously conflates the false happy ending of her novel with the happy ending of the play she never got to perform that fateful day in 1935.21 The coda of the novel includes a performance of The Trials of Arabella by Briony’s grandnieces and grand nephews, emphasizing the parallel between the two untruths: “It occurs to me that I have not traveled so very far after all, since I wrote my little play” (350). Briony, like many a literary heroine before her, has not learned the difference between storytelling and telling stories.22

The Order of Things The question for our reading experience is whether this difference makes any difference, so to speak, within the bounds of a textually suffused world. McEwan tips his hand—or perhaps his hat—to Derrida’s infamous, punning, and oft-misapplied dictum “Il n’y a pas de-hors texte” when Briony says of “the novelist”: “There is nothing outside her” (350). It is not a question of evaluating the veracity of a fictional story against a factual memoir or a recorded history. It is, rather, a question of juxtaposing a fictional novel with a fictional diary entry. Because both endings exist within the realm of fiction, they are equivalent alternatives in what we might call parallel diegetic universes, or what Jorge Luis Borges more succinctly called “forking paths.”23 This leveling of distinction between the two endings is ramified by a “poetic justice” in the novel: because of legalities about libel and marriage, Briony’s novel—which reverses her accusation of Robbie—can be

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published only when Paul and Lola Marshall are deceased. If we are reading the text, no character has survived it: “When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions. Briony will be as much of a fantasy as the lovers who shared a bed in Balham and enraged their landlady. No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel” (350). Not only will no one care about Briony’s confession within the novel’s world of 1999 London (because they will all be dead before it is published), but readers outside that world ought not care either. Robbie, Cecilia, and Briony are characters in a novel; they never lived to begin with. And yet, as we’ve seen, readers have a hard time feeling equanimity about these tall tales within the tale. The news of Briony’s authorship is gently surprising—more the fulfillment of a suspicion—but her willful manipulation of the “truth” leaves many a reader furious, many a reviewer apoplectic. The anger evident in these responses elucidates another reason I subsume Briony’s false allegation and the novel’s coda under the loaded ethical category of being untrue. Although McEwan gets most of the blame, Briony gets some, too. As Anita Brookner puts it, “she might have fared better to have told the truth.”24 Because we elide truthfulness with ethical imperatives toward honesty and integrity, it seems as if Briony has broken faith, has been as disloyal to us as she was to Robbie and Cecilia. McEwan is aware of this tendency to blame, as he says in an interview: “When someone says, ‘this happened to me’ and it didn’t, well I think the most fascinating thing about that is the outrage that follows, not so much the deceit.”25 This outrage makes sense, phenomenologically, if we account for “poetic truth,” an idea as old as Aristotle’s effort to distinguish it from historical truth in the Poetics.26 If we are to believe Sir Philip Sidney, “the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.”27 Briony defends her revision of the facts in these terms, claiming that poetic truth ought to trump the historical facts. At the same time, the coda makes us feel guilty for liking the poetry. This guilt bounces right back onto the text— hence the hyperbolic critical accusations of Tallis and McEwan. We are accused—framed—by the text, and in self-defense, we seek someone else to accuse. And the coda offers us a wrongdoer on whom we can cast aspersions. Rather than showing the foregoing events to be untrue in, say, a newspaper account, McEwan chooses to give us a confessional diary entry, encouraging the illusion of the character’s personhood: she becomes an author who lied. When Briony’s two identities—character and

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author—clash, our frames of reference overlap and lose their clarity.28 Her character hovers over her authorship, so to speak. Because we often conflate epistemological and ethical questions, this judgment of Briony confuses several kinds of untruth: a preconceived notion, a perceptual misapprehension, a false accusation, a narrative creation, and a lack of integrity. Much of what has been discussed above in narratorial terms—pseudonarration, focalization, disnarration, denarration, refusal—can be described more deftly through the narrative structure I delineated in the preface to Part I and in Chapter 1. Mutual exclusion is the coexistence of opposed narrative events, or two different stories about what happened. In Chapter 1, I discussed how this narrative structure affords readerly uncertainty in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); here, I consider its rather different affordances in Atonement. Both novels use the epistemological frame of referential order to categorize things as “true” or “untrue.” But while Pynchon’s use of mutual exclusion is keyed to two conflicting interpretations of one set of events, Atonement’s mutual exclusion is concerned with the opposition of two sets of events. While McEwan could have made Briony admit to tweaks to her narrative, instead he presents events that either happened or did not happen. Atonement presents strict dichotomies like this as a feature of the judicial machinery. When Briony gives her testimony, the officers insist on an either/or grammar: “Either she saw, or she did not see. There lay nothing in between” (160). We see this mutually exclusive framework again when Robbie accuses Briony back in the conversation they have after the war: “Do you think I assaulted your cousin?” “No.” “Did you think it then?” She fumbled her words. “Yes, yes and no. I wasn’t certain.” “And what’s made you so certain now?” . . . “Growing up.” . . . “Growing up,” he echoed. When he raised his voice she jumped. “Goddamnit! You’re eighteen. How much growing up do you need to do? There are soldiers dying in the field at eighteen. Old enough to be left to die on the roads. Did you know that?” (323)

Briony’s childish “yes and no” is an insult to the importance of truth in matters of life and death. Indeed, these are the high stakes of the most

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crucial “yes/no” “either/or” instance of mutual exclusion in the novel, the coda’s presentation of two endings to the story of Robbie and Cecilia. In Atonement, mutual exclusion seems to signify futility. Briony’s act is irreversible. Because of the Marshalls’ marriage, she can’t publish or even recant: “He’s immune. She’ll always cover for him” (328). Her Atonement and her atonement are ultimately self-canceling projects: How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all. (351)

We see the self-consuming logic of a psychic, literary, and ethical ouroboros; Laura Miller calls the novel “a twisty, self-devouring meditation.”29 James Wood argues that this twist is distinct from “those moments at the end of certain kinds of postmodern stories when the author writes: ‘And then he woke up’ or ‘Then she put down her pen, and closed the book you have just been reading.’ We don’t suddenly exclaim, at the end of Atonement, ‘Oh, it was just a fiction.’ We exclaim: ‘So, what kind of fiction is this?’ Or perhaps, better: ‘So, what kind of truth is this?’ ”30 I would draw the novel into exactly this lineage of mutual exclusion, which includes surrealist and fantastical tales as well as postmodern ones. Wood is right, though: Atonement is not just a puzzle to be solved or left unresolved. Despite the locked paradox mutual exclusion connotes, it spurs an ongoing experience because it relies not only on the referential order but also on the temporal order of things. A description of Briony’s rehearsals for The Trials of Arabella defines each type of order on either side of a semicolon: “The rehearsals also offended her sense of order. The selfcontained world she had drawn with clear and perfect lines had been defaced with the scribble of other minds, other needs; and time itself, so easily sectioned on paper into acts and scenes, was even now dribbling uncontrollably away” (34). A literary world is another order, a separate realm; it is defaced by the vicissitudes of other people and of time, which dissolves words and worlds both. Uncertainty arises in Atonement from the disturbance of both kinds of order, the “clear and perfect lines” that determine categories of truth

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and those that apportion units of time. When she sees her sister and Robbie at the fountain, Briony alludes to the latter: “The sequence was illogical—the drowning scene, followed by a rescue, should have preceded the marriage proposal” (36–37). Brian Richardson draws the two kinds of disorder together when he notes that denarration concocts “an inchoate temporality that cannot be analytically reconstructed into any sustained order.”31 The disordering of time is also another way to distinguish mutual exclusion in Atonement and The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon’s novel alternates between mutually exclusive explanations for events; McEwan’s presents one set of events, then a mutually exclusive set of events. These respective “illogical sequences” shape the contours of the two texts’ respective modes of uncertainty. Whereas Pynchon never allows the reader to believe fully in the Tristero—always interrupting that belief with skepticism—McEwan establishes a story and only then reverses it. As Robert MacFarlane comments: “McEwan pulls a trick on the reader of such magnitude that one is almost obliged to read the book again in the light of it.”32 Indeed, in what follows, I suggest that we must reread Atonement to experience fully its affective, aesthetic, and ethical mode of uncertainty. I will lay the groundwork for a description of this mode—a baroque enfolding—by sketching the operations that subtend it. To begin, Atonement conjures images such that they maintain, on the one hand, an experiential vivacity that makes them linger and, on the other, a transparency that affords layering. The novel’s imperatives toward rereading ramify this layering of images by rendering them simultaneous. In this way, the mutually exclusive stories in Atonement come to seem enfolded possibilities rather than opposed truths. The irrealis grammatical mood we call the subjunctive becomes useful here. It also characterizes the novel’s striation of human subjectivity, which is key to the ethical resonance of its mode of enfolding.

A Magical Process Early in Atonement, Briony describes the conjuring of image from the authorial side: A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to the reader’s. It

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was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled. You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade . . . (35)

James Phelan critiques Briony’s “view of language as a transparent medium” in this passage as naive.33 To be sure, Briony doesn’t just think that words conform to their meaning—insinuating that the shapes of letters accord with what they signify in “cunt,” for example. She also believes words have the power to make things happen; she might fly “through desire alone” because writing itself is “a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination” (147). Phelan argues that “the passage itself enacts the problem with her view by means of the word castle. When we encounter the clause ‘You saw the word castle,’ we are unlikely to imagine the highly embellished image of a castle that Briony believes we can’t help imagining. It’s revealing—and consistent—that Briony’s image is of a setting for some romantic tale.”34 Just as significant as Briony’s belief in language’s direct transmission, however, is her belief in its capacity to cast a “spell.” In interview, McEwan uses this same image of “telepathy”: You could either see language as a minefield in which all kinds of social and personal calamities can occur precisely because people misunderstand each other; or—and I think these things are not mutually exclusive—you see it as this most extraordinary device whereby you blow air through a little bit of tissue in your throat and you can transfer, telepathically, thoughts from your mind to another person’s.35

Imaginative language obviates the seeming mutual exclusion that structures comprehension. What is significant about the castle description is not what Briony imagines but her evocation of the capacity to imagine: a hazy scene is conjured to give us a sense of how conjuring works. Elaine Scarry notes that the “feebleness of the imagination” is often allegorized by images of transparency: “We often speak of actual mist, actual gauze, filmy curtains, fog, and blurry rain as dreamlike.” These images are taking “what the imagination is best at (dry, thin two-dimensionality) and enlisting it

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into the operation” of world-making.36 The soft and bluish air, the rising smoke, the Marvellian green shade, and the “distanced” view of the castle scene capture this ephemeral quality of literary imaginings, its final ellipsis apt punctuation for its own drift in the mind. Scarry says that when “a writer explicitly asks us to suppose imagining something before asking us to imagine it,” this process of “recomposition” actually makes images more vivid.37 Briony conjures an image of literary imagining—a vision of vision—for us. Two points about this act of hazy literary conjuring are crucial to Atonement: its resistance to erasure and its availability for subjunctive layering. The first, the vivacity of fictional perception, relies on a phenomenological account of perception as such. In The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes a familiar moment when our vision of a thing is eclipsed: “I thought I saw on the sands a piece of wood polished by the sea, and it was a clayey rock.”38 Viewed through a phenomenological lens, “each perception is mutable and only probable— it is, if one likes, only an opinion; but what . . . each perception, even if false, verifies, is the belongingness of each experience to the same world, their equal power to manifest it, as possibilities of the same world.” One might think this variability would divorce perception, as such, from “the index of reality.” But because these perceptions manifest experientially, we are obliged to “concede it to all of them, to recognize all of them to be variants of the same world, and finally to consider them not as all false but as ‘all true.’ ”39 Perception lingers even when it is shown to be untrue. Scarry points out, following Sartre, that the persistence and intensity of the literary imagination is stronger than even that of the lived imagination. That is, if visual perception resists negation, literary vivacity—based on the power of language—has even greater staying power. Explaining that “the depiction of the fictional world is a constitutive act—whatever is said to exist thereby does exist,” Brian Richardson notes that a “salient facet of . . . denarrated episodes is that they draw attention to what could be called [reconfiguring Austin] . . . the performative nature of the articulation of a fictional world.”40 Briony’s “magical process” of writing is thus analogous to the performative utterance around which the novel pivots: “the magic of naming” Robbie. It is telling that Cecilia sends Robbie the Auden poem from which I took one epigraph to my Introduction, which counters the idea that “poetry makes nothing happen” with its nature as “a way of happening,

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a mouth.” Marching to Dunkirk, Robbie maps the rhythms of a sentence to his pace, aligning his actual feet with metrical feet. McEwan says: “I do see writing, the actual physical matter of writing, as an act of imagination.”41 Claire Messud’s review of Atonement in the Atlantic, “The Beauty of the Conjuring,” is devoted to McEwan’s “power to compel.”42 Briony’s hunt for her missing cousins near the swimming pool is a minor but clear example: “She thought how she might describe it, the way they bobbed on the illuminated water’s gentle swell, and how their hair spread like tendrils and their clothed bodies softly collided and drifted apart” (146). We might say the radiance of the water, the bobbing of the bodies, the invocation of cloth, the hair spreading over the surface of the water, and the comparison of that hair to vegetative tendrils contribute to the drowning scene’s vivacity; in Scarry’s terms, the passage “enlists” a handful of noted techniques for creating and moving an image.43 Messud sums up this eerie scene: “The twins have not drowned; and yet Briony has drowned them.”44 Defamiliarization in Atonement often relies in this way on a series of morphing impressions: The drawing-room French windows still stood wide open to the night. . . . [B]y the light of a single lamp she could see, partially obscured by the hang of a velvet curtain, one end of a sofa across which there lay at a peculiar angle a cylindrical object that seemed to hover. It was only after she had covered another fifty yards that she understood that she was looking at a disembodied human leg. Closer still, and she grasped the perspectives: it was her mother’s of course. . . . [O]ne stockinged leg was supported by the knee of the other, which gave it its curious, slanting and levitated appearance. (151)

Like Briony’s vision of Robbie receding into darkness, this uncanny passage maintains the vision of a disembodied leg beyond its revelation as her mother’s knee. The members of the household later see “an indefinable shape, no more than a grayish smudge against the white, almost a hundred yards away. . . . Surely it was a trick of the mist and light. No one in this age of telephones and motorcars could believe that giants seven or eight feet high existed in crowded Surrey. But here it was, an apparition as inhuman as it was purposeful. The thing was impossible and undeniable, and heading their way” (171). This turns out to be Robbie, the twins on his

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shoulders; the “undeniable” vision of a giant persists, motivating his false arrest. If we put aside the morbid sensibility of these three scenes (the author’s nickname in the British press used to be Ian McAbre), we can redescribe their darkness as a shadowiness. Paradoxically invoking what they deny, these images resist total erasure because they already reside in a hazy realm of rarity. This makes them available for cognitive and imaginative layering, as if they were thin veils. Scarry says that events “in the past, or in the future, or in the subjunctive,” instruct us “to suppose imagining the motion rather than actually to imagine it,” creating a floating “scrim”: We made an insistent distinction between comprehending an instruction and mentally carrying it out, between comprehending what is supposed to happen and having it happen. But this stark either-or division understates the intricate discriminations the imagining mind carries out when what can be fully imagined may have riding above it what can only be half imagined, and in turn what can be half imagined will have floating above it what can be one-fourth or one-seventh imagined, so that a latticework or series of scrims sail into and out of the mind’s eye, often bringing simultaneously into one another’s company the imaginable, the barely imaginable, and the almost unimaginable. Sometimes . . . we are asked to picture something; other times we are asked to picture picturing something.45

This idea of fictional conjuring helps us revise Atonement’s mutually exclusive structure as a layering—Scarry’s “suppositional imagining”— rather than as a conflict or a negation. In the subjunctive space of fictional imagining, truth and untruth do not oppose but layer each other. If we revisit the castle passage, we see this layering in action: we picture picturing a picture. On a referential level, we imagine “the inking of symbols” onto a page and its transference to a reader’s mind. On an imaginative plane, we imagine the castle, however vaguely; we read it analytically as an “example”; we read it as description; and we read it as a piece of metafiction. McEwan’s words in interview invoke this layering: “I sometimes feel that every sentence contains a ghostly commentary on its own processes.”46 In what follows, I suggest that we can only raise these metafictional ghosts when we consider Atonement through the lens of rereading. This is key to its mechanism of experiential uncertainty. To cast doubt on the validity of events, narrative retraction (or refusal or denarration) often has to present them

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once again for our perusal. This in fact re-impresses events upon us, even more so through defamiliarization. To unnarrate or denarrate is, oddly enough, to renarrate.47

The Reverses Atonement affords different kinds of rereading. We have the recursions embedded in a first reading, whereby we are made to read a scene twice from different viewpoints as we move through the text. I call this local rereading. Another kind of rereading follows on the discovery that Briony has “faked” Parts II and III of her novel and entails an abrupt mental revision of the pages we have read: a retrospective realization. And then there is the literal rereading with which we are most familiar, a global rereading in which we revisit the whole novel from the beginning. To better clarify these disparate kinds of rereading, I will start with a summary of a “first” reading of Atonement. When we first move through Parts I, II, and III of the novel, we undergo a progression. There is a legalistic sequence (motive, crime, consequence) that works in parallel for Robbie and Briony, though he is wrongfully accused and she will never be punished, at least not in a strict, institutional sense. This can be seen as a religious sequence as well (temptation, sin, atonement), though again the novel underscores the impossibility of the last stage. Briony’s Küntslerroman is a progression, too, in which a writerly development accompanies a tour through literary history: “she had written her way through a whole history of literature, beginning with stories derived from the European tradition of folktales, through drama with simple moral intent, to arrive at an impartial psychological realism” (38). We begin with an English country house novel reminiscent of Austen, Forster, and Waugh; we shift to a realist war novel as Robbie joins the British retreat to Dunkirk; Part III could be a parody of the female novel of the 1920s and 1930s, but it is also a modernist urban narrative. As the critical interest in these intertextual allusions suggests, the novel as a whole gestures toward a literary teleology.48 As Matei Calinescu notes in Rereading, however, no first reading is  ever purely progressive. We do not move from innocence toward knowledge because we always come to texts with expectations. Further, reading always entails a perpetual look back at the text thus far. Paul Ricoeur invokes a “configurational logic” of reading, whereby we

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elicit “a pattern out of succession.”49 Wolfgang Iser describes “a dialectic of protension and retention,” in which expectations are modified by and continue to modify what is read as we proceed.50 Reading is a kind of worm, which drags its tail as its nose ventures forth, its belly shimmying with barely perceptible changes. A first reading of Atonement is therefore not as smooth or straightforward as my summary above might suggest. The novel often goes back in time to offer what Pilar Hidalgo calls “two consecutive versions of the same events,” as if enacting poor Arabella’s “trials.”51 This narrative technique, this local rereading, is not unique; examples abound in narratives from Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth to Tom Tykwer’s 1999 film Run Lola Run. Peter Matthews suggests that in Atonement the recursive tendency entails an iterative accrual of uncertainty: “Each new chapter forces the reader to revise his or her understanding of what was revealed earlier, sowing seeds of doubt that make the text blossom into a set of irreconcilable uncertainties.”52 By presenting two versions of a scene, McEwan requires that we reread it while raising—and maintaining—the question of which version to trust. Further, the imaginative recomposition afforded by Atonement’s redundancies serves to heighten rather than diminish the force and clarity of its images, even those we know to be untrue. There are two major examples of local rereading in Part I. We see the fountain scene first through Robbie’s and Cecilia’s perspectives and then through Briony’s (27, 35); we see the subsequent library scene first through Briony’s eyes and then through Robbie’s memory (116, 122). By bookending these events on either side with the privileged perspective of the lovers, the novel suggests that Briony has misconstrued things; when her vision of the library scene emerges, we already know she is wrong. While we understand that the lovers’ version of events is more “true” than Briony’s warped view, however, Atonement is careful to mark all these sequences with misunderstanding. The co-presence of equally biased views “requires the reader continually to revise their view of particular events and characters,” as Matthews puts it.53 This ongoing revision takes place on a smaller scale, too, as with Cecilia’s words, “Come back.” We first encounter the phrase as what Cecilia would say whenever she woke Briony from a bad dream; it reemerges as a talismanic incantation for Robbie—the words that she said to him when he was arrested and that she will say to him when he disappears into furies

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of trauma after the war (41, 197, 249). Briony’s novel ends with a return to these reappropriated words (330). McEwan’s novel, too, ends with a return, to the double inscription in the coda of lines from Briony’s play, The Trials of Arabella. The literal reprinting of words from the play, another example of local rereading, means that the play bookends the novel. We see its first lines in rehearsals on pages 15–16 and experience Briony’s surprise and faint recognition when we see them again in a full performance (346). This second appearance of The Trials of Arabella takes on a different cast, so to speak, its childishness far less amusing, far more poignant in light of Briony’s own trials and tribulations. We see two versions of the play but also two versions of the protagonist. Her younger self’s eager writerliness, her “hauntingly” inept constructions, appear before the elderly Briony as if in a court or on a stage: “she was right there before me, that busy, priggish conceited little girl, and she was not dead either, for when people tittered appreciatively at ‘evanesce’ my feeble heart—ridiculous vanity!—made a little leap” (346–347). This ghostly doubling of young Briony “right there before” aged Briony collapses the expanse between them; perhaps the “priggish, conceited little girl” is “not dead” after all. If revisiting these earlier moments in local rereading is a kind of narrative pleating, the coda as a whole pulls reading back entirely, folding the text back over itself. The revelations offered there initiate a revaluation of all that came before. This is another form of rereading I see in Atonement: retrospective realization. We cast our eye back on the novel we have read with two momentous adjustments in mind: that Briony wrote the novel and that she changed parts of it at will. As if obeying Cecilia’s imperative, the novel tells the reader: “Come back. It was all a dream.” Several critics and reviewers refer to the coda as “postmodern,” with varying degrees of scorn and respect.54 It is postmodern in the sense that it comes last but also postmodern in the sense that it is parasitic on the body of Briony’s Woolfian novel. In Derridean terms, the coda is supplemental—a seemingly extraneous “bit” that destabilizes the entire body to which it is attached, even as it is meant to serve as a “cap,” a moment of closure. The novel reaches full narrative disclosure at the exact moment it destroys everything it has “telepathically” built. That this happens so quickly, with such a short passage of denarration, makes me want to describe it as the obverse of conjuring. If young Briony wonders at the magical process of fictional creation—“falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a

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glance”—her admission in the coda conjures a backward glance, achieved in a handful of words (7). This form of rereading is a change in consciousness rather than a literal revisiting of pages. It is a turn, a peripeteia (which means “to fall around”), a folding back. It isn’t necessarily sudden. Both Phelan and Harold argue for more of a dawning realization given the novel’s use of another classical device: prolepsis.55 Sometimes called a flash-forward, prolepsis is a way of marking out what will happen before it has taken place. Prolepsis in a novel implies a narrator aware of both future and past, and there are moments of it scattered throughout Atonement: “She knew that it was not correct to refer to her dramas in the plural, that her mockery distanced her from the earnest, reflective child, and that it was not the longago morning she was recalling so much as her subsequent accounts of it” (38–39). Using conditional and subjunctive moods, both the self-referential content and omniscient form of this prolepsis offer warnings that what we are reading is unreliable: not only is Briony’s memory flawed, but she also willfully organizes it. While prolepses like this prompt the astute reader to guess that Briony is the author of the novel we are reading, McEwan deliberately conceals clues to the other revelation of the coda: her second untruth. Critics often gloss over the necessity of rereading to uncover these clues. One argues that those who miss the hints about Briony’s manipulation of the past engage in “a radical misreading” of the novel and its intent.56 Another notes, however, that only “a sophisticated interpretation of the novel” could make sense of the signs of Briony’s untruth, given that they are “regularly passed over without foregrounding of any kind.”57 In fact, only a psychic reader—or a rereader—would single out words in the narrative flow as the flotsam of forewarning or the jetsam of metafiction. Perhaps we ought to have known all along. But I have not yet encountered a first-time reader unsurprised by the twist of Briony’s admission to falsifying the facts. Even the novel’s earlier proleptic moments barely glint in the backsweeping light of the coda. Only when one literally reads the book again—a global rereading—do the hints as to Briony’s revision of history glow like warning lights strung along the narrative’s plotlines. In a seemingly incidental moment, Cecilia notes that “nothing was ever as one imagined it” (95). How her words resonate when we read the novel the second time! As do these, from Briony this time: “how easy it was to get everything wrong” (37). A global rereading of the novel from start to finish transforms these

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passing comments into knowing winks, downplaying suspense in favor of metafictional appreciation. These often invoke images of reversal— hints of the novel’s final “twist.” When Briony tells Lola about Robbie’s love note to Cecilia, she is too scandalized to say the incriminating word; she instead spells it out backward (112). When Briony makes her way to Cecilia’s apartment, “this was the first step in the undoing of her plans, but she was already walking back, retracing her steps” (310). As a nurse, Briony wipes a layer of grime from a wounded man’s face: “As his features began to appear from behind the mask of black, she thought of those books of glossy blank pages she had in childhood which she rubbed with a blunt pencil to make a picture appear” (281). Enforcing the analogy with narrative reversal, Briony hopes that “one of these men might be Robbie . . . she would dress his wounds and . . . with cotton wool tenderly rub his face until his familiar features emerged,” as if to remedy her misrecognition of Robbie in the dark (281). To reverse is not merely to blot out information; it is to go back over it. This is why, instead of invoking, say, an eraser, McEwan uses a figure for simultaneous deletion and reinscription. The coda is a treasure trove of these tropes for reinscriptive reversal. Briony’s vascular dementia is an “undoing”: “loss of memory, short- and long-term, the disappearance of single words—simple nouns might be the first to go—then language itself, along with balance, and soon after, all motor control, and finally the autonomous nervous system. Bon voyage!” (334, 335). The disappearance of language reverses Briony’s earlier reveries about writing’s conjuring magic. The wry “Bon voyage!” invokes the last words of The Trials of Arabella, “into the sunset we sail!,” the grammar of which she describes as “an unhappy inversion” (349). Is it merely a coincidence that the elderly woman will suffer a series of “strokes” that undo those of the pen the young girl once wielded? If reading Atonement enamors us with a love story only to tear it from our hands, rereading it takes a different pleasure in Briony’s “false” stories. We delight in her canny craft as a writer and experience the delight of noticing the pattern of these clues.58 On a first reading, young Briony’s fantasies about writing what happens seem to intimate disaster: “There was nothing she could not describe: the gentle pad of a maniac’s tread moving sinuously along the drive” (146–147). On a global rereading, this delusional script—“a maniac’s tread”—attains a bracing pathos born of the discrepancy between belief and delusion. The image is rent into temporal layers: Briony as a young girl wonders how she might

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describe her experience while Briony the elderly author invokes both the experience and the urge to describe it. On a first reading, this is free indirect discourse; on a global rereading, metafiction. Global rereading will be the lens for the remainder of my analysis of Atonement, so I will offer just one more example of its importance. The conjuring of two selves in a rereading of the past emerges in the context of war: So he would go back the way he had come, walk back through the reverses of all they had achieved, across the drained and dreary marshes, past the fierce sergeant on the bridge, through the bombed-up village, and along the ribbon road that lay across the miles of undulating farmland, watching for the track on the left on the edge of the village, opposite the shoe shop, and two miles on, go over the barbed-wire fence and through the woods and fields to an overnight stop at the brothers’ farm, and next day, in yellow morning light, on the swing of a compass needle, hurry through that glorious country of little valleys and streams and swarming bees, and take the rising footpath to the sad cottage by the railway. (247)

Robbie’s passage continues back through “unfinished business” of his retreat, including a Flemish mother and child he might have saved had a bomb not disintegrated them into thin air: “She might say no—the Flemish for no. You tried to help us. You couldn’t carry us across the field. You carried the twins but not us, no. No, you are not guilty. No” (248). His guilt during war suddenly intersects with his innocence in Lola’s rape, as if he could reverse his verdict. And yet, landing on the simple, adamant “No,” the passage reinstates—via a double negation— the reality of his punishment: Robbie enters the war from prison. This comes to life as a “foreshadow” of Briony’s denarration when we read it a second time; only then can we see its backward motion as a prediction of the reversal in the coda.59 Robbie’s reversals function as Briony’s do: they transform the truth so that the dead may rise and speak. The pathos is even sharper here because the passage reinscribes the tragic events as it reverses them: we read Robbie’s horrific journey again, only in reverse, in the subjunctive. Joe Wright’s visual translation of this “reverses” passage in his 2007 film of Atonement is brilliantly faithful in this regard—he does not fade out events but takes us backward through them again, as if pressing rewind.60 By the same logic, Atonement’s coda reinforces what it means to deny, invoking twice over the happy ending of Robbie and Cecilia’s reunion

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even as it briefly and subjunctively presents the “real,” tragic ending of their death in World War II.

Being, Untrue If we consider these two endings in terms of readerly experience, we have just as much reason to believe in the lovers’ reunion as in their premature death. McEwan has conjured this possibility for far longer than the abrupt mention of the “truth” in the coda. By making the durational narrative a fantasy and the anecdote a hard truth, he balances the force of referential fact with the power of phenomenological experience. This is ramified by a global rereading. Our advance knowledge of Atonement’s opposed endings levels them into experientially equal subjunctive possibilities throughout the novel. We might say that rereading Atonement affords a subjunctive phenomenology less invested in a hierarchy of truths than in an experience of relative untruths.61 A hazy space between fact and possibility, the subjunctive expresses situations hypothetical, contingent, imagined, expected, or hoped for. It allows us to talk sensibly about the counterfactual and the possible: “what could happen” and “what might have happened.” If, as I have been suggesting, rereading allows us to experience two Brionys, riven by time, we can see it as a kind of synecdoche for a layering of both subjunctive and subjective possibilities. Most critics insist that Atonement’s two endings are distinguished as true and false, respectively: “the diary entry . . . does identify a line between history and invention.”62 I have come across one student essay, one scholarly article, and one review, however, that call this a misreading. Annie Lowrey notes that Briony frames “the revelation that they died in syntactic uncertainty.”63 Martin Jacobi argues that “[a]lthough critics of the novel claim that Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis die during World War II, in fact the book not only offers no explicit statement of their deaths, but also offers good reasons to believe that they did not die.”64 Joining these readers—most likely rereaders—is author, reviewer, and critic James Wood: Probably millions of readers have chosen to read the passage . . . as a simple declaration that the lovers died and that Briony fictively prolonged their lives. But what Briony in fact does is float a hypothesis: she says, in effect, what if I tried to convince you that these people died? Would you

Enfolding still believe me? This sounds less like a statement than another potential fiction, as if Briony is saying: “You must believe whatever you want to believe. I could take you either way.” . . . Briony merely says, what if they died? The same reader who had happily followed Briony’s fiction in the second and third sections, who had happily acceded to the happy ending of the good read, now accedes again to Briony’s final manipulations—this same reader now longs to make of this revelation yet another kind of easy fact: oh, they actually died. But McEwan wants this to sound like another possibility, another fiction.65

Atonement’s mutual exclusion might seem to entail the incompossible: “not possible together; that [which] cannot exist or be true together; wholly incompatible or inconsistent.”66 Wood here echoes Deleuze’s description of Borges: “bifurcations, divergences, incompossibilities, and discord belong to the same motley world. . . . In a same chaotic world divergent series are endlessly tracing bifurcating paths.”67 Before her reunion with Cecilia and Robbie, Briony lends credence to this “forking paths” model with a sly moment of what Linda Hutcheon calls covert metafiction: “as she walked along the Common she felt the distance widen between her and another self, no less real, who was walking back toward the hospital. Perhaps the Briony who was walking in the direction of Balham was the imagined or ghostly persona. This unreal feeling was heightened when, after half an hour, she reached another High Street, more or less the same as the one she had left behind” (311).68 From here on out, the two versions of events proceed, like Briony and her ghost, toward distinct ends, along different High roads. I want to consider this split subjectivity in light of Bryan Reynolds’s theory of subjunctivity: “Empathy, surprise, lying, and imagination are the most common means by which people venture into what I call ‘subjunctive space,’ the hypothetical worlds of both ‘as ifs’ and ‘what ifs’ that interface subjective territories.”69 These “what ifs” and “as ifs” appear in Atonement’s model of personhood as subjunctive, as temporally split. Severance is what Briony causes in deed—rending Robbie and Cecilia asunder—and in word: when she denarrates her story, she gives us two layered slices of possibility. It is also how the novel represents human subjectivity. This attains a gruesomely literal quality when Briony becomes a war nurse: “She was not intending to remove the gauze but as she loosened it, the heavy sterile towel beneath it slid away, taking a part

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of the bloodied dressing with it. The side of Luc’s head was missing. The hair was shaved well back from the missing portion of the skull” (290). The gauze, the towel, the dressing, the hair, the skin, and the bone: all these layers are peeled away to reveal the “spongy mess” of the brain. The abstract “problem of other minds” from Part I of the novel gives way to literal vivisection as Briony confronts the inner strata of the body: “one edge of the ruptured skin rose over the other, revealing its fatty layers” (279). The novel insistently connects duplicity, fiction making, and the slicing of the body, reinforcing a model of subjunctive personhood. This layering of being is nowhere more evident than in Briony’s authorial revisions. We find hints in the novel and are able to confirm in the coda that she is an inveterate drafter. The novel begins with the “finished draft” of Briony’s play, The Trials of Arabella, whose title puns on repeated essaying. Briony’s description of her first draft of Atonement, “Two Figures by a Fountain,” also suggests a correlation between revision, rereading, and perspective: she decides to “write the scene three times over, from three points of view” (38). We come to understand, through a global rereading, that Briony has redrafted and recrafted “Two Figures by a Fountain” over the course of her whole life: “The earliest version, January 1940, the latest, March 1999, and in between, half a dozen different drafts,” all but the last of which she characterizes as “merciless” (349). Her moral development has been a grueling process over time, an unremitting revision of her soul as well as her material. The metafictional awareness afforded by rereading maps Briony’s textual revisions onto her ethical reformation: writing and living become coeval “what ifs.” Reynolds suggests that the “multileveled, higherorders of consciousness” are crucial to the scripting and performance of identity, through the “subjunctive contemplation of the ‘as ifs’ and ‘what ifs’ that work to situate an individual’s subjectivity and experience in relation to the past, present, and possible future.”70 Briony is divided by time throughout the novel, as when the repetition of The Trials of Arabella gives us an older Briony castigating her “priggish” younger ghost: we see Briony seeing herself. Rereading splits our conception of her selfhood—young and old, foolish and repentant—and renders it analogous to her efforts at rewriting. This model of personhood acknowledges past and present selves, collates them as if in her box of drafts, “in order and dated” (333). Our separate awarenesses of Briony the old and of Briony the young coexist in the time of rereading; we witness the crafted, drafty nature of personhood.

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Indeed, Briony is not the only character in Atonement who subjunctively drafts herself. Robbie writes two drafts of his note to Cecilia, composing at a desk covered with “revision notes, landscape gardening and anatomy piles, various letters and cards: unpaid battels, letters from tutors and friends congratulating him on his first, which he still took pleasure in rereading” (78). Tinkering in a reverie, his passionate words spill onto the page and “the draft was ruined” (80); only by accident does he “[fold] it into an envelope” (84). He later finds the stately, apologetic version he meant to send: “The handwritten letter he had rested on the open copy of Gray’s Anatomy, Splanchnology section, page 1546, the vagina” (89). The scene exemplifies the metafictional commentary only available to us upon rereading. We see: a “ruined” draft; the pleasure of rereading about a “first”; the studied nature of revision notes; and the body’s vivisection in the premed’s “anatomy piles” and his splanchnological Gray’s. Meanwhile, as Robbie is penning alternative versions of his love letter, Cecilia is considering alternative outfits to impress him: “Here was a dress with the first timid hint of shoulder pads, and others followed more assertively, muscular older sisters throwing off the boyish years, rediscovering waistlines and curves, dropping their hemlines with self-sufficient disregard for the hopes of men” (91). Robbie’s amorous drafts and Cecilia’s sartorial musings cannot compare to Briony’s “fifty-nine year assignment” (349). Yet they all have in common a subjunctive, striated selfhood. It is important to note that these drafts of the self exist within a limited realm of subjectivity. In the end, Robbie’s disparate notes equally express his love; Cecilia’s dresses present a spectrum, but also a narrative, of her taste. Cecilia later contemplates her day in a way that emphasizes consistency as much as difference: “these too-vivid, untrustworthy impressions, her self-doubt, the intrusive visual clarity and eerie differences that had wrapped themselves around the familiar were no more than continuations, variations of how she had been seeing and feeling all day” (92). The novel emphasizes self-continuity as well as self-schism in its account of Briony’s sin, too. Naming Robbie, she closes her own fate: “It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her,” and “she trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own construction” (156, 160). The novel presents her spiritual condition as “an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime” (162). She writes in her journal: “I’ve made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place” (350). Her novel “ends with its birth, the last word ‘begin’ conveying the cyclicality of the book.”71 The split self seems to maintain a kind of integrity.

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After Briony reads Robbie’s love note, we again see this kind of negotiation of internal difference and self-continuity: What she wanted was to be lost to the unfolding of an irresistible idea, to see the black thread spooling out from the end of her scratchy silver nib and coiling into words. But how to do justice to the changes that had made her into a real writer at last, and to her chaotic swarm of impressions, and to the disgust and fascination she felt? Order must be imposed. She should begin, as she had decided earlier, with a simple account of what she had seen at the fountain. But that episode in the sunlight was not quite so interesting as the dusk, the idle minutes on the bridge lost to daydreaming, and then Robbie appearing in the semidarkness, calling to her, holding in his hand the little white square that contained the letter that contained the word. And what did the word contain? She wrote, “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.” (108)

Briony, for the first time, isn’t sure what to write. She wants to impose order but succumbs to a new desire to be lost, to idle, to dream in dusk. The lines loosen. Her musings drift with “unfolding,” “coiling,” “spooling” movements. Yet the passage’s nursery phrases, such as “The little white square that contained the letter that contained the word” and the “old lady who swallowed a fly,” maintain a sense of boundedness. These textile and epidermal conceits for experience recur and suggest a particular aesthetic: sinuous, roiling, furling, sensuous, yet holistic and contained. This novel is, in a word, baroque.

Enfolding I believe that we can account for both the division and the continuity of both the event and the self afforded by rereading Atonement with a baroque paradigm of enfolding. Gilles Deleuze elaborates in The Fold: “The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds. . . . twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other.”72 The baroque fold draws together all of Atonement’s operations as we have described them: the transparent layering of fictions; the pleating and folding of time in rereading; the subjunction of text and person; the confluence of self-consistency and self-difference; and the fractal-like narrative structure the coda brings into being: Briony’s Atonement within McEwan’s Atonement. This novel’s mode of uncertainty is thus

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more baroque than it is romantic or even, despite its Woolfish overtones, modernist. Atonement’s ekphrasis of the defunct fountain on the Tallis estate is exemplary: The whole statue had acquired around its northerly surfaces a bluish-green patina, so that from certain approaches, and in low light, the musclebound Triton really seemed a hundred leagues under the sea. Bernini’s intention must have been for the water to trickle musically from the wide shell with its irregular edges into the basin below. But the pressure was too weak, so that instead the water slid soundlessly down the underside of the shell where opportunistic slime hung in dripping points, like stalactites in a limestone cave. The basin itself was over three feet deep and clear. The bottom was of a pale creamy stone over which undulating white-edged rectangles of refracted sunlight divided and overlapped. (27)

Note the enfolding of the world’s surfaces: water, shell, light. It is apt that the fountain is a replica of one designed by the baroque master Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), whom Deleuze invokes: “When the folds of clothing spill out of painting, it is Bernini who endows them with sublime form in sculpture, when marble seizes and bears to infinity folds.”73 The broken vase, with its baroque chinoiserie—“blue and gold interlacing strapwork and foliage”—turns out to have been a Höroldt, a porcelain rip-off of a Ming (23). The derivative quality of this “replica” and the fountain into which it falls speaks to the heightened artifice of the baroque. Deleuze emphasizes that the baroque “does not invent things” but rather enfolds the animate and the inanimate. The stagnant stone sculpture of the nymph comes alive in the vibrant, sexual form of Cecilia’s wet, then clothed body: “The frail white nymph, from whom water cascaded far more successfully than it did from the beefy Triton, carefully placed the pieces by the vase. She dressed quickly, turning her wet arms with difficulty through her silk sleeves. . . . [T]he roiling surface had yet to recover its tranquility, and the turbulence was driven by the lingering spirit of her fury” (29). As Deleuze says, “water itself is creased, and closely woven, skintight fabric will still be a watery fold that reveals the body far better than nudity.”74 Later, Cecilia in her evening dress feels “sleekly impregnable, slippery and secure . . . a mermaid” (92–93). Deleuze again illuminates this aspect of the baroque: “The fold can be recognized first of all in the textile

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model of the kind implied by garments: fabric or clothing has to free its own folds from its usual subordination to the finite body it covers.”75 Robbie fantasizes about resuming his erotic entanglement with Cecilia in “the satin darkness” of the library: “At the top of her shoulder was a little dent, scalloped in the bone,” and there is “the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their limbs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling” (122, 128). This baroque aesthetic can be erotic, but it is not strictly sexual. The fold characterizes the general layeredness of the body, as in “a heavy face, rich in seams, as though carved from folded granite” or the beads of perspiration “in the folds of skin” at the back of someone’s neck (163, 279). The folding of skin and cloth bestow a comforting familiarity to the self when Briony lets “the folds of her white muslin dress and familiar, endearing, pucker of skin about her knees fill her view” (33). There is a harmony between the folds of the body and of thought: the mind is a “smooth continuous fabric”; between thinking and action there is “no stitching, no seam” (34). The body is an envelope encasing what Deleuze calls “pleats of matter” and “folds of the soul.”76 This isn’t always pretty. Emily Tallis describes the onset of a migraine: “illuminated points in her vision, little pinpricks, as though the worn fabric of the visible world were being held up against a far brighter light” (60). More than once we read of soldiers “folded into” or “protectively folded in” their “thoughts” to numb themselves to the shattered world (201, 214). Robbie thinks the stench of rotting corpses is “insinuating itself into the folds of his clothes”; he compulsively folds and unfolds a map (214, 179, 180, 202). Cloth, body, mind, paper—often spoiled—all gather gradually under this meme of the fold. These figures present synecdoches—folds within a larger fold—for Atonement’s narrative workings. Deleuze quotes Leibniz’s model of the fold as fundamentally fractal-like: “ ‘The division of the continuous must not be taken as of sand dividing into grains, but as that of a sheet of paper or of a tunic in folds, in such a way that an infinite number of folds can be produced, some smaller than others, but without the body ever dissolving into points or minima.’ A fold is always folded within a fold.”77 This nested quality, which Deleuze likens to Russian dolls, is a crucial feature of baroque narrative: “stories enclosed one in the other, and the variation of the relation of narrator-and-narration.”78 The mise en abyme logic of the fold is demonstrated by the plethora of texts within Atonement: not just its pervasive allusions and posted

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letters but also a surfeit of material, folded papers. Robbie’s “ruined draft” is folded into an envelope and refolded there by Cecilia, and the salacious word inscribed on it is also described as an enfolding: “the smooth-hollowed enclosed forms of its first three letters were as clear as a set of anatomical drawings” (107). Briony, too, carries an old bus map: “It was torn along its folds, right along the line of the way she wanted to take” (300). The most significant text-within-a-text emerges in the revelations of the coda: Briony’s Atonement within McEwan’s. The confusion of frames instantiated by the novel’s last pages can be seen as a furling inward of the narrative’s concerns with fictionality. Its proleptic folding and recursive pleating of time produce a “fabricated” narrative, an intricate structure, fractal-like and ornate. Emily Tallis seems to foreshadow this when she speculates that Lola will soon be “wrapping herself in some fabricated misfortune,” a prophecy that comes to seem planted by a knowing authorial Briony (138). Indeed, once we discover that Briony has made changes, every detail in the novel comes to seem a trompe l’oeil, an elaborate pretension to the real. Our knowledge of Briony’s authorship as we reread raises questions about everything: What is real? What is design? Atonement neither answers narrative questions nor leaves them entirely open-ended. By embedding one story inside another, folding new information back into a text we’ve already experienced, McEwan gives us a spoiled baroque. Atonement’s folds of possibility deepen, even as our awareness of what “really happened” limits them to the novel’s fixed end. We ought to keep in mind that “what really happened” is tragic. McEwan spoils Briony’s affection for “vivid writing about light and stone and water,” just as his ending spoils our pleasure in the childish fantasy of Robbie and Cecilia’s reunion. The Bernini fountain and the Ming/ Meissen vase are both overwrought and damaged. The same might be said of the “ruined draft” of Robbie’s letter and the visions of viscera at the war hospital. Briony’s misapprehension of her mother’s crossed leg as “disembodied” acquires a gruesome reality: “Scattered around were shreds of striped cloth with blackened edges, remains of curtains or clothing, and a smashed-in window frame draped across a bush, and everywhere the smell of soot. . . . It was a leg in a tree. A mature plane tree, only just in leaf. The leg was twenty feet up, wedged in the first forking of the trunk, bare, severed cleanly above the knee” (180). The “draped” broken frame and “remains of curtains” in Robbie’s vision skew Briony’s drawing-room tableau.

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The novel enacts the same grotesque transformation with an entomoid leitmotif. In Part I, Briony sees “a cloud of insects, each one bobbing randomly, as though fixed on an invisible elastic string—a mysterious courtship dance, or sheer insect exuberance that defied her to find a meaning,” recapitulating Lily Briscoe’s image for her thoughts in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: “all of this danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate, but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net” (72).79 This textile image—“elastic net”—for the interconnection of perceptions and ideas is whipped into a frenzy of perceptual chaos in wartime, leading Robbie to a horrific misreading: “a black furry shape . . . seemed, as he approached, to be moving or pulsing. Suddenly a swarm of bluebottles rose into the air with an angry whining buzz, revealing the rotting corpse beneath” (231). The enfolding of world and body can be cruel, morbid even. Atonement intensifies this sense of lurking death as each fold, even the most innocent one, comes to harbor rot: “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.” Revisiting a novel that has already been spoiled has its grotesque pleasures: it is like seeing every ornate whorl on the surface of a petal materialize as it dies, or finding a fecund beauty in the bluish-green patina on a fountain, or delighting in the inadvertent uses of a “ruined” love letter. While other texts might invoke the fold as a figure for split selves and doubled moments—Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata (1994) comes to mind—the spoiled baroque in Atonement is more than the elaborate invagination of subjectivity, time, and untruth. The smell of corpses in Robbie’s clothes and the dissonance between buzzing ideas and rotting corpses remind us that its mode of uncertainty is a matter of life and death. Given the darker tones of this novel’s ethical cruxes—rape, war, betrayal—I will connect its mode of enfolding to a spoiled empathy: a layered, shifty relation that skewers our lordly pretensions for a beatific ethics of fiction.

Spoiling Empathy In talks and interviews, McEwan often describes the novel’s contribution to ethics this way: Within one novel you can live inside many different people’s heads, in a way that you of course cannot do in normal life. I think that quality of penetration into other consciousnesses lies at the heart of its moral quest.

Enfolding Knowing, or sensing what it’s like to be someone else I think is at the foundations of morality. I don’t think the novel is particularly good or interesting when it instructs us how to live, so I don’t think of it as moral in that sense. But certainly when it shows us intimately, from the inside, other people, it then does extend our sensibilities. Briony . . . is perhaps my fullest invention, as a person—deeply flawed and yet I hope still sympathetic.80

This follows a line about the ethics of literature that, as I noted in Chapter 1, emerged in the nineteenth century and has become a standard refrain in humanist circles. Suzanne Keen’s 2007 Empathy and the Novel examines the evidence for the ideas that “if you don’t read, you won’t be able to empathize” and that “empathic emotion motivates altruistic action.” It turns out the “empathy-altruism” hypothesis is “inconclusive at best and nearly always exaggerated.”81 McEwan returns to it with more vehemence and less subtlety in his account of the terrorists who felled the Twin Towers: “If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed.” No doubt the immediacy of this piece, published on September 15, 2001, dictated its impassioned terms. The validity of the claim notwithstanding, note the qualification of his earlier claim for identification with “deeply flawed” persons: does the terrorists’ ostensible rejection of empathy—and presumably of a liberal imagination—absolve us from empathy with them? In McEwan’s Saturday (2005), which revolves around the 2003 London protests against the wars triggered by 9/11, a literary imagination saves the day so explicitly as to beg belief: a naked, pregnant woman recites Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and thus prevents a mentally disabled criminal from attacking her family. More disturbing than what John Banville calls Saturday’s “banal” politics is the idea that it is the destitute madman who requires moral and mental adjustment—via the scalpel, no less—rather than the liberal upper-middle-class neurosurgeon who “fixes” him.82 Both of McEwan’s “responses” to 9/11 evince a troubling reification of the ethics so complexly wrought in his previous works. As Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate point out, “what is most intriguing about Atonement—particularly in the light of McEwan’s later attempts to oppose terror and literature—are the remarkable parallels it throws up between the figures of the novelist and the terrorist.”83 I, too, would suggest that the darker ethical implications of Atonement’s mode of enfolding belie the happy self-satisfaction of fictional

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empathy that even the real neuroscientists have been touting.84 As I noted earlier, the critical take on Atonement has often revolved around the ethical question of how the reader relates to Briony’s untruths as a character and as an author. The ethics of this relation seem telegraphed by the novel’s title. McEwan sees the word fall apart as “at-one-ment”— this is its etymology—and defines it as a “reconciliation with self.”85 Scholars have argued that Atonement is riven with images of fracture, and its status as a synthetic whole is a promise of at-one-ment achievable only in the relation of readers to text.86 The argument is that Briony is fractured by her untruths: these schisms prevent her from being at one with herself. We judge her for the severance she imposes on others or we forgive her fractured soul. But in the end, Briony doesn’t completely fall apart. The novel’s complex structure of subjectivity presents selves both split and continuous— that is, folded. Selfhood in Atonement is internally riven but self-same, just as Cecilia describes her day as “continuations, variations,” “eerie differences . . . wrapped around . . . the familiar” (92). A folded self is on the brink of breaking in two, but like Briony’s map, torn along the folds, it just about holds together. A reader’s ethical relation to Briony is consequent neither upon a union of her broken parts nor upon a supposed integrity that would permit us to judge or forgive her. We cannot separate ourselves enough from our co-construction of her false story to do so. Rather, Briony’s duplicity envelops our complicity, both etymologically from -plic, or fold. This, I submit, is a darker claim than the usual humanistic call for empathy because it requires our recognition of guilt, or at least, of responsibility. Deleuze’s meditations in The Fold again help unfold this model of ethics, as in his interpretation of this image from Mallarmé: The fold is . . . made of . . . the soul in which we read “plus jaunes de pensée,” the Book or the monad with multiple leaves. Now it contains every fold, since the combinations of its pages are infinite, but it includes them in its closure, and all its actions are internal. . . . [O]n one side there are all these creases of matter. . . . And then, on the other side, there are these folds in the soul, where inflection becomes inclusion ( just as Mallarmé writes that folding becomes a layering): we’re no longer seeing, we’re reading.87

Infinite subjunctive possibilities—available to the soul, to the work— remain bounded, in a “closure.” Analogously, we access the folds of

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Briony’s soul not by seeing—not via an ethical vision—but by reading, a process that insinuates our subjectivity into hers. Unlike a single act of judgment or forgiveness, complicity is an ongoing ethical mode that entails both identification and differentiation, a cleaving of subjectivities. Rereading Atonement ramifies the ethical resonance of its uncertainty. Briony’s split self—young and old—comes into clarity in tandem with the reader’s split self—reader and rereader. A first-time reader might experience an empathic identification with Briony that grows with her efforts to atone, only to be severed from it upon the discovery of her second untruth—this would then displace our sympathies onto the betrayed Cecilia and Robbie. But if we are tempted to accuse Briony on an initial reading, a rereading makes us absorb the implications of our own culpability. A common trope of rereading is that it allows the reader to see his or her self again, as in Emile Faguet’s words: “One could very well compose an autobiography by comparing reading impressions at various ages, an autobiography that could be entitled Rereading.”88 Proust says we leaf through our old books because “they are the calendars we have kept of days that have vanished.”89 This accordion-like compression of selves and time into pages reminds us that our own earlier, naive reading of Atonement is folded into our rereading. We divide our reading experience, crease our souls, envelop ourselves in the novel’s folds, in Briony’s self-schisms. Our naive reading, her naive writing, our spoiled rereading, her drafts: all are enfolded. Rereading also allows us to comprehend how much time and effort Briony has devoted to her atonement. As though imitating her revisions, the rereader undergoes the redundancy of covering the same material twice, feels the Sisyphean task of her penitence.90 In the coda, Briony points out: “I gave them happiness but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me” (351). “Don’t worry,” says Cecilia in Briony’s novel, “I won’t ever forgive you” (318). On a rereading, we realize that this refusal of forgiveness is composed by Briony. Our awareness of her insistence on the lovers’ “anger” and “derision” for her grows with rereading, as does our recognition of how much blame she has apportioned to herself. Her self-representation is excoriating (etymologically, “to remove the skin,” linking it to the origin of spoil in spolium). It is no small or romantic or naive thing to write oneself as an object of hatred. Briony says she finds hope in Robbie’s last “softly” spoken words: “ ‘Just do all the things we’ve asked.’ It was almost conciliatory, that ‘just,’ but not quite, not yet” (329). Upon rereading, we see this as her longing for an impossible atonement: forgiveness from the dead.

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In the penultimate line of the coda, however, Briony offers a brief vision that counters that “impossible task” of atonement, invoking instead the “power to conjure” so crucial to the novel’s uncertainty: “If I had the power to conjure them . . . Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It’s not impossible” (351). It is fitting that she imagines here the “not impossible” possibility of a second-time audience for her play. If rereading The Trials of Arabella entails seeing a ghost—“that busy, priggish conceited little girl”—rereading Atonement entails being one. The rereader is haunted by none other than him- or herself, the ghost of readings past. Complicity requires that we recognize the priggish, conceited former selves haunting our lives. Briony’s subjunctive, baroque phrases—“not quite, not yet,” and the double negative, “not impossible”—mark the difficulty and the exorbitance of a forgiveness she may not deserve, a forgiveness we may have no right to offer, either. If, as the writer Edward St. Aubyn says, “there is something morally condescending about forgiveness,” an ethics of complicity might be the best we can offer.91

II M U LT I P L I C I T Y

Multiplicity is a narrative structure characterized by the presentation of conflicting views within a given community about an event, an object, or a person. Corresponding to a “both/and” rhetoric that precludes an objective truth, multiplicity presents several acts of interpretation, but no one view is privileged as correct. Literary multiplicity is widespread and, according to the Russian narrative theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, it derives from the multiplicity endemic to all language, which describes a world that is “overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist—or, on the contrary, by the ‘light’ of alien words that have already been spoken about it . . . entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents.”1 This rich polysemy of language is the basis for William Empson’s first type of poetic ambiguity: “when a detail is effective in several ways at once.”2 For Bakhtin, however, the intense multiplicity of the novel distinguishes it from epic and poetry: the novel has a “socially heteroglot multiplicity,” its voices are polyphonic, its genres are stratified, and its linguistic relationships are dialogic.3 That said, literary narratives are not infinitely multiple. On the one hand, narrative discourse places a boundary around multiplicity— utterances take place within a contained diegetic realm. As Bakhtin puts it, languages “are all able to enter into the unitary plane of the novel,” but “with each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia, it must move in and occupy a position for itself within it.”4 On the other hand, the literary form ramifies multiplicity: “the actively literary linguistic consciousness comes upon an even more varied and profound heteroglossia within literary language 115

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itself, as well as outside it.”5 This combination of constraint and amplification renders literary multiplicity a specific aesthetic structure. Each historical period deploys literary multiplicity differently. The Gospels are one of its earliest manifestations, however accidental; multiple perspectives appear in the eighteenth-century epistolary novel, though the various voices don’t always conflict. The fragmentation of a text into the viewpoints of distinctive characters—what Bakhtin terms “polyphony”—emerges strongly in the nineteenth century: it structures Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874), Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Robert Browning’s narrative poem The Ring and the Book (1869), based on a true crime story, introduces a major trope of multiplicity: a central event, in this case a murder, witnessed by different people with discordant views on it. Multiplicity often has this legalistic tenor, as witnesses offer competing testimonies. Its uncertainty intensifies in American and European modernism. Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904), William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) all reflect the modernist investment in a pluralistic epistemology that accounts for the subjectivity and the variability of perception. Postmodern and contemporary fictions continue to ramify multiplicity by insisting on undecidable conflicts—rather than interesting variations—between multiple views on the same events. Multiplicity has become a very common technique for uncertainty, due to the influence of Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film, Rashomon—source of the “Rashomon effect” that is virtually synonymous with my term multiplicity—despite the oft-noted fact that one version of its events is, in fact, tagged as “true.”6 As this fallacy suggests, readers’ experiential uncertainty often competes with the diegetic reality of a text. If we view multiplicity under a phenomenological lens, we see that its various literary manifestations possess varying degrees of doubt about “what really happened.” These degrees of doubt depend as much on the thickness and intensity of the text’s mode of uncertainty as on where we land at its end. Modes of multiplicity offer particular aesthetic, affective, and ethical affordances. Shades of difference are crucial, conveyed through many colors or “gray areas”; silhouettes accrue significance as they limn the borders between proximate perspectives; forms of severalty—groups or sets—dominate the aesthetic plane. Visual figures for multiplicity include the mosaic, the palimpsest, the motley pattern, the kaleidoscope, and

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impressionism. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the rhizome to evoke a radical model of “multiplicities.”7 Bakhtin’s sonic figure for heteroglossia is apt: “these voices create the background necessary for [the writer’s] own voice, outside of which his artistic prose nuances cannot be perceived, and without which they ‘do not sound.’ ”8 Multiplicity opens up an analysis of an ethical disturbance at the center of a community of witnesses, judges, or codependents. We witness different degrees of separation between community members: the congealed mass or a scattershot collection of singularities. This perspectival structure thus raises questions about how to negotiate social cohesion with individual integrity, in both an ontological and an ethical sense. Ethical criticism tends to be enamored with the democracy, impartiality, tolerance, or all-encompassing beneficence that multiple perspectives imply. Multiplicity is said to present a more complete picture: each view adds another facet to a concept, character, or event. Given its faith in the novel as a realist genre and in what Empson calls “seeing in the round,” we might call this a kind of full-tiplicity.9 Martha Nussbaum suggests, for instance, that “the fact that [The Golden Bowl] is written from several among many possible points of view, reminds us again and again that the whole of the relevant reality is more complex yet than the text.”10 But each interpretation that emerges goes beyond this augmentation of diversity, as it partly cancels out previous ones, resulting in a null-tiplicity. This negating effect raises one problem multiplicity poses for a democratic ethos: incommensurability, the idea that different values cannot be measured or calculated in relation. My analysis of multiplicity first takes up Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved, which presents at its core a central multiplicity of chapters told in the first person from the respective perspectives of three female characters. The ethical disturbance at the heart of the novel—a fugitive slave’s infanticide—works in contrast to the ethical dimensions of its mode of multiplicity, which formally enacts one character’s wish to “put his story next to” another’s. In counterpoint to the internally driven, excessive violence of Beloved’s story, I uncover a mode of adjacency that resonates with Jean-Luc Nancy’s ethos and praxis in Being Singular Plural.11 Adjacency permits members of a community to exist in a brief, tenuous, proportionate ethical relation that succumbs neither to a fused codependence nor to an atomized dismemberment of the collective body. The novel affords an ethics of discernment or kairos, a sensitivity to the discrete features of others that nevertheless remains discreet—reserved, private—about them.

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The subsequent chapter interreads William Empson’s 1930 critical work, Shirley Jackson’s 1943 short story, and Elliot Perlman’s 2003 novel, all of which bear the title Seven Types of Ambiguity. I appraise these three texts’ respective impulses toward accounting, a mode of multiplicity that tries to account for incompatible views but can fall into a mechanistic utilitarianism, a mere counting of them. I use Empson’s Benthamism to articulate the aesthetic and affective dimensions of this mode of uncertainty, including an onus on mathematical and poetic versions of the imaginary, a playful inventiveness possessed of a cruel innocence, and an equivocal ethics that aspires to pluralism but smacks of solipsism. Jackson and Perlman try to use multiplicity to trouble a competitive, market-based paradigm of human relationships. Interreading these two texts, however—attending to their respective allusions to Empson—suggests that Jackson’s mode of accounting maintains a productive uncertainty, while Perlman’s effort to account for others devolves into a reckoning between them.

3 ADJACENCY

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

Accommodation The dominance of the authorial persona in ethics-minded criticism is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the case of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. Although her writing is well known for its difficulty, Morrison has given enough explanatory interviews to fill two volumes, both extensively cited despite the humble, homey “conversations” intimated by their titles.1 Morrison’s “conversational” appearances on the Oprah Winfrey show also dramatize an anxious negotiation of readers’ desire to know and the author’s will to tell.2 With stunning audacity, Morrison even interpreted her own novels in her Tanner lecture at the University of Michigan in 1988. Yung-Hsing Wu notes that her lecture title, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” implies that her “words and wisdom on the novels might be necessary, hinting that the novels may have left some things ‘unspoken,’ or perhaps even that some thoughts remain ‘unspeakable’ until they are voiced by Morrison’s commentary.”3 But despite the enticing prospect of receiving wisdom from the author’s mouth—the ultimate oracle—Morrison’s interpretations of her novels often befuddle rather than clarify. As Wu puts it, “Morrison explains less than she obscures.”4 Accordingly, critics dutifully repeat rather than parse or trace Morrison’s claims about the effects of the radical uncertainty in her work, taking recourse to her extratextual words to inscribe her often terrifyingly dark texts into a positive political project. As if muffled by their adherence to a principle of the “unspeakable,” critics often quote her exactly, ventriloquizing Morrison on Morrison. One example is her idea that the opening lines of Beloved present a gesture toward something that is “beyond control” but “not beyond understanding, 119

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since it is not beyond accommodation.”5 Wu notes that this language has been co-opted by critical discourses from the postcolonial (Homi Bhabha) and the feminist (Drucilla Cornell) to black diaspora studies (Paul Gilroy). This kind of “accommodation”—or critical appropriation—suits the “accommodating” gestures of those critics who don kid gloves when approaching Beloved, professing a wariness about or a resistance to interpreting it. As if prohibited from critical judgment, they instead privilege the “remembrance” and the “reclamation of history and agency that the novel is said to enact”—or that Morrison says the novel enacts.6 This has resulted in a veritable machine of canonical self-validation. Is there a way to read Beloved that neither subsumes Morrison’s authority nor defers to it?7 We might begin by noting that her authorial choices are historically contingent, in more than one sense. As Bernard Lahire and Gwendolyn Wells have recently argued, the modern author often works a second job; in the late twentieth century, that job is usually in publishing or the academy.8 Morrison’s textual authority is ramified by her roles—often concurrent with authorship—as professor, critic, and editor. The horrific event at the core of Beloved most likely derives from her editorial work at Random House, compiling fragments for the “scrapbook” of an imaginary “three-hundred-year-old black man.”9 The Black Book contains a clipping about Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed her daughter when her former slaveholder came to take his “property” back. Yet despite her professed allegiance to “revealing” this hidden history, Morrison says: “I did research about a lot of things in this book in order to narrow it, to make it narrow and deep, but I did not do much research on Margaret Garner other than the obvious stuff, because I wanted to invent her life.”10 Invent she did—and change. Morrison renames Garner as Sethe and embodies the guilt over her infanticide in a “haint,” a young woman whom Sethe recognizes as the ghost of the daughter she killed. Beyond this fantastical fictionalization of history, Morrison makes some less noticeable, yet intriguing changes. Contemporaneous journalistic reports emphasized the light skin color of Garner’s dead baby and surviving children, likely attributable to rape.11 But in Beloved, Denver is simply described as “brown,” while Beloved is pictured as “black as oil,” “midnight,” and “thunder-black” (270, 288, 301). Why this blackening of the story? Morrison also removes the male slave from the scene of the infanticide. In the historical record, while Garner was trying to

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kill their children, her husband was attacking the slaveholder who had come to take the family back into slavery. In Beloved, Sethe’s husband, Halle, is absent from this scene, because, as Morrison claims in an interview, “The loss of that man to his mother, to his wife, to his children, to his friends, is a serious loss and the reader has to feel it, you can’t feel it if he’s in there. He has to not be there.”12 Franny Nudelman notes that “while the mother’s violence, internal to the family, becomes the novel’s focus, the father’s violence, his attack on the slaveholder and, implicitly, on the institution of slavery, is left out.”13 Further, Garner’s two surviving sons—Buglar and Howard in Morrison’s retelling—run away in the first pages of Beloved. Why this feminizing of the story?14 Finally, Morrison blots the undisputed historical fact that Garner was taken back into slavery, after which recapture she vanished. Christopher Peterson argues that “Morrison’s significant revision of Margaret Garner’s story imagines a triumph over the Fugitive Slave Law that should caution readers against the almost unanimous characterization of Beloved as a novel of historical recovery rather than of historical invention.”15 Of course, the historical record on Garner—largely in the form of journalistic accounts—is melodramatic and contradictory as well, replete with competing political agendas.16 And fiction writers have the prerogative to make such changes. Still, we might wonder: What are the implications of inventing the life of someone who has already lived? Of saying that readers must “feel” the loss of a man who was in fact there? These manipulations of Garner’s story are often ignored in the name of a laudable political endeavor, or perhaps they are simply elided as a function of the (pardon the pun) Oprah-priation of Morrison’s work into book club material. By raising these questions about Morrison’s choices to fictionalize Garner’s life, I want to suggest how tricky it is to consider novels based on the values we attribute to their authors, however authoritative and however implied. In the case of Beloved, we would have to negotiate Morrison’s changes to Garner’s story, our preconceived notions about her political position as a black female American writer, what we can extrapolate about the implied author from the narrative, and how all that jibes with Morrison’s often obscurantist analyses of her own novels. Rather than struggling to reconcile these factors into a coherent authorial viewpoint, I propose that we consider the ethics of the reading experience instead. This suits Morrison’s own description of herself as a reader, as we see in this acute insight about Faulkner:

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It is technically just astonishing. As a reader you have been forced to hunt for a drop of blood that means everything and nothing. The insanity of racism. So the structure is the argument. Not what this one says, or that one says. It is the structure of the book, and you are hunting this black thing that is nowhere to be found, and yet makes all the difference. No one has done anything quite like that ever. So, when I critique, what I am saying is, I don’t care if Faulkner is a racist or not; I don’t personally care, but I am fascinated by what it means to write like this.17

This elision of authorial personae in favor of the readerly experience of structure has influenced Morrison’s aesthetic as a writer as well. At the end of Jazz, the narrator says: “make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.”18 The literal book in our hands asks to be remade. A crucial strand of Morrisonian metacommentary about fiction emphasizes readerly agency: she says her “language has to have holes and spaces so that the reader can come into it,” insisting “my writing expects, demands participatory reading. . . . The reader supplies the emotions. The reader supplies even some of the color, some of the sound.”19 Morrison connects this to open-ended musical forms: Jazz always keeps you on the edge. There is no final chord. There may be a long chord, but no final chord. And it agitates you. Spirituals agitate you, no matter what they are saying about how it is all going to be. There is something underneath them that is incomplete. . . . I want my books to be like that—because I want that feeling of something held in reserve and the sense that there is more—that you can’t have it all right now.20

Both the author’s reserve and her text’s incompleteness promote a readerly agitation. As in the tussle between author and reader that I explored in my Introduction, uncertainty is compulsory, imposed by the author precisely to compel the reader’s “free” performance of the text. In this paradigm, the reader is not just helpful but necessary, participating with the chorus but also enacting the text. Morrison is committed to a model of reading as multiplicity, one steeped in both polyphony— literature’s use of many voices—and dialogism, literature’s addresses to readers, who then participate in making meaning. Her novels, she says, afford a communal literary experience: “The reader as narrator asks the questions the community asks, and both reader and ‘voice’ stand among the crowd, within it, with privileged intimacy and contact, but without any

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more privileged information than the crowd has. The egalitarianism . . . places us all (reader, the novel’s population, the narrator’s voice) on the same footing.”21 Morrison’s insistence on active readerly participation bespeaks her interest in creating an inclusive but conflictual social space: “The chorus being the community who participates in this behavior and is shocked by it or horrified by it or they like or they support it. Everybody is in it. And it has something also to do with the way in which those stories are told because the reader becomes a participant in the books.”22 This communal literary experience is a model for this chapter: an accommodative but contestative space in which I do not omit or deny Morrison’s authorial musings but read them paratextually, alongside Beloved and its criticism.

Disremembering and the Join The ethical resonance of literary multiplicity for Morrison demonstrates the extent to which her oeuvre as a whole is invested in the question of community. She is particularly interested in our ethical responsibilities as social creatures who negotiate selfhood with membership in a relationship, a family, a neighborhood, even a nation. I would argue that this ethical investment plays out in her musings on and creations of form—“the structure is the argument.” In “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Morrison posits that Greek tragedy is similar “to Afro-American communal structures (the function of song and chorus, the heroic struggle between the claims of community and individual hubris) and African religion and philosophy.”23 One might suggest, following this line of comparison, that Beloved’s plot is set up like that of Sophocles’s Antigone. In Hegel’s analysis, Antigone’s small-scale personal imperative to bury her brother comes up against the large-scale state strictures against doing so. Martha Nussbaum, recapitulating Hegel’s argument, offers one effect of these incommensurable values: Tragedy reminds us of the deep importance of the spheres of life that are in conflict within the drama and of the dire results when they are opposed and we have to choose between them. It therefore motivates us to imagine what a world would be like that did not confront people with such choices . . . between the two spheres of value. In that sense, the end of the drama is written offstage—by citizens who enact these insights in their own constructive political reflection.24

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Analogously, the conflict between slavery and infanticide in Beloved— between political and personal spheres of value—prompts a critique of the societal ill (slavery) that made it possible. Sethe’s act of infanticide, a self-destructive murder of what she calls her “best thing,” opposes the systemic violence of slavery, which would otherwise subsume and destroy her children (289, 314). Her individual “claim” would be the hamartia that opposes both the national system of slavery and the smaller community of free blacks in which she lives. While a critique of slavery even at this point in American history is far from redundant, I would suggest that Morrison’s interest in this impasse resonates with broader ethical questions. In Beloved, nineteenthcentury American slavery—and, remarkably, that timeless relation we call motherlove—is a lens that allows us to perceive two perennial threats to communities. On the one hand, a collection of many people can succumb to a terrifying fusion, a too-proximate merging of different beings into a mass. On the other, a group of people can undergo a dispersal: an isolation, a rending, a scattering. In either case, the integrity of the individual and of the community are compromised, as is the relation between them. Kenneth Reinhard finds these two threats articulated in Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism: What is lost in totalitarianism is the spacing proper to the function of the neighbor. To destroy the relation of the neighbor is to eliminate the breathing space that keeps the subject in proper relationship to the Other, neither too close nor too far, but in proximity, the “nearness” that neighboring entails. The emptiness of the social sphere, the “desert” left by tyranny, itself materializes as a horrific “sand storm” in totalitarianism, a solidification of the void that fills up all space, allowing no room for either subject or society.25

The neighborhood can become a fixed mass, a throng, or a collection of separate solipsists. The totalization of a group of people, as Arendt’s image of a sand storm suggests, can again go in both directions: it can lead either toward a spaceless smother or toward an utter scatter; either toward solidification into a lump or toward atomization into particulate grains. Morrison uses a different figure—possession—to articulate these two problems of “proper spacing” in Beloved’s communities. Ghostly possession in the novel is tied to excess, especially the overcompensatory desire to

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be literally joined with others. But the physical and social dispossession signified by slavery conveys lack—a less-than-wholeness signified by dismemberment. I want to examine more closely these two dangers of the many as they appear in Beloved’s story line, in order to stage by contrast the kinds of multiplicity that structure its form. I will begin with the join, which emerges in the novel’s maternal imagery. Pregnant with Denver, Sethe’s body is bursting at the seams: Amy calls her “a mess,” as if her boundaries are disintegrating in an excess of abjection: sweat, tears, saliva, blood, pus, urine, amniotic fluid (94). Sethe calls her children “all the parts of her that were precious” and claims that she has “milk enough for all,” phrases that invoke scenes from her own enslavement: Schoolteacher’s separation of her “parts” and the horrific scene in which his nephews “milk” her (192, 118). Paul D accuses her of being overly possessive: “Your love is too thick,” he says; and “This here new Sethe didn’t know where the world stopped and she began” (191). The narrator concurs, “unless carefree, motherlove was a killer,” and Sethe’s motherlove does make her a killer, conjuring a ravenous ghost (154). Beloved in turn invades, possesses, and makes claims. By the time the novel ends, she is pregnant, as if replacing Sethe as the excessive maternal body. As one gains corporeality, the other withers: “the bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became. . . . Beloved ate up her life, took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it” (288). This is a parasitic relation of guilt and reprobation; mother and daughter are “locked in a love that wore everybody out” (279). Crippled by dependence, they aspire to complete fusion. Beloved continually poses this threat—“I am looking for the join”—due to her overidentification with others: “she is my face smiling at me” (246, 252). She greedily demands “the best of everything— first. The best chair, the biggest piece, the prettiest plate, the brightest ribbon” (277). At the same time, Beloved fears that “pieces of her would drop maybe one at a time, maybe all at once . . . she would fly apart. It is difficult keeping her head on her neck, her legs attached to her hips” (155). Beloved suffers a psychic version of the bodily dismemberment of slaves, to which the novel alludes in a coded malapropism: Sethe’s use of the word “disremember” to signify forgetting. The slave body is broken down, reduced to parts, a literalization of the partial selfhood legally rendered by the three-fifths compromise of 1787. Discourse imposes dismemberment: Sethe hears Schoolteacher instructing his nephews to

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“put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right” (223). We encounter various forms of bodily depletion: Nan’s one arm, Sethe’s insensible scar, her child’s head falling off, Baby Suggs’s broken hip, and even Denver’s deafness (73–74, 177, 102). Dismemberment applies to the slave family as well: “We scattered,” says Baby Suggs when asked about her people. The character most associated with displacement is Paul D, a roaming fugitive. Paul D is at one point imprisoned on a chain gang that provides Morrison with a rich ore of metaphor for a dismembered existence: living underground in separated boxes, the chain gang forms a line of disconnection, individuals linked only by virtue of their enslavement. When Paul D finally arrives at 124 Bluestone Road, “she moved him,” the novel puns: Beloved seduces and displaces him until he is “where she wanted him” (134, 147). The rapacity of slavery seems to reappear in the possessiveness of the mother, the ghost, the daughter, and even the lover. In effect, Beloved uses the introduction of its eponymous character to the community in order to represent joining and dismemberment as two faces of the same coin. Morrison presents a radical critique not only of a community that isolates its members but also of the imperative to love thy neighbor. Systemic slavery and the nuclear family are equally subject to these dangers, as is the community of free blacks in Ohio. The neighbors grow angry because the family has “overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess” in a celebratory dinner for Sethe’s homecoming (163). The family’s desire to join seems arrogant, greedy; this leads the community to withdraw. When the slave catchers come to reclaim Sethe and her children, the neighbors do not warn the family: something “like meanness” makes them “stand aside” (182). The merging of bodies and the standing aside of bodies are aligned again to signal the dangers of multiplicity: the “meanness” of the estranged community punishes the family’s closeness and its superfluity. The fusion of many bodies comes to seem an unnatural, excessive extravagance of love, but the dismembering that checks it conduces to a severe distance that leaves the community riven. The novel’s content, then, revolves around a critique of two coeval modes of communal ethics, one that draws separate members—of the body, family, community— into a too-close, joined relation; the other catalyzing an isolating, atomizing scatter. The evocation of these threats to the stability of a community within the space of the novel offers a bracing warning about the limits of love.

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But what does Beloved’s uncertain form contribute to an analysis of community? While the narrative employs free indirect discourse, it generally maintains a single focalization within each scene. As we proceed from one character to another, however, it presents key images, characters, and events from several viewpoints. The novel alternates predominantly between the consciousnesses of Sethe, Denver, Paul D, and Beloved, with occasional digressions into the minds of minor characters like Baby Suggs, Stamp Paid, and even, in one chilling episode, the slave master Schoolteacher. As this range of focal objects suggests, Beloved’s multiplicity works at many levels: it is a refracted lens for acts of perception, but it also troubles the ontological status of persons and events. As I explained in the preface to Part II, multiplicity, a long-standing property of the novel, becomes more destabilizing as we move into and through the twentieth century. Morrison’s master’s thesis on modernism—about suicidal figures in William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf—would have prepared her well for adopting multiple perspectives as a narrative form that makes “the structure . . . the argument.” So, what argument does Beloved’s structure—its aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions— make about the many?

Full-tiplicity and Null-tiplicity Two recent critical accounts of Beloved are concerned with extrapolating an ethics from its structure of multiplicity: J. Hillis Miller’s take on the novel’s fractal structure and James Phelan’s argument about how its multiple perspectives induce negative capability in the reader. Miller inclines toward an all-encompassing similitude, an “all of the above,” in which multiplicity reflects a full ethical reality. Phelan’s view results in a zero-sum game, a “none of the above,” whereby multiplicity nullifies judgment altogether. I want to suggest that while illuminating, these respective interpretations of Morrison’s novel neglect the reading experience over time. Following a critique of these versions of multiplicity, I will offer a countermodel, tracing the aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions of Beloved’s mode of adjacency. In an article called “Boundaries in Beloved,” Miller offers an interpretation of the novel that maps onto the model of multiplicity as fulltiplicity that I described in the preface to Part II.26 Miller argues that “the fantastically brilliant, moving, and dense verbal texture of Beloved allows the reader to understand what may be a universal structure of all

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communities, including even the ‘world-wide’ community being brought into existence by globalization.”27 In an all-encompassing reading of the novel’s form, Miller argues that its “paradoxical or aporetic ‘logic’ of community is fractal.”28 That is, Beloved’s multiplicity is synecdochic: Miller suggests that the novel’s several manifestations of violence are analogous, each conforming to what Jacques Derrida calls “autoimmunity.” Auto-immunity is the process whereby an organism or organization eliminates or destroys part of itself in order to preserve its integrity, its wholeness.29 In biological discourse, auto-immunity signifies an error within the immune system that prompts antibodies to attack and destroy the body’s own cells; the body turns against itself. Miller argues that Beloved reveals auto-immunity on multiple scales: The largest version in Beloved of this structure that is not a structure would be the United States as a whole before, during, and after the Civil War. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” said Abraham Lincoln. . . . [I]t was an internal war, a “civil war,” a war with brother fighting against brother, son against father, each killing what was dearest to him. On the next smallest scale, southern society was itself a house divided against itself. It was a community made up of the symbiosis of white slave owners and black slaves, each dependent on the others . . . each both at home with the other and fearful of the other . . . as radically alien, other. . . . At a still smaller scale is the structure of the black “community” itself, if it can be called that, riven as it was by the breaking up of families and the systematic destruction of any community structure that might develop within a given group of slaves. . . . At a smaller level still is the relation of each of the characters to the family group, and finally, the relation of each character to himself or herself.30

Structurally, “Beloved exemplifies, in its own specific way and at various fractal levels of self-similarity, the strange logic of what Derrida reconfigures as “auto-co-immunity,” or “community as com-mon autoimmunity.”31 At the broadest level, the nation destroys its integrity by halving itself; at the most local scale, the self destroys its “best thing”: the mother kills her child. Miller sees a conflict between the machinery of auto-immunity and the singularity of human choice: “though in the body the workings of the immune system are not voluntary, in the social world autoimmunitary acts take place as a responsible response to a demand to decide in some particular situation.” He presents Sethe’s act, for which

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she takes responsibility by saying, “I did it,” as solitary, unique, and autonomous. Referring to Jacques Derrida’s reading of Fear and Trembling in The Gift of Death, Miller argues that Sethe’s act is like Abraham’s decision to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah: “exemplary of all true ethicoreligious acts . . . [which] cannot be justified by any appeal to pre-existing standards.” While Beloved’s communities conform to the “illogical logic of auto-immunity,” Sethe’s infanticide and Abraham’s incomplete one, viewed from a theological or an ethical perspective, exceed that logic: “They are beyond the law, or outside the law. They exemplify an ethics beyond ethics.”32 This suits Sethe’s claim that she wanted to push her babies through the veil, “over there. Outside this place” (190). Surrounding Miller’s analysis is a larger argument that reading Beloved is “useful or even indispensable as an indirect way to understand the mechanisms that govern our present-day world . . . even better as a way of understanding the necessary breakdown of borderland logic than direct discussion of current politics.” Miller, expanding the novel’s purview beyond the world of slavery and its aftermath, attributes its value to its form: “The immuno-auto-immunitary logic is expressed in Beloved with the peculiar semantic richness and specificity literature especially has. . . . The moving story of Sethe’s life and Beloved’s death brings this logic home to the reader not as an abstract argumentation, but with an affective vividness . . . [making] it more likely that we shall not only understand, but also take responsibility in our turn to act as best we can on our own Mount Moriahs.”33 When Miller pluralizes Mount Moriah, however, he undermines the force of the “true ethico-religious act.” Kierkegaard agonizes in Fear and Trembling precisely because Abraham’s act cannot be analogized, cannot dictate the law, cannot withstand the test of the categorical imperative. In a radio interview, Miller admits the “danger of reading the novel, let’s say, allegorically, or ignoring the specificity and historical singularity of the story Toni Morrison tells,” but excuses himself on these grounds: “it’s almost irresistible to think of whatever one reads in terms of the present situation, whether it’s a personal situation or a global or national one.”34 Irresistible though it may be, it is the exact opposite to his claim in his groundbreaking book The Ethics of Reading (1987): “It is not because stories contain the thematic dramatization of ethical situations, choices, and judgments that they are especially appropriate for my topic, but for a reverse reason, that is, because ethics itself has a peculiar relation to that form of language we call narrative.”35 What Miller does

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not account for in this interpretation is the experience of reading Beloved’s specific narrative structure of multiplicity—over time. One might note that auto-immunity on all these scales would be evident in any account of an infanticidal slave: this is perhaps why it seems so universal. Miller’s analysis would be equally applicable to the historical archive on Garner, or to any artistic rendering of her life, like the opera Morrison cowrote.36 I harp on this because the ethics afforded by reading the structure of multiplicity in Beloved seems to me to be largely distinct from, if not counter to, the ethics of its plot as Miller sees it. The auto-immunitary logic he describes is a self-enclosed circle; its movement is inward and implosive; ethico-religious logic is like a solitary arrow; its movement is outward and transgressive. The formal logic of Beloved fits neither model: it is layered and connective, more like a palimpsest than a circle or a line. In this sense, the clarity of Sethe’s act, its transcendent singularity, is obscured by the multiple form on which Morrison insists.37 James Phelan’s “Sethe’s Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading” is attuned precisely to how Beloved’s use of several viewpoints refracts its ethical disturbance. He focuses on “the relation of the implied author to the telling and to the authorial audience” and explores how “Morrison seeks to multiply the number of valorized ethical perspectives” about Sethe’s choice to commit infanticide: “The progression of the stories gives us a progression of possibilities for ethical judgment: Sethe has committed a subhuman action [Schoolteacher’s and Paul D’s views]; Sethe has done the wrong thing but done it instinctively and understandably [Stamp Paid’s view]; Sethe has done something difficult but heroic because it is done for the best motives and it turns out to be a success [Sethe’s view].”38 The ramification of ethical positions in the story, according to Phelan, encourages us to compare them. Each reading of Sethe’s act becomes less plausible in light of the others. Paul D’s admonition, “You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” is troubling because it is so close to the slave master’s view of her as an animal; Sethe’s claim to have done right is untenable, given the bloody violence we see in others’ accounts (192, 190). Because all the ethical views on Sethe’s act offered by the novel counteract one another, the reader is left without a clear position. Multiplicity in this view is a null-tiplicity, whereby the coexistence of conflictual views results in a zero-sum game. Phelan argues that the multiplicity in Beloved compels a readerly engagement with several insufficient ethical explanations, leaving only slavery unjustified, transforming it “from an

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abstract evil into a palpable” one. He finds his own judgment of Sethe’s act of infanticide “fluctuating” and commends the novel for its refusal to choose one position (“By guiding us less, Morrison gives us more”). He concludes that Morrison “challenges us to have the negative capability to refrain from any irritable reaching after ethical closure about Sethe’s rough choice, even as that challenge implies her faith that we will be equal to the task.”39 John Keats defined negative capability as the capacity to be “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”40 In this view, Morrison’s use of formal multiplicity suspends our readerly capacity to judge. Yet Phelan’s grappling with Beloved’s uncertainty during his analysis— the enactment of his “fluctuation”—belies the impetus to “refrain” from reaching for meaning he commends. Phelan’s use of this expedient term bespeaks a general critical hesitation to stand by any interpretation of Beloved. Yung-Hsing Wu, writing against “the assumption, shared by the discourses of ethics and interpretation, that problems—whether a sticky ethical dilemma or a recalcitrant text—are meant to be solved,” recommends that criticism be as undecided as Beloved is undecidable. She claims that “the novel’s ethics provoke and are produced through the unrest and discomfort of perpetual challenges to judgment,” arguing for an endless negotiation of judgment: “the ethics of the novel lies . . . in the incessant reading that not being able to make a decision compels.”41 Martha Cutter’s analysis of Beloved and Jazz concludes similarly: “Reading becomes an infinite process.”42 This refusal to close the text’s multiplicity constitutes a savvy warning against reductive readings. But these critics advocate a Sisyphean (re) reading that renders literary uncertainty a reified value and stalls the imperative trajectory of ethics: “built on ethical dilemmas, Beloved . . . register[s] thematically what it means to say: that reading produces a suspended ethics.”43 The insufficiency of these claims is clear when we reduce them to their upshot: to read Beloved is to read reading; to read Beloved is to read the impossibility of ethics.44 Attention to literary uncertainty ought not paralyze us so completely. We are so often blinded by the fact of multiplicity in novels that we have not often moved beyond what it represents—conflict, comprehensiveness, negative capability—to consider what it affords as an experience. I want to offer an alternative to both a multiplicitous fullness that turns “complexity” into a mirror between text and world and a multiplicitous nullity that suspends ethics. Miller’s vision of a fractal machine

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of auto-immune violence is not in fact the full picture, because it is mitigated by our experience of the novel’s loosely distributed multiplicity. Phelan’s suspension of judgment is made impossible by Morrison’s agitative mode of uncertainty. I propose that Beloved’s structure of multiplicity affords adjacency, a tenuous, momentary contiguity that offers a countermodel to the dysfunctional communities its characters experience in its story line. Negotiating between the similitude of the join and the distantiation of dismemberment, a mode of adjacency permits us to conceive of a communal ethics that preserves the integrity of both the one and the many.

Long-Distance, Skin-Close In an interview with Gloria Naylor, Morrison offers an origin story for Beloved. She says that she was haunted by two historical fragments: the 1851 newspaper clipping on Garner and a James Van Der Zee photograph of a woman who had been shot by her lover but refused to accuse him: Now what made those stories connect, I can’t explain, but I do know that, in both instances, something seemed clear to me. A woman loved something other than herself so much. She had placed all of the value of her life in something outside herself . . . what it is that really compels a woman to displace the self, her self . . . I started . . . to project the self not into the way we say “yourself,” but to put a space between those words, as though the self were really a twin or a thirst or a friend or something that sits right next to you and watches you, which is what I was talking about when I said “The dead girl” . . . I just imagined her remembering what had happened to her, being someplace else and returning, knowing what happened to her. And I call her Beloved.45

Morrison reveals dismemberment and the join here to be coeval: the displacement of the self is premised on a selfless love, a dissolution of integrity into the other. Morrison would go on to pursue the consequences of this ethical problem of love in what she calls the “trilogy” of Beloved, Jazz (where the Van Der Zee photograph becomes central), and Paradise. I want to note, however, that out of an ethical dilemma about the integrity of the self springs two formal figures with their own ethical implications: the word twin and the phrase “something that sits right

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next to you.” This is what I mean by adjacency, a mode that sets disparate entities beside each other in an enclosed space, allowing them to brush up against and interrogate each other. Beloved’s way of figuring a mode of adjacency strongly resembles Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of the multiple in Being Singular Plural.46 Nancy centers his philosophy around a Heideggerian Mitsein (being-with), arguing that “being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another.” Being is “always touched upon, always lightly touched: revealing itself beside, always beside.” He calls this “being-singular-plural,” a phrase that literally maintains the integrity of “me” and “we” with hyphens. Aptly, the words that best capture this condition—which Nancy calls “both an ethos and a praxis, identically”—are prepositions: beside, near, with, between, as. The “with” is “closeness, the brushing up against or the coming across, the almost-there of distanced proximity.” Neither join nor abyss, the “between” is a “stretching out,” or a distention, a necessary distance between the singular members of a plurality.47 Nancy also sees the “between” as “a space, form, or screen into which or onto which a figure of community could be projected.” Rejecting philosophy’s denunciation of simulacra and railing against the theological “interdiction of representation,” he argues that being-singular-plural is figured by the surface phenomena of art. The “ ‘unrepresentable’ or ‘unfigurable’ runs the risk of revealing itself as completely oppressive and terrifying, if not terrorist. . . . In contrast, the ‘figure’ proves itself to be capable of opening onto the ‘with.’ ” Literature exposes being-singularplural because it has “the capacity for allowing a certain play, in and by the image-symbol, with the joining, the distancing, the opened interval that articulates it as sym-bol: this word simply means ‘put with.’ ”48 Rather than seeing art as a conduit for ethical ideas or themes, Nancy prompts us to consider how its form figures—or “exposes”—an ethics. An examination of Beloved’s symbols and images exposes the extent to which proximate yet distanced adjacency suffuses the narrative. Early in Beloved, Sethe has a vision: “They were not holding hands, but their shadows were. Sethe looked to her left and all of them were gliding over the dust holding hands. Maybe he was right. A life” (59). This thin representation is a surface phenomenon, but it is radiantly backlit—“the sky, stripped of blue, was white hot”—and vibrant with possibility: “A life” (59). Sethe later reinterprets this uncanny sign to signify her relation to two daughters: “Obviously the hand-holding shadows she had seen on the road were not Paul D, Denver and herself, but ‘us three’ ”

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(210). The shadow hands connect or join—the image that comes to mind is paper dolls attached at the palm—but those who cast them remain separate, of uncertain identity. These shadows figure the attenuated contact and projected touch of being-singular-plural: “From one singular to another, there is contiguity but not continuity. There is proximity, but only to the extent that extreme closeness emphasizes the distancing it opens up. All of being is in touch with all of being, but the law of touching is separation.”49 This ethics revolves around contiguity, which etymologically means “to touch upon,” and forms the basis for Nancy’s “co-ontology”: “the own most power of a body, the propriety of its touching another body.”50 To be “with” is to be a body proper, separate from but in contact with other bodies. We see this contiguity—as opposed to the potentially dominating logic of the gaze and of discourse—in Beloved’s acts of touching. That is, we glimpse adjacency via brief moments of physical contact. Denver’s first vision of Beloved before she appears in the flesh is an uninhabited white dress sitting beside Sethe: “Kneeling next to you while you were praying. Had its arm around your waist” (46). Beloved, Denver, and Sethe go ice-skating—“holding hands, bracing each other, they swirled over the ice”—and they keep in touch this way as they make their way home: “Walking back through the woods, Sethe put an arm around each girl at her side. Both of them had an arm around her waist” (201, 202). A moment of closeness between Sethe and Paul D gives flesh to the silhouetted proximity described above: “She slipped her fingers in his hand for all the world like the hand-holding shadows on the side of the road” (150). When he wants “to put his story next to” Sethe’s, Paul D makes it known physically: “He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. . . . His holding fingers are holding hers” (314). The double “holding” here—as adjective and participial verb—intensifies the experiential uncertainty of the mutual touch, what Maurice MerleauPonty calls a “double sensation,” a “passing” that cleaves.51 Paul D’s hands do not have the hold of possession—as when he tells Sethe that Beloved “holds on to you”—nor do they connote the imprisoning hold of a slave ship (80). Rather, they are both holding and held. This is just one instance in the novel’s pattern of hands, from Amy Denver’s “good hands” to Baby Suggs’s self-reclamation when she is freed: “These hands belong to me. These my hands” (164). So strong is Baby Suggs’s haptic sense that even when dead, her presence persists in a touch to Sethe’s

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neck: “no more than the strokes of a bird feather, but unmistakably caressing fingers. She had to relax a bit to let them do their work, so light was the touch, childlike almost, more finger kiss than kneading. . . . Baby Suggs’ long-distance love was equal to any skin-close love she had known” (112). This long distance, what Nancy calls “spacing,” not only insures against the “skin-close” merge but also serves as the gap across which meaning and relation are always “passing back and forth.” Beingsingular-plural is neither a concrete concept nor a fixed state; rather, it is an ongoing movement, an experience over time, “a praxis and an ethos.” Nancy also calls it a staging, alluding to Greco-Roman theater; Morrison, also influenced by this classical model, stages adjacency not only in her figures but also in her narrative structure.52 She, in a sense, enacts Paul D’s wish “to put his story next to” Sethe’s (314). That is, the collocation of his perspective with Denver’s, Sethe’s, and Beloved’s constitutes the narrative structure of Beloved. This formal adjacency cleaves distinct viewpoints as we move through and collate them. Nancy suggests we think about being-singular-plural as a position, a word that “implies no more, although no less, than its being discrete, in the mathematical sense, or its distinction from . . . or among . . . other positions.” This positional discreteness is a useful way to think about the singularity afforded by multiple perspectives: we attend to each discrete voice within a complex polyphony. At the same time, Nancy gestures toward a discretion in being-singular-plural. Being is “necessarily plural, diffracted, discreet, a touch of color or tone.”53 The exposure of a multiple cosmogony is not a blaring chaos but an experience both discrete and discreet. Beloved’s structural multiplicity affords a mode of adjacency that hones precisely these two capacities. Moving through its contiguous stories entails that we undergo both a reticulated experience of discreteness and a cumulative experience of discretion. Adjacency thus occludes knowledge—to promote uncertainty—but it is more subtle and processual than an utter negation.

Discreteness and Discretion Beloved’s mode of uncertainty can be likened to the logic of a palimpsest, “a parchment written upon twice or a manuscript in which a later writing is written over an effaced earlier writing.”54 That is, the novel’s mode of adjacency preserves even as it tangles threads of meaning as we

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read. First of all, it brings each element of a collective into sharper focus. This discreteness comes into being not just through the attention given to separate elements but also through their contrastive proximity. Each element’s particularity emerges from the inclusiveness as well as the contestation of multiplicity. Rather than incorporating the disparate elements of a multiplicity into a diffuse synthesis or into an ultimate denial or suspension of meaning, however, the cumulative effect of this conflict is an effacement that affords discretion. The thing described—an image, a character, an event—recedes but does not vanish behind the palimpsest of its descriptions. I want to trace some of the aesthetic and affective dimensions of this mode of adjacency by analyzing two of these symbolic palimpsests: a bodily mark and a textual being. The sheer number of perspectives the novel collects over time about the whipping scar on Sethe’s back is excessive. When we place them side by side, it comes to seem as if this bodily inscription betokens a literal palimpsest: The picture of the men coming to nurse her was as lifeless as the nerves in her back where the skin buckled like a washboard. (12) And when the top of her dress was around her hips and he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display, he could think but not say, “Aw, Lord, girl.” (26) A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk—it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. . . . Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What God have in mind, I wonder. (95) Roses of blood blossomed in the blanket covering Sethe’s shoulder. Baby Suggs hid her mouth with her hand. When the nursing was over and the newborn was asleep . . . wordlessly, the older woman greased the flowering back. (110)

The scar induces numbness and stillness in Sethe and elicits stupefaction in others.55 Amy wonders what God was thinking. Paul D thinks but doesn’t say “Aw, Lord, girl.” Baby Suggs covers her mouth, “wordlessly” tending to the wound. This suggests that the scar is unspeakable and that “Sethe’s back remains the trace of an event whose meaning, motivation and consequence are largely unreadable.”56

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Despite the silence within the novel about it, the repeated viewings of the scar force us to reread it, baring Sethe’s back again and again for our scandalized reading. Yet the figural quality of these visions reinforces the idea that the scar is like several things without actually being any of them. Reading Sethe’s scar from these adjacent viewpoints—next to each other but separated within the text—affords an experience of uncertainty that devolves neither into total silence nor into a comprehensive picture. We encounter the scar over the course of the novel, but we can never comprehend it. This is in part because each description overwrites the previous one. Maurice Merleau-Ponty invokes the paradigm of the palimpsest when he repeats Edmund Husserl’s observation about a series of adjusted visual perceptions: they are “not erased, but ‘crossed out.’ ”57 There is also an ambivalent allusive palimpsest latent in the intertextuality the scar activates. Apart from its historical source, an 1863 photograph of Gordon, an ex-slave, the stigmatic signifier invokes Christ’s body and the bodies of saints and martyrs. The convergence of flesh and word may also recall Kafka’s 1919 “In the Penal Colony,” in which convicts are punished with a machine that writes the law into the criminal’s back, a set of needles inscribing an illegible text that destroys the body. This murderous capacity of language—an obverse of the divine Word— accords with the ideology that subtends violence in the novel. In Beloved, the slave is the site of inscription: Schoolteacher’s nephews write on Sethe, describing her body with scientific coldness and etching a scar into her back. The forms of writing that circulate in the novel dominate the slave body but evade the slave consciousness.58 This imposed discursive violence is why Morrison insists on making her language “quiet”: to contest the constative, scientific discourse that silenced slaves. Her goal is not to speak the unspoken but to stage the unspeakable through language deformed by sheer excess. The proliferation of words around Sethe’s scar indexes its horror, yet undermines the efficacy of language to capture it. This creates a paradoxically lush, heady uncertainty about the scar, pitting unspeakability against an intense specificity in the reading process. Because while the silence that accompanies the scar makes it discreet, the individual resonance of each character’s vision of it is markedly discrete, or distinctive. This contingent perspectival shifting is ramified by time, as when Paul D changes his mind after he and Sethe have sex: “the wrought-iron maze he had explored in the kitchen . . . was in fact a revolting clump of scars. Not a tree” (21). His view of Sethe changes according to which side of sex he’s on: titillating foreplay

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offers a different lens from postcoital malaise. Nancy notes: “It is never the case that I have met Pierre or Marie per se, but I have met him or her in such and such a ‘form,’ in such and such a ‘state,’ in such and such a ‘mood,’ and so on.”59 In reading, we encounter each perspective in turn while building toward simultaneity: “ ‘Each time’ implies . . . the discreteness of ‘one by one’ and the simultaneity of ‘each one.’ ”60 The negotiation of the discrete and the discreet conjures an affective aura for the scar by veiling it behind language. Yet this process vivifies the scar by juxtaposing it with other things (washboard, sculpture, tree, roses) through metaphor. The uncertainty afforded by adjacency is well suited for subject matter both unfathomable and engrossing. Adjacency conduces to an affective awe that also befits the character Beloved’s numinous spectrality, her “shine” (76). The ghost’s origin, like Sethe’s scar, is distributed over the course of the novel in multiple, conflictual stories. When she first arrives at 124 Bluestone Road, Beloved reveals her scant memories: being snatched away from “a woman who was hers,” standing on a bridge, knowing a white man. Sethe concludes, “Beloved had been locked up by some whiteman for his own purposes, and never let out the door” (139). Further evidence for this hypothesis comes from Stamp Paid: “Was a girl locked up in the house with a whiteman over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone. Maybe that’s her. Folks say he had her in there since she was a pup” (271). Beloved tells Sethe that “ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light” (278). But the novel also stages Denver’s recognition of Beloved as her sister and then Sethe’s recognition of her as the daughter she killed. Moreover, Beloved’s appearance coincides with Paul D’s ejection of a “babygirl” ghost, and her name matches the one on the tombstone. The scars on her neck and forehead, her possessive love for Sethe, and her capacity to disappear at will all seem to confirm Beloved’s identity as the ghost of Sethe’s baby. As many note, her story also invokes the Middle Passage: crouching in a small space, people being thrown overboard, being separated from her mother, a “hot thing” that might be a branding iron, treacherous men “without skin” (246).61 These contiguous stories each explain differently why Beloved has no lines in her feet and palms, how she knows an elaborate two-step dance, and why she appears as a darkskinned woman rather than as a brown babygirl ghost.62 This use of multiplicity to destabilize our sense of a person is familiar from modernism: Caddy Compson is refracted through her brothers’ viewpoints in

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just this way in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. In Beloved, however, multiplicity shatters not epistemology but ontology. If Beloved is a ghost, how is she also capable of bleeding, having sex, getting pregnant? This physical presence is what makes her a threat: “As long as the ghost showed out from its ghostly place—shaking stuff, crying, smashing and such—Ella respected it. But if it took flesh and came in her world, well, the shoe was on the other foot” (296). In an interview, Morrison insists on this corporeality: “the purpose of making her real is making history possible, making memory real—somebody walks in the door and sits down at the table so you have to think about it, whatever they may be. And also it was clear to me that it was not at all a violation of African religion and philosophy; it’s very easy for a son or parent or a neighbor to appear in a child or in another person.”63 Is she a person, a ghost, a possessed body, a combination of ghosts, the wrong ghost, or all the ghosts of the Middle Passage? To choose one of these options would beg charges of oversimplification or misreading; their sheer plenitude seems to enforce indecision.64 But if we attend to the process of reading these multiple stories side by side—if we think phenomenologically instead of ontologically—we find that Beloved is necessarily all and each of these things in turn. The novel makes her relentlessly and palpably multiple, the in-process embodiment of Sethe’s “too thick love” and of Denver’s “—more” (266, 234). Again, Morrison explains in an interview: “She is a spirit on one hand, literally she is what Sethe thinks she is, her child returned to her from the dead. And she must function like that in the text. She is also another kind of dead, which is not spiritual, but flesh, which is, a survivor from the true, factual slave ship.”65 I take this to mean that Beloved is possessed: she is at least two souls in one body, Sethe’s babygirl ghost and a slave ship survivor.66 If we read closely, the text stages their join: I am loving my face so much my dark face is close to me I want to join she whispers to me she whispers I reach for her chewing and swallowing she touches me she knows I want to join she chews and swallows me I am gone now I am her face my own face has left me . . . I come out of blue water . . . (246)

To put the theory plainly: a slave ship survivor, having escaped from a white man who locked her up and abused her, jumps from a bridge into a creek, where she encounters the ghost of Sethe’s babygirl, who has

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been swimming around there since Paul D banished her from 124 Bluestone Road. These two beings merge. This idea shifts us from retrospective epistemological fuzziness to the palpable reading experience. As we read, Beloved’s being is uncertain, not ephemeral; she is no discursive wisp but a multiple being. As Morrison puts it, “literally she is” both things, and “she must function like that in the text.” Beloved thus figures in her spectral yet manifest multiplicity Nancy’s notion that “the individual is an intersection of singularities, the discrete exposition of their simultaneity, an exposition that is both discrete and transitory.”67 It is hard for readers—especially those steeped in rationalist discourse— to keep Beloved’s several souls in mind, even if she holds them in her body. But as we are reading, each of her origins subsists as a distinct possibility, beside the others. If Beloved is a living sign, she is a Bakhtinian one—multifaceted, relational, specific, material, always something to someone. Her amenability to appropriation stems precisely from the plurality that makes her so singular. “Beloved” is both the most private name—the loved person—and an abridged public address—those gathered to mourn. Belated verb, deictic noun, “Beloved” is fundamentally a name for a mode of relation. For Morrison, her uncanny language answers other people’s questions: She speaks the language, a traumatized language, of her own experience, which blends beautifully in her questions and answers, her preoccupations, with the desires of Denver and Sethe. So that when they say, “What was it like over there?” they may mean—they do mean—“What was it like being dead?” She tells them what it was like being where she was on that ship as a child. Both things are possible, and there’s evidence in the text so that  both things could be approached, because the language of both experiences—death and the Middle Passage—is the same.68

Denver and Sethe recognize Beloved’s “traumatized language,” and this allows the women of 124 Bluestone to partake in a linguistic contiguity that stages, rather than entails, understanding.

Discernment This discursive adjacency becomes more literal in Part II of Beloved, which comprises four chapters in which we read Sethe’s, Denver’s, and Beloved’s respective words in three first-person monologues and then in a woven “threnody.” This is Morrison’s most explicit deployment of a

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modernist multiperspectival structure to date. These four chapters offer a prismatic view of the severalty of women at the novel’s center, their words constituting adjacent confessions. Stamp Paid, approaching the house, initially hears the women’s words as “a conflagration of hasty voices—loud, urgent, all speaking at once so he could not make out what they were talking about or to whom,” but then the voices die down to “an occasional mutter—like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone” (198). These voices are finally described as “the unspeakable thoughts, unspoken” of the three women (230). A frenzied confession gives way to discretion, as though the voices are shying away from Stamp Paid’s ear. Yet these voices are separated and transcribed for the reader. They become discrete. Sethe asks for forgiveness and promises to protect Beloved from Schoolteacher. Denver promises to protect Beloved from their mother. Beloved describes men without skin, a man who hurt her in a house, a woman with earrings, and an iron circle around her neck. A fourth chapter combines fragments from these monologues into a kind of poem; there are lines (“You are mine”) that could belong to any or all of them (251). In interview, Morrison calls this a “threnody in which they exchange thoughts like a dialogue, or a three-way conversation, but unspoken—I mean unuttered.”69 Morrison revisits this model of adjacent confession in Paradise, a novel in the third person that focalizes by chapter the voices of four women who live in a convent. In one scene, the women lie naked on the floor and an ex-nun paints their silhouettes. These adjacent silhouettes represent visually the multiplicity that the women perform aurally in what the narrator calls “loud dreaming”: “half-tales and the neverdreamed escaped from their lips.” The women do not literally testify; the expression of the dreaming, unattributed and incoherent, drowns out their individual voices: “it was never important to know who said the dream or whether it had meaning.”70 In both novels, the women do not speak to each other but beside each other. Morrison’s idea of a shareable “traumatized language” suggests a space where the voices of wounded women can come into contact without comprehension. They expressly do not engage in direct communication, but their adjacency does produce a kind of community. Emily Budick argues that Beloved’s “voiceless, transcendent unity of mother-daughter-sister” entails the “collapsing of individual identities . . . which ultimately dissolve into speechlessness.”71 It is notable, however,

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that the novel’s multiplicity affords an experience of dialogue and conversation for the reader if not for the characters. As with Sethe’s scar and Beloved’s identity, the women of 124 may descend into silence but the process of reading their words leads neither to utter incoherence nor to total aporia in the reader. To read these stories in adjacent, then tangled, form produces instead an inscribed particularity and a cumulative obscurity. On the one hand, this “speaking all at once” is discrete: it has material presence and it is separated out on the pages. On the other, something remains discreet, hidden behind the plenitudinous pouring forth of words. Adjacency thus affords an attunement to the exact quality of things—discreteness—that also keeps those things in reserve— discretion. We can evoke this dual imperative with a sonic metaphor. The uncertainty of multiplicity is the “noise” that allows the frequency of the particular to “sound,” the ever-adjusting cacophony against which each element resonates. The coexistence of multiple elements in a text is not a descent into chaos; it is a dissonant debate out of which the haecceity, the this-ness, of the particular emerges. Readers discern the particularities of the separated monologues while also recognizing where—though not necessarily comprehending why— Sethe’s, Denver’s, and Beloved’s words coincide. If we made these pages of Beloved into old-school transparencies and laid them over each other, there would be moments of boldness in the overlapping text, places where the words were the same. Stamp Paid says the only word he can make out in the mess of tongues is “mine”: Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. (231) Beloved is my sister. I swallowed her blood right along with my mother’s milk. (237) I am Beloved and she is mine. (248)

These three lines invoke the loving desire to merge signified in the biblical Song of Solomon: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”72 Morrison separates the allusion into different riffs to highlight the singularity of each woman’s version of this feeling. Their words resonate with, rather than answer to, each other; the reader can name but not explain their connection. Reading the novel is thus to enact Sethe’s vision of handholding shadows—only with projected notions, rather than hands, joining the

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silhouettes. Beloved is ultimately a collection of adjacent viewpoints whose separation and relation are both contingent on the participation of the reader. Morrison figures the connections between characters in ghostly traces, but it is the reader who must finally bridge the gaps. We perform something like Sergei Eisenstein’s “montage” or Ernest Fenollosa’s poetic “compounding,” whereby “two things added together . . . suggest some fundamental relation between them.”73 The overlap of the three women’s unspoken love constitutes an incomplete ethics of adjacency, a subjunctive or projected community that the reader completes. While the novel’s story line describes troubled communities—too joined, too dismembered—it offers the reader the momentary opportunity to make of its adjacency a community that is discrete (manifest) and discreet (shadowy). Discrete and discreet are more than just homonyms. They are doublets: both come from discretus, the past participle of the Latin discernere. The thread running through them is the faculty of discernment. This is clear in lay usage as well as etymology: to discern is to perceive discrete things; to be discerning is to be discreet. This is because to be circumspect, to know what is appropriate, requires as a first step “the action of separating or distinguishing.”74 As we move through Beloved’s multiple perspectives, we discern their discrete outlines and their connections. But the uncertainty produced by the conflict of equally viable viewpoints makes us discerning, or discreet, about what we can truly know of others and of what joins them. The Oxford American Dictionary defines discernment as “to judge well” but also as “perception in the absence of judgment with a view to obtaining spiritual direction or understanding.” To be a discerning reader is neither to suspend nor to impose judgment. It is to take into account the circumstances at hand when considering judgment, while being circumspect about the possibility of a final judgment. It is not to stay judgment but to let it be contingent.

Discernment, or Kairos Given Morrison’s interest in Greek tragedy, we might posit that this imperative toward discernment corresponds to the classical term kairos, which translates roughly as “the right time and due measure.” Kairos emerges in theories of rhetoric, aesthetics, politics, and ethics; some argue that kairos is what joins these realms of inquiry. The concept can be found in “Pindar, Theognis, Solon, the Seven Sages . . . Aeschylus,

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Euripides, Sophocles, Menander, the pre-Socratics, Pythagoras, some of the Sophists, and Pericles,” as well as Plato and Aristotle. In his analysis of Judeo-Christian theology, Frank Kermode defines kairos as “a point in time filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end.”75 This distinguishes kairos, a moment in time, from chronos, linear time; as J. E. Smith puts it: kairos is qualitative time while chronos is quantitative time.76 Attuned to time and to the contingent, kairos is an ethical capacity, rather than a rule or a law. It requires an adaptability to circumstances, what Eric Charles White sums up in the term “improvisation.”77 Phillip Sipiora explains kairos this way: To frail human perception, things exist in an uncertain, ultimately unknowable way; a veil of sense separates them, indeed, hides them from us. In accordance with kairos, therefore, we are compelled to maintain contrary perceptions, interpretations, and arguments: opposing arguments—the dissoi logoi of sophistic rhetoric—remain equally probable, and yet the mystery of kairos enables rhetors to choose one logos over another, making one and the same thing seem great or small, beautiful or ugly, new or old.78

As in Morrison’s mode of adjacency, the dissonance of multiple logoi on the same thing allows contradiction but does not preclude choice and in fact heightens the qualities of the thing chosen. In his Antidosis and other writings, the rhetorician Isocrates describes kairos as a tool for discourse and rhetoric but also for “a modus vivendi.” Sipiora argues that by “conjoining . . . phronesis or ‘practical wisdom’ and pragmatic ethics within the ‘situation’ and ‘time’ of discourse,” Isocrates presents kairos as “a dynamic principle rather than a static, codified rhetorical technique.” Rather than adhering to rigid rules, “the rhetor remains accommodative,” resonating with Morrison’s emphasis on “accommodation.” Isocratean kairos also involves attunement to discreteness: “Isocratean rhetoric . . . stresses the importance of the particular moment or issue, rather than universals or ideals.”79 Isocrates asserts that we “be minded towards these contingencies as men who exercise their best judgment,” and best judgment is a matter of distinguishing particulars: “[T]hose who most apply their minds to [discourse situations] and are able to discern the consequences . . . will most often meet these occasions in the right way.” At the same time, Isocrates also advises discretion: “Keep watch always on your words and actions, that

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you may fall into as few mistakes as possible. For while it is best to grasp your opportunities at exactly the right moment, yet, since they are difficult to discern, choose to fall short rather than to overreach them; for the happy mean is to be found in defect rather than in excess.”80 Flexible, particular, and decorous, this measured sensibility of kairos is precisely what is lacking in the two versions of community— dismemberment and the join—we saw earlier in Beloved’s diegetic content. Beloved’s and Sethe’s mutual will to join destroys the necessary space—what Nancy calls “the just measure of the with”—that would allow them to remain discrete entities. Dismemberment discerns no connection at all between people and promotes an egoism that lacks the discretion, the sheer politeness, necessary for coexistence. Because Beloved’s story largely offers a critique of these dangerous forms of relation, we only glimpse an ethics of discernment in the interstices of the diegesis—in brief episodes revolving around minor characters. I want to approach kairos through three of these oblique moments: Baby Suggs’s exegesis, Hi Man’s escape, and Ella’s exorcism. In each case, we find a minor character drawing others into a brief moment of adjacency. Contingent leaders of loose collectives, they exemplify the ethics of discernment that the novel’s formal adjacency affords for the reader. Baby Suggs counters dismemberment with an adjacent touch in her unofficial sermons. First, she re-members the community: she calls the laughing children, then the dancing men, then the crying women into the Clearing. Then, she re-members their bodies: “Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either” (104). Her “Call” brings bodies together and to life. These communal gatherings reconstitute, part by part (hands, mouth, shoulders, neck, liver, heart, lungs), bodies dismembered by slavery. To be whole, to be a discrete body that owns itself, is to reclaim possession over body parts that were once possessed by others. Baby Suggs heals Sethe’s body in this way: “She . . . bathed her in sections, starting with her face. Then, while waiting for another pan of heated water, she sat next to her and stitched gray cotton. Sethe dozed and woke to the washing of her hands and arms” (110). Baby Suggs’s discreteness—the “stitching” together of disconnected parts—is matched by the discretion evident in her adjacent position to Sethe, “next to her.” Stamp Paid notes Baby Suggs’s discretion in judgment: “she could not approve or condemn Sethe’s rough choice” (207). This discernment is cued to a sense of proportion: “Baby

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Suggs, holy, didn’t approve of extra: ‘Everything depends on knowing how much,’ she said, and ‘Good is knowing when to stop’ ” (103). This minor character, however helpless, knows when enough is enough; “one at a time” she says when Sethe tries to breast-feed one child while holding the corpse of another (179). Neighbors wonder at Baby Suggs’s kairos: “How come she always knows exactly what to do and when?” (159). It is because she is discerning: attuned to the discrete—she spends her final days in bed, contemplating the colors of a quilt—she nevertheless knows when to greet horror with quietness. Another minor character, the leader of the chain gang into which Paul D is captured, also has this sense of proportion. As I suggested, the threat of a dismembered community is epitomized by the chain gang, the members of which are bound to each other only in slavery. Each morning, the men in the chain gang are offered “breakfast,” a code word for the fellatio they are forced to perform on the guards until the lead chain yells “Hiiii!” Paul D eventually comes to believe “that the ‘Hiiii!’ at dawn and the ‘Hoooo!’ when evening came were the responsibility Hi Man assumed because he alone knew what was enough, what was too much, when things were over, when the time had come” (127–128). Faced with a rapacity that threatens to overwhelm prisoners and guards alike, Hi Man alone knows what is enough, what is too much, when the time has come. It is fitting that it is Hi Man who reconfigures the chains of their disconnected existence: It started like the chain-up but the difference was the power of the chain. One by one, from Hi Man back on down the line, they dove. Down through the mud. . . . The chain that held them would save all or none, and Hi Man was the Delivery. They talked through that chain like Sam Morse and, Great God, they all came up . . . holding the chains in their hands, they trusted the rain and the dark, yes, but mostly Hi Man and each other. (130)

When Hi Man says it’s the right time, the men make their way toward freedom one by one, at random (plunging, pushing, reaching) yet united by a common goal. The linked distance between them no longer separates; it communicates. They hold—and use—chains that once held them. We also see this discerning deployment of adjacency in what is often described as the “exorcism” of Beloved. Ella muses on the situation at 124 Bluestone:

Adjacency Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn’t like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present. Sethe’s crime was staggering and her pride outstripped even that; but she could not countenance the possibility of sin moving on in the house, unleashed and sassy. Daily life took as much as she had. . . . “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” and nobody needed more; nobody needed a grown-up evil sitting at the table with a grudge. (295)

Ella takes note of an imbalance, compares evils, and discerns what is needed, what is sufficient. She rallies the neighbors into a loose collective with a common aim but scattershot methods: Some brought what they could and what they believed would work. Stuffed in apron pockets, strung around their necks, lying in the space between their breasts. Others brought Christian faith—as shield and sword. Most brought a little of both. They had no idea what they would do once they got there. They just started out, walked down Bluestone Road and came together at the agreed-upon time. (296)

The women then take recourse to the nonverbal, revising the Book of John: “Ella hollered. Instantly the kneelers and the standers joined her. They stopped praying and took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like” (298). Like the “conflagration of hasty voices” Stamp Paid hears, and the “loud dreaming” in Paradise, Ella’s hollering produces a loose and momentary, yet potent community of adjacent members, one that neither imposes nor is sustained by ideological discourse but is joined temporarily by a purpose. In sum, Baby Suggs, Hi Man, and Ella “raise the dead,” vivifying the corpsed slave body by loving its parts, exhuming buried prisoners, and condemning a possessed, possessive relationship. To avoid capitulating to language’s analytic violence, these three minor characters use physical modes that go beyond words: the call, the chain, the holler. They keep in touch, so to speak. And they exemplify the accommodative potential of adjacency, enacting Paul D’s plea to Sethe: “it’s not about choosing somebody over her—it’s making space for someone along with her” (57). They are discerning: they have a sense of proportion and timing that allows them to see what unites people and to gather them together, even if only for a moment.

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Baby Suggs gives up her sermons after Sethe commits infanticide. The chain gang prisoners scatter soon after they escape. After the neighborhood women “call” Beloved out of 124 Bluestone Road, Sethe is left bereft and mourning. Discernment cannot be sustained for long in a world in which bodies are so possessed and possessive. Yet these scenes provide brief counternarratives to dismemberment and the join, sketching out how kairos works. The experience of reading Beloved’s mode of adjacency affords kairos for the reader as well. It promotes a capacity to discern the discrete: to pay attention to the specificity of others and to what joins them. But it also insists we maintain a sense of discernment: a discretion that respects the other’s integrity, the ability to each be “your best thing,” as Paul D says to Sethe, while remaining “politely equidistant from one another,” as Morrison describes the position of four swallows on a lawn in her latest novel, Home (2012).

The Neighbor Beloved’s mode of adjacency opens up the ethical crux encapsulated by “the neighbor”: how do you acknowledge the neighbor without losing yourself or reducing her to a mere thing? The neighbor as a trope of communal ethics is as old as the origins of Judeo-Christianity, perhaps as ancient as Aristotle’s musings on friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. There has been a recent upsurge of interest in the neighbor due to the work of Emmanuel Lévinas and his critics.81 Lévinas uses the concept of the neighbor to bolster his claim that ethics is prior to ontology: The neighbor concerns me before all assumption, all commitment consented or refused. I am bound to him, him who is, however, the first one on the scene, not signalled, unparalleled; I am bound to him before any liaison contracted. He orders me before being recognized. Here there is a relationship of kinship outside of all biology, “against all logic.” It is not because the neighbor would be recognized as belonging to the same genus as me that he concerns me. He is precisely other. The community with him begins in my obligation to him.82

In a sense, Lévinas literalizes the sequence of the ethical injunction from Leviticus 19:18 (“Love thy neighbor as thyself”): the love for the neighbor comes first.83 The neighbor is always already there, structuring even the relation to ourselves that Leviticus presents as a measure.

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For Lévinas, this prior presence of the Other beckons to us through the face, which is presented as both literal and figurative in his philosophy: “The way in which the Other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face.”84 The face-to-face encounter serves as the experiential basis for ethical relations in Lévinas’s philosophy. The face of the Other, which beckons with its vulnerability and intransigent otherness, issues a command: “The first word of the face is the ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ It is an order. There is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to me.”85 In Entre Nous, Lévinas absorbs the social relationship—the community—into this imperative to the Other: “all the others are present in the face of the other . . . in the proximity of the other, all the others than the other obsess me.”86 Lévinas’s ethical paradigm is so fundamentally imbalanced that Paul Ricoeur claims it lacks “self-esteem.”87 In “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence,” Slavoj Žižek parses this: “The responsibility for the other—the subject as the response to the infinite call embodied in the other’s face, a face that is simultaneously helpless, vulnerable, and issuing an unconditional command—is, for Levinas, asymmetrical and nonreciprocal: I am responsible for the other without having any right to claim that the other should display the same responsibility for me.”88 Žižek uses Lacan’s Other and Freud’s Nebenmensch to critique Lévinas’s elision of the violence that inheres in our ethical relations.89 In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud finds a deep conflict buried in the injunction to love thy neighbor: As creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness . . . their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.90

Given this mutual monstrosity, Freud asks of neighbor love: “Why would we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible?”91 Žižek exhorts us to turn back to this earlier idea of “the neighbor as the bearer of a monstrous Otherness, this properly inhuman neighbor.” The Lévinasian face belies this “radically ambiguous monstrosity” because

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it “ ‘gentrifies’ the terrifying Thing that is the ultimate reality of our neighbor.” Invoking Kierkegaard’s remark to the effect that the only good neighbor is a dead one, Žižek uses Kafka’s Odradek, Ripley from Aliens, and Primo Levi’s “living dead” Muselman as exempla for this monstrous “Neighbor-Thing.”92 Žižek’s claim against Lévinas illuminates the way in which Beloved reconfigures our sense of the monstrous neighbor. Morrison’s “dead girl” embodies this monstrosity. Her “inhumanity” raises a question, as does the act that conjures her: How do you relate to the monstrous neighbor that wishes to consume or destroy you? Heather Love notes that Morrison includes in the novel the perspective of slave catchers.93 Even this cold, clinical voice, which details the bloody scene and compares Sethe to an animal, cannot be left out. That monstrous Other, too, must be accommodated. By way of conclusion, I want to suggest that Morrison’s mode of adjacency offers an oblique alternative to Lévinas’s face-to-face encounter. We can compare these two models of the neighbor along the axis of their preferred figures, so to speak, for the face. For Lévinas, ethics involves a direct gaze that stands in for many gazes, the others peering out from the eyes of the Other. In Totality and Infinity, he uses the profile to distinguish the face from the thing: The face has no form added to it, but does not present itself as the formless, as matter that lacks and calls for form. Things have a form, are seen in the light—silhouettes or profiles; the face signifies itself. As silhouette and profile a thing owes its nature to a perspective, remains relative to a point of view; a thing’s situation thus constitutes its being. Strictly speaking a thing has no identity; convertible into another thing, it becomes money.94

For Lévinas, the face signifies itself. Its inconvertible, incontrovertible presence defends it from circulation and relativity. Lévinas describes the self and the other facing each other, but Beloved troubles our sense of this face-to-face encounter. Take Beloved’s furious desire: “I am loving my face so much my dark face is close to me I want to join” (246). In the face-to-face encounter, you always run the risk of seeing only your own face in the other: “I am her face” evokes a loss of the self as well as a swallowing of the other. To evade this dangerous possibility of the join, adjacency instead places self, other, and third next to one another, ad infinitum (we can be touched on all sides). Ethics becomes peripheral, offering a glimpse of—better yet, brief contact with—the many others beside the self, the others apart from yet contiguous to the self.

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In contrast to Lévinas’s holistic “upright exposed” face, we find in Morrison a side view: a shadowed, silhouetted profile seen from an adjacent position. The uncanny anagnorisis, the moment Sethe recognizes Beloved as her daughter, is preceded by a vision: “Beloved’s profile: the chin, mouth, nose, forehead, copied and exaggerated in the huge shadow the fire threw on the wall behind her” (207). In Morrison’s novel Love (2003), we find a series of profiles: a Buffalo nickel; the Fury-like Policeheads, “gate-mouthed profiles wearing wide-brimmed hats”; a snapshot of a character, “Her profile . . . etched against the seascape”; and an aborted fetus: “There in a blur of congealed red, she thought she saw a profile.”95 These are not prettified others. Beloved is a violently needy ghost; the fetus, grotesque; the Police-heads are terrifying; the nickel invokes a genocidal history. The profile is half-monster, half-human; halfface, half-thing. Ipseity (self-hood) is inextricable from quiddity (it-ness). These mere outlines intimate our lack of knowledge about others. But the discreteness Morrison grants to even the monstrous neighbor—the “knife-clean” sharpness of the profile’s edge—undermines the idea that others are utterly unknowable. Rather, others are known in part. A profile is situated relative to a perspective; its partial form emphasizes our partiality, our incomplete, subjective knowledge of others. When Sethe gets out of jail: Outside, a throng, now, of black faces stopped murmuring. . . . She climbed into the cart, her profile knife-clean against a cheery blue sky. A profile that shocked them with its clarity. Was her head a bit too high? Her back a little too straight? Probably. Otherwise the singing would have begun at once. . . . Some cape of sound would have quickly been wrapped around her, like arms to hold and steady her on the way. (177)

This passage juxtaposes Sethe’s too-proud singularity, the too-harsh communal judgment she faces from “a throng,” and the subjunctive possibility of an ethical adjacency: a singing that might wrap around her “like arms to hold and steady her on the way.” We see the projection of the supportive linkage of adjacent, fallen beings, like a handholding figured in shadow. Ultimately, the affordances of Beloved’s formal structure of multiplicity—“the structure is the argument”—mitigate the dangers that threaten coexistence in its story line: the too-close proximity and the too-distant

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separation from which the characters suffer. Rather than offering a sprawling, proliferative fullness or a mutually negating zero-sum game, the novel’s multiplicity manifests as a mode of adjacency, a contiguity of being-singular-plural that respects the integrity of the one and the many. The palimpsest layering of adjacency as a process over time allows us to perceive distinctive viewpoints and their projected relations, even as the text maintains a cumulative circumspection. Cued to a contingent universe, adjacency promotes kairos, a sense of what is “enough,” a discernment that maintains a vivid sense of possibility—what is discretely opportune—that is readjusted according to a sense of discretion, or what is appropriate. It is fitting that Morrison’s use of adjacency works obliquely: from her shadowed figures, from her exemplary minor characters, and from her formal multiplicity, we garner (and enact with our participation) an experiential ethics that diverts us from the now-calcified model of the face-to-face encounter. Readers achieve the relative positionality of adjacency: partial, proximate, peripheral. When we experience the mode of uncertainty afforded by Beloved’s multiplicity, we neither resolve nor suspend our knowledge of others; we neither fix our gaze nor cover our eyes. Instead, we peer to the side. We glance askance, discerningly. In “The Gentleman of Shalott,” a response to Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” Elizabeth Bishop presents a man in profile, halved along the spine. While this might seem bothersome, the gentleman is reconciled to it by the end of the poem. He casts for us one last tenuous, spirited argument for an ethos and praxis of adjacency: The uncertainty he says he finds exhilarating. He loves that sense of constant re-adjustment. He wishes to be quoted as saying at present: “Half is enough.”96

4 ACCOUNTING

Interreading William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Shirley Jackson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity” (1943), and Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003) Theories of Value I. A. Richards, William Empson’s undergraduate supervisor at Cambridge, once genially described the origin of his pupil’s first and most famous work, Seven Types of Ambiguity: [Empson] seemed to have read more English Literature than I had, and to have read it more recently and better, so our roles were soon in some danger of becoming reversed. At about his third visit he brought up the games of interpretation which Laura Riding and Robert Graves had been playing with the unpunctuated form of “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” Taking the sonnet as a conjuror takes his hat, he produced an endless swarm of lively rabbits from it and ended by “You could do that with any poetry, couldn’t you?” This was a Godsend to a Director of Studies, so I said “You’d better go off and do it, hadn’t you?” . . . The following week there he was with a thick wad of very illegible typescript under his arm. . . . I can’t think of any literary criticism since which seems like to have as persistent and as distinctive an influence. If you read much of it at once, you will think you are sickening for “flu”; but read a little with care and your reading habits may be altered—for the better, I believe.1

Richards’s tone is fond, his diction damning: “games of interpretation,” “endless swarms of lively rabbits,” and “thick wad of very illegible typescript” all denigrate Empson’s generative impulses. Richards’s comparison of reading Seven Types of Ambiguity to “sickening for ‘flu’ ” puns on its “persistent . . . influence,” but the compliment 153

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feels backhanded. In a 1974 Festschrift for Empson, Richards would recall the image—“I used to press it on likely readers with this recommendation: ‘it will make you feel you’re having a lovely go of Influenza— high-fever fireworks, you know’ ”—and go on to claim that trying to write on Empson’s The Structure of Complex Words made the metaphor come to life: “I went to bed, and began turning its well-known pages over in what I sometimes call ‘my mind.’ What was this? Aches and agueshakes: the real thing! Ten days of the London flu.”2 Richards makes Empson sound like a bright, prolix, but incomprehensible wunderkind. But other critics admire Empson’s spirit of variance. Paul de Man pits rookie against don: Empson’s advance beyond the teachings of his master becomes apparent. For under the outward appearance of a simple list classifying random examples, chapter seven develops a thought Richards never wanted to consider: true poetic ambiguity proceeds from the deep division of Being itself, and poetry does no more than state and repeat this division. Richards did recognize the existence of conflicts but he invoked Coleridge, not without some simplification, to appeal to the reassuring notion of art as the reconciliation of opposites. Empson’s less serene mind is not content with this formula.3

Dissatisfied with a reconciliatory model of conflict, Empson’s sensitivity to an endemic division within Being (and therefore within art) made Richards uneasy in part because it undermined the possibility of a unified theory of art. In this second chapter on the structure of multiplicity, I first consider how Empson accounted for the conflict, and even the incommensurability, of multiple values in Seven Types of Ambiguity by adapting the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. I then interread Empson’s critical text with two fictional texts that borrow his title—Shirley Jackson’s 1943 story and Elliot Perlman’s 2005 novel—to trace their respective approaches to multiplicity. Characteristically, Empson came to his idiosyncratic blend of Benthamic utilitarianism, pluralism, and pragmatism by way of arguing with Richards. As I noted in my Introduction, Empson’s method as a critic is often linked to pragmatism. But he was of many minds about it as a philosophy. John Haffenden suggests that, after his education at Cambridge, “Empson would worry Richards’s pragmatic principles for the rest of

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his life.”4 Empson tried to clarify his beliefs about pragmatism in correspondence and went back and forth about writing an essay on it, which he eventually published as “Theories of Value,” an appendix to The Structure of Complex Words (1951).5 Richards’s criticism, Empson wrote there, is “inherently of a pragmatist type whether the believer in it is a pragmatist or not.”6 Richards’s pragmatic theory in Practical Criticism (1929) derived from Benthamism, a unique way of thinking about art at the time. The common view, established by J. S. Mill’s assessment, was that Bentham had no time for the aesthetic. Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Legislation offers vivid metaphors for the aims of utilitarianism—“to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law”— only to dismiss them: “But enough of metaphor and declamation: it is not by such means that moral science is to be improved.” It is true that Bentham paid scant and often scathing attention to the arts, denouncing William Blackstone’s figurative language in Commentaries on the Laws of England and asserting that “prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.”7 Mill’s misleading misquotation of Bentham’s statement—“push-pin is as good as poetry”—did not help his reputation. Nor did the rumor, since discounted, that calculating Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times was a parody of Bentham.8 Given this view of Bentham as grim rationalist, applying Benthamic utilitarianism to aesthetics was counterintuitive. But it suited Richards’s training as a psychologist and his collaborations with C. K. Ogden, whose analysis of Bentham’s theory of language opened an interdisciplinary path that had seemed foreclosed.9 Haffenden describes how Bentham influenced Practical Criticism: “Richards’s theory of the fullest satisfaction of positive impulses (or ‘appetencies’) essentially constituted a reprise of Bentham’s utilitarian proposition that some kind of ‘moral arithmetic’ can determine the value of the pleasurable and the good, which is in itself socially serviceable and not self-serving.”10 Empson’s gloss of Richards’s argument in “Theories of Value” emphasizes the ethical: “Anything is valuable which will satisfy an appetency without involving the frustration of some equal or more important appetency. . . . The importance of an impulse is the extent of the disturbance of other impulses in the individual’s activities which the thwarting of the impulse involves. . . . Thus morals become purely prudential.”11 In Richards’s

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secular vision, poetry—“the most important repository of our standards”— replaces religion as a vehicle for ethics. In “Theories of Value,” Empson concurs: literary ambiguity, his watchword, is conducive to a theory of diverse and conflictual impulses in poetry. He takes issue with Richards’s project not because he disagrees with its premises but because he finds it neither pluralistic nor pragmatic enough. Empson raises versions of variety that Richards’s theory does not account for. For one thing, we have “about a million impulses a minute, so the calculation involved might be pretty heavy.”12 For another, pluralism has to account for different impulses in other people. Calculating the satisfaction of appetencies within the individual might be possible, but is it feasible within a pluriform society? Finally, in a typical Ricardian calculation, impulses are opposed but equal. Empson doubts that “impulses should all have equal values, positive or negative.”13 Both pluralism and pragmatism, in other words, have to account for what is called value incommensurability, the idea that different values cannot be reduced to, or compared by, a common measure. Incommensurability is often invoked to critique utilitarianism’s effort to apply one standard of measurement or supervalue—for Bentham, pleasure; for Richards, the satisfaction of appetencies—to calculate the best outcome for everyone. Aristotle took incommensurability from a central point of Pythagorean mathematics and applied it thus in the Physics: “But may we say that things are always commensurable if the same terms are applied to them without equivocation? e.g. a pen, a wine, and the highest note in a scale are not commensurable: we cannot say whether any one of them is sharper than any other.”14 That is, sharp is a word that applies to all three objects but cannot be used to measure them against each other on a scale or in a calculation. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle went on to suggest that ethical values too—like loyalty and honesty—are not measurable in relation. In an essay, “The Ideal of the Good,” Empson makes the same point about “the good in action and of the absolute good in peace,” concluding that these “two pictures of the good are both necessary; we cannot finally choose one and not the other.”15 In “Theories of Value,” Empson teases Richards for evening out incommensurabilities in poetry by equalizing “impulses” of disparate quality: “It seems to me an unconscious bit of politics; democracy is invoked.” In other words, Richards’s theory of value is egalitarian for the wrong reasons: one ought to be democratic not due to a preconceived

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notion of equality but because it is pragmatic: “No doubt the falsity of the pretence that all men are equals entails a certain risk, and the same for impulses, but there is less risk in it than in any attempt to prejudge their different values.”16 Empson argues that it is better to pretend to a fictional equality than to set out in advance a hierarchy of values. This is, in fact, a deeply Benthamic view: an oft-noted distinction between the early philosophers of utilitarianism is that Bentham codified but refused to hierarchize different kinds of pleasure and pain, while Mill succumbed to the “prejudging” of values because he wanted to make an actual calculation between them. Empson maintains, in a Benthamic spirit, that a final sum “cannot really be” performed between incommensurable values. But calculation still has use value for pragmatic Empson, who finds it helpful for making a theoretical (subjunctive, fictional) but impermanent judgment: “It may be that the human mind can recognize actually incommensurable values, and that the chief human value is to stand up between them; but I do not know how we could see that they were incommensurable until the calculation had actually been attempted.” The use of calculation is not to fix a scale of values but to discern their incommensurability. One applies Benthamism precisely in order to prove that it is not a final philosophy. Judgment between values is not truly calculable but pragmatic and probabilistic: “we can only judge the value of the theory in terms of how it would be used . . . that is whether people would be likely to make good guesses with it or bad ones.” Empson argues that “the belief to be defended at all cost, by fiction if nothing else will serve, is ‘whatever is a good state of being is good in other people as well as me, so it is good to see that they get it.’ ”17 In sum, Empson does not reject Richards’s Benthamism in “Theories of Value”; he intensifies it. He makes it more pluralist by multiplying its dimensions (the title of his essay is pointedly plural), and he makes it more pragmatic by considering its use value and asserting the importance of persuasive belief over objective truth. Empson’s faith in Benthamism would only grow. With typical insouciance, he claimed in 1949 that “the idea of making a calculation to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number is inherently absurd, but it seems the only picture we can offer,” opining that “the only alternatives to Bentham are arty and smarty moralising, giving unreasoned importance either to a whim of one’s own or to the whim of a social clique.”18 By 1961, he would declare outright: “the satisfaction of any impulse is in itself an

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elementary good. . . . [T]he practical ethical question is how to satisfy the greatest number.”19 But as we will see, aspects of Benthamism had already permeated the workings of multiplicity in Empson’s earliest work, Seven Types of Ambiguity. That book has at its core one of the problems it tries to parse in poetry: how do you negotiate between the many conflictual—perhaps incommensurable—elements within a multiple form? If competing meanings in a polysemic word or phrase might not be reconcilable, the same holds for the seven types of ambiguity themselves. As a nested structure of multiplicity, then, Seven Types affords an uncertainty about how to measure many values in relation. Despite his attunement to incommensurability, Empson’s Benthamic desire to calculate a common ground for multiple values affords an aesthetic, affective, and ethical mode I call accounting. This mode of uncertainty sits between comprehensiveness (an admirable effort to account for many views) and mere enumeration (a mechanistic counting up of views); between a capacious view of the many (seeing in the round) and a myopic calculation of minutiae (rounding up and down). I will telegraph the dimensions of accounting by tracing some affective and aesthetic affinities between Bentham and Empson.

Heads J. S. Mill criticized Bentham for, among other things, limiting his analysis of human action to “its moral aspect, that of its right and wrong” and thus ignoring two other aspects of life: “its aesthetic aspect, or that of its beauty; its sympathetic aspect, or that of its loveableness.”20 Empson’s utilitarian project reveals the degree to which this aesthetic aspect—in the form of “imaginative fictions”—and this affective aspect—in the form of what we might call good cheer—were, contra Mill, key dimensions of Benthamism. Yet it also confirms Mill’s sense, expressed elsewhere, that Benthamism bespeaks a cold cleverness and a cruel innocence. This affective and ethical ambivalence in the mode of accounting Empson derives from Bentham can be seen in the tensions that inhere in the picture of the rational individual in “Theories of Value.” Wary of the solipsism implied by steeping an ethics in an individual’s preferences, Empson dismisses as “a delusion” and “a disgusting experience” the “supposed necessity to believe in an ethic of pure egotism” in

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utilitarianism.21 At the same time, he maintains the importance of individual free will. As Haffenden puts it, his “abiding concern with rational resistance” puts the highest value on the “responsibility to exercise individual judgment.”22 A pragmatic and subjunctive calculation of goods allows him to negotiate egoism and altruism: The creature must think “It is good, in general, to act so as to produce good effects. Good effects are the same when I am there as when I am not, like the rest of the external world, hence they are good in you as well as in me. Hence it is good for me to produce good effects in you.” Surely this simply follows from the intellectuality of the creature; it does not depend on exciting emotions of fraternal love or what not, though no doubt they are needed if he is to act on the belief when under strain. It is part of the process of believing that there is a real world outside you, an idea which is built up by generalisation and analogy.23

The belief in the existence of other people provides a moral groundwork, but a specific “creature” subtends it: an intellectual creature who generates otherness through an analogy with the self. Empson resolves the incommensurability of values within the self, and between the self and others, through the rational individual who thinks, generalizes, and analogizes. This investment in “intellectuality” as the bedrock for ethics is not surprising from a former mathematician. Indeed, Empson rarely takes issue with the idea of calculable value; he doesn’t find utilitarianism as coldly mechanistic as even Mill eventually did. When he elaborates on how we might modify utilitarianism, mathematics still comes into play: “Value seems to come into the sphere of fact of its own accord, rather like imaginary numbers into the solution of real equations.” To tackle incommensurability, he suggests we invent “a quite harmless fiction, as the basis for a method of calculating.” He then conjures someone to do it: “all that would be required would be a sufficiently firm statement by the Head Calculator that, supposing the calculation could ever be performed, it would work out just a little more in favour of altruism than you expect.” This Head Calculator does not exist; he is a necessary fiction. Empson imagines that the Head Calculator is like a poet—that is, like himself: “the inspiring lies told by poets . . . need not certainly be lies, because they are precisely in the position of the firm statement from the Head Calculator, who cannot really do the calculation.”24

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This largely speculative utilitarianism grounds Empson’s claim for the purpose of the literary: “to grasp a wide variety of experience, imagining people with codes and customs very unlike our own; and it cannot be done except in a Benthamite manner, that is, by imagining ‘how would such a code or custom work out?’ ”25 The obverse is true, too: Empson uncovers the necessity of subjunctive, pragmatic, but wholly imaginary fictions for Bentham’s utilitarianism. Philosophers sometimes miss this because even Bentham’s theory of language was deeply materialist; he believed that “language, in order to make sense, had to refer either directly or indirectly, to physical objects.” Bentham separated the “names of fictitious entities,” abstractions like law or duty, from the “names of real entities,” real substances in the world. His effort was always to expose the “real source” of the fictitious entities, unearthing their roots. But Bentham recognized that fictitious entities were “necessary fruits of the imagination, without which, unreal as they are, language could not—scarcely could even thought, be carried on.”26 Arguing that Bentham’s “fictitious entities” permit an “indefinite variety” of values, Mark Canuel locates speculative—even quasi-literary— features in Bentham’s “legal institutions”: Those structures involve and engage imaginative acts and productions. This is because they extend the mind beyond the local precincts of custom and belief into a cooperative scheme of relations that more widely encompasses thoughts of the good of others. At the same time, this scheme of relations allows basic components of a person’s belief system to remain intact. . . . This predicament—in which persons attach their beliefs to new verbal structures—is analogous to . . . the operation of literary metaphor.27

Canuel’s emphasis on the fictive imagination and on the operation of metaphor belies our picture of an anti-literary Bentham and bolsters Richards’s intuition that utilitarianism could be applied to poetry. Indeed, despite his protestations against florid prose, Bentham elsewhere invites poets to correct “the barbarous language that disgraces our statute book.”28 This awareness of the uses of literature qualifies the tenor of his oft-cited—and, as I noted, oft-misquoted—equation of pushpin to poetry. I’ve always wondered: isn’t it possible that Bentham just really liked pushpin? The “naive realism” and onus on invention and imagination that Empson shares with Bentham has precisely this childlike quality: a glo-

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rying in play. This juvenile tenor to Empson’s faith in reason is scattered across his criticism. Drawing his younger self into relation with the eponymous heroes of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Empson argues of the latter that “the child, through a means of imaginative escape, becomes the critic; Alice is the most reasonable and responsible person in the book.”29 As Adam Piette notes in an essay on Empson’s “child logic,” this essay offers a rather odd view of the child as akin to the Cheshire Cat, who is posited as an ideal of rational distance:30 The famous cat is a very direct symbol of this ideal of intellectual detachment: all cats are detached, and since this one grins it is the amused observer. It can disappear because it can abstract itself from its surroundings into a more interesting inner world; it appears only as a head because it is almost a disembodied intelligence. . . . Its cleverness makes it formidable— it has very long claws and a great many teeth—but Alice is particularly at home with it; she is the same sort of thing.31

This seems another vision of disembodied intelligence, a floating “Head” making calculations, formidable and clever. Sinister, too: Piette draws attention to the teeth in the Cheshire Cat, the grinning equanimity of whom is matched by a self-protective baring of fangs. For Piette, what Empson calls “the fresh eye of the child” combines rational clarity and magical thinking: “This double point of view is made up of utter pre-logical fidelity to particulars and facts combined with a magical, animistic sense of the world as filled with forces which are both subject to the observer’s power and interested in that point of view.”32 The child’s magical imagination takes the world to be continuous with the self; this becomes the basis for the adult’s poetic and ethical imagination. In this sense, a mode of accounting for others requires the child’s “reasonable” faith that his values are the prime measure. While it moves toward empathy, this view approximates the credulous belief that others exist only because I exist (consider a child’s stuffed animals). Empson’s biography is marked by this bracing faith in naïveté. He admits: “I remember believing I should have to die in order to grow up, and thinking the prospect very disagreeable.”33 George Fraser writes that “Empson loves games,” recalling how Empson taught him to play “shove ha’ penny” at a pub.34 Christopher Ricks argues that the conflict at the heart of Empson’s poems was between having a child and being

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one.35 Many admired Empson for “his childlike naïveté, his forthrightness. . . . [A]t times he seemed to have wanted to be loved for being so childish.”36 His air was not cloying but credulous, a courage born of innocence. But as we have seen, Richards was cutting about Empson’s “games of interpretation”; others were taken aback by his depiction in Seven Types of Marlowe’s Faustus as “a tired child” or of Herbert’s Christ climbing the cross like “Jack on the Beanstalk.”37 If I may briefly “use biography,” it is notable that Empson’s life was marked by random acts of violence—pushing a friend into a river; strangling a woman at a party—that reveal another side to this chummy cheer.38 They have the tenor of tantrums or, to apply to Empson his words about Herbert, of an “extravagant . . . unreasonable simplicity.”39 Mill uses strikingly similar terms to explain certain of Bentham’s less admirable qualities: There is an imputation cast upon Bentham of a jealous and splenetic disposition in private life of which we feel called upon to give at once a contradiction and an explanation. . . . [I]n every thing except abstract speculation, he was to the last, what we have called him, essentially a boy. He had the freshness, the simplicity, the confidingness, the liveliness and activity, all the delightful qualities of boyhood, and the weaknesses which are the reverse side of those qualities—the undue importance attached to trifles, the habitual mismeasurement of the practical bearing and value of things, the readiness to be either delighted or offended on inadequate cause. These were the real sources of what was unreasonable in some of his attacks on individuals . . . no more the effect of envy or malice, or any really unamiable quality, than the freaks of a pettish child, and are scarcely a fitter subject of censure.40

If we can judge a philosophy by its affective and aesthetic qualities, we might note that there is a playful but potential ruthless innocence to utilitarianism: the teeth in the Cheshire Cat’s grin. In sum, Empson’s Benthamism evinces a quasi-mathematical sensibility, an aesthetic keyed to the inventive and the imaginary—words that connect the poetic to the mathematical—and a playful affect that borders on the puerile. A mode of accounting is clever, fun even, but it also invokes the dark logic of the playground or of Grimm’s fairy tales. Indeed, eighteen months before he died, Bentham reported: “I am alive, though turned of eighty-two, still . . . codifying like any dragon.”41 This

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fanciful simile invokes the same grizzled will to usefulness that led Bentham to bequeath his corpse to posterity as an “object-lesson” in order to quash superstitions about death. On his wishes, his mummified head, fitted with glass eyes, was kept at the foot of his preserved skeleton in a cabinet called the “Auto-Icon” at University College London. To thwart decay and pranks, the real head is now stored elsewhere; a wax one sits atop the body instead.42

A Mind Jumping like a Flea Having elaborated its affective and aesthetic aspects, I want to consider how accounting—a mode of uncertainty pragmatic and pluralistic, childish and calculating—is afforded by the multiple form of Seven Types of Ambiguity. A mode of accounting is keen to calculate; it addresses elements in a multiplicity by inventing a measure—subjunctive and probabilistic, but a measure nonetheless—to account for their difference. As those measures accumulate, however, the apparent rigor of accounting gives way to a mere counting. Empson admits in his closing remarks to Seven Types of Ambiguity that “to a more serious analysis,” his seven types “would probably appear trivial and hardly to be distinguished from one another.” Indeed, as the book proceeds, his types slide into each other; he calls Ophelia’s song in Hamlet an example of the seventh type, only to concede that it might suit the first and “the fourth to sixth” types better, or as well.43 This laxity about the differences between types is symptomatic of an incorrigible impulse toward finding a common ground for conflicting or incommensurable things. I argue that a mode of accounting exposes in Empson an inclination to even out—or skip over—differences within multiplicity, his own version of the “unconscious democracy” of which he accused Richards. In Seven Types, Empson says he is going to “pile up” and assess the “probability” of the many meanings of the lines of poetry and drama that he analyzes; he feels compelled to do the same with the types he invents for those meanings; even the methods he uses to explore the social and ethical stakes of his analyses gradually accumulate. To clarify, there are several levels of multiplicity at which Empson operates in Seven Types of Ambiguity. He accounts for the relations between meanings; he weighs his types of ambiguity against each other; and he calculates the value of various critical methods.

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In other words, Empson’s proliferative, Benthamic tendencies infuse everything from the most local level (meaning) to the grandest arena (the human condition). As in his poetry, the literary microcosm reflects the cosmos via an analogical structure of multiplicity. Drawn to a replete complexity, he views everything as a node in a weave of relation. If, as Empson posits, “poetry is largely the perception of the relations between several . . . things,” the critic’s job is to untangle, isolate, compare, and, crucially, arbitrate between those things.44 Notably, Empson rarely lands on one thing—be it a meaning, a type, or a method—as the most valuable. Far more interesting to him is what gets invented in the process of accounting. The sheer plenitude of meaning is materially obvious in Seven Types of Ambiguity. An analysis of one line can take several pages, and Empson draws attention to his tendency to “heap up” the meanings available, which he garners from a history of critical notes and the New English Dictionary. He finds it a form of “snobbery” not to list even the obvious meanings of a word, given that we move through them: “if one’s mind does not in some way run through the various meanings of a word, how can it arrive at the right one?” Even when a poetic phrase has “one meaning which is the answer of the puzzle,” he emphasizes, “While you are puzzling the words have possible alternative meanings, and even to those who see the answers at once the alternatives are in a way present as being denied.”45 Linguistic diversity thus forms a basis or “background” for reading. Empson goes beyond variety, however. A division at the heart of poetry— the co-presence of what he calls “incompatible,” “mutually exclusive,” “conflictual,” “clashing,” or “contradictory” meanings—catalyzes acts of ingenious invention that Empson commends and performs.46 Incommensurability—as in Aristotle’s different kinds of “sharp”—intensifies this uncertainty: if they have no measure in common, how do we choose one meaning over the others or reconcile them with each other? Empson takes advantage of this incongruity to showcase his ingenuity, as if conjuring an imaginary translation between a pencil’s sharpness and a wine’s. Empson says that he has sequenced his seven types in progressive “logical disorder.” We can also see this as an acceleration in the intensity of conflict between the meanings at play: he moves from the first type, “a word or a grammatical structure . . . effective in several ways” (a kind of plurisignificance), to the seventh, “full contradiction” (an oppo-

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sition of meanings).47 As the book proceeds toward greater conflict, Empson spins more and more ways that “the mind” must account for that conflict, which is sometimes an outright incommensurability of values. The infinite variety of relations between different meanings in Seven Types is kept in check only by one consistent feature: they each entail an act of invention to explain or account for that conflict. Empson argues that the compactness of poetry means that “two statements are made as if they were connected, and the reader is forced to consider their relations for himself. The reason why these facts should have been considered for a poem is left for him to invent; he will invent a variety of reasons and order them in his mind.”48 In Empson’s mode of accounting, conflict between multiple values is what allows us to understand a poem—we invent a frame to account for it—but also what allows us to understand ourselves. Invention begins with observation, which already entails comparison: “one cannot conceive observation except in terms of comparison.” In the case of a “comparison of two things which does not say in virtue of what they are to be compared,” the critic’s job is to figure out the basis of comparison: the measure. The presence of conflicting meanings can prompt the reader to attend “to the fact that they have been fitted into one word, so that one could call it a deduction.”49 Empson lists other possible relations we might deduce from “juxtaposition”: It becomes ambiguous by making the reader assume that the elements are similar and may be read consecutively, by the way one must attempt to reconcile them or find each in the other, by the way the successive ideas act in the mind. Or you may say the experience they convey is too strong to be conceived as a series of contrasts; that one is able to reconcile the different elements; that one is not conscious of their difference but only of the grandeur of the imagination which brought them together.50

Empson’s interest in relation allows even mutually exclusive meanings to be commensurable: “In so far . . . as you know that two things are opposites, you know a relation which connects them.”51 Analyzing the ambiguity of a Chinese couplet about “the years” and “this spring morning,” Empson notes the incommensurability between these pieces of time as experiences, but then simply does the math: “their ratio is ten to the tenth and their mean is the standard working day.” Postulating a

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linguistic equation for Shakespeare—“the (noun) and (noun) of (noun)”— Empson argues, “Their main meaning . . . is a sort of highest common factor of the two of them.”52 That calculation is possible only if the respective values of these meanings are commensurable. Empson seems to sum up his own method when he says of Herbert, “the symbols themselves seem almost to be used in a way familiar to the mathematician; as when a set of letters may stand for any numbers of a certain sort, and you are not curious to know which numbers are meant because you are only interested in the relations between them.” The relations that the reader deduces do not necessarily concern meaning— Empson’s negotiation of different value systems can produce an effect of beauty, mood, humor, texture, or even morality. He finds a kind of negative capability in Spenser, who “can pour into the even dreamwork of his fairyland Christian, classical, and chivalrous materials with an air, not of ignoring their differences, but of holding all their systems of value floating as if at a distance so as not to interfere with one another.” This balanced pluralism of disparate realms of value, “an abstracted vision of all the conflicts of humanity,” can seem more stringent, as when characters in Henry IV, “in a series of lightning changes, force upon the audience in succession their mutually incompatible views of the world.” Of the conflictual tropes of sex and religion, he writes that how “a person lives by these vaguely-conceived opposites is the most important thing about his make-up.”53 This idea alludes to pragmatism, a way to negotiate contradictions in a “sensible” manner: Human life is so much a matter of juggling with contradictory impulses (Christian-worldly, sociable-independent, and such-like) that one is accustomed to thinking people are probably sensible if they follow first one, then the other, of two such courses; any inconsistency that it seems possible to act upon shows that they are in possession of the right number of principles, and have a fair title to humanity.54

We share the opinions of the poet so that we are “able to imagine their consequences . . . to act as if they were true.” Given how many poets we enjoy, Empson concludes: “in the present state of indecision of the cultured world people do, in fact, hold all the beliefs, however contradictory, that turn up in poetry, in the sense that they are liable to use them all in coming to decisions.”55 Pragmatism entails pluralism, a playful

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juggling or possession of a number of principles. But it also requires the invention of connections between those various principles. Ultimately, Empson approaches difference within a multiplicity as a calculable problem, cheerfully inventing a story to account for it. Seven Types of Ambiguity is in effect a compilation of those stories. The seven types offer various ways to account for and between values, as italicized in the following: “In the third type, two such different moods would be included, laid side by side, made relevant as if by a generalisation; in the fourth type they react with one another to produce something different from either . . . an explosion.” In the sixth type, “a statement says nothing, by tautology, by contradiction, or by irrelevant statements; so that the reader is forced to invent statements of his own.” In the seventh, “two opposed judgments are being held together and allowed to reconcile themselves, to stake out different territories, to find their own level, in the mind.” The mind can “burst the distinction between the two opposites” or allow the “settlement of territory between the opposite modes of judgment.”56 A mode of accounting “unites,” “exposes,” “judges,” “juggles,” “invents” when it is confronted with the uncertainty afforded by an intense multiplicity.57 Characteristically, Empson elides the subject of these verbs: an accounting mind can belong to the reader, author, or textual personae.58 While he agrees with Freud that the unconscious is the “seat of conflict,” Empson is willfully vague about its locus: “the idea of ‘unconscious’ . . . like the infinities of mathematics may be a convenient fiction or a product of definition.”59 The Empsonian “mind” seems a species of Bentham’s “fictitious entities,” a hypothetical Head Calculator who makes the analysis without ever forcing a decision. Because it cannot be a real person, this detached mind’s inventions have lower stakes and easier pleasures. Empson’s reliance on the imaginary means he can account between values without ever being held accountable for them. The inventiveness on display in Seven Types can often feel too clever, too specious in this way—hence the repeated accusation that the book is the reductio ad absurdum of an analytic method. Empson asserts that what is needed is an “understanding which enables one to jump neatly from one [poetic] style to another.” Over time, however, his mode of accounting resembles another of his descriptions of Herbert: “a reliable and unassuming grandeur . . . achieved by successive fireworks of contradiction, and a mind jumping like a flea.”60 Fireworks and jumping

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have panache, but Empson’s leaps of logic suggest a kind of synecdochic itch that threatens to elide important differences between dimensions. The multiple always gestures toward the infinite; if this much can be found in a word, a poem, a type, what can we eliminate? The more Empson multiplies meanings, the less coherent meaning becomes; the more types he offers, the less clear the typology; the more methods he subsumes, the less rigorous his own seems. His mode of accounting grows supplementary—so excessive that it undermines itself. Empson admits that his sense of ambiguity “must either be all nonsense or very startling and new.”61 The practice of looking for poetical ambiguity, he says, “rapidly leads to hallucinations” or to the invention of “a poem of his own.”62 The latter idea, repeated in various forms throughout Seven Types, captures a key ambivalence about its mode of accounting: you can call it a creative act—a new poem!—but what if it is a misreading?

Me Seeing My Penny Empson is wonderfully unafraid of error in Seven Types of Ambiguity. He suggests, for example, that Lewis Theobald’s emendations were just the Bard’s “first drafts,” and that “misreadings of poetry” demonstrate the “plausibility of the opposite term” lurking behind the correct one. In his counterstory to the anecdote from Richards with which this chapter began, Empson offers a figure—as apt as “high-fever fireworks”—for the cumulative effect of his own inventiveness, however prone to error it may be: “I remember saying to I. A. Richards in a ‘supervision’ that all the possible mistakes along this line ought to be heaped up and published, so that one could sit back and wait to see which were the real mistakes later on. Sixteen years later, I find myself prepared to stand by nearly the whole heap.”63 If a creative misreading of a text is akin to “writing a poem of one’s own,” mistakes are not just justifiable, they are warranted, even valuable. This idea resonates with two predominant critical works on intertextuality: Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading.64 The titular theory of the first is partially (unconsciously?) indebted to Empson, to whom Bloom refers with great approval in his earliest and latest works.65 While Bloom credits Northrop Frye with the idea and the method, his classification of those six “revisionary ratios” of influence—with their obscure, forgettable names—begs the question. It is not hard to sniff a seed of Bloom in Seven Types of Ambiguity: “Paro-

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dies are appreciative criticisms in this sense, and much of Proust reads like the work of a superb appreciative critic upon a novel which has unfortunately not survived.”66 Empson finds it natural that Shakespeare would redeploy “the fashion” of Sidney’s lines and “then improve them.” While the evidence doesn’t support the claim, Empson says it would have been “fun to maintain that Shakespeare learnt his style from a misunderstanding of Chaucer.”67 In this reading, the agonistic relationship between the poet and the predecessor is what sparks the invention of a whole new poem. Empson’s theory of misreading is brighter and lighter than Bloom’s gloomy “anxiety of influence.” But there are hints of the darker conflicts of influence in Seven Types as well: “Late nineteenth century poetry . . . can reasonably be called decadent, because its effects depended on a tradition that its example was destroying. . . . [It] is in part the metaphysical tradition dug up when rotten.”68 Empson’s tendency to clarify his position through argument is also foreshadowed in Seven Types: “to state the other side’s case more strongly than they have done so far for themselves . . . springs from a clear understanding of their feelings.”69 Once again, conflict—here an overreading of a nemesis—affords a creative act that subsumes the warring parties, drawing them into measurable relation. I want to suggest that an agonistic model of interreading as creative misreading suits the affordances of Empson’s proclivity toward accounting, his desire to treat a seemingly irreducible conflict as productive. If we take as an example his footnotes to the second edition of Seven Types—a kind of intrareading—we find a similar operation of accounting. As we have seen, when he encounters conflictual meanings, Empson generally offers an account of each meaning and then accounts for their conflict. In revising his book, he faces a conflict between his previous interpretations and his new ones. Again, he accounts for the conflict by including all sides of the debate: In preparing a second edition the wishes of the buyers ought to be considered. Many of them will be ordering a group of books on this kind of topic, for a library, compiled from bibliographers; some of them maybe only put the book on their list as an awful warning against taking verbal analysis too far. Anyway, such a buyer wants the old book, not a new one, even if I could make it better. On the other hand, there was obviously room to tidy up the old one, and I would not want to reprint silently anything I now think false.

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It seemed the best plan to work the old footnotes into the text, and make clear that all the footnotes in this edition are second thoughts written recently. Sometimes the footnotes disagree with the text above them; this may seem a fussy process, but I did not want to cut too much. Sir Max Beerbohm has a fine reflection on revising one of his early works; he said he tried to remember how angry he would have been when he wrote it if an elderly pedant had made corrections.70

This “fussy process” is pure Empson: to permit the co-presence of disagreement; to give due credit to the younger self as well as to the elderly pedant; and to subsume the disagreement, rather than making a final calculation or striking a resolution. Note that Empson takes recourse to the language of the market to account for his decision to maintain the co-presence of old and new ideas. Even in this economic tenor, he acknowledges value conflict: the value of the “original” book may be attributable to its reputational relevance or, by contrast, to its utility as “an awful warning.” Empson attends to various kinds of value in this passage: the book’s use value as an object among objects (a group of books, for a library), its exchange value (its commodity value in a marketplace of ideas, or topics), and its symbolic value as cultural capital (its reputation as a warning for or against verbal analysis).71 His language renders the conflict of buyers’ demands additive: the book is more valuable because its forms of value are multiple and incommensurable. That money should arise in this context is no coincidence: canonical influence is complicit with marketplace value. What Richards calls the “influence” of Seven Types was measured in sales as well as reviews. Empson’s economic views are a matter of some debate.72 Paul Fry notes the “strong tension, perhaps unresolved, between Empson’s socialism, tending to eliminate the underclass, and his preference for local magistracy among supervisory institutions, tending to support a neighborly reciprocity among existing classes.”73 We see this tension emerge once again in an anecdote: I remember long ago attending a lecture by Bertrand Russell at Cambridge, a dramatic affair, with the experts watching him keenly as some new paradox was expounded, and his own eyes shifting alertly and guardedly from one man whose theoretical toes were being trodden on to another whose turn was now coming. He brought out a coin, and the business about “me

Accounting seeing my penny” was gone through with some new twist; for quite a time, the eyes of everyone seemed to be shifting one way or another and back to this object. Then somebody at the back of the room began to laugh, and it turned out that what he had got was a half-crown. I thought it a very neat symbol of the Whig aristocrat and his democratic views; the actual value of his coin was a thing he would not have considered it polite to notice.74

By Empson’s own logic, his mockery of the Whig aristocrat is based in experiential knowledge: it takes one to know one. But by scoffing at the aristocratic politesse that prevents Russell from noticing the value of his coin, Empson implies that he himself is aware of values of all kinds. This tale thus reflects his attunement to value incommensurability and his desire to conjure something—a joke, a neat symbol—out of it. We again see the coin’s use value as a physical, visible object; its exchange value in a marketplace; and its symbolic value as a class marker. As I turn to examine how interreading—reading for intertextual allusions—transforms a mode of accounting, I want to keep in mind this three-sided coin, so to speak (perhaps we might better say: these two sides of a coin, plus the coin itself).75 The Benthamism I have linked to accounting is affiliated with an economic logic and is often criticized for treating people as fungible. Interreading amplifies a mode of accounting, not only because allusions are a kind of currency and the canon a kind of marketplace, but also because they can afford mere counting. A prescient prophet in 1973, Bloom asks whether the study of influence can be “anything more than the wearisome industry of source-hunting, of allusion-counting, an industry that will soon touch apocalypse anyway when it passes from scholars to computers?”76 The two works of fiction that have explicitly taken up Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity as an intertext—Shirley Jackson’s 1943 story “Seven Types of Ambiguity” and Elliot Perlman’s 2003 novel Seven Types of Ambiguity—are obsessed with precisely this imbrication of economic and literary value. In what follows, I consider how these three intertexts account for the uncertainty afforded by the collision of incommensurable values, how they each manifest a mode of accounting. In each case, I elaborate how incommensurability can inhere in a structure of multiplicity at various textual levels: in figurative devices, in nouns, and in narrative perspectives. I then turn to the ethical implications of the uncertainty afforded by interreading multiplicity

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through Jackson’s and Perlman’s respective allusions to Empson and others.

Hands Let us begin this interreading of three versions of Seven Types by zooming in on Empson’s fifth type: “a fortunate confusion.” He defines this as “when the author is discovering his idea in the act of writing, or not holding it all in his mind at once, so that for instance, there is a simile which applies to nothing exactly, but lies half-way between two things when the author is moving from one to the other.”77 In this chapter of Seven Types, romanticism seems to offer the main examples—Shelley, Swinburne—and a lens for Empson’s readings of the metaphysical poets: Herbert uses “the Romantic Movement’s technique,” and Marvell gives the impression of “a Romantic Revival piece of writing.”78 What Empson finds both compelling and troubling about the fifth type of ambiguity is the erosion of boundaries: the “blurring of the metaphysical conceit,” as when images are “piled up in a ‘sweet disorder’ ” or “dissolved in your mind, as often in dreams” or end up a “muddle of ideas clogging an apparently simple lyrical flow.”79 I would argue that the uncertainty Empson tries to account for in the fifth type emerges out of the collision of two incommensurable forms of figuration. This is also why it has him in such a snit: the value incommensurability in the fifth type resists his inventive mode of accounting. Empson often just points to the conflicts of value that a fortunate confusion exposes. Discussing a poem of Marvell’s, he says, “The lines have thus a curious and impalpable form of ambiguity, in that they are drawing their energy from three different literary conventions at once. . . . We must watch patiently the strange pageant of his actions and force upon them any interpretation we can imagine.” The necessity for forcing an interpretation is uncharacteristic for the cheery Empson; he admits in a footnote to this chapter that “It seemed hard to make the points convincingly without evocative writing.” He continues to try to explain the fifth type using Shelley’s “Skylark”: the word sphere seems to be a star until “the simile goes tumbling on into the next verse” and becomes “the moon.” But he struggles to account for it: “the transition from one simile to another itself produces an effect which must be conceived in terms of this belief; one is forced to swoon, in an ecstatic and febrile way, not rooted upon the earth, from flower to flower, and to find all exquisite

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and all unsatisfying.”80 It is as if the last phrase describes not just Empson’s feeling but his effort to disentangle, categorize, and pinpoint these “transitional” or “self-inwoven” similes.81 What we see here is Empson trying to distinguish a purposive ambiguity from an incidental one: “In so far as an ambiguity sustains intricacy, delivery, or compression of thought, or is an opportunism devoted to saying quickly what the reader already understands, it is to be respected. . . . It is not to be respected in so far as it is due to weakness or thinness of thought . . . or, when the interest of the passage is not focused upon it, so it is merely an opportunism in the handling of the material.”82 That is, a motivated ambiguity is more respectable than the “handling of the material” that leads to a careless kind of slippage between things. We can in fact separate these two devices for figuring connections between things into a familiar dichotomy: metaphor versus metonymy. Metaphor bridges disparate meanings; it traces a purposive or meaningful relation of likeness between tenor and vehicle. Metonymy, based on what is around, operates by contingent association, a coincidental proximity of meanings. I believe the fifth type of ambiguity is essentially a metonymic slippage—an associative movement—between metaphors. The combination of these two incommensurable devices troubles Empson’s mode of accounting. These two forms of figuration have been famously opposed—and their opposition famously deconstructed—since the time of Empson’s writing. In his 1956 study, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” Roman Jakobson argues that “a competition between both devices, metonymic and metaphoric, is manifest in any symbolic process, be it intrapersonal or social.” Jakobson associates metaphor with poetry, metonymy with fiction: “Following the path of contiguous relationships, the Realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the space in setting and time. He is fond of synecdochic details.”83 Empson’s preference for motivated ambiguity over incidental ambiguity presages the established hierarchy of respectability between metaphor and metonymy that Jakobson bemoans: he argues that our critical methods overvalue metaphors because we are enamored of similitude. Paul de Man explains how this hierarchy maps onto an alignment of metaphor with necessity and metonymy with contingency: “The inference of identity and totality that is constitutive of metaphor is lacking in the purely relational metonymic contact: an element of truth is

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involved in taking Achilles for a lion but none in taking Mr. Ford for a motor car.”84 Barbara Johnson, pursuing de Man’s aim of deconstructing the binary, argues that while “these two tropes have always stood in hierarchical relation to each other,” with metaphor assuming priority for writers from Aristotle to George Lakoff, “it is often very hard to tell the two apart.”85 She demonstrates this entanglement by locating examples of a “metaphorically grounded metonym” and a “metonymically grounded metaphor” in Zora Neale Hurston’s work.86 This is not an elision of the two but rather a “double-voiced” expression: “to privilege either metaphor or metonymy is thus to run the risk of producing an increasingly aphasic critical discourse.”87 The goal is “not to pretend there is no difference, but to assume and articulate the incompatible forces involved in . . . self-division.”88 Shirley Jackson’s writing, I would argue, similarly exposes—“assumes and articulates”—the incommensurability between metaphor and metonym in the fifth type of ambiguity. But Jackson does not force an interpretation or a calculation (even a subjunctive one) between them. The uncertainty afforded by this tension is powerful because of Jackson’s stronger than usual investment in the physical world, metonymy’s playground. In Come Along with Me, Jackson recommends that words be “artificially weighted”: “you can, and frequently must, make a word carry several meanings or messages in your story if you use the word right. This is a kind of shorthand.”89 Jackson’s word shorthand proves her point: it is metonymic (not a diminutive hand but the condensed writing produced by a hand), but here she uses it as a metaphor for creative writing. The word hand lends itself in this way to an ambiguity of the fifth type because the hand is common as a metaphor—Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market—and as a metonym, like the hands of a ship. This grounding in physical reality is typical for Jackson; in her advice to writers, she says “a person in a story is identified through small things—little gestures, turns of speech, automatic reactions”—and holds that “inanimate objects are best described in use or in motion.”90 These “things” are bestirred not only by their use or motion in the diegesis but also by the internal clash of the “several meanings” they carry. It is this mode of uncertainty that Jackson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity” affords: a microcosmic collision of multiple semantic forces within small pieces of language, an intensified polysemy.

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Jackson’s short story first appeared in a 1943 issue of Story magazine and was republished in 1949 in a collection called The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris. It takes place in a bookstore divided into an upstairs with a girl at the desk and “best-sellers and art books on display,” and a downstairs manned by “Mr. Harris, owner and salesclerk”: “it stretched in long rows of books off into dimness at either end, with books lined in tall bookcases along the walls, and books standing in piles on the floor.” A couple enters the basement. The man is large, hearty, and awkward; there is repeated reference to his big hands and to his confusion about where to put them. His wife, whom he calls Mother, has a soft voice and a love of Jane Eyre. The man says they’re looking for good books: “ ‘None of this trash they turn out nowadays.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Something like Dickens.’ ” Another customer in the store, a young student, asks the owner whether he can take a look at “the Empson.” The book is kept in a glass case behind the desk and is “pretty scarce,” according to Mr. Harris: “ ‘You’ll have read it through before you buy it at this rate.’ He smiled at the big man and his wife. ‘Some day he’s going to come in and buy that book,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to go out of business from shock.’ ” The man asks about the book, and the boy tells him its title (Seven Types of Ambiguity), then offers to help select some “good sets, big like Dickens,” while Mr. Harris keeps Mother company.91 The man and boy converse alone: “I’m willing to pay a reasonable amount for the books I have in mind,” the big man said. He touched the book in front of him experimentally, with one finger. “A hundred and fifty, two hundred dollars altogether.” The boy looked up at him and laughed. “That ought to get you some nice books.” “Never saw so many books in my life,” the big man said. “I never thought I’d see the day when I’d just walk into a bookstore and buy up all the books I always wanted to read.” “It’s a good feeling.” “I never got a chance to read much,” the man said. “Went right into the machine-shop where my father worked when I was much younger than you, and worked ever since.”92

The boy is not arrogant, but he readily admits to having read most of the books he recommends: “ ‘Brontës . . . Dickens, Meredith, Thackeray . . .

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Jane Austen,’ the boy said. ‘Your wife would be pleased with that.’ ” The man, proud of his own accomplishments, nevertheless seems defensive about the discrepancy in their cultural capital. The boy leaves, saying, “ ‘I’ll be back for another look at that Empson, Mr. Harris.’ ‘I’ll try to keep it around for you,’ Mr. Harris said. . . . ‘I’ll just count on its being here,’ the boy said.”93 This unremarkable set of interactions leads to a cruel twist as the man, while paying for the books the boy helped select, makes an unexpected request: “Can I have another look at that book?” “The Empson?” Mr. Harris said, looking up. “The one the boy was so interested in.” Mr. Harris reached around to the bookcase in back of him and took out the book. The big man held it delicately, as he had held the others, and he frowned as he turned the pages. Then he put the book down on Mr. Harris’ desk. “If he isn’t going to buy it, will it be alright if I put this in with the rest?”94

Mr. Harris adds it to the list, exchanging pleasantries with Mother as the man counts out bills. In this story, external attributes like the man’s big hands come to serve as class markers, as do discrepancies like those between the man’s stated wealth and his stating diction. This is typical for Jackson, whose stories often use hands—“hard hands,” “harsh hands,” “red wrists”—to telling effect.95 Despite her realist proclivity for material objects, Jackson’s “deadpan narrative style” makes the story uncertain. It is in the third person and it has no interior monologue or reported thought; it does not focalize via any one character.96 A view from nowhere coincides with multiplicity, enlisting an objectivity that encompasses multiple views but privileges no one. The story declines to calculate between their views, suggesting that a utilitarian account would not be able to: how can the man achieve what René Girard calls a “mimetic desire” for the book without depriving the boy of his intellectual, perhaps pretentious, desire for it?97 The result is what critics call “a current of uneasiness,” an uncertainty that derives from “the author’s incidental symbolism” and Jackson’s tendency to leave a story’s “meaning to our inference.”98 This has to do with the incommensurability of value at the heart of the simplest words. The word good is batted back and forth in the story,

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for example: whatever the boy finds good about the books (a metaphoric logic; this book is good because it is like other good books) is pitted against their value for the man as economic goods (a metonymic logic; this book is good because it is associated with intelligence); hovering over both is the moral category of the good.99 When Mr. Harris tells Mother “to watch the bottom step” and she passes on the warning, it is a metonymic reference (she is not being ordered to stare at it; to watch is associated with being careful); the second time Mr. Harris says “watch the bottom step,” it seems an ironic metaphor about socioeconomic ladders. Big hands are metonymically linked to a specific kind of job, yet they also figure the man’s gingerliness in contrast to the boy, who “runs his hand” over books with ease. Jackson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity” in this way deploys Empson’s fifth type.

Casting Lots If we read with an eye toward allusion, we see an analogous tension of value in Jackson’s proper nouns. With Bertrand Russell’s coin in mind, I want to posit that Jackson’s proper nouns draw on conflicting semantoeconomic forces. In the story, an object, rather than a person, is called the Empson. This is metonymically derived—the book is associated with the name on its cover—but it invokes the history of likening books to their authors, which can take the form of a genetic conceit (a child of the author’s mind) or a mimetic one (a transcript of the author’s mind). In this story, this authorial likeness is subdued because Empson’s ideas are never quoted, his style never invoked. The book is described only generically: “ ‘It’s aesthetics,’ the boy said. ‘About literature. It’s very scarce. I’ve been trying to buy it for quite a while and haven’t had the money.’ ”100 The title of Empson’s book, another proper noun, signifies these kinds of value as well: “What’s the name of this book?” the big man asked curiously. “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” the boy said. “It’s quite a good book.” “There’s a fine name for a book,” the big man said to Mr. Harris. “Pretty smart young fellow, reading books with names like that.”101

The boy says the title, Seven Types of Ambiguity, to refer to the book’s exchange value, which I submit is its metaphoric value. Marx aligns exchange value with a substitutive and motivated system of representation:

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it is a “hieroglyphic” that must be deciphered.102 The boy cares about the ideas behind the title, and how good they are, compared with others. By contrast, the big man cares about the values that accompany the title by association, the fact that it sounds fine, what the title implies rather than what it means: a metonymic attunement to its symbolic value. I would add to this a third kind of value, the “pointing” that we perform with a name, as when the owner clarifies which book the man wants: “ ‘The Empson?’ Mr. Harris said.”103 Indexical value is a kind of use value: we utilize the proper name to refer deictically to the object at hand.104 The proper nouns in Jackson’s story—“the Empson” and “Seven Types of Ambiguity”—thus work in a few ways. They point to a material object in space and time (its use for indicating an object), they possess the value of representation (worth in an exchange of ideas), and they imply a set of values by association (cultural or symbolic capital). These forms of value can be in conflict, but more crucially, they are incommensurable; they cannot be subjected to a final calculus—which is the most important value?—or a common measure. If the title Seven Types of Ambiguity were just the name for a material object Mr. Harris sells, its primary meaning would be indexical; any rare book, even an invented one, would work just as well. If it signifies something for a student, the book’s actual ideas matter. If it is meant to convey a fine intellectualism to an uneducated man, its associations are key: a fancy title that bespeaks science (seven types) and obscurity (ambiguity) is crucial. I would argue that Jackson wants the reader neither to choose one of these meanings nor to fuse them but to experience the uncertainty their collision creates. Viewing the proper noun in only one way wouldn’t feel adequate; reading it in all ways at once would conflate these distinctive values. Instead the text affords an uncertainty about which insufficient tack to take, affording what Jackson exhorts writers to create: “a surface tension . . . considerably stretched but not shattered.”105 This is not felt as a deep puzzle but as a cognitive discomfort, the “disturbing questions and nuances” that follow the story’s abrupt ending.106 Because Jackson makes “Seven Types of Ambiguity” her title, this triple signification expands from the word in the story to the story itself. We apply the same set of value operations to the story as a whole. First: how is this story like its predecessor? What is its metaphoric exchange value? It is this value that Dennis Welch insists on in his essay “Manipulation in Shirley Jackson’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity.’ ”107 Citing Emp-

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son’s seventh type—“two opposite meanings defined by the context”— Welch argues: “While the situation in Jackson’s story suggests that the teen-age boy is deprived of a valued book by an older man . . . many details imply an opposite meaning, namely that the young man in a ruse with the store owner plays a humorous game of manipulation whereby they get an ignorant customer to buy a hard-to-sell book which he will never read.”108 Welch collates details to make his case: the boy’s familiarity with the books; his gratuitous offer to help the man; his harping on the scarce and good book in the first place; and Mr. Harris’s quick execution of the sale, prefaced by a too-hasty reply when the man casually asks at the end of the story for “that book.”109 Welch says that this argument displays a “cynical delight,” and his ingenious reading does give the story a humorous twist. But this respite from the story’s dark uncertainty strikes me as fishy. Welch’s interpretation of the story’s “opposite meaning” gestures toward ambiguity— “Because I believe that Jackson’s story is intentionally ambiguous, I do not insist on my reading alone”—but in effect, it reduces the story to a double-sided trick.110 It makes the story more egalitarian but also more utilitarian: not just the man but now the boy and Mr. Harris, too, are motivated by money; in the end, everyone gets the goods they want. Welch’s argument achieves a balance that rectifies the troubling sense of inequality compounded by the man’s final, gratuitous purchase—his “one more” book. In other words, this metaphoric reading relegates the story’s incommensurable goods to a level playing field. What would a metonymic critical interpretation of Jackson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity” look like? How would it organize symbolic value? If a metonym is often a noun that calls forth a proximate domain, then allusive names can refer to intertexts that surround the story but may or may not resemble it.111 The most frequent allusion in the story, “Dickens,” invokes overlapping associated domains: books read in childhood, big books that come in sets, classic books with high cultural capital. Other books invoke other domains: “Austen” and “the Brontës” are authors Mother might like, “Empson” to signify “aesthetics” or “intelligence.” The boy has his own system of values, based on a comparison of literary worth: “ ‘Carlyle,’ the boy said. ‘You can skip him. He’s not quite what you’re looking for. Meredith is good. And Thackeray.’ ”112 We can imagine a reading that would work along this axis of canonical value. But we ought not lose grasp of Jackson’s adamant sense of materiality, which opens up an indexical interpretation attuned to use

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value in a material world. The man literally judges books by their covers— “They look nice, all alike”—and assesses them by their physical heft: “These won’t quite fill up the bookcase I got for them.” When the boy makes a list, too, the authors’ names recede into material indices: “ ‘I’ll write them down. . . . ‘Brontës,’ he said, ‘Dickens, Meredith, Thackeray.’ ”113 If we interread its allusions closely, we find that Jackson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity” requires that we speak several languages at once. The proper nouns work metaphorically, as comparative intertexts; they manifest metonymically, as objects with an aura of symbolic value; and they point indexically to the objects at hand. These forms of signification cannot trump each other, not only because they are incommensurable kinds of value—they lack a common ground—but also because, to use Barbara Johnson’s terms, they alternately “ground” each other. Each proper name conjures a historical author, affording thought experiments that rely on association and analogy: What would Dickens do with that dingy basement, that poor student? What would Austen make of Mother, “middle-aged and nicely dressed; all her clothes . . . fairly new, but quiet and well-planned for her age and air of shyness”?114 These conjured ghosts interact in the world of the bookstore; their imagined debate reproduces the story’s conflict about the uses of literature. At the same time, by adopting the title of Empson’s critical work—despite manifest differences in genre, length, intention—Jackson intimates an incommensurability of value in the canon. According to Joan Wylie Hall, literary allusions unite the twenty-five stories in Jackson’s The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris into a short-story cycle.115 The collection’s epilogue, explaining its subtitle, is “James Harris, the Daemon Lover (Child Ballad No. 243),” an allusive lodestone. The name “James Harris” floats in and out of the stories— briefly attaching itself to the bookstore owner in “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” for example. Jackson changed several other characters’ names to Jim or James Harris when she compiled the collection: are these changes nominal, so to speak, last-minute revisions to create cohesion? New York Times reviewer Donald Barr complains that the many James Harrises “give a false unity to the book and confuse the meaning of the individual stories,” while Hall suggests that their diversity “may be credited to the devil’s own shape-shifting nature, as well as to Jackson’s fascination with role playing.”116 Confused or shape-shifting? Contingent or comprehensible? The conflict of value in the names littering the

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stories affords this uncertainty, the cumulative effect of which is an almost Gothic tension: we utter names of uncertain providence, of equivocal meaning, ghostwritten. The story collection was later renamed The Lottery after her most famous story, which was published in 1948 in the New Yorker to much acclaim and many diatribes. It is about a group of townspeople who gather for an annual ritual: slips of paper are drawn from a box to determine whom the townspeople will stone to death. Its tone is quotidian, almost folksy, but its postwar publication makes the story seem both primordial and topical, both ancient and prescient. Its title is another triple-sided coin: it likens casting lots to casting stones; lot, lottery, and the numerical qualifier “lots” are metonymically derived; in the story they are material bits of paper. As for its proper nouns, is it a coincidence that two of the townspeople are named Bentham and Smith?117 Is this an allusion to Jeremy Bentham’s claim, in his letters to Adam Smith in Defence of Usury, that “lotteries” of all kinds would benefit society? Is Jackson suggesting that the scapegoat ritual is the outcome of a principle that calculates the greatest good? Or is she hinting at the moral horror entailed by making a final calculation between people contingent on a game of chance?

Speculative Relations The other intertext I want to consider, Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003), is far more explicit about its literary and philosophical investments in multiplicity.118 Set in Perth, the novel uses multiple first-person perspectives to structure its discourse: when it rewinds itself to account for another character’s view of previous events, the novel recounts dialogue verbatim, offers synopses of previous events, and emphasizes its themes. The most prominent of these last is money, which dictates the novel’s major realms of stockbrokerage and gambling but also pervades the psychiatrist’s office, the brothel, the prison, the home, even language itself. To describe personal relationships, characters use words like benefit, business, pay, owe, commerce, exchange, measure, and calculation. Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity in this way attempts to offer a critique of contemporary capitalism through a satirical use of financial terminology. And while it revolves around an ethical disturbance without financial motivation—a man kidnaps his ex-lover’s son to make her realize she

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has been neglecting her child—the plot relies on the circulation of information and money: the bag of money a prostitute, Angel, wins at the casino travels from one character to the next. An analogy between banking and prostitution leads to a horrifically literal pun: a brutish banker, Joe, anally rapes Angel using a rolled up wad of money bills. A psychiatrist, Alex, accuses a patient of having a “trickle-down theory” of happiness, but even he requires payment from his friends. Political affiliations are expressed as economic arguments, often against capitalism. Alex rages against “the enslavement of millions of people, under the aegis of globalization, to the tyranny of an unregulated market and an unprotected economy.” The righteous kidnapper Simon—a handsome, poetic teacher with a dog named Empson—rants about “the power of the stock market over the lives of ordinary people.”119 As an alternative to the infusion of economics into everyday life that the novel depicts diegetically as an argument against utilitarianism, the novel offers an ethics of empathy: “You have to empathize with children. You have to try to understand their anxieties, their terrors, their loneliness; you have to put yourself in their position.” “Empathy will work better. Sympathy is the capacity to be affected by someone else’s pain. Empathy requires that you go close to experiencing that pain yourself. It requires that you project yourself into the situation and then introspect on how you feel.” “Everything I said to the police, even the contradictions, especially the contradictions, can all be understood by someone, anyone, with enough . . . empathy.”120

Simon has such a high capacity for empathy that it makes him a good lover: “It was his way, his empathy with my body.” Simon differentiates his kindness from “New Age relativism,” but his empathy seems catholic, open even to a man testifying against him: “I looked at him in the witness box while he lost his son all over again.” When Simon lets another prisoner have sex with him, empathy attains a dangerous edge: “To think of abrasive trauma, fissures, contusions, thrombosed hemorrhoids, lacerations with bleeding, and pain in prison is bad. To think of friendship is good.” He even justifies his kidnapping of Anna’s son with this discourse about empathy: “That’s why I took Sam. I could feel his

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impending pain and it was that pain I tried to preempt by what I did.” His defense attorney qualifies, but essentially maintains, this argument: “it’s possible for a therapist, or anyone . . . to empathize too much.”121 The novel wants formally to enact this imperative toward empathy in two ways. The first is through its polyphony, its Rashomonian structure of seven perspectives on the events, each told in the first person. The second is through a particular grammar, exemplified by these quotations: “I am to Angelique what Anna is to me”; “I lied Michael’s lie to Joe”; “Joe looked at me looking, and then he saw him too.”122 Miniature summaries meant to keep the reader abreast of the elaborate plot take a similar form: “Here was Joe, the husband of the great and lovely Anna, the woman who had rejected Simon, and Joe was cheating on her, weekly, preferring me, Simon’s girlfriend, to her.”123 Built into this way of speaking is an idea that disparate elements in a multiplicity are defined relationally and a coeval one that ethical positions are relative. In Why We Read Fiction, Lisa Zunshine explains that this kind of nested grammar reflects our ability to “navigate multiple levels of intentionality.” While cognitive theorists posited in the 1980s that the recursivity of levels of intentionality could be “in principle, infinite,” recent work suggests that “our cognitive architecture may discourage the proliferation of cultural narratives that involve ‘infinite’ levels of intentionality.”124 Experiments to test the errors that arise in reading embedded intentionality show that “people have marked difficulties processing stories above the fourth level.” And this grammar is even more restricted when it comes to multiple perspectives than to multiple events. That is, sequences of events (A led to B, which caused C) do not pose the same cognitive problems as levels of intentionality (A thinks that B who wants C). Perlman’s sentences rarely push beyond these limits to what we might call our “cognitive fluency” in translating multiple levels of embedment. The grammar of multiple levels of intentionality is, like everything else about the novel, very explicit, clear, and meaningful. Indeed, reading this literalized relational form in Perlman does not stymie but obviates the reader. We do not move through levels of embedded intentionality so much as we observe the novel doing so. When his girlfriend steps out of a shower, Simon watches his father watching her: The door wasn’t completely closed. We know you did not know this. Obviously it was an accident, not an invitation, but it enabled William to watch you there. And through the accident of the open door and the

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disposition of the light, the silhouettes of both of you were visible to Simon when his car pulled up. He saw you looking out of the window and he saw William watching you; everything was still, and no one hurried to see less.125

The angles of sight in this scene figure a modernist perspectivalism— what Empson called “seeing in the round”—as a version of speculation, drawing on both visual and financial facets of the idea.126 This perspectival speculation—an economically tinged version of Empson’s accounting—does not manifest in the reading experience, however. Only at the start of each chapter of this novel do we feel any uncertainty, usually about whose first-person perspective we are going to encounter next. And yet Perlman’s novel endlessly speculates about uncertainty. It is frequently self-descriptive, offering phrases such as these: “a kaleidoscope of raw extremes”; “a series of interlocking Möbius strips”; “the act of noticing is itself relative”; “The history . . . supports conflicting views.”127 In this sense, despite its complexity, the novel’s speculative language of multiplicity does not afford uncertainty; it shows and tells it. Perlman seems to want to embrace that ethos of perspectivalism that we saw Toni Morrison derive from modernism in Chapter 3: we get the sense that these seven characters are meant to sound different and have distinctive values. The prostitute is less educated than her friends, the poet and the shrink: “I had never known people who talked like this socially, as distinct from in a literature class. I didn’t know what a Freudian slip was back then, not exactly.” Yet, we also find Angelique saying words like “paralytic,” “hagiography,” and “supine” without flinching; she compares fear to “an imbecile unable to speak of the abomination that was itself.”128 Several reviewers note “the almost unrelieved uniformity of voice” across the novel.129 The characters all sound acute, self-aware, analytical; that is, they all sound like Simon, the novel’s advocacy for whom manifests in the dominance of his voice. “I see most things through your eyes,” says Angel. Even Simon is subject to Simon: “I have always spent too much time hearing my own voice. It was always the loudest and the strongest.”130 It is telling that Perlman’s speculative grammar often repeats the same verb—“knew that I knew”; “looked at me looking”—as if rendering differences commensurable. Just as it is unambiguous in its striving for ambiguity, the formal mechanisms of this novel continually reduce multiplicity to a structure of similitude.

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The Final Reckoning In one of the novel’s more amusing scenes, the financial analyst Dennis attends a corporate retreat where coworkers fall backward into the arms of their colleagues. Dennis injures his back when they fail to catch him. He sees a photograph of the incident: “Look at them waiting to catch you, all at different heights, different degrees of rigidity . . . No wonder it felt like you’d been punched in the back.”131 This visual image— differing heights and degrees—offers a glimpse of incommensurability, yet Dennis is enraged by it. This latter-day Seven Types of Ambiguity treats incommensurability not as an inevitable fact of the collective but as a violent abrogation of it. Given its commitment to equity, so to speak, it is unsurprising to note that its form and its language are rife with Benthamic calculation. Callow Joe notes that at a brothel, a man is just a “number” to a prostitute but later justifies his presence there by calculating his “needs.”132 Anna, his wife, follows this logic: “the loss of the lover I never really had was being palliated by the impending loss of the house I never really had, and vice versa. The total pain was proving to be less than the pain of either of them alone.”133 Alex remarks favorably on a psychological model that negotiates “a person’s deficit (or lower) needs and his growth (or higher) needs” and contends that Simon’s sexual conquests “had no currency for him that wasn’t immediately devalued upon attainment.”134 Even heroic Simon conveys his political beliefs with number games: Sometime in the nineteenth century it was recognized by certain thinkers that the state should, as a corollary of the social contract implicit in the aggregation of people into a society for their mutual benefit, take more responsibility for the economic well-being of its individual citizens. Good thinking! But what happens? The idea is taken to an extreme. . . . Total responsibility by the state for the economic well-being of individuals is reduced, not to partial responsibility, but to zero responsibility.135

In the same rant, Simon says, “there’s nothing more worthy of investment than children,” translating his ethics of empathy into economic lingo, albeit a socialist one.136 Financial logic is not just a symptom of an unwitting complicity with the logic of late capitalism but is used to trump economics with ethics. This assumes a commensurability between

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the two that gives the advantage to utilitarianism: empathy may win, but the competition itself is Benthamic. In the same way, any uncertainty about the moral standing of the characters in the novel concedes to the calculus of its form. Its multiplicity of viewpoint does not formally afford or resonate with the empathy it promotes in its content. Multiperspectivalism devolves into a reckoning—from rechnen, “to count up”—between characters, a calculation that culminates in the dealing out of just deserts. The most vulnerable narrator—jobless, poverty-stricken, obsessive, depressed Simon (who is told “you don’t count”)—achieves the greatest success. Angel, the whore with a heart of gold, wins a huge sum of money. Poor Dennis, the financial analyst who blames everyone for his troubles, ends up alone. Joe, the crude banker and usurper, loses his money and his wife and becomes a stereotype: a used car salesman. Simon’s unbelievable reunion with Anna at the end of the novel is described as “a marriage between [his] enduring obsession and her pragmatism.”137 The balance proposed in their marriage—like that between the Wilcoxes and Schlegels in Howards End—implies a reconciliation of incommensurable goods. The psychiatrist Alex commits a dignified suicide; as the novel closes, his daughter is dating the kidnapped boy, Sam, all grown up now; this suggests another union of disparate temperaments. It is remarkably easy to assign final values—positive or negative—to Perlman’s seven narrators: 1. Alex (+) 2. Joe (−) 3. Angel (+) 4. Dennis (−) 5. Simon (+) 6. Anna (−) 7. Rachael (+).138 That the valences alternate by chapter only drives the point home: the characters counter each other, suggesting a balance of good and bad, rather than a multiplicity of incommensurable goods. What Empson criticized in Richards’s theory of value—the impulses “all have equal values, positive or negative”—is precisely this susceptibility to eliding incommensurability. John Bayley once accused Empson of not being novelistic enough: “he has always seen ambiguity not as the kinds of complexity of motive and behavior which a novelist almost unconsciously understands and renders, but as an arrangement of counters simple in themselves, as in mah-jongg.”139 It seems, however, that novelistic complexities can just as easily end up as gamelike counters too. Suiting this impulse to “count up,” Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity makes talismanic use of numbers. The number seven appears in the novel often, as when Angel places bets at the casino with one of her cli-

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ents: “I know it’s going to be a seven.”140 This reader, at least, feels like Angel: I know it, too. When Angel says that her luck has run out, Dennis is disgusted: “I’ve been counting the cards and telling you what to do. It’s a system. . . . There’s no luck. . . . It’s science or it’s nothing.” Yet, as Angel notes, “the supposed ultimate constituents of reality are also only elaborate fictions.”141 After a lengthy explanation of card counting, the novel pits Angel’s appeal to chance against Dennis’s utilitarianism: she bets on red at roulette and wins. But when they leave the casino, they get into a car accident. To insist upon chance quashes it. Simon’s catching sight of his ex-girlfriend may well be “an incredible coincidence”; the fact that Angel is sleeping with three of the other narrators feels opportunistic.142 Too much coincidence—like too unambiguous an “ambiguity”— begs the question. Perlman’s overdetermined means and ends reduce that tension between the contingent and the purposive in Empson’s method (“all nonsense or very startling and new”) and in Jackson’s careful placement of proper nouns.143 The same dearth of chance pertains to Perlman’s heavy-handed literary allusions, which encourage exactly that nominal “allusion-counting” Bloom warned against. Perlman’s novel aspires to be a grand work of social realism like John Dos Passos’s USA or E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime; it cites both. Perlman’s allusions to Empson gesture toward but do not afford any ambiguity for the reader: “there were more important ambiguities than the ambiguity of poetic language that Empson talked about. There’s the ambiguity of human relationships, for instance. A relationship between two people, just like a sequence of words, is ambiguous if it is open to different interpretations.”144 Simon cites facts about Empson’s life and carries a copy of Seven Types of Ambiguity with him. In a verbal joust, he defines five types off the top of his head, evincing a better recall than even Empson trusted his readers to master. Loaning Empson’s name to Simon’s dog is likely a reference to a chapter about “Timon’s Dog” in The Structure of Complex Words. This allusion adopts the semanto-economic forces I’ve described: a purposive analogy (metaphoric exchange value); an orthographic coincidence (Simon/Timon) that invokes Empson by association (metonymic symbolic value); and an object Simon carries (indexical use value). But these values all adduce to the same value: a notional “ambiguity.” Unlike Jackson’s subtle deployment of “Empson” as a circulating, uncertainly valuable loaded word, Perlman’s allusions—whether literal, coincidental, or meaningful—all get tossed onto a pile of Empsonia.

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To conclude my own interreading of some versions of Seven Types of Ambiguity, let me recap the respective modes of accounting I have juxtaposed. In Empson’s 1930 text, the collision of values and meanings sparks theories and relations, affording an inventive accounting for conflict, the novelty and fecundity of which overwhelms the possibility of a unified theory or final calculation. If Empson creates “high-fever fireworks” out of values, Jackson’s story sets them at odds, articulating an unadorned juxtapositional account of their incommensurability, allowing the lit fuse of unanswerable questions to sparkle.145 Perlman subsumes Empson’s fireworks—douses them with explanation—and makes them into an idea about ambiguity. These differences are discernible in how these authors represent children. Empson upholds the child as a Head Calculator with a naive but bracing sense of realism and equality. Perlman reduces the child to a stereotype: the poetic teacher argues for the importance of “investment in children” and sees his kidnapping of a child as a preservation of innocence. Jackson’s stories expose the co-presence of cruelty and clarity in the young, who enjoy descriptions of torture or death but often deceive and manipulate prejudiced adults.146 It is apt that “The Lottery” begins with the children gathering stones. In sum, these authors’ respective will toward calculation—Empson’s ambivalence, Jackson’s reticence, and Perlman’s insistence—distinguishes their relationships to multiplicity and to the utility of utilitarianism. The very fact of their intertextuality, however, implies a common measure in Empson, who indeed serves as a kind of mean between Jackson and Perlman and whose inventions offer a compelling yet troubling mode of accounting, teetering on the precipices between genius and absurdity, optimism and naïveté. This ambivalence is legible in the very origins of Seven Types of Ambiguity. In the Empson archive at Harvard’s Houghton Library, a scrap of paper dated 1929—the year he was kicked out of Cambridge—lists “the seven classes of ambiguity.” The types look like they have sprung fully formed onto the page, written at a slight slant in a rush of inspiration. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the list, but their order is the same as in the book: “a progression of logical disorder.” On the other side of the sheet are some random sketches: a hanging man, a scowling face, three grids of a kind of game, an arrow, and a face with a man’s face for its eye.147 To my eye, these doodles evince the troubling side of accounting: the number games, the elision of dimensions, and the violence that lurks in

Accounting

utilitarianism. Given the possibility of incommensurability, a mode of accounting for multiplicity is always a kind of violence. It makes us “force . . . interpretation” upon an uncertainty that we might articulate better with the forked tongue of “self-division.”148 At the same time, this mode of uncertainty holds the spirit of practical benevolence that many admire in Empson. The promise of accounting for our stark incommensurabilities—of pragmatically imagining us all to be equal, though we never will be—seems to offer us both the bright and darker impulses of a child at play.

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III REPETITION

Repetition is a necessary feature of narrative. A repeated name, for example, permits us to track a single character across a novel. Repetition’s operation of similitude urges consistency over time, emphasizing the reality of things and of persons, as when we speak of habits, customs, conventions. While some repetition is necessary for narrative stability, it can also afford uncertainty because every iteration can seem to bear more—or different—meaning in its new context. William Empson describes the effect of Sidney’s Arcadia: “in tracing their lovelorn pastoral tedium through thirteen repetitions, with something of the aimless multitudinousness of the sea on a rock, we seem to extract all the meaning possible from these notions”; the “latent implications” of the poem’s words, he says, “are brought out by the repetitions.”1 If we consider other phenomena associated with repetition—déjà vu, compulsion, the uncanny, synchronicity, simulacra—we see that its affordance for difference often goes beyond the extraction of “all the meaning possible.” Repetition, taken to an extreme, can actually trouble our sense of reality. In this sense, repetition works against itself, undoes itself as it intensifies. This is especially true for narrative, which is assumed to move from beginning to end. When repetition becomes a strong narrative feature, it begins to destabilize meaning, event, and temporal continuity. As a story accumulates conjunctions (“and . . . and”) and recursions (“again”), readers start to wonder whether events have taken place at all, and their ability to trace a plot trajectory falters. Uncertainty grows as repetition disturbs the originality, integrity, and continuity of objects, persons, and events. As Empson suggests, repetition is as old as rhyme, and literary history offers countless examples of its uses. The gothic invokes uncanny forms 191

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of repetition, with its classic tropes of mirrors and the doppelgänger. In modernism, Gertrude Stein’s poetry manipulates repetition at the linguistic level to convey both the rhythms of quotidian speech and what linguists call semantic saturation or semantic satiation: the way a word will come to seem meaningless if it is repeated enough times. Samuel Beckett’s work is a kind of apogee of the correlation between repetition and uncertainty at the narrative level: characters perform the same actions over and again until readers lose the sense that time is passing. As Sianne Ngai notes, this kind of modernist repetition tends toward the horizontal, invokes textural agglutination and flaccidity, and has a proclivity for debris and heaps. Traces of modernism remain in the bitty, gritty imagery and labyrinthine plots of the French nouveau roman of the 1950s and 1960s. Writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet amplify the enumerative, repetitive nature of physical description, blurring the line between objectivity (the literal texture of things) and subjectivity (the narrowed lens of human perception). Postmodernist forms of repetition are often figured by shinier surface phenomena. Warhol paintings, Disneyland, advertising slogans and images, the Twin Towers: these are all examples that Jean Baudrillard presents for his revision of Plato’s idea of simulacra.2 Michael Epstein suggests that twenty-first-century artworks often come to “self-expression in the form of repetition,” and Raoul Eshelman notes that recent art is enamored with repetition as a form of improvement.3 The contemporary iterative approach toward perfection is coeval with the machinations of capitalism, industry, and the workday. Science fiction’s interest in time travel and its incorporation of the deathless repetition of video games promotes both this progressive teleology and its dystopian underside—we want to repeat, we are doomed to repeat. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, in “The Paradoxical Status of Repetition,” collates three prominent features of repetition that characterize twentieth-century theory and philosophy: Paradox 1: Repetition is present everywhere and nowhere. Paradox 2: Constructive repetition emphasizes difference, destructive repetition emphasizes sameness. Paradox 3: The first time is already a repetition, and repetition is the very first time.4

Repetition

These three paradoxes each suggest that repetition entails a complex relation between sameness and difference, an idea that has attracted practitioners of deconstruction and poststructuralism. Sameness is the very ground of difference for theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, who argues that the etymology of iteration is iter, or “other.”5 Many theorists contend that repetition’s affordances vary depending on whether it emphasizes sameness or difference. This dichotomy—oft denoted as Platonic versus Nietzchean repetition—structures repetition’s aesthetic and affective qualities.6 On the one hand, the happier, “constructive” version of repetition is keyed to difference, buoyed by the optimistic teleology of improvement over time, by the positive valence of repetition as habit rather than as symptom, and by the comforting rhythms of sport and play. Harold Ramis’s popular 1993 film Groundhog Day is a great example of this upbeat version of repetition. On the other hand, the darker, “destructive” version of repetition—as in Christopher Nolan’s 2000 film Memento, for instance—is rife with the threats of too much similitude: automatism (as in Henri Bergson’s “mechanical encrusted upon the living”), staticity, repression, and blindness.7 Yet these versions of repetition may be two sides of the same coin, as Milan Kundera implies in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”8 While repetition’s most common affective features—boredom, enthrallment, ecstatic joy—have wildly different connotations when it comes to pleasure and intensity, they all tend toward a dissolution of the boundaries and agency of the ethical subject. Repetition bespeaks a disintegration of selfhood in both an ontological and an ethical sense. This could be considered positive if we take “unselfing,” in Iris Murdoch’s terms, to be an ethically productive activity that promotes “selflessness,” so to speak.9 But repetition also carries the risk of selfishness and self-blindness, as suggested by its connotation of compulsion, mindlessness, and delusion. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of repressed memory (“the patient . . . reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it”) depicts a subject that repeatedly acts out, because he cannot discern or heal, an internal schism.10 My next two chapters look at novels that use repetition to trouble what we might call the ethics of the self. The first-person narrators of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005)—white, male, wealthy, murderous—both exhibit a sociopathic

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solipsism that manifests in repetitive action and language. American Psycho’s repetitions, alternating between banal “consumerese” and extreme violence, promote “semantic saturation” at various scales. Objects, characters, and events are emptied of meaning, motivation, and consequence, a diegetic vacuum that suits the novel’s blank narration, airhead tone, asinine humor, and vacuous pornography. American Psycho’s rhythm of boredom and shock, however, infuses this mode of vacuity with dread and desire. This mode of uncertainty activates readers’ visceral response to violence qua violence, affording an ethics of reflexion that I connect to Bernard Williams’s theory of “stark fictions” and Barbara Johnson’s “ethics of using people.”11 Unlike American Psycho’s rhythm of boredom and shock, Remainder’s repetitions build progressively toward a horrific nirvana. Repetition crescendos as the novel proceeds, pulling the reader into a quasi-hypnotic state intensified by the practice of metareading—that is, reading with an awareness of reading. As every element of the text repeats, Remainder takes on a radical self-consistency: the novel repeats, becomes aware of its repetitions, and then proceeds to repeat its self-awareness. As Remainder increasingly coincides with itself, this extreme repetition undoes temporal sequence, producing an effect of bits of time in thronging suspension. Using Carl Jung’s idiosyncratic theory of repetition, I describe this mode as synchronicity, a mesmeric, tingling, dilatory reading experience.12 The novel draws us into the murderous narrator’s orbit this way, threatening to absorb us into a troublingly static enthrallment. Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of the syncope (a moment in which “the same undecides itself” through laughter), however, offers a potential escape hatch for the reader from this dangerous ethical imprisonment.13

5 VA C U I T Y

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991)

The Impressionism Gallery In his 1976 essay, “Interpreting the Variorum,” Stanley Fish observes that when “a host of commentators . . . are lined up on either side of an interpretive crux,” we might ask: “what if that controversy is itself regarded as evidence, not of an ambiguity that must be removed, but of an ambiguity that readers have always experienced?”1 In this chapter, I consider American Psycho’s uncertainty through the scandalized and polarized views on the novel expressed by critics, reviewers, and lay readers. This is not a new tack: it is almost a prerequisite to preface any critical argument about American Psycho with an account of the melodramatic circumstances of its publication and early reception. Simon and Schuster accepted Bret Easton Ellis’s manuscript, gave the author an advance, advertised and announced the forthcoming book, and mailed out a press packet for a publicity tour. But when excerpts from prepublication proofs were published in Time and Spy magazines in 1990, the publisher withdrew the offer of publication, forfeiting a $300,000 advance. Random House stepped in and issued American Psycho the following year.2 The first reactions to the novel came from outside the academy. Roger Rosenblatt wrote a New York Times review hyperbolically entitled “Snuff This Book!” There was a bemused, somewhat harsh assessment from Norman Mailer, who perhaps felt he had been deposed as the reigning bad boy of American literature. The culture police were quick on the draw with death threats, denunciations, and demonstrations.3 The L.A. Chapter of the National Organization of Women called for a boycott and created a hotline with a recording of a woman reading some of the novel’s most violent passages. The New 195

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Republic quietly opined that the phone number was “sure to fall into the wrong lonely hands.”4 It is fair to say that the initial response to the novel sought to establish that its protagonist, yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman, is a malevolent human being, the embodiment of evil.5 This reactionary take on American Psycho was, in essence, a literal-minded reading of its content. Over the course of 400 pages, the first-person narrator of the novel confesses to the horrific murders of homeless men, dogs, prostitutes, an exgirlfriend, and a work colleague named Paul Owen. Patrick’s most garish acts of violence are reserved for women, most of whom he seduces into having consensual or transactional sex with him before attacking. The anatomically detailed descriptions of these misogynistic murders are what prompted readers to judge not just Bateman’s character but Ellis’s too. Even early reviews of the novel noted some inconsistencies and hitches in the narration, however. This created the slightest gap between Ellis and Bateman, enough of a gap to allow terms like unreliability, satire, and allegory into the discussion.6 The more recent critical response to American Psycho—coming from inside the academy and justified by the novel’s newly minted status as a “classic”—has pushed this argument further.7 The Guardian Weekly’s online Book Section dryly describes this turn in the novel’s reception as “the interesting critical proposition that the antihero doesn’t actually rape and mutilate, he merely thinks about it.”8 The contention that the novel is in part or wholly “a long, increasingly insane rant, a malign chimera conjured by the disturbed mind of Patrick Bateman” is the first step toward rehabilitating it from its shrill decriers.9 If Bateman’s murders are hallucinations, like the ATM machine that talks to him or the park bench that stalks him, then we might reassess the ethical judgments pronounced upon character and book. Critics thus offer an insanity plea for Bateman: if his murders are not real, this explains why Bateman is never caught and why, in his own words, his confession has “meant nothing.”10 These critics wish to make the violence in the novel—its horrific ethical disturbance—as fictive as possible, to the end of emphasizing its rhetorical or satirical function over its signifying or promotional one. They contextualize Ellis’s violent language in a canon including Dante, Sade, and postmodern theorists of violence. Bateman is obviously a construct in a fictional world, a fact that Ellis immediately calls attention to in the epigraph he takes from Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Under-

Vacuity

ground: “Both the author of these Notes and the Notes themselves are, of course, fictional.” Bateman is a highly textual creature. His name puns on Hitchcock’s Norman Bates. He appears in one earlier and two subsequent Ellis novels.11 Characters from Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York, and Oliver Stone’s Wall Street make cameos in American Psycho.12 Bateman models his speech on the language of fashion, business, and music reviews. He models his behavior on visual simulacra like pornographic and snuff films. His apartment, were it to exist, would be in the impressionism gallery of the Met.13 Critic Elizabeth Young concludes: “Patrick is a cipher; a sign in language and it is in language that he disintegrates, slips out of our grasp. . . . He is a textual impossibility, written out, elided until there is no ‘Patrick’ other than the sign or signifier.”14 By the end of the novel, according to Naomi Mandel, he has “become pure text.”15 Mark Storey says: “Ellis gives us a central identity created by external forces, a fictional world encased in the language of the society that created it and told through the voice of a man who in real terms is not actually there.”16 In this view, Patrick is not a human subject but a collocation of discourses: of masculinity, the gothic, consumerism, and so on. As the product of external forces, he is devoid of agency and thus cannot really be evil; we ought to equivocate about or at least reevaluate our ethical criteria in judging him. If Patrick Bateman does not exist, neither do his murders. Somehow in the rebuttal of the reactionary argument against Bateman, critics have gone from pleading his insanity to pleading his nonexistence. We are left with two odd argumentative poles: Bateman is evil or . . . Bateman doesn’t exist. As is often true in academic debates, these two arguments do not function on the same level, nor do they actually counter each other. That Bateman is evil does not make him more real; that he is not real does not make him less evil. Nonexistence is a centuriesold definition of evil; Young notes that “As ‘nothing’ Patrick is dangerous.”17 Despite the contradiction in their premises, these two arguments are both accurate. They are also rather obvious. Take this passage, for example: There is an idea of Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and

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maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. My self is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. (376–377)

This quotation is the fulcrum around which the “Bateman does not exist” argument often turns, although most scholars elide everything after the italicized paradox that proves their point so succinctly. The grammatically uncertain sentence “I simply am not there” is meant, like Odysseus’s “I am Nohbdy,” to be a conundrum, an ontological impossibility: a speaking “I” necessarily is somewhere.18 Two casual clauses in this passage, however, belie Bateman’s nonexistence: “maybe you can sense our lifestyles are probably comparable” and “(probably at Harvard).” These two phrases are quintessential Batemania: flavored with rhetorical ambivalence, phrased in deadpan allusive consumer babble, and out of place in the pseudo-existentialist discourse. While the passage may seem like a significant moment, a key, these two phrases leaven the passage’s weightiness. The tone shifts and the satire gains traction when Bateman drops these tedious tidbits in the middle of his grandiose philosophizing. While recent critics insist on Ellis’s parodic tone, they ignore that tone in those passages, like this one, that they use to support their arguments. Given at least a century’s worth of critical attunement to unreliable narration, not to mention pervasive (post)modernist notions about the instability of the self, it is puzzling that there would even be a debate about the ontology of this character. Why did readers believe in Bateman’s existence enough to wish to condemn Ellis’s book outright? Why didn’t they realize that the discrepancies in the novel were signs, pointing to a larger, flashing sign reading “slow. unreliable narrator at work,” as Mim Udovitch puts it in a Village Voice review with the marvelous title “Intentional Phalluses”?19 Then again, why didn’t Ellis’s defenders stop at “the author is a satirist”? Or even, for that matter, at “the protagonist is delusional”? There is an eeriness to the rapidity with which Bateman’s unreliability dissolves into a disappearing act that permits the subsequent exculpation, erasure, or aestheticization of his violence. Take Julian Murphet’s reading of one of Bateman’s murders: “Bateman is not so much murdering him, as he is getting good syntactical

Vacuity

mileage out of Owen’s highly imaginative, attentive destruction.”20 Is Bateman getting syntactical mileage or is Ellis?21 It is one thing to say that Bateman is just a character in a novel; it’s another to claim that murder is a matter of syntax. Indeed, there are manifest difficulties in making the argument for Bateman’s nonexistence stick. As Mandel notes, the novel “catapults . . . critics into the paradoxical situation of maintaining the violence’s reality while denying its truth.”22 We find a symptomatic equivocation about Bateman’s agency: it is difficult to talk sensibly about a nonsubject, especially when the text is written from his perspective and in his voice.23 What results is a blank space limned by whatever discourse the critic has decided that the cipher or sign of “Bateman” represents, be it consumerism, banality, or an all-pervasive postmodern dread. At stake in the debate over Patrick’s existence is his capacity to affect others within and outside the novel. Is he aberrant (an ontological problem) or is he abhorrent (a moral one)? When “representation is construed as advocacy, and figuration is construed as performativity,” as Carla Freccero points out, uncertainty about Patrick’s existence is more than just an epistemological puzzle; it’s a problem for ethics.24 If he is disturbed rather than evil, if he is the passive recipient of psychic injury— usually postulated as family or social trauma—he is less blameworthy. His lack of agency, translated as a lack of selfhood, makes him incapable of harming other characters or the reader. But if the murderer does exist, he might more readily infiltrate the reader: the logic guiding these arguments is one of contagion. As Mandel notes, “Much of the publication scandal surrounding American Psycho was informed by the assumption that the novel itself is capable of perpetrating, or facilitating the perpetration of, violence.”25 The reality of Bateman’s actions becomes a specious index of their capacity to be realized outside the novel. Marco Abel argues that among the effects of the reactionary reviews, “one of the most remarkable was to have established the conditions of possibility for future responses to Ellis’s American Psycho.”26 Only such extreme initial responses to the novel could compel later critics to make counterclaims, apparently without irony, like this: “The critical realization: there is no violence in American Psycho. To be fair, nothing not violent occurs either.”27 Common to both the outraged reviewers and the defensive critics is a lack of real engagement with the violent scenes Ellis conjures, be they hyperfictional fantasies or not. Young asks: “What

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difference does it make whether we believe Patrick committed some, any, or all of the murders, or not? We still have to read all the detailed descriptions of the killings.”28 The hysterical logic of the debate overlooks two self-evident facts: first, evil actions within a novel are always just words; and second, mere words still have effects on readers.

A Rolls Is a Rolls Is a Rolls Only by examining how words structure the reading experience over time can we do justice to the fact that Ellis’s novel exists, profoundly, even if his narrator does not. American Psycho’s uncertain form transforms the effect of its violence; indeed, I would argue that it structures the terms of the critical debate just outlined. The deep rift in American Psycho’s reception is due not to its extreme violence (Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian was not banned; Toni Morrison’s Beloved was not censored) but rather to our inability to locate and inhabit a moral position on it. This is a question of tone: it is more akin to the uncertainty that dictated the scandal surrounding Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita or Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary before it. In this sense, we can describe the critical debate as an uncertainty structured by American Psycho’s form.29 James R. Giles calls Patrick’s existence an “ambiguity”: The essential ambiguity of Bateman’s murders leaves open at least three possible readings: all of the murders (including the final shootout with the police) actually occur; Bateman killed some limited number of people and has fantasized the rest in an obsession to become the number one serial killer ever . . . ; or all of the murders are sheer fantasy. The implausibility and over-the-top detail in the last third of the novel make the first alternate unlikely, but the text makes it impossible to choose between the second and the third.30

The uncertainty about Bateman as a perpetrator of murder does arise in part from what Giles here calls the novel’s “implausibility” and “overthe-top detail.” But I will argue that our experience of American Psycho’s (relatively speaking) unexceptional violence is molded by a deft manipulation of repetition. Two specific effects of repetition—semantic generation and semantic satiation—heighten our uncertainty about the character’s ontology and about his actions.

Vacuity

Bateman’s very being comes from repetition. Repeated habits (watching The Patty Winters Show, performing exercises, fittingly enough, in “reps”), repeated locations (the gym, the video store, restaurants), repeated actions (shopping, eating, sex, murder), and repeated verbal tics (“probably,” “I have to return some video tapes”) all imply a consistent self over time. Bateman’s mind-numbingly repetitive drivel is precisely what makes him, in his own words, a “noncontingent human being.” Habit builds character, so to speak. What John Mullan calls “the repetition of characters” across Ellis’s oeuvre makes them somehow seem more real: they resurrect in each text. The particularly citational quality to Bateman (he is easy to imitate, his lines are memorable, his trappings and actions predictable) has made him a reliable pop culture icon, subject to a plethora of spin-offs and imitations. Bateman’s consistency accords with the regularity of the text, which has been described as “perversely unified” and “beautifully controlled.”31 The novel is structurally repetitive: each chapter describes a scene, every scene has at least one corollary scene, and there are leitmotifs in every chapter (a reference to Les Misérables and a description of Bateman’s outfit that day, for example). Repeated phrases, small waves in an otherwise flat sea of language, emerge intermittently within the dialogue: “Did you know that cavemen got more fiber than we do?”; “Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone”; “I’m filled with a nameless dread.” This produces what in linguistics is called the power of semantic generation: repetition reinforces the reality of what is described. Yet repetition is also how Ellis undermines the reality of Bateman’s existence and reinforces the discursive and simulated qualities to his world. This hollowing out of reality through repetition takes place through semantic satiation: the phenomenon in which a repeated word starts to sound unreal or meaningless. American Psycho enacts this with a syntactic proclivity for lists and heightens it with tedious diction. Bateman says of his girlfriend Evelyn, “her dialogue overlaps her own dialogue,” and his reply to a plaintive “I’m hungry” from a homeless man is “I know that, I know that . . . Jeez, you’re like a broken record” (123, 130). The repetitious consumer-speak in the novel renders objects less real, despite a seeming investment in materiality. While American Psycho is brimming with objects, the brand names and fashion labels that name them in fact undermine the reader’s capacity to see them: Ellis notes that if we were actually to visualize the characters’ outfits, they would look absurd. Proper nouns like Dolce & Gabbana, Prada, and

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Valentino—thrice removed from the actual people or things they name— signify only in terms of sound, rhythm, and (if you’re in the know) reputation. Instead of functioning as an index of the real, these words come to invoke a feeling of the surreal.32 This is true for the inane redundancy of Bateman’s actions as well: the repetition of all events, even his murders, ensures that they take place without consequence, notice, or memorial: “I’m sweating, déjà vu, but why? Have I met these elves somewhere? Forget about it” (184). The sheer number of murders that he claims to have committed renders them less than probable: “I leave a message, admitting everything, leaving nothing out, thirty, forty, a hundred murders” (352). The fact that he makes this confession over the phone, that it is recorded on an answering machine, and that it is taken as a joke all undermine its veracity. As many critics have noted, Ellis’s writing resonates with Jean Baudrillard’s idea of simulation as “a process which reabsorbs every original being and introduces a series of identical beings.”33 American Psycho often uses filmic language (“as in a movie,” “jump cut,” “smash cut”) and the language of simulacra to instill a thinness and flatness to its diegetic reality. Bateman asks “if anyone has heard about two mutilated prostitutes found in Paul Owen’s apartment. But like in some movie, no one has heard anything, has any idea what I’m talking about” (367). When he returns to the scene of this crime, a realtor showing the eerily clean apartment gives him a look both familiar and filmic: “I’ve seen this look on someone’s face before. Was it in a club? A victim’s expression? Had it appeared on a movie screen recently?” (369). Even his most violent acts cannot escape simulacra: “in an attempt to understand these girls I’m filming their deaths” (304). This generic word “girls” exemplifies Ellis’s use of a “repetition without an original” to depict his characters. Most of the chapters describing Bateman’s murders are simply entitled “Girls,” and the fungibility of the women he kills has even led critics to mislabel them.34 The male characters are equally indistinguishable: the descriptions of their jobs, ages, clothing, tans, girlfriends, misogyny, racism, and cruelty to the homeless are all fungible. There are even hints that Bateman isn’t the only psycho: he sees a man writing “Kill All Yuppies” above a urinal with a Mont Blanc pen (374); in the video store, he bumps into a man holding Friday the 13th: Part 7 and a documentary on abortions (112); and he hears about “a young stockbroker . . . recently arrested and charged with murdering a young Chicano girl and performing voodoo rituals with,

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well, various body parts” (275). Because he is so generic, there is a running joke that Bateman is often mistaken for other men: “everyone is interchangeable anyway” (379). Ellis dissolves identity further by warping a form of repetition that usually stabilizes narrative: the pronoun. For the first five pages of American Psycho, the reader is led to believe that the novel is in the third person, possibly focalized through Timothy Price, whose monologue dominates the opening scene. Bateman first appears at a double remove, as a secondperson pronoun in a quotation, when Price says, “everybody hates their job, I hate my job, you’ve told me you hate yours” (3). This deceptive first chapter, “April Fools,” forms a narrative chiasmus with a later one, “Chase, Manhattan,” in which Bateman suddenly begins to refer to himself in the third person: “he staggers out of the cab, leaning against it, a nerve-wracking silence follows, ‘nice going, Bateman,’ he mutters” (349). As in its gothic precursor, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the pronoun confusion in American Psycho reinforces a disintegration of personhood.35 It renders uncanny the deictic pronouns like “I,” “he,” and “she” that usually index consistency: a basic linguistic redundancy is made strange. The novel thus heightens uncertainty by taking advantage of repetition’s affordances for both semantic generation and semantic saturation at various levels: narrative (character, event), style (general redundancy, specific refrains), and language (brand names, pronouns). In sum, repetition both establishes and bleeds the palpability from Bateman’s world. While the objects, characters, and events of the novel are brought into existence through repetition, the semantic saturation that results over time makes them seem unreal and meaningless. In an interview, Ellis aptly describes these formal choices as reflective: “I was writing about a society in which the surface became the only thing. Everything was surface—food, clothes—that is what defined people. So I wrote a book that is all surface action; no narrative, no characters to latch onto, flat, endlessly repetitive.”36 The idea that the prose is all “surface” emerges in Bateman’s words as well: “surface, surface, surface, a Rolls is a Rolls is a Rolls” (342). The oblique allusion to Gertrude Stein’s “a rose is a rose is a rose” invokes a literary heritage of repetition, but the shift from the poetic object par excellence to an expensive car brand marks Ellis’s divergence from modernism. The Rolls is an object of Bateman’s postmodern world: metonymically named for its makers, metaphorically akin to the motion of

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a wheel, symbolically valuable as an allusion and as a brand name. The punning phrase seems self-referential, too: reading this line, like reading all of American Psycho’s repetitions, is to roll along the surface of a language stripped of semantic substance. The repetition of “Rolls” both twists the tongue and sucks meaning from the word. I want to consider how these and other affective and aesthetic qualities of repetition (banality, blankness, vacancy) dictate the mode of uncertainty we experience in reading the novel. I argue that American Psycho’s repetitions burnish the novel’s surfaces even as they empty its events of depth, affording a hollow but intense mode of uncertainty I call vacuity.

A Coat of Arms The association of banality with evil is a crucial insight of Hannah Arendt’s groundbreaking work Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). Arendt aligns Adolf Eichmann’s efficient organization of the slaughter of Jews during the Holocaust with his “empty” language: The judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was “empty talk”—except that they thought the emptiness was feigned and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected to an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.37

Arendt grounds the “sheer thoughtlessness” of this “buffoon” in his repetitions, suggesting that “officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.”38 Arendt here relies on an idea about language and ethics that still holds sway in ethical criticism: as Alice Crary puts it, “learning to speak is inseparable from the development of an—individual—moral outlook.”39 Following this model, Arendt’s last line links linguistic inability to absence of thought to ethical incapacity in rapid transitive succession.

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Patrick Bateman would suit Arendt’s linguistic and moral assessment of Eichmann exactly, were it not for one characteristic tic: She inhales on the cigarette, then blows out. “So what do you do?” . . . “I’m into, oh, murders and executions mostly. It depends.” I shrug. “Do you like it?” she asks, unfazed. “Um . . . It depends. Why?” I take a bite of sorbet. “Well, most guys I know who work in mergers and acquisitions don’t really like it.” (205–206)

This scene presents in miniature several of American Psycho’s repeated motifs: Bateman fluctuates between social enthusiasm and apathy; he has blasé conversations that go nowhere; he confesses his murderous crimes to no avail. As in Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann, Bateman and his friends speak in consumerese and are brimming with received opinion. I want to note, however, Bateman’s horrific pun (in both senses), one that essentially defines the two halves of his existence: “murders and executions”/“mergers and acquisitions.” Murphet asserts that Ellis’s prose eschews “simile, metaphor, symbol and allegory. . . . [R]ather, everything is immediate, particular, and denied any sense of connection with anything else.”40 But American Psycho occasionally presents what Ellis calls the juxtaposition of “absurd triviality and extreme violence” through this most banal of literary devices: the pun. I am interested in whether we can distinguish the banality of Eichmann’s “self-invented clichés” from the banality of Bateman’s puns. It is true that puns often rely on clichés: the aural repetition of familiar language is what prompts us to recognize the signifying tweak on, say, “mergers and acquisitions.” But puns can be cleverer than the clichés they invoke. Though we may attribute the best puns in American Psycho to Ellis, Patrick seems to be aware of the deft ones he makes in dialogue, too. This suggests, contra Arendt, that banality’s link to debased ethics is not necessarily contingent on a lack of thought. The amusing puns in American Psycho in fact continually ride the line between motivated meaningfulness and trivial drivel. Bateman works for Pierce & Pierce, which cuts both ways as a murderer’s place of business; there are jokes about whether a restaurant called “Bice” sounds like “Bitch”; and “Price? . . . You’re priceless” is a refrain that accrues irony when a character named Price disappears. In one of my favorites, someone calls his colleague a “pâté animal” (398). This knowingness seems to gainsay Arendt’s emphasis on Eichmann’s thoughtlessness.

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These puns often rely on the masculinist discursive world of Wall Street, in which sexual violence signifies as humor. Bateman’s colleagues interpret his literal descriptions of violent past deeds and present desires as phallocentric and misogynist jokes: “We all know about your lead pipe, Bateman. . . . Stop bragging” (325). Conversely, they casually fling epithets at Bateman, not realizing how accurate they are: “Patrick, you devil!” “You’re a madman, Bateman . . . A total animal” (206, 384). Bateman orders a “decapitated” coffee, then corrects himself: “I mean . . . decaffeinated” (372). His cameo in Ellis’s 1998 Glamorama consists of two gloriously dark puns. Bateman tells a couple that he likes to “keep— abreast” and that he has “a coat of arms”; the gruesome literal meaning of neither pun registers with his two interlocutors, but one offers an unintentional one in her reply: “Spare me.”41 The detailed confession of rape and murder that Bateman leaves on the answering machine of Harold Carnes (punning surname no doubt intended) is perceived as a joke. The “mass murderer” sign Bateman wears on Halloween makes him a kind of walking pun: his costume is splattered with a mix of real and fake blood. Of course, no one gets it. Only Bateman and the reader are privy to these jokes. Ellis insists that readers get the puns by dissecting them for us. So while puns usually merge two meanings in one piece of language, Ellis often presents them separated in dialogue: “decapitated”/“decaffeinated”; “Luis is a despicable twit”/“Is it a receptacle tip?”; “murders and executions”/“mergers and acquisitions.” In the “coat of arms” sequence in Glamorama, Ellis repeats the exact same words, as if to make the reader look twice; the effect is to convey one meaning in the first instance, another in the next. Ellis’s puns loop more repetition into novelistic conversations, which already have the redundancy of transcription. Conversely, repetition affirms that the puns are purposefully, not accidentally, amusing. Ellis’s small-scale repetitions make his puns hard to miss, and they thus provide comic, even hermeneutic, relief to the reader. We might groan or shiver to imagine a literal coat of arms, but distilled in a pun like this is an idea about violence (prestige and money are steeped in power and “arms”). A good pun, Catherine Bates notes, “poses no problems of recognition and is easily understood, obediently yielding up two stable and identifiable signifieds which can be seen to combine in a way that is fully relevant to the context. It suggests that the random associations which language yields are not arbitrary but purposeful and motivated. The ‘best’ puns are those deemed to be the most

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pointed.”42 Bates herself puns here on the likely etymology of “pun” in the Latin word punctum (point). This pointedness connotes the perpetrated violence in puns, which can have a punch line, be painful, or make us groan. The obverse of Arendt’s banality of evil is this evil of banality, its felt imposition on the reader. Murphet argues that “most of American Psycho is a mind-numbing exercise in satirized banality, whose latent violence it was the function of the violent scenes to allegorize.”43 Ellis’s puns tend toward the hostility and transgression that Freud claimed “tendentious” humor released, allowing the reader a kind of catharsis.44 The banal pun in American Psycho makes its point, so to speak. Its redundancy is short-lived, it allows a modicum of readerly agency, and it lifts the prose out of its alternation of blandness and gore, connecting the two briefly, reassuring us that satire is at work. We roll our eyes at it, or we look beyond it to the allegory it connotes; in either case, we briefly lose sight of the violence itself. Mullan notes the prevalence in the novel of gags that, like Ellis’s puns, also rely on its use of repetition: “running jokes are about replication—the satirical reduction of narration to a crazed pattern.”45 Mary Harron’s filmic adaptation of American Psycho sharpens this satirical edge, rendering the violence into a kind of slapstick comedic routine.46 A similar tonal shift will no doubt emerge in American Psycho the musical, which is currently in development (sample song title: “Huey Lewis and the Bruise”).47

A Nameless Dread While Ellis’s repetitious gags and puns might allow a brief respite of laughter or interpretation, American Psycho’s larger-scale repetitions of consumerism and violence threaten to overwhelm—even blank out— our readerly faculties. The blankness of American Psycho has been a major topic of critical discourse ever since the critics Elizabeth Young and Graham Cavaney used the novel as a key example of “Blank Generation” fiction in their 1992 essay collection, Shopping in Space. This blankness grounds argumentative claims both for those critics who find American Psycho’s violence abhorrent and for those who are interested in its satirical or phenomenological effects. Young’s analysis places it in the context of Ellis’s other novels, including the aptly titled Less Than Zero, to argue for the author’s “expressed belief that only the most extreme and disruptive experiences can penetrate

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the blank vacuity of his generation.”48 Daniel Mudie Cunningham argues that Bateman’s blankness is racially specific: “Whiteness is thus presented as serial self-sameness and ensures Bateman’s perpetual erasure and invisibility.”49 Norman Mailer’s early review finds the novel’s blank tone troubling: Since we are going to have a monstrous book with a monstrous thesis, the author must rise to the occasion by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him. We pay a terrible price for reading about intimate violence—our fears are stirred, and buried savageries we do not wish to meet again in ourselves stir uneasily in the tombs to which we have consigned them. We cannot go out on such a trip unless we believe we will end up knowing more about extreme acts of violence, know a little more, that is, of the real inner life of the murderer.50

Mailer acutely evokes the fears and buried savagery the novel stirs, but he betrays his predilection for a species of intellectual comfort when he expresses a preference for discernible evil over blank violence.51 James Brusseau says that the novel’s phenomenological blankness deletes its violence: “Erased by our weariness and boredom with the same thing again and again, the words diffuse from the paper. First you stop caring about the descriptions and then you stop noticing them. Eyes skim along the lines. Finally, only the blank page lingers.”52 To conceptualize blankness as (absent) psychology or whiteness or Otherness might be true in a philosophical sense. But American Psycho’s violence is too intense to register on the reader as mere blankness. These critics reduce the novel’s blank effects to an answer, granting to American Psycho an original meaning that it adamantly resists: “there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing” (377). For Carla Freccero, the failed “extraction” of understanding in this passage— echoing Bateman’s futile unfleshing or gutting of the body—is a warning for overzealous critics.53 In this reading, it would be a kind of critical aggression to make American Psycho mean anything, be it “capitalism’s cannibalistic cruelty” or Brusseau’s “nonexistent violence.”54 As the very existence of these various critical takes demonstrates, the novel’s blankness is not in fact a clear allegory for something else but rather a vacuum that draws interpretation toward it.

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I want to consider not what blankness means but how it works for the reader of American Psycho. As we’ve seen, repetition evacuates the novel’s characters, objects, and events, gutting them of significance such that we are at once compelled to and repelled from subsuming them within a coherent system of meaning, be it ethical or epistemological. This mode of vacuity, analogous to the emptying of meaning we experience under semantic saturation, dovetails with the shock of reading repeated violence, as well as the boredom of reading repeated consumerist jargon. Both shock and boredom are correlated with an erasure—a blanking out—of cognitive capacity. Their repetition and alternation in American Psycho, however, imbues the experience of blankness with an aesthetic and affective intensity that pulls the body into reading. This somatic experience, I will argue, eclipses interpretation as such. In Uses of Literature, Rita Felski describes shock as an aesthetic response that “may trigger a notable absence of emotion, conjuring up a state of numbness or blankness.” A shocking style is “impassive: a blank, unyielding surface that repels interpretation and cancels out an entire repertoire of hermeneutical possibilities, that calls on us to judge and yet mercilessly undercuts all our criteria of judgment.” This “blankness . . . blocks the reader’s effort to impose a standard repertoire of psychological, political, or moral frameworks. . . . [D]isassociation [is] unnerving in its very inscrutability, its refusal to offer familiar footholds for interpretation.”55 Shock in this way overrides the mind but taps into the body: We are rudely ripped from aesthetic reflection to the baseline workings of biology, confronted with the stark evidence of our involuntary responses: the manufacturing of adrenalin, the acceleration of heart rate, the constriction of blood vessels. Our body may react even before our mind registers what is at stake, underscoring the extent of our emotional suggestibility and physical vulnerability. Images and words inscribe their all too material effects on our bodies from a distance, as if through a mysterious machinery of remote control; we feel ourselves stirred by forces we only vaguely apprehend. The protective shield of the psyche is broached; our sense of autonomy and separateness is bruised; we are no longer in full command of our own response. We find ourselves in the realm of the abject, floored by the sheer physicality of our reactions, newly conscious of being stranded on the perilous border of nature and culture.56

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The mental blankness of shock seems inextricable from a surge of physical response that belies critics’ hyperanalytical interpretations. To rephrase Mailer’s assessment of the novel, the shocking text “stirs us” even as our capacity to apprehend it is disabled. Felski notes that shock “displays a distinctive temporality characterized by a logic of punctuation, as the continuum of experience shatters into disconnected segments marked by dramatic variations of intensity.” The repeated moments of intense violence in American Psycho rely precisely on what happens in between them: a backdrop of dull, repetitious prose that strongly affords boredom. Felski describes shock and boredom as historically symbiotic facets of “modern consciousness”: “A felt dullness and deadening of emotion, along with the anesthetic, souldestroying effects of modern routines, triggers a desire for extreme sensations.”57 Sianne Ngai coins the term stuplimity to capture their counterintuitive compatibility: “the sudden excitation of ‘shock,’ and the desensitization we associate with ‘boredom,’ though diametrically opposed and seemingly mutually exclusive, are both responses that confront us with the limitations of our capacity for responding in general.” Ngai argues that repetition pushes “the reader to constantly formulate and reformulate new tactics for reading”; stuplimity demarcates what we cannot know while inspiring in us the desire to know.58 Despite being both boring and shocking, however, American Psycho is not exactly “stuplime.” The tendencies Ngai links to this affect— horizontal or prone positions; agglutination and flaccidity; debris and bits of language—do not quite fit the novel’s mode. Yes, American Psycho is “flat”: its deadpan voice and emphasis on “surface” connote horizontality, but it does not suggest or induce collapse. Instead of softness and flaccidity, we are in a world of “hardbodies,” sharp knives, and Bateman’s erect phallus. Ellis’s discursive snippets are more like the ubiquitous confetti floating around Glamorama than the objects that Stein fondles or the trash in which Beckett rummages. Ellis’s prose style also promotes a speed faster than the glutinous drowse of stuplimity. As Young says of American Psycho, “The book is written as if to be skimmed.”59 John Conley proposes that the accumulation of brand names in Ellis’s capacious run-on sentences contributes to this speed: “these very words, as if by their own magical powers, release the reader from the exhausting task of having to read them in the first place.” Gradually reading sinks

Vacuity to the level of what might be called occupation, closer to the mind-numbing particularity of those glossy entertainment weeklies whose pages one scans in the boredom of the airport than to the straining commitment to the “word by word” demanded by [Claude] Simon or [Alain] Robbe-Grillet. If when reading Ellis we, too, “slide down the surface of things,” perhaps it is because reading has been replaced by a skimming operation in which the raw material of Ellis’s text is perceived without the burden of any significance whatsoever.60

Ellis’s effortless recombinations of the dross of consumer-speak, along with perhaps the greatest command of syntactic rhythm in contemporary American fiction, lead to speedy, easy reading. The effect is to be comfortably, perhaps absent-mindedly, “sliding down the surface of things” only to slam into yet another wall of violence. The reader then negotiates the rather different speed of the violent episodes: this can entail either a voyeuristically slow pace enhanced by pornographic segues or a flinching, skipping process. The shift in speed depends on the reader, but it is enforced by the novel’s structured alternation of repetitions. As Abel puts it, “Ellis insists that boredom works as boredom only when disrupted by violence, and vice versa, that is, that the two series exist parallel to, and yet affect, each other as well.”61 Brusseau claims that American Psycho’s violent “scenes are not increasingly graphic or increasingly violent or increasingly careless or increasingly sadistic or increasingly anything. Consequently, part of one sentence about one bloody episode suffices to document them all.”62 But if we attend to the effect of reading the novel over time, we find that the initial episodes are drawn out, the later ones briefer, less pornographic, more violent. It is as though once we’ve been seduced or tricked into reading one scene, there’s less investment in luring us into others. Eventually, Bateman does not bother taking us through every step of the violence, “jump cutting” to the final tableau, the still and bloody aftermath. He acknowledges this with redundant qualifications late in the novel, like “as usual” or “predictably” (304, 327). The metanarration increasingly built into the violent scenes bleeds them of reality, renders them abstract; but at the same time the scenes also get more extreme, following the funneling trajectory of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. To read American Psycho is not to witness violence disappear but to watch it repeat and crescendo.

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What distinguishes American Psycho’s blank effects most from shock, boredom, and their combination in “stuplimity” then is not the novel’s tone or its objects but its tempo: American Psycho creates its affect-overload through a careful juxtaposition of slowness and speed, of endless repetition of items and repetitive scenes of gore. Both repetitions, however, deploy the same clinical flatness of tone, which suggests not only their affective affinities but also that affect is not so much a result of “depth” . . . but of speed differentials, of the accumulating processes of narrative structures, iterations of events, and encounters with the flow of the narrative at large. . . . [O]n the very surface level of the chapters’ titles, both the mundane repetitiveness and the singularity of the novel’s events are marked to the effect that the reading of the book moves at times painfully slowly.63

One effect of the alternating rhythm of the novel is an observable aesthetic investment in the violent scenes in contrast to the background of mind-numbing discourse. Murphet explains: “we have to wait so long for any signs of literary distinction (the text otherwise being an object lesson in ‘bad’ writing), that when they finally arrive we feed on them hungrily, even though they occur in scenes of abomination.”64 As with the novel’s puns, these scenes offer a moment of relief; for once, language is tied to a happening. No longer are we in a textual wash of proper nouns and redundant dialogue; the words on the page finally signify an event, albeit a gruesome one. We turn the pages seeking sex and violence, if not for pleasure, then for aesthetic scandal. But not knowing whether the next chapter will be awash in simulacra or blood fills the reader, like Bateman, “with a nameless dread.” While the boredom of the repetition of consumerism and the shock of the repetition of violence both blank out the mind, the alternation of the two repetitions affords an uncertainty that puts the reader on edge. As Vartan Messier notes, “the reader’s ‘horizon of expectations’ is constantly shifting.”65 In sum, the novel’s repetitions promote a representational thinness and flatness in the diegesis, but their rhythmic alternation excites an intensity in the reading experience, a kind of frisson that heightens the vividness of the horrific scenes of violence. In this sense, American Psycho’s blankness does not induce a philosophical perusal of violence but rather affords a vivid, visceral encounter with it.

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I Just Want to Fit In The function of the novel’s rhythm of repetition, I would suggest, is to ensure that while the acts of violence in American Psycho have neither cause nor consequence, they continue to have a felt impact, an aesthetic, affective, and ethical experience. The shape of that experience is a mode of uncertainty I call vacuity, riffing on the connotations of that word: evacuation, emptiness, lack, absence, vacancy. Reading American Psycho’s repetitions affords an intensely preoccupied mindlessness, a vacuous experience that is still electrified by uncertainty; Erica Wagner describes this as Ellis’s “weirdly vibrant nothingness.”66 This mode manifests in our ambivalent identification with the vacuous Bateman: life played out as a sitcom, a blank canvas that reconfigures itself into a soap opera. It’s an isolation ward that serves only to expose my own severely impaired capacity to feel. I am at its center, out of season, and noone ever asks me for identification. I suddenly imagine Evelyn’s skeleton, twisted and crumbling, and this fills me with glee. It takes a long time to answer her question—Where are you going?—but after a sip of the port, then the dry beer, rousing myself, I tell her, at the same time wondering: If I were an actual automaton what difference would there really be? (343)

The ideas in this seemingly random parataxis—an isolation ward, the impaired capacity to feel, the indeterminable telos, the automaton—all speak to the novel’s insistence that its protagonist is an empty frame. The twisted, crumbling skeleton of his nominal girlfriend Evelyn invokes her dearth of personality, even as it portends her death. There is a subtle pun here on the operations of fictional identification in Bateman’s plaint: “no-one ever asks me for identification.” Yet this framed blankness—like the camera’s all-seeing unseen eye in the more filmic passages of the novel—is what gives him authority. No one questions Bateman’s right to command narrative space; but his blankness deflects true human identification: empathy. Perhaps this is why, in lieu of an ethical rapport, Bateman yearns for “inclusivity,” saying, “I just want to fit in” (342). Taken to an extreme, repetition can repel a genuinely compassionate bond to fictional characters—as with the uncanny valley, there is a tipping point between the familiar and the creepy. But repetition does lend

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itself to a blank positionality akin to Bateman’s “inclusivity” and “envying someone’s life” (342). To redeploy Conley’s statement that reading Ellis’s sentences is an “occupation” that is not quite “labor,” I propose that reading American Psycho affords a mindless occupation of the empty gilt frame that is Bateman. This character has to be blank so that we fill in for him; we inhabit him, but unthinkingly: he is so unthinking that to think through him is not really to think. Devoid of high sentiment and intellectual understanding, this mode of vacuity entails aesthetic and affective incitements—or enticements—as we have already seen: banal humor, shock, boredom. Some might call these effects debased, but the novel’s rhythm of repetition intensifies these vacuous feelings and parlays them toward an ethics. Far from acceding to an identification based on empathy, however, this readerly substitution promotes the temporary, mindless occupation of a space limned with intensity. American Psycho’s vividness in the midst of vacuity reaches its apogee in another of its empty pleasures: pornography. To make Ellis’s representation of intercourse meaningful, to transmute sex into an idea about romance or alienation, would disrupt pornography’s substitutive logic of desire. This vacuous version of eros is contingent on the highly repetitive, instructional quality of the scenes of sex between Bateman and the prostitutes and models he picks up. Written pornography relies on a stark repetitious diction that strips away distractions of an intellectual sort. In contrast to “sexually explicit” literature that highlights “the mechanical imperfections of the human body, by including deflating techniques, humour, all emphasizing the human emotion involved,” Ben Walker argues that Bateman’s male pornographic gaze “strives for a perfection, a seriousness, an absolute.”67 The people having sex are made blank—as Mullan says, “there are no individuals, only types”—so that the reader can easily penetrate the semiotic barrier; we mentally cross the diegetic frame to enter these discursive bodies.68 Messier notes that “the absence of emotions prevalent in all pornographic writing initiates a process of identification in the reader: there is no distance between the ‘I’ in the text and the personal ‘I.’ ”69 In this process, “the reader subconsciously becomes Bateman,” as his lack of personality “plunges the reader into filling this blank.”70 Our alignment with Bateman implies that in these sex scenes, the reader “imaginatively becomes the violator,” as Laura Tanner asserts in her feminist critique of the novel.71 Many critics of American Psycho

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take the unqualified position that its pornography is meant “to appeal primarily to the male gaze, because it objectifies the female body.”72 While the sexual and violent gaze of the novel is aligned with the white, masculine power that Patrick’s blankness—his “unmarked” status— privileges, the sex scenes function as spaces of uncertainty, even resistance. A question posed to Ellis by a female reader as part of the Guardian Weekly book club session on the novel offers a stunning piece of evidence for this possibility: I first read American Psycho when I was on holiday with my family when I was about sixteen or seventeen. And had an excruciatingly embarrassing thing that my grandmother actually walked in on me masturbating while I was reading the book and then went on to read the book herself. She was about eighty-seven at the time and spent the rest of the holiday kind of staring at me in a slightly disgusted way. . . . But what I really wondered was to me, it was really key that you kind of built up this kind of sexual tension and kind of stuff before you went on to the violence because it made him as a character more credible to me, because it sort of made you kind of feel like you could understand a bit more about how he was kind of led on to these things, rather than coming in straightaway into the kind of violent side of it. So I just kind of wondered was that something purposeful that you kind of, a construct you set out to do, to kind of pull people in like that, or is that just me?

Ellis eventually stutters a reply: “I really don’t want to answer that question. I don’t really have. I guess there’s a very dry kind of thesis type answer to that, yes, ‘I was quite aware that psycho killers prey upon their victims sexually before they torture and dismember them and I was trying to capture . . .’ I wasn’t thinking that at all!” There is clearly something deeply incisive about the question—Ellis and his host say it is a “good question”—but also something threatening.73 Later, the author takes pains to mark one change in the novel’s reception over the last two decades: “We’re talking about an old school type of feminism that attacked that book and they hated it. I find it to be on the list of many young women’s favorite novels so it’s shifted radically, the whole notion of feminism is different now.”74 Is Ellis’s embrace of female desire feminist? Are his bisexual scenes progressive? If we note Patrick’s homoerotic body and homophobic peer group, as well as the homosexual actions he encourages (pays and forces) his female sex

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partners to perform, the gender dynamics of the novel seem incredibly complex. Ellis’s equivocation about what he calls his “indeterminate sexuality” has been disparaged by gay rights activists, especially in light of his public anti-gay rants.75 But Ellis’s ambivalence, like the queer scenes in his fiction, may reveal the queer logic of Judith Butler’s claim about repetition: “The repetition of heterosexual constructs within sexual cultures both gay and straight may well be the inevitable site of the denaturalization and mobilization of gender.”76 This repetition need not be purposeful; it sparks change through unexpected swerves, as when a female reader takes pleasure in bisexual sex scenes dominated by a misogynistic homophobic heterosexual male. Indeed, American Psycho’s sex scenes are rife with dread as well as desire. For some, to read them is simply unpleasant. For others, to identify with Bateman is to fear the moment pleasure tips over into sadism; to identify with his female partners is to dread the violence or death that awaits them. The readerly experience that vacuity affords is always steeped in uncertainty: there is, in effect, no singular or straightforward response to American Psycho. Its repetition seems to promote paradoxical aesthetic and affective experiences: the dread/desire for sex and violence; the shock/boredom of blankness; the groaning/laughter that attends the banal. This elucidates the polarity of responses to the novel, which do not even divide along gender lines. Male critics have been among its most avid denouncers, while the late critic Elizabeth Young led the way in constructing a defense of it. Some find it shocking, while others, like Ellis himself, are more shocked by the shock it caused: “It was really shocking. . . . I never thought they would not publish the book . . . or the book would cause this kind of fury. . . . I didn’t think there was enough in the book to make it that shocking.”77 Ellis’s parody of his “year of being hated” for American Psycho in the quasi-autobiographical Lunar Park outlines this diversity of response: “I was taken seriously. I was a joke. I was avant-garde. I was a traditionalist. I was underrated. I was overrated. I was innocent. I was partly guilty. I had orchestrated the controversy. I was incapable of orchestrating anything. I was considered the most misogynist American writer in existence. I was a victim of the burgeoning culture of the politically correct.”78 I would argue that any interpretation of American Psycho is, in this way, an interpretation of the reader. Hence the intrepid book club mem-

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ber’s qualification to her risqué question: “or is that just me?” Any response to the novel’s sex or its violence is likelier to tell you more about the critic’s take on it than Bateman’s. This aligns with Ellis’s stated intention for the novel: to provoke people, to let them discover “their own limits as readers.”79 This is not to recapitulate the old saw that literature is a mirror for our souls, the idea, as Proust put it, that “in reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self,” or, as Richard Eldridge contends, that novels are “of considerable value as vehicles for self-reflection on our personhood and its moral dimensions.”80 American Psycho refuses moral deliberation, motivation, and even action: its repetitions hollow out the narrative, interrogating “personhood and its moral dimensions.” When I speak of vacuity’s affordances for an ethics of the self, then, I mean to push beyond the notion of moral “self-reflection” to a process that is both more blank and more intense.

Stark Fictions With the affective and aesthetic intensities of American Psycho’s rhythm of repetition in mind, let us now revisit its central ethical disturbance: its horrific, sexualized violence. What is left when everything meaningful within and around violence has been stripped away by repetition? American Psycho’s violence signifies only in the reader’s response to it. Violence is not negated by repetition but rather made uncertain: hollowed of significance but nevertheless vividly present. To read violence without cause or consequence is to experience it as a surface phenomenon that reflects back to us our own responses and our own ethics. I use this reflective figure in part because the novel is obsessed with mirror images and in part because it speaks to its structure of repetition.81 If we modify the word reflection to its older form reflexion, we can capture its original sense of “bending” or “folding” back, while also resurrecting its etymological connection to physical reflex.82 American Psycho’s mode of vacuity affords neither a benumbed nor a scandalized experience of violence. Rather, it affords a reflexive reading that depends and reflects on the reader’s somatic reactions to violence qua violence. While we repeatedly confront violence in the novel, we do not understand it: we have no recourse to blame or to justice, to understanding or to resistance. As Naomi Mandel argues:

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The novel invites an active engagement with violence, one not predicated on distinctions between agent and victim, one not invested in evoking dichotomies for violence’s dispersal, one that does not value any judgment that critics—under the economy of ethical ends justifying violent means— might pass on it. In a text where there is no outside to which violence can be consigned, no safe space to which it can be banished, no comfortable “real” to which the reader can retreat and from which she might praise or denigrate the novel’s representational quality, a different approach to violence’s critique is required.83

Unable to stomach violence without the trappings of meaning, most readers turn aside, casting aspersions on the author or spinning arguments about what violence means. But the violence in American Psycho is not subsumable to the consumerism of late capitalism, nor is it simply an allegory of the ultimate Other. As Young suggests, the novel’s vacuity demands an ethical response from each one of us, personally: “the onus is on the reader to interject the moral values so conspicuously lacking . . . to engage personally with the text, to fill in the blanks as it were . . . to scrutinize his own values and beliefs.”84 American Psycho turns ethics back on us.85 Hence the propensity of readers to proclaim their antipathy for it in reflexive terms like “I felt disgusted with myself for reading it” or “as one who . . . feels thoroughly soiled by the experience.”86 Laura Tanner argues that these responses imply “a sense of powerlessness and complicity in the reading experience, a sense of being at once subjected to and guilty of violence,” and advises that we actively immunize ourselves against the novel: Unless we assert our right to read representations of violation critically, skeptically, oppositionally, we become victims of a narrative force that our own participation as readers helps to create. Oppositional reading, then, implies not just opposition to the actions occurring in the novel, to the characters that perpetrate them, or even to the narrator that describes them, but opposition to the very terms of readership implicit in the text. Only in locating and defining those terms can we become oppositional readers as well as readers of oppositional texts.87

For Tanner, the best antidote to the contagion of the novel’s violence is analysis; her probing of the novel’s gruesome details testifies to her advocacy of interpretation as resistance.

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To me, however, this sustained and, so to speak, engrossed attention to the novel’s violence is precisely what Ellis’s repetitive narrative structure discourages. Because the violence exists in a space of intensely felt uncertainty, it resists receptive vulnerability and interpretive mastery. We are not the victims, nor should we be the full-throated censors, of the novel. Reading American Psycho is too mindless and too somatically preoccupying for either position. The vacuity afforded by the novel’s repetition attains value precisely as a way of experiencing violence without being overweening and without being overwhelmed. The philosopher Bernard Williams presents an argument for the importance of uncertainty in representations of violence in a late essay on Sophocles’s The Women of Trachis. Williams coins the term “stark fiction” to describe this kind of play, in contradistinction to the “dense fictions” to which so many ethical philosophers have turned, nineteenthand twentieth-century realist novels with thick descriptions of character and deep social background. Williams describes the difference as follows: “It is not merely that [stark fiction’s] style and structure avoids the anecdotal or incidental, but that these resources are typically directed in a concentrated way to displaying the operations of chance and necessity.”88 It is precisely this attention to the inexplicability and inevitability of the horrors of human existence that Williams wishes to reintroduce into moral philosophy, which to his mind is overly enamored of “good news” and prone to focus on the actions of a putatively rational agent conducting a moral life. For Williams, The Women of Trachis provides an antidote to this ebullient but shortsighted view of moral reality because “its display of undeserved and uncompensated suffering is so entirely unrelieved.”89 In its “successive revelations” and its “display of hideous and destructive physical agony,” The Women of Trachis resembles other Greek tragedies. Rita Felski’s discussion of shock makes an analogous argument about Euripides’s The Bacchae: “it offers no standpoint from which such horror can be condemned as aberrant or exceptional. . . . [T]he play offers no clear ethical foothold, no means to pass judgment. . . . The ‘sparagmos’ that the play acts out for us—the dismembering and scattering of the human body—is also a ruthless rending of the frameworks through which we might make sense of such actions.” Felski suggests that we revisit “the widely touted idea” of catharsis, which was “originally associated with the eminently physical activity of purging one’s bowels.”90 The confluence of these bleak, shocking texts with a

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mode geared toward purgation suggests another lineage for American Psycho. If we consider catharsis not as a telos but as an ongoing hollowing out—a mode of vacuity—then its ethical implications are transformed considerably. The repetitions of American Psycho ensure that we do not achieve a climax, a moral apotheosis, a final purgation. The potential unreality and intensity of the violence at its core exacerbates our continual affective response to it. This incomprehensibility of violence only increases our horror because there is no system of justice, human or spiritual, which we can use to regulate or punish it. As Abel notes: “it is not so much violence as such but the state of not knowing what violence is that constitutes the experience of horror.”91 Williams takes the last words of The Women of Trachis—“There is nothing here that is not Zeus”—to represent this “inexplicable necessity.” That is, the gods neither explain nor take note of the suffering of humans in the play. Williams calls the moral knowledge of these absent deities “a negative thing, non-understanding.”92 What better phrases than “inexplicable necessity” and “nonunderstanding” to encapsulate the workings of uncertainty in American Psycho: [O]n the sign in letters that match the drapes’ color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT. (399) [A] rational analysis of who I am . . . [is] an impossibility. There . . . is . . . no . . . key. (264) [T]his would have happened to her no matter what . . . That she would have ended up lying here. . . . [N]o matter what other choice she might have made . . . this all would have happened anyway. I would have found her. This is the way the earth works. (328) I can already tell that it’s going to be a characteristically useless, senseless death, but then I’m used to the horror. (329)

The starkness of American Psycho, like the Greek tragedies, is dependent on a horror that cannot be conceived or explained. This is achieved not only with scattered metafictional comments like these but also through the repetitions that produce its blank yet intense mode of uncertainty. We might think that the novel’s violence would therefore be suspended in a realm of disbelief, a fantasyland. Yet these “unreal” depic-

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tions of violence also rely on the uncanniness of a truth stranger than fiction. The details from the worst murder scenes in American Psycho were culled from Ellis’s factual research: books by and about serial killers as well as FBI criminology textbooks.93 The point of stark fictions is precisely to signify the “inexplicable necessity” of horror that Williams locates in our moral reality, the very fact of violence in our world. This necessity can be conveyed through art, which can hollow out that violent reality while displaying it vividly, unflinchingly. Williams invokes the Nietzschean idea that art enables us “to contemplate such things in honesty without being crushed by them”: “When later [Nietzsche] said that we have art so that we do not perish from the truth, he did not mean that we use art in order to escape from the truth: he meant that we have art so that we can both grasp the truth and not perish from it.”94 Not to be crushed, not to perish: these aims are far removed from the safety of sublime contemplation. But fictional uncertainty can mitigate the horror of violence just enough that we can look on with courage. Williams’s argument bolsters my contention that an uncertain representation of violence can afford moral reflexion. He calls the achievement of stark fictions “necessarily obscure”; I would call it “necessarily uncertain.” It is the absence of fixed meaning in stark fictions that allows us to temporarily undergo the horrors of violence. The vacuity induced by American Psycho’s repetitions affords contemplation of those horrors and reflexion on our response to them. As Felski says of the literature of shock, it “becomes truly disquieting not when it is shown to further social progress, but when it utterly fails to do so, when it slips through our frameworks of legitimation and resists our most heartfelt values. It is at that point that we are left floundering and speechless, casting about for words to make sense of our own response.”95

The Ethics of S&M A pervasive theme in the critical discourse about artistic depictions of violence is that they inflict a certain kind of violence on the reader or viewer. Marco Abel’s Violent Affect takes this to be fundamental to our understanding of violent art, so much so that he recommends that  we adopt a masocriticism that addresses “the affective, visceral side of language and images rather than . . . their second order level— representation.”96 Abel analogizes this to Gilles Deleuze’s definition of

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the masochist as one who submits to the unforeseeable future of the violent event: The task would then be to defer the advent of pleasure that criticism clearly derives from the arrival of the moment at which the critic gets to articulate his judgment of violence, or certainty (even if it comes in the form of the assertion that the representational meaning remains undecidable). This is possible only if the critic gives him- or herself over to the expectation of pain resulting from the intensity of the encounter with violent images.97

With this paean to passivity, Abel thus counters the critical violence inflicted on texts like American Psycho, including not only innocuous “snuff this book” responses, but also the literal death threats that Ellis, his agent, and his publishers received before the novel came out. Given that American Psycho ropes desire into its depictions of violence, it is hard to tell whether sadism or masochism is the more apt term to describe the feeling of reading it. Rather than choosing between critical submission and critical violence, I would suggest that these two responses—either to subject oneself to a representation of violence or to impose a hermeneutic violence on it—are both unavoidable in reading American Psycho. These responses restage the struggle between readerly and authorial power, the uncertain imperativity that I described in my Introduction. As I claimed of Lolita, American Psycho affords a paradoxical chiasmus of sadism and masochism. A chiasmus is a crosswise arrangement in which terms are repeated and reversed; this figure resonates with an ethical reflexion that reflects or bends back responses. Young captures how this double bind, so to speak, of sadomasochistic agency plays out in reading American Psycho: From the first line, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here,” to the last, “This is not an exit,” we are signed, we are entered in to what is really a circle of hell. Once we have given ourselves up to the text, made the choice to “abandon hope,” we have no way out. It is a closed system. These imprisoning, claustrophobic qualities are deftly manipulated in order, not only to force us to live as close to Patrick as is possible in a fictional sense, but to imprint the reader with such force that we cannot ever get out. This is an act of great aggression.98

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While “giving ourselves up to the text” could be read as a masochistic free submission, this interpellation then puts us in the position and the perspective of a sadist. Freccero explains how American Psycho thus exposes another paradoxical opposition inherent to sadism: Its language is paradoxical, for normally the description of torture (as in testimonials) is the language of the victim and not the torturer, who usually invokes the hypocritical language of established power to rationalize and justify his actions, but not to describe. Elaborate descriptions of torture, then, are the victim’s strategy. Thus, as victim, Bateman establishes a relation of identification with the reader.99

In literary depictions of sadism, the perpetrator’s description of torture usurps the voice of the victim, thus aligning itself with the passive reader. So, on the one hand, under Bateman’s command, his victims— submissive readers included—become objects to be manipulated. On the other hand, if readers try to resist this interpellation, we seem to impose on the text an interpretive violence. Murders and explanations may seem two rather different kinds of violence, but while we are reading, they are both performative, linguistic acts. In other words, there is no way to read American Psycho without both submitting to and committing verbal violence. This readerly sadomasochism relies on the uncertainty about Bateman’s agency with which we began. Repetition builds the shape of Bateman’s identity, while at the same time evacuating the diegetic substance of his actions, making the murders seem imagined. If he is deranged or just vacuous, this makes Bateman vulnerable to us; the very extravagance of the violence he imagines would be an index of how lonely and insane the Reagan 80s have made him. Ellis describes his feelings about the character in these terms: “I think he’s right about a lot of stuff. I feel pity for him as well.”100 Bateman’s colleagues pity him, too; they do not believe he is capable of picking up one woman, much less seducing and murdering dozens of them. When his murders go unnoticed and unpunished, this seems at first to bolster his power: he is getting away with it. Over time, however, it undermines his authority as a narrator: is he delusional? This dissipation of power is literalized as a physical dissolution when an apartment where Bateman claims to have stored rotting corpses is shown to be suddenly, miraculously clean:

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“I think . . . I want to know what happened.” I feel sick, my chest and back covered with sweat, drenched, it seems, instantaneously. . . . All frontiers, if there had ever been any, seem suddenly detachable and have been removed, a feeling that others are creating my fate will not leave me for the rest of the day. This . . . is . . . not . . . a . . . game, I want to shout, but I can’t catch my breath. . . . Confused, I reach out for a moment to touch Mrs. Wolfe’s arm, to steady myself, but I stop it in midair, move it to my chest instead, but I can’t feel it, not even when I loosen my tie; it rests there, trembling, and I can’t make it stop. I’m blushing, speechless. (370)

The disappearance of the dead bodies inflicts an “instantaneous” dissolution in several ways: the detachment and removal of frontiers; an inability to determine his fate; a loss of psychic and physical control; a proprioceptive vertigo; the vanishing of his voice and even his breath. Bateman is similarly discombobulated when a colleague whom he thinks he murdered is spotted alive and well in London. Like Bateman himself, a character blatant and blank, manifest and seemingly absent, his victims evince a curious ontology: they are utterly destroyed, yet seem indestructible. Bodies are taken apart and dismembered, only to reappear whole, unharmed. In this sense, these characters’ concurrent subjection and resistance to violence invoke the uncertain ontology of D. W. Winnicott’s “transitional objects.”101 In an essay called “Using People: Kant with Winnicott,” Barbara Johnson juxtaposes his theory with Kant’s famous dictum in the Critique of Practical Reason, which she cites: “It follows of itself that, in the order of ends, man (and every rational being) is an end in himself, i.e., he is never to be used merely as a means for someone (even for God) without at the same time being himself an end.” Johnson offers a critique of those ethical theorists who have taken Kant’s interdiction against “using people” to be the basis for a total submission to the other: “a thought that begins in intersubjectivity and mutuality ends up sounding like a mere defense of the Other against the potential violence of the Subject.”102 Johnson notes that this ethics assumes the Subject’s power: If ethics is defined in relation to the potentially violent excesses of the subject’s power, then that power is in reality being presupposed and reinforced in the very attempt to undercut it. What is being denied from the outset is the subject’s lack of power, its vulnerability and dependence. Respect and

Vacuity distance are certainly better than violence and appropriation, but is ethics only a form of restraint?103

An ethics grounded in Kant’s interdiction can become sadistic: the subject condescendingly presumes a power over the other that obviates the subject’s own vulnerability. While critiques of the “imperial subject” are clearly necessary, Johnson nevertheless wants to consider whether “the capacity to become a subject were something that could best be learned from an object.”104 Johnson finds a way into this query with Winnicott’s transitional object, which he exemplifies with the child’s smelly blanket, sucked thumb, and pummeled teddy bear. The transitional object—like the theory of affordance I apply to reading in this book—can be reduced neither to the material thing nor to the child’s perception of it. We cannot ask of the transitional object: “Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?” Winnicott calls this “a paradox to be accepted and tolerated and respected . . . not to be resolved.”105 The baby creates the object, but the object is waiting to be created and destroyed, as Johnson explains: “The properly used object is one that survives destruction. The survival of the object demonstrates that the baby is not omnipotent, that the object is not destroyed by destruction, that the object will not retaliate in kind if the baby attacks, that the object will not leave if the baby leaves.”106 Johnson draws an analogy between the transitional object’s survival and the other’s survival: “The object’s survival of destruction is what makes it real. The reality of others depends on their survival, yes, but also on their destruction (in fantasy).”107 This is what Winnicott calls “the positive value of destructiveness”: the object, by surviving the violence of the subject, shifts outside “the subject’s projective mental mechanisms” and thus escapes the subject’s control.108 Johnson troubles the Kantian ethical dyad (self/other) with a third space: Perhaps a synonym for “using people” would be, paradoxically, “trusting people,” creating a space of play and risk that does not depend on maintaining intactness and separation. It is not that destructiveness is always or in itself good—far from it. The unleashed destructiveness of exaggerated vulnerability or of grandiosity without empathy is amply documented. But excessive empathy is simply counterphobic. What goes unrecognized is a danger arising not just from infantile destructiveness but from the infantile

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terror of destructiveness—its exaggerated and paralyzing repression. Winnicott describes the process of learning to overcome that terror, which allows one to trust, to play, and to experience the reality of both the other and the self. And this . . . suggests the ethical importance of “using people.”109

To destroy something can spark trust; to take pleasure in something can involve destroying it; to harm it can be to relinquish omnipotence; to be hurt by it can be a version of survival. The paradoxical transitional object provides a compelling alternative to the models of ethical criticism that treat love, friendship, or magic as the best models for reading.110 The sadomasochistic experience of reading American Psycho resonates far better with Johnson’s vision of an ethics of “using people.” This novel, too, instantiates a catholic space of play, risk, and violence. For many, American Psycho makes the reader the passive object of a sweeping violence. But though readerly agency is threatened by the intensity of the novel’s horror, it is also sustained by the formal mechanism—repetition—that renders its violence uncertain. It is notable that the perseverance of the transitional object requires repetition: repeated, failed acts of violence that yet harbor the potential for total destruction. Together, over and over: we destroy and are destroyed, we are demolished but survive, we are real yet emptied out.

Miss Manners While mutually assured destruction may seem the furthest thing from ethics, a coincidence of aggression and vulnerability does resonate with many relationships. Ellis says in interview: “Love and sadism, romance and sadism, romance and masochism? . . . Love can be terribly sadistic if doesn’t work out right . . . it can be some of the biggest pain you’ll ever feel in your life.”111 It makes a kind of sense for Ellis to conflate romance with sadomasochism. Andrew Motion writes in his review of Glamorama that Ellis is “a master stylist with hideously interesting newfangled manners and the heart of an old-fashioned moralist.”112 The current trend of hailing American Psycho as a dark, prescient comedy of manners is only natural for a novel with an epigraph from Miss Manners: One of the major mistakes people make is that they think manners are only the expression of happy ideas. There’s a whole range of behavior that

Vacuity can be expressed in a mannerly way. That’s what civilization is all about— doing it in a mannerly and not an antagonistic way. One of the places we went wrong was the naturalistic Rousseauean movement of the Sixties in which people said, “Why can’t you just say what’s on your mind?” In civilization there have to be some restraints. If we followed every impulse, we’d be killing one another.

John Mullan notes that “Bateman is dedicated to his appetites: food, alcohol, drugs, sex, violence. But he also has to dignify his vanity with a language of propriety. . . . A weird etiquette attaches itself to dedicated hedonism.”113 There is a question lurking here about the direction of the relationship between manners and violence in the novel. On the one hand, Bateman’s violence can be read as an effort to rupture the superficiality girded by the rules of late capitalism: what to wear, to buy, to eat, to say. On the other hand, the murders themselves have a systematic, even “mannerly” quality compounded by the extreme formal repetition I have been exploring. Is this novel about violence as resistance to social restraint or about the violence of imposed restraint? Our language about taste often includes this ambivalent violence: breaches of decorum, expressions of horror. Mullan quotes one Guardian book club reader’s amusing but somewhat precious comment: “I . . . was extremely disturbed by its unendingly visceral and graphic nature. One particularly punishing scene describing, in vivid, unflinching detail, a Salvatore Ferragamo suit with matching Armani tie, Bottega Veneta belt and complementary Oliver Peoples glasses frames left me feeling sick.” The humorous elision of the novel’s violence with its fashion faux pas bespeaks an incongruous parity of murder and manners. Ellis later makes a quip about “the most harrowing” part of writing American Psycho: “It wasn’t the bit with the rat. It was listening to Genesis for a month.”114 Like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) and Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer (2011), these are jokes that suit what Ellis has taken to calling “Post-Empire,” a new era in which he says, approvingly, “tastefulness and elegance . . . ha[ve] no meaning.”115 Their tone—wobbling between camp and déclassé—is evident in the plethora of riffs and rip-offs of American Psycho. As I noted, the novel’s repetitions make it highly amenable to appropriations, often in forms that both tame and hypostatize its violence. Apart from the film, the musical, countless Halloween outfits, and an action figurine, the novel has

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inspired several sequels: the film American Psycho II, Alain Mabanckou’s novel African Psycho (2003), and Ellis’s novel Lunar Park.116 Miles Fisher parodies the film in a music video for his 2009 cover of the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place.”117 And, fusing two meanings of the word citation, there is the Duke incident. In 2006, a female stripper and escort accused the Duke men’s lacrosse team of rape and hate crime. An e-mail sent by a member of the team was initially put forward as evidence: it described sadistic plans to kill and excoriate some strippers while wearing Duke-issue spandex. The e-mail was dismissed as a parody of Patrick Bateman. Unsurprisingly, American Psycho was on the syllabus of at least one Duke course at the time.118 If the American Psycho that emerged in 1991 gnashed its teeth at a culture of consumption, these recent, vapid parodies lack bite. The weakness of the novel’s appropriations, which defuse its intensity in the name of gratuitous, sometimes exculpatory humor, suggest the insufficiency of relegating American Psycho’s ethics to the word “satire.” Ellis distinguishes his novel from Mary Harron’s filmic adaptation in precisely this way: The things that make the book interesting cannot be adapted into another medium. . . . I think the fact that readers always ask me, well, did he do it? Or did he not do it? I don’t have an answer to that and I find that interesting. . . . The movie, by the very nature of the medium of film, has to answer that. . . . It becomes a kind of light comedy of manners among people in New York and a guy who’s Christian Bale and kind of crazy, you know, whatever, I mean, it’s very well done. But it’s just I conceived the book as a book, as something to only experience as a novel, and not to experience in any other way.119

Ellis professes not to have an answer for whether the murderous events of the novel took place at all. It is not its satire—its “light comedy of manners”—but the uncertainty afforded by the novel’s repetitions that makes it impossible to replicate as an experience beyond its medium. We might do better to shift our attention from manners, in the sense of customs and habits, to manner, in the sense of mode. This chapter has dwelt on the rhythms and the aesthetic and affective affordances of the novel’s use of repetition, a structure that cannot be relegated to a single style, tone, or satirical point. Paradoxically, to do justice to the ethics of reading American Psycho requires an attention to its repetitious form

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that does not merely imitate, judge, or vivisect the text. Hearing one violent scene from American Psycho in isolation (as in NOW’s boycott hotline) or making a bad copy of it (as in the Duke lacrosse team e-mail) is simply not the same as reading the novel over time. Ellis draws attention to “a kind of suspense where this story is not being told, it’s actually unfolding in front of the reader and we don’t really know how it’s going to end.”120 This speaks to the necessity of considering literary ethics as an experience over time, rather than merely as a representation of or an incitement to action. The ethical self-reflexion over time that American Psycho affords does not entail a suspension of legal or moral judgment over those who commit real acts of violence, however. As Williams puts it, “The point of tragedy—or at least of those tragedies that are stark fictions—must lie rather in the fact that it lays its fictional horrors before us in a way that elicits attitudes we cannot take towards real horrors.”121 That is, we should not shy from having opinions about horrific, misogynistic acts of violence. At the same time, it may be ethically useful to confront violence as violence in uncertain art, without the escape routes of explanatory labels like “satire.” In choosing as my example in this chapter one of the most extreme depictions of violence in twentieth-century literature, I wish to draw attention to the ethical value that uncertainty can give to novels with even the most horrifying subject matter. If we read texts, like American Psycho, that represent abhorrent acts through affective and epistemological modes of uncertainty, we can get a glimpse of our own fears and desires. In so doing, we might just enter into a more bracing and conscientious ethical self-reflexion on the horrors of human existence.

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Metareading Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005)

Parts, Bits Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder begins with a moment of extreme uncertainty: About the accident itself I can say very little. Almost nothing. It involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits. That’s it, really: all I can divulge. Not much, I know. It’s not that I’m being shy. It’s just that—well, for one, I don’t even remember the event. It’s a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been—or, more precisely, being about to be—hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who’s to say that these are genuine memories? Who’s to say my traumatized mind didn’t just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap—the crater—that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers. (3)

This accident bestows eight and a half million pounds on the unnamed narrator as a settlement for his injuries. After his medical rehabilitation, the question is: how will he use the rest? Rather than indulging in a hedonistic lifestyle or donating his money to the needy, he opts to pay large numbers of people inordinate amounts of money to create what he calls re-enactments: exacting replications or reconstructions of events. Revolving around this central act of repetition, the novel seems to draw into its orbit nearly every extant theory, theme, and effect of repetition, too. 230

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Remainder has been called a “work of novelistic philosophy” and is steeped, according to its maker, in deep theoretical waters: in interviews, McCarthy mentions Derrida, Lacan, Freud, Plato, Baudrillard, Hegel, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Lévinas, Bergson, and Heidegger, among others. Despite this interest in ideas about repetition, Remainder offers a philosophy of experience. As McCarthy notes, “real philosophy throws us radically and dynamically into the world, into language and experience.”1 Aligning Remainder with his previous novel, he says: “Both books could be called ‘Men in Space,’ in the most literal, phenomenological sense: they’re both about how we inhabit space and its geometries, the circuits we cut through it, the way it inhabits us and repeats itself in us, and how we repeat ourselves in it.”2 This quotation telegraphs elements of Remainder’s mode of uncertainty, a synchronicity that builds on repetition’s experiential effects over time. The novel presents its repletion of repetition in a highly organized fashion. The first quarter of the novel (pages 3–76) recounts the accident, the narrator’s recovery, and his decision to spend his fortune on re-enactments. Chapters 5–8 (pages 77–154) depict him reconstructing the experience of living in an apartment building that he recalls in a déjà vu. Following a dream sequence that marks the exact center of the novel, the next quarter chunk (pages 155–217) ups the ante as the narrator begins to re-enact events from other people’s lives. Chapters 13–16 (pages 219–308) move the narrator toward Thanatos and the ethical disturbance that erupts at the novel’s end: the all too real re-enactment of a bank robbery. I will begin by considering how Remainder’s opening chapters present an emphatically material repetition. It is striking that a novel published in 2005 starts with neither the bytes nor the bits of computer technology— in which the narrator invests some of his money but about which he knows little—but rather with the material bits of a disintegrating physical world. The bits falling from the sky introduce the novel’s innumerable images of matter—plaster, glass, soil, metal, tarmac—cracking, crumbling, and breaking into fragments. The human body is equally vulnerable to this coming apart. After the accident, the narrator has a “bit above [his] eye” and a shard of bone around his kneecap: “it just floated around beside the ball, redundant, surplus to requirements; sometimes it got jammed between the ball and its socket and messed up the whole joint, locking it, inflaming nerves and muscles” (8). Remainder’s matter

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is matter, so to speak: the novel is largely built of repetitive descriptions of actions, spaces, and objects. Strangely enough, this materiality applies to mental processing, too. The narrator is not much of a thinker. McCarthy says in interviews that “it would blow the whole book if he were an artist or an intellectual” and “it’s really important he’s just some bloke, some totally average everyman.”3 If the narrator once had a quick mind, the accident has all but erased it. When his lawyer’s secretary says, “I’m putting you through” on a phone call, he is puzzled: “I didn’t know who the you was she was putting through—Daubenay or me. A trivial distinction, you might say, but the uncertainty still made me dizzy” (6). Cutting off communication becomes literal when the narrator then rips the cord out of the wall: “The whole connection came out. . . . [I]t even brought some of the internal wiring that runs through the wall out with it, all dotted and flecked with crumbly, fleshy bits of plaster” (7). He finds a pay phone to call back, a process that involves several tedious trips home because he has forgotten to bring change. The exactitude of these recursive scenes suits their plodding style: “it went round in cycles, over the same ground again and again. I zoned out” (38); “ ‘Sign this one. . . . And this one,’ he said. ‘And this, and this’ ” (42). Though these initial, compulsive repetitions are attributable to the narrator’s mental trauma, he soon adopts mechanical repetition as a means of learning as well: “Rerouting is exactly what it sounds like: finding a new route through the brain for commands to run along. It’s sort of like a government compulsorily purchasing land from farmers to run train tracks over after the terrain the old tracks ran through has been flooded or landslid away” (19). In this day and age, nerve repair might more aptly be described in terms of networks; the materially minded narrator likens it to land, train tracks, floods. Transportation— cars, planes, the Tube—and telephone wires also offer figures for cognition. The rote repetition of physical therapy “reroutes” his modus operandi: “Everything, every movement: I had to understand how they work first, to break them down into each constituent part, then execute them” (21–22). This emphasis on the materiality of repetition invokes William James’s claims in his essay “Habit” that “the moment one tries to define what habit is, one is led to the fundamental properties of matter” and that “a path once traversed by a nerve-current might be expected to follow the law of most of the paths we know.” While James worries about our ten-

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dency to give over consciousness to habit, he argues in the end that habit allows us to move to higher planes of consciousness: “The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.”4 We see this trajectory in the novel: the more loops the narrator draws into his circuit of repetitions, the more he can add in, like a juggler adding another ball and another. This produces a kind of unthinking self-consciousness as his rerouted actions and his memories of those actions become part of his way of being. This leads to a curious metamateriality of repetition. In place of novelistic consciousness—thought, reflection, epiphany— the novel takes continual recourse to analogies with bodily experience. Knowing in Remainder often entails “seeing,” “visualizing,” “looking,” and, in the inimitable parlance of investment banking, “envisaging.” This “picturing,” as in the French nouveau roman, narratively reinforces the repetition to which the narrator’s mind is confined: while readers “see” and “hear” all that takes place, we are denied the concision of summary, analysis, or explanation.5 The narrator’s seeming incapacity for and resistance to metacognition trap us in a perceptual realm limited to the sensory, visual, and aural. Gradually, even feelings are dissociated from thought, then sensory perception, until they are relegated to haptic experience. He experiences mental uncertainty and discombobulation as a groundward-tending “dizziness,” sometimes unto nausea. By contrast, understanding and epiphany emerge as a “tingling” “from the top of my legs to my shoulders and right up into my neck. . . . I felt different, intense: both intense and serene at the same time” (9). The narrator expresses his thoughts through his material environs as well. The shard in his knee dictates how he sees his settlement: “I thought about the sum: eight and a half million. I pictured it in my mind, its shape. The eight was perfect, neat: a curved figure infinitely turning back into itself. But then the half. Why had they added the half? It seemed to me so messy, this half: a leftover fragment, a shard of detritus” (8). Equivalences—like is a prevalent word—dominate his thoughts and conversations. His comparisons are often self-referential by virtue of the tabula rasa with which he begins. So, for example, when he rips the phone out of the wall, he says: “It looked kind of disgusting, like something that’s come out of something” (8). Because he has nothing with which to compare it yet, the nascent simile devolves into tautology.

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In lieu of intellection, the narrator comes to value physical dexterity, the paragon of which is the elegant movement of sports players and movie stars. He yearns to move through the world with “fluency”: without resistance, clumsiness, or mess. Neither matter nor thought should interrupt; body and space, intention and action are to be “in sync.” The narrator seeks models for this synchronicity—in the sense of “to tally or agree”—in the first quarter of the novel.6 He admires Robert De Niro in Mean Streets: “Whether it was lighting up a cigarette or opening a fridge door or just walking down the street: he seemed to execute the action perfectly, to live it, to merge with it until he was it and it was him and there was nothing in between” (23). The narrator suspects that the young artist types he sees on a London street epitomize this seamless perfection of action—he describes them with the language of simulacra (film, advertising). But he decides instead that it is homeless people on this street who “were genuine. That they weren’t interlopers. That they really did possess the street, themselves, the moment they were in” (56). The narrator invites a homeless man to dinner, but just when it seems that his desire for physical fluency and his resources for philanthropy might intersect, the narrative warps: The waiter came back over. He was . . . She was young, with large dark glasses, an Italian woman. Large breasts. Small. “What do you want to know?” my homeless person asked. “I want to know . . .” I started, but the waiter leant across me as he took the tablecloth away. She took the table away too. There wasn’t any table. The truth is, I’ve been making all this up—the stuff about the homeless person. He existed all right, sitting camouflaged against the shop fronts and the dustbins—but I didn’t go across to him. (58–59)

In her review of Remainder in the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith describes this moment as “the final McGuffin, the end of the beginning, as if the novel were saying: Satisfied? Can I write this novel my way now?”7 The uncertainty occasioned by the fork in the narrative path works in effect as another tabula rasa: a moment of amnesia becomes a moment of erasure. This is the novel’s only instance of denarration, Brian Richardson’s term for the withdrawal of narrative fact.8 Again, the materiality of the narrative technique is notable; the erasure of event is preceded,

Synchronicity

even occasioned, by the removal of a tablecloth, then a table. Even the stuttering shift in the server’s identity is conveyed as a matter of matter: “Large breasts. Small.” Uncertainty comes about through material repetition: a concrete building up, then a Tetris-like demolition, of object and event. Instead of an abstract retraction, the narrative edifice is eroded, bit by bit.9 Aptly, the novel’s blank beginning then repeats as it starts over with a new uncertain event. At a party, the narrator steps into the bathroom: “I was standing by the sink looking at this crack in the plaster when I had a sudden sense of déjà vu. The sense of déjà vu was very strong. I’d been in a space like this before, a place just like this, looking at the crack, a crack that had jutted and meandered in the same way as the one beside the mirror” (64–65). Sensory memories flood in: the room, the apartment, the building surrounding this crack, the smell of liver, the sound of a pianist running passages, the image of a man fixing a motorcycle. The narrator also recalls that “inside this remembered building . . . all my movements had been fluent and unforced . . . seamless, perfect” (67). He decides to use his settlement to “re-enact” this moment into being.

Re-enactment This engine of re-enactment—another materialized repetition—leads toward a mode of synchronicity in several ways. The coincidence of event and idea—the narrator’s desire for fluency, to synchronize himself with matter—is matched by a simultaneity of art and reality, as he translates his vision into an experience. The people he hires to create this experience perform their roles all together, all at once, invoking a third definition of synchronicity: the collaborative coordination of action. Finally, the novel aligns the creation and the reception of the narrator’s re-enactments. Drawing together original and replica, past and present, creation and reception, Remainder’s re-enactments thus afford readerly uncertainty about what is real and what is not. Ontologically, the novel’s repetitions are a matter of matter; experientially, they mime mimesis. The narrator’s desire to embody his déjà vu introduces this tension between the real and the imaginary: “I remembered it all, but I couldn’t remember where I’d been in this place, this flat, this bathroom. Or when” (65). But the novel’s contemporary milieu also steeps it in Baudrillardian

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simulacra: a “Seattle-theme coffee shop” with a membership card that rewards repeat purchases; the repetitions of clichéd conversation (“Heyy!”); and the tendency of people to imitate television: “in their gestures and their movements they acted out the roles of the ad’s characters” (52–53). McCarthy takes the idea back further, pointing out that “the idea of the simulacra being a copy without an original, which is Baudrillard’s big selling point—it’s in the Sophist by Plato.” McCarthy suggests that the novel “definitely turns around [the narrator’s] copying, and even (as he sets about getting his re-enactors to re-enact the moments when they prepared for the previous re-enactment) his copying his moments of copying, endlessly regressive.”10 Instead of just “copying” his déjà vu down, however, the narrator turns it into a quasi-artistic experience: “I was going to recreate it: build it up again and live inside it” (69). He wishes to actualize his vision, “to move around it, relishing its details . . . to fully occupy it” (98–99). The narrator secures the services of a company called Time Control; his “facilitator,” Naz, hires people to occupy the building he has purchased and to adapt it to his specifications. They make things look older to suit his vision, and even figure out a way to puff the smell of fried liver into the air. The narrator seems a dictatorial director: he holds auditions, designs the set, and determines exactly how, when, and where re-enactors perform physical tasks—playing a piano, fixing a bike, lifting a bag—in coordination. But his Time Control facilitator, set designer, props woman, architect, and consultant perform indispensable, even creative, roles in realizing this vision. They “make the other people’s stuff all fit together,” transmitting echoing instructions along a chain of command: “I’d telephone Naz over in his headquarters, and Naz would radio three of our people while he talked to me; then one of them would radio Annie and she’d radio Naz on another channel and he’d call me back” (205, 126–127). This coordination is a form of perpetual, simultaneous action: “I dreamt that all of us had linked ourselves together: physically, arm in arm and standing on each other’s shoulders like a troupe of circus acrobats” (153). Re-enactment requires “everyone to be in sync,” “operating in sync together,” like “synchronized swimmers gliding” (126, 170, 286). The goal is “to be fluent, natural, to merge with actions and with objects until there was nothing separating us—and nothing separating me from the experience that I was having” (240). The narrator holds endless re-

Synchronicity

hearsals, tweaking his re-enactments until he achieves this synchronicity with matter. To perfect it, he repeats it “hundreds of times. More.” (162). To ensure a perpetuity of re-enactment, he hires “several teams . . . relieving one another, in relay. . . . We rotate them” (175). It takes nearly half the novel for him to put together and explore this first re-enactment. Despite the creative tenor to these projects, the narrator avoids the label of artist (“I was never any good at art”), bans cameras from his re-enactments, and is ignorant or dismissive of artistic predecessors (237).11 When an auditioning re-enactor offers to recite Beckett, the narrator says, “We don’t want to hear that” (117). Yet the collaborative and performative re-enactments of the narrator’s vision seem akin to the workings of theater and film. He invokes visual art when he makes sketches to preserve the details of his déjà vu: “I . . . started drawing diagrams, plans, layouts of rooms and floors and corridors” (73). Searching for his building, he recalls an art teacher’s advice: “the building was already there, somewhere in London. What I needed to do was ease it out, chisel it loose” (93). A later conceit describes forensics as “a higher art”: “the diagrams: with all their outlines, arrows and shaded blocks they look like abstract paintings, avant-garde ones from the last century” (185). His last re-enactment is as rehearsed and beautiful as a choreographed ballet (248). These artistic models of mimesis confuse the status of the re-enactments—are they real or art?—threatening to draw the novel into a stilled reflective staticity. But another set of uncertain mimetic forms—glitches in Remainder’s machinations—jolts the novel beyond its loops. At the end of Chapter 4, we get the déjà vu that prompts the narrator’s first re-enactment. At the end of Chapter 8, he has an ominous dream that precedes the reenactment of an incident at a tire shop; he then re-enacts two murders, taking the position of the victim. In Chapter 13, he begins to fall into trances and seems to hallucinate a “short councillor” whose questions incite the final re-enactment: an armed bank robbery (239). These unreal phenomena—a memory, a dream, a vision—prompt a new re-enactment while blurring the line between reality and replica. In the bank robbery, unbeknownst to all but the narrator and Naz, that line vanishes altogether: “I knew there was no edge, that the re-enactment zone was nonexistent, or that it was infinite, which amounted in this case to the same thing” (283).

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This is the logical telos for the narrator’s process of re-enactment, which aligns life with art until they are indistinguishable. The narrator wants a second world that is complete “down to the last details, ones you wouldn’t bother putting in a film. In films you just have stuff to show the cameras: just fronts, enough to make it look right on the outside. I want it to be right. Intimately right, inside.” “For the audience?” he asked. “No,” I told him. “For me.” (247–248)

Because the re-enactments are designed to suit his vision and to produce his pleasure, the narrator is not just the first or the most exacting but, in effect, the sole audience member. The re-enactments, in this sense, are as much about the narrator as a reader as about his efforts as a creator. Once his re-enactments are operational, he engages with them as a scientist might: “On some days I felt like gathering data: sketching, measuring, transcribing” (160). Other research methods include looking words up through Naz (a kind of embodied Google), scouring forensic manuals, and learning them “by rote” (187). He also immerses himself in the re-enactments: I was pretty analytical, concentrating on several things simultaneously. . . . I sketched small parts of line and patch in detail, and pressed sheets of paper straight on to them to make prints, which I then stuck to the walls of my flat. If I stared at them long enough they took on shapes: birds, buildings or the interlocked sections of space stations—and my whole mood would slide from analytical to dreamy. The same slide happened at the reenactment scene itself. One minute I’d be really concentrating on an aspect of the sequence and the next I’d let the movements mesmerize me, like a bird charmed by a snake. (180)

The narrator’s “reading” ranges from analytical to dreamy; from pure reception to creative interpretation; from detailed absorption to the larger view; from singular focus to “concentrating on several things simultaneously”; from direct access to a distracted, oblique view. The imperfect mood of the telling and the co-presence of these processes on the page give the sense that they are taking place at once and all in the narrator’s head. The dual nature of re-enactments as acts of creation and acts of reception thus troubles the reader’s grasp of Remainder’s hap-

Synchronicity

penings while drawing attention to the novelistic “re-enactment” in which they take place.

Section Title It should come as no surprise that the terms that the narrator uses for  his engagement with re-enactments apply to our own reading of Remainder. We, too, concentrate and glance away, slide from analysis to dream and back again. The novel ensures that we read about reading, even as we read it. This is what I mean by metareading. Remainder’s thoroughly self-referential structure—its investment in art’s replications—promotes this understudied but widespread practice. Reading a work that comments on itself as it proceeds entails a kind of repetition that we can differentiate from the iterative “again and again” of recurring events with a spatial analogy. If narrative repetition—as in American Psycho’s lists—proceeds in linear, horizontal fashion like a chain of loops, metafiction’s repetition, by contrast, is a vertical model of concurrence. If number and sequence designate iterations—something repeats this many times, in this order—metafictional elements apply simultaneously across reflective levels. Common images for metafiction are the mise en abyme (placed in an abyss), the hall of mirrors, and the infinite regress. These reflective, embedded frames depict a simultaneity in metareading that suits Remainder’s synchronicity. The novel makes us aware of its status as fiction through diegetic references to art, covert allusions, and self-descriptive prose. Even its genesis is metafictional: The idea came to me exactly as it comes to him: I was at a friend-ofa-friend’s party, in the bathroom, looking at a crack on the wall, and had an intense moment of déjà-vu. I “remembered” an identical crack, similar building, cats lounging on the facing roofs, the smell of liver wafting up from downstairs, a pianist practicing in another apartment, and thought: wouldn’t it be good to recreate this? Within minutes the whole novel had taken shape.12

McCarthy conjures here the specter of an infinite regress of metafiction. Despite the narrator’s protestations against artistic self-consciousness, his re-enactments beg the question. He even has an architect build miniature models of re-enactments, invoking the trope of a text within a text.

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Remainder’s allusions to other texts also remind us of its status as text. The narrator tries out various ways to randomize his search for the building where he will stage his first re-enactment: tracking colors along the street, an erratic doubling back, a numerical or alphabetical system, and an attempt “to I-Ching the map: to close my eyes, turn round a few times, stick a pin in blindly and then go and look” (99). Eventually, he decides to “just walk around and see what happened” (102). Yet this ostensibly mindless wandering incorporates buried references to John Ruskin (the road where he lives); Plato (the road of the party where he first saw the crack); Jung (for whom the I-Ching is an important intertext); and Marcel Proust (the building the narrator lights upon is “Madlyn Mansions”). These allusions are both oblique and quite literally manifest, leading to another synchronicity: the novel’s material elements (roads, buildings) are drawn in sync with its immaterial operations (simulacra, memory), without the narrator seeming to notice. Readers can’t easily explain this coincidence of meta- and matter, either. Generally, when we find a pattern in a text’s story world, we assume we have encountered a network of meaning caused by something: a design, a symptom, a plot. But when an event and an allusion coincide in a word like “Madlyn,” causality is more difficult to discern. Remainder’s allusions are neither random nor motivated, exactly. They fit Linda Hutcheon’s rubric of covert metafiction: “Overtly narcissistic texts reveal their self-awareness in explicit thematizations or allegorizations of their diegetic or linguistic identity within the texts themselves. In the covert form, this process is internalized, actualized: such a text is selfreflective but not necessarily self-conscious.”13 In interview, McCarthy asserts the need for “literary encryption”: “it’s quite important that whatever influence is going on there does get buried. In that respect, encryption is actually an absolutely fundamental necessity in order to do something new.”14 This encryption—the burying of literary influence into the ground of the prose—permits metafiction and fiction to coexist. Covert is a good word not only for the novel’s allusions but also for its self-descriptive language. Recall the two-word sentence with which the novel begins: “Parts, bits” (3). This fragment describes itself: the lines in medias res are as partial, fragmentary, and suspended as the falling particles they depict. If, like every novel, Remainder emerges from the void, it promptly comments on that void: “a blank: a white slate, a black hole” (3). This tabula rasa is gradually filled in: “the no-space of

Synchronicity

complete oblivion stretched and contracted itself into gritty shapes and scenes in my unconscious head . . . over which a commentator’s voice was playing, inviting me to commentate along with him” (4). While the metareference is covert here (this is a “sports commentator”), to “commentate” is both to track action (description) and to comment upon it (meta-description). Similarly, we read ourselves reading as we read Remainder. Metareading’s repetitions reconfigure events as descriptions of events: every element of the text is commented on; commentary then acquires commentary. Everything is pulled into a recursive loop of selfreference, which is itself a mark of fiction. In postmodernism, self-descriptive metafiction generally operates openly, even outrageously. John Barth’s 1988 story “Title”—the title of which ought to give you an idea of how it proceeds—carries this operation to an exhaustive extreme, as its last sentences admit: Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness. I despise what we have come to; I loathe our loathsome loathing, our place our time our situation, our loathsome art, this ditto necessary story. The blank of our lives. It’s about over. Let the denouement be soon and unexpected, painless if possible, quick at least, above all soon. Now now! How in the world will it ever15

Italo Calvino has a lighter touch: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought.”16 Whether amusing or exhausting, explicitly self-descriptive lines like these seem directed not toward a new understanding but a new experience of literature, one that obviates interpretation. In Remainder, this is more subtle. For example, one of the narrator’s re-enactors improvises her lines: “Harder and harder to lift up, she’d said. I thought about this as I stood there facing her. Harder and harder to lift up. I liked it. It was very good. As she got older, her bag of rubbish was becoming harder and harder to lift up” (144). The more times the phrase is repeated, the more it seems the re-enactor is expressing her own exhaustion about lifting up this bag of rubbish for a wealthy man with pretensions to godlike approval: “It was very good.” That is, the line we reread comes to seem self-descriptive not only through selfreference but also through repetition over time. McCarthy says, “what’s vital is that the embedded repetitions, the micro-iterations, somehow throw light on the macro-ones without explaining them away, resolving

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them.” Metareading repetition affords an uncertainty that is not only cognitive but also experiential. Asked about “the novelistic purpose of using infinite regress as a literary technique,” McCarthy says: “its main use is to set up a whole architecture of correspondence and repetition, like in a piece of music: it’s seductive and assuring at the same time.”17 To offer a metadescription of my own, we have seen how Remainder sets up its architecture (structure of repetition) and music (mode of synchronicity) in several ways. There is the idea of being in sync with the material world, the fluency to which the narrator aspires. There is the temporal alignment that draws past and present into one experiential frame: the déjà vu, for example, or the absorption of past events into present re-enactments. There is the coordination of people and objects in the re-enactments: “we needed everyone to be in sync” (126). There is the coincidence of reality and image evident in the novel’s interest in simulacra. Finally, there is the synchronized metareading that the novel affords with its artistic conceits, covert allusions, and self-descriptive prose. One might think that as more fictional levels—content, form, reading—join this synchronicity, we move toward a perfectly harmonious and comprehensible text. Remainder in fact thwarts this holistic congruity, however, because its insistent simultaneity is both unmotivated and reliant on a textual technique that affords uncertainty as it intensifies: repetition. Simultaneity is not familiar, or even well suited, to narrative. Film can use split screens and cleverly timed dialogue to create a semblance of simultaneity; theatrical productions can present two scenes at once by shifting light and volume to manipulate audience attention. Simultaneity in reading, however, seems strange, if not impossible. Generally, each sentence is read and processed in sequence; this beginning-to-endness of narrative makes all-at-onceness seem unlikely. But reading entails retention as well as progression: the reader holds onto previous data even as she proceeds to new information. For events to enter into simultaneity, they need only be repeated so as to remain present in the mind. With enough repetition, we experience the dizzying sense that all events are always and/or already happening. As the reading of Remainder proceeds, individual moments accumulate, each joining a repertoire of repetitions. By halfway through the novel, all of its previous events have been repeated into a continual presence; we are not allowed to forget them, or rather, the narrator saves us the trouble of remembering. His frequent recourse to self-reference and

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comparison, as well as his encrypted allusions, ensure that the repeated fictional elements coexist. Preceding the final re-enactment of a bank robbery, he says, “the actions we’d decided to perform had all happened already,” only to qualify himself: “it had never happened—and, this being not a real event but a staged one, albeit staged in a real venue, it never would. It would always be to come, held in a future hovering just beyond our reach” (281–282). Remainder’s repetitions gather together prior, current, and future events and ideas within its diegetic world; at the same time, they disintegrate temporal sequence and causality. The novel thus affords synchronicity in yet another sense, Carl Jung’s idiosyncratic theory of “meaningful but acausal simultaneity.”18

A Gentle Tapping We have already seen how events in Remainder teeter on the precipice between the imaginary and the real, like the denarrated dinner with the homeless man and the “false memory” in the bathroom. As repetitions accrue, even the events we believe to be actual begin to lose their ousia (or substance) and their position in a temporal sequence. Over time, this affords uncertainty, which McCarthy considers crucial to the literary experience: “Literature has to remain frustrating—to withhold something, remain incomplete—or it’s not literature anymore, but rather entertainment, edification or interpretation. That’s literature’s USP: staying unresolved, keeping its most vital messages unspoken, creating a zone of noise where everything and nothing is said at the same time.”19 This echoes the extratextual commentary from Toni Morrison that I quoted in Chapter 3. While Morrison reinvigorates a Faulknerian multiplicity to afford uncertainty in Beloved, it is McCarthy’s use of a Beckettian repetition in Remainder that almost literally produces “a zone of noise where everything and nothing is said at the same time.” Jung’s theory of synchronicity can help us unfold the aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions of Remainder’s numinous, tingling, dilatory mode of uncertainty. Jungian literary criticism has historically tended in two directions. The first is toward the investigation of archetypes in texts. Jung’s claim for a link between archetypes and synchronicity, however, is tentative—“certain phenomena of simultaneity or synchronicity seem to be bound up with the archetypes”—if not spurious.20 The second, a psychoanalytic reading of Remainder that would address the narrator’s trauma or read the text symptomatically for what it represses, might be

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more plausible. But synchronicity is phenomenological—Jung analyzes experience rather than the psyche, whether individual or collective— which is how I apply the theory to Remainder. Synchronicity, as Jung defines it, is “a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning.” It in fact requires three kinds of coincidence: two events are identical or similar; they happen at exactly or nearly the same time; and they happen to the same person. I want to argue that metareading Remainder affords a readerly experience of synchronicity, including a sense that space and time are collapsing, a palpable self-consciousness, and a suffusion of “emotional” and “numinous” qualities. Synchronicity accrues these aesthetic and affective filaments over the course of Jung’s Synchronicity: An Acausal Principle (1952), an investigation that wants to be scientific but ends up inconclusive, riddled with self-doubt. The New Physics—in particular, Albert Einstein’s idea that causality is “statistically valid and only relatively true”—inspires Jung to use methods other than an “experimental method of inquiry.” Each chapter of Synchronicity ventures a different path to the concept: Jung offers a history of synchronicity’s precursors in Western and Eastern philosophy and spends one chapter on an outlandish statistical analysis of the correlation between marriages and zodiac signs. Jung’s multipronged method approaches but never fully accounts for synchronicity, which has affinities with Freud’s idea of the uncanny.21 Jung’s theory is most resonant when it exemplifies rather than tries to explain those “ephemeral events which leave no demonstrable traces behind them except fragmentary memories in people’s minds.” He collects these fragments, “ ‘unique’ and individual descriptions” of synchronicity, into a “curio cabinet.”22 Jung’s most deft and oft-cited example of synchronicity is the following incident: A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me like a gentle tapping. I turned around and saw a flying insect knocking against the window pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.23

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The two events—the dream of the scarab and its visit—occur in distinct realms: “Synchronicity therefore means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state.” They coincide without cause: the dream doesn’t make the beetle fly in, nor does the beetle retroactively cause the dream. Note that this classic example of synchronicity, prompting the patient’s psychic renewal, is self-descriptive: “The scarab is a classic example of a rebirth symbol.”24 The idea of a relation that feels meaningful but cannot be attributed to any cause is what distinguishes synchronicity from motivated events and from pure randomness. The history of synchronicity as Jung tells it is rife with philosophical attempts to attribute it to an invisible but transcendental cause, be it Arthur Schopenhauer’s Will, Heinrich Magnus’s magic, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s pre-established harmony, or the cosmic law of the I-Ching. Jung wants to avoid the “temptation” of positing a transcendental cause, which he sees as a contradiction in terms: “anything transcendental cannot by definition be demonstrated.” He investigates synchronicity otherwise: “If . . . the meaningful coincidence or ‘cross-connection’ of events cannot be explained causally, then the connecting principle must lie in the equal significance of parallel events; in other words, their tertium comparationis is meaning.” More important than the cause of synchronicity, then, is its meaning, which nevertheless remains uncertain: “What that factor which appears to us as ‘meaning’ may be in itself we have no possibility of knowing.”25 Synchronicity’s significance is not intellectual but experiential, as evidenced by Jung’s interest in its quasi-spiritual affect: “the numinosity of a series of chance happenings grows in proportion to the number of its terms.”26 In “The Uncanny,” Freud also notes how intense repetition induces this feeling, tempting us “to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number”: “we naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together—if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day.”27 What both Jung and Freud note here is that repetition changes its experiential valence as the number of iterations increases: consider the difference between our experience of reading the gothic double and our experience of the infinite regress of duplication in the Matrix films.

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Remainder thrice refers to Jung’s synchronicity, covertly rather than explicitly. First, the novel alludes to the I-Ching, a text that Jung investigates in some detail. Second, it links Naz, the narrator’s “facilitator,” to Jung’s primary example of synchronicity through a particular image: Naz’s palmtop organizer was lying in front of him. It was a Psion—one of the companies Matthew Younger and I had bought stocks in. It was lying face up on the table, but Naz wasn’t using it. Instead, he was logging my requirements in his mind, translating them into manoeuvres to be executed. I could tell: something was whirring back behind his eyes. For some reason I thought of scarab beetles, then of the word “scion.” (87)

Unexplained and inexplicable (“for some reason”), Jung’s scarab beetle flies into the novel. Finally, late in Remainder, there is a seemingly trivial incident involving a minor character: I thought of Matthew Younger, how plaster flakes had fallen onto him when he’d visited me in my building when it was all being set up. Strangely enough, when I got home that evening I found a message from him on my answering machine. . . . As I listened to his voice, I thought of what my short councillor had said: that I was wreaking magic, like a shaman. Maybe Matthew Younger had called me and left his message at the same instant that the plaster was falling. I’d never know. (258–259)

This is a coincidence enough for the narrator to say “strangely enough,” to reach for a magical explanation, and to admit he’ll never know. It is in effect a diegetic instance of synchronicity. I am less interested in these two covert allusions to Jung and one literal moment of synchronicity in Remainder than in the novel’s efforts to afford synchronicity as an experience for the reader. I contend that its repetitions afford “an acausal simultaneity” that heightens our desire to interpret, yet thwarts our ability to do so. In his analysis of the uncanny, Freud proposes that we “differentiate between the uncanny that we actually experience and the uncanny that we merely picture or read about.” He highlights a paradox: “in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and in the second place that there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.”

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Freud elaborates these means: “the story-teller has a peculiarly directive power over us; by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions.”28 Remainder’s repetitions work on the reader in this way, coordinating what Freud calls “a great variety of effects” into a mode of readerly uncertainty. Like Jung, Freud is less interested in “intellectual uncertainty” than in the motivations and “qualities of feeling” latent in uncanny repetition.29 Doubt about its meaning cannot adequately account for “the peculiar emotional effect of the thing,” for the “impression” of the uncanny. Similarly, the very nature of Jungian synchronicity—an acausal happening reducible to neither force nor energy—makes it impossible to measure intellectually. Further, for Jung synchronicity is an affectively biased experience: “spontaneous synchronistic phenomena draw the observer, by hook or by crook, into what is happening and occasionally make him an accessory to the deed.”30 If we maintain Jung’s and Freud’s emphases on subjective experience, the grounds of analysis shift from causality to significance, from cognition to experience. That is, we move toward a phenomenology. As I noted in my Introduction, McCarthy says that “one of the real structural understandings of great literature, from Greek tragedy to Beckett and Faulkner, is that it’s an event. It’s not something that you can contain and narrate, but it’s like this seismic set of ripples that goes on through time, backward and forward.”31 While its repetitions destabilize its individual events, Remainder is itself a seismic event, one that vibrates through time “like a piece of music,” or what I call a mode of synchronicity.

They Tingled and Hummed and Sang For the (ahem) remainder of this chapter, I consider how aspects of Jungian synchronicity—simultaneity across material and temporal realms; self-description of its processes; acausality; uncertainty; affective circularity; and a sense of meaningfulness—manifest in Remainder’s experiential mode of uncertainty. Jung’s word for the relation at the heart of synchronicity, acausal, is akin to uncertainty: both intimate what is missing (“causal,” “certain”) and yearned after. The result of neither mere chance nor direct cause, a mode of synchronicity inspires an ongoing desire for causality. Remainder’s use of repetition thus affords a will to certainty—a desire to see patterns—bestirred by the experiential vibrations of uncertainty.

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Throughout the novel, pieces—of matter, of time, of perception— collect but do not cohere: “a whole tumult of images came at me” (209). Analogously, the novel’s narremes enter into a synchronicity that is more like this uncertain “tumult” than a purposive web of meaning. We experience a crowding or thickening of event space with unrelated bits. The suspension of the “parts, bits” that pervade Remainder conjures the aesthetic and affective facets of this mode: [I]t was fired up, silently zinging with significance. Held beneath a light coat of sandy dust within a solid gel of tar, the flecks of gold and silver in the granite seemed to emit a kind of charge, as invisible as natural radiation—and just as potent. (142) [T]he light seemed deeper down here—more dense and less flighty. Higher up it had more dust specks in it: these were borne upwards by the warm air in the stairwell; when they reached the top floors they hung around like small stars in massive galaxies, hardly moving at all, and this made the air seem lighter. (156–157)

Remainder sets the mind humming, as in a spark plug’s “hum of infinite self-repetition without origin or end” or in the “cacophony of modems and drilling and arpeggios and perpetually ringing phones. The hum, the meetings, the arrivals and departures turned into a state of mind—one that enveloped us within the project, drove us forward, onwards, back again” (208, 113). The energy implicit in these conceits—electric machines, a firing spark plug, stars, radioactive flecks—all convey that mixture of serenity and intensity the narrator calls “zinging” or “tingling”: “The new blast echoed round the warehouse. It made its walls tingle too—its walls, its ceiling and its floor. They tingled and hummed and sang and seemed to levitate” (300). This energy is catalyzed by the co-presence of events, silently zinging with significance, yet profoundly uncertain. As the possibility of interpretation becomes increasingly untenable, affective ripples begin to spread out from synchronicity’s “numinosity.” Remainder’s repetitions set out a discrete set of possibilities for response, two of which we saw in American Psycho: boredom, nausea, and blankness. Remainder in effect dictates and predicts the reactions it provokes, whether they are positive or negative. According to Jung, both belief and skepticism can amount to a psychic readiness to see synchron-

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icity: “an affective expectation is present in one form or another even though it may be denied.”32 Even resistant readers seem to synchronize with Remainder, bolstering Zadie Smith’s contention that the novel “trains you out of a certain way of thinking.”33 A survey of reviews and readers’ reports (culled from magazines, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Powells.com, and blogs) will reveal just how contagious Remainder’s affective vibrations are. Many readers accuse it of tedium. Even Joyce Carol Oates’s positive review in the New York Review of Books says it moves with “maddening slowness” and is often “colossally boring.”34 On Amazon, “M” from California exclaims without irony: “the re-enactments became so repetitious I was bored to death!”35 A comment from “Sarah in Chicago” is illustrative: The book started out with such an interesting premise and so many promising mysteries to be solved that I was disappointed when none—not one—was revealed. I enjoyed the beginning third or so of the book, but once the narrator started re-enacting a series of meaningless (or were they? I guess we’ll NEVER KNOW) events, it became so tedious a read I began to feel that I, like the narrator, was going insane. Possibly that was the author’s point. Well done if so, but it didn’t make for a very enjoyable read.36

This kind of ennui characterizes the narrator’s feelings after his accident: “It seemed a pretty boring party. . . . He bored me and his friends were boring too. . . . I was bored—by people, ideas, the world: everything” (62). These notes of boredom and disappointment recur in reports from readers frustrated by Remainder’s acausal repetitions, its willingness, as “Sarah in Chicago” puts it, to “string a bunch of events together without any thought.” The will to knowledge in their complaints reveals a hankering for interpretation: “There was no plot,” bemoans Joshua from Milwaukee: “I was wondering if there was some deeper meaning or some hidden symbolism, but could not connect it to anything.”37 The positive reviews of the novel can sound equally disgruntled. Stephen from Ontario notes: “Remainder is a novel to be read for the existential discomfort that it leaves you with. Those who read this for a plot will not be satisfied.”38 Ghost from New Haven goes further: “This book has no real plot, but that’s the beauty of it.”39 For such readers, the

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discomfort of uncertainty is the point: “It’s hard not to feel simultaneously irritated at both the action and the narrator, and yet utterly compelled to see his obsession through.”40 Some invoke the uncanny to explain this coexistence of fascination and displeasure: “It’s creepy and haunting and very strange, yet familiar” is Michael Samuelian’s assessment. The New Yorker concurs, labeling Remainder “hypnotically creepy.”41 Several reviews call the novel “chilly” or “chilling,” conjuring a gothic sensibility. Bbemily on Powells .com asserts: “this eerie story will leave you with a strange taste by the time you have finished reading.”42 This somatic note resonates with the “slightly nauseous feeling in the stomach” that Chris Mitchell describes in his review for Spike magazine.43 The novel induces vertigo—Tod Goldberg’s Los Angeles Times review describes it as a “dizzying existential freefall.”44 McCarthy acknowledges La Nausée as a precursor, and these affective valences repeat the text’s own self-description: the narrator tells us that “uncertainty . . . made me dizzy” (6). Receptive contagion applies even to the novel’s lack of emotion, a blankness that derives from and enhances its repetitions. Goldberg writes, “It’s funny that I am writing about a book almost devoid of emotion in purely emotional terms, perhaps because by the end it left me feeling wholly empty. Not in a good or a bad way, just—in a way.”45 This last phrase echoes the narrator’s professions of his “neutral” feelings toward others (38). It is “the clarity, plainness and pace” of the novel that make it so “hypnotic.”46 Richard Crary invokes a fugue state: “as [the narrator] slows down the process, the prose slows, and we enter into the moment as readers, achieve an almost trance-like state, as he does.”47 Amazon.co.uk readers often invoke an addictive, mesmerizing quality, saying variously: “the narrator’s damaged, compelling perspective wormed its way into my thinking”; “I was drawn into the hero’s way of looking at the physical world”; “Days after finishing it, it still stuck in my mind”; “it got under my skin.”48 One reader claims: “As the narrator pursued the perfect sequence of movements, I started searching for my own. I actually started recognizing a really fluid opening of the fridge (no suction), pouring of milk on my cereal (cascading from one cheerio to the next with a soft, rushing sound), and so on.”49 It is unsurprising that readers often use the novel’s diction—“This book gleams, it hums”—to describe the experience of reading it.50 Crary

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notes that “the temptation to write about this novel in excessive detail is strong. As is the temptation to quote from it at considerable length.”51 Remainder’s repetitions are infectious, but so is the self-consciousness—“I will describe this novel by quoting its self-description”—they afford. Metareading heightens the novel’s experiential synchronicity, coordinating our feelings and knowledge with the narrator’s until they are near simultaneous. On Powells.com, a reader with the apt tag “vanityclear” deftly captures this: “I felt like I hallucinated it, the text so closely mirrored my thoughts.”52 These reviews capture the affective ambivalence of being knowingly pulled into a madman’s orbit. Subsuming metareading into its synchronicity, the novel affords the kind of experience blog reviewer Richard Crary evokes here: One of the blurbs on my copy of the novel talks about how, in the novel, the event, is “lived and relived in . . . Beckettian vibrations.” . . . While reading Remainder, especially the slowed down, repeated re-enactments, I seemed to feel, yes, “vibrations” of what Beckett is about. Here he describes in minute detail the slowed down re-enactment at the building in Brixton: “We stayed there for a very long time, facing one another. The pianist’s chords stretched out, elastic, like elastic when you stretch it and it opens up its flesh to you, shows you its cracks, its pores. The chords stretched and became softer, richer, wider; then they kinked back, reinstating themselves as he hit the keys again” . . . and I am reminded of Morton Feldman . . . actually, scratch that: I’m not merely reminded of Feldman, the passage makes me feel that I know what it would be like to be inside Feldman’s music; and then I remember that Feldman composed a piece “for” Beckett, and the reference seems entirely appropriate.53

Note that the covert allusions to Beckett and Feldman do not take Crary out of the text but rather immerse him more deeply in its vibrations. Remainder’s synchronicity adheres to that critical commonplace about gothic literature: self-awareness of emotions can amplify those emotions. Remainder is described as “arresting” (the New Yorker); “captivating” (the LA Times); “addictively strange,” “addictively gripping” (Amazon.com); and “strangely gripping” (the Times Literary Supplement); you will feel “compelled to reread it” (Time Out London). Laura Gray from Ann Arbor sums it up well on Amazon.com: “The crescendo of this mad fugue will keep adventurous readers enthralled.” A reader’s comment on ReadySteadyBook.com uses the same word to conflate the

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novel’s disquieting and compelling qualities in an oddly resistant polemic: “How nice for you that ‘Remainders’ [sic] enthralls you. If it doesn’t you won’t read it for long. It is as excruciating a novel as I’ve read in a long time. Is it fascinating? Fuck yeah.”54 The idea that the novel is enthralling captures an anxiety about losing autonomy when reading it. The word enthrall, more so than other variants like enchant, engross, or mesmerize, is slightly soured by its etymology: “to be in thrall or slavery.”55 Remainder’s affective dimensions thus portend a troubling impingement on readerly boundaries, subjectivity, and agency.

Enthrallment According to Rita Felski, this threat to the self is just the “bad press” that aesthetic absorption has received from “politically minded critics.”56 Felski’s description of a “mode of enchantment” in her 2008 Uses of Literature resonates strongly with Remainder’s mode of synchronicity: Not only your autonomy but your sense of agency is under siege. You have little control over your response; you turn the pages compulsively, you gaze fixedly at the screen like a sleepwalker. Descriptions of enchantment often pinpoint an arresting of motion, a sense of being transfixed, spellbound, unable to move, even as your mind is transported elsewhere. Time slows to a halt: you feel yourself caught in an eternal, unchanging present. Rather than having a sense of mastery over a text, you are at its mercy. You are sucked in, swept up, spirited away, you feel yourself enfolded in a blissful embrace. You are mesmerized, hypnotized, possessed.57

Apart from the hallucinatory, numinous quality of being and the slowing down of time, Felski also captures the besieged autonomy that readers of Remainder feel—what Freud describes as repetition’s capacity to induce “the sense of helplessness experienced in some dream-states.”58 Felski addresses the two usual charges against enchantment—“that it deludes and that it disables”—by invoking Michael Saler’s concept of the modern ironic imagination: “we are immersed but not submerged, bewitched but not beguiled, suspensions of disbelief that do not lose sight of the fictiveness of those fictions that enthrall us.”59 If we are aware of being “pulled into an altered state,” Felski argues, wonder can be “enlivening, energizing, even ethical.”60 Felski’s argument is familiar.61 Theorists and philosophers have long divided artworks into dichoto-

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mies—Verfremdungseffekt versus catharsis; high art versus low art; avant-garde versus kitsch—based on the degree to which they promote a self-consciousness that checks enchantment. With the ethical stakes of the self’s autonomy and agency in mind, I want to suggest that Remainder’s enthrallment negotiates the will to similitude (a loss of self through identification) and the will to differentiation (a self-awareness through analysis) somewhat differently.62 The narrator’s capacity for close, detailed, and systematic perusal in effect deconstructs the dichotomy between emotion and analysis. The eye of the reader, lensed by the narrator’s dreamy vision, may not be sober, but it is clinical: meticulous and detached. Enthrallment not only permits but also partakes of analysis in its etymological sense: “ana- ‘up’ + luein ‘loosen.’ ”63 Our self-awareness of a loss of agency in enthrallment is key to the ethical complexity of metareading Remainder’s mode of uncertainty. The narrator’s “facilitator” offers a model for self-aware synchronicity. Far from ignorant, Naz is practically omniscient: “He was like an extra set of limbs—eight extra sets of limbs, tentacles spreading out in all directions, coordinating projects, issuing instructions, executing commands. My executor” (77). As the narrator’s demands increase, Naz’s “in-built genius for logistics” is spiked with “a kind of measured zeal, a quiet passion,” his eyes going “vacant while the thing behind them whirred, processing” (233, 89). By the end of the novel: I could almost hear the whirring: the whirring of his computations and all of his ancestry, of rows and rows of clerks and scribes and actuaries, their typewriters and ledgers and adding machines all converging inside his skull into giant systems hungry to execute ever larger commands. Naz turned his face to me and told me: “Thank you . . . I’ve never managed so much information before.” (235)

The ultimate metareader, Naz is “infected, driven onwards, on towards a kind of ecstasy just by the possibilities of information management, each one more complex, more extreme” (235). The symbiosis between the two characters tightens: “our goals aligned, mine and Naz’s. He needed me as much as I needed him” (265). Naz executes the narrator’s most horrific acts, events that require “a leap of genius: a leap to another level, one that contained and swallowed all the levels I’d been operating on up to now” (265). This is how synchronicity

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can become an enthrallment. The novel makes readers collude with the narrator in precisely this way, enlisting us to cocreate an insane world, what one reader calls “getting the reader ‘on side.’ ”64 We become his re-enactors: As a reader I felt akin to the novel’s secondary characters, in that I was sucked into the nameless narrator’s world not entirely with my consent. I was with him as he led me through an apparently harmless fascination with “re-enacting” old memories, with him as he raised the stakes with increasingly perilous memory re-constructions, and with him at the novel’s blistering close, where his obsession leads to a truly chilling climax.

The comment above from Amazon reviewer Grendel from Scotland reveals the degree to which an enthralled, immersive reading does not exclude metareading the novel’s workings. Remainder may afford an unwilling enthrallment, but it is far from unwitting. One might think that the narrator—with his money and his obdurate demands—is simply an artistic dictator, an idea bolstered by the allusions to Federico Fellini’s 8½ and lines like this: “I want you to execute the exact look I’ll dictate to you” (120). His economic power draws others, readers included, into an unethical version of being “in sync.” The knowingness of our enthrallment, however, offers support for Louis Althusser’s theory that ideology entails repeated rituals of free submission. Althusser offers writing and reading as examples—“the writing I am currently executing and the reading you are currently performing are also in this respect rituals of ideological recognition”—but he epitomizes his theory by invoking the Christian imperative to choose God.65 This chimes with the ritualistic behaviors that Remainder incites, including Naz’s quasi-religious zealotry. Indeed, the novel’s repetitions move in its last quarter toward a spiritualized stillness and fixity. Dissatisfied with perpetuating the acausal co-presence of events in his re-enactments, the narrator comes to aspire to complete “Time Control,” a totalization of time and space. The novel takes this turn toward fixity as the narrator slows down his reenactments, telling his re-enactors: “Do them normally, but at half the normal speed. Or at the normal speed, but take twice as long” (212).66 This deceleration leads to a state close to standstill: “I repeated the sequence, kinking the fragment of the episode that we were lingering on to just before it had begun—then became completely still, the two of us

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suspended in the midst of our two separate ongoing actions” (227–228). This betokens the stillness of death when the narrator re-enacts the crime scene of a man killed in a drug shoot-out, the pavement of which is “a handmade, patterned quilt laid out for this man to take his final steps across and then lie down and die: a quilted deathbed” (214). In an interview, McCarthy cites this cozy, chilling picture of death in his reply to a question about the gap between a real disaster and its symbolic mapping: When he wants to re-enact the drug dealer’s death is where he tries to close that gap. Society’s way of dealing with it is for the police to come, take forensic photographs, clear away the blood—erase everything. The hero says “No, that’s not enough. It needs more attention than that.” It’s ethical, despite his psychopathic thing. He’s committed to the event. I hadn’t read Levinas then, I read it after. But I thought yes, that’s exactly what I meant. Levinas talks about the death of the Other as being an absolute command. Your own subjectivity is breached open by that ethical encounter. You have to return to it, can’t resolve it or move on. You don’t have to solve it, because it’s unsolvable.67

In this retroactively Lévinasian model, self-dissolution and uncertainty become ways to access alterity. But McCarthy’s glib qualification about his character—“despite his psychopathic thing”—speaks volumes, as does the narrator’s description of the event: “The truth is that, for me, this man had become a symbol of perfection. . . . The spot that this had happened on was the ground zero of perfection—all perfection. . . . It was sacred ground, blessed ground—and anyone who occupied it in the way he’d occupied it would become blessed too” (198). The basis for ethics is not a “shared experience” between people but an abstracted “symbol of perfection.”68 The narrator’s movement toward fixing people into an idea is marked by a transformation of his images of others from three dimensions— dreams, hallucinations—to two dimensions: I pictured all my people lifted up, abstracted, framed like saints in churches’ stained-glass windows, each eternally performing their own action. I pictured the liver lady bright-coloured and two-dimensional, bending slightly forward lowering her rubbish bag, her left hand on her hip, the pianist sitting in profile at his piano practising, the motorbike enthusiast flat, kneeling, fiddling with his engine. I pictured the back-up people

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framed holding bright walkie-talkies and bright clipboards in bright, colourful Staff Heaven, the cat putter-outers reunited with the cats they’d posted there before them while extras hovered round the edges like cherubic choruses. I pictured this all night, lying in my bath, watching steam rising. (277)

The narrator’s flattening of his re-enactors into an infinity of eternal action dovetails with his interest in ascension and transubstantiation: the steam rising from the bath inspires him to “vaporize” his staff by  putting them in an airplane and blowing it up after his final re-enactment. The stained glass image invokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s picture of the chronotope of medieval vision literature. Texts like Dante’s Comedia, Bakhtin argues, are possessed of temporal simultaneity, the apotheosis of the vertical forms of metarepetition I have traced in Remainder: The temporal logic of this vertical world consists in the sheer simultaneity of all that occurs (or “the coexistence of everything in eternity”). Everything that on earth is divided by time, here, in this verticality, coalesces into eternity, into pure simultaneous coexistence. Such divisions as time introduces—“earlier” and “later”—have no substance here; they must be ignored in order to understand this vertical world; everything must be perceived as being within a single time, that is, in the synchrony of a single moment; one must see this entire world as simultaneous. Only under conditions of pure simultaneity—or what amounts to the same thing, in an environment outside time altogether—can there be revealed the true meaning of “that which was, and which is, and which shall be”: and this is so because the force (time) that had divided these three is deprived of its authentic reality and its power to shape thinking.69

Once past, present, and future have merged into utter synchronicity, we lose reality and thought. Lying on the ground of this bank robbery—having just shot one of his re-enactors with a real gun—the narrator succumbs to this passive aestheticization of a world outside time: The objects—the doors’ stump, the edge, the poster’s corner—had become abstracted, separated from the space around them, freed from distances to float around together in this pool of reproductions, like my staff in their stained-glass window heaven.

Synchronicity “Speculation,” I said; “contemplation of the heavens. Money, blood and light. Removals. Any distance.” I moved my head over to Four’s body and poked my finger into the wound in his chest. (294)

The narrator’s “blessed, sacred” identification with the dead has him playing Doubting Thomas, as he probes the wound he has inflicted and describes it with the same words he used earlier about a puddle on the floor. What makes Remainder’s enthrallment so dangerous is that aesthetic self-dissolution bleeds so easily into a collusion to which we cannot even plead ignorance.

Remainder The narrator transforms an uncertain synchronicity into a synchronic synthesis, merging things that ought to remain separate into a single quasi-religious vision with one cause: himself. The enthrallment afforded by Remainder’s repetitions, too, align story, discourse, and reading experience into a vertical concurrence, leading to a mode of synchronicity that locks us within a prison house of similitude and collusion. Is there an escape hatch from this perfect mirroring, from the static, abstracted prison of correspondence to which vertical synchronicity leads? While it closes with a vision of a stained-glass window, we ought not forget that McCarthy’s novel begins with “Parts, bits,” and before that the title, Remainder. We might define remainders as those things that continually interrupt and disturb the narrator’s holism, sense of containment, and will to perfection. Let us see whether different versions of “remainder”—literal, figurative, affective—might disrupt the narrator’s will and his idealized synchronicity. We can conceive of the remainder in a few ways. Material remainders— bits, parts, pieces, fragments—threaten to jam the smooth articulation of the world’s joints, its fluency. The narrator also sees the remainder as something left over, what Jacques Derrida might call a trace. This manifests in the motif of stains—coffee and wine spills, the dirt and grease marking the narrator’s clothing—and in the mathematical sense, like the half that attaches itself to his eight million pounds. Finally, the remainder is also akin to a Derridean supplement, an extra bit that destabilizes something. For instance, the smell of cordite that permeates the narrative is never explained to the reader but is recognizable as a (false)

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indication in crime fiction that a gun has been fired. Though the narrator has no basis for recognizing it—“I don’t think I’ve ever been near cordite”—the smell foreshadows the gunshots in the final reenactment (280). These versions of remainder—fragment, trace, supplement—come together here: You think of an escalator as one object, a looped, moving bracelet, but in fact it’s made of loads of individual, separate steps woven together into one smooth system. Articulated. These ones had been disarticulated, and were lying messily around a closed-off area of the upper concourse. They looked helpless, like beached fish. I stared at them as I passed them. I was staring at them so intently that I stepped onto the wrong escalator, the up one, and was jolted onto the concourse again. As my hand slipped over the handrail the black grease got onto my sleeve and stained it. I have, right to this day, a photographically clear memory of standing on the concourse looking at my stained sleeve, at the grease—this messy, irksome matter that had no respect for millions, didn’t know its place. My undoing: matter. (16–17)

The mess of the escalator renders its parts helpless, fragmentation “undoing” the narrator’s world. The blood of the machine leaves a greasy trace on the narrator, subverting him. Similarly, his re-enactments rarely proceed fluently: “Some things had worked, and some things hadn’t. My shirt had slightly caught against the cutting board, but then the fridge had opened perfectly. The liver lady had come up with that fantastic line but then dropped her rubbish bag when she’d tried to reenact her movements for a third time. Then there was the question of that smell” (152). The narrator continually absorbs remainders like these into his machinations, however, as we see in his reconstruction of a re-enactor’s accidental trip during rehearsal: In the rehearsals, after Five had tripped on it that one time, I’d told him to half-trip each time he passed it. I’d even had Frank slip a small piece of wood under the carpet, to make sure the wrinkle stayed there. Five had got so used to half-tripping on it over weeks of rehearsals—ten, twenty times each day, over and over—that the half-trip had become instinctive, second nature. (290)

Synchronicity

This effort to contain an error produces another one: the re-enactor, used to half-tripping and catching himself in rehearsals, trips and falls in the final re-enactment because there is no kink in the real bank’s carpet. Yet this unexpected remainder in the action is what leads to the fulfillment of the narrator’s desire to merge re-enactment with reality: “It became real while it was going on. Thanks to the ghost kink mainly—the kink the other kink left when we took it away” (296). That is, any remainder is systematically incorporated into the narrator’s unrelenting synchronicity. Other characters in the novel notice—and sometimes perform—these errors and glitches, but they are paid to shut their mouths about it. Indeed, the narrator’s employees all capitulate to his requests, acceding to the rhythm of “the remainder” in the novel: disruption, then reabsorption. The disparity between the narrator’s emotions and theirs, however, conduces to a form of dramatic irony, offering a kind of affective remainder.70 I want to investigate two versions of this diegetic disenchantment— skepticism and shock—as discrepancies that might disrupt the narrator’s monolithic vision. To begin with skepticism, the motorbike mechanic in the first re-enactment is stupefied by the narrator’s request that he leave an oil patch intact so it might be captured later. But the narrator fumes, “It wasn’t his business to make me explain what I meant by ‘capture.’ It meant whatever I wanted it to mean: I was paying him to do what I said. Prick” (151). The pianist in this re-enactment has recorded and broadcasts the piece he is meant to play live continually. When the narrator catches the “deception,” he becomes apoplectic with anger, insisting that a recording and actual playing are “not the same.” When the pianist asks him why not, the narrator’s voice and strength wither in the face of this “bad person”; his tingling sours into dizziness and nausea (158). The simulacrum within the simulacrum (a piece of recorded music within a re-enactment) undermines the project as a whole. The re-enactors’ disruption of the narrator’s point of view becomes more potent when the final re-enactment of the bank robbery turns all too real: “They moaned and wept and yelped and shrieked. I listened to them for a while, trying to work out the rhythm of the various sounds, the moans and wails and yelps—which followed what, how long it took for the whole sequence to repeat itself—but gave up after a while. It was too complex to pin down right now; I’d have to get it re-enacted later” (297). While he repeats, “I was very happy,” his reenactors seem “very unhappy,” an understatement that only drives home

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the affective disjunction between his serenity and their hysterical “agitated” response (296). The novel emphasizes this difference: “They all ran and screamed and bumped and fell—but I had a cylinder around me, an airlock” (294). Shock, another affective remainder, does not necessarily entail moral opprobrium, but it at least briefly puts a dent in the smooth surface of the narrator’s synchronicity. While the novel’s minor characters might express resistance, however, they are all eventually subsumed into the narrator’s monomania. The narrator’s re-enactors serve their dictated roles—the pianist returns to his job—even if this entails moving toward their deaths. This disruption, then reabsorption, of skepticism and shock applies to the reading experience as well. Readers’ skeptical commentary online often suggests that the narrator is delusional—this resonates with the skepticism afforded by the mode of oscillation we saw in The Crying of Lot 49. When we look at the data readers provide online, we see that skepticism about Remainder is often expressed in terms that the narrative itself sets out. E. D. Costello from London protests: “I couldn’t believe that Time Control existed outside of his head—no one would do what he instructed, no matter how well paid. . . . And £8.5m would not have been enough for everything that he was doing, surely.”71 As Tom S. Lee notes in his scathing Amazon review, the narrator’s fleeting references to his investments in the stock market are risible: “the sums clearly don’t add up, even taking into account the lazy and recurring nod to the central character’s exponentially rising shares.”72 But the novel precisely calls attention to this crack in the façade, parodying the narrator’s stock market speculation with mystical language: “I was wreaking magic, like a shaman” (259). The novel’s tendency to predictively describe its story and its discourse applies to the reading experience it promotes as well. Even those disparities that might allow the reader’s skepticism or resistance to interrupt the novel’s smooth fluency of similitude are accounted for by Remainder’s metafictional asides. In this sense, the more we recognize Remainder’s metafiction, the more it seems to allegorize our responses before we even feel them. We see this when blog reviewer Amelia Atlas tries to disentangle herself: I was not reading to discover more about the contours of space in the narrator’s re-enacted building or the essential nature of the liver the liver-lady incessantly cooks in the flat below his (though admittedly, the descriptions

Synchronicity of vaporized fat congealing on the vents are the among the novel’s most horrifying). I was reading to try to understand the narrator’s compulsion to re-enact, to see beyond its calculated obscurity. . . . [The narrator] refers to his re-enactments, casually, as “the whole game” and mentions the “advantages of hindsight.” These clues are subtle, but there is, as it were, an “outside.”73

Atlas’s metareading is an effort to “see beyond” the novel’s enthrallment. Yet she proves the text’s “outside” through quotations from its insides, spoken by the narrator no less: if her skepticism is prefigured, so is the horror to which Atlas admits parenthetically. The novel’s will to similitude thwarts agency in readers, preemptively subsuming even our aversion to it. It is fitting, then, that readers use the language of rapture rather than rupture to describe their response to the novel’s shocking ending: “The novel’s climax has an almost anti-climactic calm that left me bewildered and satisfied.”74 This is both strikingly similar to the narrator’s response and somewhat inappropriate to the novel’s climax: the narrator puts all of his re-enactors on a plane to be vaporized, then hijacks another plane and orders the pilot to fly the plane in a figure eight, also a sign for infinity. The final image of a hovering airplane conjures whatever preceded the novel’s first scene—“something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits”—intimating that the perfect concordance of time and space to which synchronicity aspires will be complete just past its last page. Many readers report responding to this synchronic apotheosis with a kind of awe, a dawning shock. This dilatory surprise—a slow “bursting of banks”—resonates with the unbearable lightness and density of being the narrator experiences. “It was a very happy day,” says the narrator just before he pulls out a gun. “A stunningly strange book about the rarest of fictional subjects: happiness,” reads Jonathan Lethem’s blurb on the American edition of Remainder.

Syncope Toward the end of Remainder, the narrator’s happiness comes to seem coeval with a loss of consciousness: “I spent the next three days drifting into and out of trances. They were like waking comas: I wouldn’t move for long stretches of time, or register any stimuli around me—sound, light, anything—and yet I’d be fully conscious: my eyes would be wide

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open and I’d seem to be engrossed in something. I’d remain in this state for several hours on end” (219). These trances accord with the oldfashioned word Jung’s translator uses for near-death experiences: syncope. In its etymology, this word combines sun (together) and koptein (strike or cut off); it also refers to the omission of sounds or letters in a word when pronounced. For Jung, the syncope occasions synchronicity, producing “a very distinct and impressive feeling or hallucination of levitation.”75 By way of conclusion, I want to consider two somatic responses Jean-Luc Nancy explores in his 1976 Le Discours de la Syncope: Logodaedalus: fainting and laughing. Unlike skepticism and shock—affective divergences that the novel nevertheless absorbs—the syncope in Remainder offers the reader a brief, liberating uncertainty: a syncopation that disrupts synchronicity via similitude. For Nancy, the syncope produces “the undecidable,” which he differentiates from “the ineffable,” from “equivocation,” and from “a baggy and diffuse ambiguity” that would accommodate “a profusion and multiplicity of meanings.”76 Nancy notes that the undecidable comes from mathematics and defines it, in Saul Anton’s 2008 translation, as follows: The undecidable is made from the exact superimposition—in geometry they say homography—of the blind spot and the center of vision. An undecidable proposition is one that cannot be the object of any demonstration, neither by deducing it nor by excluding it from the system; it can neither be derived nor refuted; it does not submit to the logic of a system, though neither does it oppose it (since it belongs to it). . . . The undecidable proposition is produced, marked, and classified by the system and within it.77

Nancy claims that the undecidable depends on sameness: “it’s the same that produces and inscribes the undecidable. . . . The undecidable is the very power of the same—that which, by means of discourse, withdraws discourse from its own Absolute Knowledge.” Nancy concludes that the best formulation for the syncope is: “the same undecides itself.” A waking trance epitomizes this paradox of sameness: “what is called consciousness probably never allows itself to be grasped as an identity except when it blacks out: it is the syncope.”78 The syncope thus entails both presence and absence, both knowing and unknowing. The syncope works in precisely this way in Remainder, as the narrator’s “black outs” repeat the blank slate of the novel’s opening. His

Synchronicity

trances differ from re-enactments in that they are intermittent, indeterminate, and beyond his control. In contrast to his tendency to control his visions by realizing them, the narrator seems controlled by his trances, which undermine his authority. In readers’ resistant commentary online about Remainder, the syncope often provides evidence for the narrator’s unreliability. One reader argues that “the whole sequence is a dream, possibly of someone dying on a ventilator in an ICU, having experienced a horrific trauma. It may even have occurred at the instant preceding death.”79 Others describe as a hallucination the appearance of a man whom the narrator identifies as a “borough councillor” during these trances. No other character besides the narrator sees this man, who asks probing questions of him in the third person: “Does he, perhaps . . . consider himself to be some kind of artist?”; “could it rather be that he sees these acts as a kind of voodoo? Magic? As shamanic performances?” (237). Akin to the recording made by the devious pianist, the councillor seems a destabilizing simulacrum of a simulacrum. Unlike Naz, who is drawn to the narrator’s elaborate design, and unlike the re-enactors, who are drawn to his money, this character is immune to the promise of psychic or material gain. In this sense, the councillor embodies neither a willing reader nor a bamboozled reader but rather an uncertain one. Zadie Smith suggests that the councillor “finally asks the questions—and receives the answers—that the novel has denied us till now. Why are you doing this? How does it make you feel?”80 The councillor both does and doesn’t exist, he is both metafictional and material, he is both the narrator’s projected self and a separate other (“the same undecides itself”). Rather than being dragged or pulled into the novel’s synchronicity, this figure seems to emerge out of it. Succumbing neither to a bureaucratic frenzy nor to free submission, this councillor escapes the narrator by coinciding with him; he exists within the novel’s enthrallment yet is not subject to it. Like the trances during which he appears, the councillor is a syncope, undoing the narrator from within: “The short councillor smiled—the type of smile that implied he’d known what my answer would be before I’d even given it” (242). This Cheshire Cat grin—an index of agreement—underscores one aspect of Remainder’s mode we have not yet considered: its widely acknowledged humor. Lay and professional reviewers consistently say that Remainder is hilarious, the funniest book they’ve read in years. The

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novel offers up the standard comic fare of repetition: the “mechanical encrusted on the living” slapstick and the deadpan conversations we also saw in American Psycho.81 While for Kant it is a sign of good health, and for most of us a sign of pleasure, Nancy notes that laughter implies a syncope, a loss of consciousness: “In order to think its own laughter (which it needs so it can live, so it can feel itself), thinking passes through the thought of its nonknowing.”82 Georges Bataille similarly maintains that laughter bespeaks both what we do and what we do not know: He who laughs does not, theoretically, abandon his knowledge, but he refuses, for a time—a limited time—to accept it, he allows himself to be overcome by the impulse to laughter, so that what he knows is destroyed, but he retains, deep within, the conviction that it is not, after all, destroyed. When we laugh we retain deep within us that which is suppressed by laughter, but it has been only artificially suppressed, just as laughter, let us say, has the power to suspend strict logic.83

We might say that the syncopated feeling of laughter, the spasmodic movement of the body, does not obliterate but rather skips over knowledge. This accords with the narrator’s own blankness when it comes to humor. While he uses “funny” to signify “odd” a couple of times, the accident has left the narrator immune to humor in the usual sense: “I stood there listening to his voice coming through the answering machine’s tinny speaker, simulating an orgasm. Before the accident I would have found this really funny. Now I didn’t” (84–85). He can perceive humor—he describes someone’s words as “funny and intelligent”—but cannot react to it. The implications of humorlessness for empathic capacity are well documented in studies of psychopathology, a diagnosis of which would be appropriate for Remainder’s narrator. Because the narrator pays for his re-enactors’ subservience, his patently absurd requests—to make matter disappear or to control the sunset—are often met with quiet befuddlement and deference; no one even laughs with incredulity. This again presents a form of dramatic irony: these nonresponses allow us to see through the narrator. McCarthy claims that though he had not read it before writing Remainder, Paul de Man’s essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality” describes the novel’s irony exactly:

Synchronicity Paul de Man, the literary critic, argues that irony is a direct response to what he calls dédoublement, or doubling. . . . He wrote this really brilliant essay in which he says that the basis for comedy is doubling. So comedy is basically, like, a man falls over in the street, and we watch him and we laugh. That’s basically it, right? But de Man says that some people can be both the man who trips and the man who is aware of the trip and laughs. Only a special few can do this, only artists and philosophers. And this is both a blessing, because we’re elevated to the position, but at the same time it’s a curse, because we’re splitting, having both experiences—we’re doubled, and we can never be an authentic, singular self. Our only response to this condition can be to repeat the experience of doubling on more and more self-conscious levels. And he calls that irony, which he says is the mode of the novel.84

Despite McCarthy’s retrospective admiration for de Man’s analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s dédoublement, however, Remainder’s self-conscious moments of irony are not actually that funny. The narrator may be aware when he trips, but he does not laugh, and neither do we. Just as reading about synchronicity doesn’t necessarily produce the eerie feeling of it, reading about a person tripping isn’t always funny. The purposeful, rehearsed trips the narrator forces Robber Five to perform subsequently are bereft of humor precisely because they are so deeply caused. Even the description of the first accidental “trip” is humorless: “he tripped on a wrinkle in the carpet and fell over. Everyone laughed, but I said: ‘Do that each time’ ” (257). Notably, this is one of only two moments in the novel where anyone laughs; the other is a cheerless description of passersby, “media types” who “threw their heads back when they laughed” (53–54). Humor is, in fact, the one affective response cited by readers that does not synchronize with its operations within the novel. Our laughter does not diverge entirely from the novel—we do not simply laugh at it—but it is definitively out of sync with it. While, as we have seen, boredom, nausea, enthrallment, shock, and skepticism are all self-consciously remarked upon and contagious for the reader, amusement is not. Laughter is the one affective response to Remainder that seems a true remainder, outside the auspices of the novel’s synchronicity. Yet it is funniest precisely when it uses repetition vertically as a form of self-reflexivity. Indeed, the laughter prompted by Remainder’s selfdescriptive moments seems best to capture the workings of the syncope as Nancy describes it. As Indieshock “HELLA” puts it on Amazon, “The

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repetitiveness detailing the ‘re-enactments’ are like inside jokes shared with the reader.”85 The novel’s metafictional moments are precisely what make Zadie Smith guffaw: Maybe the most heartening aspect of Remainder is that its theoretical foundations prove no obstacle to the expression of a perverse, self-ridiculing humor. In fact, the closer it adheres to its own principles, the funnier it is. Having spent half the book in an inauthentic building with re-enactors reenacting, the Re-enactor decides he needs a change: “One day I got an urge to go and check up on the outside world myself. Nothing much to report.” A minimalist narrative refusal that made me laugh out loud.86

Smith’s evocation of Remainder’s “comic declension” emphasizes the “adherence to its own principles” evident in its self-mocking, self-descriptive line: “Nothing much to report.” J. Hillis Miller, speaking of “the outrageous wordplay of a work like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” describes his response to a similar metafictional moment: “Alice and the animals are dried off after their swim in Alice’s tears by hearing the Mouse read aloud an exceedingly dry historical account. Such puns produce, in me at least, an explosion of laughter.”87 Even the cleverness of Carroll’s pun doesn’t quite account for what Miller calls its “pleasurable violence.”88 This knowing but eruptive laughter is, like the narrator’s hallucinated councillor, an uncertain effect produced not by difference but by sameness. Remainder’s exact self-description seems to prompt this syncopic laughter through what Nancy calls the “undecidability of the same.” We could see this as a kind of metafictional implosion. At the end of the novel, the narrator is on his plane with Naz, about to instruct the pilot to make that perfect figure eight. His facilitator, roped into organizing the narrator’s final wish—exploding another plane with all of the narrator’s re-enactors on board—sits across from him, frozen and silenced by the shock of his own complicity. The stewardess asks if Naz is alright: “ ‘Oh, he’s had a shock,’ I said. ‘He had it coming though’ ” (303). The “Ha!” that bursts from me when I read these lines is contingent on metafictional self-description: I, too, in my reading of Remainder, have had it coming. The unwitting knowingness of the narrator’s comment prompts a heady synchronicity of horror and laughter. As

Synchronicity

Nancy puts it, “thinking passes through the thought of its nonknowing.”89 As I read, I cannot prevent the narrator from achieving his murderous synthesis, but I am not entirely subsumed within it either. My laughter is possessed of an eruptive and momentarily free uncertainty. It is both prompted by the novel and outside of its will toward replete concordance. I laugh out loud, but I don’t quite know why.

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7 C O N C L U S I O N : F L I P PA N CY

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005)

Extremity and Intimacy The present moment is an ideal vantage point from which to examine the belatedness of literary uncertainty. As techniques for uncertainty have become widely available to writers and rapidly recognizable to readers, we have to wonder: has the pathos of literary uncertainty come to eclipse the ethos afforded by it? I pursue this question through Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, a novel that manipulates techniques for uncertainty with which readers are deeply familiar.1 Rather than unsettling our values, this novel’s flashy moves conduce to a set of clichéd ideas about uncertainty while stirring a generic, sentimental affective response. Foer’s extremely contemporary novel is in fact incredibly backward, in both senses: nostalgic and old-fashioned. It revolves around a recent event, the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, and deploys photography, typographical play, and other modern tricks. But, as I will show, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close borrows its formal verve and its emotional energy from the past. Its seemingly “new” textual experiments conjure what Raymond Williams might call an old “structure of feeling,” a pathos that merges irony and sincerity. This novel takes advantage of its post-postmodernist position by combining all three of the narrative structures I have considered in Seven Modes of Uncertainty. I will briefly recap these narrative structures, which can—but do not always—afford uncertainty. Mutual exclusion is the coexistence of opposed explanations for the same set of events; when these explanations are made irreconcilable, the reader is left puzzled 269

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about what has happened. Foer’s novel operates through mutually exclusive pairs: absence and presence, silence and sound, black and white, recto and verso. Multiplicity presents several views on the same set of events; when these views conflict, this affords uncertainty. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close deploys this perspectival structure with its three first-person narrators: a precocious nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell and his two paternal grandparents, each of whom has a distinctive way of writing about trauma. While repetition often grounds narrative stability, when taken to an extreme, it can dissolve a text’s facts, events, and temporal trajectory. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close recounts passages verbatim and redundantly illustrates its prose with visual images. As this last example suggests, the novel uses these narrative structures to distort and conceal information not only through its discourse but also through its medium. Foer makes textual experimentation manifestly experiential, grounding it in the reader’s somatic engagement with the book. My argument about this novel’s mode of “uncertainty”—please take those scare quotes as implied throughout this chapter—will move toward a discussion of this materiality in its techniques. Foer’s long title rather deftly telegraphs the major elements of my argument. Consider the experiential, interpretive, and affective imperatives implicit in the words “extremely loud and incredibly close.” With its hyperbolic tone and its adverbial, adjectival grammar, the phrase indexes the affective tenor of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, which amounts to a kind of hysterical intimacy. This affective overflow is indexed in part by the regularity with which its readers confess to weeping over it, in particular over its ending.2 It is not so surprising that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close should be moving to us. Oskar, the child narrator responsible for the tweenish hyperbole of the title, is at once extremely emotional and incredibly intellectual: And also, there are so many times when you need to make a quick escape, but humans don’t have their own wings, or not yet, anyway, so what about a birdseed suit? Anyway. (2)

Oskar here seems to be doing some “magical thinking,” to reapply Joan Didion’s incisive term for the kind of wishful beliefs that accompany

Conclusion

mourning. Exposed to trauma, Oskar comes up with a dissociative intellectual mechanism—inventing—that nevertheless taps directly into the source and repercussions of that trauma. We soon discover that the novel revolves around the fact that Oskar’s father, Thomas Schell, Jr., was in one of the towers when they fell on 9/11. Who but Thomas, Jr., trapped in a burning building about to collapse, would need a birdseed suit? The child’s mourning prompts an affective response in the reader precisely because it is indirect and misdirected. Note that the word “Anyway” gets its own paragraph, a telling instance of how the visual form of this text is meant to cue sentiment. Henceforth, whenever Oskar offers the non sequitur “anyway,” the reader is meant to translate absence—of context, of consciousness, of comfort—into a legible affective presence. The unsaid is meant to speak volumes in this novel. The title also invokes two scenes that together exemplify the novel’s workings. Extremely and incredibly are two of Oskar’s favorite words, but they appear in proximity with loud and close just twice. The first time is when he interrupts a tour of the Empire State Building: “During spring and autumn bird-migration season, the lights that illuminate the tower are turned off on foggy nights so they won’t confuse birds, causing them to fly into the building.” I told her, “Ten thousand birds die every year from smashing into windows,” because I’d accidentally found that fact when I was doing some research about the windows in the Twin Towers. “That’s a lot of birds,” Mr. Black said. “And a lot of windows,” Ruth said. I told them, “Yeah, so I invented a device that would detect when a bird is incredibly close to a building, and that would trigger an extremely loud birdcall from another skyscraper, and they’d be drawn to that.” (250)

The resonance of this precocious knowledge with the image of planes flying into buildings need not be parsed. The novel’s other oblique citation of the title comes when Oskar first meets his elderly neighbor. Mr. Black shares his surname with others whom Oskar encounters in his quest to locate the owner of a key he finds in his deceased father’s possessions. The diverse voices of the Blacks exemplify the novel’s use of multiplicity to conjure a kaleidoscopic picture of 9/11. This Mr. Black speaks loudly—rendered visually by a surfeit of exclamation points—because he switched his hearing aids off long ago. Oskar offers to turn up the volume. While the words in what follows are “extremely fast and incredibly close,” the context is about loudness:

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Conclusion I went back around behind him and turned them up just a tiny bit more, until they stopped. I went back in front of him. He shrugged. Maybe the hearing aids didn’t work anymore, or maybe the batteries had died of old age, or maybe he had gone completely deaf since he turned them off, which was possible. We looked at each other. Then out of nowhere, a flock of birds flew by the window, extremely fast and incredibly close. Maybe twenty of them. Maybe more. But they also seemed like just one bird, because somehow they all knew (165)

The text breaks off here at the bottom of the page. When we turn the leaf, we find a black and white photograph of a flock of birds spread across two facing pages. The silent image, cleverly placed, interrupts the prose even as it translates it exactly. This is one way the novel uses repetition: presenting a visual depiction and a verbal description as simultaneously as possible. After the photo spread, the text resumes: exactly what to do. Mr. Black grabbed at his ears and made a bunch of weird sounds. He started crying—not out of happiness, I could tell, but not out of sadness, either. “Are you OK?” I whispered. The sounds of my voice made him cry more, and he nodded his head yes. (168)

In both of the moments cited by the title, we find the same effect that was condensed in Oskar’s birdseed suit invention. Affectively, we witness grief and hope at once; Oskar understands this only naively, making the moment more poignant. Aesthetically, we move rapidly between different ideas and different media: mutual exclusion appears here in an interplay of absence and presence, silence and sound, black and white. This is ramified by the photograph’s visual interruption of silent reading—the text/image dichotomy aligns with a recto/verso opposition. The fact that birds figure in these scenes, as well as in Oskar’s “birdseed suit,” is far from incidental: this avian leitmotif, I will show, conjoins the novel’s investment in traumatized silence, in flights of feeling, and in the physical qualities of the material book. The final observation I wish to make about this novel’s title concerns its length: the title is extremely unwieldy and incredibly fungible. Like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a memoir by Dave Eggers—a writer whose work raises similar questions about cloying affect and

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textual self-consciousness—Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (I’ll abbreviate it henceforth as EL&IC) takes too long to say and tends toward spoonerism and jumbling.3 Yet with their rhythmic parallelism and internal alliteration, both titles have the rhythm of a good piece of slang, a conjunction cleaving in both cases excesses of aggression and intimacy. These titles are hard to keep straight, but they’re catchy; they’re ungainly but, to use an aptly adolescent term, neat. EL&IC’s title in particular collates a set of opposed textual tendencies: intimacy and extremity; immersion and interruption; difficulty and facility. The novel is remarkably easy to absorb, despite the bits and pieces— the experimental claptrap—jutting out of it. New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani concurs with this ambivalent assessment: “Despite moments of shattering emotion and stunning virtuosity . . . Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close feels simultaneously contrived and improvisatory, schematic and haphazard.”4 For all its investment in historical trauma and postmodernist trickery, EL&IC turns out to be rather a light read. In what follows, I show how its narrative structures do not afford uncertainty but conform to a unified aesthetic of polarity and an apolitical sentimentality that universalizes the personal. Mapping these effects onto message, medium, and material, EL&IC affords a mode I call flippancy, punning on the “page-turner,” while hinting at Oskar’s knowing whimsy and the potential irreverence of playing with such a raw, recent wound in American history as 9/11. In this novel, techniques often used to promote uncertainty do not—à la Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt—distance us from trauma in order to exhort social critique. Nor do they confuse or disturb our ethical values. Oddly enough, EL&IC uses them to make us weep.

Polarity Polarity is a stabilizing feature across all three of the narrative structures—mutual exclusion, multiplicity, and repetition—that EL&IC uses to cast doubt on its diegesis. Given the novel’s investment in dichotomy, it makes sense that mutual exclusion is the most prominent of the three. I will begin with this coordination of polar opposites, which constitutes the governing aesthetic of the novel. At the level of imagery, we find a chiaroscuro palette that emphasizes the high contrast of darkness and light. Along with Oskar’s proclivity for extreme adverbial forms (e.g., incredibly), the novel is also intent on strict antitheses like black

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and white, Yes and No, Something and Nothing. Mutual exclusion is translated into the medium through a juxtaposition of repletion and depletion, visual presence and absence: there are nearly blank pages and nearly full ones. Foer’s use of this narrative structure capitalizes on the materiality of the book—its textual polarity and rectilinear geometry and the reader’s turning of pages from recto to verso. The relationship between Oskar’s paternal grandparents epitomizes mutual exclusion in the discourse, medium, and material form of the novel. They are opposed in every way: their personalities, their aesthetic interests, their relationships with others, and their orientation toward language. Their life at home operates accordingly as they divvy their apartment into Nothing and Something spaces that dictate where they are allowed to interact with each other. They are joined in their mourning for the same two family members. The first is Anna, who died when the Allied Forces bombed Dresden during World War II. Anna was the grandmother’s sister and Thomas, Sr.’s first wife; this already tells you something about their relationship. The second subject of their mourning is their son—Thomas, Jr., Oskar’s father—who died in the attack on the World Trade Center. Trauma cleaves these two opposed characters, joining and separating them at once. When his first wife, Anna, dies, Oskar’s grandfather goes mute. As he loses the spoken word, he takes refuge in the written word. He scribbles in “day-books” to communicate and writes letters to the son he abandoned in chapters entitled, “Why I Am Not Where You Are”: I have so much to tell you, the problem isn’t that I’m running out of time, I’m running out of room, this book is filling up, there couldn’t be enough pages. I looked around the apartment this morning for one last time, and there was writing everywhere, filling the walls and mirrors, I’d rolled up the rugs so I could write on the floors, I’d written on the windows and around the bottles of wine we were given but never drank, I wear only short sleeves, even when it’s cold because my arms are books, too. (132)

Oskar’s grandmother, conversely, is garrulous in speech but blank in writing. The chapters she narrates, “My Feelings,” are riven with visual gaps. When her husband gives her a typewriter to write her life story, he forgets to put the ribbon in and she produces a pile of blank paper: “I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces” (176). We then move through a representative series of blank pages.

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The interplay of presence and absence that underlies the operation of their writing devices—her typewriter, his pen—reminds us of the clutter of black letters on white pages that we are reading. What we see (blank and black pages) matches the characters’ actions (hitting the space bar, writing endlessly). Oskar’s grandmother talks a lot but writes nothing, her text spaced out; his grandfather is mute but writes on everything, his text running to repletion. The depiction of the couple thus constitutes a chiasmus of darkness and blankness at the levels of the discourse, medium, and book. Rather than putting explanations or events at odds to afford uncertainty, polarity in EL&IC amounts to fungibility: “when I think of your mother’s life story, I know that I haven’t explained a thing, she and I are no different. I’ve been writing Nothing too” (132). This antithesis leads to a shared metaphysical plight: her life is void, blank; his life is void, black. Equated through rather than unsettled by their opposition, the characters both evince versions of muteness that Philippe Codde connects to the novel’s bird imagery via the myth of Philomela.5 Oskar’s narrative—also aflutter with bird imagery—might seem to disrupt this binary. The grandparents’ respective chapters alternate with Oskar’s, producing a narrative structure of multiplicity. The three voices are certainly distinctive, and the text’s modernist perspectivalism maps onto ethical questions about family, community, and nationhood after 9/11. But because the grandparents are so diametrically opposed, the tripartite narrative structure feels more like a model of synthesis than of uncertainty, with Oskar’s style merging the antithetical features of his two grandparents. Like his grandfather, Oskar sends letters, mostly fan mail, which are depicted in a suitably blocked out format on the page. And like his grandmother’s gappy prose style, textual blank spaces grow in proportion to what Oskar can and can’t hear. To reinforce the sense that Oskar’s text is the connective tissue between his alienated grandparents, the novel construes their three relationships as dyadic. That is, Oskar has a relationship with his grandmother; he has a relationship with her silent “guest,” who never discloses to Oskar that he is his grandfather; and his two grandparents have a (strained and eventually failed) relationship with each other. But there is no family reunion in which the three interact simultaneously in the story or the discourse. Curiously, this dyadic separation also applies to Oskar’s interactions with the multiple New Yorkers with the surname Black. When he discovers the name on a piece of paper in his father’s belongings, he makes his way through the boroughs of Manhattan, going to the doors of every person named Black. In his travels, Oskar seems figuratively to

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reconstitute a shattered city into a community. Yet the many Blacks never interact with each other, even when several of them attend Oskar’s performance in the school play. The novel, in a sense, is more polyphonic than heteroglossic. It represents different voices, but they are all centralized in Oskar. Further, what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as “the internal stratification of language” does not seem to apply. The many residents of the city all evince a “literary” voice: quirky, self-conscious, poetic, emotional. The novel’s pages of color—that motley emblem of multiplicity—adduce to a logic of correspondence, too. There is a spread of colored pages demonstrating the truism that people testing pens in an art supply store will either write their names or the color of the pen they’re using. Readers scan the pages only to determine whether this claim—itself a concordance of form and content—is true; the names are nominal, so to speak, as are their colors. Later, Thomas, Jr., marks errors in red ink in a letter from his father about the bombing of Dresden. He increasingly notes mistakes not just in spelling and grammar but in sentiment, too, ultimately circling the error in his deadbeat dad’s signature: “I love you, Your Father.” We read the printed letter and the tale told by the escalating edits in red; we may alternate between them or read them in tandem. Either way, we effectively read a two-track conversation between lexical and visual signs: the correlation is either technical or affective. Color fades to black and white. Even the overall variegation of Foer’s visual experiments—photographs, diagrams, games with typescript—is constrained by an overarching principle of concordance. Walter Kirn, noting its most dazzling visual tricks, wonders of the novel: “Does it even need text?”6 The question might be reversed: EL&IC’s visual elements seem largely redundant, demonstrative rather than evocative. Oskar takes photos with his grandfather’s old camera and collects them in a book called “Stuff That Happened to Me”; these are scattered throughout the novel. This visual “stuff” tends to repeat the narrative “stuff,” offering visual evidence for Oskar’s quest to uncover his father’s mystery (doorknobs and keyholes, locks and keys), Oskar’s curiosity (do elephants cry?), Oskar’s heroes (Stephen Hawking), and Oskar’s actions (he plays Yorick in Hamlet). Because the photographs are in black and white, likely a fluke of the publication budget, there is also a tendency toward homology across images. Repetition is evident here in three ways: the images parallel the text, mirror each other, and enact Oskar’s viewpoint. We see through his lens.

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EL&IC’s repetitive photographs sometimes approach uncertainty by postponing a caption, as when an image of New York City with a blanked out Central Park appears without a gloss. But these suspended images signify, rather than afford, uncertainty; they are recognizable and always explained later. Embedding photographs in a novel is hardly innovative at the end of a century that brought us Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and W. G. Sebald’s novels. It is the disjunction of text and image that prompts us to dwell on the photographs in the latter, affording a meditation on the subjective relativity of Barthes’s punctum. This uncanny intermedial negotiation is absent from EL&IC’s images, which are neither jarring nor eerie. Foer’s use of the hobbyist’s Polaroid and the newspaper shot instead invokes Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra, for which the Twin Towers were a key example. Foer himself attributes the photographs to the extraordinary degree of visual mediation in 9/11 reportage.7 Nested in a narrative that accounts for them, the images are ensconced in a recognizable studium. We flip right through them. Photography is only one of the medial tricks in Foer’s brimming bag. EL&IC is rife with graphical tics and traps, which feel mechanistic rather than purposive. There are single-sentence pages and pages of an indecipherable code based on a cellphone keypad. There are also moments where the text enacts its own erasure. We see incomplete and spaced-out words in the transcript of Oskar’s father’s last phone message. Oskar’s grandfather’s words fill the page until they crowd into indecipherable blackness. These visual experiments seriously stymie the reader’s comprehension, suggesting that they are geared toward uncertainty. But while its pages are often literally illegible, the novel remains readable. It affords skimming and scanning—the elided information scarcely matters. In both its narrative form and its medium, EL&IC’s potential for an unsettling mutual exclusion, a refractive multiplicity, or an uncanny repetition contracts into a legible polarity, which in turn becomes an idea about uncertainty.

Flippancy Rather than puzzling or unsettling us, EL&IC affords a kind of “uncertainty lite,” a mode of reading that is intensely cathartic but ethically suspect. I call this mode flippancy for a few reasons. The word flippancy captures the speciousness of the novel’s sentimentality, which is both knowing and naive. It also opens up the possibility that Foer’s juxtaposition of

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large-scale historical traumas across the globe is a reductive rather than an expansive move. Instead of affording uncertainty, EL&IC reifies it into a single concept—absence—through its explicit alignment of content, form, and medium. At the same time, this mode relies explicitly on the flipping of pages to induce an intense feeling of pathos. This investment in materiality both textual and bodily culminates in the novel’s ending: a flipbook that the reader activates by hand. Saussurian linguistics, Derridean poststructuralism, and Kittlerian media studies all argue that meaning and signification come from a play of difference. EL&IC’s language, discourse, and material experiments draw the disseminative proliferation of difference into a paradigm of likeness. The novel pretends to ramify but in the end constrains the endemic plurality of language and meaning. In Barthesian terms, EL&IC wants to be “writerly,” but as Barthes says of the classic text, “the discourse scrupulously keeps within a circle of solidarities, and this circle, in which ‘everything holds together,’ is that of the readerly.”8 Black and white, replete and depleted, image and text, color and meaning: these polarities gradually converge. As we saw with Oskar’s grandparents, they are subsumed to a mutual “Nothing,” bolstered by the etymological copula between black and white (blanco, blanche): blank. We might think the novel’s emphatic absences would invite readerly participation, as in Wolfgang Iser’s “gaps.” But the words that the white or crowded pages conceal are in fact beside the point. We do not speculate about the blanked-out story because blankness is the story. It always signifies death’s erasure of language, the speechlessness of grief: Oskar’s “Anyway.” Paradoxically, the experimental loudness of Foer’s text portends the silence of trauma. The reader supplies not meanings but feelings to fill in blanks at both a narrative and a medial level. Using a child’s voice for a 9/11 story inevitably makes the novel more sentimental; this may account for the powerful effect EL&IC has on readers of a certain age.9 The child narrator, however, is too cloying a ploy for many. More than any other aspect of the novel, reviewers take issue with Oskar. He is either too smart or too naive; either unbelievable or too derivative (like his namesake in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Oskar wears all white and plays a percussive instrument). While Oskar seems too plainly sentimental, he is eminently inhabitable. Whether we find him delightful or irritating, the journey on which we accompany Oskar builds cumulatively toward a compounding of loss, as dramatized by his encounters with New Yorkers named Black, each

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of whom has some kind of trauma or loss with which they are contending. The final Mr. Black that Oskar meets—a businessman of Thomas, Jr.’s age, who has access to the lockbox that matches Oskar’s key—is mourning his father’s death, too. When they finally meet, however, the characters do not reveal their secrets but simply embrace. The only respite from loss seems to be proximity to, or displacement of, another’s loss. Indeed, EL&IC’s losses—like its Blacks and its blanks—seem disconcertingly fungible, subsumable to a grander, generic Loss. The plot culminates in the digging up of Oskar’s father’s empty casket; when Thomas, Sr., asks Oskar what they should do then, he answers, “We’ll fill it, obviously” (321). They do so with the letters Thomas, Sr., wrote to Thomas, Jr., replacing the absent body with text about absence. One of Oskar’s cleverer inventions is an irrigation system that collects all the tears of all the people in New York City, channeling the saltwater into a reservoir (38). This magical realist thought experiment offers a model for the novel’s tributary logic of mourning. EL&IC continually creates an imaginary space that conjoins the many losses of the mourners of 9/11. The sole testimony available to us of 9/11 itself, a spotty recording of Thomas, Jr., on an answering machine, is full of gaps, which are of course visually rendered on the page. EL&IC tries both to depict and to constitute a community in mourning for the hole in the ground, the lacuna that is Ground Zero. Even this large-scale event, however, is elided with other spaces of loss. The novel seems to equate the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center with two other historical traumas: the firebombing of Dresden by the Allied Forces and the detonation of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II. One might think that with this use of multiplicity, the novel’s potentially nationalist sentimentality would be offset by these other incidents of “terrorism,” which deepen its reservoir of grief while warning against American exceptionalism.10 All these events, however, are represented as personal and universal, rather than historically or culturally specific. They are conveyed via civilians who experienced them firsthand and are largely framed by emotional response rather than historical detail. For example, Thomas, Sr., offers an eyewitness account of the bombing of Dresden in a letter, but as I noted earlier, this is filtered by his son’s red-marked edits. The experience of watching bodies burn and shooting animals is mediated by Thomas, Jr.’s personal feelings about his absentee

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father, the historical trauma both indexed and supplanted by his visually rendered rage. We also see the bombing of Hiroshima through the voice of Kinue Tomoyasu, whose historical testimony is included in the form of Oskar’s show-and-tell presentation: “I pressed Stop on the boom box, because the interview was over. The girls were crying and the boys were making funny barfing noises” (189). The students’ visceral affective reactions contrast with Oskar’s detachment. Characteristically, he distances himself from the traumatic event with scientific data about the effect of the bomb on black and white objects: “the letters, which they call characters, were neatly burned out. I became extremely curious about what that would look like, so first I tried to cut out letters on my own, but my hands weren’t good enough to do it, so I did some research, and I found a printer on Spring Street who specializes in die-cutting . . .” I held up the sheet of paper with the first page of A Brief History of Time in Japanese, which I got the translation of from Amazon .co.jp. I looked at the class through the story of the turtles. (190)

In both cases, the displacement of traumatic event onto material text is violent—blood-colored marks occluding an original text, letters burned out of the page—while acknowledging our collective distance from trauma, the layers of history we look through to see what happened. At the same time, “seeing through the eyes of another” is linked to linguistic translation; Oskar looks through cut-out Japanese letters and the red-lined errors are due to Thomas, Sr.’s broken English as a German speaker. Allowing us to see through the strata of history and culture that separate us from others, these material filters epitomize the translatability of trauma in this novel. The equation of loss across individuals and history troubles me because it renders commensurable versions of trauma that ought to remain distinct. Complex questions of political conflict are made transparently sentimental, so to speak. Making us cry over 9/11, Dresden, and Hiroshima is not necessarily a trivial effort—the power of sentimentality should not be underestimated as a political tool. But in EL&IC, textual experimentation seems to produce a trivial effect—and affect. The novel pulls us through its schematic blanks, building an affective momentum that moves us toward a universalized mourning. EL&IC’s mode of flippancy is cathartic in the worst sense—enervating, even specious—but also in the original sense of purgative (“funny barfing noises”). Fittingly, this entails the alignment of readerly and textual

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bodies. All books have imperatives: pick me up, hold me, turn my pages. EL&IC insists on them, coordinating our body with the book’s body. The novel sets this up by lingering on the physical qualities of books. We read of a library in Germany with walls made of books, and Thomas, Sr.’s daybooks are piled around his apartment in poetic fashion: “We put his filled daybooks in the bathtub of the second bathroom. . . . Once I turned on the shower. Some of the books floated and stayed where they were. . . . The water was grey with all of his days” (179–180). The novel’s images dwell on the material ancestry of books: birds because feathers were used for quills, and trees because bark was used for parchment. Both avian and arboreal conceits invoke fluttering through the sound and the feel of flipping pages. EL&IC aligns the story line, the novelistic form, and the material book precisely along the axis of a recto/verso polarity. Among the quotidian phrases in Thomas, Sr.’s daybook, his dead wife’s sister inscribes three words: “Please marry me.” His response is tellingly physical: I flipped back and pointed at, “Ha ha ha!” She flipped forward and pointed at, “Please marry me.” I flipped back and pointed at “I’m sorry, this is the smallest I’ve got.” She flipped forward and pointed at, “Please marry me.” I flipped back and pointed at, “I’m not sure, but it’s late.” She flipped forward and pointed at, “Please marry me,” and this time put her finger on “Please” as if to hold down the page and end the conversation, or as if she were trying to push through the word and into what she really wanted to say. (33)

Thomas, Sr.’s everyday language accrues poignancy through the flipping of pages, the pressing of flesh to text in the hopes of union. The characters flip backward, but we flip forward; the text repeats the previous pages, so we maintain our momentum even as our physical act reflects theirs. The mute Thomas, Sr., decides to tattoo the words he needs the most on his palms: “when I rub my hands against each other in the middle of winter I am warming myself with the friction of YES and NO, when I clap my hands I am showing my appreciation through the uniting and parting of YES and NO, I signify ‘book’ by peeling open my clapped hands.” With a later photograph of these hands, the novel again aligns polarities: yes/no, left/right, recto/verso, black/white, text/image. Thomas, Sr., renders word into flesh: through inscription (the tattoo seems like a kind of backformation of ink on parchment);

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through the hand sign for book; and through a reference to the object in which he writes. He concludes that “every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO, even this one, my last one, especially this one” (17). Which one? The one we’re reading, of course. There are outlines of a red hand on the front and a grey hand on the back of the cover of EL&IC. The outlines line up with the reader’s hands when the book is held open to read. The novel’s mode of flippancy is witty but also quite literally manipulative in its material interpellation—it catches us red-handed.

Crying over the End of the Book Flippancy attains the height of emotional intensity in the formal experiment that constitutes the end of EL&IC. The last fifteen pages of the novel are a set of collated photographs of a man falling from one of the Twin Towers on 9/11. The flipbook is meant to be Oskar’s: he prints stills from a video he finds on the Internet, reverses their order, and binds them. Flipping through them makes the man rise, a vision that often blurs behind the brimming of tears, according to my admittedly limited data. The novel’s coordination of polarity into a fluid channel of action makes this last readerly act moving in two senses: we flip through a set of rectilinear black and white photos to produce an illusion of motion that intensifies readerly emotion. The imagery in the two chapters preceding the flipbook infuses it with spiritual tones. Oskar’s grandmother has a dream: At the end of my dream, Eve put the apple back on the branch. The tree went back into the ground. It became a sapling, which became a seed. God brought together the land and the water, the sky and the water, the water and the water, evening and morning, something and nothing. He said, Let there be light. And there was darkness. (313)

This Old Testament reversal back to the beginning is matched by a reversal that invokes the end of the New Testament. Oskar remembers the night before his father died—except backward: I’d have said “Nothing” backward. He’d have said “Yeah, buddy?” backward.

Conclusion I’d have said “Dad” backward, which would have sounded the same as “Dad” forward. He would have told me the story of the Sixth Borough, from the voice in the can at the end to the beginning, from “I love you” to “Once upon a time . . .” We would have been safe. (326)

Demonstrating the reversibility and fungibility of polarity—the palindrome “Dad” emphasizes both—these are the novel’s last lines before the flipbook, which then enacts this reversal. Oskar’s final act of magical thinking aspires to transcendence through these allusions to the moment the world arose and the moment the dead will rise. If his grandmother reverses Genesis, Oskar performs a resurrection. Or, to be precise, he makes us perform it. I have yet to meet a reader who resisted the opportunity to perform, as Oskar’s surrogate, an impossible reversal by flipping the pages and raising the dead. We do this through the Word made flesh, the book in hand. The flipbook effects a fluttering that recalls the photograph of the flock of birds, reproduced earlier in the novel. That image falls in the center of the novel; when open to that page and viewed from the side, the book resembles a bird in flight. Emitting a soft echo of the wings that awaken Mr. Black’s ears and heart, the last pages of EL&IC make a falling man take flight. The flipbook enlists another material fact for its poignancy: its proximity to the end of the book, the threshold of a world where such a resurrection cannot take place. The flipbook also evinces an apocalyptic anxiety about the End of The Book, as such, in the twenty-first century. EL&IC explicitly hearkens back—as Oskar playing Yorick in Hamlet hints—to the earliest tradition of the uncertain Anglophone novel: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. The black and blank pages of Sterne’s book, too, are cued to the affective: respectively, they signify mourning and a space for the reader to draw the face of the beloved. Catering to Monthly Review readers who felt that “philanthropic sentimentalism was Sterne’s most effective mode,” Sterne inserted into later volumes sentimental vignettes “delicately poised between sincerity and satire.”11 EL&IC enacts a literary return that transforms Sterne’s “delicacy” into a blunter pathos, evincing nostalgia for the book as a material artifact. In a world dominated by Kindles, Nooks, and iPads, EL&IC’s effects require black ink printed on white pages that are bound into an object we manipulate. A flipbook—or

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Daumenkino (thumb-cinema) in German—reminds us that the word “digital” comes from fingers. After all, you can’t flip an e-book.12 Foer’s 2010 novel, Tree of Codes, takes this nostalgic impulse even further. Michael Faber explains how that novel works in relation to Bruno Schulz’s 1934 text: Snip seven letters from the title Street of Crocodiles and you get Tree of Codes—and so on, for 134 intricately scissored pages. A boutique publisher called Visual Editions, working in tandem with die-cut specialists in the Netherlands and a “hand-finisher” in Belgium, has produced a £25 artefact that, if you share Foer’s aesthetics, has “a sculptural quality” that’s “just beautiful,” or which, if you’re an average reader, might make you think a wad of defenceless print has been fed through an office shredding machine.13

The spirit is akin to Oskar burning out characters from A Brief History of Time, but the effect is more like reading through delicately inset windows. Tree of Codes is a short novel, but its pages are extraordinarily delicate and require labor—inserting a sheet of paper between pages—to read. As Faber notes, Tree of Codes instantiates a literal erasure of the precursor text that still benefits from its genius: “Comparing the two texts paragraph by paragraph, you notice quite often that what seems like an audacious coinage is already there in the original.” Foer’s revisions, however, occlude Schulz’s darker weirdnesses and uncertainties: “he discards much of Schulz’s domestic, autobiographical detail and much of his pessimism, aiming for the bigger historical picture, and journeying more determinedly towards a transcendent ending.”14 What results is a dearth of uncertainty in Tree of Codes or, rather, the transformation of “difficulty” into a kind of poetic effect. This is evident in the book’s borrowed modernist style—“poignant,” “aching”—and in its manipulation of the medium. The fragility of Foer’s work—already a figurative “undoing” of its precursor—invokes Schulz’s death during World War II: “the book’s lack of a tough shell makes it seem all the more vulnerable to mutilation. Just one rake of the fingers would destroy it.”15 In an interview, Foer says of Tree of Codes: “On the brink of the end of paper, I was attracted to the idea of a book that can’t forget it has a body.”16 Foer’s novel hypostatizes The Book by destroying it—a textual crucifixion that at once reifies and deifies it.

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One might want to see Foer’s experimental reclamation of the print book in its dotage as the culmination of Clement Greenberg’s 1939 theory of the avant-garde: “the poet or artist turns [his attention] upon the medium of his own craft.”17 But contemporary fiction’s material experiments are often as earnest as they are self-conscious, fading the bright line that Greenberg drew between avant-garde and kitsch. Even the highlow seriousness of Susan Sontag’s camp doesn’t quite fit the affective mash-up of sentimentality and irony evident in this fondling of the form. If Sterne is a forefather to this contemporary “structure of feeling,” Foer has some siblings we might consider.18 In his 1993 essay “E Pluribus Unum,” David Foster Wallace predicted: The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue . . . willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness.19

The political tint to Wallace’s “rebellion” has since dissolved. In 2006, radio host Jesse Thorn coined the term “New Sincerity”: “irony and sincerity combined like Voltron . . . Our greeting: a double thumbs-up. Our credo: ‘Be More Awesome.’ Our lifestyle: ‘Maximum Fun.’ ”20 Mark Greif’s report on the “hipster” zeitgeist of the early “aughts” is scathing about this trend: “contemporary hipsterism has been defined by an obsessive interest in the conflict between knowingness and naïveté, guilty self-awareness and absolved self-absorption.”21 Greif zooms in on the potential for bad faith and puerility I want to capture with the word flippancy: “Reflexivity was used as a means to get back to sentimental emotion. . . . The ironic games were weightless. The emotional expressions suggested therapy culture, but hipster art often kitschified—or at least made playful—the weightiest tragedies, whether personal or historical: orphans and cancer for [Dave] Eggers, the Holocaust and 9/11 for Jonathan Safran Foer.”22 Greif here juxtaposes Foer with Dave Eggers, a linchpin for this affect. Eggers’s best received projects (his 2000 memoir, the pirate store

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front for his afterschool program) and his worst (a neurotic film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are) both partake of this “ironic earnestness.” Douglas Wolk notes that while Eggers’s outfit is “essentially high modernist,” its affective ambivalence keeps things edgy: “The blade of irony is dulled unless it’s constantly whetted with absolute, unimpeachable sincerity.” Like Foer, Eggers conveys the irony/ sincerity amalgam in material form: McSweeney’s Quarterly magazine and the publishing house that sprang from it epitomize the print nostalgia that marks this decade.23 The Quarterly issues exquisite versions of old media, from “a comely hardcover book peppered with extensive full-color reproductions of visual art” to a box of loose sheets: “Our first issue of 2006 turns toward earlier and equally uncertain years, traveling back by way of pamphlets, info-cards, and letters addressing bygone conflicts and still-constant concerns.”24 To mourn the End of The Book—that obsolescing object, with its dwindling genres—is to return to its beginnings.25 This turning back is what facilitates the buoyant pathos, the twee nostalgia of the hipster aesthetic. Mourning for what cannot be reclaimed, recent fiction has it both ways: it shows off historical know-how while championing the triumph of feeling, in both emotional and material senses. This affective disavowal, with its shrugging, winking embrace of sentimentality, may be self-serving, or it may be the eternal return of generational amnesia. Musing on the panic sparked by Web 2.0, hypertextual life, and e-reading, Alan Liu notes: “Apocalyptic pronouncements about the ‘end of the book,’ we might say, pale in comparison with the original apocalypse of the Bible (Revelation, after all, is about as protohypertextual as it is possible to be). From its beginning, the book was already the end of the book. The digital is just the end of the end of the book.”26 Our new-old, postironic mode belies the idea that literary history moves forward.

On Turning We might contrast the imperative to flip through the end of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close to the imperative to mouth words at the start of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita. In the Introduction to Seven Modes of Uncertainty, I argued that Humbert’s opening lines compel the reader to say—as the novel says, as Humbert says—“Lo. Lee. Ta.” Nabokov compels an unwitting physical act

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(utterance) that gradually accrues ethical significance. Foer, by contrast, compels a contrived physical act (flipping) whose upshot is secured even before our thumbs press the pages’ edges. Similarly, we might juxtapose Foer’s literalist crowding of pages with text to the chapter of Lolita in which Humbert repeats Lolita’s name nine times but then says, “Repeat until page is full, printer.”27 Both make use of the paginated struggle between reader and author, an uncertainty about whose mouth or whose hand is moving. The difference between these two novels, separated by fifty years, lies in the uses—aesthetic, affective, and ethical—to which they put an experimental form. Is uncertainty a means to an end? Or an ongoing mode that relies on the reader’s engagement or even her willfulness?28 In this book, I have tried to convey the positive ethical affordances of itinerant modes of uncertainty that never quite lead to a cul-de-sac of ends. The most troubling texts to me are those that fix uncertainty into an idea about itself or about ethics. These turn out, upon reflection, to be the most recent of the texts I have considered. The threat of fixity lurks in the mode of accounting in Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003) and in the mode of enthrallment in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005). It reaches its apotheosis in EL&IC’s mode of flippancy. Whether harsh or obvious, my judgment in favor of the stringent, ongoing difficulty embodied by Nabokov’s Lolita over the palatable, goaloriented trickery epitomized by Foer’s EL&IC eschews a teleological history. A comparison between these two exemplary bookends of Seven Modes of Uncertainty suggests that newer literature has not become any more uncertain, nor is literary uncertainty necessarily becoming more ethically interesting or productive. I would not characterize the trajectory of experimental literature as an ethical devolution, however. A more pragmatic, more contingent model of history is needed to trace the vicissitudes of uncertainty. In a 2009 essay, “Three Wars,” Wai Chee Dimock offers this idiosyncratic model of literary history: [T]he grammatical form that [the words “as if”] underwrite—the subjunctive—is . . . a hallmark of literary history itself, a history that cannot be told solely in the indicative. Like the pluperfect tense, the subjunctive mood activates a zig-zagging path of time, a path that literally does a double-take on some clusters of words, amplifying a small-scale textual event into a large-scale historical commentary. . . . I don’t think we have a

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Conclusion literary history yet based on this kind of as if, based on a counterfactual realism, a time-line that makes a subsequent event an important context for a text written prior to it.29

If we apply a subjunctive history even to the limited time frame of the texts in Seven Modes of Uncertainty (1955–2005), their resonance zigzags across centuries. While I proposed at the start of this book to update a calcified canon of ethical criticism, the modes of uncertainty afforded by the novels I considered draw out old, even ancient aspects of ethical philosophy. I argue that the ethics afforded by oscillation in The Crying of Lot 49 evokes Martin Buber’s I and Thou, a text steeped in Talmudic Judaism. The mode of enfolding in Atonement resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the baroque, which comes from Gottfried Leibniz; the novel’s ethics of complicity is not unlike the idea of original sin. Beloved’s mode of adjacency affords a capacity for discernment that invokes Isocratean kairos. In all three versions of Seven Types of Ambiguity, a mode of accounting leads to an ethics of reckoning: a primal casting of lots and stones. The vacuity of American Psycho and the ethical reflexion it affords is as current as Wall Street, as ancient as Greek tragedy, and as new and old as pornography. We can find Remainder’s mode of synchronicity in the I-Ching; the danger of enthrallment the novel poses recalls Plato’s reasoning for the injunction against the poets. This sense that the end is always in the beginning reveals the extent to which that phrase from the early 2000s, the turn to ethics, was always a return.30 At least three invocations of this disciplinary slogan are selfconscious about this: introductions to The Turn to Ethics (2000), Mapping the Ethical Turn (2001), and On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English (2007) dwell anxiously on their titles. Marjorie Garber asks: “What kind of a turn is the turn to ethics? A Right turn? A Left turn? A wrong turn? A U-turn? Whose turn? Whose turn is it to turn to ethics?”31 David Parker splits it in two: “the ‘turn toward the ethical’ in literary studies is closely connected to a turn to the literary within ethics.”32 Michael Eskin, in a 2004 metacritical essay, suggests that “the overused and historically problematic moniker turn ultimately points to” a double turn: “a ‘turn to ethics’ in literary studies and, conversely, a ‘turn to literature’ in (moral) philosophy.” Eskin argues that “neither ethics nor literature could possibly be ‘back in literary studies [and] philosophy’ . . . respectively—if only . . . because they

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never left.”33 The turn to ethics pretends to a revolution belied by closer examination of the field. It makes sense that concerns about literary value would reemerge or regain traction given what we can call, with the confidence of habituation, “the crisis of the humanities.” Because literature is under threat—be it budgetary or ideological—the values that texts (and their exegetes) espouse have become a matter for public debate. Perhaps as a result, there has been a manifold reconsideration of other forms of literary value since “the turn to ethics,” which seems premonitory in hindsight. In the last decade or so, affect, aesthetics, form, and surface have each taken a turn at the disciplinary wheel.34 We have also witnessed a return to humanist defenses of literature’s value, to rhetorical analyses, to a consideration of authorial intention, and to critical “description” or even “paraphrase.”35 In public discourse, there has been a lot of talk— often in neuroscientific terms—about literature’s relationship to empathy, a twentieth-century word that invokes an idea from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that literature enables sympathy.36 Eschewing the word turn doesn’t change the retrograde feel: the “New Formalism” and the “New Ethics” still draw attention to conceptual predecessors.37 Our old/new versions of value come with built-in selfscrutiny, achieved through distance (the historicizing of critical discourse) or myopic proximity (close readings of that discourse).38 Even stirring arguments for “surface readings” that reject “deep” analysis nevertheless present themselves pre-analyzed, inside quotation marks.39 The self-described turns and self-conscious news of criticism, like the structure of feeling I have described in recent fiction, look inward, backward, and forward at once. They are nostalgic, they are self-aware, yet they aspire to novelty, or at least to renewal. To acknowledge being oldfashioned kills two birds with one stone: it borrows the historical heft of a critical tradition, while stylishly proffering itself as retro. It is criticism as Instagram. Maybe it is the boomerang feel to another turn of the century, but it seems we cannot move forward without turning back. My return to William Empson is, of course, no exception. All I can offer by way of defense is that he ends Seven Types of Ambiguity with a similar worry about how to judge the value of difficult poetry—and its criticism—at a belated moment: It is only recently that the public, as a whole, has come to admire a great variety of difficult styles of poetry, requiring a great variety of critical

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Conclusion dogmas, simultaneously, so as to need not so much a single habit for the reading of poetry as a sort of understanding which enables one to jump neatly from one style to another. This produces a sort of anxious watchfulness over the feelings excited by poetry; it is important not to forget what sort of poetry this is and so allow oneself to have the wrong feelings. . . . I suppose that all present-day readers of poetry would agree that some modern poets are charlatans, though different people would attach this floating suspicion to different poets; but they have no positive machinery . . . by which such a fact could be proved. . . . The result is a certain lack of positive satisfaction in the reading of any poetry; doubt becomes a permanent background of the mind, both as to whether the thing is being interpreted rightly and as to whether, if it is, one ought to allow oneself to feel pleased.40

There is some affinity between the “great variety of difficult styles” in 1930 and the eclecticism represented by and within twenty-first century texts. EL&IC’s rampant use of mutual exclusion, multiplicity, and repetition is extreme but not unique. Recent novels like Foer’s run the gamut of techniques for uncertainty, making us “jump neatly from one style to another,” oftentimes in the same book. There is an unbearable lightness of reading that makes it difficult to know how to feel about these variegated, belated forms of difficulty. But this grab-bag quality smacks of speciousness, the charlatanism that Empson suspects of poems and that I sometimes suspect of Empson (a self-accusing accusation, no doubt). His escape from the famously difficult style of Seven Types of Ambiguity is both bluff and blithe: “I should claim, then, that for those who find this book contains novelties, it will make poetry more beautiful, without their ever having to remember the novelties or endeavor to apply them. It seems a sufficient apology for many niggling pages.”41 I will make a claim neither for the novelty of Seven Modes of Uncertainty—a return to Empson begs the question—nor for the beauty of my exempla. Instead, I emphasize (without apology) my book’s advocacy for and performance of a continual “niggling,” that “permanent background of the mind” Empson calls doubt. To maintain the perpetual skepticism to which my method inclines is no doubt a Sisyphean task. But it at least renews that ongoing uncertainty I have argued for in this book, the aesthetic, affective, and ethical values of which will escape fixity only if we make an effort to revive it with analysis, with an insistent and ongoing undoing.

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To this end, perhaps we ought to treat “the turn to what-have-you” as a turn of phrase, just another uncertain trope, one that persists even in that archaic call to newness: the turn of the century. Rather than trying to avoid yet another critical turn, we would do better to concede to the trope’s internal disturbance—the uncertainty at its core—and to our continual hankering for turning. We may end up in the same place, but we might yet undergo a useful dizziness.

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APPENDIX 1: T H E VA G A R I E S O F T H E N E W E T H I C S

In metacritical accounts, the field of ethical criticism is often divided into two camps, humanistic and poststructuralist.1 Broadly speaking, critics like Lionel Trilling, Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, and others invested in Aristotelian ethics are said to be of the humanist camp, invested in models of liberalism, democracy, and positive ethical relations like friendship and love. These critics follow Nussbaum’s lead in asking, “Couldn’t a text be a work of moral philosophy precisely by showing the complexity and indeterminacy that is really there in human life?”2 Critics in the camp inspired by poststructuralism focus more on the value of the alterity (“otherness” or “difference”) they see as endemic to the literary. This camp is affiliated with Robert Eaglestone, Derek Attridge, and others inspired by the work of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Lévinas. For these critics, the literary encounter, in Judith Butler’s words, “honors what cannot be fully known or captured about the Other.”3 Despite these divergent descriptions of the value of literature, there are many deep commonalities to these two camps, as Dorothy Hale notes in her description of what she terms the New Ethics.4 Most pertinent to the foregoing book is their shared commitment to “the self-consciously unverifiable status of the alterity that the ethical subject seeks to produce— an unverifiability that retains the post-structuralist’s skepticism about knowledge as a tool of hegemony while bestowing upon epistemological uncertainty a positive ethical content.”5 While Seven Modes of Uncertainty shares the premise that literary uncertainty bears ethical relevance, I present in this appendix a critique of problems of method that plague the New Ethics, collating critics from both sides according to how 293

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they have strayed. I isolate four vagaries of ethical literary criticism: personification, self-validation, verisimilitude, and hypostatization.

Personification The first pervasive problem with ethical criticism is its proclivity for bringing into personified being that strange silent thing we call literature. As Michel Foucault notes in “What Is an Author?,” those “aspects of an individual, which we designate as an author (or which comprise an individual as an author), are projections, in terms always more or less psychological, of our way of handling texts.”6 This tendency is more common in humanistic criticism, as in Booth’s embodiment of texts as “friends” and Nussbaum’s comparison of reading to “love.” But even poststructuralist scholars use authorial personae to ground their claims: J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading is actually about authors reading themselves. Attention to literary value seems to conjure, like a spell, the specter of the author; it is no coincidence that one of Booth’s late essays is titled “The Resurrection of the Implied Author.” Booth’s invention, the “implied author,” is “the author’s ‘second self,’ ” who “chooses, consciously or unconsciously, what we read; we infer him as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man; he is the sum of his own choices.”7 The term “the implied author” seems a new name for an old problem, however, given how often critical discussions slip into claims about “the fleshand-blood” author. Personification is compounded by occasionally outrageous acts of critical prosopopeia, or appropriations of authorial voice: “ ‘Well, Judge Posner,’ we might imagine him saying, ‘it seems, then, that you are not a very valuable member of society, and before you die you may regret this fact. I never had a very high view of the legal profession, and my conversation with you has confirmed my view of its emotional aridity. But since you are a fascinating character, with your strange combination of intelligence and denial, quick formal perception and shallowness of feeling, I may possibly put you in my next short novel.’ ”8 Whether this attack on Richard Posner is ad hominem or merely overstated, it is striking that Martha Nussbaum doesn’t even acknowledge it as her own, diverting it through a conjured Dickens, who apparently “would not be at a loss for words” were he alive to read and contest Posner’s critique of her work.9 Personification is perhaps an understandable fallacy, as Louise Rosenblatt notes: “What is more natural than to sense the author behind the

The Vagaries of the New Ethics

words to which we have vividly responded?”10 But the impulse to establish authorial intention obscures the difficulty—if not the impossibility—of the enterprise, as Wimsatt and Beardsley argued, followed by Roland Barthes and Foucault in a rather different vein, succeeded in yet another by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels.11 T. S. Eliot frankly admits, “in the course of time a poet may become merely a reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning, or without forgetting, merely changing.”12 This is merely with respect to meaning. Value is even muddier. If we take literary ethics to be corollary to authorial ethics, we have to account not only for the distance between the authored work and the author’s life but also for a range of ethical views within the author. Critics often lump together under one proper noun the variety of authorial orientations in a pluriform oeuvre. Candace Vogler attributes this to the trope of antonomasia: “a name that might be variously bestowed is given to the preeminently suitable candidate.”13 Booth elides this multiplicity by describing “implied figures” as “superior versions” of real ones: “in wiping out the selves they do not like, the poets have created versions that elevate both their worlds and ours.”14 It flattens both reader and writer—smoothing out their temporal and subjective diversity—to suppose that only their best selves make contact. It also flatters them. It is only through such euphemizing that Booth can construe the relation between implied reader and implied author as a species of friendship. In essence, a set of hypotheses about a text is personified to facilitate an attribution of positive ethical relations to the literary complex. This seems spurious, if not specious, as suggested by this aside from Booth about the disjunction between art and life: “I find my admiration for . . . effective maskers actually rising a bit when I learn some contemptible details about their FBPs [flesh-and-blood persons].”15 If literature is a fantasy of what authors and readers “wished [we] could be,” isn’t it just an escape from or a denial of our baser selves? This question appears in ethical philosophy under the name “the paradox of fictional emotion.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau expressed this anxiety: “In giving our tears to these fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of ourselves; whereas unfortunate people in person would require attention from us, relief, consolation, and work, which would involve us in their pains and would require at least the sacrifice of our indolence.”16

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Further, Vogler points out, “silent reading is . . . the opposite of taking the action characteristic of those very virtues of attention, concern, acknowledged vulnerability, and openness to others” we attribute to reading.17 Personification conjures improved persons while neglecting the fallen, complex, time-riven creatures we are. There is no need for these trumped-up holistic angels. While the literary experience is clearly peopled, authors and readers are best described either in terms of their potential or projected relations, or as real, flawed, changeable people.

Self-Validation We can apportion some blame for the misconception that reading and writing make us good to the language that we use to discuss literature. Ethics, originally an unmarked word meaning the branch of knowledge pertaining to morals both good and bad, has acquired over time a positive connotation of the good. Charles Altieri notes the same slippage in the word virtue: “it brings an aura of satisfying certain deep moral values in society.” He advises a modicum of critical “embarrassment” about “taking ourselves as somehow spokespersons for self-congratulatory values in reading that are extremely difficult to state in any public language.”18 The tendency to focus only on self-affirming positive ethical values suggests critical self-validation. This self-interest is also what leads critics to another version of this vagary: the circular thinking that finds familiar values—in familiar places—when there might be fraught, curious, or monstrous ethical experiences to be uncovered. It is a commonplace that canons create themselves; ethical literary criticism is especially prone to self-perpetuation. Subsuming authors’ words into the critical argument not only heightens the allure and authority of the literary creator, it also creates a peculiar kind of canon: authors who talk about themselves, however cryptically, get talked about. Furthermore, critics often deem certain works “ethical” simply by selecting them to analyze ethically. The knowledge that is meant to emerge from the work of criticism is thus predetermined by the philosophical lens placed on it. As Altieri notes: “This criticism insists on there being something distinctive in how concrete texts engage our moral attention, and yet it has to interpret the value of that engagement in terms of the very philosophical methods and generalizations from which the concrete reading deviates.”19

The Vagaries of the New Ethics

Can literature do more than affirm or exemplify preconceived knowledge? In the philosophy of art, this is called “cognitive triviality,” the practice of “isolating a moral thesis associated with or implied by an artwork and then [going] on to commend the artwork in light of its moral commitments.”20 When, as Richard Posner puts it, “the ethical position is in place before the examination begins, and furnishes the criteria of choice and shapes interpretation,” critics only reaffirm what they already believe.21 Robert Eaglestone argues of Nussbaum’s work: “all great texts properly read echo the same Aristotelian moral points, about perception, about community and about identity,” concluding that “her argument forms a self-enclosing circle by defining what to look for in a text which in turn is justified by what it finds during its search.”22 The same accusation might be turned, however, against poststructuralist work like Eaglestone’s. Critics are just as enamored with aporia or Otherness as with virtue ethics or liberal humanism. For Dorothy Hale, both strands of ethical literary criticism are predisposed to seek alterity: “These theorists all agree that to open a novel is to open oneself up to a type of decision-making that is itself inherently ethical. For the new ethicists, the novel demands of each reader a decision about her own relation to the imaginative experience offered by novels: Will I submit to the alterity that the novel allows? An affirmative answer launches the novel reader into a transactional relation with another agent, an agent defined by its Otherness.”23 No matter its auspices—“author, characterological point of view, narrative, text, and even law”—alterity requires a prior act that makes self-subordination itself possible: “the will to believe in the possibility of alterity.”24 If you go looking for alterity, it isn’t hard to find; after decades of imperatives to honor the Other, every text seems to give back the same old Otherness.

Verisimilitude This reflexive impulse to correlate literary uncertainty with alterity seems to be an updated version of the reflective impulse that characterizes ethical criticism, as such. Andrew Gibson, in his survey of the field in the early twentieth century, notes a “curiously naïve faith in the mimetic principle.”25 It seems to have persisted to this day. For Nussbaum the reflective relation goes both ways: “the novel is itself a moral achievement and the well-lived life is a work of literary art.”26 This relation seems to work via the transitive property: literature reflects our human

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reality, and ethics reflect our human reality; thus, literature reflects ethics. Humanists invoke “the way people read,” but even poststructuralists proclaim the “irresistible” urge to think of fiction “in terms of the present situation.”27 This overreliance on verisimilitude simplifies literary ethics to an equation, one side of which is often the “human” content of a text: its characters. Martha Nussbaum makes the case for an exemplary character in The Golden Bowl: “Any daughter with Maggie’s history and character who has a father with Adam’s history and character (where this would be filled in by a very long and probably open-ended set of descriptions), should, if placed in a situation exactly like this one, respond as Maggie responds here. It also suggests, more pertinently, ‘All daughters should treat their fathers with the same level of sensitivity to the father’s concrete character and situation, and to the particularities of their history, that Maggie displays here.’ ”28 The idea that Henry James wants us to be Maggie because he describes her with exquisite metaphors bespeaks a conflation of the aesthetic and the ethical we see in Nussbaum’s double citation of the word “good” in this claim: “our task, as agents, is to live as good characters in a good story do.”29 The argument is specious in the original sense: it conflates beauty with worth.30 When it comes to ethics, why look to characters at all? One might argue that whether or not we choose to model our behavior on them, characters might yet provide useful data for moral psychology. Candace Vogler insists, however, that literary characters lack a quality fundamental to our reality: the capacity for change, what she calls contingency. She notes that treating people like characters is not just inaccurate but unethical: “I will be making an ethical mistake if I take myself to have the kind of grasp of a person that fiction makes available to me in my engagements with imaginary people. . . . With any luck, no human being will be knowable in the way that any literary character worth repeated readings is knowable.”31 For other critics, the unknowability of characters is said to be ethically relevant. Judith Butler argues that the heroine of James’s Washington Square, Catherine Sloper, is “virtually incomprehensible to everyone” because her refusal to marry is left unexplained; this leads to a suspension of judgment that “honors what cannot be fully known or captured about the Other.”32 The recourse to old-fashioned character study is qualified by an emphasis on uncertain knowledge of or by characters. Yet uncertainty continues to be depicted as a reflection of our ethics. This is verisimilitude

The Vagaries of the New Ethics

under a new name: “By showing the mystery and indeterminacy of ‘our actual adventure,’ [novels] characterize life more richly and truly— indeed, more precisely—than an example lacking those features ever could.”33 Literature is still mimetic; its truth has now become the impossibility of truth; its knowledge, unknowability. To equate ethical reality with literary uncertainty is to force them into concordance and verifiable knowledge. To rephrase Wayne Booth’s old plaint about literary ambiguity: our “foggy landscapes reflected in misty mirrors” have become all too clear.

Hypostatization There is a persistent sense that literary uncertainty is the remedy for the doldrums of ethical philosophy’s plodding language and method. Recent ethical criticism suppresses the uncertainty of literature not by neglecting it but by reifying that ambiguity as a consistent or “true” value. A conundrum arises: how do we recognize uncertainty without hypostatizing and thereby obviating it? It is as if as soon as uncertainty is raised as a subject for consideration, it is converted into something about which we are certain. The most recognizable culprit of this tendency in humanistic criticism is “negative capability,” a critical catch-all that has had us in a swoon ever since John Keats coined it, even more so when Trilling adopted it as a slogan for liberal humanism in his preface to Keats’s letters.34 In a selfpropagating irony that I perpetuate even as I note it, negative capability is one term about which critics have been resolutely incapable of being negatively capable. We cannot stop reaching after it, turning it into an explanation—a fact of, a reason for—uncertainty’s value. This alone demonstrates its implausibility. To take up “negative capability” as a slogan tempts us into an endless postponement, if not a self-congratulatory stylization, of ethics. In poststructuralist criticism, the culprit is “aporia.” The “law” of the text that J. Hillis Miller articulates in The Ethics of Reading reduces the imperativity of ethics to a Sisyphean failure: “I remain eager to obey the law of reading but without direct access to it. I am unable to write it down or to cite it as a ‘written, ascertainable law.’ ”35 Undecidable language inscribes an asymptotic ethics. But to what end do we still pursue Paul de Man’s poststructuralist claim that “ethics (or, one should say, ethicity) is a discursive mode among others”?36 Christopher Norris

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offers a critique of this idea: “What can be the status of an ethics (even an ‘ethics of reading’) that reduces all questions of truth, responsibility and self-knowledge to a play of rhetorical codes and figurations; that rejects any appeal to human agency or will as inherently self-deluding for the same reason; and that always arrives at a stage of ultimate undecidability where the ‘structural interference’ of two linguistic codes is the end point of ethical reflections?”37 Adam Zachary Newton is right to assert that recent literary theory often enacts “the ethic of nondecision.”38 There is indeed something disappointing about a critical upshot like: “I must be good. I cannot be good. I must read. I cannot read.” It is becoming almost a stylistic prerequisite of ethical criticism to refuse to assert a position, or to assert it only under a name. More often than not in recent scholarship, that name is Emmanuel Lévinas. This remains the case despite the fact that Lévinas’s theory of representation has been shown to present serious obstacles to those who wish to apply his philosophy to literature. As Robert Eaglestone shows in Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas, the Platonic lens to Lévinas’s work sees art as a “shadow-world,” a deceptive, dreamlike, spellbinding activity that strips us of agency and responsibility: “The poet exiles himself from the city. There is something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment.”39 Eaglestone tries to rescue the possibility of a Lévinasian literary criticism by noting the philosopher’s integration of language into his later work (the Saying and the Said). But at core, the contemplation of art (“non-being”) is inimical to the face-toface ethical encounter, simply because it isn’t real. The difference between life and text can be measured by the relative plausibility of “suspension of judgment” in classrooms and courtrooms. Behind the stylistic measures critics take to leave ambiguity and alterity untouched is the assumption that they can be sustained indefinitely. Models of negative capability and aporia both recommend a passivity or suspension in the act of reading. The respect for the text’s alterity ignores other ways of reading: the interrogative, the blithe, the suspicious, the hyperanalytical. It might seem that one way to counter these coeval reifications is to focus on the particular. But this leads to the analysis of an excised portion of the text, which then stands for the ethical values imputed to the entire text. This freeze-frame method makes one impasse, refusal, quandary, or judgment the exemplary moral fact about a text. Elevating one particular piece into a philosophy of the particular, this vivisection leaves out the undramatic dross of reading: the stuff that makes

The Vagaries of the New Ethics

a text go, the foil that offsets whatever striking moment or aporia that we fetishize. How do we talk about literary uncertainty without reducing it to a monolithic otherness and without promoting a paralyzed or suspended indeterminacy?

As evidenced by the lengthy book that precedes this critique of ethical criticism’s methods, I mean to suggest the difficulty rather than the impossibility of thinking literature and ethics together. Seven Modes of Uncertainty addresses passim each of the four vagaries described above. I reveal the factors that interrupt an attribution of authorial ethics; I offer a critique of self-validation in authors and critics alike; I show how a model of verisimilitude elides the ethical resonance of other kinds of aesthetic forms; and throughout my chapters, my modal approach works against the hypostatization of uncertainty and ethics. Because Seven Modes is grounded in the experiential theory of reading and the value of uncertainty touted by the New Ethics, however, my aim in this book is to ramify rather than to rectify these vagaries. Instead of setting one straight and narrow road for ethical literary criticism, I proliferate the many relations of ethics to literature. When it comes to personification, for example, I do not cast out but rather diversify literary personae in my analyses of texts. Following Empson, I pay attention to real authors’ and real readers’ comments, while always treating those data as yet more pieces of situated language—often diverse across time and space—rather than amalgamating them into an implicit “person” with an imputed “ethics.” To thwart the vicious circle of selfvalidation, Seven Modes makes an effort to shake up the canon of ethical criticism by considering several new texts and a range of theorists of experience other than Aristotle and Lévinas. Verisimilitude is a powerful pattern of thought; Seven Modes still analogizes literature and life. But this book uses the broader conceit of resonance to account for rhythms of relation other than the mimetic or reflective. Rather than prescribing a correct posture of “openness” or “submission” or “negative capability” when reading, this book considers the many reading practices within and outside the academy—close and distant reading; surface and symptomatic reading; rereading, metareading, and interreading—that subtend ethical literary criticism. Finally, if hypostatization makes literary ambiguity or “alterity” uniformly ethical, Seven Modes works under the assumption that different

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forms of uncertainty will afford different ethical modes at different times. To avoid what Bernard Williams calls the “good news” school of criticism, this book offers arguments for both the positive and the troubling modes—the risks and the threats—afforded by uncertain literature, and sometimes even by the same text during the course of reading. Unfolding the experiential ethics afforded by reading a text over time relies on a phenomenological model that thwarts the tendency toward fixity shared by the vagaries described above. To me, Seven Modes’ project of tracing the accretive processes and rhythms of reading at small and large temporal scales is its most important contribution to the field of ethical criticism. The ethics of literature ought not be reduced to a single character or feature or philosophy. Reading literature fluctuates and modulates, affording an aesthetic, affective, and ethical mode of experience that resonates within its pages and beyond its end.

APPENDIX 2: S E V E N M O D E S O F U N C E R TA I N T Y

Narrative structures

Textual Examples

Modes of Uncertainty

Mutual exclusion

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 Ian McEwan, Atonement

1. Oscillation 2. Enfolding

Multiplicity

Toni Morrison, Beloved William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity Shirley Jackson, “Seven Types of Ambiguity” Elliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity

3. Adjacency 4. Accounting

Repetition

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho Tom McCarthy, Remainder

5. Vacuity 6. Synchronicity

All of the above

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

7. Flippancy

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Introduction 1. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1989), 9. 2. Even in Alfred Appel’s account of a man’s refusal to read Lolita in the barracks, the soldier cites these lines before he throws the book across the room, exclaiming “Damn! . . . It’s God-damn litachure!!” Introduction to The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. (New York: Vintage, 1991), xxxiv. 3. Nabokov, Lolita, 9. 4. William Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” in The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 430. 5. Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me (New York: Vintage, 1991), 186. 6. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 7. Samuel Beckett, Company, in Nohow On: Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 3, 34. For more on the implicit nature of most commands, see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 33. 8. Scarry, Dreaming, 34, 35. She continues: “it might be said that each descriptive sentence in a novel or poem is implicitly preceded by these erased imperatives (and that erasure no doubt magnifies our sense of object’s givenness)” (36). 9. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage, 1990), 44. 10. Nabokov may also be invoking a tradition of encoding messages, particularly names (Lolita, Quilty), in gnomic and runic alliterative verse. (Thanks to Jeremy S. Ecke for this observation.) 11. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 80. 12. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 26, 53. The question of pronunciation colors Nabokov’s musings on the three languages that he speaks: “I list them in . . . 305

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Notes to Pages 4–6 the best rhythmic arrangement: either dactylic, with one syllable skipped, ‘Énglish, Rússian, and Frénch,’ or anapestic, ‘English, Rússian, and Frénch.’” His own surname is also a source of amusement in this regard: “Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on the first, as Russians also do. . . . The awful ‘Na-bah-kov’ is a despicable gutterism” (144, 52). 13. Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” in The Writer on Her Work, ed. Janet Sternburg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 18. 14. Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History 1 (1969): 56. 15. Ibid., 54. 16. Boyd, American Years, 493. 17. Zadie Smith, “Rereading Barthes and Nabokov,” in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin, 2009), 56. 18. For the distinction between these three, see Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C 8, no. 6 (December 2005), available at http://journal.media -culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. Shouse develops these categories from Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Massumi garners them from a strong reading of his translation of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 19. Shouse, “Feeling.” 20. William James, “The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience,” in The Writings of Williams James, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 272, 274. Quoted in Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011): 468. 21. This suits Empson’s refusal to separate intellectual from emotional “streams of experience” in Seven Types of Ambiguity and The Structure of Complex Words. 22. For a critique of the effort to extricate affect from intention and for evidence of the intentionality of even autonomous bodily responses, see Leys, “Turn to Affect.” 23. Poulet, “Phenomenology,” 54–55. 24. Nabokov, Lolita, 129. 25. Thank you to Glenda Carpio for this point. 26. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 115, 183. 27. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in W. H. Auden Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), 247–249. In her essay, “Is Writerliness Conservative?,” Barbara Johnson offers a single-line interpretation of the ambiguity of Auden’s first claim: “Poetry makes nothing happen; poetry makes nothing happen.” Johnson’s argument about Mallarmé emphasizes the “nonknowledge” of the literary act, suggesting that Auden’s line

Notes to Pages 6–8 makes a claim for poetry’s nonutility. A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 30. We might see this as the poetic analogy to the politics latent in Bartelby’s “I would prefer not to.” 28. The history of reader-response theory could be seen as a set of answers to these questions. Are we possessed by the text, as Poulet would have it? Or do we poach it, as Michel de Certeau suggests? Is reading a “light, innocent Yes,” as Maurice Blanchot says? Or do we use texts as occasions to agree with each other, as Stanley Fish puts it? Then there are diplomatic theories that attribute agency to both reader and writer, models so copacetic as to make Fish accuse them of complacency in an essay with the mockingbird title “Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser.” See Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading”; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (London: University of California Press, 1988); Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); and “Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser,” review of The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, by Wolfgang Iser, Diacritics 11, no. 1 (1981): 2–13. 29. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Why Write,” in What Is Literature?, trans. Philosophical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 48–69. 30. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 37. 31. Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” afterword to Lolita (New York: Viking, 1989), 314. 32. Bernard Williams makes a distinction between moral philosophy and ethics in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985): “By origin, the difference between the two terms is that between Latin and Greek, each relating to a word meaning disposition or custom. One difference is that the Latin term from which ‘moral’ comes emphasizes rather more the sense of social expectation, while the Greek favors that of individual character. . . . I am going to suggest that morality should be understood as a particular development of the ethical. . . . I shall for the most part use ‘ethical’ as the broad term to stand for what this subject is certainly about, and ‘moral’ and ‘morality’ for the narrower system” (6). Geoffrey Harpham argues that “As the locus of otherness, ethics seems to lack integrity ‘in itself’ and perhaps ought to be considered a matrix or a hub from which various discourses, concepts, terms, energies fan out and at which they meet, crossing out of themselves to meet the other, to meet all the others” (Shadows, 37). 33. Quoted from a lecture by Nabokov in Boyd, American Years, 11. 34. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 33. 35. Ibid., 193. 36. Nabokov, “On a Book,” 314–315.

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Notes to Pages 8–9 37. Ibid., 316. 38. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 163, 164. 39. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Vintage, 1989), 222. 40. Nabokov, Lolita, 308. 41. Uncertainty crops up as a key term for a number of works of literary criticism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but few of them press upon it or explain its advantage over its synonyms. The notion of the “uncertain self” is applied widely: to Lord Byron in Emily A. Bernhard Jackson, The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge: Certain in Uncertainty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); to Walt Whitman in E. Fred Carlisle, The Uncertain Self: Whitman’s Drama of Identity (East Lansing: Michigan University Press, 1973); and to various Australian writers in a collection entitled The Uncertain Self: Essays in Australian Literature and Criticism, ed. Harry Heseltine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). As a concept, uncertainty threads its way through studies of modernist poetry in Herbert J. Stern, Wallace Stevens: Art of Uncertainty (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966); and fiction in Ann Barr Snitow, Ford Madox Ford and the Voice of Uncertainty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984); Philip Herring, Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Herta Newman, Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Brown: Toward a Realism of Uncertainty (New York: Garland, 1996). Snitow is interested in the unstable mix of tones and intentions in Ford’s novels; Newman lightly suggests that Woolf “offers, in place of sure commitment, the rich potential of uncertainty” and correlates uncertainty with skepticism, indecision, and doubt in Woolf’s vehement “subjectivism” (xii, 4). Herring makes explicit reference to the uncertainty principle in his introduction to Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle, but his use of the term (what he calls his “nod to Werner Heisenberg”) seems more a punning way to access his main point: “the care with which, by omitting vital evidence or introducing ambiguity, Joyce designed his puzzles to be unsolvable” (ix–x). He justifies his choice as follows: “The terms uncertainty, ambiguity, and indeterminacy in common parlance have often had much the same meaning, but in this century they have parted ways in literary and scientific theory. Ambiguity, some would claim, was appropriated by the New Criticism; indeterminacy has led a life of its own in deconstruction, where it is used to indicate a problem besetting all language and all texts. The term uncertainty, still in the public domain, points to scientific theories roughly contemporary with Joyce, so to avoid confusion with Derridean principles I prefer that term to indeterminacy. What I describe is not a feature of all language or of all literary texts” (xii). For more detailed analyses of the connection between the New Physics and literature, especially modernism, see Restoring the Mystery of the Rainbow: Literature’s

Notes to Page 9 Refraction of Science, ed. V. Tinkler-Velanni and C. C. Barfoot (New York: Rodopi, 2011); and Allen Thiher, Fiction Refracts Science: Modernist Writers from Proust to Borges (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005). Uncertainty in this scientific sense is a key concept for criticism of postmodern fiction as well. Jean-Louis Hippolyte’s Fuzzy Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006) includes a discussion of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in relation to the work of Patrick Deville. Joseph M. Conte’s Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002) offers a useful history of how “uncertainty and unpredictability” came to be so prevalent in post-1970 nonlinear dynamics and postmodern fiction in its introductory chapter “Being in Uncertainties: Orderly Disorder in Postmodern American Fiction” (2–3). Jonathan Culler’s Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), a book about Gustave Flaubert’s “attempt to escape from the circuit of communication, to make the text a written object and not the physical manifestation of a communicative act,” opts for the term without offering any particular reason for doing so (xiii– xiv). Describing Flaubert’s project as “dérouter le lecteur,” Culler first presents the term as follows: “the victim must be uncertain what he is supposed to think, unsure whether he is being made fun of, suspicious that the book may have after all been written by an imbecile, even—though this project seems not to have been realized—led astray by false bibliographic references” (xiii). He hints at a Heisenbergian notion of the word when he describes the process of interpreting Flaubert in these terms: “The novels concern the difficulties of bringing interpretive models to bear on an experience, but in order to reach the point where we can derive this theme as an interpretation, we must employ exactly those interpretive processes whose failures the novels display” (xxii). 42. In his first articulation of the principle, Werner Heisenberg initially used the German words Ungenauigkeit (inexactness) and Unbestimmtheit (indeterminacy); Niels Bohr’s preference for Unsicherheit (uncertainty), only mentioned in an endnote of the paper, is what seeped into the language of English-speaking physicists. See David Lindley, Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science (New York: Anchor, 2007), 1, 149–150. 43. Vladimir Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” in Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002), 5. DNA testing in 2011 has confirmed a lepidopteral theory Nabokov posited in 1945 (Carl Zimmer, “Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated,” New York Times, January 25, 2011, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html?_r=1). Critics have recently turned to his scientific career to consider his interest in patterns, experiment, and perception. Stephen Blackwell argues that “The New Physics, especially as exemplified by Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations and Niels Bohr’s wave-particle complementarity, appears to have added some new pigments to Nabokov’s ar-

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Notes to Pages 9–11 tistic palette at this time” (“Fugitive Sense as Theme in Art,” in Transitional Nabokov, ed. Will Norman and Duncan White [Bern: Peter Lang, 2009], 19). The influence of uncertainty as scientific concept can be traced through several of the literary descendants of Nabokov I consider in this book, including Pynchon, McEwan, Perlman, McCarthy, and Foer. 44. Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce,” in Modernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 1064. 45. Vladimir Nabokov, “The Structure of Eugene Onegin” in Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, trans. Vladimir Nabokov (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 15. 46. Nabokov, “Good Readers,” 6. 47. Thomas Pynchon was literally Nabokov’s student; Vera remembered grading his essays, written in half-script, half-print, and Pynchon was part of what Brian Boyd calls a “Nabokov cult” among Cornell’s writers. Pynchon’s 1966 The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999) alludes explicitly to Nabokov’s “dirty novel”: “What chance has a lonely surfer boy / For the love of a surfer chick / With all these Humbert Humbert cats / Coming on so big and sick? / For me, my baby was a woman, / For him she’s just another nymphet” (49). Sexual perversion and sadistic cruelty are the syncopated drumbeats of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (New York: Vintage, 1991). Embracing the pornographic explicitness Nabokov eschewed, Ellis’s novel received a similarly controversial reception: when it comes to outrage and censorship, American Psycho is to the 1990s what Lolita was to the 1950s. Ian McEwan makes the lineage blatant by naming a sexually precocious fifteen-year-old Lola in his 2001 Atonement (New York: Anchor, 2003), but his protagonist Briony’s selfexcoriating investigation into the evils of authorship is even more a tribute to Lolita. Tom McCarthy’s 2005 Remainder (New York: Vintage, 2007), too, depicts the horrific outcome of the reenactment of an irretrievable moment of bliss. Other writers take up Lolita’s interest in the vulnerable child. The central event of Toni Morrison’s 1987 Beloved (New York: Vintage, 2004), infanticide, combines love for and violence toward the child. The kidnapping of a young boy is the core problem of Australian Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: Riverhead, 2003). The naturalization of the “Lolita” as a cultural meme also emerges in the novel when a prostitute’s customer wishes her to dress like a schoolgirl. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005) also stars a traumatized child despite the broader political tenor of its subject: the terrorist attacks on 9/11. 48. “Vladimir Nabokov Discusses ‘Lolita,’ ” available at http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=Ldpj_5JNFoA&feature=related and http://www.youtube.com /watch?v=0-wcB4RPasE&feature=related. 49. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 62. 50. Boyd, American Years, 91n.

Notes to Pages 12–14 51. Despite Trilling’s clout as a critic, he “was surprised when he heard himself referred to as one. His ambition was to be a great novelist; he regarded his criticism as ‘an afterthought.’ ” He wrote in his journal of “the sense that I fall between the two categories, of the academic and the man of genius & real originality.” Louis Menand, “Regrets Only: Lionel Trilling and His Discontents,” New Yorker, September 29, 2008, available at http://www.newyorker.com/arts /critics/atlarge/2008/09/29/080929crat_atlarge_menand?. 52. The next year would bring the Kitchen Debate (Nixon v. Khrushchev) and the Two Cultures War (Snow v. Leavis). The lepidopterist-author mocked the latter debate in an interview: “One of these ‘Two cultures’ is really nothing but utilitarian technology; the other is B-grade novels, ideological fiction, popular art” (Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 78). 53. Boyd, American Years, 358. 54. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 312. 55. Lionel Trilling, review of Lolita, in Nabokov: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Page (New York: Routledge, 1982), 102. 56. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 371–372. 57. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), xxi. The idea that literature’s difficulty had a political, even a moral job—critique—justified modernism to the masses while emphasizing the significance of conflicts of meaning, as such. Trilling proposed that we see “literary situations as cultural situations, and cultural situations as great elaborate fights about moral issues.” Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), 12. 58. Trilling, Beyond Culture (New York: Viking, 1968), 231. As the 1960s erupted, Trilling’s self-critical liberalism would itself calcify into what Cornel West calls “a fatigue-ridden tempered conservatism”: with James Joyce, Trilling bemoaned, E. M. Forster’s “only connect!” had become “only disconnect!” West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 176. 59. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 1104; Wolfgang Iser, “Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response in Prose Fiction” (1971), reprinted in Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 30. 60. I riff here on Walter Benjamin’s term: “Ambiguity is the figurative appearance of the dialectic, the law of the dialectic at a standstill. This standstill is Utopia, and the dialectical image therefore a dream image.” The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedmann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 10.

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Notes to Pages 15–16 61. Li Ou, Keats and Negative Capability (London: Continuum, 2009). See Menand, “Regrets Only.” 62. Lionel Trilling, E. M. Forster: A Study (London: Hogarth, 1959), 6. 63. Robert Eaglestone describes two wings of contemporary ethical criticism: “One concentrates on the importance of narrative and the ways in which it shapes and informs our lives and might be characterized (broadly) as neoAristotelian. The other, in contrast, focuses on how narratives, and texts in general, are interpreted or misinterpreted and might be (again broadly) characterized as ‘deconstructive.’ ” “One and the Same? Ethics, Aesthetics, and Truth,” Poetics Today 25, no. 4 (2004): 602. Bárbara Arizti and Silvia Martínez-Falquina find two main axes: “one pointing back to liberal humanism and the moral criticism of Arnold and Leavis, and the other informed by postmodernism and deconstruction.” On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), xi, n13. Lawrence Buell’s introduction to a PMLA special issue on ethics and literary study is the only one I have encountered that finds six paths to the “turn to ethics”: the moral thematics and commitments of texts and implied authors; the turn of philosophers toward literature as a source; the reevaluation of the ethics of deconstruction; a renewed interest in “subjectness” and agency, driven by Foucault’s work; a postcolonial studies-inflected affirmation of truth and authenticity as contingent on opaque or resistant discourse; and increased self-consciousness about professional ethics. “Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics,” PMLA 114, no. 1 (1999): 7–10. 64. Dorothy Hale, “Fiction as Restriction: Self-binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel,” Narrative 15, no. 2 (2007): 189–190. 65. There is no doubt that the influence of the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas—prolonged by theorists ranging from Jacques Derrida to Maurice Blanchot to Judith Butler—has contributed to this trend toward defining ethics in terms of a willing submission to Otherness. But the ethics of “self-binding” seems to be a wider trend, encompassing as it does the neoclassical virtue ethics espoused by both Booth and Nussbaum. 66. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 5. 67. Harpham, Shadows, 37. 68. Bernard Williams, “The Women of Trachis: Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics,” in The Greeks and Us: Essays in Honor of Arthur W. H. Adkins, ed. Robert B. Louden and Paul Schollmeier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 48–49. 69. Derek Attridge, “Ethical Modernism: Servants as Others in J. M. Coetzee’s Early Fiction,” Poetics Today: Literature and Ethics 25, no. 4 (2004): 653. Charles Altieri, “Lyrical Ethics and Literary Experience,” Mapping the Ethical

Notes to Pages 16–17 Turn, ed. Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 30–58. 70. J. L. Austin’s theory of linguistic performativity emerged, incidentally, the same year Lolita was published. In his 1955 lecture series, How to Do Things with Words, Austin granted the name “performative” to a verbal utterance that constitutes “the doing of a certain action.” His prime examples were promises (“I promise”), marriages (“I do”), and bets (“I bet”). Austin described acts “performed on a stage” or in literature as “etiolated” or “parasitic” performatives (How to Do Things, 22, 104). Roland Barthes declared in 1967, however, that “writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’ . . . rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative.” Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 1468. Jacques Derrida later took Austin to task for excluding fiction from the analysis, making a case that the iterability of all language—including literary language—serves as the basis for the performative. “Signature Event Context,” Limited, Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). Derrida claims elsewhere that “this experience of writing is ‘subject’ to an imperative: to give space for singular events, to invent something new in the form of acts of writing which no longer consist in a theoretical knowledge, in new constative statements, to give oneself to a poetico-literary performativity” (“This Strange Institution Called Literature,” interview with Derek Attridge, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge [New York: Routledge, 1992], 55). While Charles Altieri disagrees with the reappropriation of the term performative by literary critics, he, too, argues that critics concerned with value ought to shift attention from language as representation (discursive, propositional statement) toward language as realization (the performative, projective potential of literature) (“Lyrical Ethics and Literary Experience,” in Mapping the Ethical Turn, ed. Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001]). 71. J. Hillis Miller, On Literature (London: Routledge, 2002), 38. 72. See Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Keen finds that statistical evidence for the idea that “if you don’t read, you won’t be able to empathize” and for the idea that “empathic emotion motivates altruistic action” is “inconclusive at best and nearly always exaggerated”(vii). 73. James’s “Moral Philosophy and the Moral Life” suggests that ethics arises out of an unlocatable force: “in seeking for a universal principle we inevitably are carried onward to the most universal principle—that the essence of good is simply to satisfy demand. The demand may be for anything under the sun.” In The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 621.

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Notes to Pages 17–21 74. Jane Adamson, “Against Tidiness: Literature and/versus Moral Philosophy,” in Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory, ed. Jane Adamson et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 84–110. 75. Trilling, Liberal Imagination, 256. 76. As Dorothy Hale has recently noted, writers as disparate as Iris Murdoch, Robert Liddell, Wilson Harris, and Zadie Smith have used “negative capability” to justify the ethical value of a literature that eschews moralizing or didactic purposes. See “The Art of English Fiction in the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel, ed. Robert L. Caserio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 10–22. The fact that we are so negatively incapable about negative capability perhaps emerges from Keats’s oxymoronic formulation of the concept. On the one hand, he turns it into a concept: he says “I mean,” he catalogues certain examples, he describes its implications, he names it and capitalizes and underlines his term for it. In essence, he reaches after fact and reason to describe the capacity not to do so. On the other hand, the transience and uncertainty of “negative capability” (mentioned in a letter once, formulated somewhat loosely, hovering between aesthetic and ethical realms) allow it to elude our grasp. 77. Richard Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 21, no. 1 (1997): 18. 78. Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 21. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Editions, 1966). All subsequent references to Empson in this introduction will be parenthetical by page number. 79. I have cited Sartre, Poulet, and Scarry thus far; we might include Louise Rosenblatt’s transaction and Wolfgang Iser’s virtuality. More recently, Paul B. Armstrong has suggested we rethink “the experience of reading as . . . a dynamic, mutually constituting relation where the encounter is shaped by both sides. . . . [R]eading is simultaneously both subjective and objective.” Armstrong, “In Defense of Reading,” New Literary History 42, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 102. 80. Felski, Uses, 21. Shock plays a large part in my analysis of vacuity in American Psycho; enchantment is pertinent to the mode of enthrallment I find in Remainder. 81. “The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.” James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 127. Rosenblatt notes that her transactional theory of the literary work has some affinity with the ecological model in precisely this respect: “In ecological terms, the text becomes the element of the environment to which the individual responds. Or

Notes to Page 21 more accurately, each forms an environment for the other during the reading event.” Rosenblatt’s theory of reading and Gibson’s ecological theory both have roots in functionalism; the rather minor conceptual difference is that Gibson turned to Gestalt phenomenologist Kurt Lewin for his term (Aufforderungscharakter) while Rosenblatt adapts from John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley’s Knowing and the Known the term transaction (she suggests that Bentley derives transaction from William James). Her definition, “an ongoing process in which the elements or factors are . . . aspects of a total situation,” suggests Rosenblatt’s adamancy that reading be described dynamically—“interaction” is for her still too atomizing, implying “separate, self-contained, and already defined entities acting on one another—in the manner, if one may use a homely example, of billiard balls colliding.” Louise Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 17–18. See also John T. Sanders, “Affordances: An Ecological Approach to First Philosophy,” in Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, ed. Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (New York: Routledge, 1999), 121–142; Norman Segalowitz, “On the Evolving Connections between Psychology and Linguistics,” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 21 (2001); Donald Norman, The Psychology of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 1988); B. MacWhinney, “The Emergence of Language from Embodiment,” in The Emergence of Language (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999), 213–256; Endre E. Kadar and Judith A. Effken, “Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Science of the Future,” Ecological Psychology 18, no. 4 (2006): 319– 363; Maureen Walsh, “The ‘Textual Shift’: Examining the Reading Process with Print, Visual and Multimodal Texts,” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 29, no. 1 (2006): 24–37; Eve Bearne and Gunther Kress, “Editorial,” Reading: Literacy and Language (2001): 89–93. 82. J. Gibson, Ecological Approach, 129. 83. As William James wrote in 1912: “Subjectivity and objectivity are affairs not of what an experience is aboriginally made of, but of its classification.” James, “Affectional Facts,” 272. 84. Norman, Psychology, 9. James Gibson does not make a strong distinction between natural and manufactured environmental affordances. He acknowledges the origin of the idea of affordance in Gestalt psychologists Kurt Koffka and Kurt Lewin, some of whose examples were man-made, like mailboxes and drinking glasses. J. Gibson, Ecological Approach, 138–140. 85. Eleanor Gibson focuses on three main affordances in language: the syntactic, the orthographic/phonological, and the semiotic (“Perceptual Learning and the Theory of Word Perception,” in An Odyssey in Learning and Perception [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991], 457). Others have taken up affordance in the realm of linguistics: “Following upon Gibson, we can hypothesize that language

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Notes to Pages 21–22 acquisition involves attuning one’s attention system to perceive the communicative affordances provided by the linguistic environment.” Segalowitz, “Evolving Connections,” 13. 86. Paul de Man, “Form and Intent in the New American Criticism,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 25. In his introduction to Argufying, John Haffenden cites de Man’s theory as the kind of thing Empson would have argued against but I think there is actually some affinity between de Man’s notion of “intentionality” and Empson’s description of intention as a “psychological” rather than “a theoretical” matter and his onus on a pragmatic grasp of what is there on the page: “an intention is only known as it is shown. . . . Still, I couldn’t really agree that other people’s intentions are meant to be bypassed in this way.” Quoted in Haffenden, introduction to William Empson, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), 13. 87. Thanks to Abraham Croft Adams for the last two suggestions. 88. E. Gibson, “Perceptual,” 453. 89. When an American editor requested a few hundred words on the uses of books, Ford Madox Ford replied in a letter dated September 14, 1929: “Books can be useful from so many points of view. In my early days, for example, I used to use the Encyclopedia Britannica as a trouser-press and certainly the house that was without it was to be pitied. Books are also very useful for pulping; bibles and other works set over the heart will deflect bullets; works printed on thin india paper are admirable if you happen to run out of cigarette papers. Their use for that purpose is in fact forbidden in France where there is a tobacco monopoly. In fact, if you are ever without a book you are certain to want one in the end. For the matter of that, my grand aunt Eliza Coffin used to say: ‘Sooner than be idle, I’d take a book and read.’ According to her the other uses of books were (1) for the concealing of wills; (2) for the ditto of proposals of marriage by letter; (3) for pressing flowers; (4) folios piled one on the other will aid you to reach the top row in the linen cupboard; (5) they have been used as missiles, as bedsteads when levelly piled, as wrappings for comestibles; (6) as soporifics, sudorifics, shaving paper etc.” Levi Stahl, “Things to Do with Books—Other Than Read Them, That Is,” April 29, 2013, available at http://ivebeenreadinglately .blogspot.com/2013/04/things-to-do-with-books-other-than-read.html. 90. Rosenblatt, Reader, 24. Eleanor Gibson, “Reading in Retrospect: Perception, Cognition or Both?” in An Odyssey in Learning and Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 494. 91. Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” in The Common Reader: Second Series, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, 1986), 259. 92. J. Gibson, Ecological Approach, 14. Gibson points out that environments have to have a balance of these two kinds of elements: “A wholly invari-

Notes to Pages 23–26 ant environment, unchanging in all parts and motionless, would be completely rigid and obviously would no longer be an environment. . . . At the other extreme, an environment that was changing in all parts and was wholly variant, consisting only of swirling clouds of matter, would also not be an environment.” 93. “Just as a motion for the physicist can be specified only in relation to a chosen coordinate system, so is a phenomenal motion relative to a phenomenal framework.” James J. Gibson, “The Visual Perception of Objective Motion and Subjective Movement,” Psychological Review 61 (1954): 310. 94. J. Gibson, Ecological Approach, 141, his italics. 95. Invariant features can be coded in various ways: structuralist networks, such as Roman Jakobson’s communication functions, Roland Barthes’s five codes in S/Z, Northrop Frye’s formulaic or mythic archetypes, or Tzvetan Todorov’s themes and genres; formalist terms, like Vladimir Propp’s folk tale narratemes or narrative functions; narratological units, such as Eugene Dorfman’s narremes; or even the older notions of the event and the episode. 96. Adrian M. S. Piper, “Impartiality, Compassion, and Modal Imagination,” Ethics 101, no. 4 (July 1991): 726. 97. Tom McCarthy, interview by Mark Alizart, Believer, June 2008, available at http://www.believermag.com/issues/200806/?read=interview_mccarthy. 98. Derek Attridge argues that “by tracing carefully the experience of reading—and doing justice to what the text means, among other things, attending to linguistic and stylistic details with scrupulous accuracy—it may be possible to convey its engagement with the ethical” (“Ethical Modernism,” 660). 99. J. Gibson, Ecological Approach, 140. 100. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 23. 101. Eleanor Gibson invokes music to capture the temporal complexity of literary affordance: “The accomplishment of reading and comprehending the text of War and Peace is as wonderful as reading the score of a symphony, which does not come through note by note any more than the former comes through letter by letter.” E. Gibson, “How Perception Really Develops: A View from outside the Network,” in An Odyssey in Learning and Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 472. Louise Rosenblatt also asks: “Is this not the condition of music to which the reader of the literary work should aspire: a complete absorption in the process of evoking a work from the text, and in sensing, clarifying, structuring, savoring that experience as it unfolds” (Reader, 28–29). In S/Z, Roland Barthes also turns to the idea of the symphony to underscore the temporal experience of reading. Having described the five codes with which he will sort the “memes” of Honore de Balzac’s “Sarrasine,” he explains how the rhythm of these codes as we move through the text is symphonic: “The

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Notes to Pages 26–27 area of the (readerly) text is comparable at every point to a (classical) musical score.” Barthes offers a vivid account of how the brass and percussive semes rumble below the singing enigmas—“their suspended disclosure, their delayed resolution: the development of an enigma is really like that of a fugue”—as the action of the plot “brings everything together, like the strings.” He even sketches a diagram of a music score to demonstrate these rhythms. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974), 28, 29, 30. 102. This is evident in Wai Chee Dimock’s theory of textual reception as “stochastic resonance, in which a weak signal is boosted by background noise and becomes newly and complexly audible. The layering of sounds—the meshing of a faint vibration with other, apparently interfering but effectively enhancing vibrations . . . allows a range of otherwise undetectable signals to rise above the threshold of detectability.” Attuned to how context reconstitutes text, “resonance is a generative (and not merely interfering) process, one that remakes a text while unmaking it.” While Dimock looks at how literature resonates with historical moments, I find resonance between literature and experience. Wai Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” PMLA 112, no. 5 (1997): 1062–1063. 103. Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Penguin, 202), 114–115. 104. In his interviews with the New Left Review, Raymond Williams clarifies why experience can never be pure: “there is not natural seeing and therefore there cannot be a direct and unmediated contact with reality.” Williams goes on to connect experience and structures of feeling with uncertainty: “I have found that areas which I would call structures of feeling as often as not initially form as a certain kind of disturbance or unease, a particular type of tension. . . . To put it another way, the peculiar location of a structure of feeling is the endless comparison that must occur in the process of consciousness between the articulated and the lived. The lived is only another word, if you like, for experience: but we have to find a word for that level. For all that is not fully articulated, all that comes through as disturbance, tension, blockage, emotional trouble seems to me precisely a source of major changes in the relation between the signifier and the signified, whether in literary language or conventions.” Politics and Letters (London: Verso, 1981), 167–168. Thank you to Kevis Goodman for this point. 105. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 2005), 50. 106. Nöel Carroll, “Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions in Research,” Ethics 110 (2000): 362. 107. Alice Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 139. Many of Ryle’s ideas are derived from Jane Austen, whose use of the word mind “without the definite or indefinite article, to stand not just for intellect or intelligence, but for the whole complex unity of a con-

Notes to Pages 27–29 scious, thinking, feeling and acting person,” is an index of the inextricability of affect and cognition. Gilbert Ryle, The Collected Papers of Gilbert Ryle, Volume 1 (London: Hutchinson, 1971), 290. For Ryle, the narrative energies of literature orchestrate emotional and cognitive responses that comprise part of a moral education. 108. Nancy Sherman, “The Habituation of Character,” in The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 182. As Isocrates puts it in his Antidosis: “set [students] at exercises, habituate them to work, and require them to combine in practice the particular things which they have learned in order that they may grasp them more firmly and bring their theories into closer touch with the occasions for applying them.” Quoted in Phillip Sipiora, introduction to Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, ed. Phillip Sipiora (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 109. It is a happy coincidence for my project that there are seven musical modes on the modern scale: Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian. 110. Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis Macdonald Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951). 111. Aristotle concludes: “Since then music is a pleasure, and virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating aright, there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgments, and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble actions.” Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett, available at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle /politics.html, VIII. 112. David Palumbo-Liu, The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 6, 10, 13. 113. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1971), 8– 9, 16–17, 19. In Why Literature? The Value of Literary Reading and What It Means for Teaching (London: Continuum, 2011), Cristina Vischer Bruns uses object relations theory to offer a similar argument for the experiential value of what she calls “immersive” reading: “Instead of benefitting the reader primarily through her understanding of what the text says about the world (and whatever use that knowledge may serve), literary works as transitional objects benefit the reader through her experience of the text, an experience as a way of being in the world, which leaves its effects not only on her understanding, but more influentially, on her own way of being in the world” (35). Again, it is not by presenting propositional knowledge or subjecting the reader to a uniform alterity that reading has relevance to ethics, but rather by affording a specific experience that leaves its effects on a mode of existence. 114. By rights, Empson’s descendants would include Georges Poulet, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, J. Hillis Miller, Elaine Scarry, Sianne Ngai, and Rita

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Notes to Pages 30–31 Felski. I see affinities between his taxonomical proclivities and descriptive method with Poulet’s attempts to trace “variations” of the relations “between criticizing subject and criticized object” in his phenomenology of reading; Todorov’s articulation of the genres on either side of The Fantastic; Barthes’s five semantic codes weaving an open network of meaning in S/Z; Scarry’s five ways the verbal arts accrue “the vivacity of perceptual objects” in Dreaming by the Book; Ngai’s claim that the seven Ugly Feelings comprise “a series of studies” on the relation of affect to politics; and Felski’s description in Uses of Literature of four “modes of textual engagement.” J. Hillis Miller explicitly pays homage to Empson’s influence on him in interviews, as, for example, here: “The New Critics I found most interesting, however, were the slightly odd ones, especially Burke and Empson. . . . I greatly admired Empson’s work, not only Seven Types of Ambiguity but also Some Versions of Pastoral, especially the latter. . . . Both Burke and Empson are slightly wild and wacky. Their wildness is to some degree commensurate with the wildness of literature.” “Why Literature? A Profession: An Interview with J. Hillis Miller,” in The J. Hillis Miller Reader, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 412–413. 115. For more on Empson’s ambivalence about politics during World War II and the Cold War, see John Haffenden, William Empson, Volume I: Among the Mandarins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and William Empson, Volume II: Against the Christians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Mark Thompson, “Versions of Pluralism: William Empson, Isaiah Berlin, and the Cold War,” Literary Imagination 8, no. 1 (2006): 75–84. 116. Quoted in Thompson, “Versions,” 75. 117. Mark Thompson describes the shared ground and the one crucial political difference between Empson’s and Trilling’s versions of literary criticism: “Trilling’s liberalism of complexity, nuance, variousness, and ‘moral realism’ was premised on anti-Stalinism” (“Versions,” 79). The two critics may have met at the School of Letters at Kenyon College in the late 1940s. 118. “Winchester College Common Time School Report,” bMS Eng 1401 (705). [1925] 1 folder. Amy Lowell Fund *85M-65 6 Jan 1986, William Empson Archive, Houghton Library Special Collections, Harvard University. Also quoted in Haffenden, Empson, 1:85. 119. Empson, Argufying, 83. 120. Empson studied math as a schoolboy in Kent and specialized in it at Winchester College before going up to Cambridge. Ramsay remarked that “Empson was one of the best mathematicians he’d ever had”; I. A. Richards wrote that “he has the logical penetration of the mathematician.” Haffenden, Empson, 1:230, 241. 121. Quoted in Haffenden, Empson, 1:105. One could say that Empson was haunted—in Freud’s uncanny sense—by the number seven. As a schoolboy, he played the part of the sixth of the Seven Deadly Sins (fittingly, Sloth); as a

Notes to Pages 31–32 scholar, he would revisit their appearance in Faustus and the Censor (1987). A poetry magazine he co-founded at Cambridge, Experiment, ran for only seven issues. Poor Bill was a Charles Kingsley Bye-Fellow for precisely seven weeks before he was expelled from Magdalene College. Despite these associations, he still seems to have liked the number. Some Versions of Pastoral has seven chapters. The Structure of Complex Words mainly covers seven words: wit, all, fool, dog, honest, sense, and man. In “Plenum and Vacuum,” a poem from 1935, “Heaven’s but an attribute of her seven rainbows.” In “Sea Voyage,” he personifies the sea using the same image: “the crisp silver foam . . . Flaps from the haunch seven petticoats at home, / Wards, silk, in ocean overskirt, her rainbow.” Musing on bombs during his excursion to the sacred Chinese mountain Nanyueh, he imagines: “Two hundred on one floor / Were wedding guests cleverly hit / Seven times and none left to deplore.” William Empson, Collected Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, 1955), 7, 12, 77. In an aside in a letter from 1971, Empson says that “seven to thirteen are perhaps the best ages.” Empson, “Letter to William Lyons 3 May 1971,” in Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 506. 122. Katy Price, “Monogamy and the Next Step? Empson and the Future of Love in Einstein’s Universe,” in Some Versions of Empson, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 243. Haffenden offers a helpful list of these scientific strains in the poems: “The imaginative issues of Empson’s early poetry were assuredly stirred by the human implications of modern science— not just astrophysics (‘The World’s End,’ ‘Camping Out,’ ‘Earth has Shrunk in the Wash,’ ‘Letter I’), but also biology (‘Invitation to Juno’), botany (‘Value is in Activity,’ and ‘China’), chemistry (‘Villanelle,’ ‘Bacchus,’ ‘Missing Dates’), entomology (‘The Ants’), geometry (‘Letter V’), evolutionism (‘Plenum and Vacuum’), anthropology (‘Homage to the British Museum’), theories of time (‘Dissatisfaction with Metaphysics’); the list could go on.” Haffenden, Empson, 1:364. Empson also absorbed many ideas from Einstein, Rutherford, and Eddington; “Doctrinal Point” has a direct address to the latter. Collected Poems, 39. 123. Price, “Monogamy,” 243. 124. Haffenden, Empson, 1:364. 125. Allen Thiher, Fiction Refracts Science: Modernist Writers from Proust to Borges (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 40. 126. Ibid., 41. Lindley, Uncertainty, 31. As early as 1902, Henry Adams declared, “The scientific synthesis commonly called Unity was the scientific analysis commonly called Multiplicity.” Although the Copenhagen scientists would not present the uncertainty and complementarity principles until 1927, Max Planck said in 1910 that “at present no physical law is considered assured beyond doubt, each and every physical truth is open to dispute.” Both quoted in Lindley, Uncertainty, 67.

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Notes to Pages 32–35 127. William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (New York: Penguin, 1995), 445, 3. 128. Lindley, Uncertainty, 4. 129. Paul Fry, Empson: Prophet against Sacrifice (New York: Routledge, 1991), 76. Fry refers to Empson’s “ethical pragmatism” or, more aptly, his “reasonableness”: “the very openness to experience entailed in Empson’s rationalism—or better, reasonableness—led him to acknowledge verbal implications which remain insusceptible of analysis (neither aesthetic nor emotive)” (76, 61). Haffenden says that Empson reserved “to his own practice all the rights of pragmatism” (Empson, 2:307). Christopher Norris calls it a “common-sensical” and “broadly rationalist approach” in his introduction to Empson: The Critical Achievement, ed. Christopher Norris and Nigel Mapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 7, 6. In “Empson’s Generalized Ambiguities,” Gary Wihl considers “the pragmatic dimension of Empson’s work, his effort to explain semantic contradictions as the consequence of one speaker’s use of a term colliding with another’s until a small-scale consensus is reached.” Gary Wihl and David Williams, eds., Literature and Ethics: Essays Presented to A. E. Malloch (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 3. 130. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 207. 131. Quoted in Menand, Metaphysical Club, 364. William James, “What Pragmatism Means,” in The Writings of Williams James, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 380. Italics in the original. 132. John Haffenden offers an assessment of Empson’s views on authorial intention in his “Introduction” to Argufying, 11–21. 133. Graham Hough, “The Eighth Ambiguity,” in William Empson: The Man and His Work, ed. Roma Gill (London: Routledge, 1974). 134. See the articles in Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, eds., Representations 108, no. 1 (2009), and Heather Love, “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (2010): 371–391. 135. Empson attributes, for example, the richness of “cross-reference and incidental detail” in the Bard’s plays to the “circumstances in which they were written,” including the actors’ boredom. Locating “odd and pathetic relics of the state of feeling . . . in the folio stage directions,” he claims we could even “treat the plays as documents from which to draw full-length biographies” (Empson, Seven Types, 46–47). 136. As Empson puts it in an essay called “The Verbal Analysis”: “the business of the critic is simply to show how the machine is meant to work, and therefore to show all its working parts in turn” (Argufying, 106). In a reading of George Herbert, Empson describes how “the reader must pause after each dis-

Notes to Pages 35–37 play of wit to allow the various moods in which it could be read, the various situations to which it could refer, to sink into his mind” (Seven Types, 124). 137. Fry, Prophet, 74, 5. 138. Marcel Proust, The Remembrance of Things Past: Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Modern Library, 1928), 9. 139. Empson compares the indecision produced by two contradictory impulses to “the difference of sound heard by the two ears, which decides where the sound is coming from, or to the stereoscopic contradictions that imply a dimension” (Empson, Seven Types, 193). The “broken pieces of grammar” in a Donne poem “are lost phrases jerked out whilst sobbing” (142). A comma rightly divides a line in Othello because “both rhythm and grammar should be rocking and tempestuous, a precise echo to the meaning” (94). Multiple meanings can cause a semantic “clash as a sound” or serve as “slight overtones or grace-notes”; Herbert’s word mysteriousnesses is “wound up like a string to give out music, and echoing in the mind, repeatable, as a type of suffering” (229, 210–211, 230). 140. In the last chapter of Seven Types of Ambiguity and in the introduction to The Structure of Complex Words, Empson is concerned to criticize both the older form of “appreciative criticism” that was wed to a noncognitive model of emotion in poetry and his mentor I. A. Richards’s occasional attempts to separate emotion from thought in reading poetry. He notes that Richards’s early work admitted the impossibility of doing so: “when first speaking of the two streams of experience in reading a poem, the intellectual and the active or emotional, Professor Richards remarks ‘It is only as an expositor’s device that we can speak of them as two streams. They have innumerable interconnections and influence one another intimately.’ Exactly; this interconnection is what I am trying to follow out” (Complex Words, 11). 141. By my loose count, the word mode appears 43 times in Seven Types of Ambiguity. 142. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 77. 143. The critic F. R. Leavis once told a story about Wittgenstein meant to illustrate an “antipathy of temperament.” Leavis had reviewed a volume of poetry, Cambridge Poetry 1929, and had admired six poems by Empson. Wittgenstein asked what they were like. Leavis dismissed this demand—too difficult given how little his interlocutor knew of poetry—but Wittgenstein insisted, “If you like them, you can describe them.” “Do you know Donne?” Leavis asked. No, Wittgenstein did not know Donne. They resolved that Wittgenstein should read one of the poems, “Legal Fictions.” Afterward, Wittgenstein demanded: “Explain it!” but promptly cut in when Leavis began to do so—“Oh, I understand that!”—snatched the book and, as Leavis puts it, “sure enough, without any

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Notes to Pages 37–41 difficulty, he went through the poem, explaining the analogical structure that I should have explained myself, if he had allowed me.” Haffenden, Empson, 1:174. 144. Empson, Letters, 501. 145. Haffenden, introduction to Argufying, 7, 9. 146. Ibid., 30. 147. Quoted in Haffenden, Empson, 1:607n146. 148. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, 57. 149. Matthew Bevis, “Introduction: Empson in the Round,” in Some Versions of Empson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–20. 150. Haffenden, Empson, 1:145. 151. In his 1956 essay “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” George A. Miller describes his investigations into how much information a human observer can absorb before she or he begins to make errors. Miller’s title announces the astonishingly consistent value of our human “channel capacity,” which measures “the amount of information that we need to make a decision,” or “the span of absolute judgment.” Strikingly, this number accords with the capacity of our working memory and with how we discriminate numerical amounts (we “subitize” below seven; we “estimate” above it). Left with puzzling data and no unified theory, Miller still concludes, like Empson, with faith in the power of analysis: “I anticipate that we will find a very orderly set of relations describing what now seems an uncharted wilderness of individual differences.” Available at http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Miller/. 152. “Empson’s discussion demonstrates the extent to which texts may provide room for alternative responses, sometimes simultaneously by the same reader, sometimes different readers, shaping qualitatively different experiences from the same words.” Rosenblatt, Reader, 86. 153. Empson, Argufying, 571. 154. Thompson, “Versions,” 75. 155. Empson, Argufying, 126. 156. Quoted in Haffenden, introduction to Argufying, 13. 157. Empson, Argufying, 562. 158. Quoted in Fry, Prophet, 76–77. 159. Empson, Structure, 421. 160. Fry, Prophet, 76–77. 161. Empson, Argufying, 436.

I. Mutual Exclusion 1. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Editions, 1966), vi. 2. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973).

Notes to Pages 42–47 3. Philip J. Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 41–42. 5. “[H]ere are certain texts which sustain their ambiguity to the very end, i.e., even beyond the narrative itself. The book closed, the ambiguity persists. A remarkable example is supplied by Henry James’ tale ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ which does not permit us to determine finally whether ghosts haunt the old estate, or whether we are confronted by the hallucinations of a hysterical governess victimized by the disturbing atmosphere which surrounds her.” Todorov, Fantastic, 43. 6. Edmund Wilson, “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” in The Triple Thinkers (New York: Penguin, 1962), 108. 7. Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 158. 8. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), ix–xi. 9. J. Hillis Miller, “The Figure in the Carpet,” Poetics Today 1, no. 3 (1980): 113. 10. Ibid., 112. 11. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). 12. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

1. Oscillation 1. Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 127 (emphasis his). 2. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 1966 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999). Henceforth, I refer to this text as Lot 49 and cite it parenthetically by page number. 3. Debra Castillo, “Borges and Pynchon: The Tenuous Symmetries of Art,” in New Essays on “The Crying of Lot 49,” ed. Patrick O’Donnell (New York: Cambridge University Press: 1991), 21–46. 4. Thomas Pynchon, introduction to Slow Learner (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1984), 22. 5. Ibid., 1. 6. Ibid., 22. 7. John K. Young, “Pynchon in Popular Magazines,” Critique 44, no. 4 (2003): 397.

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Notes to Pages 47–53 8. Ibid., 391. 9. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 74–75. 10. In Appendix 1 of this book, I describe this as concomitant with a continued tendency toward personification in ethical criticism, a desire to funnel literature’s rampant uncertainty into a familiar ethical vehicle: a human subject. 11. Wayne C. Booth, “Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple?,” in Mapping the Ethical Turn, ed. Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 22. 12. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 84. 13. Maurice Couturier, “ ‘Do I Know You?’: Author-Reading Relationship in The Crying of Lot 49,” Cycnos 2 (Winter 1985–1986): 121. 14. Pynchon, introduction to Slow Learner, 22–23. 15. There are at least four entire books devoted to The Crying of Lot 49, including a critical companion by J. Kerry Grant that explains Pynchon’s myriad sources and allusions: A Companion to “The Crying of Lot 49” (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). The text may be so “canonical” because it is just as complex but not as long as Pynchon’s other tomes. 16. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 1470. 17. John Farrell, “The Romance of the 60s: Self, Community, and the Ethical in The Crying of Lot 49,” Pynchon Notes 30–31 (Spring–Fall 1992): 139– 156; Phillip H. Gochenour, “Anarchist Miracles: Distributed Communities, Nodal Subjects and The Crying of Lot 49,” Pynchon Notes 52–53 (Spring–Fall 2003): 40–52. 18. Emily Apter, “On Oneworldedness: Or, Paranoia as a World System,” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006): 366. 19. Ibid., 368. 20. Ibid., 371. 21. Ibid., 370. 22. See David Cowart, “Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and the Paintings of Remedios Varo,” Critique 18, no. 3 (1977): 19–26. 23. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 118. 24. Ibid., 121. 25. Ibid., 121–122. 26. Ibid., 122. 27. Ibid., emphasis mine. 28. Ibid., 53.

Notes to Pages 54–60 29. Barthes, “Death,” 1469. 30. Patrick O’Donnell, ed., New Essays on Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 14. 31. Frank Kermode, The Art of Telling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 85. 32. For a comparison of Pynchon’s narrative with the uncertainty principle in physics, see Lance Olsen’s “Pynchon’s New Nature: The Uncertainty Principle and Indeterminacy in The Crying of Lot 49,” Canadian Review of American Studies 14, no. 2 (1983): 153–163. 33. “When the amplitude and frequency of these two signals are identical the resulting figure is a steady circle. As we slowly vary the frequency of one signal, the circle will seem to rotate. As we vary the strength of one signal the pattern becomes elliptical.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Lissajou.” 34. The musical association lurks in the word’s odd etymology—the os, or mouth, in a swinging mask—as does a subtle nod to the continuing significance of drama in the novel. The Oxford English Dictionary describes the etymology of oscillate: “It has been suggested that classical Latin oscillum (or scillum) a swing represents a specific use or development of scillum a small mouth (in botanical use), a small face (applied to a mask left to swing in the breeze) < os mouth.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Oscillate.” 35. A. W. McHoul and David Wills, Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 81–82. 36. Dorothy Hale, discussing Judith Butler’s argument about Henry James’s Washington Square, says, “For Butler, human understanding comes into being through the oscillation between reading for life and reading as if for life.” “Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century,” PMLA 124, no. 3 (May 2009): 900. Lynne Huffer suggests that we need to “put theoretical pressure on our understanding of reading within the frame of a narrative performance that constantly negotiates between identification and disidentification” in “ ‘There is no Gomorrah’: Narrative Ethics in Feminist and Queer Theory,’ ” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 12, no. 3 (2001): 20. And David Palumbo-Liu in The Deliverance of Others notes that “literature, it seems, demands both identification and difference at once. We find a vacillating dynamic between empathy and critique, sameness and difference” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 13–14. 37. Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Belief since 1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 26. Hungerford says that this moment is at “night,” but it in fact relies for its eeriness on the glare of the sun in Oedipa’s eyes and on her skin. 38. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leetes Islands Books, 1980), 207.

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Notes to Pages 60–65 39. Ibid., 209. 40. Sigmund Freud, “The Dream-Work,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 928. 41. Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 9. 42. As Frank Palmeri describes it, Pynchon “uses puns, as he uses entropy, to think about the paradigms rather than within them, and to signal our position between inaccessible fullness and profane emptiness of meaning.” “Neither Literally nor as Metaphor: Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” ELH 54 (1987): 985. 43. The popular rock band AC/DC was formed after Lot 49 was published. 44. David Sorfa, “ ‘Small Comfort’: Significance and the Uncanny in The Crying of Lot 49,” Pynchon Notes 32–33 (Spring–Fall 1993): 80. 45. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 426. 46. See Pawel Frelik, “Polysemy of Names in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49,” Lubelskie Materiały Neofilologiczne 18 (1994): 47–51. Debra Moddelmog provides a useful summary of the interpretive possibilities of our heroine’s name in “The Oedipus Myth and Reader Response in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49,” Papers on Language and Literature 23, no. 2 (1987): 244. As for the allusion to Freud, there are explicit references to psychoanalysis in Lot 49, most of which pertain to Oedipa’s shrink Dr. Hilarius; incest appears as a metaphor, pedophilia appears obliquely in the predilection of two male characters for young girls, and there is a scene in which a little boy French kisses his mother. Mucho Maas’s nickname for his wife, “Oed,” connects her to the Oxford English Dictionary. Pierre-Yves Petillon points out its similarity to “odd” (“A Re-cognition of Her Errand into the Wilderness,” in New Essays on “The Crying of Lot 49,” ed. Patrick O’Donnell, 141). Peter Hays notes that öde, the German word for waste or bleak, appears as “oed” in line 42 of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, one of many literary works shadowing Lot 49. See “Pynchon’s Cunning Lingual Novel: Communication in Lot 49,” University of Mississippi Studies in English 5 (1984–1987): 26. Oedipa’s surname, Maas, means “loophole” in Dutch and “mesh” in Afrikaans. Robert Murray Davis, “Parody, Paranoia, and the Dead End of Language in The Crying of Lot 49,” Genre 5, no. 4 (1972): 373; William Gleason, “The Postmodern Labyrinths of Lot 49,” Critique 34, no. 2 (1993): 84. The phonetic variation “mass” means measure, proportion, moderation in German (Frelik, “Polysemy,” 50); the Spanish variation, “más,” means “more,” with the result that her husband’s name means “much more,” such a fortunate pun that it calls into question whether the name is relevant to her in any way other than as a marital tag.

Notes to Pages 65–73 47. Castillo, “Borges and Pynchon,” 23. 48. New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1966, 24, 26. 49. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp” (1964), available at http://www9.george town.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/sontag-notesoncamp-1964.html. 50. You can see the painting here: http://www.remediosvaro.biz/encuentro _personal.html. See David Cowart, “Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and the Paintings of Remedios Varo,” Critique 18, no. 3 (1977): 24. 51. This identity of heroine with sign is marvelously illustrated by Bantam’s 1982 paperback cover, which you can see here: http://www.thomaspynchon.com /covers/cl49_cvr.html. 52. See Stanley Cavell’s discussion of empathic projection in “Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance,” in The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 421–445. 53. Quoted in Thomas Albrecht, “Sympathy and Telepathy: The Problem of Ethics in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil,” ELH 73, no. 2 (2006): 437. 54. Judith Butler, “Values of Difficulty,” in Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, ed. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 209. 55. David Parker, “Ethics, Value and Recognition,” in Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility, ed. Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 159, his emphases. 56. Homi K. Bhabha interprets a passage from “On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” in which John Stuart Mill asserts the need to throw oneself “into the mental position of those who think differently.” Bhabha argues that the intrinsic ambivalence of political rhetoric introduces “the vicissitudes of the movement of the signifier” into the discourse of Realpolitik: “It is this to-andfro, this fort/da of the symbolic process of political negotiation, that constitutes a politics of address” (25). Descriptions of this process as “interstitial,” “in between,” “neither the one nor the other,” “hybridity,” “Third Space,” “translation,” and “agonism” appear in Bhabha’s essay. His most consistent term is negotiation, which he opposes to negation “to convey a temporality that makes it possible to conceive of the articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements: a dialectic without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent History” (25). “The Commitment to Theory,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 23–25. 57. Robert Eaglestone suggests that “[i]t is from the tension of the Saying and the Said that scepticism arises and, for Levinas, philosophy ‘is not separable from scepticism, which follows it like a shadow.’ . . . As such, scepticism works constantly to question and interrupt philosophic thought. As the shadow of philosophy, it can never be escaped or ignored, yet it is without definable substance. It is not a method of thought but rather in constant relation to thought,

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Notes to Pages 73–79 interrupting and disturbing it.” Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 150. 58. Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Lévinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 7, 165. 59. Buber, I and Thou, 53. 60. Ibid., 69. 61. Walter Kaufman, introduction to I and Thou, by Martin Buber (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 16. 62. Buber, I and Thou, 60, 175, 146–147n9. 63. Ibid., 126. 64. Ibid., 53 (emphasis mine). 65. Ibid., 69, 78. 66. Ibid., 143–144. 67. Ibid., 77, 80, 101–102, 147. 68. Ibid., 60, 148, 69. 69. Ibid., 84. 70. Ibid., 83–84. 71. Ibid., 145–146. 72. Ibid., 135–136. 73. Ibid., 174. 74. As many critics have noted, the Pentecost comes on the Sunday seven weeks, or forty-nine days, after Easter, connecting this to the moment when the Holy Ghost manifested as tongues of fire, inducing the assembled disciples to speak in tongues. See Wail Hassan, “This Is Not a Novel: The Crying of Lot 49,” Pynchon Notes 32–33 (Spring–Fall 1993): 91. 75. Buber, I and Thou, 61. 76. Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis Macdonald Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 219. 77. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Vintage, 1990), 146.

2. Enfolding 1. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “spoil.” 2. Ibid. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) did a lot to get the idea of spoilers off the ground. His stringent restrictions on the revelation of the film’s secret twists were advertised widely, and for the first time in film history, audiences weren’t allowed to come into the theater after the movie began. “It is required that you see Psycho from the very beginning,” read posters depicting a comically stern Hitchcock tapping his watch. Hitchcock was probably inspired to develop these techniques because of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955), the end of which included an “anti-spoiler” message. A decade later,

Notes to Pages 79–81 Doug Kenney wrote a piece for National Lampoon called “Spoilers,” which revealed the plots of famous films; www.spollywood.com provides one-line implosions along these lines today. “Spoiler alert”—recommended by Roger Ebert in 2005—has become a common disclaimer in film and book reviews. In 2010, this construction reached what the Web site The Awl called “zeitgeist heights” with the simultaneous “spoiling” of Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception and season four of the TV series Mad Men (available at http://www.theawl.com /2010/07/the-history-and-use-of-spoiler-alert). 3. “Everybody’s a Critic of the Critics’ Rabid Critics,” New York Times, July 21, 2010. 4. Ian McEwan, Atonement (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), 34. Henceforth, I will cite this text parenthetically by page number. (All emphases mine unless otherwise noted.) 5. James Harold, “Narrative Engagement with Atonement and The Blind Assassin,” Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005): 130. 6. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 135. 7. McEwan’s friend, the writer Julian Barnes, recently won the Booker for his 2011 novel with the title The Sense of an Ending (New York: Vintage, 2012); this book, too, has a “twist” ending that has led reviewers into convolutions to keep from spoiling. 8. Brian Finney, “Briony’s Stand against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” Journal of Modern Literature 27 (2004): 69. 9. Finney offers a summary: “ ‘[A] frustrating ending,’ concludes Caroline Moore in the Sunday Telegraph (‘A Crime of the Imagination,’ review of Atonement, by Ian McEwan, Sunday Telegraph, 16 September 2001, p. 12). Fellow novelist Anita Brookner wrote in the Spectator that she found the ending too lenient: ‘Elderly and celebrated, Briony expunges the guilt from which she has always suffered, whereas she might have fared better to have told the truth in the first instance . . .’ (‘A Morbid Procedure,’ review of Atonement, by Ian McEwan, Spectator, 15 September 2001, p. 44). Writing for the Weekly Standard, Margaret Boerner is more strident: ‘In a kind of lunacy that one supposes he imagined was like Ionesco’s absurdity, McEwan destroys the structure he has set up and tells us it was all fiction. But we knew it was fiction’ (‘A Bad End,’ review of Atonement, by Ian McEwan, Weekly Standard, 7, no. 32 [2002], p. 43).” Finney, “Briony’s Stand.” 10. Maria Margaronis, “The Anxiety of Authenticity: Writing Historical Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century,” History Workshop Journal 65, no. 1 (2008): 146. 11. James Phelan, “Delayed Disclosure and the Problem of Other Minds: Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” in Experiencing Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), 109–110, 120.

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Notes to Pages 81–87 12. Matei Calinescu contends that rereading is the hidden reality of a range of practices from close reading to translation: “[I]nterpretation presupposes not only a completed reading [but] many re-readings of the work.” “All criticism,” he insists, “good or bad, intelligent or obtuse, enlightening or obfuscating, impressionistic or systematic, prestructuralist or poststructuralist, presupposes rereading, even when it does not know it.” Rereading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 16, 278. 13. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 14. Thank you to Cathy Gallagher for this important point. See Martin Jay’s The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010) for the variation even within lying. 15. J. L. Austin, “Performative Utterances,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 1432. 16. McEwan himself describes the book as a “novel followed by two novellas followed by a sort of coda.” “Ian McEwan: Reinventing Himself Still,” interview by Dave Weich, Powell’s Author Interviews, April 1, 2004, available at http://www.powells.com/blog/interviews/ian-mcewan-reinventing-himself-still -by-dave. 17. Brian Richardson finds a range of examples, including Atonement, of “pseudo-third person” narratives: “the nature and identity of the narrator becomes itself a miniature drama as a familiar narrating situation is established throughout the text only to be utterly transformed at the end”; “the move is always away from traditional objectivity and omniscience, from the third person to the first.” Unnatural Voices (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 12. 18. Cited in Brian Richardson, “Denarration in Fiction: Erasing the Story in Beckett and Others,” Narrative 9, no. 2 (2001): 169. 19. Ibid. 20. Robyn R. Warhol, “Narrative Refusals and Generic Transformation in Austen and James: What Doesn’t Happen in Northanger Abbey and The Spoils of Poynton,” Henry James Review 28, no. 3 (2007): 259–268. 21. Phelan, “Delayed Disclosure,” 109–132. 22. We might include Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and, of course, given Atonement’s explicit debt to Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Catherine Moreland. 23. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Labyrinths (New York: New Directions, 2007), 19–29. Cited in Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 62–63, 81.

Notes to Pages 88–93 24. Anita Brookner, “A Morbid Procedure,” review of Atonement, by Ian McEwan, The Spectator, September 15, 2001, 44. 25. “A Conversation with Ian McEwan,” interview by David Lynn, Kenyon Review 29, no. 3 (2007): 47. 26. “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” Aristotle, Poetics, available at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html. See Catherine Gallagher, “When Did the Confederate States of America Free the Slaves?” Representations 98, no. 1 (2007): 53–61. 27. Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 349. Briony’s revision of the past is neither an allohistory nor a strict counterfactual, because neither version of Atonement took place. Rather, a counterfactual move takes place in the space of fiction. See Gallagher, “When Did the Confederate States of America Free the Slaves?” 28. It is interesting, along these lines, to consider how McEwan’s discarded plan for the novel’s paratext would have affected our reading: “There’s one bit of that book I never published. I thought, ‘no it’s too tricksey,’ but sometimes I regret it. . . . You would turn the page and you would get, ‘About the Author.’ . . . Then I chickened out. I thought, No—time for the tricks to end. It’s got to actually end with acknowledgments to the Imperial War Museum and set the reader down on terra firma” (“A Conversation,” 48). 29. Laura Miller, “Atonement by Ian McEwan,” review of Atonement, by Ian McEwan, Salon, March 21, 2002, available at http://www.salon.com/books /review/2002/03/21/mcewan. 30. James Wood, “Ian McEwan, Atonement,” in The Good of the Novel, ed. Ray Ryan and Liam McIlvaney (London: Continuum International, 2011), 17. 31. Richardson, “Denarration,” 173. 32. Robert MacFarlane, “A Version of Events,” review of Atonement, by Ian McEwan, Times Literary Supplement, September 28, 2001. 33. Phelan, “Delayed Disclosure,” 115. 34. Ibid. 35. Ian McEwan, interview by Ramona Koval, Radio National, September 22, 2002, available at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s679422 .htm. 36. Scarry, Dreaming, 22–23. 37. Ibid., 242. 38. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 41. 39. Ibid., 40–41.

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Notes to Pages 93–96 40. Richardson, Unnatural, 91–92. 41. “A Conversation,” 42. 42. Claire Messud, “The Beauty of the Conjuring,” review of Atonement, by Ian McEwan, Atlantic Monthly 289, no. 3 (March 2002): 106. 43. Radiant ignition, rarity or weightlessness, pseudo-materiality, layering, and floral supposition, respectively (Scarry, Dreaming, 239–243). 44. Messud, “Beauty,” 107. 45. Scarry, Dreaming, 180, 176–177. 46. “The Art of Fiction CLXXIII: Ian McEwan,” interview by Adam Begley, Paris Review 44, no. 162 (2002): 59. 47. James Harold offers an account of rereading in his essay on Atonement: “a second reading of a book like Atonement . . . is a very different experience that offers different opportunities to focus than a first reading. Even here too, the memories of one’s imaginative experience from the first time around interact with and enrich the current experience” (“Narrative Engagement,” 140). 48. Hermione Lee in her Observer review says, “Atonement asks what the English novel of the twenty-first century has inherited, and what it can do now”; argues that “historical layers of English literature are invoked—and rewritten”; and notes the novel’s hat tip to The Golden Bowl: “the glazed surface of conviction was not without its blemishes and hairline cracks.” Lee, “If Your Memories Serve You Well . . . ,” review of Atonement, by Ian McEwan, Observer, September 23, 2001; McEwan, Atonement, 160. The epigraph to the novel is from Northanger Abbey, and McEwan called Atonement his “Jane Austen novel” in his notebooks. Pilar Hidalgo also finds a connection to Mansfield Park and notes parallels with the work of contemporaries Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, and Martin Amis. Hidalgo, “Memory and Storytelling in Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46 (2005): 82–91. Hidalgo also raises allusions to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, to women’s fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, and to L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, the last of which Earl Ingersoll explores in an article devoted to the question of déjà lu. Ingersoll, “Intertextuality in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between and Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 40 (2004): 241– 258. Finney takes a comprehensive look at the novel’s intertextuality as evidence for its allusiveness, finding, apart from the above, references to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, and the criticism of F. R. Leavis. Kathleen D’Angelo describes the novel’s relationship to Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote and Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. D’Angelo, “To Make a Novel: The Construction of a Critical Readership in Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” Studies in the Novel 41, no. 1 (2009): 88–105. Also see Annie Lowrey on allusions to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Bible (“Atonement and At-one-ment in Atonement: Fracture, Restoration, and the Text in Ian McEwan’s Novel” [senior the-

Notes to Pages 97–99 sis, Harvard University, 2007]). Also see Peter Matthews on allusions to the New Testament and to Dante’s Inferno: “The Impression of a Deeper Darkness: Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 32, no. 1 (2006): 147–160. 49. Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 174. 50. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 112. 51. Hidalgo, “Memory,” 85. 52. Matthews, “Impression,” 147. 53. Ibid., 151. 54. David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2002), 88. Phelan also uses the term: “In its self-reflexiveness, McEwan’s surprise ending acknowledges Atonement’s postmodern moment” (“Delayed Disclosure,” 129). Finney says that reviewers dismiss the coda as “postmodern gimmickry” (“Briony’s Stand,” 69). 55. Harold claims that “it is more common . . . for readers to figure things out bit by bit; the discovery occurs for most readers as a gradual, almost nagging sense that something isn’t quite right. . . . [It] can dawn on a reader slowly, so that the reader never quite ‘figures it out’ prior to being told, but nonetheless the reader is ready for the discovery and is unsurprised when it comes” (“Narrative Engagement,” 138). Phelan suggests that readers end “by nodding their heads in recognition that the surprise has been prepared for and by perceiving that the surprise enhances the narrative” and that “clues to her introduction of fictionalizing elements” are “seen retrospectively”: “[I]n retrospect, we can see that the end of Part Two is a subtle preparation for the revelation that Robbie did not survive the retreat”; “the historical Briony returns to the hospital while her ghostly persona continues her wish-fulfilling journey to Cecilia and Robbie” (“Delayed Disclosure,” 128, 129). Several critics have noted the prolepses in Atonement: see Lowrey, “At-one-ment,” 15; Finney, “Briony’s Stand,” 75–76. 56. Finney, “Briony’s Stand,” 69. This is why Finney deploys phrases like “Turn back to the thirteen-year-old Briony,” which beg the question of rereading or simply assume it. 57. Matthews, “Deeper Darkness,” 152. He, too, relies on rereading when he calls our attention to the mistakes endemic to a first read: “McEwan is playing with the presuppositions of his readers, luring them into making erroneous assumptions based on their expectations about the novel’s theme and genre” (151). Hidalgo notes how the seams of Briony’s revisions appear: “The reader also will need a careful second reading of the novel to perceive that Cyril Connolly’s corrections concerning the provenance of the vase and the square in Rome, where stands the fountain after which the one in the Tallis country house is modelled, have been silently incorporated into the body of Atonement” (Hidalgo, “Memory,” 87).

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Notes to Pages 100–111 58. This is akin to what Humbert Humbert in Lolita describes as the “golden and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recognition” the reader ought to experience with the coalescence of scattered clues about Quilty’s name. Of course, only the rereader will pick up on these hints, especially since they begin as early as the novel’s faux preface by John Ray, Jr. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1989), 272. 59. Reversal of this kind is not unique to Atonement. See Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (New York: Vintage, 1992) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005) for examples of narratives interested in reversing time. 60. Atonement, dir. Joe Wright (London: Working Title Films, 2007). 61. This parallels the novel’s leveling of a hierarchical family structure; as in The Crying of Lot 49, the father figure that would ground knowledge in Atonement is absent. The novel revolves around siblings, literal and vocational—the fraternity of soldiers and the Sisters that nurse them. Analogously, we might say, the two endings to the novel are sibling rivals. 62. Phelan, “Delayed Disclosure,” 124. 63. Lowrey, “At-one-ment,” 28–29. 64. Martin Jacobi, “Who Killed Robbie and Cecilia? Reading and Misreading Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 52, no. 1 (2011): 55–73. 65. Wood, “Ian McEwan,” 19. 66. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Incompossible.” 67. Deleuze, The Fold, 81. 68. Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980), 56. See Phelan, “Delayed Disclosure,” 128–129. 69. Bryan Reynolds, Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 16). 70. Reynolds, Transversal Enterprises, 21–22. 71. Lowrey, “At-one-ment,” 24. 72. Deleuze, The Fold, 3. 73. Ibid., 121–122. 74. Ibid., 122. 75. Ibid., 121. 76. Ibid., 3. 77. Ibid., 6. 78. Ibid., 61. 79. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harvest, 1989), 25. 80. Ian McEwan, interview, Random House Reading Guide, available at http://www.humanism.org.uk/about/people/distinguished-supporters/Ian-McEwan.

Notes to Pages 111–116 81. Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), vii. 82. John Banville, “A Day in the Life,” review of Saturday, by Ian McEwan, New York Review of Books, May 26, 2005, available at http://www.nybooks.com /articles/archives/2005/may/26/a-day-in-the-life. 83. Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel: Fiction Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11 (London: Continuum International, 2010), 25. They continue rather more strongly here: “Quite simply, the young Briony fails the same moral test of the imagination as Mohammed Atta: both are unable or unwilling to grasp the simple fact that other people are as real as them” (26). 84. See, for example, Jonathan Gotschall, “Why Fiction Is Good for You,” Boston Globe, April 29, 2012, available at http://articles.boston.com/2012–04– 29/ideas/31417849_1_fiction-morality-happy-endings; Annie Murphy Paul, “The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction,” New York Times, March 17, 2012, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of -your-brain-on-fiction.html. 85. Ian McEwan, “At Home with His Worries,” interview by Kate Kellaway, Observer, September 16, 2001. 86. See Finney, “Briony’s Stand,” 81–82; Phelan, “Delayed Disclosure,” 128; Lowrey, “At-one-ment,” 49–51. 87. Deleuze, The Fold, 31. 88. Faguet, quoted in Calinescu, Rereading. 89. Proust, quoted in Ibid., 94–95 and 96. 90. See Calinescu’s analysis of Henry James’s “reading as rewriting” and Gerard Genette’s Palimpsests in Rereading, 214–216. 91. Quoted in Sarah Lyall, “After 5 Books, a Measure of Peace,” New York Times Books, March 14, 2012, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03 /15/books/edward-st-aubyn-author-of-at-last-at-peace.html?_r=0.

II. Multiplicity 1. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 276. Note that even Bakhtin’s own description of language is variegated in its images and metaphors (“shot through,” “entangled”). 2. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Editions, 1966), v. 3. Bakhtin, Dialogic, 278. 4. Ibid., 292, 295. 5. Ibid., 296. 6. See Errol Morris: “I looked at Rashomon about a month ago. I rewatched it, and much to my surprise, Rashomon isn’t Rashomon. Rashomon is

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Notes to Pages 117–120 not a movie about the subjectivity of truth. That there’s no objective truth, just subjective truth. A truth for you, a truth for me. On the contrary, it’s a movie about how everybody sees the world differently. But the claim that everybody sees the world differently, is not a claim that there’s no reality. It’s a different kind of claim. What really surprised me on re-watching Rashomon is that you know what really happened at the end. It’s pretty damn clear. Kurosawa gives you the pieces of evidence that allow you to figure out what really happened.” Errol Morris, interview with The Believer 2, no. 3 (April 2004), available at http://www.errolmorris.com/content/interview/believer0404.html. 7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 8. Bakhtin, Dialogic, 278. 9. Matthew Bevis, “Introduction: Empson in the Round,” in Some Versions of Empson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–20. 10. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 78. 11. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

3. Adjacency 1. Danielle Taylor-Guthrie, ed., Conversations with Toni Morrison (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994); Carolyn C. Denard, ed., Toni Morrison: Conversations (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008). 2. See John Young, “Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, and Popular Audiences,” African American Review 35, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 181–204. 3. Yung-Hsing Wu, “Doing Things with Ethics: Beloved, Sula, and the Reading of Judgment,” Modern Fiction Studies 49 (2003): 780. 4. Ibid., 781. 5. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Tanner Lectures, University of Michigan, 1998, available at http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/morrison90.pdf. 6. Wu, “Doing Things,” 782. 7. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin, 1987). All subsequent references will be parenthetical by page number. 8. Bernard Lahire and Gwendolyn Wells, “The Double Life of Writers,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 443–465. 9. Middleton A. Harris, The Black Book, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Random House, 1974). The details of the characters’ lives come from The Black Book, too. Rifling through its pages, we find the instruments of torture suffered by Sethe’s friend, Paul D, and her husband, Halle, at the Sweet Home plantation where they were enslaved; on the verso page of Garner’s story is an etching of a

Notes to Pages 120–128 runaway slave named Gordon, to which the elaborate scar on Sethe’s back is most likely indebted. 10. “In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison” (1988), interview by Marsha Darling, in Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations, 248. 11. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 158, 223n22. 12. “In the Realm,” 250. 13. Franny Nudelman, “Ghosts Might Enter Here,” in Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition, ed. John L. Idol and Melinda M. Ponder (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 283. 14. Christopher Peterson argues that the elision of miscegenation from Beloved is far from accidental and serves to heighten the novel’s idealization of maternal love. “Beloved’s Claim,” Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 548–569. 15. Ibid., 553. 16. See Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 138–188. 17. “Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction CXXXIV,” interview by Elissa Schappell, Paris Review 128 (Fall 1993): 101. 18. Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York: Plume, 1992), 227. 19. “Toni Morrison” (1983), interview by Claudia Tate, in Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations, 164. 20. “An Interview with Toni Morrison” (1983), interview by Nellie McKay, in Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations, 155. 21. Morrison, “Unspeakable,” 157. 22. “An Interview with Toni Morrison” (1985), interview by Bessie W. Jones and Audrey Vinson, in Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations, 176. 23. Morrison, “Unspeakable,” 125. 24. Martha Nussbaum, “The Costs of Tragedy: Cost-Benefit Analysis,” Journal of Legal Studies 29, no. S2 (June 2000): 1013. 25. Kenneth Reinhard, “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 25–26. 26. J. Hillis Miller, “Boundaries in Beloved,” symplokē 15, nos. 1–2 (2007): 24–39. I first encountered Professor Miller’s ideas about auto-immunity and Beloved in a lecture entitled “Postmodern Communities in Literature: Remembering and Disremembering in Beloved” delivered at the Dartmouth Future of American Studies Institute in 2004. I am indebted to him for sharing his lecture, his article, and his thoughts over e-mail. 27. Ibid., 29. 28. Ibid. 29. “The stem ‘mun’ in ‘immune system’ is the same as the ‘mun’ in ‘community.’ It comes from Latin ‘munus,’ meaning the obligation owed within the

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Notes to Pages 128–130 group, as the price of my citizenship, also a gift I may give to the community. ‘Immune’ was originally a social term applying to those, like the clergy who were in one way or another exempt from the ordinary citizen’s obligations” (Miller, “Boundaries,” 10). In Foi et Savoir and elsewhere, Derrida reappropriates the metaphor of immunity from the field of biology and applies it back to the social body, asserting that community can be understood only by way of auto-immunity. 30. Miller, “Boundaries,” 30–31. 31. Ibid., 34 32. Ibid., 34, 36. See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, in Kierkegaard’s Writings, Vol. 6, ed. and trans. Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). 33. Miller, “Boundaries,” 38. 34. Interview with J. Hillis Miller, “J. Hillis Miller on “Beloved,” Politics and Iraq,” Episode 6 of Radio Book Lounge, available at http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/radio-book-lounge/episode-6-j-hillis-miller-quotbelovedquot-politics -and-iraq. 35. J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 3. 36. Morrison wrote the libretto for the opera, which is entitled Margaret Garner. It was commissioned by the Michigan Opera Theatre, the Cincinnati Opera, and the Opera Company of Philadelphia and debuted in Detroit in May of 2005. My claim for its “universal” appeal echoes composer Richard Danielpour: “More than anything else, Margaret Garner is an opera that reminds us that we all belong to the same human family, and it demonstrates what can happen when we forget this fundamental truth,” available at http://www.margaretgarner .org/. 37. We might note that the beginning of Fear and Trembling also uses multiplicity to emphasize singularity: in the prefatory “Exordium,” Kierkegaard presents four versions of the story of Abraham and Isaac, all different, none official. Is the singular act only representable via several approximative truths? See Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 10–14. It is striking that despite the inexorable paternalism of the story Kierkegaard is obsessing over, each of these short anecdotes is footnoted with a short statement about weaning a breast-feeding child: this further connects Kierkegaard’s ethical ruminations to Morrison’s novel, which is deeply engaged with the physical acts of motherhood: giving birth and breast-feeding. See Mae Henderson, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: ReMembering the Body as Historical Text,” in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, ed. Hortense Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991), 62–86.

Notes to Pages 130–134 38. James Phelan, “Sethe’s Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading,” in Ethics, Literature, and Theory, ed. Stephen K. George (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 303–304, 305, 308. 39. Ibid., 312. 40. John Keats, “From a Letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 21, 27 (?) 1817,” in The Critical Tradition, ed. David H. Richter (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), 336. 41. Wu, “Doing Things,” 794, 787, 797. 42. Martha Cutter, “The Story Must Go On and On: The Fantastic, Narration, and Intertextuality in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Jazz,” African American Review 34 (2000): 72. For Cutter, continuities between Beloved and Jazz provide evidence for the adamant open-endedness of both texts: “In the end, what Morrison creates through the intertextuality between Jazz and Beloved is a story that resists closure through its very awareness of a reader’s need for  closure, and its simultaneous insistence that closure itself is a delusion, an impulse that must at all times and in all ways be deconstructed and undermined” (62). 43. Wu, “Doing Things,” 787. 44. We might note, by way of counterargument, that nowhere does Phelan or any other critic suggest that Morrison’s use of multiplicity to produce uncertainty is an abrogation of her duty to make a political or ethical choice. I raise this because these claims have been made about a crucial intertext for Beloved, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Sacvan Bercovitch and Jonathan Arac have linked the legendary multivalent ambiguity of the novel to Hawthorne’s notorious “gradualist” position on the abolition of slavery, his refusal to take a stand. Bercovitch argues that Hawthorne converts “the threat of multiplicity (fragmentation, irreconcilability, discontinuity) into the pleasures of multiple choice, where the implied answer, ‘all of the above,’ guarantees consensus.” Here multiplicity is evidence for an apolitical stance complicit with an imposed liberal ideology. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Office of the Scarlet Letter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 26. 45. “Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison: A Conversation” (1985), interview by Gloria Naylor, in Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations, 207–208. 46. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (1996), trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 47. Ibid., 3, 7, 65, 98. 48. Ibid., 5, 47, 48, 58. 49. Ibid., 5. 50. Ibid., 92, 87. 51. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2005), 80.

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Notes to Pages 135–139 52. Ibid., 71. 53. Ibid., 12, 14–15. 54. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “palimpsest.” I do not use the term palimpsest in the same way as Gerard Genette, who, in his 1982 work Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), is more concerned with the annotative, revisionary quality of the historical palimpsest. His analysis of intertextuality maintains a distinction between hypotexts, which are then reworked in various ways by later hypertexts. 55. Morrison probably based her descriptions of the scar on visual images of the elaborate scar on the back of a slave named Gordon. Three photographs of “Gordon, an American Slave” were originally taken by McPherson and Oliver and were reproduced in woodcut prints in the July 4, 1863, edition of Harper’s Weekly. The article about Gordon, entitled “A Typical Negro,” recounts how he escaped from his master in Mississippi and joined Union forces in Baton Rouge in March of 1862. The article proceeds to describe his experiences under slavery, including being flogged on the previous Christmas day, the result of which we can see in a picture showing a scar covering the entirety of his back. Morrison reprinted the image in The Black Book (1974), available at http://nova scotia.ca/museum/blackloyalists/18001900/People1800/gordon.htm. 56. Henderson, “Re-Membering,” 68. 57. Cited in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 140. 58. We see this in Baby Suggs’s futile attempt to find her children through letters and Paul D’s failure to recognize Sethe in the newspaper article about her infanticide. These nonrevelatory texts express the condition of enforced illiteracy, in which “definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined” (Morrison, Beloved, 181). The slave, Sixo, gives up speaking English because “there was no future in it” (25); Beloved spells out her name in the manner of someone who can’t read (62). In a cruel irony, Sethe makes the very ink that Schoolteacher uses to write about her and the other slaves: “It was a book about us but we didn’t know that right away” (35). At Sweet Home, Paul D is forced to wear a bit, reducing him from human being to “dumb” beast, in both senses. 59. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 8. 60. Ibid., 65. 61. Beloved’s departure from the community is plagued by similar doubts: “Baby ghost come back evil and sent Sethe out to get the man who kept her from hanging. One point of agreement is: first they saw it and then they didn’t. . . . Later, a little boy put it out how he had been looking for bait back of 124, down by the stream, and saw, cutting through the woods, a naked woman with fish for hair” (Morrison, Beloved, 253). 62. See Cutter, “The Story,” 63–65, for a similar reading of the multiple origins of Beloved. 63. Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations, 249.

Notes to Pages 139–144 64. Cutter: “I read back and forth between the two texts, taking my inferential walks, trying to figure out what Beloved really is: a ghost or a real woman. Both and neither, the two texts seem to whisper to me; you will never know, because closure and certainty is death for Beloved, for reading itself” (“The Story,” 10). My argument in this chapter takes my previous thinking about Beloved in a slightly different direction from my previously published essay, “The Ethics of the Adjoining: Reading Multiplicity in Beloved,” in On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English, ed. Bárbara Arizti and Silvia MartínezFalquina (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008), 341–365. I chalk this shift of thinking up to greater interpretive confidence rather than a change of heart. 65. “In the Realm,” 247. 66. Cutter and Morrison come closest to this interpretation, though both shy away from stating it unequivocally, the author by carefully reiterating in interviews that “you don’t know.” Cutter never considers the possibility that the multiple identities she describes (ghost of Sethe’s baby; slave ship survivor; victim of abuse at the hands of a white man) might coalesce into one body. 67. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 85. 68. “In the Realm,” 247. 69. Ibid., 249. 70. Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Knopf, 1998), 264. 71. Emily Miller Budick, “Absence, Loss, and the Space of History: Toni Morrison,” in Engendering Romance: Women Writers and the Hawthorne Tradition, 1850–1990 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 216. 72. King James Bible, Song of Solomon 2.16. Thank you to Irene Yoon for this observation. 73. Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1968), 10. “[T]wo film pieces of any kind, placed together, inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of that juxtaposition. . . . We are accustomed to make, almost automatically, a definite and obvious deductive generalization when any separate objects are placed before us side by side.” Sergei M. Eisenstein, The Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975), 4. 74. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “discernment.” 75. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 47. 76. J. E. Smith, “Time and Qualitative Time,” Review of Metaphysics 40 (1986): 3–16. 77. Eric Charles White, Kaironomia: On the Will-to-Invent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). 78. Phillip Sipiora, introduction to Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, ed. Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 4.

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Notes to Pages 144–155 79. Ibid., 14, 8, 13, 10. 80. Isocrates, quoted in Sipiora, Rhetoric, 13, 10, 11. 81. These include Badiou, Žižek, Derrida, and Nancy. 82. Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being: Or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), 87. 83. There is some distinction between the less common Hebrew word for love, lamed, used here and in Leviticus 19:34, and the more frequently used word ahav. The former construction possibly calls for “direct and helpful action” toward the neighbor. 84. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), 50–51. 85. Emmanuel Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversation with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 87. 86. Ibid. 87. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 168. 88. Slavoj Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 148. 89. Ibid., 134–190 passim. 90. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 69. 91. Ibid., 66. 92. Žižek, “Neighbors,” 162–163, 146. 93. Heather Love, “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41 (2010): 384. 94. Lévinas, Totality, 140, his italics. 95. Toni Morrison, Love (New York: Knopf, 2003), 30, 5, 178, 164. Thanks to Jeff Severs. 96. Elizabeth Bishop, “The Gentleman of Shalott,” in The Complete Poems 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980), 9–10.

4. Accounting 1. Quoted in John Haffenden, William Empson, Volume I: Among the Mandarins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 207. 2. I. A. Richards, “William Empson: Semantic Frontiersman,” in William Empson: The Man and His Work, ed. Roma Gill (London: Routledge, 1974), 98. 3. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, trans. Wlad Godzich (Chicago: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 236–237. 4. Haffenden, Empson, 1:184. 5. See Haffenden, Empson, 2: 272–308.

Notes to Pages 155–159 6. William Empson, “Theories of Value,” appendix to The Structure of Complex Words (New York: Penguin, 1995), 425. 7. Quoted in Kathleen Blake, The Pleasures of Benthamism: Victorian Literature, Utility, Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 69. 8. Catherine Gallagher, “Hard Times and Somaeconomics,” in The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 62–86. See also Kathleen Blake’s chapter, “Utility, or ‘People mutht be amuthed,’ ” in Pleasures, 42–73. 9. Richards reviewed Ogden’s 1932 Bentham’s Theory of Fictions in Scrutiny (March 1933): 406–409. 10. Haffenden, Empson, 1:191. 11. Empson, “Theories,” 420. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 421. 14. Aristotle, Physics, available at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/physics.7.vii .html. Aristotle is the father of incommensurable value. Philosophers, including Stuart Hampshire, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams, who have taken up “diversity of value” as an essential consideration for ethics often derive their ideas from his thought. See the essays collected in Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 15. William Empson, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), 562. 16. Empson, “Theories,” 421, 422. In Empson’s view, democracy does not ipso facto preclude judging one belief system to be better: “the point about democracy is not that people all really have equally good judgment; no sane man believes this; the claim is that the government or the constitution has no right to presume that some group of citizens has better judgment than the rest.” 17. Ibid., 421, 425, 427. 18. Quoted in Haffenden, Empson, 1:192. 19. William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 259. 20. John Stuart Mill, On Bentham and Coleridge (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1950), 93. 21. Empson, “Theories,” 427. Richards had already defended this potential solipsism in Benthamism in Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973): “The charge of egoism, or selfishness, can be brought against a naturalistic or utilitarian morality such as this only by overlooking the importance of these satisfactions in any well-balanced life” (53). But Empson felt that his mentor had abandoned this practical spirit in later works like Science and Poetry, succumbing to the “horror” of the egotism that subtends the moral life.

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Notes to Pages 159–162 22. Haffenden, Empson, 1:283–284. 23. Empson, “Theories,” 427. 24. Ibid., 426. 25. Quoted in Haffenden, Empson, 1:192–193. 26. Philip Schofield, “Jeremy Bentham, the Principle of Utility, and Legal Positivism,” in Selected Writings of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Stephen G. Engelmann (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 433, 434. Bentham defines “community” as one such fiction: “The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members.” Jeremy Bentham, “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation,” in Selected Writings of Jeremy Bentham, 113. 27. Mark Canuel, “Bentham, Utility, and the Romantic Imagination,” in Selected Writings of Jeremy Bentham, 513. 28. “Forfeiture of Reputation,” Principles of Penal Law, in Works of Jeremy Bentham: Volume 1, Part 2 (London: W. Tait, 1838), 464. 29. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974), 268. 30. Adam Piette, “Empson, Piaget, and Child Logic,” in Some Versions of Empson, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 31. Empson, Pastoral, 268. 32. Piette, “Empson,” 51. 33. Empson, Pastoral, 268. 34. George Fraser, “The Man within the Name,” in William Empson: The Man and His Work, 66. 35. Christopher Ricks, “Empson’s Poetry,” in William Empson: The Man and His Work, 146–207. 36. Haffenden, Empson, 1:324. 37. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Editions, 1966), 206, 232. 38. I’m here borrowing the title—and to the slightest extent the method—of Empson’s Using Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). This is the drowning incident: “One member of the party (there must have been six or seven of us) was a notorious pansy of the day, Malcolm Grigg. He always very much dressed the part, with broad-brimmed velour hats. . . . Bill obviously got sick of his peacocking around and, with no warning, pushed him into the river on the brink of which he was unwisely standing. We fished him out quickly enough and then Bill, in a curiously characteristic gesture, stripped off his own clothes, gave them to Malcolm for the return journey, and tucked a towel round his own waist” (Haffenden, Empson, 1:237). And this is the strangling one: “[Carew] Meredith’s influence on Empson was, at least in their earlier years, ‘probably homosexual in nature.’ Meredith was charming, entertaining, disputatious, and often exasperating. As his wife was to recall, ‘he could always stand

Notes to Pages 162–169 embarrassing positions where other people would die.’ Sybil Meredith’s most abiding and shocking memory of Empson is that he apparently tried to strangle her during a party that he threw to launch Seven Types of Ambiguity in October 1930. Another man, she recalled, had to pull him off; and she was left feeling (in her own words) ‘black and blue.’ It was, she maintained, ‘a ghastly experience’ ” (Haffenden, Empson, 1:268). 39. Empson, Seven Types, 49. 40. Mill, On Bentham, 98n. 41. Quoted in David Lieberman, “Bentham on Codification,” in Selected Writings of Jeremy Bentham, 461. 42. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/who/autoicon 43. Empson, Seven Types, 253–254, 214. 44. Ibid., 251. 45. Ibid., 64, 251, 252, 23. 46. Ibid., 116, 90, 124, 104, 203. 47. Ibid., 48, 2, vi. 48. Ibid., 25. 49. Ibid., 252, 21, 102–103. 50. Ibid., 115. 51. Ibid., 196. 52. Ibid., 23–24, 90. Empson even uses the language of logic to articulate opposite meanings: “If a = a1, then p; if a = a2, then −p.” 53. Ibid., 117–118, 34, 124, 116, 221. 54. Ibid., 197. 55. Ibid., 243. 56. Ibid., 150, 176, 218, 216, 221. 57. Ibid., 147, 203, 234, 197, 176. 58. Ibid., 6. As I noted in the Introduction, Empson often declines to place or name a central consciousness in reading: “I shall often use the ambiguity of ‘ambiguity,’ and pronouns like ‘one,’ to make statements covering both reader and author of a poem.” 59. Ibid., 103. 60. Ibid., 255, 226. 61. Ibid., 80. 62. Ibid., 68, 84–85. 63. Ibid., 205, viii. 64. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 65. Milton’s God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961) is one of the few critical works Bloom sees fit to include in The Western Canon (New York: Pan Macmillan, 1996). 66. Empson, Seven Types, 249.

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Notes to Pages 169–171 67. Ibid., 86, 59. 68. Ibid., 166. 69. Ibid., 43. 70. Ibid., xiv. 71. These versions of value are derived from Marx’s distinctions in the first chapter of Capital (available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works /1867-c1/ch01.htm) and from Pierre Bourdieu’s description of “cultural capital” and “symbolic capital” in The Forms of Capital (1986), available at http://www .marxists .org /reference /subject /philosophy /works /fr /bourdieu -forms -capital .htm. It is especially difficult to determine exactly what the “use” value of a coin or a book or a word might be. They all have several affordances as physical entities, but they possess inherently derivative, signifying, and socially defined values. Marx exemplifies the use value of an object like this as follows in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): “For instance, let us take as a use-value a commodity such as a diamond. We cannot tell by looking at it that the diamond is a commodity. Where it serves as an aesthetic or mechanical use-value, on the neck of a courtesan or in the hand of a glass-cutter, it is a diamond and not a commodity. To be a use-value is evidently a necessary prerequisite of the commodity, but it is immaterial to the use-value whether it is a commodity. Use-value as such, since it is independent of the determinate economic form, lies outside the sphere of investigation of political economy. It belongs in this sphere only when it is itself a determinate form. Use-value is the immediate physical entity in which a definite economic relationship—exchange-value—is expressed” (available at http:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01.htm #2a). I restrict my sense of use value to the physical world, to things as sensorily available material objects operating within a material world; this means that I will occasionally elide mechanical, aesthetic, and even symbolic uses. 72. Some Versions of Pastoral quite evidently offers readings based on the premise that “literature is a social process.” It has been seen by many as protoMarxist, and Empson’s wife, Hetta, was an avowed member of the Communist Party. His reported innocence about money in his daily life bespoke his privileged upbringing, but Empson did experience genuine poverty. He struggled to support himself when he was kicked out of Cambridge and only took a teaching job in Japan because he was strapped for cash. See Haffenden, Empson, Volume I. 73. Paul H. Fry, Empson: Prophet against Sacrifice (New York: Routledge, 1991), 115. 74. Empson, “Theories,” 422. 75. In this use of economic language for different forms of literary value, I follow Empson’s lead. In The Structure of Complex Words, he even uses a £ sign to signify mood, or “the speaker’s personal judgment,” because it is “the only symbol on the typewriter which suggests valuation”; he notes that American typewriters use a $ sign (17).

Notes to Pages 171–177 76. Bloom, Anxiety, 31. 77. Empson, Seven Types, 155. 78. Ibid., 175, 169. Given that the critic’s mode of accounting can imply, as I’ve shown, juvenile tendencies, it is notable that Empson accuses the romantics of having “exploited a sort of tap-root into the world of their childhood” (21). That is, Empson has the most trouble with the poets who confront him with a childishness that differs from his own: dreamy rather than clever. 79. Ibid., 171, 162, 175, 160. 80. Ibid., 170, 171, 157–158. 81. Ibid., 156, 160. 82. Ibid., 160. 83. Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 1268, 1267. 84. Paul de Man, “Rhetoric,” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 14. 85. Barbara Johnson, “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God”: A Casebook, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 44, 43. 86. Ibid., 49. 87. Ibid., 49–50. 88. Ibid., 50. 89. Shirley Jackson, Come Along with Me, ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman (New York: Penguin, 1998), 241. 90. Ibid., 199, 236. 91. Shirley Jackson, “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” in The Lottery and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 201, 203, 204. 92. Ibid., 205–206. 93. Ibid., 206, 207–208. 94. Ibid., 208. 95. Jackson, “The Renegade” and “Men with Their Big Shoes,” in The Lottery and Other Stories, 80, 248. 96. The only other stories in The Lottery and Other Stories lacking character focalization are “A Good Old Firm” and “The Lottery.” 97. Andrew Marr, “Violence and the Kingdom of God: Introducing the Anthropology of René Girard,” available at http://andrewmarr.homestead.com/files /violencekingdom.htm. 98. Helen E. Nebeker, “ ‘The Lottery’: Symbolic Tour de Force,” American Literature 46, no. 1 (March 1974): 101. 99. The characters also exchange the word quite, magnetizing the semantic filaments of quit (to pay up) and requite (to pay back).

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Notes to Pages 177–181 100. Jackson, “Seven Types,” 207. 101. Ibid., 204. 102. Karl Marx, Capital, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 778. 103. Jackson, “Seven Types,” 208. 104. My method here has some affinity with Empson’s effort in The Structure of Complex Words to pinpoint the content and value of various “feelings” that inhere in single words. These feelings in a word are not to be confused with “emotions” alone but rather pertain to its Senses, Implications, Appreciative and Depreciative Pregnancies, Moods, Emotions, and Existence Assertions. Empson wanted to use symbols (A, B, +,—, £, !) to signify the fullness of meaning in individual words, thereby making dictionary entries and literary criticism more accurate. I am less interested in establishing to repletion all of the available feelings in a word than in considering where, how, and why those feelings conflict with regard to what I grant the clunky name semanto-economic value. 105. Jackson, Come Along with Me, 235. 106. Nebeker, “Symbolic Tour de Force,” 100–107. 107. Dennis M. Welch, “Manipulation in Shirley Jackson’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity,’ ” Studies in Short Fiction 18, no. 1 (1981): 27–31. 108. Ibid., 27. 109. Jackson, “Seven Types,” 208. 110. Welch, “Manipulation,” 30. 111. See Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, ed. René Dirven and Ralf Pörings (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002). 112. Jackson, “Seven Types,” 206. 113. Ibid., 204. 114. Ibid., 203. 115. Joseph Glanvill’s 1689 Saducimus Triumphatus: Or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions, an annotated copy of which is in Jackson’s archive, is the most explicit intertext: epigraphs culled from Glanvill divide the volume into groups of stories. The longest story in the collection is about a literary agent, Elizabeth Style, who spends her day reading mystery novels and stealing ideas from the manuscript submissions she rejects. The character’s surname might seem heavy-handed given her occupation, but it is in fact lifted from Glanvill. Again, the name is motivated in multiple ways: “Style” is at once a believable name, a metafictional figure, and an allusion to witchcraft. 116. Joan Wylie Hall, Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 2003), 5. 117. Jackson, “The Lottery,” in The Lottery, 287. Nebeker’s analysis of the overdetermined names in the story (Adams, Summers, Graves) neglects to note the two philosophers in the list.

Notes to Pages 181–184 118. A brief plot summary: The novel begins with a psychiatrist named Alex, who is writing to a woman named Anna on behalf of his patient (and her exboyfriend) Simon. A handsome, poetic teacher with a dog named Empson, Simon fell in love with Anna at university. Anna broke up with him and impulsively married a brutish stockbroker named Joe, who is about to go bankrupt due to a plan he and his financial analyst, Dennis Mitchell, concocted to make money off the introduction of systemized health care. Simon, fired from his job as a teacher, has fallen into an alcohol-fueled depression. He takes up with a prostitute with multiple sclerosis named Angelique, who also happens to have Joe as a client and who provides Simon with information about the couple. Still obsessed, Simon starts to follow Anna and her son Sam. Playing unmonitored one day, Sam falls into a swimming pool; the stalker Simon saves him, telling the boy he is the gardener. Simon decides to scare the couple and sends conflicting messages to Anna and Joe about who should fetch their son from school one day. Simon kidnaps Sam, who is unafraid of the “gardener”; they watch cartoons and play with the dog until Angelique shows up. Afraid, she calls the police, and Simon goes to prison. Meanwhile, Mitchell attends a company retreat during which he falls and injures his back. The disabled Mitchell is Angelique’s client, too; he helps her win a large sum of money at a casino. Before she can use the money to help Simon, they get in a car accident; Dennis, suicidal and bitter, becomes Alex’s patient. Anna breaks down on the stand during Simon’s trial, prompting the defense lawyer to claim that, as her lover, Simon had permission to take Sam. Ten years after this debacle, a free Simon and contrite Anna reunite. 119. Elliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Riverhead, 2003), 29, 622, 432. 120. Ibid., 192, 193, 422. 121. Ibid., 459, 423, 441, 234, 587. 122. Ibid., 375, 493, 515. 123. Ibid., 180. 124. Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 28, 29. 125. Perlman, Seven Types, 20. 126. See Matthew Bevis, “Introduction: Empson in the Round,” in Some Versions of Empson, 1–20. 127. Perlman, Seven Types, 379, 363, 579, 622. 128. Ibid., 147, 196. 129. Andrew Riemer, “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” review of Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, Sydney Morning Herald, September 6, 2003, available at http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/05/1062549013688.html. Steven Poole also notes that between the seven narrators, “the changes in emphasis are so slight as not to warrant what becomes tiring repetition.” “Seven Types of

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Notes to Pages 184–192 Moralising,” review of Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, The Guardian, December 11, 2004, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004 /dec/11/featuresreviews.guardianreview18. Jessica Winter complains, “Seven Types of Ambiguity sounds, oddly, like a septet written for a single instrument: Each of seven narrators takes his or her turn, but all seem to speak from the same prepared testimony.” “Money Shot,” review of Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, Village Voice, December 7, 2004, available at http://www.villagevoice .com/2004–12–07/books/money-shot/1/. 130. Perlman, Seven Types, 202, 356. 131. Ibid., 314. 132. Ibid., 67, 104. 133. Ibid., 529. 134. Ibid., 11, 13. 135. Ibid., 203. 136. Ibid., 204. 137. Ibid., 169, 598. 138. Again, I am here (with tongue in cheek) imitating Empson’s own use of plus and minus signs in The Structure of Complex Words to signify the Appreciative Pregnancy and the Depreciative Pregnancy of individual words. 139. Fry, Prophet, 72. 140. Perlman, Seven Types, 334. 141. Ibid., 340, 263. 142. Ibid., 14. 143. Empson, Seven Types, 80. 144. Perlman, Seven Types, 12. 145. Richards, “Empson,” 98. 146. In The Lottery collection, see “The Witch” and “The Renegade” for examples. 147. “The seven classes of ambiguity,” bMS Eng 1401 (727) Myth A. M.S. [1929] 1 folder. Amy Lowell Fund *85M-65 6 Jan 1986, William Empson Archive, Houghton Library Special Collections, Harvard University. 148. Empson, Seven Types, 170; Johnson, “Metaphor.”

III. Repetition 1. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Editions, 1966), 37–38. 2. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 2004), 55. 3. Mikhail Epstein, “The Place of Postmodernism in Postmodernity,” paper delivered at After Postmodernism conference, University of Chicago (November 14–16, 1997), available at http://www.focusing.org/apm_papers/epstein.html;

Notes to Pages 192–196 Raoul Eshelman, “Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism,” Anthropoetics 6, no. 2 (Fall 2000/Winter 2001), available at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla. edu/ap0602/perform.htm. 4. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, “The Paradoxical Status of Repetition,” Poetics Today 1, no. 4 (1980): 151–159. 5. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia, 1994); Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited, Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 6. See J. Hillis Miller, “Two Forms of Repetition,” in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Miller notes that Kierkegaard, Freud, Marx, Nietzche, and Deleuze have offered alternative versions of this dichotomy. 7. Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” trans. Wylie Sypher, in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 84. 8. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999), 298. 9. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 2001), 82. 10. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. XII, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth 1964), 150. 11. Bernard Williams, “The Women of Trachis: Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics,” in The Greeks and Us: Essays in Honor of Arthur W. H. Adkins, ed. Robert B.  Louden and Paul Schollmeier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 43–52; Barbara Johnson, “Using People: Kant with Winnicott,” in Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 94–108. 12. C. G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Principle, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). 13. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus, trans. Saul Anton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 10.

5. Vacuity 1. Stanley Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 2072, 2075. 2. Carla Freccero, “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho,” Diacritics 27, no. 2 (1997): 48. 3. Donna Lee Brien, “The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment,” M/C Journal 9, no. 5 (2006): para. 5–6, available at http://journal .media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php. 4. “Notebook,” New Republic, December 31, 1990, 9. Freccero quotes this and goes on to write: “One might be tempted to ridicule this exercise . . .

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Notes to Page 196 just as its own gesture of citation is not to be construed as a misogynist act of violence, so too perhaps the passage quoted may bear a complicated—and willfully citational—relation to the violence it depicts” (“Historical Violence,” 50). See also Carol Iannone, “PC and the Ellis Affair,” Commentary Magazine, July 1991, for a critical evaluation of how these responses fail to note the irony of their politically correct aversion to a novel that, violence aside, amounts to a critique of the 1980s. 5. Brien, in her comprehensive assessment of the response to the novel, offers a good summary of these intensely negative early reviews: “After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticized on both moral and aesthetic/ literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written . . . schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation . . . pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful . . . violent junk . . . no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture . . . Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23)” (Brien, “The Real Filth,” para. 3). 6. Martin Weinreich, “ ‘Into the Void’: The Hyperrealism of Simulation in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 49, no. 1 (2004): 65–78; Thomas Irmer, “Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Its Submerged References to the 1960s,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 41, no. 4 (1993): 349–356. 7. I saw the novel on a book table labeled “Classics” at the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, MA (the local branch of the Barnes & Noble). John Mullan, who hosted the Guardian book club sessions on the novel, introduced the novel this way: “Now that American Psycho, which is the subject of this month’s Guardian book club, has become an established feature of the literary landscape and is generally acknowledged as a modern classic, it’s fascinating to go back through the archives and discover how much critics hated the book when it first came out” (available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog /2010/jul/14/bret-easton-ellis-american-psycho). Mary Haddon’s filmic adaptation has also been called a “cult classic” and a “mean and lean horror comedy classic.” Stephen Holden, “Murderer! Fiend! Cad! (But Well-Dressed),” New York Times, April 14, 2000.

Notes to Pages 196–199 8. “Bret Easton Ellis,” Guardian, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk /books/2008/jun/12/breteastonellis. 9. Mark Storey, “ ‘And as Things Fell Apart’: The Crisis of Postmodern Masculinity in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Dennis Cooper’s Frisk,” Critique 47, no. 1 (2005): 58. 10. Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (New York: Vintage, 1991), 377. Subsequent references will be parenthetical by page number. All italics are Ellis’s unless otherwise stated. 11. Patrick makes a cameo in The Rules of Attraction, when his father dies and his younger brother, Sean, goes to visit him in New York; he makes a brief and hilarious appearance in Glamorama. He, or someone pretending to be him, also has a major role in Ellis’s recent Lunar Park (New York: Knopf, 2005). 12. These characters are Sherman McCoy, Alison Poole, Stash, and Gordon Gekko, respectively. Nick James, “American Psycho: Sick City Boy,” in Film/ Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Ginette Vincendeau (London: BFI, 2001), 259; Irmer, “Submerged References,” 353. 13. Elizabeth Young, “The Beast in the Jungle, the Figure in the Carpet,” in Shopping in Space: Essays on “Blank Generation” American Fiction, ed. Graham Caveney and Elizabeth Young (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992), 119. 14. Ibid. 15. Young, “The Beast,” 118. 16. Storey, “ ‘As Things Fell Apart,’ ” 58. 17. Young, “The Beast,” 119. 18. Homer, The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 156. 19. Mim Udovitch, “Intentional Phalluses,” Village Voice, March 19, 1991, 65–66. A 2009 article goes to great length to prove that Bateman is unreliable, as if there were any question. Jennifer Phillips, “Unreliable Narration in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho: Interaction between Narrative Form and Thematic Content,” Current Narratives 1 (2009): 60–68. 20. Julian Murphet, Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho”: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Continuum, 2002), 45. 21. See Freccero, “Historical Violence.” This is Ellis’s response to this conflation of the character’s murderous tendencies with the author’s: “The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not.” Quoted in “Psycho Analysis,” interview by Robert Love, Rolling Stone, April 5, 1991, 49. 22. Naomi Mandel, “ ‘Right Here in Nowheres’: Bret Easton Ellis and Violence’s Critique,” in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme (London: Continuum, 2006), 11. 23. Mark Storey notes this irony, catching himself in the middle of his analysis: “In an essay that argues against the reification of Bateman and sees

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Notes to Pages 199–204 him instead as a discursive formation, the argument must rely on the mimetic language it is trying to repudiate.” Storey, “ ‘As Things Fell Apart,’ ” 63. 24. Freccero, “Historical Violence,” 50. 25. Mandel, “Right Here,” 10. 26. Marco Abel, Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 5. 27. James Brusseau, “Violence and Baudrillardian Repetition in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho,” in Phenomenological Approaches to Popular Culture, ed. Michael T. Carroll and Eddie Tafoya (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), 44. 28. Young, “The Beast,” 116. 29. Sonia Baelo-Allué proposes that “it is precisely [American Psycho’s] ambiguities that invite a proper analysis of the novel combining an ethical and an aesthetical approach.” Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction: Writing between High and Low Culture (London: Continuum, 2011), 78. 30. James R. Giles, The Spaces of Violence (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 171. 31. Murphet, A Reader’s Guide, 24; Fay Weldon, “An Honest American Psycho,” Guardian, April 25, 1991, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books /1991/apr/25/fiction.breteastonellis. 32. See Giles: “[Ellis] describes the world in which such characters live in a narrative mode that falls somewhere between literary naturalism and surrealism. In fact, Ellis’ narration explores the point at which excessive naturalistic documentation of violence inevitably takes on surrealistic overtones” (Giles, Spaces, 160). 33. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 2004), 55. 34. Brusseau cites a moment in which “the murderous protagonist . . . eyes a prostitute” (“Violence,” 43). In the scene alluded to, however, Daisy is in fact a model, not a prostitute, and she is notable as one of the few potential victims whom Patrick allows to escape. 35. Christopher Schonberger, “American Psycho and the Postmodern Gothic” (honors thesis, Harvard University, 2006), 37–44. See also Ruth Helyer, “Parodied to Death: The Postmodern Gothic of American Psycho,” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 3 (2000): 725–746. 36. Roger Cohen, “Bret Easton Ellis Answers Critics of American Psycho,” New York Times, March 6, 1991, C13. 37. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1992), 48–49. 38. Ibid., 287, 48. 39. Alice Crary, Beyond Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 43.

Notes to Pages 205–208 40. Ibid., 13. 41. Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama (New York: Vintage, 2000), 44. 42. Bates continues: “Bad puns, by contrast, are less amenable to such interpretative straightening, dividing not into two neat signifieds which combine with satirical effect but rather into a plethora of half-suggested meanings which, if adding nothing obviously relevant to the context in hand, are branded as altogether extraneous. This is the home of those troublesome halfway houses the subsumed pun; the stupid pun; the unmotivated, meaningless, gratuitous pun; puns that are dubious, accidental, or unintended.” Catherine Bates, “The Point of Puns,” Modern Philology 96, no. 4 (1999): 429. 43. Murphet, A Reader’s Guide, 67. My emphasis. 44. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). 45. “Guardian Book Club: John Mullan Meets Bret Easton Ellis,” interview and Q&A led by John Mullan, Guardian, August 6, 2010, available at http:// www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2010/jul/26/bret-easton-ellis-guardian-book -club. 46. American Psycho, dir. Mary Harron (Santa Monica, CA: Lions Gate Films, 2000). See discussion of Ellis’s comments on the film below. 47. Juli Weiner, “Songs from the New American Psycho Musical,” Vanity Fair, December 6, 2010, available at http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010 /12/leaked-musical-numbers-from-the-new-american-psycho-musical.html. The producers have received approval from Ellis, who included a musical number in the original screenplay of the novel that he failed to sell. “Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho, Christian Bale, and His Problem with Women Directors,” Movieline, interview by Kyle Buchanan, available at http://movieline.com/2010 /05 /18 /bret -easton -ellis -on -american -psycho -christian -bale -and -his -problem -with-women-directors. 48. Young, “The Beast,” 93. 49. “Patrick Bateman as ‘Average White Male’ in American Psycho,” in Pimps, Wimps, Studs, Thugs, and Gentlemen: Essays on Media Images of Masculinity, ed. Elwood Watson (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 41. 50. Norman Mailer, “Children of the Pied Piper,” review of American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, Vanity Fair, March 1991, 220. 51. Mailer wants to find a psychological explanation for Patrick: “For if Hannah Arendt is correct, and evil is banal, then that is vastly worse than the opposed possibility that evil is satanic” (ibid., 221). Carol Iannone attributes this to Mailer’s need for ethical and/or psychological justification: “Mailer’s own flirtations with the abyss, with the void, with the forbidden, have been contingent upon some sense of a traditional moral universe as backdrop” (“PC,” 53). 52. Brusseau, “Violence,” 45. 53. Freccero, “Historical Violence,” 52.

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Notes to Pages 208–216 54. Abel, Violent Affect, 44. 55. Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 113, 127, 128. 56. Ibid., 117–118. 57. Ibid., 113, 121. 58. Sianne Ngai, “Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics,” Postmodern Culture 10, no. 2 (2000): para 10, para 17, available at http://muse.jhu.edu.ezp1.harvard.edu/journals/pmc/v010/10.2ngai.html. 59. Young, “The Beast,” 101. 60. John Conley, “The Poverty of Bret Easton Ellis,” Arizona Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2009): 121. 61. Abel, Violent Affect, 10. 62. Brusseau, “Violence,” 43 63. Abel, Violent Affect, 8–9. 64. Murphet, Reader’s Guide, 45–46. 65. Vartan Messier, “Visual Poetics, Intertextuality, and the Transfiguration of Ideology: An ‘Eye’ for an ‘I’ in Mary Harron’s Cinematic Adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 11, no. 1 (2009): 85. 66. Erica Wagner, “Bret Easton Ellis, Back to Zero,” review of Imperial Bedrooms, by Bret Easton Ellis, New York Times, June 25, 2010. 67. Ben Walker, “Extremes and Radicalism in the Postmodern and the Popular: A Study of Transgression in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho,” The Bakhtin Centre, September 9, 1998, available at http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/A-C /bakh /walker.html. 68. “Guardian Book Club.” 69. Messier, “Visual Poetics,” 78–79. 70. Ibid., 86–87. 71. Laura Tanner, “American Psycho and the American Psyche: Reading the Forbidden Text,” in Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in TwentiethCentury Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 96. 72. Messier, “Visual Poetics,” 79. 73. When a male reader in the book club reprises the question later with a forced joke about the author’s own masturbatory habits, Ellis offers a bored reply: “It was a very jizzy time.” “Guardian Book Club.” 74. Ibid. 75. Interview by Robert Coleman, August 22, 2010, available at http:// robertfcoleman.com/index.php/2010/08/bret-easton-ellis-interview-part-one/. 76. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 43. 77. Quoted in Murphet, Reader’s Guide, 67.

Notes to Pages 216–219 78. Ellis, Lunar Park, 12. Decca Aitkenhead finds this ambivalent variety in Ellis’s reputation as well: “Variously constructed as a hip literary bratpacker, an enfant terrible, a drug-gobbling party boy, the Ellis identity is endlessly contested. Is he a misogynist? A monster? Or a master satirist? Is he a genius? Is he a fraud?” “Bret Easton Ellis: ‘So you’re a misogynist, a racist—so what? Does it make your art less interesting?,’ ” Guardian, July 25, 2010, available at http:// www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/26/bret-easton-ellis-pain-misogyny-drugs. 79. Quoted in Brusseau, “Violence,” 35. 80. Marcel Proust, Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor, Terence Kilmartin, and Dennis Joseph Enright (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 322; Richard Eldridge, On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, and Self-Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 33. 81. For a reading of the novel’s mirror scenes, see Helyer, “Parodied,” 734. Messier deploys the same figure, arguing that the novel “remains threatening only to those who see in the novel a mirror-image of themselves and deny it” (“Violence,” 90). 82. “The spelling reflection is now much commoner than reflexion in all uses, probably largely as a result of association with reflect v.; compare also flexion n., connection n., etc. N.E.D. (1905) notes that the spelling reflexion was then ‘still common in scientific use, perhaps through its connexion with reflex.’ ” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “reflection.” 83. Mandel, “Right Here,” 12. 84. Young, “The Beast,” 100. 85. Helyer notes that the depiction of Patrick’s violent urges harbors “the unpleasant suggestion that they are lying dormant in all of us” (“Parodied,” 727). 86. Quoted in Tanner, “American Psyche,” 103. 87. Ibid., 114. 88. Bernard Williams, “The Women of Trachis: Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics,” in The Greeks and Us: Essays in Honor of Arthur W. H. Adkins, ed. Robert B.  Louden and Paul Schollmeier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 43–52. 89. Ibid., 50. That the violence that Ellis depicts is spliced with pornography might seem to raise objections for my comparison with Williams’s analysis of the violence in Greek tragedy. I will submit that, though I do not know what Williams would have made of the combination of violence and sex in American Psycho, I am relatively certain that he would have rejected the notion that the pornographic elements of the novel constitute a threat to the reading public. Williams chaired the British Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship in the late 1970s. The statement he issued found no connection between pornography and sex crimes and used John Stuart Mill’s principle of liberty to develop a “harm condition,” whereby “no conduct should be suppressed by law unless it

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Notes to Pages 219–224 can be shown to harm someone” (quoted in Stuart Jeffries, “The Quest for Truth,” Guardian Weekly, November 30, 2002). The report concluded that the idea that pornography imposed harm on society was not just unprovable but improbable: “Given the amount of explicit sexual material in circulation and the allegations often made about its effects, it is striking that one can find case after case of sex crimes and murder without any hint at all that pornography was present in the background.” “The Williams Report,” May 23, 2008, available at http://www.backlash-uk.org.uk/williams61.html. Even more crucial than this general finding is the report’s unequivocal safeguarding of written material from its more skeptical stance toward depictions and enactments of sexual violence. See Simon Coldham, “Reports of the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship,” Modern Law Review 43, no. 3 (May 1980): 312. 90. Felski, Uses, 112. 91. Abel, Violent Affect, 12. 92. Williams, “The Women,” 51. 93. Ellis explains: “So I read a lot of books about serial killers and picked up details from that and then I had a friend who introduced me to someone who could get me criminology textbooks from the FBI that really went into graphic detail about certain motifs in the actual murders committed by serial killers and detailed accounts of what serial killers did to bodies, what they did to people they murdered, especially sex killings. That’s why I did the research, because I couldn’t really have made this up” (Ellis quoted in Murphet, Reader’s Guide, 17). 94. Williams, “The Women,” 52. 95. Felski, Uses, 110. 96. Abel, Violent Affect, 23. 97. Ibid., 22. 98. Young, “The Beast,” 93. 99. Freccero, “Historical Violence,” 53. 100. “Guardian Book Club.” 101. See the essays under “Literary Uses of D. W. Winnicott” in Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces, ed. Peter L. Rudnytsky (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Cristina Bruns makes the case that literature functions as a transitional object because of its sometimes violent transgression of boundaries: “Through the mechanism of transitional space, the temporary blurring of boundaries that occurs in immersive reading facilitates a reworking of the self’s relations across those boundaries. This in-between space allows us to access otherwise unavailable parts of ourselves, makes possible the readjustment of the boundary between self and other.” Brun emphasizes the difficulty in distinguishing between “a needed and ultimately beneficial discomfort and a provocation that pushes too far, becoming truly harmful.” Why Literature? The Value of Literary Reading and What It Means for Teaching (London: Continuum, 2011), 115, 76–77.

Notes to Pages 224–228 102. Barbara Johnson, “Using People: Kant with Winnicott,” in Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 94. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid., 95. 105. Quoted in ibid., 96. 106. Ibid., 101. 107. Ibid., 103. 108. Quoted in ibid., 105. 109. Ibid., 95. 110. See Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 111. Bret Easton Ellis, “ ‘I really wasn’t that concerned about morality in my fiction,’ ” interview by Paul MacInnes, Andy Gallagher, and Alice Salfield, Guardian, July 19, 2010, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video /2010/jul/19/bret-easton-ellis-video-morality-technology. 112. Andrew Motion, “What do you give a man with two girlfriends? A really hard time . . . ,” review of Glamorama, by Bret Easton Ellis, Observer, January 3, 1999, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1999/jan/03/fiction .breteastonellis. 113. “Guardian Book Club.” 114. Ibid. 115. Sethe Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Philadelphia: Quirk, 2009); Cecily von Ziegesar, Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer (New York: Hachette, 2011); Bret Easton Ellis, “Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire,” Daily Beast, March 15, 2011, available at http://www.thedailybeast.com /articles /2011 /03 /16 /bret -easton -ellis -notes -on -charlie -sheen -and -the -end -of -empire.html. 116. Alain Mabanckou, African Psycho, trans. Christine Schwartz Hartley (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2007); American Psycho II: An American Girl, dir. Morgan J. Freeman (Santa Monica, CA: Lions Gate Films, 2002); Ellis, Lunar Park. 117. At the beginning of the music video, Fisher, a Harvard graduate (like Patrick), steps out of a body bag wearing a suit and speaks lyrics in a blank monotone: “Home. Is Where I want to be.” As he starts to sing, he performs scripted moves from Harron’s film: he removes a face mask; does push-ups and crunches; picks up and sleeps with prostitutes; and murders a man with an ax, spraying confetti blood. The doppelgänger effect is intensified by Fisher’s impressive imitation of Christian Bale’s filmic performance. The parody reaches warp speed when, to impress some prostitutes, Fisher lowers the volume and repeats verbatim lines from Patrick Bateman’s review of Genesis in the novel— except that Fisher replaces the album with his own pop E.P., even calling it “a

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Notes to Pages 228–234 personal favorite.” Miles Fisher, “This Must Be the Place,” available at http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=6cPuaqGZGro. Ellis tweeted an ambivalent response to the video: “Props to Miles Fisher for a transcendent cover/video of Talking Heads ‘This Must Be The Place.’ Smart? Sexy? Douchebag? All of the above?” 118. Associated Press, “Duke’s McFadyen Reinstated after Sending E-mail,” USA Today, July 3, 2006, available at http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports /college/lacrosse/2006–06–30-duke-mcfadyen_x.htm. 119. “Guardian Book Club.” 120. Ibid. 121. Williams, “The Women,” 52.

6. Synchronicity 1. Tom McCarthy, interview by Mark Thwaite, ReadySteadyBook, September 17, 2007, available at http://www.readysteadybook.com/Blog.aspx?permalink=20070917072530. 2. Tom McCarthy, “Mise en abîme,” interview by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Book Ninja, Fall 2007, available at http://bookninja.com/magazine/fall2007 /mccarthy.htm. 3. Boyd Tonkin, “Tom McCarthy: How He Became One of the Brightest New Prospects in British fiction,” Independent, September 21, 2007. See also Tom McCarthy, interview by Dan, Raincoast Books, October 2007, available at http:// www.raincoast .com /blog /details /in -conversation -with -tom -mccarthy -part-one. 4. William James, “Habit,” in The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. 5. This aligns McCarthy’s project with Alain Robbe-Grillet’s work—the Web site www.3ammagazine.com has named Remainder “the best French novel written in English.” “Illicit Frequencies, or All Literature Is Pirated: An Interview with Tom McCarthy,” by Andrew Gallix, 3:AM Magazine, July 13, 2006, available at http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/illicit-frequencies-or-all-literature-is-pirated-an-interview-with-tom-mccarthy. Alain Robbe-Grillet also plays on the uncertainty produced by a surplus of physical detail; the exactitude of the prose requires the articulation of every aspect of actions and events, suggesting either an all-seeing eye or a too-close view. The reliance on redundant, mathematical, visual observation also draws the two authors together, as does the temporal confusion, and the dissolution of the eventness of an event, that repetition affords. See Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy and In the Labyrinth, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove, 1965). 6. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “synchronize.” 7. Zadie Smith, “Two Paths for the Novel,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, New York Review of Books, November 20, 2008, available at

Notes to Pages 234–243 http:// www.nybooks .com /articles /archives /2008 /nov /20 /two -paths -for-the -novel/. 8. Brian Richardson, “Denarration in Fiction: Erasing the Story in Beckett and Others,” Narrative 9, no. 2 (2001): 168–175. James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin would subcategorize what we read in McCarthy as “unreliable misreporting.” See “The Lessons of ‘Weymouth’: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day,” in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. D. Herman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 88–109. 9. Italo Calvino performs a similar literalization of erasure in the last chapter of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler . . . : “Walking along the great Prospect of our city, I mentally erase the elements I have decided not to take into consideration.” See Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler . . . , trans. William Weaver (New York: Mariner, 1982), 244. 10. Tom McCarthy, interview by Mark Alizart, Believer, June 2008, available at http://www.believermag.com/issues/200806/?read=interview_mccarthy. 11. The narrator fits anthropologist Colin Campbell’s description of an autonomous hedonist, who makes art out of dreams and imagination: “[I]n modern, self-illusory hedonism, the individual is much more an artist of the imagination, someone who takes images from memory or the existing environment, and rearranges or otherwise improves them in his mind in such a way that they become distinctly pleasing. No longer are they ‘taken as given’ from past experience, but crafted into unique products, pleasure being the guiding principle. In this sense, the contemporary hedonist is a dream artist, the special psychic skills possessed by modern man making this possible. Crucial to this process is the ability to gain pleasure from the emotions so aroused, for when the images are adjusted, so too are the emotions. As a direct consequence, convincing daydreams are created, such that individuals react subjectively to them as if they were real. . . . The individual is both actor and audience in his own drama, ‘his own’ in the sense that he constructed it, stars in it, and constitutes the sum total of the audience.” The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 78. 12. McCarthy, Random House “Author Q & A,” available at http://www .randomhouse.com/book/110540/remainder-by-tom-mccarthy#authorq&a. 13. Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980), 7. 14. McCarthy, Believer interview. 15. John Barth, “Title,” in Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Anchor Press, 1988), 113. 16. Calvino, If on a Winter’s, 1. 17. McCarthy, “Mise en abîme.” 18. C. G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Principle, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 29. According to the editorial

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Notes to Pages 243–249 preface of this volume, Jung first developed the idea of synchronicity in the 1920s, first publicly used the term in 1930, and finally published his findings in 1952. 19. McCarthy, “Mise en abîme.” 20. Jung, Synchronicity, 29. 21. Jung, Synchronicity, 36, 29, 35, 7, 8. Freud and Jung both tip their hats to Paul Kammerer’s work on the law of seriality, which attempts to account for series of coincidences. Jung notes the contradiction in Kammerer’s work, which acknowledges that the series cannot have a common cause but whose “concepts of seriality, imitation, attraction, and inertia belong to a causally conceived view of the world” (Jung, Synchronicity, 12). Freud damns him with apophasis: “Not long ago an ingenious scientist (Kammerer, 1919) attempted to reduce coincidences of this kind to certain laws, and so deprive them of their uncanny effect. I will not venture to decide whether he has succeeded or not.” Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” 1925, trans. Alix Strachey, May 23, 2008, available at http:// social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/uncan.htm. 22. Jung, Synchronicity, 7–8, 9, 8. 23. Ibid., 31. 24. Ibid., 36, 33. 25. Ibid., 42, 91, 95. 26. Ibid., 14n. 27. Freud, “The Uncanny.” In considering “involuntary repetition,” Freud offers several cases similar to Jung’s examples of synchronicity and tentatively hypothesizes a connection to “repetition compulsion” (which he pits against the pleasure principle and aligns with fear of death without explicitly calling it the death drive) and “obsessive neurosis,” which includes an infantile belief in the “omnipotence of thoughts.” 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Jung, Synchronicity, 87. 31. McCarthy, Believer interview. 32. Jung, Synchronicity, 36. 33. Smith, “Two Paths.” 34. Joyce Carol Oates, “Lest We Forget,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, New York Review of Books, July 19, 2007, available at http://www.ny books.com/articles/archives/2007/jul/19/lest-we-forget. 35. M, “Not what I expected . . . ,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Amazon.com, June 25, 2007, available at http://www.amazon.com/Remainder -Tom-McCarthy/product-reviews/0307278352. 36. Sarah, “Not a pleasant read,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Amazon.com, May 29, 2007, available at http://www.amazon.com/Remainder -Tom-McCarthy/product-reviews/0307278352.

Notes to Pages 249–250 37. Josh Zagorski, “Where’s the plot?,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Amazon.com, May 7, 2007, available at http://www.amazon.com/Remainder -Tom-McCarthy/product-reviews/0307278352. This acknowledgment of boredom may be a clever preemptive strike against bad reviews, like titling his novel with “the publishing term for the unglamorous fate of most books, a final stage in which their price is drastically reduced before pulping.” Oates, “Lest We Forget.” 38. Stephen M. Sagar, “Existential Paradox,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Amazon.com, June 4, 2007, available at http://www.amazon.com /Remainder-Tom-McCarthy/product-reviews/0307278352. 39. Ghost, “Fantastic and Disturbing,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Amazon.com, February 23, 2007, available at http://www.amazon.com /Remainder-Tom-McCarthy/product-reviews/0307278352. 40. Andrew Saikali, “Obsession, Obsessively Told: A Review of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder,” Millions, February 26, 2007, available at http://www .themillions.com/2007/02/obsession-obsessively-told-review-of.html. 41. Michael Samuelian, “wow,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Amazon.com, April 10, 2007, available at http://www.amazon.com/Remainder -Tom-McCarthy/product-reviews/0307278352; “Remainder, by Tom McCarthy” in “Briefly Noted,” New Yorker, March 12, 2007, available at http://www .newyorker.com /arts /reviews /brieflynoted /2007 /03 /12 /070312crbn _briefly noted1. 42. Bbemily, review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Powell’s Books, March 24, 2008, available at http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780307278357. 43. Chris Mitchell, review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Spike Magazine, February 2006, available at http://www.spikemagazine.com/splinters/2006 /02/tom-mccarthy-remainder_04.php. 44. Tod Goldberg, “Being and nothingness,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, LA Times Book Review, March 16, 2007, available at http://surplus matter.com/news/remainder-by-tom-mccarthy-in-the-la-times-book-review/. 45. Ibid. 46. Sean, review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Midnight Bell, February 3, 2006, available at http://www.themidnightbell.com/tmb/?p=89. 47. Richard Crary, “Two Paths for the Novel?” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Existence Machine, November 13, 2008, available at http:// yolacrary.blogspot.com/2008/11/two-paths-for-novel.html. 48. Reviews of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, available at http://www.amazon .co.uk/Remainder-Tom-McCarthy/product-reviews/1846881455 (written respectively by Grendel, August 22, 2006; Michael Donovan “Michael,” September 4, 2006; Matthew Willard, August 24, 2006; and TomCat, May 6, 2011). 49. Tom D. Kashdan, “so damn good . . . if only it didn’t lose steam at the end,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Amazon.com, December 23, 2008,

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Notes to Pages 250–253 available at http://www.amazon.com/Remainder-Tom-McCarthy/product-reviews /0307278352. 50. Matthew Tiffany, review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Powell’s Books, July 15, 2007, available at http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780307278357. 51. Crary, “Two Paths?” 52. vanityclear, review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Powell’s Books, September 20, 2011, available at http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780307278357. 53. Crary, “Two Paths?” 54. mistermojito, reader’s comment to McCarthy, ReadySteadyBook interview. 55. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “enthrall.” 56. Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 55. 57. Ibid. 58. Freud, “The Uncanny.” 59. Felski, Uses, 74–75. 60. Ibid., 76. 61. Iris Murdoch makes a positive case for a deliberate, willful absorption in beauty: “I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.” The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 2001), 82. A work of natural beauty like the kestrel or, Murdoch goes on to say, a work of art “unselfs” us by enthralling us. But this “unselfing” is distanced (“my window”), purposive (“deliberately”), and only momentary (“I return to thinking”). These frames of perception, intention, and time prevent unselfing from slipping either into the “exalted self-feeling” of which Murdoch accuses the romantics or the passivity affiliated with and descried in “low art.” In both Felski’s and Murdoch’s visions, the erosion of the boundaries of the self is checked by a framed purposiveness or self-consciousness. 62. Another idea about enchantment that Felski briefly floats—that “the analytic part of your mind recedes into the background”—runs aground Remainder’s tendency to provoke metareading. Felski contrasts the receptive modes of “the literary critic parsing the prose of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf” and “the working-class woman enthralled by a Hollywood movie.” But she notes that, while the two seem worlds apart—“one form of attention is micro, paying fastidious attention to the luminous aesthetic detail; the other is macro, involving an all-embracing sense of being swept up into another world”—

Notes to Pages 253–261 they are tied together by the experience of enchantment, “of total absorption in a text, of intense and enigmatic pleasure” (Felski, Uses, 54–55). 63. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “analysis.” 64. David Hebblethwaite, review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, New Review, available at http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/rawsharktexts.html. 65. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 1503, 1505–1507. 66. The final re-enactment of the bank robbery partakes in this filmic slow motion as well. The narrator hears the sound of the shotgun going off as “elongated, stretched out so that it became soft and porous, so it seemed to have slowed down, right down into a hum, gentle and reassuring,” and a rehearsed line of speech seems “to stretch out on both sides of itself, to build itself an inner chamber in which it could be spoken almost imperceptibly within the longer speaking of it—spoken intimately, a tender echo” (McCarthy, Remainder, 287– 288). This becomes instructive for the reader as the prose slows down to account for every detail of every moment. 67. “The Radical Ambiguity of Tom McCarthy,” interview by Clodagh Kinsella, Dossier, July 22, 2009, available at http://dossierjournal.com/read/interviews/the-radical-ambiguity-of-tom-mccarthy. 68. In this way, Remainder symptomizes the reification of otherness in Lévinasian ethics that I critique throughout Seven Modes of Uncertainty, most pointedly in Appendix 1. 69. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 157. Thanks to Sarah Chihaya for drawing this passage to my attention. 70. As Jung notes, synchronicity can be disturbed by human will: “Lack of interest and boredom are negative factors; enthusiasm, positive expectation, hope, and belief in the possibility of ESP make for good results and seem to be the real conditions which determine whether there are going to be any results at all.” He cites a psychic who attributed her failure at an ESP experiment to her inability to “summon any feeling for the ‘soulless’ test-cards” (Synchronicity, 26). 71. E. D. Costello, “Promises more than it delivers,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Amazon.co.uk, December 16, 2010, available at http://www .amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/1846880157. 72. Tom S. Lee, “Stupid storyline relies on the stupidity of the characters,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Amazon.co.uk, June 14, 2010, available at http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/1846880157. 73. Amelia Atlas, “Tom McCarthy Saves the Novel, Maybe,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, July 22, 2010, available at http://www.ameliaatlas .com/?p=126.

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Notes to Pages 261–266 74. Jonathan Sewell, “The most original de ja vu,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Amazon.co.uk, July 19, 2006, available at http://www.amazon .co.uk/product-reviews/1846880157. 75. Jung, Synchronicity, 125. 76. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus, trans. Saul Anton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 8. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., 9, 10. 79. Stephen M. Sagar, “Existential Paradox,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Amazon.com, June 4, 2007, available at http://www.amazon.com /Remainder-Tom-McCarthy/product-reviews/0307278352. 80. Smith, “Two Paths.” 81. Henri Bergson, “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,” available at http://www.authorama.com/laughter-6.html. 82. Nancy, Discourse of the Syncope, 136. 83. Georges Bataille, “Un-Knowing: Laughter and Tears,” trans. Annette Michelson, October 36 (1986): 97. Bataille argues that “The cause of such laughter can be said to be proportionate, in its effect, to the diminution of nature as known, or to the suppression of the known character of nature which makes us laugh. Certainly, the less we know of that which arises, the less we expect it, the harder we laugh.” As an example of this unexpectedness, Bataille presents a minor coincidence: “Such is the case, for example, with the unexpected meeting in the street, which may not provoke a burst of laughter, but which does usually make us laugh” (91). This moment is, in fact, an example of synchronicity. 84. Johan Grimonprez and Tom McCarthy, “If You See Yourself, Kill Him,” interview by Alexander Provan, Bidoun 18: Interviews (Summer 2009), available at http://www.bidoun.org/magazine/18-interviews/if-you-see-yourself-kill -him-johan-grimonprez-tom-mccarthy-interviewed-by-alexander-provan. 85. Indieshock “HELLA,” “Wonderfuly [sic] Meticulous,” review of Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, Amazon.com, February 28, 2007, available at http:// www.amazon .com /Remainder-Tom -McCarthy /product -reviews /030 7278352. 86. Smith, “Two Paths.” 87. J. Hillis Miller, On Literature (London: Routledge, 2002), 28. 88. The examples of self-descriptive metafiction that I have noted are in other media and more keyed to the tune of parody. A YouTube clip offers a literal version of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” music video. The dubbed lyrics alternate between setting, camera moves, and audience response: “Pan the room. Random use of candles, empty bottles, and cloth, and can you see me through this fan? Slo-mo dove. Creepy doll, a window, and what looks like a bathrobe. Then, a dim-lit shot of dangling balls. Metaphor?” “Total Eclipse of the Heart: Literal Video Version,” available at http://www.youtube.com/watch

Notes to Pages 267–275 ?v=lj-x9ygQEGA. In a wry NewsWipe segment called “How to Report the News,” Charlie Brooker performs, as he recounts, the following: “Next, a walky-talky preamble from the auteur, pacing steadily towards the lens, punctuating every other sentence with a hand gesture, and ignoring all the prigs around him, like he’s gliding through the fucking Matrix, before coming to a halt and posing a question: What. Comes next.” “Funny News Parody Video,” available at http://www.break.com/index/how-to-report-the-news.html. 89. Nancy, Discourse of the Syncope, 136.

7. Conclusion 1. Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). All subsequent references to this novel will be parenthetical by page number. All italics are Foer’s unless otherwise noted. 2. I base this contention on my survey of the more than 300 students to whom I have taught this novel. A survey of five-star Amazon.com reviews reveals a similar trend, as readers report reactions like these: “I laughed and cried and even when I was laughing, I was profoundly sad”; “Memories. Pain. Rage. Tears. Attempts to go on”; “deeply affecting”; “At one point during reading this book, I had to put it down because I was crying so much”; “a most satisfying, heart-wrenching, saddening yet somehow optimistic ending”; “heartbreakingly sad”; “I often found myself quite touched to the core”; “from laughing out loud to tears”; “I laughed through the first half and cried through the second”; “I honestly cried through the last 75 pages of Foer’s book”; “a very, very emotional journey”; “My heart ached”; “I was incredibly moved at the end of this novel.” One reviewer titles a review “Extremely Sad”; another titles it “I cried” (available at http://www.amazon.com/Extremely-Incredibly-Close-Movie-Tie-In / product -reviews /B0085RZABE /ref=cm _cr _pr _hist _5 ?ie=UTF8 & filter By =addFiveStar). 3. Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (New York: Vintage, 2000). 4. Michiko Kakutani, “A Boy’s Epic Quest, Borough by Borough,” review of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, New York Times, March 25, 2005. 5. “[T]he protagonists in Ovid’s myth are turned into birds, which may account for the emphatic recurrence of bird imagery in Foer’s imaginative adaptation: pictures of birds feature on pages iii, 166, and 167 (the latter literally, and not coincidentally, the central images of the novel); references to these and other birds are distributed throughout the novel (see 78, 79, 80, 81, 165, 211, and 250); the apartment of Thomas, Sr., and his wife is filled with bird cages, and when they make love for the first time ‘[b]irds sang in the other room’ (83, 84); all of this in addition to Oskar’s imagined rescue by a birdseed suit.” Philippe

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Notes to Pages 276–279 Codde, “Philomela Revised: Traumatic Iconicity in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” Studies in American Fiction 35, no. 2 (Autumn 2007): 247–248. 6. Walter Kirn, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: Everything Is Included,” review of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, New York Times Book Review, April 3, 2005, available at http://www.nytimes .com/2005/04/03/books/review/0403cover-kirn.html?_r=0. 7. “Up Close and Personal: Jonathan Safran Foer Examines Violence through Child’s Eyes,” interview by Alden Mudge, BookPage, September 12, 2008, available at http://bookpage.com/interview/up-close-and-personal. 8. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1974), 156. 9. In my teaching, I have been struck by how strongly my students identify with Oskar. These were college-age students at the University of California, Berkeley, in the years 2010 and 2012—that is, students who were between the ages of six and twelve when 9/11 took place in 2001. 10. There is some debate as to whether the bombings of Dresden and of Hiroshima were strategic area attacks—geared toward disabling major cities and their capacity to support military facilities—or terror bombings, aimed at wrecking civilian morale. See Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Mark Selden, War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). Genocide Watch president Gregory H. Stanton has said: “The Nazi Holocaust was among the most evil genocides in history. But the Allies’ firebombing of Dresden and nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also war crimes.” At a press conference two days after the bombing of Dresden, British Air Commodore Colin McKay Grierson said that the primary target of the bombing had been to prevent the Germans moving military supplies. He then added in an offhand remark that the raid also helped destroy “what is left of German morale.” An Associated Press war correspondent filed a story about the Dresden raid starting with the sentence: “Allied air bosses have made the long awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of great German population centres as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.” On March 28, 1945, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent a memo by telegram to the British Chiefs of Staff, which began: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.” Under pressure from the Chiefs of Staff, Churchill withdrew his memo and issued a new one on April 1, 1945, with the usual British euphemism for attacks on cities: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so called ‘area-bombing’ of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests.” Taylor, Dresden, 413, 430–431.

Notes to Pages 283–285 11. Tom Keymer, introduction to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook, ed. Tom Keymer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 12–13. 12. Reviews of the Kindle version of the novel on Amazon.com offer complaints like “it is not optimized for the Kindle ereader experience.” Susan H. Beerman, “Great book, not great Kindle experience,” review of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, Amazon.com, February 2, 2012, available at http://www.amazon.com/Extremely-Incredibly-Close-Movie-Tie-In /product-reviews/B0085RZABE. 13. Michel Faber, review of Tree of Codes, by Jonathan Safran Foer, Guardian, December 18, 2010, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/ dec/18/tree-codes-safran-foer-review. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. “Jonathan Safran Foer’s Book as Art Object,” interview by Steven Heller, New York Times, November 24, 2010, available at http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes .com/2010/11/24/jonathan-safran-foers-book-as-art-object. 17. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” available at http://www .sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html. 18. Recent theories about what comes after “postmodernism” have in common this interest in the blurring of the line between irony and authenticity. Raoul Eshelman coins the term performatism for a return to authenticity and holistic subjectivity in art and literature of the new millennium: “This closed, simple whole acquires a potency that can almost only be defined in theological terms. For with it is created a refuge in which all those things are brought together that postmodernism and poststructuralism thought definitively dissolved: the telos, the author, belief, love, dogma.” See “Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism,” Anthropoetics 6, no. 2 (Fall 2000/Winter 2001), available at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0602/perform.htm. Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s “metamodernism” sits between modernism and postmodernism: “Ontologically, metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.” See “Notes on Metamodernism,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2 (2010), available at http://www.polarresearch.net/index.php/jac/article/viewArticle/5677. Mikhail Epstein describes the advent of “an ‘as if’ lyricism, an ‘as if’ idealism, an ‘as if’ utopianism, aware of its own failures, insubstantiality, and secondariness.” “The Place of Postmodernism in Postmodernity,” paper delivered at After Postmodernism conference, University of Chicago (November 14–16, 1997), available at http://www.focusing.org/apm_papers/epstein.html. 19. David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (1993): 151–194.

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Notes to Pages 285–286 20. Jessie Thorn, “A Manifesto for the New Sincerity,” March 26, 2006, available at http://www.maximumfun.org/blog/2006/02/manifesto-for-new -sincerity.html. 21. Mark Greif, “What Was the Hipster?” New York Magazine, October 24, 2010, available at http://nymag.com/news/features/69129/index2.html. 22. Ibid. 23. Douglas Wolk, “Cracking Eggers,” Village Voice, June 26, 2001, available at http://www.villagevoice.com/2001-06-26/books/cracking-eggers/1/. 24. The McSweeney’s Store, available at http://store.mcsweeneys.net/index .cfm /fuseaction /catalog .detail /object _id /192e25f1 -9ec3 -4844 -aa4d -fe89b73904d7/McSweeneysIssue19.cfm. 25. We can see the coordination of material fetishization with the affective structure of the New Sincerity in Garth Risk Hallberg’s post on the Web site The Millions titled “Kindle-Proof Your Book in Seven Easy Steps!” The steps are Step 1. Use Color Step 2. Illustrate, Illustrate, Illustrate Step 3. Play with Text, Typeface, and White Space Step 4. Run with Scissors Step 5. Go Aleatory Step 6. Put it in a Box Step 7. Pile on the End Matter Hallberg’s mournful/gleeful “end of the book” essay points out that Balzac long ago fetishized the wooden printing press the way we fetishize the physical book. He concludes with a list of recent books that are “Pretty Damn Kindle-Proof.” These include Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) and Only Revolutions (2006); Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Million Poems (1961); Anne Carson’s boxed mourning journal Nox (2010); Maira Kalman’s The Principles of Uncertainty (2007), which has colored paintings; Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005); and the recent publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished novel, The Original of Laura (2009). The primary goal of Hallberg’s manifesto is to indulge what he calls a “nostalgia for print,” to relish the book for its own sake. He offers his “trade secrets,” he says, “in honor of the future that never was, the durable pigments of the almost obsolete.” One might wonder, however, why authors would want to Kindle-proof their novels given that e-books are the only realm in publishing showing a marked uptick in sales (available at http://www.themillions.com /2011/05/kindle-proof-your-book-in-seven-easy-steps.html). 26. Alan Liu, “The End of the End of the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins, and Social Computing,” Michigan Quarterly Review 48, no. 4 (Fall 2009), available at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0048.404.

Notes to Pages 287–289 27. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1989), 109. 28. Jonathan Franzen’s 2002 essay “Mr. Difficult” offers another way of drawing a value distinction between the two, opposing status and contract models of authorship. For the status author—the exemplar is Flaubert—literature is autonomous and self-validating: “the value of any novel . . . exists independent of how many people are able to appreciate it”; and “difficulty tends to signal excellence.” For the contract author, who “has implicitly ‘contracted’ to appeal to [a] circle of readers,” textual “difficulty is a sign of trouble.” While he admires the difficulty of the status text, Franzen concludes that “to build the reader an uncomfortable house you wouldn’t want to live in: this violates what seems to me the categorical imperative for any fiction writer.” Jonathan Franzen, “Mr. Difficult: Mr. Gaddis and the Problem with Hard-to-Read Books,” New Yorker, September 30, 2002, available at http://adilegian.com/FranzenGaddis.htm. Nabokov, clearly a status author, loathed the phrase “art for art’s sake,” however, suggesting the limits of this dichotomy. 29. Wai Chee Dimock, “Three Wars,” Henry James Review 30, no. 1 (2009): 5–6. Dimock is slightly mistaken on this last point about the novelty of the theory. This model of literary history has affinities with T. S. Eliot’s notion of the simultaneous existence of past and present in the literary tradition; in the metafictional ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges (“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”); and in Robert Kiely’s book on postmodernism and nineteenth-century fiction, Reverse Tradition, among others. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964); Robert Kiely, Reverse Tradition: Postmodern Fictions and the Nineteenth Century Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 30. Michael Eskin provides a handy footnoted summary of the uses of this notion of a “turn”: “On the application of the notion of ‘turn’ in the present context, see, for instance, Hoffman and Hornung 1996 (‘moral turn’); Rorty 1999 [1989]: xvi (‘turn . . . toward narrative’); Antonaccio 2000: 18 (‘turn to literature’); Garber et al. 2000 (‘turn to ethics’); Davis and Womack 2001 (‘ethical turn’ ); Wyschogrod and McKenny 2003: 1–2 (‘turn to the subject [of ethics]’).” “The Double ‘Turn’ to Ethics and Literature?,” Poetics Today 25, no. 4 (2004): 557–558n1. 31. Marjorie Garber, introduction to The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000), vii. 32. David Parker, “Introduction: The Turn to Ethics in the 1990s,” in Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory, ed. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, and David Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 14. 33. Eskin, “Double ‘Turn,’ ” 563, 557–558.

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Notes to Pages 289–290 34. As I discussed in my Introduction, there are several metacritical overviews that assess and critique—and thereby establish the importance of—these respective turns. Addressing the question of aesthetics and form, see Samuel Otter, “An Aesthetics in All Things,” Representations 104, no. 1 (2008): 116– 125; W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Commitment to Form; or, Still Crazy after All These Years,” PMLA 118, no. 2 (March 2003): 321–325; Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122, no. 2 (March 2007): 557–569. Addressing the turn to surface, see articles in Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, eds., Representations 108, no. 1 (2009); Heather Love, “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (2010): 371–391; Ellen Rooney, “Live Free or Describe: The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form,” Differences 21, no. 3 (2010): 112–139. Addressing the affective turn, see Patricia Ticeneto Clough, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011): 434–472. On the ethical turn, see Lawrence Buell, “Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics” PMLA 114, no. 1 (1999): 7–19; Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds., The Turn to Ethics (London: Routledge, 2000); Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack, eds., Mapping the Ethical Turn (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001); Eskin, “Double ‘Turn,’ ” 557–558; Bárbara Arizti and Silvia Martínez-Falquina, eds., On the Turn: The Ethics of Contemporary Literature (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007). 35. Love, “Close but Not Deep”; Patrick Fessenbecker, “In Defense of Paraphrase,” New Literary History 44, no. 1 (2013): 117–139. 36. “Empathy” is first cited in 1904, as a translation of the German word Einfühlung. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “empathy.” 37. Dorothy Hale, “Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century,” PMLA 124, no. 3 (2009). 38. See Rooney, “Live Free or Describe”; and Otter, “An Aesthetics” 39. See Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009), 1–21. 40. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Editions, 1966), 255–256. 41. Ibid., 256.

Notes to Pages 293–295

Appendix 1 1. See Robert Eaglestone, “One and the Same? Ethics, Aesthetics, and Truth,” Poetics Today 25, no. 4 (2004): 602. See also Bárbara Arizti and Silvia Falquina-Martínez, On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), xi, n13. 2. Martha Nussbaum, “Reply to Richard Wollheim, Patrick Gardiner, and Hilary Putnam,” New Literary History 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1983): 207. 3. Judith Butler, “Values of Difficulty,” in Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, ed. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 208. 4. Dorothy Hale, “Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel,” Narrative 15, no. 2 (2007): 187–206. 5. Ibid., 189–190. 6. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in The Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 1629. 7. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 74–75. 8. Martha Nussbaum, “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 22, no. 2 (1998): 360. 9. Ibid. 10. Louise Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 112–113. 11. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954); Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1988), 142–148; Foucault, “What Is an Author?”; Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 723–742. 12. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1933), 129–130. 13. Candace Vogler, “The Moral of the Story,” Critical Inquiry 34 (2007): 10n14. 14. Wayne Booth, “Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother?,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, ed. James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 85. 15. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 295–299 16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Philip Stewart, trans. Jean Vache (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 25. 17. Vogler, “The Moral,” 33. 18. Charles Altieri, “Lyrical Ethics and Literary Experience,” in Mapping the Ethical Turn, ed. Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 38, 30. 19. Altieri, “Lyrical,” 45. See Vogler, “The Moral,” 11–12, for a similar critique of this passage. 20. Nöel Carroll, “Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions in Research,” Ethics 110 (2000): 353. 21. Richard Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 21, no. 1 (1997): 18. 22. Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 54. 23. Hale, “Fiction as Restriction,” 189. 24. Ibid., 189, 190. 25. Andrew Gibson, “Ethics,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 287–295. 26. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 148. 27. “J. Hillis Miller on ‘Beloved,’ Politics and Iraq,” Episode 6 of Radio Book Lounge, May 23, 2008, available at www.rabble.ca/rpn/podcast.php?id=rbl. 28. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 166–167. 29. Ibid., 23. 30. “Of language, statements, etc.: Fair, attractive, or plausible, but wanting in genuineness or sincerity.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “specious.” 31. Vogler, “The Moral,” 14–15. 32. Butler, “Values of Difficulty,” 207, 208. 33. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 47. 34. John Keats, “From a Letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 21, 27 (?) 1817,” in The Critical Tradition, ed. David H. Richter (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), 336. See Li Ou, Keats and Negative Capability (London: Continuum, 2009), 14. See also Dorothy Hale, “The Art of English Fiction in the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel, ed. Robert L. Caserio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 10–22. See also James Phelan, “Sethe’s Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading,” in Ethics, Literature, and Theory, ed. Stephen K. George (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). 35. J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 127.

Notes to Pages 299–300 36. Paul de Man, “Allegory (Julie),” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 206. 37. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory (London: Pinter, 1988), 182. 38. Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 44. 39. Emmanuel Lévinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 142.

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AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

I have dedicated Seven Modes of Uncertainty to my father to acknowledge his profound contributions to this book—as bolster and as foil—and to honor him as my first and most exemplary teacher. Thank you, Papa, for believing in me enough to argufy with me. To continue chronologically: thank you, George Fayen and Joe Roach, for your stalwart encouragement early in my literary education at Yale and for giving me the aspiration to read and to write with grace. At Harvard, Phil Fisher and Luke Menand (who first suggested Empson to me) both provided invaluable and incisive advice on this project since its inception. I would also like to thank Larry Buell, whose graduate seminar named American Literature Now provided the occasion for the seed of this project, and the members of the Harvard American Literature Colloquium, who gave early versions of these essays their intelligent attention. A special thank you to Glenda Carpio for supporting this book and its writer through the vicissitudes of a scholarly career; I could not have done this without you. Hillis Miller and Jim Phelan have not only mentored me with incredible generosity but have also inspired me with their scholarly acuity. I extend my deepest gratitude to all the members of the University of California, Berkeley, English department, in particular: Elizabeth Abel, Charlie Altieri, Stephen Best, Ian Duncan, Cathy Gallagher, Steve Goldsmith, Kevis Goodman, Dori Hale, Colleen Lye, Maura Nolan, Sam Otter, Kent Puckett, and Katie Snyder. I am indebted to the members of the Junior Faculty Reading Group (Kathleen Donegan, Nadia Ellis, Eric Falci, Catherine Flynn, David Landreth, Steven Lee, David Marno, Emily Thornbury) for their careful reading and comradeship. Special thanks to Sydney Miller for assiduous research and to Samuel Bjork, Katie Fleishman, Karen Leibowitz, Shawn Mehrens, and Irene Yoon for masterful editing and stoic proofreading. The ideas in Chapter 1 were developed in Narrative 16, no. 3 (October 2008), as “Mutual Exclusion, Oscillation, and Ethical Projection in The Crying of Lot 49 and The Turn of the Screw”; Chapter 3, in “The Ethics of the Adjoining: 379

380

Acknowledgments Reading Multiplicity in Beloved” in On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), edited by Bárbara Arizti and Silvia Martínez-Falquina; and Chapter 5 in Critique 51, no. 1 (Fall 2009), as “Repetition and the Ethics of Suspended Reading in American Psycho.” Thanks also to the editors and staff at Harvard University Press for their help in bringing this book into publication. I completed the research and writing for this book with the help of several grants. The first was a National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar at Ohio State University in the summer of 2008, “Narrative Theory: Rhetoric and Ethics in Fiction and Nonfiction,” directed by Jim Phelan. A 2010 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend contributed funds that helped me write Chapter 6 on Remainder. A Berkeley Humanities Research Fellowship supported a sabbatical leave in 2011 that gave me the space to finish the first draft. Berkeley also provided me with grants to conduct archival research on William Empson at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. The year that I spent as a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2011–2012 provided me with time for revisions and research and with wonderful interlocutors. Finally, I am immensely grateful to my friends and my family for being so patient with me during the long, uncertain path this book has taken toward becoming itself.

INDEX

Abel, Marco, 199, 211, 220, 221–222 Abrams, M. H., 12 acausality, 244, 246, 247, 249 accommodation, 119–123 accounting, 153–189; and ethics, 185–189; and metaphors, 177–181; as mode of multiplicity, 25, 163–168; and speculative relations, 181–184; and theories of value, 153–158; and utilitarianism, 154, 155, 159–160, 182, 186–189; and value conflicts, 172–177; and value types, 168–172 acquaintance approach, 26 acronyms, 64–65 Adamson, Jane, 17 adjacency, 119–152; and accommodation, 119–123; and discernment, 140–148; and discreteness, 135–140; and discretion, 135–140; and displacement, 132–135; and disremembering, 123–127; and “fulltiplicity,” 127–132; and kairos, 143–148; as mode of multiplicity, 25, 117; and neighbor trope, 148–152; and “null-tiplicity,” 127–132; and spacing, 132–135 aesthetics: and adjacency, 122, 127; baroque, 107–109; and ethics, 8; experiential nature of, 26; and flippancy, 272, 287; hipster aesthetic, 285, 286; and imagination, 162; and multiplicity, 115–116; and mutual

exclusion, 42; and oscillation, 57–58; and rationalism, 158; and repetition, 228; and shock, 209; and synchronicity, 244, 248, 257; and uncertainty, 3–4; and utilitarianism, 155; and vacuity, 213 affect: and adjacency, 127; Empson’s influence on study of, 29; experiential nature of, 26; and flippancy, 272, 287; and multiplicity, 116; and mutual exclusion, 42; and repetition, 228; and synchronicity, 244, 248; and uncertainty, 4–6; and vacuity, 213 affordance, 20–29 African Psycho (Mabanckou), 228 agency: and oscillation, 45; paradox of, 6; readerly, 6–7, 122–123; and sadomasochism, 222; and synchronicity, 253; and uncertainty, 7; and vacuity, 199 aggression, 4, 149, 208, 222, 226, 273 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 161, 266 allegory, 196 alliteration, 3, 273 allusions, 171–172, 177–180, 187–188, 240, 283. See also otherness alterity, 27, 28, 44, 58, 71, 72, 73, 255, 293, 297, 300, 301 Althusser, Louis, 254 Altieri, Charles, 296 altruism, 111, 159 ambiguity, 13–14, 38 381

382

Index

Amenábar, Alejandro, 42 American Psycho (Ellis), 195–229; blankness in, 207–212; consumer culture in, 226–229; empathy in, 213–217; ethics in, 204–207, 221–226; identity in, 200–204; impressionism in, 195–200; the musical, 207; publication of, 195–196; repetition in, 193–194, 200–204; sadomasochism in, 221–226; and self-reflexion, 194, 217, 222, 229; uncertainty in, 10; vacuity in, 209, 213–221, 288; violence in, 217–221 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 116 Antidosis (Isocrates), 144 Antigone (Sophocles), 123 Anton, Saul, 262 antonomasia, 295 anxiety of influence, 169 Anxiety of Influence (Bloom), 168 Apter, Emily, 51, 54 Arcadia (Sidney), 191 Arendt, Hannah, 124, 204, 205 Aristotle, 19, 23, 27, 88, 144, 148, 156, 164, 174 Arnold, Matthew, 15 Art as Experience (Dewey), 26 Atonement (McEwan), 79–114; empathy in, 110–114; enfolding in, 44, 106–110, 288; imagining in, 91–96; mutual exclusion in, 44; order in, 87–91; reverses in, 96–102; self-continuity in, 102–106; and spoiling, 79–83, 110–114; uncertainty in, 10; untruth in, 83–87, 102–106 Attridge, Derek, 16, 293 Atwood, Margaret, 80 Auden, W. H., 1, 6 aura, 60 Austen, Jane, 96, 227 Austin, J. L., 16, 85, 93 authorship, 6, 18, 21, 30, 33–34, 45–50, 57, 77, 86, 88–89, 91–92, 99, 104, 109, 112, 119–123, 177, 208, 215, 294–296, 301

auto-immunity, 11, 128, 129, 130 avant-garde, 285 Bacchae, The (Euripides), 219 Baker, Deborah, 37 Baker, Nicholson, 110 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 65, 115, 116–117, 140, 256, 276 Banville, John, 111 Baroque, 82, 106–110 Barr, Donald, 180 Barrie, J. M., 161 Barth, John, 241 Barthes, Roland, 25, 54, 277, 278, 295 Bataille, Georges, 264 Bates, Catherine, 206–207 Baudelaire, Charles, 265 Baudrillard, Jean, 192, 202, 231, 235, 236, 277 Bayley, John, 186 Beautiful Mind, A (Howard), 42 Beckett, Samuel, 3, 6, 9, 192 Being Singular Plural (Nancy), 117, 133–135, 138, 140 Bellow, Saul, 48 Beloved (Morrison), 119–152; accommodation in, 119–123; adjacency in, 132–152, 288; discernment in, 140–148; discreteness in, 135–140; discretion in, 135–140; displacement in, 132–135; disremembering in, 123–127; “full-tiplicity” in, 127–132; kairos in, 143–148; multiplicity in, 117; neighbor trope in, 148–152; “null-tiplicity” in, 127–132; spacing in, 132–135; uncertainty in, 10 Bend Sinister (Nabokov), 12 Bentham, Jeremy, 19, 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 162, 181, 185–186 Bergson, Henri, 193, 231 Berlin, Isaiah, 26 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 107 Berton, Pierre, 11 Bhabha, Homi, 120 binaries, 42, 54–58, 174, 275 Bishop, Elizabeth, 152 Blackstone, William, 155

Index

blankness, 207–212, 213, 248, 250, 275 Blind Assassin, The (Atwood), 80 Bloom, Harold, 168, 169, 171 Boerner, Margaret, 81 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 197 Booth, Wayne: on criticism, 13, 14, 15; on literary ethics, 45, 47–49; and New Ethics, 16, 293, 294–295, 299 boredom, 194, 208–12, 248, 249 Borges, Jorge Luis, 87, 103 both/and construction, 24, 115 “Boundaries in Beloved” (Miller), 127–130 Boyd, Brian, 11 Bradley, Arthur, 111 Bray, Charles, 71 Brecht, Bertolt, 273 Bright Lights, Big City (McInerney), 197 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 43 Brookner, Anita, 88 Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevsky), 116 Browning, Robert, 116 Brusseau, James, 208, 211 Buber, Martin, 19, 44, 52–53, 58, 73–77, 288 Budick, Emily, 141 Butler, Judith, 16, 58, 71, 216, 293, 298 Calinescu, Matei, 96 Calvino, Italo, 241 Camera Lucida (Barthes), 277 Canuel, Mark, 160 capitalism, 181, 182, 185, 192, 208, 227 Carroll, Lewis, 161 Carroll, Nöel, 26 Castillo, Debra, 65 causality, 243–247 Cavalier magazine, 47 Cavaney, Graham, 207 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 149 cognitive fluency, 183 cognitive triviality, 297 collaboration, 235, 237

Come Along with Me (Jackson), 174 Comedia (Dante), 256 Commentaries on the Laws of England (Blackstone), 155 communal ethics, 148–152 Company (Beckett), 3 Company We Keep, The (Booth), 15, 45 complicity, 2, 44, 112–114, 185, 218, 266 compulsion, 7, 122, 191, 232, 252 Concept of Ambiguity, The (RimmonKenan), 43 configurational logic of reading, 96–97 Conley, John, 210, 214 consciousness, loss of, 261–262, 264 consumer culture, 198, 201, 205, 207, 209, 210–212, 218, 226–229 contemporary fiction: flippancy in, 269; Lolita’s influence on, 2, 10–11; and materiality, 285–286; multiplicity in, 116; mutual exclusion in, 41; repetition in, 192; reviewing of, 79; uncertainty in, 10, 19, 28. See also specific works contingency, 173, 298 co-ontology, 134 Cornell, Drucilla, 120 corporeality, 125, 139 Couturier, Maurice, 49 covert metafiction, 103, 240–241, 246, 251 Crary, Alice, 26–27, 204 Crary, Richard, 250–251 Critchley, Simon, 73 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 224 Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon), 45–78; and authorial responsibility, 45–50; binary constructions in, 54–58; ethical philosophy in, 54–58, 73–78; mutual exclusion in, 43, 89; oscillation in, 43, 54–58, 288; otherness in, 70–73; paranoia in, 50–54; projection in, 66–70; publication of, 46–47; truth and untruth in, 62–66; uncertainty in, 10 cultural capital, 170, 176, 178, 179

383

384

Index

Cunningham, Daniel Mudie, 208 Cutter, Martha, 131 Dante, 256 defamiliarization, 94 Defence of Usury (Bentham), 181 déjà vu, 191, 235 Deleuze, Gilles: on aesthetics, 82; on baroque aesthetic, 44, 103, 106, 108, 288; on literary ethics, 19, 112; on masochists, 221–222; McCarthy influenced by, 231; on multiplicities, 117; on repetition, 193; on resonance, 26 DeLillo, Don, 51 Deliverance of Others, The (PalumboLiu), 27 De Man, Paul, 19, 21, 154, 173, 264–265, 299 denarration, 87, 89, 101, 234 Derrida, Jacques, 128–129, 193, 231, 257, 293 desensitization, 210 Dewey, John, 26 dialectical energy, 57 dialogism, 53, 65, 74, 115, 122 Dickens, Charles, 69, 155, 175, 179, 180, 294 Didion, Joan, 4, 270–271 differentiation, 23, 27–28, 38, 106, 113, 193 Dimock, Wai Chee, 287 discernment, 140–148, 288 Discours de la Syncope: Logodaedalus, Le (Nancy), 262 discreteness, 135–140 discretion, 135–140 disenchantment, 259 disidentification, 58 dismemberment, 125, 132, 145–146 disnarration, 87, 89 displacement, 132–135 disremembering, 123–127 Doctorow, E. L., 187 Donnie Darko (film), 42 doppelgängers, 192 Dos Passos, John, 187

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 116, 196–197 double sensation, 134 Dreaming by the Book (Scarry), 2, 82 “Dream-Work, The” (Freud), 61 duality, 41, 112 Eaglestone, Robert, 293, 297, 300 eclecticism, 290 Eggers, Dave, 272–273, 285–286 egoism, or egotism, 70, 145, 158–159 Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 204 Einstein, Albert, 244 Eisenstein, Sergei, 143 either/or construction, 41, 55–58, 60–61, 89 Eldridge, Richard, 217 Eliot, George, 71, 116 Eliot, T. S., 14, 295 Ellis, Bret Easton, 10, 226–227. See also American Psycho embedded repetitions, 241 empathy: and accounting, 161, 182– 183, 186; and enfolding, 110–114; and ethics, 27, 28, 185; and literature, 71, 110–112, 289; and oscillation, 44; and projection, 72; and vacuity, 213–217, 225. See also sympathy Empathy and the Novel (Keen), 111 Empson, William: influence of, 19, 29–40; on mode, 24; on multiplicity, 118; and mutual exclusion, 41; on poetic ambiguity, 115; on repetition, 191; on value, 153–158. See also Seven Types of Ambiguity (Empson) enchantment, 20, 252–253 enfolding, 79–114; and empathy, 110–114; and ethics, 110–114; and imagining, 91–96; as mode of mutual exclusion, 25, 44; and order, 87–91; and reverses, 96–102; and selfcontinuity, 102–106; and spoiling, 79–83, 110–114; and untruth, 83–87, 102–106 enthrallment, 252–257, 288 Entre Nous (Lévinas), 149 epistemological pluralism, 32, 116

Index

epistemology, 15, 23, 31–32, 42, 55, 71, 81, 84, 89, 139–140, 199, 293 “E Pluribus Unum” (Wallace), 285 Epstein, Michael, 192 Eshelman, Raoul, 192 Eskin, Michael, 288–289 Esquire magazine, 47 ethical criticism, 19, 26, 29, 117 Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Eaglestone), 300 ethics: and accounting, 185–189; and adjacency, 127, 134; and aesthetics, 8; and alterity, 301; ambiguity as index of ethical value, 13–14; communal, 148–152; of complicity, 44; dyadic, 42, 57, 62, 72–74, 225; and empathy, 182–183, 185; and Empson, 29–40; and enfolding, 110–114; experiential nature of, 26; and flippancy, 287; literary, 6–7, 47; and multiplicity, 116; and mutual exclusion, 42; and oscillation, 54–58, 73–78; of paranoia, 50–54; and projection, 68–72; of reading experience, 121–122; and repetition, 193; of self, 193; and synchronicity, 253–257; and truth, 88; and vacuity, 204–207, 213, 221–226. See also New Ethics Ethics of Reading, The (Miller), 129, 294, 299 Eugene Onegin (Nabokov), 4, 10 Euripides, 219 exchange value, 170, 171, 177 Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Foer), 269–291; ending of, 282–286; extremity in, 269–273; flippancy in, 269–291; intimacy in, 269–273; narrative structure in, 277–282; polarity in, 273–277; uncertainty in, 10, 287 extremity, 269–273 Faber, Michael, 284 Faguet, Emile, 113 false accusations, 89 Faulkner, William, 10, 116, 139

Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard), 129 Fellini, Federico, 254 Felski, Rita, 20, 209–210, 219, 221, 252 Fenolosa, Ernest, 143 Fermata, The (Baker), 110 fictional self-consciousness, 62 fictive imagination, 160 Fight Club (film), 42 filmic language, 202 Fincher, David, 42 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 9 Finney, Brian, 80–81 Fish, Stanley, 37, 195 Fisher, Miles, 228 Fisher, Philip, 42 Flaubert, Gustave, 200 flippancy, 269–291; as composite mode, 25; implementation of, 282–286; and intimacy, 269–273; and narrative structure, 277–282; and polarity, 273–277; and turning pages, 286–287 focalization, 89, 127 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 10. See also Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Foer) Fold, The (Deleuze), 44, 106, 112 formalism, 25, 29, 285 Forster, E. M., 15, 64, 96, 186 fortunate confusion, 172 Foucault, Michel, 294, 295 Fowler, Roger, 38 Fraser, George, 161 Freccero, Carla, 199, 208, 223 free will, 6, 159, 254 Freud, Sigmund, 43, 61, 68–69, 70, 149, 167, 193, 231, 245, 246–247 Fry, Paul, 32, 35, 39, 170 Frye, Northrop, 168 full contradiction, 41 “full-tiplicity,” 117, 127–132 Game, The (film), 42 Garber, Marjorie, 288 Garner, Margaret, 120–121, 130, 132 “Gentleman of Shalott, The” (Bishop), 152

385

386

Index

Gibson, Andrew, 297 Gibson, Eleanor, 22 Gibson, James J., 21, 22–23, 25. See also affordance Gift of Death, The (Derrida), 129 Giles, James R., 200 Gilroy, Paul, 120 Girard, René, 176 Glamorama (Ellis), 206, 210, 226 global rereading, 96, 99–101 Goldberg, Tod, 250 Golden Bowl, The (James), 48, 116, 298 Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer (Ziegesar), 227 grammar, 4, 24, 25, 33, 35–36, 37, 41, 55, 89, 91, 100, 183, 184, 198, 270, 276, 287 Grass, Günter, 278 Gray, Laura, 251 Greenberg, Clement, 285 Greene, Graham, 12 Greif, Mark, 285 Groundhog Day (film), 193 Guardian Weekly on American Psycho, 196, 215 Guattari, Félix, 26, 117 habit, 201, 232 Haffenden, John, 31, 37, 154, 155, 159 Hale, Dorothy, 15, 293, 297 Hall, Joan Wylie, 180 Hard Times (Dickens), 155 Harold, James, 80, 99 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 6–7, 16 Harron, Mary, 207, 228 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 116 Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, A (Eggers), 272 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 123, 231 Heidegger, Martin, 231 Heisenberg, Werner, 9, 32 Herbert, George, 162, 166, 167, 172 hermeneutics, 42, 55 Hidalgo, Pilar, 97 hipster aesthetic, 285, 286

Home (Morrison), 148 Hough, Graham, 34 House of Mirth, The (Wharton), 97 Howard, Ron, 42 Huffer, Lynne, 58 humanism, 15, 28, 29, 71, 111, 289, 293–299 humor, 64, 66, 206, 263–264, 265–266 Hungerford, Amy, 58 Hurston, Zora Neale, 174 Husserl, Edmund, 137 Hutcheon, Linda, 103, 240 I and Thou (Buber), 44, 52–53, 58, 73–78, 288 identification, 23, 27, 58, 68–72, 111, 113, 213, 125, 216, 223, 253, 257 identity, 200–204 I-It relationship, 73–75. See also I and Thou imagery, 273–277, 282–283 imagination: and aesthetics, 162; and enfolding, 91–96; ironic, 252; and re-enactments, 235; and utilitarianism, 160 imperativity, 2, 16 impressionism, 116, 197 incidental ambiguity, 38, 173 incoherence, 38 incommensurability, 156, 159, 164, 165, 185, 186, 189 incompossible, 103 indexical value, 178, 179, 180, 187 intention, 5, 13, 14, 30, 33–34, 47, 84–84, 183, 198, 289, 294–295 “Interpreting the Variorum” (Fish), 195 interreading, 19, 24, 118, 169, 171, 180, 187, 188 intertextuality, 188 “In the Penal Colony” (Kafka), 137 intimacy, 269–273 intrareading, 169 Introduction to the Principles of Legislation (Bentham), 155 ironic imagination, 252 Iser, Wolfgang, 14, 97, 278 Isocrates, 19, 144

Index

iteration, 193, 241 I-You relationship, 73–75. See also I and Thou Jackson, Shirley, 118, 171, 174–177, 188. See also “Seven Types of Ambiguity” Jacobi, Martin, 102 Jakobson, Roman, 173 James, Henry, 19, 26, 43, 48–49, 71, 116, 298 James, William, 5, 17, 32–33, 232 Janowitz, Tama, 197 Johnson, Barbara, 174, 180, 194, 224–225 Joyce, James, 9 Jung, Carl, 19, 194, 240, 243–247, 262 Kafka, Franz, 137 kairos, 117, 143–148 Kakutani, Michiko, 273 Kant, Immanuel, 70, 73, 224–225, 264 Kaufman, Walter, 73–74 Keats, John, 15, 18, 131, 299 Keen, Suzanne, 111 Kelly, Richard, 42 Kermode, Frank, 55, 80, 144 Kierkegaard, Søren, 129, 150 Killer Inside Me, The (Thompson), 2 Kirn, Walter, 276 Knapp, Steven, 295 Kundera, Milan, 193 Künstlerroman, 96 Kurosawa, Akira, 116 Lacan, Jacques, 231 “Lady of Shalott, The” (Tennyson), 152 Lahire, Bernard, 120 Lakoff, George, 174 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 82, 245, 288 Less Than Zero (Ellis), 207 Lethem, Jonathan, 261 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 19, 71, 73, 74, 148–151, 231, 255, 293, 300 Liberal Imagination, The (Trilling), 14 Lissajous figures, 56, 61

literary encryption, 240 Liu, Alan, 286 local rereading, 96, 97 logical disorder, 164, 188 Lolita (Nabokov): aesthetics in, 3–4; affect in, 4–5; debate over, 11–20; ethics in 7–8; imperativity in, 3–4, 286; legacy of, 10–11, 48, 200, 222; uncertainty in, 1–11, 286–287 Lottery; or, The Adventure of James Harris, The (Jackson), 174–177, 180 Love, Heather, 150 Love (Morrison), 151 Love’s Knowledge (Nussbaum), 15, 294 Lowrey, Annie, 102 Lunar Park (Ellis), 216, 228 Mabanckou, Alain, 228 MacFarlane, Robert, 91 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 200 Magnus, Heinrich, 245 Mailer, Norman, 195, 208, 210 Mandel, Naomi, 197, 199, 217–218 “Manipulation in Shirley Jackson’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ ” (Welch), 178–179 Map of Misreading, A (Bloom), 168 Marvell, Andrew, 93, 172 Marx, Karl, 177 masochism, 221–222. See also sadomasochism masocriticism, 221 materiality, 230–235, 274 Matthews, Peter, 97 Maxwell, James Clerk, 56 McCarthy, Tom, 10, 24. See also Remainder McEwan, Ian, 10. See also Atonement McHoul, Alec, 57 McInerney, Jay, 197 media, 74, 272, 277–280, 284–286 Memento (film), 193 memory, 193, 235, 237, 239, 242, 243 Menand, Louis, 32 Mercer, Peter, 38 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 42, 93, 134, 137

387

388

Index

Messier, Vartan, 212, 214 Messud, Claire, 94 metafictional awareness, 104 metamateriality, 233 metaphors, 173, 174, 177–181 Metaphysical Club, The (Menand), 32 metareading, 19, 24, 194, 239–243, 251, 253–254, 261 metonymy, 173, 174, 178, 179, 187 Michaels, Walter Benn, 295 micro-iterations, 241 Middlemarch (Eliot), 116 Mill, John Stuart, 155, 157, 158, 162 Miller, J. Hillis, 16, 43, 127–130, 266, 294, 299 Miller, Laura, 90 Milton, John, 1 mimetic desire, 176, 237 mirror trope, 66–68, 192, 217 Mitchell, Chris, 250 Möbius strip, 42, 43, 52, 184 modal imagination, 24 mode of enchantment, 252 modernism, 9–10, 14, 28, 32, 43, 96, 107, 116, 127, 138, 141, 184, 192, 203, 275, 284, 286 modes of uncertainty, 1–2, 9, 20–29, 36–37, 303 moral monism, 39 moral realism, 15 Morrison, Toni, 9–10, 23, 119–123, 243. See also Beloved Motion, Andrew, 226 mourning, 271, 279 Mullan, John, 201, 207, 214, 227 multiperspectivalism, 186 multiplicity, 115–189; accounting as, 153–189; adjacency as, 119–152; and flippancy, 270, 275, 290; as narrative structure, 23, 24; and polarity, 273 Murdoch, Iris, 28–29, 193 Murphet, Julian, 198–199, 205, 207, 212 music, 26, 27, 36, 61, 122, 242, 251, 259 mutual exclusion, 41–114; enfolding as, 79–114; and flippancy, 269–270,

272, 274, 290; as narrative structure, 23–24, 42; oscillation as, 45–78; and polarity, 273 Nabokov, Vladimir: and debate over Lolita, 1–2, 11–20; on ethics in Lolita, 7; on narrative structure, 23; use of alliteration by, 3–4. See also Lolita naive realism, 160–161 Nancy, Jean-Luc: on being-singularplural, 133–135; literary ethics, 19; on multiplicity, 117, 133, 134, 138; on spacing, 145; on syncope, 194, 262, 264, 265–266, 267 narcissism, 67–68 narrative structure: binary, 54–58; and flippancy, 269, 274, 277–282; multiplicity as, 115–118; mutual exclusion as, 41–44; oscillation in, 54–58; and pronouns, 203; repetition as, 191–194; and spoiling, 79–83; and uncertainty, 23, 24, 25 National Organization of Women, 195, 229 Naylor, Gloria, 132 negative capability, 18, 131, 166, 299, 301 neighbor, 124, 126, 148–152 “Neighbors and Other Monsters” (Žižek), 149 neo-phenomenology, 20 New Criticism, 21, 30, 35 New Ethics: and hypostatization, 299–302; and personification, 294–296; rubric of, 15–19; and self-validation, 296–297; uncertainty in, 17–18, 289; vagaries of, 293–302; and verisimilitude, 297–299 New Formalism, 289 New Journalism, 47 New Physics, 9, 32, 33, 244 New Republic on American Psycho, The, 195–196 New Sincerity, 285–286 Newton, Adam Zachary, 73, 300

Index

New Yorker: The Lottery in, 181; on Remainder, 250, 251 New York Review of Books on Remainder, 234, 249, 263, 266 New York Times: on American Psycho, 195; on Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, 273; on The Lottery, 180; on names in The Crying of Lot 49, 65 Ngai, Sianne, 192, 210 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 148, 156 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 76, 193, 221, 231 Nolan, Christopher, 193 Norman, Donald, 21 Norris, Christopher, 299–300 Notebooks (Wittgenstein), 37 Notes from the Underground (Dostoevsky), 196–197 Nudelman, Franny, 121 “null-tiplicity,” 117, 127–132 Nussbaum, Martha: on Hegel, 123; on literary ethics, 47; on multiplicity, 117; and New Ethics, 15, 16, 293, 294, 297, 298 Oates, Joyce Carol, 249 objectification of others, 70, 74, 215, 224–226, 256–257 obscurity, 19 Ogden, C. K., 155 Olympia Press, 12 120 Days of Sodom (Sade), 211 ontology, 10, 24, 42, 55, 60, 74, 117, 127, 138–139, 148, 193, 198–200, 224, 235; as co-ontology, 134 order, 87–91, 164, 188 Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 124 Orwell, George, 30 oscillation, 45–78; and alterity, 28; and authorial responsibility, 45–50; and binary constructions, 54–58; cyclical nature of, 57; dialogic, 53; and empathy, 44; and ethics, 54–58, 73–78; as mode of mutual exclusion, 25; and otherness, 70–73; and paranoia, 50–54; and projection, 66–70; and truth vs. untruth, 62–66

otherness, 15, 17, 18, 70–73, 149, 159, 208, 255, 293, 297, 298, 301. See also alterity Others, The (film), 42 Palumbo-Liu, David, 27–28, 58 Paradise (Morrison), 141 “Paradoxical Status of Repetition, The” (Rimmon-Kenan), 192 paranoia, 50–54, 56 Parker, David, 72, 288 Peirce, Charles, 32 perceptual warping, 84, 93 performative, 2, 4–5, 16–17, 18, 85, 93, 199, 237 performative utterance, 2, 16, 85, 223 Perlman, Elliot, 10, 118, 171, 181–184, 188. See also Seven Types of Ambiguity (Perlman) perspectivalism, 184, 186, 270 Peter Pan (Barrie), 161 Peterson, Christopher, 121 Petty, George, 47 Phelan, James, 81, 87, 92, 99, 127, 130–131 phenomenology, 20–21, 24, 60, 88, 93, 102, 116, 139, 208, 231, 244, 247 Physics (Aristotle), 156 Piette, Adam, 161 Piper, Adrian, 24 Plato, 27, 77, 144, 192, 193, 231, 236, 240, 288 pluralism, 32, 154, 156, 163, 166–167 Poetics (Aristotle), 88 polarity, 273–277, 283 Politics (Aristotle), 27 polyphony, 115, 116, 122, 135, 183, 276 pornography, 63, 197, 211, 214, 215 Posner, Richard, 19, 294, 297 postmodernism, 10, 45, 51, 54, 81, 90, 98, 116, 192, 198, 203, 241, 269, 273 poststructuralism, 15, 16, 49, 54, 193, 278, 293, 294, 297, 298, 299 Poulet, Georges, 4, 5–6 Practical Criticism (Richards), 155 pragmatism, 32, 154–155, 157, 163, 166–167

389

390

Index

pre-established harmony, 245 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 2 Price, Katy, 31 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Grahame-Smith), 227 Prince, Gerald, 86–87 projection, 44, 66–70, 294 prolepsis, 99 pronouns, 4, 34, 203 pronunciation, 4 Proust, Marcel, 35–36, 113, 217, 240 pseudonarration, 89 puns, 64, 205–207, 266 Pynchon, Thomas, 10, 45–50. See also Crying of Lot 49, The Ragtime (Doctorow), 187 Ramis, Harold, 193 Ramsay, A. S., 31 Rashomon (film), 116, 183 readerly agency, 6–7, 122–123 reading experience: and accounting, 184; and adjacency, 121, 127, 140; Empson on, 29, 30; and enfolding, 87, 113; and flippancy, 277–278, 280, 282; and mode of uncertainty, 1–2, 9, 20; and narrative structure, 22; and oscillation, 50, 54; and synchronicity, 194, 257, 260; and vacuity, 200, 212, 218 recognition, 20 re-enactments, 230, 235–239 referential order, 89, 90 reflexion, 194, 217, 222, 229 reflexivity, 218, 265, 285 Reinhard, Kenneth, 124 reinscriptive reversal, 100 Remainder (McCarthy), 230–267; causality in, 243–247; energy of synchronicity in, 247–252; enthrallment in, 252–257, 287; materiality in, 230–235; metareading of, 239–243; re-enactments in, 235–239; remainders in, 257–261; repetition in, 193–194; reviews of, 249–250; synchronicity in, 288; syncope in, 261–267; uncertainty in, 10

remainders, 257–261 repetition, 191–267; and flippancy, 270, 290; as narrative structure, 23; and polarity, 273; synchronicity as, 230–267; vacuity as, 195–229 repressed memory, 193 Republic, The (Plato), 77 rereading, 2, 3, 13, 19, 24, 44, 46, 81, 96–102, 104, 105, 106, 113, 114, 137, 241, 251 resonance, 20–29 “Re-statement of Romance” (Stevens), 78 “Resurrection of the Implied Author, The” (Booth), 294 retrospective realization, 96, 98 reversal, 96–102 revisionary ratios of influence, 168 Reynolds, Bryan, 103, 104 Rhetoric of Fiction, The (Booth), 13 “Rhetoric of Temporality, The” (De Man), 264–265 Richards, I. A., 31, 153–158, 162, 168 Richardson, Brian, 87, 91, 93, 234 Ricks, Christopher, 161 Ricoeur, Paul, 96 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 43, 192 Ring and the Book, The (Browning), 116 Roach, Joseph, 63 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 192, 211 romanticism, 32, 172 Rorty, Richard, 8 Rosenblatt, Louise, 294–295 Rosenblatt, Roger, 195 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 295 Run Lola Run (Tykwer), 97 Ruskin, John, 240 Russell, Bertrand, 170–171, 177 Ryle, Gilbert, 26 Sade, Marquis de, 211 sadomasochism, 221–226 St. Aubyn, Edward, 114 Saler, Michael, 252 sameness, 23, 27–28, 58, 192–193, 208, 262

Index

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 6 satire, 196 Saturday (McEwan), 111 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 116 Scarry, Elaine, 2, 3, 82, 92, 93, 95 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 245 Schulz, Bruno, 284 science fiction, 192 Scott, A. O., 79 Sebald, W. G., 277 “Secret Integration, The” (Pynchon), 46 self-consciousness, 240, 251, 253, 273 self-continuity, 102–106, 112 self/other dyad, 19, 57, 225 self-validation, 120, 294, 296–297 semantic generation, 200 semantic satiation and saturation, 192, 200, 201, 209 Sendak, Maurice, 286 sentimentality, 280–281 “Sethe’s Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading” (Phelan), 130 Seven Types of Ambiguity (Empson), 29–40, 117–118, 153–189 “Seven Types of Ambiguity” (Jackson), 117–118, 171, 174–181 Seven Types of Ambiguity (Perlman), 10, 117–118, 171, 181–187, 287 Shadows of Ethics (Harpham), 6–7 Shakespeare, William, 35, 166, 169 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 172 Sherman, Nancy, 27 shock, 20, 194, 209–210, 219, 221, 259–260 Shyamalan, M. Night, 42 Sidney, Philip, 88, 191 similitude, 78, 127, 132, 173, 184, 191, 193, 253, 257, 260–262. See also sameness Simon, Claude, 211 simulacra, 133, 191, 192, 202, 234, 236, 259, 263, 277 simultaneity, 242, 243 sincerity, 269, 283, 285–286 Sipiora, Phillip, 144 skepticism, 54, 58, 77, 248, 259–260, 290–291

“Skylark” (Shelley), 172 Slaves of New York (Janowitz), 197 Slow Learner (Pynchon), 46, 49 Smith, Adam, 71, 174, 181 Smith, J. E., 144 Smith, Zadie, 4, 234, 249, 263, 266 social realism, 187 solipsism, 52, 124 Sontag, Susan, 66, 285 Sophocles, 123, 219 Sorfa, David, 65 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 116, 139 Sovereignty of Good, The (Murdoch), 28 spacing, 124–125, 132–135 Sparrow, John, 39 speculation, 184 speculative relations, 181–184 spirituality, 37, 59, 76–77, 139, 148 Spivak, Gayatri, 16 spoiling, 79–83, 110–114 stark fictions, 194, 217–221 Stein, Gertrude, 192, 203, 210 Sterne, Laurence, 283 Stevens, Wallace, 78 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 203 Stone, Oliver, 197 Storey, Mark, 197 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The (Stevenson), 203 Street of Crocodiles, The (Schulz), 284 structuralism, 25, 29, 151–152 Structure of Complex Words, The (Empson), 32, 154, 187 stuplimity, 212 subjunctivity, 103–104, 105, 112–113, 160, 288 suppositional imagining, 95 symbolic value, 170, 171, 178, 179– 180, 187 sympathy, 31, 36, 39, 69, 71, 158, 182, 289. See also empathy synchronicity, 230–267; and causality, 243–247; energy of, 247–252; and enthrallment, 252–257; and materiality, 230–235; and metareading,

391

392

Index

synchronicity (continued) 239–243; as mode of repetition, 25, 191; and re-enactments, 235–239; and remainders, 257–261; and syncope, 261–267 Synchronicity: An Acausal Principle (Jung), 244–247 syncope, 261–267 synecdoches, 108 Tanner, Laura, 214, 218 Tate, Andrew, 111 temporal order, 90, 91, 104. See also time Tennyson, Alfred, 152 textural agglutination, 192 Theobald, Lewis, 168 “Theories of Value” (Empson), 155, 156 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 71 Thiher, Allen, 32 Thompson, Jim, 2 Thompson, Mark, 39 Thorn, Jesse, 285 time: dilation of, 75; and repetition, 191; temporal order, 90, 91, 104 Tin Drum, The (Grass), 278 Todorov, Tsvetan, 41 tolerance, 117 Tolstoy, Leo, 116 Tomoyasu, Kinue, 280 Totality and Infinity (Lévinas), 150 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 110 transcendental causality, 245 transitional objects, 224, 225–226 traumatized language, 140, 141 Tree of Codes (Foer), 284 Trilling, Lionel, 12–20, 30, 293, 299 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 283 truth: and ethics, 88; and imagination, 95; and oscillation, 62–66; and spoiling, 81 Turn of the Screw, The (James), 43, 49 “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” (Jakobson), 173 Tykwer, Tom, 97

Udovitch, Mim, 198 Unbearable Lightness of Being, The (Kundera), 193 uncanny, 61, 68, 75, 94, 133, 140, 151, 191, 203, 250, 277; valley, 213 “Uncanny, The” (Freud), 245–247 uncertainty: and accounting, 153–189; and adjacency, 119–152; and enfolding, 79–114; and ethics, 8–9; and flippancy, 269–291; modes of, 20–29, 303; and oscillation, 45–78; and synchronicity, 230–267; and vacuity, 195–229 unnarration, 87 unreliable narrators, 14, 42, 85, 99, 198 “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” (Morrison), 119, 123 untruth: and enfolding, 83–87, 102– 106; and imagination, 95; kinds of, 89; and oscillation, 62–66; and spoiling, 81 USA (Dos Passos), 187 Uses of Literature (Felski), 20, 209– 210, 219, 221, 252 use value, 170, 171, 178, 187 “Using People: Kant with Winnicott” (Johnson), 224–226 utilitarianism, 154, 155, 159–160, 182, 186–189 vacuity, 195–229; and blankness, 207–212; and consumer culture, 226–229; and empathy, 213–217; and ethics, 204–27, 221–226; and flippancy, 288; and identity, 200–204; and impressionism, 195–200; as mode of repetition, 25, 200–204; and sadomasochism, 221–226; and violence, 217–221 value: and affordance, 25; by association, 178; conflicts in, 172–177; theories of, 153–158; types of, 168–172. See also accounting Van Der Zee, James, 132 Vargas, Alberto, 47 Varo, Remedios, 52, 67 Vermeule, Blakey, 80

Index

violence, 121, 128, 217–221, 229, 280 Violent Affect (Abel), 221 virtue, 296 Visible and the Invisible, The (MerleauPonty), 42, 93, 137 visual distortion, 84 Vogler, Candace, 295, 296 vulnerability, 226 Wagner, Erica, 213 Walker, Ben, 214 Wallace, David Foster, 285 Wall Street (Stone), 197 Warhol, Robyn, 87 Washington Square (James), 71, 298 Waugh, Evelyn, 96 Waves, The (Woolf), 116 Welch, Dennis, 178–179 Wells, Gwendolyn, 120 Wharton, Edith, 97 “What Is an Author?” (Foucault), 294 “What Is Literature?” (Sartre), 6 Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak), 286 White, Eric Charles, 144 Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Vermeule), 80

Why We Read Fiction (Zunshine), 183 Will (Schopenhauer), 245 Williams, Bernard, 16, 19, 194, 219–221, 229, 302 Williams, Raymond, 269 Wills, David, 57 Wilson, Edmund, 4, 13, 43 Wimsatt Law, 30 Winnicott, D. W., 224, 225 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 37 Wolfe, Tom, 197 Wolk, Douglas, 286 Women of Trachis, The (Sophocles), 219, 220 Wood, James, 90, 102–103 Woolf, Virginia, 22, 98, 107, 110, 116, 127 Wordsworth, William, 2 Wright, Joe, 101 Wu, Yung-Hsing, 119, 120, 131 Young, Elizabeth, 197, 199–200, 207, 210, 216, 218 Young, John K., 47 Žižek, Slavoj, 149–150 Zunshine, Lisa, 183

393