The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema 9780748684908

Citation preview

the speech-gesture complex

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama and Performance Series Editor: Olga Taxidou Editorial Board: Penny Farfan (University of Calgary); Robert Leach (formerly of Edinburgh and Birmingham Universities); Ben Levitas (Goldsmiths, University of London); John London (Goldsmiths, University of London); Laura Marcus (University of Oxford); Marjorie Perloff (University of Stanford); Kirsten Shepherd-Barr (University of Oxford); Alexandra Smith (University of Edinburgh)

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama and Performance addresses the somewhat neglected areas of drama and performance within Modernist Studies, and is in many ways conceived of in response to a number of intellectual and institutional shifts that have taken place over the past 10 to 15 years. On the one hand, Modernist Studies has moved considerably from the strictly literary approaches, to encompass engagements with the everyday, the body, the political, while also extending its geopolitical reach. On the other hand, Performance Studies itself could be seen as acquiring a distinct epistemology and methodology within Modernism. Indeed, the autonomy of Performance as a distinct aesthetic trope is sometimes located at the exciting intersections between genres and media; intersections that this series sets out to explore within the more general modernist concerns about the relationships between textuality, visuality and embodiment. This series locates the theoretical, methodological and pedagogical contours of Performance Studies within the formal, aesthetic and political concerns of Modernism. It claims that the ‘linguistic turn’ within Modernism is always shadowed and accompanied by an equally formative ‘performance / performative turn’. It aims to highlight the significance of performance for the general study of modernism by bringing together two fields of scholarly research which have traditionally remained quite distinct – performance / theatre studies and Modernism. In turn this emphasis will inflect and help to re-conceptualise our understanding of both performance studies and modernist studies. And in doing so, the series will initiate new conversations between scholars, theatre and performance artists and students.

THE SPEECH-GESTURE COMPLEX Modernism, Theatre, Cinema

Anthony Paraskeva

EDINBURGH University Press

© Anthony Paraskeva, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Sabon and Gill Sans by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 8489 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 8490 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 8491 5 (epub) The right of Anthony Paraskeva to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

contents

Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1  Kafka’s Amerika: The Aesthetics and Politics of Incompletion 1   Unstable Categories: Naturalist and Modernist Performance Style 14   Performative Absence and Mechanical Reproduction 18   Theatre, Cinema and the Universal Language of Gesture 26 1 James Joyce 38   ‘our sad want of signs’: Imperceptible Gestures in Ibsen and Joyce 38  Paralysis and Spectatorship: Henry James, Eleanora Duse, Yeats  and Dubliners43   Slips of the Hand in Exiles 55  ‘In the beginning was the gest’: ‘Circe’, Early Cinema and the ‘Art   of Gestures’ 64 2 Wyndham Lewis 88   The Clown and the Über-Marionette in Enemy of the Stars 88   The Childermass: Lewis vs Chaplin in the Afterlife 100  The Politics of Gesture: The Bailiff, Hitler and the Society of the  Spectacle 110 3 The Transition to Sound   Nabokov, Lewis and Garbo   Late Modernism and the Resistance to Sound

132 132 148

4 Samuel Beckett 162   Hand-writing in Nacht und Träume 162   The Politics of Depersonalisation in Catastrophe 167 Bibliography 172 Index 192

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Jesus College, Cambridge, and to the University of Dundee for their support. I would like to thank the following for guidance, criticism, advice and inspiration: Ian Patterson, Olga Taxidou, Scott Klein, Tom Jones, Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady, Laura McMahon, Morris Beja, Paul Edwards, Jeremy Hardingham, Chris Goode, Jonny Liron, Mischa Twitchin, Jim Stewart, Mark Blanco, Sean Bonney, Jeremy Prynne and Stephen Rodefer. Drew Milne offered challenging criticism and advice as my PhD supervisor. David Trotter read full drafts of my chapters on Joyce and Lewis, and my introduction on modernism and cinema in general, on his arrival in Cambridge in 2003. I am grateful to Jackie Jones, Rebecca Mackenzie, James Dale and all at Edinburgh University Press for their generous assistance and commitment to the project. I would also like to thank the BFI Archive, the Beckett International Foundation at Reading, and colleagues at Dundee, in particular, Chris Murray, Keith Williams, Matthew Jarron and Brian Hoyle, for assistance, information and support. The Carnegie Trust of the Universities of Scotland generously provided a research grant that helped in the final stages of the book. Earlier versions of chapters on Joyce, Lewis and cinema have appeared in Forum for Modern Language Studies, 43:2 (July, 2007), Bloomsday 100: The 19th International James Joyce Symposium CD-ROM (Hyperfecto/James Joyce Centre, 2005), and Bloomsday 100: Re-Readings of Ulysses (Florida University Press, 2009). The publishers are gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are due to The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust for granting permission to quote from published works by Lewis. I would like to thank my parents for their immense forbearance and support. My greatest debt is to Adam Piette, whose support and example encouraged me to keep going.

vi

INTRODUCTION

Kafka’s Amerika: The Aesthetics and Politics of Incompletion The following study of the relations between language and gesture, and the representation of gesture in writing and performance, begins with the premise that spoken utterance occurs within a non-verbal context of visible bodily signals, which often serve to complicate the utterance either by reinforcing the speech-act or displaying a conflicting intention. In Kafka’s Amerika, when Uncle Jacob explains to the ship’s crew why Karl Rossmann’s parents turned him out, what he says is complicated by the gesture he performs: ‘For he was’, Uncle Jacob went on, rocking himself a little on the bamboo cane which was braced in front of him, a gesture that actually succeeded in deprecating any unnecessary solemnity which otherwise must have characterised his statement, ‘for he was seduced by a maidservant [. . .] It is far from my wishes to offend my nephew by using the word “seduced”, but it is difficult to find another and equally suitable word.’1 The lightness of tone in Jacob’s gesture with the cane undermines the ‘unnecessary solemnity’ which is otherwise unavoidable in what he is socially permitted to express in speech. The bending cane suggests Karl’s bending will before the maid’s seduction; it draws attention to the cane’s phallic aspect; and it reiterates the element of punishment, the proverbial caning, which greeted Karl’s lapse. The gesture is a gentle comic flourish, arguing for sympathy 1

the speech-gesture complex

with Karl’s youthful indiscretion by emphasising an essentially unserious tone through which the story is then related and judgement passed. Jacob’s speech-act is determined by a gestural framework which complicates the illocutionary force of the utterance. Illocutionary force, as put forward by J. L. Austin and developed by John Searle, describes the intentional status of an utterance in ordinary language use; an illocutionary act, or the performance of an intention which seeks to exert a certain force or influence in a discursive situation, might include, for instance, imperatives, promises or warnings. However, the deduction of a speaker’s intentions can be hidden or complicated by a gesture, resulting in infelicities or cross-purposes. Linguistic exchanges are grounded in the occasion of their utterance, but this occasion is not only a linguistic condition, of the kind put forward by Austin and Searle: non-verbal contexts, gestures (however slight), the overall kinesic continuum in which speech occurs, determine and can serve to complicate, even contradict a speech-act. Austin mentions semiotic gestures – ‘we can for example warn or order or appoint or give or protest or apologise by non-verbal means and these are illocutionary acts’ – although his focus on ordinary language use overlooks potential tensions between utterance and kinesic signal: gestures are only ever regarded as ‘accompaniments of the utterance’.2 If the gesture does not support the speech which it accompanies, it becomes difficult to distinguish between, for instance, degrees of sincerity or irony. After Jacob has related the story, Karl turns round ‘to read from the gentlemen’s faces the impression the story had made’ (p. 34). Austin calls the listener’s recognition of the speaker’s intentions the ‘securing of uptake’,3 though Karl observes that ‘none of them laughed, all were listening patiently and seriously’, except the stoker, ‘who now smiled at Karl, though very faintly’ (p. 34). Laughter is suppressed as an uptake here because the explicit seriousness of the spoken utterance demands an equivalent response. The subtle Chaplinesque flourish with the cane is a gestural ‘implicature’, a term coined by Paul Grice to describe a tacit agreement between speaker and hearer which allows for ruptures in linguistic convention, in order to imply an alternative meaning from the one explicitly stated; although Grice, like Austin and Searle, does not extend its application beyond exclusively verbalised or spoken exchange.4 Jacob’s gesture asks the audience to make an inference at odds with the tone of the verbal utterance. Decorum prevents an explicit statement of the innuendo, though it is implied by an illocutionary context which is not exclusively speech-based. The impression of withheld laughter contributes to the overall sense of continued cooperation in the illocutionary exchange. Austin, Searle and Grice are primarily concerned with ordinary language use, where gestures do conventionally support the intentional status of a spoken utterance, each potentially reinforcing the meaning of the other. These gestures must be seen to be understood, and seen together with speech. But 2

introduction

the visuality which gesture requires can never be adequately or unequivocally represented in literature. Writing cannot notate or represent without equivocation the exact visible form of a gesture. This translation from the visible to the verbal leaves gestures prone to multi-angled perspectives, and amplifies the potential for a gesture to complicate the illocutionary force of an utterance. In Amerika, Kafka frequently qualifies a main gestural clause in a sentence with a subordinate clause which serves to unclarify the overall speech-act: ‘No’, shouted Karl, stamping his foot, ‘that isn’t true!’ Delmarche surveyed him with his lips pursed in mockery, as if there were many things he could divulge. (p. 196) ‘Don’t you worry’ said Robinson, shutting his eyes and shaking his head, as if shaking off all Karl’s possible worries. (p. 222) Kafka’s translator, Edwin Muir elides the difference between the subjunctive, ‘als könne’, in the first example, and the clause of purpose, ‘um . . . abzuwehren’,5 in the second, although the effect is similar in both: the subordinate clauses ambiguate where they might otherwise be expected to clarify. In the first instance, the pursed lips iconically exhibit a cessation or sealing off, though as a metaphoric gesture, they suggest the reverse, an excess of speech, ‘as if there were many things he could divulge’. In the second example, Robinson ‘shaking off all Karl’s possible worries’ occurs as an iconic gesture: Karl’s worries are accumulated particles of waste to be shaken off; although emblematically, shaking one’s head signifies negation or discouragement, and in this sense is at odds with Robinson telling Karl ‘not to worry’. Writing cannot conventionally indicate the co-occurrence of speech and gesture, it can only present them sequentially, in separate clauses, and this limitation allows for a split in the mutual co-expressiveness of speech and gesture. The subordinate clauses make vague the communicative exchange as an intentional act, preventing the hermeneutic clarity which can distinguish unequivocally between what was intended by the gesture, and what it was taken to mean by Karl; between the narrator’s and Karl’s perspective; and between the gesture as an overseen visual occurrence and the gesture as viewed through Karl’s eyes. It is hard to tell to whom the act of interpretation belongs; the gesture’s denotation is caught between the intentional conditions of the speech-act, and what Karl sees, and between the sayable element and the visible, performative element. The diegetic ambiguities Kafka’s gestures invoke in the eyes of their interlocutors frequently correlate with the technical problem for the reader in precisely determining the form and intentions of a reported gesture. Any fictional or written speech-act happens outside the reader’s perceptual fields, and the overall situation is constructed implicitly, often through inferring deictic features which 3

the speech-gesture complex

are not always clarified. Walter Benjamin’s description of the parabolic quality in Kafka’s stories, that ‘one has to find one’s way in them circumspectly, cautiously and warily’,6 is also the lead character Karl Rossmann’s challenge in determining what a gesture denotes, even though the gesture as given often refuses a single explanation, as for instance: ‘Karl handed the candle to the servant, who merely nodded to him, though it was impossible to say whether the nod was deliberate or whether it was caused by his stroking his beard with his hand’ (p. 78). The opacity of the servant’s intention in his gesture, aside from its diegetic observation, foregrounds the essential visuality of the utterance, but the candle provides insufficient illumination, so Karl cannot accurately register the movement. The obscurity of the gesture, as observed by Karl, corresponds with its imperceptibility before the eyes of the reader, who must rely on the narrator’s textual description. It is partially opaque both to Karl and to the reader. This twofold uncertainty allows the gesture to unfold into multiple connotations. Karl’s and the narrator’s interpretive response is ‘impossible to say’, a symptom of the inherent i­ndeterminacy in any textual representation of an iconographic expressive utterance. The effect of mismatch, where gesture undermines the assertions and ­certainties of speech, is generated by foregrounding the opacity of the performative situation in which the scene is enacted. What emerges from the reading of these gestures in Kafka is a tension between the textual and the performative. In one view, the body functions semiotically as a text to be read. Karl finds his uncle and Mr Pollunder ‘reclining somewhat monosyllabically [einsilbig] in two easy chairs’ (p. 54); at the Nature Theatre: ‘the head of the bureau turned with open mouth upon his clerk, but the clerk made a definite gesture with his hand, said: “Engaged”, and at once entered the decision in his book’ (p. 256). It is not clear whether the clerk uttered the word ‘engaged’ or whether he ‘said’ as much with his hand. The recurrent failure to invoke visuality for the purpose of clarifying a speech-act is an aspect, in Kafka and in the other modernist writers and artists I consider, of their extended reflection on the concomitant failure of language to describe the undocumentable immediacy and presence of the body. Writing cannot represent the visual form of gesture, and gesture cannot use the categories of discursive language to signify and convey meaning. Kafka thematises a non-symbolic performative fluidity, in excess of the speech-act in its written form, unfixing the text’s propensity to reduce gestures to codified signs and the body to the status of a readable document. The foregrounding of this contradiction between the sayable, textual element and the visible, performative element is what I call the speech-gesture complex. It was Walter Benjamin who first suggested the fundamental significance of non-symbolic gestures in Kafka: ‘Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for the author from the outset.’ 7 My book develops, modifies and extends Benjamin’s gestural 4

introduction

aesthetic, as derived from his readings of Kafka and Brecht, and is framed by a sense that the performative dimension of gestures always potentially overreaches the text’s capacity to document them. By delineating the category of the speech-gesture complex, I extend Benjamin’s aesthetic and the category of the performative gesture into a wider study of modernism, a field in which the category of the performative gesture has been relatively neglected. This is surprising given the explicit and striking recurrence and naming of gesture in literature, theatre and cinema, from Stephen Dedalus’s view that gesture ‘would be a universal language’,8 quoted by Eisenstein in the epigraph to his essay, ‘A Course in Treatment’,9 to Brecht’s gestus, and Beckett’s ‘speech-gesture complexes’,10 a phrase he uses in a letter to Alan Schneider during a production of Happy Days in 1961 to describe the dual function of the resources of body and speech. By attending to the tensions between text and gesture, and exploring the field of indeterminacy generated through this intermedial turbulence, I trace the trajectory of a complex tradition, from Ibsen to late Beckett, in which performative gesture plays a profoundly constitutive role. The critical and theoretical paradigms which have determined the shape of literary modernism, from New Criticism to poststructuralism, have overwhelmingly tended to concentrate on the function of text, and the body as text, and have consequently overlooked gesture and the more general category of performance. As James Harding puts it, ‘textuality [. . .] has become perhaps the most pervasive of the analytical paradigms’.11 Derrida’s account of the deconstructive turn – ‘the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a centre or origin, everything became discourse’12 – is an exemplary instance of the all-pervasive dominance of discursive paradigms. Literary critics and theorists predominantly regard drama from Ibsen to Beckett as textual artefacts within an exclusively literary context, and by extension neglect the fundamental implications of nondiscursive performative situations. As Olga Taxidou observes in her recent study, Modernism and Performance, ‘the concept of performance remained [. . .] stubbornly ignored in canonical readings of literary Modernism’.13 Elin Diamond similarly observes that modernist drama is ‘nearly absent from current scholarship investigating the times, spaces and practices of Western modernity and modernism’ and has been ‘excluded from the received canons of modernism’.14 The difficulty in verbally describing a highly nuanced kinaesthetic, non-­ discursive enactment is an aspect of the continued dominance of the textual paradigm, inherited from literary criticism, in theatre semiotics and film studies. Patrice Pavis, for instance, understands the theatre actor’s performance as a sign within a semiotic system, a series of codes to be read within a performance text.15 In film studies, the actor is ordinarily regarded as an element of the mise en scène, part of a structure of readable signs: as Peter Kramer notes, aside from 5

the speech-gesture complex

key works by James Naremore and Carole Zucker,16 performance studies in film is a ‘still limited area of scholarship’.17 The inbuilt resistance of performance to textuality, its lack of a conventional lexicon, means that accounts of performance are always necessarily incomplete; yet the prevailing dominance of the textual paradigm tends to obscure and erase the fluid, uncategorisable presence of the actor, whose gestures cannot simply be reduced to a form of writing. By emphasising the effect of the presence of the actor, and the attendant proliferation of gestures which elude semiotic categories, my study re-examines the network of assumptions which has relegated gesture to an ancillary status in literary modernism. By seeking to apply the category of performance style – which James Naremore defines as ‘what the performer does in addition to the actions/functions she or he performs in the plot and the lines she or he is given to say’18 – to texts which are not always in themselves oriented towards visible performative incarnation, I demonstrate how this incompletion, this dialectic of torn halves between the visible and the sayable, productively generates an openness and fluidity which, in my account, becomes the key signature of the speech-gesture complex. The resistance of the speech-gesture complex to textuality requires a paradigm which goes beyond the long-established habits of critics to reduce the body to text. My own account is partly situated within the milieu of a recent revival of Benjamin’s gestural aesthetic in philosophy (Giorgio Agamben), theatre studies (Martin Puchner) and cultural theory (Andrew Hewitt) which foregrounds the conceptual problems in the relation between non-symbolic gestures and symbolic, discursive language. Giorgio Agamben has recently sought to reclaim the Benjaminian concept of gesture as potentially open and undecipherable, beginning his brief but suggestive remarks on gesture by citing Benjamin’s view of Kafka’s writing, that it ‘constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning’.19 For Agamben, gesture ‘is not an absolutely nonlinguistic element but, rather, something closely tied to language’; gesture and language are interlaced with each other, but gesture is rather a discrepancy within language and operates beyond the conventions of linguistic expression. It is neither a decipherable sign or hieroglyph nor elemental uncodified bodily presence; it speaks by unbinding the relation between speech and expression: ‘gesture is not so much a prelinguistic content as, so to speak, the other side of language, the muteness inherent in humankind’s very capacity for language, its speechless dwelling in language’; gesture is ‘always the gesture of being at a loss in language’.20 As Agamben observes, there is a dialectic at work between gesture and language: they are in one aspect divided but conjoined, but there is an incommensurability between the two forms of expression which cannot be reduced to a straightforward unity of purely linguistic expression. This discrepancy between speech and gesture, where gesture often stands in for a failed speech-act, or speech registers a failed gesture is an aspect, in my account, of 6

introduction

the speech-gesture complex. The writers I investigate were acutely aware that to document a gesture is also to register the failure of language to document gesture. A body cannot be read, a gesture cannot be written, without distorting its signifying force. For Agamben, the problematic status of gesture’s discrepancy in its relation to language is historical. Citing the physiological studies of Gilles de la Tourette in the 1880s, and his mass observation studies of widespread involuntary muscle movements amongst the bourgeoisie, Agamben argues that ‘by the end of the nineteenth century, the Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures’. The twentieth century is immediately preceded by ‘a generalized catastrophe of the sphere of gestures’,21 and this crisis of gesture, by his reckoning, paradoxically serves to mark a gestural turn in the twentieth century: an epoch that has lost its gestures is, by the same token, obsessed by them. And when the age became aware of its loss (too late!) it began its hasty attempt to recuperate its lost gestures in extremis. Isadora Duncan and Diaghilev’s ballets, Proust’s novel, Rilke and Pascoli’s great Jugendstil poetry, and, finally, in the most exemplary fashion, silent film—all these trace the magic circle in which humanity tried to evoke for the last time what it was soon to lose irretrievably.22 Agamben’s claim about the ‘lost gestures’ of the bourgeoisie is unsupported by evidence aside from the shallow focus on the historical significance of Tourette’s studies, though my own account concurs with the general aspect of his claim, that the end of the nineteenth century does indeed initiate a historical paradigm shift in the representation and enactment of gesture across literature, performance and film. In my argument, the gestures of the Western bourgeoisie were not lost, but rather regained a new prominence in the era of cinema – its first public projections coinciding with Tourette’s diagnosis – and undergo both catastrophe and dialectical insurgence during modernist literature and theatre’s critical reaction to cinematic performance. The constant renewal and development of gesture’s relation to speech is conceived within a complex network of intermedial exchange, from cinema’s emergence in the early modernist period to Beckett’s late drama. This is a view which is not shared by literary and cultural history, which has emphasised, on the whole, interiority and speech-based discourse. It is a view which falls short of modernism’s rethinking of the novel in terms of performativity and embodied experience. For an alternative account to the novel as primarily inward-looking, one must turn to theatrical and performance theory. Martin Puchner’s illuminating study of the anti-theatrical tendency in modernism, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama, has sought to recover the category of theatre, previously neglected within literary studies, to 7

the speech-gesture complex

demonstrate modernism’s supposed resistance to theatricality. Puchner surveys theories of antitheatricality, from Nietzsche to Michael Fried, to show how literature’s resistance to theatrical mimesis – to the liveness and contingency of the theatrical event, and in particular, the idiosyncratic presence of the actor – generates a new form, the modernist closet drama, which ‘seeks to interrupt and break apart any possibility for either an actual or an imaginary stage’. My study of the speech-gesture complex in modernism complements and elaborates Puchner’s Benjaminian view that the category of gesture ‘leads directly to the contentious relation between text and theatre’, a relation overlooked both by performance theorists averse to text, and by literary critics with little interest in performance. Where Puchner is primarily concerned to demonstrate how the modernist closet drama serves to ‘de-theatricalize the act of reading drama’23 by enfolding the spatial and mimetic aspects of the stage into textual diegesis, my performative close readings of the speech-gesture complex show how the familiar view of modernist autonomy and immanence is undermined by a performative excess which cannot be enfolded into the diegesis, a failure which modernist writers thematise, and which opens out possibilities unavailable either to text or stage. Puchner’s argument originates, like my own, in Benjamin’s idea of theatre as not limited to the stage, but also spilling over into the novel. As Benjamin notes, Kafka ‘tried to derive such a meaning’ from his ‘code of gestures’ by placing them in ‘ever-changing contexts and experimental groupings. The theatre is the logical place for such groupings.’24 In my argument, the constant thematisation of the imperceptibility and multiple significations of gesture within performative situations is an aspect of deep and complex thinking about the performance of actors in both theatre and cinema. Kafka’s heightened attention to gesture’s power to undermine not only speech but also the power of language to represent speech, is closely informed, as it is in the work of other modernist writers, by critical observation of particular actors. By closely focusing on the performative gestures of the actor, I explore a series of relations between writers and actors overlooked in previous studies of modernism, from Eleanora Duse and James Joyce, to Chaplin and Wyndham Lewis, Greta Garbo and both Lewis and Nabokov. During the composition of Amerika between 1911 and 1914, Kafka immersed himself in both live and recorded performance. As Evelyn Torton Beck has demonstrated, Kafka paid frequent visits to the Yiddish theatre while writing Amerika throughout 1911 and 1912,25 which he extensively recounts in his diaries and letters to Felice: ‘the entire Yiddish theatre is beautiful; last year I went to these performances about 20 times and to the German theatre perhaps not at all’.26 These wandering Yiddish actors showed Kafka a performance style in which ‘[the actor’s] gesture was his speech and after that his significant glaring was his expression’:27 the elevation of theatrical gesture 8

introduction

to a significance above speech significantly informs the writing of gestures in Amerika, which often read like a series of instructions for actors in an absent or perpetually deferred performance. For Kafka, this absorption in the embodied performance of particular actors powerfully asserts the importance of physical, nonverbal expression as much as refinements of consciousness. Kafka’s letters and diaries between 1911 and 1914 contain extensive descriptions of the performances he witnessed, with a particular focus on the gestures of actors. For instance, after seeing the Yiddish play Der Meshumed at the Café Savoy, he writes of the ‘long-drawn forward movement’ of an actress, ‘raising and lowering extended arms in a calm rhythm, bringing the palms close to the temples and taking care not to touch them’. Later he describes an actress ‘shrugging her shoulder and twisting her back as though she were being bitten by fleas’.28 These frequent and detailed accounts of the performative gestures of actors accumulate into a repertoire from which he draws in the writing of his fiction. Most of Kafka’s several letters to Felice on theatre contain evaluations of the performances given by actors. He fosters an intense friendship with one of the travelling Yiddish actors, Yitskhok Levi, of whom he thinks ‘incessantly’ and with whom he corresponded for years after Levi left Prague. He tells Felice in November 1912 that he ‘could talk to [her] endlessly’ about actors, but that his own extensive written account of them falls short of the meaning held by an actor’s ‘presence’: ‘the actors by their presence always convince me to my horror that most of what I’ve written about them until now is false’.29 This distinction between the actors’ visible ‘presence’ and his mediated, reflective account further testifies to his profound sense of the incapacity of language to adequately describe embodied performance. Written indications cannot represent the element of visuality, or embodied spectatorship, and yet they confer upon gestures the properties of language they would otherwise lack. Kafka’s characters observe gestures without the intuition of physique and space which speaker and listener both occupy, and this deprivation frequently intensifies the act of interpretation. Andrew Hewitt has set forth a useful critical paradigm based on performativity rather than textuality in his engaging recent study of twentieth-century dance, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance. In his analysis of twentieth-century dance, Hewitt identifies a productive tension between performative gestures and language; the open-endedness of performance militates against the textual document, and resists the process of interpretation which seeks to naturalise writing as the ‘hegemonic medium for the production of meaning’30 by imposing a predetermined structure of discourse upon fluid material and perceptual elements antithetical to textual containment. In this view, performance and language each challenge, modify and distort the other by their respective means of enactment and representation. My own study shares Hewitt’s dissatisfaction with the tendency in literary and cultural 9

the speech-gesture complex

studies to reduce the body to text, and by extension to regard gestures straightforwardly as a form of writing. His view that ‘the critical challenge is to marry text-based analysis to the analysis of performance’ by refusing to reduce performative phenomena to ‘the status of document’31 is useful for my considerations of modernist writing: the sense of the irreducibility of gestures to textual documents, in my account, fundamentally animates the concerns of modernist writers for whom gesture and language are neither reciprocal nor self-­ continuous, but which generate instead a turbulence and non-identity which opens potentials unavailable to either performance or writing in isolation. As non-verbal events, gestures lack the systematic fixity of speech, its easy transferability between spoken and written language. When the nonverbal immediacy of a gesture is described in writing, it is removed from its original kinaesthetic, non-discursive perceptual context. This allows gestures – ­including hand gestures, which are the most prominent and expressive, but also facial expressions and styles of physical movement or locomotion – as represented in writing, to take on connotations which the original, signified gesture might have clarified beyond equivocation. Textual absence and visible presence are interlaced with one another, each constantly referring to the other, each clarifying and obscuring the other. By unbinding the representative relations between text and performance, the speech-gesture complex allows both functions to revive and activate their powers of signification precisely by deferring to the other’s function. The text is not only what is sayable and the performance is not only what is visible. According to this model, speech and gesture remain partially indeterminate, divided, never fully defined or finished. For Benjamin, Kafka’s world is a ‘World Theatre’, and his characters always to an extent behave as though they were performing, or rather rehearsing for a performance which never arrives: each gesture is an event, a drama unto itself. The stage on which this drama takes place is the World Theatre which opens up toward heaven [. . .] Kafka tears open the sky behind every gesture, while the gesture remains the decisive thing.32 Karl Rossman struggles throughout Amerika to sharpen and refine his interpretation of gestures, until he reaches the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, ‘the biggest theatre in the world’, and ‘almost without limit’. Gestures in this respect are charged with the heightened significance of theatricality, they are ‘too powerful for our accustomed surroundings and break out into wider areas’.33 When Karl finally arrives at the Nature Theatre, what he most desires is instruction in how to perform certain gestures without dissimulation: his desire to learn gestures is also Kafka’s desire, through the observation of performing bodies, to learn to write gestures. What Karl and Kafka learn is that the gesture is never decisive, never completed. Karl rehearses for a performance 10

introduction

which is never presented in its finished form, while Kafka overtly declares the novel’s performative openness, its summoning of presence effects which resist enclosure and documentation, by leaving the account of the Nature Theatre’s performance in the final chapter unfinished. The silent reading of Kafka’s gestures invokes the language of stage ­directions, but it leaves their illocutions unfinished, and the perceptible gestures absent from view. Gestures in Amerika are circumscribed by a double operation ordinarily peculiar to performance scripts, which make simultaneous reference to textual and performative elements. Stage directions in performance scripts thematise the relation between text and body in their function as instructions for an actor, suggesting a performance style which in a novelistic pseudo-stage direction is always imperceptible. They serve to mediate between textual and performative fictions, and are intended both to be read and embodied in performance. A gesture in a performance script is an imperative which gives instruction to an actor to enact a style of movement; it is bound towards the stage, where the spoken utterance is inseparable from the movements of the actor’s body: as Keir Elam observes, a stage direction requires ‘the intervention of the actor’s body in the completion of its meanings’.34 Neither script nor icon, stage directions maintain a tension between semiotic readability and embodied materiality; a textual gesture points to an absent phenomenological space, and in the immediate presence of a performed gesture, refers back to an absent linguistic instruction. While a playscript remains insufficient and unfulfilled on the page, the force of Kafka’s gestures in Amerika – and in the work of the other writers under scrutiny in this book – resides in this insufficiency, an aspect of the writing’s performative openness, its gestural theatricality which resists final enclosure. The inhabitants of Amerika behave as though they were actors obeying the imperatives of a stage direction. At the same time, Karl strives to imagine gestural variants and inferences as a reader, as though he were unable to observe them. The dialectical absence, on the one hand, of visibility in speech, and on the other, of language in gesture, represents the torn half of a pre-lapsarian World Theatre. The German title of Kafka’s novel, Der Verschollene, translates as ‘The Man Who Disappeared’; the ideal World Theatre for the people of Amerika is a world disappeared from view. When Karl finds himself before the staff manager of the Nature Theatre, he hesitates about his engagement as an actor because he is too much himself (p. 260), unlike the speaker in Kafka’s short piece ‘A Report to an Academy’, who ‘imitated people because I was looking for a way out, and for no other reason’.35 Karl remarks in his interview with the theatre managers: ‘I don’t know whether I’m capable of being an actor. But I shall do my best and try to carry out all my instructions’ (p. 260). The emphasis on carrying out ‘instructions’ foregrounds the enactment of an imperative, as distinct from an expressive action. An actor’s body, as Keir Elam notes, ‘acquires its mimetic 11

the speech-gesture complex

and representational powers by becoming something other than itself’.36 Yet in the Nature Theatre, as Benjamin notes, ‘all that is expected is the ability of the applicants to play themselves’, and paradoxically ‘it is no longer within the realm of possibility that they could, if necessary, be what they claim to be’.37 The applicants for the Nature Theatre are rigidly entrapped by a slavish dependence on instructions which foreclose potentiality by demanding that they must be themselves and nothing else. The applicants are refused the openness and possibility of a thematised relation between actor and role, a hallmark of modernist theatre as exemplified by Brecht; they are entrapped in a model of theatricality which slavishly imitates textual directions. As Samuel Weber suggests, this limiting of potentiality through theatre in Amerika also has political implications: the Nature Theatre is ‘a placement agency for temporary workers’, and it is not clear whether they are paid for their labour. The exclusion of a thematised potentiality between text and performance acquires, in the final sections of the novel, a quasi-fascist rigidity: Weber notes of the setting of the theatre before the applicants are taken by train to Oklahoma, that the ‘stadiums, racetracks, and precipitous transports by train, leaving barely time to pack one’s luggage, have assumed a sinister significance that was hardly obvious in 1916’.38 In the methodology I propose, the thematised relation between the visible and the sayable short-circuits both pure performative openness and textual autonomy. As a category for elucidating the intermediality of writing and performance, the completion of the speech-gesture complex is always partially deferred either to its performative or textual form. It is a means rather than an end, occupying a mid-way zone of open potential resistant to final closure. This presupposition moves beyond the familiar view of modernist autonomy and immanence towards a performative paradigm which emphasises incompletion and a perpetually deferred endpoint, either of performance which never becomes text, or text never realised in performance. It is an aesthetic of incompletion which also has political implications, and in this respect my study expands and develops the relations between gesture and political potentiality envisaged in Agamben’s model. In his discussion on dance, Agamben remarks that ‘what is relayed to human beings in gestures is not the sphere of an end in itself but rather the sphere of a pure and endless mediality’. Gesture transcends both the category of a means in view of an end, and of an end which has dissolved its means; it remains ‘unsublated in any purposive action: an excess of potentiality’. In philosophical terms, gesture comes to stand for conceptual fluidity as against the fixed, immovable form: an idea is not ‘an immobile archetype as common interpretations would have it, but rather a constellation in which phenomena arrange themselves in a gesture’.39 The potential in a gesture is not exhausted either by purposive action or by reification in an artefact; gesture opens out into a zone of potentiality which carries with it an ethical 12

introduction

and political dimension. As Agamben puts it: ‘Politics is the sphere of pure means, that is, of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings.’40 Hewitt proposes a comparable model based on the idea of rehearsal: the medial character of dance makes visible the process of working out or rehearsing social possibilities, as distinct from the discursive model which views dance as ‘enclosed and reified in an artifact [. . .] itself the finished product of a process rather than a dynamically cohering social force’. By emphasising performative process rather than the finished aesthetic object, Hewitt strives to reverse the depoliticisation of a dominant strain in writing about dance either in terms of quasi-metaphysical immanence removed from the sociohistorical, or as reification within a discursive formulation. This resistance to categories of text and discourse also, in this view, threatens ‘an ideological move that sees all physical embodiment as the pre-scripted playing out of determinant social discourses’.41 An aesthetic of performance which cannot simply be described in discursive terms is also a politics which resists a totalised pre-scripted determination. The vital significance of process as distinct from artefact also animates my own study, which reads key works by Joyce, Lewis, Nabokov and Beckett not as the familiar autonomous, self-enclosed works of canonical modernism, but rather as rehearsals towards a never-to-be finished performance. By moving beyond the textual paradigm, my readings of the aesthetics and politics of modernism are framed by a performativity which foregrounds the rehearsal of possibilities ordinarily dissolved in textual critique. As Benjamin suggests, the double aspect of the visible and sayable, or readability and spectatorship, is a crucial aspect of the open potential and alternative social possibilities in Brechtian political theatre: ‘ “to make gestures quotable” is the actor’s most important achievement; he must be able to space his gestures as the compositor produces spaced type’.42 Brechtian gestures are quotable, they refer back to the past but are also potentially open to a future reality. As Samuel Weber puts it, ‘citability means recalling the past as the possibility of a future that would be different from the present’: in this respect, the Brechtian stage ‘is a place where potentialities are tried out, rather than realities enacted or performed’.43 Brecht defines the gestus, which includes both speech and gesture, as the ‘attitudes which people adopt towards one another, wherever they are socio-historically significant’ and the ‘mimetic and gestural expression of the social relationship prevailing between people of a given period’. A gestus is a composite representation of behaviour which defines a person from outside himself, indicating social status and the relation of the person to institutions in order to critique and potentially transform those institutions. The actor stands aside from his role in order to comment on what is happening to him, as though he were incorporating the consultation of the playscript during the performance,44 enabling the audience to engage in active critical readership, as distinct from mere passive spectating. The unresolved contradictions in the 13

the speech-gesture complex

speech-gesture complex again serve to mark rehearsal and openness rather than immanence and enclosure. The alienation of speech from gesture, and of text from performance, prompts the actor to observe and comment upon ‘his own movements’, a method which Brecht derived from gestural theatre, particularly the Chinese theatre and Meyerhold. Kafka’s Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, as Benjamin observes, also ‘harks back to the Chinese theatre, which is a gestic theatre [. . .] dissolving happenings into their gestic components’.45 Kafka’s pseudo-stage directions, informed by his meticulous attention to the movements of actors, his stylised, alienated version of de-contextualised melodrama, foreshadows the Brechtian gestus: as Benjamin remarks, Kafka ‘could understand things only in the form of a gestus’. Brecht himself remarks that Kafka ‘anticipated certain forms of this alienation’, and of ‘men being alienated from themselves’,46 although he does not explicitly relate Kafka’s idea of movement to his own distanciation or alienation effect. The performative openness between actor and role are the outcome of what Brecht calls the ‘alienation of the text’, or the performance of quotation, in which the actor shows, narrates or quotes his character. A vantage point is generated for the actor from which he may survey and critique the behaviour of his character, as distinct from the applicants to Kafka’s Nature Theatre, who are ‘excluded from the realm of possibility’ precisely by having to ‘play themselves’. Unstable Categories: Naturalist and Modernist Performance Style By investigating the problematics of gesture’s relation to speech, my study seeks to reconfigure modernism’s relation to performance. But the relentless aspect-shifts between the visible and the sayable gesture, each referring to the other in a process which perpetually defers completion, permits the category of the speech-gesture complex a fluidity which potentially extends to writing and performance not exclusively in the modernist tradition. The articulation of these tensions between text and performance, and between language and visibility, in Kafka’s novel and in anti-naturalist theatre, is a defining feature of the speech-gesture complex, though it is not exclusive to anti-naturalism. Brecht defines naturalism as ‘a complete fusion of character and role’,47 and speaks of naturalism’s tendency to concentrate on dialogue at the expense of gestures and movement.48 Although Brecht was compelled to dismiss Ibsenite naturalism to advance his project – ‘works by such people as Ibsen and Strindberg remain important historical documents, but they no longer move anybody. A modern spectator can’t learn anything from them’49 – I would argue, contrary to Brecht’s position, that the speech-gesture complex in Ibsen, particularly as refracted through early twentieth-century prose fiction, crucially serves to destabilise the categories of naturalism and modernism. Brecht’s critique of naturalism’s naïve mimeticism, and its conviction in the 14

introduction

power of language to represent reality is undermined by the inability of language, tacitly acknowledged in naturalist writing, to represent the visuality of a gesture. As I explore in Chapter 1, the resulting speech-acts in Ibsen, who reinvents the textual stage direction, and the readings of Ibsen’s gestures in the prose fiction and drama of Henry James and Joyce, and the performance style of Eleanora Duse, yield to an open-ended, never fully defined zone of potentiality. These are terms which unexpectedly apply also to naturalism as well as modernism, and suggest a way out of the still dominant familiar deadlock between the two categories. The theatricality and performative turn in early twentieth-century prose fiction, its summoning of the experience of reading a play, or witnessing a performance, developed in response to the novelistic plays of naturalism and their density of visual description.50 In theatre before Ibsen, the written text contained only spoken lines for actors to learn. Between 1850 and 1880, as Elin Diamond observes, the text ‘was always a patchwork; actors usually worked from “sides”, texts containing only their lines’.51 The American copyright bill in 1891 helped introduce the notion of the integrity of the playtext; the detailed study of the text then becomes a key feature of theatre’s turn towards naturalism, with its heightened readings of character history and motivation. By this point, at the height of Ibsen’s prominence, the text also included intricate stage directions accompanying, but often contradicting the dialogue. But the familiar notion that naturalist performance is ‘subordinated to the primacy of the text’52 is undermined if the text itself cannot adequately represent spatial relations and non-verbal expression. An overwhelming consensus since the late 1950s, and the advent of what Fredric Jameson calls the ‘ideology of modernism’, has defined realism or naturalism as straightforwardly mimetic, and therefore formally conservative, and modernism as linguistically autonomous, indeterminate and self-reflexive. Elin Diamond’s assessment of Brechtian theatre exemplifies this view: With Brechtian hindsight we know that realism, more than any other form of theater representation, mystifies the process of theatrical signification. Because it naturalizes the relation between character and actor, setting and world, realism operates in concert with ideology. And because it depends on, insists on a stability of reference, an objective world that is the source and guarantor of knowledge, realism surreptitiously reinforces (even if it argues with) the arrangements of that world.53 According to Diamond, realism’s naïve, naturalised relations between language and reality, actor and character, confirms the existing social, political and economic patterns of the world, and consequently reinforces the ideology of the ruling class, which in this light appears inevitable and unchangeable. Brechtian modernism, on the other hand, seeks to challenge the same ideology 15

the speech-gesture complex

through a politics of form which seeks to emphasise the ever shifting contingencies of setting and world, thus enabling the imagination of alternative social and political worlds. My argument in Chapter 1 challenges this essentialist view by exploring Joyce’s interest in a naturalist rather than modernist tradition of performance style, and how this specific cultural and historical engagement allowed him to articulate a politics of resistance to English colonialism and Irish nationalism, and what he regarded as a reactionary Irish Revivalism, as principally embodied in Yeats’s modernist theatre experiments. My argument builds on recent studies by Toril Moi and Olga Taxidou which have reconfigured the oppositional terms of naturalism and modernism in relation to performance. Moi demonstrates that there is ‘no fundamental opposition’ between the two categories, by exploring aspects of Ibsen which are commonly regarded as modernist, such as meta-theatricality and his attack on idealism: ‘Realism – the representation of reality in writing and art – is neither modernism’s opposite nor its historically necessary predecessor. If any one entity occupies that position, it is idealism.’54 I wish to extend this perspective by emphasising the crucial opacity and indeterminacy of Ibsen’s stage directions, and their effect on Joyce. I argue that gestures in Dubliners, which often resemble stage directions in naturalist drama, testify to his reading of playscripts, but also to his prolific theatre-going, during which he developed an infatuation with the slight movements of the Italian actress Eleanora Duse. His relation to performance culture in general has been neglected in Joyce scholarship, while his fascination with Duse has been comprehensively overlooked. I also uncover the politics of Joyce’s small-scale naturalist gestures, as partly derived from Ibsen, by amplifying the contrast with the histrionic, ritualised Yeatsian gesture. Yeats’s theatre belongs to the tradition of modernist experiment, with its tendency to abstraction, its Eastern-influenced styles of gesture, and its resistance to illusion and mimesis. Joyce’s resistance to Yeatsian Revivalism overturns the conventional distinctions between a politically progressive modernism and an ideologically conservative naturalism. By thematising the split process of reading and spectating, Joyce discovers in naturalism a means to define a divided colonial consciousness open to potentiality and caught between unresolvable contradictions. Olga Taxidou’s recent study of modernism and performance ‘treats ­naturalism [. . .] as an integral part of modernist theatre and not simply as the movement against which modernism and the avant-garde are reacting’.55 Taxidou argues that the aesthetics and politics of the Brechtian tradition of modernism, which includes figures such as Eisenstein, Artaud, Meyerhold, Gordon Craig and Yeats, and which sought to mechanise the body through abstraction and estrangement, ‘interlocks and overlaps’ with the ‘empathy and identification’ of naturalism. The high level of interpretation required by the density of textual information in Ibsen and Strindberg led to the rise in impor16

introduction

tance of the theatre director in both traditions. André Antoine and Aurélien Lugné-Poë, the first major directors of naturalism, both made their mark through productions of Ibsen: the contrasting styles of Antoine’s fourth wall approach and Lugné-Poë’s stylised, anti-naturalist aesthetic, which influenced Meyerhold – in Chapter 1, I discuss their versions of Fernand Crommelynck’s Le Cocu, which played alongside Joyce’s Exiles – suggest a widely divergent consensus on the performative possibilities of Ibsen’s playtexts. While LugnéPoë’s approach is developed by Meyerhold, Antoine’s psychological acting is taken up by Stanislavski. As Taxidou notes, ‘these two schools need not be read as antithetical’; there are, for instance, external, distancing elements in Stanislavski’s emphasis on the actor’s ability to comment on as well as inhabit his role. His experimental, abstract 1911 Moscow production of Hamlet, a collaboration with Edward Gordon Craig, further attests to the historical interconnectedness between the two schools. Taxidou’s exploration of the ‘radical potential of Naturalism’,56 its connection to the political and democratic movements of the time, particularly to an emergent feminism, places it in the tradition of radical, politicised art which supported and helped instigate real social change. The impact of Ibsen was far reaching, both on turn of the century feminism, on the suffragettes, and on representations of a newly articulate female consciousness, through key actors such as Ellen Terry, Elizabeth Robins and Eleanora Duse. In its time, naturalism’s reinvention of theatrical conventions, together with its passionate concern for social injustice and the need for social change, placed it firmly in the avant-garde. My argument extends this challenge to familiar arguments about naturalist conservatism by re-examining the supposed formally pre-modernist elements in playscripts, and their absorption into prose fiction. The conventional view of naturalist technique as interior, motivebased, character-driven mimesis, closely informed by psychoanalysis’s claims to seek out the root cause of behaviour is complicated, in my view, by the speech-gesture complex, which leaves those motives ultimately opaque and indeterminate. In this respect, my argument returns naturalism back to Zola’s original, anti-mimetic notion that ‘it would be absurd to suppose that one can transfer nature to the stage [. . .] We are forced into conventions, and must accept a more or less complete illusion of reality’,57 and to the idea of theatre as an ‘art form of signing, not of mimetic copying’.58 By revealing those signs in naturalism as often complex, unreadable and indeterminate, my argument demonstrates the falsity of a straightforward antithesis between the categories of naturalism and modernism. Joyce’s thinking about the contradictions of the naturalist gesture directly inspired the key figures of modernist literature, theatre and film. For Wyndham Lewis, Joycean naturalism, by negative counterforce, defines modernism’s antimimetic style. In Chapter 2, I reconfigure the rivalry in experimental daring 17

the speech-gesture complex

between Joyce and Lewis in terms of an agonistic struggle between the opposed but mutually imbricated performance styles of naturalism and modernism, as articulated in Lewis’s unperformable playtext, Enemy of the Stars. I situate the play, which is rarely discussed as a performance text, in proximity to the modernist performance culture and depersonalised gestures of Maeterlinck, Symons, Yeats, Gordon Craig and Brecht. By recasting the opposition between Joyce and Lewis using the performative paradigm, I show their crucial rivalry in an unfamiliar light, and by doing so – given the centrality of both writers to canonical modernism, as Scott Klein has demonstrated59 – I rewrite the relation of modernism and performance in general. Brecht’s theatre of gesture, founded upon the critical dialectic between the actor’s relation to the text and its enactment in performance, mirrors Lewis’s distinctions between, as he puts it, ‘ “players” and “livers” ’,60 and his thematisation of the split process of text and performance, speech and gesture, which resolves against fixed forms in favour of fluid potentialities and short-circuits the mesmeric effect of performative mimesis. Rejection of Joycean naturalism – what he calls the ‘very nightmare of the naturalistic method’61 – and his surprising allegiance to Brechtian dramaturgy connects with my rarely made challenge to the view of Lewis as a fascist, despite his polemics of the early 1930s. Performative Absence and Mechanical Reproduction The speech-gesture complex in Kafka is shaped by his thinking about the relations between the presence of actors – the sheer undocumentable visibility of their gestures – and his own mediated account of their performance, an effort which he regarded as inadequate. Kafka is registering, as I have demonstrated, not only his own incapacity but also that of language in general to adequately describe embodied performance: it pivots around his thinking about the figure of the actor, not just in theatre, but also in the new medium of the cinema. The dialectic between theatrical presence and textual absence in the speech-gesture complex, and the resultant aesthetic of incompletion, in Kafka and in other modernist writers, is further complicated by their thinking about the historical emergence of the film actor, who shares properties both of presence and absence. Once again, Benjamin was the first to recognise the profound implications of film’s challenge to the unmediated presence of the actor in theatre. In his essay on Brecht, he describes the staccato shocks of Epic theatre as ‘like pictures in a film’;62 the frozen intervals between action, the interruption of happenings, the quotable gesture each partly derives from film’s mediation of presence through representation. Film’s mechanical reproduction challenges the auratic presence of the actor, its power of presence before a live audience, and it breaks up the actor’s performance into disjecta membra. In my methodology, theatre, cinema and writing are unavoidably intermedial, each responding to and 18

introduction

drawing from the other’s power. Film presents the visuality of gestures, as does theatre, but like writing, it lacks theatre’s presence and it gives gestures a textuality by allowing them to be edited and placed within a narrative structure. The written gesture lacks both visuality and presence, yet this apparent weakness instils in writing a desire to absorb and appropriate the resources of both kinds of performance. This energy, striving to make reference to performative media which always remain absent, drives the constant oscillation between presence and absence in the speech-gesture complex. The figure of the actor, whether present in theatre or absent in film, is, in this reckoning, of central importance. In a letter to Max Brod which describes a performance of Hamlet at the Deutsches Theater in November 1910, Kafka remarks on the doubling process between actor and role: Max, I have seen a Hamlet performance, or rather heard Bassermann. For whole quarter-hours I actually had another person’s physiognomy; from time to time I had to turn away from the stage toward an empty box to bring myself back to order.63 The alienation between actor and role is experienced mimetically by Kafka; the distinction between having ‘seen’ Hamlet and having ‘heard’ Bassermann suggests a process akin to Brecht’s ‘alienation of the text’. The same actor is mentioned by Kafka two and a half years later, during the composition of the final chapters of Amerika, in a letter to Felice dated 4 March 1913. Illustrating his own recurrent sense of physiognomic alterity, he recounts a visit to the cinema earlier that evening. In the foyer, he notices a poster of a film called The Other, an adaptation of a play starring Albert Bassermann, a German actor who performed with Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater Berlin from 1909–15, and who later starred in von Sternberg’s Shanghai Gesture (1941), Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948). Observing Bassermann’s transformation into a reproducible image, Kafka experiences a lack of coincidence between the subject and the film-image. The estrangement between the intentionality of actor and character in live theatre is intolerably magnified, in Kafka’s eyes, when the actor is not himself present before an audience, and when he is deprived of his voice. Kafka anticipates a view, later confirmed when he sees the film, that Bassermann has ‘allowed himself to be used, at least in this piece, for something that is not worthy of him’; he is ‘excluded from any influence’ on the film; he has surrendered his body to ‘old-fashioned cinematic devices’.64 Even by 1913, cinema had fixed certain events as routine, generic spectacle, and Kafka’s knowledge of these routines testifies to the frequency of his visits to the cinema. His response elucidates an acute sense of the dissociation of consciousness from physical identity. Kafka identifies, to the total exclusion of the actor’s ‘influence’ over his own 19

the speech-gesture complex

image, a phenomenological condition peculiar to the film actor. Benjamin clarifies this distinction in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’: ‘what matters is that the part is acted not for an audience but for a mechanical contrivance’. Performing for the camera, the film actor forgoes an aura indistinguishable from his physical presence: the film actor feels as if in exile – exile not only from the stage but also from himself. [. . .] his body loses corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice [. . .] in order to be changed into a mute image.65 Kafka observes in this metamorphosis, from living person into ‘mute image’, a loss of corporeal identity, as though Bassermann were unable to transmit his signature-tune as an actor. Towards the end of his letter, he has to reassure himself, and Felice, that ‘after completion of the film Bassermann goes home as Bassermann and no one else’; the letter ends with an unfulfillable request, since he is only writing a letter: ‘good night, dearest. May I kiss you, may I embrace the real body?’ Kafka’s anxiety about the difference between fictive and real bodies is crystallised in the difference between the presence of the live actor before an audience, and the mechanical flicker of the absent film actor. Hanns Zischler has collected useful evidence,66 without supplying an interpretation, concerning, in Kafka’s own words, his ‘lengthy and numerous visits to the cinema’. Kafka’s remarks on silent cinema, which occur between 1908 and 1913, coincide with his preoccupation with the Yiddish theatre of gesture and the main composition of Amerika. These remarks develop a complex attitude to cinematic performance. On the one hand, his excursions are related with exuberant joy, as he writes to Elsa Taussig, Max Brod’s then fiancée: ‘for we are so happy to have done the things that are absolutely necessary (obviously they have to happen right away, or else how could we keep ourselves alive for the cinematograph)’.67 Yet these inclinations are counter-balanced with analogies between the radical dissociation of consciousness from identity, as observed in Bassermann’s film, and his own sense of corporeal alienation. The juxtaposition of visits to the cinema with an incapacity for corporeal experience suggests a deprivation of identity akin to the self-exile of the actor before the camera: I don’t keep a diary at all, I wouldn’t know what for; nothing happens to me to stir my inmost self. This applies even if I weep, as I did yesterday in a cinematographic theatre in Verona. I am capable of enjoying human relationships, but not of experiencing them.68 Zischler suggests the possibility that Kafka took the title of his novel from a film, announced in July 1912 by the German distributor Gaumont, bearing 20

introduction

the same title, Der Verschollene, but he qualifies the similarity, remarking that Kafka ‘provides not a single hint that he drew on certain images or scenes for his writing’ and that ‘he wanted to keep these images out of his prose’.69 The fact that Kafka hardly mentions specific films excludes, for Zischler, the possibility of a palpable influence on his prose fiction. Yet contrary to these negative claims, and in light of Kafka’s heightened reaction to filmed performance, the detachment of intention from bodily volition peculiar to gestures in film, I would argue, informs the sense of Karl being trapped in a nightmare vision of America and forced to go through the motions against his will. Kafka allowed his extensive cinema-going to enrich his fantasy version of a country he never visited in person. In the scene in chapter 7, when he is chased through the streets by a policeman, Karl is locked into and must lend his reluctant body to the template of an early genre film, the chase comedy: ‘Stop him!’ The policeman shouted down the long, almost empty street, and shouting this cry at regular intervals set out after Karl at an easy run which showed both great strength and practice [. . .] the policeman [. . .] kept pointing his baton at him as he ran a parallel course, keeping shrewdly to the smooth pavement. (p. 199) This extended routine alludes to the style of the cinema’s predominant narrative genre between 1903 and 1906.70 Max Brod makes note of a visit with Kafka to the Omnia Pathé cinema in Paris on 10 September 1911, a cinema which ‘stood at the centre of so many of our enjoyments’. Pathé’s films were distributed across Europe and the US, and Brod’s reference to ‘so many of our enjoyments’ suggests the familiarity he and Kafka likely shared with Pathé’s comedies. The policeman’s pursuit of Karl resembles such Pathé films as Ferdinand Zecca’s The Policemen’s Little Run (1907), in which two policemen give chase up and down cobbled streets, pointing their batons as they run their course with the same gesture as Kafka’s policeman. This was a commonplace routine to which Kafka and Brod were well accustomed; in his account of the programme they saw at the Omnia Pathé, Brod remarks on the ‘usual revolver shots, chases, fisticuffs’ (my emphasis).71 As Karl puts on a ‘faster spurt’, he experiences a delusionary moment in which he ‘scarcely recognises his own name’: ‘someone gently called him by name – he thought it was a delusion at first, for there had been a ringing in his ears all the time’ (p. 199). Karl finds himself unable to recognise his style of movement as his own, his body runs away with him and he merely obeys the demands of the role he is given to play, in this instance, a routine from a chase film. This anguish is Kafka’s fictionalised version of his critique of Bassermann in The Other. The conversion of bodily presence into flickering image drives a wedge between the body that expresses a first-person idea of action, and the body that is the subject matter 21

the speech-gesture complex

of a third-personal apparatus. Gesture becomes text, and this is a source of profound unease and a recurrent sense of bodily estrangement. The chase genre established itself between 1901 and 1904, just before cinema’s transition into narrative continuity between 1904 and 1907, with British films like James Williamson’s Stop Thief! (1901) and Alf Collins’s The Runaway Match (1903), and the American company Biograph’s The Maniac Chase and Personal (1904),72 from which the earliest Pathé chase film, Dix femmes pour un mari (1905) derives. In the same year, Pathé sets up the first global distribution network, and opens its first cinema – visited by Kafka in 1911 – the Omnia Pathé in Paris on 15 December 1906, which initiates the rapid expansion of purpose-built cinemas across Europe and the US.73 Around 1911–12, companies such as Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios – their first release in September 1912 was a split-reel called The Water Nymph – begin to challenge the dominance of Pathé comedy films. Sennett himself readily acknowledged the influence and importance of the Pathé films on his own chase comedies. Kafka wrote the chase sequence during the release and distribution of Sennett’s first comedies. The first Keystone Cops chase sequences – The Bangville Police (1913) and In the Clutches of the Gang (1914) – are exactly contemporary with Kafka’s writing of the scene. It is not only the American location, and the ‘second policeman [. . .] blowing his whistle, obviously fresh and undwindled’ (p. 200), which suggest Kafka’s encounter with these early Keystone routines. The violent slapstick after the chase between Karl, Robinson and Delamarche recalls the cruel assaults on the body in knockabout early Keystone. Routines depicting ‘roundhouse punches to the face [. . .] stumbling, falling, tripping, bumping one’s head, twirling and falling after a missed punch’74 inform scenes in which ‘Karl drove his fist against Robinson’s chin’ and Robinson ‘punched him in the belly’ (p. 221), or slightly later when Karl ‘seized the broad collar of Delamarches’s dressing-gown, jerked it upwards, then pulled it still farther over’ (p. 234). As Douglas Riblet indicates, the emergence of the Keystone Cops and their trademark routines were a response to large-scale institutional changes and the rising centrality of the star system in industrial film production. This commerce between the ‘extra filmic star image and the fictional role’ begins to entrench itself in American film production between 1909 and 1914.75 The Keystone Cops were a defining instance of a phenomenon which achieves an end-point of fulfilment with Charlie Chaplin. Against a background generated by the Keystone Cops, Chaplin forges the unmistakable template of his Tramp persona, which, as Michael North argues, gradually begins to appear ‘independent of the actor playing the role’, as though Chaplin were merely doubling up for the Tramp.76 Kafka begins writing Amerika in 1911, reworks it between late 1912 and 1914 and abandons it in 1915 or 1916. As Parker Tyler notes, ‘the date of publication of the first chapter of Amerika is 1913, 22

introduction

the year that Chaplin [began] making comedies for Mack Sennett’.77 Chaplin emerges a year later as the Tramp in Kid Auto Races at Venice: the birth of his trademark star-persona, which soon acquired its own automatic life, overlaps with Karl’s chase scene. These constant reciprocal transformations between literature, theatre and film, and between the sayable and the visible, generate a culture of experimental modernism which thrives on representational hybridity. Kafka’s Amerika coincides with and anticipates a modernist culture of performance in film and theatre which elevates the alienation of gesture from intentionality, or actor from role, to the highest dramaturgical form. For Adorno, Kafka should be understood in the context of film, rather than theatre: his written gestures are ‘the last, disappearing textual links to silent film (which, not coincidentally, disappeared nearly simultaneously with Kafka’s death)’. Adorno’s sense of cinema’s Kafkaesque, or Chaplinesque ‘ambiguity of gesture’78 potentially hinges on film’s capacity, like writing, to fix gestures, while alienating the audience from the auratic presence those gestures summon. The proposition that cinema, and technology in general, has exerted a powerful influence on the international culture of modernism and its hybrid modes of representation is now generally accepted within modernist studies, and has been steadily developing across a number of connected works. The resurgence in studies on film and literature by, for instance, Laura Marcus and Susan McCabe79 has advanced and refined a long-established but forgotten tradition which dates from Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay ‘The Cinema’, and the avant-garde journal Close Up,80 through influential work by Alan Spiegel and Stephen Heath in the 1970s. These detailed investigations have provided a useful framework for my own cross-cutting and superimposition of three separate fields, and my argument that the relations between speech and gesture in literary, theatrical and cinematic performance is a primary shaping influence on modernist literary form. Laura Marcus’s work in the field of modernism and cinema is longstanding, from her editing and commentary of the avant-garde journal Close Up, to her monumental recent study, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period, a book which is central to the resurgence of cinema and modernism. Marcus examines the relations between technology and literature, and the shaping influence of early film commentaries, the culture of periodicals and film societies on writers such as H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce, H. D. and Woolf; her account of the impact of cinema on Woolf – the way her ‘eyeless’ prose, particularly in the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse, echoes her sense of cinema’s capacity to perceive objects in the absence of a human observer – has been highly influential. McCabe’s Cinematic Modernism has convincingly demonstrated the fundamental influence of European avant-garde film on the poetry of H. D., Williams, Stein 23

the speech-gesture complex

and Moore: Soviet, Dada and Surrealist film, she argues, offered poets a new vocabulary to enable thinking about bodily experience and sensation, and crystallised cultural debates about modernity’s dissociation of sensibility as manifest in experimental psychology. By reading modernist poetry in light of the techniques of cinema, McCabe crystallises the relations between modernist poetry, which ‘gained new angles, line-breaks, asymmetries, and synapses, shifting within and through the very technologies that disoriented the relationship of the human body’, and the ‘splintering and dynamic’81 cellular structure of filmic montage. In this respect, cinematic montage influences both the techniques of parallel action and simultaneity in Eliot and Pound, and the hysteric, feminised body, whose jarring discontinuities are embedded in the writing of Gertrude Stein. By providing fresh and original readings of the ocular crisis and fragmented bodily discontinuities, McCabe has helped initiate a reorientation in the interdisciplinary study of literature, film and psycho­ analysis. David Trotter’s Cinema and Modernism builds on this shift towards medial convergence by drawing extensively on pioneering film scholarship of early cinema. Trotter proposes an understanding of both film and literature as sharing a concern with the idea of an automatic, or non-human reproduction of the world. In contradistinction to McCabe’s study, Trotter argues for a move away from transferable, montage-based relations between film and writing, privileging instead the idea of the photographical neutrality of the mechanical recording process. Cinema’s capacity to reproduce the world, to make it present precisely by allowing, in the words of Stanley Cavell, ‘the audience to be mechanically absent’82 unexpectedly parallels the idea of modernist impersonality and automatism. These books are sharply focused on the cinema effect in modernism, and develop earlier studies on the wider impact of technology in general on sensory perception and literary form by Tim Armstrong, Michael North and Sara Danius.83 These earlier works yielded a rich understanding of the inseparability of technologies from modernist aesthetics and literary form, articulating the second industrial revolution’s profound impact on modernism’s refashioning of perceptual and epistemic habits of eye and ear. North amply demonstrates how literature incorporated techniques derived from photographic media, including cinema, while Armstrong and Danius trace ‘the technologically mediated crisis of the senses’84 in modernist culture by widening the perspective of the social and historical conditions of literature to include, in addition to cinema, the technologies of sensory prosthesis, advertising, photography, chronophotography, the radio, the telephone and electricity. The advent of new technologies of perception and the resulting perceptual crisis is indissociable, in this view, from the representational problems in modernist aesthetics. My study distinguishes itself from these studies of film, technology and modernism by adopting the performative paradigm – placing the question of the 24

introduction

performative gesture at the centre of the debate – and by negotiating between the overlaps and often fraught, competing relations between literature, theatre and cinema. I extend, reassess and critique existing studies by delineating, through the category of the speech-gesture complex, a complicated three-way exchange between the three media. Trotter and McCabe tend to concentrate on film form rather than performance style. Trotter’s model of impersonal automatism overlooks acts of authorship and the technique of camera placement and editing, even in primitive films, and by focusing on the mechanical act of recording, obscures the business of performative gestures. By re-situating film and modernism in relation to performance culture, and refocusing acts of reading and spectatorship which turn a blind eye to the many-angled versions and contradictions of the body in writing and performance, I widen the scope of the debate to include theatre as well as film and literature. The performative body in modernist theatre, I argue, both resists and is hugely influenced by the new optical perception and the style of gesture in silent cinema. A powerful dialectic between the two forms, in turn, forces a corresponding reaction in literary modernism. While theatre is partly defined by the loss of its audience to cinema, film and literature are in turn defined by their envy of theatre’s power of auratic presence. Cinema emerges from theatre by transforming presence into mediated technological representation, eliminating the auratic presence of the actor and bringing it closer to writing; yet it remains haunted by theatre, and by the representation of performative body which originates in theatre. Literature becomes a scribe to the new iconography of performance, and the rivalry between theatre’s presence and film’s auratic absence; it develops a complex of its own, the sense of its own incapacity to write the performative gesture, which compels it to absorb the heterogeneous, visual and performative elements of its rival media. My category of the speech-gesture complex is a fluid means to negotiate the constant convergence and influx of medial functions, of the visibility and material presence in theatre and cinema, as against the imaginative absences in literature, which foregrounds its incapacity to write gesture without renouncing its desire for visibility or material presence. The constellation of Kafka, Brecht, Meyerhold, Benjamin, Adorno, Eisenstein and Chaplin is a primary instance of this symbiotic interchange between dramaturgy, cinema and writing. Meyerhold insisted that ‘the skill of Biomechanics can be acquired from a study of Chaplin’, from the way in which he ‘deploys his body in space to maximum effect’,85 and Brecht’s notion of the gestus, by his own admission, was inspired by Chaplin and his ‘gestic way of performing’.86 Brecht perceived in Chaplin’s non-psychological, physical style, and the explicit separation between actor and role, a kinship with his own epic theatre project.87 In his notebooks, he lists a series of observations under the heading ‘V-Effects of Chaplin’ which became ‘a major factor in the economy 25

the speech-gesture complex

of expression that he later developed with the notion of gestic acting in the epic theatre’.88 Benjamin’s definition of the cinematic close-up as revealing ‘entirely new structural formations of the subject’ and of introducing an ‘unconscious optics’89 rewrites the Brechtian V-effect for the camera, although the V-effect had itself travelled over from Chaplin and the Russian formalist account of defamiliarisation in filmed behaviour: ‘ “Verfremdungseffekt” is a translation of the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky’s phrase “priem ostrannenija”, “device for making strange”.’90 Fredric Jameson notes the influence on Brecht’s theory of ‘any number of visits to Berlin by Soviet modernists like Eisenstein [. . .] Like Eisenstein’s montage, it permitted him to organise and coordinate a great many distinct features of his theatrical practice and aesthetic’.91 Eisenstein’s dialectical optics and his theoretical outline for a ‘conflict of motives’ between ‘purely verbal utterance’ and the ‘gesture of bodily movement’,92 itself a response to the impact of reading Joyce, is fundamental to Brechtian theatre. Brecht advises that ‘it is conceivable that other kinds of writer, such as playwrights or novelists, may for the moment be able to work in a more cinematic way than the film people’;93 it is possible he had Joyce in mind here, as he does when he mentions ‘the Verfremdungseffekt in Ulysses’, and of how Joyce ‘alienates both the way of representing (mainly through the frequent and rapid changes) and the events’.94 Brecht’s application of his theatrical effect to Joyce, in conjunction with Eisenstein’s parallel application of film theory – ‘it has been left to James Joyce to develop in literature the depictive line of the Japanese hieroglyph’95 – seeks to transform visual fields into readable ‘signatures’ (p. 31: 2) as Stephen Dedalus puts it, in light of the conflicts between the textual and performative body. Theatre, Cinema and the Universal Language of Gesture The history of silent cinema is also a history of cinema’s fraught and complex relation to theatre. Kafka wrote the gestic chase sequence during cinema’s historical transition from theatrical perception to the systematisation of editing techniques and camera positions, which brought film language closer to the mobility of focal points found in nineteenth-century prose fiction. The split between slapstick routine and subjective reflection, and between consciousness and identity is emphasised by presenting the routine Karl is forced to inhabit as external to him, as though it were happening to someone else – a figure being pursued in an American chase comedy – but also through his introceptive focal point: Karl has ‘to think first and attend to his running only in the intervals between weighing possibilities and making decisions’ (p. 199). The earliest films, such as the first chase films between 1901 and 1905, as Noël Burch argues, maintain the ‘externality of the spectator’,96 and historically precede the perceptual and physiological orientation of the spectator. This technique, 26

introduction

cinema’s mode of classical narration, emerged between 1907 and 1912 with the standardisation, primarily by D. W. Griffith, of the system of continuity editing, parallel cuts and the shot-reverse-shot, or the convention whereby the eyelines of characters are matched along an unseen 180-degree axis.97 Subjective focal points began to be written into cinema in films such as Griffith’s The Primal Call (1911), in which each of the two characters looks off-screen to the other, alternate cuts showing what each character sees, and Arthur Mackey’s The Loafer (1911), in which the camera again alternates viewpoints to encourage the spectator’s identification with the character’s point of view, which is also the view of the camera.98 Keystone comedies began to demonstrate a primitive spectator-subject identification in the use of reverseangle cross-cutting from pursuer to pursued, a method Mack Sennett learnt from working at Biograph with Griffith.99 These techniques – incipient in Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Kleptomaniac (1905), and Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909) and Gold Is Not All (1910) – were refined in films such as Thomas Ince’s The Bargain (1914) and DeMille’s The Cheat (1915), and finally codified into the standardised classical system by 1916. The dialectic between the two kinds of spectatorship, of the external, overseen event, and the subjective identification in the view through Karl’s eyes, inflects Kafka’s chase sequence. Karl momentarily acquires a double status, at once spectator and subject, conscious of inhabiting a gestural identity, a narratorial vantage point, which is external to him. The scene generates a dialectic in which the unified, tableau dimension of the performative body in theatre, and early film, is pitched against the technique of spectator-subject identification, incipient in cinema around 1910–12. Film language or textuality sets itself up in opposition to the theatricality of the performative body. This alteration in camera technique and editing parallels the shift in performance from a histrionic, melodramatic style of broad gestures, to one characterised by naturalistic restraint, small-scale gestures, and a more detailed observation of actions and reactions. Performance style in early film, before the shift in technique as standardised by Griffith, derived from tableau gestures for the stage: prior to 1910, film actors would gesticulate by standing centre stage and facing front, as though playing to an auditorium. Standardised gestures, inherited from acting manuals and handbooks for the stage,100 developed from the idea that ‘the natural size of the human body should be the unchanging unit of measurement’.101 One of the key influences on this performance style, as James Naremore and Roberta Pearson observe, was François Delsarte, a theorist of gesture who ran his own theatrical academy in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Delsarte standardised the various attempts, dating back to the early eighteenth century, to select, classify and codify gestures according to the principles of language. In the Delsarte system, any given gesture would correspond to a given emotion. A gesture combines the symbolic properties of 27

the speech-gesture complex

language with the supposedly naturalised movements of the body. As his followers put it, gestures were ‘symbols recognized as natural’; ‘each emotion had its appropriate gesture and facial expression’.102 Delsarte’s prescriptive, formulaic, ostentatious poses, an aspect of a long tradition of codified pantomime, was hugely influential on nineteenth-century European theatre, but also on actors for stage and screen in America. Steele MacKaye, one of the most powerful actor-managers of the late nineteenth century, established academies and dramatic schools across the US which taught Delsarte’s Harmonic Gymnastics, the ‘principal method of formal instruction for US actors between 1870 and 1895’.103 The restrained, naturalistic approach gradually modified the melodramatic style by allowing a closer focus on small-scale gestures and emphasising, as Louise Brooks – one of silent cinema’s most naturalistic actors – put it, ‘a new quiet and subtle style of acting’.104 A complex web of shifting relations between literature, theatre and cinema accompanies the shift from a semiotics of legible gesture, where each gesture has a fixed meaning within a taxonomic system, to psychology and restraint. On the one hand, Griffith’s Biograph films between 1908 and 1913 effectively translate the narrative techniques of the nineteenthcentury novel into the parallel editing and multiple focal points of film form. When questioned on the use of the parallel cross-cut in After Many Years (1908), Griffith replied: ‘doesn’t Dickens write that way? [. . .] these are picture stories; not so different’.105 Eisenstein argues that ‘the concept of film language was born’ when film began acknowledging ‘the traditions and methodology of literature’. In his essay ‘Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today’, Eisenstein cites the primary instance of Griffith, who defined and defended his pioneering experiments in montage cross-cutting and multiple focal points by ‘calling on Dickens as witness’.106 But the shift towards the new style also mimics the movement in theatre from melodrama to naturalism. Griffith imported the performance style of Ibsenite naturalism into a cinematic acting style which was until then dominated by Delsarte’s melodramatic, semiotic style.107 Film historians tend to emphasise the turning point in the shift from primitive to classical narration as being marked by the rejection of theatricality, of the primitive style, with its uniform frontality and long shot tableau perspectives, its emphasis on exhibitionism, and its reliance on live elements such as film lecturers, music and the variety format. But the new invisible style of classical narration, despite eliminating those elements of liveness, is indissociable from a new performance style directly imported from naturalist theatre, as Griffith – who started his career acting in Ibsen plays – often acknowledged. The emergence of restrained naturalistic gestures, which gradually replaced the codified system as derived from Delsarte, involved a movement away from denotative semiotics towards performative enactment. Pearson names the naturalistic style the ‘verisimilar code’, a code which ‘abandoned the conven28

introduction

tional gestures, replacing them with gestures coded by cultural expectations about how particular characters in particular situations might behave in real life’.108 Gestures in the verisimilar code, tailored to the particular psychology of the individual character, became less easily assimilable to general discursive categories or taxonomies. Performative fluidity, as derived from theatrical naturalism, replaces textual denotation precisely at the moment when film form begins dissembling the body into cellular sequences, initiating a widespread view of silent cinema as a universal language. Acting style and film technique are intimately connected, and the relation pivots around various notions of film form and performative gesture as a universal language. As Laura Marcus demonstrates in The Tenth Muse, the idea of the hieroglyph provides a significant context for understanding the links between divergent figures in literature, film and psychoanalysis. Modernism’s fascination with the hieroglyph, as Marcus argues, parallels the writing of film theorists and makers for whom ‘the equation made between cinema and writing was particularly marked’ and ‘connected not only to representations of speech and writing but also to a language of the body’.109 Béla Balázs, writing in 1924, remarks that ‘in the motion picture screens all over the world we currently witness the development of the first international language: that of facial expression and physical gestures’.110 For theorists and practitioners, the arrangement of shots either in the classical mode or as discontinuous montage resembled a new form of universal language. Filmmakers across the spectrum, from Hollywood to the European avant-garde, including Griffith, the Soviets, Balázs, Abel Gance and Jean Epstein, concurred in their advocation of the syntactic reality of film. Lilian Gish echoed Griffith’s view that the films they made together constituted ‘a new universal language’;111 in ‘The ABCs of Cinema’, Blaise Cendrars celebrates the notion that the close-up and the cutback are letters in a ‘new cinematic alphabet’;112 Vachel Lindsay in The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), the first aesthetic study of cinema to be published in the US, compares the hieroglyphic properties of film to ‘the invention of the picture-writing of the stone age’;113 Jean Epstein similarly describes cinema as ‘a pictorial language, like the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt’.114 The cinematic hieroglyph is an aspect not only of syntactic editing, but of the newly acquired symbolic properties of the gesturing body. As Marcus notes, silent film’s sense of itself as a language ‘anticipates the “grammar” of film and semiotics, and Christian Metz’ early focus on film writing is linked to the modernist fascination with ideographic and hieroglyphic languages, perceived to lie between word and image’.115 Explicit in the work of the writers and makers I discuss is the idea of a hieroglyphic language which conflates reading and perception; but this idea bears a complex, ambivalent relation to the widespread claim that both film form and the performative gesture represent a new form of ideographic expression. The conflation of 29

the speech-gesture complex

visual presence with textual system contains various radically unresolvable contradictions. What held the critical imagination of modernist writers, I would argue, is not the straightforward claims made for cinema as a new hieroglyphic language, but rather the contradictions and ambiguities in those claims. According to Christian Metz, silent cinema ‘liked to speak of cinema as a kind of Esperanto’ in which ‘the image is like a word, the sequence like a sentence, for a sequence is made up of images like a sentence of words’; but the view that visual reality can be reconstituted as representation or writing is an oversimplification. Cinema lacks the necessary ‘secondary articulation’ which would qualify it as a language.116 A characteristic of the film image is the mimetic closeness of sign and referent, in contradistinction to the codified, phonemic, combinatory units of language, which bear an arbitrary relation to their referents. It is this phonemic capacity which gives language its ‘secondary articulation’ and which cinema’s immediacy and perceptibility lacks. The claim for film form as a universal language is enabled only by the elision of unresolvable contradictions between language and image, and between speech and gesture. The problematic claims made for a universal language parallel a contemporary interest in the origins of language in gesture, and in cinema’s retrieval of gesture’s universalism and speech-like capacity. As Peter Sloterdijk argues, ‘This notion of a speechless language is as old as human communication, indeed even older, its roots going back into the prehuman and the prerational, into the sphere of animal sensing and orientation.’117 The Western interest in gesture as a universal language is a long-established tradition, from Quintillian’s Institutio Oratoria (ad 200), through to Bonifacio’s The Art of Signs (1616), Bulwer’s Chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644), Condillac’s Essay on the Origins of Human Knowledge (1746) and Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf and Dumb (1751).118 Wilhelm Wundt’s Elements of Folk Psychology, first published in 1916, the same year as Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale, inaugurates the modern study of gesture with a theory of ‘the origin of all signs in natural gesture-language, in movements of expression’.119 The dominant strain in twentieth-century linguistics since Saussure has tended to relegate expressive movement to an ancillary status in communicative exchange. In Saussurean terms, syntax and meaning in language are generated by differential relations between symbols which bear an arbitrary correspondence with their non-linguistic referents. As a consequence of this emphasis, it has often been taken as read that language and speech are interchangeable terms, to the detriment of iconic forms of utterance. This tendency is reversed in a theoretical tradition, beginning with Wilhelm Wundt, which seeks to emphasise the significance of expressive, non-verbal movement in language. Wundt’s interdisciplinary work, which cross-breeds anthropology, psychology and philosophy, investigates the historical evolution of language, myth and 30

introduction

religion. In his discussion on the origins of language, Wundt aligns himself with a long tradition of language scholarship, beginning with Giambattista Vico in The New Science (1744), which foregrounds the view that spoken languages originally developed from pre-lingual gestures. Yet these long-standing ideas about the language of gesture, as with the claims made for film as a universal language in the silent era, are fraught with radically unresolvable contradictions. As Ray Birdwhistell, the founder of kinesics – a detailed and rigorous practical investigation into communicative body movement – has demonstrated, gesture is essentially context-dependent on the accompanying speech-act.120 Kinesic signals such as those made by the head, face or hands, he argues, are ‘incapable of standing alone’.121 Recent work by the two leading researchers in the field, David McNeill and Adam Kendon, have retained Birdwhistell’s close analysis of recurrent gestures, and have developed more detailed and exacting methods which also show forth kinesic structures, unlike language systems, as fluid and continuous, in which the gesture’s illocution is dependent on the specific occasion and speech content of an utterance. Unlike the conventions of speech, ‘gestures are not fixed’ and are not ‘obliged to meet standards of form’. This allows a single gesture to assume a number of denotations, to present a meaning determined to a large part by the speaker’s intentions.122 In the narration of an event, for instance a car crash, the speaker’s hand could represent the driver’s hand, the driver as a whole, the pedestrian, the driver’s car, the other car, the road as it swerves or the side of the building. These symbols are freely designated by the speaker: gestures have too many non-linguistic properties to be susceptible to codification or speech-based analysis. As with Birdwhistell, McNeill and Kendon mitigate against the view of gesture as a universal language by ­demonstrating its context-dependency on particular speech-acts. The reduction of language and image into an artificial unity has wideranging political implications, as Miriam Hansen and Andrew Hewitt have argued. For Hansen, ‘the celebration of film as a new universal language ultimately coincided in substance and ideology with the shift from primitive to classical modes of narration and address’.123 My chapters on Joyce and Lewis are indebted to Hansen’s view that the discourse of universality and language which emerges during the standardisation of classical narration and the shift towards the concept of a unified spectator-subject is an aspect of Hollywood’s drive to subsume all distinctions of race, class and nationality into a homogeneous language: ‘the ideological objective of constructing a unified subject of – and for – mass-cultural consumption, of integrating empirically diverse audiences with this goal, was troped in the ambiguous celebration of film as a new universal language’.124 Cinema could appeal to a broad range of society, particularly immigrants unfamiliar with English, and could submerge class distinctions through nonverbal immediacy and narrative identification, fostering 31

the speech-gesture complex

‘the ambiguous myth of the human “community”‘;125 in fact, the codification of film form, in Hansen’s penetrating critique, reduces all social differences to a naturalised, bourgeois humanity, in order to unify a diverse population into ‘a more homogeneous nation of consumers’.126 Film’s universal language, by extension, naturalises and legitimates capitalist consumer-culture, and in this respect, I will argue, it bears comparison with the naturalised hegemony of Anglo-Irish history and culture in Yeatsian Revivalism. Hewitt’s analysis of the politics of the universal gesture as derived from Delsarte, its attempt to naturalise the language of the ruling class, chimes with Hansen’s critique of the universality of classical narration in film: in both instances, the attempts to universalise or naturalise gestures by making the body readable disguises the workings of an ideology which desires homogeneity and the assertion of hegemony through the erasure of difference. As Hewitt argues, in his insightful critique of the nineteenth-century project ‘to subject the body to a specific regime of legibility in continuance of an Enlightenment hermeneutic tradition’, Delsarte’s project was ‘hugely influential at a time when a newly emergent bourgeois class was eager to represent through its body, as well as its possessions, its newly acquired status’. His system was widely taught not only to actors, via acting academies set up by Steele MacKaye, but also to public speakers and politicians and even in deportment classes for aspiring genteel young ladies. These readable gestures effectively naturalised bourgeois cultural hegemony ‘as a certain regimen of reading and writing, and “gesture” would be the action wherein that regimen attempts to take on an apparently transhistorical and natural form: it is my body, not my class, that speaks’.127 By representing in coded gestures the language of a dominant class, its ascendency becomes a condition as ‘natural’ as the human body. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake cross and recross the boundaries between film and theatre, isolated readership and collective spectatorship, theatrical histrionics and close-up gestures through Joyce’s thinking about the coincidence between cinema’s new capacity to write the performative body, and what Stephen Dedalus calls ‘the universal language’ of gesture (p. 353: 106). But his advocacy of the non-codified naturalist gesture attests to his rejection of fixed universal formulations. By foregrounding the double aspect of a speechgesture complex and refusing the straightforwardly denotative, semiotic aspect of gestures, Joyce demonstrates his resistance to received codes and fixed forms which were often signs of nationalism or authoritarianism. For Lewis, as with Joyce, the idea of the universal language unavoidably naturalises the cultural hegemony of the ruling class by reducing potentiality, heterogeneity and difference; but for Lewis, this tendency is most powerfully manifest in Hollywood naturalism, in contradistinction to Joyce, who deployed Ibsenite naturalism as a means to resist fixed universal formulations. In Lewis’s view, it was the newly dominant form of Hollywood naturalism, together with the classical system, 32

introduction

with its unified spectator-subject, which had inherited universalism’s project to unify a population into ‘a more homogeneous nation of consumers’.128 By writing a form of ironised naturalist performance, Lewis short-circuits both its claims to universalism and its nonverbal immediacy, divesting it of its mimetic power, replacing it instead with a thematised relation between the visible and the sayable, ironised distance and reflection, critical openness and potentiality. By adopting a Brechtian method, I propose a radical re-reading of The Childermass as a prophetic satire on the cultural-political methods of fascism. I examine Lewis’s diagnosis of the danger in mass identification when exploited for political ends, and the satire of a political reality which has disappeared in its representations, by comparing the performance of mimesis in The Childermass with films such as Gance’s Napoleon (1927), and Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Die Nibelungen (1924). Lewis intensifies his critique of performative mimesis, spectacle and cinematic cliché in the era of the talkies, during a period which coincides with late modernism’s focus on ‘the contemporary “derealization” of reality, its progressive replacement with simulacra and spectacles’.129 I argue that Lewis’s ironised mimicry of classical realist style is an aspect of his sustained critique of the cinematic apparatus in the age of the sound picture: standardised naturalistic sound recording eliminates the critical dialectic of the speechgesture complex, and with it the sense of contradiction and fluid potentiality. In Chapter 3, I develop a comparison between two late modernist texts, Wyndham Lewis’s The Revenge for Love (1937) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark (1938). Both novels issue forth a critique of the synchronised dialogue in early talkies, and both develop a critique of the figure of Greta Garbo. Through their complex reaction to silent and talkie-era Garbo, Nabokov and Lewis negotiate the terrain of late modernism’s ironised naturalism, and the culture of resistance to synchronised sound – exemplified in the journal Close Up (1927–33), where the various contradictions of the universal language argument constitute its most sustained, and problematic discourse – by reimagining the speech-gesture complex in the era of the talkies. I trace a complex network of relations between figures in literature, theatre and cinema, including Joyce, Nabokov, Lewis, Beckett, Eisenstein, Meyerhold and Artaud, for whom the lack of synchronised sound in silent film emphasised, through its formal, abstract, anti-naturalist qualities, a performative style of gesture as an alternative to proscenium arch theatricality and classical realism, whereas sound forced cinema towards mimesis and shallow naturalism, restored the primacy of theatrical dialogue and relegated gesture, no longer the central means of expression, to a merely ancillary position. The thematised relations between text and performance, speech and gesture are central to Beckett’s practice as a writer-director. In 1936, Beckett writes to Eisenstein and expresses a desire to work in the lost tradition of the silent 33

the speech-gesture complex

film; he finally makes a silent film in 1964, and again in 1982. I conclude with an analysis of two late works which demonstrate the central tensions and contradictions in Beckett’s drama, and of the speech-gesture complex in general. By foregrounding the ambiguity and partial opacity of written gestures, and the doubleness of the act of reading and spectating the play, Nacht und Träume articulates a drive to textualise the body and endow gestures with the properties of language, while Catastrophe presents an explicit challenge to the modernist tendency to impose legibility on the body through a self-critique of Beckett’s practice as a writer-director to formalise gestures within a selfenclosed and immanent structure. Notes 1. Kafka, Amerika, p. 34. All references are to this edition, and are included parenthetically within the text. This translation has been measured for inconsistencies against the German edition of Der Verschollene (1927) in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1953). 2. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 119, p. 76. 3. Ibid. p. 117. 4. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 24–5. 5. Kafka, Der Verschollene, p. 241, p. 271. 6. Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’, Illuminations, p. 120. 7. Ibid. pp. 116–17. 8. Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, p. 353: 106. All references are to this edition, and are included parenthetically within the text. 9. Eisenstein, ‘A Course in Treatment’, Film Form, p. 89. 10. Letter to Alan Schneider, 17 August 1961, No Author Better Served, p. 95. 11. Harding, Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde, p. 2. 12. Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 280. 13. Taxidou, Modernism and Performance, p. 8. 14. Diamond, ‘Modern Drama/Modernity’s Drama’, p. 4. 15. Pavis, Languages of the Stage, pp. 131–61. 16. Naremore, Acting in the Cinema; Zucker, Figures of Light. 17. Kramer and Lowell (eds), Screen Acting, p. 1. 18. Dyer, Stars, p. 151. 19. Quoted in Agamben, Potentialities, p. 80. 20. Ibid. pp. 77–8. 21. Agamben, Means Without End, p. 48. 22. Ibid. pp. 52–3. 23. Puchner, Stage Fright, p. 26. 24. Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’, Illuminations, p. 117. 25. Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, p. 14. 26. 11 March 1912, Letters to Felice, quoted in Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater, p. 15. 27. Lifson, The Yiddish Theater in America, p. 138. 28. 5 October 1911 and 8 October 1911, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, p. 65, p. 70. 29. 3 November 1912, Letters to Felice, p. 37; 23 October 1911, Diaries of Franz Kafka, p. 86. 30. Hewitt, Social Choreography, p. 9. 31. Ibid. p. 10.

34

introduction

32. Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’, Illuminations, p. 117. 33. Ibid. p. 117. 34. Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, p. 130. 35. Kafka, ‘A Report to an Academy’, The Transformation and Other Stories, p. 194. 36. Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, p. 9. 37. Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’, Illuminations, p. 121. 38. Weber, Theatricality as Medium, p. 95. 39. Agamben, Means Without End, pp. 57–8, p. 55. 40. Ibid. p. 57. 41. Hewitt, Social Choreography, p. 25, p. 13. 42. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, p. 11. 43. Weber, Theatricality as Medium, pp. 45–6. 44. Brecht, ‘On the Use of Music in an Epic Theatre’ and ‘Short Description of a New Technique of Acting’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 86, pp. 137–9. 45. Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’, Illuminations, p. 116. 46. Quoted in Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, p. 106. 47. Brecht, ‘From a Letter to an Actor’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 235. 48. Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, p. 28. 49. Brecht, ‘Interview wtih an Exile’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 66. 50. For an account of the novelistic stage direction, see Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, pp. 244–6. 51. Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, p. 33. 52. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 21. 53. Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, p. 4. 54. Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, p. 67. 55. Taxidou, Modernism and Performance, p. xvi. 56. Ibid. p. 58, p. 51, p. 52, p. 58. 57. Émile Zola, ‘La Naturalisme au théâtre’ (1881), quoted in Taxidou, Modernism and Performance, p. 46. 58. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 167 59. Klein, The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. 60. Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, p. 174. 61. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 89. 62. Benjamin, ‘What Is Epic Theater?’, Illuminations, p. 149. 63. Letter to Max Brod, 9 December 1910, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, p. 69. 64. 4–5 March 1913, Letters to Felice, p. 239. 65. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, pp. 222–3. 66. Zischler, Kafka Goes to the Movies. 67. 22 August 1908, Letter to Max Brod and 28 December 1908, Letter to Elsa Taussig, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, p. 44, p. 48. 68. 6 November 1913, Letters to Felice, p. 364. 69. Zischler, Kafka Goes to the Movies, pp. 57–8. 70. Crafton, ‘Pie and Chase’. 71. Max Brod, ‘Kinomatograph in Paris’ (1912), quoted in Zischler, Kafka Goes to the Movies, p. 49. 72. Gunning, ‘The Non-Continuous Style of Early Film (1900–1906)’. 73. Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town, pp. 22–30. 74. Louvish, Keystone, p. 74. 75. Riblet, ‘The Keystone Film Company and the Historiography of Early Slapstick’, p. 172, p. 174.

35

the speech-gesture complex

76. North, Reading 1922, p. 168. 77. Tyler, ‘Kafka’s and Chaplin’s “Amerika” ’, p. 300. 78. Adorno to Benjamin, 17 December 1934, The Complete Correspondence of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, p. 70. 79. Spiegel, Fiction and the Camera Eye; Heath, Questions of Cinema; Marcus, The Tenth Muse; McCabe, Cinematic Modernism. 80. Woolf, ‘The Cinema’; Donald et al. (eds), Close Up, 1927–1933. 81. McCabe, Cinematic Modernism, p. 18, p. 21. 82. Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 25. 83. Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body; Danius, The Senses of Modernism; North, Camera Works. 84. Danius, The Senses of Modernism, p. 1. 85. Meyerhold, ‘Chaplin and Chaplinism’, Meyerhold on Theatre, p. 321. 86. Ewen, Bertolt Brecht, His Life, His Art and His Times, p. 232. 87. Brecht, ‘The Question of Criteria for Judging Acting’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 56. 88. Brecht, ‘Texts and Fragments on the Cinema’ and Silberman, note to ‘Less Certainty!!!’ (1926), Brecht on Film and Radio, p. 10, p. 5. 89. Benjamin, ‘Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, p. 230. 90. Willett, note to ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting’, Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, p. 99; see also Mitchell, ‘From Shklovsky to Brecht’, p. 81. 91. Jameson, Brecht and Method, p. 39. 92. Eisenstein, ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’, Film Form, p. 53. 93. Brecht, ‘The Film, The Novel and Epic Theatre’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 48. 94. Brecht, ‘The Verfremdungseffekt in the Other Arts’, Brecht on Film and Radio, p. 10. 95. Eisenstein, ‘The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram’, Film Form, p. 35. 96. Burch, Life to Those Shadows, p. 164. See for instance Robert W. Paul’s The Waif and the Wizard (1901); Edwin S. Porter’s Appointment by Telephone (1902), Life of an American Fireman (1903), The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Kleptomaniac (1905); Cecil Hepworth’s Alice in Wonderland (1903); William Haggar’s Charles Peace (1905). 97. Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, pp. 114–16. Important films by Griffith during this period include The Ingrate (1908), A Corner in Wheat (1909), Gold Is Not All (1910) and The God Within (1912). 98. Salt, Film Style and Technology, p. 94. 99. Louvish, Keystone, p. 26. 100. For instance, Anon, The Art of Acting or Guide to the Stage. 101. Brewster and Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema, p. 8. 102. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures, p. 22. 103. Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, p. 53. 104. Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood, p. 61. 105. Griffith, When Movies Were Young, p. 66. 106. Eisenstein, ‘Through Theater to Cinema’ and ‘Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today’, Film Form, p. 17, p. 205. 107. Gunning, ‘Weaving a Narrative Style’, pp. 11–25. 108. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures, p. 55. 109. Marcus, The Tenth Muse, p. 8, p. 10. 110. Balázs, ‘Visible Man’, Theory of the Film, p. 44. 111. Gish, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, p. 34. 112. North, Camera Works, p. 19. 113. Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, p. 25.

36

introduction

114. Epstein, ‘On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie’, in Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939, vol. I, p. 315. 115. Marcus, The Tenth Muse, p. 9. 116. Metz, Film Language, p. 63, p. 51, p. 24. 117. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 139, quoted in Moore, Savage Theory, p. 67. 118. For a survey of writing about gesture as language up to the nineteenth century, see Kendon, Gesture, pp. 17–62. 119. Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology, p. 58. 120. Birdwhistell’s first experiments began in 1952. For comprehensive selected work on kinesics, see Birdwhistell, Kinesics and Context. 121. Ibid. p. 119. 122. McNeill, Hand and Mind; McNeill (ed.), Language and Gesture; Kendon, ‘Some Relationships between Body Motion and Speech’, pp. 177–210; Kendon, ‘Gesticulation and Speech’. 123. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 79. On the advent of classical narration, see Thompson, ‘The Formulation of the Classical Style, 1909–28’, in Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, pp. 155–251; Musser, ‘The Nickelodeon Era Begins’, pp. 4–11; Salt, Film Style and Technology. 124. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 16. 125. Barthes, Mythologies, p. 100. 126. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 86. 127. Hewitt, Social Choreography, pp. 79–80, p. 83. 128. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 86. 129. Miller, Late Modernism, p. 44.

37

1

JAMES JOYCE

‘our sad want of signs’: Imperceptible Gestures in Ibsen and Joyce He heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul’s incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own. The end of these discourses was that one night, during which she had shown every sign of unusual excitement, Mrs. Sinico caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek.1 Mrs. Sinico’s gesture breaches an unspoken decorum, between her and Duffy, which rigorously occludes non-verbal expression. The moment precipitates the end of the friendship; he does not visit her for a week, before they agree, at his instigation, to break off all contact. Duffy is ever careful to give nothing away, and his abhorrence of ‘physical or mental disorder’ (p. 120) singles out unwarranted intrusions of non-verbal utterance; uneasily codified, physical expression is prudently tidied away, and he expects Mrs. Sinico tactfully to follow suit. He keeps bodily gestures at arm’s length, and this permits him to disengage at will from the tensions and crises of the body, from which he ends up living ‘at a little distance’ (p. 120), as though it belonged to someone else. This enclosed ambit of self-spectatorship – he is constantly observing himself from a vantage point, casting a cold eye on his own gestures – requires the scaling down of potential uncertainties and latently active innuendos, leaving narrow margins for possible cross-purposes and perplexed intentions. 38

james joyce

According to this plan of action, unknown quantities are kept to a minimum, and this allows him to compose sentences ‘about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense’ (p. 120). Mrs. Sinico has been careful until this point to hold herself back, allowing Duffy to relate himself from a distance; a repressed impulse is given away in her attempt to master the situation, though it is difficult to tell with any certainty what kind of force she seeks to exert, whether the gesture is closely integrated with anything she might have said, and if the movement is voluntary or not. She presses his hand to her cheek ‘passionately’, but this does not exclusively determine the act as sexual, merely affectionate or semi-religious: Duffy is brooding to his confessor about the ‘soul’s incurable loneliness’ (p. 124). The unreflective nature of her gesture – although by extension it is also his, as it is his hand which is caught up – and the manifestation of a previously only ‘half-disclosed nature’ (p. 122), upsets Duffy’s equipoise by contradicting the ‘impersonal voice which he recognised as his own’. The force of the gesture resides not in the specificity of its motive but along a shifting range of hints and implied concealments. These unspoken ambiguities and potential mistranslations of intention cut dead Duffy’s commitment. The array of possible intentions as Mrs. Sinico catches his hand is beyond what he is willing to consider, it would confuse the distinctions he draws between his carefully mediated, narrated self in the past tense, and the unmediated, tactile aspects of a relational self affirmed in her gesture. Duffy would rather she mutely spectate his meticulously ordered and narrated character: ‘he thought that in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature’ (p. 124). Their friendship is based on the role he assigns her as his ‘confessor’ (p. 123), and he keeps catching himself, during their most intimate moments, ‘listening to the sound of his own voice’ (p. 124). To secure the uptake, Duffy would have to avert his eyes from his third personal self and act through a relational self in the present tense. His paralysis – until Mrs. Sinico’s death he does not make a single gesture – is the result of a split between his intentionality, which is always retrospectively inclined, and the repressed activity of his body, which would place him in the here and now, as a first personal agent. This rift between the spontaneity of the gesturing body and the detachment of narrative voice is further emphasised in Duffy’s manuscript translation of a play, Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer, ‘the stage directions of which were written in purple ink’ (p. 119). By further emphasising their separation from the dialogue, Duffy carries over into his translation what he manifests in his own life, the ‘distance he keeps from his own body’ through the reflective mediation of a narrative voice – which has become the ‘strange impersonal voice he recognised as his own’ – in the past tense. In playscripts since the nineteenth century, for stage directions indicating gesture, it is the present tense which indicates a movement preceding utterance, 39

the speech-gesture complex

or the participle form which signals movement made simultaneously with utterance. Two separate examples from Ibsen illustrate this convention. In The Doll’s House, when Helmer teases Nora that she is careless with money beside his own sound domestic book-keeping, Nora answers back with a simultaneous speech-gesture complex in the participle form: ‘Nora: [laying her hand on his mouth] Hush! How can you talk so horribly?’2 Her gesture is read by Helmer as signifying mere childish affection. Once we learn about her secret accounting having saved her husband from ruin, the participle gesture, in its simultaneity, acquires a ventriloquial connotation: Nora silences her husband in order to speak on his behalf. Helmer’s idea of marital relations, in which the husband balances the books while his wife obediently trails behind, his blindness as to Nora’s stewardship of their accounts, obstructs his capacity to read the intention in his wife’s gesture. Nora conceals her intentions to preserve Helmer’s idea of himself, which is also Mrs. Sinico’s attitude before Duffy’s hand is caught up. In both instances, the intention in the woman’s gesture violates an established prudence wherein all acts between them are determined by the man. Rebecca West in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm demonstrates her moral independence from Kroll by separating her gestures from what she says. This detachment is signalled by the use of the present tense in the stage directions: Rebecca: [Moves a little nearer] My dear Rector, you say that with such a ring of sincerity that I cannot think there is any ill-feeling lurking in the background. Kroll: Well, it would be only natural if you felt it painful to see a stranger managing the household here at Rosmersholm. [. . .] Rebecca: But you have no such feeling? [Takes his hand]. Thanks, my dear Rector; thank you again and again. Kroll: How on earth did you get such an idea into your head? Rebecca: [Shakes both his hands] Many thanks, how kind and good you are! Kroll: [Gruffly] Am I?3 Rebecca’s ironic tone is not exclusively vocal. The poses she strikes towards Kroll are outwardly amenable, although beside her faux-naïve declarations of trust, they also imply a potential counterforce to Kroll’s threats and intimidation. Rebecca knows she can match, with sheer force of integrity, the unscrupulous behaviour of Kroll – who, like Helmer and Duffy, anxiously turns a blind eye to the unspoken meanings in a tactile gesture – simply by taking his hands. Kroll’s and Helmer’s relational paralysis is also perceptual, just as it is for Duffy, whose principle of bodily restraint prevents him from understanding Mrs. Sinico’s hand movement: they cannot read the gesture as it happens. 40

james joyce

This interpretive blindness is reproduced in the reader’s attempt to imagine and decipher the gesture. The afternoon of the publication of William Archer’s translation of Ibsen’s The Master Builder was for Joyce ‘an event’: he ‘stayed up that night to read the play’.4 A required effort of any reading of the play, as distinct from seeing it performed, is in imagining the shape of Hilda’s gestures. On the page, vistas of implication open out, but they remain overdetermined, inscrutable, both to Solness and to the reader: Solness: No, I can’t make up my mind whether you mean all you say, or are simply having a joke with me. Hilda: [Smiles] Hoaxing you, perhaps? I, too? The text does not – and as a playscript cannot – reveal the intentionality of her smile, which could be played by an actor as either scornful or affectionate. Much of the play’s tension is generated by efforts to detect what lies behind as well as what is in a gesture; Solness’s attempt to fix Hilda in his gaze, to deduce her intentions, is also the reader-spectator’s task in the absence of narrative interiority. One of Hilda’s defining traits is her incessant changes of tone in her physical attitude to Solness. When she speaks, her intentions towards Solness are playful and affectionate, but they remain partially obscured amidst ‘half suppressed’, or ‘half teasing’ smiles, ‘half-veiled’ looks and an ‘indefinable expression’ in her gestures. Solness constantly follows her with his eyes, and fixes his gaze ‘steadily upon her’, but he cannot see past her theatrical insincerity to determine whether she is in earnest or jest. He cannot ascertain her intentions because her gestures veil her speech with an ironic playfulness, and often serve to contradict the tone and intentions in her dialogue. Solness: It’s the loveliest thing in the world, you say. Hilda: [rises with vehemence, and makes a gesture of repulsion with her hand] Yes, to be sure it is, castles in the air – they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build, too – [looks scornfully at him] – ­especially for the builders who have a – dizzy conscience.5 Hilda simultaneously agrees with Solness – ‘yes, to be sure it is’ – and betrays a dangerous enmity in her scornful look, and the ‘gesture of repulsion with her hand’. Solness is constantly bewildered by these illocutionary trick-leaps; his incapacity to read the ways in which her gestures reveal latently active hostilities precipitates his ruin. Solness’s hermeneutic lack is replicated in the silent reading of stage directions which leave the gesture’s illocution unfinished. Theatrical script requires ‘the intervention of the actor’s body in the completion of its meanings’.6 A stage direction, as an instruction to an actor,7 indicates the inseparability of spoken utterance from the movements of an actor’s 41

the speech-gesture complex

body, but on the page, the gesture is imperceptible, constructed by inferring qualities which remain implicit and liable to misreading. Mrs. Sinico’s gesture, refracted through these examples from Ibsen playscripts, undergoes various perceptual aspect-shifts. In the overlaps between these elisions of novelistic interiority and the phenomenology of theatrical spectatorship, gestures in Dubliners testify to Joyce’s immersion, during the period of its composition, in writing for the stage, especially Ibsen, and in specific performances of those texts. Since university, Joyce had planned to write a play and regarded his novels and stories, from 1900 to at least 1909, as preparation.8 In 1900 he had already written his first play, A Brilliant Career; no copy of this survives, though it was read by William Archer, who denounced it as ‘wildly impossible’ for the stage.9 He delivered a paper entitled ‘Drama and Life’ at University College, Dublin,10 and then published ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’ in the Fortnightly Review.11 The moment dated 23 April 1900 when Ibsen sent Joyce a telegram, via William Archer, saluting him for his generous review, according to Ellmann, ‘kick starts his career as a writer’.12 Joyce’s preoccupation with Ibsen is well documented, although these comparisons tend to focus on thematic parallels with Exiles and Ulysses.13 The only extensive study of Ibsen’s influence on Joyce concentrates on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and argues that there are ‘fewer hints of his allegiance to Ibsen in Dubliners’.14 Yet during the composition of Dubliners between 1905 and 1907, Joyce’s conversation and intellectual focus was almost exclusively on dramatic writing, and he partly regarded these stories as warm-up exercises for a grand coup de théâtre.15 Joyce’s main point of contact with Ibsen, according to Stanislaus, was largely in the experience of reading him,16 although this view has established an imbalance which overlooks his frequent theatre going, and subsequently excludes Dubliners from any relation to the performance culture of its time. Yet from as early as 1893, Joyce ‘went to the theatre as regularly as he could afford it’. He watched plays by Strindberg, Yeats, Synge and Sudermann, amongst others, and it was through reading and watching Ibsen on the stage that he became ‘convinced of the importance of drama’.17 His translations of Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise and Michael Kramer in 1901 began to reveal to him the compositional significance of minute gestural behaviour: for instance, Doctor Schimmelpfennig’s ‘habit of frequently stroking his beard, particularly whenever he is inwardly agitated’, or ‘Loth, outwardly calm [who] toys with the peel of an apple, and seems not to heed what is taking place’.18 Such detailed textual consideration of small-scale physical events was cognate with their eventual incarnation by actors, a view he reiterates on reading Hauptmann’s Rosa Bernd: ‘I wonder if he acts well. His plays, when read, leave an unsatisfying impression on the reader. Yet he must have the sense of the stage well developed in him by now.’19 In Dubliners, a literary method 42

james joyce

which does not insist on intended meaning in moments of epiphany, preferring to show rather than tell those ‘slips, and little errors and gestures’,20 is filtered, I will argue, through Joyce’s own experience of reading playscripts, but also of watching actors perform those scripts in darkened rooms. His writing of the body in speech occurs in the margins between narrative voice, inflected by the central character, and a language of performance which foreshadows the explicitly performance-oriented Exiles and the ‘Circe’ chapter of Ulysses. My account of Joyce’s compositional intent, his preoccupation with as yet unfulfilled work for the stage, and with the phenomenology of performance, seeks to modify a dominant strain of scholarship on Dubliners which concentrates exclusively on the principle of ‘narrative ventriloquism’,21 and how the language of the characters inflects the narrative voice. Most extended commentaries have emphasised and variously re-described an operative principle which imperceptibly mingles interior speech with observable phenomena. The tendency to ‘insert a character’s characteristic speech without quote marks into the narrator’s discourse’22 is often either referred to as Kenner’s ‘Uncle Charles Principle’23 or the ‘Benstock Principle’.24 Neutral prose, ostensibly providing a cold description of physical phenomena, is gently invaded by the ‘paraphrased thoughts’, as Bruce Avery puts it, of the central character, and this ‘double voice’25 serves to distance and obscure the view of observable events, or the manner in which those events might be spectated were they to occur on stage. In my account, the persistent intervention of the characters’ own unspoken verbal manner in the description of physical phenomena, and the consequent exclusion of a disembodied narrator brings what Genette calls the ‘narrating instance’26 back to the condition of embodied spectating. In the absence of a narratorial yardstick, a heightened visual field is achieved by restricting focalisation to what the central character sees. Paralysis and Spectatorship: Henry James, Eleanora Duse, Yeats and Dubliners In the examples above, gestures in prose fiction resemble a performed movement seen on stage, or read in a stage direction: they are given without an account of an intentional state other than what is observed by the spectator. Joyce’s central characters, inhabiting the scenic space, yet so often detached from the events around them, approach the condition of the theatrical spectator. Observing speech and gesture as though from an auditorium, they are unable to intervene to alter the course of events on stage. This ‘paralysis’27 – Joyce’s own word to describe his stories – is an aspect of their constricted, inactive spectatorship. In The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty argues that ‘it is the experience that I make out of my hold on the world which makes me capable of perceiving another myself, provided that in the interior of my world 43

the speech-gesture complex

there opens up a gesture resembling my own’.28 In other words, we apprehend the illocution in a bodily gesture visually only because our own body gives us common access to a physical world in which that gesture holds significance. It is a form of embodied recognition, and depends on a capacity not merely to watch but to participate. The disengagement of Joyce’s characters from their surroundings consequently also disables their capacity to interpret gesture. Incapable of movement, Joyce’s Dubliners also become incapable of reading movement, like Lenehan in ‘Two Gallants’, who gets it wrong, observing Corley and his female companion, when he tries ‘to read the result in their walk’ (p. 64). In ‘A Little Cloud’, when Gallagher ‘in the act of drinking closed one eye expressively over the rim of his glass’ (p. 88), it is as obtuse a gesture for Chandler as it is for the reader, and signals a stark unfamiliarity between them which acquires specific resonance if placed beside an identical gesture in ‘Two Gallants’, where the friendship between the two companions is more established: ‘ “well . . . tell me, Corley, I suppose you’ll be able to pull it off all right, eh?” Corley closed one eye expressively as an answer’ (p. 55). Corley’s gesture is an affirmative wink which he explicitly offers ‘as an answer’, whereas Gallagher’s gesture, identically described, precedes a denial that he will ever settle down with a wife, ‘No blooming fear of that’ (p. 89). The contradiction makes the gesture difficult for Chandler to read, and the moment precipitates the end of their encounter. Chandler’s paralysed speech-gesture complex clouds both his view and the reader’s. These instances of failed reciprocity occur without a narratorial perception of their intentional states, and in this respect gestures in Dubliners significantly diverge from speech-gesture complexes ordinarily found in nineteenth-century and contemporary short prose fiction. Expressive physique in Maupassant – whose short stories are often cited as an influence on Dubliners, and whom Joyce described, during the writing of his own short stories, as ‘an excellent writer’29 – usually signals a relatively smooth passage from a given intention to its consequent movement: Without anger, she took hold of this daring hand and kept moving it away whenever he put it round her, but she felt no embarrassment at this caress; it seemed something quite natural which she was resisting just as naturally [. . .] She was feeling endless longings for happiness, and sudden moods of tenderness, and intimations of a transcendent poetic quality, and such a softening of her nerves and heart that she was weeping – she did not know why. The young man was now pressing her close to him; she was no longer pushing him away, nor did she even think of doing so.30 Here, there is an ease of encounter, a heightened instinctual reciprocity; the specular field is offered to a central observer aware of his own body ‘as the 44

james joyce

potentiality of that field’.31 Whereas the condition of paralysis which besets Duffy, Chandler and Lenehan – the result of a self-deception which represses or prevents the mutual cooperation of speech and gesture – is characterised by an inability to engage with their present circumstances. This serves to remove them from their dramatic surroundings and reduces them to passive spectators rather than embodied participants. Lenehan’s voyeuristic isolation allows the partial but empty fulfilment which the disengagement from his own body prevents him from achieving: when he reached the corner of Merrion Street he took his stand in the shadow of a lamp, and brought out one of the cigarettes which he had reserved and lit it. He leaned against the lamp-post and kept his gaze fixed on the part from which he expected to see Corley and the young woman return. (p. 63) Lenehan stands, his gaze fixed, in ‘the shadow of the lamp’. Darkness, as Stanton Garner observes, is a ‘pervasive extradramatic presence in the modern theatre [. . .] establishing the playing space through its boundaries, it [. . .] guarantees the audience’s invisibility’.32 Lenehan, in varying degrees, always stands in the shadows, even when he should be a participant, and this spectatorial passivity obstructs him at once from fully perceiving and inhabiting the space. Joyce observes an overlap between the reluctance of his Dubliners to inhabit their own bodies and the situation of the spectator in the darkened auditorium. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, ‘bodily space’ becomes ‘the darkness needed in the theatre to show up the performance, the background of ­somnolence [. . .] against which the gesture and its aim stand out’.33 The suppressed bodily presence of Joyce’s central observers, the disengagement of their bodies from their dramatic surroundings, their passivities and voyeurism and tendencies to live by proxy through the spectacle of others, all point towards a ­phenomenology of bodily perception which is peculiarly spectatorial. There are instructive parallels between the influence of naturalist performance on Joyce, and Henry James’s transformative encounter with Ibsen, together with his consequent failure as a playwright. As Michael Egan argues, after attending the premiere of Hedda Gabler in 1891, James actively began to support the difficult and controversial reception of Ibsen in London theatre-land.34 His absorption was both textual, through his association with William Archer, Ibsen’s translator, and performative, via his close relations with the American actress Elizabeth Robins, one of Ibsen’s chief actors. In 1893, during the production of The Master Builder in which Robins starred, ‘he attended not only rehearsals but almost every performance – and Archer records that thirty in all were given’. James, like Kafka and Joyce, had an acute awareness of the practicalities of performance for the stage – ‘it is impossible not to read [Ibsen] without perceiving that merely book in hand we but half 45

the speech-gesture complex

know him’35 – and of how this would inform his own plans for theatrical writing. James’s desperate struggle during 1890–5 for success in the theatre culminates in the spectacular critical and commercial failure in 1895 of Guy Domville, his Ibsenite play about a Catholic priest wrestling between his religious calling and worldly affairs.36 As Joseph Litvak demonstrates, James begins developing the scenic principle in The Tragic Muse (1890) – the sense of unity of space, finite perspective, and the inability to ‘go behind’ the novel’s central figure, the actress Miriam Sherringham – though it remains at this stage only a ‘metaphor and ideal of theatrical representation’, not having yet tightened into a principle of formal construction.37 After Guy Domville, a traumatised James retires from the theatre and returns to the novel with a renewed sense of dramatic method, partly learnt from Ibsen and his own deep and sustained thinking about performance. In his work 1895–9, as his biographer Leon Edel demonstrates, he develops the renowned ‘scenic principle’ of his novels as a reaction to his failure as a playwright. His fraught encounter with the stage prompts a shift in his writing from interiority and authorial intrusion to ‘scenic design: fiction conceived and executed in single-scene capsules and rendered, so far as possible, according to a dramatic analogy with all the objectivity, economy and visibility of the theatre’.38 Of the first novel he completes after Guy Domville – The Spoils of Poynton – he remarks: ‘I mustn’t interrupt it too much with elucidations or it will be interminable. IT MUST BE AS STRAIGHT AS A PLAY – that is the only way to do it.’39 Here, and in The Other House, What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age, James’s writing shifts from the narrative omniscience of the nineteenth-century novel, with its privileged access to the minds of the characters, to the limited spatial perspectives on events described as if through the eyes of a spectator in the theatre, a technique partly derived, as with Joyce, from his experience of watching actors performing in Ibsen. Ibsen’s influence bears his strongest imprint in The Other House – as Egan observes, ‘unalloyed, undistilled and hawked directly from the pages of Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm’40 – but I would argue that the influence is more paradoxical than Egan’s claims of an ‘unalloyed’ transference of the ‘objectivity, economy and visibility of the theatre’ into prose fiction. Its effect lies rather in the hinterland between the visibility of gestures as if on stage, and the opacity of gestures as incomplete textual signs. In The Other House, initially conceived as a play in 1893 before being transformed into and published as a novel in 1895–6, Rose Armiger drowns the daughter of Tony Bream, ostensibly to rid herself of her sexual rival, Jean Martle, by casting blame for the murder on her. The triangular relation is partly derived from the situation in Hedda Gabler between Hedda, Thea and Eilert Lovborg: Thea and Jean Martle are sweetly naïve; Hedda and Rose turn 46

james joyce

their strange cunning and malevolence to destruction, Hedda of Bilert’s manuscript, which Lovborg calls ‘like child murder’, and Rose of Tony’s daughter. James resists taking his account of events beneath the perceptible surface, denying recourse to internal monologue, and Rose’s motives are never clarified as they might have been in his earlier novels. He achieves this effect not only through Rose Armiger’s contradictory behaviour, reminiscent of Hedda Gabler, and Hilda in The Master Builder, but also by never allowing her deliberately opaque gestures fully to come into focus, and consequently never overtly showing her to be what she does. Rose’s indistinctness – ‘one really didn’t know whether she was awfully plain or strikingly handsome’,41 she is ‘a light sketch for something larger, a cluster of happy hints with nothing quite yet “put in” ’(p. 14) – allows her to mask her self-imposed equivocation of purpose, and to remain undetected through insidious aspect-shifts. James explicitly disavows third-person optics as a stabilising and referencing icon. Rose’s lack of hard, clear visible outline – ‘Rose exhibited some vagueness’ (p. 40), she ‘ambiguously murmured’ (p. 40), she ‘shook her head slowly and ambiguously’ (p. 73) – denies to the reader and to those around her a shared perceptual constancy. The lack of a real audience which could scrutinise her actions paradoxically allows her to implant, ‘like an actress’ (p. 86), her subtle implications: ‘Rose Armiger opened her eyes – there was perhaps a slight affectation in it’ (p. 25), she ‘hesitated in a way that almost suggested alternatives’ (p. 25). Tony Bream, lacking her skill at ambiguity, consistently fails to detect her subtle looks and the nuances of her performance, the way she puts on ‘a sudden tremor in her voice’ (p. 83), or the turns ‘that might have struck him had he not been following another train’ (p. 39). This performance of imperceptibility is one of the key elements of Rose’s character, and her indefinable expressions and motivations become an aspect of the novel’s indeterminacy and the deliberate perceptual constraints it imposes on the reader. James’s thematised split process of reading and spectating, as derived from Ibsenite naturalism, generates double hybrid constructions of gesture, by self-consciously foregrounding the performative, spectatorial aspect – what ‘might at this instant have struck a spectator’ (p. 45), what ‘would have been equally evident to a spectator’ (p. 63) – and the absence or incompletion of that performance, the inability of writing, what he calls ‘our sad want of signs for shades and degrees’ (p. 10), to make perceptible an action which might finally offer clarity to the situation. Gabriel in ‘The Dead’ is also stricken with spectatorial paralysis. He enters the Morkans’ house with ‘a call from the dark’, and is often seen ‘in a dark part of the hall’, imperceptible to the others and motionless while others continue unabated around him. His request, just prior to the moment he must take the limelight for his after-dinner speech – ‘kindly forget my existence, ladies and gentlemen’ (p. 226) – inflects this passive orientation and the accumulated 47

the speech-gesture complex

misreadings of gestures, as he is rebuffed or heckled by almost every woman present over the course of the evening. Unable to apprehend a gesture’s illocution because he is unable fully to take part, his own gestures suffer from an embarrassed sense of finding himself outside his element. They are ‘perplexed and inattentive’, or ‘thought-tormented’, and serve to distract attention from himself, and from the scene before him. He is frequently seen glancing ‘right and left nervously’, staring ‘blankly’ or trying ‘to cover his agitation’. The epiphany of Gretta, as he stands ‘in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase’, is presented as a tableau to which only he is witness, recognising her not as his wife but as a defamiliarised ‘woman [. . .] in terra-cotta and salmon-pink panels [. . .] which the shadow made appear black and white’ (p. 239). The arrangement of bodies, one observing while the other distantly listens to something else, anticipates their confrontation in the hotel room. Bob Doran in ‘A Boarding House’ is caught polishing his glasses – ‘every two or three minutes a mist gathered on his glasses so that he had to take them off and polish them’ (p. 71) – and then later again ‘his glasses became so dimmed with moisture that he had to take them off and polish them’ (p. 74). The gesture is symbolic of his inability to read the extent to which the object of his gaze, the music hall performer Polly Mooney, is putting on a show for him in order to dupe him into marrying her. Bernard Benstock notes of Doran that he exists in ‘literal entrapment’ and that ‘most critics point out that Joyce is exposing the institution of forced marriage’.42 Joyce takes the metaphor of entrapment further and imagines a marriage, forced or otherwise, as like the relation between a frustrated uncomprehending spectator and an actress always, to an extent, behaving as though she were unattainably on stage. Garry Leonard comments on Polly’s ‘theatrical flair’43 and her automatic instinct to perform for a crowd, as does Margot Norris, who asks if gestures such as the ‘agitation of her bosom’ Doran feels through her shirt ‘represent “her” own feeling or nature, or do they belong to a calculated performance?’44 A series of observable performances confronts both Doran and the reader, though Joyce elides intentional states which might confirm those performances as either genuine or theatrical. On stage, she plays the ‘naughty girl / You needn’t sham / You know I am’ (p. 67), although the role as the seduced, suicidal heroine in a melodrama, which she presents to Doran alone, sounds just as staged: ‘ “O Bob! Bob! What am I to do? What am I to do at all?” She would put an end to herself, she said’ (p. 72). Even when she is without an audience, Polly is seen performing the virgin on her bath night: she dips ‘the end of the towel in the water-jug and refreshed her eyes [. . .] looked at herself in profile and readjusted a hairpin above her ear’ (p. 74). She is an offstage actress in her dressing room, preparing for her next role as the respectable wife, appearing again in the ‘Cyclops’ chapter of Ulysses as Doran’s ‘little concubine of a wife wagging her tail up the aisle of the chapel with her patent boots on her, no less, and 48

james joyce

her violets, nice as pie, doing the little lady’ (p. 258: 811). Doran is too caught up in his role as a spectator to tell the real Polly from the fake, and there is an implication in Ulysses that his sense of Polly playing roles and masquerading for him is what he needs from her, and what defines him as her husband and spectator: he is last seen by Bloom in ‘Lestrygonians’, ‘sloping into the Empire [theatre]’ (p. 137: 29). The same year Joyce received a telegram from Ibsen, he also visited London to see the great Italian actress Eleanora Duse perform in D’Annunzio’s La Gioconda and La Città Morta.45 In the darkened theatres of London, Joyce fostered an infatuation for Duse which stayed with him for several years. After watching the two plays by D’Annunzio, both of them conceived and written for Duse,46 Joyce wrote her an encomiastic poem (unacknowledged by her, and which has not survived) and ‘procured a photograph of Duse which for a long time stood on his desk’. He later told Stanislaus that that she would be ‘an ideal actress for Ibsen parts’,47 though he had not yet seen her productions of, for instance, The Doll’s House, or Hedda Gabler. She went on to become, according to Ibsen’s Norwegian biographer Halvdan Koht, Ibsen’s most ‘perfect interpreter’.48 The writing of small-scale movements of the hand in Dubliners, in particular Gabriel’s visions of Gretta in ‘The Dead’, were partially filtered, I would argue, through his long-term attachment to Duse, and the memory of watching her perform from the darkness of the auditorium. Much of the surviving commentary on Duse draws attention to her power to articulate speechless interior struggle through tiny movements. Pirandello remarks that ‘she may have nothing to say during the whole scene; nevertheless she remains its central figure’.49 A review in The Nation comments on ‘her way of standing, of sitting, of holding some simple thing like a parasol; of handling a simple drapery like a little shawl’.50 Hofmannsthal saw her in Vienna in 1891 and ranked her alongside Nijinsky as ‘the greatest genius of mime’: she acts the transitions; she fills the gaps of motivation; reconstructs the psychological novel in the drama. With a pursing of the lips, a movement of a shoulder she portrays the maturing of a decision, the passing of a thought through the mind, the whole psycho-physical occurrence which precedes verbal expression.51 Duse had by 1900 already given definitive versions of Ibsen, and had ‘created for herself her own style [. . .] a sort of convention’,52 which consisted of rigidifying her neck, chest and shoulders, with either a backward curve for repressed characters mounting a resistance, such as Rebecca West, Nora and Hedda Gabler, or a forward curve, with hunched shoulders, for characters absorbed in interior struggle,53 or what Joyce called, in his 1900 essay on Ibsen, ‘painful introspection’.54 Pirandello remarked of her acting style that ‘the artistic skills of the actress seemed to be paralysed’.55 This semi-paralysis 49

the speech-gesture complex

of the torso would then foreground the articulations of repressed energy through her hands. D’Annunzio dedicates La Gioconda ‘to Eleanora Duse of the beautiful hands’,56 and her hands, evidently a distinguishing feature of her acting style, receive significant attention from commentators: ‘her hands are peculiar, attenuated and talon-like in the fingers, flat in the palm’;57 ‘she used her hands a great deal but did not “gesticulate” with them’;58 ‘her divine hands which seemed to talk [. . .] adding so much to the words actually spoken’.59 In Dubliners, bodies paralysed with inarticulacy, occasionally letting slip a repressed impulse with a small movement of the hand, bear witness to a meticulous attention both to Ibsen’s stage directions and to a performative style exemplified by the slight movements of Duse. When Gabriel’s hands are not engaged in a preset convention, as when he must carve the goose – ‘he felt quite at ease now, for he was an expert carver’ (p. 225) – they act as signals for his own sense of unease at the bustle which surrounds him. With the rest of the party engaged in performance, recitals and applause, Gabriel is seen by the window looking out: ‘Gabriel’s warm, trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window. How cool it must be outside!’ and later at the dinner table, his ‘trembling fingers leaning against table cloth’ (p. 218). His attitude of quiet restraint gives the impression to the party’s onlookers of self-command, although he only ever half-stifles his discomfort which surfaces often in smallscale momentary restlessness. After the misplaced remark to Lily about finding a young man, looking away from her, to disguise his embarrassment, he ‘flicked actively with his muffler at the patent leather shoes’ (p. 202). Then an attempt is made to dispel the gloom this incident casts over him by ‘arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie’. Gabriel’s strained gestures of distraction and embarrassed defensive strategies block him from fully perceiving or inhabiting his environment, the mark of a man who longs to remain inconspicuous in a place where he cannot easily de-emphasise his presence. His gestures testify to Stanislaus’s description of the origins of Dubliners’ technique: ‘ironical observations of slips, and little errors and gestures – mere straws in the wind – by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal’.60 Arthur Symons witnessed the London production of The Doll’s House in 1893, with Duse as Nora, and recalled ‘the quieting down of a tumult’ conveyed by the minutiae of her gestures.61 William Archer similarly describes the distinct absence of emphatic gesture, and of physical restraint which allowed the unconscious to work its way to the surface in discrete movements of the hands.62 Her version of Nora was radically different from previous interpretations. Betty Hennings at the Royal Theatre Copenhagen, 21 December 1879, played her with ‘nervous speed’, ‘rapidity of gesture’ and would ‘flutter about with childish officiousness’.63 Duse excised these coquettish elements and concentrated instead on Nora’s suppressed hysteria, caught up in a nervous exigency which seeks to preserve Helmer’s idea of marital relations. Duse’s 50

james joyce

Nora would only ever rise above the surface of semi-paralysis to twist and play with a handkerchief or her wedding ring. Nora, ‘deep in her own thoughts’ often ‘claps her hands’.64 In this respect she resembles Hedda Gabler, ‘clenching her hands together in desperation’,65 Mrs. Alving, who ‘wrings her hands and walks, in silent struggle, backwards and forwards’,66 and Rebecca West, who also ‘walks about clenching and wringing her hands’.67 By fastening their hands together, they keep disclosed what they know and feel about the situation. Duse’s reading of Ibsen’s stage directions clearly informs her performance style, as she strove to perfect the nuanced, minute down-playing of her gestures. This small-scale naturalism, as a performance style, in which signs of nervous apprehension briefly emerge from paralysis,68 acquires an amplified significance in ‘The Dead’. When Gabriel asks Gretta if she would like to go to the West of Ireland: ‘his wife clasped her hands excitedly and gave a little jump. “O, do go, Gabriel,” she cried. “I’d love to see Galway again” ’ (p. 218). Her hands partially allude to charged moments in Ibsen which display repression and its counterforce in a single gesture. Gretta’s hands simultaneously declare and suppress her nostalgia and excitement, an attempt to rein in the potency of her secret attachment to Galway and the figure of Michael Furey. Joyce does not paraphrase or ventriloquise Gretta’s thoughts, as he does Gabriel’s, he stages her, through speech and gesture which resemble the patterns of dialogue and stage direction in a playscript. The clasping of her hands is the initial gesture in a sequence which finally imagines her as an Ibsenite heroine, watched by her self-deluding spectator husband. Gabriel’s position in relation to his wife is one of interpretative failure as he struggles to read her gestures, to match his own lyricised self-absorption with the ‘mystery in her attitude’ (p. 240). As they travel back to the hotel, no word is exchanged as he presses her arm to his side and projects onto the silent figure of his wife his wild and radiant vision. In the hotel room, while under the same delusion, ‘slipping one arm swiftly about her body and drawing her towards him’ (p. 249) but not getting the reply he seeks, his reading of the scene begins to lapse into impalpability: ‘ “Gretta, what are you thinking about?” She did not answer nor yield wholly to his arm’ (p. 249). Gabriel tries to shake himself of an incipient disillusionment, continuing ‘to caress her hand’ though ‘it did not respond to his touch, but he continued to caress it just as he had caressed her first letter to him that spring morning’ (p. 252). He strains, with increasing desperation, to read her hand as though it were a love-letter. Although Gabriel’s ironised rancours and longings, his diffidence and sense of inadequacy and shame, as against the observable scene, take up the greater part of the narratorial description, it is Gretta’s embodied stage presence which gradually overwhelms him. In her moments of intense quietness, her statuesque poses, the smallness of her gestures and their hesitancy, suggesting the presence of an inaccessible interior struggle, Gretta performs the scene in the manner 51

the speech-gesture complex

of Duse playing Ibsen. Joyce writes Gretta, echoing eye-witness commentary on Duse, as giving the ‘impression of intimate soliloquy within her own soul or of someone conversing with invisible spirits’, and with a ‘melancholy and a quiet dignity [. . .] intense almost painful sincerity [. . .] neither self-conscious nor deliberate but impulsive’.69 Gabriel is made to watch a performance, at once resigned and capricious, showing in modulations surprise, disappointment and quiet contempt. With the recognition of his own insignificance as her husband, Gabriel’s bodily agency, unable to affect his wife, recedes into the background and fades away into imperceptibility: ‘his own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself [. . .] was dissolving and dwindling’ (p. 255). His inability to read his wife’s attitude is concomitant to his own paralysis and spectatorial passivity. It is suffused with Joyce’s reminiscence of watching Duse on stage, reading her mind through her gestures, his own identity fading out in a darkened room. Joyce models the separation between the dissolving and dwindling passive voyeur and the scene unfolding before him on the strict divide between stage and audience in fourth wall naturalist theatre, as pioneered by André Antoine’s productions of Ibsen. The paralysis of fourth wall naturalism’s passive gaze becomes for Joyce a defining condition of domestic life – Eveline cannot leave for Argentina, Chandler will never go to London, Bob Doran will be trapped in a forced marriage – but also of political life, and of the Irish political scene. The spectator in the auditorium entrapped in his seat and unable to alter events becomes a paradigm for the ‘hemiplegia of the will’ of the Irish, ‘who entrust their wills and minds to others that they ensure for themselves a life of spiritual paralysis’. For Joyce, the Catholic church and the British state as challenged by Parnell are paralysis-inducing spectacles – ‘individual initiative is paralysed by the influence and admonitions of the church, while its body is manacled by the police, the tax office, and the garrison’70 – as is the sentimental, idealised nationalism of Revivalist theatre exemplified by W. B. Yeats and the Abbey Theatre, and summoned in ‘The Dead’ by the ghost-like presence of Michael Furey. Joyce’s Ibsenite naturalism is in this respect an assertion of antipathy towards Yeatsian Revivalism. Commentators have located in Joyce’s politics an antithetical propensity towards Irish nationalism – as Emer Nolan puts it ‘nationalism [was] no more than an extension of British and Roman Catholic imperialism’71 – and nationalism’s conjoining of history and mythology, which, as Dominic Manganiello contends, serves to romanticise violence and blood sacrifice,72 but have not situated his position in relation to Yeats’s theatricalising of nationalist politics, and Joyce’s negotiations between the countercurrents of Revivalism and the modernity of European naturalism. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Irish theatre was an inescapably political matter, largely due to the powerful presence of Yeats, the central figure in the opening of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1898, and then the Abbey 52

james joyce

Theatre in 1904. The fall of Parnell incited the emergence of Irish cultural nationalism and the assertion of a national identity which would mitigate against English cultural influence; in 1897, a year before the opening of the Irish Literary Theatre at The Abbey, Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn wrote a letter outlining their plans for an Irish Literary Theatre: ‘We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery or easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of ancient idealism.’73 Explicit in the vision of Yeatsian Revivalism is the ideology of an ‘intensified sense of nationhood’ and, as Emer Nolan argues, ‘a reconstructed version of native or folk culture [...] a faith that “the people” – through an enhanced awareness of their common identity – will ultimately benefit from this aesthetic programme’.74 For Yeats, writing in 1899 on ‘The Literary Movement in Ireland’, ‘politics are, indeed, the forge in which nations are made, and the smith has been so long busy making Ireland according to His will that she may well have some important destiny’:75 the Irish Literary Theatre would provide Ireland with a model of a unifying ‘national institution’76 precisely aimed at forging a national political identity. Yeats, alongside Gregory, George Russell (AE), Edward Martyn, George Moore and others, selectively rewrote Celtic mythology, elevating the figures of Irish oral histories, such as Cuchulain, to a mythical embodiment of the people, in order to fashion a new nationalist literary culture. Yeats’s early plays, such as The Countess Cathleen (1882), The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894), Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), The Shadowy Waters (1904) and Deirdre (1907), draw heavily on the correlation of the romance of Celtic mythology and Irish nationalism. In The Countess Cathleen, a heroic melodrama derived from Celtic myth, English mercantile imperialists are allegorised as demons who bring plague and famine to Ireland and offer the peasants gold in exchange for their souls; the Countess offers the sacrifice of her soul in a grand romantic gesture to stop the peasants selling theirs; after she dies, Heaven cancels the deal, her soul is saved and the demons disappear. The presence of Yeatsian theatre reverberates in key moments in ‘The Dead’, when Miss Ivors and then Gretta speak of the West of Ireland, a region which represents for Yeats the sentimental allure of rural nationalism. Gabriel’s unease as he dances with the nationalistic Miss Ivors – she lays her ‘warm hand eagerly on his arm’, but he recoils from the gesture – is amplified, as Luke Gibbons suggests, by her political sentiments:77 the gesture accompanies her invitation to Gabriel to come to the West of Ireland, to which his hand, in its rejection of hers, provides an answer. He dismisses her reminder that Gretta is from the West of Ireland, as he also later disregards Gretta’s desire to visit the West, and she clasps her hands and exclaims she would love to see Galway again. As Christy Burns argues, Gabriel is caught between parallel resentments: ‘his refusal of cultural nationalism – ignited by Miss Ivors – and his envy of the strong, idealist passions brewed by Michael Furey and images 53

the speech-gesture complex

of Western Ireland associated with Gretta and her past’.78 Yeatsian heroic ­idealism, of the kind he mobilises in The Countess Cathleen, confers a sacrificial energy upon Michael Furey’s romantic gesture. Gabriel watches Gretta, as she in turn watches the melodramatic Michael Furey, now vanished from view, in a version of the love triangle Joyce extends in Exiles and Ulysses. Gabriel becomes a spectator in the theatre of Revivalism, experiencing by proxy an idealist intensity, romantic and nationalistic in equal measure, that he had never felt for himself. But Furey’s performance of histrionic sentimental extremism – he is an uncompromising Irish martyr – is undermined by its spectrality. Gabriel must imagine the staging of the scene through Gretta’s account. Joyce further deprives the performance of its substance by filtering it through the consciousness of a man deeply resistant to the idealising tendency of Revivalism. Michael Furey, the Revivalist hero, dissolves and dwindles just as Gabriel does, and what remains is the powerful impression of Gretta’s performance in the naturalist style of Duse. As Taxidou notes, ‘Naturalism and its conventions are tied up with the specific representation of the female’, a figure of ‘self-reliance and self-fulfilment’;79 this new figure emerges in theatre history as an alternative to the familiar idealised version of femininity in melodrama. Histrionic melodrama, for Joyce, constituted an oppressive structure of thought, both for women, and also, by allegorical extension, for Ireland. Critics have read Gretta’s attachment to the West of Ireland as embodying the attraction of the Yeatsian idea, and of Gretta as a symbol or feminine embodiment of the national spirit.80 I would argue, contrary to these claims, that Gretta counteracts the Revivalist element through an Ibsenite performance style which exceeds in power and grace the melodramatic, heroic grand style of Irish Revivalism as suggested by Michael Furey. For Joyce, the Irish Revivalist theatre, in dealing exclusively with Irish identity, in its surrender to the ‘rabblement’, and its courting of populist heroic mythology, had ‘cut itself adrift from the line of advancement’. For Joyce, this ‘advancement’ was political as well as aesthetic: an authentic literature, and here he agrees with Wagner, is ‘revolutionary because its very existence is opposed to the ruling spirit of the community’.81 His allegiance to Ibsen and European naturalism is in this respect a political gesture of resistance against the ruling spirit of Yeatsian Revivalism, a way of rejecting its central claims. Yeats’s view of Ibsen – ‘why did [his characters] not speak out with louder voices or move with freer gestures?’82 – embodied for Joyce a politically redemptive performance style which pitches the commonplace, small-scale gesture, made by ‘men and women as we meet them in the real world, not as we apprehend them in the world of faery’83 against the aggressive grand gestures of Irish heroic mythology. These heroic gestures, with their emphasis on the need for ‘blood sacrifice’,84 permit and incite the romantic lure of political 54

james joyce

violence in the name of an artificially constructed, and dangerously one-sided – Yeats spoke primarily on behalf of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency – cultural nationalism. As Joyce told Padraic Colum, ‘violence in the physical life, and sentimentality in the emotional life, were equally distressing’.85 In this respect, Joycean naturalism does not, as Elin Diamond would claim, ‘operate in concert with ideology’,86 nor is it, as Michael Egan puts it, ‘the serious, heroic and even tragic treatment, in art, of the ruling class’.87 By filtering naturalist performance style through his prose fiction, thematising the split process of reading and spectating, and the paradox of reading a performance invisible to the eye, Joyce undermines straightforward claims about naturalism’s simple conviction in the effectiveness of language to represent reality, and shows forth its emphasis on the diurnal, on Ibsen’s ‘capacity to destroy idealist notions of femininity’88 as a counterforce to Revivalism’s sentimental idealisation of women, and its tendency to allegorise Ireland through female characters. Slips of the Hand in Exiles While in Trieste, Joyce attended performances with great frequency, remarking: ‘the Italians have an immense genius for the theatre’.89 Though the documentation of plays he attended is scarce, it is certain he saw Duse – ‘the queen of the Italian stage’, in the words of Gordon Craig90 – perform in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm on 28 February 1908.91 He had not yet begun to write Exiles, though his comparison of this performance with La Città Morta in 1900 suggests the force of a visual memory which could easily recall the details of a performance several years earlier. Symons describes the signature-tune gestures in Duse’s performance: ‘her beautiful firm hand grasping the arm of the chair without movement; but so slightly that the knuckles grow rigid; her body droops sideways in the chair, her hand rests on the other hand, the eyes are like a drowsy flame; the whole body thinks’.92 Symons’s account foregrounds the importance, in drama for the stage, of bodily process as much as speech. Duse talks as much with her hands as her tongue, and ‘to talk with one’s hands is in some measure to think with one’s hands’.93 When Rosmer asks Rebecca West to leave behind their platonic relations and the restless shade of his late wife, and marry him, Rebecca briefly seizes up; the stage direction shows her ‘feeling for the chair back’. It is a heightened moment, which Duse, one imagines, depicted by rigidifying her knuckles to repress the energies of her thinking hand. Helmer, as he asks for her hand in marriage, might look to her hand for an answer. Rebecca is compelled, not having yet confessed to Rosmer her role in the suicide of his wife, to continue showing her disinterest, her fearlessness and self-command. His proposal, in that instant, forces a concealed impulse to surface in the small movement of her hand across the chair, though the exact nature of that impulse is unclear. She quickly recovers her poise, and when Rosmer questions her refusal, she ‘seizes both his hands’ and replies: ‘dear friend – both for your own sake and 55

the speech-gesture complex

for mine – do not ask why. Lets go his hands’.94 The radical equivocality of these gestures signals a series of conflicting intentions which range from her suppressed desire for Rosmer, to her guilt, newly awakened by his high-minded influence, at the malign deception of his wife. Freud’s analysis of Rosmersholm relies exclusively on the dialogue. Surprisingly, he does not apply his own theory of ‘symptomatic’ actions, those small gestures which betray the role of unconscious intention in their enactment, revealing inclinations or attitudes which would otherwise remain hidden or disguised. Joyce’s meticulous attention to the slightest movements of the hand in Exiles, which outdoes even Ibsen in the level of its detail, testifies to his first encounter during 1910–11 – between seeing Duse perform Rosmersholm and the writing of Exiles – with Freud’s work on parapraxes. One of his Trieste pupils, Paolo Cuzzi, remembers discussing ‘Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis’ with him: ‘he talked with Joyce about slips of the tongue and their significance’.95 Though no mention is made of slips of the hand, their obsessive magnification in Exiles implies a direct acquaintance with Freud’s theories on symptomatic actions. In Freud’s view, states of mind are manifested, almost without exception, in the tensions and relaxations of facial muscles, in the adaptions of the eyes, in the amount of blood in the vessels of the skin, in the modification in vocal apparatus and in the movements of limbs and in particular of the hands.96 These suggestive non-verbal phenomena can obstruct the attempted concealment of a mental process. Freud describes a symptomatic act as one ‘which people perform [. . .] unconsciously, without attending to [it], as if in a moment of distraction’; it manifests an unconscious intention which has momentarily ‘come to the surface’.97 This ‘concurrent action – or perhaps rather, the mutually opposing action – of two different intentions’,98 is a conspicuous phenomenon in Exiles, where ambiguous Ibsenite gestures of repressed energy become inflected with Freudian analysis. As Robert’s attempted seduction of Bertha becomes more apparent, Richard’s façade of self-possession begins to reveal barely perceptible cracks, in the form of symptomatic acts. When he attempts to speak calmly to Robert – ‘Your advances to her, little by little, day after day, looks, whispers. [With a nervous movement of the hands]. Insomma, wooing’99 – his hand escapes his control, involuntarily hints at his secret and a split complex of attitudes towards his wife. On the one hand, he embraces the hypothetical situation of her infidelity with Robert, and takes steps to arrange it: accepting her sexual liberty means freeing his mind from a perpetually clawing and uncertain jealous suspicion. But this distance, the moral attitude on which he prides himself, is a performed deception, for others and himself, in order that Bertha and Robert may act 56

james joyce

unhindered and of their own volition. His conscious intentions arrange the scene so that his wife and friend are free to lie together, while his unconscious intentions, signalled by his hands, are directed towards the prevention of this ever happening, ‘unwilling to carry out the [conscious] intention’.100 For Freud, ‘psychic freedom’101 in the way Richard conceives it is an illusion which involves the forgetting of intentions contrary to those which are immediately apparent. Richard’s striking composure in those rare instances where he confesses his suffering draw attention to the timing of his confession as insincere, yet his nervousness when speaking calmly to Robert reveals his attitude towards his wife as split between jealous possessiveness and libertarian distance. As Richard attempts to obstruct the revelation of his thoughts, his symptomatic gestures serve as trustworthy indicators of the nervousness underpinning his apparent grasp of the situation. The notion of symptomatic acts offers a framework which reinforces the simultaneity of conflicting intentions in the same speech-gesture complex. But Freud’s view, that physical parapraxes always occur in a state of conscious inapprehension, is less conclusive in instances of misrecognition where the grounds for cross-purposes are necessarily undefined. To pronounce gestures in Exiles as unconscious, in the Freudian sense, is to offer a conclusive rationale to which the gesture, as given, is not exclusively confined. Gestures in Exiles often ask the reader-spectator to make an inference at odds with the tone of the verbal utterance. The play explores ‘counterpositions of modes of insincerity’102 by staging gestures of convention and artifice, alongside the speakers’ efforts to read behind those conventions. Richard conceals his mistrust of Robert by resort to the gestures of etiquette; his considered ‘smiles and bows’, ‘nodding’ and ‘rising’ (p. 52) maintain an unruffled surface from which he calmly surveys Robert’s potential designs on his wife, Bertha. His effort in deducing Robert’s intentions often relies on inferences made in the act of spectating the deceptive outward show of demonstrative gestures, or their suppressed absence. There is a strong implication that Richard spies on Robert’s advances from another room: ‘Robert: You were watching us all the time? Richard: [Very coldly]. I was watching you’ (p. 84). Robert is first seen coming towards Bertha ‘with outstretched hand which she takes’ (p. 30). He frequently ‘comes nearer’ to Bertha (p. 39), and stays proximate ‘beside her’ (p. 39) while Richard attentively keeps his distance. Robert’s gestures are fervent and sentimental – ‘he kisses her with passion, holding her head between his hands’ (p. 47) – though it is uncertain whether his courtship of Bertha is not feigned with a view to the betrayal of Richard. With Robert fixed in his ‘steady gaze’ (p. 97), Richard is constantly observed ‘recovering himself’ (p. 26) while he speaks ‘coldly’ and ‘with sudden self control’ (p. 28): these qualities are as much a gestural as a vocal attitude. His gestures are slight and convey an air of self-possession. Whilst aware 57

the speech-gesture complex

that ­competence in expressive gesture is often a sleight of hand, an attempt to distract the unwary observer, Richard also understands the principle that ‘the hands are especially designed to discharge nervous tension [. . .] they are very rarely in repose; continually they reflect by minute gestures and slight changes of posture the processes of the mind’.103 A slight movement of the hand might let slip what he thinks and feels about the situation, and his strategy depends on not giving away his anger and mistrust of Robert, whom he suspects of simulating their friendship ‘in order to lull and stupefy the vigilance of his mind’ (p. 165). This allows him to concentrate on observing shades of ambiguous expression in Robert’s gestures. He remains throughout in a state of interpretative suspicion, struggling to read the implied concealments behind the suddenness and enthusiasm in a gesture. The barely perceptible struggle to keep interior deliberation hidden from view circumscribes Richard’s hand movements. His most characteristic gesture involves ‘clasping his hands quietly’ (p. 23), he only ever ‘joins his hands earnestly’ (p. 21), and this serves to keep to himself his emotional strategies and bearings. When his blood is up, he halts, ‘thrusting his hands in his pockets’ (p. 71), or ‘restrains a sudden gesture’ (p. 76). Robert consistently tries to goad him into disclosing his possible resentment against Bertha, though Richard holds out with unflagging self-command: ROBERT: Not only for your sake. Also for the sake of – your present partner in life. RICHARD: I see. [He crushes his cigarette softly on the ashtray and then leans forward, rubbing his hands slowly]. (p. 52) In fragments of dialogue for initial drafts of the play,104 the end is approached with Richard Rowan addressing Bertha: ‘O how I loved you then! My little bride! My little bride in exile!’; the preceding stage direction recalls Mrs. Sinico’s gesture: ‘seizing her hands, kisses her passionately’.105 Nowhere in the final version is Richard so demonstrative or tactile in his gestures; in the first edition’s equivalent section, he merely sighs. In situations when this tactile distance with Bertha is breached, when he speaks with emotional directness, he quickly ‘lets her hand fall’ (p. 103), or ‘releases his hand’ (p. 162), and this obstructs a straightforward reading of his intentions by disavowing gesture’s merely illustrative function. Similarly, when Richard declares to Bertha: ‘O, if you knew how I am suffering at this moment! For your case, too. But suffering most of all for my own’, the stage direction reads: ‘leans back, his hands locked together behind his head’ (p. 25). The ease and composure in the stage direction signals reflective deliberation rather than anxious involvement. His hands give away his coldness in the moment he confesses his emotional dependency and suffering. They articulate an intention to disentangle himself from the mess of contingency, to sit apart from the spectacle before him, like 58

james joyce

a playwright amongst his characters, and stage manage the physical affections and possible infidelity of his wife. The substantive variants in Exiles indicate the minute re-examination to which many of these gestures were subjected, in light of the Ibsen–Duse effect. There are 112 substantive variations from the fair copy manuscript to the first edition, of which forty-six concern the stage directions. Joyce stripped from Richard’s interactions with Bertha nearly all supportive speech and gesture, so that she is left to act from a position of uninfluenced freedom. In the revisions, Bertha too becomes less emphatic in her gestures. In the fair copy manuscript, when Robert, drenched in rain, re-enters the cottage in Act II, Bertha ‘lays her hands on his arms’, whereas in the first edition, Bertha ‘lays her hand on his arm’: both hands and arms become singular, her bodily attitude to Robert becomes more reserved, implying a heightened instinctive caution. In the process of authorial emendation, Richard’s movements are revised to allow Bertha more freedom; she in turn is shown as adopting this freedom warily. These results are achieved by presenting the gestures they make as indeterminate, so that intentions are less evidently affirmed. Like Dubliners, the politics of Exiles works by allegorising the personal: the technique which embodies two simultaneous conflicting intentions, with gesture counteracting speech, as in Dubliners, indicates not only the contradictions of an attitude to marital betrayal, but also of political betrayal, and of the ambiguities and uncertainties of the ‘divided consciousness of the colonial subject’. As Emer Nolan argues, Joyce’s critics observe in his critical writings about Irish nationalism and colonialist violence a ‘detached ambivalence’, while in his fiction these uncertainties and hesitations take the form of a ‘painful deadlock’.106 The conflict between outwardly calm detachment and fraught ambivalence, as revealed by the minute gestures which counteract speech in Exiles, is an aspect of Joyce’s thinking about the divided consciousness of the political subject, unable to accept either British colonial violence, or the violence of nationalism’s advocacy of immanent cultural unity. Joyce embodies these conflicts and self-divisions within his individual characters and in the allegorical connotations of their gestures. As Andrew Gibson notes of Ulysses, ‘colonial culture necessarily promotes self-fabrication and self-alienation’.107 For Joyce, the defining feature of Irish history is its split identity, and its impossible struggle to maintain conflicting loyalties, within a coherent body-politic which includes, on the one hand, an English sovereignty, begun in 1171 under Henry II, with its dual Irish and English legal system, and on the other, Irish nationalism’s ideology of an original national unity, fragmented over time but restorable through violence, transcending, as David Lloyd puts it, ‘historically determined cultural and political differences and form[ing] the reconciliatory centre of national unity’.108 Joyce partly admires Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, and writes to Stanislaus of 59

the speech-gesture complex

his support of commercial boycotts; but he is appalled at the prejudice such nationalism inevitably generates: ‘What I object to most of all in his paper, is that it is educating the people of Ireland on the old pap of racial hatred.’109 Where Yeats envisaged a national theatre modelled on a transcendental idea of cultural wholeness which would include both performer and audience, Joyce imagines diverse isolated spectators, riven with unresolvable contradictions, complicities and betrayals. Ireland’s ‘history of self-betrayal’110 is most powerfully marked for Joyce in the fall of his political hero, Charles Stuart Parnell, whose presence in Exiles is marked in the Notes: ‘The two greatest Irishmen of modern times – Swift and Parnell – broke their lives over women.’111 The note here on ‘the relations between Mrs. O’Shea and Parnell’ reinforces the historical and political reading of Joyce’s exploration of marital relations. His affair with the wife of Captain William O’Shea deposed Parnell and with him a Home Rule Bill in its advanced stages. According to Joyce, Parnell was ‘perhaps the most formidable man that ever led the Irish’,112 the figurehead for Home Rule, whose brilliant campaign for Irish Home Rule in the 1870s led to the introduction of the first Home Rule Bill by Gladstone in 1886. He successfully negotiated his way through disruptions to his programme by nationalist violence, in particular the assassination of the British Undersecretary and the new Chief Secretary in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, and united fragmented political factions, parliamentarians and the church. Parnell’s affair with Katherine O’Shea was an open secret from 1886, and, as Dominic Manganiello notes, ‘what impressed Joyce was Parnell’s indifference to moral convention in Catholic Ireland’.113 The scandal his affair caused was largely exacerbated by Catholic bishops who turned against him, orchestrating the by-election defeat of April 1891 in North Sligo, which effectively ended his parliamentary career, and with it the dream of Home Rule. The fall of Parnell was the lens through which Joyce viewed Ireland’s self-betrayal: No honourable and sincere man [. . .] has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another.114 In ‘The Home Rule Comet’, he wrote that Ireland had ‘betrayed her heroes, always in the hour of need and always without gaining recompense’.115 In a letter to Stanislaus of 1906, Joyce compared his sexual rival, Oliver St-John Gogarty to MacNally and Reynolds, the bishops who betrayed Parnell. This sense of the interchangeability of personal and political instincts is reinforced in the echoes between Richard Rowan’s remark that ‘There is a faith still stranger than the faith of the disciple in his master [. . .] The faith of a master in the disciple who will betray him’ (p. 58) and Joyce’s view that ‘one of the disciples who dipped his hand in the same bowl with [Parnell] would 60

james joyce

betray him’.116 Joyce’s critical analysis of the uncertainties and contradictions between Richard, Robert and Bertha is informed by the catastrophic relation between the personal and the political in relation to Parnell. Exiles represents Joyce’s thinking about the uncertainties of moral equivalents, a conflicted attempt to overcome the morality of the institution of marriage, of the insignificance of marital betrayal next to the betrayal of Parnell and of Irish Home Rule, and of Ireland as enslaved in an unhappy marriage to England. Political extremism quickly filled the vacuum after the fall of Parnell, with the rise of Sinn Fein, on the one hand, and Revivalism on the other. As Yeats put it, ‘The fall of Parnell had freed imagination from practical politics, from agrarian grievance and political enmity, and turned it to imaginative nationalism, to Gaelic, to the ancient stories, and at last to lyric poetry and drama.’117 Joyce continues to articulate his resistance to the extremism of either side by resort to the methods of naturalism, where he found an innovative, politically progressive modernity, and a means to define a hesitant, divided, uncertain colonial consciousness, caught between unresolvable contradictions. The performance style of small-scale Freudian–Ibsenite gestures remains a key element of his aesthetics and politics as late as Exiles and Ulysses, long after modernist abstraction and estrangement had supplanted and denounced an increasingly conservative naturalism. As Olga Taxidou observes, Yeats belongs to the modernist tradition of externality and formal experiment. He had already developed an anti-illusionist aesthetic as early as The Countess Cathleen, with its ‘static tableau-formations, non-realistic sets, chanted dialogue and creative lighting to portray the set but also the mood’.118 This aesthetic is further elaborated in his 1911 Abbey Theatre collaboration with Edward Gordon Craig on The Hour Glass, with its innovative use of screens to present a radically anti-illusionist scenic space and stylised, ritualistic gesture, in the manner of the Noh and Eastern influenced European modernist experiments of the time. As with Dubliners, the prevailing view that Joyce ‘resolved to demythologise the pretensions of the Revival in the name of a thoroughgoing modernism’ is undermined, in terms of performance culture, by his thoroughgoing anti-modernism, and the failure of Exiles is partly the result of his attachment to the increasingly passé method of naturalist interiority and restraint. Joyce’s director of choice for a Paris production of Exiles, Aurélien LugnéPoë, turned it down in favour of a play by Fernand Crommelynck called Le Cocu Magnifique, staged at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in 1920. Joyce later explained why Exiles was not acted in Paris. Le Cocu Magnifique took the wind out of the sails of Exiles. The jealousy motive is the same in kind in both cases. The only difference is that in my play the people act with a certain reserve, whereas in Crommelynck’s play the hero, to mention only one person, acts like a madman.119 61

the speech-gesture complex

A comparison with Le Cocu Magnifique, against the tendency to situate Exiles within extended critiques of Joyce’s novels, rather than in the performance culture of its time, assists in revealing why Exiles has proved ill-suited to the stage. The ‘certain reserve’ with which Joyce characterises his play is both a vocal quality and a physical condition, manifest in stage directions without which the play loses its force. The lack of action which commentators observe is partly a result of the frequently imperceptible on-stage tensions between speech and gesture. The static procedures are the background against which tiny movements of the hand map out the developing tensions and crises. Exiles relies on static reserve and the articulation of body parts as though separate from the total body-image, whereas Le Cocu, despite thematic similarities, presents a radically different version of speaking bodies, and its production demonstrates the extent to which Joyce’s minute permutations, in themselves not ideally suited to the perceptual fields of the proscenium arch, failed to chime with the new spirit of externality and experiment in theatre culture. Le Cocu’s central figure, Bruno, puts his jealousy to the test by forcing Stella, his wife, to sleep with all the men in the village, thinking her non-existent lover will reveal himself. His gestures are characterised by a total lack of restraint. In one scene, he demands that his friend admire his wife’s breasts: ‘feverishly he opens the bodice of the young woman’. 120 Whereas Richard manages to contain his suspicions by controlling his bodily expression, Bruno’s jealousy, as it turns into psychotic delusion, takes possession of every gesture he makes. As he loses the physical possession of his wife to other men, so he loses his self-possession: ‘Bruno: Every gesture, every word of Stella, every beat of her heart, her silence and her immobility, whether she’s awake or sleeping, all that pertains to her in time and space, is a reason for my anxiety.’ This literal rendering of physical possession is what underpins Bruno’s jealousy. He cannot accept her physical separateness, and this leads him to a severance between his instincts and his body. The mania of his suspicions takes possession of his body, whereas Richard manages to contain these suspicions by controlling his bodily expression. The darkly farcical final scene is the culmination of Bruno’s inability to interpret the language of dumbshow. His hermeneutic capacity throughout the play is based on assuming Stella will not publicly demonstrate affection for her imaginary lover, and that she may feign affection with others in order to keep him hidden: Stella and the Young man from Oostkerke remain quiet. Not a gesture, not a look. Two statues. Bruno: Your silence and your discretion give you away. This immobility means as much as an embrace.121 Bruno is consistently observed failing to secure the illocutionary uptake in the stage directions. Having reduced the role of the other characters to players on 62

james joyce

the stage of his own trauma, Bruno, usually seen arranging the scene as he wills so that he can (mis)read it in a particular way, becomes a director who ignores stage directions which would correct his error, so he can stage a private vision of infidelity. Lugné-Poë’s hyper-kinetic production inspired Meyerhold’s famous Biomechanical production of Le Cocu in 1922, at the Actors’ Theatre, Moscow. The Biomechanical law of balance between actor and character was applied to express the malign will which inhabits Bruno’s gestures: there is already a Biomechanical quality in the script which helped influence the development of the new performance style. Erast Garin, in an account of the first performance at the Actors’ Theatre, remarked: Bruno stood before the audience, pale face motionless [. . .] at the same time this Bruno was being ridiculed by [Bruno’s] actor performing acrobatic stunts at the most impassioned moments of his speeches, belching and comically rolling his eyes whilst enduring the most dramatic anguish.122 The simultaneous operation of two opposed wills in one body, that of Bruno ‘pale faced and motionless’, and the actor playing Bruno ‘performing acrobatic stunts’, served as an analogue for the split intentions Bruno has towards his wife, at once insanely jealous, and yet forcing her to sleep with other men to catch her non-existent lover. Manifest in ‘Biomechanics’, a training method for his actors, it was Meyerhold’s conviction that relationships on stage are ‘determined by gestures, poses, glances and silences’, that ‘in the new theatre, speech and plasticity are each subordinated to their own separate rhythms and the two do not necessarily coincide’.123 Meyerhold would instruct his players to begin with external physical techniques and from there work inwards towards psychological centres. An emotional reaction was the consequence, and not the cause, of a physical reaction, itself triggered by a physical stimulus. Exercises were developed in gesture and movement, which were then broken down into physical stimulus, physical reaction and emotion.124 These studies train the actor’s sense of balance, between himself and his part, serving to distance the actor’s body from his role, and signal formal correlatives for intentional states. Bruno’s self-created trauma is thematised as a total body-image, by playing on the notion that an actor’s body ‘acquires its mimetic and representational powers by becoming something other than itself’.125 Bruno, as an intentional agent, for the duration of the performance, is exiled from his own body, and must enact gestures according to the imperatives of his jealous mania. These techniques are contrary to Exiles, where hidden intentions precede their physical manifestation. In the process of composition, Joyce allocated intentions to his characters prior to the conception of dialogue and gesture. He wrote these intentions, found in the notes at the back of the play, and 63

the speech-gesture complex

i­mpractical as guides for stage management, before the play itself was drafted.126 The gesturing body in Exiles conceals hidden eddies of desire, given away in scarcely perceptible slips of the hand. Despite his admiration for Duse’s performance in The Doll’s House in 1892, even William Archer began to notice the recurring problems of imperceptibility in naturalist theatre. In the scene where Krogstad points out a crucial discrepancy between dates on the loan agreement form, Duse’s reaction, as Archer notes, was minimal to the point of being scarcely visible.127 The audience could not see her subtle expression of surprise and apprehension, likely expressed with a flutter of the hand. This problem is more acute in Exiles, where small-scale iconic utterance demands a representation which gives it a valency equal to speech. This emphasis is difficult to achieve on stage and is often imperceptible in a proscenium arch theatre. ‘In the beginning was the gest’: ‘Circe’, Early Cinema and the ‘Art of Gestures’ Joyce’s writing for the stage met largely with disappointment and failure. The rejection by Yeats in 1904, on behalf of the Abbey Theatre, of his translations of Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise and Michael Kramer anticipated Yeats’s eventual rejection of Exiles in 1915. Exiles sustained years of rejection by theatres. Yeats refused it on behalf of the Abbey Theatre in 1915, and Archer ‘did not much care’ for its ‘form of realism’.128 Exiles suffers, in my view, from two related problems. Firstly, Joyce’s attachment to naturalist theatre, which by 1920 had receded from the avant-garde, was increasingly anachronistic; naturalism’s original radical intent was being supplanted by the resurgent anti-naturalist school of Meyerhold, whose ideas and performance style would have such a transformative effect on Brecht in the early 1920s. Next to the aesthetic and political advancements of this school, Ibsenite naturalism was beginning to look distinctly passé; yet for Joyce, this performance style, in theatre at least, remained his preferred mode of articulation against Yeatsian ritual melodrama. The problem of Exiles in performance is also to a large extent related to the intricate patterns of hand gestures in the stage directions. Ezra Pound voices a majority view of Exiles: ‘I don’t believe an audience could follow it or take it in, even if some dam’d impracticable manager were to stage it.’129 John MacNicholas, in his survey of the play’s reception, remarks: ‘it is generally agreed, perhaps especially among Joyceans, that Exiles is a bad play, opaque to both reader and viewer’,130 an opinion borne out by ‘the infrequency of its performance’.131 A review of its English premiere at the Neighbourhood Playhouse, New York, in 1924 complained of the ‘lack of every vestige of action’.132 The 1926 London production at the Regent Theatre was also ‘rather tedious and lacking in action’.133 The reviews agree about lack of perceptibility 64

james joyce

and the script’s uneasy transfer to the stage, but they do not explicitly mention the importance of those detailed, almost imperceptible gestures, revealing intentions contrary to the dialogue, and easily overlooked in a proscenium arch theatre. As Joyce approached the writing of ‘Circe’ – the only text, other than Exiles, to make extensive use of stage directions – he remained desperate for the play to be performed in Paris, remarking: ‘an unperformed play is really a dead deportee’.134 ‘Circe’ invokes the technical language of the proscenium stage – ‘From left upper entrance with two sliding steps Henry Flower comes forward to left front centre’ (p. 421, 2478–9) – only then to undermine its capacity to signal performable acts of the staged body. Joyce mercilessly cuts up the proscenium, and this is partly the consequence of his fraught relations with the language of the stage. He writes ‘Circe’ against a background both of his personal failure in the theatre, and during a period of crisis for European theatre in general, which was losing its audiences to the cinema. As early as 1914 in France, ‘the cinema had largely supplanted the theatre and café-concert [. . .] in the provinces and had become a strong rival to them in the larger cities’.135 In its parodies of Irish Revivalist theatre,136 ‘Circe’ is partly Joyce’s affront to Yeats’s rejection of Exiles; the chapter takes energetic revenge on the theatrical institutions which refused his playscripts and frustrated his long-held ambition. The consequent peculiar cross-pollination of theatrical tableaux with introceptive focal points, and the discovery of a performance style beyond the scope of the stage, which can amplify the significance of small-scale symptomatic acts and bestow upon them an emphasis equivalent to speech, reveals a sustained awareness of film technique, the chapter’s natural province. From 1902, when he stayed at the Grand Hôtel Corneille in the Rue Corneille, two miles from the Théâtre Robert-Houdin owned by Méliès, until Paris in the twenties, when, according to Patricia Hutchins, ‘he went frequently to the movies, usually between dusk and dinner time when he could no longer work’,137 Joyce witnessed early film history from the exhibitionist ‘cinema of attractions’138 circa 1904, to the gradual formation of syntactic conventions, perceptual fields and the dismemberment of the gesturing body. The waltz and twirl in ‘Circe’ between language and iconicity occurs under a narrative gaze trained to read the performed gestures in films, from their earliest inception right up to the chapter’s composition in 1920–1. Joyce situates the moment of film history in 1904 retrospectively from the vantage point of later developments in film technique, and the breaking up of theatrical space, and the body, into focal points and shots of varying distance. The chapter’s stage directions demonstrate an ease and fluency with the technique of the shot sequence, moving the narration forward in cells, wholes rendered by parts, showing forth a method which clearly transgresses the confines of the proscenium arch, 65

the speech-gesture complex

where the spectator would observe the enacted scene as a whole in space, according to the total measurements of the actors’ bodies: Bloom walks on a net, covers his left eye with his left ear, passes through several walls, climbs Nelson’s Pillar, hangs from the top ledge by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters (shells included), heals several sufferers from king’s evil [. . .] turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back, eclipses the sun by extending his little finger. (p. 404: 1841–51) I wish to extend the territory of scholarship on Joyce’s film-literate prose139 by relating the chapter’s aesthetics and politics, its ‘art of gestures’ – Joyce’s own category in his Notesheets140 – to the history of spectatorship and performance style in early cinema, in light of his description of the chapter’s figures as ‘cinema fakes’,141 and his fraught relations with the theatre. Joyce had begun to think about representational overlaps between film and writing as far back as 1906, for instance, in a sixty-miles-an-hour hyperbole to Stanislaus which ends with the line: ‘the Italian imagination is like a cinematograph, observe the style of my letter’.142 His remark in 1924 that ‘the book [Ulysses] could not be translated into another language, but might be translated into another medium, that of the film’,143 testifies to his fascination with the perceptual reality of cinema’s ‘mute world’ (p. 424: 2575), and the compositional energy of aspect-shifts between acts of reading and spectatorship. At a showing of the Lumières’ Arrivée d’un train at the Grand Café in 1895, one spectator was heard to announce ‘la langue universelle est trouvée’;144 this is echoed by Stephen in the chapter’s opening declaration: ‘so that gesture [. . .] would be a universal language’ (p. 353: 106). ‘Circe’ conjures an imaginary audience for Nighttown, a crowd of observers assembled to watch scenes from the private lives of Stephen and Bloom; yet these scenes and the assembled audience are imaginary – they belong in a novel, not in concrete space – and Bloom and Stephen, and by extension the reader, who shares their predicament, are constantly made aware of their readerly isolation and failure to experience events in Nighttown as a collective experience. As David Hayman and Fritz Senn argue, physical routines in ‘Circe’ are partly an aspect of mimographic evocations which enact movement through acoustic effects.145 At the same time, the technical language and proxemic stage codes, the detailed blocking of the cast, the elaborate physical routines in the stage directions, according to Katie Wales, foreground the chapter’s essential iconicity.146 As Derek Attridge observes, the language in Ulysses, in one view, ‘draws attention to itself and its configurations independently of its referential function’, and in the other, it wills its own disappearance ‘in an enhanced experience of referentiality’.147 These perceptual aspect-shifts show forth the chapter’s politics: the intense active engagement required to imagine the chapter’s 66

james joyce

action correlates with Bloom’s and Stephen’s effort to resist being drawn into the passive attitude of an idealised collective or body politic in the Yeatsian mould, and their struggle to remain active, radically engaged individuals, responsive to the constantly shifting, fluid representations and contradictions of text and performance. Stephen and Bloom spend June 16 distracting their minds from two painful thoughts, the death of a mother and a wife’s infidelity, until they reach Nighttown’s midnight-movie, when those secrets, no longer kept, are projected onto a public screen for Dublin’s assembled throngs to watch aghast.148 Stephen and Bloom’s experience in ‘Circe’ is intensely solitary, private and fragmented, but at the same time it is on public view to Nighttown’s crowd of observers. In ‘Telemachus’, Stephen’s mother ‘in a dream, silently [. . .] had come to him’ (p. 9: 270); the past perfect tense keeps the apparition, a remembered dream, at a safe distance. ‘Circe’’s stage directions place the afflicted dead mother presently before the horrorstruck eyes of an audience: emaciated, she rises stark through the floor, in leper grey with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with gravemould [. . .] She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly. (p. 473: 4157–62) These shock tactics gain their iconic impetus by harking back to the origins of cinematic movement. Joyce recreates the first spectators’ unfamiliarity, their perceptual shock at the sheer visibility of mechanically recorded motion. Maxim Gorky’s 1896 commentary on the Lumières’ Arrivée d’un train – ‘it is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre [. . .] All this in a strange silence [. . .] no sound of footsteps or of speech’149 – also serves to describe the rising of Stephen’s mother, who ‘opens her mouth [. . .] uttering a silent word’, just as Bloom ‘calls inaudibly’ (p. 497: 4962) after Rudy, both instances rendered in the style of mute utterance in silent cinema, where the lips are seen to move but no sound is heard. Bloom is held fast as a subject while being compelled to attend a public exhibition of his own hidden sexual proclivities. Isolated voyeurisms are screened for an awestruck staring audience. Katherine Mullin has amply demonstrated the significance of the Mutoscope – a peephole machine, observed though an eyepiece using large photographs flipped through with a hand crank, and introduced the same year as the first public screening of the Lumières’ Arrivée d’un train at the Grand Café in 1895 – in her analysis of ‘Nausicaa’.150 The language of peephole pantomime which passes between Gerty and Bloom – no word is exchanged, though ‘it was a kind of language between us’ (p. 305: 944) – is Mutoscopic: it remains a private fantasy seen only by him. This fantasy is ended mid-thought, or rather mid-flick, as Gerty limps away, just as 67

the speech-gesture complex

Bloom himself goes limp: ‘she walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her but with care and very slowly because – because Gerty MacDowell was ... Tight boots? No. She’s lame! O! Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away’ (p. 301: 769–72). But Gerty reappears lasciviously in Nighttown, pawing Bloom’s sleeve, after which ‘she slides away crookedly’ rather than limping away. This pun on ‘slides’ alludes to the photos prepared for use in a Mutoscope, and Gerty’s crooked movement suggests the jerkiness and irregularity of those hand-cranked slides.151 Bloom’s reflections in the past tense – ‘he watched her as she limped away’– mutate into ‘Circe’’s stage direction which incarnates movement in the present tense and puts it before an audience, exploding private Mutoscopic peepshow into public cinema projection. Bloom then finds himself locked in a turn-of-the-century ‘through the keyhole’ film. These tableau films, which reproduced ‘the peepshow perspective of kinetoscope or mutoscope parlors’152 in their transition to public exhibition space, show characters peeping through a device, such as a telescope or keyhole, before a cut to what is seen, often an incriminating scene. A Search for Evidence (1903) displays a series of points-of-view as the deceived wife, accompanied by a private detective, observes a row of hotel rooms through keyholes which frame the tableaux, eventually finding her unfaithful husband in the last room. ‘Circe’ harks back to this arrangement when Boylan offers Bloom a view of Molly: ‘you can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times’, to which Bloom asks if he can ‘take a snapshot’ (p. 462: 3788–92). These films contained incipient identifications between the spectator-subject’s orientation and what the audience sees; the relation between the Mutoscopic drives in ‘Nausicaa’ and the sense of collective spectatorship in ‘Circe’ is suggested by the historical shift from the Mutoscope to the cinematograph. Bloom’s spectacular embarrassment at having his fantasy reconstructions laid bare is imagined as an act of voyeurism played over the ‘coughs and feetshuffling’ (p. 413: 2169) of an audience, in the style of tableau films such as The Story the Biograph Told (1904), in which an unseen office boy films the proprietor kissing his secretary, then screens the film to an audience which includes the proprietor and his wife. Bloom’s private guilt is turned into a masochistic spectacle in which he is not only a member of the audience but also its ideal reluctant spectator. In ‘Circe’, Joyce sets forth a model of collective spectatorship as an alternative to the Yeatsian model. For Joyce, an audience should consist of a group of unitary spectators, each plotting their own path, as Jacques Rancière puts it, through ‘the forest of things, acts and signs that confront or surround them’.153 He achieves this effect by thematising the speech-gesture complex and the shift from the collectivity of the theatrical audience to the isolation and individuation of the film spectator. For Yeats, the unity of a nation is ‘like an audience in a theatre’, and the Abbey should strive to become a contemporary Theatre 68

james joyce

of Dionysus, a national theatre in which the people would watch ‘the sacred drama of [their] own history’. In the Greek model, the theatre transformed Dionysian rites and mythological history into dramatic form in order to evoke a sense of communal identity and unify the city-state. The identity of each individual is transformed into the active communal body of an audience observing and confronting the history of itself as a collective political entity. Yeatsian Revivalist theatre, in conscious allusion to the Greek model, also combined occult and ritual ceremonies, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, with a sense of theatre as a model for collective civic experience, a province in which the ceremonies of a distinctly Anglo-Irish history could be enacted, where isolated individuals are transformed into the unity of an audience. A nation, according to Yeats, should be ‘like an audience’ in which ‘a room full of people share the same lofty emotion’.154 Joyce strongly objected to the politics of this model of theatre, and to what he regarded as the falsifying immanence and self-enclosure of the communitarian model of an audience. The Yeatsian conception of an assembled, unified audience pacifies the spectator with the simulacrum not only of spectacle but of history, a dangerous illusion prohibiting the spectator from experiencing the possibility of alternative versions of history, or of civic community. Against this conception, he stages Bloom’s struggles throughout the chapter to keep a zone of himself which is private, upon which various versions of himself in the form of screen personas attempt to encroach. Bloom experiences the ‘cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity’ which Roland Barthes describes in speaking of the photographic subject, or rather, ‘neither subject nor object, but a subject who feels he is becoming an object’,155 as he tries to keep a sense of himself as the real Bloom and the origin of possible Blooms. Screen representations of his body-image – as Stephen Heath puts it, ‘the body in its conversion into the luminous sense of its film presence’156 – alienate his volitional agency, as for instance in the doppelganger projections of Henry Flower and Virag, who resemble the reproducible demon images of screen personas like Douglas Fairbanks and Max Linder: Henry Flower combs his moustache and beard rapidly with a pocketcomb and gives a cow’s lick to his hair. Steered by his rapier, he glides to the door, his wild harp slung behind him. Virag reaches the door in two ungainly stilthops, his tail cocked, and deftly claps sideways on the wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with his head. (p. 426: 2627–31) Bloom’s ‘trickleaps’ as he ‘darts forward suddenly’ (p. 355: 184) and ‘blunders stifflegged’ (p. 355: 191), later transposed into Virag’s ‘ungainly stilthops’ (p. 426: 2630), resemble the style and gait of Max Linder. When Joyce showed the film A Conquest (1909) as part of the Volta programme, Linder had already established a reproducible star-persona through his distinctive style of move69

the speech-gesture complex

ment. Bloom’s personas, aspects of an alienated consciousness dissociated from his physical identity, approach the condition of the film actor, who ‘feels as if in exile – exile not only from the stage but also from himself. [. . .] his body loses corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice [. . .] in order to be changed into a mute image’.157 The effect of Bloom watching possible versions of himself is situated at the intersection of the performative gesture in theatre and cinema, or rather, the dialectic between theatricality in tableau cinema, in which the spectator is externalised and refused perceptual identification, against the technique of spectator-subject identification available since the historical shift from film tableaux to the shot sequence, and the consequent ‘shift in the relations between film and spectator’.158 The time-lag between his reflexive intelligence and his body, inhabited by the imperatives of its role, generates an effect where Bloom becomes conscious of his own representations. Cinematic dissociation compels Bloom, as we read his gestures, to become his own spectator. The majority of extant films up to 1904 required a mediating agent, for instance a keyhole or lens, to co-represent a person looking and the object looked at. Aside from the keyhole films, film historians place the identification of the film’s spectator with the diegetic viewpoint at around 1910–11. Early cinema is predominantly framed from a centred frontal position which excludes the spectator’s gaze from the gaze of the figures on screen.159 This is an aspect of a performative style derived from tableau gestures for the stage, and in particular, the standardised and codified gestures of the widespread Delsarte system, which combined the properties of symbolic language – each gesture would correspond to a given emotion – and the naturalised expression of the human body. Roberta Pearson names this coded system of gestures ‘the histrionic code’:160 it recommends actors not to use, according to Dion Boucicault, a leading Irish-American playwright and actor of nineteenth-century melodrama, ‘gesticules, or little gestures’.161 Joyce was evidently aware both of this convention and of Boucicault himself, who is mentioned in ‘Lestrygonians’ when Bloom sees Bob Doran ‘sloping into the Empire [theatre] [. . .] Where Pat Kinsella had his Harp theatre before Whitbred ran the Queen’s. Broth of a boy. Dion Boucicault business with the harvestmoon face in a poky bonnet’ (p. 137: 29–32). Vitagraph’s Francesca de Rimini (1907), shown as part of Joyce’s Volta programme in 1909, is a salient example of this performance style. The film, in its depiction of a distinctly anti-Bloomian event, the murder of an adulterous wife and her lover, contains fifteen tableau shots, acted in the classical mime style. The actors are shown in full length, and their bodies speak with exaggerated extended gestures of the arm.162 The performances consist of a series of codified gestures and exemplify Pearson’s ‘histrionic code’, with hands on both sides of the face signifying distress, covering the face for despair, or displaying resolu70

james joyce

tion with a ‘fist clenched in the air, and then brought down sharply to the side of the body’.163 Francesca de Rimini was based on a theatrical version written in 1855, and first staged at the Star Theatre, New York in 1882. Surviving detailed sketches of this production, which show the iconography of actors’ bodies in speech, closely parallel the gestures enacted in the film.164 Vitagraph’s version is a typical instance of the transferral of a work for the stage to tableau cinema’s replica proscenium arch. Gerty’s reappearance in ‘Circe’; Stephen’s rising mother; Bloom’s guilt-ridden keyhole introspections; Privates Carr and Compton marching ‘unsteadily rightaboutface’; the deaf-mute idiot, ‘shaken in Saint Vitus’ dance’; the Hobgoblin ‘kangaroohopping with outstretched clutching arms’ (p. 413: 2157–8), all represent allusions to the stagey demonstrativeness and histrionic style of early cinematic performance. Exaggerated gesticulations in cinema were more or less eliminated by 1913 once focal points had become dispersed across sequences of body parts.165 The abandonment of the ‘histrionic code’ in favour of discrete accumulations of small-scale gestures emerged from the twofold advance in camera technique and editing, and inaugurated the new capacity to write the gesturing body in its extremities, together with a more nuanced, restrained acting style. These innovations are mainly attributed to D. W. Griffith’s Biograph films of 1907–13.166 The difference between the two styles of gesture can be observed in two versions of the same narrative by Griffith, After Many Years (1908) and Enoch Arden (1911). In the first, histrionic coded gestures show the married couple embracing before the departure of the husband, who points to his chest, and then upward, raises his hand to his forehead, and clenches his fist in the air. The 1911 version concentrates on their hands rather than their outspread arms. For the same scene, closer shots show the wife’s hand cutting a curl from the head of their baby and hanging it round her husband’s head; she then plays with the lock while whispering to her husband. Griffith, like Joyce was an unsuccessful playwright. As Mayer observes, he wrote two plays in 1906–7, only one of which, A Fool and a Girl, was produced commercially, playing for a week to a nearly empty house.167 He then successfully cross-pollinates the performance style of theatrical naturalism with the new form of the cinema, inaugurating a new style of psychological realism, which, as James Naremore observes, served to ‘shorten distance between actors and the camera’ and, through the use of the system of shotreverse-shot, allowed for close-up action and reactions and ‘the smallest nuance of gesture’.168 Griffith’s innovations closely parallel Ibsen’s reaction against the histrionic melodrama of the stage: in both theatre and cinema, there is a parallel shift from a codified, semiotic performance style, where each gesture has a fixed meaning within a taxonomic system, to a restrained, psychological style. Film historians tend to emphasise the development of the classical style as marking a break from theatricality, but Griffith’s new method 71

the speech-gesture complex

of quiet restraint in fact originated in theatre, which early films such as A Drunkard’s Reformation (1909) make explicit. Arthur Johnson takes his child to the theatre to see a temperance melodrama about the evils of alcohol; scenes in the play of domestic violence mirror scenes from the life of Arthur Johnson’s family, except in the play, the actors perform in the histrionic style, raising clasped hands, ostentatiously cowering, clutching at throats, whereas the ‘real’ characters act out their domestic scenes with small, slow gestures of relative static restraint. The film stages the encounter between the film and theatre – the physical co-presence and parallel scenes of audience and performer are staged by dramatising the fate of the lead character as a spectator – as a showdown between two performance styles. Griffith’s staging of film’s encounter with theatre through the eyes of a dramatised spectator bears comparison with Joyce’s negotiation of the two performance styles through the eyes of Bloom. His performance style – his facial expression, gestures, posture, movement – as distinct from the histrionics he is made to observe, is given in a down-played naturalistic assemblage of discrete shot sequences: ‘Bloom, holding in his hand Stephen’s hat, festooned with shavings, and ashplant, stands irresolute. Then he bends to him and shakes him by the shoulder’ (p. 496: 4920–3). ‘Bloom’ and ‘stands irresolute’ name the full shot, which is interspersed with a detailed close-up of the hat, followed by a medium-close shot as Bloom shakes Stephen’s shoulder. Sequences move in an instant from the proscenium body to dismemberment of the unified body image: ‘Bloom trickleaps to the curbstone and halts again. He brushes a mudflake from his cheek with a parcelled hand’ (p. 355: 196–7). Bloom’s gesturing body tends towards fragmentation, and the audience sees him unfold in a series of particularised views or body parts: a close-up of his ‘left foot’, cuts to his ‘impelling fingers’ as he ‘gives the sign of past master’, cuts again as he draws ‘his right arm downwards from his left shoulder’ (p. 429: 2723–5). Bloom’s dual status as spectator and subject is partly expressed in the tension between the theatricality of the cinema of 1904 and the advent of the shot sequence. The dialectic between these two kinds of spectatorship, and the sense that an audience, including a shame-faced Bloom, watches versions of Bloom engaged in voyeuristic acts, frames the composition of his many-angled variousness. The technique of the shot sequence, with its heightened emphasis on smallscale gestures, and its incorporation of spectator-subject identification, articulates Bloom’s distinct style of performative gesture in ‘Circe’ as a counterforce to the gesticulating screen personas and tableau mock-ceremonies unfolding before him. His counter-histrionics are an aspect of Joyce’s parody, not only of melodramatic over-emphasis in early cinema, but also of the grand gesture in Yeatsian Revivalist theatre. Tableau gestures combine the ceremonial elements of Revivalist theatre with the historical reconstructions of early cinema, 72

james joyce

in order to critique both the histrionic style – which came to signify, for Joyce, the kind of melodrama which invariably leads to bloodshed – and the false historiography and stereotypes of Anglo-Irish Revivalism at the Abbey Theatre. The attack on Irish Revivalism is Joyce’s affront to Yeats’s rejection of Exiles, who declined to recommend it ‘to the Irish Theatre because [. . .] it is too far from the folk drama’.169 ‘Circe’ parodies the gestural conventions which assert Celtic ceremony as Ireland’s most distinguished ‘folk drama’ by alluding to the performative over-emphasis in early cinema. In Yeats’s theatre, pagan ritual gestures, preserving ancestral relations to Celtic Ireland, hark back to the patterns of movement, unchanged over centuries, of Ireland’s heroic age. In On Baile’s Strand, Cuchulain’s oath of fealty to the High King Conchubar is performed as a grand scale ritual in which his sword is joined in the fire with those of the lesser kings, to the inaudible murmur of chanting female voices, a symbolic rite directly borrowed from the Celtic Mysteries.170 These ceremonies at the Abbey were embodied in a solemn, hieratic acting style, described in a review of On Baile’s Strand at the Abbey as ‘an art of gesture admirably disciplined and a strange delicacy of enunciation [. . .] in the method of [. . .] ritual’.171 While Revivalist theatre played at the Abbey – its inaugural play, Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen was staged at the Abbey in 1899, and Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen and The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 – Dublin’s Erin Theatre would screen the tableau historical reconstructions of early cinema. Lumière programmes interspersed documentary footage of current affairs of state with ‘vues historiques’, presented in a style identical to their documentaries, as unmediated actuality. Méliès also produced tableau reconstructions of solemn rituals of state, for instance the Coronation of Edward VII (1902), which displays a procession of gifts, with the king swearing his allegiance, the presentation of the sword of justice and his adornment with an orb, crown and sceptre. In works such as Épopée napoléonienne (1903), Pathé also begins to present historical events as contemporary documentary, in the histrionic style. These spectacles of national identity, commonplace in the pre-war French Third Republic, particularly after the success of Film D’Art’s L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (1907), a film which exemplifies the histrionic style, had become by 1911 one of French cinema’s most distinctive genres.172 The ceremonies of state and empire in ‘Circe’, of the trials, executions and coronations which Bloom both watches and is made to enact, serve as mocking acknowledgements of Yeatsian Anglicisation, in the style of the historical pseudo-documentary of early cinema. Joyce detected in both a similar false historiography, particularly in the historical claims made for the grand gesture. Against the ritual style of the historical tableau, with its sweeping gestures, Joyce pitches tentative, small-scale movements. The shift between the historical tableau, in which the spectator is externalised, and the technique of 73

the speech-gesture complex

perceptual identification available since the evolution of the shot sequence, a phenomenon which emerged in 1910–12, in the films of Griffith and the system of parallel editing and shot-reverse-shot,173 is incorporated into the dialectic of Bloom’s hybrid status as spectator and subject. His ‘apologetic toes turned in’, Bloom ‘opens his tiny mole’s eyes and looks about him dazedly, passing a slow hand across his forehead’ (p. 378: 957–9); but on ‘Circe’’s exploding screen, he appears, ‘in a crimson velvet mantle trimmed with ermine, bearing Saint Edward’s staff, the orb and sceptre’ (p. 392: 1442–4). Edward VII appears ‘slowly, solemnly’ singing a song about ‘coronation day’ (p. 485: 4562), but it is Bloom’s coronation: the Archbishop of Armagh ‘pours a cruse of hairoil over Bloom’s head’ (p. 393: 1487), an aspect of the ceremony whereby an oath is taken and the sovereign is anointed with holy oil to indicate the sanctity of his person. Symbolic ceremonies further invest Bloom with the imperial mantle: Bloom assumes a mantle of cloth of gold and puts on a ruby ring. He ascends and stands on the stone of destiny. The representative peers put on at the same time their twentyeight crowns. [. . .] The peers do homage, one by one, approaching, genuflecting. (p. 393: 1490–6) These symbolic ceremonies of Anglo-Irish history summon Bloom, and by extension, Ireland, to a role Joyce regards as contrary to their natural tendencies. Once Bloom is made sovereign, he is observed enacting an idealised version, not of the grand heroic gesture, but of his own small-scale domestic routines: shaking hands with a blind stripling [. . .] Placing arms round shoulder of an old couple [. . .] He wheels twins in a perambulator [. . .] He consoles a widow [. . .] He kisses the bedsores of a palsied veteran [. . .] He whispers in the ear of a blushing waitress and laughs kindly [. . .] He gives his coat to a beggar. (p. 397: 1600–15) These are Bloom’s versions of the grand gesture. His instinctive distaste for ritual is an aspect of his independence of mind. When he finds himself in situations of ritual behaviour, his mind slips into its own routines, removing him from the scene, as it does at Dignam’s funeral. His private commemorations demonstrate a resistance to mechanical templates of imposed physical behaviour, just as his small-scale gestures contrast with the falsely historicising folk rituals of theatrical Revivalism and historical pseudo-documentary. Bloom’s acts of heroism are found in the littleness of the diurnal, rather than the grandly ceremonial. It is a performative style precisely suited to the mock-epic. Bloom’s resistance through his performance style manifests a politics contrary to the kind of integrating nationalism which fostered sectarian or racial prejudice. Bloom’s outsider status, an aspect of an ‘Irishness’ which the racist 74

james joyce

Citizen in ‘Cyclops’ attempts to deny, is emphasised by dramatising his status as a spectator, and through a style of restrained naturalism which separates him from the ceremonial histrionics of Nighttown: it is a form of ironic detachment, Joyce’s elective mode of self-assertion amidst the perceived deadlock of colonial and nationalist violence, and Bloom’s method of avoiding the self-alienation and self-division which is, as Andrew Gibson notes, ‘the most prominent feature of the Dublin unconscious as it is dramatized in “Circe” ’.174 Bloom’s struggle to hold himself together amidst opposing sides is embodied through the complicities and contradictions of performance style. He is both a ‘successor’ to Parnell (p. 394: 1513–14), attacking ‘Sir Walter Raleigh’ and English colonial trade (p. 390: 1355–61), and also a comic Edward VII persona taking his coronation oath and an oath to fealty;175 he is an ‘Anarchist’ and ‘dynamitard’ (p. 384: 1157–60) but also an advocate, of non-violent resistance – a powerful gesture in 1922, seven years after Sinn Fein’s turn towards armed struggle – advocating, as he puts it in ‘Cyclops’, ‘Love . . . I mean the opposite of hatred’ (p. 273: 1485). Bloom’s politics, like Joyce’s, involves an advocacy of multiplicity and cooperation as distinct from unified movements or leadership. As Tratner argues, Joyce did not repudiate his early anarchist syndicalist views, as expressed in letters to Stanislaus in 1906: syndicalists ‘do not desire the conquest of public powers which, they say, only serve in the end to support middle-class government’.176 Joyce’s politics, Tratner argues, ‘developed in the direction that the English Guild Socialists took syndicalism: to a nonviolent pluralism based on the elimination of any general system or action’.177 Joyce’s pluralism, in contradistinction to a unifying, reductive sovereignty – and Yeatsian Revivalism, for Joyce, was just another form of sovereignty replacing the old sovereignty of English colonialism – is embodied in Bloom’s sense of himself as a multiplicity of contradictory performance styles, and in particular, his resistance to the grand heroic gesture. As counter-Revivalist drama, ‘Circe’ stages the small-scale intimate gesture against the violent histrionics of false ceremony and sovereignty. Bloom’s naturalist gestures subvert the hieratic solemnity of the ritual body and its capacity to depersonalise the expressive life of the body. Joyce found in film technique an ideal method to present patterns of minute naturalist gestures, in particular of the hands, which are given amplified significance throughout Ulysses. Bloom not only talks with his hands but is seen thinking aloud with them. Earlier, in ‘Sirens’, bored Bloom tambourines gently with ‘I am just reflecting fingers’ (p. 229: 863), his hands as attentive as those in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ which ‘fingerponder nightly each his variorum edition of The Taming of the Shrew’ (p. 175: 1062). Hand gestures in Ulysses are forms of self-reflexivity, symptoms of (dis)engagement of the self with itself. Michel Serres describes how an internal sense of one’s own body derives from manual self-reflection in his account of cutting his fingernails: 75

the speech-gesture complex

where does the subject settle itself? [. . .] I take the implement in my left hand, and present the open blades to the end of my right index fingernail. I position myself in the handles of the scissors, the I situates itself there, and not at the tip of the right finger. [. . .] The left hand participates in the I, suffused with subjectivity, the right hand is of the world.178 Steven Connor remarks of this passage that ‘the hand is a principle and agency of this capacity [. . .] bringing oneself to oneself’.179 As it is also for Bloom: in ‘Hades’, when Boylan is sighted by the others, Bloom instantly ‘reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right hand’, after which ‘he clasped his hands between his knees’ (p. 76: 200). In ‘Lestrygonians’ his hands search his pockets in a dumbshow of misdirection: ‘I am looking for that. Yes, that.’ The chapter ends after he tries ‘all pockets’ and locates his potato soap and purse: ‘Safe!’ (p. 150: 1188). Recurrently throughout his day, Bloom prevents himself from disintegrating at the thought of Molly’s infidelity with small gestures which serve both to distract his mind and to restore his bodily self-integrity. In ‘Circe’, these gestures help ease his sense of spectatorial shock: ‘his eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself’ (p. 462: 3815). By the time Joyce had begun to compose ‘Circe’ in 1919–21, the power of the cinematic close-up, its capacity to show the exact visual form of a hand movement, the stretch or curl of a finger, the position of the palms, had achieved international status.180 According to theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein, writing in 1921: ‘the amplifying close-up demands underplaying. It’s opposed to theatre where everything is loudly declaimed.’181 Griffith remarked in 1914 that ‘the close-up enabled us to reach real acting, restraint’.182 Having seen Birth of a Nation (1914), Eleanora Duse, aware of the new possibilities for restraint on the screen, became eager to perform in a Griffith film. An attempt was made to contact him, though by that time he was already immersed in Intolerance (1916). Duse spoke of the cinema with enthusiasm: ‘the spoken word is less expressive than light. One day soon the most remarkable transcriptions will be achieved on the screen!’183 She only made one film, Cenere (1916), and as such it remains an invaluable record of the hand gestures which had so bewitched Joyce. Duse plays Rosalia, impoverished and unable to afford a life for her son, whom she sends away to a wealthier village. She first appears in the film outside her son’s house – he has now grown up, and has not seen his mother since childhood – although we only see her shadow, in a statuesque pose, as it almost imperceptibly rises upwards and her hands slowly unclench. In the reconciliation scene, medium-close shots concentrate on the activity of her hands. They begin at rest on her knee, rise up tensely to grasp her neck, nervously flutter as she picks at some string in her sleeve, then, distracted from this, they clench together, the fingers quickly outstretch and then close again into a fist. These uneasy gestures, one constantly inter76

james joyce

rupting the other before its motion is complete, subtly express her hesitancy, disappointment and anguish. From a gentle self-enfolding of her hands, she moves to clasp his hand, interrupts herself and lets her hand fall to her knees; moments later she looks up into his eyes, her hand stretches out and then falls back into rest. The interrupted gesture signals uncertainty and the unresolved division in her maternal instincts between wanting a prosperous life for her son and wanting him by her side. The movement is partially echoed after her death: the son kisses his dead mother, his hand beneath her head, she is carried away while he stands there, locked in the same gesture and staring at his empty hand, which then slowly falls to his side. Close-up gestures amplify the significance of tiny underplayed hand signals. In Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience (1914), the scene with the protagonist Walthall at the police station is constructed from close-ups of Walthall’s hands as he nervously pleads innocence: his hands pull at his clothes and stroke his knees, he plays with his thumbs, puts his hands in his pockets. Cecil B. DeMille’s The Whispering Chorus (1918) constructs an elaborate series of close-up hand gesture motifs. John Tremble, an accounts clerk, attempts to convince himself that stealing money from his office might be justified. The intertitle, an interior voice, reads: ‘Clumley has more than he can use: take what you need.’ We see his hands, in medium-close, interrupt his counting motion to tap nervously the wad of notes, his hands seeming to make their mind up for him; after taking some of the money for himself with his right hand, his left hand grasps the right, as though to conceal its guilt. The right hand appears to act with an autonomous criminal agency of its own. We next see it in extreme close-up, falsifying the figures in the account book in order not to arouse suspicion, and then later, a disembodied extreme close-up of the hand appears in superimposition: in place of his voice of conscience, or an accusing face, we see an enlarged double of his right hand in handcuffs, next to a medium shot of Tremble, whose left hand, anxiously feeling his right, falls into the same clasping position as when he had stolen the money. The rest of the film shows Tremble, as an intertitle puts it, ‘feeling suspicion in every smile he meets – and handcuffs in every welcome’. In the final extreme close-up of his right hand, it is strapped to an electric chair, as though the hand were assuming responsibility for the crime on the man’s behalf. Bloom often keeps his hands in his pockets, partly because he keeps his magic potato soap there, but also to conceal himself, to prevent his hands from speaking about him against his will. When a ‘male cough and tread are heard passing through the mist outside’, Bloom immediately adjusts his features, and then ‘places a hand in his waistcoat, posing calmly’ (p. 429: 2727–9). Put on the spot, he enacts the physical equivalent of an embarrassed change of subject. He ‘tightens and loosens his grip’, ‘fumbles again in his pocket’. Joyce’s writing of hand gestures in ‘Circe’, liberated from the contingencies of the stage and 77

the speech-gesture complex

its demands for spectatorial wholeness, are imagined as individual close-ups in a shot sequence. Correspondences between the symptomatic gesture and the isolation and analysis of cinema’s ‘unconscious optics’ anticipate Walter Benjamin’s explicit comparison between Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which symptomatic actions receive their most extensive account, with the ‘precise statements’ given by enlarged fields of view in filmed behaviour, and the revelation of ‘entirely new structural formations of the subject’.184 Derek Attridge’s observation that Ulysses ‘frequently fails to conform’ to the syntactic norms of a language which ‘allows little independence to the organs of the body’185 finds iconic correlates in the way Bloom’s hands in ‘Circe’ speak as though independent of his conscious sensation of movement, and the detachment of movement from agency in a filmed close-up. When Mrs. Breen ‘surrenders’ her ‘soft moist meaty palm’ to Bloom’s ‘finger and thumb’ (p. 364: 46–7), their hands are observed up close, conducting their own conversation separately from the dialogue. As ‘Bella approaches, gently tapping with the fan’, the fan remarks: ‘we have met. You are mine. It is fate’ (p. 430: 2775). Hugo Münsterberg’s view, writing in 1916 of ‘an enlarged play of the hands in which anger and rage or tender love or jealousy speak an unmistakeable language’,186 is suggested in Joyce’s detailed hand gestures. Particular movements of the hand make inanimate objects speak, often in the give-away voice of the symptomatic unconscious. In the chapter itself, Bella’s fan as she moves it towards her face mockingly speaks with a voice of its own: ‘The Fan: [flirting quickly, then slowly] Married, I see’ (p. 430: 2755). ‘Circe’ literally gives voice to gesture, and in one aspect realises Stephen’s desire for a universal language: ‘So that gesture, not music not odour, would be a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm’ (p. 353: 105–7). This notion closely parallels Bloom’s notion of ‘esperanto the universal brotherhood’ (p. 399: 1696–7). The chapter’s dream of a universal language of gesture, in which hands acquire a textual status, closely parallels the contemporary discourse of universalism in film. The film theorist Béla Balázs, writing in 1924, explicitly relates the origins of language in expressive movement – ‘It is the expressive movement, the gesture, that is the aboriginal mother-tongue of the human race’187 – with cinema’s universal language of gesture: ‘in the motion picture screens all over the world we currently witness the development of the first international language: that of facial expression and physical gestures’.188 Balázs had seen Griffith’s Intolerance a year earlier in 1923, a film which aspired to construct a textual system through narrative cross-cutting and constellations of recurring close-up hand gestures, inaugurating a new art of pictorial writing to rival the ancient vanished hieroglyphic language of Babylonian cuneiform. As one of the film’s intertitles reads: ‘a civilisation of countless ages was destroyed and a universal written language (the cuneiform) was made to become an unknown 78

james joyce

cipher on the face of the earth’. Griffith’s film links together four historical narratives through a complex weave of recurring textual motifs and gestures, in an attempt to generate, as Miriam Hansen observes, ‘a space of hieroglyphic signification and interpretation’, actively engaging the reader in a process of deciphering and interpretation. Griffith presents the film’s textual-pictorial system as a form of writing to rival written speech. Whereas written signs in the film often carry with them connotations of violence and death, such as Charles IX signing the decree for the massacre of the Huguenots, shown twice in close-up, ideographic signs suggest potential freedom from oppression. As Hansen notes of the Babylonian section, the close-up of Belshazzar’s seal in the mountain girl’s hand, stamped on a wax tablet with a rolling machine, allowing her to marry as she chooses, ‘emphasises the indexical nature of the process, the unity of gesture, tool, and imprint that ensures the proper name its magic power’.189 The Babylonian seal suggests a parallel between the written language of cuneiform and the universal language of film, as a hieroglyphic composite of textual system and visual presence. In one aspect, ‘Circe’ also generates a hieroglyphic space in which intricate patterns of coded hand gestures approach the condition of a natural language system. The effect is achieved by allowing the terms which ordinarily govern speech and gesture to become interchangeable, and the effect is elaborated in the Notesheets to the chapter. For Bella’s ‘fan flirt’, ‘quick = engaged’ and ‘slow = married’. A movement of the parasol towards the shoulder indicates indifference; holding it with ‘2 hands’ means ‘well?’; ‘high = darling’; ‘shut = dare all’. Swinging an umbrella ‘over hand = I am a nuisance’. A twirl of the handkerchief in the right hand means ‘love another’, whereas a twirl in the left hand connotes ‘riddance’; a folded handkerchief signifies a ‘wish to speak’.190 We learn that Bloom’s fingers are shorter than Stephen’s, and his fingers have round tips, and that this indicates his pragmatic materialism.191 The first and second bend easily, indicating shyness. Zoe sees Bloom’s secret in his hands, remarking: ‘Short little finger. Henpecked husband. That wrong?’ (p. 459: 3706). The Notesheets open out the fields of reference from which she reads Bloom’s palms: the first and second finger, if ‘far apart’, show the subject is ‘self-willed’; the third and fourth finger apart signal impulsiveness; long and white fingernails signify cruelty. The Notesheets reverse the terms which allocate coded significance only to ‘histrionic’ gestures by magnifying tiny symptomatic actions, as hand gestures move towards resembling a microlinguistic system in themselves. But aside from a few instances of correlation between the Notesheets and the final text – such as the placing of the fan on the ear with ‘forgot me?’ informing the text’s literally giving voice to the gesture: ‘The Fan: [folding together, rests against her left eardrop] Have you forgotten me?’ (p. 430: 2764) – Joyce tends to discard, or merely hint at details in the Notesheets which explicitly cross-breed gestures with discursive speech. Joyce, 79

the speech-gesture complex

unlike Stephen, and D. W. Griffith, was ambivalent about the prospects of a universal language of gesture, constantly undercutting any claim to universalism by resort to parody and ironic distance. Herring notes Joyce’s research in palm reading for the chapter’s composition: he asked Frank Budgen to bring him a handbook on the subject, and was already familiar with occult figures such as Madame Blavatsky from her prominence on the scene of the Irish Literary Revival.192 The occult details on palmistry in the Notesheets parody both Yeatsian occultism and cinema’s aspiration towards a universal language of gesture. ‘Circe’ plays out the tension between the gesture as textual phenomenon and as non-linguistic material presence, through a constant reversal of the categories of the naturalistic and histrionic codes. On the one hand, Joyce undermines the verisimilar effect of naturalist acting which, as Pearson notes, ‘had no standard repertoire of gestures, no limited lexicon. The style defined itself by the very abandonment of the conventional gestures of the histrionic code.’193 Joyce gives them a pseudo-linguistic function, undermining their naturalising function, making them seem arbitrary, symbolic. Yet the chapter just as frequently dissolves semiotic readability in the visceral force of the sensual, material uncoded body, as for instance: Stephen with hat and ashplant frogsplits in middle highkicks with skykicking mouth shut hand clasp part under thigh, with clang tinkle boomhammer tallyho hornblower blue green yellow flashes Toft’s cumbersome turns with hobbyhorse riders from gilded snakes dangled, bowels fandango leaping spurn soil foot and fall again. (p. 472: 4124–8) Gestures in ‘Circe’ frequently elude linguistic categorisation, such as Stephen’s gesture to illustrate ‘the loaf and the jug of bread or wine in Omar’: ‘Stephen thrusts his ashplant on him and slowly holds out his hands, his head going back till both hands are a span from his breast, down turned in planes intersecting, the fingers about to part, the left being higher’ (p. 353: 124–7). The gesture is evidently not as readable as he would like to think: Lynch asks him in response: ‘Which is the jug of bread?’ The lack of a fixed coded meaning, despite Stephen’s failed attempt to impose one, allows the gesture to unfold into multiple connotations. Instantaneously, ‘on the farther side under the railway bridge Bloom appears’ (p. 354: 141–2), as though summoned by Stephen’s palms. The gesture instigates the coincidence of Stephen and Bloom’s meeting. The planes of Stephen’s intersecting palms, in one sense, represent the intersection of his lines of fate with Bloom’s; in another sense, Stephen’s intersecting palms suggest the idea that ‘dreams go by contraries’ in the coincidence of Bloom’s preoccupation with ‘metempsychosis’ and Stephen’s brooding on elective fatherhood: ‘paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?’ The mutual dreams 80

james joyce

of Stephen and Bloom finally intersect and culminate in the transformation of Stephen into Rudy. The lack of a fixed, stable meaning imbues the gesture with a radical ambiguity which cannot be reduced to the predetermined forms of a coded system. For Joyce, the notion of the coded, readable gesture, exemplified by the histrionic code as derived from Delsarte, was liable to the same homogenising tendency as Yeatsian Revivalism. As Andrew Hewitt argues, ‘Delsartism served as a dictionary for the reading and writing of bodily signs.’194 Delsarte’s project to impose a legibility on the gesturing body is caught up in the project of an emergent bourgeois to represent its newly acquired social and economic status. Yet the system is built on a paradox: the reduction of the natural body to a series of readable signs. By codifying socially acceptable gestures and manners in the natural language of the body, the bourgeois sought to make those gestures seem natural and universal. This project of naturalising gesture can be observed in Film D’Art, such as Francesca de Rimini, in which the histrionic code attempts to legitimate cinema – regarded at the time as a cheap form of entertainment for the working classes – by making it appear bourgeois and respectable. The widespread teaching of the system lead to a homogeneity in performance style which concealed, in the manner of Yeatsian Revivalism’s naturalised heroic gesture, an assertion of unifying cultural hegemony. For Joyce, the histrionic code’s claims to universalism, and its forcing of gestures into pseudo-linguistic categories, masked the violence of imperialist self-assertion. Delsarte’s and Yeats’s attempts to impose a legibility on the body, the naturalising of coded gestures, and the erasure of difference and plurality of forms of expression, are also potentially complicit with Griffith’s advocacy of the universal language myth, despite the differences in performance style. As Hansen argues: ‘the ideological objective of constructing a unified subject of – and for – mass-cultural consumption, of integrating empirically diverse audiences with this goal, was troped in the ambiguous celebration of film as a new universal language’.195 Griffith’s universalism masks Hollywood’s accelerated tendency to homogenise its global audiences through a standardised language of classical film form, which was becoming increasingly bourgeois in its subject matter, values and registers. The widespread rhetoric of universalism in the film industry, and the stabilisation of the codified, universalised category of the film spectator, provided Hollywood with a method to standardise the consumption of film, to naturalise both a one-sided, white, middle-class version of American history, and also the interests of the increasingly big-business, capitalist project of large-scale industrial filmmaking. Film’s claim to utopianism, transcendence, integration and universalism resembles Yeatsian Revivalism and the histrionic code, particularly by concealing an ideology of homogeneity and suppression of difference. Joyce’s technique, by contrast, relentlessly manoeuvres between representations, revealing 81

the speech-gesture complex

the inherent instability of categories which make universalising claims on the reader-spectator. By foregrounding the indeterminacy and double aspect of a speech-gesture complex which is neither exclusively linguistic nor a transparent mirror to reality, and by imbuing small-scale gestures with a pseudo-­linguistic function, whilst at the same time resisting the totalising reduction of the body to language, Joyce challenges the familiar view that naturalism presents an unmediated view on reality, and that naturalist acting, by attempting, as James Naremore puts it, ‘to preserve the illusion of a unified self, by maintaining coherence in the face of multiple possibilities’ is essentially conservative.196 At the same time, Bloom’s small-scale naturalist gestures, informed by Ibsen and Griffith, subvert the violent histrionics of false ceremony, and the universalising tendency of both colonial sovereignty and the cultural hegemony of nationalism, which both seek to naturalise and codify an aggressive imperialism in the language of the body. The Joycean speech-gesture complex, by upsetting oppositions between text and performance, isolated readership and collective spectatorship, theatre and film, primitive tableaux and continuity editing, disrupts the naturalising process which masks contradiction, allowing Bloom to become conscious of his own representations, a spectator of possible versions of himself; his increasing awareness of himself as both an individual spectator and a member of a community, always rehearsing for a never fully determined performance, is articulated through a hybrid conjunction of reading and spectating, drawing both the reader and Bloom away from a passive attitude and transforming them into active participants. By constantly gravitating between hieroglyphic gesture and uncodified sensual presence, by refusing to allow an easy unproblematic interchangeability between the categories of speech and gesture, Joyce mitigates against the universalised, transcendental readerspectator in favour of a divided, pluralist consciousness actively resisting the suppression of other voices. The Joycean speech-gesture complex, in its rejection of set formulations, and its attack on the hegemony of any universalising grand project, manifests an aesthetics and politics which is profoundly anti-totalitarian. Notes 1. Joyce, ‘A Painful Case’, Dubliners, p. 124. All references are to this edition, and are included parenthetically within the text. 2. Ibsen, The Doll’s House, Seven Famous Plays, p. 20. This is the translation read by Joyce. 3. Ibsen, Rosmersholm, Seven Famous Plays, p. 290. 4. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, p. 99. 5. Ibsen, The Master Builder, p. 493, p. 495, p. 513, p. 514, p. 537. 6. Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, p. 141. 7. Pavis, ‘From Text to Performance’, in Issacharoff and Jones (eds), Performing Texts, p. 89. 8. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 265.

82

james joyce

9. Ibid. p. 79. 10. Joyce, Critical Writings, pp. 38–46. 11. Ibid. pp. 47–67. 12. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 74. 13. See Tysdahl, Joyce and Ibsen; Farrell, ‘Exiles and Ibsen’; Benstock, ‘Exiles, Ibsen and the Play’s Function in the Joyce Canon’. Watt, Joyce, O’Casey and Irish Popular Theatre considers the attitude to sexuality in When We Dead Awaken, in relation to popular Victorian melodrama and its effect on Ulysses. 14. Tysdahl, Joyce and Ibsen, p. 56. Two articles draw thematic and narratorial parallels between Ibsen and ‘The Dead’: Theoharis, ‘Hedda Gabler and “The Dead” ’ and Doloff, ‘Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and “The Dead” ’. Neither of these mentions performative elements, gestures, stage directions or Joyce’s preoccupation with theatre. 15. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 265 16. Joyce, The Dublin Diary, p. 12. 17. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 54, pp. 79–80, p. 54. 18. Hauptmann, Before Sunrise, trans. James Joyce, in Perkins (ed.), Joyce and Hauptmann, p. 84, p. 68. 19. Letter to Stanislaus, 9 October 1906, Letters of James Joyce, vol. II, p. 178. 20. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, p. 134. 21. Faherty, ‘Heads and Tail: Rhetoric and Realism in Dubliners’, p. 380. 22. Culleton, ‘ “Taking the Biscuit”: Narrative Cheekiness in Dubliners’, p. 112. 23. Kenner, Joyce’s Voices, pp. 15–38. 24. Benstock and Benstock, ‘The Benstock Principle’, pp. 10–21. 25. Avery, ‘Distant Music’, p. 479. 26. Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 31. 27. Joyce says he wrote Dubliners ‘to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city’. Letter to C. P. Curran, July 1904, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 163. 28. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, p. 137. 29. Letter to Stanislaus, 18 September 1905, quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 210. 30. Maupassant, ‘A Day Out in the Country’, p. 55. 31. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 206. 32. Garner, Bodied Spaces, p. 40. 33. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 104. 34. Egan, Henry James, p. 29. 35. Ibid. p. 6, p. 40. 36. James, Guy Domville, The Complete Plays of Henry James. 37. Litvak, Caught in the Act, p. 243. On the effect of the failed theatrical project on his novels, see also Greenwood, Adapting to the Stage. 38. Egan, Henry James, p. 25. 39. James, The Spoils of Poynton, p. 6. 40. Egan, Henry James, p. 60. 41. James, The Other House, p. 13. All references are to this edition, and are included parenthetically within the text 42. Benstock, Narrative Con/Texts in Dubliners, p. 124. 43. Leonard, Reading Dubliners Again, p. 134. 44. Norris, ‘Narrative Bread Pudding: Joyce’s “The Boarding House” ’, p. 163. 45. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, p. 188. 46. Weaver, Duse, p. 137. 47. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, pp. 188–9. 48. Koht, The Life of Ibsen, pp. 412–13.

83

the speech-gesture complex

49. Pirandello, ‘The Art of Duse’ (1928), in Pontiero, Eleanora Duse, p. 112. 50. The Nation, 7 May 1924, Pontiero, Eleanora Duse, p. 261. 51. Hamburger, Art as Second Nature, p. 238. 52. Letter from Adelaide Ristori to Leone Fortis, 1897, quoted in Stokes et al., Bernhardt, Terry, Duse, p. 136. 53. Ibid. p. 149. 54. Joyce, Critical Writings, p. 45. 55. Pirandello, ‘Duse’, in Pontiero, Eleanora Duse, p. 131. 56. D’Annunzio, Gioconda, p. 1. 57. New York Herald, 27 January 1893, quoted in Pontiero, Eleanora Duse, p. 113. 58. Galliene, The Mystic in the Theatre, pp. 155–6. 59. Pirandello, ‘Duse’, in Pontiero, Eleanora Duse, p. 259. 60. Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, p. 134. 61. Symons, Eleanora Duse, p. 7. 62. See Davis, ‘Acting in Ibsen’, p. 117. 63. Herman Bang, quoted in Marker, Ibsen’s Lively Art, p. 49. 64. Ibsen, The Doll’s House, Seven Famous Plays, p. 36. 65. Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, Seven Famous Plays, p. 450. 66. Ibsen, Ghosts, Seven Famous Plays, p. 148. 67. Ibsen, Rosmersholm, Seven Famous Plays, p. 344. 68. Pirandello, ‘Duse’, in Pontiero, Eleanora Duse, p. 125. 69. Hansson, Modern Women, pp. 95–125. 70. Joyce, Critical Writings, p. 171. 71. Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, p. 18. 72. Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics. On Joyce and politics, see also Kearney, Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture, pp. 31–47; Watson, ‘The Politics of Ulysses’, pp. 39–59; Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture; Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire; Platt, Joyce and the Anglo-Irish. 73. Quoted in Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, p. 24. 74. Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, p. 24. 75. Yeats, Explorations, p. 214. 76. Quoted in Flannery, W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre, p. 66. 77. Gibbons, ‘Visualising the Voice’, p. 182. 78. Burns, Gestural Politics, p. 119. 79. Taxidou, Modernism and Performance, p. 53. 80. See for instance Foster, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival, p. 170. 81. Wagner, Art and Revolution, quoted in Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics, p. 211. 82. Yeats, Explorations, p. 139. 83. Joyce, Critical Writings, p. 45. 84. Watson, Irish Identity and the Irish Literary Revival, p. 89. 85. Quoted in Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics, p. 113. 86. Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, p. 4. 87. Egan, Henry James, p. 20. 88. Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, p. 4. 89. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 266. 90. Craig, Index to the Story of My Days, p. 226. 91. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 266. 92. Symons, Eleanora Duse, p. 2. 93. Jousse, The Oral Style, p. 41. 94. Ibsen, Rosmersholm, Seven Famous Plays, p. 330. 95. Ellmann times his first exposure to Freud between 1910 and 1911 in Trieste. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 340.

84

james joyce

96. Freud, A Case of hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality, and other Works, p. 256. 97. Ibid. p. 76. 98. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 44. 99. Joyce, Exiles, p. 83. All references are to this edition, and are included parenthetically within the text. 100. Freud, Introductory lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 53. 101. Ibid. p. 49. 102. Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, p. 70. 103. Wolff, A Psychology of Gesture, p. 78. 104. These fragments were composed in 1913. The fair copy manuscript is dated 1915, and the first edition appeared in 1918. See MacNicholas, James Joyce’s Exiles: A Textual Companion, p. 29. 105. Ibid. p. 21. 106. Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, p. 130. 107. Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge, p. 192. 108. Quoted in Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, p. 52. 109. Letter to Stanislaus, 1909, Letters of James Joyce, vol. II, p. 124. 110. Burns, Gestural Politics, p. 130. 111. Joyce, ‘Notes’, Exiles, p. 175. 112. Joyce, Critical Writings, p. 162. 113. Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics, p. 6. 114. Joyce, Critical Writings, p. 213. 115. Ibid. p. 213. 116. Joyce, Critical Writings, p. 228. 117. Yeats, Explorations, p. 343. 118. Taxidou, Modernism and Performance, p. 81. 119. Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, p. 350, quoted in Empson, ‘Magnificent Cuckolds’, p. 157. 120. Crommelynck, The Magnificent Cuckold, p. 31. 121. Ibid. p. 55, p. 65. 122. Quoted in Braun, Meyerhold, pp. 182–3. 123. Meyerhold, ‘First Attempts at a Stylised Theatre’, Meyerhold on Theatre, p. 56. 124. Meyerhold, ‘Biomechanics’, Meyerhold on Theatre, pp. 197–204. 125. Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, p. 9. 126. The Notes were composed in 1913, the fair copy manuscript in 1915. See MacNicholas, James Joyce’s Exiles: A Textual Companion, p. 29. 127. Davis, ‘Acting in Ibsen’, p. 116. 128. Ellmann, James Joyce, pp. 401–2. 129. Pound to Joyce, 7 September 1915, Letters of James Joyce, vol. II, p. 365. 130. MacNicholas, ‘Joyce’s Exiles: The Argument for Doubt’, p. 9. 131. Brandabur, A Scrupulous Meanness, p. 127. 132. George Jean Nathan, American Mercury, 4 April 1925, quoted in MacNicholas, ‘The Stage History of Exiles’, p. 11. 133. Bristol and Times, 16 February 1926, quoted in MacNicholas, ‘The Stage History of Exiles’, p. 11. 134. Letter to Carlo Linati, 10 December 1919, Letters of James Joyce, vol. II, p. 457. 135. Abel, ‘Before the Canon’, in Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. I, p. 14. 136. See Platt, ‘Ulysses 15 and the Irish Literary Theatre’, in Gibson (ed.), Reading Joyce’s ‘Circe’, pp. 33–63. 137. Hutchins, ‘James Joyce and the Cinema’, p. 11. 138. Tom Gunning’s term for the almost exclusive emphasis in early cinema (1895–

85

the speech-gesture complex

1906) on the sheer ‘act of showing and exhibition’ in itself, and the use of fixed frame ‘theatrical display over narrative absorption’. See Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’. 139. For instance, Spiegel, Fiction and the Camera Eye; Briggs, ‘ “Roll Away the Reel World”: “Circe” and Cinema’; Burkdall, Joycean Frames; Danius, The Senses of Modernism; Paraskeva, ‘ “In the Beginning was the Gest” ’; Williams, ‘Odysseys of Sound and Image’. 140. Joyce, Joyce’s Ulysses: Notesheets in the British Museum, p. 288. 141. Joyce, Scribbledehobble, p. 119. 142. Letter to Stanislaus, 6 November 1906, Letters of James Joyce, vol. II, p. 203. 143. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 561. 144. Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. 1, p. 288, quoted in Heath, Questions of Cinema, p. 17. 145. Senn, ‘ “Circe” as Harking Back in Provective Arrangement’, in Gibson (ed.), Reading Joyce’s ‘Circe’, pp. 63–92; Hayman, ‘Language of/as gesture in Joyce’. 146. Wales, ‘ “Bloom passes through several walls”: The Stage Directions in “Circe” ’, in Gibson (ed.), Reading Joyce’s ‘Circe’, pp. 241–76. 47. Attridge, Peculiar Language, p. 134. 1 148. Films were shown in Dublin from April 1896, for instance, at the Erin Variety Theatre and Rotunda. There was no cinema until 1909, when Joyce opened the Cinematograph Volta. See Williams, ‘Joyce and Early Cinema’, p. 1 for a synopsis of the Volta programme. 149. Maxim Gorky, Review of the Lumière programme at the Nizhny-Novgorod Fair, 1896, trans. Leda Swan in Jay Leyda, Kino, pp. 407–9. 50. Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity, p. 155. 1 151. This reading favours the 1922 edition rather than the Gabler, whose update from “slides” to “glides” (p. 361: 386–1922) obscures the Mutoscope reference. See Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson, p. 420. 52. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 40. 1 53. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 6 1 54. Yeats, Explorations, p. 32, p. 33. 1 1 55. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 12, p. 14. 56. Heath, Questions of Cinema, p. 181. 1 157. Benjamin, ‘Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, p. 222. 58. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 24. 1 59. Burch, Life to Those Shadows, p. 164. 1 60. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures, p. 21. 1 161. Dion Boucicault, quoted in Anon, The Art of Acting or Guide to the Stage, p. 33. 162. Uricchio and Pearson, Reframing Culture, p. 99. 63. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures, p. 24. 1 164. Uricchio and Pearson, Reframing Culture, p. 99. 65. Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition, p. 141. 1 66. Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, pp. 1 114–16. 67. Mayer, Stagestruck Filmmaker, p. 2. 1 68. Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, p. 38. 1 69. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 401. 1 70. Yeats, Collected Plays, pp. 262–3. 1 171. Quoted in Flannery, W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre, p. 27. 72. Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, p. 91, p. 92. 1 1 73. Salt, Film Style and Technology, p. 94. 1 74. Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge, p. 192.

86

james joyce

75. Ibid. p. 193. 1 176. Letter to Stanislaus, 1906, quoted in Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics, p. 185. 177. Ibid. p. 185. 178. Serres, Les Cinq sens: philosophie des corps mêlés, quoted in Connor, ‘Modernism and the Writing Hand’. 179. Connor, ‘Modernism and the Writing Hand’. 180. See for instance DeMille’s The Cheat (1915); Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), Broken Blossoms (1919) and Intolerance (1919); Abel Gance’s J’accuse! (1919). 181. Epstein, ‘Magnification’, in Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. I, p. 239. 182. ‘David Wark Griffith Speaks’, The New York Dramatic Mirror, 14 January 1914, quoted in Pratt, Spellbound in Darkness, pp. 110–11. 183. Letter to Enrichetta in December 1915, Pontiero, Eleanora Duse, p. 300. 184. Benjamin, ‘Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, p. 230. 185. Attridge, Peculiar Language, pp. 160–1. 186. Münsterberg, The Film, p. 36. 187. Balázs, Theory of the Film, pp. 41–2. 188. Ibid. p. 189. 189. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 194, p. 197. 190. Joyce, Joyce’s Ulysses: Notesheets in the British Museum, p. 266, p. 296, pp. 295–6. 191. Ibid. p. 46. 192. Ibid. p. 43. 193. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures, p. 37. 194. Hewitt, Social Choreography, p. 105. 195. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 16. 196. Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, p. 72.

87

2

WYNDHAM LEWIS

The Clown and the Über-Marionette in Enemy of the Stars Pound echoes his earlier remark about the unperformability of Exiles in an account of the experimental play Enemy of the Stars by Wyndham Lewis, first published in BLAST in 1914: ‘it could not be presented in the theatre’.1 Stage directions summon the mimetic body of the actor, only then to dismantle it, resisting Pound’s definition of the ‘medium of drama’ as ‘not words, but persons moving about on a stage using words’.2 This resistance to performability, the negative critique of theatricality, is a key aspect, I will argue, of the play’s aesthetic of anti-mimesis and the tension it generates between the body of the actor, constantly invoked as a point of reference, and a ‘phrasal style’3 which seeks to explode the performative body into linguistic components. As Martin Puchner observes, modernist drama, while often seeking to ‘interrupt and break apart any possibility for either an actual or an imaginary stage’, nevertheless ‘contains that which it resists’.4 By situating the play within the performance culture of its time, and by exploring the category of theatre which Enemy of the Stars violently resists, I will show how Lewis’s attack on mimesis parallels a similar critique by figures at the forefront of a theatrical (rather than literary) tradition which privileges anti-naturalist, machine-like abstract gestures. Lewis’s anti-mimetic technique informs his complaint in Time and Western Man, where he claims ‘Circe’ as an unacknowledged appropriation of the 88

wyndham lewis

Vorticist style of Enemy of the Stars.5 As Dennis Brown points out, ‘if Enemy of the Stars was the chief proto-Modernist bid of 1914, one of its main effects was to initiate a rivalry in experimental daring which helped propel Joyce toward Ulysses’.6 Joyce conspicuously makes no mention of Enemy until Finnegans Wake, though as Brown comments, ‘it is difficult to believe that the grotesque settings, weird metamorphoses and neo-Vorticist stylistics of “Circe” are not a quite direct response to Lewis’ “play” ’.7 From this point on, as Scott Klein argues in his illuminating study of the rival aesthetic and philosophical projects of Joyce and Lewis, ‘Lewis considered Joyce to be his opponent or “Enemy”, while Joyce made Lewis, in Finnegans Wake, an idiosyncratic and archetypal figure of aesthetic conflict’.8 Lewis bitterly held to the view that Joyce ‘had, I am persuaded, read everything I had ever written. He pretended however not to have done so.’9 The publication of Ulysses, and Lewis’s grievance that Joyce had appropriated the signature tricks of his style, brings amicable relations between them to an end.10 The site of ensuing rivalry, and prolonged reciprocal counterattacks between Joyce and Lewis, which continues until the composition of Finnegans Wake, is located less, as Brown suggests, in parallel ‘Expressionist melodramatics’ and ‘psycho-drama burlesque’,11 but more specifically, I would argue, at the intersection of the iconic gesturing body, constantly invoked as a point of reference, and an anti-mimetic impulse which seeks to fracture iconicity with paratactic effects, exploding the performative body into linguistic components. Joyce writes the performative body in a hybrid style informed by the linguistic innovations, the ‘phrasal style’12 of Enemy of the Stars, and the syntax of shot sequences in early cinema; this compels Lewis towards his stylistic zenith in The Childermass, which mimics, in order to critique, the aesthetic and politics of cinematic mimesis, partly developed in ‘Circe’, as well as sending up Joyce in the figure of Pullmann, one of the lead characters. Joyce responds in Finnegans Wake by converting Lewis into an aspect of the composite figure Shaun, ‘mein goot enemy’, author of a ‘postvortex piece’ called ‘irony of stars’.13 Modernist anti-mimetic performance, its struggle between the signifying properties of phrasal syntax, and the iconic perception of the gesturing body – a key feature of the speech-gesture complex – is forged in the multiply overlapping attempts in Joyce and Lewis to collide verbal kinaesthesis with the typography of body, and to reinvent in the process congealed habits of reading and spectatorship. Vorticism’s simultaneous representation of the natural and the anti-mimetic erupts in Enemy of the Stars into a radical new form which compels a critical reorientation towards acts of reading and spectatorship. The hybrid abstractions and figurative effects of the gesturing body generate an essential interdependency between anti-mimesis and performance style. The play eludes the possibility of a staged production, and yet constantly refers to the performative body and the representational space of the theatre – the objects it seeks to resist 89

the speech-gesture complex

– only to proceed with their negation. As in ‘Circe’, the action opens by invoking the dimensions of a staged setting – ‘CHARACTERS AND PROPERTIES BOTH EMERGE FROM GANGWAY INTO GROUND AT ONE SIDE’14 – and playfully modifying the scenography by writing the solitary reader of the play, in the form of ‘Posterity’ (p. 98), into the space reserved for the diegetic ‘AUDIENCE’, which ‘LOOKS DOWN INTO SCENE’ (p. 97). The reader is also a spectator occupying a ring-side seat as the action unfolds, a member of a collective audience, a paying customer: ‘THE BOX OFFICE RECEIPTS HAVE BEEN ENORMOUS’. In this sense, reading as an act of spectatorship is foregrounded against the impalpability of depersonalised phrasal abstraction. The perceptible body, conscious of the act of performing before an audience, infiltrates the attempt to dissolve the mimetic space into abstraction and dismantle the body into formalist components. The critique of the language of mimetic realism, considered the play’s central achievement by David Graver,15 is only one side of a reciprocal transformative process which also reconfigures the perception of the theatrical body. Scholarship on Lewis’s play tends, on the whole, to concentrate on the play’s thematic and philosophical aspect, or its relations to the abstract formalism in contemporary visual art.16 Paul Edwards’s elegant close analysis considers the play’s lineage within the European Expressionist tradition, as an aspect of Arghol’s ‘Romantic quest for pure authenticity and transcendence’17 and a method which allegorises Schopenhauer, Stirner and Nietzsche. Andrzej Gasiorek amply extends and refines Edwards’s argument about the ‘use of gnostic dualism’ and Arghol’s ‘desire to return to a Platonic transcendent origin’.18 I wish to develop this line of argument about Arghol’s thwarted desire for transcendence, and the agonistic dispute which ends as a death-match between its two figures, by reading the play as a confrontation, overlooked in Lewis scholarship, between two kinds of performance style: the clown-like imitations of Hanp, which foreground the body’s materiality, versus the mechanised, formalist, reflective body of Arghol. Arghol’s position is a defence of the transcendental self, and its impossible desire to avoid the corruption of what he calls the ‘indiscriminate rubbing’ of ‘social excrescence’ (p. 107). He seeks not only to liberate ‘each gesture and word’ from its organic conditions, its ‘degradation’ and ‘ “souillure” ’, and achieve authentic selfhood, ‘the original solitude of the soul’ (p. 106), but also to demonstrate its unattainability. His gestures are slow, mechanical, anti-mimetic; every movement he makes is also an attempt to dissolve the movement into imperceptibility, so it cannot be appropriated by the crowds huddled round to observe him, or his opponent Hanp. Arghol wills his own imperceptibility. The stars, which appear as he comes out of the hut, ‘strain to see him’; Lewis mobilises the phrasal abstractions which describe him toward this end, purifying his gestures of their mimetic resemblance to organic life. 90

wyndham lewis

His immediate struggle is to preserve his integrity against, as T. S. Eliot puts it, ‘the eyes that fix [him] in a formulated phrase’,19 especially Hanp’s, whose eyes search for ‘a companion for his detached ailment of self’. His attempt to imitate Arghol’s performance style represents the organic, imitative, naturalist body: the body of an actor who ‘becomes’ himself as he ‘imitates and assimilates that Ego until it is no longer one’ (p. 102). It is this process of imitation, as Hanp’s gestures mirror his, which Arghol seeks to escape, to preserve his distinctiveness against the violent masquerade which finally supplants him. Once he realises Arghol is an immovable object, envious hostility drives Hanp, incapable of overcoming, or fully imitating him, to kill him in his sleep, an event which is then abruptly followed by Hanp’s suicide. Arghol, poised at ‘the centre of the red universe’, and the object of murderous imitation, maintains an integrity, though it proves to be his undoing, which his clown-like opponent lacks: the play closes with Hanp’s suicide as he leaps off a bridge ‘clumsily [. . .] his heart a sagging weight of stagnant hatred’ (p. 119). Arghol’s gestural style belongs to a modernist theatrical tradition which negates the living presence of the actor, and which seeks to estrange gestural mimesis by mechanising the actor’s performance style. In this respect, Enemy of the Stars resides at the forefront of a tradition which privileges anti-naturalist, or machine-like gestures, and which encompasses the major practitioners of modernist theatre, from Gordon Craig and Yeats, through Meyerhold, Brecht and Beckett. Modernist anti-naturalism in the theatre begins with late nineteenth-century Symbolism’s advocation of marionettes in favour of actors, and a subsequent style of acting whereby actors aspire to the condition of marionettes. In an account he gives of Maeterlinck’s plays for marionettes, Arthur Symons quotes a remark by Eleanora Duse, that ‘the actors and actresses must all die of the plague’;20 the depersonalised gestures of symbolist theatre, divested of their naturalist tendencies, strive for a self-reflexive formality, as distinct from a mimetic identification with ‘character’, in the manner of the naturalist actor. This disavowal of identification – as Symons puts it, sounding Brechtian before the fact, ‘I like to see my illusions clearly, recognising them as illusions’21 – begins with the Maeterlinckian notion that symbolist theatre, with its emphasis on imperceptibility, ‘will not tolerate the active presence of man’. Maeterlinck wrote plays for marionettes with the conviction that the actor’s physical presence, or mimetic representation, held captive by its own materiality, interferes with the imperceptibility available to the solitary reader of the play. The plays for marionettes are an aspect of this desire to transcend the materiality of the body. This recurrent emphasis in Symbolist theatre – on ‘the soul of things visible’22, as Symons puts it, or in Yeats’s words, ‘invisible essence’23 – is not exclusively privileged in the Lewisian performative body, although they share a hybrid sense which returns theatrical spectatorship to the act of reading, where gestures always in a sense remain ‘invisible’. 91

the speech-gesture complex

Symons spoke of Maeterlinck’s drama as a ‘theatre of artificial beings, who are at once [. . .] more mechanical than the living actors whom we are accustomed to see’, observing their ‘grave, regulated motion’.24 Arghol conducts his movements according to this performative style: he ‘shifted his legs mechanically’ (p. 102); his hands are a ‘thick shell’ (p. 101); he ‘lies in deliberate leaden inanimation’ (p. 104); he is ‘central as stone, poised as a magnet’, and when he moves, it is ‘LIKE WARY SHIFTING OF BODIES IN DISTANT EQUIPOISE’ (p. 97). His gestures are possessed of a multi-dimensional ease, control and restraint which are thoroughly marionette-like. Yeats described the marionette style of actors moving ‘slowly and quietly, and not very much, and there should be something in their movements [. . .] rhythmical as if they were paintings in a frieze’.25 Symons also foregrounds this concern to freeze movement, and the ‘sense of motion which it is the business of painting to arrest’.26 This theatrical style is one way of grasping the ‘frozen constellations’ of Lewis’s Vorticist syntax as they capture the force of gesture without motion. Arghol’s mechanised body in Enemy of the Stars, statuesque, caught between movements, a performative effect achieved by suppressing temporal continuity between phrasal sequences, correlates with the frozen tableau effects in his painting of this period, such as The Domino (1912), The Courtesan (1912) and Smiling Woman Ascending Stair (1913), where gestures stiffen into arcs and sharp lines, attitudes which resemble the symbolic body of the marionette. Lewis’s movement towards angular machine gestures in his painting crystallises between 1912 and 1914, reinforced during his attendance of T. E. Hulme’s lectures on art-historian Wilhelm Worringer. As Reed Dasenbrock has commented, this comparison of primitive art, such as the Egyptian pyramids or Byzantine mosaics, ‘directly opposed to the empathy impulse’, with modern machine-based art, coincides with Lewis’s own activity as a painter and writer.27 Hulme and Worringer identify the primitive with the modern by exposing a common impulse: the desire to extract a living object from conditions of accident and relativity, to form an abstract of the object, providing it with a refuge from those conditions, fixing it in the ‘irrefragable necessity of its closed material individuality’,28 finds its expression in the geometrical, crystalline regularity of machine-art. The Vorticist position is expounded towards the end of Tarr, which Lewis wrote between 1911 and 1915, in the disquisition on painting given by the novel’s hero: ‘Instead, then, of being something impelled like an independent machine by a little egoistic fire inside, [the statue] lives soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses’.29 Art which imitates the organic ‘pulsing and moving of the soft inside of life’ also imitates the conditions of life’s decay. Hulme’s view of ‘the geometrical line as something absolutely distinct from the messiness, the confusion and the accidental details of existing things’30 finds its counterparts in Tarr’s art theory, Arghol’s view of 92

wyndham lewis

bodily movement as liberated from its organic conditions, and the depersonalised gesture in the theatre of marionettes. Lewis’s Vorticist reformulation of European movements in the visual arts parallels the development of the ‘Über-Marionette’31 by Edward Gordon Craig, according to Michael Walton, ‘the one English [theatre] practitioner and theorist of the Edwardian era who could be said to have possessed a genuine European outlook’.32 Given Lewis’s close observations of contemporary developments in the European avant-garde – his sharp awareness of the progress of Futurism and Expressionism are key instances – it is highly unlikely he would not have encountered Gordon Craig’s journal, The Mask (1908–29), its accounts of Futurism and Cubism and their relation to modern theatre. Futurism was in fact a significant preoccupation of Craig’s from 1911–14; the journal published the first English translation of the Futurist Manifesto on the theatre in 1913.33 Both Craig and Lewis shared a suspicion of Futurism’s deification of speed, vitalism and technology, and both demonstrated intellectual affinities with the Expressionism of Kandinsky and the Blue Rider group, with their tendency towards an abstraction partly derived from Worringer.34 Lewis does mention Craig in The Art of Being Ruled, and gives a brief account which strongly resembles his conception of Arghol: ‘the influence of the Gordon Craig school had been in the other direction. They sought to make the actor more remote, masking him, robbing him of personality, so that he should seem isolated, a creature of a different birth.’35 Arghol’s contempt for the contingent accidents of ‘organic conditions’ resembles the polemical anti-naturalism of Gordon Craig: ‘in the modern theatre, owing to the use of the bodies of men and women as their material, all which is presented there is of an accidental nature’. For Gordon Craig, as for Arghol, the actor’s materiality, his mimetic presence, ‘the actions of the actor’s body’ obscure the constructedness of theatre and the attainment of a complexity of immanent relations. The unmediated live presence of unregulated actors on stage exposes the work to the accidents of naturalist performance; Craig declared that ‘art can admit of no accidents’, what Arghol calls ‘souillure’, and that the actor, as an intentional agent, ‘must go’. The figure which replaces him, the depersonalised ‘Über-Marionette’, purges the actor’s movements of haphazard, unregulated emotion, and by extension, vanity: ‘the actor plus fire minus egoism’, as Gordon Craig puts it.36 Arghol’s performance as a Vorticist Über-Marionette is the actor freed from personal vanity, unlike Hanp, hidden beneath his ‘mask of discontent, anxious to explode, restrained by qualms of vanity and professional coyness’ (p. 96). Yet Gordon Craig’s Über-Marionette remained an ideal which he never fully realised, as he found he could not entirely abstract the mimetic presence of the actor, nor eliminate all accidents and contingencies of the actor’s body from the live event. This failed project of anti-mimesis is partly enacted in 93

the speech-gesture complex

Lewis’s (conscious) failure to approximate abstraction in visual art by purging language of reference in Enemy of the Stars: ‘my literary contemporaries I looked upon as too bookish and not keeping pace with the visual revolution. A kind of play, Enemy of the Stars [. . .] was my attempt to show them the way.’37 As Peter Nicholls notes of Pound’s essay on Vorticism, published in BLAST, the ‘identification of the authentically modern with the non-mimetic was easier to grasp in terms of the new visual arts than it was in relation to literature’.38 Lewis’s ‘kind of play’ is his most concerted attempt to find correlatives between prose style and visual anti-mimetic or abstract ‘planes in relation’: ‘Throats iron eternities, drinking heavy radiance, limbs towers of blatant light, the stars poised, immensely distant, with their metal sides, pantheistic machines’ (p. 100). Clusters of static non-representational phrases, ‘frozen constellations’, as Vincent Sherry puts it,39 suppress clauses which indicate temporal relation, dispensing with continuity and ordinary syntax. These phrasal abstractions acquire their own integral significance, as William Wees observes: ‘events are broken down and reconstructed like the interrelated fragments of Vorticist pictures’.40 Yet the phrasal clusters of Enemy of the Stars are composed of indivisible units which, in themselves, remain unavoidably referential – ‘throats’, ‘iron’, ‘eternities’ – and so the style, as Lewis recognised, could never attain pure abstraction. Whilst other painters associated with Vorticism often tended to break definitively from figurative references and develop exclusively mechanical forms,41 Lewis maintained a technique which never quite dissolved the figurative body, even within his most abstract pictures, remarking: ‘the finest art is not pure abstraction, nor is it unorganised life’.42 This dual aspect is the outcome of Lewis’s attempt, as a painter and writer, to discover formal correlatives between the written and the perceptible body. In The Vorticist (1912), the human figure is expressed in a staccato vocabulary of taut linear shapes and frenzied diagonals; Vorticist Design (1914) intersperses saw-tooth edges, levers, pistons and even gun barrels amongst anatomical components: each of these elements can be identified either as a section of anatomy or the fragment of a streamlined machine. The Vorticist collision of muscular physicality with hard edges and abstractions in Enemy of the Stars is presented in BLAST alongside a drawing by Lewis bearing the same name, in which the mechanical shifts and starts of a wildly angular head and barely figurative torso are stretched downwards into curvilinear calves and thighs, described in the play as sinewy ‘explosive muscles’ (p. 95). This tension between the abstract and the organic is enacted in the struggle between Arghol and Hanp. Hanp represents the materialist and mimetic body. In contrast to Arghol’s entrance as a ‘POISED MAGNET’, Hanp ‘comes out of hut, coughing like a goat, rolling a cigarette. He goes to where Arghol is lying. He stirs him with his foot roughly’ (p. 100). The action of the play 94

wyndham lewis

is described as occurring in ‘SOME BLEAK CIRCUS’ (p. 95): Hanp is the comic servant, the acrobatic trickster, and his performative style belongs to the tradition of the grotesque. He is the ‘clown in the circus’ (p. 116). Hanp’s chthonic movements – he springs ‘out of the ground’ (p. 110) – frequently resemble the knockabout mime routines of clowns: ‘a handful of furious movements: flung himself on Arghol’ (p. 110). An established routine in commedia dell’arte, the ‘lazzi suicide’, where the First Zanni clown, the servant, having failed successfully to plot against his superior, mimes his own suicide as part of a comic interlude,43 is echoed in Hanp’s actual suicide and in the murder of Arghol: ‘Arghol rose as though on a spring, his eyes glaring down on Hanp, and with an action of the head, as though he were about to sneeze. Hanp shrank back, on his haunches. He over-balanced and fell on his back’ (p. 118). Arghol keeps his centre of gravity and strikes an elegant contorted pose in his final moment, not a dying fall but a rising upwards. Hanp gracelessly mistimes and tumbles over, a classic buffoonish pratfall. These routines of low grotesquery, clown-like and therefore deliberate, account for Hanp’s ‘blatant virtuosity of self’ (p. 96), and his attempts to mime the actions of Arghol, both defining features of the circus clown. Albert Fratellini, performing with the Fratellini Brothers at the Medrano Circus in Paris, described by the mime artist Jacques Copeau as ‘muscular perfection in the service of a spontaneous and sincere feeling’, would frequently imitate, in order to parody, his more earnest counterparts.44 Having observed Arghol as he ‘strains and stretches elegantly’ (p. 100), Hanp himself is later seen ‘stretched and strained like a toy wound up’ (p. 118). Though in Enemy of the Stars, the imitative tendency is not parody, it is riven with murderous envy of his stiff, indifferent counterpart. Lewis wrote an account of his own spectating of circus clowns at Quimperlé, on the south coast of Brittany, in his 1909 short story, ‘Les Saltimbanques’.45 The ‘heavy tight clothes’ and ‘dull explosive muscles’ (p. 95) of Hanp recall the ‘bulging muscles’ and ‘painted faces’ of the Breton clowns in his story. The night at the circus in Quimperlé begins with the head showman introducing the proceedings, ‘his movements followed with minute attention by the crowd’. As he asks them to take their seats ‘with an expressive gesture [. . .] they riveted their eyes on his hand’ although they do not as yet occupy their seats. The clown then bursts into the circle: ‘ “B-o-n-soir, M’sieurs et M’dames,” he chirped, waved his hand, tumbled over his employer’s foot’. Waving his hand, the clown imitates the gestures of the proprietor, his master, in an effort to undermine his authority and assume the role of mock-ringmaster. The audience then howls with delight as the master, woken to the sudden violence of an automatic figure set in motion [. . .] sprang nimbly backwards and forwards as though engaged in a boxing 95

the speech-gesture complex

match, and grinned at the clown’s wit, as though in spite of himself, while nearly knocking his teeth out with delighted blows.46 The idea of the clown as an ‘automatic figure set in motion’ testifies to the influence of Bergson. In Laughter, which Lewis read on its publication in 1903 whilst attending his lectures at the Collège de France,47 Bergson puts forward ‘the tricks of the circus clowns’ to exemplify the theory that imitation is a version of automatism, of the ‘momentary transformation of a person into a thing’.48 Lewis’s statements that ‘any autonomous movement of matter is essentially comic’ and ‘the root of the Comic is to be sought in the sensations resulting from the observations of a thing behaving like a person’49 are derivations of Bergson’s theory, as Robert Murray and Bernard Lafourcade have observed,50 although specific instances of these gestures in Lewis, particularly during the Vorticist period of 1912–14, tend towards negative critique of Bergson’s propositions. Lewis concurs with the view that gestural imitation posits a structure of automatic repetition, an excess of which generates mechanical uniformity: ‘to imitate anyone is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to creep into his person’. According to Bergson: ‘wherever there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some mechanism at work behind the living’.51 Mechanical repetition confers upon gesture an automatic quality. Arghol ‘strains and stretches elegantly’ (p. 100); when Hanp imitates him, he ‘stretched and strained like a toy wound up’ (p. 118). Lewis’s paintings and drawing of this period, such as Two Figures (1912), Two Vorticist Figures (1912) and Two Mechanics (1912), bring out this element of automated similarity by depicting pairs of identical machine figures, pulled down to earth by heavy ballast, each a simulacrum of the other, ‘two copies cast in the same mould’. Gesture becomes mechanical through repetition: the more thoroughly imitated, the less observable presence of mind in the gesture. The master’s ‘wave of the hand’ in ‘Les Saltimbanques’, imitated by the clown, is already a standardised, ritual gesture, signalling an invitation to the audience to take their seats. Rigid and lifeless, emptied of the Bergsonian élan vital from an excess of performative repetition, the gesture ceases to function. The audience do not take their seats until the clown’s mock-imitation. Foregrounding its explicitly automatic quality, the clown, intentionally mechanising his hand, just as his master does without realising, makes explicit the comedy in the gesture, to which the audience then reacts. As Lewis observed, after Bergson, ‘a comic type is a failure of considerable energy, an imitation and standardising of self, suggesting the existence of a uniform humanity’.52 The master is jolted, from the version of himself which is comically imitable – as Bergson puts it, ‘the attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine’53 – into the version of himself as ringmaster, his authentic self. 96

wyndham lewis

Arghol and Hanp are both automata, though radically different in kind. In his strained mechanical slowness, Arghol is a deliberate automaton, poised and self-aware, like one of Symons’s ‘living people pretending to be those wooden images of life which pretend to be living people’.54 Hanp’s movements, on the other hand, frequently take the form of involuntary outbursts, neither deliberate nor reflexive: the ‘strain of his mock life [. . .] was tremendous on his underworld of energy and rebellious muscles’ (p. 109). As Arthur C. Danto observes, if someone’s arm just flew up, because of a spasm, the description of it as an action would be false [. . .] we see bodily movements as actions only against the assumption that certain unobserved conditions hold: we see them ‘in terms of’ intentions, motives.55 Hanp’s gestures, propelled by haphazard, unregulated emotion and vanity, always appear ‘false’ in this sense; his constant sudden emissions of tension and crisis are like accidental ‘muscular spasms’ (p. 99). He carries his limbs around with him, in Bergson’s words, as ‘an isolated part of [him] expressed, unknown to, or at least apart from, the whole of the personality’.56 This unspent friction finds an outlet in his attempt to imitate Arghol and become his ‘sunken mirror’ (p. 107). Hindered by his cheap materiality – the ‘toy wound up’ – and stagnant incompletion, he sinks into mechanical obstinacy, his body transformed into an unwitting third-personal object. Hanp sees Arghol as a more authentic version of ‘another HIMSELF’ (p. 109). Arghol tells him he is ‘amazed to find that you are like me. I talk to you for an hour and get more disgusted with myself’ (p. 109); when Hanp flings himself onto Arghol to attack him – he ‘brought his own disgust back to him [. . .] He felt himself on him’ (p. 110) – and when he finally puts the knife in – ‘he could hardly help plunging it in himself’ (p. 118) – there is a momentary suspension as to whom ‘himself’ should refer. The reflexive pronoun ceases to correspond exclusively to Hanp, it drives a wedge between the body that expresses a first-person idea of action, and the body that is the subject of the idea of action. As Elizabeth Anscombe comments, ‘it is part of the sense of “I” that utterer and subject should be one and the same’, yet in these instances, the pronoun does not refer to an agency which could utter, without serious misgivings: ‘I am the thinker of these thoughts’, or ‘I am this body’.57 A similar pronominal doubling effect occurs in Tarr, a novel which further develops Lewis’s ongoing project to reorientate outdated habits of reading and spectatorship by staging a violent collision between the natural and antimimetic performative body. It pitches, once again, the figure of the detached observer, mechanised but self-reflexive, the character of the title, against the mimetic figure of Kreisler, described as ‘clown-like’ (p. 178), who moves, like Hanp the ‘toy wound up’, with the ‘dead weight of old iron, that started, must go dashing on’ (p. 107). Lewis told Hugh Kenner, echoing the declaration that 97

the speech-gesture complex

Enemy of the Stars was ‘keeping pace with the visual revolution’,58 that he wrote Tarr as ‘a piece of writing worthy of the hand of the abstract innovator [. . .] Anyhow, it was my object to eliminate anything less essential than a noun or a verb. Prepositions, pronouns, articles – the small fry – as far as might be, I would abolish.’59 This attempt to streamline parts of speech which indicate subjective agency, in particular, the reflexive pronoun ‘himself’, informs a technique concomitant to his innovations as a Vorticist painter and playwright. The Lewisian frontal assault on the line again explodes the phenomenon of the body’s intersubjective agency. The aggressive dislocation of the movement of limbs from intentionality is manifest in Tarr, as in Enemy of the Stars, in fissures and overlaps between perception and readability, and the complex dispositions of deictic referents and reflexive pronouns. Tarr is the version of himself as a painter Kreisler aspires to be, although Soltyk, who supplants him as chief recipient of money from Volker, and as Anastasya’s escort, is also an ‘efficient and more accomplished counterpart’ (p. 90). When Soltyk, provoked by Kreisler, breaks out in suddenly accruing fury to attack, ‘Soltyk tore at himself first, writhing upright, a statue’s bronze softening, suddenly, with blood’ (p. 272). The reference-field of ‘himself’, which Lewis italicises, doubles up to include both men, an effect which continues during the fight scene: ‘hands flew at Kreisler’s throat [. . .] Kreisler was hurled about. He was pumped backwards and forwards. His hands grabbed a mass of hair; as a man slipping on a precipice gets hold of a plant’ (p. 273). In this instance, ‘his hands grabbed a mass of hair’ could refer either to Soltyk attacking, an extension of his hands which ‘flew at Kreisler’s throat’, or Kreisler’s defence, ‘as a man slipping on a precipice gets hold of a plant’. This pronominal doubling effect is also a feature of Dostoevsky’s The Double, a story to which Tarr richly alludes.60 Golyadkin is a split personality, threatened by an identical simulacrum who shares his name, as intelligently varied and supple as the authentic Golyadkin is monotonous and mechanically inflexible. When Golyadkin ‘looked as though he wanted to hide from himself, as though he were trying to run away from himself’, or when he becomes ‘mistrustful of himself’,61 the reference is to Golyadkin, and his double, in equal measure. Living at a distance from their own bodies, Kreisler and Golyadkin become reproducible when they cease to be themselves. Automatism, in the form of a mimetic double, exceeds them, whereas Hanp in Enemy of the Stars, unable to become ‘himself’ by imitating Arghol, expires in a mimetic doublebind: he is his opponent’s failed double. Arghol’s fear of being assimilated and reproduced until he is no longer exclusively himself, registered in the dream in which he meets a version of Hanp and accuses him of ‘masquerading as me’ (p. 114), propels his anti-mimetic stance. In his resistance to the repetition of himself, and contempt for Hanp’s professional vanity, Arghol is also an Enemy of the Stars, of actor-stars, and 98

wyndham lewis

the phenomenon of star personas, which Lewis regards as the consequence of an excess of vanity and repetition in which the star persona, having acquired an automatic life of its own, overtakes the particularity of the actor. Arghol’s opening stage direction declares, ‘HE IS NOT EVEN A “STAR”’ (p. 96); he is rather the actor who resists the process compelling him to conform to a standardised version of himself. Hanp’s degenerate process of appropriation, as his opponent’s ‘self-centred and elemental shadow’ (p. 99), overcome with ‘qualms of vanity’ (p. 96) and indignant at ‘Arghol ACTING, he who had not the right to act’ (p. 115), mimes a standardised misrepresentation of a persona Arghol refuses for himself. The 1932 revision of the play clarifies Hanp’s status as a ‘bad actor – or else one in violent disagreement with his part’ (p. 191), unable to imitate and supplant Arghol in the eyes of the audience, the ‘faces following stars’ (p. 103). The struggle in Enemy of the Stars is also between the standardised artificial reproducibility of the star persona as a commodity, versus the irreducible authenticity of the anti-mimetic self. The consequence for Arghol in permitting even a single imitation of himself – ‘two reproductions of the same negative’ – would be to invite a ‘manufacturing process’62 for multiple autonomous reproductions. This nightmare vision blazes over him in an ‘electric atmosphere’ (p. 100): gazing up at the ‘dry, white volcanic light’ (p. 98), he sees a ‘furious mass of images’, flashes of a ‘hundred idols to a man’. The real Arghol, spectating images of possible appropriations of himself, anticipates Bloom’s struggle in ‘Circe’ to safeguard an authentic version of himself from reproducible film personas which threaten to consume him. The persona of the film actor, as Noël Burch observes, emerged as a consequence of the star system and the development of the close-up.63 The phrasal units of Enemy of the Stars, unhindered by the physical limitations of the stage, often present the performative body of Hanp in shot sequences with an emphasis on extreme close-ups: ‘Upperlip shot down, half covering chin, his body reached methodically’ (p. 99). Already a bugbear for Lewis as early as 1914, though not evolving into an extended critique until The Childermass, published in 1927, and the polemics of the late twenties and thirties, Enemy of the Stars generates intense bursts of awareness of cinematic gestures as the zenith of the mimetic image, its severance of movement from volition, and the reproducibility of inauthentic selfhood exemplified by the star system. As DeCordova has demonstrated, the star system in filmmaking, established as early as 1907–10, was inherited from the theatre. In France, the prestige historical melodramas produced by Film D’Art, essentially photographed proscenium theatre, had begun to emphasise the star quality of their performers around 1909. The performance of Sarah Bernhardt in La Tosca (1909) and then Camille (1912) set a precedent in which the appearance of a star could become a film’s most distinctive feature, its selling point.64 The US had been 99

the speech-gesture complex

manufacturing star performers in theatre since George Frederick Cooke’s extensive tour across America in 1810 generated a maximum of publicity and exposure for its actors. Around 1910, the major film production companies Vitagraph and Biograph inherit the star system from theatre, fully established by 1870, with Maude Adams, William Faversham and Ethel Barrymore its leading lights, prestige actor personas with a high commodity value. Observing the popularity of Biograph’s Florence Lawrence, Vitagraph followed suit by manufacturing their own brand-name phenomenon, Florence Turner, the ‘Vitagraph girl’.65 Lewis hints at the anxiety, especially for the actor in theatre, of this industrial manufacture of personas when Arghol gazes up at the flickering electric sky to see an ‘immense production of barren muscular girl idols’ (p. 104). These momentary glimpses foreshadow the Bailiff’s afterlife in The Childermass, where an ‘immense production’ of idols permeates every feature of the landscape and its inhabitants.

The Childermass: Lewis vs Chaplin in the Afterlife The hints towards a cinematic environment in Enemy of the Stars, and its implied critique of mechanical repetition as a phenomenon of the shadow-gestures of cinema, attain full and explicit realisation in The Childermass. The following section close reads The Childermass in light of its laceration of Charlie Chaplin’s mimetic gestures.66 The Tramp persona, by the time of the novel’s composition, had become a symptom, for Lewis, of what he found unoriginal, fraudulent and inauthentic in the culture industry. The two lead characters are compelled to enact routines from Chaplin films by the totalitarian Bailiff, who presides over the afterlife, at times appearing to his subjects as Chaplin. Performative mimesis, as exemplified by the Tramp persona, is transformed in the afterlife into a mechanised cliché which severs movement from volition, and supplants the authentic, anti-mimetic self. The endless reproducibility of individual gestures on film signifies, for Lewis, the deadness of mass-produced Hollywood group personality. The critique of Chaplin, and cinema in general, reinforces his attacks on Bergson’s theory of duration in The Childermass and Time and Western Man. The two lead characters, Pullman and Satters, both killed in the First World War, meet again in the afterlife as animated stiffs. Vorticist duality between organism and machine becomes a matter of life and death, as Lewis converts the gestures of these dead figures into the mechanical afterimage of their living bodies. Shell-shocked human forms, ‘corpses’,67 articulate themselves with the ‘stiffest joints, stalking slowly in, advancing very little’ (p. 22). Pullman searches for ‘the dead accuracy required for walking flexibly from the hips as though born a biped’ (p. 20). The Bailiff’s afterlife provides Lewis with the ideal conditions for the lifelessness of the Vorticist machine gesture, where ‘deadness is the first condition of art [. . .] that opposed to the naked pulsing and moving of 100

wyndham lewis

the soft inside of life, along with infinite elasticity and consciousness of movement’.68 This division between the empathy of the organic and the lifelessness of the mechanical is crystallised as a split, as Lewis puts it in Time and Western Man, between the ‘living person’ and the mechanical ‘image’ or ‘representation into which he or she projects himself or is projected’.69 The figure Satters observes, ‘a flat daguerreotype or one of the personnel of a pre-war film’ (p. 22), is a body converted into the afterlife of its image, its screen persona: ‘he comes and goes; sometimes he is there, then he flickers out’ (p. 22). In the language of film theory, it is a body projected into ‘the luminous sense of its film presence’.70 Pullman and Satters are flickering shadows of their former selves; like all other inhabitants of the afterlife, they occupy their earthly bodies, but the gestures they make are animated by an electro-mechanical force external to themselves. Lewis effects a total separation between movement and volition by writing his two leads as the dried shells of cinematic automata, screen personas detached from their point of origin and hardened into mechanised cliché. The narrative eye in the novel’s opening passage cuts abruptly from a wideshot of the ‘ferry-station’ to the ‘frail figure planted’ there, Pullman. His gestural presence is projected in the received images and routines of cinema as he makes his entrance in the style of the biggest star of all: The suit of nondescript dark grey for ordinary day-wear, well-cut and a little shabby, is coquettishly tight and small, on the trunk and limbs of a child. Reaching up with a girlish hand to the stick cuddled under the miniature oxter, with the other hand the glasses are shaded against the light, as the eyes follow the flight of a wild duck along the city walls northward, the knee slightly flexed to allow the body to move gracefully from the slender hips. (p. 10) The description identifies the physiognomic template of Chaplin. Pullman’s suit, ‘coquettishly tight and small on the trunk and limbs of a child’ summons the Tramp persona, as does the ‘girlish hand’ reaching for ‘the stick cuddled under the miniature oxter’. The description recalls Lewis on Chaplin in Time and Western Man: ‘his tiny wrists, his small body, are those of a child’ (p. 65). In no time, Satters begins to imitate Pullman, according to the system of habit set in motion by their meeting, ‘swinging his body with an arch girlish oscillation’ (p. 13). The Chaplin persona then overtakes Satters as he learns to walk, or learns to adapt his walk to its new standard. The Tramp’s ‘epileptic shuffle’71 is the yardstick for which Satters rehearses: he is observed ‘bracing his legs in bandy equipoise [. . .] he starts off badly, striking his feet down all over the place, but after a trial or two he finds his sea-legs and develops a gait of his own, which is manfully rachitic, if at first absurdly arrogant’ (p. 19). This captures the shrewd and defiant rickety quality of a walk which is not Satters’s, as he thinks, but Chaplin’s. The segments and directions of Satters’s 101

the speech-gesture complex

feet are brought together ‘after a trial or two’ in the angular swerves and mechanical stutter of Chaplin’s walk. As David Ayers notes, the behaviour of Pullman and Satters is merely an ‘instinctive response to the environment’.72 Specifically, their movement is attuned to the machine-like regularity and endless reproducibility of the Bailiff’s afterlife, in the manner of Chaplin, who raises, according to Benjamin, ‘the law of the filmic sequence of images to that of human motor actions’.73 Once the Chaplin walk is mastered, Pullman and Satters are compelled to rehearse more complicated routines, from the same slapstick template: David toe to toe with Goliath, he squares up, moves lithely and rapidly, measuring the insulting bulk of the egregious Satters with methodic deadly eye [. . .] The ox is felled: Satters as Keystone giant receives the crack exactly in the right spot, he sags forward in obedient overthrow, true to type – as though after a hundred rehearsals, true to a second – and crashes to earth as expected, rolling up a glazed eyeball galore, the correct classical Keystone corpse of Jack-the-Giantkiller comedy. Pullman gazes down at the prostrate enemy while the camera could click out a hundred revolutions, ready with his little tingling truncheon. (p. 116) The reference again remains indirect though indisputable. Chaplin is described recurrently by Lewis in his polemical work as ‘the little fellow put upon’; his routines are the ‘pathos of the small’; he is David to the Goliath of the ‘Keystone giants by whom, in his early films, he was always confronted, who oppressed, misunderstood and hunted him, but whom he invariably overcame’.74 The routine clearly alludes to similar square-ups between Chaplin and the Keystone Cops in films such as Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914) and A Film Johnnie (1914). Lewis comprehends the film actor’s constant need for repeated takes until the ‘crack’ can be administered in ‘exactly the right spot’. Chaplin and the Keystone Cops rehearse and repeat until they are ‘true to type’, reproductions of the muscular habits and gestures expected of their personas; by extension, Pullman and Satters repeat until they can imitate those routines, ‘as though after a hundred rehearsals’, again ‘true to type’, but a second-hand imitation of ‘type’, of a ready-made, pre-existent cinematic cliché. Helen Rowe, Lewis’s model and associate between 1914 and 1915, described his preference for a ‘flea-pit cinema at the bottom of Charlotte Street’ which screened Chaplin one-reelers: ‘This was before anyone talked about Chaplin, but Lewis discovered him there.’ Inviting Rowe to the cinema, Lewis would remark: ‘Come and see a clown’;75 he later identifies Chaplin with ‘the old spirit of the circus clown’ and writes that ‘Charlie Chaplin, the only creative personality that the cinema has produced for itself (coming in its first days, before superproduction changed, in standardising it, the character of the screen play), was the swan-song of the English clown.’76 Lewis expresses 102

wyndham lewis

an admiration for the early one-reelers, prior to his conversion into the ultimate mimetic superstar, although his view of Chaplin as a clown intimates an inherent mimetic quality which only required a level of ‘superproduction’ to transform mimesis, on an unprecedented scale, into an autonomous governing principle. During 1914–15, the Chaplin star-persona was only incipient and had not yet become an autonomous entity; the Tramp is seen for the very first time wandering on to the screen frame right in Kid Auto Races at Venice in 1914. A year later, Chaplin plays an aspiring star-actor in His New Job (1915) who successfully auditions for a part as an extra in a period costume drama. The producer agrees to hire him, Chaplin leaves the studio office and we see his walk gradually morph into the epileptic swagger of the Tramp, twirling his cane, a triumphal flourish, just before he disappears off-screen. In the scene which immediately follows, he walks onto the film set and stops centre frame. Flanked by two doors behind him, he swivels round to observe the door on the right, marked for ‘Extras’, and the one on the left, marked for ‘Stars’. The shot is repeated moments later, when he is seen deliberating about which to open before entering the door for ‘Stars’, a retrospectively iconic moment. Taking the star’s role for himself, he dons the brigadier’s costume before proceeding to the shoot. The effect of the routines which follow already depend on his trademark walk, the surest indicator of the Chaplin star-persona: he acts the part of the brigadier by attempting to hide the walk which would give him away. Forcing his legs, against their own automatic tendency, to behave themselves and not blow his cover, the result is a bizarre stuttering effect, even more mechanical than the usual shuffle. Chaplin’s own star-persona, an automaton of its own volition, already far exceeds any attempt to imitate otherwise. From this point on, the stuttering walk rapidly becomes a standardised unmistakable signature which seemed, in its familiarity and reproducibility, to suggest a star-persona ‘independent of the actor playing the role’,77 as though Chaplin were merely operating the mechanical figure of the Tramp. Chaplin testified to this sense of alienation from his screen double during his 1921 trip home to England, when he was greeted by massive crowds wanting to see the reproducible image of the Tramp as distinct from its source.78 This dual personality, peculiar to the film actor and described by Benjamin as ‘the same kind as the estrangement before one’s own image in the mirror’,79 is analogous to the split in Pullman and Satters between the rapidly fading memory of gestures which characterised them as earth-bound volitional agents, and the conversion of this organic material into the automatic gestures prescribed by the Bailiff. Having discovered him prior to superstardom, Lewis repeatedly describes Chaplin as ‘the greatest screen artist’;80 even his account of army service in the First World War is inflected with a routine from Chaplin’s war satire Shoulder Arms (1918): 103

the speech-gesture complex

I instantly wheeled with the precision of a well-constructed top; and with the tread of an irresistible automaton. I bore down swiftly and steadily upon the adjutant; I brought my heels together with a resounding spank, gave my rifle a well-deserved slap.81 As automatism’s most forthright representative, Chaplin comes to signify, for Lewis, an idea of mass mimesis and mechanised cliché, once he becomes, as Iris Barry puts it, writing in February 1926, ‘the most popular man alive’.82 In The Childermass, he represents the irresistible force of the already pre-elapsed: A stone’s-throw out he stops, faces the shore, studying sombrely in perspective the man-sparrow, who multiplies precise movements, an organism which in place of speech has evolved a peripatetic system of response to a dead environment. It has wandered beside this Styx, a lost automaton rather than a lost soul. (p. 11) Pullman’s movement is objectless, ‘peripatetic’, a mechanical response to the durational tyranny of the Bailiff’s environment, prone to halts, jerks and tics; ‘multiplies precise movements’ chops up the movement into staccato component parts, but also suggests the idea of repetition towards a pre-existent standard. Chaplin later mutates into the sinister mask through which the totalitarian Bailiff speaks to his subjects. The sky short-circuits and the Bailiff appears, beneath a mask in mechanical enlargement: in a moment of complete eclipse, all gaze up at an extreme close-up of ‘a greatly enlarged mask of Chaplin’ (p. 184). Mesmerised by this spectacle of awe, the Bailiff’s public enact, as Lewis puts it in Time and Western Man, a collective ‘submission to a giant hyperbolic closeup of a moment [. . .] to banish all individual continuity’.83 The Bailiff’s gaze imposes upon his subjects the solidification of routines endlessly rehearsed, slipped into, in Pierre Bourdieu’s words, ‘to awaken, by the evocative power of bodily mimesis, a universe of ready-made feelings and experiences’.84 The cumulative disunity of the bodies of Pullman and Satters suggests an acquaintance with Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique (1924), in which Chaplin becomes a Cubist automaton in disrepair, the locomotion of the trademark walk broken up into discrete components and abstractions; as Susan McCabe observes, in Léger’s film, Chaplin’s body ‘threatens to dissolve into the antimimetic’.85 Lewis likely saw the film in 1925, when it was screened at the London Film Society, one of whose founders was Iris Barry, with whom Lewis had an affair – according to his biographer his ‘first serious relationship with a woman’86 – and two children.87 Lewis short-circuits the effect of Chaplinesque mimesis by converting his gestures into text, writing the performance style of Pullman and Satters as a series of phrases which cumulatively reveal their disunity, on the edge of mimetic dissolution, enacting the movement of fragmentary shot sequences: 104

wyndham lewis

Pullmann stands fast. Shoulders high and squared, small calves in inflexible arcs, eyes still hypnotic [. . .] He works his toes up and down in the slipper. His head twists sharply towards the river as though in pain [. . .] Pullman comes to a stop, his feet firmly set side by side in the worn slippers, pushing down, shovelling into the hot sandy nap, the small legs braced and arched, knotted in little business-like muscles, shoulders high, hands pressed into jacket-pockets. (pp. 13–15) An extreme close-up of ‘toes’ working ‘up and down in the slipper’, to a shot of his head, from ‘calves’ to ‘eyes’, implies an elliptical rising arc which defines the sweep of the torso, sections intersecting against an unseen scaffolding. Lewis does not emphasise the main axis into which the lines and masses of the figure are organised, he offers instead a staccato rhythm of close-ups scarcely belonging to a torso. Satters’s limbs are similarly observed ‘restlessly adjusting’ (p. 51) themselves to the sharp angles and edges of an abstract body. The central characteristic of the Lewisian body, as Paul Edwards observes, involves ‘denying the concept of an integrated human subject’.88 In The Childermass, the negation of volitional agency is concomitant to the breaking up of unified perspectives into shots. The effect both for the reader and characters is to perceive their movement as utterly depersonalised. The gestures Satters makes are ‘objects’ which are ‘part of him, apparently, and yet he disowns them, and proceeds’ (p. 112). Textual form absorbs and contains the mimetic performance: the speech-gesture complex generates an ironised critical distance whereby Pullmann and Satters rehearse for a performance which never finally materialises as a finished, visible spectacle. By thematising the mid-way zone between text and mimetic performance, Lewis’s prose both enacts and resists submission to the Bailiff’s standardised template which banishes the agency of the individual. Fredric Jameson’s account of Lewis’s prose style builds on Hugh Kenner’s notion of ‘phrasal style’ to describe a ready-made language of ‘cultural and mass cliché, the junk materials of industrial capitalism, with its degraded commodity art, its mechanical reproducibility, its serial alienation of language’,89 though he does not relate the ‘mass cliché’ to cinema, which for Lewis constitutes its most vivid exemplification, or its relation to his dispute with Joyce. Despite an intense admiration for Ulysses, Lewis regarded Joyce as Chaplin’s brother-in-cliché: Pullman, a bespectacled former teacher of Berlitz English in Trieste, also deliberately resembles Lewis’s arch rival. Beckett spoke of Joyce’s ‘fondness’ for the films of Chaplin,90 and commentators such as Marshal McLuhan have described Bloom as a Chaplinesque figure.91 Lewis conflates these possible resemblances into the composite figure of Pullman in order to satirise automatism as a phenomenon both of performance and of writing. He points to an evident paradox he perceives in Joyce, of ‘an intelligence so 105

the speech-gesture complex

alive to purely verbal clichés that it hunts them like fleas, with remarkable success, and yet leaves the most gigantic ready-made and well-worn dummies enthroned everywhere, in the form of the actual personnel of the book’.92 A ‘verbal’ cliché issues from language which has gone stiff from excessive and automatic repetition; Lewis draws attention to the phenomenon of the bodily cliché, its reliance on an equivalent stiffness of movement and vision. The centre of gravity of the notorious critique of Ulysses in Time and Western Man, first published in The Enemy in 1927 as ‘An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce’,93 resides in minute readings of gestures, and the view that Joyce had inadvertently written them with a congealed and ready-made diction and visual sense. Lewis alludes to several instances of these iconic-verbal clichés: ‘When Buck Mulligan asks Stephen for a handkerchief, “Stephen suffered him to pull out” the handkerchief. The word suffered and the bathos of the gesture involved in the offering of the pocket are characteristic’;94 he calls Joyce’s adverbial phrases ‘stage directions’ and ‘usually tell-tale’: the stage directions for getting Stephen Dedalus, the irritating hero, about, sitting him down, giving accent to his voice, are all painfully ­enlightening [. . .] the incredible slowness with which he gets about from place to place, up the stairs, like a funereal stage-king; the time required for him to move his neck, how he raises his hand, passes it over his aching eyes, or his damp brow, even more wearily drops it [. . .] ‘Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him (Mulligan) wearily halfway and sat down . . .’ He does almost everything ‘wearily’. He ‘sits down’ always before he has got far. He moves with such dignified and ‘weary’ slowness, that he never gets further than half-way under any circumstances as compared with any other less dignified, less ‘weary’, figure in the book – that is to say, any of the many figures introduced to show off his dismal supremacy.95 Lewis’s critical view that Joyce’s use of the ready-made gesture was not conscious, impelled by an unyielding enemy persona, falls severely short of his acuity of vision in identifying them. Stephen’s ‘tiresome mannerisms’, as he calls them, are precisely calibrated by Joyce to signal a theatrical inauthenticity on Stephen’s part. The use of such worn-out diction suits the sense in which, by exaggerating an automated protective shell, Stephen shuts out his companions from his brooding anxiety over the death of his mother. The congealed diction and movement further speak of the extent to which Stephen has stiffened into his sullen, pseudo-magisterial persona. This deliberate crafting of automatism, enacting in order to critique, partly foreshadows the technique in The Childermass and Pullman’s own mechanical stiffness. As Paul Edwards observes, Joyce’s associative thought-stream constituted a version of Bergson’s ‘time-cult’,96 a prime target for Lewis; ‘time-philosophy’ is largely responsible for the ‘walking clichés’97 which inhabit Ulysses: 106

wyndham lewis

The powerful impressionism of Ulysses, constructed in the approved ‘time’-basis – that is, a basis of the fluid material gushing of undisciplined life – I have chosen as in some ways the most important creation so far issued from the ‘time’ mint. The approved ‘mental method’ – dating from the publication of Matière et Mémoire or the earliest psychoanalytic tracts – leads, as it is intended to lead, to a physical disintegration and a formal confusion. A highly personal day-dream, culminating in a phantasmagoria of the pure dream-order, is the result in Ulysses.98 This method of ‘ “telling from the inside” ’ (p. 101) invariably leads towards periodic decay, ‘an aged intelligence, grown mechanical and living upon routine and memory’ (p. 91), which is also his view of Bloom. The Childermass satirises the ‘physical disintegration’ and ‘phantasmagoria’ in the followers of the ‘time-school’ (p. 87) made-up of ‘Einstein with Miss Stein, of Swann and Stein, of Bergson and Bloom, of Miss Loos, Charlie Chaplin and Whitehead’ (p. 218), but also of the effects of duration, or psychological time, in the cinema. Lewis’s critique of Bergson’s qualitative durational time-philosophy, as against the ‘the geometric, the non-qualitied, the unsensational’, includes cinema as its target, as a form which obeys the law of perceptual psychology:99 the phenomenon of cinematic time, as Münsterberg observes, shows ‘events in continuous movement; and yet the pictures break up the movement into a rapid succession of instantaneous impressions. We do not see the objective reality but a product of our own mind which binds the pictures together’.100 Bergsonian ‘duration’ or ‘durée’ is interior time, the perception of changes between segments of time according to the mind’s perceptual organisation of them. It depends on each section losing its contour, as movement is established between them. This is how Pullman and Satters experience physical reality, as a ‘succession of [. . .] conscious states, but all felt at once [. . .] an incessantly renewed intensive quality’.101 Bergson’s thesis, as interpreted by Deleuze in his influential account of cinema’s ‘Time-Image’,102 defines movement as the composition of immanent material sections, rather than transcendental poses. Bergson in Creative Evolution names this the ‘cinematographic illusion’, and goes on to describe cinema in terms of two complementaries: instantaneous sections called images, and a movement or a time which is impersonal, abstract and mechanical.103 Movement is the relation between parts and it is the state of the whole. On the one hand, it modifies the respective positions of the parts of the set, each one immobile; on the other, it is itself the mobile section of a whole whose change it expresses. Cinema, as Arnheim puts it, is the ‘succession’ of single motionless frames, phases of motion: ‘it is only because they succeed each other so rapidly and because they fit one another so exactly that the impression of continuous 107

the speech-gesture complex

movement is given’.104 Jean Mitry similarly describes individual shots as ­‘distinct spaces the succession of which reconstitutes a homogeneous space, but a space unlike that from which the elements were subtracted’.105 Constellations of frozen cells in Enemy of the Stars fall short of this phenomenon; Lewis’s intention to exclude the temporal dimension, in order to achieve a transcendental critique of movement, or rather immobility, cannot render those cells as immanent successive phases of the same movement or event. The Childermass not only comprehends the technical premise of cinematic gestures as an aggregate of individual images, based on a recording process that is as continuous as the movement of photographed objects, but also perceives the immense possibilities of mechanical variation of those single frames when they are converted into text. Sequences of phrasal-shots subject gestures to durational interference, slowing down movements and reversing them, and these are distinct forms of cinematic motion-study. Film’s capacity to analyse movement closely, as Arnheim observes, to ‘slow down natural movements’ and ‘create new movement’106 is a regular phenomenon in the environment of The Childermass: ‘we attempt to slow down everything as much as possible [. . .] Or perhaps of a much greater acceleration than that you enjoy even so much greater that you might remain transfixed for a very great period in its midst’ (p. 164). Satters moves ‘in convulsive slow-movement’ (p. 65) as his limbs adjust to the mechanical template of the Bailiff’s kingdom. Displaced bodies move heavily, as though in ballast, in ‘slow-time’ (p. 214): ‘a massive time is introduced into the forward churning of his legs’, a slowness which ‘clicks into action’ (p. 235). Again, Chaplin’s walk is recalled, but this time as the signature of the cinematic apparatus itself. Lewis’s prose demonstrates an acute awareness not only of the cinematic division of movement into shots, but also of cinema as the montage of single frames. Satters ‘sees a hundred images, in the aggregate, sometimes as few as twenty’ (p. 22). The slowing of movement into successions which facilitate motion study stresses the determining conditions of cinema as the equidistance of single frames, a gesture in the process of its formation, as in Pullman’s ‘succession of classical art-poses suggestive of shadow-archery’ as he approaches Satters (p. 19). The division of movement into a series of instants harks back to the pre-cinema graphic recordings of Muybridge and Marey, where motion is clearly divided into singular frames immanent to movement. As Stephen Heath points out, the term ‘frame’ at once serves as ‘the material unit of the film’,107 and, in its derivation from painting, also defines and delimits the image on the screen, and the framing of the camera’s viewpoint. This dual function, the static single frame running in a sequence to describe the mobile frame of the camera, complicates the ordinary laws of pictorial composition. The result, as Arnheim notes, is ‘neither absolutely two dimensional nor absolutely three108

wyndham lewis

dimensional, but something in between’.108 The prose of The Childermass enacts this dual operation, in particular during the ‘Time-hallucination’. An eighteenth-century panorama appears to Pullman and Satters as a painting ‘built in a diminishing perspective’ (p. 102); there is ‘a massive horse [. . .] arrested in its toiling dream, one hoof in the air’ (p. 91), and it is ‘a little faded like a very much enlarged rustic colour-print’ (p. 88). Satters remarks, ‘it’s like a picture’, though he is ‘afraid the word may not be right’: the ‘picture’ has three dimensions as well as two, when they realise they can walk through it. Viewed from the outside, the picture is contained in its entirety within the frame. When they are inside it, the ‘frame’ switches its denotation from painting’s delimitation within its borders, to cinema’s implied continuation of reality off-frame. The picture is a ‘time-hallucination’ (p. 88); though they can walk through the scene, they are surrounded by frozen instants. Abstracted from its ordinary laws, time stands still, or moves in reverse. Pullman remarks: ‘reversibility is the proof that the stage of perfection has been reached in machine-construction – it’s the same with us, in my opinion. Here we are going backwards aren’t we?’ (p. 101). The alliance of ‘reversibility’ and ‘machine-construction’ invokes cinema’s ability to tamper with motion, to reverse it, slow it down, freeze the passage of time. The ‘Time-hallucination’ echoes the critique of Bergsonian ‘durée’ in Time and Western Man: ‘we can posit a time-district, as it were, just as much as we can a place with its individual physical properties’.109 As they enter the ‘Time-hallucination’, Pullman and Satters experience physical reality as ‘durée’. When film-time slows down or accelerates, in its emphasis on momentary impressions, it substitutes regular mechanical time with psychological time. The temporal dimension, stretched or contracted, comes to represent lived, subjective experience, equivalent to Bergson’s idea of duration. Cinematic perception works continuously, in a single movement, rather than as a regulated transition from one pose or privileged instant to another. It extracts from bodies the movement which is their common substance, or the mobility which is their essence. In The Childermass, this common substance is an abstract idea of succession endlessly repeated until it becomes entirely mechanical. This abstract duration is the property of the Bailiff: it is not only his show on endless repeat, it is also viewed through his omniscient perceptual apparatus. The Bailiff’s duration penetrates and merges each object; it is an abstract force which demands pre-determined responses from his subjects. The individual movements and gestures of Pullman and Satters, compelled to conform to the ‘Time-factor’ (p. 47), are merely the fulfilment of this pre-­determination, and no longer serve as expressions of volitional agency. Standing in front of the vast ‘group-mechanism’ (p. 24), where numberless spectators imitate and watch themselves imitating, a voice is heard within the crowd: ‘ “it’s a cinematograph!” ’ (p. 143). 109

the speech-gesture complex

The Politics of Gesture: The Bailiff, Hitler and the Society of the Spectacle The triumph of mass production over the individual personality is the recurring theme in Lewis’s work of this period. The Childermass elects mass cinema, as a standardisation of the individual, both as a means of political control and also an end in itself, the spectacle it creates to justify itself to the ‘watching throngs’ (p. 142). The endless reproducibility of individual gestures on film represents, for Lewis, the deadness of mass-produced subjectivity. The cinema of spectacle, its subsumption of the unitary identity into a manufactured group personality, as Lewis saw it, is replicated in the syntactic disintegration of the gesturing body-image into discrete parts, and the placing of each individual body within an ornamental mass. The Bailiff’s cinema-time, having reduced men to unreflective mechanical objects in order to facilitate their manipulation, is a version of government by spectacle. This fictionalised critique antecedes Benjamin’s thesis of the cinema as the ‘art of automatic movement’, and the notion of the spectator, dispossessed of his or her own thought, being repositioned ‘as part of that which is perceived’, incorporating impressions of automatism directly into his or her body through a ‘shock’ effect,110 a collision between bodily and mechanical-cinematic perception. The film-image is not taken in by a disembodied eye, it administers, as Deleuze also argues, shocks ‘to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly’.111 This passage between the representation of automatism to its bodily incorporation by the spectator is presented in The Childermass as a large-scale electric shock inducement of docility. Cinema-time in The Childermass, in which representations of the machine– gesture complex unresistingly supplant subjective reflection, argues for a structural similarity between the mere suggestiveness of the representation, for instance, of Taylorist gestures, and the imitation of those gestures by force. The idea that suggestion, once it becomes impossible to resist, is closer to force than liberal capitalism cares to think is closely informed by the critique of mass suggestion in Time and Western Man – ‘the democratic masses could be governed without a hitch by suggestion and hypnotism – Press, Wireless, Cinemas’112 – and The Art of Being Ruled: when people are encouraged, as happens in a democratic society, to believe that they wish to ‘express their personality’, the question at once arises as to what their personality is [. . .] It would be a group personality that they were ‘expressing’ – a pattern imposed on them by means of education and the Hypnotism of the cinema, wireless and press.113 The Childermass was originally planned as part of a longer work, begun in the early twenties, called The Man of the World.114 This 500,000 word ‘trea110

wyndham lewis

tise’ was also to include The Apes of God, The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man, but the London publisher Chapman and Hall deemed the manuscript, submitted on 2 February 1922, too long, so Lewis broke it up and revised it into separate works. The ‘totalising critique of the culture of liberal capitalism’,115 as Edwards notes of The Art of Being Ruled, is indissociable from the more extensive, fictionalised critique of cinematic spectacle in The Childermass. David Ayers argues that the socio-cultural critique of Lewis’s polemical works of this period potentially overturns the assumption that ‘radical cultural criticism is the exclusive province of the Left’ and that ‘Lewis’ questioning of the contemporary environment is more fundamental, less complacent about “human nature” and the possibility of knowing and fulfilling desires, than anything in contemporary socialism.’116 Ayers mentions the role played by ‘technologised modernity’ in his polemical works, although he does not relate this to the cinematic society of the spectacle as it is manifest in The Childermass. I would further argue that Lewis’s cultural critique, particularly in relation to the cinematic gesture, is the not-so-distant forebear of the theatre of Brecht, and the left modernist theories of the Frankfurt school and their critiques of commodity culture. The force of Lewis’s vision, and the emergent dialectic between mesmerised uncritical spectatorship of mimetic performance and active interpretation through its conversion into text, extends into the realm of politics, and potentially overturns the distinctions he makes in his work between left and right. It is against this extraordinarily prescient critique of the intersections between politics and performance that his declarations of allegiance to fascism in the early 1930s, self-condemning as they remain, should be assessed. The critique of the spectacle of automatism in The Childermass offers a seriously neglected counter-context to the lamentable book entitled Hitler, published in 1931, a book so self-condemning it has Lewis blacklisted in universities and art-schools to this day. As Paul O’Keefe notes: ‘Hitler has done more lasting harm to Lewis’ reputation than anything else he produced and, several decades after his death, that positive evaluation of National Socialism continues to be branded against him.’117 The outcome of a series of commissioned articles by Lady Rhondda, editor of the political journal Time and Tide, whose contributors included Orwell, Woolf, Shaw and Emmeline Pankhurst, it became the first book in English on Hitler. The damage to his reputation was instantaneous. He stopped receiving portrait commissions from wealthy patrons, and after its publication, alongside The Apes of God and the libel suits of the early thirties, ‘no established publisher wanted a book about Lewis’.118 After Hitler, Lewis becomes, for decades and to this day, the least read of the major Anglo-American modernists, the consequence of a widespread view, exemplified by John Carey in The Intellectuals and the Masses, of an ideological allegiance to Hitler. As Carey remarks: 111

the speech-gesture complex

both were obsessive, and expounded their relatively small collection of ideas with unflagging repetitiveness. Both regarded themselves as unjustly neglected artists, and took this neglect as the central fact around which to construct their distorted and vindictive models of the societies in which they lived.119 Hitler begins with Lewis saying that he writes ‘as an exponent – not as a critic nor yet as an advocate – of German National Socialism, or Hitlerism’ before proceeding to incriminate himself with a series of dreadful misapprehensions: ‘Hitler would, I am positive, remain peacefully at home, fully occupied with the internal problems’; ‘perhaps the German people are today nearer to true democracy, who knows, than any European nation has ever been at all’; ‘the present Hitlerist attitude is adamantly pacific’.120 Lewis is uncritically seduced by Nazi propaganda, to his eternal discredit. Yet what remarks such as these reveal is a profound misunderstanding, not entirely uncommon in 1931, as to the nature of Hitlerism, and what lay ahead. Even as late as 1935, Winston Churchill writes uncritical praise of Hitler’s personal qualities: ‘those who have met Herr Hitler face to face, in public business or on social terms, found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism’.121 Lewis’s biographer notes that as a First World War veteran, his ‘attempt to prevent a Second World War, however wrongheaded or misguided, was the dominating impulse behind the disastrous political books of the 1930s’.122 Paul Edwards also points to Lewis’s ‘radical misunderstanding of Hitler’s anti-semitism’ as an ‘incidental, embarrassing side issue to the main imperative of avoiding war’.123 Lewis had in fact foolishly avoided reading Mein Kampf until 1938, another blind-spot which further contributed to the book’s hideous misunderstanding of German fascism’s true nature and intent. The mistakes in Hitler reveal a severe ignorance, rather than an ideological sympathy with fascism. As Charles Ferrall observes: ‘Lewis’ flirtation with Nazi ideology was not only brief but also less than committed’ and ‘the only consistent aspect of Lewis’ many and varied ideological pronouncements is their opposition to liberal democracy’.124 A contradictory picture emerges, in light of his other writing of this period, particularly when Lewis comments directly on his own politics. In The Diabolical Principle he describes himself as ‘partly communist and partly fascist, with a distinct streak of monarchism in my Marxism, but at bottom an anarchist, with a healthy passion for order’;125 in Time and Western Man, ‘I am that strange animal, the individual without any “politics” at all. You will find neither the politics of communism nor those of the militant right’;126 in The Art of Being Ruled: I have already said in the abstract I believe the soviet system to be the best [. . .] all Marxian doctrine, all etatisme or collectivism, conforms very 112

wyndham lewis

nearly on practice to the fascist ideal [. . .] what will shortly be realized will be a great socialist state such as Marx intended, rigidly centralised, working from top to bottom with the regularity and smoothness of a machine.127 Hitler, which bizarrely considers its protagonist ‘a socialist prophet’, recognises the future significance of its subject, post-beer-hall putsch and jail sentence, during a time when, to most of England, it looked like Hitler might be finished: ‘it might very well be the deciding factor in the political life of the world what Germany dreams and wishes and resents cannot be lightly set aside’. Against the serious mistakes as to Germany’s future political reality, the false prophecy, the book contains remarks which invoke the instinctive premonitory vision of Hitler’s fearsome spectacular methods, the prophetic satire in The Childermass: ‘the political cinema unrolling itself in the German capital, with many a hefty start and flick’ he observes in Hitler, hints at the courtship of political regime with cinematic spectacle, of the appropriations of spectacle by government he attacks in The Childermass. The comments in Hitler that ‘it is rather a person than a doctrine with which we are dealing’, and of ‘a nation acting as one man’,128 foreseeing the extent to which Hitler’s personality would hold sway over Germany’s collective psychological dispositions, echoes the figure of the Bailiff in The Childermass, a figure who conflates the tyrant hypnotist with the idea of the totalitarian dictator as film star. The analogy, refined in the fictional critique, is then marshalled into a thorough repudiation of the Hitler book in The Hitler Cult, published in 1939, in which he unequivocally condemns National Socialism as ‘barbaric’, predicting it ‘will die a violent death [. . .] in six years time’. Hitler’s method of presentation, the book argues, is based on the model of the film star: he is ‘two-dimensional’, a ‘hysterical prima donna’, ‘taken from every conceivable angle, and dished up in every possible mood, from playful buffoonery to savage admonition’; the representation of himself as the heroic embodiment of German folklore a variation on the ‘disgusting travesty’ of Hollywood acting. Lewis’s perception in The Hitler Cult that ‘for the Berliner, life has become like a never-ending film of The Life of Adolf Hitler’129 forecasts the post-war view of left modernist film theory, expressed for instance by Deleuze, that ‘Nazism thinks of itself in competition with Hollywood’.130 The Hitler book of 1931 should remain permanently inexcusable, the work of a destructive contrarian over-stepping the line. But the view of Lewis represented by John Carey – that his ‘hatred of democracy’ is ‘essentially fascist’131 – is simply false. It is not hatred of democracy which compels Lewis, but in fact, the elements in liberal democracy which demonstrate a will-to-fascism. The Bailiff’s afterlife calls to mind the critique of these elements of democracy, and of the relations between fascism and the market economy of liberalism, 113

the speech-gesture complex

found in the Frankfurt school of Adorno, Benjamin and Kracauer. The perception, in the separate works which were to constitute the Man of the World, of a structural continuity between liberal democracy and an insidious future totalitarian government re-emerges, once that government takes hold in Germany, in the work of Theodor Adorno. Esther Leslie, commenting on Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), notes the ‘duplicate dialectic of instrumental reason’132 Adorno and Horkheimer perceive between Nazi Germany and the democratic US, particularly in terms of the principles of mass production, citing the ‘mutual admiration’ of Hitler and Henry Ford as an instance of this continuity: in 1931, Hitler had informed a Detroit newspaper that he regarded Henry Ford as his inspiration [. . .] The German subsidiaries of Ford and General Motors controlled 70 per cent of the German car market in 1939. For this reason Ford was not keen for war to be declared on Germany.133 In both political zones, culture becomes subsumed and standardised by big business, which turns culture into industry, manufactured under the economic principles identical to all other forms of industrial production. The function of culture under these conditions, in particular the role of the film industry, is required to enforce the continued operation of those economic conditions by the incorporation of the spectacle of automatism. Taylorism, Fordism and UFA-influenced Hollywood conspire to make a spectacle of reification, to make the human beings they reproduce resemble things. Lewis’s and Adorno’s critiques of the application of ‘the democratic principle’134 in liberal democracies uncannily resemble one another. Both argue that democratic governments depend upon and represent the vested interests of big business over and above the majority of an electorate which has entrusted them to act and speak on its behalf. Rationalising this imbalance, the ruling class incorporates the ‘antidemocratic stimuli’ of an all-pervasive spectacle to influence political subjects by ‘irrational means’.135 As a consequence, political subjects are treated as subjects for hypnosis, in order to undermine their intellectual autonomy. Lewis clearly articulates this phenomenon in The Art of Being Ruled: The working of the ‘democratic’ electoral system is of course as follows. A person is trained up stringently to certain opinions; then he is given a vote, called a ‘free’ and fully enfranchised person; then he votes [. . .] strictly in accordance with his training [. . .] education and suggestion, the imposition of the will of the ruler through the press and other publicity channels, cancelling it. So ‘democratic’ government is far more effective than subjugation by physical conquest. 114

wyndham lewis

Lewis’s view of ‘the standardisation coming in the wake of the compounding of local national interests’ and the ‘highly organised uniformity’136 of public opinion is a counterpart to Adorno’s notion of ‘the standardisation of what is individual’137 and of ‘totality gaining primacy over individual interests’.138 Both writers observe the alliance of film technology with mass politics – the levelling trends of state machinery, represented by one of its most potent weapons, the reproducible moving image – as central to this means of irrational transference. Lewis constantly reiterates the seismic cultural effects marked by ‘the mass-arrival of cinema’.139 Movies, indistinguishable from big business, are an aspect of ‘indirect government’: ‘Whether openly or covertly, it is Press and Cinema hypnotism that rules Great Britain and America, not the conversazione at Westminster or the White House.’140 Cinematic spectacle, in the hands of big business, with its routine modes of production and readymade ornaments, forces upon the spectator a pre-fabricated schema of interchangeable sameness, and this leaves the spectator, as Lewis puts it, ‘open to objective control’,141 encourages a ‘self-annihilating obedience’, makes him or her ‘ecstatically obedient’.142 The Lewisian society of the spectacle anticipates Adorno’s view that the effective domination of cinema and the wider ‘culture industry’ to which it belongs, exerting itself by its ‘undemanding docility’,143 is equivalent, in liberal democratic states, in the scope of its repression, to the political techniques of National Socialism which ‘regards masses not as self-determining human beings [. . .] addressed as rational subjects, but [. . .] as mere objects of administrative measures who are taught, above all, to be self-effacing and to obey orders’.144 The technical alliance of the standardised culture of mass spectacle with big business, as Adorno puts it, ‘belongs to the presuppositions and effects of Fascism’; ‘Hitler was merely the final executor of tendencies that had developed within the womb of German society.’145 The Childermass was published a year after Siegfried Kracauer’s ‘The Mass Ornament’ (1927),146 an essay which forges a set of relays between Fordism, Taylorism and the effacement of individual autonomy in representations of the mass spectacle in Weimar cinema. Kracauer later reconfigures the notion of the mass ornament in Weimar cinema as foretelling the rise of fascism, in his seminal study, published in 1947, From Caligari to Hitler, identifying a continuity, in particular, between the inclination towards the construction of crowd scenes as a geometric ornament in German Expressionist film, the mechanised automation of Fordism and Taylorism, and the spectacles and public rallies, arranged as geometric patterns, under National Socialism. Along with the national productions of France and Russia, Lewis held German cinema in high regard: ‘you have to go to the French cinema, or the German or Russian, to match the wonderful resourcefulness and intelligence of some American [radio] productions’.147 Since the successful screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), Weimar cinema had become a regular fixture at the London 115

the speech-gesture complex

Film Society. In an article published in 1924, Iris Barry lists ‘seven producers of genius’ – ‘Lang, Grune, Wiene, Lubitsch, Chaplin, Griffiths and Seastrom’148 – four of which were German. Lewis could well have seen Metropolis (1926), which contains one of German Expressionism’s most notorious automata, the evil robot double of Maria, at one of these screenings. Maria, a figurehead for the city’s underground workers, is abducted by the scientist Rotwang and replaced by a robot double programmed to send the workers’ organisation into disarray. The reproduction of Maria, detached from the volitional agency of its ‘referent’, the real Maria, mimes the process of malign dominance by the spectacle – or the representation, the copy, the reproduction – which is the film’s aesthetic principle, the means by which it turns content into form – as Raymond Bellour argues, ‘the actual process of substituting a simulacrum for a living being directly replicates the camera’s power to reproduce automatically the reality it confronts’149 – and also the idea it seeks to critique. The city of Metropolis is dominated by an administrative complex in which the workers, situated in a vast underground complex beneath the city, serve as automata for the ruling classes who live above. The workers’ manual tasks consist exclusively of the operation of large clocklike machines. Their gestures, a form of standardised mechanical leverage, replicated by each worker, are versions or parodies of Taylorism. F. W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management appeared in 1911, a study of industrial management which sought to introduce a system of standardised repetitive operations to boost mass production in factories and eliminate wasted energy.150 Industrial, systematised efficiency and the mechanisation of its workers are elevated by Taylor to the status of an imperative. As Mark Seltzer argues, ‘the real innovation of Taylorism becomes visible in the incorporation of the representation of the work process into the work process itself – or the incorporation of the representation of the work process as the work process itself’.151 The automated gesture is both the means and the spectacle of the work process, both function and aesthetic: in Metropolis, the workers’ movements as they operate the machines’ dials resemble the rhythmic stutter of clock-hands, mimicking the idea of the time-schedule, or work process, they serve. Incorporating the spectacle into the work process, the version of Taylorism in Metropolis, in which all gestures must conform to a standardised template, imbues the ideology of efficiency, of keeping time, with an aesthetic of ornamental uniformity. The domination of the idea of the ‘mass ornament’,152 as Kracauer describes the phenomenon, is reinforced by Lang’s geometrical compositions, particularly of the shots of the engine room, in which the multitude of workers are arranged symmetrically, each individual repeating the same movements, each holding significance only within the ornament. Workers advance, as Kracauer notes, in ‘wedge shaped, strictly symmetrical procession’.153 During the narrated vision of the Tower of Babel parable, thousands of workers, seen in 116

wyndham lewis

intersecting columns, generate an image of five outspread fingers. Each worker, a pair of hands, is subsumed by the giant hand of the ideological ornament, the administrative system itself, which now assumes the character of agency, or personification. In The Childermass, the mechanical repetition imposed upon Pullman and Satters also systematically holds sway over the entire city’s inhabitants. Close formations of people expand and contract as a compact mass, nuclei of larger groups, ‘dense centripetal knots’ (p. 239) breathing in synchronicity: a slow animation flexes and disturbs the tableau, a clockwork spring or a trumpet blown in other spaces. The figures move clumsily as though to rehearse their occupations, each in its kind, but first to stretch their joints, and practise ankle, neck and wrist. Several, slowly lurching from one foot to the other and back, persevere. (p. 24) The machine gestures of the workers in Metropolis are paralleled by the ‘clockwork regularity’ (p. 24) with which Lewis’s peons enact their routines. The stress Vorticism places on minimum wastage of energy and, in Pound’s words, ‘the greatest efficiency in the precise sense – as they would be used in the text book of MECHANICS’154 is distorted in The Childermass into a hyper-Taylorist principle of industrial organisation. In both Lewis and Lang, the peon-workers’ stupefied enslavement to time schedules exemplifies Henry Ford’s classification of workers as ‘a few heads and many hands’,155 or razor blade tycoon King Gillette’s view of ‘cogs in the machine, acting in response to the will of a corporate mind as fingers move and write at the direction of the brain’.156 Iris Barry described Metropolis as an image of ‘standardised mankind’.157 A similar fearful vision of total adaptation to the systematic forces of production informs The Childermass, which points to the Taylorist connection between film and mechanisation: ‘as F.W. Taylor had found out, film, with its multiple frames per second, is the most excellent technology of time-motion analysis for industrial purposes – a machinery that spurs the mechanisation of its subject’.158 Lewis aims to attack the ideology of mechanised efficiency, the spectacle of movement as a means to enforce industrial replication, and, by extension, cinema’s ‘art of automatic movement’, as Deleuze puts it, and its relation to the ‘automatism of the masses’:159 the multitude of ‘myopic percipient automata’ in The Childermass, in clockwork muscular activity, is characterised as ‘like a film-scene’ (p. 29). In Metropolis, ‘the decorative appears [. . .] as an end in itself’.160 Films such as Lubitsch’s Passion (1919), The Loves of Pharoah (1922) and Deception (1920) depict large-scale spectacles of crowds as a solid, dynamic unit, a ‘wheeling mass, rushing in figures from every corner to cover the screen’. The compositions of Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924) reduce people to accessories of vast buildings, each individual forming an ornamental mass, where ‘absolute 117

the speech-gesture complex

authority asserts itself by arranging people under its domination in pleasing designs’.161 The spectacular ornamental groupings, also ends in themselves in The Childermass, the stark angles and geometric abstractions of Lewis’s peons, his description of these dense ornamental tableaux, in conjunction with Lewis’s polemics on the alliance of film technology with mass politics, parallels this prescient. At the same time, Lewis’s description of these ornaments as ‘vortices of people’ (p. 239), as ‘a compact circular mass or vortex’ (p. 239), their violent perspectivist geometry, oblique perspectives, the replacement of curved lines with sharp diagonals, signal a problematic shared emphasis between Vorticism and the German Expressionism of Kracauer’s thesis. As Tom Gunning points out, Worringer’s Form in Gothic (1912) helped inspire the geometric visual design of Lang’s Die Nibelungen, in which ‘monumental set design interacts with (and to a large degree determines) the placement and composition of actors as well as the composition of the camera frame’.162 The natural contingencies of the forest are contained by the symmetry and geometrical abstraction of the Court of the Burgundians. In Gutner’s hall, the king and his courtiers are observed seated in symmetrical arrangement, a manifestation of ‘the geometrical line as something absolutely distinct from the messiness, the confusion and the accidental details of existing things’.163 These geometrical groupings suggest a parallel with the rigid lines and dead crystalline forms of the Vorticism expounded by Tarr – ‘art is ourselves disentangled from death and accident’164 – and Arghol’s gestures, liberated from their organic conditions. A perilous contradiction emerges between, on the one hand, the geometry of the individual gesture, and on the other, the rigid lines of the proto-fascist mass ornament, its replication of individual gestures according to a mimetic template. Lewis abandoned Vorticism after the war: that The Childermass calls its ornamental groupings of manipulated automata ‘vortices’ suggests a self-critical awareness of the dangers of geometrical abstraction as a large-scale phenomenon of the crowd. This rift between the Vorticism of the individual and the mutated geometry of crowd spectacle reflects the problematic contradiction in Lewis’s art and polemics, between a left modernist negative critique of liberal capitalism, against an uncritical expounding of German fascism in the early 1930s. The group-mechanism of the authoritarian mass ornament was evidently a strong ideological feature of the spectacle of the Third Reich. The Munich pageants of the 1930s, such as the ‘Night of the Amazons’, were enormously elaborate spectacles, designed not only for the edification of the spectator, but also to attack and devalue the possibility of a self-reflection which would make the individual aware of him- or herself. Nazi pageantry was an aggressive form of anti-enlightenment. Hitler’s own techniques of public address were modelled on this notion of pageantry, in which spectators are looked upon as mere physical objects to be coldly manipulated. His speeches were addressed to an 118

wyndham lewis

enormous ornament consisting of hundreds of thousands of particles, a phenomenon captured by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will (1934), which drew inspiration from Lang’s Die Nibelungen in the organisation of its pageants. Vast panoramas of geometrical crowd-scenes are intercut with Hitler on a raised podium looking on, the ideal spectator, as though the spectacle is constructed exclusively for his edification. The assembled throngs raise their arms, an automatic response to Hitler’s gaze, as he declaims: ‘and remember, that, at this moment, not only are the 100,000 eyes of Nuremberg looking at you, but for the first time, all of Germany’. Riefenstahl’s film contains several moments of Hitler, in medium shot, surveying his panoramic awe-struck crowds, spectacle obscuring the real conditions under Nazi rule. The Nazi obsession with order in fact masked severe administrative chaos. For twelve years, ‘Hitler produced the biggest confusion in government that had ever existed’.165 Gunter Lohse, a diplomat and Nazi Party Member from 1937–45 remarked on this attitude: ‘That’s order for you – they’re all in line.’166 The illusion was partly generated by the spectacle of arranging bodies in geometrical patterns. The Bailiff’s performances as he addresses his crowds resemble a fascist rally, not least in their preoccupation with the process of spectacular representation. His entrance, preceded by a ‘massed cast in stately procession’ (p. 128), framed by the thousands of peons around him, forecasts this phenomenon: ‘the massive business of the show as it unfolds itself at the centre of the stage of the Miracle is heralded by the sudden detonation of a solitary furious trumpet’ (p. 128). Pyrotechnics, ornament and ceremony characterise the Bailiff’s rallies, the positions of the audience as much as the principal functionaries fixed by ‘rigid custom’ (p. 130). In Adorno’s words, ‘the merging of one’s impulses within a ritual scheme is closely related to the universal psychological weakening of the self-contained individual’.167 The Bailiff’s gaze imposes upon his subjects the principle of mimetic automatism. The ‘watching throngs’ (p. 142) gaze up in collective submission at the ‘greatly enlarged mask of Chaplin’ (p. 184), the mask of mimetic authority, ‘a giant hyperbolic close up’ which serves ‘to banish all individual continuity’.168 The mask of Chaplin serves the injunction to be like him, fixing the collective spectators into the false coherence of the ‘Time-factor’ (p. 47), the abstract duration of cinema-time. All movement in the afterlife, continuous, stretched or contracted, is seen through the Bailiff’s eyes, the product of his perceptual apparatus converted into objective reality. Standing in front of the ‘group-mechanism’ (p. 24), the individual within the crowd, participating as subject and object, both imitates and spectates himself imitating: there is no you apart from what you perceive: your senses and you with them are all that you habitually see and touch: I am a part of you at this moment: those battlements are becoming you; the you bodily and 119

the speech-gesture complex

­ therwise, which has been perpetuated, much to your disgust it seems, is o all that at present you are witnessing and sensing. (p. 224) The Bailiff’s performative technique exemplifies Adorno’s notion, derived from Freud’s analysis of the group ego, that totalitarian demagoguery involves a procedure resembling hypnosis in which individuals ‘undergo the regressions which reduce them to mere members of a group’.169 The Bailiff’s routines, endlessly repeated, mesmerise the audience into mimetic identification. They enact seeing themselves and being seen as a group-ego, an ornamental image of collective submission to the ego of the totalitarian father figure. This cinematic phenomenon, exemplified in Triumph of the Will, appears much earlier, in a silent film which became a key influence for Riefenstahl, Abel Gance’s French Impressionist masterpiece, Napoleon (1927). In one of the Bailiff’s many appearances as a screen persona, he ‘attempts to pace up and down in his narrow box, his hands behind in Napoleonic clutch, but strikes his nose at once and desists’ (p. 194). The routine echoes scenes in the final reel, projected onto a three-screen triptych, of Gance’s Napoleon. Opening at the Albenga encampment, after an elaborate montage of panorama shots of Napoleon on his white horse and the massed units of his soldiers, the scene cuts to Napoleon addressing his troops: a tight close-up of Napoleon’s face against the clouds is intercut with panoramic shots of hundreds of soldiers in collective rapture. The sequence, matching eyelines between Napoleon and his troops, effects a shot-reverse-shot, a technique ordinarily reserved for spatial continuity between two actors, though in this instance, it is between Napoleon and a crowd of hundreds. His soldiers, effaced as individuals, meld into a group-ego as they rise to his commands, the mirror image and fulfilment of Napoleon’s messianic narcissism. The following sequence reiterates the event of collective transference between Napoleon and his troops and brings the film to an ecstatic climax. A rapid montage between three screens cross-cuts shots of the marching troops, the scenes of the French revolutionary leaders, and close-ups of Napoleon, at various stages of his life, before the triptych explodes into the tricolour of the French flag. Napoleon becomes both the subject of this version of the recent history of the revolution, the means through which it is realised – the sequence is presented as his own subjective vision – and its object, its culmination and fulfilment. The sequence represents an unprecedented technical innovation in film montage; at the same time, its emphasis on the introceptive vision of a single leader lends itself to charges of further refining the language of totalitarian demagoguery. Moussinac has pointed out that the image of Napoleon as the embodiment and fulfilment of military dictatorship is close to the image of the Emperor held by groups of the extreme right.170 There is a clear-cut influence, in the means of representing the collective ego under hypnosis, between Napoleon and Triumph of the Will, particularly in the shots 120

wyndham lewis

of Hitler’s rallies, with him gazing at his rapt audience of thousands, his gaze submissively returned. Lewis demonstrates a constant awareness, both in his fiction and polemics, of the vast alteration to mass politics brought forth by the film camera, once again anticipating Benjamin’s canonical essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Benjamin argues that Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of masses. In big parades and monster rallies, in sports events, and in war, all of which nowadays are captured by the camera and sound recording, the masses are brought face to face with themselves. A bird’s eye view best captures gatherings of hundreds of thousands [. . .] the image of the eye cannot be enlarged as a negative is enlarged. This means that mass movements, including war, constitute a form of human behaviour which particularly favours mechanical equipment.171 The vision of mass automatism in The Childermass brings ‘the reproduction of the masses’ not only ‘face to face with themselves’ but also with their mimetic template, the ruler whose perceptual apparatus appropriates the reproduction. Benjamin also comments on the new kind of democratic selection involved in the mechanical reproducibility and public presentation of the ruler: ‘since the innovations of camera and recording equipment make it possible for the orator to become audible and visible to an unlimited number of persons, the presentation of the man of politics before camera and recording equipment becomes paramount’. This alteration in the public presentation of rulers is a change which ‘equally affects the actor and the ruler’. 172 The film camera enables a form of irrational transference between the actor-ruler and his audience, institutionalising the falsity of enthusiastic identification, and the dynamics of performance and group psychology. For Lewis, as for Benjamin, politics has disappeared in a representation of the same order as the actor’s representation before an audience, and the mimetic identification enacted, by dissolving the critical relations between body and speech, constitutes a disempowerment of an electorate who are reduced to the status of passive onlookers. Adorno’s account of the histrionics of the totalitarian leader, shouting and crying and fighting ‘the Devil in pantomime’, is mirrored in the Bailiff’s ‘Punch-and-Judy theatre’ routines, where each speaker repeats the same clichéd gestures, the mechanical application of which is ‘one of the essentials of the ritual’.173 The Bailiff is always conscious of his own mass reproduction, and of the technique of mimetic theatricality: he stands on an elevated platform in a ‘large auditorium’ for his subjects who ‘come there for the spectacle’ (p. 129). He revolves in his hands ‘the pivetta used by the atellan actors to mimic the voices of the mimes of classical tragedy’ (p. 131); he wears Chaplin’s face like a ‘tragic mask’ which allows him to progress from slapstick clown to 121

the speech-gesture complex

‘the tragical person’ (p. 151). The Bailiff’s technique, shrewdly personalised pseudo-emotional wish-fulfilment, relies heavily on physical routines which elicit instant responses from his audience: he allows his head to sink slowly upon his arm, which is in horizontal collapse along the ledge: completely sunk, the head hangs forward outside the box, he rolls it from side to side several times as a sign that he is inconsolable [. . .] Shoulders shaken with sobs [. . .] Several of the assistants are so moved by this that they take out their handkerchiefs and quietly cry into them. (p. 196) Identification with the gestures of authority prompts the hypnotised spectator ‘to participate in their leader’s performance’,174 to substitute the reflective ego, or ‘independent autonomous conscience’,175 as Freud puts it, for the group ego. Lewis’s satire of performative demagoguery and the dangers of imitative histrionics remains in advance both of the prime target itself, Hitler, and of left modernist attacks on that target in Adorno, Benjamin and Kracauer, and also Brecht, whose theorised ironical juxtapositions of actor and ruler had not yet come to full realisation by 1927. The Childermass, as a diagnosis of the severe danger of mimetic identification when exploited for malign political ends, also intersects with the dramaturgical, iconographic culture of alienated machine gestures from which Brechtian anti-fascism emerged. The speech-gesture complex in Lewis seeks to restore the critical distance which is lost in the absorption of the spectator in the mimetic performance: by turning the performance into ironical text, Lewis foregrounds its status as a representation masquerading as political reality. In this respect, the writing of performance opposes and corrects the visible performance it describes. Reading and spectatorship, by antagonising each other, activate a dialectical force which avoids the imposition of a false coherence on both performer and spectator. The central target of Lewis, as for Brecht, is performative mimesis as derived from Aristotle, and exemplified by naturalism. The example above illustrates the convention. The Bailiff performs hysterical inconsolability, his ‘shoulders shaken with sobs’; his spectators, imitating the display of emotion, ‘are so moved by this that they take out their handkerchiefs’. Brecht defines this style of performance according to the ‘identification’ or ‘empathy’ which passes between actor and spectator: ‘weeping arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from weeping’.176 Aristotelian mimesis depends upon an avoidance of contradiction between actor and role, and between actor and spectator; the actor’s identification with the role should stimulate an equivalent empathy in the spectator. Brecht’s non-Aristotelian dramaturgy rejects this style of performative mimesis in favour of ‘a critical attitude [. . .] (as opposed to a subjective attitude of becoming completely entangled in what is going on)’.177 The Brechtian actor, 122

wyndham lewis

aiming not to put the audience in a trance, must not go into a trance himself. His muscles must remain loose, for a turn of the head, eg. with tautened neck muscles, will ‘magically’ lead the spectator’s eyes and even their heads to turn with it, and this can only detract from any speculation or reaction which the gesture may bring about.178 Finding a gesture which contradicts the emotion of the character, the actor is able to avoid identification, adopt a critical attitude to his role and provoke the spectator, who is also, by extension, refused identification, to critique the character and events portrayed. The dramaturgy of performative mimesis, for Brecht, regards its audience ‘not as a number of individuals but a collective individual, a mob, which must be and can be reached only through its emotions’.179 In this reliance on emotional suggestibility, it resembles the political techniques of fascism, what he calls ‘fascism’s grotesque emphasising of the emotions’, which seek to exercise domination over an electorate through mimetic hysteria and undermine the rational element of political choice. The Bailiff’s ‘intensity of the will-to-please’ is a master of these gestural tricks and fictitious imitations of real feeling which manipulate an audience: Archly he rolls his eye sideways to take his measure from a test-gauge [. . .] Back in the middle of his box, slowly he dilates his chest, then, with a constipated grunt, forcibly collapses [. . .] With another glance of reference at the test-gauge he inhales tip-toes and flaps his arms in a caricature of flight [. . .] Thereupon he stands-easy, breaks into smiles and rolls out his genial relief at the successful issue of the test over the audience. General laughter accompanies the demonstration. (p. 181) The ease with which ‘salvoes of sympathy and admiration’ (p. 184) are registered impels this repressive false enjoyment of the spectacle of state power, personalised in the clichéd banality, the ‘two-dimensional life’ of the actorstar, tailoring his performance according to test screenings and behaviourist response techniques: ‘from star to stage-struck there are tokens, signals’. The Bailiff maintains total control by appealing to the unconscious optical mechanisms of ‘the staring awe-struck [. . .] eternal Public’ that ‘WILL have its favourite show himself again’ (p. 184). Brecht frequently calls this kind of performance, in which an audience is ‘worked up by a display of temperament or “swept away” by acting with tautened muscles’,180 overwhelmed with the power of the actor’s transformation into a state of passive empathy, a version of ‘hypnosis’, of casting ‘a spell’181 over an audience. In contradistinction, non-Aristotelian acting does not ‘make the spectator the victim, so to speak, of a hypnotic experience’:182 ‘the first condition for the V-effect’s application to this end is that stage and auditorium must be purged of everything “magical” and that no “hypnotic tensions” should be set up’.183 In The Childermass, 123

the speech-gesture complex

Hyperides’s view of the Bailiff as a ‘hypnotist or technical trick performer’ (p. 153), an ‘old mesmerist’ (p. 275), finds its vindication in the rhetorical mode with which the Bailiff addresses his crowds. He can switch in an instant from histrionic inauthenticity to the measured cadences of the hypnotist: ‘there is no you apart from what you perceive: your senses and you with them are all that you habitually see and touch: I am a part of you at this moment’ (p. 224). The proto-Brechtian sense of performative hypnosis combines in The Childermass with an all-pervasive ‘hypnotism of the cinema’,184 of spontaneous docility and subjective dissolution induced by an electromagnetic spell, a view which echoes Kracauer’s description of the experience of cinema viewing in general: the moviegoer is much in the position of the hypnotised person. Spellbound by the luminous rectangle before his eyes – which resembles the glittering object in the hand of the hypnotist – he cannot help ­succumbing to the suggestions that invade the blank of his mind.185 In the manipulative spell he casts over his audience, the Bailiff also bears comparison with the tyrannical hypnotists of German Expressionist cinema, ­particularly the arch villains in Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), figures who employ their hypnotic power to empty their victims of volition, and make them vulnerable to the imposition of an external will. Kracauer argues that the ‘omnipotence of a state authority’ represented by Caligari, a showman who puts his assistant Cesare into a hypnotic trance, forcing him to become a murderous automaton, and Mabuse’s unscrupulous manipulation of the ‘multitude in search of easy pleasures’, foreshadow ‘in content and purpose, that manipulation of the soul which Hitler was the first to practice on a gigantic scale’.186 The appearance of the Bailiff’s face as a ‘mask’ in extreme close-up shaking above the audience (p. 184) recalls an instant in Dr. Mabuse when the face of Mabuse rushes to the foreground and fills the whole frame, superimposed over the stock exchange he has just cleaned out. In order to operate undetected, Mabuse the master criminal employs a range of disguises: stockbroker, psychoanalyst, gambler, conjuror, drunken sailor; the close mimetic identification with the characters he plays becomes synonymous with his practice as a hypnotist, mobilising his passive victims through the power of his gaze. The opening shot of the film shows a close-up of his hand holding cards with images of his various disguises; in a later scene, when he forces Countess Told to witness the hypnotism of her husband during a game of poker, a series of shot-reverse-shots across the table bind together the eyeline between Told and Mabuse, setting up an expectation which is then disrupted when we see a close-up of Mabuse’s eyes, followed by the cards in what should be Told’s hands. The disorientation when the audience sees Mabuse’s hands in place of 124

wyndham lewis

Told’s mimes the hypnotic identification Mabuse employs throughout the film. In this instant, the film viewer, as spellbound as Told, his or her perceptual apparatus invaded by the malign agency of Mabuse, also becomes a victim of hypnosis. The sequence exemplifies, in its suggestive intercutting of gaze and gesture, Lewis’s critique of the power of cinematic hypnosis. Lewis shares with the anti-fascist culture theory of the Frankfurt school and Brechtian performance theory a fierce, politicised strain of anti-mimesis. His conviction that ‘the democratic masses are [. . .] governed by hypnotism’187 is the outcome of a complex understanding of the multi-dimensional relations between the mimetic gestures of an actor, induced mass identification in the spectacle of cinema and the manipulation by political leaders of the plastercast tokens of that spectacle. The emergent speech-gesture complex in Lewis – the outcome of his long-term project as a painter and writer to discover a critical dialectic between iconography and experimental syntax in his representations of the performative body, and in particular, the anxiety of experience in finding one’s body set in motion apart from one’s own intentions – compels a reassessment of his political affiliations in light of the theoretical work of Adorno and Brecht. For Adorno, as for Lewis, the perceptual closeness between sign and referent in cinema encourages the occlusion of rational interpretation with false immediacy. This mode of collective reception, the reification spell which instils in an audience the principle of automatism, objectified in UFA, Fordism and classical Hollywood, obstructs critical and reflective consciousness with illusionist self-identity and spectacle, which only the symbolic mode of written language can achieve, to prevent the intrusion of a malign system upon reflective consciousness. In order to counter this inbuilt iconic character, cinema should incorporate modes of representation which resemble the phenomenon of writing. Adorno, like Lewis, excludes from his polemic against cinematic iconicity those filmmakers, in particular the Soviets, who attempted to inhibit the exclusively iconic with the principle of montage which ‘arranges things in constellations akin to writing’.188 The collision between iconic and symbolic properties enables dialectical thinking, which ‘interprets every image as writing. It teaches how to read in its own features the admission of its falsity so as to deprive it of its power and appropriate it for truth.’189 Brechtian dramaturgy is also founded upon a dialectic between reading and spectatorship, of a resistance to spectatorship divorced from the critical, distanced reflective activity of the solitary reader. The denial of mimetic identification is an effect of this tension between the actor’s relation to the text and its enactment in performance. The gestus renders the iconic gesture readable, and opens out the possibility of critical enquiry, by explicitly turning the actor into a reader of his or her own role. In his directorial capacity, Brecht would insist on ‘more reading rehearsals than usual’, and that the actor ‘should go 125

the speech-gesture complex

on f­ unctioning as long as possible as a reader, which does not mean a readeraloud’. He instructed Helen Weigel, in his production of Mother Courage in 1932, to speak the stage directions aloud and in the third person, to clash between the two kinds of speech-act in the dramatic text – direction and dialogue, or scene and text – and inhibit the transferential process between Weigel, and by extension the audience, and Mother Courage. In this technique, as he puts it, ‘the mimic principle is replaced by the gestural principle’:190 the Brechtian gesture, conflating iconic and symbolic properties, ensures that enactment is always accompanied by critique. The speech-gesture complex in Lewis, initiated by the radical experiments between the iconic gesture and paratactic effect in Enemy of the Stars, and extensively developed in the written film-gestures of The Childermass, antecedes the politicised transference between perception with signification in Adorno and Brecht. By stirring up contradictions between distinct modes of representation, on the one hand, of the perceptible immediacy of the performative body, and on the other, of the distanced, reflective body in language, those representations are forced mutually to inform and rectify one another. The critical awareness in Lewis of the far-reaching political consequences of the spectacle, the urge to distort that representation and short-circuit its mesmeric effect, jolting the reader-spectator into an active critique of its political appropriations and misuse, serves to counteract the equivocality of his declared political affiliations. The innovations in The Childermass foreshadow not only Brecht’s notion that ‘literature needs the film not only indirectly but also directly’ and that ‘decisive extension of its social duties entails the multiplying or the repeated changing of the means of representation’191 but also the sixties revival of the modernist project in film, interrupted by the arrival of the talkies. As Stephen Heath argues, the aim of the left modernist cinema, for instance, of Godard, requires the audience to be pulled ‘into an activity of reading’, to interrupt the illusory coherence of the spectacle with the critical distance available to the reader. Demonstrating ‘the contradictions that coherence avoids’ in this activity of spectatorial reading encourages a critical attitude to the spectacle, which fixes the spectator, if it retains the properties of mimetic identification, into ‘an imaginary coherence [. . .] the condition of which is the ignorance of the structure of his production, of his setting in position’.192 Interrupting the enactment of identification with critical commentary allows the inference of alternative deeds and histories, and a sense that the narrative might be altered by critical intervention. To alter the representation entails a concomitant reconstruction of the reader-spectator’s attitude to the representation, and consequently to the governing institutions which appropriate that representation and hypnotise their subjects into a false coherence. The simultaneous anti-mimetic fracturing of iconic coherence, and the constant intervention of the perceptible body of cinema into syntactic coherence 126

wyndham lewis

in Lewis, belongs to this polemical tradition, particularly if the connection is made to his powerful critique of the disappearance of political reality in its representations. The Lewisian critique of the victimhood of political hypnosis, having transformed the representations of the performative body and of modernist prose syntax, argues, by extension, for a transformation of the institutions of government, a motive-force which further places him in a left modernist genealogy. As one of his characters in Rotting Hill remarks: ‘ “once the profit motive is banished – as it will be in a socialist society, then there will be nothing but an intelligent standard of movie. If nothing else, its educative power will be enormous. Today it miseducates and corrupts.” ’193 Lewis realised soon after 1931 the catastrophic errors in his book on Hitler and National Socialist ideology. Although the nature and extent of Hitler’s menace was not clear in 1931, and despite the correction of his carelessness and leniency in The Hitler Cult, the book had done irreversible damage, both to potential readers in his lifetime, and to generations after him. Repositioning his work in relation to the speech-gesture complex of left modernism offers an alternative, if not fully redemptive context to the branding of Lewis, false in its simplicity, as modernist literature’s ultimate political reprobate. Notes

1. Pound, ‘D’Artagnan Twenty Years After’, Selected Prose 1909–1965, p. 454. 2. Pound, ABC of Reading , p. 46. 3. Kenner, Wyndham Lewis, p. 56. 4. Puchner, Stage Fright, p. 26. 5. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 97. 6. Brown, Intertextual Dynamics within the Literary Group, p. 65. See also Klein, The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, p. 20. 7. Brown, Intertextual Dynamics within the Literary Group, p. 65. 8. Klein, The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, p. 7. 9. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 266. 10. See also Edwards, ‘Wyndham Lewis versus James Joyce’, pp. 11–18. 11. Brown, Intertextual Dynamics within the Literary Group, p. 65. 12. Kenner, Wyndham Lewis, p. 56. 13. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 155: 19, p. 150: 7, p. 160: 22. All references are to this edition, and are included parenthetically within the text. 14. Lewis, Enemy of the Stars, Collected Poems and Plays, p. 96. All references are to this edition, and are included parenthetically within the text. 15. Graver, ‘Vorticist Performance and Aesthetic Turbulence in Enemy of the Stars’. 16. For illuminating accounts, see Klein, The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis; Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound & Wyndham Lewis; Beatty, ‘Enemy of the Stars: Vorticist Experimental Play’. 17. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, p. 143. 18. Gasiorek, Wyndham Lewis and Modernism, p. 18. 19. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Collected Poems, 1909–1962, p. 15. 20. Symons, Studies in Seven Arts, p. 336. 21. Symons, Cities and Sea Coasts and Islands, p. 169. 22. Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, p. 5.

127

the speech-gesture complex

23. Yeats, ‘William Blake’, Selected Criticism, p. 22. 24. Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, p. 153, p. 168. 25. Yeats, Explorations, p. 179. 26. Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, p. 168 27. Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound & Wyndham Lewis, p. 53. 28. Hulme, ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, p. 248. 29. Lewis, Tarr, p. 299. 30. Hulme, ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme, p. 278. 31. Craig, ‘The Actor and the Über-Marionette’, pp. 3–11. 32. Walton, ‘Craig and the Greeks’. 33. Taxidou, The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig, p. 54. 34. Ibid. pp. 56–9; Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, p. 108. 35. Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, p. 175. 36. Craig, Craig on Theatre, p. 82, pp. 82–4. 37. Lewis, Rude Assignment, pp. 138–9. 38. Nicholls, Modernisms, p. 174. 39. Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism, p. 108. 40. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, p. 48. 41. For instance, Bomberg’s Composition (1914) and In the Hold (1913–14). See Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age Vol. 2. 42. Lewis, BLAST, I, p. 134. 43. McManus, No Kidding, p. 18. 44. Ibid. p. 31. 45. Lewis, ‘Les Saltimbanques’, The Complete Wild Body, pp. 237–47. 46. Ibid. pp. 239–41. 47. Murray, ‘ “Our Wild Body” ’, pp. 15–17. 48. Bergson, Laughter, p. 29. 49. Lewis, ‘The Meaning of the Wild Body’, The Wild Body, pp. 158–9. 50. Murray, ‘ “Our Wild Body” ’, pp. 15–17; Lafourcade, ‘The Wild Body, Bergson, and the Absurd’. 51. Bergson, Laughter, p. 29, p. 34. 52. Lewis, ‘Inferior Religions’, The Wild Body, p. 316. 53. Bergson, Laughter, p. 29. 54. Symons, Studies in Seven Arts, pp. 374–5. 55. Danto, ‘Description and the Phenomenology of Perception’, p. 206. 56. Bergson, Laughter, p. 143. 57. Anscombe, ‘The First Person’, p. 47. 58. Lewis, Rude Assignment, pp. 138–9. 59. Letter to Hugh Kenner, 23 November 1953, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, pp. 552–3. 60. Materer, Wyndham Lewis the Novelist, p. 54, p. 172. 61. Dostoyevsky, The Double, p. 95, p. 33. 62. Bergson, Laughter, p. 34. 63. Burch, Life to Those Shadows, p. 267. 64. DeCordova, Picture Personalities, p. 39. 65. Ibid. p. 24, p. 64. 66. See Paraskeva, ‘Wyndham Lewis vs Charlie Chaplin’. 67. Lewis, The Childermass, p. 50. All references are to this edition, and are included parenthetically within the text. 68. Lewis, Tarr, p. 299.

128

wyndham lewis

69. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 203. 70. Heath, Questions of Cinema, p. 181. 71. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 64. 72. Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man, p. 110. 73. Quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Dream World of Mass Culture: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Modernity and the Dialectics of Seeing’, p. 322. 74. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 64. 75. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, p. 147. 76. Lewis, The Lion and the Fox, p. 41. 77. North, Reading 1922, p. 168. 78. Chaplin, My Trip Abroad, pp. 32–3. 79. Benjamin, ‘Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, p. 224. 80. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 65. 81. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 22. 82. Barry, ‘The Cinema’, Vogue, February 1926, in Hankins, ‘Iris Barry, Writer and Cinéaste’, p. 496. 83. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 13. 84. Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 474. 85. McCabe, Cinematic Modernism, p. 87. 86. Meyers, The Enemy, p. 197. 87. After her fractious and difficult relationship with Lewis, Barry went on to become a pioneering film critic, especially of Griffith, Chaplin and German Expressionism. She wrote the first serious film criticism in England in 1923 for The Spectator, and founded the Film Society in 1925 and the prestigious film library in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which she curated until 1950. Her collection Let’s Go to the Pictures (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926) includes her long review of Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1924), and in February the same year she published an essay in Vogue magazine entitled ‘The Cinema’, which is really about Chaplin: it begins, as Leslie Kathleen Hankins has shown, with a full-page picture of him, and attempts to explain his iconic status as ‘the most popular man alive’, a ‘legendary figure’ as much with the artistic elite as the wider population. See Hankins, ‘Iris Barry, Writer and Cinéaste’. 88. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, p. 326. 89. Jameson, Fables of Aggression, p. 73. 90. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 98. 91. McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 53. 92. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 94. 93. Joyce considered Lewis ‘by far the best hostile critic that had appeared’. See interview with Frank Budgen, 1956, Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 596. The review provokes a counter-defence by the Joyce circle, who rally around him to write Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress in 1929. 94. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 96. 95. Ibid. p. 95. 96. Edwards, ‘Wyndham Lewis versus James Joyce’, pp. 11–18. 97. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 94. 98. Ibid. p. 112. 99. Ibid. p. 416. 100. Münsterberg, The Film, p. 74. 101. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 411. 102. Deleuze, Cinema 2. 103. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 322.

129

the speech-gesture complex

104. Arnheim, Film as Art, p. 100. 105. Quoted in Heath, Questions of Cinema, p. 40. 106. Arnheim, Film as Art, p. 116. 107. Heath, Questions of Cinema, p. 10. 108. Arnheim, Film as Art, p. 12. 109. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 83. 110. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Illuminations, p. 159. 111. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 156. 112. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 117. 113. Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, pp. 164–5. 114. Lewis told Pound of his ‘five hundred thousand word book, The Man of the World’. Letter to Pound, 29 April 1925, Pound/Lewis, p. 144. 115. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, p. 300. 116. Ayers, English Literature of the 1920s, pp. 112–13. 117. O’Keefe, Some Sort of Genius, p. 303. 118. Meyers, The Enemy, p. 198. 119. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, p. 182. 120. Lewis, Hitler, p. 3, p. 46, p. 196, p. 46. 121. Churchill, ‘Hitler and His Choice’, p. 19. 122. Meyers, The Enemy, p. 87. 123. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, p. 385 124. Ferrall, Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics, p. 136, p. 146. 125. Lewis, The Diabolical Principle, p. 126. 126. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 116. 127. Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, pp. 369–70. 128. Lewis, Hitler, p. 46, p. 3, p. 12, p. 31. 129. Lewis, The Hitler Cult, p. 21, p. 30, p. 39, p. 41, p. 114, p. 25. 130. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 264. 131. Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, p. 185. 132. Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, p. 133. 133. Ibid. p. 126. 134. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 298. 135. Adorno, ‘Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation’, p. 267. 136. Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, p. 111, p. 44. 137. Adorno, ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’, The Culture Industry, p. 56. 138. Adorno, ‘Culture and Administration’, The Culture Industry, p. 96. 139. Lewis, Self-Condemned, pp. 89–90; The Writer and the Absolute, p. 38; Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 36. 140. Lewis, Doom of Youth, p. viii. 141. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 329. 142. Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, p. 143. 143. Adorno, ‘On the Fetish Character’, The Culture Industry, p. 27. 144. Adorno, ‘Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda’, The Stars Down to Earth, p. 164. 145. Adorno, ‘What National Socialism Has Done to the Arts’, p. 414. 146. Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’, The Mass Ornament, pp. 75–86. 147. Lewis, America and Cosmic Man, p. 206. 148. Barry, ‘Hope Fulfilled’, in Hankins, ‘Iris Barry, Writer and Cinéaste’, p. 501. 149. Bellour, ‘Ideal Hadaly’, p. 131. 150. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, p. 40. 151. Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, p. 14. 152. Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’, The Mass Ornament, pp. 75–86. 153. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 164.

130

wyndham lewis

154. Pound, BLAST, I, p. 153. 155. Ford, My Life and Work, p. 56. 156. Gillette, The People’s Corporation, p. 167. 157. Barry, ‘The Cinema: Metropolis’, The Spectator, 26 March 1927, quoted in Minden and Bachmann (eds), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, p. 104. 158. Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, p. 139. 159. Deleuze, Cinema II, p. 253. 160. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 149. 161. Ibid. p. 55. 162. Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang, p. 40, p. 41. 163. Hulme, ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, p. 278. 164. Lewis, Tarr, p. 299. 165. Otto Dietrich Hotler, Nazi Chief Press secretary, quoted in Ian Kershaw, ‘The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich’, in Crew (ed.), Nazism and German Society, p. 207. 166. Quoted in Jeremy Noakes, ‘The Nazi Party and the Third Reich: the Myth and Reality of the One-Party State’, in Noakes (ed.), Government, Party and People in Nazi Germany, p. 14. 167. Adorno, ‘Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda’, Stars Down to Earth, p. 167. 168. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 13. 169. Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, The Culture Industry, p. 119. 170. Moussinac, ‘Panoramique du cinéma’, quoted in Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, p. 196. 171. Benjamin, ‘Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, p. 244. 172. Ibid. p. 240. 173. Adorno, ‘Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda’, Stars Down to Earth, p. 166, p. 168. 174. Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, The Culture Industry, p. 131. 175. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, pp. 99–100. 176. Brecht, ‘Two Essays on Unprofessional Acting’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 152. 177. Brecht, ‘The German Drama: Pre-Hitler’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 78. 178. Brecht, ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 193. 179. Brecht, ‘The German Drama: Pre-Hitler’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 79. 180. Brecht, ‘A Short Description of a New Technique of Acting’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 136. 181. Brecht, ‘The Street Scene’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 122. 182. Brecht, ‘The German Drama: Pre-Hitler’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 78 183. Brecht, ‘A Short Description of a New Technique of Acting’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 137. 184. Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, pp. 164–5. 185. Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 160. 186. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 64, p. 81, p. 72. 187. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 117. 188. Adorno, ‘Transparencies on Film’, The Culture Industry, p. 158. 189. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 24. 190. Brecht, ‘On Experimental Theatre’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 134. 191. Brecht, ‘The Film, the Novel and Epic Theatre’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 48. 192. Heath, ‘Lessons from Brecht’, p. 106, p. 118, p. 106. 193. Lewis, Rotting Hill, pp. 198–9.

131

3

THE TRANSITION TO SOUND

Nabokov, Lewis and Garbo For Adorno, as for Lewis, film’s iconic immediacy, the mimetic spell it casts over the audience, pacifying them into submission, could be negated through a form of image-writing. The spell is broken, in Adorno’s view, through montage, which ‘does not interfere with things but arranges them in a constellation akin to writing’; for Lewis, the dialectic between writing and image, or in my terms, speech and gesture, is generated through a performative prose style which thematises the double aspect of textual absence and mimetic presence. The Lewisian speech-gesture complex counteracts both iconic or performative mimesis which casts a reifying spell over the spectator, breaking down the performative body into linguistic components, and it also resists the autonomy and self-enclosure of writing, by showing forth a series of rehearsed gestures which never materialise as a finished spectacle. His aesthetic, which cannot be reduced solely to discursive or performative terms, manifests a politics which resists a totalised pre-scripted determination and disrupts the naturalising process of the universalised, transcendental reader-spectator. In Lewis’s view, the newly dominant form of Hollywood naturalism and its narrative conventions reduced spectator-subjects to mere consumers. For Lewis, as for Adorno, these conventions had become a new universal language, encoded according to forms of mimetic behaviour, rendering the audience passively star-struck and inducing the desire for mass mimesis. The tendencies 132

the transition to sound

Lewis critically observes in silent film, particularly as regards performative mimesis and the star system, are intensified in the era of the talkies, during the period of the ‘late modernism’ of experimental mid-century writers including Nabokov and Beckett. As Tyrus Miller observes, late modernism is characterised by an all-pervasive presence of ‘spectacle and simulacra’.1 The following chapter will further define this period category by contextualising late modernist style in its relation to the dominant form of the classical-realist Hollywood style. For Lewis and other writers, the house-style of performative naturalism, which emerges by standardised consensus as Hollywood’s dominant model, its universal language, with its synchronised dialogue and straightforward relation between sound and image, neutralises the critical dialectic of the speechgesture complex. By imposing a false coherence between speech and gesture to sustain the illusion of a coherent self, it becomes the exemplary articulation of the fabricated homogeneity of commodity capitalism. Allusions to Chaplin, French Impressionism and German Expressionism situate The Childermass in the era of the silent film, although it was revised and published two years after the first public demonstrations of the Vitaphone sound film, and one year after The Jazz Singer (1927). Tyrus Miller astutely interprets Lewis’s use of the term ‘phono-film’ as referring to the new Vitaphone recording process, which involved recording sound separately onto discs and then aligning with the image using synchronising motors.2 The Vitaphone phono-film inflects Lewis’s view of Gertrude Stein’s prose song as ‘gramophonic’ jazz in Time and Western Man together with the satirical conflation of Stein and Al Jolson when Satters’s speech breaks down into a series of stutters. The Vitaphone process, the studios’ first attempt at synchronised sound, often resulted in a peculiar dissociation of voice and body. According to Fitzhugh Green, who wrote the first book on the subject in 1929, if voice and body ‘did not coincide perfectly, the movie voice seemed to wander away from its owner and the listener no longer connected it with him; it might be anybody’s voice’.3 As Miller notes, Lewis was fascinated by ‘the estranging qualities of the Vitaphone process’, and he mimics its ‘lack of tight correspondence between body and voice’ in both The Childermass and The Apes of God.4 Voices originate from outside the bodies of the characters, apparently not belonging to them but to the predetermined discourse of the figures of the Bailiff, or Pierpoint in The Apes of God, already recorded as though onto a gramophonic disc. Yet the potentially experimental, non-naturalistic Vitaphone process, which allowed voices to wander away from bodies, and for voice-doubles to impose themselves onto the body of the actor, did not last beyond 1930, when location sound and recording directly onto film enabled a tighter synch between speech and gesture, and by extension a more naturalistic style of performance in which the actor was indissociable from his or her voice. The Vitaphone 133

the speech-gesture complex

moment was transitional, but Lewis’s critique of cinema accelerates in the period of the industrial standardisation of sound recording technique. His thinking about the mass standardisation of sound, and the attendant style of naturalist performance, continues to inform both his fiction and polemics, echoing Adorno’s view that ‘the masks of mass culture’5 are all the more effective once they are naturalised by synchronic sound. The worldwide conversion to optical, synchronised sound was rapid and inexorable, and occurred against a background of competition, patent wars and the triumph of an elite of international conglomerates. The emergent optical sound technology required immense reserves of capital, both for production and distribution. As Douglas Gomery observes, the major Hollywood studios, already dependent on finance from banks, colluded with a small group of large electronics companies ‘to manage the legalities, logistics, and finances of sound conversion so as to avoid a costly patents war’. Conversion to sound, as Gomery argues, ‘enabled powerful economic forces in the United States to expand and become further entrenched’.6 This economic rationale transformed the film industry in Hollywood, and the rest of the world soon after. In order to remain cost-efficient in the new era of expensive optical sound, and to retain worldwide control of sound recording technology, the major electronics companies, in league with the big film studios in Hollywood, forged alliances with a view to standardising both technology and film production methods. Rather than compete against each other over patents, Western Electric, the manufacturing subsidiary of American Telephone and Telegraph, the Radio Corporation of America, a subsidiary of General Electric, and the DutchGerman Tobis-Klangfilm, a company backed by Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft (AEG), Germany’s largest electrical manufacturer, formed an international cartel and effectively carved up the world between them. The United States, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand and the Soviet Union were assigned to Western Electric and RCA; Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, the Dutch East Indian colonies, Scandinavia and the Balkan countries were put under the dominion of Tobis-Klangfilm.7 The cartel of electronics companies, in negotiation with the Hollywood studios, installed a system called vertical integration, which involved the total ownership of each and every element of film production and distribution. The studios and cartels developed a house-style of naturalism, which synchronised speech and gesture and effectively denied, through sheer economic dominance, the possibility of alternative acting styles and film technique. The rich and varied innovations of the late silent era were suddenly halted by a standardised consensus imposed on the industry to ensure maximum profit. Hollywood’s studio-approved techniques of narrative continuity editing and naturalistic performance style was quickly adopted by the rest of the world, including the Soviet Union, with the result that by the mid-thirties, there was ‘a 134

the transition to sound

drastic reduction in the cinema’s range of stylistic options’ and ‘the variety of national film styles’.8 For Adorno, this corporate, big business erasure of cultural difference in world cinema during the thirties signalled the triumph of the culture industry, and its savage reduction of culture to the economic principles dominant in other forms of industrial production. Similarly, for Lewis, there was a structural similarity between what he calls the ‘Film-racket’, ‘rigidly constrained by the profit motive’,9 the ‘pernicious racket’10 of German fascism and the ‘Big Business Fascism’ exemplified by US capitalism. Alternatives to Hollywood’s industrial method of production and narrative style were radically reduced and could only survive on the margins, rather than occupying the central position within the industry as they had in the silent era. The blocking of actors according to the required proximity of non-directional microphones, together with camera placement designed to maintain the continuity of audible speech, acquired a new technical priority.11 The cinematographer Michel Kelber spoke of the straightforward standardised pattern of ‘long shot, close-up, long shot, close-up’ imposed by the producers: ‘we were always supposed to show the actors from the front – not in profile, not from the back – because the management wanted to show the public how the sound was perfectly synchronized with the lip movement’.12 Character-driven causality and formulaic, linear, naturalistic synch-sound effectively superseded the still developing modernist cinema of critically reflective montage, of repetition, and variations of speed, of superimposition, dynamically mobile camera movement, radical alternations of lenses and camera angles, and anti-naturalist performance style. The principle of synchronised, audible speech supplants visibly expressive gesture and reduces it to a merely illustrative function. As Rudolf Arnheim put it, once speech assumes priority over gestural utterance and image, or the ‘visible aspect of behaviour’,13 cinema loses the principal features which distinguish it from other media. As Steven Connor points out, the ‘ventriloquial demand to glue the voice to the lips [. . .] brings with it the repression of the body’.14 Synchronised dialogue, by preventing creative disjunctions between sound and image, relegated the expressive capacity of the body to an ancillary status, where gestures merely support and reinforce speech, now the primary means of expression for the actor. The absolute priority of synch-sound crystallised what James Naremore calls ‘the rule of expressive coherence’, whereby the actor’s effort is directed to ‘preserve the illusion of a unified self, by maintaining coherence in the face of multiple possibilities’.15 In the new, amplified style of performative screen naturalism, speech and gesture, sound and image work in concert to sustain the illusion of a coherent self. Both actor and spectator dissolve, through mimetic identification, into the illusion of a homogeneous character. Lewis was fascinated and appalled enough at the prospects of cinema’s 135

the speech-gesture complex

intensified mimetic capacity to visit the film set of an early talkie in 1930. Lewis’s account of the Moroccan production – ‘The Three Unlucky Travellers’ – in Filibusters in Barbary (1932) concentrates almost exclusively on the work of the actors. ‘In his professional displays’, Lewis remarks, ‘the Screen-worker in the nature of things is the last word in naturalism, at the opposite pole to a formal art.’ For Lewis, synch-sound intensified the mimesis of screen naturalism, in which actors are observed ‘modelling a lie from the life – upon the living original – in an odd process of deliberate misrepresentation’. The actor’s naturalistic imitation of the unmediated behaviour of his or her character is ‘a sham-article in process of manufacture, out of the raw material of the Real’. The identification this process induces in an audience, as they ‘smile in debonair close-ups, or prance in wistful middle-distance shots, for the benefit of a gum-chewing World-pit’, is based not on reality, but on synthetic fabrication, a ‘sham article’.16 What troubled Lewis, and what becomes the chief subject of his most significant work of fiction in the thirties, The Revenge for Love (1937), is precisely the lie of standardised naturalism, the false coherence an actor imposes on a character, and the big business commodification of fabricated sameness as individuality, inducing a mass audience to imitate what they see and hear. Or as Adorno puts it, a ‘monopoly [which] shuts its doors on anyone who fails to learn from the cinema how to move and speak according to the schema which it has fabricated’.17 The Revenge for Love originates in Lewis’s thinking about performative naturalism, sound conversion, the star system and big business standardisation in Filibusters in Barbary. His scathing account of the actors on set in Morocco as ‘dumb characters in search of an author dumb enough to concoct a plot and text for them [. . .] creatures, that is, of an art one remove from the shadow-picture’ is developed in Revenge for Love: ‘the mere notion of Victor as a shadow-person distressed [Margot] so much that she grappled him to herself, so that he, at least, should not be outside herself among the unreals’.18 The description of the film set he observes in Morocco, ‘a rather elaborate arabesque of kiss stuff, crime and contraband of arms’,19 roughly also serves to describe the plot outline of Revenge for Love, in the style of a pitch to a Hollywood mogul, and its title, ‘The Three Unlucky Travellers’ anticipates the novel’s central characters, Victor and Margot Stamp, and Percy Hardcaster, victims both of shadowy pre-Civil War agent provocateurs, and of the standardised, formulaic Hollywood template they are forced to inhabit. Victor Stamp, a second-rate Australian painter and forger, and his wife, Margot, who sees their marriage as a grand Hollywood romance, unthinkingly fall victim to a gun-running mission into pre-Civil War Spain, against a background of intrigue between the romantic communist agitator Percy Hardcaster – the novel’s third protagonist – fashionable inauthentic Bloomsbury left-wing intellectuals, failed artists and shady arms-dealing capitalists. Lewis interweaves the 136

the transition to sound

genres of the political espionage thriller with the domestic melodrama, while simultaneously attacking the genre’s function, as he narrates how two versions of romantic idealism, Hardcaster’s politics and Margot’s marital passion, fall victim to the brute reality of ruthless and violent party apparatchiks and businessmen of no political commitment. Hardcaster is drawn into the same gun-running scheme as the Stamps by the unscrupulous O’Hara, who sets Victor up as a decoy to allow someone else to smuggle the guns; Hardcaster mistakenly gives himself up in a vain effort to save the Stamps, while Margot, attempting to save Victor, unwittingly leads them both to their doom; in a desperate attempt to avoid arrest by the Civil Guard, the Stamps drive towards the Pyrenees, killing a guard in a high-speed car chase, before plunging over a cliff trying to reach France. Lewis wrote The Revenge of Love during 1934 and early 1935, submitted the manuscript in January 1936 to Cassell, who published it in May 1937. The novel bears a striking resemblance to a novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov wrote his novel initially in Russian as Kamera Obskura between the end of 1930 and 1931, and it was first published in 1933; he translated it into English and published it in 1936, and then again as Laughter in the Dark, with significant revisions and alterations, in 1938. No biographical detail or work of scholarship connects The Revenge for Love and Laughter in the Dark yet their similarities are numerous and insistent. The lead female character in both novels is called Margot; in both, she is a victim of a particular kind of film spectatorship, and in helpless thrall to the films of Greta Garbo; both novels include male characters who forge paintings, and who occupy forged identities, intensely artificial second-hand imitations of cinematic persona; both intermingle plots from Hollywood thrillers and romantic melodramas, climactically stage a spectacular car crash, satirise the Hollywood star system, and articulate a view of an ultimately lethal intensification of performative mimesis in the era of cinema’s conversion to sound. For both Lewis and Nabokov, the talkies brought with them a solidification of predetermined templates, standardised homogeneity and the injunction to an audience to imitate insubstantial artifice masquerading as reality. But while Nabokov’s novel begins and ends as modernist melodramatic thriller, Revenge for Love extends its critique of the star system, of imitation, unreality and the deadly cliché of standardised naturalism into the realm of politics, as a crucial element of what is one of his most political novels, and ‘acclaimed by Lewis’ admirers as his best novel’.20 Nabokov, in his own words, ‘wanted to write the entire book [Laughter in the Dark] as if it were a film [. . .] the scene and dialogue do manage to follow a cinematic pattern [. . .] it’s a verbal imitation of what was then termed a “photoplay.” ’21 The novel opens in the style of a pitch for a Hollywood melodrama, compressing the novel’s narrative arc in a sentence: ‘Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, 137

the speech-gesture complex

respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.’22 Albinus, a German art connoisseur and expert in forgeries, falls desperately in love with a model and wannabe film actress, Margot; he leaves his wife for her, and helps her find acting work in the film industry for which she is spectacularly ill-suited; his daughter dies; Margot conducts an affair with Albinus’s associate Robert Horn; he loses his sight in a car accident in the south of France, before learning of Margot’s betrayal; he dies of a gunshot wound whilst attempting to kill Margot. The novel’s thirty-eight chapters imitate the scenic structure of a melodramatic thriller. Nabokov, fond of the ‘grotesqueness of the cinematic cliché’,23 cruelly imagines Albinus, with his pretensions to high-minded grand passion, as the self-deluded victim of a cheap Hollywood romance. Albinus and Margot, in their vulgarity, insidiousness and cruelty, are deliberate clichés, locked in a stock scenario, the objective correlative to their own banality and fakeness. Nabokov’s critique of the insidiousness of the cinematic cliché develops ideas recurrent elsewhere in his work, particularly his concept of ‘poshlost’, which he defines as ‘not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive’.24 The concept is not dissimilar to Lewis’s sense of the ‘intense artificiality’ and ‘odd degenerescence’ of the second-rate actors, as he puts it in Filibusters in Barbary, who force reality ‘to conform to what was certainly a vulgar average, but a particularly odd variety of the vulgarest commonplace’,25 and the sham-reality in mass-produced group personality and the standardised film-star persona in Revenge for Love. Lewis and Nabokov both develop overlapping central ideas around the borrowed, the inauthentic, and the fake by casting Victor as an art forger and Albinus as a second-rate expert of forgeries. Victor lacks talent and originality as a painter and makes his living forging pictures in Abershaw’s ‘fake masterpiece factory’ (p. 226). He is ‘no good as an artist’; his pictures suffer badly from ‘formal shortcomings’ and ‘prettiness’ (p. 83), and his only talent is for ‘dull imitation’ (p. 82), which he exploits in his forgeries. He has enough selfawareness to be disappointed in himself, as for instance when he puts his foot through one of his Van Gogh forgeries, yet he also partly seeks solace in his forged work; Victor ‘would never make his mark’ (p. 83) as an artist, but in his fake pictures he can at least make his mark as someone else. While forging the signatures of great painters, his own signature, one he himself cannot use on his own work, acquires currency when it is forged in a letter which sets him up as a decoy, allowing the real gun runner safe passage, and initiating the sequence of events which leads to his death. Nabokov’s Albinus is a second-rate art critic, and his acquaintance and nemesis Axel Rex is a forger of Old Master paintings. Albinus, like Victor, is a victim of his unoriginality and like Swann, another art expert (in one of 138

the transition to sound

the novel’s many Proustian imitations) has a tendency to look for physical resemblances between people, usually women, in life and in paintings – ‘he had often amused himself by having this or that Old Master sign landscapes and faces which he, Albinus, came across in real life’ (p. 5) – priding himself on his skill at identifying the genuine from the forged. These disjunctions and false correspondences between interior fantasy, representation in art and real life blind him to the ‘sprinkling of fakes’ (p. 146) in his apartment, such as the seventeenth-century Baugin (a forgery painted by Rex), and also to Margot, his most ‘brilliant discovery’, and his deadliest fake. He is already vulnerable to the surface attractions of the artificial when he first sees her, ‘the melting outline of a cheek which looked as though it were painted by a great artist against a rich dark background’ (p. 13), working as an usherette in a cinema. Margot, according to Albinus, is a ‘picture postcard’, yet the surface appearance which so entrances Albinus is the precise inverse, like the image of the camera obscura, to the role Margot performs: he considers her to be ‘better than the most loyal wife’, yet she conducts a protracted affair with Rex, taking his money and finally killing him. Margot’s aspirations and unreal vision of herself – ‘that vision of herself as a screen beauty in gorgeous furs being helped out of a gorgeous car by a gorgeous hotel porter under a giant umbrella’ – crystallises her into a screen icon, though it is a vision only Albinus can see, and it fuels her doomed ambition to become ‘a model and then a film star’ (p. 17). For Nabokov, and for the audience at the premiere of her film, she is a hopeless cliché, her behaviour a bad imitation of an infantile Hollywood film star: ‘there were stormy scenes at home, sobs, moans, hysteria. She flung herself on the sofa, the bed, the floor. Her eyes sparkled brilliantly and wrathfully; one of her stockings had slipped down. The world was swamped in tears.’ Margot’s cheap imitation of melodramatic film style, ‘as abandoned damsels do in films’ (p. 25), becomes itself a subject for mimetic desire for Albinus, who also starts to play out the version of himself he sees in a film romance: ‘he arrived, he jumped out, he paid as men do in films – blindly thrusting out a coin’ (p. 52). Margot’s talent as an actress falls emphatically short of her desire to be a film star. At the premiere of her film, she watches her ‘stiff, clumsy, angular gestures’ (p. 122) in horror; she sees ‘a ghastly creature [. . .] awkward and ugly’ (p. 120) up on screen, in a performance which delights Rex, who ‘had never doubted that Margot would be a failure on the screen’ (p. 121). Yet Albinus, oblivious to their reactions, sees only her ‘delightful childish zeal’ (p. 121). Margot is presented through the dual perspective of Albinus, in slavish devotion to a romantic ideal, and Nabokov, for whom Margot’s behaviour is a capricious and absurd cliché. Albinus, finding perfection in a fake, and caught up in a private film in which he casts himself as the hero, cannot see what is self-evident to the rest of the audience at the screening of Margot’s 139

the speech-gesture complex

film, that she is a terrible actress, just as he cannot see the tawdry love triangle melodrama in which he is cast by Nabokov as the victim. In Revenge for Love, it is Victor who is cast as the imitation film persona, but only his wife Margot sees him in this aspect, as ‘her private screen-star’ (p. 303). As David Ayers argues, ‘Margot’s love is a thoroughly romanticised and sentimental one, conditioned by romantic reading and Hollywood.’26 Her love for Victor, filtered through Hollywood, appears to her in the heavenly dimensions of a romantic film lead. After his identity is forged in a letter and stolen from him, he is forced to assume a second-hand persona; he is, as Ayers notes, ‘condemned to be forever a film character – he never loses his Clark Gable smile – condemned to act out a part determined wholly by forces outside him and culminating in his death’.27 But only Margot sees him as Clark Gable, and it is only in scenes with Margot that he appears in this particular light: ‘ “Man must work!” he said, with a Clark Gable smile telescoping one side of his face, and with a sardonic corrugation of the brows’ (p. 72). Victor’s shortcomings as an artist and his lack of judgement dissolve in a deeply sentimentalised romantic vision, in which he is imbued with a heightened Gable-like masculinity, cast as the central figure in Margot’s, and Lewis’s, tragic melodrama. Margot’s singular perspective on Victor congeals him into the received gestures of a mass-produced Hollywood code, in which he takes on a ‘heroic look as his body strained upwards following the skyward aspiration of his uplifted arms’ (p. 88); her vision of him seals his fate, as the Gable persona acquires a mind almost independent of Victor the struggling painter, and ends up playing the lead role in a stock narrative of crime and contraband. Victor’s ‘education had betrayed him and caused him to think of his bovine aptitudes bovaristically, and led him into behaving as if he were an artistic star’ (p. 83). But he surrenders his own bovaristic tendency, just as Albinus does, to Margot, finally becoming a botched version of Margot’s private screen idol. Lewis and Nabokov extend Flaubertian mimetic desire, as a phenomenon of the romantic novel, into the spectacle of the film star. Both Margots are as much constructs of their film-going as they are of the books they read; immersed in second-rate films, they have, like Emma Bovary, eroded their ability to act spontaneously through excessive imitation of the desires of their idols. The performances of themselves are always borrowed, mediated, unoriginal. As Peter Nicholls argues, citing René Girard, the work of Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky and Proust show how ‘desire is thus mediated by and copied from a third party whose function as a model turns out to be more important than the actual object of desire’.28 In Lewis and Nabokov, the third party is the film star to which the two Margots are in hypnotic thrall. But they do not so much copy desires in the Girardian sense as imitate styles of performance and, as Victor puts it in reference to his painting, a ‘saccharine type of seeing’ (p. 83). The word recurs in Blasting and Bombardiering, published the 140

the transition to sound

same year as Revenge for Love: ‘Further, there is a worse thing than no art at all (no manner, no style) – the saccharine travesty of art, namely, of the kind supplied by the Hollywood magnate.’29 Lewis maintains an ambivalent attitude to Margot: on the one hand, she is histrionic, inauthentic, second-hand, and yet in her dedication to Victor, in her perception, which is finally not good enough, of the agitators’ deadly masquerade, she remains one of Lewis’s most sympathetic characters. Lewis is striving for a Flaubertian effect, where the clear derivation of her character from films and novels does not necessarily nullify our sympathy for her. As Paul Edwards observes in his introduction to the novel, the reader’s empathy for Victor and Margot represents a radical departure from his earlier fictions in which empathy for his characters is always short-circuited by social critique. There is a tacit analogy here between Lewis’s double-sided portrait of Margot, and his ambivalent attitude to the iconic figure of Greta Garbo, whose unattainable semi-divine presence haunts both Revenge for Love and Laughter in the Dark. The two Margots’ fabricated, histrionic performance styles are bad attempts at imitation of the Garbo manner. Lewis’s Margot, like Garbo, has ‘an attractive foreign accent’ which ‘made her speech pleasant and a little “quaint” ’. Like Garbo, who learnt to talk English so she could perform in Hollywood, Margot ‘had taught herself English [. . .] It was flavoured with American talkie echoes’ (p. 71). Lewis makes a single, direct reference to Garbo, rich with implication, in his description of Jack Cruze: The fact that ‘the Garbo’ is the accepted way of describing the Swedish Queen of Hollywood must just mean that she saw herself as that, rather than ‘Gretta’. That sort of impersonal style she must have carried about with her – shutting out the familiar, the diminutive or the fond. But old Jack Cruze was the opposite of that [. . .] He was a natural Jack! (p. 93) The reference appears favourable, especially in light of an earlier mention of Garbo in Filibusters in Barbary: All day long the individuals of this herd were showing off to each other, attempting to convince the rest that they were ‘coming’ stars, or if already by way of being stars, that this show would give them a place in the centre of the world-spotlight, with semi-Garbo-like laurels – or recall the days of Valentino, when Stars were stars indeed.30 Lewis dismisses the diminutive, coarse, ‘natural’ Jack Cruze, by comparing him to the ‘impersonal’ Garbo; similarly, a distinction is established between the actors in Filibusters, who display ‘the last word in naturalism’, a crude mimesis of the ‘vulgar commonplace’, and Garbo, who Lewis suggests is much closer to the heightened sense of ‘the formal art’, of ‘the reflections of 141

the speech-gesture complex

a transcendent, abnormal existence’. The violent capitalist Jack Cruze is as deluded and vain as the actors on a film set, and just as unreal; whereas Garbo remains ‘impersonal’, transcendent, almost abstract. The distinction between two kinds of performance style, of naturalism and impersonality, harks back to the agonistic dispute in Enemy of the Stars, between the mimetic naturalism of Hanp, and the formalist, impersonal body of Arghol, who seeks to achieve ‘the original solitude of the soul’ (p. 106). Like Garbo in Grand Hotel, Arghol ‘wants to be alone’. In her time, Garbo was the biggest star of all; only Chaplin could rival her. Lewis accords her the status of impersonality, and the passing references in Filibusters in Barbary and Revenge for Love strongly suggest an awareness, even an admiration of that famous impersonal style, which potentially contradicts a view, consistent throughout his writing, of actor-stars as crass and vain. She remained the modernist writer’s film-star of choice: for Lewis and Nabokov, but also for H. D. and later, Roland Barthes; her aloof asceticism, her resistance to her own celebrity, her mask-like features crystallised a luminous, intangible otherworldliness which approached the ideal of modernist impersonality. H. D., writing in the avant-garde film journal Close Up, describes her performance style in Pabst’s Joyless St (1924), its ‘chiselled purity, its dazzling, almost unearthly beauty’; Garbo is less a personality, according to H. D., but a ‘symbol [. . .] a glorified embodiment’.31 Roland Barthes’s essay on Garbo performs the ecstatic rapture her performances could induce in an audience: The name given to her, The Divine, probably aimed to convey less a superlative state of beauty than the essence of her corporeal person, descended from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light. She herself knew this: how many actresses have consented to let the crowd see the ominous maturing of their beauty. Not she, however; the essence was not to be degraded, her face was not to have any reality except that of its perfection, which was intellectual even more than formal.32 Garbo’s mask-like features suggest an archetype, a Platonic idea; her intensity and gracious superiority, the way she combined worldliness with detachment, by these accounts, suggest impersonality by resisting appropriation by mimesis, or standardised reproduction. Yet aside from Mamoulian’s Queen Christina and Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, the films she made as a star in Hollywood are widely regarded as substandard genre vehicles. She refined her impersonal style in Europe under auteur directors like Pabst and Maurice Stiller, but in Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer offered her only formulaic roles in clichéd melodramas fashionable at the time. While Garbo was magnificent in Joyless St, according to H. D., she was torrid and cheap in Torrent, her first Hollywood film, a mere ‘house maid’. H. D. believed that Hollywood had corrupted 142

the transition to sound

Garbo’s transcendent playing style in an effort to market her to a mass audience: she was ‘deflowered, deracinated, devitalised, more than that, actively and acutely distorted by an odd unbelievable parody of life, of beauty’. She had been ‘trained with astonishing efficiency, to sway forward and backward in long skirts with pseudo-Lilian Gish affectation, to pose with a distinct, parrotlike flare for the Gloria Swansonesque’.33 Received acting styles, the ‘pseudo Lilian Gish’, the ‘Swansonesque’, were imposed upon her, eclipsing her own uniqueness as a performer. MGM quickly realised that Garbo was going to survive the transition to sound, unlike her co-star John Gilbert, a bigger star than her in the late twenties, but whose performance style, as for instance with Louise Brooks and Buster Keaton, was not suited to vocal delivery. The studio prized Garbo as their ultimate mass-market commodity, and it continued in the era of the early talkies to tame her refined aloofness, her quality of remoteness from the world around her, forcing it to conform to the stock Hollywood personas of the vamp, the woman of affairs, the woman of noble self-sacrifice. Despite heightened moments in Queen Christina and Flesh and the Devil, where Garbo was able to develop an unhistrionic style of maximum effect through minimal movement, it is the coarsened Garbo, I would argue, which fascinated Lewis and Nabokov, and the mass market, ‘saccharine travesty’ of Garbo which informs the two Margots. In Nabokov’s view, ‘she was so pretty but except for Ninotchka (1939), the films themselves were always so awful, the stories so absurd’.34 In Revenge for Love, Margot desires her life to resolve itself in a Garboesque Hollywood contrivance, but she ends in a tragic, rather than a romantic melodrama. Her tragedy is her failure to see her life as a series of events derived bovaristically from Hollywood and romantic fiction, and in particular, from too many second-rate Garbo talkies. She is often observed striking melodramatic poses learnt from Hollywood: Flinging herself against a great paneled door, like something out of a Hollywood set, which offered itself, she pressed her streaming face into the hollow of her lifted arm. She was convulsed from head to foot. Great cries came from her. Settling in against a sculpted jamb, Victor drew her round, and supported her head against the big twin-pillow of his chest. (p. 270) This is the Garbo of her weaker Hollywood output, commonplace, childishly submissive, dependent on the rugged male lead, precisely the ‘diminutive and the fond’ which Lewis railed against in his account of her. In her coarsest moments, Garbo would bite her lip and break out into hysterics alongside her lesser performers. The way Victor holds her head in his hands is a very Gableesque gesture: Garbo did in fact make one film with Gable, Susan Lennox in 143

the speech-gesture complex

1932, one of her worst films and very possibly on Lewis’s mind when he wrote the scene. In the confusion over a letter she sent to Albinus, during one of his bouts of hysteria, Margot looks around her for clues as to how to react: ‘She shrugged her shoulders, picked up the book and turned her back on him. On the right hand page was a photographic study of Greta Garbo’ (p. 51). The vision she has of herself as a ‘screen beauty’ with a ‘gorgeous hotel porter’ recalls Garbo in Grand Hotel (1932); her supine lizard-like anomie, the way she lies ‘in a kimono on a dreadful chintz-covered sofa’ (p. 50) suggests Garbo in her trademark supine pose – ‘Garbo has been photographed supine in erotic scenes with all her leading men [. . .] It is something of a trademark’35 – as does her often distracted despondency. Margot’s sense of herself as a budding Garbo is further enhanced by references to specific films: As she sat between these two men who were sharing her life, she felt as though she were the chief actress in a mysterious and passionate film drama – so she tried to behave accordingly; smiling absently, drooping her eyelashes, tenderly laying her hand on Albinus’ sleeve as she asked him to pass the fruit, and casting a fleeting, indifferent glance at her former lover. (p. 95) The scenario here recalls the silent film Flesh and the Devil (1927), which Nabokov’s wife remembers having seen with him,36 in which the supine Garbo, often seen lounging on sofas, conducts an affair with her husband’s friend and rival under his nose, with indifference and bored delight in her power over the situation. Margot aspires to becomes a Garbo vamp, as for instance in The Temptress, in which she drives Lionel Barrymore, who leaves his wife for her, to ruin, disaster and finally suicide. Albinus first sees Margot working as an usherette in the cinema. He watches her watching the film on screen: ‘He had come in at the end of a film: a girl was receding among tumbled furniture before a masked man with a gun [. . .] A car was spinning down a smooth road with hairpin turns between cliffs and abyss’ (p. 14). The two scenes Albinus uncomprehendingly watches mime events which happen to him later in the novel: the car on a winding road of ‘hairpin turns’ anticipates his drive from the hotel at Rouginard which ends in a crash that causes his blindness, and the girl ‘among tumbled furniture’ is Margot as he tries to shoot her in the novel’s final scene, just before she shoots him, a scene Nabokov writes as a series of ‘stage directions’ (p. 187) in a film script. Albinus watching Margot in the cinema imitates Garbo’s entrance in the espionage melodrama The Mysterious Lady. We first see her in an opera box watching Puccini’s Tosca, and being watched adoringly by Conrad Nagel. Garbo watches the scene in which Tosca kills Scarpia to save Cavaradossi, a situation later played out in the film itself when Garbo shoots her old spy chief 144

the transition to sound

to save Nagel. In Laughter in the Dark, the film Margot watches in the cinema, re-enacted for real in the novel’s climactic scene, as is Tosca in Mysterious Lady, is itself a copy of another Garbo vehicle, Mata Hari (1931). Garbo, spying for the Germans in Paris, having fallen in love with Ramon Novarro, is confronted by her former lover, Lionel Barrymore; amongst tumbled furniture, in a mise en scène replicated at the end of Laughter in the Dark, Garbo points a gun at Barrymore and shoots him. It is clear Nabokov had seen Mata Hari, both from his own reminiscences and from a reference in The Real Life of Sebastien Knight (1941), in which Paul Pahlovich’s second wife says that his marriage to the mysterious Nina ‘was merely a bad dream after seeing a bad cinema film’: ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if she turned out to be an international spy. Mata Hari! That’s her type.’37 Margot’s cheap imitations are enacted amidst a hodge-podge of Garbo films. When Albinus returns for a second time to visit her in the cinema: ‘She stood in the darkness leaning against the wall and watched Greta Garbo’ (p. 27). Mesmerised by his private screen icon, Albinus watches his counterfeit Garbo in giant close-ups: ‘her face was aflame, the iris of her eyes was dazzling, and a large tear trembled on the side of her nose: he had never before seen tears of that size and brilliance’ (p. 77). The rapture of Albinus gazing at Margot resonates in Barthes’s account of the Garbo effect. For Barthes, ‘Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre.’38 Barthes is thinking about Queen Christina, a film which contains an extraordinarily high rate of close-ups of Garbo’s face, and which ends with her alone on the bow of a ship, taking her place as its figurehead, and looking out to sea, in a close-up which fills the screen and lasts for almost a minute. Her inscrutable lack of expression turns her face into a mask of all-absorbing power, an image before which audiences would venerate. Queen Christina, Mata Hari and The Temptress stage this spectatorial effect in individual acts of courtly love by Garbo’s male leads, in which adoration tips over into something closer to worship. Barthes observes that Garbo’s face in Queen Christina has ‘the snowy thickness of a mask’, and that it ‘comes to resemble the flour-white complexion of Charlie Chaplin, the dark vegetation of his eyes, his totem-like countenance’.39 The veneration of audiences before the mask-like countenance of Garbo and Chaplin recalls the sudden appearance in The Childermass of the Bailiff as ‘a greatly enlarged mask of Chaplin’:40 the Bailiff’s audience enact, as Lewis puts it in Time and Western Man, a collective ‘submission to a giant hyperbolic close-up of a moment’. For Lewis, the close-up intensifies the process of identification, the point at which, as Richard Dyer puts it, ‘the audience-member places himself in the same situation and persona of the star’, activates the instinct to imitate, and serves the injunction to be remade in his or her image. 145

the speech-gesture complex

As Dyer argues, ‘the more extreme the projection, the more the person lives his or her life in terms bound up with the favoured star’. This construction of image, personality and character-type is bound up with industrial capitalism: according to Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Studios, ‘the fabrication of stars is the fundamental thing in the film industry’, a process involving huge financial investment, as contracts with stars become monopoly products for mass consumption, bought for vast sums, advertised on an industrial scale, and regarded by banks as insurance for the money lent to studios. For Dyer, as for Lewis, the process of a standardised manufacturing of ego ideals is indissociable from the ideology of industrial capitalism, and by rendering the audience passively star-struck, ‘depoliticising their consciousness by individualising it, rendering the social personal’,41 the process becomes capitalism’s most visible and glamorous articulation. Lewis invokes this process to describe what happens to Margot, finally unable to tell the real from the fake, but also Percy Hardcaster, in his moment of realisation at his role in the death of Victor and Margot. In the final sentence of the novel, we observe Hardcaster in an effect similar to Nabokov’s close up veneration of Margot’s tear: ‘And down the front of the mask rolled a sudden tear, which fell upon the dirty floor of the prison’ (p. 336). This is the language of melodramatic self-pity, and therefore double edged in Lewis’s terms, both tender and artificial. Hardcaster is transformed in these final moments into one of the cinematic shadow-people, the novel’s leitmotif for inauthenticity, and crystallises the novel’s sense in which the political imagination is just as vulnerable to the deadly unreality and second-hand imitation of swooning idealism. Jameson sums up Hardcaster’s moment of realisation: ‘out of the realm of the shades [. . .] there issues at length a force to kill the living. What does not exist reaches out its shadow arm to strike down real flesh and blood, and, itself insubstantial, to leave real corpses behind it.’42 For Lewis, the shadow sign system is not only, as it is in Nabokov, a phenomenon of the private imagination; it is also inescapably political, and has real political consequences on real flesh and blood. The satirical language of surface, of disguise, of acting applies as equally to politics as it does to romance. The political agitators, as much as Margot and Victor, are playing a part, or faking it. Margot fails to perceive the unreality of a romantic love derived from second-hand Hollywood, just as Hardcaster is mesmerised by the illusion of political utopia, leaving him powerless to resist the deadly cabal of big business. Abershaw is the foremost representative of the big business arms dealers and chief arranger of the downfall of Victor and Margot – Victor works for him as an art forger, before being duped into a gun-running mission – and of Hardcaster. Abershaw, like Jack Cruze, is a capitalist conspirator, manufacturing false and deceptive surfaces to disguise the salesmanship of arms to both the Spanish fascists and communists. Though the politics Lewis attacks are 146

the transition to sound

Communist, namely, the activities of the Communist party in Spain before the Civil War and the delusions of the bohemian intellectuals who romanticised them, Lewis’s critique is ultimately of totalitarian power in general, whether left or right. As Edwards argues, Lewis’s critique is ‘ultimately in as sharp a conflict with Fascism as with Communism’.43 The critique of the Communists in Spain, and their ‘brutal suppression of the P.O.U.M. by the Communist party, on the orders of Stalin’,44 is echoed in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) and, as Frank Kermode notes, the ‘indictment of the intellectual left’, their delusions and hypocrisy in supporting Stalin, ‘has to a large extent prevailed’,45 not least amongst commentators on the left. Lewis misjudged the ambitions of Nazi Germany (the Communists did not); yet his consistent repudiation of political violence and totalitarian systems – ‘we must not waste our time in predilections or beliefs of an illusory nature, pitting this system against that. All are apt to be equally bad’46 – together with his extraordinary analysis of the politics of the culture industry, suggest a critique as advanced and progressive as writers such as Adorno who are unambiguously of the radical left. Margot’s sense of the unreality of the corrupt political world around her, ‘a dangerous crowd of shadows’ (p. 163), derives from the love for Victor to which she holds fast. But the language in which she perceives this unreality is itself as unreal as her film fantasy romance: ‘if it came to a showdown, between a shadow and a man of flesh and blood – they would give way [. . .] They could only brow-beat you like a grammaphone, or impose on you like the projections on the screen of the cinema’ (p. 164). Margot sees those around her, including Victor, as cinematic types rather than individuals. Victor is Clark Gable, Tristy is the town sheriff – ‘his party badge gleamed upon the lapel of his jacket, or at all events it forced itself upon her notice, like the star of the film-sheriff, out to get the bad man dead or alive’ (p. 207) – Abershaw is ‘out of a Caligari’s drug-cabinet’ (p. 153); and the civil guards in the final scene are ‘True to type’ in their ‘highwaymanesqueness’ (p. 320). When she realises they have killed one of the guards, her mind refuses to accept the fact of death by imagining it as occurring elsewhere, on a screen in front of her eyes: their car (it had left her behind) was rapidly disappearing and had already grown quite small, in diminishing perspective; while in the foreground she was staring down at a disagreeable flattened object. Sprawling in the center of the road, it was incredibly two-dimensional, and, in short, unreal [. . .] the face. That was flat, as well – as flat as a pancake, but as pale as a sheet. (p. 325) Margot’s vision of death is, finally, as artificial as her vision of love. The dead guard is merely a two-dimensional object in her visual field, as though she did not share a common physical world with him. She understands her 147

the speech-gesture complex

e­ xperience cinematographically, as something external to her rather than happening to her. The car in which she rides with Victor seems to rapidly disappear while she is still inside it as ‘trees, rocks, and telegraph poles stood up dizzily before her and crashed down behind [. . .] Like a card-world clacked cinematographically through its static permutations’ (p. 314). By confusing flesh-and-blood reality with projected surface, Margot becomes a spectator of rather than participant in her own death. In this respect, she resembles Albinus in Laughter in the Dark, entering the cinema towards the end of the film, uncomprehendingly watching scenes from the car crash which leaves him blind – ‘A car was spinning down a smooth road with hairpin turns between cliffs and abyss’ (p. 14) – later remembered in terms similar to the accident in Revenge for Love: ‘a telegraph post loomed in front of the windscreen’. Nabokov saw the crash ‘vividly as a film’,47 and so does Albinus, unoriginal to the bitter end, even his death reduced to a stock narrative device in a low-grade film. Both novels belong to the period of ‘late modernism’. As Tyrus Miller argues, the period is frequently characterised by an ironised return to the conventions of classical realist prose, as distinct from the disrupted syntax of earlier modernism. The world depicted by this ostensibly naturalist prose is one ‘permeated by mimicry, counterfeit, diversion, imposture, and spectacle: the condition of generalized mimetism’. The style enacts in order to critique a ‘universally de-realised’ world saturated in spectacle. It is mimetic in the traditional sense, but ‘the referent is explicitly thematized by the text as a mirage’.48 The mirage-like spectacle in Revenge for Love and Laughter in the Dark, as I have argued, is largely generated by the cinematic apparatus of the early talkies; Miller’s sense of ‘generalised mimeticism’ is an aspect, in Lewis and Nabokov, of Hollywood’s universal language, its melodramatic cliché and archetypes which activate second-hand mimetic desire in a mass audience of pacified consumers. Both Lewis and Nabokov resist Hollywood’s universalism, its all-pervasive standardisation of synchronised speech and gesture, by writing an ironised version of its classical realist style, thematising the split operations of textual absence and visible presence. Histrionic performance style is called forth, yet remains insufficient, never fully defined on the page, its mimetic force diminished by its imperceptibility, and an ironised narrative voice which refuses the naturalised coded conventions and universalised reader-spectator of Hollywood. Late Modernism and the Resistance to Sound Lewis’s and Nabokov’s satirical mimesis of the victims of simulacra belongs to a culture of resistance to synchronised sound, a culture that was powerless to alter the inexorable course of big business. Lewis’s admiration for silent film is replaced with disgust at the sham-reality of manufactured naturalism. As 148

the transition to sound

Albinus explains to Margot: ‘ “Sound,” he said, “will kill the cinema straight­ away” ’ (p. 79), while Nabokov himself remarked that the verbal part of the cinema is such a hodge-podge of contributions, beginning with the script, that it really has no style of its own. On the other hand, the viewer of a silent film has the opportunity of adding a good deal of his own inner verbal treasure to the silence of the picture [. . .] I think what I love about the silent film is what comes through the mask of the talkies and vice versa, talkies are mute in my memory.49 Nabokov’s and Lewis’s objections to the standardisation and generalised mimesis of regressive early talkies belong to an avant-garde culture of the thirties, which includes Eisenstein, Brecht, Artaud, Beckett, Chaplin and Meyerhold, and which regarded the talkies as having slowed down film’s attempt to keep up with the other arts. The central forum for this short-lived resistance thrived in the pages of two avant-garde magazines, Close Up (1927–33) – which published, for instance, H. D.’s essay on Garbo, and Eisenstein and Pudovkin’s famous response to the advent of the talkies, ‘The Sound Film: A Statement from U.S.S.R.’50 – and transition (1927–38), which serialised Finnegans Wake, the first English translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Eisenstein’s essay on the cinematic hieroglyph and film scenarios by Artaud. Both magazines closely focused on film’s relation to and impact on the other arts, on photography, literature, painting and theatre. As Laura Marcus observes in her account of the journal’s activity: ‘The years of Close Up were the years of the transition from silent to sound cinema, and the journal is a highly significant resource for cultural perceptions of the transition.’51 Close Up’s opposition to sound, as in Lewis and Nabokov, meant opposition to Hollywood’s industrialisation and standardisation, or as Kenneth Macpherson put it, ‘the militant imperialism of the screen’.52 Hollywood’s massively accelerated level of industrial expansion in the era of sound consolidates its imperialist domination of the global film market; the hegemony of naturalistic, synchronised speech and gesture, as Eisenstein and Pudovkin warned in 1928, ‘threatens to ruin’ the purely visual means of effect in montage for commercial ends.53 Synchronised sound had reintroduced an unwelcome and regressive return to theatricality. The writers of Close Up recount a growing anxiety, widespread amongst cinéastes, at the ‘reactionary strivings of [early] talking films’ which had brought cinema back to the ‘proscenium front’54 after the leaps and bounds of montage. Theatricality becomes a sign of cinema’s reactionary step backwards into a primitive pre-modernist era of frontal staging and simplistic narrative editing patterns. As Meyerhold remarked in 1929, ‘the dialogue retheatricalizes the cinema, slowing down the pace of actions [. . .] the moment the film began to talk, the international power of the screen began to diminish’. For Meyerhold, who spoke of the profound influence on his theatre of 149

the speech-gesture complex

Chaplin’s art of movement, an indebtedness which Brecht also acknowledged, the Tramp loses his universal outreach the moment he is heard speaking: ‘a Russian peasant will refuse to accept Chaplin as an Englishman’.55 Chaplin remained acutely conscious of this need for silence and gesture, resolutely holding his tongue until The Great Dictator in 1940. Antonin Artaud’s remarks on the decline of cinema’s expressive and gestural force in the era of sound – ‘the elucidations of speech arrest the unconscious and spontaneous poetry of image; the illustration and completion of the meaning of an image by speech show the limitations of the cinema’56 – coincide with his development, between 1931 and 1937, of a new language of theatre which regards dialogue as secondary to the bodily presence of a ‘sign, gesture and posture language with its own ideographic values’.57 Artaud had already acted in two of the acknowledged masterpieces of silent film, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927), and Gance’s Napoleon (1927), and wrote several screenplays, including the first Surrealist film, Dulac’s La Coquille et le clergyman (1928). But he loses interest in sound cinema: To make a talking picture now, or at any time, seems wrong to me. The Americans who have staked everything on it are preparing a very sinister future for themselves, as are all companies which produce bad films on the pretext that they are more saleable; the talking picture is idiotic, absurd. The very negation of the cinema. For Artaud, as for Meyerhold and the writers of Close Up, cinema’s sound conversion had irremediably damaged its artistic prospects by accelerated commercialisation, and by denying cinema’s anti-naturalist capacity to deliver visual sensation through a direct, visceral effect on the spectator, ‘independent of speech’. Artaud turns away from cinema and devotes his energies to directing the Alfred Jarry Theatre, transferring his vision of a cinema of sensation to the theatre and the construction of ‘a new bodily language no longer based on words but on signs which emerges through the maze of gestures’. The primacy of the image and the signifying properties of the performative body, decimated in the cinema by the recent arrival of the audible, discursive logic of speech, were re-envisaged in a theatre of the future with its own elaborate method, similar to musical notation or the hieroglyph, for the effective ‘transcription of gesture’.58 Artaud’s project emerges from the iconographic culture of silent cinema. Despite his claims for improvised direct staging and the unrepeatability of performance, Artaud’s aim was in fact to devise a system to precisely notate and fix gestures, to make them reproducible, as though they had been mechanically recorded, to remove accident from performance. This technique of ‘methodically calculated effects’ in the theatre was inspired, as Christopher Innes has 150

the transition to sound

argued, by his experience with working in silent film.59 Artaud’s style of intricately patterned movements, the use of slow motion and the freezing of gestures into emblematic positions, and the invocation of archetypal forms, was strongly derived from German Expressionist film; he also transferred techniques absorbed from working with Dreyer, Gance and Dulac to his productions of The Conquest of Mexico and The Cenci, such as the use of rhythmic cutting and montage, minimal dialogue and the repetition of highly patterned gestures. An alternative history emerges, in light of hybrid interactions between theatre and cinema, in which modernist theatre becomes the inheritor of a project, developed in silent cinema but cut short by the advent of the sound picture, which pitches the expressive, signifying force of the gesturing body against discursive speech. Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, with its vision of actors as ‘moving hieroglyphs’60 chimes with Meyerhold’s notion that ‘every movement is a hieroglyph with its own peculiar meaning’,61 and Brecht’s version of gestic acting, heavily influenced, according to John Willett, by the ‘acting style of silent cinema’.62 Anti-naturalist theatre elevates the contradiction of speech and gesture, a process forbidden by the commercial restrictions of synchronised speech, into an ethic of practice. The idea of the hieroglyph as a dialectic of speech and gesture, or reading and spectating, was regarded with intense seriousness in Close Up, and also in transition (1927–33), where it unified the disparate figures of Eisenstein, Joyce and Artaud, each of whom converged in the journal to locate a nexus of constant reference to the hieroglyph. As Michael North observes, transition considered poetic language to be ‘an optical as well as an aural phenomenon, and film and photography were to provide much of the momentum behind the revolution [of the word]’.63 The conversion to sound intensified the avantgarde’s drive to reconsider interchangeable elements between film, theatre and literature; transition published poetry by Eugene Jolas, Robert Desnos, Philippe Soupault, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, which drew heavily on the techniques of montage, alongside Artaud’s scenario for The Seashell and the Clergyman and Eisenstein’s essay on film and the Japanese hieroglyph, ‘The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram’. Eisenstein’s essay, published in June 1930, intensifies his thinking about the silent film techniques of montage and juxtaposition as a resistance to the dominance of synchronised speech. Film is a ‘methodology of language’, in which shots are edited together into ‘montage-phrases’, according to ‘the principle of the hieroglyph’. The body is ‘dismembered’ into ‘a close-up of clutching hands’, ‘medium shots of the struggle’, ‘an extreme close-up of bulging eyes’; these ‘montage-phrases’, constituting the disintegrated event, are ‘newly collected into one whole’.64 The disembodiment of the total body-image is a major characteristic of film’s supposed linguistic quality: the syntactic complexity in the alternation of 151

the speech-gesture complex

c­ lose-ups with longer shots of variable rhythm confers upon the disembodied gesture the properties of a clause within a sentence. The claims made for a hieroglyph in theatre and cinema which retrieves gesture’s speech-like capacity parallel a contemporary interest in the origins of language in gesture. Béla Balázs, writing in 1924, explicitly relates the tendency in contemporary linguistics to demonstrate ‘the origins of language in expressive movement’ with cinema’s universal language of gesture: ‘It is the expressive movement, the gesture, that is the aboriginal mother-tongue of the human race.’65 In Elements of Folk Psychology (1916), Wilhelm Wundt aligns himself with a long tradition of language scholarship, beginning with Giambattista Vico in The New Science (1744), which shows forth ‘the origin of all signs in natural gesture-language, in movements of expression’.66 According to Wundt, during the period of evolutionary history before mankind learned to speak and developed natural language systems, people communicated experience, or affective states, in expressive patterns of physical movement. These patterns of gesture were observed and imitated by others, in a process which induced similar affective states in the imitator. Gestures then develop from affective expression and begin to express concepts, and non-expressive imitations of gesture elaborate into movements which create dialogue and enable the basis for communication: gestures move from descriptive mimeticism to the conventional symbolism of a language system. To support his thesis, Wundt examines such diverse manifestations of expressive movement as the use of gesture by speakers with no language in common, the gesture language of deaf-mutes, the coded movements of Cistercian monks and Neapolitan gestures. As Adam Kendon observes, Wundt’s ‘classification of various forms of gesture is based on principles that we would call semiotic. There are signs for objects, signs for processes and signs for actions.’67 In his analysis of the narrative conversations conducted in mime between Native American tribes such as the Klamath, who communicate in a language governed by the arrangement of visual signs in syntactic order, Wundt emphasises the use of signs which mime their referents. For instance, the several expressions the Klamath use to signify ‘walking’ are indicated by the particular walk itself. Yet the Klamath, and the sign language of the deaf, Wundt argues, also demonstrate that a gesture-language can be as syntactical as spoken discourse. Furthermore, the evidence of these syntactic orders suggests that patterns of gesture were the basis for original sentence construction. Symbolic gestures retain the afterimage, in the way words cannot, of their original mimetic function, which once represented an object or action iconically. A further implication of Wundt’s thesis is that the mutual commerce, throughout the historical development of a natural language, between speech and writing, has privileged speech as a form of expression over gesture: it is not possible to trace the etymology of a gesture, because gesture-language lacked 152

the transition to sound

a system of transcription. Even despite the lack of notation to indicate such features of speech as timbre, intonation and accent, spoken language, unlike gesture, is readily transferable from its original enunciation to its textual representation. The diachronic absence of mutual influence and interdependency between gestures and their textual representation has contributed to gesture’s secondary status as an expressive tool, and the consequent indeterminacy of its fields of reference. For many of its most significant theorists and filmmakers, silent cinema shows forth the makings of a universal language of gesture, a development cut short by the arrival of sound technology. Wilhelm Wundt’s theories on the origins of language and the syntactical reality of gesture did not achieve much recognition in the realm of language scholarship. As Kendon notes, there is ‘hardly anything’ written on gesture, as a topic in linguistics, between 1900 and 1915,68 and aside from Macdonald Critchley’s The Language of Gesture (1939), David Efron’s Gesture and Environment (1941) and Charlotte Wolff’s A Psychology of Gesture (1945), there is nothing sustained until Ray Birdwhistell in 1957. Kendon does not explain this decline; it would be beyond his intention as a linguistic anthropologist. I would argue for more than mere historical coincidence between the disappearance of gesture theory in the age of the new iconography: it is the practitioners of modernist literature, theatre and silent cinema who inherit the project abandoned by language scholars, and they in turn provoke literature into asking questions about its own status as text and as speech-based, verbal discourse. In a review written the year it was published, T. S. Eliot remarks: ‘one thinks of Wundt as one of half a dozen or so of the founders of modern psychology . . . undoubtedly he has made great and permanent contributions to the science of language’.69 Eisenstein considers the neglected Wundt an exemplary thinker when he describes his own montage practice. In his essay ‘Film Form: New Problems’, he alludes to the work of Wundt and the language of the Klamath tribe, in which each type of walk has its own iconic term, sign indistinguishable from referent, to support his notion of cinema’s pictorial language, of the ‘literacy of film diction’ and ‘filmsyntax’.70 Wundt was not the only anthropologist whose views on gesture were radically overlooked. Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1744), one of the earliest books to propose the view of the origin of language in prehistorical gesture, did not, according to Kendon, ‘attain much recognition and indeed his views on language and its origins have received more than passing attention only quite recently’.71 Kendon makes no mention of another champion of Vico’s gesture-theory, other than Wundt: James Joyce, to whom the importance of the prehistory of gesture in Vico was first brought to critical attention in Samuel Beckett’s first published work, an essay on ‘the savage economy of hieroglyphs’ in Finnegans Wake, published in the 1929 collection Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress.72 153

the speech-gesture complex

Vico’s New Science, published in 1744, anticipates contemporary work by linguists such as Wundt on the origins of language in gesture. As Beckett remarks of Vico: ‘in its first dumb form language was gesture. If a man wanted to say “sea”, he pointed to the sea.’ In the Viconian scheme, the etymological roots ‘of any word whatsoever can be traced back to some prelingual symbol’;73 during this ‘Hieroglyphic’ period in human history, when language consisted exclusively of gesture, speech and writing, the verbal and the nonverbal were in sensuous correspondence. The particular – for instance, individual body parts – would signify the general: ‘head for top; eyes for needles, mouth for opening, teeth for saw, beard for wheat’. The language of the gesture-hieroglyph is gradually supplanted by alphabetism, and the attendant distinction between the universal language of direct expression, and the capacity for abstraction, manifest in the written sign: ‘as the power of abstraction grew, personifications were reduced to diminutive signs’.74A similar diachronic evolution, from picture-gesture, to speech in imitation of gesture, to alphabetism, is traced in the contemporaneous work of the linguist Marcel Jousse, with whom Joyce was also familiar during the composition of Finnegans Wake: At that time the Abbé Jousse was lecturing in Paris. He was a noted propounder of a theory that Joyce gave adherence to, that language had its origin in gesture – ‘In the beginning was the rhythmic gesture’ Joyce often said [. . .] Around the lecturer was a group of girls, who addressed him as ‘Rabbi Jesus’. The words spoken – one of the parables, I think – were, I gathered in Aramaic, and what was shown was the word as shaped by the gesture. Joyce was full of the subject.75 ‘In the beginning was the rhythmic gesture’ is a quote from Jousse.76 As Stephen Heath notes, Joyce and Jousse both advocated a form of reading based on the primacy of mimographic script, and the revival of the originating instance of speech in the physical immediacy of gesture.77 Spoken language, in Jousse’s theory, bears the traces of the manual gestures of pre-lingual mankind, the consequence of a diachronic pattern in which ‘the progress of civilisation is due to the reciprocal action of hand on mind and mind on hand’,78 a view also shared by contemporaneous linguists such as Richard Paget, who cites Jousse in support of his thesis that ‘gestures previously made by hand were unconsciously copied by movements or positions of the mouth, tongue or lips’, in a ‘specialised pantomime of the tongue and lips’. The word ‘hither’, for instance, corresponds to the equivalent hand gesture, extended hand, palm up, drawn inwards towards the face and at the same time fingers bent inwards towards the palm. This is imitated with the tongue protruding, withdrawing and bending up its tip as it re-enters the mouth and falls to rest.79 154

the transition to sound

These conjunctions of etymology and writing as an inscription of gesture traces are a constant presence in Joyce’s practice, from Stephen Hero, via ‘Circe’, and into Finnegans Wake, and the hybrid form in which the tongue mimes the prelingual sensuous mimeticism of the hand: ‘clap your lingua to your pallet, drop your jowl with a jolt, tambourine until your breath slides, pet and pout and its out’ (p. 248: 8–10). Joyce’s fascination with the origins of language in gesture – ‘by ancientest signlore his gesture meaning: s!’ – and the complex relation between gesture signs and mimesis – ‘hourspringlike his joussture, immitiate my chry!’ – ­coincides with the historical transition from the grand project of cinema’s universal pictorial script into, as Joyce puts it, the ‘soundpicture’.80 In Finnegans Wake, as Scott Klein convincingly argues, the ‘internal formal emblem for an authentically dialectical mimetic is the modern technology of the film’.81 Joyce intertwines the contemporary notion of the primacy of the hieroglyph with the culture of a resistance to and rethinking of the relation between sound and image, and between speech and gesture. The language of the Wake is constantly heard miming the ‘shadows by the film folk’ (p. 221: 21): Shaun appears as a ‘Moviefigure on its scenic section’ (p. 602: 27) in ‘longshots, upcloses’ (p. 221: 21–2); Mercius thanks ‘Movies from the innermost depths of my still attrite heart’ (p. 194: 2–3). The sense of ‘moving pictures’ (p. 565: 6) conflates the cinema effect with the mimography of the hieroglyph, echoing the prominent theoretical premise of cinema as ‘a pictorial language, like the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt’.82 Joyce continued to visit the cinema during the writing of Finnegans Wake, despite the crisis of his steadily worsening eyesight. The book’s complex tensions between speech and gesture play out in parallel the blind advance of cinema into the sound picture. A letter dated 23 November 1925 to Harriet Shaw Weaver describes his ninth eye operation to date: ‘Twice a day they flash a light before my eyes and say, “You see nothing? Not anything?” I am tired of it all. This has gone on so long.’83 Attending a play in July earlier that year, he was unable to see the actors’ faces even while sitting near the stage. In 1926 he could scarcely see at all, writing the manuscript of Book III, which contains a film script, in an enormous scrawl, during severe bouts of near total blindness. Joyce loses his eyesight just as the movies themselves lose the primacy of visibly expressive movement. The transition of cinema from mute gesture to anti-pictorial speech, coinciding with the fading of Joyce’s eyesight – ‘light ears left yet he could but ill see’ (p. 158: 12–13) – is manifest in the wild collision of gesture hieroglyphs and audible speech, the ‘sound seemetery’ of Finnegans Wake: ‘windhame Lewis’, ‘the enemay the Percy’, author of ‘irony of stars’, fades in and out of the composite figures of Shaun and Ont, accusing Shem (Joyce) the ‘innerman monophone’, of being ‘camera shy’ and ‘all ears’ in an extended argument staged as a sound picture watched by HC Earwicker, 155

the speech-gesture complex

‘earish with his eyes shut’,84 for whom the gestures are heard as sound miming fading sight. The complex web of indeterminate, ambiguous and contradictory relations between text and image, and between speech and gesture, which much of the rhetoric around universalism and film is eager to elide, is a fundamental aspect of the modernist project. The writers and makers of this period chose to foreground these contradictions, rather than seeking to naturalise them, or collapse them into the artificial unity of Hollywood’s universal language. The silent cinema, by avoiding, as Artaud put it, ‘the illustration and completion of the meaning of an image by speech’,85 allowed the viewer to add, as Nabokov remarked, ‘his own inner verbal treasure to the silence of the picture’; for Eisenstein, it enabled a dialectic between the mute gesturing body and the syntactic reality of montage. The contradiction which is at the root of silent cinema’s visual Esperanto – that it attempts to create a text of signification and interpretation from the constituent properties of an expressive body without an audible speech-act to support it, lacks the status of language – parallels the contradiction which occurs in reverse in modernist writing: the writing of gestures bestows upon them the status of language they would otherwise lack, although their illocutionary function, a necessarily visual occurrence, is imperceptible to the reader and remains insufficient on the page. This illocutionary lack, which prevents the simultaneous display of speech and gesture in both silent cinema and modernist literature, and also between the playscript and the performed gesture, generates a dialectical unease which becomes a defining feature of the speech-gesture complex. Joyce’s attempt to revive the sensuous immediacy of pre-lingual gestural expression is cross-bred with the contemporary notion of cinema as a form of hieroglyph of ‘the celluloid art!’ (p. 534: 25). But his sensuous intermingling of speech and gesture, as it plays out the tensions and contradictions between the idea of a universal language based on natural signs and the specificity of individual languages, gestures and cultures, manifests a politics, as with Ulysses, which is deeply resistant to universalism. The constant shifting in Finnegans Wake between speech and gesture, between the sensuous correspondence of the archetypal gesture hieroglyph and the materiality of language, or the particularity of alphabetism, generates an endlessly fluid mode of representation which refuses fixity and universalism. As Christy Burns notes, ‘identities dissolve and resurrect at an alarming rate, and Joyce parodies the drive to fix identity by naming and, as well, by association’.86 Joycean plurality is neither exclusively general nor particular: ‘Be ownkind. Be kithkinish. Be bloodysibby. Be irish.’ (p. 465: 31). The portmanteau word ‘ownkind’ refuses the stability of an exclusive identity either with mankind in general, or one’s ‘own’ in particular; ‘ownkind’ quickly slides into ‘kithkinish’ and then the bloodysibby’ of warring tribes each of whom claim the universalism of ‘mankind’ 156

the transition to sound

for their own particular familial, social or national group. Joyce’s language is a radical refusal of the ‘ownkind’ of nationalistic claims for universalism. To be ‘bloodysibby’ is inherent in the idea of the purity of a nation, whether Irish or English. By dismantling the structure and syntax of English and merging it with elements from other European languages, as well as with a sensuous form of gesture-language, Joyce articulates a form of transnationalism which resists claims made by any one particular language or culture for universalism. By thematising the double aspect of the speech-gesture complex, Joyce challenges conventional notions of language, performance and mimesis, and presents a radical alternative to the claims made by Gaelic on Irish intellectuals, to the imperialism of English literature – as Beckett notes, English was as universal a language as Latin in the Middle Ages – and by the new form of colonisation through the universalism of naturalistic synchronised sound. Written between 1923 and 1939, the book’s radical conception of gesture-language, partly derived from an engagement with an accelerated culture of word–image hybridity in the era of the colonisation of the talkies, and the lethal nationalistic turn in European politics, becomes, according to Philippe Soller’s wellknown account, ‘the most formidably anti-fascist book produced between the two wars’.87 As Eisenstein puts it in the essay in transition: ‘it has been left to James Joyce to develop in literature the depictive line of the Japanese hieroglyph’.88 The idea of the hieroglyph becomes a significant point of contact between Joyce and Eisenstein. As Neil Cornwell notes, Joyce is very likely to have read Eisenstein’s essay in transition,89 which was also publishing Finnegans Wake. Eisenstein develops his theory of non-synchronised sound and of a syntax of gesture alongside his reading of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In his famous statement made with Pudovkin and Alexandroff in 1928, Eisenstein advocates the incorporation of sound into the established method of dialectical counterpoint, which had until then remained the exclusive province of visual montage: the ‘non-coincidence’ of sound with image ‘affords new possibilities of developing and perfecting the visual mounting’.90 Sound should be subsumed under the totalising principle of montage, or the syntactic organisation of each particle of a film fragment. Earlier that year, Eisenstein begins to read Ulysses for the first time,91 writing in his diary that he had ‘received Ulysses, the Bible of the new cinema’,92 and completing it around spring. In October he asks friend and film critic Moussinac to send him Work in Progress, as it was published in the journal transition,93 and he begins a long-term advocation of Ulysses as a training manual for filmmakers, delivering lectures to this effect in London between November and December.94 A year later, on 30 November 1929, at 2 Square Robiac, 192 rue de Grenelle, Paris, Eisenstein and Joyce meet for the first and only time.95 In the account he gives in his autobiography, Eisenstein is struck when he 157

the speech-gesture complex

meets him by Joyce’s near blindness, ‘how weak his vision had become in relation to the surrounding world’; they listen to a recording of Joyce reading ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ on the gramophone;96 Joyce expresses a desire, ‘despite his almost total blindness’, to see Battleship Potemkin and October, and is ‘intensely interested’ in Eisenstein’s conception of the ‘inner film monologue’.97 For Eisenstein, the practical realisation of the inner monologue had been enabled by the sound-picture, although it is not dialogue, as manifest in ‘merely naturalistic passive sound recording’, the cumbersome lip-synch of the commercial cinema, which he considers ‘the true material of the sound-film’, but a polyphonic version of the monologue he had recently read, and heard, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In his account of the unfilmed adaptation of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy – obstructed, inevitably, by Paramount Studios and their insistence on straightforward sound-image continuity – he elaborates a Joycean conception of an interior monologue conveyed through portmanteau, non-synchronised sound-images, heard over a ‘black screen and interspersed with accelerated images over silence, of ‘polyphonic sounds’ and ‘images’ alternating visible gesture with the variable syntactic rhythms of interior speech. The dialectic of gesture and interior speech in Joyce profoundly influenced Eisenstein’s view that ‘the sound-film is capable of reconstructing all phases and all specifics of the course of thought’.98 Rather than constituting a fundamental disruption, audible portmanteau speech could become another expressive resource in montage filmmaking. At the Film School he established in Moscow in 1931, he taught students of cinematography to translate Bloom’s monologues into film language,99 in rhythmic alternations of audible speech and expressive movement. The Joycean reversibility of speech and gesture, of reading and spectatorship, dominates Eisenstein’s theoretical writing from 1929. Audible speech should be organised according to the principles of visual montage established in the silent era, in a process which resembles listening ‘to one’s own train of thought, particularly in an excited state, in order to catch yourself looking at and listening to your mind’.100 This echoes Beckett’s view of Finnegans Wake, that it is ‘to be looked at and listened to’,101 in his 1929 essay on Finnegans Wake, published in the collection Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, in response to Lewis’s attack on Joyce in the first issue of transition (January 1927), ‘An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce’.102 As Beckett puts it, Joyce’s mimographic text is written in the ‘savage economy of hieroglyphs’.103 The ‘ “reading” ’ – Beckett places the word in quotes – of Joyce’s ‘hieroglyphic [. . .] extraction of language and painting and gesture’, straining towards the apprehension of pictorial visibility, collapses the distinction between language as arbitrary, conventional symbolism, and the sensuous immediacy of the visible, where the word-gesture mimes the picture-gesture. In Joyce’s mimography, ‘when the sense is sleep, the words 158

the transition to sound

go to sleep. When the sense is dancing, the words dance’.104 Beckett’s first published work is directly situated in modernism’s culture of interconnected representations, of Eisenstein’s montage-gestures and his advocacy of a ‘noncoincidence’ of sound with image,105 which emerged in response to a critical reading of the speech-gesture complex in Joyce, itself forged in rivalry with Lewis, and later developed in Brechtian theatre’s incorporation of the ‘epic, gestic and montage elements that appeared in films’,106 and Artaud’s hieroglyphic performance style. Notes

1. Miller, Late Modernism, p. 62. 2. Ibid. p. 108. 3. Green, The Film Finds its Tongue, p. 141. 4. Miller, Late Modernism, p. 108. 5. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 47. 6. Gomery, The Coming of Sound, p. 51. 7. O’Brien, Cinema’s Conversion to Sound, p. 19. 8. Crafton, The Talkies, p. 251. See also Bordwell et al., The Classical Hollywood Cinema, pp. 298–308. 9. Lewis, America and Cosmic Man, p. 110, p. 177, p. 190. 10. Lewis, The Hitler Cult, p. 23. 11. Reisz and Millar, The Technique of Film Editing, p. 258. 12. Quoted in O’Brien, Cinema’s Conversion to Sound, p. 126. 13. Arnheim, Film as Art, p. 110. 14. Connor, ‘Sounding Out Film’. 15. Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, p. 72. 16. Lewis, Filibusters in Barbary, pp. 101–4. 17. Adorno, ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’, The Culture Industry, p. 79. 18. Lewis, The Revenge for Love (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1991), p. 163. All references are to this edition, and are included parenthetically within the text. 19. Lewis, Filibusters in Barbary, p. 91. 20. Edwards, Painter and Writer, p. 443. 21. Quoted in Appel, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, pp. 258–9. 22. Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark, p. 5. All references are to this edition, and are included parenthetically within the text. 23. Quoted in Appel, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, p. 108. 24. Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, p. 70, pp. 63–9. 25. Lewis, Filibusters in Barbary, p. 96. 26. Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man, p. 171. 27. Ibid. p. 175. 28. Nicholls, Modernisms, p. 14. 29. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 259. 30. Lewis, Filibusters in Barbary, p. 96. 31. H. D., ‘Garbo/Helen: The Self-Projection of Beauty’, in Donald et al. (eds), Close Up, 1927–1933, p. 145, p. 108. 32. Barthes, ‘The Face of Garbo’, Mythologies, p. 56. 33. Donald et al. (eds), Close Up, 1927–1933, p. 107, p. 109. 34. Appel, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, p. 41. 35. Affron, Star Acting, p. 105. 36. Appel, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, p. 41.

159

the speech-gesture complex

37. Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastien Knight, p. 145. 38. Barthes, ‘The Face of Garbo’, Mythologies, p. 56. 39. Ibid. p. 55. 40. Lewis, The Childermass, p. 184. 41. Dyer, Stars, p. 20, p. 13, p. 10, p. 27. 42. Jameson, Fables of Aggression, p. 176. 43. Edwards, ‘Afterword’, Revenge for Love, p. 393. 44. Edwards, Painter and Writer, p. 446. 45. Kermode, History and Value, p. 62. 46. Lewis, Men Without Art, p. 263. 47. Appel, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, p. 259. 48. Miller, Late Modernism, p. 83. 49. Appel, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, p. 57. 50. Eisenstein, W. I. Pudovkin and G. V. Alexandroff, ‘The Sound Film: A Statement from U.S.S.R.’, in Donald et al. (eds), Close Up, 1927–1933, p. 84. 51. Marcus, The Tenth Muse, p. 324. 52. Macpherson, ‘As Is’, Close Up, quoted in North, Camera Works, p. 89. 53. Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandroff, ‘The Sound Film’, in Donald et al. (eds), Close Up, 1927–1933, p. 83. 54. Macpherson, ‘As Is’, in Donald et al. (eds), Close Up, 1927–1933, p. 80. 55. Meyerhold, ‘The Reconstruction of the Theatre’, Meyerhold on Theatre, p. 255 56. Artaud, ‘The Premature Old Age of the Cinema’, Selected Writings, p. 313. 57. Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, pp. 27–9. 58. Artaud, The Collected Works of Antonin Artaud, vol. 4, p. 25, p. 38, p. 72. 59. Innes, Avant Garde Theatre, p. 62, p. 75. 60. Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, p. 29. 61. Meyerhold, ‘Biomechanics’, Meyerhold on Theatre, p. 200. 62. Brecht, ‘The Question of Criteria for Judging Acting’, Brecht on Theatre, pp. 54–5. 63. North, Camera Works, p. 65. 64. Eisenstein, ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’ and ‘Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today’, Film Form, p. 60, p. 236. 65. Balázs, Theory of the Film, pp. 41–2. 66. Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology, p. 58. 67. Kendon, Gesture, p. 58. 68. Ibid. pp. 62–3. 69. Eliot, ‘Review of Elements of Folk Psychology’, pp. 252–4. 70. Eisenstein, ‘Film Form: New Problems’ and ‘Film Language’, Film Form, p. 139, p. 112. 71. Kendon, Gesture, p. 36 72. Beckett, ‘Dante . . . Bruno.Vico..Joyce’, p. 15. 73. Ibid. p. 10, p. 11. 74. Vico, The New Science of G Vico, pp. 128–9. 75. Colum and Colum, Our Friend James Joyce, pp. 130–1. 76. Jousse, The Oral Style, p. 13. 77. Heath, ‘Ambiviolences: Notes for Reading Joyce’, p. 55. 78. Jousse, The Oral Style, p. 92. 79. Paget, Human Speech, p. 132, p. 138. 80. Ibid. p. 36: 15–17, p. 535: 2–4. p. 570: 14. 81. Klein, Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, p. 177. 82. Epstein, ‘On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie’, in Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. I, p. 315.

160

the transition to sound

83. Quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 573. 84. Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, p. 352: 10, p. 160: 22, p. 462: 16, p. 171: 33–4, p. 169: 14, p. 130: 19. 85. Artaud, ‘The Premature Old Age of the Cinema’, Selected Writings, p. 313. 86. Burns, Gestural Politics, p. 166. 87. Quoted in Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, p. 140 88. Eisenstein, ‘The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram’, Film Form, p. 35. 89. Cornwell, James Joyce and the Russians, p. 80. 90. Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandroff, ‘The Sound Film’, in Donald et al. (eds), Close Up, 1927–1933, p. 84. 91. Moussinac, Sergei Eisenstein, p. 148. 92. 15 February 1928, Leyda and Voynow, Eisenstein at Work, p. xii. 93. Moussinac, Sergei Eisenstein, pp. 120–1. 94. For a summary of his lectures on Ulysses, see Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein, pp. 482–5. 95. Werner, ‘Joyce and Sergej Eisenstein’, p. 494. On Joyce and Eisenstein, see also Costanzo, ‘Joyce and Eisenstein’; Palmer, ‘Eisensteinian Montage and Joyce’s Ulysses’. 96. Eisenstein, Immoral Memories, pp. 214–15. 97. Eisenstein, ‘A Course in Treatment’, Film Form, p. 104. Joyce told Eugene Jolas that for any film adaptation of Ulysses, he could ‘only think of two persons qualified enough: Eisenstein and Walter Ruttman’. Hutchins, James Joyce’s World, p. 245. 98. Eisenstein, ‘A Course in Treatment’, Film Form, p. 103, p. 105. 99. Marie Seton mentions looking through Eisenstein’s copy of Ulysses in spring 1934 and finding Bloom’s interior monologues ‘broken down into a rough shooting script’ by means of pencil margin notes. Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein, p. 290. 100. Eisenstein, ‘A Course in Treatment’, Film Form, p. 105. 101. Beckett, ‘Dante . . . Bruno.Vico..Joyce’, pp. 14–15. 102. As Scott Klein, argues, ‘Joyce took Lewis’ criticism seriously.’ Klein, The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, p. 3. 103. Beckett, ‘Dante . . . Bruno.Vico..Joyce’, pp. 14–15. 104. Ibid. pp. 14–15. 105. Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandroff, ‘The Sound Film’, in Donald et al. (eds), Close Up, 1927–1933, p. 84. 106. Brecht, ‘On Film Music’, Brecht on Film and Radio, p. 11.

161

4

SAMUEL BECKETT

Hand-writing in Nacht und Träume In 1936, Beckett writes to Eisenstein as a ‘serious cinéaste’1 and expresses a desire to work in the lost tradition of the silent film. His extensive study of silent film history and theory during this period, including Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Rudolf Arnheim and Close Up,2 inspired the formulation of a view which remained a shaping influence throughout his work: ‘the industrial film will become so completely naturalistic, in stereoscopic colour & gramophonic sound, that a backwater may be created for the two-dimensional silent film that had barely emerged from its rudiments when it was swamped’.3 Beckett’s thinking about silent film culminates in the production of Film (1964), which is set in 1929, the moment in film history when talking pictures had just begun to inundate the screen, when figures such as Nabokov, Lewis, Joyce, Eisenstein, Artaud and Brecht, insisting on the separation or non-coincidence of speech with gesture, sought to resist the transition from cinema’s mute language of gesture to the proscenium theatricality of the talkies. He returns again to silent film in one of his final works, Nacht und Träume (1982). By emphasising continuity with the silent film of the twenties, from Film (1964) to Nacht und Träume (1982), and developing a performance style which refuses to domesticate the contradictions between reading and spectatorship, Beckett’s practice exemplifies the relentless blurring of boundaries between speech and gesture, and the refusal of rigidly defined categories of 162

samuel beckett

either literary or performative representation. The thematised split between speech and gesture, a technique Eisenstein formulated after reading Joyce, becomes one of the chief principles of Beckett’s dramaturgy. In Krapp’s Last Tape, the mechanical reproduction of Krapp’s voice dislocates the ghost-like distance of his speech from the presentness of his gesture, as he attempts to maintain the illusion of a coherent self amidst multiple possibilities; during the recording of Eh Joe in April 1966, while recording Deryk Mendel’s image for the Süddeutscher Rundfunk Joe, Beckett was asked by a visitor what he thought of Nancy Illig’s Voice: he replied, ‘today I’m concentrating on the picture’; in Ghost Trio, the split is formalised by the two separate figures, the prescriptive voice of V and the marionette-like gestures of F. This principle of synchronicity, the split function of speech and gesture, correlates with the thematised double aspect of gestures inflected as much by their readability as by their performative materiality. The dual function of Beckett’s stage directions prescribes specifics of stage management and, on the page, they call to the eye of the mind; they preserve gestures as instructions for spectatorial effect, but also, in their compositional force, guide the solitary reader, for whom the gesture remains imperceptible. This emphasis on the double aspect of reading the gesture echoes Maeterlinck’s notion that the transmission of the gesture’s symbolic qualities, in the act of reading, is not obstructed by the contingent body of the actor.4 By liberating the gesture’s imitative relation to its field of vision, it can attain a signifying property ordinarily reserved for writing. Maeterlinck’s plays for marionettes, alongside Yeats, for whom the invisibility of the actor also assumes a privileged status,5 attempt to dissolve the living actor into a symbol or sign. The Beckettian actor is weighed down by the body’s materiality, yet the elaborate patterns of minute gesture, the balletic arrangement even of clownish routines, the regulated and solemn motions of his theatre, suggest a kinship with the modernist anti-naturalism exemplified in marionette theatre. The depersonalised gestures of the marionette theatre advocated by Maeterlinck, Symons and Yeats aimed to return spectatorship to the act of reading, based on the principle that the actor’s physical presence, held captive by its own materiality, detracts from the imperceptibility available only to the solitary reader of the play. By way of conclusion, I wish to show how two of Beckett’s late works, Nacht und Träume and Catastrophe, demonstrate the central tensions and contradictions of the speech-gesture complex. Beckett’s deep structure of recurring gestures, his constant placing of the same gesture in a different context, exemplified in Nacht und Träume, articulates a drive to textualise the body and endow gestures with the properties of language. As a director, he was renowned for a style which seeks to regulate and formalise individual gestures through intensive and particular work with actors.6 But in this book, I have also been arguing against the view of modernism as autonomous, immanent 163

the speech-gesture complex

and as reducing the body to text. It is through the category of the speechgesture complex that we find Beckett’s most explicit challenge to the modernist tendency to impose legibility on the body, and to the familiar view of Beckett as ‘apolitically committed to the autonomy of his work’.7 Beckett’s intense anti-naturalist formalism mutates in Catastrophe into a situation where the prescriptive demands on the actor are explicitly paralleled with the violence of authoritarianism; by foregrounding the ambiguity and partial opacity of the written gestures, and the doubleness of the act of reading and spectating the play, I read the aesthetics and politics of Catastrophe as a self-critique of Beckett’s own practice as a writer-director to formalise gestures within a selfenclosed and immanent structure. Nacht und Träume, despite its electronic image, harks back to silent film: the only audible sound is the Schubert song of the title. During its production, which he wrote and directed for Süddeutscher Rundfunk in 1982 (it was broadcast a year later), he told the cameraman, Jim Lewis, that ‘it was difficult for him to keep writing words, without having the feeling that it was a lie’,8 echoing his argument in 1929 that Joyce had ‘desophisticated language’ by resort to the ‘savage economy of hieroglyphics’.9 The writing of gesture in Beckett’s late work, and the reversibility of terms ordinarily applied to language and movement, in this sense, hark back to the aspect-shifts between acts of reading and spectatorship, between the word-gesture in writing and the picture-gesture on stage or film, in Joyce, Eisenstein and Artaud. The words for this late film, a work rarely screened or discussed,10 consisting entirely of stage directions for camera and movement, are not a radical compression and omission of words per se but of speech. The clarity of the film’s language of gesture strives to elide every possible mendacity and corruption of the speechbased properties of words. The neutral, prescriptive language of the stage directions dissolves once the image on screen passes before the spectator; yet the icon, the perceptible gesture, in its intense condensation, its referential force, the way each gesture of the hand becomes an index of all the other hands in Beckett, strives to achieve, within the context of the earlier work for stage and screen, the symbolic properties of a micro-language. Cinema, according to Agamben, ‘leads images back to the homeland of gesture. According to the beautiful definition implicit in Beckett’s Nacht und Träume, it is the dream of a gesture.’11 It is rather, in my account, a dream of the language of gesture. This enclosed referential structure, each gesture taking its meaning by association with other gestures, either from the same or from other work, had by this late stage achieved an intricate complexity in Beckett’s work. A cumulative structure of gestural cross-reference and formalist repetition had always been a steadfast principle of Beckett’s work as a writer-director, even before his own activity as a director had begun: 164

samuel beckett

producers don’t seem to have any sense of form in movement [. . .] When, in a text, actions are repeated, they ought to be made unusual the first time, so that when they happen again – in exactly the same way – an audience will recognise them from before.12 In Ghost Trio, F’s hands clutching his cassette, his head bowed, echo the posture of Krapp’s bowed head, his hand on his tape machine. Krapp reacting when he feels ‘Old Nick behind him’13 in the Schiller Theatre production (1969) informs the reflex of F, the turning of his body when he ‘thinks he hears her’.14 The effect of immateriality in F’s ‘slow faltering walk’ which ‘makes no sound’15 resonates alongside the ‘clearly audible rhythmic tread’16 of May’s pacing in Footfalls. During the Schiller Krapp, Beckett asked Martin Held to fold his arms across his body and clutch his upper arms:17 Krapp shudders at the chill of winter as he warms himself, but the gesture is also symbolic of his self-containment, his condition of existing only for himself, having ‘nothing to talk to but his dying self, and nothing to talk to him but his dead one’.18 Quoting himself in his 1976 production of Footfalls, he instructed Billie Whitelaw to reproduce the gesture’s double aspect of mimesis and formalism. Beckett stipulated her feeling ‘cold the whole time’ in the way she ‘holds [her] body. Everything is frost and night’, but her posture of self-embrace also suggests ‘that May is there exclusively for herself’.19 Nacht und Träume achieves a multi-dimensional allusive compression, particularly in its hand gestures. The two figures, played by the same actor, A, the ‘dreamer’, and B, ‘his dreamt self’, summon the cinematic doubles in Film and Eh Joe and the dream-eaten TV Krapp. A is observed by the camera in right profile, his head bowed, like F and Winnie, and his hands resting on the table, recalling Krapp at his desk, and the figures of the Listener and Reader – after B, the dreamt self, appears to the right of the frame in left profile – in Ohio Impromptu, written and produced a year earlier in 1981. Where Ohio Impromptu stages an act of reading, Nacht und Träume stages an act of symbolic gesture. In addition to A and B, there are two more roles assigned in the text: ‘Dreamt hands R (right) and L (left)’ (p. 465). L, a disembodied hand, rests on B’s head and then withdraws. R then appears, also disembodied, offering a cup from which B drinks, and then appears again with a cloth, wipes B’s brow and disappears. The person to whom the hands belong remains ‘invisible’, the only indication as to his or her identity when ‘B raises his head further to gaze up at invisible face’ (p. 466). B lifts his right hand, still gazing at the invisible face, and ‘holds it raised palm upward’ (p. 466); R then reappears and rests his hand upon B’s upward palm, B raises his left hand and ‘rests it on joined hands’ (p. 466). The hands ‘sink to table’, B’s head falls upon them, L reappears and rests on B’s head. The dream fades out, A, the dreamer, fades 165

the speech-gesture complex

up again, and the whole sequence is repeated as before, except this time, ‘in close-up and slower motion’ (p. 466). While fondly remembering the hands of the old woman on the stairs in Film and the ‘beautiful’ hands of Buster Keaton, which he declared were ‘his only good memory of the shoot’, Beckett told André Bernold in 1980 of an intention to write a play consisting solely of hands, remarking on their ‘photogenic’ qualities, and expressing compassion for hands ‘at rest after all that they have done’.20 The switch in perspective from E to O, observer to observed in Film, signalled by close-ups of Keaton’s hands – the camera, assuming the view through O’s eyes, records his disembodied hands taking their pulse, locking the door, covering the fishbowl, closing the curtain – is distantly echoed in Nacht und Träume, in the shift from dreamer to dreamt self. Each is the double of the other, the same in every particular, except the dream is distinguished by the disembodied hand gestures appearing from above. The camera-eye records Keaton’s hands, towards the end of the film, viewing a series of photos of himself from birth to the present and then tearing them up one by one. The second photo, showing a child, hands clasped in prayer beside his onlooking mother, is reminiscent of a photo of Beckett as a child of three in a similar posture, hands in prayer, his mother beside him. The gesture in the photo reverberates, between Beckett’s first and last silent film, in the joined hands of B and L, their palms clasping one another in communal prayer. James Knowlson notes the similarity with Christian painting of the seventeenth century, in particular, of an etching by Dürer of praying hands, a reproduction of which used to hang on the wall of Beckett’s room in his ancestral home at Cooldrinagh.21 Sacred ritual is reduced to essential gestures made with the hands. Beckett told the cameraman, Jim Lewis, that the cloth which wipes the brow of B ‘alluded to the veil that Veronica used to wipe the brow of Jesus on the Way of the Cross. The imprint of Christ’s face remains on the cloth.’22 The redemptive quality of the hand gestures also chimes with an observation Beckett made almost sixty years earlier in 1924. On seeing the actor Michael Dolan as a modern Job in T. C. Murray’s Autumn Fire, he remarked how much the hand movements had come into representing a kind of redemption when, ‘as a man who was maimed and stricken’, he had ‘all these tragic occurrences falling upon him’.23 In one of the film’s ‘numerous teasers’, as Beckett puts it, he asks that ‘the sex of the hands must remain uncertain’, but then qualifies this: ‘I think no choice but female for the helping hands.’24 The female hands reiterate the image of Veronica wiping the brow of Christ, but they also allude to other female figures in Beckett, also given to prayer. The joined hands of B and R recall the ritual intertwining hands of Flo, Vi and Ru in Come and Go as they mime a communal prayer. The pattern made by their joined hands, the figure on the right holding the left hands of each of the others, the one on the left holding both right hands, the one in the centre 166

samuel beckett

holding a right and a left, suggests a figure of eight turned on its side, the mathematical symbol for infinity. As Enoch Brater observes, the figure of eight is also mimed by the pacing of May in Footfalls: her wheel and turn, from right to left, then left to right, from above, is also an ‘elongated variation’ of the same figure.25 These restless souls, trapped in the template of their physical predicament, are consigned to eternal repetition, like the lovers in Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones, compelled to live and relive their unhappy existence, or the mother in Purgatory, condemned to tread the same circular path. The ritual hands in Nacht und Träume are encoded with religious symbolism, although they ambiguously also suggest, in light of another female figure who attaches great import to prayer, the comforts of domestic routine. Winnie begins her day, hands clasped, with an ‘inaudible prayer’ (p. 138). During Act I, amongst her other routines, she wipes her spectacles with a handkerchief, and takes a drink from her bottle of medicine. These two gestures, elements of her domestic habit, are distantly recalled and formalised into sacrament in the wiping of the brow and the offering of the cup. The final line of the act – ‘Pray your old prayer, Winnie’ (p. 159) – is accompanied, in Beckett’s production in 1979, with an amended stage direction, from ‘long pause’ (p. 159) to ‘hands remain frozen apart as interrupted above’.26 Her hands freeze on the way to the clasp of the opening gesture, setting up the second act, in which she can no longer pray, or enact her small-scale but vital routines. These elaborate rituals – precisely regulated in the production Notebook, Beckett indicating when she should use her left (‘LH’) and right (‘RH’) hands, again anticipating L and R in Nacht und Träume – are Winnie’s sole consolation. Between the first and second act, when she is buried up to her neck, Winnie could also be dreaming of hands appearing from above to comfort her. Referential fields of force in Nacht und Träume point to religious assuagement, although in the distant allusions to the etching by Dürer on the wall of Beckett’s childhood bedroom, the photo of himself as a child praying beside his mother, and the routines of Winnie, they also enact a palliative domestic or maternal tenderness. The ritual patterns, fixed once and for all by the camera, bring out the archetypal quality of both religious and maternal consolation, and attain a clarity of symbolic gesture, a shifting range of referential insight in the constellation of gestures they summon, exemplifying Beckett’s sense of form in movement. The Politics of Depersonalisation in Catastrophe Beckett breaks his rigid tendency towards self-enclosed, non-referential abstraction and autonomy in two late works for the stage. Tyrus Miller mentions that Beckett asked each character in What Where, ‘with its plot suggestive of repetitive, mindless torture’, to wear a Tarboosh, a fez-like headgear often associated with Armenians, for a production in Stuttgart. Beckett ­suggested, 167

the speech-gesture complex

in his own words, to think of ‘ “the political situation in Turkey” ’.27 But the most explicit correlation between a real political situation and the formal situation of the work is in Catastrophe, written for the Avignon Festival in 1982 and dedicated to the Czechoslovakian dissident Václav Havel, arrested and imprisoned in 1979. In previous plays, tyranny and oppression appear as abstractions; in Catastrophe, the relation between the director and the actor is explicitly politicised in the dedication to Václav Havel. A Director (D) moulds and manipulates the body of the Protagonist (P) as he stands on a bare stage in a theatre. P remains passive and mute throughout as D literally sculpts and arranges his gestures, with the help of his Assistant (A), so as to elicit the intended response in the audience. D instructs P not to raise his head, but in the final moments of the play, in an act of defiance and a demonstration of independent will, he ‘raises his head, fixes the audience. The applause falters, dies’ (p. 461). Critics have read the sound of an imaginary audience faltering in their applause as an act of resistance. As Anthony O’Brien argues, P’s defiant gesture breaks the ‘bonds of domination’ that keep him under the tyranny of D.28 In its dedication and P’s act of defiance, the play advocates a politics of resistance to depersonalisation and a protest at the suffering and violence of authoritarian political repression. For H. Porter Abbott, Beckett’s tyrannies of theatre and state merge in the insight that the political will that seeks to constrain human life to an imagined social order, imprisoning or eliminating those uncontrollable elements that threaten that order, is rooted in the aesthetic will that seeks to dominate the human through formal representation.29 Politics and theatricality are one, and the urge to freeze the body in its formal function acquires, in this late work for the stage, a politics of resistance to formality. But I would like to offer an alternative reading to Abbott’s claim that ‘the particular human life at stake in this aesthetic tyranny [. . .] on the block, as it were, is Beckett’.30 Catastrophe is both a critique of modernism’s long-established vision of the human body as a form of writing and a critique of naturalism’s mimesis of text and performance, its desire to induce identification in the mind of an audience; but it is also a self-critique of Beckett’s own practice as a writer-director to suppress the actor’s own agency in the process of finding the right gesture. In this respect, Catastrophe’s negative critique of Beckett’s own often proclaimed tendency toward fixed forms and unalterable media provides a potentially fluid, less determinate perspective between authorial speech and the gesture of the actor. The Director and his Assistant stand in front of the mute Protagonist as they attempt to find the gesture which would most effectively induce identification in the audience and ‘have them on their feet’ (p. 461). They focus on the actor’s hands: the director gives instructions – ‘he mustn’t clench his fists’ 168

samuel beckett

(p. 458) – while the Assistant ‘takes out pad, takes pencil, notes’ (p. 458), and then ‘advances, unclenches fists’ (p. 459); they try joining his hands, A ‘advances, joins the hands’, D asks them to be higher, A ‘raises waist high the joined hands’, D asks them to be higher still, A ‘raises breast-high the joined hands’ (p. 459). The conjunction of A’s notation and D’s precise determination of hand gestures recalls the fixing of gestures in Artaud, the tradition of depersonalisation in Gordon Craig’s Über-Marionette theatre and the thematisation of external authority in Meyerhold’s Biomechanics. But it also implicates Beckett’s own practice of writing gestures and the intense formal demands he made on his actors. Totalitarian violence in Catastrophe is an aspect of an antinaturalist formalism which seeks to transform gestures into text, and which inflicts suffering on the materiality of the body’s non-linguistic presence. As Jim Hansen notes, ‘D is a symbol-maker who imagines himself in sympathy with P. P’s body becomes the symbol writ large on the stage and in front of an audience.’31 In this sense, it is the reality of P’s physical presence, which includes the specific gesture of the raised head, which resists the attempt to fix his gestures. As Andrew Hewitt argues in relation to twentieth-century dance, the body becomes ‘the final point of resistance to both social and discursive determination’. For Hewitt, the attempt to enclose and reify the performative body into an end-product shares a structural fantasy with totalitarian politics, namely, a ‘belief in immanent totality’32 rather than process, rehearsal and potentiality. Catastrophe is Beckett’s challenge to the body as text, to the fixing of the body in an enclosed, immanent, signifying text, a system of signs to be read by an audience. What the audience reads in Catastrophe is the violence of the imposition of legibility on the body. The play’s action critiques the double mimesis of theatre in which the actor merely obeys action which the director prescribes, and the director in turn merely transmits the word as it is written in the text. Catastrophe exposes the structural violence in this self-enclosed theatrical mimesis between writer– director–actor. In this structure, it is the text which assumes absolute primacy. The actors’ gestures transmit an intended effect from the writer, via the director and actor, into the mind of the audience. D uses his absolute power over P to exert his directorial vision: P should represent the universalised plight of mankind. As Jacques Rancière argues, this is the stultifying ‘logic of straight, uniform transmission: What the spectator must see is what the director makes her see. What she must feel is the energy he communicates to her.’33 Catastrophe disrupts this transmission, and this disruption is political as well as theatrical. The raising of the head has been read as an unambiguous act of defiance, a view which Beckett himself has reinforced, remarking of the final gesture: ‘There’s no ambiguity there at all [. . .] he’s saying: you bastards, you haven’t finished me yet!’34 Despite Beckett’s counterclaims, I would argue that the stage direction ‘raises his head’, as a speech-gesture complex, is richly 169

the speech-gesture complex

ambiguous and that its double aspect, as both an instruction and as a partially opaque written sign, thematises a politics of resistance to the imposition of textuality on the body. On the one hand, P is simply complying with the external authority of the instruction as written by Beckett: it is an act of defiance which has been pre-scripted and predetermined, and P’s climactic moment is no more than a playing out of a design imposed upon him from above. Yet the partial opacity of the stage direction, its sketch of a gesture invisible to the eye, the absence of certain physical details such as the type of look P gives to the audience, whether he raises his head slowly or sharply, the expression on his face, imputes an openness and indeterminacy to the text, leaving the actor with choices to make, allowing him to be the author of himself in the play’s climactic moment. The inherent incapacity of the text to fully delineate the performative gesture allows P a degree of power and freedom to assert his self-determination, and consequently to refuse the reduction of his body to the status of a text. Notes  1. Beckett to Eisenstein, 3 February 1936, quoted in Leyda (ed.), A Premature Celebration of Eisenstein’s Centenary, p. 59.  2. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 226.   3. Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy, 6 February 1936, quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 226.  4. Deak, Symbolist Theater, p. 21.   5. Yeats, ‘William Blake’, Selected Criticism, p. 22.  6. Ben-Zvi, Women in Beckett, p. 31; Asmus, ‘Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett’s That Time and Footfalls’, in Gontarski (ed.), On Beckett, p. 253; Kalb, Beckett in Performance, p. 64.  7. Milne, ‘Attacking the World’s Portadownians’, in Boxall (ed.), Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’Hui, p. 284.  8. Kalb, Beckett in Performance, p. 98.   9. ‘Beckett, ‘Dante . . . Bruno.Vico..Joyce’, p. 15. 10. Notable exceptions include Brater, ‘Towards a Poetics of Television Technology’. 11. Agamben, Means Without End, p. 55. 12. To Charles Marowitz, Encore, March–April 1962, quoted in McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 16. 13. McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 280. 14. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 410. All references are to this edition and are included parenthetically within the text. 15. MS 1519/1, Ghost Trio, Beckett International Foundation: Reading University Library. 16. Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 399. 17. McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, p. 264. 18. Letter to Schneider, 4 May 1960, No Author Better Served, p. 59. 19. Asmus, ‘Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett’s That Time and Footfalls’, in Gontarski (ed.), On Beckett, p. 258. 20. Bernold, L’Amitié de Beckett: 1979–1989, p. 73. 21. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 682. 22. Quoted in Kalb, Beckett in Performance, p. 255.

170

samuel beckett

23. Bill Cunningham on Telefis Eireann radio programme, quoted in Knowlson and Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull, p. 282. 24. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 683. 25. Brater, ‘A Footnote to Footfalls’, p. 37. 26. Beckett, Happy Days: The Production Notebook, p. 198. 27. Miller, ‘Beckett’s Political Technology’, p. 271. 28. O’Brien, ‘Staging Whiteness’, p. 47. 29. Abbott, ‘Tyranny and Theatricality’, p. 87. 30. Ibid. p. 87. 31. Hansen, ‘Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe and the Theater of Pure Means’, p. 667, p. 668. 32. Hewitt, Social Choreography, p. 14, p. 30. 33. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 14. 34. Conversation with James Knowlson, 1984. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 680.

171

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbott, H. Porter, ‘Tyranny and Theatricality: The Example of Samuel Beckett’, Theatre Journal, 40.1 (1988). Abel, Richard, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). ——, French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1988). ——, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Democratic Leadership and Mass Manipulation’, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–86), pp. 267–87. ——, ‘What National Socialism Has Done to the Arts’, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970–86), pp. 413–30. ——, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays in Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein, trans. Nicolas Walker et al. (London: Routledge, 1991). ——, The Stars Down to Earth and other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. Stephen Crook (London: Routledge, 1994). ——, The Complete Correspondence of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, 1928–1940, trans. Henri Lonitz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). ——, and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, [1972] 1997). Affron, Charles, Star Acting: Gish, Garbo, Davis (New York: Dutton, 1977). Agamben, Giorgio, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). ——, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Anon, The Art of Acting or Guide to the Stage (Boston: William V. Spenser, 1855). Anscombe, Elizabeth, ‘The First Person’, in Samuel Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), pp. 45–67. 172

bibliography

Appel, Alfred, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). Armstrong, Tim, Modernism, Technology and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Arnheim, Rudolf, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). Artaud, Antonin, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Victor Corti (London: John Calder, 1970). ——, The Collected Works of Antonin Artaud (London: Calder and Boyars, 1972). ——, Selected Writings, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976). Attridge, Derek, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London: Methuen, 1988). Aubert, J. and M. Jolas, Joyce & Paris 1902 . . . 1920–1940 . . . 1975: Papers from the Fifth International Joyce Symposium (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1979). Austin, John L., How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). Avery, Bruce, ‘Distant Music: Sound and the Dialogics of Satire in “The Dead” ’, James Joyce Quarterly, 28.2 (1991), pp. 473–83. Ayers, David, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). ——, English Literature of the 1920s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). Balázs, Béla, Theory of the Film, trans. Edith Bone (London: D. Dobson, 1952). Barish, Jonas, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Barry, Iris, Let’s Go to the Pictures (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926). Barthes, Roland, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972). ——, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1972). ——, Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977). ——, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Cape, 1982). Beatty, Michael, ‘Enemy of the Stars: Vorticist Experimental Play’, Theoria, 46 (1976), pp. 41–60. Beck, Evelyn Torton, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971). Beckett, Samuel, ‘Dante . . . Bruno.Vico..Joyce’, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber and Faber, [1929] 1962). 173

the speech-gesture complex

——, Disjecta (London: John Calder, 1983). ——, Happy Days: The Production Notebook of Samuel Beckett, ed. James Knowlson (London: Faber, 1985). ——, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). ——, No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). –– MS 1519/2, Ghost Trio, Beckett International Foundation: Reading University Library. –– MS 4137, ‘Deborah Warner’s Footfalls’, Observer, 17 December 1994, Beckett International Foundation: Reading University Library. Beja, Morris and Shari Benstock (eds), Coping With Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989). Beja, Morris, Phillip Herring, Maurice Harmon and David Norris (eds), James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). Beja, Morris and David Norris (eds), Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996). Bellour, Raymond, ‘Ideal Hadaly’, Camera Obscura, 15 (1986), pp. 111–34. Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1968). ——, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: N.L.B., [1973] 1983). ——, Selected Writings, 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Belknap Press, 1996). Benstock, Bernard, ‘Exiles, Ibsen and the Play’s Function in the Joyce Canon’, Forum, 11 (1970), pp. 26–37. ——, Narrative Con/Texts in Dubliners (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1993). Benstock, Shari and Bernard Benstock, ‘The Benstock Principle’, in Bernard Benstock (ed.), The Seventh of Joyce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 10–21. Ben-Zvi, Linda (ed.), Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). Bergson, Henri, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1911). ——, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1911). ——, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1912). Bernold, André, L’Amitié de Beckett: 1979–1989 (Paris: Hermann, 1992). Birdwhistell, Ray L., Kinesics and Context: Essays on Body Motion Communication (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971). 174

bibliography

Bluestone, George, Novels into Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). Booth, Wayne, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Modes of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). Bosinelli, Rosa M. Bollettieri and Harold F. Mosher Jr. (eds), ReJoycing: New Readings of Dubliners (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1998). Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). Boxall, Peter (ed.), Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’Hui, 9 (2000). Brandabur, Edward, A Scrupulous Meanness: A Study of Joyce’s Early Work (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971). Brater, Enoch, ‘A Footnote to Footfalls: Footsteps of Infinity in Beckett’s Narrow Space’, Comparative Drama, 12 (1978), pp. 33–47. ——, ‘Towards a Poetics of Television Technology: Beckett’s Nacht und Träume and Quad’, Modern Drama, 28 (1985), pp. 48–54. Braun, Edward, Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre (London: Methuen, 1995). Brecht, Bertolt, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1965). ——, Brecht on Film and Radio, ed. and trans. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 1999). ——, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, [1964] 2001). Bremmer, Jan and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Gesture: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). Brewster, Ben and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Briggs, Austin, ‘ “Roll Away the Reel World”: “Circe” and Cinema’, in Morris Beja and Shari Benstock (eds), Coping With Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), pp. 145–57. Brooks, Louise, Lulu in Hollywood (New York: Knopf, 1982). Brown, Dennis, Intertextual Dynamics within the Literary Group: Joyce, Lewis, Pound and Eliot (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). Buck-Morss, Susan, ‘Dream World of Mass Culture: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Modernity and the Dialectics of Seeing’, in David Michael Levin (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 175

the speech-gesture complex

Budgen, Frank, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses and Other Writings (London: Oxford University Press, [1934] 1972). Burch, Noël, Life to Those Shadows, trans. Ben Brewster (London: BFI, 1990). Burkdall, Thomas L., Joycean Frames: Film and the Fiction of James Joyce (New York: Routledge, 2001). Burns, Christy, Gestural Politics: Stereotype and Parody in Joyce (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). Carey, John, The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). Carlson, Marvin, Performance (New York: Routledge, 1996). Cartwright, Lisa, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Cassell, Justine and David McNeill, ‘Gesture and the Poetics of Prose’, Poetics Today, 12.3 (1991), pp. 376–404. Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Chaplin, Charlie, My Trip Abroad (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922). Cheng, Vincent J., Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Churchill, Winston, ‘Hitler and His Choice’, The Strand Magazine, 90 (1935). Colum, Padraic and Mary Colum, Our Friend James Joyce (New York: Doubleday, 1958). Connor, Steven, ‘Modernism and the Writing Hand’ (1999), (last accessed 12 May 2004). ——, ‘Sounding Out Film’ (2000), (last accessed 4 March 2004). Cork, Richard, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age Vol. 1: Origins and Development (London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1976). ——, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age Vol. 2: Synthesis and Decline (London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1976). Cornwell, Neil, James Joyce and the Russians (London: Macmillan, 1992). Costanzo, William V., ‘Joyce and Eisenstein: Literary Reflections on the Reel World’, Journal of Modern Literature, 11.1 (1984), pp. 175–80. Craig, Edward Gordon, ‘The Actor and the Über-Marionette’, The Mask, 1.2 (1908), pp. 3–11. ——, Index to the Story of My Days (London: Hulton Press, 1957). ——, Craig on Theatre, ed. J. Michael Walton (London: Methuen, 1983). Crafton, Donald, ‘Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy’, in Eileen Bowser (ed.), The Slapstick Symposium (Brussels: Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film, 1988), pp. 49–60. ——, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 176

bibliography

Crew, David F. (ed.), Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945 (London: Routledge, 1994). Crommelynck, Fernand, The Magnificent Cuckold, trans. Marnix Gijsen (New York: James H. Heineman, 1966). Culleton, Claire A., ‘ “Taking the Biscuit”: Narrative Cheekiness in Dubliners’, in Rosa M. Bollettieri Bosinelli and Harold F. Mosher Jr. (eds), ReJoycing: New Readings of Dubliners (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), pp. 110–22. D’Annunzio, Gabriel, Gioconda, trans. Arthur Symons (London: W. Heinemann, 1901). Danto, Arthur C., Analytical Philosophy of Action (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973). ——, ‘Description and the Phenomenology of Perception’, in Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds), Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). Danius, Sara, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Aesthetics (Cornell University Press, 2002). Dasenbrock, Reed Way, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound & Wyndham Lewis: Toward the Condition of Painting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). Davis, Tracy C., ‘Acting in Ibsen’, Theatre Notebook, 39.3 (1985), pp. 113–23. Deak, Frantisek, Symbolist Theater: The Formation of an Avant-Garde (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Deane, Seamus, ‘Joyce and Nationalism’, in Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980 (London: Faber, 1985). DeCordova, Richard, Picture Personalities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1983). ——, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone Press, 1989). Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Diamond, Cora and Jenny Teichman (eds), Intention and Intentionality: Essays in Honour of G. E. M. Anscombe (Brighton: Harvester, 1979). Diamond, Elin, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (London: Routledge, 1998). ——, ‘Modern Drama/Modernity’s Drama’, Modern Drama, 44.1 (2001), pp. 3–15. Doloff, Steven, ‘Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and “The Dead”  ’, James Joyce Quarterly, 31 (1994), pp. 111–14. 177

the speech-gesture complex

Donald, James, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (eds), Close Up, 1927– 1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998). Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, The Double, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Dover Publications, [1917] 1997). Dyer, Richard, Stars (London: BFI Publishing, [1979] 1998). Eaton, Katherine Bliss, The Theater of Meyerhold and Brecht (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985). Edwards, Paul, ‘Wyndham Lewis versus James Joyce: Shaun versus Shem?’, Irish Studies Review, 7 (1994), pp. 11–18. ——, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Efron, David, Gesture, Race and Culture (The Hague: Mouton, 1972). Egan, Michael, Henry James: The Ibsen Years (London: Vision Press, 1972). Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, [1949] 1977). ——, Immoral Memories: An Autobiography, trans. Herbert Marshall (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983). Elam, Keir, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Routledge, [1980] 1997). Eliot, T. S., ‘Review of Elements of Folk Psychology’, International Journal of Ethics, 27.2 (1917), pp. 252–4. ——, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, [1963] 1989). Ellmann, Richard, James Joyce (London: Oxford University Press, [1959] 1982). Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990). Empson, William, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Hogarth Press, [1930] 1991). ——, ‘Magnificent Cuckolds’, The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, ed. John Haffenden (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), pp. 156–60. Esslin, Martin, The Theatre of the Absurd (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964). Ewen, Frederic, Bertolt Brecht, His Life, His Art and His Times (New York: Citadel Press, 1967). Faherty, Michael, ‘Heads and Tail: Rhetoric and Realism in Dubliners’, James Joyce Quarterly, 28.2 (1991), pp. 377–87. Fairservice, Don, Film Editing: History, Theory, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Farrell, James T., ‘Exiles and Ibsen’, in Seon Givens (ed.), James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism (New York: Vanguard Press, 1963), pp. 95–131. Ferrall, Charles, Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 178

bibliography

Flannery, James W., W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Ford, Henry, My Life and Work (New York: Doubleday, 1922). Foster, John, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987). Freud, Sigmund, The Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality, and Other Works (1901–5), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), vol. VII. ——, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1915), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), vol. XV. ——, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), vol. XVIII. Galliene, Eva La, The Mystic in the Theatre: Eleanora Duse (London: Bodley Head, 1966). Garner, Stanton B., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (New York: Cornell University Press, 1994). Gasiorek, Andrzej, Wyndham Lewis and Modernism (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004). Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979). Gibbons, Luke, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996). ——, ‘Visualising the Voice: Joyce, Cinema and the Politics of Vision’, in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds), A Companion to Literature and Film (London: Blackwell, 2004). Gibson, Andrew, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). —— (ed.), Reading Joyce’s ‘Circe’ (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994). Gillette, King, The People’s Corporation (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924). Gish, Lillian, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (London: W. H. Allen, 1969). Gomery, Douglas, The Coming of Sound: A History (London: Routledge, 2005). Gontarski, S. E. (ed.), On Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1986). Goodwin, James, ‘Eisenstein, Ecstasy, Joyce and Hebraism’, Critical Inquiry, 26.3 (2000), pp. 529–57. Graver, David, ‘Vorticist Performance and Aesthetic Turbulence in Enemy of the Stars’, PMLA, 107.3 (1992), pp. 482–97. Green, Fitzhugh, The Film Finds its Tongue (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929). 179

the speech-gesture complex

Greenwood, Christopher, Adapting to the Stage: Theatre and the Work of Henry James (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Greimas, A. J., Structural Semantics, trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer and Alan Velie (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). Grice, Paul, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Griffith, Linda Arvidson, When Movies Were Young (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925). Gunning, Tom, ‘Weaving a Narrative Style: Style and Economic Background in Griffith’s Biograph Films’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 6.1 (1981), pp. 11–25. ——, ‘The Non-Continuous Style of Early Film (1900–1906)’, in Roger Holman (ed.), Cinema 1900–1906: An Analytical Study (Brussels: Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film, 1982), pp. 219–29. ——, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the AvantGarde’, in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 56–62. ——, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). ——, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: BFI, 2000). Guttenplan, Samuel (ed.), Mind and Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Hamburger, Michael, Art as Second Nature (Cheadle: Carcanet New Press, 1975). Hankins, Leslie Kathleen, ‘Iris Barry, Writer and Cinéaste, Forming Film Culture in London 1924–1926: The Adelphi, The Spectator, the Film Society, and British Vogue’, Modernism/Modernity, 11.3 (2004), pp. 488–515. Hansen, Jim, ‘Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe and the Theater of Pure Means’, Contemporary Literature, 49.4 (2008), pp. 660–2. Hansen, Miriam, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Hansson, Laura Mohr, Modern Women, trans. H. Ramsden (London: J. Lane, 1896). Harding, James (ed.), Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Hart, Clive, James Joyce’s Dubliners (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). Hayman, David, ‘Language of/as Gesture in Joyce’, in Louis Bonnerot (ed.), Ulysses: Cinquante Ans Après (Paris: Didier, 1974), pp. 209–21. Heath, Stephen, ‘Lessons from Brecht’, Screen: Brecht and a Revolutionary Cinema, 15.2 (1974), pp. 103–28. 180

bibliography

——, Questions of Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1981). ——, ‘Ambiviolences: Notes for Reading Joyce’, in Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (eds), Post-Structuralist Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 31–66. Hewitt, Andrew, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Hulme, T. E., The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Hutchins, Patricia, James Joyce’s World (London: Methuen, 1947). ——, ‘James Joyce and the Cinema’, Sight and Sound, 9 December (1951). Ibsen, Henrik, The Master Builder, trans. William Archer (London: W. Heinemann, 1893). ——, Seven Famous Plays, ed. William Archer (London: G. Duckworth, 1950). Innes, Christopher, Avant Garde Theatre (London: Routledge, 1993). ——, ‘Modernism in Drama’, in Michael Levenson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Issacharoff, Michael and Robin Jones (eds), Performing Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). James, Henry, The Art of the Novel (New York: Scribner, 1934). ——, The Complete Plays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1949). ——, The Spoils of Poynton, in The Bodley Head Henry James, vol. 4 (London: Bodley Head, [1896] 1967). ——, Complete Stories 1898–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1996). ——, The Other House (New York: New York Review Books Classics, [1896] 2005). Jameson, Fredric, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). ——, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). ——, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998). Jousse, Marcel, The Oral Style, trans. Edgard Sienaert and Richard Whitaker (New York: Garland, 1990). Joyce, James, Exiles (London: Cape, [1918] 1952). ——, Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann, 3 vols (London: Faber and Faber, 1957–66). ——, Critical Writings, ed. Richard Ellmann and Ellsworth Mason (London: Faber and Faber, 1959). ——, Scribbledehobble: the ur-workbook for Finnegans Wake, ed. Thomas E. Connolly (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961). 181

the speech-gesture complex

——, Joyce’s Ulysses: Notesheets in the British Museum, ed. Phillip F. Herring (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972). ——, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, [1939] 1975). ——, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, [1916] 1976). ——, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Garland, 1984). ——, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1922] 1993). ——, Dubliners (London: Penguin, [1914] 1999). Joyce, Stanislaus, My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber and Faber, 1958). ——, The Dublin Diary, ed. George Harris Healey (London: Faber and Faber, 1962). Kafka, Franz, Der Verschollene (1927), Gesammelte Werke, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1953). ——, Amerika, trans. Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1938] 1971). ——, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, trans. Joseph Kresh, Martin Greenberg and Hannah Arendt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1948] 1975). ——, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (London: John Calder, 1978). ——, Letters to Felice, trans. James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth (London: Minerva, [1973] 1992). ——, ‘A Report to an Academy’ (1917), The Transformation and Other Stories, trans. Malcolm Pasley (London: Penguin, 1992). Kalb, Jonathan, Beckett in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ——, ‘The Mediated Quixote: The Radio and Television Plays, and Film’, in John Pilling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 124–45. Kearney, Richard, Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). Keil, Charles, Early American Cinema in Transition (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001). Kendon, Adam, ‘Some Relationships between Body Motion and Speech’, in A. W. Siegman and B. Pope (eds), Studies in Dyadic Communication (New York: Pergamon, 1972), pp. 177–210. ——, ‘Gesticulation and Speech: Two Aspects of the Process of Utterance’, in M. R. Key (ed.), The Relationship of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication (The Hague: Mouton, 1980), pp. 207–27. ——, Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Kenner, Hugh, Wyndham Lewis (London: Methuen, 1954). ——, Dublin’s Joyce (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962). 182

bibliography

——, Joyce’s Voices (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). ——, Ulysses (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1980] 1987). Kermode, Frank, History and Value (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Kershner, R. B. (ed.), Joyce and Popular Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). Kirby, E. T., ‘The Delsarte Method: Three Frontiers of Actor Training’, The Drama Review, 16.1 (1972). Klein, Scott, ‘The Experiment of Vorticist Drama: Wyndham Lewis and Enemy of the Stars’, Twentieth Century Literature, 37 (1991), pp. 225–40. ——, The Fictions of James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Kleist, Heinrich Von, ‘About the Marionette Theatre’ (1918), trans. Cherna Murray, Life and Letters Today, 16.8 (1937), pp. 101–5. Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). ——, and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1979). Koht, Halvdan, The Life of Ibsen, trans. Ruth Lima McMahon and Hanna Astrup (London: Allen and Unwin, 1931). Kovács, András Bálint, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema 1950– 1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1947] 1974). ——, The Mass Ornament, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). ——, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1960] 1997). Kramer, Peter and Alan Lowell (eds), Screen Acting (London: Routledge, 1999). Lafourcade, Bernard, ‘The Wild Body, Bergson, and the Absurd’, Enemy News, 15 (1982), pp. 23–5. Law, Alma and Mel Gordon, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Biomechanics (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996). Leach, Robert, Stanislavski and Meyerhold (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003). Leonard, Garry M., Reading Dubliners Again (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993). Leslie, Esther, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2002). Levin, David Michael (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960). 183

the speech-gesture complex

—— (ed.), A Premature Celebration of Eisenstein’s Centenary, trans. Alan Upchurch (London: Methuen, 1988). ——, and Zina Voynow, Eisenstein at Work (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). Lehmann, Hans-Thies, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jurs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006). Lewis, Wyndham The Art of Being Ruled (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926). ——, The Wild Body (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927). ——, The Diabolical Principle (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931). ——, Hitler (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931). ——, Doom of Youth (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932). ——, Filibusters in Barbary (New York: McBride, 1932). ——, Men Without Art (London: Cassell, 1934). ——, The Hitler Cult (London: Dent, 1939). ——, America and Cosmic Man (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1948). ——, Rotting Hill (London: Methuen, 1951). ——, The Writer and the Absolute (London: Methuen, 1952). ——, The Demon of Progress in the Arts (London: Methuen, 1954). ——, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose (London: Methuen, 1963). ——, The Childermass (London: Calder and Boyars, [1928] 1965). ——, The Lion and the Fox (London: Methuen, [1927] 1966). ——, Enemy Salvoes: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. C. J. Fox (London: Vision Press, 1975). ——, Collected Poems and Plays, ed. Alan Munton (Manchester: Carcanet, 1979). ——, Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography, 1914–1926 (London: Calder and Boyars, [1937] 1982). ——, The Complete Wild Body, ed. Bernard Lafourcade (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1982). ——, The Revenge for Love (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1937] 1983). ——, Self-Condemned (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, [1954] 1983). ——, Rude Assignment (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, [1950] 1984). ——, Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, ed. Timothy Materer (London: Faber and Faber, 1985). ——, Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change: Essays in Art, Literature and Society, 1914–1956, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1989). ——, Tarr: 1918 Version, ed. Paul O’Keefe (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1990). ——, The Revenge for Love (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, [1937] 1991). 184

bibliography

——, Time and Western Man (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, [1927] 1993). ——, The Enemy, 3 vols (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, [1927–9] 1994). —— (ed.), BLAST , 2 vols (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, [1914–15] 1981). Lifson, David S., The Yiddish Theater in America (New York: Yoseloff, 1965). Lindsay, Vachel, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1915). Litvak, Joseph, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth Century Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Lloyd, David, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Louvish, Simon, Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett (London: Faber and Faber, 2003). MacCabe, Colin, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan, 1979). MacNicholas, John, ‘Joyce’s Exiles: The Argument for Doubt’, James Joyce Quarterly, 11.1 (1973), pp. 33–41. ——, James Joyce’s Exiles: A Textual Companion (New York: Garland, 1979) ——, ‘The Stage History of Exiles’, James Joyce Quarterly, 19.1 (1981), pp. 9–26. Macpherson, Kenneth, ‘As Is’, in James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (eds), Close Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998), pp. 90–3. Maeterlinck, Maurice, The Blind Ones, trans. Laurence Tadema (London: Allen and Unwin, 1895). ——, The Treasure of the Humble, trans. Alfred Sutro (London: George Allen, 1897). Manganiello, Dominic, Joyce’s Politics (London: Routledge, 1980). Marcus, Laura, ‘How Newness Enters the World: The Birth of Cinema and Origins of Man’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 37.2 (2001), pp. 186–203. ——, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Marey, Etienne-Jules, Animal Mechanism: A Treatise on Terrestrial and Aerial Locomotion (London: Henry S. King, 1874). Marker, Frederick J., Ibsen’s Lively Art: A Performance Study of the Major Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Mast, Gerard, A Short History of the Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 185

the speech-gesture complex

Materer, Timothy, Wyndham Lewis the Novelist (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1976). Maupassant, Guy de, ‘A Day Out in the Country’ (1881), in Guy de Maupassant, Bed 29 and Other Stories, trans. Donald Adamson (London: Folio Society, 1993). Mayer, David, Stagestruck Filmmaker: D. W. Griffith and the American Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009). McCabe, Susan, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). McManus, Donald, No Kidding: Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth Century Theater (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003). McMillan, Dougald and Martha Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre (London: John Calder, 1988). McNeill, David, Hand and Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). —— (ed.), Language and Gesture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Primacy of Perception, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). ——, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, [1962] 1986). ——, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Messing, Lynn S. and Ruth Campbell (eds), Gesture, Speech and Sign (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Metz, Christian, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, trans. Celia Britton (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1981). ——, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1974] 1991). Meyerhold, Vsevolod, Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. and trans. Edward Braun (London: Methuen, [1969] 1998). Meyers, Jeffrey, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). Michel, Walter, Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). Miller, Tyrus, Late Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). ——, ‘Beckett’s Political Technology: Expression, Confession and Torture in the Later Drama’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’Hui, 9, ed. Peter Boxall (2000), pp. 256–92. Minden, Michael and Holger Bachmann, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic 186

bibliography

Visions of Technology and Fear (New York: Camden House, [2000] 2002). Mitchell, Stanley, ‘From Shklovsky to Brecht: Some Preliminary Remarks Towards a History of the Politicisation of Russian Formalism’, Screen: Brecht and a Revolutionary Cinema, 15.2 (1974), pp. 74–103. Moi, Toril, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Moore, Rachel, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). Moussinac, Leon, Sergei Eisenstein, trans. D. Sandy Petrey (New York: Crown, 1970). Mullin, Katherine, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Münsterberg, Hugo, The Film: A Psychological Study (New York: Dover Publications, [1916] 1970). Murray, Robert, ‘ “Our Wild Body”: Lewis’ Forgotten Essay?’, Enemy News, 14 (1981), pp. 15–17. Musser, Charles, ‘The Nickelodeon Era Begins: Establishing the Framework for Hollywood’s Mode of Representation’, Framework, 22 (1983), pp. 4–11. Nabokov, Vladimir, Nikolai Gogol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1944] 1989). ——, The Real Life of Sebastien Knight (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1941] 1995). ——, Laughter in the Dark (London: Penguin Classics, [1938] 2005). Naremore, James, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). Noakes, Jeremy (ed.), Government, Party and People in Nazi Germany (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1986). Nolan, Emer, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995). Norris, Margot, ‘Narrative Bread Pudding: Joyce’s “The Boarding House” ’, in Mary Power and Uli Schneider (eds), New Perspectives on Dubliners (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 143–66. North, Michael, Reading 1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). ——, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). O’Brien, Anthony, ‘Staging Whiteness: Beckett, Havel, Maponya’, Theater Journal, 46.1 (1994), pp. 45–62. O’Brien, Charles, Cinema’s Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). 187

the speech-gesture complex

O’Brien, Darcy, The Conscience of James Joyce (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). Ohmann, Richard, ‘Literature as Act’, in Seymour Chatman (ed.), Approaches to Poetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973). O’Keefe, Paul, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). Paget, Richard, Human Speech (London: K. Paul Trench, 1930). Palmer, Richard Barton, ‘Eisensteinian Montage and Joyce’s Ulysses: The Analogy Reconsidered’, MOSAIC, 28.3 (1985), pp. 73–85. Paraskeva, Anthony, ‘Wyndham Lewis vs Charlie Chaplin’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 43.3 (2007), pp. 223–34. “In the Beginning was the Gest”: “Circe”, Early Cinema and the ——, ‘  Language of Gesture’, Bloomsday 100: The 19th International James Joyce Symposium CD-ROM (Dublin: Hyperfecto and the James Joyce Centre, 2005); in Anne Fogarty and Morris Beja (eds), Bloomsday 100: Essays on Ulysses (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009), pp. 117–35. Pavis, Patrice, ‘Problems of a Semiology of Theatrical Gesture’, Poetics Today, 2.3 (1981), pp. 65–95. ——, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theater (New York: PAJ Books, 2001). Pearson, Roberta, Eloquent Gestures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Perkins, Jill, Joyce and Hauptmann: Before Sunrise (San Marino: Huntingdon Library, 1978). Platt, L. H., ‘Joyce and the Anglo-Irish Revival: The Triestine Lectures’, James Joyce Quarterly, 29 (1992), pp. 259–66. ——, Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998). Pontiero, Giovanni, Eleanora Duse: In Life and Art (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1986). Pound, Ezra, ABC of Reading (London: George Routledge, 1934). ——, Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973). Power, Mary and Uli Schneider (eds), New Perspectives on Dubliners (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997). Pratt, George, Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1966). Puchner, Martin, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Rancière, Jacques, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009). 188

bibliography

Read, Forrest (ed.), Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound and James Joyce (New: York: New Directions, 1967). Reisz, Karel and Gavin Millar, The Technique of Film Editing (London: Focal Press, 1968). Riblet, Douglas, ‘The Keystone Film Company and the Historiography of Early Slapstick’, in Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (eds), Classical Hollywood Comedy (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 168–89. Ruthrof, Horst, The Body In Language (London: Cassell, 1999). Salt, Barry, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London: Starword, 1983). Schuchard, Ronald, The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Searle, John, Speech Acts: An Essay on the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Segel, Harold B., Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Seltzer, Mark, Bodies and Machines (London: Routledge, 1992). Seton, Marie, Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography (London: Dobson, [1952] 1978). Sherry, Vincent, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Spiegel, Alan, Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976). Stern, Daniel, ‘On Kinesic Analysis’, The Drama Review, 17 (1973), pp. 114–31. Stokes, John, Michael R. Booth and Susan Bassnett, Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: The Actress in Her Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Symons, Arthur, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Constable, 1899). ——, Studies in Seven Arts (London: Constable, 1906). ——, Cities and Sea Coasts and Islands (London: Constable, 1908). ——, Plays, Acting and Music (London: Constable, 1909). ——, Eleanora Duse (London: Elkin Matthews, 1926). Tall, Emily, ‘Eisenstein on Joyce: Sergei Eisenstein’s Lecture on James Joyce at the State Institute of Cinematography, November 1, 1934’, James Joyce Quarterly, 24.3 (1987), pp. 133–43. Taxidou, Olga, The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig (London: Routledge, 1998). ——, Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 189

the speech-gesture complex

Taylor, F. W., Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1911). Theoharis, Theoharis C., ‘Hedda Gabler and “The Dead” ’, ELH, 50 (1983), pp. 791–809. Tratner, Michael, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Trotter, David, Cinema and Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Turner, Victor, From Ritual to Theatre (New York: PAJ Books, 1992). Tyler, Parker, ‘Kafka’s and Chaplin’s “Amerika” ’, The Sewanee Review, 58 (1950), pp. 299–311. Tysdahl, Bjorn, Joyce and Ibsen (Oslo: Norwegian Universities Press, 1968). Uricchio, William and Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Vico, Giambattista, The New Science of G Vico (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968). Walton, J. Michael, ‘Craig and the Greeks’ (2000), (last accessed 12 July 2005). Watson, G. J., Irish Identity and the Irish Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O’Casey (London: Croom Helm, 1979). ——, ‘The Politics of Ulysses’, in Robert D. Newman and Weldon Thornton (eds), Joyce’s Ulysses: The Larger Perspective (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), pp. 39. Watt, Stephen, Joyce, O’Casey and Irish Popular Theatre (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991). Weaver, William, Duse: A Biography (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984). Weber, Samuel, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Wees, William C., Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972). Werner, Gosta, ‘Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein’, James Joyce Quarterly, 27.3 (1990), pp. 491–509. Williams, Keith, ‘Joyce and Early Cinema’, James Joyce Broadsheet, 58 (2000), p. 1. ——, ‘Odysseys of Sound and Image: “Cinematicity” and the Ulysses Adaptations’, in John McCourt (ed.), James Joyce and the Cinema (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010), pp. 158–74. Williams, Raymond, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (London: Hogarth Press, 1952). Wilson, F. A. C., W. B. Yeats and Tradition (London: Methuen, 1968). Wolff, Charlotte, A Psychology of Gesture (London: Methuen, 1945). Woolf, Virginia, ‘The Cinema’ (1926), in Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1966). 190

bibliography

Worringer, Wilhelm, Abstraction and Empathy, trans. Michael Bullock (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948). Wundt, Wilhelm, Elements of Folk Psychology, trans. E. L. Schaub (London: Macmillan, 1916). Yeats, W. B., Preface for Plays for an Irish Theatre (London: Bullen, 1911). ——, Collected Plays (London: Macmillan, [1934] 1953). ——, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961). ——, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962). ——, Selected Criticism (London: Pan Books, 1976). Zischler, Hanns, Kafka Goes to the Movies, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Zucker, Carole, Figures of Light: Actors and Directors Illuminate the Art of Film Acting (New York: Plenum Press, 1995).

191

index

Abbey Theatre, 52–3, 61, 64, 68–9, 73 Abbott, H. Porter, 168 actors, 121, 136, 142, 163, 164, 168, 169 Adams, Maude, 100 Barrymore, Ethel, 100 Barrymore, Lionel, 144, 145 Bassermann, Albert, 19, 20, 21 Bernhardt, Sarah, 99 Brooks, Louise, 28, 143 Chaplin, Charlie, 8, 22–3, 25–6, 100, 101–5, 107, 108, 119, 121–2, 133, 142, 145, 149–50 Cooke, George Frederick, 100 Dolan, Michael, 166 Duse, Eleanora, 8, 15, 16, 17, 49–50, 51–2, 54, 55, 56, 59, 64, 76–7, 91 Fairbanks, Douglas, 69 Faversham, William, 100 Gable, Clark, 140, 143–4, 147 Garbo, Greta, 8, 33, 137, 141–5, 149 Gilbert, John, 143 Gish, Lillian, 29, 143 Held, Martin, 165 Hennings, Betty, 50 Illig, Nancy, 163 Keaton, Buster, 143 Lawrence, Florence, 100 Levi, Yitskhok, 9 Linder, Max, 69–70 MacKaye, Steele, 28, 32 Mendel, Deryk, 163 Nagel, Conrad, 144 Novarro, Ramon, 145 Reinhardt, Max, 19 Robins, Elizabeth, 17, 45 Swanson, Gloria, 143 Terry, Ellen, 17 Turner, Florence, 100

192

Weigel, Helen, 126 Whitelaw, Billie, 165 Actors’ Theatre Moscow, 63 Adorno, Theodor, 23, 25, 114, 115, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 126, 132, 134, 135, 136 Agamben, Giorgio, 6, 7, 12, 13, 164 Alfred Jarry Theatre, 150 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 97 Antoine, André, 17, 52 Archer, William, 41, 42, 45, 50, 64 Aristotle, 122, 123 Armstrong, Tim, 24 Arnheim, Rudolf, 107–9, 135, 162 Artaud, Antonin, 16, 33, 149, 150–1, 156, 159, 162, 164, 169 Attridge, Derek, 66, 78 Austin, J. L., 2 Avery, Bruce, 43 Ayers, David, 102, 111, 140 Barry, Iris, 104, 116, 117, 129n Barthes, Roland, 69, 142, 145 Beckett, Samuel, 7, 13, 33–4, 91, 105, 133, 149, 157, 162–71 Catastrophe, 163, 164, 168–70 Come and Go, 166–7 Eh Joe (for TV), 163, 165 essay on Finnegans Wake, 153–4, 158–9 Film (film), 162, 165, 166 Footfalls, 165, 167 Ghost Trio (for TV), 163, 165 Happy Days, 5, 167 Krapp’s Last Tape, 163, 165 letter to Alan Schneider, 5 letter to Eisenstein, 162 Nacht und Träume, 34, 162, 163, 164–7

index

Ohio Impromptu, 165 What Where, 167–8 Bellour, Raymond, 116 Benjamin, Walter, 4–5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 18, 20, 25, 26, 78, 102, 103, 110, 114, 117, 121, 122 Benstock, Bernard, 43, 48 Bergson, Henri, 96, 97, 100, 106, 107, 109 Bernold, André, 166 Birdwhistell, Ray, 31, 153 body, the, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11–12, 20, 21–2, 25, 27–8, 29, 31, 32, 34, 39, 40, 41–2, 43, 44–5, 49–50, 52, 55, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75–6, 80, 81, 82, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 101, 105, 109, 110, 125, 126–7, 132, 133, 135, 150, 151–2, 156, 163–4, 168, 169, 170 Boucicault, Dion, 70 Bourdieu, Pierre, 104 Brater, Enoch, 167 Brecht, Bertolt, 5, 12, 13, 14–16, 18, 19, 25–6, 33, 64, 91, 111, 122–4, 125–6, 149, 150, 151, 159, 162 Brod, Max, 19, 20, 21 Brown, Dennis, 89 Burch, Noël, 26, 99 Burns, Christy, 53–4, 156 Carey, John, 111–12, 113 Cavell, Stanley, 24 Cendrars, Blaise, 29 Churchill, Winston, 112 cinema see film; film directors; films Colum, Padraic, 55 Connor, Steven, 76, 135 Copeau, Jacques, 95 Cornwell, Neil, 157 Critchley, Macdonald, 153 Crommelynck, Fernand, 17, 61–3 Cuzzi, Paolo, 56 dance, 9, 12, 163, 169 Danius, Sara, 24 D’Annunzio, Gabriel, 49, 50, 55 Danto, Arthur C., 97 Dasenbrock, Reed, 92 DeCordova, Richard, 99 Deleuze, Gilles, 107, 110, 113 Delsarte, François, 27–8, 32 Der Meshumed (play), 9

Derrida, Jacques, 5 Deutsches Theater Berlin, 19 Diaghilev, Sergei, 7 Diamond, Elin, 5, 15, 55 Dickens, Charles, 28 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 98, 140 Dreiser, Theodore, 158 Duncan, Isadora, 7 Dürer, Albrecht, 166, 167 Dyer, Richard, 145–6 Edel, Leon, 46 Edwards, Paul, 90, 105, 106, 111, 112, 141 Efron, David, 153 Egan, Michael, 45, 46, 55 Elam, Keir, 11–12 Eliot, T. S., 24, 91, 153 Ellmann, Richard, 42 Erin Theatre Dublin, 73 Ferrall, Charles, 112 film, 19–20, 21–7, 31–2, 65, 66 acting, 8, 18, 19–20, 25 as hieroglyphic, 29–30, 78–9, 151–2, 155 as hypnotic, 123–5 cinematograph, 68, 109, 148 close-up, 26, 29, 71, 76–7, 78, 79, 99, 104, 105, 119, 120, 124, 135, 136, 145, 146, 151, 166 continuity, 27 cross-cutting, 120 cutback, 29 Dada, 24 documentary, 73 frame, 108–9 genre, 21, 22 juxtaposition, 151 kinetoscope, 68 long shot, 135 montage, 24, 26, 28, 29, 108, 120, 125, 132, 135, 149, 151, 153, 156, 157, 158, 159 Mutoscope, 68 parallel cuts, 27, 28, 74 reverse-angle cross-cutting, 27 shot-reverse-shot, 27, 71, 74, 120, 124 silent, 7, 20, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29–30, 33–4, 67, 133, 134–5, 148–9, 150, 151, 153, 156, 158, 162

193

the speech-gesture complex

film (cont.) sound, 132–61: cartels, 134–5; talkies, 33, 126, 133, 137, 141, 143, 148, 149, 157; Vitaphone, 133–4 Soviet, 24, 26, 29, 125, 134 studies, 5–6 Surrealist, 24, 150 takes, 102 ‘through the keyhole’, 68, 70 time, 107 wide-shot, 101 see also gesture(s); performance; theatre and the theatrical film companies, 150 Biograph, 22, 27, 28, 71, 100 Film D’Art, 73, 81, 99 Keystone, 22, 27, 102: Cops, 22, 102 MGM, 143 Paramount, 158 Pathé, 21, 22, 73 Universal, 146 Vitagraph, 70, 71, 100 see also Hollywood film directors Balázs, Béla, 29, 78, 152 Collins, Alf, 22 DeMille, Cecil B., 27, 77 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 150, 151 Dulac, Germaine, 150, 151 Eisenstein, Sergei, 16, 25, 26, 33, 149, 151, 156, 157–8, 159, 162, 163, 164: copy of Ulysses, 161n; ‘Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today’, 28; ‘Film Form: New Problems’, 153; Moscow Film School, 158; ‘The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram’, 5, 149, 151–2, 157; ‘The Sound Film: A Statement from U.S.S.R.’ (with Pudovkin and Alexandroff), 149, 157 Epstein, Jean, 29, 76 Gance, Abel, 29, 33, 120, 150, 151 Godard, Jean-Luc, 126 Griffith, D.W., 27, 28, 29, 71–2, 76, 77, 78–9, 80, 81, 82: A Fool and a Girl, 71 Hitchcock, Alfred, 19 Ince, Thomas, 27 Lang, Fritz, 33, 116, 117–18, 119, 124 Lubitsch, Ernst, 117, 142 Lumière, Louis and Auguste, 73

194

Mackey, Arthur, 27 Mamoulian, Rouben, 142 Méliés, George, 65, 73 Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, 142 Porter, Edwin Stanton, 27 Powell, Michael, 19 Pressburger, Emeric, 19 Riefenstahl, Leni, 119 Sennett, Mack, 22, 23, 27 Stiller, Maurice, 142 von Sternberg, Joseph, 19 Wiene, Robert, 124 Williamson, James, 22 Zecca, Ferdinand, 21 films A Conquest, 69–70 A Corner in Wheat, 27 A Drunkard’s Reformation, 72 A Film Johnnie, 102 After Many Years, 28, 71 Arrivée d’un train, 66, 67 A Search for Evidence, 68 Ballet Mécanique, 104 Battleship Potemkin, 158 Birth of a Nation, 76 Camille, 99 Catastrophe, 34 Cenere, 76–7 Coronation of Edward VII, 73 Deception, 117 Der Verschollene, 20–1 Die Nibelungen, 33, 117–18, 119 Dix femmes pour un mari, 22 Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, 124–5 Enoch Arden, 71 Épopée napoléonienne, 73 Film, 162, 165, 166 Flesh and the Devil, 143, 144 Foreign Correspondent, 19 Francesca de Rimini, 70–1, 81 Gold Is Not All, 27 Grand Hotel, 142, 144 His New Job, 103 In the Clutches of the Gang, 22 Intolerance, 76, 78–9 Joyless St, 142 Kid Auto Races at Venice, 23, 103 La Coquille et le clergyman, 150: The Seashell and the Clergyman, 151 L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise, 73 La Tosca, 99 Mata Hari, 145

index

Metropolis, 116–17 Nacht und Träume, 34, 162, 163, 164–7 Napoleon, 33, 120–1, 150 Ninotchka, 142, 143 October, 158 Passion, 117 Personal, 22 Queen Christina, 142, 143, 145 Shanghai Gesture, 19 Shoulder Arms, 103 Stop Thief!, 22 Susan Lennox, 143–4 The Avenging Conscience, 77 The Bangville Police, 22 The Bargain, 27 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 115, 124 The Cheat, 27 The Gold Rush, 129n The Great Dictator, 150 The Great Train Robbery, 27 The Jazz Singer, 133 The Kleptomaniac, 27 The Loafer, 27 The Loves of Pharaoh, 117 The Maniac Chase, 22 The Mysterious Lady, 144–5 The Other, 21 The Passion of Joan of Arc, 150 The Policemen’s Little Run, 21 The Primal Call, 27 The Red Shoes, 19 The Runaway Match, 22 The Story the Biograph Told, 68 The Temptress, 144, 145 ‘The Three Unlucky Travellers’, 136 The Triumph of the Will, 119, 120–1 The Water Nymph, 22 The Whispering Chorus, 77 Tillie’s Punctured Romance, 102 Torrent, 142–3 Flaubert, Gustave, 140, 141 Ford, Henry, 114, 117 Fratellini, Albert, 95 Freud, Sigmund, 56–7, 61, 78, 120, 122 Fried, Michael, 8 Garin, Erast, 63 Garner, Stanton, 45 Gasiorek, Andrzej, 90, 147 General Motors, 114

Genette, Gérard, 43 gesture(s), 6–7, 9–13, 18, 20, 23, 33, 122, 123, 135, 150–1, 152, 154–5, 156, 157, 163–5, 168, 169, 170 and film as international language, 29–31, 66, 78, 79–80, 81, 148, 153, 154, 156 clichéd, 121, 123 comic, 1–2, 95–6 context dependency, 31 deictic, 3–4 Delsarte system, 27–8, 32, 70, 81 denotation and reference, 3, 4, 28, 30, 31, 32, 100, 152 facial, 41, 56 histrionic code, 70–1, 72, 80, 81 illocution, 41, 44, 48, 62, 156 illustrative, 135 kinesics, 31 manual, 49–50, 55, 56–9, 75, 76–7, 78, 80, 154, 164, 165, 166–7, 168–9 manuals and handbooks of, 27, 30 mechanical, 116–17, 118, 122, 150 modern study of, 30 performativity, 3, 4, 5, 8–9, 24–5 political potential, 12–13 repetitive, 95–6 scale of, 27–8, 42, 49–50, 51, 54–6, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 70, 71, 72–3, 74, 75, 76, 79, 82, 106 sign-language, 152 symbolic, 4, 6, 27–8, 70, 80, 152–3, 165, 167 verisimilar code, 28–9, 80 visuality, 3, 9, 19 see also performance; theatre and the theatrical Gibbons, Luke, 53 Gibson, Andrew, 59, 75 Gillette, King, 117 Girard, René, 140 Gomery, Douglas, 134 Gordon Craig, Edward, 16, 17, 18, 55, 91, 93, 169 Gorky, Maxim, 67 Graver, David, 90 Green, Fitzhugh, 133 Grice, Paul, 2 Griffith, Arthur (founder, Sinn Fein), 59–60 Gunning, Tom, 118

195

the speech-gesture complex

Hansen, Jim, 169 Hansen, Miriam, 31–2, 79, 81 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 39, 42, 64 Havel, Václav, 168 Hayman, David, 66 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 23, 142–3, 149 Heath, Stephen, 23, 69, 108, 126, 154 Herring, Phillip, 80 Hewitt, Andrew, 6, 9–10, 13, 31, 32, 81, 169 Hitler, Adolf, 111–15, 118–19, 120–1, 122, 124, 127; see also National Socialism Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 49 Hollywood, 29, 31, 32–3, 81, 100, 113, 114, 125, 132, 133, 134–5, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 148, 149, 156; see also film companies Horkheimer, Max, 114 Hulme, T. E., 92 Hutchins, Patricia, 65 Ibsen, Henrik, 5, 14, 15, 16–17, 28, 32, 42, 49, 50, 51–2, 54, 55, 56, 59, 61, 64, 71, 82 Ghosts, 51 Hedda Gabler, 45, 46–7, 49, 51 Rosmersholm, 40–1, 46, 51, 55–6 The Doll’s House, 40, 49, 50–1, 64 The Master Builder, 41–2, 45, 47 Innes, Christopher, 150–1 Irish Literary Theatre, 52–3 James, Henry, 15, 45–7 Guy Domville, 46 The Awkward Age, 46 The Other House, 46–7 The Spoils of Poynton, 46 The Tragic Muse, 46 What Maisie Knew, 46 Jameson, Fredric, 15, 26, 105, 146 Jolson, Al, 133 journals BLAST, 88, 94 Close Up, 23, 33, 142, 149, 150, 151, 162 Fortnightly Review, 42 The Enemy, 106 The Mask, 93 The Nation, 49 The Spectator, 129n

196

Time and Tide, 111 transition, 149, 157, 158: poetry in, 151 Vogue, 129n Jousse, Marcel, 154 Joyce, James, 8, 13, 15, 16, 17–18, 23, 26, 31, 33, 38–87, 88–9, 105–6, 151, 154, 162, 164 A Brilliant Career, 42 ‘Drama and Life’, 42 Dubliners, 16, 38–9, 40, 42–5, 47–50, 51–2, 53–4, 58, 59, 61 Exiles, 17, 42, 43, 54, 55–65, 88: revisions of, 59 eyesight loss, 155–6, 157–8 Finnegans Wake, 32, 42, 89, 149, 153, 154, 155–7, 158–9 ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’, 42 interview with Frank Budgen, 129n letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 155 Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, 129n, 153, 158–9 Stephen Hero, 155 ‘The Home Rule Comet’, 60 Ulysses, 5, 26, 32, 42, 54, 59, 61, 66, 75, 78, 89, 105, 106–7, 156, 157, 158: ‘Circe’, 43, 65–8, 71, 72–3, 74, 75, 76, 77–8, 79–81, 88–9, 90, 99, 155; ‘Cyclops’, 48–9, 73–4, 75; film of, 161n; ‘Hades’, 76; ‘Lestrygonians’, 49, 70, 76; ‘Nausicaa’, 67, 68; ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, 75; ‘Sirens’, 75; ‘Telemachus’, 67 Joyce, Stanislaus, 42, 49, 50, 59–60, 66, 75 Kafka, Franz, 1–5, 6, 8, 14, 18–19, 20–1, 22, 25, 45 Amerika, 1–4, 8–9, 10–12, 19, 20–3, 26, 27: Der Verschollene, 11 ‘A Report to an Academy’, 11 diaries, 8, 9 letters, 8, 9, 19, 20 Metamorphosis, 149 Kandinsky, Wassily, 93 Kelber, Michel, 135 Kendon, Adam, 31, 152, 153 Kenner, Hugh, 43, 98, 105 Kermode, Frank, 147

index

Kipling, Rudyard, 23 Klamath tribe, study of, 152, 153 Klein, Scott, 18, 89, 155 Knowlson, James, 166 Koht, Halvdan, 49 Kracauer, Siegfried, 114, 115, 116, 118, 122, 124 Kramer, Peter, 5–6 Lady Gregory, 53 Lady Rhondda, 111 Laemmle, Carl, 146 Lafourcade, Bernard, 96 Lawrence, D. H., 23 Léger, Fernand, 104 Leonard, Garry, 48 Leslie, Esther, 114 Lewis, Jim, 164, 166 Lewis, Wyndham, 8, 13, 17–18, 31, 32–3, 88–131, 132–4, 135–6, 143–4, 146, 149, 159, 162 ‘An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce’, 106, 158 and Communism, 146–7 and fascism, 18, 33, 111–15, 118–27, 135, 146–7 Blasting and Bombardiering, 140–1 Enemy of the Stars, 18, 88–98, 108, 126, 142: drawing of same name, 94 Filibusters in Barbary, 136, 138, 141, 142 Hitler, 111–13 ‘Les Saltimbanques’, 95–6 Rotting Hill, 127 Smiling Woman Ascending Stair, 92 Tarr, 92, 97–8, 118 The Apes of God, 111, 133 The Art of Being Ruled, 93, 110, 111, 112–13, 114 The Childermass, 33, 89, 99, 100–5, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119–20, 121–4, 126, 133, 145 The Courtesan, 92 The Diabolical Principle, 112 The Domino, 92 The Hitler Cult, 113, 127 The Man of the World, 110–11, 114 The Revenge for Love, 33, 136–7, 138, 140–2, 143, 146–8 The Vorticist, 94

Time and Western Man, 88–9, 100, 101, 104, 106, 109, 110, 111, 112, 133, 145 Two Figures, 96 Two Mechanics, 96 Two Vorticist Figures, 96 Vorticist Design, 94 Lindsay, Vachel, 29 Litvak, Joseph, 46 Lloyd, David, 59 Lohse, Gunter, 119 London Film Society, 104, 115–16 Lugné-Poë, Aurélien, 17, 61–2 McCabe, Susan, 23–4, 25, 104 McLuhan, Marshal, 105 McNeill, David, 31 MacNicholas, John, 64 Macpherson, Kenneth, 149 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 18, 91, 92, 163 Manganiello, Dominic, 52, 60 Marcus, Laura, 23, 29, 149 Marey, Etienne-Jules, 108 Martyn, Edward, 53 Maupassant, Guy de, 44–5 Mayer, David, 71 Mayer, Louis B., 142 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 43, 45 Metz, Christian, 29–30 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 14, 16, 17, 25, 33, 63, 64, 91, 149–50, 151, 169 Miller, Tyrus, 133, 148, 167 Mitry, Jean, 108 Moi, Toril, 16 Moore, George, 53 Moore, Marianne, 24 Moore, Rachel, 30 Moussinac, Leon, 120, 157 Muir, Edwin, 3 Mullin, Katherine, 67 Münsterberg, Hugo, 78, 107 Murray, Robert, 96 Murray, T. C., 166 Muybridge, Eadweard, 108 Nabokov, Vladimir, 8, 13, 133, 142, 143, 144, 146, 149, 156, 162 Laughter in the Dark, 33, 137–40, 144–5, 148–9: Kamera Obskura, 137 poshlost, concept of, 138 The Real Life of Sebastien Knight, 145

197

the speech-gesture complex

Naremore, James, 6, 27–8, 71, 82 National Socialism, 111, 112, 113, 115, 118–19, 127, 147 Neighbourhood Playhouse New York, 64 Nicholls, Peter, 94, 140 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 90 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 49 Nolan, Emer, 53, 59 Norris, Margot, 48 North, Michael, 22, 24, 151 O’Brien, Anthony, 168 O’Keefe, Paul, 111 Orwell, George, 111, 147 Paget, Richard, 154 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 111 Parnell, Charles Stuart, 52, 53, 60, 61 Pascoli, Giovanni, 7 Pavis, Patrice, 5 Pearson, Roberta, 27, 28–9, 70, 80 performance, 12–13 acting, 5–6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 20, 25, 28, 43, 63, 70, 80, 90–1, 93, 122–3: as hieroglyph, 150–2 anti-naturalism, 14, 17, 64, 88, 91, 93, 122–3, 135, 150, 151, 163, 164, 169 mime, 49, 70, 95, 152 mimesis, 8, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 30, 33, 88, 91, 93, 100, 103, 104, 122–6, 132–3, 135–6, 137, 141, 142, 148, 152, 155, 157, 168, 169 naturalism (realism), 14–18, 27, 28, 29, 32–3, 47, 51, 52, 54, 61, 64, 71, 80, 82, 91, 93, 132, 133, 134, 135–6, 141–2, 148, 168 performative paradigm, 12, 13, 18, 24–5 stage directions, 11, 14, 15, 16, 39–42, 50, 51, 55–6, 57–9, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 74, 77–8, 79, 80, 88, 90, 94, 99, 106, 126, 144, 163, 164, 169–70 studies, 5–6, 7–8 see also theatre and the theatrical Pirandello, Luigi, 49 Pound, Ezra, 24, 64, 88, 94, 117 Proust, Marcel, 7, 138–9, 140 Puccini, 144–5 Puchner, Martin, 6, 7–8, 88

198

Rancière, Jacques, 68, 169 Regent Theatre London, 64 Riblet, Douglas, 22 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 7 Roman Catholic Church, 52, 60 Rowe, Helen, 102 Royal Theatre Copenhagen, 50 Russell, George, 53 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 30 Schiller Theatre, 165 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 90 Searle, John, 2 Seltzer, Mark, 116 Senn, Fritz, 66 Serres, Michel, 75–6 Shakespeare, William, 17, 19 Shaw, George Bernard, 111 Sherry, Vincent, 94 Shklovsky, Viktor, 26 Sinn Fein, 59–60, 61, 75 Soller, Philippe, 157 Speech-act(s), 6, 31, 43, 126, 135, 152–3, 156 decorum, 2 dialogue, 126 direction, 126 illocution, 2, 11, 31 implication, 2 inference, 2, 11, 57 intentionality, 2, 3, 19 irony, 2 subordinate clauses, 3 see also gesture(s) Spiegel, Alan, 23 Stalin, Joseph, 147 Stanislavski, Constantin, 17 star system, 22, 23, 99, 103, 133, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 146 Star Theatre New York, 71 Stein, Gertrude, 23, 24, 133 Stendhal, 140 Stirner, Max, 90 Strindberg, August, 14, 16–17, 42 Süddeutscher Rundfunk, 163, 164 Sudermann, Heinrich, 42 Symons, Arthur, 18, 50, 55, 91, 92, 97, 163 Synge, J. M., 42, 73 Taxidou, Olga, 5, 16–17, 54, 61 Taylor, F. W., 116, 117

index

technology, 24 textual paradigm, 5–6, 13 theatre and the theatrical, 18–19, 25, 66, 99, 100, 149–50, 159, 169 character, 15, 17, 63 Chinese, 14 closet drama, 8 clowning, 95–6, 102–3, 121, 163 comic, the, 95–6 commedia dell’arte, 95 directors, 16–17, 62–3 fourth wall, 17, 52 Futurist Manifesto on, 93 Greek, 68–9 Irish and Anglo-Irish, 16, 32, 52–5, 69, 73 marionettes, 91–4, 163, 169 melodrama, 14, 27, 28, 54, 64, 70, 71, 72–3, 138, 139–40, 142, 143, 146 metatheatre, 16 mise en scène, 5–6, 145 Noh, 61 proscenium, 33, 62, 64, 65, 71, 72, 99, 149 rehearsal, 13, 14 script(s), 11, 13, 16, 17, 18, 39–40, 41, 43, 51, 63, 65, 156 studies, 6, 7–8 Symbolist, 91 Yiddish, 8 see also performance Théâtre de l’Oeuvre Paris, 61 Théâtre Robert-Houdin Paris, 65 Tourette, Gilles de la, 7 Tratner, Michael, 75

Trotter, David, 24, 25 Tyler, Parker, 22–3 Vico, Giambattista, 31, 152, 153–4 Vorticism, 88–9, 92, 93, 94, 96, 100–1, 117, 118 Wales, Katie, 66 Walton, Michael, 93 Weber, Samuel, 12, 13 Wees, William, 94 Wells, H. G., 23 Willett, John, 151 Williams, William Carlos, 23 Wolff, Charlotte, 153 Woolf, Virginia, 23, 111 Worringer, Wilhelm, 92, 93, 118 Wundt, Wilhelm, 30–1, 152–3, 154 Yeats, W. B., 16, 18, 61, 67, 80, 81, 91, 163 Cathleen Ni Houlihan, 53 Deirdre, 53 On Baile’s Strand, 73 Purgatory, 167 The Countess Cathleen, 53, 54, 61, 73 The Dreaming of the Bones, 167 The Hour Glass, 61 The Land of Heart’s Desire, 53 The Shadowy Waters, 53 theatre, 16, 32, 42, 52–4, 60, 64, 68–9, 72–3 Zischler, Hanns, 20–1 Zola, Émile, 17 Zucker, Carole, 6

199