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).

7

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.

23

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

Me

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