Critical Quotes

2008-08-18T12:59:00.001-07:00

Butler, Judith. “Subversive Bodily Acts.” 1990. (Chapter 3 from Gender Trouble). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 2488-2501.

Norton intro to Butler

to explore how gendered identity is socially produced through repetitions of ordinary daily activities. Her goal is to uncover the assumptions that “restrict the meaning of gender to received notions of masculinity and femininity.” In opening up “the field of possibility for gender,” Butler aims for a feminism that avoids “exclusionary gender norms” in its portrayal of acceptable identities. 2485

Key for Butler is the insistence that nothing is natural, not even sexual identity. 2485

Following Foucault’s work in The History of Sexuality (1976), Butler stresses that modern culture sees sexuality as a fundamental constituent of identity. Our sex and sexual desires and activities are profound indices of who we are. Butler hopes—like many contemporary critical theorists—to reveal that the seemingly “natural” is actually socially constructed and, thus, contingent. The established and conventional connections between anatomy and desire, and between sexual activities and ascriptions of identity, are not inevitable; they have been different in other cultures and in other historical eras, and they are open to revision or, to use on of Butler’s favorite words, “resignification.” The meanings and categories by which we understand and live our daily existence can be altered. 2485

For Foucault, discourse (the articulated categories of thought) orders knowledge along lines that produce subjects open to power’s control. Such power, he stresses, works at the level of daily routine. For Lacan, individuals achieve an identity, a recognized place in the social order, by passing into the Law (the culture’s signifying order)—at the cost of creating the unconscious and establishing a permanent split, an alienation of self from desire, within the subject. 2485

But Austin realized that some utterances are creative: they make something come into existence, rather than referring to something that already exists. Anyone who makes a promise, or a judge who sentences someone to prison, creates a fact (the promise, the sentence) through the act of speaking. Such speech acts are performatives. 2486

An utterance that departs too far from received understandings will be incomprehensible. But exact repetition does not occur very often either. After all, we are using the old words in new contexts. Each separate use of a word tweaks it in this or that direction in relation to a variety of pressures: the context, the audience, conscious or unconscious purposes. 2486

The little boy learns that his crying is not masculine; he must grow into his masculinity by imitating the behavior designated as “male” to the point that such behavior becomes “second nature.” The little girl learns that some ways of acting make her a tomboy, and she is encouraged to dress the part of “femininity.” In Butler’s view, we feel our way into these roles, slowly establishing (under the watchful eyes of powerful social forces) the way we will occupy them. Given our prevailing categories, we experience this process as discovering our identity. Butler believes identity is a trap, a hardening into rigid, binarized categories of much more fluid and heterogeneous possibilities. She calls for actions that will “resignify” our received meanings—actions that will lead to a “proliferation” of the “constitutive categories” into which all selves are now constrained to fit. 2486

Thus, while Butler’s work grows out of feminism, she is against any “identity politics” that sees political groupings and beliefs as grounded in a shared identity, whether ethnic, racial, sexual, national, or economic. All forms of identity politics, she believes, are prone to aggressions used to enforce rigid consistencies. 2487

At the end of Gender Trouble, Butler advocates parody in general and drag performances in particular because such “subversive” performances “destabilize the naturalized categories of identity and desire. 2487

From Butler:

To expose the foundational categories of sex, gender, and desire as effects of a specific formation of power requires a form of critical inquiry that Foucault, reformulating Nietzsche, designates as “genealogy.” A genealogical critique refuses to search for the origins of gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic sexual identity that repression has kept from view; rather, genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin. The task of this inquiry is to center on—and decenter—such defining institutions: phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality. 2490

Categories of true sex, discrete gender, and specific sexuality have constituted the stable point of reference for a great deal of feminist theory and politics. These constructs of identity serve as the points of epistemic departure from which theory emerges and politics itself is shaped. In the case of feminism, politics is ostensibly shaped to express the interests, the perspectives, of “women.” But is there a political shape to “women,” as it were, that precedes and prefigures the political elaboration of their interests and epistemic point of view? 2490

Even within Foucault’s essay on the very theme of genealogy, the body is figured as a surface and the scene of a cultural inscription: “the body is the inscribed surface of events.” The task of genealogy, he claims, is “to expose a body totally imprinted by history.” 2491

In a sense, for Foucault, as for Nietzsche, cultural values emerge as the result of an inscription on the body, understood as a medium, indeed, a blank page; in order for this inscription to signify, however, that medium must itself be destroyed—that is, fully transvaluated into a sublimated domain of values. Within the metaphorics of this notion of cultural values is the figure of history as a relentless writing instrument, and the body as the medium which must be destroyed and transfigured in order for “culture” to emerge. 2492

By maintaining a body prior to its cultural inscription, Foucault appears to assume a materiality prior to signification and form. Because this distinction operates as essential to the task of genealogy as he defines it, the distinction itself is precluded as an object of genealogical investigation. 2492

If the presumption of some kind of precategorial source of disruption is refused, is it still possible to give a genealogical account of the demarcation of the body as such as a signifying practice? 2492

The construction of the stable bodily contours relies upon fixed sites of corporeal permeability and impermeability. Those sexual practices in both homosexual and heterosexual contexts that open surfaces and orifices to erotic signification or close down others effectively reinscribe the boundaries of the body along new cultural lines. 2494

Significantly, Kristeva’s discussion of abjection in The Powers of Horror begin to suggest the uses of this structuralist notion of a boundary-constituting taboo for the purposes of constructing a discrete subject through exclusion. The “abject” designates that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered “Other.” This appears as an expulsion of alien elements, but the alien is effectively established through this expulsion. The construction of the “not-me” as the abject establishes the boundaries of the body which are also the first contours of the subject. 2494

Regardless of the compelling metaphors of the spatial distinctions of inner and outer, they remain linguistic terms that facilitate and articulate a set of fantasies, feared and desired. “Inner” and “outer” make sense only with reference to a mediating boundary that strives for stability. And this stability, this coherence, is determined in large part by cultural orders that sanction the subject and compel its differentiation from the abject. Hence, “inner” and “outer” constitute a binary distinction that stabilizes and consolidates the coherent subject. 2495

When that subject is challenged, the meaning and necessity of the terms are subject to displacement. If the “inner world” no longer designates a topos, then the internal fixity of the self and, indeed, the internal locale of gender identity, become similarly suspect. The critical question is not how did that identity become internalized? As if internalization were a process or mechanism that might be descriptively reconstructed. Rather, the question is: From what strategic position in public discourse and for what reasons has the trope of interiority and the disjunctive binary of inner/outer taken hold? In what language is “inner space” figured? What kind of figuration is it, and through what figure of the body is it signified? How does a body figure on its surface the very invisibility of its hidden depth? 2495In a sense, Discipline and Punish can be read as Foucault’s effort to rewrite Nietzsche’s doctrine of internalization in On the Genealogy of Morals on the model of inscription. In the context of prisoners, Foucault writes, the strategy has been not to enforce a repression of their desires, but to compel their bodies to signify the prohibitive law as their very essence, style, and necessity. 2496

The construction of coherence conceals the gender discontinuities that run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, and gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire, or sexuality generally, does not seem to follow from gender—indeed, where none of these dimensions of significant corporeality express or reflect one another. When the disorganization and disaggregation of the field of bodies disrupt the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence, it seems that the expressive model loses its descriptive force. That regulatory ideal is then exposed as a norm and a fiction that disguises itself as a developmental law regulating the sexual field that it purports to describe. 2497

Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the “integrity” of the subject. 2497

If the “cause” of desire, gesture, and act can be localized within the “self” of the actor, then the political regulations and disciplinary practices which produce that ostensibly coherent gender are effectively displaced from view. The displacement of a political and discursive origin of gender identity onto a psychological “core” precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject and its fabricated notions about the ineffable interiority of its sex or of its true identity. 2497

I would suggest as well that drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of true gender identity. Newton writes:

At its most complex, [drag] is a double inversion that says, “appearance is an illusion.” Drag says [Newtown’s curious personification] “my ‘outside’ appearance is feminine, but my essence ‘inside’ [the body] is masculine.” At the same time it symbolizes the opposite inversion; “my appearance / ‘outside’ [my body, my gender] is masculine but my essence ‘inside’ [myself] is feminine.”

Both claims to truth contradict one another and so displace the entire enactment of gender signification from the discourse of truth and falsity. 2498

But we are actually in presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance. 2498

In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency. 2498

The notion of gender parody defended here does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original; just as the psychoanalytic notion of gender identification is constituted by a fantasy of a fantasy, the transfiguration of an Other who is always already a “figure” in that double sense, so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin. To be more precise, it is a production which, in effect—that in its effect—postures as an imitation. 2498

Although the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic recontextualization. As imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself. In the place of an original identification which serves as a determining cause, gender identity might be reconceived as a personal/cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally to other imitations and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self or parody the mechanism of that construction. 2499

Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony. 2499

Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an “act,” as it were, which is both intentional / and performative, where “performative” suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning. 2500

Discrete genders are part of what “humanizes” individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right. Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions—and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them; the construction “compels” our belief in its necessity and naturalness. The historical possibilities materialized through various corporeal styles are nothing other than those punitively regulated cultural fictions alternately embodied and deflected under duress. 2500

Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and style of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality. 2501

Gender is also a norm that can never be fully internalized; “the internal” is a surface signification, and gender norms are finally phantasmatic, impossible to embody. 2501

The possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction. 2501

2008-08-18T12:56:00.000-07:00

Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter Fifth Edition. New York: Norton, 1999.

American Prose since 1945

The first two—and only two—atomic bombs were exploded in Japan in August 1945; their effect was so horrific that a strategy of geographical “containment” emerged as a military policy. 2261

In the years following World War II the U.S.S.R. had assumed a stance considered adversarial to Western interests. Ideologically, the opposition was between Western capitalism and Soviet state socialism; militarily, the contest exhibited itself in the West’s rebuilding of Germany and the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) versus the Soviet Union’s influence over Eastern Europe’s nations by means of the Warsaw Pact. Geopolitically, the U.S.S.R. sponsored the formation of socialist governments in what became known as its satellite nations of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, separated by what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill characterized as an Iron Curtain inhibiting contact with the democracies of Western Europe. 2262

By the end of the 1970s some characteristics of the previous decade’s countercultural revolt had been accepted in the mainstream, including informalities of dress, relaxation of sexual codes of behavior, and an increased respect for individual rights. The 1980s experienced a call for traditional values, which were interpreted not as a / return to community and self-sacrifice but as the pursuit of wealth. During the presidency of Ronald Reagan incomes rose while taxes fell; the Sixties’ distrust of government mutated into a defense of personal acquisition. 2264

Economically, American boomed, but in new ways: manufacturing dominance was replaced by service efficiency . . . 2264

[writers wanting to be like Hemingway] Hence the desire to write what was called “the great American novel,” a major work that would characterize the larger aspects of experience. Ambitions were not simply to write a war novel, for example, but the war novel; not just a work about corporate big business, but something that generalized the subject for all times. Regionalism could remain an interest, but only if it provided deeper meaning; here the example of William Faulkner encouraged the belief among younger writers that dealing with the American South meant grappling with monumental issues of guilt and the inexorable power of history. 2265

The first such challenge was the “death of the novel” controversy, sparked by some writers’ sense that social reality had become too unstable to serve as a reliable anchor for their narratives and fueled by certain critics’ conviction that fiction had exhausted its formal possibilities. The short story and the novel, it was argued, demanded a set of fairly limited conventions; these conventions, such as characterization and development by means of dialogue, imagery, and symbolism, however, relied on a securely describable world to make sense. 2265

As boundaries of time and space were eclipsed by television, air travel, and an accompanying global awareness, the once essential unities of representation (time, space, and action) no longer provided ground on which to build a work of literary art. 2265

A parallel development in literary theory posed another great threat to conventional literature. Known as “Deconstruction” and brought to American shores from France by means of a series of university conferences and academic publication beginning in 1966, this style of criticism questioned the underlying assumptions behind any statement, exposing how what was accepted as absolute truth usually depended on rhetoric rather than fact, exposing indeed how “fact” itself was constructed by intellectual operations. 2265

New Journalism, which held that characterization, imagery, symbol, and the like were no longer the exclusive province of fiction but appropriate tools for an improved journalism. One of Deconstruction’s / claims was that there is no absolute objectivity; every author, journalist or not, writes from a point of view whose perspective carries with it any number o colorings and biases. Why not capitalize on that perspective—be honest about it, and report not so much the event as the writer’s place in it? 2266

The second development involved not transposing the conventions of fiction to another medium but discarding them as completely as completely as possible. The beginnings of this movement involved rejecting the principal convention of traditional fiction, the suspension of disbelief that enabled an invented story to be presented as factual. By emphasizing their own presence as creators of the tale and making their main subject the procedures by which their narratives were brought into being, writers of Metafiction (as the form was called) sidestepped objections from both the Deconstructions and the Death of the Novel critics. There were no false illusions in Metafiction; what you saw was what you got, a literary work representing nothing other than itself. The value of such work lay in the author, not the tale: how interesting the writer could make the process, how much evidence of imagination and intelligence and creative personality showed through. 2266

Consider the approaches taken to a common figure, the salesperson, by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman (1949) and David Mamet in Glengarry Glen Ross (1984). The older playwright poses his character struggling to articulate his identity as an antihero, fighting to keep his head above water in a world so powerful as to overwhelm him. Four decades later, David Mamet’s sales staff is awash in a tide of language, their slick talking managing to submerge all traces of reality in a realty world built on illusive premises; as long as a character can talk, he survives. 2267

Challenged by new understanding of how reality is constructed, literary realism is transformed. John Cheever’s The Swimmer takes recourse to the magical to express what in an earlier time might have been a sociologically and psychologically inclined story. 2268

2008-08-17T11:15:00.000-07:00

Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter Fifth Edition. New York: Norton, 1999.

American Literature between the Wars, 1914-1945

The modern temper was also shaped by forces internal to the United States that had long been at work but whose pace quickened between the wars. Urbanization, industrialization, immigration—these general terms encapsulate huge demographic shifts in the nation: from country to city, from farm to factory, from native-born to new citizen. Technological evolution was another part of the mix. The telephone and electricity, nineteenth-century inventions, now expanded into American homes at large. They made life more comfortable and interesting for many and changed the nature of the gap between better- and worse-off Americans. Those without electricity and phones were, literally, out of the network. The phonograph record and the record / player—devices for playing recorded music—the motion picture, which acquired sound in 1929, and the radio made for a new kind of connectedness, and a new kind of culture, which we call mass or popular culture. Television and the computer did not arrive on the scene until the end of World War II. 1800

By far the most powerful technological influence between the wars came from the automobile. 1800

Back in the 1830s, the French social commentator Alexis de Tocqueville pointed to continual movement, lack of tradition, and rootlesssness as characteristics of American life. Now it could be more truly said than ever before that the United States was a nation, not so much of immigrants, but of migrants. 1800

Just as the interwar period has authentic historical specificity, so too does each of the two decades it encompasses, the 1920s and the 1930s. In 1929 the New York stock market crashed (in fact, the crash was worldwide), putting millions of Americans out of work and obliterating the life savings of many others. Throughout the 1930s, Americans struggled to restore or restructure the nation’s economy. The 1920s saw great struggles over such concerns as personal freedom, social permissiveness, the pursuit of pleasure, and the results of new affluence. 1800

The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, forbidding the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors” was ratified in January 1919. It was widely and openly ignored. Some historians believe that Prohibition opened the door to organized crime, and certainly the phenomenon of the “gangster” arose in the 1920s in connection with bootleg liquor, which organized crime was ready to transport and supply to otherwise law-abiding citizens. The amendment was finally perceived to be unenforceable and was repealed in 1933. The gangster, however, persisted in American life and became a central figure, sometimes a hero, sometimes a villain, int eh movies and in the hard-boiled fiction of the 1930s. 1800

The 1920s also saw significant changes in sexual mores. The middle-class double-standard had always granted considerable sexual freedom to men; now women—enfranchised politically by the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed in August 1920 after more than seventy years of suffragist agitation, and also liberated by automobiles and new job possibilities—began to deman similar freedoms for themselves. The demand went far beyond erotic behavior: it encompassed education, professional work, mobility, and whatever else seemed like a social benefit reserved / for men alone. 1801

The 1920s was also a decade in which African Americans made themselves a permanent part of the nation’s cultural life. In 1915, as a direct result of the industrial needs of World War I, opportunities opened for African Americans in the factories of the North, and the so-called Great Migration out of the South began. Once in the North, African Americans faced the problems of adjusting from rural to urban ways, problems vastly compounded by racism, by segregated occupations and neighborhoods. Still, there was comparative economic improvement and an increase in personal freedom for African Americans who went north. 1801

Visitors to the Soviet Union returned with glowing reports about a true workers’ democracy and prosperity for all. The appeal of communism was significantly enhanced by its claim to be an opponent of fascism. 1801

But Soviet communism showed another side to Americans when Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator, instituted a series of brutal purges in the Soviet Union beginning in 1936 and then in 1939 signed a pact promising not to go to war against Germany. 1801

The most important development in the period before the wars was certainly the growth of modern science. At the turn of the century and soon afterward scientists became aware that the atom was not the smallest possible unit of matter, that matter was not indestructible, that both time and space were relative to an observer’s position, that some phenomena were so small that attempts at measurement would alter them, that some outcomes could be predicted only in terms of statistical probability, that the universe might be infinite in size and yet infinitely expanding; in short, much of the commonsense basis of nineteenth-century science had to be put aside in favor of far more powerful but also far more complicated theories. Among many results, scientists and literary intellectuals became less and less able to communicate with each other and less respectful of each others’ worldview. 1802

Scientists saw literary people as careless thinkers; literary people, especially the more conservative among them, deplored the loss of authority for traditional, humanistic explanations of the real, concrete, experienced world and the felt human life. 1802

The two thinkers whose ideas had the greatest impact on the period were the Austrian Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and the German Karl Marx (1818-1883), both of whom tried to create far-reaching sciences of the human. 1802

Marx provided an analysis of human behavior opposed to Freud’s, yet both seemed to espouse a kind of determinism that, although counter to long-standing American beliefs in free will and free choice, also seemed better able to explain the terrible things that were happening in the twentieth century. 1802

In the 1920s American Marxists, Socialists, anarchists, and radicals, along with union organizers, were often subject to violence. The most dramatic instance of this was the so-called Sacco-Vanzetti case. 1803

modernism. Used in the broadest sense, it is a catchall phrase for any kind of literary production in the interwar period that deals with the modern world. More narrowly, it refers to work that represents the breakdown of traditional society under the pressures of modernity. Much modernist literature of this sort (which critics now call “high modernism”) is actually antimodern; it interprets modernity as an experience of loss. As one can tell from its title, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land—the great poem of the movement—represents the modern world as a scene of ruin. 1803

The American public was introduced to modern art at the famous New York Armory Show of 1913, which featured cubist paintings and caused an uproar. 1803

At the heart of the modernist aesthetic lay the conviction that the previously sustaining structures of human life, whether social, political, religious, or artistic, had been either destroyed of shown up as falsehoods or fantasies. To the extent that art incorporated such a false order, it had to be renovated. Order, sequence, and unity in works of art might well be considered only expressions of a desire for coherence rather than actual reflections of reality. Generalization, abstraction, and high-flown writing might conceal rather than convey the real. The form of a story, with its beginnings, complications, and resolutions, might be mere artifice imposed on the flux and fragmentation of experience. 1803

The subject matter of modernist writing often became, by extensions, the poem or literary work itself. Ironically—because this subject matter was motivated by deep concern about the interrelation of literature and life—this subject often had the effect of limiting the audience for a modernist work. The difficulty of this new type of writing also limited the appeal of modernism: clearly, difficult works about poetry are not candidates for best-sellers. Nevertheless, over time, the principles of modernism became increasingly influential. 1804

The inclusion of all sorts of material previously deemed “unliterary” in works of high seriousness involved the use of language that would also previously have been thought improper, including representations of the speech of the uneducated and the inarticulate, the colloquial, slangy, and the popular. The traditional educated literary voice, conveying truth and culture, lots its authority; this is what Ernest Hemingway had in mind when he asserted that the American literary tradition began with Huckleberry Finn. 1804

The reading audience in America was vast, but it preferred a kind of book quite different from that turned out by literary modernists: tales of romance or adventure, historical novels, crime fiction, and westerns became popular modes that enjoyed a success the serious writer could only dream of. The problem was that often he or she did dream of it; unrealistically, perhaps, the Ezra Pounds of the era imagined themselves with an audience of millions. When, on occasion, this dream came true—as it did for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—writers often accused themselves of having sold out. 1805

Because modernism was an international movement, it seemed to some to conflict with the American tradition in literature and hence was by no means automatically accepted by American writers. To some, the frequent pessimism, nostalgia, and conservatism of the movement made it essentially unsuited to the progressive, dynamic culture that they believed to be distinctive of this nation. To many others, modernist techniques were exciting and indispensable but required adaptation to specifically American topics and to the goal of contributing to a uniquely American literature. Thus artists who may be thought of as modernists in one context—Hart Crane or William Carlos Williams, for example—must be thought of as traditional American writers in another, since they wanted to write “American” works as such. And a profoundly modern writer like William Faulkner cannot be extricated from his commitment to writing about his native South. 1805

expatriates like Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H. D., and T. S. Eliot . . . these writers left the United States because they found the country singularly lacking in a tradition of high culture and indifferent, if not downright hostile, to artistic achievement. They also believed that a national culture could never be more than parochial. 1806

Those writers who came back, however, and those who never left took very seriously the task of integrating modernist ideas and methods with American subject matter. Many writers chose to identify themselves with the American scene and to root their work in a specific region. 1806

Something akin to regionalism can be seen in the surge of literary expressiveness of black Americans. In the 1920s the area of New York City called Harlem, whose population had been swelled both by black New Yorkers moving “uptown” and by southern newcomers, became a center for black cultural activities. The so-called Harlem Renaissance involved the attempt of African American artists in many media to develop a strong cultural presence in America, both to demonstrate that black artists could equal white artists in their achievements and to articulate their own cultural traditions and values. 1806

Healthy changes in American theater are often in reaction against Broadway, a pattern observable as early as 1915 with the formation of the Washington Square Players and the Provincetown Players, both located in New York’s Greenwich Village and both dedicated to the production of plays that more conservative managers refused. The Provincetown Players would short be producing the first works of Eugene O’Neill. 1808

[O’Neill] experimented less in language than in dramatic structure and in new production methods available through technology (e. g., lighting) or borrowed from the stylized realism of German expressionism. 1808

2008-08-16T19:17:00.000-07:00

Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter Fifth Edition. New York: Norton, 1999.

American Literature, 1865-1914

The result was that between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I the country was wholly transformed. Before the Civil War, white American had been essentially a rural, agrarian, isolated republic most of whose idealistic, confident, and self-reliant inhabitants believed in a Protestant God. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, it was an industrialized, urbanized, continental world power forced to deal with some of the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution as well as with profound changes in social institutions and cultural values. Increasingly, it would be obliged to acknowledge (if not to remedy) racism that emancipation had not eradicated, military expansionism initiated by the war of aggression against Mexico in 1846-48, and the policy of Indian removal that was a prominent fact of its pre-Civil War life. 1241

Some of this urban growth was the result of population shifts from country to cities, but even more of these new urban dwellers were immigrants. 1242

During his long literary career, James evolved from a recognizably “realistic” writer to one concerned with the complexities of the inner life and the instability of subjective perceptions on which meaning-making depends. No small part of the pleasure in reading The Ambassadors (1903), for example, comes from observing the deepening perception and subtle but certain growth of its protagonist, Lambert Strether. James’s fiction still makes demands on readers even after many of his innovations—stream of consciousness, limited point of view, and so forth—have become commonplace. But as the continuous flow of first-rate criticism of James suggests, the taste for his fiction is worth acquiring. 1245

Broadly speaking, realism is used to characterize a movement in European, English, and American literature that gathered force from the 1830s to the end of the century. As defined by William Dean Howells, who not only practiced realism but argued powerfully in support of its esthetic and ethical rightness, realism “is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” While this definition does not answer every question that may be raised about truth, treatment, or even about material, it offers a useful point of departure. When Henry James, in the letter quoted above, spoke of the “documentary” value of Howells’s oeuvre, he called attention to realism’s fascination with the physical surfaces, the particularities of the sensate world in which fictional characters lived. 1246

This same novel illustrates another aspect of American literary realism—its tendency to select “representative” or ordinary characters—characters one might meet on the street without noticing them. Unlike their romantic counterparts, they don’t walk with a limp, their eyes don’t blaze, they don’t emanate diabolical power. 1246

To verisimilitude of setting and ordinariness of characters living conventional lives as markers of realism, we may add the use of a point of view that reduces authorial intrusion. In Lapham the proportion of dialogue—all of it attempting to render accurately the spoken language of individuals—is very high. And on occasions when the author intrudes, he or she does so in plain language and simple syntax. 1247

Naturalism is commonly understood as an extension or intensification of realism. The intensification involves the introduction of characters of a kind only occasionally to be found in the fiction of Howells, James, or Wharton—characters from the fringes and lower depths of contemporary society, characters whose fates are the product of degenerate heredity, a sordid environment, and a good deal of bad luck. 1248

One of the most far-reaching intellectual events of the last half of the nineteenth century was the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. This book, together with his Descent of Man (1870), hypothesized on the basis of massive physical evidence that over the millennia humans had evolved from “lower” forms of life. Humans were special, not—as the Bible taught—because God had created them in his image, but because they had successfully adapted to changing environmental conditions and had passed on their survival-making characteristics. 1248

They were all concerned on the one hand to explore new territories—the pressures of biology, environment, and other material forces—in making people, particularly lower-class people, who they were. 1249

Regional writing, another expression of the realistic impulse, resulted from the desire both to preserve distinctive ways of life before industrialization dispersed or homogenized them and to come to terms with the harsh realities that seemed to replace these early and allegedly happier times. At a more practical level, much of the writing was a response to the rapid growth of magazines, which created a new, largely female market for short fiction along with correlated opportunities for women writers. 1251

Kate Chopin, not unlike Samuel L. Clemens, may be thought of as a regional writer interested in preserving the customs, language, and landscapes of a region of the south. We have no better record of antebellum lower Mississippi River Valley than Clemens provided in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, and Chopin’s short stories and her novel The Awakening pick up, almost literally, / where Clemens’s books leave off—in the northern Louisiana countryside and, downriver, in New Orleans. 1251-52

so too does Chopin, in The Awakening, give us unique access to the interior life of a Protestant woman wakening to her oppressions and repressions in the context of a Catholic community still marked by less conscience-stricken Old World attitudes. That The Awakening also has crystallized many women’s issues of the turn of the century and since is testimony to the potential for regional realism to give the lie to attempts to derogate it as a genre. 1252

Chesnutt’s black people, by contrast, are clearly post-Civil War in outlook; even if they live on plantations, they are as much concerned to serve their own interests as they are to please their “master.” 1252

2008-08-16T18:37:00.000-07:00

Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter Fifth Edition. New York: Norton, 1999.

American Literature, 1820-1865

Gender differences in literary knowledge were more obvious than regional differences, for at least into the middle of the century efforts were made to censor the / reading of girls and young women. 410

and even in the next generation Emily Dickinson read fiction against her father’s wishes. 410

Early calls for the existence of an American literature were altered by the popularity in the United States of Sir Walter Scott, first as the author of widely read poems such as The Lady of the Lake, then, decisively, as a historical novelist. After 1814, when he published Waverly anonymously, Scott produced a new novel almost every year. Until the secret authorship was revealed in 1826, the novels were ascribed to “The author of Waverly” or, by reviewers, to “the Great Unknown.” In the United States, where a new novel by the author of Waverly was almost a national event, literary critics and aspiring novelists instantly saw the appeal of Scott’s use of historical settings and his creating imagined scenes in which real historical people intermingled with fictional characters. Scott’s example not only made the novel a respectable, even elevated, genre, it had much to do with redirecting the literary efforts of ambitious Americans from epic poetry to prose fiction. 410

Scott marks shift from poetry to prose / esp. historical novels / in American fiction

From adolescence Hawthorne was steeped in Scott . . . 411

Before the midcentury, when every up-to-date American read Dickens, every literate American read Scott, and all appeals for the creation of a great American literature were infused with the knowledge that Scott had invented an infinitely adaptable genre of historical fiction. 411

Washington Irving, beloved by ordinary readers and by most of his fellow writers, was the central American literary figure between 1809 and 1859. 411

Despite the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803 and the vast southwest from Mexico in 1848 . . . 414

Through almost all the century, American printers routinely pirated English writers, paying nothing to Sir Walter Scott or Charles Dickens or later writers for their novels, which were rushed into print and sold very cheaply; but American writers suffered, because if they were to receive royalties, their books had to be priced above the prices charged for works of the most famous British writers. 416

In Amherst, Emily Dickinson out-Thoreaued Thoreau in her resolute privacy, idiosyncracies, and individuality. 417

Despite such powerful individualists, it seemed to some of the writers that Americans, even while deluding themselves that they were the most self-reliant populace in the world, were systematically selling out their individualities. Emerson sounded the alarm: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. 417

Thoreau repeatedly satirized America as a nation of joiners that tried to force every newcomer “to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society”: to Thoreau, members of the Odd Fellows and other social organizations were simply not odd enough, not individual enough. 417

All the major writers found themselves at odds with the dominant religion of their time, a Protestant Christianity that exerted practical control over what could be printed in books and magazines. 418

This church, Emerson said, acted “as if God were dead.” Whitman, bred as a Quaker, was even more bitter toward all Protestant churches: “The churches are one vast lie; the people do not believe them, and they do not believe themselves.” Still, the writers all came from Protestant backgrounds in which Calvinism was more or less watered down (less so in the cases of Melville and Dickinson), and they knew their theology. 418

Awareness of the faction of religious ecstasy was not at issue. Emerson, for instance, showed in The Over-Soul a clinical sense of the varieties of religious experience, the “varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the universal soul.” Similarly, Thoreau acknowledged the validity of the “second birth and peculiar religious experience” available to the “solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord” but felt that any religious denomination in America would pervert that mystical experience into something available only under its auspices and in accordance with its particular doctrines. 418

By the end of the Civil War many native-born American whites shared Stowe’s profound nostalgia for the days before the railroads, before the influx of Catholics, before the even more alien influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, few of whom spoke English and many of whom were not Christian at all. 420

The major writers of the period lived with the anguishing paradox that the most idealistic nation in the world was implicated in continuing national sins: the near-genocide of the American Indians (whole tribes in colonial times had already become, in Melville’s erroneous phrase for the Massachusetts Pequots, as extinct as the ancient Medes), the enslavement of blacks, and (partly a by-product of slavery) the staged “Executive’s War” against Mexico, started by President Polk before being declared by Congress. Emerson was an exception, but most writers were silent about the successive removal of eastern Indian tribes to less desirable lands west of the Mississippi River, as legislated by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. American destiny plainly required a little practical callousness, most whites felt, in a secular version of the colonial notion that God had willed the extirpation of the American Indian. The imperialistic Mexican War was so gaudily exotic—and so distant—that only a small minority of American writers voiced more than perfunctory opposition; an exception was Thoreau, who spent a night in the Concord jail in symbolic protest against being taxed to support the war. 420

Lincoln was not wholly teasing if in fact he called Stowe “the little woman had started the big war.” 421

and Douglass’s oratory had revealed to many white Northerners a sense of the evils of slavery and the humanness of those of another race (or of mixed races). 421

In the young country, Emerson’s fellow writers fervently shared his conviction that “nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. 423

2008-08-16T17:57:00.000-07:00

Abrams, M. H., and Stephen Greenblatt. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Volume 1. New York: Norton, 2000.

The Early Seventeenth Century, 1603-1660

When Queen Elizabeth died on March 24, 1603, after more than four decades on the throne, her kinsman James VI of Scotland succeeded her as James I of England without the disruptions or attempted coups that had been feared. 1209

But there was also cause for unease, as the nation saw itself exchanging an English Deborah, whom God had favored with a miraculous victory over the Spanish Armada and who had declared herself married to her people, for an aloof Scotsman with a foreign entourage that might displace English place-seekers. 1209

terms suited to his [James’s] patriarchal and absolutist style. 1210

They span the centuries (roughly 1500—1700) that scholars refer to as the Renaissance when they mean to emphasize breaks with medieval culture and the Early Modern Period when they mean to emphasize seeds of the modern world. Nor do authors’ lives and careers neatly conform to the conventional periods. Shakespeare wrote his great tragedies and romances in James I’s reign; Donne wrote his elegies, satires, and some love poems in the last decade of Queen Elizabeth’s. Milton completed Paradise Lost and wrote two other major poems in the 1660s. 1210

The Stuart kings, James I and his son Charles I, were unable to do this, engaging in constant confrontations with their Parliaments / and subject over taxes, religion, unpopular ministers, and parliamentary rights. Elizabeth did not try to define precisely how power is divided in what was usually described as a “mixed” government of Monarch, Lords, and Commons. James, while yet in Scotland, published two arguments for royal absolutism. The True Law of Free Monarchies (1597) and Basilikon Doran (1598). These works, both reissued in 1603, proclaim the divine right of kings as God’s deputies and as fathers of their people and explain that monarchs are “free” in that they are accountable only to God. A series of analogies is seen to structure a patriarchal social order: as God is absolute ruler of the universe, so is the king of his people and the father of his family. 1211

Such sentiments, not surprisingly, gave rise to widespread rumors of homosexual activities at court. The rumors are certainly plausible, thought the surviving evidence of same-sex relationships in Early Modern England is extremely difficult to interpret. Sodomy was a crime punishable by death, but prosecutions were extremely rare. English law simply declined to recognize the possibility of lesbian acts. From Shakespeare’s sonnets to James’s letters, we find avowals of love and desire between men which may sometimes be formal expressions of affection based on classical models, or, alternatively, expressions of passionate physical and spiritual love. 1211

The discovery and thwarting of the “Gunpowder Plot” in 1605, in which Guy Fawkes and a band of Roman Catholic conspirators plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament and seize control of the government, unified English Protestants in a wave of anti-Catholic sentiment and support for the monarch. James, it seemed, had been preserved by a divine miracle even as Elizabeth had been by the defeat of the Armada. Also, the king’s sponsorship of the so-called King James Bible (the Authorized Version, 1611) was a powerful force for Protestant unity. 1212

From the other side, Puritans, as they were disparagingly called, pressed for more reformation in doctrine, ritual, and especially in church government, so as to bring the English church into closer conformity with the Presbyterian Church organization in Geneva, as established by the Protestants reformer John Calvin. 1212

The appointment in 1633 of William Laud as archbishop of Canterbury, the ecclesiastical head of the English Church, proved to be a watershed event. Throughout the 1630s Laud promoted the rapid growth of a high Anglican faction within the church, conforming its ceremony, ritual, and doctrine more closely to Roman Catholicism. 1213

Donne was especially fond of the macrocosm/microcosm parallel according to which the human being is seen as “a little world” or recapitulation of the world itself; and almost everyone believed in some version of the “chain” of being that links and orders all species hierarchically. 1214

But this system [chain of being], with it’s a priori assumptions and reliance upon ancient authority, was challenged by Francis Bacon’s new emphasis on scientific method, as well as by actual experiments such as William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood and Galileo’s telescope, which supplied evidence confirming the Copernican astronomy. Galileo dislodged the earth from its former fixed and stable position at the center of the cosmos and, in defiance of all ordinary observation, sent it whirling around the sun; he also found evidence of change and corruption in the heavens and advanced mind-boggling speculations about life on other planets and infinite universes. Donne, like other writers of his age, responded to the new ideas, giving voice to the anxieties they produced in his Anatomy of the World:

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The element of fire is quite put out;

The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit

Can well direct him where to look for it.

1215

Gifted Church of England preachers like Donne . . . called on all the resources of artful rhetoric and elegant style to enthrall their congregations. 1216

The theaters continued to flourish in the Liberties just outside the City, and therefore not under London’s jurisdiction; this was the only sphere in which authors could support themselves by writing. Shakespeare was at the height of his powers: King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, and several others were staged during the early years of James’s reign. 1216

Several prominent Elizabethan genres were no longer much in evidence: long allegorical or mythological narratives, sonnet sequences, and pastoral poems. 1216

John Donne, whose imprudent marriage cost him a much desired career in the court bureaucracy but who later became a famous preacher and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, cast himself in the older mold of gentleman amateur, circulating his poems in manuscript to friends and coterie circles, and largely avoiding print publication (his poems were published posthumously in 1633). In both their style and their content, Donne’s poems were designed to be read by a select few rather than the public at large. His best poems explore the private worlds of love and religion, often developing passionate dialectical arguments that set them in anxious opposition to the public world. 1217

His style is characterized by learned terms and images, speechlike and often unmelodic verses, and strikingly dramatic language that often evokes a scene in progress. It is also characterized by witty play with paradoxes, ironies and the conjunction of opposites, as in the so-called “metaphysical conceit”—a surprising that metaphor that (as Samuel Johnson later observed) links together images from very different ranges of experience. Donne took particular delight in challenging his sophisticated readers by interchanging the vocabularies of sexual and religious love both in his love poems and in his religious poems. Donne has sometimes been regarded as the founder of a “metaphysical school” of poetry, but that classification is not very useful. 1217

The Jacobean era (so-called from King James I) . . . 1218

there is no doubt that the twenty-year revolutionary period left the English economy far more open to the development of capitalist production. It also saw the development of concepts central to bourgeois liberal thought and soon to influence John Locke and the theorists of the American and French revolutions: religious toleration, separation of church and state, social contract, popular sovereignty, representative government, and republicanism. 1221

Puritans were united in passionate opposition to the bishops, associating them with popery, tyranny over conscience, evil counsel to the king, and pompous excesses in lifestyle. Many, including Milton, demanded that they be cast out of the church, “root and branch.” 1221

Milton’s commitment to the revolution was unwavering, early to late, despite his disillusion when it failed to realize his fundamental ideals: religious toleration for all Protestants and the free circulation of ideas without prior censorship. 1229

He was a Puritan, but both his theological heterodoxies and his poetic vision mark him as a distinctly unusual one. 1229

2008-08-16T16:11:00.000-07:00

Abrams, M. H., and Stephen Greenblatt. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Volume 1. New York: Norton, 2000.

The Sixteenth Century, 1485-1603

The social and economic health of the nation had been severely damaged by the so-called Wars of the Roses, a vicious, decades-long struggle for royal power between the noble houses of York and Lancaster. The struggle was resolved by the establishment of the Tudor dynasty that ruled England from 1485 to 1603. 470

The court was a center of culture as well as power: court entertainments such as theater and masque (a sumptuous, elaborately costumed performance of dance, song, and poetry); court fashions in dress and speech; court tastes in painting, music, and poetry—all shaped the taste and imagination / of the country as a whole. Culture and power were not, in any case, easily separable in Tudor England. In a society with no freedom of speech as we understand it and with relatively limited means of mass communication, important public issues were often aired indirectly, through what we might now regard as entertainment, while lyrics that to us seem slight and nonchalant could serve as carefully crafted manifestations of rhetorical agility by aspiring courtiers. 470-471

Festive evenings with the likes of the ruthless Henry VIII were not occasions for relaxation. The court fostered paranoia—the principal character in John Skelton’s poem about court life is aptly named “Dread”—and an attendant obsession with secrecy, spying, duplicity, and betrayal. Courtiers were highly gifted at crafting and deciphering graceful words with double or triple meanings. Sixteenth-century poets had much to learn from courtiers, the Elizabethan critic George Puttenham observed; indeed many of the best poets in the period, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and others, were courtiers. 471

If court culture fostered performances for a small coterie audience, other forces in Tudor England pulled toward a more public sphere. Markets expanded significantly, international trade flourished, and cities throughout the realm experienced a rapid surge in size and importance. London’s population in particular soared, from 60,000 in 1520 to 120,000 in 1550 to 375,000 a century later, making it the largest and fastest-growing city not only in England but in all of Europe. 471

The greater availability of books may also have reinforced the trend toward silent reading, a trend that gradually transformed what had been a communal experience into a more intimate encounter with a text. 472

Yet it would be a mistake to imagine these changes as sudden and dramatic. Manuscripts retained considerable prestige among the elite; throughout the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth centuries court poets in particular were wary of the “stigma of print” that might mark their verse as less exclusive. 472

During the fifteenth-century a few English clerics and government officials had journeyed to Italy and had seen something of the extraordinary cultural and intellectual movement flourishing in the city-states there. That movement, generally known as the Renaissance, involved a rebirth of letters and arts stimulated by the recovery of texts and artifacts from classical antiquity, the development of techniques such as linear perspective, and the creation of powerful new aesthetic norms based on classical models. 472

In the brilliant, intensely competitive, and vital world of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, the submission of the human spirit to penitential discipline gave way to unleashed curiosity, individual self-assertion, and a powerful conviction that man was the measure of all things. To Renaissance intellectuals, the achievements of the pagan philosophers of antiquity came to seem more compelling than the subtle distinctions drawn by the Christian theologians of the Middle Ages. 472

The perception spurred an impossibly ambitious attempt to assert the underlying unity of the truth found in all philosophical systems, along with an emphasis on the worth of life in this world and the remarkable malleability of the individual. 472

This flowering, when it occurred, came not, as in Italy, in the visual arts and architecture. It came rather in the spiritual and intellectual orientation known as humanism. 473

That education—predominately male and conducted by tutors in wealthy families or in grammar schools—was ordered according to the subjects of the medieval trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music), but its focus shifted from training for the church to the general acquisition of “literature,” in the sense both of literacy and of cultural knowledge. For some of the more intellectually ambitious humanists, that knowledge extended to ancient Greek, whose enthusiastic adherents began to challenge the entrenched prestige of Latin. 473

Still, at the core of the curriculum remained the study of Latin, the mastery of which was in effect a prolonged male puberty rite involving pain as well as pleasure. 473

The purpose was to train the sons of the nobility and gentry to speak and write good Latin, the language of diplomacy, of the professions, and of all higher learning. Their sisters were always educated at home or in other noble houses. 473

from the Sententia Pueriles (Maxims for Children) for beginners on up through the dramatists Terence, Plautus, and Seneca, the poets Virgil and Orace, and the orator Cicero, the classics were also studied for the moral, political, and philosophical truths they contained. Though originating in pagan times, those truths could, in the opinion of many humanists, be reconciled to the moral vision of Christianity. 473

But throughout Europe nationalism and the expansion of the reading public were steadily strengthening the power and allure of the vernacular. 474

There had long been serious ideological and institutional tensions in the religious life of England, but officially at least England in the early sixteenth century had a single religion, Catholocism, whose acknowledged head was the pope in Rome. 474

What began in November 1517 as an academic disputation grew with amazing speed into a bitter, far-reaching, and bloody revolt that forever ruptured the unity of Western Christendom. When Luther rose up against the ancient church, he did so in the name of private conscience enlightened by a personal reading of the Scriptures. 475

Henry VIII, who had received from Pope Leo X the title Defender of the Faith for writing a book against Luther . . . 475

In 1533 Henry’s marriage to Catherine was officially declared null and void and Anne Boleyn was crowned queen. The king was promptly excommunicated by the pope, Clement VII. 475

The Act of Supremacy, passed later in the year, formally declared the king to be “Supreme Head of the Church in England” and again required an oath to this effect. 475

Protestants regarded Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine as invalid and hence deemed Mary illegitimate, so Catholics regarded his marriage to Anne Boleyn as invalid and hence deemed her daughter, Elizabeth, illegitimate. Henry VIII himself seemed to support both views, since only three years after divorcing Catherine, he beheaded Anne on charges of treason and adultery and urged Parliament to invalidate the marriage. Moreover, though during her sister’s reign Elizabeth outwardly complied with the official Catholic religious observance, Mary and her advisers suspected her of Protestant leanings, and the young princess’s life was in grave danger. Poised and circumspect, Elizabeth warily evaded the traps that were set for her. When she ascended the throne, her actions were scrutinized for some indication of the country’s future course. During her coronation procession, when a girl in an allegorical pageant presented her with a Bible in English translation—banned under Mary’s reign—Elizabeth kissed the book, held it up reverently, and laid it to her breast. England had returned to the Reformation. 477

Many English men and women, of all classes, remained loyal to the old Catholic faith, but English authorities under Elizabeth moved steadily, if cautiously, toward ensuring at least an outward conformity to the official Protestant settlement. 477

for the Protestant exiles who streamed back were eager not only to undo the damage Mary had done but also to carry the Reformation much further than it had gone. They sought to dismantle the church hierarchy, to purge the calendar of folk customs deemed pagan and the church service of ritual practices deemed superstitious, to dress the clergy in simple garb, and, at the extreme edge, to smash “idolatrous” statues, crucifixes, and altarpieces. Throughout her long reign, however, Elizabeth herself remained cautiously conservative and determined to hold religious zealotry in check. 477

In the space of a single lifetime, England had gone officially from Roman Catholicism, to Catholicism under the supreme headship of the England king, to a guarded Protestantism, to a more radical Protestantism, to a renewed and aggressive Roman Catholicism, and finally to Protestantism again. Each of these shifts was accompanied by danger, persecution, and death. It was enough to make people wary. Or skeptical. Or extremely agile. 477

Medieval England’s Jewish population, the recurrent object of persecution, extortion, and massacre, had been officially expelled by King Edward I in 1290, but Elizabethan England harbored a tiny number of Jews or Jewish converts to Christianity. They were the objects of suspicion and hostility. Elizabethans appear to have been fascinated by Jews and Judaism but quite uncertain whether the terms referred to a people, a foreign nation, a set of strange practices, a living faith, a defunct religion, a villainous conspiracy, or a messianic inheritance. 478

Jews were not officially permitted to resettle in England until the middle of the seventeenth century, and even then their legal status was ambiguous. 478

As the word “infection” suggests, Elizabethans frequently regarded blackness as a physical defect, though the black people who lived in England and Scotland throughout the sixteenth century were also treated as exotic curiosities. 478

Africans became increasingly popular as servants in aristocratic and gentle households in the last decades of the sixteenth century. 479

In the legal sphere, crown lawyers advanced the theory of “the king’s two bodies.” As England’s crowned head, Elizabeth’s person was mystically divided between her mortal “body natural” and the immortal “body politic.” While the queen’s natural body was inevitably subject to the failings of human flesh, the body politic was timeless and perfect. In political terms, therefore, Elizabeth’s sex was a matter of no consequence, a thing indifferent. 480

Elizabeth was drawn to the idea of royal absolutism, the theory that ultimate power was quite properly concentrated in her person and indeed that God had appointed her to be His deputy in the kingdom. Opposition to her rule, in this view, was not only a political act but also a kind of impiety, a blasphemous grudging against the will of God. 480

Apologists for absolutism contended that God commands obedience even to manifestly wicked rulers whom He has sent to punish the sinfulness of mankind. 480

Elizabeth ruled through a combination of adroit political maneuvering and imperious command, all the while enhancing her authority in the eyes of both court and country by means of an extraordinary cult of love. 480

Ambassadors, courtiers, and parliamentarians all submitted to Elizabeth’s cult of love, in which the queen’s gender was transformed from a potential liability into a significant asset. 480

England’s leading artists, such as the poet Spenser and the painter Nicholas Hilliard, enlisted themselves in the celebration of Elizabeth’s mystery, likening her to the goddesses of mythology and the heroines of the Bible: Diana, Astraea, Cynthia, Deborah. Her cult drew its power from cultural discourses that ranged from the secular (her courtiers could pine for her as the cruelly chaste mistress celebrated in Petrarchan love poetry) to the sacred (the veneration that under Catholicism had been due to the Virgin Mary could now be directed toward England’s semi-divine queen). 481

Pope Gregory XIII’s proclamation in 1580 that the assassination of the great heretic Elizabeth (who had been excommunicated a decade before) would not constitute a mortal sin. The immediate effect of the proclamation was to make life more difficult for English Catholics, most of whom were loyal to the queen but who fell under grave suspicion. 482

The career of professional writer in sixteenth-century England was almost impossible: there was no such thing as author’s copyright, no royalties paid to an author according to the sales of his book, and virtually no notion that anyone could make a decent living through the creation of works of literature. 483

Not surprisingly, therefore, literary texts sometimes bear traces of self-censorship and often deploy strategies of indirection designed to evade official scrutiny. 483

Fortunately, the system of state censorship was inefficient, and many men and women of the sixteenth century had a passionate determination to make themselves heard. 483

Elizabethan writers of exalted social standing, like the earl of Surrey or Sir Philip Sidney, thought of themselves as courtiers, statesmen, and landowners; poetry was for them an indispensable social grace and a deeply pleasurable, exalted form of play. 484

While Protestantism, with its emphasis on reading Scripture, certainly helped to improve female literacy in the sixteenth century, girls were rarely encouraged to pursue their studies. 485

Every piece of writing by a woman from this period is a triumph over nearly impossible odds. 485

Renaissance literature is the product of a rhetorical culture, a culture steeped in the arts of persuasion and trained to process complex verbal signals. (The contemporary equivalent would be the ease with which we deal with complex visual signals, effortlessly processing such devices as fade-out, montage, crosscutting, and morphing.) In 1512, Erasmus published a work called De copia that taught its readers how to cultivate “copiousness,” verbal richness, in discourse. The work obligingly provides, as a sample, a list of 144 different ways of saying “Thank you for your letter.” 485

Elizabethans had a taste for elaborate ornament in language as in clothing, jewelry, and furniture, and, if we are to appreciate their accomplishments, it helps to set aside the modern preference, particularly in prose, for unadorned simplicity and directness. 485

the succession of images in Shakespeare’s sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self that seals up all in rest.

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the deathbed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

What seems merely repetitious in Lyly here becomes a subtle, poignant amplification of the perception of decay, through the succession of images from winter (or late fall) to twilight to the last glow of a dying fire. Each of these images is in turn sensitively explored, so that, for example, the season is figured by bare boughs that shiver, as if they were human, and then these anthropomorphized tree branches in turn are figured as the ruined choirs of a church where services were once sung. No sooner is the image of singers in a church choir evoked than these singers are instantaneously transmuted back into the songbirds who, in an earlier season, had sat upon the boughs, while these sweet birds in turn conjure up the poet’s own vanished youth. And this nostalgic gaze extends, at least glancingly, to the chancels of the Catholic abbeys reduced to ruins by Proestant iconoclasm and the dissolution of the monasteries. All of this within the first four lines: here and elsewhere Shakespeare, along with other poets of his time, contrives to freight the small compass and tight formal constraints of the sonnet—fourteen lines of iambic pentameter in three-principal rhyming patters—with remarkable emotional intensity, psychological nuance, and imagistic complexity. The effect is what Christopher Marlowe called “infinite riches in a little room.” 486

But here and in other plain-style poetry, the somber, lapidary effect depends on a tacit recognition of the allure of the suppleness, grace, and sweet harmony that the dominant literary artists of the period so assiduously cultivated. 487

there is evidence of impressively widespread musical literacy . . . 487

In poetry and music, as in gardens, architecture, and dance, Elizabethans had a taste for elaborate, intricate, but perfectly regular designs. They admired form, valued the artist’s manifest control of the medium, and took pleasure in the highly patterned surfaces of things. Suspicion of surfaces, impatience with order, the desire to rip away the mask in order to discover a hidden core of experiential truth: these responses to art, highly characteristic of later periods, are far less in evidence in Renaissance aesthetics than is a delight in pattern. 487

Such an emphasis on conspicuous pattern might seem to encourage an art as stiff as the starched ruffs that ladies and gentlemen wore around their necks, but the period’s fascination with order was conjoined with a profound interest in persuasively conveying the movements of the mind and heart. 487

In his Defense of Poesy, the most important work of literary criticism in sixteenth-century England, Sidney claims that this magical power is also a moral power. All other arts, he argues, are subjected to fallend, imperfect nature, but the poet alone is free to range “within the zodiac of his own wit” and create a second nature, superior to the one we are condemned to inhabit. 489

Among the most prominent of the clusters of conventions in the period were those that defined the major literary modes (or “inds,” as Sidney terms them): pastoral, heroic, lyric, satiric, elegiac, tragic, and comic. 489

The conventions of the pastoral mode present a world inhabited by shepherds / and shepherdesses who are chiefly concerned to tend their flocks, fall in love, and engage in friendly singing contests. 490

Probably the most famous pastoral poem of the period is Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, an erotic invitation whose promise of gold buckles, coral clasps, and amber studs serves to remind us that, however much it sings of naïve innocence, the mode is ineradicably sophisticated and urban. 490

With is rustic characters, simple concerns, and modest scope, the pastoral mode was regarded as situated at the opposite extreme from heroic, with is values of honor, martial courage, loyalty, leadership, and endurance and its glorification of a nation or people. 490

The spectacular mixing of genres in Spenser’s poem is only an extreme instance of a general Elizabethan indifference4 to the generic purity admired by writers, principally on the Continent, who adhered to Aristotle’s Poetics. Where such neoclassicists attempted to observe rigid stylistic boundaries, English poets tended to approach the different genres in the spirit of Sidney’s inclusivism: “if severed they be good, the conjunction cannot be hurtful.” 490

Several towns in late medieval England were the sites of annual festivals that mounted elaborate cycles of plays depicting the great biblical stories, from the creation of the world to Christ’s Passion and its miraculous aftermath. Many of these plays have been lost, but the surviving cycles, as the selection in this anthology demonstrates, include magnificent and complex works of art. They are sometimes called “mystery plays,” either because they were performed by the guilds of various crafts (known as “mysteries”) or, more likely, because they represented the mysteries of the faith. 491

Before the construction of the public theaters, the playing companies often performed short plays called “interludes” that were, in effect, staged dialogues on religious, moral, and political themes. 491

Some of Shakespeare’s amazing ability to look at critical issues from multiple perspectives may be traced back to this practice and the dramatic interludes it helped to inspire. 492

Another major form of theater that flourished in England in the fifteenth century and continued into the sixteenth was the morality play. Like the mysteries, moralities addressed questions of the ultimate fate of the soul. They did so, however, not by rehearsing scriptural stories but by dramatizing allegories of spiritual struggle. 492

Plays such as Mankind (ca. 1465-70) and Everyman (ca. 1495) show how powerful these unpromising-sounding dramas could be, in part because of the extraordinary comic vitality of the evil character, or Vice, and in part because of the poignancy and terror of an individual’s encounter with death. 492

If such plays sound more than a bit like sermons, it is because they were. The church was a profoundly different institution from the theater, but its professionals shared some of the same rhetorical skills. 492

Roman playwright Seneca, and Senecan influence—including violent plots, resounding rhetorical speeches, and ghosts thirsting for blood—remained pervasive in the Elizabethan period, giving rise to a subgenre of revenge tragedy. 492

A related but distinct kind is the villain tragedy in which the protagonist is blatantly evil: if Thomas Preston’s crude Cambyses, King of Persia (ca. 1560?) seems to bear out Aristotle’s strictures, in his Poetics, against attempting to use a wicked person as the hero of a tragedy, Shakespeare’s Richard III and Macbeth amply justify the general English indifference to classical rules. 492

The conventions of romantic comedy call for noble characters and a plot in which love triumphs over potentially tragic obstacles. 493

In the dismemberment with which Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus ends, the audience was witnessing the theatrical equivalent of the execution of criminals and traitors that they could have also watched in the flesh, as it were, nearby. 494

Moralists warned that the theaters were nests of sedition, and religious polemicists, especially Puritans, obsessively focusing on the use of boy actors to play the female parts, charged that theatrical transvestism excited illicit sexual desires, both heterosexual and homosexual. 495

It was at least plausible, as officially claimed, that in her dying breath, on March 24, 1603, Elizabeth designated James as her successor. A jittery nation that had feared a possible civil war lit bonfires to welcome its new king. But in a very few years, the English began to express nostalgia for the rule of “Good Queen Bess” and to look back on her reign as a magnificent high point in the history and culture of their nation. 496

2008-08-16T13:26:00.000-07:00

Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. London: Prentice Hall Europe, 1999.

The Beginning

it establishes the poem to be about the first disobedience of Adam and Eve which ‘Brought death into the world, and all our woe’. But it is also about itself as a beginning: it assures us that this is the first time that such a project has been attempted (‘Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’). It is as if the opening to a poem could be the equivalent of a moon-landing—one small step for John Milton. 2

Despite the complications of Milton’s opening, however, at least it tries (or pretends to try) to begin at the beginning, rather than in the middle. Beginning in the middle—in media res—is the other way to begin. One of the most famous beginnings-in-the-middle is Dante’s opening to The Divine Comedy (c. 1307-20) . . . / There are at least three different middles here: the middle of ‘our life’, the middle of a dark wood, the middle of a narrative. Dante conflates life, journey and narrative, and suggests the uncanny terror of beginning at such a moment of middling. In particular, the uncaniness of ‘mi ritrovai’ suggests the hallucinatory terror of (re-)finding, of retrieving oneself. But Dante’s opening might also suggest that there are no absolute beginnings—only uncanny originary middles. No journey, no life, no narrative ever really begins: all are ‘always already’ begun. 2-3

Tristam Shandy famously confronts the intractable problem of how to end an autobiography: such a text can never catch up with itself because it takes longer to write about life than it takes to live it. In this sense, autobiography can never end. 3

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851) is also framed by a number of what Gerard Genette calls ‘peritexts’—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’. 4

The first sentence of Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) is sheer heart-tugging seduction: ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard’ (7). It is the sort of sentence from which a novel might never recover. 5

A poem, novel or play that does not in some sense relate to previous texts is, in fact, literally unimaginable. The author of such a text would have to invent everything. It would be like inventing a new language from scratch, without any knowledge of already existing languages. In this sense, intertextuality (the displacement of origins to other texts, which are in turn displacements of other texts and so on) is fundamental to the institution of literature. No text makes sense without other texts. Every text is what Roland Barthes calls ‘a new tissue of past citations’. 6

According to this myth, all literary criticism involves a corruption of the original ‘experience’ of reading. Although we often talk about literary texts as though they have been subjected only to one reading, we all know that this is many respects 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)’. Professors—who are usually old people, very seldom children, though not infrequently an undecidable mixture of the two—include Roland Barthes, of course, and it is part of his aim to question the very idea of a single or first reading. Rereading, he argues,

contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is a primary, naïve, phenomenal reading which we will only, afterwards, have to ‘explicate’, to intellectualize (as if there were a beginning of reading, as if everything were not already read: there is no first reading).

Readers and Reading

Some of the most widely publicized developments in literary theory of the second half of the century have gone under the umbrella term ‘reader-response criticism’. Such developments are usually understood as a reaction against Anglo-American ‘new criticism’ of the post-war period. 11

Associated with such US critics as Cleanth Brooks, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, and indebted also to the principles of ‘practical criticism’ associated with the British critics I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis, new criticism involved a way of reading that emphasized form—the importance of considering ‘the words on the page’—rather than factors such as the life of the author and his or her intentions, or the historical and ideological context in which the text was produced. New critics considered that such questions, while no doubt interesting, were irrelevant to a consideration of the text itself: they thought of literary texts as ‘autonomous’, as self-sufficient and self-contained unities, as aesthetic objects made of words. Correspondingly, new critics argued that to try to take account of the reactions or responses of readers in the context of, for example, a poem, was to introduce an alien and fundamentally extraneous factor. They even invented a term for what they saw as the ‘error’ involved in talking about a reader’s response in discussions of literary texts: they called it the ‘affective fallacy’. For new critics, then, what was important was to pay scrupulous attention to the words of texts themselves, and to go beyond the subjective impressionism of the reader’s response. 11

Beginning in the late 1960s and becoming increasingly influential in the 1970s and early 1980s, reader-response criticism directly questions the principles of new criticism. 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. 12

The new critics’ sense that the meaning of the poem is simply there involves thinking of meaning (in Terry Eagleton’s memorable metaphor) as like a wisdom tooth, ‘waiting patiently to be extracted’. 12

Normand 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’. 13

Theorists such as Stanley Fish on the other hand argue that any individual reader is necessarily part of a ‘community’ of readers. Every reader, he suggests, reads according to the conventions of his or her ‘interpretative community’. In other words, an individual reader’s response, according to this model, is determined by the conventions of reading that he or she has been educated into within a certain socio-historical context. Our recognition of the equivocality of ‘Ozymandias’, for example, is determined by the fact that we have been taught to recognize multiple meanings of texts whenever possible; polysemia is, in a sense, the very ‘logo’ of contemporary university English studies. 13

Rather, the text produces certain ‘blanks’ or ‘gaps’ that the reader must attempt to complete: the reader ‘is drawn into the events and made to supply what is meant from what is not said’. For Iser, the fact that we know nothing about the traveler in Shelley’s poem, for example, ‘spurs / the reader into action’. ‘Who is this traveler?’, we might ask. ‘What does he or she think about what is described in the poem?’ The text prompts us imaginatively to fill in or fill out such hermeneutic or interpretative ‘gaps’. 14

Judith Fetterley, for example, has argued that female readers of classic US fiction (and, by implication, of other literary texts) have been ‘immasculated’, by which she means that they have traditionally been taught to read ‘as men’. Writing in the late 1970s, Fetterley argues that women should begin to liberate themselves from the notion of a ‘universal’ reader (who is implicitly male) and from an identification with male viewpoints in reading, and to develop specifically female models of reading. 15

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 and even ‘impossible’. 17

Jacques Derrida has referred to the delireium of reading, a pun or ‘portmanteau’ word which combines the French ‘lire’ (‘to read’) with ‘delirium’, to suggest ways in which reading can be delirious or hallucinatory. 17

The Author

The ambiguity of ‘it’ corresponds to another kind of uncertainty. For what is also unclear from this opening sentence is who is speaking or, more accurately, who is writing. After all, despite the seductiveness of the confiding, colloquial voice here, it would be somewhat naïve or at least reductive to pretend that this is not writing. 19

Above all, they provoke the question: who is speaking? In presenting us with the voice of a fictional speaker, these texts draw attention to the figure of the author as a sort of concealed or cryptic, haunting but unspecified presence. Who is behind this ‘I’? The opening of The Catcher in the Rye thus introduces a general question for literary criticism and theory, the question of the presence of another ‘I’—the haunting absent-presence of the ‘I’ who writes, of the author. The author is a kind of ghost. 20

You really can be drawn into the feeling that the author is ‘a terrific friend of yours’ or at least that your appreciation and understanding of an author is so intense it touches on the telepathic. In a sense, Holden’s reference to getting on the phone to the author is uncannily apposite: the rapport that exists between you and your favourite author is indeed like a sort of surreal tele-link. The author is an absent presence, both there and not there. You may feel that you understand like nobody else what it is that the author is saying; and you may be willing to acknowledge that his author can express your opinions, thoughts and feelings as well as or even better than you yourself could. This is, in fact, precisely how the greatness of Shakespeare is often described. It is what William Hazlitt says, for example, in his 1818 lecture on dramatic poetry: ‘the striking peculiarity of Shakespeare’s mind’ is ‘its power of communication with all other minds’. 21

The author, in other words, is not so much an ‘actual author at all: rather, it is your personal projection, your idea of the author. Second, it is also the case that the author not only may be dead, but in some respects always already is dead. 21

[intentional fallacy]: In what became a conceptual cornerstone of Anglo-American New Criticism, they argued that ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a literary work’. All we have, they argued, are the ‘words on the page’—which may indicate intention but can never finally prove it. Even if we were to go to a living author and ask what he or she meant by a particular text, all we would get would be another text (his or her answer), which would then, turn, be open to interpretation. Just because it comes ‘from the horse’s mouth’ does not mean that the horse is telling the truth, or that the horse knows the truth, or indeed that what the horse has to say about the ‘words on the page’ is any more interesting or illuminating than what anyone else might have to say. 22

But rather than solving the problem of interpretive authority, ‘The Death of the Author’ in certain / respects simply transfers it. In particular, Barthes argues that ‘the death of the author’ is synonymous with ‘the birth of the reader’. 22-23

Barthes writes:

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. 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’s essay should be read alongside Michel Foucault’s ‘What Is an Author?’ an essay that is undoubtedly more systematic and / rigorous than Barthes’s in many respects. More drily but more carefully than Barthes, Foucault provides (but note the present tense: Foucault, too, is dead) 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 the notion of the author as ‘the principle of a certain unity of writing’. 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. He notes, for example, that

There was a time when the texts that we today call ‘literary’ (narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author; their anonymity caused no difficulties since their ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of their status.

23-24

While we think of the author as endlessly creative, in other words, our practice of reading and criticism makes him or her into a locus of authority which confines meaning and significance to a single univocal strand. Foucault thus concludes: ‘The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning’. We want there to be an identifiable author for a text because this comforts us with the notion that there is a particular sense to that text. 24

The Text and the World

Poststructuralism (including new historicism, feminism, and deconstruction) consistently undermines the very terms of this text-world dichotomy. Michel Foucault puts the point in a Nietzschean way: ‘if language expresses, it does so not in so far as it is an imitation and duplication of things, but in so far as it manifests . . . the fundamental will of those who speak it’. 29

But Marvell’s poem [“To His Coy Mistress”, 1681] does not stop here. It can be shown to engage with the world through the use of a number of specific discourses. The seduction is mediated not only by reference to other kinds of literary texts (poems of section, 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. This complex jumble of references to different discourses positions the text in relation to ‘the world’—even if we try to read the poem as simply fictional. 31

In this way we could attempt to clarify the notoriously controversial statement by Jacques Derrida, in his book Of Grammatology, that ‘There is nothing outside the text’. This much quoted and much misunderstood slogan is, in fact, a misleading translation of the French sentence ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’, which might be better translated as ‘There is no outside-text’. The latter version is preferable because it is easier to see that it is saying something credible: Derrida’s point is not that there is no such thing as a ‘real world’ but that there is nothing outside context, there is no perception or experience which is not bound up with effects of text or language. 31

Edward Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic, especially the title essay, persuasively argues for a recognition of the fact that ‘a text in being a text is a being in the world’. 34

The uncanny has to do with a sense of strangeness, mystery or eeriness. More particularly it concerns a sense of unfamiliarity which appears at the very heart of the familiar, or else a sense of familiarity which appears at the very heart of the unfamiliar. 36

‘Familiar’ goes back to the Latin familia, a family; as an adjective it means ‘well acquainted or intimate’, ‘having a thorough knowledge’, etc.; but as a noun ‘familiar’ carries the more unsettling, supernatural sense of ‘a spirit or demon supposed to come to a person esp a witch, etc., at his or her call’. We might think here, for example, of the demonic ‘familiar’ that is said to haunt Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) or, more comically, of the 12-year-old Maud’s ‘supernatural companion’ in Elizabeth Bown’s superb novel A World of Love (1955). 36

On the other hand, literature itself could be defined as the discourse of the uncanny: literature is the kind of writing which most persistently and most provocatively engages with the uncanny aspects of experience, thought and feeling. In some ways this is in keeping with the sort of conception of literature theorized by the Russian formalists of the early twentieth century, especially Viktor Shklovsky. Literature, for the Russian formalists, has to with defamiliarization (ostranenie): it makes the familiar strange, it challenges our beliefs and assumptions about the world and about the nature of ‘reality’. Bertolt Brecht’s argument that theatre should produce ‘alienation effects’ is an obvious analogy here. For Brecht, no actor is supposed to identify completely with the character he or she plays. Likewise the spectator is encourage to feel dissociated, uneasy, alienated. In accordance with this, Brecht’s concern is to demonstrate that the ‘real’ is not something that is simply a given: it is not something definite and immutable, but is constructed through human perception, language, beliefs and assumptions, and consequently it is something that can be changed. In Brechtian terms, the alienating or defamiliarizing power of drama—and art and literature more generally—lies in its capacity to transform us and the world around us. 37

The uncanny—in particular as first elaborated by Freud, in his essay of that title—is central to any description of the literary. 37

1. The uncanny involves, above all, strange kinds of repetition: repetition of a feeling, situation, event or character. Two obvious examples of the uncanny, in this respect, would be the experience of déjà vu (the sense that something has happened before), and the idea of the double (or doppelgänger).

2. Odd coincidences and, more generally, the sense that things are fated to happen. 37

Robots and other automata (such as Terminator), on the other hand, are also uncanny, for the opposite reason: what is perceived as human is in fact mechanical. 38

we might think, for instance, of George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1878)—the very title of which gestures towards uncanny revelation. Eliot’s narrator, Latimer, describes how he suddenly becomes capable of reading others’ thoughts. In this way he presents an uncanny example of one of the most fundamental characteristics of narrative fiction: he becomes an omniscient (or nearly omniscient) narrator. 40

10. Death, in particular, death as something at once familiar—‘all that lives must die’, as Gertrude puts it (Hamlet)—and absolutely unfamiliar, unthinkable, unimaginable. 40

What makes the double uncanny? According to Freud’s essay, the double is paradoxically both a promise of immortality (look, there’s my double, I can be reproduced, I can live forever) and a harbinger of death (look, there I am, no longer me here, but there: I am about to die, or else I must be dead already). The notion of the double undermines the very logic of identity. 41

Every ‘word’, for example, is capable of being put into quotation marks and the act of putting it into quotation marks makes that word a little strange, as if different from itself, referring to something or somewhere else. This is a general point, also, about repetition: repetition of a word (‘Words, words, words’, as Hamlet says) can give rise to a sense of hollowness, strangeness, even spookiness. 42

The uncanny, then, is an experience—even though this may have to do with the unthinkable or unimaginable. It is not a theme which a writer uses or which a text possesses. The uncanny is not something simply present like an object in a painting. It is, rather, an effect. In this respect it has to do with how we read or interpret (interestingly, it makes no difference here whether we are talking about something in a book or something in the so-called outside world). In other words, the uncanny has to do, most of all, with effects of reading, with the experience of the reader. The uncanny is not so much in the text we are reading: rather, it is like a foreign body within ourselves. 43

Monuments

For Kermode, it is the possibility of a certain ‘openness’ to interpretation, what he terms the text’s ‘accommodation’, which allows what we call a ‘classic’ to survive. Kermode evokes a sense of the as the living dead, surviving endlessly on new readers. His account has certain implications for notions of authorial intention and for ideas about the limits of interpretation: if a literary text can be read and reread at different times, in accordance with their varying (conscious and unconscious) interests, prejudices, ideas and conventions, then it would seem that the text cannot be limited to a single or univocal interpretation. If this position is correct, Kermode comments, we must somehow ‘cope with the paradox that the classic changes, yet retains its identity’. And this has the further consequence that the text must be ‘capable of saying more than its author meant’, even if it were the case that saying ‘more than he meant was what he meant to do’. Strange as it might seem, a ‘classic’ author may have meant what he or she cannot have known that he or she meant. Ultimately, Kermode suggests, ‘the text is under the absolute control of no thinking subject’ and is ‘not a message from one mind to another’. 47

critical vocabularies change over time while always being in any case somewhat porous, unstable, contentious. In the eighteenth century, the vocabulary of value included ideas of proportion, probability and propriety; the Romantics developed a vocabulary of the sublime, imagination and originality; while nearer to our time, the New Critics valued complexity, paradox, irony and tension in poems, and postmodern critics valorize disjunction, fragmentation, heteroglossia, aporia, decentering. 48

At the same time, this conception of the Shakespearean monument has undergone radical demystification and deconstruction in the work of such critics as Terence Hawkes, Jonathan Dollimore, Joel Fineman, Catherine Belsey, John Drakakis, Margreta de Grazia and others. 49

Narrative

The historian Hayden White has given special emphasis to the fact that history is written in the form certain kinds of narrative, that the task of the historian is to ‘charge . . . events’ with ‘a / comprehensible plot structure’. 54-55

One of the ways in which lyric poetry is defined, in fact, is by the absence of any such representation of events—lyric poems characteristically use the present tense and exploit a sense of the presence of the speaker in the act of meditating or speaking. 55

Narrative, however, is characterized by its foregrounding of a series of events or action which are connected in time. 55

But narratives also invariably involve what the narratologist Gerard Genette has called anachronisms—flashbacks, / jumps forwards (or prolepses), the slowing down and speeding up of events and other distortions of the linear time-sequence. Texts such as Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1921) dislodge our sense of temporal sequence The story begins: ‘Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year’. This suggests that the event recounted span a number of months, but by the end we have the sense that the story follows the wanderings of the narrator’s consciousness over only a number of minutes or, at most, hours. Despite this and many other distortions of chronological order, however, Woolf’s text is only readable insofar as it exploits our expectations of narrative sequence. Indeed, these distortions themselves can only be conceived against a background of linear chronological sequence. 55-56

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. A lyric poem does not seem to rely on its ending to provide coherence: the end is not typically the place where all will be resolved. By contrast, we often think of a good story as one that we just cannot put down, a novel we compulsively read to find out what happens at the end. The narrative theorist Peter Brooks has studied ways in which readers’ desires are directed towards the end, ways in which narratives are structured towards, or as a series of digressions from, an ending:

we are able to read present moments—in literature and, by extension, in life—as endowed with narrative meaning only because we / read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those ending that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot.

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 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. 56-57

As Jonathan Culler has suggested, a fundamental premise of narratology is that narrative has a double structure: the level of the told (story) and the level of telling (discourse). 58

These levels have been given different names by different theorists—the Russian formalists call them fibula and sjuzhet; the French structuralists call them either recit (or historie) and discours, and so on. ‘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. In fact, of course, these two levels can never be entirely separated, and much narrative theory has been concerned to describe ways in which they interact. 58

Indeed, rather / than appealing to the idea of a sequence of events, Barbara Herrnstein Smith has argued that we need to ground our understanding of narrative in terms of ‘someone telling someone else that something happened’. The significance of this proposition is that it redirects our focus from the events or actions themselves to the relationship between the author or teller and the reader or listener. As Jonathan Culler has put it, ‘To tell a story is to claim a certain authority, which listeners grant’. Much of the work in narrative theory has involved attempts to discriminate among different kinds of narrators (first person or third person, objective or subjective, reliable or unreliable, omniscient or not, together with questions concerning his or her ‘point of view’, his or her ‘voice’ and so on). Our understanding of a text is pervaded by our sense of the character, trustworthiness and objectivity of the figure who is narrative. Moreover, it is often very important to discriminate between the narratorial point of view and that of the so-called implied author—a particularly important distinction in certain ironic texts. 59

Character

In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that character is ‘secondary’ to what he calls the ‘first essential’ or ‘lifeblood’ of tragedy—the plot—and that characters are included ‘for the sake of the action’. By contrast, in his essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), the novelist Henry James asks, ‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?’ 63

In this chapter, we shall focus, in particular, on the nineteenth-century realist tradition. It is, we suggest, this tradition which has culminated in the kinds of assumptions that we often hold about people and characters today. And it is against such preconceptions that modernist and postmodernist texts tend to work. 64

Realist characterization presupposes a ‘mimetic’ model of literary texts whereby what is primary or original is a real person, and a character in a book is simply a copy of such a person. 65

Indeed, ‘person’ goes back to the Latin word persona, the mask worn by an actor in a play on the classical stage. 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. 66

‘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 kharateein, 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. 66

Voice

One of the most obvious extremes of voice in literature is in relation to music—in other words, the idea that voice becomes pure sound, turns into music. Here we may recall Walter Pater’s suggestion that all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music: this is as much true of the ‘smoky kind of voice’ whose singing transfixes and transforms the life of the narrator in Jean Rhys’s story ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ (1962) as it is of the glozing, serpentine voice that seduces Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost, or of the song of the skylark or of the nightingale to which Shelley and Keats respectively aspire in their great song-like Odes. At the same time, however, we are all perfectly aware that literary texts are not (simply) music or song. Part of what makes texts literary is indeed their peculiar, paradoxical relation to music (not least in lyric poems and ballads, originally with or as music). That is to say, poems or short stories or other texts may aspire towards the condition of music, but they are necessarily stuck in their so-called linguistic predicament. 73

Bloom’s celebrated theory 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. 77

there is the importance of seeing literature as a space in which one encounters multiple voices. Literary texts call upon us to think about them in terms of many voices—for instance, in terms of what M.M. Bakhtin calls heteroglossia or of what he, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes and others refer to as polyphony. 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’. 78

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 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. There is difference and polyphony within every voice. We have tried to suggest this by looking at some of the ways in which the voice of an author or poet is always phantasmagoric or ghostly. We might conclude, however, with a through proffered in one of the ‘Adagia’ (or ‘aphorisms’) of the poet Wallace Stevens: ‘When the mind is like a hall in which thought is like a voice speaking, the voice is always that of someone else’. 78

Figures and Tropes

When we think that we speak ‘truthfully’, without the distortions of figuration, Nietzsche suggests, we only deceive ourselves. The language of truth, language supposedly purified of figures and tropes, is simply language to which we have become so habituated that we no longer recognize it as figurative. This suggests that our world is constituted figuratively, that we relate to ourselves, to other people, to the world, through figures of speech. The manipulation and exploitation of figurative language may therefore be understood to have fundamental implications for the political, social, even economic constitution of our world. The very way that we understand the world may be said to be mediated by the kinds of figures that we use to speak about it. We could think about this in terms of any everyday aspect (aspect is a visual metaphor) of life—for example, the names of newspapers, those ‘organs’ (a metaphor) that help to organize (the same organic metaphor) our world. 81

As Paul de Man / remarks, tropes are not ‘a derived, marginal, or aberrant form of language but the linguistic paradigm par excellence’: figurative language ‘characterizes language as such’. 82

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 an act 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, an act 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 figures. 83

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’, 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 trompes l’eil and hallucinatory effects. It dramatizes the ease, the inevitability with which language slides away from effects of / reference. 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 borrowed words and phrases. In this respect, the phrase repeats the Shakespearean ‘bank and shoal of time’ from Macbeth’s murderous speech—giving the sense of the present being a kind of isthmus within the ocean of eternity—and suggests the end or the edge of time, of 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. In these and other ways, Dickinson’s poem suggests that figures make and unmake our world, give us meaning and take it away. 86

Laughter

To take a metaphor literally (which can also be called ‘catachresis’ or ‘misapplication of a word’) is an example of a rhetorical device that is often very effective as a means of laughter. 89

This fall might be seen as a literalization and structural equivalent of the fall of the tragic hero. In this respect comedy is not the opposite of tragedy but the same, viewed from a different perspective. 95

When we think of tragedy in the context of literature in English, no doubt we think first of Shakespeare and especially of the ‘great tragedies’, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. With such plays in mind we could suggest that tragedy comprises four basic elements. The first is that there is a central character (the protagonist), someone who is ‘noble’ and with whom we are able to / sympathize or identify. The second is that this character should suffer and (preferably) die, and that his or her downfall or death should roughly coincide with the end of the play. The third is that the downfall or death of the central character should be felt by the spectator or reader to be both inevitable and ‘right’ but at the same time in some sense unjustifiable and unacceptable. The fourth element can be referred to as apocalypticism. As we have already indicated, it is not just the death of the protagonist that we are presented with, in a tragedy: in identifying with the protagonist who dies, we are also drawn into thinking about our own death. And because the protagonist’s death is invariably shattering to other characters, tragedy always engages with a broader sense of death and destruction, a shattering of society or the world as a whole.

Without these four elements there cannot be tragedy. 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’ of jealousy. Aristotle introduced the term in the context of tragedy, though it is also apposite in other contexts, including comedy (where a character experiences a reversal or sudden change for the good). 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. 100

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 or revelation at the heart of the tragic has to do with the idea that there is no God or gods 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. 102

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’. It carries clear connotation of the original Greek terms ‘syn’, with, and ‘pathos’, suffering—that is to say, ‘sympathy’ as ‘suffering with’. It is important to distinguish this from ‘feeling sorry for’. In tragedy, sympathy with a character is indistinguishable from a logic of identification, of identifying with that character and experiencing and suffering with her or him. Likewise, it may be useful to distinguish ‘sympathy’ from ‘empathy. ‘Sympathy’, ‘sympathetic’ and ‘sympathizing with’ are preferable to ‘empathy’, ‘empathetic’ or ‘empathizing with’, if only because the notion of empathy (‘I can really empathize with that’) tends to suggest that we know who we are. The tragic, on the contrary, has to do with a sense of loss of identity—the sense that (in Barker’s words) ‘you are not certain who you are’. 103

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. 104

But it is also evident that tragedy seems to have undergone certain changes in the past century or so. There are various reasons for this. One reason 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. . . 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 Ibsen’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. 107

History

New historicists argue that to ask about the relationship between literature and history is the wrong question. The form of the question presupposes that there is literature on the one side and history on the other. Despite their differences, ‘new critics’, ‘background critics’ and ‘reflectionists’ tend to rely on precisely such a polarity: they assume that the categories of ‘literature’ and ‘history’ are intrinsically separate. They distinguish, more or less explicitly, between the need for the interpretation of literary texts on the one hand, and the transparency of literature on the other. 112

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. 112

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 and as a rejection of the autonomy of the literary text and the objectivity of interpretation in general. 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’. Thus, new historicists argue that the production of literary texts is a cultural practice different only in its specific mode or formulation from other practices—from furniture-making to teaching to warfare to legal process to printing to basket-weaving to selling double-glazing. No absolute distinction can be made between literary texts and other cultural practices. As Stephen Greenblatt puts it, art is ‘made up along with other products, practices, discourses of a given culture’. Literary texts are embedded within the social and economic circumstances in which they are produced and consumed. But what is important for new historicists is that these circumstances are not stable in themselves are susceptible to being rewritten and transformed. 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. 112

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 this assertion. In the first place, there can be no knowledge of the past without interpretation. (This is one of the ways in which new historicism is specifically Nietzschean: as Nietzsche said, ‘facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations’. 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 configuration—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.

In this respect, the strategies and tools of critical analysis—the consideration of figures and tropes, a critical awareness of the rhetorical elements of language and so on—are as appropriate to a critical study of history as they are to literary studies. 113

Greenblatt and other new historicist critics reject any attempt to produce a ‘whole’ or final reading and argue for reading which are apparently disjunctive or fragmented. Similarly, questioning the boundaries of text and world, of art and / society, such critics work ‘at the margins of the text’ in order to gain ‘insight into the half-hidden cultural transaction through which great works of art are empowered’. A critic might study legal documents, for example, or arguments concerning the politics of kingship, or handbooks on the education of children, or accounts of exotic travels and exploration and so on, in order to get a purchase on a particular work of literature. But such texts are not to be understood as the background to or context of the literary text. Rather, like plays, poems and novels, they are to be understood as texts through which questions of politics and power must be negotiated. 114

Stephen Greenblatt argues that culture ‘is a particular network of negotiations for the exchange of material goods, ideas, and—through institutions like enslavement, adoption, or marriage—people’. Greenblatt also contends that ‘Great writers are precisely masters of these codes, specialists in cultural exchange’. 120

T.S. Eliot is not often read as a new historicist, but he did make at least one comment with which such critics might subscribe: writing of the task of the poet in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot remarks that he (or she) needs a ‘historical sense’ which, he says, ‘involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence’. 123

The French poststructuralist 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’. The word ‘person’, by contrast, 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’) misleadingly 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 when he speaks of ‘His Majesty the ego’. 123

The usefulness of the term ‘subject’, then, is that it encourages a more critical attentiveness to the fact that the ‘I’ is not autonomous, 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). 124

You cannot be an ‘I’ without having a proper name, and in English-speaking countries you usually acquire a proper name around the time of birth or even before. we are born into language, we are born—more precisely—into patriarchal language, into being identified by a patronym, by a paternal proper name. 124

More broadly what is being suggested here is that questions of personal or individual identity are indissociably 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. We cannot, in any meaningful way, escape the fact that we are subject to language. 125

The principle of the Cartesian cogito (‘I think therefore I am’)—that is to say, the model of the rational subject which Descartes theorizes . . . 125

Likewise, and more recently, Jacques Derrida has been repeatedly concerned to demonstrate that, as he puts it: ‘reason is only one species of thought—which does not mean that thought is “irrational”’. 125

Psychoanalysis, then, has been a particularly disturbing but valuable discourse in the twentieth century because it has promoted an awareness of the extent to which any ‘I’ or human subject is decentered. 126

In the case of psychoanalysis, he says, ‘powerful human feelings are hurt by the subject-matter of the theory. Darwin’s theory of descent met with the same fate, since it tore down the barrier that had been arrogantly set up between men and beasts.’ Freud goes on to suggest that ‘the psychoanalytic view of the relation of the conscious ego to an overpowering unconscious was a severe blow to human self-love’, and that, ‘as the psychological blow to men’s narcissism’, it compares ‘with the biological blow delivered by the theory of descent and the earlier cosmological blow aimed at it by the discovery of Copernicus’. 126

Language governs what we (can) say as much as we govern or use language. Language is not simply an instrument: we are, unavoidably, agents of language. 127

In particular there is this astonishing, anarchic freedom in literature: at least in principle, the author of a literary work can be any ‘I’ he or she wishes to. To put it like this is to imply that the author is an ‘I’ before outside the literary work. But who is to say that there is an ‘I’ anywhere that is not in part literary? 127

Solipsism presupposes the idea of something like what Wittgenstein calls a private language. 129

Beckett’s writing is perhaps only the most philosophically refined recent example of post-romantic literature which is concerned to explore, deflate and transform our understanding of the question, ‘Who do we think we are?’ In this respect his work might be seen to anticipate and encapsulate much of what is called poststructuralism. Poststructuralism demonstrates that the I or human subject is necessarily decentered. 130

Ghosts

Ghosts are paradoxical since they are both fundamental to the human, fundamentally human, and a denial or disturbance of the human, the very being of the inhuman. 133

Ghosts, that is to say, move into one’s head. The ghost is internalized: it becomes a psychological symptom, and no longer a thing that goes bump in the night or an entity issuing commandments on a mountain-top. 133

Why is it, for instance, that when the ghost appears in Act III, scene iv, it is only seen by Hamlet and not by his mother? 133

Lacan develops the ghostly or phantasmatic dimensions of the basic Freudian reading of the play as Oedipal drama: Hamlet cannot take revenge on his murderous uncle Claudius because he is haunted by the sense that what Claudius has done is what he would have wanted to do—kill his father and go to bed with his mother. In Lacan’s scandalous and brilliant development of this reading of Hamlet . . . the ghost has to do with the phallus. As ‘an imaginary object which the child comes to accept as being the father’ s possession’, the phallus is in a sense the very symbol of paternity. For Lacan, the reason for Hamlet’s inability to kill Claudius (until, at least, the moment of ‘complete sacrifice’, i.e. of his own death) is that ‘one cannot strike the phallus, because the phallus, even the real phallus, is a ghost’. 133

From the great fourteenth-century Middle English dream-elegy Pearl to Toni Morrison’s very different dream-elegy Beloved (1987), literature is a place of ghosts, of what’s unfinished, unhealed and even untellable. 135

As E.M. Forster put it, in Aspects of the Novel (1927): ‘Once in the realm of the fictitious, what difference is there between an apparition and a mortgage? 136

This is one basis for thinking about canonicity in Harold Bloom’s terms: the canon is always a spectral affair. As he declares, in The Western Canon: ‘One ancient test for the canonical remains fiercely valid: unless it demands rereading, the work does not qualify’. A great work will always seem uncanny, at / once strange and familiar; a surprising, unique addition to the canon and yet somehow foreseen, programmed by the canon; at once readable and defiant, elusive, baffling. For Bloom, writing itself is essentially about a relationship (always one of anxiety, according to him) with the dead, with earlier great writers. The point is most succinctly made by Bloom’s precursor, T.S. Eliot, when he says in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) that the ‘best’, ‘most individual’ parts of a literary work are ‘those in which the dead poets . . . assert their immortality most vigorously’. 137

Sexual Difference

In this context it is not surprising that some of the most provocative feminist criticism since the mid-1970s has been closely bound up with what is referred to as deconstruction. Deconstruction could be defined as a strategy of disruption and transformation with regard to every and any kind of essentialism. ‘Essentialism’ here would include, for example, the assumption that everyone is essentially either male or female, that the literal is essentially different from the figurative, that speech is essentially different from writing and so on. 146

A deconstructive reading of The Yellow Wallpaper, for example, might elaborate on the logic whereby the narrator is both mad and not mad at the same time. The narrator both is and is not the woman behind the wallpaper. The narrator both is and is not herself. 147

The subjects who empower themselves through ‘identity politics’ are in some sense disempowered by their very subjection to it. This, in part, is why we have titled this chapter ‘Sexual difference’ rather than, say, ‘Gender and identity’. 147

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. 147

God

More specifically, as Nietzsche, Freud and others have argued, God is simply a projection of the human ego onto the surrounding universe. And it comes as no surprise to find that this ego or ‘me’ writ extremely large is, almost invariably, male. 151

By the mid-nineteenth century it had become clear, at least to a significant number of educated European people, that the Bible was a tendentious collection of writings, many of which simply could no longer be trusted in terms of their historical fact and accuracy. 151

Barthes sees the notion of the author as interdependent with that of God. And he presses for a theory and practice of literature that would no longer be theological, declaring:

The space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, and activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law. 152

It is in this context that we might consider the notion of what Jacques Derrida has called logocentrism, in other words the entire system (of Western thought, culture and philosophy) that is implicitly or explicitly governed by notions of essential and stable meaning and ultimately by what Derrida refers to as a transcendental signified (God, for example). 153

What Barthes helps us to see, however, is that this activity is theological in the sense that it presupposes and hearkens towards a single, stable and authoritative centre. 153

It is in this respect that we could recall Nietzsche’s assertion that we shall not get rid of God until we get rid of grammar. 153

‘Literature is not innocent’, writes Bataille: ‘Literature, like the infringement of moral laws, is dangerous’. 155

This may help to explain William Blake’s famous remark about Paradise Lost, in ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, that ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.’ 156

Ideology

Finally, for poststructuralist critics, the notion of ideology is fundamentally suspect, since it appears to rely on a classical opposition of the true and false, of reality and false conscious2ness, which such critics would question. By this view, ideology appears too easily as a master term for totalizing readings of literary texts. It assumes a privileged position—outside ideology—through which the ideological may be examined and criticized. 162

To put it simply: subjects—people—make their own ideology at the same time as ideology makes them subjects. 162

Detective fiction may be understood to have a conservative ideological form because of its generic investment in the restoration of the status quo. 164

Moreover, the genre conventionally relies on the idea of the criminal as an autonomous individual: he or she must be morally responsible for his or her actions and must not be insane. 164

The fact that Minister D. conceals the purloined letter precisely by not hiding it, by leaving it where all can see it (the place where no one—except Dupin—will look, because it is too exposed), makes ‘The Purloined Letter’ an allegory of ideological formation. 166

Desire

In spite of himself, Orsino illustrates the accuracy of Nietzsche’s aphorism: ‘In the end one loves one’s desire and not what is desired.’ 169

While the term ‘homosexual’ can refer to both men and women, its entry into the English language in the late nineteenth century did not result in a sudden visibility for lesbians, however. Indeed, the most striking aspect of lesbianism in ‘straight’ culture generally has been the denial of its existence. In 1885, for example, Queen Victoria is said to have reacted to the new law against ‘gross indecency’ between men by remaking, simply, ‘no woman could ever do that’. 170

Lacan elaborates on Freud’s contention that there is something about the nature of desire that is incompatible with satisfaction. His account of desire is more radical than Freud’s, however. Freud emphasizes the ways in which we can never get what we want: we may think we gave got it (pouring ourselves a gin and tonic, paying for a new car), but actually desire will always have moved on again (to the next gin and tonic, the chance to get on the road and drive and so on). Waiting for a final fulfillment of desire is, indeed, like waiting for Godot in Samuel Beckett’s play. For Freud, this endlessly deferred complete satisfaction is seen simply as an unavoidable, if rather pathetic aspect of what it is to be human. For Lacan, on the other hand, the nature of desire is at once more alien and more subversive. This can be illustrated in two ways. First, for Lacan, the alien or alienating character of desire is at once more alien and more subversive. This can be illustrated in two ways. First, for Lacan, the alien or alienating character of desire is not something that happens to come along and make life difficult for people (or ‘subjects’ in psychoanalytic terms). The human subject is always already ‘split’—divided within itself by the scandalous nature of desire. Second, Lacan gives much greater emphasis than Freud to the role of language in relation to desire. One of Lacan’s / most famous dicta is that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language . . . For Lacan, language is not something that we can use in order to try to make ourselves more comfortable with the alien nature of desire: desire speaks through language and its speaks us. We are, in a way, the senseless puppets of desire as much when we speak or write as when we fall in love. 172

The speaker desires the ‘good minute’—analogous to what James Joyce later calls ‘epiphany’ and Virginia Woolf ‘moments of being’—but recognizes its inevitable escape. 174

Queer

while the first entry for the word in its homosexual sense is from 1922 . . . 179

from what Adrienne Rich, the contemporary lesbian poet and critic, calls ‘compulsory heterosexuality’. 179

Indeed, as Leo Bersani remarks, ‘Unlike racism, homophobia is entirely a response to an internal possibility. 183

But it is crucial to understand that when Foucault claims that homosexuality was invented at a particular time in the recent past he is not arguing that men did not love, desire and have sex with other men, or women with women, before that time. Rather, he is suggesting that what many people tend to think of as the clear, unequivocal distinction between being homosexual or being straight—the sense that you are one or the other, and the sense that who you are is defined by that distinction—is an aspect of sexual relationships and personal identity which has developed only recently. According to Foucault, during the nineteenth century a series of shifts in the discourses of medicine, law, religion, politics and social analysis combined to produce the homosexual as a discrete identity. 184

[Foucault]:

The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. / It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature . . . Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. 185

For Butler, gender and sexuality are performative, rather than fixed or determined by biology or ‘nature’: gender identity ‘is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’. ‘I’m queer’ is not simply a descriptive statement but makes something happen: it not only states but affirms and even creates the identity it refers to. According to this argument, in fact, the more of a man or the more of a woman you are, the more obviously your masculinity or femininity is a performative construct, the more overtly it is acted out. 185

[Butler and Aretha Franklin, 185]

Suspense

The Turn of the Screw is suspended between two mutually exclusive readings. 189

‘There is no literature’, claims Derrida, ‘without a suspended relation to meaning and reference’. 189

In addition to such narrative suspense, effects of suspense can be produced on a more local and less melodramatic scale by aspects of syntax and versification, by the very language of the text. James, in fact, is famous for a peculiarly suspenseful sentence structure which complements the intensity of narrative suspense in stories such as The Turn of the Screw. 190

Verse also relies on turns. In particular, the fact that the word ‘verse’ comes from the Latin vertere, ‘to turn’, might alert us to the way in which verse is wedded to the turns of line endings, suspenseful places of ghostly pausation. 191

This, then, is just one example of the many ways in which poetry is able to create effects of suspense in rhythm such that the form of the poem is inseparable from its content. 192

Wordsworth’s poem is similar in that most of its lines are end-stopped. Only line three is run on or enjambed: there is no punctuation after the word ‘feel’, and the next line is required for syntactical completion. 193

Wordsworth’s poem prompts a number of undecidable questions, sites of irresolvable suspension. In the very opening line of the poem, for example, it is not clear whether ‘my spirit’ sealed a slumber or a slumber sealed ‘my spirit’: in any case it is very difficult to know what the three words (‘slumber’, ‘spirit’, ‘seal’), either separately or together, are referring to. 194

In particular, we might recognize that the poem is suspended by the uncanny gap of time between stanza one and stanza two, that moment outside the poem when ‘she’ dies, the unspoken, perhaps unspeakable event of a death which at once haunts and generates the poem. 195

In the middle decades of the century, partly as a response to Empson’s book, the so-called new critics focused on ambiguity as a major concern of literary texts. More recently, poststructuralist critics have emphasized the notion of undecidability. The difference between new critical ambiguity and poststructuralist undecidability, though apparently minimal, is, in fact, fundamental. For the new critics, ambiguity produces a complex but organic whole, a unity wherein ambiguity brings together disparate elements. For poststructuralist critics, by contrast, undecidability opens up a gap, a rift in the text which can never be fully sealed. Undecidability opens the text to multiple reading, and ultimately threatens to undermine the very stability of any reading position, the very identity of any reader. 195

Racial Difference

Invisibility, as this suggests . . . is the condition of racial otherness. As Henry Louis Gates has commented, ‘The trope of blackness in Western discourse has signified absence at least since Plato’. 199

This is what we might term the ‘subtext’ of the novel: while only opposition is announced, Jane Eyre is haunted by the possibility that Bertha is not simply other to but also, in some ways, identical with Jane. In these respects, then, Jane Eyre articulates how racial otherness is constituted—both absolutely other, non-human, bestial, and at the same time an integral element in what defines racial sameness, in this case ‘Englishness’, in other words part of the self-same, part of Western identity. And it is this ambiguous status of the other (racial or otherwise) that makes it so threatening, so disturbing, so dangerous. This dangerous (racial) other, far from being unusual is, in fact, quite common in canonical works of English literature. 200

Our brief reading of the dehumanization of Bertha in Jane Eyre has begun to suggest that Western humanism necessarily defines itself through racial otherness, by constructing a racial other which then stands in opposition to the humanity of the racially homogenous. Such essentializing of race is at once philosophically untenable and very dangerous. Racism is, before anything else, the delusion of essentialism. 201

The Western constitution of human identity itself as universal or unchanging may be recognized as a historical construct constituted by the exclusion, marginalization and oppression of racial others. 201

The passage is evidence that, as Frantz Fanon remarks, for the native, ‘objectivity is always directed against him’—that ‘objectivity’ is ideological. In Macaulay’s statement, such objectivity is, in fact, blatantly ideological in its dependence on judgments of aesthetic value. By their very nature, such statements can only be culturally, ethnically and historically specific. 202

Mae Gwendolyn Henderson has argued that black women’s writing is ‘interlocutionary, or dialogic’ owing to their position as not only the “Other” of the Same, but also as the “other” of the other(s), [which] implies . . . a relationship of difference and identification with the “other(s)”’. The value of this analysis is that it allows us to recognize the plurality of identity, to recognize that any identity is constituted by a multiplicity of positions and differences. Black women’s writing, in particular, being marginalized twice over, figuring the other of the other, reinforces a sense of the polymorphic nature of identity in all discourse. In addition, Henry Louis Gates has argued that all black texts are necessarily ‘two tone’ or ‘double-voiced’, that they both engage with white canonical discourse and, at the same time, express a black consciousness. 203

The Colony

Here are three convenient, if deadly, definitions: ‘colonialism’ is ‘the policy or practice of obtaining, or maintaining hold over, colonies, esp with the purpose of exploiting them’; ‘postcolonialism’ is concerned with what ‘occur[s] or exist [s] after the end of colonial rule’; ‘neocolonialism’ is concerned with the continuing effects of colonialism after the end of colonial rule, and thus with a questioning of the apparently straightforward break implied by the post- of ‘postcolonial’. 205

Colonization here, as always, works in two directions: to colonize is, how ever imperceptibly or insidiously, to be colonized. If, as William Burroughs claimed, language is a virus, this is because it is a colonizer. 206

Indeed, as some linguists like to say, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Finally, however, we may suppose that there is no way of thinking about any of these matters in one’s language without being already colonized by language. Colonization is at the origin: we are always already dependants of language, colonized by one or more languages. To be ‘always already’ is to be unsure, among other things, about one’s sense of time. 206

Rhys’s novel complicates our sense of time in more general narrative terms. Its disordering of temporality has to do, above all, with its status as a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: post- but also pre-Jane Eyre, it exposes the colonialist dimensions of the earlier novel before the event. 207

Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha in particular have come to be seen as what Dennis Walder calls ‘the three police officers of the postcolonial’. 210

As Kafka’s story suggests, when it comes to thinking about the colony, there is no getting away from the founding complexity of questions of textuality, from the uncanny character of writing, from the limits of the readable. For law itself is inseparable from textuality, writing, inscription. 210

In Plato’s philosophical colony, his imagined Republic, mimetic art, including poetry and drama, is to be excluded. It is dangerous because / it ‘waters and fosters’ false feelings: art embodies the uncomfortable truth that imitation is formative. This recalls the idea, proposed at the outset of this chapter, that language and colonization are inextricable. To imitate is to be uncertainly colonized and colonizing. 212

One of the understated effects of Bhabha’s essay is to suggest how important the notions of theatre, acting and drama are for thinking about (post- or neo-) colonialism. Indeed it encourages us to reflect more broadly on the extent to which personal identity is based on imitation, is inherently theatrical. These are hardly new concerns in the context of literature. . . A play about strange derangements in the experience of time as well as place, and pervasively concerned with questions of legitimacy, authority and justice, The Tempest is also profoundly engaged with the ‘colonial’ paradoxes of language, acting and identity. It is a play not least about teaching and mimicry. Just as Prospero is Miranda’s ‘schoolmaster’, so she in turn becomes the teacher of Caliban, the ‘slave’ whom they find when first coming to the island. In a celebrated exchange near the beginning of the play she reminds Caliban: ‘I pitied thee, / Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour / One thing or other’. Caliban retorts: ‘You taught me language; and my profit on ‘t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!’ There are a number of paradoxes in play here. This exchange suggests how thoroughly language determines who or what we are or might become: there is no escape from the colonizing and mimicking power of language as it annexes one subject (Caliban) after another (Miranda). As the quibble on ‘red’ and ‘rid’ intimates, one cannot be rid of what is read, what is read cannot be unread: language in The Tempest is itself a sort of plague. Caliban’s capacity to curse, indeed his very capacity to embody any meaning at all, is an effect of linguistic colonization. Yet his cursing at the same time can only ever be based on a reflection or mimicking of the colonizers and, no doubt, of their ‘innermost desires’. Caliban presents Miranda and Prospero with a disturbing and uncertain mirroring of themselves which nothing in the play can finally efface. This is evident in the very syntax and versification of Prospero’s final declaration of recognition regarding Caliban: ‘this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine’. The inverted syntax and the hesitancy of the enjambment underscore this ambivalent sense of Prospero as not merely owning but also, and paradoxically, being ‘this thing of darkness’. 213

The Performative

A performative is a statement that not only describes an action but actually performs that action. A performative is, in principle at least, the opposite of a constative statement. A constative statement involves a description of how things seem to be, a statement or assertion of something that can be true or false. 215

First of all, John Keats’s ‘This Living Hand’ (written in c.1819): “This living hand, now warm and capable” . . . 216

that calls to mind Coleridge’s favourite image / for a story—that of a snake with its tail in its mouth. 218

The notion of the performative is extremely helpful for thinking about literature, then, because it allows us to appreciate that literary texts not only describe but perform. Literary texts not only say but do things: they do things with words and do things to us. More precisely they things by saying. 219

Alongside this we could juxtapose a remark made by Jacques Derrida, who says: ‘promising is inevitable as soon as we open our mouths—or rather as soon as there is a text’. 219

Derrida gives: ‘A title is always a promise’. 219

Secrets

This is the general context in which Roland Barthes elaborates his notion of the ‘hermeneutic code’. The hermeneutic code concerns everything in a narrative text that has to with the creation of an enigma and its possible clarification and explanation. 223

More importantly perhaps, they generate a sense of mystery and secrecy through the very institution of the omniscient narrator. The idea of such a narrator is basically magical or occult (the word ‘occult’, it may be noted, literally means ‘hidden’, ‘secret’): such narratives are structured by powers of foresight. For it is invariably part of the nature of omniscient narration (including all of what is known as ‘realist fiction’) that the narrator ‘knows’ the future and that this power of foresight is implicitly or explicitly articulated at numerous moments in a given narrative. 224

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, on the other hand, involves the final revelation that the two primary narrators (an omniscient narrator and one of the characters, Claudia) are apparently the same: such a revelation does not serve to clarify or rationalize the nature of the storytelling but, on the contrary, exacerbates the reader’s sense of the narrator-as-enigma. 225

‘odd afternoon’ is mentioned), might be compared to what Wordsworth calls ‘spots of time’ or Hardy ‘moments of vision’. 226

The definiteness and absoluteness of ‘forever’ confirms, in effect, the sense that this poem at once reveals and can never reveal its secret. Dickinson’s poem could in fact be described as exemplary of literary texts in general. In particular it dramatizes the fact that the notion of a secret is paradoxical. Jacques Derrida has formulated the paradox as / follows: ‘There is something secret. But it does not conceal itself. 223

However superficial or profound or elliptical, it simply says what it says. In these terms, then, it is not only a question of literature as involving secrets that are concealed and that are gradually or finally brought to light. It is also—and perhaps more enigmatically—a matter of a secrecy that does not involve any kind of concealment at all. 227

It has been traditional to think of meaning as something behind or within the words of a text. Reading has conventionally been thought of on the basis of a surface-depth model, with the words of the text as the surface and the meaning lurking somewhere inside or underneath. The text has secrets and often explicitly conveys and exploits the idea that it has the power to disclose or preserve these secrets. With poststructuralist accounts of literature, however, there has been an important shift away from this surface-depth model. 228

Poststructuralism, however, is generally suspicious about any reading of a literary text that would equate a secret with the ‘true’ or ‘ultimate’ meaning. Poststructuralism pays particular attention to the paradoxical nature of secrets—to the fact that secrets can be undiscoverable and yet at the same time unconcealed. In this sense the secrets of a literary text may be right in front of your eyes and yet they remain secret, like ‘the purloined letter’ on the mantelpiece in Edgar Allan Poe’s story of that title, or like the solemn, siren Alps, some odd afternoon. 228

Freud puts it, ‘It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. 229

The Postmodern

Theorists of the postmodern are drawn into that exhilarating as well as terrifying ‘play’ of a text thrown up by its forms of undecidability. For those nervous of the postmodern, this results directly in nihilism and chaos. But for postmodernists it is precisely those monolithic, unthinking / assumptions about a fixed grounding for political, ethical and textual decisions that lead to abhorrent results. It is the belief in a transcendent explanatory system—such as God, national identity or historical materialism, to name just three-which leads to terror, persecution and oppression. In each case, there is a transcendental value (God, the Nation-State, a certain reading of the writings of Marx) which can justify any excess. Postmodernists suggest that reason itself has been used to justify all sorts of oppression. Reason may be said to lie behind the Stalinist terror, for example, in the form of a rational or ‘scientific’ development of Marx’s thinking. Alternatively, in the science of eugenics, ‘rational’ argument or so-called empirical science helped to justify the Jewish holocaust on grounds of racial difference. This is why, writing in 1944, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that ‘Enlightenment is totalitarian’. ‘Enlightenment’ here can be understood very generally as a way of characterizing Western thought since the seventeenth century. Very simply, the notion of the Enlightenment entails the assertion of the power of reason over both superstition and nature, the belief that a combination of abstract reason and empirical science will lead to knowledge and eventually to political and social progress. By contrast, the postmodern is skeptical about claims of progress in history, not least because of the necessary marginalization (of the apparently non-progressive) which it entails. 233

The postmodern can more helpfully be understood, however, as a suspension and deconstruction of the opposition between the rational and irrational. 233

This has taken the form of, among other things, a fundamental questioning of the notion of originality and correspondingly a new kind of emphasis on citation and intertextuality, parody and pastiche. In this respect, originality, which has been of such importance as an aesthetic value since at least the nineteenth century, is seen as a kind of ideological fetish, rather than the overriding criterion in aesthetic judgments. 234

One of the best-known distinctions in the postmodern is that made by Jean-Francois Lyotard concerning what he calls ‘grand’ narratives ‘little narratives. ‘Grand narratives’ such as Christianity, Marxism, the Enlightenment attempt to provide a framework for everything. Such narratives follow a ‘teleological’ movement towards a time of equality and justice: after the last judgement, the revolution, or the scientific conquest of nature, injustice, unreason and evil will end. Lyotard argues that the contemporary ‘world-view’, by contrast, is characterized by ‘little narratives.’ Contemporary Western discourse is characteristically unstable, fragmented, dispersed—not a world-view at all. ‘Little narratives’ present local explanations of individual events or phenomena but do not claim to explain everything. Little narratives are fragmentary, non-totalizing and non-teleological. Lyotard claims that, in the West, grand narratives have all but lost their efficacy, that their legitimacy and their powers of legitimation have been dispersed. 234

The Western philosophical tradition of aesthetics has relied heavily on a distinction between the real and its copy. This goes back at least as far as Plato, who argued that painters, actors, dramatics and so on, all produce representations or ‘imitations’ of the real world. (In fact, Plato argues that even a bed is an imitation of the concept or idea of a bed, so that a picture of a bed is a second-degree copy of an essential but unobtainable bed, the essence of bedness). This way of thinking has given rise to a hierarchical opposition between the real and the copy. And the hierarchy corresponds to that of nature and fabrication, or nature and artifice. The postmodern, however, challenges such hierarchies and shows how the set of values associated with these oppositions can be questioned. 235

Another way of thinking about this phenomenon is to use Jean Baudrillard’s term ‘simulation’ (or ‘the simulacrum’). Simulation is contrasted with representation. The latter works on the basis that there is a distinction between what the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure calls the signifier and the signified, between a word or ‘sound-image’, and the idea or the ‘mental concept’ that it represents. In classical terms, there is an absolute distinction between the word ‘hamburger’ and what that word represents. Similarly, common sense tells us that there is a clear and necessary distinction between a photograph of a hamburger and a hamburger. Simulation, by contrast, short-circuits such distinctions. Saturated by images—on computers, TV, advertising hoardings, magazines, newspapers and so on—the ‘real’ becomes unthinkable without the copy. In other words, simulation involves the disturbing idea that the copy is not a copy of something real; the real is inextricable from the significance and effects of the copy. That hamburger that looks so tempting is far more delicious than any you could ever taste. But, paradoxically, when you taste your hamburger, you are at the same time tasting what is created by advertising images of hamburgers. 236

Another way of talking about simulation or the simulacrum is in terms of depthlessness. If one governing opposition for Western thought has been between the real and the copy, between nature and artifice, another has been between surface and depth. An obvious example of this would be the notion of ’expression’, which involves the idea that the words which we write or speak express something ‘inside’ our heads (thoughts). The words are the surface, whereas our thoughts or consciousness represent depth. Similarly, the idea of the self, the very possibility of being human, has conventionally relied on such an opposition: the subject or self is constituted as a relation between surface and depth, inside and outside. Fredric Jameson provides a useful account of four depth models that, he argues, have dominated the West in the twentieth century:

1. Marxism: Marxism crucially depends on the notion of ideology. Put simply, this involves the idea that we do not see the reality of the world around us but only what we have been indoctrinated into seeing.

2. Psychoanalysis: Freud’s theories are based on the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious, whereby the unconscious is held to be the truth behind or beneath the distorted representation which we call consciousness.

3. Existentialism: in its various forms, existentialism relies on a distinction between, on the one hand, authentic existence and, on the other hand, inauthenticity: authenticity is the truth of selfhood underlying the distortions effected by a state of inauthenticity.

4. Semiotics: as we have seen, Saussurean notions of language presuppose a distinction between the signifier on the one hand and the signified on the other. The word or sound-image indicates an underlying idea or mental concept.

In each case, the authentic or real is understood to be hidden or disguised, while the surface phenomenon, the façade, is an inauthentic distortion or arbitrary offshoot of the underlying truth. With the postmodern, all of these surface-depth models are shaken up. The postmodern suspends, dislocates and transforms the oppositional structures presupposed by major Western modes of thought—by classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, existentialism, semiotics. 237

Jameson also distinguishes between parody and pastiche. Both rely on imitation of earlier texts or objects. In parody, there is an impulse to ridicule by exaggerating the distance of the original text from ‘normal’ discourse. The postmodern, however, no longer accepts the notion of ‘normal’ language: pastiche is ‘blank’ parody in which there is no single / model followed, no single impulse such as ridicule and no sense of a distance from any norm. Postmodern architecture, for example, borrows elements from various earlier periods of architecture and puts them in eclectic juxtaposition. In what the architectural critic Charles Jencks has terms ‘radical eclecticism’, there is no single stable reference. Similarly, a Madonna video parodies, for example, film noir, Marilyn Monroe, contemporary pornography, avant-garde erotic art and Catholic icons, in an apparently random dissonance of combination. Indeed this sense of eclecticism is what distinguishes contemporary culture for Lyotard:

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.

This hybridization, a radical intertextuality which mixes forms, genres, conventions, media, dissolves boundaries between high and low art, between the serious and the ludic. 237-38

The postmodern is grammatically specified as inhabiting the future perfect, what will have been. There is no present, no presence of the present, on the basis of which representation may take place. 239

Pleasure

In particular, a literary text can seduce us through a logic of what Freud calls ‘disavowal’. Disavowal involves the situation in which someone knows that such and such is not true but nevertheless thinks, speaks or acts as if it is true. Disavowal involves thinking: ‘I know, but still . . .’. The process of disavowal whereby we can be seduced into the world of literature, into fictional worlds, has been neatly phrased by Roland Barthes in his book, The Pleasure of the Text (1973): the reader disavows, in other words he or she keeps thinking, ‘I know these are only words, but all the same . . .’ 245

The logic of disavowal perhaps offers a more precise way of thinking about how we read works of literature than Coleridge’s famous idea of a willing suspension of disbelief: the notion of disavowal more dramatically highlights the contradictoriness of what is going on in the act of reading. 245

This principle is disavowal—of reading a work of fiction as though it were not only words—permits us to suggest a way of distinguishing between literature and pornography. Both have a capacity for erotic and sexual stimulation but the difference between them could be said to consist in the fact that a literary work does not allow the reader to forget the process by which he or she is being seduced, whereas pornography calls for the abolition of the ‘as though’ altogether. In other words, pornography entails what John Forrester (following Jean Baudrillard) describes as ‘a fantasy of a real in which representation does not exist, i.e. a real without seduction’. 245

whether in the form of epiphanies (in James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for example), or of what Virginia Woolf famously refers to as ‘moments of being’, or of what Mansfield, at the start of ‘Bliss’, refers to as ‘moments like this’. All of these writers in their different ways are concerned with the uncontainable, delirious, ecstatic, inexpressible quality of individual moments, of time as (only) now. It is not simply a question of a ‘carpe diem’ (‘seize the day’) motif in modern literature. Rather, it is a matter of how the present moment resists any attempt to appropriate or ‘seize’ it. It is a matter of how moments of extreme pleasure (including orgasms) are at the same time moments of loss: such moments involve, indeed, a kind of dissolution and more generally suggest a sense of experience in terms of what Pater calls ‘that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves’. 247

Barthes writes:

Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumption, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

Barthes’s book suggests, then, that there are two ways in which we could think about pleasure. One is basically recuperative: it does not break with culture but rather reinforces traditional or comfortable notions of meaning, society, ideology, etc. The other sense of pleasure (‘bliss’) is more unsettling and strange. No doubt all literary and other cultural texts are susceptible to being read in both of these ways. Barthes’s own emphasis, however, falls on ‘bliss’ (‘jouissance’ in French). ‘Bliss’ has to do with the inexpressible: ‘pleasure can be expressed in words, bliss cannot’. Bliss has to do with a deconstruction of the political: it is thus engaged in ‘de-politicizing what is apparently political, and in politicizing what apparently is not’. 248

As Barthes remarks: ‘Pleasure’s force of suspension can never be overstated’. 250

The End

As in many of Shakespeare’s plays (As You Like It, All’s Well That Ends Well and The Tempest, for example), the epilogue functions as a kind of supplement, and thus / conforms to the paradoxical logic of both coming after the end and at the same time being the end. 254

Poststructuralism in particular challenges us to think critically about the ways in which the idea of the end is in various ways paradoxical. It calls on us to acknowledge—rather than to deny or ignore (as more traditional literary criticism has done)—the importance and value of aporia, suspense and the undecidable. 256

Jacques Derrida, for example, emphasizes that we cannot do without the notion of end as goal or purpose (or, in its Greek form, telos). Nor can we do without the idea of a fulfillment or plentitude of desire. But there is a paradox which means that we can never get to the end of desire. As Derrida puts it: ‘Plentitude is the end (the goal), but were it attained, it would be the end (death)’. 258

Part of what makes Asbery’s poetry ‘postmodern’ is that it repeatedly articulates the desire to ‘step free at last’ but at the same time repeatedly ironizes, dislocates, writes off this gesture or ‘ambition’. 258

Thus, for example, the great systems of Western philosophy—such as Christianity and Marxism—make sense of the world by imagining a future in which the world is fundamentally different, in which our world has ended forever. Christianity and Marxism, then, engage with desires that can be called apocalyptic. Such desires are crucial, also, for an appreciation of literature. Literature offers at once an imaginative experiencing and a critical questioning of the end, and it does so in ways that can be both at once exhilarating and terrifying. Literary texts, and particularly the ends of literary texts, open onto the future. And as Derrida has observed: ‘The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger’. 258

2008-02-16T14:01:00.000-08:00

Auslander, Philip. “Intellectual Property Meets the Cyborg: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Technology.” Performing Arts Journal. 14.1 (1992): 30-42.

Early in the film [Home of the Brave], Anderson appears masked, lecturing the audience in a digitally synthesize ‘male’ voice. The subjects of her lecture are the digits ‘0’ and ‘1.’ She points out that in common discourse, these signs have opposite meanings: to be ‘number one’ is at the other end of the spectrum from being a ‘zero.’ She suggests that this way of using signs needs to be reformed, because the distance between the highest and lowest, between ‘0’ and ‘1,’ leaves ‘very little room…for everybody else. Just not enough range.’ She proposes that we should abandon the value judgments associated with these signs and recognize them as of equal value because they are equally the building blocks of the modern computer age. Anything that can be expressed in words or numbers, in any language, can be communicated using this simple, foolproof system. It’s all here in a nutshell—the entire alphanumerical system, A to Z, the zero to infinity of digital intelligence.

She then gives examples of letters, numbers, and a musical phrase expressed as digital combinations, zeroes and ones filling the projection screen behind her. As she concludes, she counts off a two-beat rhythm (‘and zero—and one’). Projections of a large zero and large one alternate behind her, accompanied by a metallic, rasping sound. 37

In this section of her performance, Anderson not only describes the leveling of cultural binaries implicit within the epstimology of digital technology, but enacts it. The figure we see before us displays both male and female signs, yet ultimately is neither. It is also a cyborg, a human being whose voice is produced by the very digital technology it describes for us. This figure claims to have written the song from which Anderson extracts her example of binary code: the irony may be that the cyborg, the amalgam of human and machine, truly is the composer in this case, as Anderson used a computer in composing the song. 37-38

The passage is comic in that the lecturer’s hyperbole and the seeming inefficiency of expressing a simple number, letter or musical note as a huge number of ones and zeroes appear somewhat ridiculous, yet underlying this gently deflating humor is the suggestion of the deep technological utopia Haraway has in mind. Computer logic cannot abolish binaries—it cannot exist without them—yet those binaries imply no value judgments; unlike the societies and cultures it has had such an impact on, digital technology itself is genuinely indifferent to the differences between the terms of the binaries it employs.

Through the mediation of electronics, Anderson’s and Burroughs’s voices merge: the voice that emerges from the tape-bow violin is his, yet it is not. It is her ‘voice’ in that she plays the instrument, yet it is not her voice. He ‘authored’ the sentence by speaking it, yet she wrote the words and actually controls the articulation of the spoken text with her bow. The homosexual-junkie-misogynist-Beat novelist, and the heterosexual-feminist-postmodernist entertainer-performance artist achieve a strange and unstable unity of the kind described by Haraway for the duration of the song by speaking through a single voice that belongs to both, yet to neither. 40

Her work reflects a provisional glimpse of the cultural environment that will become possible if new technologies are indeed permitted to realize their potential as ‘technologies of freedom.’ 41

2008-08-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994 (orig. 1981).

It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself. 1

To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. 3

Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the “true” and the “false,” the “real” and the “imaginary.” Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces “true” symptoms? 3

This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear—that deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum—from this came their urge to destroy the images. If they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason / to destroy them. One can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn’t conceal anything at all, and that these images were in essence not images, such as an original model would have made them, but perfect simulacra, forever radiant with their own fascination. Thus this death of the divine referential must be exorcised at all costs. 4-5

Such is simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation stems from the principle of equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. 6

Such would be the successive phases of the image:

it is the reflection of a profound reality;

it masks and denatures a profound reality;

it masks the absence of a profound reality;

it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. 6

In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being “discovered” and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it. 7

It is against this hell of the paradox that the ethnologists wished to protect themselves by cordoning off the Tasaday with virgin forest. No one can touch them anymore: as in a mine the vein is closed down. Science loses precious capital there, but the object will be safe, lost to science, but intact in its “virginity.” It is not a question of sacrifice (science never sacrifices itself, it is always murderous), but of the simulated sacrifice of its object in order to save its reality principle. 7

In any case, the logical evolution of a science is to distance itself increasingly / from its object, until it dispenses with it entirely: its autonomy is only rendered even more fantastic—it attains its pure form. The Indian thus returned to the ghetto, in the glass coffin of the virgin forest, again becomes the model of simulation of all the possible Indians from before ethnology. 7-8

The museum, instead of being circumscribed as a geometric site, is everywhere now, like a dimension of life. Thus ethnology, rather than circumscribing itself as an objective science, will today, liberated from its object, be applied to all living things and make itself invisible, like an omnipresent fourth dimension, that of the simulacrum. 8

It is science that masters the objects, but it is the objects that invest it with depth. 9

Only absolute secrecy assured them this millennial power—the mastery over putrefaction that signified the mastery of the complete cycle of exchanges with death. We only know how to place our science in service of repairing the mummy, that is to say restoring a visible order, whereas embalming was a mythical effort that strove to immortalize a hidden dimension. We require a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures us about our end. Because finally we have never believed in them. 10

Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. 12

The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the “real” world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere—that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness. 13

The denunciation of scandal is always an homage to the law. And Watergate in particular succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal—in this sense it was prodigious operation of intoxication. 14

All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. . . formerly one worked to dissimulate scandal—today one works to conceal that there is none. 15

One imputes this thinking to the contract of capital, but it doesn’t give a damn—it is a monstrous unprincipled enterprise, nothing more. It is “enlightened” though that seeks to control it by imposing rules on it. And all the recrimination that replaces revolutionary though today comes back to incriminate capital for not following the rules of the game. “Power is unjust, its justice is a class justice, capital exploits us, etc.”—as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules. It is the Left that holds out the mirror of equivalence to capital hoping that it will comply, comply with this phantasmagoria of the social contract and fulfill its obligation to the whole of society (by the same token, no need for revolution: it suffices that capital accommodate itself to the rational formula of exchange). 15

Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists, or extreme-right provocation, or a centrist mise-en-scène to discredit all extreme terrorists and to shore up its own failing power, or again, is it a police-inspired scenario and a form of blackmail to public security? All of this is simultaneously true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the facts does not put an end to this vertigo of interpretation. That is, we are in a logic of simulation, which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason. 16

Hell of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of the subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning—where even the condemned at Burgos are still a gift from Franco to Western democracy, which seizes the occasion to regenerate its own flagging humanism and whose indignant protest in turn consolidates Franco’s regime by uniting the Spanish masses against this foreign intervention? Where is the truth of all that, when such collusions admirably knot themselves together without the knowledge of their authors? 18

All the referentials combine their discourses in a circular, Möbian compulsion. Not so long ago, sex and work were fiercely opposed terms; today both are dissolved in the same type of demand. Formerly the discourse on history derived its power from violently opposing itself to that of nature, the discourse of desire to that power—today they exchange their signifiers and their scenarios. 18

It is always a question of providing the real through the imaginary, proving truth through scandal, proving the law through transgression, proving work through striking, proving the system through crisis, and capital through revolution, as it is elsewhere (the Tasaday) of proving ethnology through the dispossession of its object—without taking into account:

the proof of theater through antitheater;

the proof of art through antiart;

the proof of pedagogy through antipedagogy;

the proof of psychiatry through antipsychiatry, etc.

Everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated form. All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes. 19

The impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, that is posed here.

Organize a fake holdup. Verify that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no human life will be in danger (or one lapses into the criminal). Demand a ransom, and make it so that the operation creates as much commotion as possible—in short, remain close to the “truth,” in order to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulacrum. You won’t be able to do it: the network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman will really fire on sight; a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart attack; one will actually pay you the phony ransom), in short, you will immediately find yourself once again, without wishing it, in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour any attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to the real—that is, to the established order itself, well before institutions and justice come into play. 20

It is necessary to see in this impossibility of isolating the process of simulation the weight of an order that cannot see and conceive of anything but the real, because it cannot function anywhere else. The simulation of an offense, if it is established as such, will either be punished less severely (because it has no “consequences”) or punished as an offense against the judicial system (for example if one sets in motion a police operation “for nothing)—but never as simulation since it is precisely as such / that no equivalence with the real is possible, and hence no repression either. The challenge of simulation is never admitted by power. 20-21

namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real. 21

As long as the historical threat came at it from the real, power played at deterrence and simulation, disintegrating all the contradictions by dint of producing equivalent signs. Today when the danger comes at it from simulation (that of being dissolved in the play of signs), power plays at the real, plays at crisis, plays at remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, and political stakes. For power, it is a question of life and death. But it is too late. 22

Presidents Johnson and Ford were both the object of failed assassination attempts which, if / they were not staged, were at least perpetrated by simulation. The Kennedys did because they incarnated something: the political, political substance, whereas the new presidents are nothing but caricatures and fake film—curiously, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, all have this simian mug, the monkeys of power. 23-24

Death is never an absolute criterion, but in this case it is significant: the era of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and the Kennedys, of those who really died simply because they had a mythic dimension that implies death (not for romantic reasons, but because of the fundamental principle of reversal and exchange)—this era is long gone. It is now the era of murder by simulation, of the generalized aesthetic of simulation, of the murder-alibi—the allegorical resurrection of death, which is only there to sanction the institution of power, without which it no longer has any substance or an autonomous reality. 24

One must not resist this process by trying to confront the system and destroy it, because this system that is dying from being dispossessed of its death expects nothing but that from us: that we give the system back its death, that we revive it through the negative. End of revolutionary praxis, end of the dialectic. 24

Nixon has nevertheless arrived at the goal of which all power dreams: to be taken seriously enough, to constitute a mortal enough danger to the group to be one day relieved of his duties, denounced, and liquidated. 25

Everything happens as if Mao or Franco had already died several times and had been replaced by his double. From a political point of view, that a head of state remains the same or is someone else doesn’t strictly change anything, so long as they resemble each other. For a long time now a head of state—no matter which / one—is nothing but the simulacrum of himself, and only that gives him the power and the quality to govern. No one would grant the least consent, the least devotion to a real person. It is to his double, he being always already dead, to which allegiance is given. This myth does nothing but translate the persistence, and at the same time the deception, of the necessity of the king’s sacrificial death. 26

More interesting is the illusion of filming the Louds as if TV weren’t there. The producer’s triumph was to say: “They lived as if we were not there.” An absurd, paradoxical formula—neither true nor false: utopian. The “as if we were not there” being equal to “as if you were there.” It is this utopia, this paradox that fascinated the twenty million viewers, much more than did the “perverse” pleasure of violating someone’s privacy. In the “verité” experience it is not a question of secrecy or perversion, but of a sort of frisson of the real, or of an aesthetics of the hyperreal, a frisson of vertiginous and phony exactitude, a frisson of simultaneous distancing and magnification, of distortion of scale, of an excessive transparency. 28

Because heavenly fire no longer alls on corrupted cities, it is the camera lens that, like a laser, comes to pierce lived reality in order to put it to death. 28

End of the panoptic system. The eye of TV is no longer the source of an absolute gaze, and the ideal of control is no longer that of transparency. This still presupposes an objective space (that of the Renaissance) and the omnipotence of the despotic gaze. It is still, if not a system of confinement, at least a system of mapping. More subtly, but always externally, playing on the opposition of seeing and being seen, even if the panoptic focal point may be blind. 29

Something else in regard to the Louds. “You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you (live),” or again: “You are no longer listening to Don’t Panic, it is Don’t Panic that is listening to you”—a switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance (Discipline and Punish [Surveiller et punir]) to a system of deterrence, in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished. There is no longer any imperative of submission to the model, or to the gaze “YOU are the model!” “YOU are the majority!” Such is the watershed of of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the statistical operation, or with the medium, as in the Louds’ operation. Such is the last stage of the social relation, ours, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of propaganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc.) but one of deterrence: “YOU are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.” An about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side. 29

But one must watch out for the negative turn that discourse imposes: it is a question neither of disease nor of a viral infection. One must think instead of the media as if they were, in outer orbit, a kind of genetic code that directs the mutation of the real into the hyperreal, just as the other micromolecular code controls the passage from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic one of the programmed signal. 30

Resist the evidence: in satellization, he who is satellized is not who one might think. Through the orbital inscription of a spatial object, it is the planet earth that becomes a satellite, it is the terrestrial principle of reality that becomes eccentric, hyperreal, and insignificant. 35

All dramaturgy, and even all real writing of cruelty has disappeared. Simulation is the master, and we only have a right to the retro, to the phantom, parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials. 39

Entry into the atomic club, so prettily named, very quickly effaces (as unionization does in the working world) any inclination toward violent intervention. Responsibility, control, censure, self-deterrence always grow more rapidly than the forces or the weapons at our disposal: this is the secret of the social order. Thus the very possibility of paralyzing a whole country by flicking a switch makes it so that the electrical engineers will never use this weapon: the whole myth of the total and revolutionary strike crumbles at the very moment when the means are available—but alas precisely because those means are available. Therein lies the whole process of deterrence. 39

Take The Last Picture Show: like me, you would have had to be sufficiently distracted to have thought it to be an original production from the 1950s: a very good film about the customs in and the atmosphere of the American small town. Just a slight suspicion: it was a little too good, more in tune, better than the others, without the psychological, moral, and sentimental blotches of the films of that era. Stupefaction when one discovers that it is a 1970s film, perfect retro, purged, pure, the hyperrealist restitution of 1950s cinema. One talks of remaking silent films, those will also doubtlessly be better than those of the period. A whole generation of films is merging that will be to those one knew what the android is to man: marvelous artifacts, without weakness, pleasing simulacra that lack only the imaginary, and the hallucination inherent to cinema. 45

Cool, cold pleasure, not even aesthetic in the strict sense: functional pleasure, equational pleasure, pleasure of machination. One only has to dream of Visconti (Guépard, Senso, etc., which in certain respects make one think of Barry Lyndon) to grasp the difference, not only in style, but in the cinematographic act. In Visconti, there is meaning, history, a sensual rhetoric, dead time, a passionate game, not only in the historical content, but in the mise-en-scène. None of that in Kubrick, who manipulates his film like a chess player, who makes an operational scenario of history. 46

Is there something of this already in Leone’s Westerns? Maybe. All the registers slide in that direction. Chinatown: it is the detective movie renamed by laser. 46

The cinema in its current efforts is getting closer and closer, and with greater and greater perfection, to the absolute real, in its banality, its veracity, in its naked obviousness, in its boredom, and at the same time in its presumption, in its pretension to being the real, the immediate, the unsignified, which is the craziest of / undertakings (similarly, functionalism’s pretension to designating—design—the greatest degree of correspondence between the object and its function, and its use value, is a truly absurd enterprise); no culture has ever had towards its signs this naïve and paranoid, puritan and terrorist vision. Terrorism is always that of the real. 46-47

Concurrently with this effort toward an absolute correspondence with the real, cinema also approaches an absolute correspondence with itself—and this is not contradictory: it is the very definition of the hyperreal. 47

One no longer makes the Jews pass through the crematorium or the gas chamber, but through the sound track and image track, through the universal screen and the microprocessor. Forgetting, annihilation, finally achieves its aesthetic dimension this way—it is achieved in retro, finally elevated here to a mass level. 49

Or, rather, TV and the nuclear are of the same nature: behind the “hot” and negentropic concepts of energy and information, they have the same power of deterrence as cold systems do. TV itself is also a nuclear process of chain reaction, but implosive: it cools and neutralizes the meaning and the energy of events. Thus the nuclear, behind the presumed risk of explosion, that is to say of hot catastrophe, conceals a long, cold catastrophe, the universalization of a system of deterrence. 53

Because an explosion is always a promise, it is our hope: note how much, in the film as in Harrisburg, the whole world waits for something to blow up, for destruction to announce itself and remove us from this unnameable panic, from this panic of deterrence that it exercises in the invisible form of the nuclear. 55

And it is because of this that events no longer have meaning: it is not that they are insignificant in themselves, it is that they were preceded by the model. 56

then the only means of mitigating this scenario would be to make the catastrophe arrive, to produce or to reproduce a real catastrophe. To which Nature is at times given: in its inspired moments, it is God who through his cataclysms unknots the equilibrium of terror in which humans are imprisoned. Closer to us, this is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security. Besides, therein lies terrorism’s ambiguity. 57

[Apocalypse Now] In this sense, his film is really the extension of the war through other means, the pinnacle of this failed war, and its apotheosis. The war became film, the film becomes war, the two are joined by their common hemorrhage into technology. The real war is waged by Coppola as it is by Westmoreland: without counting the inspired irony of having forests and Phillipine villages napalmed to retrace the hell of South Vietnam. 59

No real distance, no critical sense, no desire for “raising consciousness” in relation to the war: and in a sense this is the brutal quality of this film—not being rotten with the moral psychology of war. Coppola can certainly deck out his helicopter captain in a ridiculous hat of the light cavalry, and make him crush the Vietnamese village to the sound of Wagner’s music—those are not critical, distant signs, they are immersed in the machinery, they are part of the special effect, and he himself makes movies in the same way, with the same retro megalomania, and the same non-signifying furor, with the same clownish effect in overdrive. But there it is, he hits us with that, it is there, it is bewildering, and one can say to oneself: how is such a horror possible (not that of the war, but that of the film strictly speaking)? 60

Certainly, all the cultural contents of Beaubourg are anachronistic, because only an empty interior could correspond to this architectural envelope. The general impression being that everything here has come out of a coma, that everything wants to be animation and is only reanimation, and that this is good because culture is dead, a condition that Beaubourg admirably retraces, but in a dishonest fashion, whereas one should have triumphantly accepted this death and erected a monument or an antimonument equivalent to the phallic inanity of the Eiffel Tower in its time. Monument to total disconnection, to hyperreality and to the implosion of culture—achieved today for us in the effect of transistorized circuits always threatened by a gigantic short circuit. 63

overtly proclaims that our time will never again be that of duration, that our only temporality is that of the accelerated cycle and of recycling, that of the circuit and of the transit of fluids. 64

Yet—yet . . . if you had to have something in Beaubourg—it should have been a labyrinth, a combinatory, infinite library, an / aleatory redistribution of destinies through games or lotteries—in short, the universe of Borges—or even the circular Ruins: the slowed-down enchainment of individuals dreamed up by each other (not a dreamworld Disneyland, a laboratory of practical fiction). An experimentation with all the different processes of representation: defraction, implosion, slow motion, aleatory linkage and decoupling—a bit like at the Exploratorium in San Francisco or in the novels of Philip K. Dick—in short a culture of simulation and of fascination, and not always one of production and meaning: this is what might be proposed that would not be a miserable anticulture. Is it possible? Not here, evidently. But this culture takes place elsewhere, everywhere, nowhere. From today, the only real cultural practice, that of the masses, ours (there is no longer a difference0, is a manipulative, aleatory practice, a labyrinthine practice of signs, and one that no longer has any meaning. 64-65

And they throw themselves at it. There lies the supreme irony of Beaubourg: the masses throw themselves at it not because they salivate for that culture which they have been denied for centuries, but because they have for the first time the opportunity to massively participate in this great mourning of a culture that, in the end, they have always detested. 65

The masses, themselves, rush there to enjoy this execution, this dismemberment, this operational prostitution of a culture finally truly liquidated, including all counterculture that is nothing but its apotheosis. 66

That is “mass production,” not in the sense of a massive production or for use by the masses, but the production of the masses. The masses as the final product of all sociality, and, at the same time, as putting an end to sociality, because these masses that one wants us to believe are the social, are on the contrary the site of the implosion of the social. 68

No relief, no perspective, no vanishing point where the gaze might risk losing itself, but a total screen where, in their uninterrupted display, the billboards and the products themselves act as equivalent and successive signs. There are employees who are occupied solely in remaking the front of the stage, the surface display, where a previous deletion by a consumer might have left some kind of a hole. The self-service also adds to this absence of / depth: the same homogeneous space, without mediation, brings together men and things—a space of direct manipulation. But who manipulates whom? 75-76

Even repression in integrated as a sign in this universe of simulation. Repression become deterrence is nothing but an extra sign in the universe of persuasion. The circuits of surveillance cameras are themselves part of the décor of simulacra. A perfect surveillance on all fronts would require a heavier and more sophisticated mechanism of control than that of the store itself. 76

Information is thought to create communication, and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social—just as consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. Well, the fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs. 80

Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. 80

That means that all contents of meaning are absorbed in the / only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event—whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or subversive. 82

Even the “traditional” status of the media themselves, characteristic of modernity, is put in question. McLuhan’s formula, the medium is the message, which is the key formula of the era of simulation (the medium is the message—the sender is the receiver—the circularity of all poles—the end of panoptic and perspectival space—such is the alpha and omega of our modernity), this very formula must be imagined at its limit where, after all the contents and messages have been volatilized in the medium, it is the medium itself that is volatilized as such. Fundamentally, it is still the message that lends credibility to the medium, that gives the medium its determined, distinct status as the intermediary of communication. Without a message, the medium also falls into the indefinite state characteristic of all our great systems of judgment and value. A single model, whose efficacy is immediate, simultaneously generates the message, the medium, and the “real.” 82

Finally, the medium is the message not only signifies the end of the message, but also the end of the medium. There are no more media in the literal sense of the word (I’m speaking particularly of electronic mass media)—that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another. Neither in content, nor in form. Strictly, this is what implosion / signifies. The absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning, the erasure of distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the medium and of the real—thus the impossibility of any mediation, of any dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the other. Circularity of all media effects. Hence the impossibility of meaning in the literal sense of a unilateral vector that goes from one pole to another. One must envisage this critical but original situation at its very limit: it is the only one left us. It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable. 83

Evidently, there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses and the media: do the media neutralize meaning and produce unformed [informe] or informed [informée] masses, or is it the masses who victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all the messages that the media produce without responding to them? 84

Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence perpetrated on meaning, and in fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle? 84

The media carry meaning and countermeaning, they manipulate in all directions at once, nothing can control this process, they are the vehicle for the simulation internal to the system and the simulation that destroys the system, according to an absolutely Möbian and circular logic—and it is exactly like this. There is no alternative to this, no logical resolution. Only a logical exacerbation and a catastrophic resolution. 84

Not necessarily advertising itself, the kind that is produced as such—but the form of advertising, that of a simplified operational mode, vaguely seductive, vaguely consensual (all the modalities are confused therein, but in an attenuated, agitated mode). More generally, the form of advertising is one in which all particular contents are annulled at the very moment when they can be transcribed into each other, whereas what is inherent to “weighty” enunciations, to articulated forms of meaning (or of style) is that they cannot be translated into each other, any more than the rules of a game can be. This long movement toward translatability and thus toward a complete combinatorial, which is that of the superficial transparency of everything, of their absolute advertising (of which professional advertising is, once again, only an episodic form), can be read in the vicissitudes of propaganda. 87

It is not that people no longer believe in it or that they have accepted it as routine. It is that if its fascination once lay in its power to simply all languages, today this power is stolen from it by another type of language that is even more simplified and thus more functional: the languages of computer science. The sequence model, the sound track, and the image track that advertising, along with the other big media, offers us—the model of the combinatory, equal distribution to all discourses that it proposes—that still rhetorical continuum of sounds, signs, signals, slogans that it erects as a total environment is largely overtaken, precisely in its function of simulation, by the magnetic tape, by the electronic continuum that is in the process of being silhouetted against the horizon of the end of this century. Microprocessing, digitality, cybernetic languages go much further in the direction of the absolute simplification of processes that advertising did on its humble—still imaginary and spectacular—level. And it is because these systems go further that today they polarize the fascination that formerly devolved on advertising. It is information, in the sense of data processing, that will put an end to, that is already putting an end to the reign of advertising. That is what inspires fear, and what is thrilling. The “thrill” of advertising has been displaced onto computers and on the miniaturization of everyday life by computer science. 89

If at a given moment, the commodity was its own publicity (there was no other) today publicity has become its own commodity. It is confused with itself. 90

As a medium become its own message (which makes it so that now there is a demand for advertising in and of itself, and that thus the question of “believing” in it or not is no longer even posed), advertising is completely in unison with the social whose historical necessity has found itself absorbed by the pure and simple demand for the social: a demand that the social function like a business, a group of services, a mode of living or of survival (the social must be saved just as nature must be preserved: the social is our niche)—whereas formerly it was a sort of revolution in its very project. This is certainly lost: the social has lost precisely this power of illusion, it has fallen into the register of supply and demand, just as work has passed from being a force antagonistic to capital to the simple status of employment, that is to say of goods (eventually rare) and services just like the others. 90

It is not by chance that advertising, after having, for a long time, carried an implicit ultimatum of an economic kind, fundamentally saying and repeating incessantly, “I buy, I consume, I take pleasure,” today repeats in other forms, “I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned”—mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification. 91

Like the signs in advertising, one is geared down, one becomes transparent or uncountable, one becomes diaphanous or rhizomic to escape the point of inertia—one is placed in orbit, one is plugged in, one is satellized, one is archived—paths cross: there is the sound track, the image track, just as in life there is the work track, the leisure track, the transport track, etc., all enveloped in the advertising track. Everywhere there are three or four paths, and you are at the crossroads. 91

how all of that is staged exactly like sex in pornography, that is to say without any faith, with the same tired obscenity. That is why, now, it is useless to analyze advertising as language, because something else is happening there: a doubling of language (and also of images), to which neither linguistics nor semiology correspond, because they function on the veritable operation of meaning, without the slightest suspicion of this caricatural exorbitance of all the functions of language, this opening onto an immense field of the mockery of signs, “consumed” as one says in their mockery, for their mockery and the collective spectacle of their game without stakes—just as porno is a hypertrophied fiction of sex consumed in its mockery, for its mockery, a collective spectacle of the inanity of sex in its baroque assumption (it was the baroque that invented this triumphal mockery of stucco, fixing the disappearance of the religious in the orgasm of statues). 92

The Father and the Mother have disappeared, not in the service of an aleatory liberty of the subject, but in the service of a matrix called code. No more mother, no more father: a matrix. And it is the matrix, that of the genetic / code, that now infinitely “gives birth” based on a functional mode purged of all aleatory sexuality. 97

The mirror stage is abolished in cloning, or rather it is parodied therein in a monstrous fashion. 97

It is no longer even a question of being twins, since Gemini or Twins possess a specific property, a particular and sacred fascination of the Two, of what is two together, and never was one. Whereas cloning enshrines the reiteration of the same: 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, etc. 97

The most advanced, the most modern form of this development, which Benjamin described in cinema, photography, and contemporary mass media, is one in which the original no longer even exists, since things are conceived from the beginning as a function of their unlimited reproduction. 99

This is what happens to us with cloning, no longer only at the level of messages, but at the level of individuals. In fact this is what happens to the body when it ceases to be conceived as anything but a message, as a stockpile of information and of messages, as fodder for data processing. 99

The TV studio transforms you into holographic characters: one has the impression of being materialized in space by the light of projectors, like translucid characters who pass through the masses (that of millions of TV viewers) exactly as your real hand passes through the unreal hologram without encountering any resistance—but not without consequences: having passed through the hologram has rendered your hand unreal as well. 105

The hallucination is total and truly fascinating once the hologram is projected in front of the plaque, so that nothing separates you from it (or else the effect remains photo- or cinematographic). This is also characteristic of trompe l’oeil, in contrast to painting: instead of a field as a vanishing point for the eye, you are in a reversed depth, which transforms you into a vanishing point . . . The relief must leap out at you just as a tram car and chess game would. This said, which type of objects or forms will be “hologenic” remains to be discovered since the hologram is no more destined to produce three-dimensional cinema than cinema was destined to reproduce theater, or photography was to take up the contents of painting. 105

The closer one gets to the perfection of the simulacrum (and this is true of objects, but also of figures of art or of models of social or psychological relations), the more evident it becomes (or rather to the evil spirit of incredulity that inhabits us, more evil still than the evil spirit of simulation) how everything escapes representation, escapes its own double and its resemblance. In short, there is no real: the third dimension is only the imaginary of a two-dimensional world, the fourth that of a three-dimensional universe . . . Escalation in the production of a real that is more and more real through the addition of successive dimensions. But, on the other hand, exaltation of the opposite movement: only what plays with one less dimension is true, is truly seductive. 107

In any case, there is no escape from this race to the real and to realistic hallucination since, when an object is exactly like another, it is not exactly like it, it is a bit more exact. There is never similitude, any more than there is exactitude. What is exact is already too exact, what is exact is only what approaches the truth without trying. 107

What happens on the other side of the truth, not in what would be false, but in what is more true than the true, more real than the real? Bizarre effects certainly, and sacrileges, much more destructive of the order of truth than its pure negation. Singular and murderous power of the potentialization of the truth, of the potentialization of the real. This is perhaps why twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture; hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning. 108

Technology is never grasped except in the (automobile) accident, that is to say in the violence done to technology itself and in the violence done to the body. It is the same: any shock, any blow, any impact, all the metallurgy of the accident can be read in the semiurgy of the body—neither an anatomy nor a physiology, but a semiurgy of contusions, scars, mutilations, wounds that are so many new sexual organs opened on the body. In this way, gathering the body as labor in the order of production is opposed to the dispersion of the body as anagram in the order of mutilation. Goodbye “erogenous zones”: everything becomes a hole to offer itself to the discharge reflex. But above all (as in primitive initiation tortures, which are not ours), the whole body becomes a sign to offer itself to the exchange of bodily signs. Body and technology diffracting their bewildered signs through each other. Carnal abstraction and design. 112

Dysfunction is no longer possible in a universe of the accident—therefore no perversion is either. The Accident, like death, is no longer of the order of the neurotic, the repressed, the residual or the transgressive, it is the instigator of a new mode of nonperverse pleasure (contrary to the author himself, who speaks in the introduction of a new perverse logic, one must resist the moral temptation of reading Crash as perversion), of a strategic organization of life that starts from death. Death, wounds, mutilations are no longer metaphors of castration, exactly the opposite—not even the opposite. Only the fetishistic metaphor is perverse, seduction via the model, via the interposed fetish, or via the medium of language. Here, death and sex are read on the same level as the body, without phantasms, without metaphor, without sentences—different from the Machine of the The Penal Colony, where the body in its wounds is still only the support of a textual inscription. 113

Three orders of simulacra:

simulacra that are natural, naturalist, founded on the image, on the imitation and counterfeit, that are harmonious, optimistic, and that aim for the restitution or the ideal institution of nature made in God’s image;

simulacra that are productive, productivist, founded on energy, force, its materialization by the machine and in the whole system of production—a Promethean aim of a continuous globalization and expansion, of an indefinite liberation of energy (desire belongs to the utopias related to this order of simulacra);

simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game—total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control.

To the first category belongs the imaginary of the utopia. To the second corresponds science fiction, strictly speaking. To the third corresponds—is there an imaginary that might correspond to this order? The most likely answer is that the good old imaginary of science fiction is dead and that something else is in the process of emerging (not only in fiction but in theory as well). The same wavering and indeterminate fate puts an end to science fiction—but also to theory, as specific genres. 121

The imaginary was the alibi of the real, in a world dominated by the reality principle. Today, it is the real that has become the alibi of the model, in a world controlled by the principle of simulation. / And, paradoxically, it is the real that has become our true utopia—but a utopia that is no longer in the realm of the possible, that can only be dreamt of as one would dream of a lost object. 123

Until now we have always had a reserve of the imaginary—now the coefficient of reality is proportional to the reserve of the imaginary that gives it its specific weight. This is also true of geographic and spatial exploration: when there is no longer any virgin territory, and thus one available to the imaginary, when the map covers the whole territory, something like the principle of reality disappears. 123

From then onward, something must change: the projection, the extrapolation, the sort of pantographic excess that constituted the charm of science fiction are all impossible. It is no longer possible to fabricate the unreal from the real, the imaginary from the givens of the real. The process will, rather, be the opposite: it will be to put decentered situations, models of simulation in place and to contrive to give them the feeling of the real, of the banal, of lived experience, to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because it has disappeared from our life. Hallucination of the real, of lived experience, of the quotidian, but reconstituted, sometimes down to disquietingly strange details, reconstituted as an animal or vegetal reserve, brought to light with a transparent precision, but without substance, derealized in advance, hyperrealized. 124

What did the torturers of the Inquisition want? The admission of evil, of the principle of evil. It was necessary to make the accused say that he was not guilty except by accident, through the incidence of the principle of Evil in the divine order. Thus confession restored a reassuring causality, and torture, and the extermination of evil through torture, were nothing but the triumphal coronation (neither sadistic nor expiatory) of the fact of having produced Evil as cause. Otherwise, the least heresy would have rendered all of divine creation suspect. In the same way, when we use and abuse animals in laboratories, in rockets, with experimental ferocity in the name of science, what confession are we seeking to extort from them from beneath the scalpel and the electrodes?

Precisely the admission of a principle of objectivity of which science is never certain, of which it secretly despairs. Animals must be made to say that they are not animals, that bestiality, savagery—with what these terms imply of unintelligibility, radical strangeness to reason—do not exist, but on the contrary the most bestial behaviors, the most singular, the most abnormal are resolved in science, in physiological mechanisms, in cerebral connections, etc. Bestiality, and its principle of uncertainty, must be killed in animals.

Experimentation is thus not a means to an end, it is a contemporary challenge and torture. It does not found an intelligibility, it extorts a confession from science as previously one extorted a profession of faith. A confession whose apparent distances—illness, madness, bestiality—are nothing but a provisional crack in the transparency of causality. This proof, as before that of / divine reason, must be continually redone and everywhere redone—in this sense we are all animals, and laboratory animals, whom one continually tests in order to extort their reflex behaviors, which are like so many confessions of rationality in the final moment. Everywhere bestiality must yield to reflex animality, exorcising an order of the indecipherable, of the savage, of which, precisely in their silence, animals have remained the incarnation for us. 129-130

The trajectory animals have followed, from divine sacrifice to dog cemeteries with atmospheric music, from sacred defiance to ecological sentimentality, speaks loudly enough of the vulgarization of the status of man himself—it once again describes an unexpected reciprocity between the two. 134

In particular, our sentimentality towards animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them. It is proportional to this disdain. It is in proportion to being relegated to irresponsibility, to the inhuman, that the animal becomes worthy of the human ritual of affection and protection, just as the child does in direct proportion to being relegated to a status of innocence and childishness. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality, the racist commiseration, in which we ridiculously cloak animals to the point of rendering them sentimental themselves. 134

that of King Kong wrenched from his jungle and transformed into a music-hall star. Formerly, the cultural hero annihilated the beast, the dragon, the monster—and from the spilt blood plants, men, culture, were born; today, it is the beast King Kong who comes to sack our industrial metropolises, who comes to liberate us from our culture, a culture dead from having purged itself of all real monstrosity and from having broken its pact with it (which was expressed in the film by the primitive gift of the woman). The profound seduction of the film comes from this inversion of meaning: all inhumanity has gone over to the side of men, all humanity has gone over to the side of captive bestiality. 135

The challenge of madness has historically been met by the hypothesis of the unconscious. The Unconscious is this logistical mechanism that permits us to think madness (and more generally all strange and anomalous formations) in a system of meaning opened to nonmeaning, which will make room for the terrors of the nonsensical, now intelligible under the auspices of a certain discourse: psychic life, drive, repression, etc. The mad were the ones who forced us to the hypothesis of the unconscious, but we are the one in return who have trapped them there. Because if, initially, the Unconscious seems to turn against Reason and to bring to it a radical subversion, if it still seems charged with the potential of the rupture of madness, later it turns against madness, because it is what enables madness to be annexed to a reason more universal than classical reason. 136

All normality sees itself today in the light of madness, which was nothing but its insignificant remainder. Privilege of all the remainders, in all domains, of the not-said, the feminine, the crazy, the marginal, of excrement and waste in art, etc. But this is still nothing but a sort of inversion of the structure, of the return of the repressed as a powerful moment, of the return of the remainder as surplus of meaning, as excess. 145

Now we are faced with a much more original situation: not that of the pure and simple inversion and promotion of remainders, but that of an instability in every structure and every opposition that makes it so that there is no longer even a remainder, due to the fact that the remainder is everywhere, and by playing with the slash, it annuls itself as such.

It is not when one has taken everything away that nothing is left, rather, nothing is left when things are unceasingly shifted and addition itself no longer has any meaning. 146

Power (or what takes its place) no longer believes in the university. It knows fundamentally that it is only a zone for the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a certain age, it therefore has only to select—it will find its elite elsewhere, or by other means. Diplomas are worthless: why would it refuse to award them, in any case it is ready to award them to everybody; why this provocative politics, if not in order to crystallize energies on a fictive stake (selection, work, diplomas, etc.), on an already and rotting referential? 150

If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.

But such a sentiment is utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality—as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning. 163

2008-04-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

Beidler, Philip D. American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1982.

Chronological discussion of Vietnam antiwar literature, illustrating the stages and styles of writing. Privileges writers attention to the writing process itself and literature’s potential to tell a war story that is truer than true.

From David Halberstam’s One Very Hot Day, “‘yes as no longer yes, no was no longer no, maybe was more certainly maybe.’ So it was in Vietnam with all attempts at signification. To try to talk or write about it, before, during, or after the fat, was to risk being swept up into a self contained universe of discourse where everything from official euphemism to battlefield slang seemed the product of some insane genius for making reality and unreality—and thus, by implication, sense and nonsense—as indistinguishable as possible” (Beidler 5).

“In this way, what facts that could be found might still be made to mean, as they had never done by themselves, thought he shaping, and ultimately the transforming power of art” (Beidler 16).

“the literary interpreters who most often got Vietnam right from the outset began with the premise (or quickly accepted it along the way) that all the basic categories of meaning one might think of—facts and fictions, realities and imaginings, things remembered an things reconstituted in the shapes of collective myth—had to be reckoned in this case as simply and flatly interchangeable” (Beidler 31).

“This was the most important discovery made by major early writers about Vietnam, and it is the one that has dominated the literature of the war ever since: that what sense was to be made of it at all would lie in the self-conscious explorations of relationships between experiential and aesthetic (and in a vast number of cases, mock-aesthetic) possibilities of truth-telling, in the realization that far from being incompatible or opposite, they would often imply and even entail each other” (Beidler 34).

Moore’s The Green Berets: “the initial focus of concern is not with the war as subject but instead with identifying in generic terms the appropriate manner of its depiction. From the outset, however intuitively, this first ‘big’ book about Vietnam focuses itself on the nature of literary process, the idea of sense-making itself. Should the narrative be seen as basic reportage, shaped, edited, infused with color and point, perhaps, but still essentially ‘factual’? Or might it be best described in terms of one of the more familiar categories of the ‘creative’—a novel, a collection of stories, a linked series of dramatic vignettes? Moore opts for the latter, calling his work a novel even as he continues to attest to its wholesale veracity. He suggests in this case that fiction will somehow be truer than fact” (Beidler 37).

“the matter of the thing would find a reality truer than the truth alone in the literary means of its telling” (Beidler 46).

“Preexisting myths and conventions of form, even in their frequent appropriation and acknowledgement, become at most part of a first step toward new kinds of sense-making suited to the peculiarities of the experience at hand” (Beidler 47).

“Verification, he [Harold Pinter] writes must be a kind of ‘truth-i-fi-cation’ in the fullest sense of the term possible. Our wish for it, he continues, ‘is understandable.’ Unfortunately, the wish, ‘cannot always be satisfied. There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what false. The thing is not necessarily true or false. It can be both true and false” (Beidler 51).

“The truth of Eastlake’s vision of the war, to put it another way is art-truth. It is something that in its fashion just may be truer, he proposes, than facts themselves can be” (Beidler 53).

“The feature, besides Bunting’s and Roth’s comparable gifts for experiential witness, that brings new creative life, so to speak, to the unabashedly ‘epic’ impulse standing at the heart of their narratives, is the self-conscious, indeed almost self-depreciating way in which the two writers both acknowledge and in a manner mock their sense of formal indebtedness” (Beidler 93).

“both writers also seriously employ the strategies of their literary predecessors, almost to make their world of war a microcosm of their America and their age as well” (Beidler 93).

“In striking new affiliations between experiential and literary values, both writers finally succeed in allowing the war to create, after a fashion, its own master iconography” (Beidler 96).

“The account of a young infantryman’s passage through a year at war becomes at the same time an odyssey through a whole inherited body of cultural myth, with a perpetual striking of connections, more or less as they are found, along the way; apace, precisely through this synthesizing function of consciousness, the process of narration becomes itself the source of what might be thought of as new permutations of useable myth as well. More than anything else, finally, a sustained mediation no only on the experience of the war but also on the very idea of sense-making itself, If I die in a Combat Zone . . . “ (Beidler 100).

“Experience remembered becomes in the same moment experience made to signify in terms old and new through the transforming power of imaginative myth, experience made in effect a set of notes toward its own master iconography” (Beidler 105).

“Again, moreover, this seems to be in large part a function of the Vietnam writer’s increasingly complex and sophistication ability to see consciousness itself as the ground of a new reality somehow born equally of memory and imaginative invention, a Vietnam somehow more true in its achieved signification than anything that had ever existed in fact” (Beidler 119).

“Yet if it is as close perhaps, to a vision of the end as any writer of the war has come, a genuine exemplar of apocalyptic horror, it is also in the same moment, for the book that it introduces, a kind of beginning as well, a tight, harrowed first step on the way back to meaning. Now the poet begins the work that can be found in the war’s wake, begins in art to enact the process whereby experience even of so devastating a kind can finally somehow again be imaginatively assimilated to terms of collective sense-making” (Beidler 133).

“one can at least begin to deal with them by imagining a context in which personal memory might be something like cultural memory, a medium of collective witness and truth. One can make a sense that is at least better than no sense by recognizing the commonality of human experience, and by doing so specifically in terms of that especially rich and complex form of cultural memory that comes as literary tradition. The remembered ‘worlds’ of Gawain and the Green Knight and the Iliad can and indeed must be brought into touch with the world of private experiential remembrance, all of them at once casting the light of new meaning on each other” (Beidler 133).

“It can all be there insofar as we learn to make it from our own responding. Sense-making, be it that which we inherit or that which we invent, must be given a chance to sustain us after our war” (Beidler 134). Sense-making – begins with the premise that war is incommensurable.

“To put this another way, the most distinctive feature of the ‘optative’ mode across the whole range of recent Vietnam writing would seem to be the self-reflexive attempt to comprehend what can be known of the war within a dimension of consciousness at once incorporating both memory and invention” (Beidler 140-141).

“This is not to suggest that recent Vietnam writing has been largely ‘metafiction’ in the current, fashionable sense of that idea. Most of it is far less flashy, studied, oppressively art-conscious. The dominant impulse of the mode would seem to be something more simple, a basic acceptance of each age’s need to examine the nature of its own myth-making processes, to find the crucial nodes” (Beidler 141).

“Michael Herr’s Dispatches, by general consent one of the most fully wrought and authoritative works to emerge from all the literature of Vietnam” (Beidler 141).

“The prize of experience for the Vietnam writer, as all these novels again reveal, is the penetration of a strange midworld of consciousness, a ‘country,’ once more to paraphrase Michael Herr, that is ‘the war,’ a precinct of memory and imagining, the two caught in some curious, perpetual suspension” (Beidler 171).

“One must finally make a going back that is a going ahead as well” (Beidler 172).

“Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato, a work not so much a synthesis of memory and imagination, life and art, as a testament to their utter fluid interchangeability” (Beidler 172).

“No substance equals no order. ‘Can’t have order in a vacuum’” (Beidler 173). Doc Peret; body = substance

“For him, for all the writers represented here, for all of us who care to read what they have to say, the war is not over. It will only be over when we have made it so through a common effort of signification, when we have learned at what cost it was waged for everyone it touched then and now and beyond. Then it will be over. then we can say good-bye to it. Not before” (Beidler 202).

2008-02-16T12:49:00.001-08:00

Beckerman, Bernard. “Shakespeare’s Dramaturgy and Binary Form.” Theatre Journal. 33.1 (1981): 5-17.

That tradition is of timely interest to us. Because it relied so utterly upon previous narrative sources, it vividly illustrates how a literary art is reshaped into a presentational one. When a playwright turns a story into a script, he has to arrange characters, events, and sentiments in a sequence of playable units or scene. 5

Central to presentation is the obvious fact that the performer, not the page, is the medium. He is autonomous, disconnected from text or creator, seeming to be his own creator, whatever persona he adopts. Moreover, because he carries out his work in immediate contact with an audience, his effectiveness directly depends on a capacity to make himself felt. He must not only be present before an audience in bodily form; he must be there before them as a vibrant presence. The dramatic writer has the task of devising scenes that support and utilize the presence of the actor. 5

As models they had the examples of morality interludes and the classic drama. They could pick and choose among several ways of formulating plays and scenes. Each choice entailed consequences that had to be faced. Take, as one case, the matter of cast size. The number of people a writer puts on stage at any one time keenly affects a player’s ability to make his presence felt. One performer can readily make contact with an audience. Two performers can relate either to the audience or to each other. As numbers grow beyond two, the possibility increases rapidly of diluting a coherent sense of presence unless the larger number of performers is choreographed carefully. The more a writer expands his cast, the more skillful he has to be in ordering the action to prevent the dilution of the performer’s presence. 6

But these occasional presentation where the performer is subordinated to the physical stage are not characteristic of Elizabethan theatre as a whole. There the players reigned, splendid in their sumptuous garments and masters of the open stage. 7

From a presentational point of view, a duet with only two people and a duet with mutes have analogous but not identical structures. While a mute servant may play a minimal part in the effect of a scene, the presence of Silvia and Thurio as witnesses of the duet between the Duke and Valentine adds a dimension to the action. In performance, they are bound to react to what is said though their reactions would be quite subsidiary to the main action. Shakespeare, however, does not give us a clue to their possible responses. Rather than diffuse focus, he is content to stress the binary nature of the scene. 7

As I have previously remarked, a static display may serve as a presentation. Its power will depend on a capacity to fill space with beauty and strangeness. But a static object has limited power to sustain attention. It is the active force in presentation, the temporal element that dominates, and the performer embodies or rather modulates that force. As a player, the performer engages in both showing something to the audience and transforming that audience. He works upon the audience’s sensibility and imagination. To do so requires considerable expenditure of energy, both to hold attention and to effect the transformation of the audience’s mind and heart. One way of doing this is by playing directly to the audience. 9

The audience’s laughter acts as a counterforce against which the actor playing Launce works. Ideally, the more he appeals to the playgoer, the greater should be the laughter, thus producing that fruitful tension which underlies so much of theatrical presentation. 9

Although the tone of Launce’s speech is softer, his working upon the audience is a direct descendent of the way the Vice worked upon audiences in the interlude. 9

By the time Shakespeare came to write Two Gentlemen of Verona in the early 1590s, however, direct contact like that of Launce’s with the audience was becoming increasingly rare. 10

At the same time writers sought to exploit the soliloquy more fully, not as an instrument of contact with the audience, however, but as a means of displaying passion and dilemmas. 10

As writers did before him, Shakespeare here introduces apostrophe as a device for channeling acting energies. This device is one of the most widely used to provide actors with lines that allow them to project presentational energy to an audience indirectly. For a time in the 1570s writers exploited this type of soliloquy fully, but by the 1590s, it too assumed less prominence in the total organization of a play. 10

As fundamental and as prevalent as the duet is in dramatic art, it deserves far greater study than it has received. If I am correct, a dramatist’s artistry is largely determined by his skill in shaping and ordering duets. 11

2008-02-16T12:50:00.000-08:00

Beckerman, Bernard. Shakespeare at the Globe: 1599-1609. London: Collier Books, 1962.

Perhaps all that the evidence can demonstrate is that no special area of the stage seems either reserved for or barred to the soliloquy and that the actor took the stage as the temper of the scene prompted. In all likelihood the actor himself decided how and where he played the soliloquy. 185

In none of the Globe plays is there any certain indication that the audience was directly addressed in the soliloquy. 186

2007-12-27T11:38:00.000-08:00

Bazin, André. “Theater and Cinema” (from What is Cinema?). 1951. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 5^th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 408-418.

As Rosenkrantz wrote in 1937, in Esprit, in an article profoundly original for its period, “The characters on the screen are quite naturally objects of identification, while those on the stage are, rather, objects of mental opposition because their real presence gives them an objective reality and to transpose them into beings in an imaginary world the will of the spectator has to intervene actively, that is to say, to will to transform their physical reality into an abstraction. This abstraction being the result of a process of the intelligence that we can only ask of a person who is fully conscious.” 410

Let us compare chorus girls on the stage and on the screen. On the screen they satisfy an unconscious sexual desire and when the hero joins them he satisfies the desire of the spectator in the proportion to which the latter has identified himself with the hero. On the stage the girls excite the onlooker as they would in real life. The result is that there is no identification with the hero. He becomes instead an object of jealousy and envy. In other words, Tarzan is only possible on the screen. The cinema calms the spectator, the theater excites him…[About film]: Alone, hidden in a dark room, we watch through half-open blinds a spectacle that is unaware of our existence and which is part of the universe. There is nothing to prevent us from identifying ourselves in imagination with the moving world before us, which becomes the world. 410

Even when it appeals to the lowest instincts, the theater up to a certain point stands in the way of the creation of a mass mentality. 411

Incontestably, there is in the pleasure derived from cinema and novel a self-satisfaction, a concession to solitude, a sort of betrayal of action by a refusal of social responsibility. 411

What is really in dispute are two psychological modalities of a performance. The theater is indeed based on the reciprocal awareness of the presence of audience and actor, but only as related to a performance. 412

There is nothing to prevent us from identifying ourselves in imagination with the moving world before us, which becomes the world. 412

As Jean-Paul Sartre, I think it was, said, in the theater drama proceeds from the actor, in the cinema it goes from the décor to man. This reversal of the dramatic flow is of decisive importance. It is bound up with the very essence of the mise-en-scène. 412

Everyone knows that when the actor “retires to his apartment” from the yard or from the garden, he is actually going to his dressing room to take off his make-up. These few square feet of light and illusion are surrounded by machinery and flanked by wings, the hidden labyrinths of which do not interfere one bit with the pleasure of the spectator who is playing the game of theater. 413

When a character moves off screen, we accept the fact that he is out of sight, but he continues to exist in his own capacity at some other place in the décor which is hidden from us. There are no wings to the screen. 415

It is because that infinity which the theater demands cannot be spatial that its area can be none other than the human soul. 415

But if Racine, Shakespeare, or Molière cannot be brought to the cinema by just placing them before the camera and the microphone, it is because the handling of the action and the style of the dialogue were conceived as echoing through the architecture of the auditorium. What is specifically theatrical about these tragedies is not their action so much as the human, that is to say the verbal, priority given to their dramatic structure. 415

The dramatic force of the text, instead of being gathered up in the actor, dissolves without echo into the cinematic ether. 416

The play lies there before us apparently true to itself yet drained of every ounce of energy, like a battery dead from an unknown short. 416

Illusion in the cinema is not based as it is in the theater on convention tacitly accepted by the general public; rather, contrariwise, it s based on the inalienable realism of that which is shown. All trick work must be perfect in all material respects on the screen. 416

Gouhier’s formula, “The stage welcomes every illusion except the illusion of presence,” that “the cinematographic image can be emptied of all reality save one—the reality of space.” 416

The concrete forest of Die Nibelungen may well pretend to be an infinite expanse. We do not believe it to be so, whereas the trembling of just one branch in the wind, and the sunlight, would be enough to conjure up all the forests of the world. 418

2008-04-12T22:04:00.000-07:00

Bauman, Zygmunt. Community.

“But we never wish each other bad luck, and we may be sure that all the others around wish us good” (Bauman 2).

“In short, ‘community’ stands for the kind of world which is not, regrettably, available to us—but which we would dearly wish to inhabit and which we hope to repossess” (Bauman 3).

“‘Community’ is nowadays another name for paradise lost” (Bauman 3).

“Imagination, unlike the harsh realities of life, is an expanse of unbridled freedom. Imagination we can ‘let loose’, and we do, with impunity—since we have not much chance of putting what we have imagined to the test of life” (Bauman 3).

“It is not just the ‘harsh reality’, the admittedly ‘noncommunal’ or even the explicitly community-hostile reality, that differs from that imagined community with a ‘warm feel’. That difference, if anything, only spurs our imagination to run faster and makes the imagined community even more alluring. On this difference, the imagined (postulated, dreamed of) community feeds and thrives” (Bauman 3-4).

“On this difference, the imagined (postulated, dreamed of) community feeds and thrives” (Bauman 4).

“The ‘really existing community’ were we to find ourselves in its grasp, would demand stern obedience in exchange for the service it renders or promises to render. Do you want security? Give up your freedom, or at least a good chunk of it. Do you want confidence? Do not trust anybody outside your community. Do you want mutual understanding? Don’t speak to foreigners nor use foreign language. Do you want this cosy home feeling? Fix alarms on your door and TV cameras on your drive. Do you want safety? Do not let the strangers in and yourself abstain from acting strangely and thinking odd thoughts. Do you want warmth? Do not come near the window, and never open one. The snag is that if you follow this advice and keep the windows sealed, the air inside would soon get stuffy and in the end oppressive” (Bauman 4).

“There is a price to be paid for the privilege of ‘being in a community’—and it is inoffensive or even invisible only as long as the community stays in the dream . . . Missing community means missing security; gaining community, if it happens, would soon mean missing freedom” (Bauman 4).

“We cannot be human without both security and freedom; but we cannot have both at the same time and both in quantities which we find fully satisfactory” (Bauman 5).

“Tantalus was guilty of acquiring/sharing knowledge which neither he nor other mortals like him should have” (Bauman 7).

“as long as you just enjoy your happiness while staying ignorant of the nature of the things that made you happy and not try to tinker with them, let alone t o take them ‘into your hands’. And that if you do dare to take matters into your own hands you will never resurrect the bliss which you could enjoy only in the state of innocence. Your goal will forever escape your grasp” (Bauman 8).

“One can be truly happy only as long as one does not know how truly happy on is” (Bauman 9).

“This is exactly what makes that circle ‘warm’: it has no room for cold calculation and rota-learning of whatever society around, frostily and humourlessly, presents as ‘standing to reason’. And this is exactly why frost-bitten people dream of that magic circle and would wish to cut that other, cold world to its size and measure. Inside the ‘warm circle’ they won’t have to prove anything, and whatever they do they may expect sympathy and help” (Bauman 11).

“Since, ‘community’ means shared understanding of the ‘natural’ and ‘tacit’ kind, it won’t survive the moment in which understanding turns self-conscious, and so loud and vociferous; when, to use Heidegger’s terminology again, understanding passes from the state of being ‘zuhanden’ to being ‘vorhanden’ and becomes an object for contemplation and scrutiny. Community can only be numb—or dead” (Bauman 11).

“‘Distinctiveness’ means: the division into ‘us’ and ‘them’ is exhaustive as much as it is disjunctive, there are not ‘betwixt and between’ cases left, it is crystal-clear who is ‘one of us’ and who is not, there is no muddle and no cause of confusion—no cognitive ambiguity, and so no behavioural ambivalence” (Bauman 12).

“‘Smallness’ means: communication among the insiders is all-embracing and dense, and so casts the signals sporadically arriving ‘from the outside’ into disadvantage by reason of their comparative rarity, superficiality and perfunctory character” (Bauman 12).

“‘self-sufficiency’ means: isolation from ‘them’ is close to complete, the occasion to break it are few and far between. All three features join forces in effectively proftecting the members of the community from challenges to their habitual ways. As long as each and every one of the triune traits stay intact, it is indeed highly unlikely that the motivation to reflection, criticism and experimentation would ever arise” (Bauman 12-13).

“The sameness evaporates once the communication between its insiders and the world outside becomes more intense and carries more weight than the mutual exchanges of the insiders” (Bauman 13).

“From now on, all homogeneity must be ‘hand-picked’ from a tangled mass of variety through selection, separation and exclusion; all unity needs to be made; concord ‘artificially produced’” (Bauman 14).

“all vying for attention and each promising a better (more correct, more effective or more pleasurable) assortment of life tasks and solutions for life problems” (Bauman 14).

“no agreement will appear as ‘natural’ and as ‘self-evident’ as in the communities of Tonnies or Redfield, whatever its spokesperson and promoters do to portray it as such” (Bauman 14).

“Community of common understanding, even if reached, will therefore stay fragile and vulnerable, forever in need of vigilance, fortification and defence” (Bauman 14).

“‘Men and women look for groups to which they can belong, certainly and forever, in a world in which all else is moving and shifting, in which nothing else is certain” (Bauman 15).

“‘Identity’, today’s talk of the town and the most commonly played game in town, owes the attention it attracts and the passions it begets to being a surrogate of community: of the allegedly ‘natural home’ or that circle that stays warm however cold the winds outside” (Bauman 15).

“Identity sprouts on the graveyard of communities, but flourishes thanks to the promise of a resurrection of the dead” (Bauman 16).

“Contemporary seekers of community are doomed to share Tantalus’ lot; there purpose is bound to elude them, and it is their own earnest and zealous effort to grasp it that prompts it to recede” (Bauman 17).

“It will call for twenty-four hours a day vigilance and a daily resharpening of swords; for struggle, day in day out, to keep the aliens off the gates and to spy out and hunt down the turncoats in their own midst” (Bauman 17).

2007-12-27T13:26:00.000-08:00

Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” 1989. (Chapter 5 from Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body). 1993. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 2362-2376.

The body—what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend to the body—is a medium of culture. 2362

The body is not only a text of culture. It is also, as anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu and philosopher Michel Foucault (among others) have argued, a practical, direct locus of social control. 2362

Such an emphasis casts a dark and disquieting shadow across the contemporary scene. For women, as study after study shows, are spending more time on the management and discipline of our bodies than we have in a long, long time. In a decade marked by a reopening of the public arena to women, the intensification of such regimens appears diversionary and subverting. Through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity—a pursuit without a terminus, requiring that women constantly attend to minute and often whimsical changes in fashion—female bodies become docile bodies—bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, “improvement.” Through the exacting and normalizing disciplines of diet, makeup, and dress—central organizing principles of time and space in the day of many women—we are rendered less socially oriented and more centripetally focused on self-modification. Through these disciplines, we continue to memorize on our bodies the feel and conviction of lack, of insufficiency, of never being good enough. At the farthest extremes, the practices of femininity may lead us to utter demoralization, debilitation, and death. 2363

Following Foucault, we must first abandon the idea of power as something possessed by one group and leveled against another; we must instead think of the network of practices, institutions, and technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination in a particular domain. 2364

Second, we need an analytics adequate to describe a power whose central mechanisms are not repressive, but constitutive: “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” Particularly in the realm of femininity, where so much depends on the seemingly willing acceptance of various norms and practices, we need an analysis of power “from below,” as Foucault puts it; for example, of the mechanisms that shape and proliferate—rather than repress—desire, generate and focus our energies, construct our conceptions of normalcy and deviance. 2364 [quotes from Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1]

Nonetheless, anorexia, hysteria, and agoraphobia may provide a paradigm of one way in which potential resistance is not merely undercut but utilized in the maintenance and reproduction of existing power relations. 2365

Doctors described what came to be known as the hysterical personality as “impressionable, suggestible, and narcissistic; highly labile, their moods changing suddenly, dramatically, and seemingly for inconsequential reasons . . . egocentric in the extreme . . . essentially asexual and not uncommonly frigid”—all characteristics normative of femininity in this era [nineteenth century]. As Elaine Showalter points out, the term hysterical itself became almost interchangeable with the term feminine in the literature of the period. 2366 [quotes from Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct]

The hysteric’s embodiment of the feminine mystique of her era, however, seems subtle and ineffable compared to the ingenious literalism of agoraphobia and anorexia. In the context of our culture this literalism makes sense. With the advent of movies and television, the rules for femininity have come to be culturally transmitted more and more though standardized visual images. As a result, femininity itself has come to be largely a matter of constructing, in the manner described by Erving Goffman, the appropriate surface presentation of the self. 2366

But slenderness is only the tip of the iceberg, for slenderness itself requires interpretation. “C’est le sens qui fait vendre,” said Barthes, speaking of clothing styles—it is meaning that makes the sale. So, too, it is meaning that makes the body admirable. To the degree that anorexia may be said to be “about” slenderness, it is about slenderness, as a citadel of contemporary and historical meaning, not as an empty fashion ideal. As such, the interpretation of slenderness yields multiple readings, some related to gender, some not. 2367

In the enormously popular Aliens, the heroine’s personality has been deliberately constructed, with near-comic book explicitness, to embody traditional nurturant femininity alongside breathtaking macho prowess and control; Sigourney Weaver, the actress who portrays her, has called the character “Rambolina.” 2368

One cannot simply add the historically feminine virtues to the historically masculine ones to yield a New Woman, a New Man, a new ethics, or a new culture. Even on the screen or on television, embodied in created characters like the Aliens heroine, the result is a parody. Unfortunately, in this image-bedazzled culture, we find it increasingly difficult to discriminate between parodies and possibilities for the self. 2369

On the symbolic level, too, the protest collapses into its opposite and proclaims the utter capitulation of the subject to the contracted female world. The muteness of hysterics and their return to the level of pure, primary bodily expressivity have been interpreted, as we have seen, as rejecting the symbolic order of the patriarchy and recovering a lost world of semiotic, maternal value. But at the same time, of course, muteness is the condition of the silent, uncomplaining woman—an ideal of patriarchal culture. Protesting the stifling of the female voice through one’s own voicelessness—that is, employing the language of femininity to protest the conditions of the female world—will always involve ambiguities of this sort. 2371

Here, examining the context in which the anorexic syndrome is produced may be illuminating. Anorexia will erupt, typically, in the course of what begins as a fairly moderate diet regime, undertaken because someone, often the father, has made a casual critical remark. Anorexia begins in, emerges out of, what is, in our time, conventional feminine practice. In the course of that practice, for any number of individual reasons, the practice is pushed a little beyond the parameters of moderate dieting. The young woman discovers what it feels like to crave and want and need and yet, through the exercise of her own will, to triumph over that need. In the process, a new realm of meanings is discovered, a range of values and possibilities that Western culture has traditionally coded as “male” and rarely made available to women: an ethic and aesthetic of self-mastery and self-transcendence, expertise, and power over others through the example of superior will and control. The experience is intoxicating, habit-forming. 2372

At school the anorectic discovers that her steadily shrinking body is admired, not so much as an esthetic or sexual object, but for the strength of will and self-control it projects. 2372

This is not to deny the benefits of diet, exercise, and other forms of body management. Rather, I view our bodies as a site of struggle, where we must work to keep our daily practices in the service of resistance to gender domination, not in the service of docility and gender normalization. This work requires, I believe, a determinedly skeptical attitude toward the routes of seeming liberation and pleasure offered by our culture. It also demands an awareness of the often contradictory relations between image and practice, between rhetoric and reality. Popular representations, as we have seen, may forcefully employ the rhetoric and symbolism of empowerment, personal freedom, “having it all.” Yet female bodies, pursuing these ideals, may find themselves as distracted, depressed, and physically ill as female bodies in the nineteenth century were made when pursuing a feminine ideal of dependency, domesticity, and delicacy. The recognition and analysis of such contradictions, and of all the other collusions, subversions, and enticements through which culture enjoins the aid of our bodies in the reproduction of gender, require that we restore a concern for female praxis to its formerly central place in feminist politics. 2376

2008-04-12T21:54:00.000-07:00

Doane, Maryanne. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” Film and Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000. 495-509.

“Furthermore, the image of hieroglyphics strengthens the association made between femininity and the enigmatic, the undecipherable, that which is ‘other.’ (495).

“The claim to investigate an otherness is a pretense, haunted by the mirror-effect by means of which the question of the woman reflects only the man’s own ontological doubts” (496).

“. . . the riddle of femininity is initiated from the beginning in Freud’s text as a question in masquerade” (496).

“The woman, the enigma, the hieroglyphic, the picture, the image—the metonymic chain connects with another: the cinema, the theater of pictures, a writing in images of the woman but not for her” (496).

“In this sense, the hieroglyphic, like the woman, harbors a mystery, an inaccessible though desirable otherness. On the other hand, the hieroglyphic is the most readable of languages” (496).

“For the image is theorized in terms of a certain closeness, the lack of a distance or gap between sign and referent” (496).

“This is precisely why Freud evicted the woman from his lecture on femininity. Too close to herself, entangled in her own enigma, she could not step back, could not achieve the necessary distance of a second look” (496).

“Thus, while the hieroglyphic is an indecipherable or at least enigmatic language, it is also and a the same time potentially the most universally understandable, comprehensible, appropriable of signs. And the woman shares this contradictory status” (496-497).

“‘proper nouns and abstract notions (including inflections) are then the ones that will be noted phonetically’” (Todorov and Ducrot in Doane, 497).
“My insistence upon the congruence between certain theories of the image and theories of femininity is an attempt to dissect the episteme which assigns to the woman a special place in cinematic representation while denying her access to that system” (497).

“The woman’s relation to the camera and the scopic regime is quite different from that of the male” (497).

“The image orchestrates a gaze, a limit, and its pleasurable transgression” (497).

“It would seem that what the cinematic institution has in common with Freud’s gesture is the eviction of the female spectator from a discourse purportedly about her (the cinema, psychoanalysis)—one which, in fact, narrativizes her again and again” (498).

“Precisely the fact that the reversal itself remains locked with in the same logic. The male strip-tease, the gigolo—both inevitably signify the mechanism of reversal itself, constituting themselves as aberrations whose acknowledgment simply reinforces the dominant system of aligning sexual difference with a subject/object dichotomy. And as essential attribute of that dominant system is the matching of male subjectivity with the agency of the look” (498).

“The supportive binary opposition at work here is not only that utilized by Laura Mulvey—an opposition between passivity and activity, but perhaps more importantly, an opposition between proximity and distance in relation to the image” (498).

“The voyeur, according to Metz, must maintain a distance between himself and the image—the cinéphile needs the gap which represents for him the very distance between desire and its object. In this sense, voyeurism is theorized as a type of meta-desire” (499).

“‘If it is true of all desire that it depends on the infinite pursuit of its absent object, voyeurism desire, along with certain forms of sadism, is the only desire whose principle of distance symbolically and spatially evokes this fundamental rent’” (Metz in Doane 499).

“Yet even this status as meta-desire does not fully characterize the cinema, for it is a feature shared by other arts as well (painting, theater, opera, etc)” (499).

“The cinema is characterized by an illusory sensory plentitude (there is ‘so much to see’) and yet haunted by the absence of those very objects which are there to be seen. Absence is an absolute and irrecoverable distance. In other words, Noel Burch is quite right in aligning spectorial desire with a certain spatial configuration” (499).

“For the female spectator there is a certain over-presence of the image—she is the image. Given the closeness of this relationship, the female spectator’s desire can be described only in terms of a kind of narcissism—the female look demands a becoming” (499).

“Nearness however, is not foreign to woman, a nearness so close that any identification of one or the other, and therefore any form of property, is impossible. Woman enjoys a closeness with the other that is so near she cannot possess it any more than she can possess herself” (499).

“‘More so than men who are coaxed toward social success, toward sublimation, women are body’” (Cixous in Doane 499).

“This theme of the overwhelming presence-to-itself of the female body” (Doane 500).

“Similarly, Montrelay argues that while the male has the possibility of displacing the first object of desire (the mother), the female must become that object of desire” (500).

“‘This body, so close, which she has to occupy, is an object in excess which must be ‘lost.’ That is to say, repressed, in order to be symbolized” (Montrelay in Doane 500).

“This body so close, so excessive, prevents the woman from assuming a position similar to the man’s in relation to signifying systems’” (500).

“Female specificity is thus theorized in terms of spatial proximity” (500).

“For the little girl in Freud’s description seeing and knowing are simultaneous—there is no temporal gap between them” (500).

“The boy, unlike the girl in Freud’s description, is capable of a re-vision of earlier events, a retrospective understanding which invests the events with a significance which is in no way linked to an immediacy of sight. This gap between the visible and the knowable, the very possibility of disowning what is seen, prepares the ground for fetishism. In a sense, the male spectator is destined to be a fetishist, balancing knowledge and belief” (501).

“The female, on the other hand, must find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to assume the position of a fetishist” (501).

“the mode of judging ‘in a flash,’ is conducive to what might be termed as ‘over-identification’ with the image” (Irigaray in Doane 501).

“ . . . whilst the feminine can try to speak to itself through a new language, but cannot describe itself from outside or in formal terms, except by identifying itself with the masculine, thus by losing itself” (501).

“Irigaray goes even further: the woman always has a problematic relation to the visible, to form, to structures of seeing. She is much more comfortable with, closer to, the sense of touch” (501).

“And, in fact, the result is a tendency to view the female spectator as the site of an oscillation between a feminine position and a masculine position, invoking the metaphor of the transvestite. Given the structures of cinematic narrative, the woman who identifies with a female character must adopt a passive or masochistic position, while identification with the active hero necessarily entails an acceptance of what Laura Mulvey refers to as a certain ‘masculinization’ of spectatorship” (501).

“trans-sex identification is a habit that very easily becomes second Nature. However, this Nature does not sit easily and shifts relentlessly in its borrowed transvestite clothes” (Mulvey in Doane 501).

“What characterizes the sequence is the marked facility of the transformation of the two women into men in contradistinction to a certain resistance in the case of the man” (502).

“The idea seems to be this: it is understandable that women would want to be men, for everyone wants to be elsewhere than in the feminine position” (502).

“After assuming the position of the subject of discourse rather than its object, the intellectual woman whom Riviere analyzes felt compelled to compensate for this theft of masculinity by over-doing the gestures of feminine flirtation” (502).

“Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it . . . The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the masquerade. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing” (502).

“To masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between oneself and one’s image” (502).

“a separation between the cause of desire and oneself. In Montrelay’s words, ‘the woman uses her own body as a disguise’” (503).

“‘we are watching a woman demonstrate the representation of a woman’s body.’ This type of masquerade, an excess of femininity, is aligned with the femme fatale” (503).

“By destabilizing the image, the masquerade confounds this masculine structure of the look” (503).

“ . . . masquerade as a type of representation which carries a threat, disarticulating male systems of viewing. Yet, it specifies nothing with respect to female spectatorship. What might it mean to masquerade as spectator? To assume the mask in order to see in a different way?” (503).

“The first scene in Now Voyager depicts the Bette Davis character as repressed, unattractive, and undesirable or, in her own words, as the spinster aunt of the family (‘Every family has one.’)” (503).

“The woman with glasses signifies simultaneously intellectuality and undesirability; but the moment she removes her glasses . . . she is transformed into spectacle, the very picture of desire” (503).

“the woman’s appropriation of the gaze. Glasses worn by a woman in the cinema do not generally signify a deficiency in seeing but an active looking, or even simply the fact of seeing as opposed to being seen” (503-504).

“There is always a certain excessiveness, a difficulty associated with women who appropriate the gaze, who insist upon looking” (504).

“The man with binoculars is countered by the woman with glasses. The gaze must be dissociated from mastery” (504).

“Joan Crawford’s problematic status is a result of her continual attempts to assume the position of spectator—fixing John Garfield with her gaze. Her transformation from spectator to spectacle is signified repetitively by the gesture of removing her glasses” (504).

“The man is not centered; in fact, he occupies a very narrow space on the extreme right of the picture. Nevertheless, it is his gaze which defines the problematic of the photograph; is his gaze which effectively erases the woman. Indeed, as subject of the gaze, the woman looks intently. But not only is the object of her look concealed from the spectator, her gaze is encased by the two poles defining the masculine axis of vision. Fascinated by nothing visible—a blankness or void for the spectator—unanchored by a ‘sight’ . . . the female gaze is left free-floating, vulnerable to subjection” (505).

“On the other hand, the object of the male gaze is fully present, there for the spectator” (505).

“The woman’s look is literally outside the triangle which traces a complicity between the man, the nude, and the spectator. The feminine presence in the photograph, despite a diagetic centering of the female spectator (although it is not clear whether she is looking at herself in a mirror or peering through a door or window)” (505).

“it also demonstrates how the photograph makes figurative the operation of centering—draining the actual center point of significance in order to deposit meaning on the margins. The male gaze is centered, in control—although it is exercised from the periphery” (505).

“What is it that makes the photograph not only readable but pleasurable—at the expense of the woman? The critic does not ask what makes the photograph a negotiable item in a market of signification” (507).

“The photograph displays insistently, in microcosm, the structure of the cinematic inscription of a sexual differentiation in modes of looking” (507).

“Films play out scenarios of looking in order to outline the terms of their own understanding. And given the divergence between masculine and feminine scenarios, those terms would seem to be explicitly negotiated as markers of sexual difference” (507).

“Both the theory of the image and its apparatus, the cinema, produce a position for the female spectator—a position which is ultimately untenable because it lacks the attribute of distance so necessary for an adequate reading of the image. The entire elaboration of femininity as a closeness, a nearness, as present-to-itself is not the definition of an essence but the delineation of a place culturally assigned to the woman” (507).

“Above and beyond a simple adoption of the masculine position in relation to the cinematic sign, the female spectator is given two options: the masochism of over-identification or the narcissism entailed in becoming one’s own object of desire, in assuming the image in the most radical way” (507).

“The effectivity of masquerade lies precisely in its potential to manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a problematic within which the image is manipulable, producible, and readable by the woman” (507).

“Doisneau’s photograph is not readable by the female spectator—it can give her pleasure only in masochism. In order to ‘get’ the joke, she must once again assume the position of the transvestite” (507).

“It is quite tempting to foreclose entirely the possibility of female spectatorship, to repeat at the level of theory the gesture of the photograph, given the history of a cinema which relies so heavily on voyeurism, fetishism, and identification with an ego ideal conceivable only in masculine terms” (507).

“And, in fact, there has been a tendency to theorize femininity and hence the feminine gaze as repressed, and in its repression somehow irretrievable, the enigma constituted by Freud’s question” (507).

“Yet, as Michel Foucault has demonstrated, the repressive hypothesis on its own entails a very limited and simplistic notion of the working of power . . . In theories of repression there is no sense of the productiveness and positivity of power” (507).

“Femininity is produced very precisely as a position within the network of power relations” (507-508).

2008-02-14T11:58:00.001-08:00

Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” 1983. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 15-34.

Like the female spectator, the female protagonist often fails to look, to return the gaze of the male who desires her. In the classical narrative cinema, to see is to desire. It comes as no surprise, then, that many of the “good girl” heroines of the silent screen were often figuratively, or even literally, blind. Blindness in this context signifies a perfect absence of desire, allowing the look of the male protagonist to regard the woman at the requisite safe distance necessary to the voyeur’s pleasure. 15

But even when the heroine is not literally blind, the failure and frustration of her vision can be the most important mark of her sexual purity. 16

The bold, smouldering dark eyes of the silent screen vamp offer an obvious example of a powerful female look. But the dubious moral status of such heroines, and the fact that they must be punished in the end, undermine the legitimacy and authentic subjectivity of this look, frequently turning it into a mere parody of the male look. More instructive are those moments when the “good girl” heroines are granted the power of the look, whether in the woman’s film, as discussed by Mary Ann Doane, or in the horror film as discussed below. In both cases, as Doane suggests, “the woman’s exercise of an active investigating gaze can only be simultaneous with her own victimization.” The woman’s gaze is punished, in other words, by narrative processes that transform curiosity and desire into masochistic fantasy. 17

I hope to reveal not only the process of punishment but a surprising (and at times subversive) affinity between monster and woman, in the sense in which her look at the monster recognizes their similar status within patriarchal structures of seeing. 18

First, Nina’s look at the vampire fails to maintain the distance between observer and observed so essential to the “pleasure” of the voyeur. For where the (male) voyeur’s properly distanced look safely masters the potential threat of the (female) body it views, the woman’s look of horror paralyzes her in such a way that distance is overcome; the monster or the freak’s own spectacular appearance holds her originally active, curious look in a trancelike passivity that allows him to master her through her look. 18

Thus her look [in The Phantom of the Opera, 1925] occurs after the film audience has had its own chance to see him—they are framed in a two-shot that has him standing slightly behind her; only when she turns does she see his masked face. 18

The audience’s belated adoption of the woman’s point of view undermines the usual audience identification and sympathy with the look of the cinematic character. But it may also permit a different form of identification and sympathy to take place, not between the audience and the character who looks, but / between the two objects of the cinematic spectacle who encounter one another in this look—the woman and the monster. 19-20

Clearly the monster’s power is one of sexual difference from the normal male. In this difference he is remarkably like the woman in the eyes of the traumatized male: a biological freak with impossible and threatening appetites that suggest a frightening potency precisely where the normal male would perceive a lack. 20

It may very well be, then, that the power and potency of the monster body in many classic horror films . . . should not be interpreted as an eruption of the normally repressed animal sexuality of the civilized male (the monster as double for the male viewer and characters in the film), but as the feared power and potency of a different kind of sexuality (the monster as double for the women). 20

The male look expresses conventional fear at that which differs from itself. The female look—/a look given preeminent position in the horror film—shares the male of the monster’s freakishness, but also recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference. For she too has been constituted as an exhibitionist-object by the desiring look of the male. There is not that much difference between an object of desire and an object of horror as far as the male look is concerned. 20-21

The strange sympathy and affinity that often develops between the monster and the girl may thus be less an expression of sexual desire (as in King Kong, Beauty and the Beast) and more a flash of sympathetic identification. 21

Laura Mulvey has shown that the male look at the woman in the cinema involves two forms of mastery over the threat of castration posed by her “lack” of a penis: a sadistic voyeurism which punishes or endangers the woman through the agency of an active and powerful male character; and fetishistic overvaluation, which masters the threat of castration by investing the woman’s body with an excess of aesthetic perfection. 22

According to Lurie, the real trauma for the young boy is not that the mother is castrated but that she isn’t: she is obviously not mutilated the way he would be if his penis were taken from him. The notion of the woman as a castrated version of the male is, according to Lurie, a comforting, wishful fantasy intended to combat the child’s imagined dread of what his mother’s very real power could do to him. This protective fantasy is aimed at convincing himself that “women are what men would be if they had no penises—bereft of sexuality, helpless, incapable.” 23

For, looked at from the woman’s perspective, the monster is not so much lacking as he is powerful in a different way. The vampire film offers a clear example of the threat this different form of sexuality represents to the male. The vampiric act of sucking blood, sapping the life fluid of a victim so that the victim in turn becomes a vampire, is similar to the female role of milking the sperm of the male during intercourse. What the vampire seems to represent then is a sexual power whose threat lies in its difference from a phallic “norm.” 23

The vampire’s insatiable need for blood seems a particularly apt analogue for what must seem to the man to be an insatiable sexual appetite—yet another threat to his potency. So there is a sense in which the woman’s look at the monster is more than simply a punishment for looking or a narcissistic fascination with the distortion of her own image in the mirror that patriarchy holds up to her; it is also a recognition of their similar status as potent threats to a vulnerable male power. 23

Helen’s [in Peeping Tom, 1960] refusal of narcissism also turns out to be a refusal of the only way patriarchal cinema has of representing woman’s desire. If she has the power to recognize and refuse the mirror-trap, it is because she is portrayed as ignorant of sexual desire altogether. She is like the one virginal babysitter who survives the attacks of the monster in Halloween (1978), or like Lila, Marion Crane’s “good girl” sister in Psycho, who survives Norman Bates’s final attack, or even like Helen’s blind mother in Peeping Tom who immediately “sees”—in the tradition of the blind seer—the turbulence in Mark’s soul. In other words, in most horror films the tradition of the power of the woman “pure of heart” is still going strong: the woman’s power to resist the monster is directly proportional to her absence of sexual desire. Clarity of vision, it would seem, can exist only in absence. 27

Psycho has been the model for the new form of the “psycho at large” horror films that began to emerge in the early 1960s and which now dominate the market. There is no more convincing proof of the influence of this model / than de Palma’s flagrant imitation of it in Dressed to Kill. 27-28

We have seen that in the classic horror film the woman’s sexually charged look at the monster encounters a horror version of her own body. The monster is thus one of many mirrors held up to her by her patriarchy. But, as I have tried to suggest, she also encounters in this mirror at least the possibility of a power located in her very difference from the male. 31

Ebert points out that in these films we rarely see the psychopathic murderer whose point of view the audience nevertheless adopts. This “non-specific male killing force” thus displaces what was once the subjective point of view of the female victim onto an audience that is now asked to view the body of the woman victim as the only visible monster in the film. In other words, in these films the recognition and affinity between woman and monster of the classic horror film gives way to pure identity: she is the monster, her mutilated body is the only visible horror. 31

In this light, Bobbie’s vengeance on Kate [in Dressed to Kill, 1980] can be viewed not as the act of a jealous woman eliminating her rival, but as acting out the male fantasy that woman is castrated, mutilated, “what men would be if they had no penises—bereft of sexuality, helpless, incapable.” 32

The horror film may be a rare example of a genre that permits the expression of women’s sexual potency and desire and that associates this desire with the autonomous act of looking, but it does so / in these more recent examples only to punish her for this very act, only to demonstrate how monstrous female desire can be. 32-33

2008-02-15T12:06:00.000-08:00

Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” 1991. Film Genre Reader II. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. 140-158.

This essay explores the notion that there may be some value in thinking about the form, function, and system of seemingly gratuitous excesses in these three genres [Porn, Horror, and Tear-Jerkers]. For if, as it seems, sex, violence, and emotion are fundamental elements of the sensational effects of these three types of films, the designation “gratuitous” is itself gratuitous. 141

Altman argues that Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, who locate the Classical Hollywood style in the linear, progressive form of the Hollywood narrative, cannot accommodate “melodramatic” attributes like spectacle, episodic presentation, or dependence on coincidence except as limited exceptions, or “play,” within the dominant linear causality of the classical. 141

…thus makes a strong case for the need to recognize the possibility that excess may itself be organized as a system. 141

Pornography is the lowest in cultural esteem, gross-out horror is next to lowest. Melodrama, however, refers to a much broader category of films and a much larger system of excess. It would not be unreasonable, in fact, to consider all three of these genres under the extended rubric of melodrama. 142

I shall limit my focus here, however, to a narrower sense of melodrama, leaving the broader category of the sensational to encompass the three genres I wish to consider. Thus, partly for purposes of contrast with pornography, the melodrama I will consider here will consist of the form that has most interested feminist critics—that of “the woman’s film,” or “weepie.” 142

I am expanding Clover’s notion of low body genres to include the sensation of overwhelming pathos in the “weepie.” The body spectacle is featured most sensationally in pornography’s portrayal of orgasm, in horror’s portrayal of violence and terror, and in melodrama’s portrayal of weeping. 142

Visually, each of these ecstatic excesses could be said to share a quality of uncontrollable convulsion or spasm—of the body “beside itself” in the grips of sexual pleasure, fear and terror, and overpowering sadness. Aurally, excess is marked by recourse not to the coded articulations of language but to inarticulate cries—of pleasure in porn, screams of fear in horror, sobs of anguish in melodrama. 143

Looking, and listening, to these bodily ecstasies, we can also notice something else that these genres seem to share: though quite differently gendered with respect to their targeted audiences—with pornography aimed, presumably, at active men and melodramatic weepies aimed, presumably, at passive women, and with contemporary gross-out horror aimed at adolescents careening wildly between the two masculine and feminine poles—in each of these genres the bodies of women figured on the screen have functioned traditionally as the primary embodiments of pleasure, fear, and pain. 143

There are, of course, other film genres that both portray and affect the sensational body—e.g., thrillers, musicals, comedies. I suggest, however, that the film genres with especially low cultural status—which have seemed to exist as excesses to the system of even the popular genres—are not simply those that sensationally display bodies on the screen and register effects in the bodies of spectators. Rather, what may especially mark these body genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen, along with the fact that the body displayed is female. 143

Whether this mimicry is exact—e.g., whether the spectator at the porn film actually experiences orgasm, whether the spectator at the horror film actually shudders in fear, whether the spectator of the melodrama actually dissolves in tears—the success of these genres seems a self-evident matter of measuring bodily response. 144

We feel manipulated by these texts, an impression that the very colloquialisms “tearjerker” and “fearjerker” express—and to which we could add pornography’s even cruder sense as texts to which some people might be inclined to “jerk off.” 144

Mary Ann Doane, for example, writing about the most genteel of these jerkers—the maternal melodrama—equates the violence of this emotion to a kind of “textual rape” of the targeted female viewer, who is “feminized through pathos.” 144

Robin Morgan’s famous slogan “Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice” is well known. 144

The aptly named Twitchell thus describes a kind of erection of the hair founded in the conflicting desires of “fight and flight.” 144

“Torture the women!” was the famous advice given by Alfred Hitchcock. 144

Many feminists have pointed to the victimization of the woman performers of pornography who must actually do the acts depicted in the film as well as to the victimization of characters within the films. Pornography, in this view, is fundamentally sadistic. In weepies, one the other hand, feminists have pointed to the spectacles of intense suffering and loss as masochistic. 148

While feminists have often pointed to the women victims in horror films who suffer simulated torture and mutilation as victims of sadism, more recent feminist work has suggested that the horror film may present an interesting, and perhaps instructive, case of oscillation between masochistic and sadistic poles. This argument, advanced by Clover, has suggested that pleasure, for a masculine-identified viewer, oscillates between identifying with the initial passive powerlessness of the abject and terrorized girl-victim of horror and her later, active empowerment. 148

Pornography’s appeal to its presumed male viewers would be characterized as sadistic, horror films’ appeal to the emerging sexual identities of its (frequently adolescent) spectators would be sado-masochistic, and women’s films’ appeal to presumed female viewers would be masochistic. 149

The subgenre of sadomasochistic pornography, with its suspension of pleasure over the course of prolonged sessions of dramatic suffering, offers a particularly intense, almost parodic, enactment of the classical melodramatic scenario of the passive and innocent female victim suffering at the hands of a leering villain. 149

It worth noting as well that nonsadomasochistic pornography has historically been one of the few types of popular film that has not punished women for actively pursuing their sexual pleasure. 150

The point is certainly not to admire the “sexual freedom” of this new fluidity and oscillation—the new femininity of men who hug and the new masculinity of women who leer—as if it represented any ultimate defeat of phallic power. Rather, the more useful lesson might be to see what this new fluidity and oscillation permits in the construction of feminine viewing pleasures once thought not to exist at all. (It is instructive, for example, that women characters in the new bisexual pornography are shown verbally articulating their visual pleasure as they watch men perform sex with men.) 152

For fantasies are not, as is sometimes thought, wish-fulfilling linear narratives of mastery and control leading to closure and the attainment of desire. They are marked, rather, by the prolongation of desire and by the lack of fixed position with respect to the objects and events fantasized. 153

Each of the three body genres I have been describing could be seen to correspond in important ways to one of these original fantasies. Pornography, for example, is the genre that has seemed to endlessly repeat the fantasies of primal seduction, of meeting the other, seducing or being seduced by the other in an ideal “pornotopia” where, as Steven Marcus has noted, it is always bedtime. Horror is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat the trauma of castration, as if to “explain,” by repetitious mastery, the original problem of sexual difference. And melodramatic weepie is the genre that seems to endlessly repeat our melancholic sense of the loss of origin, the impossible hope of returning to an earlier state that is perhaps most fundamentally represented by the body of the mother. 154

Italian critic Franco Moretti has argued, for example, that literature that makes us cry operates via a special manipulation of temporality: what triggers our crying is not just the sadness or suffering of the character in the story but a very precise moment when characters in the story catch up with and realize what the audience already knows. We cry, Moretti argues, not just because the characters do, but at the precise moment when desire is finally recognized as futile. The release of tension produces tears—which become a kind of homage to a happiness that is kissed goodbye. Pathos is thus a surrender to reality, but it is a surrender that pays homage to the ideal that tried to wage war on it. 155

However, one thing already seems clear: these “gross” body genres, which may seem so violent and inimical to women, cannot be dismissed as evidence of a monolithic and unchanging misogyny, as either pure sadism for male viewers or as masochism for females. 156

Genres thrive, after all, on the persistence of the problems they address; but genres thrive also in their ability to recast the nature of these problems. 156

2008-05-18T07:50:00.000-07:00

Hutcheon, Linda. “A New Introduction, an Old Concern.” Preface to 2000 Edition of A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985. xi-xx.

Parody changes with the culture; its forms, its relations to its “targets,” and its intentions are not going to be the same in North America today as they were in eighteenth-century England. And theories of parody have changed along with parody’s aesthetic manifestations. This is why the / definition of parody as ridicule that developed in tandem with the art of Pope, Swift, and Hogarth doesn’t necessarily feel right today. xi-xii

Because this kind of parodic art comes in a very wide variety of tones and moods—from respectful to playful to scathingly critical—and because its ironies can so obviously cut both ways, any theory that would try to account for its complexity must begin from a broad definition. From observing it at work, I chose to define parody as a form of repetition with ironic critical distance, marking difference rather than similarity. xii

Of course, parody is clearly a formal phenomenon—a bitextual synthesis or a dialogic relation between texts—but without the consciousness (and then interpretation) of that discursive doubling by the perceiver, how could parody actually be said to exist, much less “work”? xiii

Parody both distances us and involves us as perceivers; it always has an impact. xiii

The entire communicative act needs to be taken into account; like its rhetorical miniature, irony, parody is intensely context- and discourse-dependent. Even in a theoretical age like our own that has cast deep suspicion on the concept of intentionality, the experience of interpreting parody in practice forces us to acknowledge at least an inference of intention and to theorize that inference. xiv

Parody’s pragmatics, then, are likely as complex as either its dual formal structure of its ideological ambivalence. Like irony, parody is a form if indirect as well as double-voiced discourse, but it is not parasitic in any way. In transmuting or remodeling previous texts, it points to the differential but mutual dependence of parody and parodied texts. Its two voices neither merge nor cancel each other out; they work together, while remaining distinct in their defining difference. In this sense parody might be said to be, at heart, less an aggressive than a conciliatory rhetorical strategy, building upon more than attacking its other, while still retaining its critical distance. It is this critical distance, however, that has always permitted satire to be so effectively deployed through the textual forms of parody. From Tony Kushner to Weird Al Yankovic, satirists continue to use the pointed and effective doubling of parody’s voices as a vehicle to unmask the duplicities of modern society. xiv

Not only can parody destroy the Benjaminian “aura” of an original work through reproduction but it can actually undermine that work’s monetary value. This is usually the point at which the law is invoked. The proliferation of adaptations, that is, of translations of works into other genres and media, has no doubt contributed to this new recourse to litigation. When Richard Wagner adapted / the medieval tales of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Chrétien de Troyes for his 1882 opera Parsifal, that act was considered part of the normal creative process. And, a few generations later, when Thomas Mann adapted Wagner’s opera Die Walküre for his story “Wäsungenblut,” the more obviously parodic play with the intertext was both recognized and approved by readers and critics alike. Why then did a commercial photographer sue artist Jeff Koons, when the latter reproduced in sculpture his photograph of two friends holding a litter of new puppies? xiv-xv

I recall a friend once saying that the god of parody, if there were one, would have to be Janus, with his two heads facing in two directions at once. Increasingly though, I find myself invoking Hermes, the mediating messenger god, with his winged sandles and paradoxically plural functions, for Hermes is the god of both thieves and merchants, cheating and commerce. What better deity to preside over the thinking about parody’s transgressing and authorizing impulses, its challenges to as well as its reinscriptions of authority? xvii

2008-05-18T08:03:00.000-07:00

Williams, Linda. “Power, Pleasure, and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography.” Representations. 27 (1989): 37-65.

Yet elsewhere in his writing Bazin has celebrated documentary realism in fictional contexts, and he is honest enough here to acknowledge “a critical contradiction,” which he notes “without resolving.” 38

Our complicity as viewers of the act is different from what it would be if we were actually in the room with the “object”; it is connected to the fact that we are watching (whether with fascination, pleasure, horror, or dread) an act that seems to be really taking place but with which we have no spatial or temporal connection ourselves. 38

-proximity / distance = greater distance because we know there’s a frame, greater proximity because it’s often presented in an unmediated way. Might want to look at Wood’s article on art vs. exploitation.

[about Snuff]: Nevertheless, added signals of documentary evidence—the director’s speech to and “look” at the camera, the indication of film “run out,” the shocking transition from sex scene to violence—all operated to convince some viewers that if what they had seen before was fake violence belonging to the genre of horror, what they were seeing now was real (hard-core) violence belonging to the genre of pornography. 41

. . . especially in the context of the hard-core genre’s perpetual quest for documentary evidence of involuntary pleasure in female bodies that do not give as ready evidence of this pleasure as male bodies. 41

. . . perverse pleasure of witnessing the involuntary spasm of death. 42

Snuff probably became the “case” that it did because it did not, like the horror film, simply displace the sexual desires of characters onto violent acts; rather, its mix of soft-core sex and sexual desires of characters onto violent acts; rather, its mix of soft-core sex and violence was more messy, interrupting expectations for pleasurable sex with violence and vice versa. Snuff, both the film and the idea, exists at the contradictory intersection of the spectacle of pleasure (generally assumed to be real in hardcore pornography) and pain (generally assumed to be faked in horror films). 42

2008-05-18T08:02:00.000-07:00

Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1997.

Dr. A’s Fowleresque dismissal of TV as just a “distraction” is less naïve than insane: there is nothing but television on this episode. 32

I, the pseudo-voyeur, am indeed “behind the scenes,” primed to get the in-joke. But it is not I the spy who have crept inside television’s boundaries. It is vice versa. Television, even the mundane little businesses of its production, have become my—our—own interior. 32

A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger. 33

But once television introduces the element of watching, and once it informs an economy and culture like radio never could have, the referential stakes go way up. Six hours a day is more time than most people (consciously) do any other one thing. How human beings who absorb such high doses understand themselves will naturally change, become vastly more spectatorial, self-conscious. Because the practice of “watching” is expansive. Exponential. We spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start watching ourselves watching. Pretty soon we start to “feel” ourselves feeling, yearn to experience “experiences.” And that American subspecies into fiction writing starts writing more and more about . . . 34

For Metafiction, in its ascendant and most important phases, was really nothing more than a single-order expansion of its own great theoretical nemesis, Realism: if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it. This high-cultural postmodern genre, in other words, was deeply informed by the emergence of television and the metastasis of self-conscious watching. 34

That products presented as helping you express individuality can afford to be advertised on television only because they sell to enormous numbers of people. 35

If even the president lies to you, whom are you supposed to trust to deliver the real? 36

But something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as a relief from the very problems it causes. 38

Hence the networks’ bland response to its critics that in the majority of cases—and until the rise of hip metatelevision you could count the exceptions on one hand—“different” or “high-concept” programming simply doesn’t get ratings. High-quality television cannot stand up to the gaze of millions, somehow. 40

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to. 42

Put simply, the pop reference works so well in contemporary fiction because (1) we all recognize such a reference, and (2) we’re all a little uneasy about how we all recognize such a reference. 42

The status of Low-cultural images in postmodern and contemporary fiction is very different from those images’ place in postmodernism’s artistic ancestors, e.g. the “dirty realism” of a Joyce or the ur-Dadaism of something like Duchamp’s toilet sculpture. Duchamp’s aesthetic display of that vulgarest of appliances served an exclusively theoretical end: it was making statements like “The Museum is the Mausoleum is the Men’s Room,” etc. It was an example of what Octavio Paz calls “Meta-irony,” an attempt to reveal that categories we divide into superior/arty and inferior/vulgar are in fact so interdependent as to be coextensive. The use of Low references in a lot of today’s High literary fiction, on the other hand, serves a less abstract agenda. It is meant (1) to help create a mood of irony and irreverence, (2) to make us uneasy and so “comment” on / the vapidity of U.S. culture, and (3) most important, these days, to be just plain realistic. 43

We’re not different from our fathers in that television presents and defines our contemporary world. Where are different is that we have no memory of a world without such electric definition. This is why the derision so many older fictionists heap on a “Brat Pack” generation they see as insufficiently critical of mass culture is at once understandable and misguided.

commercial-length conversations 44

Even the stream-of-consciousness guys who fathered Modernism were, on a very high level, constructing the same sorts of illusions about privacy-puncturing and espial on the forbidden that television has found so effective. 45

What distinguishes another, later wave of postmodern literature is a further shift from television-images as valid objects of literary allusion to television and metawatching as themselves valid subjects. 46

the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat. 49

It is a natural adaptation of the hoary techniques of literary Realism to a ’90s whose defining boundaries have been deformed by electric signal. 51

For one of realistic fiction’s big jobs used to be to afford easements across borders, to help readers leap over the walls of self and locale and show us unseen or –dreamed-of people and cultures and ways to be. Realism made / the strange familiar. Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall’s fall—i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar—it’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious Realist fiction is going about trying to make the familiar strange. 51-52

The fact is that for at least ten years now, television has been ingeniously absorbing, homogenizing, and re-presenting the very same cynical postmodern aesthetic that was once the best alternative to the appeal of Low, over-easy, mass-marketed narrative. 52

products billed as distinguishing individuals from crowds sell to huge crowds of individuals 56

The crowd is now, paradoxically, both (1) the “herd” in contrast to which the viewer’s distinctive identity is to be defined and (2) the witnesses whose sight alone can confer distinctive identity. The lone viewer’s isolation in front of his furniture is implicitly applauded—it’s better, realer, these solipsistic ads imply, to fly solo—and yet it’s also implicated as threatening, confusing, since after all Joe Briefcase is not an idiot, sitting here, and knows himself as a viewer to b e guilty of the two big sins the ads decry: being a passive watcher (of TV) and being part of a great herd (of TV-watchers and Stand-Apart-product-buyers). How odd. 56

The surface of Stand-Out ads still presents a relatively unalloyed Buy This Thing, but the deep message of television w/r/t these ads looks to be that Joe Briefcase’s ontological status as just one in a reactive watching mass is at some basic level shaky, contingent, and that true actualization of self would ultimately consist in Joe’s becoming one of the images that are the object of this great herd-like watching. That is, television’s real pitch in these commercials is that it’s better to be inside the TV than to be outside, watching. 56

Maybe, though, the relation of contemporary viewer to contemporary television is less a paradigm of infantilism and addiction than it is of the U.S.A.’s familiar relation to all the technology we equate at once with freedom and power and slavery and chaos. For, as with television, whether we happen personally to love technology, hate it, fear it, or all three, we still look relentlessly to technology for solutions to the very problems technology seems to cause—see e.g. catalysis for smog, S.D.I. for nuclear missiles, transplants for assorted rot. 57

Joe Briefcase might have been happy enough when watching, but it was hard to think he could be too terribly happy about watching so much. Surely, deep down, Joe was uncomfortable with being one part of the biggest crowd in human history watching images that suggest that life’s meaning consists in standing visibly apart from the crowd. TV’s guilt/indulgence/reassurance cycle addresses these concerns on one level. But might there not be some deeper way to keep Joe Briefcase firmly in the crowd of watchers, by somehow associating his very viewership with transcendence of watching crowds? But that would be absurd. Enter irony. 58

This in turn reflected a wider shift in U.S. perception of how art was supposed to work, a transition from art’s being a creative instantiation of real values to art’s being a creative rejection of bogus values. 59

ads that today’s hip viewer finds old-fashioned and “manipulative.” In contrast to a blatant Buy This Thing, the Pepsi commercial pitches parody. The ad is utterly up-front about what TV ads are popularly despised for doing, viz. using primal, flim-flam appeals to sell sugary crud to people whose identity is nothing but mass consumption. 60

The commercial invites a complicity between its own witty irony and veteran viewer Joe’s cynical, nobody’s-/fool appreciation of that irony. It invites Joe into an in-joke the Audience is the butt of. It congratulates Joe Briefcase, in other words, on transcending the very crowd that defines him. And entire crowds of Joe B.’s responded: the ad boosted Pepsi’s market share through three sales quarters. 61

Isuzu Inc. hit pay dirt in the late ’80s with its series of “Joe Isuzu” spots, featuring an oily, Satanic-looking salesman who told whoppers about Isuzu’s genuine llama-skin upholstery and ability to run on tapwater. Though the ads never said much of anything about why Isuzus are in fact good cars, sales and awards accrued. The ads succeeded as parodies of how oily and Satanic car commercials are. They invited viewers to congratulate Isuzu’s ads for being ironic, to congratulate themselves for getting the joke, and to congratulate Isuzu Inc. for being “fearless” and “irreverent” enough to acknowledge that car ads are ridiculous and that Audience is dumb to believe them. 61

The ads invite the lone viewer to drive an Isuzu as some sort of anti-advertising statement. The ads successfully associate Isuzu-purchase with fearlessness and irreverence and the capacity to see through deception. You can now find successful television ads that mock TV-ad conventions almost anywhere you look. 61

The real authority on a world we now view as constructed and not depicted becomes the medium that constructs our world-view. Second, to the extent that TV can refer exclusively to itself and debunk conventional standards as hollow, it is invulnerable to critics’ charges that what’s on is shallow or crass or bad, since any such judgments appeal to conventional, extra-televisual standards about depth, taste, quality. Too, the ironic tone of TV’s self-reference means that no one can accuse TV of trying to put anything / over on anybody. As essayist Lewis Hyde points out, self-mocking irony is always “Sincerity, with a motive.” 63

if television can invite Joe Briefcase into itself via in-gags and irony, it can ease that painful tension between Joe’s need to transcend the crowd and his inescapable status as Audience-member. For to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about “seeing through” the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it’s taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. 63

TV’s institutionalization of hip irony. 63

Or, in contemporary art, that televisual disdain for “hypocritical” retrovalues like originality, depth, and integrity has no truck with those recombinant “appropriation” styles of art and architecture in which “past becomes pastiche,” or with the repetitive solmizations of a Glass or a Reich, or with the self-conscious catatonia of a platoon of Raymond Carver wannabes? 64

In the same regard, see that in 1990, flatness, numbness, and cynicism in one’s demeanor are clear ways to transmit the televisual attitude of stand-out transcendence. 64

Television has pulled the old dynamic of reference and redemption inside-out: it is now television that takes elements of the postmodern—the involution, the absurdity, the sardonic fatigue, the iconoclasm and rebellion—and bends them to the ends of spectation and consumption. 64

Pynchon reoriented our view of paranoia from deviant psychic fringe to central thread in the corporo-bureacratic weave; DeLillo exposed image, signal, data and tech as agents of spiritual chaos and not social order. 66

The assumptions behind early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: it was / assumed that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom. 66-67

It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. 67

Victorious rebels, in fact, seem best at using their tough, cynical rebel-skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves—in other words, they just become better tyrants. And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so pwerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. 67

And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself. 68

What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution? 68

How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”? How is one to be a bona fide iconoclast when Burker King sells onion rings with “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? 68

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism. 70

The novels of Pynchon and DeLillo revolve metaphorically off the concept of interference: the more connections, the more chaos, and the harder it is to cull any meaning from the seas of signal. 73

And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as “liberating” as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of a particular construct’s quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience. 79

high-quality prose television 80

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. 81

2008-05-18T08:01:00.004-07:00

Walker, Joseph S. “Mom and the Blair Witch: Narrative, Form, and the Feminine.” In Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Ed. Sarah Lynn Higley and Andrew Weinstock. Contemporary film and television series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 163-180.

By the end of 1999, the Internet Movie Database had already recognized a dozen features directly spoofing Myrick and Sanchez’s film, and many more have appeared since. 163

In fact, like any number of earlier, similarly startling assaults on dominant Hollywood style, BWP is “superficially radical, [but] internally conservative” (Ray 296). Although the film continually disrupts the conventionalizing forces of linear storytelling and seamless technical presentation, it ultimately does so only in the service of a deeply / reactionary restoration and defense of the most conservative form of patriarchal power. 164

Despite its position in the clearly fantastic tradition of the horror genre, the film is convincing enough in its realistic guise (aided, as I discuss below, by various auxiliary texts) that, for several months after the film’s release, Burkittsville, the town in which its opening sequences are set, regularly received visitors and callers volunteering to join search parties looking for the missing students. 164

The one gap in this series of calculated revelations, the tool the film cannot entirely account for, is editing. The film is taken from two separate cameras, and there is a clear implication within the world of the narrative that there are many hours of footage. BWP itself, then, was stitched together by someone for some purpose, and it represents only one possible view of the embedded narrative. This alone stands as internal evidence of a narrative authority outside the scope of the film itself—as evidence, in other words, of the fic/tionality of the entire work. 164-165

It might reasonably be objected at this point that there is, in fact, nothing “historical” about The Blair Witch Project. The “legend” was created for the film, the people who appear on screen are actors, and the scenarios they act out are predetermined and without real consequence. To gain the perspective necessary for such an observation, however, we must remove ourselves from the immediate narrative frame of the film as an autonomous text and enter the more complicated and even contradictory web of multitextual frames that surround it. Most prominently, of course, there are the auxiliary texts which I discuss below, and which extend and deepen the story told within the film itself: the Web site, the television special, the book, and so on. Beyond these, however, are texts (primarily interviews and news stories) that immediately acknowledge that the film is fiction and then go on to discuss the mechanics of its production. These stories provide the widely disseminated details of how Donahue, Leonard, and Williams actually camped in the woods for several days, filmed their experiences themselves, endured isolation, cold, hunger, and exhaustion, knew only the broad outlines of the story, and were frequently surprised / as the unseen filmmakers brought some new element into the scenario. A story by Josh Wolk in Entertainment Weekly, for example, reveals that the actors did not know that they would encounter the stickmen, that Leonard would be “taken” from the group, or that they were being guided toward an abandoned house for the film’s climax. The purpose of subjecting the actors to these ordeals, of course , was to ensure the authenticity of the footage, to guarantee that “the actors were legitimately frightened by the filmmakers’ stunts” (Wolk). 166

Essentially, the experiences we witness on the screen are real, are historical. Whether we see them as Heather, Josh, and Mike being pursued by a witch or as Donahue, Leonard, and Williams responding to the calculated torments of the filmmakers becomes a matter of preference rather than necessity, and the more deeply the viewer is immersed in the multiple planes of narrative, the more individual moments seem to mark ambiguous points of intersection between them. The two narratives (or, more accurately, the two narrative frames) cannot be cleanly distinguished from each other or organized into a simple hierarchical model. In this, too, BWP echoes experiments in literary fiction. Brian Richardson points out that any number of “nonmimetic narratives regularly—even typically—point to, problematize, or violate the principles of framing that must be adhered to in all mimetic or nonfictional narratives,” and he laments the fact that narrative theory, with its nostalgic preference for linear, traditional texts, has developed no language to address such complications or contaminations (35). 166

This generates multiple obstacles for discussions of The Blair Witch Project. Not only do the contaminations and cross-pollinations of the various narrative structures make it difficult to address the film as a distinct entity, but we have no rigorous method for mapping and dissecting such intricate intertextual intersections. Thus we have what I am calling the Blair Witch metatext: a complex interweaving of at least three levels of narrative “reality” (the film itself, the auxiliary fictional texts, the production and reception history of the film), each further fragmented by multiple perspectives, none of which can claim ultimate authority or primacy. There is no center and no predetermined point of entry. It is a heteroglossic space, a multimedia version of collaborative hyptertext. It is fitting that the film has been very successful on DVD, a format that allows entry at any point of the text (unlike necessarily linear tape) and which equally showcases the film itself and wide variety of the supplementary material). 166

In postmodernism, “no narrative can be a natural ‘master’ narrative: there are no natural hierarchies; there are only those we construct” (Hutcheon 13). Contemporary theory has generated any number of images for this tendency to erase—or at least render incomprehensible—centralized authority and organization. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, for example, propose the spreading rhizome as a replacement for the rigidly ordered tree as the preferred model of knowledge: “the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states” (21). Similarly, Fredric Jameson identifies the decentered and disorienting Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles as an emblem of postmodern space, “transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself” in conjunction with the “breakdown of all previous narrative paradigms” (44). These metaphors foreshadow the dominant contemporary version of excessive, chaotic knowledge, the endless, formless Internet, and it is, again, only fitting that the Blair Witch has such a successful presence in that medium. In fact, there is no “underlying” narrative to The Blair Witch Project or to the Blair Witch metatext as a whole. Every answer only leads to more questions; every explanation is subject to contestation; “narrative continuity is threatened, is both used and abused, inscribed and subverted” (Hutcheon 59). Again, while there is nothing radical about this in terms of contemporary literature or theory, it is surprising for such an exploded / narrative to be so eagerly accepted by the mass American film industry and audience. 169-170.

Heather’s increasingly irrational dependence on her cameras, then, is ultimately the counterpoint to the persistently mysterious nature of the Blair Witch threat. Just as the witch resists explanation, Heather undercuts her own chances of comprehension in her need to believe that the world can be meaningfully reduced to a filmic image (or, for that matter, that the territory they wander can be meaningfully reduced to the map, a belief that reduces her to hysteria when the clearly useless map is lost). On both sides, the real stubbornly refuses to be collapsed into a stable formation. 170

In the end, if there must be an end, we can either embrace the ambiguity and multiplicity of the narrative (as postmodern theory would ask us to do) or simply accept that a supernatural power is at work, one that utterly controls both reality and our perception of it and which is beyond comprehension. 172

Indeed, it is my sense that the film is evidence of a generally widening acceptance in popular cinema of playfully nontraditional forms. Other recent examples of this trend might include Run, Lola, Run (1998), Sliding Doors (1998), The Limey(1999), Being John Malkovich (1999), Memento (2000), or, going back a bit further, The Usual Suspects (1995). While none of these films achieved quite the success of BWP, particularly in terms of cultural visibility, all exhibit a similarly playful attitude toward representation and framing, and all have been accepted by the mass audience. 172

It is worth asking, however, whether this willingness on the part of both producers and audience to experiment with form is matched by similarly daring content. On the evidence of BWP, there is little reason to think so. 172

Instead, it is my contention that the Blair Witch metatext as a whole cannot avoid replicating elements and patterns of repression and limitation, and that the apparently extreme openness of the film only masks these more reactionary aspects within it—aspects we have become accustomed to discovering in more conformist texts. It may well be that as the form of the Blair Witch metatext becomes more radical, it becomes more vital to detect the presence of conservative tendencies and moments within it. Specifically, I am troubled by traces of a deep misogyny in the narrative field, a distrust of the feminine and celebration of the patriarchal that is most visible in elements of the film’s auxiliary texts. 173

While it is certainly commonplace for contemporary Hollywood productions to be accompanied by a raft of promotional and marketing tools, BWP is virtually unprecedented in its organization and coordination of this material. 173

None of these materials simply reproduces the narrative events of the film itself, or even of each other, Instead, they duplicate its speculative and purportedly documentary tone, offering fragmentary evidence from multiple, frequently conflicting perspectives of either the search for the filmmakers or the origins and manifestations of the legend itself. 173

The marketing and merchandising of the film thus becomes indistinguishable from the narrative of the film itself, and while this may open up creative possibilities for the playful (de)construction of narrative, we should not forget that the profit motive is never far from the surface. 174

It has been a decade and a half since Robin Wood identified the restoration of the father as “the dominant project, ad infinitum and post nauseam, of the contemporary Hollywood cinema” (172). / It is disheartening, if not surprising, to discover such a conservative cliché concealed beneath such a novel surface, but the discovery is nonetheless valuable for its reminder that subversive form does not necessarily indicate similarly subversive content. 179

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Telotte, J.P. “The ‘Blair Witch Project’ Project: Film and the Internet.” Film Quarterly. 54.3 (2001): 32-39.

The official Web site especially not only offers potential viewers the sort of information or lures that would, after the fashion of traditional film advertising, make them want to rush out and see the film. It can also effectively tell the “story” of the film, that is, as the film’s makers and/or distributors see it and want it to be understood. For it can frame the film narrative within a context designed to condition our viewing or “reading” of it, even to determine the sort of pleasures we might derive from it. 32

. . . and widely distributed posters for the “missing” principals of the film. 33

Indeed, Amorette Jones, head of the Artisan marketing campaign for The Blair Witch Project and a veteran of marketing at such major studios as Universal, Columbia/Tri-Star, and MGM/UA, acknowledges a hardly modest $20 million marketing campaign for the film that included a series of ever-more-elaborate trailers, some of which were pointedly tied to playdates for Star Wars: Episode One in hopes of drawing in that same audience. As Jones admits, Artisan “did commercial things; we just did them in a non-commercial way.” 33

Marc Graser and Dade Hayes offer a partial explanation, nothing that “calmer heads are realizing that the ‘Blair Witch’ site was not an added-on marketing tool, but was designed as part of the film experience—one that tapped into fans of the horror genre.” I would go a bit further and suggest that the selling of The Blair Witch Project and the telling of that film, its narrative construction, were from the start a careful match or “project,” one that better explains both the film’s success and why that success was so quickly and easily laid at the door of the now almost equally famous Web site. 34

Artisan’s own ambitious marketing campaign, and especially its Internet strategy, seems to have been designed to employ an element of this contextualizing, while also moving visitors in a direction different from the advertising sites just described. In fact, it seems to / have been fashioned precisely to avoid the sort of situating at which these similar sites aim (including the hierarchical entertainment value of the movie itself that the established film industry would prefer to affirm), seeking instead to capitalize on the particular characteristics of this film. That campaign, which ended up as a television project as well, pitches the fictional movie as a documentary about three real student filmmakers who vanished while working on a documentary about a legendary witch near the town of Burkittsville, Maryland. The story unfolds through their own footage, accidentally discovered by student anthropologists a year after their disappearance and then pieced together by Artisan. The Web site that became the hub, although hardly the sole focus, of the campaign offered much additional material about the case of the missing filmmakers: information on the “Mythology” surrounding the Blair Witch legend, background on “The Filmmakers” who disappeared, a summary of “The Aftermath” of the disappearance, and a tour of “The Legacy” of these mysterious events—that is, of the various materials recovered in the search for the student filmmakers. All of these elements, the film’s backstory, if you will, elaborately propagate the notion of authenticity, attesting to the film as, quite literally, a “found-footage” type of documentary rather than a fictional work, and more particularly, as a different sort of attraction than the movies usually offer, a reality far stranger than that found in any “classic old-style horror film.” Rather, they suggest we see the film not as film, but as one more artifact, along with the materials gathered together at the Web site, which we might view in order to better understand a kind of repressed or hidden reality. 34-35

Thus The Blair Witch site, in contrast to those noted above, points in various ways away from the film’s privileged status as a product of the entertainment industry. Or more precisely, its “project” is to blur such common discrimination, to suggest, in effect, that this particular film is as much a part of everyday life as the Internet, that it extends the sort of unfettered knowledge access that the Internet seems to offer, and that is pleasures, in fact, closely resemble those of the electronic medium with which its core audience is so familiar. 35

While employing the same sort of dark and suggestive color scheme as other sites, the Blair Witch page especially distinguishes itself by its power of immersion. Rather than pointing to the entertainment industry, it lures visitors into a world that is, on the surface, deceptively like our own, and even anchors us in that realm of normalcy with maps, police reports, found objects, and characters who evoke the film’s target audience of teenagers or young adults (the missing student filmmakers and the University of Maryland anthropology class that, we learn, later discovered their film and various other artifacts). After establishing this real-world context and giving it authority, the site shifts from that anchorage into a completely “other” world, one of witchcraft, one connected to the repressed history of the mysteriously abandoned town of Blair, and one with a mythology all its own, attested to by a collection of woodcuts depicting witchcraft in the region and selections from the supposed book The Blair Witch Cult, which we are told “is on display at the Maryland Historical Society Museum.” 36

Here cannot morph into another figure or become one of the tree central characters; the best we can do is become the anonymous surfer of cyberspace or settle into the role of an investigator and adopt that posture as a satisfactory shift out of the self. The various interviews offered here—with, for example, Bill Barnes, Executive Director of the Burkittsville Historical Society; Charles Moorehouse, a professor of folklore; or private investigator Buck Buchanon, among others—all place us in the typical position of the documentary audience, as recipients of the direct address of these speakers. 36

For making the experience immediate rather than mediated could reassert a kind of cinematic context, reminding us of the extent to which subject position is always constructed by point of view in film, and would thus show the film not as another artifact, co-terminous with the site, but as a kind of game played with—or on—us by the film industry. Simply put, it would work against the film’s reality context. More to the point, the site mainly hints at the power of transformation because that closely allied pleasure the payoff at the core of the film itself. 36

As Marc Graser and Dade Hayes explain, an initial industry frenzy to mimic the Blair Witch Internet campaign has given way to a recognition “that the ‘Blair Witch’ site was not an added-on marketing tool but was designed as part of the film experience—one that tapped into fans of the horror genre” in a special way. 36

In his review of The Blair Witch Project, Richard Corliss notes two “rigorous rules” that, he believes, account for its effectiveness as a horror film: “It will show only what the team could plausibly have filmed, at it will not reveal any sources of outside terror—no monsters or maniacs.” 36

The film offers us “no monsters or maniacs,” no horror-movie fare of mad slashers, incarnate devils, or outsized monsters, because it is trying to immerse us in a world that, to all appearances, is coextensive with our own. In fact, the young filmmaker Heather worries specifically about making her film look too much like traditional horror movies. “I don’t want to go too cheesy,” she says, in a way that echoes the site’s constant insistence on the real. 37

Yet here, after a fashion long familiar from other horror films and their limited use of subjective camera, agency is evoked only to be frustrated, creating a sense of helplessness that is fertile psychic ground for horror. 37

What may be just as significant as these simple alterations of extended subjective shots, though, is the film’s self-consciousness, which constantly pulls us back from the typical film experience as if it were trying to reach for a more realistic context, one beyond the camera and its limited field of vision, one perhaps more in keeping with the Internet and its seemingly trans/parent access to the world. For while the camera is a device that appears to let us capture the real, to chronicle in “as straightforward a way as possible,” it also constrains our experience by restricting what we can see, as is literally the case when Josh, Heather, and Mike run out into the night and we can see only as far as the limited light on their camera. Thus Josh tells Heather that he knows why she likes the video camera: “It’s like a totally filtered reality.” 37-38

In fact, the film ultimately challenges, even attacks our relationship to the cinema, the technological in general, and their usual filtering effect. For its three filmmaker-protagonists eventually prove ill-equipped for dealing with a natural and transformative world: their car can only take them so far; their map and compass prove useless; their cameras and sound equipment, designed to record the real, offer no insulation against a mysterious, perhaps even supernatural realm. 38

And by funneling our relation to the natural world, even to one another, through the technological, the narrative evokes our own sense of being lost in the mediated contemporary world. 38

Her reply, “No, I’m not turning the camera off. I want to mark this occasion,” seems the response of someone who is already fully lost to and within the cinematic. 38

It shows her, and perhaps by extension us as well, as a frail contemporary human, immersed beyond all insulation by her technology, involved to such an extent that she can no longer find a safe distance, transformed from skeptical reporter to helpless victim of this quaint bit of local folklore. 38

Libby Gelman-Waxner has also linked the film’s technological bent and its successful computer-based promotion. As she comments, its success must be “partially attributed to the heavy promotion of the movie on the Internet, and that makes sense: It’s a movie for men and women . . . who prefer to see the world entirely through technology—it’s nature downloaded.” 38

Paul Virilio has recently described the postmodern experience as like living in “the shadow of the Tower of Babel,” not simply as a result of the many and different voices with which the multimedia environment bombards us but because of a certain dislocation that accompanies those various voices. For the electronic experience, he believes, with its tendency to bring together many and different places, to bind us within what he terms “glocalization,” also leaves us without a real place—decentered and lost. The Blair Witch Project, along with its Internet shadow, seems to have effectively captured, and capitalized on, this sensibility. For it recalls the nature of the typical electronic document, the hypertext, which consists of a series of documents connected to one another by links; that is, it is a text of many fragments but no whole, no master text. And by virtue of its very lack of center, its absence of what Murray terms “the clear-cut trail,” the hypertext invites us to find our own way, even to find some pleasure or profit in its very decenteredness. That absence of a center—or the lostness which the / hypertext user shares in part with the three protagonists of Blair Witch—is simply part of the great capital of the Internet experience, something it typically barters with, plays upon by alternately denying and opening onto it. 39

The well-made, small-budget, independently produced, and star-less movie does have a chance to be seen, picked up by a national distributor or cable outlet, and then offered to a wide audience. 39

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Schopp, Andrew. “Transgressing the Safe Space: Generation X Horror in The Blair Witch Project and Scream.” In Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Ed. Sarah Lynn Higley and Andrew Weinstock. Contemporary film and television series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 125-143.

. . . he asserts that he now knows why she keeps filming: “I see why you like this video camera so much. . . . . It’s not quite reality. It’s totally like filtered reality. It’s like you can pretend everything is not quite the way it is.” Josh’s statement suggests that when one views his experience through the camera’s mediation, as any viewer must, this mediation provides a sense of control, even safety, rendering the experience somehow less real, an ironic notion given the relentless cinema verité experience the film provides its audience. Still, Josh’s statement foregrounds one of the most persistent assumptions held by those who study horror, an assumption that I call the “safe space” fallacy. According to this traditional model, horror texts merely provide safe spaces to experience and then defuse individual or collective fears. For years, critics have perpetuated this reductive assessment of horror and of how fear works within horror texts, but films like BWP and Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) challenge this notion of narrative safety. In fact, in the Scream trilogy the very formulaic conventions that allow the viewer to experience a sense of safety become the subject of the film and the means by which the killers claim victims. 125

The latter film’s [Blair Witch] formal techniques disrupt the filmic conventions that provide narrative safety, and they do so as a means of reinforcing structurally what the film’s content examines: anxieties that our nation and culture are predicated upon a set of constructs that themselves provide merely an illusion of safety. BWP reflects contemporary fears that the presumably “safe” world we inhabit is rendered so only through cultural narratives that mediate our experience and, much like Heather’s camera, filter reality, pro/viding a false sense of safety that loses its potency when one loses control over the mediating device. 126-127

And even at a structural or perhaps metaphorical level, these products are safe. In other words, because such texts rely on conventions that the popular audience recognizes, these conventions and the knowledge of such conventions provide a certain level of comfort or safety. In fact, as I shall argue, it is precisely this level of safety that films like Scream and BWP strive to disrupt. Nonetheless, the insistence on the safety of the text often suggests that all thoughts, ideas, and emotions a text evokes become contained within the reading/viewing experience, for once the book is closed or the lights come up, the fears the text has produces have either been defused through the narrative or are subsequently dismissed as fictions. Such fears cannot carry over into the world beyond the text or interact with the consumer’s or the culture’s ideologies and belief systems. One implication of the safe space argument, then, would be that it posits a divorce between narrative and social practice. One might expect to find some analysis of this “safety” as an instrument of social control, but most critical assessments of horror stop short of extending their analyses this far. Instead, the text becomes a space for play (a term frequently used in these discussions). While I don’t want to reject the idea that fear narratives provide a pleasurable space to engage with fear, I do want to challenge the overriding notion that the purported “safety” of this space means that the engagement that occurs necessarily defuses fears. 128

If this is the case, films like Scream and BWP become that much more significant because they are texts that openly disrupt conventional notions of safety and the structural, narrative conventions that might provide safety, yet crowds flock to them. 129

Still, from bungee jumping to mountain climbing to paragliding, Gen X thrill-seekers subject themselves to harrowing and frightening experiences for the sake of pleasure, and it is hard to discern / whether Gen Xers are somehow more invested in this game of pleasure and fear of if their investment has simply been more encoded into popular culture than that of previous generations. 130

Thrill rides have to have more turns, higher hills, and new twists for the same reason scary novles and films have to: they stop being scary—and therefore stop being pleasurable—if changes are not made. 130

In fact, Peter Stearns has argued that twentieth-century American culture did not devise such entertainments to provide a space to defuse fears but rather to provide a space to indulge in an intensity of emotion not culturally allowable in day-to-day / life. 131

I find it especially compelling that BWP does away with home altogether until the very end, when the appropriately abandoned house signifies a space of prior, present, and likely future death. Still, the majority of Scream’s murders take place in a house, and the message seems relatively clear: the ease with which we bring these narratives into our home via cable and VCR parallels the ease with which the home’s safety can be rendered null and void, since it can be so easily penetrated by those who seek to play games with life. 131

. . . within the film’s frame. 132

Though I have had one student insist that Craven “raped” horror fans by carving up classic films and restructuring them into Scream. 132

. . . and the killers’ eventual discussions of the game they are creating/playing debunk Randy’s theories about the rules and the way they are supposed to work. 132

They date their victims, throw parties for them, sleep with them, and have no motive for killing them other than a desire to create a horror narrative that ultimately thwarts the conventions of safety by stripping away any mediation, whether camera or text. Their narrative is real life and text at the same time. Although we collectively want to believe that we can identify psycho-killers, this film insists that such a belief is little more than a necessary fiction in contemporary culture. Of course, the Gen X audience still has its mediation—the camera—even if the generic narrative conventions that take place within the world of the camera collapse. 133

I mention Scream largely because reviewers of The Blair Witch Project often claim that BWP revitalized the genre. However, Scream also revitalized the genre by making the very conventions of the genre the subject of the film, and we should not understate the significance of this fact. 133

. . . once the horror film’s form and structure have been “raped” or even “dismembered” by a film like Scream, a film like BWP is almost inevitable, as it both re-imagines the horror text and relies on classic conventions that merely fit together in new ways. 133

As I shall explain in what follows, BWP is self-reflexive about both horror and America, and in that respect it owes a lot to its predecessor Scream. 134

More disturbingly, the first film suggests that this very desire for radical revision might function as the missing motive for Billy and Stu’s murder spree. They can do what others cannot: they control a revision of convention and thus cross from consumer to producer, but they do so by producing death and destruction. While advertisers and marketing strategists would consider the primary audience for Scream as Generation X and the audience for BWP as Generation Y (due largely to birth dates and not to attitudes), I would suggest that the evolution from the earlier film to the later reflects an evolution of Gen X culture. I am most interested in the way this evolution signals a further debunking of narrative safety coupled with an even more expansive commentary on the physical limits of contemporary American cul/ture and on the limited endurance of necessary fictions about safety and opportunity that are manifest within this culture. 135

. . . the viewer must still wonder why these characters insist on filming even when their lives are in danger. 135

Significantly, however, the film’s formal structure constantly reminds us that what we watch is not immediate and unmediated. Though Michael Atkinson insists that “what we’re watching is what occurred,” how it occurred is another matter. The film contains footage from two cameras, one color and one black and white; therefore, someone has clearly edited the footage together. This may seem like a minor point, and I would hardly suggest that the average viewer consciously considers this fact. Nonetheless, the absent Other associated with the camera, the presence whose absence is required for the pleasure of the filmic experience to manifest, makes itself very known in this film, a fact that seriously compromises the fictional safety. And given the fact that no bodies are found—only footage—the film conflates the absent Other with the individual or force that control not only the viewing experience but the lives of these characters. In other words, the film’s formal process implicitly conflates the camera, editor, director, and “monster.” 136

Those who complain of never seeing what takes place or of not seeing the killer express their desire for the safety of sight. Jason and Freddy horrify, but their ability to frighten diminishes once they have been identified. 136

The hyperrealism of the handheld camera mocks the film’s audience, gives that audience excessive immediacy but obscured vision, and thereby suggests a disturbing relationship between immediacy and obscurity. By manipulating our desire for visual mediation while exposing that mediation’s limits, the film thus confirms its larger message that we cling to forms and conventions. 137

While the film succeeds by disrupting the comfort of narrative structure, its marketing succeeds by cultivating the comfortable belief that the Web generation has a new and lucrative frontier before it, an idea that may be just as specious as the comforting illusions about America to which these characters eventually cling. 138

They do cling to the camera as a way of making the experience less real and more safe. 139

Her confession also melds the formal conceits with the narrative ideas. She is both object before the camera and subject behind the camera, wanting to control what we see but subject to the control of the narrative device. 139

In a wonderful manipulation of visual form and narrative, and to a degree far more disturbing than its predecessor Scream, BWP reveals a world and culture in which safe spaces simply no longer exist. 140