Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations 9780823292592

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Situated Utterances

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[pragmatic presuppositions] are defined not on the relations between sentences but on the relations between utterance and situation of utterance . . . Open the door presupposes, pragmatically, the presence, in a room with a door that is not open, of another person who . . . is in a relation to the speaker which enables him to interpret this as a request or command. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction My primary documents . . . are the paintings I examine. I understand them as situated utterances: dense, complex, overdetermined objects that do not sit pristinely upon a hill and observe the world about them. Rather they drag a bit of that world around with them, like roots bearing mineral traces of the soil in which they formed. Bryan Jay Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing

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harry berger, jr.

Situated Utterances texts, bodies, and cultural representations Introduction by Judith H. Anderson

Fordham University Press New York, 2005

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Copyright 䉷 2005 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berger, Harry. Situated utterances : texts, bodies, and cultural representations / Harry Berger, Jr. ; introduction by Judith H. Anderson. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8232-2428-7 (hardcover) — ISBN 0-8232-2429-5 (pbk.) 1. Literature—History and criticism. I. Title. PN511.B46 2005 801⬘.95—dc22 2005007081 Printed in the United States of America 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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For my pal Ezra who is our best future if he plays his cards right and trusts the magic in the play

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prior publication

‘‘Bodies and Texts,’’ Representations 17 (1987): 144–66. ‘‘The Origins of Bucolic Representation: Disenchantment and Revision in Theocritus’ Seventh Idyll,’’ Classical Antiquity 3 (1984): 1–39. ‘‘Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene,’’ English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 3–48. ‘‘The Pepys Show: Ghost-Writing and Documentary Desire in The Diary.’’ English Literary History 65 (1998): 557–91. ‘‘From Body to Cosmos: The Dynamics of Representation in Precapitalist Society.’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (1992): 557–602. ‘‘The Lie of the Land: The Text Beyond Canaan.’’ Representations 25 (1989): 119–38. ‘‘Social Structure as Doom: The Limits of Heroism in Beowulf ’’ (with H. M. Leicester, Jr.), in Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, ed. Robert Burlin and E. B. Irving, Jr. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 37–81. ‘‘Christian Nudity: Fiction and Facticity in Pre-modern Representations of the Body.’’ Textus 13 (2000): 205–22. vii

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‘‘Facing Sophists: The Charismatic Bondage of Socrates in the Protagoras.’’ Representations 5 (1984): 66–91. ‘‘Phaedrus and the Politics of Inscription.’’ In Plato and Postmodernism, ed. Steven Shankman (Glenside, Pa.: Aldine Press, 1994), 76–114.

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contents

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Introduction by Judith H. Anderson part one

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Situating Utterance

1. The Interpretive Shuttle: The Structure of Critical Practice after World War II

19

2. Bodies and Texts

99

part two

Situating Agency: Texts against Countertexts

129

3. The Origins of Bucolic Representation: Disenchantment and Revision in Theocritus’s Seventh Idyll

131

4. Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene

173

5. The Pepys Show: Ghostwriting and Documentary Desire in The Diary

218

part three

Situating History: Contexts as Countertexts 253

6. From Body to Cosmos: The Dynamics of Representation in Precapitalist Society

255

7. The Lie of the Land: The Text beyond Canaan

297

8. Social Structure as Doom: The Limits of Heroism in Beowulf by Harry Berger, Jr., and H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.

321

9. Fiction and Facticity: Reflections on Christian Nudity

363 ix

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Contents

part four

Situating Socrates: The Sublation of Socratic Utterance in Plato’s Dialogues

379

10. Facing Sophists: Socrates’ Charismatic Bondage in Protagoras

381

11. Phaedrus and the Politics of Inscription

415

12. The Athenian Terrorist: Plato’s Portrayal of Critias

455

part five

Conclusion: Situating Interpretation

13. Making Interpretation Manageable: An Eight-Step Program

491 493

Notes

517

Index

559

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Situated Utterances

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Introduction Judith H. Anderson

Situated Utterances is about contextualized language—language spoken, written, acted, and interpreted, language in printed texts, genres, ideologies, rituals, and institutions. Before encountering Harry Berger’s capacious study in book form, I had taught several of its published or unpublished essays, especially its first two chapters, in an introductory course on the issues and motives of graduate study in English, a course that mainly combined literary with theoretical texts, along with some attention to institutional and professional concerns. Each time, I teamtaught the course with an academic other, that is, a colleague younger than I and of different gender, whose theoretical orientation and primary area of expertise differed from mine, in one instance a Marxist Romanticist and in another a post-structural Freudian Modernist. Our various versions of the course focused either on issues of representation, textuality, and interpretation, or on history and language as they practically and theoretically exist in interaction with and antagonism to one another. The first of the following chapters, ‘‘The Interpretive Shuttle: The Structure of Critical Practice after World War II,’’ which offers a theoretical 3

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model for Berger’s whole book, proved a cornerstone in every version of the course, providing a review of the past fifty years of the interpretive history of texts that is breathtaking in its comprehensiveness. Especially for current students of literature with training in cultural studies but less practice in the kinds of reading techniques once taken for granted, it has been something of a surprise. They have been interested, startled, rightly suspicious to find what was in their experience the vaguely caricaturized dinosaur of New Criticism lurking within the genealogical caverns of their own enlightened views and practices. The depth and breadth of ‘‘The Interpretive Shuttle’’ and of this entire volume make a powerful claim on the present, as well as affording a critical perspective on the past. Berger envisions the contemporary interpretive enterprise as a shuttle continually moving between textualization and detextualization—between texts and countertexts (e.g., documents or embodied scripts)—and between signifier/signified and sign/referent relations, between a centripetal looking at language and a centrifugal looking through it. The past fifty years of interpretive activity are located on one or the other extremity of the shuttle’s route: science, denotation, Kristeva’s phenotext, and mimetic or realist writing and reading, for example, go on the documentary side, and poetry, connotation, Kristeva’s genotext, and deconstructive writing and reading on the other. In a diagram that proves to be a useful pedagogic device, Berger also aligns key theorists with the periodic phases of activity their writings represent. (See p. 98.) Although Berger’s shuttle has two opposite stops on its route, the chapter that invites readers to ride it puts three conceptions into play: textuality, countertextuality, and what I shall term documentality or documentalite´. In the interest of clarity, I’ll represent them schematically: Documentality (documentalite´)— State of innocence (innocent reading) or pretextuality, primacy of referentiality (literalness, surface meaning), transparency of language. Normative Reading. Textuality— Play and difference (where differential structuring enables the discourse of the other). Interpretation, which includes some degree of

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reference and therefore a move back toward limitation or countertextuality, that is, the left side of the diagram. Countertextuality— Any shutting down of play or any ‘‘fixing’’ (freezing) of difference/ play, for example, in a textbook, by a ritual or genealogy, by a constitution or government. All the examples follow an awareness of play and assume its danger; they fend it off, stabilize it, contain it, repress it. Like textuality, countertextuality thus includes something of its other, namely, textuality, but as potential, rather than as realization. As my glosses of these conceptions suggest, all three are bound together. The very conceptualizing of them requires some degree of abstraction (as any concept does), and the additional conception of shuttling among them is very much a metaphor for perceptual activity, a meta-reading, if you will. Whereas the conception of the interpretive shuttle caps the first chapter, Berger approaches it by investigating, analyzing, and exposing the developments in interpretive theory that undergird its construction. Representing himself ironically in the first chapter as a reconstructed Old New Critic (emphasis on reconstructed), he first distills New Criticism’s blindness and insight into six elegant postulates: the structural postulate of the work’s organic unity and the aesthetic postulate of its self-sufficient autonomy; the deictic postulate of its dissociation from the author and the rhetorical postulate of its complexity, irony, ambiguity, and the like; the cosmological postulate of the work as a ‘‘world’’ and the epistemic postulate of its fictiveness. He constructs each postulate either in terms of the later critical developments it underlies (e.g., theories of the text and subject, indeterminacy, and the discourse of the other) or else provokes by way of contrast and critique (e.g., intertextuality, textual production, reception theory, ideological analysis, the fictiveness of fact). Berger’s purpose is partly to conserve what is useful in New Criticism— for example, its focus, now highly qualified, on the complexity of the linguistic and rhetorical text available to close reading. Perhaps even more, however, it is to document the extension of the New Critical postulates to the world beyond the ‘‘work’’ and to trace the introjection of the world into the text in ways still oriented by the postulates, which exten-

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sion and introjection have radically altered. Two relevant interests in this chapter involve form as a critique of the cultural discourse it represents, rather than as merely a reflection of it, and the basis of ‘‘the logocentric illusion,’’ not primarily in speech, but in the body as a medium of communication and a system of signs, as evident in human presence and positionality and more specifically in age and gender. Berger’s second chapter, ‘‘Bodies and Texts,’’ develops his view of the body as a naturalizing symbol (after Mary Douglas), in which texts can be embedded or detextualized. Embedding, or at least the literate observer’s awareness of it as a process of imposition, ‘‘presupposes a prior act of disembedding,’’ an act of abstraction or, indeed, of textuality itself (p. 105). Of course this claim is deconstructive, and Berger consistently employs text in Derrida’s larger sense, which includes ‘‘ ‘every horizon of semiolinguistic communication’ ’’ (p. 114). In appearance, however, bodies and texts are opposite forms of communication and semiosis. The order of bodies, or presences, includes voice, visible gesture, behavior, and clothing and extends to actors on stage. Berger argues that bodies repress or bind the openness and complexity of textuality, which is prototypically instanced in the written text, distanced from the author’s intention and immediate control. The contrasting order of texts is not simply a thing but a function, ‘‘the value we give to whatever we treat as an object of interpretation, and subject to the fate of reading’’ (p. 109). Here Berger cites Fredric Jameson’s description of textuality as ‘‘ ‘a methodological hypothesis whereby the objects of study in the human [and biological] sciences . . . are considered to constitute so many texts which we . . . interpret, as distinguished from the older views of those objects as realities or existents or substances which we in one way or another attempt to know’ ’’ (p. 109). Having started this chapter with Shakespearean drama, Berger concludes it with a discussion of ‘‘iconic recoding’’ in the culture of the Zambian Ndembu. In such recoding, or embedding, semantic networks within the Ndembu’s language are projected onto natural phenomena such as trees and are ‘‘reified in—and as—‘nature’ ’’ (p. 122). In the speech of Ndembu rituals thus lies a ‘‘repressed and crumpled text’’ (p. 124). By situating utterances in the history of interpretation and more specifically in the polar values, or functions, of bodies and texts, things and

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interpretations, the first two chapters of Berger’s opening section provide the theoretical model for the individual studies of variously embedded and disembedded texts in the three sections that follow. In each of these studies, a reader can witness the metamorphosis of the New Critical postulates mothlike into a contemporary form and the nature of the shuttling from text to countertext to text again that Berger has in mind: this is not a sequential or segmented movement—one methodology for one text or one part of a text and one for another—as a reading of Berger’s diagram alone might imply. Rather it is a dialectical method of interpretation whose synthesis is always provisional and temporary (as the image of shuttling suggests). Berger is invested in the wide applicability, as well as the specific historicity, of the methodology he proposes, and the first of the sections to follow ranges from ancient Greece to early modern England. Each chapter in it offers an incisive analysis of the representation of literary forms and cultural discourses. Had I been charged with naming this section, I would have offered ‘‘The Self-Reflexivity of Literary Form as Cultural Critique,’’ since the section is concerned throughout with the re-presentation of representation. In the first chapter, ‘‘The Origins of Bucolic Representation,’’ Berger finds in Theocritus, as elsewhere in Plato, a writer haunted by the voices of his precursors, yet one who responds by resisting and by reconceiving the originary oral influence in a medium of signs, namely, writing. This is recognizably the resistance of the son to the father or, in Berger’s words, an act of ‘‘revisionary filiation, . . . the establishment of identity by the creative misreading of one’s sources’’ (p. 132). Thus read, Theocritus’ Seventh Idyll enables and encourages ‘‘the dissociation of ‘voices’ from the text so that they may be objectified, impersonated, and parodied as embodiments of ethical, social, political, and cultural attitudes’’ (p. 136). Similarly, centuries later and in England, Spenserian narrative is a representation of storytelling, rather than storytelling itself. If Spenser’s characters are ‘‘little more than puppets . . . it is not Spenser who pulls their strings and speaks though them; rather it is the conventional discourses he represents’’ in the poem (p. 194). (I would add, ‘‘at least some of the time.’’) The schemes and values of his story itself, not the commentary on it, are deliberately made unreliable so that they critique the cultural discourses they represent (p. 210). Here, as in

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other chapters, the proof of Berger’s argument stands or falls (or both) in the detailed readings, of which he is master. In Restoration England, Samuel Pepys’s celebrated Diary orchestrates, rather than simply reflects, what Berger calls ‘‘documentary desire’’—a ‘‘desire for graphic justification by paper and on paper,’’ a need to be named, or realized, by and on paper, that coincides with the ever-increasing importance of the graphic medium (p. 220). Pepys’s Diary, too, is persuasively a representation, not simply a presentation, of cultural form; it is ‘‘a record of the daily recording of events’’ rather than ‘‘a record of daily events’’ (p. 232). The Diary, Berger also suggests, ‘‘is part of the awareness . . . [Pepys] carries with him into all the day’s happenings . . . [and has] the effect of internally distancing the agent and monitor of writing from its subject and referent, who would always to some extent be in the position of performing for the benefit of the diarist—who, in turn, performs for his own benefit as the diary’s monitor and first reader’’ (p. 247). The Diary is not unmediated verisimilitude, but instead a performance for writing and in writing that is co-extensive with life. In short, it is a ‘‘Pepys Show,’’ as Berger’s title wittily puts it. Whereas the first section of Berger’s individual studies reflects on the relation of agency to performance in dominantly literary texts, the second more broadly explores representational modes in historical structuralism. Its four studies include an anthropological account of ascription and reascription (different degrees of abstraction from the body) in precapitalist society; an examination of the counterpoised functions of land and text, loss and promise, in biblical history; a discussion of the fated interweaving of aggression and aspiration in Anglo-Saxon society; and a comparison of the idealized nudity of classical sculpture to the antiaesthetic nudity of medieval Christianity, the latter a nudity that only seems more natural. My own name for this section or pocket-code for organizing it is ‘‘Reading Countertexts.’’ ‘‘Body to Cosmos,’’ the first study, has evident conceptual roots in the earlier ‘‘Bodies and Texts’’: ‘‘The body is a representation as well as a presence: something more than meets the eye always meets the eye’’ (p. 255). While the anthropological term ascription refers to what is ‘‘natural’’ to a person at birth, such as gender, age, and genealogical ties, Berger rightly observes that even these characteristics carry variant meanings and

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values in different societies and are therefore culturally inflected. Since they are grounded in the body, however, they are considered ‘‘natural,’’ whereas what he christens ‘‘reascribed’’ distinctions, such as those affirmed in traditional rituals of patrilineal rebirthing, are conspicuously artificial and further abstracted from the body, in which they nonetheless seek to ground their symbolism, as the idea of male ‘‘rebirthing’’ might suggest. In reascription a reality effect is thus sought both through and despite the body. When abstraction increases in degree and complexity, reascription gets extended from the human body to the cosmos, which is ‘‘the second great natural symbol.’’ Society and the cosmos become reciprocal images of one another: ‘‘In traditional ideologies the cosmos tends to be organized in the image of the sociopolitical hierarchy, but the human origins of this construction are neutralized by reascriptive reversal: society is [instead] represented as the image and extension of the natural cosmos’’ (p. 285). Reascription has political as well as formal consequences; its form has real effects. It entails ‘‘not only the formal abstraction of concepts from their ascriptive locus in the body but also the alienation of power and meaning from the domestic group’’ (p. 280). The abstracted power that is based increasingly in reascriptive legitimacy is assertive and domineering in inverse proportion to its perceived basis in ‘‘nature.’’ As Berger formulates a general rule of abstraction from the body, ‘‘the increase of [self-asserting] human power . . . is directly proportional to the decrease [of direct, individualized] human control over that power’’ (p. 289). Accordingly, what separates modern culture from its more traditional predecessors, which reascribe their fictions in nature, is its often troubled acceptance of fictions—texts and the institutions constructed by them—as legitimate and legitimating. In another of Berger’s characteristic mots, thus not mere abstraction but ‘‘the abstraction of abstraction’’ is the sign of modernity (p. 288). Toward the end of this remarkable account of cultural symbolization, Berger suggests that the Old Testament itself is a reascriptive or ‘‘retraditionalizing strategy’’ meant to cope with a crisis of representation in Solomon’s Israel. Subsequently, as an instance of alienating technological development, he also aligns Yahweh’s commanding Abraham to leave his father’s house for a new land with ‘‘the journey from preagricultural to

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agricultural economies . . . and the first definitive extension and abstraction of human power: from body to land’’ (pp. 286, 291). Together, these observations look ahead to the next chapter, where they are developed and greatly extended. In an obvious but poignant pun, the title of this next chapter is ‘‘The Lie of the Land.’’ Opposed to the land, with its illusion of permanence and possession, is the desire of the biblical text, always unfinished and unfulfilled. Opposed to settlement is the unending journey. In Berger’s analytical meditation on the founding myths in Genesis and Exodus, which invokes appropriate biblical scholarship generously, journey and absence of fulfillment have a positive spin, however. They become an opening to hope and creativity, albeit endless and, unless the hope is real, also illusory. I can only quote the quip by which Berger describes his own nomadic goal: ‘‘I shall return to the textual home where all good landless Israelites still live’’ (p. 297). Berger seizes on two apparent facts: the first is that every ten generations or so (every 250–300 years), the sociopolitical organizations of the ancient world underwent radical change or destruction, and the second is that the biblical Israelites were initially an agrarian rather than a nomadic people, whose recurrent positive valuing of movement begs for explanation. Berger’s theory pertains to the Redactor of the Mosaic revolution or, more exactly, to his story of an exodus from Egypt in search of the promised land. This Redactor, unlike the usual antiroyalist (anti-Zionist, to use a more modern concept), who he appears to be, however, cannot want the Israelites actually to return to the nomadic life, the tent and the wilderness, in order to escape their vulnerability to predatory nomads, enforcers of the tenth-generation effect that displaces them, because the nomadic life is not their reality to begin with. Instead, the biblical Redactor realizes that even within the Mosaic revolution, which is a movement away from the bondage implicit in settlement, lie the seeds of another tenth-generation effect, since it, too, will only lead to land destined for displacement. He has understood that ‘‘to possess the land is to lose the promise’’ and that ‘‘losing the land must be a condition for regaining the promise,’’ for as Augustine, Calvin, and more recently Jacques Lacan (just for starters) have believed and as Wallace Stevens has put it, ‘‘not to have is the beginning of desire.’’ The only community ‘‘that can gather around the

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holy of holies at its [absent] center’’ is therefore not a landed one, but ‘‘the hermeneutical community, the community of textual desire’’ (pp. 318–20). A negative realization fires unceasing movement and, who knows, perhaps something more. Returning to English literature, this time to an Anglo-Saxon form, in an essay co-authored with Marshall Leicester, Berger examines the structure of heroic institutions, which feed the destructive flames of envy, greed, and vengeance that the heroes they honor battle and to which they or their heirs succumb. In Beowulf, ‘‘the characters [may] focus on ethical behavior—ideal heroic consciousness—as the key to order,’’ but the poem exposes the vicious motives that the heroic surface not only glosses over but also elicits (p. 326). From beginning to end, Celtic doom, the sense of fate that stalks the poem, rises out of the very institutions the poem seems to celebrate. Built verbally into the first description of Heorot, Hrothgar’s meadhall, for example, are the battle wealth that memorializes it, the monster who will ravage it, and the kin strife that will destroy it; the gift-giving it shelters will recall that of Grendel’s ancestor Cain and foreshadow both Hygelac’s loss ‘‘when for pride,’’ or heroic ambition, he feuded with the Frisians and Beowulf ’s final heroic but hubristic battle with the fire dragon, who guards the hoard of ancestral treasure. Gift-giving itself ‘‘arouse[s] contention’’ by calling attention to ‘‘conspicuous success and wealth, by the charity that threatens to wound [one thinks of Milton’s Satan] and the riches tempting to greed’’ (p. 342). The heroic ethos is self-centered, and when the hero of the poem dies, he is the only laf (‘‘heirloom’’) ‘‘bequeathed by his people to the world,’’ unless the poet’s ambivalent attitude toward the institution of heroism, his ideological critique of it, is another laf more telling (pp. 342, 361–62). The fourth and last chapter of this section treating historical structuralism and interpretive practice recalls both its first, ‘‘Body to Cosmos,’’ and the foundational ‘‘Bodies and Texts’’ in Part 1. In ‘‘Christian Nudity: Fiction and Facticity in Premodern Representations of the Body,’’ Berger contrasts the idealized and therefore fictive nudity of classical sculpture with the factitious nudity of premodern (medieval) Christianity: whereas the classical ideal, at least as Kenneth Clark describes it, is abstracted from the necessarily imperfect human body, the early Christian ideal of

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nudity, as a commitment to purity and to virtuous practice, is embedded in the body and thereby naturalized. The early Christian ideal makes a claim to reality that is, like the classical ideal, also founded on fiction, however. As Berger puts it, ‘‘the equivalent of the nude, the re-formed, corrected, fiction of the superior body is ritually embedded in the actual body’’ [through religious practices] as its facticity’’—its ‘‘fact-like-ness’’ (p. 374). Such an appearance of factuality is actually tropic, merely an illusory likeness that is, in fact, really the product of human fiction. It is self-fashioning, self-cultivation, Foucault’s technology of the self, and, in short, the sculpting of living human clay in the likeness of an exemplar, indeed, in the Christ-likeness of one. Concluding, Berger relates the early Christian effort to naturalize such fiction to the occluding of tropic likeness in hagiographic representation where, at all costs, the factitious autonomy of the referent represented must be preserved through an art that denies art. This is the highly conventionalized, or cultivated, artistry of antiaestheticism. In modern terms, it thus appears comparable to the artistic style of realism—a very different realism, I might add. The penultimate section of this wide-ranging book resembles the second one in focusing on the interrelation between cultural form and cultural discourse but differs in two ways: it deals with texts that traditionally belong to another discipline, philosophy, where they are primarily countertexts, and it consists in a sustained inquiry into the texts of a single writer, Plato’s Protagoras, Phaedrus, and Critias. At once radically revisionist and entirely reasonable, each chapter takes seriously the blatant irony of Plato’s discourse, from which the interpretive tradition, including Derrida, has shielded its eyes: as Berger shows, the Platonic text, which spurns the written word in favor of the spoken one, is itself very much written, not spoken, and, in a further irony, it is the only record of the Socratic method of pedagogic midwifery we have. The usual, approbative reception of this method, Berger also argues, is the result of misreading and is the opposite of Plato’s method. He enforces his argument in persuasive detail. His interpretation is well worth attention; its sobering implications, including its pedagogic ones, come from a master teacher—perhaps two master teachers. In Berger’s interpretation, Socrates’ description of his midwifery in the Theaetetus—’’The arguments never come from me; they always come from

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the person with whom I am speaking’’—is actually ‘‘a mordantly toned disclaimer of responsibility with a rueful confession of failure’’ (p. 381). In fact, Socratic midwifery is an instance of the ‘‘discourse of the other,’’ defined as an instance when what is said escapes authorial intention and becomes instead the expression of ‘‘a collective or structural agency: diffe´rance . . . or the unconscious, or the unconscious as language, or heteroglossia, or language games, or the collective discourses shaped by a society’s cultural and institutional practices’’ (p. 416). The speech acts traditionally identified with the Socratic method are actually the silencing of Socrates. In their face-to-face, charismatic, embodied presentism, they are an illusion of authenticity. In reality they become for Socrates a performance of himself that suppresses his own voice, except insofar as Plato’s ironic rendering can re-present it. Existing only in irony, as an unspoken opposite, both an implied objection and a literal absence, the Socratic dilemma historically resembles Thucydides’ critique of the decline of Athens on account of its charismatic politics. In other words, Plato’s ironic account of Socratic dialogue actually exposes the causes of Athens’s decline. Berger’s chapter on the Critias builds on these readings and goes beyond them in asserting that Plato’s characters ‘‘model states of mind, cultural attitudes, ethical stances that reflect different facets of Athenian disenchantment.’’ Likewise, the dialogues are primarily about who is discussing ideas and why and how they are doing so, rather than about the ideas themselves (p. 463). The dialogues engage the logocentric conditions that appear to enable but actually disable an intellectual exchange that is democratic. Early in the Timaeus, when Critias first appears, the totalitarian polis that Socrates describes could be a target of Socratic irony even on the face of it, and in fact it turns out to be ‘‘a Spartan caricature and Skinnerian fantasy,’’ both a critique and a warning (pp. 456–57, 466). At the end of the essay on the Protagoras, Berger reemphasizes that ‘‘the Socratic ideal of dialogue’’ materializes only in Plato’s writings ‘‘and only as an ideal which could not possibly be fulfilled.’’ The sema of Plato’s representation of representation replaces the soma of Socrates’ life: word replaces flesh. But ‘‘there is no book of Plato,’’ Berger continues, and then quotes a Platonist: ‘‘ ‘There is not and will not be any written work of Plato’s own. What are now called his are the work of a new and more

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beautiful Socrates’ ’’ (p. 414). The Platonist’s equivocal assertion leads Berger to ask, well, what if Plato’s work ‘‘was written by Socrates?’’ In assessing and ironizing my own relation to this volume, I would add, ‘‘And what if it were written by Harry?’’ Since the writing of my parting question, however, a conclusion to this book in the form of an eight-step program of critical moves has become its fifth section. This section is a helpful synopsis and handbook of Berger’s reading practices in Situated Utterances, and it is intended to make ‘‘interpretation manageable.’’ In it, with irreverent tongue hilariously in cheek, Berger ranges from recommending a daily pledge to interpretation, avoidance of the fallacy of premature evaluation, and a selfcheck for gynephobia, to advising definition of the term text, memorization of three rules of self-representation, mastery of performative duplicity, and an unending ride on the interpretive shuttle: countertext to text and back. This serio-comic codification of method is a final move toward self-ironization. Heard as voice, it is ambiguously either embodiment or, conversely, a distancing mechanism and thus ambivalently either naturalization or denaturalization. Whichever, it is a suitable ending: it is useful, yet like any other abstraction from process and discovery, by the application of Berger’s own ‘‘abstraction rule,’’ it is also a countertextual assertion of control over interpretation (p. 508). Showing his hand, Berger also focuses a historicist’s questions about the transportability of his method from one century and indeed from one millennium to another. Situated Utterances thus ends, and rightly ends, with the challenge to shuttle back to textualization, perhaps by way of another of Berger’s eleven rules, but more likely by the way of his complexly nuanced textual arguments, which I find more fascinating. In introducing what I believe is a vitally important book, my role has been to provide a road map. I’d like to step out of this role momentarily to address two challenges the book will face. One involves prior publication of most of its chapters—with the notable exception of the crucial first, as well as the twelfth and the conclusion. The other involves minor instances of repetition between chapters, an inevitable result of their having been written and published at different times. Considering these, what needs emphatically to be said is that this is not just a collection of

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occasional essays. I could hardly overstate the extent to which the conception and impact of the chapters of this book as a whole, to my mind, exceed the sum of its parts. This is not simply because the whole includes essays like the mind-stretching ‘‘From Body to Cosmos,’’ which most of us would not otherwise have encountered, although this is part of the reason. It is rather because, although the first two chapters together provide the theoretical model and raison d’eˆtre for the whole, they only find their illustration, conviction, and full meaning in the fascinating, surprising, and sometimes daunting variety of what follows. Expansion and extension of what the introductory chapters argue have much to do with this effect, but reinforcement from differing contexts—cumulative persuasiveness—does as well. The occasional repetition from chapter to chapter of fundamental positioning that results from the original, separate publication of each piece proves, in my reading, finally more helpful than distracting. After working through the complications of ‘‘Body to Cosmos,’’ for example, I was relieved to find a concise summary of their relevant axioms in ‘‘Lie of the Land,’’ and after grappling with the subtleties of the chapter on the Protagoras, I was reassured to find a summary of many of its fundamentals at the outset of the chapter on the Phaedrus. From a logical point of view, and, in Berger’s testimony, also from an autobiographical one, each chapter that succeeds ‘‘The Interpretive Shuttle,’’ including even ‘‘Bodies and Texts,’’ is a kind of building block for its highly complex finished structure. What in fact we have in these progressively unfolding chapters is the archeology of a textual theory of human institutions. Although there is some repetition here, more importantly there is a lifetime of far-reaching reflection on the significance of textuality for human culture. And in the best pedagogic spirit, here is truly a cornucopia of fruitful provocation in every sense of the word.

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part one

Situating Utterance

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one

The Interpretive Shuttle: The Structure of Critical Practice after World War II

Whenever I stop to ask myself what it is that all of us who teach and study literature have in common besides that—what we all do, what we have been doing ever since I was an undergraduate, what rules or conventions of procedure we tacitly or explicitly agree to share, in short, what it is that makes us an ‘‘interpretive community’’—the answer that keeps preferring itself as the simplest, the most economical, the most comprehensive, yet closest to the bone of practice, is this: we textualize and we detextualize. But what could that possibly mean, short of anything anyone who appropriates those terms makes it mean? How can we funnel the various senses of such well-worn and fuzzy buzz words into a compact, definitional mass so as to convert them into interpretive energy? In this essay I will first establish a set of postulates that models the structure of the New Criticism, then analyze the effects on this model of subsequent interpretive practice. The basic instruments of this project, in addition to the model, are a diagram (p. 98, below) and a dialectic. The diagram consists in a series of paired terms and concepts arranged in two columns; the dialectic consists in the conflicts and negotiations between the two 19

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columns. The terms and concepts implicated in the dialectic have been introduced over the years from a variety of authorial sites. They index a variety of interpretive practices common to the range of the ‘‘human sciences.’’ These practices include, for example, those we associate with psychoanalysis, cultural and symbolic anthropology, linguistics and semiotics, Marxist and other forms of institutional analysis, structuralism, deconstruction, New Historicism, and some of the activities that go by the name of cultural studies. The definitional account of textualizing and detextualizing is intended to elucidate—and in turn be elucidated by— the dialectical relation between the two columns. This essay, then, is an attempt both to chart and to explicate some of the transformations in critical theory and practice that have occurred over the last fifty years since the advent of the New Criticism, and in reaction to it.

New Criticism: The Postulational Model The story I have to tell is basically autobiographical, since it represents what has happened to me as a practicing critic, and is in effect the story of my continuing reeducation. But except for a few stray comments it will not be autobiographical in tone or procedure. It will be partly an analysis of and partly a meditation on changes and their implications for interpretive practice. I begin with a critical description of certain features of New Criticism, with the aim of abstracting from that diffuse body of work a set of clearly defined principles, or postulates, and showing how they compose into a model whose presuppositions regulate a wide range of practices.1 As the use of upper case suggests, the New Criticism has itself become mythologized and essentialized since its emergence during and after the Second World War. It has also been reduced to a form better wrought than in fact it actually had in order to be comfortably inurned. Its hic iacets have not always (i.e., seldom) been eulogistic. This poses a certain embarrassment to the present writer, who finds himself still kicking about in the urn, still blowing on the ashes, still trying to emerge phoenixlike into the light of the New Day. I consider myself a Reconstructed Old New Critic, and I therefore feel compelled to defend my calling, though, since I remain firmly tied to the illusion that ‘‘Reconstructed’’ is the most

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important term in the title, my defense is sure to add a few cracks to the already battered urn. There was, of course, more than one New Criticism in the period of emergence. Some of them have not, to my knowledge, succeeded in expiring as perhaps they ought, and even the ashy mythical integer has been refracted into any number of competing posthumous representations. Yet, although Frank Lentricchia has observed that ‘‘The New Criticism was . . . no monolith but an inconsistent and sometimes confused movement’’ traversed by real differences, retrospective analysis has brought out certain common themes and impulses whose continuing influence suggests to Lentricchia that if New Criticism is officially dead, ‘‘it is dead in the way that an imposing and repressive father-figure is dead.’’2 Since my aim is partly to effect a restoration of the father, I do not have a heavy investment in Lentricchia’s image. Nor am I interested in sketching yet another official portrait or parody of New Criticism. Instead, I shall describe What New Criticism Means To Me. When I was reading the handbooks and essays produced by predominantly conservative and southern critics—Understanding Poetry, Understanding Drama, The World’s Body, and The Well-Wrought Urn—I had already been corrupted by the more liberal and irreverent approaches to interpretation embodied in Seven Types of Ambiguity, Some Versions of Pastoral, and The Philosophy of Literary Form. In the long retrospect of almost a half century of practice I can see that my experience of Empson and Burke most deeply affected me.3 Even as I valued what I learned from the conservative New Critics, I found much in their work oppressive. At one extreme, I resisted what I thought were overspecific articulations of the interpretive act into such distinct categories as those of tone, imagery, diction, and so on because, although they were presented as heuristic, they ended up in practice as reified parts of a dismembered body of procedures one was supposed to reassemble according to instructions. At the other extreme, I was troubled by (what was then) a vague but sharply felt sense that I was being preached to, was being told what to value and dismiss, and that this was in some way being smuggled in under the surface of an earnest, disinterested, benign, indeed often condescending pedagogy: moral instruction embedded in sugar-coated technical instruction. That impression became less vague when I came to learn more about some of the political and cultural agendas behind apparently diverse ex-

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amples of critical practice—’’agendas’’ is probably the wrong word, suggesting something more conspiratorial than I mean. Before the McCarthy era, when I think agendas did come into play, what existed was a moralism born of a diffuse cultural nostalgia that provided the bond of the so-called ‘‘fugitives’’ and penetrated New Critical practice in some odd thematic insistences, such as the interpretation of King Lear as a critique of rationalism. The most salient manifestation of that nostalgia is, of course, to be found in the central article of New Critical belief: the isolation, autonomy, self-sufficiency, unity, and completeness of the literary work as a ‘‘world.’’4 This was clearly the product of an attempt to shelter a paradisiacal activity of reading that could regreen a sense of value everywhere bleached out by the arid landscape of science and consumer capitalism. The aestheticism of this ideology has often been criticized, but I want to direct your attention to its structural implication. Before New Criticism, when the study of literature was treated as a branch of history or the history of ideas or the Arnoldian inculcation of morality and taste, literature was embedded in something conceived of as existing before, around, and outside language, discourse, and poetry. This something was called the real world, as studied by historians and others, and literature was treated as evidence of, or a reflection of, the particular versions of the so-called real world that historians and others constructed. On the face of it, New Criticism seemed to liberate literature from this imprisonment. But in fact it was complicit in sustaining the priority and authority of those naturalized constructions of the real world, because it exiled the author, the reader, and their respective contexts from interpretation. It left them standing as unexamined givens; it fenced them off as the irrelevant Outside of literary study so as to produce New Criticism’s ‘‘cognitive’’ focus on the self-sufficient object called ‘‘poem.’’ For all these reasons, I agree with the many critics who’ve justified unraveling the New Critical enterprise. But I also want to argue that several decades of unraveling have made it possible for us not only to see the positive features of the enterprise but also to restore them in a new form. In fact, my argument is that this is exactly what has been happening in those decades: there is a describable continuity between New Criticism and all the subsequent developments that seem to have rendered it obso-

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lete. This isn’t a continuity of influence; New Criticism had little or no influence in postwar France, where many of these developments were already under way. It’s a continuity of structure, and my purpose here is not to give a history of the changes but to define the underlying structure in terms of which the changes have occurred, the structure that has indeed been continuously reproduced and reaffirmed by the changes in practice and theory. I don’t for a moment mean to imply that the garden wall of New Critical aestheticism circumscribed some oasis of pure poetry, some golden age of faith and community.5 The garden of literature was full of snakes, toads, weeds, and rotten apples. The point is, rather, that the claims made for literature’s inclusiveness and impurity—its tensions, paradoxes, complexities, and all that—tended to aestheticize them by immuring them in a garden of reading. The moral and political implications of aestheticism come out most clearly in moments when its latent didactic impulse is apologetically acknowledged, as it is by Wimsatt and Brooks in the epilogue to their Literary Criticism: A Short History: Of course the reflective and responsible theorist will say that he doesn’t call evil itself, or division, or conflict, desirable things. He is sure, however, that facing up to them, facing up to the human predicament, is a desirable and mature state of soul and the right model and source of a mature poetic art. But again, with a certain accent, that may sound somewhat like telling a boy at a baseball game that the contest is not really important but only his noticing that there is a contest. That is the accent I remember, and its echo is not dimmed by a subsequent comment in which the interpretive elite reflectively and responsibly build the wall higher: ‘‘The great works and the fine works of literature seem to need evil—just as much as the cheap ones, the adventure or detective stories. Evil or the tension of strife with evil is welcomed and absorbed into the structure of the story, the rhythm of the song. The literary spirit flourishes in evil and couldn’t get along without it.’’6 The canonizing gesture that makes inclusiveness a criterion of exclusion is inseparable from the properly ‘‘cognitive’’ function of criticism, as Wimsatt calls it. In another context, however, Wimsatt makes a much

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stronger claim for the meaningfulness and usefulness of the cognitive function, a claim based not on an ethical criterion of exclusiveness but on an epistemological and rhetorical criterion of difference: Poetic symbols—largely through their iconicity at various levels—call attention to themselves as symbols and in themselves invite evaluation. What may seem stranger is that the verbal symbol in calling attention to itself must also call attention to the difference between itself and the reality which it resembles and symbolizes. . . . Iconicity enforces disparity. The symbol has more substance than a noniconic symbol and hence is more clearly realized as a thing separate from its referents and as one of the productions of our own spirit. Seeing a work of art, says Ortega y Gasset, is seeing the window pane with the garden pasted behind it, or the world inverted into the belvedere of our own concepts. . . . As a stone sculpture of a human head in a sense means a human head but in another sense is a carved mass of stone and a metaphor of a head (one would rather have one’s head carved in stone than in cheese), so a poem in its various levels and relations of meaning has a kind of rounded being or substance and a metaphoric relation to reality.7 Wimsatt’s critical dualism draws its energy from the heroic effort to harmonize yet sustain the disparity between the claims of two conflicting cognitive orientations, one hermeneutic and the other protreptic: one focused on the complexity and integrity of the work, its ‘‘truth of coherence,’’ its ‘‘poetic value’’; the other focused on its relation to ‘‘moral value’’—on the need to ‘‘recognize the metaphoric capacities of language and the moral importance of valid linguistic expression without surrendering our conception of truth as a thing beyond language.’’8 His use of the metaphor of metaphor to characterize the tensional relation between poetry and reality that this dualistic perspective constitutes testifies to a healthy distrust of any reconciling formula, an unwillingness to articulate the relation in more specific or analytic terms. As Christopher Ricks has remarked in a moving eulogy, Wimsatt’s ‘‘particular forte’’ is ‘‘his ability to argue very strictly on behalf of ‘loose’ and limber concepts or principles,’’ like the principle that the poem is a metaphor.9

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The dangers in the position adhere to the images with which the passage cited above conveys its iconic concreteness. What, exactly, lies behind the garden pasted behind the window pane? I am perhaps unaccountably reminded of the precarious belvedere of Isabel Archer’s mind in James’s Portrait of a Lady, and of the green door in Albany beyond which she dares not look. And why the hilarious aside about stone and cheese? Those symbols, however casually introduced, ‘‘invite evaluation’’—between, say, ‘‘the great. . . . and the fine works of literature’’ carved in stone to endure our contemplation and ‘‘the cheap ones’’ we consume. Isn’t cheese one of the productions of our own spirit? Isn’t the engendered body another? And would one rather have one’s head carved (and why would one?) by itself, apart from the gendered, cheese-eating body? The heroic pastoral of New Criticism consigns to extramural invisibility not only the intentions and affections of author and reader, but also those that motivate the interpreter’s cognitions. It is nevertheless true that the formula ‘‘Iconicity enforces disparity’’ brilliantly—and prophetically—encapsulates in an epigram the structural dynamics on which much subsequent criticism would focus: the fraught relations not only of semiotic with rhetorical and referential fields of activity but also of textual with intratextual and extratextual fields of activity. In a relatively early critique, Robert Scholes observed that for the New Critics ‘‘the ambiguity of the text is an objective correlative of a purely contemplative state in the reader, who recognizes that the text is not seeking to denote a reality but to connote an elegantly balanced aesthetic structure.’’10 I think that, given its etymology, ‘‘contemplative’’ catches the implications of the attitude better than ‘‘cognitive’’: contemplatio is what one does in a templum, a space marked off for augury or visionary survey or sanctuary; its Greek forebears are temnein (to cut) and temenos, not only a chief ’s stronghold but also ‘‘a piece of land cut off from common uses and dedicated to a god’’; in this case, the god Hermes.11 The fact that our word contempt comes from the same root may suggest the slanderous turn this portrait of New Criticism seems to be taking. If anything has come to appear obvious, it is that New Criticism democratized literary study, releasing it from a higher humanism that masters of taste and erudition sought to instill in select cadres of gentleman scholars and oligarchs. New Criticism enabled ‘‘even the meanest student who

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lacked the scholarly information of his betters’’ to make ‘‘valid comments on the language and structure of the text.’’ This statement seems all the more credible in being a concession with which Jonathan Culler prefaces his argument that ‘‘what is good for literary education is not necessarily good for the study of literature in general,’’ and that the task for literary study is to move beyond the interpretation of ‘‘one work after another’’ toward inquiry into literature as an institution.12 In a different manner, of course, New Critical contemplation cuts off its piece of land from common uses. ‘‘In the name of improved interpretation,’’ Scholes writes, ‘‘reading was turned into a mystery and the literature classroom into a chapel where the priestly instructor (who knew the authors, dates, titles, biographies, and general provenance of the texts) astounded the faithful with miracles of interpretation.’’ Instructors who used that parenthetically immured knowledge ‘‘officially asserted that such material was irrelevant to the interpretive process,’’ and this was not a question of ‘‘conscious fraud’’ but a consequence of the commitment to ‘‘the notion of the bounded, self-sufficient work.’’13 Though their projects differ considerably, Scholes and Culler agree about the need to destroy the hegemony of an interpretive method that invests its power in an aristocracy of canonized works. Where Culler is against the continued focus on interpretation, Scholes is for it. He not only advocates but also demonstrates an interpretive method based on an eclectic semiotic approach to the literariness of texts considered as acts of communication (‘‘literary’’ in his lexicon means dominated by ‘‘duplicitous’’ communicative features).14 He bases his move beyond New Criticism on the distinction between work and text: A text, as opposed to a work, is open, incomplete, insufficient. This is not a quality inherent in any particular piece of writing . . . but only a way of regarding such a piece of writing or any other combination of signs. The same set of words can be regarded as either a work or a text. As a text, however, a piece of writing must be understood as the product of a person or persons, at a given point in human history, in a given form of discourse, taking its meanings from the interpretive gestures of individual readers using the grammatical, semantic, and cultural codes available to them.15

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From this standpoint, New Criticism is simply a set of closure techniques for blocking textuality and constructing works. These techniques were based on the selection of discriminative criteria (organic unity, tension, ambiguity, etc.) in which the descriptive and the evaluative were strategically confused. Therefore the criteria for producing the work were at the same time the criteria for producing the canon of works worthy of being Newly Criticized. New Criticism was a seminary for oysters, not clams, and its divers not only extracted the pearls from textual shells but also assembled them in strings.16 Transforming texts into works and canons, it placed them in contrastive relation to nonworks and nonfiction. A basic premise of New Criticism was that certain writings but not others were entitled to be treated as works because of their intrinsic qualities rather than because of decisions to treat them that way. There were literature and nonliterature, or good and bad literature, or classy writing and everything else, which amounted to the detritus of mass culture. The high intensity of New Critical practice derives from the narrow focus of its lectorial beam. It picks out and penetrates a privileged set of linguistic artifacts, marks them off in a luminous, self-englobing space, and fills the space with the jouissance, or juice, of what Terry Eagleton calls the ‘‘lemon-squeezing style of analysis.’’17 Culler’s countermove from work to text is similar to Scholes’s in its objective and responds to that double mode of production:18 arguing that literary study should deemphasize the production of ‘‘interpretations of works,’’ he urges teachers to ‘‘think of literature not as a hallowed sequence of works defined by literary history but as a species of writing, a mode of representation, that occupies a very problematic role in the cultures in which our students live.’’ As Scholes proposes to extend the hegemony of literary study by pursuing literariness throughout the entire domain of sign production and communication, so Culler wants us to appreciate ‘‘the importance and pervasiveness of structures that we traditionally regard as ‘literary,’ ’’ to explore ‘‘textuality’’ in nonliterary as well as literary discourse, and, above all, to explore the theoretical problems that beset any inquiry into ‘‘the relationship between the literary and the nonliterary.’’19

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The most problematic register in which this relationship is formulated, one that impinges directly on New Critical practice, is the theme of fiction. Meditating on that theme in the mid-1960s, Frank Kermode finds it ‘‘surprising, given the range and minuteness of modern literary theory, that nobody, so far as I know, has ever tried to relate the theory of literary fictions to the theory of fictions in general.’’20 He takes the influence of Vaihinger’s philosophy of ‘‘as if ’’ on Wallace Stevens as his starting point and goes on to discuss fictional emplotment in history writing, in the organization of time and space, in theology, and in modern physics. Culler, referring to Kermode’s discussion a decade or more later, still finds that ‘‘we ought to understand much more than we do about the effects of fictional discourse. . . . What is the status and what is the role of fictions, or, to pose the same kind of problem in another way, what are the relations (the historical, the psychic, the social relationships) between the real and the fictive?’’21 Our failure to understand these things is ‘‘in part due to the preeminent role accorded interpretation,’’ which is ‘‘the legacy of the New Criticism.’’22 This kind of historical accounting, appropriate to Culler’s polemical purpose, skims over the problem shrewdly if impressionistically formulated by Kermode. But the problem becomes discernible when we superimpose Culler’s reference to relations between the fictive and the real on his reference to relations between the literary and the nonliterary. The New Critical tendency to enclose fictiveness in works defined as literary diverted attention from the fictiveness of the nonliterary and the ‘‘real.’’ It diverted attention from precisely the large questions explored in Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending. For example, the aestheticized morality of New Criticism, welcoming evil into the work and proclaiming that the literary spirit can’t get along without it, shows poorly when confronted with such events as the Holocaust: ‘‘How, in such a situation, can our paradigms of concord, our beginnings and ends, our humanly ordered picture of the world satisfy us, make sense? . . . If King Lear is an image of the promised end, so is Buchenwald; and both stand under the accusation of being horrible, rootless fantasies, the one no more true or more false than the other, so that the best you can say is that King Lear does less harm.’’ Of course there are differences, since

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anti-Semitism is a fiction of escape which tells you nothing about death but projects it onto others; whereas King Lear is a fiction that inescapably involves an encounter with oneself and the image of one’s end. This is one difference; and there is another. We have to distinguish between myths and fictions. Fictions can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive. In this sense antiSemitism is a degenerate fiction, a myth; and Lear is a fiction.23 Kermode then itemizes the types of nonliterary fictions discussed by Vaihinger and concludes with ‘‘what Vaihinger calls, in words remembered by Stevens, ‘the last and greatest fiction,’ ‘the fiction of an Absolute.’ ’’24 Such explorations of the contrast between literary and nonliterary fictions, and between fiction and ‘‘myth,’’ cannot be undertaken from within the premises of New Criticism. A practice that leaves the Real standing immaculate outside the domain of fiction and that refers the adequacy of literary representations to some reified and dehistoricized standard of absolute good and evil cannot avoid being ideological, cannot avoid falling into myth, whether it means to or not. The New Critical templum or garden of works is situated, like the Terrestrial Paradise, in a domain of higher fiction: below the higher actuality of the Real; above the Weberian iron cage of a lower actuality where the degraded fictions of ‘‘adventure or detective stories’’ flourish like parasites hosted by the infernal triad of bureaucracy, technology, science.25 The fictiveness of this paradise, being ‘‘one of the productions of our own spirit,’’ guarantees the priority and independence of the Real. But if, as Wimsatt claims, the verbal icon produces this guarantee by calling attention both to itself and to its difference from what it refers to, if ‘‘iconicity enforces disparity,’’ the disparity is, nevertheless, qualified or limited, since it obtains between an icon and a ‘‘reality which it resembles and symbolizes.’’26 As in the example of imago dei, the postulate of resemblance allows the icon to assimilate itself to or even participate in the higher reality.27 Thus although it is not as pure as Marvell’s dewdrop, although it does not exclude the World, the ‘‘little Globes Extent’’ contemplated by New Criticism shares some of that ‘‘Figure’s’’ disdain: ‘‘Dark beneath, but bright above: / Here disdaining, there in Love.’’ This, then, is the substance of a brief against the New Criticism. It is a brief with which I largely concur, and I have given what I take to be a

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fairly harsh formulation of the critique, which may indeed seem both unjust and facile. I do so because I’m convinced that the sum of New Critical parts is greater than the whole, and that the insights inscribed in those parts must be extricated from the blindness of the whole if their power is to be realized. Since my account of New Criticism has so far been impressionistic, I shall now articulate these ‘‘parts,’’ prefacing my analysis with two cautionary remarks: 1. The scheme or model that follows is not put forward as an objective or comprehensive description and takes no account of differences among the always fluctuating number of practitioners admitted into what Cleanth Brooks wryly calls ‘‘the guild.’’28 It describes no more than my own sense of New Criticism—what I have both used and struggled against in my own practice—and, since it is the product of retrospective reflection, it probably represents my present interests more accurately than those I have in previous pages attributed to my New Critical salad days. 2. The model is retrospective in another way. It depicts New Criticism as being held together by a cluster of overlapping postulates. Several of them may seem redundant, and my reason for listing them separately is that they represent different facets or emphases that become more significant when the structure is decomposed. I have, in effect, constructed the model in terms of later critical developments. There are six facets—or postulates, as I shall call them from now on. I list them below in three pairs, each of which speaks to a recognizable set of interrelated concerns. 1. The structural postulate of organic unity, which underwrites the integrity of the work and is challenged by theories of the text and intertextuality. 2. The aesthetic postulate of self-sufficiency: construing the work as autonomous and autotelic makes it the proper object of a ‘‘cognitive’’ and ‘‘disinterested’’ attention, protects it from the intentional and affective orientations of the older criticism, and subsequently, therefore, exposes the construal to the reconstructed forms of those orientations in semiotic theories of text production, reception theory, reader re-

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sponse theory, and so on, all of which raise questions about any claims to disinterestedness.29 3. The deictic postulate of the dissociation of the text and its speaker or ‘‘point of view’’ from the author, which encourages the interpretive pursuit of ‘‘unbound’’ or ‘‘surplus’’ meaning (unbound by the author’s intention and exceeding that of the speaker or narrator), and which has been not so much challenged as radicalized by expansion into theories of the text and of the subject. 4. The rhetorical postulate of the work’s complexity, irony, ambiguity, and the like, subsequently radicalized in the intensification of ‘‘duplicity’’ to undecidability and in its extension to all discourse, understood as the discourse of one or several kinds of Other. 5. The cosmological postulate of the work as ‘‘in some sense’’ (the evasion is useful) a fully meaningful world, that is, as embodying a coherent world view; this adds to the structural and aesthetic postulates the implication that the work as microcosm makes some kind of ‘‘statement’’ about the macrocosm, and it is vulnerable to ideological analysis. 6. The epistemic postulate of the fictiveness or imaginariness of the work, which is, so to speak, wrapped around the other five postulates; fictive circumscription detaches the second world of the work, and, although it elicits ‘‘disinterested’’ interpretation, it also presents itself as a representation, an image of the first world; as such, it offers a kind of play or staging ground for the serio ludere rewarded by fuller knowledge of ‘‘the human predicament’’ than is possible in the hustle of the iron cage. This postulate is also vulnerable to ideological analysis, to the charges that there are interests in interpretation and that the fictiveness of the actual world has been neutralized. The six postulates provide the means of production by which works are manufactured from textual raw material and placed on the interpretive market presided over by Hermes. I noted earlier that New Criticism (or at least the practice I was first familiar with) was held together by this model, but it is better to say that the postulates were held, indeed squeezed, together by the interpretive, academic, and cultural interests of the practitioners who contributed to its assemblage and often collabo-

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rated in its maintenance. From the fact that different if related critical forces press on each postulate, I deduce that even where the postulates seem virtually identical, as 1 and 2 do, and perhaps also 5 and 6, they have divergent theoretical implications; redundancy, mutual reinforcement, may provide the attractive counterforce that binds them together so that their interdependence lends each postulate more theoretical power than it actually has and thus defers the working of the centrifugal logic discernible in the developments that decomposed the model. There is, for example, a significant contradiction between the requirement of autotelic organicity (1 and 2) and the referential skew of 5 and 6. The first pair of postulates encodes strategies of decontextualization that distinguish ‘‘art’’ from ‘‘life,’’ confine the interpretive gaze within the boundaries of the ‘‘work,’’ and privilege the self-rewarding acts of attention performed in the presence of so complex a unity. The third pair encodes strategies of contextualization that distinguish but interrelate the work and the world, fiction and ‘‘reality,’’ art and morality, the forms of representation and the meaning they induce from the ‘‘experience’’ they represent. These four postulates provide defensive reinforcement against the older criticism and lend moral weight to the new enterprise. The two pairs run in seemingly opposed directions, the first inward and the third outward. This tension is mitigated by foregrounding the operations specified in the second pair, since 3 and 4 are the active kernel of New Criticism and remain its most significant legacy. But the opposition they mediate, when viewed as a sequence, is familiar: the ancient pattern of withdrawal and return. The aestheticism of the inward flight is justified by the claim that, unlike the structures of science, prose, and daily life in capitalism, the structures of art and poetry are deliberately organized to offer the devout interpreter a ‘‘redeemed vision’’ of ‘‘experience’’ in the world dominated by science, prose, and capitalistic reason—a ‘‘truer,’’ more adequate, perspicuous, and so on image of itself than the world (from which the work has been subtracted) would proffer of its own accord. The organization of the postulates thus has ideological implications that, as my language must suggest, I don’t find very attractive. Despite the surface inconsistency or tension between the tendencies of the first and third pairs, the model has arguable theoretical coherence, a coherence that constricts the range of interpretive possibilities latent in the individ-

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ual postulates. Thus I welcome critiques of New Criticism, even though I find many of them off target. It has been too easy for its critics to single out the ideological issue or to harp on apparent logical inconsistencies and then to illustrate these flaws in the work of this or that practitioner. But critiques of this sort tend to be trivial, because they do not take into account the structure of the model and the work it does. For example, the kind of inconsistency Gerald Graff triumphantly exposes in Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma is merely a symptom of the ideological pattern that gives the structure of the model its equilibrium. It is by no means peculiar to the practices of New Critics. My model of New Criticism is intended to exhibit an ‘‘objective’’ structure, which has a specific historical provenance, one that New Critics have themselves obscured, and which gives the model positive value as an instrument of historical analysis. It remains true, however, that the generative power of the postulates is inhibited by the ideological skew of the model. Post–New Critical theory and practice have shown how to realize this power, and in the next section I shall explore two paths out of the model that have been, or can be, taken. The first puts pressure on the postulates of organic unity and aesthetic autonomy; the second entails a new approach to the deictic and rhetorical postulates.

Reconstructing the Old New Criticism (1): Intertexual and Extratextual Routes Out of the Model Recent developments have led, on the one hand, to broadening the scope of textual hermeneutics well beyond the domain of traditional literary criticism and, on the other hand, to more ‘‘politicized’’ variants of the practice once associated with the New Criticism. Of course, ‘‘recent’’ is misleading, since much of what I shall describe has been going on for a long time, much antedates the heyday of New Criticism, and in many cases the ‘‘developments’’ may have occurred with no awareness of or debt to New Criticism. When I speak of the disassembling of the model and the subsequent career of its postulates, I am concocting a narrative that is fictional in all respects but one: it corresponds to my own experience and practice over the years, and perhaps to those of others in my generation. Many of us who were inducted into the community of the

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model and have followed the different filaments of our practice along paths leading to foreign shores find them rewoven in the volatile and interpenetrating fields of inquiry that produce the texture of the ‘‘human sciences.’’ For me that meander has been almost as problematical as it has been revelatory, and my purpose in this study is to some extent reactionary: it is to resist the drift away from the model without sacrificing the increase of interpretive power released by the drift, to inscribe the traces of a reconstructed old New Criticism in the postulates in flight from the model. I begin with a summary of the logical trajectory imposed on this flight by my fictional narrative. Its precondition is the breaking down of the barriers erected around the work by the structural and aesthetic postulates. This leads to the universalized application of the deictic postulate and problematizes the intentional framework, in whose terms the rhetorical postulate guides interpretive practice. The breakdown of the distinction between work and nonwork puts the cosmological and epistemic postulates in question by threatening the distinctions between (1) the aesthetic microcosm and the macrocosm it represents, and (2) fiction and nonfiction. Interpretive processes and categories that the model confines to the language and ‘‘world’’ of literature or art transgress their boundaries to participate in ‘‘the social construction of reality,’’ ‘‘ways of worldmaking,’’ ‘‘the discourse of the other,’’ and the constitution of the subject by ideology, language, or ‘‘power/knowledge.’’ The material basis of aesthetic autonomy is suggested in Catherine Belsey’s remark that the weakness of New Criticism ‘‘originates in the attempt to locate meaning in a single place, in the words of the text, ‘on the page.’ ’’30 Autonomy is secured by identifying ‘‘the words of the text’’ with their material signifiers ‘‘on the page.’’ The New Critics, as Walter Ong puts it, ‘‘assimilated the verbal art work to the visual object-world’’ and ‘‘insisted that the poem or other literary work be regarded as an object, a ‘verbal icon.’ ’’31 It is significant, and hardly surprising, that much talk about organic unity is carried on in terms that subordinate temporal process to spatial form—the verbal artwork as icon, image, world, well-wrought urn. The dynamic implications of organic process are too easily transformed by the concept of organic unity into the static image of the parts and whole of a visualizable integer protectively en-

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closed within imaginary outlines. The beginning, middle, and end are those of a finished product, like a page or a book. The structural unity and aesthetic autonomy of the work are guaranteed by the reductive identification of the text with the words on the page in the book. Its material position underwrites the work’s independent existence. So blatant an example of ‘‘the fallacy of simple location’’ is an obvious target and has often been criticized for screening out those systems of differences, or ‘‘discursive formations,’’ within which and against which the work participates in the logically more tenable kind of uniqueness conferred by its position in the system.32 Such systems have been distinguished as intertextual and extratextual. Critics of New Criticism have exploited their possibilities to show how they can remove the barriers established by the structural and aesthetic postulates, and open up two paths out of the postulational space of the model. In the first, the concept of intertextuality is employed to dissociate the text from the page and the work simply located. In the second, the intimate relation of text to page is emphasized in all its materiality to produce a very different orientation toward the interplay of work and text with their extratextual environment. I shall now discuss examples of each approach, noting by way of preface that the distinction between intertextual and extratextual is itself relative to specific interpretive projects: it is sometimes useful to distinguish them as intersecting coordinates of the discursive field within which the work is located and which the work represents; for other purposes, the extratextual may be subsumed under an expanded concept of intertextuality so that cultural and institutional contexts are approached on the model of the work or the text. the intertextual approach. Jonathan Culler’s brief account of intertextuality in The Pursuit of Signs says all that needs to be said about the topic: ‘‘Intertextuality’’ . . . has a double focus. On the one hand, it calls our attention to the importance of prior texts, insisting that the autonomy of texts is a misleading notion and that a work has the meaning it does only because certain things have previously been written. Yet insofar as it focuses on intelligibility, on meaning, ‘‘intertextuality’’ leads us to consider prior texts as contributions to a code which makes

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possible the various effects of signification. Intertextuality thus becomes less a name for a work’s relation to particular prior texts than a designation of its participation in the discursive space of a culture. . . . The study of intertextuality is thus not the investigation of sources and influences as traditionally conceived; it casts its net wider to include anonymous discursive practices, codes whose origins are lost, that make possible the signifying practices of later texts. (p. 103) The final sentence indicates how the traditional procedures suppressed by New Criticism have been recuperated on the entirely new basis of a structural or synchronic systematics in which the work is inscribed, which it presupposes, and which makes its particular ‘‘effects of signification’’ possible. Culler illustrates ‘‘the dangers that beset the notion of intertextuality’’ (p. 109) with sympathetic critiques of the way Riffaterre, Kristeva, and Bloom conceive and deploy it: on the one hand, its theoretical focus is on a general and anonymous discursive space; on the other hand, their intertextual practice puts the general theory in question by seeking out particular pretexts and precursors. Advocating a flexible and variable procedure with ‘‘multiple strategies’’ and ‘‘different focuses’’ (p. 111), Culler nevertheless agrees with Kristeva’s statement that ‘‘every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it’’ (quoted on p. 105), and I find telling the implied emphasis on imposition and jurisdiction in his insistence that the task of poetics is to relate a literary work to a whole series of other works, treating them not as sources but as constituents of a genre, for example, whose conventions one attempts to infer. One is interested in conventions which govern the production and interpretation of character, of plot structure, of thematic synthesis, of symbolic condensation and displacement. In all these cases there are no moments of authority except those which are retrospectively designated as origins and which, therefore, can be shown to derive from the series for which they are constituted as origin. (p. 117) As Culler describes it, the series, the code, the system of conventions, the genre govern the construction of a particular text. And the passages

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cited make clear that he conceives of the ‘‘discursive space’’ of intertextuality in diachronic as well as synchronic terms: earlier and later texts form the series through which the system of conventions, genre, and so on is elaborated and continuously modified. This raises a question about the sources of power and authority. Who or what retrospectively designates moments of authority, and what does it mean to say they ‘‘derive from the series’’? Toward the end of his discussion, Culler momentarily wavers from his emphasis on the hegemony of ‘‘the series’’ or of general discursive space and gestures toward an alternative approach, which is ‘‘to look at the specific presuppositions of a given text, the way in which it produces a pre-text, an intertextual space whose occupants may or may not correspond to other actual texts. The goal of this project would be an account of how texts create presuppositions and hence pre-texts for themselves’’ (p. 118). This implies a different relationship between the given text and its intertextual environment, one in which the lines of force and ‘‘moments of authority’’ derive not from the series but from the text. Culler, however, doesn’t develop this alternative. He merely states it as the first of two useful if ‘‘limited approaches to intertextuality’’ and goes on to restore his major emphasis in describing the second: ‘‘a poetics which is less interested in the occupants of that intertextual space which makes a work intelligible than in the conventions which underlie that discursive activity or space’’ (p. 118). I think both the first alternative and the functional relation between the two deserve more attention and articulation than Culler gives them, and I shall briefly illustrate this contention with the genre of epic, in which the creation of generic presuppositions and pre-texts is especially salient. Any intertextual series may be viewed in the complementary perspectives that Saussure called prospective and retrospective. When the series of epic poems inaugurated by Homer is viewed prospectively, as if from the past forward, it may appear to be the continuous development of a formal paradigm that accommodates variations and revisions, and is subject to few revolutionary violations of ‘‘paradigm-induced’’ expectations. From this standpoint, revisions sequentially effected by Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, Spenser, Milton, and even Wordsworth only confirm the durability of normal epic practice, the flexibility with which the paradigm ‘‘evolves’’ by adjusting to changes that ‘‘bring it up to date.’’ But when viewed

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retrospectively or ‘‘preposterously,’’ from the latest work backward, every new epic poet appears to invent his own version of the genre he ‘‘inherits’’ (represents as inherited), and to do so in order to overthrow that paradigm. From this standpoint, every canonical epic is a revolutionary crisis, an anomaly, and a paradigm shift. In this divided perspective, the ‘‘discursive space’’ of genre as a code or system of conventions assumes two conflicting aspects. On the one hand, it becomes the preexisting code that governs new practice, ‘‘impose[s] a universe on it,’’ and ‘‘makes possible the various effects of signification.’’ On the other hand, it becomes the revisionary representation or perhaps caricature of the first aspect: the new poem chooses the particular set of epic norms and precursors to be represented as its source, tradition, and target. Retrospectively, then, the code that makes the new poem’s ‘‘effects of signification’’ possible is itself an effect of the new poem’s signifying strategies. Thus we return, though in qualified measure, to a focus on the autonomy of the new poem and on the uniqueness not only of its bounded form as a verbal icon but also of the discursive space, the generic universe, it constitutes ‘‘outside itself ’’ as the condition of its possibility. Given this complementarity, it might be thought that the best way to establish both the evolving structure of the generic paradigm and the uniqueness of the new poem’s retrospect would be to compare the two perspectives. I don’t think this a tenable procedure because the generic paradigm, along with its prospectively determined ‘‘evolution,’’ is a fantasy produced either by an academic tradition of interpreters who abstract and reify the genre or by the new poem’s retrospect itself. The existence and character of the genre as an intertextual ‘‘space’’ or system can be established only by close interpretation of the poems that announce their membership in the genre, interpretations that attend to the way they characterize it and attend also to poems that define themselves over against it in such parasitic antigenres as mock epic and Alexandrian bucolics. The ‘‘epic tradition’’ then emerges as a series of representations of epic that poems set up as points of departure, and the resultant picture of repetitions and differences provides a profile that, ranging over the series, becomes that reader’s (or those readers’) representation of the genre.

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Now, at least in the case of epic, the new poem’s retrospective characterization tends to identify the genre with one or more particular precursors. This confronts the reader with the task of comparing, for example, Homer’s practice with his representation of epic conventions, Homer’s practice and representation with Virgil’s practice and his representation of Homer’s practice and representation, and so forth. Such an intertextual approach to epic resolves into a series of close readings that situate intertextual space within each poem as a fictitious projection of its ‘‘external’’ generic context, and these readings may well conform to the principles of the model even as they revise or ignore distinctions the model enjoins: distinctions between the autonomous text and its literary historical context, between literary and nonliterary (in this case, historical) interpretation, between the bounded ‘‘interior’’ of the fictional microcosm and its nonfictional ‘‘exterior’’ in the intertextual macrocosm of the generic code. Thus in the retrospective view to which the postulates give primacy, the poem circumscribed by the model becomes the constitutive source both of itself and of the intertextual universe around it. Later, I shall generalize this proposition, arguing that a reconstructed version of the model enables us both to extend the interpretive operations of the postulates to any aspect of the world beyond the work and to introject that aspect into the still circumscribed interior of the work. Conceived in this manner, what intertextual study opens up is not so much a way out of the New Critical model, a way that reduces the interpretation of texts to an ancilla of poetics (the program advocated by The Pursuit of Signs), as a way that takes the model with it, by turns dilating and contracting the scope of its application: first expanding the reach of its postulates beyond the work into the discursive space of its literary or cultural or institutional contexts, then driving those contexts back into the interior of the work. A first approach to any poem in the HomericVirgilian series considers how it presents or displays the traces of its precursors and the conventions of its genre. Further interpretive elaboration transforms those traces and conventions from presented to represented features and probes for the possibility of an ideological skew to the representation of epic norms—that is, the possibility that the representation of precursors and norms is ambivalent or critical and is directed outward toward a similarly toned representation of contemporary culture

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and institutions. Thus Alasdair MacIntyre’s observation that ‘‘epic and saga . . . portray . . . a society which already embodies the form of epic or saga’’33 contains an implied proposal for expanding the model to the ambience of heroic poetry in aristocratic society, but ‘‘portray’’ begs an important question, namely, whether the portrayal merely reproduces aristocratic ideology or represents it in the more complex and distanced perspective that Althusser ascribes to ‘‘art’’ and the novel: What art makes us see . . . is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes. . . . Balzac and Solzhenitsyn give us a ‘‘view’’ of the ideology to which their work alludes and with which it is constantly fed, a view which presupposes a retreat, an internal distantiation from the very ideology from which their novels emerged. They make us ‘‘perceive’’ (but not know) in some sense from the inside, by an internal distance, the very ideology in which they are held. . . . Neither . . . gives us any knowledge of the world they describe, they only make us ‘‘see,’’ ‘‘perceive’’ or ‘‘feel’’ the reality of the ideology of that world.34 To ‘‘ ‘see’ the reality of the ideology’’—as opposed to the conceptual or analytical knowledge that science gives of the same object—is to see that it is imaginary, that it represents itself as reality, that it is enunciated as such from specific sites of power, and that it is deeply inscribed in the individuals whom it constitutes or ‘‘interpellates’’ as subjects.35 Internal distance or detachment makes the epic poem a commentary on and not merely a reflection of the society and ideology it represents, the Iliad on early Hellenic ideology, the Aeneid on Augustan ideology, the Divine Comedy on the multiple clashing ideologies precariously equilibrated in the super-ideology of Christianitas (pagan and Christian, imperial and ecclesiastical and civic, Augustinian and Thomistic). But this commentary on what the poem represents as its extratextual referent gains added force by being mapped onto its distanced intertextual commentary on precursors: the Odyssey’s commentary on the Iliad brings out contradictions in the heroic/aristocratic code; the Aeneid shows how Augustan ideology activates and cloaks its contradictions in an archaic Homeric vestment; the Divine Comedy ideologizes putative realities of the present by assimilating them to the literary fictions of the poem’s heroic and

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courtly predecessors. In each case the commentary is produced by distinguishing the extratextual from the intertextual environment and then making them intersect. The interpretive commentary on this commentary is in turn produced by expanding the operation of the postulates into the different ‘‘spaces’’ of the two environments and contracting those interpreted ‘‘spaces’’ into the ‘‘space’’ of the work. So far I have surveyed an intertextual path out of the model and given some very rough indications of the way this approach could be reincorporated in a revised application of the postulates. The second or more strictly extratextual path may be anticipated by observing that it is one thing to explore a series of poems connected by intertextual allusion, the latest poem linking itself to precursors in the generic space it represents, and quite another thing to compare poems that are not so linked yet still display generic similarities—Beowulf and the Aeneid, for example, or, more generally, any of the northern series of epics or sagas (Icelandic, Teutonic) with each other and with the classical/medieval/renaissance series rooted in Homeric epic. In such cases, poems that are not intertextually connected exhibit the common extratextual norms of structurally analogous social, political, and cultural institutions and their discourses. For example, the instituted discourse of honor has its own logic, dynamic, and contradictions, and these manifest themselves in the conflictive politics of gender, generation, gift exchange, and competing social groups (family, kin group, polity, war band, etc.). The fact that the manifestations display marked similarity in such unrelated poems as Beowulf and the Homeric epics testifies to the extratextual influence on epic norms and forms suggested in MacIntyre’s comment. What remains to be seen is how those extratextual discourses can be accommodated to intratextual and New Critical interpretation. Some clues in Culler’s discussion point toward a particular topic of extratextual research that in recent decades has become very important, and I shall begin there. the extratextual approach. Culler’s proposal for two limited approaches to intertextuality is modeled on a distinction linguists make between two kinds of presuppositions—logical and pragmatic—‘‘at work in a natural language’’ (p. 111). A sentence implies or creates a logical presupposition when the proposition it expresses entails prior proposi-

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tions: ‘‘Presuppositions are what must be true in order that a proposition be either true or false. Thus, It surprised me that John bought a car presupposes that John bought a car, as does It didn’t surprise me that John bought a car’’ (ibid.). This ‘‘modest intertextuality in relating sentences of a text to another set of sentences which they presuppose’’ takes on ‘‘considerable importance in literature,’’ in the form of what Barthes has called the de´ja` lu, the intertext of ‘‘anonymous, undiscoverable, and nevertheless already read’’ bits of prior discourse that a text produces as its pre-text (pp. 112, 102, 114). But I want to draw attention to the other kind of presupposition, and I mention the logical kind only to enforce the contrast with pragmatic presuppositions, which ‘‘are defined not on the relations between sentences but on the relations between utterance and situation of utterance . . . Open the door presupposes, pragmatically, the presence, in a room with a door that is not open, of another person who understands English and is in a relation to the speaker which enables him to interpret this as a request or command’’ (p. 116). Culler notes that here the ‘‘analogies with the case of literature are not very rich’’ except insofar as ‘‘we take the literary utterance as a special kind of speech act, detached from a particular temporal context and placed in a discursive series formed by other members of a literary genre, so that a sentence in a tragedy, for example, is appropriately read according to conventions which are different from those which would apply in comedy’’ (ibid.). He goes on to argue that ‘‘the investigation of pragmatic presuppositions’’ in speech act theory ‘‘is similar to the task which confronts poetics’’ because in both cases ‘‘one is working on the conventions of a genre’’ (of speech act or of literature) in a manner that relates the sentence or work in question to a series of presupposed sentences or works in a generically bounded ‘‘discursive or intertextual space’’ (pp. 116–17). In this argument Culler shifts ground from the linguist’s extratextual focus on ‘‘relations between utterance and situation of utterance’’ to an intertextual focus on the conventional presuppositions to which speech act theory and poetics attend. Since the appearance of The Pursuit of Signs, considerable attention has been devoted to the study of the ‘‘situation of utterance’’ as a structure of presuppositions that profoundly influences the production, transmission, reception, interpretation, and exchange of

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messages and their meanings. In particular, the following three interrelated areas of inquiry have been opened up and explored: 1. the functional interdependence between the structural properties of media (speech, writing, print, electronic and cybernetic networks) and the institutions in which they are embedded; 2. the interdependence between those properties and the agencies of control over the production, dissemination, and appropriation of meaning; 3. the literary or graphic representation of (1) and (2), especially in texts that present themselves in ironic rather than mimetic relation to the speech acts and contexts of utterance they represent. In the following discussion of these topics, I skim quickly over the first, which has been staked out pretty well, and go more slowly over the second and third.

Reconstructing the Old New Criticism (2): Situations of Utterance in Political and Poetical Perspective ‘‘The New Critics have assimilated the verbal art work to the visual object-world of texts rather than to the oral-aural event-world.’’36 This statement is significant not only because it recalls the theme of ‘‘the words on the page’’ but also because it was written by Walter Ong, one of the pioneers in the study of communications media. Following in the footsteps of Eric Havelock and Marshall McLuhan, Ong argued that an institutional order founded on oral discourse implicates—by virtue of that foundation—a specific set of interrelated social, political, ethical, and cultural parameters. Havelock’s account of the interplay between oral and literate institutions in classical antiquity has been generalized in Ong’s study of media shifts in terms of the global effects of the progressive overlays of typographic on chirographic culture, and of (what he unfortunately calls) the ‘‘secondary orality’’ of electronic media on print culture. Ong’s explorations organize a historico-diachronic testing ground for such theories of the text as Paul Ricoeur’s structural analysis of the differences between direct and indirect, or dialogical and textual discourse. Research into the history of media has increased awareness of the ways

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the structural constraints and opportunities specific to institutions based on writing/reading differ from those of institutions that feature the direct interaction of ‘‘senders’’ and ‘‘receivers.’’ Ricoeur’s revision of hermeneutic theses borrowed from Heidegger and Gadamer makes it easier to correlate differences in media structure with differences in the relation between the meanings senders intend and those receivers appropriate. Distinguishing between event and meaning in discourse, and between utterer’s meaning and utterance meaning, he argues that in spoken discourse the latter two coincide because the production and reception of meaning occur in the same speech event. The event is characterized by immediacy because the speaker belongs to the situation of interlocution. He is there, in the genuine sense of being-there, of Da-sein. Consequently the subjective intention of the speaker and the discourse’s meaning overlap each other in such a way that it is the same thing to understand what the speaker means and what his discourse means. . . . With written discourse, however, the author’s intention and the meaning of the text cease to coincide. This dissociation . . . gives to the concept of inscription its decisive significance, beyond the mere fixation of previous oral discourse. Inscription becomes synonymous with the semantic autonomy of the text, which results from the disconnection . . . of what the author meant from what the text means. The text’s career escapes the finite horizon lived by its author. What the text means now matters more than what the author meant when he wrote it. Thus ‘‘liberated from the narrowness of the face-to-face situation’’ and ‘‘distanciated’’ from its author, the text is open to an indefinite number of readers, and, therefore, of interpretations. The opportunity for multiple readings is the dialectical counterpart of the semantic autonomy of the text. It follows that the problem of the appropriation of the meaning of the text becomes as paradoxical as that of the authorship. The right of the reader and the right of the text converge in an important struggle that generates the whole dynamic of interpretation. Hermeneutics begins where dialogue ends.37

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Whatever its flaws, this simple model provides a working hypothesis for exploring the effects the different media might have on the expression, dissemination, and appropriation of meaning in the institutional settings adjusted to the powers and limits of those media. Thus from Ong’s story of the shifts from oral to chirographic to print dominance, one can abstract a diachronic grid with the following polarized pattern: (a) increasingly amplified power of transmission of messages—greater distances, more receivers, more accurate inscription in a more permanent medium—provides more opportunities ‘‘for multiple readings,’’ which leads to (b) increasing loss of senders’ control over the received meanings. Superimposing Ricoeur’s story on Ong’s generates a model that would, for example, provide the structural coordinates of such paired phenomena of early print culture as the intensified attempts to control channels of communication (e.g., by censorship and propaganda) and the multiplying conflicts of interpretation to which growing sectarianism, more organized political and religious dissent, and the beginnings of cultural pluralism all testify. It is obvious that a model of this sort encourages the extension of the aesthetic, deictic, and rhetorical postulates well beyond the boundaries of the old New Criticism into putatively extratextual domains. The weak point in Ricoeur’s theory is his idealization of spoken discourse. This has been noted by Edward Said: ‘‘Ricoeur assumes circumstantial reality to be symmetrically and exclusively the property of speech,’’ which exists ‘‘in a state of presence,’’ and he treats oral discourse as ‘‘a type of conversation between equals,’’ whereas ‘‘the discursive situation is more usually like the unequal relation between colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed.’’38 To soften Said’s characteristically tendentious way of putting things, it is more usually like the unequal relation between man and woman, parent and child, senior and junior— between positions or ‘‘sites of enunciation’’ (Foucault) that give their incumbents the right to initiate speech and those that impose the obligation to listen and respond. Thus the word obedience derives from a Latin verb, obedire (ob-audire), whose literal meaning is ‘‘to listen from below.’’39 That the politics of oral discourse is hierarchic rather than egalitarian has more to do with asymmetries in the reciprocity and authority relations

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of gender, genealogy, and generation within a speech community than with mere power relations between insider and outsider communities. Ricoeur’s model is based on Emile Benveniste’s analyses of the linguistic system of deictic relationships, a system organized radially around the cardinal discursive function of the first person. The system is egalitarian and symmetrical in that all actual speakers have theoretically equal access to the first person and in that interlocutors cooperatively alternate between first and second persons. But such a system is abstracted from the institutional role structure of any speech community that uses the system. To revert momentarily to Culler’s distinctions, the relations of deixis analyzed by Benveniste and other linguists comprise a set of logico-grammatical presuppositions internal to the pure discursive field of speech acts. But this set is intersected and—from an idealist’s standpoint— systematically distorted by the pragmatic presuppositions that condition the context of utterance and derive from institutional role structure. Said’s comment would have been more telling had he observed that Ricoeur in effect represses the pragmatic presuppositions to produce an idealized situation that Derrida would call logocentric. The Derridean perspective allows a more fundamental criticism. Though Ricoeur does not valorize speech over writing, his view of the former is in other respects logocentric because it premises that since ‘‘the speaker and listener are both present to the utterance simultaneously,’’ this ‘‘immediacy seems to guarantee the notion that in the spoken word we know what we mean, mean what we say, say what we mean, and know what we have said.’’ Against this view, Derrida ‘‘attempts to show that the very possibility of opposing the two terms on the basis of presence vs. absence or immediacy vs. representation is an illusion, since speech is already structured by difference and distance as much as writing is.’’ Speech no less than writing is hollowed out by the ‘‘discourse of the other,’’ though the other need not be identified with the unconscious; it may be rooted in linguistic, social, political, or cultural conventions and discourses: ‘‘this diffe´rance inhabits the very core of what appears to be immediate and present. . . . The illusion of the self-presence of meaning or of consciousness is thus produced by the repression of the differential structures from which they spring.’’40

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These structures include the asymmetrical positional dyads—man and woman, parent and child, senior and junior—that constitute the discourses of gender, genealogy, and generation. Each is quite literally a discourse in that it is a dialogical structure of complementary but unequal sites of enunciation, a specific ‘‘domain of language use, a particular way of talking . . . and thinking.’’41 And each is an ‘‘ideological configuration’’ in Althusser’s sense in that it transforms individuals into subjects inscribed with positional attributes: dominant male and obedient female, loving parent and grateful child, wise senior and docile junior, and so on. These ideal or imaginary complementarities are nevertheless traversed by contradictions. Each positional dyad is freighted with conflicting interests, ambivalent desires, and ambiguous motivations. What makes its discourse ideological is that the contradictions are either repressed or differentially valorized. In that respect, each discourse is a preferred interpretation that closes down a more complex set of relational possibilities. Thus a positional discourse is, if not a script, at least a scenario. To change the metaphor, it frames the loom and spins the threads of the speaking subject’s discourse even if it doesn’t weave its patterns. To change it again, the crosshatching of different positional discourses— gender, generation, family, household, and kin group—foregrounds the subject as a center of psycholinguistic play against the complex institutional field of ‘‘discourses of the other.’’ Reconceiving the basic Ong/ Ricoeur model of oral discourse in these ‘‘grammatocentric’’ terms enhances the applicability of Derrida’s notion of logocentrism to speechcentered cultures. Derrida’s use of the term entails its opposition to the grammatocentric pole, from which he criticizes the logocentric illusion (‘‘presence vs. absence,’’ etc.). In the ensuing discussion, my use of the term reflects and implies his but modifies it so that it may perform a more positive or descriptive service on behalf of the following anthropological hypothesis: The most important source of that illusion is not speech per se but the body as a medium of communication and a system of signs—the perceptual signs of human presence and the functional signs of gender, age, and consanguinity that both determine and express the basic positional order. In a pure nonliterate society this order structures all interactions through the medium of embodied human presences. Presence in the body is ex-

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tended through oral/aural and visual channels of communication. The presence of the body is inscribed in the positional roles and networks that condition the discursive relations of communication. Thus a pure nonliterate society, organized wholly in terms of the body’s perceptual and functional signs, may be postulated as the ur-state of pure logocentrism, a hypothetical point of origin that can anchor any diachronic model constructed to analyze changes in the structural relationship between communication and signification. In this model the ur-state must be given a Derridean interpretation. That is, it is not sufficient to say, with Ricoeur, that ‘‘hermeneutics begins where dialogue ends.’’ Instead, we stipulate that in speech-centered culture dialogue tends to repress or inhibit ‘‘the opportunity for multiple readings’’ that provides the material of hermeneutics, that is, multiple readings are theoretically possible because already embedded in the differential structures, the positional discourses, that constrain and enable speech. But given the structural character of a hypothesis that ‘‘explains’’ logocentrism as the consequence of a particular model of social organization—a body-centered positional order—rather than as ‘‘the underlying ideal of Western culture,’’42 I think it would be well to suspend whatever pejorative implications adhere to Derrida’s use of ‘‘logocentrism.’’ If indeed we are going to stipulate that multiple meanings are inhibited by speech and encouraged by writing/reading, then it is not helpful to insist in absolute terms that the opposition ‘‘of presence vs. absence or immediacy vs. representation is an illusion.’’ It becomes important to hold fast at least to a relative distinction between them in order to explore the material differences imposed by media on the communication, control, and interpretation of meaning. Derrida’s critical impulse is radically opposed to the theologism latent or residual in the work of Ong and Ricoeur, but I think a revisionary middle way may be charted by imparting a Derridean spin to the combination of Ong’s media theory and Ricoeur’s text theory. If, as Johnson remarks, ‘‘Derrida’s critique of Western metaphysics focuses on its privileging of the spoken word over the written word,’’43 then a dialectical articulation of those two theories offers a way to convert the Derridean critique into a program of research: a historical hermeneutics grounded in the interdependence of changing modes of communication with

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changes in the production, reception, and control of signification. Such a hermeneutics, whose dialectical profile is more fully rendered in later sections of this book, would still rely on an interpretive practice oriented by the postulational model. But the postulates would have to be made more sensitive both to the textuality, the interpretability, of extratextual contexts (including media and their institutional parameters) and to the representation of those contexts within literary works. To illustrate this need, especially as it concerns the deictic and rhetorical postulates, I turn now to the third of the topics mentioned above, the literary or graphic representation of media and the institutions in which they are embedded. Writing that represents oral discourse is legion. But within that multitude we can pick out an important category of texts marked by this distinctive feature: what they represent is not oral discourse but ‘‘oral discourse.’’ They do not so arrange conventions that the imitation of speech is mediated through a transparent or translucent screen of writing. They focus on the larger implications of speech-centered performance, on strategies and rituals of face-to-face interaction, and on the effects of oral culture and institutions on the production of meaning. But they do this from ‘‘outside’’ the imitated medium; they achieve distance by calling attention to themselves as writing—as works inscribed in a different medium, the medium of difference, that is, of graphic signs rather than bodily or vocal signs. They may even orient the reader’s attention toward the dialogue or agon between the speech acts they represent and the complex interplay of textual codes accessible to the act of reading. This general description needs to be more precisely articulated, a task I shall preface by noting that similar claims have been put forward specifically for Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller by Jonathan Crewe. Calling that work ‘‘an informal phenomenology of the page,’’ he discusses Nashe’s thematic punning on ‘‘page’’ (the first-person protagonist is a page), observes ‘‘that Nashe is credited in the O.E.D. as the first user of ‘page’ in its sense of a printed sheet (in the Menaphon preface),’’ and reaffirms the traditional view that the point of Nashe’s work lies in its exploitation of, and bondage to, the emergent technology of printing. . . . The self-conscious emergence of the page in its own right implies a radical, perhaps irrevocable, alienation of language from its

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supposedly primordial character as speech (from its ideal character); a ‘‘purely technical’’ phenomenon threatens to make an essential difference. . . . The moment in which the page is foregrounded is one in which it ceases to be the invisible servant of a higher order of language and meaning, and assumes its own existence in a world in which it is no longer to be denied.44 The historical observation seems reasonable because one can think of so many other examples in the dawn of the print era of works that anatomize the rhetoricity and theatricality of oral performance (and of literary performance that strives to be its ape) by mediating it through the conspicuous textuality of their writing: Rabelais, Erasmus, Sidney (in the Defence), Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, and Marvell, to name only a few.45 The same can be said, however, for several writers active in literate cultures before that era. Chaucer comes to mind immediately, and perhaps Petronius, Ovid, and some of the Greek dramatists. I say ‘‘perhaps’’ because, although we now distinguish between writing against another represented medium and writing against another represented genre (as did the early bucolic and pastoral poets), this distinction cannot easily be applied to literature that writes against the dominant ancient genres, since their characteristic features identify them with ritualized modes of oral performance. Writing that conspicuously differentiates its medium and production of meaning from those centered in the oral discourse it represents may be called heterological, on the grounds that logos denotes patterns not only of meaning or thinking but also of lexis and phone¯; logos is the equivalent of sermo, which subsumes ratio. Within this general category we can distinguish writing that may be called counterlogical because it more pointedly writes against logos-centered discourse. And within it, another distinction can be made. Much counterlogical writing represents and targets phenomena of utterance; it explores the sociopolitical implications of such specific aspects of oral discourse as levels of sermo—vernacular, courtly, learned, and so on—and rhetorical or theatrical strategies. But some counterlogical writing also targets the circumambient context of utterance, mounting a more systematic critique of the effects of logocentrism on the oral culture the writing represents. Some of the more interesting examples

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occur in ancient literature when traditions of writing have developed sufficiently to allow the play of reflexive awareness in works that confront pretypographic cultures alien to rather than grounded in the written word. I conclude the present section with a discussion of this theme in order to provide a very rough sketch—hardly more than a rumor—of the way interpretive practice can revise traditional approaches to ancient literature by opening up the model and sending some of the postulates out to occupy extratextual territory. Earlier I commented on the symbolic dominance of the body in what I referred to as the ur-state of pure logocentrism, and on its function as the basic organizing symbol of social and political order. To this I now add that—as Mary Douglas and others have argued—the body is not only an organizing symbol but also a naturalizing symbol. Even as it underlies the social construction of a corporate institutional order, it assumes a countervailing ideological function: through its status as an organism, a natural entity, it legitimizes that order as given rather than socially constructed, transcendent reality rather than human fiction. In modern text-centered societies the politically, economically, and culturally important corporate groups tend to define themselves as products of human art; the concept of corporation is itself a legal fiction disembedded or differentiated from that of the natural corpus. But the important corporate groups of speech-centered societies tend continually to re-embed themselves in the concept of corpus of which they are at least the terminological extensions. In speech-centered societies there are several respects in which the individual body and person is less clearly self-contained, less sharply isolated, than the subject cut out by the ideological template of modern individualism. First, the body is not only the material, visible, and mortal locus of a personal presence but also the model of the spiritual, invisible, and immortal presences that people its ambient reality. Thus a reverberating and intercommunicating network of presences—including ancestral presences—binds together nature, humanity, cosmos, and numen or divinity; presences that speak to each other, represent each other, even permeate and penetrate each other. Second, embodied persons are icons of the institutional order and its roles because the past of a preliterate community—’’its memory, its set of instructions, its sacred text—is literally

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embodied in every domicile, in every person or group marked by a kinship term or by a taboo, in every person or group who exemplifies a ritual or who recalls a myth . . . the significant distinctions in such a society have to be maintained, reconstructed, represented, and, in essence, re-invented in the very flesh of each generation.’’46 Third, ‘‘oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings.’’47 Since such cultures tend ‘‘to cast up accounts of actuality in terms of contests between individuals,’’ these interactions replace more abstract models of explanation, and their participants assume allegorical dimensions. Ong questions ‘‘the abandon with which early nontechnological societies have tended to polarize in virtue-vice categories not merely moral matters as such but also a great deal of essentially nonmoral actuality, seeing, for example, the operation of what we know today to be economic or social or even purely political forces as essentially naked struggles between moral good and evil.’’48 Exactly the same perception lies behind Erich Auerbach’s much earlier critique of the limited realism, the limited historical consciousness, of ancient writing: ‘‘it does not see forces, it sees vices and virtues, successes and mistakes.’’49 Ong’s analysis of the way chirographic culture was dominated by categories congenial to oral comprehension provides a material explanation lacking in Auerbach’s otherwise brilliant observations: In the realistic literature of antiquity, the existence of society poses no historical problem; it may at best pose a problem in ethics, but even then the ethical question is more concerned with the individual members of society than with the social whole. No matter how many persons may be branded as given to vice or as ridiculous, criticism of vices and excesses poses the problem as one for the individual; consequently, social criticism never leads to a definition of the motive sources within society. . . . [Yet] it is precisely in the intellectual and economic conditions of everyday life that those forces are revealed which underlie historical movements; these, whether military, diplomatic, or related to the inner constitution of the state, are only the product, the final result, of variations in the depths of everyday life.50

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A world view organized in these ethical and agonistic terms is dominated by the category of the visible, audible, embodied person. Its social, institutional, and cosmic orders are iconically condensed in that figure of presence; they share in and extend its reality; they reinforce the me´connaissance enabling the subjects inscribed in its ideological discourses to repress or ignore forces whose analysis and representation presuppose instruments other than those available to speech-centered media. Ong’s analysis helps explain how these limits and occlusions are functional elements of logocentric cultures. But neither Ong nor Auerbach (nor Havelock, nor, for that matter, Derrida) has appreciated the extent to which such ‘‘modern’’ insights were anticipated by ancient authors themselves—by Thucydides and Plato, for example, to whose work I now turn because both focus ironically rather than mimetically on the logocentric dramas of the oral culture they inhabit. They present their representations of oral discourse in an art and medium of writing whose presence as such is conspicuous and whose differences from the speech medium are often conspicuously featured. In Thucydides, the very difficulty of syntax and density of style seem calculated to discourage oral recitation and aural comprehension. Furthermore, he explicitly thematizes the differences at the beginning of his history. When he contrasts traditional modes of transmission to his own superior method of testing evidence and making revisionary paraphrases, the flaws he picks out in the former are all those we associate with narratives based on the techniques and motives for producing oral history: the limits of memory, the unreliability of eyewitnesses, the prevalence of legend mystified by antiquity, the uncritical passivity of auditors, the temptation to seduce audiences with epideictic self-display and fanciful tales (The Peloponnesian Wars, 1.20–23). Thucydides anticipates Plato in his critical analysis of the speechcentered institutions of Athens, which he obviously cherishes and much prefers to the laconic eunomia of Spartan culture. He and Plato anticipate Ong in portraying aspects of what Ong (after Marcel Jousse) calls ‘‘verbomotor lifestyle.’’ Ong notes, for example, that the interaction of oral narrative ‘‘with living audiences can actively interfere with verbal stability; audience expectations can help fix themes and formulas.’’51 The Socrates portrayed by Plato is much concerned with the deeper implications of

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this interaction, which in Chapter 10 I will discuss in Weberian terms as the dynamics of charismatic bondage. In the dialogues, Socrates confronts the tangle of social, political, and ethical discourses that respond to the logocentric structure of the dialogues’ Athenian setting—the same tangle and the same structure as that depicted in Thucydides’ ‘‘history.’’ Like Thucydides’ series of orators caught in the downward pull, the lysis, of the factional discourse of a democracy that gives preeminence to ‘‘speech over all other instruments of power,’’52 Plato’s text represents a Socratic discourse trapped in the contradictions of that setting. Socrates’ speech reveals but cannot penetrate the panoply of logoi that defend against self-criticism and self-exposure, preserve self-esteem, and rationalize self-interest. His own logoi are ‘‘stolen’’ and anamorphically subverted by anti-Socratic speakers who use them to camouflage the politics of reactionary despotism in ‘‘disinterested’’ discourses. Consider, for example, the weird logic/metaphysics/ontology of Parmenides and the Eleatic Stranger, Timaeus’s equally weird cosmology and anthropology, and Critias’s Egyptian legend (see Chapter 12, below). The gentle but persistent interrogation of close reading reveals them to be complex and devious rhetorical persuasions of the same order as the sophistical performances of Protagoras and Gorgias. So understood, the Platonic scripture is no longer a direct transmission of the Word of Platonic philosophy. In presenting a representation of Socratic discourse fettered by its conditions, it presents itself as the deferred telos of that discourse, the only medium capable of releasing it to new, fuller, and longer life. The texts of Thucydides and Plato present themselves as representations of a densely specific historical situation that is at once their extratextual ‘‘referent’’ and their subject. I have been using the awkward formula ‘‘present themselves as representations’’ advisedly. It would be misleading to say that texts simply represent their subject. This is especially true in the case of counterlogical writing, because it presents itself as a form of discourse that differs significantly and radically from the discourses it represents. It does not discreetly vanish into transparency with the modesty that befits a mere medium; it prefers itself, commends itself, and stands in the way; it presents itself over against the subject it represents. For Thucydides and Plato, this subject consists in the collective or cultural discourses that circulate orally through a structured speech

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community. These are not merely the utterances of an aggregate of speakers, and they include but are not reducible to a culture’s legacy of logoi and topoi. Rather, they are the inherited stock of ‘‘language games,’’ understood in the crude lay-psychological sense of ‘‘the games people play.’’ The discourses represented by Plato consist in (1) deep and patterned motivational structures of apprehension, misanthropy, and unappeasable desire, and (2) the formulaic ‘‘moves’’ by which they may be expressed, justified, rationalized, concealed, or repressed. Some of Ong’s comments on the doctrine of commonplaces illuminate the functions these ‘‘moves’’ serve, but throw too pale a light on them: ‘‘The doctrine of the commonplaces picks up and codifies the drives in oral cultures to group knowledge of all sorts around human behavior and particularly around virtue and vice.’’ The locus communis or topos ‘‘was thought of as some kind of ‘place’ . . . in which were stored arguments to prove one or another point.’’ Such commonplaces enabled one ‘‘to analyze a subject or an accumulated store of readied material . . . to which one resorted for ‘matter’ for thinking and discoursing,’’ and they were used ‘‘in true oral fashion not merely as formulas but as themes which were strung together in traditional, and even highly rationalized, patterns to provide the oral equivalent of plot.’’ Finally, ‘‘the oral performer, poet or orator, needed a stock of material to keep him going. The doctrine of the commonplaces is, from one point of view, the codification of ways of assuring and managing this stock, a codification devised with the aid of writing in cultures which, despite writing, remained largely oral in outlook and performance patterns.’’53 We can make this account less bland and more applicable to the Platonic representation of discourse by giving it a reflexive emphasis. Speakers are represented directly or through Socrates’ mimicry as using these readymade logoi and topoi to prove a point not only to others but also to themselves. There is, for example, a discourse of piety and holiness that rationalizes impious actions or behavior motivated by fear (deos, apprehension, i.e., the fear of being taken which is the obverse of the desire to take). There is a discourse of aido¯s, or reverence, which allows one to reunderstand the fear of public opinion as the respect for public opinion. There are logoi, discourses, traditional stories, that keep the oral performer going in the sense that they help him preserve self-esteem in the face of

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motives or behavior he might deem shameful and unjust. Paolo Valesio’s brief synopsis of ‘‘the ontology of rhetoric’’ captures, with more pungency than Ong’s account, this sense of the discourses Socrates encounters: ‘‘The filtering of reality through the sieves of the common places, the conflicts among the functions of discourse (both internally and externally), and the eristic slant present in any discourse, at any level, on any topic—these are its main distinctive features.’’ Discourse is eristic because its ‘‘mechanisms . . . are simplified representations of reality, inevitably and intrinsically slanted in a partisan direction.’’54 In the Platonic text, Socrates’ famous elenchos machine, his discourse of refutation, is directed only superficially against individual interlocutors. Its main target is the individual’s easy access and submission to the supply of anonymous discourses circulating throughout the community and legitimized by the aura of tradition. The elenchos operates on individuals who permit themselves to be the sites and embodiments of socially constructed discourses that fend off self-knowledge and, as a result, occlude the awareness that the speakers have permitted themselves to be mere embodiments. In that respect it may be said that what speaks through the speaker is ‘‘the discourse of the other.’’ But this also holds true in another respect: partly through its specifically textual resources and partly through the agency of Socrates’ duplicitous discourse, the text not only represents those discourses but analyzes their relationship to the motivational structures they conceal and, by concealing, enable. Socrates and the text together draw from interlocutors meanings they seem not to intend or want to express, meanings they seem unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge, but meanings already inscribed in the anonymous discourses to which they give voice and power. This, then, is a glimpse of the complex interpretation of logocentric culture and institutions that the Platonic text performs, and that it sometimes ascribes to the speaker named Socrates. But it is not an analysis any of his interlocutors are shown to comprehend; it is neither what they want to hear nor what they will let his words mean. It is displaced, repressed, buried in the rhizomes branching silently through the text. Refused by the speech community represented in the dialogues, it awaits the harvest of future readerships, commits itself with trusting openness to communities of the text who may or may not glean it, depending on

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whether or not they practice the hermeneutical or circular method of farming. And this interpretation contains a further range of irony: Socrates is represented as laboring under the same logocentric constraints as the traditional Homeric culture he ‘‘deconstructs.’’ He, no less than the poets and sophists, is forced to submit to the tyranny of his audience. The Platonic text presents its rhizomatic textuality as an alternative to the logocentrism that foils Socrates by enabling his auditors—and especially those who are his friends and admirers—to alienate his logoi and fill his words with their meanings. In such writing, the very obviousness or conspicuousness of textual complexity is itself a major stylistic feature, whether in the register of syntax, or of lexical and figurative effects, or of intertextual play, or of metaliterary devices. Complexity in any or several of these registers demands the kinds of interpretive responses that characterize close reading: decelerating the tempo, violating sequence, and dislocating or conflating passages; tracing the threads of various patterns through the textual weave; analyzing formal or logico-propositional structures such as hypotaxis, parataxis, and epago¯ge¯ for their tonal, thematic, and motivational implications. These effects of conspicuous complexity are counterlogical: they defy the temporal and linear constraints of oral performance and audition; they inhibit the form of reading that simulates listening; they solicit a readership of textual or grammatocentric rather than oral or logocentric interpreters. And they are by no means gratuitous; they constitute the message of the medium, or the content of the form. For the kinds of communicative transactions they inhibit are precisely those they represent, and represent with varying degrees of ambivalence as modes of performance they value or admire on the one hand, but modes whose limits they subject to parodic or ironic critique on the other. In these remarks on Thucydides and Plato, I have tried to suggest how a Derridean version of the Ong/Ricoeur model might give the deictic and rhetorical postulates a new interpretive purchase on texts that present themselves as critiques of the logocentric dramas they represent. I could have made the same point with other counterlogical writers—Chaucer and Shakespeare, for example. But I chose Thucydides and Plato because the former’s text has been classified as ‘‘history’’ and the latter’s as ‘‘philosophy,’’ whose fictive elements are thereby dismissed as mere heuristic

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devices. Such classifications are strategies for imposing discursive distance on the relation between text and reader—that is, for discouraging the kind of close interpretation reserved for texts classified as ‘‘literature.’’ In the case of Plato, discursive distance produces what is essentially a logocentric relationship because it makes us read the dialogues as if we are listening, weighing, and actively responding to the arguments Plato places in Socrates’ mouth: ‘‘Whoever the interlocutors and others present may be, we, the readers, are also listeners and must participate, as silent partners, in the discussion; we must weigh and then accept or reject the solutions offered and must comment, as well as we can, on what is at stake.’’55 Under such an interpretive regime, ‘‘what is at stake’’ too often turns out to consist in essentialized ‘‘issues’’—either the themes and problems canonized by the history of philosophy or those that remain of interest to contemporary ‘‘thinkers,’’ or those that illuminate ‘‘the human predicament.’’ The title of Paul Shorey’s book is revealing, and still reflects the spirit of much current commentary: What Plato Said—about art, logic, justice, the state, the Forms, the soul, the cosmos, and so on—not what he wrote, not what he represented Socrates as saying, which often includes Socrates’ representation of what his interlocutors want to hear rather than what he wants them to know. To collapse discursive distance by shifting into the literary register and submitting the text to the play of the postulates is by no means to abandon such thematic analysis, nor is it to impose an aestheticizing quarantine on ‘‘the words on the page.’’ Rather, it is to constitute within the text, and as a fictive representation, the historically specific structure of logocentric institutions we associate with fifth-century Athens and, more generally, with the culture of the Hellenic polis. In the very cursory overview I have given of this approach to the dialogues, my emphasis has been on those features of the text that respond to deictic and rhetorical analysis, and perhaps the overview, however cursory, will suffice to suggest that a refinement of the deictic postulate is necessary to bring it in line with the above sample of interpretive practice. The original New Critical form of the postulate focuses on ‘‘the dissociation of the text and its speaker or ‘point of view’ from the author, which encourages the interpretive pursuit of ‘unbound’ or ‘surplus’ meaning (unbound by the author’s intention and exceeding that of the speaker or narrator)’’ (p. 31,

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above). I now want to place more emphasis on the dissociation of the text from the speaker in order to situate the pursuit of surplus meaning there rather than between text and author. But as we have seen, that intratextual space—the space of representation—is not a void or a neutral ground against which are posed individual speakers. The text presents itself over against the discourse(s) it represents.

Breaking Out of the Old New Criticism The moralizing and aestheticizing tendencies of New Criticism have proved to be easy targets. Critiques that prepared the way for freeing up the postulates of the New Critical model were reinforced by developments on other fronts (including infusions from more traditional disciplines), which broadened the scope of textual hermeneutics well beyond the domain of traditional literary criticism. In various ways, semiotics, structuralism, deconstruction, neo-Marxist poetics, psychoanalysis, and the ‘‘new historicism’’ showed how to do things with the postulates (or with reasonable facsimiles thereof ) that were undreamt of, perhaps repressed, in New Critical philosophy. That it deserves to be called a philosophy, which is to say, an ideology, has been made clearer by those developments. We can now see that the ideology was not ahistorical but antihistorical; a familiar myth, based on an Eliotesque cultural critique, informs the ideology of the model: The New Critics are protesting against the mechanistic and positivistic nature of the modern world; and their protest is framed in terms of a cultural tradition, a religious order, and sometimes an aristocratic social system.56 There used to be once a perfectly ordered world, which is, for instance, behind Dante’s poetry. This world disintegrated under the impact of science and scepticism. The ‘‘dissociation of sensibility’’ took place at some time in the seventeenth century. Man became increasingly divided, alienated, specialized as industrialism and secularism progressed. The Western world is in decay, but some hope seems to be held out for a reconstitution of the original wholeness. The total man . . . is the ideal that requires a rejection of technological civilization, a return to religion or, at least, to a modern myth.57

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Mechanism, positivism, science, skepticism, industrialization, secularism, technology: instead of subjecting the emergence of technological society, and its own institutional relation to it, to analysis, interpretation, and critique, New Criticism buried its head in its ideological sand and contented itself with the most jejune pastoral retreat to the golden age. The return to a religious order and an aristocratic social system is a return to the rehabilitating constraints of a higher truth beyond homo faber. If this return is not realizable it can at least be enacted, mediated, within the terrestrial paradigm constructed by the ideology of the fictive work. In that pastoral oasis we may criticize and resist the heterocosmic process by which our more brazen creations drive the world ever farther from the original wholeness of a perfectly ordered organism. Verbal icons, the units of poetic discourse, alone preserve the traces of that lost original in the complex integrity of aesthetic form, but they also preserve the awareness of its loss in the express fictiveness of their epistemic mode. The poem as microcosm is the relict or relic of a vanished macrocosm. New Critical uses of the term organism testify to this nostalgia. Explicitly, the term is applied to the complex unity in which different parts or functions contribute to the welfare of the whole. But organism also denotes that which is a natural rather than human creation, and in that sense ‘‘the poem as organism’’ is a figure that keeps alive the memory of a time when the reality of human intervention had not yet severed itself from the transcendent source and object of human representation.58 One can take a narrowly Marxist and tendentious view of this position, associate ‘‘New Criticism’s high regard for ‘ambiguity’ ’’ with ‘‘a bourgeois mistrust of single-mindedness and commitment,’’ and push that toward the predictable conclusion: ‘‘the stances it prizes most— sophistication, wit, poise—are those of a decaying aristocracy characteristically revered by a sycophantic middle-class.’’59 But this prevents a more complex perception of the ways in which the ideology participates in the contemporary currents it eschews. Consider, for example, how the Intentional and Affective Fallacies, and the intense ‘‘cognitive’’ focus on what Ian Hacking (following Quine) calls ‘‘the fabric of sentences,’’ dovetail with theories of the autonomy and anonymity of discourse and technique; or how the focus on fictive speakers and points of view dovetails with theories of the subject; or how the focus on ambiguity and the

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ironic relation of the speaker to the text dovetails with theories of polyglossia, the unconscious as language, and other versions of the idea of the ‘‘discourse of the other.’’ When these currents flow back into the model, however, they form strangely recidivist patterns and turn against themselves. The postulate of autonomy secured by the Intentional Fallacy, for example, is operative only within the boundaries of the fictive work. And in spite of that principle, the fictive work is addressed as the product of formal decisions and artistic purpose. The discarded empirical author returns in the ghostly form of a creative subject, the Poet who validates the interpretive enterprise by receiving responsibility for the readings it produces. From that subject, construed as the text, New Criticism in turn abstracts another, the fictive speaker, narrator, or dramatic character, to whom varying degrees of awareness and unawareness are attributed. Gerald Graff is thus partly right to emphasize the extent to which New Criticism is concerned with poetry ‘‘as presentation of ‘experience,’ of states of mind,’’ and the extent to which its ‘‘vocabulary is pervaded by psychologically-weighted terms.’’ But he is wrong in thinking he has therefore caught the New Critics out in another logical inconsistency: ‘‘the poem as the New Critics see it cannot be conceived as a purely aesthetic object; it is deeply implicated in human psychological processes, in psychic conflicts and resolutions.’’ His mistake is focused in the word ‘‘presentation.’’ The poem as ‘‘a purely aesthetic object’’ is constituted as a representation—not a ‘‘presentation’’—of experience, and it is hardly illogical, hardly inconsistent with the New Critical ‘‘concept of poetic autonomy,’’ for a poem to be both a work and a fiction.60 The difference is important, because both the fictiveness of the experiencing subject, the speaker, and the ghostly reality of the creative subject, the poet, represent a lost ideal. The limitations of the speaker’s awareness glitter against the foil of the greater awareness of the poet or text: together these model a complex ‘‘subjective’’ reality, with the poet/text construed as a kind of transcendental subject whose discourse is the discourse of the speaker’s other. This model is preserved only as fiction, only within the work, against the drift of a culture perceived as jeopardizing that reality. To recall some phrases from Wimsatt and Brooks cited earlier, the ideology of the fictive work celebrates the values associated with the experience of ‘‘facing up to

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the human predicament’’; enshrined in second-world amber, the dialectic between the work’s transcendental subjectivity and its finite fictive subjects produces in readers ‘‘a desirable and mature state of soul’’ and is ‘‘the right model and source of a mature poetic art.’’ In the history I am fabricating, the breakdown of the model is not the result of a random or piecemeal series of events. The aestheticized romanticism of New Criticism has a logic that binds the postulates together, that constitutes them as interdependent parts of its Whole. Thus in the precarious moment circumscribed by the model’s postulational space, the work, the individual (or individuated) artifact, is a thing apart, picked out for and by interpretive attention. But this artifact is also a fiction. And fiction is a different category. The work is something made, an independent locus of special value, a focus for aesthetic attention. Fiction is not only something made but also something made up, not only something that may be evaluated as ‘‘imaginative’’ but also something that may be described as ‘‘imaginary’’ and something that calls attention to its imaginariness. Furthermore, make believe carries with it an implicit commitment to representation. It conforms to the logic of the image (which is by definition an image of ) and denotes or symbolizes or expresses or exemplifies something extraneous to it. The work may be said to present itself, and to present itself. When, in addition, it presents itself as a representation, when it foregrounds the illusion of denotation and referentiality, it takes on the characteristics of fiction. To make believe is conspicuously to pretend to denote. Since making believe presents itself as such, since it ‘‘exemplifies’’ itself as a symptom of the aesthetic and fictional, it stages the refusal of an actual gesture of reference, the refusal of an innocent claim to denote. What is important about this is that to refuse the actual gesture by making the conspicuously illusory gesture presupposes and depends on the possibility of the actual gesture. The fictive act is defined in terms of what it is not, just as the fiction of representation constitutes an imaginary reality beyond it that it pretends to depict or describe. The work, on the other hand, marginalizes or peripheralizes what fiction represents and refers to. This is the state conferred on it by the contemplative template of the New Critical ideology, which severs it from such referential linkages as those to actual authors and audiences. The relation be-

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tween fiction and nonfiction therefore differs from that between work and nonwork. From the convergence and conflict of these two categories, work and fiction, arise the force, tension, and dialectical instability of the ideology of the fictive work. The structural and aesthetic postulates constitute the properties of the work and, in disaffiliating it from the world (history, authors, audiences), reduce the latter to the status of ‘‘given’’ background. But the cosmological and epistemic postulates reestablish the filiation in the oscillatory interplay of the representational relationship between fiction and nonfiction. Thus the model organizes interpretive attention and its object together in a movement that, when considered sequentially, displays the familiar pastoral pattern of withdrawal and return. The first two postulates divert attention from the industrialized and secularized brazen world and toward the object, constituting it as a work, and then redirect attention toward a golden world of equilibrated complexity in the oscillatory movement between image and referent that constitutes the work as fiction. This is the logic, or dynamic, that holds the model’s structure together, hence an interpretive practice that liberates any of the postulates from the structure radically affects all the others. I shall now explore some of the effects produced by the process of liberation on the epistemic and deictic postulates and their relationship. Research into the history of media has made us more sensitive to the structural constraints and opportunities of writing/reading/interpretation compared with those of logocentric institutions that feature the direct interaction of ‘‘senders’’ and ‘‘receivers.’’ At the same time, reflection on this history produces the recognition that everything we know about senders and receivers in the cultures of the past—and a fortiori in those that were nonliterate or semiliterate—comes to us in texts that have been found, preserved, selected, edited and re-edited, interpreted and reinterpreted, in a word, controlled, by the instituted interests and assumptions of the scholarly traditions whose beneficiaries or victims we are. In attending to the particularity of those scholarly vehicles, we have come to be sensitized not only to the textuality—the materialized textuality—of our encounter with the past but also to the more generalized applicability of textual practices developed in encounters with fictional works. Hence the influence of theorists who, like Burke, Ricoeur, and Geertz, propose

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extending ‘‘the model of the text’’ or of the drama to all aspects of that encounter, not merely those we canonize as Literature and Art. If, as a result, all past senders and receivers are perceived as textualized, then none can be accorded a privileged position in relation to others in terms of such criteria as ‘‘fact vs. fiction,’’ historical vs. imaginative sources, and so on. We can indeed put these distinctions into play, but only relative to some explicit scheme of interpretation that gives rules for deciding how past senders and receivers themselves made the distinction, why they made it (what interests and objectives were served by making it), and to what extent our reading of the evidence confirms or questions the view of the distinction we attribute to them. One could, for example, invent a history of fiction by comparing texts that seem to discuss it as a concept, or a cluster of concepts, with texts that seem to exhibit features of one’s own definition of the term. It was still possible in the heyday of New Criticism to invent a history comparing what Plato or Sidney ‘‘says’’ as a critic with what he or his contemporaries ‘‘do’’ as ‘‘artists,’’ as if that critical ‘‘saying’’ was not itself embedded in a textual ‘‘deed’’ demanding the same attention as that lavished on art. And if I note that this particular pair of examples skips over a big slice of the Christian era, it is to recall the obvious fact that any history of fiction is simultaneously a history of nonfiction—of ontological polemics, stylistic subterfuges, religious faith, and vested political interests; a history of attempts to control the definition, representation, and sanctification of Reality. Such a history can no longer be written out of the essentializing innocence of a commitment to the autonomy of fiction and its distinctiveness as a cognitive representation of some kind of ‘‘truth.’’ It must be an ideological history: objectively ideological in that it cannot avoid telling the story of the way particular fictions of Reality have been privileged and defended, and of the interests that motivate them; reflexively ideological in that it cannot avoid telling this story in a way that privileges and defends particular fictions of Reality, including the fiction that what is being told is a history. To this history the fictions of Aquinas belong as much as those of Dante; those of Cosimo de’ Medici, Luther, Calvin, Bacon, and Galileo as much as those of Fra Angelico, Du¨rer, Spenser, and Milton; those of the Estates General and the House of Commons as much as those of French Academies and Royal Societies.

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The confidence of an earlier critical age that one could intuitively, as it were, distinguish the fictional from the nonfictional has been shaken by a triple assault on the idea of the nonfictional. One is made in terms of the general axiom that reality is socially constructed. The second is made in terms of the proposition that underwrites conventional social role theory, ‘‘all the world’s a stage.’’ This proposition was most interestingly and quirkily unpacked by Erving Goffman, and is given an added dimension in Derrida’s argument—made during his critique of speech act theory—that all discourse is conventional, citational, and in that respect no less fictional than the speech of actors and characters on stage. The third is made in terms of the proposition that history is textualized narrative and is at least structurally if not modally identical with forms of narrative fiction. In what follows I shall focus on the third proposition and try to show how the revision of the epistemic postulate affects the deployment of the cosmological, deictic, and rhetorical postulates. In a review of recent theories of historical narrative, Ricoeur proposes to ‘‘resolve the problem of the referential dimension of historical discourse’’ by showing that ‘‘the form of life to which narrative discourse belongs is our historical condition itself.’’61 Ricoeur makes no claim to originality, and the demonstration is largely a summary of the procedures elaborated by Hayden White and others for reading the historical text as a literary artifact.62 As White himself notes, we can no longer take for granted the appeal ‘‘to history as a way of deciding between conflicting interpretations of a literary text, as if this history were a seamless web and told only one story which could be invoked as a way of defining what is only ‘fictive’ and what is ‘real’ in a given literary representation of a form of life.’’63 The thesis is easily extended from the literariness of historical representation to that of the form of life it represents, hence it is hardly a shock to be told by Alasdair MacIntyre that (in a passage I quoted earlier) what ‘‘epic and saga . . . portray is a society which already embodies the form of epic or saga,’’ or that he ascribes ‘‘to Sophocles a belief analogous to that which Anne Righter . . . has ascribed to Shakespeare: that he portrayed human life in dramatic narratives because he took it that human life already had the form of dramatic narrative.’’64 Since this New Law of fictive or social construction is counterintuitive, it is sometimes easier to honor than to observe. Ricoeur, for exam-

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ple, notes that ‘‘however fictional the historical text may be, it claims nevertheless to be a representation of reality.’’ This is unobjectionable, but in the very next sentence he backslides to the Old Law: ‘‘In other words, history is both a literary artifact (and in this sense a fiction) and a representation of reality.’’65 Between being a representation and claiming to be one lies all the difference between the Old Law and the New, and in ignoring it Ricoeur reactivates ‘‘the problem of the referential dimension’’ which he proposed to resolve. The New Law directs attention to the fiction of referentiality as a gesture, a framing intention, of some ideological importance, and it commands us to explore the text in order to determine how and why it was effected, or affected. To follow this Law, however, is not necessarily to assume that the referent does not exist, the semiotic and deconstructive demon by which Ricoeur’s work is persistently haunted.66 As Fredric Jameson sensibly remarks, ‘‘One does not have to argue the reality of history: necessity, like Dr. Johnson’s stone, does that for us. That history—Althusser’s ‘absent cause,’ Lacan’s ‘Real’—is not a text, for it is fundamentally non-narrative and non-representational; what can be added, however, is the proviso that history is inaccessible to us except in textual form, or in other words, that it can be approached only by way of prior (re)textualization.’’67 ‘‘Reality’’ traditionally denotes what has not, as a whole, been humanly constructed and therefore cannot be substantially changed by human intervention. This reifying definitional claim has often been targeted as ideological and assigned to such categories as ‘‘the production of false consciousness,’’ me´connaissance, and so on. Although the statement that reality is socially constructed is by no means identical with the statement that reality is fictional, it has the effect of blurring the boundaries at least to the extent of allowing ‘‘socially constructed’’ to be mediated toward ‘‘fictional’’ via the concept ‘‘ideological.’’ Once ‘‘reality’’ slides toward ‘‘social construction,’’ it is easy for it to continue downhill through ‘‘ideology’’ toward ‘‘fiction,’’ ‘‘illusion,’’ ‘‘delusion,’’ ‘‘deception,’’ and ‘‘lie.’’ These terms are tricky because they evoke visions of conspiratorial sugarplums. But in fact even the theses embedded in critiques of ‘‘onedimensional man,’’ corporate advertising, or science as ideology are little more than superficial variants of the more profound hermeneutic program Ricoeur attributed to ‘‘the school of suspicion,’’ the aim of whose

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negative moment he described as ‘‘reduction of the illusions and lies of consciousness,’’ the demystification of ‘‘truth as lying,’’ ‘‘the decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as ‘false’ consciousness,’’ and as a text to be deciphered.68 When Ricoeur was writing this in the 1960s, the uncontested masters of the school were Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, but they have since been augmented and revised by another unholy trinity, Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan, and the question of consciousness has passed through the grid of the question of language to become the question of the subject. The emergence of this question under the tutelage of the masters of suspicion affects the de-aestheticizing routes out of New Criticism taken by two of its favorite topics, the cosmological postulate of the work as world and the rhetorical postulate of the ironic relation of language to the speaker. I shall briefly discuss each and suggest how it may be—in some cases has been—articulated with reconstructed versions of New Criticism. the afterlife of the cosmological postulate. Perhaps the most important influence of the school of suspicion on the construct of the subject has been its de-idealization and historicization. To the extent that you conceive of this construct as historically conditioned, you logically commit yourself to situate any analysis of the subject in an analysis of a particular configuration of its ‘‘world.’’ Here we can see how an Althusserian approach to ideology threatens the cosmological postulate. For Althusser, an ideology ‘‘represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,’’ but imaginariness is neutralized because ideologies are not mere systems of ideas but are embedded in material practices, rituals, and institutions (‘‘ideological state apparatuses’’). Through their agency, ideology ‘‘interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.’’69 What Althusser means by ‘‘interpellates’’ or ‘‘hails’’ may be glossed by Kenneth Burke’s more playful description: ideology ‘‘is like a god coming down to earth, where it will inhabit a place pervaded by its presence. An ‘ideology’ is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop about in certain ways; and that same body would have hopped about in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it.’’70 An observer who notices other bodies hopping about in ways different from his own attributes their motions, but not his, to ideology:

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We commonly call religious ideology, ethical ideology, legal ideology, political ideology, etc., so many ‘‘world outlooks.’’ Of course, assuming that we do not live one of these ideologies as the truth (e.g., ‘‘believe’’ in God, Duty, Justice, etc. . . .), we admit that the ideology we are discussing from a critical point of view, examining it as the ethnologist examines the myths of a ‘‘primitive society,’’ that these ‘‘world outlooks’’ are largely imaginary, i.e. do not ‘‘correspond to reality.’’ However, while admitting that they do not correspond to reality, i.e. that they constitute an illusion, we admit that they do make allusion to reality, and that they need only be ‘‘interpreted’’ to discover the reality of the world behind their imaginary representation of that world (ideology ⳱ illusion/allusion).71 This conception sufficiently resembles the cosmological and epistemic postulates of the work as an imaginary world to exert a beneficially subversive pressure on the aestheticizing postulate of autonomy by which that ‘‘world’’ is walled in and valorized. The notions of work and fiction are projected beyond the model. So also is the distinction between fictional and nonfictional ‘‘worlds,’’ between ‘‘ideology’’ and ‘‘reality.’’ ‘‘The world’’ may itself be constituted on the model of the work, a strategy illustrated in Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking, for example: Frames of reference . . . seem to belong less to what is described than to systems of description. . . . If I ask about the world, you can offer to tell me how it is under one or more frames of reference, but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say? We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described. Our universe, so to speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world or of worlds. The physicist takes his world as the real one, attributing the deletions, additions, irregularities, emphases of other versions to the imperfections of perception, to the urgencies of practice, or to poetic license. The phenomenalist regards the perceptual world as fundamental, and the excisions, abstractions, simplifications, and distortions of other versions as resulting from scientific or practical or artistic concerns. For the man-in-the-street, most versions from science, art, and

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perception depart in some ways from the familiar serviceable world he has jerry-built from fragments of scientific and artistic tradition and from his own struggle for survival. This world, indeed, is the one most often taken as real; for reality in a world, like realism in a picture, is largely a matter of habit. Ironically, then, our passion for one world is satisfied, at different times and for different purposes, in many different ways.72 The full title of the world is a discourse about the world—a discourse, and not The discourse. The only world can never be more than a claim made about a world, one of an indefinite number, this world rather than another, this world over against that world. The claim is implicitly ideological, always arises within a context of potential alternatives or competitors, and defends against the appearance of ideologicality by employing various conventions or devices that maintain discursive distance. Such devices work to discourage interpreters from getting too close to the text that represents the discourse and reveals the particularity of the viewpoint on the world. Since viewpoint ⳱ view Ⳮ viewer, the focus of particularity may be directed to either component. To speak of the Elizabethan, Neoplatonic, or scientific world pictures is to distinguish views of the world ascribed to generalized positions or collective authors whose viewpoints may be traced to particular sets of historical and institutional conditions rather than to the discourse of any particular viewer. This is to engage in structural analysis. To shift attention from view to viewer is to redirect emphasis from structural to motivational analysis. The discursive subject who claims, like Plato’s Timaeus, to divulge a worldview may mobilize a variety of rhetorical strategies to defend against the critique that targets the motives of divulgence (as Timaeus defends against the silently listening Socrates by deploying recognizable Socratisms in an anti-Socratic discourse). Displacing attention from the subject as motivated viewer by controlling self-reference is one such strategy for producing the effect of ‘‘objectivity.’’ Imagine, for example, a discourse abstracted from its speaker or author, a worldviewpoint abstracted from the discourse, the represented world abstracted from the viewpoint and made fully present. This is the apogee of discursive distance, farthest away from the earthy particularity, the materiality, of the

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instance or moment of discourse. It is the Archimedean vaulting of pure spirit levering the world out of its words—the end of desire, the dream of a referential apocalypse transcending discourse, impossible, since the referent is inseparable from the veil of discourse that constitutes, hides, and represents it. As if a discourse could efface its source and its own particularity by jumping the referential gap from description to described and drawing up the description into the described, like the transfigured body into the soul that returns to God or nature at some last judgment, after which the world shall be no more. The subject aims to disappear so as to reappear as God. A reconstructed New Criticism doggedly refuses this move, marks it as ideological, persists in reading the repression of self-reference as an aggressive display of self-reference. It is a weakness in Benveniste’s otherwise admirable discussion of self-reference that he fails to take this into account in distinguishing history and discourse as ‘‘two different planes of utterance. . . . The historian will never say je or tu or maintenant, because he will never make use of the formal analysis of discourse, which resides primarily in the relations of the persons je : tu.’’ Analyzing some specimens of narration, he observes that ‘‘there is . . . no longer even a narrator. The events are set forth chronologically, as they occurred. No one speaks here; the events seem to narrate themselves.’’73 And this is what is aimed at in the attempt to achieve maximal discursive distance: the effect, or representation, of historicality. Similarly, discourses about ‘‘the world’’ tend often to be language games in which self-reference is either suppressed or shifted from the particularity and personality of the discursive subject who is the viewer in order to invest the viewpoint with the effect of objectivity. The asceticism that constitutes the subject as disinterested source or recipient of knowledge operates in the general register of style to direct attention toward the text’s ‘‘larger meaning,’’ its ‘‘ideas’’ and argument. These are represented as paraphrasable—abstractable from the concrete features of style, which aim at transparency. The preceding three paragraphs ought to make any reconstructed New Critic uneasy because of their its facile appeal to the language of vision and visibility. Where could such a notion as ‘‘worldview’’ have come from? Who has actually viewed the world? It is not something that can be seen. I have seen what I have been told are parts of the world I belong

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to, and I know that the people who told me this were told it by other people or read it in books, and I myself have read about other parts I haven’t seen. Furthermore, I have read about worlds other peoples, cultures, epochs are asserted to have told themselves they live in—such worlds as those of the Nuer, the Sumerians, the Mayans, the Hellenes, the Melanesians, the Hebrews, the Hopi, the Elizabethans. I have not seen these worlds any more than I have seen mine, or, to put the point more forcefully, I have not seen mine any more than I have seen theirs. Where, then, did we get this idea, this picture, of a viewable world? Maybe Heidegger is right in arguing that the worldview is a recent invention: ‘‘the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age,’’ and it is when the ‘‘position of man’’ as subject is self-constituted ‘‘for the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole’’ that the world becomes conceived and grasped and conquered as a human-made Gebild.74 Here the advent of the world picture is correlated with the advent of modern technology. Yet Heidegger also hints that Plato’s vision-based concept of eidos ‘‘is the presupposition, destined far in advance and long ruling indirectly in concealment, for the world’s having to become a picture.’’75 As Ong and Havelock have shown, this vision-based concept is in turn based on writing, and Plato not only incorporated it in the world picture he dramatizes—and textualizes—as the utterance of Timaeus; he also represents it as motivated by ‘‘the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is whole.’’ That is, Timaeus’s appeal to disinterested exposition is undermined by the text, which draws attention to the rhetoricity of the discursive distance that dominates his speech. The speech characterizes its speaker as the site of a utopian discourse amplified to cosmic proportions by misanthropic distrust—indeed, disdain—of human nature. Read this way, it becomes an ideology—a ‘‘picture argument’’—for such aristocratic reactionaries as his companions, Critias and Hermocrates. Timaeus’s speech is outlandishly graphic, a parody of the attempt to domesticate and conquer reality by reducing it to geometrical diagrams and technical visualizations. The speech aspires to the condition of a certain kind of writing—the condition of an apodictic and hieratic revelation, comparable to the sacred scripture of the Egyptian priesthood.

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Platonic writing, conspicuously ironic and aporetic, presents itself as an ideological critique of the world-viewing utterance it represents. This suggests to me that cosmology and ideology have less to do with modern technology than with the more ancient technology of writing, though it may have taken something like the print revolution to bring out the extent to which ‘‘the conquest of the world as picture’’ has always placed pictures and their creators in an ideological position: ‘‘Because this position secures, organizes, and articulates itself as a world view, the modern relationship to that which is, is one that becomes . . . a confrontation of world views.’’76 Yet there have been worldviews and ideologies at least since the time of Plato and ‘‘the literate revolution in Greece,’’77 not to mention the much earlier if more inchoate and metaphoric cosmologizing of the ancient Near East to which Timaeus alludes. Many of these must have been rolled up side by side in that glowing center of the Hellenistic world, the museion at Alexandria, and through succeeding centuries pictures of the world survived in several continually revised editions. Worlds seem to be things we write and read about.78 But what of those genuinely collective and anonymous productions, the worldviews of nonliterate cultures that are the subjects of ethnographies? The answer to this is that we do not find these productions anywhere but in the books that claim to describe them. Recent work in meta-ethnography has much to tell us about the ways these worlds are produced, and I conclude these remarks on the extension of the cosmological postulate with a particularly incisive example of that work, one that displays with great clarity the value of a reconstructed New Criticism to the ideological critique of world-viewing. Analyzing one of the paradigms ethnographers use to authorize their cultural accounts, James Clifford details the textualizing process by which the writer’s data and interpretation become reified as the native worldview: Data constituted in discursive, dialogical conditions are appropriated only in textualized form. Research events and encounters become field notes. Experiences become narratives, meaningful occurrences, or examples. . . . The data thus reformulated need no longer be understood as the communication of specific persons. An informant’s expla-

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nation or description of custom need not be cast in a form that includes the message ‘‘so and so said this.’’ A textualized ritual or event is no longer closely linked to the production of that event by specific actors. Instead, these texts become evidences of an englobing context, a ‘‘cultural’’ reality. Moreover, as specific authors and actors are severed from their productions, a generalized ‘‘author’’ must be invented to account for the world or context within which the texts are fictionally relocated. This generalized author goes under a variety of names: the native point of view, ‘‘the Trobrianders,’’ ‘‘the Nuer,’’ ‘‘the Dogon,’’ as these and similar phrases appear in ethnographies. . . . By representing the Nuer, the Trobrianders, or the Balinese as whole subjects, sources of a meaningful intention, the ethnographer transforms the research situation’s ambiguities and diversities of meaning into an integrated portrait. But it is important to notice what has dropped out of sight. The research process is separated from the texts it generates and from the fictive world they are made to call up. The actuality of discursive situations and individual interlocutors is filtered out.79 Clifford notes that the ‘‘dialogical, situational aspects of ethnographic interpretation’’ are not entirely banished from ‘‘the final representative text’’ because ‘‘there exist approved topoi for the portrayal of the research process’’—for example, the ‘‘more or less stereotypic ‘fables of rapport’ ’’ that ‘‘narrate the attainment of full participant-observer status.’’ The effect of such ‘‘fables’’ is to dramatize the context of particularized selfrepresentation—interests and motives, ‘‘ignorance, misunderstanding,’’ and other all-too-human failings—only in order to stage its transcendence in ‘‘the attainment of ethnographic authority’’ (p. 132). By directing attention to this, Clifford foregrounds the formal constituents of ideological discourse. Consider, for example, the effect of this move on the ethnographer’s account of the native worldview. Clifford argues that the ethnographer has invented the native culture and worldview, and then legitimized the invention by displacing authorship and authority to the generalized native author.80 But this mirrors and accentuates an implicit ethnographic claim: that the native collectivity has invented its culture and worldview, and then legitimized the invention by displacing authorship and authority to nature. Two demystifications in one blow: when

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Clifford fictionalizes the ethnographer’s claim he brings out the latter’s implicit fictionalization of the native claim. Clifford’s ideological challenge injects its ideologicality into both the ethnography and the native culture. But the challenge is skeptical rather than fully contestatory, and in this it differs from another kind of critique that Clifford also discusses: the critique of ‘‘colonial modes of representation’’ that ‘‘portray the cultural realities of other peoples without placing their own reality in jeopardy,’’ modes that essentialize the ethnographic self/other relationship by abstracting it from ‘‘specific historical relations of dominance and dialogue’’ (pp. 119, 133). The objective of ideological critique, whether contestatory or skeptical, is to make explicit either those specific relations or the strategies— displacement, naturalization, essentialization, and so on—by means of which authority is constituted. In this essay and others, Clifford’s analyses achieve the objective by seeking clues to particular motivations and interests in the concrete features of style and narrative. That is, he reads ethnographic texts as literary texts, which are to be approached in terms of the conventions, genres, and techniques that make up the normal toolkit of contemporary interpretive practice. He explores the ideological significance of particular tropes, of novelistic and dramaturgical techniques, of character construction, of ironic structure and appeals to the conventions of literary realism. The principle behind this procedure suggests how a reconstructed New Criticism has been directed precisely toward areas of extraliterary discourse in which the old New Criticism feared (or scorned) to tread: ‘‘One may approach a classic ethnography seeking simply to grasp the meanings that the researcher derives from represented cultural facts. But . . . one may also read against the grain of the text’s dominant voice, seeking out other, half-hidden authorities, reinterpreting the descriptions, texts and quotations gathered together by the writer’’ (p. 141). the afterlife of the rhetorical postulate. The ideology that makes the subject’s body hop about in certain ways also makes it think and talk in certain ways—and for certain reasons. To consider a speaker as a subject rather than as an individual places the deictic and rhetorical postulates on an entirely different footing and calls for a new approach

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to the topics of intention and irony. The kinds of irony with which New Criticism has amused itself are reducible to three, one a function of narrative plotting and the other two rhetorical. Aristotle’s peripeteia and anagnorisis are the staples of dramatic irony, which involves proleptic misdirections, the production of ‘‘discrepant awarenesses,’’ and other practices of this sort, practices whose effects derive more from large-scale diachronic patterns than from the local texture of language.81 Of the two linguistic forms, intentional irony involves saying one thing and meaning another, whereas what I have called structural irony involves meaning one thing but unintentionally saying another. The speaker controls the irony in the first, but unmeant meanings invade his utterance and speak through him in the second.82 Of these three, structural irony is by far the most interesting and has received the most attention. It was basic to the formulation of the Intentional Fallacy, whose argument is essentially that the empirical author should be considered (from the standpoint of what he intends) an unreliable narrator. But to put it this way is already to remark an extension of interpretive focus beyond the boundaries of fiction—or, more accurately, to extend the boundaries of fiction beyond the field within which New Criticism confined it. This confinement is a relatively isolated and recent episode in the history of an inquiry whose modern phase goes back at least to Bakhtin’s exploration of the thesis that any speaker confronts a language ‘‘populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others,’’ so that ‘‘forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions . . . is a difficult and complicated process.’’83 Among the several lines along which to chart the examination of structural irony as a generalized phenomenon, one could cite the fairly straight path from the hermeneutic circle to the textual dialectic (Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur), and the meander through theories of false consciousness and bad faith, Freudian analysis, semiotics, structural linguistics, and structural anthropology, to the more radically suspicious ´ecriture of Lacanian and Derridean practice. All lines converge on the single if variously inflected notion of the ‘‘discourse of the other.’’ Derrida soothingly reassures the speech act theorist and the rest of us that in his new typology generated from diffe´rance ‘‘the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from this place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and the entire system of

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utterances.’’ If only owing to the sheer conventionality and iterability of discourse, ‘‘the intention which animates utterance will never be completely present in itself and its content,’’ and ‘‘this essential absence of intention for the actuality of the statement, this structural unconsciousness . . . prohibits every saturation of a context.’’84 It is nevertheless the case that the convergent play of Freudian, Lacanian, Foucauldian, and Derridean forces have worn away the intentional tip of the discursive iceberg and deepened the subaqueous resonance of the Other. This has occurred not simply because, from the linguistic standpoint, statements are inhabited by meanings other than those intended but also because when the intending and desiring of the concrete subject are viewed through the bathyspheric lens of suspicion they too appear to be citational or conventional products of ideological inscription. The question ‘‘What do you mean?’’ sinks down past ‘‘What do you think you mean?’’ and ‘‘What do you want and mean to mean?’’ to ‘‘Why do you think you want and mean to mean what you think you mean?’’ and thence to ‘‘Why do you think it’s you who wants and means to mean what you think you mean?’’ Foucault’s studies of carceral, panoptic, and pastoral technologies develop the theme that the subject’s conscience, desire, intention, ‘‘inner truth,’’ and ‘‘soul’’ are no less products of interpellation than the subject itself. Furthermore, the thesis that the subject is continuously produced entails as its consequent the thesis that the unified and enduring subject is itself an effect of ideology. In their Lacanian critique of Althusser, Rosalind Coward and John Ellis insist that the subject’s ‘‘consistency’’ and ‘‘wholeness’’ is produced by the splitting that separates this mirage not only from the unconscious but also from its own atomicity, as well as from inscribed social contradictions: This subject, traversed and worked by social contradiction, is nevertheless set in place as fully responsible, a controlling consciousness, consistent within one articulation. Brecht pinpointed this when he said (in 1926), ‘‘The continuity of the ego is a myth. A man is an atom that perpetually breaks up and forms anew’’. . . . Ideologies set in place the individual as though he were this subject: the individual produces himself in this imaginary wholeness, this imaginary reflection of himself as the author of his actions.85

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Given such theses, the category of intention may not indeed disappear, but its flickering traces become harder to read, and this has an unsettling effect on any consistent effort to identify structural irony. For if we define it as meaning one thing and unintentionally saying another, this presupposes that in any particular case of structural irony we have to be able to distinguish what was intended from what was not. In literary interpretation a good deal of conflict centers on this question. It was, as I said, a New Critical favorite; the intentions of speakers and characters were scrutinized with as much energy as those of authors were avoided. But Coward and Ellis raise a more pressing question about intention because they imply that, as an act of self-interpretation, it is necessarily fictional or erroneous. As Jameson points out, however, this opens up the possibility that if intention is construed as motivated self-interpretation—as the re- or misinterpretation of ideologically inscribed motives— the subject can be approached in historical terms: What becomes interesting . . . is not the denunciation of the centered subject and its ideologies, but rather the study of its historical emergence, its constitution or virtual construction as a mirage which is also evidently in some fashion an objective reality. For the lived experience of individual consciousness as a monadic and autonomous center of activity is not some conceptual error, which can be dispelled by the taking of thought and by scientific rectification: it has a quasi-institutional status, performs ideological functions, and is susceptible to historical causation and produced and reinforced by other objective instances, determinants, and mechanisms.86 This means not only that subjects as speakers occupy institutional ‘‘sites of enunciation’’ but also that they may themselves be sites of institutional intentions. Literature offers a familiar example of such institutional sites: the genres. The analyses of Althusser and Jameson go a long way toward showing how the concept of genre may be de-aestheticized and universalized, with important consequences for the extended employment of the rhetorical and deictic postulates.

The Interpretive Shuttle: After the New Criticism From the late 1950s on, the practice of reading in the academy has gradually been extended to everything New Criticism considered unworthy of

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attention, including its own social, political, and theoretical premises. A lot of this has gone on under the rubric of ‘‘cultural studies,’’ which has the kind of cachet today that interdisciplinary studies had in the 1960s. The cultural studies program is sometimes reduced to an oppositional vehicle sporting the bumper sticker that tells you to Question Authority, and sometimes its commitment to raising social and political consciousness is coupled with a cavalier attitude toward close reading. This is too bad, since the cultural critique of New Criticism and its canon is most effective when it appropriates the method of its New Critical target and redirects attention from the form of the content to the content of the form (Hayden White). An oppositional reading can’t be less powerful, technically less skillful, than the reading it opposes. One of the aims of cultural studies is to show that—and how—the aesthetic is a political category, never more so than when it claims to be apolitical, and enshrined in an aura of moral value (like the moralized aesthetic of New Criticism). But if you want to politicize the aesthetic—that is, unpack the political content of aesthetic form—you can’t avoid the kind of close reading that originated with the New Criticism. So what you need is a conceptual structure or model that integrates aesthetic with political analysis, or formal with ideological analysis in a single interpretive system. The outlines of such a system have been in place for a very long time. When Ricoeur distinguished between two conflicting philosophies of interpretation, a hermeneutics of faith and a hermeneutics of suspicion, the first devoted to the restoration or recollection of meaning, the second to the ‘‘reduction of the illusions and lies of consciousness,’’ he fingered Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the masters who dominated the school of suspicion.87 I don’t share either Ricoeur’s faith in faith or his suspicion of suspicion, but a version of the conflict he describes underwrites the dialectic expressed in the diagram I’m about to put into play. For me, unlike Ricoeur, the two sides of the conflict are co-constitutive: faith and suspicion are mutually interanimating terms, a dyad bound by as tight a logical bond as fiction and reality, or parent and child. And unlike Ricoeur, I distinguish faith and suspicion as hermeneutic philosophies from innocent and suspicious reading as lectorial techniques and strategies. As I see it, a lot of New Criticism was a practice of suspicious reading in the service of the hermeneutics of faith, while a lot of what passes today

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for cultural studies is more consistent in its adherence to the school of suspicion than in its adherence to suspicious reading. So I want to make the case that although cultural studies differs profoundly from New Criticism at the level of ideology, it’s most effective when it recognizes its resemblances to New Criticism at the level of practice, when it appropriates the interpretive strategies of New Criticism and extends them through all the codes and media that diversify the empire of signs the true believer refers to as nature or its mirror. Among the objects of reference cultural studies ought to be New Critical about, and read suspiciously, is cultural studies. The move that secured the aestheticized politics of New Criticism was the double dissociation of the literary artifact from author and from reader. This was a political move in that it hermetically sealed the artifact not only from its contexts of production and reception but also from the historical and psychological disciplines, which competed with English departments for the right to control literary turf. Superior insight into the structure and texture of the work as a finished product, already written, thus entailed blindness to the structure and texture of the discourses that govern the ongoing acts of reading, as well as those that govern changing modes and motives of literary production. A definable logic shaped both the New Critical enterprise and its conception of literature, and this logic is precisely the opposite of the logic that shapes cultural studies. To move from one to the other involves breaking the hermetic seal, reinserting critical practice and its objects into the history, the academic politics, and the institutional contexts of authorial and lectorial production, from which New Criticism had insulated them. It involves a shift of focus from the reifying act of objective interpretation to the previously occluded act of self-interpretation. Though such changes were initiated not only by the critics of New Criticism but also by independent academic sources and political events, New Criticism retrospectively became the symbol of a reactionary humanism, and the insight into its ideological implications often entailed blindness to the radical possibilities of the refinements it introduced into suspicious reading. My account of these changes will proceed with the help of the accompanying diagram, ‘‘The Interpretive Shuttle’’ (see page 98 below).

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In phase 1 of the diagram, I list the polarities that prevailed in the heyday of New Criticism, from I. A. Richards’s early writing through the period just after World War II. Phase l(a) is an anomalous, one-member class named Northrop Frye, about which, or whom, a word of explanation is in order. In Anatomy of Criticism Frye bases his theory of symbols on a distinction between two kinds of reading: reading centrifugally from verbal signs to their referents, and reading centripetally from verbal symbols to their intraliterary contexts of meaning. He claims that whenever we read anything we find our attention moving in both directions at once.88 I put Frye in a category separate from New Criticism partly because of this focus on two kinds of reading. But he falls back into the New Criticism he criticizes by sliding from that focus to a focus on two kinds of writing, nonliterary and literary.89 This reifying displacement duplicates the tendency of New Criticism to transform two levels of interpretive intensity into two kinds of literary objects, literature and nonliterature. The logic that governs the shift from phase 1 to phase 2 of the diagram was already at work in the 1960s. The point I want to make about the shift is that, despite of the tilt from a more reactionary to a more radical set of agendas, the new modes of suspicious reading don’t foreclose or transcend the table of opposites; they only change the terms of opposition. You can see from a look at the diagram that, although political agendas have changed, and although various emphases differentiate any one binary pair from any other, critical practices of many kinds, and in many disciplines, are easily accommodated by this paradigm. That in itself may be trivial, given the generality of the two contrasting categories. But my point about the diagram is prescriptive rather than descriptive: it’s that the structure of the paradigm imposes a dialectical obligation on its practitioners, the obligation to shuttle continuously back and forth between the poles of innocence and suspicion; this means resisting the temptation to cling to one of the poles, consider it an adequate critical position, and vilify what goes on at the other pole; it also means resisting the temptation to make a single definitive swing from the left to the right and back again, which is the procedure followed, for example, by Ricoeur and Gadamerian hermeneutics. In saying this I’m laying down an injunction about the ethics of reading in J. Hillis Miller’s sense, or in the sense

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he attributes to Paul de Man’s insistence that the referential function of language is at once necessary to affirm and impossible to verify. The ethical imperative, as Miller puts it, paraphrasing de Man, ‘‘is the unavoidable exigency to be true to the obligation to lie . . . in the sense that one necessary moment in any act of reading is the referential turn which draws ethical conclusions, makes ethical judgments and prescriptions,’’ the grounds for which are ultimately inscrutable.90 What this boils down to is the injunction to keep on shuttling. The first step in describing the structure of the shuttle is to rewrite Frye’s directional vectors (phase [1a]) as two modes of lectorial attention. In my lexicon, centripetal reading is renamed ‘‘textualization’’ and centrifugal reading ‘‘detextualization.’’ To move from left to right on the diagram is to textualize; to move from right to left is to detextualize. I define textualization as what occurs when, in the act of close reading, attention is redirected from a particular set of sign/referent relations to relations of various kinds between the signifiers and signifieds, the material constituents, of the signs in that set. Detextualization is what occurs when this operation is reversed. The ‘‘de-’’ in ‘‘detextualization’’ marks the anteriority of the textualizing act. It confers a value similar to the one given by Barthes when he called myth ‘‘depoliticized speech,’’ or when he suggested that denotation in the classic text is the ultimate connotative illusion. At bottom I’m talking about a simple and familiar distinction: the difference between looking at language and looking through it; between focusing on ‘‘the languageness of language’’ (Joel Fineman’s phrase) and minimizing or ignoring it. But my emphasis here is definitional. I want to reserve the word ‘‘text’’ strictly for the product of the first operation. In this I follow Jameson’s and the Tel Quel view of textuality. Jameson describes textuality as a methodological hypothesis whereby the objects of study in the human sciences . . . are considered to constitute so many texts which we decipher and interpret, as distinguished from the older views of those objects as realities or existents or substances which we in one way of another attempt to know. . . . The notion of textuality . . . has . . . the advantage as a strategy of cutting across both epistemology and the

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subject/object antithesis in such a way as to neutralize both, and of focusing the attention of the analyst on her own position as a reader and on her own mental operations as interpretation. At once, then, she finds herself obliged to give an account of the nature of her object of study qua text: she is thus no longer tempted to view it as some kind of empirically existing reality in its own right. . . . [She necessarily reconstitutes] it in such a way as to resolve her ‘‘facts’’ back into semantic or syntactic components of the text she is about to decipher.91 Among the objects that can be textualized, according to Jameson, are ‘‘the various levels or instances of a social formation; political power, social class, institutions, and events themselves.’’92 In a similar account of textualizing, Mieke Bal defines ‘‘text’’ as the product of ‘‘a mode of reading’’ that allows for ‘‘a continuous shaping and reshaping of sign-events,’’ and that is opposed to the ‘‘realist’’ mode of ‘‘reading for a content . . . modeled on reality at the expense of awareness of the signifying system of which the work is constructed.’’93 In the Tel Quel formulation, ‘‘textuality’’ is opposed to ‘‘any communication and representational . . . use of language’’ and defined ‘‘essentially as productivity,’’ which amounts to saying . . . that in practice, a textual writing supposes that the descriptive orientation of language has been tactically thwarted and replaced by a procedure that, on the contrary, gives full play to its generative power. . . . [It amounts to saying that in theory] the text has always functioned as a transgressive field with regard to the system according to which our perception, our grammar, our metaphysics, and even our scientific knowledge are organized, a system according to which a subject, situated in the center of a world that provides it with something like a horizon, learns to decipher the supposedly prior meaning of this world. . . . To the idealism of a meaning anterior to that which ‘‘expresses’’ it, the text would then oppose the materialism of a play of signifiers that produces meaning effects. . . . To the aestheticizing ideology of the art object as a work that is situated within history or in literature as the object of a history of the ornamental, the text would oppose the reinsertion of its signifying practice—situated as a

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specific practice—within the articulated whole of the social practice (or transformation practices) in which it participates.94 Under these definitions, ‘‘text’’ differs both from actual writing, the script that represents words, and from the messages transparently conveyed by the writing. Some kinds of writing seem to resist textualization. They invite us to look through the language by constructing the reader as an auditor or spectator who reads as if listening to speech, or as if visualizing events, objects, places. Other kinds invite us to look at the language, into it, and read as if textualizing. But we can decide to textualize any writing, whether or not it sends out invitations, and in fact the oppositional stance of cultural studies produces an interest in writing that doesn’t send out invitations to close reading, writing that preemptively directs us beyond the interactions going on within and among its signs. As I said, my aim in describing the shuttle is to suggest that many different theoretical and practical events can be mapped onto a model that has the coherence, dramatic tension, and organized complexity of, say, a well-wrought urn. To ride the shuttle is to weave a fabric within a frame of reading polarized by the tension between two orientations. On the one hand, there is a ‘‘set’’ toward the message, the story, whatever is being referred to or talked and written about. This includes a set toward the communicative transaction between sender and receiver—includes, that is, not merely the informational context but also the rhetorical form of the content. On the other hand, there is a set toward the production of meaning and toward the content of the form, and this includes a set toward the possibility that the text may generate a message about the message. I’ve defined a text as the product of a shift of attention from sign/ referent relations to relations of various kinds between signifiers and signifieds. These four terms—signifier and signified, sign and referent— generate a lot of confusion, and, before going on, I think I should try to be clear about the way I use them. To begin with, then, imagine the standard form of the dictionary entry: the signifier is the word being defined, and the signified consists in the words that define it. Together, the signifier and the signified constitute the sign. The sign is the whole

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dictionary entry. It is the defined word. Now if a sign is ‘‘everything that, on the grounds of a previously established convention, can be taken as something standing for something else,’’ the ‘‘something else’’ is its referent.95 The signified designates or marks out a particular range of referents. I said ‘‘designates or marks out,’’ not ‘‘indicates or points out.’’ The referent has to be marked out, distinguished by language, before the sign can be used to point it out. Pointing the sign at the thing—which could of course be another sign—constitutes the thing as a referent, and is itself an act of reference. I use the expressions ‘‘point out’’ and ‘‘point at’’ to dramatize the notion that referring is an act, something sign users do. Considered strictly as a signifying code, a system of signifiers and signifieds, language makes reference possible, but it doesn’t refer. Signs refer only when language users point them at things outside the signs they use. Although signs normally don’t signify their signifiers and signifieds, they can be made to do so, just as things normally positioned as referents can be made to signify their signs. The explanation I just gave is based on lexical interactions. Even there, you can glimpse the potential for complexity in the fact that one signifier can have many signifieds and one signified can couple with many signifiers. But going beyond the lexical and sentential levels, problems and complications multiply. For example, insofar as reference involves sign users, the study of reference necessarily implicates the study of self-reference. This inevitably leads to the study of transactional relations between and among sign users, and thus of the role of the subject in sign use, and of the politics of reference. It brings into play the two basic elements of New Critical practice, the deictic and rhetorical postulates. And it includes, as Teresa de Laurentis insists, the study of ‘‘the materiality and the historicity of the subject itself,’’ the study of ‘‘a subject touched by the practice of signs . . . physically implicated or bodily engaged in the production of meaning, representation, and self-representation,’’ and therefore, as she reminds us, the study of a gendered subject.96 Another problem is posed by the tendency to syncopate the two pairs of terms, signifier/signified and sign/referent; the reasoning here is that, since both the signifier and the sign can be said to signify, why can’t the signifier be coupled to the referent, and if it can, what’s the point of distinguishing between signified and referent? Many interpreters make do

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with only the terms signifier and signified; the distinction between signified and referent is elided in much cultural critique and deconstruction, for example. At the same time, something else also tends to get elided: the distinction between what language does and what language users do. Granted that we interpreters always look at examples of language use— never at language pure and simple, but at discourse or language in use (dictionaries are products of discourse)—we can still, by textualizing, uncouple the language from the language user. That is, we can distinguish what the users do with their language, what they mean by it, what they see and hear in it, from what their language says, does, and means regardless of what they say, do, mean, and read or hear. In media that use linguistic signs, to textualize means to explore the goings-on among the semiotic, phonological, prosodic, lexical, rhetorical, grammatical, deictic, and semantic registers of any signifying context. It includes attention to the effect of different media or channels on these events. It doesn’t exclude attention to reference. For one thing, textual interactions position their context, differentiate it, by referring through citation or allusion to similar events in other sectors of the intertextual field they organize around themselves. For another thing, the product of textualization will always be a comment on the message, the reference, the apparent intentionality (vouloir-dire) of the writing. The problem is to try to determine where this comment comes from: the writing, the reader, or some combination of both. If there is opaque writing that invites textualization, and transparent writing that resists it, mustn’t there also be oppositional writing that represents the resistance to textualization in an ironic or parodic mode of critique? The question is political as well as practical: whose side is the text on, that of the writing or that of the textualizing reader? Redirecting attention from sign/referent relations to the various kinds of interplay between signifiers and signifieds is the founding move of interpretation as we know it, and as we’ve come to love or hate it. It is the move phase 1 has in common with phase 2, New Criticism with deconstruction, and modernism with postmodernism. But it’s by no means a sufficient move, since the dynamics of the model call for continuous shuttling. When I say that attention is redirected from sign/referent relations, I mean to emphasize that it is normally—or normatively—

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fixed on those relations. Innocent reading comes first; it is what we all do as ordinary readers in the street. Suspicious reading comes not from experience or resentment alone but from instruction. In the final analysis, however much we celebrate jouissance and the pleasures of the text, textualization is not its own reward so long as we’re part of the instructional labor force. But if detextualizing returns us to the pole of innocence, it gives its sign/referent relations a look different from the one they had in the pretextual moment. Let’s call that original moment documentary: the objects constructed by the desire or decision to focus on sign/referent relations are scenes of instruction and persuasion, sources of evidence, purveyors of doctrine, instruments of knowledge and doxa, producers of docility: in a word, documents. In the mid-fifteenth century the word document came to signify a means of showing, proving, furnishing evidence. The slow but sure gravitation of those functions to the graphic medium was confirmed in the early eighteenth century by the first recorded instance of ‘‘document’’ as ‘‘something written.’’ By then, what Foucault calls ‘‘the disciplinary regime’’ had begun to ‘‘capture and fix’’ individuals in ‘‘a network of writing,’’ a ‘‘mass of documents,’’ through which education, morality, conduct, law, property, commercial practice, scientific inquiry, bureaucratic administration, and political power were mediated and authenticated.97 Documentary desire is the desire for justification by paper and on paper. In a print culture, as Lewis Mumford argued long ago, ‘‘reality means ‘established on paper,’ ’’ and the effect of the real is conveyed by or even identical with the effect of documentation.98 Foucault took account of this in his essay on the author function, but Wimsatt and Beardsley ignored it in their famous critiques of the Intentional and Affective Fallacies. To borrow a familiar procedure that Lacan mischievously attributes to Saussure in the very act of subverting Saussurian linguistics, we can express the documentary relation by the algorithm in the upper left of the diagram, s⬍r, where the formula s⬍r means ‘‘the sign corresponds to, stands for, and indicates a prior referent.’’ Placing the textual relation, sr/sd, under the bar and under erasure signifies the transparency of the sign and its subjection to the referent that shines through it. Textualization provisionally or temporarily dethrones the sign/referent relation,

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and puts it in brackets in order to free up and encourage the seditious particles bouncing about and colliding within the nucleus of the sign. We can express it by the algorithm in the upper right of the diagram, where the formula s⬎r means ‘‘the sign is prior to and constitutive of the referent it stands for and indicates.’’ Detextualization establishes, or reestablishes, the hegemony of the referent. By placing the product of textualization in brackets, it restores the transparency of the sign and fixes the reference. But it doesn’t restore documentary innocence. Rather, it produces an imitation or simulacrum of the document. (See the algorithm in the lower left.) Because it enacts or stages a defense against textualization, this product can be called a countertext. This may well promote the suspicion that documents enact the same defense and are countertexts in disguise. The effect of the reciprocal play of the two operations of the shuttle is to place in question not only the givenness and closure of the sign/referent linkage, but also the innocence of the documentary standpoint that privileges them. The practice of textualization produces text and textuality by freeing up the sign from the referent and exploring its internal relations. The practice of detextualization, moving in the opposite direction, establishes or reestablishes the hegemony of the referent over the sign and its internal components; to borrow an academic idiom, it ‘‘fixes the reference.’’ In his account of the production of myth, or ‘‘depoliticized speech,’’ in the essay ‘‘Myth Today,’’ Barthes analyzes the countertextual strategies that subordinate the play within the sign to the ‘‘natural’’ fixing of sign to referent—where ‘‘natural’’ means ‘‘naturalizing,’’ or ‘‘ideological.’’99 If, however, those strategies succeed, they do so by vanishing, making themselves invisible, and representing the countertext as a document. The document is represented, or represents itself, as a transparent conveyor of knowledge or instrument of power. It transmits to its possessor the authority it receives from its site of authorship (personified or impersonal). It has everything to do with the negotiations it facilitates between its writers and its readers. Thus it is the documentary status of literature that New Criticism bracketed as irrelevant to a proper interpretive practice, and in making that move it left the documentary standing in its mystified form. The move New Criticism failed to make in its dissociation of the textual from the documentary is the move that characterizes

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the critical enterprise represented in phase 2 of the diagram: the demystification of the document, its reconstruction as countertext, and along with it the reconstruction of authors and readers as functions or effects of writing. Countertexts come in many forms. Books can be countertexts; textbooks definitely are. The body and the cosmos are the major cultural countertexts. Where texts offer the opportunity to interpret, countertexts offer the possibility of knowledge and truth. All the now familiar strategies of reification, naturalization, alienation, and what anthropologists call ascription are detextualizing operations. Countertextuality has a long history. We all know that one picture is worth a thousand words. Or at least we’ve heard that; we’ve been told it since the Middle Ages, when visual images were called the Bible of the illiterate, who could look at them while they were hearing ritual and homiletic speech acts. In his famous vindication of images, Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604) writes that ‘‘the picture is for simple men what writing is for those who can read, because those who cannot read see and learn from the picture the model they should follow. Thus pictures are above all for the instruction of the people.’’100 Some seven centuries later, around 1285, William Durand uses Gregory’s dictum to introduce a discussion of church pictures: ‘‘what writing supplies to him who can read, a picture supplies to him who is unlearned and can only look. Because they who are uninstructed thus see what they ought to follow: and things are read, though letters be unknown.’’ A little later he again cites Gregory on the value of pictures: ‘‘paintings appear to move the mind more than [written] descriptions: for deeds are placed before the eyes in paintings, and so appear to be actually carrying on. But in [written] descriptions, the deed is done as it were by hearsay: which affecteth the mind less when recalled to memory. Hence, also, is it that in churches we pay less reverence to books than to images and pictures.’’101 Notice that this is more tendentious than the preceding statement, which only vindicates images as a kind of stopgap, a second best if not a last resort. This one implies, on the contrary, that even if you can read words you’ll get more out of ‘‘reading’’ pictures; the instruction will be more effective because more affecting; the indoctrination will be more thorough, will go deeper, because the medium of instruction is more vivid and immediate. Here we

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slide into other familiar places: the discourse of paragone, the comparison of visual, verbal, and auditory arts; the discourse that grew up around Horace’s ut pictura poesis; the Reformation project of getting the power of interpretation out of the clutches, and out of the spaces, of Catholic ritual and mythology. My point about the tendentious statement is not that it is a theory of interpretation. Rather, it is a theory of disinterpretation, for if one picture is worth a thousand words, then a thousand words are reducible to one picture. On this theory the best method of reading involves looking through the language at the referent, that is, reading as if visualizing. The theory is a form of censorship that aims to discourage the textualizing effects of suspicious reading and mischievous writing.102 Another version of the theory seems to invite interpretation by the promise of hidden meaning but withholds it from all who do not have the key. In his important study of iconoclasm in the English Reformation, Ernest Gilman observes that the Renaissance’s ‘‘odd fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphs’’ instances a conception of the visual image as concealing a language. . . . The Egyptian priests had preserved their arcane wisdom in ideograms. . . . Here was ‘‘a mute and symbolic language of ideas’’ (Valeriano) at once more universal and indelible than other tongues, and more directly expressive of divine wisdom than written language. In the hieroglyphic image, meaning presented itself purely and instantaneously in the lexicon of things—in rebus rather than in verbis—without the mediation of words.103 This involves a more explicitly elitist rationale than that of the Gregorian mode, but the goal is the same. As Plato had shown in the Phaedrus and the Timaeus, the pictographic writing of the Egyptians differed from the more democratic alphabetic writing representing oral speech in that the interpretation of hieroglyphics was restricted to the priesthood.104 Gilman also discusses the example of George Sandys, whose frontispiece to his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is followed by a brief poem called ‘‘The Minde of the Frontispeece, And Argument of this Worke,’’ a poem that not only clarifies the allegory but further suggests by its

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title that the frontispiece is itself the image of a ‘‘Minde,’’ of the integral idea of the Metamorphoses now unfolding into the sequential ‘‘Argument’’ of Sandys’s text. On the same principle, Sandys explains in a preface ‘‘To the Reader’’ that he has ‘‘contracted the substance of every Booke’’ of Ovid’s poem ‘‘into as many Figures,’’ each figure condensing all the fable to be told in that book into what Ficino would call ‘‘one complete image.’’ So the illustration to Book 3 . . . shows Actaeon, Narcissus, Semele, Tiresias, and so on, the narrative in which they will be positioned linearly for the reader here contracted beforehand into a display inviting the reader to apprehend at a glance the whole network of their interrelationships.105 Here again, in this preemptive strike one picture reductively preinterprets one thousand words. Visual representation and condensation impose a contertextual defense against seditious democratic reading, the jouissance that Ovid’s rhizomatic textual play invites. The countertextual effects of stylized rhetoric in song, dance, political oratory, and other forms of ritualized communication have been studied in detail and persuasively analyzed by the anthropologist Maurice Bloch, who did his field work in Madagascar. From this study he draws the conclusion that ‘‘you cannot argue with a song.’’106 He claims that ‘‘reasoned contradiction or argument . . . is . . . reduced or ruled out’’ by the formalized—or, as he calls it, ‘‘arthritic’’—character of ritual communication, whether in religious or political contexts. ‘‘As a result the communication of ritual is protected by its form from challenge, rapid modification, or evaluation.’’107 Stylized expression produces a sense of inevitability in the receivers as well as the senders of ritualized messages. And the messages tend to be traditional in content as well as in form. Bloch notes the ‘‘speeches of elders at the beginning of a ritual are identical to the speeches of elders in political councils.’’ Both share the same restrictive syntactical, lexical, and rhetorical features and employ the same restrictively traditional body of content. Both are ‘‘referred to . . . as ‘speaking the words of the ancestors.’ ’’108 The process by which textuality is countered is sometimes described as erasing the signifier, rendering it transparent to or identical with a preexistent signified, and fixing that identity so as to produce the reality

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effect. St. Thomas Aquinas’s famous account of the four levels of meaning illustrates one detextualizing procedure, based on the proposition that God can signify ‘‘His meaning, not by words only . . . but also by things themselves.’’ In this example, the role of the signifier is extended or transferred from verbal signs to their referents and confers on them the semantic power of language. Those referents in turn become the signifiers of other referents. In all such operations, the signified is elided either with the signifier or with the referent. The fourfold method has been described by Northrop Frye and many others as a machine for producing ambiguity through polysemy, but that’s a mistake. What it produces is not multiple meanings but multiple inscriptions of a single meaning or message in a variety of media—in books and buildings, icons and images, natural bodies of all kinds, their souls if they have such, their careers in the visible medium of this life and the invisible medium of the next. The desired effect is not ambiguity but redundancy, the mechanism of doctrinal reinforcement. The semiotic richness that lurks in the tension or slippage between the elements of the sign is controlled by displacing meaning from verbal to extraverbal signifiers, exiling it from the unruly domain of language to that of the referent. So, according to the wisdom of the elders, or at least of one elder, Duke Senior in As You Like It, meaning gets stuck in things, like tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, arrowheads in the round haunches of the world. This makes possible the knowledge that leads to truth, closure, and the secure nesting of the sign in the referent. By textualizing the consequences of this operation, we may identify its original status as a countertext rather than an unconditioned reality, and we accentuate the political or ideological investment in the repression of textuality. All this throws a strange light on the deep-structural processes by which references get fixed; a light that elucidates the shadow of evasiveness in the very use of a deterministic-sounding term like deep-structural, since the countertextual operations I just illustrated are instituted ideological strategies that display political motives and interests. To shine this light on standard accounts of reference put forth by language philosophers makes them begin to look a little strange, too, and I want to conclude with some comments and examples that suggest the documentary or countertextual orientation of such accounts.

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The literature on reference is both large and frustratingly disorganized, but for my purposes the various attempts to construe reference can be illustrated by the following statements: 1. Whatever is referred to must exist.109 2. Referring and predicating ⳱ performing propositional acts. . . . Any expression which serves to identify any thing, process, event, action, or any kind of ‘‘individual’’ or ‘‘particular’’ . . . [is] a referring expression.110 3. [a] Since linguistic communication often has extra-linguistic reality as its object, speakers have to be able to designate the objects that constitute this reality; this is the referential function of language. . . . 3. [b] This reality is not necessarily, however, the reality, the world. The natural languages in fact have the power to construct the universe to which they refer; they can thus give themselves an imaginary discursive universe.111 4. Reality is not what is ‘‘given’’ to this or that ‘‘subject,’’ it is a state of the referent (that about which one speaks) which results from the effectuation of establishment procedures defined by a unanimously agreed-upon protocol. . . . Real or not, the referent is presented in the universe of a phrase, and it is therefore situated in relation to some sense.112 5. The term [refer] can mean either (a) a factual relation which holds between an expression and some other portion of reality whether anybody knows it holds nor not, or (b) a purely ‘‘intentional’’ relation which can hold between an expression and a nonexistent object. Call the one ‘‘reference’’ and the other ‘‘talking about.’’ . . . ‘‘Talking about’’ is a commonsensical notion; ‘‘reference’’ is a term of philosophical art. . . . I think that the quest for a theory of reference represents a confusion between the hopeless ‘‘semantic’’ quest for a general theory of what people are ‘‘really talking about,’’ and the equally hopeless ‘‘epistemological’’ quest for a way of refuting the skeptic and underwriting our claim to be talking about nonfictions. . . . The latter demand is for some transcendental standpoint outside our present set of representations from which we can inspect the relations between those representations and their object. . . . But nothing can refute the skeptic—nothing can do what epistemology hoped to do. For we discover how language works only within the pres-

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ent theory of the rest of the world, and one cannot use a part of one’s present theory to underwrite the rest of it.113 In one construal, you point a sign or proposition at an object, go Bang! and the object turns into a referent. This is the Anglo-American construal, illustrated in statements 1, 2, and 3a. In another construal, you make the referential gesture of pointing a sign or proposition anywhere—into the void, for example—and the referent turns into an object. This is the Gallic construal (3b and 4). In the third construal (5, and to some extent, 4) reference is simply the act of talking about something; to talk about x is to refer to it. We can call this the folksy construal. It holds for writing and showing as well as for talking, and it can be extended to imitating and representing whenever the word of is interchangeable with the word about, as in ‘‘a story about x,’’ ‘‘a portrait of x,’’ etc. The object of about or of is the referent of the sign, and the referent is the content considered apart from the way it’s expressed, signified, shown, or represented. Of our three construals, the first two are strong because they involve ontological commitments, while the folksy construal, which doesn’t involve them, is weak. The Anglo-American construal is innocent or naive: it makes the possibility of reference hinge on or presuppose the prior existence of what’s referred to. The commitments of the Gallic construal are more disenchanted, more constructionist, as you can see by comparing the Anglo-American examples with passage 3, which moves from the naive construal in 3a to the Gallic version in 3b; 3b can easily be unfolded into the radical proposals of Althusser, the Tel Quel writers, and Laclau and Mouffe. The Gallic version presupposes the referent in a way that gives ‘‘presupposing’’ a different sense, one closer to the transitivity of ‘‘suppose’’ or ‘‘imagine’’ or ‘‘invent’’: to presuppose in this sense is to constitute the object of reference by supposing or inventing its pre-existence. Passage 4 marks a transition from the Gallic to the folksy construal, which turns out to be the brainchild of Richard Rorty. It is his ‘‘commonsensical’’ improvement on the fancy but flawed theories of reference generated by the reliance of Anglo-American semantics and epistemology on the mirror-of-nature paradigm. Truth without mirrors, he argues, can

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be better apprehended by the weak commitments of ‘‘talking about’’ than by the strong commitments of ‘‘referring to.’’ His criterion of aboutness is ‘‘just whatever its utterer . . . thinks he’s talking about.’’114 These eight criterial words contain at least two fallacies analyzed by Derrida, but the statement has a number of useful features, some of which I mentioned earlier. First, it reminds us that however we construe it, reference is an act, something sign users do, as apart from what the signs they use do or mean. Second, it brings into focus the problems of agency and intention raised by the effort to distinguish what language users mean to say from what their language says, whether they mean it or not. Third, it reminds us that any study of reference is necessarily a study of self-reference, that is, a study of the rhetorical and deictic strategies by which the first person or subject is positioned in discourse. These features invite a harder look at Russell’s famous or infamous axiom ‘‘Whatever is referred to must exist.’’ John Searle dismisses it as a tautology on the grounds that ‘‘it says only that one cannot refer to a thing if there is no such thing to be referred to.’’115 Rorty advances the folksy construal as a superior alternative to the axiom, which he dismisses as ‘‘pointless, a philosopher’s invention’’ based on the discredited notion that truth is correspondence to reality rather than the relativized function of one or another language game.116 However, if you take Russell’s statement not only as an axiom but also as an utterance, it will seem neither tautological nor pointless. Rather, its mood is imperative: ‘‘Whatever is referred to must exist.’’ When you lean on the imperative, what the utterance proposes is that reference confers existence: if one can refer to a thing it must (as a result) exist even if there is no such thing to be referred to. The mood of the utterance makes the ontological imperative it delivers sound more emphatic and insistent than some of the traditional formulas of correspondence theory (e.g., ‘‘Truth is the adequation of thought to thing’’ or ‘‘Nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses’’). It isn’t only that the utterer of Russell’s formula has shifted his epistemological concern into the semantic register, but also that he sounds more anxious about the truth claims, the veridictive force, of the referring instrument. This is the anxiety that Rorty, following Heidegger, describes as the Parmenidean fear of losing contact with the real.117

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The example of Russell’s statement suggests that the problems of agency are more complicated for textualists than for language philosophers. The philosophers write about talking but they don’t talk about writing. They’re happy to work within the narrow confines of the communication model in which an unmarked sender is the source of the utterance and the message it contains. But textualists reject or bracket this model. For them, the utterance is constitutive of the sender as an effect of discourse, a virtual, not empirical subject; a subject variously marked by gender, class, race, and institutional status, marked also by the signifying style that constitutes it; a subject whose utterance is conditioned by the properties of the medium in which it is represented (speech, writing, print); a subject, finally, whose message and referential intentions are produced by partly detextualizing the interpretation of what the language does by itself—that is, by reconstituting the document as a countertextual act of communication. Rorty tries to clean up the philosopher’s act by dismissing the AngloAmerican construal, but textualists can’t take that step because the kind of reference and talking about they’re interested in is a slippery mixture of all three construals. Its formula can be expressed by putting the folksy construal together with passages 1 and 3b: ‘‘Whatever I’m talking about must be true, and therefore must exist prior to my talking about it (even if it doesn’t).’’ Let’s test this out with some examples. Suppose I happen to be talking about the fact that ladies are more emotional than men, or that negroes are instinctively better coordinated than whites, or that abortion is child murder, or that the Constitution represents the intention of the founding fathers, or that justice, which is the interest of the stronger, consists in helping your friends and hurting your enemies. I’d be instantly swamped by a mob of miscellaneous textualists and reference freaks. Some would question the referential status of the oppositions ladies/ men and negroes/whites, and they’d also want to know why I said ‘‘ladies’’ instead of ‘‘women’’ and negroes’’ instead of ‘‘blacks.’’ Others would start pushing on my predicates by unpacking their etymological, figurative, and rhetorical values—‘‘emotional,’’ for example, or ‘‘instinctive,’’ ‘‘intention,’’ ‘‘child,’’ ‘‘fathers,’’ ‘‘helping,’’ ‘‘hurting,’’ ‘‘friends,’’ ‘‘enemies.’’ A folksy pragmatist would ask why I happened to be talking about these things, what I was intending to say about them, and who I

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was trying to convince. An Anglo-American philosopher would crisply reply that I was fixing references, meaning that each of these statements asserts the truth of a proposition about the referent: ‘‘it is a fact that x is y.’’ Gallic textualists would first ask whether I actually thought the ‘‘I’’ was the subject and site of enunciation. They might then go on to giggle at the factitious or fetishistic assertion of fact because they, along with some of their German friends and enemies, have spent a lot of time exploring ‘‘the grammar of systematically distorted communication’’ and the various strategies (semantic, rhetorical, and genealogical) by which discourses that respond to specific conflicts of interest get naturalized. How, they might ask, do I account for the linguistic and ideological conditions that give documentary force to fictions of hierarchy, biology, law, and morality? No matter how deeply they get textualized, what is at stake in all these cases is the politics of reference-fixing. To fix a reference includes more than the ostensive gesture of pointing. It includes affixing a predication to the referent. Consider, for example, the existence and predication of rape, an example I heard discussed several years ago at a conference on cultural studies. The speaker queried the journalistic report ‘‘A rape occurs every seven minutes’’ and its variant ‘‘A woman is raped every seven minutes.’’ She noted that the man drops out of the picture and wondered why the report couldn’t as easily say ‘‘a man rapes every seven minutes,’’ especially since, in the variant, it is so easy for the middle voice of shared responsibility to creep in, so that ‘‘A woman is raped’’ slides effortlessly into ‘‘A woman gets raped.’’ Examples of this sort suggest why Lyotard insists that the referent, whether real or not, ‘‘is presented in the universe of a phrase, and . . . is therefore situated in relation to some sense,’’ some predicate that the phrasing changes from an attribution to the referent to a property of the referent.118 Of course, I have just stacked the deck with inflammatory examples. Reference-fixing, like price-fixing, may be conspiratorial or policy driven, but it doesn’t have to be. It is a major industry of Althusser’s state apparatuses, whose production of the effects of knowledge, truth, and reality sustains what may be called the countertextual imaginary. Acts of reference arise from existing sites of documentary and countertextual production, the most important of which have traditionally been the body and

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the cosmos because they best allow human constructs to be naturalized as objects of reference external to discourse. Within and between body and cosmos is an array of supporting countertexts that include genders, lineages, ethnicities, rituals, governments, religions, philosophies, textbooks, and the variety of institutional discourses investigated by Foucault and others. When textualization burrows into the universe of the phrase, it does so within this detextualized form of reference, and the texts it produces are always relative to some particular state or aspect of the framework—relative, rather, to two states of the framework: one is the context of the documents and the other is the context of the interpretive act. As I see it, then, cultural studies is most responsible when it demands that these relations be made explicit, that they be correlated, and thus that detextualizing—placing the text and the act in context—be part of the textualizing process. It needs to translate suspicion from a hermeneutic attitude to a lectorial practice by approaching its documentary objects with the following premise: in any organized act of sign use there are micro-movements of meaning that seem to be both produced and damped down by the sign user’s orientation toward the message. The trick is to magnify these micro-movements so that they can be shown, or made, to interfere with the referential and propositional claims of the message. But this can’t be done with too long a face. Cultural studies is most effective when its textual play is performed by merry pranksters. When they get on the shuttle at the documentary stop the destination logo they crank up is Question Reference. That’s unquestionably a good way to refer to what they do. But on the ride back to the countertext, they need a different logo to prepare them for the next trip textward. Maybe that one should say Question Cultural Studies. Or maybe it should just say Further.

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The Interpretive Shuttle innocent reading s⬍r sr / sd

s uspicious r eading

Document

Text Phase 1: New Criticism

mechanism science reason referential meaning denotation extension statement interested, purposeful truth of correspondence more transparent poetry of exclusion

冤

冥

nonliterary factual

sr / sd 关s ⬎ r兴 organism poetry emotion contextual meaning connotation intension suggestion disinterested, autotelic truth of coherence more complex & opaque poetry of inclusion

冤

Phase 1(a): Frye

discourse

冥

literary fictional

centrifugal reading

centripetal reading

Phase 2:

self-satisfying artifaces readerly work

discourse

Fish Barthes

self-consluing artifacts writerly text

mimetic or realist writing & reading

deconstructive writing and reading

filiative relations of the work: sources, influences, genetic & generic fields

the intertextual network

phenotext logocentrism truth claims: themes & messages

Kristeva Derrida de Man

genotext grammatocentrism tropology: figural materiality

the imagined presence of the reader as rhetorical subject

Media & Text Theory

The imagined absences & representation of the reader as literary subject

冤 reading as if visualizing 冥 reading as if listening

story the promise of knowledge the form of the content transmission of information metonymizing s⬍r

reading as if textualizing narratology Jameson White

discourse the demand for interpretation the content of the form production of meaning metaphorizing

Countertext

Text legend: s ⳱ sign r ⳱ referent

冋 册 sr / sd s⬎r

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I Whenever I open my text of King Lear and look fixedly at certain phrases sitting on the page, they begin to move, change shape, dance, wriggle, turn inside out, sprout wings, and fly about flapping from one speech or speaker to the other until my wits begin to turn. Try, for example, to pin down even so short and simple a text as Edmund’s reply to Kent’s offer of friendship: ‘‘Sir, I shall study deserving.’’ First, I immediately see the words change places, as in, ‘‘Sir, I shall deserve studying.’’ That is not so bad, and besides, it’s true. But second, I find the unspoken text reinflecting itself and telling me, ‘‘Sir, I shall study de-serving.’’ This is mad, of course, but it is also absolutely true. Clearly, these fantasies have nothing to do with what Shakespeare intended. On the other hand, if the play does not show that all the characters are diligent students of deserving and deserving, and that all deserve a more carefully researched study of motives than any of them is willing to undertake, then what does it show? Again, why is it that whenever I see the phrase ‘‘I gave you all,’’ its shifters start shuffling about until they tell me, ‘‘you give me all’’? Or what about Kent’s ‘‘See better, Lear; and let me still remain / The true blank of thine eye’’? Editors tell me blank means ‘‘the center of a target,’’ but the genitive ‘‘of ’’ arrows back from object to part and turns ‘‘blank’’ into the center of a sightless eye. Then, one meaning that escapes from 99

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Kent’s phrase is ‘‘See through my eyes so I can keep you from seeing what’s really there.’’ Another escapes when ‘‘me’’ starts clamoring for attention: ‘‘Let me still remain your target and victim rather than Cordelia.’’ Still another escapes when ‘‘remain’’ steps forward: ‘‘let me go on being your victim, more sinned against than sinning, my interest in victimage mirroring yours, my targeted and justified anger mirroring yours, the blind leading the blind.’’ Kent’s feathered phrase flies through the text and pierces other blanks. Lear’s ‘‘Get thee glass eyes,’’ for example, or Kent’s own ‘‘Take vantage, heavy eyes, not to behold / This shameful lodging.’’ Of course he beholds his being lodged in the stocks with a certain perverse pride, clasping his jailer in a mutual embrace that proves he still remains a true blank. It may be that Kent’s words, as he says of Cordelia, ‘‘reverb no hollowness,’’ but since ‘‘reverb’’ splits apart into reverberate and re-word or conceal, they reinstate the hollowness, the blank space within which all my rabid re-verbings germinate. I prefer to think of this hollowness less in terms of my uncontrol than in terms of what’s sometimes referred to by the mildly risible expression ‘‘the unlimited play of semiosis,’’ or the play of unlimited semiosis, or even, in the case of the present examples, the limited play of unlimited semiosis. The hollowness is the language folded inside speech. It is both a void and a plenum, for it is a targeted matrix. Since it can never succeed in making from the interpreter’s shaft, its plight is to swell into new meanings even before the old ones empty out a space by their escape into critical quarterlies. I am trying to say about Shakespeare’s text what Cordelia tries to say about her sisters: ‘‘Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides.’’ But I may not be any more successful than she is in controlling the flow of explicative power, nor can I say for certain in what or whose hollowness the cunning hides. ‘‘Plighted cunning’’: in that double-folded phrase, the cunning that conceals is itself hidden by the plight of the speaker who activates it. Plighted means not only ‘‘infolded’’ but also ‘‘pledged.’’ Cordelia had used the noun form earlier in referring to the marriage pledge, but used it in a way that also enabled a third meaning, ‘‘imperiled’’ or ‘‘unhappy state’’: that lord whose hand must take my plight (must be forced to take it forcefully from Lear). France wonders what she could have done ‘‘to dismantle / So many folds of favor,’’ but we suspect that the folds may have been less than favorable. The meaning of Cordelia’s dismantlement is unfolded later in Lear’s ‘‘Off, off, you lendings,’’ and in his and Edgar’s search for the relief or mantle of unaccommodated nakedness. Their escape to the enmity of the unsubstantial air is no mere back-to-nature movement. It is a flight in which everyone participates, a flight from the impotence produced either by one’s own sense of guilt, folly, or unfulfilled obligation, or by the heavy folds of favor with which others weigh one down.

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Within this plighted network Cordelia’s performance in the first scene may be seen as acting out an impulse to disencumber herself of her father’s lendings and to transfer Lear from her nursery to one that is less kind. I want to insist that this has nothing to do with her intention, that it happens with no apparent acknowledgment of her part in the project. Of course my insistence struggles against my own tendencies toward cynical reading, and I often feel the need to protect myself by seeing the play performed. In the theater, when I pack my unfolded interpretation back into the more benign presence of an embodied Cordelia who speaks her own lines, my reading may complicate, but it does not imperil, my sense that she feels her love for her father to be deeper and more genuine than his love for her. When I carry this impression back to the text, I can accredit her feeling without blinking away the defensive logic of her behavior. Hers is a plighted cunning in that it is beset and motivated by adversity. It hides her ‘‘small fault’’ under the folds of Lear’s new disfavor. It pledges her to serve where she loves, but to love only according to her bond, and to wait patiently for time to explicate Lear’s folly along with her truth. A very slight hollowness, a glimpse or passing echo of nothing, breathes out in the theatricalized thirdpersoning of her opening words, ‘‘What shall Cordelia speak?’’ Performance contains this nothing, shelters it from interpretive violence even as it continually restates it. I have to abstract it from that performative shelter and sow it in the furrows of its textual matrix in order to breed more assertive negations that shadow what she clearly means to say with darker sayings she doesn’t mean. I put the preceding passage in italics to signify that it is cited from a lecture I have delivered to different audiences during the past few years. Invariably, if the auditors responded with anything more notable than quizzical twitches and furrows or body signals of limp resignation, it was to come up after the lecture and ask me what it all meant, or why I didn’t read more slowly—much more slowly—or whether they could see the text I was reading from. The last request was most frequent, possibly because it was more polite, perilously close to flattery and thus easy to make. I have never been overly swift in making connections between what I was talking or writing about and the way I was talking or writing about it. My reflexive or metacritical faculties have atrophied from years of New Critical sedentism. A measure of the atrophy may be gleaned from the fact that the above passage is from a lecture whose topic is text versus performance in Shakespeare. It took me a while to realize that my inability to get my point across in recitation only proved my point—to my

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satisfaction if to no one else’s. The point, to oversimplify, is that when Shakespeare is staged and you hear his language at performance tempo, you are always haunted by the sense that you are receiving more information than you can process, and you wish you could slow the tempo down, or have passages repeated, or reach for a text. I didn’t make this point very well, and I have since profited from what I consider just accusations that I scapegoated Shakespeare, theater, and the audience.1 But apart from the quality of the argument, the thesis was bound to encounter serious objections from the currently virulent strain of Shakespeare criticism I set out to challenge: the stage-centered criticism—associated with the names of John Russell Brown, J. L. Styan, Bernard Beckerman, Richard Levin, Alan Dessen, and, more recently, Philip McGuire and Gary Taylor—that has flourished in recent decades in reaction to the excesses of the academic poetic drama or armchair view of Shakespeare. I won’t dwell on the controversy here. My purpose is to suggest that the controversy itself (including my share in it) has been ill founded, poorly grounded, and myopic, and to explore some of the basic structural forces and cultural changes of which it is a superficial symptom. We have learned from Fernand Braudel and the Annales school to distinguish different levels and rates of cultural change, and I plan to drop down from the swiftly moving surface of modern criticism to the deeper layer where the tectonic plates of the ‘‘modern’’ age and its antecedents slowly but continually grind, rumble, and shift. Any talk of the conflicting claims of performance and reading is talk about the age-old problematic of speech versus writing, and we have all heard or read enough about that in the last twenty years to know what bases have to be touched. So I’ll leave Shakespeare behind after a brief final glance at the general situation out of which the text/performance controversy emerges. The controversy is itself an epitome of divergent tendencies in contemporary cultural, institutional, and political life. The resurgence of interest in performance can only partly be explained as a reaction to the excesses of such academic approaches to theatrical drama as those associated with poetic-drama criticism and the New Criticism. The motive for releasing Shakespeare from his confinement in the ivory tower, and from the curse of what Richard Levin has called the ‘‘Age of the Reading,’’ is

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reinforced by the challenge with which electronic media and the ‘‘secondary orality’’ discussed by Ong confront the hegemony of print culture. At the same time, in what may well be the twilight of the Age of the Reading, academic interest in and analysis of the concepts of writing, text, textuality, and reading appear to have reached a take-off point. The present essay is situated in the twilight zone because its author is an old New Critic who feels more at home with texts than with performances, who is bemused more by what he sees words doing on the page than by what he hears them doing on the stage, and who finds solace for this infirmity in his recent if belated discovery of theories of the text. Since my own version of these theories was embedded in Chapter 1’s more general account of the fate of New Criticism, I’d like to preface the discussion of bodies and texts with a synopsis of that version, which can be reduced to the following six premises. 1. The practice of interpretation and sign use ranges across a continuum between the poles of innocent and suspicious reading. Innocent reading is oriented toward the message and suspicious reading toward messages about the message. 2. The continuum can be imagined as an interpretive shuttle. To ride the shuttle is to weave a fabric and pattern of reading that responds differentially to the forms of attentiveness characteristic of innocent reading at one pole and suspicious reading at the other. 3. These two poles or orientations correlate with the two-level structure of the sign: at the semantic level, the sign is coupled by sign users to a referent normally within the sign’s range of denotation or connotation; within the sign, at the semiotic level, the signifier or verbal expression is coupled to the signified, the expression’s content, or sense, or meaning. Innocent reading is oriented toward the semantics of sign-referent relations, suspicious reading toward the semiotics of signifier-signified relations. 4. Corresponding to the polar distinctions elaborated in these premises is a distinction between documentary and mischievous sign use. In the documentary mode signs are used and represented in a manner that directs attention beyond them to their referents, a manner that either doesn’t invite or more actively resists any effort to explore the mischief going on within the signs themselves.

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5. To shuttle from innocent to suspicious reading or sign use is to textualize, that is, to modify semantic messages by exploring or exploiting semiotic messages about those messages. 6. To shuttle back from mischievous to documentary sign use is to detextualize. A section of Chapter 1 was devoted to an account of the relative positions on the shuttle of spoken and written discourse, an account in which these positions were correlated with the relation of discourse to the body: speech resists but writing encourages the abstraction of discourse from the body. The abstraction of discourse from the body increases the disseminability of its message but decreases the sender’s control over it. In the remainder of this chapter, my focus will be on the problems and politics of abstraction, which I define as the alienation of discourse from the body.

II I begin by distinguishing between two hypothetical orders of communication and semiosis—one centered on speaker and hearer, the other on reader and writer.2 In the first, all messages—nonverbal as well as verbal—are transmitted through the channel of the body and its extensions, whereas in the second, all messages are abstracted from the body and reconstructed in graphic media so they can pass through written channels. These two orders may be called, not surprisingly, the order of the body and the order of texts. Communication in the order of the body is restricted to interaction contexts whose senders and receivers are present to each other; since these distinctions are formulated with Shakespeare in mind, I shall arbitrarily name them performance communities. But where the order of texts remains embedded in the order of the body, semiosis extends far beyond the boundaries of such contexts. Thus we read about societies in which the bodily signs of gender, genealogy, and age provide the organizing categories of institutional life, so that, for example, economic and political roles are embedded in sexual, domestic, kinship, and lineage roles. We read that in premodern economies the relations of commodity, money, and credit were embedded in the language of personal or group exchange

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and concrete use objects. We read that algebraic operations were embedded in the visual language of geometry, mechanical operations in the language of vitalism and organism. We characterize embeddedness as a totalizing effect produced by the tendency of the signifying body to expand into all available spaces until it permeates society, nature, the cosmos, and the gods with the resonance of its categories, imagery, and voice. Finally, we attribute to embeddedness an ideological import that derives from a specific signifying power of the body, the power indicated by Mary Douglas in calling the body a ‘‘natural symbol,’’ which is to say a naturalizing symbol. The signature of the body confers the appearance of inevitability, inalienability, and transcendent reality inscribed in it by ‘‘nature.’’ ‘‘Nature’’ in return borrows those forms of being that the human body signifies: person, consciousness, presence, and self-presence. In a word (a Derridean word), both the communicative and semiotic powers of the body, both the performance community and the embedded cosmos, are logocentric.3 Or so it seems to ‘‘us’’—those who do the reading, the characterizing, and the attributing. We confer the title ‘‘embedded’’ from the standpoint of our privileged knowledge that all the items listed in the previous paragraph have become ‘‘disembedded.’’ From our reading of, for example, Marx, Weber, Mumford, Parsons, or Polanyi, we have learned that political and economic functions were the sleepers abstracted from the body’s bed and that they woke up as soon as they stepped into their own institutional orders; that the invisible hand of the market society divested itself of the too perceptible hierarchic grip of status society; that the universes of the various sciences were disembedded from the constraining symbolism of the perceptual world; that the technological expansion of sensory and labor power came about by freeing instruments and machines from the limits of the body and its tools, which also meant freeing them from its control. These examples suggest that to write about embedding presupposes a prior act of disembedding, for in attributing embeddedness to the order of the body we simultaneously inject into its logocentric structure, though under a negative sign, the disembedded components of our own differentiated environment. But who are we? We are the beneficiaries and victims of a grammatocentric culture, though we are not, however, every-

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one who has learned to read and write. We are the privileged few who have had access to the specialized forms of training, the canonical texts and paradigms, the professional and disciplinary norms, commitments, organization, and practices that enable us to participate in what Stanley Fish calls ‘‘interpretive communities,’’ which it would be more realistic to call interpretive elites.4 Interpretive elites control the production, authorization, interpretation, and rewriting of the paradigms that guide practice in all fields, not only in the academic disciplines, not only in law, medicine, and scientific research, but also in bureaucratic administration, business, finance, and so on, wherever methods of recruitment and standards of technical competence are based on the mastery of a corpus of texts. If ‘‘interpretive’’ picks out the grammatocentric engagement of readers with texts, ‘‘elites’’ focuses the political dimension of that engagement. In particular, it indicates a problem of control inherent in the very structure of the engagement, a struggle to confine the free play of meaning, a struggle Nietzsche taught us to see as one that involves power as well as knowledge—or, in Foucault’s revision, involves the production and distribution of ‘‘power-knowledge.’’ The scene of this struggle is the space that opens up between writer and reader, the anonymous and autonomous field produced by the ‘‘disappearance of the author,’’ the void out of which erupts the conflict over interpretive authority not only between reader and text, not only among competing readers and readerships, but also between the performative and interpretive forms of appropriation. The differences between stage-centered and text-centered readings of Shakespeare fall into the latter category, and though these differences may not seem to pulse with vital political significance, they reflect broader conflicts that do: structural strains between the ways power and meaning are represented, controlled, and distributed (or communicated) in the two orders. This is neither a merely contemporary struggle between logocentric and grammatocentric interests nor an essentialized structural opposition but a set of far-reaching institutional and cultural changes connected with the rifting apart—as of two previously superimposed tectonic plates—of the order of texts from the order of the body. The effects of the rift begin to make themselves felt during Shakespeare’s time, and in such a manner that the text versus performance

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problematic with which I am concerned is an issue our age shares with the Renaissance. In the following discussion I map the issue onto a heuristic scheme whose axial coordinates are (1) the semiotic ratio between meant and unmeant (or bound and unbound) meaning and (2) the communications ratio between unmediated and mediated discourse. With these coordinates I formulate a dynamic model by postulating that changes in the first are functions of changes in the second, and that the pattern of change is directional: the production of surplus meaning—meaning unbound by intention—is inhibited more by conditions of oral discourse than by those of writing, and more by chirographic conditions than by those of printing. By ‘‘the conditions of oral discourse’’ I refer not only to the mouth/air/ear system but also to its paralinguistic context of visible gesture, behavior, and dress. The superimposition on this context first of manual and then of mechanical inscription progressively broadens the range of communication and extends its power, but at the same time progressively abstracts the means of production from the control of the body and thus alienates the production of meaning. In this interdependence of a semiotic shift with a communications shift we can discern the working of a more general logic, whose paradoxical character may be suggested by a glance at the odd relationship between two notions, extension and abstraction. We can say, for example, that speech, writing, and print are—in that order—progressively extended from the body as media of communication, or we can say that they are progressively abstracted from it. Both terms seem equally applicable to the same process. This holds true for media of perception (telescopes, amplifiers, electronic brains), as well as for media of labor, production, and exchange. But a closer inspection of the examples indicates that two different things are going on, and that the terms extension and abstraction may pick out contrary tendencies. The difference accords with what Derrida has described as the logic of the supplement. As extensions of the body, technical and organizational instruments augment its power, but as abstractions from it they not only fill a void or supply a lack, they also create one, since power and meaning are alienated from body to instrument or medium. To free power and meaning from the limits of the body entails freeing them from the body’s control and releasing them to the forms and

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forces of instrument or medium. Hence we can formulate the general rule of abstraction from the body: the increase of human power produced by extension/abstraction is directly proportional to the decrease of human control over that power. Extension is always hollowed out by abstraction. If abstraction and its institutional correlative, structural differentiation, arise in Toynbee-esque response to ‘‘challenges,’’ the more successfully they ‘‘adapt’’ to the environment and tap its resources, the more likely they are to change the environment and disenable the adaptation. The effects of the abstraction rule on semiosis are basically those Paul Ricoeur has picked out in his studies of interpretation and text theory, especially in his formulation of the textual dialectic. The textual dialectic is the process through which written discourse is freed from the author’s intentions and the constraints of face-to-face communication, acquires semantic autonomy, and is appropriated by readerships in conformity with their interpretive norms and conventions. Structural irony (though Ricoeur does not use the phrase) informs both sides of the dialectic. On the one side, ‘‘the author’s intention and the meaning of the text cease to coincide. . . . What the text says now matters more than what the author means to say.’’5 Thus, ‘‘to understand an author better than he could understand himself is to display the power of disclosure implied in his discourse beyond the horizon of his own existential situation.’’ On the other side, any text will always mean more and other than any reader can make it mean: ‘‘It is part of the meaning of a text to be open to an indefinite number . . . of interpretations. The opportunity for multiple readings is the dialectical counterpart of the semantic autonomy of the text.’’ Nevertheless, ‘‘if it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal. The text presents a limited field of possible constructions. . . . It is always possible to argue for or against an interpretation.’’6 In this formulation, the text is the product of writing and the precondition for the reader’s interpretation. But if different interpreters in effect produce different texts, their reading is a kind of writing even if it is not literally inscribed. For them the text is a product as well as a precondition of interpretation. And insofar as writing is writing about, it interprets its ‘‘subject,’’ and it does so in the course of the compositional processes and choices through which it interprets itself. As reading is a kind of

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writing, so writing is a kind of reading. But if writing does to the world what reading does to a text, if writers address and respond to the world as readers to texts, then isn’t the world a kind of text? And doesn’t this subvert the polarity I have been trying to sustain between the order of the body and the order of texts? Suppose we construe text not as a thing but as a function: text is the value we give to whatever we treat as an object of interpretation and subject to the fate of reading. The structural and methodological advantages of this construal are explored in Ricoeur’s famous essay on the model of the text, but for a concise account of the difference it makes I turn once again to Jameson’s definition of textuality (cited in Chapter 1, above) as ‘‘a methodological hypothesis whereby the objects of study in the human [and biological] sciences . . . are considered to constitute so many texts which we . . . interpret, as distinguished from the older views of those objects as realities or existents or substances which we in one way or another attempt to know.’’ Jameson claims that this hypothesis has the advantage of ‘‘focusing the attention of the analyst on her own position as a reader and on her own mental operations as interpretation,’’ so that she is ‘‘no longer tempted to view’’ the object of study ‘‘as some kind of empirically existing reality in its own right.’’7 The distinction between the knowable and the interpretable is that between given and taken, reflected and constructed, prior and consequent meaning—in essence, it is the difference between traditional and modern epistemologies and their objects. The knowable is already ‘‘there’’ in the world as prior meaning; the interpretable is what awaits the act that produces consequent meaning. Jameson frames the distinction in diachronic and somewhat tendentious terms: the modern hypothesis of textuality will help us resist the temptation of the older views. From this grammatocentric standpoint, the older views are mystifications in which knowledge is alienated interpretation, just as nature is alienated art and reality alienated fiction. To posit prior meaning is to deposit interpretation—deposit it into the world, where it becomes the knowable that precedes knowing. Textualization makes explicit both interpretation and the fictiveness of its products. Hence the historical emergence of the order of texts merely exteriorizes the repressed inner ‘‘truth’’ of the order of the body. The

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grammatocentrist claims that the world constituted by the signifying practices of the body is a text, a product of interpretation, but that interpretive power and the textuality of its texts are repressed by being represented as knowledge and preexistent realities. They are represented as representable, as imitable, and to represent meaning as representable is to constitute its presence as prior to that constitution. The ideological consequences of this repression are familiar. In nonliterate societies, for example, the ‘‘texts’’ most indelibly ‘‘inscribed’’ in the body produce the most intractable political differences. They govern the construction of performance elites: male over female, elder over younger, parent over child. Representing socially constructed interpretations of gender, generation, and genealogy in the body rather than in nonbodily media of textualization confers on them the inalienable aura of natural difference; the same holds true for ‘‘texts’’ embedded in mineral, vegetable, and animal bodies, in significant features of landscape, in climatological and meteorological phenomena, in the visible and invisible registers of the cosmos, and in the spatiotemporal order that perception ‘‘gives.’’ Performance communities cite and recite these ‘‘texts’’ not merely in the reproduction of speech and custom but also in the reproduction of bodies. In an important sense, the ‘‘texts’’ preserve their authority by remaining unwritten. To the extent that textualization entails writing, it is a conscious productive process, an art, and the written text, being its product, will always bear the imprint or signify the intention of art, regardless of the semantic autonomy it gains from writing. Conversely, ‘‘texts’’ that remain unwritten, unacknowledged, not signed by art, conceal their textuality. The signifying practices of the body effect a kind of detextualization. If the semantic autonomy of written texts enables competing interpretations, the signature of art encourages them by directing attention to the intentions and interests of the merely human source and to the consequent fictiveness of its product. Detextualization inhibits the textual dialectic and its dynamic chain of revisionary appropriations. The difference between textualization and detextualization is most clearly evident in such cross-cultural interpretive contexts as ethnography. In the essay on styles of ethnography I discussed in Chapter 1, Clifford uses Ricoeur’s text theory to analyze an ‘‘interpretive’’ style ‘‘based on a philological model of textual ‘reading.’ ’’ He defines textualization as ‘‘the process

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through which unwritten behavior, speech, beliefs, oral tradition or ritual, come to be marked as a corpus, a potentially meaningful ensemble separated out from an immediate discursive or performative situation.’’ He goes on to describe how interpretive ethnography constitutes its authority by a series of displacements. His argument, profiled in Chapter 1, deserves further quotation: as the ‘‘research process is separated from the texts it generates,’’ as the ‘‘actuality of discursive situations and individual interlocutors is filtered out,’’ the texts ‘‘become evidences of an englobing context, a ‘cultural’ reality. Moreover, as specific authors and actors are severed from their productions, a generalized ‘author’ must be invented to account for the world or context within which the texts are fictionally relocated. This generalized author goes under a variety of names: the native point of view, ‘the Trobrianders,’ ‘the Nuer,’ ‘the Dogon,’ as these and similar phrases appear in ethnographies.’’ By locating ‘‘unruly meanings’’ in the ‘‘single, coherent intention’’ of this generalized author, the ethnographer ‘‘transforms the research situation’s ambiguities and diversities of meaning into an integrated portrait.’’8 Clifford’s topic is the textualizing process that ‘‘separates out’’ the ethnographer’s written interpretation. But in another sense, detextualizing also separates out its ‘‘texts’’ from ‘‘immediate discursive or performative situations’’; it does so by alienating and displacing them from their (collective or aggregated) human source to ‘‘nature’’ or ‘‘cosmos’’—the total ‘‘text’’ or meta-‘‘text’’ constituted as the originary locus of other ‘‘texts.’’ Now it may be that however divergent these processes appear, the problems implicit in the ethnographic strategies Clifford analyzes are also implicit in the detextualizing defenses against interpretation. I’ll at least explore this hypothesis. Clifford’s account suggests that a certain anxiety is symptomatically revealed in the ethnographer’s accommodation of ‘‘unruly meanings’’ to the fiction of a collective author and its ‘‘coherent intention’’—an anxiety that is justified by Clifford’s own genial deconstruction of the authorial strategy, his claim that, in effect, the social construction of native reality is a product of the ethnographic interpreter, who has authorized his fiction by displacing it, alienating it, to the collective native source. My point is that what Clifford has done to the ethnographer is not very different from what he claims the ethnographer has done to the Trobrianders, the Nuer, or the Dogon, that is, imputed to

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‘‘them’’ the inventions of a culture whose authority depends on ‘‘their’’ displacing it to nature. Structurally inherent in textualized cultures is the anxiety of authorship, the anxiety of interpretation, the anxiety of fictionalization—all aspects of the same anxiety. In the encounter between textualized and detextualized cultures, isn’t this anxiety transmitted by the former to the latter like an infection? To go further and put my hypothesis in its strongest (or weakest) form, couldn’t we imagine that the specter of this anxiety already inheres in the repressed textuality of the order of the body? I ask, in effect, whether the work done in modern society by what Foucault calls the ‘‘author function’’ isn’t also done—albeit in different ways—in nonliterate societies: How can one reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world? The answer is: One can reduce it with the author. The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches, but also with one’s discourses and their significations. The author is . . . a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we can make him function in exactly the opposite fashion.9 The author function is a principle of closure, of semiotic inhibition, employed in the conflict of interpretations to privilege certain readings and control ‘‘unruly meanings.’’ Its aim is to validate the reader’s interpretation by displacing it to the author, converting the author and his text to objects of knowledge. And this is precisely the effect produced by detextualization, where the role of the author function is played by nature. Furthermore, the author function responds to the fundamental instability of textualized culture, to the aura of fictiveness and arbitrariness that perforce surrounds the operation of the textual dialectic. In their study of Foucault, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow characterize this effect of the textual hypothesis as follows:

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Interpretation is not the uncovering of a hidden meaning. In ‘‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,’’ Foucault made a similar point: ‘‘If interpretation is a never-ending task, it is simply because there is nothing to interpret. There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret because . . . underneath it all everything is already interpretation. . . .’’ The more one interprets the more one finds not the fixed meanings of a text, or of the world, but only other interpretations. These interpretations have been created and imposed by other people, not by the nature of things. In this discovery of groundlessness the inherent arbitrariness of interpretation is revealed. For if there is nothing to interpret, then everything is open to interpretation; the only limits are those arbitrarily imposed.10 In the order of the body, the limits are imposed, and the arbitrariness concealed, by the mechanisms of detextualization. Can these mechanisms by any stretch of the imagination be construed as motives?

III I approach this question by noting that the word write does not appear in Clifford’s definition of textualization. What he writes is that unwritten behavior comes to be marked, not necessarily written, as a potentially meaningful ensemble. This allows a statue, a painting, a building, a narrated myth, and a song to qualify as products of textualization. And it allows native performers as well as foreign interpreters to do the marking. Their arrangements of domestic or village space, their totemic and utilitarian classifications of species, their cosmological systems, are meaningful ensembles produced by interpretation. So also are ritual formulas and practices, technical skills and recipes, and in general the ensembles of preinterpreted lore that in oral societies are cited and recited, handed or spoken down from one generation to the next, and that undergo continual if tacit and incremental reinterpretation in the process. Should we call them ‘‘texts’’? The textual dialectic is discernible in the order of the body, but it is ‘‘cooled’’ by its signifying and detextualizing practices. My precedent for using text in the context of a discussion of nonliterate production is Derrida’s use of writing (arche´-writing, spacing, diffe´rance) to

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mean the general possibility of ‘‘every horizon of semiolinguistic communication,’’ spoken or written—a usage that extends to all discourse the textual dialectic Ricoeur confines to literal writing. Especially important to the notion of a detextualized ‘‘text’’ are the entailed concepts of ‘‘iterability’’ and ‘‘citationality’’ developed in Derrida’s critique of speech act theory. Against Austin’s exclusion from the category of speech acts of those that are not seriously intended as such (those, e.g., uttered by the speaker of a poem or an actor in a play), Derrida insists that intention is an inappropriate criterion since all speech acts are ‘‘nonserious’’ insofar as they are conventional: they succeed only because they repeat ‘‘coded’’ statements, conform ‘‘to an iterable model,’’ and are therefore ‘‘identifiable in a way as ‘citation.’ ’’ Since meaningfulness is made possible by ‘‘different types of marks or chains of iterable marks’’—phonic as well as graphic—we must distinguish between what a speaker means (i.e., the statement he is trying to make) and what the sentence in which he makes it means: ‘‘The intention which animates utterance will never be completely present in itself and its content.’’ And since any sentence can be repeated, ‘‘can be cited, put between quotation marks,’’ and given different senses in different contexts, it can escape every intention, ‘‘break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion.’’11 A citation is a particular kind of quotation or iteration: it is an appeal for support from one’s own authority to that of a more illustrious or unquestionable source; to cite is to ventriloquize and thus summon up an authoritative other as a means of legitimating one’s own utterance, meaning, opinion, behavior, and so on. Myth and ritual, for example, are citational acts that perform the author function and prevent against interpretation by closing down on unbound meaning. Such performances can succeed only because they presuppose and continually reinvent an iterable corpus or ensemble of detextualized ‘‘texts’’ that privilege a certain interpretation of cosmology, values, and norms, that is, an interpretation of what there is in the world, what one ought to think about it, and how one ought to behave. In order to abandon the awkward procedure of enclosing ‘‘texts’’ in citational marks every time I write the word, I shall henceforth refer to citational texts. I choose this adjective because citare, the Latin cognate of

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cite, means to put into motion, to shout out, to call forth or produce, to summon another, to quote an authority; the term thus condenses all the logocentric elements of ritual performance and, more generally, evokes the ensemble of signifying practices, the arts of body, voice, presence, and thought, by which a traditional text may be at once mimetically invented and reunderstood as received. The citational texts of gender, nature, cosmos, and divinity produced by detextualized (repressed) interpretation precede and enable the various systems of response in which they are communicated, interpreted, and acted upon. These systems of citational performance include myth, ritual, magic, medicine, and the division of productive and reproductive labor. Performers may derive—are encouraged to derive—their authority from their ability to appropriate traditional meaning and use it as a vehicle of self-expression. But generally in nonliterate societies such interpretive performances present themselves not as revisionary, not as new ‘‘readings’’ in our sense, but as reenactments and representations based on knowledge of traditional meaning. One of the clearest accounts of the mechanisms of detextualization by which citational texts are produced appears in the prologal first question of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica: The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves. So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science [theology] has the property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification. Therefore that first signification whereby words signify things belongs to the first sense, the historical or literal. That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal and presupposes it. Now this spiritual sense has a threefold division. For . . . so far as the things of the Old Law signify the things of the New Law, there is the allegorical sense; so far as the things done in Christ, or so far as the things which signify Christ, are types of what we ought to do, there is the moral sense. But so far as they signify what relates to eternal glory, there is the anagogical sense.12

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The effect of this detextualizing procedure, which is a kind of iconic recoding, is to displace meaning from phonic signifiers to their referents, conferring on the latter the semantic power of language. The literal level of verba refers to levels of res that signify each other. The verbal sign is opened up and its signified transplanted in the referent, which thereby becomes the wordlike signifier of other meanings, and the sign of the referent. Paradoxically, in this process the effect of polysemy is not ambiguity but redundancy, the iteration of a single system of meanings in a variety of media. The semiotic richness inherent in the tension or slippage between the signifying and signified elements of any sign is controlled by the referential primacy achieved through iconic recoding. As Aquinas states, the ‘‘multiplicity of these senses does not produce equivocation or any other kind of multiplicity, seeing that these senses are not multiplied because one word signifies several things; but because the things signified by the words can themselves be types of other things’’ (1.1.10, ad 1). A compound result of the splitting of discourse into the speech of the community and the citational language of ‘‘nature’’ is that both the descriptive and the magical orientations of speech become privileged. On the one hand, as meanings slip from their verbal signifiers to extraverbal referents in the order of the body, the ostensivity of speech—its indicative, descriptive, and naming functions—is reinforced, while its semantic power and semiotic generativity decrease. To disclose the knowledge hidden from the ethnographer, native informants have only to indicate, enumerate, and describe the different contexts in which the embedded meanings may be observed. On the other hand, the same knowledge is transformed into power in the prayers, songs, spells, and ritual acts with which specialists address and awaken the hidden meanings/forces and persuade them to reveal themselves. The indexical and the magico-poetic functions of speech are alike in that one registers and the other operates on the same field—on the field of a semiosis that iconic recoding binds by alienating it to nature. It is precisely against this citational binding of language to nature that the modernist text, and the Tel Quel theory that justifies it, protest. In Oswald Ducrot’s words, the theory premises

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that the descriptive orientation of language has been tactically thwarted and replaced by a procedure that, on the contrary, gives full play to its generative power. This procedure will be, for example, at the level of the signifier, the systematic recourse to analyses and combinations of the anagrammatic type. At the semantic level, it will be the recourse to polysemy . . . but it will also be a ‘‘blank’’ writing that escapes all the ‘‘depths’’ of worlds by systematically dispelling connotations and by restoring the apparatus of semic distinction to its arbitrariness. At the grammatical level, it will be the appeal to a grid or matrix that controls the variations of person or tense, no longer according to the canonical structures that convey verisimilitude . . . but according to an organized exhaustion of the possibilities of permutation. It will also be—and to a certain extent at each of the levels we have just evoked—the putting into play within writing itself of the relation addresser-addressee, writing-reading, as the relation of two productivities that intersect and create space by intersecting.13 The ideological implications targeted by this program emerge in Ducrot’s linkage of ‘‘the descriptive orientation of language’’ to ‘‘the system according to which our perception, our grammar, our metaphysics, and even our scientific knowledge are organized, a system according to which a subject, situated in the center of a world that provides it with something like a horizon, learns to decipher the supposedly prior meaning of this world, a meaning that is indeed understood to be originary with regard to the subject’s experience of the world.’’14 This speaks to the supreme fiction of logocentric ideology, the fiction that its world system is not a fiction. Though the Tel Quel theory is a symptom of an advanced stage of textualized culture, it will serve to highlight the anxiety of interpretation that motivates the detextualizing and defictionalizing mechanisms operative in the order of the body, and it will direct attention to their political uses. In Saving the Text, Geoffrey Hartman notes the ‘‘curious, unending investment’’ of the idea of power ‘‘by metaphors of possession, appropriation, originality, breakthrough, penetration, centeredness, immediacy,’’ and he adds that Derrida ‘‘tends to make them dependent on another term, presence,’’ and to think ‘‘of textuality as an antibody to body-images

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of power and presence.’’15 I submit that we can understand the politics of detextualization as the logocentric reversal of this, and that we think of body-images of power and presence as a kind of preventive immunization against the specter of textuality. Every pure or nonliterate performance community controls the rights to interpretation by distributing them among the positions citationally marked out in the uncharted texts of gender, generation, and kinship. In the simplest societies we know, the distribution is maximal: everyone is or becomes an interpreter/performer if only by virtue of his or her changing roles in the kinship system. In less simple nonliterate societies, the interpretive function and power tend to gravitate toward male elders in patrilineages; these may be the first interpretive elites. Anthropological critiques of the integrationist orientation of functionalism have made clear the extent to which citational texts and performances are motivated by interests, and are therefore ideological and political. Introducing a survey of male initiation rituals in Papua New Guinea, Roger Keesing notes that ‘‘we are dealing with a politics of subordination masked and mystified by a shared commitment to cultural symbols.’’ The domination is primarily sexual, and secondarily generational, and it is naturalized by the ideology of embeddedness that the textualizing process sustains: The ideologies about male and female, the elaborations of secret knowledge and the systematic deceptions that surround them, not only sustain and rationalize the subordination of women and the appropriation of their labor by men for male ends; these ideologies also maintain the control senior men hold over boys and young men, and they disguise its nature. Physical and psychological dominance is cast in terms of duty and cosmic necessity and is mystified in ideologies about growth. In these systems, those who are dominated share an ideological consensus with those who dominate. . . . How is such a social order reproduced? In the ideologies described in these chapters, what is political, contingent on power, is depicted in an all-embracing religious ideology as cosmic, natural,

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and inescapable, determined as it is by the confluence of supernatural control and biological nature. . . . The reproduction of such a system of social and productive relations depends on an ideology that ‘‘celestializes’’ (Marx) and ‘‘naturalizes’’ an order which is in fact human and cultural.16 Because citational performances reflect and transmit citational texts, embody or encode them, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish them, and in the subsequent pages I may not always do so as consistently as I would like. But I think the kernel of the distinction may be illuminated by appealing to Gregory Bateson’s account of the way what he calls ‘‘deutero-learning’’—learning to learn—paradoxically structures the response of the learning subject. Bateson assumes that in learning experiments of the Pavlovian or Instrumental Reward type ‘‘there occurs not only that learning in which the experimenter is usually interested, namely, the increased frequency of the conditioned response in the experimental context, but also a more abstract or higher order of learning, in which the experimental subject improves his ability to deal with contexts of a given type.’’ Bateson argues that [1] the deutero-learning of the animal subjected to a sequence of Pavlovian experiences will presumably be a process of character formation whereby he comes to live as if in a universe where premonitory signs of later reinforcements (or unconditioned stimuli) can be detected but nothing can be done to precipitate or prevent the occurrence of the reinforcements. In a word, the animal will acquire a species of ‘‘fatalism.’’ [2] In contrast, we may expect the subject of repeated Instrumental Reward experiments to deutero-learn a character structure that will enable him to live as if in a universe in which he can control the occurrence of reinforcements.17 If we premise that in nonliterate communities the ‘‘contexts of a given type’’ are designed not by experimenters but by citational texts, then we can conclude that in the above elaboration, statement (1) specifies the normative ideological effect produced by the alienation of citational texts to nature, while statement (2) specifies the positive oppositional mode, the performative response, for which the contextually conditioned re-

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sponse in (1) serves as an enabling and constraining background. The italicized as ifs in the passage indicate the neutralized fictiveness of the social construction that constitutes the citational text in (1) and elicits the citational performances that, in (2), ‘‘control the occurrence of reinforcements.’’ To illustrate how this control works, I shall draw on Victor Turner’s account of Ndembu symbolism.

IV Turner writes that the Ndembu (now of northwest Zambia) call their signifying ritual elements chijikijulu, which literally means a ‘‘landmark’’ or ‘‘blaze’’ and also ‘‘a ‘beacon,’ a conspicuous feature of the landscape,’’ and he adds that the etymon of that term, ‘‘ku-jikijila, ‘to blaze a trail’ . . . is drawn originally from the technical vocabulary of hunting.’’ The term thus connotes the ‘‘connection between known and unknown territory, for it is by a chain of such elements that a hunter finds his way back from the unfamiliar bush to the familiar village.’’ Here we may note, first, that the meaning of the noun signifier is related to the meaning of the verb signifier as effect to cause; second, that the infinitive form itself signifies an intention; and third, that the transfer of the signifiers from one context to another—from hunting to ritual—redirects the signified meaning to a different set of referents so that hunting, which is already heavily ritualized, becomes a model for ritual per se.18 In its ritual use, chijikijulu ‘‘connects the known world of sensorily perceptible phenomena with the unknown and invisible realm of the shades. It makes intelligible what is mysterious, and also dangerous.’’19 Turner’s emphasis is on the verbal sign, not its referent, since he states that the ‘‘ritual use is already metaphorical.’’ And although he is discussing citational performances, the folk definition is oddly applicable to the effect of citational texts in domesticating the unknown. Turner’s procedure is to begin with the natives’ own interpretations of their symbolism, which, he notes, are largely based ‘‘upon folk etymologizing. The meaning of a given symbol is often, though by no means invariably, derived by Ndembu from the name assigned to it, the sense of which is traced from some primary word, or etymon, often a verb’’ (p. 11). Thus, for example, Isoma, the name of a therapeutic woman’s ritual

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connected with procreative failures and gynecological disorders, is derived by native informants ‘‘from ku-somoka, ‘to slip out of place or fastening.’ This designation . . . refers to the specific condition [e.g., miscarriage or abortion] the rites are intended to dispel,’’ but it also has a more general meaning, ‘‘to leave one’s group,’’ which ‘‘seems to be related to the notion of ‘forgetting’ one’s matrilineal attachments’’ (p. 16). The connection between specific and general meanings is elucidated in the following passage: The Ndembu word for ‘‘ritual’’ is chidika, which also means ‘‘a special engagement’’ or an ‘‘obligation.’’ This is connected with the idea that one is under an obligation to venerate the ancestral shades. . . . The rituals . . . are in fact performed because persons or corporate groups have failed to meet this obligation. Either for his own default or as a representative of a group of kin, a person is believed to have been ‘‘caught’’ . . . by a shade and afflicted with a misfortune thought to be appropriate to his sexual or social role. The misfortune appropriate to women consists in some kind of interference with the victim’s reproductive capacity. . . . Isoma is thus a manifestation of a shade that causes a woman to bear a dead child or brings death on a series of infants. (pp. 11, 16) In this example, the meaning of the verb ku-somoka is transferred to three concrete signifying contexts that, as their common signified, it weaves together into the interdependent elements, the meaningful ensemble, of a citational text: a perceptible reproductive disorder, an invisible sociomoral disorder and retributive power imputed to it as its cause, and the ritual designed to cure them by making ‘‘intelligible what is mysterious, and also dangerous.’’ The ritual performs its cure by transferring the meaning of Isoma both to a representation of ‘‘the patient’s inauspicious condition’’ and to particular trees whose capacity to manifest the meaning is what elevates them (on grounds of sympathetic magic) to medicinal status. The mulendi tree, for example, has a very slippery surface, from which climbers are prone to slip . . . and come to grief. In the same way the patient’s children have tended

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to ‘‘slip out’’ prematurely. But the ‘‘glossiness’’ . . . of this tree also has therapeutic value, and this side of its meaning is prominent in other rites and treatments, for its use makes the ‘‘disease’’ . . . slip away from the patient. It is, indeed, not uncommon for Ndembu symbols . . . to express simultaneously an auspicious and an inauspicious condition. For example, the name Isoma itself, meaning ‘‘to slip out,’’ represents both the patients’ undesirable state and the ritual to cure it. (p. 25) Turner’s analyses reveal that semantic networks generated within language are not only displaced to other human constructions but are also reified in—and as—’’nature.’’ The meanings thus extended or transferred appear as forces that originate in the ‘‘reality’’ that the extension constitutes. These examples of the transfer of meanings from verbal to extraverbal signifiers illustrate detextualization or iconic recoding: the meaningful ensembles of a culture (its cosmology, values, and norms) are reproduced in a variety of concrete media, all of which thereby become systems of signifiers that embed the signified cultural interpretation in natural and technical extensions of the body. In this process elements of the interpretation are displaced, condensed, and visualized (or auralized) in terms of the different signifying capacities of each medium. Iconic recoding proceeds according to the principles of polarity and analogy, according to what Le´vi-Strauss has called the logic or science of the concrete; the reification of meanings in, for example, the color, shape, activity, and other properties of any signifying object binds the meanings to the object in a nonarbitrary or motivated way because it commits them to the associational networks in which the object is perceived.20 This may be illustrated by Turner’s account of the ‘‘mudyi tree . . . conspicuous for its white latex which exudes in milky beads if the thin bark is scratched.’’ Ndembu women attributed several meanings to this ‘‘milk tree’’: (1) ‘‘It stands for human breast milk and also for the breasts that supply it’’; (2) ‘‘They describe the milk tree as ‘the tree of a mother and her child,’ ’’ shifting the meaning from ‘‘a biological act . . . to a social tie’’; these meanings found more abstract and diffuse senses, in one of which (3) ‘‘the milk tree stands for matriliny, the principle on which the continuity of Ndembu society depends’’; and, since this principle is ‘‘the backbone of Ndembu social organization,’’ (4) matriliny ‘‘itself

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symbolizes the total system of interrelations between groups and persons that makes up Ndembu society.’’21 The perceptible character of the tree gives it its symbolic valency, and it seems clear that as one moves from the more immediate and concrete associations of milk to the more extended and abstract meanings, the symbolism is likely to become more vulnerable to the exigencies of sociocultural change. This review of Turner’s work suggests that ritual can reveal the sources of disorder, can make invisible dangers visible, only because the citational texts of a culture have selectively visualized as invisible certain kinds of danger, thereby repressing others. The visibly invisible (e.g., ancestral shades) is differentiated from the invisibly invisible. Those invisible disorders that cannot be signified, cannot be bound by some polar or analogical operation to the range of phenomena classified by language and accessible to perception, remain buried in the margin of surplus meaning. The criteria of signifiability and of the perceptibility or, better, ‘‘appearability,’’ of imperceptibles can themselves be signified and made apparent in ritual. It is by meditation on their language and etymology that native informants explain both the meanings of their rituals and the meanings/forces of their world. They can do this because semantic elements of their language at the level of what A. J. Greimas calls the lexeme have already been alienated to the world by iconic recoding. Thus reified, or referentialized, those meanings are misrecognized as forces of an intelligible and responsive reality; thus rendered meaningful, reality can be interpreted and acted on, can be made to ‘‘speak’’ and disclose its meanings. If, as Jacques Lacan puts it, it is ‘‘the world of words that creates the world of things,’’ this is because ‘‘the passionate desire peculiar to man to impress his image in reality is the obscure basis of the rational mediations of the will.’’22 In this statement, the impressed image may be translated as the citational text, and the ‘‘rational mediations’’ as the citational performances.

V Citational performances code and represent their texts in ways that enforce acceptance, that block interpretation, by confining the latent semi-

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otic power of languages within the limits of a culturally authorized interpretation. They do this not only by formalizing or formulizing speech but also by transmitting messages through performative channels that inhibit semantic ‘‘noise’’ and semiotic richness: measured speech, just-so stories, rhythmic articulation, incantation, gesture, song, and dance. This is significant if we consider that when one ranks communication systems in terms of semiotic capacity, their generative power increases as one moves from the systems of differences called codes, many of which are nonsignifying, through nonverbal sign systems (e.g., kinesic action) to verbal language. The texts we humanists normally work with are richest in generative power. Citational performances select channels in which the generativity of ordinary speech is policed by paralinguistic and kinesic functions. From my prejudiced standpoint as a literate interpreter, this policing of citational texts and performances suggests an anxiety about the margin of surplus meaning, an anxiety implied, implicated, in its repression. It is as if oral societies have a prevision of what happens when language is textually unfolded; as if they foresee how congested with codes its traffic is; as if they already sense what modern interpreters know, that the more we try to police language by adding interpretations, the more snarled it gets, since the police are always part of the problem; as if, finally, there is something they fear more than the justice of nature or the gods, namely, the justice of the famous or infamous Tel Quel theory of the text as ‘‘productivity,’’ as the generative play of signifiers, the transgressive subsoil forever pushing up new swells of unmeant meaning under the macadam of communications. I float this fantasia of as ifs perhaps a little too airily toward the conclusion that every instance of ritual speech is a repressed and crumpled text, a nucleus in which the transgressive field of signifying forces is anamorphically syncopated. Textuality, then, comes in two forms, folded and unfolded, or citational and written. Speech, in Cordelia’s phrase, is plighted cunning, and writing splits the citational nucleus, releasing its textual power for peaceful or polemical purposes. If this is granted, we can go on to complicate the plight of textuality by premising not only that it comes in two forms, folded and unfolded, but also that unfolded textuality comes in two forms, manuscript and print. This will enable us

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to yoke together the operations of the textual dialectic with those of the media in which they are communicated, and to undertake a brief sketch of the history of textuality. If we compare manuscript culture with print culture, it seems clear that the transgressive play of meanings tends to be more inhibited by the peculiar orientation toward writing and reading that chirographic conditions encourage. We can assume, for example, that much writing was oral in the sense that the author dictated and the scribe merely wrote down what he heard: to write was not to compose or invent or (therefore) to interpret but to copy. And we can also assume that, however few readers there may have been in any manuscript culture, there were always fewer texts. To be an author or reader was to be a lecturer, one who composes or reads aloud to others (or to oneself ). This places the reader in the author-position, thwarts what Ricoeur calls ‘‘distanciation’’ from the interlocutory context, limits the receiver’s appropriative freedom, and effectively reincorporates the textual dialectic into that context. Thus, yielding to the constraints of performance, textuality is muffled, repressed, and met by the resistance that enfolds it whenever it tries to unfold. Ong has shown how even a book-oriented culture like that of the Middle Ages was dominated by the categories and forms of oral communication.23 It was not until the high Middle Ages that reading and textuality began to show their teeth—as in, for example, the pagina dentata of the summa; though, as Ong demonstrates, the summa was itself organized in terms of quaestiones and such other aspects of oral disputation as Aquinas’s insistent and choric respondeo. The Summa theologica is so conspicuously textual in its effect because its purpose is countertextual; it has to fight texts with texts. It confronts the growing diversity of text-generated interpretations, and it has the same purpose as the fourfold method described in its first question: to close down on ambiguities, ambivalences, and equivocalities, on the riotous growth of sic et non manured by the texts of the interpreters of Scripture, and by the texts of the interpreters of the interpreters, and of the interpreters of the interpreters of the interpreters. As I noted earlier, polysemy is the antidote to ambiguity: in itself and in the explanations that justify it, it is one form of the major countertextual strategy of redundancy. In print culture redundancy becomes the mainstay of the most significant form of countertext, the textbook.

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The logocentric and countertextual project of the Middle Ages was bound to undo itself. The later the text, the more it had to struggle to repress the surplus meaning that, as Augustine foresaw, God had planted in scripture and history. It would have been a different story had He planted his text of Creation only in history or nature. By supplementing it in a book in order to fix and stabilize the text, He lost control of it, for not even God is immune to the revisionary metastasis of the textual dialectic. Or perhaps in his wisdom He understood that one can only gain life by losing it. At any rate, it is interesting that the first definitive shift from the manuscript roll to the codex is attributed to the desire to make the Word of God available for private reading. It is supposed to facilitate free access to the exact words, the comparison of different accounts, and the isolation of passages for special attention. As an instrument of conversion, the folio text is intended to increase control over the recipient by bringing God’s word and presence nearer, and encouraging the implied dialogue of prayer. But since the shift from roll to folio further unfolds the transgressive potentiality of the text, the project that motivates the shift is ultimately self-subverting. The hapless folio can be opened and closed at will, its pages riffled, its sequence ruffled. The implicit distanciation of God’s Word from its Author is less easy to contain in private than in public reading. The reader’s appropriative control increases. Diversely contextualized readings activate the process of interpretive transgression. Public reading tends to lead auditors through the greatest story ever told. It is more convenient for the private reader to be led outside the story in order to appropriate relevant meaning from the senses of the text. Diegesis, in short, gives way to exegesis. The history of biblical exegesis well illustrates the basic paradox of chirographic textuality: the effort to contain the power of semiosis only increases that power, calling for new efforts of containment, which further articulate and give way to the form and pressure of surplus meaning. When the surplus that has been tightly braided up in a single-valued, univocally toned message untwines into a tousle of sics and nons, the textual dialectic rears its ugly head. Aquinas tries in vain to bind it in fillets, while Dante and Chaucer, in their very different ways, shake it loose. It wants a revolution to make it respectable, a new Aquarian Age, and the Age of Gutenberg is just around the corner.

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The graphic culture of the high and late Middle Ages tries to authenticate itself by continuing to transcendentalize authority. But its form, its conventionality, its excesses of order or fantasy, its textual analyses of what it represents, give back to its readers an image of themselves transformed by chirographic artifice. Human art challenges divine art even when it protests against the challenge, since the form of the protest only intensifies the force of the challenge. The writing of citational texts jeopardizes their preinterpretive authority and institutionalizes the radical power of revisionary interpretation. Hence the extravagance that Johan Huizinga associates with the waning of the Middle Ages: ‘‘the craving to give a definite form to every idea, and the overcrowding of the mind with figures and forms systematically arranged.’’ Huizinga’s general thesis that ‘‘art in those times was still wrapped up in life’’ can be sharpened by reversing its emphasis, that is, life was wrapped up in art: sacraments, canonical hours, ecclesiastical festivals, ‘‘all the works and . . . joys of life, whether dependent on religion, chivalry, trade, or love, had their marked form’’—I would add, text-marked, stamped with the mark of their writerly and graphic provenance.24 Huizinga tells the tragicomic story of logocentrists trying to live by the book. The more they do so, the more their logocentricity is abstracted and formalized in the conventions of graphic and writerly art, the more they find themselves compelled to represent their presentations of self on textual models. In the effort to save the appearances of traditional realities, late medieval readers and their writers reduce those realities to patent appearances. Feudal and ecclesiastical politicians begin to live the stories they read in order to justify or repress the actual character of practices that diverge more and more from what becomes, therefore, explicitly a mere ideal and disconcertingly a fiction. The traditional world picture, anchored in logocentric fantasies, is thus on the verge of disengaging its sphere from that of the actual world and floating off into an imaginary second world. When it returns for a brief spell in the odd and inflated transitional episode of absolutism, it does so under the aegis of a new order, a textual order, to which it is forced to accommodate itself if both the King’s Two Bodies are not to be decapitated. Print completes the textualizing process already entrained by the bookishness of manuscript culture. The typographic revolution is at once

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the consequence, the catalyst, and the symbol of the general rift between the order of the body and the order of texts that characterizes early modern culture. In two problematic consequences of this rift we can see the operation of the abstraction rule. First, the citational efficacy of texts abstracted from the order of the body is always at least potentially diminished insofar as those texts transmit signals of productive intention and skill. When the signature of art forges or countersigns or replaces that of nature, it raises all the familiar questions about interest, authority, mystification, false consciousness, fictionalization, and so forth. Second, when texts are abstracted from the order of the body they divide as if by prismatic refraction into a plurality of media—codes, sign systems, languages—each of which has its own system of constraints and possibilities. To transfer a text from one medium to another—from writing to pigment, from points/lines/planes to equations, from bodies to machines, from metal to paper currency to bills of credit—is to expose it to the play of an entirely different set of signifying practices and representational forces, and to the autonomous and self-augmenting logic of what Jacques Ellul, in The Technological Society, has called technique. The postmedieval histories of the visual arts, sciences, and mathematics, for example, make it abundantly clear that, in the creative and experimental interchange between any medium and its practitioners, the purely presentational aspects of the medium tend to unfold beyond mimetic necessity. Technique, the coefficient of art, increases the margin of surplus meaning within which structural irony challenges any representational intention.25 Whereas much has been made of the objectivity and objectification produced by new modes of abstraction, it is equally important to stress the way the development of the nonobjective properties of media is encouraged by technical play. Ultimately technology outstrips the human art that invented it until the order of the body is infiltrated, reconstituted, and surrounded on every side by a diversity of counterintuitive systems of representation. The technical dialectic and the textual dialectic are in this respect one. In both, the efforts of interpretive elites to bind, appropriate, and contextualize unbound meaning and power only—as Derrida puts it—’’engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion.’’

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part two

Situating Agency: Texts against Countertexts

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four

Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene

I Narrative and rhetoric are terms that commentators on The Faerie Queene perennially couple, distinguish, and question, and this essay will continue the discussion. My question about narrative takes as its point of departure the old observation, most emphatically insisted upon by C. S. Lewis, that Spenser is an accomplished storyteller whose poetry has the qualities we value in storytelling.1 The question is, does it make a difference if, instead of merely reading the poem as a piece of storytelling, we approach it as a poem that represents storytelling, and does so in a manner that isn’t innocent, a manner that interrogates the values and motives, the politics and ideology, embedded in the structure of storytelling? Can such an approach be illuminated by attempts to distinguish between the commitments of oral discourse and those of written discourse? The same reason lies behind my questions about rhetoric, although here the situation is a little more complex, in part because the term rhetoric has come to denote so many different things. It is used to refer to the art of public speaking, to the formal study and teaching of the art, and to the analysis of its products. Although rhetoric initially centered on oratory, it 173

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was always intimately associated with writing, and in a literate culture the term is often applied to the practice and study of writing intended for readers rather than for auditors. My questions about rhetoric have in general to do with what happens when logography—the writing of speeches to be delivered before live audiences—is represented in writing produced for the very different conditions of silent reading, and produced by authors whose commitment to the constraints and challenges no less than to the pleasure, skill, and possibilities of writing run counter to the aims and functions of oral discourse. Margaret Ferguson has written about the transgression of ‘‘the boundary between spoken and written discourse’’ effected by ‘‘a type of writing that presents itself as if it were a speech given in a court of law. Renaissance authors frequently make this ‘as if ’ a locus of theoretical concern, as they meditate on the similarities and differences between a written defense and an oratorical performance.’’2 Unlike the orator, the writer ‘‘addresses people who do not answer’’ (p. 6), ‘‘an audience he can neither see nor control’’ (p. 161), an absent ‘‘reader who perhaps cannot (or will not) understand his words at all’’ (p. 151). What is at stake, then, when a work like Sidney’s Defence ‘‘at once exploits and questions the fiction it creates by its imitation of the classical forensic or judicial oration; the fiction . . . that the writer is an orator addressing an audience present to his view’’ (pp. 5–6)? The tendency to confine rhetoric to the types of oratory picked out by Aristotle and to limit its purpose to persuasion is reductive. Oratory is but one kind of formal public monologic speech, a genus that includes poetic and dramatic recitation, homiletics, didactics, ritual incantation, and storytelling. Depending on the context, each may serve any or all of several functions, of which persuasion is only one: for example, entertainment, prediction or prophecy, and such acculturative functions as instruction, initiation, and religious indoctrination. The familiar claims made for rhetoric by classical and humanist authors reflect these functions. They also reflect its basic orientation to social and political formations dominated by speech-centered institutions, a logocentric orientation at once modified and reinforced by Christian culture. So—to quote from a survey of images of the orator by Brian Vickers—the classical emphasis on the contribution of eloquence to civic order and virtue was supported by the idea ‘‘that language is the gift of God to man,’’ and that rhetoric,

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‘‘the instrument of civilization’’ and ‘‘origin of human learning,’’ was ‘‘conducive to the maintenance of order and degree.’’3 The logocentric aspect is especially noticeable in accounts of rhetoric’s psychological function. ‘‘Renaissance theorists,’’ Vickers writes, ‘‘held that rhetoric’s primary purpose was to express thought or reveal the mind,’’ and he cites John Hoskins’s statement that the ‘‘order of God’s creatures in themselves is not only admirable and glorious, but eloquent; then he that could apprehend the consequences of things, in their truth, and utter his apprehensions as truly were a right orator.’’4 Of course, this idealized view of the civic and psychological functions of public speech hardly went uncontested. As Arthur F. Kinney reminds us, ‘‘Eloquence for many Tudor writers was not—could not have been, in any realistic sense—the golden language of the good and wise man as Quintilian . . . seemed to premise, but the manipulation of words in a country where eristics was respected and daily practiced.’’5 Since rhetoric is one of the ‘‘sciences’’ that Sidney distinguishes from poetry because they claim to affirm something—to assert and deny, to refer and refute, to state the truth—it could be accused of lying. Kinney’s extensive study of educational practices in Tudor grammar schools makes clear that the training writers received would encourage a suspicious view of the good rhetoric and its logocentric ideal, and that these writers would know how to imitate the good rhetoric in representations of monologic speech that criticize or deconstruct its claims to affirm truth, promote order, and move to virtuous action. ‘‘Rhetoric not only produces or organizes speech as expression, but above all things it controls speech for persuasion’’: this consensus view cited by Vickers indicates the two basic divisions of rhetoric, the tropological and the transactional.6 The tropological division consists in the art of adapting linguistic expression, the relation of signifiers to signifieds, to the logical and dialectical organization of speech; it includes both the syllogistic and, as Nancy S. Struever calls it, the ‘‘topological’’ (from topos) approaches to mastery of the strategies of argument.7 The transactional division consists in mastering the strategies of linguistic communication, the relations of senders to receivers, and it includes the two forms of ‘‘artificial proof ’’ Aristotle called ¯ethos and pathos: the first focused on the speaker’s self-representation, the second on the skills by which he moves

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the audience. The relation between these two divisions will obviously be affected by the coupling of the shift from oral to written discourse with the shift from audition to silent reading. As I see it, the major change these shifts involve is the disruption of the normative scheme that dominates the theory and practice of oratory from classical to humanist rhetoric, the scheme in which tropological means serve the transactional ends of persuasion, indoctrination, instruction, and control. Literary representations of speech make problematic either or both media, dissociate the fictional speaker from the writer or text and the speaker’s partner, the virtual auditor, from the reader; they do this by freeing the tropological resources of language from their subordinate position in the normative scheme and turning them seditiously against their transactional master. It is through the subversive mobilization of tropological strategies dear to New Critical and deconstructive hearts that the writerly text interrogates the rhetorical practice and aims of fictional speakers as well as its own complicity with those aims, that is, its own attempt to control the reader’s response. We should remember that, from ancient times, rhetoric as oratory was a mixed medium inasmuch as it made use of writing: speeches were written to be recited, books were written to instruct writers and speakers, speeches already given were preserved in writing to serve as models for instruction and practice. Rhetoricians were a technical elite, and a major effect of this mixed-medium system was to confer authority on speech that sounded as if it had been composed in advance. The effect of writtenness made the art and thought behind a speech conspicuous, and produced a predictable ambivalence. On the one hand, it could arouse the anxiety or doubt the Greeks called deos, fear of the power of authors who were deinos (clever, dangerous, duplicitous). On the other hand, such an effect of art was praised and admired, especially if it was carried off with what Castiglione would later call sprezzatura—was blended, that is, with the effects of improvisation, or passion, or sincerity. Not spontaneity or vitality itself was praised, but its status as the effect of art. Such an effect was an important element of persuasion because it flattered those auditors capable of discerning and appreciating it, auditors whose familiarity with the finer points of rhetoric was the product of the superior education, wealth, and status that set off the oligarchs and aristocrats in the democratic

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city-state. This was the hidden epideictic dimension (the orator attracting praise for his implicit praise of the audience) in all forms of oratory. Thus the rhetorical economy of the classical tradition appropriated by Renaissance humanism was based on a complex system of medial exchange. Writing that imitates the speech it represents—that sounds colloquial—was no doubt one form of exchange, but it was less important than two other forms: speech that imitates the writing that represents it, and speech that imitates writing that imitates speech. The changing attitudes toward this mixed-medium system in early modern times may be profiled by glancing at two studies that focus in different ways on the disruption of the normative scheme produced by turning tropological strategies against the rhetorical transaction. The first is Victoria Kahn’s Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance, and the second is Kinney’s Humanist Poetics.8 Kahn argues that for the Quattrocento humanists writing and reading not only represent but are analogous and supplementary to civic and political action in the Italian city-state. Even when the reader of their orations and treatises is exercised by techniques borrowed from Academic skepticism (such as the technique of antilogy, arguing both sides of a question), the humanists aspire to transcend uncertainty and redirect the reader’s will to moral action and assured faith. I should pause here to point out that there is a big difference between the projects of classical rhetoric and Italian humanism. Kahn’s humanists were not trying to be logographers (speechwriters); they were representing or imitating logography so as to transfer its rhetorical powers and effects to writing. If, in classical logography, speechwriters exploited the resources of their art so that effects and powers of writing could be reincorporated in oral performance, the early humanists gave this another twist: they tried to transfer the logographically reinforced strategies of oratory to the scene of writing, and their aim was to give the writer who addressed an absent audience of readers greater control by reducing the role of reader to that of auditor. Kahn goes on to show how such later writers as Erasmus and Sidney questioned this commitment to a rhetorical writing that aspired to move the reader to virtuous action. They ‘‘stressed the merely symbolic and therefore illusory nature of such action.’’9 Their texts are self-referential, ‘‘literary’’ in the modern sense, because for them ‘‘the rhetorical dimen-

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sion of the text can no longer be contained by practical concerns; rather, it is conceived as threatening, aberrant, resistant to the author’s intention to persuade to right action.’’10 A slight adjustment in Kahn’s thesis will bring it into line with my previous statements about the change in the relation between the transactional and tropological aspects of rhetoric. Her point is that the later writers questioned the transactional goal of the earlier humanists, and not merely their own uncertain tropological control. Therefore her statement that they ‘‘conceived’’ the rhetorical (that is, tropological) dimension ‘‘as threatening, etc.’’ should be rewritten as follows: they represented it as threatening, aberrant, resistant to the author’s intention to persuade to right action. In other words, they used the effect of aberrant rhetoric to set off in critical quotation marks their dramatization of logography and its politics, a politics whose ideal the Platonic Socrates paradoxically described in the Phaedrus as a kind of speaking that writes directly on the auditor’s soul. This is a logocentric ideal, a fantasy of unmediated transmission of the speaker’s message, truth, knowledge, or teaching from his mind to that of his auditor or pupil. But it is also a truncated model of communication with sinister overtones, for speaking and hearing are compared not to writing and reading but to writing and being written on. What the earlier humanists attempt is the effect of a kind of speechwriting that aspires to psychic inscription. The later humanists target this aim in their ironic mimesis of rhetorical transactions. I turn now to Kinney’s Humanist Poetics, which is confined to English writers; his thesis is that a humanist poetics of fiction emerged from the rhetorical orientation of Tudor educational practices and that, under the pressure of political and cultural change, it gradually broke free and came to challenge the norms and claims of the rhetorical ideal until it entered a new, skeptical, posthumanist phase. Kinney isolates a specific aspect of the kinship and quarrel between rhetoric and poetry: on the one hand, humanist rhetoric devises strategies for maintaining transactional stability and control by fixing the reference of discourse to a common culture and set of values ‘‘that author and reader were expected to share’’;11 on the other hand, this project was jeopardized by the ultimately subversive tendencies of the training in verbal wit and agility. Although this training was instrumental to the rhetorical ideal, it promoted the kind of word-

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play, the experiments in perspectival incongruity, that loosened, destabilized, and fictionalized the relations between signs and their referents. It sensitized writers to the tropological resources of the vernacular and encouraged them to assay the variety of ways—etymological, orthographic, lexical, figurative—in which signifiers may be disconnected and reconnected to signifieds. Kinney stresses the Tudor writers’ awareness of ‘‘the inherently problematic’’ character of humanist rhetoric, its claims for moral truth, and its deceptive practices, and he focuses on their doubts about the effort to impose its ambivalent aims on writing and fiction by means of techniques that construct the reader as a virtual auditor. Subsequent studies of Sidney and his contemporaries demonstrate that this skepticism about rhetoric is complicated by irony directed toward the writer’s own logocentric desire—by a critique of the very desire for authority, autonomy, clarity, influence, permanence, and privileged aesthetic status that the technologies of print and printing seem to promise. Those technologies intensify the structural ambivalence of writing: on the one hand, the written text may represent, supplement, reinforce, and extend the author’s presence, or the presence of authority; on the other hand, written discourse escapes the author’s intention, is appropriated by readerships, and confronts the author with the problem of trying to anticipate, control, and outmaneuver invisible readers. Sidney’s way of dealing with this dilemma may be epitomized by glancing at the implications of his statement that the poet affirms nothing and therefore never lies. This move has two consequences. The first is that, in pretending to absolve poetry of the rhetorical functions of asserting, affirming, and denying, Sidney, as Ferguson shows, questions the aggressive and often mendacious emphasis on referential truth that marks, in his words, ‘‘the scope of other sciences.’’ The value of imaginariness or fictiveness lies in its opposition to discourses that make referential claims and in its ability to make fictiveness rub off on those claims. The second consequence is that to affirm that poetry affirms nothing— itself an archly problematic move—is to imply a different role for the reader, one that is outside the zero-sum game of rhetorical practice. The interpretive power ceded to the reader increases as that role is freed from the reductive confines of the rhetorical subject. Kinney gives several ex-

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amples of Tudor writing that do this by representing the narrator as a rhetorician. At one point he mentions the strategy, pursued by Erasmus and More, of placing ‘‘the narrator squarely within the narrative’’ and making ‘‘him or her, Hythlodaye or Folly, a subject of the argument the narrative is meant to provide.’’12 Although this is much too spicy and pungent a model of the narrator to work for the Spenserian function I’m about to discuss, the implicit convergence of rhetorician and narrator suggested in Kinney’s statement helps me to make a transition to Spenser because it allows my previous discussion of the rhetorical ideal and its critique by later humanists to be mapped onto his representation of the diegetic act in The Faerie Queene. Note that I called the Spenserian narrator an it, not a he, a function and not a figure, an act and not an agent, because at my back I always hear Paul Alpers’s flaggy wings mowing down the characterological and visionary seedlings in my garden of fiction.

II In one of his later attempts to address the problem of narration in The Faerie Queene, Alpers insists that it is a mistake to treat the narrator dramatically as a character in the poem, and even a greater mistake to treat him as a character whose moral comments on the story he tells are ‘‘inadequate to the fiction.’’13 In the first half of the poem, at least, and certainly in the third book, any irony we discern in the relation between story and commentary is not to be dissociated from ‘‘the narrator’s explanatory mode’’ and turned against it: ‘‘far from being at the narrator’s expense, it shows the play of his wit’’ (p. 25). Since any narrative is neither more nor less than a ‘‘process of narration,’’ that is, ‘‘what the narrator tells us,’’ ‘‘the narrator’s role cannot be investigated apart from’’ that process (pp. 22, 24). Alpers therefore feels comfortable in identifying the ‘‘actual or putative source’’ of the narrative with the name ‘‘Spenser’’ (the ‘‘or’’ in his phrase, ‘‘actual or putative,’’ denotes synonymy rather than disjunction). And he finds the term that best characterizes Spenser’s relation to his materials to be ‘‘confidence,’’ which connotes both ‘‘trust in’’ and ‘‘fidelity to’’ those materials. In Book I, for example, ‘‘Spenser shows his confidence that he speaks for realities genuinely external to

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him,’’ and this confidence, ‘‘explicit when he speaks of his poetic task, is implicit in his mode of narration, which derives its authority . . . from theological, cosmic, moral, and historical truths and the literary traditions which record them’’ (pp. 28–29). I cite this view in some detail because I want to challenge it. The view is consistent with Alpers’s earlier thesis that Spenser’s ‘‘use of narrative materials’’ should be called ‘‘rhetorical’’ because his stanzas ‘‘are modes of address by the poet to the reader,’’ a poet whose ‘‘attention is focused on the reader’s mind and feelings and not on what is happening within his fiction.’’14 These phrases make clear that, although Alpers distinguishes what he calls ‘‘Spenser’’ and ‘‘the poet’’ from the ‘‘putative speaker’’ as ‘‘a dramatic identity and presence’’ (pp. 95–96), he all but obliterates the distinction by treating Spenser the poet as a rhetorician whose ‘‘poetic motive in any given stanza is to elicit a response—to evoke, modify, or complicate feelings and attitudes’’ (p. 5). For Alpers, this rhetorical transaction should control the reader’s response to both the tropological and the fictional features of the poem. His emphasis on the narrator as rhetorician, coupled with the easy glide from the identification of narrator with narrative to the identification of both with Spenser, is a major symptom of the problem I want to address. It is not merely that the collapse of all functions—narrator, narrative, rhetorician, poet—into Spenser is unargued and theoretically wobbly. Rather, my interest is in unscrambling his account in order to appropriate a more promising view that I think his terms and distinctions both contain and defend against. The clue to this revision lies in the remarks about rhetoric I made earlier. The rhetorical transaction Alpers commends includes a poet who trusts the universe and a reader who trusts the verse. The poet’s confidence in the world’s realities and truths, and in ‘‘the literary traditions which record them,’’ is displayed by his ‘‘easygoing’’ attitude toward the unity of his poem as well as by the relatively ‘‘self-effacing’’ manner in which he addresses his stanzas to the reader (pp. 133–34, 9). The permissiveness of his syntax, the dominance of the verbal formula and the individual line over sentence structure, and the vividness, the ‘‘immediacy and obviousness,’’ that result from this dominance—these qualities of style encourage the reader to adopt a passive role and ‘‘follow the path of least resistance’’ (pp. 89–90, 105, 84). While I accept the formal features of

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this account, I argue that Alpers misdescribes the transaction as an empirical one between the author and actual readers, whereas I take it to be a virtual or fictive transaction, one that the poem actively represents and subtly criticizes, and therefore one that constitutes a rhetorical scene of reading from which actual readers can dissociate themselves. This does not oblige me to separate the narrator as a character either from his narration or from what may loosely be called the poet, that is, whatever ‘‘voice’’ the reader imputes to the interpreted text. On this point I accept Alpers’s strictures against demarcating the commentator from the storyteller in order to reduce the former to a naı¨ve moralist (strictures that are virtually identical with those of Stan Hinton, who insists that commentator, narrator, and poet fade imperceptibly into each other, and whom Alpers unfairly censures).15 I accept those strictures because I think the textual critique targets the moralist/storyteller/rhetorician not as a dramatic character but as the site of an ideological function. The function is expressed with great precision by Alpers, although he would object to my calling it a target: it is a ‘‘mode of narration . . . which derives its authority . . . from theological, cosmic, moral, and historical truths and the literary traditions which record them.’’ The narrator, in short, is the voice of the literary traditions that the poem puts in play by imitation, allusion, parody, and conspicuous revision. The values embedded in those traditions are placed in question by a variety of strategies, of which the poet’s arch mimicry of the moralizing voice is only one. I submit that the voice that comments on the story is the same as the voice that tells it because storytelling is itself one of the traditional values the poem parodically represents. And I use the word voice advisedly in order to accentuate the contrast between telling a story and writing a poem; between the aims and investments of the rhetorical transaction and those of the literary transaction, between the desire to control ‘‘the reader’s mind and feelings’’ as if the poet were a rhetorician and the reader an auditor, and the awareness of the danger, the duplicity, perhaps the futility, of this hegemonic desire. The view I just set forth had its origin in my reading of two important essays by John Webster, but before turning to them, I’d like to give some examples of the traditional opinions I think Webster’s essays help supersede. In 1961 Northrop Frye argued that the fiction writer in Spenser

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never ‘‘clashes with the moralist . . . for long. . . . Complicated behaviour, mixed motives, or the kind of driving energy of character which makes moral considerations seem less important . . . —none of this could be contained in Spenser’s framework,’’ and as a result, The Faerie Queene ‘‘is necessarily a romance, for romance is the genre of simplified or black and white characterization.’’16 Fifteen years later he suggested a political motivation for Spenser’s way with the genre when he argued that Spenser knowingly pandered to ‘‘a middlebrow appetite for stories about fearless knights and beauteous maidens and hideous ogres and dragons,’’ and that he did this to get ‘‘imaginative support for the Protestant revolution of his time.’’ As Frye put it, Spenser ‘‘kidnapped’’ romance formulas and made them express the religious and social ideals of the Reformation state.17 In the same year (1976) Walter Ong argued that the ‘‘formal fixity’’ of Spenser’s ‘‘[a]bstract characters, virtues and vices’’ and ‘‘the formal fixity of his epithets’’ derive from Spenser’s immersion in the ‘‘oral heritage’’ and ‘‘are part of the ancient oral poetic.’’ Ong’s point is that Spenser is less ‘‘bookish’’ than Milton, by which he means less in control of the oral-formulaic tradition he draws on.18 The idea that Spenser was an oral poet was first articulated in 1969 by Michael Murrin, who began The Veil of Allegory with the statement that, since most of the numerous books recently published on Spenser were close textual studies, he would try ‘‘to step away from the poems and understand them generally as rhetoric.’’19 Although Murrin’s understanding of the term rhetoric coincides with mine, his understanding of the poem does not, because his rhetorical approach produces a picture of Spenser as a failed oral poet writing for an upperclass audience, expecting them to read his work aloud, hoping to instruct and control their minds, avoiding irony because he ‘‘want[ed] them to trust his statements’’ (pp. 14, 54, 84–85, 64). Murrin’s Spenser fails precisely where Alpers’s succeeds. Whether or not the middlebrow taste to which Frye refers belongs to Murrin’s upper-class audience, Murrin’s reminder that most of Spenser’s readers probably still read aloud to themselves as well as to each other deserves to be taken seriously. It suggests something Ong should have considered, which is that Spenser may have been trying to control his audience, if not the oral tradition.

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Murrin, like Frye and Ong, assumes what has to be proved, namely, that the oralist and moralist he criticizes is to be identified with the author of Spenser’s poetry. Others have taken the more interesting line censured by Alpers: they agree that the oralist and moralist is to be criticized but argue that Spenser has already done so in depicting a narrator whose occasional comments on the story he tells are ‘‘frequently oversimplified, contradictory, or misleading.’’ Jerome Dees, whose words I have just quoted, gave Alpers his opening by pushing to an extreme the separation between the simple or obtuse narrator and the smart poet.20 At one point he speculates that the function of this figure is both to address and to represent ‘‘the typical English audience,’’ and that in the course of moralizing his song he ‘‘embodies the attitudes and aspirations’’ but also the ‘‘weaknesses’’ of this audience, and of its political, religious, literary, and social culture (p. 554). Dees casually mentions this idea and does not do much with it. But it points toward a more promising possibility: that the rhetorical transaction Frye and Murrin associate with an actual poet and audience may be reconceived as a fiction the poem represents for critical scrutiny. We can get closer to this possibility by turning to the essay from which Ong got the idea of examining Spenser’s use of oral formulas, John Webster’s ‘‘Oral Form and Written Craft in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.’’21 Webster argues that the style of the poem invites a conflicted mode of reading. On the one hand, the looseness of construction, the fluency of line, the lulling proliferation of merely formal epithets, the ritualistic use of narrative as well as rhetorical formulas, the redundancy and interlace of narrative patterns all work together to encourage readers to respond as if they were an audience that ‘‘expects and appreciates only what is possible under the conditions of oral performance,’’ which means an audience that doesn’t have ‘‘time to reflect, to go back and re-read’’ (pp. 84–85). On the other hand, ‘‘while the speaker and his style ask us to assume the oral mode, the poem as a written work, along with our own habits of reading, makes just the opposite demand, asking us to read closely, to follow ambiguities, to appreciate verbal play’’ (p. 85). Thus ‘‘if we ‘read’ the poem as well as ‘listen’ to it, we continually find that its language can reveal surprisingly intricate insights on the poem’s allegory’’ (p. 86). Webster seems to be making a case for the idea that the poem

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thematizes the limits of oral performance by asking its readers to contrast their New Critical responses to those of a narrator who simplifies his material, a storyteller whose discourse is keyed in the oral mode to solicit the kind of easy reading that slides over complexities. Although this approach generates several fine moments of local interpretation, there are two reasons why it does not succeed. The first is that Webster never tells us why the poem invests in this representation of conflicted reading; he describes it but he does not give it a motive. The second is that, because he is too respectful of Alpers’s critique of the dramatic conception of the speaker, he ends up worrying whether the often aleatory wordplay that gets away from the speaker also eludes the poet (pp. 90, 93), which implies that the poet intended but failed to confine reading within the limits of imaginary audition. Webster more successfully makes the case for the thesis of simple versus complex reading in a later essay that develops a parallel contrast. A very smart critique of Stanley Fish’s distinction between self-satisfying and self-consuming texts leads to a revision in which Webster replaces Fish’s categorical scheme with another that focuses on the contrast between direct and indirect methods of organizing sequences of words, arguments, and other rhetorical or narrative units. He associates directness with the clarity and simplicity used to satisfy the expectations of an audience prepared to be instructed, persuaded, and moved, while to the ‘‘discourse of indirection’’ he assigns devices ‘‘that make reading a tentative, revisionary, active mode of experience.’’22 It is clear—although Webster does not make the connection—that Spenser’s ‘‘oral form’’ corresponds to the direct method and his ‘‘written craft’’ to the indirect method. In a reading of the Phedon episode (II.iv), Webster analyzes the way Spenser mixes the two methods. The episode begins with the dramatization of the ‘‘relatively simple allegorical scheme’’ of Occasion and Furor, which, ‘‘as if to teach [us] directly’’ (p. 41), Spenser reinforces with the Palmer’s explanation in stanzas 10 and 11. After citing the sermon the Palmer delivers at the conclusion of Phedon’s narrative (II.iv.34–35), Webster goes on to show how Spenser’s rhetorical management of the subsequent encounter with Atin subverts the Palmer’s message and questions the efficacy of the action he persuades Guyon to take; for the bind-

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ing of Occasion ‘‘becomes itself an ‘occasion’ for ‘wrath and heinous crueltie’ ’’ (p. 39). Unfortunately Webster does not deal with the heart of the episode, Phedon’s narrative, a close reading of which would have powerfully substantiated his view that the indirect method subverts what the direct dramatization of the allegorical scheme promotes, namely, ‘‘a particularly debilitating conception of Temperance’’ (p. 43). That Book II coherently and ironically represents such a conception is the thesis persuasively argued in a recent essay by Lauren Silberman, who shows in a brief but trenchant commentary on the Phedon passage how it contributes to that thesis. Spenser, she claims, discredits ‘‘Classical Temperance as a moral standard in order to put in question the actual relationship between ethical principle and moral action and to examine allegory itself as a methodology. . . . The object of this critique . . . is not so much Temperance itself, but the misappropriation of the classical virtue as a ready-made theoretical framework for acting in the fallen world.’’ The temperance depicted in Book II ‘‘becomes a series of exegetical defenses against experience masquerading as a classical, self-sufficient virtue.’’23 Two interrelated aspects of Silberman’s argument bear directly on my own: her insistence that the critique is directed at the exegetical scheme of a specific traditional (‘‘ready-made’’) discourse and the skill with which she correlates the poem’s critique of temperance with its critique of the forms of allegory and narrative that illustrate, accommodate, and indeed reinforce the self-subverting defensive strategies of that discourse. Thus she demonstrates that the House of Alma is an ‘‘example of bad allegory that exposes the inadequate strategy of defense Temperance offers in place of true understanding of the human body and its capacity to mediate experience’’ (p. 16). Maleger’s assault proves ‘‘that adhering to defensive strategies results only in an intolerable division between the ideal of security and the reality of perpetual siege’’ (p. 18). And she shows how, in the Bower of Bliss, ‘‘Spenser strips the veil from the sexual fear that motivates the elaborate sensual defenses of Book II’’ (p. 19). When she turns to Phedon’s tale, Silberman uses it to highlight ‘‘the discordant relationship of . . . the apparently crude allegory of personification to the full significance of Spenser’s text.’’ Concisely unfolding ‘‘the violent

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complexity of Phedon’s plight,’’ she focuses on the ‘‘discrepancy between narrative victory over allegorical figures and a satisfactory solution to the moral problems those figures represent’’ (p. 13). At this juncture, however, her attention briefly swerves from the limits of the allegorical narrative to those Guyon and the Palmer display in responding to it. ‘‘Guyon does not see,’’ she remarks, ‘‘that Furor and Occasion may refer both to inner states and to outward manifestations’’ (p. 14). But, as we shall see, the analysis of Phedon’s tale discloses that they are themselves misleading manifestations. They represent certain kinds of psychic energy as if they were alien, autonomous, morally and socially inferior, enemies to the true self within the ‘‘fort of Reason.’’ Thus they objectify and valorize the self-deceiving rhetoric Phedon uses ‘‘both to justify and to sustain his furor’’ (p. 13); the very appearance of Furor testifies to the success of that project and presents Guyon with a narrativized misinterpretation of Phedon’s problem. ‘‘The limitations of Guyon’s attitude towards the allegory of Occasion and Furor’’ (p. 14) are thus already structured into the allegory, whose form and function provide a decoy that attracts Guyon and the Palmer toward precisely the misreading Phedon’s language defensively solicits. I think the ideological links joining the tale, the allegory, and the protagonists are even stronger than Silberman suggests. The ‘‘exegetical defenses’’ of all three equally betray the basis of temperance not only in ‘‘sexual fear’’ but in a more pervasive gynephobia, and the poem ascribes both the defenses and the fantasy they protect against less to individual characters than to the literary and cultural discourses that speak through them. The third section of this chapter will pursue this line of argument by taking Silberman’s insights deeper into the tale and then, with the help of David Miller’s study, connect the tale to larger issues in Book II discernible in the allegory of the temperate body (cantos ix–xi). This will enable me to explore at the level of practical criticism the principles of suspicious reading that lead such recent commentators as Silberman, Webster, and Miller to question the innocence of Spenserian narrative. The exploration will set the stage for a return to Webster’s essays in the fourth section, in which I briefly survey the prospects they offer critics

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interested in revising current approaches to the literary representation of narrative, rhetoric, and the forms of oral discourse.

III Phedon tells Guyon and the Palmer how he became Furor’s victim as a result of the passion that led him to slay his betrothed and his best friend when the latter falsely persuaded him of the former’s infidelity. By letting the victim tell his own sad story, Spenser shifts the focus of action from the past to the present, from the deeds being recounted to the rhetorical performance. That performance is notable less for the lethal onslaught of irrational fury it presumptively thematizes than for the evasive rationalizations of a guilty conscience, a guilt the speaker seems both to flee and to savor. As Silberman points out, he ‘‘blames his own violent actions entirely upon the friend who shared his love and private confidences’’ and ‘‘fails to see his own faithlessness in Philemon’s guilt or to recognize the dark side of his love for Claribell in the violence provoked by intimations of her sexuality’’ (p. 13). Although I agree with this I am aware that at least in its rhetoric the statement commits the dramatistic fallacy Alpers censures. I’ll return to Alpers shortly, because he has a strong reading of the episode, one that does not ignore the psychological complexity of the speaker’s performance. For now, it is enough to say that I find it compatible with Silberman’s own approach to shift the focus of her observations from the dramatic speaker tout court to the ‘‘ready-made’’ strategies of self-exculpation, the ‘‘exegetical defenses’’ of the traditional discourses that, she rightly argues, the poem ironically portrays. The effect of this shift is to redirect attention to the interplay of several familiar discursive patterns that I have elsewhere discussed as the ethical discourses of the sinner and the victim/revenger, and the positional discourse of gender.24 Thus, for example, Silberman’s comment on ‘‘the dark side’’ of Phedon’s love can be supported by the indications of culture-induced gynephobia in his account, as well as in the allegory of Furor and Occasion. Preeminent among the symbolic scapegoats of which he avails himself is the fantasy of male disempowerment by virulent or erotic female forces. The oxymoronic embodiment of this figure

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in the fable as Occasion sets the stage for the Acrasian variant Phedon selects to serve him as nemesis: Misfortune waites advantage to entrap The man most warie in her whelming lap. So me weake wretch, of many weakest one, Unweeting, and unware of such mishap, She brought to mischiefe through occasion, Where this same wicked villein did me light upon. (II.iv.17)25 When Phedon turns from Occasion and Furor to the ‘‘faithlesse Squire, that was the sourse / Of all my sorrow,’’ he attributes the origin of the ‘‘league of vowed love’’ into which the friends subsequently entered to their nurture ‘‘from tender dug of commune nourse’’ (iv.18). In the victim’s perspective from which he speaks, this apparently benign reference to nurturant womanhood associates it with Misfortune’s ‘‘whelming lap,’’ since it contributes to the childlike trust and gullibility that blinded him to what he now recognizes as his friend’s dissembling (iv.18.9). It is therefore significant that verbal elements of the two female images combine in the causal phrase that opens the next stanza: ‘‘It was my fortune commune to that age, / To love a Ladie faire of great degree’’ (iv.19, my italics). That is to say, it was ‘‘natural.’’ He couldn’t help it. His readiness to blame and be betrayed by the woman rather than the man, to trust the man rather than the woman, is prepared for by the assumptions inscribed in the imagery: the threat to male autonomy comes from the other, not from one’s mirror image in the second self. This distinction is brought home in the characterizations of the two relationships. Equality, autonomy, and rational choice are featured in the union of friends: eft when yeares More rype us reason lent to chose our Peares, Our selves in league of vowed love we knit: In which we long time without gealous feares, Or faultie thoughts continewd, as was fit; And for my part I vow, dissembled not a whit. (iv.18) By contrast, the union of lovers is preceded by the probationary convention of courtship, with its acknowledgment of inequity and ambivalence

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in the ritualized role of the servant who aspires to become master. Whereas the friend is the friend of a friend, the lover is the lover of a beloved. To the sexual difference that threatens the desired unity of lovers—as well as that of friends—Phedon adds a social difference that accentuates the weakness and vulnerability of the suitor’s position, and therefore calls for a certain watchfulness:26 a Ladie faire of great degree, The which was borne of noble parentage, And set in highest seat of dignitee, Yet seemd no lesse to love, then loved to bee: Long I her serv’d, and found her faithfull still, Ne ever thing could cause us disagree: Love that two harts makes one, makes eke one will: Each strove to please, and others pleasure to fulfill (iv.19). The rhetorical self-betrayal of the speaker’s claim to be a true lover and a ‘‘weake wretch’’ centers on ‘‘seemd,’’ the adversative clause that contains it, and the phrase ‘‘serv’d, and found.’’ ‘‘Seemd’’ is the most volatile word. At first it registers cautious gratitude for favors returned from above. Then, because the whole line echoes ‘‘And for my part I vow, dissembled not a whit,’’ it is momentarily tainted by a diffidence peculiar in one who knows what actually happened. The lines that follow produce another modulation: ‘‘seemd’’ denotes the judgment that results from an assay of the beloved’s good faith. But in this context ‘‘serv’d’’ takes on the uneasy connotation of ‘‘observ’d.’’ And the activity implicit in ‘‘serv’d, and found,’’ that is, ‘‘put her to the test,’’ assumes sinister proportions in the next stanza. Phedon there bitterly celebrates his trusting openness in giving his friend a share in the lovers’ intimacy, but since his account taps into the topos of the suspicious lover’s trial of his beloved, it smacks of a voyeuristic impulse to set up the classic triangle that will put both friend and beloved to the test: My friend, hight Philemon, I did partake Of all my love and all my privitie; Who greatly joyous seemed for my sake, And gratious to that Ladie, as to mee,

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Ne ever wight, that mote so welcome bee, As he to her, withouten blot or blame, Ne ever thing, that she could thinke or see, But unto him she would impart the same: O wretched man, that would abuse so gentle Dame. (iv.20) Behind the final condemnation of Philemon is the shadow of guilty selfcondemnation. The shadow reaches back to darken the second clause of ‘‘Yet seemd no lesse to love, then loved to bee,’’ so that if we construe the line as a zeugma (she ‘‘seemd . . . loved to bee’’—’’I seemed, or believed myself, to love her’’), we can read it as a muffled comment on the questionable quality of his love. Phedon’s first reference to the traitor is touched by the same shadow: ‘‘It was a faithlesse Squire, that was the sourse / Of all my sorrow.’’ In his detailed antidramatic reading of the story, Paul Alpers argues that Spenser’s ‘‘images and formulas . . . express complete unity’’: rather than ‘‘showing the behavior of . . . people to each other, he describes feelings or purposes they share’’ and thus draws ‘‘dramatic personages and events . . . together into the phenomena of a single mind.’’27 This comment is directed toward the parallel description of relationships in stanzas 18 and 19, but the approach that underwrites it governs his treatment of the whole episode and produces several helpful insights into the way Phedon constructs and projects the external events that victimize him. Equally instructive, however, are two flaws that, in my opinion, disable this treatment. They derive from Alpers’s insistence that Spenser is ‘‘not simply dramatizing the experiences of the jealous lover’’ and that the episode’s ‘‘[r]ichness of meaning’’ is to be sought in the ideas and formulaic energies of the verse rather than in ‘‘dramatic action’’ or in ‘‘the fictional complexity of Phedon’s feelings’’ (pp. 63, 61). The first flaw is that, in his insistence on Spenser’s versifying, Alpers overlooks the difference made by voicing the episode in the first person. In contrast to the Ariostan episode with which he compares it, our attention is centered on the discursive conflicts and strategies of evasion active in the speaker’s rhetorical transaction with auditors, among whom we assume Phedon himself to be included. Alpers reads the episode as if the past and present actions could be conflated. Thus he illustrates his single-

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mind thesis with the formula Phedon utters in stanza 19: ‘‘In these stanzas [18 and 19] it is quite literally true that ‘Love that two harts makes one, makes eke one will’ ’’ (p. 60). But from the speaker’s retrospective standpoint it is quite literally false, since it does not apply to his share in the love, and his saying it—as if to comfort himself with a reassuring truism and remain blind to the truth—is part of what makes it false. The point about the ‘‘images and formulas that express complete unity’’ is that they do not apply in the same way to the conventions governing male friendship and those governing heterosexual love. The differences between them are registered in Phedon’s language. An air of test and contest, an undertone of suppressed but alert suspicion, a set of precautionary rituals and practices that guard against future infidelity— these are institutionalized in and reproduced by the convention of courtship, and the uneasiness they arouse is discernible in the terms with which he describes his successful suit: he served/observed her in order to test her and win her, and when he won her (iv.21) she was ‘‘to me assynd’’ and ‘‘to me did bynd’’ her faith (iv.22). The lack of reciprocity is notable because it stands in contrast to the mutuality of friendship expressed earlier in ‘‘Our selves in league of vowed love we knit.’’ What gives ironic force to Alpers’s emphasis on the coalescence of the three characters into ‘‘a single mind’’ is, first, that Phedon attempts to override the differences between the two conventions even as his language reproduces them, and, second, that owing to this attempt the expectations produced by each convention are reversed: the friend is unfaithful, the beloved true. In the heterosexual convention, such formulas as ‘‘Love that two harts makes one, makes eke one will’’ mystify the narcissism or imperialism of the male fantasy that would eliminate the otherness of the other’s will: love—that is, the lover—conquers all, and there is more otherness to conquer in the beloved than in the friend, according to the economy and ideology of gender which Spenser dramatizes. This may well account for the sense of wonder, magic, or unreality inscribed in the hyperbolic sentiment and for its usefulness in encouraging lovers to overcome reservations and suspicions in order to reach the paradise of full complacency, a paradise rendered improbable by a convention that carries those reser-

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vations and suspicions over the nuptial threshold into postmarital fantasies of cuckoldry. The question my reading raises is whether the poem accepts or questions these conventions, as I describe them, and this question leads to what I consider the second flaw in Alpers’s account. Although his salutary attention to the formulaic qualities of Spenser’s verse puts him in a good position to deal with the question, he does not do so. And this failure affects his equally salutary attention to the psychological complexity of the Phedon episode. Given his principled refusal to identify such complexity with the dramatic portrayal of fictional characters, he finds no alternative but to associate it with general psychological observations conveyed moment by moment in ‘‘the verbal events of individual stanzas’’ (p. 41) that comprise the rhetorical transaction between poet and readers. His own verbal formulas emphasize the merely exemplary function the characters serve, and what they exemplify are the motives, purposes, feelings, and passions of lovers anywhere and everywhere—the truths of the human condition: the phenomena of a single mind (p. 61) an initial formula that takes us directly into the feelings of the jealous lover (p. 61) a series of formulas, each of which suggests a disturbing quality of feeling. (p. 62) we see the ‘‘tragedy’’ as part of a complex psychological phenomenon—the mind feeling that it is about to do something dreadful and being helpless to stop itself. (p. 63) The line [iv.30.5] thus turns Phedon’s proposed act of suicide into a moral formula, and . . . brings out something important in the nature of wrath—its self-proliferation. . . . Spenser’s formula [iv.30.7], with its unclear fictional references, expresses . . . the continual toll taken by a criminal passion. (p. 65) Alpers’s essential and essentializing move is to appeal always to human experience as the touchstone of interpretation, but in his precipitous flight from fiction to the rhetorical transaction, he bypasses the possibility that the psychological phenomena he discusses may be flagged by the poem as constituents or products of the conventions I described above.

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In his view of the transaction, the readers’ position is always occupied by ‘‘we,’’ and although ‘‘we’’ have a specific historical and cultural provenance, he discounts the specificity, gives ‘‘us’’ privileged access to human truth, and thus occludes the influence of the socially constructed conventions of gender (and class) both on our reading of the poem and on its representations. To return to the question I raised before, if those conventions are among the objects represented by the poem (as I believe I have shown them to be), is the representation innocent or ironic? The case for irony can be made by reorienting Alpers’s two major emphases—on the formulaic quality of the verse and the nondramatic treatment of the characters—in the light of Webster’s distinction between, on the one hand, the direct method, the oral-formulaic mode, and the classical norms of the rhetorical transaction, and, on the other, the indirections and tropological complexities of the literary transaction. This reorientation produces the following interpretive scheme: between the psychology of the individual dramatic character and that of general human nature is the psychology whose motivational patterns and complications are keyed to conventional discourses (of gender, class morality, religion, or hierarchy); between the two partners in the literary transaction, the poet and his readership, are the two partners in the rhetorical transaction, the storyteller and his virtual audience or the speakers he imitates and their audience; the conventional discourses are marked as citational by the oral-formulaic style and thus occupy the inner framework of the rhetorical transaction, where they supply the target rather than the substance of the literary transaction. In this scheme even the major characters in the story may have little dramatic depth, may be translucent if not transparent, because that enables them to model the dramatic interplay of discourses that shape, direct, confuse, frustrate, repress, or mystify the desires and purposes of individual agents. If characters are little more than puppets, and speakers little more than ventriloquists’ dummies, it is not Spenser who pulls their strings or speaks through them; rather, it is the conventional discourses he represents. And what the literary transaction conveys is the psychological complexity of those discourses. When we apply this scheme to the Phedon episode, we may see that if Spenser uses the first-person narrative to explore the cunning of self-

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deception, it is a cunning whose origin is collective rather than individual, a cunning that draws on the cognitive subtlety and rhetorical ingenuity of the resources a literary culture makes accessible to a guilty conscience that chooses to deceive itself. The episode can then be read as a wonderfully wry piece of citational mimicry, in which Spenser pumps up the melodramatic shrillness of a popular, even banal story type, a Mediterranean Nights entertainment at least ten versions of which had previously been published during the sixteenth century. At the same time as his hyperliterary treatment marks it as conventional, he lets the darkness of the fantasies embedded in such conventions peep through the gaps of rhetorical and diegetic formulas that seem designed to contain or domesticate them. Scattered through the speech are hints of sadomasochistic desire, gynephobia, and something that resembles what Eve Sedgwick might call homosocial anxiety, hints that are amplified elsewhere in Book II by varied representations of threatening female power. These hints further disturb the uneasy air of moral casuistry pervading the speaker’s rhetoric as he continues to solicit the punishment that will obliterate bad conscience in the pleasure of justly deserved victimization. (Much Ado About Nothing is just over the horizon.) This air of casuistry becomes more visible when Phedon reaches the climax of his narration. As he tells how Philemon led and ‘‘in a secret corner layd’’ him to witness the betrayal, he stresses his passivity by calling himself the ‘‘sad spectatour of my Tragedie’’ (iv.27); yet the very phrase speaks against him, since it can mean that he is not only an actor as well as a spectator, as Alpers notes (p. 63), but also, and more importantly, the author of the tragedy in which he has given Philemon the ‘‘false part’’ of villain and cast himself as the helpless observer. The success of this play was such that, he reports, ‘‘Soone as my loathed love appeard in sight, / With wrathfull hand I slew her innocent’’ (iv.29), where ‘‘innocent’’ looks both ways, ruefully at the real victim, defensively at the act. He then confesses that when Pryene, his lately departed’s ‘‘faultie Handmayd,’’ told him she had been suborned by Philemon to impersonate her mistress in the tragedy, he was ‘‘all enragd’’ with such ‘‘horrible affright / And hellish fury’’ that he ‘‘sought / Upon my selfe that vengeable despight / To punish,’’ but that a moment’s reflection produced a better idea:

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it better first I thought, To wreake my wrath on him, that first it wrought. To Philemon, false faytour Philemon I cast to pay, that I so dearely bought; Of deadly drugs I gave him drinke anon, And washt away his guilt with guiltie potion. (iv.30) Like ‘‘innocent’’ in the preceding stanza, ‘‘guiltie’’ looks two ways, aiming the speaker’s sarcastic wordplay first at Philemon (an eye for an eye; the drug, not the druggist, did the deed), then at himself; the nasty little pun on absolution shifts the burden, which passes from Philemon through ‘‘guiltie’’ to Phedon. This new surge of guilt flares up in the rhetoric of the lines that open the next stanza with a feint toward another confession of suicidal intent: Thus heaping crime on crime, and griefe on griefe, To losse of love adioyning losse of frend, I meant to purge both with a third mischiefe, And in my woes beginner it to end: That was Phedon? No: ‘‘That was Pryene; she did first offend, / She last should smart.’’ Silberman’s comment on the episode is focused on this stanza and the preceding one, especially on the ‘‘elaborate parallels,’’ ‘‘facile antitheses,’’ and ‘‘spurious causality’’ that ‘‘divert attention from Phedon’s own role’’ and indicate an attempt ‘‘both to justify and to sustain his furor.’’28 Her emphasis on the ‘‘poetic fakery’’ of his language points up the irony of the attempt to justify violent self-abandon in carefully controlled rhetoric. The above lines enact a swerve away from self-recrimination that reaches a climax in ‘‘she did first offend, / She last should smart’’: this has the appearance of a verdict the speaker pronounces now—his present opinion. But the remainder of the sentence swerves back from the victim/revenger’s justice to the sinner’s rhetoric of guilt: with which cruell intent, When I at her my murdrous blade did bend, She fled away with ghastly dreriment, And I pursewing my fell purpose, after went. (iv.3I)

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‘‘[P]ursewing my fell purpose’’ acknowledges willfulness and sustains the awareness of purposive (if obsessive) action registered by ‘‘I meant to purge’’ and ‘‘cruell intent.’’ In addition, the rhetorical and logical niceties noted by Silberman imply a speaker sufficiently attentive to the production of ¯ethos and pathos to reassure us that the wounds inflicted by Furor have not robbed Phedon of his mastery of the skills of persuasive rationalization. Thus vacillating between the victim’s discourse and the sinner’s, Phedon reinvokes Furor at the conclusion of his tale: whatever his fell purpose was—vengeance against others, or against himself, or both—it drove him into Furor’s arms, enabling him once again to lose control, ensconce himself in the victim’s position, and commit his punishment to vicious scapegoats: As I her, so he me pursewd apace, And shortly overtooke: I, breathing yre, Sore chauffed at my stay in such a cace, And with my heat kindled his cruell fyre; Which kindled once, his mother did more rage inspyre. Betwixt them both, they have me doen to dye, Through wounds, and strokes, and stubborne handeling, That death were better, then such agony, As griefe and furie unto me did bring; Of which in me yet stickes the mortall sting, That during life will never be appeasd. When he thus ended had his sorrowing, Said Guyon, Squire, sore have ye beene diseasd; But all your hurts may soone through temperance be easd. (iv.32–33) Alpers finds Guyon’s offer of relief through temperance surprising because he wonders ‘‘whether any human act can ease the kind of anguish Phedon has undergone,’’ and he concludes that Spenser nodded: ‘‘a moment when Spenser allows simple moral categories to take over the complex realities rendered in his verse.’’ But he also assumes that when Phedon complains of the mortal sting ‘‘he refers to the passions of grief and fury, and not to what he has done.’’29 I would have thought it harder

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to ease Phedon’s anguish if it sprang from guilt over ‘‘what he has done.’’ His tale features that possibility, but the intervention of Furor and Occasion blurs the issues so that there is no way to tell whether the mortal sting is a function of the speaker’s guilty conscience, his inability to purge his fury by revenge, or his mauling by the monsters. Guyon’s and the Palmer’s decision, influenced by the monsters, occludes the first possibility. Hence, if simple moral categories take over, they do so not merely in Guyon’s words but also in the allegorical intervention that ‘‘objectively’’ skews Phedon’s problem from guilt to grief and fury. This displacement is in line with the strategies of evasion that characterize the discourse of the victim/revenger in the tale. It imposes a conspicuously inadequate closure, which I think we are encouraged to notice and resist, and it brings the victim’s disease within the scope of the kind of medicine, the simple moral categories, Guyon and the Palmer are prepared to dispense. From this standpoint, a shift of interpretive mode from judgment to description will convert Alpers’s criticism to a valuable insight: Spenser represents moral categories taking over the complex realities rendered in his verse. This takeover is secured by the Palmer’s diagnostic and prescriptive homily: Then gan the Palmer thus, Most wretched man, That to affections does the bridle lend; In their beginning they are weake and wan, But soone through suff ’rance grow to fearefull end; Whiles they are weake betimes with them contend: For when they once to perfect strength do grow, Strong warres they make, and cruell battry bend Gainst fort of Reason, it to overthrow: Wrath, gelosie, griefe, love this Squire have layd thus low. Wrath, gealosie, griefe, love do thus expell: Wrath is a fire, and gealosie a weede, Griefe is a flood, and love a monster fell; The fire of sparkes, the weede of little seede, The flood of drops, the Monster filth did breede: But sparks, seed, drops, and filth do thus delay;

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The sparks soone quench, the springing seed outweed, The drops dry up, and filth wipe cleane away: So shall wrath, gealosie, griefe, love dye and decay. (iv.34–35) Once again, Alpers is surprised that ‘‘the Palmer speaks only of psychological struggles’’ in stanza 34 ‘‘and says not a word about the murders Phedon committed,’’ but this time he insists that Spenser is not to be faulted: the Palmer’s omission reflects ‘‘the transformation of actual crimes into psychological disasters’’ that ‘‘occurred some stanzas before’’ and is part of a coherent pattern. It illustrates Spenser’s method of ‘‘transforming narrative materials’’ so as to ‘‘give a . . . severe and fearful rendering of the passions . . . and at the same time . . . hold out the possibility of averting disaster by an act of temperance’’ (pp. 67–68). In this way Phedon’s passions are purged and his hurts eased even though nothing ‘‘has happened to him dramatically. It is the reader’s own mind which, simply by following the devices of . . . [stanza 35], enacts the process of being purged of passion.’’ Thus, he concludes, this climactic stanza ‘‘is not an action at all, but a rhetorical scheme, a formal arrangement of words—precisely a stanza of poetry, and nothing else’’ (p. 69). But in the alternative scheme I’m proposing, the double framework of rhetorical and literary transactions, this interpretation responds to the former and ignores the textual action of the latter. The effect of the literary transaction is to mark the rhetorical cure as a conspicuous allegorical whitewash, one in which the heroes and enemies of temperance are brought in to collude with and reconfirm the speaker’s effort throughout his tale to purge his mind of guilt by soliciting the grief and fury that qualify him as helpless. Alpers commends the Palmer’s moralizing as ‘‘genuinely impressive’’ because ‘‘it perfectly brings out both sides of Phedon’s tragedy—that he let himself be carried away, there was some fault of will, and yet the affections have an independent energy of their own’’ (p. 67). Yet the Palmer’s diagnosis is hilariously self-assured and misdirected, since what he idealizes as the ‘‘fort of Reason’’ is revealed by Spenser’s indirect method to be a fort of rationalization, the very source of the guilty speaker’s defensive evasion of responsibility. Furthermore, the androcentrism of the discourse of temperance, together with the aristocratic em-

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phasis on the hero’s innate nobility (see iv.1), betrays the same gynephobia as the tale, and the same scapegoating of class and gender stereotypes: the ‘‘groome of base degree’’ impersonated by Philemon (iv.24, 27), the ‘‘rude,’’ ‘‘currish,’’ ‘‘clownish’’ ‘‘villein’’ Furor (iv.8, 9), and his wicked old ugly maimed mother. Stanza 35 is entertaining because the Palmer’s application of the principle of an ounce of prevention makes it all sound so easy. His instructions are delivered in the manner we nowadays associate with televised tips on personal hygiene. The displacement to the field of environmental damage control further alienates or distances the source of trouble while enhancing the conspicuous irrelevance of the prescription to what ails Phedon. At the same time, however, the advice is contaminated by an antierotic sentiment easy to associate with the gynephobia lurking in Phedon’s tale. After repeating the list that links stanzas 34 and 35, the Palmer separates the four passions into two pairs: wrath and grief are coupled by elemental imagery and (except for line 6) consigned to the left or precaesural side of the stanza, while jealousy and love are moved to the longer clauses and stronger position of the right side, where they receive more emphasis. Love in particular is singled out, not only because its place at the end of each of the two metaphoric series, descriptive and causal, gives it climactic force, but also because its characterizing epithet and cause are of a different order than the others. Love is depicted not as a natural hazard but as a figure of fantasy. In the first series the difference is stressed by the trisyllabic form of the epithet: fire, weed, flood, monster fell. In the second series Monster love is set off by the use of upper case, by the syntactic fullness of the phrase (which makes it incompatible with the ‘‘a of b’’ structure of those it follows), and by the disparity and pointed offensiveness of the cause it denotes. The stanza offers the reader three levels or registers of apprehension. First, as a predictable display of the Palmer’s wisdom, it solicits not merely unquestioning acceptance but also applause for its facile and ingenious parade of conceits. At this level the parade maintains the superficial form of a set of discrete cures to be applied severally to each of the affections, and to any others, ‘‘whiles they are weake.’’ Second, as a parade of concepts, the stanza produces the effect noted by Alpers: ‘‘the continual transferring of attention to new sets of terms’’ until ‘‘the passions and

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their awesome metaphoric equivalents turn into their small beginnings,’’ and the process that began with ‘‘the imperative ‘expell’ ’’ becomes, in the last three lines, ‘‘an easy and even natural process’’ (p. 68). It is also a process whose analogical displacements from psyche to nature, inside to outside, are conspicuously reductive; the reversal enacted by the two stanzas as a verbal sequence takes the magical and wholly unbelievable form of the obsessional mechanism Freud called ‘‘undoing’’ (Ungeschehenmachen, ‘‘making unhappened’’). The third level, illustrated by my analysis in the preceding paragraph, goes against the grain of the first two because it uncovers beneath the Palmer’s facility, wit, and prescriptive confidence an excremental vision of love as the filthy root of the other passions. The apparently casual sequence of items, in which love is merely one of the four passions strengthened through ‘‘suff ’rance,’’ is disrupted by the genetic logic imported from the context of the episode as a whole: love causes jealousy; jealousy causes the wrath and grief that eventuate in Furor. Given that context, the love mentioned by the Palmer is presumably heterosexual love. And although its membership in the series of proscribed affects tends to reduce it by association to lust, its link to jealousy and its relevance to Phedon’s plight nudge the Palmer’s indictment toward the ‘‘true’’ love that leads to marriage. The notion that even this form of heterosexual love is to be expelled becomes more probable when we map the third level, with its causal logic, onto the allegory of Occasion and Furor: then the causal power of the filth-bred monster converges with that of the filthy old hag. Both in turn converge with the figures of erotic and maternal power in Phedon’s language (the ‘‘whelming lap’’ and ‘‘tender dug’’), the power to enfeeble, unman, and infantilize the lover, and render him vulnerable to treachery. As I suggested above, these gynephobic tropes help explain Phedon’s decision to trust his friend and distrust his beloved. The distinction reflects the influence of the culturally induced distrust of the sexuality and desire that ensnare men and make women faithless. Stephen Orgel has shown how ‘‘male domination over women’’ was justified in Renaissance ideology by a variety of arguments, some of which, drawn from ethnoscience, supported the belief that it was physiologically possible for men to regress to their prepubescent state of effeminate childhood. ‘‘Women are dangerous to men be-

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cause sexual passion for women renders men effeminate: this is an age in which sexuality itself is misogynistic, as the love of women threatens the integrity of the perilously achieved male identity.’’30 This integrity is the subject of the second book, whose allegories of temperance defend, illustrate, and celebrate an ideal of heroic autonomy based on the repression/sublimation of what traditional moral discourse codifies as the potential alien within the self: the so-called irascible and concupiscible ‘‘parts’’ of the soul, the latter more dangerous because more deeply rooted in the gendered body. The narrator pronounces the man who unbinds wrathful furor ‘‘His owne woes authour’’ (v.1), but it is harder for ‘‘feeble nature’’ to resist what ‘‘she’’ covets, the ‘‘sweetnesse’’ that ‘‘doth allure the weaker sence,’’ because, unlike the ‘‘griefe and wrath, that be her enemies,’’ ‘‘joyous pleasure’’ fulfills her desire (vi.1). The ‘‘fear of effeminization’’ that Orgel notes as ‘‘a central element in all [Renaissance] discussions of what constitutes a ‘real man’ ’’ (p. 15) is fear of the woman within the man. The ideology of temperance dramatized in Book II interprets that fear as a good thing. To read the book as a critique of the ideology is to change the venue from a trial of sexuality to a trial of the fear of sexuality and of the gynephobic fantasy it privileges. ‘‘True’’ love is conspicuously de-emphasized in Book II. Apart from the references to Arthur’s sublimed and deferred desire to ‘‘serve’’ Gloriana, it appears only twice, and both times, in the Amavia and Phedon episodes, comes to grief. If, according to the formula of courtship, true love can make two hearts one, it cannot make two bodies one, nor would it want to ‘‘avoid’’ and reduce to ‘‘nought’’ the very difference that gives it meaning. I put those words in quotation marks because I borrow them from the famous account of the excretion machinery in Alma’s castle (ix.32), which I connect with the Palmer’s image of expelling the monster bred of filth. My sense of the connection owes much to David Lee Miller’s powerful reading of the allegory of the temperate body. Miller argues that the ninth canto performs a reflexive critique of its own sublimatory allegorical procedure, a critique centered on the avoidance or omission of the genital organs that in effect makes it—although described as androgynous (ix.22)—genderless.31 This ‘‘epicene body’’ explicitly figures an ‘‘image of the higher unity of man and woman,’’ but implicitly it ‘‘represents the castration of both genders,’’ and within the

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‘‘image of transcendence and reconciliation we find masculine authority hierarchically privileged’’: ‘‘while the ascending movement’’ of the allegorical description ‘‘pursues increasingly sublime refigurations of the male organ’’ as it leads back up to the head, ‘‘the female organ disappears except in its negative form, becoming ‘nought’ in every sense. No wonder shame is personified as a hysterically blushing woman’’ (pp. 182–83). Miller shows that even as the allegory of temperance ‘‘turns aside from the literal penis in order to erect the symbolic privilege of the phallus’’ (p. 191)—a movement completed in xii.1 when the feminized structure receives the displaced imagery of phallic pride (when the ‘‘goodly frame of Temperance’’ begins ‘‘Fairely to rise, and her adorned hed / To pricke of highest praise forth to advaunce’’)—the ‘‘avoided’’ sexuality is persistently reinscribed. The language of the stanzas depicting the coquetry in Alma’s parlor, for example, ‘‘resonates with sexual innuendo’’ although it is partly sublimated by ‘‘strategic displacement’’ to the heart (pp. 169–70), the seat not only of affections scaled down ‘‘in modest wise’’ (ix.34) but also of the cultural discourse that imprints them, the refined or etiolated sentiments of courtly romance. In the parallel encounters of Guyon with Shamefastnesse and Arthur with Prays-desire, what has been repressed or ‘‘castrated’’ emerges ‘‘in an unstable ratio of shamefastness, which denies access to the genitals, and desire for praise, which reinscribes libido as ambition’’ (p. 174). And, to add a footnote to Miller’s account of cantos ix and x, the ‘‘strong affections’’ (xi.1) that do not evade the repressive defenses of castrative sublimation are expelled outside ‘‘the fort of reason,’’ (xi.1) which, under Maleger’s leadership, they have besieged for seven years, forcing the well-tempered body to keep its ‘‘gates fast barred . . . / And every loup fast lockt, as fearing foes despight’’ (ix.10). Maleger, his attendant hags Impotence and Impatience, and his mother earth reenact a magnified Antaean variant of the allegory of Furor and Occasion.32 The analogy to Antaeus can be explained in terms of the sublimatory pattern Miller finds in the ascent from body to spirit, earth to sky, monstrosity and feminine weakness to phallic self-sufficiency: Maleger thrives on the gravitational depression that makes him the springboard of the ascent. If his ‘‘force is fiercer through infirmitie’’ (xi.1), ‘‘most strong in most infirmitee’’ (xi.40), that is because his wicked lightness of being (his mal-legerity), as a fantasy invented by the discourse of

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temperance, gains substance through the fortunate fall (occasio, which derives from occidere through its supine form, occasus) produced by his expulsion and dejection from the fort of reason. The origin of this melancholy fantasy, as Nohrnberg suggests, is in Phantastes’ chamber in the castle of temperance.33 To see Maleger’s repeated Lazaruslike resurrections as an effect of the forces of temperance is to confirm Silberman’s reading of Alma’s House as ‘‘the example of bad allegory that exposes the inadequate strategy of defense Temperance offers. . . . The moral and exegetical defenses provided by Temperance to cope with sensual experience fail in their designated task because the very notion of defense is revealed to be a spurious ideal.’’ If the castle/body’s five senses are, ‘‘paradoxically, the bulwarks of defense and the points of greatest vulnerability,’’ it is because their assailants are created by the very structure of the defensive exegesis that interprets the senses as bulwarks.34 The ‘‘sure establishment’’ of Alma’s ‘‘happy peace and goodly government’’ (xi.2) is inextricably bound to the process by which the ‘‘idle fantasies’’ of Phantastes (ix.50) become the ‘‘idle shades’’ of Maleger’s army (ix.15), and the shadowy Maleger, the ‘‘noyous . . . nought,’’ is ‘‘avoided quite, and throwne out privily’’ (ix.32).

IV In reading Book II as a critique rather than a celebration of the ideology of temperance and heroism which it represents, Silberman and Miller direct attention to the aesthetic reflexivity of the critique—that is, to the ways in which the poem places in question the narrative strategies, allegorical translations, and episodic visualizations that seem most vividly to get the message of that ideology across. They demonstrate in practice the general point I have been trying to make at a somewhat more theoretical level: the coherence of the oppositional patterns, discussed by Webster, between the direct and oral-formulaic values of storytelling, and the complexity of the literary indirections that represent it. Miller’s general orientation toward Spenser’s poetics is similar, and suggests an emergent theoretical consensus. ‘‘Our literal-minded desire to read the story for its own sake,’’ he notes at one point, ‘‘is often a target for the poker-faced Chaucerian irony so common in The Faerie Queene.’’35 He argues persua-

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sively and in detail that the poem simultaneously projects and negates what he calls ‘‘epistemological romance, in which disciplined meditation on a signifying body—Nature, scripture, the beloved—produces the transcendental object of its own desire’’ (p. 80) and thus metaleptically constitutes the truth it aspires to know. In opening itself to ‘‘didactic allegory,’’ the fiction of the poem ‘‘has introjected a powerful cultural demand for truth, and can meet this demand only by striving to differ internally from itself as fiction. In the effort to secure within itself a decisive representation of this difference, Spenserian allegory becomes ‘otherspeak’ in the most radical sense—generating . . . at once the integral body of truth and its repressed ‘other.’ . . . The Faerie Queene is able to summon its ideal form into representation only as a sublimated negative image of itself ’’ (p. 81). I am in general less persuaded by Miller’s positive emphasis on the poem’s ‘‘aesthetic theology’’ (‘‘Spenser’s art fantasizes its own perfection in terms of access to a spiritual body replete with truth’’; p. 71) than I am by his analysis of the ‘‘pervasively internalized principle of selfrenunciation’’ on which that vision ‘‘rests’’ (p. 81). I would prefer a more active term than ‘‘rests’’ to describe the relation between the poem’s two bodies, and a rhetoric that more fully registers the presence and significance of the tonal wit, the deadpan and often hilarious impersonation of rapt tale-telling, that indicates parodic treatment of both fictional and allegorical constructions. Self-renunciation frequently manifests itself as the self-mockery of a narrator at once amused and bemused by his material, falling in love with it while making fun of it—and ‘‘it’’ denotes both the tale and the tale-telling. These are the signals of a tonally complex form of ‘‘otherspeak’’ whose specific character has been best suggested by Webster in the two essays I discussed earlier. We recall that the account Webster gives in one essay of the contrasting demands on the reader made by Spenser’s oral-formulaic and literary modes is parallel to the account he gives in the other of the distinction between the direct and indirect methods the writer uses to maintain control of the transactional dynamics. In the latter he uses the example of the Furor/Occasion episode to show how Spenser, by mixing the two methods, induces readers to criticize the moral ideology that the narrative action, taken simply and directly, encourages them to endorse. Webster’s

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steady focus in both essays on the transactional dimension in rhetorical and literary performance offers a model of the kind of interpretive attention that is especially well suited to the dual project of ‘‘placing’’ The Faerie Queene in a specific network of textual, cultural, and institutional practices while explicating the strategies by which the poem represents its complex negotiations with that network. In this concluding section, I want to move from a summary of three of the model’s most promising features to a general account of the ways in which this transactional approach can contribute to the dual project. First, in characterizing the two methods as ‘‘reader-oriented strategies’’ of organization, Webster in effect keys the direct method to the oral mode by showing that its objectives are the traditional rhetorical ones of instruction and persuasion. The importance of this move is that it enables us to assimilate rhetorical effects to narrative effects, that is, to analyze allegorical and narrative schemes in rhetorical terms that highlight their transactional aims or motives. Second, as I noted before, Webster emphasizes the consonance between the direct method as a traditional medium of instruction and the traditional moral scheme it conveys. He shows how the medium reinforces the message by conveying it not only through the directness of the Palmer’s sermon but also through translation into the directness of episodic action. He argues convincingly that the hero’s success-induced failure in the episode casts doubt on the wisdom of what is recognizably a strong classical, or classico-Puritan, strain in the traditional discourse of temperance—a discourse, I would add, that the poem represents as elitist and sexist in its scapegoating of class and gender stereotypes. He thus makes it possible for us to see how the oral mode, the direct method, and traditional moral discourse coalesce into a complex but integrated target of Spenser’s indirect and writerly method. Third, Webster’s comments on the misdirections of the Occasion episode point the way toward a more general insight into the structure of narrative irony in The Faerie Queene. He argues, for example, that if Spenser’s indirections force us to complicate and revise our initial response to the episode, it was ‘‘his own allegorical logic that misled us’’ in the first place; ‘‘he gives us a figure called Occasion and then has his narrative treat her as if she—and, by extension, . . . [what] she represents—is

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indeed the kind of thing that can be taken hold of and subdued.’’36 What is misleading, as we saw in the Phedon episode, is the very process of externalization itself, or rather the internalization of exteriority, because it alienates and scapegoats the source of moral responsibility. And this holds in general for the logic of allegorical translation. The process that makes for good stories, instructive examples, and easy listening is also a process that accommodates the powers, dangers, and comforts of moral self-deception. The Faerie Queene sustains a sharp and ironic focus on what Freud calls ‘‘considerations of representability’’ and ‘‘intelligibility.’’ Again and again, its landscapes, figures, and events are marked as conspicuously reductive and deceptive by textual indirections that challenge the reader to question the meanings offered by the storyteller’s oral, visual, and dramatic formulas. That the poem’s duplicitous landscape and wordscape pose problems of interpretation for characters and readers alike is hardly a new idea. It is the major thesis of Maureen Quilligan’s Language of Allegory (1979), and it was explored as far back as 1966 by Donald Cheney in ways that anticipate both Quilligan and Webster.37 After noting that ‘‘Spenser must appeal to conceptual and narrative continuities if he is to keep his audience,’’ Cheney goes on to demonstrate that the intricacies of the Spenserian stanza call for a different tempo of reading: the sequence of stanzas sometimes reads like a sonnet sequence in the play of its ‘‘continually shifting ironic perspectives’’ coupled with ‘‘imagistic repetition’’ (pp. 97– 98). He argues that, although the allegorical explanations appended by Tasso to his epic may be ‘‘helpful in providing an initial perspective’’ on scenes of temptation in The Faerie Queene, ‘‘they quickly fail to account for the developing complexities’’ of those scenes (p. 95). Of an Ariostan echo in the first episode of Book III (in which Britomart floors Guyon), he remarks that ‘‘Spenser appears to be presenting in all seriousness the conventional sentiments which his predecessor was satirizing,’’ but that his wryly nuanced rhetoric unhorses the seriousness and the sentiments along with the hero (pp. 85–86). Cheney’s account of the structural strain between two modes of reading becomes even more illuminating when beamed through some of the formulations in William Kennedy’s Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature, published in 1978, and one of the army of ‘‘formalists-have-it-wrong,

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let’s-get-more-historical’’ books appearing in that decade.38 Kennedy scolds critics for their narrow focus on the tropological dimension of rhetoric, and he urges them to recontextualize their analyses by reviving the traditional study of rhetoric as a transactional art of persuasion and communication. His own response to this challenge is to center on the ‘‘rhetorical strategies of voice and address’’ (p. 130), and on the ‘‘norms of integration governing the speaker’s characterization and his relationship to an audience,’’ as keys to genre differences as well as to differences of style and mode within the larger system of genre (p. 3). Thus he describes as a constant and normative feature of epics from Homer through the Renaissance the ‘‘implicit rhetorical identification’’ of speaker with audience effected by the speaker ‘‘himself playing an audience to the action . . . he recounts as transmitter or mediator’’ (p. 136). In this relation ‘‘the speaker formalizes and codifies the values of the culture’’ he shares with the audience, ‘‘and he does so with hortatory force, urging contemplation and acceptance of those values’’ (pp. 187–88). Kennedy’s chapter on the Petrarchan mode in lyric poetry brings out the sharp contrast between lyric and epic genres. This mode is characterized by ‘‘a split addresser whose voice as speaker differs from that of the author,’’ and a ‘‘split addressee whose function as fictive audience— usually the speaker’s beloved—differs from that of the actual reader’’ (p. 20). The emphasis on transactional relations as a structural principle underlying differences of genre is genuinely useful because it directs attention to a larger framework within which to explore the critical representation of one medium by another. In this connection, Kennedy’s account of the moral purpose of the epic speaker is especially suggestive; it delineates a possible target of irony. But partly because of what is for all practical purposes a bias against close reading, he does not entertain this possibility and fails to realize the full value of his approach.39 Nevertheless, if we revise that approach in the light of Cheney’s observations, a revision that involves combining the epic and lyric norms that Kennedy discusses in separate chapters, we can better grasp the peculiar role of Spenser’s narrator as an epic speaker who ‘‘formalizes and codifies the values’’ of his audience, but does so in a poem whose modal structure resembles that of Petrarchan lyric. This means that his identification with

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his audience is not merely implicit, as Kennedy claims; it is explicit, and even preemptive in that it models or represents a particular kind of response, one that conforms not only to the culture’s dominant discourses but also to the expectations of oral narrative discussed by Webster. In order to make this effect conspicuous, the poem has to encourage, and the critic acknowledge, the very different expectations and practice of reading for story and of close reading as at least a potentially oppositional discourse. The clash is not so much between two kinds of reading as between two representations of reading: reading-as-if-listening and reading-as-if-reading. Since the oral-formulaic devices that invite us to read as if listening to a story contribute to the strings of generalized and discontinuous descriptions by which the story is made vivid, they also contribute to an effect of reference by inviting us to visualize or pictorialize or cinematize as we ‘‘listen,’’ that is, to imagine the referent, whether it is an event, a place, or an agent. The cavalier treatment of the story’s referents—the inconsistencies, contradictions, interruptions, ritualized repetitions, and deferrals for which the narrative of The Faerie Queene is famous—could not be registered as interference unless the story at the same time depicted the referent with which those strategies interfere. The moments of strident allegorical visualization that characterize the episodes of Furor and Alma encourage the reader intermittently to abstract the pictures from the rhetoric in which they are conveyed and through which they are interpreted. Thus reading-as-if-seeing is a component of reading-as-if-listening. If the textual critique of reading-as-if-listening is (for me) the implicit thesis of Webster’s argument, the critique of reading-as-if-seeing is the explicit thesis of Miller’s. He picks out as ‘‘a central feature’’ of Spenser’s ‘‘allegorical poetics, a sort of internalized iconoclasm that makes the poetry a perpetually self-displacing mode of discourse. . . . It is as if the text contained an implicit self-censoring principle, or were doubly written as itself and its own simultaneous retractation.’’40 The specular reflexivity Miller pursues through his study of the poem’s two bodies can be made less specular and less reflexive by the premise that the allegorical schemes and narrative rhetoric of its ‘‘body politic’’ are the site of the corporate wisdom, the traditional discourses, the cultural imperium, on which the text—Miller’s ‘‘poetic ‘body natural’ ’’ (p. 14)—performs its iconoclastic

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operations. These operations proceed by ‘‘a sustained movement of displacement-and-revision that keeps undoing the premature or provisional closure which enables mimetic representation’’ (p. 175). Miller acutely perceives the consonance between the allegorico-mimetic method of the poem’s body politic and the tendency of epistemological romance to visualize or envision the icons that desire constructs and misrecognizes as transcendent. I associate the antimimetic and antirepresentational strategies described by Miller as iconoclastic with the textual critique of reading-as-if-seeing, which is encouraged by the storyteller’s inducement to read-as-if-listening. The drift of the observations I have gathered together from various sources indicates, as I noted earlier, an emergent consensus among recent Spenserians about the ideological meaning and rhetorical function of narrative. It also indicates a new approach to the problem of the inadequate or unreliable speaker—the narrator as commentator—that responds to Alpers’s important criticism of the concept. Two interrelated consequences of the approach are especially relevant to my argument. First, it shifts the locus of unreliability from the speaker’s commentary to the story itself, that is, to the values of the allegorical and narrative schemes directly conveyed by the storyteller’s discursive practices. As a result, second, there is no longer any point in insisting that the narrator’s occasional comments on and reactions to the story be narrowly construed as the performance of a dramatic speaker. At the same time, the unreliability we may wish to attribute to that performance can be explained on new grounds. I shall conclude with comments on each of these features. 1. The transfer of unreliability from commentary to story puts us in a good position to explore the connection between the unreliability of the schemes and values and their expressly traditional character. And it sets the stage for an ideological reading of The Faerie Queene as a critique of the cultural discourses it represents, a reading that numbers among those targeted discourses the traditional forms of storytelling the poem imitates. Webster’s description of the way Spenser’s narrative technique, ‘‘in being traditional, redundant, and in some sense ‘loosely’ put together, repeatedly encourages the expectations proper to an oral mode,’’41 takes on added resonance when set against the background of the burgeoning field of media studies inaugurated by Harold Innes, Marshall McLuhan,

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Eric Havelock, and Walter Ong. Their work is more sensitive to the politics of storytelling and oral performance than that of the scholars Webster himself relies upon (Parry, Lord, Bowra), and during the seventies and eighties study of the politics of oral communication expanded across the whole range of the ‘‘human sciences.’’ To pause briefly over one example, the analysis of oratory as social control has been illuminated by the theory of ritual communication that the anthropologist Maurice Bloch developed during his fieldwork in Madagascar and that I briefly discussed in Chapter 1. I noted there that the thesis of his inquiry into the effects of stylized rhetoric may be epigrammatically reduced to the statement that ‘‘you cannot argue with a song.’’42 From his examination of the procedural protocols of village councils, Bloch found that if someone has merely been ‘‘allowed . . . to speak in an oratorical manner’’ his auditors have all but ‘‘accepted his proposal,’’ since ‘‘the highly formalised codes of . . . oratory put people in a situation where they feel compelled . . . to follow’’ the suggested ‘‘course of action.’’43 Stylized expression encourages acquiescence in the receivers of messages whose formulaic rhetoric is itself a sign of traditionality. Bloch notes that, in the politico-religious practices of the Malagasy people with whom he worked, the elders employ ‘‘a restricted archaic vocabulary,’’ ‘‘a special style of delivery,’’ ‘‘a rigid traditional’’ organization of the sequence of speech acts, and illustrations drawn only from traditional sources, to imitate as if by ventriloquism the authoritative voices of the dead.44 He shows how such formalization of language can be used to express, maintain, and control hierarchic relations in systems of traditional authority. Ritual communication is among the ideological apparatuses that Bloch examines in analyzing the means by which one Malagasy people, the Merina, converted power into authority—the means by which ‘‘a turbulent state based on . . . unscrupulous exploitation’’ came to be represented as a harmoniously integrated hierarchy. The archaism and change-resistant formality of ritual communication ‘‘makes the social world appear organized in a fixed order which recurs without beginning and without end,’’ and so ‘‘the political, the social, the discontinuous, the cultural and the arbitrary’’ are projected ‘‘into the image and the realm of repetitive nature,’’ an image that focuses on its ‘‘beneficial cyclical aspects, fertility and reproduction.’’45

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All this is familiar enough to students of Tudor ideology, and especially to those who in recent decades have amused themselves by deconstructing Tillyard’s celebration of the Elizabethan World Picture and uncovering the imperialist program it legitimates. To close the link to Spenser, we need only include storytelling and mythmaking among the forms of ritual communication discussed by Bloch. Of course, the archaism and formalism of the Spenserian storyteller have been seen as instruments that participate in the exploitative colonialism of the Renaissance state. Thus Stephen Greenblatt, who reads The Faerie Queene as an ambivalent celebration of royal and colonial power, implies that the poet shares his heroes’ ‘‘profound conviction that there is a moral task set for themselves by virtue of the power of Gloriana,’’ and that ‘‘the rightness of the moral mission’’ is ‘‘anchored in the ardent worship of power.’’46 It is significant that, when Greenblatt speculates on the cultural conditions that enabled Spenser successfully to convey this conviction, he characterizes the communicative act as an oral transaction and assimilates it to an inscriptive process that he impugns with a Kafkaesque analogy: If Spenser told his readers a story, they listened, and listened with pleasure because they themselves, in the shared life of their culture, were telling versions of that story again and again, recording the texts on themselves and on the world around them. . . . Spenser’s poem is one manifestation of a symbolic language that is inscribed by history on the bodies of living beings as, in Kafka’s great parable, the legal sentences are inscribed by the demonic penal machine on the bodies of the condemned. (p. 179) Spenser’s art does not lead us to perceive ideology critically, but rather affirms the existence and inescapable moral power of ideology as that principle of truth toward which art forever yearns. It is art whose status is questioned in Spenser, not ideology; indeed, art is questioned precisely to spare ideology that internal distantiation it undergoes in the work of Shakespeare or Marlowe. In The Faerie Queene reality as given by ideology always lies safely outside the bounds of art, in a different realm, distant, infinitely powerful, perfectly good. (p. 192) The first of these two passages articulates in initially benign but ultimately sinister language the logocentric fantasy of unmediated inscription

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which, in the first section of this essay, I attributed to Plato’s Phaedrus. The effect is both benign and sinister because the pleasure induced by the consonance of Spenser’s story with the culturally preinscribed story is morally ambiguous. On the one hand, in Greenblatt’s Freudian reading, focused on the Bower of Bliss, this consonance supports the forces of civilization against the excess of unruly sexual pleasure. On the other hand, the repression and renunciation facilitated by the poem’s pleasurable rehearsal of privileged cultural texts serves an art inseparably linked to ‘‘a repellent political ideology.’’47 The second passage, however, articulates the ideological desire and goal of Spenser’s art in terms remarkably similar to those with which Miller characterizes the aims of Spenser’s ‘‘epistemological romance’’ and the poem’s ‘‘body politic.’’ The point about this similarity is that Miller persuasively demonstrates the omnipresent force of internal distantiation by which the poem in effect makes Greenblatt’s version of The Faerie Queene the target of the very criticism he essays. The politics of Spenserian storytelling, which Greenblatt takes straight, is contested by the counterdiscourse, the countermedium, of an iconoclastic and audioclastic ´ecriture. 2. The second consequence of the approach I have been sketching is that, if the locus of unreliability shifts from narrator to narrative, we can be a little more relaxed in our efforts to make sense of what often seems to many readers to be misleading or inadequate commentary. If, that is, we find that the unreliability of the speaker reflects that of the story, that the ideological premises of his explicit comments are consistent with those implicit in the story, then we can assume that it makes no difference whether he is merely fabulating or moralizing and expostulating, since in all three capacities he performs an interpretive function of a specific kind. As a storyteller he is a reader of traditional discourses, and as a commentator he is a reader of the stories he tells, a traditional reader of a traditional story, the first reader of The Faerie Queene, a guide and model for all subsequent readers; but a guide whose misinterpretation is to be noted and rejected, a model of how not to read The Faerie Queene. Like the listeners imagined by Greenblatt, the narrator who speaks the words of the ancestors and retells their stories often shows himself to be seduced by the traditional pleasures, powers, and values the text subjects to critique, including the jouissance and spellbinding mastery of storytelling

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itself. This mastery is traditional in a special sense: the narrator is marked as a male storyteller who gets his material and authority from the old books and oral sources—the anonymous ‘‘they say’’—of traditions shaped by the male imagination. In the Garden of Adonis and other passages, this gender marking is particularly strong and renders conspicuous the chauvinism of the discourses that speak through his voice. The narrator’s didactic or exegetical function is roughly comparable to that of the Palmer in the episode with Occasion. The Palmer is an unreliable guide because the morality he endorses conforms to that inscribed in the allegorical scheme transparently rendered by narrative action; it is the story and not merely the diagnostic sermon that misinterprets Phedon’s problem. And if the Palmer has inside knowledge of allegorico-narrative ‘‘facts’’ (the true meaning of Occasion and Furor, the reason why the babe’s hands cannot be washed in canto ii), it is because those ‘‘facts’’ have been constructed to conform to the morality he endorses and the medicine he is prepared to dispense. Similarly, the narrator annotates the commitments of such schemes and actions in melodramatic utterance that reinforces our sense of their parodic or citational character. But his exegetical ‘‘voice’’ can hardly be accorded the status of an inadequate or obtuse dramatic speaker—on this point I agree with Alpers—because it is so obviously the altered ‘‘voice’’ of the authorial or textual impersonator ventriloquized in the same ebullient and selfdelighting spirit of citational parody that enlivens the stories he tells.48 These stories compose a compendious interlace of discursive traditions that includes not only the spectrum of literary genres but also the genres of religious, ethical, political, and cosmological discourse, along with their attendant motifs and topoi. Critics writing in the earlier decades of the last century were content to ascribe this grab bag of traditional forms to Spenser’s eclecticism, as in C. S. Lewis’s two lists, ‘‘Elfin Spenser : Renaissance Spenser : voluptuous Spenser : courtly Spenser : Italianate Spenser : decorative Spenser’’ and ‘‘English Spenser : Protestant Spenser : rustic Spenser : manly Spenser : churchwardenly Spenser : domestic Spenser : thrifty Spenser : honest Spenser,’’49 or as in Douglas Bush’s portrait of ‘‘the wistful panegyrist of an imagined chivalry, the bold satirist of ugly actuality, cosmic philosopher and pastoral dreamer, didactic moralist and voluptuous pagan, puritan preacher and Catholic

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worshipper, eager lover and mystical Neo-Platonist.’’50 Noting that Bush also insists that Spenser was not ‘‘conscious . . . of disturbing conflicts,’’ Angus Fletcher remarks that in spite of this ‘‘disturbingly bland account of Spenser’s characteristic manner,’’ Bush’s list ‘‘presents a Spenser full of conflict.’’ Fletcher’s own attempt to do justice to the ambivalence of Spenserian epic while accounting for its ‘‘striking lack of dramatic excitement’’ brings us close to the view that the personas Bush conjures up denote not the author but the figures constructed by the stories they tell, and that if these stories are not themselves exciting, it is because they defer and displace excitement from the immediacy of the rhetorical transaction to the process of reading-as-if-reading, the process in which we interrogate the rhetoricity of narrative. Fletcher argues that it is the reader who brings excitement to the work; the work does not, like a mimetic work, present us with a series of events capable in their autonomy of exciting our attention and sympathy [although, I add, they make a pretense of, a feint toward, doing so]. On our first encounter the figures are miniature, like the knights Proust imagined on his bed, jousting in the playful light of a magic lantern. But as we read our way into Spenser, his figures grow large with another size, of dull reverberations, by alluding to other cultures, other religions, other philosophies than our own.51 Passing through the playful light of citational magic we may indeed find behind the miniatures thus illuminated and amplified the traces of uncanny forces, but what surprises us most is the perception that those forces live and lurk within the old familiar places catalogued by Lewis and Bush.52 Spenser’s magic lantern casts defamiliarizing shadows even as it sharpens the outlines and flattens the forms of its twice-told tales. Ironically, those shadows compel our attention as soon as we recognize that the narrative is a crazy quilt less of discursive traditions than of discursive traductions. As I tried to demonstrate in the third section of this essay, the targets of parody are problematic effects of the culture’s dominant discourses about attitudes toward gender, desire, marriage, morality, justice, and religion. But, in the manner suggested by Fletcher, our sense of the seriousness of the problems is enhanced by and inseparable from our

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first encounter with the miniatures. The tales of jousting figures appear in the poem as metonymic and occasionally slanderous simulations of the system Miller calls ‘‘epistemological romance’’—simulations of the tropological strategies, ideological commitments and claims of truth by which (he argues) the system brings the idealized body politic of the poem into being. These simulations are marked as such by the expressive simulation that conveys them: the oral-formulaic simulation of a medium whose transactional structure inhibits decelerated inquiry into textual aporias. The conspicuousness of the effect of inhibition is directly proportional to that of the text’s complexity. If the narrator models a kind of reading that dramatizes the direct method by inviting identification rather than distance, innocent rather than suspicious response, mimesis rather than irony, our refusal of the invitation begins with the awareness that the effect of the fiction of direct method is one of the poem’s major forms of indirection. I noted above that I view the narrator as the first reader of The Faerie Queene, and I now conclude with the suggestion that the best and most sustained example of his kind of reading—the reading of the oralist and moralist—is to be found in the Letter to Ralegh. There he states that to give Ralegh and the general reader better light and understanding, he will ignore ‘‘any particular purposes or by-accidents . . . occasioned’’ in the course of fashioning ‘‘a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.’’ For Ralegh’s benefit he will ‘‘overronne’’ the ‘‘whole course’’ of the poem in order to direct his ‘‘understanding to the wel-head of the History, that from thence gathering the whole intention of the conceit, ye may as in a handfull gripe al the discourse, which otherwise may happily seeme tedious and confused.’’53 I am tempted to add that directing attention to the wellhead is directing it away from what Ralegh, his peers, and his Queen might consider to be the sick textual feet the poem creeps on. Like the writer represented by the Letter, the narrator represented by the poem ‘‘kidnaps’’ romance and its readership and brings them tied up like Acrasia to the wellhead of Tudor ideology. In this he contributes to the project described by Frye in the foreword to Unfolded Tales: ‘‘Renaissance education was within a context of class and patriarchy, and knowing one’s place in society was at the center of all other knowledge. But romance tries to give that knowledge a chivalric idealism

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that minimizes the arrogance that goes with class and sex distinctions.’’54 However, as I have noted elsewhere, if the narrator and his story are working for the government, the poem is not.55 Rather, it is a double agent that kidnaps the narrator and his chivalric idealism in the service of a more subversive agenda, lurking snakelike in the dense underground forest of ‘‘by-accidents’’ that twist like rhizomes through the text, but occasionally showing its back, like the serpentine gold thread of Busirane’s tapestries.

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five

The Pepys Show: Ghostwriting and Documentary Desire in The Diary While I am writing without knowing that I will keep these nine cahiers and take them with me to Stockholm, where they will be found among my papers after my death and sent to Clerselier in France. . . . and though I do not know the story of these events, it is no less true that I write to be read after my death, and that is why I do not publish. . . . While I am writing I think I see myself being seen by many others, who are reading over my shoulder the words traced by a dead man’s hand immobilised for eternity, the eternity of truth, in the instance of inscribing it: dum scribo. —Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘‘Dum Scribo’’ Your food stamps will be stopped effective March, 1992, because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances. —Greenville County, South Carolina, Department of Social Services, letter to a dead person

The subject of Samuel Pepys’s Diary was no inner-worldly ascetic, no Calvinist. He doesn’t fit the Weberian pattern. He was a fiscal conservative in the sense that he kept most of his wealth in gold and his gold under his bed. Although he was reluctant to invest in land and slow to speculate in securities, his financial health came increasingly to depend upon his ability to navigate the precarious waters of paper instruments and promises. The Diary’s monthly statements of his accounts were among these instruments—the few signatures of rough notes bound into the first volume of the diary show that it began as a combination journal and account record, with memoranda that listed many items in order to document expenses. The memoranda were transferred to separate account books, but it remains tempting to construe the diary figuratively as a record of experiential expenditures and acquisitions—a record in which Pepys ‘‘tells’’ the day’s happenings in a form that makes them as discrete and precious as his gold coins and shorthand symbols. Pepys writes that during a time of danger in 1667 he removed his gold from his house and buried most of it for safekeeping in the yard of his 218

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father’s house in the village of Brompton. The entry for October 10–11 of that year contains a comic account of his furious search to recover the poorly hidden coins, wash the dirt off them, and carry them apprehensively back home. Equating the gold coins with diary entries produces a parable of Pepys’s ambivalent relation to the diary: like his money it is removed from his person for safekeeping, buried in foul papers, refurbished in fair copy, and returned to its hiding place at home; there it remains like a time capsule, containing his self-portrait safely disembodied and reincorporated in another medium, a paper investment in the future, but an uncertain investment owing to the coyness that solicits discovery only by conspicuously resisting it. Since the nine-year growth of Pepys’s Diary to its six substantial volumes paralleled the growth of his fortunes, he may well have been justified in the diligence with which he gave not simply a daily picture of his life and times but an account of them, in the sense of an accounting. And whether or not the parallelism was superstitiously or fetishistically interpreted by the writer as a causal relation, the weight of a diaristic enterprise animated (if only in part) by expressly moral, social, and economic motives falls on the accounting activity as a form of self-protection and validation. From this standpoint, the mimetic motive may itself be conceived as instrumental or secondary to another, variously expressed in the following passages: Custom and memory now played second fiddle to the written word: reality meant ‘‘established on paper.’’1 ‘‘Graphic’’ means ‘‘like writing’’; it also means ‘‘like truth.’’2 The self-conscious emergence of the page in its own right implies a radical, perhaps irrevocable, alienation of language from its supposedly primordial character as speech. . . . The moment in which the page is foregrounded is one in which it ceases to be the invisible servant of a higher order of language and meaning, and assumes its own existence in a world in which it is no longer to be denied.3 The secret book is not only a finding list or key to the organization of family knowledge, but its very pages mediate the terms of relations in such a way as to circumscribe the ‘‘reality’’ of facts and feelings within the limits of the page.4

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It is important to stress . . . that the sense of reality that the diary can foster is of two kinds. The artless spontaneity of the internal, nonretrospective record is one. The other is the document itself, which as a document, claims to be real.5 Etymologically affiliated to doxa and docere, and thus to the doctrine that makes—through instruction and admonition—for docility, by the middle of the fifteenth century document was being used to signify a means of showing, proving, furnishing evidence. The slow but sure gravitation of those functions to the graphic medium was metonymically confirmed some decades after Pepys’s death by the first recorded instance of document as ‘‘something written.’’ By then, what Foucault calls ‘‘the disciplinary regime’’ had begun ‘‘to capture and fix’’ individuals in ‘‘a network of writing,’’ a ‘‘mass of documents,’’ through which education, morality, conduct, law, property, commercial practice, scientific inquiry, bureaucratic administration, and political power were mediated and authenticated.6 Documentary desire is the desire for graphic justification by paper and on paper, the desire for appellation (naming as appeal or accusation), interpellation, identification, and resistance—or counteridentification—by paper and on paper. When the literacy promoted by the Reformation, with its new emphasis on such graphic forms of spiritual accountancy as the confessional diary, passed into the society of the Restoration, when in the 1660s London swarmed with booksellers and stallkeepers, the practice of self-documentation was diffused into a more general culture of documentation, of which state censorship—the Licensing Acts (1662–95)—was a symptom. Pepys was a creature of documentary culture and desire. In the first year of the Restoration and the Diary, he moved into a new home in the Naval Office Building, which housed his career as a diarist, a naval administrator, a government official, a member (and later president) of the Royal Society, a writer and collector of books and official documents. Documentary desire made him both the ‘‘greatest of diarists’’ and ‘‘the greatest of civil servants’’; ‘‘he was able to return from the distractions of the park or the bargaining of the yards to the work of preparing a parliamentary report, or the devising of new official forms; with equal facility he could lose his heart to a woman and find his soul in a ledger’’—a

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comment that blandly, condescendingly, overlooks the documentary desire and facility responsible for the evidence on which the comment is based.7 To acknowledge the force of Pepys’s desire to transfer— transform—his life to the reality and justification of a document is to interrogate and complicate the standard view of the diary’s verisimilitude, a view that gives commentators permission to write as if they were looking through the diary’s window at the person behind the book. Even the most cursory glance at the relation between media shifts and the structural conditions of communication will be enough to place the standard view in question. The effect of the proliferation of discursive media and genres in early modern culture conforms to the observation of J. G. A. Pocock that ‘‘the more complex, even the more contradictory, the language context in which . . . [an author] is situated, the richer and more ambivalent become the speech acts he is capable of performing, and the greater becomes the likelihood that these acts will perform upon the context itself and induce modification and change within it.’’8 The kind of self-representation implicated in staging oneself in writing is a function of the more complex and contradictory performances of textualized speech acts. No matter before whomever else writers perform, they perform in the first instance before themselves. The I that writes is always an I that reads what it writes and monitors the act of writing. It continuously ‘‘reads’’ what it is about to write, and as it reads what it is writing and has written it may anticipate, may try to preempt or defuse or encourage, the reading it imagines others will give it. Authorship thus divides into these opposed but inseparable functions—into the communicative complementarity of sender and receiver—and the product of their negotiation is the I that gets written, but also, of course, the I that gets read. The difference between writing and conversation is that in the former the abstraction of the process from the body and its reincorporation into the graphic medium more expressly dissociates the product and the interpreter from the agent and monitor. Under the conditions of ‘‘primary orality’’ (Ong), the I that gets spoken—whether in monologic or dialogic speech events—is the product of collaborative construction simultaneously going on between the listening I and the listening other, the interlocutor or audience. Under the conditions of print literacy, the

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I that gets written and read may well, as Ricoeur insists, be more fully alienated from the writer’s control and appropriated by the reading other, but it may also—because of its disseminability—have more power (in Pocock’s words) to ‘‘perform upon’’ its context. According to the conventional wisdom, when—as a result of this increase in power—the context comes to include censorship, which in turn motivates the development of conventions of coded discourse, these complications intensify the demand for self-censorship as a preemptive strategy of the I that writes and reads. Thus changes in the technical order are no less important than changes in the order of symbolic interaction in modifying the structure of self-representation. In The Tremulous Private Body, Francis Barker attributes the origins of the modern ‘‘bourgeois subject’’ to two features of the context I just described. The first is ‘‘a shift in representative and central discourse from the performed writing of the early seventeenth-century stage to the more evidently ‘written’ writing of the later period: a transition from collaboration (of composition and performance) to individual production, and from visuality to script.’’9 The second is ‘‘the profound implication’’ of ‘‘the subject of writing (or of reading)’’ in ‘‘the machinery of censorship.’’ This was ‘‘a constitutive experience for the seventeenth century’’ (pp. 50–51) because what Annabel Patterson calls ‘‘the hermeneutics of censorship’’ generated a theory and practice of ‘‘functional ambiguity’’ that intensified the potential self-division implicit in all writing insofar as it can’t avoid representing the writing subject:10 ‘‘While censorship is a state function, an exterior apparatus of control, in so far as the domain it polices is the production, circulation and exchange of discourses, it is one that reaches into the subject itself.’’11 Taking Pepys’s Diary and Descartes’s Discourse as important sites and epitomes of the ‘‘founding moment’’ of ‘‘bourgeois subjectivity’’ (p. 10), Barker extrapolates from them the following structure: ‘‘a public persona surrounds an intermediate self (of which neither are ‘really’ the subject’s own . . .); and within these there shelters a disembodied ‘inner self ’: . . . the I that writes the text’’ (p. 58).12 He shows how the text of Descartes’s Discourse ‘‘constitutes the bourgeois individual as a split narration isolated within a censored discourse where it is crucial both that it is narrated and that is censored’’ (p. 57). But it is his (by now) notorious reading of

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a passage in Pepys’s Diary on which I want to focus.13 The passage contains, among other items, Pepys’s reference to ‘‘reading a little of L’escholle des filles, which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world’’ (p. 3). According to Barker, ‘‘the Diary tries to say that the part of Pepys that consumes the pleasures of the French text is not really Pepys’’; the authorial subject becomes self-censoring. The I that writes deletes from its text the body of the unacceptable, or allots it to a marginal or parenthetical status. . . . The constitution of the subject in this form is the principal support of the new order. Its splitting, in which modern discourse is founded, engenders . . . intense self-’’consciousness’’ . . . [and] an awareness of self that goes along with the elision from that consciousness of other elements in the psychic ensemble. . . . The profound and corporeal guilt with which the subject is invested as the febrile undertone of that self-consciousness, which turns out to know so little of itself, is decisive in securing the deep inner control, which has been called interpellation, that is so vital to the bourgeois illusion of freedom. . . . While it would be difficult to deny that external controls are at work in bourgeois society . . . this must not occlude for us the more profound strategy of domination which is achieved not by post hoc intervention from without, but by the pre-constitution of the subject in its subjection. (pp. 58–60) Here, in a fashion illustrative of current trends in cultural interpretation and critique, theses of Althusser, Foucault, and Elias converge. The first two are explicitly present in Barker’s text; the resemblance to the Elias thesis is merely my observation—what Elias analyzes as part of the civilizing process Barker treats as a cultural catastrophe—but I mention it to bring Elias’s emphasis on self-censorship into closer contact with the specific form of reflexive self-representation associated with writing. ‘‘Elias,’’ write Stallybrass and White, ‘‘connects manners to the internal construction of the subject,’’ but in Barker’s story it is writing more than manners that produces what they call the ‘‘self-regulating bourgeois identity.’’14

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The choice of Pepys as an exemplary instance of ‘‘the newly interiorated subject’’ (p. 52) enables Barker to dramatize—or allegorize—his thesis that the English Revolution established ‘‘a new set of connections between subject and discourse, subject and polity,’’ and also between ‘‘body and soul, language and meaning,’’ and that a new ‘‘ensemble of . . . power relations’’ installed the subject (i.e., Pepys) ‘‘as a private citizen in a domestic space, over against a public world’’ (pp. 10–11). In ‘‘what has been hitherto called the discourse of the clerk,’’ Barker is struck not by ‘‘the relative lack of opacity of the self-deception (to and for whom is Pepys writing this secret text?)’’ but by ‘‘the indirect . . . manner of its self-exposure in another discourse within and around the clerk,’’ a discourse ‘‘concerning desire, disease, the mess of the body and its passions’’ (pp. 6–7). Thus to fasten on the plain style, its clarity, its ‘‘epistemological naivety’’ (p. 5), and its informational value, as commentators have done, is to participate in the repression of guilty sexuality that marks the Diary; it is to be complicit with Pepys in treating the plain style as a mask, and in providing the discourse of the clerk with an alibi that substantiates its innocence, namely ‘‘the a-libi-dinous justification of reading ‘for information sake’ ’’; it is to reproduce not only the repressive and factitious proprieties but also the self-division that characterizes ‘‘the typical structure of all bourgeois discourse’’ (p. 6). What I find most valuable in this account is its analysis of the convergence of the effects of the structure of writing on self-representation with the effects of changing ‘‘power relations’’ on self-censorship and surplus meaning. But as it stands I don’t think The Tremulous Private Body succeeds in making good on either its historical or its interpretive claims. One reason for this is that, although Barker insists on the novelty of this founding moment of bourgeois subjectivity, his references to preceding versions of subjectivity are too cursory to provide the contrast that would validate his claim. Another reason, more germane to my topic in this essay, is that his approach is dominated by two parsimonious strategies, snippetotomy and metonymy: since large historical claims are defended by readings of small excerpts from a few major exhibits, both the excerpts and their textual habitats are made to stand for the wholes of which they are parts.15

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This is notably evident in his account of the Diary, which produces what seems to be a characterization of the whole from a reading of a single entry. Barker concludes that the Diary is the work of a man who ‘‘says sing when he means fuck, who fears sex and calls it smallpox, who enjoys sex and calls it reading,’’ and whose guilt is aroused by a ‘‘representation of a representation. . . . Behind it all, not even an adulterous act, but an act of reading’’ (p. 9). The problem with this conclusion is that it doesn’t even apply to the entry it is based on.16 Barker cites the entry from an abridgment relying on earlier editions that deleted the more ‘‘explicit’’ erotic passages, most (but by no means all) of which were coded in garbled French, Spanish, and polyglot. Such a passage appears in parentheses near the end of the entry for February 9, 1668, in volume 9 of the magisterial edition prepared for the University of California Press by Robert Latham and William Matthews. I cite it after the version Barker used: We sang until almost night, and drank a mighty good store of wine, and then they parted, and I to my chamber, where I did read through L’escholle des filles, a lewd book, but what do no wrong once to read for information sake. And after I had done it I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame, and so at night to supper and to bed.17 We sang till almost night, and drank my good store of wine: and then they parted and I to my chamber, where I did read through L’Escholle des Filles; a lewd book, but what doth me no wrong to read for information sake (but it did hazer my prick para stand all the while, and una vez to decharger); and after I had done it, I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame; and so at night to supper and then to bed.18 Apart from the deletion, the other differences are caused by faulty transcription of Pepys’s shorthand. The change from ‘‘drank a mighty good store of wine’’ to ‘‘drank my good store of wine’’ shifts the sense of the passage from Barker’s emphasis on the heavy drinking that makes Pepys ‘‘blurtingly confess’’ his indulgence (p. 7) to an emphasis on the good quality of his wine and hospitality. The scene of writing implied by

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‘‘blurtingly confess’’—he sets down the entry when still under the weather, perhaps after supper and while in bed—is countered by everything Latham and Matthews have deduced about Pepys’s method of composition from their analysis of the manuscript and his references to it in the Diary.19 Above all, the double adversative (‘‘but what doth me no wrong,’’ ‘‘but it did hazer’’) has the preemptive effect of making Pepys anticipate Barker’s view of him in what amounts to a proleptic parody of it: first, the bourgeois rationalization that a prudent man can profit from even this filthy trash so long as he mines it disinterestedly to increase his store of worldly knowledge; second, the parenthetical eruption of polyglot prurience that hilariously punctures the display of prudence. Together, the two clauses stage a mini-comedy of The Bourgeois Gentleman and Hypocrite. Such an effect of self-parody gets lost when the historian of institutions appropriates the passage only ‘‘for information sake’’: ‘‘ ‘to read for information’s sake’ . . . was a somewhat lame excuse, for the reading gave Pepys an erection and led him to ejaculate once.’’20 From his concise summary of the diary’s portrait of its author’s sexual behavior, Stone concludes that Pepys, who ‘‘recorded what he regarded as his failings as an aid to his reformation, . . . was a man at war with himself, and as such was an epitome of his time and class’’ (p. 350, my italics). He also insists that the diary ‘‘is a unique piece of evidence, which could only have been kept by a very unusual man’’ (p. 348). These two assertions may be brought into closer and more productive contact with each other by changing the two italicized terms to ‘‘represented’’ and ‘‘represented himself as’’ respectively. This is not to question the validity of Stone’s assertions; my purpose is only to redirect attention from what the diary purports or pretends to record to what it does, that is, what its rhetorical and textual effects suggest not about Pepys’s pornographic fantasies or sexual adventures but about his representation of his relation to those fantasies or adventures. If anything makes Pepys ‘‘a very unusual man,’’ it is the occasional wryness, verging on self-parody, with which the diarist parades himself as an epitome of the ‘‘homme moyen sensuel’’ caught between his ‘‘powerful appetites and his nagging, puritanical, bourgeois conscience’’ (pp. 349–50).

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Since Pepys is perfectly capable of saying what he means about sex, and happy to write about it, there must be another way to interpret his several uncoded—or barely coded—references to masturbation and all the passages (uncoded before 1664, coded thereafter) detailing his extramarital pursuits.21 The psychoanalyst responsible for the entry on Pepys’s health in the companion volume of the California edition ventures the following opinion: For the most part he was not deeply guilty about his sexual adventures. He did think them improper and he recorded them usually in his private language, as if to disguise or conceal the meaning of such entries. He could not, however, have seriously considered that this would have been an effective shield from prying eyes. Anyone who could go to the trouble of deciphering his shorthand could readily get the sense of the simple mixture of foreign words he employed. It would seem more probable that he was in this way attempting to separate those thoughts from himself, to make them less immediately part of his own consciousness and yet at the same time more titillating. Perhaps the remnant of the Puritan in him had to be deceived.22 The final sentence states a view similar to Barker’s and also a slightly more complex view of one of the motives Matthews ascribes to the diarist: ‘‘Despite his fondness for pleasures of the flesh he was a man divided, given to acting as recorder and punitive magistrate over his own inclinations’’ (1.cvii). It would be tempting to settle for this level of interpretation, but something both in Pepys’s language and in the above passage argues against it. The psychoanalyst’s tentative conclusion—that Pepys may have been trying to deceive himself—ignores a strong implication in his own claim that Pepys couldn’t have seriously thought his secrets would be concealed by the shorthand and lingua franca. To entertain this possibility is to wonder whether the Puritan or bourgeois selfstruggle picked out by our three commentators isn’t something the diary places in quotation marks: perhaps the interior drama of reflexive selfrepresentation is part of what it represents to the prying eyes of others. But should this be true it would not be enough to hypothesize that Pepys was trying to make ‘‘those thoughts . . . more titillating’’ to himself alone, for the italicized passage suggests that the very conspicuousness of the

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lingua franca passages flags what they pretend (not too energetically) to conceal.23 They have the same effect as stage whispers, and so it would be more consistent to assume that if Pepys betrays guilt he also studiously flaunts his virility and manly prowess in language that showcases his ‘‘naughtiness,’’ as when he boasts of ‘‘the first time I did make trial of my strength of fancy . . . without my hand, and had it complete avec la fille que I did see au-jour-dhuy in Westminster hall’’ (6.331).24 Pepys’s male commentators tend to make the point—dismissively, or consolingly, or censoriously—that the objects of his conquest were only ‘‘[s]ervants, shopgirls, barmaids, prostitutes’’;25 in this they realize and reinforce the promise of homosocial bonding the diary holds out to ‘‘prying eyes’’; they join Pepys in the locker room. It is worth noting, however, that if he does betray guilt—and he does—it is not over promiscuous sexuality but over marital infidelity. That may indeed be a Puritan or bourgeois scruple—or just a scruple—but the chief effect of the diarist’s rhetorical display of randiness is that it projects the pose of one who aspires not to Roundhead virtues but to Cavalier vices. The rake who peeps through the diary, however, is no more than a pint-sized Don Giovanni. It would only give the screw of this interpretation another turn to posit that the diary means thus to demean its subject’s libertine pretensions. But who can speculate on, much less try to specify, the motives behind a diary that seems to want to give everything away? Since commentators do speculate and continue to specify motives, one suspects that the diary’s display of giving everything away may be a tease. Matthews lists five motives (1:cvi–cix) and Ollard four (p. 19). The psychoanalyst adds another when he proposes a connection between Pepys’s anxiety over his health—his life-threatening encounter with kidney stones, his poor eyesight, his apparent sterility—and ‘‘the urgency of his sexual desires,’’ which might well have served to reassure him about his potency while providing ‘‘a great source of pleasure’’ (10.179). But it doesn’t seem useful to muse over the psychology of the absent referent of the Diary, especially during the time he is not writing but doing all the other things about which he will or may (or may not) write. Better to restrict oneself to inquiring whether the ‘‘I’’ that gets written is represented in the Diary as depicting his escapades in a manner, and in contexts, that display or betray anxiety about potency. But as soon as we ask

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this question, we encounter an obvious stumbling block that threatens either to render it trivial or to force the reader into a reductive distortion of the Diary. Although references to the escapades are scattered with some frequency throughout the Diary, by far the greatest proportion of the material it contains is about other matters.26 And all of it is about writing. The value of Barker’s approach is that it keeps his psychoanalytic speculations focused on the text: The decisive pattern of this subjectivity, in . . . its representation . . . , is the pattern of obliquity, evasion, displacement and condensation . . . at work in the incorporeal speech of a private writer. As the privatized subject writes, its text is constrained to say more than it knows itself to say, an excess of signification . . . incited, paradoxically, by the censorship which is the governing principle of its discourse.27 The weakness of the approach is that it depends on snippetotomy, on dismemberment of the writer’s incorporeal speech, in order to reduce the Diary to a psychodrama of guilty sexuality—the tremulous private body in question—and self-censorship. It would be hard to find many passages in which ‘‘the I that writes deletes from its own text the body of the unacceptable’’—the unacceptability of the body in its guilty sexuality—and it would at any rate be more consistent with Barker’s emphasis on the forms of linguistic mediation to redirect attention to the whole diary as a practice of writing and self-representation.28 Reduced to its most general characteristics, the practice of early modern diary writing is marked by a tension between two divergent emphases, one teleological and the other formal. The telos of the diary is accountancy—the socioeconomic account keeping of Italian merchants, the spiritual account keeping of the Puritan saints—and its recording function entails mastery of a set of mimetic procedures Ian Watt has called ‘‘formal realism’’ and associated with the rise of the novel, procedures for guaranteeing (the effect of ) ‘‘accurate transcription of actuality.’’29 These emphases are divergent because, although both involve acts of recollection and although the conventions of formal realism validate the truth claims of accountancy, the sense given ‘‘re-’’ by mimetic recollection dif-

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fers from that given by the re-collective activity of account keeping. The former connotes repetition, the aim of accurate transcription, whereas the latter connotes a more constitutive process of revision centered in the discipline and self-representation of writing. It is in the strain between these two emphases that I shall try to locate the new model of subjectivity Barker attributes to Pepys’s diary. In the standard view of the genre, writing that announces itself as diary asks to be read as a mimetic transcription of what ‘‘is here, there, given, waiting to be written down.’’30 According to one of the California edition’s principal editors, a good diary will move . . . at the pace of natural life, set by the rhythm of waking and sleeping. Its diurnal form will mean that its treatment of some events will be spasmodic and episodic, but this is the way in which many events—even processes—happen. Its sole principle of arrangement will be chronology. All that the diarist observes he will hold suspended in the same stream of time which carries him and everything else along with it. . . . The diarist, although he will comment on events and may well relate some events to others, will not attempt (if he is a good diarist) to isolate them or rearrange them: he will merely mark their passing in the stream. . . . So much for the ideal. Pepys comes as close as anyone to it. (Latham, 1:cxvi) Latham is by no means insensitive to extramimetic motives such as those implied by the orderly appearance of Pepys’s shorthand: ‘‘By sieving the untidy events through his memory and marshalling them in the diary’s straight and neatly written lines he could impose on them some semblance of control.’’31 But his emphasis is on its mimetic functions as both a ‘‘mirror’’ of the author’s personal life and ‘‘a private window’’ on public affairs (1:cxiv–cxv): ‘‘because Pepys relates events in the form of daily observations, he registers their flow at something not very different from the rate at which they occurred. He almost persuades us that we are sharing his life.’’32 The logic behind this reasoning is that the accuracy and transparency of the record is guaranteed by the proximity of the scene of writing to the scene of its referents. Thus the impression of daily recording is an important factor in establishing the diaristic effect of the real, as is also

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the effect of spontaneity and immediacy for which Latham and many other commentators praise the diary. But like the wording of the italicized phrase above, the terms impression and effect gesture toward the possibility that the appearance of daily recording may be a strategic (if conventional) fiction of the genre. And on this point the two principal editors of the California Diary differ in the relative attention each pays to that possibility. In a brilliant set of deductions from the manuscript evidence, William Matthews, who transcribed the diary from Pepys’s shorthand, details ‘‘five possible stages in the composition of the diary’’ and concludes that even if they all weren’t always traversed, the ‘‘appearance of most of the manuscript, the regularity and even spacing of the symbols and lines, the straightness of the lines, the even color of the ink over large sections, the neat disposition of the daily entries on the pages, all suggest that this is in fact largely a fair copy.’’ Matthews shows that the entries for each day were not always—or, to put it more strongly, not necessarily—inscribed on that day. Pepys himself notes many times that he transferred a series of daily entries from his ‘‘loose papers’’ to the ‘‘Journal’’ at a later date. From the several signatures of these rough notes bound into the diary, and from evidence of corrections and additions in the fair copy, Matthews concludes that the production of the final draft ‘‘entailed selection, occasional expansion and condensation, and a measure of polishing’’ (1:cii, xcviii, cii). His analysis thus focuses both on the fictiveness of the impression of daily recording and on the artfulness by which Pepys produces the impression and the air of spontaneity: ‘‘his great diary is no simple product of nature, thrown together at the end of each succeeding day. In part, at least, it is a product fashioned with some care, both in its matter and its style’’ (1:ciii). So, for example, ‘‘what is seemingly the most spontaneous and living series of entries in the diary, the long account of the Great Fire, was, as Pepys himself states, entered into the diary-book three months and more after the events . . . , Pepys seems to have treated the rewriting’’ of his rough notes into the final draft ‘‘as an opportunity for imaginative re-entry into the recent past . . . and also for making all those changes that contribute to immediacy in the literary sense’’ (1:cv– cvi). And even the fair copy gives evidence—‘‘in the hundreds of instances where longhand has been superimposed on shorthand’’ and notes

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added in blank areas of the page—‘‘that Pepys sometimes read over entries he had recently made in the diary-book and revised them’’ (1:cii). In transcribing foul papers into fair he becomes the first reader and interpreter of the diary. This analysis drives a wedge—and destabilizes the relation—between the diary as a record of daily events and the diary as a record of the daily recording of events. It directs us to a structural anomaly we could otherwise easily overlook, an anomaly well illustrated by the long concluding clause of the entry for Christmas Day 1666. After supper, Pepys writes, he went to my chamber to enter this day’s journal only, and then to bed—my head a little thoughtful how [to] behave myself in the business of the victualling, which I think will be prudence to offer my service in doing something in passing the pursers’ accounts—thereby to serve the King—get honour to myself, and confirm me in my place in the victualling, which at present hath not work enough to deserve my wages. (7:421) Did he ‘‘enter this day’s journal’’ before going to bed but include as part of it what he knew was about to happen as if it had happened?33 Was he already reflecting on his new job as navy food contractor while setting the entry down, or is this also proleptic? If the infinitive in the first clause is purposive and ‘‘to bed’’ is read in parallel with ‘‘to enter’’ rather than with the prepositional ‘‘to my chamber,’’ the syntax connotes an intended but not yet performed pair of actions.34 If the infinitive is descriptive (‘‘to enter’’ ⳱ ‘‘where I entered’’) the journal entry has already been completed, and he has already gone to bed. Reading ‘‘to bed’’ prepositionally—‘‘to my chamber . . . and then to bed’’—accentuates this effect. In either case, the mise-en-abıˆme relation of the entry we read to the stated moment of its production renders them temporally discontinuous and leads us to wonder when he wrote the entry in which he wrote that he wrote the entry. Again, in the entry for August 5, 1662, Pepys concludes with ‘‘to the office again all the afternoon, till it was so dark that I could not see hardly what it is that I now set down when I write this word; and so went to my chamber and to bed, being sleepy’’ (3:156).35 Confronted by

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this telltale garble of verb tenses, the editors comment that the phrase in the floating present tense ‘‘must relate to a prior form of the diary’’ since the shorthand ‘‘is as neat here as in the preceding and following entries’’ (ibid.). The ‘‘now’’ of ‘‘when I write this word’’ precedes the ‘‘now’’ in which he writes that he writes this word. In the entry for June 23, 1663, we read that ‘‘I returned home and to my office, setting down this day’s passages; and having a letter that all is well in the country, I went home to supper; then a Latin Chapter of Will and to bed’’ (4:193). Matthews deduces that in such entries only some of ‘‘this day’s passages’’ were set down on ‘‘this’’ day, and the remainder was added later. He goes on to note that in the text as we have it ‘‘uniformity of ink and penmanship . . . characterizes the added material and the material which precedes it’’ (1:xcviii). The effect of this uniformity, which is of course reproduced in printed versions of the diary, is to reinforce the conventional mimetic promise and premise of the diary genre, the promise of accuracy supported by the premise, if not of daily recording, then of recording that closely follows on the time of the events recorded. Pepys frequently notes that his recording was irregular. Thus at the end of the entry for March 16, 1666, he writes that he went ‘‘to make good my Journall for two or three days, and begun it, till I came to the other side, where I have scrached so much, for, for want of sleep, I begun to write idle and from the purpose—so forced to break off, and to bed.’’ And at the beginning of the next entry: ‘‘Up, and to finish my Journall, which I had not sense enough the last night to make an end of ’’ (7:74). The indefiniteness of ‘‘for two or three days’’ (didn’t he remember? wasn’t he sure how many days he would get through?) compounds the indefiniteness of the temporal relation between the acts of writing he describes and the writing that describes them. This creates the effect of a strangely floating, disembodied, unlocatable now of inscription: when is he now writing ‘‘Up, and to finish my Journall’’? Later that day? Just after the moment in which, he writes, he went ‘‘to bed, drinking butter-ale’’? But the entry continues with another item of the day’s news concerning one of Pepys’s favorite targets, Sir William Penn, and concludes with a reflection: ‘‘But I need no new arguments to teach me that he is a false rogue to me, and all the world besides’’ (7:75). When was or is this sentiment written in relation to the time recorded

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in the entry? The next day? Some other day? While reading and revising his notes for the entry? Such examples could be multiplied—to use one of Pepys’s favorite words, they could be ‘‘mightily’’ multiplied—and what they confront the reader with is a temporal conundrum, for the actual act of writing can never be congruent with any of the acts of writing specified in the diary. This is strikingly obvious in the anomalous ‘‘I could not see hardly what it is that I now set down when I write this word; and so . . . to bed,’’ or in ‘‘so home and set down my three last days’ Journalls, and so to bed’’ (7:61): on this day, he wrote those entries, but not this one. And again: I sat up till the bell-man came by with his bell, just under my window as I was writing of this very line. (1:19) Home, where my wife not yet come home. So I went up to put my papers in order. and then was much troubled my wife was not come, it being ten a-clock just now striking as I write this last line. (2:14) Then back home again, and to my chamber to set down in my Diary all my late journy, which I do with great pleasure; and while I am now writing, comes one with a tickett to invite me to Captain Robt. Blakes buriall. (2:73) The past progressive in the first passage clearly implies a later scene in which ‘‘this very line’’ is being read or rewritten; the ‘‘while . . . writing’’ of the third passage has the feel of a historical present that makes vivid a moment of interrupted pleasure; the time warp produced by the wandering tenses of the second passage—the rush from the preterit through the present participle to the immediate now of writing—works as a hyperbole conveying the writer’s impatience. In all these cases, the emphasis on the presence of the scene of writing, the dum scribo, ironically displaces it to the past and precipitates out a later scene in which he writes that he was or ‘‘is’’ writing. A generalized continuum of writing emerges, a ghostly sequence of serial but temporally unspecifiable acts of recording that dissociates itself from the putative sequence of the acts of writing the diary refers to. I shall refer to this continuum as the register of ghostwriting and distinguish it from the dated continuum that includes the sequence of days, the

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sequence of entries, and the occasions of writing they imply or refer to. This distinction brings out the structural tension occluded by the standard mimetic view of the diary, as a glance at the structural relations of mediation will show. The formula for the standard view is: the I that writes (the agent) represents the I that gets written (the product) as the I that gets written about (the referent); the writing agent represents itself in the midst of its daily life. This bypasses the basic feature of the revised view, the formula for which is: the I that writes represents the I that gets written as the I that writes; the writing agent represents itself representing itself in the midst of its daily life. The complete formula for the revised view is: the I that writes represents its product, the I that gets written, as both referent and agent, both the I that gets written about and the I that writes. It represents the referent, I that gets written about, in the dated continuum and the agent, I that writes, in the continuum of ghostwriting. This divides the temporality of the referent’s life from that of the agent. The score of references to the act and context of writing, and the very much larger number of references to his method of composition, represent Pepys in his monitorial function as a double agent who sees himself writing, reads what he has written, and copies or rewrites it. These references are generated from within the unlocatable register of ghostwriting alienated from the dated continuum. The two can’t be selfidentical. The use of first-person, present-tense expressions to designate a now, a present scene of writing can only yield a self-representation distanced and displaced by another now, the tacit present in which the deictic expressions are being used, and this in turn—since the site of the tacit present is the written page—represents and is displaced by another now, the implied but unrepresented series of now’s that produced the page. Writing and seeing oneself write make explicit the structure of hearing oneself speak elucidated by Derrida in his critique of Husserl’s logocentrism: ‘‘hearing oneself speak is not the inwardness of an inside that is closed in upon itself; it is the irreducible openness in the inside; it is the eye and the world within speech,’’ or, in Lacan’s formulation, it is the inside-out structure of the gaze.36 The evidence adduced by Matthews to show that the rough notes presumably made during the day they document were read, rewritten, and often revised by the writer suggests a time lag between the sequence of rough notes and the sequence of fair-copy entries. Taking the lag into

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account reinforces our sense of the gap between the dated continuum and the register of ghostwriting. The register intervenes between the continuum and the reader. Once the register is identified and dissociated from the continuum, the reader’s attention is drawn to meanings produced strictly within the former’s syntactical and rhetorical field. Thus, after noting that a potential suitor for his sister’s hand raised his dowry demand, Pepys continues ‘‘this I do not like; but however, I cannot much blame the man, if he thinks he can get more of another then of me. So home, and hard to my business at the office, where much business; and so home to supper and to bed’’ (7:81). The opening reflection brings the now of ghostwriting into the foreground and puts a strange spin on the effect of the connector idiom: ‘‘So home’’ becomes syntactically ambiguous; it can indicate both parataxis and consequence. To activate the latter function (‘‘as a result’’) is to make the whole of the concluding sentence swerve from a simple narrative statement in the dated continuum to a gesture of resignation and dismissal: ‘‘So home . . .’’ equals ‘‘that’s that, so let’s turn to other matters.’’ As an affective response to the opening reflection, the gesture emerges in the register of ghostwriting. To take another example, consider Christopher Hill’s epigrammatic assessment of a diary passage illustrating how Pepys’s ‘‘[c]omplicated equivocations enabled him to deny accepting bribes—’not looking into it till the money was out, that I might say I saw no money in the paper, if ever I should be questioned about it’ (3.4.63). This is indeed the homage that vice pays to virtue—or the post-restoration civil servant to the standards set during the interregnum.’’37 But the equivocation Hill’s epigram characterizes differs from Pepys’s description of it in the diary. To the extent that the latter displays a touch of self-satisfaction one may as easily speak of the entry as an act expressing the homage virtue pays to vice, an act depicting his skill in maneuvering between ‘‘residual Puritanisms’’ that make the diarist disapprove of ‘‘the morals of the post-restoration world’’ and his ‘‘determination to prosper in’’ that world. Hill reels off a list of the ‘‘comical evasions and self-deceptions’’ that enabled Pepys to circumvent his vows intended ‘‘to keep play-going and drinking under control.’’38 But in all the passages he cites, the diarist appears to be reciting, performing once again, the rationalizations or equivocations of a weak-willed lover of playgoing and drink. Do these performances betray

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guilty conscience? Do they assuage it? Do they express enjoyment in representing the actions that caused guilt? Or enjoyment in the comical transparency of his subterfuges? However wide the range of interpretive options may be, they are all responses to the act of self-representation portrayed in the register of ghostwriting; that is, they are responses not to the referent, the I that gets written about in the dated continuum, but to the agent, the I that represents itself in the continuum of ghostwriting. Hill’s assertion that Pepys ‘‘is not concerned to create an image of himself ’’ and ‘‘is not writing for a public but for himself ’’ (p. 259) is later qualified by the statement that ‘‘the care with which he preserved’’ the diary ‘‘suggests that Pepys had envisaged the possibility of others ultimately reading it’’ (p. 271). But to anyone who agrees with David Miller that all writing qua writing is ‘‘addressed, forestructured by the expectation of reading,’’ that possibility lies at the foundation of the diaristic enterprise in which the writer in the first instance addresses himself or herself as monitor.39 If one is a writer of secrets, it isn’t only one’s secrets that one sets down for one’s own readerly delectation, it is the writing, the graphic self-representation of one’s setting down secrets, and this reflexive performance is always potentially a rehearsal in which the monitor stands in for, anticipates the reading of, subsequent interpreters. It is in the register of ghostwriting that such effects as those produced by the following juxtaposition are situated: Thence, meeting Dr. Allen the physician, he and I and another walked in the park, a most pleasant warm day, and to the Queen’s chapel— where I do not so dislike the music. Here I saw on a post an invitation to all good Catholics to pray for the soul of such a one, departed this life. The Queen, I hear, doth not yet hear of the death of her mother, she being in a course of physic, that they dare not tell it her. (7:87) The juxtaposition of the two unrelated items seems motivated not only by the theme and thought of death but also by sheer association at the level of the signifier: ‘‘Queen’’ follows from ‘‘Queen’s chapel’’ and ‘‘physic’’ from ‘‘physician.’’ ‘‘I hear’’ situates the interjection in the unspecified now of ghostwriting; the sequence of items represents the train of thought occurring in that register, and the repetitions in the second

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item seem to be prompted not by what the writer remembers but by what he reads—either his rough notes or else the revised version that just danced from his pen.40 These considerations suggest that Pepys’s formula of closure, ‘‘and so to bed,’’ has a rhetorical function within the register of ghostwriting: when it concludes an entry it reinforces the mimetic fiction that ‘‘this day’s passages’’ of writing are correlated with or integrated into the daily passages of life Pepys writes about. William Matthews’s claim that entries terminated by the formula ‘‘were made late at night, just before Pepys turned in,’’ indicates that in these cases the register of ghostwriting is integrated into the dated continuum. But Matthews goes on to note, first, that this practice isn’t consistent, since Pepys himself writes that ‘‘many entries were made during mornings and afternoons’’ (entries that could be concluded with a recollective rather than proleptic reference to turning in) and, second, that many entries containing this formula ‘‘go on, with no break in style, to describe matters that occurred after the diarist was abed or asleep’’ (1:xcvii), hence the formula concludes an earlier draft that is subsequently augmented. These instances suggest that there is no way of verifying whether any particular entry was in fact written at night, and that the fiction of the integration of the register into the dated continuum is often paper thin. In a telling phrase Matthews remarks on Pepys’s ‘‘practice of ending a day neatly at the bottom of a page’’ (1:ciii): even as the metonymic substitution of ‘‘day’’ for ‘‘entry’’ reflects the force of the fiction, it subverts it by implying that the real point of conclusion lies not in the end of the day but in the end of the page. Thus ‘‘and so to bed’’ may be construed as marking the end of an episode of writing, whenever that occurred; it marks, that is, a moment in the register of ghostwriting. Its occurrence in the middle of an entry suggests that it is literally a trope, a turn that opens up the two previous closures of going to bed and concluding a first draft of the entry. Here, where the trope marks a boundary to be transgressed by revision, it signals the prelude to a new start that will bring to completion a process only initiated by the closing of the day. Left to itself, the day would fall away, would lack the reality of inscription. To announce its demise is the first step of a process leading to resurrection in the life of the page.

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This division between the mimetic and revisionary contexts, the dated continuum and the register of ghostwriting, becomes deeper when we take into account the most obvious peculiarity of the diary, its being written in shorthand. Barker, who mentions but barely engages this fact, attributes it to the desire for secrecy: ‘‘A text . . . hidden in a difficult early seventeenth-century shorthand, written in secret and kept locked away during Pepys’s lifetime.’’41 This supports his thesis about guilty secrecy, and it accords with the consensus view of most Pepys scholars, including Latham, who states that the shorthand was ‘‘meant to protect the diary from prying eyes.’’42 It is true that Pepys was secretive about the diary, and I shall consider this in due time. But it’s also true—and oddly enough my authority here is Latham, who is not consistent on this issue—that the shorthand Pepys used, the method invented by Thomas Shelton, was ‘‘simple, almost naive’’ when compared ‘‘with the wellknown shorthands of our own day. . . . That, in fact, may have been one ground of its popularity, for it could have taken no one very long to learn it’’ (1:li). Since three editions had been published at Cambridge by the time Pepys matriculated, it isn’t a system one would choose primarily for secrecy. The two titles under which it was published, Short Writing and Tachygraphy, make it clear that what it promised was not secrecy but economy and speed. The paradoxical status of shorthand has been incisively described by Jonathan Goldberg, who observes that its sixteenth-century inventors dreamt ‘‘of a writing swift as speech—so swift that it could not be phonetic’’ and ‘‘would immediately represent the mind by bypassing the representation of ideas in sounds.’’43 Murray Cohen comments on the ideographic project of manual writers who believed ‘‘that ideas can be visually represented’’ and, convinced that ‘‘short-hand . . . is an example of the transformation of propositions into pictures,’’ concentrated ‘‘on the layout of their systems on the printed page.’’44 In separating itself from the phonetic link to speech conventional to alphabetic writing, shorthand also separates itself from the reflexive transcription of the writer’s speech rhythms. Its relation to its referent is more like that of algebra than like that of plane geometry; it is digital rather than analogical. James Nielson has suggested, however, that the ‘‘mixed constructions’’ of tachygraphy may not fully evade ‘‘the rhythms of speech,’’ and perhaps resem-

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ble the syncopated structure of what Vygotsky describes as ‘‘inner speech.’’45 To whatever degree shorthand abstracts the symbol system from voice, it may be imagined to open up a space between the sociable and voluble subject of the diary as a dated continuum and its author or other in the register of ghostwriting. The organization and rhetoric of Pepys’s entries bear out this hypothesis. The condensed syntax of his prose, its paratactic parade of discrete items, its elision of verbs and auxiliaries, its reliance on participial clauses to foreshorten complex episodic references, and its energetically terse use of deictic locators for rapid scene-setting, all bear the mark of shorthand composition. The prose is not logographic except when Pepys ‘‘deals with important public affairs,’’ and there the voicing is oratorical in a strictly literary sense—‘‘the extended sentences and rotund utterance of the public man’’ who ‘‘sometimes speaks like a whale’’ (1:ciii–iv). Those more polished passages imitate the style of chronicle writing. But in the great majority of other entries there is little support for the opinion of one scholar that Pepys’s diary reads as ‘‘an echo of his speaking voice.’’46 The rhythm and ‘‘music’’ of the following passages are those not of the voice but of the hand subjected to the topological demands of the notational system: Up, and to the office all the morning. At noon, my wife being gone to her father’s, I dined with Sir W. Batten, he inviting me. (7:80) Up, and going out of my dressing-room when ready to go downstairs, I spied little Mrs. Tooker, my pretty little girl, which it seems did come yesterday to our house to stay a little while with us, but I did not know of it till now.47 (7:80) Up; and having many businesses at the office today, I spent all the morning there, drawing up a letter to Mr. Coventry about preserving of Masts, being collections of my own. (5:54) And here met with Mr. Hawly and with him to Wills and drank. And then by coach with Mr. Langly, our old friend, into the city. Set him down by the way; and I home and there stayed all day within—having found Mr. Moore, who stayed with me till late at night, talking and reading some good books. Then he went away, and I to bed. (2:40)

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To see the kaleidoscopic jig of discrete figures made by the pen dancing across the pages of Pepys’s manuscripts—a cross between algebraic and musical notation in appearance—is to apprehend the source of a volubility that doesn’t always lend itself to the reading voice. Neither alphabetic nor cursive, separated from the logographic flow of speakable language, it has a pulse, a rhythm that (for all its colloquial directness) resists imaginary audition, as presumably it resisted the reflexive transcription of the writer’s vocality.48 Its manual choreography transmits its spirit to the staccato attack, the busy inventorial saccade, the sprightly but awkward impatience of a syntax sometimes jerked awry by a weakness for the ablative disjunctions that cram a lot of news into a little space. This prose in turn transmits its spirit—vibrant, restless, awkward—to the life it represents. It is understandable that biographers look through the Diary as a window on Pepys’s life: ‘‘No two entries are alike, for no two of Pepys’s days were alike. Between the opening ‘‘up betimes’’ and the familiar closing ‘‘and so to bed,’’ his average day was crammed with activities so diverse, momentous, and pleasurable that the ordinary person would need a week or two to sort them out and live through them.’’49 It doesn’t detract from the busyness of his average day to remember that this impression is produced by the way the writer crams into the average entry a run of time-and-motion clauses powered by prepositions or prepositional phrases that register the changes of time and scene (up, to, so, thence, after, all the morning). Events are telescoped to fit into sentences, and the sentences are often distended to cram in more events along with observations on them. At the same time, the sentences themselves are often telescoped by the omission of verbs and the first-person pronoun. These two tendencies combine to produce an effect at times of breathlessness, the effort to squeeze as much as possible into the confined sentential space of the diary page—since Pepys’s shorthand is for the most part unpunctuated, this effect is both reflected and attenuated in the occasionally strained periods constructed by the editors. Furthermore, the pace is enlivened and the sense of the day’s fullness enhanced by the simultaneous accentuation and truncation of deictic markers, a practice that transmits the tempo of stenography to the round of daily pursuits:

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To Westminster. My Lord being gone before my coming to Chappell, I and Mr. Sheply told out my money. . . . After that to Chappell. . . . After sermon, a dull Anthem; and so to my Lord’s (he dining abroad) and dined with Mr. Sheply. So to St. Margaretts. . . . From church to Mrs. Crisp’s (having sent Will Ewre home to tell my wife that I would not come home tonight because of my Lord’s going out erly tomorrow morning); where I sat late. . . . I drank till the daughter began to be very loving to me and kind, and I fear is not so good as she should be. To my Lord’s and to bed with Mr. Sheply. (1:237) I did many things this morning at home before I went out—as looking over the Joyners, who are flooring my dining-roome—and doing business with Sir Wms. both at the office. And so to White-hall and so to the bull head where we had the remaynes of our pasty, where I did give my verdict against Mr. Moore upon last Saturdays wager. Where Dr. Fuller coming in doth confirme me in my verdict. From thence to my Lord’s and dispatcht Mr. Cooke away with the things to my Lord. From thence to Axeyard to my house; where standing at the door, Mrs. Diana comes by, whom I took into my house upstairs and there did dally with her a great while, and find that in Latin ‘‘nulla puella negat.’’ So home by water; and there sat up late, putting my papers in order and my money also, and teaching my wife her Musique lesson, in which I take great pleasure. So to bed. (1:239)50 Several features of the second entry are characteristic of the way Pepys’s prose ventilates and interprets what it describes: changes of rhetorical pace, the repetitive but differential use of shifters, and the juxtaposition of the nuanced sentential forms that not only shape the day’s diverse activities but also establish their relative importance to the writer. Thus the first sentence displays both impatience to get through the inventory of matutinal chores and—in the exemplary interpolation—the obligation to record them so he can move with easy conscience to more pleasurable items. The repetition of ‘‘and so’’ registers relief and speeds him to the first of these items; the repetition of ‘‘where’’ clauses emphasizes his delight by anaphoristically extending the period in which he savors the

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good things that happen when men of distinction gather for outstanding food and talk;51 the repetition of ‘‘From thence’’ dispatches another piece of business and sends him quickly to his house to dally in the ‘‘where’’ and the ‘‘whom’’ and the ‘‘there . . . a great while’’ of his impromptu frolic with the obliging daughter of Mrs. Crisp (‘‘not so good as she should be’’), which he terminates with the sort of knowledgeable reflection one expects from a worldly man, a university man; ‘‘So home by water’’ marks this accomplishment and leads to a countervailing list of legitimate satisfactions.52 The difference between flirtation and family music reinforces the parallel and contrast between the versatile Pepys’s two spheres of pleasure and mastery. The happy coda, ‘‘So to bed,’’ repeats the satisfaction of ‘‘So home by water,’’ and as a trope of closure it locates satisfaction more in the act of perusing and concluding the diary than in the retirement that ends (or ended) the day. A day in the life of Samuel Pepys emerges from life in the ‘‘day’’—the rhetorical life in the entry—of his diary as from a simulacrum. It derives some of its raw vitality from its stenographic provenance, and much of its form from the organized balance and distribution of clauses itemizing duties and pleasures. Thus, as I have been trying to suggest, our picture of the life recorded in the dated continuum is generated and controlled by rhetorical forces within the register of ghostwriting. The suggestion can be carried further by imagining that the life Pepys lived was raw material for the diary—not merely that it was raw material but that it was lived as raw material. That is, I can imagine that a man who resolved to keep a diary and then spent nine years representing himself to himself in shorthand went about his day knowing that everything he did was grist for that mill. If he became habituated to the project so that it was part of his daily agenda, wouldn’t that have some influence over the selection and conduct of the daily pursuits he planned to write about? ‘‘Pepys,’’ writes Latham, ‘‘went through London spreading a closemeshed net for his daily haul of news’’ (1:cxxvii). Though a butterfly net might more appropriately characterize many of his catches, the sense I draw from Latham’s metaphor is that from ‘‘up betimes’’ to ‘‘and so to bed’’ the daily round is organized as a fishing expedition for the diary, and that the move from one catch to another may to some extent have been guided, preinscribed, by diaristic desire. This isn’t Latham’s sense,

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since, as an advocate of the diary’s mimetic function, he asserts that the process of recording enabled Pepys ‘‘to relish every experience more than once—not only at the moment of its happening but also in its recollection’’ (1:cxxviii). ‘‘Recollection’’ both muffles and betrays its reliance on the activity it follows and depends upon. Perhaps the diarist is already a collector when he takes his net out into the field of daily pursuits; perhaps the life recorded in the diary is a life lived for the diary, a life lived in expectation of writing about it, a life monitored to ensure the provision of collectable and writable experiences in the ongoing project of self-collection through self-representation. Such a project might be imagined to place the subject as referent in the position of performing for the benefit of the subject as writing agent, who in turn performs for the benefit of the subject as monitor. In this more radical view it is not merely our picture of the life recorded in the dated continuum that is generated and controlled from within the register of ghostwriting; it is the life itself. It is easy to subordinate the desire and jouissance of diary writing to the mimetic function, but Pepys’s diary writing is better viewed as an act of collecting, an act of self-collecting through self-representation, the master work of a master collector: ‘‘All of Pepys’s many collections . . . represent his response to both Baconian research and the new historiography. Collection of basic materials was the new watchword in both fields.’’53 Documentation presupposes collection, and the desire of collecting is an essential component, a prerequisite, of documentary desire. Collection has the same function in Bacon’s inductive science as inventio has in classical rhetoric. But collection can be informed by motives and strategies different from those on which Bacon was to found the great instauration. In his stimulating account of the politics of collection, Steven Mullaney explores the paradoxes of a cultural practice that asssembles, ‘‘rehearses,’’ and fully exhibits what is to be purged, ordered, or repressed. Mutually exclusive aims ‘‘were often announced by one and the same collector; purification could only come after all that would ultimately be banished . . . was first worked through, in full. . . . [T]he exhibition of what is to be effaced, repressed, or subjected to new and more rigorous mechanisms of control can be a surprisingly full one.’’54 Mullaney’s focus is on the rehearsal of alien cultures and of alien, marginal, and unfamiliar features

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in the collector’s own culture. But what about extending the idea to the practice of self-collection, or of self-exhibition or self-effacement or selfrehearsal? Mullaney considers the context for such a turn to reflexive self-representation during an account of the popular stage in England as ‘‘a theater of (self )apprehension’’ in which, as in ‘‘conduct books . . . and from the pulpit, the individual was being exhorted to . . . interiorize a judgmental social perspective’’—the debt to Norbert Elias is explicitly acknowledged—and thus to engage in ‘‘a form of self-scrutiny that would eventually produce something like the modern subject’’ (132). This attributes to the popular stage the function the Puritans themselves attributed to diary keeping. ‘‘The devout Puritan,’’ observes William Haller, ‘‘turned his back on stage plays and romances, but only to look in his own heart and write what happened there’’—which implies, of course, an equivalence in the contrasting practices, an orthopsychic tendency to theatricalize and romanticize the sinful inner self produced by such spiritual accountancy:55 Nor only mercies and signall works of gracious providence, but judgements, great changes, overturnings, and the sins of the age are to be registred in this Christian Journall, as this Author well mixes the ingredients of this Diary. . . . There is a book of three leaves thou shouldest read dayly to make up this Diary; the black leaf of thy own and others sins with shame and sorrow; the white leaf of Gods goodnesse, mercies with joy and thankfulnesse; the red leaf of Gods judgments felt, feared, threatned, with fear and trembling.56 The diary, here a metaphor of documentary desire, takes its lurid place beside the other products of an age of growing reliance on documentation: ‘‘The state . . . has its ‘diurnals’ of affairs, tradesmen keep their books of precedents and physicians theirs of experiments, wary heads of households their records of daily disbursements and travelers theirs of things seen and endured.’’57 Haller, who emphasizes the importance to Puritans of collecting and documenting ‘‘the most trivial circumstances of the most commonplace existence’’ and who notes the influence of this practice on Pepys, throws

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an interesting light on the Diary’s trope of closure (‘‘and so to bed’’) when he describes the many references in Puritan literature to ‘‘saints’’ who withdrew each night to continue the daily record so that, having balanced their spiritual books, they ‘‘could go to bed with a good conscience.’’58 This suggests not only that Pepys’s use of the device may have served the same purpose but also that it may have functioned intertextually as an allusion to the practice—as if activating the convention, citationally reproducing it, were a way to inscribe himself in that saving tradition and appropriate its efficacy. What I find interesting about the suggestion is that in the Diary the incidences of the device are often explicitly marked as fictional and merely conventional, which prompts the further suggestion that, however mechanical the recurrence of the device may seem (or precisely because it seems mechanical), it registers an ambivalence of motive: a residual and perhaps superstitious reliance on the efficacy of a practice that Pepys consistently violates. As I noted above, the closure formula often marks the conclusion of an earlier draft that is subsequently augmented and revised. Therefore, rather than marking the conclusion and attendant good conscience of nocturnal recording, it marks the boundary to be transgressed in converting foul papers into fair copy. Good conscience is thus displaced from spiritual accountancy to documentary self-transcendence; the focus is not on the integration of writing into the saint’s daily routine of confessional self-scrutiny but on the liberation of the daily round from its embodied state through the stages of revision to the reality of stenographic hard copy. For all its differences from its Puritan precursors and contemporaries, Pepys’s diary is no more a mere act of recollection than they are. It shares with them a formative activity of re-collection, and perhaps it also shares with or derives from Puritan journals a peculiar attitude toward the collecting of data that comes into view as soon as one considers what the resolution to keep a diary might mean to the selection and conduct of daily pursuits the diarist plans to write about. The saint who keeps ‘‘a daily record of the state of his soul’’59 may well spend his day doing things that stage and perhaps romanticize the soterial drama—bad things as well as good—so that he may carry his haul back to his nocturnal closet and ‘‘book’’ himself. He enters the day prepared to search out ‘‘whatsoever thoughts and actions the old Adam within had most desire

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to keep hidden, the very worst abominations of the heart’’ as well as ‘‘the good things that . . . showed the saint that, bad as he was, God had not forsaken him.’’ In this way, he will rehearse, perform, and exhibit to himself during the day those behaviors that best yield up the spiritual meanings to be re-collected when he withdraws to his ‘‘private chamber’’ at night to ‘‘draw [them] forth into the light of conscience.’’60 That the motive informing Pepys’s diaristic enterprise significantly differs from the motives of the saints whose journals he must have read during the Protectorate (if not after) and that the Diary itself is a magnificent anomaly only serve to highlight their common ground in the culture of documentary desire. The mimetic force of the Diary is seductive; it leads people to look through the words at the pictures they conjure up and to treat the diary as an ex post facto record of Pepys’s life and times. It seems important therefore to keep in focus the ‘‘picture’’ of a man writing, a man who spent nine years representing himself to himself and who went about his day knowing that everything he did was grist for that mill. I find it difficult to believe that this project didn’t have some influence over what he did—what he chose to do—during the day. Isn’t it likely, for example, that on a particular day he may have gone to one coffee house or play rather than another because there he expected to find more to write about—not that he would go in order to write about it, rather he would go because he knew he would write about it, perhaps reflect on it and savor it, which is to say that he knew he would represent himself reflecting and savoring? If this is part of the awareness he carries with him into all the day’s happenings, wouldn’t it have the effect of internally distancing the agent and monitor of writing from its subject and referent, who would always to some extent be in the position of performing for the benefit of the diarist—who, in turn, performs for his own benefit as the diary’s monitor and first reader? And, as the following passage by Ollard suggests, even Pepys’s ‘‘furtive’’ pursuits might have been performances in the sense that they recall theatrical models: An irresistible air of bedroom farce clings to him, partly deriving from the candor of the Diary, partly from the bawdiness of Restoration comedy. . . . As Mr. Tattle scampers across the stage, baulked of the seduction of Miss Prue by an unwelcome intrusion, we are reminded

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of the furtive and futile lecheries so vivaciously recorded by Pepys and for the moment identify the great civil servant with a character described by his creator as a half-witted Beau.61 Pepys, who represents himself as a devout and exacting hedonist of the theater, doesn’t tell us what he thought about bawdiness on the public stage; his comments are reserved for the private theater in which his performances are undertaken for the commentator’s eyes only. My fantasy, then, is that the lives Pepys and the Puritan saints live when they aren’t writing are lives to some extent organized by the pursuit of the writable, the recordable, lives that give themselves to be seen, to be scrutinized and written and read about, by their subjects. It is as if Pepys and the saints, every evening before going to bed, write or imagine the scenario to be enacted the next day. The supplementarity conventionally ascribed to writing exerts its deconstructive power and, indeed, transfers itself to—writes and writes on—the writable life. To entertain this view is to suspect that the relation between autobiography and its referent described in the following passage may be the same as the relation between the diary and its referent: But are we so certain that autobiography depends on reference, as a photograph depends on its subject or a (realistic) picture on its model? We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium? And since the mimesis here assumed to be operative is one mode of figuration among others, does the referent determine the figure, or is it the other way round: is the illusion of reference not a correlation of the structure of the figure, that is to say no longer clearly and simply a referent at all but something more akin to a fiction which then, however, in its own turn, acquires a degree of referential productivity?62 The structure of the figure of mimesis de Man alludes to may be expressed by the formula ‘‘Mimesis is always mimesis of,’’ so that anything

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represented as mimesis is by definition correlated to the original it seems to imitate, whether or not there actually is an original. As an effect of the trope, the illusion of reference acquires referential productivity when placed in the field of reading, the field in which the reference implicit in the figure is actualized, interpreted, and characterized. The ironic force of de Man’s formulation increases when we consider that ‘‘the technical demands’’ are never the only demands affecting selfrepresentation; there are also social, political, and psychological demands—for idealization, exemplarity, and documentary self-transcendence in the heaven of the future perfect: While I am writing I think I see myself being seen by many others, who are reading over my shoulder the words traced by a dead man’s hand immobilised for eternity, the eternity of truth, in the instant of inscribing it: dum scribo.63 [W]e received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances.64 I have elsewhere discussed the narcissistic desire that may make autobiography a form of autothanatography, a kind of ars moriendi whose aim is to write one’s own epitaph, to shape the death mask that will control the future by representing the deceased as he or she wishes to be remembered, to undo or encrypt what resists identification, what frustrates the project of disappearing into (or behind) the death mask, vanishing into the gaze that is the ultimate armor/mirror of alienating identity.65 ‘‘If I believe this story, then I will have been other than I was, or thought (suspected, feared) I was’’: the hope of the subjects of psychoanalysis is also that of the subjects of autobiography, whose desire to control the future perfect may lead them—as de Man implies—to try to live the stories they envisage so that they may believe what they set down in the writing that seeks confirmation, seeks referential productivity, in the assent of future readerships.66 One looks to the idea of the acquisition of referential productivity for help in dealing with the most puzzling aspect of Pepys’s Diary and with a key question Barker poses but dismisses in a parenthetical phrase: ‘‘to and for whom is Pepys writing this secret text?’’ (p. 6). So far as we

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know, Pepys was secretive about the diary during his life. Only twice does he mention having told someone else about it (1:107 and 9:475), and in the final entry he writes that, since his failing eyesight prevents him from continuing the diary and forces him ‘‘to have it kept by my people in longhand,’’ he ‘‘must therefore be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know; or if there be anything (which cannot be much, now my amours to Deb[orah Willet] are past, and my eyes hindering me in almost all other pleasures), I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add here and there a note in shorthand with my own hand’’ (9:564–65). This suggests that his extramarital ‘‘amours’’ are the only cause for secrecy, and that ‘‘all other pleasures’’ must fall in a similar category, which makes it understandable why Pepys’s editor should conclude that he writes ‘‘for himself alone’’ in a secret diary ‘‘not designed for publication’’ and in shorthand ‘‘meant to protect the diary from prying eyes.’’67 It is worth pointing out, however, that in the final entry Pepys’s concern was mainly about his wife and the members of his household, not about posterity nor the public at large, nor those whom he might expect would ultimately gain access to the volumes; given the sexism and homosociality of the courtly, bureaucratic, university, and scientific circles he moved in, it’s conceivable that he might expect them to appreciate both the delicacy of his domestic scruple and the strength of his manly desires. But would he expect them to gain access to the volumes? On this issue, Matthews is more flexible and illuminating than his coeditor. Though he acknowledges that the diary was probably ‘‘meant only for Pepys’s own eyes’’ during his lifetime, he finds some things that suggest Pepys ‘‘may have intended it to be read by future scholars of historical taste. He carefully guarded it, catalogued it in detail and set it in the library that he bequeathed to Magdalene specifically for the benefit of scholars’’ (1:cvii). More interesting is a subsequent comment that grounds the suggestion in the very structure of diaristic writing: the diary ‘‘often reads as though it had been written by an alter ego, by another man in the same skin, one who watched understandingly but rather detachedly the behavior and motives of his fellow-lodger. The diary form lends itself to this kind of duality, since the diarist is at once performer, recorder and audience’’ (1:cix). As Matthews shows, the principles of selectivity and

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style that inform Pepys’s production of the diary are pretty much the same as those that later inform his redaction of the king’s story in Charles II’s Escape from Worcester.68 He is no less an alter in the first case than in the second. The I that writes assesses both performances from the standpoint of a monitor concerned for the writability of the original, and the chief difference is that as diarist he not only edits his rough notes but also, as I suggested, selectively lives a writable life.

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part three

Situating History: Contexts as Countertexts

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six

From Body to Cosmos: The Dynamics of Representation in Precapitalist Society For David Schneider and Richard Randolph Loves mysteries in soules do grow, But yet the body is his booke. —John Donne

The body is also culture’s book: culture, like love, has designs on the body. ‘‘The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of society.’’1 Thus the body is a representation as well as a presence: something more than meets the eye always meets the eye. Bodies are not only media of communication but also media of signification. While I use my body to say one thing, it uses me to mean another. ‘‘Society’’ appropriates, interprets, and designs the body, catches it in a network of ‘‘writing,’’ inscribes privileged ensembles of meaning, or ‘‘texts,’’ in it. Yet surely the body is not a book, any more than its ‘‘writing’’ is writing or its ‘‘texts’’ texts (as we normally use the term), because the body naturalizes or detextualizes ‘‘the social categories through which it is known.’’ It lends them its immediacy and reality as an organism, something humans did not fabricate and therefore cannot change. And in many cultures ‘‘nature’’—in exchange for the naturalness it bestows—borrows logocentric forms which the human body signifies: person, consciousness, presence, and self-pres255

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ence. Then the signifying body tends to expand into all available spaces until it permeates society, nature, the cosmos, and the gods with the resonance of its categories, imagery, and voice. To be more specific about my designs on the term body, I use it here as shorthand for the set of physiological indices that perform the following two representational functions: (1) They signify the differential relations of gender, age, and genealogy that articulate the inner divisions and external boundaries of the ‘‘social text,’’ and (2) They signify the ‘‘naturalness’’ of such differential systems. Inscribing meanings in the body produces what I shall call, after Barthes, the effect of nature (the effect of the real). That is, it confers an aura of inalienability on social constructions by making them appear given, determined, and unalterable. The effect of nature is in this respect an effect of transcendence, since it situates the sources of social construction beyond the human maker. And it is also a closure effect: it serves, in Foucault’s terms, as ‘‘a principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning’’ by which ‘‘society’’ controls interpretation; by which it ‘‘limits, excludes, and chooses.’’2 It does the same kind of work as the author function, God, and the textbook. And so does my use of the term society, since it closes down the question of who or what group or institution controls interpretation. These effects—of nature, transcendence, and closure—are most secure and telling when they require no strategies of maintenance, no art or effort on the part of intentional agents, and when, consequently, they are not attended to but fade into the background against which, or the frame within which, effort, strategy, art, intention, and struggle take place. Such notions belong to the conventional lore of the ‘‘human sciences,’’ but I have a special reason for reciting them here. They set the stage for the initial phase of a general model of cultural change. This phase is intended to provide a dynamic matrix for the organization of interdisciplinary work in the study of premodern culture and institutions—of those so-called ‘‘primitive,’’ ‘‘archaic,’’ and ‘‘traditional’’ societies that are sometimes indiscriminately lumped under the title ‘‘precapitalist social formations.’’ The basic theme of the model may be loosely expressed by the phrase abstraction from the body, though this rubric will eventually have to be more specifically articulated and indeed modified. To prepare the

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body to assume its central if unenviable role in the model, two procedures must be carried out. 1. The first procedure is to isolate the bodily signs most important for the construction of significant social differences. These are the signs of gender, age, and genealogical relationship. Anthropologists and sociologists have grouped these in one of two opposed sets of criteria in terms of which cultures allocate status. The distinction was first articulated by Ralph Linton: Ascribed statuses are those which are assigned to individuals without reference to their . . . abilities. They can be predicted and trained for from the moment of birth. The achieved statuses are, as a minimum, those requiring special qualities although they are not limited necessarily to these. They are not assigned to individuals from birth but are left open to be filled through competition and individual effort.3 Linton reiterated that ‘‘reference points for the ascription of status’’ are always ‘‘of such a nature that they are ascertainable at birth’’— ascertainable, that is, in terms of the ethnoscientific categories that determine a culture’s understanding and deployment of gender, age, and genealogy.4 Strictly speaking, the predictions are made not in terms of birth but in terms of biological probability. (Prediction is not determination: one may or may not become a mother; one may die before becoming an elder.) And, strictly speaking, the disjunction between ascription and achievement is neither as sharp nor as simple as it appears in Linton’s formulation. It would be better to conceive any differential system of rights and obligations, any authorized structure, etc., as socially defined in terms of both criteria, with one of them privileged over the other. As employed in the social sciences, ‘‘ascribed’’ seems to be synonymous with ‘‘naturalized.’’ While I shall continue to use this term, I do so under protest, because ascription etymologically signifies a mode of writing, and since we assume that writing requires skill and—if it is not automatic—is intentional, it produces the effect of art rather than of nature. If any equivalent of writing lies behind social ascription, it must surely efface itself to do the work assigned to ascription by the social sciences. But more about that in the commentary that follows the second procedure.

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2. The bodily indices of gender, age, and genealogy provide the representational material in terms of which social differences are organized and signified. The second procedure is generated from the hypothesis that these three ascriptive signifiers vary in their relation to the body; that the more visibly fixed and articulated in organic structure the sign is, the less arbitrary it appears, and, conversely, the more abstract and noncorporeal it is, the more arbitrary it appears and the more variable is its use. The procedure is to arrange the signs along a continuum that charts the degrees of abstraction from the body, and what we find is that gender, age, and biological kinship are, in that order, increasingly underdetermined by their bodily indices. Gender marking is so simple, sharp, and clear that it tends to resist the play of cultural invention. It appears as a permanent if changeable property of the body system through all its temporal states, so that we are easily led to believe that bodies ‘‘have’’ gender and ‘‘are’’ male or female. Bodies do not ‘‘have’’ age in the same way: bodies that ‘‘have’’ gender undergo aging, which is the trajectory of states through time. Since there could conceivably be socially significant age sets for every few years of life, the character of the body inhibits the symbolic versatility of age less than it does that of gender, and age grouping selectively filters out more information than gender grouping.5 The social patterning and utilization of age differences in different cultures tend to be more arbitrary and variable, and where they are most consistent—in distinguishing generations—they are superimposed on the reproductive consequences of gender. Finally, genealogical signs—family resemblances—express spacing in a less determinate and more pliable way, which makes them ancillary to the dominant variables, gender and age. Genealogical terms and relations are easily abstractable from family resemblances because cues to kinship are not inscribed in the body in the way cues to gender and age are. Since, in consequence, genealogical cues and concepts rely more heavily on linguistic or symbolic marking, they are more flexible, more versatile and modifiable, than gender and age, have symbolic plasticity over a potentially wider range of social constructions, and can be made responsive to new or varying pressures. They are more open to the play of ethnographic imagination in the ‘‘natives’’ themselves, and not merely in the

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outside observers. At the same time, precisely to the extent that they are more abstract, linguistically based, and manipulable, genealogical concepts are more vulnerable to the disenchantment process by which the effect of nature gives way to the effect of convention or even to the effect of art. Our two procedures thus yield a spectrum that charts the relative abstractness of signifying indices with relation to the body, as in Diagram 1.

Diagram 1 Body: gender age V (in age sets, generations, the life cycle) V genealogy or kinship

The arrows indicate movement from a more embedded to a more differentiated and abstract relation between the ascriptive category and the body. Each step away from the body produces a freer, more arbitrary, and culturally more pliable set of signs. Each lends itself to a more fluent play of interpretive power that can organize more diversified groups in networks of ascriptive ‘‘writing.’’ ‘‘Ascription’’ is an odd and telling usage, especially when the term is applied to nonliterate societies, for it places in question the very meanings ascribed to it. ‘‘Ascription,’’ which denotes a gift of nature or God, a facticity beyond the reach of art, is rooted in the human ars scribendi. Latin ascribere means: to fix or appoint, to enroll (as a colonist or soldier, for example); to include in a class (e.g., patrician); to attribute or impute—’’Impute: to think into,’’ as, for example, to think gender into the body. The general sense of ascribe (as opposed to the sociological sense), like the theological sense of impute, has a peculiar tension built into it. The former means ‘‘to consider or allege as belonging to, to reckon as a property or characteristic.’’ The latter means ‘‘to attribute guilt or merit [but especially guilt] to someone as transmitted from another’’: ‘‘In Adam’s sin we sinne´d all.’’ In both formulas the italicized as is unstable: it veers toward as if; perhaps this reflects only my skepticism and not the lexicographer’s. At any rate, the sociologist, with a touch of condescension and disenchantment, imputes ascription to the natives as their practice but begs the question of authorship. Ascribed by what or whom? If

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we could simply say ‘‘by nature’’ or ‘‘by God,’’ there would be no question of considering, alleging, reckoning, and attributing. God and nature need not do anything so modest as ascribe or impute, and to ascribe ascription to them would put them out of play as God and nature, reconstruct them as mystifications perhaps of Durkheim’s ‘‘society,’’ perhaps of the natives themselves. But the primary subject of the verb can only be the user—the sociologist or anthropologist. The usage at once asserts a transcendent determination (‘‘belonging to,’’ ‘‘transmitted from another’’) and refuses to commit itself to the assertion. ‘‘To ascribe to’’ is more tentative and less coercive, for example, than ‘‘to inscribe in.’’ But both terms, because they evoke writing, also evoke the Derridean paradox whereby Foucault’s ‘‘network of writing’’ is situated at the center of oral culture, detextualized in the body-based network of ascription. The term reflects its culture-specific origins in the conceptual apparatuses of a literate society. Its connotations remind us that, for the investigators who use it, the categories it refers to are (1) sociocultural constructions rather than ‘‘facts of nature,’’ but (2) constructions that may be given the appearance and value of facts, which is to say, (3) that ‘‘naturalness’’ and the ‘‘facts of nature’’ are themselves socioculturally constructed effects. But of course these three statements apply equally well to the socioculturally constructed concept of ascription itself. The criterion behind the social scientist’s nature/culture distinction is a culture-specific set of assumptions about the reality and universality of certain biological ‘‘facts.’’ As David Schneider (who has been saying this for many years) puts it, those assumptions derive ‘‘directly and practically unaltered from the ethnoepistemology of European culture.’’6 To state it a little more tendentiously in terms I used earlier, ascription is one of the means by which the realities of others are fictionalized and one’s own reality factualized. This doesn’t mean that ascription is not a useful instrument. It only means that its usefulness is confined to the establishment of a decentered grid of differences with which—to borrow Roy Wagner’s formulation—we simultaneously invent the cultures of others and counterinvent our own. The three-step diagram, gender to age to genealogy or kinship, is both inadequate and misleading as it stands. First, it makes no distinction

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between different institutionalized forms of biological relatedness— extended families, stem families, nuclear families, kindred, consanguineous descent groups. Nor does it distinguish between kinship, which is ‘‘ego-centered,’’ and descent, which is ‘‘ancestor-centered,’’ nor between genealogical terms or categories restricted to biological kin and those that are extended to nonkin or to mixtures of kin and nonkin to produce ties of putative, stipulated, or fictive kinship. Nor does it distinguish between the relatively informal structure of small, family-type kin groups and the more ritualized, formalized structure of corporate groups to which kinship or descent is ascribed—clans, moieties, lineages, castes, aristocracies, military or spiritual brotherhoods, and so on. The model as it stands would be adequate for the description of very few societies, those which have little or no organization beyond the domestic group or extended family and which anthropologists used to call ‘‘band’’ societies: the Mbuti Pygmies, the !Kung Bushmen, the Hadza, the Polar Eskimos, and the Shoshone are examples. The model would not be adequate to describe the enormously complex ‘‘primitive’’ societies of aboriginal Australia or Papua New Guinea. Hence a first revision in the diagram is needed to distinguish biological kinship from what has sometimes been termed social kinship. Since the former tends to be informally or weakly institutionalized and the latter ritually or strongly institutionalized, I shall speak of them from now on as weak and strong kinship, respectively. Abstraction from the body continues to provide the principle of distinction: kinship or lineal terms extended from kin to nonkin are abstracted from organically based relationships; social kinship is in that respect more abstract than biological kinship.

Diagram 2 Body: gender V age V weak kinship V strong kinship

This version is still inadequate, but for a reason quite different from the first one discussed above. One might be tempted to assume that the first three ascriptive categories are equally recognized by all cultures. Is there a dividing line between universally recognized and culture-specific criteria? The diagram is not explicit about this, but it offers a clue: in

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terms of its logic, kinship signs are less conspicuous and their employment as criteria in the distribution of statuses, rights, and obligations presupposes more interpretive activity. To recognize kinship even at the level of the nuclear family, one has to distinguish and interrelate concepts of linearity, collaterality, and affinity, each of which is variable, and each of which assembles the data of gender and age in diverse configurations. The coexistence of mothers, fathers, and children does not by itself constitute nuclear families. One can conceive of a society that appears organized on systematically related lineal, collateral, and affinal principles but that doesn’t recognize them. Imagine, for example, a society composed exclusively of domestic units whose members organize themselves only by gender and age. Their nomenclature distinguishes only between females and males (gender minus age), seniors and juniors (age minus gender), parents and children (gender plus age). Crossing the axes of gender and generation at the point of reproduction adds generational differences to the others. Their terminology stresses generational separation and focuses not on degrees of kinship but on age levels: childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age. Gender distinction is articulated only at the parental level. And since, according to the logic of abstraction, mothering (birth and nurture) is more clearly inscribed in the body than fathering, the mother-child dyad provides the organizing center of the domestic unit and imposes the basic constraint on the sexual division of labor. Though the domestic group of this imaginary society seems to resemble our nuclear family, the differences are significant. Husband and wife are not formally instituted categories but refer to cohabitation roles, which are more casually assumed and abandoned. ‘‘Fathers’’ are adult males who have rights in children through the women with whom they share the household. Cognates are not distinguished from affines. Where there is classificatory extension of terms and functions, it is governed by age, gender, and generation: all age mates are siblings; all adult males are fathers insofar as each has ‘‘paternal’’ authority over all children: all ‘‘married’’ women are mothers by whom children can expect to be fed. This imaginary society, then, organizes itself in terms of age, gender, and generation, but not in terms of kinship. And it may not be entirely imaginary. Except for a few ornaments, most of the details of the above

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structural description are paraphrased from Colin Turnbull’s account of the Mbuti Pygmies in Wayward Servants.7 It may seem no more than common sense to assume, with Alfred Kroeber, that ‘‘while one must live somewhere, one can live without artificial exogamous groupings, descent reckoning, or totems’’—without ‘‘formal social organization,’’ or, in two words, without strong kinship. But what about weak kinship? ‘‘Co-residence,’’ Kroeber continues, ‘‘necessarily brings associations which have social influence; just as one must have kin, but need not have clans.’’ One must of course have kin biologically, but that is not the same as having kin ascriptively; one must have kin but need not have families. Kroeber’s phrasing implies as much: if ‘‘kin’’ equals ‘‘associations which have social influence,’’ then kin reckoning may be the effect of co-residence, in which case weak kinship would not be among Kroeber’s primary patterns of group residence and subsistence associations, though he seems to imply that it is. On the other hand, weak kinship would not exactly fit into the category of ‘‘secondary patterns of social structure,’’ which he attributes to the ‘‘impulse toward cultural play, innovation, and experiment,’’ and which he describes as ‘‘unstable embroideries on the primary patterns of group residence and subsistence associations.’’8 When Kroeber formulated these views in 1938, it was necessary for him to resist the ethnographic glamour of strong kinship in order to defend the priority of the lowly household: ‘‘[R]esidence is at least as important as lineage, if not indeed primary.’’9 Almost fifty years later, the publication of the proceedings of a symposium on households (Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group) stressed the viability of the household as ‘‘a significant unit in the description, comparison, and analysis of human societies,’’ and in doing so distinguished the household from both the house and the family.10 Households become ‘‘conceptual units’’: what they look like can be analytically differentiated from what they do and from their cognitive status as cultural constructs ‘‘that serve as normative guides for social action and its interpretation.’’11 Anthony T. Carter distinguishes between the ‘‘familial’’ and ‘‘household’’ dimensions of the domestic group, notes that this distinction is inscribed in the ‘‘household systems’’ (cognitive models) of many societies, and concludes that rules or ties of kinship are less widespread and basic as a

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principle of household organization than are gender, age, and other ordering elements.12 All this calls for further revisions in the diagram, the first of which is that gender and age should be more sharply dissociated from weak as well as strong kinship because they are not on the same conceptual level. As the Mbuti example suggests, they can be combined in structures other than those of kinship, and, as the consensus in Households suggests, combinations of gender and age can produce household systems without familial components. ‘‘Genealogy’’ and ‘‘kinship’’ denote ascriptive complexes that, like households, are partly constituted by culture-specific patterns of gender and age. The latter are therefore ascriptive simples. If we think of household and kinship as systems, gender and age are their elemental properties; if we think of them as structuring processes, gender and age are their instruments. Different folk theories of kinship feature different aspects and values of gender and age; their meaning as properties or instruments is partly dependent on their use. Yet the basic asymmetrical oppositions, male/female and young/old, would seem to be cross-culturally invariant, and this accords with the logic of the original diagram: their signifying indices are more determinately fixed and more clearly visible in the body; the effect of nature is most deeply inscribed in the statuses and functions associated with these oppositions. With these distinctions and the additional factor of the domestic group, our diagram begins to get more complicated. The statuses and relationships associated with the household are by no means exclusively ascriptive—to classify them as such was the error of those who identified the household with the family. As Carter implies, only the familial dimension of the domestic group is ascriptive, being ‘‘defined by the origin of the links between its members, links that have their source in culturally defined relations of birth, adoption, and marriage, regardless of whether those who are so linked live together or engage in any shared tasks. The household dimension of the domestic group, on the contrary, is defined by shared tasks of production and/or consumption, regardless of whether its members are linked by kinship or marriage or are coresident.’’13 This dimension, then, is defined in terms of performance and achievement rather than ascription. The diagram continues to ramify, and now results in Diagram 3.

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Diagram 3 Cross-cultural

Culture-specific

Ascriptive elements

Body: gender

Configurations Ascriptive Nonascriptive

domestic group

age weak kinship

strong kinship

Particular cultures may or may not recognize kinship, may or may not distinguish weak from strong kinship, may or may not mark the former as more natural and the latter as more artificial or fictive. But strictly in terms of the vector of abstraction represented by the arrows that point to the right, we can posit the logical priority of weak to strong kinship without conceding that the priority has any empirical basis or chronological actuality. However, it is less problematic to posit some empirical basis for the priority of gender, age, and the domestic group, and to assume, with Jack Goody, that small domestic groups ‘‘involved in the processes of production, reproduction, consumption and socialization’’ are universal.14 This assumption will set the stage for the eventual appearance of the fourth and, so far, most important version of the diagram, one that will redirect attention from the division between cross-cultural and culture-specific items to the line that divides strong kinship from weak kinship. Returning for a moment to Kroeber’s distinction, let the following comments be applied to the opposition between the domestic group and strong kinship: A moment’s reflection will show that the stable things in culture which everyone takes for granted are less likely to be in conflict or under strain, and will probably have only latent emotional interests connected with them. It is those things which are new and not yet worked out into a stable routine, or with a formerly successful routine which is breaking down, the elements that differ or are beginning to differ from those adhered to by one’s father, or by neighboring peoples, or by a class or group in one’s own society, about which feeling ordinarily is strong. . . . I propose therefore . . . a distinction between patterns

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and constituents of culture which are relatively primary, stable, and adhered to with unconscious conservatism unless outward circumstances compel their abandonment, on the one hand, and such as are relatively secondary, unstable, within the field of innovation from internal cultural causes, and perhaps more readily invested with conscious group emotions, on the other.15 So, for example, Goody argues that the main changes caused by the industrial revolution and modernization ‘‘do not center upon the emergence of the ‘elementary family’ out of ‘extended kin groups,’ for small domestic groups are virtually universal. They concern the disappearance of many functions of the wider ties of kinship, especially those centering on kin groups such as clans, lineages and kindreds.’’16 But the same argument also works in reverse, for although it is easy to imagine that some forms of domestic groups have been on the ground since Paleolithic times, it is less easy to have the same fantasy about strong kinship systems. Those connected with hierarchy and traditional civilizations, for example, appeared relatively late in human history and had a relatively short life span.17 Kroeber’s characterization of primary patterns emphasizes the inertial or customary conditions which, in my hypothesis, are one source of the effect of nature, conditions that would be reinforced wherever some form of weak kinship articulates with household organization in the folk model. The argument I now want to develop and illustrate departs from Kroeber’s basic/secondary distinction and consists in an attempt to correlate the following four themes 1. The instability of strong kinship groups and the variety of strong kinship systems relative to the domestic group and household systems: The phenomena of formal social organization would thus represent a field of experimentation or play on the part of cultures, a fact that accords with their intricacy and variety, which in turn argues relative transience. They would be among the more variable and unstable constituents of culture; among its fashions, so to speak. This would not in the least imply that they were regarded as trivial. In fact, highly impermanent fashions of dress, etiquette, conduct and belief may be

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held to with emotional intensity, and the insistence on conformity to them may be very powerful while the fashion is in vigor.18 2. The relation of the abstractness of genealogy, and of the consequent diversity of lineal, collateral, and affinal pattern-possibilities to the ‘‘intricacy and variety’’ of secondary patterns. And also, perhaps, to their relative instability: strong kinship may well be unstable in being more subject to human invention because freer of the constraints of the body. But this is what makes it useful. It can be used to transform history into a genealogical structure, territory into a genealogical map, the alliance of individuals into the alliance of groups and territories. This imaginative and interpretive power makes it an instrument of economic and political control over wider regions of interaction, between and among larger groups, and in areas where such control exceeds the coordinating capabilities of the domestic group: where the potentiality for conflict is high, rights of access to territory uncertain, ownership and inheritance of property a perennial issue, and hence ‘‘strategies of heirship’’ important; also where incipient hierarchization—usually connected with differential access to resources—is to be established or maintained, justified or mystified. Maurice Bloch’s argument that ‘‘kinship is, very often, the best type of long-term moral relationship’’ is reversible: when organization for the short term is desirable, the domestic group with weaker kinship is likely to work better.19 3. The representational ambivalence of the symbols of strong kinship. Kroeber casually remarks in a footnote that ‘‘secondary patterns occasionally do become primary,’’ and my hypothesis is that this is what the extension of kinship is for: to make the secondary patterns dominated by extragenealogical social categories at least appear (if not become) primary.20 What complicates and qualifies the effect of nature is that in their extended contexts and abstracted forms the ‘‘naturalness’’ of the body-based categories is relatively more artificial. Kroeber’s comparison of secondary patterns to ‘‘highly impermanent fashions of dress, etiquette, conduct, and belief ’’ implies an element of anxiety: they ‘‘may be held to with emotional intensity and the insistence on conformity to them may be very powerful.’’ The ascriptive insignias of secondary institutions, especially in traditional hierarchy, are heavily formalized and rit-

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ualized. They involve strategies of recruitment and exclusion more continuously controlled by human purpose than those of simpler societies. The attempt to give more obviously fictive categories the effect of nature may betray itself as an effect of art. 4. The political and conflictive aspect of strong kinship: the possibility that the extension of meaning from weak to strong kinship groups is also an abstraction—an alienation—of power. This is clearest in hierarchic civilizations, where power and meaning may be alienated from smaller- to larger-scale forms of organization, from weaker to stronger groups, and from lower to higher levels of the social order. Aristocrats have lineages but peasants only have families. Strong kinship may be more exclusive than inclusive in its orientation. It may serve to reinforce social boundaries and to legitimate unequal access to power and resources. If one thing emerges from the brief conspectus of these themes, it is that the concept of ascription does not fit equally comfortably over the expressive phenomena of weak and strong kinship. Strong kinship is displayed in representational forms that ritualize ascriptive signs and statuses. Compare, for example, the difference inscribed in the bodily indices of gender, age, and family resemblance to the superscribed panoply of heraldic designs ranging from tattoos and bodily (dis)figuration through food and dress codes and portable insignias to pageants and spectacles to castles and courts to total ritualized ‘‘lifestyles.’’ Our paradigms of simple societies indicate that practices and representations confined within the basic ascriptive perimeter can be, in Pierre Bourdieu’s words, ‘‘objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of rules,’’ can be ‘‘objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them,’’ and thus that they can be ‘‘collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.’’21 Such customary and collective ‘‘orchestration’’ gives way to the visible agency of ‘‘conductors’’ when the extension of ascriptive categories is used to mask or justify the abstraction of power from one group or institution to another. The effect of political designs on cultural design

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is more conspicuous in hierarchy: the effect of art, that is, competes with the effect of nature that art strives to produce. Hence when ‘‘primitive’’ and ‘‘traditional’’ social formations are compared, the social constructions of the former appear to have the effect of nature, while those of the latter appear to seek it. But even apart from the question of political designs, ritual design involves and displays the learned mastery of a symbolic ensemble—conventions of behavior, dress, language, and procedure—by which the practitioner represents the institutional authority that entitles him to practice. Traditional hierarchy is itself a ritual order represented as part of a natural, cosmic, or divine order from which its authority derives. The aim of ritual art in this context is to transcend itself toward the effect of nature. That is, ritual art marks out an area within which the representational enactment of higher authority can transform what is artificial, fictional, humanly invented, and so forth into the sacred or natural. Among the human fictions to which ritual art is applied are particular patterns of ascriptive extension, particular conceptions of cosmos, and particular pantheons. In all these cases, the strength of strong kinship or ritualization is that of a compensatory representation: strong in art because weak in nature. Strong in ritual art ideally conveys the message stronger in nature or reality, but the motive of self-transcendence is jeopardized because strong in the effect of art conveys the message weak in the effect of nature and therefore signifies weak in nature. ‘‘Strong’’ thus conceals a subsidiary sense: ‘‘embattled, therefore assertive.’’ These reflections suggest that the modes of representation in weak and strong kinship, basic and secondary patterns, are so radically different that any attempt at a comparative study of the two, any attempt to formulate a model of culture change that can focus on relations between them, cannot live by ascription alone. Anything resembling ‘‘historical’’ analysis or interpretation requires a supplementary category—which is perhaps why the term ‘‘ascription’’ tends to be confined to ethnography and sociology. I have, of course, loaded the dice to make this point by using traditional hierarchy as an example of strong kinship. Traditional hierarchy is a special case because of its agrarian character, a topic I shall return to later. But the point can be illustrated just as well by non- and pre-agrarian social formations. To a student of the humanities, however,

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the evidence may seem exotic. Much of it—and in my opinion the most interesting examples—can be found in the literature on Australia and Papua New Guinea. This literature throws much light on the four themes outlined above because it displays, with great clarity, a fundamental conflict between weak and strong kinship institutions, and because the role of the domestic group in that conflict produces a focus on gender difference. In what follows, I shall survey several ethnographic examples— specific accounts as well as summary overviews—in order to demonstrate that even within the range of ‘‘primitive’’ societies there is need for an analytical category that will supplement ascription. I note in passing that, with a few exceptions in New Guinea, most of the societies in the area to be discussed are mobile or shifting cultivators who do not practice the kind of intensive agriculture that produces agrarian civilization. The survey that follows presupposes a particular hypothesis about the relation of gender to weak kinship. This is that, in ‘‘primitive’’ societies with little organization beyond that of associated domestic groups and extended families, societies in which the household ‘‘is the main unit of economic cooperation,’’ one of the chief sources of inequality between women and men is at the same time the source of particularly pronounced maternal influence: ‘‘the unalterable fact of long child care combined with the exigencies of primitive technology.’’ While male parenting is limited to training boys in techniques of subsistence and warfare, mothering extends through birth, nursing, and food preparation to the domestic rearing of both sexes. However much ‘‘official’’ power males may have as household heads, women have considerable ‘‘unofficial’’ power simply because they ‘‘tend children and shelters and usually do most of the cooking, processing, and storage of food.’’22 The significant feature of this hypothesis is that women’s control of the domestic perimeter translates into pronounced early influence on the socialization of male children. And the point I want to make about the hypothesis is that, whether or not it is ‘‘true,’’ whether or not it holds for any actual society, whether or not it is entertained by the writers whose accounts mediate the situations to be surveyed, its presence is a dominant factor in all the examples that follow. The hypothesis about maternal power is dramatically visible as an implicit assumption in the rituals, myths, and strategies of strong kinship the accounts describe or analyze.

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1. In her analysis of the iconography of the Walbiri, a central Australian desert people, Nancy Munn discusses the ‘‘ritual rights exercised by men’’ of the patrilineal descent group ‘‘over a series of ancestral localities and their associated ceremonies, cult objects, and ancestral totemic designs.’’ The descent group is temporally continuous from the ancestors to the present, and when ‘‘men speak of ‘following’ their fathers’ fathers,’’ they can do this in a literal spatial manner, because their ancestors have left their marks, their tracks, in the landscape. In their narratives, the men ‘‘bind events to an objective geographical space,’’ and by this means the patrilineage embeds the continuity of the descent group in external nature. This spatial localization ‘‘yields the basic symbolism of transgenerational continuity,’’ Munn writes, ‘‘since the sense of continuity over generations is ‘carried’ in the experience of the country as a network of objectively identifiable places, the prime ‘givens’ of the external environment.’’23 Walbiri rituals project the division of labor at the symbolic level by dividing the tasks of ceremonial production between women and men, or between family camp and patrilineage. Ceremonial exchanges are undertaken primarily to practice, display, and give assurance of continued economic cooperation. But they are also undertaken by male-controlled lineages to assert political control over women and juniors; therefore, at the same time that they emphasize equality and cooperation, they also dramatize dominance and reveal their competitive function. Munn notes that in certain fertility rituals ‘‘the structure of ceremonial activity reverses that of the family: the personnel are all male rather than female, and the creation begins with the formation of ancestors who then proceed to the production of their progeny. This set of reversals marks the distinction between masculine, symbolic, or social creativity, and feminine, biological creativity.’’ Ancestors ‘‘are continuously embodied in ceremony and the fertility of human beings as well as other . . . species is symbolically maintained.’’24 In ritual, the descent group reaffirms its rights to the particular parcels of land from which it draws spiritual potency through totemic linkages. Thus, although the ritual enacts the symbiosis between weak and strong kinship groups, its maintenance of the imaginary cosmos serves at the same time to maintain the dominance

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of the descent group and to disclose its reliance on, its need of, a more powerful ideological support structure. Munn does not seem to realize the political implications of her account, and her attitude toward Walbiri social structure is confused. On the one hand, she speaks of ‘‘a complementary dualism’’ whose ‘‘polarities together express wholeness or ‘unity.’ ‘‘25 She couples an emphasis on parallelism and functional equality with an emphasis on the cooperative rather than competitive aspects of the male/female complementarity. On the other hand, her frequent recourse to the terms levels and planes implies differential status. Her analysis centers, for example, on ‘‘the two different social planes of the personal or familistic’’ in which ‘‘personal identity is mediated through the individual’s biological relationship to his mother,’’ and the ‘‘sociopolitical or patrilineal’’ in which ‘‘ancestral identity based on group membership is mediated through the men of the patrilineal lodges.’’26 Her accounts of the fertility rituals reflect in their detail not only a dominance order but also a latent conflict, and the need to maintain dominance. Her study consistently evades this possibility, yet there may be a grain of truth in Le´vi-Strauss’s often-repeated assertion that one of the functions of dual organization is ideological: its representations of complementarity or egalitarian dualism may work to conceal and, in concealing, to sustain the dominance of male-centered descent groups and strong kinship. In the fertility rituals Munn describes, men play the roles of women and symbolically appropriate their generative functions. The group reproduces itself by laying claim to a spiritual version of those functions, and in doing this it challenges woman’s productive power as well, since the group creates new generations of male food suppliers (hunters) through its initiation rites and new generations of food through its fertility rites. Ritual celebrates the physiological functions of woman and the domestic group for their instrumental value as well as for their inferiority. Of course, the lineage’s spiritual reproductive power is invisible, because it is imaginary. Its precarious life is entirely owing to the constitutive art of the ritual order. When female powers and functions are mimed by men, they are not merely acknowledged: the women are excluded and their powers appropriated, so that men can do on the more elevated spiritual level what women do ‘‘naturally.’’

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2. In Amazonia as well as Australia and New Guinea, the use of phallic, sound-producing ritual objects by men’s cults is accompanied by the same myth: the bullroarers or sacred flutes were first found by women but were later taken away by men. In Africa, too the Mbuti Pygmies, according to Turnbull, tell this story about their ‘‘trumpet,’’ the molimo that gives their major ritual its name. But Turnbull’s account reveals a significant difference between the rituals of the nonlinear Mbuti and those of strong kinship groups in Amazonia and Oceania. The Pygmies have no formal initiation ritual for males, only a puberty ceremony for females.27 Death is the occasion of the ‘‘greater molimo’’ festival, and women are important participants. An old woman, ‘‘referred to by no title other than ‘mother,’ ’’ attacks the molimo fire either alone or accompanied by a girl, dancing through it and scattering it all around. Thus the woman who gives birth to life also seeks to destroy it. . . . It is primarily the young men who hastily rebuild the fire and fan it back into a blaze with their dance of life. It is said that the women used to possess the molimo, but it was stolen from them by the men, and this dance, together with the tying up of the men by the old lady . . ., may well represent in part this early conflict, and the attempt of women to regain possession of the molimo. Whatever the symbolism, it is nowhere clearly stated by the Mbuti, each individual claiming to see something different in the performance. It is generally agreed, however, that it shows how strong the women are, and that they have to be respected by men.28 Turnbull speculates that, apart from its psychological function, the molimo ‘‘is a means of reaffirming the effective division of the band into age groups’’ and of emphasizing—through ‘‘the participation of the old lady, who demonstrates the power of women over men’’—’’the lack of sex differentiation’’ and the unity of the band ‘‘regardless of kinship considerations.’’29 The tentative tone with which Turnbull ventures to interpret the ritual (‘‘whatever the symbolism’’) seems appropriate to the informal and consensual character of Mbuti interpretation (‘‘nowhere clearly stated,’’ ‘‘generally agreed’’). When we return to Australia, where the lines are more clearly inscribed, everything stiffens, and even the ethnographers are

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drawn into the gender-centered fray between weak and strong kinship institutions. The Wik-mungkan (or Wikmunkan) of the Cape York Peninsula in northeastern Australia are the occasion of one such incident. In Wik-mungkan mythology, bullroarers were either male or female and, true to form, were said to have been found by women but taken away by men. Ursula McConnel, who was the first ethnographer of the Wikmungkan, interprets their meaning as follows: ‘‘The social value placed upon womanhood is demonstrated by the cult of the ‘bull-roarers’, symbols of her creative functions, the ritualistic swinging of which by youths and men of varying age and status, awakens in the respective auwa [totem centers] those attributes concerned with the development of womanhood from puberty through marriage toward motherhood.’’30 In one of her earlier fieldwork reports, McConnel had included, with accompanying photographs, a description of the bullroarer ritual on which this reading was based. A man dressed as a woman and swinging a female bullroarer (moipaka) stands at the end of a line of men lying on their backs, and in the middle of the line another man is designated ‘‘woman’’: ‘‘Those on the left of the ‘woman’ are men who are growing old. Then came woman and birth. Those on the right are the children who came after as a result of sex and birth. At the end of the line stands a man who swings the moipaka (female). The ritual symbolizes the continuity of life by means of sex and birth.’’31 Rodney Needham, who had studied right-left symbolism, discovered that McConnel had reversed the lateral symbolism of the photographs, replacing the participants’ left and right by those of the observer, and he ingeniously made this the basis of a general criticism of McConnel’s ethnocentric and gynocentric emphasis on the priority of woman, motherhood, and natural ‘‘sex and birth’’: right is superior to left, the ‘‘woman’’ with the bullroarer stands on the left, not (as McConnel had surmised) on the right, natural children are represented by the men left of the central ‘‘woman,’’ and the elders who give spiritual birth are on the right.32 Needham’s response to McConnel confirms the wisdom of the bullroarer myth: once again, the meaning first found by a woman was later taken away by a man. Needham’s investigation of Wik-mungkan symbolism led him to the conclusion that their symbolic order was organized in a ‘‘series of analogically related oppositions.’’ ‘‘Left’’ heads a column that includes women,

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maternal relatives, affines, junior, inferior, young, female, and wife. The ‘‘right’’ column includes men, paternal relatives, kin, senior, superior, old, male, and husband. While he recognizes the unequal weight given the two columns, he fails to pursue its political implications. The columns represent symbolic right and left from the standpoint not of the society as a whole but of the dominant ideology of male-bonded strong kinship. Both its dominance and its precarious secondary status are expressed by the origin myth of the bullroarers, and what the myth encodes in its ‘‘once-upon-a-time’’ convention is the power struggle structurally present and reenacted in rituals of initiation. Although Australian rituals often frame the struggle in terms of ‘‘the physiological functions of the female as against the spiritual attributes of the male,’’ the issue is broader and more complex.33 What woman metonymically stands for is the order and influence of the body, weak kinship, the domestic group, and the maternal custody of a reproductive power that must be weaned away so that the patrilineal male group may continue to father and mother itself through ritual parthenogenesis. This power is vested in young males. Their initiation period is described by David McKnight as ‘‘a hard time for the youths.’’ He reports that ‘‘they are guarded and taken into the bush by the old men,’’ taught how to hunt, and kept in bough shelters for long periods during which they must not whistle, or talk loudly, or eat large fish, birds, or animals which have sharp beaks, claws, or teeth. What is emphasized is that they are denied maternal care. The women may try to send them food but the old men take it for themselves and mock them for their concern. The women are not allowed to come near the initiation grounds. Hostility between men and women, and older initiated men and the young boys, is openly expressed. The old men claim that the boys have been pampered and spoiled by the women, . . . but now the boys belong to them and they will make men out of them. The initiates complain that the old men are greedy and mean.34 Initiation makes weaning the staging ground of a ritual conflict in which the older men capture the boys from the women, who try to hide them. This organized mock struggle is not simply a battle of the sexes and

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generations, but a struggle between competing institutions, weak and strong, for control of human resources. Men establish their corporate authority by diminishing the biological and domestic dominance represented by women, and symbolically appropriating (imitating) their generative power. In one ceremony the youths crawl through the legs of the initiated men: Hence the initiated men participate in giving birth, and as the youths face them it is as if they were born from the anus of the older men. McConnel . . . records that at the conclusion of this ceremony ‘‘The women sit in a long row, with their backs turned to the initiates, who pass along the row touching the women one by one with their spears, saying as they do, . . . ‘you and I speak to one another.’ ’’ And finally the women put their milk on the initiates’ legs and give them food.35 The institutional struggle is contained in both senses of the term: it is ritually enacted, which means that the existence of conflict is acknowledged, and it is then ritually resolved in the noblesse oblige of the concluding action. The value and necessity of the woman-centered institution are recognized, but by initiates who have been captured and given a second birth in the corporate group. In symbolically reproducing latent conflicts, the ritual not only contains them in order to reconcile oppositions and encourage cooperation; it reinterprets them so as to confirm the hierarchic superiority of the right of strong kinship. The compensatory and competitive quality of the ceremony that converts heterosexual to unisexual relationships is nicely brought out by McKnight’s comments: It is at their initiation that men obtain their unseen children. . . . The parallel between birth and initiation was well recognized by my informants. The former is the business of women, the latter of men. Just as men may not be present when a woman gives birth, so it is taboo for women to be present at the esoteric initiation rituals. . . . As a newly born child is formally presented to his father, so the newly initiated youths are presented to their mothers. The crucial difference between the two births is that women give birth to babies, but men give birth to adult human beings. . . . I would argue that, in the Wik-

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mungkan initiation ceremonies, the men are denying that the women have complete control over reproduction. Women may give birth to babies, but it is men who finally make them into adults.36 3. Initiation and fertility rituals all over Australia testify to conflicts between older and younger men, between men and women, between camp and clan, between lineage and lineage. Frederick Rose has described the complexities of the system in the course of demonstrating that the concern of Aborigines to maintain natural and human fertility ‘‘has a real material basis’’ in the possibility of drought and famine, and in high infant mortality. They respond to the first with intergroup cooperation, and to the problem of infant mortality with polygyny. Women tend to gather around men who are at the peak of their productive activity, but these men are generally ‘‘past their physical and sexual peak,’’ hence the ‘‘economic necessity . . . to provide collectives of co-wives in which to raise the infants or young children, comes into conflict with the sexual drive of the younger men.’’37 This contradiction ‘‘has been resolved by the older men controlling the young through the elaborate system of male initiation.’’ For several years initiates spend long periods of time in the bush, are forbidden to form ‘‘economic alliance for the foundation of a family with a woman,’’ are under ‘‘the strict control and tutelage’’ of an older man, and learn subsistence skills through the medium of tribal myths and cult ceremonies that convey totemic ideology and practical know-how in a single package. While learning skills, the initiate is made sensible of the importance and power of ancestors, elders, kinsmen, and their lineal affiliations. Initiation and patrilineages are colegitimating, each reinforcing the legitimacy of the other, and both helping to maintain in structured form the dominance of older males over their juniors. Control over juniors is connected with control over women.38 The burden of Rose’s account is to suggest how polygyny, gerontocracy, initiation, and intergroup cooperation are functionally interdependent, comprising a complex systemic response to the material basis of the Aboriginal preoccupation with fertility. The picture he and others present is of a set of interrelated two-story hierarchies giving precedence not only to men over women and to older men over their juniors but

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also—in cult and intergroup affairs—to lineages over domestic groups. Rose concludes that it is on the material basis, ‘‘with all the contradictions it involves, that the whole superstructure of aboriginal cult and religious life has been logically erected by the aborigines.’’39 To this I would add two points: first, that the superstructure has been erected primarily by male- and elder-centered corporate groups to preserve the authority of the strong kinship system through which they maintain their control; and second, that the elaborate nature of aboriginal cult and religion testifies to the fundamental uncertainty of this control, and to the need to keep it shored up. It is here that the symbolic function of the land comes in. In Australia, small mobile groups had to be able to exploit large territories, to expand and contract under varying environmental conditions, to secure their territories from nonrelated groups, and to share access to more favorable environments with related groups. As you go from the humid coasts of Australia to the increasingly arid desert interior, resources become scarcer and more dispersed. This movement inward has been found to correlate with three other features. First, tribal territories get larger toward the interior. Second, there is a progressive increase in the size of tribal groups, while the local bands of which they are composed have to increase their mobility, and hence their separation in time and space. Since this leads to more contact with other groups, it becomes important for them to find ways to guarantee reciprocal access. Third and most significant, these changes are accompanied by a progressive increase in the elaboration of strong kinship units—of moieties, clans, sections, and subsections.40 Because strong kinship is more subject to human invention, freer of the symbolic constraints of the body, it can be adapted to these needs. In the range of adaptations from the simplest social formations (the Mbuti Pygmies, for example) through aboriginal communities to Neolithic food-producers, sedentism is only the end point of a particular modernizing sequence. The symbolic importance of land to mobile cultures can be shown to precede its agricultural importance—if not its economic importance—and to be separable from it. Though aboriginal peoples do not ‘‘own’’ land or ‘‘deal in land’’ in the purely economic sense, they engage in cooperative ritual exchanges that sustain the econ-

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omy, and these ritual exchanges are controlled primarily by patrilineal descent groups that mediate relationships among mobile economies organized primarily into domestic units. It is in the interaction between these two levels of organization—between the patri-clan, as it is sometimes called, and the domestic camp—that we can most clearly grasp the problematic of strong kinship as an institution alienated from the body, one that is at once economically necessary and socially precarious. It faces not only outward toward environmental pressures, but also inward toward pressures from competing institutional interests. The abstractness, the imaginariness, that makes strong kinship a flexible instrument of adaptation also makes it more vulnerable to demystification insofar as the extension and formalization of weak kinship categories attenuate their affective power. This calls for further ideological labor and a new source of the transcendence effect. The most obvious alternative to the body is external nature, which may be symbolically inseminated to yield a crop that includes cosmos, spirit, and divinity. In defense of its legitimacy, the descent group perpetually copulates with external nature, making it bear a macrocosm of the descent group structure so that the descent group may represent itself as a microcosm of nature. 4. In the essay on male initiation rituals in Papua New Guinea I cited in Chapter 2 (p. 118 above), Roger Keesing describes a climate of ‘‘endemic warfare,’’ producing conditions that align local men’s house groups against one another, polarize the sexes sociologically and psychologically, and separate male productive tasks from those of females. In such settings, the separation and solidarity of the men’s house community and the separation between male and female realms are likely to be expressed and reinforced in cultural symbols, in the form of men’s rituals and cosmological formulations of gender polarity. In a social order where male loyalty to fellow males is the foundation of warfare . . . and where male prestige quests depend on the systematic appropriation of women’s labor, it is ties with women that pose the greatest threat. . . . The bond between mothers and sons could keep boys from becoming men: it must be broken dramatically and traumatically.

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[Male rituals] celebrate, not the unity and power of society, but the unity and power of men. They celebrate and reinforce male dominance in the face of women’s visible power to create and sustain life, and in the face of the bonds between boys and their mothers which must be broken to sustain male solidarity and dominance. Women’s physical control over reproductive processes and emotional control over their sons must be overcome by politics, secrecy, ideology, and dramatized male power.41 Papua New Guinea may be the scene of a hyperdevelopment of phallic power and anxiety, but just for this reason its caricature clearly outlines the more general point that what I have been calling the extension of ascribed relations is also abstraction in a special sense: alienation of power. A new plane of ideological labor is brought into play by rituals of initiation that focus on the symbolic alienation and political containment of the domestic power embodied in woman, though what seems to be involved is not simply a war between the sexes but a conflict between two institutional orders for ideological control of the dominant matrix of meaning, the body. In this process the community as a whole may increase its power to deploy human resources in food production, alliance, exchange, and warfare. But the continuous symbolic warfare waged over children by weak and strong kinship institutions suggests that control over human resources becomes more precarious and demands more complicated strategies to maintain it. The aim of this ethnographic survey has been to show that the extension of ascriptive concepts of gender, age, and genealogical relationship from weak to strong kinship institutions involves abstraction in the political as well as in the formal sense—not only the formal abstraction of concepts from their ascriptive locus in the body but also the alienation of power and meaning from the domestic group. Some of the tentative conclusions that may be drawn from the survey indicate the need for another revision of the ascriptive diagram. It will be recalled that its first revision took the form shown in Diagram 2: gender V age V weak kinship V strong kinship

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I have been discussing this sequence as if the move from left to right was from a more fixed and visibly embodied to a more variable and noncorporeal relation of ascriptive concepts to their bodily indices. This gives the scheme the appearance of a unidirectional movement away from the body, but we shall see that the ethnographic sample suggests a qualified return, a looping back toward the body, in the position of strong kinship. Two observations by Robert Murphy will help orient us toward the revision. He notes, first, that the men’s cult is not found among the structurally most simple people in the world, such as the Polar Eskimo and the Shoshone. It tends, rather, to occur in societies having larger local groups and in which economic cooperation is a stable and daily affair. In such a setting, members of each sex are in daily association and engage in common pursuits, frequently in cooperation, to the virtual exclusion of the other sex. In short, the sexes are true social groups, and the locus of social control over the women is vested in the males as a social entity. . . . Institutionalized sex antagonism in these societies is thus not just functional to the sex differentiation of the individual . . . but it also maintains the internal solidarity and external boundaries of the sex-ascribed groups through opposition. Second, commenting on one of the origin myths associated with flutes and bullroarers, Murphy calls the tale a true social charter inasmuch as it explains and legitimizes sex role differentiation. But . . . it refers to a period when the women held sway over the men. It is noteworthy that sex role differences are not viewed as being necessarily in the nature of things, given in biology and taken for granted, but depend rather upon a mythological selfassertion by the men. And the boundaries between the sexes must be constantly maintained through ritual and other more directly defensive measures against intrusions upon the male domain.42 It is easy to misconstrue the idea that the social actors view sex role differences as depending on achievement and maintenance rather than as ‘‘given in biology.’’ This could lead, for example, to a rationalistic model of the sort exemplified by K. E. Paige and J. M. Paige’s reductive theory

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of ritual behavior as ‘‘a bargaining strategy employed out of political selfinterest’’ and of reproductive rituals as ‘‘attempts to gain political advantage in conflicts over women and children,’’ attempts whose ‘‘true objectives’’ are cloaked by ‘‘sentimental and religious symbolism.’’43 But the Paige model does not explain why the ideologies that ‘‘sustain and rationalize the subordination of women’’ and ‘‘the control senior men hold over boys and young men’’ should be ‘‘cast in terms of duty and cosmic necessity’’ and be ‘‘mystified in ideologies about growth’’—why ‘‘what is political, contingent on power, is depicted in an all-embracing religious ideology as cosmic, natural, and inescapable, determined . . . by the confluence of supernatural control and biological nature.’’44 One possible line of explanation is suggested by the difference between women’s reproduction and men’s ‘‘reproduction’’: ‘‘[W]omen give birth to babies, but men give birth to adult human beings.’’45 The phallus is artificial, and it may be that—like Pinocchio’s fabulous nose—the bigger it is, the more it lies. It signifies the desire for a power its bearer lacks, and must try to control, in the domestic perimeter dominated by woman’s productive and reproductive powers. It is through woman’s ‘‘natural’’ power that the domestic group reproduces itself, but the power structure of male corporate groups is not ‘‘naturally’’ reproduced. They cannot easily avail themselves of the body of reproductive practices, the practices of the reproductive body, which constitute an implicit ideology of ascribed norms that diminishes the need for more explicit fictive supplements. Mothers do not need ancestor-centered ideologies or other imaginary appurtenances to keep the domestic system of reproduction going. But male cults have to resort to intergenerational myths, sending factitious lines of filiation back into the past, making their ancestors their children. And since the phallus is not a penis, since the male body is not a socially ascribed source of intergenerational power, since the body as such has been appropriated by the domestic group, corporate groups are forced outward to seek their ideological resources not in the bodily center of nature but in the spatio-geographic regions that lie between the domestic perimeter and the cosmic horizon. They plant the phallus in the omphalic or vaginal center of what, by that very husbandry, they constitute as their world.

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I have found no term or concept in anthropological literature to distinguish this particular representational practice, in which the effect of nature is sought by conspicuously artificial means—is sought not only by extending, abstracting, and alienating the ascriptive norms of the domestic ideology, but also by reinforcing their weak transcendence with the strong, ritualized transcendence of cosmic, totemic, spiritual, or divine orders. I therefore and hereby baptize the practice: henceforth, let it be known as reascription. I choose this name because it presupposes a rupture with, a fall from, the ascriptive paradise in which status and difference are ‘‘viewed as being necessarily in the nature of things,’’ and it entails an effort to recover the lost effect of nature by ‘‘mythological selfassertion.’’46 The latter phrase encapsulates the problematic character of reascription: ‘‘self-assertion’’ connotes conspicuous agency, effort, and interest, while ‘‘mythological’’ denotes a new compensatory thrust toward a mystified order, a transcendence—and self-transcendence—toward reality; yet at the same time ‘‘mythological’’ implies a falling short since it suggests myth rather than reality, and this failure to secure transcendence, the full effect of nature, may be correlated with the effect of effort and interest implied by ‘‘self-assertion.’’ The addition of this new concept requires another revision of the abstraction diagram, into Diagram 4.

Diagram 4 Cross-cultural Ascriptive elements Configurations Ascriptive Reascriptive Nonascriptive

Body: gender

Culture-specific age weak kinship strong kinship

domestic group

The concept of reascription makes explicit the latent political character of a process which up to now I have been modeling in purely structural terms. From the hypothetical distinction between weak and strong kinship groups, coupled with the hypothetical sequence in which the latter

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are constituted by extension, abstraction, or differentiation from the former, we can deduce a further hypothesis: that the point of reascription presses down more heavily, and its pressure is more apparent to those it inscribes, than the point of ascription. Reascription accompanies the emergence of a variety of new institutions and statuses in the category of strong kinship. The new structures are legitimized under the ascriptive sign of the primary order of bodies amplified and reinforced by two other sources of naturalizing symbolism: the cosmos and divinity. So, for example, signifying practices extend ascriptive categories to craft lineages, military and priestly aristocracies, gerontocracies, divinely ordained offices, and hereditary bureaucracies; to caste, fatherland, tribe, nation, race, the cosmos, and the gods; to priests and popes and mothers superior; and eventually to the brotherhood of man and the sisterhood of woman. Reascription is basically a retraditionalizing strategy—the means, that is, by which traditional culture maintains its traditionality, the effect of tradition, while undergoing constant institutional change. In reascription the changes are preserved or legitimized by being reinterpreted as and reincorporated in traditional forms. A double irony is apparent in the historical process by which ascriptive categories are either extended or displaced from one set of reference groups and reascribed to another. The first is that when ‘‘the sacred canopy’’ (Peter Berger’s phrase) is held over changes that threaten the traditional order, it secures those changes. The second is that the sacredness of the canopy may itself be called into question by the more conspicuous presence of the human art and interest that sustain it. As the Sumerians said, kingship was lowered from heaven, but, as they well knew, it was often lowered onto the head of some marauding adventurer. Reascription more conspicuously displays the human art and interest that motivate it—the ‘‘conscious aiming at ends’’ and ‘‘express mastery of . . . operations’’—than does the primary network of ascription, and its contrastive relationship to ascription forms the basis of the continuum Mary Douglas uses in Natural Symbols.47 Douglas formulates the following ‘‘rule of distance from physiological origin’’: ‘‘[T]he more the social situation exerts pressure on persons involved in it, the more the social demand for conformity tends to be expressed by a demand for physical control. Bodily processes are . . .

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more firmly set outside the social discourse, the more the latter is important.’’ She characterizes the formal correlative of this rule as ‘‘the purity rule’’: ‘‘[A]long the dimension from weak to strong pressure the social system seeks progressively to disembody or etherealize the forms of expression.’’ This is also stated in other terms as a continuum from informal to formal behavior and from low to high ritualism.48 The equation of increased social constraint with increased ritualism and formality indicates that ‘‘the dimension from weak to strong pressure’’ may be motivationally linked with the dimension from ascription to reascription, or from weak to strong institutionalization of ascribed statuses. For example, mother illustrates a weak status, jural father may be a little stronger, cult elder is even stronger, and the pharaoh is much stronger. Shamanism is weak, priesthood strong. Ego-centered kinship is weaker than ancestorcentered kinship, domestic roles weaker than patrilineal clan roles. That symbols of reascription need further ideological reinforcement is suggested by the records of their inscription in a cosmos. Cosmos augments body as the second great natural symbol; it brings into play natural and supernatural powers that transcend those of the human body. In traditional ideologies the cosmos tends to be organized in the image of the sociopolitical hierarchy, but the human origins of this construction are neutralized by reascriptive reversal: society is represented as the image and extension of the natural cosmos. Reascriptive symbolism is ritualized and etherealized—not so much disembodied as displaced from individual bodies—in order to accentuate the transcendence of authority to the individual who claims it, but the institutional monumentalism that dramatizes transcendent authority easily betrays by its aggressive artifice the interest it is meant to conceal. The very form of representation throws into question the transcendence it represents. There is an obvious and short-term moral problem here in the revelation of human pride and illegitimacy, but there is a deeper, longer-term, structural problem in the corrosion of the legitimacy of the available forms of transcendence. The problem is that if, for the sake of legitimacy, you want to transcendentalize your institutions, you have to institutionalize transcendence. If you want to make the pharaoh or emperor a god, you have to make one or more gods the pharaoh or emperor. On this principle of co-legitimation, the institution and the forms of

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transcendence used to reascribe it perforce legitimize or delegitimize each other. The failing legitimacy of legitimizing language populates culture with dead and dying gods, and leads to the crisis of representation that is an important aspect of what Weber has called disenchantment. But this crisis can be observed at many moments before the early modern era in which Weber situated it. We have evidence of its frequent recurrence in the ancient Near East. Something like it seems to have happened in Solomon’s Israel, which may well account for the genesis of the Old Testament as a new retraditionalizing strategy. It happened to monarchies and empires from the Alexandrian Age to late antiquity, and the radical response of Christianity was to raise up the order of bodies to heaven. Christianity reascriptively transforms the central relationship of the primary order of the body, the mother-child dyad, into the link by which the earthly family both validates and is subordinated to the heavenly family. The heavenly family in its turn mediates the ascent to the male parthenogenesis of the Trinity. Thus the signs generated in terms of the old structure are submitted to the transgressive forces latent in the new structure. The Gospel is very clear about this: ‘‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth: it is not peace I have come to bring, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-inlaw against her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies will be those of his own household. ‘‘Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who prefers son or daughter to me is not worthy of me.’’ (Matthew 10:34–37) Jesus replied, ‘‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’’ And stretching out his hand toward his disciples he said, ‘‘Here are my mother and my brothers. Anyone who does the will of my Father in heaven, he is my brother and sister and mother.’’ (Matthew 12: 48–50) The social and political power of Christian institutions grew by being extended or abstracted from families to communities to churches to the imperial state to the Church. As the size and power of the world family

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increased, so did its formality, ritualism, and effects of artifice. The family crystallized into a hierarchy; it branched into ecclesiastical and secular institutions, both of which in time disarticulated into factions. The factions came to discredit the holy body under whose name they sheltered, and they did so by the very strategy of sheltering under it. This gave rise to the perception that what had formerly been authorized by the signature of nature or God was now deeded over to the human signatory, and sometimes it encouraged the related charge or suspicion that the divine signature may have been a forgery. When the ascriptive network of signs and powers is displaced from the primary order of the body originally invested in it, it is exposed to the danger of fictionalization. These phenomena of reascription prompt another and more skeptical look at the sociological concept of ascription. We recall that, for the sociologist, to ascribe is to attribute or impute status, rights, obligations, etc., as belonging to one by virtue of membership in a ‘‘biogenetically defined’’ class or set of classes. ‘‘ ‘Biogenetically defined’ ’’ expresses the premise of the sociologist, as a disenchanted outside observer, that although the native’s biogenetic categories are social rather than natural in origin, the native culture misrepresents them as natural. The reascription of biogenetic categories of kinship beyond the boundaries of traditional reference groups that more clearly embodied the categories allows some of the sociologist’s ingenuity to contaminate the ingenuousness he ascribes to natives. On its positive side, the effects of reascription resemble those of a written charter authorized by a sovereign or legislator to confirm the rights of certain classes of people. But on its negative side, its effects resemble those of bondage. Baxter and Johnson’s Medieval Latin Word-List tells us that in the twelfth century ascripticius meant ‘‘bound to the soil,’’ and this is the way Thomas More uses it in Utopia (acripticios servos).49 In Cicero’s time it meant ‘‘enrolled in a community.’’ The variable usage brings out the metaphor latent in ascribere: the word implies an ascriber, an author, an authoritative interpreter. Who determined that Roman laborers during the third century a.d. should be bound to the soil and thus into a caste? And by what devious path did this caste system, the product of a desperate government in the City of Man, come to be reconceived in the later Middle Ages as part of a system of divinely ordained estates? Is there any ascription that was not at some time the

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effect of politically motivated art? Isn’t every ascription a reascription? That may not be the case, but since we’ll never know, all our ascriptions of ascription must remain hypothetical, as mine are, and bound to the soil of our own interpretive achievements. To conclude this account of reascription and bring it up to modern times in the space of a paragraph: traditional cultures are those that tend to reascribe the fictions they create under the sign of nature, and what distinguishes early modern culture from its predecessors is that it comes to embrace fictionalization as a legitimate form of representation, a way of life, a weapon, a form of exploitation, and a technique of discovery. It comes to embrace a rift between the two previously superimposed orders: the order of the body and the order of texts and institutions that had been logocentrically embedded, abstracted, reembedded, reabstracted, and so forth, by the traditional dialectic of abstraction and reascription described above. Historians of modern culture and society tend to commit themselves to the idea that the traditional order organized and defined itself in concrete anthropomorphic categories, and that modernization meant the separating out of abstract counterintuitive systems from a mystified logocentric order, a precapitalist golden age of Gemeinschaft, and so forth. This notion seems to me to be confused. The historical disjunction of an order of texts, sign systems, technique, instruments, and institutions from the order of bodies is not abstraction pure and simple. Abstraction as a morphogenetic process, the differentiating of new structures from old, is a universal of culture. But it is not a universally recognized universal of culture. In most premodern cultures we read about, the abstractive processes that produced cultural change went on unobserved, or their effects were misattributed to other causes. It is not, then, abstraction that creates, distinguishes, and torments the modern world. It is the abstraction of abstraction. I think the model of cultural change has been sufficiently articulated and illustrated in the foregoing sketch to allow us to recognize that the principle informing it is the general rule of abstraction from the body introduced in Chapter 2: the increase of human power produced by the extension or abstraction of activity and meaning from the body is directly proportional to the decrease of human control over that power.50 We may also speak indifferently of sequential extensions of extensions or

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abstractions of abstractions: both apply to the relation of print to writing and speech, and of digital algorithms to print, or to the transition from organic to mechanical to electronic media of labor and perception. Extension and/or abstraction: in the preceding pages I have used the terms virtually as synonyms. In so doing, I’ve ignored the opposition between them discussed in Chapter 2—the opposition symptomatically registered by grammatical usage. Writing is an extension of speech but an abstraction from it; speech is extended to writing while writing is abstracted from speech. We say of speech, writing, and print that each (in that order) extends the power of communication further from the body. But we can also say that the move from speech to writing to print is a move in the direction of greater abstraction from the body. And in the necessity of abstraction lies the danger of alienation—that is, the danger that although the process of abstraction gives senders and producers increasing power, it diminishes their control over that power. As extensions of the body, technical and organizational instruments augment its power, but as abstractions they alienate power from body to instrument or medium. The same pattern of change is apparent (1) in the move from manual labor to machines, (2) in the move from perception to spectacles, telescopes, amplifiers, and electronic brains, and (3) in the transfer of economic function and power from human hands in situated markets to the invisible (and severed) hand of an abstract market process. The dynamics of cultural change inscribed both in this principle and in the model developed in the present chapter is predicated on a basically ironic idea of the relationship between humans and their environment, the idea—stated in Chapter 2—that since any significant adaptation to the environment is also an adaptation of it, the more successfully humans adapt, and tap the environment’s resources, the more likely they are to produce changes that disenable and destabilize the adaptation.51 This pattern has been thoroughly—if variously—described for the modern period. One of the most familiar accounts is Jacques Ellul’s analysis of the technical dialectic that governs the career of technology in a capitalistic age. In a critique of the views expressed by Ellul and other critics of technological society, Langdon Winner concisely summarizes that society’s basic dilemmas:

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The means are much more productive than our limited intentions for them require. In technological innovation . . . the possibilities widen, but so do the demands. At the outset, the development of all technologies reflects the highest attributes of human intelligence, inventiveness, and concern. But beyond a certain point, the point at which the efficacy of the technology becomes evident, these qualities begin to have less and less influence upon the final outcome; intelligence, inventiveness, and concern effectively cease to have any real impact on the ways in which technology shapes the world.52 The dialectic between intention and outcome, or means and ends, has been fully explored in Ellul’s Technological Society. On the one hand, ‘‘two factors enter into the extensive field of technical operation: consciousness and judgment. This double intervention produces . . . the technical phenomenon. . . . Essentially, it takes what was previously tentative, unconscious, and spontaneous and brings it into the realm of clear, voluntary, and reasoned concepts.’’53 But, on the other hand, ‘‘technique sharply reduces the role of human invention’’ and of ‘‘the man of genius.’’ What is decisive is the ‘‘anonymous accretion of conditions’’ that lead to the self-augmentation of technique. Technique ‘‘poses primarily technical problems which consequently can be resolved only by technique. . . . Technical elements combine among themselves, and they do so more and more spontaneously.’’54 Ellul’s account of the automatic, autonomous, anonymous, self-augmenting, and totalizing character of modern technique has been criticized by Winner and others for flirting with technological determinism, but his basic formulation of the dialectic between intention and outcome still seems (and is generally accepted as) valid. ‘‘People know what they do,’’ Foucault once observed, ‘‘[and] they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does,’’ and the italicized what indicates the area within which Ellul situates the logic of technique.55 If we give the agent’s domain of intentions and ends the name of art, understood in its most general sense, and call the structural

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domain of operations and means technique, then we arrive at another formulation of the abstraction rule: the expanding power of human art has the paradoxical effect of expanding the autonomous power of technique and diminishing human control over it. As reality is alienated fiction, so technique is alienated art, and thus ‘‘it is possible to speak of the ‘reality’ of technique—with its own substance, its own particular mode of being, and a life independent of our power of decision.’’ Thus also, Ellul believes, although the individual ‘‘who lives in the technical milieu knows very well that there is nothing spiritual anywhere,’’ he ‘‘transfers his sense of the sacred to the very thing which has destroyed its former object: to technique itself. In the world in which we live, technique has become the essential mystery.’’56 Though it has been usual to focus discussion of the technical dialectic on the rise of early modern and modern societies, I submit that the abstraction rule universalizes the dialectic and allows it to be applied across the historical board. From the standpoint of that rule the techniques of reascription are as much part of and subject to the technical dialectic as are those connected with capitalist and postcapitalist technology. This can best be illustrated by reconsidering the premodern play of the abstraction rule in a context I haven’t yet discussed: the structure and politics of economic change. In Genesis, Yahweh issues this command to Abraham: ‘‘Leave your father’s house for the land I will show you. I will make you a great nation.’’ If we remember that Abraham was seminomadic, we may read this with minimal violence as ordering a parabolic reenactment of something that had ‘‘happened’’ millennia earlier: the first massive movement toward modernization in the journey from preagricultural to agricultural economies. The agricultural revolution was the most important event in the early history of abstraction because it brought about the first definitive extension and abstraction of human power: from body to land. In so doing, it radically accelerated the pace and broadened the scope of the technical dialectic. Consider what happens when mobile subsistence is replaced or overlaid by extensive and then intensive farming—when land, as Marx put it, becomes the instrument of labor rather than merely the subject of labor. In the villages of gatherers, hunters, and shifting cultivators, political and economic functions are more firmly embedded through

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ascription in the villagers’ bodies than in their temporary shelters and settlements. When those functions are abstracted from ascribed bodies and localized in relatively permanent sites, inscribed in the landscape, they are committed to spatial patterning that tends to reify and rigidify the social organization it expresses. Generations flowing through a structured space are bound together by its common impress. If a community is carried off and new groups take over the system of built and planted structures, they are in turn taken over by it. This fate was well known in ancient times. The antiroyalist moral of Old Testament history, the moral with which Zionism quarrels, is that if you take over the promised land of Canaan it takes you over and you become a Canaanite, reproducing the bondage to an agrarian despotism you sought to escape. To organize the landscape into localized functions—house, fields, shrine, granary, toolshed—is to create a potentially autonomous system that has an impact on its creators. In the change from gathering and hunting to domestication, a new and critical time interval, the long wait between planting and harvesting, reorganizes the awareness of time and the future: agriculture makes this long future more precarious at the same time that it makes it more conspicuous. The interval intensifies the importance of planning, protection, and predictability. It increases the need to formalize the control over inheritance. To be bound to the soil is to be subject not only to weather but also to predation. Their more aggressive command over nature makes villagers more vulnerable to other human groups. Especially in such diversified-resource regions as the Near East, farmers are never merely farmers for long. They become peasants, create enemies by their very existence, bring into the world nonfarmers who are economic have-nots, and protect themselves by inviting potential aggressors to join the community as their defenders. The enemies and defenders fall into the same category: today’s enemies may well be tomorrow’s defenders, and vice versa. The defenders legitimize and stabilize their power by reascribing it in aristocracies, priesthoods, and princely dynasties. But such reascribed statuses as aristocratic rank and religio-political office can be disconnected from the groups that possess them because they are embedded in the land-based hierarchy and are thus structurally alienable. This makes possible the upward mobility which has to be fended off, or else mystified, by strategies of reascription

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and boundary maintenance that close the ranks and naturalize the stratified order. As I noted earlier, aristocrats have lineages but peasants only have families. Commitment to land sends strong kinship up the ladder and leaves weak kinship below. Here, then, is the paradox: the more you abstract your productive instruments and institutions from the ascribed body to the land and the more you overcome the technical limits of the body, and of the informal social systems—the weak kinship groups—adapted to it, the more you expand your productive power. By the same token, the more you expand your power, the more you lose control over it. When you plant crops, you cannot avoid planting cities, empires, hierarchies, warfare, intensified trading networks, pantheons, and monumentally amplified displays of art and death. You also plant writing. What is ironic about this is that these characteristics of agrarian society belong to what historians usually represent as the most conservative and traditional form of socioeconomic organization. They speak of the power of custom and tradition in the lifestyles dominated by agricultural economy, of the relatively simple and stable occupational structures centered in family and household, of repetitive patterns of labor determined by seasonal cycles; of limited mobility in space, and of limited access to new or different experiences. How can so comfortable a set of descriptions refer to a way of life that is so perverse, so unnatural to the species? The human race, we are told, has probably passed about 99 percent of its occupancy of the earth in a more or less itinerant state, and what we normally call history has covered only the last 1 percent or so of this occupancy. Thus where historians write about traditional civilization, prehistorians write about the agricultural revolution. How do we reconcile these perspectives in light of the abstraction rule and the theory of reascription? I think an informal and measured use of cybernetic concepts opens up one approach to the problem. The difference between prehistoric and historical, preagricultural and agrarian relations to the environment is analogous to that between a ‘‘negative feedback’’ or homeostatic system and a ‘‘positive feedback’’ system. Homeostatic mechanisms convey information about performance or behavior to an automatic control device that corrects for errors, compensates for changes, and counteracts tendencies toward system deviation. In that they work to maintain or reinstitute

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a past state of the system by ‘‘reinserting into it the results of its past performance,’’ they are conservative, whereas ‘‘positive feedback’’ mechanisms enhance tendencies toward system deviation.57 Prehistorians tend to explain the deviation from paleolithic economies to agrarianism in terms of two mechanisms: technological innovation and population pressure. But their explanations ignore another mechanism that interacts with the technical and demographic variables: ascription, that is, the extent to which ascribed relations and statuses control the factors that inhibit or encourage technical and demographic change. A list of the parameters usually picked out to characterize the hunting/gathering adaptation suggests that high ascriptive control interacts homeostatically with low population and technical conservatism: impermanent and erratic food supply, no storage or surpluses, limited production objectives, and irregular work patterns correlate with mobility, dispersiveness, and the tendency of groups to fission before growing too large. The usefulness of a low ceiling on population size, density, and rate of growth in turn correlates with organizational flexibility: mobile societies tend to be egalitarian and segmentary, to have weakly institutionalized political roles, to find their basic groupings in household or weak kinship units, to have little specialization and no officialdom, and to accord prestige to personal skill or achievement. The significant feature of all these tendencies—tendencies that work to keep local populations relatively small—is that they promote the cultural, and not only the economic, dominance of the basic productive and reproductive unit, the domestic group, or household. For the dominance of the domestic unit supports the dominance of the basic ascribed relations—gender, age, and weak or informal kinship. Permanent increases in the size and concentration of any group entail the shift of power to more structured, artificial, and hierarchic political institutions. The shift accompanies technological changes that may lead to further demographic changes. These changes will be inhibited by the ascriptive character of domestic economy so long as it can reproduce the existing social relations of production in which the techniques are embedded, and by which they are constrained. The homeostatic circularity of the domestic mode of production may be described as follows: if population remains stable, the household re-

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mains the dominant unit of production; if it remains the dominant unit of production, its social relations generate the high ascriptive control that inhibits the extension of economic and political power, and keeps authority ‘‘in the family’’; if this extension of power and the improvement of technology that accompanies it are inhibited by ascriptive control, the ceiling on population growth holds firm.58 Insofar as the processes of natural ecosystems are, in the short run, homeostatic, the human and natural systems harmonize and reinforce each other in a more comprehensive pattern of negative feedback.59 The slow rate of ecological change prevailing (between cataclysms) in prehistoric times suggests that adaptive pressure on human communities would be imposed primarily by short-term recurrent homeostatic processes. Hence the obvious difference between Paleolithic and post-Paleolithic environments is not that the former is in equilibrium and the latter is not, but that the rate of change accelerates, and increasingly accelerates, in the latter. Returning to my question about the duality of agrarian civilization, we may now distinguish and interrelate its radical and traditional features. Considered as a trajectory of institutional changes, Neolithic agrarianism appears—when compared with its Paleolithic predecessors—to move so rapidly and powerfully toward a relatively advanced level of structural differentiation that we may speak of the movement as an incipient modernizing process. The synoptic view picks out the perpetual instability of a positive feedback system whose variables display the runaway tendencies we associate with the technical dialectic. Viewed from closer up, the prospect composes into a fairly stable pattern of urbanism, and, at the level of sociocultural change, a repetitive cycle of advance and reversal which George Mendenhall has called the ‘‘tenth-generation’’ effect.60 But population continues to grow and to concentrate; agricultural intensification reaches new plateaus; the natural setting alters in irreversible ways as the urban equilibrium maintains itself by continually upsetting the natural equilibrium; the imposition of traditional ideology becomes more monumental and assertive, and, at the same time, more precarious and short-lived. Mendenhall’s ten-generation cycle is thus propelled along a spiral that finally undoes itself, yielding to new counter-Neolithic and initially countertraditional sequences in Palestine, Greece, and Rome.

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By ‘‘the imposition of traditional ideology’’ I refer partly to the strategies of reascription that particular groups and institutions employ to legitimize and preserve their power. We connect traditionalism with all the splendors of ancient art, culture, and religion aestheticized by teachers of humanities and ancient civilization: cosmic order, sacred hierarchy, ritualization, and monumentalism. If the glorious remains of Babylon, Assyria, and eternal Egypt generate such potent images of archaic stability and permanence that their ruined state prompts meditations on human vanity, they achieve, ironically, a belated success they may not have attained when they flourished. They impose the effect of tradition, the appearance of permanence, on us as they seem meant to do on a permanently unstable institutional order dominated not by divine or natural law, certainly not by the human art and control they celebrate, but by the technical dialectic. Superficially, the agrarian effect of tradition sets itself against the positive feedback system that emerged as a consequence of the Neolithic rupture between human society and natural ecosystems: superficially, because the effect confirms and legitimizes the modernizing drift by concealing it, enables it to continue its course under the protective auspices of tradition’s sacred canopy.

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The Lie of the Land: The Text beyond Canaan For Norman O. Brown And not to have is the beginning of desire, To have what is not is its ancient cycle. —Wallace Stevens Midrash commentary on the problem of creation: Why is the world created with the letter Beth? Used as a prefix, Beth ⳱ the preposition ‘‘in,’’ and is the first letter of the first word of Genesis: BeRashit, ‘‘in the beginning.’’ Solution to problem: Beth (b) is blocked on three sides and open only on one. Therefore, one has no right to demand knowledge of what is above, what is below, or what is before, only of what comes after, from the day on which the world is created.

This essay centers on a nongenetic reading of a very small piece of the Old Testament. By ‘‘nongenetic’’ I mean that the essay takes its genesis from the genesis of Genesis within the text—that is, from the Bible’s picture of the conditions that we assume led to the first step in the formation of the Old Testament canon, the conditions of Solomonic imperialism and its demise in the division of the kingdom. From this point of departure I plan to wind my way out through Exodus into some general extratextual reflections, following which I shall return to the textual home where all good landless Israelites still live. But first, in order to do justice to the conditions that generate Genesis, I want to devote a few pages to some general distinctions and definitions. These will enable me to sketch out a conceptual framework for the exploration of the kinds and tensions of structural change that I think the text of the Old Testament not only represents but also subjects to continuous critique.

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I I begin with two definitions. The first is a basic and perhaps too familiar term whose boundaries I would like to delimit in ways that will make it applicable to my topic. The second elaborates on a distinction I casually put into play in the preceding chapter. Definition 1: Transcendence. Transcendence names a genetic category established in terms of a contrastive relation to human agency. The category includes whatever appears to the categorizer to owe its origins, being, continuance, and—where relevant—authority to nonhuman sources. Given two positions, let’s call them observer and native, transcendence is unconditional when observer agrees with native’s ascriptions but conditional when he does not. Native might say that gender, kinship, society, the state, the emperor, patriarchy, marriage, and babies are all marked by transcendence—that is, produced or authorized by god or nature, with a little supplementary human help. Observer might not agree with much of this and decide that native is naturalizing, or reifying, or transcendentalizing a social or cultural construction. He may then suspect that native is up to something ideological, appropriative, and political. The more centralized hierarchic power is, for example, the more it claims to encompass the whole of existence, the more its thrust beyond history toward nature strives to be absolute. Its assertion of totality is presented as the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But as this judicial injunction implies, the truth is always enjoined in the face of the suspicion that it may not be believed or obeyed. The hierarchic worldview presents itself as the world precisely because it is not the world; it presents itself as the truth of nature precisely because it is merely a ‘‘truth’’ of culture. This creates a problem we confront again and again in the civilizations of the ancient Near East, or at least in the texts that imagine them for us. The problem arises from certain structural features and consequences of agricultural economy—the relatively unchanging mode and social organization of production, its slow rhythms and long cycles, the creation of soilbound labor whose produce continually attracts the depredations of nonfarmers. Agriculture creates both peasants and their enemies or defenders. When new ethnic groups of attackers and defenders drive out the incum-

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bents, they have to appropriate, and often refashion, the modes and insignia of legitimacy. In the royal cults and administrations of agrarian antiquity, the gods of subject peoples were taken over and, as George Mendenhall puts it, their ‘‘pre-state functions’’ were ‘‘transferred from the realm of the unpredictable unseen world beyond the control of . . . humanity, to the realm of the state, which is the maximization of human control.’’1 As noted in the preceding chapter, the problem is this: if, for the sake of legitimacy, you want to transcendentalize your institutions, you have to institutionalize transcendence. If you want to make the pharaoh or emperor a god, you have to make one or more gods the pharaoh or emperor. The institutional monumentalism that represents and dramatizes transcendent authority easily betrays by its aggressive artifice the interest it is meant to conceal; the very form of representation throws into question the transcendence it represents. The problem centers not on the revelation of human pride and illegitimacy but on the corrosion of the legitimacy of the available forms of transcendence. A principle of colegitimation is at work: once you institutionalize transcendence, transcendence and the institution perforce legitimize, or delegitimize, each other. The alienation of social constructions of divinity and cosmos by conquest groups resembles the alienation of socially constructed kinship and status terms from domestic kin groups to corporate descent groups—in anthropological jargon, from the ego-centered kinship system of families to the more patently fictional ancestor-centered system of lineages. These two forms of alienation reinforced each other in ancient agrarian civilization. Mendenhall observes that ‘‘large social organizations seem at least to be absolutely necessary to support a large population,’’ but they rapidly tend ‘‘to become intolerable to the populations . . . they dominate.’’ Hence the conqueror who wanted to legitimize his power tried to transfer ‘‘the allegiances of the small kin group to the larger social organization.’’ It is hard to determine from the record ‘‘whether one king who is described as the ‘son’ of another king is actually his physical descendant or merely his dependent vassal’’ (TG, 220, 199). Definition 2: Weakly and Strongly Institutionalized Transcendence. To approach this distinction ostensively, we might say that the pharaoh is an example of strongly institutionalized transcendence—or strong transcendence, for

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short—and mothering is an example of weak transcendence. Shamanism is weak; priesthood strong. Ego-centered kinship is weaker than ancestorcentered kinship. Family membership illustrates weak kinship; tribal membership, strong kinship. Strong in this formula conceals a subsidiary sense: ‘‘embattled, therefore assertive,’’ and it is embattled because its fictiveness, its human origin and the interests behind it, are more conspicuous. Weak implies signifying indices whose message is ‘‘informal, spontaneous, automatic’’; to use the terms long ago applied by W. G. Sumner, weak equals ‘‘crescive’’ and strong equals more formally ‘‘instituted.’’ I speak of these terms as appearances, or representations. There are two corollaries to these definitions. Corollary 1, which I lack space to defend and will only strongly assert (because everyone already knows it), is this: the political and religious features of strong transcendence seem to be interdependent with problems of land control, and therefore with agrarian civilization. Status that depends on land is generally more precarious and alienable than status inscribed in the body; mobile subsistence economies tend to conceptualize status in terms of the signifying indices of the body—indices of gender, age, and kinship— rather than of more conspicuously artificial constructions, and are closer to the weak end of the weak-to-strong scale. Corollary 2 is related to this: in weak transcendence, authority and charisma adhere primarily not to the role but to the person in the role. This evokes some Weberian distinctions. The institutional roles of mother, father, and tribal ‘‘big man’’ are characterized particularistically by the performances and personalities of those who enact them. Under the conditions of strong transcendence, however, such personal centering may well be dysfunctional. This is blatantly illustrated by Akhnaton’s failed Amarna experiment. The most successful royal performer is the one who cloaks himself in the authority and charisma of the instituted role, and who persuades his subjects that the authority and charisma derive from the divinities that support the role if they do not actually inhabit it. One of the familiar problems we associate with the career of ancient Near Eastern civilization is that transcendent authority and institutional charisma came to lose their positive value, their legitimating power, because they were locked too exclusively and anthropomorphic-

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ally in repressive human figures. Overextension, Babel, the human creature usurping divine power and slandering it by his embodiment: the ethical dimensions of imperial despotism reflected its political weakness, that is, its failure to diffuse its power or to routinize it, its carelessness of the bases of legitimacy. Restoring transcendence meant releasing it from the confines of the despotic figure, and this was something many ancient observers, not least the followers of Yahweh, experienced and recognized. Remember the famous antiroyalist text in I Samuel. The people say to Samuel, ‘‘Let us have a king to rule over us, like other nations’’—rather than a priest, prophet, or judge. Yahweh says to Samuel: ‘‘Obey the people, it is not you they have rejected; they have rejected me from ruling over them; they have deserted me and served other gods. Obey them, give them a king, but instruct them in the rights of the king who is to rule them.’’ And the rights are Ozymandian: he will take, take, take, and take, and, ‘‘When that day comes, you will cry out on account of the king you have chosen for yourselves, but on that day God will not answer you.’’ Samuel of course means that God will punish the stiffnecked people, but from another standpoint the statement means that God will effectively be subordinated to or replaced by the king. This concludes my modest attempt to excogitate a framework for the interpretive wandering that follows. As a footnote and transition, I preface the journey with two clues to the location of the home I hope to settle in. The first is an interesting suggestion by Herbert Schneidau that, since milk and honey are ‘‘emblematic pastoral foods,’’ there may be something a little odd about promising a land of milk and honey to potential farmers—rather than, say, a land of grain, olives, and grapes.2 The second clue is that among the distorted analogues of the fate of Israel, we find the figure of Cain, who was the first-born son and a farmer, whose fruits of tillage pleased Yahweh less than the offerings of his younger brother the pastoralist, and who, after his fratricide, was doomed to wander so he could display his mark, and to settle in the land of Nad, which means ‘‘to wander.’’ Ironically, the analogy between Cain and Israel both succeeds and fails when we learn that Cain became a builder of cities.

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II In the picture that emerges from recent scholarship, Israel from Moses until the Davidic monarchy, roughly from 1250 to 1000 b.c., represents a sociological experiment to determine whether a society is possible when not sanctioned and protected by the imperial gods of a totalitarian and hierarchic social order.3 It represents, that is, an experimental rejection of strong transcendence in favor of a less coercive and somewhat weaker alternative, the tribal system, which cuts across both local allegiances and stratificational discontinuities. At the center of the experiment is a tension between two covenants, the Mosaic and the Davidic. In 1979, in a survey of recent work, Walter Brueggemann borrowed the notion of trajectory from New Testament scholarship, and suggested that this tension could be viewed synoptically in terms of conflicting trajectories running through the biblical tradition, trajectories associated with different centers of power.4 The value of this approach is that it operates at a level of analysis at which the study of literary and narrative structure intersects the study of political history and ideology. As Brueggemann formulates it, the Mosaic tradition tends to be a movement of protest which is situated among the disinherited and which articulates its theological vision in terms of a God who decisively intrudes, even against seemingly impenetrable institutions. The Davidic tradition tends to be a movement of consolidation which is situated among the established and secure, and which articulates its theological vision in terms of a God who faithfully abides and sustains on behalf of the present order. (T, 162) In diachronic profile, the radical experiment of Moses was given up, and Israel embraced the very system it rejected in leaving Egypt when the united monarchy for a brief spell resolved the religious and sociological conflict in favor of royalty. But the synchronic picture is different, and gives us what might be called, borrowing Fredric Jameson’s terms, the Old Testament ideologeme: the dialectical struggle between antiroyalism and royalism persists throughout the course and formative career of the Old Testament as its structuring force. It sets the tent against the house (T, 169–70), nomadism against agriculture, the wilderness against Canaan,

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wandering and exile against settlement, diaspora against the political integrity of a settled state. I find the general thrust of this formulation powerful and persuasive. These recent directions taken by biblical scholarship show that the different paths of research are converging on a new respect for the integrity and coherence of the text. The older interest in sorting out the contributions of the four major sources—Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly—is giving way to a more textual view in which the concept of source is replaced by that of represented viewpoint or voice. Whether we view the Old Testament as the stitchery of a single Redactor, or the Redactor as the product of our encounter with the text, we can have confidence in the consistency—however ambivalent, however embattled, and however flawed at the level of minor detail—with which it gradually discloses, along the tensional path of the two trajectories, a decisive attitude toward the history it continually recreates. We can begin to see the four sources less as sources than as narrative functions, ideological voices struggling for possession of the story. The road to the promised land begins with this question: Where does one locate the genesis of Genesis? Does it begin at the beginning? From nothing? Does the genesis of the world precede the genesis of the book about the genesis of the world? Or is it the other way round? Does it begin after it is over? Before it starts? Does it begin in heaven, or in Egypt, or in Jerusalem, or in the Bible? Clearly the book of Genesis ends in Egypt, where Joseph is a high-ranking bureaucrat, something like the minister of agriculture. And perhaps less clearly, some of it begins in tenth-century Jerusalem, or thereabouts, shortly after the death of Solomon and the division of the kingdom. So let’s try scouting that period to see if the text throws any light on its own genesis. The united monarchy lasted only through the unhappy reign of Saul and the successful regimes of David and Solomon. In the biblical account there is a kind of charismatic profile to this sequence of kings. Saul and David get more attention as human beings and complex personalities. This is important, because the royal office in Israel had little charismatic power of its own. The king was anointed by Yahweh, but his legitimacy was defined, or refined, by his own possession or lack of charisma and effectiveness. In terms of traditional categories, this was either a paradox

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or a contradiction: a monarchy established in the mode of weak transcendence. David made it work by his skill as a charismatic leader, warrior, and administrator. At the same time, he tried to displace the loyalties and solidarity of kinship ties from clans and tribes to the national dynasty. Ironically, the ambivalence of kinship, the inseparability of kin-love from kin-strife in his own household, returned to haunt him, and his conflict with Absalom led to civil war. The Davidic attempt at this precarious balance took a totalitarian tilt in the regime of Solomon. The biblical portrait of Solomon is a complex study in which the characteristics of strong transcendence are embedded in the personality and career of its representative. The portrait is drained of much of the charismatic human quality that animates the presentation of David. His personal accomplishments—wisdom and poetry—are separated from the portrait and collected in other books. The famous judgment of Solomon reveals primarily the psychological insight of a skilled arbitrator or a political negotiator. The account of his private relationships is held till the end of the portrait, where the narrative concentrates on his decline, on his weakness for foreign women and his religious laxity, both of which are connected to the fact that the account is probably in part an ethical or particularistic way of talking about marriages that were economic and political alliances requiring him to admit alien gods. Religion in this disenchanted regime came to be demoted to an instrument of foreign policy. The transcendence of Yahweh was jeopardized by its clear subservience to the projects and needs of the master technician. Solomon’s ethical weakness seems to be the counterpart of his technical strength as a builder, administrator, trader, and—for a time—politician. He perfected and extended the administrative organization begun by David, and improved the methods of collecting taxes and recruiting labor. At the same time, he further weakened tribal loyalties by dividing Israel into twelve administrative units that cut across existing tribal boundaries. The tribes entered into an adversary relation with the central government, and this was intensified by the challenge that the centralized temple and priesthood posed for regional cult centers. This was part of a program to centralize power and unify the nation by overcoming the territorial dispersiveness of local tribal jurisdictions. The political and religious centers were spatially and institutionally fixed in the

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capital city. Paradoxically, if expectedly, this effort to centralize and unify the nation further fragmented it. The legitimacy of the center was weakened, tribal loyalties were regenerated, and the stage was set for the division of the kingdom. This was seen, was presented, as the ultimate oriental consequence of the attempt to sink into the land, give up the wilderness ethic for the easier security and servility of another Egypt or Babylon. The shift from the charismatic leadership of David to the faceless bureaucracy of Solomon reflected Solomon’s unsuccessful effort to transfer charisma to the office and imitate the oriental mode of strong transcendence. The triumph and failure of Solomon’s art produces the need for a new myth, a charter, an ideology that could restore loyalty, legitimacy, and transcendence. I imagine that it was in this context, and to fill this need, that the early sections of the Old Testament began to take shape. Reading back through history from the Redactor’s postexilic standpoint, we can see that when Genesis and Exodus describe institutions and codes directly dependent on Yahweh, and independent of kingship, they react to this situation. The creation of the world with which Genesis opens is, and reflects, a verbal act that radically releases Yahweh from the bonds of kingship. Yet at the same time it is, in its priestly manner, a carefully ritualized, hierarchic, and artificial performance. Yahweh is an architect who organizes the universe by making a vault, a solid dome, called heaven. Again and again, Genesis gives us glimpses of the oriental danger and temptation. The tower of Babel, for example, is the epitome of the vanity of human arrogance and art, an attempt at universal hegemony that follows on the universal deluge. Its vertical and spatial character hyperbolizes the violent desire to control everything here and now. A monstrous jar of Tennessee, it pushes into the ground, reaches up to heaven, takes dominion everywhere. And it is shortly followed by its contrary: the covenant between God and Abraham, which is a promise that can only unfold gradually through time, sending a horizontal vector into the future, based on obedience, on mobility, on delaying the act of settlement until the appointed time. In Genesis 12, Abraham briefly visits Egypt, and Genesis ends, as we know, with Joseph triumphant in Egypt. Here are the final lines: ‘‘Joseph died at the age of a hundred and ten [prematurely, for those patriarchal days]; they embalmed him and laid

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him in his coffin in Egypt.’’ This is a symbol, a very quiet yet haunting symbol, of what success means in eternal Egypt (a symbol of the lie of the land). Hence Exodus begins with a violent effort to restore the ethical life and autonomy and morale of the people. At first, Yahweh has to do all the work of restoration. He functions precisely like a superpharaoh5 competing in contests of magical power. I think it makes sense of what has been called ‘‘the mighty deeds of God’’ tradition to situate it in this dramatic perspective: Yahweh is represented as having to win his spurs and develop his constituency by appropriating the strategies of oriental imperialism. Only gradually does he try to transfer some of his power to the ethical capacities of his followers. The move from plagues to Passover is the first step in this process. It is a move from divine military and magical force to ritual injunctions. Ethics is reduced to obeying divine instructions in the proper performance of the rite. Immediately after, in the episode of the crossing of the Red Sea, Yahweh reverts to his role as hero, magician, and military expert; he has to show the Egyptians who’s boss and to persuade the still timorous Hebrews. He tells Moses, ‘‘So shall I win myself glory at the expense of Pharaoh, of all his army, his chariots, his horsemen. And when I have won glory for myself, at the expense of Pharaoh and his chariots and his army, the Egyptians will learn that I am Yahweh.’’ This sounds like countless inscriptions ordered by Near Eastern kings, and Moses’ song of victory drives the impression home. Still, Yahweh has a ways to go. As soon as the wanderers hit the desert they begin to complain, to ignore Moses, and to lose what little faith they have, so that Yahweh has to appease them with a display of commissarial extravagance, namely, manna. In the eighteenth chapter a significant piece of institutional reorganization takes place. Moses was administering justice for the people from morning till evening, and his father-in-law thought he was overworking himself. ‘‘The work is too heavy for you,’’ he says, and he advises him to share the burden with others: ‘‘Teach them the statutes and the decisions; show them the way they must follow and what their course must be. But choose . . . some capable and God-fearing men, trustworthy and incorruptible, and appoint them as leaders of the people.’’ This was the beginning of instituted judgeship, a move away from the informal charis-

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matic leadership of Moses, a diffusion of responsibility among the other previously passive wanderers. And the institution is immediately followed by the Sinai covenant, the disclosure of the decalogue, and its elaboration in the body of civil and criminal law known as the Book of the Covenant. Here we begin to move further away from the folkloristic conception of the all-powerful divine hero and his passive, childlike constituency. The prohibitions of the decalogue, like the negative injunction in the garden of Eden, make genuine ethical response possible by defining the boundaries of permitted behavior, exhorting the people freely to obey—making it possible for them to disobey, and to disobey knowingly. As St. Paul was to put it, ‘‘I had not known sin except for the law.’’ And as St. Paul also made clear, law is not enough. It exists to be broken, because it addresses those matters most vital to the life of the community and hardest for individuals to control. So Yahweh immediately shores up the law with ritual instructions that are easier to obey. After the covenant is ratified and inscribed in stone—compare this to the covenant with Abraham, inscribed in the flesh through circumcision—Yahweh gives Moses six chapters of detailed instruction on the building of the sanctuary and the institution of the priesthood. Then comes the episode of the golden calf. Since this falling away occurs after the people have received the commandments from Moses, it merely reveals their unreadiness for the law, and its insufficiency. The episode demonstrates the need for covenant and prohibitions, and at the same time foreshadows the difficulty of keeping the covenant. But for the time being, things end well. The tablets that Moses broke are reconstructed, and the covenant is renewed. Exodus ends with an account of the building of the sanctuary, which Yahweh then possesses and from which he guides the people through the wilderness. As the capacity for ethical behavior is gradually transferred from Yahweh to his people, it divides into two modes. One is centered in the individual conscience, and in something close to a face-to-face relation with a vibrant, often unpredictable, and roguish divinity who demands self-discipline, offers difficult choices, makes promises that impose heavy obligations, and requires the continuous reactivation of the will to endure and to honor one’s commitments. Over against this ethical art is the easier technical art of ritual performance. To be good in ethical terms is

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more difficult, and it is also dangerous not only to the individual but to any person or institution whose interests he might be forced on principle to endanger. To be good in ritual terms is easier because it may shortcircuit the need for ethical art; ritual virtue is also easier for any person or institution whose interests are served by the compliance and avoidance that ritual art by itself tends to induce. Exodus shows that both kinds of virtue or art are necessary—humans cannot live by ethical art alone—so long as the ethical decalogue circumscribes, permeates, and rationalizes the ritual code. But Exodus also dramatizes the difficulty of ethical art, the temptations that the very knowledge/power of transgression creates. And having shown that, in the covenant and golden calf episodes, Exodus backpeddles and devotes almost eleven of its final fifteen chapters to a technical act of construction. As I see it, this constitutes another symbolic return to Egypt, a kind of parallel to the conclusion of Genesis. Exodus begins in Egypt with the all-powerful pharaohlike divinity, wanders tentatively toward the contrary ideal of autonomous internalized ethical art, finds that too precarious, and returns to a more secure technical relation in which the people carry out the divine ruler’s commands. Since this is not exactly a self-evident interpretation, I want to pause long enough to unpack it and stake it down.

III We may begin by invoking the genetic hypothesis that Exodus, like Genesis and the other Yahwist and Elohist texts, came into being ‘‘by redaction in the period of post-Solomonic breakdown.’’6 But Exodus also contains some postexilic priestly interpolations. The most important of these are chapters 25 through 31, in which Yahweh instructs Moses on the building of the sanctuary and the institution of the priesthood, and chapters 35 through 40, the end of Exodus, in which Moses directs the actual building of the sanctuary and the production of the priestly vestments. The parts of Exodus that are written, rewritten, or compiled by postexilic authors make the whole book resonate with analogies, in fact, stand as a prefigurative symbol of the later return from exile. At the same time, the sanctuary building prefigures and commemorates the building of the Solomonic temple. From the priestly standpoint there is an injunction to

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reestablish the Davidic kingdom along theocratic lines, and the priesthood is legitimized by the account of its origins, which links it to the covenant and the divine command. One might infer from this that the same benefit would accrue to the royalist position that favors the achievement of David and Solomon. Yet this may not unambiguously be so. Chapters 35 through 40 contain many passages in which Yahweh’s earlier instructions are ritually repeated, this time as the actual project of construction. The repetition dramatizes both the divine institution and the scrupulous obedience of the human builders. No such repetition accompanies the building of the temple by Solomon in Kings. We learn, rather abruptly, in a message he sends to Hiram of Tyre that because it is a time of peace he plans to fulfill Yahweh’s prediction to David that his son rather than David himself should build a temple for Yahweh’s name. When compared to the original passage in 2 Samuel 7 that this recalls, Solomon’s statement is inaccurate and slightly invidious toward David; above all, it misses the contrast Yahweh makes between a house considered as a dynasty perpetuated through time and its metonymic condensation in a physical dwelling. The text presents the building of the temple as Solomon’s own technical achievement, undertaken through his initiative and featuring both his skill as a trader and his efficiency in mobilizing forced labor. Yahweh comes in after the fact with a single, partly admonitory comment: About ‘‘this house you are building,’’ he says, ‘‘if you follow my statutes and obey my ordinances and faithfully follow my commandments, I will fulfill the promise I made about you to your father David. And I will make my home among the sons of Israel, and never forsake Israel my people.’’ Solomon then builds the temple, and in an interesting juxtaposition of sentences we are told that he took seven years to build it, while, ‘‘as regards his palace, Solomon spent thirteen years on it before the building was completed.’’ In textual retrospect, Yahweh’s conditional remark is ominous. We could see this as a grim, priestly irony pointing to the failings of monarchy and the need to reconstruct it on a less secular and more hieratic power base. The building of the sanctuary in Exodus could then appear as the pristine model that, tarnished by Solomon’s hubris, is to be reestablished. But I think the Redactorial viewpoint, by dramatizing both the royalist and the priestly possibilities, offers us an alternative. This is that

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all three constructions—the sanctuary, Solomon’s temple, and the priestly reconstruction—share in the same structural moment, belong to the same paradigm. Regardless of the particular ethical assessment accorded to each instance, all three point in varying degrees toward the return of the rejected, namely, toward ritualism, hierarchy, and the architectural entrapment of God. Clearly the building of the sanctuary differs, because the tabernacle is a portable tent. But what a tent! And what a courtyard around it! The whole contraption, even though it is supposed to be put together once each month and disassembled for traveling, seems suspiciously monumental. That is partly a function of priestly rhetoric. But it is also a result of the fact that several equivalences are established between the sanctuary in Exodus and the temple in I Kings, and many of these are reduplicated in Ezekiel’s prophetic vision of the postexilic temple. We can easily explain these analogies by the retrospective and appropriative character of the Old Testament’s intratextual relations. But if we say that the Exodus passage is projected backward from the standpoint of either the unified monarchy or the postexilic priesthood, then we are also saying that its more nomadic and less bureaucratic setting, its apparently greater distance from the orientalized context of politics and hierarchy, is compromised. Its function is to legitimize restoration of the very world from which Exodus narrates the exodus. There is a vague, stylistic return to Egypt at the end of Exodus in the building of so elaborate a portable structure, and our sense of this return is greatly intensified by the network of appropriative allusions. If we step back behind the royalist and priestly observers to the Redactor who deploys their perspectives on the action, then we can see that his deployment is in fact a characterization of those perspectives, a judgment on them. We see, in the first place, an aggressive competition between royalist and priest for the appropriation of the symbolic capital invested in Exodus. But we see, in the second place, that all three passages, as I said, are bound together by a paradigmatic affinity that is ultimately more significant than the differences of situation, program, or ethical intention. To build the sanctuary is to return to Egypt. To build the temple is to return to Egypt. To rebuild the temple is to return to Egypt.

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IV Is there no way out, then? Are we trapped in Egypt? Will Exodus never end where it wants to end? These are interesting questions, but I am not yet ready to plough them up. I first want to wander into another text, one that has been fairly influential in recent scholarship, and see if we can get any help from a real specialist. George Mendenhall has approached the dilemma of the ancient Near East from the standpoint of what he calls the ‘‘tenth-generation effect.’’ His starting point is the observation that archeological subdivisions of the history of Palestine from Early Bronze I to the Persian empire average ‘‘about 200 to 250 years each, and are necessitated by the fact that cultural changes had taken place to such an extent that a new ‘label’ was required for the various layers of ancient ruin mounds.’’ He deduces from this ‘‘that very few specific socio-political organizations of the ancient world survived for more than 250 to 300 years without undergoing radical change, if not total destruction.’’7 The particular scenario Mendenhall elaborates for this process begins with the countryside divided ‘‘into a multitude of city-states’’ with surrounding villages. He assumes that the situation in Palestine and Syria in the mid-fourteenth century b.c. resembles in organization what we know about ancient Rome. Local population is distributed in a cluster of small agricultural and pastoral villages in the vicinity of a fortified town that has a complex ‘‘of relationships to the villages—as a market, a place of refuge. . . . the location of specialities not available in the village, and so on.’’ He accepts the standard view ‘‘that there was a constantly maintained network of kinship ties’’ between city and village populations, and fluid movement back and forth between them, conditioned by political and climatological pressures. He premises that, all over the Mediterranean during the fourteenth to twelfth centuries, outsiders with superior force moved in and took over these village/city networks. Their favorite tactic was ‘‘to harass, threaten, and drive out the villagers’’ of the neighboring towns so that they could not ‘‘till their fields’’ or ‘‘tend their grapevines, fig trees, and olive orchards.’’ This conquest system was thus founded on an unstable and self-defeating relation to the very mode of subsistence that brought it into being in the first place; the consequence

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was that ‘‘the economic system upon which the whole kingdom depended’’ evaporated, and along with it went the state’s ‘‘prestige, authority, military power, and even religion.’’ If it was ultimately replaced ‘‘by another example of the same system,’’ this was only after profound social disorder (TG, 186, 221–22). Mendenhall’s version of this scenario leads him to conclude from the archeological and documentary evidence that the tenth generation in each cycle is ‘‘characterized by a relatively high density of population,’’ by ‘‘a breakdown in confidence in the existing social and political organization,’’ by ‘‘an increasing resort to illegitimate force and violence,’’ and by a deeply felt ‘‘sense of . . . impending doom’’ that the catastrophic ending of the cycle justifies. ‘‘Deurbanization takes place,’’ cities are abandoned, civilization disappears from view for a time ‘‘to reemerge with the rebuilding process in . . . changed form.’’ The Dark Age comes into ‘‘historical view once again,’’ and the new communities, remembering very little of what preceded them, ‘‘conclude that God destroyed the old in a Great Flood’’ (TG, 217–19). Such hypotheses produce a reading of Old Testament history that departs in several significant details from the paradigm that has dominated biblical studies since the nineteenth century. Mendenhall is one of a number of interpreters moving in this direction. Norman Gottwald is another. They deny the association of tribalism with nomadism; they deny the assumption of Israel’s ethnic homogeneity; they deny that the biblical narratives of a single decisive conquest of Canaan can be correlated with archeological evidence showing that ‘‘most excavated cities of Palestine suffered violent destruction during the second half of the thirteenth century’’ (TG, 22). In short, they deny that the Israelites came in as nomadic wanderers who conquered Canaan and subjugated the indigenous population. They note that many of the names of the twelve tribes ‘‘are very archaic Canaanite,’’ and some of them seem originally to have been geographical terms. They note that biblical Hebrew ‘‘is from its earliest sources a collection of materials from various local dialects, all of which are Canaanite of the Iron Age.’’ They note that the early Israelite sources not only fail to disclose any ‘‘trace of nomadic origin’’ but actually indicate ‘‘that the Israelite villages constituted a thoroughly Mediter-

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ranean type of economy, with cereals, fruit, and domesticated animals furnishing a considerable diversity and economic security’’ (CD, 156). In this interpretation, early Israel is seen (in Gottwald’s words) as ‘‘a slowly converging . . . cluster of rebellious and dissenting Canaanite peoples distinguished by an antistatist form of social organization with decentralized leadership.’’ Their reaction ‘‘took the shape of a ‘retribalization’ movement among agriculturalists and pastoralists,’’ who ‘‘organized in economically self-sufficient extended families with egalitarian access to basic resources.’’8 Gottwald exhaustively develops this thesis in The Tribes of Yahweh. The word retribalization points to the still powerful Weberian influence on modern sociological approaches. Gottwald’s usage is a little tricky, since it implies a devolution to a previous time of tribal organization, whereas the question I believe he and other revisionists intend to raise is whether there actually was such a time, or whether the idea of return and revival was not itself part of the new antistatist ideology. At any rate, Mendenhall agrees that these groups were able ‘‘to furnish an effective counterweight to the military aristocracies of the city,’’ forcing them to form ‘‘hasty coalitions of their own to cope with the new threat to political control. Confrontation was inevitable, and the urban military aristocracies met with defeat in unorthodox military tactics’’—among which we might want to include stopping the sun and using a brass band to blow down a city’s walls (TG, 186–87). The meaning and function of tribal ideology is a crucial question, and it marks the point at which I think the interpretation I have been outlining falters. I submit that Mendenhall and Gottwald do not grasp the full significance of the thesis that the Israelites were peasants rather than nomads, settled villagers rather than wanderers. And I think it is associated with a broader misunderstanding that they share with other proponents of this view. Consider the following representative statement of the view, from The Tenth Generation: ‘‘It was the Mosaic period which constituted revolution; with Solomon the counter-revolution triumphed completely, only to collapse under the same weight of political tyranny and arrogance which had so much to do with the troubles of the pre-Mosaic period’’ (TG, 196). Norman O. Brown, who referred me to this passage, pointed out how conventional Mendenhall’s opening summary of the Mosaic revolution actually is, how little account it takes of the texture of

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the text.9 This is a function of the strength of his approach, which aims ‘‘to disentangle authentic historical facts from the folkloristic elaborations [in the Bible] that are the result of the tribal organization, not the historical cause.’’ From this follows his valuable conclusion that ‘‘early Israel was an ideological movement,’’ and that the Twelve Tribe system ‘‘was founded upon a new religious way of thought and upon a covenant tradition that furnishes a common basis of trust in social life’’ (CD, 155), which is what makes the Mosaic revolution an exceptional and creative countercurrent to the tenth-generation effect.10 But to get to the objection behind Brown’s remark, we have to look a little more closely at Mendenhall’s account of the tribal system. The Hebrew word for tribe is the same as that for baton or staff, the symbol of office or authority; the tribe is ‘‘that over which the staff of office rules. It is an administrative unit’’ within the federation of twelve tribes, and Mendenhall thinks it likely that ‘‘such units corresponded to already existing social groupings which entered the federation as corporate bodies’’ (TG, 184–85). They must have formed as territorially based peasant coalitions organized for protective purposes, and of course they would have the secondary function of guaranteeing that internal conflicts remained less important than dangers from the outside. Mendenhall does not think that individuals characteristically identified themselves ‘‘with the tribe to which their village was assigned. Our evidence for this is the fact that the names of the Twelve Tribes occur very rarely in narratives as gentilic designations either of villages, lineages, or persons. The lineage or the village was the unit of primary importance, and the tribe was a superstructure with very limited social function’’ (TG, 27). The tribal population was apparently diverse, a ‘‘mixed multitude,’’ and since ‘‘any emphasis on the diversity of social origins’’ can be expected to threaten a ‘‘newly formed community’’ by reinforcing stresses that derive from diversity, it will ‘‘be tacitly ignored in all official records and traditions, in favor of the common ancestor or common tradition’’ (TG, 180). Since ‘‘actual kinship is neither the basis nor origin of a tribe,’’ the common ancestor, whether or not he actually existed, was important for his social utility ‘‘in transferring the close ties of brotherhood from the actual kinship lineage to the larger tribal organization’’ (CD, 155).

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The tribes were too large for the fiction of strong kinship to be effective, given the cross-cutting village and peasant organization. But this only accentuates the special importance of tribal ideology. It may not have been the provision of solidarity that gave tribalism its chief value as an alternative to the urban/imperial power structure and that enabled it to function as a religious community, constituted by covenant into the Kingdom of Yahweh. It may rather have been the special figurative implications embedded in the correlation of tribalism with nomadic mobility and political marginality. Brueggemann concludes from Mendenhall’s analysis that the marginality was ‘‘not geographical in character, but rather social, economic, and political.’’11 I think this misses the point, Brueggemann’s own point about trajectories and the point made by Schneidau when he situates the issue within what I called earlier the biblical ideologeme, which Schneidau in Sacred Discontent describes as the cultural dialectic between shepherd and farmer: ‘‘The shepherd stands for a rebuke to urban values, while the farmer stands for acquiescence’’ (SD, 124). The image of geographical marginality was what the Israelites desperately needed, precisely because they did not have it. In one of his conventional forms, the tribal nomad has no fixed home; to sedentary villagers his migrations may resemble wanderings in the wilderness. For the Israelite villagers, to imagine themselves as nomads meant to hold themselves apart from the land in order to resist the structural doom, the positive feedback system, that begins with the first furrow ploughed and moves inexorably from agriculture to urbanization to centralized monarchy to bondage. At least this is what it seems to mean. But actually it does not quite mean ‘‘a rebuke to urban values,’’ if we view it in terms of the perspective inscribed in the reading I gave of Exodus. Within the setting of ancient agrarian civilization, the shepherd/nomad/tribe ideology is subject to the working of a particular logic, and this is the ten-generation logic of the larger system. I think the Redactor presents this ideology as something of a tactical and even ethical mistake; perhaps a heroic and courageous mistake, but maybe not heroic and courageous enough. At the center of that ideology he suggests a blindness inseparable from the insight that produced it. There is a way in which he already knows everything Mendenhall and his colleagues will discover.

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Consider this: when Mendenhall notes that many of the names of tribes were originally Canaanite geographical terms, he implies that the Israelites projected them back to eponymous ancestors so that the geographical association of peasants could be reunderstood as a tribal community of nomads bound together by kinship and religious covenant—nomads who long ago migrated into the land from outside and who remain closer to each other than they do to the land (CD, 155–56). In the text, this projective process is, naturally, reversed: the name Israel and the twelve other names gravitate from persons to tribes to places. From the disenchanted scholar’s standpoint, this is a mystification. Nevertheless, it states the true structural order of the historical process as modern scholarship reconstructs it. That is, it marks the alienation of authority and power from body to land, from mobile person to landbased office; and it marks the gradual loss of autonomy, the breakdown of solidarity, that accompanies the agriculturally induced drift from weak to strong kinship and from strong kinship to centralized territorial kingship. The ideological mystification turns out to be a structural truth, by the same modern criteria. This gives it the ironic impact of a boomerang. The ideology the peasants invent in order to sanction their resistance to the despotic effects of the gravitation to land is inscribed within the very process from which they are trying to escape.12 Mendenhall’s deconstruction only confirms the Redactor’s insight: the reversal that produces tribal ideology bears a deeper truth, a clearer perception of intractable reality, than the putative historical fact that place names preceded their tribal and personal displacements. Not only that: Mendenhall points out that the three classic functions of the Near Eastern king—administering law, waging war, and supervising the economy—the functions that, he says, ‘‘correspond to the modern functions of a state as a monopoly of force’’—’’were directly attributed to Yahweh’’ in early Israel. I conclude from this that Mendenhall does not realize that the failure of the Mosaic revolution was built into the very premises it started from, and into the very conditions of its origin and triumph. A phantom double of the pharaoh, what the Egyptians would have called an akh, a vital force emanating from the tomb, traveled with the fugitive Israelites, stored its potency within their early image of Yahweh, and waited for the time when they would inevitably return to spiritual Egypt, not as slaves

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who had been betrayed or been forced into captivity but as the captors and victors themselves. Thus the Redactor presents the Mosaic revolution as part of the problem, not as a thwarted escape from it; the seeds of Egypt are carried within it and will sprout the tenth-generation effect when sown in any new land. From this standpoint, the Davidic and Solomonic counterrevolution is merely the logical consequence of the Mosaic revolution. And this means that the idea of two conflicting trajectories, as Brueggemann has defined them, may itself be something of a mystification. I think the royalist and antiroyalist trajectories are certainly present in the text, twining and untwining throughout its career. But as I see it the Redactor is not only a closet antiroyalist, he is also another kind of antiroyalist: that is, he has an agenda different from that of the antiroyalist trajectory represented in the biblical traditions depicted by the commentators. A final glance at tribal ideology will suggest what this agenda is. Early in this essay I noted that agriculture creates both peasants and their enemies and defenders. Those enemies and defenders very often tend to be nonagriculturalists—that is, tribes of pastoral nomads. The agricultural system is a kind of vacuum machine that sucks in possessive nomads at the top and discharges dispossessed peasants from the bottom, into either captivity or wandering. There is of course a big difference between the enforced wandering of such groups and the periodic migrations that characterize mobile pastoralism.13 The mobility of pastoral nomads is not the consequence of loss, failed conquest, or exile; it is their preference, their condition, their basic economic strategy. Let us call them customary wanderers, to distinguish them from both enforced wanderers and possessive nomads who take over the governments of sedentary societies. The figure of the customary wanderer might well serve as the ideal condition aimed at by enforced wanderers who wish to avoid being taken over by the land they take over. Which of these three categories did the Israelites select for their tribal ideology? From the beginning, their quest had a land in view. It was promised to Abraham. They followed Joseph triumphantly into Egypt. They settled, and stayed, and ended up in bondage. The wanderers in the desert had not lost their own land. The Mosaic wandering, the Mosaic revolution, was not an escape from the bondage of settlement to the freedom of organized mobility.

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Its aim was conquest and new settlement. They followed Joshua into Canaan as they had followed Joseph into Egypt, and they failed to realize that the pattern of their Egyptian sojourn was transferable because it was embedded in the theory of possessive nomadism they selected. Later, when they found themselves eligible for the category of exile because they had a land, the same pattern returned in the form of the strong priesthood, whose problems were anticipated by Ezekiel. In the final words of his book, the mobile chariot of Yahweh is once again grounded: ‘‘The name of the city forever after shall be: Yahweh-is-there.’’ The period between the return from exile and the fall of the second temple is another sinking back into the ten-generation cycle. In the Redactorial view, then, nomadic ideology failed, not because it was a fiction, but because it was the wrong fiction, and, more important, because it did not remain within the boundaries of fiction. It was a fiction that validated the desire to possess the land and fulfill the historical promise, and it was an ideology whose fictiveness the Israelites tried to cancel out by chronotopical embodiment—that is, by incorporating it into their actual practices, their institutions and political agendas. The promised land is an abstraction blooded. Is there still no way out? There does not seem to be if—like a good historian—you insist on the referentiality of the Old Testament and look out through its eyes to the chronotope beyond it where ancient history is supposed to be going on, for then you join the other wanderers toward Canaan. I have no personal solution to this, but I think the Redactor does. He would say that the only way to avoid the doom is somehow to release yourself from the geographical and temporal limits of your historical locus, to find an Archimedean standpoint from which to get more leverage on it. For this you need a higher nomadism, and a second, more radical, Mosaic revolution. Such a nomadism exists, and such a revolution took place. The Old Testament has its genesis shortly after the zenith of the unified monarchy that embodies the political triumph of the ‘‘great nation.’’ It continues to grow and change during the period of the divided kingdom, during the Babylonian exile and captivity, and after the return and rebuilding. Its message to all those who possess the promised land, or who long for it, is clear: to possess the land is to lose the promise. Possession is loss; ergo, loss must be a kind of possession, a kind of

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promise—losing the land must be a condition for regaining the promise. (Not to have is the beginning of desire.) The text enshrines the loss for us to see, for us to share, for us to have. (To have what is not is its ancient cycle.) It isn’t that we cannot have the promise in the land because it is irrevocably past; it’s that we must not even long for anything like it in the future. The whole point of the conquest lies in the subsequent loss, and the significant wandering is not the migration to Canaan but the after-wandering, the wandering of exiles not of nomads, the dispersal that follows and reverberates with loss. The wandering narrative of this exile offers no expectation of return to its chronotopical referent. The road back is perpetually blocked, and blocked by the very biblical text in which its image survives. I connect the report that Moses did not live to see the conquest or enjoy the promised land with another report: that he is the author of the first five books of the Old Testament. Putting these together gives me the measure of the Redactor’s antiroyalism. If he resists the Davidic trajectory, he has also, logically, to resist the Mosaic trajectory; has to create and disseminate a permanent diaspora, not in default of the promised land but as its replacement. Against both sides of that single trajectory he lays down another, the trajectory of interpretation. His home— diaspora and promised land in one—can only be his text. In constituting the ten-generation cycle within it as the hard fact and fate of the history he knows, the Redactor creates the space outside that cycle for the People of the Book, creates the second Mosaic revolution, the one that still goes on, the one that gets challenged whenever anyone accepts its counterhistorical fiction, longs for the lie of the land, and tries to make it real. The text is the first Book of Loss, presenting itself to us as the abiding revision of what it abidingly absentiates. It places the history it writes forever beyond the grasp of its readers and sustains it as their object of desire. It disperses its theme of loss into all the passages it claims to revisit, or to celebrate. The linearity of its history gives way to the structural repetition of the doom that configures the linearity of the text—as in the example I gave of the coalescence of the three sanctuaries of Moses, Solomon, and the postexile temple. The traveling ark is a metaphoric embodiment, which is to say, it is portable. In the metaphoricity, the portability, of the text lies the seed of the one community that can gather

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around the holy of holies at its center, whose circumference is nowhere and which can bear it and birth it through time: the hermeneutical community, the community of textual desire. Significant in their perpetual obsolescence, the sanctuaries prefigure the covenant with the Book that creates and represents and displaces them. Not to have is the beginning of desire. To have what is not is its ancient hermeneutic cycle.

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Social Structure as Doom: The Limits of Heroism in Beowulf Harry Berger, Jr., and H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.

This essay is less a full-scale interpretation of Beowulf than a qualifying and occasionally critical extension of some recent readings of the poem to which our approach is heavily indebted. Our view of Beowulf owes much to Edward B. Irving, Jr.’s fine studies A Reading of ‘Beowulf ’ and Introduction to ‘Beowulf,’ with an assist from John Halverson’s essay ‘‘The World of Beowulf.’’ We propose to navigate along a line of inquiry somewhere between those struck by Irving and Halverson, for in significant ways these two interpretations contradict, and can therefore be made to complement, each other. We shall try to sketch out the various positions by considering some critical responses to a particular incident, Hrothgar’s raising of Heorot. The building of Heorot is the climax of Hrothgar’s career, a turning point from his years of active military conquest to a phase of stability and ‘‘cultural’’ leadership. Like Beowulf ’s barrow in years to come, Heorot will be the site and source of continuing group life, a widely visible center of protection, solidarity, reciprocity, and celebration, a seemingly permanent symbol of achieved Scylding glory. Hrothgar’s aim 321

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may be simply to settle down and enjoy the fruits of long years of battle, but the passage describing the raising of Heorot poses some questions about this: Him on mod bearn, 3æt healreced hatan wolde, medoærn micel men gewyrcean 3on[n]e yldo bearn æfre gefrunon, ond 3ær on innan eall gedælan geongum ond ealdum, swylc him God sealde buton folcscare ond feorum gumena. 2a ic wide gefrægn weorc gebannan manigre mæg3e geond 3isne middangeard, folcstede frætwan. Him on fyrste gelomp, ædre mid yldum, 3æt hit wear1 ealgearo, healærna mæst; scop him Heort naman se 3e his wordes geweald wide hæfde. He beot ne aleh, beagas dælde, sinc æt symle. Sele hlifade heah ond horngeap; hea1owylma bad, la1an liges; ne wæs hit lenge 3a gen, 3æt se ecghete a3umsweoran æfter wælni1e wæcnan scolde. 2a se ellengæst earfo1lice 3rage ge3olode, se 3e in 3ystrum bad, 3æt he dogora gehwam dream gehyrde hludne in healle. (67–89)1 It came to his mind that he would command men to construct a hall, a mead-building large[r] than the children of men had ever heard of, and therein he would give to young and old all that God had given him, except for common land and men’s bodies. Then I have heard that the work was laid upon many nations, wide through this middleearth, that they should adorn the folk-hall. In time it came to pass— quickly, as men count it—that it was finished, the largest of hall dwellings. He gave it the name of Heorot, he who ruled wide with his words. He did not forget his promise: at the feast he gave out rings,

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treasure. The hall stood tall, high and wide-gabled: it would wait for the fierce flames of vengeful fire; the time was not yet at hand for sword-hate between son-in-law and father-in-law to awaken after murderous rage. Then the fierce spirit painfully endured hardship for a time, he who dwelt in the darkness, for every day he heard loud mirth in the hall.2 Like other readers, we detect a faint echo of the building of the tower of Babel in this passage. But unlike some Christian and allegorizing critics, we don’t infer from this that Hrothgar is a spiritual son of Cain and Heorot an emblem of the earthly city. Nor are we persuaded by the cooler argument of R. E. Kaske, who views Hrothgar’s flaw through patristic glasses as a failure of fortitudo which affects the old king’s otherwise exemplary sapientia: ‘‘he is no longer at his best when facing decisions involving violence or the prospect of it,’’ and this accounts for ‘‘such mistakes as the marriage of Freawaru to Ingeld and, apparently, the unwise toleration of Hrothulf at the Danish court.’’ His courage having waned with age, ‘‘he now relies chiefly on counsel, kingly munificence, diplomacy, and wise endurance—all valuable means in themselves, but indifferent substitutes for fortitudo as a defense against the forces of naked violence.’’3 Thus Kaske sees Grendel ‘‘as the product of the present Danish situation,’’4 that is, as an allegorical projection of fortitudo breaking loose from sapientia’s control and joining forces with malitia. Both Halverson and Irving have persuasively argued against such Christian and ethical critiques of part 1.5 They defend Hrothgar and Heorot as good, not bad. ‘‘The point,’’ observes Irving, ‘‘is that Heorot is not a false good in the poem; it is not something like Pandemonium or the Tower of Babel in Paradise Lost, an assertion of Satanic pride and arrogance.’’ This view, he continues, may be encouraged by lines 8lb–85 describing the splendor and doom of Heorot; yet the passage only implies that Heorot, mighty as it is, will one day perish. But the tone of this passage is far from the smug I-told-you-so of the Christian moralizer; it is rather a tone of deep regret for the instability of all human things, even the greatest. The sons of Cain in the poem are the Grendels, not the Hrothgars. In

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terms of the dominant heroic values of the poem, Hrothgar’s Denmark is represented as very nearly the height of human achievement.6 Given so difficult a world, this achievement is bound to be less than perfect, and Irving’s studies contain many perceptive passages describing the weaknesses and instabilities of Danish institutions. We agree with Irving that the poet is not by any means presenting Hrothgar as an example of human pride or of the failure of courage. We see no ethical disapproval in the sense of criticism directed by the poet either at the intentions of this individual or at the sinfulness of fallen man aspiring to divine status. But we might well ask an ‘‘ethical’’ question at another level: has the society ‘‘done wrong’’—and not the Danes only, since the poem clearly embraces pan-Germanic institutions? It is here, for the poem as a whole, that Irving and Halverson part company. Irving often notes the inability of such institutions as vendetta and marriage to provide satisfactory solutions to the ‘‘powerful and centrifugal forces [that] must always have been felt in a society so dedicated to aggressive behavior and the strutting niceties of personal honor,’’7 but his response to this is expressed in casual and discrete observations that reflect nothing so much as the sense of the world held by the characters themselves.8 Like Hrothgar and Beowulf, Irving tends to bury the specific institutional bases of conflict and disorder in the purely ethical and universal terms of the opposition between the heroic individual and cosmic doom: the hero is all the nobler because he confronts so dark a world. In this connection, some of Halverson’s brief suggestions about social organization in the Dark Ages point to a more specific set of polarities existing in what might be called the middle range between hostile cosmos and hero: The way to stability . . . is through closer social ties and greater common effort. This is implicit in the treow-ethic, but conflicts with heroic individualism. . . . The Dark Ages period is an heroic age, the time of the individual hero. Everything depends on ‘‘the will of one man.’’ . . . It is the great men who, by force of personality and military capacity, alone keep together the fabric of civilization, and when they die the order they have established soon disintegrates. . . .

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The code of loyalty . . . expresses the intent of cooperation. Why does it fail? Because of individualism. The ‘‘cowardice’’ of the retainers is simply an expression of the priority of the individual over the group. . . . Beowulf, the greatest of heroes, is loved and revered by his nephew [sic], but the heroic solution is not always the best solution. It is not Beowulf ’s pride that brings about the ultimate catastrophe, but precisely his heroism. He is not a victim of ego inflation; he simply cannot see other alternatives to his own way. He is a victim of the heroic milieu; he is molded gloriously and inflexibly by his world.9 Where Irving tends to agree with the more reflective characters in the poem (Hrothgar and Beowulf ) that the source of man’s doom lies in the universal human condition, Halverson steps back behind the poet to suggest a specific historico-social cause in conflicting institutional ideals. He suggests a level at which ethical considerations are irrelevant because we are dealing with structural patterns operating for the most part beneath the consciousness of the characters in the poem. They may well feel the stresses and strains their society imposes on them, but the institutions that cause them are taken for granted and are not subject to analysis by the characters, who tend rather to ascribe their troubles to fate, God, pride, the way of the world, the ‘‘instability of all human things,’’ and other generalized perceptions of this sort. At this level Halverson provides a perspective complementary to Irving’s, but his explanation of the tensions in the poem centers on the problem of individualism and fails to account for the ways in which other institutions—raid, feud, marriage, feasting, gift-giving, and the rituals for magnifying honor—equally contribute to the difficulty of life in heroic society.10 He seems to accept at face value the poet’s apparently positive attitude toward the social order of the Danes, perhaps because he assumes that only modern readers and historians can identify institutional contradictions of this kind. For example, he tends—along with Irving—to overpraise Heorot in defending it. Both critics appeal to Mircea Eliade’s mythography of the sacred center, which leads Halverson to see Heorot ‘‘as a repetition of the original cosmogonic act’’: just as God ‘‘brought form out of chaos, light out of darkness, so the king brings order to his world and maintains it. . . . The

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lord’s hall defines meaningful reality.’’11 And Irving invokes Eliade to support the idea that the scop’s ‘‘Song of Creation serves to exalt the significance of the building of Heorot by associating divine creativity . . . with the purely human creativity of the Danish civilization.’’12 But surely we are meant to distinguish the viewpoint of Hrothgar and his scop— which the two critics here adopt—from that of the Beowulf poet: the scop’s song, itself a bright island of praise, is followed immediately by the poet’s dark sequel, which we, but not the Danes, hear. If God himself in the midst of his leafy new world wove kin-strife as well as kin-love into the primal family structure, how could Hrothgar do less (or more)? To create a family, a society, a dynasty, or a gift-hall is to create conditions that are inseparable from, and have no meaning apart from, social order: treachery, envy, isolation, and exile. To create an inside is to create an outside, but an outside existing within the bonds of hall and family as well as beyond them. The Babel echo, then, suggests something about the latent consequences, the doom, built into the meadhall and—if we may extend the reference—into all the interwoven institutions of Germanic society. At this point we part company with both Halverson and Irving. If the latter tends to stay too close to the characters, and therefore to miss or occlude patterns in the poem of which they are not conscious, the former tends to distance himself from the critical perspective of the poet, and therefore to simplify the trouble with Germanic society by failing to hear what the poet is telling us about institutions other than that of heroic individualism. In the following sections we take up and develop some of the clues offered by our two critics and try to articulate a more consistent account of the negative aspects of social structure, treating these as specific causes of the problems that confront the hero. Our argument turns on the hypothesis that, whereas the characters focus on ethical behavior—ideal heroic consciousness—as the key to order, the poem and the poet direct our attention to fundamental conditions of social structure that operate beneath or beyond consciousness and that constrain heroic behavior in ways not discernible by the characters. These latent conditions, as presented in the poem, have certain resemblances to the motivational and structural bases of tribal society, which one anthropologist has character-

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ized in terms of Hobbes’s primitive state of ‘‘Warre,’’ the war ‘‘of every man against every man’’: Individuals and subgroups of tribal society maintain the certain right and potential inclination to secure by force their safety, gain, and glory. . . . Warre exists, but mainly in the form of an underlying circumstance. In fact, tribesmen live in kin groupings and communities within which feuding is usually suppressed, and they have benefit too of economic, ritual, and social institutions conducive to good order. To speak of Warre, then, is to uncover by analysis tendencies ordinarily concealed by powerful impositions of the cultural system. Primitive anarchy is not the appearance of things. It is the unconscious of the system. Yet as the outward behavior of a person may not be intelligible except as the transfiguration of unconscious desires, so the objective organization of tribal society may only be understood as the repressive transformation of an underlying anarchy. Many of the special patterns of tribal culture became meaningful precisely as defense mechanisms, as negations of Warre.13 If we ignore the misleading Freudian metaphor, we can more easily adapt this description to the different conditions of post-tribal Germanic society by noting that assertions of Warre in that society are as important as negations. Feuding is less fully suppressed in heroic society than in those of which Sahlins speaks. It is in fact a necessary institution. Germanic society is post-tribal in being centered on the war band, or comitatus, more than on actual kin groups. Kin-strife widens as ‘‘kin’’ relations are extended to, or augmented by, the bonds of the comitatus. The society has to channel and constrain violence chiefly because it values and encourages it. The kin group gives way, or is extended, to the comitatus,14 because the latter is a more efficient means of protection against raid and vengeance. Yet the comitatus relies on raiding for economic purposes and therefore encourages ellen and honor seeking, which in turn provide a heroic context of motivation for the acquiring and redistributing of treasure. The reliance on honor and performance supplant the more ‘‘automatic’’ ascriptions of function and role prescribed by kinship patterns in tribal societies. But honor is as jealous and proud as it is zealous, and the ceremonial publicity attending the reward for performance may stir up

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envy and discontent, ultimately dishonor and treachery (e.g., Unferth). All this naturally keeps alive the very dangers which the comitatus is organized to fend off. Intertribal feuds simmer for generations, providing the environment of Warre in which the men of heroic societies pass their lives, for example, the predicted fate of the Geats at the hands of their old enemies, the Franks, Frisians, and Swedes. The same ambivalence and contradictions inhere in peace-weaving institutions. Wergeld is substituted for vendetta to reduce bloodshed and bring feud under jural control, but it also diminishes the opportunity for enhancing and preserving honor through aggressive behavior. The ironic references to Grendel’s refusal to pay wergeld set the stage for the hero to enter and win glory. As the Finn and Ingeld episodes suggest, marriage brings into close contact groups that would otherwise be enemies at a distance, thus exacerbating tensions and increasing the chances that sooner or later peace-weaving will become war-making. As in exogamy, kin groups and war bands have both an economic and a metabolic need of outsiders in order to guarantee the continuing supply or circulation of women, children, protective alliances, treasure, honor, risk, and potential corpses. The structure of heroic institutions requires and therefore creates enemies and victims as well as the heroes who thrive on them. The backlash from the comitatus is felt within dynastic kin groups. Kinstrife is intensified. Hrothgar’s sons and Onela’s nephews are threatened because the stakes are higher, the crown more attractive, the sanctions against kin murder less potent in the setting provided by large war bands and ‘‘international’’ politics. Hygd is rightly uneasy about Heardred. Wealhtheow’s double uneasiness—about Beowulf (1169ff.) and Hrothulf (1216ff )—testifies to the dilemma posed by the necessity and danger of having heirs in such a setting. Yet the alternative, exemplified by Beowulf, who died childless (and, perversely, by Grendel’s mother, who died heirless), proves to be even worse. This institutional network or, rather, tangle supplies the limiting conditions of the heroic world, and not merely of the single conflict between heroism and common effort (as Halverson would have it) nor of the extrasocial grimness of cosmic fate (as Irving would have it). ‘‘The edge of the grimpen’’ is an edge created by those who make boundaries. In

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what follows, we explore some aspects of the doom created by heroic institutions.

The Munificent King and the Meadhall Hrothgar has spent most of his life doing everything right and now finds himself suffering for it. He ‘‘was given success in warfare, glory in battle, so that his retainers gladly obeyed him and their company grew into a great band of warriors’’ (64ff.). He built the biggest and best of meadhalls, acquired an exemplary wife and peace-weaver from the Helmings, displayed great liberality and piety, is known abroad as a wise and good king. Why, then, should he be humiliated by Grendel and castigated by critical Christians? What can the alien mearcstapa possibly have to do with him? Where did he come from, and why? We know more than the Danes do on this score, since it isn’t clear that they have been filled in on Grendel’s ancestry. Grendel is less an outsider than he seems. But the poet suggests through his language even more intimate relations between Grendel and Heorot. Consider once again lines 82–89 in the passage quoted earlier. Grendel, still nameless, begins his career in the poem interwoven with Heorot, Hrothgar, and Ingeld. This convergence is produced in the first reference to him, ellengæst, and is intensified if we momentarily hear or think ellorgast: Grendel is not yet alien; for a moment he shares the ellen of bold warriors like Hrothgar and Ingeld. That earfo5lice can mean ‘‘impatiently’’ as well as ‘‘painfully’’ assimilates his present inactivity to ‘‘the time not yet at hand for sword-hate.’’ Grendel and Heorot are creatures ‘‘conscious’’ of waiting; they ‘‘know’’ what conscious men do not. They wait for burning or booty together, and momentarily Grendel’s spirit melts into that of the son-in-law Ingeld, or into the fierce feuding spirit that joins Hrothgar with Ingeld in war, in marriage, and again in war. All manifest the spirit of kin-strife. Presumably at this moment the feud between Danes and Heatho-Bards is temporarily pacified by the promised gift of Freawaru. Yet even if ferocity only smolders, even if it sleeps, the contentious spirit holds the marches of consciousness and waits for the inevitable dawn of kin-strife. Grendel will break forth first, Ingeld later, no doubt because Grendel as a walker-alone is relatively free, while Ingeld is subject to the constraints and displacements by

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which human institutions delay or temper violence while recreating it in new and more complex forms: the incestuous monsters are ultimately self-destroying in their blind violence, but the simple immediacy of their relationship is clean of the kinds of anxiety, distrust, betrayal, and deeply cleft loyalties generated by the intertribal dialectic of raid, feud, precarious peace-weaving, and the symbiosis of honor and resentment. The spirit of Cain is never too far away. Both destroyers, and both dangers to Heorot, are verbally presented as consequences of the building of the hall: its doomful future is built into it as surely as its conspicuous splendor and iron reinforcements, as surely as the ‘‘dream’’ of feasting, gift-exchange, and honor rituals that Heorot magnifies. These illustrious activities, brightened by the meadhall, work like a magnet to draw envious raiders and outsiders. Greed, competition, and distrust are intensified among kinsmen and retainers. And why should they not be? The poet clearly describes the building of Heorot as Hrothgar’s culminating display of power. It is a heroic deed, another act of conquest topped off with a beot—promise or threat—of implacable prestation.15 And this is presented as Hrothgar’s plan: Him on mod bearn that he would command men to build (gewyrcean) the hall, no sooner thought than done—weorc gebannan on many peoples, it rose quickly, and he whose word-sway was wide over men gave it its name. Gewyrcean and weorc here imply mighty achievement, painful or difficult accomplishment: the magical speed combined with the difficulty of the labor imposed on many tribes reflects the magnitude of Hrothgar’s deed. Its likeness to the fiat of God is sealed by the scop’s song of creation. Heorot is the embodiment of heroic aspiration. And it is not only the sequel to years of contention and violence; it is itself the product of a contentious spirit—not Hrothgar’s alone, but that built into his social order.16 If contentiousness and violence, the fear of kin-strife, the perpetual uneasiness of the ‘‘Warre . . . of every man, against every man,’’ are at the roots of human association, they must somehow be put to use. Contentiousness must be made to enhance group solidarity. Thus, among the benefits that flow from the gracious nature of a liberal king like Hrothgar are bloody occasions. Thanes are under obligation to their lord for the chance to fight and kill or die nobly, to contend with others in manliness and compete for the position, treasure, and honor with which valor and

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loyalty are rewarded. Hrothgar shares with the poet a clear and consistent understanding of the two-phase temporal pattern of ideal lordship, a pattern enunciated in the old king’s long sermon (1700–84) as well as in the passage under consideration: first you spend most of your time fighting, then you spend most of your time giving and rewarding. The building of Heorot must seem to Hrothgar to signify the happy end of his initial raiding career, and the peaceful beginning of a more positive way to express and share his heroic being. Perhaps also, after years of contention, of tensed and always ready awareness, there can be a tempered de´tente, a de-tensing just sufficient to allow more expansive hall-joys, among which the savoring of the glorious past will no doubt be a prime source of renewed pleasure and solidarity. Thus Beowulf tells Hygelac that the old Scylding was accustomed to speak ‘‘of times far-off,’’ and ‘‘of his youth, his battle-strength’’ (2105, 2112–13). The trouble with this ‘‘dream’’ is that its creators and participants are asleep to the latent motives and consequences that necessarily alter its character. Fighting is not the only mode of contention. As the language of our passage reveals, gift-giving and reciprocity are equally contentious. Lords and thanes strive to outdo each other in service and reward, and in expressions of love, loyalty, and obligation. The contentious nature of gift-giving is discussed at length in Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, for example: Between vassals and chiefs, between vassals and their henchmen, the hierarchy is established by means of . . . gifts. To give is to show one’s superiority, to show that one is . . . magister. To accept without returning or repaying more is to face subordination, to become a client and subservient, to become minister. . . . The aim is to be the first, the finest, the luckiest, strongest, and richest.17 This personalistic economics provides the basis for the reciprocity that structures the social relations of lord and retainers. Its basically competitive character is stressed in the description of the building of Heorot as an appropriately ornate setting for a liberality so heroic that it must surely lay all who approach the gifstol under uneasy obligation. ‘‘Charity,’’ observes Mauss, ‘‘wounds him who receives,’’ and ‘‘the gift not yet repaid debases the man who accepted it’’ (63). This theme is not explicit in Beowulf, yet its presence must be felt wherever political relationships

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among individuals are welded to ethical concepts—honor and shame— and are fluid enough, free enough from kinship prescription, to depend upon reciprocal performance. The king’s gift is not only a reward for service done but also a challenge to match munificence and avoid shame by further service. Kings like Hrothgar depend on the potential wound charity can inflict to tighten the bonds of loyalty and fellowship. Prestation is a giving which is lending, a challenge to be met by counter-prestation or some other reciprocating act.18 Heorot is a challenge—a beot—to the rest of the world as well as a gift to the Danes, and a glance at some responses to Hrothgar’s demanding generosity will help establish the institutional rather than ethical character of the trouble in Denmark. The range of responses is bounded by the extreme cases of Beowulf and Grendel: Hrothgar for once finds it hard to match with treasure the generous heroism of Beowulf; and he is unable to give Grendel anything at all, not merely because Grendel will not reciprocate or will not deign to receive, but because God will not let him approach the gifstol to receive treasure (168–69)—this, it should be noted, might be a problem for Hrothgar as well as for Grendel. Whatever else Grendel represents, he is by pedigree the product of faulty giving, descended from one who stirred up kin-strife because his own gift-giving was less acceptable to God. To see the evil and rancor and exile of Cain’s brood of walkers-alone as the effect of defeated or rejected gift-giving is to understand both how important Hrothgar’s special art is to group solidarity and how precarious is the psycho-social atmosphere that such an art creates. This uneasiness is exacerbated by the presence of Beowulf. The alternate definitions of his mission which he and Hrothgar give constitute a verbal duel. First Beowulf tells the guard (258ff.) that he has come to help the ‘‘protector of the people,’’ teach him how to conquer his enemy and ease him of his affliction: ‘‘Or else ever after he will suffer tribulations, constraint, while the best of houses remains there on its high place.’’19 When Beowulf ’s presence is announced to the old king by Wulfgar, the terms of his answer tend to diminish the hero’s overpowering image: Hrothgar remembers Beowulf as a boy, he knows his father received a home and wife through the generosity of Hrethel, and now Ecgtheow’s eafora has come here, ‘‘sought a fast friend’’ (sohte holdne wine)

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in Hrothgar. Beowulf is a good man sent by God, and Hrothgar will reward him well with treasure, repay him for his mod7ræce (372–85). Against this carefully reductive picture of the hero as a proper object for the king’s friendship and munificence, Beowulf ’s address to Hrothgar (407–55) threatens to swell his ethos and the value of his offer, his risking of life, beyond the limits of adequate repayment. During this speech, and before his beot, he reminds Hrothgar that Heorot ‘‘stands empty and useless,’’ and says he came because the ‘‘best wise earls’’ of the Geats, knowing his strength, advised him to volunteer his services to the king. Hrothgar meets this with a different account (457–72), reminding him of a prior obligation, for Hrothgar had settled a feud between Geats and Wylfings by paying the wergeld for a Wylfing whom Ecgtheow had killed. Against Beowulf ’s emphasis on his own singular power and generosity—the claim on Hrothgar is heightened by Beowulf ’s vivid image of the less likely prospect, Grendel’s victory feast (445–55)—he affirms the principle that sons should honor the debts incurred by their fathers. Not long after, when stirred to another account of his feats by Unferth’s insult, Beowulf ’s taunt to the fratricide is generalized to include all the Danes (595–601): Grendel ‘‘has noticed that he need not much fear the hostility, not much dread the terrible sword-storm of your people, the Victory-Scyldings. He exacts forced levy, shows mercy to none of the Danish people; but he is glad, kills, carves for feasting, expects no fight from the Spear-Danes.’’20 Thus in his own way Beowulf threatens Heorot—or what it stands for—as much as Grendel, and Hrothgar is pressed to predefine the hero’s promise and achievement so as to keep it within the bounds of reciprocity. In this latent manner we feel the presence of the problem articulated by Mauss: ‘‘charity wounds him who receives.’’ Hrothgar is arming himself against that possible wound. And when Beowulf ’s conquest of Grendel is celebrated, the poet’s account of the treasure-giving stresses two features: the heroic quality of Hrothgar’s repayment, and the uneasiness that lurks beneath the joyful surface of the ceremony (1020–62). Irving comments on the fact that gift-giving must be public and ostentatious: Gifts must not only change hands but must be seen to change hands. Many watched . . . as the wargear was brought into the hall; Beowulf

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had no need to feel ashamed of these gifts in front of all the warriors. . . . [The poet] voices approval of Hrothgar’s manly generosity, remarking that no one can find fault with it (with the suggestion implicit that it is always open to public criticism).21 But the negative implication seems to us to be a little stronger than that: ‘‘no man will ever find fault with them—not he that will speak truth according to what is right’’ (1048–49). This conspicuously suppresses the opposing thought: that someone might find fault—for example, some one of those fighting men before whom Beowulf had no need to be ashamed. The public nature of the ceremony is such as to tempt onlookers to envy and fault-finding as well as gratitude and admiration. The institution in this fashion demands control and watchfulness, not only from heroic giver and receiver, but from all those lesser comrades who depend on them. The poet emphasizes this need a few lines later in his sententious conclusion to the gift-giving, which is also a transition to the account of the doomed hall-joys of Hildeburh and Finn: ‘‘Yet is discernment everywhere best, forethought of mind. Many a thing dear and loath he shall live to see who here in the days of trouble long makes use of the world’’ (1059–62). The ambivalence of gift-giving is stressed in the Finn and Freawaru episodes and, in a somewhat lower key, in the network of passages tracing the necklace, breast-armor, and standard from Wealhtheow and Heorogar through Beowulf and Hygd to Hygelac, who wore and lost them all, along with his life, ‘‘when for pride he sought trouble, feud with the Frisians’’ (1201–14). Mauss observes that ‘‘the theme of the fateful gift, the present or possession that turns into poison, is fundamental in Germanic folklore. The Rhine Gold is fatal to the man who wins it.’’22 Freawaru, and probably Hildeburh, are gifts who become poison; their very presence and situation generate anew the anxieties they are intended to alleviate. Irving draws from such entanglements the lesson that ‘‘gifts are obvious symbols of human success and felicity, but they cannot govern the future, they cannot keep people alive or ensure that their expectations will always come true.’’23 This again seems to skew the message, which is, not that gifts fail to govern the future, but that gift-giving governs the future only too well: it bears within itself the destructive

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possibilities that cancel its manifest function. The pattern of reversal, edwenden, about which Irving has many good things to say, derives less from the general unreliability of life than from the excessive reliability of heroic institutions which sooner or later impose on men both sides of their character. The point to be made about edwenden is that it is, emphatically, a pattern, a predictable structure dynamically at work beyond the consciousness of the men locked into it, revealing itself to them only in their perpetually uneasy consciousness of wyrd, doom, what happens because life and the world are the way they are. This uneasiness is nicely caught by Mauss, who describes how, in primitive societies, men in times of feasting and ceremony ‘‘meet in a curious frame of mind with exaggerated fear and an equally exaggerated generosity,’’ because ‘‘there is no middle path. There is either complete trust or mistrust,’’ therefore festival and warfare lie very close together. In ‘‘setting up the will for peace against rash follies’’ of violence, tribesmen ‘‘succeed in substituting alliance, gift and commerce for war, isolation and stagnation.’’24 In Beowulf, these substitutions retain their original contentiousness and danger in transformations that keep them alive as sleepers.

The Meadhall and the Monster In Hrothgar’s munificence the substitution has the same aggressive valence and may be understood to produce the same latent anxieties. There is another reason for this: consider, for example, the brief reference to the Franks plundering the Geat bodies after the death of Hygelac, and taking with them the vaunted neck-ring and armor given him by Beowulf (1212–14). Consider also the related reference to Hama, who apparently stole another neck-ring from Eormenric and ‘‘got eternal favor’’ (1198– 201). Consider, finally, the more extensive speculation of Beowulf that the gift of Freawaru will lead to a situation in which the Heatho-Bards will rankle at the sight of the Danes wearing the gomelra lafe of Ingeld’s people (2032ff.)—that is, the booty taken in previous raids and redistributed by Hrothgar. These allusions remind us that the treasures Hrothgar hands out must come from somewhere; the poet refers only twice to human smithies. Hrothgar’s gift-giving is a challenge full of latent strife

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because the other side of giving is taking. If the Danes seem to have few active enemies, Hrothgar’s thirty-eight or so years of successful war must have produced a host of ill-wishers—those, for example, on whom the burden of building Heorot was laid, as well as those whose treasures he plundered: maybe the building of Heorot is simply to be understood as the positive or honorific side of that dark coin.25 This notion suggests the appropriateness of introducing Ingeld and Grendel together with the building and doom of Heorot. The extent of the king’s munificence and the hall’s magnificence may also be the measure of how many enemies lurk—like Grendel—dreamum bedæled and bealohydig (721, 723), embers under ashes. Grendel may himself be a caricature in which are gathered all those deprived and festering spirits, those wounded and angered souls, whose mod is abstracted from the network of human creatures and social institutions containing it in both senses of that term—producing and domesticating the ellengæst, allaying and reviving Grendelian rancor. Grendel taking his thirty thanes home is hu5e hremig (124), like a plundering warrior. As taking is the other side of giving, and contention the other side of generosity, so Grendel shadows the darker antecedents and consequences latent in Hrothgar’s good works.26 But this is not, we repeat, to be construed in terms of ethico-psychological categories, for example, ‘‘unconscious pride,’’ to which Christianizing critics appeal when attributing the gilded rottenness in Denmark to our old stock, or to pagan vanitas. Nor is Hrothgar a Germanic version of the fisher king, though there are some structural similarities in his dilemma: the presence of an evil intrinsically connected to the ‘‘land’’—that is, the society—and therefore eradicable only by one who is an outsider, and who is singular or ‘‘touched’’ in some magical or religious sense. Hrothgar’s good works are exemplary of the best in heroic society generally; what is good or bad in the poem is pan-Germanic. And the deep-structural ambivalence, the edwenden, of hall-building, gift-giving, honor-seeking, and peace-weaving—with raid, plunder, slaughter, feud, vengeance, envy, resentment, and treachery finely woven into them—is presented as the practical basis that both supports and constrains the way men live, behave, act, choose, and think. With one possible exception,27 Grendel does not appear as an allegorical projection of something specifically wrong with Hrothgar and the Danes. He and Heorot are causally linked

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crystallizations of the bad and good features of heroic institutions. If the defeat of Grendel does not spell the end of Danish troubles, the burning of Heorot does not end either the Scylding dynasty or the Danish people. This aspect of Grendel’s significance is persuasively brought out by Irving’s descriptions of his human and social dimension: He is the rebellious exile, the ymbsittend, the neighbor who cannot be tamed, will not pay tribute, refuses to be brought within the frame of social order by force of arms or rule of law.28 Grendel seems representative at times of an evil and arrogant individualism that is wholly destructive in its effects on society and has some connection thematically with the feuds smoldering below the surface of the poem or with a figure like Heremod, type of the self-willed and wicked king.29 If Grendel has had originally a human kind of strength like Cain’s, it has now blurred and become almost unrecognizable; he is a disturbingly alien creature who will no longer fit our familiar categories. But he is never totally unrecognizable. The poem succeeds in giving the figure of Grendel its memorable power precisely by keeping him flickering in that half world on the edge of the human, manncynne fram, far out away from mankind, and yet part of mankind.30 At once an ellorgast and a mearcstapa, he is not only arrogant, not only—as Kaske would have it—an embodiment of ‘‘purely malicious violence.31 He is a joyless creature (wonsæli wer, 105) who endured distress (7rage ge7olode, 87) when he heard the hall-joys; a despairing walker-alone (angengea, 165) forbidden to touch or receive treasure; one deprived of joy (dreamum bedæled, 721),32 who Godes yrre bær (711)—an odd phrase, suggesting that Grendel brought to others the divine wrath he felt (perhaps as his own) and under which he suffered. Cain’s crime and exile followed his contentious effort to please his lord with gifts and the lord’s rejection of this effort. Grendel is thus no purely malicious outsider but an exile from the cynn of man to which his ancestors belonged. His hatred springs from the pain of the have-not, the violent knocker at the door who wants to return and possess or destroy the forbidden hall-joys that torment him.

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In these brief ethical references to his underlying helplessness and fatedness, the poet links hatred, anger, and violence in a general way to a deep human fear—the dread of losing existence, freedom, security, favor, and companionship. The structural edwenden of heroic institutions continually jeopardizes these necessities of life in the process of sustaining them. Like Grendel, who is doomed to bear Cain’s mark and God’s anger, the institutions seem to have the spirit of kin-strife woven into them. Yet, unlike Grendel, they do not make themselves known. Or rather, they make themselves known only as Grendel (and his mother). Grendel serves as a kind of decoy, drawing the fear of the Danes and the wrath of the hero toward himself. And the poet shows the significance of this diversionary function by changing the characterization of Grendel as the poem proceeds. We now turn to explore these changes. Irving’s interpretation offers an approach to the changes, but in a vague, germinal form, which remains undeveloped. Along with other critics, he remarks on Grendel’s dull-wittedness, his misplaced expectations, and the self-destructive ‘‘combination of passionate juggernaut will and dimmed intellect’’ which make him seem ‘‘as much a blind victim of fate as an agent of it.’’33 He shows how the poet presents Grendel’s defeat in a comic and derisive light, and concludes that ‘‘to expose the essential incongruity of Grendel, half bogey and half outlaw, by bringing him into the sunlit world of laughter is a powerful exorcism, perhaps the most powerful of all. The devil cannot endure to be mocked.’’34 But he fails to distinguish this narrative mode of helplessness from the deeper helplessness described above, and he misses the real point of the comic exorcism, which is that it diverts attention from more proximate and permanent dangers. The story of Grendel is like those narrative myths which, in primitive and traditional societies, serve to block further explanations by giving definite answers that set the curious or anxious mind at rest—and serve often to distract it from the underlying insoluble sources of social stress. The initial helplessness Grendel externalizes is that of an embittered wræcca, a victim of ancient kin-strife and rebellion against a munificent lord; an exiled soul doomed to privation, isolation, and violence as a way of life, roused to envious rage by the presence of all he desires but cannot share. After being introduced in momentary conjunction with Heorot

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and Ingeld, he is extricated from that complex and given his own alien being. Like a scapegoat, he bears the mark of Cain beyond the border into the nonhuman world. But his Old Testament genealogy keeps his human meaning before us and suggests how Irving’s appeal to Grendel’s more universal significance is to be understood:35 as an evil transcending this or any individual monster, sown in the world with the generation of the first human family, and therefore never to be finally purged by the heroic solution of single encounter. Through line 189, Grendel retains this universal significance as an enemy of mankind, reflecting the kind of spiritual and psychological evil connected with transgressions against the social order and customs of the Danes (150ff.). Grendel is psychologically most powerful when he possesses the hall and its occupants—when his assaults communicate his own despair to his victims who, in their helplessness, turn to heathen sacrifices and pray for deliverance from the gastbona. After Beowulf arrives, Grendel’s humanity becomes increasingly physical and social. While the introduction of his eerie habitat adds strangeness to his being, intensifies his alien quality, by line 1258 he has become a member of a truncated kin group. Just as Grendel had materialized from the Heorot-Ingeld complex, so his mother appears in close connection with Wealhtheow’s uneasy references to her sons’ future, following the scop’s song of Hildeburh. This introduces a new set of themes as Grendel’s ‘‘mother, woman, and monster wife’’ emerges from nowhere to become his nuclear family and jural avenger. Hrothgar now explains (1345ff.) that there were two such mearcstapan, both human in form, and when Beowulf penetrates the depths of the mere, that alien place suddenly changes into a mirror image of the human hall and hearth. Thus as Grendel and his mother become stranger and more monstrous to the other characters in the poem, the evil they embody appears to us increasingly to reflect locally specific problems inherent in Germanic society: problems of feud and vengeance; the recurrent outbreak of violent disorder (the power, in Kaske’s terms, ‘‘of even defeated violence to spawn further violence’’); and the problems of succession and perpetuation implied by the fact that Grendel and his aglæcwif are the last survivors of their particular branch of Cain’s brood. Hildeburh and Grendel’s wife represent opposing extremes: the former a passive political object, the

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latter a usurper of the male avenger’s role. Between these extremes, Wealhtheow feels the pressures and dilemma of the woman’s role as wife and mother, feels hovering over her perhaps the specter of the same ultimate doom that frustrates the Grendel dynasty. But the actual assault on the hall by Grendel’s wife has the effect of diverting everyone to an episode which, however grim its onset, falls clearly within the consoling category of adventures for the invincible hero. By conveniently locating and distancing these problems in the hateful outsiders, the poet prepares them for easy disposal by Beowulf. Thus poet and hero co-operate in exorcising and destroying the enemies, and in bringing on another happy ending. Or so it appears to the Danes. We see something different, namely, that the embodiment of evil in monsters diverts the characters from the true intra-psychic and -social sources of more abiding trouble. As a condensed and melodramatic version of the trouble, the monstrous manifestation followed by the happy ending provides the Danes with a deceptively skewed exemplum of evil and its conquest. The poet consistently distinguishes the messages received by his characters from those received by us, never more so than when his characters are moralizing.36 Hrothgar’s sermon provides a beautiful example of this. After receiving from Beowulf the hilt of the giant sword, the old king praises his wisdom as well as his strength, foreseeing a successful career for him as leader of the Geats—if he will learn by the example of Heremod to keep up his guard against unsnyttru and oferhygd. Heremod’s career in its beginning was similar to Hrothgar’s: God gave him power and strength, set him up over all men, but, unlike Hrothgar, Heremod neglected to ‘‘give rings to the Danes for glory.’’ What follows develops the contrast. God gives wisdom, land, and earlship to mankind, makes the kingdoms of the world so subject to a man of illustrious family 3æt he his selfa ne mæg his unsnyttrum ende ge3encean. Wuna1 he on wiste; no hine wiht dwele1 adl ne yldo, ne him inwitsorh on sefa(n) sweorce1, ne gesacu ohwær ecghete eowe1, ac him eal worold wende1 on wiIIan: he 3æt wyrse ne con—,

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o1 3æt him on innan oferhygda dæl weaxe1 ond wrida1; 3onne se weard swefe1, sawele hyrde; bi1 se slæp to fæst, bisgum gebunden, bona swi1e neah, se 3e of flanbogan fyrenum sceote1. 4onne bi1 on hre3re under helm drepen biteran stræle —him bebeorgan ne con—, wom wundorbebodum wergan gastes; 3ince1 him to lytel, 3æt he lange heold, gytsa1 gromhydig, nallas on gylp sele1 fætte beagas, ond he 3a for1gesceaft forgyte1 ond forgyme1, 3æs pe him ær God sealde, wuldres Waldend, weor1mynda dæl. (1733–52) that in his unwisdom he may not himself have mind of his end. He lives in plenty; illness and age in no way grieve him, neither does dread care darken his heart, nor does enmity bare sword-hate, for the whole world turns to his will—he knows nothing worse—until his portion of pride increases and flourishes within him; then the watcher sleeps, the soul’s guardian; that sleep is too sound, bound in its own cares, and the slayer most near whose bow shoots treacherously. Then is he hit in the heart, beneath his armor, with the bitter arrow—he cannot protect himself—with the crooked dark commands of the accursed spirit. What he has long held seems to him too little, angry-hearted he covets, no plated rings does he give in men’s honor, and then he forgets and regards not his destiny because of what God, Wielder of Heaven, has given him before, his portion of glories. (30–31) It seems unlikely that Hrothgar is thinking of Grendel. Grendel’s body is out there somewhere, dead; his head is on display in the hall. ‘‘The accursed spirit’’ is probably the devil whose ambush was set up by his soul-Quisling, the pride that makes a conquering ruler covetous and niggardly. The poet’s language, however, ought to remind us of Grendel chiefly because of the image of sleep. The victims of Grendel and his mother were all men who fell asleep in the hall after feasting, celebrating, and drinking. There are some nine references to the unhappy hall-sleepers,37 a more general reference to man’s soul which must seek ‘‘the place

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where, after its feasting, one’s body will sleep fast in its death-bed’’ (1008), and two references to Beowulf ’s watchful waiting (660 and 1268). These sleepers and wakers do not enact an allegory of pride and alertness in the sense defined by the example of Heremod. On the contrary, the sleepers are all beneficiaries of Heremod’s implied counter-example, Hrothgar himself. Their sleep is the consequence of his careful liberality, a consequence of golden Heorot. The good king gives them their ‘‘dream,’’ and therefore the evil monster takes their lives. The institutional double bind is apparent in the way the two messages cut athwart each other: Heremod dramatizes the message ‘‘if you try to keep it, you lose,’’ while the latent message is, ‘‘if you share it, you lose.’’ The Grendelian spirit stands behind each act of giving in two ways. (1.) It is neutralized in that the taking which aroused that spirit, or which depends on it, is placated by the act of giving what has been taken. The more you give, the more you ought to be able to neutralize the effect of the prideful spirit within you and within those to whom you give. Yet, (2) the more you give, the more you arouse contention by your conspicuous success and wealth, by the charity that threatens to wound and the riches tempting to greed. Furthermore, the neutralization in (1) is actively centered in the most important of social functions, feasting in the meadhall. The purposes of feasting are to renew solidarity and tighten social bonds; to give treasure or gifts, to bestow praise and honor; to pledge help or vengeance, to define status and value or impose one’s charismatic presence on others, and to commemorate past deeds and heroes, often by way of celebrating a more recent triumph. As the poem reveals in more than one place, feasting and beer-drinking may bring on shame, envy, and strife. But its manifest function in Beowulf is to heighten the sense of group security. Its latent disfunction is, therefore, that it may lull the members of the war band into the sleep of false security. They may look in the wrong places for the sources of trouble. The rhythm of fighting and feasting may produce the false sense of the happy ending. At the same time, the various hall scenes also suggest the lurking uneasiness which qualifies the notion that feasting merely lulls warriors to sleep. We may also feel in those scenes, as a desperate undercurrent, the insistence that the hall-celebration should be compact of ‘‘dream’’—somewhat like

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keeping a bad party going by insisting that one is really having a good time, and proving it by drinking oneself to sleep. Whether the tension is reduced because the feasters believe they are in a safe place or exacerbated because they are never sure it is safe, the sleep that invites Grendel is certainly not the ethical sleep exemplified by Heremod. As individual figures, both Grendel and Heremod are distractions who prompt the Danes to locate the source of their trouble in corrupt forms of consciousness, in bad men and monsters. The selfdestructive behavior of the outsiders conceals from the Danes what it reveals to us, the potentially destructive aspects of heroic institutions even at their best. The continuation of Hrothgar’s sermon reveals a mounting uncertainty in his own mind. He exhorts Beowulf to keep himself from Heremod’s wickedness, but he then goes on to itemize other dangers not ascribable to ethical failure. He concludes with a vague, perhaps puzzled, reference to his own predicament. Evil, he begins, befalls the evil man: Hit on endestæf eft gelimpe1, 3æt se lichoma læne gedreose1, fæge gefealle1; feh1 o3er to, se 3e unmurnlice madmas dæle3, eorles ærgestreon, egesan ne gyme1. Bebeorh 3e gone bealoni1, Beowulf leofa, secg betsta, ond 3e 3æt selre geceos, ece rædas; oferhyda ne gym, mære cempa! Nu is 3ines mægnes blæd ane hwile; eft sona bi1, 3æt 3ec adl o11e ecg eafo3es getwæfe1, o11e fyres feng, o11e flodes wylm, o11e gripe meces, o11e gares fliht, o11e atol yldo; o11e eagena bearhtm forsite1 ond forsworce1; semninga bi1, 3æt 1ec, dryhtguma, dea1 oferswy1e1. Swa ic Hring-Dena hund missera weold under wolcnum ond hig wigge beleac manigum mæg3a geond 3ysne middangeard,

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æscum ond ecgum, 3æt ic me ænigne under swegles begong gesacan ne tealde. Hwæt, me 3æs on e3le edwenden cwom, gyrn æfter gomene, seo31an Grendel wear1, ealdgewinna, ingenga min; ic 3ære socne singales wæg modceare micle. (1753–78) In the end it happens in turn that the loaned body weakens, falls doomed; another takes the earl’s ancient treasure, one who recklessly gives precious gifts, does not fearfully guard them. Keep yourself against that wickedness, beloved Beowulf, best of men, and choose better—eternal gains. Have no care for pride, great warrior. Now for a time there is glory in your might: yet soon it shall be that sickness or sword will diminish your strength, or fire’s fangs, or flood’s surge, or sword’s swing, or spear’s flight, or appalling age; brightness of eyes will fail and grow dark; then it shall be that death will overcome you, warrior. Thus I ruled the Ring-Danes for a hundred half-years under the skies, and protected them in war with spear and sword against many nations over middle-earth, so that I counted no one as my adversary underneath the sky’s expanse. Well, disproof of that came to me in my own land, grief after my joys, when Grendel, ancient adversary, came to invade my home. Great sorrow of heart I have always suffered for his persecution. (31) Perhaps God sent Grendel because Hrothgar dropped his guard, was too sure of himself, swallowed a drop from the cup that undid Heremod. At any rate, the lesson has been learned, the Almighty has supplied a savior, and for this happy ending there will be ‘‘joy of the glad feast’’ and many ‘‘treasures will be shared when morning comes’’ (1782–84). The passage incidentally suggests how the reckless giver begins as a taker and reinforces with ethical justification the first of the two phases of the good ruler’s career. But when he mentions how a similar, if less extreme, plague visited the good ruler himself, he falters and offers Beowulf a brief aphorism, which, while ethical in tone, is diffuse and cryptic in meaning, because ethical explanation is irrelevant. What happened to

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him happened because he did everything he was supposed to do. And this problem, this irrelevance, will pursue the hero into part 2.

Hoard and Hero Heroic generosity demands reciprocity—demands it in two senses: as the repayment in loyalty and service through which munificence attains its objective of strong group solidarity, and as a contentious response to the challenge inherent in giving. In his sermon, Hrothgar takes note of the practical dimension of gift-giving and alertness, viewing them in ethical perspective. But a good king may fail as well as a Heremod, and the consequences of his failure for his people may be as grave, or even graver. The ethical focus of Hrothgar’s sermon is quite irrelevant to part 2 of Beowulf, and in this fact lies the most complex and moving aspect of the last part. Nor is it enough merely to say that in part 2 the good king somehow fails. Rather, he fails precisely because he is so good a king. Thus we return to Halverson’s insight: ‘‘It is not Beowulf ’s pride that brings about the ultimate catastrophe, but precisely his heroism.’’ Once again, if this reintroduces ‘‘ethical’’ issues, it does so at a level beyond that of the sphere of conscious choice and action to which ethical analysis normally applies. Beowulf is the best of men in the poem, Hrothgar the second best. Hrothgar and Beowulf have both been seen as figures of the good king, but the ideal includes Hrothgar more completely than Beowulf. Beowulf in part 2 fuses two different roles, hero and king, yet this is only one reason why he is atypical. Readers have always felt this atypicality, and, though the analogies to Christ are ludicrous, they suggest one aspect of the kind of feeling Beowulf inspires. Irving speaks of ‘‘that vital extra margin of power which distinguishes the hero as individual and unique force from the hero as representative man,’’ and of ‘‘that special blend of wild daring, restless strength, alert intelligence, luck, and divine favor that makes a hero.’’38 But the poem suggests even more than that: a kind of mana attaches to this hero, a misty and superstition-ridden aura of the uncanny, the unheimlich. This comes through in the references to his special relation to the ocean, the watery depths, and water monsters.39 It comes through also in

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the folktale of the bear-son hovering in the background and recalled by his name (‘‘Bee-wolf ’’), by the narrative elements of the two Grendel adventures, and by the reference to his deviance as a youth (2183ff ). In the early parts of the poem, his presence gives off a power edged with menace. Under his self-possessed and well-minded demeanor lives the mod for terrible violence evident in the tone and substance of his first address to Hrothgar and in his reply to Unferth. We have seen Hrothgar’s verbal efforts to control this power and keep the hero’s offer of help within the limits of reciprocity. In the fight with Grendel, his eagerness for battle and his tremendous energy burst forth with such fury as to make the two enemies momentarily indistinguishable. Both equally threaten Heorot: ‘‘Yrre wæron begen, / re1e renweardas. Reced hlynsode,’’ so that it was a wonder the wine-hall did not fall to the ground (769–72). Grendel’s grasp affixed to the wall is a dark, admonitory image of the hero’s handgrip. Both are walkers-alone and both are outsiders, Beowulf even more so than Grendel.40 If only as a cancelled possibility, the fury of Grendel smokes the contours of the hero’s bright outline. When the scop who praises his exploit recalls the glory of Sigemund and the infamy of Heremod, his account of the latter (901–15) resonates with an odd tone, somewhere between a caveat (‘‘Beware, Beowulf, strength and courage are not enough’’) and an exhortation (‘‘Please, Beowulf, strength and courage are not enough’’). However domesticated and benign the bear-son has become, his presence in the hall adds a touch of uncertainty to the general uneasiness communicated by the poet in his account of the gift-giving ceremony. The edginess about Beowulf is partly a function of the situation: the helpless and humiliated Danes are forced to place themselves in the hands of and in debt to an outsider. In order to help themselves trust him, they have to try to persuade him to be good. The outsider is necessary because the evil that ravages the Danes is partly generated by their own social structure. The meadhall attracts hero and monster together. Thus the hero is not only limited in his role: he can only provide a temporary cure by ridding the Danes of this particular manifestation of their problem. He is also a potential threat, who may evoke Grendelian feelings in others if not in himself. In his final speech, Hrothgar is still working on him,

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trying not only to bind him as a potential ally but also to neutralize the possible threat of a Geat attack. Hence the curious reference—the first and only one in the poem—to the sacu and inwitni5as which the Danes and Geats had practiced on each other in the past (1856ff ) and his concluding words, which promise a continuing supply of gifts and appeal to the blameless character of the Geats in indirect exhortation (1859–65). That this carefulness coexists with Hrothgar’s deep and fatherly affection for Beowulf (1870–76) points not only to the ambivalence inherent in the role of alien hero but also to Beowulf ’s unheimlich charismatic power. BeowuIf ’s strangeness attaches to his being, not to his consciousness, which is singular in a more familiar manner: he is ethically the best of all possible men. In part 2 this combination, as we suggested, becomes the source of failure. Two reasons for this are anticipated in the contrasting image of Scyld which opens the poem: (1) A son was born to Scyld, ‘‘a young boy in his house, whom God sent to comfort the people: He had seen the sore need they had suffered during the long time they lacked a king.’’ (12–16); (2) While still young, a man should give gifts ‘‘to make sure that later in life beloved companions will stand by him, that people will serve him when war comes’’ (22–24). It seems only a logical consequence of his uniqueness that Beowulf leaves no heir (2730–32); his brief reference to that fact adds resonance to his earlier comments on Hrethel and the father of the hanged man (2430ff ) and to his concluding remark about Hrethel: ‘‘To his sons he left—as a happy man does—his land and his town when he went from life’’ (2470–71). Beowulf ’s relation to his cowardly retainers and his motives for attacking the dragon by himself raise further questions. Institutional contradictions are most strongly felt in these passages. In their reflective and pastminded mood, the poet and Beowulf together express inconsistent sentiments about the coming encounter. The poet first speaks in his own voice, and Beowulf later amplifies the same sentiments and subjects in his long soliloquy. The effect of this peculiar reiteration is to intensify the sense of inevitable doom, to put it off by reviving the past in order to prepare for the doom, and to set the dragon fight in an extraordinarily complex tissue of past and future feuds, shifting attitudes and alliances, and social dilemmas (2324–2509). Beowulf ’s consequent decision to charge the dragon single-handedly comes almost as a relief.

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The poet first tells us that Beowulf was confident of winning and so ‘‘scorned to seek the far-flier with a troop, a large army’’ (2345ff ). At line 2419b, however, we are told that ‘‘his mind was mournful, restless and ripe for death’’—as if, having ‘‘survived every combat, every dangerous battle’’ (2397–98), he had fought and lived long enough. Beowulf himself communicates this feeling in a sympathetic remark about Ongentheow’s death: ‘‘his hand remembered feuds enough, did not withstand the lifeblow’’ (2488b–89). But remembering his past deeds on behalf of Hygelac and Hrothgar seems to give him new spirit. He is tempted to replay his conquest of Grendel and, though the dragon’s fiery blast prohibits handto-hand combat, he will at least engage the foe in single encounter; therefore he orders his retainers not to help him (2512–37). When Beowulf is pressed, Wiglaf urges them to help their king, ignoring his order (2633– 60), and rushing to the barrow himself delivers the first blow that makes the dragon’s fire subside (2700ff ). Afterward, he and the poet blame the retainers for their disloyalty and cowardice (2846b–49 and 2864–91), but at line 3077 Wiglaf articulates the nearest thing in the poem to a criticism of the hero: ’Oft sceall eorl monig anes willan wræc adreogan, swa us geworden is. Ne meahton we gelæran leofne 3eoden, rices hyrde ræd ænigne, 3æt he ne grette goldweard 3one, lete hyne licgean, 3ær he longe wæs, wicum wunian o1 woruldende.’ (3077–83) Often many a man must suffer distress for the will of one man, as has happened to us. We might by no counsel persuade our dear prince, keeper of the kingdom, not to approach the gold-guardian, let him lie where he long was, live in his dwelling to the world’s end. (53) This tends retrospectively to accentuate the heroic self-concern of such remarks as the following, addressed by Beowulf to his retainers: ‘‘This is not your venture, nor is it right for any man except me alone that he should spend his strength against the monster, do this man’s deed. By my courage I shall get gold, or war will take your king, dire life-evil’’ (2532b–

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37). In the end, however, the heroic assertion (‘‘ne gemet mannes, nefn(e) min anes’’) is frustrated by Wiglaf ’s eorlscype, just as his request to Wiglaf to distribute the treasure is frustrated. The request is itself tonally weighted with the weariness of being a ruler, the ripeness for death: Nu ic on ma1ma hord mine bebohte frode feorhlege, fremma1 gena leoda 3earfe; ne mæg ic her leng wesan. (2799–801) Now that I have bought the hoard of treasures with my old life, you attend to the people’s needs hereafter: I can be here no longer. (49) With this brief glance toward leoda 7earfe—the phrase is vague and generalized, the sentiment remote—he turns away from the cares of kingship to speak with more buoyant energy of his barrow (2801–8). His final words are not about the grim future of his leode—he has shifted that responsibility to Wiglaf—but about the end of his own line; he and his kinsman are the last of the Wægmundings (2813–16). The cumulative effect of these passages is to stress the conflict, identified by Halverson, between ‘‘heroic individualism’’ and the code of loyalty and reciprocity, which leads to ‘‘closer social ties and greater common effort.’’41 Halverson’s admirable account of this dilemma prompts us to add that the poet reveals it not only in the relations between Beowulf and his retainers but also within Beowulf himself: the justifiable self-concern of the hero is shown not to square with the political concerns of the ruler. In the collapse or fusion of the two roles, the second gives way to the first. The king is old and weary of life, but the hero fulfills his long career by dying in glory. Beowulf embarrows himself, and the Geats along with him (2804).42 The future offers no consolations but those provided by the past. His death is made easier by the sight of the ancient laf and by the memory of his long career. His mind dwells on these, turns inward and backward, from the Geats to his immediate kinsmen and from their continuing life-needs—7earfe—to his memorial. Halverson observes that ‘‘in an altogether personalistic era, the center of order is conceivable only as a person. One cannot yet say, ‘The king is dead, long live the king,’ but only ‘Beowulf is dead—what will happen now?’ ‘‘43 One can say, however, ‘‘the king is dead, long live the hero,’’ and this seems closer to the sentiments expressed by Beowulf.

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Halverson finds Wiglaf ’s criticism of Beowulf just, since the king’s death means ‘‘the disintegration of the Geatish nation. . . . The king has greater responsibility than the warrior.’’44 This is an important insight, yet there may be more to Beowulf ’s dilemma than the conflict in values generated by the appearance of the dragon, and more than the general ‘‘excess of individualism’’ from which the Dark Ages suffered. The problem raised by particularistic conceptions of socio-political roles—king, hero, vassal—is one thing. The problem raised by conflicting roles and values—between king and hero, individualism and common effort—is another. There is only a vague historical similarity between Beowulf ’s dilemma and that of such powerful men as ‘‘Clovis, Offa, Penda, Charlemagne, Alfred,’’ whose ‘‘kingdoms rise, flourish briefly, and decline with the deaths of their creators.’’45 After all, the Danes outlast Hrothgar, and in the poem the Swedes outlast Ongentheow. We know about the Danes and the Swedes. But who has heard of the Geats? Klaeber’s summary of the evidence shows how scanty and confused it is.46 Outside of Beowulf there are only a few scattered Scandinavian references to them. If we put this together with his remarks that Beowulf ‘‘is a solitary figure in life,’’ that ‘‘he dies without leaving any children,’’47 and that he does not ‘‘play any real part in the important events of his time,’’ and if we add to this the ‘‘curious fact that Beowulf himself is never mentioned in the surviving Germanic heroic literature of Scandinavia and the continent,’’48 Beowulf ’s dilemma may take on a complexion more specific than can be explained by the particularism of the Dark Ages. That is, his dilemma may owe less to ‘‘an excess of individualism’’ than to ‘‘an excess of Beowulf.’’ Consider, in addition to his childlessness, the cowardice of his retainers, noted by the poet as well as by Wiglaf. Consider also the instant demoralization reflected by the Geatish messenger and woman. Our account of the effects of Hrothgar’s liberality on his sleeping thanes suggests to us that the failure of Beowulf ’s retainers may be intended to reflect on his leadership as well as on their cowardice. There is only one passage in the poem that supports this hypothesis, but it seems to us to be significant. It is Beowulf ’s dying apologia (2736–43), which Halverson cites to show that Beowulf is satisfied that ‘‘he has lived up to the code, protecting his people, true to his oaths, faithful to his kinsmen,’’ so that ‘‘he can die content’’ because he has honored ‘‘the

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traditional contractual obligations.’’49 But Halverson neither quotes the immediately preceding lines (2733b–36a), nor comments on their implications. Beowulf says that he heold the Geats fifty winters, that no neighboring kings ‘‘dared approach me with swords, threaten me with fears. In my land I awaited what fate brought me, held my own well, sought no treacherous quarrels.’’ Therefore God ‘‘need not blame me for the slaughter of kinsmen when life goes from my body’’ (48). Earlier, the poet had told us that Beowulf had come through many battles after purging Heorot, but his subsequent remarks suggest that most of these occurred in the early part of his reign, ending with the victory over Onela. Beowulf himself confirms this impression in lines 2511–15. From these clues we draw the implication that his unparalleled successes produced the kind of de´tente futilely sought by Hrothgar in building Heorot. Beowulf was the Heorot of the Geats. What he fashioned and gave with such generosity was himself. And in so doing he unwittingly but unavoidably took something too: his unique and charismatic being made reciprocity impossible—worse, it made reciprocity unnecessary. Giving too much, he therefore gave too little. The role of hero, intensified by Beowulf ’s uncanny singularity, contains in its structure the same pattern of edwenden as the other heroic institutions. In effect, he absorbed so much ellen from the surrounding atmosphere that too little was left to nourish his people. He created something like a power or energy vacuum, de-tensing his war band in a world where tension, alertness, and uneasiness are basic to survival. Like Hrothgar’s, his success turned warriors into sleepers. Hence the behavior of his retainers and the choric sense of helplessness expressed by the messenger and the figure of the wailing woman. In the vast temporal perspective of the second part of the poem, Beowulf ’s fifty years as king—one for each foot of dragonlength—pass like a whisper, collapsing between the past and future Swedish raids,50 and serving mainly to suggest the double bind that confronts the great hero as ruler: if by his excellence he holds fearful aggressors in abeyance, keeps raid and feud to a minimum, he erodes the Geat warrior ethos; if, by contrast, he wages continual warfare every trophy he wins creates new enemies and lust for vengeance. In both cases the others, the ymbsittend, ‘‘painfully endure hardship for a time’’ (86–87), and when

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he dies his people become losers. The hero becomes the only winner, the only laf bequeathed by his people to the world. Among the Geats, all that remained of the will to fight (wig) was concentrated in his kinsman, appropriately named Wiglaf. Even this fact reflects indirectly on the problem, for Wiglaf ’s sword and courage are pointedly derived from his father and connected with Weohstan’s participation in the anti-Geat campaign of Onela. Weohstan’s change of allegiance is like Hrethel’s insoluble wergeld dilemma: these, together with the analogy of the father whose son is hanged, suggest the increasing complexity and confusion, the imminent breakdown, produced by institutional edwenden. The poet ironically and pointedly notes Onela’s politically inspired violation of feuding customs (2611ff ). He suggests a general crisis in which the wider bonds of the war band are weakening, so that only political expediency or the more primitive and intuitive bonds of real blood relationship keep men together (cf. 2600–2601). Thus only another Wægmunding comes to Beowulf ’s aid. This hypothesis differs from Halverson’s in suggesting that the disintegration of the Geats is a consequence of Beowulf ’s total career, and not merely the consequence of his decision to meet the dragon in single encounter. Our interpretation might be metaphorically focused by means of two phrases that the poet applies to Beowulf, which seem, in our opinion, to suggest certain points of resemblance between Beowulf and the dragon. At line 2422, the poet tells us that the fate was very close which should come to seek Beowulf ’s sawle hord, and at lines 2791f, when Wiglaf returns to attend the dying king, a wordes ord broke through Beowulf ’s breosthord.51 Like the dragon, the hero is a hoarder. His soul’s hoard consists of the riches of heroism, the hero’s power and charisma, his ability to hold a war band together by his prowess, generosity, courage, and shining example. Theoretically, this should communicate itself to his people and quicken all their solidary institutions. But actually his singular powers are not communicable to ordinary men; failing to provide his retainers with the need (and therefore ability) to reciprocate, his eacen spirit produces an enervating imbalance in the social bonds that hold the Geats together. Strange resonances bind the two old hoarders together even as they differentiate them. Each is a solitary weard, an old guardian wise in win-

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ters (2209, 2277), Beowulf an e7elweard, folces weard, and 7eodcyning (2210, 2513, 2694); the dragon a hordweard (e.g., 2293) and 7eodscea5a (2688). Another hordweard, Hrothgar (1047), predicts that Beowulf will become a good hordweard (1852) of the Geat treasure. At lines 2273f the dragon is described as a nacod night-flier fyre befangen. At line 2585, Beowulf is failed by his war blade, nacod æt ni5e, and as a result he, who before had folce weold, was fyre befongen (2595). We read the nacod at 2273 metaphorically as ‘‘unsheathed.’’ The dragon takes the air at night and burns when he flies. His barrow is his hall, his hordwynn (2270), his hall-joy. Unlike Grendel, he is not described as a predator but remains sheathed (and sleeping) until disturbed in his barrow, at which point he becomes hot and fiercehearted, and exults in the thought of war, an enemy of living men.52 Beowulf too was like this; he awaited what fate brought him and sought no treacherous quarrels (2736ff ); his sword was nacod æt ni5e, unsheathed in response to hostility but not otherwise. In death the two lie side by side, and after death a curious interchange is suggested: the dragon is pushed into the watery depths in which Beowulf had been so much at home—his element—and Beowulf, now a barrow-dweller, is consumed by the dragon’s element. Why these correspondences, which suggest that the dragon may in some manner be the double as well as the antithesis of the hero? Beyond their connection with hoarding, we have no answer. We might speculate, however, that it has something to do with the theme of oblivion. The dragon is an ancient uhtsceaga (2271), which could mean ‘‘an enemy of the dawn’’ (as well as the more usual translation, ‘‘enemy at dawn’’): he presides over the laf of dead societies, keeps them unused and forgotten in darkness. As Irving has suggested,53 his hoard contains objects which embody the customs and institutions of heroic society: cups, rings, helmets, and a gold standard (2760b–69a), synecdoches of hall-joys, honor and reciprocity, protection and attack. The symbolic value that glints from the hoard objects suggests those activities whose edwenden leads inevitably toward the kind of confusion and breakdown stressed throughout part 2. When the dragon is aroused, his rage ‘‘is directed unselectively against . . . whatever lives. He obliterates men, halls and all.’’54 He presides over and sustains the oblivion of that which has been obliterated.

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No names, no famous heroes, are connected to his hoarded laf. The dragon’s hoard is collective, whereas Beowulf ’s is singular. It may be that the dragon himself, emerging from that welter of institutional confusions, condenses them into his mythic and monstrous form, making them ripe for heroic disposal. He may be linked to the fate that settles down on old societies. The oblivion and fate Beowulf fights might then be what threatens his own people. But his battle is necessarily in vain, since the fate of the Geats emerges as much from his own breasthoard as from the dragon’s barrow. His own riches are blessed/cursed no less than those guarded by the dragon. Because the dragon kills Beowulf, the Geats will no longer be able to survive as a people; the treasure will not be recirculated. Because Beowulf kills the dragon, the Geats will escape oblivion. But they will be remembered only for Beowulf. His glory is the best and only laf they bestow on the future. Theirs is consumed in his: along with the treasure, their future lies in his barrow. Thus in the special sense defined by the meanings of this poem, the haunting refrain of Deor permeates the desolate world of the Geats: ‘‘3æs ofereode; 3isses swa mæg.’’

Coda: The Beowulf Poet and the Barrow There are three barrows in Beowulf. The dragon’s is one. The hero’s is the second. The poem is the third. The dragon is a doom-sitter, his barrow oblivion, his hoard the golden and rusting artifacts of dead societies. The poet’s time-calipers span a thousand years in part 2, and in this perspective the doom of whole peoples and ways of life is the sad and central theme. It may seem dry, academic, and anachronistic to speak of this as an institutional doom, but from another standpoint that only increases the sadness. Looking back, we see that men are trapped by the order they have made. The world of human artifice includes not only swords, cups, standards, and halls but also kin group and comitatus, good and evil, gift-giving and honor seeking, marriage, raid, and feud, and such roles as hero, king, and monster. The edwenden, the double bind, produced by the complex interaction of these structures and processes is bewildering in appearance but sure in its doom.

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The splendid things men do—their conscious acts of heroic will, endurance, and generosity—they do in the setting of this doom and against its drift, yet ultimately, unwittingly, in its behalf. Since their social order is not the product of conscious artifice but the nonconscious or ‘‘crescive’’ work of generations of culture, men experience it as part of the reality that appears to them to be given, grim and unalterable. They can only, as Hrothgar does, give ethical counsel and try to act according to the norms and values prized by heroic consciousness. Yet these very acts, norms, values, and consciousness have the doom woven into them and bring it on. Our modern sadness is not quite that of the early English poet: he does not speak of institutions as if they were ‘‘artifacts’’ of human culture transposed into reality. For him they are not the Frankenstein’s monsters that our institutions have seemed to become during the last three or four centuries. And yet—as we hope we have demonstrated—he clearly locates the doom in the processes of social order and just as clearly shows that his characters are baffled by this, that their institutions conspire to divert their attention by misleading symptoms and solutions. It is the poet who presents us with an old-time world in which the institutional doom is no less apparent and no less real than the doomed monsters. The movement from part 1 to part 2, which Irving has described so well,55 strongly suggests the working of this pattern of edwenden. To center attention on Hrothgar, Heorot, Beowulf, and the monsters is to stress human skill and control, the excellence of what men do and make, their ultimate conquest over the forces of evil. The treatment in part 1 is, figuratively, spatial: the monsters are ‘‘out there,’’ the Finn episode is not only long ago but also elsewhere, and Heremod is so exemplary as to be timeless. Except for occasional ominous asides, most evils are of the past, which is itself consoling, but they are present in the poem as analogies or antitheses visualized in some spatial or quasi-logical relation to the bright center of Danish life. The effect of the transitional section—from the end of Hrothgar’s sermon to the beginning of part 2 (1789b–2199)—is to intensify foreboding by orienting us toward the future. The poem looks ahead in time at threatening possibilities in existing arrangements: the possibility of enmity between Geats and Danes, Hrothgar’s premonition that he will not see Beowulf again, the long account of the Danes

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and Heatho-Bards, which occupies nearly a third of Beowulf ’s report to Hygelac. His final touching words to Hygelac (‘‘ic lyt hafo / heafodmaga nefne, Hygelac, 1ec,’’ 2150b–51) anticipate a cluster of themes in part 2: his childlessness and solitary nature, the desolate and sparsely inhabited landscape, the death of old men, loss of sons, and killing of kinsmen.56 In part 2 these themes are caught up in the dense interweaving of various Geat feuds, which cover over two generations and which— through the poet’s repetition, amplification, narrative dislocation, and vivid description—produce the image of an embattled society on the edge of chaos. It is as if the lurking dangers swept under the rug of Heorot had broken loose in Geatland to envelop Beowulf ’s people. The predicament is generalized by the arrival of the dragon and the dramatic increase in the poem’s time scale: the doom threatens not only the Geats but all societies founded on the values and accomplishments that Beowulf and the dragon, in their different ways, hoard. That this doom is the product and not merely the fate of heroic society has been shown by Irving in the one passage in which he clearly defines the accountability of heroic institutions, his study of the battle of Ravenswood. Irving notes there that ‘‘as the kind of heroic achievement that Beowulf represents nears its end in Beowulf ’s own death, the kind of self-destructiveness the feuds represent—the negative side of the heroic ideal— comes into clearer and clearer focus.’’ At Ravenswood, as everywhere in the poem, we can perceive the central tragic fact about the society that heroic poetry reflects: that in its very strength and beauty, in its cohesive loyalties and allegiances, lie inevitable forces of destruction and anarchy. Hygelac’s action in honoring the slayers of Ongentheow is impeccable heroic etiquette, yet it plants the seeds of disaster; the greater the Geatish triumph, the more violent the predictable vengeful reaction on the part of the Swedes. Like the story of Finnsburg, the account of the battle of Ravenswood has an ostensibly happy ending, but both stories are fundamentally tragic prophecies in their contexts.57 The ‘‘central tragic fact’’ is generalized by a feature of part 2 that readers of the poem have always noticed: the mythical or typical quality produced by the application of animal names to persons and places. Irving

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views the animal theme as symbolizing the failure of control: the fighters in Ravenswood are ‘‘released from any burden of rational choice or selfdiscipline by the animal necessity of survival. Brought to bay, they fight like animals. . . . Two men named Wolf and Boar drag down the mighty Ongentheow in the Wood of the Ravens, and the Messenger’s speech ends with a dialogue between Raven and Eagle,’’58 a dialogue in which Raven mentions the co-operation of Wolf in despoiling future Geat bodies. Immediately after the messenger’s speech, the Geats go to the foot of Eagle Cliff to gaze on the bodies of Beowulf and the dragon. Wood and cliff join the birds in becoming symbols of battle and devourers of carrion. The messenger foresees no scop in the future except the raven, no audience except the eagle. But raven and eagle, wood and cliff are not merely agents of cosmic fate. As symbols of battle and death they are consequences of social forces, the recipients of meanings generated by human laf. And the penetration of animal being into the human world signifies not only death but also oblivion. Eagle and raven are tributaries of the dragon. Beneath the heroic self-assertion of great lords and warriors works the anonymous edwenden threatening them with the namelessness of carrion in a time when there will be no more companions to collect, embarrow, and remember the dead, only animals to despoil them. The dragon’s arrival three hundred years ago in Geat territory is a prophetic sign of this general and anonymous fate. He waits and sleeps until his moment comes. That moment is itself significant. It deserves our attention, because it reinforces the theme of social breakdown and anonymity. It is brought about by a combination of accident and symptoms of social stress. A slave (or captive) stumbled on the hoard (‘‘Nealles mid gewealdum . . . sylfes willum’’) while fleeing from his lord’s heteswengeas (2221–24). The poet describes him as hygegiomor (2408) and synbysig (2226); Donaldson translates the latter as ‘‘guilty of wrongdoing’’ (39), but it may also mean ‘‘distressed by (another’s) hostility or crime.’’ He is at first called a thief (2219), but later the poet says of his successful escape with the cup, ‘‘So may an undoomed man who holds favor from the Ruler easily come through his woes and misery’’ (2291–93). The indefinite references to the man (twice specified by the term nathwylc), his anonymity yet narrative importance, assume a choric dimension. Questions of praise and blame, guilt and innocence now appear more complex

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and more irrelevant. Whether the slave is guilty or not, others will suffer the consequences of his theft. He steals the cup to bring his master a peace-pledge (frio7owære, 2282), and whatever the cause of the breach, the generalized sense of strained social relations is only increased by his insignificance and anonymity. As one of those who accompany Beowulf, his reluctance to return to the barrow anticipates the cowardice of the others. This nameless man’s resonance deepens as we look at him, for he becomes a figure of man in the society that Beowulf has heold for fifty years—a figure of social man shrinking in the shadow of oblivion. When Beowulf first learns of the dragon he blames himself, thinking he had in some way angered God by offending ofer ealde riht (2330). But once again the ethical concern is irrelevant; at that level he finds out that it was not his fault. It is ‘‘his fault’’ only at the deeper level to which praise, blame, and ethical consciousness do not penetrate. The poet lays bare in part 2 what he had persistently hinted at in part 1—that men suffer the consequences of the dilemmas inherent in the dynamic of their institutions—and shows that, although everyone perceives and feels these consequences, the only way one can cope with them is to continue behaving, thinking, and judging according to the very norms by which one is being destroyed. Beowulf unavoidably does the dragon’s work and thus, at his death, replaces the dragon as embarrowed doom-sitter. Since the dragon is dead, his barrow defeats oblivion. Yet the poet’s treatment of the hero’s burial most movingly bathes this triumph in the tenebrous ambivalence of the second part. What he discloses is not quite the triumph that Irving sees: ‘‘The barrow is the objectification of memory and admonition. It is typical of this hero’s practical altruism that he intends his grave to be a landmark and an aid to navigation. But it is to be an aid to moral navigation as well. . . . The Geatish sailors on the dark sea of the world . . . will orient themselves by the name and story of Beowulf.’’59 But Beowulf ’s words place the emphasis of the purpose clause not on the ships driven over the mists of the seas but on the sailors’ recognition of his barrow: ‘‘3æt hit sæli1end sy11an hatan / Biowulfes biorh’’ (2806–7). Later the poet merely notes that it was ‘‘(wæ)gli1endum wide g(e)syne’’ (3158). Neither Beowulf nor the poet explicitly stresses its navigational function, but rather its character as a ‘‘wide-seen’’ memorial. His emphasis, and that of his people in the

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final lines of the poem, is on the hero’s marker placed high in everyone’s view, a beacon of inestimable brightness speaking of what has passed: ‘‘3æs ofereode; 3isses swa mæg.’’ And if, as Irving rightly observes, we are ‘‘watching the funeral of an entire nation,’’ if the Geats themselves are right in sensing that their dead king presages ‘‘the fact of their own death,’’ then the provision of navigational aid to Geatish sailors— nautical or moral—is hardly to the point. If this is what Beowulf intends by the puzzling phrase ‘‘to gemyndum minum leodum’’ (2804), his good intention will be thwarted, just like his wish to distribute treasure, by his unwitting contribution to the dragon’s work of doom. The barrow beams forth into the darkness to announce his death to Franks, Frisians, and others, and in that sense, too, it may stand as an omen, perhaps a cause, of the nation’s funeral. Beowulf ’s funeral is divided into two parts, cremation and burial, and moves from a lament over the effects produced by the fiery dragon to a sorrowful but more positive eulogy to the hero. Burning his bonehouse, the Geats lament ‘‘their heart-care, the death of their liege lord,’’ and the Geatish woman prophesies ‘‘invasions of armies, many slaughters, terror of troops, humiliation, and captivity.’’ That the poet immediately adds, ‘‘Heaven swallowed the smoke,’’ may be meant to suggest the fulfillment of her dire prediction. Ten days later, after building the mound, twelve warriors circle it singing dirges. They ‘‘mourn their king’’ and ‘‘speak of the man,’’ praising his eorlscipe, ellenweorc, and dugu5. Finally, they say that he was of wyruldcyning(a) the ‘‘mildest of men and the gentlest, kindest to his people,’’ and lofgeornost, ‘‘most eager for fame’’ (3171–82 [55]). Their eulogy moves back and forth between the king and the hero, but ends firmly fixed on the latter. The poet approves their acts (3174–77), yet the poem ends in indirect discourse, with the poet paraphrasing their words, not quite allowing their perspective fully to fuse with his. In his own conclusion, Irving observes that the cremation, with its accompanying ‘‘realization of annihilation . . . must remain subordinate to the intense and unswerving focus of attention on Beowulf.’’ He comments on the tone of the final lines: The Geats mourn the passing of their king, but in words that rise to something close to triumph, in praises out of the heart of love that

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point to Beowulf ’s own affectionate and kind nature. To the extent to which they can courageously face their own destruction, they will draw their courage and their dignity from their love for their dead king, the incarnation of the heroic spirit and the radiant center of the poem.60 All true, and yet there is something else, since the heroic spirit has other, darker avatars in the poem, and indirectly the Geats draw their courage and dignity from the source of their destruction. It is not exactly that the dual structure of the ritual constitutes a kind of heroic or stoic evasion; they may be said to flinch from the specter of annihilation and cling to the only laf they can expect to bequeath the future, the hero’s lof. But a more cautious appraisal is that the desperate fixing of their eyes on the barrow is simply the other side of everything they do not, cannot, see. What they cannot see is the deep doom-structure that the poet reveals to us. Assuredly, he shares their feeling and joins them in the sentiments of which he approves. But between his sense of the occasion and theirs lies the whole of Beowulf as a poem. Like their eulogy, the poem is an act of commemoration. That is, it is in part a ritual burial, an embarrowing of the hero. More effectively than the mourning Geats, this poet has told a tale to thwart the raven as well as the dragon. If Beowulf ’s barrow sends its message across the seas, even across Jutland to England, the poet’s literary barrow transmits it across time. Beowulf himself leaves little behind. Heroes and their societies propel themselves toward some inevitable grave and their laf—cursed or useless, golden or rusty— remains to haunt the souls of children, romantics, and antiquaries in later times. It is the scop who revives the heroic image, polishes and preserves it, cleans away rust and restores it to later communities both as example and as warning. There is a strange moment near the end of the poem when the poet, who otherwise approves the heroic burial, briefly abandons that attitude to comment on the old treasure: ‘‘3ær hit nu gen lifa1 / eldum swa unnyt, swa hi(t æro)r wæs’’ (3167b–68). There it ‘‘now still lives,’’ useless to men. The emphatic nu gen directly connects the past act of burial with the present of the poet and his audience. Lifa5 is not merely the neutral ‘‘dwells,’’ as Donaldson translates it—if it only sleeps, the treasure still has life, may still be revived and restored to men. Since the hero’s ashes

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are mingled with the treasure, perhaps the phrase may be extended to Beowulf. Does the poet mean that Beowulf and the treasure are useless because they can’t be unearthed, that their only use was in life, and that God (the true king of victories) has not appointed one fit to unearth and revive them? If so, the burial is being criticized because something important to men is being denied them now—perhaps the image of heroic consciousness and its undeniable virtues as a workable ideal that hardpressed contemporaries might do well to emulate. Or does the poet mean that Beowulf and the treasure would be useless to men if unearthed, and therefore had better remain buried? If so, the burial is important because the hero’s soul-hoard and the laf of old societies are finally useless in their original form. They cannot be restored to living men unless they are significantly altered. The poet’s ambivalent attitude toward heroic society suggests that we combine these two responses. We said earlier that the scop revives the heroic image, but ‘‘revives’’ insufficiently describes his act. He revises the image, sees it anew and differently. To us the poem conveys an implicit message: that the hero may perform his most useful social function not in his ‘‘historical’’ but in his literary role—not during his life but after his death in the work of the scop. If this echoes the sentiment, the hope, shared by the Geats and their lofgeornost lord, the negations expressed in the previous sentence cast it in a very different light. Beowulf, the dragon, Grendel, and Heorot are wundorlic not merely in the manner of old legends and fairy tales; this very quality lends them the more fatal attraction of dragongold, of the gift that may become poison. For what does it mean to ‘‘unearth’’ Beowulf, what or who is being unearthed, what can he do for us, or to us? As a primitive and uncanny figure (the bear-son), he seems less a historical personage than a creature of the folk imagination, while as hero he is more ideal, a better and purer example of the heroic ethos than figures who, like Hygelac and Hrothgar, are presumptively more historical. In his career through the poem he moves from the first of these qualities to the second, becoming more human and fallible, more milde and lige—the potentially dangerous outsider who first confronts Hrothgar is, by the end of the poem, domesticated into a beloved culture hero. Taming that wildness, like conquering Grendel, is exchanging bad

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dreams for good. Of what use is it to bring forth such dreams from the earth, or from the folk imagination with its powerful longing for mystery, terror, beauty, and peace? Beowulf appeases the folk longing; his strange but consoling image answers the dread and passivity, dispels the ennui, that gave rise to it. A dream of Beowulf might relax and enervate the poet’s audience just as Beowulf unstrung the Geats and Hrothgar the Danes. Between the scop and his subject matter, between the audience and the poem, reciprocity has to be possible. The scop reciprocates by revising, and we reciprocate by remaining alert, refusing to be lulled by the heroic dream, listening attentively for the sounds of doom working within the social order. This interpretive reciprocity distinguishes our relation to the Beowulf poet from the relation of the Danes to Hrothgar’s scop. The Beowulf poet seems to share with his Danish scop the inclination as well as the ability to tell a story of times far off, a strange story told in accordance with what is right or customary (rehte æfter rihte, 2110), a story that might please an old king by harking back to the ways of youth and battle-glory. Yet the magnetic influence exercised by the hero yearning forward on the audience yearning pastward may be worse than useless if the tale does not at the same time depict the so5 ond sarlic contradictions in heroic society. We are not to respond to Beowulf as the Danes responded to the tale of Finn, and perhaps, too, we are to take note of the omissions that deceptively illuminate the scop’s tale of the triumph of Sigemund. By what he reveals in his poem, the Beowulf poet offers us a view of the scop and his function that contrasts with what he ascribes to the scop in heroic society. We might say that he contains within himself the impulses of the heroic scop as the innocent heart of his own more sophisticated and self-conscious activity, that the poem, by giving full play to those impulses, arouses and then tempers them in its audience, and that in this way the heroic past is both glorified and exorcised, both celebrated and embarrowed, within the ‘‘vicarious’’ boundaries of literary experience. As one of the institutions of heroic society, the role of the scop shares in the fundamental ambivalence attendant on feasting and hall-joys. The Beowulf poet embodies in his poem a revised version of this role by centering on the ambivalence that the work of the heroic scop tends to ignore.

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nine

Fiction and Facticity: Reflections on Christian Nudity

‘‘To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition.’’ So Kenneth Clark proclaimed in the second sentence of The Nude, leaving us to wonder who the unembarrassed and uncivilized minority might be.1 Clark went on to be High Civilization’s arbiter elegantiae, which placed him directly—and in my opinion justifiably—in the post-60s line of cultural fire. In the nearly fifty years since the publication of The Nude, the elitism and sexism that maculate this and such later studies as his two Rembrandt books have made him an easy target. As Margaret Miles has shown, when he identifies nakedness with ‘‘a huddled and defenseless body’’ or with ‘‘the shapeless, pitiful model that the students [in art school] are industriously drawing,’’ ‘‘the embarrassment most of us feel’’ is directed not merely toward nakedness per se but toward the naked truth of the female body.2 The point of view constructed by Clark’s rhetoric is signified by a ‘‘we’’ that fluctuates between the connoisseurial authority of a royal plural and a democratically inclusive appeal to common human sentiment: ‘‘A mass of naked figures does not move us to 363

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empathy, but to disillusion and dismay. We do not wish to imitate; we wish to perfect.’’3 The tonal hint of condescension and the frequent identification of the ‘‘we’’ with the position of a privileged male gazer have made it hard for Clark’s critics to appreciate the strength of the basic idea that informs The Nude, and so I would like to redirect attention to it. I begin with Miles’s paraphrase: In Clark’s distinction between ‘‘nakedness’’ and ‘‘nudity’’ the nude body is a representation of a naked body from which subjectivity, along with moles and lumps, has been elided. At the same moment when the naked body was ‘‘re-formed’’ to render it pleasingly balanced and proportioned and without blemishes, it lost its ability to express the personal character of the person whose body it is. . . . In Clark’s description, the naked body becomes ‘‘a nude’’ by having its feeling (‘‘embarrassment’’) removed along with the visible symbols of its individuality and personality (‘‘wrinkles, pouches and other small imperfections’’). The nude achieves universality at the expense of particularity. The subject of a nude painting has been deleted, replaced by the role the nude plays in representing ‘‘a far wider and more civilizing experience.’’4 This account accentuates Clark’s emphasis on the abstraction of nudity from nakedness in order to highlight what has been sacrificed in the process of reformation. And although that is surely one way to formulate and critique the Clark thesis, it doesn’t quite do justice to a variant reading of the naked/nude relation occasionally discernible in The Nude—a subordinate argument whose causal logic runs counter to that of the thesis Miles picks out. The variant is perhaps most concisely stated in a comment on Rembrandt: ‘‘Rembrandt’s male models are as miserably thin as his women are embarrassingly fat. By a paradox, the academic search for perfection of form through a study of the nude has become a means of showing the humiliating imperfection to which our species is usually condemned.’’5 In other words, our unhappiness with the naked body is a backlash produced by our experience of its artistic metamorphosis into the ideal form of the nude body, the ‘‘balanced, prosperous,

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and confident . . . body re-formed’’ that is the most durable of ‘‘those inheritances of Greece which were revived at the Renaissance.’’6 In the light of this argument, Clark’s casual opening reference to privation—’’To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes’’—glances beyond itself toward the more deeply embedded consequence of artistic achievement and inheritance: to be naked is to be deprived of our nudity. If we didn’t have clothes and representations of nudity to begin with we wouldn’t be embarrassed by our bodies in their ‘‘natural state.’’ Like clothes, then, the nude may be given the ambivalent value of a supplement that supplies the body’s deficiency: a consequence of art or technology that manifestly improves on the naked body and therefore latently disparages it; initially an enhancement and ultimately a compensation. In the preposterous perspective of genealogical interpretation, nudity came first and provides the edenic vision of innocent perfection from which we fell and always fall into the sin of nakedness. Thus Clark notes that photographers of the nude, ‘‘in spite of all their taste and skill,’’ cannot satisfy ‘‘those whose eyes have grown accustomed to the harmonious simplifications of antiquity. We are immediately disturbed by wrinkles, pouches, and other small imperfections, which, in the classical scheme, are eliminated. . . . In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art had led us to believe it should be.’’7 The emergence or re-emergence of artistic and idealized canons of nudity, the depiction of better bodies than the bodies we have, accentuates the defectiveness of mere nakedness and makes the body a victim of prosthetic backlash. Clark attributes this effect to forms of cultural production that have broad but nevertheless specific historical provenance in the art of classical antiquity and its Renaissance revisions. The shape that art led us to believe the body should have was determined by the now familiar elements of early modern representational technology that characterized revivals and revisions of antique canons and practices. Innovations in visual arts, anatomy, and medical discourse were closely linked to improvements in the media through which representations in word or image were produced and disseminated. In Italy during the Quattrocento, the transformation from nakedness to nudity took place within the career of visual art itself: the more effective and accurate techniques of imitation that marked earlier fifteenth-century vi-

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sual practice initially conflicted but eventually combined with norms of idealization based on principles of proportion, symmetry, and harmony. Most importantly, the nude that emerges from these changing representational protocols is not only an abstraction from the actuality of naked bodies but also an expressly fictive construction. If mimesis makes the represented body a reflection and possible model of the naked actuality, idealization and fictionalization work together to produce the nude as both an exemplary and a counterfactual supplement that supplies the deficiencies of nakedness. It seems counterintuitive to assert that when the Middle Ages gave way to the so-called age of humanism and individualism, somatophobia intensified as a consequence of Renaissance achievements in the arts, sciences, and technologies of representation. In the standard view, ascetic contempt of the body has always been a dominant cultural discourse. In the brief and synoptic survey of pre- and post-Cartesian attitudes toward the body with which she begins Volatile Bodies, for example, Elizabeth Grosz emphasizes the ‘‘profound somatophobia’’ that has underwritten philosophy since its inception in ancient Greece. Yet her description of the continuity of Aristotelian with Christian accounts of the mind/body split contains hints of a different view: The matter/form distinction is refigured in terms of the distinction between substance and accident and between a God-given soul and a mortal, lustful, sinful carnality. Within the Christian tradition, the separation of mind and body was correlated with the distinction between what is immortal and what is mortal. As long as the subject is alive, mind and soul form an indissoluble unity, which is perhaps best exemplified in the figure of Christ . . . whose soul, whose immortality, is derived from God but whose body and mortality is human. The living soul is, in fact, a part of the world, and above all, a part of nature. Within Christian doctrine, it is as an experiencing, suffering, passionate being that generic man exists. This is why moral characteristics were given to various physiological disorders. What Descartes accomplished was not really the separation of mind from body . . . but the separation of soul from nature.8 Perhaps because this account of the pre-Cartesian view is intended only as a synoptic backdrop, it is deliberately oversimplified—but oversimpli-

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fied to a fault in its totalizing emphasis on somatophobia. The italicized phrases point toward a more complex understanding of pre-Cartesian dualism, which I shall turn to in a moment. Clark’s discussion of the causes that ‘‘had combined to bury the nude’’ in the early Christian era reflects a view similar to that of Grosz. After mentioning the iconoclastic influence of the ‘‘Jewish element in Christian thought’’ and the demonization of the nudity associated with pagan divinities, he notes that ‘‘iconoclasm and superstition were in the end less powerful factors than the new attitude to the body that accompanied the collapse of paganism,’’ an attitude that was to some extent a survival of the old Platonic contention that spiritual things were degraded by taking corporeal shape. . . . [The body] became an object of humiliation and shame. The whole of medieval art is a proof of how completely Christian dogma had eradicated the image of bodily beauty. . . . In general, the unclothed figures of the early Middle Ages are more shamefully naked, and are undergoing humiliations, martyrdoms, or tortures. Above all, it was in this condition that man suffered his cardinal misfortune, the Expulsion from Paradise; and this was the moment in Christian story of his first consciousness of the body, ‘‘They knew they were naked.’’ While the Greek nude began with the heroic body proudly displaying itself in the palaestra, the Christian nude began with the huddled body cowering in consciousness of sin.9 Clark does not find representations of a fictitious and factitious ideal of nudity in the Christian Middle Ages until the relatively late arrival of the ‘‘alternative convention’’ of the Gothic body, which appealed ‘‘to Northern taste.’’ This convention featured ‘‘bulblike women and rootlike men’’ who, ‘‘pale, defenseless, unself-supporting,’’ betray their origins in the shame of nakedness.10 Identifying the Renaissance canon of nudity with Italian and Mediterranean culture, Clark argues that the alternative convention evolved during the later Middle Ages in France, Burgundy, the Low Countries, and, taking a different form under Du¨rer’s influence, in Switzerland and Germany.11 There is, however, a passage in his account of the Gothic convention that suggests a different context for, a different understanding of, the

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revival of nudity—different, indeed, from his own sense of it as an expressly artificial convention: In the middle of the thirteenth century . . . a new direction in iconography forced artists to study the naked human body. This was the decision that the encyclopedic history of human life portrayed on the great cathedrals should no longer end with the Apocalypse but with the Last Judgment. . . . [I]n the instructions for artists . . . contained in the Speculum of Vincent of Beauvais, the subject is given an interpretation directly derived from the humanist philosophy of Greece. It states that in the Resurrection the figures rising from the grave must not only be naked, but that each one must be in a state of perfect beauty.12 Sculptors and other artists may represent that ‘‘state of perfect beauty,’’ but the semantic relation of the artistic image to its referent in this Christian discourse differs from the one Clark posits between the nude and its referent: in Clark the referent is an imaginary model or canon of the body different from and better than the naked state of real bodies, while in Christian discourse the referent is a possible state of real bodies. Given this distinction, it seems clear that what the art historian may consider ‘‘a new direction’’ in thirteenth-century iconography has a much longer history in Christian anthropology and eschatology, and that Clark’s emphasis on medieval asceticism and somatophobia needs to be qualified. The principle of qualification nevertheless itself inhabits and can be appropriated from Clark’s theory. Something like the contrast he formulates between nakedness and nudity is discernible in Christian representations of the state and fate of humans and their bodies, but in order to make the contrast applicable, Clark’s understanding of nudity as an expressly artificial state has to be jettisoned and replaced by a concept I shall call Christian nudity. My sense of Christian nudity is drawn chiefly from the work of Peter Brown, Margaret Miles, and Caroline Bynum. In the sculptural metaphor that concludes the following passage by Brown, the aesthetics of nudity and artistic mimesis flashes briefly forth before it metamorphoses into the ethical self-fashioning of imitatio Christi:

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In Christian circles [of the fifth and sixth centuries], concern with sexual renunciation had never been limited solely to an anxious striving to maximize control over the body. It had been connected with a heroic and sustained attempt, on the part of thinkers of widely different background and temper of mind, to map out the horizons of human freedom. The light of great hope of future transformation glowed behind even the most austere statements of the ascetic position. . . . The pain of Christian asceticism consisted in the fact that the present human person was an unfinished block, destined to be cut into the form of an awesome model. The body required the deep chisel-bites of permanent renunciation, if the Christian was to take on the lineaments of the risen Christ.13 As this figure suggests, the transfer of nakedness and nudity to Christian discourse gives them metonymic value: the terms designate bodily manifestations of spiritual states. Brown’s studies of classical and Christian self-cultivation in Late Antiquity are magnificent interpretations of what Foucault calls ‘‘technologies of the self.’’ Unlike the three other technologies identified by Foucault—of production, of sign systems, and of power—technologies of the self do not operate on things, sign use, and other subjects; rather, they ‘‘permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.’’14 In Brown’s account of Late Antiquity, the technologies of production and sign systems are indispensable but ancillary to the technologies of the self. He insists that the Christian asceticism developed in Late Antiquity shared the literate and aesthetic aspiration of the ‘‘civilization of Paideia’’: ‘‘exposure to the classics . . . was intended to produce exemplary beings. . . . Books . . . were there to produce persons,’’ and it was in this spirit that the ascetic life was constructed as an embodiment of holy scripture.15 Christians participated in a broader culture in which the aesthetic and moral norms of paideia were so closely interfused that selffashioning could seem to Plotinus to resemble the art of sculpture, a comparison (from Enneads I, 6, 9) that Brown paraphrases:

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What concerned late classical men was the capacity of the inner to penetrate the outer. They expected their soul to display its quality in their body, and, along with the body, in those concrete and visible particulars of poise and lifestyle that counted so much for them. . . . They believed without question that moral paradigms that had bitten to any depth in the soul would and should show themselves by reassuringly consistent body-signals. . . . The imagery of formation itself is not altogether reassuring: the sculptor of the soul does not, like Michelangelo, bring out the surprising essence of the block: rather, he chisels and files and polishes away the unnecessary lumps of stone that stand in the way of a perfect shape. (p. 5) When he turns to consider how ‘‘the role of the Christian saint as exemplar’’ departs from its classical predecessor, Brown focuses on the belief that the saint is a ‘‘Christ-carrying’’ figure who is ‘‘a gift of God to his or her age and region,’’ and he goes on to emphasize the difference between ‘‘the Late Antique form of the Imitation of Christ, and that disciplining of the religious sensibility associated with later Christocentric devotion in the late Middle Ages and Reformation’’ (pp. 6–7). The former did not take as its starting point the projection of the imagination and the sensibility of the believer on to a relatively fixed and delimited image of the historical Jesus and the circumstances of His life and Passion. That passing of the mind to a precise image ‘‘out there,’’ such as would cause Margery Kemp to fall to ‘‘great boisterous weeping’’ at the sight of a pieta` on the altar of a side-chapel . . . was notably less prominent in Early Christian disciplines of meditation. Late Antique men did not tend to kneel, as do the donors on Flemish Primitive paintings, gazing with sad eyes at a hill of Golgotha fixed forever with a merciless exactitude. A leap of the imagination across time seen as a thrilling but real chasm . . . lies at the back of late medieval and modern devotion. (p. 7) Technologies of the self in Late Antiquity did not rely in this manner on the technologies of production and sign systems for fictive representations of a world long gone. The Imitation of Christ was naturalized by

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being charismatically and corporeally embedded in the exemplary life and deeds of the holy man. And indeed, during the early phases of the ascetic movement of the fourth century . . . the intensity of the master-pupil relationship, that had ensured the continuity and the characteristics of the ‘‘Civilization of Paideia,’’ had been heightened to such an extent that literacy itself, both the medium and the raison d’eˆtre of traditional paideia, was vaporized in the intensity of face to face loyalty. Direct force of example was what mattered most; and the ‘‘Imitation of Christ,’’ not mediated by any text or visual aid, was the logical extension to the divine Master of the tangible, almost pre-verbal adherence of the human pupil to his human model. (p. 16) Ascetic performances are surely representations but what they represent is the attempt to burn off the mists of representation—attempts to deaestheticize, detextualize, and defictionalize the Christ-bearing presence of the exemplar. But defictionalization did not entail de-idealization: ‘‘the sudden rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary and of other virgin saints spoke of a poignant need for untainted solidarity with perfect human beings. Late antique Christians placed a heavy stress on the fact that the flesh of Christ and that of his virgin mother were utterly continuous with human flesh.’’16 A similarly positive view of asceticism as a spiritual techne¯ informs the critique with which Caroline Bynum, writing of a later period, rejects the one-sidedness of the conventional opinion ‘‘that pious folk in the Middle Ages were practical dualists who hated and attacked the body.’’ She demonstrates in several studies that, even though body was assumed to be ‘‘inferior to soul’’ and ‘‘the locus of temptation and decomposition,’’ even though misogyny and dualism were undeniably prominent ‘‘aspects of medieval attitudes,’’ ‘‘a deep conviction that the person is his or her body’’ was a central article of faith in both scholarly debate and pious practices: Control, discipline, even torture of the flesh is, in medieval devotion, not so much the rejection of physicality as the elevation of it—a horrible yet delicious elevation—into a means of access to the divine. . . . Compared to other periods of Christian history and other world religions, medieval spirituality—and especially female spirituality—was

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peculiarly bodily . . . not only because medieval assumptions associated female with flesh but also because theology and natural philosophy saw persons as . . . body as well as soul. . . . Those who wrote about body in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were in fact concerned to bridge the gap between material and spiritual and to give to body positive significance. Nor should we be surprised to find this so in a religion whose central tenet was the incarnation . . . of its God.17 Incarnation was one of two doctrines that preserved the dignity of the flesh in spite of its fallibility. Resurrection, which was premised on the continuity of the person’s relation to its particular body, was the other. But of course they were more than mere doctrines; they were doctrinally validated and naturalized as events. What comes through most clearly in Bynum’s argument is the vital importance of these two interlocking events—as objects of ideology, discourse, belief, and hope—in inhibiting somatophobia. They secured the dependence of personal identity on bodily continuity and integrity. Their efficacy as inhibitors is obviously contingent on their transcendence, that is, on their cognitive and discursive status as natural or divine rather than human constructions: The crucial question to which discussion of the resurrected body returned again and again was not ‘‘Is body necessary to personhood?’’ Medieval theologians were so certain it was that they sometimes argued that resurrection was ‘‘natural.’’ Peter of Capua suggested, for example, that it was a consequence not of divine grace but of the structure of human nature that body returned to soul after the Last Judgment.18 The point of entry and mode of initiation into this redeemed community is baptism. In late antique Christianity baptism ‘‘was apparently already connected with rituals that acted out an explicit stripping off of the distinguishing marks on which the hierarchy of ancient society depended,’’19 and this ritual of divestment was literalized in the fourthcentury practice of naked baptism discussed by Margaret Miles. In an account that connects with and augments Bynum’s argument, Miles makes a strong case for a distinction, effected by the power of that limi-

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nal sacrament, between Christian nakedness and nudity. Even though her well-taken critique of Clark’s gender bias leads her to avoid using the word ‘‘nude,’’ the following passages make it clear that his version of the naked/nude contrast illuminates not only the structure of the specific distinction she develops but also its difference from his notion of the classico-Renaissance ideal of nudity—a difference that helps explain why Christian nudity may diminish somatophobia whereas Renaissance nudity may increase it: The practices that prepared for and accompanied baptism developed a context for nakedness that removed the naked body from social meanings and identified it as the site and symbol of religious subjectivity; in Christian baptism, the naked body was no longer object, but subject. Christian naked baptism, then, cannot be understood as a continuation of secular culture made feasible by Christians’ familiarity with and acceptance of secular nakedness [i.e. in the public baths]. Ironically, the appropriate context for Christian baptism must rather be Christian aversion to secular nakedness, an aversion informed by the sense that a human body, because of its intimate connection with the soul, should not be casually or carelessly exposed. For Christians, following an incarnated Christ meant that naked bodies have religious meaning; bodies are the site and naked bodies the symbol of religious subjectivity. Even Christian authors who differed from each other in their philosophical ideas of the relationship of bodies and souls nevertheless claimed the mutual and reciprocal influence of body and soul.20 In Christian nudity the body is reformed as the soul’s habitat and set over against secular nakedness. Nudity is produced not in inorganic media by techniques of art but in the organic medium of the body through the agency of ‘‘ ‘techniques of the self ’—actually communal techniques—by which [in baptism] a chosen self-in-community was created and established.’’21 What baptism ritualized was the act of divestment by which one exposed one’s nakedness as the precondition to the assumption of nudity: Clothing, which represented the candidate’s lifelong accumulation of secular interests, values, and loyalties, was laid aside, and the candidate

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entered the baptismal waters in the same condition of naked vulnerability in which he or she entered the world. . . . A change of beliefs and values was certainly a desired effect of catachesis and baptism, but it was not the only effect. A new integration of the body in religious commitment was produced by the practices surrounding and including naked baptism. The naked body, the exposed body of birth, baptism, and death, came to represent religious subjectivity, aspiration, and commitment.22 By such ritual technologies nakedness is invested in nudity when the body becomes a signifier of soul and is redeemed or at least partially protected from the shadows of ascetic devaluation. Unlike Clark’s concept of nudity, Christian nudity is not an abstraction from the naked body, not a graphic ideal, a pictorial or sculptural fiction, but ‘‘an abstraction blooded’’—an ideal embedded, imprinted, in the body, and thereby naturalized, or defictionalized. Although produced by technology, it has the structure not of an artificial and compensatory prosthesis but of a supernatural enhancement. It is not something that signifies the naked body’s lack but something superadded to it, the effect of a real operation that mediates grace through ritual channels.23 ‘‘The key to a victory of Christianity in the life of the person is the physical practices—fasting, sexual abstinence, vigils, prayers, and exorcisms—that effectively deconstruct the person’s physical and social habits and make possible the reconstruction of a new orientation. Just as the unbaptized were seen as the property of the devil, bearing evil in their bodies, so the baptized became, body and soul, flesh of Christ’s flesh and bone of his bone.’’24 The equivalent of the nude, the re-formed, corrected, fiction of the superior body is ritually embedded in the actual body as its facticity. Facticity: de-latinizing this term yields fact-like-ness. Unlike fact and factuality, facticity names a state of appearance and resemblance and thus implies a rhetorical effect, a trope. By an imaginative deployment of false etymology, we can link it to factitious as its adjective, and factitious means artificially produced and therefore lacking authenticity—fake, sham. Factitious slides easily, by a one-letter change, into fictitious. Factitious also shares a common etymology with fetish, fetishistic—both derive (the latter via Portuguese) from Latin facticius. To fetishize is to confer an especially intense

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degree of facticity as a repository and guarantor of value; to characterize the conferral as fetishizing is to affirm that it is factitious or fictitious. Given a context of competing ideological economies, the production of facticity depends on the development and maintenance of strategies of defictionalization. In the epoch-long culture of defictionalization that lasted from the Gospel Age through the Middle Ages, the development of Christian facticity had as its objective not only the design, institution, and continuous operation of factitious strategies for producing fetishistic effects, but also the provision of devices that enable agents to disown, ignore, or occlude the factitious or fictitious origins of the effects. Emerging in the crazyquilt synchrony of Mediterranean cultures, this project found its diachronic mechanism in the dialectics of appropriation that was given its decisive characterization by Hegel and compressed into the term aufheben, initially—and inadequately—rendered in English as ‘‘to sublate’’ and more recently as ‘‘to supersede.’’ Three different and conflicting senses of the term are activated in the Hegelian dialectic. Auf Ⳮ heben primarily means to lift up, raise, elevate to a higher plane. It also means to suspend in another sense—to repeal, annul, destroy the force of. Thirdly, it means to keep, reserve, preserve, or store away. Aufhebung, as Nietzsche characterizes it in The Genealogy of Morals, is a continuous chain of reinterpretations by which the past is simultaneously overcome and reconstructed. Thus, for example, Christian discourses supersede those of classical antiquity and Old Testament culture by constructing them as misguided or blind precursors, full of lies and illusions at worst. But in that very negation Christian discourses enhance their predecessors’ historical generativity and resurrect them as prefigurations of the facticity that supersedes them. In the journey toward new heaven and new earth, for example, discursive oikoi of synagogue, gens, natio, polis, urbs, and imperium are negated by and remodeled in the household, family, community, empire, and Church of Christ. Thus, even as it aims to negate the institutions, practices, and discourses of its precursors by radical appropriation and reformation, Christianity can’t help conserving—and being troubled by—the aufgehoben within itself as that which has been remodeled, transcended, and remaindered. This last term should forestall the tendency to emphasize only the ‘‘progressive’’ movement of the Aufhebung, which marks its course by

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conserving the shades of, reanimating the danger posed by, the precursors it continuously revives as its repressed others. The remainder is thus forced stubbornly, resentfully, to remain, living the half-life of a ghostly revenant buried under the cornerstone of a new narrative and haunting the renovated stories of the structure from which it was and is and will be dispossessed.25 To sublate is to release into the aufgehoben material the stain of negativity thereafter sustained as the necessary shadow and double of the new illumination. The element that stains and sustains, that threatens and defines, Christian facticity is the moral disvalue of fictionalization, of illusoriness, that Christian discourse releases into pre- and non-Christian belief systems. Consider, for example, how hagiography centers on the need to manage this threat: The primary social function of sacred biography . . . is to teach (docere) the truth of the faith through the principle of individual example. . . . The effect of this emphasis was to diminish the importance of the aesthetic dimensions of the text. Such diminished importance is crucial, for it underlines a central thesis of sacred biography: the art of the text is designedly not a reflection of individual ability, of virtuoso excellence but is part of a tradition and posits a different orientation between author, text, and audience from that which would exist if aesthetics were a chief concern. As a result of this secondary interest in a text’s art, the major anticipation which unites author and audience is how the text reflects the received tradition, a tradition whose locus is in the community.26 The phrase ‘‘aesthetic dimensions’’ encodes not only the signs of rhetorical and narrative virtuosity but also the more general display of human poiesis as the hubristic invention of individuals rather than the truth of received tradition or inspiration.27 Such signifiers of imaginative (therefore imaginary) activity jeopardize the facticity and transcendence of sacred biography, which are guaranteed by invoking the criteria of defictionalization. Thomas Heffernan’s emphasis on the diminution of the aesthetic suggests that an awareness of its danger is built into hagiographic discourse, and his assertion that ‘‘the art of the text is designedly not a reflection of individual ability’’ betrays the hagiographer’s reliance

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on aesthetic elements of design to produce the anti-aesthetic effect. Thus the strategies that defend against the danger of fictionalization are themselves sources of the danger. The need for strategies of defictionalization is a central theme in Hans Belting’s account of medieval cult images: Common to the most diverse of attitudes is a recognition of the cult image not as an aesthetic illusion or as the work of an artist but as a manifestation of a higher reality—indeed, as an instrument of a supernatural power. . . . What mattered was not whether the depiction of a saint was beautiful, but whether it was correct. Therefore, there could not be several authentic portraits, but only one. It was then necessary to establish which was the true one. This made it desirable for images to declare themselves authentic by performing miracles, the classic proof of authenticity. . . . The difference between the image and what it represented seemed to be abolished in them [that is, in images that ‘‘legitimated themselves as receptacles of God or a saint’’]; the image was the person it represented, at least that person’s active, miracle-working presence, as the relics of saints had previously been.28 Likeness, a function of art, has to be overcome so that the presence of the referent may bleed into the image: ‘‘The image, understood in this manner, not only represented a person but was also treated like a person, being worshiped, despised, or carried from place to place in ritual processions.’’29 In the structure of hagiographic representation, the saint is the referent, the hagiographic history, romance, myth, or legend is the representation. The aim of hagiographic representation is not only to inspire devotion and piety toward the saintly referent and to edify the devotees, it is also to assert, guarantee, promote, certify, preserve, prolong, the facticity of the referent. As the different genres of hagiography suggest, whole-cloth facticity isn’t demanded of the representation.30 But no matter how legendary or romancelike or embroidered by pious fictions and marvels the representation may be, it must contribute to, or presuppose, or not disturb the facticity of the referent. The facticity of the referent, its autonomy relative to its representations, its transcendence of and pri-

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ority to its representations, is what counts and what must be displayed in representation, even when the referent is perceived as bleeding into its image and transforming a likeness into a presence. To do its job, the representation should indicate, participate in, deliver, a presence that may inhabit but must not seem to be created by its representation, and it is in the service of this objective that hagiographic discourse deploys the rhetoric of antirhetoric and the aesthetic of the anti-aesthetic. The words I have italicized in Heffernan’s insistence that ‘‘meaning must be served by language that is not consciously self-referential, not consciously seeking after artistic eloquence,’’31 need to be reversed to bring out the full force of the defictionalizing effort and the risk attendant on its being a calculated (anti-)aesthetic strategy: ‘‘consciously not self-referential, consciously not seeking after artistic eloquence,’’ though the agency of the ‘‘consciousness’’ at work may be embedded in discourses rather than in individuals.

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part four

Situating Socrates: The Sublation of Socratic Utterance in Plato’s Dialogues

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ten

Facing Sophists: Socrates’ Charismatic Bondage in Protagoras

I ‘‘The arguments never come from me; they always come from the person with whom I’m speaking’’ (Theaetetus 161b). So the Platonic Socrates describes the cornerstone of his famous method, the principle of midwifery, or maieutics, by which the Great Teacher, refusing to impose his own knowledge in a manner that would reduce his auditors to disciples, epigoni, or replicas of the master, helps each pupil bring his own wisdom to birth. This method has provided an enduring model of the educational process, an ideal—especially in recent decades, a liberal ideal—of proper teaching, an ideal in which teachers sensible of divine power modestly hide their godhead under the somewhat laughable title of Facilitator. It may therefore seem ungenerous to argue that the ideal is based on a complete misconstrual of the ancient source that authorizes it. Our notion of Socratic method comes from the Platonic text in which it is inscribed, and I submit that the text does not represent Socrates as offering a mere description of his procedure. On the contrary, the quoted sentence that opens this paragraph blends a mordantly toned disclaimer of responsibility with a rueful confession of failure. This essay will explain and defend 381

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this assertion in a selective reading of the Protagoras that circumscribes the larger theme centered on the problematic implications of the maieutic ideal. This theme, the Platonic critique of Socratic method, can be more sharply focused by rewriting it as follows: Platonic writing is a deconstructive representation of Socratic speech. Plato’s writing critically differentiates its textual ‘‘method’’ from that of Socratic conversation, and this is a critique not so much of Socrates as of the limitations inherent in the mode of discourse Socrates chooses and is constrained to employ. The mode is locutionary—the mode of speech acts—face-to-face, charismatic. The Socratic logos is embodied and phonocentric, and because of that, it is self-subverting. What Socrates has to say cannot be said the way Socrates says it, cannot be said by saying, can only be said by writing. Plato’s text does not merely, transparently, represent Socratic discourse. It presents itself. It presents itself as—it pretends to be—a representation of Socratic discourse; the writing is a presentation that loves its own textuality as much as it loves and longs for, laments and mourns for, the speech it lovingly reconstructs and deconstructs. Socratic speech emerges in the dialogues as the fallen and secondary pre-text that contains, hidden within itself, inscribed in the pervasive irony that Socrates’ interlocutors never hear, the textuality of Platonic discourse. But if Plato’s text presents itself as primary and immediate, it remains a structure of mediations proclaiming the absence of Plato no less than that of Socrates. This view, of course, collides with the canonical interpretation of Plato, an interpretation that gives priority to a few passages about writing, like that in the Phaedrus, over some twelve or thirteen hundred pages of writing. The canonical emphasis on Plato’s derogation of writing correlates with a failure to acknowledge the presence and intervention of his text as a medium whose grammatological resources are privileged over those of the logocentric experience they represent. The failure to appreciate Plato’s appreciation of the difference between writing and speech, and of the critical power residing in the heterological or nonmimetic relation between them, leads to another failure: even the most politically oriented traditions of commentary (diverted by the opposition between ‘‘politics’’ and ‘‘philosophy’’) ignore the extent to which the Platonic text unfolds a profoundly ambivalent critique, but a critique nonetheless, of the logo-

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centric institutions of fifth-century Athenian culture. I find this failure a little surprising in view of the fact that such a theme has a familiar and illustrious precedent in Thucydides’ portrait of the decline of Athens, a portrait that centers on the structural weaknesses of charismatic politics. One could well expect Plato to have discerned the general possibilities that the Thucydidean theme held for his own project. Since I plan to use the Protagoras primarily to illuminate Plato’s appropriation of this theme, I’ll begin with an epitome of my own interpretive ‘‘method’’ of unpacking what I take to be Plato’s Socratic ‘‘method’’ (or Socrates’ Platonic ‘‘method’’). I do this in order to suggest the kind of texture one may expect to find if one tries to read the Platonic dialogue rather than pretending to listen to Socrates, or watch him as if he were on a stage. This texture is characterized by a structure of displacement that I think is normative for Socratic discourse—quite literally, an ideological displacement in which reflexive characterizations of the transactions between interlocutors are voiced as constative statements about the ideas presumptively under discussion. In the course of putting Theaetetus through the paces of a Protagorean theory of perception, Socrates speaks in the following way of the exchange that occurs between the perceiver and the object perceived. As we read the passage, let’s imagine that he is talking not about a perceived object but about another percipient, a perceived person, one who is also perceiving, which includes hearing as well as seeing. The result of the exchange is that we . . . are or become, whichever is the case, in relation to one another, since we are bound to one another by the inevitable law of our being, but to nothing else, not even to ourselves. The result, then, is that we are bound to one another; and so if a person says anything is, he must say it is for, or of, or toward something, and similarly if he says it becomes; but he must not say or let others say that it is, or becomes, just in and by itself. (Theaetetus 160b–c)1 This language continually glances away from its epistemological context toward an ethical-rhetorical context; the account fits the logocentric relation of dialogue as well as—in fact better than—the perceptual coupling that is its nominal subject. Socrates will go on to refute the Protagorean

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theory of perception. But the Protagorean theory of logocentric bondage will be confirmed by the inescapable constraints of Socrates’ own practice, and so, at a different level, Protagoras, or whatever he embodies, will refute Socrates. In this example, the perceptual account comes to work as a displacement, a metonymic condensation, of the larger, more complex human relationship of which the perceptual relation of bodies and their extensions is a part. The Protagorean dialogues reveal that neither Socrates nor Protagoras ‘‘is, or becomes, just in and by’’ himself. They are and become together as if they were two parts of a single being. We are familiar with Edgar Rubin’s visualization of the figure/ground reversal in which two facing profiles are also the contours of a vase, so that the only ‘‘interior’’ the faces enclose is outside and between them. One face, one presence, is the verge or limit of the other, and outside the contours of the vase, behind the profiles, there is nothing but the ground that sets them off. What binds and bounds the faces together, making them one as any self/other is one, is the new interior they constitute between them. The difference between reading the Theaetetus grammatologically as a text and reading it logocentrically as a discussion to be overheard is the difference between seeing the figure as a vase and seeing it as two faces separated by a neutral ground. The dialogue must be read both ways so that, as in Rubin’s image, the two figures flicker back and forth in alternating focus. But the relation between them is not symmetrical: the vase emerges as the reality, the faces as the appearance. The deconstruction that valorizes the vase is the result of procedures—dislocation, displacement, decelerated reading—not easy to put into play in the unilinear thrust and tempo of logocentric performance. But there is no reason why we should be bound to view the dialogues as if they were speech acts. By privileging the textual, we can decelerate, detemporalize, and dislocate such passages to constitute them as metonymic condensations. Our timeline is not subordinate to that of Socratic conversation; it dominates and reorganizes the inert or latent forces contained in the synchronic field of the text. In turning now to the Protagoras I attempt to demonstrate how the difference made by reading transforms the faces to the vase and brings out the limits structurally imposed on Socratic conversation, or on any conversation.

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II In the Protagoras, Socrates tells an anonymous auditor about the debate he had upon that same day with Protagoras, who had come to town two days earlier and was a guest at the house of Callias, along with two lesser lions, Hippias and Prodicus. The sophists were attended by their prides of paying disciples—the radical elite of Athens, ambitious young men of good families who considered themselves ‘‘inside dopesters’’ and enjoyed being in the neighborhood of what used to be called ‘‘advanced ideas.’’ The dialogue is one of Plato’s more engaging dramatic performances. In fact it is so much like a sporting event or a show that commentators often write as if they were eye-witness reporters giving us their views and reviews of the event. The debate is divided up into a number of rounds differing in length and character. The nominal topic is arete¯, which can mean excellence, power, skill, or virtue, and in fact one of the points in dispute is whether it is to be conceived primarily in technical or ethical terms, whether it is teachable the way knowledge as know-how is teachable or the way knowledge as wisdom is teachable. This topic keeps turning new facets toward us as the debate proceeds. Socrates begins by asking Protagoras whether arete¯, especially political arete¯, can be taught, and Protagoras concocts a long myth to show that it can be and is taught by everyone to everyone, especially by him. Socrates then shifts ground and asks whether the different nominal virtues—temperance, justice, wisdom, courage— are all one thing or different. Protagoras tries to sit the fence on that one—they are all one but different—but Socrates pushes him into the difference corner and keeps him there. Later, after a long and hilarious parody of literary interpretation, Protagoras claims courage differs more than the others and is not a virtue at all. Socrates brings him to his knees with a complicated set of moves, including a much-disputed defense of the hedonist position that pleasure and pain are the criteria of good and evil, and that arete¯ is a form of knowledge, the knowledge underlying an art of measurement that enables you to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. He then returns to argue that, since courage is concerned with the expectation of evil or pain, in particular with knowing which evils are to be feared and which to be faced, it must be a form of virtue.

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The event Socrates narrates begins when young Hippocrates charges in on our sleeping hero before dawn. He has just heard Protagoras is in town, and he is desperate to meet the Great Man, pay him his fee, and start in on his success lessons. Notice that he does not wake Socrates up because of any longing to learn the truth about himself and about the Good, or to submit his ignorant soul to Socrates’ formidable elenchos machine. All he wants from Socrates is an introduction to Protagoras. Socrates makes him realize he does not know what he is getting into and points out that, since the sophist is like a traveling food-salesman, he ought to know in advance whether the soul-food he is paying for will harm his system. Nevertheless, he agrees to take him there, and he seems resigned to being associated, if not confused, with the sophists. One of the functions served by this preliminary episode is to show that Socrates’ influence with the radical elite is largely the result of this confusion; he is prized as the local deconstructor of traditional beliefs, the most obvious Athenian candidate to sit with the panel of visitors. Another function is to show that he is valued less as a philosopher in his own right and more as a means of access to the center of new ideas. And a third, which comes out in his unflattering comments on the sophists, is to make clear his own sense of his difference from them. This gives us a standard in terms of which to judge his subsequent behavior toward Protagoras. Finally, it is important to notice that, once he gets to Callias’s house and brings Hippocrates and Protagoras together, he forgets about Hippocrates and begins to hog the stage himself. In effect, he reduces Hippocrates to the go-between who sets up the battle royal Socrates is keen to wage and keener to win. The account of the dialogue I have given so far completely ignores a crucial aspect of its narrative form. After saying that Socrates tells the story to an auditor, I went on to describe what he tells in the present tense. This eliminates an entire dimension of the dialogue, the mediation produced by the narratorial act. The act is easy to overlook when Plato confines it, as he does here, within a framing conversation which is either sporadic or dropped after serving its introductory purpose. With the exception of the Symposium, where mediation is especially prominent, very few of the narrated dialogues have received serious consideration as such. The few commentators who mention the narratorial action of the Prota-

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goras restrict their remarks to the brief opening dialogue, and even those remarks are nullified by the fact that the storyteller is assumed to be Plato rather than Socrates, hence the possibility that the representation of the narrator may affect the meaning of the dialogue is canceled. But if we look at it, or listen to it, with Socrates in mind, we may learn something: Friend: Where have you come from, Socrates? No doubt from pursuit of the captivating Alcibiades. Certainly when I saw him only a day or two ago, he seemed to be still a handsome man, but between ourselves, Socrates, ‘‘man’’ is the word. He’s actually growing a beard. Socrates: What of it? Aren’t you an enthusiast for Homer, who says that the most charming age is that of the youth with his first beard, just the age of Alcibiades now? Friend: Well what’s the news? Have you just left the young man, and how is he disposed toward you? Socrates: Very well, I think, particularly today, since he came to my assistance and spoke up for me at some length. For as you guessed, I have only just left him. But I will tell you a surprising thing. Although he was present, I had no thought for him, and often forgot him altogether. Friend: Why, what can have happened between you and him to make such a difference? You surely can’t have met someone more handsome—not in Athens at least? Socrates: Yes, much more. Friend: Really, an Athenian or a foreigner? Socrates: A foreigner. Friend: Where from? Socrates: Abdera. Friend: And this stranger struck you as such a handsome person that you put him above the son of Clinias in that respect? Socrates: Yes. Must not perfect wisdom take the palm for handsomeness?

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Friend: You mean you have just been meeting some wise man? Socrates: Say rather the wisest man now living, if you agree that that description fits Protagoras. Friend: What? Protagoras is in Athens? Socrates: And has been for two days. Friend: And you have just now come from seeing him? Socrates: Yes, we had a long talk together. Friend: Then lose no time in telling me about your conversation, if you are free. Sit down here; the slave will make room for you. Socrates: Certainly I shall, and be grateful to you for listening. Friend: And I to you for your story. Socrates: That means a favor on both sides. Listen then. Last night, a little before daybreak, Hippocrates, son of Apollodorus, Phason’s brother, knocked violently on my door with his stick, and when it was opened, came straight in in a great hurry and shouted out, Socrates, are you awake or asleep?2 This friend is nearly, but not entirely, anonymous. For one thing, he is excited by the prospect of hearing about Protagoras. For another, it is clear that he will be a selective listener. He is eager for gossip about Socrates’ erotic affairs, shares the common misconception (held by Athenians in the dialogues) of Socrates as a tireless hunter of beautiful youths and especially of Alcibiades, makes a snide reference to Alcibiades’ passing his prime, and insists that Socrates take his slave’s place—a nice gesture—so that, if he has nothing better to do, he can repeat his conversation. The auditor’s lightheadedness and excitability are immediately transferred backward by Socrates to Hippocrates, making us feel that Socrates’ so-called friends and admirers are better material for the sophists than for the trials of the Socratic elenchos. We thus find him operating under two restrictions. First, he is useful to both the auditor and Hippocrates primarily as a means of access to the handsome and therefore wise words of Protagoras: his function is to bring Hippocrates to the sophist

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and bring the story of the sophist to the friend. Second, it is as a performer, an entertainer, that he is valued. Replacing the auditor’s slave, he presents his contest with Protagoras as a diversion for the idle rich. The kind of audience he confronted yesterday is the kind he confronts again today; there is little to choose between the auditor and the guests of Callias, whose applause for Protagoras’s treacle Socrates twice mentions during his narrative. The same can be said for the audience Socrates will speak to tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, until the day he dies, and long after. The question we take with us into the dialogue, then, is whether he shares these perceptions: does his present perspective as narrator give any clue to his awareness of the problem? And if he does share this awareness, how is it related to the dialogical perplex as it confronts him within the narrated event—that is, related to the logocentric obstacles that prevent his fathering his own logos? Let’s begin this inquiry by glancing at several passages that foreground the narrator. Some are merely reports that pick out details and could be assigned to any narrator, as when Socrates describes the way Hippocrates violently broke in on him in the middle of the night (310a) or lists the names of those in the company of the sophists (315a). None of these stage directions is very long, and all could easily have been handled through direct dialogue. Several others, which are more personal, describe reactions (Hippocrates ‘‘replied with a blush,’’ 312a); the most significant of these concern Protagoras’s vanity, difficulties, and embarrassment: 1. I suspected that he wanted to put on a performance in front of Prodicus and Hippias and show off because we had turned up to admire him. (317c–d) 2. At first Protagoras appeared to be coy, alleging that the argument was too disconcerting. (333d)3 3. At this point I thought Protagoras was beginning to bristle, ready for a quarrel and preparing to do battle with his answers. Seeing this I became more cautious and proceeded gently with my questioning. (333e) 4. I knew that he was dissatisfied with his previous replies, and that he wasn’t willing to take the role of answerer in the discussion, so l felt that there was no point in my continuing the conversation. (335b)

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5. Protagoras was altogether unwilling, but nonetheless he was obliged to agree to put the questions, and when he had asked a sufficient number, to submit to questioning in his turn and give short replies. (338e) 6. Protagoras was ashamed, as it seemed to me, at these words . . . and so he reluctantly prevailed on himself to take up the debate, and asked to have questions put to him, since he was ready to answer. So I proceeded to say, ‘‘Protagoras, do not suppose that I have any other desire in debating with you than to examine the difficulties which occur to myself at each point. For . . . if one observes something alone, forthwith one has to go about searching until one discovers somebody to whom one can show it and with whom one can confirm it.’’ (348c–d) 7. At this point he could no longer bring himself to assent, but was silent; so I said, ‘‘What, Protagoras, won’t you say either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to my questions?’’ ‘‘Finish it yourself,’’ said he. ‘‘Just one more question first,’’ I replied. ‘‘Do you believe, as you did at first, that men can be utterly ignorant yet very brave?’’ ‘‘You seem bent on having your own way, Socrates, and getting me to give the answers; so to oblige you, I will say that on our agreed assumptions it seems to be impossible. ‘‘ ‘‘I assure you,’’ said I, ‘‘that in asking all these questions I have nothing else in view but my desire to learn the truth about virtue and what it is in itself.’’ (360d–e) All these passages characterize Protagoras, but with the exception of passage 5, all are explicitly reported as Socrates’ opinion. We could more easily ignore this if the narrator were not also an interested party in the events he reports, but since he is, his repeating the characterizations of Protagoras opens up a new range of possibilities: such narrative choices may reflect light on the attitude that informs his account, and may link it to his behavior in the contest. The identity of narrator with protagonist increases the reflexive potentiality of any ‘‘objective’’ characterization.4 His comments are not calculated to stand in the way of anyone inclined to cheer him on. At significant moments, usually marking the end of a round he has won, he punctuates the account of his victory with observations that connect his skill in argument, his shrewdness in sizing up the

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opponent, with Protagoras’s discomfiture. Plato was under no necessity to include this set of comments. Their presence in the text can, if we let it, shift our attention from exclusive concern with Socrates then toward the partiality of the narrator who now accentuates, and therefore in effect continues, his success in humiliating the sophist—a continuation that is never more blatant than when he tells how he pulled a punch or picked his enemy up from the floor and gave him another chance, assuaging him with sweet assurances that Protagoras was his partner in the disinterested search for truth. The mood with which Socrates as agonist reeled in and played out the line, by turns dogged and blandly condescending, bleeds into the narrator’s report. Even if we assume that Protagoras’s reputation and the fairly sneaky sophistry of the myth he tells justify the self-endorsement that Socrates’ narration solicits, the double performance (then and now) arouses an uneasiness in Plato’s readers, which may come from two sources. First, there is a strain between the textual view of the sophist’s insidious power (his attractiveness to the young) and the ease with which he is baffled by Socrates. Since this is part of the larger dilemma that confronts Socrates and informs his narration, I shall reserve comment until the dilemma has been explored. The second source of uneasiness concerns the tone and employment of several statements in which Socrates assures Protagoras he is not being contentious but disinterestedly pursuing the truth. These statements are rendered questionable by the contexts in which they are uttered, yet they express the ethical ideal that the figure of Socrates has come to stand for. How, for example, are we to accredit the noble professions in passages 6 and 7? Both were introduced as mollifying tactics. The concluding sentence of passage 6 may remind us of Socrates’ search on behalf of the oracle in the Apology, the outcome of which—that everyone failed the test—vibrates in the misanthropic resonances of Crito and Phaedo. Socrates follows this effort to placate Protagoras with an appeal to the sophist’s fitness as a partner that sounds, to Plato’s readers, increasingly sarcastic: ‘‘It’s not just that you regard yourself as a worthy man; others are upright themselves without the ability to make others so. You are both good yourself and capable of making others good, and have such self-confidence that, whereas others make a secret of this profession, you give yourself the name of sophist and proclaim yourself openly to

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the whole of Greece as a teacher of culture and excellence, and have been the first to ask a fee for this’’ (348e–349a). How then, I repeat, are we to take his profession of disinterest? Passage 7 is followed by the wrapup, in which Socrates points out that the argument has fallen into confusion and the two discussants have concluded by defending positions contrary to those they first upheld. Socrates’ claim that he only wants to learn the truth about virtue is edged by the implication that Protagoras has let him down, since he is not willing to persist in carrying his share of the argument. At the end of this summary, he alludes to Protagoras’s myth and offers to begin from that point and go through the whole inquiry once more (361c–d). This is clearly less an offer than a threat, a disingenuous strategy calculated to terminate the discussion while placing the onus for termination on Protagoras. Protagoras responds according to plan, extricating himself with a piece of flattery economically aimed at saving Socrates’ face and his own. It was clear from Socrates’ conversation with Hippocrates that he did not anticipate learning the truth about arete¯ or anything else through conversation with the sophists. Once he gets to Callias’s house he seems interested primarily in scoring points, putting on a good show, and showing the sophists up by beating them at their own game. This accounts for some of the more hilarious moments in what is often a very funny dialogue. At the same time, his recklessness combines with his pre-established low opinion of the sophists to put a sharp edge on both his pious references to the aims of Socratic inquiry and his praises of Protagoras. We may wonder what Socrates intended then, and also what he intends now, in a report which—even as it stresses his ethical and polemical superiority—reveals a certain inclination toward overkill, along with other questionable motives and tactics. Why, for example, does he characterize his responses in statements like the following, whose irony belongs explicitly to the narratorial present? So Protagoras concluded this lengthy exhibition of his skill as a speaker. I stayed gazing at him, quite spellbound, for a long time, thinking that he was going to say something more, and anxious to hear it; but when I saw that he had really finished, I collected myself with an effort, so to speak, and looked at Hippocrates. (328d)

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And again: what Protagoras said ‘‘produced a shout of approval from many of the audience. At first, what with his argument and the applause of the others, my eyes went dim and I felt giddy, as if I had been hit by a good boxer’’ (339d–e). Since the outcome is never in doubt, since Socrates manhandles Protagoras throughout, what rhetorical function does this sarcasm serve? These comments clearly play to the anonymous auditor’s sense of the way Socrates ought to feel and behave, and partly because of this they leave a bad taste in the reader’s mouth. They contribute to a diffuse suspicion that, although Socrates was easily the winner in the contest, something about the terms of his victory still troubles him and affects the voicing of his replay, so that even the passages of high comedy are edged with a vague uneasiness. This comes out clearly in the most sustained passage of narratorial irony, to which I now turn, Socrates’ first description of the scene at Callias’s house: When we were inside, we came upon Protagoras walking in the portico, and walking with him in a long line were, on one side Callias, son of Hipponicus; his stepbrother Paralus, the son of Pericles; and Charmides, son of Glaucon; and on the other side Pericles’ other son, Xanthippus; Philippides, son of Philomelus; and Antimoerus of Mende, the most eminent of Protagoras’s pupils, who is studying professionally, to become a Sophist. Those who followed behind listening to their conversation seemed to be for the most part foreigners— Protagoras draws them from every city that he passes through, charming them with his voice like Orpheus, and they follow spellbound— but there were some Athenians in the band as well. As I looked at the party I was delighted to notice what special care they took never to get in front or to be in Protagoras’s way. When he and those with him turned round, the listeners divided this way and that in perfect order, and executing a circular movement took their places each time in the rear. It was beautiful. ‘‘After that I recognized,’’ as Homer says, Hippias of Elis, sitting on a seat of honor in the opposite portico, and around him were seated on benches Eryximachus, son of Acumenus, and Phaedrus of Myrrhinus and Andron, son of Androtion, with some fellow citizens

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of his and other foreigners. They appeared to be asking him questions on natural science, particularly astronomy, while he gave each his explanation ex cathedra and held forth on their problems. ‘‘And there too spied I Tantalus’’—for Prodicus of Ceos was also in town, and was occupying a room which Hipponicus used to use for storage, but now owing to the number of people staying in the house Callias had cleared it out and made it into a guest room. Prodicus was still in bed, wrapped up in rugs and blankets, and plenty of them, as far as one could see, and beside him on the neighboring couches sat Pausanias from Cerameis and with him someone who was still a young boy—a lad of fine character I think, and certainly very good-looking. I think I heard that his name is Agathon, and I shouldn’t be surprised if Pausanias is particularly attached to him. Well there was this boy and the two Adimantuses—the son of Cepis and the son of Leucolophides—and a few others. But what they were talking about I couldn’t discover from outside, although l was very keen to hear Prodicus, whom I regard as a man of inspired genius. You see, he has such a deep voice that there was a kind of booming noise in the room which drowned the words. (314e–316a) There is irony in the comic animus with which Socrates represents Protagoras as a kind of chore¯gos leading a dance of disciples in a tragic performance. The scene is then changed to the Homeric house of Hades as the narrator, quoting Odysseus, compares Hippias to the shade of Heracles and Prodicus to Tantalus. Protagoras/Orpheus leading the dance, Hippias/Heracles discoursing from his throne, and the supine Prodicus/Tantalus form a declining sequence of shades. Like Orpheus, the tepid lover (cf. Symposium 179c–d), they are pictured as poor leaders of souls, the blind leading the blind back into the world of the past, purveyors of the conventional and archaic wisdom of the poets who created Hades. Socrates’ account of Protagoras’s performance as a carefully staged production seems as good-humored as it is amusing. And yet it yields to a darker perception: whirling down from Thrace framed in cardboard clouds of Orphic and Dionysian allusion, Protagoras emerges not as a mere huckster but as an impersonator who knows how to deploy the props of a divine or semi-divine figure. To the extent that he is

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successful, he registers both the cynicism of the accepting culture and its still-living desire for the god and the good. He fills the void left by the demystification of the gods. The passage invests the figure of Protagoras with pathos as well as with danger. Protagoras will shortly (316d ff ) claim that the ancient poets were actually sophists in disguise, and this identification is shown to be true in a way he does not appear to intend. For the dialogues represent poet and sophist as versions of the charismatic figure implicated with his validating audience in the uneasy dialectic of the charismatic bond. In the classic Weberian account, the essential features of charisma are, first, that it is recognized as a gift transcending human power and, second, that it is recognized in and as the embodiment of transcendent power in a personal presence. The charismatic relation grounded in this embodiment thus breaks down into three components: at the center stands the figure; ‘‘above’’ is the transcendent source of his gift and favor, the power that he or she or it condenses and refracts; ‘‘around’’ are those who see in the figure the manifestation of the power, those who comprise the validating audience that confers the status of charismatic embodiment. The problematics of this relation turns on the extent to which the reality of the second component, the legitimizing source, is rendered believable by existing socio-cultural constructions. This and another variable—the extent to which both figure and audience can repress or ignore the disabling suspicion that charisma lies in the eye of the observer—are interdependent. By focusing on the weakness of the second component in Athenian culture and by dramatizing the pervasive effects of the consequent suspicion, the Platonic dialogues articulate the subversive dynamic that transforms the charismatic bond to bondage. Again and again, for example, they suggest, either through dramatic interaction or through Socratic speech, that the audience’s self-induced passivity, its refusal to recognize the middle voice of shared responsibility, is the source of its power. The audience makes the charismatic figure at once its god and its slave, ventriloquizing its own logoi through his voice. The power by which the sophist masters the audience (hoi polloi) derives from the power by which the audience masters him. The figure of the sophist as an omnicompetent outsider is a phantasm created and ventriloquized by those who welcome him into their midst—and are

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careful to keep behind him in the dance they let him lead. And insofar as the sophist provides a visible and audible focus in which converges the power of the many-headed beast, his arts guarantee its so¯te¯ria in a profound if familiar sense. It is not possible to confront the power of that Protean agora, the validating audience, unless it is countenanced—unless it commits itself to a visible place, shape, and personal presence. Otherwise it is as invisible as the air that circulates throughout the community of the polis, the air everyone breathes in the metabolic interchanges that keep the system going. The local embodiment of the power, the representative of the many, is dispensable, or at least as dispensable as a dream, since he condenses, displaces, and manifests in his own person the latent power of the audience that is the father of his discourse. The sophist exists to be effaced, if necessary; he is the pharmakos as well as the pharmakeus of the many. Like the evil dragon or monster, he is the allegorical embodiment who offers the hero a chance to prove himself and set things right in single logocentric encounter, in an epic dream of justice and victory through battle. To discern the true nature of the sophist’s influence in the community, it is necessary to look beyond the individual, to discount his respectability, pleasantness, good intentions, hypocrisy, self-interest, or triviality as a person. He is dangerous chiefly as a prismatic focus, an embodiment of the institutional, cultural, social, and historical structures that have made him an effective power. Thus Plato’s Protagoras and Gorgias do not appear as hypocrites in the dialogues, nor are they reducible to mere eristic wranglers. Their success is shown to depend on their ability not only to persuade others but also to be persuaded themselves of their own reliability and trustworthiness. The moral and motivational obtuseness that the sophist shares with his disciples, and which they collaborate in preserving, both justifies and reinforces his influence. His power to help or harm lies less within himself than beyond himself, in the atmosphere that calls him forth. For Socrates to describe Protagoras as a new Orpheus is thus to represent him as a poet and spiritual conductor who is enabled by the souls he leads, who revives for their benefit the material values and interests embodied in the mythography of Hades. As Socrates implies in the Apology, Hades is itself a fantasy of the poets, which, since they ‘‘know none

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of the things they say’’ (22c), is not likely to be true. But it is likely to be what people want to hear, to serve as an anamorphic representation of their desires and values. And inasmuch as the poets depict death as an escape from the corrupt present to the golden past—escape out of time and the contemporary democratic polis to another place (allos topos, 40e), where Homeric heroes abide and are immortal and (thus) happier than in this life—they speak primarily to the desires of particular Athenian or Hellenic interest groups. Socrates etymologizes Pluto in the Cratylus (403a ff.) as the giver of wealth who binds the shades with the desire (epithymia) of being made better (ameino¯n). Ameino¯n connotes the betterness of ‘‘stronger,’’ ‘‘braver,’’ ‘‘of the better sort’’ (cf. Laws 627a) and is a traditional or Homeric-aristocratic status word. The connotation is secured by the derivation of Haide¯s from the desire panta ta kala eidenai (404b), ‘‘to know all fine [or noble] things,’’ where ta kala is another of Socrates’ aristocratic code words. This is apposite to the katabasis in the Protagoras because the sophists are there compared to shades whose Tantalean greed (pleonexia) for power, fame, wealth, and pleasure made life seem futile to them, left them nothing but bitterness and the sense of loss, or of having lost. The many whose power is metonymically condensed in the speaking presence of the sophist include not only the poorer voting and rowing majority but also their political pilots and rich socio- economic superiors, and the latter include both the reactionary aristocrats (Eupatridai), who seek to restore the ancient pre-Solonian regime, and the new agathoi, the lately arrived oligarchs who seek to invest themselves with the ideological panoply of that regime. The guests of Callias are a mingle of Eupatridai and agathoi. It is chiefly with men of these classes or communities that Socrates converses in the dialogues, and it is their desires, their motivational profiles, that Plato inscribes in the text of those conversations. Socrates alludes to shades who, obsessively bound to their desires and punishments, endlessly repeating them, have already been judged and are the subjects or victims of the laws of Hades/Pluto. The laws of Hades are identical with those of the charismatic bondage that enchains the sophists and their pupils. Socrates’ dark image projects the deep apprehensiveness, the fear of being taken, that is the reciprocal of the prehensile urge to take. The fear and the desire together constitute the

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community of pleonexia. Pleonexia means having more, wanting to have more, wanting to be superior and get the better of others, to do unto them before they do unto you. It means never having enough because you aspire to total and immortal self-sufficiency, even if that involves draining the rest of the world of its substance. It is the disease of the oriental despot and the tyrant, the paranoid desire for autarchy. It binds together the sophists and their audience not in symbiosis but in synthanatos. Since it is Socrates who compares his visit to Callias’s house with Odysseus’s descent to the underworld, his narratorial presence is edged with the bitterness that inheres in the allusions. He speaks as one enchained in the same system of pleonectic and charismatic bondage as the sophists. Here, as in the Republic, the Symposium, the Phaedo, and other dialogues, he associates with those who count themselves his friends and devotees. It is not to his enemies that he presents the questionable consolations of the poets but to his friends and—in the Apology—specifically to his supporters. Hence his Odyssean katabasis is at once a figure of his judgment on them and a gesture of disengagement. He presents himself as the hero of the drama, but a hero who dissociates himself from all his interlocutors, and whose arete¯ is most stringently tested, whose kleos is most critically endangered, by those who consider themselves friends or disciples. The heroic andreia communicated by the narrator to Plato’s readers is that of the isolated and misunderstood warrior forced in spite of himself to become what he opposes. To compare himself to Odysseus is to suggest that his descent into the Tartarean cave of Athens compels him to submit to the customs and laws, the enchaining nomoi, of that alien place. It is to suggest that he is a wandering stranger in the city that gave him birth, and in that respect is no different from the sophistical outsiders. And it is to suggest that, like Odysseus describing Hades in the court of Alkinous, he is a narrator, still far from home, telling his story in a doomed Phaiakian dream world whose cooptations he refuses, trapped like a poet in the role of an after-dinner entertainer. At the end of his description Socrates reports the entrance of ‘‘Alcibiades the handsome, as you call him.’’ This is the only time after the opening frame that he directly addresses the auditor, and he does so with a comment, in a tone, that vibrates with the textualized sarcasm informing the

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Hades passage—textualized because it is produced intertextually by the trope of allusion. The narrative frame is momentarily reconstituted in the mode of radical irony that affirms the dissociation of the auditor from some more ideal, belated audience, the audience of Plato’s readers. In that gesture, the auditor is again enrolled in the anti-Socratic community that is the subject of narration. Phaiakia and Hades coalesce with each other, and with Athens. The narratorial speech act becomes a repetition of the act it narrates, and as the two interlocutory communities join forces, the narrated past moves forward to surround and imprison the narrator. It is thus dramatically appropriate that the auditor appears at this point only to vanish for good. To return to the past encounter, the climax of the dialogue occurs during the famous hedonism argument. There Socrates undertakes to show, on behalf of Protagoras and himself, that the majority opinion about pleasure is wrong. The majority hold that when the many are overcome by pleasure, the cause is incontinence. Against this, Socrates will assert that the cause is ignorance—ignorance of the art of measurement that will enable them to determine whether in the long run the pleasure they seek will outweigh the pain it may occasion. If the many could master this hedonist calculus, this technical knowledge, their batting average would be much better. As one commentator concisely puts it, ‘‘Socrates and the many agree that we choose something as a good for its pleasure, and that we choose pleasure as the good.’’ He claims ‘‘not that the many consciously accept this form of hedonism, but that examination will show that their deliberation and choices are hedonistic.’’5 The problem this argument has posed for commentators is that Socrates shows every sign of embracing the hedonist position, even though it is directly opposed to the famous ethical injunction he lives and dies by, ‘‘It is worse to do wrong to another than to suffer it oneself.’’ I want to defer consideration of this problem until after I mention another aspect of the argument, which concerns Protagoras. When they begin discussing the topic, Protagoras three times dissociates himself from the many and their opinions, which, he says, are shameful and contemptible.6 What Socrates does, by means of some shifty rhetorical devices, is to reduce Protagoras to the many. He unmasks his self-preening and self-protective diffidence, and persuades him to answer on behalf

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of the many that the pleasurable is unqualifiedly the criterion of the good. Protagoras unknowingly emerges as the double, the mouthpiece, of the many. They, and not he, are the father of his discourse. What he claims to teach them is what they have taught him to teach them. At the end of the argument Protagoras thinks he and Socrates have won a victory over the majority and joined forces in the hedonist camp, whereas Plato’s readers see that Protagoras has unknowingly betrayed his commitment to a position for which he claims to have no respect, since it is associated with the vulgar many who say whatever comes into their heads. Shortly after, Socrates will make this commitment the basis for bringing Protagoras to his knees and winning the contest. Since most commentators, or a fair number of them, agree that this is what happens, I shall skip over the moves that produced this victory, interesting as they may be, in order to turn to something even more interesting, which is that Socrates’ victory is Pyrrhic, and that he shows, and therefore knows, that winning in the short run is losing in the long run. This knowledge, which is reflected in the narratorial moments of mordant irony it produces, is displayed in the narrated event, and perhaps most interestingly in Socrates’ conduct of the hedonism argument (351b– 358d), to which I now turn.

III Commentators who worry that in this episode Socrates turns hedonist are right. What effectively happens is that as Protagoras collapses into the many, Socrates collapses into Protagoras. But the commentators approach this conversion and collapse in terms that are exclusively logocentric, in the sense that they pretend to listen to Socrates speak: their focus is on the constative aspect of his discourse, and they subordinate its rhetorical or illocutionary features to this aspect. Thus, for example, C. C. W. Taylor insists that since, in the latter part of the hedonism argument, Socrates argues ‘‘in his own person’’ that the pleasurable is the good, ‘‘it would be dishonest on his part to allow the sophists to accept his inference’’ if he himself tacitly rejected it; and since ‘‘it seems implausible that Socrates should be represented as arguing with conscious dishonesty,’’ we must conclude that he ‘‘is represented by Plato as sharing

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the [hedonist] assumptions of the common man and the conclusions which he (Socrates) derives from those assumptions.’’7 This view assumes precisely what the text of the hedonism argument throws into question, namely, the limits of the concept ‘‘in his own person.’’ Propria persona: a proper person, an own or owned person, enduring, autonomous, safely reified as a body, visible, bounded, filling a particular place, emitting presence through a particular face and voice. Integrity, individuality, identity; self and not other; sincere or insincere, honest or dishonest, telling a lie or seeking a truth: these clarities of the logocentric ideal of presence and self-presence are what the episode ambiguates. The text shows how Socrates flags the outcome of the argument, his apparent commitment to hedonism, as a self-defeat, the result of a self-division, an inner contradiction that belongs to the structure of face-to-face conflict. This outcome suggests that a better translation of in propria persona might be ‘‘in his own mask,’’ though the maskmaker is not Socrates but his audience. I begin a closer consideration of the hedonism passage by pointing out that within the space of a single page (354b–355b) Socrates adverts five times to an alternative that the many are unable to cite as the criterion governing the choices they make. The fourth and fifth recurrences are fired off in rapid succession, separated by only a single question, but a critical one: But even now it is possible for you [the many; and now also, by implication, Protagoras] to retract if you can say that the good is different from pleasure or the bad from pain. Or is it enough for you to live out your life pleasantly, without pain? If it is, and you can’t call anything good or bad that doesn’t end in pleasure or pain, listen to what I have to say next. (354e–355a) This next move is to reduce to absurdity the claim that a man knowingly commits evil or refrains from doing good ‘‘because he is driven and dazed by his pleasures.’’ He argues that since ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘evil’’ have become synonymous and thus interchangeable with ‘‘pleasure’’ and ‘‘pain,’’ you can show how ridiculous the claim is by unmixing the two pairs and employing only the first: ‘‘a man does evil, knowing it to be evil, and not having to do it, because he is overcome by the good’’ (355a–d).

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The illocutionary strategies in this part of the text deserve careful scrutiny. We have a good idea of what is implied in the excluded alternative, and we want to interrupt and say: The good is different from pleasure, and it is not enough to live out our lives pleasantly. But Socrates refuses to let his imaginary interlocutors say that. His ‘‘even now it’s possible to retract’’ suggests that, although the moment of truth is close at hand, ‘‘you’’ have a final chance to retract before it is too late. The chance is immediately withdrawn by the rhetorical question that follows; he goes on to foist the conclusion of the many on them, and on this basis sets out to reduce their opinion to absurdity, with odd effect. On the one hand, the repeated references to the alternative assume the character of a persistent leading question (‘‘Have you any other criterion, or telos?’’), as if to give them a chance to reconsider, and, on the other hand, his answers on their behalf make them appear doggedly to refuse to entertain what may be a better if more difficult alternative. The reduction itself is extremely strange, as well as strained. It becomes the basis for the perverse hedonist argument that incontinence is a mistake, a product of technical ignorance (amathia), which can be corrected by learning and applying the instrumental art of measurement. This is not what the reader expected. The following logos would have been more in accord with what we know of Socrates: once the many are made to acknowledge that they are responsible hedonists rather than helpless incontinents, it may be possible to show them, not that their incontinence resulted from ignorance of the calculus, but rather that their totalizing commitment to what has been called by Terence Irwin the ‘‘principle of hedonistic prudence’’ (see n. 5) was itself the wrong kind of knowing—or the wrong kind of ignorance. It was not a mere absence of the knowledge that the good differs from the pleasurable; it was a skilled ignorance, which was based on the refusal to inspect one’s motives and on careful avoidance of the gadfly’s sting. It was the ignorance of Cephalus, Crito, and other decent human beings whom Socrates numbers among his so-called friends. This alternate ethic pleads and presses to be let into the discussion, but Socrates blocks it. Why and how does he do that? Or, to be more precise, by what means does he dramatize the pressure and the blocking? I noted above that he himself performs the reductio and leads it into the

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hedonist argument. But this is inaccurate. He ventriloquizes another voice, the voice of a hubristic (ill-mannered, arrogant, violent) questioner who steps in, pushes Socrates to the wall, and takes the argument away from him. The questioner suggests impatiently that Socrates has put the reduction in a tendentiously absurd form, which can be salvaged by shifting the notion of ‘‘being overcome’’ from affective to cognitive terms. He does this by introducing the term axios, whose general sense, ‘‘worthy,’’ derives from contexts that involve weighing and exchange (‘‘worth as much,’’ ‘‘equal in weight,’’ ‘‘counterbalancing’’). He forces Socrates to admit that the pejorative word overcome in the reduction means that ‘‘the good is not worthy of conquering the evil’’—is not equal in weight or force—and then he mounts his attack. I have interposed numbers in the passage to indicate places where a change of interlocutor is definitely called for, or seems probable, or is questionable: But in what sense, he might ask us, is the good unworthy of the bad, or the bad of the good? [1] This can only be when the one is greater and the other smaller, or when there are more on the one side and fewer on the other. We shall not find any other reason to give. [2] So it is clear, he will say, that by ‘‘being overcome’’ you mean getting the greater evil in exchange for the lesser good. [3] That must be agreed. [4] Then let us apply the terms ‘‘pleasant’’ and ‘‘painful’’ to these things instead, and say that a man does what we previously called evil, but now call painful, knowing it to be painful, because he is overcome by the pleasant, which is obviously unworthy to conquer. [5] What unworthiness can there be in pleasure as against pain, save an excess or defect of one compared with the other? That is, when one becomes greater and the other smaller, or when there are more on one side and fewer on the other, or here a greater degree and there a less. [6] For if anyone should say: But, Socrates, the immediately pleasant differs widely from the subsequently pleasant or painful, I should reply: Do they differ in anything but pleasure and pain? [7] That is the only distinction. Like a practiced weigher, put pleasant things and painful in the scales, and with them the nearness and remoteness, and tell me which count for more. . . . [8] Can the case be otherwise, I should ask, than thus, ¯o anthropoi? I am sure they could not disagree. (355d–356c)

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It is not at first necessary to assign step 1 as a response to Socrates— the questioner could be answering his own question—but this move becomes evident by the time we get to step 2. That Socrates responds at step 3 is unambiguous, but whether he stops or continues at step 4 is less certain. Taylor’s looser translation of tauta men oun houto¯ at step 3, ‘‘so much for that,’’ makes it more conceivable that step 4 marks a change of subject by the same speaker, but Taylor in fact argues against a reading whose ‘‘main attraction’’ is ‘‘that the ‘ill-mannered questioner’ takes no further part in the discussion,’’ since it is the questioner’s thesis that is being developed. Whether there is a change of speakers at step 5 is even less certain. Assuming that the questioner picks up at step 4, it is possible to read the first question at step 5 as Socrates’ response to the statement that the pleasant is unworthy to conquer. But until we get to step 6, it is equally possible that the questioner continues his exposition. Step 6 marks a definite continuation, and since it introduces a new speaker, an objector who addresses Socrates by name, we conclude retrospectively that Socrates has been speaking in his own voice at least since step 5 and possibly since step 3. In comparing this sequence to its reversal, we find the most problematic juncture to fall at step 4. After a moment of hesitation at step 7—the first sentence could be read as a restrictive response on the objector’s part—we also conclude that Socrates speaks in his own voice to the end of the passage. At step 8 he completes the exposition addressed to the majority and the many, and presumably also to the questioner and the objector, and turns finally from ‘‘them’’ to Protagoras. What does Socrates accomplish by these shifts? We had been set up by the recurrent allusions to an alternate telos to expect that the reductio would be used to recuperate a familiar Socratic position. It is not allowed to actualize that project, however, and the entry of the questioner coincides with a change of direction. Socrates makes it appear that the questioner has his own agenda, and that it is he who foils the project by heading the reductio toward a different—a ‘‘scientific’’ or epistemic— resolution to the problem of demystifying incontinence. The questioner is clearly a sophistical proponent of the hedonist position. His redirection at first imposes a strain on the reduction. While it remains focused on the term good, its absurdity extends to the questioner’s attempt to make sense of it, since to say one is overcome by the good because it is

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less axios than the bad is ridiculous. Therefore, at step 4, the good is quickly discarded for its presumptive equivalent. And now it is perfectly reasonable to argue that what the majority really meant by ‘‘overcome’’ was a failure in logistical judgment. This move is congenial to the claims of the Protagorean teacher, who can then go on to persuade the many that their incontinence is avoidable through instruction. Incidentally, if the shift from ‘‘good’’ back to ‘‘pleasure’’ converts an absurd proposition to a reasonable one, then ‘‘good’’ cannot actually be synonymous with or reducible to ‘‘pleasure.’’ That irreducibility persists though the argument and reminds us of the excluded alternative. Step 4, then, is the turning point that defeats Socrates’ attempted reductio and enables the triumph of the hedonist argument. At the same time, it is the most ambiguous interlocutory juncture, for we cannot decide whether Socrates or the questioner is speaking. And the moment in which their ‘‘voices’’ blend indistinguishably is also the moment that lays the basis for an argument favorable to Protagoras. The questioner is a spokesman for an enlightened or hedonistic defense of the commitment of the many to pleasure. His argument now mediates the position of the many so that it converges with that of Protagoras, and just as this happens, the questioner, who was initially introduced as a hubristic opponent to Socrates, expropriates Socrates’ voice. From that moment on, the ventriloquist becomes the ventriloquized. The spokesman borrows Socrates’ voice and transmits his argument through it. Socrates, who of course is staging all this, signifies this development by a change to first person plural (at 356d), which he maintains through the conclusion of his hedonism argument: ‘‘if our welfare consisted in doing and choosing’’ etc.— here, finally, ‘‘we’’ are all together, united in our commitment to and praise of the thesis that it is enough to live life pleasantly because the pleasurable is the good. To define virtue as the forethought that enables humans to protect themselves against pain, danger, defeat, is sure to be pleasing to all his auditors. All of them agree six times to his concluding summaries of the argument, the final statement of which is ironically phrased in familiar Socratic terms: ‘‘No one willingly goes after evil or what he thinks to be evil . . . in preference to the good.’’ Here, because of the preceding argument, ‘‘evil’’ and ‘‘good’’ have been overcome by the values of ‘‘pain’’ and ‘‘pleasure.’’ The alliance with Protagoras results in

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Socrates’ own logoi being occupied by Protagoras’s meanings. But Socrates’ ultimate achievement is to have brought all the sophists—who had been competing with each other before—into harmonious agreement. It is he who, by wresting agreement from his interlocutors and winning the round, constitutes the community of pleasure. His final victory over them is to unite them in affirming the ethos and practices they live by, and thus to strengthen the very interests he opposes. The thematic emphasis of the hedonism passage is not substantive or constative but performative. Its ‘‘message’’ is not an argument about hedonism but an argument about the interlocutory constraints on the utterance of one’s ‘‘own’’ truth, logos, ¯ethos, or anything else. In this episode, Socrates enacts the drama of the theft of voice and of the permeability of presence. He performs a monologue, which he gradually dissolves into what Bakhtin might call heteroglot dialogism, a monologue subverting itself by dramatizing its own impossibility. He allows himself not only to be captured and occupied by, but also to be transformed into, the imaginary opponent who speaks through the ventriloquist. The face he presents to his interlocutors gradually changes into the face of the other. Hence to say that Protagoras has been reduced to the many he contemns is only to express the more superficial half of the drama. The illocutionary detail of the episode shows the cost of achieving that reduction: allowing himself to be infiltrated by the combined voices of the many, the enlightened majority, and the sophists, Socrates fatefully enchains himself to Protagoras and becomes his double. To defeat Protagoras is to be defeated by him; to play him is to become him. Defacing Protagoras, he effaces himself. Reducing him to silence, he silences himself. Giving voice to the speeches of others, he shows himself robbed of his own. What Socrates performs is the inability of his own logos to fill the words he utters or penetrate to the surface of the logocentric encounter. When he utters familiar Socratic sayings, their sting is drawn, their meaning usurped. ‘‘Good’’ signifies pleasure, and ‘‘evil’’ pain, therefore the saying, ‘‘no one voluntarily goes after evil or what he thinks evil’’ becomes a canceled ideal, a wishful fantasy replaced by its hedonistic simulacrum. The discourse on hedonism is Socrates’ dramatization of the death of the Socratic logos, a condensed profile of the many aborted conversations

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that the dialogues represent. That he performs his own self-defeat shows that he already has been silenced from the moment he chose to make his katabasis into the house or Hades of Callias. ‘‘The Platonic dialogues,’’ Hannah Arendt writes, ‘‘tell us time and again how paradoxical the Socratic statement . . . sounded, how easily it stood refuted in the marketplace where opinion stands against opinion, and how incapable Socrates was of proving and demonstrating it to the satisfaction not of his adversaries alone but also of his friends and disciples.’’8 To this I add that the Platonic dialogues tell us time and again how Socrates, recognizing this, and recognizing its cause in the self-dividing structure of logocentric experience, also recognized that he was bound to fail so long as he remained within the charismatic prison of his speaking presence. If the readers of the Protagoras sometimes have the satisfaction of seeing through the sophists and grasping both Socrates’ irony and his clear superiority in the skills of argument, that satisfaction is placed in question as soon as attention is refocused on their hero’s act of narration. The hero’s self-portrait is conveyed in misanthropic tones that register the pathos of the submission, the loss of speech, entailed by his katabasis. And the pathos derives from the nostalgia for a lost or missing ideal of unmediated presence and full ownership of speech, the traces of which are inscribed in the dialogue. Socrates told Protagoras, for example, that those who argue about poetry resemble drinkers at a symposium who, ‘‘owing to their inability to carry on a familiar conversation over their wine by means of their own voices and discussions . . . [hire] the extraneous voice of the flute . . . and carry on their discourse by means of its utterance.’’ But a gathering that ‘‘includes such men as most of us claim to be, requires no extraneous voices, not even of the poets.’’ Such men ‘‘prefer to converse directly with each other, and to use their own logoi in putting one another by turns to the test.’’ This is, he continues, the ‘‘sort of person that I think you and I ought . . . to imitate; putting the poets aside, let us hold our discussion together in our own persons, making trial of the truth and of ourselves’’ (347c–348a). Here he indicates the desired and conspicuously excluded possibility of genuine Socratic dialogue, the pursuit of truth in the company of friends who, speaking at variance, speaking their own words in their own voices, caring more for the ‘‘truth’’ than for themselves, make themselves fully present to them-

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selves and to each other. It is precisely the ideal that, privileging the spoken over the written word, is the target of the Derridean critique. Socrates’ statement seems perfectly to reflect this logocentric valorization. But if we look more closely at the words Plato writes into his mouth, the statement becomes problematical: we ought to imitate (mimeisthai) those who prefer this ideal, putting aside the poets themselves and by ourselves mutually poieisthai our logoi—we should, that is, replace the poets by making our own imitation and doing our own poetic fashioning of ourselves, as if the unmediated discourse we desire were itself a product of poetic mediation; as if we could not present but only represent or impersonate ourselves to each other. For—to unpack the logic further—if I offer myself as a presence to another, a space opens up between the I and the myself. The I is withdrawn from the other, myself splits from the I and advances toward the other, representing itself as the I, as the propria persona, which at that very moment the first I ceases to own. The first I becomes an imitator, myself becomes its imitation. I is the poet, myself the poem. The relation becomes textual and, like an undefended text, is exposed to arbitrary interpretation. I and myself are rendered absent to each other in the movement by which I defers myself and tries or pretends through that deferral to be present to the other. Thus in the very act of describing the Socratic ideal of genuine dialogue, face to face and mind to mind, Socrates’ language subverts it, affirms instead the difference, absence, and mediation that mark the textuality enclosed within the charismatic bondage of the body and the voice. Any logocentric or interlocutory interchange is a process in which one divides into two and two become one. One dividing into two becomes smaller than himself; one having another added to himself becomes larger than himself. The two processes are one. Socrates receives Protagoras into himself when he divides into I and myself and cedes myself to Protagoras. And so it is in every interlocution. ‘‘The arguments never come from me; they always come from the person with whom I am talking.’’ But if the other is always internalized through the process, if the other becomes myself as opposed to I, then of course the arguments do come from me, and I am always talking to myself in talking to an other, always talking to an other in talking to myself. To second person myself in interior monologue is to ‘‘otherate’’ myself, divide in two. Self-division,

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self-opposition, perhaps self-contradiction is the condition of dialogue. To speak at all is to speak at variance. We are bound to one another by the law of our face-to-face existence. But also, each of us is divided from himself by the same law. To build a community of communicating individuals is to fragment each individual into a community. Against this perpetual round of mutual contamination and fragmentation two ideals are posited: the mystical unity of all as if in a single body (the Pauline body); and the totally pure, isolated, autonomous, integrated, fully selfsufficient unbreachable autarchy of the embodied individual. In the dialogues, the first ideal is represented in the sinister parodic form of the guardian polis as an extended kin-group whose collective pleasures and pains are likened to those of a single body (Republic V, 462a ff.), while the second is comically figured in the portrait of the self-sufficient Hippias in the Hippias Minor (368b ff.).

IV In the Theaetetus, when Socrates brings Protagoras back for his second defense, he imagines the sophist emerging ‘‘from the ground, here at our feet, if only as far as the neck’’ (171d). A possible gloss on this partial emergence is provided by Socrates’ ironic reference in the Symposium (198c) to the deinos ‘‘Gorgias’s head,’’ which, if its rhetoric were opposed by Agathon ‘‘to mine, would turn me thus voiceless into stone’’—another allusion comparing Socrates to Odysseus in Hades (Odyssey xi.632–35). The head is the locus of the deinos face—the eloquent, spellbinding, wonderful, dangerous proso¯pon from which (as Timaeus put it) phrone¯sis streams in speech.9 By his command of face and speech, the sophist stands over against others, a separate and, as he would claim, a superior individual, greater than his auditors by a head. But of course in the Theaetetus the selfassertive owner of Protagoras’s face, speech, and truth is not even present. He is revived from the dead and ventriloquized by Socrates, just as Socrates is revived from the dead and ventriloquized by the boy who reads from Euclides’ text, just as Euclides and his text are ventriloquized by Plato, who is not present. Where, then, do we locate the boundaries of any individual presence, any natural face? If Protagoras’s head is affixed to the underwater body of the political hydra (cf. Euthydemus 297c, Republic

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426d-e, 492a ff., 588c ff.), then, like the heads of other sophists, poets, and rhapsodes, it is expendable, and more than expendable: decapitation nourishes and activates the root structure, which always sends up two heads for every one lost. In creating the illusion of presence and offering the Socratic hero a defeatable target, the head, with its arts of face, constitutes the most profound ‘‘soterial’’ agent by which the community of pleasure preserves itself. In the passage of the Theaetetus that I discussed at the beginning of this essay, Socrates indirectly expresses his own reservations about the proprietary individualism that the logocentric fallacy induces when it encourages one to locate the parts and powers of arete¯ in those of the face, in this case, the eyes. He is speaking of the exchange that occurs in visual perception between the percipient and the perceived, and, as I noted, we should imagine that the latter is another percipient: ‘‘The result . . . is that we . . . are or become, whichever is the case, in relation to one another, since we are bound to one another by the inevitable law of our being, but to nothing else, not even to ourselves. The result, then, is that we are bound to one another; and so if a man says anything is, he must say it is for, or of, or toward something, and similarly if he says it becomes; but he must not say or let others say that it is, or becomes, just in and by itself ’’ (160b–c). This will, of course, be discounted as a statement of the Protagorean position being refuted, that is, that ‘‘nothing is one and invariable . . . but it is out of movement and motion and mixture with one another that all those things become which we wrongly say ‘are’ ‘‘ (152d). Yet shortly after the passage at 160b, Socrates returns to his maieutic self-description and phrases it in such a way as to allow the model of perceptual dialogue to rub off on it: ‘‘None of the arguments comes from me, but always from him who is talking with me. I myself know nothing, except just a little, enough to extract an argument from another man who is wise and to receive it fairly’’ (161b). Socrates’ assertions of the principle of maieutic nonresponsibility are always difficult to assess because they are at once accurate and misleading. It is easy to see that he can adopt and use a Thrasymachean logos against Thrasymachus, and a Protagorean logos against Protagoras. But it is less easy to see what equity he has in this move. Is it always to be interpreted

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under the sign of radical irony as pure opposition, derogatory mimicry? At 166a–b, ‘‘Protagoras’’ makes a discriminating comment on Socrates’ procedure: ‘‘when you examine any doctrine of mine by the method of questioning, if the person who is questioned makes such replies as I should make and comes to grief, then I am refuted, but if his replies are quite different, then the person questioned is refuted, not I,’’ which is a weak and reasonable version of the nonresponsibility principle. It may occur to us that, since Socrates seems almost invariably to deliver ‘‘wind eggs’’ from his interlocutors, his assertion of the principle could sound like special pleading. Is this inversion of Protagorean possessiveness not itself proprietary and possessive? A little later, ‘‘Protagoras’’ speaks out in a distinctly, if deceptively, Socratic manner when he states that the serious dialogician will avoid trying to score and will instead set his interlocutor on his feet, pointing out to him those slips only which are due to himself and his previous associations. For if you act in this way, those who debate with you will cast the blame for their confusion and perplexity upon themselves, not upon you; they will run after you and love you, and they will hate themselves and run away from themselves, taking refuge in philosophy, that they may escape from their former selves by becoming different. But if you act in the opposite way, as most teachers do, you will produce the opposite result, and instead of making your young associates philosophers, you will make them hate philosophy when they grow older. (167e–168b) These comments on the avoidance of blame and the production of selfcontempt as the spur to philosophy make the whole process sound devious and evasive, and they cut athwart Socrates’ remarks in the Phaedo on misanthropy and misology. We have seen that those who run after Socrates and love him do not necessarily hate themselves as a result; if they seek to escape from themselves, their refuge is not in philosophy but in the antiphilosophical consolations of immortality. Do we say, then, that ‘‘Protagoras’’ has simply misunderstood the difficulties of serious dialogue, and especially the complexities of the Socratic way? Is he ingenuous in distinguishing so easily between successful and unsuccessful teaching? And is he ingenuously disingenuous in ascrib-

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ing success to the mastery of the strategies enabling the teacher to shift blame and collect disciples? But such questions tempt us to forget that ‘‘Protagoras’’ is Socrates. Is Socrates’ Protagorean view merely the sophistical semblance that outlines the standard misunderstanding of the Socratic ideal? Those who run after him and love him do hate themselves, not in the sense intended by ‘‘Protagoras,’’ but in the deeper sense that they hate the mortality that renders them merely human, hate the perishability of the body they love, and its inability to appease the desires it proposes. What ‘‘Protagoras’’ describes is the misunderstanding Socrates has himself experienced, the no-win situation that produces wind eggs up to the moment of his death, and after—Phaedo’s narrative is not the least of them. There may well be, then, a touch of bitterness in the assertion of the maieutic principle, a Protagorean or Gorgian element of ‘‘don’t blame me if you haven’t been able to comprehend my truth.’’ And this may be inextricable from an even more profound Protagorean perception that ‘‘we are bound to one another by the inevitable law of our being, but to nothing else, not even ourselves.’’ For in the logocentric situation can we be truly ‘‘known’’ apart from the way we perceive each other? If we are so bound together face to face, eye to eye, and mouth to ear, is it possible for a person to exist or become in and by himself? If behind the face there abide a presence and a knowledge doomed to go unperceived, captive within the opacity of the body’s walls, then for all practical purposes they may as well not exist at all; to be is to be perceived. Thus the opponent Socrates impersonates may exist within himself, just as ‘‘Socrates’’ has often been interpreted as a projection of Plato, or, indeed, of ‘‘Plato.’’ If the narrator of the Protagoras presents what Gregory Vlastos has called a ‘‘not wholly attractive’’ portrait of himself doing battle against the sophist,10 it is to dramatize the consequences of his bondage to the pleonectic and hedonist logoi that appropriate his voice. As he made clear to Protagoras in summarizing the results of their discussion, the two interlocutors appeared to have exchanged positions, so that Socrates at the end found himself trying to persuade Protagoras of the latter’s original thesis, which was that arete¯ can be taught. Hence their exodos—the military or theatrical implication of the term is significant—’’seems to

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me as though it accused and mocked us like some human person; if it were given a voice it would say: ‘What strange [atopoi] creatures you are, Socrates and Protagoras!’ ’’ (361a). They are literally atopos, out of place, shifted about by a discussion that seemed to have its own life and to speak through their voices, directing them where it wanted to go, defeating their promethean precautions. This questioner is a strange hybrid in which Socrates and Protagoras, like the image of pleasure and pain mentioned in the Phaedo, are ‘‘joined together in one head.’’ Perhaps if Aesop had made a fable of Socrates and Protagoras he would have told ‘‘how they were at war and the god wished to reconcile them, and when he could not do that, he fastened their heads together, and for that reason, when one of them comes to anyone, the other follows after’’ (60b–c). The accusing and mocking voice of a discussion beguiled by epimethean rashness (Protagoras 361c–d) lives on in the afterthought of Socrates’ narrative. Since at the end of his life Socrates finds that all his conversations have been ventriloquized by such a personified logos, he also finds himself clearly susceptible to the misanthropy he describes at Phaedo 89d–91e: misanthropy, he explains, is generated from its opposite, a view of human nature which is too sanguine and idealistic, leading to expectations that are bound to be frustrated, and to a faith in one’s fellows that is bound to be disappointed. To expect that very many people will be good easily produces an inversion of the same fallacy when the disillusioned idealist decides on the basis of his experience that very many people are bad. Socrates’ account of the genesis of misology makes use of a similar psychological commonplace. Uncritical assent leads through uncertainty and skepticism to the so-called wisdom of the cynic who acknowledges no truths but those of flux and relativism. The deeper implication of these remarks is not psychological but structural, however. Misanthropy does not appear in the dialogues only as a private condition, a matter of individual psychology. It is also presented as a cultural and institutional condition structured into the polis. The few and the many, the sophists and their pupils or victims, are equally subject to its logic, bound together in a reciprocal network of fears and interests. And the source of this condition, as it touches Socrates, is the structure of the logocentric experience to which he is committed, in which he is trapped.

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The Socratic voice can find its true dialogic telos only by being stilled, transformed into the graphe¯ that already structures it. Plato pits his own graphe¯ against the graphe¯ entered by Meletus on behalf of Athens. Socrates’ anabasis, unlike the one he ventriloquizes through Diotima, ends not in the heaven of Forms but in the book of Plato. Hence death is identical to textualization, and the Socratic ideal of dialogue materializes throughout Plato’s writings, but only in his writings, and only as an ideal that could not possibly be fulfilled. Critically and erotically, the book of Plato portrays Socrates and the Socratic ideal in traces that adumbrate an absent original we shall never find because they are together the se¯ma that, replacing his so¯ma, marks an empty tomb. But of course there is no book of Plato: ‘‘There is not and will not be any written work of Plato’s own. What are now called his are the work of a new and more beautiful Socrates.’’ This piece of arrogance and modesty appears in a writing attributed to Plato. Yet what if, as I imagine Derrida to claim in a recent book I have not read but know, it was written by Socrates?

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Phaedrus and the Politics of Inscription

Strange things start to happen under the spreading Plato tree when Socrates swings into his Phaedrian song and dance about the trouble with writing. After he complains at some length about the inferiority of the written word to the best kind of speech, he goes on to speak of the good discourse as ‘‘another sort of writing,’’ in which the dialectical speaker directly inscribes his auditor’s soul. Derrida was not the first to pick up on the weirdness of this move, but he made more of it than others when he scattered or smeared it over the rich field of Western culture and metaphysics. Socrates, he writes, treats the good logos ‘‘not merely as a knowing, living, animate discourse, but as an inscription of truth in the soul.’’ And Derrida finds it remarkable that ‘‘the so-called living discourse should suddenly be described by a ‘metaphor’ borrowed from the order of the very thing one is trying to exclude from it,’’ remarkable that the bad writing—a false brother, a bastard, a traitor, an infidel—should serve as the copy, which is to say, as the model, if not the paradigm, of the good.1 415

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I find it remarkable, too, but for reasons that, although related to Derrida’s, run in a different direction. It is different because my interest in themes that would now be labeled Derridean springs from a reading of Plato fundamentally at odds with his. Derrida ascribes to the author of Plato’s dialogues a commitment to the metaphysics of presence that leads him (the author) to close down on, stop the play of, the contradictions inherent in his text; contradictions that arise from the writing Plato condemns, the writing he ‘‘never comes to grips with,’’ the writing whose structural basis in the law of difference he ‘‘never thematized as such.’’2 The bad influence of this commitment and closure dominates the long tradition that Derrida, following Heidegger, calls onto-theology. For the sake of convenience, but also to emphasize the tendency to blame ontotheology, Western philosophy, and other things on Plato, I shall call this tradition Platonism, and at this point I merely assert, without arguing, that the closure and commitment Derrida deconstructs should be ascribed to Platonism but not to Plato, that the metaphysics of presence is reflected back into the text as Plato’s both by Platonism and by its rivals or critics (including Derrida). Derrida has put into play a finely tuned set of moves with which to question Platonism’s view of Plato. But because he assimilates Plato to Platonism, because he converts a Platonistic reading of the text to Platonic intentions, he hasn’t done that himself. Far from challenging the Platonistic interpretation, he assumes it, uses it, confirms it. Were he to have challenged it, I think he would have found inscribed in the dialogues a critique of Platonism very similar to his own. In this essay I shall try to track down some of the features of this critique—a critique of the metaphysics of presence—by focusing on the theme of inscription. To begin with, the representation of inscription in the dialogues makes contact with several aspects of the theme currently known as the discourse of the other. Taken in its most general sense, this phrase denotes the citational character of any performed discourse, that is, the alienation of its source from the intentional presence of the performer. The author/other is usually classified as a collective or structural agency: diffe´rance, for example, or the unconscious, or the unconscious as language, or heteroglossia, or language-games, or the collective discourses shaped by a society’s cultural and institutional practices. But in Plato’s text, and in the Athens it repre-

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sents, the role of author/other may also be filled by the class of intentional agents. This includes the gods, who are said to possess a speaker in the experience of enthusiasm. It includes poets, dramatists, and writers of dialogues, as well as speechwriters who don’t deliver their own speeches. In a more restricted but complex way, it includes those acts of impersonation, role-taking, and hypocrisy that constitute the actor as a double or duplicitous person who represents himself as another, and who may impose this representation on himself as well as on others. Finally, a unique and signal form of the discourse of the other is suggested by the principle of dialogical or maieutic modesty Socrates expresses in the Theaetetus when he says that the logoi never come from him but from the person with whom he speaks.3 Superficially this means that his procedure is not to dogmatize but to help his interlocutors unpack—or to unpack for them—the arguments, motives, interests, fears, desires, flaws, and contradictions embedded in the opinions they state. But at a deeper level this benign purpose involves him in a peculiar difficulty, which is that his own logos is continually blocked and displaced by the discourse of the others with whom he speaks. It is in the context of these various forms of the discourse of the other that I want to explore Plato’s treatment of the theme of inscription. To set the stage for this exploration I shall run quickly through the section of the Phaedrus that culminates in Socrates’ statement of the ideal of psychic inscription, and as I start I remind you that the specific thesis to be questioned is the thesis that in this passage Plato endorses that ideal. At 275d Socrates tells Phaedrus that the trouble with writing is just like the trouble with painting: the graphic imitation of spoken words is as silent as that of the living creature: it always says ‘‘only one and the same thing, and everything that’s written rolls or is tossed about alike among those who understand and those to whom it isn’t akin, and since it can’t defend itself when ill-treated or unjustly abused, it always needs its father to come to the rescue.’’4 Socrates then describes this bastard’s legitimate brother and, with Phaedrus’s help, unpacks the famous figure of the good writing, which consists in ‘‘things said for the sake of teaching and learning about the just and also about the beautiful and the good, and really written in a soul’’ (278a). During this passage he moves beyond the concern with educational writing to condemn all writing, and as he repeats

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and varies the accounts of soul-writing he gradually increases his emphasis on oral teaching, and on the father whose legitimate word is begotten first in his own soul and then in the souls of others, where it defends not only itself but also its father. The good logos is first said to be begotten, then to be written in the learner’s soul, then to be sown as by a farmer, finally to be spoken by a teacher whose ethical discourse and didactic intent constitute real soul-writing (276a, 276b, 276e–277a, 278a–b). This passage gets more puzzling the more closely you look at it, but even in my rapid summary several obvious problems stand out. First, why should Plato represent Socrates as criticizing the medium in which that representation takes place? Or, putting it the other way round, if Plato agrees that writing makes the logos vulnerable, alienates it from its father’s control, why is he so perverse as to commit—or to condemn—Socrates and his logoi to writing? Some have suspected foul play and cried parricide, but that begs the question of who is the father of whose logoi: is Plato Socrates’ scribe or is Socrates Plato’s mouthpiece?5 Second, when Socrates says that the legitimate brother can defend itself, he suggests that it doesn’t need its father. Why then does he later worry about the father, saying that the epistemic logoi sown in a likeminded soul can defend not only themselves but also the farmer or father? Isn’t the father present in the psychic inscription? And why would the logos need to defend itself (granted that it could) if sown, begotten, or written in a proper soul? Against what or whom should it defend itself? Against the learner, even if he is like-minded? Third, why should Plato have Socrates promote a form of oral discourse that works by—or like—inscription? This is Derrida’s money question, but my motive in asking it differs from his. For him the question is: Why should Plato have modeled the good writing on the bad so that—whatever he (Plato) intends—the good is contaminated by the logic of the bad? My interest is in the contradiction between the inscriptive ideal and what I referred to above as the principle of dialogical modesty. Gregory Vlastos has emphasized the counter-inscriptive character of Socratic discourse in explaining the complex irony of the disavowals of knowledge and teaching: In the conventional sense, where to ‘‘teach’’ is simply to transfer knowledge from the teacher to the learner’s mind, Socrates means

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what he says: that sort of ‘‘teaching’’ he does not want to do and cannot do. But in the sense in which he would give to ‘‘teaching’’— engaging would-be learners in elenctic argument to make them aware of their own ignorance and give them opportunity to discover for themselves the truth the teacher held back—in that sense of ‘‘teaching’’ Socrates would want to say that he is a teacher, the best of teachers in his time, the only true teacher.6 With one reservation, which I shall get to eventually, I agree with this, and therefore find Socrates’ account of soul-writing suspect: if it is meant to articulate a Socratic ideal or aspiration, it isn’t in tune with the counter-inscriptive principle described by Vlastos. Fourth, there is a problem, at least for me, in the way Socrates uses the honorific terms that have become the trademark of his ethic: the just, the beautiful, the good. Those are the terms over which, he often says, people fight and can’t come to a satisfactory agreement because the conflict is not one that can be resolved, as technical disagreements are resolved, by appealing to criteria of number, measure, and weight. The terms are ambiguous enough to serve as blank checks, and Socrates sometimes uses them casually, without discussing them, so that it is up to us to decide what construction to put upon his usage. This occurs in the Phaedrus passage. We know from occasional discussions in the Republic and elsewhere what meaning Socrates himself attaches to the terms, and they accord with our simplest, most obvious ethical intuitions. But if you take the maieutic principle seriously, it is dangerous to assume that every time Socrates mentions these terms he speaks for himself rather than for his interlocutor. That assumption has to be submitted to contextual interpretation. But this much, at least, may be suggested about the idea that the just, good, and beautiful can be inscribed in a soul: if you do take the principle seriously as a practice grounded in an ethical belief about the best way to teach, then it follows that anything that can be directly written in a soul can’t be good, just, or beautiful as Socrates understands those terms. Finally, when Socrates refers to inscription he introduces a disturbance into the normal communication scheme, the scheme in which a sender mediates a message through a contact or channel to a receiver. Since you

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can probably guess what this disturbance is, I won’t insult your intelligence until later. For the present, a clue will have to suffice. At 276b–d Socrates compares literal writing to sowing seeds in a garden of Adonis—sowing them, as he says, in ink with a kalamos, a reed pen. In this analogy the unfit garden soil presumably stands for a material carrier or receptacle, such as a writing tablet or a scroll. The serious and thoughtful farmer will eschew this receptacle and sow his seeds in proper soil, which turns out to be a proper soul. The soul, then, is the alternative to the scroll. And that is the clue. The implications of these different metaphors of teaching—fathering, sowing, writing—are diverse, but they converge on the theme of the learner’s passivity. Plant husbandry is the most benign and idyllic figure. It focuses on three aspects of transmission: the soul as passive receptacle, the automatism of natural process, and the reproduction of the same, that is, the idea that words are programmed to bear certain kinds of fruit the way seeds are and will, if sown in the right soil, become plants that are identical with those they came from. This should be reassuring to the farmer/teacher, however hard he has to work to put in his crop. Fathering is less benign. The mixed metaphor of sowing seeds through a reed pen packs a barely concealed phallic punch that’s unloaded in the shift from farmer to father. This brings two disturbing ideas into play: first, teaching as phallic penetration becomes comparable to the sexual domination of the passive partner by the active partner and, second, teaching is assimilated to the fantasy of male parthenogenesis, a fantasy whose immediate force is directed not so much against woman per se as against any sort of otherness that will reduce the resemblance of the offspring to their father. Given the restless figural metamorphosis of the passage, and granted that the father is the teacher, it is not always easy to identify the occupant of the filial position: is it the learner and his soul, or the logos he receives? Nor is it easy to distinguish the position of pais, the son, from that of paidika, the pederastic partner. The Phaedrus, like the Symposium, gives a lot of attention to the abuses of pederasty, to its positive social and educational function, and to the slanderous way its ideology is deployed (in the speeches of Pausanias and Lysias) to justify or conceal the abuses. The dialogues focus on the narcissistic motives behind the ideal of peder-

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astic inscription. Pais and paidika name the instrument as well as the product by which mortal fathers strive to reproduce and perpetuate themselves. As an institutional alternative and political supplement to the adult male’s sexual and paternal role in the household, pederasty enables the desire of phallic penetration to converge with that of paternal selfreproduction. The major premise of the pederastic ideology depicted in the dialogues is that the father can’t replicate himself and his logos as perfectly in his biological children (because woman interferes) as in his intelligible children. Socrates sometimes compares fathers to lovers, poets, and legislators because all are makers of images—imitators—whose production is motivated by the desire not merely to memorialize themselves or their logoi but to have power over the future. This is harder to achieve with human children than with laws and poems, and even the pederast has to be clever enough to overcome the resistance of the potentially intractable partner he wishes to inseminate with his logos. You have only to probe a little way beneath the surface of suave speech making in the Symposium to find the flood of apprehensions that shakes its base: the desire of lovers to throw off the yoke of fathers, parents, and the patriarchal oikos; the attempt to overthrow the myth celebrating woman’s—Aphrodite’s— power over male desire by distinguishing a higher, Uranian, Aphrodite who presides over all-male attachments; the fears implicit in that attempt, which registers the Hesiodic association of Aphrodite with the nightmare of terrible fathers hating, burying, swallowing their sons, of the son mutilating the father, of the paternal phallus begetting the archetypal seductress who will enact his revenge in her ability to disempower and emasculate his sons. The dialogues present pederasty and patriarchy not only as competing sources of paideia, the name given to the institution for socializing the young, but also as forms of generational and factional warfare. Paideia provides the obvious context for exploring the role of collective practices of inscription in Athenian culture, and the accounts given in the Republic and Protagoras bring out its strategic contributions to this warfare. But before discussing those accounts, let me say a word about a key word I have already used several times, the word word, or logos.

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Logos has the range and diffuseness of our term discourse. In the dialogues its range of denotation includes: particular arguments or processes of arguing; words, the meanings they signify, or the things they refer to; and conversations, speeches, stories, and sayings (an epigram or proverb can be a logos). In the most general sense, a person’s logos or argument can be equivalent to what we sometimes call a value system, as when it is said that a father hands his logos down to his son. What I think is historically important and specific about the term is the assimilation of its cognitive and semantic dimensions to its communicative and performative sense. That is, the concept logos reflects in its multivalence a situation in which forms of thought, argument, and public communication are carried on primarily through the oral channel, and conform to the structure of that channel. I use the word logocentric to denote this situation. Logocentric specifies the speech-centered character of a society’s culture and institutions, and the effect of this character on collective patterns of thought, belief, motivation, interaction, and public practices. ‘‘Logocentrism,’’ thus understood, overlaps with, but is broader than, ‘‘phonocentrism,’’ and it excludes a notion sometimes associated with it, a commitment to the alphabetic transcription of speech. The accounts given in the Republic and Protagoras both focus on the stage of paideia known as music, or mousike¯, which covers instruction not only in harmony, rhythm, and song but also in the traditional morality transmitted chiefly by the poets. There are, however, significant differences in the two accounts. Protagoras claims to be describing the actual practices of Athenian education, whereas Socrates and his interlocutors elaborate a reformed version of this paideia as part of their fantasy of the guardian polis. Protagoras tells how boys learn to read and write so that they may memorize the works of good poets and imitate the good men of the past the poets write about (325e–326a). But in Socrates’ discussion of mousike¯ there is no mention of reading and writing The proposed indoctrination of guardians appears to be channeled strictly through the oral/aural medium. The exclusion is rendered conspicuous by three strategically placed passages in which Socrates uses reading and inscription in purely metaphoric expressions (368c–d, 402a–c, 501a–d).

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The political significance of this exclusion may be suggested by a glance at the following passage: Every group entrusts to bodily automatisms those principles most basic to it and most indispensable to its conservation. In societies which lack any other recording and objectifying instrument, inherited knowledge can survive only in its embodied state. Among other consequences, it follows that it is never detached from the body which bears it and which—as Plato noted—can deliver it only at the price of a sort of gymnastics intended to evoke it: mimesis. The body is thus continuously mingled with all the knowledge it reproduces, which can never have the objectivity and distance stemming from objectification in writing.7 Reversing Bourdieu’s emphasis will bring out the point of the exclusion of writing in the paideia of guardians: it is to make sure that inherited knowledge will never be detached from the body that bears it, so that it will not be abstractable from the authorized channel and therefore will not be obtainable through any other channel. To inscribe directly in the body is to naturalize what has been inscribed and conceal its socially constructed character. To inscribe in the body, not in any more objective or distanced medium, is to inhibit the possibility of reading, which is to say, the possibility of interpretation. If one’s aim is to prevent interpretation, one tries to keep inherited knowledge from being detached from the body. The educational practices Bourdieu alludes to have been thoroughly explored in Eric Havelock’s now classic studies of the musical and mnemotechnical mechanisms of oral culture. Havelock reconstructs the means by which the ‘‘Homeric encyclopedia’’ was ‘‘imprinted upon the brain of the community,’’ as he puts it, as if it were ‘‘a body of invisible writing.’’8 I find the details of his reconstruction compelling and imaginative, but I have doubts about the political assumptions that inform it. Havelock rightly recognizes that the Homeric epics were unlike the oral poetry of the Balkan peasants they had been compared to by Parry and Lord in that they were the poetry of the ‘‘governing class’’ and were used in Athenian paideia to educate ‘‘for leadership and social management.’’9 Nevertheless, he persistently attributes the process to ‘‘the community’’

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as a whole, ‘‘oral society’’ as a whole, and to the technical features of its mimetic practices. This is a structuralist explanation, and it ignores the motivating force exerted on paideia by factional and ideological conflict. What Plato’s Socrates and Protagoras describe is less a structural tendency than a sociopolitical strategy. In the Republic, which I’ll consider first, the aim is to reestablish a warrior aristocracy, whereas in the Protagoras the sophist depicts paideia as an instrument by which wealthy oligarchs and aristocrats can gain, regain, or keep control of democratic institutions. The Republic represents the paideia for guardians as a particularly devious form of ideological inscription. First, its moral content is determined in advance of the institution of the polis by Socrates and his interlocutors, who are playing at being its founders: their logoi, their views of right and wrong, their schemes of institutional order and political culture will be transmuted to the truth, law, and nature unquestioningly embraced by all citizens. Even the rulers will be programmed: their form of reasoning is not logos but logismos or logistike¯; not dialogical argument about ends or values but calculation, computation, instrumental reasoning about means. As we learn when Glaucon assents to Socrates’ remarkable invention of the philosopher dog, philosophy in the guardian polis is to be reduced to animal conditioning. Second, the founders are to disappear behind the smokescreen of the famous noble or well-born lie, which, if it is accepted as truth, will make them the hidden gods and voyeuristic masters of a polis putatively instituted by nature. Third, not only this but also other lies will be instilled through paideia so that, for their own good, the citizens will unknowingly live and transmit the lies as truth. Socrates’ interlocutors agree with his repeated assertion that what counts in the stories told the young is not whether they are false or true but whether they are kalos (fine, beautiful) or bad. The representations made by poets and painters are to be judged fine or bad only in terms of the pre-established standards of guardian morality; these are to be dissociated from, and to prevail over, all other criteria of truth. But for Socrates to insist on calling them lies is to remind us that there are other criteria and that they are being suppressed. This reminder encourages us to read the account of the inscription of lies through music with deep suspicion.

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Socrates blithely admits that the tales to be told children ‘‘are, as a whole, false.’’ This is because we who tell them are ignorant of ‘‘the truth about ancient things’’ (since our only evidence for the existence and behavior of gods and heroes comes from the tales we are now criticizing). But, he continues, just as lying is occasionally justified ‘‘against enemies’’ and as a pharmakon to prevent ‘‘so-called friends’’ from doing ‘‘something bad,’’ so fine lies are always justified in educating children (382c–d) because ‘‘the beginning is the most important part of every work.’’ Then, when the child is young and tender, ‘‘it’s best molded and takes whatever impression one wishes to stamp on it’’; the opinions thus imprinted tend ‘‘to become hard to eradicate,’’ and so, ‘‘with respect to virtue,’’ children must be told ‘‘the finest . . . tales for them to hear’’ (378a–d).10 The properly trained child will intuitively ‘‘praise the fine things’’ and ‘‘blame and hate the ugly . . . before he’s able to grasp [‘‘reasonable speech,’’ Bloom; ‘‘the reason,’’ Jowett, Shorey, Lee], and when the logos comes, he would take most delight in it . . . because of his nurture’’ (401d-402a). That is, whatever logos accords with the doctrine stamped in by mousike¯ is to be defined as reasonable by virtue of that harmony. The language of artistic production is repeated later, when Socrates describes the conditions set by philosophers as the price of their participation in the polis. They would not agree to take a city or individual in hand unless it had already been purged or they themselves could clean it up. This they would do by treating the city and human dispositions as one treats a pinax, a wooden writing or drawing tablet: they would first ‘‘wipe it clean’’—no easy task—and then inscribe (either by writing or drawing) the better laws and dispositions, erasing and revising until they had produced the fairest possible graphe¯ (501a–c). As artists and imitators who aim to produce a city of obedient androids, the philosophers have a desire reflecting that of the founders. We learn in Book VIII that this dream, this nightmare, of inscription is bound to fail, but the real question is: Why was the project undertaken in the first place? By whom and for whom was it undertaken? Do the arguments for the guardian polis come from Socrates? Do they come from Plato? Or someone else? There is a clue to a possible answer near the end of the discussion of paideia. At 401d, after going through the proposals for the reform of poetry and after stating that poets and all other craftsmen must be compelled

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to inscribe the founders’ values on the guardians’ environment, Socrates explains that musical paideia is ‘‘most powerful’’—kyrio¯tate¯—because ‘‘rhythm and harmony most of all insinuate themselves into the inmost part of the soul and most vigorously lay hold of it in bringing grace [eusche¯mosyne¯n] with them; and they make one graceful if he is correctly reared; if not, the opposite’’ (401d–e). The combined suggestions of sneakiness, violence, and political mastery give this description an uneasy edge—as if the soul has to be assaulted and infiltrated—and call for a closer look at the word Jowett, Shorey, and Bloom translate as ‘‘grace.’’ Eusche¯mosyne¯ means ‘‘having good sche¯ma,’’ and sche¯ma in various contexts means form, shape, outward appearance, figure, bearing, mien, stateliness, fashion, the constitution or state of a thing, and, finally, a figure in dancing. Socrates’ usage crystallizes the image of a good dancer, and it connotes not only the outward bearing of a gentleman (kalos te k’agathos, 402a) but also the inward formation of certain socially charged aesthetic and moral preferences. Since the root meaning of sche¯ma is having, holding, possessing, the term also suggests having good having, good holding(s), good possessing. Finally, this sense gets its currency from the etymological kinship of sche¯ma to pleonexia, a key term and problem in the dialogue. In Chapter 10 I noted that pleonexia means not only having more but wanting to have more, wanting to be bigger, better, superior. I now add that there is another, more defensive side to pleonexia in a society whose members are aware of competing with each other: pleonexia involves wanting to take from another before another takes from you. The pleonectic society described and dramatized in Book I of the Republic, and subversively present in the remaining books, is an apprehensive society. It is founded on a misanthropic perception of the social order as a system of relationships motivated primarily by apprehension, that is, by the prehensive desire to take and the apprehensive fear of being taken. Socrates’ chief interlocutors, Adeimantus and Glaucon, are especially disturbed by the cynicism and pleonexia of the city’s traditional culture and by its slander of justice. One of the things that troubles them is that they are half-persuaded by the slander, don’t know how to come to the rescue of justice, and want Socrates to do it for them. They want him to come to their rescue as well by making better arguments than they can make for what they would like to believe. They want him to persuade

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them, since they can’t persuade themselves, that justice per se is good, and is its own reward. This motivational setting is what drives the utopian critique and construction with which Socrates responds to their demand. Every step of that construction is made contingent upon their assent. In that respect they are at very least the co-founders of the polis. Socrates’ utopian discourse reflects their values, projects the unexamined or repressed fears, desires, and contradictions motivating their demand for a defense of justice. The specter of pleonexia haunts the account of the guardian polis if only by conspicuous exclusion, that is, by the extraordinary, indeed desperate, lengths to which the founders go in order to contain it. ‘‘Meta-utopian’’ discourse—the critique of utopianism—characteristically attributes the source of the utopian exorcism of actuality to ressentiment, or paranoid apprehensiveness. The more time and ingenuity the utopian spends in describing reforms, the more we feel there is to reform, and the more difficulty we have in believing the reforms will work. Later in the discussion, when Adeimantus comments on the difficulty of preventing lawlessness from spreading like a plague ‘‘until it finally subverts everything private and public’’ (424d–e), we sense that the extremism of the proposed reforms only measures the misanthropic anxieties of the brothers who endorse them. Turning now to the Protagoras, I shall focus on one section of the sophist’s ‘‘great speech,’’ as Socrates wryly calls it, the section that purports to describe mousike¯. The brilliance of both the dialogue and the sophistical performance it represents owes much to the way Protagoras is made subversively to stir up the apprehensiveness of his audience and to appeal to its pleonexia. His audience includes such pleonectic malcontents as the radical Alcibiades and the reactionary Critias, men hard pressed by the tendency of a mobile democracy to produce rich upstarts, or agathoi.11 His performance seems intended to stir up the fears for which he alone claims to have the antidote, and this strategy explains why, in his myth of origins, he fastens on the virtues of aido¯s and dike¯, reverence and justice, as preconditions of political virtue. Responding to Socrates’ statement that the Athenians did not think virtue was teachable, he fabulates as follows: Zeus proclaimed that whoever did not partake of justice and reverence

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should be put to death; justice and reverence don’t come naturally to the human creature and must therefore be taught; all Athenians teach and are taught virtue ‘‘from earliest childhood till the last days of their lives’’; those who are most powerful and wealthy keep their children in school the longest, and are in the best position to top off their efforts by sending them to Protagoras for advanced instruction. In line with this appeal to the wealthy, he revises Zeus’s sentence by adding a property qualification: ‘‘not merely death, but confiscation of property, and, in a word, the absolute ruin of their estates.’’ What Protagoras means by aido¯s is not adequately rendered as ‘‘reverence.’’ He insists at one point that there is something all humans believe, namely, that when people know a man is unjust, and when the man himself knows it, he is expected—and should be taught—to lie in public about it. Protagoras thus teaches that everyone teaches that everyone should be taught, not how to be just, but how to escape being punished for injustice. Aido¯s in this scheme becomes partly a deterrent—fear of public opinion and punishment—and partly the learned ability to persuade the public by clever speaking that one has justice or some other political virtue even if one lacks it.12 Packed inside this doctrine is another, which is that no one made invisible by the ring of Gyges’ ancestor would be expected to get high marks for justice. This is an article of Protagoras’s more subversive teaching: since virtue comes only ‘‘by training,’’ injustice, impiety, greed, and the other vices must be ‘‘natural’’ to human beings. His myth portrays a deprived and helpless Epimethean creature, who begins existence with no inherent protective armor and is the potential victim of all species, including his own. This Epimethean basis produces the nasty brutish Promethean reaction: the stolen fire increases the power to do harm and the desire to advance or protect one’s own interest. I think it is thus inaccurate to call the anthropology in his speech melioristic, as has often been done, for what Protagoras teaches can best be called misanthropology. The course from savagery to civilization is not envisaged as a gradual development in ethical self-awareness. When he distinguishes civilized humanity from savages, he singles out education, courts of justice, and law as forms of necessity compelling civilized individuals to be heedful of virtue. In his account of the human condition, only the sum total of political and rhetorical constraints separates

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civilized communities from the self-destroying factionalism of life under the regime of Promethean arts, a regime he slyly associates with the competing sophists in his audience. It is against this background that we can best appreciate the political force of his treatment of paideia. Protagoras first describes how the child’s elders begin as soon as he can understand speech to badger him with moral instruction. To each word and act they assign a moral value—just or unjust, noble or base, holy or unholy—and they spend every moment teaching, admonishing, and punishing, until he is ready to be packed off to the grammatiste¯s, or writing master. They instruct the master to take more trouble over his charges’ good behavior than over their letters and harp playing. Accordingly, he teaches them to read by setting ‘‘the works of good poets before them on their desks and compelling them to learn them by heart.’’13 This is clearly a reference to individual or group recitation rather than to silent reading. Though writing produces a representation of speech that is not only extended but also abstracted from the more immediate exchanges of oral discourse, in chirographic as opposed to typographic communication the body remains in closer touch with the abstracted medium. And in predominantly oral cultures this control is increased by the practices of dictation and reading aloud, which reincorporate writing into the phonocentric medium. Reincorporation tends to muffle the potential difference and nonlinearity of the graphic medium. The poet’s written words are treated as images of his voice. The children who recite the written words and impersonate the poet revive the presence of the ‘‘good men of old’’ whose stories and praises he tells. This hegemonic process of reincorporation is dramatically emphasized in Protagoras’s account. First, he describes the learning of letters and reincorporates that into the learning of morality. Then he compares the learning of laws (nomoi) to writing lessons: ‘‘just as writing masters first draw letters in faint outline with the pen for the pupils who are not yet skilled [or clever, me¯po¯ deinois], and then give them the copy-book [grammateion] and make them write according to the guidance of their lines, so the city sketches out for them the laws devised by good lawgivers of old, and constrains them to rule and be ruled according to these’’ (326d). But where does this second process of ‘‘writing’’ (hypograpsasa) occur? Since traditional nomoi are unwritten, this phase of learning and socialization is

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carried out under more informal and pervasive logocentric controls. What the writing analogy suggests is that the nomoi are inscribed in the learner’s ‘‘soul’’ as a result of socialization, and that he, by continual mimetic practice, deepens and fixes the inscription. The ‘‘soul’’ replaces the grammateion, which is probably a wax-coated wooden tablet. The learner ‘‘writes’’ as he is ‘‘written on’’ and makes himself a copy of what he copies. This metaphor was prepared for earlier, when Protagoras said that the blank surface of the human grammateion is first straightened out by punishment if it happens to be warped (325d), so that it will receive an undistorted imprint of paideia. In Protagoras’s phrase ‘‘the city sketches out the laws,’’ ‘‘the city’’ is a euphemism for the wealthiest, ‘‘who are most able’’ (hoi malista dynamenoi, those who are most powerful, 326c). His speech suggests that the Athenian nomoi are actually the code observed by and favorable to aristocrats and oligarchs. By representing the learner as a medium of inscription, the sophist emphasizes the structure of dominance and deference relations that wealthy aristocrats aspire to transmit through filial mimesis. In doing so, he is making a bid for a share in that structure. His message is that the inscription may be sealed indelibly by resorting to the sophist for the lessons in leadership toward which Protagoras’s speech and Athenian education tend as toward their goal. The learners are not merely to be ruled by the nomoi; they are also to rule by them (326d). I mentioned earlier that the inscription metaphor introduces a disturbance in the normal communication scheme. Protagoras’s account shows us what this is: the relation of speaking to hearing is compared not to writing and reading but to writing and being written on. In this jarring displacement, the recipient is neither an auditor nor a reader but the carrier, the servant and support, of the imprinted logos. Although the Athens represented by Plato is a predominantly oral society, its intellectuals know writing well enough to appreciate the symbolic implications of its material structure. They borrow the metaphor of inscription, a truncated form of writing, to express a despotic version of the discourse of the other. It is a fine irony that the Platonic text whose aporetic play solicits the conflict of interpretations should represent speakers who propose the notion of a writing that is not something to be read, questioned, and interpreted but is, on the contrary, an ideal of psychic pro-

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gramming that would eliminate the danger and power of interpretive or interrogatory reading. This ideal is to be approximated, the free play of meaning inhibited, by what I referred to as reincorporation, the embedding of written discourse in the forms of oral communication. Reincorporation secures the interlocutory power of those who control access to the culture’s texts and the transmission of its values. Oddly enough, the very mediation that threatens the logocentric control of meaning— threatens to liberate meaning through what Ricoeur calls the ‘‘textual dialectic’’—becomes the model of a technique that perfects logocentric control. The dream of inscription is comparable to the Gorgianic ideal of spellbinding rhetoric, except that it would not only fulfill the aims of persuasion but also render persuasion unnecessary. More than that, it would render all forms of democratic speech unnecessary—would, indeed, cancel their possibility. It would inscribe the ‘‘living and breathing word of him who knows’’—or who claims he knows—so indelibly that the future would safely be predetermined, tyrannized, by the past. What motivates the desire of inscription is the general atmosphere of apprehensiveness on which, as I noted earlier, Protagoras capitalizes. And the source of apprehensiveness is the structure of speech-centered institutions prevailing in the Athenian democracy represented by Plato. In the Phaedrus this representation focuses on speech writing, or logography. Socrates’ discussion of soul writing is preceded by a lengthy state-of-theart account of logography, and especially of the way it contaminates the logocentric interactions of Athenian public life. Speeches are written by one person to be performed by another; manuals are written to show speechwriters how to be effective; speeches already given are recorded in writing to serve as models for new speeches. The Athenian air, the medium of Hellenic sound, is heavy with inscription. Everywhere writers are speaking through speakers, and writing speeches that—as Aristotle showed—create their speakers (rather than the other way round); speeches that create their speakers’ ¯ethos in the assembly just as dramatists create it in tragic fiction, just as Plato creates it in dialogues. And since the speeches that speak through and construct those speakers are aimed at appealing to the interests, values, and sentiments of the audience, especially to its more influential members, one could say that the speeches are in effect written by the audience, who also authorize the words of

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wisdom they ascribe to ancient poets, philosophers, and mystagogues, as well as those they hear from sophists and orators. Socrates concisely characterizes Protagoras’s attitude toward inscription, as well as the speech in which it is expressed, when he says that if public speakers like Pericles are questioned, ‘‘they are just like books, incapable of either answering you or putting a question of their own.’’14 Later in the dialogue he makes a similar comment about the poets: you can’t question them ‘‘on the sense of what they say’’ because some interpreters claim they mean this and others that, ‘‘and they go on arguing about something they are powerless to put to the test.’’ The implication that if the poets were present to defend their poems—that if they weren’t dead they could help us out—is challenged in other passages that suggest the helplessness of the poets themselves to put their poems to the test either by interpretation or by refutation. For the poets are filled with the god, which I interpret to mean that they’re moved by the godlike power of whatever or whoever speaks through them. And this is the power of whatever audience or community pipes the music of its desires through the allotria pho¯ne¯ (the other or alien voice) of the poet (347c–e) and then receives it from him as the gift, injunction, or wisdom of the gods. Poet, sophist, logographer, and orator participate in the system of charismatic bondage that makes them resemble books: all have made themselves sites of inscription so that they may in turn successfully inscribe their opinions in the minds of their audience. Doctors and natural philosophers are also in the system, and Socrates often uses the former as a model for the others who, like doctors, are clever at taking the audience’s pulse, at determining how to gratify its desire for worldly health or, more radically, how to shape that desire to conform with whatever medicine it is in their interest to dispense. Socratic use of the medical analogy in the dialogues is always loaded because it focuses on the following two problematic features, the first adhering to the analogy itself, the second to medical practice. First, the doctor/patient relation differs from the familiar Socratic ideal of the teacher/pupil relation in being nondialogical: the patient is passive, ignorant, helpless, and dependent; the doctor monopolizes knowledge and power, and maintains mastery over the patients, who submit their bodies to medicine—or, rather, not to medicine per se but to medical discourse. This leads to the second

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feature: as practitioners no less than as teachers, doctors must cultivate the art of persuasive speech, and thus they are vulnerable to charges of sophistry. Distrust of doctors is reflected in the following passage from the Hippocratic ‘‘Canon’’: Although the art of healing is the most noble of all the arts, yet, because of the ignorance both of its professors and of their rash critics, it has at this time fallen into the least repute of all. The chief cause for this seems to me to be that it is the only science for which states have laid down no penalties for malpractice. Ill-repute is the only punishment and this does little harm to the quacks who are compounded of nothing else. Such men resemble dumb characters on the stage who, bearing the dress and appearance of actors, yet are not so. It is the same with physicians; there are many in name, few in fact.15 Perhaps the reference to their being dumb is ill-advised. The charlatans satirized in ‘‘The Sacred Disease’’ conceal their ignorance and failure by ‘‘picking their phrases carefully’’ and by ‘‘their patter about divine visitation and possession by devils.’’ The author of ‘‘Tradition in Medicine’’ chides ‘‘doctors and sophists who maintain that no one can understand the science of medicine unless he knows what man is’’ and whose discourse ‘‘tends to philosophy, as may be seen in the writings of Empedocles and all others who have ever written about Nature.’’16 I am reminded by these passages of the connection Socrates draws between Empedocles and Gorgias in the Meno, of the medical sophistry of Phaedrus’s eraste¯s, Eryximachus, and also of other Socratic statements in which Presocratics are enlisted as logographers to supply purveyors of epideictic and deliberative oratory with the kind of bookish doubletalk that credentiates them as those who know, lofty-minded philosophers who rise above petty self-interest and understand the nature of things, and whose ethics and expertise are therefore beyond reproach. Allusions to medical discourse and this Hippocratic context are especially prominent in the Phaedrus from 268a through 270.17 Socrates appeals to the medical expertise of Akoumenos and his son Eryximachus in the course of an epago¯ge¯ aimed at persuading Phaedrus that the true art of rhetoric transcends the rudimentary skill taught and practiced by the most influential sophists, logographers, and manual writers.18 He goes on

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in a vein of Hippocratic irony to associate the true art with the adoleschias kai meteoro¯logias physeo¯s peri with which Anaxagoras inflated Pericles’ natural speaking abilities and hypse¯lonoia or ‘‘loftymindedness’’ (269e–270a). I consider the statement ironic because, although Jowett and Fowler render the phrase in a straight-faced manner as ‘‘discussion and high speculation about nature,’’ this doesn’t catch the full flavor of the Greek. Adoleschias is flexible enough to yield ‘‘garrulity’’ (Hackforth), while meteo¯rologia denotes a form of speculation whose height is usually determined by the distance of heavenly bodies. This gives us a handle on the value of the hypse¯lonoia (a nonce usage) Socrates attributes to the influence of Anaxagoras, and what he thinks of Anaxagoras and his book is pretty well laid out in the Phaedo (97b–99e). As I have argued elsewhere, the figures of Anaxagoras, the philosopher king in the Republic, and the philosopher described in the Theaetetus interlude, as well as the two Eleatic speakers, give a particular meaning to ‘‘loftymindedness’’: hypse¯lonoia may be defined as the highflying philosopher’s apprehension, his deos and contempt of the many, his pleonectic desire to escape from local entanglements to mastery of the All.19 Judging from what Socrates reports he heard a man reading from Anaxagoras’s book—that nous ‘‘orders [diakosmo¯n] and is the cause of all things’’ (Phaedo 97c)—the implication of the Phaedrus reference may be that Pericles learned from Anaxagoras how to speak so as to keep the many under his control (diakosmein has a military sense, i.e., ‘‘to muster’’).20 At any rate, the Hippocratic allusion comes out into the open immediately after, when Socrates explains the reference by saying that the ‘‘method of the art of healing is much the same as that of rhetoric’’ because in both cases no one can ‘‘adequately understand the nature of the soul [or the body] without understanding the nature of the whole.’’ When Phaedrus attributes this opinion to Hippocrates, one is reminded of the ironic passage from ‘‘Tradition in Medicine’’ cited above. The pejorative resonance of this allusion vibrates through the account of what has variously been called ‘‘true’’ or ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘philosophical’’ or ‘‘dialectical’’ rhetoric. In my opinion, Socrates’ line of argument in this account has been the victim of general misinterpretation. My view of the way he manages the discussion of good and bad rhetoric is very simple. Initially he sets up the expectation that the two arts will be ethically differentiated, the good rhetoric being more just and truthful than the

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bad. But this expectation is aroused only to be frustrated: ultimately the only differences between the two will be that the good rhetoric is a more artful and effective way than the bad of deceiving and mastering audiences, that the two dialectical procedures of collection and division are no more than techniques instrumental to this end, and therefore that they have little or nothing to do with the ‘‘philosophical rhetoric’’ or dialectical approach to the good which commentators attribute to Plato and/ or Socrates. To run through some of the key passages that support this view, at 259e Socrates asks Phaedrus whether, if things ‘‘are to be said well [eu] and beautifully [kalo¯s], there mustn’t be knowledge in the mind of the speaker of the truth about whatever he intends to say?’’ Phaedrus understands this as a question about the ethics of speech and replies that he has heard ‘‘that one who intends to be an orator doesn’t need to know [manthanein, have learned or been taught] what is really just but only what seems just to the majority of those who are to pass judgment, and not what is really good or noble but what will seem to be so, because persuasion comes from that and not from the truth.’’ Socrates proposes that they examine this piece of wisdom, and this is the standard opening move in his practice of refutation. But surprisingly his refutation does not engage the ethical issue. At 262a he remarks that ‘‘he who is to deceive another, and is not to be deceived himself, must know accurately the similarity and dissimilarity of things.’’ Especially in the case of such unstable and contested—and crucially important—terms as the just and the good and their contraries, the ‘‘good’’ or dialectical rhetorician knows how to make the just or good appear unjust or bad, and vice versa (261c–e, 263a–c). This presupposes his knowing the truth about the things he discusses (262a), since ‘‘he cannot become skilled in making people pass from one thing to its opposite by leading them little by little through resemblances, or [skilled] in avoiding the same [deception] unless he knows the reality of each thing’’ (262b). Thus one who knows what is truly good and just can choose to employ that knowledge wickedly and unjustly; the dialectical art that makes him technically superior may be employed in the service of morally corrupt ends. To know the good is not necessarily to do it.

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The goal of this dialectical rhetorician is power, not virtue. It is ‘‘to produce conviction’’ (271a) and influence souls (psychago¯gia 271d). In order to do this he must know more than the truth of what he is talking about. He must have true knowledge of ‘‘the nature of that to which his words are to be addressed, and that is the soul’’ (270e); knowledge also of the kinds of soul to be addressed, and the kinds of speeches appropriate to the kinds of souls (270c–272b, 273d–e). This is a purely technocratic telos, and it is to this end that the two dialectical procedures of collection and division are to be employed. The moral parity of good and bad rhetoric, their identical purpose, is brought out in Socrates’ comments on ta eikota, probabilities. At 266e, 267a, and 272d–e, an important feature of incomplete or undialectical rhetoric is said to be its valorizing of probabilities, which ‘‘are more to be esteemed than truths’’ since, according to its practitioners and teachers, ‘‘in the courts . . . nobody cares for truth . . . but for the pithanon, what is convincing, and that is the probable,’’ and if the truth of what happened is improbable it should not be told. In his response to this opinion Socrates appears to turn the tables on Tisias and the other selfstyled experts who profess to teach the shorter, easier road to success in the art of rhetoric. Pretending to address Tisias, he says, ‘‘some time ago, before you came along, we were saying that this notion of the probable was accepted by the many because of its likeness to the true, and we just now explained that the one who knows the truth is always best able to discover likenesses’’ (273d). Ronna Burger argues that Socrates here ‘‘claims Phaedrus’s allegiance for the defense of dialectics,’’ and that ‘‘in his demand for the principles of dialectics as the necessary foundation of the true art of rhetoric, Socrates points to that desired transformation of ero¯s to philosophical ero¯s presupposed by his recantation.’’21 This reading is not supported by either the passage or its context. In the first place, Socrates has not explicitly discussed the probable in connection with his own account of the skill in producing resemblances at which the dialectician would be superior. He has delegated the trade in probabilities to nondialectical rhetoricians; thus his identifying them here tends to collapse the difference between the two and make them resemble each other. In the second place, the passage itself merely reiterates Socrates’ earlier statements about the kind of knowledge that will enable the rhetorician

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to deceive people and avoid being deceived, the knowledge of the truth of things that will enable him to produce the likeness of truth as well as the truth itself—and note that in those statements the question of the rhetorician’s concern for ethical truth is conspicuously excluded. In the third place, Socrates goes on to make two moves that further dissolve any ethical difference between good and bad rhetoric. First, he summarizes the demand he has previously elaborated three times in successively greater detail (270c–d, 271 a–b, 271c–272b): the true rhetorician must know the soul and its diverse forms well enough to be able to enumerate the natures among his audiences; he must know, as Socrates said earlier, that ‘‘men of a certain sort are easily persuaded by speeches of a certain sort for a certain reason to actions or beliefs of a certain sort, and men of another sort cannot be so persuaded’’ (271d); the repeated instances of the intensified indefinite adjective, toiosde, emphasizes the purely technical and amoral aim of this techne¯. Second, he repeats that the true rhetorician must be able to perform the two dialectical operations, dividing things (ta onta) into classes and comprehending—or embracing, or capturing (perilambanein)—each thing (hekaston) under a single idea (273d–e). It is significant that the more aggressive perilambanein replaces the blander term first used to denote the process of collection, synago¯ge¯, and that ta onta to be divided and hekaston to be embraced or captured may well, according to the sequential logic of the statement, include audiences. Hence in this conclusion to his account of the true art of rhetoric, Socrates returns to the idea of inscription. All ancient writing, as Socrates presents it, is logographic, political, and oriented toward control of logocentric institutions. It is motivated by the desire for power and the fear of impotence, and this is perhaps the most salient point to emerge from the discussion in the Phaedrus, the locus classicus on the subject. Logography thus provides a metaphor that expresses the penetration of any speech act, any speaking presence, by some form of the discourse of the other. Plato’s Socrates would not be surprised by such views as those elaborated by Bakhtin and Derrida. Of course, when Socrates disparages the written word, he is speaking to Phaedrus, which in the present interpretive framework means—to an extent not always fully determinable—that he is speaking for Phaedrus, and the view of

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writing he develops reflects the constraints of that discourse. He entertains only two alternatives, both of them based on a strict logocentric understanding: total control of the text’s meaning by its ‘‘father,’’ or else total loss of control. This is the burden of the Egyptian fable. When Theuth claims that his invention of writing is a pharmakon of memory and sophia, Thamus objects that it will have the opposite effect on those who learn it. They will not exercise their memory ‘‘because through trust in writing they will be calling things back to mind by means of alien marks [allotrio¯n typo¯n] outside them, not from within themselves,’’ and the sophia Theuth offers is more apparent than real, ‘‘for having become, through you, hearers of many things without instruction they will seem to be knowers of many things while for the most part knowing nothing and being hard to get along with’’ (275a–b). The crux of the issue lies in the phrase ‘‘hearers of many things without instruction,’’ and especially in the first word of the Greek text, polye¯kooi, which I have rendered as ‘‘hearers of many things.’’ Translators have trouble with this word, in part because of its context and in part because it is a rare Platonic coinage. Jowett’s rendering, which I follow, is ‘‘they will be hearers of many things,’’ Fowler’s is ‘‘they will read many things,’’ and Hackforth’s, ‘‘by telling them of many things.’’ Granted that reading is performed aloud, ‘‘hearing,’’ which presupposes ‘‘telling,’’ doesn’t seem relevant to Thamus’s objection. I suspect that the force of the objection centers not on reading versus hearing but on the implications of the remainder of the Greek phrase: ‘‘hearers of many things’’ aneu didache¯s, ‘‘without instruction.’’ My suspicion is based on the only other passage in which the term polye¯koos appears (these are the only two entries in the Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek Lexicon). At Laws 810e the Athenian sarcastically refers to the many thousands of voices proclaiming that the young should be indiscriminately fed the works of poets in all meters in order to make them, ‘‘by means of recitations, lengthy listeners [polye¯koous] and large learners, who learn off whole poets by heart.’’22 Against this the Athenian genially offers to make himself in effect the god/priest/king of the new city by offering as the criterion for rules of censorship his own discourses in the Laws. Teachers should be compelled ‘‘to learn these writings, and to praise them, and if any of the teachers fail to approve of them, he must not employ them as colleagues; only those who agree with his praise

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of the discourses should he employ, and entrust to them the teaching and training of the youth’’ (811e–812a). This passage should be set in the context provided by other references to the role of writing in the methods of thought control that Plato represents as the means by which Egypt succeeded in becoming the model of a change-resistant polity. For example, the Athenian praises the Egyptians’ ability to prevent innovation or deviation in dance and choric song by posting lists of approved postures and songs in the temples, ascribing them to ‘‘a god or someone divine,’’ and preventing poets from being allowed to teach ‘‘whatever the poet himself finds pleasing in the rhythm or tune or words of poetry.’’23 The authorized songs, poems, and dances are consecrated to gods and spirits worshipped at specified times according to the annual calendar of festivals in ceremonies regulated by officials who enforce strict conformity to those ancient paradigms. The only poetic writing to be accorded this ‘‘divine’’ status in the neo-Egyptian polity the Athenian and his Dorian interlocutors are founding is the ‘‘tragic’’ discourse entitled Laws (817b). In the Timaeus Critias reports Solon’s account of the Egyptian priests who create and control the authorized tradition. The aged priest who patronizes Solon and the childlike Greeks because they have ‘‘no store of old belief based on long tradition’’ seems to belong to an order that has not heeded Thamus’s warning: ‘‘if any event has occurred that is noble and great or in any way conspicuous, whether it be in your country or in ours or in some other place of which we know by hearsay [akoe¯n], all such events are recorded from of old and preserved here in our temples’’ (23a).24 The priest praises writing because, in effect, it calls external things to remembrance ‘‘by means of alien marks,’’ while Thamus uses the same reason to condemn writing as a crutch that will prevent the mathe¯te¯s from exercising the kind of mnemonic skill necessary to receive and transmit ancient wisdom. The apparent inconsistency between these two Egyptian views of writing can be resolved by premising that what the priest in the Timaeus refers to is hieroglyphic writing, which is monumental and controlled by an elite. The priest does not share the skepticism of Socrates, who says to Phaedrus of his Egyptian tradition that the ancestors who passed it on ‘‘alone know the truth of it’’ (274c).25 In Egypt truth is the province of

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the temple and its ordained living interpreters. When the priest speaks of the ancient writers recording whatever was kalon and mega or otherwise diaphoran—conspicuous mainly for nobility and greatness (i.e., power)—he is describing the heroic aristoi of old and their wars, but the phrase could just as well describe the recording medium itself.26 Ronna Burger has distinguished the pictographic and elitist character of hieroglyphs from alphabetic writing, which represents ‘‘oral speech’’ and ‘‘is in principle democratic’’ (93, 86). She suggests that Thamus is criticizing hieroglyphic writing in the Phaedrus, but her own footnotes throw doubt on this because they indicate that the references to Naucratis and the ibis are connected to papyrus and reeds—and therefore to scrolls that can travel about.27 In the Philebus Socrates specifically credits Theuth with the invention of alphabetic writing.28 The ability of his beneficiaries to record whatever they hear, to do so quickly and economically, using reed pens, portable papyrus, and phonetic writing, and their ability to read these writings to themselves and each other in private places—such abilities will free them to be indiscriminate hearers of many things without authority or supervision. That freedom, more than their failing power of recall, will make them agno¯menes, lacking in the ancient wisdom imprinted on the memory, and they will therefore be hard to live with, chalepoi syneinai, a phrase suggesting that they don’t make good followers or disciples. Thamus hints at a recipe for turning out docile subjects. Proper instruction means hearing not many things but one, the authorized tradition, and hearing it from its embodiment, the priestly instructor who regulates both what the disciples learn and how they learn it. The danger of polye¯kooi is that it will encourage a kind of writing not easily subject to the control effected by reincorporation in the official logocentric channels, a kind of writing that finds its way, for example, into Plato’s dialogues. This danger is avoided, first, by the hieratic authority of the writers and the place of inscription and, second, by the selectivity of the priests. Theuth claims that his invention will make the Egyptians wiser, but the response of Thamus indicates that the Egyptian power structure has no use for this kind of wisdom. Indeed, the response prompts one to wonder whether the subversive Promethean aspect of Theuth, the threat posed for the established authority by the rebellious inventor of technai, doesn’t lurk in the background of Socrates’ fable. Thamus/Ammon of

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Thebes is a god and king associated with the hegemony of the priesthood, and the ambiguous formula, ‘‘some god or godlike human’’ (applied to Theuth at Philebus 18b—eite tis theos eite kai theios anthro¯pos—and used at Laws 657a, theou ¯e theiou tinos an eie¯), suggests the permeability of the boundary that separates mortals from gods in Egypt. In a theocratic polity the gods and their mortal ministers mutually reinforce each other’s power and authority, and some mortals succeed in becoming divine. Egyptian politicians are shrewd enough to know how to take advantage of the strong institutional charisma inherent in this system. As the Athenian shows in Laws Vll, control of the politics of inscription has been centralized, and authorized truth emanates from the center into educational practices, religious beliefs, and political statuses. In Athens, on the other hand, control is decentered and dispersed throughout the circle of inscription, which is a site of continuous contestation. The Egyptian model is thus a pleonectic ideal for Athenians who aspire to the megethos and kratos of god, king, and priest in a politeia to which such a ritualized system of roles has become alien, a thing of the past, precisely because Theuth must have peddled his inventions and discoveries to Greece after having been snubbed by Thamus.29 According to Derrida, writing is censured by the King for its ‘‘ineffectiveness’’ and specious appearance of productiveness, ‘‘since it can only repeat what in truth is already there.’’30 From this assumption Derrida will draw the consequences that Plato’s text, Platonism, and Western metaphysics fall prey to the ineffectiveness Thamus criticizes. I submit, on the contrary, that what Thamus criticizes is the potential effectiveness of writing as subversive of authorized teaching. Alphabetic writing makes possible logography, the art of rhetoric, and the circle or vortex of inscription, and, through them, the continuous alienation of power and meaning. Platonic writing represents that situation, critiques it, and yet, at the same time, partially submits to it. It gambles on the possibility that inscription can be counter-inscriptive. It is congenial to polye¯kooi, to rolling about ‘‘alike among those who understand and those to whom it isn’t akin.’’31 The circle goes round and round from audience to speechwriter to speaker to audience. Of any member of the circle it might be said that the arguments never come from him but from those he is speaking with,

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or to, or for. Whether or not Socrates is represented as being in the same predicament, his disclaimer only articulates the general effect of the circle. ‘‘We are,’’ as he puts it in the Theaetetus, ‘‘bound to one another by the inevitable law of our being, but to nothing else, not even to ourselves . . . we are bound to one another; and so if a person says anything is, he must say it is for, or of, or toward something; but he must not say or let others say, that it is, or becomes, just in and by itself.’’32 As I note in Chapter 10, this argument comes not from Socrates but from Protagoras; Socrates is giving voice to the implications of the Protagorean theory of perception. He will go on to refute this theory. But at another level the Protagorean theory of logocentric bondage will be confirmed by the inescapable constraints of Socrates’ own practice. The institution of logography makes explicit, and historically specific, a situation in which the arguments don’t come from the speaker and in which—as Aristotle would demonstrate in the Rhetoric—the ‘‘I’’ uttered by the speaker is the product and not necessarily the author of his utterance. The circularity of this institutional process gives rise, in Derrida’s words, ‘‘to a structure of replacements such that all presences will be supplements substituted for the absent origin.’’33 Logography thus proves a metaphor that expresses the penetration of any speech act, any speaking presence, by some form of the discourse of the other. This structural duplicity, in which presence is the effect of representation, can’t have been news to any but the most monumentally pious members of the circle. The rest must have been reasonably disenchanted, possibly cynical, conceivably misanthropic. And maybe this was the condition that kept the system going and made it work. That presence was a representation; that one person’s speech was another’s text; that the first-person subject spoken by a speech was alienated from the first-person subject who uttered it: these things didn’t have to be thematized since, being elements of a system of practice, they could be taken for granted and ignored. But even if ignored, they persist in the undertone of distrust and apprehensiveness that marks the social relations directly or indirectly represented in the dialogues. And in the speech of Lysias that Phaedrus reads to Socrates, this undertone takes a new and sinister turn. * * *

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This speech purports to be the attempt of a self-proclaimed nonlover to warn his auditor against the dangers of yielding to men infected by the madness of ero¯s. Contrasting the lover’s pleonexia and instability to the nonlover’s disinterested prudence and self-control, he not only appeals to the auditor’s rational self-interest but also plays on his fear, encouraging him to take measures to protect himself from the dangers conventionally ascribed to love. The trick, of course, as Phaedrus admiringly points out (227a), is that the speech is itself an act of seduction: the imaginary lover is disingenuously pressing his suit for sexual favors. Since he’s driven by the same ero¯s he condemns, he both contradicts his argument and compounds his explicit slander of the pederastic system by showing that a lover needn’t be a raving maniac; even the slave of desire can be a calculating schemer and role player.34 Thus the covert lover’s dissimulation is an example of the disorder and bad faith he depicts, a stratagem that justifies and would eventually intensify the apprehensiveness he instills in his addressee. Socrates responds by improvising a Lysian speech that makes this rhetorical situation explicit: his speech will be by a lover pretending to be a nonlover.35 But where Lysias’s speaker promotes his attentions solely on the grounds of the hedonist calculus, Socrates invents a lover who reasons like a dialectician, gives ethical counsel like a moralist, and opposes to the pleasures of sex the benefits of ‘‘divine philosophy.’’ Several commentators argue that this speech has a ‘‘higher moral tone’’ than the other,36 but I think that, since the speaker uses the familiar terms of Socrates’ ethical logos as instruments of deception, he thereby discredits them.37 What’s really at stake here is not the use, misuse, and desire of the body but the use, misuse, and desire of discourse; not the sexual desire and seduction imitated by the speeches but the desire and seduction focused on the love of logoi, and especially of clever logoi used to deceive. The apparently innocuous character of Lysias’s writing conceals its own erotic project. A gymnastic exercise turned out at leisure to entertain the writer and his friends—turned out, as Socrates suggests, with such lovers of discourse as Phaedrus in mind—the speech that praises the nonlover’s cleverness cleverly solicits praise for its author’s cleverness and calls attention to its own seductive power. And as Socrates also suggests more than once, Lysias writes heady speeches that are to be tasted, consumed, and

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enjoyed like the food or wine at a symposium, speeches that are to be assimilated or reincorporated so that they become the auditor and move or guide him from within, speeches that can be memorized and repeated by performer after performer, thereby achieving a sort of immortality and authority. Because such writing is earmarked primarily as the play and display of clever speech making rather than as the vehicle of a serious message, it disarms the impulse to interrogate, analyze, or interpret. However insidious the message may be, it is not to be taken seriously but consumed as if the speech were a placebo that didn’t contain a pharmakon. Yet, as Socrates’ Lysian parody clearly shows, the speech is a collection of cynical argument. They slander the conventional practices of a system that involves much more than sex. Those arguments derive from and appeal to the culture of pleonexia. The speech is therefore all the more dangerous for being playful and gratuitous, for being a seduction aimed not at possession and use of another’s body but at possession and use of another’s love of discourse. What is new and sinister about Lysias’s speech is suggested later in the dialogue, at 261a–b, when Socrates asks Phaedrus whether he has heard that the art of rhetoric—the art that ‘‘leads souls by means of words’’—operates ‘‘not only in law courts and various other public gatherings but also in private ones as well.’’ Phaedrus, who shows familiarity with the works of rhetoricians (see esp. 266d ff.), replies in the negative: ‘‘the art of speaking and writing is exercised chiefly in lawsuits, and that of speaking also in public assemblies, and I have never heard of any further uses.’’ Socrates goes on to insist that the art which characterizes forensic disputation—the art ‘‘directed to confounding good and evil, truth and falsehood’’38 —would be ‘‘one and the same in all kinds of speaking,’’ ‘‘if it is an art at all’’ (261e); and a similar generalization is applied to speech writing (earlier, at 257d–258d, and later in the critique of Lysias’s speech). For me, the point of this—and I’m aware that my opinion is eccentric—is the light it throws both on the speech of Lysias and on the conversation between Phaedrus and Socrates. The speech pretends to be mere epideixis, or display, but what it imitates is the mode of forensic or deliberative persuasion, the invention of deceptive arguments aimed at persuading an audience to accept a particular verdict or course of action.

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In other words, it extends a public practice into the sphere of private relations, relations in which it is conventional to ‘‘speak from the heart.’’ If logography had a bad name in some circles (257d–e) this is because its premeditated citational performances and hidden agendas have made it a model and symptom of the sophistry, the dissimulation, the distrust, that pervade the face-to-face interactions of public life. Transforming persons to personas, and presences to representations, speech writing is an inscriptive practice. Its currency increases the apprehensiveness of a pleonectic society by dramatically foregrounding the elements of manipulation, impersonation, and deception that already hollow out political interactions.39 Lysias’s speech, as privatized logography, offers to insinuate these elements into the personal sphere, whose institutions and discourse inform erotic relations between males. The conventions that govern such relations demand friendship, patronage, and tutelage as well as sex, and so, as I said, the imaginary speaker slanders the conventional relation.40 But the speech maker plays a similar game. That is, although the speech is assigned to an imaginary seducer, not Lysias, the writer who pretends to be a nonlover is actually a lover—a lover of his own rhetorico-literary skill, of its product, its effect, and the rewards he expects from it. He aims to seduce people to desire written speeches not only for their readymade eloquence, art, and cleverness but also for their value in helping speakers become more persuasive in erotic pursuits. If the model speech betrays a cynical view of the affairs in which he proposes to intervene with readymade performances, that may only reflect his estimate of the moral state of the speechwriter’s market, a market he plans to diversify and expand so as to poach on private preserves. Lysias’s speech sets up the conditions and constraints within which the rest of the dialogue unfolds. It is a clear indicator of the values, desires, and motives of the interlocutor with whom Socrates has to contend. I can describe Phaedrus more briefly, because he has been well characterized in several recent commentaries (those, for example, by Ronna Burger, Charles Griswold, and G. R. F. Ferrari). He is, as Ferrari puts it, an intellectual impresario, an indiscriminate lover of ‘‘highbrow talk,’’ whom Socrates pretends to find impressive for his ‘‘ability to promote discourses, whether delivering them himself or milking them from

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others.’’41 Like the nonlover in the speech, he expresses contempt for the slavish desires of the body (258e) and for the base pleasures of the many (276d–e), but this disdain—factious, aristocratic, self-stroking—conceals and justifies an equally irrational appetite for discourses. Through Socrates’ ironic mimicry, the dialogue shows that Phaedrus is a nonlover of the Socratic logos pretending to be a lover, or deceiving himself into thinking he wants what Socrates has to offer when in fact what he tries to do is turn Socrates into another Lysias—to make him, as Phaedrus is himself, a site of Lysian inscription.42 Griswold has good things to say about the way Socrates brings out Phaedrus’s desire and motives by mimicry. but he takes too sanguine a view of this strategy. Socrates, he claims, imitates Phaedrus ‘‘in such a way as both to hold the mirror up to Phaedrus and show Phaedrus what he (Phaedrus) should look like’’; he enters into this ‘‘comedy of imitation and deception . . . in order to lead Phaedrus to self-knowledge.’’43 But the mimicry only shows what Phaedrus does look like, not what he should look like. In this dialogue, as in others, self-knowledge is honored in the breach. Socrates’ ironic mimicry, or mimetic irony, continues to showcase Phaedrus’s defenses against self-knowledge to the end. It marks his obtuseness, or blindness, or whatever it is, as the source of his power. That power consists in his ability to contain, control, and domesticate Socrates through a strategy which I believe Alexander Sesonske was the first to articulate many years ago: the strategy of reducing the Socratic enterprise . . . to the level . . . of a spectacle, an entertainment.’’ Sesonske quotes Polemarchus’s words to Socrates at the beginning of the Republic, ‘‘Could you really persuade [us] . . . if we don’t listen?’’ (327c), and he observes that one of the ‘‘many ways in which one may refuse to listen . . . is to allow the words to be spoken, and attend to them, but to treat the whole process as a game, a mode of entertainment, and thus drain the words of all significant meaning.’’44 The idea that Socrates’ interlocutors disarm him by reducing his performances to the status of entertainment activates as a presupposition the idea that there is something to disarm—something dangerous or threatening about Socrates. The idea is familiar enough because it smokes the edges of Plato’s portrait of him in all the Socratic dialogues. He is not a mere truth-sayer but a self-proclaimed gadfly to the polis (that is

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an ironic self-deprecation; calling himself a mere gadfly implies that although he can sting and irritate he can’t do very much harm)—a stingray to Meno, a hubristic sorcerer to Alcibiades. He is also a sophist, a disputatious antilogikos skilled in the shifty tactics of eristic warfare, and famed for his ability to put down his opponents. He thus poses a threat at two levels. First, his ethical medicine is bitter to the taste because in asking people to examine themselves critically he threatens their self-interest and self-esteem. Second, his procedure confuses or entraps his interlocutors, makes them look bad, and draws from their utterances meanings they didn’t intend. As Sesonske suggests, Socrates’ interlocutors control him by occluding the first level—blocking the ethical challenge—and fixing on the second level, which then provides entertainment for auditors, hangers-on, and even opposing verbal pugilists who take pleasure in a good fight. Whether it derives from his ignorance or from his skill in managing the resources culture makes available for defending against self-knowledge and self-refutation, Phaedrus’s power lies in his ability to reduce Socrates to a Lysian entertainer and a Phaedrian lover of good talk—his ability to contain Socrates within the circle of inscription and keep him from breaching his interlocutor’s defenses. To some extent, I think, Socrates’ palinode is constructed as an interpretive reflection of Phaedrus’s motives and desire. The limits of space prevent me from discussing this speech in the manner it deserves, but a few cursory comments will at least suggest the direction a more adequate reading might take. C. I. Rowe argues that the palinode is ‘‘a set piece,’’ a paignion ‘‘Socrates indulges in . . . just because he is aware of the limitations of the form which Phaedrus has forced him to adopt.’’ Pretending to be serious when in fact it isn’t, and pretending to be a spontaneous ecstatic outburst when it is actually a citational pastiche, the speech ‘‘turns out—once more—to be just like a book.’’45 It is a visualized, simplified, detextualized narrative whose background is the latent set of contradictions and complexities conspicuously excluded from the previous speeches and brought to the surface by the subsequent rhetorical analysis that textualizes the myth. The palinode is a double act of mimicry that brings its two targets into relation with each other. On the one hand, Socrates parodies an archaic and elitist discourse, like that of Timaeus in its hypse¯lonoia, aristo-

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cratic in its values and ideology, hegemonic in its proliferation of ranks and categories that impose hierarchy on its hubristic overview of the cosmos, the gods, and the psyche. On the other hand, the imagery of the palinode is revised to serve as a parody of Lysian logography, a parody of the erotics of discourse, in which sexual desire is diffused and sublimated and displaced until it becomes, alive and powerful beneath its disguises, the motive force of the All.46 Putting its myths in scare quotes, Socrates flags not only the hegemonic appropriation of archaic culture by the old and new agathoi but also the mystifying rhetoric by which the whole of culture and cosmos are conscripted in the service of privatized logography as an art of seduction. The palinode thus fans out the range of discourses funneled and compacted into the figure and proper noun Phaidros, one made bright by reflection of a light source, and one who feels the self-lack that might become self-contempt did he not make himself a trap to catch, a screen or tablet to be inscribed with, the brightness of others. Phaidros: both mirror and grammateion. Near the end of the palinode Socrates suggests that the only way he could find or constitute a true dialogical partner and beloved would be to create him by narcissistic projection and reflection (252d ff.). There is considerable bitterness behind that idea: his beauty penetrates you as desire and ricochets back to him not as your desire per se but as his image idealized by your desire. What you would have to do to draw the beloved toward you is inscribe his idealized reflection on your surface. This is the mirror stage with a vengeance. And I think it throws a lot of light on the puzzling passage about soul writing with which I began and to which, finally, I now return. At 275e Socrates describes the bastard logos as tossed about ‘‘alike among those who understand and those to whom its contents aren’t akin.’’ ‘‘Understand’’ here renders epaiousin, which also means ‘‘give ear to’’; those who understand may therefore be those who are read to, and if this is so, maybe the others are those who read to themselves, that is, those who aren’t being controlled by the lecturer in a context of instruction or authoritative interpretation. Socrates’ account of the legitimate logos that follows at 276a in fact suggests a circumvention of the ear. This logos, he says, is better and more powerful in the manner of its begetting because,

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written with episte¯me¯ in the learner’s soul, it has the power to defend itself, knowing (episte¯mo¯n) to whom it ought to speak and before whom to be silent. It has been suggested that Socrates is talking here about an intelligible logos that pre-exists verbal expression. Is writing a figure for a more abstract, impersonal, or ‘‘spiritual’’ process of learning, one that’s somehow secured not only from the promiscuity of bad writing but also from the constraints and uncertainties of face-to-face discourse? This question suggests the possibility that if there is a truth to be communicated, its text may be jeopardized by oral as well as by graphic mediation, that the problem therefore may not be writing per se but loss of control over interpretation, a danger inherent in the transmission of messages whenever a contact or medium intervenes between the sender and the receiver (even when sender and receiver are the same person). At 276e Socrates says that the serious teacher, taking hold of a proper or like-minded soul, uses the art of dialectic to plant and sow epistemic logoi that contain ‘‘seed from which other logoi springing up in other dispositions or characters [e¯thesi] are capable of making this [process] ever undying, and making their possessor happy.’’ The new logoi may be ‘‘other’’ in the sense of ‘‘different,’’ but the farming metaphor doesn’t support this reading. The comparison of insemination and inscription to planting has an effect similar to that produced by other texts in which the reproductive function is imaged in tropes that suggest male parthenogenesis: as I mentioned earlier, the emphasis is on the reproduction of the same, the suppression of otherness, and the secure transmission guaranteed by the automatism of natural process. This emphasis is heightened by the reference to immortality. Hackforth notes that this can suggest the immortality of the possessor as well as of the transmission process, and I think it can also suggest the immortality of the first possessor, the sower and father; if he himself can’t live forever, he can at least try to clone himself in an endless series of replicas.47 Desiring nothing less than this, which is a kind of filicide, he may wonder whether even the so-called legitimate logos will be able to defend against misinterpretation, the symbolic parricide that’s an appropriate response to symbolic filicide. For the father who wants to perpetuate his logos, defending against misinterpretation is the same as defending against interpretation. Anxiety on this score

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is expressed by the phrase ‘‘taking hold of a proper or like-minded soul.’’ The Greek word which, following the translators, I’ve just blandly rendered as ‘‘proper or like-minded,’’ is prose¯kon. This word also means ‘‘akin to,’’ and, more interestingly, ‘‘belonging to’’—as a child, for example, or a woman, or a slave, or some other member of an adult male’s household, may be said to belong to him. The father, let’s say, wishes to inscribe his logos on what he considers his property. But if the son is akin to the father, and like-minded, he may want to avoid inscription; that is, he may want to father his own logos; and this may account for the coercive participle, labo¯n, ‘‘taking hold’’ or ‘‘seizing.’’ The father who desires to live forever by reducing souls to receptacles bearing his imprint may well fear that nothing short of violence will do the trick. The implication of violence may seem to be softened by the mention of dialectic in the phrase I just discussed, but I don’t think it is. Socrates had earlier (265d–266c) described dialectic as an art comprising two processes, collection and division. The first, he mentions in passing, was illustrated by his second speech. But here, in speaking of rhetoric, he only illustrates the other method, division, or diaeresis. (This is the art promoted and carried to an outlandish extreme by the Eleatic Stranger, who is, as I’ve argued elsewhere, represented by Plato as a despotic enemy and devious appropriator of the Socratic logos.)48 The rhetorician is dialectical, Socrates says, if he can analyze the different classes of soul and the different speech-classes, can discern these classes in actual affairs, and can match the right kind of speech with its proper soul type. At 265e he characterizes this procedure as an art of efficient butchery and distinguishes the good carver of discourse from the bad by his ability to cut the body at its natural joints. The association of dialectic with dismemberment and food production doesn’t strike me as innocent, and there’s no reason why it should: its ultimate destination is an account of the techniques that improve logography and help extend its practice into private life. Socrates first introduces the method of division after suggesting that the ‘‘good’’ or dialectical rhetorician knows how to deceive people by making the just appear unjust and the good bad (263a–b). Socrates will conclude his account of soul writing at 278c by condemning all types of logography unless they are informed by truth, and— here’s the rub—unless the writer who composed them can support them

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by refuting them and ‘‘has the power to show by his own speech that the written words are of little worth’’ (278c). That is, those who know the truth also know that it cannot be transmitted, cannot be defended against misinterpretation, by writing; and if this is part of the truth they know, one may legitimately ask why they bothered to write in the first place. The answer suggested in several dialogues is that they confused their desire to perpetuate the truth with their desire to perpetuate themselves. If so, since they are not themselves immortal, since they can’t hang around forever to defend their writing, they foolishly chose the wrong medium; their mastery of the dialectical art went for naught, and that mastery is itself placed in question by the fact that, having divided the written truth from the spoken truth, and writing on scrolls from writing on souls, they chose the wrong division. At 277b–c Socrates recalls and summarizes the earlier discussion of dialectical logography. He then goes on to assert, first, that it is a disgrace for any writer to believe his writing has great certainty and clarity, and second, that it is a disgrace to be ignorant ‘‘of what is a waking vision and what is a dream-image [I follow Hackforth here] of the just and the unjust, the bad and the good, . . . even if the whole mob applaud it’’ (277d–e). Here again, if you connect the two assertions, the implication is that a written image of the just and the good is itself unjust and bad, that—or perhaps I should say because—the writer is motivated by the desire for applause and power as well as by his self-defeating belief in the clarity and certainty of the medium. The final version of the soul-writing formula at 278a focuses more intensely than before on the father’s problematic relation to his project: ‘‘only in things said for the sake of teaching and learning about the just and also about the beautiful and the good, and really written in a soul, is there clearness and completeness and serious value; and . . . such logoi should be considered the speaker’s own legitimate offspring, first the one within himself, if it be found there, and secondly such of its children and brothers as may have sprung up worthily in the souls of others. That man who renounces all other logoi is likely, Phaedrus, to be such as you and I might pray that we may become.’’ I note in passing the hesitation of ‘‘if it be found there,’’ the conditional softening of ‘‘such . . . as may have sprung up,’’ and the uncompromising accent of ‘‘renounces all other logoi.’’ But what most

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attracts my attention is the statement that the speaker is the father of the logos inscribed in his own soul. Wasn’t there a prior father? Is his logos autonomous and self-generated? Since talk about the just, the beautiful, and the good uniquely characterizes Socratic discourse, I’m inclined to think he is proposing his own anomalous practice and its telos as a model. Did he then conceive or invent his ethical logos, first teaching himself, learning from himself, inseminating himself, and inscribing himself until he came to ‘‘see’’ its truth at last, fixed clearly, unambiguously, in his soul? If so, inscription would scarcely be possible. For either the logos he transmits is the product of that process or it is the process itself. If it is the product, it would be inscribed in another without the method of selfinsemination that would enable the learner to produce and defend his own legitimate offspring. If the logos is the process, then each new father displaces his predecessor and generates his own logos in terms of his conception of the truth about the just and the good and the beautiful— terms about whose positive content the Socratic father could hardly be said to be overly forthcoming. The result of the first scenario would be filicide, and, of the second, parricide. Both scenarios are aporetic in the sense that they imply that the pathway of inscription is blocked. And the passage as a whole remains perplexing because the ambiguity of the term logos defends against decisive interpretation. In spite of all uncertainty, however, Socrates’ repeated formulations of the ideal keep his official advocacy of soul-writing in the foreground. But the more he rephrases and insists on the ideal, the more he sows seeds of doubt as to its viability. As he pushes the argument for inscription aggressively forward, something in his language resists it and shrinks away from it, progressively undermines it. So, when he ends on the upbeat and carries the now enthusiastic Phaedrus along with him, any voyeur looking down at the text from the Plato tree under which Socrates and Phaedrus are, in their different ways, lying is likely to feel a certain uneasiness about what Phaedrus hasn’t heard. And the feeling is not diminished by the way Socrates more or less abruptly shuts off the discussion: ‘‘we’ve already played around long enough with talk about logoi.’’ Then, as Griswold notes, ‘‘he sends Phaedrus off to deliver to Lysias and all composers of discourses, to Homer and all the poets, to Solon and all the law writers, a report of their dialogue,’’ but it is an incomplete report, one

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restricted to the logography discussion, since Phaedrus is shown to have understood little of what went on in the speech and myth-making it followed. But if Socrates releases Phaedrus to the circle of inscription, Phaedrus—Griswold adds—‘‘is sent by Plato out into the world under cover of a text’’ whose ‘‘message is far more complex than that which Phaedrus is charged by Socrates with delivering.’’49 Phaedrus will deliver an anecdote whose secret message is not given out. Plato represents Socrates as uttering logoi that can only be given out to an audience beyond his power to reach, and given out thanks to the resources of the medium he rejects. The increasing dissonance between what Socrates says and Phaedrus seems to hear leads me to imagine a touch of anger or bitterness in his words, as if he has resigned himself to telling Phaedrus what Phaedrus wants to hear. I can imagine, for example, that he puts forth the rigorous concept of soul-writing as a kind of sardonic hyperbole expressing what he would have to do to secure his logos, or mimicking what those who think of themselves as his friends want from the great teacher. They want exactly what he refuses to give them, and they want it in the way that would destroy what he does have to give them. They want to be sites of Socratic logography, just as they are already sites of sophistical, poetic, nomothetic, and rhetorical logography. But they also want to control the content of inscription. Socrates is to be their speechwriter, supplying them with zero-sum logoi for all occasions; logoi to make them performers, entertainers, and politicians; logoi to help them get the better of their fellow citizens, their households, their lovers, their parents, their children, and themselves; logoi to protect them from their fear of death, of each other, of themselves. Because I believe Vlastos is right in the account of Socrates’ disavowal of knowledge and teaching I cited earlier, I can’t subscribe to a straight reading of the inscription passage. On the other hand, I can’t fully agree with Vlastos’s assertion that ‘‘Socrates would want to say he is a teacher, the best of teachers in his time, the only true teacher.’’ At least I would need to know whether ‘‘best’’ is meant as the superlative of a Socratic or a Protagorean good. Socrates, and I mean Plato’s Socrates, is hardly the most successful teacher in his time, and I don’t think he would want to say that he is. I am more inclined to agree with Derrida’s statement that

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Plato ‘‘writes from out of . . . Socrates’ death,’’ that is, writes from out of ‘‘the sterility of the Socratic seed left to its own devices.’’50 But I would add some riders to this statement and turn its head in a different direction. First, Plato represents that sterility. Second, he represents Socrates as aware of the sterility, and in the Phaedrus this awareness is signaled by his subversive conduct of the inscription logos. Third, when Socrates says the arguments never come from him, he may not merely be stating his principle of dialogical modesty; he may be voicing a complaint or confession, acknowledging that the sterility that makes him a midwife derives from his failure to get free of the circle of inscription. After his long struggle to circumvent the defenses of Phaedrus, he might well be expected to toy with the idea that if he could write directly on the soul the arguments would always come from him. If you can’t beat the circle, why not join it? Of course, if he is in the circle and is unable to get out of it, he must be an inscribee as well as an inscriber. But inscription has one saving feature: it is a reversible process. That is, although the process is clearly described as operating from the past to the future, there is no reason why that logic isn’t reversible too. Why couldn’t Socrates be describing what he does, for example, to Protagoras in the Theaetetus, or to Achilles in the Apology, or to Homer and Hesiod in a number of dialogues? Or what Plato does to him? If philosophy is an art of dying, that could mean it is part of the maieutic process of being killed by reverse inscriptions—by arguments coming from others in the future. It could also mean, as Kant might say, that it is an art of curtailing knowledge and its inscription to make room for interpretation. It could mean being inscribed in a revisionary structure of inscriptions that undo themselves and foreclose closure. It could mean refusing to resign oneself to the genealogical tyranny of the future and fighting the good fight for the control of the future perfect. Although the living who flee obliteration seek to be perpetuated or resurrected, they may have to settle for revision, for Hegelian Aufhebung appropriated by Nietzsche in the Eternal Return of the Different. I conclude that if Platonic philosophy is an art of dying and a desire for death, and if that is taken to be a desire for sublation and appropriation, then it is a desire not for immortality but for textuality; a desire not to be concluded

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The Athenian Terrorist: Plato’s Portrait of Critias

‘‘Critias’’ is the name Plato gives to a character who appears in several dialogues. He’s one of the followers of the sophists in the Protagoras. In the opening section of the Timaeus, he’s the host of Hermocrates and Timaeus, and also their chief spokesman. He narrates the Critias. Finally, he’s closely identifiable with a historical figure of the same name in the Charmides. That figure was the cousin of Plato’s mother, a rich aristocrat, a pro-Spartan, and a violent antidemocrat, whose political career flowered during the last stages of Athens’s late-fifth-century decline. He had philosophical and literary pretensions, and though he was loosely associated with Socrates for a time, after 415 b.c. he turned increasingly to power politics and terrorism. Critias has been described as ‘‘the most bloodthirsty and unscrupulous member’’ of the group of thirty men who came together to draw up a constitution at the disastrous end of the Peloponnesian War, but who ‘‘made themselves tyrants instead, and massacred their opponents.’’1 He may have been about fifty when he died in civil war, on the streets of the Piraeus, in 403. Socrates’ connections with men like Critias had some455

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thing to do with the Athenians’ bringing him to the trial that ended in his death in 399. Much later, when, in the Seventh Epistle, Plato reviews his own frustrated ambition to participate in public life, he speaks of his initial hope that the Thirty ‘‘would lead the city out of the unjust life she had been living, and establish her in the path of justice.’’ Among his subsequent disappointments was the attempt of the Thirty to implicate Socrates in their lawless actions. Socrates, he writes, refused, ‘‘risking the utmost danger rather than be an associate in their impious deeds.’’2 This background should be enough to alert you to the possibility that Plato’s Critias may not be one of his so-called mouthpieces. In fact, I will argue that the dialogue entitled Critias is not so much a picture of Atlantis as a deeply critical portrait of Critias, a deeply critical portrait of a pro-Spartan oligarch who longs for the good old days when the better sort of people had power and everyone else did their house- and field-work for them. The historical Critias had much in common with his contemporary Hermocrates, the Syracusan military hero. Both inclined to Sparta and were enemies of Athenian-style democracy. Both were sent into exile, from which they returned to plot against democratic governments in their respective cities. In Plato’s dialogue Critias is clearly the leader of the trio, Hermocrates his lieutenant, and Timaeus the relatively passive ‘‘third partner,’’ as Critias calls him, in the little hierarchy. Critias is the orator, Hermocrates the soldier, and Timaeus the philosopher. Critias is the host, and the other two are his guests. It’s Critias who proposes the Egyptian story, initiates the plan of response to Socrates, and manages the arrangements. That Timaeus’s discourse and choice of topic were influenced by Critias—perhaps even dictated and generated by him—is suggested in the latter’s remark that he told his story a second time ‘‘to our friends early this morning, so that they might be as well provided as myself with materials for their discourse.’’ On the previous day, Socrates had entertained the other three with a description of the kind of political constitution and citizens that, he says, seem ‘‘likely to prove the best,’’ and the others were to respond by taking that image and setting it into motion. He gives a recapitulation which shows that the polis he described was almost identical to the one constructed in Books II through V of the Republic (17c–19d). This allusion to the Republic is important, and I’ll return to it later; for now I’ll just point

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out that the term translated as ‘‘the best’’ is ariston, and that a possible paraphrase of the clause is, ‘‘the kind of constitution which seemed to me likely to prove the most aristocratic.’’ Socrates’ discourse places his companions under an obligation, against which they contend by trying to pay back more than they have received. Critias is especially active in the effort to repay Socrates, and his eagerness leads to an odd mix-up. When invited to speak, he makes it appear that he will immediately recite the old Egyptian story of Athens and Atlantis in order to transfer the citizens of Socrates’ city ‘‘from the region of theory to concrete fact; we will take the city to be Athens and say that your imaginary citizens are those actual ancestors of ours, whom the priest spoke of.’’ But when Socrates urges him to begin, Critias points out that they have a different plan: since Timaeus ‘‘has made knowledge of the nature of the universe his chief object,’’ he will begin ‘‘with the birth of the world and end with the nature of man.’’ Critias will then follow, combining Timaeus’s newly created humans with those whose ‘‘supremely good training’’ Socrates described, and he will then, ‘‘in accordance with Solon’s enactment as well as with his story, bring them before our tribunal and make them our fellow citizens, on the plea that they are those old Athenians of whose disappearance we are informed by the report of the sacred writings.’’ It’s as if Critias had momentarily forgotten that he had delegated Timaeus to prepare the way for him. This is not an isolated effect, to be attributed to Plato’s oversight. Critias’s first misstatement of the plan is of a piece with everything else in the introduction. He waits outside the dialogue until he is announced, so to speak, and the waiting has clearly made him impatient. Socrates begins by singling out the third partner for the first conversation. A responsive and somewhat deferential yes-man, Timaeus initially speaks as an equal contributor to the plan. After Socrates urges his companions to describe the city at war, the second partner tells him that they had already considered the project, and that Critias had unveiled his ancient story. He asks Critias to repeat it now to Socrates. Critias complies willingly, with a polite but perfunctory gesture toward Timaeus: ‘‘It shall be done if our remaining [third, tritos] partner, Timaeus, approves’’ (20d). He then moves into a long and leisurely account, which gives the impression that he is telling the whole story. But

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at 25e he brakes himself, stating that he has just given ‘‘a brief account of the story,’’ and when he finally manages to leave off, it is with an offer to begin over again: ‘‘To come to the point I have been leading up to: I am ready now, Socrates, to tell the story, not in summary, but in full detail as I heard it’’ (26c). By the end of the Critias he will, in his boundless enthusiasm both for the story and for his recital of it, have repeated it four times since Socrates’ preamble had suggested it to him. The introduction leaves us with the sense that Critias has waited restively in the wings while his two heralds disposed of the opening formalities and set the stage for him, and that once in possession of the floor, it is difficult for him to give it up. Only a last-minute effort keeps him from sacrificing the common plan to his special interest. The reason for this is that his special interest lies in his own contribution. For him the cosmology of the Timaeus is only a preface that will enhance his climactic sequel in several ways: he can count on Timaeus to be more difficult and perhaps boring; the cosmology would provide a justifying ground in nature, giving his myth the legitimacy of divine and cosmic origins; and this effect would in turn be heightened by the authority of the expert, for Timaeus, when he speaks, presents himself as a priestly and esoteric purveyor of previously hidden truths about reality, truths that in fact have a strong aristocratic flavor, even an authoritarian stink, about them. Behind Critias’s bumptious and self-preening aggressiveness, we can discern an apprehensive shadow. He’s concerned to persuade his companions that his story is true, that he didn’t make it up but got it from genuinely ancient and legitimate sources. Socrates doesn’t help him out. Critias prefaces his account with, ‘‘Listen then, Socrates, to a story which, though strange, is entirely true, as Solon, wisest of the Seven, once affirmed. He was a relative and close friend of . . . my great-grandfather, as he says himself several times in his poems; and he told my grandfather Critias (according to the story the old man used to repeat to us) that there were great and admirable exploits performed by our own city long ago which have been forgotten through lapse of time and the destruction of human life’’ (20d–e). To which Socrates responds, ‘‘Eu legeis’’—’’nicely said. But come now, just what was this ancient exploit that your grand-

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father described on Solon’s report [or, conceivably, Solon’s hearsay, akoe¯n] as unrecorded and yet really performed by our city’’ (21a). The words flash a momentary edge: how much truth does the authority of Solon confer on an ancient exploit communicated by hearsay without evidence? It may be nicely said, but is it true? Critias continues to firm up his credentials with further appeals to Solon and the ancient sources, bolstered by personal witness (‘‘the story I heard,’’ ‘‘Critias, by his own account,’’ ‘‘how well I remember it’’) and by his delight in reviving the memory of a time, an occasion, that so deeply impressed him. ‘‘How true it is,’’ he exclaims after finishing his ‘‘brief account,’’ ‘‘that what we learn in childhood has a wonderful hold on the memory! I doubt if I could recall everything that I heard yesterday; but I should be surprised if I have lost any detail of this story told me so long ago. I listened at the time with much boyish delight, and the old man was very ready to answer the questions I kept on asking; so it has stayed in my mind indelibly like an encaustic picture’’ (26b–c). After Timaeus concludes his discourse, Critias sets up his own performance by mildly putting Timaeus down for expatiating on matters that can be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed because they are beyond human experience; his own discourse will be more difficult because it concerns mortal and human affairs that can be checked out. He concludes his preamble by invoking memory, and a little later, after reminding his auditors of his mnemonic effort (112e), he forgetfully lets slip a detail that, previously unmentioned, might lead the cynical reader to question his claim to powers of recall: Solon, it now appears, wrote down the Egyptian fable; ‘‘his actual papers were once in my father’s hands, and are in my own, to this day, and I studied them thoroughly in my boyhood’’ (113b). This is hardly consistent with the impression conveyed at the beginning of the Timaeus, to the effect that he learned the tale from old Critias’s oral narration and had to recover it by reflective effort. But it is consistent with that impression in one respect: both statements are attempts to persuade his audience of his reliability as a narrator and of the verisimilitude, the factual truthfulness, of his account. In the prologue to the Timaeus, Socrates has twice dropped hints on this point, once in the passage

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already noted (21a) and a little later (26e) in praising Critias because the story is no contrived myth but a true account. Through Critias’s repeated attempts to forestall skepticism, coupled with Socrates’ ironic reassurances, Plato encourages us to question the objectivity of the ancient legend and its sources. Things look pretty fishy by Timaeus 25e, when Critias tells Socrates he ‘‘was surprised to notice in how many points your account exactly agreed, by some miraculous chance, with Solon’s.’’ As we follow the transfer of Socrates’ account from Critias through Old Critias, Dropides, Solon, and the Egyptian priest to the ancient priestly recorders and their anonymous sources, the chain of transmission is progressively (or regressively) contaminated by doubt. At Critias 109d, for example, we learn that, whereas the names of the original Athenians have been preserved, their deeds have been ‘‘forgotten by reason of the destruction of their successors and the lapse of time.’’ The illiterate survivors of earthquake and flood ‘‘had heard no more than the names of the country’s rulers and a few of their deeds’’; ‘‘as for the virtues and laws of older generations, they knew nothing of them beyond some dim reports.’’ Solon’s statement that the names the priests used also exist in early Attic tradition is cited for an odd reason: to prove not simply that ‘‘the names of the ancients have been preserved,’’ but that they have been preserved ‘‘without any memorial of their deeds.’’ How can this be proof unless the priests received the names from the rude survivors, and if this is the case, how, where, from whom, did they learn about the deeds attached to these names in the tale of Athens and Atlantis? The chain of transmission is further threatened in Critias’s second reference to priestly records, and this time Solon is the potentially weak link. Critias doesn’t want his auditors to be amazed if they hear the Atlantean barbarians called by Greek names. He can clear up this small problem: Solon had asked the Egyptian about the general sense or force (dynamis) of the names the Egyptians had translated into their own tongue; in this way he recaptured the dianoia—the thought, intention, meaning—expressed by each name and wrote it down in Greek (113a–b). Dynamis is a vaguer and more impressionistic term than dianoia, and the clause containing dianoia connotes appropriation as well as restoration.

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Critias’s first statement had raised a doubt about the quality of information the ancient Egyptians received about Athens, and Solon’s etymological research adds another doubt concerning possible Greek adjustments. But it doesn’t stop there. What about old Critias, who had his own ideas about Solon, was accustomed to repeat the story on ceremonial occasions after the reforms took place, and was very eager to answer his young grandson’s questions about it? And what about the grandson? From the standpoint of the transmission of ‘‘truth,’’ it makes no difference whether the remodeling of tradition occurs through censorship or through ignorance: what is handed on will bear the imprint of the latest transmitter. In a certain sense all humans are like the rustic illiterates in making discourses that reflect their ‘‘own needs’’ or perplexities. But Plato makes a special point of emphasizing that lapses in the tradition arise through ignorance rather than censorship. An honest attempt to recover a lost fact or meaning reveals more clearly than a disingenuous one the shaping force of interest and the prevailing ideology. In the Timaeus/Critias, the past is always threatening to collapse into the present, the there into the here, the externality of narrated place, time, and culture into the needs and perplexities of the narrator’s psyche. All the theories about the submarine whereabouts of Atlantis miss the point, if they’re motivated by Plato’s account. The only archaeology that will unearth Atlantis is the one that excavates the links of narrative transmission, and the deepest layer will always be the most recent one. The tale of Atlantis is about its tellers, and our archeological research is directed by Plato toward such questions as: Why the priests? Why Egypt? Why Solon? Why old Critias? Why his grandson? Why, in particular, is Critias so concerned with the veracity of his tale, and with his credibility as a narrator? We can see, of course, that the very conditions of legendary diegesis could make him nervous, since every time he tries to support his account he further weakens it. But is that all Plato wants us to see? The connection with the Republic suggests that this isn’t the case. But how does Plato connect the narrator’s perplexity, his aporia, with his politics? What relation obtains between factitious truth and factional interest? Such questions head us away from Critias toward the Republic and its historical context, and away from Solon’s career as a tale-teller to his career as a political reformer.

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The introductory discussion of the Timaeus occurs on the day of the festival of Athena, who is described as a lover of war and wisdom. The Egyptian priest whom Critias is quoting told Solon that it was Athena who taught the manner of warfare and gave the arms that the Egyptians ‘‘were the first people in Asia to bear.’’ As for wisdom, the priest continues, ‘‘you see what great care the law has bestowed upon it here from the very beginning, as concerns the order of the world, deriving from those divine matters the discovery of all arts applied to human affairs, down to the practice of divination and medicine, and the acquiring of all other branches of learning. All this order and system the goddess had bestowed upon you earlier when she founded your society, choosing the place in which you were born because she saw that the well-tempered climate would bear a crop of men of high intelligence’’ (24b–d). This linking of war with wisdom is crucial to any understanding of the Timaeus and Critias, and it seems to be the essential feature of the discussion plan on which the four participants had agreed. It isn’t wisdom by itself of which they speak, but wisdom in the context and service of war. And it wasn’t the political constitution in itself that Socrates had undertaken to discuss the previous day at the request of the others. He described the polis with the understanding that the other speakers would supply as a sequel an account of ‘‘this city engaged in a war worthy of her,’’ and so his discourse was initially limited by its relevance to the sequel. Since his earlier discourse can easily be recognized as a sampling of some of the proposals for social and political reform made in Books II through V of the Republic, our sense of those proposals will affect our approach to the Timaeus and Critias. The ideal city, the guardian polis, described in the Republic has sent offensive fumes up every liberal nose and has caused Plato to be characterized as a totalitarian, a fascist, and an enemy of the open society. Such characterizations, however, have always assumed what they have to prove, namely, that this city is Plato’s ideal, or even the ideal of the fictional Socrates in the dialogue. On the face of it, it’s just as conceivable that the guardian polis is another target of the famous Socratic irony and is therefore the object of his criticism rather than his praise. Because this is how I read the Republic, it leads me to a similarly suspicious view of Timaeus, Critias, and Plato’s

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other characters. All seem to me to model states of mind, cultural attitudes, and ethical stances that reflect different facets of late-fifth-century Athenian disenchantment. All are reducible to two positions—either they are for Socrates or they are against him—and the dramatic interaction between or among them is the real subject of the dialogues. In this view, the dialogues are not primarily about the ideas being discussed, but about who is discussing them, why they’re discussing them, and how they’re discussing them. The ideas, the topics of discussion, are only the raw materials and resources that the discussants fight to appropriate by way of defending their interests. I accept the view, then, that the polis Socrates designs with the help of his interlocutors is intended to be a dystopia, and the best statement of its purpose I’ve ever seen comes from an unlikely source, namely, Gregory Bateson’s reflections on John Lilly’s experiments with dolphins. These discriminative experiments involve a series of steps in which what Bateson calls ‘‘deutero-learning,’’ or learning to learn, is conditioned by a set of stimulus-response sequences centered on the bestowal or denial of, of all things, fish: (1) The dolphin may or may not perceive a difference between the stimulus objects, X and Y. (2) The dolphin may or may not perceive that this difference is a cue to behavior. (3) The dolphin may or may not perceive that the behavior in question has a good or bad effect upon reinforcement, that is, that doing ‘‘right’’ is conditionally followed by fish. (4) The dolphin may or may not choose to do ‘‘right,’’ even after he knows which is right. Bateson’s point is that it is ‘‘of prime importance to know whether the organism with which we are dealing is capable of step 4. If it is capable, then all arguments about steps 1 through 3 will be invalidated unless appropriate methods of controlling step 4 are built into the experimental design.’’ It follows that the first requirement of a trainer is that he must be able to prevent the animal from exerting choice at the level of step 4. It must continually be made clear to the animal that, when he knows what is the right thing to do in a given context, that is the only thing he can do, and no nonsense about it. In other

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words, it is a primary condition of circus success that the animal shall abrogate the use of certain higher levels of his intelligence. The art of hypnosis is similar.3 This is a familiar tactic of utopian or Skinnerian fantasies of social control. They try to build into the design of socialization ‘‘appropriate methods of controlling step 4,’’ so that the individual will be trained ‘‘to abrogate the use of certain higher levels of his intelligence.’’ And this is precisely the program Plato’s Socrates ironically sketches in Books II and III of the Republic in his account of the primary socialization proper for the guardians—the warrior elite—of the new polis. The charter for the founding of the guardian polis is more, or less, than a myth of origins: it’s a lie about origins—a noble lie, as the word gennaion is usually translated. But gennaion means ‘‘noble’’ in the sense of ‘‘well born,’’ and the ascriptive meaning is fundamental to the success of the program, which depends on the ability of the founders to conceal the truth that the polis is the product of human machinations. The wellborn lie Socrates suggests as a charter for the polis is divided into two articles. The first is a myth of autochthony, which binds all the citizens together as siblings by claiming they are the children of the earth; the second is a myth of metals, which naturalizes the stratification of the community into three castelike orders by telling them the potential rulers will have gold mixed into their constitutions at birth, the guardians silver, and the farmers and craftsmen iron and bronze. The mechanism for perpetuating the lie, for ensuring that every generation involuntarily lives the lie and hands it on, is the carefully monitored program of primary socialization called paideia (from pais, child). Its two components are music and gymnastics, but ‘‘music’’ translates a term with a much wider range: mousike¯ is instruction not only in harmony, rhythm, and song but also in letters, and this includes hearing, memorizing, and reciting the inherited stories that generate the proper moral attitude toward the nomoi (customs, usages, laws) of the community. Paideia embeds technical training in moral training, and both are encoded in the sensuous qualities of myth and oral performance. As Eric Havelock and others have argued, the techniques of performance by which the Homeric encyclopedia was inscribed in the young psyche utilized the resources

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of patterned speech, percussive accentuation, incantation, and actual or empathic bodily movement. In Socrates’ polis the guardians, the military caste, seem to be envisaged as the primary if not sole beneficiaries of paideia. The group ethos will be inscribed into the body, so that each new generation will be formed by musical training into an obedient, wellcoordinated dramatic chorus, and by gymnastics into an obedient, wellcoordinated army. Each will be walking (or dancing) embodiments of the tradition, replicas of the previous generation. As we saw in Chapter 11 (pp. 425–26 above), Socrates sums up the method and aim of musical paideia in what is conspicuously, even parodistically, the rhetoric of mystification, at once bland and cooptative, benign and devious. He explains that ‘‘rhythm and harmony most of all insinuate themselves into the inmost part of the soul and most vigorously lay hold of it in bringing grace [eusche¯mosyne¯n] with them; and they make a man graceful if he is correctly reared, if not, the opposite.’’ The child so trained would intuitively have ‘‘the right kind of dislikes’’ and ‘‘would praise the fine things.’’ He would ‘‘blame and hate the ugly in the right way while he’s still young, before he’s able to grasp reasonable speech. And when reasonable speech comes, the man who’s reared in this way would take most delight in it, recognizing it on account of its being akin [oikeiote¯ta]’’ (401d–402a). The last sentence really means that whatever speech is in harmony with what was learned in musical paideia is to be defined as reasonable by virtue of that kinship. What holds true for Bateson’s dolphin thus holds true for the guardian: ‘‘It must continually be made clear to the animal that when he knows what is the right thing to do in a given context, that is the only thing he can do, and no nonsense about it.’’ Socrates suggests several times that the education of guardians is a form of animal training. The guardians are not students of philosophy but products of behavioral conditioning. ‘‘Philosophy’’ is defined as the kind of knowing by which dogs distinguish their friends or masters from their enemies. Through this socialization the guardians are relieved of any questions—any possible perplexes —about what is good or bad, just or unjust. They don’t have to waste time in the sort of discussion, debate, or inquiry in which Socrates has passed his life, and which is going on during the fictive time of the Republic.

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Cloaked by the ideology of kinship and sustained by a secretly monitored system of eugenic controls, the polis Socrates offers Critias is a Spartan caricature and Skinnerian fantasy. It betrays a little too clearly how much energy would have to be invested in the deviously repressive measures by which alone—according to the misanthropes who build such utopias out of their despair—one could protect oneself from the apprehensiveness generated by the suspicion that others must be as lawless as oneself au fond. By its own lights, this constitution is bound to fail, and in the eighth book of the Republic Socrates shows how it does fail. Critias isn’t told about that failure, but, as we’ll see, he enacts it. He willingly takes over the image of a polis that concentrates power and privilege exclusively in the military aristocracy. The institutions Socrates proposes are those that might have enabled the Thirty tyrants to delay the power outage that brought them down in so short a time. What Critias welcomes is a program not for the success, military or otherwise, of a polis but for the success of a faction, a program that would return power from the many to the few and from the new urban vulgar rich to the older kinship groups, the best people, who might well have blamed Solon for their troubles. He started the process that shifted a measure of the political franchise from natural superiors to hoi polloi, the many, who are, like Hobbes’s human nature, nasty, brutish and short. Solon’s reforms were prompted by economic and social problems that centered, as always, on the oppression of the poor by the rich. In 594, after the class struggle reached an impasse, Solon was chosen by agreement and given the job of reforming the constitution. He was himself a Eupatrid, that is, an aristocrat (Eupatrid means ‘‘well-fathered’’), and he wanted to limit, not destroy, aristocratic access to power. In any event, strong conservative inhibitions were placed on his reforms by the prestige of the old aristocratic council and of the strong kinship groups, known as phratries or brotherhoods, that ‘‘provided the basic social and military organization’’ of Athens at the time.4 He nevertheless succeeded in breaking the aristocratic monopoly on public office by changing the criteria of eligibility from tribal to territorial qualification, from family membership to membership in a census class or order.5 He established four orders determined by their income in kind from the land. These orders boiled

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down, in W. G. Forrest’s phrase, to ‘‘the rich, the comfortable, the ordinary, and the poor.’’ The higher posts were reserved for the higher orders; the lowest and poorest order could only attend the general assembly and sit in the appeal court to review unsatisfactory judicial decisions rendered by magistrates. But in the long run, because the assembly grew in importance, the power of the people, the de¯mos, increased. It didn’t, however, increase enough to guarantee anything like political unity. One reason for this was pointed out by Gregory Vlastos, who argued that the Athenian ideal called isonomia, the equal share of all citizens in the laws, had a Solonian catch built into it.6 Here’s a summary of Vlastos’ argument: When the Attic peasants rebelled against the Eupatrids in the sixth century, they asked for ‘‘redivision of land as well as redistribution of political rights and privileges.’’ Solon procured them ‘‘a share, though nothing like an equal share, of political power,’’ and ‘‘on the score of economic equality they got nothing at all’’ (352–53). Subsequently, the two demands became completely separated. ‘‘The demand for equality in the land was quickly dropped,’’ while ‘‘the demand for political equality . . . was progressively implemented by waves of farreaching reforms that swept away . . . all constitutional guarantees of political privilege for the upper classes’’ (353). Thus apprehensiveness and competitiveness intensified on both sides. On the one hand, ‘‘isonomia refused to countenance either the ancient monopoly of law in the hands of a hereditary aristocracy or the claims to political privilege of the new plutocracy whose social power came to rival that of the old nobility’’ (355). But, on the other hand, as Vlastos feelingly observes, ‘‘the man who, as citizen, shares the kingly dignity, the sovereign power, of the demos’’ through his participation in the assembly ‘‘may yet as a private individual labor under the indignity of utter destitution.’’ The consequences of this plight are ‘‘moral degradation, political corruption, and ceaseless class conflict’’ (ibid.). In the long run, Solon’s reforms facilitated a set of socioeconomic changes that loosened the texture of Athenian public life. Under the old aristocratic constitution, wealth consisted primarily of land, but aristocratic descent was the criterion of entitlement. Forrest remarks that, if the mastery of the leaders ‘‘was rooted in simple wealth,’’ this mastery ‘‘had been so sanctified and strengthened by generations of command . . .

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that it seemed to have been given by the gods.’’7 Solon’s graded census orders provided economic criteria that politicized nonaristocratic groups and made wealth a means to participation and power, removing it from the sole control of the Eupatrid families. The gradual shift of emphasis to movable wealth and economy produced two changes that completed the victory of urban over tribal constitution. First, the money economy encouraged new forms of individual enterprise, a new psychology of the self-made man, and more skeptical attitudes toward the traditional norms rooted in aristocratic ideology. Second, the criteria of success became less fixed, more external. Aristocrats were forced to see their political privileges become accessible to different social groups. They had to watch people who hadn’t had wealth before want more and more of it instead of knowing their place and staying in it. They had to put up with the encroachment of the huckster spirit, the ‘‘shifty and distrustful habits of soul’’ that the Athenian speaker in Plato’s Laws found to his distaste in the Phoenicians and Egyptians. They saw large groups of people with little or no status become much more important to the survival of the polis. In the anonymous conservative tract ascribed to someone called the Old Oligarch, the writer complains of the advantages over the nobles that the poor and the common people possess because ‘‘they row the ships that give the city its power.’’ The growing importance of mercantile and entrepreneurial activity compelled aristocrats to compete with upstarts and foreigners, and this they were reluctant to do. This is the state of affairs reflected in both the Republic and the Timaeus/Critias. The noisy character of the outer wall of Atlantis suggests Critias’s view of the Piraeus, the commercial port in Athens, and his mention of the 1,200 warships (119b) is a significantly democratic detail. The discussion in the Republic takes place in the home of one of those rich resident aliens, the Syracusan weapons maker Cephalus, and the contemporary perspective of the discussants is heavily stressed. They’re speaking in and of the Athens of the late fifth century—of the life, culture, and moral climate of a polis that’s progressive, commercial, and democratic, and that has fallen on hard times. Within this dramatic setting, Socrates’ account of the guardian polis ironically mimics a particular form of utopian misanthropy: that of the

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aristocrats and oligarchs, the reactionaries for whom democracy is merely oligarchy gone bad, undone by the moral failures and contentiousness of the oligarchs themselves. What they would like to restore is a military aristocracy on the Spartan model, like the one that, they assume, dominated Athens prior to Solon’s reforms. Socrates had imposed that regime on a prior city, which he described as decadent in its surrender to pleonexia (the desire to have more and more, the desire for unlimited gain). The urge to consume more food, pleasure, and property leads to war, and it’s for this reason that the guardian class is to be trained. In the purged city, the guardians are to avoid their past failures by having discipline and self-restraint programmed into them. Since aristocratic reactionaries contemn the decadent city partly because it appeals to their own pleonexia and arouses the desire that caused their downfall, they don’t trust themselves, and can’t see that any reform will succeed which is less drastic than the one Socrates proposes. Critias’s attempt to revive the ancient days and ways in his narrative is informed by this context, and the context may help us see that there’s more than nostalgic revival in his effort. It’s a symbolic re-enactment. The original occasion on which he heard the tale of Atlantis was called the Koureotis, or Children’s Day, because it ‘‘was the day on which children were inscribed on the register of the clan.’’8 In fact (as we saw in Chapter 6), this is what the Latin word ascribere, ‘‘to ascribe,’’ means: to enroll in a strong kinship group. Critias says he will bring the ancient Athenians created by Timaeus and trained by Socrates ‘‘before our tribunal and make them our fellow citizens.’’ Critias now speaks as an authoritative elder presiding over his own Children’s Day. But in this reenactment he isn’t merely continuing what has endured; he’s trying to restore what has been lost. The ambivalence in his account of Solon suggests how this is so. Old Critias implies that he wishes Solon had stuck to his poetry and kept out of politics. Solon, on the other hand, cut short a story whose content was an encomium to the old aristocracy, against which many of his reforms were directed. Had he continued to preoccupy himself with such poems and mythoi as this, two birds would have been killed by one stone: the old clans would have maintained their autocratic rule and they would have acquired another heroic legend to add to their ideology, another Iliad or Theogony to legitimize their power. The aristoi find it hard to

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come to grips with Solon because he is one of them and because, being a latter-day Homer, he has added new brilliance to the family name. For Critias to pick up what Solon laid aside is tantamount to selectively refashioning the ancient authority in Critias’s own image— bringing the ancestral poet and kinsman into the light, pushing the political reformer into the shadows. It is symbolically an act of counterreform, a reactionary effort to restore the image of pre-Solonic times and to revive at least in a verbal account the virtue, values, and political arrangements of the antediluvian cities whose images Solon found preserved in Egyptian records. ‘‘Once,’’ the priest tells Solon, ‘‘before the greatest of all destructions by water, what is now the city of the Athenians was the most valiant [ariste¯] in war and in all respects the best governed [eunomo¯tate¯] beyond comparison: her exploits and her government are said to have been the noblest [kallistai] under heaven of which report has come to our ears’’ (23c–d). The implied comparison is not only with other cities but also with contemporary Athens. Athens was once like Sparta but is no more. In the increasingly corrosive atmosphere of post-Periclean Athens, the ability to speak well became more important, even as the credibility of speech and speakers became more suspect. This is amply documented in Thucydides, in the careers of the sophists, and in Plato’s portrayal of such figures as Gorgias, Protagoras, Thrasymachus, Hippias, and Critias. Near the end of the Meno, Socrates concludes a specious argument by asserting that, since virtue is not teachable, and since it was not by wisdom that respected men of the past became successful politicians, it could only have been by eudoxia. Eudoxia is an interesting word because it can mean not only true or right opinion but also good reputation. As Jacob Klein observes in his commentary on the Meno, the term points ‘‘to the kind of ‘opinion’ generally opined to be ‘true’ or ‘right’, because those who hold or utter an opinion of that kind are themselves held in high esteem and said to be ‘true and good.’ ’’9 The charismatic criterion makes truth depend on the legitimacy of the source. Plato suggests that this was a real problem for Critias, and he shows him struggling hard to overcome it. Critias affirms the truth of his old story on the grounds that it is traditional—that it has been recorded and handed down by men who are

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‘‘held in high esteem and said to be ‘true and good.’ ’’ But the truth he affirms is also the truth of tradition: the burden of his story is that what is most true is ancestral virtue, the ancestral constitution, the ideology that authorizes the power of ancient clans. In Plato’s dialogues, the ancestors have the same status and function as the poets. They are subject to the logic of eudoxia, which is at best only half understood if it is viewed in terms of the dominance of the past over the present. ‘‘The good reputation of these men,’’ Klein observes, ‘‘is a matter of our opinion.’’ If the relation between past and present is one of reciprocity, it’s also one of complicity. The disenchanted view of this relation that I tease out of the dialogue goes something like this: Our opinion sustains the power and legitimacy of the voices of the past. We, the living, reach back and continually remodel the past to make it conform to our wishes and interests. But we can succeed in this only if we manage to neutralize, disclaim, forget our ideological labor. We can’t reduce the ancestors and poets to our servants or scapegoats unless we set them over ourselves as the gods who determine what’s right and good, who validate the very standards by which we validate their authority over us. The ancestor who supports the kinsman rests, like Anchises, on his shoulders, and the kinsman can support ancestral truth only by making it appear reliable enough to support him. Its objectivity depends on his performance, his ability not merely to persuade others but to be persuaded himself of his own reliability and trustworthiness, as well as those of his sources. In this dialectic between present and past, authority doesn’t exist apart from the succession of individuals who embody and interpret the tradition for each new generation. In the Timaeus and Critias, Plato persistently reactivates doubt in the truth of the story. Every time Critias tries to affirm its veracity, it becomes more doubtful—not least because his various efforts lead him into inconsistent reports about his own contribution. When Solon’s papers materialize midway through the Critias, what seems the surest evidence ironically triggers the greatest doubt. It gradually becomes clear that this whole tale may be a collective invention, the product of a tradition going back through Critias’s forebears to ancient Egyptian records. It isn’t the invention of Critias: I don’t believe the possibility of his lying about that is the issue (he may have lied about his difficult feat of memory). Rather,

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his nervous maneuvering seems motivated by the need to persuade his hearers of the objective truth of the family tradition. The apparent failure of the Athenian experiment at the end of the fifth century was a message to men like Critias that the time had come to replace face-to-face leadership with command systems that worked from behind the back. Plato’s Critias is pretty circumspect when he speaks of the training and regimen of the warrior elite. He minimizes the factor of self-discipline. He observes, in his dialogue, that war was among the common practices of men and women in the ancient Athenian polis. This implies some training, but he diminishes the force of the implication by noting at 110c that every species practices the arete¯ (virtue or excellence) which comes to it by nature. In general, while he accepts the account of the guardians’ training he received from Socrates, and thus takes its regimen for granted, he tends to de-emphasize it, shifting to the priestly tradition, which describes a more ascriptive method of forming humans. Critias’s own version of the source of Athenian virtue amplifies an explanation offered by the Egyptian priest at Timaeus 24c, and in turning to consider this passage, we may begin to see why Egypt and its priests are important to Critias. In a word, eternal Egypt offers Critias a repository of strong transcendence lacking in his own culture, the paradigm of a theocratic polity that has successfully naturalized and stabilized its hierarchic order by sacralizing bureaucracy and royalty. The priest patronizes Solon and the childlike Greeks because they have ‘‘no store of old belief based on long tradition, no knowledge hoary with age.’’ They have to start over again and again, whereas the priests have everything written down and preserved in their temples—or not everything, for the ancient priests were selective: by recording whatever was kalon, noble, or mega, great, or otherwise diaphoran, distinguished, superior, they preserved the heroic image of the old aristocrats and their wars along with reports of outstanding calamities (23a–b). The priest suggests to Solon that illustrations or samples of old Athenian nomoi are current in Egypt, but both his tone and his description suggest to us that Egyptian nomoi are the patterns or criteria in terms of which he perceives and evaluates the nomoi of others. Egyptian nomoi lasted; those of old Athens did not. For the priest, the ability to preserve or

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mummify the past is clearly the source of his pride, and of his friendly condescension to Solon. Like badly trained children, the Greeks reject the wisdom and the code of the ancestral tradition, continually change their nomoi, and modify their institutions. Solon might have smiled. The priest, however, asserts Egyptian superiority in a genial manner. He attributes the stability of good order to Egypt’s better climate and its more beneficent god, the Nile. He finds it easy to naturalize the cultural order, and his displacements of causal attribution to climate, gods, and blood are finely attuned to the needs of an aristocratic ideology. They have political implications in spite of themselves. In the passage at Timaeus 24c, the priest has just described the hegemony of the law—and therefore of its priestly interpreters—over divination, medicine, and the other branches of knowledge deriving from the ‘‘divine things’’ or ‘‘causes’’ (theion onton) connected with the cosmic order. His next statement is linked to this, and it becomes an example of the way the priests use their special relation to divine things to control interpretation: All this order and system the goddess had bestowed upon you earlier when she founded your society, choosing the place in which you were born because she saw that the well-tempered climate would bear a crop of men of high intelligence. Being a lover of war and wisdom, the goddess chose out the region that would bear men most closely resembling herself and there made her first settlement. And so you dwelt there with institutions surpassing all mankind in every excellence, as might be looked for in men born of gods and nurtured by them. Whether this is the product of naive belief or disingenuous myth making is not in question; in either case, it’s offered as a literal explanation well in accord with the Egyptian priesthood’s preference for the ideology of ascriptive determinism. It stands as an alternative to Socrates’ account of the guardians’ training, not as its metaphoric equivalent; it extends the Republic’s noble lie, the myth of autochthony, in such a way as to honey over the arduous aspects of military discipline and economic self-discipline.

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The Critias minimizes the Socratic and expands the priestly explanation. Critias says at 109c that the gods did not have to rule their human flocks by force, coercing the body like shepherds ‘‘who drive their flocks to pasture with blows.’’ Rather they ‘‘directed from the stern where the living creature is easiest to turn about, laying hold on the soul by persuasion, as by a rudder, . . . and thus they drove and steered all mankind.’’ In this manner Hephaestus and Athena ‘‘planted as native to the soil, men of virtue, and ordained to their mind the mode of government.’’ Note the image of persuasion, peitho, as a rudder. This is by no means persuasion as we normally understand it, the attempt to change minds in face-to-face discussion, often in the context of debates about the choice of ends. The persuasion of the divine helmsman is a mechanism, a form of cooptation, that renders this unnecessary. The god steers from the stern, from behind the back. The Egyptian logic of autochthony dominates Critias’s comparison between the past and present states of Athenian topography (110d–112e). We find the logic embedded in the rhetoric, where, under the topographic surface, Critias’s real values betray themselves. Let me quickly paraphrase the passage, touching down on the key words, before trying an interpretation. Critias says that the hypse¯los (lofty, proud) land of Athens was originally much larger and more productive. The arete¯ of its soil outdid that of all other places, supporting a stratopedon ‘‘exempt from all tasks of husbandry’’ (110e). The lofty crested hills (ge¯lophous [crest of hill, bird, helmet] hypse¯lous) were once full of lofty cultivated trees (hemera hypse¯la dendra), and when the land was akeraios (pure, unmixed), its soil was still rich (pieira). Because this soil was keramos, porous like potter’s clay, it provided a good receptacle for storing up the annual rains from Zeus. Shrines (hiera . . . se¯meia) still testify to the vanished fountains once supplied from this source. Through the husbandry of the gods men were planted like trees or molded like clay that had been prepared (inseminated) by Zeus, and this is how it came about that men were devout and hemeros by nature. Even the mortal husbandmen shared in this abundance of natural virtue: the land was adorned (diekekosme¯to) by true earthworkers, who did that and nothing else, and who were philokalo¯n kai euphuo¯n. A. E. Taylor’s translation, ‘‘lovers of all that is noble and men of admirable natural parts,’’ might be sharpened without straining the sense of the

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context: the husbandmen were ‘‘lovers of those who are noble and [they were] therefore good-natured,’’ that is, easy to command. The verbal underplot in Critias’s description brings out an attitude contrary to the one implied by his acceptance of Socrates’ relatively austere proposals for the ruling class. The elements of this attitude are stored in terms that by themselves need not connote it, but which kindle the connotation when they are rubbed together: ‘‘crested,’’ ‘‘lofty,’’ ‘‘rich,’’ ‘‘cultivated,’’ ‘‘pure,’’ ‘‘loving the noble’’; ge¯lophos, hypse¯los, pieira, hemera, akeraios, philokalo¯n. They suggest respect for more than good blood, military virtue, and political leadership. They also suggest the interest of proud and contentious aristocrats in wealth, fine things, and good living. Critias’s earlier remark about the limits of the rustic survivors reveals his own values: ‘‘legendary lore and inquiry into ancient things both visit cities in the train of leisure, when they see men already provided with the necessaries of life, and not before.’’ In the myth of old Attica, these necessaries were provided in the very beginning by the gods, the soil, and the hardworking, obedient subject classes. The phrase Taylor translates as ‘‘stored up in the layers of nonporous potter’s clay’’ vibrates with richer implications: te¯i keramidi stegouse¯i ge¯i diatamieuomene¯ (111d). The image briefly glancing off this phrase is that of a carefully protected treasury, perhaps a rich aristocrat’s tamieion (storehouse) covered over by a tiled roof. An economic and political process is implied: the wealth of divine virtue stored deep within the rich, pure soil until the god distributes it in neighboring springs and rivers. By the logic of autochthony a failure of ethos can be ascribed to and described as a failure of soil. The lysis (decline, loosening, slackening) or apollysis Critias depicts at 111a–d is the loosening of the rich soft soil, which disappeared like Atlantis into the deep, leaving only, ‘‘so to say, the skeleton of a body wasted by disease,’’ the ‘‘bare framework’’ of stony ground (phelleus). This bare soil no longer retains the divine water from Zeus. Today the land is reduced to a promontory ‘‘running out from the main body of the continent into the open sea’’: ‘‘running out’’ translates proteinousa, which also means ‘‘exposed,’’ as to danger. If we reverse the displacement of terms, we may see this as a figure of the fall of wealthy, proud, cultured, leisurely aristoi from the high places sustained by the gods. The disappearance of all but a precious remnant

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of these autochthones, the original topsoil of Attica, threatens the continuing health of the land. Critias could find some support for such a claim in Timaeus’s account of the functions of flesh and hair (74c–76d): they insulate the body against falls, shield it from heat, and protect it from cold. To carry out the first function, the craftsman made the flesh malake¯ (soft). What wasted the body of Athens, according to Critias, was the slipping away of the pieira kai malake¯ soil. These are positive terms in Critias’s perspective: fertile or wealthy, and soft or gentle. But they can also mean fat and effeminate, given to luxury. This is the underlying Platonic or Socratic view of the basic inconsistency in Critias’s viewpoint, for he is inwardly torn between the pull of a contentious, overbearing thymos (high spirit) and the pull of an epithymia (an appetite) disposed to soft living. To continue with Critias’s myth, his account of the acropolis and its original occupants reveals the same nostalgia, and the same lack of insight into his own values. The acropolis was once much larger and covered with soil, which was washed away ‘‘by one night of extraordinary floods in which an earthquake and the third terrible deluge before that of Deucalion fell together’’ (112a). On top of the ur-acropolis, which was level save for a few places (ple¯n oligo¯n), to machimon (the military) dwelt by itself around the temple of Athena and Hephaestus, surrounded in turn by a single enclosure that effectively made their buildings a single dwelling, watered by a single fountain providing ‘‘an abundant supply of water equally wholesome in winter and summer.’’ This concentric arrangement will be repeated, with significant variations, in the description of Atlantis. But it also has a precedent in the Timaeus: at 73d Timaeus describes the molding into a globe of ‘‘the ploughland, as it were, that was to contain the divine seed,’’ the sperm or marrow; this spherical brain was in turn protectively fenced in by a ‘‘stony enclosure’’ of bone around which the outer defenses of the flesh were placed. The starker and more inflexible virtues of stone and bone play a larger role in Timaeus’s physiology of the human frame and in the utopian morality of the guardians (being gifts of the gods in both cases) than they do in Critias’s topographic elegy. Critias says that the guardians made no use of gold or silver, aiming at a mean between hypere¯phania and aneleutheria. This is a statement worth

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pausing over because it tells us something about Critias’s own malake¯ perspective. The usual translations, ‘‘splendor (ostentation, etc.)’’ and ‘‘meanness’’ fail to do justice to these odd terms. The former, hypere¯phania, literally ‘‘over-appearance,’’ also denotes arrogance and contempt, while the meanness of aneleutheria may be that of stinginess or that of slavishness. Arrogance and slavishness seem to fall together as one set of opposing terms, conspicuous expenditure (over-appearance of wealth) and stinginess as another. The interesting thing about Critias’s observation on the use of wealth is the slight but significant shift of emphasis from Socrates’ statement that because of their training the guardians ‘‘were never to regard gold or silver or anything else as their private possessions’’ (18b). When Critias first adverted to that statement at 110c–d, it was part of his praise of the sufficiency produced for the guardians by the other classes; they didn’t need private property. Here he’s concerned more with the problems and strategies of self-display than with the fact of possession. Conspicuous expenditure and stinginess in fact presuppose some private control over possessions. Plato may have wanted to show Critias incapable of conceiving that temperance in the use of precious metals was more than skin-deep, or that some guardians would not hoard riches in a secret tamieion. Thus his statement stresses the self-consciousness and perhaps the difficulty of aiming at the mean. I have lingered over this passage because it contains in a nutshell the clue to Critias’s description of Atlantis, to which I shall turn in a moment. Suffice it to say that, while he sees restraint in the use of gold and silver as necessary for class unity, he also views it as something that is difficult, perhaps goes against the grain of nature, and needs more careful management than the other virtues bequeathed by the founding gods. It is therefore especially to be admired, and his admiration produces a nostalgic encomium: the guardians built themselves houses that expressed this difficult mean in being kosmios (moderate, decorous, well-ordered), and in these they and their children’s children grew old and handed them on in succession unaltered to others like themselves. . . . In this fashion, then, they dwelt, acting as guardians of their own citizens and as leaders, by their own consent, of the rest of the Greeks; and they watched

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carefully that their own numbers, of both men and women, who were neither too young nor too old to fight, should remain for all time as nearly as possible the same, namely, about 20,000. So it was that these men, being themselves of the character described and always justly administering in some such fashion both their own land and Hellas, were famous throughout all Europe and Asia both for their bodily beauty and for the perfection of their moral excellence, and were of all men then living the most renowned. (112d–e)10 This account of the Athenians ends with homage to the temperate, warcentered, common life without which their illustrious successes could not have been achieved. When Critias turns from Old Athens to Atlantis, it is as if in a spirit of release—release from the restraints imposed by the Athenian ideal. Communism, military regimen for the rulers, temperate diet, avoidance of precious metals, a technology limited to ‘‘handicrafts and tillage of the soil’’ (110c), kosmios dwellings that seem, according to Critias’s language, to have been built by the guardians themselves: all this goes out the window in Atlantis. The important thing to notice about Atlantis is not that ‘‘the seeds of disintegration’’ find a more favorable climate there— which is obvious—but that Critias can’t admire it enough. It is, after all, his fondness for Atlantic detail that makes his account roughly three times as long as the section on Athens. Eric Voegelin scolds Atlantis for incarnating ‘‘the order of wealth and power fraught with the temptations of greed and hybris,’’11 but he doesn’t scold Critias for loving it. Critias is dazzled by wealth ‘‘such as had never been amassed by any royal line before them and could not easily be matched by any after,’’ by the natural resources and advanced technology of the Atlantids, by the size and elaborate splendor of their buildings and statues, the profusion of gold, silver, and orichalch (bronze), the ingenuity of their monumental feats of engineering. Their penchant and cure for overeating are especially congenial, and touch him nearly—note the first person plural: ‘‘Then, as for cultivated fruits, the dry sort which is meant to be our food supply and those others we use as a solid nutriment—we call the various kinds pulse—as well as the woodland kind

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which gives us meat and drink and oil together, the fruit of trees that ministers to our pleasure and merriment and is so hard to preserve, and that we serve as welcome dessert to a jaded man to charm away his satiety—all these were produced by that sacred island . . . in marvelous beauty and inexhaustible profusion’’ (115a–b). Critias scarcely notes the inconsistency involved in praising two such diverse cultures. Until the final paragraph of the dialogue, the closest he comes to awareness is the brief, half-apologetic remark that there was something barbaric in the lavish aspect of Poseidon’s temple (116d). His one criticism of anything Atlantic merely reveals his aristocratic bias: ‘‘the large harbor and canal were constantly crowded by merchant vessels and their passengers arriving from all quarters, whose vast numbers occasioned incessant shouting, clamor, and uproar, day and night’’ (117e), but luckily the disorderly motions of metics (resident aliens) and hoi polloi are consigned to an area far from the royal center of the island. Having praised the Athenians for handing their modest houses down through the generations without change, he turns around to praise the Atlantids because each monarch, inheriting his palace from his father, ‘‘added beauties to its existing beauties, always doing his utmost to surpass his predecessor, until they had made the residence a marvel for the size and splendor of its buildings’’ (115c–d). Having praised the compact unity and commonalty in which the Athenian guardians protectively enclosed themselves, he turns around to admire the diffusion of wealth and luxury in Atlantis where ‘‘private persons’’ (mentioned three times, twice in the same breath as kings) are as eminent as royalty. He goes on to admire the differentiated arrangements in Atlantis: ‘‘several sets’’ of baths for kings, private persons, women, and animals; ‘‘numerous temples to different gods, and a variety of gardens and gymnasiums’’ (117b–c). And he can describe the despot’s need of three separate bodyguard contingents without indicating any sense of the irony implicit in his attention to trustworthiness: the main contingent was stationed on the outer ring; ‘‘a number of the more trusty were stationed in the smaller ring, nearer the citadel; to the most eminently trustworthy of all, quarters were assigned within the citadel about the persons of the kings’’ (117d).

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There’s a simple enough explanation for Critias’s ecumenical appreciation of both oriental luxury and Spartan simplicity, despotic monarchy and military aristocracy: both provide traditional antecedents that accentuate the legitimacy and hegemony of Eupatrids like himself. The scene he depicts in most vivid detail, the one that seems to invoke the most intense nostalgia in him, is the Homeric vignette of the ten Atlantic kings carrying out their ancestral ritual of judgment, which includes sacrificing and drinking the blood of sacred bulls. Critias would clearly prefer to live in Atlantis, and for all the reasons that promote political instability and guarantee the city’s ultimate defeat. His aristocratic longings tend more to the horse- and sea-god, the enemy of Athens who was the direct begetter of the Atlantic kings, than to Athena and Hephaestus, who have more to do with craftsmen. But he can’t deny that the Athenians were superior in war and conquest, that they were—as he aspires to be—the contest winner, famed all over the world for beautiful bodies and virtues of soul. In Atlantis, the hubristic size and splendor of public works, especially those in the divine and royal compound, may be taken to imply the imperial despot’s need or anxiety to flaunt his power: given the expansionist policies of the ten kings and the lurking competition among them, their architectural hypere¯phania suggests at least their awareness of problems of legitimacy. This contrast to the controlled austerity of the guardian life style suggests something else: while the order of old Athens is programmed into the souls of guardians, that of Atlantis is programmed into the land, locked into the external forms produced by engineering and architecture, so that the life of Atlantis is structured by its artificial topography, and its future inescapably bound up in it. The guardians in Socrates’ account are more self-sufficient, and since their psychic order is more independent of the land, they are theoretically capable of renewal regardless of what happens to the physical polis: But Atlantis, having to rely on the order imprinted in the physical world, is captivated and captured and finally destroyed by it. Thomas Rosenmeyer has acutely observed the catabolic dynamism of Critias’s Atlantic narrative: the initial impression ‘‘is one of miniature life’’ and brilliant artifice, with Poseidon’s concentric rings being ‘‘conceived on a minor scale.’’ But as he proceeds, ‘‘the rings seem to grow

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before our eyes until each ring, and each segment of a ring, is crowded with plains and mountains and walls and harbors, each of them in turn quickened with tumult and activity.’’12 Poseidon first created the rings to preserve the godlike isolation of the center and render it impassable to man (113d–e). But after we hear of his sons, of the immense natural wealth of the domain of Atlas, and its contribution to the groaning board, we are brought back to the rings to hear how the royal generations competing with each other rendered the central island passable to maritime commerce by building canals and bridges and subterranean wharves (115c–116c). In this fashion, the mortal sons reverse the pattern laid down by the divine father. What follows is the logical development of this hubristic aggrandizement: the account of their huge temples and statues, their gardens and gymnasia, race courses and crowded dockyards, and—as a natural consequence—the three contingents of bodyguards. The expansion continues in the next section, in which Critias returns to the physical environment to describe how the plain surrounding the rings was domesticated through ‘‘the long-continued exertions of a succession of kings,’’ further improving communication and trade with the outlying regions (118c–e). The negative import of this is obliquely pointed when Critias immediately appends the particulars of military organization and then concludes with his vignette of the ritual of judgment, in which the ceremonial cooperation of the kings appears to be a counterpressure applied against the background of continual expansion and competition. The self-destructive logic of Atlantis is thus inscribed in and enacted by the course of Critias’s narrative. Alternating three ‘‘rings’’ of topographic description with three that attend more to social, political, and economic technology, the tale dramatizes the close interaction between the ambitiousness of the kings and its externalization in the changing physical forms of the system. These forms both express and entrap Atlantean institutions, progressively exposing the rulers to their own embodied weaknesses, and to the ‘‘wholesale traffic and retail huckstering’’ that, by bringing in more wealth, breed ‘‘shifty and distrustful hablts of soul’’ (Laws 705a–b). Critias’s gravitation toward Atlantis continues in his concluding paragraph on the reasons for its failure. He begins by praising the Atlantids

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for their self-regulation and ethical control, stressing not what the gods do for them but how they behave toward themselves and the gods: ‘‘submissive to the laws and kindly disposed to their divine kindred. For the intents of their hearts were true and in all ways noble, and they showed gentleness joined with wisdom in dealing with the changes and chances of life and in their dealings with one another.’’ But as the long sentence continues it begins to sound like overexplanation, protesting too much: ‘‘Consequently they thought scorn of everything save virtue and lightly esteemed their rich possessions, bearing with ease the burden, as it were [oion achthos], of the vast volume of their gold and other goods; and thus their wealth did not make them drunk with pride [tryphe¯s, insolence or luxury] so that they lost control of themselves and went to ruin; rather, in their soberness of mind they clearly saw that all these good things are increased by general amity combined with virtue, whereas the eager pursuit and worship of these goods not only causes the goods themselves to diminish but makes virtue also to perish with them’’ (120e–121a, trans. Bury). The emphasis shifts from virtue for its own sake to virtue for the sake primarily of wealth, secondarily of virtue. I think we can locate the beginning of the shift at oion achthos, where Critias seems to be trying very hard to be ironic (‘‘as if gold could be a burden!’’), and if this is an acceptable reading it indicates that he is identifying a particular ethical viewpoint: ‘‘there are those who think the possession of so much gold must be a burden and temptation, bringing on pride and the inevitable fall.’’ The crude irony is directed toward the guardian ethic, and the tone must therefore be defensive. I imagine Critias to be pointing these remarks toward Socrates in an effort to ward off the obvious moral of the story with a fairly limp rationalization: ‘‘See, regardless of the fact that they violated the guardian code by amassing great heaps of wealth and other goods, they did not get drunk with pride, did not lose control of themselves, did not go to ruin. So it must be possible to acquire private property and keep your virtue if only you proceed coolly, with sprezzatura, and refrain from coveting your neighbor’s wealth, and be sure to stay sober.’’ In spite of his justifying purpose, Critias’s words increasingly betray his sense of the difficulty of sustaining that high position, of remaining attentive to the nomoi and friendly minded toward one’s divine

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kin (120e). Without continued divine support, it would require heroic effort to keep one’s place as king of Guardian Hill in Atlantis, especially since Atlantis was built low on a plain and not on an acropolis. Because Atlantis did in fact fall, and Critias is unwilling to blame it on ethical failure in the face of the temptations of wealth, he needs a prophasis (pretext) that will attribute the ruin to transcendent rather than ethical causes. The tradition he follows accommodates him: As a result, then, of such reasoning [logismou, calculation] and of the continuance of their divine nature all their wealth had grown to such a greatness as we previously described. But when the portion of divinity within them was now becoming faint and weak through being ofttimes blended with a large measure of mortality, whereas the human temper [anthro¯pinon ¯ethos] was becoming dominant, then at length they lost their comeliness [e¯sche¯monoun], through being unable to bear the burden of their possessions, and became ugly to look upon, in the eyes of him who has the gift of sight; for they had lost the fairest of their goods from the most precious of their parts [ta kallista apo to¯n timio¯tato¯n apollyntes]; but in the eyes of those who have no gift of perceiving what is the truly happy life, it was then above all that they appeared to be superlatively fair and blessed, filled as they were with lawless ambition and power [pleonexias adikou kai dynameo¯s]. And Zeus, the God of gods, who reigns by Law, inasmuch as he has the gift of perceiving such things, marked how this righteous race [genos epieikes]was in evil plight, and desired to inflict punishment upon them, to the end that when chastised they might strike a truer note [emmelesteroi so¯phronisthentes]. Wherefore he assembled together all the gods into that abode which they honor most, standing as it does in the center of the Universe, and beholding all things that partake of generation; and when he had assembled them, he spake thus. (121a–c, trans. Bury) The explanation of the fall is studiedly vague, but not so vague as to avoid seeming evasive. What is Critias really saying? Or what is he not saying? More specifically, if the notion of the fading god-part is not wholly literal, what is its figurative import? And to whom does the lawless life of pleonexia and dynamis seem fair and blessed? By the time he comes to the kallista (fairest things) that the Atlantids lost, the range of

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reference has become fairly inclusive: the lost god-part, the lost sche¯ma, the loss of power over self and goods to which Critias earlier attributed the loss of goods as well as arete¯. Sche¯ma is a key word in the Timaeus and Critias: in the former, it is the shape imposed by the craftsman gods on the disorderly preexisting stuff of chaos. In the latter, to lose sche¯ma is to lose the god-given form—’’the portion of divinity with them.’’ The process operates on the simple principle that since the god was involved only in the founding of the lineage, every succeeding mortal generation diminishes the percentage of divinity. Being unable to transmit or give birth to an undiminished portion of godhead, they are unable to transmit or give birth to an undiminished portion of goods. Hence, losing the divine sche¯ma, they lose face and bearing; in the eyes of those who could see truly, they made a bad appearance because now the voracious Atlantids filled the void left by their vanishing goods and godhead with lawless ambition and power. Since power, privilege, and property were no longer theirs by nature they had to be acquired by conspicuous displays of force which, having lost legitimacy, appeared ugly and lawless. According to the logic of the passage, the Atlantids may well have retained their logismos—the human power enabling them to calculate the practical advantage of arete¯—but it was no longer effective when they lost the divine sche¯ma that covered and legitimized this element of mortal ethos. If the drift of this interpretation is not clear by now, I need only add that for Critias the Atlantids are turning into fifth-century Greeks. All the contemporary allusions commentators have found in the Critias come into play: the Persian lysis (decline) described in Laws III; the socio-economic consequences of Periclean imperialism and of the public works program that justified and depended on it; the implied analogy between the Piraeus and the Atlantean harbor. They suggest a context for the pompously moralizing tone with which Critias distinguishes those who see truly from those who do not. A sensible answer to the question I asked earlier can only be given in terms of contemporary affairs: to whom does the lawless life seem fair and blessed? To those who profit from the decline of the Eupatrids and who have come to share with them membership in the new Athenian upper classes, for example, Aristophanes’

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knights, ‘‘now becoming faint and weak through being ofttimes blended with a large share’’ of middle-class morality. I am not sure whether Critias is speaking primarily of men like himself or of men like Cleon when he laments the loss of sche¯ma that brings on pleonexia and dynamis: if the former, he may be describing the plight of fallen Eupatrids who have to resort so openly to unsavory tactics because their justifying ideology is no longer effective and their control of ta paronta (the present circumstances) consequently weakened; if the latter, he may be referring to the aischrokakos style of demagogues and business men who have displaced the older aristocrats in access to power and wealth, and brought on a corresponding decline in the aesthetic tone, the sche¯ma, of public life. Choosing between these alternatives is not essential, however, since both work together to produce the contemporary dilemma of Eupatrids, and both may be traced to the cultural and political failure of the myths of divine birth and autochthony, a failure whose origin could be traced back as far as Solon’s reforms. It is not absolutely certain that the nameless god whose nature the Atlantids inherit is Poseidon, though that would be the natural assumption: the ancient enemy of Athens and Athena has found a good pretext—punishing and correcting his wayward descendants—to mount hostilities against the best of men. If it is Poseidon, his act soon receives the qualified sanction of the ruler god, who appears in the closing lines invested in Homeric fashion with all his credentials: theos . . . ho theo¯n Zeus en nomois Basileuo¯n (121b). Zeus had the ability to see these things from above—dynamenos kathorain, looking down from the magisterial heights of divine power—and in his nous he considered how wretchedly this reasonable or moderate people had been treated: ennoe¯sas genos epieikes athlio¯s diatithemenon. Critias is appealing from Poseidon to Zeus in the hope that the ruler of gods will undo the misery caused by the loss of divine sche¯ma. The appeal to Zeus ex machina presumes that humans cannot undo by themselves what the god has done to them. And the judgment of Zeus makes no sense in its mythic context, since it failed: the Atlantids were conquered and destroyed. But it does make sense if Critias is thinking beyond Atlantis to such latter-day Atlantids as himself: ‘‘Let the gods punish us for our own good, impose a test, try us in war, pit us against

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our enemies, and restore to us the temperance and power of the guardians of old.’’ The end of the Critias is thus in effect the beginning of a new Iliad or Odyssey—a Critiad. The final word, eipen, cries out for a speech, invites the reader to continue the dialogue by imagining or finding the god-speech that most placates his own interpretation. Critias might have found Zeus’s second speech in the Odyssey consoling, and he would at least have found his old friends Atlas and Poseidon in its vicinity. After Athena complains that her prote´ge´ has been ‘‘suffering griefs’’ in the arms of the ‘‘daughter of malignant Atlas,’’ Zeus assures her that Poseidon (currently on earth being feasted by the widely dispersed Ethiopians) will eventually stop persecuting the hero, whom the other gods will help restore to his rightful power and heritage. Had Critias stumbled on the opening words of Zeus’s first speech in the Odyssey, he might have suffered a failure of voice. The words make perfect sense as a concluding epigraph to the dialogue, but hardly the particular kind of sense Critias is looking for: ‘‘Oh for shame, how the mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, but it is they, rather, who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given.’’13 The god would bite the hand that feeds him, since why else do gods exist but to receive the blame for, and to validate, the evils that men do? These lines are my candidate for the continuation, or possibly the conclusion of the dialogue because they comment so pertinently on the motive behind mythic speech, and on the depoliticizing, de-ethicizing function that becomes more evident when Critias sees his own embattled genos in Atlantean embodiments: his speech gives way to silence as it is on the verge of being re-politicized. It makes little difference, incidentally, whether we assume that the Critias was intentionally or unintentionally terminated at this point. For even if Plato left it incomplete, what we have makes sense as it stands, when considered in relation to the speaker. We learned early in the Timaeus that Solon had laid aside the tale before finishing it, and I suggested that Old Critias connected this to interruption by political activity. Solon clearly got farther in his version than Critias does here, and it is not

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gratuitous that his account encompasses the destruction of the two ancient cities: it points a useful moral for the reformer whose legislation loosened the tight bond of wealth to blood and diluted the traditional ruling class’s monopoly of political power by widening the qualification for holding office in a manner that shifted the criterion of entitlement from ascription (birth) to achievement (landed wealth). By his encouragement of the growth of industry and trade to provide the urban poor with employment, Solon set off changes in economic structure that enabled new men to infiltrate the upper class. It may be just as significant that Critias, while anticipating the failure of the Eupatrids of Atlantis and giving his own weighted explanation of it, stops before being forced to go into the details. I conclude this reading of the Critias with an attempt to set the dialogue in a Platonic perspective. Let me first recall the implied hierarchy of the Egyptians, based on the criterion of staying power. The old priest boasts that old Egypt has been preserved from destruction by the Nile, has the oldest civilization and traditions on record, and still possesses institutions going back to the time of old Athens. This ranks Egypt ahead of her Athenian war friends, who repeatedly lost their civilization and had to ‘‘start again like children, knowing nothing of what existed in ancient times’’ (23b). Their mutual enemy, Atlantis, ranks last, having gone down all at once, once and for all. Critias shares these values. He has few good words for the illiterate mountain men (oreion), who were for many generations in aporia de to¯n anankaio¯n (want of necessities, 109d–e). His account of the fall of Attica from its topographic paradise suggests an equation between these survivors and the phelleus, the stony ground remaining after the fat, rich, noble topsoil had been washed away by cataclysms. And his emphasis falls more squarely than the priest’s on the degeneration from past to present: though what is now left of the land ‘‘is a match for any soil in the world’’ in quality, the remnant is small and the bones show through the wasted flesh. Critias’s view of the survivors excludes an alternative of which we are reminded by the two references to Deucalion—his own at 112a, and Solon’s reference to ‘‘the story of how Deucalion and Pyrrha survived the deluge’’ and ‘‘the pedigree of their descendants’’ (Timaeus 22a–b). The

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myth of Deucalion centers less on survivors of the past than on forerunners of the future, less on the phelleus as a wasted skeleton than on the bones of Mother Earth as potential spartoi, less on the fertility of rich topsoil than on the enduring support of skeletal structure. In one of his rare undistorted Platonisms, the Athenian stranger, the chief speaker of the Laws, acknowledges the positive value of the loss that precedes and stimulates recovery: when the cities are destroyed by deluge, all tools are lost and ‘‘any discoveries of value due to the science of statesmen or other specialists vanish. . . . For . . . if such inventions could persist permanently in their present excellence, how could there ever be a new discovery of anything?’’ (677c). Critias is not one to appreciate the functional importance of aporia, with its connections to philosophic eros and to the Socratic belief that ‘‘all that is beautiful is difficult.’’ What he admires is the ease with which Poseidon initially adorned the central island of Atlantis and bestowed the inexhaustible gifts of the soil on his sons who, instant technicians, employed them ‘‘to construct and beautify their temples, royal residences, harbors, docks, and domain in general.’’ In Platonic perspective, the ‘‘forever’’ of Egypt and the ‘‘never again’’ of Atlantis merge in reciprocal relation: the dread of ‘‘never again’’ motivates the desire of ‘‘forever.’’ Both yield precedence to the never-ending, always inconclusive cycles of loss and recovery traced by individual and collective careers through ever-changing configurations toward the future. Allegorically, to drive everything Atlantis stands for into the embodiment that is the city called ‘‘Atlantis,’’ to locate and destroy it at the beginning of time, may itself be an Egyptian kind of wish fulfillment: the dialogue underlines this by its allusions to Atlantean elements in Persia, Egypt, Athens, Syracuse, and—by implication—in humans generally, wherever or whenever they exist. Egypt enshrined in the ale¯theia of old legend the Athenian conquest of a nation that fell because its mortal kings did not or could not guide their divine father’s chariot along their father’s course. The echo of the myth of Phaethon resonates briefly in the temple of Poseidon when Critias mentions the oversized ‘‘golden statues of the god standing in a chariot drawn by six winged horses, and on such a scale that his head touched the roof ’’ (116e). But in the conquest of Egypt by the despot Cambyses, of Persia by Athens, of Athens by Sparta, of the Eupatrids by the Solo-

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nian democracy, and of the Thirty by themselves, the Atlantean pattern is repeated. The end of the visible Atlantis is the beginning of a career of less visible Atlantean tendencies—images of the paradigm, the many born of the dissolution of the one—diffused throughout history and rendering quixotic any vision of ultimate recovery just as it brings out the pessimism or misanthropy of any vision of inexorable decline. If there ever was an Atlantis, it is reborn and revised in the new interpretation these Platonic dialogues give it. Its original character is lost, drowned in reinterpretations. Its career lies open to retrospective appropriations, from the survivors to the Egyptians to Solon to old Critias to Critias, and from Plato to all of us who have appropriated the legend anew. But Plato suggests that it is more likely there never was an Atlantis. This is, of course, the paramount revision and appropriation: he simultaneously depicts and foils the efforts of his characters to give it reality. Being an old legend, a putative cultural myth, it is nothing like a dream. Yet this flickering half-existence has some points in common with dream. Freud described dream as projection, ‘‘an externalization of an internal process,’’ and Sartre criticized this notion because dream is, if anything, a failed projection: it never quite succeeds in validating its independent and external existence: ‘‘what constitutes the nature of the dream is that reality eludes altogether the consciousness that desires to recapture it; all the effort of consciousness turns in spite of itself to produce the imaginary.’’ It remains a story, ‘‘a ‘spell-binding’ fiction’’ from which the sleeper awakes and which he cannot—even when dreaming—take for reality. The dream ‘‘is the odyssey of a consciousness dedicated by itself, and in spite of itself, to build only an unreal world.’’14 If dream is a failed projection, old legends and myths are—when culturally validated—successful ones. Plato creates the fiction of a successfully de-politicized and naturalized myth. By making us aware of its fictiveness, he takes away with one hand the historicity he gave with the other. And as a dreamer is more real than his dream, Critias becomes more real to us as a character when we see that the old legend has become his, and that he is finally unable to keep from destroying its innocently allotrios (alien or alienated) nature as ancient history. His interest combined with his lack of control enables the story of Atlantis to be reembodied as the expression of his own desires. But not Critias alone.

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Because the myth of Atlantis fails to attain the status of fact and nature after which it aspires, it hovers and oscillates incessantly between historical embodiment and disappearance, and so it teases forth ever-new efforts to grasp it and pin it down, of which mine is only the latest and hardly the last.

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part five

Conclusion: Situating Interpretation

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thirteen

Making Interpretation Manageable: An Eight-Step Program

I’ve been in this racket long enough to wonder whether and how anyone can make sense of the bewildering changes that seem continually to have destabilized and reorganized critical practices since I started teaching in 1949. Does any discernible coherence or continuity underlie all the changes from, say, New Criticism to cultural studies? What keeps us together as an interpretive community? I started thinking about this some years ago, because I consider myself a reconstructed old New Critic, and though I continue to change with the changes, I still think that however much the boundaries of disciplines alter, what I do, what I’m supposed to do, what I was put on this earth to do, is close reading. But when I look around at the contemporary landscape or climate of literary studies, especially in my field, which is mainly early modern, I see some but not enough close reading going on. Nowadays a lot of people talk too much about theory. And in a kind of guilty liberal atonement for the ahistorical sins of the old New Criticism, a lot more go in big for history. Relatively speaking, there’s too much history, too much context, too many anecdotes, and not enough about 493

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how to deal with all this stuff. When we talk with our students or among ourselves as critics, I think we need to be more up front about how to do it. In order to practice or teach the kind of reading that will enable us to interpret any kind of text, including theoretical and historical texts—and not only verbal texts but also texts in different media—we have to keep in constant touch with something that, for lack of a better name, I’ll call interpretive method. That’s a slightly fancy way to talk about an always changing, loosely organized set of moves that inform any critic’s reading practice. In these pages I’m going to run (or maybe walk) through a series of eight moves that I’ve found useful not only in sharpening the practice of close reading but also in contextualizing it as a skill essential to cultural and political analysis. Though the selection of moves I’ll discuss is arbitrary, the list has some theoretical and ideological commitments built into it. Many of the passages that follow have been lifted (and in some cases revised) from books and essays I’ve previously written. A few are repeated from earlier chapters of the present book in order to set them in a more general context of methodological reflections.

Move 1: Pledging Allegiance to Interpretation The first and most important move every young citizen of the interpretive community should make is to perform the pledge of allegiance to interpretation, and I don’t think it’s a bad idea for students to learn a little piety along with the move. So I urge all teachers everywhere to insist that their students begin every class by murmuring in unison, and with expression, dutifully and even prayerfully, the two parts of the primal invocation that will prepare all American children to question both church and state: 1. Let there be at least one unacceptable interpretation of any text. 2. Let there be at least two acceptable interpretations of any text. This little pair of exhortations seems innocuous, but taken together and perused more closely they open up a space between dogmatism and indeterminacy; they establish textual boundaries that can be policed. More important, they establish a contestatory field within which what

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counts as truth, or as knowledge, or as fact, emerges only through a process of textual perusal and interpretive negotiation. These are fine words, but they don’t mean a thing unless we can agree on the way we use terms like peruse and text, about which more below.

Move 2: The Fallacy of Premature Evaluation This is a tendency to criticize or judge when you ought to interpret. You say, for example, that the experience represented by this or that poem or play doesn’t work, doesn’t hang together, therefore the representation doesn’t work, and you give it low grades on aesthetic or other grounds. You say Homer nodded, Shakespeare napped, and Spenser snored. That may or may not be the case, but it isn’t interesting, and it might be trivial. The real question is whether this adverse judgment was or is anticipated by the text you’re criticizing. Take Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Spenser’s Bower of Bliss (in The Faerie Queene, Book II, canto xii). It’s been easy for cultural critics to jump to the conclusion that they’re ideologically wicked because they’re ‘‘imbricated within the discourse of colonialism’’ and lend aid and comfort to ‘‘a repellent moral ideology.’’ But this judgment closes down too quickly and easily on an alternative that a slower, more attentive perusal suggests: the possibility that the texts of The Tempest and the Bower criticize what the critic criticizes—that they not only preemptively perform a moral critique of the repellent ideology, but also parody the moral condescension of their critics. So the critics have been scooped, and they stand in danger of resembling the Tempest’s Prospero or the uptight protagonist of Spenser’s poem more than they would like.1

Move 3: Meditation on the Word Peruse Though its etymological connection with the act of reading is obscure, from the fifteenth century on the verb to peruse has carried such meanings as ‘‘to scrutinize, inspect, consider in detail; to go over again, revise; to read thoroughly, carefully, critically; to study or examine closely.’’ The teacher’s basic exhortation to the student is ‘‘always peruse.’’ Perusing names the activity of New Critics and armchair Shakespeareans who pore painstakingly, or painfully, over what they call ‘‘the text,’’ and who pause

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or dawdle over what Joel Fineman calls ‘‘the languageness of language.’’ Given this history, it’s strange to find that in current colloquial speech people use the word in exactly the opposite way. They say ‘‘peruse’’ when they mean ‘‘to glance over, or skim,’’ which makes the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary (3rd edition) miserable. As an example of misuse, the panel cites the following statement: ‘‘I only had a moment to peruse the manual quickly.’’ This is the student’s brilliantly lame response to the teacher’s exhortation, and it’s calculated to drive Poor Teacher up the wall. Nevertheless, I have a use for this misuse. My objective is to show that the conflict between these two opposed senses of ‘‘peruse’’ lies at the root of a central conflict that divides the interpretive community: the conflict between documentary and textual representation (discussed at length in Chapter 1).

Move 4: The Three Fictions of Reading You can imagine yourself reading as if listening to a speech, debate, conversation, or story; you can imagine yourself reading as if visualizing a picture, play, film, or sequence of events (as in a historical narrative); and you can imagine yourself reading as if perusing—that is, producing and constructing—a text. I call these fictions of reading because reading is always reading-as-if, which is only to repeat the tired and politically correct (but still correct) opinion that reading is a socially constructed practice, like the writing that reproduces and represents it. The two fictions of reading-as-if-listening and reading-as-if-visualizing are in cahoots, while reading-as-if-perusing (or as-if-textualizing) produces a critical representation of that complicity. The first two aspire to the condition of music and picture, and they solicit a relatively more receptive and obedient (in that respect more innocent) practice of reading, while the third encourages a counter-practice that finds the pretense of innocent reading disingenuous and ideologically suspect. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that the word obedience comes from Latin obaudire, which means ‘‘to listen from below’’; unfortunately, ‘‘suspicion’’ comes from suspicere, which means ‘‘to look from below,’’ so I’m not sure I can make these terms work the way I want them to. Nevertheless, I like the correlation of obedience with oral discourse because, as we know, bodies—or the presences they signify—have differential access to the power of

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speech depending on their apparent gender, age, and color, and on their generational and genealogical markings or positions. When you redirect attention from poetry to drama the structural division changes to one based on the distinction between reading play texts and seeing them performed: the division here is between reading-as-iftextualizing and reading-as-if-playgoing (which involves fictions of audition and spectatorship). Serious adjustments of response are called for when language passes from the speech prefix (the character’s name) in the script to the actor playing the character. The textualizing activity is expected to yield pride of place to the activity of imagining and/or witnessing a performance; the textuality of the play’s language becomes incorporated in and mediated through the presentational conventions of theater. These are the conventions that govern relations between actors and characters, actors and actors, characters and characters, actors and their audiences, characters and their audiences. Reading-as-if-textualizing neverthless remains important in the interpretation of stage plays, because the lexical, syntactical, rhetorical, and semantic features of language characterize the play’s speakers. Shakespearean characterization is complex because it fully exploits the two levels I mentioned above when I distinguished what speakers do with their language from what their language does on its own. Let’s call these two levels interlocutory and intralocutory, respectively. The former consists in what speakers mean to say or do with their language as they speak to each other and to themselves. The latter consists in what goes on within speech rather than between speakers. Intralocutory information about major speakers is often packed into ambiguous utterances. Consider, for example, Cordelia’s ‘‘for thee, oppressed king, I am cast down,’’ which slides from the pity of ‘‘I grieve for you’’ through the clear-eyed acknowledgment of a difficult choice, ‘‘I have sacrificed my safety on your behalf,’’ to the sharper, angrier edge of ‘‘it’s because of you that I’ve been disempowered and imprisoned.’’ Consider Portia’s ‘‘I stand for sacrifice,’’ which slides from ‘‘I stand here as a sacrificial victim’’ through ‘‘I represent sacrifice, I stand for the principle of self-giving,’’ to ‘‘I advocate sacrifice and demand it from you: I expect you to give and hazard all you have.’’

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Consider Banquo’s advice to his fellow thanes after they have been roused from their beds by Duncan’s murder. This is how he tells them to get dressed: ‘‘when we have our naked frailties hid, / That suffer in exposure,’’ let’s meet in the hall. The whole of Macbeth is about hiding naked frailties, and among those Banquo hides is his motivated failure to tell Duncan about the witches’ prophecy, thus insuring Duncan’s ignorance of and vulnerability to the murder plot. Finally, turning to Part Two of Henry IV, consider the last line of the soliloquy in 3.1 in which King Henry complains of insomnia: ‘‘uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.’’ Throughout this long soliloquy, the guilt-ridden king tries to sedate his conscience by blaming his insomnia on the cares of state and by representing himself as the victim of his office, the unappreciated donor who gives his subjects all and sacrifices his peace of mind for theirs. But when you slow down his speech and peruse it, its text conveys the uneasiness of a speaker who can’t escape the suspicion that he’s lying to himself; what he’s trying not to say or hear is, ‘‘uneasy lies the head that stole the crown.’’ This is what I mean by intralocutory characterization. It’s the level at which Shakespearean language suggests the motives, desires, and anxieties speakers hide from others, those they try to hide from themselves, and also, those that hide from them.

Move 5: The Principle of Performative Duplicity and the Uses of Malapropism The word perform has two major senses: (1) displaying, playing, or acting before an audience; and (2) doing, executing, carrying through an action. The second sense has been appropriated by speech act theorists, who analyze the performativity of language: what it does and how it acts, more or less on its own, apart from the uses to which speakers put it in their rhetorical performances. The relation of the first sense to the second, of theatrical or rhetorical performance to linguistic performativity, becomes charged when we realize that they denote opposed functions in language use. When language users perform—when they represent themselves, stage themselves, listen to themselves, give themselves to be seen and heard—

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they may remain enclosed within their projects of self-representation or persuasion, attentive to what they do with their language, what they mean by it, what they hear in it, and what they think others hear in it. But while they use their language to say one thing, it uses them to say another, and they can’t—and may not want to—monitor all the textual forces active in it, all the things the language says and does regardless of what they say, do, mean, and hear during their acts of verbal performance. So the two senses of performativity tend to part ways. The theatrical performativity of verbal self-representation encloses speakers in whatever alienating identities they desire or imagine themselves to possess. Therefore the linguistic performativity of their speech acts escapes them, or, to put it more pointedly, is escaped by them. Such performative duplicity gets parodied in the misuse of language called malapropism and named after Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals, who is given such lines as ‘‘He is the very pineapple of politeness.’’2 You commit a malapropism when you mean to say one thing but unintentionally say another that has a different, and possibly a contradictory, sense. Malapropism is often used as a signifier of class consciousness; it betrays the desire of speakers to imitate their betters. The example from Sheridan’s play is just funny, but Shakespeare had earlier shown how malapropism could be a trope, not merely a gaffe. He used it as a form of unintentional (or structural) irony. That is, he made speakers who are usually minor characters misuse words in a manner that not only characterizes them but also serves to critique the values, the ideology, and the discourses of the community that speaks through its speakers. In Much Ado about Nothing 3.3, for example, Dogberry, the Constable of the Watch in Messina, begins his address to his men with ‘‘Are you good men and true?’’ His associate, Verges, answers, ‘‘Yea, or else it were pity but they should suffer salvation, body and soul.’’ To which Dogberry replies, ‘‘Nay, that were a punishment too good for them if they should have any allegiance in them.’’ As it turns out, it is by meaning and trying to be good men that the watchmen both enable thievery and legitimize their complicity in it. Dogberry tells them that ‘‘the most peaceable way’’ to keep order is not to interfere with those who disturb the peace. Ac-

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cording to him, the ideal watchman is ‘‘desartless’’ (he means ‘‘deserving’’) and ‘‘senseless,’’ one who can ‘‘comprehend all vagrom men’’ but can talk himself into releasing them on the grounds that ‘‘they are not the men you took them for.’’ This standard makes the malapropism ‘‘desartless’’ an accurate term: it fuses ‘‘lacking merit’’ (desert-less) with disingenuous (dis-artless), and it makes ‘‘senseless’’ mean self-blinding. The comic paradox that informs Dogberry’s instructions for maintaining self-respect is that by refusing to associate with thieves or apprehend them, the watchman becomes their accomplice. He confirms his illusion of honesty and joins the community of thieves at the same time. Thus it seems unavoidable that Shakespeare’s so-called ‘‘good’’ characters should merit salvation and damnation simultaneously. To suffer salvation, to be condemned to redemption, is to suffer the self-deception that Erasmus (in The Praise of Folly) calls philautia, or self-love. The watchman is indeed superior to the known thief in his ability to hide his thievery from himself, to rob himself of knowledge, by redistributing complicities. In that respect he ‘‘comprehends’’—includes, represents—‘‘all vagrom men.’’ He stands for what he calls ‘‘our whole dissembly’’ of the play’s sexist aristocracy; his malapropisms caricature the way they all speak more and other than they know, the way their language speaking through them betrays their efforts to disown knowledge of their complicity. In act 4, when the accomplices of the villain have been duly ‘‘comprehended,’’ Dogberry says, ‘‘let them be opinioned.’’ If you translate the pun and generalize it, it says, ‘‘let them be pinioned by their opinion.’’ The opinion that shackles them is what he had earlier called ‘‘the deformed thief,’’ Fashion. In Much Ado, fashion—as one critic puts it— ‘‘signifies the conception of one’s self which one presents or wishes to present, to the public eye,’’ but also (I add) to oneself, since it is the characters’ slavery to fashion that steals from them ‘‘their knowledge of themselves.’’3 The malapropisms of Dogberry and Verges thus throw a penetrating beam of light that illuminates the discourse of bad faith by which the community of the play, Shakespeare’s imaginary Messina, is dominated. This reflects and reinforces their role in the narrative: they ultimately do their job in spite of themselves when they stumble on and ‘‘comprehend’’ the play’s true villains. As Jean Howard puts it, there’s ‘‘something im-

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probable about their rescue of Messina from illusion’’ because ‘‘these lower-class figures conveniently solve society’s problems without ever threatening its central values or power relations.’’ In Howard’s view, they ‘‘perform a sentimental utopian function,’’ which is ‘‘to escape the world of deception,’’ the same function as that performed by the happy ending for which they are largely responsible.4 The ‘‘central value’’ of ‘‘[self-] deception’’ nevertheless discloses its power and inescapability by sneaking into their malapropisms.

Move 6: Self-representation and Narcissism Down with self-fashioning! Up with self-representation and -performance! Why? Why should there be a moratorium on the use of the phrase ‘‘self-fashioning’’ and the concept(s) it denotes? For this reason: it has a flaw built into it that not even Stephen Greenblatt has been able to avoid. Consider the difference between these two statements: ‘‘Shakespeare fashioned himself ’’; ‘‘Shakespeare fashioned his self.’’ In the first, the reflexive term (‘‘himself ’’) circles back and disappears into the subject of the sentence; in the second, ‘‘his self,’’ the noun phrase that is the object of ‘‘fashioned,’’ splits off from the subject and moves forward in search of the reification promised by the verb. The first implies no claims about the separate existence of an object called ‘‘the self.’’ But in the second, reification doubles your trouble: two referents instead of one have to be considered, not to mention the relation between them. An ontic rather than reflexive signifier, ‘‘[the] self ’’ denotes an independent entity and thus carries theoretical commitments that are lacking—or at most implicit—in the first locution. By definition, self-fashioning is something you do to yourself and with yourself, and, if you’re lucky, for yourself, but not necessarily something you show about yourself. By definition, self-representation is something you show about yourself and something you do with yourself but not something you do to or for yourself; this may happen, but it’s contingent to the definition. Since any proposition about self-fashioning is based on the interpretation of a representation of self-fashioning, we should be skeptical of everything except our interpretation. If self-fashioning isn’t represented, how do you know it’s going on? If it is represented, how do you

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know it’s really going on? If people represent themselves as fashioning themselves, does it look like they’re representing it to themselves as well as to you? I don’t think it’s useful to talk about self-fashioning except as a mode of self-representation, which in turn is a mode of representation. Remember what Descartes said, or at least what the text of his discourse says, ‘‘I represent myself to myself, therefore I am.’’ So I now declare a moratorium on talk about self-fashioning, and this will let me proceed to some comments on self-representation. In the interest of getting back to basics, let’s dust off the noble principle for which some of our forefathers tossed their tea into Boston harbor, though with one minor qualification: since too much prime time has recently been wasted on the first part of the principle, ‘‘no taxation,’’ I want to concentrate your minds on representation by introducing three new principles. First, no representation without alteration, which I use in its Latin sense, other, alterity, alienation; the very concept of representation involves entry into a signifying medium that splits the representation, alienates it, from the presence it represents. Therefore, second, no representation without mediation—without, that is, the materials and technical processes of representation and their formal consequences. Representations are products, and mediation designates the means of production. Third, no representation without self-representation. This third rule is actually the first of another trio of postulates that underwrite the analysis of all relations of representation: 1. You never represent another without representing yourself, if only as the agent of representation. 2. You never represent yourself to others without representing yourself to yourself. 3. You never represent yourself to yourself without representing yourself as an other, because your representation necessarily confronts you in a medium (conceptual, fantasmatic, organic, or technical) and produces self-division. Lurking behind these rules and postulates is the basic image of selfrepresentation, the mirror image, which Jacques Lacan uses as a figure for the early vicissitudes of identity formation. ‘‘The dialectic of identification’’ is first experienced in the encounter with one’s self-image as an other

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in the idealizing fictional form the mirror gives it.5 Lacan’s figure is grafted onto the much older figure and myth of Narcissus. Narcissism, in one account, is ‘‘the impossible effort of the subject to reunite with itself in its own objectified image . . . within the register of representation’’; the result of this failure of integration is continuous ‘‘alternation between self-deprecation and pretension.’’6 The Lacanian account throws light on an objective common to many traditional strategies of identity formation: the objective of challenging the human subject to give an account of itself to itself as well as to others: the objective, in other words, of constructing a creature always subject to guilt and shame, always conscious of being in the world’s eye—always, in Lacan’s words, ‘‘given to be seen.’’7 The continuousness of the challenge is crucial. It means that the production of identity—or, as Althusser appropriately put it, interpellation (being summoned, or hailed, as by the police)—the production of identity is never merely inscription, or is partial inscription at most. As this challenge moves inward, from tuition to intuition, its pressure is internalized by a dialectical procedure: cultural value systems and imperatives are imposed in a manner that simultaneously generates, first, the desire to resist them (and thus test one’s autonomy) and, second, the desire to resist that resistance and voluntarily complete the work of inscription ‘‘society’’ has begun but left strategically incomplete. The manifest consequence of this edifying dialectic may be the sense of integration often surrounded by the halo of such modifiers as mature, at peace, humble, pious, self-reliant; but the latent consequence and objective is continuous dissatisfaction with self-representation. This unhappiness is narcissism, and in the Lacanian account of it given by Joan Copjec it consists in the belief that one’s own being exceeds the imperfections of its image. Narcissism . . . seeks the self beyond the self-image, with which the subject constantly finds fault and in which it constantly fails to recognize itself. What one loves in one’s image is something more than the image. . . . Thus is narcissism the source of the malevolence with which the subject regards its image, the aggressivity it unleashes on all its own representations. And thus does the subject come into being as a transgression of, rather than in conformity to, the law. It is not the

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law, but the fault in the law—the desire that the law cannot ultimately conceal—that is assumed by the subject as its own.8 Strange resonances link this version of the drama of narcissism formulated by psychoanalysis to the formation of the subject as conceived in traditional Christian doctrine. Christian ideology produces its own brand of narcissism. This is best glossed by St. Paul’s ‘‘I had not known sin but for the law,’’ which may be unpacked as follows. What I desired and did wasn’t sinful in my eyes until the law told me it was. The new knowledge simultaneously intensifies guilt and intensifies desire by making the once accessible fruit forbidden and thus more tempting. The law arouses resistance to itself and punishes at it arouses. This double effect makes me feel more unworthy and sinful, helpless to overrule the contrary ‘‘law of the members,’’ and it thus drives me to resist my resistance—drives me beyond myself and beyond the law toward the violence of grace that alone can shatter and transform and redeem both.9 Christian discourse is an Ideological Cultural Apparatus for the production of narcissism. It aims to install in the subject an initial and sometimes lasting effect of self-deprecation, insufficiency, even self-loathing. It actively cultivates the self-division, the psychomachia, latent in the very structure of the subject as a creature that apprehends itself, is present to itself, only through historically delimited forms of mediation and representation. It induces the sinner to seek identification with ‘‘the self beyond the self-image’’ in the forms of self-transcendence sanctioned by God and the Church. Proponents of such diverse ideologies as Christianity and psychoanalysis are bound to disagree as to whether the fall into mediation—the media of language or of the body—is the effect of self-division or its cause. But they fully agree that this fall produces anxiety, and anxiety of several kinds. In the next two moves, I deal with two kinds and contexts of anxiety: gender anxiety in male discourse and prosthetic anxiety in technological change.

Move 7: Misogyny and the Types of Gynephobia There is a tendency in criticism by feminist scholars and others to use the term misogyny broadly to denote the whole antifeminist position rather

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than specifically the hostility, contempt, and dismissal expressed in conventional denigrations of woman. Yet it isn’t hard to show that antifeminist discourse has a divided structure of which misogyny is only one side, and, in my opinion, the less important side for interpretive purposes. Misogyny may be no more than the reaction to or surface manifestation of a deeper anxiety, gynephobia. And gynephobia divides into two categories, the gynephobia of gender and the gynephobia of sex. The gynephobia of gender is fear of effeminization, fear of the woman within the man. The gynephobia of sex is fear of impotence, emasculation, or infantilization, fear of the women outside the man. The gynephobia of gender is fear of a threat to man’s possession of the power signified by the phallus. The gynephobia of sex is fear of a threat to man’s possession of the power signified by the penis. The gynephobia of gender is a fear of having one’s status reduced to that of woman but not necessarily by women. The gynephobia of sex is specifically a fear of having one’s status reduced or usurped by women. To be unmanned by ‘‘the system’’; to be politically or socially unmanned by other males or by women in positions of power or authority, to be sexually unmanned by women’s insatiability, infidelity, and promiscuity: these ‘‘sources’’ of gynephobia may interact or signify each other, but they are both analytically and empirically distinct, and their conjunction in any particular case must be demonstrated. Representations of the gynephobia of sex often tend to be influenced by the gynephobia of gender, which may not be a response to actual women at all. Anxieties about woman and women are displacements of anxieties about male self-representation; this is itself sexist, reducing woman and women to symptoms of male problems. Such displacements produce a kind of reverse prosthesis: Jack gets rid of a bad part of himself, say, a crooked rib, by displacing it to Jill—or better, displacing it as Jill, who gets to be the scapegoat representing Jack’s badness; but then how does he go about replacing the missing rib, the loss of which is sometimes called castration? A final suggestion: there is a way to correlate gender anxiety with narcissistic Christian anxiety. Since the misogyny and gynephobia I’m exploring are functions of male fantasy and discourse, those terms denote reactions to the other. The shortest distance between those terms and

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narcissism is via their lexical transfer from other to self. Replacing gynewith auto-, we change misogyny to misautia, and gynephobia to autophobia. Hatred and fear of oneself are the basic attributes of narcissism, and they also characterize the pathology Christian discourses analyze through the use of such concepts as despair, guilt, and self-loathing. Clearly the term ‘‘autophobia’’ doesn’t have the rich juicy sound and connotations of despair, guilt, and self-loathing, so why bother to replace them with a silly, anachronistic, and pompous neologism? My answer is that these neologisms are influenced by, and intended to allude to, a cluster of Greek derivations belonging to current discourses of gender and sexuality—like misogyny, misandry, homophobia, etc.—and deployed in cultural critiques of the sexist features of norms, values, and practices ascribed to the so-called Judeo-Christian culture. One of my objectives is to make it possible to argue that the critique of gynephobia has been anticipated, preempted, and dramatized in at least some of the canonical texts attributed to male authors writing in the so-called JudeoChristian tradition.

Move 8: The Prosthetic Dialectic Taken in its narrow sense, the term prosthesis designates compensatory devices in the area of medical technology as opposed to more general technological achievements. We distinguish artificial legs from automobiles, hearing aids from audio systems, and eyeglasses from microscopes and telescopes. It just doesn’t feel right to apply the label prosthesis to the enhancements of power or function produced by the move from speech to writing to printing to word processing; from manual labor to machines; from walking to riding and driving; and from physiologically based perception to telescopes, amplifiers, and computers. Such changes are not merely compensatory. They are additive; they increase the power of human functions by extending them from the limits of the organic body to the instruments or media of communication, labor, transportation, perception, and representation. It’s nevertheless the case that compensatory and additive changes have often been treated as interchangeable and lumped together under the name ‘‘prostheses.’’ There’s a good reason for this. To start at the level

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of trivia, think of the sense of disability often expressed by people temporarily without a computer or a telephone or a car. What was once an enhancement becomes a necessity lacking which they feel, relatively speaking, ‘‘crippled.’’ This turnaround, which may be called cybernetic alienation, is one of the unintended consequences of technological advance. But to shift to a level of less trivial trivia, think of the effect intended by the strategies for marketing the so-called natural look that have become standard operating procedure in the culture of cosmetics. They try to give aesthetic enhancements the utilitarian value of necessities without which consumers would be inadequate; they offer compensation for the shortcomings they persuade you you have, and should do something about.10 Economic regimes depend on the finesse with which they inject into the cultural imaginary the virus of misanthropic self-understanding, the suspicion or fear that without the alienated enhancements they provide, human life would be miserable. The interaction of technological progress with cybernetic alienation gives shape to the prosthetic dialectic, which has four moments. First, human power is increased by being extended from the limits of the organic body to the instruments or media of labor, perception, representation, and communication. Second, power can’t be extended from the body without being abstracted from it. Extension and abstraction denote contrary tendencies in the same process. As extensions of the body, technical and organizational instruments augment its power. But as abstractions from it, they not only fill a void or supply a lack, they also create one. Think of the anxieties built into the transfer of economic function and power from human hands in situated markets to the invisible (and severed) hand of an abstract market process. Or think of the effects of the printing press and the Internet, and the symptom of the problem in the anxiety of censorship. The superimposition of writing on speech, of printing on writing, and of the electronic medium on the print medium progressively broadens the range of communication and extends its power, but at the same time it progressively abstracts the means of production from the control of the authorial body and thus alienates the production of meaning— alienates it not simply to the forces of the medium but to whoever is in the position to profit from and control those forces. Enhancement and

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alienation are the manifest and latent consequences of the same process; you can’t have one without the other. Thus we arrive at the basic rule of culture change, the abstraction rule: the increase of human power produced by extension and abstraction is directly proportional to the decrease of human control over that power. Third, to the extent that power alienated from the body to its artificial extensions produces not only diminishing control but also discursive awareness of diminution, the instrument or medium assumes a function similar to prosthesis: what’s considered merely natural and bodily tends to be devalued, treated as defective, even resented; this devaluation is often positively coded as the desire for an art that transcends nature. The other side of praise for the technical and artistic ingenuity enabling humans to correct the body’s imperfections is a more sharply focused awareness of those imperfections. (It isn’t only that glasses make you see better; stronger glasses make weaker eyes. This is prosthetic backlash.) Technophiles may exalt the benefits of extension and technophobes lament the costs of alienation, but within the structure of technical change and the discourses that intersect it, there’s a motivated skew toward representing the body as a diminished thing, the source of weakness, disorder, and vice. In the light of prosthesis, human life appears solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes attributes this miserable state, the state he calls Warre, to the absence of government, commerce, and technology. I suggest that on the contrary the state of Warre may be one consequence of their functioning presence. The Hobbesian picture of the state of Warre is constructed in the backwash, and as the backlash, of technological change (change in science, economics, politics). This is the complement of the idea of the state in which political power and authority are abstracted from the aggregate of unruly natural bodies and reimposed in the name of the more perfect artificial being each docile subject is to internalize as its second and better nature. Internalization is, in fact, the fourth moment of the technical dialectic. In a compensatory reaction, a prosthetic inversion, techniques and technologies originating as other, alien, and supplementary to the body become models in terms of which the concept of body, always in flux, is reconceived, creating a second nature, a new body or subject with new

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gaps and lacks, and new technical and prosthetic needs. The body and its functions have been reinvented, for example, in terms of perspective, architecture, the camera obscura, clockwork, the machine, the factory, and the computer. The genealogy of the cyborg goes back a long way. Once you start looking for the signs of this technical dialectic, you find versions and variations of the pattern in funny places. For example, the design and construction of extended kinship and lineage systems may be viewed as prosthetic devices. And you may also see glimpses of the same pattern in the political practice and discourse connected with the doctrine of the king’s two bodies. I mean, it would be interesting to study the king’s second body as a prosthetic device, especially when the first body is the Queen’s. Reprise: the four steps of the prosthetic dialectic. First, technology enhances life; machines do better what we used to do for ourselves. They encourage fantasies of self-transcendence and idealization, the flip side of which is the abjection (in Kristeva’s sense) of the body. Second, the price of enhancement is the alienation of control that occurs because machines have their own structure and logic. Third, when we become dependent on our machines, when usage converts technological enhancements into necessities, they come to feel less like enhancements and more like compensatory or prosthetic supplements, that is, things we can’t seem to do without. Fourth, in the backwash produced by the interplay of these factors, a tendency arises to disparage residual cultural constructions of nature and human nature, as well as of the body.

appendix 1: genealogical flipover, or the pancake maneuver ‘‘If A is the cause of B, then B is the cause that A is a cause; the effect is the cause of the cause; the cause is the effect of the effect.’’ This simple, lilting hypothesis is a paralogism (i.e., false reasoning, illogical argument, beyond, beside, outside the logos). Specifically, it is the paralogism of inverse causality, and it lies at the root of the most stimulating and influential criticism of the last century. It’s the basic move of deconstruction. In Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man traces it back to Nietzsche.11 The defini-

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tive account of it in Shakespeare criticism is to be found in Patricia Parker’s brilliant meditations on and explorations of the preposterous.12 Inverse causality governs a hierarchy of structural flipovers ranging from the scheme of hysteron proteron and the trope of metalepsis to the larger structures of genealogical (re)construction. The procedure draws its inspiration from a mix of now-canonical sources (Hegel, Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, to name a few). A staple of the hermeneutics of suspicion, it both presupposes and generates a skill of ironic reading. Thus it is that in the materializing precipitations of my preconscious imaginary the convergence of structural flipovers with ironic skill modulates into operations performed with an iron skillet and becomes the pancake maneuver in modern criticism.

appendix 2: the origin of hierarchy—authority, obedience, deference (a batesonian meditation) Of an animal lying still and bloody on the ground we might say, ‘‘signs of struggle,’’ or, ‘‘no signs of life,’’ or, more hopefully, ‘‘signs of life.’’ Of a possum, whom we recognize as playing possum, we would not say merely, ‘‘no signs of life,’’ but rather, ‘‘signals of ’no signs of life.’ ’’ This distinction between sign and signal, admittedly a special usage, is borrowed from Gregory Bateson: it is the distinction between the involuntary and voluntary communication of meanings. Thus Bateson: ‘‘the nonhuman mammal is automatically excited by the sexual odor of another; and rightly so, inasmuch as the secretion of that sign is an ’involuntary’ mood-sign; i.e., an outwardly perceptible event which is part of a physiological process.’’13 Like humans, animals are capable of distinguishing signs from signals, and can ‘‘recognize that the other individual’s and its own signals are only signals, which can be trusted, distrusted, falsified, denied, amplified, corrected, and so forth’’ (178). Bateson’s topic is the logical and expressive structure of metacommunicative signals that transmit the message, ‘‘this is play,’’ which he unpacks in the following ‘‘expanded’’ definition: ‘‘’These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote.’ The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not

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denote what would be denoted by the bite’’ (180). Mammals without language have a versatile repertory of kinesic signals by which to metacommunicate not only play-functions but also such pattern-features of social relationships as dominance, submission, dependency, and territoriality. My concern here is primarily with an imaginary aetiology of the first two features, dominance and submission, and with two terms that express relations between them, obedience and deference. Obedience, from ob-audire, is literally to listen submissively, since ob- in this compound takes its postural sense, analogous to sub-: obedire, the syncopated form, means ‘‘to listen from below, or underneath,’’ that is, ‘‘from closer to the ground.’’ Like the stooped posture of certain animals, it signals a voluntary assumption of the attitude of defeat intended to stave off or defer involuntary assumption of the same attitude. One drops to the ground, mimes defeat, plays at being conquered, in order to signal to the other who dominates or threatens that actual violence is unnecessary, would be redundant. The negative message—‘‘these actions . . . do not denote’’—is thus ambivalent. At once expressing ‘‘what would be denoted by those actions’’ and enjoining its absence or deferral, it works by conspicuous exclusion to translate what might be a single, definitive, and conclusive event, violent death, into the qualified form of a sustained relational state. The prospect of death, the threat of violence, is thus built into the relationship as a permanent feature. It’s by a happy conjunction of morphemes (similar to the one Jacques Derrida seized on) that two Latin verbs, deferre and differre, combine in English defer. Deferre means to bear down, remove to a lower place, sometimes violently, but it also means to convey or transfer, to offer or hand over. Deference combines these two senses through the catalyzing medium of differre, to put off, delay, postpone: to defer being borne down by another, one removes oneself to a lower place and offers the higher place to the other. Deference, the expression of obedience and inferiority, metacommunicates the following message: ‘‘These actions in which we now engage defer, absentiate, conspicuously exclude those violent actions that these actions denote.’’ But just as humility is a positive attitude that defends against humiliation, so the self-limitation of deference is grounded in a voluntary decision by which an inferior not only defers

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death but also circumscribes the expression of the power to which s/he chooses to submit. Deference is thus implicitly, or structurally, a form of agency. It is the ability not only to transform violence into hierarchy but also to transform the superior’s power into authority. To defer is to create a reserve of power in the inferior’s gift, a reserve from which s/he transfers a portion whenever s/he submits to—and thus helps to constitute and authorize—a superior. The reserve is not diminished by withdrawal so long as the relationship subsists because, in a peculiar (if familiar) sense, when superiors acknowledge deference and impose their superiority they return power to the inferiors. For surely the meaning of the message, ‘‘I obey,’’ is not exhausted by reading it as mere submission to another’s superior power. The dominant mammal’s power is greater if the path behind him is filled with a file of living inferiors than it would be if the path were cluttered by corpses. Power expressed as a continuous state exceeds the power expressed in discrete quanta of violent actions. And the margin of difference is a product of the inferior’s decision to submit rather than be killed; the decision converts mere physical power to social and political power and thus, in accordance with the master-slave dialectic, real power is a gift bestowed by the inferiors on whom superiors depend for their ongoing superiority. Every signal of obedience, homage, respect, honor, or deference is a voluntary transfer of the power in the inferior’s gift, a transfer without which the superior would be neither superior nor empowered. The acts by which superiors express and impose their power are thereby the acts by which they receive and take it. But since they are also the acts by which superiors acknowledge their dependency on those who inferiorize themselves, they are acts that return to the latter some of the power they offered up. Hence the continuous state of the power relationship rests on a dynamic system of transactions in which power in its liquid form is always shuttling back and forth, circulating through the ranks, and binding the differential positions together. The liquid fund may be increased by investment, as when superiors share out or delegate their power to others to widen their base and increase their returns. Finally, ob-audire, the root of obedience, combines a postural or body image with a reference to hearing. It thus combines the two chief mani-

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festations of presence, body and voice. Violence is deferred and its threat sustained by being displaced from blows to words. As Bateson might put it, ‘‘these speech acts in which we now engage defer but represent those physical acts which these acts replace.’’

appendix 3: the khaki class—changing the curriculum after world war II (a personal memoir) It was at first a straightforward generational struggle within the family of each academic discipline. Our elders and betters were beautifully cultivated, decorous, authoritative. They seemed fluent in ever so many languages. What each knew about his (I use the pronoun advisedly) specialty was daunting. The goal of English Literature and similar subjects in the Ivy League during the early 1940s was still represented in the terms attributed to the Renaissance poet’s poet, Edmund Spenser: ‘‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.’’ If you were planning to go on not only in the teaching profession but also in law or medicine or business, you were advised to spend your undergraduate years majoring in the aptly named humanities because these were the subjects that produced the Spenser Effect. Yet to many of us who arrived on campus a little before the start of World War II in the United States, something else seemed to be happening. Seniority was toppling over into senility. The wisdom of ‘‘the quiet voiced elders’’ began to be received with impatience as ‘‘a deliberate hebetude’’ toward new ideas—so one of the elders of the time, T. S. Eliot, phrased it in 1943. What they tacitly but continuously (and with increasing desperation) demanded was respect; what they got was deference and diffidence, embarrassed civility masking skepticism and distaste. Nothing new here; the eternally recurrent family romance, but with no trace of mother. This time, however, there was a difference. While most of the significant elders went on doing what they did, the young and innocent were called away by the war. They returned not with new ideas but simply, and more dangerously, with new eyes. New eyes, a new world order. But not the New Left. In the long run Hollywood’s subversive dreams threatened a nervous and defensive cold war state less than the

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New Intellectual Capitalism seeded by its investment in the romance of universal university education. This compensatory gesture materialized in the GI Bill of Rights and helped form the Khaki Class, a political generation of ‘‘veterans’’ (not merely ‘‘students’’) who came back to school singing songs of experience and who profited in sometimes perverse ways (see below) from the nervous state’s reactions to every challenge the term sputnik and its referents stood for. Those who trace the history of late-twentieth-century culture and its anxieties back to the Sixties and the Vietnam experience underestimate the preparatory role played by the emergence of the Khaki Class. The postwar climate drastically altered student behavior and expectations. Authority’s imperatives increasingly rubbed up against the academy’s interrogatives. The quick, paranoid response that flared in McCarthyism and smoldered on through the bland neoconservatism of the Eisenhower years only helped kindle the spark that would eventually flame forth under the sign Question Authority. Within the array of traditional disciplines, and well before gender and ethnic and cultural studies made their way into the curriculum, new waves of cross-pollinating intellectual labor—theoretical analysis, critique, methodological revision—swept across one field after another and changed everything. Resistance to the contagion that eventually erupted in the form of a French flu had been weakened in advance by the emergence, from the late 1940s on, of a transnational and transdisciplinary imaginary, the work mainly of the now-legendary heroes of postwar European scholarship: Ernst Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Edgar Wind, Erwin Panofsky, Rudolf Wittkower, Jean Seznec, and other seekers and makers of a multinational or pan-European cultural community. Add to these another figure, who may, in the light of hindsight, have become much more important to changes of understanding that occurred during the second half of the twentieth century: Simone de Beauvoir. If this is too heroic, too charismatic, a prospect of the postwar and cold war university culture, consider the view from the underside, and replace transcendence with transgression, as in John Le Carre´’s unforgettably sad portrayal of the culture of intelligence (i.e., spying) during the passage from the hot war to the cold: the self-imperiling desire to sleep with the enemy; the seductiveness of curiosity mixed with diffidence; the

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weariness of the old generation confronted by the wariness of the new; the excitement and uneasiness—and confusion—of continual bidirectional boundary breaching. It was as if the separate songs of a disciplinary innocence specialized and pure in faith had begun simultaneously to lust after each other, distrust and spy on each other, cohabit with each other, and send tinctures of alien experience humming through all their arterial passages until each darkened the others with the hermeneutics of its desire and its suspicion.

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chapter 1. the interpretive shuttle 1. I will not discuss the already much-analyzed debate between ‘‘historicists’’ and ‘‘formalists.’’ ‘‘Formalism’’ is a broader and simpler phenomenon than the particular picture of New Criticism I develop here. For a trenchant and dialectically astute survey of the debate, see Michael McCanles, Dialectical Criticism and Renaissance Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 1–13. 2. Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), vii–viii. See also Jonathan Culler’s account, in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), of the persistence in post–New Critical practice of the ‘‘insidious legacy of the New Criticism,’’ the ‘‘notion that the critic’s job is to interpret literary works’’ (5). For one of the more interesting paternal resurrections—or postmortems—see Rene´ Wellek’s ‘‘The New Criticism: Pro and Contra,’’ Critical Inquiry 4 (1978): 611–24 and the critical interchange in response to this essay between Wellek and Gerald Graff, Critical Inquiry 5 (1979), 569–79. 3. With one exception: William K. Wimsatt. But I was and remain Wimsatt’s student in spite of (because of?) the differences of perspective documented in the following pages. 4. Loose talk about worlds abounds in the critical literature. Its provenance is traced by Meyer Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), esp. 3–13, 42–46, 238–40, 272–85. Abrams quotes two exemplary statements on p. 284. From Austin Warren: ‘‘The poet’s ‘final creation’ is ‘a kind of world or cosmos; a concretely languaged, synoptically felt world; an ikon or image of the ‘‘real world.’’ ’ ’’ From Elder Olson: ‘‘In a sense, every poem is a microcosmos, a discrete and independent universe with its laws provided by the poet.’’ 5. On the marginalizing and depoliticizing effects of New Criticism, see Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Min517

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nesota Press, 1983), 46–51, and William E. Cain, The Crisis in Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 4–7. 6. William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 743–44. Elsewhere, Wimsatt admits that ‘‘the New Critics, with their repeated major premises of ‘interest,’ ‘drama,’ and ‘metaphor,’ advancing often enough to an emphasis on ‘inclusiveness’ and ‘maturity,’ have tended at moments unhappily toward the didactic.’’ ‘‘Horses of Wrath: Recent Critical Lessons,’’ in Hateful Contraries: Studies in Criticism and Literature (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), 24. 7. William K. Wimsatt, ‘‘Verbal Style: Logical and Counterlogical,’’ in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 217. 8. From ‘‘Poetry and Morals: A Relation Reargued’’ and ‘‘Poetry and Christian Thinking,’’ in The Verbal Icon, 98–100 and 279. 9. Christopher Ricks, review of Day of the Leopards, Wimsatt’s last book, in New York Times Book Review, June 13, 1976, 21. 10. Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 11. 11. See Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1883). In Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), Catherine Belsey comments on the New Critical emphasis on contemplation, ‘‘performed in isolation,’’ involving ‘‘only the individual reader and the text. The poem, selfcontained and closed, constitutes a pattern of knowledge which leads to a philosophy of detachment’’ (20). 12. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, 3–4, 16, and passim. 13. Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation, 15. 14. Ibid., 20ff. 15. Ibid., 15–16. 16. This is partly why my sense of New Criticism differs from Michael McCanles’s sense of formalism. He shows ingeniously how the formalist is a historicist in spite of himself, becoming his dialectical opposite because he ‘‘implicitly views literary works as functions of historically conditioned perspectives, namely his own’’ (Dialectical Criticism, 5). But the view is hardly implicit. If the New Critics are in part formalists, they are quite explicit in establishing a canonical literary history according to criteria supplied by modern literature and interpretation. The qualities assigned to the work of Joyce, Faulkner, Eliot, etc. provided criteria of inclusion and exclusion. (Cf. Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939].) McCanles remarks that ‘‘the formalist’s ahistorical standpoint violates itself to the exact degree that he uses methods of analyzing literary structure that are the

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products of literary developments in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The very notions of ‘organic form,’ ‘structure of meaning,’ ‘ambiguity,’ and the rest derive from conceptions of literary structure for which such writers as Flaubert, James, Conrad, Joyce, and Eliot were primarily responsible’’ ( 9). But if there is a violation of logic, it is conscious and consistent with the establishment of criteria for organizing the canon. In any event, as I noted earlier and will note later, New Criticism is not reducible to formalism. 17. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 51. 18. The production, that is, of works and canons. 19. Culler, Pursuit of Signs, 213, 217, 221, 218. 20. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 36. 21. Culler, Pursuit of Signs, 6. 22. Ibid., 6–7. 23. Kerrmode, The Sense of an Ending, 38–39. 24. Ibid., 41. 25. Cf. Wellek, ‘‘The New Criticism: Pro and Contra,’’ 615–16, on the ‘‘historical scheme’’ of the New Critics and Gerald Graff ’s response, ‘‘New Criticism Once More,’’ Critical Inquiry 5 (1979), 570–71. The historical and referential aspects of New Criticism are too often ignored. For a representative instance, see Terence Hawkes’s summary in Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 151–56. A more perspicuous comment on the ways in which New Criticism is and is not historical may be found in Belsey, Critical Practice, 18–20. 26. Wimsatt, Verbal Icon, 217, my italics. 27. On the strategic ambiguity of the imago dei relation, see my Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 21–22. 28. Assuming, of course, that the ‘‘C. B.’’ responsible for the short entry on New Criticism in the enlarged edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (ed. Alex Preminger et al. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974], 567–68) is Brooks. The entry is interestingly spare and notable chiefly for the following remark: ‘‘The . . . charge that the n.c. represents a revival of the doctrine of art for art’s sake runs into complications when one notices how many of this group have a definite religious position,’’ a position that leads them ‘‘to distinguish art from religion and morality rather than to make art a substitute for religion and morality’’ (568). Here again, one might argue, iconicity enforces disparity. 29. As Wellek (‘‘The New Criticism,’’ 616) and others have noted, the structural postulate goes back to Aristotle and the aesthetic postulate to Kant. 30. Belsey, Critical Practice, 19.

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31. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982), 160. 32. On the fallacy of simple location, see Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 198–203, and Science in the Modern World (1925; rpt. New York: Mentor Books, 1948), 50–56 inter alia. 33. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 118. 34. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 222–23. 35. See Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation),’’ in Lenin and Philosophy, 170ff. 36. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 160. 37. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 29–32. 38. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 34, 48. 39. I am grateful to my colleague Professor John P. Lynch for this etymology. 40. Barbara Johnson, Introduction to Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), viii–ix. 41. Belsey, Critical Practice, 5. 42. Johnson, introduction to Derrida, Dissemination, ix. 43. Ibid., viii. 44. Jonathan Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 69–70. 45. See Margaret Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 151–62. 46. Anthony Wilden, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, 2nd ed. (New York: Tavistock, 1980), 407. 47. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 42. 48. Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 201. 49. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 38–39. 50. Ibid., 32–33. 51. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 67. 52. Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 49. 53. Ong, Presence of the Word, 80, 82, 84. 54. Paolo Valesio, Novantiqua: Rhetorics as a Contemporary Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 24, 21.

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55. Jacob Klein, Plato’s Trilogy: ‘‘Theaetetus,’’the ‘‘Sophist,’’ and the ‘‘Statesman’’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 1. 56. C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 4th ed. (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1980), 295. 57. Wellek, ‘‘The New Criticism: Pro and Contra,’’ 616. 58. ‘‘Organism’’ connotes not only integrated complexity but also life and nature, and it further encourages the thought of a spatial arrangement of parts and whole. 59. Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, 155. 60. Gerald Graff, Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 108–109. 61. Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘The Narrative Function,’’ in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 288. 62. Ibid., 290–91. 63. Hayden White, ‘‘Getting Out of History,’’ Diacritics 12 (Fall 1982): 11. Cf. also 5: ‘‘The difficulty with the notion of a truth of past experience is that it can no longer be experienced, and this throws a specifically historical knowledge open to the charge that it is a construction as much of imagination as of thought and that its authority is no greater than the power of the historian to persuade his readers that his account is true. This puts historical discourse on the same level as any rhetorical performance and consigns it to the status of a textualization neither more nor less authoritative than ‘literature’ itself can lay claim to.’’ 64. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 118, 134. 65. Ricoeur, ‘‘The Narrative Function,’’ 291. 66. Ricoeur tried to deal with referentiality, first by distinguishing the nonostensive reference of textual discourse from the ostensive reference of dialogical discourse, and second, in The Rule of Metaphor, by introducing a quasi-theological concept of metaphoric reference. See also Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), x–xi and 80–81. These efforts did not prove persuasive. See, for example, the trenchant critique by Dominick La Capra, ‘‘Who Rules Metaphor,’’ Diacritics 10 (Winter 1980), 15–28. 67. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 82. 68. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 32–33. 69. Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’’ 143, 173. 70. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 6. 71. Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’’ 162.

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72. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 2–3,

73. Emile Benveniste, ‘‘The Correlations of Tense in the French Verb,’’ in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 206–8. 74. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Age of the World Picture,’’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), 129–30, 132, 134. 75. Ibid., 131. 76. Ibid., 134. 77. See Eric A. Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 78. This is a point Ricoeur has frequently emphasized. 79. James Clifford, ‘‘On Ethnographic Authority,’’ Representations 2 (Spring 1983), 131–32. 80. This is what I take to be the import of ‘‘these texts become evidences of an englobing context, a ‘cultural’ reality . . . the world or context within which the texts are fictionally relocated.’’ 81. ‘‘Discrepant awarenesses’’ is a phrase borrowed from Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare’s Tragic Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 82. See my ‘‘Text against Performance: The Gloucester Family Romance,’’ in Shakespeare’s ‘‘Rough Magic’’: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppe´lia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 212–13. Reprinted in Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, ed. Peter Erickson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 52–53. 83. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 294. 84. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Signature Event Context,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 326–27. 85. Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 75–76. 86. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 153. 87. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 32. 88. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 73–74. 89. Ibid., 73–82. 90. J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 53. 91. Fredric Jameson, ‘‘The Ideology of the Text,’’ in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, 2 volumes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 2:18.

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92. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 296–97 93. Mieke Bal, ‘‘De-disciplining the Eye,’’ Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 508, 506. 94. Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, eds., Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, trans. Catherine Porter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 356–57. 95. The definition is Umberto Eco’s in A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 16. 96. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 183–84. 97. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 189. 98. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934; New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), 137. 99. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 109–59. 100. Gregory the Great, Epistula ad Serenum, trans. Wladislaw Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, vol. 2, Medieval Aesthetics (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 104–5. 101. William Durandus, Rationale of the Divine Offices, trans. J. M. Neale and B. Webb, in A Documentary History of Art, vol. 1, The Middle Ages annd the Renaissance, ed. Elizabeth Gilmore Holt (1957; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 121, 123. 102. This is an injunction that Calvin, among others, objected to, when, for example, he complained that ‘‘visualization [in Norman Bryson’s paraphrase] is the mark of a failed reading of the text. . . . Understanding takes place not through visuality but rather through discourse.’’ Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 118. 103. Ernest Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 17. 104. On this, see Chapter 11, below. 105. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, 18. 106. Maurice Bloch, ‘‘Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation, Or Is Religion an Extreme Form of Traditional Authority?,’’ European Journal of Sociology 15 (1974): 71. 107. Maurice Bloch, ‘‘The Disconnection between Power and Rank as a Process: An Outline of the Development of Kingdoms in Central Madagascar,’’ Archives europe´ennes de sociologie 18 (1977): 138. See also Bloch’s introduction to Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, ed. Maurice Bloch (London, 1975), 1–28. 108. Bloch, ‘‘Symbols, Song, Dance,’’ 58: ‘‘By this is meant that the elders are speaking not on their own behalf but on behalf of the ancestors and elders of

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the whole descent group whether living or dead. They are repeating the general truth which they have had passed on to them by previous generations.’’ Bloch goes on to distinguish ritual from secular political speech in one important respect: As the ceremony goes on, and ‘‘under the influence of rhythmic music, drink, and general excitement,’’ the elders begin to speak in a different manner and tone, and their utterances ‘‘are often indistinct.’’ They ‘‘appear to be in a trance-like state and it is said that it is not they who are speaking but their ancestors.’’ For the participants, such ‘‘possession is an extreme form of saying what would have been said by the elders of the past, or repeating their words. Instead of the ancestors speaking indirectly through the memory of the living elders they speak directly through their person’’ (58–59). 109. John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 77. The assertion is Bertrand Russell’s. 110. Ibid., 24, 26–27. 111. Oswald Ducrot, in Ducrot and Todorov, eds., Encyclopedic Dictionary 247. 112. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 4, 42. 113. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 289, 293–94. 114. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 127. 115. Searle, Speech Acts, 77. 116. Rorty, Consequences, 127. 117. Ibid., 127–32. 118. Lyotard, The Differend, 42.

chapter 2. bodies and texts note: In writing and revising this essay, I have been much helped by Page DuBois, James Clifford, Lisa Lowe, and Louis Montrose. I want the world to know I appreciate it, and I want them to know it too. 1. See my ‘‘Text Against Performance in Shakespeare: The Example of Macbeth,’’ Genre 15 (1982): 49–79; and Richard Levin’s criticism of that essay, ‘‘The New Refutation of Shakespeare,’’ Modern Philology 83 (1985): 123–41. 2. ‘‘Semiosis’’ throughout this essay denotes ‘‘the production of meaning.’’ 3. ‘‘Logocentric’’ is sometimes used to describe the domination of culture by logos (word and meaning), whether written or spoken, and especially by the alphabetic logos, but I use it here to characterize the effects and commitments of oral as against written communication and semiosis. ‘‘Logocentrism’’ refers to an organization of thought, behavior, action, and their cultural and institutional settings influenced by the primacy of the visible, audible, speaking/hearing body as a signifying and communicating medium. See, for example, Walter J. Ong,

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Orality and Literacy (New York: Methuen, 1982), esp. 5–77. Synopses of Derrida’s use of the term and of the range he gives it are legion and are by no means in agreement. For me, the simplest and most helpful discussion (outside those of Derrida himself ) has been Jonathan Culler’s account in On Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 89–109. 4. I owe this touch of realism to Page DuBois. 5. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 201. 6. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press,, 1976), 31–32, 79, 93. 7. Fredric Jameson, ‘‘The Ideology of the Text,’’ in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 2:18. 8. James Clifford, ‘‘On Ethnographic Authority,’’ Representations 2 (Spring 1983): 130–32. 9. Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is an Author?’’ trans. Josue´ V. Harari, in Textual Strategies, ed. Josue´ V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 158–59. 10. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 107. 11. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Signature Event Context,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 320, 326. 12. Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica 1.1.10, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 3 vols. (New York: Benziger Bros., 1947), 1:7. 13. Oswald Ducrot, in Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, ed. Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, trans. Catherine Porter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 356–57. 14. Ibid., 357. 15. Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), xxv. 16. Roger Keesing, introduction to Rituals of Manhood, ed. Gilbert H. Herdt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 26–27. 17. Gregory Bateson, Naven, 2d ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 285–86. 18. In this particular case, detextualization—the transfer of meanings from language to nonhuman forces in ‘‘nature’’—is not merely exemplified, but represented. 19. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (1969; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 15. 20. See G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); and Claude Le´vi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

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21. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 20–21. 22. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 22, 65. 23. See, for example, Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 58ff., 262ff.; see also M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record (London: Edward Arnold, 1979). 24. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman (New York: Longmans, Green, 1949), 223, 227–28. 25. On the ‘‘art coefficient,’’ see Marcel Duchamp’s brief essay ‘‘The Creative Act,’’ in The New Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1966), 23–26.

chapter 3. the origins of bucolic representation note: It gives me pleasure to name the friends and colleagues whose comments—suggestions, corrections, criticisms—have been so valuable to me during the various stages of writing: Professors Paul Alpers, Page duBois, Carolyn Dewald, Mark Griffith, John Lynch, Gary Miles, Thomas Rosenmeyer, and Seth Schein. I am especially grateful to Professors Schein and Miles for their assistance on earlier drafts, to Professor Griffith for his help in final revisions, and to Professor Rosenmeyer for his discerning and generously detailed commentary, which was far and away the most helpful I have ever received from any journal referee. The text and translation to be cited are those of A. S. Gow, Theocritus Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), vol. 1. 1. Plato, Ion, 533d–534e. 2. Søren Kierkegaard, quoted by Harold Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 26. 3. Plato Second Letter, 314c. I am attracted by the hypothesis that Plato could not speak in his own voice because Socrates took his voice away and that he regained his voice only by evacuating Socrates into his text in order to find the distance that would enable him, finally, to read rather than to hear, to interpret rather than to submit. 4. I have discussed strong pastoral (without using the term) in ‘‘The Aging Boy: Paradise and Parricide in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender,’’ in Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance, ed. Maynard Mack and George de Forest Lord (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1982), 25–46, and in ‘‘Orpheus, Pan, and the Poetics of Misogyny: Spenser’s Critique of Pastoral Love and Art,’’ ELH 50 (1983): 27–60.

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5. I use ‘‘strong’’ and ‘‘weak’’ essentially in the senses given by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), and subsequent studies of poetic influence. A more prosaic description of weak pastoral appears in the four-point definition assembled by David M. Halperin in Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), which I discuss below. 6. See, for example, Giuseppe Giangrande, ‘‘The´ocrite, Simichidas et les Thalysies,’’ L’Antiquite´ classique 37 (1968): 491–533, and ‘‘Hellenistic Poetry and Homer,’’ L’Antiquite´ classique 39 (1970): 46–77; B. A. van Groningen, ‘‘Quelques proble`mes de la poe´sie bucolique grecque,’’ Mnemosyne ser. 4, 11 (1958): 293–317 and 12 (1959): 24–53; Charles Segal, Poetry and Myth in Ancient Pastoral: Essays on Theocritus and Virgil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 3–234 (chaps. 1–9); John Van Sickle, ‘‘Epic and Bucolic (Theocritus Id. vii; Virgil Ecl. i),’’ Quaderni Urbinati di cultura classica 19 (1975): 45–72, and ‘‘Theocritus and the Development of the Conception of Bucolic Genre,’’ Ramus 5: (1976) 18–44; Frederick Williams, ‘‘A Theophany in Theocritus,’’ CQ 21 (1971): 137–45. The very large number of references to Segal in the notes that follow reflects not only the disagreements that mark their surface but also my profound obligation to his work. Much of what I have learned along the way has emerged through my struggle with his essays. 7. On the green world and its self-criticism see, for example, my ‘‘The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World,’’ Centennial Review 9 (1965): 36–78, ‘‘Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House,’ ’’ Southern Review (Australia) 1, no. 4 (1965): 7–26, and ‘‘Andrew Marvell: The Poem as Green World,’’ Forum for Modern Language Studies 3 (1967): 290–309. 8. ‘‘Alphabetic transcription, effecting a slow accumulation of documented speech, created in the Hellenistic age a past that could separate itself from the present, and from the present consciousness. The reader could look back (and the word ‘‘look’’ is not merely metaphorical), as his oral counterpart could not and never wanted to. . . . The time had come to collect, to annotate, to correct, and to reflect, standing apart from what prior men had done and said, and compare it with what was to be said now, and to use the comparison for a new type of literary creation.’’ Eric A. Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 25. 9. See John Van Sickle, ‘‘The Book-Roll and Some Conventions of the Poetic Book,’’ Arethusa 13 (1980) :5–42; L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 2d. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 5ff.; and Havelock, The Literate Revolution, 331–36. 10. By ‘‘textual dialectic,’’ I mean the process described by Paul Ricoeur in his analysis of the shift from spoken to written discourse in Hermeneutics and the

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Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 201, and, further, Interpretation Theory (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 93, 31–32, 79. This is the process through which written discourse is freed from the author’s intentions and the constraints of face-to-face communication, acquires semantic autonomy, and is appropriated by readerships in conformity with their interpretive norms and conventions. In his writings on orality and literacy, Havelock, in The Literate Revolution and A Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1963) never touches on the problems of intention, unmeant meaning, and the possibility of interpretive appropriation that arises with the distancing or autonomizing effects of writing. This failure may lie behind his egregiously reductive treatment of Plato’s dialogues, and especially the Republic, as documents in which Plato directly ventriloquizes his own arguments and opinions through Socrates and the other principal speakers. He contradicts much in his own major thesis by approaching the Platonic text logocentrically. He does not see that the text presents its own textuality in its representation of a Socrates who is shown to labor under the same kind of logocentric constraints as does the Homeric culture that Plato has Socrates criticize. Cf. Preface to Plato, 197–311, and Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’’ in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 63–171. For a view of Platonic textuality that differs from both the Havelockian and Derridean extremes, see my ‘‘Plato’s Flying Philosopher,’’ Philosophical Forum 13 (1982): 385–407, and ‘‘Facing Sophists: Socrates’ Charismatic Bondage in Protagoras,’’ Chapter 10 in this volume. 11. See Halperin, Before Pastoral. For an emphatic, if unpersuasive presentation of the mouthpiece theory, see Gilbert Lawall, Theocritus’s Coan Pastorals (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1967), and for a more complex appreciation of these issues, Stephen Kelly’s analysis of the nice balance of irony and sincerity informing the narrator’s tone in Idyll 12, ‘‘On the Twelfth Idyll of Theocritus,’’ Helios n.s. 7 (1979–80): 55–61. 12. On the strategies of inversion and allusion and of diminution of narrative scale and amplification of minutiae and ‘‘precious detail,’’ see Halperin Before Pastoral, e.g., 174, 219. 13. Gary Miles, ‘‘Characterizations and the Ideal of Innocence in Theocritus’s Idylls,’’ Ramus 6 (1977): 139–64; Charles Segal, ‘‘Landscape into Myth: Theocritus’s Bucolic Poetry,’’ Poetry and Myth, 210–34. See also Segal’s more extended treatment of Idyll 7 in ‘‘Theocritus’s Seventh Idyll and Lycidas,’’ Poetry and Myth, 110–66, henceforth cited as ‘‘Lycidas.’’ This comparison with Miles is confined to ‘‘Landscape into Myth’’ because it is both more general and more compact than ‘‘Lycidas.’’

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Because of his many studies of bucolic irony, Giuseppe Giangrande would seem to be a more logical representative of this position than Miles. But Giangrande’s emphasis on ethical irony—the ironic or satiric portrayal of character—tends to be myopic (perhaps because it is so polemical) and is based on a less refined sense of the theoretical issues than is the case with Miles. That is, Miles’s essay offers us easier access to the problematics of the impersonation structure that provides the ground of the irony Giangrande discusses. 14. As he notes in the opening pages of ‘‘Lycidas,’’ Segal’s aim is to strengthen the symbolist interpretation of Idyll 7 by a sort of inoculatory strategy that takes account of such ‘‘contradictions, ironies, ambiguities’’ (Poetry and Myth, 115) as those featured in Giangrande’s work, but does so in order to limit and contain them in the service of a more powerful and complex symbolic orientation. His comments in Poetry and Myth, 18–19, reaffirm this objective. 15. Though I am more in sympathy with the view represented in Miles’s essay than with that represented in Segal’s, I do not think Miles takes full advantage of his own approach in dealing with Idyll 7. He fails to confront a crucial issue, the characterization of the figure of Lycidas, and on this point he concedes too much to Segal’s symbolic view of the figure. See Poetry and Myth, 31ff. 16. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961), 158–59 and passim. Booth’s odd moral disapproval of the unreliable narrator (see especially his final chapter) results primarily, I think, from his failure to maintain a consistent distinction between (what he calls) the ‘‘implied author’’ and the perspective of the text. (Cf. 71ff. and passim.) 17. Theater based on scripts reincorporates the textual effects that writing releases from the signifying order of the body. Like oral poets or rhapsodes, performers try to control the rights over interpretation and thus to inhibit the play of the textual dialectic. 18. I think this also holds for the interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues, including Socrates. See Chapter 10, below. 19. Professor Rosenmeyer has reminded me that the fragmentary ending of Idyll 24 makes it uncertain whether it belongs in this group or the next (personal communication) 20. Miles, ‘‘Characterizations,’’ 139. 21. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968) 4, 76–77. 22. Thomas Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (1969; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 63. 23. Ibid., 28. 24. Halperin, Before Pastoral, 222. See, in this context, his excellent account of the way epic allusions enrich the act of impersonation.

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Notes to Pages 144–149

25. K. J. Dover, Theocritus: Select Poems (London: Macmillan, 1971), 97. 26. Thus, Dover remarks ‘‘that the emotional predicament of a suburban Medeia does not differ in nature from that of a princess of Kolchis’’ (Theocritus, 95). Cf. the similar comments on Idyll 1 by Halperin, Before Pastoral, 176ff. 27. The subject is extensively treated in Halperin, Before Pastoral, chapter 2 (217–48), where the different registers of epos—represented by the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod, and Theocritus—are nicely distinguished. Halperin’s account develops the distinctions proposed by John Van Sickle in The Design of Virgil’s Bucolics (Rome: Edizioni dell’ Ateneo e Bizzarri, 1978) 99–116. 28. Miles, ‘‘Characterizations,’’ 158. 29. The critical abuse to which poor Simichidas must submit may be sampled in Giangrande, ‘‘The´ocrite,’’ and Williams, ‘‘A Theophany,’’ in Charles Segal, ‘‘Simichidas’ Modesty: Theocritus’s Idyll 7.44’’ (Poetry and Myth, 167–75), and in K. J. McKay, ‘‘Pomp and Pastoralia in Theokritos’ Idyll 7,’’ AUMLA 44 (1975): 181–88. Frederick T. Griffiths, in Theocritus at Court (Leiden: Brill, 1979), finds Simichidas ‘‘overearnest’’ (49) and cites the ‘‘stilted symmetries’’ of his ‘‘glorification of the country festival’’ as an example of the poet’s skill (37). Halperin still clings to the older view, calling Simichidas ‘‘cynical and humorous’’ and noting ‘‘the sophisticated urbanity’’ of his song (Before Pastoral, 123), as does Stephen F. Walker who, in Theocritus (Boston: Gale, 1980), identifies Simichidas with Theocritus (19, 70, 80, 83) and apparently ignores all interpretation to the contrary. 30. See Halperin, Before Pastoral, 225ff., for a list and discussion of Homeric allusions giving this passage its air of ‘‘epic inversion.’’ 31. Segal, ‘‘Landscape into Myth,’’ 228, 227. 32. Ibid., 229. 33. Segal, ‘‘Lycidas,’’ 125. 34. Segal, ‘‘Landscape into Myth,’’ 227, 229. 35. Ibid., 230. 36. Miles, ‘‘Characterizations,’’ 158. 37. I take this detail to indicate that Lycidas is the real initiator of the contest. Dover argues that Simichidas’ boasting ‘‘is designed to provoke Lycidas to compete’’ (Theocritus, 154). These are not incompatible readings, but they reflect different views of the relation between text and narrator. For Dover, the narration at this point is transparent, not a dramatic issue, and he elicits from it merely information about the narrator’s motives and performance in the past. For me, the ironic relationship between the ‘‘information’’ and the narrator who gives it is the crux of the passage: The textual 0 suggests that Lycidas knowingly (epitades) promoted the encounter at a level too subtle for Simichidas to discern, either then or—more interestingly—now (as he tells the story). Giangrande (‘‘The´ocrite,’’ 507) supplies an entirely different context for the interpretation of this detail, but one that stresses Lycidas’s role as aggressor.

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38. On Simichidas’s self-presentation, see Segal, ‘‘Simichidas’ Modesty,’’ 168ff. In ‘‘Lycidas,’’ Segal notes ‘‘the alternation of bragging and modesty,’’ but sees it only as a ‘‘balance’’ of high and low that makes it difficult to distinguish Simichidas from Lycidas in terms of stylistic levels (Poetry and Myth, 137). Here, however, he discusses the questionable light thrown on Simichidas’s self-presentation by Lycidas’s irony. 39. Dover, Theocritus, 146. 40. Dover assumes that Lycidas favorably contrasts Simichidas to the tekton and the cocks (Theocritus, 147), but I take it as an admonitory response to Simichidas’s boast that he is the equal of Lycidas and the best of singers. 41. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, 22–23. 42. Ibid., 270. 43. In his song, however, he gives vent to some Hesiodic comments on the Arcadian Pan cult. 44. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, 23. 45. Cf. McKay, ‘‘Pomp and Pastoralia,’’ 184–85; for a more general discussion of the strategies of conspicuous exclusion by which Theocritus adumbrates political and social actualities, see Griffiths’s interesting comments on Idylls 1 and 15 in Theocritus at Court, 125–28. 46. Simichidas now reports that he introduced his performance with the announcement that this was his best song (94–95). It is important to keep his past remarks and performance firmly within the frame of the idyll’s impersonation structure—to insist, with Giangrande (‘‘The´ocrite,’’ 512–13), that the narrated details, the narrative act, are elements in the characterization of the narrator. If this portrayal is critical or parodic, it is the narrator who (so to speak) ‘‘tells’’ on himself. This does not appear to be self-parody in the present tense on the part of a sophisticated and ironic Simichidas. Rather, the narrative rehearsal blandly ratifies and blindly accentuates the textual and Lycidan ironies of which he is the target. And as I will argue, his present-tense performance in describing the Thalysia seals his fate. The failure to maintain a consistent distinction between the textual 0-position and Simichidas’s 1/3 position mars what is otherwise, in my opinion, by far the most stimulating and interesting commentary on Idyll 7, that is, Segal’s. His attempt to balance and integrate Lycidas and Simichidas into the ambivalent structure of a Theocritean dialectic leads him often to ignore their unequal roles as speakers: Lycidas is ventriloquized by Simichidas, the narrator. 47. Dover, Theocritus, 161. Segal contrasts the ‘‘negative ways’’ in which Simichidas ‘‘achieves calm’’ to Lycidas’s more positive route to hasychia (Poetry and Myth, 140), but in his effort to emphasize the balance between the two poles they represent (‘‘Both songs move from violence to rest, and both end in images of calm,’’ Poetry and Myth, 138) he underestimates the continuing irritability evident in the final lines of Simichidas’s song.

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48. The displacement is sustained anagrammatically in the echoing name changes: Erotes at line 96 to Horatos in line 98, modulating to Aristis in the following line. Gow asserts that the play on Aristis at line 100 indicates a reference to an actual person (Theocritus 2:156). I think it is more likely that it indicates a reduction to a type, that is, to the figure of an ideal poet, worthy of singing in Phoebus’s own sanctuary, and an archaic figure whose instrument (the phorminx) is the ancient Homeric lyre Phoebus played. Since what ‘‘Aristis knows’’ is what Simichidas knows, we can assume that the brief appearance of the former represents another element of displacement, this time under the aspect of the modesty topos: The humble Simichidas implicitly contrasts himself to an ideal, archaized poet-figure—the functional equivalent of Lycidas’s Comatas— but the desire of identification seems as clear as the suggestion of contrast. 49. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet , 191. 50. On the frog and bees, cf. Gow, Theocritus, 2:165–66. On the Odyssean and Tantalean allusion, 2:164 and 166; Dover, Theocritus, 164–65. 51. Miles, ‘‘Characterizations,’’ 154. 52. Ibid., 154–55. 53. A comparison with Rosenmeyer’s remarks on the Epicurean attitude toward music— The Green Cabinet, 146—is instructive. 54. The change from apion to ochne seems partly influenced by the appearance of the latter word in Od. 11.589. 55. Cf. Rosenmeyer on the spring of Bourina, The Green Cabinet, 187. On the different views of Simichidas’s referring to Nymphs rather than Muses, see Giangrande, ‘‘The´ocrite,’’ 519 n. 67. 56. The reference to the ponos of cicadas by itself alludes to the ideal qualities listed by Rosenmeyer—‘‘pure music . . . no wants . . . marvellously gifted with speech or song’’ (The Green Cabinet, 134)—and denied by its context. See Iliad 15.416 for an allusive antithesis that reinforces the denial (noted by Halperin, Before Pastoral, 231). 57. Cf. the comment of Stephen Walker that Lycidas’s ‘‘flight of imagination is spurred on by the theme of sublimation’’ (Theocritus, 67). Perhaps it was also spurred on by sublimation itself. 58. Cf. Segal, ‘‘Lycidas,’’ 143–44, and ‘‘Landscape into Myth,’’ 216, 222–23. 59. Since Lycidas plays the syrinx (28), there may be another association with Comatas in the nectar-feeding motif. In Idyll 1, the syrinx is described as ‘‘fragrant of honey from its compacted wax’’ (128–29). Halperin’s reading of this process of surrogation is apparently similar, but actually quite different, first because he ignores the suggestions of violence and threat, and second because he identifies poetic desire with sexual desire: Before Pastoral, 121–22. 60. Segal, ‘‘Lycidas,’’ 142,134. 61. Ibid., 129–30.

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62. Ibid., 150ff. 63. This has been remarked by Giangrande, Segal, and Williams. 64. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, 136. This is more specific than a houlette (shepherd’s crook), as van Groningen calls it (‘‘Quelques proble`mes,’’ 27). Giangrande thinks the point of this gift is that it has no point, carries no symbolic indication of poetic ability (‘‘The´ocrite,’’ 520. See also Giangrande, ‘‘Irony in Theocritus: Methods of Literary Interpretation,’’ Museum Philologum Londiniense 3 (1978): 144–45. My view, which is different, appears immediately below. 65. See Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, 139. 66. Cf. Idyll 1.15–17. For a scholiastic attempt to argue the identity of Lycidas with Pan, see Edwin L. Brown, ‘‘The Lycidas of Theocritus’s Idyll 7,’’ Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 85 (1981): 59–100. Brown never stays close enough to the poem to make clear the interpretive relevance of his extensive meander. 67. Segal makes the same point about the possibility, broached by Frederick Williams in ‘‘A Theophany,’’ that Lycidas is a disguised Apollo. 68. Gow notes the echo in line 14 of Hermes’s appearance to Kalypso. 69. Segal, ‘‘Simichidas’ Modesty,’’ 170. 70. Halperin, Before Pastoral, 20, 257. 71. This is the burden of my ‘‘Facing Socrates.’’ 72. Compare with this the effects of centuries of pastoral impersonation as registered by Milton in Lycidas and discussed by Stanley Fish in ‘‘Lycidas: A Poem Finally Anonymous,’’ Glyph 8 (Baltimore 1981): 1–18. Fish argues— persuasively, I think—that the story the textual 0-voice of Milton’s poem tells is the story of the speaker’s effort and failure ‘‘to privilege . . . individual experience, in relation to the impersonality of public and institutional structures,’’ his effort and failure to call into question ‘‘the efficacy of pastoral’’ in order to establish his own efficacy ‘‘as someone who stands apart from the conventions and is in a position to evaluate them’’ (8). But the text ‘‘relentlessly denies the privilege of the speaking subject . . . and is finally, and triumphantly, anonymous.’’ The final eight lines introduce a narrative perspective suggesting ‘‘that everything presented as spontaneous was in fact already spoken’’ (16). This throws an interesting light both on the idyllic theme of spontaneous song and on the portrait of Simichidas, which emphasizes, in Segal’s words, ‘‘the citydweller’s compulsive need to assert his individuality’’ (Poetry and Myth, 134). For an interesting critique of Fish’s reading, see Paul Alpers, ‘‘Lycidas and Modern Criticism,’’ ELH 49 (1982): 468–96. 73. ‘‘The fairytale atmosphere of these opening lines’’ noted by Wilamowitz ‘‘suggests a mythical distance which the subsequent details belie,’’ and this ‘‘blending of imprecision and specificity’’ is part of ‘‘the dialectic between imagination and reality which controls the entire work’’ (Segal, ‘‘Lycidas’’ 163). Segal’s interest in this dialectic is perhaps too objectified in that it tends to obscure its

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characterizing dimension as a comment on the narratorial attitude: the airy epic gesture rendered slightly pretentious by its unheroic local context and, in the 0position behind the narrator, the semantic and semiotic play framing the gesture in the textual critique of the idyllicism that motivates the urban speaker’s double escape into the country and into Literature. Here I follow Giangrande ‘‘The´ocrite,’’ 532. 74. See M. L. West’s discussion in his edition of Hesiod’s Works and Days (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 174. 75. I have bracketed Gow’s ‘‘on us’’ because it is not in the Greek, and I will argue that Demeter’s smile or laughter is directed specifically at the singular first person who plants the winnowing fan. 76. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, 191; Miles, ‘‘Characterizations,’’ 158. See also Griffiths, Theocritus at Court, 37. 77. Cf. Segal, ‘‘Lycidas,’’ 156. 78. Although Segal notes that Simichidas’ closing myths are ominous, he strips them of their characterizing function by assimilating them to the larger Theocritean dialectic (Poetry and Myth, 154–55 and 227). 79. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, 125–26. 80. Segal, ‘‘Lycidas,’’ 164. 81. Segal, ‘‘Landscape into Myth,’’ 222. 82. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet, 62. 83. Segal, ‘‘Landscape into Myth,’’ 222. 84. Dover, Theocritus, 149. 85. The dairy smell is so conspicuously irrelevant to what follows as to suggest a reference to the excluded world of Hesiodic husbandry, and this accords with the rationale analyzed by Rosenmeyer in his discussion of ponos. 86. Dover, Theocritus, 148–50. 87. This analogy was suggested to me by Gary Miles. 88. John Van Sickle associates this gesture with Theocritus’s articulation of a tripartite hierarchy within epos: between ‘‘those who would build as high as Homer’’ and ‘‘his own ‘cowherd singing’ ’’ comes ‘‘the shadowy trace of Hesiod, the authority for a form of epos less than Homeric,’’ but more ‘‘than a bucolic mode that receives its sanction second hand from the Muses—a hunter’s stick not a prophet’s laurel rod’’ (Van Sickle, Design, 110). See also Van Sickle, ‘‘Epic and Bucolic,’’ 58–61. The argument against the serious view of this moment as a poetic investiture was made by Giangrande (‘‘The´ocrite,’’ 519–20.) against Mario Puelma, ‘‘Die Dichterbegegnung in Theokrits Thalysien,’’ Museum Helveticum 17(1960): 144–64. 89. The word ‘‘good’’ translates kalos, ‘‘well’’ or ‘‘beautifully,’’ and although this avoids an awkward adverbial construction, it misses the important qualification always implied when Socrates chooses kalos rather than agathos. The point

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is not inapplicable to Theocritus: The idylls are not mere songs, but rather critical representations of song that inquire into its logos and question the viability of the ‘‘beautiful’’ as a criterion. Since the representations are textual, the Platonic theme of writing versus speaking/singing is also relevant. 90. See Halperin, Before Pastoral, 194–95. 91. Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, 1.26–27, 2.38. See also my Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 94–103), and The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), passim. 92. Griffiths, Theocritus at Court. 93. Segal, Poetry and Myth, 43, 16–17. 94. Contrast ibid., 32, 33, 39, 41, 45, and 46 with 33, 41, and 44. 95. Ibid., 41. 96. Ibid., 33. 97. And thus, in my opinion, Segal’s view of Thyrsis should be modified by that of Miles in ‘‘Characterizations,’’ which I follow here. Miles argues convincingly that the tragic and heroic values of Daphnis’s behavior are discredited partly by the victim’s shrill self-dramatizing, his sense of his own megaloprepeia, but partly also by the bucolic impersonator, Thyrsis, who believes himself to be living a happy life equal to that of the golden age. Theocritus (or the 0-voice) indirectly and partially reinstates those values by offering a critical perspective on the escapist values that inform bucolic narration. We can therefore appreciate more than Thyrsis does the more valid claims of heroic self-determination that he and Daphnis, in contrary ways, are complicit in slandering—claims previously stated in a lower key in the image of the heroic old fisherman. Hence, Theocritus’s ambivalence is directed both toward the pockets of innocence and self-deception inherent in the sophisticated art of ancient epic and tragedy and toward the same pockets in his bucolic speakers. 98. Segal, Poetry and Myth, 18. 99. On Simichidas’s name, see McKay, ‘‘Pomp and Pastoralia,’’ 183–84. 100. To this extent, one can only agree with the view, most recently expressed by Halperin, that Simichidas is a ‘‘comic persona of Theocritus’’ (Before Pastoral, 245). 101. Personal communication. 102. Throughout this essay, I have tried to mediate between Giangrande’s too strict ethical emphasis on the ironic portrayal of Simichidas and Segal’s tendency to objectify the elements of that portrayal so as to assimilate them into the richly symbolic texture of the Theocritean dialectic. It is the blending of these two emphases that makes it possible to recuperate the meta-pastoral dimension of the poem, its brilliantly ambivalent love and critique of the generic conventions it represents. Speakers in strong pastoral are significant less as ‘‘au-

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tonomous’’ fictive persons than as condensations of the cultural or literary attitudes that speak through them. Nevertheless, if the ethical focus exemplified by Giangrande’s approach is not consistently sustained, it is more difficult to dissociate from the 0-position from which the project of ironic impersonation is launched.

chapter 4. narrative as rhetoric in the faerie queene 1. For C. S. Lewis’s discussion of narrative and rhetoric in Spenser, see, for example, ‘‘Edmund Spenser, 1552–99,’’ in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 143; Spenser’s Images of Life, ed. Alastair Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1–2 (although the whole of his introductory chapter is relevant in its emphasis on the immediacy of visual and iconographic effects); and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 389. In The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), Lewis implies that Spenser’s Italian precursors were racier storytellers than he was (305–6) but that the native and popular elements in The Faerie Queene align its effects with those of ‘‘the Lord Mayor’s show, the chap-book, the bedtime story, the family Bible, and the village church’’ (312). Lewis’s emphasis on the appeal to the child in us and on the resonance of these oral, visual, and homiletic elements lends support to the thesis I will develop in this paper. 2. Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 5–6. 3. Brian Vickers, ‘‘ ‘The Power of Persuasion’: Images of the Orator, Elyot to Shakespeare,’’ in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 412–13, 415. 4. Ibid., 417. 5. Arthur F. Kinney, ‘‘Rhetoric and Fiction in Elizabethan England,’’ in Renaissance Eloquence, 387. 6. Vickers, ‘‘ ‘The Power of Persuasion,’ ’’ 417. 7. Nancy Struever, ‘‘Lorenzo Valla: Humanist Rhetoric and the Critique of the Classical Languages of Morality,’’ in Renaissance Eloquence, 195. 8. Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics; Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986). 9. Kahn, Rhetoric, 20, 23. 10. Ibid., 21–22. 11. Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 426.

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12. Ibid., 55. 13. Paul Alpers, ‘‘Narration in The Faerie Queene,’’ ELH 44 (1977): 22, 24. 14. Paul Alpers, The Poetry of ‘‘The Faerie Queene’’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 5. 15. Stan Hinton, ‘‘The Poet and His Narrator: Spenser’s Epic Voice,’’ ELH 41, (1974): 165–81. See also Kathleen Williams, ‘‘Vision and Rhetoric: The Poet’s Voice in The Faerie Queene,’’ ELH 36 (1969): 131–44. Williams moves uncertainly toward a position similar to Hinton’s, which she states on the final page of the essay, insisting that the different functions (maker, seer, teller, commentator) are aspects of one poet-narrator. 16. Northrop Frye, ‘‘The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene,’’ in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), 74. 17. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 28–30, 168. 18. Walter J. Ong, ‘‘From Epithet to Logic: Miltonic Epic and the Closure of Existence,’’ in Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 198, 202–3. 19. Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), ix. 20. Jerome S. Dees, ‘‘The Narrator of The Faerie Queene: Patterns of Response,’’ Texas Studies in Language and Literature 12 (1970–1971): 537. 21. John Webster, ‘‘Oral Form and Written Craft in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,’’ Studies in English Literature 16 (1976), 75–93. 22. John Webster, ‘‘ ‘The Methode of a Poete’: An Inquiry Into Tudor Conceptions of Poetic Sequence,’’ English Literary Renaissance 11 (1981), 22–43, here 26–29. 23. Lauren Silberman, ‘‘The Faerie Queene, Book II and the Limitations of Temperance,’’ Modern Language Studies 17, no. 4 (1987): 9. The view that Spenser undermines his own allegory in Book II was put with great force by Madelon Sprengnether Gohlke, ‘‘Embattled Allegory: Book II of The Faerie Queene,’’ English Literary Renaissance 8 (1978): 123–40. My debt to Gohlke’s important essay is obvious. 24. Harry Berger, Jr., ‘‘What Did the King Know and When Did He Know It? Shakespearean Discourses and Psychoanalysis,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 811–62. Also in Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 211–50. 25. All citations of Spenser’s text are from Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene,’ ed. J. C. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909), vol. 1. V’s and j’s have been normalized. In the passages of the poem with which I’m concerned, Smith’s preference for the 1596 revisions suits me better than the stricter allegiance to

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the 1590 text shown by the textual editors of Hamilton’s second edition: Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 2d ed., ed. A. C. Hamilton, text edited by Hirasoshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki (Harlow: Longman, 2001). 26. The self-description Phedon gives in his concluding words indicates his aristocratic status: Phedon I hight (quoth he) and do advance Mine ancestry from famous Coradin, Who first to rayse our house to honour did begin. (iv.36)

This responds to Guyon’s question, ‘‘read how thou art nam’d, and of what kin,’’ and informs us that if he was of lower degree than Claribell, as he intimates in stanza 19, he was still ‘‘of noble parentage’’ and may have exaggerated the difference in that stanza. A glance at the narrator’s effusive defense of blueblood values in iv.1 will show that Phedon is an embarrassment to his and Guyon’s class, the ‘‘noble seed’’ who seem to be ‘‘borne by native influence’’ and ‘‘gentle bloud’’ to ‘‘things of valorous pretence’’ and ‘‘brave pursuit of honorable deed.’’ But if Phedon lets Guyon and the narrator down, so does his etymologically subverted ancestor, Coradin, or Impotency of Heart, who may have raised his house to honor before the college of heralds accorded him a certificate of ‘‘gentle bloud.’’ The narrator’s attempt to conflate the criteria of social and ethical superiority merely reflects the romance values of the chivalric epic. But the attempt falls before the demands imposed by the rationale of the allegory of temperance. Social and gender boundaries are metaphorically transgressed by qualities or dispositions associated with villeinage and womanhood, and the knightly class of Book II is riddled with intemperate throwbacks. But class and gender boundaries are persistently redrawn by those metaphors, since they characterize villeinage and womanhood as the source of the moral failings that assault the knights. 27. Alpers, Poetry, 60–61. 28. Silberman, ‘‘Faerie Queene,’’ 13–14. 29. Ibid., 66–67. 30. Stephen Orgel, ‘‘Nobody’s Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 14–15. 31. David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 ‘Faerie Queene’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 168. In a recent review, Donald Cheney expresses doubts about this thesis, arguing that ‘‘the conspicuously ungendered house of Alma may owe its elided genitalia to the fact that it is figuring the human body and not just the male or female body’’ (Spenser Newsletter 20 [1989]: 7). But apart from the statement in stanza 22 that the castle/body includes both feminine and masculine ‘‘proportions,’’ it is clear from the description of Alma’s authority, the functions represented by male figures, the courtly

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negotiations in the heart’s parlor where the two sexes mix and flirt, and the contrast provided by male control of the cognitive turret, that the house figures not only a gendered body, but a body in which power and potential conflict are organized primarily in terms of gender. 32. James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of ‘‘The Faerie Queene’’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 314. 33. Ibid., Analogy, 314–23. 34. Silberman, ‘‘Faerie Queene,’’ 16–18. 35. Miller, Poem’s Two Bodies, 143. 36. Webster, ‘‘ ‘Method,’ ’’ 41, 39. 37. Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979); Donald Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature: Wild Man and Shepherd in ‘‘The Faerie Queene’’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). 38. William J. Kennedy, Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). 39. Not that Kennedy doesn’t do close reading; he does it pretty well. But he does not factor it into his theoretical framework as the source of a legitimate perspective that interacts dialectically with his privileged theoretical perspective. 40. Miller, Poem’s Two Bodies, 12–13. 41. Webster, ‘‘Oral Form,’’ 83. 42. Maurice Bloch, ‘‘Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation, or Is Religion an Extreme Form of Traditional Authority?,’’ European Journal of Sociology 15 (1974): 71. 43. Maurice Bloch, introduction to Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, ed. Maurice Bloch (London: Academic Press, 1975), 9. 44. Bloch, ‘‘Symbols, Song, Dance,’’ 58. 45. Maurice Bloch, ‘‘The Disconnection between Power and Rank as a Process: An Outline of the Development of Kingdoms in Central Madagascar,’’ Archives europe´ennes de sociologie 18 (1977): 128, 138–39. 46. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 179. 47. Ibid., 174. 48. Rejecting the separation of the narrator from his narrative, Alpers insists that the narrator’s comments are not ‘‘intrusions,’’ but ‘‘a continuation of his own discourse,’’ and he claims that if there is irony, ‘‘far from being at the narrator’s expense, it shows the play of his wit’’ (‘‘Narration in The Faerie Queene,’’ 22–25). My view of narrative agency is congruent with this in its structural features, but where Alpers pushes the narrator/narrative unit toward the poet, I propose moving it in the other direction. In other words, Alpers incorporates the unit in the hybrid rhetorico-literary transaction occurring between Spenser and his readers: the ‘‘his’’ in ‘‘his own discourse’’ and ‘‘his wit’’

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both refer to Spenser. For me, on the other hand, the authorial or textual play of wit informs the narrator’s discourse, but it does so in the mode of parody. The object of parody is the rhetoric of storytelling addressed as if to auditors; the play of wit is conspicuous—the sense of witty impersonation is a central feature of my experience of both narrative and narrator, and so I am not inclined to isolate and reify an unreliable speaker. Finally, I think the special verve of this impersonation derives from the frequently displayed tendency of the parody to turn back on itself. For example, in many descriptions of physical conflict, the extravagant epithet-stuffed, hyperbole-crammed displays of enargeia/energeia, inventively if needlessly protracted by elegant and inelegant variation, project a commitment to excess, an unwillingness to leave off, that is too high-spirited not to be interpreted as reflexive mockery. The tonal effect is complex: a narrator who, as I noted earlier, parodies both the chivalric conventions he represents and his own unremitting attachment to them. He simultaneously flags his narrative folly and throws himself into it. 49. Lewis, Allegory of Love, 320–21. 50. Quoted by Angus Fletcher in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1964), 273. 51. Fletcher, Allegory, 273. 52. What Lewis writes of Spenser’s Italian precursors applies as well to Spenser: The pleasure they give ‘‘is not only the pleasure of mockery. Even while you laugh at it, the old incantation works. Willy-nilly the fairies allure, the monsters alarm, the labyrinthine adventures draw you on’’ (Allegory of Love, 299). But in Spenser, the equivalent of the old incantation is not something ‘‘heard’’ in the telling of the story, but something ‘‘worked’’ by deeper and darker tracings of the lineaments of desire and dread, as in the effect of nightmare that Lewis himself discerns in the representation of Maleger (308). 53. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 2d ed., ed. Hamilton, 714, 718. 54. Northrop Frye, Foreword to Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), xi. 55. Harry Berger, Jr., Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 468.

chapter 5. the pepys show note: I’m very grateful to James Nielson, Molly Whalen, and Beth Pittenger for their careful reading of drafts of this essay and for many incisive suggestions that greatly facilitated the task of rewriting 1. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934; New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, l963), 137.

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2. Anne Hollander, ‘‘The Unacknowledged Brothel of Art,’’ Grand Street 6 (1987): 118; quoted by Jonathan Goldberg in Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 203. 3. Jonathan V. Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 70. 4. Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 83. 5. H. Porter Abbott, Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 19. 6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 189. 7. David Ogg, England in the Reign of Charles II, 2d ed. (1956; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 2:737–38. 8. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 5. 9. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), 50. 10. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 20. Whatever the merits of their common insistence on the causal efficacy of state censorship in the seventeenth century, Patterson and Barker deploy the premise in different ways that illustrate the shapes given to historicist and deconstructive interpretation in the 1980s. Patterson precipitates the ‘‘reality’’ of her authors out of a dense texture of historical documentation. Her ‘‘real authors’’ exist outside of their texts; their fears and their strategies of self-censorship are reactions to the known or suspected dangers of state censorship. The ‘‘reality’’ of Barker’s authors runs in the other direction; it is to be sought, beyond the decoding of hidden or subversive messages, in the agency of textual operations: ‘‘As the privatized subject writes, its text is constrained to say more than it knows itself to say, an excess of signification . . . incited, paradoxically, by the censorship which is the governing principle of its discourse’’ (The Tremulous Private Body, 67). In this emphasis on textual reality, Barker’s practice implicitly subscribes to the principle enunciated by Norman Bryson: ‘‘the effect of the real’’ is the product of ‘‘hermeneutic effort’’; because exegesis ‘‘must extract meaning . . . under conditions of difficulty and uncertainty,’’ because ‘‘it must go out of its way to uncover its object,’’ the meanings ‘‘are experienced as found, not made,’’ and ‘‘the effect of the real is enhanced.’’ Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 64. 11. Barker, The Tremulous Private Body, 52. 12. Barker’s identification of the ‘‘disembodied ‘inner self ’ ’’ with the ‘‘I that writes the text’’ is open to question—is indeed placed in question by subsequent

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moves in his analysis, as when he writes of the elision of psychic elements from the writer’s consciousness (59) and of the ‘‘excess of signification’’ that results from self-censorship (67), an excess obviously identical with the elided elements. 13. The reasons for its notoriety, which appear below, are spelled out in James Nielson’s fascinating ‘‘Reading between the Lines: Manuscript Personality and Gabriel Harvey’s Drafts,’’ Studies in English Literature 33 (1993): 47–49. 14. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 90, 88; see 90–91 for a mention of Pepys. 15. Barker’s claims rest on a sparse database, a small sample of texts and images that are, despite his commitment to suspicious reading, selectively and at times tendentiously interpreted. The Tremulous Private Body wavers tonally between a cautionary tale and a jeremiad, the story of ‘‘our subjection,’’ of ‘‘what was done to us in the seventeenth century’’ when we became bourgeois subjects, a fate it may not be too late to ‘‘undo’’ (68, 115). 16. Not to mention all the other entries in which Pepys describes singing and clearly means singing. If there is a connection between singing and fucking, it needn’t be so crude a one as simple displacement. Analysis of the connection would have to detour through the other representations of his body, his health, his appetite for food, and his anxiety about money. And such an analysis would have to respect thematic juxtapositions within single entries as well as a statistical account of juxtapositions—for example, how often does Pepys juxtapose references to sex and to song? 17. Barker, The Tremulous Private Body, 3; quoted from John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys: Selections from the Diaries, ed. James Gibson (London, 1957), 216–17. 18. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, vol. 9, 1668–1669 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 59. Only volumes 10 and 11, the Companion (commentary) and Index, appeared too late—1983— for Barker to consult. A cursory glance through the magnificent introduction in volume 1 (xvii–clii; published in 1970), with special attention to the two sections on the material text and previous editions (xli–xcvi), would have set Barker straight. In effect, he has equated Pepys with a Victorian expurgation of his text and then constructed him as a proto-Victorian, thus producing a fiction of bourgeois continuity. 19. See Diary, 1:xliii–xlv, xcvii–cxiii. 20. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage: In England 1500–1800, abridged ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 334. 21. For a likely source of Barker’s comments on the circumlocution about sex, see Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 20: ‘‘Under the authority of a language that had been carefully expurgated so that it was no longer directly named, sex was taken

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charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed to allow it no obscurity, no respite.’’ 22. Martin Howard Stein, in Diary, 10:179–80, my italics. 23. Pepys’s macaronics ‘‘would hardly have deceived [his wife] Elizabeth had she per impossibile mastered his shorthand and broken the lock under which he kept those dangerous volumes. The only gaze from which he was disguising them was his own’’: Richard Ollard, Pepys: A Biography (1974; New York: Athenaeum, 1984), 96. Of course this assumes that he tried to deceive himself by writing in a cipher he fully understood, which is absurd. 24. ‘‘The forbidding of certain words, the decency of expressions, all the censorings of vocabulary, might well have been secondary devices’’ that morally and technically facilitate ‘‘the task of passing everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech’’ (Foucault, History of Sexuality, 2:21): this may suggest the kind of norm against which—and in terms of which—Pepys displays indecency of expression, for it is this as much as the details of sexual behavior it denotes and pretends to obscure that the lingua franca passages foreground. 25. Ollard, Pepys, 98. 26. It is important to qualify this statement by noting, with Lawrence Stone, that affairs of business and pleasure were closely interrelated—that Pepys was not exceptional in using his official power ‘‘to obtain consent from women for his sexual advances’’ and that both parties could realize practical benefits from strategic submission to sexual pleasure (The Family, Sex, and Marriage, 346, 348). 27. Barker, The Tremulous Private Body, 58, 57. 28. Ibid., 59. 29. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 32. 30. Barker, The Tremulous Private Body, 5. 31. Robert Latham, ed., The Illustrated Pepys: Extracts from the Diary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 9. 32. Ibid., 7. My italics. 33. Why ‘‘this day’s journal only’’? Were there other days still to be entered? 34. And he thinks about victualling while preparing to write the entry. 35. See also the entries for October 26 in the same volume and May 10, 1667 (8:208): ‘‘a sad spectacle . . . which makes my hand now shake to write of it.’’ Of the latter, the editor notes that the ‘‘handwriting is however steady at this point.’’ 36. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 86. 37. Christopher Hill, The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, Volume One: Writing and Revolution in 17th Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 267.

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38. Ibid., 264–66. 39. David Lee Miller, ‘‘The Writing Thing,’’ Diacritics 20 (Winter 1990): 23. 40. I note in passing that if the diary had been written only for the writer’s eyes, there would be no need to add ‘‘the physician’’ to ‘‘Dr. Allen.’’ Pepys has reason to keep his diary secret, not only because he seems intent on documenting his infidelities, but also because he uses it to tell himself truths he would not be likely to tell others, such as the truth of his low opinion of Sir William Penn. But there are many signs that he wants the secret to be discovered—eventually if not immediately—so that the inner Pepys, the real Pepys, may preserve his truth in the medium that replaces his mortal body, the glorified body of shorthand encrypting his mind so that it may be translated, resurrected, revealed. 41. Barker, The Tremulous Private Body, 6. 42. Latham, Illustrated Pepys, 8. 43. Goldberg, Writing Matter, 203–4. 44. Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640–1785 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 14. 45. Personal communication. On inner speech, see L. S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), passim, but especially 44–51 and 135–53. 46. Richard Luckett, Diary, 10:221. Though Luckett acknowledges the stenographic pressures and resultant ellipses ‘‘imposed by the actual keeping of a diary,’’ he goes on to document what he considers evidence of ‘‘the ring of the spoken word’’ (10:221). But his examples of ‘‘the excellencies and intimacies of table talk’’ (10:222) seem theatrical and literary to me, and his subsequent account of the influence of Latin constructions further suggests the attempt to ‘‘sound’’ literary. 47. ‘‘Till now’’ is another floating present: is it the now of writing, or the now of the past moment of espial? 48. Different kinds of entry correlate with different stylistic registers. As Matthews shows, when the diary ‘‘deals with important affairs,’’ the prose is more orotund (1:civ). It aspires to the kind of scriptural authority conveyed by weighty prose that looks literary and polished. Compared with the more stenographic entries, these passages foreground the signs of rewriting and revision; they conjure up a scene of imaginary audition; theirs is the rhetoricity of writing that only pretends to be speaking. 49. Ivan E. Taylor, Samuel Pepys, updated ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1989), 4. 50. As Matthews notes, the style becomes more ponderous when the diary ‘‘is dealing with important public affairs,’’ but these two passages are among those he describes as ‘‘written in rapid, even impetuous language, simple and limited in its sentence patterns . . . innocent of ornament or rhetoric . . . close to ordinary speech,’’ but ‘‘more economical, denser with facts and more elliptical

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than most men’s speaking’’ (1:civ). I have tried to suggest why I think it more elliptical and in that respect not close to ordinary spoken speech. 51. The phrase ‘‘remaynes of our pasty’’ alludes to a similar meeting three days earlier, in the entry for which Pepys writes that he dined on ‘‘the best venison pasty that ever I eat of in my life’’ and anticipated eating the rest of it at the next meeting (1:236). 52. In this entry, the apparent confusion between ‘‘my house’’ and ‘‘home’’ is caused by Pepys’s referring to his former house in Axe Yard. He now lives in the Navy Office in Seething Lane. 53. William Matthews, ed., Charles II’s Escape from Worcester: A Collection of Narratives Assembled by Samuel Pepys (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 12. On Pepys’s activity as a collector of chapbooks—a hobby that engaged him mainly during the 1680s, after the period of the Diary—see Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 129–55 and passim. 54. Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 74. 55. William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (1938; New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 96. 56. John Fuller, publisher’s preface to Samuel Beadle, The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian (1656), sig. b4, r. and v. Quoted from Paul Delaney, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 64. 57. Haller, The Rise of Puritanism, 96; a paraphrase of Beadle. 58. Ibid., 97–100. 59. Ibid., 97. 60. Ibid., 99–100. 61. Ollard, Pepys, 18–19. 62. Paul de Man, ‘‘Autobiography as De-Facement’’ (1979), in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 69. 63. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘‘Dum Scribo,’’ trans. Ian McLeod, Oxford Literary Review 3, no. 2 (1978): 7. 64. Newsweek, March 23, 1992, 21. Thanks to Beth Pittenger for directing my attention to this moving missive. 65. See Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 119–21. 66. There is a nice illustration of this concern in Pepys’s remarkable account of the great fire. He writes that ‘‘all over the Thames, with one’s face in the wind you were almost burned with a shower of Firedrops—this is very true—so as houses were burned by these drops and flakes of fire’’ (7:271, my italics): he is, as it were, soliciting referential productivity from a potentially incredulous reader.

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67. Latham, Illustrated Pepys, 7–8. 68. See Matthews, Escape, 9–12, 36–37.

chapter 6. from body to cosmos 1. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Vintage, 1973), 93. 2. Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is an Author?’’ in Textual Strategies. Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue´ V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 159. 3. Ralph Linton, The Study of Man (New York: Appleton-Century, 1936), 115. 4. Ibid. 5. According to Pierre Bourdieu, There is no need to insist on the function of legitimation of the division of labor and power between the sexes that is fulfilled by a mythico-ritual system entirely dominated by male values. It is perhaps less obvious that the social structuring of temporality which organizes representation and practices, most solemnly reaffirmed in the rites of passage, fulfills a political function by symbolically manipulating age limits, i.e. the boundaries which define age-groups, but also the limitations imposed at different ages. The mythico-ritual categories cut up the age continuum into discontinuous segments, constituted not biologically (like the physical signs of aging) but socially, and marked by the symbolism of cosmetics and clothing, decorations, ornaments, and emblems. . . . Social representations of the different ages of life . . . rank among the institutionalized instruments for maintenance of the symbolic order, and hence among the mechanisms of the reproduction of the social order whose very functioning serves the interests of those occupying a dominant position in the social structure, the men of mature age. (Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977], 165) The emphasis on manipulation and on the diversity of symbolic instruments of representation testifies to the greater fluidity of age in comparison to gender as a signifying category—its less determinate relation to the body, its correspondingly greater openness to imaginary constructions. For a situated discussion of the use of age sets, see Colin M. Turnbull, Man in Africa (Garden City, N.J.: Anchor, 1977), 41–50. 6. David Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 175. 7. Colin Turnbull, Wayward Servants: The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies (Garden City, N.J.: Natural History Press 1965), 268ff. 8. Alfred Kroeber, ‘‘Basic and Secondary Patterns of Social Structure,’’ in Kinship and Social Organization, ed. Paul Bohannan and John Middleton (Garden City, N.J.: Natural History Press, 1968), 297–99.

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9. Ibid., 286. 10. Robert M. Netting, Richard R. Wilk, and Eric J. Arnould, eds., Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xiii. 11. Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, ‘‘Explicating Residence: A Cultural Analysis of Changing Households among Japanese-Americans,’’ in Households, xxix, 331–32. 12. Anthony T. Carter, ‘‘Household Histories,’’ in Households, 45, 49, 52–56. 13. Ibid., 45. 14. Jack Goody, ‘‘The Evolution of the Family,’’ in Household and Family in Past Time, ed. Peter Laslett, with Richard Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 104–5, 119. 15. Kroeber, ‘‘Basic and Secondary Patterns,’’ 297–99. 16. Goody, ‘‘Evolution of the Family,’’ 119. 17. ‘‘Late’’ from the standpoint of the estimated rough length of the career of the species on earth. 18. Kroeber, ‘‘Basic and Secondary Patterns,’’ 297. 19. Maurice Bloch, ‘‘The Long and the Short Term: The Economic and Political Significance of the Morality of Kinship,’’ in The Character of Kinship, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 77. 20. Kroeber, ‘‘Basic and Secondary Patterns,’’ 299. 21. Bourdieu, Outline, 72. 22. Kathleen Gough, ‘‘The Origin of the Family,’’ in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 63, 74. 23. Nancy Munn, Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 21, 27, 214–15. 24. Ibid., 209, 28. 25. Ibid., 220. 26. Ibid., 31. 27. Turnbull, Wayward Servants, 62, 70ff. 28. Ibid., 263. 29. Ibid., 280. 30. Ursula McConnel, Myths of the Munkan (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1957), 18. 31. Ursula McConnel, ‘‘Myths of the Wikmunkan and Wiknatara Tribes: Bonefish and Bullroarer Totems,’’ Oceania 6 (1935): 68, 70. 32. Rodney Needham, ‘‘Genealogy and Category in Wikmunkan Society,’’ Ethnology 1 (1962): 257. 33. Ronald M. Berndt, Australian Aboriginal Religion (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 4:26. 34. David McKnight, ‘‘Men, Women, and Other Animals: Taboo and Purification among the Wik-mungkan,’’ in The Interpretation of Symbolism, ed. Roy Willis (New York: Wiley, 1975), 93.

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35. Ibid., 94. 36. Ibid. 37. Frederick Rose, ‘‘Australian Marriage, Land-Owning Groups, and Initiations,’’ in Man the Hunter, ed. Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore (Chicago: Aldines, 1968), 204, 207–8. 38. Ibid., 207. 39. Ibid., 208. 40. See Aram A. Yengoyan, ‘‘Demographic and Ecological Influences on Aboriginal Australian Marriage Sections,’’ in Man the Hunter, 185–99: see also Maurice Godelier, ‘‘Modes of Production, Kinship, and Demographic Structures,’’ trans. Kate Young and Felicity Edholm, in Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology, ed. Maurice Bloch (London: Malaby Press, 1975), 3–27. 41. Roger Keesing, Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea, ed. Gilbert H. Herdt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 34, 23–24, 22–23. 42. Robert F. Murphy, ‘‘Social Structure and Sex Antagonism,’’ Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 15 (1959): 96–97, 95–96. 43. K. E. and J. M. Paige, The Politics of Reproductive Ritual (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 255, 50. 44. Keesing, Rituals of Manhood, 26. 45. McKnight, ‘‘Taboo and Purification,’’ 94. 46. Murphy, ‘‘Social Structure,’’ 96 47. Bourdieu, Outline, 72. 48. Douglas, Natural Symbols, 12, 100, 36, 99–100. 49. J. H. Baxter and Charles Johnson, Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 31. 50. For a fuller discussion, see pp. 107–8 above. 51. See p. 108 above. 52. Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 96, 102, 313–14. 53. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf, 1964), 20. 54. Ibid., 86, 93. 55. Quoted in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 187. 56. Ellul, Technological Society, 93, 143. 57. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1954), 61. 58. The concept of the domestic mode of production is discussed at great length by Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 41–148.

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59. See Marston Bates, ‘‘Process,’’ in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, ed. William L. Thomas, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 2: 1136–37. 60. George E. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 215–26 and passim.

chapter 7. the lie of the land note: This is a slightly modified version of a lecture delivered at the 1983 meetings of the Humanities Institute, held at the University of Southern California. It is gratefully and affectionately dedicated to my colleague, Norman O. Brown, who taught me how to look at the Old Testament. His were the founding insights that enabled me to write this essay, though their development is my own responsibility. I also want to record my gratitude to Joel Rosenberg and Herbert Schneidau not only for sharing with me their ideas, enthusiasm, and command of a field of scholarship about which I know next to nothing, but also for studies of the Old Testament without whose stimulation and challenge I could not have worked through the thesis contained in these pages. 1. George Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 192 (TG in references cited in the text). 2. Herbert Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 126 (SD in references cited in the text). 3. See, for an especially powerful version, Norman Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 B.C.E. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1979). 4. Walter Brueggemann, ‘‘Trajectories in Old Testament Literature and the Sociology of Ancient Israel,’’ Journal of Biblical Literature 98, no. 2 (1979): 161–85 (T in references cited in the text). 5. This term was suggested to me by Norman O. Brown. 6. Norman O. Brown’s phrase. 7. George Mendenhall, ‘‘ ‘Change and decay in all around I see’: Conquest, Covenant, and The Tenth Generation,’’ Biblical Archaeologist 39 (1976): 152 (CD in references cited in the text). 8. Norman Gottwald, ‘‘Were the Early Israelites Pastoral Nomads?’’ in Rhetorical Criticism: Essays in Honor of James Muilenberg, ed. Jared J. Jackson and Martin Kessler, Pittsburgh Theological Monograph Series, no. 1 (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1974), 93. 9. Personal communication. 10. Gottwald parts company from Mendenhall on this point: Tribes argues for the priority of the sociological over the theological perspective on the relation of Israelite social relations to Yahwist religion.

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11. Brueggemann, ‘‘Trajectories,’’ 164. 12. This boomerang effect is not sufficiently appreciated by Leonard L. Thompson in his otherwise impressive essay, ‘‘The Jordan Crossing: Sidqot Yahweh and World Building,’’ Journal of Biblical Literature 100, no. 3 (1981): 343–58. For Thompson, the story of the Jordan crossing ‘‘marks a qualitative spatial break between wilderness and land, and contrasts the mode of life in each. . . . At the beginning of the story the people are living under Moses at the end of their transient existence in the wilderness; at the end, the people are living under Joshua at the beginning of their landed existence in promised Canaan. The difference between beginning and end is so great that the metamorphosis cannot be managed by human action; the transformation requires Yahweh’’ (355). My argument directly opposes this: What seems to be a difference is a reversal, a repetition, in which the flight from Egypt is represented as a return to Egypt, and Yahweh as superpharaoh performs another mighty deed. 13. On nomadism, see A. M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, trans. Julia Crookenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

chapter 8. social structure as doom note: The authors wish to express their gratitude to Professor Edward B. Irving, Jr., who read the essay and made many helpful suggestions both substantive and editorial. 1. All passages of text quoted from Fr. Klaeber, ‘Beowulf ’ and ‘The Fight at Finnsburg,’ 3rd ed., (Boston: Heath, 1950). 2. Beowulf, trans. E. Talbot Donaldson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 2–3. Future references refer to this translation. 3. R. E. Kaske, ‘‘Sapientia et Fortitudo as the Controlling Theme of Beowulf,’’ in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 285. 4. Ibid., 287. 5. See esp. John Halverson, ‘‘Beowulf and the Pitfalls of Piety,’’ UTQ 35 (1966): 260–78. 6. Edward B. Irving, A Reading of ‘Beowulf ’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 92. 7. Edward B. Irving, Introduction to ‘Beowulf ’ (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1969), 23. 8. With one exception: the treatment of the battle of Ravenswood (cf. Irving, Reading, 189) This statement of the theme, however, is not expanded to the rest of the poem in an operational manner. 9. John Halverson ‘‘The World of Beowulf,’’ ELH 36 (1969): 606–8.

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10. This is because he reads part 1 of the poem primarily as ‘‘the contrast and conflict of two worlds—inside and outside, the world of man and the world of monsters, the world of order and the world of chaos’’ (Halverson, ‘‘The World of Beowulf,’’ 601). This perspective keeps him from exploring the ways in which the major problems are ‘‘inside’’ the world of man, and projected ‘‘outside.’’ 11. Halverson, ‘‘The World of Beowulf,’’ 596–97. 12. Irving, Reading, 90. 13. Marshall Sahlins, Tribesmen (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 7–8. 14. The inadequacy and instability of unextended kinship organization could be exemplified by our First Parents and their feuding sons, and, more perversely, by the Grendel family (in reference to which the term ‘‘unextended’’ is a hyperbole). 15. Klaeber (cvii) speculates that line 73—‘‘buton folcscare ond feorum gumena’’—might be a legalistic addition to the text. If so, this may suggest that Hrothgar’s eagerness to give was felt by at least one scribe as extreme and in need of some editorial constraint. 16. In an odd way, Kaske’s mistaken idea in ‘‘Sapientia et Fortitudo’’ that Hrothgar is being accused of insufficient fortitudo supports our opinion because it presupposes that the aggressive and contentious spirit is essential to survival in the Germanic world and that it is not to be confused with prideful selfassertion. But Hrothgar does not simply depend on ‘‘kingly munificence’’ as one of the ‘‘indifferent substitutes’’ for the fortitudo he lacks: As we have just tried to demonstrate, he embraces it aggressively as a constructive mode of expression, at once glorifying himself, strengthening his dynasty and comitatus, and benefiting others. Hence his liberality is the cause of ensuing violence, rather than an ineffective defense against it. 17. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1967), 72–73. 18. The only use in the poem of the relatively rare word, leon (‘‘lend’’), occurs at line 1456, when Unferth lah his sword to Beowulf. But the general expectation of lean (‘‘reward’’), and the convention of recompense, leanian, makes every gift a loan. 19. In emphasizing Beowulf ’s tact and courtesy, Irving (Reading, 53ff.) seems to us to slight the way this section of the poem is structured to bring out the more aggressive but certainly conventional features of beot and counter-beot. 20. Donaldson, Beowulf, 20. The verbal dual between Beowulf and Unferth is later followed by the loan and return of Hrunting. Although superficially this seems to signify a truce to their bickering, the way both loan and return are

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described (1455ff. and 1807ff.) strongly suggests that the one-sided contest is being continued in the more positive expressive forms of prestation. 21. Irving, Reading, 131. 22. Mauss, The Gift, 62. 23. Irving, Reading, 143. 24. Mauss, The Gift, 79–80. 25. The Danish coast guard’s challenge to the landing Geats early in the poem dramatizes the uneasy watchfulness of Hrothgar’s people and tells us the Danes have potential enemies overseas. See especially 240ff. 26. Irving puts this well, though he makes something else of it: ‘‘what Grendel seems to represent is a rather complex objectification of antiheroic and antisocial forces intimately related by opposition to the positive heroic and social values of the poem, especially as they are embodied in the hero himself ’’ (Introduction, 48). This stresses his function as a counterexemplum—like Heremod—which may be the way the Danes view him. Our emphasis is less on mere objectification than on allegorical displacement of the evil. Both sides of Hrothgar’s activity—giving and taking—are compressed into the word first used to describe his generous intention, gedælde, which appears three times in the poem with two different meanings: to distribute, divide, and share out treasure (71); to sever, as when Grendel mentally gedælde the men in the hall, hoping to divide lives from bodies (731); and, again, to sever, as when the dragonfate approached Beowulf to seek his sawle hord and ‘‘gedælan / lif with lice’’ (2422–23), dividing that treasure not to share it out, but to keep it from use. 27. That is, lines 170–88, where the Danes’ turning in despair to hell and the gastbona is described in such a way as to suggest a Grendelian state: cf. the later passages describing Grendel’s death (756, 805ff., 844ff., 1002ff.). Their sacrifices and inability to praise God may echo passages about the Babylonians in the Book of Daniel, but they may also call to mind the unacceptable offering of Cain—an ideological, if not a verbal analogue. 28. Irving, Reading, 93. 29. Ibid., 111. 30. Irving, Introduction, 48. 31. Kaske, ‘‘Sapientia et Fortitudo,’’ 280. 32. In context, this epithet is immediately proleptic in effect, but it also strikes us as generally descriptive. 33. Irving, Introduction, 111. 34. Ibid. 35. Cf. Irving, Reading, 93–94, 96, 111. 36. For example, the Danish scop’s praise of Beowulf developed as a contrast between the good dragon killer Sigemund and the evil Heremod. The point of

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Beowulf ’s connection with the former is apparently, for the scop and the Danes, that both are slayers of monsters. Just which of the elements of the enormously complex Sigemund-Volsung-Sigfrid-Nibelung saga the poet could have expected his audience to know we cannot say, but we may assume that the juxtaposition with Heremod controls the area of reference, and what we then notice is that by concentrating on the difference in lof between the two exemplars, the scop slides over the similarities in their ends in darkness and betrayal. Though passing and unfocused reference is made to the wider context of Sigemund’s tangled career (Wæls, Fitela, and ellendædum, uncues fela [876]) the scop’s focus makes what is traditionally the beginning of the hero’s great deeds sound like the culmination of them, and therefore conspicuously excludes the darker elements of kin-strife, the curse on the hoard, etc., that were his later fate. 37. At 129, 640, 703, 729, 741, 1251, 1280, 1580, and, less directly, 85 (which suggests that the feud-rage between Hrothgar and Ingeld still sleeps). 38. Irving, Reading, 121. 39. It is interesting that among the possible etymologies for Grendel that Klaeber lists (‘Beowulf,’ xxviii–xxix), one derives from ‘‘*grand,’’ (‘‘sand,’’ ‘‘bottom [ground] of a body of water’’). The other possibilities—’’grind,’’ ‘‘evil,’’ ‘‘bolt’’ or ‘‘bar,’’ and ‘‘storm’’ or ‘‘bellow’’—maybe combined with the first in a Spenserian mock etymology to suggest the darker characteristics that lie at the root of what it means to be a man: the spirit of contentiousness, the capacity for angry and cruel violence, the dread yet need of others, the pain that erupts in vengeance. These potencies are most fully transformed in the figure of the hero, but their raw power is occasionally glimpsed. They are less fully transformed in the other institutions of heroic society. 40. That is, as our previous discussion of Grendel suggests, the monster has close connections with the family of man and, more specifically, with the social institutions of the beleaguered Danes. 41. Halverson, ‘‘The World of Beowulf,’’ 606. 42. The phrase ‘‘to gemyndum minum leodum’’ (2804) is not unambiguous. Beowulf could mean that the barrow will be a memorial for surviving Geats to see when they sail by. Irving reads it this way (Reading, 233 ff.) and Donaldson’s translation, ‘‘as a reminder to my people’’ (49), while noncommittal, implies a similar understanding. But the phrase could just as easily be read as a double dative, ‘‘for a memorial to my people,’’ which suggests that Beowulf foresees his barrow as the most enduring monument to the Geatish people after they have perished or dispersed. Even if the hero means the first, the poem ‘‘chooses’’ the second meaning. 43. Halverson, ‘‘The World of Beowulf,’’ 607. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid.

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46. Klaeber, ‘Beowulf,’ xlvi–xlviii. 47. Beowulf ’s comments on the probable doom of the Freawaru-Ingeld union have often been praised for their political astuteness. But they might as easily be viewed within the context of his own childlessness and the lack of reference to any wife or immediate kin outside of Hygelac and Wiglaf. Perhaps the puzzling reference to Offa is meant to suggest an ‘‘ideal of kingship’’ more responsible to the needs of history, less singular and mythic, than that exemplified in Beowulf ’s career. Offa was not only brave in war and gift-giving, widely honored and wise; he domesticated and redeemed a cruel wife and left an heir. Kemp Malone was led by the Thrytho-Offa vignette to wonder why the poet chose Beowulf rather than Offa as his hero and decided it was because the poet ‘‘found spiritual values in Beowulf ’s monster-quelling which he could not find in Offa’s man-[and woman-] quelling.’’ Malone quaintly remarks that Offa ‘‘proved master of the situation at home as well as on the field of battle’’ (Kemp Malone, ‘‘Beowulf,’’ in Anthology, 148–49). These qualities may be meant to accentuate Beowulf ’s singularity by contrast. 48. Irving, Introduction, 12. 49. Halverson, ‘‘The World of Beowulf,’’ 606. 50. See the fine discussion by Irving in Reading, 179–91 and 198–205. 51. Significantly, the only other use of breosthord comes in a reference to another hoarder, Heremod (1719), though once again the irrelevance of the ethical failure of Heremod should be noted. 52. Irving notes that the dragon is described as a stingy king, in contrast to the generous Beowulf (Reading, 209). But again, stinginess as a defect of will, an ethical failure, is not the problem, and at the deeper level, where Beowulf and the dragon interchange qualities, ‘‘stinginess’’ might be used as an inept— because ethical—metaphor to describe the inability of the singular hero to communicate or share his breasthoard. 53. Irving, Reading, 208, 232. 54. Ibid., 214, 55. Ibid., 192 ff. 56. Some phrases after Hrothgar’s sermon have an ominous ring: the reference to nightfall (1789b–90) and to the sleeping guest and blithe-hearted raven (1800b–1802). Beowulf ’s careful lie to Unferth sustains the sense of an uneasy atmosphere never fully secure in spite of the hero’s triumph. In his report to Hygelac, he amplifies the account of Grendel’s seizure of the Geatish victim, and his brief image of Hrothgar stresses the old king’s age and nostalgia. In all these ways, the superficial character of the happy ending is framed in darker retrospects and anticipations. 57. Irving, Reading, 179, 189. 58. Ibid., 188.

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59. Ibid., 234. 60. Ibid., 245–46.

chapter 9. fiction and facticity 1. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 23. The critique of Clark that appears in the following pages reproduces material published in my Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 435–37, and in my ‘‘Second-World Prosthetics: Supplying Deficiencies of Nature in Renaissance Italy,’’ in Early Modern Visual Culture, ed. Clark Hulse and Peter Erickson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 138–40. 2. Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (1989; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 13–14. 3. Clark, The Nude, 23, 25, 26. 4. Miles, Carnal Knowing, 14. 5. Clark, The Nude, 439. 6. Ibid., 23–24. 7. Ibid., 27. 8. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 5–6, my italics. 9. Clark, The Nude, 400–403. 10. Ibid., 400. 11. Ibid., 400–435. Though Clark describes it as a convention that applies to men and women, most of his comments and illustrations focus on the development of the female of this Gothic species. 12. Ibid., 407. 13. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 442. 14. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Technologies of the Self,’’ in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: The University of Msssachusetts Press, 1988), 18. 15. Brown, ‘‘The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity,’’ Representations 2 (1983): 1, 20–21. 16. Brown, Body and Society, 444. 17. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 222, 236, 202, 296, 182–83, 223. Though Bynum’s studies focus on gender and women’s history, they sympathetically but critically engage the more general and gender-blind arguments of an older tradition of historical interpretation. Her insistence that medieval discourses emphasize a notion of personhood in which body and soul are intimately fused and the body is thus ideologically redeemed without being

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idealized accords with the scholarly consensus about the broad influence of creationist and incarnational anthropology on the Christian polemic against Platonist, Neoplatonist, and Gnostic forms of asceticism. In the consensus view, the powerful strain of Christian realism that developed from this polemic united the thought of figures as diverse as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Bynum’s revisionism consists in claiming that the resurrection debate ‘‘revolved not around a soul/body contrast . . . but around the issue of bodily continuity’’ and in arguing that this issue was central not only to the scholarly debates, but also to the religious practices and popular piety of the thirteenth century (253– 54). Perhaps the most important points in her critique of the conventional wisdom are that Aristotelian hylomorphism as elaborated by Aquinas was not ‘‘a victory over dualism’’ (as has often been argued), but a threat to the realist or somatocentric position, and that ‘‘it was those with the sharpest sense of body/soul conflict and the most ferocious ascetic practices . . . who had the clearest and most passionate awareness of the potential of the body to reveal the divine’’ (255–56). 18. Ibid., 254. 19. Brown, Body and Society, 49. 20. Miles, Carnal Knowing, 25, 29–30. 21. Ibid., 30–31. The phrase in quotes is a reference to Foucault’s account of technologies of the self. 22. Ibid., 44–45. 23. ‘‘Christian apostolic and patristic writings support [Jonathan Z.] Smith’s claim that early Christianity shared both Judaism’s horror of nakedness and its insistence on naked baptism. Smith interprets naked baptism in the light of catacomb depictions of naked figures in which they symbolize new life and represent a present sign of the promised resurrection of the body’’ (Miles, Carnal Knowing, 34). In a characteristic example of ritual redundancy, the promise of access to the benefits both of incarnation and of resurrection are embedded in the practice of naked baptism. 24. Miles, Carnal Knowing, 40. 25. The threat posed by the precursor that refuses to remain remaindered has been exhaustively investigated by Harold Bloom in his applications of Oedipal conflict theory to literary history. Jacques Derrida sublates the problematic of the remainders produced by the Aufhebung in his interpretations of the logics of diffe´rance and supplementarity. On the general Derridean response to the problematic of the Aufhebung, see the illuminating footnote by Alan Bass in his translation of Derrida’s ‘‘Diffe´rance,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 19–20. For Derrida’s reading of the Hegelian concept via his Aufhebung of Bataille’s reading of the concept, see ‘‘From General to Restricted Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,’’ in

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Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 251–77. For a brilliant discussion of the aufgehoben as remainder in literary history, see Julia Lupton, Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), xvii–xxiii and passim. 26. Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 19. 27. The danger is structurally identical to that posed by the Montanist heresy. 28. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 47. 29. Ibid., xxi. 30. For an account of these genres see H. Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints: An Introduction to Hagiography, trans. V. M. Crawford (1907; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961). 31. Heffernan, Sacred Biography, 25, my italics.

chapter 10. facing sophists 1. H. N. Fowler’s translation of Theaetetus (Loeb Classical Library), substantially modified (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). 2. Plato, Protagoras, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York, Pantheon Books, 1961). Unless otherwise noted, future translations of the Protagoras will be drawn, and often altered, from one or more of the following sources: Guthrie, Protagoras; Plato: Protagoras, trans. C. C. W. Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); and Plato, vol. 11, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library (1924; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). 3. The same verb is used in 317c to mean ‘‘show off ’’ (kallo¯pisasthai) and in 333d to indicate the appearance of coyness or mock modesty (ekallopizeto). The two senses are closely connected aspects of the rhetoric of performance. 4. Cf. the interesting comments by Alexandre Koyre´ in Discovering Plato, trans. Leonora Cohen Rosenfield (1945; New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 18–19. 5. Terence Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory: The Early and Middle Dialogues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 104. 6. Protagoras, 352d, 352e, 353a–b. 7. Plato: Protagoras, 209. 8. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, rev. ed. (New York: Viking, 1968), 244. 9. At 329d, Socrates asks Protagoras whether the parts (moria) of arete¯ are related ‘‘in the sense of the parts of a face, as mouth, nose, eyes, and ears; or, as in the parts of gold, none of which differs from any other or from the whole

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except in greatness or smallness?’’ At 330a, he repeats the question with respect to the powers, dynameis, of the parts of virtue, this time curtailing and etceterating his enumeration of facial parts, naming only the eye and the ear. Of the fifteen times proso¯pon, ‘‘face,’’ appears in the dialogues (or at least in Brandwood’s Word Index), eight occur in the Protagoras, seven in connection with this analogy. Proso¯pon—countenance, front, mask, dramatic character, what not only has eyes, but is before the eyes—is a significant image, a synecdoche not only of the body and its visibility, but also of charismatic and logocentric power. To define the particular aretai and their dynameis in terms of the parts of the face and their functions is to define them as ‘‘parts’’ and powers of the visible, audible presence. Arete¯ as ‘‘face’’ is the arete¯ of public performance, of self-concealment and self-presentation. That Protagoras chooses to define the parts of arete¯ in terms of the face rather than on terms of gold implies his commitment to arete¯ as a techne¯ of saving face. 10. Plato, Protagoras, trans. Benjamin Jowett and Martin Ostwald, ed. Gregory Vlastos (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), xxix.

chapter 11. phaedrus and the politics of inscription note: This is a revised and much expanded version of an essay with the same title published in Textual Fidelity and Textual Disregard, ed. Bernard P. Dauenhauer (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 81–103. 1. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’’ in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 149. 2. Ibid., 159. 3. Plato, Theaetetus, in Theaetetus, Sophist, trans. H. N. Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1921) 161b; see 149b–151d for the discussion of midwifery, or maieutics. 4. My translation, though some of my word choices were influenced by the following translators: H. N. Fowler in volume 1 of the Loeb Classical Library bilingual editions of the dialogues (l914; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 565–67; R. Hackforth, Plato’s ‘‘Phaedrus’’ (1952; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 158; and C. J. Rowe, Plato: ‘‘Phaedrus,’’ 2d ed. (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1988), 125. Future translations from the Phaedrus rely mainly on Fowler, with some help from Hackforth, but I haven’t hesitated to vary or ignore their renderings in order to get closer to particular meaning effects in the Greek text. 5. See the hilarious and scintillating speculations on this theme in Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

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6. Gregory Vlastos, ‘‘Socrates’ Disavowal of Knowledge,’’ Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1985): 8–9. 7. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 218. 8. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 141. 9. Ibid., 93– 94. 10. Plato, Republic, 377a, 382d, 382c, 377a–b, 378e. Translation based on that of Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 54–60, but freely revised; choice of words occasionally influenced by the translation of Paul Shorey for the Loeb Classical Library Republic, revised edition (1937; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953). 11. See Chapter 10 above. 12. Plato, Protagoras, 323a–c. On aido¯s as a species of deos (fear, anxiety), see Euthyphro, 12a–c. 13. Plato, Protagoras, 325c–326b. My translation, though I have consulted those by W. R. M. Lamb and C. C. W. Taylor in the Loeb Classical Library and the Clarendon Plato series, respectively. 14. Protagoras 329a. 15. ‘‘The Canon,’’ trans. J. Chadwick and W. N. Mann, in Hippocratic Writings, ed. G. E. R. Lloyd, rev. ed, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), 68. 16. Hippocratic Writings, 238–39, 83. 17. See Ronna Burger, Plato’s ‘‘Phaedrus’’: A Defense of a Philosophic Art of Writing (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 84–86, for a different but not sharply enough focused account of the limits of the medical analogy. 18. In this connection, it is interesting that Akoumenos is thrice mentioned in the Phaedrus (227a, 268a, 269a)—interesting for me, at least, because when the name is shifted from a proper to a common noun, it functions as a comment on both the knowledge and the reputation of doctors: akoumenos, ‘‘knowing by hearsay’’ and ‘‘being known by hearsay.’’ Reincorporating the common property in the referent of the proper noun personifies the unreliability, the sophistry, of medical discourse and allows one to imagine the genealogy of its transmission from father to son to paidika. I am grateful to my colleague Daniel Selden for help on this point. 19. I discuss this topic at greater length in ‘‘Plato’s Flying Philosopher,’’ The Philosophical Forum 13 (1982): 385–407. 20. See Burger, Plato’s ‘‘Phaedrus,’’ 84 and 144 n. 34. See also Socrates’ Anaxagorean parody at 246b–d: The fully winged soul ‘‘mounts upward and governs the whole world’’—meteo¯roporei te kai panta ton kosmon dioikei—but when it loses its wings, it falls and takes hold of a body. This Icarian trajectory resembles that

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of the fate of Anaxagoras’s (theory of ) nous in the Phaedo. See ‘‘Plato’s Flying Philosopher,’’ 393–96. At Phaedrus 246e, Zeus becomes the Anaxagorean placeholder: the megas hegemo¯n in the sky goes first, diakosmo¯n panta kai epimeloumenos (‘‘ordering and managing all things’’). 21. Burger, Plato’s ‘‘Phaedrus,’’ 88–89. 22. Plato, Laws 810e–811a, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1926). 23. Plato, Laws, 656c–657b, quoted passages from the translation of Thomas L. Pangle, The Laws of Plato (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 36–37. 24. Plato, Timaeus, trans. R. G. Bury, in Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952). 25. In the Timaeus, when Critias promises—or threatens—to tell about the ancient Athenian exploit (against Atlantis) that he learned from his grandfather, who learned it from his father, who learned it from Solon, Socrates tartly responds, ‘‘Excellent! But come now [alla de¯], just what was this exploit described by Critias [the grandfather] following Solon’s akoe¯n [report or hearsay] as a thing not verbally recorded although actually performed by this city long ago’’ (21a, Bury’s translation modified). This response rings with the same skeptical irony as the statement to Phaedrus. The Timaeus and Critias bring out the affinity between Egyptian and Eupatrid values and strategies lurking in the background of this section of the Phaedrus. Critias continues by describing the occasion on which he heard Solon’s Egyptian tale: the Koureo¯tis, the day during the Dionysian festival of the Apatouria on which newly born male children of Eupatrid fathers were enrolled in the clan. The ceremony gave the elders an opportunity to inscribe older sons with ‘‘family values’’ by having contests in recitation in which ‘‘many poems of many poets were recited’’ and, ‘‘since the poems of Solon were at that time new, many of us children chanted them’’ (21b). After finishing his account of how he went about recovering the true story he had heard many years ago in that initiatory context, Critias exclaims on the truth of the old saying ‘‘that what we learn in childhood has a wonderful hold on the memory,’’ for the story ‘‘the old man was eager to tell me is stamped indelibly on my mind like an encaustic painting’’ (27b). The graphe¯ has been imprinted by fire so that it can’t be washed out by water (enkaumata anekplytou), and it is destruction by water that most threatens the continuity and accomplishments of ancestral rule, bypassing the illiterate rustics in the mountains, but sweeping away the lower-lying urban centers of culture and aristocracy (22b–23d) like Atlantis and the Old Athenian warrior community. Critias’s tale of Atlantis is a symbolic reenactment, an attempt by an embittered Eupatrid to restore the lost power and glory of predemocratic Athens. The whole episode vividly dramatizes what is behind Socrates’ comment and Egyptian tale in the Phaedrus. For more on the Critias, see Chapter 12 below.

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Phaedrus has just enthusiastically endorsed as pankalo¯s Socrates’ advice to Tisias that the wise man will practice the art of rhetoric primarily in order to be able to please the gods; he should strive to please ‘‘not his fellow slaves, except as a secondary consideration, but his good and noble masters’’ (273e– 274a), and this locution—alla despotais agathois te kai ex agatho¯n—is standard Socratic code for new and old agathoi and would-be tyrants (see, for example, Euthyphro 14a–15d). A few interchanges later, Socrates prefaces his Egyptian tale by asking Phaedrus whether he knows how to act or speak about logoi so as best to please god, and it is then that he says he has heard something on the subject from to¯n protero¯n, ‘‘but whether it is true, they only know. But if we ourselves should find this out, should we care any longer for human opinions?’’ (274c), for, presumably, we should have made ourselves gods and other humans our slaves. The rhetoricians and sophists admired by Phaedrus, and especially Tisias, on whom Phaedrus is an expert, could not find a better way to make their dream of inscriptive power come true than to study the career and teachings of Thamus, the king who became a god and whom Protagoras might well number among the disguised sophists of ancient times. For Critias and Thamus—and for Phaedrus, who was hoping at the beginning of the dialogue to exercise his memory by reciting Lysias’s speech—authoritative truth is constituted by the domination and dominance of memory: its domination and appropriation by institutionalized despotism and its dominance not only as a mode of reception that validates its contents as ‘‘received knowledge, wisdom, truth,’’ etc., but also as a rhetorical mode, since to produce the effect of memory is a standard strategy for naturalizing or authorizing whatever logoi one wants to put into play. Finally, a word about G. R. F. Ferrari’s interesting and sophisticated argument that the myth is about the cause of the loss of the innocence that would make it possible to accept the myth at face value and believe its truth (Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato’s ‘‘Phaedrus’’ [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 214–22). Implicit, but not stressed in Ferrari’s balanced interpretation of the mechanical and ethical relations of speech and writing is the thesis that the emergence and awareness of inscription as logography is an important factor in destroying ‘‘the innocence of an earlier age’’ that Socrates values because of its ‘‘unconcern with questions of pedigree and status where this is irrelevant to truth’’ (217). But what Ferrari fails to consider is that this Socratic ‘‘ideal’’ is itself represented as a naturalized fiction, a tale of bygone innocence thinly enough disguised as a deposit of memory for Phaedrus to complain that ‘‘you easily make up stories of Egypt or any country you please’’ (275b). Socrates replies that to Phaedrus, unlike the innocents of old, ‘‘it makes a difference who the speaker is and where he comes from, for you do not consider only whether or not his words have truth’’ (275b–c). Ferrari argues that although this admoni-

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tion seems disingenuous because in Socrates’ day, ‘‘considerations of pedigree’’ do matter, it nevertheless ‘‘offers the best means of both incorporating and going beyond the lost simplicity of that earlier time,’’ for it enables Socrates ‘‘both to enunciate and to put into action the very ideal that the people of oak and rock themselves exhibited, but could not enunciate’’—because, as he had noted earlier, ‘‘pedigree and truth had not yet been sundered in their society’’ (217–18). Yet the ideal Ferrari attributes to Socrates and unwittingly hints at in the preceding statement is that pedigree is and determines truth. For what criterion governed the ancients who were ‘‘content in their simplicity to hear an oak or a rock, provided only that it spoke the truth’’ (275b–c)? The criterion is location in a holy shrine: ‘‘those at the sanctuary of Zeus of Dodona said the words of an oak were the first prophetic utterances’’ (275b, trans. Rowe). A myth, Ferrari states, ‘‘is just a story that has been accepted on the grounds of pedigree and tradition . . . rather than truth’’ (217); rather, it has been accepted on those grounds as truth, the truth placed in the god’s mouth by the human medium through whom speak those with the power to construct and ventriloquize the gods. For Phaedrus to accept Socrates’ rebuke is to betray his commitment to, his respect for, his fear and desire of, the new criteria of pedigree, status, and tradition that dominate public opinion: the logographic criteria that establish the rhetorician as the modern purveyor or mystifier of truth, heir to the oracle, the oak, the rock, and the god. 26. Plato, Timaeus, 22c–23b. 27. See Burger Plato’s ‘‘Phaedrus,’’ 146, nn. 14 and 20. For a compact description of the priestly role, see Helmut von den Steinem, ‘‘Plato in Egypt,’’ Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts of the Fouad I University Faculty of Letters (Cairo) 13 (1951): 116–18, 123. Von den Steinem distinguishes ordinary writing from hiera grammatica— hieroglyphs—in an effort to reconcile the difference between this passage and the priest’s interests in the written work in the Timaeus. This at least has the virtue of reminding us that if Plato had seen hieroglyphs, he could have considered them in the category of visual art and seen them as obscurantist symbols serving the political purposes of the priests. The hieroglyphs, von den Steinem writes, ‘‘bear in themselves mystical powers, that is, they can be interpreted only by priests who are inspired from mouth to mouth, from living soul to living soul through cosmic knowledge’’ (123). Von den Steinem finds Plato in sympathy with this. My view is that the author gives a very clear statement of an ideology that Plato represents as the enemy with which Socrates contends. 28. Plato, Philebus, 18b–c. 29. Inventions and/or discoveries: Between 273b and 275a, some form or compound of heuriskein appears seven times: two refer to the art of Tisias, one to the activity of the ‘‘true’’ rhetorician, one to Socrates and Phaedrus, and four to the works of Theuth. The puzzle about the term is that it bears the contrary

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meanings of ‘‘to discover’’ and ‘‘to create or invent.’’ Those who claim to know the truth and discover likenesses already in existence can point to something beyond themselves—perhaps the god in whose name the discovery as such is authorized. Those who want to claim such authority for their own inventions can rename them discoveries—unless, of course, they are or proclaim themselves gods, in which case the difference between invention and discovery falls away. 30. Derrida, ‘‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’’ 134. 31. Derrida and Burger identify the legitimate logos with Platonic writing. Burger argues that Plato represents the limits of Socrates’ commitment to oral discourse and the limits of the appreciation of writing that commitment causes, but that the Platonic dialogue also acknowledges its own limitations as writing (99). Substantially the same position is argued by Charles L. Griswold, Jr. in Self-Knowledge in Plato ‘s ‘‘Phaedrus’’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Burger and Griswold both insist that Plato’s dialogues transcend the limits of writing specified in the Phaedrus and become bearers of the true logos. Griswold asserts that ‘‘Plato’s dialogues themselves recant their authority as written in order to return the reader to the life of ensouled discourse’’ (225). In Burger’s view, the ‘‘Platonic defense of dialectic writing against Socrates’ apparent commitment to the ero¯s of living speech is established through the ‘internalizable’ written logoi which point to the dangers of the written word’’ (109). The point is interestingly argued by both authors, and the only problem is that they both avoid the implications of the inscription metaphor. Burger’s term, ‘‘internalizable’’ doesn’t mean the same as ‘‘inscribed,’’ while Griswold’s ‘‘life of ensouled discourse’’ would emit a less airy resonance if it had been ‘‘life of inscribed discourse.’’ 32. Plato, Theaetetus, 160b–c, my italics. 33. Derrida, ‘‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’’ 167. 34. See Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas, 91–95. It should be noted that Lysias’s speech in effect praises the power of the beloved. The so-called passive partner, the object of predation and penetration, is not only the speaker’s quarry, but also the father of his logos. The speech celebrates the beloved’s mastery over his lovers in what is actually mutual seduction. The beloved inspires the madness that the speaker describes as well as the deception that he perpetrates. This is worth mentioning because Phaedrus positions himself both in this dialogue and in the Symposium as a beloved. In the Symposium, as Griswold notes (19), he is called the father of the logos by his lover Eryximachus, and his own speech is a defense of the primacy of the beloved. Socrates plays on the paradoxical interchange of passive and active roles between lover and beloved throughout the dialogue, and he does so for what should by now be an obvious reason: the interchange is a bipolar version of the circle of inscription. 35. Ferrari points out that Plato has Socrates ‘‘correct the age of the beloved to whom the speech is addressed: ‘there was once a boy (pais)—or rather, a

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young man (meirakiskos) . . . ’ ( 237b2). The ethical stance in Socrates’ speech is more suitable for one who is old enough to appreciate a principled resistance to pleasure, where Lysias’s nonlover appeals only to a relatively childish scheming towards the maximum of selfish satisfaction’’ (253). 36. Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas, 99. 37. See especially ibid., 96–99. He makes the important observation that Socrates’ speaker differs from Lysias’s in that his speech manifests self-hate (98). This insight, which I find substantiated by the text, strikingly qualifies one’s impression of the speech: Socrates’ lip-smacking excoriation of lovers as a host of pleonectic marauders becomes not only a strategic act of self-concealment, but also, and hiding behind that disguise, a voyeuristic act of self-flagellation. 38. Hackforth, Plato’s ‘‘Phaedrus,’’ 129. 39. Lysias is famous especially for writing speeches to be delivered in court cases (forensics) and public assemblies (deliberative). Most of his extant speeches fall in the first category and in public cases occasioned for the most part by the political struggles taking place at the end of the fifth century in Athens. He is mentioned in the dialogue as the son of Cephalus, the old man in whose house the discussion reported in the Republic takes place. Cephalus and his family appear to have been resident aliens who did not have rights of citizenship, but did have privileges denied other aliens. Ferrari notes the irony of the situation in which, excluded by his status from direct participation in politics, he devoted most of his professional activity to writing speeches for others: ‘‘Lysias the professional in court—just as he is the voice concealed beneath Phaedrus’s cloak—cannot appear in that forum even when the summons is directed to him in person’’ (228). (An exception to this occurred when he was briefly granted citizenship after the overthrow of the thirty tyrants, and at this time he delivered one speech in person.) He can only exercise his art and arguments through others, but this constraint is a source of power; at the same time, the fact that he was so successful indicates that he knew how to appeal to, how to reflect and imitate, the sentiments of the many who comprised the juries and deliberative assemblies. 40. As K. J. Dover puts it, love—philia, not ero¯s—’’inspired by admiration and gratitude towards the erastes, coupled with compassion, induces the eromenos to grant the ‘favors’ and perform the ‘services’ which the erastes so obviously and passionately desires.’’ Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 53. See also David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990), 75–151. 41. Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas, 6. 42. When Socrates mockingly imitates Phaedrus’s reaction to the speech he is reading, he says ‘‘I am dumbstruck because, looking at you, I saw that you were gladdened by the speech as you read. So . . . I, following, shared in the

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frenzy with you, the divine head’’ (234e). I translate the idiom, te¯s theias kephale¯s, literally in order to bring out Socrates’ innuendo: a transmission of enthusiasm, similar to that described in the Ion, is here superimposed on the circle of inscription. From Lysias’s divine head, the words flowing like wine gladden and stimulate his votary. This means that the effect of Lysias’s writing on Phaedrus is precisely what the nonlover’s speech condemns. The anonymous ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘you’’ of the written discourse converge with Lysias and Phaedrus. The former’s words have unstrung their speaker and made him the medium of further conquests. Thus, the dissembling lover’s seduction of his auditor is enacted in a recitation that aims to pass the spell on to the next auditor, a confessed ‘‘lover of logos.’’ What began as a text and a fiction invades actuality when it is embodied, reincorporated, by speakers and auditors. 43. Griswold, Self-Knowledge, 28, 29. 44. Alexander Sesonske, ‘‘Plato’s Apology: Republic I,’’ Phronesis 6 (1961): 35–36. 45. C. J. Rowe, ‘‘The Argument and Structure of Plato’s Phaedrus,’’ Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 212, n.s. 32 (1986): 120. 46. See Griswold, Self-Knowledge, 55, for an astute account of the meaning of Socrates’ hiding his head in his cloak. 47. Hackforth, Plato’s Phaedrus, 160, n.3. 48. See my ‘‘Plato’s Flying Philosopher,’’ 400–406. 49. Griswold, Self-Knowledge, 217. 50. Derrida, ‘‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’’ 153–54.

chapter 12. the athenian terrorist note: This essay was extracted from a book-length manuscript on Plato’s Timaeus, Critias, and Charmides. Provisionally entitled Plato’s Portrait of Critias, it was completed, except for a chapter (or two) on the figure of Timaeus, during the late 1970s. I returned to it occasionally in the next decade or so to make occasional revisions, but after that I put it aside for other projects. During that period, I moved several times, and on one of those relocations I seem to have lost the original draft of notes for the book. I didn’t get back to the project until 2003, when I decided to adapt some of the Critias material for a possible lecture on the menu I offered to the universities I visited that year as a Phi Beta Kappa scholar. There were no takers. There were also no notes. The present chapter is a slightly revised and expanded version of that lecture. I managed to recuperate a few of the original notes, but many remain lost among the elision marks that signal the unending of Critias’s story and fill the broken sentences of my life, any life . . . Since page and column citations from the Stephanus text usually appear without the dialogue title, I give the numerical boundaries here: Timaeus, 17a to 92e; Critias, 106a to 121e.

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1. W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 298. 2. Plato, Epistle VII, 324d–325a, in Plato, Epistles, trans. Glenn R. Morrow (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 19692), 216. 3. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), 368–69. 4. W. G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy, 800–400 b.c. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 163. 5. Ibid., 161. 6. Gregory Vlastos, ‘‘Isonomia,’’ American Journal of Philology 74, no. 4 (1953): 337–66. 7. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy, 58. 8. Francis MacDonald Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology (New York: Humanities Press, 1952), 14. 9. Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s ‘Meno’ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 253. 10. Loeb Classical Library translation by R. G. Bury, in Plato, vol. 4 (1929; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 277–79. Later citations from this translation will appear in the text. 11. Eric Voegelin, Plato (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 206. 12. Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, ‘‘Plato’s Atlantic Myth: Timaeus or Critias?’’ The Phoenix 10 (1956): 166. 13. Homer, The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), i.32–34, p. 28. 14. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, trans. Bernard Frechtman (1948; New York: Washington Square Press, 1968), 228–29.

chapter 13. making interpretation manageable 1. That is, just as Caliban is Prospero’s scapegoat, the so-called ‘‘colonialist’’ Prospero is the scapegoat of the play’s anticolonialist critics, who identify Prospero’s stance with that of the play. They fail to see that the text of The Tempest already contains a more general critique of Prospero, part of which is aimed at his attitude toward and treatment of Caliban. 2. The example is from the American Heritage Dictionary, third edition. 3. John A. Allan, ‘‘Dogberry,’’ Shakespeare Quarterly 24 (1973): 41. 4. Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), 63–64. For an interesting alternative reading of Dogberry and Verges see Chris Stroffolino, ‘‘Radical Dogberry,’’ in Spin Cycle (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2001), 9–24.

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5. Jacques Lacan, ‘‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,’’ E´crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1–7. 6. Franc¸ois Roustang, ‘‘A Philosophy for Psychoanalysis?,’’ trans. Terry Thomas, Stanford Literature Review 6 (1989): 175. 7. Lacan’s idiom is donner a` voir: to give (oneself ) to be seen (by the others, the Other, before whom or which one is always aware of performing). 8. Joan Copjec, ‘‘The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan,’’ in Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 37. Originally published in October 49 (Summer 1989): 53–71. 9. Romans 7:7. In the Geneva Bible: ‘‘For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sinnes, which were by the Law, had force in our membres, to bring forth frute unto death. . . . What shal we say then? Is the Law sinne? God forbid. Nay, I knewe not sinne, but by the Law: For I had not knowen lust, except the Law had said, Thou shalt not lust’’ (7:5, 7). The Geneva gloss on 7:7 is: ‘‘There is nothing more enemie to sinne then the Law: if so be therefore that sinne rage more by reason thereof then before, why shulde it be imputed to the Lawe which discloseth the sleightes of sinne her enemie.’’ 10. For a trenchant account of the ambivalence and backlash produced by early modern techniques of enhancement and idealization, see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), especially chap. 4, 163–214. A relevant example: ‘‘if breast and nipples can be made more beautiful through cosmetics, then breast and nipple au naturel become plain and less erotic’’ (207). 11. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 79–131. 12. Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1996), 20–56 and passim. 13. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), 178.

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index

Aborigines, 277 social organization of, 278–79 Abraham, 291, 305, 307, 317 Absalom, 304 Abstraction from body, 108, 256, 261, 289 extension vs., 107, 288–89, 507 politics of, 104 rule, 291, 508 Academic skepticism, 177 Accountancy, 229 Achilles, 454 Adeimantus, 426–27 Aeneid, 40– 41 Aesop, 413 Aesthetic postulate of self-sufficiency, 5, 30, 33–34, 63 Age gender vs., 258–59 genealogy vs., 258–59, 262–64 social differences and, 257–58 in social organization, 262–64 Agrarian civilization duality of, 295 strong transcendence and, 300 transcendence and, 299 Agricultural economy, 298 Agricultural revolution, 291–92 Agriculture, 317 kinship and, 292–93 Akhnaton, 300 Allegories of Reading (de Man), 509

Allegory didactic, 205 Spenserian, 205 Alpers, Paul, 170, 180–82, 185, 188, 191–95, 198–200, 210, 214 Althusser, Louis, 40, 47, 66–67, 76–77, 93, 96, 223, 503 Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), 80 Anaxagoras, 434 Annales school, 102 Antaeus, 203 Antilogy, 177 Antistatist ideology, 313 Aphrodite, 421 Apology (Plato), 391, 396, 398, 454 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 64, 91, 116, 126 Summa theologica, 115 Arendt, Hannah, 407 Ariosto, Ludovico, 37 Aristotle, 75, 174–75, 431, 442 Rhetoric, 442 Ascription meaning of, 259–60 reascription vs., 288 societal change and, 294 sociological concept of, 287 in writing, 259 Assyria, 296 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 91 Athena, 474, 480, 485–86 Athenian culture, 470 inscription in, 421, 431

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Index

Athenian education, 427 Protagoras and, 422, 428–29 Athenian paideia, 423 Athenians, 427, 479 original, 460 Socrates and, 386 Athenian stranger, 488 Athens, 399, 414, 457, 461, 478, 485, 488 decline of, 383, 455, 468, 472 government of, 431, 441, 456, 466–69 as oral society, 430 of Plato, 430–31 topography of, 474, 476 Atlantis, 456–57, 461, 469, 475, 490 Critias on, 477–85, 487–89 in Plato’s dialogues, 489 Atlas, 481, 486 Attica, 475–76 fall of, 487 Auerbach, Erich, 52–53, 514 Augustine, 126 Austin, J. L., 114 Author function, 112 Autobiography, 249 Autochthony, 474–75 Autophobia, 506 Autothanatography, 249

Belsey, Catherine, 34 Benveniste, Emile, 46, 70 Beowulf, 321, 324–25, 328, 331–35, 339–40, 342–43, 349, 355, 362 dilemma of, 350 dragon and, 347–48, 352–54, 356–59, 361 funeral of, 359–61 generosity of, 351 heroism of, 345, 361 hoarding of, 353, 356 report to Hygelac of, 356 Beowulf, 11, 41, 321, 326, 331, 335, 345, 350, 354, 360, 362 Berger, Peter, 284 Bible, 297, 302, 313 Biblical exegesis, 126 Bloch, Maurice, 90, 211, 212, 267 Bloom, Harold, 36, 167 Body abstraction from, 108, 256, 261, 289 as culture’s book, 255 Gothic, 367 order of, 104 signifying indices of, 259 social vs. physical, 255–56 Body indices, 259–61 Book of Loss, 319 Book of the Covenant, 307 Booth, Wayne, 139 Bourdieu, Pierre, 268, 423 Bourgeois subject, 222 Bowra, 211 Brass, 223 Braudel, Fernand, 102 Brecht, Bertoldt, 76 Brooks, Cleanth, 61 Literary Criticism: A Short History, 23 Brown, John Russell, 102 Brown, Norman O., 313 Brown, Peter, 368–70 Brueggemann, Walter, 302, 315, 317 Buchenwald, 28 Bucolic, 159, 164, 168, 171. See Also Poetry, pastoral, 133, 136 Bucolic pleasures, 166

Babel, 301, 326 Tower of, 305, 323 Babylon, 296, 305 Bacon, Francis, 64, 244 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 406, 437 Bal, Mieke, 82 Balzac, Honore´ de, 40 Baptism, 372–74 Barker, Francis, 223, 225–27, 229–230, 239, 249 The Tremulous Private Body, 222, 224 Barthes, Roland, 42, 87, 143, 256 Bateson, Gregory, 119, 463, 465, 513 on sign and signal, 510 Baxter, J. H., Medieval Latin Word-List, 287 Beardsley, Aubrey Vincent, 86 Beckerman, Bernard, 102 Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry (Halperin), 133, 158

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Index Bucolic song, 165 Bucolic texts, 166 Bullroarer myth, 274, 281 Burger, Ronna, 436, 440, 445 Burgundy, 367 Burke, Kenneth, 21, 63, 67 Bush, Douglas, 214–15 Butler, H. E., 145 Bynum, Caroline, 368, 371–72 Cain, 301, 323, 330, 332, 337, 339 Callias, 386, 389, 392–94, 397–98, 407 Calvin, John, 64 Canaan, 292, 302, 312, 318–19 Carter, Anthony T., 262, 263, 264 Castiglione, Baldassare, 166, 176 Censorship, 222 Cervantes, Miguel, 132 Chalkon, 160 Charles II’s Escape from Worcester (Pepys), 251 Charmides, 455 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 50, 57, 126, 140 Cheney, Donald, 207–208 Chian bard, 166 Child care, 270 Christian asceticism, 369 Christian facticity, 375–76 Christian institutions, 286–87 Christianitas, 40 Christianity, 286 narcissism and, 504–506 during Reformation, 370 Christian Middle Ages, 367, 370–71 Christian naked baptism, 372–74 Christian narcissistic anxiety, 505–506 Christian nudity, 11–12, 363, 367–68, 374 secular nakedness vs., 373 Christians, 329 Christian sexual renunciation, 369 Christ, Jesus, 115, 286, 345 historical, 370 Imitation of, 369–70 Cicero, 287 Citation, 114 Clark, Kenneth, 365, 367–68, 374 gender bias of, 373 The Nude, 363–64

................. 11350$

571

Clifford, James, 72–74, 110–11, 113 Close reading, 493–94 Cohen, Murray, 239 Collection literary function of, 244, 246 self, 245 Comatas, 147–48, 153–54, 160–61, 165, 170, 172 Comitatus, 327–28 Communications ratio, 107 Conquest groups, 299 Construal, 93 Contextualized language, 3 Conversation, writing vs., 221 Copjec, Joan, 503 Cosimo de’ Medici, 64 Cosmological postulate, 5, 31, 34, 67 afterlife of, 67–74 Countertext, 87–88 Countertextuality, 4–5, 88 Coward, Rosalind, 76–77 Cratylus, 397 Crewe, Jonathan, 49 Critias, 427, 439, 459, 462, 474, 476 on Atlantis, 477–85, 487–89 Old, 461, 469, 486, 489 of Plato, 456, 470, 472 as political reformer, 455–56, 470, 472, 475 Socrates and, 455–58, 460, 466 Critias (Plato), 12–13, 54, 455–56, 458, 460– 62, 468, 471, 474, 484, 486–87 Criticism. See Modern Criticism; New Criticism Crito, 402 Crito, 391 Culler, Jonathan, 26–28, 36–37, 41, 46 Cultural studies, 78, 97, 493 New Criticism vs., 79 Culture manuscript, 125, 127 oral, 423 print, 125 social organization and, 266–67 Curtius, Ernst, 514 Cybernetic alienation, 507 Prosthetic dialectic and, 507

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PAGE 571

572

Index

Danes, 329, 332–33, 335–40, 343, 346–47, 350, 362 Geats and, 355 Dante, 37, 59, 64, 126 Daphnis, 147–48, 168–71 Dark Ages individualism in, 350 social organization in, 324 Dated continuum, 234 David, 303–305, 309 Davidic counterrevolution, 317 tradition/trajectory of, 302, 319 Dees, Jerome, 184 Defence (Sidney), 174 Deference, 511–12 Defictionalization, 377 Deictic postulate, 5, 31, 33–34, 58, 74 de Laurentiis, Dino, 84 de Man, Paul, 81, 167–68, 248–49 Allegories of Reading by, 509 Denmark, 324, 336 social organization of, 325–26 Derrida, Jacques, 46, 48, 53, 57, 65, 75, 94, 107, 114, 117, 128, 235, 289, 414–15, 437, 442, 510–11 on inscription, 418 on Platonism, 416 on writing, 441 Derridean paradox, 260 Descartes, Rene´, 502 Discourse, 222 Dessen, Alan, 102 Detextualization textualization vs., 81, 110 Detextualizing, 19–20, 104 Deucalion, 487–88 Diagram of body indices, 259–60 problems with, 261 Diagram of cultural elements, 265, 283 Diagram of kinship, 261, 280 Dialectics prosthetic, 506, 509 Socrates on, 436–37, 449–51 technical, 291, 296, 508–509 textual, 431

................. 11350$

INDX

Dialegein, 172 Dialogues of Plato, 407, 416, 431, 440, 456, 471. See also Plato; Socrates; specific topics Atlantis in, 489 patriarchy in, 421 pederasty in, 421 Diary, 230, 240 documentary desire of, 245 early modern, 229 revised view of, 235 standard view of, 235 Diary (Pepys), 8, 218, 220, 222, 226, 228 accounting in, 219 censorship and, 225 composition of, 226, 231–51 mimetic function of, 244, 247 new subjectivity of, 230 register of ghostwriting in, 243–44 self-representation in, 241–45, 247–49 sexual repression in, 224–25, 229 trope of closure in, 246 Discourse, 422 Discourse (Descartes), 222 Discourse of the other, 416–17, 430 Divine Comedy, 40 Document, 220 Documentality, 4 Documentary, 86 representation, 496 Documentary desire, 8 of diary, 245 of Pepys, 220–21, 245 Domestic groups kinship strength in, 270 strong kinship vs., 265–67 Donaldson, E. T., 360 Don Giovanni, 228 Donne, John, 50, 255 Douglas, Mary, 50, 105 Natural Symbols, 284 Dover, K. J., 154, 163–64 Dreyfus, Hubert L., 112 Ducrot, Oswald, 116–17 Dum Scribo (Nancy), 218 Dum scribo (scene of writing), 234 Durand, William, 88

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PAGE 572

Index Du¨rer, Albrecht, 64, 367 Durkheim, Emile, 260 Eagleton, Terry, 27 E´criture, 213 Effect of nature, 256 Effeminization, fear of, 202 Egypt, 296, 302–303, 305, 310–11, 317–18, 472–73, 487–88 alphabetic writing in, 440 Plato on, 439 as theocratic polity, 441 Egyptian fable, 438 Egyptian priest, 473, 487 Solon and, 460, 472 Egyptians, 461–62, 468–89 Ekphasis, 169 Eleatic Stranger, 450 Elenchus, 170 Eliade, Mircea, 325–26 Elias, Norbert, 223, 245 Eliot, T. S., 513 Elizabethan World Picture, 212 Ellis, John, 76–77 Ellul, Jacques, 289, 291 The Technological Society, 128, 290 Empson, William, 21, 134 English Revolution, 224 Epicene body, 202 Epic genre, 208 Epic poems, 37–39 Epic speaker, 208 Epideictic dimension, 177 Epistemic postulate, 5, 31, 34, 68 Erasmus, Desiderius, 50, 177, 180 The Praise of Folly, 500 Erotes, 152–53 Ethical art, 307–308 Ethos, 175 Euclides, 409 Eudoxia, 470 Eupatrid (well-fathered), 466 Eupatrids, 467–68, 480, 485, 488 Euripides, 131 Exodus, 10, 297, 305–306, 307–308, 310–11, 315

................. 11350$

573

Extension, 107 abstraction vs., 288–89, 507 Extratextual approach, 35, 41–46 Ezekiel, 318 Facticity, 374 Christian, 375–76 The Faerie Queene (Spenser), 173, 180, 183–84, 204–205, 212–13, 216, 495 as cultural discourse critique, 210 narrative irony in, 206–207 referents in, 209 Ferguson, Margaret, 174, 179 Ferrari, G. R. F., 445 Fiction of referentiality, 66 theme of, 28 Fictive work, 63 Fineman, Joel, 81, 496 Fish, Stanley, 106, 185 Fletcher, Angus, 215 Formal realism, 229 Forrest, W. G., 467 Foucault, Michel, 45, 67, 76, 86, 97, 106, 112, 220, 223, 290, 369, 510 network of writing of, 260 ‘‘Nietzche, Freud, Marx’’, 113 Fowler, H. N., 434, 438 Fra Angelico, 64 France, 367 Freud, Sigmund, 67, 78, 201, 207, 489 Frye, Northrop, 81, 91, 134, 183–84, 216 Anatomy of Criticism, 80 Furor, 185, 187–89, 197–98, 200–201, 203, 205, 209, 214 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 44, 75 Galileo, 64 Geats, 340, 347, 349, 351, 359–60, 362 Danes and, 355 fate of, 352–53 feuds, 356 Geertz, Clifford, 63 Gemeinschaft, 288 Gender age vs., 258–59 anxiety, 505

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PAGE 573

574

Index

genealogy vs., 258–59, 262–64 gynephobia of, 505 kinship and, 270, 273–76 marking, 258 social differences and, 257–58 in social organization, 262–64, 270, 272–82 weak kinship and, 270 Genealogy abstractness of, 267 age vs., 258–59, 262–64 gender vs., 258–59, 262–64 social differences and, 257–58 The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 375 Genesis, 10, 291, 305 genesis of, 297, 303, 308 Genre, 208 Germanic society, 339 post-tribalism of, 327 Germany, 367 Ghostwriting, 235 register of, 234, 236–40 The Gift (Mauss), 331 Gift-giving ambivalence of, 334 contentiousness of, 331–33, 335–36, 342, 345 reciprocity and, 345 Gilham, Ernest, 89 Glaucon, 424, 426 Goffman, Erving, 65 Goldberg, Jonathan, 239 Goodman, Nelson, Ways of Worldmaking, 68 Goody, Jack, 265–66 Gorgias, 396, 470 Gospel, 286 Age, 375 Gothic body, 367 Gottwald, Norman, 312 The Tribes of Yahweh, 313 Gow, A. S., 154, 156–57, 164 Graff, Gerald, 61 Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma, 33 Greece, 295, 364, 366, 392 Greek Lexicon (Lidell-Scott-Jones), 438 Greek nude, 367

................. 11350$

INDX

Greeks, 473 Greenblatt, Stephen, 212–13, 501 Gregory the Great, 88 Greimas, A. J., 123 Grendel, 323, 328–29, 332–33, 336, 340, 343– 44, 346, 348, 353, 361 defeat of, 337–38, 341 evil of, 339 Griffiths, F. T., 168 Griswold, Charles, 445–46, 452 Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies, 366 Guardian polis, 425, 427, 462, 464, 468 Guyon, 187–88, 198, 203, 207 Gynephobia of gender, 505 Judeo-Christian tradition and, 506 misogyny vs., 505 of sex, 505 Hackforth, R., 438, 449 Hacking, Ian, 60 Hades, 394, 396–99, 407 Odysseus in, 409 Hagiographic representation, 377–78 Haller, William, 245 Halperin, David M., 134–35 Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry, 133, 158 Halverson, John, 323–26, 328, 345, 349, 350–52 ‘‘The World of Beowulf ’’, 321 Hartman, Geoffrey, Saving the Text, 117 Havelock, Eric, 43, 53, 71, 211, 423 Hebrews, 306 Hedonism, 399–402, 404–406 Heffernan, Thomas, 376, 378 Hegel, G. W. F., 375, 510 Heidegger, Martin, 44, 71, 75, 94, 416 Heorot, 325, 329, 332–33, 337, 342, 346, 351, 355–56, 361 building of, 321–23, 326, 330–31, 336 Hephaestus, 474 Heracles, 394 Hercules, 142, 157, 160 Heremod, 340, 342–44 failure of, 345 Hermes, 25, 31

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PAGE 574

Index Hermocrates, 456 Heroic aspiration, 330 Heroic individualism, 326, 349 Heroic institutions, 326, 329, 335, 337–38, 351 Heroic society, 356, 362 Heroic world, 328 Heroism of Beowulf, 345, 361 ideology of, 204, 327–28 Hesiod, 135, 454 Hierarchic power, 298 Hieroglyphs, Egyptian, 89 Hill, Christopher, 236–37 Hinton, Stan, 182 Hippias, 394, 470 Hippocrates, 386, 388–89, 434 Socrates and, 392 Hobbes, Thomas, 327, 466, 508 Hollywood, 513 Homer, 37, 39–41, 57, 131, 135, 167, 170, 172, 208, 452, 454, 470, 495 epics of, 423 Horace, 89 Hoskins, John, 175 Households as dominant production unit, 295 familial vs., 263 kinship and, 263–66 organization of, 263–64 Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group (Kroeber), 263–64 Hrothgar, 323–26, 328–29, 332–35, 342, 346– 48, 350, 353, 361–62 Heorot building and, 321, 330–31, 336, 351 sermon of, 340–41, 343–45, 355 Huizinga, Johan, 127 Humanist Poetics (Kinney), 177–78 Husserl, Edmund, 235 Hybris, 163–64, 168 Hygelac, 356, 361 Iconic recoding, 6, 116 Identity formation, 502 self-representation and, 503 Ideologeme, 302

................. 11350$

575

Ideology antistatist, 313 of heroism, 204, 327–28 imposition of traditional, 296 of Israelites, 317–18 nomadic, 318 pederastic, 421 of temperance, 204 Idyll 1 (Theocritus), 7, 132, 136, 138, 147, 153, 158, 168–69, 170–71 Idyll 7 (Theocritus), 7, 132, 136, 138, 143, 147, 149, 151, 157–58, 160, 165, 170–71 Idylls (Theocritus), 132–33, 135, 137–39, 142, 145–46, 168 Iliad, 40, 141, 469 Impersonation, literary, 144–45 Impersonator, 171 Individualism in Dark Ages, 350 heroic, 326, 349 Ingeld, 329, 335, 339 Innes, Harold, 210 Inscription in Athenian culture, 421, 431 Derrida on, 418 desire of, 431 Lysian, 446 metaphor of, 430 Plato on, 417 politics of, 441 Protagoras on, 430–32 Socrates on, 419, 452 Institutions Christian, 286–87 doom of, 355 heroic, 326, 329, 335, 337–38, 351 peace-weaving, 328 Institutio Oratoria, 145 Intentional Fallacy, 60–61, 75 Interlocutory, 497 Internal distantiation, 40 Interpretation, 103 perusal and, 495–96 Pledge Allegiance to, 494 premature evaluation vs., 495 of stage plays, 497

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PAGE 575

576

Index

Interpretative method, 494 Interpretive community, 19, 496 Interpretive ethnography, 111 Interpretive shuttle, 5, 77, 103 diagram of, 79–81, 83, 98 Intertextuality, 35–41 Intralocutory information, 497–98 Introduction to ‘Beowulf ’ (Irving), 321 Inverse causality, 510 paralogism of, 509 Ion (Plato), 131–32, 167 Irving, Edward B., Jr., 323–26, 328, 335, 339, 345, 353, 355–56, 359 Introduction to ‘Beowulf ’, 321 A Reading of ‘Beowulf ’, 321 Irwin, Terence, 402 Isoma, 121 Israel, 301, 303, 316 as ideological movement, 314 tribal system and, 302, 304, 312–13 Israelites, 297, 312–13, 316 tribal ideology of, 317–18 Italian Humanism, 177 Italy, 365 James, Henry, Portrait of a Lady, 25 Jameson, Fredric, 66, 77, 81–82, 109, 302 Jerusalem, 303 Johnson, Charles, Medieval Latin Word-List, 287 Jonson, Ben, 50 Joseph, 303, 305, 317–18 Joshua, 318 Jouissance, 213, 244 Jousse, Marcel, 53 Jowett, 434, 438 Judeo-Christian tradition, 506 Judgeship, instituted, 306 Kafka, Franz, 212 Kahn, Victoria, 178 Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance, 177 Kant, Immanuel, 454 Kaske, R. E., 323, 337, 339 Katabasis, 398, 407 Keats, John, 169, 172 Keesing, Roger, 118, 279

................. 11350$

INDX

Kemp, Margery, 370 Kennedy, William, 208–209 Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature, 207 Kermode, Frank, 29, 134 The Sense of an Ending, 28 Khaki Class, 514 King Lear (Shakespeare), 22, 29, 99–101 Kinney, Arthur F., 175, 179–80 Humanist Poetics, 177–78 Kinship ancestor-centered, 300 biological, 261 diagram of, 261 domestic groups and, 265 ego-centered, 300 gender and, 270, 273–76 households without, 263–64 modernization effect on, 266 nuclear family and, 262 social, 261 in social organization, 262–70 tribalism and, 314–15 Kinship, strong, 261, 263–64 Aborigines and, 278–79 agriculture and, 293 ambivalence of, 267 domestic groups vs., 265–66 gender and, 274–75 instability of, 267 political aspect of, 268 ritual art and, 269 traditional hierarchy and, 269 tribalism and, 315 weak kinship vs., 270 Kinship, weak, 261, 263–66, 268–69 agriculture and, 293 gender and, 270, 274–75 in mobile societies, 294 strong kinship vs., 270 Kin-strife, 328, 330, 338 Klaeber, 350 Klein, Jacob, 471 Kristeva, Julia, 36, 509 Kroeber, Alfred, 265, 267 Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group, 263–64

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PAGE 576

Index Lacan, Jacques, 66–67, 86, 123, 235, 502–503, 510 Laclau, 93 Language of Allegory (Quilligan), 207 Late Antiquity, 369–70 Latham, Robert, 225–26, 230–31, 239, 243 Laws (Plato), 439, 468, 484, 488 Laws VII (Plato), 441 Leach, E. W., 134 Le Carre´, John, 514 Lentricchia, Frank, 21 L’escholle des filles, 223, 225 Levin, Richard, 102 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, 122 Lewis, C. S., 173, 214–15 Licensing Acts, 220 Lidell-Scott-Jones, Greek Lexicon, 438 Lilly, John, 463 Linton, Ralph, 257 Literary Criticism: A Short History (Wimsatt and Brooks), 23 Logocentric, 46, 422 illusion, 6 Logography, 174, 431, 441–42 classical, 177 of Lysias, 443–48 metaphor of, 437 Socrates on, 451 Logos (words/argument), 421–22 London, 220 Lord, 211, 423 Love, true, 202 Luther, Martin, 64 Lycidas, 143, 147–50, 152–57, 160, 163–66, 170–72 Lyric genre, 208 Lysias, 452 logography of, 443–48 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 498 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 40–41, 65 Madagascar, 211 Magdalene, 250 Malagasy people, 211 Malapropism Shakespeare use of, 499–500

................. 11350$

577

as a trope, 499 use of, 498–99 Malaprop, Mrs., 499 Maleger, 203–204 Marlowe, Christopher, 50, 212 Marvell, Andrew, 29, 50, 132, 172 Marx, Karl, 67, 78, 105, 291 Mary, Virgin, 371 Maternal power, 270 Matthews, William, 225–31, 235, 238, 250 Mauss, Marcel, 333, 335 The Gift, 331 Mbuti Pygmies, 262–64, 273–75, 278 McCarthyism, 22, 514 McConnel, Ursula, 274 McGuire, Philip, 102 McKnight, David, 275 McLuhan, Marshall, 43, 210 Meadhall, 329, 335 Medieval Latin Word-List (Baxter and Johnson), 287 Mendenhall, George, 295, 299, 314, 316 The Tenth Generation, 313 tenth-generation effect of, 311–13, 315, 317–19 Meno, 470 Merina people, 211 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 89–90 Metonymy, 224 Michelangelo, 161 Middle Ages, 125–27, 366, 375 Christian, 367, 370–71 Miles, Gary, 137–38, 152–53, 161–62 Miles, Margaret, 363–64, 368, 372 Miller, David Lee, 187, 202–204, 209–10, 213, 216, 235–37 Miller, J. Hillis, 80–81 Milton, John, 11, 37, 64, 132, 140, 143, 183 ‘‘Lycidas’’, 143, 147–50, 152–57 Mimesis, 248–49 Misanthropy, 413 Misautia, 506 Misogyny in criticism, 504 gynephobia vs., 505 Mobile societies, weak kinship in, 294

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PAGE 577

578

Index

Modern criticism, 510 Modernization, 291 effect on kinship, 266 More, Thomas, 180 Utopia, 287 Mosaic period, 313 Mosaic revolution, 314, 317–19 Mosaic tradition/trajectory, 302, 319 Moses, 306–308, 319 Mouffe, 93 Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare), 499, 500 Mullaney, Steven, 244–45 Mumford, Lewis, 86, 105 Munificent King, 329 Munn, Nancy, 271–72 Murphy, Robert, 281 Murrin, Michael, 184 The Veil of Allegory, 183 Muses, 148, 150–51, 153, 155, 162, 165 Nakedness nudity vs., 364–65, 368, 373 shame of, 367 Nancy, Jean-Luc, Dum Scribo, 218 Narcissism, 503 Christianity and, 504–506 self-representation and, 501 Narcissus, 503 Narrative, 173 ideological meaning of, 210 oral, 209 rhetorical function of, 210, 215 Narrator, 180, 182 as commentator, 210 as epic speaker, 208 with protagonist, 390 as reader, 216 self-mockery of, 205 of text, 141–42, 146 Nashe, Thomas, The Unfortunate Traveller, 49 Natural Symbols (Douglas), 284 Ndembu, 6 symbolism, 120–23 Near East civilizations problems of, 298, 300 Needham, Rodney, 274

................. 11350$

INDX

Neolithic agrarianism, 295 New Criticism, 4, 28, 36, 493. See Also Old New Criticism after, 77 critiques of, 29–30, 32, 34–35, 78, 87–88 cultural studies vs., 79 history of, 20–23, 25–27, 60–61, 64 poetic-drama criticism and, 102 poetry and, 61 postulates of, 5–7, 19, 30–35, 58, 67–68, 74 postulational model of, 20 reconstructed, 70–72, 74 New Critics, 21, 25, 33–34, 43, 59, 495 New Testament, 302 Nielson, James, 239 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 67, 78, 106, 454, 509–10 The Genealogy of Morals, 375 Nohrnberg, James, 204 Nomadic ideology, 318 Nomadic mobility, 315 Nomads, 316 pastoral, 317 possessive, 317–18 Nuclear family, 262 Nude Christian, 367 fictive constructions of, 366 Greek, 367 The Nude (Clark), 363–64 Nudity artistic/idealized canons of, 365 Christian, 11–12, 363, 367–68, 373–74 classical sculpture and, 11 demonization of, 367 nakedness vs., 364–65, 368, 373 paganism and, 367 Renaissance, 367, 373 Obedience, 511–13 Occasion, 185–89, 198, 201, 203, 205–206, 214 Odysseus, 163, 394, 398 in Hades, 409 Odyssey, 40, 141, 154, 486

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PAGE 578

Index Old New Criticism, 33–34, 103, 493 breaking out of, 59 reconstructing, 33, 43 Old Testament, 9, 286, 292, 302–303, 310, 312, 339 composition of, 305, 318–19 culture, 375 structural change and, 297 Ollard, 228, 247 Onela, 352 Ongentheow, 350, 356 Ong, Walter, 34, 43, 45, 47–48, 52–53, 55– 57, 71, 103, 125, 183–84, 211, 221 Onto-theology, 416 Oral culture, 423 ‘‘Oral Form and Written Craft in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’’ (Webster), 184 Oral poetry, 423 Oral society, 424, 430 Oratory, 174, 176 as social control, 211 Organic unity. See Structural postulate of organic unity Orgel, Stephen, 201–202 Orpheus, 394, 396 Ortega y Gasset, Jose´, 24 Otherspeak, 205 Ovid, 50 Metamorphoses, 89–90 Paganism, 367 Paideia, 421–22, 464 Athenian, 423 musical, 426, 465 Protagoras on, 428–30 in Republic, 424 Paidika (pederastic partner), 420–21 Paige, J. M., 281–82 Paige, K. E., 281–82 Pais (son), 420–21 Paleolithic environments, 295 Palestine, 295, 311–12 The Palmer, 187–88, 198–202, 206, 214 Pan, 157 Pancake maneuver of modern criticism, 510 Panofsky, Erwin, 514 Papua New Guinea, 270, 279–80

................. 11350$

579

Paradise Lost, 323 Paralogism of inverse causality, 509 Parker, Patricia, 510 Parmenides, 54 Parry, 211, 423 Parsons, Talcott, 105 Passover, 306 Pastoral bucolic vs., 133 meta-, 132 strong, 132–36, 168, 171–72 weak, 132–34, 168 Pastoral nomads, 317 Pastoral poetry, 133 Pastoral theory, 134 Pathos, 175 Patterson, Annabel, 222 Paul, St., 307, 504 Pavlovian experiments, 119 Pederastic ideology in the dialogues, 421 of Socrates, 421 Peloponnesian War, 455 Penn, William, 233 Pepys, Samuel Charles II’s Escape from Worcester, 251 composition method of, 226, 231–51 Diary, 8, 218–20, 222–51 documentary desire of, 220–21, 245 fiscal conservatism of, 218–19 as interiorated subject, 224 new subjectivity of, 230 Puritan influence on, 245–47 register of ghostwriting and, 243–44 secrecy of, 239, 250 self-parody of, 226 self-representation of, 241–45, 247–49 sexuality of, 226–28, 250 shorthand of, 239–41 Short Writing, 239 Tachygraphy, 239 Perform, 498 Performance citational, 115, 119–20, 123–24 rhetorical, 498 Performative Duplicity, 498–99

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PAGE 579

580

Index

Performativity linguistic, 498–99 theatrical, 499 Pericles, 432, 434 Persia, 488 Peruse, 495–96 Petronius, 50 Phaedo (Plato), 391, 398, 413, 434 Phaedrus Socrates and, 417, 419, 433–35, 437, 439, 442–47, 452–54 on speaking and writing, 444 Phaedrus (Plato), 12, 89, 165, 213, 382, 417, 419–20, 431–33, 454 Phaethon, 488 Phaidros, 448 Phantastes, 204 Phedon, 186–92, 194–99, 201–202, 207, 214 Philebus, 440 Philemon, 190–91, 195–96, 200 Philinus, 152, 157 The Philosophy of Literary Form, 21 Phoenicians, 468 Pinax (wooden tablet), 425 Plato, 7, 14, 53–58, 64, 72, 159, 383, 396, 399, 408, 425, 450, 470 Apology, 391, 396, 398, 454 Athens of, 430–31 Critias, 12–13, 54, 456, 458, 460–62, 468, 470–72, 474, 484, 486–87 dialogues of, 407, 416, 431, 440, 456, 471 on Egypt, 439 Ion, 131–32, 167 Laws, 439, 441, 468, 484, 488 Phaedo, 391, 398, 413, 434 Phaedrus, 12, 89, 213, 382, 417, 419–20, 431, 433 Protagoras, 12–13, 15, 54, 382–87, 391, 397, 407, 412–13, 421–22, 424, 427, 455 Republic, 398, 409, 419, 421–22, 424, 434, 446, 456, 461–62, 464–66, 468, 473 Seventh Epistle of, 456 Socrates of, 412, 414–15, 418, 424, 437, 446, 453–54, 464

................. 11350$

INDX

Socratic method of, 383 Symposium, 386, 398, 409, 420–21 Theaetetus, 12, 383–84, 409–10, 417, 434, 442, 454 on theme of inscription, 417 Timaeus, 13, 69, 71, 89, 439, 455, 458–62, 468, 471–73, 484, 487 on writing, 416, 418, 420 Platonic writing, 441 Socratic conversation and, 382 Platonism, 416, 441 Pleonectic society, 426 Pleonexia, 398, 426–27, 444–44, 469, 485 Plotinus, 369 Pluto, 397 Pocock, J. G. A., 221–22 Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma (Graff ), 33 Poetic symbols, 24 Poetry, 497. See Also Epic poems bucolic, 133, 135–36, 147, 165, 171 New Criticism and, 61 oral, 183, 423 pastoral, 133 rhetoric vs., 178 storytelling and, 173, 182 Poggioli, Renato, 134 Polanyi, 105 Polemarchus, 446 Ponos, 150–51, 153–54, 161, 163 Pope, Alexander, 132, 172 Portrait of a Lady (James), 25 Poseidon, 480–81, 485–86, 488 The Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 500 Precapitalist society, 256 Primary orality, 221 Primitive societies, 270 Propia persona (proper person), 401, 408 Prosopopoeia, 144 Prosthetic dialectic, 506, 509 Cybernetic alienation and, 507 technological progress and, 507 Protagoras, 384, 424, 470 Athenian education and, 422, 428–29 on inscription, 430–32 ‘‘misanthropology’’ of, 428 on paideia, 428–30

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PAGE 580

Index Socrates and, 385–86, 388–96, 399– 400, 405–409, 411–13, 422, 432, 442, 454 Protagoras (Plato), 12–13, 15, 54, 382–87, 391, 397, 407, 412–13, 421–22, 424, 455 ‘‘great speech’’ of, 427 Protagorean discourses, 384 Protagorean theory of logocentric bondage, 384, 442 of perception, 383, 442 Protectorate, 247 Puritans diaries of, 245–46, 248 influence on Pepys, 245–47 The Pursuit of Signs, 39 Pyrrha, 487 Quattrocento, 365 Humanists, 177 Quilligan, Maureen, Language of Allegory, 207 Quine, 60 Quintilian, 144–45, 175 Rabelais, 50 Rabinow, Paul, 112 Ralegh, Letter to, 216 Ransom, John Crowe, 143 Ravenswood, 356–57 Reader as narrator, 216 Reading. See Also Close reading countertext, 8 as if listening, 209–10, 496 as if perusing, 496 as if playgoing, 497 as if reading, 209–10, 215 as if textualizing, 496–97 as if visualizing, 496 innocent, 103 suspicious, 103, 187 three fictions of, 496 A Reading of ‘Beowulf ’ (Irving), 321 The Real, 29 Reascription, 9, 283–85, 287, 291–92 ascription vs., 288 strategies of, 296 Reascription symbolism, 286

................. 11350$

581

Reciprocity, 331 code of loyalty and, 349 gift-giving and, 345, 351 Redactor, 315–19 Redundancy, 124 Reference, 91–92, 94 Reference-fixing, 96 Referents, 83–85 in The Faerie Queene, 209 Reformation Christianity during, 370 literacy during, 220 Reincorporation, 428, 431 Renaissance, 107, 208, 364–66 authors, 174 colonialism of, 212 education, 216 misogyny during, 201–202 nudity, 367, 373 theorists, 175 Representation documentary, 496 principles of, 502 of self-fashioning, 501–502 textual, 496 Reproduction, 282 Republic (Plato), 398, 409, 419, 421–22, 434, 446, 456, 461–62, 464–66, 468, 473 paideia in, 424 pleonectic society in, 42 Restoration, 220 Resurrection, 372 Retribalization, 313 Revisionary filiation, 7, 132, 159 Rhetoric, 173–74, 181, 183, 441 aberrant, 178 art of, 444 classical, 176–77 humanist, 176–78 as oratory, 176 poetry vs., 178 Socrates on, 436–37 transactional, 175, 208 tropological, 175 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 442 Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature (Kennedy), 207

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PAGE 581

582

Index

Rhetorical postulate, 5, 31, 33–34, 58 afterlife of, 74–77 Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Kahn), 177 Richards, I. A., 80 Ricks, Christopher, 24 Ricoeur, Paul, 43–45, 47–48, 57, 63, 65, 67, 75, 78, 108–10, 113–14, 125, 222 textual dialectic of, 431 Riffaterre, 36 Ritual art, 269 Ritual virtue, 308 The Rivals (Sheridan), 499 Romance, epistemological, 205, 213, 216 Rome, 295, 311 Rorty, Richard, 93–95 Rosenmeyer, Thomas, 143, 151–52, 161, 163, 480 Rowe, C. I., 447 Royal Society, 220 Rubin, Edgar, 384 Russell, Bertrand, 94–95 Sacred Discontent (Schneidau), 315 Said, Edward, 45–46 Samuel, 301 Sandys, George, 89–90 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 489 Saul, 303 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 37, 86 Saving the Text (Hartman), 117 Scandinavia, 350 Schema, 426, 484 Schneidau, Herbert, 301 Sacred Discontent, 315 Schneider, David, 260 Scholes, Robert, 25–27 Scop, 362 Scylding, 321, 331, 337 Searle, John, 94 Sedgwick, Eve, 195 Segal, Charles, 137–39, 148–49, 155–56, 163– 65, 168–70 Self-fashioning, 501 representation of, 502 Self-representation, 245, 249, 499 in Diary, 241–45, 247–48

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identity formation and, 502–503 male, 505 narcissism and, 501 Self-sufficiency. See Aesthetic postulate of self-sufficiency Semiotic ratio, 107 The Sense of an Ending (Kermode), 28 Sesonske, Alexander, 446–47 Seventh Epistle (Plato), 456 Seventh Idyll (Theocritus), 7. See Idyll 7 Seven Types of Ambiguity, 21 Sexuality, fear of, 202 Seznec, Jean, 514 Shakespeare, William, 50, 57, 65, 102, 104, 106, 132, 140, 172, 212, 495 characterization of, 497 Henry IV, 498 King Lear, 28–29, 99–101 Macbeth, 498 malapropism use by, 499–500 Much Ado about Nothing, 499–500 The Tempest, 495 As You Like It, 91 Shelton, Thomas, 239 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, The Rivals, 499 Shorey, Paul, What Plato Said, 58 Shorthand, 239–40 of Pepys, 239–41 Short Writing (Pepys), 239 Sidney, Sir Philip, 50, 64, 132, 175, 177, 179 Defence, 174 Sign, 83–85 signal vs., 510 Signified, 83–85 Signifier, 83–85 Sign/referent relations, 85–87 Sign use documentary, 103–104 mischievous, 103–104 Silberman, Lauren, 186–88, 196–97, 204 Simichidas, 146–47, 149–50, 152–58, 162–66, 168, 170 Simos, 170 Situated utterances, 3, 6 Situations of utterance, 42 in political/poetical perspective, 43

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Index Snippetotomy, 224, 229 Social ascription, 257, 260 Social control, 464 Social differences age and, 258 gender and, 257–58 genealogy and, 258 Social organization of aborigines, 277–79 age in, 262–64 ascriptive elements in, 265, 268 child care and, 270 culture and, 266–67 in Dark Ages, 324 of Denmark, 325–26 diagram of, 265 gender in, 262–64, 270, 272–82 kinship in, 262–64, 266–67 of Mbuti Pygmies, 262–63 nonascriptive elements in, 265 in Papua New Guinea, 270, 279–80 in primitive societies, 270 transcendence and, 299 of Walbiri, 271–72 of Wik-mungkan, 274–75 Socrates, 12–14, 53–69, 131–32, 159, 167, 171, 384, 397–98, 410, 470, 480 on Anaxagoras, 434 Athenians and, 386 Critias and, 455–58, 460, 465–66 on dialectics, 436–37, 449–51 ‘‘discourse of the other’’ and, 417 discourses of, 382–83, 418, 427, 457 on good vs. evil, 402–403, 405–406, 434–35 on hedonism, 399–402, 404–406 Hippocrates and, 392 on inscription, 419, 452 ironic of, 446, 462 on logography, 451 on lying, 424–25 medical discourse of, 432–33 on misanthropy, 413 on musical paideia, 426, 465 pederastic ideology of, 421 Phaedrus and, 417, 419, 433–35, 437, 439, 442–47, 452–54

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583

philosopher dog of, 424 of Plato, 412, 414–15, 418, 424, 437, 446, 453–54, 464 Platonic, 381 on politics, 456, 463–64, 469, 475 Protagoras and, 385–86, 388–96, 399– 400, 405–9, 411–13, 422, 432, 442, 454 on rhetoric, 436–37 sophists and, 391, 406–407, 409 on soul writing, 431, 448–53 on teaching, 453 Timaeus and, 457 on writing, 415, 417–18, 420, 437 Socratic conversation, 382, 384 Socratic dialogue, 387–88, 407–408, 414 Socratic method, 381 Platonic critique of, 382 Socratic midwifery, 12–13 Solomon, 286, 303–305, 309, 313, 319 Solon, 457–59, 462, 471–73, 486–87, 489 Egyptian priest and, 460, 472 as political reformer, 461, 466–70 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 40 Some Versions of Pastoral, 21 Sophists, 385–86, 388–89, 391, 395, 398, 410, 429, 470 community influence of, 396 Socrates and, 391, 406–407, 409 Sophocles, 65 Sophron, 144, 146 Sparta, 456, 488 Spenser, Edmund, 37, 64, 132, 172–73, 181, 185–86, 188, 191, 193–95, 198–99, 208– 209, 212–13, 495 direct method of, 205–206 eclecticism of, 214–15 The Faerie Queene, 173, 180, 183–84, 204– 207, 209–10, 212–13, 216, 495 indirect method of, 205 literary mode of, 205 oral-formulaic mode of, 205–206 as oral poet, 183 Spenser Effect of, 513 Spenserian narrative, 7 Spirituality female, 371 medieval, 371

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584

Index

Stage plays, 497 Stallybrass, 223 Status, ascribed vs. achieved, 257 Stevens, Wallace, 28–29, 297 Stone, 226 Storytelling poetry and, 173, 182 Spenserian, 212–13 values of, 204 Structural postulate of organic unity, 5, 33– 34, 63 Struever, Nancy C., 175 Styan, J. L., 102 Summa theologica (Aquinas), 115 Sumner, W. G., 300 Swedes, 350, 356 Switzerland, 367 Symposium (Plato), 386, 398, 409, 420–21 Synthanatos, 398 Syria, 311 Tachygraphy (Pepys), 239 Taylor, C. C. W., 400, 404, 475 Taylor, Gary, 102 Teaching metaphors of, 420 Socrates on, 453 Technical dialectic, 291, 296, 508–509 Technique, 291 Technological determinism, 290 The Technological Society (Ellul), 128, 290 Technologies of power, 369 of production, 369–70 of self, 369–70 of sign systems, 369–70 Tel Quel theory, 81–82, 93, 116–17, 124 Temperance, 206 allegory of, 203 ideology of, 204 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 495 The Tenth Generation (Mendenhall), 313 Tenth-generation effect, 311–13, 315, 317–19 Text, 495–96 citational, 114–15, 120, 124 narrator, 141

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order of, 104 work vs., 26 Textual desire, 320 Textuality, 4–6 definition of, 109 folded, 124 unfolded, 124 Textualization detextualization vs., 81, 110 Textualizing, 19–20, 104 reading as if, 496–97 Thamus, 438–41 Theaetetus, 383 Theaetetus (Plato), 12, 383–84, 409–10, 417, 434, 442 Thebes, 441 Theocritus, 144, 164, 172 bucolic poetry of, 135, 142, 147, 150 Idyll 1, 138, 142, 147, 153, 158, 168–71 Idyll 7, 7, 136, 138, 142–43, 147, 149, 151, 157–58, 160, 165, 168, 170–71 Idylls, 132–33, 135, 137–39, 142, 145–46, 159, 168 Theogony, 469 Theology aesthetic, 205 onto-, 416 Theuth, 438, 440–41 Thucydides, 53–54, 57, 383, 470 Thyrsis, 168–70 Tillyard, 212 Timaeus, 409, 447, 455–56, 458–59, 462, 471, 476 Socrates and, 457 Timaeus (Plato), 13, 54, 69, 71, 89, 439, 455, 458–62, 468, 472–73, 484, 487 Tolliver, Harold, 134 Traditional hierarchy, 269 Transcendence agrarian civilization and, 299 definition of, 298 despots and, 301 social organization and, 299 Transcendence, strong, 299, 304–305 agrarian civilization and, 300 Transcendence, weak, 299, 304 personal centering of, 300

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Index The Tremulous Private Body (Barker), 222, 224 Tribal ideology, 313, 315–17 Tribalism bases of, 326 kinship and, 314–15 nomadic mobility and, 315 political marginality and, 315 urban/imperial power structure vs., 315 The Tribes of Yahweh (Norman), 313 Trope, 238, 249 of closure, 246 malapropism as a, 499 Tudor ideology, 212, 216 writers, 175, 179 Turnbull, Colin, 273 Wayward Servants, 263 Turner, Victor, 120, 122 Twelve Tribe system, 314 Understanding Drama, 21 Understanding Poetry, 21 Unfolded Tales, 216 The Unfortunate Traveller (Nashe), 49 University of California Press, 225 Utopia (More), 287 Utopianism, 427 Vaihinger, Hans, 28–29 Valesio, Paolo, 56 The Veil of Allegory (Murrin), 183 Vickers, Brian, 174–75 Virgil, 37, 39, 133, 136, 172 Vlastos, Gregory, 412, 418–19, 453, 467 Voegelin, Eric, 478 Volatile Bodies (Grosz), 366 Vygotsky, 240 Wagner, Roy, 260 Walbiri, 271–72 Wanderer, 317 War, 327 intertribal feuds and, 328

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585

Watt, Ian, 229 Ways of Worldmaking (Goodman), 68 Wayward Servants (Turnbull), 263 Weber, Max, 105, 286 Webster, John, 182, 185–87, 194, 204–207, 209–11 ‘‘Oral Form and Written Craft in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’’, 184 The Well-Wrought Urn, 21 Western philosophy, 416 What Plato Said (Shorey), 58 White, Hayden, 78 Wiglaf, 348–50, 352 Wik-mungkan, 274–75 Wimsatt, William K., 24, 29, 61, 86 Literary Criticism: A Short History, 23 Wind, Edgar, 514 Winner, Langdon, 289–90 Wittkower, Rudolf, 514 Word of God, 126 Wordsworth, William, 37, 172 Work, text vs., 26 ‘‘The World of Beowulf ’’ (Halverson), 321 The World’s Body, 21 Writing ascriptive, 259 conversation vs., 221 Derrida on, 441 Egypt and, 439–40 Platonic, 382 Plato on, 416, 418, 420 social ascription and, 257, 260 Socrates on, 415, 417–18, 420, 437 soul, 431, 448–53 as subversive, 441 Yahweh, 291, 301, 303, 305–309, 315–16, 318 Zeus, 427–28, 474–75, 483, 485–86 Zionism, 292

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