Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 9783110775884, 9783110775853

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Symbolism An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Editorial Board Heinz Antor ‧ Susan Bassnett ‧ Daniela Carpi ‧ Marc Chénetier ‧ Cristina Giorcelli Yasmine Gooneratne ‧ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht ‧ Maria Herrera-Sobek Linda Hutcheon ‧ Eva-Marie Kroeller ‧ Francisco A. Lomelí ‧ Susana Onega Frédéric Regard ‧ Kiernan Ryan ‧ Ronald Shusterman ‧ Stefanos Stefanides Toshiyuki Takamiya ‧ Richard H. Weisberg ‧ Walther Chr. Zimmerli

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Volume 22 Edited by Florian Klaeger, Klaus Stierstorfer and Marlena Tronicke Founding Editor Rüdiger Ahrens Corresponding Editor Patrick Gill

ISBN 978-3-11-077585-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-077588-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-077594-5 ISSN 1528-3623 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022939010 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Foreword from the Editors Over two decades ago, founding editor Rüdiger Ahrens opened the Foreword to the inaugural volume of Symbolism (then with AMS Press) with the question, “why should we be concerned about symbolism in a world seemingly dominated by factuality, technology, and measures, a world where hidden meanings and symbolic structures seem to be suppressed by hasty communications and superficial information.” Looking back, it is difficult not to see this assessment of the world as prescient. Dramatic changes to the amount, speed, and nature of communications have been accompanied by a distinct tendency towards the sharp-cut, if not the absolute, at least in the realm of politics. Still, some twenty volumes of Symbolism have shown that much is to be gained from the study of nuance, ambiguity, and the figurative. Opening with a number of general volumes and later offering special foci curated by distinguished corresponding editors, the annual has traced the forms and functions of ‘the symbolic’ across a wide range of fields and disciplines. Contributions by authors from all continents, exploring symbolic practices from classical antiquity to the present day, provided valuable input into the theory and practice of symbolism. Hence, it is with some sadness that we bring this tradition to a close with the present volume. For economic reasons, Symbolism must fold, although we are confident that its mission will be carried on in other forms. We are pleased that the present volume’s special focus constitutes a poetically apt closure to Symbolism’s explorations of the non-literal. Corresponding editor Patrick Gill’s thematic focus on ‘omission’ – defined as the “use of absences to conjure an imagined reality into a recipient’s mind based on their expectations” – offers inquiries into realities haunted by a lack, worlds fraught with possibilities that are unrealized except in the minds of readers, viewers, and listeners. The contributors to this volume examine what it means to hold up alternatives and withhold them at the same time. In a way, thus, the manifold omissions discussed in the following pages revolve around that which is placed sous rature, in Derrida’s terms. Covering ground from medieval verse romance to manga and from 1950’s comics to experimental poetry, the essays collected here theorize what it means simultaneously to proffer something and take it away, and how the absent can signify as potently, or even more so, than the present. It is likewise fitting that two essays on the symbolism of nature in surrealist poetry and of string quartet music in modernist writing conclude this final volume: the special concern of Symbolism has always been to offer explorations of symbolist and modernist signifying practices in particular, alongside the wider frame encompassing such practices in other periods.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-202

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Foreword from the Editors

Over the years, the editorial team has accrued many debts. First and foremost, thanks are due to the founding editor, Rüdiger Ahrens, who attended to the annual with great acumen and care from its inception. Numerous corresponding editors ensured the innovative thematic range and depth that Symbolism has stood for. Contributors to special foci and general sections demonstrated how fruitful and rewarding the study of symbolism remains. A host of expert referees helped us maintain the standard of scholarship that Symbolism is proud of. Generations of editorial assistants saw the volumes through the press with keen eyes for detail; for the present volume, we thank Dominik Mika, Aurelia Spielkamp, and Svea Türlings in particular. Very special thanks are due to Chris Wahlig at Münster, who capably and good-naturedly chaperoned the annual longer than anyone else outside the editorial team. Florian Klaeger University of Bayreuth

Klaus Stierstorfer University of Münster

Marlena Tronicke University of Münster

Contents Foreword from the Editors

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Special Focus: Omission Corresponding Editor: Patrick Gill Patrick Gill Introduction: Omission

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M-C. Newbould “[B]y the Knowledge of the Great Saint Paraleipomenon—”: Si(g)ns of Omission in Laurence Sterne 13 Nigel Fabb When Words Stop: Omission in Songs

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Anni Haahr Henriksen Omissions, Blanks, and Silences: Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126 49 Tiffany M. B. Anderson Blackness as Disability: Compulsory Whiteness, Able-Bodiedness, and Masculinity in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy 67 Nobuko Anan Girls’ Aesthetics in Japan: Absence of Female Material Bodies

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Aysha Strachan Meliur as a Figure of Omission in Konrad von Würzburg’s Partonopier und Meliur 101 Kenneth Eckert Repression and Omission in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills

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Contents

Catherine Charlwood Don’t Mention the Guns: Omission by Substitution in Simon Armitage’s Killing Time 143 Jochen Ecke Omission and the Poetics of the EC Comics Twist: An Analysis of “Last Respects” (1951) and “Master Race” (1955) 159 Carsten Schinko The Omissions of Intermediality: Pop Music and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad 173 Gregory Betts Aliens in the Void: Writing Beyond the Limits of Language in bpNichol’s The Martyrology (and (Luigi Serafini’s ((Code)x Seriphian(us)))) 193 Art Redding The Mystery of the Missing Mystery: Midcentury Intellectuals on Modernism and Detective Fiction 211

General Section Margaryta Golovchenko Nature and I: The Human/Nature Relationship in Surrealist and Proto-Surrealist Poetry 231 Kiyoko Magome The Symbolism of the String Quartet in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus 253 Contributors Index

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Patrick Gill

Introduction: Omission When, in The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253–55, the Flemish Franciscan decides to omit the description of a particularly impressive aspect of life among the Mongols, it may appear nothing more than a negligible rhetorical flourish: The matrons make for themselves most beautiful carts, which I am not able to describe unto your majesty [. . .] but by pictures only: for I would right willingly have painted all things for you, had my skill been aught in that art.1

What is here so modestly presented as simply a purported failure of verbal communication is in fact a highly complex operation encompassing the quadruple constellation of writer, reader, form and reality: in describing far-off lands, the writer makes a decision to leave out the description of a particular phenomenon and proceeds to signpost that decision. The reader may pick up on the express signal of the writer’s “I may not describe,” but they will also note the omission based on their knowledge of and expectations vis-à-vis the textual genre they are in the process of reading: the travel account is meant to provide descriptions of exotic locales and extoll their opulence and otherness. The omission of said description is thus a conspicuous maneuver on the part of the writer, and one that, in a final step, jolts the reader’s imagination into action: if words do not suffice to describe the splendor of these carts, it falls upon the reader to imagine their beauty and resplendence. It is this astute use of absences to conjure an imagined reality into a recipient’s mind based on their expectations vis-à-vis artistic form and/or their experience of reality that is here termed ‘omission.’ That the term ‘omission’ is championed in the present volume over the received notion of the ‘gap’ has two (superficially contradictory) reasons. The first is that the notion of gaps in literary texts is founded in a perfectly understandable but ultimately limiting linguistic approach. Given that a text’s constituent

Note: For their diligence and critical comments, I would like to thank the editorial team of Symbolism as well as my colleagues at Mainz University who undertook to read and comment on the essays here assembled: Laura Eyselein, Mirjam Haas, Anna Schmitt.  William of Rubruck, The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253–55, as Narrated by Himself, ed. and trans. William Woodville Rockhill (London: Hakluyt Society, 1900): 56. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-001

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parts are signifiers whose relation to the signified is arbitrary, any use of language will implicitly point to an absence, or, as Venuti phrases it: “Because meaning is an effect of relations and differences among signifiers along a potentially endless chain [. . .], it is always differential and deferred, never present as an original unity.”2 It can thus be considered the very nature of verbal constructs to carry within themselves absences, regardless of whether or not these can be read as productive complements to the text itself. While this view of a purely referential use of language is not espoused by Iser, who after all, sees in the language of literature not so much a system to describe what is, as a performative act bringing into existence the objects to which it refers,3 his assumptions are nonetheless founded on the very notion of textual reference or non-reference: in Iser’s view, the language of literature opens up gaps because it is not referential but expressive of an imaginative reality in and of itself that is by necessity incomplete. The idea of a Saussurean approach to artistic expression is simply too narrow if it is to encompass forms such as music, drama, and film. After all, while texts may be reducible to a chain of signifiers intimating the absence of the signified, the onscreen representation of a character or the onstage presence of an actor bend that discussion in a different direction. In this sense, then, Iser’s ‘gap’ may be thought of as too limiting a term in the present discussion. Its very roots in the logocentric view of texts as Saussurean signifiers, though, means that the received notion of the ‘gap’ is also too unspecific, encompassing as it does all manner of inadvertent leavings-out unavoidable in any verbal rendering of reality. The term ‘omission’ used in these pages has been chosen to demarcate a common artistic phenomenon that is yet specific enough to require differentiation from Iser’s nomenclature: a silence, blank, or absence, introduced, by design, against the recipient’s generic or experiential expectations, frequently symbolic of the tenor of the respective work itself. The first of these notions is certainly the least fashionable in terms of poststructuralist criticism as it is based on authorial intention. Against this doubt, I would argue that formulating a hypothesis as regards a message’s tenor is one of the most natural aspects of any act of communication. And so, even though such hypotheses may on occasion turn out to be mistaken, their formulation as such is a simple fact of any act of reception. Furthermore, a hypothesis regarding the deliberate design of a work’s use of omission is easily checked against other factors such as that omission’s compatibility with the overall unity of the  Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation [1995] (London: Routledge, 2008): 17.  Wolfgang Iser, Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1970): 10.

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work, its flagrant disregard for generic expectations, as well as the degree to which attention is drawn to the omission by the work itself. All of these points so central to our understanding of omission can be summed up by the idea of its “radical relativity:”4 an omission becomes detectable in relation to what is present, what has not been omitted; it also becomes conspicuous when measured against the recipient’s expectations. That expectation, something that might be thought of as a passive predisposition, becomes an active constituent element in eliciting meaning from a text, “a peculiar form of action, getting ready, namely, to receive certain kinds of stimuli rather than others.”5 What makes recipients notice such productive leavings-out, then, is not simply a dichotomy of absence/presence located within the respective text or artefact, but a notion on the part of the recipient that “an expectation of presence is frustrated.”6 This sense of an expectation frustrated, likened by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to “that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair case, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four,”7 is such a dynamic generator of affective responses that it is here seen as the major constituent aspect of signification by omission. Be it the recipient’s experience of a given form or genre, or the recipient’s experience of life: when texts or other works of art conspicuously clash with their prior knowledge by omitting a particular aspect, by not saying or not showing that which must reasonably be expected, forcing the recipient to discard previously held interpretive frames, or provoking them into filling the resultant gap with their own imagination, they cajole or bludgeon recipients into an active participation in the creation of meaning. As a failsafe, so as not exclusively to rely on contextual information and recipients’ prior knowledge, the artefact itself will often go out of its way to signpost the phenomenon of omission. In the case of Rubruck, he explicitly tells the reader that he will not describe the beauty of the Mongolian carts. So in relation to the many other things he does describe in his account, this is the one instance where he refuses to do so. The omission is also flagged up as noteworthy when viewed in relation to readerly expectations: travel accounts describe things. That is their entire raison d’être. The form engenders expectations that are deliberately thwarted by the text itself. But the reader’s active involvement with even as relatively insignificant a passage as that under discussion here does not end

 Justin Remes, Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing (New York: Columbia UP, 2020): 3.  I. A. Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism [1924] (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959): 88.  Remes, Absence, 3.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria [1817], ed. Nigel Leask (London: Dent, 1997): 220.

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with their noticing the omission: in refusing to paint a picture in words of the ladies’ beautiful carts, Rubruck performs a complex maneuver of abrogation and conferral of responsibility. In deserting his duty as a writer, after all, what he is not primarily concerned with is his own technical ability or any extended discourse on the shortcomings of his chosen mode of expression. Instead, by explicitly choosing not to describe the object of his fascination, he leaves it to his readers to imagine it. What has occurred here, then, is a signposted leaving-out that becomes productive in the reader’s mind by challenging them to imagine what is not said. When the writer trusts the omission to convey an idea of beauty or riches more effectively, more efficiently and more eloquently than any attempted description, it is because they trust the reader’s imagination to rush in and fill the gap. Silence, in this instance, has become productive as a kind of hyperbole. Where the recipient’s imagination is at least conceptually able to react to the work’s prompting and fill the gap, such omissions have a tremendous affective potential: when W.B. Yeats concludes “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” without having explicitly commemorated the subject of his poem and instead saying that “a thought / Of that late death took all my heart for speech,”8 the reader may not know verbatim what Yeats would have had to say about Robert Gregory – but they are made aware of the scope of Yeats’ loss, and the poem suggests that its own silence has more to say about the talent, beauty and dignity of the dead young man than any traditional form of eulogy might hope to express. Employed in other ways, however, omission can confront the recipient with the limits of their own knowledge. When, for instance, pivotal scenes in Shakespearean plays are not shown on stage, it deprives the audience of the ability to form a judgment on characters and their behavior: what, for instance, are we to make of Caesar’s apparent refusal to accept the crown in 1.2 when instead of witnessing the scene first-hand, all we have is Casca’s uninformed adumbration? The effect of such omissions is thus as a reminder of certain epistemological constraints. This is not to say that an epistemological use of omission cannot be affective. That the rational in the form of the boundaries of our knowledge can go together with the emotional is borne out by Enlightenment discourses around the knowability and representability of God. The reason, for instance, that Immanuel Kant is particularly taken with the second commandment, is that it

 William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989): 134.

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though the imagination [. . .] finds nothing beyond the sensible world to which it can lay hold, still this thrusting aside of the sensible barriers gives it a feeling of being unbounded; and that removal is thus a presentation of the infinite.9

With no “graven image” to contemplate, the mind is confronted with a void filling it with “the feeling of the sublime.”10 Ethical questions, too, can be raised and negotiated by means of omission: in some contexts, considerations of decorum may make silence a more appropriate response than any form of utterance. This is the case when Geoffrey Hill abruptly ends “September Song” (1968), a poem commemorating Holocaust victims but also aware of the pitfalls of turning their tragedy into commodified art, with the line “This is plenty. This is more than enough.”11 In prose fiction, omission may be used to mark who dominates discourse and who is left with little or no voice, as is the case in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), in which the reader gradually realizes that the entire novel revolves around the omission of the tongueless Friday’s voice.12 Finally, in referring back to the mechanics of representation as well as the recipient’s expectations, the use of omission always brings with it a certain level of meta-discursiveness. A thirteen-line sonnet does not just represent a comment on whatever the subject of said sonnet might be – it constitutes a comment on the form itself. In employing this radical form of meaning-generation, then, specimen texts and artefacts always draw attention to themselves and their form. That type of self-conscious discourse in and about any given form is often associated with more recent literary history, but as the present volume’s first contribution demonstrates, it has long been a mainstay of any sustained critical engagement with the eighteenth-century novel. M-C. Newbould’s essay picks up the familiar thread of Laurence Sterne’s typographical experiments – many of which can be seen as elaborate forms of creating material blanks on the page for the reader to contemplate – and integrates the traditional interpretation of these as playful meta-commentary on the newly emergent form of the novel into an original reading of Sterne’s use of visual blanks not as mere gimmicks but as a reflection on his characters’ spiritual lives, in both Tristram Shandy (1759) and A Sentimental Journey (1768). Rather than seeing them as mere references to the possibilities and limitations of the form of the novel itself, Newbould reads

 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment [1790], trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1911): 274.  Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 274.  Geoffrey Hill, Selected Poems (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006): 30.  J. M. Coetzee, Foe [1986] (London: Penguin, 1987).

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Sterne’s typographical experiments as “marks that make manifest literature’s lapse into silence:”13 they take on the role of the visible embodiment of characters’ spiritual lives. Taking its cue from Newbould’s investigation of the stand-ins, the graphic symbols arranged on the page as remnants pointing out the absence,14 Nigel Fabb’s essay inquires into what happens when the music of a song continues unaccompanied by vocals for a conspicuously long time. Based on Fabb’s discussion of the Steely Dan song “The Royal Scam” (1976), his essay employs relevance theory as well as source-based semantics to categorize the listener’s experience in such cases as an “epistemic feeling of knowing something without being able to say what it is” (47). With its emphasis on cognitive processes, Fabb’s essay highlights the ways in which the listener receives information and what inferences can be drawn from it. A similar invitation to infer meaning on the part of the recipient is under discussion in Anni Haahr Henriksen’s contribution to the present volume in which she discusses William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126, which famously (or infamously) ends in two missing lines marked out by two pairs of parentheses. After carefully considering the editorial history of this sonnet and editors’ policy vis-à-vis questions of punctuation, the essay offers its own reasoned inferences as to a meaningful and productive reading of the mysterious missing lines. Having investigated the scope omissions give to the recipient when it comes to inferring and constructing meaning, the present volume continues with an investigation of the impact omission can have on the characterization of protagonists and the portrayal of their identities. How can a conspicuous omission in the representation of a fictional character define that character in the eyes of the reader? That question is answered in different ways by the next two essays. In the first, Tiffany M. B. Anderson revisits Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), one of the first novels ever published by an African American woman. With remarkable prescience of the ongoing issues around race and identity in contemporary America, Harper chooses to reveal her characters’ external features such as their skin color, but also physical disabilities in a deferred way, so as to impress upon readers how little these superficial characteristics have to do with the

 Anne Toner, Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015): 1.  “Um eine Absenz bemerken zu können, bedarf es eines kleinen Restes Präsenz. Irgendetwas von dem Abwesenden ist da und verweist darauf, macht die Tatsache der Abwesenheit erst evident” (Sabine Zubarik, “Präsenter Mangel – abwesendes Material: Fußnoten in literarischen Texten,” in Figuren der Absenz/Figures de l’absence, ed. Anke Grutschus and Peter Krilles [Berlin: Frank und Timme, 2010]: 33–46, 33).

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inherent qualities of her characters and how much store is set by them in the eyes of others. Taking its cue from Iola Leroy’s apparent identification of disability and blackness, Anderson problematizes the persistent focus on appearance as she moves the discussion of identity from the Jim Crow era to the present-day. Nobuko Anan’s contribution is concerned with a phenomenon she terms ‘girls’ aesthetics:’ a rejection of the superficial trappings of sex and sexuality designed to counter the stereotypical representation of women as biologically and socially determined bearers of children. Discussing how this resistance to societal heteronormativity is established and finds expression in various art forms, Anan rehearses discussions in contemporary art on the question of whether by carving out its own spaces and omitting the markers of the binary, such art can actively challenge the patriarchy whose authority it intends to reject. In discussing the outer trappings, variously of ethnicity or able-bodiedness, or of womanhood and thus fertility, the works investigated in the essays of both Anderson and Anan do not only use omission to represent the phenomenon in question: instead, by their very use of omission, they turn the question of the significance of such external markers for aspects of identity over to us as recipients, asking us to consider how easily we ourselves are swayed by such superficial notions. That the reader may find themselves confronted with difficult questions may also be said of the topic of the final essay concerned with identity and omission, Aysha Strachan’s contribution on the character of Meliur in Konrad von Würzburg’s Partonopier und Meliur. What is omitted in this medieval romance is, for the most part, the visible embodiment of its female title character, the empress Meliur. Remaining invisible and ultimately unknown throughout most of the text, Meliur takes up an uncertain position located somewhere between human female and demonic fay. As the hero’s (and the reader’s) curiosity as to Meliur’s true being grows, however, the questioning gaze is gradually turned from the looked-upon toward the looker: her invisibility raises the question of who looks upon her and why their gaze takes on the characteristics it does – always deferring, never fully revealing to the reader the true nature of this elusive female figure. The gradual piquing of the reader’s interest by means of a consistent yet at first fairly unobtrusive omission is also a feature of the work discussed in Kenneth Eckert’s contribution. Approaching Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Plain View of Hills (1982) from the basic standpoint that it is set not so much in an authentically rendered Japan as in the protagonist Etsuko’s memory of that country, Eckert proceeds to read the novel as primarily concerned with and characterized by Etsuko’s ongoing repression of her own and her country’s tragic past. By “asking the reader to piece together the charged absences left by Etsuko navigating her minefields of notthinking about a problem” (140), Ishiguro’s text avails itself of one of the central

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functions of omission in art: the transferal of interpretive power and responsibility onto the recipient. That such a transferal can only work where contextual clues are provided, is a given. If these clues are so insistent as to lead to univocal reactions among readers, it might raise the question where the use of such forms of omission may lie. An answer is provided in Catherine Charlwood’s discussion of the Columbine passage in Simon Armitage’s long poem Killing Time (2000). Concerned with the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, the passage renders events simultaneously less shocking and more affecting by omitting the express mention of any traces of graphic violence. The technique it employs in this will give little leeway to readers to imagine their own version of events – too familiar are the news reports and gruesome TV pictures. What it does do, however, is to force the reader’s mind into an act of translation – substituting something that is said in the poem with something that is deliberately omitted – and thus using the reader’s meaning-making capabilities to bypass the explicit and familiar to devastating effect. While the reader’s ability to construct meaning from ostensible omission in a near-instantaneous fashion is at the heart of Charlwood’s contribution, the subject of Jochen Ecke’s essay, EC Comics, relies on the double-take: readers will be unable to notice and thus process omissions at first reading and will only be able to make sense of what they have witnessed when retracing their initial steps after having experienced a surprise ending or twist. This discrepancy between first impression and final comprehension, Ecke argues, is primarily based on a discrepancy between the textual and visual components of the comic narratives: relying on textual clues, readers will follow one version of events, when the more objective, more objectively mimetic visuals would have allowed them to construe an entirely different meaning all along. Whereas in the example of EC Comics, textual omission serves to temporarily garden-path readers into disregarding visual meaning, the subject of Carsten Schinko’s essay, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011), is built around the consistent absence of an entire dimension of her book: the personal, spontaneous, highly individual and idiosyncratic experience of pop music. Far from simply lacking this dimension, Egan’s book is built around its absence, challenging readers to imagine what even this highly innovative text cannot supply: an individual transcendent experience brought about by or experienced in the presence of a medium unrepresentable between two book covers. The unrepresentable is also the topic of the penultimate contribution to the present volume. In it, Gregory Betts employs the phenomenology of Husserl and Waldenfels to read experimental writers bpNichol and Luigi Serafini as expressive of an absence of meaning so stark, so disruptive, that it simultaneously represents an alien, non-human perspective on life while at the same time blurring the boundaries between said and unsaid, between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ This “space of

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saying where communication has yet been omitted” (194) to Betts, is what truly marks out these writers as innovative and engaged in a revivification of language. In their radical approach to communication, to concepts of saying and not-saying, bpNichol and Luigi Serafini stretch our concept of omission to its very limit. A contribution taking us beyond that limit by concerning itself not so much with a literary genre but with the criticism engendered by said genre, is Art Redding’s essay on the disappearance of the mysterious not necessarily from detective fiction per se but as the focus of mid-century critics. The fascinating study of the discourse promulgated around a popular genre offers many gaps in the criticism while potentially being read as a defense of omission in literature itself. What these contributions on the topic of omission show, then, is not only that it can be a useful category of discussion, but that it manifests itself in many genres across continents and periods. Given its fourfold definition, i.e. its reliance on being part of the design of a work, on creating a discrepancy between the recipient’s knowledge of the world or the form they are in the presence of, and its function of activating the recipient in order to make them part of the generation of meaning engendered by the work, omission in its many guises can be identified, classified and discussed. The uses to which it is put vary depending on context. As these and other examples show, omission can spark emotions in the recipient, it can provide them with a moral argument, it can raise epistemological issues, and it can draw attention to form itself, thus extending a form’s lifespan and relevance.

M-C. Newbould

“[B]y the Knowledge of the Great Saint Paraleipomenon—”: Si(g)ns of Omission in Laurence Sterne Abstract: Laurence Sterne’s fiction has long been recognized as a key example of the eighteenth-century investment in the material text. Tristram Shandy frequently uses innovative typography and graphic elements that complement its metanarrative qualities. Many of these symbols can be called ‘signs of omission’ – asterisks, dashes, and blank spaces that leave meaning unclear or incomplete. They sit alongside numerous other types of omission in Tristram Shandy, from rhetorical figures such as the aposiopesis to the many unfulfilled promises the narrator makes. This essay discusses these well-known interpretations of how Tristram Shandy exemplifies numerous types of ‘omission’ in narrative and typographic forms alike. But it also considers how these figure within a larger, more conceptual framework of ‘omission’ across Sterne’s writing, and which potentially holds a theological dimension. A Sentimental Journey and Sterne’s sermons in particular tackle what it means to omit to perform a good act, in some ways recalling the Catholic doctrine of ‘sins of omission.’ When Yorick fails to do something he knows he should, he confronts moments of self-doubt that – according to the sermons – are crucial on the route toward attaining greater self-knowledge

Introduction Paralipomenon – the book of things “passed over” – is the term used in the Vulgate and some other versions of the Bible to describe the books of Chronicles in the Old Testament supposed to contain material omitted from the book of Kings. In a more general sense, it also indicates matter that has been left out from the main body of a text, but which is included in an appendix. That Tristram Shandy should evoke this so-called “saint” as the patron deity of his work is fitting, given the multiple missing components it seems to contain and its perhaps imperfect “knowledge.” The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) comprises near-countless “signs of omission”: typographical symbols which paradoxically inscribe the presence of a chasm, of something missing. Coupled with this, the narrator makes many narrative pledges that remain https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-002

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unfulfilled and leaves many stories unfinished, omitting, as it were, to provide substance, conclusions, or anything definite in the pregnant space of what often turns out to be an empty promise. Known for weaving between the paradoxical absence and presence of “something” and “nothing,” Tristram Shandy toys with omission in varying guises. It is, however, indicative of a wider fascination with gaps, with absent-presence, and with the commission of omission as a seemingly deliberate not doing of a thing displayed across Sterne’s work. My concern here is to reinvestigate the familiar ground of Sterne’s signs of omission as a way into probing the more embedded concern with sins of omission – and, perversely, of their commission – explored in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), and especially in his sermons. Knowing oneself to have sinned is one thing; knowing that sin to have been committed not in the doing of a bad act, but in not having done what one knows to be a good one, remains an ongoing preoccupation in Sterne’s theological quest for authentic, honest self-knowledge.

Sterne’s Page Breaks: The Somethingand-Nothing of Typographical Signs The graphic qualities of the eighteenth-century text have attracted considerable scholarly attention over several years: from unusual uses of typography to pictorial features to illustrations, the look of the book forms an important part of this period’s experimentation with form and content in newly emerging fictive modes.1 Janine Barchas summarizes the then-current critical landscape in Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2003) by bringing together the variant strands of social history, literary studies, and book history that collectively address “the manner in which the material reality of print technology affects social change,” central to which is “the basic assumption that presentation affects interpretation.”2 Indeed, as an important essay collection preceding Barchas’s book (and to the typographical prompt of which this essay’s title is partially indebted) suggests, the increasing tendency has been to transcend “traditional oppositions” between “textual and interpretive studies” to gain a more holistic view of  See, for instance, Christopher Flint, The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011).  Janine Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003): 8. See also Helen Williams, Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021): 3–4.

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the eighteenth-century book, its makers, and its consumers.3 More recent work has expanded the field of enquiry still further, drawing attention to larger-scale features of book production and circulation in the period, and to more specific elements (choices of type, for instance, and individual printer-booksellers), that consolidate the extent to which “the” eighteenth-century book was inherently bound with its look and feel, from the inception of authorship to reader reception. It is often acknowledged that formal and presentational experimentation coheres with a growing interest in the movements of the individual mind, and that recurrent self-reflexive narrative gestures – including drawing attention to a work’s composition as well as to its appearance – provide insight into how eighteenth-century writers map thinking onto writing and reading. Christopher Fox, for instance, focusing on the early-eighteenth-century Scriblerian group and the graphic complexities of the works of writers such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, has vitalized interest in how John Locke’s theories of the mind provided one stimulus for these writers to weld “material” and “immaterial” substances together, and to invest in ideas of individual consciousness that sought new ways for the printed text to represent it.4 Few authors of the period are as closely aligned with these different, entwined strands of “novelty” as Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy in particular is upheld as an exemplar of self-reflexive narrative strategies and of graphic innovation alike. Again, the two are frequently connected in analyses of Sterne’s work. Tristram, the narrator, often discusses his method of composition, in which the array of typographical symbols and graphic features for which Tristram Shandy became famous – asterisks, dashes; black, blank and marbled leaves – speak of the work’s purported novelty in approaching not just what a book is about, but how it is written, and how it looks and feels.5 After all, Tristram asserts, he sets out to rebuke a vicious taste which has crept into thousands [. . .] —of reading straight forwards, more in quest of the adventures, than of the deep erudition and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly impart with them.6

 Ma(r)king the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page, ed. Joe Bray, Miriam Handley and Anne C. Henry (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000): 1.  Christopher Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Early EighteenthCentury Britain (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988): 14.  Christopher Fanning, “Small Particles of Eloquence: Sterne and the Scriblerian Text,” Modern Philology 100.3 (2003): 360–392, 361, 383.  Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1978): 1.65. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “TS.”

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The ruptures each page experiences, not only with typographical symbols such as the dash used here, but with the sometimes obscure path Sterne traces toward “erudition and knowledge,” make this a work in its own cast. However, it has long been established that Tristram Shandy is not as sui generis as some might have claimed in the past. Sterne’s apparent indebtedness to earlier writers, Swift in particular, has increasingly fed into scholarly interest in his connection with “the moderns” of his own day. Thomas Keymer’s Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel provides a notable milestone in this reevaluation, and it has stimulated more recent research into Sterne’s comparableness to and difference from now lesser-known writers of the decade immediately preceding Tristram Shandy’s appearance. Keymer draws attention to now-forgotten works such as John Kidgell’s The Card (1750) to demonstrate quite how innovative mid-century writers were in entwining the graphic features of the printed book with verbal “meaning” such as to create new modes of “interpretation.”7 Tim Parnell has further expanded the discussion surrounding Sterne and his experimental contemporaries, while work on other mid-century writers (such as Eliza Heywood) has shown how the self-reflexive strategies for which Sterne became particularly famous were abundantly present in this period.8 Most recently, Helen Williams has drawn upon a wide range of now-neglected works to demonstrate the extent to which Sterne certainly innovated in terms of eighteenthcentury print technology, but also how immersed he was in the experimentation with the material book practiced by his contemporaries.9 None of this is to detract from Sterne’s achievement or uniqueness. Indeed, the experimental complexities of his work – both material (typographic and graphic) and abstract or immaterial (with narrative method, for instance) – become all the richer when situated in dialogue with the creations of his antecedents and immediate contemporaries. To see Sterne as both “an original,” producing eccentrically innovatory work, and “originary” is to secure his interconnectedness with this most revolutionary of periods, in terms of its fictional creativity. It also allows Sterne to pivot between the seemingly conflicting but interconnected strands of purpose and effect in the period’s fiction. Sterne’s work took its share in the criticism levelled at the novel in general, especially throughout the latter half of the century, when it was accused of being merely novelty-seeking and flimsily produced, aimed only at satisfying momentary

 Thomas Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002): 69–71.  Tim Parnell, “Sterne’s Fiction and the Mid-Century Novel: The ‘Vast Empire of Biographical Freebooters’ and the ‘Crying Volume,’” in The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. James Alan Downie (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016): 264–281.  Williams, Laurence Sterne, 6.

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pleasure. Tristram Shandy gestures toward its self-proclaimed singularity, but also perhaps toward the negative criticism supposed gimmicks such as typographic experimentation attracted, in the marbled leaf Sterne inserts in volume three of the novel, its second installment.10 He calls this the “motly emblem of my work!” – the erratic patterning of marbled paper embodies Tristram Shandy’s idiosyncrasy – its exceptionalism emphasized by the fact that each example of these hand-marbled sheets in the early editions is unique.11 On the practical level, this required skill and expense on the part of Sterne’s printers. The marbled leaf also requires readers to indulge unresolved or enigmatic meaning, including the possibility that this is just festive play and nothing more. These two pages are preceded by Tristram’s invocation to the “great saint” of deferred knowledge, reinforcing the coincidence between textual and conceptual chasms as inherently meaning-full: —Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader! read,—or by the knowledge of the great saint Paraleipomenon—I tell you before-hand, you had better throw down the book at once; for without much reading, by which your reverence knows, I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unraval the many opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one. (TS 1.268)

What might appear to be insubstantial, novelty-pleasing gimmicks to some are also conveyors of meaning and substance to others, linked to those evolving ideas about how “the mind” might be represented through writing, if at all.12 As Anne Bandry says of the use of asterisks, and by extension of Tristram Shandy’s typographical play in general: “L’usage que fait Sterne des astérisques dépasse donc le simple masque, ludique, d’un mot qui ne peut s’écrire” [“Sterne’s use of asterisks therefore surpasses the simple, ludic mask of a word that cannot be written”].13 In this, Sterne further contributes to ongoing discussions about the interaction between word and image, the visual symbol of print shaped into an apparently meaningful word, and the evasively meaningful symbol, picture, or

 See, for example, Laurence Sterne and Sterneana, ed. M-C. Newbould and Helen Williams, hosted by Cambridge Digital Library (acc. 09 February 2022); Williams, Laurence Sterne, 99–124.  Peter de Voogd, “Tristram Shandy as aesthetic object,” Word & Image 4.1 (1988): 383―392, 384.  See, for instance, Peter J. de Voogd, “Laurence Sterne, the marbled page, and the ‘use of accidents,’” Word & Image 1.3 (1985): 279–287, 280–281, 285.  Anne Bandry, Tristram Shandy: créations et imitations en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle, Thèse à l’Université de la Sorbonne (Paris III) (1991): 70.

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image. As Peter de Voogd has suggested in relation to Sterne’s work, and Tristram Shandy in particular, word and image cohere to create an “aesthetic whole” where the verbal and the visual cannot be disjoined without causing damaging rupture to Sterne’s purpose.14 For example, the famous conclusion to Tristram Shandy’s sixth volume describes in graphic form the “progress” of the narrative in each volume printed so far, and represents its notably digressive tendencies in a series of squiggled lines.15 One joke here is Tristram’s claim that his diagrammatical descriptions are a form of art-work, “invented” and “sculpted” by himself. Another is that the impulse to digress, noted by his critics, is somehow a fault that he strives to correct; he facetiously undertakes to pursue the “straight line” favored by, among others, “cabbage-planters.”16 Of course, the squiggles are more interesting to look at than a straight line, and encourage the reader-viewer to seek correspondences between what he or she sees and what has been read up to this point. The correlation is both inviting and elusive: it will never be direct. That, of course, is partly the point. A text cannot fully describe itself, or be represented in diagrammatic form, much less than a verbal narrative can capture the experience it might seek to convey. And, as such, the interplay between the seeming-to-be-something, the apparently nothing, and what appears to be definitely there creates complex mechanisms of meaning in Sterne’s verbal-visual texts. Several of these symbols – asterisks and dashes in particular – signal the presence of something and of nothing simultaneously. They present ink on the page, but also an absence of readily discernible (verbal) meaning – perhaps a word concealed or censored. Like the blank spaces, and blank pages, of the work, they indicate the uses of print paradoxically to advertise absence, omission. Anne Toner’s Ellipsis in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Signs of Omission provides an important touchstone here. She positions Sterne, and Tristram Shandy above all, within the context of some of the discussions outlined so far. Among the widespread diversity of typographical symbols, and the scholarly interest they have generated, Toner identifies the ellipsis – most often indicated with “ . . . ” – as peculiarly capable of capturing the gap between experience and its representation with which the eighteenth-century novel consistently grapples. “It seems extraordinary,” she writes, “that a simple mark can communicate so

 de Voogd, “Tristram Shandy as aesthetic object,” 384.  The visual elements referred to can be viewed on the Laurence Sterne and Stearneana pages of Cambridge Digital Library. See Newbould and Williams (ed.), Laurence Sterne and Sterneana, .  See Newbould and Williams (ed.), Laurence Sterne and Sterneana, (acc. 09 February 2022).

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efficiently the rawest of human emotions. From a sign of interruption, ellipsis marks evolve into tokens of passion, interiority and complexity” that are especially aligned with the endeavor of prose fiction: “The novel in particular has aspired through its history to reach closer to realizations of human interiority, including its incoherencies and blanks.”17 Toner describes Tristram Shandy as “English literature’s most famous compendium of ellipsis marks”: The many interconnected ways in which one does not say something is at the heart of this work. Sterne’s pages are notoriously covered with dashes and asterisks (there are hyphens and dots), while such sentence ellipses burgeon into the larger structural gaps of a blank page and an entire missing chapter. Each gap has its own purpose, but most display some scepticism about writing’s representational abilities.18

One frequently cited example involves the apparently easy substitution of letters for asterisks in Susannah’s question to the infant Tristram who needs to use the toilet while the chamber pot is inconveniently not to hand:19 ———The chamber-maid had left no ✶✶✶✶✶✶✶ ✶✶✶ under the bed:———Cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the window seat with the other,—cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time (TS, 1.449) to ✶✶✶✶ ✶✶✶ ✶✶ ✶✶✶ ✶✶✶✶✶✶?

Letters seem to substitute asterisks to form words, but they don’t definitively do so. And when juxtaposed with passages where several lines of asterisks seem to “represent” nothing coherent or discernible at all, Toner’s point about the potentially skeptical view on whether writing can actually “represent” experience is borne out. Slop’s observation to Walter Shandy, for instance, upon the importance of using his proffered forceps correctly, makes just such an elusive gesture towards an unstated meaning: “————because, Sir, if the hip is mistaken for the head,—there is a possibility (if it is a boy) that the forceps ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶” (TS, 1.221). Sterne’s blank spaces similarly complement the joke about something and nothing, and the absent presence of the typographical symbol. Several scholars have noted quite how purposeful the blank space surrounding the supposedly meaningful printed text can be in Sterne’s work, which perhaps as readers we take for granted and which we may not even notice is there at all.20 Is the blank space the most overt sign of omission in Sterne, the most provocative way of

 Anne Toner, Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015): 13.  Toner, Ellipsis, 54.  de Voogd, “Tristram Shandy as aesthetic object,” 386–387.  de Voogd, “Tristram Shandy as aesthetic object,” 387; Williams, Laurence Sterne, 143–177.

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suggesting that in a seeming gap something will always be present, whether an unarticulated intention or an action not yet, maybe not ever, performed? At one point, Tristram provides the reader with a blank sheet on which he (or she) might imaginatively “paint” a portrait of Widow Wadman, Uncle Toby’s unrequited romantic attachment, “as like your mistress as you can———as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you” (TS, 2.566). Sterne seems keen to remind us that an omission – a seeming lack of a something – is itself a form of act. These visual features of Tristram Shandy cohere with an array of other signs of omission throughout the text. Rhetorical figures figuring a nothing abound; for instance, Tristram invokes the aposiopesis for humorous, often bawdy ends. It is, as Toner reminds us (using Keymer’s words), “‘Sterne’s favourite rhetorical figure.’”21 Uncle Toby’s “modest” speculation about why Mrs. Shandy might prefer a female midwife to Dr. Slop, the male version proposed by her husband, provides an aptly typographical example: —Then it can be out of nothing in the whole world, quoth my uncle Toby, in the simplicity of his heart,—but MODESTY:—My sister, I dare say, added he, does not care to let a man come so near her✶✶✶✶. I will not say whether my uncle Toby had compleated the sentence or not;— (TS, 1.115)

This became perhaps the most infamous example of the salient possibilities inherent in something-nothing typography, the “four stars” becoming a byword for Shandean innuendo. Tristram’s explanation of these ✶✶✶✶, “Make this dash, ———’tis an Aposiopesis.——Take the dash away, and write Backside,——’tis Bawdy” (TS, 1.116), compounds the effect of implying but eluding meaning that only the reader’s imagination (or conscience) can definitively supply. Not everything in Tristram Shandy’s gaps invites bawdy innuendo. Its blank pages, its white spaces on the page, and the “chasm of ten pages” (TS, 1.372) of a discarded chapter the narrator claims to have ripped out (which disrupts the pagination for the entire remainder of volume four) provide a wide array of creative opportunities between print, “empty” space, and the imagination. There are deliberately unfilled gaps, but there are also things withheld, only temporarily omitted until a deferred completion date: “favorite chapters” on “chamber-maids,” “pishes,” and “button-holes” (TS, 1.345) are advertised by Tristram but their delivery indefinitely scheduled. 22 He first

 Toner, Ellipsis, 89.  See Melvyn New, “Sterne’s Bawdry: A Cautionary Tale,” The Review of English Studies 62.253 (2011): 80–89, 80.

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promises all this and more when describing his baptism in volume four, in Tristram Shandy’s second installment. Tristram reminds us, one volume and a year later, that none of this has yet been delivered: Amongst many other book-debts, all of which I shall discharge in due time,—I own myself a debtor to the world for two items,—a chapter upon chamber-maids and buttonholes, which, in the former part of my work, I promised and fully intended to pay off this year [. . .]. (TS, 1.434)

Well might he invoke the “great saint” of omission, personifying Paralipomena as the titular deity of a book in which “Things omitted in the body of a work, and appended as a supplement” are often promised, but never supplied.23 The giant appendix of Tristram Shandy is yet to be discovered. These are not new observations. Much has been written on Sterne’s use of punctuation, his typography, rhetorical flourishes, self-reflexive games, fragmentation, and apparently innovative creativity in Tristram Shandy.24 The purpose of this discussion is not just to rehearse this familiar territory again – while also paying heed to it – but to indicate its interconnectedness with a wider conceptual approach toward “omission” in Sterne’s work, within but also beyond Tristram Shandy. As Toner points out, the typographical marks of ellipsis that are intrinsically complemented by rhetorical signs of omission are mapped onto the narrative structure of the novel as a whole: “Marks of ellipsis travel from the sentence end to terminate the larger structure of the book,” in which “The signs of aposiopesis, so prominently cultivated in Tristram Shandy, began to become visible as a plot’s final event.”25 This coheres with a growing trend for fragmentation in this period. In Sterne’s work, within but also beyond Tristram Shandy, it attains a spiritual dimension – gesturing toward a different sort of “final event” – in which the festive and the serious, levity and gravity, are inextricably entwined as part of human experience.26

 “Paralipomenon, n.” OED Online. Oxford UP, 2021. (acc. 15 March 2022).  See, for instance, Roger B. Moss, “Sterne’s Punctuation,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 15.2 (1981/82): 179–200.  Toner, Ellipsis, 89 [emphasis in original].  Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville and London: Virginia UP, 1994): 42.

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Sins of Omission: Self-Knowledge, the Ought, and the Ought Not to Have Done A Sentimental Journey features fewer typographical quirks and is not as overtly invested in self-reflexivity as Tristram Shandy, but this text is equally fascinated by how “omission” fits into both a broader creative and a spiritual schema. Recent work on Sterne in relation to debt, for instance, indicates how the unfulfilled promise characterizes the later work too, but in a manner that holds spiritual resonance with an author nearing his own death. As Paul Goring has eloquently demonstrated, Sterne’s real-life preoccupation with monetary debt conjoins with a consciousness of his “book-debts” – meaning an amount owed to a tradesperson that they record in their ledger of debts, but which can also be interpreted to mean the numerous borrowings, named and unnamed, present in Sterne’s work – and of the debt of mortality that every Christian feels he or she must eventually pay.27 What debts, financial, literary, and otherwise, might we all leave behind us, unrequited? This is inherently linked to the problematic nature of Sterne’s handling of sensibility – a rich source for debate among critics, especially in A Sentimental Journey28 – and its relation to sins as much as signs of omission. The reticent or withheld acts of charity Sterne’s Yorick feels he should perform as a man of feeling are rarely so straightforwardly executed; instead, there is often a tussle between selfishness and the good deed he knows he ought to put into action. It is this gap between the “ought” and the act, the great “nought” of (Yorick’s) sensibility, as it were, that compounds Sterne’s theological investment in omission. Although the discussion so far has focused on Tristram Shandy, it is in Sterne’s final, incomplete work of fiction, published just before his death, that the potential inherent in the earlier work to position fragmentation as part of a larger spiritual whole attains fuller realization. A Sentimental Journey presents the paradoxical “something” in relation to the seeming “nothing” more specifically in relation to actions, or deeds, than Tristram Shandy, and as

 Paul Goring, “Debt, Death, and Literary Inheritance: The Ends of Sterne and A Sentimental Journey,” in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey: A Legacy to the World, ed. W. B. Gerard and M-C. Newbould (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2021): 215–216, 222–223.  See, for instance, Tom Keymer, “A Sentimental Journey and the Failure of Feeling,” in The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, ed. Tom Keymer (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009): 79–94; Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000): 71–72; W. B. Gerard and M-C. Newbould, “Introduction: A Sentimental Journey’s Critical Legacies,” Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey: A Legacy to the World (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2021): 1–20.

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such it can be taken as the fuller theological complement to the arguments Sterne puts forward in his sermons. While the narrator of A Sentimental Journey is declaredly a Protestant traveler in a Catholic country – and although Tristram’s mother is most definitely “not a Papist” and the Catholic Dr. Slop is mockingly reviled – Sterne is fascinated with the Sin of Omission that characterizes Augustine’s teaching on sin and free will, but which also feeds into later iterations of these central tenets of Christian faith in Catholicism and its parallel in the Anglicanism that Sterne practiced. Sterne’s sermons are an invaluable resource for such an investigation, as divine texts in their own right and not only as the moralistic essays of a literary genius.29 Interpretation of Sterne’s fiction in relation to his sermons has been the source of some critical contention.30 Nevertheless, important essay collections such as Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne, edited by W. B. Gerard, evidence the rich potential for these overtly religious texts and the quasi-theological fiction to be read in tandem. We don’t have to look far to see that Sterne’s sermons – like his novels – are riddled with moments of selfdoubt. Their discussion of the failure to act on good intentions, or indeed to act at all (other than, at times, viciously or impiously), confirms the notion of “omission” as a sin and, perhaps more gently but no less significantly, as humanly reprehensible. Performing words not deeds, Sterne suggests, signals a failure to do God’s work; the spiritual inertia this creates, of omitting rather than committing, incurs a failure to realize the divine potential inherent in each of us, such that (according to the Book of Common Prayer) there remains “no health in us.” Numerous episodes in A Sentimental Journey demonstrate this failure to act well, and thereby the commission of a type of sin. Perhaps the most overtly framed within this religious discourse, in which a fallible individual human being meets the difficulty of always enacting the precepts learned through the theological texts which teach them, occurs toward the beginning of Yorick’s journey, when he encounters a mendicant Franciscan. The monk meekly begs charity, but Yorick adopts a tone of English superiority, suggesting that while naturally inclined to share whatever he can spare from his albeit meagre possessions, “the unfortunate of our own country, surely, have the first rights; and

 W. B. Gerard, “Introduction,” Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne, ed. W. B. Gerard (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2010): 13–42, 24.  See, for instance, Christopher Fanning, “Review of Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 23.3 (2011): 590–592.

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I have left thousands in distress upon our own shore.”31 The monk modestly listens to Yorick’s condescending sermon before withdrawing, but leaves his preacher with immediate regrets: MY heart smote me the moment he shut the door—Psha! said I with an air of carelessness, three several times—but it would not do: every ungracious syllable I had utter’d, crouded back into my imagination: [. . .] —I have behaved very ill; said I within myself; but I have only just set out upon my travels; and shall learn better manners as I get along. (SJ, 11)

Yorick knows “within” himself that he has acted meanly, while pretending to occupy the moral high ground. He has withheld one virtuous act on the pretense of pursuing another, and as such displays the hypocrisy Sterne decries in his sermons regarding the conscience and self-knowledge: it’s easy to find an excuse for an act of meanness – which in this case involves not doing one thing (giving charity) while doing another (saying unkind words under the guise of moralizing) – and so to appease ourselves that we’ve acted rightly.32 This episode has attracted critical attention for its role within Yorick’s wider journey of self-awareness, and of the continual trials to his professed Christian virtue that he encounters. As Jennifer Preston Wilson, for one, has argued, this scene exposes the conflict between the immateriality of Yorick’s religious sentiments, and the material acts (manifested, in this case, in hard cash) that are really required to enact them: “Yorick briefly recognizes his sinfulness for what it is,” before reasoning himself out of his guilt “to protect his self-pride.”33 Casuistry in action, as it were. More generally, this passage has been considered exemplary of Yorick’s aspiration towards being a “sentimental traveller,” a “man of feeling” touched by humanity’s plight with each human encounter mobilized through the pursuit of a journey “for the heart,” but who repeatedly encounters blocks on the road toward better self-knowledge, and ultimately, salvation. His all-too-human qualities are also inherently failures

 Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal, ed. Melvyn New and W. G. Day, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: Florida UP, 2002): 9. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “SJ.”  Robert Markley sees this as a manifestation of the “social and economic inequalities” inherent in sentimentalism, about which Sterne remains ambivalent, in “Sentiment as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue,” in The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York and London: Methuen, 1987): 210―230, 211, 230.  Jennifer Preston Wilson, “Things of the Spirit: Vibrant Matter in A Sentimental Journey,” in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey: A Legacy to the World, ed. W. B. Gerard and M-C. Newbould (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2021): 150―168, 153.

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when low-level sins – avarice, self-interest – impede the performance of a good deed. In this context, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, a foundation text for Roman Catholic teaching, addresses the question of sins of commission and of omission, and whether there are differences between them: [. . .] they do not differ specifically, because they are directed to the same end, and proceed from the same motive. For the covetous man, in order to hoard money, both robs, and omits to give what he ought, and in like manner, the glutton, to satiate his appetite, both eats too much and omits the prescribed fasts. The same applies to other sins: for in things, negation is always founded on affirmation, which, in a manner, is its cause.34

So, in the balance between negatives and positives in the pursuit of virtue – we abstain from evil (a negative), and then go on to do good (a positive) – the same can arguably apply to sin: the deliberate commission of a sinful act weighed against not doing something good on purpose, as the example of the miser suggests. But this leads Aquinas to speculate further whether there are differences between “thought, word, and deed” in the context of sin. He argues that [. . .] sins are divided into these three, viz. sins of thought, word, and deed, not as into various complete species: for the consummation of sin is in the deed, wherefore sins of deed have the complete species; but the first beginning of sin is its foundation, as it were, in the sin of thought; the second degree is the sin of word, in so far as man is ready to break out into a declaration of his thought; while the third degree consists in the consummation of the deed.35

As such, the thought, word and deed are entwined in the contemplation and execution of sin, whether in performing a wrong act or, following the former logic, in failing to do the thing that should be done, and which leads to virtue in a positive act of commission. As Cardinal John Manning, among the most eloquent Catholic theologians to inherit the topic from Aquinas, and who similarly draws a comparison between commission and omission, aptly summarizes: “The first was, the sin of doing evil; the last, the sin of leaving good undone.”36 This places the onus on our necessary requirement for self-knowledge: to acknowledge honestly what we ought and ought not to have done, and not to provide excuses for ourselves when we know we’ve gone awry. This is, of course, a theme that Sterne explores in perhaps his best-known sermon, “The Abuses of conscience considered,” the appearance of which part St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1947, Sacred Texts (acc. 18 March 2021).  Aquinas, Summa Theologica, n.p.  Henry Edward [Manning], Sin and its Consequences (London: Burns and Oates, 1874): 102.

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way through the second volume of Tristram Shandy (that is, in its first instalment) surprised and partly delighted Sterne’s earliest and subsequent readers. He himself was clearly attached to this particular sermon: alone of all those preached and published, “The Abuses of conscience” was printed three times, firstly on its own in 1750, then again in Tristram Shandy in 1759, and then once more in the second instalment of The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1766), the first two volumes of which had appeared in 1760. In the novel’s version, Yorick’s sermon on “The Abuses of conscience” is delivered by Corporal Trim to the male members of the Shandy family assembled in the parlor to pass the time while awaiting Tristram’s birth, but who repeatedly interrupt the oration with comments (Walter), objections (Slop), and questions (Toby). The subsequent publication of the text in The Sermons naturally omits the “breaks and interruptions” from Trim’s audience, although the preface draws attention to the sermon’s fictionalized pedigree: “[. . .] the following Sermon upon Abuses of Conscience, has already appeared in the body of a moral work, more read than understood.”37 These ruptures in Trim’s delivery of the sermon, however, are integral to this text’s recycled appearance in a work where ruptures and gaps are woven into the fabric of the narrative and its graphic presentation alike, as we’ve seen. It is also highly apposite to the theological dimension that such ruptures acquire in Tristram Shandy – as Elizabeth Harries notes of its fragmentary quality38 – and, perhaps even more pertinently, in A Sentimental Journey. For, as “The Abuses of conscience” shows, it is at those moments where we experience a rupture in honest self-knowledge that the opportunity for sin creeps in.39 As Manning puts it, “sins of omission lead on to sins of commission”; “They are the beaten pathway that leads to actual sins,” because in leaving “duty undone” lies a sin of omission that might rise out of “any one of the seven capital sins: and then it is also a sin of commission.”40 For Sterne, it is as though the commission and the omission are inseparable at such moments of “abuse.” As he summarizes of commonly held assumptions: Now,———as Conscience is nothing else but the knowledge which the mind has within itself of this; and the judgment, either of approbation or censure, which it unavoidably makes upon the successive actions of our lives,———’tis plain, you will say, from the very

 Laurence Sterne, The Sermons of Laurence Sterne: The Text, ed. Melvyn New, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1996): 255. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “S.”  Harries, Unfinished Manner, 42.  See Donald Wehrs, “Anarchic Significations and Motions of Grace in Sterne’s Anarchic Satire,” in Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New, Peter de Voogd and Judith Hawley (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2016): 77―99, 80.  Manning, Sin, 104.

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terms of the proposition, whenever this inward testimony goes against a man, and he stands self-accused,—that he must necessarily be a guilty man. And, on the contrary, when the report is favourable on his side, and his heart condemns him not,——that it is not a matter of trust, as the Apostle intimates, but a matter of certainty and fact, that the Conscience is good, and that the man must be good also. (S, 256)

Sterne goes on to show the limits of this argument. “At first sight, this may seem to be a true state of the case,” but although the “conscience of a man, by long habits of sin, might [. . .] insensibly become hard” such as to lose its original “nice sense and perception,” self-love, which makes us biased in favor of our own judgments, Interest, and Passion all conspire to tamper with man’s ability to judge himself, and with “his own approbation or censure” (S, 256–257). As Melvyn New notes of these passages in his authoritative edition of the sermons, Sterne picks up on familiar themes in eighteenth-century sermon culture and moralistic essay-writing alike. Not only does he echo Swift’s own sermon “On the testimony of conscience,” he also picks up on the theme of self-deception as explored in periodical essays such as Joseph Addison’s Spectator 399 (June 7, 1712): A wise Man will suspect those Actions to which he is directed by something besides Reason, and always apprehend some concealed Evil in every Resolution that is of a disputable Nature, when it is conformable to his particular Temper, his Age, or way of Life, or when it favours his Pleasure or his Profit.41

Sterne’s sermon on conscience elaborates the theme further, where the absence of self-honesty legitimates the commission of sin, which concludes with the dictum “In a word,———trust that man in nothing———who has not a conscience in every thing” (S, 266), while also providing the caveat that this is a fallible moral tool, which we should be circumspect in using and judicious in assessing. The idea of self-knowledge – especially when it involves a willful lack or ignorance of such a thing – features elsewhere in Sterne’s sermons, and provides a touchstone for better understanding those passages in his fiction where a failure to act in a right way constitutes a sin of commission. Sermon IV, “Self knowledge,” for instance, cuts straight to the quick in tackling “the deceitfulness of the heart of man to itself” through the example of King David (S, 31). The inability to know oneself is one thing – and an inevitable feature of fallible man – but deliberately to ignore truths about oneself forms the basis of woeful deception and leads to sinful deeds. As Sterne reminds us:

 Melvyn New, The Sermons of Laurence Sterne: The Notes, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1996): 286–287.

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To know one’s self, one would think could be no very difficult lesson;—for who, you’ll say, can well be truly ignorant of himself and the true disposition of his own heart. If a man thinks at all, he cannot be a stranger to what passes there—he must be conscious of his own thoughts and desires, he must remember his past pursuits, and the true springs and motives which in general have directed the actions of his life: he may hang out false colours and deceive the world, but how can a man deceive himself? That a man can—is evident, because he daily does so. (S, 31)

Self-interest leads to self-deceit, and the appearance of comfortable self-knowledge in a man often itself proves to be deceptive on closer examination. We are quick to condemn in others the vices we do not rightly perceive existing in ourselves (S, 36–37): Most of us are aware of and pretend to detest the barefaced instances of that hypocrisy by which men deceive others, but few of us are upon our guard or see that more fatal hypocrisy by which we deceive and over-reach our own hearts. (S, 38)

Once again, the surface appearance of a thing conceals a vacuum beneath: the visage of virtue may, of course, shelter vice, but it can also harbor an absence of virtue altogether, a commission via omission. Sterne therefore advises that we should spend a small portion of each day in meditative self-examination, attempting to assess ourselves “with a curious and impartial eye,” the better to discover the “hidden springs and motives” we might most conceal from ourselves (S, 39). But if the discovery of what might be “hidden” is of something nasty and shameful, then it is nonetheless bound up with an apathy not to acknowledge it, an absence of self-duty leading to the evolution of sin. It recalls Manning’s question about how, “if the knowledge of the intellect and the consent of the will be necessary to constitute a sin [. . .] there can be secret sins?” – a query addressed by the notion of “omission.”42 This is a theme Sterne revisits in Sermon 14, “Self-examination,” where willful negligence of acting rightly, as much as the purposeful fact of acting wrongly, is a cause of universal woe: [. . .] the reason the world is undone, is, because the world does not consider,—considers neither aweful regard to God,—or the true relation themselves bear to him. [. . .] as the world goes, there is no leisure for such enquiries, and so full are our minds of other matters, that we have not time to ask, or a heart to answer the questions we ought to put to ourselves. Whatever our condition is, ’tis good to be acquainted with it in time, to be able to supply what is wanting,—and examine the state of our accounts, before we come to give them up to an impartial judge. (S, 132)

 Manning, Sin, 99.

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Here, Sterne again addresses the “breaks,” ruptures, gaps, and absences of “what is wanting” which provide a theme of his sermons and his fiction alike: not taking time to consider a thing properly usually means leaving a thing undone which ought to be done, and in the very absence of doing that good thing a bad one might inadvertently be committed too. Not contemplating “our works” properly, the better to be “prepared with honest dispositions to amend them” (S, 133), makes for a thoughtless engagement with “the world” to the detriment of ourselves and others. In Manning’s terms, this very distractedness even when seemingly engaged in the most pious of acts constitutes a sin of omission, when the “mind is full of colors cast in from the world even when kneeling before God.”43 Again, hypocrisy and fault-finding in others, rather than conducting honest self-examination, form a theme of this sermon. Sterne turns toward an example comparable to Aquinas’s miser, where the hypocritical Pharisee condemns the publican in the temple for not observing the same self-deprivations that he inflicts upon himself: “His abstinence and frequent fasting,—exactness in the debts and ceremonies of the law; not balancing the account as he ought to have done” (S, 134). As Sterne asserts, this inability to be honest with ourselves forms a sin of omission as striking as that of committing an outright act of villainy. It requires us to go deep to the roots of our “thoughts, words, and deeds” and to examine them truthfully, the better to know the links between them and, indeed, ourselves. And yet we are apt, he says, to “leave out of the calculation” of our self-assessment the “material parts” of “our works”: —I mean, the motives and first principles from whence they proceeded. There is many a fair instance of generosity, chastity, and self-denial, which the world may give a man the credit of,—which if he would give himself the leisure to reflect upon and trace back to their first springs,—he would be conscious, proceeded from such views and intentions, as if known, would not be to his honor. (S, 135)

Here, Sterne invokes the Stoics who, in the process of self-examination needful to the good life, return to “first principles” – a theme to which Sterne also returns in A Sentimental Journey, and one of his most characteristic and provocative gaps which leave a query over whether a vicious or a virtuous act has been committed, precisely through the omission of vital information. In “The Temptation. Paris” Yorick is visited in his hotel room by a young fille de chambre. The scene seems innocent enough as they engage in conversation, but Yorick’s performance of honest self-enquiry thinly conceals the suggestiveness of the episode:

 Manning, Sin, 106.

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There is a sort of a pleasing half guilty blush, where the blood is more in fault than the man—’tis sent impetuous from the heart, and virtue flies after it—not to call it back, but to make the sensation of it more delicious to the nerves—’tis associated— ——————but I’ll not describe it.—I felt something at first within me which was not in strict unison with the lesson of virtue I had given her the night before—I sought five minutes for a card—I knew I had not one.—I took up a pen—I laid it down again—my hand trembled—the devil was in me. (SJ, 121–122)

An admission of a failure to enact a “lesson of virtue” is tantamount to a sin of omission, which is swiftly followed by a chasm between the cliff-hanger on which the chapter ends – seated on the bed, Yorick and the girl topple over – and the ensuing chapter, which toys with the possibility of emission resulting from these indescribable sensations. The opening paragraph of “The Conquest” immediately positions the reader in the possession of a knowledge the fullness of which is nonetheless withheld:44 YES——————and then—Ye whose clay-cold heads and luke-warm hearts can argue down or mask your passions—tell me, what trespass is it that man should have them? or how his spirit stands answerable, to the father of spirits, but for his conduct under them? (SJ, 124)

The ensuing discussion, however, loiters between explaining and suggesting. Yorick resorts instead to an examination of the Stoic principles of first movements, as Will Ramsay has shown, the bawdy irony of which is naturally complicit here, too.45 Perhaps “something” actually happened, perhaps nothing; but is even the thinking about what might have happened, and more pertinently about what Yorick might have liked to have happen, just as self-culpatory? Not doing something, as we have seen, does not necessarily absolve a person from all guilt – on the contrary, it can be damning in its own degree. As Sterne concludes in “Self-examination,” it is the inseparable combination of “thought, word, and deed,” of doing a good thing and not doing a bad one, that leads to greater spiritual enlightenment and, what is perhaps more, to a more contended life: That for this end—he must call his own ways to remembrance, and search out his spirit, ———search his actions with the same critical exactness and same piercing curiosity, we are wont to sit in judgment upon others;—varnishing nothing———and disguising nothing. If he proceeds thus, and in every relation of life takes a full view of himself without

 See W. G. Day, “Tactus Interruptus as Sternean Trope,” in Hilarion’s Asse: Laurence Sterne and Humour, ed. Anne Bandry-Scubbi and Peter de Voogd (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013): 93–106.  Will Ramsay, “Sexual Ethics and Stoic First Movements in A Sentimental Journey,” The Shandean 31 (2020): 101–116.

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prejudice–––traces his actions to their principles without mercy, and looks into the dark corners and recesses of his heart without fear–––and upon such an enquiry–––he acts consistent with his view in it, by reforming his errors, separating the dross and purifying the whole mass with repentance;––– this will bid fair for examining a man’s works in the apostle’s sense [. . .] (S, 138–139)

And this, Sterne concludes, leads man to “rejoicing in himself,” and to finding the “peace and comfort” we all seek in life, founded “in the testimony of a good conscience, and the joyful expectation that having done his utmost to examine his own works here, that God will accept them hereafter [. . .].” This, he suggests, may provide a surer solution to a problem that has vexed generations. As the very first sermon in the volume, “Inquiry after happiness,” suggests: “Never did the busy brain of a lean and hectick chymist search for the philosopher’s stone with more pains and ardour than this great man did after happiness” (S, 11).46 And as such, whether or not much-maligned “Popery” (S, 260) might advocate not entirely dissimilar advice, knowing oneself, knowing oneself to have committed a sinful act, but more importantly knowing oneself to have omitted doing something virtuous, will only ever lead to a prickly conscience. Sterne nonetheless urges that even the most fallible human being’s inability to put precepts into practice, to forge the link between “ought” and “does,” is not a lost cause. As Wilson’s discussion of Yorick’s self-deception suggests, there is always the hope of salvation from sin: “Sterne frames Yorick’s backsliding as an aspect of our free will in working toward grace.”47 The notion of “grace” in the context of honest self-reflection in our interactions with ourselves and with others receives perhaps its most eloquent treatment from Donald Wehrs. Grace lends due gravitas to the evidence of “anarchic” “disruption” (or fragmentation) comically scattered across Sterne’s fiction: the seeming chaos is orchestrated as it were by an invisible, providential hand, entwinements of self-love and social love that give us abundant return for cares and affections directed toward others in the form of feelings we derive from viewing our own minds and from contemplating our management of relations with the outer world.48

These salient strands link together the Sterne of the typographically eccentric fiction, whose idiosyncratic narrator never quite delivers on his promises while invoking the “great saint” of omission, with the Sterne of the theologically driven

 See Melvyn New, “The Odd Couple: Laurence Sterne and John Norris of Bemerton,” Philological Quarterly 75 (1996): 361–385, 373, 379.  Wilson, “Things of the Spirit,” 151.  Wehrs, “Anarchic Significations,” 79, 93.

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enquiry into the failure to act. There is a fundamental link between a seemingly superficial string of asterisks concealing (perhaps) a bawdy word and the selfexculpating, self-reproving internal monologue of the humanly flawed cleric – who is, he reminds us, foremost a man – who can’t bring himself to give a coin to a beggar and then feels bad about it. Does repenting, and then acting, make up for the fact that benevolence wasn’t instinctual? This sort of inner dilemma can and should be juxtaposed with the comical dilemmas of the narrator who never quite finishes his sentences, who omits as much as he commits to paper, and for whom the deferred appendix is akin to the afterlife of a text that can never be fully realized on earth, but which its author might seek to balance out when making his final reckoning on the unwritten ledger.

Nigel Fabb

When Words Stop: Omission in Songs Abstract: The song “The Royal Scam,” by Steely Dan, alternates lines of text with instrumental sections which are longer than the textual lines. The song thus follows a pattern of repeated and noticeably long textual omissions. The paper discusses various types of omission in song, and how music without words can produce emotional effects and meaning. Meaning in music and songs can be generated by the pragmatic processes described in relevance theory, as well as by a source-based semantics (Schlenker 2019) and by the manipulation of expectation (Huron 2006). The paper concludes by drawing on these various ways of producing meaning, to explore how meaning arises from the extended periods of textual omission in this song, arguing that one of the basic types of response is an epistemic feeling of knowing something which feels significant, without being able to specify what is known.

The Omitted Voice in “The Royal Scam” The Steely Dan song “The Royal Scam” (1976) begins with instruments playing, then the first verbal line is sung accompanied by the instruments. This verbal line lasts seven seconds. After this, the instruments play without any words being sung for ten seconds. This omission of the verbal text is the omission which is the focus of this article. The next verbal line lasts seven seconds, followed by an instrumental section of ten seconds, which is again longer than the verbal line. Most songs in which instruments accompany the voice have an alternation between verbal+instrumental sections and just instrumental sections. But the pattern we see in “The Royal Scam” is unusual: here the instrumental sections are longer than the verbal+instrumental sections. In contrast, in most songs the instrumental sections are either shorter than the verbal+instrumental sections or, particularly in the style of blues songs, the instrumental sections and the verbal+instrumental sections are about the same length. The instrumental sections in a song are a type of verbal omission because there are no words sung during this part of the song. In this essay, I ask how the instrumental section can nevertheless contribute to the meaning of the song, even though it has no words. In particular, I explore the rather specific effect, at least on me, that is produced by this pattern in “The Royal Scam,” in which the instrumental section is consistently longer than the verbal+instrumental section. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-003

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In this first part of the paper, I discuss the structure of “The Royal Scam.” The song was written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen and is the final song on the Steely Dan album of the same name, The Royal Scam (1976). While this song has a rare type of alternation, the other songs on the same album have three other types of alternation which can easily be found elsewhere. There is one song which is mostly instrumental with occasional and unsystematically placed verbal+instrumental sections (“The Fez”) and one song which has the blues pattern of equal length verbal+instrumental and instrumental sections (“Sign in Stranger”). In the other six songs on the album, the verbal+instrumental sections are longer than the intervening instrumental sections: relatively short instrumental sections come between each of the lines of verse. “The Royal Scam” tells a story of migrants from Puerto Rico to New York and appropriates the voices of its characters, and Others them; Clements describes the narrative as “ironic.”1 It is 6ʹ30ʹʹ (six minutes thirty seconds) long, with the large-scale structure shown in Table 1. Table 1: General structure of “The Royal Scam.” Start

End

Length

Section

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

instrumental (introduction)

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

stanza 

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

instrumental (between stanzas)

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

stanza 

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

instrumental long section

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

stanza 

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

chorus repeated, with breaks, and outro

At this level of structure, the pattern is common; it is only once we get inside the stanzas that we can see that something odd is happening. Table 2 shows this for the first stanza; the other two stanzas have an identical pattern. In the first four lines, the alternation is clear: there is a shorter verbal+instrumental section of about seven seconds, or two and a half bars, and a longer instrumental section of about ten seconds, or three and a half bars. After the fourth line of the stanza, there is a five-second instrumental section before the second chorus;

 Paul Clements, “Cultural Legitimacy or ‘Outsider Hip’?: Representational Ambiguity and the Significance of Steely Dan,” Leisure Studies 28.2 (2009): 189–206, 200.

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Table 2: The structure of stanza 1 (including chorus) of “The Royal Scam.” Start

End

Length

Section

Length

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

line = verbal+instrumental

. bars

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

Instrumental

. bars

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

line = verbal+instrumental

. bars

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

Instrumental

. bars

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

line = verbal+instrumental

. bars

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

Instrumental

. bars

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

line = verbal+instrumental

. bars

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

Instrumental

. bars

ʹʹʹ

ʹʹʹ

 secs

chorus line = verbal+instrumental

. bars

this five-second break is the shortest instrumental break in the song’s overall structure, and it gives the five-line group of stanza plus chorus a balance which I think is odd because, for a song with long pauses between lines, it is unexpected when the chorus rushes in after the last line of the stanza. This change at the chorus might function to emphasize even further the length of breaks between the lines of the stanza. Each stanza is divided into four quite long lines, each of which is a clause (or subclause). In some transcriptions of the lyrics, the lines are broken up and presented as shorter lines (e.g., [genius.com] presents the stanza as eight lines whereas [sdarchive.com] presents the stanza as twelve lines). These transcriptions seem to be assuming that the four lines are unusually long and so must be broken up. So, we can add the unusual length of the lines to the unusual balance of lines to instrumental as a second oddity in the song. Each line is performed with five stressed syllables, matching the first and third beats of each of the two and a half bars. Overall, the lines vary between sixteen and nineteen syllables, at least in the first stanza, so the metrical structure of the text is loose (i.e., based on counting stressed syllables not overall number).2 The third and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme with each other, and this is the clearest evidence that the

 Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle, Meter in Poetry: A New Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008): 67.

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stanza consists of four long lines, rather than a larger number of short lines, as in some of the transcriptions. In terms of the musical form of the song, it is worth noting that the melody of the solo verbal+instrumental part has a very narrow range, using only four notes: B-flat, C, E-flat and F, all within the same octave. The choral verbal+instrumental line is slightly wider in range. The song is in the key of c minor, and each vocal line has its final syllable on the tonic note C, a note which is insistently present throughout the instrumental music. The instrumental section, in contrast, uses all seven notes and over a much wider range of four octaves. This creates what will be called a “registral silence” in the vocal part, where most of the registers are silent or omitted; I return to this notion below. I chose to discuss this song because I experience it as odd, and have done so for the nearly half a century, since I first heard the song. There is something about the balance of verbal+instrumental to instrumental sections which feels significant. My response is what I call a type of “epistemic feeling,”3 a feeling of knowing something which feels significant, without being able to specify what is known. Here, it feels as if the music of the instrumental parts adds meaning to the words of the verbal+instrumental parts, perhaps commenting on them; and yet, the musical parts are not expressive in the way of word-painting, or otherwise clearly commenting on the text. The effect seems to arise not just from having long instrumental sections but also from the fact that, in these instrumental sections, the words are explicitly omitted. Omission itself thus produces this epistemic feeling.

Types of Omission in Songs Songs exist in time, and so omissions of parts of the music have durations over which those omissions extend, and so the song can exploit those durations. Silence is the most complete kind of omission, and the use of silence has been widely explored in music, relative to the surrounding materials.4 Consider, for example, the joke in the final movement of Haydn’s String Quartet in E Flat, Op. 33, No 2, where there are harmonically complete apparent endings followed by silences, each interrupted by the music restarting, and the whole piece

 Nigel Fabb, Thrills, Sublime, Epiphany: How Literature Surprises Us (London: Anthem Press, forthcoming 2022).  Thomas Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” The Musical Quarterly LXII.2 (1976): 163–181; Andrew Edgar, “Music and Silence,” in Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Adam Jaworski (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997): 311–328.

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concluding in an actual ending which is harmonically incomplete, as though there should be more to come. When we consider the verbal and instrumental aspects of a song and how they might change in the course of the song, we can distinguish between three main types of section: i. The verbal and instrumental components exist at the same time, as when someone sings while an instrument plays. This is a verbal+instrumental section. ii. The instruments play but there is no verbal component, as might arise between lines or stanzas of the song, or before or after the singing. This instrumental section involves the omission of the verbal part. iii. The voice sings words but there are no instruments playing. For example, in James Brown & The Famous Flames’ song “Please Please Please” (1956), there are moments where all the instruments fall silent, and we hear only James Brown’s voice. This is a verbal section which involves the omission of the instruments (not discussed in this article). There are other possibilities. For example, where there are several instruments, we might find that a particular instrument only plays when there is no singing, as, for example, when a performer either sings or blows harmonica but cannot do both at the same time, so one or the other is omitted at any time. There can also be an alternation between two different types of verbal section, between the main voice and the chorus’s voice, if they are distributed in sequential sections. For example, in James Brown & The Famous Flames’ “Please Please Please,” there is, at all times, a verbal component which is either solo or chorus, in alternation. It is also possible for the voice to produce nonverbal sound, so that during the nonverbal instrumental sections, the singer might still produce sounds, including whoops, cries, vocables (meaningless word-like items), and so on. The boundaries between verbal and nonverbal vocal behavior are not always completely clear, and so the notion that the verbal is “omitted” can sometimes be a matter of interpretation. Consider, for example, The Clash song “Complete Control” (1977); in one of the longer instrumental sections during a guitar solo, the singer calls out “you’re my guitar hero” (at 1ʹ08ʹʹ). Strictly speaking, this is a verbal+instrumental moment because these are words, and furthermore, this interjection relates to the overall meaning of the song, which is about songs and the music industry. However, these words are performed as if improvised and are not part of the stanzas of the song, and so they have an uncertain status as verbal components of the song. The lyrics as represented on [azlyrics.com] do not include this text, but they are included in the lyrics as represented on [songmeanings.com], and this difference illustrates the problem of deciding whether this verbal interjection is part of the

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song or not. The complexities here do not undermine the three-part typology suggested above; in fact, they depend on this typology to produce the ambiguity of this moment in the song. As another example of the complex role of nonverbal vocalizations, consider another song by The Clash, “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” (1977). At the very end of the song, after the verbal text has ended, there is a moment in which the instruments fall silent and, in that silence, the singer just breathes out loudly and emphatically. This is not a word, so not an example of a purely verbal section, but it feels quite expressive, even if its exact meaning is unclear. Certain genres of song exploit the balance between verbal+instrumental and instrumental sections in a systematic way. This is most obviously true of some blues songs, which may alternate equal-length (or almost equal-length) verbal+instrumental and instrumental sections. The singer sings a line, and then the instrument or instruments play for the same length of time.5 For example, in Bessie Smith’s performance of “St Louis Blues” (1925), the verbal+instrumental and instrumental sections are similar in length, though not exactly the same: the first line and the first instrumental are each about eight seconds, the second line and second instrumental each about six seconds, and so on, sometimes varying so that the two parts are not exactly the same length. More regular instances of this alternation can be found in rock ‘n’ roll songs, such as Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll” (1954), in which lines of approximately three seconds alternate with instrumental sections of approximately three seconds, i.e., the verbal+instrumental and instrumental sections are of the same length; this changes in the chorus, where the instrumental sections are greatly shortened. Another regular example is Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman” (1954), where there is an alternation of equal length verbal+instrumental and instrumental sections, approximately two seconds long. It is easy to find songs with a similar structure: The Stooges’ “Down on the Street” (1970) alternates equal-length verbal+instrumental and instrumental sections, as do the David Bowie songs “Station to Station” (1976) and “Breaking Glass” (1977). Songs can have other types of long instrumental sections outside the alternation of text and music. Popular songs may have a single long instrumental section, sometimes an instrument solo, in the second half of the song. Songs also begin with long instrumental sections; Bowie’s “Sound and Vision” (1977) has only occasional vocalizations until 1ʹ28ʹʹ, after which the verbal part of the song dominates. Bowie’s “Station to Station” (1976) has an instrumental section

 Samuel A. Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997): 96.

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until 3ʹ18ʹʹ, when the voice starts unexpectedly, and the song then follows a blues pattern of equal length verbal and instrumental sections. In Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” (1975), the instrumental section extends until 8ʹ42ʹʹ, after which the voice starts, and thereafter we hear the normal pattern in which verbal sections tend to be longer than intervening instrumental sections; this appearance of the norm, after a very long introduction, may make the introduction, retrospectively, even more marked. Songs can also have long final instrumental sections, as, for example, in Talking Heads’ “The Big Country” (1978), whose final line ends almost a minute before the end of the song at 4ʹ28ʹʹ, after which the singer vocalizes without words for almost thirty seconds until 4ʹ55ʹʹ, followed by a fully instrumental section for the final thirty seconds to the end at 5ʹ25ʹʹ. These long instrumental sections can appear to communicate meaning in the context of the song. In this Talking Heads song, language is explicitly disavowed by the final line, “It’s not even worth talking about those people down there,” before the instrumental section, and, in this context, the omission first of words and then of the voice can both be taken as communicating a meaning related to the final line. In “Wish You Were Here,” the long instrumental section includes a particularly prominent and expressive guitar, as though the guitar is ‘speaking,’ an interpretation I return to shortly. Another type of omission in songs is complete silence, where neither voice nor instruments can be heard. In principle, there may be silence before and after a song, and there can be brief silent sections in songs. It is worth noting, however, that even some silences still have musical content, so they are not entirely empty. Consider the beat structure of a song. A beat structure is a psychological construct, not an acoustic one, but nevertheless part of the musical form of the song even though it cannot strictly be heard. The beat structure can continue during a silent section, and this can be shown on a musical score by using timed symbols for rests instead of symbols for notes. There are also symbolic ways of thinking of music as existing unheard in silence as though silence can still have musical content, as in Keats’ “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 1819), or Paul Simon’s “The Sound of Silence” (1965). And, of course, silence has an important role in contemporary classical music, as most significantly theorized by John Cage.6 So, the radical type of omission in music – silence – even though it has no verbal or instrumental content can sometimes also appear to produce meaning, though this meaning always arises in a context.

 Edgar, “Music and Silence,” 312.

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Clifton and Edgar discuss another kind of omission which is found in all kinds of music and is what they call a registral silence.7 For example, the high notes, these being the notes in an upper register, may not appear at all in a piece of music, or they may appear only very rarely; this constitutes a ‘silence’ in the upper register, a type of omission, even though there is sound in the lower registers. Clifton says that “certain registers are not occupied all the time – this enables us to identify structurally important tones,”8 when, for example, a register, which is not generally used, is occasionally used, producing a markedness in the music. Edgar expands this notion to suggest that music can be thought of as the removal of aspects of sound, leaving just the sounds which compose the piece, like a sculpture which is produced by removing the surrounding stone: “music can be seen as the result of the paring away (or silencing) of all but a few possible sounds, so that the sounds that remain have their meaning due to the silences that have been created around them.”9 In “The Royal Scam,” the vocal melody manifests this type of ‘silence,’ compared with the instrumental melody which involves more different notes over a wider range. So, the words are omitted in the instrumental sections, and the vocal lines omit much of the musical range: these are two types of omission in alternation. Clifton’s focus is on registers which are mostly silent but occasionally occupied, and he emphasizes that the effect on the listener, and the possibility of producing meaning, comes not from the omission itself but from the contrast between omission and presence of notes in the particular register. In this way, registral omission relates to the broader issue of change as a characteristic of a linear artwork such as a verbal text or a piece of music. Changes can have various effects on an audience, including emotional effect and implied meaning. As Huron shows, a change can be a surprise, and surprise involves an emotional response.10 I have found, when exploring thrill responses to songs with my students, that textural thinning and thickening in a song are among the triggers of thrill responses. This is most obvious when there is a crescendo where the omission of loud sound is replaced by its presence, and this is extensively documented in experimental studies of the triggering of thrill responses.11 I find that thrills are triggered also by a sudden thinning out, as when most of

 Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” 171; Edgar, “Music and Silence,” 312.  Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” 173.  Edgar, “Music and Silence,” 314.  David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006): 19–40.  Jaak Panksepp, “The Emotional Sources of ‘Chills’ Induced by Music,” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13.2 (1995): 171–207.

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the instruments are omitted; my go-to example for this is the ending of Shostakovich’s fifth symphony. The key is D major and most of the instruments sustain the dominant note A during the final part, while the timpani drum plays an alternating pattern of the tonic D and the dominant A. Then, all the instruments cut out except for the timpani, which keeps playing this pattern and which is joined at that moment by the bass drum. The effect is that, for three beats, all you hear is the thin texture but loud noise of the three beats of the drums. Then, the rest of the orchestra comes back for the last two bars to conclude on the tonic. I almost invariably get a chill response from this and, when measured experimentally, discovered that, at this moment, my breathing is shallower and longer (i.e., a freeze response); I think it is the sudden thinning of the texture which produces this, though the fact that this is a key structural moment in the piece, and there are other meanings swirling around, undoubtedly contributes to the experience. This is an example where a change involving an omission, in context, can produce a powerful response. This is a change, and any change can also demand increased processing effort because something new has to be processed, and increased processing effort itself can produce an emotional response.12 In relevance theory, increased processing effort, when demanded by a communicative act, licenses the derivation of increased cognitive effects.13 This means that any change in a text, so long as it is ostensive, can give the reader or hearer permission to derive additional meanings beyond the literal. All the changes discussed here, including registral and textural changes and the changes from verbal+instrumental to instrumental parts of a song, might, in principle, demand increased processing effort, with its emotional and interpretative consequence. This is the general relevance-theoretic principle of how style can produce meaning without coding it: by demanding increased processing effort, stylistic devices including stylistic changes can thereby legitimate further interpretation of the text. But it cannot be that all changes produce these effects because a song or other text tends to change all the time, in various ways; so, the change must itself have something noticeable about it, which draws our attention. Since increased attention is equivalent to increased processing effort, it is the noticeable changes, the oddities, which, in principle, can produce the greatest effects, including the epistemic feelings which I suggest are produced by the odd alternations of verbal+instrumental and instrumental sections in “The Royal Scam.”  Nigel Fabb, “Processing Effort and Poetic Closure,” International Journal of Literary Linguistics 5.4 (2016): 1–22; Fabb, Thrills (forthcoming).  Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, second ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995): 263–266.

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How Do the Non-Verbal Parts of a Song Produce Meaning? I take a relevance theory approach to meaning.14 I begin by assuming that songs are (at least in part) communications, and so fall under relevance theory: the hearer is induced to engage in interpretative effort with the guarantee that the effort will be rewarded by cognitive effects. This means that the meaning of the song is the set of thoughts which the hearer attributes, with strong or weak confidence, to the singer or composer as what they intended to communicate. The text of the song, and other aspects of the song, all contribute evidence which the hearer uses to derive the intended meanings of the song. The evidence is interpreted in context, including real-world knowledge, knowledge of the band, the other songs on the album, given that the entire album has the same name as the song, and the album’s cover picture which specifically relates to this song. For our purposes, the two most important parts of the song are its verbal text and its musical form. The words in their syntactic context provide the most specific evidence for meaning because words have coded meanings, and the syntactic structure also contributes to the coded meaning of the text. These coded or literal meanings may not be the intended meanings: for example, the literal meaning is not the intended meaning in a metaphor. Furthermore, a general characteristic of songs is that they tend to have a small vocabulary with much repetition and an attenuated syntax, with juxtaposition and listing replacing complex sentence structure.15 (However, neither are true of this song, which has a rich vocabulary and complex sentences, with only the chorus line being repeated) Nevertheless, language gives the listener the richest and most detailed of the clues needed to make sense of the song. The clues encoded by the verbal text then form part of the basis for inferring what meanings the singer or composer intend to communicate. The particular focus of this paper is on the places where words are omitted and whether the instrumental sections between lines also contribute to the implied meaning of the song, and particularly the extra-long instrumental sections in “The Royal Scam.”

 Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, 158.  Nigel Fabb, “Why is Verse Poetry?” PN Review 189 36.1 (2009): 52–57; Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, “Repetition and Emotive Communication in Music Versus Speech,” Frontiers in Psychology 4.167 (2013): 1–5.

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This raises the familiar question of how music in general is able to communicate meaning. Following Schlenker,16 we can say that there are two ways in which music can provide evidence for the communicated meaning of the song. They both depend on inference because, in music, there is no equivalent to the lexical and syntactic codes which translate verbal sound into verbal meaning. The first way by which music can communicate meaning is by what Schlenker calls a source-based semantics. When we hear music, we draw on our general acoustic knowledge of how things sound in the world, by which we can judge that a certain kind of sound might imply a possible source. A loud sound can come from a potentially large source; a crescendo can come from a source approaching the listener, and so on. We do not necessarily turn off these inferences when we are listening to music, and so the acoustic properties of music can be attributed to imagined sources of various kinds, even if we know that the actual sources of the music are quite different, that the music is produced by musical instruments. In this theoretical approach, listeners to a song do not switch away from ordinary auditory cognition into a specialized musical cognition; instead, the ordinary auditory cognition is always present and impinges on our aesthetic experience. This fits with some aspects of contemporary cognitive anthropology,17 and elsewhere I argue, for example, that doubles have an uncanny effect on us because they contradict deeply embedded knowledge that the world is characterized by constant variation and not exact repetition.18 It is in contrast to approaches to aesthetic experience which see them as separated off from ordinary experience, and where ordinary experience is not prior or always underlyingly present. This holds, for example, of the frame-based approach to aesthetic experience, according to which, when we listen to a song, we listen to it relative to specific frames, as an aesthetic object, as a performance, and so on.19 The source-based semantics helps us understand how the musical aspect of a song can seem to involve word-painting, where some aspect of the music appears to parallel the meaning of nearby words, perhaps by a type of source Philippe Schlenker, “Prolegomena to Music Semantics,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 10.1 (2019): 35–111.  Dan Sperber, “Why Are Perfect Animals, Hybrids, and Monsters Food for Symbolic Thought?” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8.2 (1996): 143–169; Pascal Boyer, “What Makes Anthropomorphism Natural: Intuitive Ontology and Cultural Representations,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2.1 (1996): 83–97.  Fabb, Thrills (forthcoming).  Richard Bauman, “Verbal Art as Performance,” American Anthropologist 77.2 (1975): 290–311; On silence and frames: Adam Jaworski, “Aesthetic, Communicative and Political Silences in Laurie Anderson’s Performance Art,” in Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Adam Jaworski (Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997): 15–35, 17.

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based semantics in which we recognize the parallel between an acoustic phenomenon and some other real-world phenomenon. In the Talking Heads song noted earlier, “The Big Country,” when the word “good” is sung, the melody goes up in pitch (at 3ʹ07ʹʹ). While there is no coded relation between a rise in pitch and the notion of good, it is possible to think of a rise in pitch as somehow related to goodness, perhaps via a source-based semantics in which happy people produce sounds which are higher in pitch. In Thomas Weelkes’ song, “Thule, the Period of Cosmography” (1600), the words “doth vaunt” are sung to a rising melody; here the source-based semantics attributes something which rises (vaunts) as analogous to a rising melody. In Michael Tippett’s setting of Hopkins’s “The Windhover” (1942), the word “morning” is accompanied by a rise in pitch; again, it is possible to find a relation between the two, perhaps via a more indirect source-based semantics which links the rising of the music with the morning rising of the sun. Schlenker discusses how the beginning of Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896) can be interpreted as its rising music resembling a sunrise. He suggests that these resemblances depend on “preservation principles,”20 whereby certain kinds of musical change (such as a rising melody) involve relationships which are analogous to certain kinds of nonmusical change (something gets better, the sun rises, someone leaps, etc.). It is worth noting that, while all these examples happen to have a rising melody, they can nevertheless have different meanings. This is a reminder, if needed, that musical meaning is always inferential, and that if the instrumental sections in “The Royal Scam” have meaning, it must be inferential meaning not coded meaning. The second way in which music can provide evidence for the communicated meaning of the song is by the form of the song and, in particular, how the song progresses, either according to expectations or violating expectations. Edgar notes that there is a long tradition of interpreting the meaning of a piece of music in terms of the musical structure of the work (and in fact refers to relevance theory).21 Meyer and Huron emphasize how the meaning of the musical piece depends on manipulating the specifically musical expectations of the listener.22 This is relevant to “The Royal Scam” in that the song has a structure of a type which is very familiar, in which verbal lines alternate with instrumental lines, but it consistently violates this structure by having the instrumental lines consistently longer than the verbal lines; in this way, the song may provide  Schlenker, “Prolegomena to Music Semantics,” 74.  Edgar, “Music and Silence,” 321; reference to relevance theory in a footnote on page 324.  Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1956): 25; Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 2.

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evidence for meaning by manipulating the expectations which we have developed on the basis of our knowledge of music. One of the specific questions to be asked about this song is what generic expectations we bring to it; these will influence how we interpret both the words and the musical form. We might bring to the song our expectations of songs in which the intervening instrumental parts are significantly shorter than the verbal lines. Or we might bring to the song our expectations of songs (in the blues tradition) in which the instrumental parts are about the same length as the verbal lines. Both types of song have already been heard on the album by the time we get to this final song, and it makes sense that both types of expectation may play a role in producing meaning from this song. If we start by interpreting it as a variation on the blues structure, then have available to us the notion that made of the blues structure involves a verbal call and an instrumental response, as though the instrument is speaking back to the words. Floyd draws on Gates’s notion of Signifyin(g) (1988) to describe this: A twelve-bar blues in which a two-measure instrumental ‘response’ answers a twomeasure vocal ‘call’ is a classic example of Signifyin(g). Here the instrument performs a kind of sonic mimicry that creates the illusion of speech or narrative conversation.23

Similarly, Evans says of the alternation of verbal+instrumental and instrumental sections in blues, “Blues also elevated the role of the musical instrument within popular song making it a second voice, integral to the song itself, punctuating, commenting upon, and answering the vocal line.”24 So, if we interpret “The Royal Scam” as a variation on the blues pattern, then a meaning we can infer from the song is that the instrumental lines respond to the verbal lines, but, in this particular song, since they are longer, the instrumental parts have more to say in response than the verbal lines. The structure of the stanzas thus emphasizes to the listener that the words are only a part of the meaning of the song, and that there is much more that is not explicitly said but can only be inferred. This fits well with a broad interpretation of the song as involving meanings which are concealed or not fully expressed in the lyrics, and, in particular, that the song is communicating that the lure to move from Puerto Rico to New York is a “(royal) scam.” This fits also with the narrative in the final stanza where an old man back home reads a letter which misdescribes the Puerto Rican protagonist’s experience, presenting it as positive, when in fact it

 Floyd, Power of Black Music, 96.  David Evans, “The development of the blues,” in The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music, ed. Allan Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002): 20–43, 21.

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was negative, and fails to say what needs to be said. But we can also read the song as a variation on a different genre, the type of song in which lines are long and instrumental sections short. In this reading, the song violates a structure where the text is long and the instrumental short. This reading produces the interpretation that the instrumental sections are particularly long, and this, added to the interpretation of the instruments as responding, further emphasizes that the parts in which the words are omitted have the most to say. If we draw on a source-based semantics, we might further associate the greater size of the instrumental sections with a meaning which is more important by the analogy of size with importance. There are two alternative genres, or song structures, relative to which this song can be interpreted; in principle, the listener could interpret the song relative to both of them, particularly as the readings in the two cases reinforce each other. Floyd’s and Evans’s characterization of blues songs suggests that the instrumental part is heard as if it is in language. Songs in other genres can be interpreted in a similar way, as though the music is language. For example, Bullock discusses a song by Tchaikovsky in which a “non-existent dialogue is expressed by the mirroring of the descending vocal part by an ascending line in the piano accompaniment.”25 Hearing music as speech, but in the absence of speech, seems to be common, and perhaps it draws on a source-based semantics, whereby characteristics of speech are preserved in the comparison with characteristics of music. Our knowledge of the characteristics of speech is presumably more basic than our knowledge of the characteristics of music. This suggests that we do not ‘turn off’ our tendency to hear sound as speech, even when we know it is coming from an instrument. Juslin makes the interesting claim that, in listening to music, we seem to be hearing a language whose syntax we understand, but not its semantics: In listening to music, there is a strong sense that something ‘highly structured’ and ‘meaningful’ is being said, but our brain cannot make out what it is. The resulting feeling might be construed as ‘mild excitement’ mixed with ‘confusion’ as our brain is continuously ‘hooked’ by this subtle yet inexplicable language-like structure that we call ‘music.’26

Expressing the same basic idea, here is Robert Browning, a poet who had a great interest in music (from “A Serenade at the Villa,” 1855):

 Philip Ross Bullock, “Ambiguous Speech and Eloquent Silence: The Queerness of Tchaikovsky’s Songs,” 19th Century Music 32.1 (2008): 94–12, 114.  Patrik N. Juslin, “From Everyday Emotions to Aesthetic Emotions: Towards a Unified Theory of Musical Emotions,” Physics of Life Reviews 10 (2013): 235–266, 261.

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What they could my words expressed, O my love, my all, my one! Singing helped the verses best, And when singing’s best was done, To my lute I left the rest.

A final general point to make about instrumental sections in a song relates to time, processing, and memory. The verbal line is followed by a nonverbal part, and, in principle, the omission of words in this part could allow for the line to be remembered and processed more deeply, compared with if another line immediately followed. In this song, by having such long instrumental sections, more time is given to the listener to interpret the lines; the predictability of the pattern enables processing effort to be managed, with the expectation that there will always be space to further understand each line. Deeper processing allows more meaning to be inferred from the lines and also enables the line to be better remembered.27 A complicating factor is that the line is not followed by silence but by a musical section which also demands processing effort. This will take away some processing from the preceding line, but on the other hand, by increasing processing complexity, the line will be more deeply processed and better remembered. The second factor specifically in this song is that the instrumental section does not vary much from section to section, and so in principle requires less effort each time we hear it.

How Does Meaning Arise from the Instrumental Sections of “The Royal Scam”? In conclusion, it is possible to suggest various ways in which the instrumental sections can contribute to the meaning of the song, even though words are omitted. The first points to make are that all such meanings are derived by inference, that a range of possible meanings can be derived, and that it is difficult to generalize over the meanings. A related point is that it may be that the hearer feels that meanings have been implied, but that they are so indeterminate that it is impossible to fix on any of them; this might give the sense of an epistemic feeling of knowing something without being able to say what it is. The third thing to say is that there may be a tendency, theorizable under a source-based semantics, to

 David P. McCabe, “The Role of Covert Retrieval in Working Memory Span Tasks: Evidence from Delayed Recall Tests,” Journal of Memory and Lang 58 (2008): 480–494, 481.

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hear instrumental sections in a song as though they are in language; this further adds to the feeling that meaning has been implied but without saying what that meaning is. As part of this way of hearing the instrumental sections as verbal, we might interpret them as responses to the verbal sections with which they alternate. This particular song has particularly long instrumental sections, which has two kinds of consequence. First, it makes the instrumental sections particularly marked, noticeable, and ostensive, and this adds to the sense that the singer or composer is trying to say something to us during these sections. Second, the length of the sections means that they can be interpreted as saying more than the shorter verbal lines can say. However, it is worth noting also that the instrumental sections tend to be quite similar throughout the song, and so we might also attribute variations on the same response to all these instrumental sections, as though each line is commented on in the same way. At the beginning of the essay, I described my response to this song as a type of “epistemic feeling,” a feeling of knowing something which feels significant, without being able to specify what is known. It is precisely the fact of omission, in which the verbal component that supplies the richest kinds of evidence for meaning is omitted, which produces this effect.

Anni Haahr Henriksen

Omissions, Blanks, and Silences: Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126 Abstract: The empty couplet in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126 has puzzled readers for centuries. This essay begins by tracing the history of the sonnet’s final couplet in editions from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, giving an overview of the various reasons for its omission and inclusion. Despite the recent turn in scholarship on the empty couplet, the enigmatic parentheses continue to be omitted and their Quarto form questioned. A recurrent argument is that the poem seems thematically and syntactically complete within its twelve lines, ending in a full stop. This essay, however, explores what happens if we remove the full stop in line twelve and accept the empty couplet as an integral part of the Sonnet’s structure. The result is a cascade of effects: as the verb “render” is allowed to spill over into the next line it takes on the blank silence in the empty couplet as its complement and the two italicized words Audite and Quietus in lines eleven to twelve emerge as complementary agents in a sonorous landscape. Most of its long life, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126 has been an object of omission. With its couplet structure and enigmatic parentheses, the poem has puzzled editors for centuries. It was first printed as a fourteen-line sonnet ending with an empty couplet in 1609, but its odd form and direct loving address to a male saw it ousted from the sonnet sequence in 1640. Once ostracized, its exile proved long, and the sonnet was not reinstated within the sequence for 140 years. Restored to its Quarto position in 1780 as a twelve-line sonnet without its final empty couplet, Sonnet 126 was not restored to its Quarto form in critical editions for another two hundred years.1 Despite the recent turn in scholarship on

Note: I want to thank Anne Toner, Jesper Kruse, Anne Sophie Refskou, Gordon McMullan, and Svenn-Arve Myklebost for their generous comments, help, and valuable critique of this essay. I also want to thank the undergraduates at the English Faculty, Cambridge University, for their insightful questions during the 2017 lecture, when I first presented the early stages of this essay. This research was conducted at the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies (138).  To my knowledge, this is true except for the case of Samuel Butler’s 1899 edition, in which Butler includes the empty parentheses. Butler, however, re-excludes Sonnet 126 from the sonnet sequence and places it in the appendix. I deliberately distinguish between critical editions and mere reprints of the 1609 Quarto. William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-004

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the empty couplet, outlined in the next section, the enigmatic parentheses continue to be omitted and their Quarto form questioned.2 A recurrent argument for the empty couplet’s continued elision is that the poem seems thematically and syntactically complete within its twelve lines.3 Ending on a full stop in line twelve, the Sonnet, one editor argues, “need not be filled up to make fourteen.”4 This essay, however, explores what happens if we remove the full stop in line twelve and accept the empty couplet as an integral part of the Sonnet’s structure.5 The result is a cascade of effects: as the verb “render” is allowed to

Reconsidered, and in Part Rearranged with Introductory Chapters, Notes, and a Reprint of the Original 1609 Edition, ed. Samuel Butler (London: A. C. Fifield, 1899) (acc. 21 June 2021).  This being said, there are important exceptions and signs of new developments. A case in point is The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, which in the 2005 edition omits the parentheses but includes them in the 2016 edition. See William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon P, 2005): 794; William Shakespeare, The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016): 2871. The recent Norton Shakespeare also includes the empty couplet and even retains their italicized Q form, see William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare 3E, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gosset, Jean E Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus and Gordon McMullan (New York: Norton & Company, 2016): 2293.  An important exception is Colin Burrow’s 2002 edition, in which, in the commentary to Sonnet 126, Burrow ends his notes on lines eleven and twelve with an acute observation: “Although the syntax of the poem is complete, the brackets create the impression that render could be functioning as a transitive verb, of which the object is sliced away by the sickle hour of time, bracketed to oblivion.” William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002): 633.  Katherine M. Wilson, Shakespeare’s Sugared Sonnets (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974): 319. Ingram and Redpath come to the same conclusion: “the poem, (such as it is) [Ingram and Redpath do not retain the parentheses] forms a complete whole.” William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. W. G. Ingram and Theodore Redpath (London: U of London P, 1964): 288.  Seventeenth-century punctuation and orthography were not standardized, and the work of pointing texts was a labor undertaken by the compositor, or compositors, as well as the printer. The ground-breaking study by P. Jackson MacDonald gives a succinct introduction to the punctuation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and argues that the text, being an autograph or a corrected scribal transcript, was worked on by two different compositors. P. Jackson MacDonald, “Punctuation and the Compositors of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1609,” The Library, 30.1 (1975): 1–24. The question of the 1609 Quarto’s authenticity, and the relation between autograph and printed text is vividly discussed and investigated by Kathrine Duncan-Jones in William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones [1997] (London: Bloomsbury, 2019): 27–40. For a more general overview of the development in sixteenth-century punctuation from rhetorical to syntactical, see: Neil Rhodes, “Punctuation as Rhetorical Notation? From Colon to Semicolon,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 82.1 (2019): 87–105.

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spill over into the next line it takes on the blank silence in the empty couplet as its complement, activating Audite and Quietus in lines eleven to twelve as complementary agents in a sonorous landscape. Traditionally, Audite and Quietus, italicized in Q, are read as financial tropes, but they also carry connotations related to the acts of hearing and listening, to sound and silence. In this sense, the blank space in Sonnet 126 becomes a visual and aural pun on the silence of death and the aphasia of loss. Standing as the final poem in the fair youth section, this closing farewell to the lovely boy embraces closure and visualizes the void that a lost loved one leaves behind. The purpose of this essay is threefold: first, it provides an overview of the complicated print history of Q 126 with a special emphasis on the status accorded to the empty couplet across editions. Second, it discusses recent critical interpretations of the empty couplet and highlights three theories that give a visual reading of the parentheses and the blank space at their capture. Third, it offers a new interpretation of the couplet that takes into account the visual, verbal, and aural modes of the poem.

Editorial Overview: From Benson to Duncan-Jones Shakespeare’s Sonnets have gone through numerous editions since their first printing in 1609. Two particular editions have had a marked effect on their outlay and reception: John Benson’s edition from 1640 and Edmond Malone’s edition from 1780. As far as we know, John Benson’s was the first edition of the Sonnets to be published after the 1609 Quarto. With only 30 years between them, it is remarkable that they differ so greatly.6 Benson’s edition is often seen as corrupt due to the editorial liberties he takes. Rearranging the sonnets by topical clusters, Benson renames them, disrupts the sonnet form by combining some of the sonnets to make longer poems, alters personal pronouns from “he” to “she,” and even omits eight of the sonnets from the sequence.7 Among the

 Colin Burrow gives a lucid overview of the different early editions of the Sonnets and the role Benson’s edition played for the reception of Shakespeare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See Colin Burrow, “Editing the Sonnets,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007): 145–162.  The eight omitted sonnets are 18, 19, 43, 56, 75, 76, 96, and 126. L. Cottegnies, “‘No cloudy stuff to puzzle the brain’: Fair Editing and Censorship in John Benson’s Edition of Shakespeare’s Poems (1640),” in Freedom and Censorship in the Early Modern Literature, ed. Sophie Chiari (New York: Routledge, 2018): 177–190. See also Raymond MacDonald Alden, “The 1640 Text of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Modern Philology 14.1 (1916):17–30.

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omitted poems is Sonnet 126. Benson’s edition became the standard authority on the Sonnets, and as a result, Sonnet 126 was banished from the sequence for over a century. Indeed, the authority of Benson’s edition was not decisively challenged until 1780 when Edmond Malone edited a supplement containing the Sonnets to Johnson and Steevens’ ten-volume edition of Shakespeare’s plays.8 From 1780 onwards, Malone’s work gained academic standing, and the status of Benson’s edition soon moved from authority to oddity. Edmond Malone’s Supplement heralded a decisive bibliographic shift from Benson to the Quarto. Breaking with Benson’s structure and titles, revised pronouns, and omissions, Malone restored the Sonnets to their Quarto structure, numeral titles, proper pronouns, and sonnet form. Taking the Quarto sequence seriously, Malone introduced the now broadly accepted division between sonnets 1–126 as addressed to a fair youth and 127–154 to a dark lady. This division places Sonnet 126 at a key position as the final sonnet in the fair youth section, thereby arguing for its place and importance in the sequence.9 Yet, despite the careful attention shown to the place and contents of Sonnet 126 in Q, Malone’s version of the Sonnet nevertheless stands two lines short, still lacking its empty couplet. Indeed, the blank parentheses are not mentioned at all. Instead, the commentary on Sonnet 126 in the 1780 Supplement dryly informs the reader that “[t]his sonnet consists of only twelve lines.”10 Sonnet 126 remained a twelve-line sonnet in critical editions until Samuel Butler’s 1899 Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered and in Part Rearranged. The reconsideration that Butler pays the Sonnets both takes and gives when it comes to Sonnet 126. The poem is reunited with its final couplet but is once again exiled from the sonnet sequence. Placing Sonnet 126 in the appendix, Butler writes: Nothing would surprise me less than to find that this sonnet had been originally the first of the whole series, and had been transferred to the beginning of what we should consider as an appendix collection, on the score of its being in a different form from those that follow; and also less attractive as an opening sonnet. But whatever may have been

 William Shakespeare, Supplement to the Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays Published in 1778 by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens. Containing additional observations by several of the former commentators: to which are subjoined the genuine poems of the same author, and seven plays that have been ascribed to him; with notes by the editor and others. 2 vols., ed. Samuel Johnson, George Steevens and E. Malone (London: Printed for C. Bathurst 1780) (acc. 29 July 2021).  The Sonnet’s importance is underlined in John Dover Wilson’s now often cited analysis that Sonnet 126 is an envoy, ending the fair youth section. John Dover Wilson, An Introduction to the Sonnets of Shakespeare (London: Cambridge UP, 1964): 14.  Shakespeare, Supplement, 1:681.

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the circumstances under which 126 Q was written, and wherever it may have originally stood, it has no connection with the story of the sonnets.11

It is uncertain which status Butler accords to the empty couplet in Sonnet 126. On the one hand, he retains the silent couplet in his edition; on the other hand, he refuses any aspect of authorial intervention in the printing. “It may be confidently affirmed that Shakespeare had nothing to do with this [Quarto] edition. [. . .] It is very carelessly printed, and though it has infinite claims on our gratitude it has none upon our respect.”12 The use of parentheses, even empty ones, was not unheard of in early modern poetry and drama, as John Lennard’s study of parentheses in English verse demonstrates.13 It is possible that Butler was aware of these examples and therefore included the empty couplet, which by his theory is part of a dramatic piece, meant to be acted out.14 Whatever Butler’s reasons for retaining the empty couplet, his example was not followed. Indeed, the Sonnet’s couplet structure – as opposed to the usual quatrain and sestet – and empty parentheses continued to be seen by editors as unassailable proof that Shakespeare had nothing to do with the Quarto. Writing in 1912, Charlotte Porter remarks in her edition of the Sonnets that “[t]he parentheses tell their story, therefore, and were not added in vain.”15 According to Porter, the “story” we find in the blank lines of Sonnet 126 is one of non-authorial printing. Surely, Porter writes, “[t]he omission of the closing couplet, apparently intentional on the Poet’s part, would scarcely have been marked as it is by Thorpe [the printer] as not filled up if he had been at liberty to confer with the Author.”16

 Butler, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 66–67.  Butler, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 2.  John Lennard, But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991): 37–43. Most of the examples brought to light by Lennard are from the works of John Marston (1576–1634).  Butler places Sonnet 126 in an appendix in his edition. As an explanatory note above the Sonnet, Butler writes: “To Mr W. H. Written under some special circumstances, the clue to which is lost. Perhaps to be spoken to Mr W. H. when acting the part of Cupid in some Masque.” Butler, The Sonnets, 271. Butler expands on this theory in an earlier chapter, discussing the order of The Sonnets. See page 66 in particular.  William Shakespeare, Sonnets and Minor Poems, ed. Charlotte Endymion Porter (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1912): 256 (acc. 18 July 2021).  Porter, Sonnets and Minor Poems, 145. The same conclusion continued to be drawn. Writing in 1974 Katherine Wilson surmises that “Thomas Thorpe identified it [Sonnet 126] as a nonsonnet with a pair of empty brackets where the final rhyming couplet ought to have been.” Wilson, Shakespeare’s Sugared Sonnets, 186.

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Authorial intent, and even attractiveness, as noted by Butler above, has been the ruler with which editors have measured the empty couplet in Q 126. Ingram and Redpath’s 1964 edition notes that “Q prints brackets round the blank space for an imaginary final couplet, the printer evidently considering that the poem must be incomplete.”17 Some thirteen years later, Stephen Booth famously echoes the prevailing argument for omitting the parentheses, namely that they are put there by the compositor, not the author. In his 1977 edition, Booth writes: “The Q printer appears to have expected a sonnet to have at least fourteen lines whatever its rhyme pattern; he bracketed two final blank lines, apparently to indicate that something was missing.”18 These are the arguments that are repeated again and again in subsequent editions. Exceptions to this rule, however, begin to surface in the 1980s and 1990s.19 Joseph Pequigney’s 1985 collection of essays on the Sonnets retains the vacant couplet. In his discussion of Sonnet 126, he entertains the possibility that the parentheses are intentional, arguing that they intimate a sense of closure and silence.20 Another forerunner is John Lennard who, in 1991, examines the empty couplet at length in his survey of parentheses in English printed verse, but passes no judgement on the question of intent. This opening coyness in critical readings is soon turned to bashful blazing. Arguing for the empty couplet’s relevance, Roy Neil Graves questions the printer theory head on. In his 1996 article “Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126,” Graves boldly states: “My thesis is that the ‘empty couplet’ in Sonnet 126 is an authorized detail, not just a printer’s add-on effort to regularize the poem.”21 The following year, 1997, a new Arden Shakespeare edition of the Sonnets is published. Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones, the edition flags a new critical regard for Q printing: “the 1609 printing reflects the minutiae, as well as the substance, of a copy-manuscript, certainly authorized, and perhaps also penned, by Shakespeare himself.”22 As for Sonnet 126, Duncan-Jones challenges the printer theory: “while previous editors have suggested that these

 Ingram and Redpath, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 288.  William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Edited with Analytical Commentary by Stephen Booth (New York: Yale UP, 1977): 430.  In 1995, standing hesitantly somewhere between inclusion and omission, John Kerrigan weighs the arguments for and against authorial intent, but in the end decides to cut out the parentheses from his edition “not without regret, as accidentals.” William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and a Lover’s Complaint, ed. John Kerrigan (London: Penguin, 1995): 350.  Joseph Pequigney, Such is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985): 202–208.  Roy Neil Graves, “Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126,” The Explicator 54.4 (1996): 203–207, 203 (acc. 20 May 2021).  Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, xiii.

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[the empty parentheses] were inserted by the printers [. . .] I think this is an unlikely intervention.”23 Like Graves, Duncan-Jones argues that the empty parentheses were intentional, not haphazard, and retains them in her edition. Finally, in 1997, after almost 400 years of complete or near-omission, Sonnet 126 sees itself restored to its Q form within a critical modernized edition.24 The liberties that Benson, Butler, Porter, and others before and after them take with the Quarto structure, form, and punctuation serve as vivid examples of the little regard – in terms of printing – the Quarto has been given. Colin Burrow, who retains the parentheses in his edition, aptly describes the muddy waters of authenticity when he states that “Although Q is entitled Shake-speares Sonnets, it is partly Compositor A’s sonnets and partly Compositor B’s sonnets and partly perhaps the publisher Thomas Thorpe’s sonnets.”25 This uncertainty obviously leaves editors with ample space to maneuver. Thus, every modernized edition is an interpretation, as Benson’s 1640 edition is an example nonpareil. More than any other, Benson’s edition contained perhaps less Shakespeare’s sonnets and more Benson’s sonnets. But the same, albeit to a lesser extent, goes for more abstemious editors, and we are to a certain degree reading Helen Vendler’s, John Kerrigan’s, and Stephen Booth’s sonnets.26 Arguing for the empty couplet in Sonnet 126, I believe we must banish the idea of intent when we read the poem. What is important is not to divine at what Shakespeare, in the case of authorial design, might have thought or intended with the empty parentheses. The importance lies rather in what is printed in Q and how the blank couplet affects the rest of the poem; how Q 126 interacts with the sonnet sequence, and how it diverges or reflects poetic tradition and innovation of the period.

 Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, xiii.  In his overview of Shakespeare commentaries, Carl D. Atkins (2007) observes that, before Duncan-Jones, Samuel Butler (1899) and George Harrison (1938) both include the empty parentheses in their editions. Butler, as we have seen does indeed include the parentheses, but Harrison does not. William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: With 300 Years of Commentary, ed. Carl D. Atkins, (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2007): 313. It might be argued that Pequigney, rather than Duncan-Jones, should be credited with restoring Sonnet 126 to its Q form, but Pequigney’s Such Is My Love is an essay collection on the Sonnets, not a critical edition. That being said, Pequigney does take the trouble to give his own version of Sonnet 126 in its entirety. See Pequigney, Such is My Love, 202.  Burrow, “Editing the Sonnets,” 145.  This list could easily be continued with the names of other editors: Gwynne Blakemore Evans, Carl Atkins, Stephen Greenblatt, Stanley Wells, and many more. However, the intention is not to mention every major Shakespeare editor, but merely to make the point that any edition is an interpretation.

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Reading the Empty Couplet Omitting the couplet entirely is easy. The poem ends with a full stop in line twelve, and we calmly flip the page to read the next sonnet. Retaining the empty couplet, on the other hand, is a different and much more difficult matter. Explanations are in order. Evidence of a kind is demanded. Duncan-Jones is aware of this. Dismissing the printer theory, she writes that in her edition of the Sonnets “the two pairs of empty parentheses [. . .] are both included and explained.”27 Explanations for why the blank parentheses should be included and not omitted are many and base themselves on readings ranging from the conservative to the obscene. Three readings are repeated in editions: reading the empty couplet as a visual pun on the poem’s hourglass motif; reading the couplet as accounting symbols, signifying the idea of paying one’s debt to nature; and finally reading the empty couplet as a pun on silence, death, and ending.28 Common to all three theories is that they presuppose a dialogic interaction between verbal imagery and visual conceit. Informed by the semantic potential of the written words, the parentheses are interpreted as approximate shapes, reproducing to the eye an image of what is read. The hourglass theory hinges on “fickle glass, his sickle hour;” the accounting theory hinges on “treasure,” “Audite,” “Quietus,” and “render;”; the silence theory hinges on “still,” “kill” in lines seven and eighth, as well as the blank space in lines thirteen to fourteen. This essay develops on the silence reading, by suggesting that Audite and Quietus carry sonorous connotations that are activated in the blank couplet and by examining what happens if line twelve is allowed to run on into the silent couplet. The first two lines of Sonnet 126 introduce the “lovely Boy” (S, 365) as the object of attention, and time is personified as the inevitable reaper, harvesting the fair youth’s beauty.29 Time, and its ineluctable passing, is the element of crisis. The main tenet of the hourglass theory combines the Sonnet’s chronological focus with a visual reading of the empty couplet.30 The theme is introduced in  Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, xiii.  I take this formulation from Booth, who, in turn, has it from M. P. Tilley’s A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. See Booth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 433.  William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 126,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones [1997] (London: Bloomsbury, 2019): 365; further references in the text, abbreviated as “S.”  The key promulgators of this theory are René Graziani, Roy Neil Graves, and Rayna Kalas. Erroneously, Duncan-Jones cites Graziani for interpreting the empty brackets as a visual play on the Sonnet’s hourglass imagery, but Graziani states no such thing. Graziani does indeed give a cogent interpretation of ‘Sonnet 126’ and the relation between the number 126 and the

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line two: “Dost hold time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour” (S, 365), evoking the notion of an hourglass and the passing as well and the potential reversal of time. In her article “Fickle Glass,” Rayna Kalas explores the hourglass motif and gives an elaborate and sophisticated reading of the Sonnet that ranges far beyond her observations on the “two sets of curved brackets that graphically render the approximate shape of an hourglass.”31 () ߓ( ) In lines four to five, nature is personified as “sovereign mistress over wrack” (S, 365). Nature is the agent throughout the remaining couplets of the poem. The praise for the lovely boy’s beauty turns to warning with the volta in line nine “Yet fear her” (S, 365). Lines six to ten may be summarized as follows: nature, the all-powerful force, is holding back time, in order to detain aging, but however young you may be now, you should fear nature, because she cannot detain time forever. In line ten, “treasure” introduces a financial trope that is elaborated in lines eleven to twelve, but it also intimates a sense of covetousness and objectifies the lovely boy as a passive pawn in a game where Nature and Time are the active players. The financial trope is unfurled in the two remaining written lines “Her audit, though delayed, answered must be, / And her quietus is to render thee” (S, 365). Playing on the notion of settling one’s debt to time, the financial trope in lines eleven and twelve complements the hourglass metaphor of time running out as well as the notion of ending and death. With a visual nod to keeping the books, Duncan-Jones observes that the empty brackets bear resemblance to accounting marks, that is, the marks at the end of an “accountbook enclosing the final sum” (S, 366). This reading is questioned by William

hourglass topos: “The hour-glass uniting two lives is what explains the numbering 126. This contains, like the hour-glass, the numerical equivalent of two lives of sixty-three years.” René Graziani, “The Numbering of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: 12, 60, and 126,” Shakespeare Quarterly 35.1 (1984): 79–82, 81. Regarding the empty couplet, however, Graziani is only too happy to agree with Butler, Porter, Booth, etc., on the printer theory: “the printer Thomas Thorpe seems to have been uncomfortable with the anomaly and cautiously bracketed two more empty lines.” Graziani, “The Numbering,” 81. Another observation on the number 126 is made by Don Paterson, who notes that the number is equal to the amount of lines and couplets, i.e. twelve lines of verse consisting of six couplets. William Shakespeare, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Don Paterson (London: Faber and Faber, 2010): 374–379.  Rayna Kalas, “Fickle Glass,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007): 261–276, 264.

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Logan, who does not find such a use of parentheses in Elizabethan ledgers. He does, however, remark that in modern accounting books parentheses “mark a loss.”32 The empty couplet then, in this reading, is enclosing the sum (Quietus) of what is owed (Audite) and thereby lost. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun audit is used literally and figuratively to mean “A statement of account; a balance-sheet as prepared for the auditor.”33 It stems from the Latin auditus, “a hearing,” which is a derivative of audire, “to hear.” In medieval Latin (auditus compoti), it became more specifically associated with the “hearing of accounts.”34 The idea is further stressed by the following Quietus, which is short for quietus est, that is, “An acquittance or discharge granted on payment of a debt.”35 In addition to the two words Audite and Quietus, we find “render,” which likewise carries monetary connotations. When used in this sense, “render” means the submission of “a statement of money held, spent, or due.”36 Moving from the lucid to the lurid, we find the cheek theory. This reading is put forward by Graves, who argues that the two pairs of brackets are pictograms of “cheeks – those on our face, or the buttocks, even labia.”37 ( )ߓ( ) Bawdry is not uncommon in Shakespeare’s works. On the contrary, profane puns and obscene innuendos are sprinkled across his authorship, the Sonnets included. Graves’ suggestion, for it is no more than that, is a nod to that aspect. These visual interpretations, the hourglass, the lunar shapes, the accounting symbols, and the cheek pictograms are in part a result of the irresistible urge we as readers feel to fill the vacant couplet in lines thirteen to fourteen

 William Logan, The Sins of the Sonnets: The Undiscovered Country (New York: Columbia UP, 2008): 344–374, 351.  “audit, n.” OED Online. Oxford UP, 2021. (acc. 17 February 2022).  “audit, n.” OED Online. Oxford UP, 2021. (acc. 17 February 2022).  “quietus, n.” OED Online. Oxford UP, 2021. (acc. 17 February 2022).  “render, v.” OED Online. Oxford UP, 2021. (acc. 17 February 2022). The use of monetary metaphors is likewise governing in Sonnets 1 and 4, although the wording is slightly different. In Sonnet 1 it is “due,” “grave,” and “niggarding” that foster the idea. Booth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 135–137.  Graves, “Sonnet 126,” 206.

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with a form of meaning. Visually enigmatic, the italicized parentheses invite if not demand interpretation. Yet, the readings they elicit easily run into the realm of the over-imaginative. I say over-imaginative, as, in order for them to be plausible, we have to rearrange the poem’s form. The two brackets will have to be put closely together as in the hourglass theory, or set on a horizontal line next to each other, as we see above in the illustration of the cheek theory. The parentheses, however, are none of those things. They are spaced out with the length of a line between them, indented like all of the couplets of the sonnets in Q. Sonnet 126, and we may say this with some certainty, is meant to look like a sonnet.38

Silence and Omission: Removing the Full Stop in Line Twelve I have now touched upon two of the major visual readings and a small handful of more quaint visual readings of Q 126’s two silent sets of parentheses. Remaining is what we might call the silence theory. Like the other readings, this theory has a graphic approach, which is based on the assumption that the poem has a twofold register: one that is verbal and one that is visual. In this sense, Sonnet 126 should be equally read and seen. The visual has a mimetic value that might inspire pictograms or accounting symbols, but also simply nonsentience, absence, and the silence of death.39 On a performative level, in Sonnet 126, the silent couplet suggests an auditory dimension as the blank in lines thirteen and fourteen is heard, seen, and read.

 Finally, we must remember that the parentheses in Q are set in italics. Had Shakespeare or his printer wanted an hourglass or cheek pictogram surely they would not have tilted them. This being said, it is uncertain how much meaning we should allot to the italicization of the parentheses. John Lennard observes that some of the parentheses in Sonnet 126 are tilted and others not: the opening parenthesis in line eleven is not tilted, but the closing parenthesis is. Lennard suggests the sober conclusion that the printer ran out of non-italicized parentheses. Lennard also notes that only two out of the 154 sonnets in Q have parentheses. These are Sonnet 126 and Sonnet 98. Lennard, But I Digress, 41.  Rayna Kalas aptly argues that the blank mocks language: “And yet, the blank space held open by that set of empty parentheses seems almost to mock the sense making capacity of language and lines of verse. [. . .] Drawing the reader to the space where there is no language, only blank page, the sonnet represents nonsentience both death and thingness. Over the course of the poem, sonnet 126 describes what it is to be subject to both time and nature.” Kalas, Fickle Glass, 262, 270.

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A modern example of a sonnet that uses blanks to play on silence verbally, visually, and aurally is Eugen Gomringer’s “Silencio,” published in Konstellationen in 1953.40 silencio silencio silencio silencio silencio

silencio silencio silencio silencio

silencio silencio silencio silencio silencio

Not unlike the empty couplet in Sonnet 126, the blank space in “Silencio” is easily filled by our imagination with another repetition of “silencio.”41 In that sense, the verbal references to silence in the words “silencio” echo within the blank space. Similarly, in Sonnet 126, the twelve lines above the blank parentheses enter into a dialog with the empty couplet’s vacant space: before our eyes, sickle-shaped moons are waning and the bulbs of an hourglass begin to take form; and for our ears, a resounding silence plays.42 The silence in Sonnet 126 lends itself to several metaphors: the inevitable death of the lovely boy (“the rest is silence”);43 paying the debt or “quietus” that Nature owes to Time (“When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin?”);44 the dumbness of loss; and finally as a visual pun on the emptiness of ending, as the Sonnet concludes the fair youth section. On a semantic

 Eugen Gomringer elaborates on his use of the sonnet structure in an interview with W. Mark Sutherland in 2010 and in Der Sonette Gezeiten. Sutherland, W. Mark, “A Conversation with Eugen Gomringer,” Rampike, 21:1 (2012): 12–15, 14–15; and Eugen Gomringer, Der Sonette Gezeiten – the Sonnets’ Tides (Berlin: Edition Signathur, 2009): 60.  This will strike many as anachronistic, and quite rightly when Concrete Poetry is a term coined in the 1950s. But, visual poetry, that is, poetry that functions verbally and visually, is a tradition that goes back far beyond the age of Shakespeare. Indeed, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, George Herbert, is famous for his experiments with the visual in poetic form. For an enlightening overview of the genre, see Lars Elleström, “Visual Iconicity in Poetry,” Orbis Litterarum 71.6 (2016): 437–472.  Helen Vendler also ‘hears’ the silence of the empty couplet: “The Quarto’s set of two eloquently silent parentheses (which I retain) emphasize the reader’s desire for a couplet and the grim fact of its lack. Inside the parentheses there lies, so to speak, the mute effigy of the rendered youth.” William Shakespeare, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Helen Vendler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999): 538. Similarly, Don Paterson sees and hears the vacant couplet “as to the meaning of the gap, I hear nothing more than a simple visual pun.” Paterson, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 378.  William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Bloomsbury, 2006): 5.2.312.  Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1.75–76.

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level, the silence in the final couplet is anticipated in lines eleven and twelve in the words Audite and Quietus. These two words form the kernels of the financial trope but they elicit other readings too. As we have seen, Audite comes from audire, which means to hear and is also commonly used in the English language as something that is concerned with hearing or listening, that is, connected to the use of our ears. This sonorous interpretation is a rendition that is given import, as we find what looks like an antonym in the succeeding line; namely, Quietus. Quietus may be the abbreviation of “quietus est,” but it also denotes silence “A quiet period,” and stillness “a time of inactivity.”45 The latter meaning is prefigured by “still” in lines six and ten.46 The two words, Audite and Quietus, stand out in lines eleven and twelve because they are written in italics whereas the rest of the Sonnet is not. Italicization was an indicator of Latin words as well as a tool of emphasis.47 In the Sonnet, italicization points us to notice these words and confer significance to their meaning.48 In denoting a sonorous quality, the two italicized words are antonyms; each conveying qualities that are the opposite of each other. Yet at the same time, they also denote the same quality; to be quiet is to be silent, and to listen or hear is also mostly a silent action. Such trade upon sound and silence is anticipant of the empty couplet. This reading of Audite and Quietus suggests an additional layer of meaning to the imagery brought to mind by the two words, and to the ideas of loss and silence at play in Sonnet 126 more broadly. Throughout this essay, I have strived to show the long history of omission that marks this sonnet and its empty couplet, and I have sought to trace the strong arguments for its inclusion in the sonnet sequence. The break with tradition that Graves, Duncan-Jones, and Vendler make in the mid-1990s has, as we have seen, in many places resulted in a shift in mind-set concerning the silent couplet in lines thirteen and fourteen. A testament to the trio’s continued influence is that two of the authoritative Shakespeare

 “quietus, n.” OED Online. Oxford UP, 2021 (acc. 17 February 2022).  “quietus, n.” OED Online. Oxford UP, 2021 (acc. 17 February 2022).  Audite is also used in Sonnet 4 and italicized in Q.  This practice was also known in the seventeenth century. In Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, it is observed that “Words of Emphasis come in that precedent Matter; that he [the printer] may Set them either in Capitals, Roman, Italick, or English.” Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises: Or, The Doctrine of Handyworks Applied to the Art of Printing (London: Printed for J. Moxon, 1683): 2:221.

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editions, The Norton Shakespeare and The New Oxford Shakespeare now include the parentheses. As a result, we might conclude that the printer theory is dead, or, at least, that some editors do not regard it as an argument for omission. The argument that the Sonnet is syntactically whole within its twelve lines, however, seems to be still at large in the sense that the final full stop is retained. In challenging this argument, I would like to suggest that the empty couplet and lines eleven and twelve are syntactically connected and that the full stop in line twelve impedes this connection.49 The critical stands on Q punctuation and orthography quoted in the sections above are eloquent evidence of a long and liberal tradition of modernizing Q. Taking Sonnet 126 as an example, the Q version has eleven commas, one colon, eighth parentheses, one exclamation mark, and four full stops. A brief look across four modern editions in Table 1 reveals how freely editors insert and omit marks of punctuation in their efforts to modernize the poem:50 Table 1: The table gives an overview of how the punctuation in Sonnet 126 differs across a selection of acclaimed modern editions.

Quarto () Booth () Duncan-Jones () Vendler () Burrow ()

Comma

Colon

Semicolon

Exclamation mark

Parenthesis

Full stop

Hyphen

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

Reading across the numerous editions of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, most marks in Sonnet 126 have been shuffled around. Looking at the full stops specifically, we

 Gary Taylor, The New Oxford Shakespeare, 2871; Stephen Greenblatt, The Norton Shakespeare 3E, 2293. The parentheses are also retained in William Shakespeare, All the Sonnets of Shakespeare, ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021): 222. Notably, The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the Sonnets does not retain the empty couplet, but continues to omit them. See, William Shakespeare, The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Sonnets, ed. Gwynne Blakemore Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006) : 126.  The table gives an overview of how the punctuation in Sonnet 126 differs across a selection of acclaimed modern editions. For comparison, I have included the 1609 quarto in the table. W. Shakespeare, Shake-speares Sonnets, folio 30; Booth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 108; DuncanJones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 365; Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 533; Burrow, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, 633.

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see that the original four full stops in the Quarto are reduced to three in Booth, who omits the full stop in the middle of line two as well as the full stop in line seven that was putting a jolting halt to the enjambment running from line seven to eight.51 In succeeding editions, the number of full stops is further reduced to two. Despite the willingness to remove full stops, the final mark in line twelve has stood the test of time, indicating the ending of what for hundreds of years was presented as a twelve-line sonnet. What I mean to say is that it makes sense to have a full stop in line twelve, when line twelve is the final line of the sonnet, but the inclusion of the empty couplet changes the structure of the sonnet and calls the position of the final stop into question.52 Let us now have a look at Sonnet 126, without a full stop in line twelve: O thou my lovely boy, who in thy power Dost hold Time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour; Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow’st If Nature (sovereign mistress over wrack) As thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back, She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill May Time disgrace, and wretched minutes kill. Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure: She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure! Her Audite (though delayed) answered must be, And her Quietus is to render thee ( ) ( )53

The effect is striking. Pulling the plug from line twelve, the line spills over into the vacant space of the empty parentheses and the sonorous qualities of Audite and Quietus are triggered. Equally, “render” is now activated as a complex transitive verb, free to take on the silent couplet as its complement. The verb is usually counted among the words carrying the Sonnet’s financial trope. Here, the

 This full stop in line seven after “skill” is commonly omitted in editions from Malone (1780) to Edmondson and Wells (2021). Its elision is not an expression of Booth’s editorial practice in particular.  Within its new semiotic environment of a fourteen-line sonnet, the full stop in line twelve, like the original full stop after “skill” in line seven, is set in the awkward position of inhibiting an enjambment.  I have taken Colin Burrow’s 2002 edition of Sonnet 126 as my model for showing the Sonnet as it might look in a modern edition without the full stop. Altering Burrow’s version, I have italicized the parentheses and italicized and capitalized Audite and Quietus. Burrow, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, 633.

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example from Much Ado About Nothing when Benedict says “Claudio shall render me a dear account” is often cited.54 But Shakespeare also uses ‘render’ in ways that are not associated with giving, taking, or in any way signifying money.55 Indeed, ‘render’ is also used to connote visual representation, as in Henry VI Part 1 “But rather drowsed and hung their eyelids down, / Slept in his face, and rendered such aspect / As cloudy men use to their adversaries.”56 The OED entries for the verb ‘to render’ provide two additional examples: in the fourth entry, we find ‘render,’ with a complement, defined as: “To describe as being of a certain character or in a certain condition.”57 Incidentally, the first use of ‘render’ in this sense is found in As You Like It: “O, I have heard him speak of that same brother, / And he did render him the most unnatural that lived amongst men.”58 Similarly, the second use is found in All’s Well that Ends Well: “There is a remedy, approved, set down, / To cure the desperate languishings whereof / The King is rendered lost.”59 Clearly, ‘render’ was not only used to connote money and as we have seen there are many examples of the word being used with a complement, acting as a transitive verb.60 The complement is important, because this particular verbal form allows for an enjambment as “render thee” runs on into the blank couplet visually and aurally ending the sentence “render thee / silent.” When read as a transitive verb with a complement, ‘render’ is allowed to take the blank silence of the parentheses as its complement. This reading embraces the empty couplet by syntactically reattaching it to the rest of the poem proper and turns the often raised question about Q typography from “who put in the empty brackets?” to “who supplied the final full stop?”61

 William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, ed. Claire McEachern (London: Bloomsbury, 2005): 4.1.327. See Booth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 434.  The Shakespeare Concordance lists no less than fifty-eight uses of “render,” “rendered,” and “rendering” in all. Mary Cowden Clarke, The Complete Concordance to Shakespeare [1847] (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013): 642.  William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan (London: Bloomsbury, 2002): 3.2.81–83. I am indebted to Svenn-Arve Myklebost for alerting me to reference.  “render, v.” OED Online. Oxford UP, 2021. (acc. 17 February 2022).  William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: Bloomsbury, 2006): 4.3.120–122.  William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, ed. Helen Wilcox and Suzanne Gossett (London: Bloomsbury, 2019): 1.3.225–227.  In Sonnet 125, ‘render’ is also used with a complement: “But mutual render, only me for thee.” Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 363.  I am indebted to Anne Toner for making this point.

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In her lucid exploration of Ellipsis in Literature: Marks of Omission, Anne Toner discloses a tendency in early printed drama to misprint instances of aposiopeses by erroneously marking the unfinished sentences that perform the rhetorical figure, thereby misrepresenting meaning.62 Aposiopesis is the figure of interrupting oneself or breaking off a sentence, resulting in a pause or silence. Toner’s examples are from plays, not poems. To be sure, Sonnet 126 is not a piece of drama, and the empty couplet is not an aposiopesis, but there is a similarity. A similarity in the sense that both broken off sentences, aposiopeses, as well as the unmarked line twelve of Sonnet 126 run on into silence. This is all suggestion, but surely, a missing full stop would have puzzled the printer or compositor just as much as a sonnet of only twelve lines. The printer theory, as it is expressed by Ingram and Redpath: “Q prints brackets round the blank space for an imaginary final couplet, the printer evidently considering that the poem must be incomplete,”63 might be rephrased as “Q prints a full stop in line twelve for a syntactically whole line, the printer evidently considering that the poem must be complete.” Leaving the realm of conjectures and the scrabble for arguments of intent or authorial design, the full stop in line twelve is in Q and so are the parentheses. An editorial decision to retain the empty couplet and omit the final full stop should not be based on ideas of ‘originality’ but rather on considerations of form and meaning. Removing the full stop, as I hope to have shown, embraces the Sonnet’s rich metaphoric potential. Thus allowing it to reach us on a plethora of modes by concluding the address to the fair youth in a silent echo that reverberates verbally, visually, and aurally.

 See in particular Anne Toner’s chapter on “Ellipsis Marks in Early Printed Drama,” in which she traces how editors have marked aposiopeses in English and French translations of Terence’s Andria. Anne Toner, Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015): 25–53. Additionally, P. Jackson MacDonald, observes that the marking of the final lines of a text was the compositors’: “the task of supplying it [end-line punctuation] being largely left to the compositors as was common in the hand-press period.” MacDonald, “Bibliographical Principles and George Eld’s Quarto of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” The Library 20.2 (2019): 216–223, 217.  Ingram and Redpath, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 288.

Tiffany M. B. Anderson

Blackness as Disability: Compulsory Whiteness, Able-Bodiedness, and Masculinity in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy Abstract: Frances E. W. Harper’s novel Iola Leroy examines the distinct ‘Negro Problem’ in post bellum America through the incorporation of characters with disabilities. While some characters become disabled within the narrative, Harper omits the disabilities of most for much of the story to highlight what Robert McRuer terms as compulsory able-bodiedness. Not only does the audience carry expectations of able-bodiedness, the audience’s perception of characters changes for the worse once Harper reveals their disabilities. Similarly, Harper connects the disability of some characters to their race. Specifically, Harper’s omission of character disabilities foil the Leroy family’s omission of blackness. By drawing a parallel between disability and blackness, Harper establishes how blackness is a disability in America and further establishes that both blackness and disability are social constructs. Furthermore, by creating narrative restrictions on black and disabled characters, Harper demonstrates the social limitations for both people of (apparent) color and people with disabilities because their social treatment depends on racialized and disabled appearances. Frances E. W. Harper creates a valuable stage for disability studies application in her novel Iola Leroy in that most of the characters within the story either become disabled or enter the narrative as disabled. While Harper briefly mentions the characters’ corporeal disabilities within the narrative, the brevity of her attention to the disability redirects the reader’s attention to her use of disability as a narrative tool for her African American characters. The physical and mental disabilities serve as obstacles that characters must overcome or endure in preparation for the struggles presented for living on the wrong side of the color line in America. By drawing a parallel between disability and blackness, Harper establishes how blackness is a disability in America and further establishes that both blackness and disability are social constructs. By creating narrative restrictions on black and disabled characters, Harper demonstrates the social restrictions for both people of (apparent) color and people with disabilities because the social treatment depends on racialized (or admittance of black race)

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-005

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and disabled appearances: in other words, one can be of the African American race and never experience the social mistreatment of black people if one appears white and does not claim black identity. Harper also controls the revelations of disability through initial omission to illuminate the fear of uncertainty in racial identification at the time of the novel’s publication. Samuels notes the fear surrounding identifying blacks in America because of the diminishing traces of race on so many mixed-race people.1 As black people who appeared and believed themselves to be white (Iola and her brother Harry), the Leroys ignite the societal fear of the inability to identify black people simply. Just as it was assumed (and desired) that race inscribes and announces itself on bodies, disability is also imagined to be an apparent physical identity. Harper ridicules this assumption by allowing the characters to exist within the narrative, while withholding the knowledge of their disabilities. Disability in African American communities is especially prevalent post emancipation toward the end of the nineteenth century. According to James and Wu, there exists “a nearly reflexive ascription of disability to enslaved bodies in antebellum abolitionist literature.” The oftentimes “violent practices slaveholders used to reduce blacks to object status and the forms of labor they were made to endure ensured that many blacks became disabled within that institution.”2 Perhaps, as a result, this common connection between freed slaves and disability regulated the means by which blacks were to prove themselves equal to whites in the coming years. Minister writes that “many arguments for gender and racial equality initially relied and continue to rely on ideologies of ability.” Her article points to Sojourner Truth’s claiming her womanhood and her blackness while “directing attention away from her disability” to suggest equality.3 Also in nineteenth-century African American literature, we see white imposition on black people who appear white, in an attempt to ascribe race on their bodies through extreme physical injury. For example, in the Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke, Lewis Clarke provides accounts of when Mistress Banton would “fix [him] so that nobody should ever think [he]

 Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, and Race (New York: New York UP, 2014).  Jennifer James and Cynthia Wu, “Editors’ Introduction: Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Literature: Intersections and Interventions,” MELUS 31.3 (2006): 3–13, 7.  Meredith Minister, “Female, Black, and Able: Representations of Sojourner Truth and Theories of Embodiment,” Disability Studies Quarterly 32.1 (2012): (acc. 4 January 2022).

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was white.”4 Franzino argues that the “master class inflicts disabling injury in an attempt to ‘fix’ race—to produce a stable and visible black identity.”5 In Our Nig; or Sketches in the Life of a Free Black, In a Two-Story House, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There, a free biracial child named Alfrado is beaten and abused to make apparent “the nigger in the child.”6 This article traces Harper’s use of disabled bodies as a characterization device representative of race as disability and as a narrative tool of emasculation. Harper maintains the narrative standard that precedes her within the literary tradition which utilizes and, consequently, reduces disabled bodies as mere props and metaphors.7 However, Harper alters the typical narrative manipulation of disability to address the distinct ‘Negro Question’ of the 1890s by writing black characters with physical and emotional disabilities and to demonstrate the social disability of being black in America. Readers assume characters are white and nondisabled until the author notes otherwise. Harper manipulates her omission of race and disability to demonstrate how readers privilege whiteness by revealing the compulsoriness of able-bodiedness.8 Furthermore, this article explores the connection between male characters’ disabilities and their unlikelihood to become heroes of the novel. Harper discloses the physical disabilities of characters as simply as another writer might disclose the race of characters. And similar to the race of characters, the disabilities of characters emasculate them, therefore, altering their fate within the plot. Harper toys with readers’ expectations for what a hero should look like (white or with light skin and able-bodied) to unveil the compulsoriness of these identities. While Harper is typical in her narrative treatment of disability, she pioneers a new understanding of disability as it relates to race. Is blackness a real disability? In other words, can blackness exist as a disability beyond figurative language? Because

 Lewis Clarke, Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke, During a Captivity of More Than Twenty-Five Years, Among the Algerines of Kentucky, One of the So-called Christian States of North America (Boston, 1845): 21.  Jean Franzino, “Lewis Clarke and the ‘Color’ of Disability: The Past and Future of Black Disability Studies,” Disability Studies Quarterly 36.4 (2016): (acc. 4 January 2022).  Harriet Wilson, Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black [1859] (New York: Penguin, 2005): 26.  David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000): 47: “[People with disabilities] function in literary discourse is primarily twofold: disability pervades literary narrative, first as a stock feature of characterization and, second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device.”  Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York UP, 2006): 2.

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blackness does not physically disable a person, Iola Leroy proves that the disability of race comes from outside of the person of color. By demonstrating the lack of agency racialized bodies have, Harper highlights the social and cultural construction of both race and disability.

On Tom’s Disabled Body Iola Leroy (1893) was, for a long time, considered the first novel written by an African American woman, until the discovery of Emma Dunham Kelley’s Megda (1891) and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859). Iola Leroy (or Shadows Uplifted) is centered on the Leroy family and the tragedy beset them due to the miscegenetic marriage of Iola’s mother, Marie, and father and slave owner, Eugene.9 Although Eugene was genuinely in love and intentionally protective of his wife and children, his death threatened the lives to which the family had become accustomed. His cousin revealed the condition (blackness) of Marie and her two children, remitting them to slavery (all except their son, Harry). The story continues in the fashion of ‘Tragic Mulatto/a’ narratives in that Iola, although she appears white, becomes the property of a rough slave master whose sexual advances she must circumvent.10 However, Iola is soon rescued by Union soldiers (with the help of a former slave friend, Tom Anderson) and made a nurse for the army. Although the Leroy family is dispersed throughout the country, at the novel’s end, they reunite, and Iola becomes an educator and a model of black uplift, typical of characters written in this time period. Although the central plot is typical of both a sentimental novel and a novel of racial uplift that gives ideology prominence over style and aesthetics, the use of disability in Iola Leroy is quite the contrary.  This marriage is significant in that miscegenation was illegal in the United States (a common state law that was not overturned until the pivotal 1967 landmark court decision of Loving v. Virginia), and in the late nineteenth century, when Harper wrote this novel, there was fear among white Americans that blacks might walk amongst them, veiled under the guise of whiteness. The descendants of miscegenetic marriages justified these fears in that they could often and would sometimes pass for white, despite their African ancestry.  The ‘Tragic Mulatto/a’ (person of mixed ancestry) is a typical trope used in American abolitionist literature. The mixed-race character is often torn between his or her own races and forced to choose one. In instances with so-called Mulattos, the character is often driven to suicide or to murder his own white father (often, his slave master). In the cases of mulattas, the character risks sexual advances or violence by white men in power. These characters are meant to appeal to the sentiment of readers by portraying slaves as near-white and, consequently, more human.

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Harper’s first mention of disability occurs forty pages within her narrative, exactly thirty-three pages after she introduces the character who is disabled. Tom Anderson, the first character to speak in the novel, is a slave who decides to run away to the Union army so that he may be freed from slavery as contraband of war. He hopes to serve in the war but “on account of physical defects, instead of enlisting as a soldier, he was forced to remain a servant.”11 Although Tom does not serve the army as a soldier, he willingly enters a field of open fire during battle, so that able-bodied soldiers may narrowly escape with their lives to fight another day and tell of his bravery to the novel’s heroine, Iola, whom he loved and desired from a distance and who mourns his death somberly. Harper creates a story that seems like a legend yet writes so that Tom aspires to be a hero and performs heroic feats, yet never actually becomes one himself. He runs away from slavery, saves Iola from her abusive enslavement, is fatally wounded in battle, only to die with the woman of his dreams at his bedside, singing him a song that carries him to heaven. However, despite his many efforts toward heroism, Tom falls short of heroic status and is quickly forgotten, as the narrative moves past his disabled body to the real heroes and heroines of the story. And after all of the heroic acts, Tom passes admiration and marches towards pity in the eyes of the readers and characters of the novel. Although saving Iola and his ultimate sacrifice during battle are all undeniably admirable and heroic, we are left with his last words before volunteering to distract the soldiers, “Some one must die to get us out of this. I mought’s well be him as any. You are soldiers and can fight. If they kill me, it is nuthin’” (IL, 53). By equating the soldiers able-bodiedness to fighting, he reduces his disabled body as being worthy of death. What is most disturbing perhaps is that we can mark his downfall from the moment Harper mentions his “physical defects.” Before the reader is made aware of his disability, he seems more like a comrade of Robert rather than his liability. He urges other slaves to join them in their escape to the Union army in earlier chapters and helps rescue Iola mere paragraphs before his disability is disclosed. After her prolonged omission, followed by her quick mentioning of Tom’s disability, Harper aligns the disabled Tom with what one expects a disabled character to be: sidelined, feminized, and soon forgotten. Although Tom escapes his enslavement, he does not escape the role as servant that he played as a slave. Robert, a former slave of similar circumstance, not only joins the army but is praised for his participatory role. Tom’s disability reduces him to the same tasks he performed within slavery despite his status as

 Francis E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted [1892] (Boston: Beacon P, 1987): 40; further references in the text, abbreviated as “IL.”

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a freedman. While he escaped the control of his master, the wealthy planter, Tom’s disability becomes his master in freedom: Tom can only serve in a way that the disability allows him to serve. Perhaps this explains why Harper omits the disability for so long, revealing it well after Tom’s introduction and mere pages before his death. Tom’s low evaluation of himself leads him to sacrifice his life for the lives of the soldiers. Harper’s story depended on Tom not being a soldier in the army, and the only mention of his disability happens to explain his position of servitude: “on account of physical defects, instead of enlisting as a soldier, he was forced to remain a servant” (IL, 40). Harper never provides details of these “physical defects,” first leaving the reader surprised by the disability because the character was introduced in the very beginning of the narrative and, second, desperate for a full picture of Tom’s body. McRuer presents an argument rooted in the social construction of disability and queerness in his 2006 book, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. In it, McRuer argues that not only are these identities social constructs, but the non-marginalized identities are also compulsory expectations of literary and cinematic audiences. This would seem to be true of Iola Leroy, where the disabled body represents the disability of blackness, and in contrast, the abled body represents whiteness. In developing his argument, McRuer claims that, whenever a character enters a narrative, the audience reads him as abled-bodied and heterosexual.12 We can, I believe, extend this normative reading practice to include a large number of diverse demographics. Here, in Iola Leroy, when a character enters the narrative a reader assumes two things: the character is white and the character is ablebodied. Harper plays with this expectation by omitting a character’s race and level of able-bodiedness. The first chapter, for example, begins with a dialogue between Tom and Robert. While Harper does not disclose the characters’ race, she provides clues that suggest blackness, namely dialect and enslavement. For example, Tom asks, “Good mornin’, Bob; how’s butter dis mornin’?” and when he is named, Harper notes that he is known “among his acquaintances as Marster Anderson’s Tom,” and Robert is said to be his mistress’s “favorite slave” (IL, 7). The reader accepts these racial markers, language and slave status, without considering the need for indicators of physical ability. Later, when Tom’s disability is revealed, the assumption of able-bodiedness reflects the compulsoriness of able-bodiedness but also the supposition that one must be fully able-bodied to be a slave. Within the same paragraph in which Harper mentions his disability, the description of Tom changes from a “man of herculean strength” to a man with

 McRuer, Crip Theory, 19–28.

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“tender” hands (IL, 40). This is the beginning of the feminization of Tom. Harper continues to feminize him by comparing him to a woman’s gentleness: “he couldn’t have been more tender if he had been a woman” (IL, 50). The descriptions of Tom change from the masculine to the feminine only after his disability is revealed. Moreover, the possibility of a romantic relationship with Iola escapes within pages of his disabled characterization. During Harper’s omission of Tom’s disability, a romantic connection between Iola and Tom seems like an obvious narrative move since he rescues her from being defiled by her master. Typically, he who rescues the heroine becomes the hero. However, Tom dismisses the previously growing suspicions of the readers that he may serve as a match for Iola once he speculates, “I don’t spose she would think ob an ugly chap like me” (IL, 42). Kriegel asserts that “the cripple simply embarrasses” those around him.13 I disagree with the emotional response that Kriegel suggests is instinctive of an audience. Harper more accurately encourages a pathetic appeal for Tom, not embarrassment. Even at his deathbed, Robert watches over his friend “pityingly” (IL, 52). Robert’s reaction refuses Tom heroic status because no one pities the hero as he dies. Even Tom’s decision to leap before the soldiers as a sacrificial lamb is not heroic but rather results from a lack of self-worth. Tom reveals his self-evaluation when he claims, “If they kill me, it is nuthin’” (IL, 53). A few pages before Tom’s death, Captain Sybil says, “I suppose any white soldier would rather have his black substitute receive the bullets than himself” (IL, 49). Although Tom does not die for white soldiers, his death for black soldiers serves as a parallel to Sybil’s statement: an able-bodied soldier would rather have a disabled substitute receive the bullets. Furthermore, Tom agrees with this notion as demonstrated by his willingness to die in their places.

Compulsory Able-Bodiedness/Compulsory Whiteness A disability that follows Tom’s is that of Dr. Gresham. Similar to how Harper omitted Tom’s disability, although Dr. Gresham loses his arm early in the war, Harper does not speak of this disability until halfway through the novel. Before the end of the Civil War and the dispersing of characters, Iola and Dr. Gresham work together in the army’s makeshift hospital. When Dr. Gresham proposes

 Leonard Kriegel, “Uncle Tom and Tiny Tim: Some Reflections on the Cripple as Negro,” The American Scholar 38 (1969): 412–430, 412.

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marriage, Iola rejects the proposal, claiming that she cannot imagine marrying a white man now that she is aware of her race and the dramatic results her mother’s marrying a white man has produced. After she rejects his proposal and the war ends, Dr. Gresham comes to offer help to Iola. Before offering his assistance, Gresham says to Robert, a soldier who is recovering from a flesh wound, “In the early part of the war I lost my arm by a stray shot, and my armless sleeve is one of the mementos of battle I shall carry with me through life” (IL, 144). What remains of great importance of Dr. Gresham’s disability is how long Harper omits the disability and how quickly and simply Harper mentions Dr. Gresham’s missing arm, in the same way that she introduces Tom’s disability. Instead, she mentions the disability briefly and long after readers are aware of the character. As with Tom, Harper controls the information of Dr. Gresham’s disability, choosing when to tell and how much to tell, likely to the dismay of her audience. Sanborn argues that this is breaking from literary conventions: If this were an ordinary sentimental novel—or an ordinary novel, period—we would have learned of the armlessness of the heroine’s suitor at an earlier moment, and the information would not have been presented in passing by the suitor himself. It would, instead, have been made visible and significant by the narrator very soon after Dr. Gresham’s initial appearance in the text. [. . .] The characters in Harper’s novel are quite often face-toface with one another [. . .]. But they almost never bestow on another character a look that gathers in such things as height, weight, shape, clothing, bearing, facial expression, or the existence of limbs. I know of no other novel in the canon that so scrupulously refuses to pay to bodies the kind of attention that we think of as their due.14

Most scholars read Harper’s lack of attention to the body as “symptomatic of the conditions under which African-American women wrote at the turn of the [century].”15 However, I read Harper’s lack of explanation of bodies (specifically disabilities) as a refusal to deal with corporealities on the terms and expectations of her readers. While I agree with Sanborn that typical novels would mention Gresham’s amputation earlier, I argue that this is purposefully omitted to complete Harper’s use of disability as a prop for plot development. Harper controls the omission and dissemination of information and descriptions of characters to make the reader aware of their own compulsory expectations of characters. Readers are surprised by Dr. Gresham’s disability precisely because they peremptorily assumed his able-bodiedness. Harper forces the question, “Why did you assume that in the first place?”

 Geoffrey Sanborn, “Mother’s Milk: Frances Harper and the Circulation of Blood,” English Literary History 72.3 (2005): 691–715, 691–692.  Sanborn, “Mother’s Milk,” 691–692.

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When the reader becomes aware of Dr. Gresham’s disability, the reader is perhaps more surprised than with the revelation of Tom’s disability. The assumed parallel between able-bodiedness and whiteness does not prepare one for a disabled white man. Harper capitalizes on this expectation by the vastly different fate of Dr. Gresham, in comparison to Tom. As demonstrated in the previous section, once Tom is identified as being disabled, everything is stripped from him within pages of the disclosure: heroic status, love, and life. Although Iola’s rejection of Gresham’s proposal of marriage takes place chapters before Harper reveals his disability, the reader questions Iola’s claims against the marriage in the first place. While the reader was not aware of Dr. Gresham’s disability, of course Iola was. Perhaps the disability informed her decision. Furthermore, once Dr. Gresham notes his missing arm, he seems accepting of their platonic relationship and even compares his concern for her as concern he hoped would be afforded his sister. Even though both Tom and Dr. Gresham are disabled, their destinies within the novel are very different. Neither wins Iola’s heart. However, Dr. Gresham has a home to return to, a career to continue, and will be heralded as a war hero. So, Dr. Gresham’s narrative is not altered in the extreme way that Tom’s is, upon the disclosure of disability, and we can assume that his whiteness saves him from a similar fate.

Disability as Preparation Tom is the only character in Iola Leroy who does not become disabled during the narrative time period, which further demonstrates how disability operates as a pawn used to drive the plot forward. Why do characters become disabled within the novel and how do their disabilities create opportunity for them within the storyline? Harry Leroy becomes disabled by illness nearly halfway through the novel. Once he reads Iola’s letter, explaining all that has transpired at home in his absence (the death of his father, his mother’s blackness, and their enslavement), Harry goes into a shock that instantly disables him: As he read, he turned very pale; then a deep flush overspread his face and an angry light flashed from his eyes. As he read on, his face became still paler; he gasped for breath and fell into a swoon [. . .]. The doctor came at once and was greatly puzzled. Less than an hour before, he had seen him with a crowd of merry, laughter-loving boys, apparently as light-hearted and joyous as any of them; now he lay with features drawn and pinched, his face deadly pale, as if some terrible suffering had sent all the blood in his veins to stagnate around his heart. (IL, 121)

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The moment Harry becomes aware of his blackness and the enslavement of his sister and mother, his physical appearance becomes an extreme opposition of his race. Harper points to his “pale” skin three times within the paragraph. Harry’s awareness of his blackness alone is enough to send him into a disabling illness. Although he has not directly been affected by the social disability of blackness, he becomes aware of his black blood and the knowing alone disables him. While Harry’s reaction carries narrative importance, Harper uses it to highlight the drastic difference in quality of life that comes with blackness, which I identify as its social disability. For his mother and Iola, their social disability of blackness took shape in their enslavement. Instead of depending on more variant social disabilities as racism, Harper relies on the most extreme social disability of blackness: the loss of one’s freedom. How quickly freedom can be taken away, due to blackness, establishes the immediacy of black social disability. Harry’s illness operates on two levels in the narrative: it acts as a placeholder for the social disability that his mother and sister endure as slaves and prepares him for his future decision to enter a black regiment of the Union army, ultimately choosing the social disability of blackness over the social comforts of whiteness.

Depression as a Woman’s Disability Disability in Iola Leroy seems gender specific: male characters are physically disabled, while female characters suffer from mental disabilities. Iola suffers from depression early in the novel, while, later in the novel, her mother’s signs of physical illness are merely reflective of her mental frailty. Moreover, these characters’ disabilities result from their concern for men whom they love. While serving as a nurse to the Union army during the war, Iola “suffer[s] from general debility and nervous depression” (IL, 112), due to her strained love situation with Dr. Gresham. After much resistance to his affections, Iola becomes lovesick and tortured by the barrier her race would serve in a romantic relationship with Dr. Gresham. It is Iola’s unfulfilled love that drives her to depression, yet it is her race that disallows the fulfillment of the romance in the first place. Iola’s mother falls physically ill late in the novel. Iola and Robert create a special visit in which Dr. Latimer may observe and diagnose Marie without her knowing it. He concludes that “her failing health preceded more from mental than physical causes” (IL, 241). Marie worries for her son Harry who works in the South. Again, Harper makes the illness appear simply as a result of Harry’s dangerous work environment, but Harry’s work environment is dangerous only because of his race.

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In “Racial Hysteria: Female Pathology and Race Politics in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and W. D. Howells’s An Imperative Duty,” Michele Birnbaum connects on both semantical and medical levels the “consanguinity of the ‘Race Problem’ and the ‘Woman Question’ in the ‘mixed blood’ hysteric” present in these two novels.16 Birnbaum argues that Harper and Howells play on their traditional realist writing styles to present the “alternative reality” of Jim Crow through their “manipulation of the dominant languages of realism.”17 A prime example of this is that authors take the use of hysteria and the notion that it, and other nervous disorders, is a middle-class white woman’s disease, yet a disorder that classified them members of a “lesser race,” and write this disorder as part of their characters’ traits. This assignment of disability converts these previously identified “tragic mulattas” into “hysteric mulattas,” a transformation that takes place because of their mixed-race identity. This shift in language also changes the fates of the protagonists. Instead of facing fatal ends, as other mulattas do, Iola, with the help of medical professionals along the way, is saved.18 Although Birnbaum remarks that disability transforms the archetypal story of mulatta characters, she does not venture into the space that demonstrates the intersections of race and disability and the social constructions of both. Iola’s and Marie’s disabilities do not simply represent race as a disability. Here, Harper constructs a more detailed analysis of disability in that the disability of blackness produces the mental disabilities of Iola and Marie. Moreover, Harper seems to comment on the mental maddening the disabilities of blackness entails. Tettenborn posits that mental disabilities in African American literature operate as a mode of resistance for black characters.19 At first reading, Iola’s and Marie’s mental disabilities seem to reflect weakness, or worse, the frailty of women. With Tettenborn’s position in mind, however, our understanding of Iola and Marie shifts. To accept the effects of the social disability of blackness without response is weakness. Indeed, Iola and Marie are so disgusted by how race operates in love relationships and racial uplift in the South that their bodies protest. Marie’s and Iola’s mental anguishes take over their mental and emotional wellness in situations that they are otherwise ineffectual.

 Michele Birnbaum, “Racial Hysteria: Female Pathology and Race Politics in Francis Harper’s Iola Leroy and W. D. Howell’s An Imperative Duty,” African American Review 33.1 (1999): 7–23, 7.  Birnbaum, “Racial Hysteria,” 7–8.  Birnbaum, “Racial Hysteria,” 8.  Eva Tettenborn, “Melancholia as Resistance in Contemporary African American Literature,” MELUS 31.3 (2006): 101–121, 102.

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Blackness as Disabilities Harper plays with physical disability, as a result of blackness, from beginning to end of her novel. However, it is not until the end of the novel that she directly connects disability to blackness. She relies on both the figurative use of disability and the disabilities of characters to exist before she addresses blackness as a disability. While Harper weaves disability as narrative propellant for her novel, a proper examination of her dealing with disability in connection to blackness places her as a pioneer in the understanding of both disability and race. Harper connects disability to blackness most succinctly when Iola refuses Dr. Gresham’s offer of marriage towards the end of the novel. He attempts to coax Iola into an inter-racial marriage by pointing to the whiteness of her skin and the blueness of her eyes. Iola, however, accurately separates the appearance of skin from the disability of race when she asserts, “It is easier to outgrow the dishonor of crime than the disabilities of color” (IL, 233). Here, Iola juxtaposes dishonor (the crime being the rape of black women by their white masters and other white men) to disability (the color being the children born as a result of these rapes). She echoes her mother’s quotation regarding dishonor in an earlier section of the novel, “Neither wealth nor education can repair the wrong of a dishonored birth” (IL, 78). Marie asserts that births resulting in miscegenetic rapes and affairs between masters and their black slaves are dishonorable and, if we turn to Iola’s quotation, criminal. However dishonored the birth might be, the skin color of one birthed from such circumstance may be passable enough to avoid the disability of color. Race does not render the Negro race disabled, rather the color of their skin or the appearance of blackness places Negroes in disadvantaged positions. The absence of color presents the opportunity to pass and free oneself of the disability, but once association with the colored race is revealed, the disability of the races comes with it. Therefore, if one can be of the Negro race without having to suffer the molestation typical of other members of the race, then he is not disabled at all. The disability roots itself in the appearance of (or acknowledgement of) blackness not the actual racial bloodline. It is, instead, the community that forces the disability upon the race. Through this line of reasoning, Harper presents the disability of blackness as a cultural construction. Appiah introduces such possibilities in “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race.” In the article, he seeks to trace Du Bois’s uncompleted attempt to prove “the unbiological nature of races.”20 Du Bois goes as far

 Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 21–37, 22.

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as to define race as a sociohistorical concept in his paper “The Conservation of Races.”21 Du Bois makes this claim in the face of assimilation and efforts to minimalize the differences in race. In his paper, he encourages people to proudly embrace the differences. Appiah pushes against this argument by asking, “Does adding a notion of common history allow us to make the distinctions between Slav and Teuton or between English and Negro? The answer is no.”22 So, we are still stuck with the question: What is race? Du Bois certainly rejects the conflation of race and skin color. Yet he writes in Dusk of Dawn, “the black man is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.”23 A postscript to this claim is that the black man must either appear black or claim to be black. In other words, a black man who appears to be white can pass for white and avoid the requirements of race, as Du Bois defines it here. Appiah picks up the question of race where Du Bois left off: The truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask “race” to do for us. The evil that is done is done by the concept and by easy—yet impossible assumptions as to its application [. . .] What exists ‘out there’ in the world—communities of meaning, shading variously into each other in the rich structure of the social world —is the province not of biology but of hermeneutic understanding.24

In other words, race is how people perform racialization. During the writing of Iola Leroy, the interpretation of black bodies was that of inferiority. Specifically, Harper emphasizes the difference between being racially black, visually black and unknowingly black. These distinctions allow Harper to further prove race as no more than a cultural construction. It is this argument that positions race beyond the figurative language of disability and into the category of disability. As Baynton asserts: [While] disability has functioned historically to justify inequality for disabled people themselves, the concept of disability has been used to justify discrimination against other groups by attributing disability to them.25

The cultural construction of disability only creates another type of ‘othering.’ Just as society dictates whiteness as preferable to blackness, abled-bodiedness is also valued above disability. And Harper plays with the compulsoriness of able-

 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races” [1897], in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric Sundquist (New York: Oxford UP, 1996): 38–47.  Appiah, “Uncompleted Argument,” 27.  W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept [1940] (Piscataway: Transaction Publishers, 1975): 153.  Appiah, “Uncompleted Argument,” 35–36.  Qtd. in Appiah, “Uncompleted Argument,” 36.

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bodiedness to demonstrate that a reader exists in the cultural “hermeneutic understanding” of both. Furthermore, the role of omission plays heavily in the book. Iola’s parents omit the information of her race her entire life. Harper reflects this racial omission by omitting the disability of characters throughout the novel. Without omission as a narrative tool, Harper would not be able to turn the audience’s attention to the compulsoriness of race and able-bodiedness, ultimately illuminating their social constructions.

Nobuko Anan

Girls’ Aesthetics in Japan: Absence of Female Material Bodies Abstract: Japanese girls’ culture is typically characterized by cuteness (kawaii), but this essay explores a different type of Japanese girls’ culture, focusing on what I call girls’ aesthetics. While cute girls sometimes challenge gender norms, their rebellions take place within the heteronormative paradigm where women are ultimately seen in their relationship to men. In contrast, girls’ aesthetics defy heteronormativity, especially the role of motherhood within the paradigm. Their resistance takes a form of erasure of female material bodies in girlie cultural artefacts. This essay traces the development of the aesthetics and explores their traits by discussing contemporary case studies from manga (graphic novels) and installation arts.

Japanese girls’ culture is typically characterized by cuteness (kawaii) as seen, for example, in Hello Kitty or girl characters with huge starry eyes in anime (animations) and manga (graphic novels). This culture reflects some aspects of gender and sexuality in Japanese society. Hello Kitty, a cute female kitten without a mouth, may symbolize Japanese women’s voiceless status. In contrast, visually cute girl characters in mainstream anime and manga sometimes rebel against gender norms. Nonetheless, this takes place within a heteronormative framework, where women are ultimately seen in terms of their relationship to men. This essay explores a different type of Japanese girls’ culture by focusing on what I call girls’ aesthetics. This feminist aesthetics depicts a different image of girls, where they resist heteronormativity. The rejection can be seen in their reconceptualization of the notion of ‘female innocence.’ Within heteronormativity, this usually means virginity, which will be eventually violated when a girl enters a relationship with a man. However, in girls’ aesthetics, female innocence symbolizes nonconformity to patriarchal, heteronormative social structure. Heteronormativity functions in tandem with the reproduction of offspring, and therefore, in girls’ aesthetics, innocence also involves repudiation of women’s bodies as reproductive organs. In Japan, women’s bodies have been politicized as reproducers of its citizens, and childbirth and childcare have been the Note: This essay is based on research conducted for my monograph, Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls’ Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-006

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major roles expected of women, as evinced by a male politician’s utterance in 2007 that women are “childbearing machines.”1 If they cannot fulfill this role, they are considered undeserved recipients of the public welfare, as another male politician said in 2003.2 The view is not just shared among male politicians. In 2017, a female politician proposed that women who bore more than four children should be commended by the government.3 All these politicians were in the ruling party when they made the remarks, indicating that such a view of women is deeply rooted in Japanese politics. Girls’ aesthetics resist reduction of female bodies to wombs. This takes a form of erasure or omission of female materiality in girlie cultural artefacts. Girls perform two-dimensional, free-floating bodies that are not anchored on Mother Earth. In their wish to evade wifehood and motherhood and prolong their girlhood, they imagine a space without temporalities. Furthermore, they express multiple forms of love that are not tied to their female material bodies. In this essay, I will discuss boys, as girls’ alter egos, in romantic relationships in Hagio Moto’s manga, The Heart of Thomas (Tōma no shinzō) (1974) and old women as girls in Yanagi Miwa’s video installation work, Granddaughters (2002 and 2003).4 In both works, the material/maternal is eliminated from the girlie space. I call those who share these resistant aesthetics girls, and therefore, they are not necessarily female teens. Sally Mitchell states in her discussion on modern girls’ novels in England that girlhood “signifies [. . .] a state of mind rather than a chronological or legal concept,”5 and this applies to girlhood in Japanese girls’ aesthetics. As a matter of fact, artists and consumers of girls’ aesthetics are often adult women. Thus, girls’ aesthetics are not what Deborah Shamoon calls “the aesthetics of girls’ culture” in the title of her book Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of

 “Josei wa umu kikai [Women Are Child-Bearing Machines],” Mainichi Shimbun (January 28, 2007): 2.  Sōshiren, “Watashi tachi wa Mori Yoshiro shi ni ika no hatsugen no tekkai to josei e no shazai giin jishoku o motomemasu [We Demand Mr Mori Yoshiro to Repeal the Following Comments, Apologize to Women, and Resign from the Diet]” (8 July 2003), Sōshiren (acc. 6 August 2021).  “Jimin no Santō-shi ‘yonin ijō unda josei, kōrōshō de hyōshō o’ [Ms Santo of LDP Said, ‘Women Who Gave Birth to More than Four Children Should be Commended by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan’],” (21 November 2017), Asahi Shimbun Digital (acc. 6 August 2021).  In a Japanese name, the family name comes before a given name. In this essay, I follow this order, except for individuals who publish in English.  Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia UP, 1995): 7.

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Girls’ Culture in Japan (2012),6 where she regards girls as female heterosexual adolescents who are getting ready to enter adult heterosexual relationships. Moreover, like Mitchell’s girls, girls in this essay live an “imaginative life.”7 They are an aesthetic category referring to certain kinds of representations and those who identify themselves with these representations, including artists and consumers of girlie arts. Thus, this essay is not so much about the social reality of Japanese women. It is about the ways imaginary girls are constructed and manifested in arts, as a result of the desire of those with girlie sensibilities to create an alternative to their everyday reality. Although ‘girlness’ is defined by a state of mind, girls’ aesthetics originated in girls’ schools and girls’ magazines in the early 1900s, and therefore, below, I will first provide the overview of the historical contexts surrounding the aesthetics as well as summaries of their key traits. What will become clear is that the aesthetics which started over a century ago remain fundamentally unchanged in the present while there are shifts in the ways they are manifested. This demonstrates that the Japanese social structure in terms of gender and sexuality remains fundamentally unchanged. The fact that the aesthetics are now embraced by girls in a variety of age groups also testifies to the hegemony of this gender and sexual ideology. I will then explore how the aesthetics are played out in manga and installation arts from different periods, and this shows the pervasiveness of the aesthetics across different genres and times. While this essay is about the aesthetics critical of adulthood-cum-motherhood, I am certainly aware that motherhood is not a monolithic category. There are many representations of subversive mothers in arts but discussing them is beyond the scope of this essay.

Girls’ Aesthetics: History and Characteristics The category of ‘girls’ is a modern construct in Japan. Before the late nineteenth century, people were simply divided into children and adults, but the development of capitalism in the modernization process created a new category of adolescence, during which those between childhood and adulthood were trained

 Deborah Michelle Shamoon, Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan (Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2012).  Mitchell, The New Girl, 9.

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or invested in to become the future labor force.8 The investment took place at school. Beyond the elementary school, girls’ and boys’ education was separated, showing that the government assumed that educating female students would not provide as high a return as their male counterparts who would work in the military and industry after graduation. Young women were defined as those who would not appear in the public arena in the future,9 and it is these women who formed the social category of girls. Girls were thus synonymous with schoolgirls. Instead of providing future access to the public domain, the government determined that girls should become future guardians of the private sphere. Girls were designated as future “good wives, wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo), who would represent the moral core of the expanding middle class,10 and as reproducers of loyal Japanese citizens to support Japan’s nation-building. Girls’ schools were established as reservoirs of those who would be the paragons of this state-sanctioned womanhood, characterized by qualities such as “grace, elegance, gentleness, and chastity.”11 Until they embodied such womanhood, they were isolated from the rest of the society to remain ‘pure.’ Thus, girls were enclosed in schools with their sexuality surveilled under this gendered capitalist logic. However, burgeoning consumerism opened a space for their internal rebellion. Magazines targeting schoolgirls, which started to be published in the 1900s, contributed to the emergence of an aesthetic category of girls and became the primary site for the development of resistant girls’ aesthetics. These magazines did not openly confront state-sanctioned womanhood, but their editorial policy was (possibly, intentionally) ambivalent. While they preached conservative morality for future ‘good wives, wise mothers,’ they also functioned as a space for schoolgirls to perform their fictional selves, ignoring the hegemonic gender and sexual ideology. For instance, girls communicated with other girls through the readers’ columns, where they used beautiful pen names as if to leave their material reality behind.12 In prose pieces that they sent in, they described the images of their everlastingly young and beautiful bourgeois bodies, which would not

 John Whittier Treat, “Yoshimoto Banana Writes Home: The Shōjo in Japanese Popular Culture,” in Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture, ed. John Whittier Treat (Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 1996): 275–308, 280.  Honda Masuko, Kodomo no ryōya kara [From the Field of Children] (Kyoto: Jinbun Shoin, 1983): 214–215.  Honda, Field of Children, 214–215.  Honda Masuko, Ibunka to shite no kodomo [Children as Different Cultures] (Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shoten, 1982): 213.  Honda, Field of Children, 225–227.

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produce anything including offspring. They even fantasized death as the ultimate way to freeze time and remain young. Moreover, they celebrated their imagined bodies in a sensuous and narcissistic way, using romantic and ornate phrases, and their erotic desire was often directed towards other girls.13 Popular contents included not only the readers’ columns but also novels about romantic intimacy among girls as well as articles and photographs of stars of the Takarazuka Revue (Takarazuka kagekidan), an all-female musical/ revue company, which was founded in 1914 and staged heterosexual romances with gender-bending performances. These desires seeped out within the settings of girls’ schools, which were detached from the rest of the world. Through girls’ magazines, girls thus reconfigured the closed domain of sexual surveillance as a resistant space. This was motivated by the fact that they were exempted from wifehood and motherhood during their studentship, even though their bodies were mature enough for these roles. Thus, unlike the first-wave feminists such as the members of the first Japanese feminist group Seitō (Bluestocking), formed in 1911, girls did not attempt to transgress the boundary between the public and the private spheres. Rather, their rebellion took a form of twisting the function of the private sphere or, more precisely, a liminal sphere between their home and society, in their imagination. It is important to clarify here that I do not restrictively categorize girls’ bonds either as intimate friendship or as lesbian relationships, which typifies the discourse on girls’ relationships from the modern to contemporary period. As Yuka Kanno points out, those who are urged to separate intimate friendship and homosexuality base their arguments on the involvement of the genital pleasure or the lack thereof in girls’ bonds.14 In their view, if a girl has experienced genital pleasure with another girl, she is homosexual. If she has not, she has a close friendship. However, girls’ intimacy, whether genital or not, forces us to reconsider what is counted as the sexual and the erotic. For example, why are affects, including bodily sensations, experienced by exchanging passionate love letters with each other (which was a typical activity of those in intimate relationships in modern girls’ schools) considered to be qualitatively different from pleasure incited in genital sexual practices? Girls reveal the arbitrariness of such distinctions and expand the scope of the sexual and the erotic. They are

 Kawamura Kunimitsu, Otome no inori: kindai josei imēji no tanjō [Girls’ Prayer: Images of Modern Women] (Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shoten, 1993): 55–64.  Yuka Kanno, “Love and Friendship: The Queer Imagination of Japan’s Early Girls’ Culture,” in Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls’ Media Culture, ed. Mary Celeste Kearney (New York: Peter Lang, 2011): 17–34, 28.

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affectively and erotically tied to each other in their rejection of the modern construction of Japanese womanhood. Girls’ aesthetics continued into the postwar period. However, girls lost their homosocial environment as a primary site of their daily lives because, under the U.S. Occupation (1945–1952), co-education was introduced, reflecting a democratic ethos that both sexes were entitled to receive the same kind of education. Girls had to adjust to a heterosocial space, but they did not give up their girlie community. This was again made possible by girls’ magazines. Girls employed a strategy where they created androgynes and expressed in these magazines their ideal image of girls as those with both feminine and masculine traits (i.e., typical female and male gender and sex markers such as kindness as feminine, boldness as masculine, long eyelashes as feminine, tall height as masculine, etc.).15 The unprecedented magnitude of the consumerism of the 1970s rediscovered girls as consumers, which led to what Ōtsuka Eiji calls “the big bang of girls’ culture.”16 Some important girlie works, where artists critically speculated on bodies, gender, and sexuality, started to be produced in this period, especially in girls’ manga with its expanded market. ‘Girls’ manga’ is a label commonly used to designate a manga genre for female teens, and it does not necessarily mean manga exhibiting girls’ aesthetics. However, within this genre, works appealing to girlie sensibilities appeared, although they were not mainstream. As shown in Hagio’s work, to be discussed later, they often had androgynous boy characters as alter egos for girls in romantic relationships. Unlike the androgynes in the 1950s, they are boys on the narrative level, further queering girls’ identification. It must also be noted that the category of schoolgirls became more inclusive in this period, as more women started to have at least a high school education. Prewar girls’ aesthetics were largely enjoyed by upper-class schoolgirls, but from the 1970s onwards, the aesthetics became more accessible to lower-class girls through consumption of manga, magazines, fashion, films, and theatre. In the 1990s, so-called Gothic-Lolita girls appeared, and they exhibited a girlie sense of time and space. They spent time in the Japanese urban environments dressed in elaborate laced costumes inspired by Victorian and Rococo cultures. (The word ‘Lolita’ is associated outside of Japan with the pedophiliac

 Catherine Yoonah Bae, “Girl Meets Boy Meets Girl: Heterosocial Relations, Wholesome Youth, and Democracy in Postwar Japan,” Asian Studies Review 32.3 (2008): 341–360, 347–348.  Ōtsuka Eiji, Shōjo minzokugaku: seikimatsu no shinwa o tsumugu “miko no matsuei” [Girl Ethnography: “Descendants of Shamans” Spinning the Fin-de-Siècle Myth] (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 1989): 49.

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desire depicted in Nabokov’s novel Lolita, but in Japan, it is usually understood as female child-like innocence). Their performance of the (imagined) West deserves analysis, but regrettably, there is no space here. What is more important for the purpose of this essay is their girlie sense of time; they brought the past back into the present and complicated the teleological flow of time. They further performed eternity – eternal childhood (Lolita) and eternal life (Gothic). They carried with them the non-Japanese space whose temporalities did not synchronize with that of the contemporary Japanese cities in which they strolled. These cultural artefacts and performances – girls’ same-sex romance novel, manga about male same-sex romance, the Takarazuka Revue, Gothic-Lolita girls, among others – still exist in the present. This suggests that, even though Japanese women’s status has improved over the postwar years, girls’ aesthetics have not lost their appeal. In 1947, under the US Occupation, women were finally granted the right to vote, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s, women’s liberation movement claimed multiple possibilities for women’s bodies and challenged traditional gender roles and sexual norms. In 1985, women achieved the employment condition equal to men (at least in theory), with the issuance of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. The 1990s witnessed a rise of postcolonial sensitivities among many feminists, who voiced their critique of women’s involvement in Japan’s prewar and wartime imperialism and colonialism. In the 2000s and onwards, women’s unstable employment status in an increasingly neoliberal society has been widely discussed. In the 2010s, long-term activism of LGBTQ communities has made some progress with many local governments issuing ‘partnership certificates’ to same-sex couples, so that they can receive benefits equivalent to those of married couples. Thus, women have been raising their voices in the public arena and successfully changed many aspects of their circumstances. However, despite these changes, girls’ aesthetics has not disappeared, and this testifies to the persisting ideology surrounding women’s material bodies. It should be reiterated here that what distinguishes girls’ aesthetics from the mainstream feminist approaches is that girls do not demand public visibility. They are inclined to a closed, exclusive space only for girls. Thus, as Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley write, girls’ resistance does not “conform to the traditional ‘radical’ political position of ideological debate or participation in direct action movements of whatever persuasion.”17 Nonetheless, this does not mean that girls are apolitical. They quietly leave their disturbing reality for their imagined girlie space, but as will be argued below, imagining a better

 Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley, “Introduction,” in Girl Reading Girl in Japan, ed. Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011): 1–14, 8.

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place is a beginning of politics. Thus, they are different from ‘loud girls,’ for example, in girl power culture in the US and UK in the 1990s. While introversion is one of the key traits of the aesthetics, it is not the same with ultra-right exclusivism, which arose in various parts of the world in the past decade or so. As seen in the works discussed in this essay, within their imagined space, girls travel freely to meet their counterparts across geographical, cultural, and historical borders. As Yagawa Sumiko notes, girls reside in “a nation without land.”18 What unites them is neither language, religion, nor racial/ethnic origin, but resistant aesthetics. It should also be mentioned that many artists of girls’ aesthetics are professional and established public figures. Their works reach those who are outside the girlie domain, and the artists themselves appear in various venues and media in the public sphere. In this sense, although I call them ‘girl’ artists, there is a gap between them and representations of girls in their works. Nonetheless, these artists sympathize with girlie sentiments and are aware of the political potentials of the aesthetics. In the following sections, I will discuss how the aesthetics are manifested in the works of Hagio and Yanagi. The material/maternal is either erased or absent in them, and I will explore this in relation to girls’ desire for multiple forms of love (Hagio) and for non-linear time in a closed space (Yanagi).

Hagio Moto’s The Heart of Thomas Hagio Moto represents a generation of female artists in the 1970s who experimented with gender and sexuality within girls’ manga. Prior to their arrival, male artists were dominant in the genre, creating heteronormative romances and comedies among teens. In contrast, Hagio and other girl artists often had androgynous boys in same-sex relationships. Moreover, their works employed a more complex narrative structure and innovative visual techniques to depict characters’ inner thoughts and emotions. By focusing on Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas, I will argue that these boys are the alter ego of girls, both artists and readers,19 who wish to experience sexes and sexualities that are not tied to their material bodies. Manga is an ideal medium for girls’ aesthetics, as it

 Yagawa Sumiko, “Chichi no musume” tachi: Mori Mari to Anaisu Nin [“Father’s Daughters”: Mori Mari and Anaïs Nin] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2006): 198.  In the film adaptation of this manga, titled Summer Vacation 1999 (1999 nen no natsuyasumi) (1988) and directed by Kaneko Shūsuke, girl actors performed the roles of boys.

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makes it possible for girls to imaginatively immerse themselves in a flat realm where immaterial bodies as visual signs do not always correspond to referents in the three-dimensional, material world. It is also important that, in this manga, mother characters die. I consider this to be Hagio’s matricide. Drawing on psychoanalysis, I will explore the matricide in relation to multiple forms of love to which the girls aspire. The Heart of Thomas is set in a Christian boarding school for boys in West Germany in the 1970s. Exemplifying girls’ aesthetics, Hagio chooses a school setting that is isolated from the rest of society. Works of girls’ aesthetics are also often set in the West, and this reflects Japan’s longing for it in the modern years when the aesthetics were born, as well as girls’ desire to disregard their Japanese reality. These works also tend to employ Christian settings. This may sound odd, as the aesthetics embrace same-sex love and The Heart of Thomas portrays romantic sentiments among boys. However, what matters for the aesthetics is not the prohibition of homosexuality but the sanctification of the perpetual virginity of Mary, i.e., heterosexual virginity.20 In this manga, no sense of guilt regarding homosexuality is shown, but the protagonist is devastated by his loss (read as ‘her loss’) of heterosexual virginity, which is the emblem of a girl. The story of the manga begins with a scene of the suicide of a student, Thomas Werner. The protagonist, Julusmole Bayhan (called Juli), blames himself for Thomas’ suicide; Juli rejected Thomas’ love and believes that this is the reason for his suicide. In fact, Juli was also in love with Thomas, but he could not tell him. Juli saw himself too tainted for Thomas, who was admired by many for his angelic grace; Juli was a victim of sadistic violence and rape by a delinquent senior student, Seifriet, who was expelled from the school after the incident. Seifriet’s violence left scars on Juli’s back, which he compares to those caused by the loss of his wings. On the narrative level, this is homosexual violence, but I suggest that this manga depicts a girl’s trauma caused by heterosexual violence, that is, materialization of a girl by a man. Juli’s loss of wings implies that ‘she’ succumbed to a heterosexual experience, resulting in ‘her’ loss of angel-like weightlessness as a ‘girl.’ What supports this reading is the differences in the visual portrayals of Seifriet and other students. In manga’s graphic convention, different signs are used to designate characters’ gender, sex, and age. For example, eyes and cheeks of female and younger characters are rounder than those of male and older ones. If female and male characters are about the same age, female characters’ eyes and cheeks are slightly rounder. However, in this manga, there are no such differences in the images of male and female youth, except for

 Honda, Children as Different Cultures, 191.

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Seifriet. He has sunken cheeks and oval eyes, and he is also much taller than the others. Thus, he appears more masculine. Other students, including Juli, are only different from female youth characters (who only appear as minor characters) in that they have shorter hair and wear boys’ clothes. Seifriet is thus the Other in this space of ‘girls.’ It is important to point out here that, while girls appear as boys in The Heart of Thomas and other manga of this kind, the visual images of these boys, or ‘boys who look like girls,’ suggest that girls do not disappear into boys. Girls do not want to be restricted by their female material bodies, but it does not mean that they want to be male. Their identification with the androgynous boys manifests their objection to such dichotomy. By devising these androgynes, the author Hagio seems to be exploring a possibility of multiple forms of love among boys/non-boys and girls/non-girls. The tragedy depicted in this manga is that this multiplicity is reduced to heterosexuality by the violence of rape. Or this rape incident may signal that such reduction itself is violent. The Heart of Thomas is thus about traumatic materialization of a ‘girl,’ but it also traces ‘her’ recovery, that is, ‘her’ recuperation of de-materialized status. Importantly, what sets the stage for this is matricide, albeit symbolically. Two students, Oskar and Erich, help Juli’s recovery, and they both arrive at the school after the loss of their mothers. Oskar’s father sends him to the school after he learned that Oskar was not his own and murdered his wife. Erich joins when his single mother, to whom he has excessive attachment, gets engaged. She later dies in a traffic accident with her fiancé. These mothers desire a place within the traditional family structure or the site of material reproduction (although they eventually fail), and they are surely not attractive from a perspective of girls’ aesthetics. Indeed, Hagio frequently removes mothers from her work, and it is not too much to call her an artist of matricide; she herself admits that she has “no hesitation to kill mothers” in her work.21 Oskar and Erich meet Juli after their relationships with their mothers were severed, as though they were to pull him back to where they were, or the place where they could arrive after their separation with the maternal/material. Oskar supports Juli by patiently standing by him, even though he became reclusive after the incident. Erich commits more actively. After his separation from his mother, he directs his love towards Juli. Importantly, Erich, who entered the school after Thomas’ suicide, is the living image of Thomas. This means that Juli is symbolically offered an opportunity to recapitulate his relationship with

 Hagio Moto and Saitō Tamaki, “Shōjo manga to ‘haha goroshi’ no mondai [Girls’ Manga and Issues of ‘Matricide’],” Eureka 12 (2008): 50–62, 58.

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Thomas. Through the interactions with Erich, Juli eventually realizes that the reason for Thomas’ suicide is not because Juli rejected him. The key here is the ‘wings.’ When Juli confesses to Erich that he could not reciprocate Thomas’ love because, as he says, “I have no wings,”22 Erich replies, without knowing about the rape at this stage: Do you mean the wings which take us to Heaven? You don’t have them? . . . . . . . . Wouldn’t my wings be good enough? If you think I have wings, wouldn’t my wings be good enough? I’ll give you one of them. . . . . . . . . I can give you both. I don’t need them. If you have wings, you . . . . . . you can go to Thomas. . . to Thomas . . . . (HT, 407–408 [ellipses in original])

Erich may sound as though he was willing to help Juli if he wants to follow Thomas, but this is not the point. What is important is that Erich, who is Thomas’ double, is saying that Juli deserves wings, which are the signature of girlie immateriality. Equally important is that Erich/Thomas is expressing selfsacrificing love for Juli. From these, a girlie interpretation of Thomas’ suicide is possible; he sacrificed his life to restore Juli’s wings, i.e., Juli’s life as a ‘girl.’ Thomas left the will to Juli: “To Julusmole / My last words to you / This is my love / These are my heart beats / You must know what I mean” (HT, 12). Juli originally thought that this meant Thomas’ curse – he would keep haunting Juli after his death. However, Juli realizes that he was wrong. Thomas died to live in the eternity as a ‘girl’ (as shown in “These are my heart beats”) who keeps loving another ‘girl’ (as shown in “This is my love”). As explained in the previous section, eternity as a girl, in exchange for the material death, is indeed a typical girlie trope. The story reveals towards the end that Thomas was worried about Juli’s sudden change from a cheerful ‘girl’ to a reclusive one, while not knowing about the rape. In the prose/poem ‘she’ secretly wrote, Thomas expressed ‘her’ thoughts that Juli was “almost dead,” and Thomas wanted “to have him [Juli] come to life.” For this purpose, Thomas was willing to let ‘her’ body be “crushed.” (HT, 6, 285–287). For non-girls, Thomas’ love, or girls’ love, would appear too idiosyncratic and too extreme. Truly, girls’ aesthetics are extreme, and this reflects girls’ intense desire to cling to girlhood and put off adulthood-cum-motherhood. Motherhood is considered an obstacle to be removed in girls’ aesthetics, and this takes a form of matricide in The Heart of Thomas. However, although matricide is the basis for Juli’s restoration of ‘her’ girl status, a difficulty arises. If girls gain eternity through death, so do mothers. As much as girls want to

 Hagio Moto, Tōma no shinzō [The Heart of Thomas] (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1995): 407; further references in the text, abbreviated as “HT.”

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stay motherless, they are haunted by their mothers. As if to testify to this, matricide recurs in Hagio’s work, suggesting that she keeps failing to completely terminate mothers from her manga world. Takemura Kazuko approaches mother-daughter relationship not in terms of the daughter’s rejection of her mother but rather through the daughter’s melancholia for her, and this may offer an insight to Hagio’s repeated matricide. Within the dominant Oedipal formation of sexuality, abandonment of incestuous desire is a prerequisite for one’s maturation, but a tacit understanding is that what is prohibited is genital love, that is, incest between a son and his mother. A daughter lacks a penis, and therefore, her love for her mother is desexualized and rendered an unworthy concern. Privileging the genital, the penis in particular, in the formation of sexuality and of the self, results in acknowledging love relations after maturation only at the genital level,23 reminiscent of the urge to draw a clear distinction between intimate friendship and lesbian relationships among girls, as discussed in the previous section. Multiple forms of love, represented by those that existed between mother and child, are reduced to the genital love within the Symbolic. Takemura writes: [I]f the Self is formed through the separation from chaos [where mother and child experience no boundary between them] and love supplements the separation, identification [i.e., the formation of the Self] means to acquire the ability to love and to be urged by the necessity of loving. Therefore, love includes the emotion of missing at every level.24

However, this love at every level is consigned to oblivion. Reduction of love to the genital level produces the dichotomies of sexuality distinctively male and distinctively female as well as male bodies and female bodies. It further restricts love relations to two differentiated sexes, i.e., heterosexuality that accompanies sexism.25 These dichotomies are supported by the maternal, and this is because a mother lives an oxymoronic existence. She implies a possibility of genital love between her and her son (in its very prohibition) but not between her and her daughter. Also, on the one hand, she builds a relationship with the father, based on genital attachment, but creates non-genital attachment with her children. She embodies the exchange of genital love by “pregnancy and delivery,” but she also symbolizes non-genital love endorsed by “the ideology of maternal

 Takemura Kazuko, Ai ni tsuite: aidentiti to yokubō no seijigaku [On Love: Identity, Desire, and Politics] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002): 169–170.  Takemura, On Love, 171.  Takemura, On Love, 172.

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love.”26 This oxymoron is internalized by the daughter when she incorporates her mother as she experiences melancholia. Drawing on Judith Butler, who argues that prohibition of incest also affects the daughter, Takemura theorizes a daughter’s melancholia. As Butler explains, a daughter’s loss is experienced more intensely than a son’s because it involves a double prohibition; while a son only shifts his love from his mother to another woman, a daughter also needs to suppress her love for the same sex with her. Unable to face this deep pain, she forgets that she loved her mother by incorporating her into herself. In Butler’s theorization, a daughter incorporates the category of woman, but Takemura considers that it is not woman but mother.27 The daughter then directs her sexual desire to a man and eventually, as a mother herself, showers her children, daughters in particular, with non-genital love, hereby reproducing the dichotomies of sexes and sexualities. In her attempt to defy these dichotomies, Hagio continues to create a girlie world where multiple forms of love are embraced. For this purpose, she continues to cut the thread that connects daughters and mothers by committing matricide. However, these are contradictory moves because it was in their relations with their mothers that girls or daughters experienced love at every level, before they were forced into the Symbolic. Therefore, without mothers, such love may not be restored. Moreover, matricide is in theory impossible. As Julia Kristeva writes, “Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non condition of our individuation,”28 but since the daughter has melancholically incorporated her mother into herself, killing mother means killing herself: “Indeed, how can She be that bloodthirsty Fury, since I am She (sexually and narcissistically), She is I?”29 As if to demonstrate this, Hagio repeatedly fails to kill mothers. Unable to exist outside of the melancholia, Hagio’s rage against the maternal takes a form of extreme violence, but this reflects the magnitude of the loss, the loss of what mother used to embody. After the loss, what remained in the place where her beloved mother was is a heteronormative, reproductive organ.

 Takemura, On Love, 175.  Takemura, On Love, 174–175.  Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, transl. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1989): 27–28.  Kristeva, Black Sun, 29.

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Yanagi Miwa’s Granddaughters In Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas and other works where matricide recurs, mothers’ presence is felt intensely in their very disappearance. In contrast, Yanagi Miwa’s visual arts, many of which I consider as works of girls’ aesthetics, are not haunted by the maternal. Mother is simply omitted from the girls’ utopian space. In the 2010s and onwards, Yanagi has worked primarily as a theatre director, but prior to this, she focused on visual arts (photography and video) as a leading artist; she represented Japan in the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Unlike her theater productions, her visual arts abound with girlie sensibilities, where a sense of time is nullified and the notion of progress or maturity is cancelled. Moreover, her works evoke the closed nature of girls’ space. Despite this, she is critical of girls’ culture as, in her idea, it functions as a shelter for those who cannot challenge patriarchy.30 Such a critique is not surprising; although girls behave subversively in their imaginary space, for those who only appreciate political visibility in the public arena, girls appear to be simply maintaining the status quo. However, interestingly, Yanagi’s visual arts contradict her statements. She says, “I think we eventually have to say good-bye to what we used to love,”31 but her works reveal her inability to give up this ‘shelter.’ In this sense, her works may exhibit her melancholia for girlhood (and not for mother). In Granddaughters, she presents the alliance of ‘young girls’ and ‘old girls,’ who are detached from reproductive roles. It also opens a possibility of a ‘transnationally closed’ community of girls; Yanagi creates a heteroglossic space in which girls with different racial/ethnic backgrounds reside. Granddaughters is a video installation work, consisting of a collection of TV-news-like screens projected onto the walls in a gallery room (Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo, Japan in 2002) and in a church (Sainte Marie-Madeleine Church in Lille, France in 2003). Each screen focuses on a woman over seventy years old, who is talking about her memories of her grandmother. The women are from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North and South America, and their memories vary. Some recall their grandmothers during wartime, while others fondly remember their grandmothers’ beauty. But regardless of these differences, they are all personal accounts. Yet, these women appear on a ‘news program,’ as though they were local correspondents reporting public incidents. Their utterances are simultaneously translated into Japanese (at Shiseido Gallery) and French (at Sainte Marie-Madeleine Church) by local schoolgirls whose

 Yanagi Miwa, “Onna, ie, kazoku [Women, Home, Family],” diatxt 15 (2005): 66–77, 66–67.  Yanagi, “Women, Home, Family,” 67.

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images in the translators’ booth are also projected onto the wall. Thus, the old women’s speeches about their grandmothers are translated by those who are in their granddaughters’ generation. In other words, granddaughters are translated by granddaughters. Omitting the mothers in the second and fourth generations, the granddaughters assemble. It is possible to see that Granddaughters challenges the exclusive nature of the public sphere by having these women talk about their personal experiences within a ‘news program.’ Although the public sphere is supposed to be open to citizens with common interests, it is a dominant group that decides what counts as ‘common,’ and women’s experiences are typically excluded and relegated to the private sphere. However, this interpretation does not capture the complete experience of this work. The women are in TV-news-like screens, but they do not seem to wish to be heard in the public arena. The work was exhibited in the small gallery room and the church space, giving a sense of closed, private space (even though they were technically open to the public), typical of Yanagi’s visual arts as well as the works of girls’ aesthetics. In this confinement, the memories are shared, as if they were too personally important to be made public. For example, an old woman talks about her grandmother’s gift to her: When I graduated from college, she wanted to give me something special, and had a pearl necklace that she always called “her real pearls.” She gave them (sic) to me which was a bit sacrificial, because it was her one treasure. Years later, it started to deteriorate and I took it to a jeweler and asked him, “How do you tell that’s real?” And he said, “You have to destroy one to find out. You have to peel off the layers. Otherwise you don’t know if it’s real or not.” He said, “It looks to me like it has a few fake ones in it.” I think she may have broken the strain (sic) and bought a few more at the dime-store to add on to it. [. . .] But [. . .] I never really wanted to find out, because I liked to think I own my grandmother’s real pearls.32

For both her and her grandmother, fake pearls from a dime store can be “real pearls.” As if to signal only to those who can share these sensibilities, Yanagi exhibited Granddaughters in small and intimate spaces. Schoolgirls are also in these spaces, and they dub the old women. Both of them are portrayed as girlishly playing public figures, or possibly, they are portrayed as parodying the public sphere. The ‘seriousness’ of the public sphere is turned into intimacy among old women and girls. In this space, what is negated is not only the typical public value system. Developmental time does not exist, either. Although an older generation’s experiences and memories are shared by a younger generation, the concept of

 Yanagi Miwa, Granddaughters (Tokyo: Shiseido, 2002): 26–31.

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generation does not mean much here, because the old women and the girls are identified as the same entity. Through simultaneous translation, the girls talk as the old women and vice versa. They are both granddaughters, and time circulates only among them without moving linearly. Identification of girls with old women is not unique to Yanagi’s work, as it is sometimes found in manga and novels for those with girlie sensibilities. For example, in Nakamori Akio’s novel Foppish Thief (Oshare dorobō) (1988), girl characters say that they are young old women and that old women are girls. These girls claim that the old women represent purer “precision of girlness,”33 as impurities have been filtered over time. What connects the old women and the girls is the fact that they do not give birth, or as the girls in Foppish Thief say, their wish is to “skip women,”34 i.e., mothers. In Granddaughters, girls do not mature into mothers, and grandmothers are not mature mothers. Developmental time on which mother is placed between girls and old women is severed. Here, old women are girls whose material bodies have aged. Following the title of one of Yanagi’s work, Windswept Women: The Old Girls’ Troupe (2009), I will refer to the old women in Granddaughters as ‘old girls.’ Thus, the maternal does not exist within the exhibition space, but curiously, the space itself may be reminiscent of such, as Kanai Keiko describes the exhibition room in Shiseido Gallery, located in the basement, as “womb-like.”35 This seems to imply that the young and old girls are impregnated within this womb. Nonetheless, this does not suggest mother’s haunting presence. On the contrary, Yanagi seems playfully parodying the function of the womb, like she does with the ‘news program,’ because these girls are impregnated only as two-dimensional images. Within the exhibition space, all the material bodies are absent, not just the mothers’. Both young and old girls exist as images projected on the walls. This evokes Elin Diamond’s theorization of feminist mimesis, inspired by Luce Irigaray’s deconstructive reading of Plato’s myth of the cave, in which he associates women with mimesis or deceptiveness. In the Republic, Plato conceives the wall as “a metaphor for the illusory nature of worldly objects that keep man from contemplating true Forms, the unseeable Ideal.”36 Implying the birth metaphor, he argues that men cannot see the Truth/Ideal until they go through the painful expulsion from the cave. Irigaray utilizes this metaphor to reconceptualize the cave

 Nakamori qtd. in Ōtsuka, Girl Ethnography, 195.  Nakamori qtd. in Ōtsuka, Girl Ethnography, 195.  Kanai Keiko, “An Etiquette for Speaking about Grandmothers: Connection, Separation, and Expansion,” in Granddaughters, by Yanagi Miwa (Tokyo: Shiseido, 2002): 21–23, 23.  Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (London: Routledge, 1997): xi.

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as the “womb-theatre,” functioning as the “illusionistic apparatus,” which “obscure[s] the mode of production”; as those inside of the cave cannot see the origins of the reflections, they experience the reflections as the origins or “mimesis without truth.”37 Granddaughters creates a womb-theatre-like space filled only with reflections where there are no true ideal material women’s bodies. However, unlike the womb-theatre, which “opens and delivers [. . .] fake offspring” and fills the outside world with “mimesis without truth,”38 the girlie space in Granddaughters is never opened for delivery. The girls, both young and old, are impregnated in the womb without temporalities and never come into the world. They deliberately adhere to this enclave where they can exist as images without material bodies. In addition to female material bodies, nationalized female material bodies are also invalidated in Granddaughters. Without any weight to nail them down to the earth, the girls vault into this exhibition space from various parts of the world, regardless of the material distances. Here, there are neither essential Japanese women’s bodies nor any other essentialized women’s bodies; they are all just girls. However, this is a polyvocal space, where a variety of memories of grandmothers are equally held dear. This affective sphere of girls contrasts with the effect-oriented public sphere, where the exclusive citizens discuss ways to achieve ‘common’ goals under the logic of productivity. In Granddaughters, girls turn the effective public sphere of a news program into an affective girlie sphere, where they disregard productivity and instead shower themselves with joy and pleasure by ceaselessly sharing memories of their grandmothers. Nonetheless, this does not mean that Granddaughters is apolitical. James Thompson challenges the assumption that the affective realm is void of politics. He critiques the marginalization of affects (such as “joy, fun, pleasure, beauty”) in the conventional evaluation methods of applied theatre, which solely rely on the indicators such as “social impact” and “identifiable effect.”39 He argues that the aesthetic creation of affective space testifies to its lack within the reality that the creator resides,40 and that “the creation of a ‘more enjoyable life,’ in its most infinitely demanding sense, is exactly the point of politics.”41 Thus, the aesthetic intensity is far from being a retreat.

 Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, xi.  Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, xii, xi.  James Thompson, Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 116.  Thompson, Performance Affects, 126.  Thompson, Performance Affects, 128.

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Likewise, Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris argue for the politics in imagination and fantasy in theatre arts from the feminist perspectives. Within the scholarly discourse, the mainstream theatre, aimed at women in particular, tends to be neglected, as it is considered less politically conscious and therefore less politically effective. However, Aston and Harris maintain that “theatrical ‘transformations,’” staged in this genre, although they “do not necessarily have a literal, instrumental or direct political impact on the world of the social, may have a role in reimagining it.”42 For example, female friendship is a popular theme in mainstream productions targeting women. These shows are staged as fantasy because, in reality, ideal female friendship is perceived to be difficult to establish. However, the popularity of this theme does suggest female audiences’ reimagining of their reality or longing for a different space.43 Affects, imagination, and fantasy discussed by Thompson, Aston, and Harris are also the kernels of girls’ aesthetics. Girls say ‘no’ to the goal-oriented, effect-driven society and imagine and yearn for somewhere else where they can live a “more enjoyable life.”44 In the space without ‘origin’ or ‘truth,’ girls shine. Just like cheap, glass beads sold in a fair which fascinate girls, they themselves are “fake,”45 without any substantial materiality. Indeed, they might be compared to the necklace with fake pearls in the old girl’s memory of her grandmother. Each girl, young and old, is a constituent of this necklace, whose value cannot be determined by the realness of the pearls. Girls, like fake pearls, twinkle in the necklace, which has neither a beginning point nor an end point in its circular structure.

Conclusion This essay explored girls’ aesthetics in Japan with two case studies. As they exemplified, with their ‘light’ bodies, girls freely move across various borders – gender, sexual, historical, national, racial, and ethnic. Their resistance to normative womanhood takes place within the imagined sphere, detached from their ‘heavy’ material reality. I see girls’ aesthetics as a feminist approach to

 Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris, A Good Night Out for the Girls: Popular Feminisms in Contemporary Theatre and Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 11 [emphasis in original].  Aston and Harris, A Good Night Out for the Girls, 18.  Thompson, Performance Affects, 128.  Honda, Children as Different Cultures, 201.

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theorizing and living female lives. However, girls’ resistance may appear simply escapist without any political awareness. For this type of claim, I would point out that girls actively withdraw from their oppressive reality to create a place of safety. Clearly, the hegemonic understanding of political activity is gendered in ways that exclude girls’ aesthetics. For example, Catherine Driscoll critiques the Birmingham School’s exclusion of female teenagers from the youth culture, which emphasizes the “public spectacle of resistance” created by the male youth.46 Unlike such public spectacle, I have explored girls’ inner resistance in this essay. Direct confrontation with authority is certainly important, but the idea that political resistance always requires putting your body on the street limits the range of the political. For sure, girls’ inner resistance could end up preserving the conservative gender and sexual ideology in the world outside of their place of safety. They may perform resistant girls only in their imagination and return to their reality where they are subject to conventional womanhood. However, even if girls’ aesthetics are just utilized for a respite, the very desire for them demonstrates girls’ feminist consciousness. They feel unfit for a kind of womanhood imposed on them and want to resist it even if the resistance only takes place in their imaginations. And yet, such ‘practices’ may result in the gradual change in their material reality, as a ‘residue of girls’ may stay with them even after they return to their outside reality after a respite. The line between their material lives and girlie imaginative sphere may gradually dissolve as they frequently move between them. In other words, social change may follow internal change, and therefore, imagination and social change do not constitute a dichotomous relationship. For example, Boys’ Love (BL) manga, which developed under the influence of Hagio and her generation of girl artists and yet constitutes a genre outside of girls’ manga with its more explicitly pornographic depictions, has been attracting considerable interests in arts and literary fields since the late 2000s, showing that those in these fields have started to recognize politics and artistic quality of the BL genre. A genre that has its origin in girls’ aesthetics is now connecting with gender and sexuality issues outside of the girlie sphere. While girls are the residents in their imagined sphere, girl artists, the majority of whom are professionals and grown-up women, provide a way of partially being a girl. They do not separate themselves from the public domain, as they release their works in it. No matter how closed their works may seem with representations of girls who depart from their material reality, they are open to

 Catherine Driscoll, Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (New York: Columbia UP, 2002): 258.

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the public. By doing so, these artists urge the public to consider the meaning of girls’ self-isolation. Girls have thus been practicing feminism in their own ways. They reimagine the space of sexual surveillance as one in which their transgressive desire can flow towards any target. Within this two-dimensional, closed space without temporalities in their fantasy, they become whoever and whatever they want to be, and they go wherever they want to go. Girls do not raise their voices in the public arena, but this does not mean that they are content with their surroundings. Resisting the values which dominate their reality, they create a girlie sphere as a platform for their feminism.

Aysha Strachan

Meliur as a Figure of Omission in Konrad von Würzburg’s Partonopier und Meliur Abstract: This essay explores Meliur as a figure of omission in Konrad von Würzburg’s Partonopier und Meliur (c. 1277). Meliur lures Partonopier to her foreign lands, orchestrates a sexual relationship in the dark and forbids him to see her. Drawing on Hemingway’s conceptualization of the text as iceberg (Hemingway, 1932), Meliur’s invisibility encapsulates that there is more to discover than the one-eighth of the ice that is visible on the surface. By creating a purposeful interpretive gap that complicates her status as human/fay, desire for Meliur is fuelled by narrative ellipses which heighten the erotic fantasy for this foreign woman. When Partonopier upskirts Meliur with a lantern, Konrad plays with the juxtaposition of Meliur’s superlative radiance and her invisibility; she appears a human woman too bright to be seen. Reading Konrad’s linguistic play in the unveiling of Meliur through the lens of Meyda Yeğenoğlu’s theory of the western conqueror’s desire to peer beneath the veil of the Oriental woman, this essay reveals the fragility of male desire by asking to what extent male desire is stable if it is grounded upon an aesthetics of omission for that which lies beyond the limits of the male gaze.

Introduction In Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway’s metaphor of the iceberg is used to imply that the unsaid can hold just as much significance as that which is visible on the text’s surface: If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.1

If we turn our attention to the seven-eighths of the ice that is submerged beneath the water, there are multiple imaginative possibilities open to the reader to infer. Crucially, as scholars of Hemingway have noted, unreadability, like invisibility, does not entail inexistence; rather, here, readers’ imaginations  Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner’s, 1932): 192. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-007

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come alive, actively engaging in a creative kind of reading to seek meaning between the gaps.2 In what follows, I use Hemingway’s conceptualization of the text as iceberg as a starting point from which to read an invisible female figure in medieval literature: Meliur in Konrad von Würzburg’s Middle High German verse romance Partonopier und Meliur (c. 1277).3 Meliur, the ruler of an exotic kingdom located vaguely in Byzantium, remains under the cover of darkness for the first half of the narrative, using necromancy to lure the young Frankish knight, Partonopier, to her lands – and eventually to her bed – to be her lover. Taking advantage of the fact he cannot see her, Meliur sneaks under the bedsheets, using touch to seduce him. Partonopier is constantly unsure whether Meliur is a supernatural being or a human woman, and this is a question that we, the recipients, are also left to ponder throughout the text.4 Konrad constructs a deliberate poetics of omission; he keeps Meliur invisible and her bodily form out of the reach of our knowledge in a space of obscurity and questioning. Exploring how the narrative of Partonopier und Meliur functions in terms of what is kept off-limits to the recipient, this article exposes Konrad’s poetic practice of omission. I use the term recipient rather than reader here to acknowledge that the medieval text would have been performed aloud to a courtly audience as well as read amongst aristocratic and monastic circles. Due to the male authorship, masculine narrator, and the male-dominated audience, I refer to the recipient of the text as “he.”5 I first show how Konrad sets the scene for Meliur’s arrival in what I term “spaces of omission” – the city of Schiefdeir and  Beatriz Penas Ibáñez, “‘Very Sad but Very Fine’: Death in the Afternoon’s Imagist Interpretation of the Bullfight-Text,” in A Companion to Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, ed. Miriam B. Mandel (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2004): 143–164, 157.  The edition referenced throughout is Konrad von Würzburg, Konrads von Würzburg Partonopier und Meliur, ed. Karl Bartsch (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1970); further references in the text, abbreviated as “KPM.” All translations from the text are my own.  Meliur’s status as human or fay is also a point of contention for scholarship; see Ernst Ralf Hintz, “The Psychology of Paradox in Konrad von Würzburg’s ‘Partonopier und Meliûr,’” Monatshefte, 94.2 (2002): 153–164, 155; Rüdiger Brandt, Konrad von Würzburg (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987): 160; Beate Otto, Unterwasser—Literatur: von Wasserfrauen und Wassermännern (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001): 42–44; Anne Wawer, Tabuisierte Liebe: mythische Erzählschemata in Konrads von Würzburg “Partonopier und Meliur” und im “Friedrich von Schwaben” (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 2000): 15; Elisabeth Frenzel, Motive der Weltliteratur: Ein Lexikon dichtungsgeschichtlicher Längsschnitte (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1992): 778; Bea Lundt, Melusine und Merlin im Mittelalter (Munich: Finck, 1991): 112.  It is important not to understate the inclusion of women in the courtly audience and in textual production as scribes, readers and scholars of the written and spoken word within nunneries; see Alison I. Beach, Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in

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Meliur’s darkened bedchamber. Second, I describe how he creates an alternative aesthetics to the depiction of Meliur that is not based on initial sight; she is instead depicted as a figure who embodies the obscurity of the space in which she exists. Next, I move to a reading of the passage when Partonopier ‘unveils’ her and makes her visible. Here, I argue that Partonopier and the recipient’s gaze are encouraged to hunger for a figure about whom we remain – quite literally – in the dark. In Meliur, Konrad has created a figure who, through her invisibility and unknowability, has the power to threaten to expose the instability of the masculine protagonist and patriarchal system – an instability that is revealed through the desire of both protagonist and recipient to understand and dominate her. Turning to the lens of decolonial theory here, it is possible to draw parallels between the unveiling of the Oriental woman in the quest to subjugate Meliur as an other and an object of desire.6 Meyda Yeğenoğlu’s theory of the western conqueror’s desire to peer beneath the veil of the Oriental woman offers a new way of reading Partonopier’s quest for knowing and seeing Meliur.7 It is vital that all we know of Meliur is the tip of Hemingway’s iceberg, given Partonopier does not see her, but experiences her through touch. Konrad’s aesthetic practice of omission invites the recipient to desire to render Meliur – a figure beyond the horizons of the male gaze – both visible and readable, and how this desire in turn renders masculine superiority unstable.

Konrad’s Playful Poetics: Partonopier und Meliur as a Narrative of Omission Konrad von Würzburg delights in leaving things unsaid and creates an aesthetic practice of omission that encourages his recipients to actively fill in the gaps between his verse. Konrad is well known for his complex, self-consciously playful

Twelfth-Century Bavaria (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004); Roberta L. Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993).  I adopt the term “decolonial” over “post-colonial,” as the former communicates an ongoing need to dissemble colonial power structures, while the prefix “post-” in “postcolonial” conveys a specific historical temporality of colonialism; see Walter Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21.2 (2007): 449–514.  Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998).

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poetics.8 Partonopier und Meliur is a particularly fitting example of a narrative that leaves its recipient with unanswered questions, given that the poem is unfinished in all extant manuscripts; we leave the hero fighting the Sultan of Persia at the end of the text, meaning we cannot know what adaptations Konrad might have made to the Old French analogue Partonopeus on which he based his text.9 The lack of an extant conclusion, although not deliberate on the part of the author, leaves the recipient with even more loose ends to question. Partonopier’s plot is one that plays with and inverts readerly expectations at every turn. It is Meliur who brings Partonopier to her lands, having heard of his beauty from afar, thereby reversing the gender roles in the courtly topos of fernminne according to which men choose a distant bride they have never seen based on her reputation as beautiful.10 Konrad playfully inverts this literary schema, giving Meliur the power to choose her own lover. She sends an enchanted ship to fetch Partonopier from his hunt in the forest of Ardennes to her distant kingdom across the tumultuous sea – a journey across a body of water, which is often coded as a transition, a movement between spaces and worlds. Already, we might associate Partonopier’s destination with otherness, intrigue, and perhaps even danger. The realm he arrives in appears paradisical in its opulence, with every wall, building and cobblestone encrusted with shining gemstones. Yet it appears to be entirely abandoned. Led into a darkened bedchamber by invisible hands, Partonopier is unable to see who is lurking in the shadows and fears for his life. Once Meliur appears to him under the covers, she uses his sightlessness to her advantage, manipulating her body to convince him of her physicality and sleeping with him (we should note that he is young and a virgin) in his vulnerable state. After they have had sex, Partonopier agrees to her demand that she will remain invisible to him until his knightly investiture in three years’ time, typically understood in medieval courtly culture as a moment of

 Jutta Eming, “Geliebte oder Gefährtin? Das Verhältnis von Feenwelt und Abenteurwelt in ‘Partonopier und Meliur,’” in Die Welt der Feen im Mittelalter, ed. Danielle Buschinger and Wolfgang Spiewok (Greifswald: Reineke, 1994): 43–58, 55–56; W. Günther Rohr, “Verlockung und freie Sexualität im ‘Partonopier’ Konrads von Würzburg,” in Ethische und Ästhetische Komponenten des Sprachlichen Kunstwerks: Festschrift für Rolf Bräuer zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Jürgen Erich Schmidt, Karin Cieslik and Gisela Ros (Göppingen: Kümmerle Verlag, 1999): 157–176, 158.  On the symbolism of the lovers’ reunion in the Old French text, see Penny Schine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1985): 36.  Horst Wenzel, “Fernliebe und Hohe Minne: Zur räumlichen und zur sozialen Distanz in der Minnethematik,” in Liebe als Literatur: Aufsätze zur erotischen Dichtung in Deutschland, ed. Rüdiger Krohn (Munich: Beck, 1983): 187–208.

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coming of age. But he eventually breaks this promise when his mother convinces him to look under Meliur’s robes with a magic lantern to determine whether she is a human woman or not – effectively asking him to gender her by her genitalia. It becomes clear that the authority of sight and its connection to truth is at the forefront of the story: can we trust what we see? Who controls what we see? What lies beyond the surface? Konrad’s highly playful language helps to underscore these questions even further; his narrative persona appears to have fun with language, teasing his recipient with subtle interpretive clues in his verse. The narrator’s jovial tone is apparent from the offset when, in the prologue, he claims that the help of the translator Heinrich Marschant was needed to translate the text from French (KPM, l. 203), as he himself does not have the linguistic skills; he admits: “franzeis ich niht vernemen kan” [I cannot understand French] (KPM, l. 212). Immediately afterwards, the narrator shows off his linguistic prowess with an example of wordplay that is typical of Konrad’s ironic narrative style: “daz [franzeis] tiutschet mir sîn künstic munt” (KPM, l. 212), [[French] spoils his learned words for me]. Like many medieval poets, Konrad demonstrates his awareness of the story’s situation in a multilingual tradition by praising and acknowledging his French translator, but nevertheless insults his mother tongue in the process by playing with the similarity between “tiutsch” [German] and “tiutschen” [to deceive or mislead].11 We are therefore encouraged to perceive the narrator’s humility as performative. Konrad therefore establishes right from the start the instability of his poetics, setting the scene for a narrative which causes its recipient to question the authority of what we are told. Such playful language is used to establish two spaces of omission – locations characterized by a lack of information –, both of which are closely associated with Meliur: her city of Schiefdeir and her bedchamber. These locations function as spaces of omission, as the only details that we are given about these mysterious places are the lavish gemstones that decorate both the city and the bedchamber. The narrator focuses on these specific objects only, calling upon the recipient’s symbolic associations with these objects to create an imagination of the sort of space our hero is travelling through. The recipient is then able to challenge how far these spaces might embody the curious female figure who inhabits them. Perhaps the most obvious way in which Konrad establishes Meliur’s existence in spaces of omission is by taking advantage of the play between dark and light, using this juxtaposition to capitalize on the recipient’s association

 Konrad’s playful narrative tone is discussed in Rohr, “Verlockung und freie Sexualität,” 158.

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between light/knowledge and darkness/ignorance. Partonopier arrives on the shores of Schiefdeir: an isolated, walled city shrouded in mystery and awe. Her kingdom is described as abandoned yet is characterized by numerous marvelous ornaments and decorations that fluctuate between familiar and foreign, appealing, and dangerous. We are told that there are no humans to be found in this city (KPM, ll. 825–827), and its architecture is coded in terms of otherness. The city’s gates that are checkered with red and gold, “alsam ein schâchzabelspil,” [like a chessboard] (KPM, l. 815), which conforms to the conventional contemporary topos of exotic cities and their inhabitants.12 Through the halls of the palace, Konrad describes the palace’s ornamentation in ekphrastic detail, which serves to underscore the heathen lavishness of the castle: six marble ornaments in a variety of brilliant, shining colors (KPM, ll. 833–840), a transparent stone which evokes a mirror (KPM, ll. 844–845), many hunting trophies of lions and other fierce beasts (KPM, ll. 849–851) and several gold-framed paintings depicting “der alten âventiure” (KPM, l. 860) [old adventure].13 The location of Schiefdeir is kept vague and is only revealed as part of Empire of Constantinople much later in the text (KPM, l. 8067); any geographical specificity is omitted entirely.14 Meliur and her lands remain shrouded in mystery, inspiring the recipient’s intrigue and establishing a connection between the ruler of this kingdom and the territory over which she rules in terms of their otherness. The name

 In Herzog Ernst, the gates of the city of Grippia – inhabited by hybrid crane-men – are also compared to a mosaic checkerboard of different precious stones in various luminous colors, (KPM, ll. 2216–2229). Meliur’s chessboard image also contributes to the thematization of hybridity, hinting at her foreign yet familiar ethnicity – a trope which is also used in the description of Feirefiz in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival who has checkerboard skin; see Karl Bartsch (ed.), Herzog Ernst: Ein mittelalterliches Abenteuerbuch, trans. Bernhard Sowinski (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970); Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival: Mittelhochdeutsch/Neuhochdeutsch, (vols. 1–2), trans. Wolfgang Spiewok (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2011).  This description is nearly identical to that of Grippia in Herzog Ernst with its paintings of “beide zam und wilde” [both familiar and foreign] (l. 2226), that are “lûter lieht als ein glas” [shine more brightly than glass] (l. 2229). The streets of Schiefdeir are cobbled with precious stones so that, when it rains, they shine “lûter als ein glas” [more transparent than glass] (KPM, l. 867).  Monika Schulz argues that Partonopier’s setting between France and Constantinople is no coincidence, as it reflects a contemporary political fascination with the clashing concepts of East and West and the impact on the sense of national identity following Barbarossa’s selfdeclaration as the legitimate ruler of the Holy Roman Empire; yet it is impossible to know whether this political tension was deliberately mapped onto the text; see Monika Schulz, Eherechtsdiskurse: Studien zu König Rother, Partonopier und Meliur, Arabel, Der guote Gêrhart, Der Ring (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2000): 56–58; Armin Schulz suggests that Meliur’s land is situated in the Eastern Roman Empire, as this corresponds with the creation of

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Schiefdeir is most probably a phonetic reproduction of the Old French “Chief d’Oire” in Partonopeus, which hints etymologically at the superiority of the kingdom through “chef” and the importance of hearing and perceiving through the similarity to the verb “oir” – a subtle clue for the recipient to question the authority of what Partonopier hears or perhaps even to listen very carefully to the story himself. Sarah Kay notes that Chef d’Or also means “journey’s end,” alluding to the underworld.15 The recipient cannot be sure whether Partonopier is heading to his doom. What is certain is that Meliur’s land is a place of otherness and uncertainty and that Meliur herself embodies the very exoticness and intrigue of the foreign territory over which she rules. Much like her lands, Meliur’s bedroom is unlike anything that we could possibly imagine: a space of infinite sexual possibility to which we are granted privileged access. The author builds up the tension by increasing the layers of darkness throughout the scene that leads up to the climax of Partonopier and Meliur’s first physical encounter. When Partonopier enters the bedroom, all candles are suddenly taken from the room, leaving him and the recipient in a state of suspense: die kerzen beide giengen wider ûz der kemenâten und liezen in berâten mit sorgen und mit leide. (KPM, ll. 1186–1189) [both candles went back out of the chamber and he was left guessing with worry and with sorrow].

We never receive any information from our narrator as to who carries the candles away, making us increasingly dependent on the details that the narrator provides as channels of our own voyeuristic eye into the bedroom. The recipient’s eye searches for Meliur, sharing in Partonopier’s “sorgen” [worry] and “leide” [sorrow] whilst the sexual tension builds, and the narrative heightens the erotic mystery surrounding Meliur’s intentions with Partonopier.

small states in the aftermath of the fourth Crusade: see Armin Schulz, Poetik des Hybriden: Schema, Variation und intertextuelle Kombinatorik in der Minnev- und Aventiureepik: Willehalm von Orlens – Partonopier und Meliur – Wilhelm von Österreich – Die schöne Magelone (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2000): 110–111.  Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001): 276.

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The darkness of Meliur’s chamber seduces the senses, enabling Konrad to construct his own sensual hierarchy in the absence of sight. He establishes a sensual hierarchy of his own with which to project and stimulate erotic desire; the recipient must rely on the descriptions of the space to build an image of Meliur, listening carefully to the details of the description as he waits in suspense for Meliur to appear. Konrad creates desire for Meliur in this space of anticipation, calling upon the listening skills of the recipient, asking him to pay attention to the fine details that his narrator provides. Seeing through the eyes of another in an act of displaced seeing heightens the eroticism of the sexscene even further; the recipient is invited into the bedroom with the spying narrator. In the Middle Ages, the senses were often thought of as the gateway to temptation of worldly desires, and, according to thirteenth-century pastoral texts on the topic of sin, were thought of as something that needed to be controlled.16 While the senses should work for good, root out and destroy sin, penitential interrogatories in the thirteenth century began to cover the temptations of the senses, and so vision (visus), hearing (auditus), taste (gustus), smell (odoratus), and touch (tactus) were all associated with temptation.17 In this vein we are encouraged to give in to the very same temptation as Partonopier: picturing Meliur’s body and yearning to see it. What makes this displaced seeing quite so tantalizing is its voyeuristic element: the recipient breaks social boundaries along with the narrator and is allowed a subtle glimpse of something that would normally be off limits. Where Partonopier initially cannot see, the poet nonetheless teases his recipient with slight morsels of light – but only enough to see what he wishes to be seen. The corners of the room are described as almost dark, suggesting there might be something partly visible hiding there: nu wart in allen enden dar inne tunkel vaste. (KPM, ll. 1206–1207) [now, in every corner it was almost completely dark].

 C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2006): 11–12. Richard Newhauser also discusses sensory indulgence according to the theories of Augustine and Gregory the Great who interpreted the parable of Luke 14:19 and the banquet to criticize “living through the senses,” as this removes the self from an internal life of discipline and obedience. See Richard G. Newhauser, A Cultural History of the Senses (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014): 3.  Newhauser, History of the Senses, 9–10.

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Such teasing only increases our appetite to see and to know who is in the bedroom. But the narrator withholds the light, clinging onto the power over what can and cannot be seen; the result is a deliberate artistic practice of omission that capitalizes on withholding information and teasing the recipient with drips of knowledge as the scene progresses. The information we are provided with focuses not on who Meliur is, but on the furniture in her extravagant bedroom, such as the “golde” and “gesteine” [gold and gemstones] that encrust her bed and her walls (KPM, l. 1211), the salamander skin that hangs from the bedpost (KPM, ll. 1130–1131) and the feathers from a phoenix that weave together to make Meliur’s carpet (KPM, ll. 1144–1149). We are encouraged to imagine these lavish objects, distracting ourselves from the suspense of waiting for Meliur. Equally, though, the decoration of the bedroom might give a clue about its inhabitant. Konrad juxtaposes the chamber’s darkness with an abundance of shining gemstones, which, ironically, create such an abundance of light that they are harmful for Partonopier to behold: dâ manic lieht carfunkel und edel stein vor ime bran. (KPM, ll. 1196–1197) [there (in the chamber) many radiant carbuncles and precious stones burned before him].

The carbuncle stone which crowns Meliur’s bedpost creates a surplus of shine to contrast with the intense darkness, but this brightness is – ironically – one which blinds Partonopier.18 Partonopier, otherwise desperate for the light to return to the room, is forced to shield his eyes by drawing the covers over himself: dô der getriuwe junge man den gulter über sich gezôch, dô wart erleschet unde flôch der ganzen kemenâten schîn. (KPM, ll. 1198–1201) [so the noble young man drew the covers over himself, there the light was extinguished; and fled from the whole chamber].

 I turn to the unveiling of Meliur in the third part of this article, but the terms used to describe Meliur in this later scene are remarkably similar to the carbuncle.

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There is something quite unnatural and perverse about this light that appears to have a particular agency with which it flees from the chamber. The light is so bright that it fails to be seen. Moreover, we are left asking who it is who controls the light in the room from the shadows. Konrad signals to his recipient that, by isolating a single object – a stone or a ray of light – from the rich description of Meliur’s chamber, a multitude of meanings point to the issues of the figure it could represent. Without a sense of directness or conclusiveness in this narrative we must ask: what does it say about Meliur that she is kept hidden in the shadows? Why are we not allowed to see her directly? Is our hero safe here in her company?

Meliur as a Figure of Omission Konrad von Würzburg’s aesthetics of omission is both literal and figurative: omission functions both on the level of the story and the language used to narrate it. When introducing Meliur, it becomes clear that his poetics of omission enables Konrad to create room for play with this foreign female figure, as a means of exoticizing her and keeping her other. Subsequently, the recipient’s desire for knowledge of Meliur is heightened as the narrator appears to delight in the erotic potential of that which is left unsaid, focusing instead on the intricate details of her bedchamber. Konrad creates an aesthetic practice of omission by withholding physical descriptors of Meliur, distracting us with the lavish objects that surround this exotic figure so that the recipient’s sexual imagination can run wild. It is certainly no coincidence that Konrad chooses to situate Meliur in a bedchamber that is “vinster unde tunkel,” (KPM, l. 1195) [gloomy and dark]; this space of omission challenges our expectations about the female love interest in courtly literature. There is a rhetorical topos of beauty in medieval literature which closely links female beauty to light: Meliur stands out among a literary community of shining women such as Enite in Hartmann von Aue’s Erec, whose skin is likened to white lilies and swans.19 As we have already  Hartmann’s narrator describes Enite: “sô schein diu lîch dâ / durch wîz alsam ein swan. / Man sagte, daz nie kint gewan / einen lîp sô gar dem wunsche gelîch [. . .] ir lîp schein durch ir salwe wât / alsam diu lilje, dâ si stat / under swarzen dornen wîz.” (KPM, ll. 329–339), [and so her body shone through / (her robe) as white as a swan. / It was said that there never was a child / that had such a desirable body (. . .) her body shone through her dirty robe / she stood there like the lily, / white among the black thorns]; Hartmann von Aue, Erec: Mittelhochdeutsch/ Neuhochdeutsch, ed. and trans. Volker Mertens (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2008): 25.

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seen, Konrad encourages us to challenge the authority of the eye, which no longer possesses the power of sight; instead, we must use our assumptions of what beautiful women normally look like in romance to inform our imagination of Meliur. It is more commonly the case that the male protagonist gazes upon a female love interest without her knowledge, casting her in the role of object; in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein, for example, the hero gazes at (and falls in love with) the grief-stricken Laudine while wearing a ring that renders him invisible.20 Here, though, the situation is inverted: the invisible woman gazes upon the man who cannot see her. Konrad deliberately departs from literary conventions, inverting readerly expectations through a poetics of omission. Konrad’s poetics of omission works as a way for the narrator to constantly play with the fact that he knows more than us but will not disclose the full information. In fact, we are never told that Partonopier sees anything at all. When the narrator invites the recipient to spy on the private encounter between Meliur and Partonopier, we are effectively blindfolded, leaning on the narrator’s details when he outlines the precise positions of the lovers in the bed just before intercourse: er lag an einem orte, si lag an disem ende. (KPM, ll. 1514–1515) [he lay at one end, she lay at this end].

The recipient is encouraged to adopt a voyeuristic gaze – an imaginative, inner gaze that pictures this intimate scene. While Partonopier cowers under the bedcovers, he cannot see Meliur arrive, so it is the narrator who grants the recipient a peek at her, but only enough to determine her position in relation to the hero – only enough detail for the recipient to imagine where she is in the bed without being able to see her. With deliberately limited narrative information, the recipient is encouraged to adopt a voyeuristic gaze that can only imagine what occurs in this intimate scene. In the absence of sight, the power of the spoken word becomes of utmost importance. Meliur uses the authority of her voice in the darkness to her advantage to convince Partonopier that she is of a noble background:

 Hartmann von Aue, Gregorius, Der arme Heinrich, Iwein, ed. and trans. Volker Mertens (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2014).

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er hôrte an ir gebære wol und an ir sprâche reine, daz nie wart von beine noch ûz fleische ein wîp geborn sô lûter als ûz erkorn. (KPM, ll. 1539–1542) [he heard from her fine bearing and her pure speech that no woman was born of flesh nor of bone as luminous as her, as if she were a chosen one].

It is Meliur’s “sprâche reine” [pure speech] which convinces Partonopier that she is an acceptable match for him and not in fact her flesh and bone, as they are omitted entirely from the field of sight. The purity of her speech enables her to exercise power over Partonopier and influence his – and also the recipient’s – imagining of her: she sounds like a luminous, physically tangible woman, even though we cannot verify this with sight. One might hesitate before describing Meliur’s words as pure, given her speech appears to be a skilled performance. Aware of the power of her voice over the clearly embarrassed and vulnerable Partonopier, she cleverly asks: lâ mich wizzen, ob du man, tiuvel oder mensche sîst. (KPM, ll. 1334–1335) [let me know if you are a man devil or human].

She asks precisely the question that Partonopier and the recipient have been asking themselves about her. The young knight is therefore cast into a more vulnerable position as an intruder in a foreigner’s bed, demonstrating how Meliur uses darkness to add authority to her voice in order to control the situation and exercise power over him. His words do not have the same effect in stimulating her desire. On the contrary, Meliur insults him for his childish way of speaking: du maht wol sîn ein tumber gouch, sît du sô kintlichen redest. (KPM, ll. 1422–1423) [you must be a stupid fool, as you speak so childishly].

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She later reprimands Partonopier for his waffling, childish talk (KPM, l. 1462) and repeatedly refers to him as a “vil tumber jungelinc” [a very stupid young boy] (KPM, l. 1459). The power imbalance between the two lovers is underscored again as it is Partonopier’s lack of ability to articulate himself that allows Meliur to take control of the situation and influence his imagination of her as a powerful, noble queen and a physical woman. In a literary tradition in which we might expect the male gaze to assert power over the female love object, Meliur’s status as a figure of omission deliberately enables her to claim power over Partonopier. Just as Partonopier’s imagination fills in the blanks at the sound of her voice, the recipient must listen intently to the narrator’s voice in order to make his own conclusions. Throughout this passage, the narrator deliberately withholds any definitive information that might tell us whether Meliur is a monster, demon or malicious fay, and Konrad appears to enjoy the process of denying us the full picture. The only direct mention made of any creature of this sort is to be found in the description of the enchanted ship that leads Partonopier to the shores of Schiefdeir, Meliur’s land: sam ez ein wilde feine ze wunsche ir selber hæte erwelt. (KPM, ll. 640–641) [it seemed as though a wild fay had designed (the ship) to her liking].

Monika Schulz bases her argument that Meliur is a “fay” on this quotation, claiming that the text explicitly labels her as such, yet it is crucial to note that Konrad appears cautious never to refer to her in these terms. Instead, he establishes a comparison between the ship and its wondrousness, rather than defining the status of its creator, which is implied through the use of the word sam [like/ as though].21 We later discover that Meliur is skilled in the art of “nigrômancîen” [necromancy] (KPM, l. 8096), one of the several learned arts that she has mastered. She only uses it when it is deemed necessary, though, and Konrad is quick to rationalize her extraordinary skills by explaining that there was no male heir to learn the ways of ruling the Empire; her unusual education is therefore normalized in a manner which upholds the patriarchal institution of inheritance. We are almost provided with clarity as to whether Meliur might pose a real threat to Partonopier, but this clarity is, on closer inspection, always denied. Within this poetics of omission, it becomes increasingly important whenever something is said about Meliur. Our teasing narrator provides a fleeting,  Schulz, Eherechtsdiskurse, 63.

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subtle reference to her feet when she crawls into bed with Partonopier. Yet this irregular reference highlights the way in which she capitalizes on the element of surprise by creeping into bed with Partonopier and making first contact with him, rather than providing a concrete, physical descriptor of her appearance that might otherwise convince the recipient of her human features. Again, we are never told what Partonopier sees when Meliur comes into the bed, but rather what her sexual intentions are with the young knight: nu wolte sich diu frouwe guot [. . .] ruorte mit den füezen den klâren und den süezen. (KPM, ll. 1310–1313) [now the good woman wanted (. . .) to touch the pure, sweet one with her feet].

Here, we do not experience Meliur’s feet through the hero’s eyes. This one short reference to anything physical about Meliur’s body is used to configure her in terms of touch and sensuality and to stress her role as an instigator of a sexual encounter. The fact that the narrator describes feet might indeed reassure the recipient of her humanity, as this sets Meliur apart from the half-mermaid figure of Melusine in Jean d’Arras’ Le Roman de Mélusine (c. 1392), which was later adapted by Thüringen von Ringoltingen (c. 1456); in this story Melusine is revealed to have a fish tail when she is spied upon in the bath by her lover.22 Almut Suerbaum argues that the fundamental role of a hybrid figure such as Melusine is to invite reflection on the position of the recipient, inviting him to pass critical judgement on that with which he is presented, a stance we have already established in the case of Partonopier und Meliur.23 The sighting of Melusine, Andreas Krass argues, can also be interpreted as a “Sinnbild der Literatur”: an  In one manuscript version, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, mgf 1064 (c. 1471), both Partonopier und Meliur and Thüringen’s Melusine appear together, suggesting that the texts were thought of as participating in the same literary tradition, at least for the patron (Christoph Ruether von H. Wincklär), whilst Jean’s version includes a brief allusion to Meliur as the sister of Melusine; see Handschriftencensus (acc. 23 August 2021); Jean d’Arras, Melusine; or, the Noble History of Lusignan, ed. and trans. Donald Maddox and Sarah Sturm-Maddox (University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 2012).  Almut Suerbaum, “Augenschein und inneres Sehen in Thüringen von Ringoltingen ‘Melusine,’” in Sehen und Sichtbarkeit der Literatur des deutschen Mittelalters XXI. Anglo-German Colloquium 2009, ed. Ricarda Bauschke, Sebastien Coxon and Martin H. Jones (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011): 425–440, 428.

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object or image that makes sense of the wider theme of reading a text and searching for meaning.24 If we read Meliur as a “Sinnbild” too, then she also provides a way of reading Partonopier und Meliur critically; the recipient is given a choice to constantly reevaluate his impression of whether she is a monstrous creature or a human woman, or may choose to go along with the excitement that Partonopier does not fully know who is crawling into bed with him. Konrad uses Meliur as a means of interrogating the relationship between his literature and the recipient who must interrogate what he chooses to accept as the truth. We might have expected Meliur to be revealed to Partonopier under the bedsheets, but the narrative continues to build sexual suspense in describing everything but Meliur herself in extreme detail.

Meliur Unveiled Although Partonopier promises not to look at Meliur until his investiture in three years’ time, he continues to hunger for Meliur’s truth. Eventually, Partonopier suffers from homesickness and takes leave of Meliur to return to his mother. Thereupon, he faces the disapproval of his family and courtiers who are fearful that he is sleeping with the devil. His mother enlists the help of the king and Archbishop of France – representatives of the highest echelons of both secular and religious society – to convince him to take an enchanted lantern to peer under Meliur’s robes. ‘Up-skirting’ her appears to be the only way to be sure of her humanity and suitability for Partonopier. He reveals her body “nackent unde blôz” [naked and bare], (KPM, l. 7779), but she is too bright to be seen, a “glanzer sunneschîn” [blinding ray of sun], (KPM, l. 7870). In this “Tabubruch” [oath breaking] episode, what we find beneath her robes is far from conclusive. She is revealed to be brighter than can possibly be seen or imagined; the likes of her brightness have never been seen before: “nie sô lûter und sô vîn” [never so bright nor so fine], (KPM, l. 7871). We are cast back into a metaphorical and physical darkness in which Meliur and any questions about her appearance remain omitted. We can read this enchanted lantern as a metaphor for the nature of text: the meaning is cloaked when it appears to be illuminated and the more the recipient demands answers, the more questions he is left with. Looking closer at the language with which Konrad reveals Meliur, we can see how he claims her as his own masterpiece of literary creation, brighter and

 Andreas Krass, Meerjungfrauen: Geschichten einer unmöglichen Liebe (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2010).

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more beautiful than any other female figure in the literary canon. Yet his constant insistence on her luminosity fails once again to provide us with any concrete, physical descriptors which might be useful in picturing her physical form: ez wart ein liehter meientac und ein glanzer sunneschîn nie sô lûter und sô vîn, sam ir lîp nâch wunsche gleiz. got selber sich vil harte fleiz, dô si geschuof sîn meisterschaft. er hete rîches heiles kraft geleit an meliûre. ir forme und ir figure het er mit sîner hende vor aller missewende gereinet alsô garwe, daz man sich in ir varwe und in ir bilde wol ersach. swer des ie von ir gejach daz si der tiuvel solte sîn der louc, si was ein engelîn durchliuhtic und durchsihtic. (KPM, ll. 7869–7885) [there was never a bright May day nor a beaming ray of sun that was as clear or as fine as her body, which fulfilled all desire. God himself had taken great pains when his mastery created her. He had spent plenty of his divine strength on Meliur. With his hands he made completely sure that her form and her figure, were free from all flaws. You could see this well in her complexion and in her image. Whomsoever claims she should be the devil is a liar; she was an angel, illuminous and transparent].

Konrad’s narrator does not ask us to look directly at Meliur’s body, but he asks us to imagine her as the most illuminous and transparent female figure there

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ever was. This paradoxical luminescence makes her, if anything, less visible: a figure beyond imagination. The more closely this excerpt is read, the more disjunction it raises with regard to Meliur. The semantic field of light is so exaggerated that it verges on hyperbole. She is brighter than a May day or any ray of sun. It is no surprise, then, that her name should resonate etymologically with the Latin “melior” [superior]. The remainder of her description proceeds to distinguish her as markedly different, rather than similar to exemplars of ‘femaleness’ that we might recognize. Meliur both reflects and gleams, shines and blinds; she literally becomes a mirror, reflecting to the viewer everything he has ever desired. A crucial part of this desire is that her body cannot be made too specific with physical descriptors for her body to function as a universal reflection of masculine desire which mirrors every man’s dream. As Karl Uitti argues of Enite’s description in Chrétien’s Erec et Enite, when she is described as “com an un mireor” [like a mirror] it is not her individual beauty that causes Erec to fall rapture to her, but it is that she was made to be admired and to reflect the image of the self by the other.25 In the scene in which Partonopier exposes Meliur, the poet uses his verse to unearth the tension between the subject and the object, commenting on the nature of seeing and blurring the boundaries between the viewer and the object he views. Bettina Bildhauer’s exploration of the shining “thing” in medieval literature illustrates the destabilizing power of the shining object which promises maximum visual impact only to distort and blind its beholder.26 Bildhauer describes the “surface aesthetics” of various medieval narratives in which shining objects fail to provide a fixed focal point despite inviting the eye: they deny complete objectification. When the object is described in terms of exaggerated shine – or “hypervisibility” in the words of Bildhauer – it becomes threatening to the beholder, as it unsettles the subject’s power of vision to such a degree that it exhibits a destabilizing level of subjectivity itself.27 The shining thing, then, demands a critical interrogation on the relationship between subject and object. In Konrad’s text, Meliur’s “hypervisibility” in fact distorts rather than clarifies; Partonopier’s position as the dominant subject who gains knowledge of Meliur’s appearance in this moment is threatened, as Meliur retains the

 Karl D. Uitti, “‘Cele [qui] doit estre Rose claimee’ (Rose vv. 40–44): Guillaume’s Intentionality,” in Rethinking the “Romance of the Rose”: Text, Image, Reception, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992): 38–64, 57.  Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Things: Agency, Materiality and Narratives of Objects in Medieval German Literature and Beyond (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2020): 34.  Bildhauer, Medieval Things, 38.

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secrecy of her appearance. This episode provides a comment on the nature of the act of seeing; in “looking” at Meliur – or rather, failing to look at her – we must in fact look at ourselves and interrogate why it is that we are desperate to see her. Our desire is hinged upon an object that is so intrinsically other that she defies concrete imagination.28 Even in the scene where we are supposed to gain a definitive answer as to what Meliur looks like, we are left with a distorted image that defies visibility and undermines our position as the viewer. The uncloaking scene demands a radical questioning of the stability of the male observing subject, which invites a decolonial reading of this episode, as it is a moment in which we expose the inherent fragility of western male subjectivity that critically depends upon its subjugation of the female other that it desperately seeks to know. Partonopier, the western male subject, is left with more questions, as the appetite of the male subject for the secrets of the foreign female other remains unsatisfied. We still do not know anything concrete about her; we cannot grasp her in a multitude of ways. Partonopier forces Meliur’s visibility upon her, giving in to his insurmountable temptation to invade Meliur’s privacy and breaching her trust. Partonopier’s metaphorical “unveiling” of Meliur – exposing her beneath her robes – echoes the violent act of the unveiling of Muslim women in Algeria in the French colonial conquest (1830–1962) that is described by Yeğenoğlu as a moment of frustration for the conqueror; in her refusal to be gazed at, the woman behind the veil becomes invisible, inaccessible, fantasmatic.29 The subject is confronted with a sense of nothingness in that moment which fails to fulfil his fantasy of the secrets of the female other. What is at stake in Konrad’s text is not whether there is something behind the metaphorical veil or not, but rather what it says about he who dared to look; the subject thinks himself able to secure his identity against this imaginary anchor that is the female other. In fact, in Partonopier, desire is hinged upon a nothingness because the hero cannot completely face that which he desires: Meliur cannot be rendered visible and therefore always omitted. Just as the Orient is, in fact, nothing but an “endless dissemblance and dissimulation,” Meliur’s embodiment of this emptiness and dissemblance beyond

 Andreas Krass discusses Helena’s description in Konrad’s Trojanerkrieg, arguing that it communicates the impossibility of female beauty ideals by creating such a detailed portrait that it is impossible to picture; see Andreas Krass, Geschriebene Kleider: Höfische Identität als literarisches Spiel (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 2006): 156.  Meyda Yeğenoğlu, “Veiled Fantasies: Cultural and Sexual Difference in the Discourse of Orientalism,” in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2003): 542–566, 542.

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the veil provides the recipient with a lesson to question and challenge why he desires to see behind it.30 To this extent, Meliur embodies the ungraspable Orient, void of any specificity and curiously unknowable. It is more a question about the nature of our desire to penetrate the truth than it is a question about what truths lie in the Orient, or what truths we can come to know about Meliur. There is never any truth to be had when the male subject penetrates the secrets of the Orient; the people of the Orient, the Oriental object, and the Orient itself are not true and their truth omitted: [The Orient’s] absence is dissimulated by appearances and masks. But it is paradoxically this doubt which makes the observing subject certain that there is something hidden in this infinite play of dissimulation, dissemblance, and concealment. The veil must be hiding some essential truth, some mystery or secret.31

The fact that Meliur is constantly dissimulated, a mere mirage of what we think femininity should look like, means that she embodies omission. The female body is always just out of reach to the observing subject, forever concealed to the extent to which men are left to construct an ideal which speaks to their imagined desires. A figure that is based on nothingness, who is never to be seen, Meliur provides Konrad with a way of challenging the way in which the eye tricks and seduces the subject into thinking that it can see the truth when it was never to be discovered.

Conclusion Reading Meliur as a figure of omission in the context of a poetics of omission, has unearthed the recipient’s active role in imagining his own erotic fantasy between the gaps of what is said: we are free to create our own aesthetic of the idealized female love object and participate in Partonopier’s hunger to “unveil” Meliur. This article has explored how Konrad’s language has established a playground for the author to tease the recipient with morsels of information in the scenes that build up to her uncloaking. Konrad then uses the opportunity Meliur’s omission presents by claiming her as his own linguistic masterpiece who defies comparison with other female figures in the medieval literary community. He uses the female body as a hermeneutic device: that is, a way of providing his

 Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies, 50.  Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies, 50 [emphasis in original].

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recipients with a clue as to how to receive the text critically by challenging the truth when it appears to be presented to them. Konrad reminds his recipient that it is not so much about who or what Meliur is, but more about whether we can trust what we see: can we trust female figures are what they appear when depicted in male-authored literature? If we scratch beneath the surface of what we are presented with, we might ask whether femininity is something stable, if it is grounded upon an aesthetics of omission, if it is something that constantly asks us to search beyond what we see. Once the hunger to see Meliur is satiated, the main drive that sustains the story is taken away and Partonopier must continue to prove his worth in a series of battles for the ensuing narrative. Instead of providing us with conclusive answers at this pivotal point in the text that is Meliur’s “unveiling,” what we are left with instead is the bitter aftertaste that Konrad has denied us the full picture. Perhaps, then, our idea of woman is something that is always withheld from us – always omitted, always in a state of beyond. What we are confronted with is that the male gaze has little authority at all. The male gaze fails. It cannot see Meliur even in the moment where it invades and thinks it has penetrated her secrets. It is the figure of omission who, in the end, carries with her an unveiling power: only this time, what she has the power to unveil is the deep-rooted fragility of a patriarchal power system in which the male subject gains security from his opposition to the female other.

Kenneth Eckert

Repression and Omission in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills Abstract: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills (1982) has been read for its supposed culturally Japanese location and setting. However, the stage of the novel is not a physical place but rather the recollections and thought processes of the protagonist, Etsuko, as she attempts to come to terms with her daughter Keiko’s suicide. The historical fact of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and its repercussions for the city and nation both ground and reflect Etsuko’s thoughts, which are ones of omission and repression in response to her submerged personal guilt for Keiko’s death through her emigration and remarriage. In Etsuko’s memories of Nagasaki, repression is seen at the level of the community of survivors, in interpersonal relationships, and in Etsuko’s cognitive actions, which often indicate symbolic interconnections or meaningful lacunae caused by her (non-) thinking. While criticism has tended to examine how Etsuko’s unreliable narration affects the ‘truth’ of the story, the narrative focuses on the ways in which Etsuko’s mental processes navigate between desire, evasion, and resolution. Upon introducing a Kazuo Ishiguro novel to my students, I will ask them to close their eyes, to lean back – and to not think about carrots. They may do as they wish, but they must not allow carrots to enter their minds. The exercise is meant to be amusing, for they of course can only think of carrots when persistently reminded not to, but it also demonstrates that active not-thinking about a subject is mentally fatiguing. As Sigmund Freud noted, “repression demands a persistent expenditure of force.”1 It is unsurprising that several early Ishiguro novels climax in the protagonist being no longer able to sustain these mental energies, whereupon unwanted conclusions emerge to the surface.

Note: Thanks go first to Beth Rosenberg at UNLV, for whom this text originated in early form in 2008 as a seminar paper; thanks go second to Partial Answers, which published this text in article form as “Evasion and the Unsaid in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills,” PA 10.1 (2011): 77–92 and has permitted this expanded reuse. Thanks go third to editor Patrick Gill at JGU Mainz for his kind invitation for this chapter during my 2020–2021 sabbatical.  Sigmund Freud, “Repression” [1915], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (1914–1916), ed. and trans. James Stratchey (London: Hogarth, 1957): 143–158, 151. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-008

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If Agatha Christie was the Queen of Crime, Ishiguro is perhaps becoming the King of Memory Loss, for characters with problematic recall is a frequent trope in his books. Yet these scenarios form a continuum, for Ryder in The Unconsoled (1995) wants to remember but cannot, and attempts to reconstruct himself in the nameless city to which he must give identity and purpose.2 Similarly, the amnesiac post-Arthurian characters in The Buried Giant (2015) suffer from a sort of communal memory-‘mist.’ Stevens in Remains of the Day (1989) does remember past events, but struggles against connecting their meaning until the novel’s close, when it is inescapable that in trying to please a distant father, he has robotically served a lord with dubious fascist sympathies and lost Miss Kenton’s affections. Yet the novel’s ending is not total gloom, for Stevens chiefly suffers regret, not guilt; he has mainly harmed only himself.3 As with Ono in An Artist of the Floating World (1986), there remains some scope for Stevens, however limited by his advanced age, for change. In returning to Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills (1982) after a decade one is newly struck by its bleakness, for unlike Stevens and Ono, Etsuko cannot amend what she has done; her daughter is dead. The novel ends with her seeing her emotionally distant younger daughter leave as she is left alone, with the reader finally aware that Etsuko’s recollections have been underreported or untrue, as a means of assuaging or evading feelings of personal responsibility for Keiko’s alienation and suicide following Etsuko’s flight to England with a new husband. If Remains is about regret, Pale View is about remorse. To contextualize this within the trope of omission, there is also a continuum. For things to merely not be there in an Ishiguro novel is not necessarily omission in our present discursive sense if there is no conspicuous absence that we are meant to perceive. There is some omission in Remains, for the reader can observe discrepancies and occupatio statements from Stevens that telegraph facts he attempts to deny or skirt; similarly, at times the non-human AI protagonist of Klara and the Sun (2021) lacks the ability to relate what is obvious. But Pale View is maximally relevant here, for there is so yawning and pregnant a lacuna between what the reader would like to know about Etsuko and what she chooses to reveal. The “very powerful vacuums” that Ishiguro deploys in Pale View,4 the information the reader suspects is there but is omitted, is one of the novel’s key features, if not its most salient.

 See John Rothfork, “Confucianism in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled,” Quarterly Literary Review Singapore 4.1 (2004), (acc. 5 March 2021).  Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (New York: Random House, 1990).  Ishiguro qtd. in Don Swaim, “Don Swaim Interviews: Kazuo Ishiguro,” Donald L. Swaim Collection (MSS# 177), Ohio University Libraries, in Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, ed. Brian W. Shaffer and Cynthia F. Wong (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2008): 89–109, 97.

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As a recap, Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills takes place in rural England at a date seemingly near-contemporaneous with its 1982 publication, but most of its action is in flashback to postwar Nagasaki, with a terminus of the early 1950s, as Etsuko alludes to the Korean War.5 The narrative traces the thoughts of Etsuko and her conversations with her younger daughter Niki as she recalls her life in Nagasaki and labors to resolve her feelings over her first daughter Keiko’s suicide. The locus of her memories involves her acquaintance Sachiko, who occupied a shack edging the muddy wasteground near the apartments with her daughter Mariko, and this comprises one of Etsuko’s narrative ‘problems,’ as sometimes pronoun mistakes or other aporia suggest that Etsuko jumbles her own actions with Sachiko’s – near the beginning, the local wives gossip that Sachiko is unfriendly, whereupon Etsuko explains “It was never my intention to appear unfriendly” (PV, 13). Although Etsuko has warned that her memory has “grown hazy with time” (PV, 41), her narrative reliability is increasingly dubious and exploded in a slip near the end when she conflates Mariko with Keiko, recalling herself telling Mariko that “we’ll come straight back” (PV, 173) if she does not like their new home abroad, and scolding her in a tone inconsistent with how she would address someone else’s child when Mariko insults her new stepfather (PV, 172). Soon after, Etsuko again seems to fuse the two girls, impossibly telling Niki about a cable-car ride she took to Inasa with Keiko (PV, 182) at a time when Etsuko was still pregnant with her. Critics have made much of these errors, asking whether Sachiko and Mariko were real people “onto whom Etsuko can project her own guilt for neglecting and abusing Keiko,”6 or if they existed at all, and are merely fantasy avatars through which Sachiko acts as Etsuko’s “split-off bad self,” for the purposes of reassuring Etsuko that she “was not such a bad mother after all.”7 Interpreters of Pale View have sometimes missed the point that Pale View’s stage is Etsuko’s remembered past and not the actual Japan. Some studies have attempted to trace or date real locations in Nagasaki referenced in the novel,8 and much journalism or scholarship has (over)analyzed to what extent the novel is ‘Japanese.’ Western commentators have persistently identified Ishiguro’s style

 Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills [1982] (New York: Vintage, 1990), 11; further references in the text, abbreviated as “PV.”  Brian W. Shaffer, Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1988): 21.  Elke D’Hoker, “Unreliability between Mimesis and Metaphor: The Works of Kazuo Ishiguro,” in Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel, ed. Elke D’Hoker and Gunther Martens (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008): 147–170, 157.  Akiyoshi Suzuki, “How to Employ Nagasaki: Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills (1982),” IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship 9.2 (2020): 69–80.

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as such, whereas Eastern critics have claimed that he has “lost his Japaneseness,”9 criticizing him for depicting an “artificial Japan” as full of stock images as Madame Butterfly.10 Ishiguro himself, who moved with his parents to England as a small boy and has remained there, has voiced less interest in this question. Calling himself an “international writer,”11 Ishiguro cites not Asian novelists but Chekhov, Dickens, and Brontë as influences,12 and he has voiced frustration over being pigeonholed as a Japanese author. Some of his subsequent books are perhaps deliberately set in ambiguous or futuristic locations,13 and Ishiguro has complained that his early works were not meant to be historical realism, lamenting critics who assume that his settings are “key to the work.”14 In interviews, he has explained that the Japan in his early novels is largely that of his imagination, and that this created pseudo-Japan was more compelling for him as a narrative setting.15 Again, while the historical Nagasaki and its atomic bombing inform Pale View, their importance lies in their representation in Etsuko’s memory. To Ishiguro, what the characters do is less interesting than “how they come to terms with it.”16 How Etsuko does, or begins to come to terms with ‘it’ is via repressing and omitting information, or by displacing events onto Sachiko and Mariko, portrayed through narrative and symbol patterns. Ishiguro has never settled the matter of Sachiko and Mariko’s reality: “I’m not interested in the solid facts. The focus of the book is elsewhere, in the emotional upheaval.”17 Critics have noted Etsuko’s “suppression of memory,”18 but the novel’s portrayal of her psychological processes, and what Paul Ricoeur might call “the work of memory”19 still remains underexplored. This discussion explores these emotional and thought patterns and ways in which Etsuko’s guilt over Keiko shapes the novel as she, in

 Maya Jaggi, “Kazuo Ishiguro with Maya Jaggi,” in Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk, ed. Susheila Nasta (New York: Routledge, 2004): 159–170, 170.  Barry Lewis, Kazuo Ishiguro (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000): 23.  Cynthia F. Wong, Writers and Their Work: Kazuo Ishiguro (Horndon, UK: Northcote, 2000): 7.  Peter Childs, Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005): 123.  Lewis, Kazuo Ishiguro, 9.  Jaggi, “Kazuo Ishiguro,” 160.  Kazuo Ishiguro and Oe Kenzaburo, “The Novelist in Today’s World: A Conversation,” Boundary 2 18.3 (1991): 109–122, 110.  Wong, Writers and Their Work, 25.  Gregory Mason and Kazuo Ishiguro, “An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro,” Contemporary Literature 30.3 (1989): 335–347, 338.  Shaffer, Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro, 17.  Yugin Teo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 9.

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Ishiguro’s words, “talks all around it.”20 In brief, I will examine the role of repression and omission in the novel by describing how they function at a community, interpersonal, and private level for Etsuko. Repression as a psychological act is simply a defense mechanism against painful experience. Freud describes it in “Repression” (1915) as “nothing else than the avoidance of unpleasure,” an ongoing attempt at “turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious”21 in order to isolate and contain thoughts which the mind is unable or unwilling to deal with. This process, as noted with the carrot example, requires an ongoing expenditure of mental energy. Freud did not classify repression (Verdrängung) as either solely conscious or unconscious, although Freud’s daughter Anna interpreted it as unconscious in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936).22 The Freuds may now seem a quaintly odd if not dangerously outdated way to discuss psychological processes, and some researchers outright reject the concept of repression; the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) no longer lists ‘neurosis’ as a category. But much of Sigmund Freud’s lexicon remains relevant to decoding Etsuko, and some psychologists still explain repression as purposeful acts of “intentional forgetting.”23 However much Ishiguro’s early novels may focus on the internal psychologies of his protagonists, their acts of repression and omission are caused or aggravated by a common historical origin: war. Ono in An Artist of the Floating World is a Japanese painter mulling his nationalist complicity in the Second World War; Stevens in The Remains of the Day has lost his older brother in the Boer War and evades accepting that his employer was seduced into Nazi sympathies; Etsuko in the present Pale View has lost her family in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Signally, none of Ishiguro’s first three novels take place during the war, but rather in its painful aftermath, long after the events which are repressed and dredged up. In conceding that When We Were Orphans (2000) does have a battle scene, Ishiguro notes that “the other books have been in the shadow of bombings or war, but this is the only time I think I’ve been required to take a character through that kind of horror.”24 To use Gerald Prince’s term, the Second

 Mason, “An Interview,” 337.  S. Freud, “Repression,” 153, 147.  Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence [1937], trans. Cecil Baines (New York: International UP, 1948).  Matthew Hugh Erdelyi, “The Unified Theory of Repression,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2006): 499–511, 501.  Cynthia F. Wong, “Like Idealism is to the Intellect: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro,” CLIO 30.3 (2001): 309–325, 323–324.

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World War in Pale View is “nonnarrated,”25 for its noticeable omission or minimization in the reported text indicates the war’s importance to the story. This is especially so for the bombing of Nagasaki and its human cost, which is alluded to but never discussed, and certainly not depicted in the novel. Science-fiction movies may abound in carnage and time traveling robots, but apocalyptic literary fiction often, like Pale View, has postbellum settings, seldom showing atomic war in progress.26 Even those critics who address atomic war as an artistic subject tend to be oblique regarding it; Jacques Derrida states that the textual treatment of atomic war can only be hypothetical, as its actual occurrence would destroy or discredit any semantic system capable of describing it.27 War, and especially loss of that war, is an especially poignant literary theme, for its consequences infect not only characters but the societies they identify and interact with. Events such as bombardment or capitulation are in themselves horrific, but they were also intertwined with shameful triumphalist and militarist programs – here Japan and Germany, whose national agendas led to atrocities and a collapse of state. Ishiguro has discouraged historical readings of his novels, but collective postwar repression among losing states is a widespread literary (and real) phenomenon, and repression of shared national ignominy comprises an extensive literary topos: many of Faulkner’s novels evoke the “non-narrated” defeat of the South in the American Civil War but also the moral taint of slavery, which continues to poison new generations. More recently, Walter Abish’s How German Is It (1980) features Germans who try to repress pain over their wartime Überkatastrophe. Repression may result from emotional trauma but also from guilt, and Anna Freud accordingly sees the super-ego, a font of moral action, as “the author of all neuroses”;28 a broader sociological model is Ruth Benedict’s distinction between eastern ‘shame’ and western ‘guilt’ culture. The collective response among Abish’s Germans is “willful forgetting”29 via self-censorship, averting the “panic at what might happen if by chance a wrong word slipped out,”30 as though everyone risks being exposed for their former complicity in a criminal group project.

 Gerald Prince, “The Disnarrated,” Style 22.1 (1988): 1–8, 2.  Kyoko Matsunaga, “Post-Apocalyptic Vision and Survivance: Nuclear Writings in Native America and Japan” (Dissertation, University of Nebraska, 2006): 4.  Jacques Derrida qtd. in Matsunaga, Post-Apocalyptic Vision, 6.  A. Freud, Ego and Mechanisms, 59.  Paul Wotipka, “Walter Abish’s How German Is It: Representing the Postmodern,” Contemporary Literature 30 (1989): 503–517, 503.  Walter Abish, How German Is It (New York: New Directions, 1980): 30.

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Ishiguro’s position that the postwar Japan of Pale View is merely a backdrop for Etsuko’s reflections can be taken at face value; yet her Nagasaki has especially little civic solidity, its sprawling fragments connected only by trams and rivers. Some sections have been destroyed by the bomb, others are haphazardly intact, and little is named. Etsuko’s complex sits on the indeterminate ruins of some village in an ambiguous “area to the east of the city” (PV, 11). Though the novel is set soon after the atomic bombing, there are few physical acknowledgments of it. A commemorative statue in the park, an uncomfortable reminder, is disregarded by Etsuko as no more than a figure of “a policeman conducting traffic” (PV, 138). A real-life cenotaph in Hiroshima’s Peace Park reading, “Please sleep peacefully / We’ll never repeat the mistake” had the word ‘mistake’ vandalized in 2005,31 yet at least this indicates that the statue is noticed by someone. Etsuko lives in a bland concrete block of apartments, preserving no memory of traditional Japanese styles. One of the few traditional buildings surviving is the dilapidated cottage which Sachiko temporarily inhabits, but it is marginalized from the residents who “want to obliterate their memories of the bombing.”32 It is true that Nagasaki is being rebuilt. But these activities indicate not a generative renewal of civic purpose so much as burying an obscene past. For Ishiguro to describe the rebuilding is both a realistic and symbolic touch; and for Etsuko to frequently recall herself or others noticing the reconstruction sounds and sights may also hint at what she is burying. One of the novel’s strongest and darkest symbols of repression is the “dried mud and ditches of the wasteground” (PV, 11). There are hints as to what makes the wasteground so unpleasant, such as the poor drainage and the mosquitoes, but the history of the space is never stated, suggesting the worst: that it was abandoned because of flattened buildings or bodies. Abish’s novel similarly employs this architectural motif when a construction project embarrassingly turns up a mass grave of prison camp inmates that the city had hoped to permanently conceal, both literally and socially. The wasteground is further reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, signifying shards of a dead or morally discredited empire, but it also marks a past that is pushed down but continues to bubble up. Villagers complain, and officials are seen “pacing out measurements or scribbling down notes” (PV, 11), but nothing can seemingly be done to effect closure, any more than psychic pain can be expediently interred and forgotten.

 Matsunaga, Post-Apocalyptic Vision, 98.  Yu-Cheng Lee, “Reinventing the Past in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills,” Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 1.1 (2008): 19–32, 25.

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The architectural nullity and amnesia of the city extends to its occupants. With no municipal sense of identity or tradition remaining after the shock of war, there is no sense of shared project. The occupants of Etsuko’s block seem to avoid being identified with the building; there is “an unmistakable air of transience there” (PV, 12). The city’s austere park does little to invite recreation or civic activities, and unlike Joyce’s poor but busy Dublin streets, Etsuko’s Nagasaki memories seldom have crowds in them, excepting perhaps the Kujibiki toy lottery visit. It is irresistible to insert a last Abish reference: his Germans are at least connected by a mutual general suspicion of each other, or a conveniently neutral fondness for pet dogs or strictly pre-twentieth century Teutonic nostalgia. Here the Nagasaki denizens seem especially alone and anchorless. If Shimazu claims that the actual postwar Japanese “liked to portray themselves as victims of pre-1945 militarism,”33 Ishiguro’s Japanese lack any apparent memory or interest in any collective former ‘themselves.’ Sachiko equally has no emotional investment in Nagasaki. She also glances toward the frantic reconstruction on the hillside below her in Inasa, agreeing with Etsuko that “we have to keep looking forward” (PV, 111), but the double meaning is that a) the past is not worth looking at, and b) the ‘we’ denotes ‘you and I,’ not a concern for anyone else in a reviving society. This information is of course mediated through Etsuko’s memories, and so we cannot be certain that this civic alienation is not amplified by her own sentiments. But she depicts Ogata-San as having such a sense of belonging to both Nagasaki and Fukuoka, or at least a past and fading version, and she indicates no evident disapproval of this; he easily navigates finding his student’s home in Nakagawa and the noodle shop, and Etsuko is impressed by how quickly Ogata-San feels at home with Mrs. Fujiwara. Otherwise Etsuko does not have much more sense of civic or Japanese cultural identity than does Sachiko. She refers to a day trip to Inasa as one of her “better memories” (PV, 103): there she enjoyed pine trees and mountain scenery, which offered a residual sense of permanence. Yet she barely notes the traditional fish market or the Kujibiki stand that she passes, dismissively mentioning that she “might have forgotten about the existence of such a thing” (PV, 120). Upon Niki’s birth Etsuko wishes to give her as minimal a Japanese-sounding name as possible.34 Her gift to Niki’s poet-

 Naoko Shimazu, “Popular Representations of the Past: The Case of Postwar Japan,” Journal of Contemporary History 38.1 (2003): 101–116, 101.  Matek posits that a young Keiko would have noticed that in Niki’s naming, their mother sees her Japanese heritage (and presumably Keiko) as burdensome. See Ljubica Matek, “Narrating Migration and Trauma in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills,” American, British and Canadian Studies 31 (2018): 129–146.

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friend is a photograph from a torn calendar, a fragmented image disconnected from its context – a leftover from a discarded artifact. Her fuzzied image of the city mirrors her censored memories of her life there. The novel’s title suggests that it is Etsuko’s view and not the hills which are pale.35 Her later sense of identity in Britain is no less wispy, for her home is “so truly like England” (PV, 182), as if it were a construction (like England) and not the actual country. Her view is equally obscured by fog and rain, and Etsuko never even mentions her village’s name. Again, everything is colored by Etsuko’s thoughts. But consistently within the past she remembers, the taboo but omnipresent past exacerbates generational silences and divisions. Concretely, this affects the pairs Ogata-San/Jiro, Ogata-San/Shigeo, Mrs. Fujimara/Sachiko, and Etsuko/ Niki. Consistently, the older cohort seeks to salvage and rationalize the best of Japanese values, and the younger blames the older and rejects collusion in such ideals, or dismisses them as obsolete. Ogata-San has been given negative readings as a pathetic and “embarrassing incarnation of anachronism,”36 but he is notable in Etsuko’s memories for being interested in dialogue, if admittedly on his terms, and is perhaps one of the psychologically healthiest characters in the novel. It is difficult to square his interpretation as a dinosaur with his interest in learning to cook (PV, 32) and his easy-going humor with his daughter-in-law. Yet this all makes his failures more moving. Ogata-San’s insistence that Jiro face Shigeo over the latter’s printed insult of Ogata-San’s career results in excuses, and Etsuko sees that Jiro’s “strategy” is to delay until his father departs, whereupon “the whole affair could be forgotten” (PV, 126). Only once during his stay does an abortive discussion over values emerge, when Ogata-San laments that formerly “People were bound by a sense of duty” (PV, 65), and Jiro rebuts that the end of such dictums as “Japan was created by the gods” in schools is not “such a loss” (PV, 66). As the debate becomes heated, Jiro voices banal placations to end it such as, “Yes, no doubt you’re right” (PV, 65), between yawns. The interchange sputters out when Jiro uses the excuse of bedtime, vacuously telling his father, “It’s most regrettable” (PV, 67). These dialogues are not honest or productive interchanges, but rather the speech of two solitudes. Jiro only opens up when his drunk co-workers visit, perhaps because they are his generation, or perhaps because they have no taboo shared history outside their workplace. Jiro otherwise avoids his father by absenting himself from

 Lee, “Reinventing the Past,” 22.  Fumio Yoshioka, “Beyond the Division of East and West: Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills,” Studies in English Literature 101 (1988): 71–86, 81.

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home during his father’s visit and attributing it to work demands (PV, 29), or by structuring their hours together with time-fillers such as chess. The veneer of duty allows Jiro to avoid any intimacy with his father. The cover is bruised when Jiro’s co-workers joke that he mostly reads the paper at work (PV, 61); it later slips when Jiro stops eating in suppressed panic after Etsuko invites his father to stay longer (PV, 155); and the evasion is violently exposed when Ogata-San’s analysis of Jiro’s loss at chess becomes dangerously personal: Ogata-San notes that Jiro “always had a streak of defeatism” (PV, 129), and Jiro responds to the personal trespass by lunging at his father in a primal gesture and then collecting himself and leaving the room (PV, 131). Ogata-San seems to sentimentalize this action as Jiro acting like a boy again, but Yoshioka sees this as him tactfully covering over the bitter realization that he “discovers a complete stranger in his son,”37 and it leads to the end of Ogata-San’s visit one day later. This is also as good as it gets. Elsewhere, things are simply not mentioned, and the functional tool for this in Etsuko’s society is Japanese etiquette, where characters delicately euphemize potential conflict as ‘misunderstandings.’ Rebecca Walkowitz also remarks that Ishiguro’s characters habitually use this term as a salve “whenever they want to claim that there is confusion rather than conflict.”38 Walkowitz believes that these ‘misunderstandings’ can be productive because they allow characters to confront stagnant or dangerous ideas. But the readers are the ones who confront them, if that; in Etsuko’s recollections, excuses of error prevent dialogues rather than facilitating them. For example, the meeting between Ogata-San and Shigeo lacks the normal social etiquette of an invitation, as Ogata-San appears unannounced, and much of the pseudo-conversation is uncomfortable silence. Shigeo shovels in equivocations similar to Jiro’s with clichés such as “Time really flies by, doesn’t it?” (PV, 145), and only Ogata-San forces matters to a head by confronting Shigeo over his printed statements. Yet Ogata-San’s attempt at engagement and resolution again fails when Shigeo dodges the issue by suggesting that Ogata-San’s career had merely taken a “misguided direction” (PV, 147), by vague predictions of “a new dawn” (PV, 148), and by a pro forma apology that he is late as he breaks away. Ogata-San can only resort to a face-saving remark later with Etsuko: “How confident young men are [. . .] I suppose I was much the same once” (PV, 148). To whatever extent Etsuko understands them, these non-interchanges are important in reflecting the dialogues that do not happen as a result of wartime

 Yoshioka, “Beyond the Division,” 81.  Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia UP, 2006): 110.

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trauma, as social roles fail to function. Shigeo disassociates himself and his generation from his mentors, in light of the imperial agendas and academic witch-hunts he blames them for. In turn, Ogata-San’s traditional and familiar role as a teacher solicitously correcting a wayward student is rebuffed and rejected. The episode is juxtaposed against Ogata-San’s subsequent warm conversation with Mrs. Fujimara in her noodle shop, a woman of his age cohort who can agree on the perversity of a wife’s refusal to vote as her husband does (PV, 152). Presumably, if a prediction can be taken from Akira, the boy whom Etsuko meets on the cable-car ride to Inasa, the further generation will have nothing to say to both earlier ones, for Akira, although a child, is both impertinent and vulgarly materialistic. While Ishiguro partly uses his fretful, overprotective mother to juxtapose Sachiko’s parental apathy, Akira wields his schooling as a pathway to future money and power, and immediately as a weapon to dominate Mariko with. Intergenerational conflict also separates the novel’s women. There is no evident rapport between Mrs. Fujimara and Sachiko, and when Etsuko visits the restaurant Mrs. Fujimara refers to Sachiko as “Your friend” (PV, 24). Sachiko in turn condescendingly scorns the “loathsome” noodle shop (PV, 46) and asks Etsuko to relay her resignation to Mrs. Fujimara, sighing impatiently when Etsuko suggests that she do it herself. Sachiko may also be uncomfortable with what Mrs. Fujimara represents: a good mother who makes sacrifices for her child and engages in the traditionally maternal enterprise of cooking.39 By contrast, Etsuko has no memory of ever seeing Sachiko cooking for her daughter. Nor does Sachiko show any of the concern for her child’s education that Mrs. Fujimara does for her son’s (PV, 150), another sign of maternal investment in one’s community which Sachiko rejects. To sum, puns are necessary: Etsuko’s extended circle lead ‘atomized’ lives, lacking understanding or emotional closeness, and they forestall substantive communication with social niceties and safe clichés. Cultural formalities of politeness and discretion similarly paper over communal repression of disquiet over a taboo past, so that none can relate to the ‘frank’-ness of outsiders. Sachiko can merely say that “Everyone who lived in Tokyo saw unpleasant things” (PV, 73), and Mrs. Fujiwara, normally a chatty and expansive woman, only obliquely refers to her son’s dead fiancé and his need to move on (PV, 76). Such reactions are normative for survivors of disasters, who may feel both emotional pain and guilt over those

 Ruth Forsythe, “Cultural Displacement and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills,” West Virginia Philological Papers 52.4 (2005): 99–109, 103.

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who did not survive. Most find “the horrific experience ineffable,”40 and even Ogata-San only euphemistically refers to “those of us who were left” (PV, 58). As a minor note, there is no hint at all of sexual intimacy in the novel. The only sexual possibility is between Frank and his “worthless saloon girl” (PV, 87), but he is a foreigner outside the Japanese community and is never seen; in an earlier draft of the novel, Etsuko tries to make conversation with Mariko, asking if Frank-san ever stays with them, but Ishiguro struck even this line.41 Sigmund Freud notes that repression is often accompanied by a reduction of libido,42 and Etsuko tellingly remarks that Jiro was usually “not in the mood for conversation” as they lay in bed (PV, 36); to speak crudely, one wonders how Keiko was ever conceived. The happy exception is perhaps Etsuko’s substitute parental figures, OgataSan and Mrs. Fujiwara.43 The latter is conspicuous for protectively fussing over Etsuko and making sure she eats (PV, 77). Etsuko’s warm filial relationship with Ogata-San particularly contrasts with the perfunctory and cooler roles she has with others, perhaps explaining why she thinks about him at such length. Their camaraderie and bantering provide one of few occasions in the novel for shared confidence. The bond originates in Ogata-San’s rescue of Etsuko at the war’s end, an act of pure compassion, one requiring no nervous skipping-over. In one scene Etsuko worries that something painful is about to be broached when Ogata-San sees her violin and reminisces that she “used to play in the dead of night” (PV, 57), and yet she has enough trust in him to allude to a dreadful time when she acted like “a mad girl” (PV, 58). Ogata-San handles the scene gracefully, defending Etsuko’s actions as an understandable response to trauma, “which was only to be expected” (PV, 58). Yet realizing he has overstepped, Ogata-San tells her to “forget these things” (PV, 58) and changes the subject. Etsuko also closes off the tension by humorously saying “The little child is feeling guilty now” (PV, 58). Ogata-San’s rapport with Etsuko is in sharp contrast to Jiro’s chilliness to her. Jiro’s conservative strictness reflects period marital roles in his culture, and neither Ogata-San nor Jiro’s co-workers protest his treatment of Etsuko. The co-worker denies that he struck his wife with a golf club, not that the action itself is wrong. Yet Jiro and Etsuko’s relationship is especially mechanical, and there is little apparent love and certainly no affection leavening the duty list.

 Lee, “Reinventing the Past,” 25.  See Enora Lessinger, “Genesis of a Self-Translation: Inside the Archive of Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills,” Palimpsestes 34 (2020): 84–100.  Sigmund Freud, “Repression,” 155.  Karen Oshima, “Etsuko’s Memory of Past Relationships in Japan in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills,” Bulletin of the Faculty of Education, Kumamoto University 68 (2019): 25–32, 27.

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Jiro treats his wife “like a recalcitrant maid”44 and his sole interaction is giving scolding commands, such as “I wouldn’t mind some tea, you know” (PV, 154), or asking why she is standing there when he describes his work meeting to his father. He evinces no interest in creating a nurturing domestic space; Etsuko recollects that he would “frequently dress in shirt and tie” (PV, 28) at home, and in her memories, Jiro never once inquires about her pregnancy. Etsuko does not seem to comment on this, and her later remarks on Jiro are ambiguous: there is no clear sense who she is disapproving of when she muses about young couples holding hands that it was “something Jiro and I had never done” (PV, 120) – or are qualified: “I do not claim to recall Jiro with affection” (but) “he was never the oafish man my husband considered him”; “I never pretended Keiko would not miss him” (but Etsuko does not say ‘we’ or ‘I’ would miss him) (PV, 90). The conspicuous void of her not-thinking about Keiko does not seem to apply to Jiro. What happened to him? He is not omitted; he is gone. Omission and repression also play a part in the generational relationship between Etsuko and Niki, with their visit charged by the spectral innuendo of Keiko’s suicide and Etsuko’s submerged fears that her abandonment of Jiro and Japan have led to it. Etsuko’s strained relationship with Niki results in a nonvisit mostly consisting of parallel non-conversations: “I had a dream last night,” I said. “I think it might be to do with the quiet. I’m not used to it being so quiet at night.” “I dreamt about that little girl. The one we were watching yesterday. The little girl in the park.” “I can sleep right through traffic, but I’ve forgotten what it’s like, sleeping in the quiet.” (PV, 55)

Such soliloquies are not ‘misunderstandings,’ because neither is listening to the other. Much of Niki’s visit is a wasted effort at communication. In the few episodes where mother and daughter hear each other, they fail to resolve the unease they feel over Keiko. The April weather is “cold and drizzly” (PV, 9) during Niki’s stay, and the windows betray only a “grey light” (PV, 175). Despite Niki’s interest in her father’s journalism, when Etsuko presses Niki to tell her what her “bad dreams” are about, Niki snaps back in order to preserve her privacy (PV, 175). Many of Niki’s more caustic remarks concern children, perhaps in response to anxieties that any offspring might be too much like her and her sister.45

 Forsythe, “Cultural Displacement,” 104.  Forsythe, “Cultural Displacement,” 105.

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The most egregious example of personal isolation is that of Sachiko, who has no substantial communication or intimacy with anyone, barring her brief acquaintance with Etsuko. Sachiko has evidently been so traumatized by loss that she rejects any attachment, and her moods range within a destructive spectrum from apathetic to callous to selfish. Her thanks for Etsuko’s help in finding her a job is to abandon it. She mocks Etsuko’s surprise at her emigration plans: “Yes, America. You’ve no doubt heard of such a place” (PV, 37). Her relationship with Frank, a name shared with the American who abandons Madame Butterfly, involves going to bars to search for him, as well as repeated frustrations at his drinking bouts and infidelity. Sachiko’s actions are as narcissistic and calculating as Frank’s venal excesses, and having rebuffed the women in the apartments, she is as alone at the end of the novel as in the beginning. Unable to trust anyone, Sachiko refuses offers of succor from her extended family while cynically admitting that Frank’s promises are probably worthless (PV, 170). Sachiko is possibly the most damaged character in the novel, and her avoidance of her past is so strong that she disconnects herself from either it or the future, renouncing any responsibility or goals beyond immediate gratification of needs. Sachiko piously preaches to Etsuko that her daughter’s welfare is “of the utmost importance” (PV, 86), but Sachiko is usually absent from the dark cottage, and her indifferent mantra whenever the child runs off is “leave her” (PV, 85). The most appalling lack of compassion in the story is evinced in Sachiko’s pitiless drowning of the girl’s kittens after she promises Mariko that she can keep them, and Mariko may likely wonder if she is merely another of the “sentimental attachments” (PV, 165) to be disposed of when they become inconvenient. That “atomic warfare is painfully destructive”46 is obvious not only in physical consequences but also in the long-term emotional damage that impedes empathy. At the close of the novel every relationship has ended in emotional or physical abandonment or isolation. Even the ‘family’ of cats, the only functioning family relationship Mariko knows, has been cruelly killed. The awful kitten-drowning scene leads to the book’s climactic moment where Etsuko seems to conflate Mariko with Keiko: “What’s the matter with you?” I said. “Why are you sitting like this?” [. . .] “I don’t want to go away. And I don’t like him. He’s like a pig.” “You’re not to speak like that,” I said, angrily. We stared at each other for a moment, then she looked back down at her hands. “You mustn’t speak like that,” I said, more calmly. “He’s very fond of you, and he’ll be just like a new father. Everything will turn out well, I promise.”

 Wong, Writers and Their Work, 13.

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The child said nothing. I sighed again. “In any case,” I went on, “if you don’t like it over there, we can always come back.” This time she looked up at me questioningly. “Yes, I promise,” I said. “If you don’t like it over there, we’ll come straight back. But we have to try it and see if we like it there. I’m sure we will.” (PV, 172–173)

At this point the ‘we’ pronouns make it clear that Etsuko is “no longer bothering to put it in the third person,” as Ishiguro says.47 Possibly the Mariko moving-away conversation did not happen, or did but is intertwined with one a few years later with Keiko; Mariko has already previously slurred Frank with obscenities and called him a pig (via a frank also being a pork sausage). To confuse things more, the rope stuck to her sandal in her first meeting with Mariko reappears in her last one when “the little girl” (PV, 172) asks more vexing questions about it (PV, 84, 172). The reader cannot at this point distinguish what happened with all of these conflicting facts, and the episode “comes to an abrupt conclusion without any sense of completion.”48 Further, all of this information is double-coded, in that the reader only knows what Etsuko chooses to reveal, but also only knows what Ishiguro chooses to have her reveal. This complicates the story’s revelatory climax, for Ishiguro has said in interviews that had he been a more experienced writer, this might have been more deftly handled.49 If so, are we to see the suddenness of this confusingly bombshell scene as Etsuko’s or Ishiguro’s action? A variety of analyses have been given on this difficult scene. One reading is that it exposes Sachiko and Mariko as merely mental projections of Etsuko and Keiko, an extreme form of elaborative repression. Erdelyi catalogues both simple repression, a “(not-thinking) of some target material,” and elaborative repression, which “distorts the original memory through a variety of transformations and false additions.”50 In both episodes, Mariko runs away from Etsuko and vanishes into the darkness (PV, 84, 173), foreshadowing Keiko’s emotional withdrawal and suggesting that Mariko might be no more than an avatar of Keiko in Etsuko’s memory. D’Hoker notes that, in the cases of unreliable narration, “we usually trust scenic presentations,”51 but here the reader has no basis for distinguishing imagination-

 Mason, “An Interview,” 337.  Lee, “Reinventing the Past,” 21.  Mason, “An Interview,” 337–338.  Erdelyi, “Unified Theory of Repression,” 499.  D’Hoker, “Mimesis and Metaphor,” 157; Kathleen Wall, “The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration,” Journal of Narrative Technique 24.1 (1994): 18–42, 20.

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within-imagination from diegesis, or, conversely, the story from a story-within-astory. But if Sachiko and Mariko never existed, this is, to say the least, problematic – why place them in a shack which did not exist either, after it seems clear that Etsuko’s apartment did? The same can also be argued about Ogata-San and Jiro. If so, and no holds are barred, does anyone exist in the novel, and is it all dreamed by a mouse? For such reasons some have judged Pale View a problem text.52 An alternative is to see Etsuko as delusional, and Wong emphasizes her (temporary?) madness when rescued by Ogata-San.53 Ishiguro, for better or worse, is no George Bernard Shaw, and has declined to dictate to readers the answer to these questions, instead stating, “Whatever the facts are about what happened to Sachiko and her daughter, they are of interest to Etsuko now because she can use them to talk about herself.”54 But Ishiguro never says in interviews that Sachiko is imagined;55 nor does Niki (at least in Etsuko’s reportage) indicate mistrust of her mother’s faculties or competence.56 Etsuko as a madwoman staring at the yellow wallpaper would also cheapen the horror of Nagasaki, suggesting that only she was “affected by the aftermath of war.”57 Further, interpreting Etsuko as a duplicitous or mentally ill narrator would be inconsistent with the sympathy the novel otherwise elicits for her; she has lost her family as well as “her homeland, her husbands, and her elder daughter.”58 What exactly do we want? She has already conceded, as do other Ishiguro narrators – Ono, Stevens, and Ryder – that her memory of these events is imperfect. These characters’ “open admission of real human flaws gains a reader’s empathy,”59 and it is certainly plausible that Etsuko should blur people and events from three decades earlier and, like many retrospective narrators, tint them with her own anxieties. Nevertheless, as I revisit Pale View a decade later, and older, this answer seems less sufficient. Etsuko is likely in her sixties, and she is not a young woman, but neither is she geriatric. Additionally, how does she mix up Mariko/ Keiko/the girl on the swing/the unseen murdered girl in this half-dream, halfmemory scene, but accurately report entire conversations elsewhere, such as  D’Hoker, “Mimesis and Metaphor,” 157.  Cynthia F. Wong, “The Shame of Memory: Blanchot’s Self-Dispossession in Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills,” CLIO 24.2 (1995): 127–145, 132–136.  Ishiguro qtd. in Mason, “An Interview,” 337.  See Wong, Writers and Their Work, 32.  Michael R. Molino, “Traumatic Memory and Narrative Isolation in Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills,” Critique 53 (2012): 322–336, 331.  Wong, “The Shame of Memory,” 136.  Childs, Contemporary Novelists, 123.  Wong, Writers and Their Work, 24.

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Ogata-San’s confrontation of Shigeo? One solution to this problem is to read the novel against Remains of the Day, where in scenes where Stevens is pleased (the moving speeches in support of Darlington and European peace at the 1933 conference), his memory is near-photographic, but where he is ashamed or attempts to repress a memory, it is extremely confused (when was Miss Kenton crying on the other side of the door?). In Pale View, we also see that where Etsuko was relaxed (her joking with Ogata-san) her recollections are detailed, but her most shameful or painful memories are also deeply muddled. Taking this difference as a way to understand or bring a rationale to Etsuko’s memories, we can surmise, or hypothesize, that the war is indeed a painful memory for her, for it is vague or omitted in her memories and for the people in them; but that her actions regarding Keiko are a very painful memory, for they are very vague and muddied. The two matters are intertwined in Etsuko’s past, and Parlati notes her “obdurate negation of her personal/national mourning.”60 But Etsuko’s wish to blur or gloss over her actions as a mother toward Keiko may also result in her projecting this repressive emotion onto other people, so that her depiction of the alienation and transience of postwar Nagasaki might be true, but it is colored by her feelings. Henri Bergson also uses a color analogy to describe this sort of recollective time-echo where later memories tint prior ones as a normative part of human biology, with the memory process an “increasing-rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow,”61 new events being imprinted upon old ones, altering and being altered by them. It is now also easier to parse how Etsuko represses and omits feelings of maternal shame over her perceived culpability for neglecting Keiko and perhaps for her suicide. In short, she uses someone else’s story to (not) tell hers, in the climactic scene substituting lying to Mariko that ‘we’ can easily come back instead of saying so to her own daughter. Ishiguro admits that the Etsuko of the past may be “somewhat nearer the mousy Etsuko she talks about in the forties than she is to the Sachiko figure,”62 but Sachiko/Mariko fall into a useful sweet spot where the duo are more selfish/ruder people than are herself/Keiko, and thus a slight consolation by comparison, but similar enough to be a safe vehicle of thinking about herself/Keiko. They are further linked by regret in that Etsuko may also feel prior guilt for not doing more to help Mariko (PV, 168). Etsuko otherwise tries to keep the two strands separate, and if Etsuko does not question

 Marilena Parlati, “Memory in T/Rubble: Tackling (Nuclear) Ruins,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 21.1 (2019) (acc. 8 March 2021).  Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution [1907], trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911): 2.  Mason, “An Interview,” 338.

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Sachiko’s maternal homilies then or decades later, it may be because they come too close to reminding Etsuko of her own failures. But human minds are not so neatly managed, and this is what makes the novel and Ishiguro’s crafting of it additionally interesting. Two problems have already been noted – one via Bergson, that Etsuko’s feelings slightly tint those of the people she claims to describe, and two via Erdelyi’s elaborative repression model, that some things Etsuko did are ventriloquized to Sachiko. But even this construction is shot through with random image patterns and noise bubbling up from Etsuko’s semi- or subconscious, which intersect with and destabilize these memories. Sights, objects, and events in the past “begin to weave back and forth through time and levels of consciousness until they gain symbolic but shifting meaning.”63 Thus the drowning of Mariko’s kittens replays the gruesome narrative of a desperate woman drowning her baby (PV, 74), and then reiterates in the woman’s claimed apparition, which was or was not seen by Mariko (or Keiko). In the same scene there is a rope, linking a further set of associations; a chain-rope holds a girl “playing on the swing” (PV, 95), connecting to memories of a murdered girl “found hanging from a tree” (PV, 100), and to the recurring image of Keiko “hanging in her room” (PV, 54), also from a rope. This sustained image cluster connects Mariko and Keiko in a way Etsuko can only imperfectly keep submerged. As noted, the effect of omission is particularly strong in Pale View because it is unresolved. Unlike Remains, which ends with Stevens breaking into tears on a pier to a listener and admitting his ‘dignity’ is near-worthless, Etsuko never persuasively admits to her mental maneuverings. Much of what we do know is from comments or questions by Niki, who laments that her father largely ignored Keiko (PV, 175), or stubbornly asserts that Etsuko did nothing wrong in bringing Keiko to England. Etsuko cannot securely consider these matters, and although she claims to feel gratitude for Niki’s support, Etsuko shuts down uncomfortable topics with “there is little to be gained in going over them” (PV, 94) formulas in her interior dialogue, or brusque “Let’s not discuss it any further” (PV, 176) replies to Niki. Gerald Prince refers to ‘disnarration’ as a reporting of hypothetical events which did not happen; while the reader is left suspicious that some of Etsuko’s memories are counterfactual, Ishiguro’s practice here is closer to ‘nonnarration,’ where something is left unsaid through “ignorance, repression, or choice,”64 calling attention to its absence.

 Forsythe, “Cultural Displacement,” 102.  Prince, “The Disnarrated,” 2. See also Laura Karttunen, “A Sociostylistic Perspective on Negatives and the Disnarrated: Lahiri, Roy, Rushdie,” Partial Answers 6.2 (2008): 419–441, 419–420.

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This is, of course, just another hue of omission, where elisions are “inferrable from a significant lacuna in the chronology” or “explicitly underlined by the narrator.”65 The former occurs when Mrs. Fujiwara repeatedly tries to cheer and reassure Etsuko that she will be a good mother and must concentrate “on happy things now” (PV, 24), but no mention is made by Etsuko of her being unhappy, which would explain these gestures; or, at risk of overstraining, Etsuko repeatedly mentions drinking coffee (and not tea) with Niki, perhaps as a way of avoiding reminders of Japan and Jiro’s constant demands for the refreshment. The latter move (a scene where the narrator observes an omission) occurs when Etsuko proleptically comments on Jiro’s evasion of his father’s conflict with Shigeo: “Had he not, years later, faced another crisis in much the same manner, it may be that I would never have left Nagasaki” (PV, 126). The remark both hides and signals a tantalizing information block which Etsuko cannot afford to admit into her conversation with herself. Ishiguro also uses Etsuko’s living space to suggest her state of mind where she will not. Home ownership usually embodies belonging or identity, but Etsuko’s home is an “uncomfortable space,”66 with the persistent hint of Keiko’s lost presence hanging in the air, “hovering over us” (PV, 10). Rather than being a place of rest, the house is a zone of unnerving noises where its occupants have difficulty sleeping (PV, 174). Perhaps conscious of the ‘ghosts’ of their past, Etsuko muses that she would like to move, and Niki selfishly parries with “But it’s a really nice house” (PV, 183), fearful that Etsuko will come to London and be near her. But for Etsuko the house is possibly too much like her mental space: Keiko’s room gives her a “disturbing feeling” (PV, 53), and she is reluctant to enter it, literally or emotionally. Etsuko tends to refer not to rooms but to the doors between them, and little mention is made even of her conjugal bedroom. In discussing the phenomenology of spaces, Gaston Bachelard describes the house as a protective space where “a great many of our memories are housed.”67 Such memories include painful ones, and Etsuko only dimly grasps that after Keiko’s death the rooms contain more baggage than her conscience can tolerate. Another way to avoid dealing with pain is to flee it, again literally or emotionally, or both. Whether it happens or not-recalls her own actions, Etsuko repeatedly reports that Sachiko packs and prepares to hurriedly leave, just as Mariko deals with hurt by running away, taking flight into the marshes of the

 Prince, “The Disnarrated,” 2.  Forsythe, “Cultural Displacement,” 101.  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space [1964], trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1969): 8.

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wasteground. Sachiko’s need to subdue her memories is transferred to household objects, which equally seem “to give her some difficulty” (PV, 169), as she repetitively attempts to fold them away into a space where they can be forgotten. Similarly, a telling psychic emblem of Niki’s anxieties is her bulging, messy suitcase. When she argues with her mother, the lid of her suitcase resists attempts to shut it, and Niki “push[es] down at it impatiently” (PV, 180), much like how Jiro stumbles over a teapot, as he seeks to escape his father (PV, 131). Like the dark, muddy wasteground’s associations, such symbolic gestures relate back to Etsuko’s and other reflected characters’ ongoing effort to contain or flee taboo thoughts or realities where they do emerge. For omission and the not-telling of information to be so central to the novel, and to Ishiguro’s oeuvre, is not to everyone’s taste; some critics have groused of Pale View that at certain points they “could have done with something as crude as a fact.”68 In less-skilled hands, literary omission may misfire as teasing the reader with withheld information, or formulistic pedantry. But here, asking the reader to piece together the charged absences left by Etsuko navigating her minefields of not-thinking about a problem has a narrative reason and purpose. While the book does deal with “the modernist concerns of knowing,”69 Etsuko’s thoughts are not arid, philosophical Everlasting Yeas, but raw and realistic responses to trauma and guilt, and perhaps bereavement is a tangible human emotion Ishiguro related to, for he has noted he grieved over his estrangement from his grandfather when the family left Japan.70 Here Etsuko is an orphan of an atomic bombing, and the pain of her early life reverberates into, or back from, Mariko/Keiko’s injured childhoods. Just as Stevens in Remains mulls his past in order to understand his frustrated emotions, Etsuko seeks to work out her guilt over Keiko and possibly Jiro. The process may be cathartic, and Wong suggests that the goal is to put the memory of Keiko to rest so that Etsuko can heal and focus on her other daughter.71 How successful this healing can be has been given different readings. Yoshioka sees a positive ending, and Teo agrees that the story “concludes with a sense that the work of mourning has begun.”72 After confusing Mariko/Keiko, Etsuko does not backtrack with another qualification that her memory may be faulty, and confesses with new honesty that “I knew all along she wouldn’t be

 Paul Bailey qtd. in Lewis, Kazuo Ishiguro, 36.  Linda S. Raphael, Narrative Skepticism: Moral Agency and Representations of Consciousness in Fiction (Mississauga, Ontario: Rosemont, 2001): 169.  See Jaggi, “Kazuo Ishiguro,” 165–166.  Wong, Writers and Their Work, 28. See also Molino, “Traumatic Memory,” 326.  Yoshioka, “Beyond the Division,” 85; Teo, Ishiguro and Memory, 95.

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happy over here” (PV, 176). It has been suggested that Etsuko allegorizes her Japanese nation, but on Etsuko and Niki’s last mourning/morning together, the foggy, drizzly English spring yields to sunshine and the singing of birds (PV, 177). The imagery is not particularly Japanese but a trope in English literature since Beowulf that is indicative of renewal or optimism. This sudden sunlight occurs in further contrast to the rain and dim light of the rest of Niki’s visit, perhaps again emphasizing some new clarity or acceptance. Nevertheless, could this novel end any bleaker without being set at night, like Joyce’s Gabriel watching snow fall on the living and dead? The narrative freezes with the final and achingly sad image of Etsuko waving to her surprised daughter at a distance (PV, 183). Etsuko smiles at Niki in futility as she is left alone; the reader is reminded that likely everyone she has described in the story save Niki is gone, dead or scattered. Yet perhaps as a last symbolic touch, Etsuko stands at a doorway, a zone that can suggest closure from the world but also engagement if the door is left open. What saves the moment from despair is Etsuko’s instinctual efforts to connect, to love, and to make sense of experiences. Such hope, however wistful, is also not geographically specific but timeless.

Catherine Charlwood

Don’t Mention the Guns: Omission by Substitution in Simon Armitage’s Killing Time Abstract: This article reads closely the section of Simon Armitage’s Killing Time (1999), which retells the Columbine High School Massacre. Pointedly omitting the key word “gun,” Armitage recasts events in floral terms, blackly emphasizing bountifulness and benevolence. Armitage ironizes the elegiac trope of the hope of new life since the “whole botanical digest” ends lives. In attending to Armitage’s manipulations of poetic devices, this article considers how, through its central omission and substitution of an alternative, the poem criticizes not just gun culture but also news media and societal responses. Armitage never omits to observe the strict formal constraints of the poem, again highlighting the missing through delivering on the reader’s expectations in a variety of other ways. Interdisciplinary with psychology, this article reads omission alongside the DRM (Deese–Roediger–McDermott) paradigm: a list of related words that omits a “lure” word sees subjects frequently recall the omitted word. The textual absence of “gun” does not prevent its cognitive present in the reader’s mind. The article also compares Armitage’s poetic (non-)guns with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) and Fred D’Aguiar’s Continental Shelf (2009) to highlight Armitage’s unusual practice. In a section from a long poem which memorializes the Columbine High School Massacre, poet Simon Armitage resolutely refuses to write about either guns or bullets. This crucial missing piece is glaring in its absence, as the poem moves from this particular event to the ongoing – and seemingly deadlocked – debate over gun legislation in America. Maintaining coherence to the form throughout, this section omits the key content in question. I want to argue that this omission by substitution puts the reader in the position of having to substitute back the original, and thus involves them in the true (deadly) content of the poem in a much more disturbing way than would have happened had Armitage written about events directly. I use the DRM paradigm from psychology to reflect on the cognitive processes behind omission by substitution and contrast Armitage’s practice with Fred D’Aguiar’s “Elegies,” written after the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, where D’Aguiar taught and in which he lost a student. Throughout, I am interested in Armitage’s interactions with the elegy tradition through his choice of

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-009

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flowers for his substitution, as well how poetic omissions can highlight the modern surfeit of news media. As an afterword, I recount my experiences of teaching Armitage’s poem to secondary school students as proof of the fact that – to rephrase Auden – poetry makes a lot happen. Killing Time is a 1,000-line poem in several sections, which was commissioned by the New Millennium Experience Company as part of Armitage’s role as the official millennium poet. As part of his residency, Armitage visited the “12 regions covered by the NMEC,” but he is aware that the resulting poem was perhaps not quite what the commissioners had in mind and that “I was dealing with bigger issues” than how different areas spent their millennium funds.1 Killing Time was also produced as a broadcast for BBC Radio 3 and as a 90-minute program by Century Films for Channel 4, starring Chris Eccleston as ‘Millennium Man.’ Neither of these versions is still available for public consumption, and in the long run, the textual version is the only one which has stood the test of time. Of the 1,000 lines of this book-length poem, I am interested in 80, those which retell the events of April 20, 1999, when two students opened fire at Columbine High School. These boys killed twelve fellow students and one teacher, before committing suicide. Here are the opening lines of this section: Meanwhile, somewhere in the state of Colorado, armed to the teeth with thousands of flowers, two boys entered the front door of their own high school and for almost four hours gave floral tributes to fellow students and members of staff, beginning with red roses strewn amongst unsuspecting pupils during their lunch hour, followed by posies of peace lilies and wild orchids.2

Armitage is deliberately vague on the persons and places involved – “somewhere,” “two boys” – but resolutely specifies the many different varieties of flower complicit in this event. Even this opening displays many of the features which characterize the section. It is, in some ways, overly poetic: flowery in technique as well as imagery. There is an abundance of alliteration (“flowers,” “front,” “four,” “floral,”), but this speaks to the quantity of weaponry and destruction the “two boys” have both brought and wrought. Armitage uses the line break to its full effect here, preparing the reader to receive some kind of firearm with “armed to the  Robert Potts, “Mean Time” (December 15, 1999), The Guardian, (acc. 06 October 2021).  Simon Armitage, Killing Time (London: Faber, 1999): 22; further references in the text, abbreviated as “KT.”

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teeth,” but meeting “with thousands of flowers,” not so much disappoints as defiles expectations, as the beautiful is brought into collision with the deadly, the natural with one of humankind’s worst inventions. This is not the only moment in Killing Time where Armitage omits the name of the weapon and rebrands it. In recounting the 1999 nail bombing attacks which targeted London locations associated with non-white and gay communities, Armitage offers This season, luggage containing terrible thoughts was left in Brixton, Soho and Brick Lane, the kind which scatters the baggage of one man’s mind into the public’s brain. (KT, 28)

It is “thoughts” not nails which attack, emphasizing the ideology behind the plot. Yet, Armitage opening with “This season” seems to begin a fashion directive – the language of the media is never far from the tragic events retold. The most overt device in the Columbine section is the metaphorical framing of flowers: Armitage makes a clear omission of “guns,” “bullets,” or any associated words. It is their conspicuous absence that makes them so horribly present in the reader’s imagination. While Dennis O’Driscoll, with scant praise, claims that Armitage “handles the more tragic stories of 1999 with protective layers of metaphor [. . .], he makes effective use of a 1960s-style substitution of flowers for guns,” I would argue that this is anything but “protective” for the reader.3 This is metaphor at its most cognitively disturbing, since a young person “flowering for all their worth” would otherwise – figuratively – be achieving their full potential (indeed, “blossoming” is often used when an adolescent is newly thriving). Every word and image in Armitage’s poem, though, must be retro-translated to its gunrelated origin. This is more ironic when we consider that the name for the columbine comes from the Latin word for “dove,” so-called because the inverted flower looks like doves clustered in a ring. Armitage inverts the peace of this naming into floral violence. The line breaks are especially unsettling since “the colour-burst | of a dozen foxgloves” is as close as the reader gets to the brutalized bodies, and this delayed reaction (as we are re-routed by metaphor) makes it worse: the realization of the gunshot is borne of your reading brain, the connections you know to make. The metaphor also invites alternative situations and occasions: renaming the gunmen as “flower-boys” conjures up a wedding and a celebratory occasion, as well as  Dennis O’Driscoll, “Dome Laureate,” London Review of Books 22.9 (2000), (acc. 23 February 2022).

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reaffirming the shooters’ – and their victims’ – youth. Similarly, the lexical field around “medallions,” “such honours,” “were decorated” brings to mind the sort of civic ceremonies held post-terrorist-event to honor the bravery of individuals responding to extreme circumstances. The Columbine section is the fifth section to begin “Meanwhile” and have the same metrical and rhyme scheme. These are the sections that – formally at least – emulate Louis MacNeice’s long autobiographical poem Autumn Journal (1939), the poem in which, as Armitage states, Killing Time “had its roots.”4 Armitage follows a similar structure of continuous quatrains of varying line lengths, though Armitage’s largely follow a pattern of a longer line (of around thirteen syllables) followed by a shorter rhyming line (of around six syllables). However, while MacNeice’s poem is set against the backdrop of war-anticipating London (Autumn Journal was written during 1938), the tenor of the work is personal and reflective. By contrast, Killing Time maintains its detached stance of watching the news events of 1999 unfold, if not unmoved then certainly unable to stop and dwell on this one moment among many. “Meanwhile” speaks to the poem’s concerns over simultaneity and time collapsed in on, or exploded out of, itself. But “meanwhile” conjures up the related word “elsewhere”: in the meantime, while you were looking over there, this other event was happening in another location. In this consideration, Armitage calls to mind Auden’s observation about tragedy in ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ that “suffering [. . .] takes place | While someone else is eating,” while other human, animal and plant life continues without any apparent concern for this particular tragic happenstance.5 For others in Auden’s poem, “it was not an important failure,” and anyway, they “Had somewhere to get to”: like Armitage’s individual news events pulled from the multitude of stories (in a single year, 1999), these events will matter more to some than others – and will quickly be overtaken by others.6 “Meanwhile,” then, is the casual introduction as the poem pans round to lock frame onto a horrific event, to bear witness and refuse to look elsewhere until it has been

 Alex MacDonald, “Jaundiced Reality: Simon Armitage Interviewed” (October 12, 2014), The Quietus (acc. 28 September 2021).  W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux-Arts,” in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1994): 179–179, 179. Parallel with the composition of Autumn Journal, Auden’s poem was written in “December 1938” (179). The connection to Auden seems confirmed by Killing Time’s reference to “a sky-diving stunt-parachutist over Villa Park,” who “falls like Icarus out of the sun and onto the terrace,” though to advertize the new football season and without any apparent tragic overtones (KT, 15).  Auden, “Musée,” 179.

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witnessed, all the while remaining ambivalent in tone about the good such witnessing will do. One of the awkward aspects of this section is that the reader watches first from the perspective of the killers, then gathered observers of the tragedy, before the poem moves into a debate about gun culture more generally. While it is not in the first person, the poem sees things happen to the victims rather than occupying their subject position: “Therefore a daffodil | was tucked behind the ear | of a boy in a baseball hat, and marigolds and peonies | threaded through the hair | of those caught on the stairs or spotted along corridors” (KT, 22). The line of the poem follows the trajectory of what is, secondarily, a bullet, the misplaced delicacy of “threaded” mimicking the enjambment which refuses to halt the ammunition, horticultural as it may present as. The reader, then, seems to make events happen by following the logic of the form of the poem, and while the content is disguised (flowers in the place of guns and bullets), it is clear as to what is really being talked about. Indeed, this omission by substitution does not prevent the absent guns from appearing in the mind of the reader. Throughout this section, Armitage uses plenty of words and phrases which call to mind the unmentioned weapons: “armed to the teeth,” “point blank,” “right to carry.” This matters because psychology has long been interested in the power of association to awaken false memories of unseen words. In 1959, James Deese published “On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall,” an article in which he proved how easily people would falsely remember a word being present in a list containing associated words but not the word itself. Asked to recall immediately as many words as they could from a list of twelve words, people would readily supply “extra-list intrusions. These are items which occur during recall but which come from none of the lists presented.”7 Deese characterizes the presence of the purposely omitted word as “intrusions,” making their presence felt despite not being invited through their inclusion. He is referring to these words intruding into the correct recall of items given to the subject to learn during the experiment, but this characterization also emphasizes the lack of control a human subject has over this process: the “intruding” words are so strongly associated with those actually heard that they are given as if present. Deese’s findings went largely unnoticed until they were picked up in a 1995 article by Henry L. Roediger III and Kathleen B. McDermott: “Creating False Memories: Remembering Words Not Presented in Lists” (the resulting “DRM paradigm” in psychology is named for Deese, Roediger and McDermott). Roediger

 James Deese, “On the Prediction of Occurrence of Particular Verbal Intrusions in Immediate Recall,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 58.1 (1959): 17–22, 17.

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and McDermott replicated and extended Deese’s findings, such that when given a list of the words “bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, wake, night, blanket, doze, slumber, snore, pillow, peace, yawn, drowsy,” subjects would falsely remember the word “sleep” as appearing in the list.8 They added weight to the finding of false memories by asking subjects in experiment 2 to also do a recognition test on items previously presented. Upon seeing a long list of words, subjects were asked to judge them as “old” (seen before) or “new.” If judged as “old,” subjects were further instructed that they should further distinguish between remembering and knowing [. . .] Essentially, subjects were told that a remember judgment should be made for items for which they had a vivid memory of the actual presentation; know judgements were reserved for items that they were sure had been presented but for which they lacked the feeling of remembering the actual occurrence of the words.9

Beyond showing that previous recall encouraged further recall, then, Roediger and McDermott revealed something of “the phenomenological experience of the subjects: They did not just claim that the nonpresented items were familiar; rather, they claimed to remember their occurrence.”10 What Deese termed an “extra-list intrusion” becomes in Roediger and McDermott’s article a “critical nonpresented word” and, later, “critical lure,” emphasizing the temptation inherent within the experiment.11 Words with powerful associations to other words can cause people to remember falsely their presentation. Read in light of the DRM paradigm, Armitage’s passage about Columbine becomes a cognitive set-up, omitting the words it so firmly seeks to plant in the unconsciousness mind of the reader. Omitting crucial words is not new in poetry, especially poetry dealing with death. Rather than euphemism, omission by substitution allows the whole situation to be recast in other terms. Since “sleep” is a critical lure word in all the above experiments, we might consider Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal,” which substitutes a kind of sleep in the place of death, but which displays none of euphemism’s ameliorating capacity. From the intangible realm of “slumber,” the reader is quickly brought back to the tangible ground (even if “she” can no longer “feel | The touch of earthly years”).12 Wordsworth omits the  Henry L. Roediger III and Kathleen B. McDermott “Creating False Memories: Remembering Words Not Presented in Lists,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 21.4 (1995): 803–814, 807.  Roediger and McDermott, “Creating False Memories,” 807.  Roediger and McDermott, “Creating False Memories,” 811.  Roediger and McDermott, “Creating False Memories,” 805–806.  William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads [1968], ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Taylor & Francis, 2005): 199.

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coffin and any comforting ritual or ceremony of burial, and substitutes instead the image of her “Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course | With rocks and stones and trees!”13 This co-opting of Lucy into a violent and unceasing process substitutes the elegy’s usual relationship with nature as one of rebirth with one of joining only a mechanical process. Throughout, Wordsworth falls into line with ballad form, making his perhaps contentious content all the more arresting. Armitage’s poem, then, draws on poetic tropes and possibilities which have long been exploited, but he levels them at a thoroughly modern topic, that of gun violence. This collision of poetic technique and the starkest of news stories creates something which can stop us in our tracks. Books, if not poetry, were already part of the Columbine narrative, since the most serious violence occurred “in the school library,” as the poem records (KT, 22). Once again, “individuals were singled out for attention” by the gunmen, if not the poet. The only definitive names are the floral labels, “a boy in a baseball hat” the most individual victim the reader is prompted to visualize in the imagination (KT, 22). Armitage’s poem also speaks to the elegiac tradition, as noticed by Katy Shaw in her 2018 monograph Hauntology. She notes that Killing Time is written with a parodic awareness of all the historic events and literary texts that precede it. Through a combination of poetic retrospection, scathing satire, and ironic elegy [. . .] Armitage offers poetry as a form of protest.14

She makes an unsubstantiated claim that “the first section offers a parody of Grey’s [sic] earlier ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard.”’15 While I don’t see that, Gray’s famous flower stanza concerning the “wast[ing]” of human life haunts Armitage’s version. Armitage radically overhauls the tradition of the pastoral elegy here, since nature is not that into which the dead are subsumed and from whence new life springs, but figures as the cause of death: this is nature as life-ending rather than as offering regeneration. It is also nature as something disposable, since the flowers mentioned are cut flowers (reminiscent of those that decorate coffins and graves – indeed, though it is “red roses” which are “strewn amongst unsuspecting pupils,” bodies too can be strewn, or flowers otherwise strewn across graves and memorials) (KT, 22). While the bullet-flowers are cut, however, those which represent the buzz of tragedy on which the news media can feed are “in full bloom,”

 Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 199.  Katy Shaw, Hauntology: The Presence of the Past in Twenty-First Century English Literature (Cham, CH: Palgrave, 2018): 28.  Shaw, Hauntology, 28.

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able to be visited periodically by “butterflies” and “honey bees” (KT, 23). Armitage subtly allows for the continued growth of the media frenzy around such tragedies. With living plants in place of guns, guns are seen as organic, as natural. Armitage’s floral imagery may have been picked up from a more unexpected source. In a recent lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, “On Lists,” Armitage praised Marianne Moore’s early poem ‘Steeple-Jack.’ His description of it could equally apply to his own Columbine elegy: he refers to “the superabundant, riotous digest of flora that springs up unannounced” and speaks of “being inundated and intoxicated by nature’s profusion and variety.”16 Compare this praise with the “veritable rain-forest of plants” and “whole botanical digest of one species or another” with which Armitage phrases the arsenal of weaponry unleashed at Columbine. Perhaps Moore inspired Armitage’s own “profusion,” but in a context with deadlier outcomes. In foregrounding the natural world, Armitage makes yet another subversion of elegy in that nature allows him to emphasize abundance. Nature is ever-overflowing, pervasive in her giving: and so are the gunmen. Detailing the booby traps and pipe bombs which the boys intended to cause further loss of life even after their own suicides, Armitage creates “garlands and bouquets [. . .] timed to erupt | like the first day of spring into the arms of those | who, during the first bout, | either by fate or chance had somehow been overlooked | and missed out” (KT, 23). Again, this is cognitively confusing because it sounds generous. We teach children not to leave people out, but this is malevolence disguised as benevolence. The ironic “outpouring of this nature” has an obvious double meaning, but I am more interested in the “outpouring” which Armitage has stressed throughout. For this section at least, the title ‘Killing Time’ takes on a different meaning. Switching from verb phrase to noun phrase, this is not an action performed by speaker or poet, but a factual description of a specific event. As Katy Shaw notes, As a popular phrase, ‘Killing Time’ is often understood to mean a mundane act used to pass time aimlessly, or to keep busy while waiting for something else to happen. In Armitage’s poem, the phrase takes on new political and social meanings, as well as evolutionary implications for humanity.17

As a whole, Killing Time displays what O’Driscoll calls “a revulsion [. . .] at the exploitative behaviour of the news media,” and Armitage himself admits that “News is business, and it ends as entertainment. Sometimes I find that stomach-

 Simon Armitage, “On Lists,” University of Oxford: Professor of Poetry Lectures (May 18, 2016) (acc. 23 February 2022), 06:51–06:59; 08:37–08:43.  Shaw, Hauntology, 39.

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churning.”18 We might think of Armitage’s later poem in which “You’re beautiful because you can’t work the remote control. | I’m ugly because of satellite television and twenty-four-hour rolling news.”19 Indeed, Killing Time begins by constructing a creature, “a new freak in the ape-house” which has “a huge appetite” for news (KT, 3). This news-hungry ape is the overarching presence in the poem, fed further by Columbine since the “crowd [. . .] gathered outside the school [. . .] dip their tongues in [. . .] savour the goings-on” (KT, 23). The news, and society’s appetite for it, is the villain across the entirety of the poem, but O’Driscoll misses the point to call Killing Time “an essentially public poem which reflects on our times and recollects some recent headline-grabbing stories.”20 In the Columbine section, Armitage is purposely forcing the reader to go beyond the arresting moment and “headline-grabbing” attention. In fact, Armitage’s telling is virtually the opposite of returning us to the headlines, since the “headline-grabbing” versions of the Columbine shooting were – as we shall see – couched in terms of “Gun spree” or “Bloodbath.” Jahan Ramazani notes that “We need elegies that, while imbued with grief, can hold up to the acid suspicions of our moment.”21 Refashioning both the second amendment and the nature versus nurture debate, Armitage satirizes the arguments which are rehearsed in the aftermath of shootings to no avail: the law of the land dictates that God, guts and gardening made the country what it is today and for as long as the flower industry can see to it things are staying that way. What they reckon is this: deny a person the right to carry flowers of his own and he’s liable to wind up on the business end of a flower somebody else has grown. As for the two boys, it’s back to the same old debate: is it something in the mind that grows from birth, like a seed, or is it society makes a person that kind? (KT, 24)

 O’Driscoll, “Dome Laureate,” n.p.; Potts, “Mean Time,” n.p.  Simon Armitage, “You’re Beautiful,” Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid (London: Faber & Faber, 2006): 17–20, 17.  O’Driscoll, “Dome Laureate,” n.p.  Jahan Ramazani, Poetry and Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1994): x.

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As Catherine Coussens notes, “The [final] question is ironic, since it is frequently the process of media exposure and publicity itself that generates and feeds such events, distorting and corrupting people’s responses to them.”22 Armitage’s replacements remain until the bitter end (though it’s fitting that NRA – the National Rifle Association, the most vociferous gun rights advocacy group, should rhyme with “staying that way”). His ironic double-meanings last too: “liable” hints at the legal battles surrounding gun control and the closing “that kind” bespeaks both personality type and yet reiterates the generosity which has characterized the whole shooting match. Unlike Armitage’s, Fred D’Aguiar’s poem “Elegies” is explicitly elegiac, engaging with the literary form from the title. The lyric ‘I’ pervades the twentyone-part poem, as this is a recounting of personal experience, an event from which the poet had no distance. D’Aguiar places his poem self-consciously within the literary canon, with references to Shakespeare, Dante and Charon from Greek mythology, as well as through his use of the sonnet form. Apart from the striking difference to Armitage, in that guns are allowed into the poem, D’Aguiar also specifies individuals. The reader meets Erin, the student who D’Aguiar lost in the shooting, not given just her name and talents, but even intimate knowledge of “her loping way | Of crossing a room.”23 For both Armitage and D’Aguiar, the moral problem in elegy seems to be less that the poet is earning aesthetically or financially from death – the “economic problem of mourning,” as Jahan Ramazani calls it – than that the news media is capitalizing on tragedy by cashing in on the spectacle of the story.24 Armitage’s “crowd” are drawn through suburbia by the rumour of flowers in full bloom, drawn through the air like butterflies to buddleia, like honey bees to honeysuckle, like hummingbirds dipping their tongues in, some to soak up such over-exuberance of thought, others to savour the goings-on. (KT, 23)

 Catherine Coussens, “British National Identity, Topicality and Tradition in the Poetry of Simon Armitage,” Cankaya University Journal of Arts and Sciences 1.9 (2008): 17–37, 28.  Fred D’Aguiar, Continental Shelf (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009): 55; further references in the text, abbreviated as “CS.”  Jahan Ramazani, Poetry and Mourning, 6.

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The supposed richness of the event is presented to the reader’s palate in the form of alliteration and sickening sibilance. This tragedy is edible, lapped up. D’Aguiar’s poem, set in 2007 (and thus within a world of advanced media possibilities compared to 1999), watches “live | Feed of the latest from Iraq” in the first sonnet, only to have this overtaken by domestic tragedy, so that by the seventh sonnet of Part One, “I sit glued with the rest of the country to the TV,” and in the eighth, people “search for the missing and ignore the journalists’ lenses | Thrust at them” (CS, 54). The eight sonnet ends with the truth that “While the dead lie in mortuaries, their names and faces shine | Through optic fibres and satellite feeds for all time” (CS, 54). Rather than the poet as the one with the moral quandary when it comes to memorializing, here the news media becomes the nucleus of Ramazani’s “economic problem of mourning,” ceaselessly profiting from suffering and tragedy. London-born to Guyanese parents but raised in Guyana, Fred D’Aguiar’s engagement with elegy reaches back into the history of an oppressed people. Part Nine of “Elegies,” when “A bone I throw to polemic, my dog,” draws upon imagery from slavery narratives, when African ancestors “were captured there, | And packed in ships in shackles” (CS, 81). Another of the poem’s specificities is the repeated mention of “April 16th,” the day of the shooting (CS, 59). This is a watershed, not just in time but in feeling, since “Today I am more black than white. | Yesterday I felt no allegiance to either | Race” (CS, 104). D’Aguiar’s poem raises the question of race within gun culture, and while his is more tangential (since the Virginia Tech shooter was Korean American and targeted no specific people), Claudia Rankine’s award-winning collection Citizen, about the implicit racism still hugely evident in America, foregrounds one of the major threads running through contemporary gun culture debates, that of guns in authoritative white hands, taking black lives. Rankine offers a list which begins in “In memory of Jordan Russell Davis.”25 The following seven lines each begin “In memory of,” followed by the name of an African-American man in chronological order of their deaths. All of these men were killed by white men, all of the perpetrators policemen (apart from the case of Davis), with six of eight victims being shot while unarmed. As the list goes on, the print starts to fade from the page. Following the last name (Freddie Gray Jr.), Rankine continues the list with just “In memory” twenty more times, until the page runs out, and type is barely visible. She leaves spaces for further names to be added (as indeed they could, since the list of unarmed black men shot by police in America has lengthened since the poem’s publication in 2015).

 Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (London: Penguin, 2015): 134.

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The print returns to full strength for the fragment on the facing page: because white men can’t police their imagination black men are dying.26

The consequence is left until last, the continuous verb coupled with the fading list, showing this to be an ongoing problem. As in Armitage, here it is the unsaid, the implicit, which makes the poem: after the list of the dead, the “police” as perpetrators are in the reader’s mind, yet Rankine doesn’t write “the police” as a noun, but makes this behavior a function of the verb “to police.” Those associated qualities of vigilance, maintaining order, offering protection are newly applied to the “imagination.” The simple noun form for verb form substitution forces the reader to rethink why there are so many similar instances of police shootings. Like Armitage’s characterization of the 1999 nail bombings as a problem of “terrible thoughts” harbored towards other people, Rankine similarly locates the issue not in the weaponry but in the minds of individuals. What happens in the mind seems to be a source of concerned fascination for these poets, even as they use their poetry to engineer an alternative form of thought experience. Armitage and D’Aguiar share floral imagery, for all their many differences. Part Twelve of “Elegies” opens In my dream I see a man who hands Out flowers to everyone he meets. People accept his roses when they catch His eyes and broad smile and before They bow, bless, hail or enquire, what for, He rushes to another surprised taker, Until he runs out and skips back [. . .] To his dorm, to load up with more. [. . .] How a man thrust flowers at everyone, And before they thanked him he moved on. (CS, 91)

Like Armitage, the enjambment (and here stanza break) allows a momentary suspension in which people could, “when they catch,” catch a bullet rather than “His eyes and broad smile,” though the latter might be even more distressing to read. There is a certain level of omission at this moment with the floral substitution, but  Rankine, Citizen, 135.

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within a more detail-driven telling overall. D’Aguiar has confirmed by email that he’s never read Killing Time, but the similarity is striking, both even beginning with “roses.” For D’Aguiar, “The flowers motif is an emblem of 1960s activism, from the anti-Vietnam movement to the Kent State University shootings in 1970,” but having read Armitage’s poem, the same ideas of overabundance, generosity and an act of harm disguised as one of peace recur.27 Ultimately, D’Aguiar’s poem feels too close to the event, too much but in a way different from Armitage’s 80-line abundance. Denying irony and satire autocracy, D’Aguiar’s poem is more indebted than Armitage’s to the traditional elegy, with its promise that “we know this week is not the end but new life begun” – a change appears promised, rather than another consideration of “the same old debate” with which Armitage moves on from Columbine (CS, 56; KT, 24). While the elegy traditionally cycles in terms of the season, giving way to new life and possibility, Armitage hints at a cyclical system of the recurrence of avoidable tragedy, with no intervention in sight. The power of Armitage’s omissions comes into stark focus when it is read alongside two reports of the tragedy in its immediate aftermath on April 21, 1999: one from a national paper (The New York Times) and the other from a local paper (The Denver Post). I have often taught the poem this way: preceded by these two articles. Students could see at a glance that The New York Times piece was more measured in its three-paragraph coverage, while The Denver Post showed signs of sensationalism and glorying in gory detail. The New York Times piece, “Gun Spree at Columbine High,” begins with a similar tone to Armitage’s: “Once again a routine school day was interrupted by blasts of gunfire.”28 There is an embittered sense of joining a roster of such events. However, with the title and first sentence, “guns” are very much on the article’s agenda. Despite admitting that many details of the attack are “not yet known,” the article uses the opportunity to discuss gun legislature at large. The final paragraph is introduced by “Meanwhile, it is not too early to begin drawing lessons.”29 While I make no claims that Armitage read this particular article, the sweep of his poem mimics the event-aftermath larger conclusions trajectory of news articles, while crucially omitting the key component of the event. If Armitage’s no-gun stance distinguishes it from the above article, then it is poles apart from The Denver Post. “Massacre at Columbine High: Bloodbath leaves  Fred D’Aguiar, “Re. Simon Armitage’s Killing Time,” personal email to the author (September 12, 2018).  “Gun Spree at Columbine High,” The New York Times (April 21, 1999) (acc. 07 October 2011).  “Gun Spree at Columbine High,” n.p.

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15 dead, 28 hurt”: the headline alone sets a precedent for heightening drama at every turn and a salacious news event. Reading more like an exercise in creative writing than the careful recounting the local community perhaps needed, The Denver Post uses similes, short sentences, and dynamic verbs to captivate the reader: “Smoke spread, and the fire alarm blared. In the chaos, some students sprinted to safety. Others were gunned down in the hall.”30 In immediate contrast to the above short sentences of the Post, the whole of Armitage’s Columbine section contains only one short sentence. Against the long lines which enjamb and extend, one long line is split with “No would not be taken for an answer (KT, 22).” Armitage pulls the reader up not for an image of violence but for another omission by substitution: the victims had no choice in being given such “floral tributes.” Thanks to the rhyme and meter, Armitage’s poem was harder (in the sense of emotionally taxing) for students to read and to hear. One of the most common responses I’ve heard from students is “I didn’t know poetry could do that”: this mediated experience of a real-life event – omitting the crucial nouns which no news reporter could afford to do – was more effective than a factual telling. Poetry is often dismissed as irrelevant, and this claim can only stand if students have no sense that poetry can be political. In sharing verse such as Armitage’s and D’Aguiar’s, we challenge students not only to engage with poetic devices, but to ruminate on contemporary issues. Both the Columbine High School Massacre and the Virginia Tech shootings were hailed as ‘the worst ever’ at their respective moments in time, but other shootings have since superseded this awkward title, some recently. While poetry does not have the shock-force of the graphic visuals spat out by rolling news, Armitage’s, D’Aguiar’s and Rankine’s poetry argues that this is precisely the point. Read silently in the individual reader’s head at the individual’s speed of processing, there is an enforced contemplation of the sickening facts of these deaths, which happen as the reader cognitively makes sense of them. As Jahan Ramazani notes, “At its best, the modern elegy offers [. . .] a spur to rethinking the vexed experience of grief in the modern world,” and poetry offers a different kind of “spur” than the news media can.31 In her afterword “Why Elegies?,” Melissa F. Zeiger notes that “these poems inevitably pose the question of separation – not just the final separation between

 Mark Obmascik, “Massacre at Columbine High: Bloodbath leaves 15 dead, 28 hurt,” The Denver Post (April 21, 1999). (acc. 07 October 2011).  Ramazani, Poetry and Mourning, ix.

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the living and the dead, but also a wide range of contingent disconnections.”32 So much discussion in the aftermath of a shooting goes into how the shooter(s) become so socially disenfranchised, and it is these social separations that poems concerning gun crime draw out, however elliptically. When asked about the prevalence of violence in his poetry and in relation to the Columbine passage “where violence is addressed indirectly,” Armitage said that I’m conscious that at times I am using violence in poems to make contact with other human beings. I felt that we were pretty sleepy as a species, and that a good jolt of a primitive human emotion could do the trick of waking people up.33

While he allows that in his later poems the violence is “more mediated,” it “is still there,” and as I have argued, this mediation is precisely what makes the violence disturbing for the reader. If Armitage seeks to provoke a “jolt,” D’Aguiar speaks of the need for the poet to experience something for themselves: “I think unless your nervous system is shaken up in some way, what comes out will really hardly ever impact anybody else because most of us are struggling with articulacy and with some real needs in the world.”34 These poems return the reader to those fundamental questions of how and why it can happen that such misplaced “munificence” is levelled at the innocent. Looking back at Armitage’s poem from the vantage point of 2022, with its ever-increasing proliferation of news media across various platforms (many of which didn’t exist in 1999), must give us pause. The wealth of news leaves us numb to many of its messages, and, perhaps in this age of digital media, poetry has a role to play in cognitively catching us out and forcing us to reconsider what individual events mean. In not giving the reader everything up front, Armitage allows us more room to realize how terribly events affect us. What might we omit that could, ironically, restore our sense of what is missing in society, or indeed in ourselves.

 Melissa F. Zeiger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1997): 168.  MacDonald, “Jaundiced Reality,” n.p.  Fred D’Aguair, “Elegy for the Tech,” The Documentary Podcast (April 16, 2008) (acc. 23 February 2022), 12:27–12:38.

Jochen Ecke

Omission and the Poetics of the EC Comics Twist: An Analysis of “Last Respects” (1951) and “Master Race” (1955) Abstract: In most publications about Feldstein and Krigstein’s influential comics story “Master Race,” the focus is on its serious subject matter: published in 1955, it was one of the first narrative treatments of the Holocaust in US popular culture. This essay proposes an alternative explanation as to why “Master Race” had an enormous influence on comics writers and artists such as Art Spiegelman. It contends that part of the story’s impact derives from its status as serialized fiction within the larger framework of its publisher, EC Comics. To demonstrate the dependency of “Master Race”’s narrative innovations on EC practices, the essay focuses on the uses of omission in the story to orchestrate the twist ending that characterizes most EC tales. While not revolutionary in the context of EC’s output, the changes “Master Race” makes to the EC approach to omission are designed to encourage re-readings of the story on the level of abstract interpretation and to foster the construction of authorship, even more so than is already characteristic of EC Comics’ offerings. “Master Race” therefore demonstrated to future generations of comics writers and artists that to evolve, the comics medium needed to thoroughly engage with its own history and poetics. When the short story “Master Race” was first published on the pages of the EC Comics anthology Impact in 1955, it went largely unnoticed, a victim of the decline of the publishing house at the time. But since then, critics and comic book creatives alike have consistently ranked it among the very best stories that EC put out.1 Questions of quality aside, it is doubtless among the most influential of EC tales. “Master Race,” García writes, continued to be rediscovered over subsequent decades by comics artists with authorial aspirations, who have sought a historical model to latch on to. It is no accident that [Art] Spiegelman [. . .] would co-author one of the first and most important articles about “Master Race,” twenty years after the publication of the comic, and that none other than

 Qiana J. Whitted, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2019): 99. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-010

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Spiegelman would set the foundation stone for the contemporary graphic novel with a comic about the Holocaust. A fine thread runs from “Master Race” to Maus.2

This essay is an attempt to explain the immense influence García describes, which cannot be merely attributed to the serious subject matter of the story, i.e., the Holocaust. Rather, I contend that the impact of “Master Race” can only be understood within the context of serialization. Specifically, “Master Race” makes use of the serialized strategies of omission that are typical of EC Comics. It heavily relies on the reader’s prior experience of and knowledge about these gapping strategies. While not revolutionary in the context of EC’s output, the changes “Master Race” makes to the conventional EC approach to omission are designed to encourage re-readings of the story on the level of abstract interpretation and to foster the construction of authorship, even more so than is already characteristic of EC Comics’ offerings. The story’s deep entanglement with EC’s brand of serialized storytelling is precisely why, on a first reading, the reasons for the story’s renown in the comics world may not be immediately apparent. Instead, readers used to highbrow fiction may be struck by the clear roots of “Master Race” in the cheerily vulgar conventions of US comic books at the time. Writer Al Feldstein and artist Bernie Krigstein tell the story of Carl Reissman, a German immigrant to the United States who, at least that is what we surmise after the first few pages, escaped the horrors of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and made the USA his new home in the hopes of escaping his traumatic past. However, the past quickly catches up with him. At the beginning of the story, we find Reissman sitting in a New York subway car when a gaunt man dressed entirely in black enters. Our protagonist immediately recognizes him as a figure from his (supposedly) harrowing personal history. A series of flashbacks then tells us more of Reissman’s experiences in Nazi Germany, and at the end of this analeptic montage, we discover that Reissman is not a victim at all: in fact, he is the former commander of BergenBelsen concentration camp, and the grim man in the opposite seat a past inmate who had sworn revenge against his tormentors. The swift resolution of the story finds the real victim chasing the terrified Reissman out of the subway car, off the platform and onto the tracks. A train entering the station ensures poetic justice. First-time readers may find themselves somewhat disappointed by a story often mentioned in the same breath as the overtly literary Maus. Some may find the twist ending trite, perhaps even disrespectful, considering the serious subject matter. Others may chuckle at the 1950s comic book-isms: at one point, for

 Santiago García, On the Graphic Novel, trans. Bruce Campbell (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2015): 86.

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example, Reissman’s anxiety is expressed in a speech bubble saying “Choke!”3 And in general, the multitude of prose captions by writer Al Feldstein may appear overly verbose and redundant. This, then, is where the concept of omission first becomes relevant for any analysis of “Master Race”: clearly, something is missing for readers who come to the story without prior knowledge of comics history in general and EC Comics in particular. What is absent most of all is the experience of serial storytelling, or as Whitted puts it: the experience of consuming a story such as “Master Race” “as part of a system of texts and contexts,”4 with “each story [. . .] participating in a larger tradition.”5 In other words: regular readers of EC Comics would have their sensibilities much more finely tuned to the stylistic and formal innovations of “Master Race.” They would immediately recognize how the story adheres to but also stretches and subverts the serialized narrative norm. EC published their tales in anthologies with titles such as Shock SuspenStories and Tales from the Crypt. These already give clear indications as to the genres published within their pages: in this case, suspense in the former, horror stories in the latter. However, opening the pages of such an anthology, seasoned readers already knew far more about their contents than just the genre – all this before scanning even a single panel. Here is publisher William (“Bill”) M. Gaines’s contemporary description of (some) EC conventions readers of “Master Race” would have been keenly aware of: You should know this about our horror books: we have no ghosts, devils, goblins or the like. We tolerate vampires and werewolves, if they follow tradition and behave the way respectable vampires and werewolves should. We love walking corpse stories. We’ll accept an occasional zombie or mummy. And we relish the contes cruels story. On the other hand, Shock SuspenStories do not contain supernaturalism. We want shock endings to wind up plain, logical suspense stories. Crime SuspenStories contain no shock. These are logical stories in which the villain tries to get away with murder – and probably does. No cops and robbers stories. Virtue doesn’t always have to triumph.6

It is readily apparent that Gaines conceives of the EC stories as governed by conventions and narrative norms here: vampire stories that do not deviate from the basic Bram Stoker rulebook, suspense stories that hinge on the readers’ superior knowledge of the storyworld as compared to the protagonist(s), and

 Al Feldstein and Bernie Krigstein, “Master Race” [1955], in The EC Archives: Impact, ed. Daniel Chabon (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2020): 33–39, 34, panel eight; further references in the text, abbreviated as “MR.”  Whitted, EC Comics, 27.  Whitted, EC Comics, 29.  William Gaines qtd. in Whitted, EC Comics, 28.

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above all, stories with “shock” or twist endings. David Hajdu describes these endings, mostly concocted by writer Al Feldstein, in much less flattering terms: Feldstein’s stories, each done in a few hours’ time by a production-oriented writer of limited imagination, grew repetitive, despite the boldness and shock value of their content. Emulating the O. Henry short stories he remembered from elementary school, Feldstein gave every EC story a “twist” ending [. . .]. The reader, expecting the twist, knows the ending from the first page. Among the cheapest of literary tricks, the surprise ending works best in the hands of a writer who anticipates the reader’s anticipation and respects it while he toys with it, understanding that the thrill lies not in the surprise but in the earning of it.7

There are too many blanket statements in Hajdu’s assessment. Many of Feldstein’s twist endings are, in fact, quite difficult to predict – both “Master Race” and “Last Respects” are good examples of this. And rather than being cheap tricks, the best EC twists will have considerable thematic repercussions for the entire story. At the very least, the insistent serialization of the shock ending turns it into more than a thrilling surprise on the final page: since readers anticipate the twist, they will scan the pages for hints and telling omissions. In short, they will inevitably become expert judges of what Jason Mittell has called an “operational aesthetic.” Rather than just enjoying the story on its own, readers will thus also take pleasure in “marveling at the craft required to pull off such narrative pyrotechnics” and become accustomed to analyzing the narrative skill involved in engineering the EC twist.8 In and of itself, this EC penchant for an operational aesthetic already constitutes an important step towards author-driven, more literary comic books, since it draws attention to writerly techniques and stylistic choices and thereby encourages the construction of authorship. Having established this basic framework, we need to consider how the EC operational aesthetic works by analyzing an example of the “normal” EC twist ending. This will provide us with a baseline against which to compare the modifications of the norm in “Master Race.” The story “Last Respects,” written by Al Feldstein and drawn by Graham Ingels, was first published on the pages of Tales from the Crypt in 1951, and it makes for a representative case study of the EC norm. The fragmentary presentation of its first page already demonstrates just how much the EC style is built on omission.9 In this case, the many gaps

 David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Picador, 2009): 184.  Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary TV Storytelling (New York and London: NY UP, 2015): 43.  Al Feldstein and Graham Ingels, “Last Respects!” [1951], in The EC Archives: Tales from the Crypt Volume 2 (Timonium, MD: Gemstone Publishing, 2007): 21–27, 19; further references in the text, abbreviated as “LR.”

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on the page are designed to remind us that a twist ending is waiting for us. The layout is made up of three panels, of which the first dominates the multi-frame of the page. Its vertical composition makes up almost half the page and shows a young man in front of a crypt entrance. His eyes lack pupils, which gives him a ghostly appearance. He is staring at the reader directly, his mournful gaze piercing the fourth wall in a moment of overt metalepsis. Importantly, this very first panel of the story lacks a caption that would clarify the narrative basics: when and where exactly this moment is situated in the story and how it fits into the larger causal chain. In and of itself, this omission is already going to be significant for the experienced EC reader, since the EC style heavily relies on such orienting prose captions. The entirety of “Last Respects” consists of 45 panels, of which only nine make do without such a caption. Even then, the other caption-less panels of the story are nowhere near as confusing as this first panel; their place in the spatio-temporal as well as causal order of the story is never in any doubt. In short, the omission of a caption here is designed to make the reader ask questions: When do the events depicted in the panel take place? Why? How do they fit into the larger story? Is the protagonist alive or (un-) dead? There are hints in the second and third panels of the page that allow for the formulation of a hypothesis. In the third panel, the same man can be seen entering a graveyard – the caption reads, “The rusty hinges squealed a horrifying protest as he pushed the cemetery gate open” (“LR,” 19). It is therefore likely that the first panel shows a flashforward: i.e., a point in time when the protagonist has already entered the graveyard. This hypothesis is further strengthened by the second panel. It shows the story’s presenter, “the old witch.” The presenter is another EC convention: each serial would be introduced by a ghoulish character extraneous to the actual storyworld. The old witch naturally has a bubbling cauldron sitting in front of her, and in the vapors rising from it, we can see a screaming, emaciated figure clutching its cheeks in horror. Readers need not be familiar with Macbeth to associate the figure of the witch with fortunetelling and visions of the future, and so are likely to take this as another hint that the first panel announces the twist ending in an underhand fashion, just like the hinges’ “horrifying protest” in the third panel suggest that crossing the threshold to the graveyard will lead to disaster. Finally, there is a third reason why readers are likely to formulate this hypothesis: the cover page or first narrative page of mainstream US comics very often presents an enigmatic, fragmentary, and somewhat

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unreliable prolepsis.10 The reader is thus insistently cued to scan the pages for the operational aesthetic of the twist ending being prepared. Other than evoking the operational aesthetic and the twist ending, this first page also makes use of omission in a different sense. The beginning in medias res creates another obvious gap: Why does this young man enter the graveyard? In a thought bubble, he states, “I . . . I’M COMING, ANNA . . . I’M COMING!” (“LR,” 19, panel 3). Who is this Anna to whom he is referring? Is she alive or dead? In short, what is the inciting event of the story? At this point it might be helpful to define different types of omissions or, as Meir Sternberg and David Bordwell call the phenomenon, gaps. They distinguish between temporary and permanent as well as diffuse and focused gaps. The idea of distinguishing between temporary and permanent gaps is rather self-explanatory: an omission is temporary if the omitted information is given at some point in the story; it is permanent if the gap is never filled. The omissions on the first page of “Last Respects” constitute focused gaps: they evoke clear, obvious questions on the reader’s side. If an omission does not imply such a clear-cut line of inquiry, we must consider it a diffuse gap. Finally, we need to consider how much attention is drawn to the process of omission itself. If a gap is flaunted, the narration unambiguously alerts us to the fact that parts of the story have been omitted. If the narration does not signal an omission, we may consider this a suppressed gap.11 The flaunted, focused gap that makes us wonder about the story’s inciting event is not going to be permanent. Instead, Feldstein and Ingels spend the next pages dutifully closing it, or rather: filling in part of the larger omitted backstory and thus opening further focused gaps that will later be filled as well. We enter the graveyard alongside the protagonist. In panel two of the second page, Anna is indeed revealed to be dead, since the protagonist invokes her in the following way: “HELP ME, ANNA! I DON’T KNOW MY WAY! GUIDE ME, ANNA! GUIDE ME TO YOUR GRAVE!” (“LR,” 20, panel 2 [emphasis in original]). We find out that our protagonist’s name is Anthony and that he was prohibited from attending Anna’s funeral, which makes us wonder why. Anthony has come to Anna’s grave to leave her a token of his affection, “one of those furry little animals they give away at amusement parks when you knock over the stack of bruised wooden bottles” (“LR,” 21, panel 2). This opens another focused gap concerning the origin

 For a discussion of flashbacks and flashforwards in US mainstream comics, see Jochen Ecke, The British Comic Book Invasion: Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison and the Evolution of the American Style (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019): 55–65.  See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985): 55 ; Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978): 50–51.

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story of this shared totem. The entire backstory will be filled in via a long, entirely conventional flashback: Anthony and Anna are doomed lovers; she is from a wealthy family, he is the family’s chauffeur. As Anna is denied marriage to Anthony because of their class difference, she dies of grief; Anthony is not even allowed to attend the funeral. The well-worn plot is not necessarily the focus here. Instead, readers will be scanning the pages for hints as to the twist ending. Here are a few examples of what they might find: on the third story page (“LR,” 21, panel 4), Graham Ingels renders the carnival that Anna and Anthony visit together as the opposite of a joyful place: backlit, the rollercoaster in the background and the merry-go-round in the foreground of the panel end up looking sinister; happy children become an uncanny sight when rendered purely in black outline. In the next panel, the carny at the shooting gallery calls Anthony “dead-eye” – a reference to his throwing skills which win the stuffed animal for Anna, but the allusion to Anthony’s dead eyes in the very first panel may be equally salient for the perceptive reader. On the same page, Anna’s question “Why does it have to end? Why?” (“LR,” 21, panel 6) clearly has a double meaning as well, referring to both the day the couple have spent together and their later ignominious end. Such foreshadowing devices abound: e.g., on the next page (“LR,” 22), we see Anthony and Anna embracing each other through a window. They are rendered only in outline as though already dead, both phantoms in the underworld, rain streaking down the windowpane like tears. Still, these obvious hints at the couple’s future do not really go beyond what has already been established. Anna is going to die; Anthony is going to be miserable (and he might end up dead, too). It is even conceivable that Feldstein makes fun of attempts to guess the ending based on these obvious instances of foreshadowing by first engineering a fake twist ending before the actual shock ending is revealed on the final page. It turns out that before coming to the graveyard, Anthony has killed Anna’s uncle, her only living relative and the man responsible for keeping the lovers apart. An offscreen murder motivated by revenge is clearly anticlimactic and far from effective as a surprise dénouement, but for some readers, this might already register as a (disappointing) ending. The actual hints at the story’s climax are much more subtle and more reliant on omission. Often, they are cued by a lack of multimodal redundancy. Here is what I mean by this: in most cases, the prose captions throughout the story make the visual narration in the panel underneath redundant in some manner (and vice-versa). Consider, for example, the second panel of the second story page (“LR,” 20). We see Anthony, a paper bag clasped in his hands; he is frantically searching for Anna’s mausoleum in the graveyard. The caption above the panel states: “Up the grass carpeted path, past the graves of those long dead, the man . . . Anthony Colton . . . stumbled! In his hands he clutched a paper bag!

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Every so often he stopped and looked about . . . searching . . . searching . . . .” In short, every causally important detail – the search, the paper bag, the protagonist’s state of mind – is cued in both narrative modes, i.e., both verbally and visually. However, the hints that potentially give away the twist ending are often only provided in one narrative mode, and in many cases, it is the much more ambiguous visual mode. If at all, these hints will then only become apparent on a second or third reading. The gaps or omissions they point to thus become liminal cases: they are far removed from being flaunted gaps, but not quite the suppressive kind either. These hints are present from the very first page, and they are closely tied to the story’s central theme, i.e., the dynamics of social exclusion and inclusion. After all, Anthony and Anna cannot be together because of class differences. This theme is introduced in a subtle and abstract manner in the first and third panels of the first story page (“LR,” 19). The first panel shows the protagonist inside the graveyard, close to Anna’s mausoleum; the third panel depicts him the moment before he steps inside the cemetery to find Anna’s final resting place. If this is what he so clearly desires – to be near Anna – why does he look so miserable and wraith-like in the first panel after he has reached his goal? This is the question that will get the reader much closer to guessing the twist ending; it is also the question that inevitably leads to appropriations of the story in abstract terms, i.e., social class. On a re-reading, we may now recognize how Feldstein and Ingels make a pattern of this inside/outside theme throughout. When Anthony reaches the mausoleum, his anxiety is immediately that he might have to stay outside: “Anthony breathed a silent prayer as he approached the huge metal door! Suppose it should be locked!” (“LR,” 20, panel 5). When he lays down the stuffed animal on the coffin, he exclaims: “ . . . It’s no good this way, Anna! You can’t feel it . . . out here . . . ” (“LR,” 21, panel 3). The previously mentioned panel showing the lovers through a rain-streaked window clearly plays into this theme, too, with separation and tragedy waiting just outside the window. Additionally, many of the story’s panels show doorways and characters on thresholds: Anna on the way out of Anthony’s humble apartment above the garage (“LR,” 22, panel 3), her uncle refusing to let Anthony enter the house as Anna is withering away upstairs (23), and then finally Anthony trapped inside the mausoleum with Anna’s dead body, unable to open the door that has fallen shut. This is the real twist ending: in a clear perversion of their relationship while alive, Anthony is going to cannibalize her corpse before dying of the formaldehyde used to preserve Anna’s corpse. This is also an obvious, cruel twist on his former desires to cross class boundaries – hence his ghostly, crestfallen appearance in the story’s very first panel.

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Importantly, this abstract interpretation of the story is a secondary concern of the narration. Readers may just as well be satisfied with the shocking conclusion, the implication of grand guignol without its visual representation. Anthony’s turn to cannibalism is only implied in the dialogue in the captions. We never get to see him in the act of cannibalism, nor are we allowed to glimpse Anna’s “white picked-clean bones” (“LR,” 25, panel 6). In and of itself, the narrative experience of Anthony’s act of transgression would have been political, forcing readers to connect with immediately recognizable characters, such as our chauffeur protagonist, who end up overstepping fundamental ethical boundaries, “‘normal’ people who happened to possess a disturbing capacity for murder,” as is often the case in EC stories.12 But with each re-reading, “Last Respects” may become more clearly indicative of the fact that “in EC comic books American society was not a ‘melting pot’ that dissolved racial, religious, ethnic, and political differences into a national consensus.”13 Instead, the story suggests that the American myth of a classless society is precisely that. “Master Race” is not so different from this normal EC fare. In fact, it follows the structural template of “Last Respects” almost perfectly. “Master Race,” too, begins in medias res, with our protagonist Carl Reissman descending the stairs into the New York subway (“MR,” 33). The first panel’s caption immediately opens a flaunted, focused gap, i.e., Reissman’s past: “You can never forget, can you, Carl Reissman? Even here . . . in America . . . ten years and thousands of miles away from your native Germany . . . You can never forget those bloody war years” (“MR,” 33, panel 1[emphases in original]). Just like in “Last Respects,” the first two pages will then provide some exposition, mostly via verbal flashbacks in the prose captions, while flaunting further omissions at the same time, most notably: Who is the gaunt-looking man that enters the subway train and inspires such fear in Reissman? Just as mechanically and in precise analogy to the flashback in “Last Respects,” story page three sees the beginning of a long, conventional analepsis that will gradually fill these flaunted, focused gaps (“MR,” 35–38). The twist ending is delivered in the final panel of the penultimate page – Reissman was actually the officer in charge of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp – and the dénouement sees the transgressor punished (“MR,” 39–40). Why would prominent comics artists such as Art Spiegelman single out “Master Race” among EC’s output then? Partly, the reason must be the extraordinarily serious subject matter. After all, “[t]he Holocaust was an unusual theme

 Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003): 147.  Wright, Comic Book Nation, 142.

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for a comic book – in fact, it was an almost unheard of theme in Western mass media” at the time.14 However, “Master Race” is not at all a singularity in EC’s output. The overt treatment of a very difficult subject matter is typical of a certain kind of EC story often called a “preachy,” a term coined by Al Feldstein and William Gaines themselves: We came out of World War II, and we all had great hopes for the marvelous world of tomorrow. And when we started writing our comics, I guess one of the things that was in the back of our minds was to do a little proselytizing in terms of social conscience. So Bill and I would try to include, mainly in our science fiction, but I think we did it in the horror books too, what we called ‘preachy’ stories – our own term for a story that had some sort of plea to improve our social standards.15

The preachies have their detractors. As Whitted notes, “[c]ritics of the preachies do not hesitate to characterize the stories as ham-fisted and overly didactic, while admirers speak just as effusively of the guts it took to print them.”16 At first glance, the unambiguous moral of “Master Race” might lead to a similar conclusion – that “Master Race” is overly didactic. Readers may argue whether Anthony in “Last Respects” deserves his gruesome fate, but “Master Race” leaves no doubt that Reissman’s death should be construed as poetic justice. However, the story’s impact does not derive from its simple moral punchline – i.e., “Nazis are bad.” Instead, it is based on the stylistic and formal texture that makes re-reading “Master Race” for abstract interpretation(s) not an option, as in the case of “Last Respects,” but almost mandatory. Most critics agree that this is largely due to Bernie Krigstein’s extraordinary efforts: After receiving Feldstein’s scripted springboards, Krigstein, a Jewish, New York-born artist, asked for permission to expand the story and spent a month splicing and rearranging the panels into an eight-page narrative unlike any that EC had published before. Krigstein incorporates elements of Futurism and pop art into the comic, as Santiago García notes, and even includes wordless sequences in an effort to decompress the copious text of Feldstein’s captions and to add a more complex sense of pacing to the visual narrative.17

Krigstein’s artful reworking of the story is certainly an important factor that distinguishes it from the typical EC tale. Much more so than Ingels in “Last Respects,” he draws attention to his stylistic choices while obscuring their full meaning until the twist ending, making re-readings for the potential significance behind them more likely. The story’s potential for re-reading is ritually cited in    

García, On the Graphic Novel, 84. Al Feldstein qtd. in Whitted, EC Comics, 3. Whitted, EC Comics, 5. Whitted, EC Comics, 99.

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the secondary literature, most prominently in Benson, Kasakove and Spiegelman’s groundbreaking analysis of the story: “[. . .] ‘Master Race’ has layers of meaning and detail both in its form and visual content which will yield the alert reader new enjoyment beyond the immediately apparent with each rereading.”18 Additionally, I argue that Krigstein radicalizes the EC tendency to force us into the transgressive protagonist’s subjectivity. This, not the simplistic moral, makes for the true impact of the twist ending: the fact that we have been unwittingly empathizing with a mass murderer for most of the story. It is essential to point out again that all these innovations are gradual changes rather than revolutionary. They rely on and build upon the narrative conventions established in years of normative EC practice, in stories such as “Last Respects.” Let us consider the evidence for these contentions. On a first reading, readers are likely to consider most of Krigstein’s visual choices as cues to assume Reissman’s anxious, paranoid subjectivity, which is most likely to be construed as a kind of tortured post-traumatic state. For example, Krigstein consistently uses frames within the frame to convey a feeling of being trapped alongside Reissman. The very first panel of “Master Race” shows him going down the stairs into the New York subway (“MR,” 33, panel 1). The panel is already small, but Krigstein chooses to box in the protagonist even more by placing him in a narrow corridor of light. The rest of the staircase is characterized by the absence of light, which creates a frame within the frame. The angle on the composition is slightly skewed, suggesting Reissman’s paranoid, unhinged state of mind. As Reissman buys his subway ticket, we see him trapped behind bars (“MR,” 33, panel 2). He is similarly framed by bars as he crosses the barrier that leads him to the train platform (“MR,” 33, panel 3). In panel five of the same page, in a clear instance of foreshadowing, Krigstein chooses a flat composition that makes it look as though the subway train is coming straight towards Reissman, about to crash into him. These choices are likely inspired either by film noir or its German antecedent, Expressionism: the material world as representation of an alienated, lonely, and neurotic subjectivity. As if these stylistic flourishes were not enough, the final panel of the first page shows the arrival of the subway in an image referencing Futurist art. We see a man and a woman through the windows of the car, both reproduced multiple times in individual, film-like frames that are meant to suggest the visual rush of the speeding train at proximity. In short: in Krigstein’s art, the subway becomes a metaphor for Reissman’s emotional state. At the same time, the level of visual sophistication and

 John Benson et al., “An Examination of ‘Master Race’ [1975],” in A Comics Studies Reader, ed. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2009): 288–305, 288.

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overt abstraction goes beyond what readers usually got to see in EC comics, drawing attention to authorship and compelling the construction of authorial intention. In “Last Respects,” these abstractions were almost hidden away; here, they could not be more obvious. It is equally important to consider how Krigstein chooses to end this skillful manipulation of the reader. The insistent cues for subjectivity continue until the penultimate page (“MR,” 39). Then the visual narration abruptly changes, depriving us of all intimacy with Reissman. The first half of the page layout is still dedicated to conveying the protagonist’s terror, as the former concentration camp inmate gets up from his seat and chases him out of the subway car. The first three panels are extremely narrow, continuing the visual motif of entrapment. Reissman’s hunched body is dwarfed by the gaunt, dark figure of the former prisoner in the foreground. We do not get to see the assailant’s facial expression, but Reissman’s face is full of terror. Panels four to six convey the protagonist’s panicked state of mind by showing him halfway out of frame, his body just as fragmented as his state of mind. And then for the remaining one and a half pages, these cues for Reissman’s subjectivity cease abruptly. Panel eight shows the train platform in an extreme long shot, a symbolic pulling away from the protagonist that foreshadows the reader’s future moral repulsion. Panels ten and eleven, the final panels of the page, associate Reissman with the color yellow for the first time: the hue signifying fascist fervor and Nazi atrocities throughout the story.19 The verbal caption that Bergen-Belsen was “the camp that you [=Reissman] commanded” (“MR,” 39, panel 11) makes redundant what is already quite clear in the visual narration. Instead of staying attached to Reissman’s inner state, the narration now gives the few remaining cues for subjectivity to the former concentration camp inmate, most obviously in panel eleven of the final story page (“MR,” 40). Here, Krigstein repeats the Futurist representation of the speeding train entering the subway station, but this time, we assume the stranger’s point of view. This switch clearly signifies that, given the revelation of Reissman’s genocidal past, the subjective attachment to him is no longer sustainable; rightfully, we should pity the gaunt stranger. This is perfectly in keeping with readings of the story that assign it a simple moral message. However, there is also an important omission on this final page that would be immediately obvious to the seasoned EC reader: there are no prose captions. As previously pointed out, this omission is highly unusual in an EC story and

 For examples, see “MR,” 35, panels 3, 4, 5 and 7; page 36, panels 1 and 3; as well as page 37, panels 3 and 4.

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likely to be entirely of Feldstein’s devising. The effect is more than just a decompression of Reissman’s violent death, shown in many narrow panels that depict only very short moments in time: Reissman tripping, Reissman failing to regain his balance, and finally Reissman falling onto the subway tracks. Rather, the flaunted absence of the omniscient second-person narrator can be construed as signifying and reinforcing the loss of self that readers may experience when the character they have been empathizing with is revealed to be a mass murderer. This final page of “Master Race,” then, becomes one of the most accomplished examples of a more general tendency of this particular strain of EC story: “[T]he preachies consistently took advantage of the visual and verbal medium of comics to disassociate white normative subjectivity from virtuous qualities such as innocence, courage, and moral authority.”20 In “Master Race,” the reader’s own confidence in their innocence, courage, and moral authority is thus destabilized, and Krigstein’s stylistic choices draw attention to the narrative manipulation that achieves this destabilization. Having been subtly coaxed to sympathize with a Nazi, the reader may now feel compelled to re-read the story and examine the way in which the narration accomplished this. Such a reappraisal may end up a master class in visual literacy. Witness Krigstein teaching the re-reader that point of view matters, for example: on page 36, the visual narration shows us three different views of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In the first of these panels (“MR,” 36, panel 5), our point of view is clearly outside the barbed-wire fence, looking in at the emaciated prisoners. In panel six, too, our point of view is that of the perpetrator, since we are looking at the camp from a guard tower, a large machine gun dominating the foreground of the frame. Finally, the sequence moves beyond the walls of the camp, showing ordinary German citizens covering their noses with handkerchiefs to mask what is presumably the awful smell coming from the chimneys behind the walls. This very clear visual pattern is easy to overlook on a first reading, especially because the prose captions never draw attention to it. The panels read as objective, almost documentarian representation of the material realities of the camp. But on a second or third reading, it may become obvious that they represent Reissman’s point of view. The sequence thus not only shows Reissman’s complicity, but it also clearly points to the general German population’s guilt – and potentially the reader’s, whose own sense of moral righteousness may have been destabilized by their first reading of the story. As re-readers scan the pages for more of these covertly subjective panels, they will find them. There is the panel showing “mad experiments with human guinea pigs” (37, panel 1), which

 Whitted, EC Comics, 53.

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on a first reading looks merely like a matter-of-fact high angle shot of an operating theater, the four surgeons arranged around the table in such a manner as to block our view of the gory details. On a re-reading, we may wonder why we did not immediately recognize that this cannot possibly be the victim’s point of view – it would have shown the masked faces of the surgeons from a low angle. Instead, this is the perspective of a cool observer, looking at the obscene experiments from the elevated position of a superior officer. In the next panel, we see an officers’ lounge, a lamp in the foreground, which the verbal narration identifies as one of several in the camp whose bulbs are “glowing through their human-skin-shades.” How could an inmate know of this or assume this point of view? This, then, is how “Master Race” becomes so influential: first of all, it demonstrates to prospective comics writers and artists like Art Spiegelman that, to create the experience of innovation for the reader, a deep engagement with convention and stylistic tradition is necessary. After all, Krigstein’s reworking of Feldstein’s script shows a keen understanding of the EC style of narration in general and its strategies of omission in particular. On the final story page, Krigstein knows when to decompress the visual narration and get rid of Feldstein’s prose to make the reader feel the profound loss of identity, as we no longer gain insights into Reissman’s state of mind. In the long flashback in the story’s middle section, he skillfully manipulates the reader into thinking that his images lack the subjectivity that Feldstein’s second-person narration primarily tries to convey. In fact, the opposite is true, as revealed by the rereading process. His approach is thus largely based on increasing the patterns of omission typical of EC Comics. However, Krigstein knows when the inverse method might create the thrilling impression of narrative innovation as well. For example, while EC’s narrative norm often chooses not to draw attention to abstract thematic patterns, “Master Race” makes abstraction its focus, especially on a re-reading. As is so often the case in the heavily serialized comics medium, it therefore makes no sense to think of a story such as “Master Race” as a work of individual genius that stands entirely on its own. This conclusion does not just have implications for any approach to EC’s output. When a story is as influential as “Master Race,” its status as part of a series rather than a singular piece of work may also change our point of view on the narratives it influenced. For example, it would be just as productive to think of something like Spiegelman’s Maus as serialized fiction instead of a novelistic whole. The legacy of “Master Race” is therefore two-fold: it provided early proof that the comics medium is suitable to negotiate complex, serious issues. But also, and perhaps more importantly, “Master Race” showed future generations of comics writers and artists that to evolve, the comics medium needed to become aware of and thoroughly engage with its own history and poetics.

Carsten Schinko

The Omissions of Intermediality: Pop Music and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad Abstract: Pop music is an odd, multi-medial phenomenon including far more than simply music and its conventions. Indeed, one of the elements most essential to its appeal is pop music’s complex embrace of indexically induced, uncontrollable moments. It is these moments Egan tries to come to terms with in her much acclaimed book A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011). If, in pop music, such moments seem to transcend the symbolic realm they are inevitably surrounded by, Goon Squad can be read as an attempt to emulate such moments and their irritation of hermeneutic routines on both a diegetic and a performative level. This translation of the logic of pop into Egan’s own domain, the symbolic world of the written word, engenders a stimulating aesthetics of omission that draws on both modernist and postmodernist ideas. Omissions become meaningful only if pit against a horizon of expectations within which these lacunae disclose their specific contexts and functions. Intermedial phenomena considerably up the ante as such patterns of expectations now potentially come from both sides, the host as well as the target medium. And things really get complicated if – as in Jennifer Egan’s critically acclaimed A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011) – the overall reference is to pop music, a multi-medial cluster of sensations at odds with the unity at least suggested by predominantly mono-medial, language-based artworks.1 In order to interpret Egan’s intermedial interests and their relation to omissions, I will first introduce the logic of pop music – an umbrella term that includes the genre she is most concerned with, punk rock. It is especially pop music’s complex embrace of indexically induced, uncontrollable moments Egan’s book tries to come to terms with. If such pop moments seem to transcend the symbolic realm they are inevitably surrounded by, Goon Squad can be read as an attempt to emulate such moments and their irritation of hermeneutic routines on both a diegetic and a performative level. This translation of the logic of pop into her own domain, the symbolic world of the written word, engenders a stimulating aesthetics of omission that draws on both

 Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (New York: Knopf, 2010); further references in the text, abbreviated as “GS.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-011

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modernist and postmodernist ideas. At the same time, the book’s interest in pop music goes even further, as it also strives to assess the historicity of pop and its embeddedness in an ever-changing media environment, most notably the turn to digital production, dissemination and reception. While occasionally going back to the heyday of the punk era in the late 1970s, glancing at 9–11, and ending in the near, slightly dystopian future, Egan more often than not has her characters looking back on these temps perdu, both moments and movements; at times her characters eagerly try to reassess the wilder youthful days of musicking, which involves a nostalgic remediation. Then, the incoherent soundtrack of their respective lives aspires to the coherence of an artwork, and the stubborn desire to possess what earlier on was a form of life approximates a bourgeois good, a monument of an allegedly glorious past. By taking such shifts and contingencies into consideration, Egan tries to figure out the place of literary communication through this intermedial evaluation.

Mind the Gap: Pop as Indexical Art One would misunderstand pop music, Diedrich Diederichsen argues, without taking into consideration the specific place of recording effects that turn it first and foremost into an indexical art: in order to create meaning, the individual voice and other recorded sound-effects are complemented by traditional modes of meaning-making, never fully closing the gap between the non-hermeneutic and the hermeneutic, nor the gap separating the magic moments of listeners and the coherent narrations, e.g., in peer groups, or subcultures or other communities of interpretation.2 Thus, when assessing literature’s intermedial ties to pop music we should speak of its medial others, since pop music is not only music but best understood as a cluster of media, ranging from the sonic to the visual to the textual. Emerging as a specific phenomenon after the Second World War, pop music is different from other kinds of music. This difference is less a matter of sociocultural distinctions like high and low, and more of a difference of the implications of sound. In classical European music, sound functions as resource for the creation of what is essential, the notation-led domestication of such sound into conventionalized symbolic forms. In pop music, Diederichsen argues,3 this

 Diedrich Diederichsen, Über Pop-Musik (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2014).  Diederichsen, Über Pop-Musik, 19.

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relation between sound and music is administered inversely: here, musical conventions (composition, melody, etc.) are relegated to the background of peculiar sound events that are then highlighted, e.g., the feedback of the electric guitars but, most notably, the grain of a (more often than not untrained) voice. Rather than the peculiar style of singing, it is these affective contingencies of recording techniques that mark the specific nature of pop. It is the heart of its indexical fascination: there is a real body behind these voices that I hear, an absent presence that is delivered to me, and that in ever-increasing high fidelity I cannot help but experience as authentic. The German critic employs Barthes’ notion of the punctum to explain these unpredictable idiosyncratic studio effects. Radically reception-oriented as these phenomena are, they exceed the cultivation or erudition of intersubjectively shared or sharable meaning. Like the French semiotician, Diederichsen supplements the non-hermeneutic, uncontrollable intensity of the punctum’s momentary raid – “this element which arises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me”4 – with a more sober quest for meaning, the studium of the material inevitably tied to the sonic dimension: record covers, lyrics, fashion, interviews, video clips – elements that can become part of (subcultural) erudition, the coherent sense of group identity and the collective narrations these are based on. A number of distinctions follow from such a definition: there is no fundamental unity of pop music, no object like a book that seemingly contains aesthetic experience; in fact, it is better to use Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking” to describe the messiness of pop’s pleasures instead of relying on the entity-suggesting “music.”5 For, while the record has proven to be an allimportant trigger in the formation of this expressive culture, what listening consumers are confronted with is a whole array of elements and media that they have to re-combine. It is only here, in such acts of reception that pop music’s disarray is brought together. Moreover, the solipsism of the punctum pit against the (often collective) studium can be sketched as the rivalry between moment and narration, as well as indexical ‘authenticity’ against symbolic and iconic inauthenticity (the knowledge that, in their mass production, the star is the product of a culture industry available to many others). Finally, the fact that pop music is so heavily tied to recording technologies and the materiality of

 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage, 2000): 26.  Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1998): 9.

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consumption (vinyl, CD, and even MP3) that engenders the punctum, the status of art is put into doubt.6 A Visit from the Goon Squad uses a series of revealing omissions to translate this logic of pop to the literary page. First, Egan offers material heterogeneous enough to disallow for a smooth reading experience, eagerly asking us to bridge the visible gaps between the material, e.g., between a chapter designed as a PowerPoint presentation severed from other, more conventional parts of writing. This writing, in turn, quite flexibly fuses realist, modernist and postmodernist styles in the respective chapters. Moreover, the book consists of what many critics have seen as a set of only loosely connected short stories, returning without the familiar (psychological or narrative) motivation to characters, places and events alluded to before. Thus, by dodging the question whether what we are reading is a collection of short stories or a ‘genuine’ novel (with its traditional links to totality), these omissions work on the level of literary genre, too.7 Finally, some chapters revolve around an intense (unspeakable) moment in wait of context, of resolution or explanation, or a reconstruction in memory. Gaps connote inaccessibility. Here, Egan’s Proustian curiosities and her interest in the cracks of memory come to the fore, most vividly on the level of plot. If time really is a goon, as more than one character insinuates, it is up to us to solve the riddle by bridging the gaps, by creating coherence out of a fragmented, void-ridden narrative. In a series of complexly interconnected vignettes, Goon Squad circles the lives of two recurrent characters: Sasha, troubled assistant to Bennie Salazar, a middle-aged former punk and record executive. Even though these two never really discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in chapter after chapter narrated by or following a whole host of characters whose paths intersect at different times and places – from the late-1970s San Francisco punk scene to New York in the near future. The major bulk of writing on Goon Squad seems to agree on the importance of both time and pop music, especially punk rock, as essential thematic issues in Egan’s literary artwork – topics that lend some kind of coherence to an otherwise rather fragmented text. Given that it is quite a complex piece of writing, one should not fault the fact that only a handful of critics have focused

 Defining pop music as an “indexical art” is a paradoxical understanding, Diederichsen convincingly argues, “geht doch die klassische Ästhetik davon aus, dass die Künste Sprachen (Symbole) und Bilder (Ikone) bearbeiten, während die indexikalische Komponente den Medienstandards und ihrer Technik überlassen bleibt ” (Diederichsen, Über Pop-Musik, xix). [as classical aesthetics traditionally defines art by its handling of languages (symbols) and pictures (icons) whereas the indexical element is attributed to media standards and its technologies.]  The locus classicus for this novel-totality-nexus is, of course, György Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1974).

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on both simultaneously. Those who often understood the impact of “punk time” in the novel as a general cure against linear chronology and sketched music as “an agent of redemption”8 or saw the sonic temporality as the healing power of kairos against the “brutalizing force” of chronos.9 This is convincing for quite a few passages, and it is a notion Egan herself comes close to embracing most likely towards the end, when she invests Scotty, one of the minor characters and a gifted if unknown musician, with the power to unify a mass of people by his allegedly authentic sounds. Before the author arrives at this magic moment, however, she reflects upon many facets of pop music (not all of them good), the latter’s relation to time, and, most importantly, on the way literary omissions help define its medial other. Kairotic time as momentary authenticity pit against empty clock time – one could indeed be tempted to hear in pop’s fascination with the fleeting instant an echo of rivaling categories better known in literary departments. Indeed, “an old name for the exceptional moment is kairos,” Diederichsen confirms,10 but he also wants us to keep in mind that in the domain of pop the availability of such special, contingent moments on record came at the price of their mass production. This severely impaired the old aura and cuts any links to the metaphysical and ethical promises critics often have attributed. Pop moments, however, “are not always beneficial, sublime and epiphanic” – neither good nor bad, these can also be little everyday moments “of an altogether unexceptional singularity.”11 The only necessary element is thus the fact that they indexically are linked to someone who is public but comes to me in the most intimate of ways. The gap that opens up in pop reception is a gap between this private moment that owns me and the far less intimate material surrounding it. And the duty is to make it available to others, but also to me: what is it that has touched me like a real body? Now, the translation into the hermeneutic domain is at stake: who is that person? What is he or she like? We enter the realm of the mass-produced image and any other material publicly available; we also enter the realm of meaning and narration.

 Martin Moling, “‘No Future’: Time, Punk Rock, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad,” Arizona Quarterly 72.1 (2016): 51–77, 73.  Melissa J. Strong, “Found Time: Kairos in A Visit from the Goon Squad,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59.4 (2018): 471–480, 471.  Diederichsen, Über Pop-Musik, 177.  Diederichsen, Über Pop-Musik, 177.

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Psychoanalysis of the Punctum Goon Squad cuts right into its interest in elevated moments. In its first two chapters, the book gives life to vastly different ways to assess time, and while, of these, only chapter two, “The Gold Cure” – with its focus on music producer Bennie – is explicitly engaged with music per se, both seem to highlight essential ways of talking about enhanced moments in relation to pop music as delineated above. The initial “Found Objects” presents what can be called a functional equivalent for pop-induced kicks, and it focuses on the problems of coming to terms with such moments, of how to ‘share’ them. This is where a fundamental omission sets in, for the chapter prepares enough expectations in its own confines and for future passages for this making-available to happen. Sasha, in her mid-thirties, is a kleptomaniac, and the opening page finds her in the act of stealing a wallet. The chapter’s title is ironic, of course, as her delinquency might include the detection of the desired object but also its willing abduction. Yet, “Found Objects” simultaneously points both to the past and the future. In its adherence to a DIY-aesthetic the punk scene habitually made use of unrefined and raw material, and the collages that Sasha sometime later in life (and the book) will create are based on the same principle. Finally, the term punk itself, with its origins in describing low-life creatures rather than respectable citizens, certainly does not suggest greater concern with ownership issues. The key information offered, though, is that the “wallet must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall” (GS, 3). Indexical sound, thus, is connected to the object Sasha “found,” and absent presence, and now all that was to be done was to “seize the moment” or “take the leap” and “live dangerously” (GS, 3–4). The moment is golden indeed, it is hers, inacceptable as it might be, and Egan further stresses this fact by turning Sasha into the focalizer of this vignette, thus allowing her to find a way of appropriating it from within an otherwise heterodiegetic narration. Delaying all the links to later information about her troubled childhood – the abusive father who beat the mother, and an uncle’s attempt to resurrect a teen Sasha from a life as a drug-seller and prostitute in Naples – what the chapter initially stages is a montage between the pure lure of an object and the thrill it promises on the one hand, and a cultivated, scholarly discourse that tries to narratively control the event on the other. While Sasha is the focalizer of her own deed, we soon learn that the account of the theft takes place at a meeting with her therapist, Coz, who instructs her to avoid euphemisms like found” or “take.” It is a steady to-and-fro between night of theft and session, yet these two levels never find a synthesis, no matter how much Sasha and Coz “were collaborators, writing a story whose end had already been determined: she would get well [. . .]

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and start caring again about [. . .] music” (GS, 6). Instead, there is an air of surrealism entering the sheltered sphere of patient and therapist all of a sudden. Another stolen item they talk about, a screwdriver, suddenly “seemed to hang in the air of Coz’s office. It floated between them: a symbol” (GS, 8). We might have shifted from indexical lure to symbolic registers, but the suddenness of the image already indicates that this communal effort will not be successful, at least not for this time. Read as signifier of a thrill-based community, Coz simply is not the in-crowd necessary to turn signs into subculturally coded material. The fact that Egan leaves it at that might have readers anticipate further sessions, a healing curve maybe, or even some kind of redemption. Towards the end of Goon Squad we do find the later Sasha a much-adept mother of two, and a loving wife, but the book itself gives no trace as to whether it actually was the therapy with Coz that helped her back on her feet. All we are offered in “Found Objects” is unbearable “silence, the longest silence that ever had passed between them” (GS, 18) – a silence that results in Sasha’s listening in what Michel Chion defines as a reduced mode. This kind of listening is different from both “causal listening” (to a source) and “semantic listening” (for meaning): “In reduced listening the descriptive inventory of sound cannot be compiled in a single hearing. One has to listen many times over, and because of this the sound must be fixed, recorded.”12 While not exactly a recorded sound, the repetitiousness suggests that she listens as if to a record. With meaning obliterated, what she hears is “the faint hum that was always there when she listened,” which soon gives way to the moments passing, “these minutes of Coz’s time: another, then another, then another” (GS, 18). No narration is about to ensue from this place, no history unfolds, in fact the time of therapy – if not linear, then goal-oriented by definition – is taken apart, moment for moment. In a way, Egan has used her first chapter to pitch the kicks of stealing as functional equivalent, as a way to render visible the enhanced moment – hardly utopian, certainly not kairotic – a sheer moment of thrill and the (as yet) impossibility to grasp that moment in a communal discourse. If anything, the telling name “Coz” now seems to echo the impossibility of delivering its hidden promise: the “because” of causality, its logic of connection, is exactly what has been omitted. Then again, because the in-group is missing, and Sasha is not linked to a subculture anymore, this thrill has turned into a loop of kicks awaiting a context to work, raw punk energy without peer-group embeddedness. Alternatively, we might take the story at face value, and read it as a – admittedly rather poetical – way of rendering a trip to therapy. The reader still might hope or even anticipate the process

 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision. Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia UP, 1994): 30.

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of healing, but, for the time being, all we get are the gaps and the puzzlement that follows: How did she get from A to B? Because/Coz [. . .]. In line with this therapeutic framework, Heather Duerre Humann tries to apply the Freudian concept of ‘Nachträglichkeit’ to Egan’s text in general, and Sasha’s case more specifically, arguing that, if the patient is incapable of finding the right response initially, the full traumatic impact is felt “at a later stage in psychological development.”13 Her optimistic reading assumes that Sasha, indeed, has successfully faced and worked through her past. Again, we might accept that she is living a ‘normal’ life, but the question remains: how to attribute the newly found happiness, rendered rather indirectly by her daughter Alison in the penultimate chapter on a set of PowerPoints? This becomes even more important as her mother is unwilling to talk about her darker hours – at least with her teenage daughter. Thus, if, as Duerre Humann correctly claims, readers will have to “process the text of the novel in much the same way that Sasha processes her traumatic memories,”14 the only thing we can safely agree on is that there is no vantage point in sight, no outside of the text from which we could assess and settle the situation once and for all. The only thematic continuation on which we have to base our projections is the stolen material itself, which her one-night-of-the-wallet-stand Alex finds at her place, carelessly piled up on a table. Later, in her slide-driven chapter, Alison will reveal that her mother is enduringly making collages out of everyday material – art that is not timeless at all: according to Sasha, the process of deterioration is very much a part of the overall design. We have to go with the ebb and flow of events narratively accounted for, deal with incoming material whenever available as in a puzzle without coherent framework, and humbly accept the omissions in causality and characterization, linearity and logic. We have to, that is, find our own ways to connect the dots, meager and random as they might seem, hoping for a coherent interpretation to materialize; or, if interpretation is what we have grown weary of, material that we can playfully engage with on a less depth-oriented level.15 We have to create our own collage-like life for Sasha and the other characters, and check for possible material to put together. Seen in this light, the operating principle

 Heather Duerre Humann, “Nachträglichkeit and ‘Narrative Time’ in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad,” Pennsylvania Literary Journal 9.2 (2017): 85–97, 95.  Humann, “Nachträglichkeit and ‘Narrative Time,’” 94.  Two key contributions to this celebration of a principle at odds with the time-worn notions of hermeneutic depth and the eternal quest for meaning are Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966) and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993).

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is associative more than (chrono)logic or root-cause-driven. At times the means of connection are the correlations of “Found Objects,” in this case offering the contextual link to the DIY-culture of punk. Kleptomania and aesthetic creation have merged, which means that, as readers, our work itself can be based on these DIY principles, that we “participate in compiling the pieces as they draw inferences from Goon Squad’s missing parts and gaps in time.”16 This collage mode is not only the operating principle during the reading process; at first glance, it also seems fully in line with the overall structure of the text. So far, I have not made use of the paratextual label applied by the publisher (“a novel”), nor the alternatives of generic designation occasionally used, such as short story collection or short story cycle.17 Once we have understood the principle, and finished reading, we have a fairer grasp of the relations of part to whole. Parts of Goon Squad were first published before in magazines like The New Yorker, Harper’s or Granta, and while one might take pleasure in any of these, their status as stand-alone pieces can now be seen as a kind of temporary omission in its own right – the aspiring to future form is the actualization of the potential embedded in each. Egan has constructed these singular pieces as slice-of-life-type stories, but she has put them together in such a fashion that we can not only perceive the collage practice as a nod to the DIY ethos of the punk milieu; we also understand that, more generally, the elements resemble the components that go into the making of pop music used as an umbrella term as discussed above. Music is about the sound, about the moment, and she pondered about the moment so essential for the indexical art. Yet, next to this punctum-oriented agenda she places the studium-type chapters. Often populated by minor characters taking center-stage for the time being, these chapters will introduce elements beyond sound and elevated moments, such as the PR-based production of the star image (chapter 8), or pop journalism (chapter 9) creating the necessary material surrounding the sonic input. Here, the focus is either far more traditional in its narrative deployment, as causal construction and characterization follow fairly realist patterns (the PR chapter); or, Egan temporarily resorts to absurdly digressive writing, as in the simulated journalism piece that uses footnotes so heavily as to turn the author into a legitimate heir of David Foster Wallace.18 Again, the decisive idea is the heterogeneity of such segments open for our hermeneutic quest. One could list other aesthetic

 Strong, “Found Time: Kairos in A Visit from the Goon Squad,” 473.  Cf. Jennifer J. Smith, “Atomic Genre,” in The American Short Story Cycle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018): 141–169, 144.  Johanna Hartmann, “Paratexualized Forms of Fictional Self-Narration: Footnotes, Headnotes and Endnotes in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad,” Symbolism 15 (2015): 101–120, 103.

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choices, such as the brief evocation of a first-person plural narrative that – at least tentatively – puts these parts into a collective meaning-making process. The fact alone that all writing has to use symbolic means – written language – to evoke even the most indexical moments should request a further step back. For all its looseness and interweaving of material, the book’s openness is hardly due to negligence on the author’s part, and acute readers will take away the feeling that the clustering of vignettes is not as random or radical as some observers would have it after all. There is a reason for the way the novel presents its vignettes, and while this sounds like a truism what the emerging order establishes (or reactivates) is a sense of progression and endorientation.19 For example, one can still discern that Egan starts off with the moments, then moves on to the heated scene in the club in which a young punk band are playing, while the older, successful producer Lou is present. Chronologically, the night of the show is far earlier in time, but here it is presented as the blending of two kinds of rivaling intensities: on the one hand, we see both Scotty and his crazy stage antics, while, on the other, there is Lou having sex with underage Joycelyn, one of the band’s high-school peers. The fact that this chapter is narrated in first-person plural at first, with Rhea, her best friend chronicling the growing apart, ending with the first-person account adds a new layer of meaning. On one level, this is a standard coming-of-age plot pattern, of course, but on a more abstract level it is music being compromised by power, an intruder from the outside who will challenge the integrity and authenticity of any future sound. Lou, then, takes over the following two chapters further highlighting the toxic masculinity of the music business until his death in chapter five. Only then, at the end of the first part of the book, can we renew the contract, putting hopes in Bennie. The former bass player of the Flaming Dildos is taken in by Lou as protégé, and thus might not be uncompromised. However, the purity comes with his old friend guitarist Scotty, who, out of the blue, pays his former bandmate a visit. In yet another power game of music proper versus marketing, Scotty’s integrity wins the upper hand against Bennie, who initially assumes the visit can only be about money. Scotty’s talent was obvious to anyone right from the start, so his seemingly ex nihilo appearance is both linked to a possible return of genuine creativity that feeds Bennie with

 This, however, would put into question the collage metaphor if applied to the book. While it is true that the novel – a term I would happily apply – assembles heterogeneous material, and while we would accept the metaphorical thrust, forgetting that collages usually combine materially different elements, this progressive drift of symbolic or allegorical cohesion seems to go against the grain of the spatially oriented collage.

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new life, and that, in the end paradoxically re-appears at fictional Ground Zero.20

Moments & Memories, or Proustian Pop Egan, never shy to talk about her influences and inspirations, revealed that she had read her share of Proust when crafting her own book, and allegedly she took quite some inspiration from the ways her modernist predecessor. Thus, a more traditional literary source is exploited to capture the quest for the moment. In “The Gold Cure,” however, Egan comes close to satirizing mémoire involontaire by omitting key aspects of the French author’s aesthetic. Bennie Salazar, music producer and presently Sasha’s employer, is suffering from “shame memories” (GS, 19). In talks about “pulling the plug on Stop/Go, a sister band,” and thus in the most mundane of business operations, “the memory overcame Bennie (had the word ‘sisters’ brought it on?)” (GS, 20). All of a sudden, he finds himself squatting behind a nunnery in Westchester at sunrise after a night of partying – twenty years ago was it? More? Hearing waves of pure, ringing, spooky-sweet sound waft into the paling sky: cloistered nuns who saw no one but one another, who’d taken vows of silence, singing the Mass. Wet grass under his knees, its iridescence pulsing against his exhausted eyeballs. Even now, Bennie could hear the unearthly sweetness of those nuns’ voices echoing deep in his ears. (GS, 20)

While this moment is rendered graspable by the focalizing mind, elaborately made vivid by synesthetic efforts, what is omitted is “the pure self-presence of the ‘now’ in the temporal setting of the instant,” leaving us only with a “now” already tinged by the semantics transported by the later moment of retention.21 Such Husserlian retention is essential in Proust as well, of course, for without “the moment of reflex, if not reflection,” the fullness of the re-lived moment would be indecipherable.22 In Egan, however, the aesthetically created self-

 Oscillating between collage-like integration and latent thematic progression, the novel offers twin options. These, in turn, are related to ideas of spatiality and temporality of modernist and postmodernist provenience.  Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance (New York: Columbia UP, 1994): 207.  Bohrer, Suddenness, 207. “This conscious memory makes clear that the unknown cause of the feeling of happiness lay in the memory that remained unknown, the mémoire involontaire that was elicited by tasting the madeleine,” Bohrer elaborates, adding: “This coupling of the

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presence is triggered thematically right away – the nuns shut off from the outside world sing beautifully – while in Proust the sense of fullness is arrived at in a two-step shift of communicating moments, the first one reserved for pure moments of intensity. In a way, modernist promise in Goon Squad is corrupted by postmodernist impurity. Moreover, if Karl Heinz Bohrer is right, and these experiences of fullness in the life of the psyche are an echo of older utopian social aspirations of fulfillment, in Bennie’s case such modernist promises are gone, too. Thus, again, the passage’s delivery might be contingent on the punkish act that is unburied: sound aficionado that he was and is, Bennie wants to capture the beauty of the nuns singing. A deal has successfully been made, when “the Mother Superior appeared behind a square opening in the wall” accepting the offer of the “A and R guy in purple corduroy” (GS, 20). Bennie, however, blows it in the last second “because he lurched across the sill and kissed her on the mouth” (GS, 20) – evidently a far cry from the days of the connoisseur at Combray. The sensory impressions are still vivid; these include “velvety skin-fuzz, an intimate, baby powder smell in the half second the nun cried out and jerked away” (GS, 20). Punk, we learn, means reaction, it needs the shock value of the moment, “grinning through his dread” (GS, 20), rather than the upper-class complacency in Proust. What is important, however, is that the acoustic beauty remains intact as something the producer cherishes up to this day. Part of the ‘failed’ rendition of the mémoire involontaire is that there is a sensory division, as the aggressive act was directed against the highlighted face – the visibility of an authority figure framed like a record cover – rather than the sounds emanating from the place. Egan uses this failed deal to foreshadow the recording session with the band, with Bennie longing “to feel that excitement again” (GS, 21). If the moments involuntarily memorized did not work out as fanciful as in the hands of Proust or Joyce, A Visit from the Goon Squad makes sure the voluntary ones do not either. “The Gold Cure” alluded to via the chapter’s title is Bennie’s superstition that gold flakes help him reactivate the “sex drive, his own having mysteriously expired” (GS, 21 [emphasis in original]). Egan blends a supposed male mid-life crisis, with its longing for sexual potency, with the producer’s longing for the good old times of “actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room” (GS, 22). When the sisters kick off their set, and “the raw, almost threadbare sound of their voices mixed with the clash of

present, sudden moment with a temporality distant moment, which enables the present moment to exist without robbing it of its dignity, completes the second element of the utopian ‘now’” (Suddenness, 208).

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instruments” they hit “a faculty deeper in Bennie than judgment or even pleasure; they communed directly with his body” (GS, 30). And if he actually “was on fire,” the “first erection in months,” cannot be attributed to the band he asked to play, but was “prompted by Sasha, who had been too near Bennie all these years to really see her, like in those nineteenth-century novels he’d read in secret” (GS, 30 [emphasis in original]). Does the inauthenticity of borrowed emotions, culled from literary texts of days long gone, give away the futility of the endeavor? Possibly. What is more, for a sound purist that he pretends to be this visual supplement should be unnecessary to feel “the music in his mouth, his ear, his ribs” (GS, 30). The italicized “see,” however, signals that this is not the same objectifying gaze he directed at Sasha’s breasts earlier on for arousal: it is a seeing beyond appearance he ends up with – the look of love. Accordingly, the next set of involuntary memories kick in, this time lacking even the sex appeal of transgression the Mother Superior has potentially transported for the punk-turned-producer: moments of being bullied by colleagues calling him a “hairball” (GS, 30) give way to the assumed stigma of the lice found in his son’s hair. In his agitation, Bennie scribbles these markers of shame on a parking ticket, a list Sasha mistakes for song titles. Agonized at first when she wants to see them, her voice – or better: the grain of her voice – soothes his anxieties, as the words “were neutralized the instant Sasha spoke them in her scratchy voice” (GS, 37). When, at Bennie’s request, she does so for a second time, he “felt peaceful, cleansed” (GS, 37), as sound and face belonging to a person he actually cares for. Still, his midlife-crisis-ridden producer-self has to produce kicks, go for the moments that – as music seemingly does not work anymore in the digital age – will be at least in part visual and sexual stimuli. The whole day long he had “glanced at Sasha’s breast,” lusting “after her for most of the years she’d worked for him” (GS, 22). A potential aphrodisiac, the gold flakes are linked to the golden records he helped produce earlier in his career, before falling from grace with the industry, and which he aspires to. Yet, if the earlier success was based on a kind of resourcefulness organically growing out of the punk milieu rather than focused on the visible signs of success, his current life is lacking these resources. His nostalgic clinging to past grandeur – a nostalgia he at one point chastised in Lou, knowing it would be the end of the older producer’s reign – is linked to the sexual neediness that will lead him to make advances on Sasha for the first time. Sasha, in turn, not only is the one resource he has, and that helps him pacify the hurtful sting of memory (without knowing anything about this peculiar kind of suffering); she also knows that this longing is corrupted, compromised, and that it would ruin the thing they cherish: a form

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of genuine intimacy and trust, a real friendship.23 Put differently, a ‘real’ intimacy presented as alternative to pop’s parasocial longings, even though here to a certain blindness – Sasha knows nothing about the haunting memories – is built in as well.

From Analog to Digital, From Moments to Pauses In the first two chapters Goon Squad is most concerned with the moments and memories of pop in its formative phase. With punctum interests handing over to studium vignettes, the story then delineates the fall of Lou’s toxic sway, and the more ambivalent, contested reign of Bennie as key producer. This is the generation in transition, as Egan helps us understand, until we find ourselves in an age in which the old institutional parameters do not hold anymore. Having dismissed what came before them out of hand, Bennie’s generation will wax nostalgically about the music back then, and it is a younger group of characters that has to convince them (and us?) that cultural pessimism is not an option. In which way, however, does Goon Squad suggest a sense of continuity despite the digital turn? The two final chapters are set in the near future, and both signal their futurity with a peculiar set of omissions. In “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” it is Sasha’s daughter, Alison, age 12, presenting her take on the family’s life in a PowerPoint journal. Its alterity in terms of page design is more than obvious, with the typical charts, shapes and arrows supplanting the steady line run. This also entails readerly affordances different from the rest of the book. Easily the longest chapter of the book, it arguably takes the shortest to skim through the simulated slides of an actual presentation. Egan herself has mentioned that the PowerPoint format “epitomizes this really extreme way of all the principles” informing Goon Squad, its interest in meeting the irritations of new media from within the old, the radically different outlook of a newer generation of digital natives fairly oblivious to print modernity.24 PowerPoint done properly, Egan argues, “requires that you break down a particular thought, or fictional moment, into its basic structure, and then illustrate that structure,” and as such the program “does offer an achronological

 Thus, if Egan refuses to fully accept psychologizing in Sasha’s case, she applies it to the male figure who nostalgically clings to a past and refuses change – quite a classic characterization in pop-related novels. Cf. Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (London: Victor Gollancz, 1995).  Heidi Julavits, “Jennifer Egan” (July 1, 2010), Bomb Magazine 112 (2010) (acc. 15 September 2021).

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option, for multiple chronologies.”25 While one might argue that such options have been readily available since modernism, there seems to be a shift from the intensity of a short moment, epiphanic or not, to a more contemplative preoccupation with de- and re-composing. And if this, in turn, is an idea well-known from a set of postmodernisms – both in the playful literary engagement with genres and their chronotopes and in post-punk’s preoccupation with re-modeling earlier styles – here it is signaled by a turn from moments to pauses decidedly contingent on digital material. In her PowerPoint journal Alison implicitly suggests as much, e.g., by contrasting generational creativity: on the slide “Mom’s Art” she tries to fathom the process of Sasha’s creativity, the earlier piling up of found objects now a more elaborate collage practice. And if ‘found’ used to imply ‘stolen,’ the material now is the most mundane, the debris of everyday, from little memos to shopping lists: “They come from our house and our lives” (GS, 265), one of the slide’s speech bubbles informs us, an act by which Alison virtually includes herself quite explicitly. Thus, while she remains skeptical and even dismissive (“Annoying Habit #22” [GS, 264]) of the aeshetic practice, the daughter very much mimics her mother – especially on this most anarchically constructed slide that approximates a collage, albeit in ‘remediated’ fashion: here, analog practices turn into the digital domain, and this changes their materiality dramatically, e.g., two-dimensional simulation of three-dimensional spatial integration. Moreover, the default for PowerPoint usage is an oral presentation, i.e., in presence of others and with an end in sight; here, however, the tool is appropriated by Alison as written form of self-expression with neither a public nor an end in sight.26 Sasha has troubles on her own understanding Alison’s digital journal, which to her does not really qualify as writing – “I mean writing a paper” (GS, 253 [emphasis in original]) – and has difficulties coming to terms with the gaps this writerly practice creates: “I see a lot of white. Where does the writing come in?” (GS, 253). However fragmented, the idea of potential fullness or completion regulates the mother’s understanding of giving an account of one’s life at this point. Omissions, in her case, inevitably evoke a sense of totality: “But they tell the whole story if you really look,” Sasha insists, and they do so despite the very fact that the singular elements “are precious because they’re casual and meaningless” (GS, 265).

 Julavits, “Jennifer Egan,” n.p.  Cf. Nathalie Aghoro, Sounding the Novel: Voice in Twenty-First Century American Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2018): 234.

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Both mother and daughter are mostly aware of what separates them and work the digital divide into this equation; still, there is similarity enough to discern: implicitly, by Alison’s mimicking of her mother’s practice; explicitly, in Sasha’s care for her son’s obsession with pauses in rock songs. An autistic child, Lincoln has become an expert in such gaps in continuity, resulting in a twin skillset – a knowledge about such pauses as well as a talent in using them as sampling material for loops. In his digital practice, moments might have given way to loops; yet, not only are collage-like energies re-affirmed in this sampling of silence, these, again, are strongly linked to the notion of meaningful omissions. As Alison and Sasha both understand, Lincoln uses the pauses to communicate things he cannot articulate directly. It is his father – arguably the novel’s most adult and rational character – who is oblivious to the validity of such sub-standard, omission-based communication and its mimetic continuity, a ceaseless passing on of skills beyond official knowledge. Lincoln’s loops also convey the affordances of digitalized sound. While the pauses have obviously been part of rock songs before, here they turn into segments ready to sample. The loop, moreover, is indicative of a new chronotope that leaves behind the outlook of a modernity in which the present turns into a “barely perceptible short moment” separating a past that has lost its binding powers from an open horizon of the future.27 As digital native, Lincoln has grown up with a “broad present” of archived “present pasts” instead.28 His loops signal a break with linearity as no progression towards an end is in sight, and instead of future-boundedness there is a curatorial interest in an enhanced moment of silence interrupting the flow of sound. This openness to an elongated moment comes with both an awareness of the contingencies of meaning making, and with a sense of possibilities within silence. And yet, Sasha seems capable of tracing an acute sense of ending when she translates Lincoln’s obsession with pauses to his father: The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL. (GS, 281 [emphasis in original])

What all family creativity lacks, however, is an outreach to the wider world: the omission, in other words, is social.29 Sasha’s collages and Alison’s diary are

 Baudelaire qtd. in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 2014): 55.  Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present, 55.  Some of Sasha’s other art can be found outside the domestic sphere, but these sculptures are placed in a void – the desert next to their home with no public in sight.

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rather private agendas. Lincoln’s sound experiments could easily be shared but these, as yet, seem to be designed without an audience in mind beyond the next of kin. Egan seems to suggest that – while there is an ongoing creativity of pop-related energies – these still have to find a place in a new (media) environment. We are back at the question of continuity and discontinuity – a theme that finds a more explicitly political twist when Egan turns to Ground Zero.

Virtual Musical Duels at Ground Zero In more than one way, Goon Squad can be read as a 9/11 novel, and therefore the final, but politically most charged omission emerges in the ultimate chapter, culminating with Scotty’s return to the stage at Ground Zero. Occasionally mentioned before, the site of the terrorist attacks – the fictional Footprint – finally is foregrounded as an important place. Sasha, who had found the void “incredible” earlier and wondered “how there’s just nothing there,” implicitly points to “a logical gap in narration” as Christoph Horne perceives, “incompatible with narrative control” but not with the “impetus for increased surveillance.”30 Others have built on this finding, describing how Egan critically comments on the political urge to create new post-Exceptionalist narratives of the United States.31 For my present concerns, the show itself is of interest, the way in which it is narratively designed to unify an utterly heterogeneous mass through sound, however momentary such unification might be. Working for Bennie, Alex and Lulu have excelled at their viral marketing campaign even though it omitted the usual image production of the artist: it is a show without a face at first. Alex even mistakes Scotty for a roadie before he understands that the whole performance relies on a man utterly lacking charisma, and, on top of that, the looks to be a star. More importantly, when approaching the site and taking in “the weight of what had happened here more than twenty years ago,” the aura he perceives is cast acoustically, “as a sound just out of earshot, the vibration of an old disturbance” (GS, 331). It might be the anticipation of the gig – an anticipation of a next sonic layer – that has the present sound “more insistent than ever: a low, deep thrum that felt primally familiar, as if it had been whirring inside all the sounds that Alex had made and

 Christoph Horne, “Closing the Gap: Narrative Control and Temporal Instability in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad,” The Albatross 9 (2019): 56–65, 57.  Aaron DeRosa, “The End of Futurity: Proleptic Nostalgia and the War on Terror,” Literature Interpretation Theory 25.2 (2014): 88–107.

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collected over the years: their hidden pulse” (GS, 331). Any new sound will now have to compete with, work through, correspond to or shape a communal structure of feeling represented by this foundational background-turned-foreground “thrum,” that pulsating ur-sound. What the upcoming sonic show-down already implies is the absence of any context- and contingency-free purity Lulu so cherishes (and, oddly, thinks she can find in a new kind of texting, based on symbolic reduction of letters in tweetlike messages). A pure language or music will cease to be pure once it falls on and is tinged by meaning provided by the place and time of its articulation. Indeed, Egan describes the reactions to Scotty – who enters “[w]ithout a glance or a word of introduction” and wants the music to speak for itself – quite ambiguously: “the pointers, who already knew these songs, clapped and screeched their approval, and the adults seemed intrigued, attuned to double meanings and hidden layers, which were easy to find” (GS, 335). From childish joy in repetition to an erudite proto-literary sensibility – Scott resonates with the whole demographic spectrum, baby boomers to digital natives. The reasons provided for this positive reverberation are ambivalent enough, as the beginnings of the following sentences (“And it may be”; “Or it may be” [GS, 335]) indicate. Yet, resonance turns into “something strong, charismatic and fierce” only once “a swell of approval palpable as rain lifted from the center of the crowd and rolled out toward its edges, where it crashed against buildings and water wall and rolled back at Scotty with redoubled force” (GS, 335). Something communal has finally been created or at least prepared for; it is not only Scotty now, but Scotty and the crowd, the latter authenticating the genius of the moment. The affirmative force has an almost biblical ring to it, a positive plague of rain and water crashing in, matching in force the terror that still permeates the place. Soon to become part of myth, the moment – that we now see in a narrative stretch – is pregnant with possibilities, as it manages to temporarily obliterate the book’s allegedly key omission: any serious or more consistent discursive engagement with Ground Zero. The national wound has only been held in latency, slumbering all the time in the background to be reactivated at this pivotal site. The silenced abundance of discursive engagement with the moment of the attack is thus obliterated by sound, and Egan is clever enough not to reveal if this is yet another futile attempt of creating a Ground Zero – simply starting from scratch again – after all. It helps Egan to describe something that still affirms traces of “purity” and “authentic” ex negative, with Scotty’s genius “full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure” (GS, 336). The “now” is essential, of course, for while critics are correct that Egan does not fully shed the notion of Romantic genius and modernist new, she also smuggles in the necessity of authentification of the authentic. It needs (political) Ground Zero to create (musical) Ground Zero.

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Coda: From A to Z, from A to B The key question, structurally, is whether such a key event, in which all the elements elaborated on before converge, creates a narrative hierarchy in the end, a verticality incompatible with the alleged horizontal integration of the vignettes. The sheer fact that Egan chose to find a loose, if highly visible macrostructure for her book suggest as much. For, she does not simply attempt to make coherent thirteen vignettes which the publisher sells as a novel – she is setting apart six of these vignette-like chapters on the side ‘A’ from the seven the flipside (or B-Side) contains. This simulation of a vinyl record in print evokes the theme of time from the vantage point of storage media, and as the most perceptible paratextual design it overdetermines (our reading of) the messy, non-linear A to Z that the novel’s characters have understandable trouble assessing. This vertical integration supplements the hidden linearity of thematic development alluded to above. To broaden the perspective is a fruitful endeavor, as such an enhanced intermedial reading will not only help to explain the significant omissions the reading process will have to face; inevitably, it will also provide some information as to the potential of literature interested in its medial other. Moreover, while the sonic dimension, and especially the harsh sounds of punk rock historically did make a difference, pop music never really is just music, and thus Danica van de Velde is correct in sketching the original punks as a movement, an assessment of which needs to include other subcultural markers as well. What, indeed, would the punks have been without the spiked hair and safety pins, or the rich fanzine culture, or the Dada-like leanings of their cover art? If van de Velde correctly sees the text interested in re-creating “the structural vocabulary of punk,” and finds a useful guide in Dick Hebdige, she is fundamentally interested in (predominantly male nostalgia for) symbolic group cohesion.32 Material, heterogeneous as it might be, is integrated in peer-group coding, no matter how solipsistic the punctum energies might have been for individual listeners. What, however, does that imply for the reading of literature about pop music? If we take the emulation of pop musical communication seriously, we have finally succeeded in connecting the dots, in restoring unity in what was the messiness of heterogeneous material. The more we understand the form-finding agenda of the novel, however, the more we tend to believe in something that transcends peer-group pragmatism,

 Danica van de Velde, “’Every Song Ends’: Musical Pauses, Gendered Nostalgia, and Loss in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad,” in Write in Tune: Contemporary Music in Fiction, ed. Erich Hertz, Jeffrey Roessner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014): 123–135, 125.

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or, in terms familiar to literary critics, “interpretive communities” – communities that have to engage in the symbolic material only in any case.33 Then again, the very design that promises order reminds us that it includes an omission in its own right; for while the structure of A and B suggests timeless and almost non-contingent form, it takes time to flip the vinyl, thus the temporality negated by the album design creeps back in.

 Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980): 14.

Gregory Betts

Aliens in the Void: Writing Beyond the Limits of Language in bpNichol’s The Martyrology (and (Luigi Serafini’s ((Code)x Seriphian(us)))) Abstract: Aliens are, by definition, out beyond our language system and thereby attest to the limits and barriers of our words. They, inevitably a presumptive pronoun for an unknowable subject, embody a void in and of our knowledge of the universe. In literature, aliens are coded through the human imaginary, creating a projection of the nonhuman by the human as writers seek to imagine conscious life in the void. This paper turns to the insights of phenomenology, particularly Edmund Husserl and Bernhard Waldenfels, to examine how such experimental writers, particularly bpNichol and Luigi Serafini, push against the limits of language and use the trope of the alien to establish a space of linguistic rupture and freedom, a clearing away of cultural and linguistic detritus, as a provocation against knowledge and the closed habits of perception. In these works, the avant-garde intersects with science fiction representations of life beyond the limits of human culture. A unique kind of phenomenological utopianism emerges in this mix, in the idea of presenting alienated language – a space of saying where communication has yet been omitted – as if it were a portal out of the human world, but also, potentially, out of alienation. bpNichol, Canada’s most celebrated experimental poet, wrote a series of books of lyrical, freeplay poetry called The Martyrology (1972–1993)1 that is particularly invested in exploring the alien as mark of the end of human knowledge and communication. He presents a series of saints arriving amongst us from an imaginary planet called Knarn. The disturbance they embody provokes intense meditations on the relation, responsibility, and boundaries of self and other. Luigi Serafini’s The Codex Seriphianus (1981),2 meanwhile, presents an imaginary encyclopedia from an alien universe, written entirely in a strange, inaccessible script, affording readers an encounter with one of the most mysterious and indeed inhuman

 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Books 1 & 2 [1972], second ed. (Toronto: Coach House Books, 1998).  Luigi Serafini, Codex Seriphianus [1981], 40th anniversary ed. (Milan: Rizzoli, 2013). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-012

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books ever produced. My paper turns to the insights of phenomenology, particularly Edmund Husserl and Bernhard Waldenfels, to examine how such experimental writers work with the excess of language and use the trope of the alien to establish a space of linguistic rupture and freedom, a clearing away of cultural and linguistic detritus, as a provocation against knowledge and the closed habits of perception. In these works, the avant-garde intersects with science fiction representations of life beyond the limits of human culture. A unique kind phenomenological utopianism emerges in this mix in the idea of presenting alienated language – a space of saying where communication has yet been omitted – as if it were a portal out of the human world, but also, potentially, out of alienation. The imaginary saints in bpNichol’s The Martyrology pose a unique problem in their metaconscious genesis. They were born out of language, we are told repeatedly, and trapped by it: “this is a real world you saints could never exist in / born in an imperfect reading of the stars.”3 Informed by chance and the wonder of language, they become embodied meditations on the relations of self and other through the alien technology of language that mediates between both. In Book Five, he compares “how the saints come to me in the writing / how i speak to you Lord” as “moments when the channel opens.”4 The channel in this case is language and perception, both of which occlude the full feeling of presentation. The phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels attends to the mediating category of “the third”5 as the constitution of a space in which relations become possible. He uses language as a poignant example of this idea of the mediating third: “We cannot utter a word or carry out a gesture of action without a third coming into play, which can neither be reduced to the behavior of the addressee nor to that of the addresser.”6 Language, with its rules, orders, and laws, is given this consensual authority to become the silent stage of our communication. Nichol’s aliens, though, reverse that transparency here and make the purported neutrality of language a central theme of his writing. As he and his frequent collaborator Steve McCaffery write, “To be born into a particular speech community entails inheriting that community’s modes of perception and system of values.”7 If you question or have doubts about that system of

 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “Scenes from the Lives of the Saints,” n.p.  bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 5, “Chain 3,” n.p.  Bernhard Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Aliens: Basic Concepts [2006], (Evanston, IL: Northwest UP, 2011): 80–83.  Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Aliens, 81.  bpNichol and Steve McCaffery, “Report 1: Translation,” in Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book Machine, The Collected Research Reports of the Toronto Research Group 1973–1982, ed. Steve McCaffery (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992): 27–43, 27.

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values, you quickly encounter the limits of your own language. Translating becomes a problem of seeing beyond one’s inherited perception and a portal into another way of seeing. Nichol’s linguistic alien artifacts, imaginary translations taken to the furthest extreme, foreground his efforts to perceive language from another perspective. They create a trope for exploring the alienating effects of a language that prevents contact and real exchange, even while it invents the possibility of communication. By philosophical convention, the alien belongs within the category of the other, as a subset but at the extreme radical end of the type. Its extremity and inaccessibility has led some philosophers to note how it might be said to elude and even empty the meaningfulness of categorization – the anomaly that breaks the rule. The other unto itself, described as noumena by Kant, is only imaginable as an object of perception by the self.8 Similarly, the noumena only becomes recognizable through direct perception (whether visual or mental) that creates a “central noumatic nucleus” that allows the noumena to be meaningful, thinkable, recognizable as something by the perceiving self.9 And while the self or ego must contend with itself as noumena, the relation establishes the field of ethics. The alien, though, falls outside of any dialogical relationship of perception, perceiving, or being perceived. It exists so far outside of relation, indeed of coherence, as to disrupt the presumptive legitimacy of self/other (or ego/noumena) binaries through which the self comes to constitute itself. The alien exceeds the noumena. Waldenfels, working from Husserl’s anticipation of the alien, ponders whether there is “a secret horror alieni” inherent to philosophy that strives to dispel the alien rather than think through its harrowing implications.10 It is for this reason, too, that Richard Kearney reads the alien as a manifestation of sublimity, calling forth all of the repulsion and attraction of the abject.11 We are drawn to the inherent horror of the “no-thing, that is to an archaic and unnameable non-object that defies language,”12 both for the illusory freedom of being outside the rules and the desire to redeem “that which is defiled and needs to be purified” or brought into the rules of knowledge.13

 Immanuel Kant, Inaugural Dissertation, trans. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002): 397.  Edmund Husserl, Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1931): 260.  Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien, 20 [emphasis in original].  Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2003): 88–95.  Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 89 [emphasis in original].  Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 91.

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Avant-garde writers, since at least Stephan Mallarmé’s ambition to “Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu” [“purify the words of the tribe”], have sought to mobilize the seeming purity of the radically new.14 Kearney, though, resists both the attraction and abstraction of the alien precisely because neither attends to or prepares for the genuine, potential threat of the alien. Alien infatuation is naïve. We need to recognize evil as such, he argues, before succumbing to inaction in the face of a threat to our security – physical and mental, but also ontological in the very constitution of our being. It is insufficient to merely play host to the radical other given the risks (a recurring premise of science fiction and horror narratives). Indeed, the alien embodies the possibility of our ontological dissolution as a species. In contrast, the Canadian science fiction author Phyllis Gotlieb proposes the alien as a mode of disconnection and as a problem of dis-affect: “She felt no pity or horror. They were purely alien.”15 In her short story collection, she writes about characters struggling to empathize with the alien, who eludes the empathic response needed to establish relations; there is no reason to care for something outside our cosmology, something not afforded Being or recognized by our social milieu. Writing about or even through the problem of non-relations and non-meaning is a particular facet of the literary investigations of the alien. For phenomenologists like Waldenfels and Ian Bogost, the encounter with the purely alien, and this kind of empathy barrier, provokes a category of experiential knowledge that disrupts all other categories, that exists outside of experience as such, exposing that “the fact of reason is not itself reasonable.”16 Encounters with something radically different from ourselves that is beyond a possible object of consciousness, outside of our general semiotic economy, exposes the limits of our knowledge of how things work and what the universe is, disrupting the centrality of self and other to models of ontology. There is a reason that phenomenologists continue to return to the trope of the alien as the ultimate test of intersubjectivity.17 Such work follows from Husserl’s own endeavor to make philosophy a “rigorous

 Stephan Mallarmé, “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” in Poésies [1887], eighth ed. (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1914): 132–133, 132.  Phyllis Gotlieb, Blue Apes (Edmonton: Tesseract Books, 1995): 217.  Waldenfels, Phenomenology, 13.  Cf. Cristin Ellis, “Object-Oriented Ontology’s Endless Ethics,” Postmodern Culture 25.2 (2015), (acc. 8 June 2021); Elisabeth Pacherie, Melissa Green, Tim Bayne, “Phenomenology and Delusions: Who Put the ‘Alien’ in Alien Control?,” Consciousness and Cognition 15.3 (2006): 566–577; Bernhard Leistle, Anthropology and Alterity: Responding to the Other (New York: Routledge, 2017).

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science” of ontology,18 despite his lack of engagement with the idea of the alien and its unique limit-case challenge to ontology. Science fiction has spent perhaps the most time of any literary genre exploring this challenge, but in this paper I am interested in how bpNichol and Luigi Serafini situate such a rupture in relation to human communication. Nichol’s saints, aliens from beyond our language system who arrive through it, attest to the limits and barriers of our words. They are coded imaginary in that the speaker of the poem invents them and acknowledges that invention, furthermore wrestles with the burden of their origination: “you become rhetorical.”19 While in Book One this invention is more often described as a process of finding the saints buried in the language, their having been invented becomes an increasing theme of the project the further on you get into the books in the nine-volume sequence. Disrupting the saints’ alien backstory, Nichol writes about discovering them in broken, misread language. He inserts a gap into a variety of ‘ST’ words, such that, for instance, ‘stand’ becomes canonized as ‘St. And.’ As they come from the space, the typographic pun on the gap between the letters opens further and becomes a magical kerning portal to an alien cosmology. The new words formed by the fissure offer clues about the individual personalities of the saints. St. And, for instance, is a cosmic clown without a circus, an unnecessary supplement to a culture already consumed by spectacle and entertaining diversions. The alien backstory provides a different origin, however, as these invented saints with “the strange distorted faces of the intergalactic crowds” come from a planet called Knarn that was consumed by an exploding sun.20 In writing a section called “from The Chronicle of Knarn,” which has presumably been translated from Knarnish to English, the author or speaker inside the poems interrupts the writing to express dismay that our sun, too, “is dying,” cementing a link between their fate and our own future.21 The possibility of writing Knarn, of communication in toto, is disrupted, and spins out of the speaker’s control because of this parallel to an imaginary, alien reality. Furthermore, it is in the parallel between the phantasy of Knarn and the presentational world that the speaker discovers his own alienation from language: “i wish i could scream your name & you could hear me / out there somewhere where our lives are.”22 This

 Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as a Riorous Science and Philosophic and the Crisis of European Man, trans. and introd. Quenton Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965): 71.  bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 2, “fasting sequence,” n.p.  bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “from The Chronicle of Knarn,” n.p.  bpNichol, Martyrology, Book 1, “from The Chronicle of Knarn,” n.p.  bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “from The Chronicle of Knarn,” n.p.

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appeal to communication speaks well to the phenomenologist’s distinction between presentation (“Gegenwärtigung”), representation (“Vergegenwärtigung”), and re-presentation or phantasy (“Darstellung” or “Vorstellung”), where in Husserl’s distinction we encounter a split between the object of perception, the posited object of perception, and the expectation produced by the posited object of perception.23 The speaker in Nichol’s work perceives the possibility (phantasy) of breaking through the boundary of fiction (representation) to become an object in and of direct experience (presentation) – but can only express that desire with/through/ in language. A key element of Nichol’s writing is that the speaker only exists in language, trapped in representation. He likens himself a “kid of the book machine,”24 as if born into or within the technology, and spends an enormous amount of energy attending to the interface. The Martyrology consistently returns to the ways that language permits access to certain possibilities and revelations, but also about how language disrupts direct experience and creates a perpetual gap between our knowledge systems and the world “out there somewhere where our lives are.”25 On the next page, he laments: “the language i write is no longer spoken,” highlighting the gap between lived and literary language, another element of abstraction inherent to his art. Later, he writes, “i want to tell you a story in the old way / i can’t // haven’t the words or / the hands to reach you.”26 The gap between ego and noumena overwhelms the limits of representation. For many philosophers, such linguistic conundrums create an abyss of reason, a gap in reason itself that undermines all categories of knowing (a predicate of doubt shared by philosophers such as Nietzsche, Bataille, Lyotard, and Derrida). Language communities, though, shape perception, including the perception of philosophers. Linguist Edward Sapir shares or rather anticipates their mistrust of language as mere “lever to get thoughts ‘across’”27 but wonders whether many of the great problems of philosophy are, in fact, products of the internal machinations of our grammar rather than actual problems of the world outside of the linguistic system. For instance, he explores the example of the Kantian notion of causation, which has no correlate in the Inuit language. While some use such a lack to justify a sense of cultural hierarchies (and,

 Cf. Regina-Nio Kurg, Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Image Consciousness, Aesthetic Consciousness, and Art (dissertation, Université de Fribourg en Suisse, 2014): 5–9.  The subtitle to his co-written book Rational Geomancy (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1973) is “Kids of the Book-Machine.”  bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “from The Chronicle of Knarn,” n.p.  bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “The Sorrows of Saint Orm,” n.p.  Edward Sapir, “The Grammarian and His Language,” American Mercury 1.1 (1924): 149–155, 150.

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indeed, European colonialism), Sapir dismisses the lack as merely one of cultural interest: “They [the Inuit] have no difficulty in expressing the idea [. . .]. All languages are set to do all the symbolic and expressive work that language is good for, either actually or potentially.”28 The problem is not inherent to language, then, but yet offers a clue into how language intertwines with culture. Elements of the form of a particular language, such as German in Kant’s case, create conceptual gaps that puzzle philosophers and lead speakers to particular orientations of thought. While fascinating, these elements of the form can also be regarded as errors or logical glitches. In this way, the philosopher, Sapir suggests, is no master of ideas and is more “likely to become the dupe of his speech-forms.”29 Language and the arbitrary but internalized rules of speech not only influence thought but establish the boundaries of thinking – even, in the case of the philosopher, where language limits seem like a separate concern from the act of thinking. Despite this seeming, though, language remains the silent but not uninfluential third, subtly mediating the phantasy of representation and the experience of presentation. It was precisely an awareness of inherent bias that led Husserl to pursue a more rigorous stance in philosophic enquiry. For Nichol, the sense of language as mediator creates an insurmountable barrier that disconnects all speakers from genuine, unmediated communication. The silent third is far from neutral and actively prevents individuals from connecting to each other such that language is itself a problem in communication. It creates a tautological mind trap where the alien interference creates alienation. Nichol’s first visual poems, in fact, attempted to depict linguistically-inspired tautologies (“Mind-Trap #1” and “Mind-Trap #2,” both from 1964).30 Working from that recognition of the trouble with words, consequently, his writing aims “to free the emotional content of speech from ideation or from words, necessarily, and to just be able to let out the voice.”31 In other contexts, he connects his desire to transcend language-as-third, and the illusions of unadulterated communication, to the wider crisis of modernity, and to particular avant-garde efforts that “attempt to regain the magic to rediscover the basic tool [gap in original].”32 His faltering confidence in the ability of

 Sapir, “The Grammarian,” 152.  Sapir, “The Grammarian,” 154.  Both works are unpublished. Source: April 1964 Notebook, MsC 12, Simon Fraser University Library Special Collections & Rare Books.  bpNichol, “Interview,” The Capilano Review 1.8/9 (1975): 313–346, 325.  bpNichol, “Passwords: The Bissett Papers,” in Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol, ed. Roy Miki (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2002): 44–71, 56.

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modern, avant-garde art to revivify language in this way helps to explain why Frank Davey describes a project like The Martyrology, with its dramatis personae of aliens, fantastical heroes, and science fiction mythologies, as a “defence against darker thoughts, including suicide.”33 Indeed, the nine-volume project confronts the abyss of communication directly, recognizing language as a dead tool that the living are stuck with to survive. For Nichol, though, the book was not a concession to depression, but a thinking through of the trauma of our linguistic separation from each other – the alienation of the gap and the perils of the abyss itself: “i grasp the edge of vision & am frightened.”34 Letting his worldview expand to include intense meditation on the structure of cultural thought, including his speech and its grammar, created the possibility of genuine connection, a bridge over the abyss, while possibly overcoming some of the grammatical traps identified by Sapir. He knew he wasn’t alone in this pursuit and likened this push beyond conventional grammar to a language revolution occurring through the works of writing peers like bill bissett in Vancouver and other international members of the concrete poetry movement. Though the concept of a ‘language revolution’ is a little watery,35 they experimented aggressively, insistently, and collectively believed, via the ideas of Edward Sapir and Marshall McLuhan, that a new, less circumscribed relationship to language could establish a new culture entirely. Hence, Nichol worked hard to (re)animate language, to transform single letters into comic book frames and panels through which alternative modalities could be imagined (see Figure 1). These alien dislocutions create possible sites of revolution by presenting (Gegenwärtigung) new dimensions of expression. While such texts trouble the possibility of language and expression – opening up the division of tongues, the emptiness of speech, the haunting aforementioned gap – Nichol’s visual work particularly explores interruptive layers that prevent the fantasy of an internal fictional world and become themselves the subject of the work.36 In his comics, as Borkent explores, the gap of the panel bursts over into other frames, dissolving the logic of comicbook’s visual language. In phenomenological terms, the presentation forecloses form’s immanence and its transparent

 Frank Davey, Aka bpNichol: A Preliminary Biography (Toronto: ECW Press, 2012): 115.  bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 2, “Sons & Divinations,” n.p.  See Eric Schmaltz, The Language Revolution: Borderblur Poetics in Canada, 1963–1988 (dissertation, York University, 2018): 8–19.  Mike Borkent, “Post/Avant Comics. bpNichol’s Material Poetics and Comics Art Manifestos,” in Avant Canada. Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries, ed. Gregory Betts and Christian Bök (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2019): 95–115, 96.

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function as the silent third. The breaking releases a palpable indeed revolutionary force for a new vitality (Vorstellung). It is in a similar fashion that The Martyrology proposes alien-saints created out of broken language. The dead language is opened up, renewed, and brought back to life. Our quotidian language is saved by the presence of holy beings hidden inside that burst forth. Consequently, the alien in Nichol is not the raw hostile agent from a movie like Alien (a film by English director Ridley Scott, based on a story by Canadian science fiction author A. E. Van Vogt) or the timetravelling enigma in Arrival (a film by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, based on a story by American science fiction author Ted Chiang). Ultimately, the science fiction element is beside the point for Nichol: our language – our point of access to the world and the silent third mediating our connection to each other – is already a source of alienation easily exposed in such games as his creation of these saints. He reverses that alienation, though, by suggesting a possible redemption within the alien operatives inside words.

Figure 1: bpNichol, Grease Ball Comics, Issue 1 (Toronto: grOnk, 1970). Series 8, Number 1. Used with permission of the Estate of bpNichol.

The Codex Seraphinianus is an encyclopedia, as if from and about an alien world beyond the gap between speakers that haunts Nichol’s writing, inattentive to the foibles of human grammar and philosophy. Because the idea of its alien origins is

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never directly expressed within the book, this lack of signification creates the effect of a radical estrangement, an alien encounter, through an unknown script and abundant images that depict impossible, irrational objects collected and assembled by the internal, fictional botanist. At first glance, the script offers no clues to interpretation or decoding (see Figure 2). Readers are kept firmly out of the internal narrative universe, opening up a gap of understanding between the text and its wider context: such alienation perfectly aligns with its alien depictions. Textual anomalies, like the red O and seemingly related red sphere in Figure 3, lead and mislead us simultaneously. Like Arrival’s Dr. Louise Banks, readers are stuck trying to read through the mystery of the text, reading against its alien difference for clues to interpretation. While there is a strange pleasure in encountering such a mystery, it has predictably attracted cryptographers and linguists who have deployed the tools of their disciplines to crack the alien.37 These efforts have been mildly successful, picking up on the trace of human conventions that make the book recognizable as a book and as a genre. Such attempts to solve the game, though, merely overstep the radical gap the book proposes – the idea of an outside to human language and knowledge presumptions. Unlike Nichol who pursues communication across the gap (while keeping the gap firmly in mind), Serafini dismisses such attempts to find the secret message in his alien script directly: “It doesn’t matter much to me, it’s an obsession related to the persistent fascination with mystery. I always said that there is no meaning behind the script; it’s just a game.”38

Figure 2: Detail from the Codex Seraphinianus © Luigi Serafini.

 See Tomi S. Melka and Jeffrey C. Stanley, “Performance of Seraphinian in Reference to Some Statistical Tests,” Writing Systems Research 4.2 (2012): 140–166; Klaus Schmeh, “Encrypted Books: Mysteries That Fill Hundreds of Pages,” Cryptologia 39.4 (2015): 342–361.  Andrea Girolami, “Look Inside the Extremely Rare Codex Seraphinianus, the Weirdest Encyclopedia Ever,” Wired (25 October 2013) (acc. 10 June 2021).

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While the linguists in Arrival would have loved a book like this from the Heptapods, who came to earth with the specific intention of communicating with us, readers have no comparable indication about the desire of the Codex’s aliens to speak to us. This difference matters, for as Waldenfels notes, the first step in a conversation with aliens is the realization of the aliens’ own gaze upon us.39 It is through this recognition of their recognition that they become recognizable as something (Bogost would protest the anthropocentric nature of that kind of recognition). Instead, we have something more mysterious, a projection of human self-consciousness onto an alien universe. This book, the full-color, hardcover, high-production value fact of it, attests to a human desire to encounter aliens and to see something else as something. While aspiring to the intellectual freedom of a counter-environment, the book encodes a worldview that is yet shaped by the contours of specific human cultures and expectations – that proposes but does not escape an inherited perception. The Codex follows a conventional linear arrangement of textual objects, like chapter headings and section breaks, modeled after early encyclopedias by the likes of Carl Linnaeus (see his binomial nomenclature from the Systema Naturae in 1736, for instance). The Codex similarly features illustrious hand-drawn representations of various creatures and handwritten texts that accompany their documentation. The content of scientific knowledge and discourse, the foundations of contemporary Western culture, was created by such texts. I also think about Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings (1957) that maps out a compendium of fictional, surreal creatures. If you combine even just these two texts, you have enough of a precedence to start to recognize this book as something, if only as a reflection of the human desire to know and map out the known world, combined with a reflection of the human desire to be amazed by impossible, fictional, mythological beings that defy our reason and sense of how the world works. The very human desire to find something suggests deeper possibilities and alternates to our consensual reality. In that way, this book functions like the wardrobe access point to Narnia, or the board game in Jumaji, or the rabbit hole, and so on. Western readers love stories of finding things that reveal secrets about our world, especially if they lead to other worlds or ruptures in the scientific laws. The Codex functions like one of those fictionalized, happened-upon portals, akin to the frame disruptions in Nichol’s comics. Thus, there is pleasure in the occasion of the textual anomalies re-appearing, morphing, or defying even our tenuous assumptions. In Figure 3,

 Waldenfels, Phenomenology, 21.

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we encounter the red O from Figure 2 as an anthropomorphized monarch writing the asemic script of the Codex, as if in parodic imitation or interruption.

Figure 3: Detail from the Codex Seraphinianus © Luigi Serafini.

Interruptions are also an important mode of Nichol’s exploration of the alien. Right from the start, The Martyrology begins with a long series of false starts and broken frames: an epigraph (taking the form of a quotation from Gertrude Stein); a dramatis personae; a blank page; a half-title page; an illustration; an excerpt from a previous, imaginary work (“The Chronicle of Knarn”); a second illustration; a title page; a second epigraph from an imaginary work (“The Writings of Saint And”); a dedication; a blank page; a volume title page with an illustration; a blank page; an epigram (“the breath lies”); a blank page; a section title page with illustration; a blank page; and, finally, a text on page nineteen that reverses the feeling of arrival into the text: “so many bad beginnings // you promise yourself / you won’t start there / again.”40 The paratext pervades and indeed prevents the book from beginning – unless the book is recognized as an interruption of inherited perceptual habits. He provides a date of composition (“dec 67”) and proceeds, in the next line, to write about “the undated poem.”41 What to do with a text that so flatly, so brazenly contradicts itself, undermines itself, undoes the

 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, n.p.  bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “The Martyrology of Saint And,” n.p.

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magic escapism of literature? In a book about aliens, alienation, and failures of communication, it seems appropriate that readers should also feel alienated from the very start of the text, if only for a moment. Back at the first “bad beginning”42 he gives us an overview of the saints, a dramatis personae that is undermined on the second page: these details are “nothing but a history,” highlighting the chronological gap between the past and the present. As a gap-crossing text, this history implies a future – or, more specifically, a “premonition of a future time or line we will be writing.”43 I like this line very much for the way that it highlights how the grammar of our language and our literary conventions create an order for the imagination that invents a future in which the past is re-presented. While operating without recourse to a truly alien order (such as proposed in Villeneuve’s movie Arrival, where time for the Heptapods is experienced as cyclical), Nichol maps out the implications of a renewed linear linguistic experience. In Sapir’s sense, the foundational importance of grammar shapes cultural expectation, such that the causality of linear expression and grammar creates an experience of time and chronology, shaping in Husserl’s terms both representation and phantasy. The “we” that “will be writing” thus creates a future community invented by the act of writing, even as it erases alternative possible experiences of the present. As with all language acts, it also invites the addressed reader into a shared experience with the author. This helps give additional nuance to the lines that follow: one thing makes sense one thing only to live with people day by day that struggle to carry you forward it is the only way44

Though the lines appear to (attempt/fail to) reach outside of the text, scholars suggest that the “you” evoked in such recurring direct addresses is actually the ‘mad’ language that bp is stuck writing within, implying that what will turn out to become a life-long writing project is in fact a “vast insanity [. . .] anamorphosis in language itself.”45 Nichol died tragically young at age 43, and what

 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “The Martyrology of Saint And,” n.p.  bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “of those saints we know the listing follows,” n.p.  bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “of those saints we know the listing follows,” n.p.  Steve McCaffery, “In Tens/tion: Dialoguing with Bp,” Tracing the Paths: Reading ≠Writing The Martyrology (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1988): 72–91, 77.

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would be the last and final books of The Martyrology appeared posthumously. Others let this biographical fact overwhelm the writing and argue that the ultimate subject of the book is Nichol’s own premature death, given his regular self-denigration in the poetry, hence the entire project becomes a life-long apostrophe to a doom foretold.46 The idea of living with people as the only way, however, adds an important phenomenological gloss to the section. Regardless of the biographical dimension, down the page, he begins this writing: “a future music moves now to be written” – what follows is not the music, not the notes, not even a musical use of language, but four apparently random letters.47 Now, to be up front, I have no idea why these four particular letters are presented in this way. Is there a secret code here? Some allusion? Perhaps. They are all in ‘writing’ but in different order. What is clear, though, from this section is that Nichol intends to work through the Sapirian delimitation of language and grammar as a cognitive environment. Nichol attends to the secret form of language and its feeling orientation, create alternative pathways to a future through re-assembling the secret form of the alphabet itself: “its form is not apparent / it will be seen.”48 Language thus can be a phenomenological disruptive force, like a rune that alters the reality into which it is spoken. The Martyrology laments the gap, the abyss of communication, but yet invokes and deploys alien forces that defy such human boundaries. Serafini, who revels in imagining impossibilities, betrays no such lament at the gaps in communication. Given its inaccessibility, alas, it is perhaps not too surprising that criticism of the Codex reveals an overwhelming tendency to rehumanize, or de-alienate, the book. Just as the cryptographers and linguists have sought to solve the secrets of the book’s invented language, other extant criticism has almost exclusively attempted to track the range of influences and comparisons to existing literary forms and cultural products, to render its alien conventions recognizable and coherent. Indeed, with so many identifiable features shaping the writing, from the use of chapters, page numbers, table of contents, to alien creatures using or built from human technologies (such as a plant that grows in the exact shape of scissors, or the fish whose tail is a usable, conventional broom), such

 Stephen Scobie, “The Death of Terry/The Death of the Author (bpNichol),” Signature Event Cantext (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1989): 9–23; David Clark, “Monstrous Reading: The Martyrology After De Man,” Studies in Canadian Literature 15.2 (1990): 1–32; Glen Lowry, “Where Do We Go from Here? The Romance of Beginning The Martyrology Again,” in Beyond the Orchard: Essays on The Martyrology, ed. Roy Miki and Fred Wah (Vancouver: West Coast Line, 1997): 59–75.  bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “of those saints we know the listing follows,” n.p.  bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “of those saints we know the listing follows,” n.p.

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scholarship debunks the alien fantasy of the text rather than an elaboration or exegesis of its hermetic artistry. Under the weight of such disillusioned attention, the artifice of the text shatters into the splinters of borrowed fragments. In the 2013 edition of the Codex, Serafini toys with such critics by insisting that the book was, in fact, written by a white stray cat that ambled into his scriptorium, and he “merely its manual executor.”49 Such surrealist humor helps to remind critics of the strangeness of writing itself, and of all the cultural conventions we take for granted in the act of writing and producing a book. While opposed to the troublesome fun of the book, the demystifying efforts of critics is, inevitably, correct: the alien does remain outside Serafini’s book precisely because the alien, by definition, is that which remains inaccessible, that which establishes the outer boundary of our knowledge in the present. Aliens, in this way, are not just extra-terrestrials, though those two categories will overlap until we make contact with life off planet. (Astrobiologists like to joke that the study of life in space is the only scientific field without an actual object of study.) The idea of alien encounter shapes Serafini’s project, but the desire for estrangement embodied in the book as a commercial product is a distinctly human convention. Again, though, the context overwhelms the content, despite the ways the book entices us to encounter: “perhaps unintelligible and alien writing could make us all free to once again experience those hazy childhood sensations” of reading books before understanding language.50 The alien in Serafini’s alien encyclopedia is, thus, intertwined with a liberatory impulse to release a reader’s imagination from the circumscription of inherited perception. Its alien, certainly a human conceit, presents as a boundary of the rupture, an acknowledgement of the gap just beyond our cognizance that yet fills the remaining universe of ideas. Like Nichol, when asked why he wrote such an alien book, and what it was really all about, Serafini had no illusions or hesitation about the audience for the project: “I was trying to reach out to my fellow people.”51 The phenomenological alien, the radical category disruptor, remains outside the text. What is the alien within it then? Like Nichol, Serafini’s book presents a disruption that establishes a liberatory perceptual shift that pushes the reader into a feeling as if they occupy the space of the alien, the one whose perception is not recognized as something by the text. Carlotta Vacchelli brings in Molotiu’s idea of ‘iconostasis,’52 how comics tend to create an experience of reading the  Luigi Serafini, “Decodex,” Supplement to the 2013 edition of Codex Seriphianus.  Serafini, “Decodex,” 9.  Girolami, “Look Inside,” n.p.  Carlotta Vacchelli, “The Intelligible Book: Timothy Ely’s and Luigi Serafini’s Book Arts,” Italica 96.2 (2019): 281–302.

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entire page as a unified composition, reading not so much left to right or sequentially, but taking in the whole at a glance. Arrival, as described above sans le mot, also used iconostasis to establish the difference of alien perception. Vacchelli does a close reading of the final image in the book, which depicts the author’s dead hand, and argues: “My goal is to explain how the clash between the unintelligible codes and the intelligible material with its visual characteristics actually form a specific aesthetic of communication.”53 She arrives at the conclusion that, paradoxically, “unintelligible codes convey the idea of a universal readability.”54 The empty codes of the Codex make every reader illiterate, establishing a universal illiteracy which reverses the closed experience of language. She compares this book to Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006), a wordless graphic novel that presents a delightfully bizarre examination of an immigrant’s arrival into an impossible world. From this, and the difference with Serafini’s encyclopedia of nonsense, she concludes that the Codex is a “re-education into play [. . .] the liberation of the meaning in the words serves as a machine for setting free from a pre-existing knowledge.”55 Like Nichol, the alien conceit of the Codex is merely a ruse or perhaps metonymy of the text’s deeper investigation of the phenomenology of the alien in its disruption of perceptual habits. Nichol confesses that the scenario of his devising fails: “you saints [. . .] i don’t give a fuck for your history.”56 Instead, he turns to family, history, and, through them, his ancestral Ireland to recall the ancient Celtic Runic tradition as a possible valid, unalienated form of writing. While it is certainly not an alien technology, or a radical departure from the Western tradition, the rune is a visual-object language that demonstrates more alignment between sense and sensibility, body and mind, than the pure, de-materialized abstraction of the Phoenecian alphabet. Nichol’s consistent method of experimentation is to break and disrupt sequential language experience and thereby draw the silent third into the communication. Moments of rupture produce if not genuine speech and connection then the idea of the possibility, the phantasy, of such presentation. He does not want language to be a hindrance (he does not want to become a ‘dupe’ of language, in Sapir’s terms). He wants to push language right to the edge of communication, accept its alien nature as mark of our own mutual alienation, and push through. As he writes in “from The Chronicle of Knarn”:

   

Vacchelli, “Intelligible Book,” 282. Vacchelli, “Intelligible Book,” 282. Vacchelli, “Intelligible Book,” 300. bpNichol, Martyrology, Book 2, “Friends as Footnotes,” n.p.

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i don’t know where the rim ends to look over into the great rift i only know i drift without you into a blue that is not there57

This short passage enacts some of the ideas mapped out above in a very playful way. The first line ends, peeks over and sees the line “to look over.” The line cuts back to the margin and talks about a great rift. By the internal logic of the paragram (and looking beyond the rift of semiotics), from rift we get the word “drift” in the fourth line. Is that the great rift? That words appear in other words? bpNichol deploys the multiple levels of meaning in poetic language, and in the constantly shifting registers of his paragrams, to encode his proposition of a revivified language. Finally, the idea in this section that he wants to look over and investigate the great rift (perhaps the abyss between people that creates an alien division, and an alien within) is pushed aside for his self-recognition that he only exists as something in relation to the second person, “you.” Who is this “you”? Nichol evokes the familiar Husserlian notion of the necessity of the Other for the invention of the self but pushes past into the inaccessible space of a “a blue that is not there.”58 This absence names the space outside of language and communication, the dislocuted realm of the alien. What prevents the disappearance of the self into this kind of alienation? The presentation of another, the call of the other, and the phantasy of reaching them. Waldenfels describes attention as the conduit of thoughtfulness, the inventor of insight, the means by which we come to be in the presence of something else. Nichol’s saints, like Serafini’s book, are the embodiments of that kind of attention. They use the trope of the alien to talk about the void, and use the void to propose a feeling of expanded, perhaps limitless possibility in language.

 bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “from The Chronicle of Knarn,” n.p.  bpNichol, The Martyrology, Book 1, “from The Chronicle of Knarn,” n.p.

Art Redding

The Mystery of the Missing Mystery: Midcentury Intellectuals on Modernism and Detective Fiction Abstract: Edmund Wilson’s attacks on the mystery genre and the debates spurred among a number of major intellectuals at the close of the Second World War offer deeply suggestive clues about a set of interlinked and pressing questions about cultural production: how the fate of modernist aesthetic practices became entwined with new formations of popular literature at midcentury; the broadening of American cultural and political hegemony in western Europe; the political fortunes of aesthetic styles under a regime of mass marketing; and the affective resonance of mass murder on the sensibilities of populations wilted by wartime suffering. This essay considers understandings of the popular genre over the course of the twentieth century: Wilson’s assessments of Symbolism and his dashed hopes for politically significant literature; disparagement by George Orwell and defenses by W. H. Auden, Raymond Chandler, and Jean-Paul Sartre at mid-century; later critical analyses by Gilles Deleuze and Fredric Jameson; the reclamation of popular culture more broadly in the hands of such critics as Andreas Huyssen and Andrew Ross in the 1980s. I argue that what’s missing in Wilson’s assessment is the dogged persistence of mystery, even at the very heart of crime fiction’s rationalist overreach, which continues to resonate.

Prologue: Edmund Wilson Cocks a Snook “The reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice,” pontificates Edmund Wilson, “that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles.”1 In his infamous trio of reviews excoriating the genre (published in the New Yorker in 1944 and 1945), Wilson repeatedly likened popular detective fiction to a “habit-forming drug,”2 one whose gratifications are endlessly deferred. “The addict reads not to find anything out but merely to get the mild stimulation of the succession of unexpected incidents and the suspense

 Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (New York: Farrar Straus, 1950): 263.  Wilson, Classics and Commercials, 264. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-013

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itself of looking forward to learning a sensational event.”3 The experience was always disappointing, never truly satisfying. Moreover, the prose in crime novels was insipid and banal, Wilson bloviated, the narrative craftsmanship overrated, and the pleasure afforded to the reader cheaply purchased: it might be entertaining to indulge the minor delights of solving puzzles (or, for readers of Agatha Christie, of failing to solve them), but it wilted the intellect. Posing not so much as highbrow cultural product but rather as a popular intellectual stimulant for middlebrows, detective fiction ultimately amounted to little more than a minor vice. It only pretended to challenge the intellect, and it did nothing at all to fire the imagination. What had been shriven from the genre was its capacity for genuine wonder, argues Wilson. What had been drained from detective fiction, in short, is ‘mystery’ itself. While Wilson’s somewhat cranky taste for mystery novels might seem a trivial concern, the set of debates he spurred at the close of the Second World War offer deeply suggestive clues about a set of interlinked and pressing questions about cultural production: how the fate of modernist aesthetic practices became entwined with new formations of popular literature at midcentury; the broadening of American cultural and political hegemony in western Europe; the political fortunes of aesthetic styles under a regime of mass marketing; and even the affective resonance of mass murder on existential sensibilities wilted by the long suffering of populations during the war. Detective fiction evolved and was perfected at the same time as modern, technologically enhanced mass warfare and emerges discursively in the same field as the new social sciences. Crime fiction does at least gesture reflexively towards the problem of endemic violence, even if it seldom faces the problem squarely. Consequently, I will argue, what’s missing in Wilson’s assessment is the dogged persistence of mystery, even at the very heart of crime fiction’s rationalist overreach, and this is something shared by modernism and mystery writing alike. When, say, the Continental Op, dauntless hero of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929), awakens after a long night of laudanum, liquor, and bad dreams to find his love interest, Dinah Brand, dead with an icepick in her chest, he spends the rest of the novel trying to convince other characters, readers, and mostly himself that he didn’t do it. His protests are equivocal, however; the real story, the real mystery, is the deluge of bloodlust infecting everyone in an urbanizing, modernizing America, which the genre – profess as it may its irreducible faith that crimes have solutions – would do little to quell.

 Wilson, Classics and Commercials, 264.

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It might be appropriate to take up an inquiry into what is admittedly something of a cold case in the pages of the present volume. Wilson’s earlier key work, Axel’s Castle (1931), had proven among the most robust summary assessment and theorization of modern literary symbolism. Wilson’s classic study of the heavy hitters of modernism – Yeats, Valéry, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Stein – understood their work to derive from the encounter between Symbolist abstraction and hard-nosed sociology: “the literary history of our time is to a great extent that of the development of Symbolism and its fusion or conflict with Naturalism.”4 Wilson has in mind the French symbolist poets Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, each of whom was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe (the writer, not incidentally, generally credited with the invention of the modern detective story). By “Naturalism” he refers to Zola and his followers, the tradition of Darwinian thinking, as well as such variants as Ibsen or Flaubert, each of whom “study man in relationship to his particular environment and time.”5 Yet, Wilson grimly concludes, the harsh realities of the Depression had rendered the modernist trajectory obsolete. “The reaction against nineteenthcentury Naturalism which Symbolism originally represented has probably now run its full course.”6 At the dawn of the Depression, Wilson anticipated the need for a more socially engaged literature, recommitted to emancipation and solidarity, which might use symbolist techniques “absorbed and assimilated”7 in the cause of revolutionary commitments: I believe therefore that the time is at hand when these writers, who have largely dominated the literary world of the decade 1920–30, though we shall continue to admire them as masters, will no longer serve us as guides. Axel’s world of the private imagination in isolation from the life of society seems to have been exploited and explored as far as for the present is possible.8

That was Wilson in 1931. A decade and a half on, it seems, at the time he penned his diatribes against detective fiction, as Wilson himself was acutely aware, politically charged proletarian literature had in turn flamed out, even in its experimental forms (think of John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams). By midcentury, both the high modernist derivatives of what he had termed an a-political ‘symbolism,’ and the proletarian realism that he once hoped to productively re-politicize

 Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870 to 1930 (New York: Scribner’s, 1931): 24.  Wilson, Axel’s Castle, 9.  Wilson, Axel’s Castle, 293.  Wilson, Axel’s Castle, 294.  Wilson, Axel’s Castle, 292.

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letters seemed to have exhausted themselves. Too long a dalliance with Stalinism had left many on the left, Wilson included, with a sour taste in their mouths. In the USA, an expanding economy, buttressed by the GI Bill and neo-Keynesian formation of what President Eisenhower would shortly term the ‘military industrial complex,’ promised to fold once formidable alliance of white working-class resistance into the cozy bosom of the suburban middle classes. At the same time, in league with other literary intellectuals, Wilson was extremely wary of the whitebread taste temptations being marketed to this expanding middle class. As Andrew Ross has documented in his study, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989), a coterie of critics dreaded the incursions on taste being made by a presumably banal ‘mass’ culture, as would soon be represented by a whole range of commercialized habit-forming middlebrow cultural practices: bestsellers, Hollywood melodrama, television, popular musical forms of jazz and later rock-and-roll, and, yes, with its well-padded Barcalounger conservatism, detective fiction. The barbarians of banality were at the gates. What was a literary highbrow to defend? For Wilson, decidedly not the mystery novel, redolent as it had become both of a mundane, prosaic aesthetics and of political paunchiness. Though Wilson was notorious for his crankiness and inconsistency, there is an overall coherence to his argument. Detective fiction was ultimately guarded and critically unstimulated. Wilson does permit faint praise for some writers. He admits to a grudging admiration for Raymond Chandler, for example, because Chandler writes “a novel of adventure” rather than detective fiction per se,9 and he singles the work of John Dickson Carr for praise on account of its “tinge of black magic.”10 Wilson’s more full-throated admiration for Conan Doyle, moreover, hinges, paradoxically enough, not upon the explicit positivism of the work, its seeming insistence on deductive logic and ratiocination (as embodied in the character of Holmes). To the contrary, argues Wilson, the stories are powerful literature insofar as they are “fairy-tales.”11 Conan-Doyle is working in “the commonplace and common-sense narrative which arouses excitement and wonder.”12 Mystery is to be indulged, rather than solved. Holmes’s adulation of logic was pretty much a red herring, which distracted later writers, who modeled their works on the wrong characteristics. Wilson thereby implicitly indicts the genre’s commitment to rationalism. Along with so many other products of the age, mystery novels had become sterile, functionalist, hyper-rationalized, logical, consumerist, and mass-produced. Cheap imitators of Conan Doyle,  Wilson, Classics and Commercials, 262.  Wilson, Classics and Commercials, 261.  Wilson, Classics and Commercials, 267.  Wilson, Classics and Commercials, 269.

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bemoans Wilson, are complicit in the whole tawdry project of modernity: the eclipse of enchantment. One thing missing from modernity was mystery; one thing missing from high modernism, according to such later critics as Ross and Andreas Huyssen when in the 1980s they retroactively reviewed its history, was popular culture. Again, note how the detective novel as a middlebrow consumerist cultural product is easily aligned with a presumably soulless and overly rationalized modernity. For many midcentury intellectuals, the great cultural war still to be fought was that against the dictatorship of banality. “It was only in the 1940s and 1950s that the modernism gospel and the concomitant condemnations of kitsch became something like the one-party state in the realm of aesthetics,”13 observes Huyssen, aligning the skepticism towards mass culture with an increasingly pervasive Cold War mindset. If proletarian literature was exhausted, so too was the brief dalliance that Wilson wanted between a symbolist avant-garde and a socialist revolution, which had proven so promising to European constructivists, dada-ists, and cubists and American experimentalists (Dos Passos, for example) alike. Stalinist-style socialist realism was equally uniform, uninspired, massproduced, prepackaged, and banal. There seemed little to choose between the kitsch of Norman Rockwell and that of Boris Ioganson. It was not unusual at the time to come across essays by such thinkers as Clement Greenberg, Lewis Mumford, or Paul Goodman condemning popular commercial art. So much so, that in 1957, Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White edited a collection of essays on the theme.14 Entitled Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, it included thought pieces mostly decrying popular culture by such luminaries as Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Theodor Adorno, and others. The section devoted to Detective fiction opens with Wilson’s denunciation. In his landmark critical text from 1986, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Huyssen defines one “Great Divide” as “the kind of discourse which insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture,”15 precisely the kind of discourse Wilson was enacting. Heroic modernism had been a generally reactive formation, Huyssen argues, demonstrating the gender dynamics at work in the enforcement of these distinctions. In the highly charged troping of the advocates of modernist experimentalism, mass culture has been consistently designated womanly. So too the detective

 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986): 54.  Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (ed.), Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: The Free Press, 1957).  Huyssen, Great Divide, viii.

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novel, in the hands of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh, had been a woman’s genre during the Golden Age, written mostly by women, apparently, and mostly for women. In fact, even in the interwar years, there were more male crime-writers than woman and the readership was largely male; nonetheless, crime writing between the wars was stereotyped as woman’s genre. Moreover, while Wilson is careful to lampoon both male and female authors, it is clear that his biggest problem with the genre was that it was to his mind effeminate. At the same time, we should note that Wilson’s earlier 1931 critique of the political insularity of the modernist masters runs precisely parallel to Huyssen’s in 1986. However much Wilson admired the achievements of the modernists, he contends that such writers “have endeavored to discourage their readers, not only with politics, but with action of any kind.”16 Wilson targets the political inefficacy of Symbolists and other high modernists, their self-imposed isolation from the world. Similarly, Huyssen too attacks the modernists for political neutrality and sterility. He distinguishes between a politically inert high modernism and a committed avant-garde (expressionism, constructivism, dada, surrealism) that, as Wilson hoped, could put experimental techniques to politically efficacious and social transformative purposes. Huyssen insists on the transformative power of art, as opposed to Theodor Adorno’s emphasis on autonomy and purity of art as an enacted resistance to reactionary containments of mass culture. We should note as well that Huyssen, Ross, and other like-minded critics of the 1980s have largely won the theoretical field, arguing for a more nuanced understanding of the symbiotic relations between gallery-bound works or those designated for exclusive readership with mass-marketed design, popular fiction, and advertisements across the wide field of cultural production in the modern era. It is a cliché of pop art and postmodern thinking to have broken down the supposed barriers between high and low taste. Huyssen, Ross and other theorists of the mid-eighties had also taken to heart the lessons of the New Left and British Cultural Studies, to the effect that ordinary culture is a domain of political struggle. Indeed, the complex aesthetic, ideological, and discursive exchanges among popular consumer cultures and canonized, classic, or avant-garde cultural productions was arguably the most salient feature of ‘postmodernism’ and remains, mutatis mutandis, a political hot potato in today’s unabated culture wars. For his part, Huyssen was wary of American-style postmodernism, which he worried – again, his position is not so distant from Wilson’s – might trade off its political potency for commercial viability. Huyssen worried that postmodernism

 Wilson, Axel’s Castle, 298.

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constituted a belated American effort to revive the sensibilities of the European avant-garde. Thus, the unresolved problem of its critical potential and capacity for resistance – would it prove to be simply a toothless consumerist eclecticism? The last three decades have no doubt offered an equivocal answer to that question, at best, though we can be safe in asserting that the old modernist question of the politics of popular culture still lingers, even in our digital age.

Modernity and Mystery Let’s rehearse things and see what the trail of evidence reveals. The fact that so many leading male intellectuals at the close of the Second World War felt compelled to stake out their positions vis-a-vis mystery novels is the first curiosity that must be explained. Wilson’s indictment spurred a good deal of consternation on the part of literary intellectuals as to the aesthetic qualities of crime fiction. His initial foray, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” which mostly makes fun of the writing of Rex Stout and insists that the form had only declined since the nineteenth century, appeared October 14, 1944. It seemed to have hit a nerve, as Wilson noted a few months later. In response, a number of other writers have published articles defending the detective story: Jacques Barzun, Joseph Wood Krutch, Raymond Chandler and Somerset Maugham have all had something to say on the subject – nor has the umbrageous Bernard De Voto failed to raise his voice.17

Those were some heavy hitters among the literati. De Voto’s rejoinder, in Harper’s, for example, attributed the popularity of the genre to the “only current form of fiction that is pure story.”18 Such commentators as Barzun, who analyzes the variant plot structures (whodunnit, the thriller, the suspense novel), do concede Wilson’s point about the literary thinness of the genre. The cheerful characters in these stories and novels are recognizable types for example, Barzun notes, rather than complex psychological portraits. For Barzun, the pleasure of crime fiction lies precisely in the satisfaction of solving the puzzle: “the pleasure is not the symbolic satisfaction of aggressive desires. The pleasure of crime fiction is intellectual and exploratory [. . .] the love of making

 Wilson, Classics and Commercials, 257–258.  Berdard De Voto, “The Easy Chair,” (New York) Harper’s Magazine (December 1, 1944): 34–37, 37.

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order out of confusions.”19 Thus, in keeping with the generally conservative thrust of Barzun’s thinking, the detective participates in the task of the historian, to make order and sense out of the chaos of presumably random events. Ultimately, however, Barzun acknowledges that crime fiction is a guilty pleasure. We read detective stories because they are fun. In his rejoinder to these other commentors, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” which appeared January 20, 1945, Wilson doubles down, channeling his inner Mencken and delivering a full-throated broadside: How can you care who committed a murder which has never really been made to take place, because the writer hasn’t any ability of even the most ordinary kind to persuade you to see it or feel it? How can you probe the possibilities of guilt among characters who all seem alike, because they are all simply names on the page? It was then that I understood that a true connoisseur of this fiction must be able to suspend the demands of his imagination and literary taste and take the thing as an intellectual problem. But how you arrive at that state of mind is what I do not understand.20

It isn’t simply a question of acknowledging the difference between poorly written crime novels and quality prose, he notes, attacking Dorothy Sayers in particular for her literary pretentiousness – it’s all bad, lock, stock, and smoking barrel! Yet other luminaries – George Orwell, W. H. Auden, and Jean-Paul Sartre among them – also weighed in on the debate, so it may be worth also reviewing a few of their positions in a bit more detail. In 1948, for example, esteemed poet W. H. Auden penned “The Guilty Vicarage,” also in Harper’s, conceding Wilson’s point that the reading of mysteries was “an addiction, like tobacco or alcohol.”21 Nonetheless, Auden insists, the genre serves an important social function, and in that was akin to Greek tragedy. The act of reading mysteries does perform a mystery, in the strict theological sense of the term: it performs a magical expiation of sin: It is sometimes said that detective stories are read by respectable law-abiding citizens in order to gratify in phantasy the violent or murderous wishes they dare not, or are ashamed to, translate into action. This may be true for the reader of thrillers (which I rarely enjoy), but it is quite false for the reader of detective stories. On the contrary, the

 Jacques Barzun, “A Catalogue of Crime,” in A Jacques Barzun Reader, ed. Michael Murray (New York: HarperCollins, 2002): 567–571, 567.  Wilson, Classics and Commercials, 260.  Wystan Hugh Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict,” Harper’s Magazine 196.1176 (1 May 1948): 406–412, 406, (acc. 17 March 2022); further references in the text, abbreviated as “GV.”

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magical satisfaction the latter provide (which makes them escape literature not works of art) is the illusion of being dissociated from the murderer. (“GV,” 411–412.)

There are a few important points to underscore in Auden’s compelling formulation. First, unlike, say, the sacramental forgiveness of sin (at least for a believer), the mystery novel does not truly cleanse the reader of guilt. Rather, it offers only an illusion of innocence, which is why it is escapist. What we escape from, briefly, when we read the work is precisely our common guilt, our inextricable entanglement in a contaminated social contract. We can pretend, for a moment, that the world is safe again, the guilty have been punished, and we are whole and innocent. It is a small, blissful trip, like any drug. By contrast, a genuine literature is more like a hangover: it will compel us to face the dirty sordid world and to acknowledge our own deeply hurtful complicity within it. The world is pretty rotten, literature tells us, and so are we. Who doesn’t need a cocktail break of light mysteries, every now and again? At mid-century, as Auden, Wilson, and other critics note, however, crime writing was itself confessedly in something of a crisis. Traditional detective novels – ones where often amateur sleuths like Lord Peter Wimsey, say, or Miss Marple work assiduously to solve a mysterious crime and identify the guilty party – were being supplanted in popularity by an upstart style of crime writing. The crisis was occasioned by the eclipse of British Golden Age novels by the American hard-boiled school of crime writing, in the hands of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. Note that Auden is careful to hive off thrillers from mysteries proper. A thriller is not concerned with solving a crime, aligning the sickness of the world with the guilt of the criminal, and so render the world once again safe and the reader, at least for a moment, whole and clean. The thriller, as its name implies, rather thrills to the crime. The thriller, it appears, does not proffer the fantasy of a world that is largely immaculate: it offers the fantasy of a world that is wholly corrupt, where depravity is more or less universal, and where the reader her or himself is folded into a social compact characterized largely by mutual perversion: just look what a turn-on it is, the thriller says to its readers, voyeuristically to lap up all this sordid vice and sin. Aren’t you the sick one! And it was exactly the heightened bloodthirstiness of the increasingly popular thriller form of crime-writing that incensed George Orwell, in his contribution to the debate. “It seems to be the case that the crime story, at any rate on its higher levels, has greatly increased in blood-thirstiness during the past

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twenty years,”22 he writes in his essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” published in Horizon in 1944. The “Raffles” of Orwell’s title refers to the gentleman criminal protagonist in the fiction of E. W. Hornung, Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, which was highly popular early in the twentieth century: the charm of Raffles is partly in the period atmosphere and partly in the technical excellence of the stories. Hornung was a very conscientious and on his level a very able writer. Anyone who cares for sheer efficiency must admire his work. (“R,” n.p.)

Despite making the criminal (rather than the sleuth) the hero, the work was boyish, simple, charming, innocent, if even pretty silly. “And though the stories are convincing in their physical detail, they contain very little sensationalism – very few corpses, hardly any blood, no sex crimes, no sadism, no perversions of any kind” (“R,” n.p.). Because Raffles was still a good guy. “The truly dramatic thing, about Raffles, the thing that makes him a sort of byword even to this day [. . .] is the fact that he is a gentleman” (“R,” n.p.[emphasis in original]). But that has changed, as society has become more barbaric, Orwell notes. The “Miss Blandish” of his title is a reference to British imitation of an American-style gangster novel, popular No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), by James Hadley Chase (René Raymond). Typically, Orwell blames the inane enthusiasms of his fellow intelligentsia for this development, indicting the taste for Stalinism on part of British left. The new thriller was also no doubt reflective of the uncivil barbarity of the age, Orwell argues, a barbarity leavened, at least in part, by the wars. But it is largely the Americans who are to blame. Orwell’s verdict on the appeal of American-style pulp or hard-boiled thrillers reads: “in real life one is usually a passive victim, whereas in the adventure story one can think of oneself as being at the centre of events” (“R,” n.p.). This is a characteristically American fantasy, Orwell claims, and it is characteristically narcissistic; it is tantamount to pure fascism insofar as it betrays a blind adoration of power.

Manning up the American Detective Novel Whodunnit? According to Orwell, the Americans. The conservative old-fashioned mystery novel, which fantasizes a generally harmonious society, had been supplanted by a hard-boiled style of crime writing that was rapidly morphing into

 George Orwell, “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” (October 1944) Horizon, (acc. 10 December 2021); further references in the text, abbreviated as “R.”

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the noirish thriller, a deeply pessimistic genre that fantasizes a social field of near-universal corruption and criminality. Recall that both Wilson and Auden had effectively excluded American crime writing from consideration: the novels of Hammett, Cain, Chandler, and others in the hard-boiled tradition were not really mysteries at all. Of Hammett, Wilson concedes, “he infused the old formula [. . .] with a certain cold underworld brutality which gave readers a new shudder.”23 Chandler, in turn, penned a novel of “adventure” rather than a detective story.24 Auden confesses that “I find it very difficult, for example, to read one that is not set in rural England” (“GV,” 406). Milieu is of primary importance for Auden, who lays out very strict definitions of the plot and function of mystery novels. Only the works of the golden era merited the term. This is because the detective story requires: (1) A closed society so that the possibility of an outside murderer (and hence of the society being totally innocent) is excluded; and a closely related society so that all its members are potentially suspect. (“GV,” 407)

Thus, in accord with Orwell (though for very different reasons), Auden would exclude the American hard-boiled version of mystery from analysis. Chandler’s “powerful but extremely depressing books,” for instance, “should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art” (“GV,” 408). Chandler would blush at the claim, though others will concur. In his study The Noir Thriller (2001), Lee Horsley argues that what overwhelmingly characterizes the genre is its mournful and critical sensibility; it is “the most durable popular expression of [. . .] modernist pessimism.”25 Chandler’s well-known essay, “The Simple Art of Murder” which first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1944, lays out a defense of the importance of American crime writing in modernist literary terms, while also invoking its blue-collar roots in the dime novel, pulp fiction, and literary naturalism. He lays out the case against what he termed “the English formula,”26 lampooning the poor taste of the public: old ladies jostle each other at the mystery shelf to grab off some item of the same vintage with a title like The Triple Petunia Murder Case, or Inspector Pinchbottle to the Rescue. They do not like it that “really important books” get dusty on the reprint counter, while Death Wears Yellow Garters is put out in editions of fifty or one hundred thousand copies on the news-stands of the country.27

    

Wilson, Classics and Commercials, 235. Wilson, Classics and Commercials, 262. Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller (New York: Palgrave, 2001): 1. Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Vintage, 1988): 3. Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder, 3.

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Such works – on this point Chandler concurs entirely with Wilson – are insipid, implausible, convoluted, rearguard, and, in a word, effeminate. By contrast, he champions Hammett, who will increasingly be understood as a key link in an American line of revolutionary modernism that runs from Whitman to Hemingway. Like these writers, Hammett is able effectively to throw off “that heavy crust of English gentility and American pseudo-gentility”28 that has weighed so ponderously on the mystery genre. His work was arch, homespun, redolent of a streetwise gritty realism: Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements.29

Moreover, for such thinkers as Jean-Paul Sartre, what Chandler claimed for Hammett was consonant with a wholly revolutionary model of literature itself. “The heroes of Hemingway and Caldwell never explain themselves – do not allow themselves to be dissected. They act only,”30 writes Jean Paul Sartre in “American Novelists in French Eyes,” published just after the war (1946), also in The Atlantic. In this well-known and concise elaboration of the French fascination for American writing, Sartre enthuses over “a veritable revolution in the art of telling a story,”31 one that dispenses with analysis and introspection entirely. Consequently, we might reframe our analysis of these midcentury conversations about the mystery genre as reflective of a larger cultural crisis, as intimated by both Wilson at the time and Huyssen later. As a function of a massive shift in the cultural marketplace (which I haven’t time to flesh out in full in this short essay) at least one strand of popular fiction was becoming ‘literary.’ For Sartre was not the only French intellectual to laud American thrillers; an enthusiastic French readership and a devoted fandom of Hollywood movie versions of the thrillers were largely responsible for cultivating noir sensibilities. Launched in 1945, French publisher Gallimard’s celebrated La Série Noire, was a line of crime fiction devoted to American-style hard-boiled and noir thrillers, “an

 Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder, 14.  Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder, 14–15.  Jean-Paul Sartre, “American Novelists in French Eyes” (August 1946), Atlantic Monthly (acc. 10 December 2021).  Sartre, “American Novelists,” n.p.

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adaptation of Sanctuary for a mass market.”32 The very term noir for the distinctive black covers of the series, was derived by critic Nino Frank to describe a whole generic literary and cinematic style. These were the sorts of books that Sartre celebrated and that Orwell loathed; precisely the sort that both Auden and Wilson considered to rank as ‘literary’ rather than as mystery novels. Edited by Marcel Duhamel, the series included works by Americans David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Horace McCoy, and Ed McBain, as well as Hammett and Chandler, alongside French and British writers in the pulp tradition. Chester Himes, who was recruited into the ranks of crime writers for the series, recalls Duhamel’s comment, that Hammett “was the greatest writer who ever lived.”33 Duhamel’s advice on the form is strictly in keeping with Sartre’s: “Make pictures. Like motion pictures. Always the scenes are visible. No stream of consciousness at all. We don’t give a damn who’s thinking what – only what they are doing.”34 Thus, for champions of the American hard-boiled style, the tradition kickstarted by Hammett represented a reinvigoration and a re-masculinization of an enervated modernism. Witnesses for the defense concur: not only was American crime writing the future of the popular genre, it was rising from the morass of mass commercial culture to save literature itself form moribund introspection. As critic Erik Dussere points out in his gloss on Huyssen, the modernist novel, on the one hand, and the detective novel or crime thriller, on the other hand, stand on opposite sides of the divide. However, the case of the American hard-boiled crime novel has always made the maintenance of the high/ low cultural distinction difficult.35

American thrillers would liberate writing from its milquetoast late modernist malaise. They would undo the opposition between high and low culture; in their steely-eyed pessimistic, critical masculinity, crime thrillers surmounted the stereotypical ‘effeminacy’ that had so long been understood as characteristic of popular culture, in Huyssen’s assessment. In the face of the emasculating threat of mass culture, which was understood to be displacing paternal cultural powers, the ‘authenticity’ of Hammett, Chandler, Faulkner, Hemingway, etc., arises like a great lost father.

 Gilles Deleuze, “The Philosophy of Crime Novels,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953– 1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004): 81–85, 81.  Chester Himes, My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography of Chester Himes: Vol. 2 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976): 102.  Himes, Life of Absurdity, 102.  Erik Dussere, America is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 2014): 83.

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From Post-Mystery to Postmodernism There are a few more plot twists to the story I am trying to tell. As everyone knows, noir didn’t survive particularly long as a cultural formation. Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) is generally considered the last great noir movie (until the neo-noir revival of the mid-seventies and eighties). And such literary critics as Woody Haut have argued, persuasively, that the hard-boiled, working-class pulp writing style could not effectively adapt itself to the cool new sensibilities of the nineteen sixties.36 What did emerge from noir, rather, was not a rejuvenated modernist realism but parody; what was spawned, as I think Fredric Jameson in his work on Chandler was the first to acknowledge, was a certain type of existentially laced proto-postmodernism. In a relatively early (1970) essay on Chandler, Jameson points to a dialectical intimacy between modernism and the detective story (whose developments are almost entirely synchronous). If, as De Voto has asserted, a detective story is all story, “modernism was” by contrast, “a reaction against narration, against plot.”37 Such later writers as Vladimir Nabokov and Robbe-Grillet, Jameson argues, organize their functionally plotless narratives around a murder, “which serves as a way of organizing essentially plotless material into an illusion of movement, into the formally satisfying arabesques of a puzzle unfolding.”38 The real secret to Chandler, then, and to American crime writing, is not the tautness of its writing, but its endless deferral of the satisfactions of closure as in Chandler. As Jameson points out, the solution to the mystery when it ultimately does arrive, is relatively incidental, and effectively pointless: the fun here is not in solving the puzzle, but in forgetting it; the fun is in the jampacked formlessness of the novel. “American literature feels obliged to put everything in.”39 In Chandler’s book, there is a lot of extraneous information that detracts from the puzzle. And from the solution. Here, the missing mystery is that there is no ‘mystery,’ frankly, at least not in the theological sense of the term. In that capacity, Chandler effects a demystification, exposing the genuine purposelessness of violence and death. And parody? In 1966, in celebration of the thousandth book published in La Série Noire, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze published a brief commentary,

 Woody Haut, Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999): 164.  Fredric Jameson, “On Raymond Chandler,” The Southern Review 6.3 (1970): 624–650, 625–626.  Jameson, “On Raymond Chandler,” 626.  Jameson, “On Raymond Chandler,” 628.

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“The Philosophy of Crime Fiction,” in the journal Arts et Loisirs. Deleuze mentions Chases’ No Orchids for Miss Blandish explicitly, the object, you will recall, of Orwell’s ire. For Deleuze, “the birth of La Serie Noir has been the death of the detective novel” because these works “taught [. . .] police activity has nothing to do with a metaphysical or scientific search for the truth,”40 and thereby dispenses with both the inductive and deductive models of ratiocination that had been at the philosophical heart of British and French detective fiction to date. Consequently, Deleuze argues, the social and ethical logic of the noir thriller precisely reverses the theological absolution that Auden saw at work in the traditionally conservative detective form. For Auden, the polluting element was identified and punished; thus, society was purged of contaminants and social harmony imaginatively restored, even as the reader, herself folded into the blessed social order, renewed and rendered innocent. For Deleuze, by contrast, by virtue of its profound and amoral pessimism the new crime fiction (in which vice is only arbitrarily punished and virtue seldom rewarded) exposes the fraudulence of the social order even as it recalibrates it. It set in motion “a process of restitution that allows a society, at the limits of cynicism, to hide what it wants to hide, reveal what it wants to reveal, deny all evidence, and champion the improbable.”41 Society is renewed, but it is in no way cleansed, social balance (rather than harmony) is restored. The social contract is reconstituted with a wink and a nudge, and all social agents – cop and criminal, and bystander alike – agree to keep playing the game as if it made sense knowing full well that it doesn’t: “these compensations have no other object than to perpetuate an equilibrium that represents a society in its entirety at the heights of its power of falsehood.”42 Complicity runs deep in what Deleuze terms the “great trinity of falsehood – informant-corruptiontorture.”43 This is all very stark, Deleuze concludes, but it is not simply a question of a literature that can maintain a cold-eyed realism. Characteristically, Deleuze emphasizes the pathos, the – to remedy precisely what Wilson found lacking in the genre – enchantment of reading, the charm. He develops an affective rather than intellectual theory of reading crime fiction, which is only on the surface of things counter-intuitive. Ultimately, “the most beautiful works” in the series are those in which “the real finds its proper parody, such that in

   

Deleuze, “The Philosophy of Crime Novels,” 82. Deleuze, “The Philosophy of Crime Novels,” 83. Deleuze, “The Philosophy of Crime Novels,” 83. Deleuze, “The Philosophy of Crime Novels,” 83.

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turn the parody shows us directions in the real world which we would not have found otherwise.”44 Hence the much-commented hyper-stylization of the noir genre (which, in so many neo-noir productions of the 70s, 80s and beyond, threatens to spill over into sterile self-parody). Yet, what else could we ask of literature? For the record, Deleuze’s favorite work in the series was Deadlier than the Male (1942), a one-off by the Hollywood screenwriter James Gunn, about whom very little is known, and which is now sadly out of print. The book, a gangster novel on the surface, is remarkable as an allegory of passion and homosocial rage understood as pure power: “I’m strong. I’m the strongest guy I know,” claims one of its antiheroes, the aptly-named killer Sam Wild, “And what I want is mine, and I take it, and then nobody cuts in.”45 Somebody does cut in, of course – many bodies do – both Sam’s adoring male partner and the adoring but conniving femme fatale, who proves to be, as a character, precisely what the title stipulates. The book was the basis for the controversial Robert Wise film, Born to Kill (1947), starring Lawrence Tierney, a deeply disturbing RKO feature that ended up being banned in Ohio, Memphis, and Chicago. I recommend both works highly, if you can get a hold of copies.

Coda: Who Cares Who Killed Roger Scruton? “I’ve often noticed,” says one of Agatha Christie’s sleuths, “that once coincidences start happening they go on happening in the most extraordinary way.”46 And so what? Seventy-five years after Wilson, fifty years after Jameson, and as I am writing, thirty-five years after Huyssen, debates about the political power of literature seem rather antiquated. In the post-Trump world of global digital culture, anyone who reads books at all is no doubt on the side of conventional liberal pluralism. But the digital world generates its own coincidences, or maybe we do. I wrote my Research Assistant to run a quick search through the appropriate databases, in order to see if there was any contemporary critical commentary on Edmund Wilson’s essays. What I got back was a series of pieces on moral individualism and the conservative case for good government. What happened was this: instead of asking about “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd,”

 Deleuze, “The Philosophy of Crime Novels,” 85.  James Gunn, Deadlier Than the Male (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1942): 41.  Agatha Christie, “Secret Adversary [1922],” Agatha Christie: Five Classic Murder Mysteries (New York: Wings, 1985): 29; further reference in the text, abbreviated as “SA.”

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I inadvertently asked about “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Scruton.” I would like to blame this on the auto-correct function of my word processor (which is responsible for all sorts of creative malapropisms), but it is more like a synaptic glitch or Freudian slip of my own. I could have done worse, I suppose; I might have inadvertently referenced Robert Zemeckis’ 1988 mash-up, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Taking as its setting the year 1947, the film (based on a satirical 1981 mystery novel by Gary K. Wolf) is a deeply telling and now-classic postmodernist parodic gloss on two of the great hegemonic American cultural formations that flourished between the 1930s and the late 1950s: the hard-boiled and noir fiction and film we have been discussing and the theatrical animated cartoons of Warner Bros, Disney, Fleischer Studios, King Features/Paramount, and others. But that’s a subject for another essay. For those of you who don’t know his work, Roger Scruton (1944–2020) was a British philosopher who, presumably scandalized by the excess of the student movement and May 68, espoused traditional conservative – even paleoconservative – views. In the eighties, through the Jan Hus Foundation, he became active in the dissident movement in Central and Eastern Europe. My colleagues, when I taught in Brno and Prague, were heavily influenced by his anticommunist thinking, and he exerted considerable influence over political philosophies circulating at Central European University. Scruton’s rather banal vision of a moral social order, beset by leftist demagogues and philistines, has shaped the rhetoric of such reactionary strongmen as Viktor Orban. Despite all Orban’s anti-Semitic vitriol, and his subsequent personal targeting of George Soros in particular, he had, in 1989, received a grant from the Soros Foundation to study at Oxford. According to Scruton’s Wikipedia page, in 2019, Polish President Andrzej Duda awarded Scruton the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for his contributions to restoring ‘democracy’ in Poland! While I haven’t the space here to relish the full ironies of this anecdote, I want to point out that Scruton’s nostalgic vision of once peaceful England is also the world of Raffles, of Inspector Pinchbottle to the Rescue, of Auden’s fantasmatically innocent rural vicarage. The world conservatives are trying to build is the world of the Golden Age of mystery novels. Scruton’s England is also Agatha Christie’s, is also Brexit’s. Scruton’s work is idiotic, mostly, and stereotypically nostalgic, like Christie mystery novels, as Wilson has argued. Still, though, as critic Thomas Leitch has argued, while “frequently invested in a fetishized past,”47 the mystery genre can embrace a whole spectrum of attitudes towards the past. Golden Age

 Thomas Leitch, “The Many Pasts of Detective Fiction,” Crime Fiction Studies 1.2 (2020): 157–172, 160.

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writers were indeed “conservators of traditional values,”48 on the whole; but that was not entirely the case for either Christie or, say, Dorothy Sayers, each of whom inserted often explicit feminist messages into their novels. We should keep in mind Deleuze’s dictum, too, that “parody shows us directions in the real world which we would not have found otherwise.”49 There might be some hope to wrest yet in a world seemingly dominated by the most farcically populist and reactionary forms of political tyrannies. Christie, certainly, is always a little more clever than most of us are willing to give her credit for being; she is certainly a lot more clever than I am. And while she didn’t write a lot of explicitly political novels, The Secret Adversary (1922) is an important early exception. The plot hinges on a ragtag group of insurrectionists – Bolsheviks, Anarchists, Sinn Féinians, nihilists, along with their co-traveling dupes and lackeys in the Labour Party – who are, in a scenario that is a conservative’s worst nightmare, plotting to topple British society. As one of the conspirators remarks, menacingly, “Every revolution has had its honest men. They are soon disposed of afterwards” (“SA,” 41). (No doubt this is true of literary revolutions too.) The conspiracy is led by a shadowy archcriminal, Mr. Brown. Who Mr. Brown really is is anyone’s guess: he may be the scion of an American robber baron capitalist. More possibly, in a truly political allegorical twist, he may be someone who dwells at the very heart of the English establishment itself. Or it may be someone else entirely. I don’t want to give away the end, though you might (or might not) be reassured that, in the comfortingly safe fictional universe of Agatha Christie-land, the plot will probably be foiled. A somewhat new England, somewhat more progressive and democratic, with a somewhat less hidebound class system, will emerge gradually out of the post-World War I era. I recommend this work heartily as well. Enjoy. Or is it the American billionaire, after all, who has been plotting the overthrow of civilization?

 Leitch, “The Many Pasts,” 164.  Deleuze, “The Philosophy of Crime Novels,” 85.

General Section

Margaryta Golovchenko

Nature and I: The Human/Nature Relationship in Surrealist and Proto-Surrealist Poetry Abstract: Using Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1857), Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations (1886), and André Breton’s Earthlight (1923) as case studies, this article proposes that the concerns of Romantic poetry earlier in the nineteenth century found a new language and form at the turn-of-the-century and into the twentieth. It challenges the notion that, with the emergence of modern technologies and increasing commercialization, the natural world disappeared physically as well as from the minds of modern poets. Contextualizing the three poets, particularly Breton, within the evolving ecocritical discourse, the article suggests that their preoccupation with the human-nature relationship, which they explore through the unnamed “I” or “speaker-poet,” in metropolitan Paris should, in fact, be considered a concern for Nature. Baudelaire’s discontent and perpetual sense of loss at the Haussmanization of Paris gives way to Rimbaud’s attempts to reinvigorate the modern metropolis, made monstrous through innovation, by blurring the boundaries between reality and fantasy. It is Breton’s poetry that proves to be the most optimistic in this regard. Drawing on the unexpected, in the form of the Surrealist notion of the “chance encounter,” Breton challenges the idea that Nature is truly located on the fringes, out of sight and mind. The individual’s relationship with and understanding of Nature changed over the course of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth. The emergence of new technologies and social developments, such as increased industrialization and the mass-production of consumer goods, refashioned urban centers like Paris while gradually pushing out Nature into the peripheries of this new, modern life. Whereas the Romantics of the nineteenth century looked to Nature as a source of inspiration, elevating it to the status of subject, elements of this newfound modernity, like Charles Baudelaire’s famous flaneur, replaced Nature as the source of fascination and discussion in the new, avant-garde poetic traditions of the twentieth century. That is not to say that all discussions of urban modernity

Note: This article began as an undergraduate independent study under the supervision of A.F. Moritz at Victoria College, the University of Toronto. I am indebted to his guidance and support in shaping the direction of the work and am grateful for his encouragement to pursue the topic further. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-014

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were positive, as Jane Desmarais makes clear in her examination of decadence as a critique of modernity. Although French writers like Baudelaire, Émile Zola, and Joris-Karl Huysmans were “horrified by progress, especially of the inflated status and importance granted to the bourgeoisie,” they were simultaneously “fascinated by the exigencies, distortions, and chaos of modern life, particularly as it impacted on the individual.”1 This article charts the evolving role of Nature in French poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, beginning with Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1857) and Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations (1886) before looking at how Surrealism took up the subject matter using André Breton’s Earthlight (1923) as a case study. Already in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, one finds Nature depicted as a remnant of a previous world order that has been subsumed by the modern city. For Baudelaire, Nature has been integrated into the discussion about modernity and, in some cases, has even been sacrificed to it, no longer as untouchable and awe-inspiring as it was for the Romantics. Rimbaud takes the issue a step further by presenting the city as a new landscape that has come to replace the natural one and portraying the resulting new urban life as a place of wonder. Baudelaire and Rimbaud capture Nature in the process of being subsumed by the city. In their poetry, the individual is no longer enthralled by Nature as much as they strive to make it comply with the new world order. On the other hand, it is the Surrealist poetry of Breton that is able to reclaim some of the Romantic sentiments and fascination with the natural world by demonstrating that humanity’s connection with Nature survived, if only in a weakened form. The Surrealist goal to remove rationalist thinking’s privileged position within Western society and encouraging a greater awareness of the unconscious proves capable of rekindling the individual’s connection to Nature, especially the sense of awe and wonder that it once elicited. Breton’s use of absurd juxtapositions in his imagery reminds the reader that, although relegated to the peripheries for a long time, Nature can still be found in the contemporary cityscape, so long as one knows where to look.

Tracing a Romantic and Ecocritical Lineage None of the three chosen poets are Romantics; Baudelaire was one of the prominent figures of the Decadence movement, Rimbaud was a Symbolist, and Breton

 Jane Desmarais, “Decadence and the Critique of Modernity,” in Decadence and Literature, ed. Jane Desmarais and David Weir (New York: Cambridge UP, 2019): 98–114, 99.

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a Surrealist. Despite these radical stylistic differences, Baudelaire and Rimbaud can be considered precursors to Breton, and the poetry of all three cannot be entirely disentangled from Romantic ideology, or at least the movement’s sentiments. As Kate Rigby observes, “[t]o speak of a ‘recognizably Romantic literature’ also begs a question to which there is no clear answer,” since the notion “of a distinctive and relatively coherent Romantic ‘school’ or ‘movement’ occurred after the event.”2 With this in mind, this article serves to intervene in the existing Romantic canon, to expand it beyond the binary identifications of original Romantic and post or “new” Romanticism.3 According to Jonathan Bates, “[i]f the French Revolution was one great root of Romanticism, then what used to be called ‘the return to Nature,’ associated above all with the Rousseau of the second Discourse and the Nouvelle Heloise, was surely the other.”4 The Romantics consider the natural world an intimation of immortality, a reminder that anything that has been creating by humanity’s hand cannot truly be eternal. By invoking Nature in their poetry, they attempted to preserve the fleeting moment by examining it on a sensorial and temporal level, as is the case with Emily Dickinson’s hummingbird, whose flight is “ephemerality embodied [. . . and] could not be reproduced.”5 By using Nature as a vehicle to “contemplate[e] remnants of the ancient world [. . .] for there is no more useful reminder of mortality than a vine-covered ruin,”6 the

 Kate Rigby, “Romanticism and Ecocriticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard (New York: Oxford UP, 2014): 60–79, 60.  For those interested specifically in the theorization of New Romanticism, which recontextualizes Romantic thought within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Jos de Mul’s Romantic Desire in (Post)modern Art and Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) and Edward Larrissy’s edited volume Romanticism and Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999) are good starting points. For more “straightforward” re-examinations of Romanticism, the following establish a helpful framework: Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer “Romanticism: Breaking the Canon,” Art Journal 52.2 (1993): 18–21; Damian Walford Davies (ed.), Romanticism, History, and Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 2009); Andrew McInnes, Michael Bradshaw and Steve Van-Hagen, “Introduction: Edgy Romanticism,” Romanticism 24.2 (2018): 113–117; Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March-Russell (ed.), Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Aesthetics, Landscape (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013); Richard Thomas Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism: Essays in Philosophy and Literature (New York: Cambridge UP, 2001).  Jonathan Bates, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991): 7.  Sarah Weiger, “‘A Route of Evanescence’: Phenomenophilia and Romantic Natural History,” in Wordsworth and the Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Lisa Ottum and Seth T. Reno (Durham, NH: U of Hampshire P): 108–126, 110.  William Logan, Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past (New York: Columbia UP, 2018): 9.

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Romantics were able to simultaneously understand the natural world itself and humanity’s place within it. All three of the chosen poets invoke a similar feeling of transformation within the urban landscape, and while none of them speak of an “ancient world” by relying on the conventional image of a ruin, there is nonetheless a sense of temporal disconnect within their work, as well as varying degrees of melancholy at the rapidly changing world around them. It is change itself which forces a shift in how key Romantic concepts like the sublime and the picturesque are discussed, and which – more than the disappearance of the natural world itself – serves as the driving force in these poems, although all three poets also address literal extinction. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Breton conjure variations of the familiar notion of the sublime in their poems, drawing on some aspect of the term’s rich catalogue of meanings while also managing to redefine it for their own time. The result is not so much the establishment of three new “sublimes” but an acknowledgement of the term’s multivalence. To distinguish between Nature as a physical force (the natural world in a biological sense) and Nature as a constructed notion of essence, Immanuel Kant employs the terms ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Sublime.’ He suggests that what is deemed beautiful is considered so because of its form, whereas the sublime is boundless and therefore total and overpowering.7 This results in the division between the sensorial appreciation of Nature from a distance and the ability to emotionally sense Nature, to become consumed by it without necessarily being able to comprehend why. The Romantics thus argued “that matter itself is alive,”8 prefacing Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s discussion of the modern city as a living industrial behemoth, one that not only challenged the idea that the human-made cannot be immortal but that it also leaves no room for the ephemeral and fleeting moments of Nature, which began to be gradually pushed out of the city by going unnoticed. That is not to say that Baudelaire and Rimbaud suddenly proclaimed Nature to be inferior to the city. In fact, the distrust and even distaste they express for the latter in their poetry, which is picked up later on by the Surrealists, stems from the work of John Ruskin, who saw the city as a hostile and disorderly environment

 See Yu Liu, “The Beautiful and the Sublime: Kant’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained,” Studies in Romanticism 42.2 (2003): 187–202, and James Phillips, “The Case for a Convergence of the Beautiful and the Sublime: Kant, Aesthetics and the Temptations of Appearance,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 43.2 (2012): 161–177.  See Allison Dushane, “Reverie and the Life of Things: Rousseau, Darwin, and Romantic Visionary Materialism,” in Wordsworth and the Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Lisa Ottum and Seth T. Reno (Durham, NH: U of New Hampshire P, 2016): 127–145, 129.

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that was increasingly mechanical and impersonal.9 Ruskin frowned upon technology such as the railroad, which he saw as “a device for making the world smaller,”10 for the way it changed how humans interacted with Nature. It is possible that this sentiment was linked, in part, to a nostalgia for a slower pace of life, which allowed for the kind of up-close and long-term engagement with the natural world that one finds in Romantic poetry. Movement and speed appealed to Breton in particular, who spoke of “convulsive beauty” and was interested in capturing the tension between motion and rest, or “repose.” He used a photograph of a train abandoned in the wilderness, overgrown by vines, to illustrate his point while also underscoring the fact that, despite technological developments, Nature is still capable of stopping something as fast.11 Ruskin’s ideology demonstrates how the very allure of Nature was already wearing off, that it was increasingly seen as a resource to be used rather than as a source for both inspiration and answers in the poetic process of self-discovery. Baudelaire and Rimbaud wrote poetry that encapsulated this very dilemma of how the individual is to engage with Nature at a time when it lost its previously privileged position within society. The result is a specifically “modern,” rather than Romantic, poetry that captures the situation Nature found itself in within the human-built environment, engulfed and made dependent on the cityscape. Both poets present the landscape as a helpful analogy for understanding the cityscape, which incorporates Nature within itself before eventually coming to replace Nature as the modern equivalent. Edmund Burke’s conceptualization of the sublime complements Kant’s, as Burke believed that the sublime “in all things abhors mediocrity,” and that to experience the sublime means to have the “mind [. . .] so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.”12 In this regard, it is Breton who takes up Burke’s belief that the sublime “always includes something of the terrible [. . .] Because terror, which is the heart of the sublime, is a passion.”13 Just as Surrealism sought to break down the stable and rational object in order to create a new, “disagreeable”

 See Phillip Mallett, “The City and the Self,” in Ruskin and the Environment: The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Michael Wheeler (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995): 43–46.  John Ruskin, “Landscape, Mimesis and Morality,” in The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (London: Routledge, 2000): 26–31, 30.  See Marylaura Papalas, “Speed and Convulsive Beauty: Trains and the Historic AvantGarde,” Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature 39.1 (2015): 1–23, 12–13.  Edmund Burke, qtd. in Adam Phillips, “Introduction,” in Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry, ed. Adam Phillips (New York: Oxford UP, 1990): ix–xxiii, xiv.  Burke qtd. in Phillips, “Introduction,” xxi.

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form of beauty through the emergence of the surreal or found object, so Breton’s poetry blurs the boundaries between recognizable biological forms and fantastical inventions of the subconsciousness, reality and dreams. In his poetry, it is the loss of control within this newfound environment, changed by modernization and the gradual breaking-down of ontological boundaries, that risks replacing the total physical absence of Nature as the source of anxiety. While this article draws primarily on the English Romantic movement, it does not suggest that the work of Baudelaire and Rimbaud should be treated as manifestations of an English understanding of human/Nature relationships, thus making Breton’s poetry the ultimate rejection on all fronts. There were French Romantic authors whose work can be read as a more conventional, even straightforward, response to Rousseau’s call to return to Nature. Alphonse de Lamartine is a notable example: His “Le Lac” (1820) forms at once a meditation and a sweeping literary landscape painting that, as Karen Quandt argues, employs the image of the lake, a “charged setting of a clearly outlined body of water,” to symbolize the source of lyrical inspiration “of a mature poet.”14 Instead, such a cross-cultural comparison is employed to heighten the significance of Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s work as a shift in French Romantic poetry and as transitional, marking a turn in how modernity is understood and discussed. Breton’s work, on the other hand, is itself the embodiment of modernity, drawing from the avant-garde energies abound at the time. Instead of making Nature secondary to the anthropocentric meditations the way the Romantics do, Breton arguably creates a new state of consciousness in which the human and the vegetal/animal are interconnected, recalling Timothy Morton’s conceptualization of communality within queer ecology, where “[e]very life-form is familiar, since we are related to it.”15 Rather than drawing on the definition of queer ecology of thinkers Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, which emphasize the “queer” portion of the term,16 I instead refer to the entire term’s broader significance as a form of resistance and community. Queer ecology challenges the human/Nature divide by inviting us to conceive of a future grounded in multi-species cohabitation.

 Karen Quandt, “Elusive Shores: Lamartine’s ‘Meditations’ and the Art of Poetry,” French Forum 39.2/3 (2014): 49–64, 53.  Timothy Morton, “Guest Column: Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125.2 (2010): 273–282, 277.  See Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, “Queer Ecology,” in Keywords for Environmental Studies, ed. Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason and David N. Pellow (New York: New York University Press, 2016): 169–171.

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Just as Greg Garrard expresses a distrust of the “wave” metaphor for discussing ecocriticism,17 I do not seek to place the work of the three poets in question within a clearly demarcated ideological box. Contemporary ecocriticism has taken Bate’s call to contest the term “Nature” to heart, because “[i]t is profoundly unhelpful to say ‘There is no Nature’ at a time when our most urgent need is to address and redress the consequences of human civilization’s insatiable desire to consume the products of the earth.”18 Garrard addresses this in the introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism while the volume’s contents reflect the diverse sub-fields – posthumanism, animal studies, queer ecology, to name but a few – that have long moved past the nostalgic and often racist notion of a return to a primordial and harmonious coexistence with Nature. Similarly, the New International Voices in Ecocriticism, edited by Serpil Oppermann, captures ecocriticism’s new form as a “matrix of expansion[,] as Ursula K. Heise would say,”19 that has reframed the question of human-Nature interaction to account for the increasing awareness of the Anthropocene’s rewriting of Nature. It is not within this article’s capacity to undertake a significant rereading of the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Breton using the new and expansive corpus of ecocriticism like a microscope for identifying the ways in which these poets foreshadowed ideas of vibrant matter and the redefinition of the inanimate. Instead, in the following I will identify a few potential starting points for considering how the poetic image and language changed as Nature and the imagination become intertwined, and how the notion of reconnecting with Nature evolved in tandem with an emerging new idea of the self.

Baudelaire and the Failure to Escape Even in Dreams The poems in Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil undertake a picturesque approach to describing Paris, creating a self-contained tableaux of nineteenth-century Parisian life. The daily urban lives of Parisians maintain a dominant presence in poems such as “Landscape,” “The Sun,” and “The Swan,” where the city serves as backdrop, and while the natural world is present, it never gets the full attention

 See Greg Garrard, “Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard (New York: Oxford UP, 2014): 1–24, 2.  Bates, Romantic Ecology, 56 [emphasis in original].  Serpil Oppermann, “Introduction,” in New International Voices in Ecocriticism, ed. Serpil Oppermann (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015): 1–24, 5.

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commonly found in Romantic poetry. Instead of pitting Nature and humanity against each other, Baudelaire’s poems reveal a complex relationship between the two as both are trapped in the urban metropolis, making do with their current situation. In order to do so, Baudelaire employs the first-person figure of the “speaker-poet” in his poetry, an individual acutely aware of their surroundings to the point that it causes them great suffering. When these moments of suffering seem to become too much to bear, Baudelaire leaves the key to the possible way out in “Parisian Dream,” suggesting that it is in dreams and imagination that one should seek solace from the oppression of the urban world. Baudelaire resituates the natural world and its symbolic essence by emphasizing that the city has, in fact, replaced the Romantic landscape, becoming more of a source of terror than of admiration. The struggle to depict Nature is two-fold in “Landscape,” whose title refers to the creative liberty that artists underwent when shaping Nature with their brushes or pens. Baudelaire warns the reader that what they are experiencing is a carefully staged depiction of an ‘urban Nature’ that also functions as a reflection of the creative process itself. He suggests that a proximity and connection with one’s surroundings is a necessary prerequisite to writing about them. The speaker-poet reaffirms this sentiment themselves: “So as to write my eclogues in the purest verse / I wish to lay me down, like the astrologers, / Next to the sky, and hear in the reverie the hymns / Of all the neighbouring belfries, carried on the wind.”20 Even in the city, Nature remains close, and one can admire it no less than the Romantics in the allegedly untouched countryside. Here, Nature and urbanity are present as an organic whole, without explicitly indicating whether it is the urban reaching for Nature or the reverse. Only the final lines of the poem question the difference between the struggle to write about Nature and what is being done to Nature. The speaker-poet is consumed by their task of “conjuring the spring with all the poet’s might, / Of hauling forth a sun out of [their] heart, with care / Transmuting furious thoughts to gently breathing air” (FE, 167). Arden Reed notes this tension, pointing out that Baudelaire’s speaker is himself caught in between as he watches the world from indoors, looking “for eternity in the sky rather than modernity in the streets.”21 Here, modernity in the guise of the riot becomes a distraction for the speaker-poet as they attempt to convey what the touch of Nature – even a gentle spring breeze – elicits in them, suggesting that the sense of connectedness they felt earlier was an illusion. Baudelaire’s speaker “acknowledges the  Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (New York: Oxford UP, 1993): 167; further references in the text, abbreviated as “FE.”  Arden Reed, Romantic Weather: The Climates of Coleridge and Baudelaire (Hanover, NH: Brown UP, 1983): 234.

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city’s presence only through negation,”22 attempting to write not about the world directly outside their window but the one that he must reach back through time and literary tradition to recuperate. Meanwhile, the speaker of “The Swan” becomes overwhelmed by artifice itself: “I picture in my head the busy camp of huts, / And heaps of rough-hewn columns, capitals and shafts, / The grass, the giant blocks made green by puddlestain, / Reflected in the glaze, the jumbled bric-a-brac” (FE, 175). This struggle results in a disconnect between reality and fantasy. The speaker acknowledges the physicality of the new Paris, the “New palaces, blocks, scaffoldings,” yet this newness is an encroachment on the old more than it is the opening up of new possibilities, as even “Old neighbourhoods [. . .] are allegorical for [them]” (FE, 175). The solution to this struggle lies in an earlier observation that “the form a city takes / More quickly shifts [. . .] than does the mortal heart” (FE, 175), reminding the reader that while the city may be a kind of living organism, it is still humanity who truly facilitates change. Baudelaire locates Nature in the newly opened spaces. By writing about the aftermath of urban violence and its resulting alienation, he also writes about Nature, a nostalgic opposition manifested in the lamentation of the speaker in “The Swan.” While there are obvious differences between Nature in the countryside and the city, the former arguably a ‘purer’ experience than the latter due to distance from pollution, Baudelaire demonstrating that Nature’s cleansing ability can still be found in the city in “The Sun.” More significantly, the poem is as close as Baudelaire comes to speaking for Nature by anthropomorphizing the sun. As a character, Baudelaire’s Nature come across as untouchable. On one hand, it is akin to a New-Testament God who sees through the “shutters for concealing secret acts” (FE, 175) and who “fills our minds, with honey fills hives, / Gives crippled men a new view of the world” (FE, 175). On the other, Baudelaire demonstrates that Nature is a poet in its own right, “com[ing] to town awhile / [. . . and] lend[ing] a grace to things that are most vile” (FE, 175). “The Sun” reminds the reader that humanity depends on Nature, not the other way around. For all the Romantics’ and Baudelaire’s attempts to make sense of Nature, Nature does not appear to reciprocate the feeling. This one-way relationship complicates Reinhardt H. Thum’s argument that, while “[t]he sun is still the symbol of transcendent spiritual and artistic principle [. . .] it is the poet, Apollo’s erstwhile disciple and protégé himself, who embodies this principle.”23 In “The Sun,” it is the speaker-poet who is

 Reed, Romantic Weather, 237.  Reinhard H. Thum, The City: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verhaeren (New York: Peter Lang, 1994): 29.

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indebted to and seeking the natural world, only sometimes conscious of their quest. Yet in the end, they are merely an interpreter and self-proclaimed translator for the natural world, which is capable of acting as a poet on its own. Baudelaire points to the need for a sustained relationship between humanity and Nature, which in the modern and industrial age becomes even more imperative given how the natural world is being pushed ever further to the fringes. “Parisian Dream” is the epitome of this struggle between Nature and the city as Baudelaire demonstrates how both modernity, with its “distinctive and authentic beauty [. . . that] is inseparable from its innate misery and anxiety, from the bills that modern man has to pay,”24 and artifice encroach upon everyday life just as Nature, through of vines and weeds, once did. But the speaker-poet’s fantastical descriptions reveal how Nature has no respite even in the dream world, for although “Sleep is so full of miracles[,] / By whimsy odd and singular / [it’s] banished from these spectacles / Nature and the irregular” (FE, 207). While dreaming of a more glorious alternative to the deathly urban, “Parisian Dream” nonetheless accepts the persistency of artifice and the suppression of Nature that continues even in the speaker-poet’s imagination, who describes “The sleeping pools – there were no trees – / Gathered around them colonnades, / And in them naiads at their ease / Could cast the narcissistic gaze” (FE, 207). The natural order has been fully subverted only a couple stanzas later, as “Some Ganges, in the firmament, / Poured out the treasure of their urns” (FE, 207). Even in dreams, Nature has become subservient to humanity and the city in a new fantastical and overthe-top version of itself. The fact that some of what Baudelaire describes cannot possibly occur in reality only further accentuates the fact that Nature is now a manifestation of the urban, particularly of the city’s fondness for spectacle and making the impossible seem possible. Yet even though the dreamworld presents an exaggerated display of Nature, the dream remains preferable to the reality the speaker-poet returns to, their “ardent eyes [opening to] see / The horror of [their] wretched hole / [. . . as] The clock proclaimed the time was noon / In accents brutal and perverse, / And from the misty sky a gloom / Poured through the torpid universe” (FE, 209). The dreamworld serves as a temporary solution for the speaker-poet’s desire to get out of the mundane and oppressive daily life. Although Nature never regains the revered status it had under Romanticism, it maintains a quasi-sublime quality, facilitating emotions the modern cityscape tries to suppress.

 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988): 141.

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Baudelaire never advocates for a return to Nature but, rather, presents the aftermath of urbanization, a process that is notably indebted to imperialism. The French colonial project entailed not only the physical horrors of slavery but also the trauma of displacement, oftentimes by force, by peoples from the colonies. Baudelaire’s choice of imagery to convey the consuming sense of loss that results in an uprooted existence is therefore significant. He writes of a “negress, thin and tubercular, / Treading in the mire, searching with haggard eye / For palm trees [. . . that recall for her] splendid Africa, / Somewhere behind the giant barrier of fog” (FE, 177) in a way that erases the history of violence and trauma the experience entails, rendering it mundane in a way that would be comprehensive for his contemporary reader, the white male. However, to argue that the presence of the cityscape in poetry from Baudelaire onwards “begin[s] to rival[,] if not to surpass[,] the importance of the natural landscape in lyric poetry,”25 would mean returning to dichotomous thinking. In this case, the dichotomies in question would be past versus present and Nature versus and the belief that, “[i]nstead of coming to terms with their essentially urban age, [Baudelaire’s Romantic predecessors] took refuge in Nature [. . .] exclude[ing] the city in all but name.”26 In The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire questions why the city has come to feel ‘natural’ by depicting the encounter between the natural and the human-made as a “contact between the material and the ideal, between solar splendor and urban misery and filth, that the poet encounters on the city streets.”27 He presents a Nature that has adapted to contemporary society and which, like in “The Sun,” has formed judgements about it. The speaker-poet, meanwhile, continues to look to Nature for guidance instead of simply turning away to face modern reality on their own.

Rimbaud’s Tamed Nature and the Trap of the City If Baudelaire’s poems depict the moment when the city and Nature are in a mutual state of flux, then Rimbaud’s Illuminations capture the inevitable end of the process, where the speaker-poet and Nature have both settled into their independent niches as master and servant. Yet, Rimbaud questions how long the metropolitan city and this dynamic can last. He attempts to counteract the lingering

 Thum, The City, 2.  Thum, The City, 8.  Robert St. Clair, “Nature, The City, and Other Lyrical Material,” L’Esprit Createur 58.1 (2018): 59–73, 64.

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stagnancy of city life by introducing an element of the unknown into his poems, prefiguring the Surrealist interest in the unexpected encounter. Instead of pushing the idea of chance encounters, Rimbaud uses what Gwendolyn Bays calls “the poetry of magic” to highlight the alchemical balance of Nature that is spiritual in its own way.28 He creates a heightened awareness of one’s surroundings, putting the familiar into perspective and thereby empathizing the eerie quality of the now-tamed Nature. Rimbaud manifests what D. H. Lawrence envisioned in “Remembering Pan,” where he describes humanity’s disconnection from Nature as a kind of primordial state: “Gradually men moved into cities. And they loved the display of people better than the display of the tree.”29 This is especially the case in his urban poems “City,” “Cities” I and II, and “Metropolitan.” In these poems, the Baudelairean speaker-poet becomes merely the speaker, losing their overt poetic voice and assuming the role of an observer. Through this figure, Rimbaud encourages the reader to question the new order of the city as well as the newer, tamer version of Nature. It is worth noting, as Susan Harrow does, that Rimbaud’s poetry is home to literal monsters, which appears to contradict the earlier assertion that the ancient Nature embodied by figures like Pan has disappeared. Harrow argues that Rimbaud’s monstrosity is an extension of his critique of material modernity, much like Baudelaire confronted decadence from a complex love-hate relationship.30 The glimmers of an otherworldly Nature, then, should be taken as manifestations of abjectness – in other words, Nature’s own reaction of horror to the fast-paced alterations of the modern metropolis, as well as repulsion at its new, degraded form. In Rimbaud’s poems, it is the city that not only exhibits qualities of an independent, semi-sentient being but also replaces Nature as the dominant force in shaping thoughts and interactions in people’s lives. The absence of “any monument to / superstition” in a space where “[m]orality and language are reduced to their / most basic expression” (I, 175) speaks to a loneliness that goes beyond what Baudelaire described in “The Swan.”31 Rationality and order leave no room for individual or collective expression, whether through religion or language, leading to a uniformity both stagnant and oppressive. When the speaker

 See Gwendolyn M. Bays, “Rimbaud – Father of Surrealism?” Yale French Studies 31 (1964): 45–51, 48.  D. H. Lawrence, “Remembering Pan,” in The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (London: Routledge, 2000): 70–72, 71.  See Susan Harrow, “Modernist Monstrosity in Rimbaud’s Verse and Prose Poetry,” Australian Journal of French Studies 55.2 (2018): 138–153, 141.  Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations, trans. John Ashbery (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011): 75; further references in the text, abbreviated as “I.”

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looks out their window, they “see new specters / rolling through the thick and eternal fumes of coal fires, / – our shadow of the woods, our summer’s night” (I, 175). Rimbaud suggests that one can only accept, not admire, the new world order, in which one finds it “[i]mpossible to express the dull / light produced by the perpetually gray sky, the imperial / glint of the barracklike buildings, the eternal snow on/ the ground” (I, 87). The modern landscape has become predictable, architecture replacing mountains and trees, the fumes of industry a sign of power that was once attributed to storms and lightning. The natural world found in Illuminations is divorced from the essence of Nature, becoming merely a decoration to be retailored for human use. At the same time, Giovanni Berjola argues, the metropolitan spaces in Illuminations are also monstrous, in part, because the metropolitan is a place of excess, first and foremost on the level of scale.32 The fact that Rimbaud occasionally breaks the laws of physics in his poems also does not help alleviate the growing anxiety about what the seemingly tame and predictable city is truly capable of doing.33 The resulting societal conflict is torn between the desire to return to the moment of creation in a mythological past and to remain in the new order in which Nature has become warped by humanity and modernity. This is evident in “Cities [II],” where a parade of gods infiltrates the city. The gods are both stand-ins for natural phenomena like the tide – the “sea whipped up by the eternal birth of Venus” (I, 79) – and manifestations of longing for the aforementioned Nature-as-original-paradise, the “[s]uburban Bacchantes / sob[bing] [as] the moon burns and howls” (I, 81). The parade is a Surrealist precedent due to its melding of the fantastical with everyday life. It also illustrates how the human-made has become worthy of the admiration and awe once reserved for Nature. In “Cities [I],” for instance, the speaker tells the reader about “the Norwegian Nebuchadnezzar / [who] commissioned the staircases of the ministries / [. . . that] even the flunkies that [they were] able to glimpse are more [haughty] than Brahmas and [that they] shuddered at the colossal / aspect of the caretakers and construction officials” (I, 87). Rimbaud returns to a dichotomous view of Nature and the city, proposing that both influence people in different ways. The carefully fabricated architecture of modernity counteracts the hidden and instinctive “wild side” that occasionally shines through, like when the “elk stampede through the towns [. . . and] [s]avages endlessly dance out the festival of night” (I, 81). Rimbaud does not condemn the occasional display of joy

 See Giovanni Berjola, “Architecture et intimité dans Illuminations d’Arthur Rimbaud,” Études littéraires 42.1 (2011): 23–35, 24.  Berjola, “Architecture,” 25.

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and reverie that stems from the fantastical but does not necessarily encourage it the way Baudelaire might. Instead, Rimbaud juxtaposes reality with fantasy, using romantic irony to “break[] the spell of the poem with the unannounced interjection of the poet’s ego [. . .] with a statement of the victory of the reality principle over the artificial world of the poem.”34 Most important, however, is Rimbaud’s suggestion that urban planning now influences human character and interactions as previously only Nature could. He also draws attention to the importance of space and location, and the difference between the center and the suburbs. The individual’s life is now dictated by the “ordering of buildings into squares, court- / yards and enclosed terraces, [which keep the] cabdrivers [. . .] out [,] [t]he parks represent[ing] primitive Nature detailed with / superb technical mastery” (I, 87). Here, Nature becomes an archaic reminder of a past life, overcome by the efficiency-driven present, where people and architecture must abide by strict rules that shape who they are and, more importantly, what their function is. For those searching for the last remnants of Nature, Rimbaud points to the suburbs, where houses “don’t follow one another [. . . and] lose [themselves] / bizarrely in the countryside” filled with “forests and prodigious plantations / [. . . with] savage gentlefolk” (I, 91). Meanwhile, in “Metropolitan,” which reads as a study of an unnamed contemporary city, Rimbaud challenges the reader’s perceptions of “downtown” and the peripheries. Although the poem opens with a description of a picturesque scene stretching out before the reader, the “crystal / boulevards ris[ing] up and intersect[ing] [. . . are] immediately populated / by poor families who shop for groceries at the fruit / stands” (I, 115). The Nature versus humanity struggle returns in full force, although further subdivided into a tension of land verses sky. The latter, untouched by the industrial fumes found in Baudelaire’s poems, has a purity and appeal that the land has lost after being claimed by humanity. Human manipulation and subversion of Nature has led to the struggling and desolate life of its inhabitants, despite the promise of a better life that the city often held in nineteenth-century discourses, which often proclaimed the benefits of industrialization. The city is shown to be a place filled with off-putting sights around every corner, such as “the foolish mermaid in / the garish dress, at the bottom of the river [. . . and] the luminous / skulls in the pea patch” (I, 115), yet there is a novelty to this. His descriptions of the countryside, on the other hand, are imbued with a sense of the old world, one that is superstitious and impoverished but,

 Douglas P. Collins and Herbert S. Gersham, “Romantic Irony in Rimbaud,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 13.4 (1972): 673–690, 685.

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due to the very phantasmagoric quality that he describes, is arguably closer to Nature than the modern city ever will be. With “Metropolitan” serving as the culminating point, Rimbaud conveys a sense of a dead-end in his urban-focused poems, presenting the reader with the pinnacle of the modern city, the result of Nature’s banishment from its borders. What remains is only a pale imitation, a reminder of the past. Rimbaud does not suggest that this is an entirely bad thing, however. Nature can now watch from a distance the way Baudelaire’s anthropomorphized sun once did, before it became uninvested in humanity and focused on performing its duty of maintaining the natural cycles. Thus, Rimbaud suggests that humanity has reached an impasse between a life “less than valuable, admirable and impressive [. . .] present[ing] ‘modernity’ [. . .] as an accepted, unconscious sameness.”35 While a lingering call for an unknown alternative is vaguely hinted at in Rimbaud’s poems, it remains a faint echo, going unanswered.

Breton’s Reclaimed Nature and the Surrender to Chaos The relationship between Nature and humanity continued to fascinate poets into the twentieth century and took on a less pessimistic tone. The poems of André Breton move past the Romantic nostalgia for Nature and interest in its sublime quality to propose a way for humanity to navigate its way through cityscapes of its own creation. Rather than present a carefully laid out solution, Breton prefers to re-examine the prior understanding of the city with the help of sensorial perception and the imagination. Through unexpected and fantastical encounters, which are encouraged poetically but should take place organically, Surrealists like Breton reinvigorated the natural world by giving it a newfound wildness. In doing so, they freed the cityscape from its predictable, linear existence. Though Nature is not the central focus of his poetry, Breton suggests that Nature is parallel to humanity and can fuse with it. The result is a wholly new entity that bridges the divide between Nature and the human that was once found in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud and the Romantics. In this way, Breton is a precursor to one of queer ecology’s most fundamental principles, as defined by Morton: “Queer ecology will worry away at the human-nonhuman boundary [. . .] Noth-

 Thum, The City, 178.

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ing is self-identical. We are embodied yet without essence.”36 The world of Breton’s poems is not so much a hybrid, a literal intertangling of Nature and the human, than a state of coexistence, the two getting ever closer to each other until their physical contours begin to blur. At the same time, Breton suggests that this newfound connection can help reclaim a lost past, an earlier state of being that is only now rediscovered and sought. Mortimer-Sandilands conceives of this loss as a condition of melancholia, a state of suspended mourning in which the object of loss is very real but physically ‘ungrievable’ within the confines of a society that cannot acknowledge nonhuman beings, natural environments, and ecological processes as appropriate objects for genuine grief.37

Although Mortimer-Sandilands refers to late capitalist society in her definition, Breton’s Paris, much like Baudelaire’s and Rimbaud’s, nonetheless exists in a post-Industrial world. It is therefore merely at an earlier stage of the Anthropocene development, although the signs of loss are already present. Nature thus takes on several roles and guises in Breton’s poetry, from serving as the (seemingly) apparent subject in poems like “The Egret” and “Sunflower” to assuming a more psychological, even magical quality in “Ghostly Stances,” “The Vertebral Sphinx,” and “The Deadly Helping Hand.” Breton examines the concept of Nature while also allowing it to serve as a vehicle for understanding society’s emotional state. His poetry suggests that the only “true” way of reclaiming Nature is to reject the rational and the familiar. Only the extreme and the imaginary would allow contemporary society to gain access to both a heightened awareness of the self and a newfound appreciation for Nature. Like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Breton relies on the speaker-poet to bring the reader into the poem on a more personal level. However, unlike them, Breton no longer makes the speaker-poet speak on behalf of humanity by facilitating a dialogue between Nature and the cityscape. Instead, Breton uses the first-person voice of the speaker-poet as an example of how one should trust their senses and thoughts, encouraging a relationship where the individual is not only open to Nature but also a part of it. The opening lines of “Ghostly Stances” are evidence of this, the speaker informing the reader: “I don’t attach any importance to life /

 Morton, “Guest Column,” 277.  Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, “Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies,” in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, ed. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010): 331–358, 333 [emphasis in original].

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I don’t pin life’s least butterfly to importance / I’m unimportant to life.”38 Breton demonstrates a viable link between the natural world and human emotions while also suggesting that Nature can accurately represent the seemingly infinite permutations of emotional and psychological states. At the end of the poem, when the speaker describes how “On the sea at the hour when the sun cools down / The beings who signal to me are separated by stars / And yet the carriage travelling at a gallop / Carries away [his] very last hesitation” (EL, 197), Breton captures this very state of openness. Suppose the bubbles and sea anemones, which are mentioned later in the poem, serve as vessels for containing and transforming the speaker’s fragility and overwhelming sadness. In that case, the final lines of “Ghostly Stances” reveal a complete surrender to the forces of Nature. This occurs not through the amazement associated with the sublime but through a trust that often accompanies surrendering to forces beyond the individual’s control. Like the bubbles and sea anemones, Breton’s images indicate commonalities between humanity and Nature, dissuading the reader from assuming a confrontational tone towards the natural world. Breton reminds readers that Nature is not the enemy since humanity will always, to varying extents, remain dependent on the natural world as a means of expressing their emotions. Nature, meanwhile, relies on the mercy of society to not be erased from the modern cityscape altogether. Nature thus becomes the source of poetic release for the speaker-poet’s emotions when the body denies them this opportunity, whether by providing the speaker-poet with a way of adequately describing these sensations or simply facilitating the latter’s release. When the speaker-poet describes how they “watched over [themself] over [their] thoughts like a night / watchman in an immense factory” (EL, 197), the suppression of the natural world by industrial modernity comes to light, a concern that mirrors Baudelaire’s. Breton comments on the cityscape’s ability to make individuals feel disconnected from their bodies and on Nature’s ability to counteract this. In “The Egret,” the speaker-poet captures Nature’s potential in his words: If the luxurious echo of the rivers I lash Hurled only my body on the Paris lawns If only it would rain in jewelry stores At least spring wouldn’t scare me any more If only I were a root of the gingko tree In short whatever’s good in the sugar cane of the air. (EL, 131)

 André Breton, Earthlight, trans. Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow (Boston: Black Widow P, 2016): 193; further references in the text, abbreviated as “EL.”

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Rather than suggesting, like Baudelaire, that mechanization is the source of this dreariness, Breton proposes that the human mind is like the overworked factory in need of respite, which Nature can provide. Although one can seek out Nature in the hopes that doing so will reveal some forgotten truth, it should be thought of more as an instigator of revelations and changes in mentality that are ultimately up to the individual to undertake. Breton shifts the blame from the city and works to address the individual’s present emotional and cultural condition, with the speaker-poet serving as a “call to action,” particularly when they declare: “As I leave I set fire to a lock of hair that’s the fuse of a bomb / And that bit of hair drills a tunnel under Paris / If only my train were entering that tunnel” (EL, 133). All of the pieces are in place; all that is left is to set them in motion. At times, Breton trades the more personal tone for a narrative-like structure that he then uses to guide his readers, encouraging them to seek out a connection with the unidentified speaker-poet. “The Vertebral Sphinx” is the only poem among those discussed here in which the speaker-poet is not the focal point, nor is the poem written in first-person. Nonetheless, Breton creates a meditative atmosphere that facilitates the kinds of surprise and “chance” encounters that the Surrealists advocated for, most famously with Breton’s own stories about coming across strange yet charming objects, like the infamous slipper-spoon.39 In “Vertebral Sphinx,” Breton captures the individual’s movement through a cityscape, where “Venetian windows open and close on the square / Where beasts run free followed by traffic lights” (EL, 233) and “It’s daytime to the left but night completely night to the right” (EL, 235). While it is true that reading a poem numerous times leads to a familiarity with the text and hence removes the initial sense of surprise, Breton is more interested in making the reader actively engage their imagination in unusual and impossible ways. Breton creates the kinds of surprise encounters with the natural world that the reader is encouraged to seek out in everyday life, and he begins by making the reader feel like they are witnessing the events described in “The Vertebral Sphinx” first-hand. Breton thus dispels the conventional idea of order found in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, according to which Nature and the human are two distinct entities, even opposing forces, that exist in constant tension. In theorizing the emergence of the posthuman consciousness, N. Katherine Hayles notes that “chaos went from being associated with dissipation in the Victorian sense of dissolute living and reckless waste to being associated with dissipation in a

 See André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987): 30.

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newly positive sense of increasing complexity and new life.”40 Hayles’ conception of “boundary areas between chaos and order [in which] there [is] the necessary innovation/replication tension that allows patterns to build up, modify, and travel over long distances without dying out”41 can be applied to Breton’s poetry. The meeting ground of Nature and the human creates a space where the Surreal imagination can bring into being the seemingly impossible forms of the natural world and the human mind. Breton proposes a new world view in which absurdity and unexpectedness are more important than a strict separation according to form and function. Moreover, Breton minimizes the divide between the natural world and the human-made by showing that the two have come together to form a new hybridity characteristic of contemporary society and contemporary poetics. The boundary between the two is most fluid in “The Deadly Helping Hand,” which includes “The swan of Montevideo / [. . . who] [o]pens two different-colored eyes on the false universe / One of iron sulfate on the trellis of his eyelashes[,] the other / of diamond studded mud” (EL, 257) as well as “the train car / that’s upholstered in roses / [with] a hammock that[’s] [been] thoughtfully made [. . .] out / of [some women’s] hair” (EL, 259). Breton also inadvertently questions what an “authentic Nature” might even look like in modern society, a question that the queer ecology branch of contemporary ecocriticism is directly concerned with, arguing Nature looks natural because it keeps going, and going, and going, like the undead, and because we keep on looking away, framing it, sizing it up. Acknowledging the zombielike quality of interconnected life-forms will aid the transition from an ideological fixation on Nature.42

By heeding Morton’s advice, one also accepts the unconformity of the natural world. The conventional idea of form, which in this case would mean having “only” a regular swan or “only” a regular train car, would go against the foundation of Surrealism, whose goal is to encourage a blending of forms. The resulting question is whether one can even distinguish between Nature and the human-made world any longer, especially if human emotions can easily find a parallel form among animals or plants. This upsets the power dynamic found in Baudelaire and Rimbaud’s poems, levelling out the playing field and encouraging society to form a new relationship with Nature, one no longer rooted in the need to control, to physically and poetically tame, Nature.

 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999): 103.  Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 241.  Morton, “Guest Column,” 279.

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It is worth noting that this new hybrid state of existence is not the final goal for Breton – if anything, he presents hybridity as a kind of quick fix that does not fully disrupt the current societal structure. Rather than reclaiming Nature, Breton’s idea of renewal is taken to the extreme in his apocalyptic imagery in “Ghostly Stances” and “The Vertebral Sphinx.” Here, the natural world has renewed itself in terms of strength and appearance and reclaimed some of its previous status as a force to be reckoned with, even feared. By comparison, “Sunflower” functions almost as a polar opposite, a combination of a utopian harmony with Nature and an atmosphere of quasi-apocalyptic emptiness. The speaker-poet in “Sunflower” tells readers of A farm [that] prospered in the middle of Paris And its windows looked on the Milky Way But no one lived there yet because the people who stumbled upon this neighbourhood Who everyone knows are more devoted than the ghosts who stumble around this neighbourhood. (EL, 141)

Although the natural world has now been brought to the very center of the cityscape, it has also been stripped of its agency and transferred under the control of the population, as a farm’s existence is rooted in practicality and servitude, catering to society’s need for nourishment by nurturing in a way that only the natural world can provide. “Ghostly Stances” reads as a response to the “pathetic death” of Nature found in “Sunflower.” The poem balances an apocalyptic tone with a hope for renewal that is made possible by the absence of humanity, with Curtains that have never been opened Float[ing] in the windows of houses yet to be built Beds made of all lily beds Slid[ing] under lamps of dew An evening will come Nuggets of light roll to a stop under blue moss. (EL, 195)

It is “The Vertebral Sphinx” that actively works against this idea of a complacent Nature. Breton presents readers with an active and aggressive natural world that is now encroaching upon humanity the way the latter did not too long ago. The poem serves as a warning, speaking of the “coming [of] the wolf with glass teeth / The one who eats time in little round boxes / The one who breathes the all-too-penetrating aromas of / herbs / The one who gives the third degree all night in the turnip / patch” (EL, 233), who is

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Green enough to challenge a bottle of foam spilled on the snow His jade claws in which he admires himself as he flies His coat the color of sparks He’s the one snarling in the ironworks at dusk and in abandoned linen closets. (EL, 235)

The wolf is no longer merely an animal in its conventional, biological sense. It has been queered according to Morton’s conception of the “strange stranger,” “uncanny, familiar and strange simultaneously.”43 Whereas the lily beds in “Ghostly Stances” are evidence of the influence humanity is capable of exerting upon the natural world, transforming it into something new, the wolf in “The Vertebral Sphinx” is independent from humanity despite its similarity to the human-made bottle of foam. The wolf embodies Nature’s presence in the city that the individual can expect to encounter, but which is nonetheless unexpected and unpredictable when it comes to the time and location when this will occur.

Coda Breton is by no means the only Surrealist poet worthy of attention in discussing a subject as overlooked as the presence and role of Nature and the natural world in Surrealist poetry. In Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), for instance, the speaker-poet assumes the role of a guide. Aragon emphasizes the importance of walking through, examining, and contemplating the modern cityscape in a way that was previously reserved for studying the landscape in the Romantic tradition. Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939), on the other hand, is less interested in closely examining the modern city as it is in writing up a poetic portrait of humanity’s current state. Specifically, Césaire advocates not so much for a return to a primary state of existence than for a past state of being, a sense of self that has been undermined and suppressed by colonialism, which he presents as the main proponent of modernity. Drawing on Breton for his prominent role in the Surrealist movement as opposed to treating him as a representative of the movement, this article is but an introduction to the way Nature and the natural world figure in Surrealist poetry. While the Surrealist use of Nature may initially seem radically different from the way Romantic and Modern poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud wrote about it, there are nonetheless certain  Morton, “Guest Column,” 277.

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key concerns that are shared among the three groups. The most notable of them is the individual and their role in contemporary society. Using the speaker-poet as a kind of stand-in, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Breton address how Nature has not only been suppressed and largely pushed out of the city, the cityscape serving as a human-made replacement of the natural landscape, but also demonstrate that Nature’s presence can still be felt within urban spaces, usually where one least expects it. By capturing the persistence of the natural world and its ability to adjust to industrial society, the three poets reinforce the Romantic idea that a relationship with the natural world is vital for the emotional well-being of the individual and of society. Additionally, they remind readers that although Nature may no longer be depicted in the guise they are familiar with, it can still be found within as seemingly oppressive an environment as the modern cityscape. In this way, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Breton expand the definition of what constitutes a Romantic poem. While each poet’s approach and individual concerns differ from the familiar Romantic lineage, their continued search for what a deep and meaningful relationship with Nature looks like can be considered a variation of Romantic sentimentality.

Kiyoko Magome

The Symbolism of the String Quartet in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to explore how Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn As Told by a Friend (1947) creates the symbolism of the string quartet. It is clear from Mann’s diary and other writings that the novel is greatly influenced by a particular string quartet, Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132. In addition, several other string quartets appear, gradually developing the image of the musical discourse into a rich, microcosmic symbol for literature. Toward the tragic end of the novel, the musico-literary, aesthetic symbol stimulates the reader’s sociopolitical imagination and evokes a democratic society organized with extreme caution as a possible “breakthrough” and/or “hope beyond hopelessness” after World War II. The socio-political image can be examined more deeply in a larger context, for like Mann, other representative modernist writers, such as Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Carson McCullers, and Vladimir Nabokov, also published literary works closely interacting with the image of the string quartet. In other words, the symbolism of the string quartet in Doctor Faustus prompts a new exploration of modernist literature and calls up a practical image of the future.

Introduction The importance of the string quartet in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn As Told by a Friend (1947) may not be recognized easily, but its symbolism plays an indispensable role. The narrator of the novel, Serenus Zeitblom, regards “The Revelation of St. John and Lamentation of Dr. Faustus” as the “highest and boldest creations” by Adrian Leverkühn, the talented German composer and Zeitblom’s old friend.1 Many critics have shared the narrator’s opinion. For example, Ronald Bogue emphasizes that “[u]ndoubtedly, the most significant of Doctor Faustus’ imaginary musical works are Apocalipsis cum figuris and The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, the last major compositions of

 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn As Told by a Friend [1947], trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage Books, 1999): 161; further references in the text, abbreviated as “DF.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775884-015

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Adrian Leverkühn.”2 However, it is also worth noting that between “the production of his masterpieces,”3 in 1919 and 1930 respectively, Leverkühn composed a string quartet in 1927. It is his “most esoteric work,” or a “seemingly anarchic piece [composed as if] to take a deep breath before his Faust cantata, his most rigorously formal work” (DF, 478–479). In other words, the string quartet represents the last, most significant turning point in the protagonist-composer’s life and music. The string quartet can be understood as a well-balanced, dynamic microcosm functioning with no clear center. The ensemble consisting of four solo string instruments – two violins, one viola, and one cello – was born in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century as “the quintessential ‘music of friends’, an intimate and tightly constructed dialogue among equals, at once subtle and serious. [. . .] ‘Four rational people conversing’ was how Goethe would later see it.”4 Since the age of Franz Joseph Haydn, the so-called “father of the string quartet,” it has been “widely regarded as the supreme form of chamber music,”5 or “the most widely cultivated and influential chamber-music genre.”6 In fact, “[m]any of the greatest composers have cast their finest ideas in its mold, and many distinguished players have found in it a vehicle for their highest achievement.”7 The discourse of the string quartet as “the supreme form” can be described concisely as follows: Quartet playing means four individuals who must make a unified whole yet remain individuals. The soloist is a whole in himself, and in the orchestra individuality is lost in numbers that are held together by the personality of the conductor. [. . .] Good quartet playing gives the best possible training in all-round musicianship, since it requires adaptability to others, as well as clear and understanding performance on the part of each member.8

The four players as “friends” and “equals” must be highly independent as “individuals” and at the same time collaborate with the other three closely to create “a unified whole” without a “conductor,” or a visible center controlling the whole discourse. This is a marked characteristic of the string quartet as “a self-sufficient

 Ronald Bogue, “Deleuze, Mann and Modernism: Musical Becoming in Doctor Faustus,” Deleuze Studies 4.3 (2010): 412–431, 413.  Bogue, “Delueze, Mann and Modernism,” 414.  Christina Bashford, “The String Quartet and Society,” in The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet, ed. Robin Stowell (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005): 3–18, 4.  “String Quartet,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan Publishers, 2001): 585.  “String Quartet,” in The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th ed., ed. Don Michael Randel (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2003): 843.  M. D. Herter Norton, The Art of String Quartet Playing: Practice, Technique and Interpretation (New York: The Norton Library, 1966): 11.  Norton, The Art of String Quartet Playing, 18.

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instrumental form,”9 and this microcosmic image can easily interact with the traditional idea that the universe consists of groups of four elements. For example, Empedocles’s famous idea of the universe that the four elements – earth, air, water, and fire – keep mingling and separating eternally is similar to the dynamic image of the string quartet, and they can be associated with each other in a natural way. Doctor Faustus includes a series of scenes dealing with various groups of four elements. For example, those scenes highlight such things as people’s unusual interest in the Empedoclean four elements since ancient times, the theory of the four temperaments and its portrayal in Renaissance art, and the birth and the development of the string quartet in classical and modernist music. As the story progresses, they flexibly intertwine with each other around the image of the string quartet, and the musical discourse gradually grows into a rich, multidimensional symbol. When the novel is about to reach its tragic end, the symbol, reflecting both tradition concerning the microcosm-macrocosm analogy and its changes in Western history, brings the reader to consider the continuation of the history, or the future after World War II, on both aesthetic and practical levels.

The Number Four and Its Relationship with the String Quartet In Doctor Faustus, the repeated reference to the number four leads to the image of the string quartet. For example, the first sentence of Chapter XIV implies Leverkühn’s obsession with numbers: “Numerology is not for me [Zeitblom], and it was always only with apprehension that I observed Adrian’s interest in it, which had always been tacitly but clearly evident” (DF, 120). In the first thirteen chapters it is the number four that has had the greatest influence on Leverkühn. He watched his father’s experiments with the four elements in his childhood, listened to casual performances of string quartets at his uncle’s house as a teenager, and kept an arithmetical etching of a 4 x 4 magic square as a university student as if regarding it as an indispensable source of inspiration for his musical composition. In other words, the number four seems to keep functioning as the basis of Leverkühn’s life and music, and the novel gradually relates his different experiences with the number to the image of the string quartet.

 Norton, The Art of String Quartet Playing, 11.

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Leverkühn’s childhood experiences with the four elements are mentioned repeatedly. Around the beginning of the novel, Zeitblom remembers experiments performed by Leverkühn’s father, which “in certain ages might have been characterized as a desire to ‘speculate the elements’” (DF, 16). In addition, the Devil talks to Leverkühn about the similarities between him and his father: “He is sly, always wanting to speculate the elements. From him you also have that megrim in your head” (DF, 250). In a later scene, Leverkühn’s “knowledge of nature and the cosmos” reminds Zeitblom of “his father and that pensive mania to ‘speculate the elements’” (DF, 281). These scenes keep highlighting the fact that Leverkühn’s understanding of the universe depends largely on his vivid childhood experiences with his father, especially in terms of “speculat[ing] the elements.” As Leverkühn grows up, his imagination greatly influenced by the four elements begins to interact with an arithmetical etching of a 4 x 4 magic square like the one in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514). The importance of the 4 x 4 magic square is obvious from Leverkühn’s unusual interest in it. In fact, while the arithmetic etching was first “[t]acked to the wall above” a borrowed upright piano in his room when he was a student at the University of Halle, he “once again tacked the ‘magic square’ above his upright piano” after moving to Leipzig (DF, 102, 191). The 4 x 4 magic square in Leverkühn’s student room is described as follows: He had completed the furnishings with a borrowed upright piano, always buried under music, some of which he had written himself. Tacked to the wall above it was an arithmetical etching that he had found in some curio shop or other: a so-called magic square, like the one visible in Dürer’s Melancolia – along with hour-glass, compass, balance scales, polyhedron, and other symbols. As in that case, the square was divided into sixteen fields inscribed with Arabic numbers, but so that the “1” was at the lower right, the “16” at the upper left; and the magic – or curiosity – lay in the fact that when added, whether from the top or bottom, horizontally or diagonally, the numbers always gave the sum of thirty-four. (DF, 101–102)

The 4 x 4 magic square closely related to Melencolia I immediately starts intertwining with cosmological conceptions since ancient times in the next paragraph, for Leverkühn and Zeitblom attend a philosophy lecture together at the university where the professor lectured on the pre-Socratics, [. . .] most extensively, on Pythagoras. [. . .] we heard about the early cosmological conceptions of an austere and pious mind, who had elevated his fundamental passion – mathematics, abstract proportion, numbers – to the principle of the world’s origin and duration and who, as an initiate and savant standing before All Nature, had been the first to address it in a grand gesture as “cosmos,” as order and harmony, as the spheres sounding in a system of intervals beyond our hearing.

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Numbers per se and the relationship of numbers [were] the constitutive essence of being and moral values. (DF, 102–103)

The Pythagorean idea explained here clarifies the significant relationship between numbers and music in traditional cosmologies, and in Leverkühn’s imagination “the early cosmological conceptions” undoubtedly interact with the 4 x 4 magic square in his room and in Melencolia I. Melancholy, represented by the woman Melencolia deep in thought in Melencolia I, is one of the four temperaments, and the viewer of the engraving probably remembers the fact: “Men had always been accustomed to couple the four temperaments with the seasons, the rivers of Paradise, the four winds, the four ages of man, the points of the compass, the elements, and, in short, with everything determined by the ‘sacred tetrad.’”10 The tradition of the “sacred tetrad” traces back to the Pythagoreans who “regarded the number four as specially significant. They used to swear by four, ‘which holds the root and source of eternal nature.’”11 Later, the Pythagorean tradition was “taken up by Empedocles,” and “[t]hrough the whole of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance [it] remained virtually unchanged.”12 In this tradition since the time of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans – which the lecture Leverkühn and Zeitblom attended focuses on – Melencolia I appeared, and the engraving, especially the 4 x 4 magic square in it, seems to represent not just the tradition itself but rather the power to bring about positive changes with it toward the future. Michael Palencia-Roth concisely introduces Erwin Panofsky’s analysis of Melencolia I and explains how the 4 x 4 magic square in it can change negative characteristics of melancholy into positive ones at least to some degree: In Panofsky’s analysis, melancholy is associated with the planet Saturn, the most malignant of the planets and the one most closely linked with the mind, tools and geometry. In medieval alchemy, saturnalian melancholy may be counteracted by an appeal to the planet Jupiter. This appeal suggests the potential function, says Panofsky, of the magic square in the upper righthand corner of the engraving, for the magic square is also known as the mensula Jovis of the little table of Jupiter; as such, it can turn “evil into good” and “dispel all worries and fears.” The solution, then, to Melencolia’s black depres-

 Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art, ed. Philippe Despoix and Georges Leroux (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019): 367.  Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy, 4.  Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy, 9–10.

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sion and its cause, artistic and intellectual sterility, is a submission – exactly how is unspecified – to the forces of Jupiter represented by the magic square.13

The engraving seems to show the possibility that “the forces of Jupiter represented by the magic square” can change “saturnalian melancholy” into something more positive and inspire “artistic and intellectual” creativity. Of course, this possible change is not completely optimistic but rather ambiguous, for “Dürer (as we can see from the dark face and clenched fist) creates a Melencolia whose sad but sublime destiny cannot, and perhaps should not, be averted by palliatives, whether natural or magical.”14 However, at least the power to bring about positive changes represented by the 4 x 4 magic square undoubtedly encourages viewers like Leverkühn toward “artistic and intellectual” creation. Considering the fact that Leverkühn’s magic square is always tacked to the wall above the piano and his music, it is clear that it functions as a powerful, mysterious source of inspiration for his musical composition, especially for the creation of innovative music. As the story progresses, Leverkühn’s different experiences with the number four gradually converge on one point, that is, the image of the string quartet. In this sense, the symbolism of the string quartet develops into a crucial key to the protagonist-composer’s life, his music, and the novel. One important point to remember in examining the symbolism of the string quartet in Doctor Faustus is that Leverkühn’s fictional life and music faithfully reflect “artistic and intellectual” persons’ unusual interest in the number four and their special attention to the string quartet at that time. During the modernist period, the “sacred tetrad” and the image of the string quartet often appeared together in artistic and scholarly works, especially in literature. For example, in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943), a collection of four independent poems, several different groups of four elements, including the image of the string quartet, intertwine with each other, creating a poetic microcosm. Philip Ball argues that “[l]iterary tradition has continued to uphold the four ancient elements, which supply the organizing principle of T. S. Eliot’s Quartets.”15 In addition, introducing Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher of science and poetics, Northrop Frye relates his special interest in the four elements to famous literary works like Eliot’s Four Quartets: The four elements are not a conception of much use to modern chemistry [. . .]. But, as Bachelard’s book and its companion works show, and as an abundance of literature

 Michael Palencia-Roth, “Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus,” German Studies Review 3.3 (1980): 361–375, 371–372.  Klibansky et al. Saturn and Melancholy, 327.  Philip Ball, The Elements (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002): 10.

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down to Eliot’s Quartets also shows, earth, air, water and fire are still the four elements of imaginative experience, and always will be.16

The point is that these people fascinated by “the four elements of imaginative experience” – Mann, Bachelard, and Eliot – were born between 1875 and 1888.17 This fact invests Leverkühn’s fictional life between 1885 and 1940, his obsession with the number four, and his special relationship with the string quartet, with further symbolic meaning. While Leverkühn’s relationship with the string quartet can be understood as a reflection of the real world at that time, it is also worth noting that the modernist period was the first big chance for the string quartet to grow into a significant symbol in Western history, which Mann fully utilizes in his novel. As mentioned earlier, the string quartet was born around the mid-eighteenth century, in the period of Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and was developed by other composers, especially Beethoven, during the nineteenth century. In other words, the string quartet was rather a new member – or still a potential member – of the “sacred tetrad” in Western history, and it probably took time for its well-balanced, dynamic image to become a symbol. In fact, writers and scholars finally began to incorporate the image of the string quartet in their works as an effective symbol to express their ideas of the universe during the modernist period. It is also important to remember that at the beginning of the twentieth century, composers like Arnold Schönberg focused on string quartets in new ways to experiment with the so-called “new music.” Theodor W. Adorno – the famous German philosopher, sociologist, and most importantly in the context of this essay, musicologist, who greatly helped Mann with musical knowledge in Doctor Faustus – maintains that “[t]hat Schönberg’s roots lay in the polyphony of the string quartet has never been doubted.”18 As Mann admits, Leverkühn and his characteristic way to compose music are based partly – or even largely – on Schönberg and his twelve-tone technique.19 Thus, while Leverkühn’s life is rich with images closely related to the

 Northrop Frye, Preface, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, by Gaston Bachelard, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968): vii.  According to his diary, while working on Doctor Faustus, Mann received Eliot’s Four Quartets on June 21,1943. It is not clear whether or not Eliot’s poems influenced Mann’s novel, but their literary works reveal that two representative writers at that time had a special interest in both the “sacred tetrad” and the string quartet. See Thomas Mann, Tagebücher: 1940–1943, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1982): 591.  Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1976): 97.  See Mann, Doctor Faustus, 535. In the “Author’s Note” at the end of the novel, Mann writes: “It does not seem superfluous to inform the reader that the method of composition

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number four, he, as an intellectual modernist composer, represents artists and scholars obsessed with them at that time, gradually revealing how the string quartet develops into a symbol.

Beethoven’s Late String Quartets and Their Influence on Leverkühn Since several important string quartets composed by Leverkühn and real-life musicians in Western history appear in Doctor Faustus in chronological order, close analyses of them and their relationships help unlock the symbolism of the string quartet. Leverkühn first encountered string quartets at his uncle’s place when he was a teenager. Zeitblom writes: I do not wish to say that he was shamming, nor do I forget that for us at that point music had hardly any reality other than the purely physical form it took in Nikolaus Leverkühn’s armory. True, we had passing acquaintance with chamber music – which was played every week or two at Adrian’s uncle’s house, sometimes in my presence, and certainly not always in Adrian’s. The group consisted of our cathedral organist, Herr Wendell Kretzschmar, a stutterer who would become Adrian’s teacher only a little later; the choral director of Boniface Gymnasium; and Uncle Nikolaus, who joined them for selected quartets by Haydn and Mozart, for which he played first violin, Luca Cimabue second, Herr Kretzschmar cello, and the choral director viola. (DF, 48)

As referred to earlier, “quartets by Haydn and Mozart” represent the beginning of string quartets in Western music history and are not very difficult to play. In fact, the four performers in this scene – not really professional string players – got together “every week or two” and enjoyed playing without hard practice. Leverkühn’s casual, relaxed experiences with string quartets lead to a later scene where Kretzschmar gave a lecture on one of Beethoven’s late string quartets. While Leverkühn attended the lecture while still a teenager, the transition from Haydn and Mozart to Beethoven is effective in highlighting the development of string quartets in Western music history. Part of Kretzschmar’s lecture series held in the community examines “the ‘Monster of All Quartets’ (which [. . .] was one of Beethoven’s last five, written

presented in Chapter XXII, known as the twelve-tone or row technique, is in truth the intellectual property of a contemporary composer and theoretician, Arnold Schoenberg, and that I have transferred it within a certain imaginary context to the person of an entirely fictitious musician, the tragic hero of my novel. And in general, those parts of this book dealing with music theory are indebted in many details to Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony.”

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in six movements)” (DF, 63), or String Quartet in B-Flat Major, Op. 130. Unlike Haydn’s and Mozart’s string quartets in the previous scene, it is “far too difficult” for the four members gathering “at Nikolaus Leverkühn’s” to play (DF, 63). In the lecture, Kretzschmar focuses on “the final fugue” of the string quartet, “which [. . .] at the demand of the publisher was separated from the work and replaced with a final movement in a freer style” (DF, 63–64). The original finale became an independent piece called “Grosse Fuge,” and Kretzschmar explains the reason for the replacement: It had been dreadful listening for healthy ears of the day, which resisted hearing what its author did not have to hear, but had made bold to conceive only in a soundless form: a savage brawl between hellishly dissonant instrumental voices, wandering lost in heights and depths, clashing with one another in variant patterns at every irregular turn, so that the performers, unsure of both themselves and the music, had probably not played it all that cleanly, thereby consummating the Babel of confusion. (DF, 63)

String players at that time could neither understand the difficult fugue clearly nor perform it “all that cleanly,” which caused such experiences as “dreadful listening for healthy ears of the day.” This happened mainly because the Grosse Fuge was way ahead of its time and full of power to bring about changes. In fact, people gradually found it fascinating rather than just “resisted hearing” it. About a century later, Igor Stravinsky praised it as “the most perfect miracle in music” and as “the most absolutely contemporary piece of music.”20 In addition, Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique can partly trace back to it: “Some analysts – including Stravinsky – see foreshadowings of twelve-tone music in the Grosse Fuge.”21 In other words, Kretzschmar’s lecture on the Grosse Fuge seems to be a crucial stimulus for Leverkühn, a modernist composer like Schönberg, especially for his composition of string quartets. At the end of the episode, Zeitblom emphasizes that “it is important for the reader to know, and keep in mind, that my friend was stirred, impressed” by Kretzschmar’s lecture on the Grosse Fuge (DF, 65). Another point concerning Kretzschmar’s lecture is that it loosely relates the Grosse Fuge to Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132, one of the most important string quartets in Doctor Faustus. The two string quartets were composed in the same year, 1825, having a marked similarity in terms of the four-

 William Kinderman, “Beethoven’s Last Quartets: Threshold to a Fourth Creative Period?” in The String Quartets of Beethoven, ed. William Kinderman (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2006): 279–322, 279.  Robert S. Kahn, Beethoven and the Grosse Fuge: Music, Meaning, and Beethoven’s Most Difficult Work (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2010): 143.

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Figure 1: Grosse Fuge, op. 133, mm. 1–10.

Figure 2: Op. 132, first movement, mm. 1–8.

note motive. Though Kretzschmar doesn’t refer to this point in his lecture, the four notes G-G♯-F-E appearing at the beginning of the Grosse Fuge (Figure 1) strongly reminds the listener – especially if they are familiar with Beethoven’s late string quartets to some degree – of the first four notes G♯-A-F-E of Op. 132 (Figure 2). In both string quartets, the four notes function as the bases of the entire works. Michael Steinberg points out the extremely close relationship between the two pieces: “In Beethoven’s notebooks, the ideas for the introduction of Op. 132 are intermingled with those for the Grosse Fuge.”22 The fact that the Grosse Fuge can evoke Op. 132 in this way is worth noting in that their close relationship effectively enriches and emphasizes the symbolism of the string quartet as a microcosmic discourse based on the number four not just through the four independent string players’ collaboration but also through the fournote motives’ crucial roles to organize the entire discourses.

 Michael Steinberg, “The Late Quartets,” in The Beethoven Quartet Companion, ed. Robert Winter and Robert Martin (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994): 215–282, 265.

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Since the Grosse Fuge examined in Kretzschmar’s lecture often reminds the listener of Op. 132 in terms of their close relationship, a later scene focusing on Op. 132 naturally appears as an implicitly continued argument of Beethoven’s late string quartets. This string quartet is important in several respects. First of all, the process of writing Doctor Faustus was greatly influenced by it. Mann repeatedly mentions his experiences with listening to this particular piece while working on his novel. In The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, he writes that “I must also not forget a glorious matinee performance by the Busch Quartet at Town Hall – they played Beethoven’s Opus 132, that supreme work which, by what might be called the kindness of providence, I had the chance to hear at least five times during the years I was working on Faustus.”23 In the same book, he also emphasizes how special this string quartet was for him at that time: “Fortune had it that we could enjoy chamber music right in our own house. [String players visiting Mann’s place] played quartets of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Opus 132!), Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Dvořak.”24 In addition, he mentions Op. 132 in his diary several times while writing Doctor Faustus.25 Thus, Op. 132 kept inspiring Mann, the author creating Leverkühn’s life and music. As for marked characteristics of Op. 132, the first four notes at the beginning, as pointed out earlier, play key roles to create a musical microcosm. Joseph Kerman concisely explains that “[t]he four-note motive of the opening assai sostenuto (G#-A-F-E, but just as frequently inverted into F-E-G#-A) has been called a primitive ‘four-tone row’, for a good deal of the material throughout the Quartet can be seen to incorporate these four notes pointedly, prominently, or incidentally.”26 In addition, Leverkühn, now a young composer in Leipzig, talks to Zeitblom about the famous third movement of this quartet, “the Lydian movement, the ‘Hymn of Thanksgiving upon Recovery,’” in his characteristic way: It proved anew, he said, the relationship between music and the study of the heavens, just as it had been proved before by Pythagoras’s theory of cosmic harmony. From time to time he would return to the quartet and its third movement – that alien air, that lunar landscape – and the enormous difficulty of performing it. (DF, 170)

 Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961): 61.  Mann, The Story of a Novel, 86.  See Mann, Tagebücher: 1940–1943, 602–603, 627, 628, 648; Thomas Mann, Tagebücher: 1944–1.4.1946, ed. Inge Jens (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1986): 50, 72, 77, 203, 248–249.  Joseph Kerman, “Beethoven: The Single Journey: Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132,” The Hudson Review 5.1 (1952): 32–55, 34–35.

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Leverkühn’s talk, going back and forth between old cosmologies and “the quartet and its third movement,” reveals that in his imagination the string quartet already exists as a microcosmic symbol reflecting the tradition since the time of Pythagoras. The conversation between Leverkühn and Zeitblom continues to focus on “the fourth movement [and] that incomparable finale” (DF, 170), and just after that, Leverkühn suddenly tells Zeitblom to go to see Kretzschmar. This implies that Op. 132 made Leverkühn remember Kretzschmar’s lecture on the Grosse Fuge, which is understandable, for the two string quartets, composed in the same year and based on the very similar four-note motives, were both too difficult to play cleanly in the early nineteenth century but have become strong stimuli for ambitious modernist composers like Leverkühn. In fact, critics like Adorno “read late Beethoven back from the perspective of Schoenberg’s atonal ruptures of style and process.”27 Since Leverkühn is a fictional, symbolic composer similar to Schönberg in terms of musical technique, it is natural that the two string quartets by Beethoven become crucial stimuli for his own string quartets. The two scenes dealing with Beethoven’s late string quartets greatly enrich the image of the string quartet. The novel so far has loosely associated such things as the four elements, the four temperaments, the 4 x 4 magic square, and the four-note motives, with the image of the string quartet, developing the musical discourse into a well-balanced, dynamic microcosm characteristic of the Western tradition. However, Beethoven’s late string quartets, part of this tradition, deviate from it at the same time. For example, the Grosse Fuge was separated from the original string quartet, a six-movement work, and became independent. Similarly, Op. 132 has a unique structure: “Departing from the standard four-movement form of a string quartet, Beethoven placed this unique piece [the third movement] as the centre-piece of a five-movement work.”28 In other words, Beethoven’s late string quartets emphasize a sense of “[d]eparting from the standard [. . .] form” and new developments toward the future. This seems to help the string quartet and its symbolism maintain room for flexibility. Stirred both by the string quartet as a microcosmic symbol based on the Western tradition and by the possibility of its further development shown through Beethoven’s late string quartets, Leverkühn begins to work on his own string quartets as a modernist composer, and the symbolism of the string quartet continues to develop as the story progresses.

 Barbara Barry, “In Search of the Enigma Code: Beethoven’s A Minor Quartet Op. 132 and the Double Helix,” The Musical Times 158.1940 (2017): 47–64, 60.  Edward Dusinberre, Beethoven for a Later Age: Living with the String Quartets (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016): 176.

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Leverkühn’s String Quartets and What Their Symbolism Evokes Leverkühn’s works add crucial characteristics of modernist music to the symbolism of the string quartet. One of the most important characteristics of his string quartets is that they are composed in what he calls “a strict style” (DF, 205). Zeitblom remembers how Leverkühn explained it in 1910 and writes the scene in Chapter XXII: One would have to [. . .] build longer words from the twelve steps of the tempered semitone alphabet, words of twelve letters, specific combinations and interrelations of the twelve semitones, rows of notes – from which, then, the piece, a given movement, or a whole work of several movements would be strictly derived. Each tone in the entire composition, melodic and harmonic, would have to demonstrate its relation to this predetermined basic row. None would dare recur until all have first occurred. No note would dare appear that did not fulfill its motif function within the structure as a whole. Free notes would no longer exist. That is what I would call a strict style. (DF, 205)

Listening to Leverkühn’s idea of the “strict style,” Zeitblom says as if he has suddenly remembered something important, “A magic square” (DF, 206). It is clear that, while the “strict style” itself is based on the number twelve, it reminds Zeitblom of Leverkühn’s interest in numerology, especially the number four in terms of the 4 x 4 magic square. Since Leverkühn’s 4 x 4 magic square exists in various memories the two old friends share, such as attending the philosophy lecture after fascinated by the numbers in it in Leverkühn’s room in Halle and arguing Op. 132 and old cosmologies in front of it in his room in Leipzig, Zeitblom seems to feel that these memories are crystallized into the “strict style” by the mysterious power of the magic square. In addition, Leverkühn’s “strict style” not just symbolizes one fictional composer’s life and music but also reflects actual modernist music and critical analyses of it at that time. As Mann admits in the “Author’s Note,” the explanation of Leverkühn’s “strict style” quoted above is based largely on that of Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique. Mann also writes that “[t]he analysis of the row system and the criticism of it that is translated into dialogue in Chapter XXII of Faustus is entirely based upon Adorno’s essay,”29 and Adorno sees references to Schönberg in the string quartet. Thus, Leverkühn’s “strict style” is closely related to string quartets on both fictional and practical levels. Leverkühn’s first string quartet appears in the form of “an accompaniment”:

 Mann, The Story of a Novel, 46.

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Adrian provided two hymns by Keats (the eight stanzas of “Ode to a Nightingale” and the shorter “Ode on Melancholy”) with an accompaniment by string quartet – to be sure, leaving far behind, and below, any traditional meaning of the term “accompaniment.” For in fact this consisted of an extremely ingenious form of variation, in which not a single note by the voice or the four instruments did not belong to the theme. (DF, 279)

What is interesting is that while this string quartet is supposed to play the role of “an accompaniment,” it actually doesn’t fit “any traditional meaning of the term ‘accompaniment,’” making itself conspicuous. In addition, the fact that this unique string quartet accompanies “Ode on Melancholy” is important, for it effectively connects Leverkühn’s string quartet with Melencolia I, including the significant 4 x 4 magic square as the symbol of his “strict style.” In other words, this “accompaniment” already represents key characteristics of Leverkühn’s music. In a later scene, it also turns out that part of the violin concerto he composed in 1924 is “an obvious reminiscence of the first violin’s recitative in the last movement of Beethoven’s [A Minor] Quartet [Op. 132],” or a further development of Beethoven’s groundbreaking string quartet by Leverkühn (DF, 430). Thus, through the untraditional “accompaniment by string quartet” and the violin concerto as a unique descendant of Beethoven’s unconventional string quartet, the novel gradually highlights Leverkühn’s experiments with a departure from tradition and dramatizes the appearance of his representative string quartet. Zeitblom explicates remarkable characteristics of Leverkühn’s string quartet composed in 1927: The tendency toward musical “prose” reaches its height in the String Quartet, perhaps Leverkühn’s most esoteric work [. . .]. Whereas chamber music usually offers a playground for the working out of thematic motifs, here that is avoided in outright provocation. There are no linkages, developments, variations, or even repetitions of motifs whatever; uninterruptedly, in an apparently fully disjointed fashion, one new idea follows another, connected only by a similarity of tone or timbre, or, almost more frequently, by a contrast. There is not a trace of traditional forms. It is as if the meister were using this seemingly anarchic piece to take a deep breath before his Faust cantata, his most rigorously formal work. (DF, 478–479)

Zeitblom emphasizes that “[t]here is not a trace of traditional forms” in “Leverkühn’s most esoteric work.” In fact, if it does not offer “a playground for the working out of thematic motifs” at all, that means that this string quartet is far more drastic than Beethoven’s late string quartets like the Grosse Fuge and Op. 132. In them, though such “traditional forms” as four-movement structures didn’t remain, the famous four-note “thematic motifs” played crucial roles. The differences between Beethoven’s late string quartets and “Leverkühn’s most esoteric work” seem to reveal how strong the modernist composer’s desire to go

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beyond the limits of tradition is. Part of the reason for that can be found in the scene following the passage quoted above, where Leverkühn briefly refers to his memory of student life and says to Zeitblom, “In studying philosophy [. . .] I learned that to set limits is to go beyond them. I’ve always held to that notion” (DF, 479). Leverkühn has carefully learned traditions in philosophy and music since the time of Pythagoras, and on one level, he regards them as “limits,” trying to “go beyond them,” especially through his string quartets. Leverkühn’s strong desire revealed through his relationship with string quartets is fully understandable, for they have often represented the power to cause changes. For example, Beethoven’s late string quartets are so stimulating that they have encouraged Leverkühn to “go beyond” the “limits” of the stimulating works themselves and to compose the untraditional “accompaniment by string quartet” and the “most esoteric” string quartet. In addition, the 4 x 4 magic square in Leverkühn’s room – the symbol of the power to change the traditional, rather negative image of melancholy into a positive, constructive one – has functioned as another stimulus, inspiring him to give birth to his “strict style” and the unique string quartets based on it. The point is that Leverkühn’s string quartets derive and depart not only from the tradition of string quartets since the mid-eighteenth century but also from that of the microcosmmacrocosm analogy based on the “sacred tetrad” since ancient times. In short, the symbolism of the string quartet the novel has created so far is rich, multidimensional, and radical, reflecting various things from ancient cosmologies to modernist music. Leverkühn totally understands how complex the symbolism of the string quartet is, senses the strong power to bring about changes toward the future in it, and creates his own string quartets. In fact, as Zeitblom points out, while Leverkühn composes his “most esoteric” string quartet by depending heavily on “the subtlest knowledge of the string quartet form” as if showing respect for the tradition, the work breaks “the old boundaries between chamber music and the orchestral style” and other conventions (DF, 479). Thus, Leverkühn recognizes various traditions as “limits,” fully utilizes them, and powerfully tries to “go beyond them” through his string quartets. After the scene of “Leverkühn’s most esoteric work,” string quartets disappear from the novel. Though its influence may indirectly remain in his last masterpiece, Mann stops developing the symbolism of the string quartet here. In fact, while Leverkühn’s unfinished first performance of The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, his insanity and subsequent death, and the fate of Germany toward the end of World War II do not encourage optimism at all, the string quartet disappears before these scenes as if to lurk under the surface and secretly prepare for a change. From this structure, a vision of the future evoked by the symbolic power of the string quartet will emerge, to repeat Mann’s words, as a

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possible “breakthrough” and/or “hope beyond hopelessness.” More specifically, the future world must be a democratic one, for one of the most remarkable characteristics of the string quartet is that the musical discourse is highly democratic. As pointed out earlier, in a string quartet, there is no clear center like a conductor controlling the whole orchestra, but the microcosmic discourse keeps functioning dynamically through flexible, balanced interactions among the four independent string performers. In addition, the fact that the symbolism of the string quartet in this novel is completed with Leverkühn’s modernist string quartet based on his “strict style” should be noted. His “strict style,” similar to Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique, has no tonal center. In other words, Leverkühn’s string quartets composed in the “strict style” strongly emphasize the image of a dynamic discourse operating without any clear center. From one perspective, such a discourse can be regarded as highly democratic and far different from the real organization of society during World War II as controlled by dictators like Hitler. However, this vision is not completely optimistic but rather ambiguous. In fact, while traditional string quartets represent well-balanced, democratic discourses almost perfectly, Leverkühn’s modernist string quartets, like Schönberg’s, are radical experiments with the “strict style,” often producing not peaceful but rather painful sounds, or dissonances. As a result, there is a possibility that “dire consequences [may] flow from the constructive Schönbergian [or Leverkühn’s] approach to music” and that “subject[ing] music to rigorous rational analysis [. . .] [may lead to] the converse of rationality.”30 Thus, what the symbolism of the string quartet indicates at the end of the novel can be understood as a democratic discourse organized with extreme caution, especially in terms of the idea of the center. This democratic discourse is worth exploring as a practical vision of the future. For example, it is plausible to think that Mann, after leaving Europe for the United States, was more interested in democratic discourses than before. Janet Flanner points out in 1941: The fact that Thomas Mann today is a political refugee and the circumstance that he is living in exile in our democracy constitute a pair of the more illuminating personal paradoxes involved in this present war. When the last war ended, Mann was still ignorant of politics, he disliked the democratic form of government, and he published, in 1918, a much-discussed essay, “The Reflections of a Non-Political Man” to prove both.31

 Mann, The Story of a Novel, 45.  Janet Flanner, “Profiles: Goethe in Hollywood ~ II,” The New Yorker (December 20, 1941): 22.

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Three years later, he became an American citizen and expressed how he felt about that: “So we were now American citizens, and I am glad to think [. . .] that I became one under Roosevelt, in his America.”32 Mann’s emphasis on “his America” probably means Roosevelt’s idea of America as “the great arsenal of democracy” emphasized in his famous fireside chat, or America representing democracy.33 It is understandable that, while living in America, Mann, consciously or unconsciously, approached the democratic image of the string quartet, developed it into a rich symbol, and made it reflect his changing and deepening idea of democracy. As a result, the symbolism of the string quartet set in the context of World War II gained the power to evoke a practical vision of the future, a democratic world reflecting Mann’s idea of its discursive center. In order to elucidate the vision of the future Mann conveys, examining the symbolism of the string quartet in a larger literary context is effective, for it plays important roles not just in Mann’s novel but also in its contemporary literary works, such as McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and Eliot’s Four Quartets. While The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Four Quartets create unique musico-literary worlds related to World War II, they both rely on the image of the string quartet as Doctor Faustus does.34 What is interesting is that all three of them stimulate the reader in different ways to think about the center of the string quartet, whereas the musical, democratic discourse has functioned perfectly since the mid-eighteenth century without any clear center like a conductor. This contradiction is the key to the symbolism of the string quartet as a vision of the future. As argued earlier, Doctor Faustus gradually underlines that there is no tonal center in Leverkühn’s “strict style,” emphasizing how radical, “esoteric,” and “seemingly anarchic” his representative modernist string quartet is. This can be understood as a warning that while the string quartet is traditionally “a self-sufficient instrumental form” functioning with no clear center, trying to exclude all types of centers completely from the democratic discourse may lead to its destruction. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter carries a similar message. In the novel, a deaf-mute character named “Singer” attracts four lonely persons in a small American town, unconsciously playing the role of an ambiguous center among them for a little while. However, the quiet, mysterious center disappears when Singer commits suicide, and the four characters disperse, which is carefully juxtaposed with the socio-psychological fragmentation in Europe at the

 Mann, The Story of a Novel, 82; emphasis in original.  Sherill Tippins, February House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005): 142–143.  See Kiyoko Magome, “The Image of the String Quartet Lurking in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” in Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Alison Graham-Bertolini and Casey Kayser (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 97–111.

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beginning of World War II. Unlike McCullers’s novel, Four Quartets deals with actual destructions during the war, and the expression “the still point of the turning world” and its variations keep appearing,35 imply the existence of something like a mysterious center in the wounded world, and finally cause a sense of unity at the end of the last poem: “And the fire and the rose are one.”36 Just as McCullers and Eliot quietly shed light on the importance of something like a mysterious center in the image of the string quartet, the symbolism of the string quartet at the end of Doctor Faustus seems to focus on the idea of a possible center. For example, I, as a reader, imagine the implied message consisting of a warning and a suggestion: Do not try to exclude all types of centers in radical ways from the symbolism of the string quartet, especially if you want to develop it into a more practical vision of a better, democratic society in the future. Rather, think carefully about the possibility of adding something like an effective center. The role of the center added to the “self-sufficient,” democratic discourse should be to support or even enhance its well-balanced, flexible mechanism in a mild way without harming it. Since the modernist literature incorporating the symbolism of the string quartet only implies that the possible center will be something or someone calm, modest, and mysterious, it is the reader’s task to consider the center to be added to the democratic discourse as carefully as possible and modify its discursive image each time he or she tries to utilize it practically. During and after World War II, Mann representing Germany in California, like McCullers in the United States and Eliot in England, almost certainly desired a society like a string quartet, which the reader is expected to keep exploring.

Conclusion: The String Quartet Beyond the World of Doctor Faustus The symbolism of the string quartet in Doctor Faustus can be examined effectively in a larger literary context, which also means that it prompts a new exploration of modernist literature. In fact, such diverse and talented modernist writers as Mann, Woolf, Eliot, McCullers, and Nabokov use the string quartet as a key symbol in both similar and different ways, revealing an unexplored aspect of literature at that time.37 In addition, I believe that the string quartet can play significant roles  T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets [1943] (Orlando: Harcourt, 1971): 18.  Eliot, Four Quartets, 59.  See Magome, “The Image of the String Quartet Lurking in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” 97–111; Kiyoko Magome, “Vladimir Nabokov’s Musico-Literary Microcosm: ‘Sounds,’ ‘Music,’

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not only on the musico-literary level but also on the socio-political level as a practical vision of the future. The fact that Adorno greatly helped Mann with Doctor Faustus reminds me of the influence of Adorno’s socio-musical philosophy on Edward Said, which has become a good example of how a discursive image in music can be utilized carefully and practically in aesthetic, scholarly, and social activities. Adorno’s ideas stimulated Said in terms of counterpoint. Since counterpoint represents another democratic discourse in music and has played important roles both in literature and in society, it will be effective to compare the string quartet with it. Counterpoint symbolizes a highly democratic discourse, for in contrapuntal music like a fugue, independent voices, or melodic lines, intertwine with each other in the passage of time without any hierarchical relationships among them. Fascinated by counterpoint, especially through Adorno’s socio-musical understanding of it, Said thinks that counterpoint is not just an aesthetic, metaphysical model but rather a practical way of exploring and creating the world.38 For example, his famous “contrapuntal reading” regards a work of literature as a contrapuntal discourse consisting of various social and aesthetic voices, discovers unnoticed ones in it, and examines them and their relationships. In addition, Said and Daniel Barenboim, the world-famous pianist and conductor, carefully applied the idea of counterpoint to the real world. A famous example is the Weimar workshop held by them in 1999, where young Arab, Israeli, and German musicians played together as if realizing contrapuntal collaboration among independent members. The workshop developed into the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which has actively been performing around the world. Just as Said effectively used counterpoint on different socio-aesthetic levels, the string quartet, another democratic discourse in music developed into a rich symbol by Mann with Adorno’s help, must function not just in one literary work but on a larger socio-aesthetic scale. Unlike what Said and others have done with counterpoint, the string quartet has neither been analyzed closely enough as a sophisticated democratic discourse in music and as a key symbol in modernist literature nor been modified carefully for its practical application to the real world. I believe that after examining the symbolism of the string quartet in Doctor Faustus, the reader should go beyond Mann’s literary world to explore it more deeply and flexibly in a larger musico-literary context and to utilize its exceptionally rich symbolism more fully and practically for a better society in the future.

and Nabokov’s Quartet,” in The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, ed. Marie Bouchet, Julie Loison-Charles and Isabelle Poulin (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020): 295–312.  See Kiyoko Magome, “Edward Said’s Counterpoint,” in Paradoxical Citizenship: Edward Said, ed. Silvia Nagy-Zekmi (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006): 67–74.

Contributors Tiffany M. B. Anderson, PhD, joined the Department of Literature and Languages at Texas A&M University, Commerce in 2018. She previously served as the Director of Africana Studies at Youngstown State University. Dr. Anderson received her doctorate in US Ethnic Literature at The Ohio State University. Her research, presentations, and publications consider black masculinity, maternal activism, and rearing black children in the age of Black Lives Matter. She often lectures on Critical Race Theory and the ban on CRT in Texas education. Nobuko Anan is Professor in the Faculty of Foreign Language Studies at Kansai University, Japan. Her research focuses on theatre, performance, and visual arts in contemporary Japan from the perspectives of gender and sexuality. She is the author of Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls’ Aesthetics (Palgrave 2016), and her articles have appeared in many anthologies and journals such as TDR and Theatre Research International. Before she took up her current position, she was Newton Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick and Senior Lecturer in Cultures and Languages at Birkbeck, University of London. She received her PhD in Theatre and Performance at University of California, Los Angeles. Gregory Betts is Professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of two of the most exhaustive academic studies of avant-garde writing in Canada, Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (2013) and Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959–1975 (2021), both with University of Toronto Press. He is an experimental poet with collections published in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Ireland. He is most acknowledged for If Language (2005), the world’s first collection of paragraph-length anagrams, and The Others Raisd in Me (2009), 150 poems carved out of Shakespeare’s sonnet 150. His other books explore conceptual, collaborative, and concrete poetics. He has performed these works hundreds of times, in many countries, including at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games as part of the “Cultural Olympiad.” He is the President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), curator of the bpNichol.ca Digital Archive, and Associate Director of the Social Justice Research Initiative. His most recent poetry book is Foundry (2021), a collection of visual poems inspired by a font named after a fifteenth century poet. Catherine Charlwood received her doctorate in English and Comparative Literary Studies from the University of Warwick in 2017, for a thesis on memory in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. A Fulbright American Studies Scholar, in 2020 Catherine won the Lesley Lee Francis Scholar Award for the best annual scholarship in Frost studies with her article “‘Recognizing Something’: Robert Frost and Recognition Memory,” which appeared in Volume 29 of The Robert Frost Review. She has previously published articles on the relationship between literature and science, Ishiguro’s novels, and Hardy’s musical instrument poems. Catherine left literature academia to become the Research Translation and Impact Manager for IDEAL, a large dementia research program at the University of Exeter. If you are affected by dementia, visit the Living with Dementia Toolkit at www.livingwithdementiatoolkit.org.uk.

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Contributors

Jochen Ecke is an instructor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany. He is the author of The British Comics Invasion: Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison and the Evolution of the American Style (McFarland, 2018). His research focuses primarily on popular culture, film history and the Gothic. Most of his publications focus on the history and poetics of US and British mainstream comic books. He is also the co-host of the film history podcast Ein Filmarchiv. Kenneth Eckert is from Canada and is Associate Professor of English at Hanyang University ERICA, Korea, where he teaches British literature, including modernism and postmodernism courses. He is an alumnus of University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Memorial University of Newfoundland. He has chiefly published on Geoffrey Chaucer and medieval English romance, but also has recent articles on Jane Austen, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Leacock, and Agatha Christie. He has one academic book, Middle English Romances in Translation (Sidestone, 2015), with a new monograph in preparation on Middle English romances, and two novels of humor literary fiction, Shorter of Breath (Moldy Rutabaga, 2017) and Learning to Crawl (MR, 2020). Nigel Fabb is Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow UK. He has a PhD in linguistics from MIT (1984) and was the editor of Journal of Linguistics for many years. He has written about the linguistics of English and African languages, about poetry and memory, metre, the pragmatics of literary form, and literary linguistics. His eleventh and twelfth books will be published in 2022 and are Thrills, Epiphany, Sublime: How Literature Surprises Us (Anthem Press) and, as co-editor with Venla Sykäri, Rhyme and Rhyming in Verbal Art, Song and Language (Studia Fennica Folkloristica). Patrick Gill is a senior lecturer at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz where he also received his PhD. He is the author of Origins and Effects of Poetic Ambiguity in Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems (WVT, 2014) and the co-editor of Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle (Routlegde, 2018) and Translating Renaissance Experience (Vita Traductiva, 2021) amongst others. He has lectured and published on English poetry, the contemporary novel, and British and American media culture. His ongoing research is into the efficacy of literary form. Margaryta Golovchenko is a PhD student in the art history department at the University of Oregon. Her SSHRC-funded research focuses on the representation of human-animal relationships, particularly between women and animals, in eighteenth and nineteenth-century French and British painting. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in Fantastika Journal, Journal of Posthumanism, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, and tba: Journal of Art, Media, and Visual Culture. She has written art and literary criticism for a variety of literary and cultural publications, including Canadian Art, Peripheral Review, Cornelia, RACAR, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Arc Poetry Magazine, and others. She is also a poet. Anni Haahr Henriksen is a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen, working on Elizabethan ideas about mind and privacy. Anni has an MA and BA in English from the University of Copenhagen as well as an MPhil in medieval English literature from Cambridge University.

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Kiyoko Magome is Associate Professor at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, teaching literature and music. Her publications include “Vladimir Nabokov’s American Short Story Surrounded by the Image of Russia” (Connections and Influence in the Russian and American Short Story, Lexington Books, 2021), “Carson McCullers’s Musico-Psychological Narrative and American Democracy during World War II” (Understanding the Short Fiction of Carson McCullers, Mercer UP, 2020), “Vladimir Nabokov’s Musico-Literary Microcosm: ‘Sounds,’ ‘Music,’ and Nabokov’s Quartet” (The Five Senses in Nabokov’s Works, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), “The Image of the String Quartet Lurking in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), “Democracy Realized through Music and Its Collaboration with Literature” (Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2009), The Influence of Music on American Literature Since 1890: A History of Aesthetic Counterpoint (Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), and “Edward Said’s Counterpoint” (Paradoxical Citizenship: Edward Said, Lexington Books, 2006). Supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Magome has been researching musico-literary quartets in the midtwentieth century, especially literary works closely related to the image of the string quartet. M-C. Newbould has taught and researched English at the University of Cambridge for many years, specializing in eighteenth-century literature and visual culture. Her main area of expertise is Laurence Sterne, and in particular his reception and adaptations of his fiction. Her monograph on ‘Sterneana’ was published in 2013; more recently, she has co-edited Laurence Sterne and Sterneana with Helen Williams, a digital edition of this material hosted by Cambridge Digital Library. She still publishes extensively on Sterne and is an editor of international journal The Shandean. As part of her work on eighteenth-century visual culture, She is currently co-editing with Jakub Lipski a Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Arts, a multi-authored volume to be published by Edinburgh University Press. Art Redding is Professor of English at York University in Toronto and author of four books on American culture and literature: Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence (1998), Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War (2008), “Haints”: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fiction (2011), and Radical Legacies: Twentieth Century Public Intellectuals in the United States (2015). He has written essays and book chapters on such topics as Gothic and the American South, the Cold War and North American literature, terrorism and fiction, and the cinema of the American west. He is currently completing a manuscript provisionally entitled Pulp Virilities in Postwar American Culture. Carsten Schinko received his PhD from the University of Tübingen in 2006 (Research Training Group “Pragmatization and Depragmatization of Literature”) and his Habilitation from the University of Stuttgart (2016). He has been a temporary Professor at the University Wuppertal and a visiting professor at HU Berlin. In April 2019 he returned to Tübingen for a stint as Associate Professor/ Akademischer Rat. He specializes in African American Literature, Literary Theory, Systems Theory, as well as Intermediality and Popular Culture. His publications include monographs on African American Literary and Cultural Theory as well as intermedial study of literature and pop music. He has edited volumes on the Culturalization of Poverty and a Systems Theoretical Approaches to US American Culture. His latest publication is Sonic Fictions of America: Literature and Popular Music 1950 – 2010 (Winter, 2021).

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Contributors

Aysha Strachan is a joint PhD researcher at King’s College London and the Humboldt University Berlin on a fully funded scholarship from the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (AHRC). Her thesis, Women as Agents of Desire in Middle High German Literature is supervised by Sarah Bowden (KCL) and Andreas Krass (HU) and is forthcoming in 2022. Her field of research spans diverse premodern genres (eleventh – fifteenth century), reading literary contexts through the lens of modern gender and psychoanalysis and vice-versa to challenge the “pastness” of Medieval Studies. She is also a Graduate Teacher in both German language and Gender in Arthurian Romance at King’s College London and has lectured on medieval visual culture, gender, and identity in the Middle Ages.

Index Abish, Walter – How German Is It 126–128 able-bodiedness 67–75, 80 – compulsory able-bodiedness 67, 73, 75, 80 Adorno, Theodor W. 215–216, 259, 264, 266, 271 aesthetics of omission 101, 110, 120, 173 African American 67–68, 70, 74, 77, 153 alien/Alien 10, 193–209 Allingham, Margery 216 America 8, 67–69, 94, 143, 153, 167, 212, 269 androgyne 86, 90 Armitage, Simon – Killing Time 143–157 Arts et Loisirs 225 Atlantic Monthly 221–222 atomic bombing 121–141 Auden, W. H. 144, 146, 211, 218–219, 221, 223, 225, 227 Audite 49, 51, 56, 58, 61, 63 Augustine 23, 108 authorial intent 4, 54, 170 Bachelard, Gaston 139, 258–259 Barenboim, Daniel 271 Barthes, Roland 175 Baudelaire, Charles – The Flowers of Evil 231–232, 237–241 Beethoven, Ludwig van 253, 259–267 Benson, John 51–55 Beowulf 141 Bergson, Henri 137–138 Bible 13 bissett, bill 200 Bogost, Ian 196, 203 Borges, Jorge Luis – The Book of Imaginary Beings 203 Borkent, Mike 200 Boys’ Love 99 bpNichol – The Martyrology 193–194, 197–201, 204–206, 209

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Breton, André – Earthlight 231–232, 247–251 Burke, Edmund 235 Cain, James M. 219 Carr, John Dickson 214 cats 134 chance encounter 231, 242, 248 Chandler, Raymond 211, 214, 217, 219, 221–224 (see also crime fiction, detective novel) Chase, James Hadley (René Raymond) – No Orchids for Miss Blandish 220 cheek theory 58–59 Chiang, Ted 201 Chrétien de Troyes – Erec et Enite 117 Christie, Agatha 122, 212, 216, 226–228 (see also crime fiction, detective novel) – The Secret Adversary 228 Coetzee, J. M. – Foe 7 Cold War 215 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 5 Columbine High School Massacre 143–157 comic (see also graphic novel) 159–172, 200–203 Conan Doyle, Arthur 214, 220 counterpoint 271 crime fiction 211–212, 217–218, 222, 225 (see also detective novel) D’Aguiar, Fred – Continental Shelf 143, 152–157 – “Elegies” 143, 152–157 Davey, Frank 200 decolonial theory 103 desire 83, 85, 87–93, 99–101, 103, 108, 110, 112, 117–119, 121, 174, 178, 195, 198–199, 203, 207, 217, 237, 240, 243, 256, 267 detective fiction 211–215, 225 (see also crime fiction, detective novel) Diederichsen, Diedrich 174–177 (see also pop music)

278

Index

disability/disabilities – disabled bodies 69–73 – mental disabilities 67, 76–77 – race as disability 69–80 disnarration 138 dreams/dreaming 133, 136, 236–238, 240 DRM paradigm (Deese-Roediger-McDermott) 143, 147–148 Duda, Andrzej 227 Dürer, Albrecht 256, 258 ecocriticism 231–233, 237, 249 Egan, Jennifer – A Visit from the Goon Squad 173–192 elegy 143–157 Eliot, T. S. 127, 253, 258–259, 269–271 – The Waste Land 127 ellipsis 18–21 emancipation 68, 213 emasculation 69 epistemic feeling 8, 33, 36, 41, 47–48 equality 68 expectation(s) 3–5, 7, 31, 33, 44–45, 47, 67, 69, 72, 74, 104, 111, 143, 145, 173, 178, 198, 203, 205 Faulkner, William 126, 223 – Sanctuary 223 feminine/feminism 71, 73, 81, 85–87, 96, 98–100 financial trope 51, 57, 61, 63 Freud, Anna 125–126 Freud, Sigmund 121, 125, 132, 180 (see also psychoanalysis) – Nachträglichkeit 180 Gaines, William (Bill) M. 161, 168 gap 3–6, 18–22, 60, 88, 101, 164, 167, 174, 177, 189, 197–200, 205–207 gender 68, 76, 81, 83–89, 98–99, 104–105, 215 generational divisions 129, 131, 133 girl, girls – girls’ aesthetics 81–100 – girls’ magazines 83, 85–86 – girl power 88

– girls’ schools 83–85 Gomringer, Eugen – “Silencio” 60 Goodis, David 223 Goodman, Paul 215 ‘good wives, wise mothers’ (ryōsai kenbo) 84 Gothic-Lolita girls 86–87 Gotlieb, Phyllis 196 Greenberg, Clement 215 Ground Zero 183, 189–190 (see also 9/11 novel) gun culture 143–157 Gunn, James – Deadlier than the Male 226 Hammett, Dashiell 212, 219, 221–223 – Red Harvest 212 Harper, Frances E. W. – Iola Leroy 67–80 Harper’s 181, 217–218 Hartmann von Aue – Iwein 110–111 Haydn, Franz Joseph 36, 254, 259–261, 263 Hayles, N. Katherine 248–249 Hemingway, Ernest 101–103, 222 hero(es) 9, 69, 71, 73–75, 104–105, 110–111, 114, 118, 200, 215, 226 Heywood, Eliza 16 Hill, Geoffrey – “September Song” 7 Himes, Chester 223 Hiroshima 127 homosexuality 85, 89 (see also queerness) Hornung, E. W. 220 hourglass theory 56, 59 Howe, Irving 215 Husserl, Edmund 193–199 Huyssen, Andreas 215–216, 222–223, 226 – After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism 215 hybrid(ity) 106, 114, 246, 249–250 identity 8–9, 68–69, 77, 106, 122, 128–129, 139, 172, 175

Index

imagination 3, 5–7, 20, 60, 85, 98–99, 101, 105, 110–111, 113, 117–118, 124, 135–136, 145, 149, 154, 205, 207, 212, 237–238, 240, 245, 248–249, 253, 256–257, 264 Inasa, Japan 123, 128, 131 Ingels, Graham 162, 164–168 Ioganson, Boris 215 Iser, Wolfgang 4 Ishiguro, Kazuo – An Artist of the Floating World 122, 125 – Klara and the Sun 122 – The Buried Giant 122 – The Remains of the Day 122, 125, 137 – The Unconsoled 122 – When We Were Orphans 125 Jan Hus Foundation 227 Japan 81–98, 123–124, 126–133, 139–140 Jean d’Arras – Le Roman de Mélusine 114 Joyce, James 141, 184 kairotic time (kairos) 177, 179 Kant, Immanuel 6, 195, 198–199, 234–235 Kearney, Richard 195–196 Kidgell, John 16 Konrad von Würzburg – Partonopier und Meliur 101–110, 115 Korean War 123 Krigstein, Bernie 159–161, 168–172 Labour Party 228 landscape 14, 49, 51, 232–238, 241, 243, 251–252 Linnaeus, Carl 203 Locke, John 15 Macdonald, Dwight 215 MacNeice, Louis 146 Madame Butterfly 124, 134 male gaze 101, 103, 120 Mallarmé, Stéphane 196, 213 Malone, Edmond 51–52 manga 81–83, 86–92, 96, 99 Mann, Thomas

279

– Doctor Faustus 253–261, 263–271 Manning, (Cardinal) John 25–26, 28–29 marital roles 132 Marsh, Ngaio 216 matricide 89–94 McBain, Ed 223 McCaffery, Steve 194, 205 McCoy, Horace 223 McCullers, Carson 253, 269–270 McLuhan, Marshall 200 mechanization and industry 231, 234–235, 240, 244, 246–248, 253 medieval 9, 58, 102, 104–105, 110, 117, 119 (see also Middle Ages) metaphor 42, 57–58, 60, 69, 96, 101, 115, 118, 145, 169, 182, 237 Middle Ages 108, 257 (see also medieval) Middle High German 102 (see also medieval, Middle Ages) Miwa, Yanagi – Granddaughters 82, 94–98 – Windswept Women: The Old Girls’ Troupe 96 modernity 186, 188, 199, 215, 217, 231–232, 236, 238, 240, 242–243, 245, 247, 251 monsters/monstrosity 113, 242–243 Moore, Marianne 150 Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona 236, 246 Morton, Timothy 236, 245, 246, 249, 251 Moto, Hagio – The Heart of Thomas 82, 88–94 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 259–261, 263 Mumford, Lewis 215 Nabokov, Vladimir 224, 253, 270–271 Nagasaki 87, 121–139 Naturalism 213, 221 New Left 216 New Romanticism 233 New Yorker 181, 211 news media 143–157 nineteenth century 68, 70, 83, 185, 217, 231, 237, 244, 259, 264 novel – 9/11 novel 189–191 (see also Ground Zero)

280

Index

– detective novel 221–228 (see also crime fiction, detective fiction) – graphic novel 81, 160, 208 (see also comic) – mystery novel 212, 214, 217, 219–221, 223, 227 object of desire 103 Old French 104, 107 operational aesthetic 162, 164 Orbán, Viktor 227 order 154, 163, 182, 192, 205, 218, 225, 227, 232, 240, 242–243, 248–249, 256 Orient 118–119 (see also Said, Edward) Orwell, George 211, 218–223 Passos, John Dos 213, 215 peripheries 231–232, 244 Poe, Edgar Allan 213 pop – pop art 168 – pop music 10, 173–178, 181, 191 (see also Diederichsen, Diedrich) Pope, Alexander 15 ‘preachy’ 168 printer theory 54, 56–57, 62, 65 processing 41, 47, 156 Proust, Marcel 183–184 psychoanalysis 89, 178–183 (see also Freud, Sigmund) psychology 143, 147 pulp fiction 221 punctum 175–176, 178–181, 186, 191 punk 173–174, 176–187, 191 queer ecology 236–237, 245, 249 queerness 72 Quietus 49, 51, 56, 58, 60–61, 63 Rankine, Claudia – Citizen 143, 153–154, 156 race 8, 67–70, 72, 74, 76–80, 153, 159–172 (see also whiteness) – mixed race 68, 70, 77 – race as disability 69 – racial identification 68

– racial uplift 70, 77 rape 78, 89, 91 registral silence 36, 40 relevance theory 8, 33, 41–42, 44 ‘render’ 49–50, 56–58, 63–64 repression 9, 121–138 Ricœur, Paul 124 Rimbaud, Arthur – Illuminations 231–232, 241–243 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 224 Rockwell, Norman 215 Romantics/Romanticism 190, 231, 245, 251–252 ruin 233–234 Ruskin, John 234–235 Said, Edward 271 (see also Orient) same-sex romance 87 (see also homosexuality, queerness) Sapir, Edward 198–200, 205–206, 208 Sartre, Jean-Paul 211, 218, 222–223 Saussure, Ferdinand 4 Sayers, Dorothy 216, 218, 228 (see also crime fiction, detective novel) Schönberg, Arnold 259, 261, 264–265, 268 Scott, Ridley 201 Scruton, Roger 226–227 Seitō (Bluestocking) 85 sensibility 22, 190, 208, 221 Serafini, Luigi – The Codex Seriphianus 193–209 serialization 160, 162 Série Noire, La 222, 224 sermon 13–14, 23–29, 31 sexual intimacy 132 Shakespeare, William 6, 152 – Sonnet 126, 49–65 ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ culture 126 silence theory 56, 59 slave/slavery (enslaved) 68–72, 75–76, 78, 126, 153, 241 social constructs 67, 72, 77, 80 sonnet sequence 49, 52, 55, 61 Soros, George 227 source-based semantics 8, 33, 43–44, 46–47

Index

space of omission 110 speaker-poet 231, 238–242, 246–248, 250–252 Spiegelman, Art 159–160, 167, 169, 172 – Maus 160, 172 Steely Dan – The Royal Scam 33–48 Sterne, Laurence – A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 7, 13–14, 22–24, 26, 29 – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 7, 13–22, 26 Stoics 29 Stout, Rex 217 Stravinsky, Igor 261 string quartet 253–255, 258–271 subjectivity 117–118, 169–172 sublime 7, 234–235, 240, 245, 247 Swift, Jonathan 15–16, 27 Takarazuka Revue (Takarazuka kagekidan) 85, 87 Tan, Shaun – The Arrival 208 thirteenth century 108 Thomas Aquinas 25, 29 Thompson, James 97–98, 223 thrill 40, 178–179 thriller 217, 219–221, 225 (see also crime novel) Thüringen von Ringoltingen 114 ‘Tragic Mulatto/a’ 70, 77 travel account (writing) 3 two-dimensional(ity) 82, 96, 100, 187 typography 13–14, 20–21, 64 unreliable narration 121, 135 unveiling 101, 103, 109, 118, 120

281

urban 231–232, 234, 237–242, 244–245, 252 Vacchelli, Carlotta 207–208 Van Vogt, A. E. 201 Venuti, Lawrence 4 Villeneuve, Denis – Arrival 201–203, 205, 208 Virginia Tech shootings 143–157 Vulgate 13 Waldenfels, Bernhard 193–196, 203, 209 Wallace, David Foster 181 Welles, Orson – Touch of Evil 224 whiteness 67, 69–70, 72, 75–76, 78–79 (see also race) – compulsory whiteness 67, 73–75 Whitman, Walt 222 William of Rubruck 3 Williams, William Carlos 213 Wilson, Edmund 211–227 – Axel’s Castle 213 Wise, Robert – Born to Kill 226 Wolf, Gary K. 227 women’s liberation movement 87 Woolf, Virginia 253, 270 Wordsworth, William 148–149 Yeats, William Butler 6, 213 Yeğenoğlu, Meyda 101, 103, 118–119 Yorick 13, 22–24, 26, 29–31 (see also Sterne, Laurence) Zemeckis, Robert – Who Framed Roger Rabbit? 227