An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory Flashcards
The beginning
The opening to Jane
Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) is apparently unequivocal:
usten proclaims the values of universalism
(‘a truth universally acknowledged’), while satirizing them: what is acknowledged as a truth for upper middle-class men in early nineteenth-century England is not necessarily acknowledged universally.
The Whale (1851) is also framed by a number of what Gérard Genette calls ‘peritexts’ (Genette 1987) – by a contents page, a dedication, an ‘Etymology’ (of the word ‘Whale’) and ‘Extracts’ (several pages of quotations
about whales) – before it begins with the famous words ‘Call me Ishmael’.
Satirical prevarication and pedantry, combined with blustering assertiveness, characterize the whole novel.
Proust’s opening gives a sense that narrative begins in
repetition, that no single event can be said to be a beginning.
As we have begun to see, one of the ways in which a literary text multiplies its beginning is through the deployment of peritexts – titles, subtitles, dedications, epigraphs, introductions, ‘notices’ and so on.
The Waste Land may seem to be unusually concerned with questions of origins and their displacement. Literary texts, that is to say, are always constructed by and within a context or tradition.
In this sense, intertextuality (the displacement of origins
to other texts, which are in turn displacements of other texts and so on – in
other words an undoing of the very idea of pure or straightforward origins) is fundamental to the institution of literature. No text makes sense without other texts.
The second common myth
But although we often talk about literary texts as though
they have been subjected to only one reading, we all know that this is in manyrespects simply a convenient fiction. Roland Barthes, in his book S/Z (1970),
makes a point about the act of rereading as ‘an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society’ and suggests that it is ‘tolerated
only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people and professors)’ (Barthes 1990b, 15–16).
What do you do when you come across a poem like this?
In Percy Bysse Shelley’s famous sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) the narrator speaks of meeting a traveller who reports having seen a vast shattered statue strewn across the desert. The statue is of Ozymandias, the thirteenth-century King Rameses II of Egypt (Ozymandias is the Greek name for this king). All
that remains of the King of Kings and of his ‘works’ are a few broken fragments, a couple of legs and an inscription which commands the reader to despair.
The poem, then, is about monuments, survival and the transience of even the greatest of us. But we might also notice that the poem is about readers and
reading – the traveller reads a piece of writing, an inscription on the pedestal of a fragmented statue. The inscription commands the reader. And, rather differently, the word ‘read’ appears in line six, referring to the way that the sculptor understood the ‘passions’ of Ozymandias and was able to immortalize them in stone. Both the traveller and the sculptor are explicitly figured as readers, and we might also think about the ‘I’ of the first line as another kind of reader – a listener to the traveller’s tale.
The poem, then, concerns a series of framed acts of reading. The sculptorreads the face of the king, the traveller reads the inscription, the narrative ‘I’
listens to the tale and, finally, we read the poem. One of the things that we might do with this poem is to think about these acts of reading. The poem can be thought about as what Paul de Man calls an ‘allegory of reading’: it isnot only a poem which can be read, it is also a poem which tells an allegory or subtextual story about reading. One of the crucial questions of reading, for example, is how we can justify any paricular reading: how can we tell if a particular reading or interpretation is valid?
the poem also engages with other questions. Who is this traveller who reads the inscription, for example? And who is the ‘I’ who listens to, or ‘reads’, his story? Is the
sculptor’s ‘mocking’ of the king’s face a kind of reading? What do such questions lead us to think about the power relations of any reading? Is it in the king’s power to command his readers to despair? Or to make them obey?
Is the traveller’s reading of the inscription different from how that inscription might have been read while the king was alive? And does reading therefore change over time – is reading historically specific? What does all of this suggest about reading more generally?
For critics and theorists such as Wolfgang Iser,
Stanley Fish and Michael Riffaterre, questions of the literary text and its meaning(s) cannot be disengaged from the role that the reader takes. Although these
and other reader-response critics have widely different approaches to literarytexts, they all agree that the meaning of the text is created through the process
of reading.
What they object to in the new critical approach is the notion that
a certain quality or ‘meaning’ of a literary text simply lies there in the text waiting for the reader or critic to come along and pull it out.
‘It is a truth
universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’ (1)
This sets the stage for the whole novel. The topic
is marriage, the tone is ironic.
‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his [sic]
complete meaning alone’: rather, what is important is the poet’s ‘relation to the dead poets and artists’ (Eliot 1975, 38).
Every text is what Roland Barthes calls ‘a new tissue of past citations’ (Barthes 1981, 39).
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away’.
Norman Holland, for example, argues that ‘interpretation is a function of identity’ and that ‘all of us, as we read, use the literary work to symbolize and finally to replicate ourselves’ A reading concerned with questions of race might start from the fact that this English poem deals with a racial other – Egyptian or African – and explore the way in which such otherness is inscribed in the poem. The fact that the land is referred to as ‘antique’, for example, entirely effaces any possibility of a contemporary civilization and culture there. There is nothing beside the barrenness of the ‘lone and level sands’. For this poem, Africa apparently only signifies in terms of a mythical past. Finally, a poststructuralist or deconstructive reading of ‘Ozymandias’ might, in addition to these concerns, trace the dispersal or dissolution of the reader’s identity in the act of reading and affirm the sense of a radical otherness which undermines all claims to interpretive mastery. For poststructuralists, there is a dynamic significance in the question of which comes first – the text or the reader? Deconstruction explores the space between these two possibilities and it seeks to highlight ways in which every reading and every text is unpredictable. Thus deconstruction is interested in the fact that while any text demands a ‘faithful’ reading, it also demands an individual response. Put differently, reading is at once singular (yours and nobody else’s) and general (conforming to patterns of meaning dictated by the text – a text that does not require you in order to function). Through analysis of these and other paradoxes, critics such as Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller suggest ways in which reading is strange, unsettling, even ‘impossible’. Like Ozymandias himself, we are fragmented, mute and transient: our ‘passions’ are read, and perhaps mocked, by the sculptor, in the form of the poem itself. After all, in reading this poem, we perhaps cannot avoid a ventriloquistic articulation, silent or not, of the king’s words –
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
How do you read that? What happens to you, to your name?
literary texts can generate powerful feelings of identification, not only between reader and character but also, perhaps more enigmatically, between reader and author.
It is what William Hazlitt says, for example, in his 1818 lecture ‘On Shakespeare and Milton’: ‘the striking peculiarity of Shakespeare’s mind’ is ‘its power of
communication with all other minds’ (Hazlitt 1910, 47).
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture
. . . Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. (Barthes 1977a, 146) Barthes’s essay should be read alongside Michel Foucault’s ‘What Is an Author?’ (1969), an essay that is undoubtedly more systematic and rigorous
than Barthes’s in many respects. More drily but more carefully than Barthes,
Foucault provides an extraordinary sense of the figure of the author as a historical construction. The idea of the author is not a timeless given: the figure and significance of the author varies across time, and from one culture to
another, from one discourse to another and so on. As regards works of literature, Foucault is concerned to criticize th notion of the author as ‘the principle of a certain unity of writing’ (Foucault 1979, 151). In other words, like Barthes, he puts into question the idea that the author is a god-like or (in more Foucauldian terms) saint-like figure, that the author is the presiding authority
or principle of coherence for the understanding of a text. He does this primarily by focusing on the historical and ideological determinations of the notion of the author.
The fact that we know (assuming that we do) that John Keats died of tuberculosis
at the tragically early age of 25 cannot but affect the way we read those prophetically poignant lines from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819), written only two
years before his death:
Specifically, as Jacques Derrida has argued,
an author is ‘dead insofar as his [or her] text has a structure of survival even if he [or she] is living’ (Derrida 1985a, 183). Like any piece of writing (even a
text-message), a literary work is capable of outliving its author. This capacity for the text to live on is part of its structure, of what makes it a text.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
- The text and the world
How do texts represent the world?
Where does a text begin and end? Is an author an inhabitant of the world or the creation of a literary text? To what extent is history a kind of text? And what implications does this have for thinking about literature? Can literary texts do things to the world as well as simply describe it? These are some of the questions with which we engage in this book.
This distinction is, of course, a very common way
of thinking about literature: it is implicit in a certain understanding of mimesis or imitation, and in notions of realism and naturalism, and of representation,
as well as in metaphors which figure literary texts as offering a window on to the world or (in Hamlet’s words) as holding a mirror up to nature.
How can an act of inscription or an act of reading not be part of the world? Is there a world without such acts? In a
later chapter, we look at the ways in which texts may be considered as performative, as acts of language which themselves do things, as well as just talk about things. In this chapter, we shall explore the idea that literary texts
are acts that destabilize the very notion of the world and that disturb all assumptions about a separation between world and text.
In order to consider this proposition, we shall discuss Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (1681). The poem presents itself as a work of seduction. The speaker addresses his ‘coy mistress’ and attempts to persuade
her to go to bed with him:
As soon as we ask even the simplest questions about this poem we come up against the problem of representation, the problem of the relationship
between the text and the world. Perhaps the most obvious question that we would want to ask is whether the poem should be read as really a poem of
seduction: is the speaker the same as the poet and, if so, is this text really addressed to a woman Andrew Marvell knew? Or should we understand the speaker to be a fictional construction and the ‘real’ addressee to be another reader – us, for example – a reader or readers not explicitly addressed but nevertheless implied by the text? Most readings of the poem assume that the
latter is the case, that rather than attempting to seduce a woman, this poem presents a fictional dramatization of such an attempt. In this sense, it may seem
that the poem is categorically separate from the ‘real’ world and from ‘real’ people. But this poetic attempt at seduction does not just take place between a
fictive woman and speaker. In various ways, ‘To His Coy Mistress’ challenges our thinking on fiction and the real. For example, regardless of whether
the mistress is conceived as real or fictive, the poem has effects on us. In particular, such a poem can be considered as performative – in the sense that it
performs an act not so much of sexual as of textual seduction. It tries to entice
us to read and to read on and to draw us into another world – a world of reading that is both fictional and real.
But Marvell’s poem does not stop here. The seduction
is mediated not only by reference to other kinds of literary texts (poems of seduction, love poems, the blazon, the carpe diem or memento mori motif
and so on), but also in terms of other kinds of discourse (biblical, classical, colonial, philosophical, scientific, military). In this respect, the poem could
be seen as an example of what the Russian critic M.M. Bakhtin calls ‘heteroglossia’, in that it embraces a series of overlapping codes and discourses.
In this context we could attempt to clarify the notoriously controversial statement by Jacques Derrida, in his book Of Grammatology (1976, 158, 163), that ‘There is nothing outside the text’.
His point is not that
there is no such thing as a ‘real world’ but that there is no access to the real world of, for example, Marvell’s poem, except through the language of the poem. In other words, there is no reading of ‘To His Coy Mistress’ that is not dependent, precisely, on language: the ‘real world’ of the poem is the poem.
We cannot go beyond or transcend the text to Marvell’s coy mistress since our only access to her is through the poem.
In this sense, the whole poem may be read in terms of a conflict played out between the text and the world, an attempt to go beyond its own discourse to the body of the woman. At the same time, however, and paradoxically, the poem appears to suggest that
this separation of text and world is itself impossible. The poem culminates in a rejection of speech or discourse and in a militaristic metaphor for the violent exchange between two bodies (‘Let us roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into one ball: / And tear our pleasures with rough strife / Thorough the iron gates of life’). But this final rejection of speech in favour of action
simply results in silence, the end of the poem: it does not, cannot, go beyond talk to the body of the woman.
Nevertheless, at various points in the poem, the speaker does attempt to point beyond language, to refer to the woman’s body – here and now. At the beginning of the third verse-paragraph, for example, he describes a blush
which suffuses the woman’s body:
What we might call the poem’s ‘fiction of immediacy’ (the sense that the speaker is addressing a woman who is present and that the action of this poem takes place in ‘real time’) becomes fully apparent at this point, when the speaker refers directly to the altering state of the woman’s body. In addition to the insistent deixis of ‘Now . . . Now’, this sense of immediacy is generated
through complex rhetorical strategies. For example, the blush or sweat which ‘transpires / At every pore’ is read as a sign of the inner ‘fires’ produced by the ‘willing soul’ of the woman. In its most direct reference to the woman’s body, at this ‘instant’, here and now, the poem is highly figurative. The complicated metaphoricity of these lines, their sheer insistent textuality, dissolves any illusion of corporeal presence. Moreover, as we have suggested, the speaker interprets the woman’s blush just as we interpret his lines. The fiction of immediacy in Marvell’s poem, the reiterated force of the ‘now’, is derived
above all perhaps from the extraordinary turn that occurs at the start of the second verse-paragraph: ‘But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near’. This ‘always’ evokes the constant imminence of something, an unceasing urgency and apprehension that is always there, always ‘hurrying near’, regardless of whether we are reading or making love, writing or fighting.
‘The text and the world’ names a false opposition. Texts cannot but be part of the world. To talk about texts as ‘representing’ reality simply overlooks ways in which texts are already part of that reality, and ways in which literary texts produce our reality, make our worlds. In this respect we may be prompted to ask what is at stake not only in the narrator’s but in Marvell’s and in Western
culture’s representations of the female body. In particular, we might ask what is involved in the violence embedded within Marvell’s figuration of the woman as a body and as dead – as What is the relationship between aesthetic
and erotic contemplation in this representation on the one hand and its imagining or the woman’s death on the other?
According to this thinking, the very status of Marvell’s poem as a classic, as a showcase poetic urn in the imaginary museum of English literary history, its reproduction in classrooms, lecture theatres, anthologies and in books such as our own, produces and reinforces the cultural construction of ‘woman’ as allied with death and with the aesthetic.
Indeed, Bronfen would argue that such a poem and its reception have a crucial social and cultural function since, like other representations of the death of a
beautiful woman, the poem exemplifies patriarchy’s repression of the fact of the (male) subject’s own death by the displaced representation of that death
in the ‘other’ (the woman). The linguist Roman Jakobson famously defines the ‘poetic function’ of language as ‘a focus on the message for its own sake’
(Jakobson 1960, 365), and the critical tradition has tended to respond to Marvell’s poem in just this way, reading it as a self-reflexive, autonomous work
of art which transcends the interests of the world. But if instead we read it as a powerful and influential expression of the cultural construction of femininity,
we see that the distinction that is embedded in our chapter title – between the text and the world – has dissolved.
One of the most stubbornly provocative challenges to what, in his view, has become the modern critical orthodoxy, is Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994).
Bloom’s ‘single aim’ is to ‘preserve poetry as fully and purely as possible’ against the politicizing of what he calls the ‘school of resentment’. For Bloom, the school of resentment is typified by those critics who argue that the literary critical institution has valorized the work of ‘dead white males’ at the expense of the work of marginalized writers – women, say, or Afro-Caribbeans or Hispanics or gays or the working classes (Bloom 1994, 18). For these ‘resentful’ critics, the work of criticism cannot be disengaged from the work of social and political critique since the traditional canon operates as an ideological
justification of the values (often racist, heterosexist, patriarchal, colonial and elitist) of the male, Western, establishment figures which it enshrines. For Bloom, by contrast, literature is and should be an antisocial body of work.
Literary texts, he argues, even work against political and social improvement: indeed, for Bloom, great writers ‘are subversive of all values
Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. 5 Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood: And you should, if you please, refuse 10 Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires, and more slow. An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze.
15 Two hundred to adore each breast: But thirty thousand to the rest. An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart: For, lady, you deserve this state, 20 Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. 25 Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. 5 Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood: And you should, if you please, refuse 10 Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires, and more slow. An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze. 15 Two hundred to adore each breast: But thirty thousand to the rest. An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart: For, lady, you deserve this state, 20 Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. 25 Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity: And your quaint honour turn to dust; 30 And into ashes all my lust. The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now, therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, 35 And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour, 40 Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength, and all Our sweetness, up into one ball: And tear our pleasures with rough strife, Thorough the iron gates of life. 45 Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Now, therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may . . .
- Narrative
The beginning–middle–end sequence of a narrative also tends to emphasize what is known as a teleological progression – the end (in Greek, telos) itself
as the place to get to.
Likewise, Brooks has elaborated the paradoxical ways in which the dénouement or tying up of a story is worked towards through the paradox of digression. Thus, for example, while we may find a novel, film or play frustrating if it contains too many digressions from the main plot, we enjoy the suspense involved in delaying a dénouement. ‘Suspense’ movies, thrillers and so on, in
particular, exploit this strangely masochistic pleasure that we take in delay.
One of the paradoxical attractions of a good story, in fact, is often understood to be its balancing of digression, on the one hand, with progression towards an
end, on the other.
One of the most fundamental distinctions in narrative theory is that between ‘story’ and ‘discourse’
Story’, in this sense, involves the events or actions which the narrator would like us to believe occurred, the
events (explicitly or implicitly) represented. ‘Discourse’, on the other hand, involves the way in which these events are recounted, how they get told, the
organization of the telling.
narrative involves a linear series of actions connected
in time and through causality.
By contrast, as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, the Stalinist version of history did not even have to be plausible, because its lessons would be enforced in other ways. Narrative power, then, may be the only strategy left for the weak and dispossessed: without narrative power, they may not be heard.
The social and political importance of stories is eloquently expressed by the old man in Chinua Achebe’s novel Anthills of the Savannah (1987): ‘The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards – each is important in its own way’ (123–4). But, the man continues, the story is ‘chief among his fellows’:
‘The story is our escort; without it we are blind. Does the blind man own his
escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns us and
directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on
the face that sets one people apart from their neighbours.’ (124) Stories own us, and tell us, Achebe suggests, as much as we own or tell stories.
There are many questions of narrative, then, which may be considered in
relation to literature: temporality, linearity and causality, so-called omniscience, point of view, desire and power. But most of all, perhaps, it is the relation between narrative and ‘non-’ or ‘anti-narrative’ elements that fascinate and disturb. Aspects such as description, digression, suspense, aporia and selfreflection, temporal and causal disorders are often what are most compelling in narrative. A text such as Woolf ’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’, indeed, has no narrative outside of description and aporetic reflections on the nature of narrative.
Correspondingly, Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ depends to a large extent on moments of what Joyce refers to elsewhere as ‘epiphany’, moments of revelation or understanding, moments that appear to stand outside time, outside of
narrative. As Gabriel watches his wife listening to a piece of music as they prepare to leave the party, there is just such a moment – a moment of revelation
which is also a moment of mystery. Gretta, standing listening to a song is, for Gabriel, full of ‘grace and mystery . . . as if she were a symbol of something’
(240). Like Scheherazade’s, Joyce’s storytelling holds off, and hangs on, death. And as the snow falls on the world outside the hotel window at the end of the story, as Gabriel falls into unconsciousness and the narrative slips away, there is another moment of epiphany, a dissolution of time, of space, of life, of identity, desire and narrative.
characters
The text implies that our knowledge of people
is determined by writing, by the character of written words. Although he is ‘unreasonable’, in taking the shape of letters to denote character, Pip is not simply mistaken in recognizing that our sense of our self and of other people is developed through language. For as this passage clearly indicates, we construct ourselves through and in words, in the image-making, story-generating power of language.
Thus ‘life-likeness’ appears to involve both multiplicity and unity at the same time. In the classic nineteenth-century realist novel Middlemarch (1871–
2), for example, there is a character called Lydgate of whom George Eliot observes: ‘He had two selves within him’, but these selves must ‘learn to accommodate each other’ in a ‘persistent self ’ (182). It is this tension,
between complexity and unity, that makes a character like Lydgate both interesting and credible. The importance of such unity in realist texts is made clear by works like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) or, less melodramatically, Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Sharer’ (1910): these narratives can be called ‘limit texts’ in that they
use the framework of life-like or realistic characters to explore what happens when the self is demonically split or doubled. In doing so, such texts challenge the basis of realism itself.
The English language
uses the word ‘persona’ to signify a kind of mask or disguise, a pretended or assumed character. The word ‘person’, then, is bound up with questions of
fictionality, disguise, representation and mask. To know a person, or to know who a person is, involves understanding a mask. In this respect, the notion of
person is inseparable from the literary. This is not to say that ‘real’ people are actually fictional. Rather it is to suggest that there is a complex, destabilizing
and perhaps finally undecidable interweaving of the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’: our lives, our real lives, are governed and directed by the stories we read, write
and tell ourselves.
There is a similar enigma about the word ‘character’: just as the word ‘person’ has a double and paradoxical signification, so ‘character’ means both
a letter or sign, a mark of writing, and the ‘essential’ qualities of a ‘person’.
Again, the etymology of the word is suggestive: from the Greek word kharattein, to engrave, the word becomes a mark or sign, a person’s title and hence a
distinguishing mark – that which distinguishes one person from another – and from this a ‘fictional’ person or a person on stage. Pip’s characterological reading of his parents’ tombstones, then, is perhaps not so far off the mark. And in Hamlet, when Polonius tells his son Laertes that he should remember his ‘precepts’ or advice, he plays on this double sense, using ‘character’ as a verb: ‘And these few precepts in thy memory / Look thou character’ (I.iii.58–9). In this way, Shakespeare’s play suggests how intimately ‘character’ is bound up
with inscription, with signs, with writing.
We have argued that the realist novel tends to rely on a particular conception of what a person is – that a person is a complex but unified whole. We might develop this further by suggesting that the realist model of character
involves a fundamental dualism of inside (mind, soul or self ) and outside (body, face and other external features). The ‘inside’ that we associate with being human has many different forms. In the nineteenth century this was often described in terms of ‘spiritual life’ or ‘soul’. More recently, it has just as often (and perhaps more helpfully) been understood in terms of the unconscious. The following extracts from the first paragraph of George Eliot’s novel
Middlemarch will allow us to explore this in more detail:
And these few precepts in thy memory / Look thou character’ (I.iii.58–9). In this way, Shakespeare’s play suggests how intimately ‘character’ is bound up
with inscription, with signs, with writing.
We have argued that the realist novel tends to rely on a particular conception of what a person is – that a person is a complex but unified whole. We might develop this further by suggesting that the realist model of character
involves a fundamental dualism of inside (mind, soul or self ) and outside This extraordinary opening paragraph, with its ironic insistence on the importance of clothes despite Dorothea Brooke’s spiritual aspirations, clearly
acknowledges that physical appearance (outside) works as a sign of character (inside). What is indicated here is an opposition that is fundamental in realist texts: that there is an inside and an outside to a person, that these are separate, but that one may be understood to have a crucial influence on the other.
The opening to Middlemarch concentrates almost obsessively on Dorothea’s clothes because it is her clothes that allow us insight into her character. As this
suggests, another convention of characterological realism is that character is hidden or obscure, that in order to know another person – let alone ourselves
– we must decipher the outer appearance. Eliot constantly manipulates and plays with the mechanisms of such realism, above all with that form of telepathy or mind-reading whereby a narrator can describe a character from the outside but can also know (and keep secrets about) that character’s inner thoughts and feelings, conscious or unconscious. At the same time, by evoking Dorothea’s appearance in terms of how ‘the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters’ and by comparing her ‘plain garments’ to ‘the impressiveness
of a fine quotation’, Eliot subtly foregrounds a sense of the painterly and the textual. We are drawn and caught up in intriguing uncertainties about where
representation (a picture or text) begins or ends.
From Dorothea’s clothes, then, Eliot weaves a fine and intricate web of character – in terms of the familial, social and political, and in terms of the moral and religious. Indeed, one of the most striking sentences of the excerpt
focuses ironically on this concern with clothes:
This brings us to one of the central questions raised by many novels:
How can we know a person? As we have seen, realist novels such as George Eliot’s attempt to answer this question by presenting people as knowable by
a number of ‘outward’ signs of ‘inner’ worth. Appearances, however, can be deceptive. Indeed, many novels and plays are concerned with the problem
of deception or disguise, with discriminating between an appearance that is a true sign of inner value and one that is not. The realist tradition often relies on the possibility of such deception, while also presupposing the
possibility of finally discovering the worth or value of a person by reading the outward signs. The exposure, despite appearances, of Bulstrode’s hypocrisy, for example, and the final validation of Lydgate’s good character are central to the plot of Middlemarch. But the fact that a ‘person’ is itself, in some sense, a ‘mask’, means that even if we think we ‘know’ the soul or self
of a person, his or her true identity, there is always a possibility, even if that
person is ourself, that such an identity is itself a form of mask. This irreducible uncertainty may partly account for realism’s obsessive concern with the
question: ‘Who am I?
The stories of Raymond Carver (1938–88), like many so-called postmodern texts, relentlessly play with such conventions of characterological construction and perception.
In this respect, it is significant that the opening to Great
Expectations explores one of the major themes of literary texts: the question ‘who am I?’ One fascination of characters in fiction and drama, as well as one
of their most ‘characteristic’ activities, is to suggest answers to this question, not only for themselves, but also for us.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin
appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation
from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph from today’s newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense.
Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close observers that her dress differed from her sister’s, and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke’s plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared. The pride of being ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably ‘good’ [ . . . ] Young women of
such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlour, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition
of a huckster’s daughter. Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made show in dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was required for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasons would have been enough to account for plain dress, quite apart from religious feeling; but in Miss Brooke’s case, religion alone would have determined it [ . . . ] and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in guimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. [ . . . ] (29–30)
‘She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest
in guimp and artificial protrusions of drapery.’
The passage as a whole makes it clear, however, that Dorothea’s puritan plainness is simply the reverse
side of a ‘keen interest in guimp’. Her preference for ‘plain dressing’ is itself a complex and considered statement of fashion. It is at this point, in particular,
that Eliot’s ironic presentation of Dorothea involves a subtle questioning of the conventional opposition between a ‘spiritual life’ on the one hand and
the ‘artificial protrusions of drapery’ on the other. The passage suggests that this opposition is itself artificial, that whatever people ‘really’ are cannot be
separated from how they appear. It suggests that people are constituted by an interplay of inner and outer, but that it is not a question of one being the truth
and the other mere surface. So while realist conventions of character may rely on the opposition between inner and outer, mind or spirit and body, and so on, Eliot’s description of Dorothea also shows how this opposition can be questioned from within the realist tradition itself.
In ‘Cathedral’ (1983), for example, the somewhat
obtuse, belligerent, intolerant, discriminatory narrator finds it both comic and unnerving to think about how a blind man, a friend of his wife who has been invited to pass the evening in their home, looks – even while (or because) he cannot look. The narrator is struck by the fact that the blind man does not wear
dark glasses. This disturbs him, since although at first sight the blind man’s eyes ‘looked like anyone else’s eyes’, on closer inspection (and the narrator
takes the opportunity for a lengthy session of unreciprocable inspection) they seem ‘Creepy’: ‘As I stared at his face, I saw the left pupil turn in toward his
nose while the other made an effort to keep in one place. But it was only an effort, for that eye was on the roam without his knowing it or wanting it to be’
(297). The story culminates in a dope-smoking session in which the blind man teaches the narrator the advantages of drawing with closed eyes, of the necessary visual imagination of the blind. On one level, the story performs
a conventional reversal of the blind and the seeing, figuring the blind man as the seer. But on another level, Carver explores conventions of characterological construction by querying the equation of the look of someone with their identity (the eyes, conventionally the most telling indicator of character are, for our view of the blind man, just ‘creepy’ signifiers of mechanical dysfunction, disconnected from intention, emotion, will), and by prompting an awareness that in this story it is the one who is not seen – either by us as readers or by the blind man – who most fully exposes himself, exposes his ‘character’, in all its belligerence, intolerance and obtuseness.
- Voice
For Bloom, any ‘strong’ poem will always involve
an encounter between the ‘living’ poet – in this case Hardy – and the dead – in this case perhaps most obviously Keats, whose ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is also
explicitly concerned with the ‘dissolving’ qualities of voice and identity. From a Bloomian perspective, Hardy’s reference to ‘You being ever dissolved to wan
wistlessness’ might be read not so much as an address to the poet’s dead wife (strange enough as that gesture may itself seem) but rather as an eerie and ambivalent ‘replay’ of Keats’s lines:
Literature is, as Salman Rushdie has observed, ‘the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way’ (Rushdie 1990, 16). Saleem,
the narrator of Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981), is an excellent example: he is telepathic, like every so-called omniscient narrator in a work of fiction, and he is continually hearing multiple voices. As he remarks:
‘I was a radio receiver, and could turn the volume down or up; I could select individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will, switch off my newlydiscovered inner ear’ (164).
On the other hand – and this has been a related and similarly important feature of recent critical and theoretical concerns – literature encourages us to
think about the idea that there may in fact be no such thing as a voice, a single, unified voice (whether that of an author, a narrator, a reader or anyone else).
Rather, there is difference and multiplicity within every voice. There is, then, not only the kind of socio-literary polyphony that Bakhtin describes, and which he illustrates for example by looking at the way Dickens orchestrates, inhabits and detaches himself from the role of various speakers in his novel Little Dorrit (Bakhtin 1992, 203–5). But in addition to this, and more fundamentally, any one voice is in fact made up of multiple voices.
Take the opening of a short story by Raymond Carver, entitled ‘Fat’ (1963). It begins: I am sitting over coffee and cigarettes at my friend Rita’s and I am telling her
about it.
This is, in some ways at least, a descriptively straightforward opening. But once we reflect on it, we find that it is doing many different and quite sophisticated things. The first point to observe is that this is a first person narration with a strong sense of a speaking voice: we are drawn away by what we might
call the ‘reality effect’ of a speaking voice that is produced in part through the conversational language – the lexical items and syntax, the topic, use of the
present tense, repetition – and in part through the explicit reference to the fact that the narrator is speaking and ‘telling’ us something. The opening sentences,
in a quite subtle way, put the reader in the position of the narrator’s friend Rita (‘I am telling her . . . Here is what I tell . . .’). Despite the seductively ‘realistic’
or ‘everyday’ quality of voice here, something fairly complex is going on: we are presented with a narrator who, even in the apparently straightforward language of the opening two sentences, makes it clear that this is a self-referential or metafictional story, a story that is at least at some level a story about storytelling. The seductiveness of an apparently casual speaking voice tends to distract attention from this dimension of the text. Moreover, without really drawing attention to the fact, we have up till now been referring to the ‘I’ of the story as the narrator. In other words, we have been making an implicit distinction between narrator and author. This is a first-person narration and the narrator, we quickly learn, is a waitress. What we are being presented
with, in other words, is the ‘voice’ of a girl or young woman. At the same time, however, there is a sort of double-voicing here to the extent that we may
recognize this text as being characteristic of Raymond Carver’s work. In this respect, we could say, there is also the phantasmatic voice of Carver lurking in these lines. We hear the ‘voice’ of Carver in a figurative, ghostly sense (like a signature tune).
Rather differently, there is Thomas Hardy’s poem, ‘The Voice’:
Written in December 1912, ‘The Voice’ belongs to the series of so-called ‘1912–13 poems’ that Hardy wrote following his first wife’s death earlier that year. It is difficult, in other words, not to read this poem as autobiographical – to understand it as a poem about the poet’s experience of mourning following his wife’s death. But the poem is more than simply autobiographical: it is
about the radical uncertainty of human identity and experience, their faltering. ‘The Voice’ not only describes the uncanny experience of hearing a dead
person’s voice but in some sense transfers the call to us in turn. The poem functions as a kind of strange textual switchboard. Again, we can respond to the poem in quite straightforward terms – it is a poem about someone who is out walking in an autumn or early winter landscape and who thinks he hears the voice of a woman whom he once loved (who was ‘all’ to him) but who is no
longer above ground (‘heard no more again far or near’). As its title suggests then, it is about ‘the voice’ he hears. But it is also a poem about voice more generally, and about the relationship between poetry and hearing a woman’s call.
(This may in turn recall the notion of inspiration in classical Greek and Roman times, in other words hearing the voice, music or song of a female Muse or Muses.) This is evident, for example, in the opening line: ‘Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me’. What we are presented with here is an affirmation of the spooky actuality of hearing a dead woman’s voice – an
affirmation which the poem proceeds to question (‘Can it be you that I hear?’), but which it concludes by reaffirming (‘Thus I; faltering forward . . . And the
woman calling’). This opening line, however, is at the same time grammatically ambiguous: ‘how’ suggests a questioning as well as an exclamation. ‘Call
to me, call to me’, on the other hand, can be read as an echo (as two voices, even if the second is a double of the first) or as changing from an exclamation – ‘how
you call to me’ – to a demand: ‘call to me’.
The ending of the poem suggests either that the speaker is off his head, hearing voices, or that the dead really do come back and it is indeed possible to hear voices from beyond the grave. But it also suggests something about
literary texts in general. Every one of the writers who has been discussed in this chapter is dead. But as we indicate in our discussion of ‘the death of the
author’ (in Chapter 3), every literary text can be thought of as involving a voice
from beyond the grave, since every text is at least potentially capable of outliving the person who originally gives voice to it. The woman in Hardy’s poem
is in this respect a figure of the poet par excellence. Do we hear Hardy’s voice in ‘The Voice’ or not? Or – to reflect on the poem in a quite different way
altogether, that is to say in the light of what Harold Bloom calls ‘the anxiety of influence’ – do we perhaps hear Keats’s voice in this poem? Bloom’s celebrated theory (Bloom 1973) is that what impels poets to write is not so
much the desire to reflect on the world as the desire to respond to and to challenge the voices of the dead. For Bloom, any ‘strong’ poem will always involve
an encounter between the ‘living’ poet – in this case Hardy – and the dead – in this case perhaps most obviously Keats, whose ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is also
explicitly concerned with the ‘dissolving’ qualities of voice and identity. From a Bloomian perspective, Hardy’s reference to ‘You being ever dissolved to wan
wistlessness’ might be read not so much as an address to the poet’s dead wife (strange enough as that gesture may itself seem) but rather as an eerie and
ambivalent ‘replay’ of Keats’s lines:
Keats’s voice might, in this sense, be said to haunt ‘The Voice’ as much as it does other Hardy poems, such as ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900) – the very title of which explicitly refers us to Keats’s ode (‘Darkling I listen . . .’).
In poems such as ‘The Voice’ and ‘The Darkling Thrush’, in other words, we can recognize the ‘trick’ of Hardy’s voice in terms of an idiomatic tone (lugubrious, plaintive, ironic etc.) and idiomatic rhymes and neologisms
(‘listlessness’, ‘wistlessness’). But this is ‘voice’ in a figurative, ghostly sense.
Moreover, it is ‘voice’ as plural – haunted by, for example, the voice or voices xof other poets such as Keats.
away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou amongst the leaves hast never known . . . Keats’s voice might, in this sense, be said to haunt ‘The Voice’ as much as it
does other Hardy poems, such as ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900) – the very title of which explicitly refers us to Keats’s ode (‘Darkling I listen . . .’).
In poems such as ‘The Voice’ and ‘The Darkling Thrush’, in other words, we can recognize the ‘trick’ of Hardy’s voice in terms of an idiomatic tone (lugubrious, plaintive, ironic etc.) and idiomatic rhymes and neologisms
(‘listlessness’, ‘wistlessness’). But this is ‘voice’ in a figurative, ghostly sense.
Moreover, it is ‘voice’ as plural – haunted by, for example, the voice or voices of other poets such as Keats.
Here is what I tell her.
It is late of a slow Wednesday when Herb seats the fat man at my station.
This fat man is the fattest person I have ever seen, though he is neat appearing and well dressed enough. Everything about him is big. But it is the fingers I remember best. When I stop at the table near his to see to the old couple, I first notice the fingers. They look three times the size of a normal person’s fingers – long, thick, creamy fingers. (64)
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me failing,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou amongst the leaves hast never known . . .
- Figures and tropes
Literary language is sometimes defined in terms of its deviations from or distortions of ordinary language.
Chambers Dictionary defines a rhetorical figure as ‘a deviation from the ordinary mode of expression’, and trope as ‘a figure of speech, properly one in which a word or expression is used in other than its literal sense’.
Central to literary criticism and theory, then, are such questions as: What are the effects of rhetorical figures in literary texts? What purpose do they serve? And how do they function? One of the most common misconceptions about literary texts is that their figurative language is simply decorative, something added to the text to make it more readable, more dramatic, or more ‘colourful’. It is certainly true that the perceived presence of figurative language often seems to increase at points of emotional and dramatic intensity, like the soaring violins at moments of sexual passion or dramatic tension in a Hollywood film. Thus D.H. Lawrence, for example, is known for his
so-called ‘purple passages’.
Figuration is fundamental to our world, to our lives. An alteration in the way we figure the world also involves an alteration in the way that the world works.
The categories of black, white and coloured operate as instances of synecdoche.
What people
‘see’ is a form of metaphor, a figment or figure of imagination – a ‘phantom in other people’s minds . . . a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with
all his strength to destroy’ (3). It is in this way that Ellison’s narrator is invisible, for while people think that they see – they think they see a black man – in fact they see nothing, they are blinded by metaphor. Ellison’s novel suggests
that such habitual blindness may be challenged and in turn transformed by acts of language. It presents a metaphor or allegory of the invisible man to
counter the worn coin of representation. After all, the effacement of the black man is, in a crucial sense, constituted through acts of language. Without the
vocabulary of prejudice and racism, any such effacement would be inconceivable. Racism is an effect of language. In particular, the passage from Ellison cited above suggests that racism is an effect of synecdochic substitution – skin pigment for personal identity, individual for collective or racial identity. The invisible man can be seen again, his invisibility perceived, through alternative
metaphors, through rhetorical figures.
The opening of Ellison’s novel, then, gives us one answer to the question of how figures and tropes function in literary and other texts: they can make us see what is otherwise invisible, concealed by prejudice, effaced by habit. They seek to change the world. To recall the term used by Viktor Shklovsky and other Russian formalist critics writing in the 1920s, figurative language has
the capacity to ‘defamiliarize’ our world – to refigure, reform, revolutionize.
What kinds of effects can be produced through figuration and how far can a reading of such figures go? Let us consider another example, a poem by the nineteenth-century New England poet Emily Dickinson. In Dickinson’s work, figures, like language considered more generally, tremble on the edge of meaning. One reason why her poetry is particularly appropriate in a discussion of figurative language is that it characteristically ‘deconstructs’ ordefamiliarizes its own rhetorical figures: her poetry constitutes a subtle yet decisive assault on figuration itself. This poem (no. 328) was written around 1862:
In language at once direct and elusive, the poem describes a bird eating a worm, taking a drink and flying away. The rhetorical figure which stands out in the opening lines is personification or anthropomorphism. Both the bird (‘he’) and the worm (the ‘fellow’) of the first stanza are described as if they were human. But the anthropomorphic insistence of the first half of the poem becomes strangely convoluted as it goes on to explore the specificity of simile (a is like b) as a species of metaphor (a is b, in other words the ‘like’ is unstated).
In line eleven we learn that the bird’s eyes ‘looked like frightened Beads’. But this simile is not as simple as it looks. It remains unclear whether ‘looked like’
means that the eyes actively looked (they looked, in the way that beads look, assuming that they do), or whether the bird’s eyes, to the narrator, looked like beads. The simile is itself ambiguous. Moreover, what the eyes looked like – the beads – also undergoes an uncanny metamorphosis. To refer to beads as ‘frightened’ is to employ the rhetorical figure called animism, whereby an
inanimate object is given the attributes of life. Far from clarifying the look of the bird’s eyes, the simile makes it less concrete, less visible or imaginable, by making a comparison with something that cannot possibly be seen. It is entirely incorrect to say that the bird’s eyes ‘looked like’ frightened beads, since frightened beads are not available to the gaze at all, and beads cannot look. The simile, a peculiar example of a ‘transferred epithet’, disturbs the sense of who or what is frightened and confounds the distinction between the figurative and the literal, image and word, the imagined and the visible.
The last two stanzas of the poem increase these uncertainties. In the penultimate stanza, rowing on an ocean is the ‘vehicle’ for the metaphor, the ‘tenor’
or ‘meaning’ of which is flying. But once again the figure is ambiguous: the ocean metaphor is inadequate, the line suggests, to express the softness, the silvery delicacy of the movement of the bird’s flight. Where a boat would leave a wake in the water, a kind of seam, the bird leaves none in the air. But while ‘Too silver for a seam’ may be ‘translated’ as meaning something like ‘too delicate for a wake or track in water’, the line may also be understood to be referring to the delicacy of figurative language and its relation to the world. Critics usually distinguish simile within metaphor more generally by pointing out
that phrases such as ‘like’ or ‘as’ mark simile as explicitly figurative. Through another kind of figure known as paronomasia – produced by the homophone
‘seam’/‘seem’ – the poem reflects silently on figuration itself. Metaphors seem to be unmarked, too silver, too subtle, for a seam, or for the word ‘seem’ (or ‘as’
or ‘like’), too delicate for the mark of figuration. Just as there is no seam left behind after the bird’s flight – it flies as if by magic – metaphor also leaves no mark, no ‘seem’ and no seam. Or, to put it more paradoxically but more
accurately, like the word ‘plashless’, a word which negates ‘plash’ but does so only by referring to it, metaphor both does and does not leave a mark.
The extraordinary ending to the poem involves another metaphor for the bird’s flight – the flight of a butterfly – but presents this in terms of swimming.
The bird is like a butterfly leaping off a bank into the water so delicately that there is no (s)plash. With the phrase ‘Banks of Noon’, however, Dickinson’s
poem disturbs the basis of metaphorical transformation itself. ‘Banks of Noon’ is no more comprehensible than the ‘frightened Beads’ encountered earlier. The metaphorical transitions are short-circuited, for while it is possible to see that a bird’s flight is ‘like’ rowing a boat, it is unclear how a bank of noon can be ‘like’ anything physical – are we to believe that ‘noon’ can be a
kind of river bank, for example? The phrase highlights the deceptiveness of figuration, its potential for linguistic effects of trompe l’œil and hallucination.
It dramatizes the ease, the inevitability with which language slides away from referential assumptions. On the other hand, ‘Banks of Noon’ can be considered in terms of another kind of phenomenon – intertextuality – whereby a text is woven out of words and phrases from elsewhere. In this respect, the phrase recalls the Shakespearean ‘bank and shoal of time’ from Macbeth’s
murderous speech (Macbeth I.vii.6) – giving the sense of the present as a kind of isthmus within the ocean of eternity – and suggests the end or the edge of time, time strangely suspended or delayed. The ending of Dickinson’s poem
suggests that figurative language entails a series of displacements and substitutions which both produce and withhold the illusion of reference.
Take Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), for example. This novel uses invisibility as a figure (both metaphorical and literal) for the marginality,
the oppression, effacement and dehumanization of black people in the United States. Here is the opening to the prologue to Ellison’s great novel:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows,
it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors and hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything
except me. (3)
A Bird came down the Walk—
He did not know I saw—
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,
5 And then he drank a Dew From a convenient Grass— And then hopped sidewise to the Wall To let a Beetle pass— He glanced with rapid eyes 10 That hurried all around— They looked like frightened Beads, I thought— He stirred his Velvet Head Like one in danger, Cautious, I offered him a Crumb 15 And he unrolled his feathers And rowed him softer home— Than Oars divide the Ocean, Too silver for a seam— Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon 20 Leap, plashless as they swim.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay
buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little grate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (255–6)
In our chapter on narrative we referred briefly to James Joyce’s great long short story ‘The Dead’. The story begins with the following sentence:
In fact, Lily is not literally run off her feet at all. Strangely, we say ‘literally run off her feet’ to mean not literally but figuratively run off her feet. The use of the word ‘literal’
here, like the phrase about feet, is metaphorical. In this respect, we can see that the opening sentence to the story produces a play of figuration which refers
indirectly both to the subject of the story, death, and to its telling. ‘Literally run off her feet’ is a dead metaphor, a metaphor which has become so common that
its identity as figurative has largely been lost: dead metaphors are Nietzsche’s worn coins of language. We can say ‘I was literally run off my feet’ without
recognizing that we are using a metaphor at all, that far from using the phrase literally, we are exploiting a figure of speech. The metaphorical use of the word
‘literally’ in this phrase is a good example of the evocative possibilities of‘catachresis’, the rhetorical term for a misuse or abuse of language. ‘The Dead’,
which is above all about death, is also about dead language, dead metaphors. Joyce’s story ends with the return of a ‘figure from the dead’ (251), the haunting memory of Gretta’s dead boyfriend, Michael Furey. In the final pages, Gretta’s husband Gabriel looks out of the window of a hotel as his wife sleeps. The last paragraph of the story is couched in intense, swooning, highly
figurative prose:
The most remarkable, the most pressing feature of this paragraph is, perhaps, repetition. In particular, the word ‘falling’ occurs seven times: falling obliquely, falling, falling softly, softly falling, falling, falling faintly, faintly falling.
This verbal repetition produces a mesmeric sense of descent, sleep, fading and death. What Joyce appears to be evoking here, through figurative effects of language – repetition, alliteration, assonance and sibilance, syntactic inversion or chiasmus (‘falling faintly, faintly falling’) – is a fading out, a falling off, of language itself. ‘The Dead’ is about the death of (figurative and literal) language.
To borrow Joyce’s metaphor and reverse it, it is indeed the metaphorical death of language (rather than the death of metaphorical language) that gives the story lif
‘Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet’ (199).
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay
buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little grate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (255–6)
Tragedy
tragedy always engages with a broader sense of death and destruction, a shattering of society or the world as a whole.
From an Aristotelian perspective we might want to propose additional elements, in particular the notions of peripeteia (‘reversal’), anagnorisis (‘revelation’ or
‘coming to self-knowledge’) and hamartia (‘tragic flaw’ or ‘error’). Peripeteia is a useful term for referring to the reversals or sudden changes in fortune that a character or characters may experience – Lear’s being made homeless, for instance, or Othello’s being transformed by ‘the green-ey’d monster’ (III, iii, 166) of jealousy.
Anagnorisis refers to the idea of a moment of revelation or recognition, especially the moment when a protagonist experiences a sudden awakening to the truth or to self-knowledge. A tragic work may contain more than one such moment:
Finally, hamartia refers to the idea of tragic characters having a particular flaw or weakness, or making an error of judgement which leads to their downfall or death. Thus, for example, each of the male protagonists of Shakespeare’s ‘great tragedies’ could be considered in terms of a fundamental moral or psychological weakness.
A primary aim in this chapter, however, is to stress the ways in which the tragic entails a fundamental sense of what remains painful, mysterious or uncertain. That is to say, to focus on a character’s ‘tragic flaw’ or ‘error’ tends
to suggest something straightforwardly causal: Hamlet’s irresoluteness is the cause of his tragedy and so on. This is not to say that Hamlet’s irresolution or Othello’s jealousy are unimportant. These ‘flaws’ or ‘weaknesses’
are crucial – they are integral to what we think and feel about Hamlet and Othello as characters and therefore to what we think and feel about their tragic fates. But what constitutes the tragic is always stranger and more
painful than is suggested by the inevitably moralistic and reductive claim that, for instance, Othello should not have allowed himself to get so jealous and worked up. His jealousy has a crucial but partial and perhaps finally
uncertain significance in terms of the tragic power of the play. About to murder his beloved wife, Othello begins what is one of the most anguished and intolerable soliloquies in Shakespeare’s work:
What is conveyed in these lines is a sense of what cannot be named, a profound strangeness and uncertainty regarding the very sense of this repeated and equivocal word, ‘cause’. Tragedy, we want to suggest, and as Othello pointedly demonstrates, is not only about the sense of particular causes or explanations but also, and more importantly, about a painful absence or uncertainty of cause Tragedy (and here we use the word to embrace both Shakespearean and more recent forms) is not only inimical to the pleasure-button-pushing mentality of Hollywood or Broadway, but also at odds with the very idea of identity and meaning. As Howard Barker puts it, in a series of aphoristic statements entitled ‘Asides for a Tragic Theatre’ (1986):
In tragedy, the audience is disunited . . . Tragedy is not about reconciliation . . . Tragedy offends the sensibilities. It drags the unconscious into the public place . . . After the carnival, after the removal of the masks, you are
precisely who you were before. After the tragedy, you are not certain who you are. (Barker 1989, 13) Tragedy is offensive, it generates disunity and exposes disharmony. Like psychoanalytic theory (itself of course crucially indebted to Sophocles’s Oedipus the King), tragedy makes the unconscious public. It leaves us uncertain about our very identities, uncertain about how we feel, about what has happened to us.
Finally, there is something apocalyptic about the tragic, not only in the sense that it consistently entails an experience of unmanageable disorder but also in that this experience of disorder is linked to a more general kind of revelation (the meaning of the original Greek word ‘apocalypsis’). The apocalyptic revelation at the heart of the tragic has to do with a sense that no God
or gods are looking down on the world to see that justice is done, or that, if there are gods, they are profoundly careless, indifferent, even sadistic. The heavens may be occupied or vacant, but the world is terrible and makes no sense. To illustrate this idea in relation to King Lear, for example, we could look to a few lines spoken by Albany – addressed to his wife Goneril and concerned with the ‘vile’ behaviour of herself and her sister Regan towards
their father, the King:
The tragic revelation of King Lear concerns the sense that humanity is indeed monstrous and that there are no ‘visible spirits’ or any other sort of spirits that might properly or profitably be called down from the heavens. One of the shortest, yet perhaps most powerful lines in Shakespeare – ‘It will come’ – is apocalyptic both in terms of the dark revelation of the idea that there are no
gods or divine justice and in terms of the sense of an impending or accumulating cataclysm of general destruction and death. The word ‘come’ is crucial
here – as indeed it is in the final passages of several of Shakespeare’s tragedies – in part because it resonates with the apocalypticism of the end of the Bible:
Tragedy says ‘come’ in a double sense:
it summons us, it engages our feelings of sympathy and identification, it demands that our emotions be involved in what is happening. But at the same time tragedy says: we have to suffer, we are going to die, there is no justice and there is no afterlife. It, death and cataclysm, will come. In this way, tragedy engages with the limits of sense, verges on the senseless. Because what tragedy
is about is senseless, meaningless – the unjust and yet unavoidable shattering of life. This would be another way of trying to highlight the mysterious and paradoxical nature of the tragic.
When Ludovico says, of the bed displaying
the corpses of Othello and Desdemona, ‘Let it be hid’ (Othello, V, ii, 365),
Shakespeare’s play paradoxically conceals or encrypts this intolerable sight that tragedy calls us to witness. Correspondingly, in King Lear, the death of Cordelia and Lear’s madness of grief are figured in apocalyptic terms – Kent asks, ‘Is this the promis’d end?’ Edgar retorts, ‘Or image of that horror?’ (V, iii, 264–5) – but what the tragedy finally and paradoxically reveals is perhaps
rather the ethical and spiritual horror of a world in which violence, torture and terror recur unendingly. What is revealed in King Lear, in other words, is the sense that there is no image of the end except as thisunendingness. With these rather dark thoughts in mind, let us try to say a little more about the first three elements of a tragedy. First of all, there is the idea of the central character with whom one strongly sympathizes or identifies. ‘Sympathy’
here entails primarily the idea of ‘entering into another’s feelings or mind’ (Chambers). It carries clear connotations of the original Greek terms ‘syn’, with, and ‘pathos’, suffering – that is to say, ‘sympathy’ as ‘suffering with’.
Hamlet’s life, for instance, might be described as a sort of anagnorisis ‘block’, a ghostly series of apparent but ineffective anagnorises starting with his exclamation ‘O my prophetic soul!’ (I, v, 40) on discovering the murderous truth about his father’s death and realizing that this is what he had imagined, deep in his ‘prophetic soul’. Classically, though, a tragedy tends to be construed as having one crucial or climactic moment of anagnorisis.
Hamlet’s irresolution, Othello’s jealousy, Lear’s pride
and Macbeth’s ambition might then be seen as a key element in each of these works.
‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul;/Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars,/It is the cause’ V, ii, 1–3). ‘Cause’ here may mean ‘crime’, ‘legal or other case’ or ‘reason’.
If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses,
It will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself
Like monsters of the deep. (IV, ii, 46–50)
‘He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so,come, Lord Jesus’ (Revelation 22:20).
The tragic has to do with a sense of loss of identity – the sense that (in Barker’s words) ‘you are not certain who you are’. We might try to clarify this a little more by remarking on the paradoxical nature of sympathy specifically inrelation to drama. Sympathy involves going out of ourselves, and sharing or identifying with the position of another. Putting it slightly differently, it
involves a sense of going out of ourselves but, at the same time, putting ourselves on stage. In this respect we have an intriguing example of chiasmus, which can be formulated as follows: there is no drama without sympathy, but there is no sympathy without drama. This proposition may also help us to appreciate why, in historical terms, tragedy has so consistently been associated with the dramatic. More than any other genre, tragedy explores the limits of the experience of sympathy, as it broaches self-obliteration and death. In a manner especially suited to the stage, tragedy is exposure to death – to that extreme of sympathy or identification where, putting oneself on stage, one
loses a sense of oneself and becomes the one who dies.
It is only on the basis of this first element (sympathy) that the second (the
suffering and death of a character) can be described as tragic. This seems logical enough, but the third element of a tragedy is distinctly paradoxical: the death that occurs at the end of a tragedy is experienced as being at once unavoidable and unjust. This is sometimes talked about as tragic inevitability.
Every tragic work will generate a sense of the inevitable or (to use a term that is perhaps too easily loaded with religious connotations) the fated. The tragic
invariably concerns a sense of what is foreseeable but unavoidable. But what is unavoidable (Desdemona in Othello must die, Tess in Hardy’s novel must die,
Ikem and Chris in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah must die) is also unacceptable: the tragic seems to involve a peculiar contradiction whereby death is inevitable and therefore (however painfully) appropriate but at the same time unjust, unacceptable and therefore inappropriate.
Consider, for example, th moment in the final scene of Hamlet when Hamlet confides to Horatio:
Pity ( pathos in ancient Greek) is understood by Aristotle in terms of a movement towards the spectacle of destruction and death on stage (or page), while fear or terror (phobos in ancient Greek) is a movement away from it. In this way, the spectator or reader
is torn apart. And it is in this sense that we can say that the tragic is not rationalizable, rather it is an affront to our desires for meaning and coherence.
In thinking about a particular drama or other work in terms of the tragic, then, perhaps the most obvious thing to do in the first instance is to consider the question of sympathy and/or identification. One could for example think about such questions as the following: how does a tragic text generate sympathy? Which character or characters elicit our sympathy? What is it that
happens in the text that produces a feeling of sympathy or identification on our part? It is not only a question of character (what is he or she like as an individual?) and plot (what happens to him or her, the poor sod?) but also, and more fundamentally, a matter of how character and plot are created in language. In short, it is worth trying to think about which particular passages,\ which particular speeches, and even which particular phrases or words help to generate sympathy in the spectator or reader.
But it is also evident that tragedy has undergone certain changes in the past century or so. There are various reasons for this. One reason has to do with the notion of ‘the death of God’. Tragedy, that is to say, is bound to be different if it is considered, at the outset, from a secular
perspective. Shakespearean tragedy might be said to be modern to the extent that it seems to dramatize the terrible revelation of a secular and arbitrary world, a purposeless universe of suffering and death. Thomas Hardy’s novels The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), for example – might be
regarded as limit-texts in this respect: they are remarkably close to the sort of model of tragedy that we have outlined in this chapter but their tragic force
consists less in a dramatic revelation that there is no God or ultimate justice and more in an ironic toying with the very grounds of such a revelation. If, as
Paul Fussell has argued, irony is the ‘dominating form of modern understanding’ (Fussell 1975, 35), this is especially clear in the sort of ironization of tragedy evident in Thomas Hardy’s work. The fact that these novels incorporate allusions to what Hardy calls the Immanent Will, the ‘intangible Cause’ or ‘Unfulfilled Intention’, as well as to more familiar classical deities, is simply part of this ironization. In terms of drama itself, there have been quite traditional examples of the tragic – one might think of Arthur Miller’s great allegorical work, The Crucible (1953), for example – but more characteristic of the past century have been the kind of secular tragicomedies of Chekhov
or Beckett.
A second reason why tragedy is not what it used to be concerns the transformations that have taken place over the past two hundred years or so regarding the notions of the individual and society. If modern tragedies tend to be about ordinary people rather than kings or queens, they also show how far the lives of such ‘ordinary people’ are bound up, determined and constrained by
broader social, economic and political realities. One of the first modern tragedies in European drama, Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), for example, is not simply about the break-up of the ‘doll’ Nora’s marriage: it is
about the ways in which the patriarchal institution and conventions of marriage effectively programme this tragic break-up. Particularly in the wake of bsen’s work, in other words, there is a fundamental shift from a classical idea of tragedy as inevitable and beyond human control to the modern idea of a tragedy as something humanly engineered and happening in a world in which
something could and should be done, for instance about sexual inequality, racism and so on. In his autobiography, Bertrand Russell remarks that ‘One of the things that makes literature so consoling, is that its tragedies are all in the past, and have the completeness and repose that comes of being beyond the reach of our endeavours’ (Russell 1968, 169). Russell’s observation may be
appropriate for thinking about tragedy in its classical modes; but it is quite inadequate and misleading for thinking about modern tragedy. New historicist and poststructuralist critics, in particular, have been concerned to underline what many of the more recent examples of tragic works of literature make clear, namely that what Russell comfortably refers to as ‘the past’ is precisely what is in question. And if the past is in question, so is the present. Whose past are we talking about? From whose perspective? With whose interests at stake?
We could illustrate this by referring briefly to a couple of contemporary works of tragic literature. The first example is a novel about the United States. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) contains the basic elements
of tragedy – even if this includes a modification of Shakespearean ‘suffering and death’ into Morrisonian ‘suffering and terrible abuse’. It is set in Ohio, and the narrative begins in 1941. It recounts the story of a young black girl called Pecola and how she comes to be sexually abused by her grimly named father, Cholly Breedlove. Morrison’s novel may be set in the past but its power as a tragic text consists partly in the fact that it is making an explicit political statement not only about racism in contemporary US society but also about
the perception of history itself. The novel involves a lucid but terrible elaboration of why this man called Breedlove should have abused his daughter. By stressing the ways in which Breedlove himself had in the past been racially and physically abused in turn, Morrison’s novel provides a complex historical account of racism and violence. The Bluest Eye is tragic but the villain is paradoxically part of the tragedy. Morrison’s novel broaches a despairing
realism quite foreign to Shakespearean tragedy. King Lear concludes with Edgar’s words:
His words may sound like a hollow formality or formalism – even as they ironically refer to the importance of saying ‘what we feel, not what we ought to say’ – but there is at least an implicit affirmation here of some kind of future.
Toni Morrison’s novel concludes more blankly:
Gr young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (V, ii, 324–7)
‘It’s too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it’s much, much, much too late’ (190).
- History
For old-historicist critics, history is not so much textual as more simply a series of empirically verifiable events. And they also assume that it is possible for our knowledge of both historical events and literary texts to be detached and objective, outside the forces of history.
New historicism may be understood as a reaction against such presuppositions: put briefly, it may be defined as a recognition of the extent to which history is textual, as a rejection of the autonomy of the literary text and as an
attempted displacement of the objectivity of interpretation in general.
Literary texts are embedded within the social and economic circumstances in which they are produced and consumed.
From this perspective, literary texts are part of a larger circulation of social energies, both products of and influences on a particular culture or ideology. What is
new about new historicism in particular is its recognition that history is the ‘history of the present’, that history is in the making, that, rather than being monumental and closed, history is radically open to transformation and
rewriting.
New historicists argue that any ‘knowledge’ of the past is necessarily mediated by texts or, to put it differently, that history is in many respects textual.
A number of major consequences follow from such an assertion. In the first place, there can be no knowledge of the past without interpretation. (This is also one of the ways in which new historicism is specifically Nietzschean: as Nietzsche said, ‘facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations’ (Nietzsche 1968, section
481).) Just as literary texts need to be read, so do the ‘facts’ of history. Thus, theorists such as Hayden White suggest that our knowledge of the past is determined by particular narrative configurations – that in talking about the past we tell stories. ‘Properly understood’, White remarks, histories ought never to be read as unambiguous signs of the events they report, but rather as symbolic structures, extended metaphors, that ‘liken’
the events reported in them to some form with which we have already become familiar in our literary culture . . . By the very constitution of a set of events in such a way as to make a comprehensible story out of them, the
historian charges those events with the symbolic significance of a comprehensible plot structure.
As the quasi-founder of new historicism, Stephen Greenblatt, remarks in an essay entitled ‘Toward a Poetics of Culture’, ‘methodological self-consciousness is one of the distinguishing marks of the new historicism in cultural studies as opposed to a historicism based upon faith in the transparency of signs and interpretive procedures’ (Greenblatt 1990a, 158).
In this, at least, they are in agreement with Jacques Derrida who declared in Of Grammatology in 1967: ‘The age already in the past is in fact constituted in every respect as a text’ (Derrida 1976, lxxxix)
The subject
The French poz ststructuralist Michel Foucault has written: ‘There are two meanings of the word “subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to one’s own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge’ (Foucault 1983, 212, cited by During 1992, 153). The word ‘person’, by con- trast, perhaps too easily retains connotations of the ‘I’ or ‘me’ as detached from everything, a free agent. Likewise, the term ‘individual’ (etymologically from the Latin individuus, ‘undivided’ or ‘not divisible’) suggests a sense of the ‘I’ as simply free, as being at one with itself and autonomous or self-ruling. It is this idea of the sovereignty of the ‘I’ that Freud gestures towards and ironizes when he speaks of ‘His Majesty the Ego’ (Freud 1985f, 138).
The term ‘subject’ is useful, then, in that it encourages a more critical attent- iveness to the ways in which the ‘I’ is not autonomous, to the fact that it does not exist in a sort of vacuum. Rather an ‘I’ or ‘me’ is always subject to forces and effects both outside itself (environmental, social, cultural, economic, educational, etc.) and ‘within’ itself (in particular in terms of what is called the unconscious or, in more recent philosophical terms, otherness).
We are born into language, we are born – more precisely – into patriarchal language, into being identified by a patronym, by a paternal proper name. (Even the mother’s maiden name is, of course, a patronym.) We are also endowed with a forename and again this is not some- thing we choose, it is something to which we are subject – even if, in Britain for example, people do legally have the right to change their names at the age of eighteen. Juliet’s complaint is haunting and even tragic precisely because it highlights the way in which we are subject to names, even if we wish to ignore or disown them:
More broadly, questions of personal or individual identity are indissocia- bly bound up with language. We may like to suppose that there is some ‘me’ outside language or that there is some way of thinking about ourselves which involves a non-linguistic ‘me’. But the idea of this non-linguistic ‘me’ must found itself in language – beginning with the name itself, or with the words ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’, ‘myself ’ and so on. We cannot, in any meaningful way, escape the fact that we are subject to language. As Jacques Derrida has put it:
The significance of Freud’s theory of the unconscious thus consists in the demonstration that the subject who thinks (the subject of ‘I think’) is com- posed of forces and effects which are at least in part unconscious. ‘I’, let us remind ourselves, is not ‘God’ – even if it may be subject to fantasies of being so.
Psychoanalysis, then, has been a particularly disturbing but valuable dis- course because it has promoted an awareness of the extent to which any ‘I’ or human subject is decentred: I, in other words, can never be simply or precisely who or what I think. What makes this idea disturbing and at the same time valuable is that it involves a dislocation of notions of human mastery and autonomy of self. It introduces instead the humility of recognizing that the human subject is not centred in itself, let alone centred in relation to the surrounding world or solar system.
We could conclude by trying to say a little more about the ways in which, as we suggested earlier, the ‘I’ or ‘me’ is in fact historically determined. One very
broad but decisive example of this would be the question of the ‘I’ or ‘me’ in relation to romantic and post-romantic literature. In Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida argues that the importance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work consists in the fact that he ‘starts from a new model of presence: the subject’s self-presence within consciousness or feeling’ (Derrida 1976, 98). European romanticism in general might be characterized in terms of this kind of ‘new model of presence’, and in particular in terms of a new emphasis on the centrality and importance of the ‘I’ as a subject who both thinks and feels.
The new emphasis on the ‘I’ in romantic culture is consistently articulated in terms of the polarity or gulf between a subject (‘I feel’) and an object (the clouds, a skylark, a nightingale). The (impossible) desire for a fusion between subject and object (the idea for example of being, in Matthew Arnold’s words, ‘in harmony with nature’) is one of the most striking characteristics of the work of the English romantic poets. It is clear, for instance, in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, in which the speaker is eventually compelled to admit defeat in his attempt to fuse or dissolve into the nightingale’s song: the word ‘forlorn’ is ‘like a bell / To toll me back from thee to my sole self ’. This emphasis on the ‘sole self ’ broaches the notion of solipsism – that is to say the refusal or inabil- ity to believe in the reality of anything outside or beyond the self.
But as we hope will by now be clear, solipsism is a myth, a delusion or mirage. Solipsism presupposes the idea of something like what Wittgenstein calls a private language (Wittgenstein 1984). There is no such thing as a private lan- guage: the phrase ‘private language’ is an oxymoron. Language is social or, at least, language comes from elsewhere, from others and from otherness in general. Even to say, as a self-avowed solipsist might, ‘I do not believe in the reality of anything apart from myself ’, is to demonstrate a dependence on what is not ‘me’, not oneself. It is to demonstrate that one is subject to language. As the voice, or one of the voices, in The Unnamable puts it: ‘I’m in words, made of words, others’ words . . .’ (390).
But we could say that romantic and post-romantic literature has been increasingly sensitive to the role of otherness and increasingly aware of what might be described as our obligations in relation to otherness. Beckett’s writing is per- haps only the most philosophically refined recent example of post-romantic literature which is concerned to explore, deflate and transform our under- standing of the question, ‘Who do you think you are?’ In this respect his work might be seen to anticipate and encapsulate much of what is called poststruc- turalism. Poststructuralism demonstrates that the ‘I’ or human subject is neces- sarily decentred. It argues against the reductiveness (and even the possibility) of rationalism, in particular through its attention to what is other (though not simply ‘irrational’) as regards Western ‘rational’ thinking. And it persistently shows up the presumptuousness of the model of an autonomous, supposedly masterful human being, and thus points beyond ‘merely’ literary questions, exposing the barbarities of anthropocentrism in general.
But we could say that romantic and post-romantic literature has been increasingly sensitive to the role of otherness and increasingly aware of what might be described as our obligations in relation to otherness. Beckett’s writing is per- haps only the most philosophically refined recent example of post-romantic literature which is concerned to explore, deflate and transform our under- standing of the question, ‘Who do you think you are?’ In this respect his work might be seen to anticipate and encapsulate much of what is called poststruc- turalism. Poststructuralism demonstrates that the ‘I’ or human subject is neces- sarily decentred. It argues against the reductiveness (and even the possibility) of rationalism, in particular through its attention to what is other (though not simply ‘irrational’) as regards Western ‘rational’ thinking. And it persistently shows up the presumptuousness of the model of an autonomous, supposedly masterful human being, and thus points beyond ‘merely’ literary questions, exposing the barbarities of anthropocentrism in general.
We would like to conclude by trying to explore some of these ideas in rela- tion to Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. This novel, first published in 1987, is set in America, in the years leading up to and following the abolition of slavery. It is about the unspeakable reality of slavery, about ghosts and the way in which US culture continues to be haunted by the atrocities of its past. The narrat- ive of the novel rests on the dynamic of ghostly secrets and the untellable. ‘Beloved’ is a baby murdered by her mother, Sethe, because the mother sees death for her daughter as preferable to slavery; ‘Beloved’ is also a beautiful ‘shining’ ghost of a woman who, years later, haunts the lives of Sethe and her other daughter, Denver, and Sethe’s drifting partner Paul D. The novel, in its very title, is a ghost, or gathering of ghosts. Beloved is about what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin; to feel the baby blood pump like oil in [Sethe’s] hands; to hold her face so her head would stay on; to squeeze her so she could absorb, still, the death spasms that shot through that adored body, plump and sweet with life. (251)
This, 250 pages into the text, is the most ‘graphic’ description we are given of what nevertheless haunts the book from the title onwards. The haunting is inscribed in the passage just quoted, for example, in the eerie double sense of ‘still’ (as adverb ‘yet’ and verb ‘stop’): this gross moment is a still, stilled moment, caught in time, which still haunts, is still to be absorbed. On the final page of the novel we encounter the statement that ‘This is not a story to pass on’ (275). This statement suggests that the story should not or cannot be told, but also that it is not one we can pass by. The history of the United States is an untellable ghost story that must not, however, be forgotten. Every house in the US is a haunted house. As Baby Suggs says in grimly comic response to her
daughter-in-law Sethe’s suggestion that they vacate the baby-haunted house known only by its number (124):
Beloved is set in the nineteenth century and is faithful to the modes of ghost- liness, spirits, tele-culture and telecommunications available at that time: the text opens with an attempted exorcism and an instance of apparent telekinesis (‘The sideboard took a step forward but nothing else did’: 4); there are allu- sions to telegraphy and the recently invented Morse code (110), to ‘long- distance love’ (95) and even to photography (275). But in other ways Beloved is a profoundly contemporary novel, a work of the late twentieth century not only in style and form but also in terms of its conception and implacable analysis of ghosts. In particular, it is written out of or through a psychoana- lytically inflected understanding of deferred meaning, a sense of trauma as ghostly, as that which comes back again and again, which continues, haunt- ingly. Morrison’s novel is about the unspeakable not only now but in the future, slavery as a legacy still, not as something belonging to what we call the history books.
Marx in 1848 saw communism as ‘a spectre . . . haunting Europe’ (the famous opening words of The Communist Manifesto). One hundred and fifty years later, Derrida too sees communism as spectral. Hence its rapport with deconstruction. Deconstruction, as Derrida describes it, is concerned to think about the sense that ‘everyone reads, acts, writes with his or her ghosts’ (Derrida 1994, 139), to think about presence (and absence) as necessarily haunted, about meaning as spectralized. In these respects, deconstruction offers perhaps the most important contemporary theory of ghosts. Commun- ism is like democracy itself: ‘it has always been and will remain spectral: it is always still to come’ (Derrida 1994, 99).
“Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband’s spirit was to come back in here? or yours? Don’t talk to me” ’ (5).
Sexual difference
Patriarchy involves upholding the supposed priority of the male. In Gilman’s text, for example, John is the head (or patriarch) of the family, he makes the decisions and rules the household. The notion of phallocentrism, on the other hand, involves some of the more subtle, more symbolic and perhaps more funda- mental ways in which the phallus can be equated with power, authority, presence, and the right to possession. The ‘logo’ of ‘phallogocentrism’ points us towards the argument (promoted by theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray) that the very notions of truth, reason, rationality, the proper, meaning, etc. are phallocentric.
But what is most important about literary representations of gender is not merely that a particular text can be shown to be sexist or phallocentric, or even feminist. Rather it is that literary texts call into question many of our essentialist ideas about gender.
In other words it could be argued that there is no such thing as a feminist, or a masculinist or a sexist, literary work in itself: it all depends on how it is read.
‘Sexual difference’ involves not only difference between but difference within. We are, in Julia Kristeva’s phrase, ‘strangers to ourselves’ (Kristeva 1991). The Yellow Wallpaper could be seen to enact or allegorize this notion of difference within. That is to say, it subverts the idea of identity itself, in its presentation of a woman who is, in a sense, uncannily double, always already inhabited by another, in this case the woman behind the wallpaper. The text thus prompts us to ask: what is a woman (and conversely, what is a man) if she is double within herself ?
This sort of disruption or subversion of identity is further suggested at the level of writing itself. The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper presents herself as a writer. This is indicated in the passage we cited at the beginning of this chapter: ‘I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind.’ The narrator attests to her own ‘imaginative power and habit of story-making’ (15). With this in mind we could suggest the following hypothesis: wherever there is writing, sexual or gender identity becomes equivocal, questionable, open to transformation.
The word ‘demonic’ in this context is significantly ambiguous and is best left that way: a demon is ‘an evil spirit’ or ‘devil’, but can also be ‘a friendly spirit or good genius’ (Chambers). To argue that literature has an evil streak is not to imply a moral denunciation of literary works any more than it is to provide support for the liberalist notion that reading literature makes you a better person. Literary texts are dangerous. No one, we might suggest, can be more palpably aware of this fact than the author of The Satanic Verses (1988) who, following the novel’s publication, notoriously became subject to a fatwa (a death sentence pronounced by a Muslim judicial authority). Reading literary texts engages us, in a disturbing but creative and singular way, in the obligation to ‘think the evil for oneself ’. The paradoxically creative force of evil in literary texts is what makes them in turn the exemplary space for experiencing the undecidable and for thinking about ethics. Far from being immoral or even amoral, literature involves us in what Bataille calls a ‘hypermorality’ (Bataille 1985, ix). It con- fronts us with questions which call for different kinds of decision-making and critical responsibilities. Is The Satanic Verses an evil work? Is it any more evil than Paradise Lost, say, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris (1935)? To rush to decisions in response to such questions is to turn a blind eye to the enigmatic powers of the literary and to ignore what could be called its peculiar ethical imperative.
But the lecture then moves on to cast doubt on this idea that nothing is sacred. Rushdie suggests that he may be obliged
‘to set aside as holy the idea of the absolute freedom of the imagination and a
longside it [his] own notions of the World, the Text and the Good’ (5). He goes on to speculate on the idea that art can and must offer us something like ‘a secular definition of transcendence’ where transcendence is defined as ‘that flight of the human spirit outside the confines of its material, physical existence which all of us, secular or religious, experience on at least a few occasions’ (7).
Finally Rushdie withdraws and appears to want to retract these earlier claims about art and, in particular, literature. He declares:
‘now I find myself backing away from the idea of sacralizing literature with which I flirted at the beginning of this text; I cannot bear the idea of the writer as secular prophet’ (14).
