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1 2 Oxford Research in English

Graduate Research Journal Faculty of English Language and Literature, The University of Oxford oxford research in english

Graduate Research Journal Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford

https://oxfordresearchenglish.wordpress.com ISSN: 2397-2947

Editor-in-Chief william kroeger

Editorial Committee 2018–19 lakshmi priya, Secretary ann ang, Peer Review Facilitator james misson, Production Editor carina rampelt, Assistant Production Editor felix taylor, Submissions Editor eleanor baker, Communications Officer sophie barber, Features Editor zachary garber alexandra braverman

Special Features Reviews lakshmi priya & sophie barber

Peer Reviewers ann ang, eleanor baker, alex braverman, angelica de vido, joan etskovitz, zachary garber, lillian hingley, kim hyei jin,mariachiara leteo, audrey southgate

Founding Members camille pidoux callum seddon jennie cole Contents 7 Foreword Omission bill kroeger

9 ‘‘Improper words’: Silencing same-sex desire in eighteenth-century general English dictionaries stephen turnton

37 Race, place, and urban space: Teju Cole and Ta-Nehisi Coates in relation to the sociology of the streets maddie mitchell

55 Becoming everything: constitutive impurity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness carissa ma

77 Publication without a Publicity of the Self: The lyric ‘I’ in Emily Dickinson and Claudia Rankine fernanda lai

97 Double Vision, Split Gaze: Prison Writing and Metatheatre susan zhang maginn

117 Reviews

133 Special Feature A Little Gay History – Professor Richard B. Parkinson sophie butler

137 Special Feature The Art of Omission in Theatrical Practice: An Interview with Professor K.S. Rajendran lakshmi priya balakrishnan

143 Notes on Contributors

Foreword

bill kroeger

mission, more than simple absence, is a weighted term, laden with the moral and (for some) religious tone of culpability. The 2018 Oxford English Graduate Conference invoked such normative connotations, Oinviting papers about exclusions and other ‘sins of omission’, but also encouraging attention to productive, playful omissions – textual, poetic, and dramatic – gaps in scholarship and conceptual spaces ripe for critical exploration. This, the yearly conference issue of Oxford Research in English, includes some of the colloquium’s most stimulating contributions: representing both types of omission, we have attempted to create a forum where these related but often separate discourses intersect. Omission implies lack. Definitionally, it is never simply nothing, but rather a something that is missing or excluded. Concrete exclusion of facts, narratives, and experiences - a lack of accountable accuracy – thus alters personal and political histories. Many of the papers and features in this issue and the books reviewed herein address such verifiable, concrete exclusions, and perform the important work of filling in gaps by supplying untold stories or supplementing incomplete accounts. Competing ontologies, philosophies, and psychologies tend to propose common origins for such experiences of lack, developing structural hierarchies based on the norms they impose, but critics have challenged these foundations for millennia. Aristotle argued that Plato’s forms could not simultaneously instantiate and describe, for example, exposing a founding gap in Platonic idealism.1 Saussure, exploring linguistic structures, and Mauss and Levi-Strauss, documenting structures of social relationships, each identify a primary absence or 0 value that establishes equivalence, an initial signifier that makes further reference possible. In her account of this originary absence, Catherine Diehl compares poststructuralist thinkers and how they analyze the functions of ‘lack’ (Derrida) and ‘space’ (Deleuze) in establishing structuralism’s ‘finite field’ or ‘floating signifier’. 2 Apart from extremist discourses of suspicion and paranoiac

1 Aristotle, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, translated by Joe Sachs, (Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 1999), 1038b14–1038b37. See specifically Aristotle’s claim that attributes cannot be primary to the things or animals they describe, (1038b28). Also see Plato’s ‘Parmenides’, 132d4–134; Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961). 2 Catharine Diehl, ‘The Empty Space in Structure: Theories of the Zero from Gauthiot to Deleuze’, Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 38.3, 93–119, pp. 97, 104–105, 106, 109.

7 foreword projections of shimmering simulacra, these theorists agree on an epistemological and social/linguistic non-convergence or non-totality, a gap between the world and how we describe it. This rupture, reiterated in object oriented ontology’s subsequent description of the object’s withdrawal from human apprehension, alerts us – as critical readers, media consumers, and citizens of the earth - that the seemingly seamless alignment of narratives with realities is always founded on omissions, of alternative perspectives and of the social dynamics constructing the hierarchies we inhabit.3 For the essays of this issue, such omissions often become a source of agency. Stephen Turton’s investigation of excluded words for same-sex desire in eighteenth century dictionaries specifies not only what was omitted, but where it could be found, and what took its place, tracing the instances and shapes of a historical exclusion. Sophie Butler’s feature interview with Egyptology Professor Richard Bruce Parkinson considers his book A Little Gay History and its companion exhibit ‘No Offence’, exploring a longer historical arc of socio-sexual norms and their impacts on artistic expression. Maddie Mitchell compares Ta-Nehisi Coates’ and Teju Cole’s experiences in the streets of Baltimore and New York, challenging de Certeau’s concept of the urban flaneur on the grounds that it fails to consider conditions faced by black inner city youth. Carissa Ma, in her descriptive theoretical analysis of Roy’s The Ministry of Untold Happiness, explores purity and grievability, potential sources of violent cultural omission and exclusion, and in another instance of multiple, intersecting omissions, Luke Doughty notes that Greta LaFleur’s The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America investigates a historical conflagration of race with sex and sexuality. Other contributions encounter concept, drama, and text, linking formal omissions with significant human impacts. Colton Valentine’s review of Daniel Wright’s Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel questions its method, structure, and characterizations of sexual identity. Lakshmi Priya interviews Professor K.S. Rajendran about the techniques and critical implications of intercultural, interepochal theatre. Fernanda Lai analyses use of first and second person pronouns in Emily Dickinson and Claudia Rankine, tracing an omission of authorial presence or ‘publicity’, and Susan Maginn explores metatheatricality in plays by Beckett and Fugard that interrogate the prison as a site of omission. Considering omissions intentional and accidental, concretely local and paradigmatically foundational, this issue of ORE calls your attention to instances of the unseen, unnoticed, and unexpected.

3 Graham Harman, Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, (UK: Penguin, 2018), p. 192.

8 ‘Improper words’ Silencing same-sex desire in eighteenth-century general English dictionaries

stephen turnton

A literary lady expressing to Dr. J[ohnson] her approbation of his Dictionary, and, in particular, her satisfaction at his not having admitted into it any improper words; ‘No, Madam,’ replied he, ‘I hope I have not daubed my fingers. I find, however, that you have been looking for them.’1

his apocryphal tale was recounted in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1785, a year after Samuel Johnson’s death; a variation of it appeared in Beste’s Personal and Literary Memorials in 1829, in which the ‘literary lady’ was Treplaced with two ladies, but Johnson’s riposte went unchanged.2 In both versions, the implication remains the same: a reader should not seek out certain kinds of knowledge in a dictionary any more than a lexicographer should record them. The ‘orchestration of ignorance’, to adopt a phrase from Sedgwick,3 is an activity in which both the dictionary-writer and -user should seemingly be complicit, in order to suppress the transmission of any knowledge deemed to be ‘improper’. Such wilful ignorance is not simply a matter of linguistic propriety. Cameron argues that the normative treatment of language is ‘not just about ordering language itself, but also exploits the powerful symbolism in which language stands for other kinds of order—moral, social and political’.4 Imposed ignorance and silence may be used to reinforce hegemonic structures around what, or who,

1 ‘Dr. Johnson at Oxford, and Lichfield’, The Gentleman’s Magazine: and Historical Chronicle, 55.1 (1785), 288. Original emphasis. 2 Henry Digby Beste, Personal and Literary Memorials (London: Henry Colborn, 1829), pp. 11–12. 3 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), p. 5. 4 Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 25.

9 improper words is permissible in respectable discourse and reputable society, and who or what is unacceptable and unspeakable. Attempts by lexicographers at organizing the English language in dictionaries are inevitably shaped by broader social mandates about the ordering of decency and morality. In the story from The Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘improper words’ are evidently indecent ones—including the sexually taboo. Yet words may be ‘proper’ in more than one sense: ‘properness’ may also denote legitimacy or authenticity. Thus, while Johnson illustrated many of the headwords in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language with quotations drawn from a range of literary sources, he also included entries for words which he could find no ‘authorities’ for, but which he ‘kn[e]w to be proper’ to the language.5 A century and a half earlier, Robert Cawdrey had argued in his Table Alphabeticall—generally regarded to be the first monolingual English dictionary6—that speakers who wished to use ‘the best kind of speech’ should choose words ‘proper vnto the tongue wherein we speake’; that is, proper English words, not ‘French English’ or ‘English Italianated’.7 Of course, in any dictionary, which words are considered ‘proper’ to a language and worthy of record, and which are not, is partly up to the discretion of the dictionary’s writer. A lexicographer may not just mark the borders of a language, but actively and autocratically draw them up. This construction has implications not only for English but Englishness, as language and nation-building were ideologically imbricated in early modern dictionary-writing. The seventeenth-century lexicographer Edward Phillips (1658: C4r) proclaimed that ‘the renown and glory of the Nation […] cannot but be much advanced by such like indeavours’ as writing dictionaries.8 A century later, Johnson’s dictionary would be repeatedly characterized as an Englishman’s riposte to the national lexicons of the Académie française in France and the Accademia della Crusca in Italy.9 In his dictionary’s preface, Johnson reinforces the link between language and nationhood: ‘tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us

5 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: Printed by William Strahan for John Knapton and others, 1755), i, sig. B2r. 6 Noel E. Osselton, ‘The Early Development of the English Monolingual Dictionary (Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries)’, in The Oxford History of English Lexicography, ed. by Anthony P. Cowie, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), i, pp. 131–54 (p. 132). 7 Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true vvriting, and vnderstanding of hard vsvall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French. &c. (London: Printed by I. R. for Edmund Weaver, 1604), sigs. A3r–A4r. 8 Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words: or, a General Dictionary (London: Printed by E. Tyler for N. Brooke, 1658), sig. C4r. 9 See John Considine, Academy Dictionaries 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 121–133.

10 stephen turnton make some struggles for our language’.10 Johnson’s use of the first-person plural joins dictionary-writer and -user in a shared cause to preserve their national heritage: the language which, like their legislature, gives structure to their society. Crucially, Mugglestone points out that implicit in the notion of lexicography as a tool for ‘imaging both nation and identity’ is the polarity of that image.11 If a dictionary presents what a nation is, then it also delimits what a nation is not. The whole dictionary text comes to act as an extended performative utterance, constructing a selective image of a language and society from which certain words can be tacitly excluded as ‘improper’. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the lexis of same-sex sexuality was, to a considerable extent, included in general English dictionaries, even though it was often defined opprobriously—in terms of sinfulness and unnaturalness. The definitions of words concerning same-sex sexuality in Nathan Bailey’s influential folio dictionary, the Dictionarium Britannicum, reproduced in Table 1, are representative.12 (Etymologies have been elided from these entries, as has Bailey’s retelling of the myth of Ganymede.) These entries are overwhelmingly about sexuality between men (thoughto bugger and buggery also encompass sex with a woman ‘after an unnatural manner’, or between human and animal).13 The sole entry to address sexuality between women explicitly is confricatrices or confrictrices. This entry had already appeared in one of Bailey’s earlier lexicons, the second edition of the quarto-sized Universal Etymological English Dictionary, though it was again the sole entry of this kind in that work.14 Remarkably, Bailey’s dictionaries are the only general English lexicons surveyed for this article to include any headword expressly for a woman who has sex with women, although a range of terms besides confric(a)trice can be found sporadically in other English texts of the period, ranging from satirical poetry to travelogues and anatomical treatises.15 By the seventeenth century, a woman who took other women as sexual partners could be called a tribade or fricatrice; both terms were already in use in French, and ultimately derive from verbs meaning

10 Johnson, 1755, i, sig. C2v. 11 Lynda Mugglestone, Dictionaries: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 96. 12 Nathan Bailey, Dictionarium Britannicum: Or a more Compleat Universal Etymological English Dictionary Than any Extant (London: Printed for T. Cox, 1730). 13 See also Stephen Turton, ‘Unlawful Entries: Buggery, Sodomy, and the Construction of Sexual Normativity in Early English Dictionaries’, Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, 40.1 (2019), forthcoming. 14 Nathan Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, 2nd edn (London: Printed for E. Bell and others, 1724). 15 For a detailed account of the lexis of sexuality between women in these and other genres, see Emma Donoghue, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668– 1801 (London: Scarlet Press, 1993).

11 improper words

Table 1: Definitions concerning same-sex sexuality in Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum bardach, bardash […] a Boy kept for Pleasure, to be abused contrary to Nature. to bugger […] to copulate with a beast; also with a man or woman after an unnatural manner. buggerer […] one who copulates beastlily [sic]. buggery […] the copulation of one man with another, or of a man or woman with a beast. catamite […] an Ingle, a Boy kept for sodomitical Practices. confricatrices, Confrictrices […] lustful women, who titulate one an- other in the Clitoris, in imitation of venereal intercourses with men. ganymede, a Catamite or Bardachio, the Name takes its rise from what the Poets tell us of a beautiful young Trojan Shepherd, whom Jupiter ravish’d […] Ingle, a Boy hired to be abused contrary to Nature. pathic […] a Sodomite, an Ingle, who suffers his Body to be abused contrary to Nature. pederast […] a Sodomite, a Buggerer. pederasty […] Buggery, Sodomy. sodomite […] one who commits the Sin of Sodomy, a Buggerer. sodomitical […] of, or pertaining to the Sin of Sodomy. sodomiticalness […] Guiltiness of Sodomy. sodomy […] the Sin of the Flesh against Nature, so named because commit- ted by the Inhabitants of the City of Sodom, Buggery.

‘to rub’ in Greek (τρίβειν) and Latin (fricare). Tribade and fricatrice were joined by the English calque rubster in the same century. Lesbian in the sense of a woman who desires other women was a later addition, but it had arrived in English by the 1730s.16

16 The OED Online offers the following earliest known attestations of these words in English: tribade, 1585; fricatrice, 1607; rubster, 1657; lesbian, 1732. Lesbian in its original demonymic sense, ‘A native of Lesbos, an inhabitant of Lesbos’, is recorded in John Ash, The New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: Printed for Edward Dilly, Charles Dilly, and R. Baldwin, 1775), i, sig. Xxx2r.

12 stephen turnton

Although tribade, fricatrice, rubster, and lesbian in its sexual sense are not recorded in eighteenth-century general dictionaries, they did not pass unnoticed in all corners of English lexicography. Medical dictionaries offer a partial but significant exception. Bailey’s definition of confricatrices or confrictrices had, in fact, been copied almost verbatim from a medical dictionary, the Lexicon Physico- Medicum of John Quincy.17 Before the middle of the century, confricatrices would also appear in Robert James’s Medicinal Dictionary and John Barrow’s Dictionarium Medicum Universale, in both of which the word is tersely explained to mean ‘Tribades’.18 James is the only one to define tribades in turn: these ‘unhappy Females’, he asserts, who ‘are by the Greeks call’d Τριβάδες, and by the Latins Fricatrices’, are ‘fonder of associating themselves with Women than with M e n’. 19 An analysis of same-sex desire in eighteenth-century medical lexicography is beyond the scope of this article, but these dictionaries provide a useful counterpoint to general lexicography of the same period.20 Medical lexicons were specialized reference works written for an elite, implicitly male audience of medical practitioners and students. General dictionaries, on the other hand, were meant to encompass a broader stock of English vocabulary, and were aimed at female and male readers of varied educational backgrounds. Thus, J.K.’sNew English Dictionary is addressed to ‘Young Scholars, Tradesmen, Artificers, and the Female Sex’; Dyche and Pardon’s New General English Dictionary is ‘intended for the Information of the Unlearned, and particularly recommended to those Boarding Schools, where English only is taught, as is the Case commonly among the Ladies’; and the anonymous Pocket Dictionary is ‘design’d for the You th of both Sexes, the Ladies and Persons in Business’. 21

17 These terms, Quincy writes, ‘are used by many Authors for such lustful Women who have learned to titulate one another with their Clitoris, in imitation of venereal Intercourses with Men’. See John Quincy, Lexicon Physico-Medicum: or, A New Physical Dictionary, 2nd edn (London: Printed for E. Bell, W. Taylor, and J. Osborn, 1722), sig. G3v. 18 Robert James, A Medicinal Dictionary, 3 vols (London: Printed for T. Osborne, 1743– 1745), ii, sig. 5A2r. John Barrow, Dictionarium Medicum Universale: or, a New Medicinal Dictionary (London: Printed for T. Longman, C. Hitch, and A. Millar, 1749), sig. M3v. 19 James, iii, sig. U†2v. 20 For the treatment of tribades as objects of medical study in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, see Theresa Braunschneider, ‘The Macroclitoride, the Tribade and the Woman: Configuring Gender and Sexuality in English Anatomical Discourse’, Textual Practice, 13.3 (1999), 509–32. 21 J.K., A New English Dictionary: Or, a Compleat Collection of the Most Proper and Significant Words, Commonly used in the Language (London: Printed for Henry Bonwicke and Robert Knaplock, 1702), sig. A1r. Thomas Dyche and William Pardon,A New General English Dictionary (London: Printed for Richard Ware, 1735), sig. A3v. A Pocket Dictionary or Complete English Expositor (London: Printed for J. Newbery, 1753), p. 1.

13 improper words

We may contrast the exclusion of words for female same-sex sexuality from these and other pre-1755 general dictionaries with, firstly, the same dictionaries’ inclusion of words for male same-sex sexuality (see Table 3 below); and, secondly, the documentation of sexuality between women in medical lexicons. It is tempting to suppose that the absence of the tribade from general dictionaries might reflect a desire on the part of their writers to withhold information about tribady from their female readers. Certainly, in other works intended for lay audiences in early modern England, historians of sexuality have identified a reluctance to describe female same-sex acts, and a reticence to make such knowledge available to women who might otherwise have (supposedly) remained ignorant of the acts’ possibility.22 Thus, while the physician James Parsons could write with fanciful candour to fellow members of the Royal Society about ‘Confricatrices’ who penetrate other women with their clitorises—‘for that Part being, as all allow, the Seat of great Titulation, it is no wonder it should be stimulated by being embraced in the Vagina’—a popular pamphlet like Henry Fielding’s Female Husband is much more circumspect in presenting the same subject to a general readership.23 Though the avowed purpose of his pamphlet is to warn women against engaging in ‘transactions not fit to be mention’d’ with their own sex, Fielding explains neither what these acts might physically entail nor what the woman who engage in them are called.24 Instead, he vouches that ‘not a single word occurs through the whole [work], which might shock the most delicate ear, or give offence to the purest chastity’ of the female reader, and tellingly concludes that ‘unnatural affections are equally vicious and equally detestable in both sexes, nay, if modesty be the peculiar characteristick of the fair sex, it is in them most shocking and odious to prostitute and debase it’.25 Amid such epistemic anxieties, it is less surprising that sexuality between women was almost entirely beyond the purview of eighteenth- century general lexicography even before Samuel Johnson was applauded for excluding ‘improper words’ from his own dictionary.

22 See Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-sex Literary Erotics, 1550–1714 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Catherine Craft-Fairchild, ‘Sexual and Textual Indeterminacy: Eighteenth-century English Representations of Sapphism’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 15.3 (2006), 408–431. 23 James Parsons, A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the Nature of Hermaphrodites (London: Printed for J. Walthoe, 1741), pp. 21–22. [Henry Fielding], The Female Husband: or, the Surprising History of Mrs. Mary, Alias Mr George Hamilton (London: Printed for M. Cooper, 1746). 24 Fielding, p. 3. 25 Fielding, p. 23.

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Table 2: A comparison of sexual definitions in Bailey’sDictionarium and Johnson’s Dictionary Bailey Johnson adultery […] properly the Sin of adultery […] The act of violating Incontinency in Married Persons, de- the bed of a married person. filing the Marriage Bed; it is Adultery, if but one of them be married, in the married Person, Fornication in the unmarried. bestiality […] the copulation of bestiality […] The quality of beasts; a man or woman with a beast; also degeneracy from human nature. beastly quality, filthiness. dildo […] Penis succedaneus [‘sub- x stitute penis’], called by the Italians Passatempo. fornication […] the act of unchas- fornication […] 1. Concubinage tity between single persons. or commerce with an unmarried woman. to fuck […] a term used of a goat; x also subagitare fœminam [‘to subagi- tate a woman’]. gonorrhoea […] a Disease when gonorrhoea […] A morbid running there is a frequent discharge, or an of venereal hurts. involuntary dripping of the Seed without erection of the Penis; called also a Clap or running of the Reins. onania […] the Crime of self pollu- x tion. onanism […] the Crime of self x pollution. priapismus […] an involuntary priapism […] A preternatural ten- Erection of the Yard, or without any sion. Provocation to Lust, L[atin]. prostitution […] a Harlot’s letting prostitution […] 2. The life of a out the Use of her Body for Hire publick strumpet. to swive […] to copulate with a x Woman.

15 improper words

Impropriety in Johnson’s Dictionary

Johnson’s dictionary did not, in fact, omit all sexually improper words.26 Still, as the examples in Table 2 illustrate, Johnson’s documentation of the lexis of sexuality was often deficient in comparison to Nathan Bailey’s, whose Dictionarium Britannicum was one of the sources consulted by Johnson when compiling his own dictionary.27 (Etymologies are again omitted.) In Johnson, terms for indecent sexuality may be veiled in euphemism (e.g. gonorrhoea, priapism) or simply omitted.28 Notably, there is a schism between sexual acts that are heteronormative and acts that are not. Adultery, fornication, and prostitution are socially stigmatized, but they are still physically ‘natural’ insofar as they are acts that may occur peno-vaginally between a man and a woman. All are encompassed, with variable frankness, in Johnson’s dictionary. (The exceptions arefuck and swive, in which case it is not the acts but the words themselves that are obscene.) On the other hand, terms and senses for inherently non-procreative acts—bestiality, masturbation, the use of a dildo—are routinely excluded from the dictionary. Firmly within this latter category are words for same-sex acts and their actors. Johnson did not include confricatrices either from Bailey’s Dictionarium or directly from Bailey’s own source, Quincy’s Lexicon Physico-Medicum, which Johnson also consulted. Johnson’s dictionary quotes other entries from Quincy, with citation, under numerous headwords for which Johnson offers no definitions of his own (e.g. colick n. s., hydatides, levigation, marmalade, and scleroticks).29 Johnson might otherwise have found confricatrices, as well as tribades, in James’s Medicinal Dictionary—for Johnson was a lifelong friend of James, and is known to have contributed material to the latter’s dictionary.30 Of course, Johnson’s own dictionary was not a medical text, and in choosing its headwords and quotations he favoured literary sources over technical. It would be unreasonable to expect him to reproduce all or even most of the terms covered by the specialist works of Quincy and James. Yet tribade, at least, was not restricted to technical usage. Significantly, it appears in two literary works, both by Ben

26 See Freya Johnston, Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 1709–1791 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 12. 27 Allen Reddick, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary: 1746–1773, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 201. 28 See Lynda Mugglestone, ‘“The Indefinable Something”: Representing Rudeness in the English Dictionary’, in Rude Britannia, ed. by Mina Gorji (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 23–34. 29 Confricatrices appears in Quincy’s Lexicon from its second edition (1722) onwards. Johnson relied on the third (1726) or a later edition: he attributes to ‘Quincy’ his definition of condenser, which is absent from Quincy’s first and second editions 30 Johnson’s hand has been identified in James’s proposal for the Medicinal Dictionary’s compilation, the dictionary’s dedication, and a number of its biographical entries for famed physicians: see O. M. Brack, Jr., and Thomas Kaminski, ‘Johnson, James, and the Medicinal Dictionary’, Modern Philology, 81.4 (1984), 378–400.

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Jonson, that Johnson cites elsewhere in his dictionary. In Canto X of The Forest, Jonson exhorts the goddess Venus to ‘[g]o, crampe dull Mars […] when he snorts, / Or with [her] Tribade Trine, inuent new sports’.31 Johnson’s dictionary quotes Canto VIII of The Forest under daintiness (sense 1) and to man (sense 5), and Canto IV under gyves. In ‘An Epigram on The Court Pucell’, Ben Jonson accuses the writer Cecilia Bulstrode of committing ‘Tribade lust’ with her muse; the poem appeared in the collection Under-woods, which is cited by Johnson under various headwords, including bridecake, clatter (n. s. 2), nard (sense 2), and weft (n. s. 1).32 It seems implausible that, in selecting quotations from these works, Johnson inadvertently overlooked tribade twice. Despite the lacunae concerning sexuality between women among Johnson’s headwords and definitions, there are occasional echoes of Sapphic desire within the other quotations he selected for the dictionary. Under conformable (sense 3) appears an ambiguous comment from Addison’s Spectator that ‘[t]he fragments of Sappho give us a taste of her way of writing, perfectly conformable with that character we find of her’.33 The Spectator itself suggestively went on to remark that it may have been ‘for the Benefit of Mankind that [her Works] are lost’, filled as they were with ‘such bewitching Tenderness and Rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them a Reading’.34 Under to sport (v. a. 2), a quotation from Dryden’s translation of Persius’s sixth satire alludes to ‘Sappho’s wanton art / Of odes’; how they were ‘wanton’ goes unsaid.35 Early modern classicists were uneasily aware that pieces of Sappho’s surviving poetry were addressed to female lovers, though contemporary translations of her work from Greek into English elided the feminine gender of the addressees.36 Yet sexuality between women was not always lost in translation, as is demonstrated by Dryden’s translation of the satires of Juvenal. Dryden’s rendering of the sixth satire is cited in Johnson’s dictionary under turn (v. n. 10): ‘They turn viragos too; the wrestler’s toil / They try’; the second line, modestly clipped in Johnson’s dictionary, concludes ‘and Smear their Naked Limbs with Oyl’ in Dryden’s Juvenal.37 Johnson would go on to explain virago as a ‘female warrior; a

31 Ben Jonson, The Workes of Beniamin Ionson (London: Printed by Will Stansby, 1616), pp. 829–830. 32 Ben Jonson, The Workes of Beniamin Ionson. The second Volume (London: Printed for Richard Meighen, 1640), p. 220. 33 Johnson, 1755, i, sig. 5H1r. 34 Joseph Addison, ‘No. 223. Saturday, November 15, 1711’, in The Spectator (Dublin: Printed for Peter Wilson, 1755), iii, pp. 208–12 (p. 209). 35 Johnson, 1755, ii, sig. 24X1r. 36 Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 340. Yopie Prins, ‘Sappho’s Afterlife in Translation’, inRe-reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, ed. by Ellen Greene (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 36–67 (p. 43). 37 Johnson, 1755, ii, sig. 27C2r. Juvenal, The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, trans. by John Dryden (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1693), p. 102.

17 improper words woman with the qualities of a man’ (sense 1), before observing that it is ‘commonly used in detestation for an impudent turbulent woman’ (sense 2).38 Dryden’s use of the word to translate Juvenal combines both senses. The satire’s depiction of women who engage in warlike sports proper to men is followed by a denunciation of women’s sexual immorality, including their tribadic indulgence in the ‘mimick Leachery of Manly Loves’ with each other.39 Such lustful and assertive behaviour is not compatible with the feminine ideals presented by Johnson in his quotations for woman (sense 1): women are ‘soft, mild, pitiful and flexible’ (Shakespeare), by ‘nature form’d […] To temper man’ (Otway).40 The quotations cannot help but recall Johnson’s initial intention to select authorities for the dictionary that would give ‘instruction’ as well as ‘pleasure’.41 Of course, how these authorities are interpreted depends upon the dictionary- user. It is conceivable that someone who found the quotations from Dryden’s translated satires in the dictionary might decide to inquire into Sappho’s ‘wanton odes’ herself, if she could read them in unexpurgated Greek, or to consider the depiction of sex between women in Juvenal’s sixth satire, whether in the original Latin or Dryden’s English version. The uses to which the dictionary’s quotations were put by contemporary or near-contemporary readers are largely inaccessible. Nonetheless, it is tempting to wonder what would have been made of them by a classically educated woman like Anne Lister, whose sexual encounters with other women in the early nineteenth century are well-documented in her diaries. Johnson’s own aphoristic reply to Lord Chesterfield’s belated show of support for his dictionary—that ‘[h]ad it been earlier, it had been kinder’42—would be quoted by Lister in a diary entry of 1819, as her rationale for staging a timely ‘tête-à-tête’ with a woman in whom she had developed a romantic interest.43 By the time the fourth edition of Johnson’s dictionary was published in 1773, Sappho’s erotic legacy had led to a new term for sexual desire between women entering the English language: Sapphic. The word was deployed in The Banquet, a 1761 translation of Plato’s Symposium printed to be sold by William Sandy, James Dodsley, and Robert Dodsley (the last of whom had first proposed to Johnson

38 Johnson, 1755, ii, sig. 29F2v. 39 Juvenal, p. 106. 40 Johnson, 1755, ii, sig. 30U2r. 41 Samuel Johnson, A Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed for John Knapton and others, 1747), p. 31. 42 The precise wording in Johnson’s letter to Chesterfield, whose planned patronage of the dictionary had proved unsatisfactory, was: ‘The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind’. See Samuel Johnson, The Celebrated Letter from Samuel Johnson, LL.D., to Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield; Now First Published, with Notes, ed. by James Boswell (London: Printed by Henry Baldwin for Charles Dilly, 1790), p. 4. 43 Anne Lister, I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister, 1791–1840, ed. by Helena Whitbread (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992), p. 81.

18 stephen turnton that he compile a dictionary, and was among the booksellers who funded and sold the work).44 The Banquet describes women whose ‘Affections tend rather to their own Sex: and of this Kind are the Sapphic Lovers’.45 By then, Sapphic was already in use in a poetic sense, denoting ‘a Kind of Greek and Latin Verse; so called of Sappho, a famous Poetess of Mytelene, the Inventress of it’, as Bailey defined it in the Dictionarium.46 Johnson’s dictionary does not admit Sapphic in any sense, in keeping with his lexicographical policy of ‘omitt[ing] all words which have relation to proper names’.47 Nor would he have included two related terms, Sapphist and Sapphism, had they been in use before his death in 1784. As it is, their earliest known attestations in English occur in the writings of Johnson’s friend, Hester Thrale Piozzi. In 1789, Thrale recorded in her diary that ‘One hears of Things now, fit for the Pens of Petronius only, or Juvenal to record and satyrize: The Queen of France is at the Head of a Set of Monsters call’d by each other Sapphists’. 48 In 1795, Thrale observed with alarm that ‘French and English Women are now publicly said to practise Atrocities’; their ‘Vice’ has ‘a Greek name now & is call’d Sapphism’.49 Despite its historic association with the homoerotic poetry of Sappho in ancient Greece, modern Sapphism was persistently cast as a (Catholic) French vice. Yet not all eighteenth-century writers were as ready as Thrale to admit that Sapphism had crossed the English border. The anonymous tractPlain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy, in England reports that in France, ‘the Ladies (in the Nunneries) are criminally amorous of each other, in a Method too gross for Expression’—in English, presumably, for the author ‘affirm[s], or, at least, hope[s]’ that Englishwomen ‘claim no Share of this Charge’. 50 In a similar vein, Emma Donoghue has pointed out that in the first English translation of Diderot’s La religieuse, a passage describing the sexual intimacy between two nuns is expurgated, and a footnote from the translator explains that ‘French writers […] are permitted a latitude which the English Taste has forbidden’.51 The foreignness and unspeakableness of same-sex activity in England and in English was also applicable to sexuality between men. Plain Reasons for the

44 Reddick, p. 17. 45 Plato, The Banquet a Dialogue of Plato Concerning Love. The First Part, trans. Floyer Sydenham (London: Printed by H. Woodfall, 1761), p. 93. 46 Bailey, Dictionarium Britannicum, sig. 7G1v. 47 Johnson, 1755, i, sig. B1v. 48 Hester Lynch Thrale, Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale(Later Mrs. Piozzi), ed. by Katharine C. Balderston, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), ii, p. 740. 49 Thrale, ii, p. 949. 50 Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy, in England (London: Printed for A. Dodd and E. Nutt, c. 1730), p. 12. 51 Donoghue, p. 193. Denis Diderot, The Nun, trans. (Dublin: Printed by Brett Smith, 1797), p. 142.

19 improper words

Growth of Sodomy declares that ‘How famous, or rather how infamous Italy has been in all Ages, and still continues in the Odious Practice of Sodomy needs no Explanation’.52 Twenty years later, the newspaper Old England disingenuously claims that ‘peccatum illud Sodomiticum’ (‘that sin of Sodom’) is ‘yet without a Name’ in English, for ‘There are not Words in our Language expressive enough of the Horror of it’.53 In his influential Commentaries on the Laws of England, Sir William Blackstone describes ‘the infamous crime against nature, committed either with man or beast’ as ‘a crime not fit to be named’, for ‘the very mention of [it] is a disgrace to human nature’.54 The symbolic unnameability of this transgression was well established by then: the jurist Sir Edward Coke had called buggery a ‘sin, amongst Christians not to be named’ a century before.55 Yet, unlike Coke, Blackstone follows his own proscription. While buggery and sodomy are listed in the index to his Commentaries, neither word occurs in his description of the offence. By the time that Blackstone had called sex between men an unnameable crime, ‘of a still deeper malignity’ than ‘rape’,56 both buggery and sodomy had been omitted from Johnson’s dictionary. It is the earliest general English lexicon surveyed for this article to include neither term, though denunciative allusions to the act can still be found elsewhere in the dictionary. An admonitory quotation from the Book of Jude appears under example (sense 5): ‘Sodom and Gomorrah, giving themselves over to fornication, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire’. Underrape (sense 1), a quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost reads:

Witness that night In Gibeah, when the hospitable door Expos’d a matron, to avoid worse rape.57

The ‘worse rape’ in question was, as biblically literate readers would have known, that of a man by men.58 The sense of rape that Milton’s quotation is meant to illustrate in Johnson’s dictionary, ‘Violent defloration of chastity’, is seemingly

52 Plain Reasons, p. 17. 53 Argus Centoculi, ‘Saturday, June 2, 1750. No. 323’, Old England, sigs. A1r–A1v (sig. A1r). 54 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England. Book the Fourth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1769), pp. 215–16. 55 Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London: Printed by M. Flesher for W. Lee and D. Pakeman, 1644), p. 58. 56 Blackstone, p. 215. 57 Johnson, 1755, i, sigs. 8K2r, 21D2v. 58 Judges 19. 22–25. 59 Johnson, 1755, ii, sig. 21D2v.

20 stephen turnton vague enough to encompass sex between men.59 Yet Johnson definesdefloration in turn as ‘The act of deflouring; the taking away of a woman’s virginity’ (sense 1), which complicates the possibility of a male victim.60 In any case, the prospect of sexual intercourse between men or between women is not countenanced in Johnson’s definition of copulation itself: ‘The congress or embrace of the two sexes.’61 Johnson’s failure to name or describe same-sex acts—along with the reticence he shows in treating other forms of ‘deviant’ sexuality—is in part, perhaps, a reflection of his staunch Anglicanism.62 Though he did not always succeed in finding quotations for the dictionary that embodied ‘precept[s] of prudence, or piety’, as he had initially hoped, prudent and pious scruples may still have influenced his choice of headwords and definitions, just as such scruples are visible in his other published works.63 In The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Johnson castigates the Earl of Rochester for ‘los[ing] all sense of religious restraint’ and ‘play[ing] many frolicks, which it is not for his honour that we should remember’.64 James Boswell reports that Johnson gave instructions for Rochester’s poems to be ‘castrate[d]’ before inclusion in the anthology which Lives of the Poets was meant to accompany.65 Rochester was notorious for his poetical celebrations of sodomy and fornication; to him was credited the scandalous volume Poems on Several Occasions by the Right Honourable, the E of R—, published in 1680 ‘with an air of concealment’, according to Johnson.66 The collected poems contain such homoerotic lines as ‘two Beldames, and a jilting Wife, / Came to swive off, the tedious hours of life’, and ‘missing my Whore, I bugger my Page’. 67 If Rochester’s unexpurgated poetry was unsuitable, in Johnson’s view, for the polite literature of the eighteenth century, it is hardly surprising that such words as bugger and swive are not countenanced in Johnson’s dictionary. The dictionary itself would

60 Johnson, 1755, i, sig. 6M2r. 61 Johnson, 1755, i, sig. 5P2r. 62 See Reddick, p. 145. 63 Johnson, A Plan of a Dictionary, p. 31. For the contrast between Johnson’s public reputation for piety and his use of obscenity in private settings, see Allen Walker Read, ‘An Obscenity Symbol’, American Speech, 9.4 (1934), 264–78 (p. 270). 64 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, 4 vols (London: Printed for C. Bathurst and others, 1781), i, p. 300. 65 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 3rd edn, 4 vols (London: Printed by H. Baldwin and Son for Charles Dilly, 1799), iii, p. 208. 66 Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, new edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 49–50. Johnson, 1781, i, p. 304. 67 John Wilmot, Poems on Several Occasions by the Right Honourable, the E of R— (Antwerp: n.p., 1680), pp. 36, 60.

21 improper words later be praised by James Murray, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, for having ‘raised English lexicography’ into a ‘department of literature’ in its own right.68 The only quotation from Rochester that has been identified in Johnson’s dictionary—attributed to ‘Anon’ under refine (v. a. 1)—is, in this case, fitting: ‘Weigh ev’ry word, and ev’ry thought refine’.69

Johnson’s Legacy

New editions of dictionaries first published before Johnson’s, such as Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary and Dyche and Pardon’s New General English Dictionary, continued to appear after 1755, and these retained their earlier entries for same-sex sexuality.70 Yet their influence could not compete with that of Johnson. In 1791, John Walker remarked that Johnson’s dictionary had been ‘deemed lawful plunder by every subsequent Lexicographer; and so servilely [had] it been copied, that such words as he must have omitted merely by mistake […] are neither in Mr. Sheridan’s, Dr. Kenrick’s, nor several other Dictionaries’.71 The lexis of sexuality between women and between men is among the words absent from the dictionaries of Sheridan and Kenrick—as well as those of Baskerville, Perry, Browne, and Walker himself.72 Figure 1 illustrates the declining coverage of terms for same-sex sexuality in general English dictionaries across the eighteenth century. The graph includes only first editions, except where these have been unavailable (e.g. Anne Fisher’s Accurate New Spelling Dictionary), and later editions revised by a different lexicographer from the first (e.g. John Kersey’s 1706 revision of Edward Phillips’s seventeenth-century dictionary The New World of English Words).73

68 James A. H. Murray, The Evolution of English Lexicography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), p. 42. 69 The quotation is from Rochester’s bawdy “Allusion to Horace” (Wilmot, p. 44). For the attributions of anonymous quotations in Johnson’s dictionary, see W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Margaret H. Wimsatt, ‘Self-quotations and Anonymous Quotations in Johnson’s Dictionary’, ELH, 15.1 (1948), 60–68. 70 For example, Nathan Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, 22nd edn (London: Printed for J. Buckland and others, 1770); Thomas Dyche and William Pardon, A New General English Dictionary, 18th edn (London: Printed for Toplis, Bunney, and J. Mozley, 1781). 71 John Walker, A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (London: G. G. J. Robinson, J. Robinson, and T. Cadell, 1791), p. viii. 72 Thomas Sheridan, A General Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed for James Dodsley, Charles Dilly, and J. Wilkie, 1780). William Kenrick, A New Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed for John Rivington and others, 1773). John Baskerville, A Vocabulary, or Pocket Dictionary (Birmingham: Printed by John Baskerville, 1765). William Perry, The Royal Standard English Dictionary (London: Printed by David Willison for William Perry, 1775). Thomas Browne, The Union Dictionary (London: Printed by J. W. Myers for G. Wilkie and others, 1800). 73 Anne Fisher, An Accurate New Spelling Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language, 2nd edn (London: Printed for Anne Fisher, 1773). Edward Phillips and John

22 stephen turnton

Figure 1: Headwords for same-sex sexuality in general English dictionaries of the eighteenth century

0 5 10 15 20 25

23 improper words

Table 3: Headwords for same-sex sexuality in general dictionaries of the eighteenth century J. K. (1702) bugger (v.), buggerer, buggery, sodomite, sodomy Cocker (1704) catamite, ganymede, gomorrhean, ingle, sodomite, sodomitical, sodomy, spintrian Kersey–Phillips (1706) bardach, bardash, buggery, catamite, Ganymedes, ingle, pederast, pederasty, sodomite, sodomitical, sodomy Glossogaphia Anglica- buggery, catamite, ganymede, gomorrhean, sodo- na Nova (1707) mite Kersey (1708) bardach, bardash, buggery, catamite, ingle, peder- ast, pederasty, sodomite, sodomitical, sodomy Bailey (1721) bardach, bardash, buggery, catamite, ganymede, ingle, pederast, pederasty, sodomite, sodomitical, sodomy Bailey (1730) bardach, bardash, bugger (v.), buggerer, buggery, catamite, confricatrices, confrictrices, ganymede, ingle, pathic, pederast, pederasty, sodomite, sodo- mitical, sodomiticalness, sodomy Defoe (1735) buggery, sodomite, sodomitical, sodomy Dyche and Pardon catamite, Ganymede, sodomite, sodomitical, (1735) sodomy Martin (1749) bardachio, bardach, buggery, catamite, ingle, mol- ly, pathic, pederast, pederasty, sodomite, sodomit- ical, sodomy Pocket Dictionary buggery, catamite, ganymede, sodomite, sodomiti- (1753) cal, sodomy Wesley (1753) catamite, sodomy S. Johnson (1755) x Buchanan (1757) buggery, catamite, ganymede, sodomite, sodomiti- cal, sodomy Rider (1759) catamite Marchant and Gordon bugger (v.), catamite, ganymede, pathic, sodomy (1760)

24 stephen turnton

Table 3: Headwords for same-sex sexuality in general dictionaries of the eighteenth century Fenning (1761) catamite J. Johnson (1763) catamite Allen (1765) catamite

Baskerville (1765) x Entick (2nd edn, 1766) catamite Barlow (1772) catamite Fisher (2nd edn, 1773) catamite, sodomite, sodomy Kenrick (1773) x Barclay (1774) catamite, ganymede, pathicks, sodomy Ash (1775) bardach, bardash, bougerons, bugger (v.), bug- gered, buggerer, buggering (n.), buggering (v.), buggery, catamite, Ganymed, Ganymedes, ingle, pathic, pederast, pederasty, sodomite, sodomitical, sodomiticalness, sodomitish, sodomy, spintrian Perry (1775) x Sheridan (1780 x Walker (1791) x Jones (1798) catamite Browne (1800) x

The twelve dictionaries surveyed before Johnson have an average of eight headwords concerning same-sex sexuality; a dictionary most commonly has five such headwords in this period. In the nineteen dictionaries surveyed from Johnson onwards—a more prolific lexicographical period—the average number of relevant headwords drops to 2.5, and a dictionary most frequently has one or none. The headwords in each of the surveyed dictionaries are listed in Table 3.

Kersey, The New World of Words: or, Universal English Dictionary, 6th edn (London: Printed for J. Phillips, H. Rhodes, and J. Taylor, 1706).

25 improper words

Whatever Johnson’s reasons for omitting the lexis of same-sex sexuality, it seems improbable that its low coverage, or total absence, in many subsequent dictionaries is merely a recurring accident resulting from their writers hewing too closely to Johnson’s wordlist. Johnson makes no overt mention of his policy for treating obscenity in the preface to his dictionary, but a number of his contemporaries and successors were eager to assure their readers of the propriety of their works in this respect. The anonymousPocket Dictionary is advertised as having ‘rejected all obsolete, bad, low and despicable words’, and Marchant and Gordon’s New Complete English Dictionary asserts that the compilers had ‘taken especial Care to exclude all those Terms that carry any Indecency in their Meaning, or have the least Tendency to corrupt the Minds of Youth’.74 Fisher claims that her dictionary is ‘without any obsolete or inelegant [words]’, and Kenrick omits words ‘not of modern and elegant use’.75 Such protestations of decency contrast with, for instance, the earlier attitude of Ephraim Chambers in his lexicon of technical terms, the Cyclopædia: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. Chambers argues that words need ‘not [be] infamous and indecent, tho’ they signify very infamous things; because they represent them as covered with a Veil of Horror’; Chambers’s own examples are incest and adultery.76 In this view, the distance between speech and act is emphasized. A word should be admissible in polite society even when the practice it signifies is not. It is an attitude which places Chambers at odds with subsequent lexicographers like John Baskerville, whose 1765 Vocabulary, or Pocket Dictionary avowedly treats ‘only those more difficult Words which occur in sensible genteel Company’; adultery and incest are not among them.77 Notably, the attitudinal shift between Chambers’sCyclopædia and the dictionaries of Johnson and his successors coincides with a change in the legal status of obscene literature. In 1728, the same year that the Cyclopædia was published, printing obscenity became a criminal offence under English law.78 The legal construction of libel, previously limited to the defamation of a particular person or the government, was broadened to include any text which the courts deemed was ‘intend[ed] to weaken the bonds of civil society, virtue, and morality’.79 Language was once again imbricated in nation-building: if cultivated

74 A Pocket Dictionary or Complete English Expositor, p. 4. John Marchant and M. Gordon, A New Complete English Dictionary (London: Printed for J. Fuller, 1760), p. iv. 75 Fisher, p. ii. Kenrick, p. iii. 76 Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2 vols (London: Printed for J. Knapton and others, 1728), ii, p. 380. 77 Baskerville, p. ii. 78 See Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 312–18. 79 T. B. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (London: Printed by T. C. Hansard for Longman and others, 1813), xvii, col. 160.

26 stephen turnton speech could strengthen society, then indecent speech could destabilize it. In the subsequent decades, the Court of King’s Bench issued warrants for the arrest of several individual authors, printers, and publishers of obscene books; and in 1755, a general warrant was issued which authorized agents of the law to search any ‘Houses, Warehouses, Shops, and other Places’ suspected to contain ‘lewd and infamous Books and Prints’, and to arrest any ‘Person or Persons, in whose Custody they shall be found’.80 Not only the production, but the possession, of obscene libel became hazardous, though what counted as obscene was ill-defined and left to the discretion of the courts. In this suppressive climate, it is perhaps more understandable why later eighteenth-century general dictionaries can appear, in Burchfield’s phrase, ‘like herbaceous borders in a private garden, filled with well-cultivated flowers that had been planted with reasonable deliberation’.81 Nevertheless, some terms were more prone to being weeded out than others. Baskerville’s decision to omit adultery and incest from his Vocabulary is exceptionally restrained. Of the 19 dictionaries published from Johnson’s onwards that are surveyed in Table 3, all but Baskerville’s contain entries for adultery and incest, as well as fornication, harlot, and rape. 17 dictionaries (other than Baskerville’s and Allen’s) include whore, 18 (other than Allen’s) contain polygamy, and all 19 encompass bigamy and prostitute. As Table 2 earlier demonstrated for Johnson’s dictionary, terms for promiscuous or iniquitous opposite-sex intercourse could be tolerated in spaces where the lexis of same-sex sexuality was not. In light of this trend, John Ash’s 1755 New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language is an extreme outlier. The dictionary boasts 22 headwords concerning same-sex sexuality, its wordlist swelled by the inclusion of separate entries for alternative spellings of the same word (bardach, bardash), derived terms (sodomite, sodomitical, sodomiticalness, sodomitish) and inflected forms of the same lemma (bugger, buggered, buggering). Yet despite this prolixity, Ash’s definitions are devoid of any explicit same-sex dimension. A comparison of entries for the verb bugger and its inflected and derived forms between Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum and Ash, illustrated by Table 4, is representative.

Where expressly sexual relations exist in Ash’s entries, only one of the sexual partners is gendered. The reader is left to conjecture whether a pederast (‘One who has a criminal passion for boys’) can be female, male, or either, or to whom exactly an ingle (‘A boy prostituted to unnatural purposes’) is prostituted.82 Ash’s dictionary presents a wordlist in which sexuality between men, although named, is never clearly defined. Sexuality between women is not even named. Ash drew on Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary, perhaps the 1770 edition,

80 Philip Carteret Webb, Copies Taken from the Records of the Court of King’s-Bench, at Westminster (London: Court of the King’s Bench, 1763), p. 55. 81 Robert W. Burchfield, Unlocking the English Language (London: Faber and Faber, 1989; repr. New York: Hill & Wang, 1992), p. 149. 82 Ash, 1775, ii, sig. 4P2r, and i, sig Ppp2v.

27 improper words for several sexual terms: ‘ B a i .’ or ‘Bailey’ is cited in Ash’s entries for frig (‘To rub’), fuck (‘To perform the act of generation, to have to do with a woman’), and swive (‘To perform the act of generation’).83 Yet Bailey’s entry for confricatrices or confrictrices is absent from Ash’s New and Complete English Dictionary. It is one instance of how, in Ash’s own words, ‘the copiousness of the English Language’ leaves the lexicographer ‘short of that perfection which the [dictionary’s] plan seems to require’.84

Table 4: A comparison of definitions concerning buggery in Bailey and Ash Bailey Ash

To bugger […] to copulate with a Bugger […] To commit an unnatu- beast; also with a man or woman ral crime.Buggered […] Defiled by after an unnatural manner. unnatural intercourse. Buggering […] Committing an un- natural crime. Buggering […] The act of commit- ting an unnatural crime. buggerer […] one who copulates Buggerer […] One guilty of an un- beastlily [sic]. natural crime. Buggery […] the copulation of one Buggery […] An unnatural inter- man with another, or of a man or course. woman with a beast.

Johnson had expressed similar sentiments about the limits of lexicography: he acknowledges in the advertisement to his dictionary’s fourth edition that he had ‘left […] that imperfect which never was completed’.85 Yet his Dictionary of the English Language makes no titular claim to completeness. Nor does Johnson’s definition ofdictionary : ‘A book containing the words of any language in alphabetical order, with explanations of their meaning; a lexicon; a vocabulary; a word-book’. In these respects, Johnson departs from Nathan Bailey’s first general lexicon, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, in which a dictionary is ‘a Collection of all the Words of a Language, explain’d in Alphabetical Order’.86

83 Ash, i, sigs. Aaa2v, Aaa4r, and ii, sig. 5Z2v. 84 Ash, i, sig. A2v. 85 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edn, 2 vols (London: Printed by William Strahan for William Strahan and others, 1773), i, sig. [C]. 86 Nathan Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (London: Printed for E. Bell and others, 1721).

28 stephen turnton

Equally inclusive assertions are made for dictionaries succeeding Johnson’s.87 Rider’s New Universal English Dictionary, J. Johnson’s New Royal and Universal English Dictionary, and the Complete English Dictionary of Allen and, later, Barlow proclaim the exhaustiveness of their linguistic coverage in their titles.88 Fenning’s Royal English Dictionary is said to explain ‘Every word made use of in the common occurrences of life, or in the several arts and sciences necessary for the subsistence or improvement of our being’, while Entick’s New Spelling Dictionary is advertised as a ‘Complete Pocket Companion For those That read [...] English Authors of Repute’.89 Likewise, Browne’s Union Dictionary is ‘calculated […] to explain […] every approved word in our language’.90 It is significant, then, that Browne’s dictionary seemingly contains no headwords for same-sex sexuality, and the other six post-Johnsonian lexicons contain only one: catamite. Moreover, all of their definitions of this word manage to avoid making its same-sex dimension clear, as Table 5 shows (while also demonstrating the pronounced intertextuality of dictionaries in this period).

Four of the dictionaries position the catamite as a foreign subject, kept by the Romans and Italians for purposes that were immodest, vile, or infamous, but never actually clarified. J. Johnson and Entick both explain thecatamite in terms of sodomy, but as neither dictionary has an entry for sodomy or any of its related terms, the reader is left uninformed. Same-sex sexuality remains exotic and inexplicable. The partial disappearance of men who have sex with men, and the total absence of women who have sex with women, from the ‘complete’ and ‘universal’ dictionaries of the late eighteenth century has a powerful performative force—for silence, as Sedgwick remarks, can be ‘rendered as pointed and performative as speech’.91 If a dictionary is advertised as a comprehensive record of English, or at least of all ‘authorized’ English words, then any term excluded from the dictionary is tacitly positioned as peripheral or exterior to the English language, at best unauthorized, at worst non-existent.

87 See Lynda Mugglestone, ‘Registering the Language: Dictionaries, Diction and the Art of Elocution’, in Eighteenth-century English: Ideology and Change, ed. by Raymond Hickey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 309–38 (pp. 319–320). 88 William Rider, A New Universal English Dictionary: or, a Compleat Treasure of the English Language (London: Printed by W. Griffin for I. Pottinger, 1759). J. Johnson,The New Royal and Universal English Dictionary, 2 vols (London: Printed for A. Millard and R. Dorsley, 1763). Francis Allen, A Complete English Dictionary (London: Printed for J. Wilson and J. Fell, 1765). Frederick Barlow, The Complete English Dictionary: or, General Repository of the English Language, 2 vols (London: Printed for Frederick Barlow, 1772). 89 Daniel Fenning, The Royal English Dictionary: or, a Treasury of the English Language (London: Printed for S. Crowder and Co., 1761), p. viii. John Entick, The New Spelling Dictionary, 2nd edn (London: Printed for Edward Dilly and Charles Dilly, 1766), sig. A1r. 90 Browne, p. iii. 91 Sedgwick, p. 4.

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Table 5: Definitions of catamite in late eighteenth-century dictionaries Rider (1759) a person kept by the antient Romans and Italians for immodest purposes. Fenning (1761) a person kept by the antient Romans and Italians for the vilest of purposes. J. Johnson (1763) a sodomite. Allen (1765) a person kept by the antient Romans and Italians for the vilest of purposes. Entick (1766) one kept for sodomy Barlow (1772) a person kept by the antient Romans and Italians, for the most infamous purposes.

Such exclusions should not always be assumed to be deliberate. However, dictionaries’ repeated omissions of same-sex sexuality cannot be divorced from a wider textual culture of silencing. We have already observed that sex between men was ‘a crime not fit to be named’ in the view of William Blackstone, and sexual acts between women were ‘transactions not fit to be mention’d’ according to Henry Fielding. Hester Thrale would go on to brand erotic desires between women and between men alike as ‘unspeakable Sins’.92 It was a silence that continued to spread into new terrain beyond the close of the century. While, for instance, the popular trade in pamphlets describing adultery trials flourished from the 1780s onwards, the distribution of pamphlets concerning buggery trials ‘virtually ceased after 1800’.93 Such textual omissions did not correspond to any judicial lapse in prosecutions under the Buggery Act 1533: H. G. Cocks demonstrates a steady increase in committals per capita for sex (or attempted sex) between men from the 1780s into the nineteenth century.94 Literary attempts to erase the word buggery thus coincided with continued legal efforts to eradicate the act. The symbolic unspeakableness of same-sex sexuality turns its signifiers into shibboleths whose avoidance distinguishes the polite from the impolite, the pious from the impious, and the proper from the improper. It is small wonder that these words should be banished from the cultivated dictionaries of the post-Johnsonian decades. Butler has argued that the ‘production of the unsymbolizable, the

92 Thrale, ii, p. 770. 93 ; Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 54. 94 H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the 19th Century (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003), p. 24.

30 stephen turnton unspeakable, the illegible is […] always a strategy of social abjection’, implicated in the ‘regulation of what will and will not qualify as a discursively intelligible way of being’.95 In the images of the English nation regulated and constructed by late eighteenth-century lexicographers, in their struggle against the linguistic and civil ‘degeneration’ envisioned by Johnson, there is little space for the lexis or praxis of non-procreative sexuality. The Sapphist and, to a lesser extent, the sodomite are alienated by their absence: their names are repeatedly unrecorded, and their experiences are unexplained. They become indefinite beings beyond the margins of legitimate English, their existence inarticulable in respectable English society.

95 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1993; repr. 2011), p. 142.

31 improper words

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Dilly and Charles Dilly, 1766) Fenning, Daniel, The Royal English Dictionary: or, a Treasury of the English Language (London: Printed for S. Crowder and Co., 1761) Fisher, Anne, An Accurate New Spelling Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language, 2nd edn (London: Printed for Anne Fisher, 1773) Glossographia Anglicana Nova: or, a Dictionary (London: Printed for Daniel Brown and others, 1707) James, Robert, A Medicinal Dictionary, 3 vols (London: Printed for T. Osborne, 1743–1745) Johnson, J. The New Royal and Universal English Dictionary, 2 vols (London: Printed for A. Millard and R. Dorsley, 1763) Johnson, Samuel, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: Printed by William Strahan for John Knapton and others, 1755) — A Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edn, 2 vols (London: Printed by William Strahan for William Strahan and others, 1773) Jones, Stephen, Sheridan Improved. A General Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed for Vernor and others, 1798) K., J., A New English Dictionary: Or, a Compleat Collection of the Most Proper and Significant Words, Commonly used in the Language (London: Printed for Henry Bonwicke and Robert Knaplock, 1702) Kenrick, William, A New Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed for John Rivington and others, 1773) Kersey, John, Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum: Or, A General English Dictionary (London: Printed by J. Wilde for J. Phillips, H. Rhodes, and J. Taylor, 1708) Marchant, John, and M. Gordon, A New Complete English Dictionary (London: Printed for J. Fuller, 1760) Martin, Benjamin, Lingua Britannica Reformata: Or, a New English Dictionary (London: Printed for J. Hodges and others, 1749) OED Online, ed. by John Simpson and Michael Proffitt (2000–) [accessed 21 June 2018] Phillips, Edward, The New World of English Words: or, a General Dictionary (London: Printed by E. Tyler for N. Brooke, 1658) — and John Kersey, The New World of Words: or, Universal English Dictionary, 6th edn (London: Printed for J. Phillips, H. Rhodes, and J. Taylor, 1706) A Pocket Dictionary or Complete English Expositor (London: Printed for J. Newbery, 1753) Perry, William, The Royal Standard English Dictionary (Edinburgh: Printed by David Willison for William Perry, 1775) Quincy, John Lexicon Physico-Medicum: or, A New Physical Dictionary (London: Printed for Andrew Bell, William Taylor, and John Osborn, 1719) — Lexicon Physico-Medicum: or, A New Physical Dictionary, 2nd edn (London: Printed for E. Bell, William Taylor, and John Osborn, 1722)

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— Lexicon Physico-Medicum: or, A New Medicinal Dictionary, 3rd edn (London: Printed for John Osborn and Thomas Longman, 1726) Rider, William, A New Universal English Dictionary: or, a Compleat Treasure of the English Language (London: Printed by W. Griffin for I. Pottinger, 1759) Sheridan, Thomas, A General Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed for James Dodsley, Charles Dilly, and J. Wilkie, 1780) Walker, John, A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (London: G. G. J. Robinson, J. Robinson, and T. Cadell, 1791) [Wesley, John], The Complete English Dictionary (London: Printed by William Strahan, 1753)

Other Sources [Addison, Joseph], ‘No. 223. Saturday, November 15, 1711’, in The Spectator (Dublin: Printed for Peter Wilson, 1755), iii, pp. 208–212 Andreadis, Harriette, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-sex Literary Erotics, 1550–1714 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001) Argus Centoculi, ‘Saturday, June 2, 1750. No. 323’, Old England, sigs. A1r–A1v [Beste, Henry Digby], Personal and Literary Memorials (London: Henry Colborn, 1829) Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England. Book the Fourth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1769) Boswell, James, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 3rd edn, 4 vols (London: Printed by H. Baldwin and Son for Charles Dilly, 1799) Brack, O. M., Jr., and Thomas Kaminski, ‘Johnson, James, and theMedicinal Dictionary’, Modern Philology, 81.4 (1984), 378–400 Brady, Sean, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) Braunschneider, Theresa, ‘The Macroclitoride, the Tribade and the Woman: Configuring Gender and Sexuality in English Anatomical Discourse’, Textual Practice, 13.3 (1999), 509–32 Bray, Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, new edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) Burchfield, Robert W., Unlocking the English Language (London: Faber and Faber, 1989; repr. New York: Hill & Wang, 1992) Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1993; repr. 2011) Cameron, Deborah, Verbal Hygiene (London: Routledge, 1995) Cocks, H. G., Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the 19th Century (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003) Coke, Edward, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London: Printed by M. Flesher for W. Lee and D. Pakeman, 1644)

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Considine, John, Academy Dictionaries 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) Craft-Fairchild, Catherine, ‘Sexual and Textual Indeterminacy: Eighteenth- century English Representations of Sapphism’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 15.3 (2006), 408–431 DeJean, Joan, Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) Diderot, Denis, The Nun, trans. (Dublin: Printed by Brett Smith, 1797) ‘Dr. Johnson at Oxford, and Lichfield’, The Gentleman’s Magazine: and Historical Chronicle, 55.1 (1785), 288 Donoghue, Emma, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801 (London: Scarlet Press, 1993) [Fielding, Henry], The Female Husband: or, the Surprising History of Mrs. Mary, Alias Mr George Hamilton (London: Printed for M. Cooper, 1746) Hitchcock, Tim, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997) Howell, T. B., A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (London: Printed by T. C. Hansard for Longman and others, 1813), xvii Johnson, Samuel, A Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed for John Knapton and others, 1747) — The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, 4 vols (London: Printed for C. Bathurst and others, 1781) — The Celebrated Letter from Samuel Johnson, LL.D., to Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield; Now First Published, with Notes, ed. by James Boswell (London: Printed by Henry Baldwin for Charles Dilly, 1790) Johnston, Freya, Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 1709-1791 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) Jonson, Ben, The Workes of Beniamin Ionson (London: Printed by Will Stansby, 1616) — The Workes of Beniamin Ionson. The second Volume (London: Printed for Richard Meighen, 1640) Juvenal, The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, trans. by John Dryden (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1693) Lister, Anne, I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister, 1791–1840, ed. by Helena Whitbread (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992) McKeon, Michael, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) Mugglestone, Lynda, ‘“The Indefinable Something”: Representing Rudeness in the English Dictionary’, in Rude Britannia, ed. by Mina Gorji (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 23–34

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— ‘Registering the Language: Dictionaries, Diction and the Art of Elocution’, in Eighteenth-century English: Ideology and Change, ed. by Raymond Hickey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 309–38 Murray, James A. H., The Evolution of English Lexicography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900) Osselton, Noel E., ‘The Early Development of the English Monolingual Dictionary (Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries)’, in The Oxford History of English Lexicography, ed. by Anthony P. Cowie, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), i, pp. 131–54 Parsons, James, A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the Nature of Hermaphrodites (London: Printed for J. Walthoe, 1741) Persius, The Satires of Aulus Persius Flaccus, trans. by John Dryden (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1693) Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy, in England (London: Printed for A. Dodd and E. Nutt, c. 1730) Plato, The Banquet a Dialogue of Plato Concerning Love. The First Part, trans. [Floyer Sydenham] (London: Printed by H. Woodfall, 1761) Prins, Yopie, ‘Sappho’s Afterlife in Translation’, in Re-reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, ed. by Ellen Greene (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 36–67 Read, Allen Walker, ‘An Obscenity Symbol’, American Speech, 9.4 (1934), 264–78 Reddick, Allen, The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary: 1746–1773, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990) Thrale, Hester Lynch,Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi), ed. by Katharine C. Balderston, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942) Turton, Stephen, ‘Unlawful Entries: Buggery, Sodomy, and the Construction of Sexual Normativity in Early English Dictionaries’, Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, 40.1 (2019), forthcoming [Wilmot, John], Poems on Several Occasions by the Right Honourable, the E of R— (Antwerp: n.p., 1680) Wimsatt, W. K., Jr., and Margaret H. Wimsatt, ‘Self-quotations and Anonymous Quotations in Johnson’s Dictionary’, ELH, 15.1 (1948), 60–68

36 Race, place, and urban space: Teju Cole and Ta- Nehisi Coates in relation to the sociology of the streets

maddie mitchell

his paper will examine the integral role that the urban environment, and specifically the streets play in Teju Cole’s 2011 novelOpen City and Ta- Nehisi Coates’s 2015 autobiographical essay Between the World and Me. TThe streets are a central part of both works, and yet the reasons for their centrality are diametrically opposed. Although both protagonists – Julius in Open City and Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me – are black men living in contemporary urban America, Julius relishes his strolls through the streets of New York, viewing them as an act of freedom and a necessary release from the stresses of daily existence, while Coates views the streets as sites of ever-present danger, violence, and police brutality. Where Julius finds safety and comfort in the act of walking, Coates finds great fear and potential threats. Essentially, each character’s relationship to the streets can be summarized by their respective titles: while Open City equates the urban space with discovery, possibility, and a sense of boundlessness, Between the World and Me conjures ideas of clash and struggle. I will argue that a large part of the reason why these texts register their spaces so contradictorily is because, although it may not appear so upon first glance, the context in which each was written is radically different. Simply put – as I will demonstrate through historical and statistical data – New York in 2011 was a profoundly different environment compared to Baltimore in 2015. While their publication dates may not seem significantly far apart from one another, these four years proved to be an absolutely critical turning point in the American public’s increased awareness and outrage surrounding police brutality, which subsequently gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and fuelled discussions about the institutional racism inflicted every day upon African Americans. Amidst this watershed moment, Between the World and Me reflects a far angrier and more scathing indictment of the United States’ systematic oppression of black bodies than Open City, and therefore neither work can be divorced from the historical conditions under which they were written.

37 race, place & urban space

The implications behind these differing perceptions of the cities will be explored in the final section of this paper, and will be analysed in relation to French sociologist Michel de Certeau’s thesis on walking in a city, as explained in his influential work The Practice of Everyday Life, published in 1984. Certeau’s central argument is that ‘walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.’1 In other words, there are a set of pre-existing terms in any given language, and the speaker rearranges them to construct their own individual sentences and meanings through a process of ‘appropriation.’2 Certeau further analogizes speaking to walking:

A spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g. by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g. by a wall that prevents one from going further), [and] the walker actualizes some of these possibilities … But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform, or abandon spatial elements … Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it ‘speaks.’3

In other words, Certeau views walking the city and forging one’s own paths within the prescribed rules that map makers and urban planners originally set forth as being a rebellious act. This theory holds true, but only for a certain demographic in society. I argue that he fundamentally fails to consider race, environment, and context as complicating factors. (There are undoubtedly other important aspects of people’s identities that pass unmentioned in The Practice of Everyday Life, such as gender and sexuality, but for the purposes of this paper, I will limit the scope of my focus to these three variables.) Ultimately, I contend that the opposing roles of the streets in Open City and Between the World and Me are more than just mere literary devices: this disjunction a) provides important insight into the ways in which the Black Lives Matter movement has drastically shifted the discourse surrounding institutional racism in recent years, b) foregrounds the significance of race in navigating the streets and the vulnerability of black bodies, and c) interrogates the reductive conceptions of walking a city on which Certeau’s argument is predicated.

1 Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 1 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 97. 2 Ibid. 3 Certeau, pp. 98–99.

38 maddie mitchell

‘The Precariousness of Black Life’: The Birth of the Black Lives Matter Movement

In this section, I will provide the necessary historical background for both understanding the changes that the United States underwent between 2011 and 2015 regarding race relations, and for allowing keener insight into the many disparities in treatment between different racial groups in society, which will ground my analysis of the primary texts as well as my ultimate critique of Certeau. So, what happened within the span of these four years to so dramatically shape the discourse surrounding black lives? In her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor identifies Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 as a significant turning point. While ‘other beatings and murders’ from history were ‘not forgotten,’ they also ‘did not lead to a national movement’ in quite the same way that Ferguson did.4 And while ‘it is impossible to answer, and perhaps futile to ask, the question “why Ferguson?” just as it’s impossible ever to accurately calculate when “enough is enough,”’ it is nevertheless clear that ‘the transformation of Mike Brown’s murder from a police killing into a lynching certainly tipped the scales’.5 Indeed, in the article ‘“I am not afraid to die”: Why America will never be the same post-Ferguson,’ writer Brittney Cooper similarly concurs that ‘Mike Brown’s death has brought new meaning to local black struggles’:

His death, and officer Darren Wilson’s callous disregard for his life, has made the precariousness of black life visible for a whole new generation of black youth. The precariousness has been made visible and it has been deemed unacceptable…For [black men and women], having nothing to lose is more clearly iterated in the words some of us recited as we held hands around Mike Brown’s street memorial: ‘We have nothing to lose but our chains.’6

This notion that the ‘precariousness of black life’ has been ‘made visible’ is central to understanding the ways in which issues of police brutality in particular have come to light. Cell phone footage of such murders has become ubiquitous and provides an objective depiction of the often disproportionate levels of physical violence that law enforcement officials display and the resulting helplessness of black individuals. The tragic nature of these videos, shared widely on social

4 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), p. 154. 5 Ibid. 6 Cooper, Brittney, ‘“I am not afraid to die”: Why America will never be the same post-Ferguson,’ Salon online, 03 September 2014, , [Accessed 08 December 2017.]

39 race, place & urban space media, has given clout to Black Lives Matter, a name which refers to a hashtag, an international movement, and, most tangibly, ‘a chapter-based, member-led organization whose mission is to build local power and to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes,’ an organization ‘working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically targeted for demise.’7 ‘Systematically targeted for demise’ was a tragically apt way of describing what Taylor deems was a ‘killing season’ that spanned from the summer of 2014 through to the spring of 2015.8 Perhaps most pertinent to Coates’s work was the 12 April 2015 murder of Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old black man and a Baltimore City resident.9 In the days and weeks that followed, the city became increasingly radicalised regarding issues of police brutality towards the African American community, resulting in a series of large protests. According to The New York Times, on 25 April 2015, a ‘crowd of hundreds – and by some estimates more than 1,000 – marched through the streets, clogging intersections, carrying signs and shouting, “All night, all day, we’re gonna fight for Freddie Gray!”’10 This is not to suggest that race issues did not exist in Baltimore previously, but rather that 2015 ushered in a new wave of discourse, awareness, and anger surrounding such problems for this specific city. As I will identify later inBetween the World and Me, Coates’s tone is therefore not only inflected by the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement more broadly, but by the particularity of Baltimore at this precise historical moment. Taylor goes on to argue that ‘in the short span of a year, the impact of the [Black Lives Matter] movement is undeniable,’ and that its progress can be measured both in terms of concrete actions (i.e. certain localities mandating their officers to wear body cameras) as well as in the overall ‘shifting discourse about crime, policing, and race.’11 The racist links that have been drawn between African Americans and criminality are hardly new, having been embedded into the United States’ collective mentality since slavery, and continuing after Emancipation, after the Civil Rights Movement, and into the present day. According to Khalil Gibran Muhammad in his book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, statistician Frederick L. Hoffman published a manuscript in 1896 entitled Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro.

7 ‘About,’ Black Lives Matter website, [Accessed 03 December 2017] 8 Taylor, p. 157. 9 Stolberg, Sheryl Gay, and Stephen Babcock, ‘Scenes of Chaos in Baltimore as Thousands Protest Freddie Gray’s Death,’New York Times, 25 April 2015. 10 Ibid. 11 Taylor, p. 14.

40 maddie mitchell

This work provided ‘statistical data on black criminality’ (without accounting for factors like economic disenfranchisement) that allowed for ‘an intellectual defence of lynching, colonial-style criminal justice practices, and genocide’ and also ‘helped usher in the age of Jim Crow.’ 12 The racist notion that black people are somehow biologically predisposed to crime has thus existed for as long as America itself. However, this facile interpretation of the statistics has, as a result of the aforementioned video footage and a newly radicalised discourse that examines the historical and structural underpinnings of black subjugation, been recently called into question. And, most significantly to this paper, I argue that it has transformed discussion surrounding the streets of the States themselves, as countless black individuals have been tortured by police officers for simply existing:

Mike Brown was only walking down the street. Eric Garner was standing on the corner. Rekia Boyd was in a park with friends. Trayvon Martin was walking with a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea. Sean Bell was leaving a bachelor party, anticipating his marriage the following day. Amadou Diallo was getting off from work. Their deaths, and the killings of so many others like them, prove that sometimes simply being Black can make you a suspect – or get you killed. Especially when the police are involved, looking Black is more likely to get you killed than any other factor.13

There is a compelling body of data to support this notion that ‘simply being Black can make you a suspect.’ In their book Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship, authors Charles R. Epp, Donald P. Haider-Markel, and Steven Maynard-Moody report their findings on comprehensive studies that they conducted regarding the extreme racial disparities within investigatory stops, which the Wex Legal Dictionary notes is a type of stop that is predicated on a police officer’s ‘reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed.’14 According to their conclusions, ‘race, gender, and age interact’ in investigatory stops, and that ‘young African American men are by far the most likely to be stopped for investigatory reasons.’15 The data bears this out: for drivers under the

12 Muhammad, Khalil Gibran, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 35; Ibid., p. 11. 13 Taylor, p. 13. 14 ‘Investigatory stops,’ Wex Legal Dictionary, [Accessed 04 December 2017] 15 Epp, Charles R., Donald P. Haider-Markel, and Steven Maynard-Moody, Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 67.

41 race, place & urban space age of twenty five, “the likelihood of being subjected to an investigatory stop over the course of a year” is 28 percent for black men, compared to only a 7 percent chance for white men.16 Even for older drivers, the discrepancies are stark, a finding which ‘supports a widely expressed complaint of black men: no matter their age or station in life, police seem to be suspicious of them.’17 Epp et al.’s work is especially important in positioning the African American situation within a larger systemic framework. In their preface, they draw a clear distinction between mere ‘racial profiling,’ a term which focuses on ‘the motives of individual officers’ and ‘impl[ies] that African Americans and Latinos are stopped at higher rates because police officers deliberatelychoose to stop more of them,’ and the structural underpinnings that inform investigatory stops.18 They argue that ‘even when police departments have taken deliberate steps to prohibit “racial profiling,”’ race is nevertheless still inherently ‘embedded in police practice and criminal justice policy’ more broadly: one such example of this is ‘how official police practices and training encourage officers to make large numbers of stops merely to check people out,’ and how, moreover, ‘these practices implicitly incorporate negative stereotypes of African American and Latino criminality’.19 Throughout this paper, I will focus on this institutional nature of racism, which I will define in the same way that it was first put forth in 1967 by Charles V. Hamilton and Kwame Ture in Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America: ‘acts by the total white community against the black community’, which, in comparison to racism enacted by an individual, is ‘less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms ofspecific individuals committing the acts’ but is nevertheless ‘no less destructive of human life’.20 An example of individual racism would be ‘white terrorists bomb[ing] a black church and kill[ing] five black children’, but a result of institutional racism would be the fact that ‘five hundred black babies [in Birmingham, Alabama] die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities’.21 It is the collective machinery of society, all ‘the policies, programs, and practices of public and private institutions’ that contribute to ‘greater rates of poverty, dispossession, criminalization, illness, and ultimately mortality of African Americans’.22 Central to its definition is that it holds everyone who is complicit within the system accountable; in other words, ‘it is the outcome that matters, not the intentions of the individuals involved’.23

16 Epp at al., p. 67. . 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. xv. 19 Ibid., p. xvi. 20 Hamilton, Charles V., and Kwame Ture, Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 4. 21 Ibid. 22 Taylor, p. 8. 23 Ibid.

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This idea that systems perpetuate racism is one of the fundamental differences between Cole and Coates. While Open City discusses race on a very individual level, Between the World and Me constantly reminds its audience that each one of the anecdotes referenced are part of a wider social and political framework. Again, this logically coheres given that New York in 2011 was a different environment from Baltimore four years later. It is precisely this disjunction in context and space that influences the ways in which each text theorizes the streets. Cole largely avoids discussing his protagonist’s interactions with institutional racism, and as such, can view the act of walking the streets as beautifully liberating. By contrast, it is impossible to ignore the institutional nature of the racism that Coates discusses on every page of his essay, and his corollary perspective is that walking the streets is an act fraught with fear and anxiety for his livelihood, especially in light of the research surrounding race and policing that I have just presented. In the sections to follow, I will present my original close analysis of both works, and examine the ways in which their language and rhetoric undeniably reflect this radical difference in their reactions towards their urban environment.

Open City and the Freedom of Walking

For Julius, the Nigerian-German protagonist of Open City, walking is a wholly cathartic experience. It allows his mind to reach a relaxed state where his thoughts can wander freely, which is mimicked by the fluid, languid, and, at times, aimless style of Cole’s language and content. Such an attitude towards walking is figured from the outset of the novel, as Julius explains:

The walks met a need: they were a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and once I discovered them as therapy, they became the normal thing, and I forgot what life had been like before I started walking. Work was a regimen of perfection and competence, and it neither allowed improvisation nor tolerated mistakes … The streets served as a welcome opposite to all that. Every decision—where to turn left, how long to remain lost in thought in front of an abandoned building, whether to watch the sun set over New Jersey, or to lope in the shadows on the East Side looking across to Queens – was inconsequential, and was for that reason a reminder of freedom.24

This passage provides readers with important insight into Julius’ relationship with the city of New York, and demonstrate that his psychological disposition is distinctly opposed to Coates’s mentality towards the streets of Baltimore in Between the World and Me. Here, the rhetoric surrounding walking is one of total

24 Cole, Teju, Open City (New York: Random House, 2011), p. 7.

43 race, place & urban space unrestraint: the words ‘release,’ ‘improvisation,’ ‘lope,’ and ‘freedom’ all reinforce this notion. They conjure an image of New York as a vast, sprawling city that is his for the taking and that he can move through with great ease. They are the ‘welcome opposite’ to a ‘tightly regulated mental environment’ and a ‘regimen of perfection and competence’, again illustrating the ways in which walking is a form of freedom, a total departure from the confines of the workplace. Moreover, it is analogized to a type of ‘therapy’, showing how this activity is not just passively relaxing, but rather actively functioning as a means of self-awareness, understanding, and contemplation. The use of the word ‘therapy’ further shows that the walks provide a complete contrast from the strictures of his professional life because, as a psychiatrist, Julius is often the one administering therapy; yet here, the roles become reversed and he is the one receiving therapy, vis-à-vis the streets of New York. Walking is thus both affirmatively described as being inherently freeing and comparatively figured as an opposition to the limitations and inflexibility of the work world, showing readers how, for Julius, it is fundamentally tied to personal liberation. Quite notably, the other major claim staked in this passage is that navigating the city allows for ‘tolerated mistakes’, as each ‘decision’ is ‘inconsequential’. For Coates, every decision with regards to walking is painstakingly thought over, precisely because he argues that the consequences for not doing so can be fatal, at least for a black man in Baltimore. But instead, Cole depicts the city as a quiet backdrop for Julius’s own organic thoughts and self-discovery, rather than as an oppressive entity that forces him to perform and shape his behaviour in certain ways. It is important to note that this passage does come at the beginning of the novel, and thus this view is challenged to an extent as the narrative proceeds. However, I argue that his relationship to New York as being a significant and liberating part of his life holds true throughout; in stark contrast to Coates’s work, the streets in Open City are figured as the pinnacle of freedom. Nowhere is this ideology more self-evident than in the passages that show how Julius not only feels safe, but actually relishes walking in areas of New York that might normatively be considered dangerous. For example, on one of his walks, he enters a ‘small alley’.25 Though he admits that the alley is ‘no one’s preferred route to any destination’, he nevertheless feels as if ‘the entire world had fallen away. I was strangely comforted to find myself alone in this way in the heart of the city’.26 Instead of being fearful of taking this circuitous route and venturing into an area that is often theorized as being dark and ominous, Julius embraces it, employing rhetoric similar in register to the opening passage discussed earlier. The streets themselves become a personal respite, a place of intimacy into which he can retreat and find peace. They are a space of ‘comfort’; even the phrase ‘heart

25 Cole, p. 52. 26 Ibid.

44 maddie mitchell of the city’ implies an affective warmth in the relationship between Julius and New York. It is telling that he feels completely at ease in navigating the city, even in areas of which one should perhaps be wary. For example, in Coates’s world of Between the World and Me, no area would engender more discomfort and distrust for a black man in America than affluent, predominantly white suburbs. Yet surprisingly, even in such a setting, Julius moves effortlessly, as a type of invisible, flâneur figure:

The stairs brought me out into the dead end of Pinehurst, a different world from the busy street life a few dozen yards below: residential buildings, a richer, whiter neighborhood. And so I proceeded among the whites, entering their quieter street life, feeling for minutes that I was the only person walking around a depopulated world, and reassured only by occasional signs of life: an old lady at the end of the block carrying a bag of groceries, a pair of neighbors in conversation in front of an apartment building, and the appearance, one after the other, of glimmering lights from within the windows of lovely brick houses set back from the street.27

As with the passage involving the alley, walking through this ‘richer, whiter neighborhood’ is a means by which the rest of the world can peacefully fall away. The entire tone of this passage seems hushed, as particularly evidenced by the notion that he feels like ‘the only person walking around a populated world’ around a type of ‘quieter street life.’ There are hints that he may feel unsettled by this isolation, but they are quickly allayed, not by the absence of white people, but rather by their presence. Unlike in Coates’s work, Open City does not interrogate the potential dangers of a black man wandering around a wealthy, white neighborhood, but instead positions Julius as being able to move freely, without a high level of consequence. However, this is not to say that Julius never has negative or traumatizing experiences while navigating New York and this is not to suggest that Cole sets forth a simplistic narrative about being black in an American urban environment. In one particularly difficult scene to read, for instance, Julius is beaten and robbed. It is unexpected, a sharp ellipsis that interrupts the serenity of his walks and meditations: ‘And it was in the middle of that thought that I felt the first blow, on my shoulder. A second, heavier, landed on the small of my back, and my legs gave way like sticks. I fell to the ground’.28 This incident demonstrates that the novel is far from a reductive reading of New York; it does not romanticize the sprawl and exploratory possibilities of the city to such a point as to obscure the realities

27 Cole, p. 236. 28 Ibid., p. 212.

45 race, place & urban space of daily existence. While it is important to recognize this fact, I still argue that the robbery that occurs in Open City does not convey the threat that the streets hold with quite the same political import and explicitly racial overtones as we will later see in Coates’s work. This is because the episode seems rather arbitrary and accidental, over and above any more sinister agenda. It is not linked to systematic issues of police brutality or organized gang violence, but, rather, a singular instance of Julius simply being the unfortunate victim of ill chance. Furthermore, although he is naturally disturbed by the robbery, it does not deter him from continuing his aimless wanderings around New York afterwards. For example, two chapters later, he charts his circuitous movement ‘from the intersection of 172nd Street’ through to ‘small shops selling knickknacks, the sprawling window display of El Mundo Department Store’, and the former ‘Loews 175th Street Theatre’.29 In other words, Julius still feels safe enough, even after the incident, to continue navigating the city as he pleases. It is in this way that the robbery, while undeniably physically and psychologically taxing, is bracketed from the rest of the text as being a solitary episode of violence, rather than being part of a larger racist machinery. To wit, Julius’s perceptions of the systemic issues confronting black Americans are perhaps best summarized by the conversation he has with his friends, Khalil and Farouk, in Brussels. When Khalil asks him if the media portrayals of black Americans align with reality, he responds:

American blacks are like any other Americans; they are like any other people. They hold the same kinds of jobs, they live in normal houses, they send their children to school. Many of them are poor, that is true, for reasons of history, and many of them do like hip-hop and devote their lives to it, but it’s also true that some of them are engineers, university professors, lawyers, and generals. Even the last two secretaries of state have been black.30

It is important to note that he intentionally gives a pared-down, reductive response; the casual nature of friendly conversation in this context does not allow for a highly politicized, comprehensive answer. And he is clearly aware of the oppressive historical conditions imposed on this demographic that still carry a cruel present-day legacy. Nevertheless, I contend that his answer reveals his mentality that a major inequality between American blacks and whites does not ultimately exist. As Taylor asserts, there is a danger inherent in Julius’ response and in this attitude of upholding a select few successful black individuals as being somehow representative of the United States’ racial tenor:

29 Cole, p. 234. 30 Ibid., p. 119.

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[The fact that] an African American family inhabits the White House, an edifice built by slaves in 1795, is a powerful example of the transformation of racial attitudes and realities in the United States. Beyond the presidency of Barack Obama, thousands of Black elected officials, a layer of Black corporate executives, and many highly visible Black Hollywood socialites and multimillionaire professional athletes animate the ‘postracial’ landscape in the United States. The success of a relative few African Americans is upheld as a vindication of the United States’ colorblind ethos and a testament to the transcendence of its racist past.31

Julius’s response is therefore problematic because he focuses on the exceptions at the expense of obscuring the systemic injustices. In so doing, he fails to hold individuals and communities accountable for their overt and covert perpetuation of racism – he merely gestures to the abstract idea of ‘history,’ but does not name specific people or institutions as being complicit and culpable. By extension, he implies that race is no longer a significant barrier to African American achievement or treatment, although the research and data that I have presented in the introduction to this paper speaks to the contrary. His response is symptomatic of his broader views. Simply put, in Open City, Julius sees the situation of American blacks to be just like ‘any other Americans’ and ‘any other people,’ whereas in Between the World and Me, as I will explore in greater detail, these ideas of institutionalized racism come to the fore and provide the majority of the book’s content. This stark difference is why for Julius, the streets are a source of freedom, and why for Coates, to whom I will now turn, the streets pose an ever- present threat; they materialise as real-life shackles.

Between the World and Me and the Streets as Prisons

It is important to note that Between the World and Me is an inherently different text from Open City, and such differences are registered on several levels: form (nonfiction essay/epistolary letter as opposed to a fictional narrative), tone (pointed, direct, and enraged as opposed to a ‘callous’ narrator with a stream of wandering meditations), and intent (political and social critique that speaks on behalf of a large, marginalised group as opposed to a story that provides insight into one man’s psychology). One of the most significant differences, however, and one that I argue informs the views espoused in each book, is the socio-political context within which they were respectively written. Coates writes primarily about

31 Taylor, p. 4.

47 race, place & urban space young black men living in Baltimore in 2014-2015, in the wake of Freddie Gray’s murder and the protests it catalysed; being in this specific city at this specific moment undoubtedly, I argue, shapes the content of Between the World and Me. The primary way that this radicalised context influences the text is through the manner in which the streets are portrayed. Unlike Cole, Coates views the streets as symbolic prisons that are constraining, confining, and above all, terrifying. As a black man within this environment, he discusses fearing for his life every day, where the police force has been systematically and disproportionately murdering black bodies. From the outset, he cites a small handful of examples of this brutality, from 2014 alone:

I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store … And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable.32

In this passage, the relationship between quotidian activities of the streets – ‘selling cigarettes’, ‘seeking help’, ‘browsing in a department store’, ‘turn[ing] into a’ stairwell – and the possibility of such routines resulting in fatality is foregrounded. The repetition of the phrase ‘it does not matter’ reinforces the cold hostility of the streets; there is no pattern or rationale through which a black man can predict if and when the police may strike. Even the use of the words ‘can be’ contribute to this notion, this idea that there is always a lurking potential, nested even within the most innocuous of events, for black lives to be taken away in an instant. It is in this way that the streets inculcate a chilling fear in black Americans from a very young age. A few pages later for instance, Coates expands on the ‘Baltimore of [his] youth’, how being black ‘was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease’, which he asserts ‘is the correct

32 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, Between the World and Me (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2015), p. 9.

48 maddie mitchell and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear’.33 He clearly ties this terror that the streets of Baltimore impose with larger problems of politics and of history, marking a departure from the ways in which Cole theorises and writes about the streets of New York. They are not avenues for idealised, freeing walks, but rather, vehicles for bodily destruction. Thus, while Julius sees walking as a ‘release’ and ‘a reminder of freedom’, Coates frames the discussion in a drastically different light. When describing his outlook towards his urban environment growing up, and the strategies he employed to navigate it, he writes:

I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed.34

The rhetoric he uses here provides great insight into his perception of the ever- present threat that Baltimore poses, as specifically symbolized by the streets. For instance, he uses the word ‘survive’ twice, indicating that one must become familiar with a complicated set of rules merely to be granted the basest of human privileges; it conjures an image of a hunter and his prey. Even more importantly, he invokes this idea using the physicality of the streets themselves. The ‘asphalt itself’ is what gives ‘rise’ to these challenges, to the necessity for black Baltimoreans to contort themselves to fit into an artificially imposed ‘lethal puzzle’, and for ‘every ordinary day’ to be ‘transform[ed]’ into a threat. This idea that the streets regularly hold a threat motivates Coates to tell his son that ‘black people love their children with a kind of obsession’.35 It is because ‘you are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made … [My mother] knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine’.36 The notion that ‘America made’ the streets implies that the nation’s values and cultural practices had a large hand in actively moulding the urban landscape, not just in terms of its sheer physicality, but in the omnipresent danger it holds for African Americans. The country itself is responsible for the streets and all the policing, violence, and fear associated with them. The verbs used in the following sentence, ‘shattered’

33 Coates, p. 17. 34 Ibid., pp. 21–22. 35 Ibid., p. 82. 36 Ibid.

49 race, place & urban space and ‘spilled’, are aggressive, mimicking the ruthless and inhumane treatment that is constantly inflicted upon black individuals. Such mercilessness is reflected in the comparison of Coates’s body to mere ‘bum wine’ – he is viewed by the Baltimore police as a useless object, to the extent that it does not matter if he is left to die on ‘the curb’, on the streets themselves. This attitude from officers has significant statistical backing: according toThe New York Times, ‘more than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life,’ and that the reasons for this are ‘largely because of early deaths or because they are behind bars’.37 Their livelihood is simply not valued. It is in this way that Coates writes to his son not only to inform him of present events, not only to potentially incite him to action, but to warn him about the precariousness of his life in the eyes of Baltimore police officers and the consequent threat that the streets constantly present to him as a young black man. As I will explore in the following section, race and environment are thus extremely important forces to consider in the sociology of the streets and urban theory more broadly.

Cole and Coates in Relation to Michel de Certeau and Classical Sociology

I will now turn to Certeau’s theories put forth in The Practice of Everyday Lifein light of my analysis on Cole and Coates’s texts, focusing on the ways in which it fails to account for race, environment, and context. Such a gap has also been briefly identified by scholar Andrew Smith, who states that ‘the “classical” sociology of everyday life has [on the whole] been remarkably blind to the role played by racism and processes of racialization in modernity’.38 In Between the World and Me, Coates demonstrates that being a flâneur, like Julius, where one can wander the streets at leisure as a detached and almost invisible observer, is inherently a form of privilege. This is because black men, women, and children in Baltimore are stripped of this ability to slip by undetected. Rather, the penalties for reformulating the rules of the city and rearticulating one’s own paths can be extremely harsh, to the point of fatality. To this end, the book shows that when police brutality, violence, and racism are continually fuelled, it is essential for black residents in Baltimore to follow the rules, oftentimes to the strictest extent possible, for the sake of mere survival and self-preservation. It is the reason why many black Americans have lost their lives while walking in predominantly white neighborhoods, areas to which they are not perceived to belong. For instance, in Between the World and Me, Prince Jones (Coates’s friend from Howard University), is shot by the police for merely driving in Northern Virginia.

37 Wolfers, Justin, David Leonhardt, and Kevin Quealy, ‘1.5 Million Missing Black Men,’ New York Times, 20 April 2015. 38 Smith, Andrew, ‘Rethinking the “everyday” in “ethnicity and everyday life,”’ Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38.7 (2015) p. 1139.

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And he is far from a lone case. One finding by Epp et al. shows that ‘over the course of a year, an African American man who is less than 40 years old and is driving an older domestic luxury car has a 44 percent likelihood of an investigatory stop’, whereas ‘a similar white man driving any other vehicle has an 8 percent chance of such a stop, and a white man has only a 4 percent chance’.39 In a related study, they found that African Americans who appear to be ‘“out of place” in America’s racially bounded urban geography’ were also targeted.40 In fact, ‘stops of African Americans are especially skewed toward investigatory stops in the inner suburbs’, which effectively translates to the ‘“white” areas of town’ in the United States’ hyper-segregated metropolitan areas.41 African Americans who are thought to be walking where they do not belong are extremely vulnerable to police stops and, consequently, potential brutalisation. Thus, it is essential in a post-Black Lives Matter era to recognize that Certeau’s thesis is quite one- dimensional. By not addressing issues of race, he suggests that his ideas about walking can be universally applied, whereas Coates makes it clear that these principles cannot hold for many black Americans. The streets cannot be a source of rebellion and walking cannot be an enunciative process in the same way as a speech act – not when one’s livelihood is at stake. I argue that The Practice of Everyday Life therefore must be made considerably more nuanced by taking a racialized perspective into account. The latter two factors, environment and context, are also ones that are important to consider, and arise from the dialectic formed between Coates’s book and Open City. As previously stated, the way each author writes about the streets is a direct product of the specific time and place in which they were created. Being black in New York in 2011 may well be a significantly different experience than being black in Baltimore in 2015, as a result of location and current events. (By this, I am not implying that one reading is ‘right’ or ‘better,’ as I am in no way equipped to draw those judgments. I simply mean to argue that in analysing how each of these texts grapple with and explore race in relation to the urban space, the environment and context must both be carefully taken into consideration in order to better understand the characters’ attitudes and actions.) Even within the texts themselves, the treatment Julius and Coates individually face differs greatly depending on the given city: Julius’ treatment in New York varies from his treatment in Brussels; Coates’s treatment in Baltimore varies from his treatment in Washington, D.C., New York, and Paris. Nowhere is this more apparent than in one of the final scenes inBetween the World and Me, taking place in Paris:

And the entire time [my friend] was leading me, I was sure he was going to make a quick turn into an alley, where some dudes would be waiting to strip me of … what exactly? But my new friend

39 Epp et. al, p. 70. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., p. 71.

51 race, place & urban space

simply showed me the building, shook my hand, gave a finebonne soirée, and walked off into the wide open night. And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.42

In this passage, Coates clearly differentiates between his experience in Baltimore and his experience in Paris, moreover noting how his behaviours and perceptions are fundamentally formed by the hostility of the environment in which he was raised. It is in this way that it is not sufficient to only consider one’s identity politics in relation to Certeau’s sociology, but also the city and time period in which one lives; taking the same person and divorcing them from their original context inherently gives rise to a new set of social positions and relations. Given the fact that Certeau is an extremely influential sociologist whose theories are widely taught today, I argue that it is critical to introduce more contemporary discussions of race, environment, and context to these ideas and to put pressure on their overly reductive nature.

Conclusion

The issues surrounding the intersection of race, the stigma of criminality, and policing are hardly new. They are all a function of institutional racism, which, in the way I have defined it in the introduction, has existed as long as America itself. This is because it is premised on a belief in the inhumanity and inferiority of African Americans. And it manifests itself in profoundly disturbing implications:

Racism in the United States has never been just about abusing Black and Brown people just for the sake of doing so. It has always been a means by which the most powerful white men in the country have justified their rule, made their money, and kept the rest of us at bay. To that end, racism, capitalism, and class rule have always been tangled together in such a way that it is impossible to imagine one without the other. Can there be Black liberation in the United States as the country is currently constituted? No.43

As Taylor suggests, racism interacts with other systems, of which the police force is but one, to continually oppress black individuals and destroy black bodies. Thus, in the year between 2014 and 2015, millions of Americans’ anger could no longer be contained. This may have been catalysed by Michael Brown’s death,

42 Coates, p. 126. 43 Taylor, p. 216.

52 maddie mitchell but the fight was about far more than this lone murder – it was about the United States’ historically rooted and systematic disvaluing of African Americans. As such, it follows that the streets, which are closely tied to the idea of policing, would be theorised differently in Cole’sOpen City and Coates’s Between the World and Me, based on the context and the environment in which they are respectively situated. 2015 was a far more politicised year for black lives than 2011, which is in part why Julius relishes walking in the city while Coates is extremely fearful of such an act. Similarly, Baltimore’s relationship with race is fraught in a fundamentally different way than New York’s. In addition to considering these dimensions of time and space to nuance Certeau’s sociology, Coates’s work in particular demonstrates how racism, both individual and (especially) institutional, reveals the extent to which Certeau’s views surrounding walking are highly privileged. I therefore argue that the context of a given historical moment, the environment of a particular city, and the race of the individual in question must be taken into account when considering the act of walking the streets. To fail to do so not only creates an overly facile theorising of urban spaces, one in which we blindingly assume parity across all metropolitan environments, but also creates the false, misguided impression that all demographics of society have the ability to transform into a flâneur at will and can roam their streets with equal freedom.

53 race, place & urban space

Bibliography

Primary Texts Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 1(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984) Coates, Ta-Nehisi, Between the World and Me (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2015) Cole, Teju, Open City (New York: Random House, 2011)

Secondary Texts Black Lives Matter website, ‘About’, . Accessed 03 December 2017. Cooper, Brittney, ‘“I am not afraid to die”: Why America will never be the same post-Ferguson.’ Salon, 03 September 2014. . Accessed 08 December 2017. Epp, Charles R., Donald P. Haider-Markel, and Steven Maynard-Moody, Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014) Hamilton, Charles V., and Kwame Ture, Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967) Muhammad, Khalil Gibran, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard University Press, 2010) Smith, Andrew. ‘Rethinking the “everyday” in “ethnicity and everyday life.”’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 38.7 (2015) pp. 1137–1151 Stolberg, Sheryl Gay, and Stephen Babcock, ‘Scenes of Chaos in Baltimore as Thousands Protest Freddie Gray’s Death.’New York Times, 25 April 2015. . Accessed 07 December 2017. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016) Wex Legal Dictionary, ‘Investigatory stops’, . Accessed 04 December 2017. Wolfers, Justin, David Leonhardt, and Kevin Quealy, ‘1.5 Million Missing Black Men’, New York Times, 20 April 2015 . Accessed 03 December 2017.

54 Becoming everything: constitutive impurity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness carissa ma

1 Introduction

‘ ow to tell a shattered story?’ One of the characters reads the question in his lover’s notebook towards the end of the novel, and the accompanying answer: ‘By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming Heverything.’1 Indeed, Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is not a story of one, but a story of many. Roy unpacks the layers of politics and privilege inherent in caste, religion, and gender identity through the novel’s eclectic cast of characters which includes a trans woman from Delhi, a man from an untouchable caste passing himself off as a Muslim who names himself Saddam Hussein, a Brahmin government official, a Kashmiri resistance fighter, a Faustian media opportunist, an architect-turned-activist who gets swept up in the Kashmiri struggle for independence. From time to time the birds, the beetles, and the cattle become as important as the people in this narrative. At the core of Roy’s latest novel is an ethics of connectivity and multispecies entanglement. It sets out to dismantle boundaries in binary opposites: human/non-human, male/female, living/dead, killable/unkillable, grievable/ungrievable. The reception to Roy’s novel has been mixed. Time magazine lauded it as ‘a complex, nonlinear narrative that blends the personal and political’.2 Meanwhile, The Atlantic was more circumspect; they found ‘more than a touch of fairy tale in the book’s moral simplicity’ and described the world conjured by Roy as ‘often

1 Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2017), p. 436. 2 Sarah Begley, ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Is Worth the 20-Year Wait’, Time, 2017 [accessed 20 June 2018].

55 becoming everything brutal, but never confusing or even very complex’.3 In this essay, I shall investigate alternative ways of understanding Roy’s novel that attest to its moral complexity and ethics of impurity, informed by theories of gender and animal ethics. I believe that analysing how the novel engages with feminist and animal theories opens an important window onto Roy’s own work as an activist.4 For an overarching theoretical framework, I turn to Alexis Shotwell’s Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times; Shotwell’s work takes into account the difficulties of life in the Anthropocene — the current geological age during which human activity has been the dominant influence on the Earth’s ecosystems — and offers helpful ways of pondering the ethical claims brought upon us by our entanglements with other life forms. I shall argue that Roy offers a compelling argument for a politics of relationality that resists the demand for ‘purity’. At the heart of the novel is an interrogation of sectarian violence, why it persists and what feeds it, particularly what Shotwell has diagnosed as an overwhelming desire for the restoration of purity in our troubled times. Interestingly, the first words of the novel read, ‘At the magic hour, when the sun has gone but the light has not’.5 The novel, which begins teetering on the cusp of darkness, argues against the logic of rigid boundaries that delimit the world into ‘pure’ entities. My analysis shall focus on configurations of purity politics, including the maintenance of the human-nonhuman binary and oppressive regimes of norm-enforcement based on gender, caste, and racial distinctions. In section one, we shall discuss how Roy’s novel demonstrates that both human and non-human lives are situated in a hierarchy of grievability, drawing on Judith Butler’s Frames of War. We shall also explore how the novel complicates Butler’s notion of grievability by depicting officially disenfranchised grieving. In section two, we shall discuss how the novel demonstrates that the differential distribution of grievability is predicated on the will to purity—an ethical aspiration for personal purity critiqued by Shotwell in Against Purity. The last two sections will expand on Roy’s concern with grievability and purity, showing how Roy expresses her ethical stance against purity and the hierarchy of grievability by employing analogical structures, bringing into play Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive use of analogy, which questions the presumably absolute distinction between the human and the animal.

3 Parul Sehgal, ‘Arundhati Roy’s Fascinating Mess’, The Atlantic, 2017, [accessed 20 June 2018]. 4 See Arundhati Roy, The Algebra of Infinite Justice (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2002); Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story (London: Verso, 2015); and Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). 5 Roy, Ministry, p. 1.

56 carissa ma

2.1 Differential distribution of grief

Butler discusses the differential distribution of public grieving and its political significance inFrames of War. According to Butler, war essentially ‘divid[es] populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all’.6 In the novel, this division is rendered blatant in many references to national tragedies of Modern India and this division is extended to peacetime, where war is waged symbolically against certain groups by the state or the dominant majority or hegemonic group. In the wake of the Godhra train burning, in which Hindu pilgrims were burned alive, the Chief Minister of Gujarat ‘ordered that the burnt bodies of the pilgrims be brought to Ahmedabad, the capital of the state, where they were to be put on display for the general public to pay their respects’.7 This public grieving aims at conferring upon the bodies of the Hindu pilgrims an iconic function for the nation. In stark contrast to the officially sanctioned public grieving for the Hindus, as portrayed in the novel, the vengeful killing of Muslims and the destruction of the shrine of Wali Dakhani — one of the first great Urdu poets — by Hindu mobs are hushed up: the police refuses to register murder cases of Muslims and a tarred road is built over the site of the destroyed shrine. What remains in the aftermath of the Indian state’s anti- Muslim pogroms are nameless and faceless ‘corpses [that] no longer resemble[] corpses’ and flowers left in the middle of the new road by anonymous people. 8 The terrible extent of targeted violence against Muslims in Gujarat contrasts strongly with the lack of material evidence that could be used to hold the perpetrators to account, rendering the act of mourning almost impossible. This impossibility of mourning, Butler suggests, means that the lives in question are in some way considered unreal: ‘If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated.’9 Nevertheless, the officially ungrievable are still grieved by some: ‘[w]hen the flowers were crushed to paste under the wheels of fast cars, new flowers would appear’, like a choreographed dance—a dance of sorrow that dances around the Indian government’s efforts to regulate and control who shall be publicly grievable and who shall not.10 The flowers, surreptitiously placed, constitute a form of disenfranchised grieving that publicly displays and avows the un-mourned losses in the carnage. The ever-appearing flowers for the dead Muslims in Gujarat are examples of an irrepressible form of counter-grieving for

6 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), p. 38. 7 Roy, Ministry, p. 45. 8 Ibid. 9 Butler, Precarious Life, p. 33. 10 Roy, Ministry, p. 46.

57 becoming everything those who are not officially grievable. Time and again, the novel draws attention to the importance of counter-grieving for the disenfranchised whose deaths should be accounted for. The novel’s portrayal of the so-called martyrs’ funeral for Kashmiri militants highlights the political potential of counter-grieving. The Kashmiri chant for freedom accompanies the funeral procession; the cry is so powerful that it is said to have ‘the power to cut through the edifice of history and geography, of reason and politics’, and thus the power to disrupt, even only temporarily, the order and hierarchy of political authority. 11 As pointed out by Butler, ‘[o]pen grieving is bound up with outrage, and outrage in the face of injustice or indeed of unbearable loss has enormous political potential’.12 However, the martyrs’ funeral for Kashmiri militants as portrayed in the novel is far more complex than Butler’s assessment of open grieving and the power of affect as purely disruptive; the dead militants are not considered officially grievable but are, paradoxically, still grievable politically for the purpose of containing public anger and managing outrage. It is clear that the act of public mourning is manipulated by the Indian state for furthering its political dominance in Indian- administered Kashmir such that ‘the outpouring of [the Kashmiris’] grief and fury ha[s] become part of a strategic, military, management plan’.13 The martyrs’ funeral as a counter discourse against the official definition of grievability is hijacked by the state to manage the volatile political situation in Kashmir. For Butler, ‘[w] hether we are speaking about open grief or outrage, we are talking about affective responses that are highly regulated by regimes of power and sometimes subject to explicit censorship’.14 We can see how affect is regulated not by suppression but rather by rationing, to support the Hindu nationalist agenda in the novel — ‘The thinking was that permitting the population to vent its feelings and shout its slogans from time to time would prevent that anger from accumulating and building into an unmanageable cliff of rage.’15 Ironically, the public mourning for the Kashmiri militants serves as part of the production of the frame within which violence against the Kashmiris becomes possible. Here, the act of grieving, instead of enabling empathy with the vulnerability of others, helps to maintain that vulnerability. The Indian state’s frames of violence and regulation of affect in support of the Hindu nationalist agenda are, however, not with complete or guaranteed success, which is where the opportunity for resistance lies. Ironically, this space for counter-grieving is appropriated by the Kashmiri militants in a way not unlike that employed by the Indian state. The militants’ official ungrievability marks them

11 Roy, Ministry, p. 46. 12 Butler, Frames of War, p. 39. 13 Roy, Ministry, p. 230. 14 Butler, Frames of War, p. 39. 15 Roy, Ministry, p. 181.

58 carissa ma out as ‘martyrs’, thus grievable in an exemplary sense. The martyr is both a symbol and narrative framework used by the Kashmiri militants to galvanize opposition to the Indian state regime. In turn, by allowing for the making and remembering of martyrs, the state can manage the grief and rage of the Kashmiris and foreclose any revolutionary mass movement in Indian-occupied Kashmir. A catch-22 situation thus ensues wherein forms of grieving are constantly taken up and hijacked by the other side. As Foucault noted, discourses and techniques of power ‘are always liable to forms of re-appropriation, reversibility and re-utilization’.16 As demonstrated by examples of counter-grieving in the novel, the politicization of grief is plagued by an internal conflict that is implacable. InFrames of War, while Butler has dwelt at length on the differential frames of recognition whereby the ontological status of a targeted population is compromised, she has neglected to devote as much attention to how the targeted population may appropriate said frames in a counter-gesture. In the next section, I shall discuss how the novel demonstrates that the differential distribution of grievability is predicated on the will to purity.

2.2 Will to purity

In a manifesto against purity entitled ‘Modes of Syncretism’, Law et al. read Bruno Latour’s claim that ‘we have never been modern’ as in part about the production of purity practices. 17 According to Law et al., ‘[Latour’s] argument is that modernity presents itself as gleaming, consistent, and coherent— as something that is pure rather than fuzzy.’18 In the novel, the modern will to purity can be found in the ‘sleek, climate-controlled cars [and] quick-fix spiritual manuals You( Are Responsible for Your Own Happiness…or How to Be Your Own Best Friend…)’ which exist uneasily alongside ‘miles of bright swamp tightly compacted with refuse and colourful plastic bags’.19 Both the climate-controlled cars and the individualist self-help manuals can be understood as homogenizing practices for domesticating and denying noncoherence — that which is fuzzy, uncertain, multiple, and impure; while the former sustain the illusion of an impermeable border between inside and outside, the latter promote an individualizing purity politics that offers a vision of human potential rendered in terms of the fictive singular, autonomous agent. The will to purity is also cartographically enacted

16 Colin Gordon, ‘Afterword’, in Michel Foucault,Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. by Colin Gordon, trans. by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 229–59 (p. 256). 17 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) 18 John Law et al., ‘Modes of Syncretism: Notes on Noncoherence’, Common Knowledge 20 (2013), 172–92 (p. 172). 19 Roy, Ministry, p. 100.

59 becoming everything in the novel, in the form of New Delhi’s affluent diplomatic enclave. Tilo feels utterly out of place living with her husband Naga, a journalist from a diplomatic family, ‘at an address she oughtn’t to be at’.20 Within the enclave community, purity language is employed to guard against contamination by the outsider. Naga’s mother, who models herself into ‘a modern Indian Maharani with a plummy British accent’ and has skin ‘the colour of alabaster’, finds Tilo’s dark complexion ‘shocking’ and ‘trauma[tic]’.21 Naga’s father, ‘a Balliol man’, pronounces words ‘the way an Englishman would’.22 Naga’s parents’ aristocratic demeanour and their big European-style Art Deco house both conform to an archetype of refinement and good taste, which is predicated on fantasies of social purity. Tired of the respectable classes’ pretensions to purity, Tilo develops a peculiar compulsion for wandering through the city; on one occasion, making her way towards the impoverished urban periphery, Tilo ‘walk[s] through miles of city waste, a bright landfill of compacted plastic bags with an army of ragged children picking through it’.23 Tilo’s propensity for walking through garbage and refuse is demonstrative of her aversion to a metaphysics of purity and inclination for a ‘metaphysics of compost’. Speaking of queer disability food politics but in a mode that we could take up more broadly, Kim Q. Hall argues for a ‘metaphysics of compost’ since ‘there are no pure bodies, no bodies with impermeable borders [and] reality is not composed of fixed, mutually exclusive, or pure bodies’.24 The reason Naga is so troubled by Tilo’s wandering, calling it ‘unsafe’ and an indicator of ‘the onset of an unsoundness of mind’,25 is because it is transgressive — it not only challenges Naga’s assumption of individual purity, but also draws attention to how the ‘clean’ bourgeois neighbourhood that he inhabits achieves its status in large part through downloading its effluents and excreta into other places and other bodies. The novel renders it obvious that such a redistribution of harm away from some bodies and toward others is to a great extent enabled by the caste system and Hindu nationalist rhetoric. The Hindu nationalist Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, referred to as Gujarat ka Lalla in the novel, ‘disseminate[s] his message of Cleanliness, Purity and Sacrifice for the Nation’26 in his weekly radio broadcast, bringing together the lexicon of ethnic purity with the discourse of cleanliness and sanitation. Both the discourses of ethnic purity and toxicity attempt to secure a rhetorical space for individual purity that would allow us to imagine that we can succeed in not being altered and shaped by the world — a

20 Roy, Ministry, p. 100. 21 Ibid., pp. 184–85. 22 Ibid., Ministry, p. 186. 23 Ibid., p. 234. 24 Kim Q. Hall, ‘Toward a Queer Crip Feminist Politics of Food’, philoSOPHIA 4 (2014), 177–96 (p. 179). 25 Roy, Ministry, p. 216. 26 Ibid., p. 401.

60 carissa ma belief also known as ‘corporeal exceptionalism’.27 As a subscriber to a conception of bounded individuality, the Prime Minister is constantly wary of incursions from pollutants and toxins such that he becomes unreasonably ‘paranoid and secretive’; ‘For his personal protection, he hire[s] food-tasters and security guards from other countries.’28 The convergence of the discourses of individual purity and toxicity is replicated in the mob killing of Saddam’s father, a Dalit cattle-skinner, on the day of the Hindu festival of Dussehra. The festival is a prime example of a convergence of multiple purity moves. During the festival, the Ramlila, the story of how Lord Ram vanquished Ravan in the battle of Lanka, which Hindus believe is ‘the story of the triumph of Good over Evil’, is vividly enacted.29 With the rise of the Hindu nationalists — ‘the Parakeet Reich’ — the evil demons of the Ramlila become synonymous with ‘everybody who [is] not Hindu’.30 Not unlike Big Brother’s Newspeak, a politics of oppositionality governs the Hindu nationalist ‘saffron parakeet-speak’ such that Good is necessarily opposed to Evil, Hindus against non-Hindus, purity against filth.31 The mob killing of Saddam’s father — allegedly out of moral revulsion to ‘cow-slaughter’ — against the backdrop of the Ramlila story, which emphasizes mutually exclusive binaries, displays traffic between caste prejudices and ethnic prejudices. Notions of caste purity and biophysical filth have never been entirely distinct—particularly with respect to untouchability. In the novel, the discourses of caste purity and toxicity are articulated in the Hindu nationalist metanarrative in this instance of communal violence. As pointed out by Mel Chen, ‘There seems to be a basic semantic schema for toxicity: in this schema, two bodies are proximate; the first body, living or abstract, is under threat by the second; the second has the effect of poisoning, and altering, the first, causing a degree of damage, disability, or even death.’32 This schema for toxicity underlies the treatment of Untouchables and dead bodies in the novel. Upper- caste Hindu doctors working at the mortuary where Saddam works refuse to handle the cadavers and perform the post-mortem ‘for fear of being polluted’.33 Instead, they leave the job to the cleaners who belong to a lower caste of sweepers and leatherworkers traditionally called Chamars. Also, upper-caste farmers call Saddam’s family of Chamars to collect cow carcasses — ‘because they [can’t] pollute themselves by touching them’.34 The Hindu doctors’ and farmers’ redistribution or

27 Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 85. 28 Roy, Ministry, p. 401. 29 Ibid., p. 86. 30 Ibid., p. 87. 31 Ibid. 32 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 191. 33 Roy, Ministry, p. 72. 34 Ibid., p. 86.

61 becoming everything avoidance of what they consider foul matter, demonstrates Chen’s conception of toxicity as ‘a biopolitically interested distribution (the deferral of toxic work to deprivileged or already “toxic subjects”)’.35 Significantly, as Chen has argued, ‘[s]uch a distribution, in its failure to effectively segregate, leaks outside of its bounds to “return”’.36 In the novel, the commune at Janat Guest House helps us understand toxicity and vulnerability as not something that we must (or can) defend against, but instead as a constitutive fact of our lives. Anjum’s Janat Guest House, built on a graveyard and situated near a mortuary and a public hospital, is nestled among the sick, the dying, and the dead, literally and figuratively. Anjum declares the guest house ‘the place of falling people’ — excluded, racialized, gendered bodies subject to violence. The guest house is a shelter for the doubly marginalized — ‘a hub for Hijras who, for one reason or another, had fallen out of, or been expelled from, the tightly administered grid of Hijra Gharanas’.37 The guest house, which functions also as a funeral parlour, helps bury those whom the graveyards and imams ordinarily reject, such as prostitutes. The guest house is also an animal shelter — ‘a Noah’s Ark of injured animals’.38 The ‘falling people’ who stay at the guest house fulfil the negative political function of demarcating the boundaries of legitimate citizenship, in a way resembling what Agamben calls ‘bare life’, that which ‘presents itself as what is included by means of an exclusion’.39 For Agamben, ‘the realm of bare life — which is originally situated at the margin of the political order — gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction’.40 This inclusive exclusion is apparent in the figure of Anjum, a Muslim trans woman and self-identified Hijra, who is deemed killable in the eyes of Hindutva activists but also not killable because ‘killing Hijras brings bad luck’.41 Anjum, ‘[u]n-killed’ and ‘[u]n-hurt’, is defined negatively as ‘Butcher’s Luck’, for the activists believe that ‘the longer she live[s], the more good luck she b[rings] them’.42 Similarly, a sense of irreducible indistinction can be found in the way those staying at the guest house move in a zone where apparently, life and death, animate and inanimate, human and inhuman, cannot be clearly differentiated. As Tilo observes, ‘the battered angels in the graveyard that ke[ep] watch over their battered charges h[old] open the doors between worlds[…]so that the souls of the present and the departed could mingle, like guests at the

35 Chen, p. 218. 36 Ibid. 37 Roy, Ministry, p. 68. 38 Ibid., p. 399. 39 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 7. 40 Ibid., p. 9. 41 Roy, Ministry, p. 62. 42 Ibid., p. 63.

62 carissa ma same party’.43 Instead of portraying this nebulous state as disabling, Roy paints a generative picture of what Anna Tsing calls ‘contaminated diversity’.44 Recognizing that we live in an impure world, Anjum tells Saddam, ‘I don’t care what you are… Muslim, Hindu, man, woman, this caste, that caste, or a camel’s arsehole.’45 As Tsing argues, ‘We are contaminated by our encounters […] Everybody carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option.’46 Anjum’s commune at Janat Guest House poses a challenge to narratives of bodily boundedness and possessive individualism. Roy’s intervention thus vividly demonstrates how discourses of purity have historically circulated within systems of classification and biopolitical practices that attempt to eliminate queerness, disability, nonhuman animals, poverty, and so forth, exposing the persistence and violence of fundamentalist narratives of purity. Because of the indeterminacy of life and death at the Janat Guest House, Tilo finds that she is no longer plagued by the ‘perpetual apprehension[…]of suddenly receiving news of [her lover] Musa’s death’.47 And when Musa passes away, Tilo is ‘not undone by her grief because she [is] able to write to him regularly and visit him often enough through the crack in the door that the battered angels in the graveyard h[o]ld open[…]for her’.48 A vegetable garden flourishes behind the guest house; vegetables of various kinds grow out of the soil of the graveyard — ‘a compost pit of ancient provenance’ and a threshold between life and death, ‘attracting several varieties of butterflies’.49 The novel ends with the image of Guih Kyom, the graveyard’s resident dung beetle ‘lying on his back with legs in the air to save the world in case the heavens f[a]ll’.50 The dung beetle feeds partly or exclusively on faeces and the posture of the beetle as described here is a tell-tale sign of a dead or dying insect. Guih Kyom is dead or dying but also ‘wide awake and on duty’, like a dung-eating, six-legged version of the Titan Atlas; filled with hope and conviction, the beetle thinks to himself, ‘things w[ill] turn out all right in the end. They w[ill], because they ha[ve] to’.51 Thus the dead, the dirty, the abhorred become the lively conditions for hope and flourishing in the novel. By locating the site of flourishing in the midst of impure subjects or entities that transgress categorical understandings, the novel argues against the logic of boundedness that rhetorically or conceptually delimits the world into something disentangled, separable, and homogenous, instead of entangled, coconstituted, and multiple.

43 Roy, Ministry, p. 62. 44 Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 33. 45 Roy, Ministry, p. 85. 46 Tsing, The Mushroom, p. 27. 47 Roy, Ministry, p. 398. 48 Ibid., p. 437. 49 Ibid., p. 399. 50 Ibid., p. 438. 51 Ibid.

63 becoming everything

2.3 (De)differentiation

As noted by Shotwell, ‘[t]he delineation of theoretical purity, purity of classification, is always imbricated with the forever-failing attempt to delineate material purity—of race, ability, sexuality, or, increasingly, illness’.52 In her novel, Roy demonstrates that ‘the imbrication of failure with attempt’ is an essential feature of classification, by employing analogical thinking or practices of (de) differentiation that diverge from binary oppositions that insist on the purity of categories.53 Building on Derrida’s use of analogies in The Animal That Therefore I Am, this section of the essay takes up practices of comparison and analogy between humans and animals. This essay argues that analogical structures in Roy’s novel function as (de)differentiations that allow for both differences and similarities to emerge. Far from collapsing differences, analogical thinking in Roy’s novel allows for specificities to emerge, rendering generic categories far more complex. Analogical thinking is widely perceived to be humanist in its orientation, often relying on the human schema in understanding nonhuman entities and lives. For Haraway, among other activists and scholars, analogies collapse differences and efface the particularly situated material and historical relations that produce the lives and deaths of animals.54 Famously, Derrida invokes an analogy between the Holocaust and industrialized animal slaughter in The Animal That Therefore I. Am As pointed out by Creedon, such an analogy is associated with the problematics of rights-based discourse.55 For Haraway, as for Derrida and others, understanding human/animal relations through the humanist discourse of ‘rights’ fails to take into account the simultaneously ‘hierarchical and communicative’ nature of the relations and effaces the specific modes of being of the animals who work both for and with us in industrialized societies.56 Recognizing the danger of equating the terms of his analogy, Derrida turns his attention to the conceptual violence involved in collapsing the specificity of animals into the homogenized, monolithic construction of the animal. According to Derrida, the name of ‘the animal’, delineating the ultimate ethical difference from the human, is what renders them vulnerable to being sacrificed. Adopting the multiple, heterogeneousl’animot , as opposed to the singular, generic l’animal, Derrida consciously departs from the nameless, faceless notion of the generic animal, traditionally opposed to

52 Shotwell, p. 4. 53 Ibid. 54 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 55 See Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 56 Paul Patton, ‘Language, Power, and the Training of Horses’, in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 83–99 (p. 96).

64 carissa ma the human, to articulate a wide range of plural animalities and histories that constitute ‘an irreducible living multiplicity of mortals’.57 The tension between differentiation and de-differentiation, staged through Derrida’s cautious analogy between systems of mass extermination of animals and the Nazi Holocaust, is also prominent in Roy’s novel. The body of Anjum, a Hermaphrodite, a ‘She-He, He-She’ with both male and female characteristics, is an embodied analogy in its fully dialogic sense.58 Through juxtaposition, comparison, analogy, the novel enacts a process of (de)differentiation to complicate the difference between terms of comparison and thus forcing them into further refinement. An interesting example of analogical thinking that articulates both differences and similarities is the juxtaposition between Khwabgah or the House of Dreams — a community of Old Delhi Hijras — and Duniya or the World — everything that is supposedly outside the Hijra community. In the novel, Khwabgah, home to transgender or gender-non-conforming bodies, is often pitched against the concept of Duniya, which represents sex/gender normativity, forming a spatial division within a Manichean logic. But more often than not, the novel foregrounds the porosity between and plurality within the two ostensibly insular realms. In one of the novel’s most ironic moments, Nimmo Gorakhpuri, one of the Hijras, refers to Hindu-Muslim riots and the Indo-Pakistani war as merely ‘outside things that settle down eventually’ and can never measure up to the inner riot of gender dysphoria: ‘The riot is inside us. The war is inside us’, says Nimmo.59 As the novel unfolds, the effects of so-calledoutside things, such as the Emergency, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, Union Carbide tragedy in Bhopal, Narmada Bachao Andolan, the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, 9/11, the unrest in Kashmir, Maoist insurgency, atrocities against Dalits, the saffron wave, become irrevocably up close and personal to all the characters in the novel, including those living in the sanctuary of Khwabgah. Just as the characters in the novel turn out to be inextricably intertwined with the social and political fault lines of the Indian subcontinent, gender enactment proves to be more collaborative and socially determined than otherwise presumed. Contrary to Nimmo’s belief, the issue of gender identification far exceeds a physical and psychologicalinside - war. Instead, ‘gender is produced through social worlds as much as through fleshy signifiers’.60 Contesting a voluntarist and individualist model of gender definition, Shotwell calls for ‘a thicker conception of how gender formation is coconstituted’,61 that is, a more relationally grounded understanding of gender that accounts for its inextricable entanglement with racial, social, and economic

57 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I, Am trans. by David Wills, ed. by Marie- Louise Mallet (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 41. 58 Roy, Ministry, p. 12. 59 Ibid., p. 23. 60 Shotwell, p. 154. 61 Ibid., p. 141.

65 becoming everything justice.62 This approach to gender or sexuality is rooted in the assumption that ‘social relations are entangled and intra-implicated’.63 Ustad Kulsoom Bi, Chief of the Delhi Hijra community, describes Khwabgah as a place where ‘Holy Souls trapped in the wrong bodies were liberated’.64 This formulation of Khwabgah is an example of gender voluntarism, in that it assumes that individuals are the locus of change, that the intentional or expressive act of entering Khwabgah is complete in itself. Gradually, Anjum ‘learn[s] that the Holy Souls [are] a diverse lot and that the world of the Khwabgah [is] just as complicated, if not more so, than the Duniya’.65 Inhabitants of the Khwabgah variously identify with a wide spectrum of religious and gender identities and are thus by no means a homogeneous bunch. Recognizing the interrelationship between and complexity within the terms of the Khwabgah-Duniya analogy helps us to better understand the systemic and power-laden realities of gender, sexuality, and race. Gendered vulnerability in the novel is beyond individualized situations of interpersonal violence; instead it involves the relational production of geopolitical and geo-economic violence through systematic and institutional forms of oppression. The spatial binary division of Khwabgah and Duniya takes on a transnational resonance to connote also the imagined binary, in the context of post-9/11 American nationalism, between the USA and the Islamic world; in the aftermath of 9/11 and the increased flattening of the Middle East region as a breeding ground for terrorism. Numerous identities associated with the region became conflated into a single racial category labelled as the anti-American and associated with terrorism against the West. In Queer Necropolitics, Sima Shakhsari discusses post- 9/11 American nationalism and its construction of a Manichaean logic within which ‘the US signified freedom and democracy, the Muslim world stood for homophobia and gay oppression and the protection of queers against the homophobic enemy became the raison d’être of war’.66 Against such a reductive logic, Roy offers not binary oppositions but politically more helpful (de)differentiation, by which the Westernized trans subject and the victimized Muslim Hijra are constructed analogically through difference and commonality. In the novel, Saeeda, the young and educated self-identified ‘transperson’, straddles the supposed divide between the ‘civilized’, liberated West and the victimized, otherwise ‘barbaric’ Muslim

62 With regard to a global feminist project, Chandra T. Mohanty claims that the ground for feminist political strategy and critical analysis should be based on the intersection of anti-racist, anti-imperialist and gay and lesbian struggles. See Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 63 Shotwell, p. 158. 64 Roy, Ministry, p. 53. 65 Ibid., p. 27. 66 Sima Shakhsari, ‘Killing me softly with your rights: Queer death and the politics of rightful killing’, in Queer Necropolitics, ed. by Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 93–110 (p. 97).

66 carissa ma world. Saeeda is actively involved with gender rights groups and is well-versed in the universalized queer and trans language—easily juggling terms such as ‘cis- Man and FtoM and MtoF’.67 Both Anjum and Saeeda are equally caught in what Shakhsari calls ‘the politics of the unstable life, which is simultaneously imbued with and stripped of liberal universal rights’.68 Both Saeeda and Anjum occupy ‘[a] liminal space between death and a life, which is not bare, but is imbued with rights’.69 As a trope, the ‘victimized Muslim queer people’ constitute a population which is produced through the discourse of rights but whose lives are also deemed disposable by international entities and transnational market-driven actors. Both Saeeda and Anjum are totem figures who, at one time or another have been media favourites, sought after by foreign newspapers, NGOs, and film-makers. Anjum as ‘the chosen one’ is often encouraged to repeat a narrative of abuse and cruelty that demonizes ‘her conventional Muslim parents, siblings and neighbours’.70 When Anjum chooses to reverse the narrative, insisting on ‘how much her mother and father ha[ve] loved her and how she ha[s] been the cruel one’, her interlocutors are ‘invariably disappointed’.71 As Minoo Moallem argues, ‘the barbaric other is there to legitimize and give meaning to the masculine militarism of the “civilized” and his constant need to “protect”. Protection enables an alliance between the protector and the protected against a common foe’.72 In order [to] construct that barbaric other and ‘to suit readers’ appetites and expectations’ for a common foe, Anjum’s story as published in foreign newspapers is always ‘slightly altered’.73 Such deliberate modifications thus reproduce the Third World barbarism versus First World freedom narratives.74 The insistence on visibility and testimonies of oppression become necessary to the civilizational narratives of queer oppression in India and liberation in the West. Anjum’s phone number is exchanged between foreign correspondents ‘as a professional favour’ because her story is ‘lucrative in a market where information about human rights abuses in [developing countries] may translate into funding by think tanks, democratizing states and individual funders’.75 Anjum’s altered story — that of queer Muslim persecutions in India — provides fame and/or fundraising opportunities for some organisations that bank on such stories. Likewise, in ‘the supermarket of sorrow’, the famous photo of the Bhopal Boy, victim of the Union Carbide gas leak, is a priced commodity to be marketed and consumed, such that ‘[t]he battle over the copyright of

67 Roy, Ministry, p. 38. 68 Shakhsari, p. 103. 69 Ibid. 70 Roy, Ministry, p. 26. 71 Ibid., p. 26. 72 Minoo Moallem, ‘Whose Fundamentalism?’, Meridian 2 (2002), 298–301 (p. 300). 73 Ibid. 74 Sherene Razack, Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in the Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1998). 75 Shakhsari, p. 101.

67 becoming everything the photograph continued for years, almost as ferociously as the battle for compensation for the thousands of devastated victims of the gas leak’.76 Like the Bhopal Boy, Anjum is taken up into processes of global marketing and business competition, but as soon as the foreign readership’s desire has shifted from ‘the old exotics in favour of the younger generation’, Anjum is unceremoniously displaced from ‘the Number One spot in the media’.77 Being no longer a media sensation and deeply traumatized by her experience in the Gujarat riots, Anjum becomes like ‘a ravaged, feral spectre’ and is as good as dead to her previous admirers.78 It is in this context that Anjum, the Muslim Hijra is at once politicized and produced through ‘civilized’ discourses of rights, freedom, democracy, free market, and global security that implicitly authorize war and imperialism in the Muslim world, and ‘depoliticized as homo sacer—one whose life is disposable once it loses value in neoliberal economies and geopolitical discourses’.79 Reading the Khwabgah-Duniya analogy in the wider, transnational context of the neoliberal ideal of freedom and geopolitical deployments of queer life and death, as demonstrated by the opportunistic appropriation of Anjum’s story by the Western media, helps us tease out the situated material and historical relations that produce, manage, and ultimately diminish the Muslim gender-non-conforming subject. As Butler argues, sexual politics is often enunciated from within state power such that Europe and the sphere of modernity are defined ‘as the privileged site where sexual radicalism can and does take place’.80 Many have described the cultural and political opposition between LGBT rights and identities and Muslim cultures. Within the binary framework of cultural conflict (queer versus Muslim), both positions are defined in terms of their putatively conflictual relation with one another, at which point little is known about either category or their existential convergence in Muslim trans subjects. Such a framework that assumes that religion and sexuality are both singly and exhaustively determining of identity does not bother to investigate, in more grounded, patient, complex ways, how religion and sexuality are variously organized.81 Anjum and her counterparts in Roy’s novel complicate such ‘ontological givens’ — ‘notions of subject, culture, identity, and religion whose versions remain uncontested and incontestable within particular normative frameworks’— by fleshing out how people live in relation or in relative indifference to such rules or taboos against gender nonconformity. 82 The enactment of (de)differentiation between Khwabgah and Duniya in the novel draws attention to the dynamic character of subject-formations, which include the crossing of queer and Muslim identities and the migratory constitution of dynamic subject positions that do not reduce to single identities.

76 Roy, Ministry, p. 327. 77 Ibid., p. 38. 78 Ibid., p. 63. 79 Shakhsari, p. 104. 80 Butler, Frames of War, p. 102. 81 Ibid., pp. 143–44. 82 Ibid., p. 149.

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2.4 Animal suffering

In the novel, while writing a letter, Tilo considers industrialized animal practices in the poultry industry through an analogy to the plight of The Mothers of the Disappeared in Kashmir:

P.S. I have learned that scientists working in the poultry industry are trying to excise the mothering instinct in hens in order to mitigate or entirely remove their desire to brood. Their goal, apparently, is to stop chickens wasting time on unnecessary things and thereby to increase the efficiency of egg production. Even though I am personally and in principle completely against efficiency, I wonder whether conducting this sort of intervention (by which I mean excising the mothering instinct) on the Maaji—The Mothers of the Disappeared in Kashmir—would help. Right now they are inefficient, unproductive units, living on a mandatory diet of hopeless hope, pottering about in their kitchen gardens, wondering what to grow and what to cook, in case their sons return.83

At first glance, the analogy appears ludicrous. However, it is but a hyperbolic example of efficiency at work that consigns humans and non-humans alike to the category of the killable. This transposition of the efficiency principle to mothers forcefully confronts readers with their own views of political pain. The analogy is consistent with the novel’s concern with the existing discourse of efficiency; throughout the novel, there are many instances of victims of political violence being managed along similar lines, for example the slum-dwellers who are violently displaced by the growth of the rapidly urbanizing India. Tilo’s wry proposal for ‘an efficient Quantum of Hope’ is clothed in a reductive, scientistic language which ironizes the technocratic ethos: a relentless pursuit of efficiency and productivity; an extensive rational control over every variable; an organizational logic which stresses extreme systemization that animates the logic of the factory farm which, as demonstrated by this particular analogy, tends to undermine the unique horrors of industrialized animal practices and provide an un-situated, facile explanation for the hurdles against Kashmiri parents of disappeared persons.84 The (de) differentiation between factory farm animals and Kashmiri parents acknowledges that animal lives are not so separate from ‘our’ discourses about trauma and violence as we might like to think; it enacts a blurring between those seemingly insurmountable ontological boundaries that categorically divorce the human from its animality (and the animal from its ‘humanity’ in the sense that the industrial farm animals are devastatingly caught in human discourses and practices rather

83 Roy, Ministry, p. 300. 84 Ibid.

69 becoming everything than existing outside them; as Kersty Hobson writes, ‘animals are already subjects of, and subject to, political practices’).85 Tilo’s analogical thinking, situates us within the heterogeneous multiplicity of relations between beings, human and non-human. Tilo’s analogy echoes Derrida’s analogy between the Holocaust and industrialized animal slaughter in that both raise the crucial question of how or why we draw certain distinctions between human and animal in such a way that the animal is often not or cannot be a subject in our interrogations of violence. (De)differentiation offers us a way of situating humans and non-humans in a web of interspecies dependencies. Haraway’s recent work on relationality describes it in the following terms: ‘Through their reaching into each other, through their “prehensions” or graspings, beings constitute each other and themselves’.86 The following deals with how Roy’s novel reckons with suffering, particularly where the lines between human suffering and animal suffering become blurred, where ostensibly easy distinctions fall apart. In When Species Meet, a book that critiques the ‘killability’ of animals used only as ‘worked objects’ instead of ‘working subjects’, Haraway argues that it is not killing but making beings killable that is the central problem of the anthropocentric construction of the animal.87 Haraway’s work highlights that animal objectification in science laboratories is the result of human unwillingness to see animals as ‘response-able’.88 As she writes, ‘instrumental relations of people and animals are not themselves the root of turning animals (or people) into dead things, into machines whose reactions are of interest but who have no presence, no face, that demands recognition, caring, and shared pain’.89 It is the assumption of unidirectional relations in the use of animals that ensures that they remain facelessly generic. In the novel, human characters and animals function as both subjects and objects to each other in ongoing intra-action. Animals in the novel are recognized as actors, if not agents in their own right. Roy draws an interesting comparison between Saddam Hussain, a young sight-impaired Dalit and Payal, a ‘gaunt and battered white mare’.90 A strangely hierarchical but communicative relationship is delineated here with Payal as ‘Saddam’s business partner’, working both with and for Saddam.91 Saddam and Payal partake in a kind of ‘companion- species’ relationship built on mutual agreement, much like the one Haraway describes between dogs and humans in The Companion Species Manifesto.92

85 Kersty Hobson, ‘Political animals? On animals as subjects in an enlarged political geography’, Political Geography 26 (2007), 250-67 (p. 251). 86 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p. 6. 87 Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 80. 88 Ibid., p. 71. 89 Ibid. (Emphasis in original). 90 Roy, Ministry, p. 73. 91 Ibid., p. 77. 92 Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto.

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Another interesting analogy in the novel is that between Biroo and Anjum. Biroo is a beagle who has barely survived the ordeal of animal testing in a pharmaceuticals testing lab. The beagle and the Hijra share many similarities: they follow the same diet and are both ‘unreasonable and unpredictable’; both have been traumatized by experiences of unspeakable suffering that leave them permanently changed.93 What little we know about the traumatic history of Biroo is deduced from his appearance and behaviour: when he was first found by Saddam, the beagle was ‘wild-eyed and disoriented, with a mess of transparent tubes dangling out of him’, and was ‘troubled by frequent epileptic fits and snorting, debilitating reverse sneezes’.94 Both Saddam and Anjum treat Biroo as an individual being with a name and a distinguishing appearance: the beagle is unusual for the ‘smoky, greyish patina’ that covers his coat.95 For the pharmaceutical company, Biroo’s value lies in his practical use in drug testing, but for Saddam and Anjum, they have clear regard for the animal’s intrinsic value. Biroo’s tortured body bears the marks of physical coercion or ‘unwilled imposition of force’, which according to Butler, shows that ‘the boundary of the body never fully belongs to [oneself]’.96 Like Biroo, Anjum’s body demonstrates the enmeshed nature of the social body, as her sex reassignment surgery and medication, as well as exposure to political trauma, render her a literally ‘partial, incomplete subject’97 with a ‘patched- together body’.98 For Butler, the body is invariably in ‘unwilled proximity to others and to circumstances beyond one’s control’.99 The bodies of Biroo and Anjum are both testament to life as a set of largely unwilled interdependencies such that it is impossible to separate the categories of the human and the non-human since the two co-constitute each other. The (de)differentiation between the traumatic histories and bodies of Anjum and Biroo represents an important line of inquiry and ethical consideration. The process of (de)differentiation, which deals with significant differences in a context of potential similarity, resists the usual invisibility of animal suffering by refusing to trivialize concern for the precarity of non-human existence in the face of the toll that traumatic histories exact on their human subjects. For Roy, it is clear that animal suffering must be responded to, rather than systematically effaced. Paying attention to asymmetries and differences between human and non-human suffering is crucial to ensuring that animals become less ‘killable’. The suffering of animals is not ‘human’ but humans can still, to a certain extent, share in animal suffering, the way Anjum can sense ‘the ghosts of vultures’ that died

93 Roy, Ministry, p. 83. 94 Ibid., pp. 82, 83. 95 Ibid., p. 82. 96 Butler, Frames of War, p. 54. 97 Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002), p. 30. 98 Roy, Ministry, p. 29. 99 Butler, Frames of War, p. 34.

71 becoming everything of diclofenac poisoning like ‘an ache in an amputated limb’.100 Anjum’s somatic cognition of the vultures’ suffering demonstrates an ethical practice that Haraway terms ‘sharing suffering’, which is about entangled subjectivities ‘opening to shared pain and mortality and learning what that living and thinking teaches’.101 In her characteristically eloquent way, Anjum asks ‘Where do old birds go to die? Do they fall on us like stones from the sky? Do we stumble on their bodies in the streets?’102 This deceptively simple question concerns the entanglement of human and animal bodies, demanding our imagination to articulate, feel, be ‘response-able’ to the suffering of animals. Roy’s handling of violence against non-humans presents animals in their own corporeality, as bodies capable of suffering alongside human ones, as beings in a complex socio- and eco-political network of oppression shared between species. Sharing suffering is about working with animals in ways that ‘never leave the practitioners in moral comfort, sure of their righteousness’.103 This entails rigorously facing the inevitability of, and the responsibilities that come with, killing animals.

3 Conclusion

Despite a growing awareness of the destructiveness of the human species and the precarity in which such destruction puts all inhabitants of the Earth, there has been little discussion of the fundamental forces that have led us to the brink, namely mutually reinforcing systems of oppression and the nature/ culture dualism of patriarchal thought. The dismantling of oppositional binaries via analogical thinking in the novel works as a subversive strategy questioning the conceptualization of hierarchies where for ‘the anthropocentric feminists, the “other” is nonhuman animals and nature; for radical feminists, “other” is culture and man; for the animal liberationists, “other” is human emotion and collectivity’.104 Analogical structures in the novel foreground the multiplicity of relations between diverse beings, showing that an ethical approach aiming for individual purity is inadequate in the face of the entangled situation in which we in fact live. Butler urges us to acknowledge our ethical entanglement with other suffering bodies, arguing for an ethics that is not hung up on purity: ‘the meaning of responsibility is bound up with an anxiety that remains open, that does not settle an ambivalence through disavowal, but rather gives rise to a certain ethical practice, itself experimental, that seeks to preserve life better than it destroys it’.105 Roy does not write from a position of moral comfort, but an open position of moral discomfort. Insisting on the difference between her novel and

100 Roy, Ministry, p. 3. 101 Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 83. 102 Roy, Ministry, p. 5. 103 Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 75. 104 Lori Gruen, ‘Dismantling oppression: An analysis of the connection between women and animals’, in Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, ed. by Lori Gruen (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 60–90 (p. 80). 105 Butler, Frames of War, p. 177.

72 carissa ma her non-fiction political essays, Roy claims that ‘I have little patience with novels that are only thinly disguised manifestos in which the characters neatly play out the author’s pre-conceived ideological ideas. Neatness is not something I aspire towards in fiction. I like it when the folks in my book trip me up’.106 Contrary to claims that the novel is morally simplistic, characters in the novel often do not belong to sharply defined moral categories. Roy writes in the novel, ‘In Kashmir in those days, the difference between what constituted guilt and innocence lay in the realm of the occult’ and ‘[i]t wasn’t clear what, or who, the sinner was and who the sinned against’.107 This morally undecidable quality is true both of Kashmir in the novel and of the novel itself.

106 ‘Interview: Arundhati Roy on The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’, Penguin Books, [accessed 20 June 2018]. 107 Ibid., pp. 219, 220.

73 becoming everything

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Begley, Sarah, ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Is Worth the 20-Year Wait’, Time (2017) [Accessed 20 June 2018]. Butler, Judith, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). — Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). Chen, Mel Y., Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Davis, Lennard J., Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002). Derrida, Jacques, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. by David Wills, ed. by Marie-Louise Mallet (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008). Foucault, Michel, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975- 76, ed. by Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani (New York: Picador, 1997). Gordon, Colin, ‘Afterword’, in Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, 229–259, ed. by Colin Gordon, trans. by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). Gruen, Lori, ‘Dismantling oppression: An analysis of the connection between women and animals’, in Ecofeminism: Women, animals, nature, 60–90, ed. by Lori Gruen (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). Hall, Kim Q., ‘Toward a Queer Crip Feminist Politics of Food’, philoSOPHIA 4 (2014), 177–196. Haraway, Donna, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). — When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Hobson, Kersty, ‘Political animals? On animals as subjects in an enlarged political geography’, Political Geography 26 (2007), 250–267. Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). Law, John, and others, ‘Modes of Syncretism: Notes on Noncoherence’, Common Knowledge 20 (2013), 172–192. Moallem, Minoo, ‘Whose Fundamentalism?’, Meridian 2 (2002), 298–301. Patton, Paul, ‘Language, Power, and the Training of Horses’, in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, 83-99, ed. by Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Penguin Books, ‘Interview: Arundhati Roy on The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’, [Accessed 20 June 2018].

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Razack, Sherene, Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in the Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1998). Roy, Arundhati, The Algebra of Infinite Justice (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2002). — Capitalism: A Ghost Story (London: Verso, 2015). — The End of Imagination (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). — The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2017). Sehgal, Parul, ‘Arundhati Roy’s Fascinating Mess’, The Atlantic (2017) [Accessed 20 June 2018]. Shakhsari, Sima, ‘Killing me softly with your rights: Queer death and the politics of rightful killing’, in Queer Necropolitics, 93–110, ed. by Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). Shotwell, Alexis, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Tsing, Anna, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Wolfe, Cary, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

75 76 Publication without a Publicity of the Self: The lyric ‘I’ in Emily Dickinson and Claudia Rankine fernanda lai

The splendid word “incarnadine”, for example – who can use it without remembering also “multitudinous seas”?1 — Virginia Woolf.

video of a young black woman refusing to put down her book at a Trump rally in Springfield, Illinois went viral in October of 2016. Even before news sources could identify the reader, feminist-news publication Jezebel Aran a headline—‘We Are All This Woman Refusing to Put Down Her Book at a Trump Rally.’2 The anonymous reader was later revealed to be Johari Osayi Idusuyi, a writer and student at Lincoln Land Community College, and the book she was reading to be Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), a work of poetry confronting racism in contemporary America.3 For many, the incongruity of this book being read at a Trump rally captured the ideological rupture during the presidential election, which exposed the deep divisions in everyday experience along lines of race. As Jezebel’s headline indicates, Idusuyi’s act of reading was interpreted as a performative sign of protest because it appeared out of place, disrupting public expectations about appropriate behaviour at a rally, as well as contradicting our expectations about whom we expect at a Trump rally—not a black woman reading Citizen.

1 Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays, ed. by David Bradshaw (Oxford: OUP, 2008), pp. 85–94, p. 88. 2 Kara Brown, ‘We Are All This Woman Refusing to Put Down Her Book at a Trump Rally,’ Jezebel, 10 November 2015 < http://theslot.jezebel.com/we-are-all-this-woman-refusing-to-put-down-her-book- at-1741798507> [accessed 17 October 2016] 3 Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2014),

77 publication without a publicity of the self

While some interpreted Idusuyi’s behaviour as an act of resistance on their behalf, for others, her behaviour compelled a form of relationality that reflected their responsibility to her. Remarking upon the coincidence of the moment, poet Saeed Jones tweeted: ‘Don’t interrupt a black woman if she’s reading Claudia Rankine’s CITIZEN in the middle of a Trump rally.’ While the implications of Jezebel’s headline leads us into a politics of collective inclusion and exclusion based on defining who ‘we’ are, a binary choice where being against Trump means being with ‘us,’ Jones’s imperative points towards another interpretation that favours individuated alliance over generalised exclusion and inclusion. It is a call to each individual to usher in a world where a black woman reading Rankine’s Citizen at a Trump rally can go uninterrupted. That Jones expresses his intervention in the imperative, moreover, echoes Rankine’s own use of direct address in Citizen, which calls the ‘you’ of her address peremptorily into view, a ‘you’ that is already simultaneously individual and collective. Jones’s imperative requires a recognition of difference between the way his reader (the ‘you’ to whom the imperative is implicitly addressed) and Idusuyi are positioned, as Jones’s naming of specificities—who, what, when, where—emphasises how we are not all this woman, naming our responsibility in relation to her instead. Jones’s emphasis on the difference between this woman and his reader is not based on separation and opposition, an unspecified ‘we’ against a generalised ‘them,’ but emphasises the relation between ‘you’ and another self—your responsibility to fulfill what ‘you’ have been tasked with. ThroughoutCitizen, Rankine creates a similar relation between speaker and reader by refusing to appear as the univocal and authorial ‘I’ of her text, putting the ‘you’ of the reader in her place instead through her broadly sustained use of direct address. This use of ‘you’ destabilises the separation between the speaker and reader to show how the difference between the two can only be established relationally, placing the reader ‘in proximity to, adjacent to, alongside, within’ the text.4 Although Rankine uses direct address to foreground how this ‘you’ is implicated in the structure of racism in contemporary America, this destabilised and decentered lyric ‘I’ is not a uniquely modern invention, and appears as well in the poetry of an earlier American poet—Emily Dickinson. Rankine often cites Dickinson as a significant poetic influence—the first poem she learnt by heart was ‘Because I Could Not Stop for Death.’5 Her admission is surprising, since Dickinson’s lyric voice is radically different at first glance, favouring compressed, almost epigrammatic lines in comparison to Rankine’s more prosaic and direct work. Indeed, in marked contrast to Rankine’s sustained use of ‘you’ in Citizen, ‘I’ is the dominant pronoun in Dickinson’s work, appearing 1,682 times out of

4 Rankine, p. 24. 5 Paula Cocozza, ‘Poet Claudia Rankine: “The invisibility of black women is astounding”’, The Guardian, 29 June 2015, [accessed 23 November 2016]

78 fernanda lai around 2000 poems.6 However, despite this predominance of the ‘I,’ it was Dickinson’s express intention to appear as other than herself in her work. As she once pointedly reminded her future editor Thomas Higginson: ‘When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.’7 Given their different historical contexts and social positioning, it is perhaps surprising that both Rankine and Dickinson expressed a similar desire to distinguish themselves from the ‘I’ of their text, and sought a form of publication that resisted any identification of the ‘I’ with themselves, or what I term publication without a publicity of the self. These days, it is a commonly accepted belief in literary studies that the ‘I’ of the text should be interpreted as a construction, rather than the author’s direct representative.8 Nevertheless, the lyric remains rather resistant to the decoupling of the speaker from the lyric ‘I.’ As Viriginia Jackson and Yopie Prins conclude in The Lyric Theory Reader, what competing understandings of the lyric still have in common is ‘a general sense that the lyric is the genre of personal expression, a sense assumed whenever we talk about “the lyric I.”’9 The influence of New Criticism, which proposes to understand a poem as ‘a thing in itself,’ only served to solidify an understanding of the lyric ‘I’ as a historically specific poet transformed into a ‘historically indeterminate’ speaker, ‘[a] fictional person of all times and all places […] [which] could speak to no one in particular and thus to all of us.’10 In contrast, Dickinson’s and Rankine’s lyric ‘I’ refuses generality and universality, and requires us to attend to the specificity of the relationship between speaker and reader, showing how it is not only the speaker that is produced anew with each reading, but the reader as well. While I remain interested in the material dimensions of publication, I am more interested in how the poets I look at, Claudia Rankine and Emily Dickinson, each understand publication to be a space of representation between the ‘I’ of their speaker and the ‘you’ of the reader through their destabilisation of the lyric ‘I.’ Their questioning of what the ‘I’ can hold asks us to re-examine our assumptions around the relationship between speaker and reader by showing how the very boundaries of selfhood are pronominally and relationally constituted. Indeed, for Dickinson and Rankine, the lyric ‘I’ is neither a specific poet nor a universal speaker, but earned through a reflective process of relation in a publication without a publicity of the self, rather than a position taken for granted in the absence of relation.

6 S.P. Rosenbaum, A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 865. 7 Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, L268, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1986), pp. 409–410. 8 See Roland Barthes’s The Death of the Author (1967) and Michel Foucault’s What is an Author? (1967) 9 Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 2014), p. 2. 10 Jackson, p. 5.

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I.

Although Citizen is now widely acclaimed for its critical and thoughtful engagement with the banality of racism, it begins away from the streets in the privacy of ‘your’ room—in safety, in intimacy. We begin with ‘you’ trying to settle in bed, yet failing to make yourself at home:

When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor.11

This dramatic situation precedes a string of racist incidents and micro-aggressions recounted in the second person: a close friend calls you by the name of her black housekeeper when distracted and a stranger wonders why ‘you’ care that ‘he has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers.’12 Yet ‘you’ are not yet exposed and vulnerable, out in the open of public spaces, as Citizen keeps ‘you’ in the safety of privacy a while longer, ‘alone’ in an ‘empty’ house by yourself, or are ‘you’? Direct address calls the reader’s attention to his or her embedded presence in the text, showing how ‘you’ are never really alone, since reader and speaker always and immediately stand in relation to each other in the process of reading. ‘You’ are brought further into the text as the separation between interior and exterior; public and private, is increasingly destabilised through metaphor. Even as the narration physically moves outward from the ‘pillows’ and ‘blankets’ of the interior to the world ‘beyond the windows,’ metaphor ensures that we never really leave the room by turning the night sky back into the ‘low gray ceiling’ of the interior and the speaker’s interiority. We are eased into the relational logic of Citizen, which invites us to ‘fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor.’ The structure of metaphor is one of recursive movement. As the colloquial phrase ‘fall back into’ suggests, metaphor creates a temporal and spatial ambiguity that reconstructs experience and re-structures the narrative logic of this opening. The colloquial phrase ‘fall back into’ echoes the first image of ‘you’ settling into ‘your’ pillows, combining a physical return to comfort with a temporal return, as ‘you’ simultaneously ‘fall back into’ the comfort of ‘the past stacked among your pillows.’ The speaker’s recursive movement is paralleled by the narrative turn from the immediacy of the moment towards the indeterminacy of memory,

11 Rankine, p. 5. 12 Rankine, p. 24.

80 fernanda lai combining past action with the present moment—we move from an indexical ‘when’ to the unspecifiedqualifications fo routine, memory and habit—‘[u]sually,’ ‘sometimes’ and ‘depending on,’ as we ‘linger in a past.’ As we move out of the room towards the distant night sky, the distant becomes closer, more familiar, more ‘approachable’ through the recursive movement of metaphor, collapsing the difference between the original object and the object of comparison, the night sky and the grey ceiling, the past and the present. The movement of metaphor is not mere comparison, but, as its etymology suggests, a transfer from one object to the next which retroactively transforms both the original object and the object of comparison. Metaphor becomes a way of turning the text back on itself towards the ambiguity of experience, refuting the temporal direction of the narrative and any straightforward, linear interpretation. Nowhere is the reflexivity of metaphor more powerful than in the use of direct address, which is sustained throughout the first section ofCitizen and more generally throughout the book. Replacing the expected ‘I’ of the speaker with ‘you’ creates a doubled metaphor: ‘you’ are the speaker (and not the speaker), and also you (and not you). ‘I’ is shown to be an empty pronoun that can be replaced by the individuated ‘you’ of the speaker or the reader, or the plurality of anyone else, as in a community of readers. As the speaker later observes,‘[t]his makes the first person a symbol for something,’ an unfixed sign that does not refer to something in particular.13 Just as we substitute ‘one’ for ‘you’ in colloquial use to indicate a more direct appeal for understanding, the use of direct address reveals how ‘I,’ like ‘you,’ can contain both the unknown anyone and a specific someone. Citizen reminds us of our potential for de-specification throughout, substituting ‘you’ at turns for ‘someone,’ ‘we’, ‘I’, ‘no one’ and ‘nobody.’ Although direct address unmoors the lyric ‘I’ from its seeming reference to the poet, Rankine simultaneously emphasises that replaceability does not amount to equivalence. Even as metaphor allows you, the reader, to take the place of ‘you,’ such as in this moment of friction between two friends, the reflexivity of metaphor reveals how you and ‘you’ are never equivalent or equal:

A friend argues that Americans battle between the ‘historical self’ and the ‘self self.’ By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. What did you say?14

13 Rankine, p. 71. 14 Rankine, p. 11

81 publication without a publicity of the self

The passage does not designate the race of either interlocutor in the beginning, only requiring that ‘you’ must take the racial position opposite ‘your friend.’ Here, the history of race relations prevents any easy transposition of subject, even though the chiasmus of ‘her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self’ suggests that these ‘historical selves’ are transposable and constructed identities, making it possible for the ‘friend’ in the first line to be interpreted as either ‘white’ or ‘black.’ This creates a kind of metaphor where the ‘black self’ and the ‘white self’ seem similarly constructed. Yet the passage raises the possibility of equivalence only to deny true equality by setting up binary choices, reflecting the reality of race relations in the structure of the line. The proposed interchangeability of racial assignation is repeated in miniature by the chiastic phrasing of ‘face-to-face,’ evoking a moment of simultaneous intimacy and confrontation, until the moment—‘What did you say?’ For this moment of disruption to make sense, it must be the ‘black self’ speaking to ‘the white self,’ seeking recourse to perceived injury. With this last question, identities appear to be partially and momentarily settled on either side of the conflict. Yet the ambiguity of meaning returns as a polyphonic possibility of speakers emerges. These final words—‘What did you say?’ is most persuasively interpreted as an expression of outrage, the ‘black self’ rhetorically questioning the ‘white self,’ seeking recourse to verbal insult and injury. Yet we also hear the potential response of the ‘white self’ to the ‘black self,’ deflecting responsibility for the verbal offense just given. The specification of the ‘historical self’ and the ‘self self’ remains ambiguous: it could be ‘you’ speaking to your friend, and vice versa, or ‘a black self’ speaking to ‘a white self,’ and vice versa. Regardless of who is speaking to whom, the passage sets up a binary choice of oppositional relations, so that although the designation of the ‘historical self’ and ‘self self’ is left undetermined, ‘you,’ ‘your friend’ and your ‘historical selves’ remain set against each other. Direct address opens up the possibility of parallel experiences that stand face-to face, mirrored, intimate but oppositional. What did ‘you’ say? The foreclosure of the personal leaves this question unanswerable, since you, the reader, is not the ‘you’ of the text, and cannot know what was said or who the speaker of this question was. This shared moment is also a disruptive moment that reveals the distance between two friends, drawing a parallel between the experience of the reader and the speaker in a shared question that also calls attention to the difference between ‘you’ and you. ‘What did you say?’ is the ‘black self’ speaking to the ‘white self’ or vice versa, as well as the reader’s confused question. It is a rhetorical question that only the ‘you’ of the text can answer. In contrast, ‘you,’ as the reader, are seeking clarification that never comes, since the precipitating utterance has been elided by the easy sequential movement of ‘[t]hen.’ Although you were invited into the passage, you were not there and cannot know who said what. As Rankine later describes in Citizen, this realisation of difference only occurs when you try to step into the position of another: ‘Sometimes “I” is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. Then what

82 fernanda lai is comes apart the closer you are to it.’15 The use of direct address becomes both a potential invitation and reminder to the reader of the difference in relation: we may occupy the same pages, but not the same experience. Through her use of direct address in Citizen, Rankine challenges our contemporary understanding of race as a fixed determinant by unsettling our assumptions around the assignation of race, such as in the aforementioned passage. The otherness of the second-person also calls attention to the subject matter at hand. As Rankine remarks in an interview: ‘I also found it funny to think about blackness as the second person. That was just sort of funny. Not the first person, but the second person, the other person.’16 The black-and-white nature of print further underscores the parallel with contemporary race relations, where blackness remains the marked position set against the whiteness of the page, the othered position in relation to the default of whiteness in our understanding of the world. A quote from Zora Neale Hurston in Citizen resonates throughout—‘I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.’17 These racial differences only become apparent relationally, and are always already violently hierarchical. By transposing the reader onto the speaker through direct address, Rankine avoids any obvious conflation of herself with the speaker, which is particularly important for her as a poet of colour writing in contemporary America, since it allows her to resist interpretations of her work that attempt to read her solely in terms of race.18 As Rankine observes of her own practice, ‘In my own work, it’s not that I feel I need to say every ten minutes that I am a black woman who lives in America—but I am a black woman who lives in America.’19 ‘You’ cannot be read as representative of either Rankine specifically or of blackness generally,

15 Rankine, p. 71. 16 Meara Sharma,“Claudia Rankine: On Blackness as the Second Person,” GUERNICA, 17 November 2014, [accessed 1 December 2016] 17 Rankine, p. 42. 18 As Dorothy Wang has shown in Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), there is a ‘double standard in discussing the work of poets of color and those who are supposedly racially “unmarked’’ (Preface, XX). Works by poets of colour tend to be read autobiographically and reductively as “content-based,” while poetry by white poetry is seen as contributing to contributing to ‘“universal” questions of subjectivity and poetics’). Wang argues to read for content at the expense of form, or vice versa, does the poem a disservice, and I aim to follow her view with regard to the complex interplay of form and content in my reading of both Emily Dickinson and Claudia Rankine. 19 Claudine Rankine, Interview with Jennifer Felscher and Robert N. Caspar, Jubilat, 12 (2016), [accessed 19 November 2018]

83 publication without a publicity of the self showing how these incidents of racism register individually while representing a communal problem, drawing in the reader to implicate them in the structure of the problem. With her use of direct address, Rankine inherits and transforms the Dickinsonian project of a decentered and destablised lyric ‘I,’ and combats the tendency to view the racialised individual as a presupposed person by showing how race, like the roles of speaker and reader, is assigned and presumed, instead of predetermined.

II.

While the political stakes of a destabilised lyric ‘I’ are evident for Rankine, it is much less apparent why Dickinson pursued a similar publication without a publicity of the self. Indeed, at times, Dickinson appears to refuse publication altogether, and has often been reconstructed in her literary afterlife as a reclusive poet who shunned both society and publication, having declared ‘that [to publish] being foreign to my thought, as Firmament is to Fin.’20 Indeed, Dickinson published only ten poems in print during her lifetime, all of them anonymously and none at her own instigation, despite writing close to two thousand poems. However, Dickinson’s refusal of publication is more accurately described as a refusal of print. Critics such as Sharon Cameron and Susan Howe have convincingly argued that her fascicles, small hand-sewn booklets, crucially allowed Dickinson to retain her individuality through handwriting and markings, and so constituted a form of self-publication.21 Further evidence that Dickinson was not averse to circulation comes from her epistolary output, in which she circulated over a third of her poetry freely among friends, intimates and acquaintances, creating her own public in the same way ‘The Soul selects her own Society.’22 Moreover, the volume of Dickinson’s epistolary output—addressed to ninety-nine known correspondents and comprising 1049 extant letters and 124 prose fragments, constitutes more than sixty percent of her entire textual production—causing critics such as Marietta Messmer to argue that her letters should be considered an integral part of her

20 Emily Dickinson, Letters v.1, L265, pp. 408–409. 21 Susan Howe has described Dickinson’s manuscripts as having a ‘halo of wilderness’ (Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values’, Sulfur 28, Spring 1991, 136). See also Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 2007) and The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Wesleyan University Press, 1993). In a similar vein, Sharon Cameron’s Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles (University of Chicago Press, 1992) shows how fascicles, as a form of self-publication, allowed Dickinson to both choose and not choose textual variants, revealing an indeterminate intention that opens up infinite nuances of interpretations. 22 Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson v.1, ed. by R.W. Franklin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1998), FR 303, p. 434.

84 fernanda lai literary corpus.23 Dickinson preferred to keep her poetry close to her through a more intimate form of dissemination in her letters, suggesting that her refusal of publication was due to her concerns around how print publicises the ‘I’ that she wished to maintain as specific. The poem most often marshaled as evidence of Dickinson’s disavowal of publication is ‘Publication - is the Auction | Of the Mind of Man.’24 Many a reading of this poem has concluded that Dickinson’s distaste for publication stems from having to write for the demands of the market, based on the lines ‘Poverty-be justifying | For so Foul a Thing’ (3-4). However, the speaker’s concerns are not only economic in nature, but rest upon deeper-rooted anxieties around public representation, as shown by the turn towards increasingly figurative language in the second stanza:

Possibly - but We - would rather From Our Garret go White - unto the White Creator - Than invest - Our Snow – (5–8)

The line of thought from the first stanza spills over into the next, giving the appearance of a disrupted thought through enjambment, by adding yet another qualification—‘Possibly,’ which seems almost a stage direction for tonal adjustment. The uncertainty and ambiguity of ‘Possibly’ creates a turn that revises the propositions of the first stanza, suggesting that Povert‘ y’ might not justify ‘Publication’ after all, while also implying that the alternatives offered in stanza two are not mere revisions, but are different possibilities altogether. The ‘but We’ reverses the logic of the first stanza: instead of naming an exception to her belief that publication is ‘so Foul a Thing’ (4), the speaker revisits her original refusal, rewriting it as a more figurative choice between ‘go[ing] | White - unto the White Creator’ and ‘invest[ing]-Our Snow-.’ The necessary and reflexive shift in our understanding of ‘invest’ guides us away from an economic valuation of language. What the speaker phrases as a preference— ‘We- would Rather’ (4)—is not an actual choice, and as the pronoun ‘we’ shows, the speaker has already brought us along with her in her experience of language. An economic valuation of language, as in a literal understanding of ‘invest,’ flattens the possibility of meaning by conflating equivalency with equivalence. It is only through a figurative interpretation of ‘Snow’ that we come

23 Marietta Messmer, A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), p.4. 24 Emily Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, (Boston, Massachusetts: Robert Brothers, 1890), v. 2, FR 788, lines 5-8, p. 742.

85 publication without a publicity of the self to understand the meaning of these lines, performing what the line describes. We return ‘Snow’ unto its ‘White Creator,’ so that the value of ‘Snow’ is no longer limited to a natural phenomenon and is re-invested with the possibilities of figurative language, where ‘White Creator’ also recalls the potentiality of a blank page. Only semantic ‘Poverty’ could justify the ‘Auction / Of the Mind of Man’ (1-2). For although publication is similar to an auction in that they both deal in commodities, it remains fundamentally different as an auction values objects only in economic terms, while language always contains the possibility of multiple systems of figuration, returning ‘White-unto the White Creator’ (6). The valuation of language, as it impacts the relationship between writer and reader, is not the only relational structure at stake within the poem, since Dickinson indirectly invokes the problem of slavery through the word ‘Auction’ in the opening line. Some critics, such as Domhnall Mitchell, have castigated Dickinson for comparing her position as an upper-class white woman to the enslavement of a black person: […] the designation of color in the poem is a conscious choice […] Dickinson encourages us to see only the personal implications: she moves the frame of the debate from the public to the private sphere. In other words, the speaker draws on imagery that can be related to slavery, but instead, makes it refer to the self: rather than comment directly on social malpractice, she transfers sympathy to her own plight.25 However, while Dickinson does transfer the question of slavery onto the speaker, it is reflected on the reader and not onto herself, and the poem indirectly criticises the human auction block for its valuation of a human being through a critical appraisal of publication. Just as an economic valuation of language flattens meaning, a figurative devaluation, such as the law and principle that ‘the slave could only be known through his master’ in the slaveholding South denied slaves the right and the means of speaking for themselves, 26 like the way an economic valuation of language reduces the possibility of meaning inherent in language, and consequently, the freedom for the reader as a subject that determines meaning. Publication can flatten meaning by emphasising the ‘I’ of the poet and detracting from the embedded presence of the reader as an equal participant in the production of meaning. Through a destabilised use of pronouns in ‘I’m Nobody. Who are you?’27, Dickinson shows how publication necessarily entails a

25 Domhnall Mitchell, Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), p. 82. 26 William Lee Miller, Arguing about Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), p. 256. 27 Emily Dickinson. Poems v.1, FR 260, p. 279.

86 fernanda lai reader. She recreates the initial moment of textual encounter through the language of self-introduction, showing the relational possibility inherent in publicity. The speaker declares herself—‘I’m Nobody’ (1). The one who begins sets the terms of the game, taking control of an initial encounter through a refusal to name herself and make herself known. She turns the question back on the reader—‘Who are you? | Are you - Nobody - too?’ (1-2). Just like the use of direct address in Citizen, which sets up an equivalency between the ‘you’ and you to emphasise relationality, Dickinson uses direct address to construct a ‘you’ that is both the reader and not the reader. Although the opening question to the reader appears genuine, its rhetorical force is ambiguous, precisely because it functions as both invitation and confrontation. It seems flirtatious, self-deprecating, interrogative and aggressive at the same time. By inhabiting the posture of anonymity, the speaker refuses the reader any possibility of knowing who they are, underscoring how the speaker’s playful introduction is also a moment of violent performativity that always positions ‘you’ relationally. Moreover, the declarative ‘I’m Nobody’ invokes another cautionary tale around naming, underscoring the doubled potential for manipulation and self-protection—it is anonymity that allows Ulysses to escape from the island of Cyclops, when he tells Polyphemus that his name is ‘Nobody.’ Still, despite the difficulty of knowing who is ‘you,’ the speaker wants to know— ‘Who are you?’ (1). The poem answers its questions rhetorically: ‘Then there’s a pair of us! | Don’t tell! they’d advertise you — you know!’ (3-4). We are ushered again into an intimacy between two, but even as this injunction intensifies the warrant of secrecy, it eliminates this warranty by telling ‘you’—you and everyone else about the ‘pair of us.’ While the speaker simultaneously professes a fear of being ‘advertised,’ of being made public for economic reasons, it ironically stages the process of being made public, showing how publicity is the public secret of publication. ‘I had told you I did not print —’ Dickinson once wrote to Thomas Higginson, ‘I feared you might think me ostensible’28. ‘Ostensible’ means ‘able to be shown or exhibited; presentable,’ or ‘stated or appearing to be genuine, but not necessarily so.’ Being ostensible is the contradictory condition of appearing while appearing to be otherwise, which is how the ‘I’ for Dickinson appears in publication, ventriloquising the poet while being someone else. The position of anonymity may be a position of universality, yet through adopting this pose, Dickinson shows how the position of anonymity is never entirely true, as relations are established in the moment of address—‘you’ are not nobody, and neither am ‘I.’

28 Emily Dickinson, Letters v.2, L 316, p. 450.

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III.

While Rankine often focuses on the relational aspects of direct address, in ‘There’s a certain slant of light,’29 Dickinson shows how one’s relationship with oneself is also established relationally, and how this relation is also not a neutral process. From the very first line of the poem, the speaker’s diction underscores the difficulty of rendering one’s personal experience public, the contradictory use of ‘certain’ reflecting the paradox of articulating ‘a certain slant of light’ (1). While the speaker is certain in her conviction as to the particularity of this light, she remains simultaneously uncertain, since she cannot specify her description. ‘Certain’ acts as a placeholder for potential adjectives that elude her, presenting the light in an indeterminate yet specific way, because the speaker cannot describe the light’s specificity without describing the light itself. A‘slant’ can mean ‘a ray of light,’ a more architectural ‘slope’ or ‘a way of regarding something, a glance,’ so that to say ‘a certain slant of light’ is akin to saying a light of light, resulting in a circularity of description. Yet at the same time, this repetition partitions the difference in meaning between the particularity of the light from light itself. Just as the difference between ‘you’ and you can only be understood in relation to each other, the speaker’s ‘certain slant’ can only be understood in relation to her description of ‘light,’ being both a way of seeing and a particular kind of light. The speaker’s difficulty in describing the ‘certain slant’ also stems from her inability to return to the original moment, since the light she is describing is no longer present. While the poem alludes to the moment of creation itself—‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light’ (KJV Genesis 1:3)—the speaker lacks the certainty of the biblical declaration, as this is not divine creation, where the word brings forth light. The light that the speaker is describing is no longer there. The deictic ‘There’s’ shows how the speaker can only approach the light at a temporal and spatial distance; the light is not here, but there, and the contraction also compresses the temporal difference between ‘there is’ and ‘there was,’ just as ‘certain’ condensed multiple possible adjectives in one adjective. While the light seems to be a singular instance at the beginning of the poem, it increasingly unravels into a plurality refracted through time and memory, belonging to multiple ‘Winter Afternoons’ (2). This is not creation, but recreation predicated on absence, where the light is not a singular occurrence unique in and of itself, but becomes particularized only through its relation to the speaker. Brought into being, this light no longer behaves as an object, and ‘oppresses | Like the heft of Cathedral Tunes’ (3-4). While light traditionally connotes life, creation, or illumination, this light ‘oppresses,’ a turn in meaning partly pre- empted by the designation of this light as belonging to ‘Winter Afternoons’ (2), which connotes death, endings and darkness, inverting our usual associations

29 Emily Dickinson, Poems, FR320, p. 338.

88 fernanda lai with light. In addition, the synesthesia of the simile individuates this experience further, turning a visual image into an auditory one. Despite light and music being intangible objects, an additional sense of tactility is implied by the word ‘heft.’ In earlier publications of this poem, editors disastrously changed ‘heft’ to ‘weight,’ losing not only the provincialism of ‘heft,’ but also the implication of individual specification. Whereas weight is a scientific quantification and a common standard, the word ‘heft’ is a tactile estimate of mass, a measurement carried out through individual experience that demonstrates its particularity to the speaker. These sensory paradoxes are held in suspension by figurative associations that individuate the speaker’s experience of the light. The light is both what and how the speaker sees, resisting our usual physical and intellectual associations with light—what would it mean to hear and feel light? Through the distance between her description and the object, the speaker captures the specificity of experience by creating the light anew through language. Although the light is distant from the speaker, hard to describe and no longer present, the use of figurative language simultaneously establishes a new relation that collapses this distance— this recreated light ‘oppresses,’ which in its etymology and one of its definitions means pressed up against. While some critics have tried to explain the oppressiveness of the light through Dickinson’s agnostic relation with organised religion, this interpretation focuses on explaining the strangeness of the simile, interpreting the light through the ‘heft of the Cathedral Tunes’ (4), rather than how the subject of the stanza—‘a certain slant’—can be oppressive. Moreover, this interpretation fails to attend to the deeply conflicting significations and associations in the stanza—what ‘oppresses’ is neither heavy nor material, whether it be ‘light’ or ‘Tunes.’ In fact, what ‘oppresses’ is the ‘certain slant,’ the act of description instead of an object. While this poem’s opening may seem to be a deviation from more common openings in Dickinson’s poetry, which often begin with ‘I’ or a metaphoric definition, such as the aforementioned ‘I’m Nobody. Who are you?’ and ‘Publication - is the Auction | Of the Mind of Man,’ this poem actually combines the question of the self with the act of definition, where the light reflects how the speaker defines herself as she describes her ‘certain slant.’ This mutual definition of the light and speaker both ‘oppresses’ and is oppressive to the speaker, creating a ‘Heavenly hurt’ that ‘leaves no scar, | But internal difference — | Where the Meanings, are —’ (5-8). The lack of a scar suggests that the light is internally experienced, therefore leaving no physical mark, and is a psychological experience that Dickinson often describes in other poems, such as ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ and ‘I felt a Cleaving in my Mind.’ Moreover, the lack of a scar also suggests that the ‘hurt’ creates no boundary, just as the light and the speaker are combined yet separate entities that can only be understood in relation to each other, revealing the ‘Meanings’ in ‘internal difference’. The ‘certain slant’ of meaning is contained within the internal construction ‘certain’, replicating the paradoxical distance between the object and how the speaker perceives it, as well as the difference between how the speaker and the reader interpret the

89 publication without a publicity of the self light through the poem. This light oppresses,‘ ’ because it is both proximate but distant, like the contradiction of ‘Heavenly hurt’ (5), both within and without, as the speaker is unable to establish the boundaries of where she ends and her perception of light begins.

IV.

At a certain slant (mostly rhyme), Dickinson’s ‘light’ becomes Rankine’s ‘life’, reflecting a different meaning ofcertain ‘ ’ when Rankine cites Dickinson’s poem in an earlier work: ‘A certain type of life is plot-driven. A certain slant in life’.30 Rankine’s citation of Dickinson shows how, at a different angle, a ‘certain slant of light’ can seem like a ‘plot-driven life.’ As Rankine remarks in an interview, the word ‘plot’ is a ‘flexible’ and ‘rigid’ one, and may well refer to narrative plot as well as the ‘plot points of a grave’; it is a ‘word that allows you to live and die in it’.31 Instead of a site for potential description, as it was in Dickinson, ‘certain’ now refers to a predetermined limitation on what we can see, reflecting how the meaning of a word is dependent on its specific ‘slant’. The shift in perspective not only changes the meaning of ‘certain,’ but also what is seen; what frames an individual instance of light in Dickinson circumscribes our entire life in Rankine, when seen in a different light. In her allusion to Dickinson, Rankine also shows how the certain slant cannot be seen without an object of description—‘life’. While Dickinson attempts to show the internal division between her ‘certain slant’ and the ‘light’ through the use of figurative language, Rankine brings up the disquieting possibility that a ‘certain slant’ is already external to you, established from without by someone other than you. Just as a ‘certain type’ dictates how language is visually represented as typeface, to see this ‘certain slant’ is not just to see how we perceive an object, but requires us to go outside of ourselves and see the way in which our experience is structured. This sense of going outside of oneself is already present in the use of direct address, which suggests that the speaker is recounting their experience from a perspective other than their own, and requires you to consider yourself from another slant reflectively, marking your difference from a singular and plural ‘you’. These moments of self-externalisation are rarely voluntary in Citizen. Direct address frequently coincides with moments when the speaker is taken out of their own experience by another; it is as much demand as invitation, emphasising the violence latent in Dickinson’s question—‘I’m Nobody. Who are you?’ (FR 260). In Citizen, this reflective approach towards identification forces a sense of narrative instability and consequently destabilises the speaker’s sense of self, illuminating the power relations at play in the boundaries of identity:

30 Claudia Rankine, Plot (New York: Grove Press, 2001), p. 51. 31 Claudine Rankine, Interview [accessed 19 November 2018]

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In line at the drugstore it’s finally your turn, and then it’s not as he walks in front of you and puts his things on the counter. The cashier says, Sir, she was next. When he turns to you he is truly surprised.

Oh my God, I didn’t see you. You must be in a hurry, you offer. no, no, no, I really didn’t see you.32

Through the repetition of ‘I didn’t see you’ and ‘I really didn’t see you,’ the speaker shows how meaning changes with a different slant,‘ ’ underscored by the constant shifts in perspective throughout the passage. The narrative begins with the speaker’s sense of relief—it is ‘finally your turn’ in line, your turn to speak—but this is quickly negated, temporally and syntactically. It is ‘your turn, and then it’s not’. The use of direct address shows how the speaker has already been set outside of the situation, and ends with the perspective of the man who has cut in front of ‘you,’ who is ‘truly surprised’ by what has happened. We move from ‘your’ perspective of control over your experience, to the perspective of injury, where the event is something that happens to ‘you’. The contested perspective between ‘him’ and ‘you’ narrows to the level of the phrase. When he first says, ‘I didn’t see you,’ it is a conventional phrasing of a polite excuse, which is affirmed, accepted and mirrored by the speaker—‘You must be in a hurry.’ However the second repetition—‘no, no, no, I really didn’t see you’— shows the same phrase at a different slant. Moreover, these utterances are not of equal force, as this repetition reasserts and makes literal the man’s statement, which negates ‘your’ interpretation and presence—the man somehow literally didn’t see you. The passage ends at this point of difference, enacting the erasure the man’s words threatened and proving language’s own unique form of injury on a subject’s sense of presence. In this passage, ‘I didn’t see you there’ becomes hurtful when it acquires another meaning, which the passage underscores by placing the phrase in proximity to itself through repetition, showing how this adjustment of meaning entails a refusal of the speaker’s perspective and an erasure of ‘your’ presence. Through these moments of exchange, Rankine directs our attention to the unique injury that language inflicts on our sense of presence and on our ability to inhabit a moment. Later on in Citizen, Rankine cites Judith Butler, arguing that language can be ‘hurtful,’ because ‘[o]ur very being exposes us to the address of another […] We suffer from the condition of being addressable.’33 Butler explored this idea of injurious language earlier on in Excitable Speech: Politics of the Performative, demonstrating through juridical discussions of hate speech that language does not just represent violence, but can wield its own kind of violence on subject formation through interpellation. Drawing on Althusser’s account of

32 Rankine, p. 77. 33 Rankine, 49.

91 publication without a publicity of the self interpellation, which shows how subjects are constituted in the moment of address and recognition, Butler argues: ‘The subject need not always turn around in order to be constituted as a subject, and the discourse that inaugurates the subject need not take the form of a voice at all.’34 While she agrees with Althusser that interpellation constitutes us as linguistic subjects, she emphasises the potential for injury within the encounter, even when one does not turn around, since ‘[o] ne “exists” not only by virtue of being recognised, but, in a prior sense, by being recognisable.’35 Rankine alludes to this Althusserian notion of encounter in Citizen through the way that she interpellates her reader. Yet the moments of interpellation she stages are ones of simultaneous identification and disidentification, where ‘you’ is always both you and not you. By emphasizing the way in which ‘you’ are overlooked or not seen, Rankine also explores what becomes of our sense of presence at moments when we are rendered unrecognisable. Moments of injurious interpellation occur ordinarily and routinely in Citizen to the ‘you’ of the speaker and the reader, showing how language can wield a violence that is indistinguishable from our ability to understand ourselves as subjects. Judith Butler writes, ‘To be injured by speech is to suffer a loss of context, that is, not to know where you are. Indeed, it may be what is unanticipated about the injurious speech act is what constitutes its injury, the sense of putting its addressee out of control’.36 However, within this passage, the speaker combines both the immediacy of immersion and the construction of narrative to show how even when the man’s actions are anticipated, they remain hurtful when recounted. When the speaker says, ‘it’s finally your turn and then it’s not,’ the ‘and’ versus the alternative of ‘but’ registers no surprise, as though this moment of negation were expected. The contraction ‘it’s’ also allows the passage to remain temporally indeterminate, moving from present tense to the simple past imperceptibly—‘it is finally your turn and then it is | was not’—so that the moment of occurrence is unsurprising, as it has already happened in the moment it is described. While the passage takes on the man’s perspective, showing how he is ‘truly surprised’ that he overlooked ‘you’, the speaker foreshadows another perspective through narration, reflecting how the speaker is unsurprised at being overlooked. Neverthless, even as language can injure and register injury, language can also bring disparate interpretations together again. Although ‘you’ are only able to ‘offer’ your interpretation of events in the moment, ‘you’ are now able to narrate what happened, reflected in how the form of the passage allows the speaker to retain her ‘certain slant’ of the situation.

34 Judith Butler. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 31. 35 Butler, p. 5. 36 Butler, p. 4.

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Critic Marjorie Perloff praisesCitizen for these moments of open-endedness: saying that ‘Rankine is never didactic: she merely presents, her eye for the telling detail and the documentary image all allowing you to draw your own conclusions.’37 However, the effect of Rankine’s language is actually more complex. As Nick Laird writes, ‘Rankine’s series of anecdotes are geared to a purpose and theme: they are ethical formulations that are too honest and angry to be merely presentations; they’re intended as proofs.’ 38 It is not the infinitely open-ended text championed by the Language poets, which Lyn Hejinen defines as a text where ‘all the elements of the work are maximally excited,’ encouraging multiple readings and interpretations. Rankine is interested in multiple interpretations, but she is simultaneously interested in why some interpretations have more weight than others, why some meanings are the default while others are denied.39 The act of interpretation in Citizen becomes a weighing between multiple implied interpretive conclusions that are as impossible to conclusively choose as they are to ignore.40 While Dickinson operates at the level of the word, showing us the different slants compressed into words like certain‘ ’ and ‘oppresses,’ Rankine operates at the level of the phrase in Citizen, revealing everyday language at a different slants, thereby separating individual moments of meaning from what is publicly understood, and showing the heuristic obfuscation that is inherent in everyday language. We are not sure what was really meant by ‘I didn’t see you there,’ but we do know that it was hurtful for ‘you’. ‘What did you just say?’—is a constant verbal tag throughout Citizen and accrues meaning with each incident. Unlike its conventional usage, this phrase does not point to having missed, misheard or misunderstood what the other person has said. It expresses the desire to have misunderstood, while knowing that one has not, and asks for a revision of what has just been said—it asks the other person to reconsider the meaning of their words and for the reader to consider the same language at a different slant. Most, if not all, direct speech inCitizen is cited without quotation marks, blurring the boundaries between the original speaker and the speaker of Citizen, as well as between ‘you’ and you. We all ‘speak’ the quote. Unlike the anecdote, which relays moments belonging to individuals, the quotation, as reported speech, is an attempt to put things back together by showing the moments

37 Marjorie Perloff, cited from the back cover of the first edition ofCitizen. 38 Nick Laird. “A New Way of Writing about Race.” The New York Review of Books. 23rd April, 2015 39 Lyn Hejinian. “The Rejection of Closure”, Poetry Foundation, 13 October 2009, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69401/the-rejection-of-closure [accessed 3 February 2019] 40 Mary-Jean Chan makes a similar argument in Towards a Poetics of Trauma: Lyric Hybridity in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (Journal of American Studies, 52 (2018), I, p. 139) in which she argues that Citizen refashions the lyric in response to the tribulations of being a black citizen in contemporary America, influenced by the Language poets. While I agree with Chan that moments of open-endedness are crucial in Citizen, I contend that moments of denial are equally important for Rankine, foregrounding the question of why some interpretations are considered invalid.

93 publication without a publicity of the self where experiences converge, using language as a form of evidence. ‘I didn’t see you there’ is spoken by the man and ‘you’, yet registers as completely different to each speaker, performing the moment anew each time, never fully resolved in the fullness of its meaning. In these moments, Rankine shows how we are dependent on a language we never made, and that the meaning of language to an extent is already outside of us. However, while we are subject to this publicised language, it is also through our ability to use this language that we first become able to understand ourselves as subjects. Although the injurious use of language may be unanticipated in the moment, these moments of textual convergences reveal moments at which perspectives diverge, separating each speaker in the moment, and ‘you’ from you. Citizen shows how you can reconstitute yourself as a subject by establishing a new relationship to your experience through the use of language. Just as the speaker can identify her ‘certain slant’ by going outside of it, the reader is also given agency again in these moments to interpret, to choose to see a particular slant, to see the boundaries of difference between ‘you’ and you. Rankine reminds us: ‘You said “I” has so much power, it’s insane’.41 It is ‘insane’ that ‘I’ has so much power, but to say ‘I’ without a reflective awareness of one’s boundaries is also its own form of distorted reality. While Dickinson’s publication without a publicity of the self draws our attention to the ways in which identity formation in publication is ever present, and always violent and relational, Rankine shows how a version of that violence is enacted structurally and daily in the process of racialised subject formation outside of the lyric—it is always done to ‘you’. Publication without a publicity of the self redirects our attention to this process of subject formation and identification in publication, where the public and the private, the individual and the collective become imbricated. It is in reading that these questions are constantly unsettled and settled again. Citizen’s subtitle is fittingly—An American Lyric. With its expansive scope and almost prosaic poetry, it recalls another American poet who tried to sing of the relationship between country and self. A central concern of Citizen is the question of who gets to belong to America, who gets to count, who gets to show up at a rally and participate as a member of the public—perhaps a reader of Citizen? The subtitle reminds us that the lyric ‘I’ Rankine proposes is not just a formal innovation or a new way of understanding identity, but a political statement about how ‘you’ and ‘I’ should relate. Publication without a publicity of the self opens up a responsibility that is predicated on the relation between ‘I’ and ‘you’, maintaining a specificity and interdependency that situates you alongside ‘you’. In Precarious Life (2006), Judith Butler calls for ‘the de-centering of the first-person narrative… to consider the ways in which our lives are profoundly implicated in the lives of others.’42 Similarly, we are not all a black woman at a Trump rally reading Citizen, but we are set alongside her through a relationality that names our responsibility to her, just as saying ‘I’ necessarily means saying ‘you’.

41 Rankine, p. 130. 42 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso Books, 2006), p. 7.

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Bibliography

Brown, Kara, ‘We Are All This Woman Refusing to Put Down Her Book at a Trump Rally’, Jezebel, 10 November 2015, [accessed 17 October 2016] Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. (New York: Routledge, 1997). — Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence.(New York: Verso Books, 2006). Cocozza, Paula, ‘Poet Claudia Rankine: “The invisibility of black women is astounding”’, The Guardian, 29 June 2015, [accessed 23 November 2016] Dickinson, Emily, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1986). —Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. (Boston, Massachusetts: Robert Brothers, 1890). —The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1998). Domhnall, Mitchell, Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). Hejinian, Lyn. ‘The Rejection of Closure’, Poetry Foundation, 13 October 2009, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69401/the-rejection-of- closure [accessed 3 February 2019] Howe, Susan. ‘Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values’, Sulfur 28, Spring 1991, 136). Jackson, Virgina and Prins, Yopie. The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology. (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 2014). Laird, Nick, “A New Way of Writing about Race.” The New York Review of Books, 23 April 2015, [accessed 23rd November 2018] Messmer, Marietta, A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence. (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). Miller, William Lee, Arguing about Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). Mitchell, Domhnall, Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). Rankine, Claudia, Citizen: An American Lyric. (Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2014). —Interview with Jennifer Felscher and Robert N. Caspar, Jubilat,12 (2016), [accessed 19 November 2018]

95 publication without a publicity of the self

— Plot. (New York: Grove Press, 2001). Rosenbaum, S.P, A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1964). Sharma, Meara, ‘Claudia Rankine: On Blackness as the Second Person’, GUERNICA, 17 November 2014, [accessed 1 December 2016]

96 Double Vision, Split Gaze: Prison Writing and Metatheatre susan zhang maginn

n interrogation of theatrical representations of prison should in part consider the extent to which crime and punishment has consistently been conceived of in theatrical terms. Prison cells as configured by AJeremy Bentham’s Panopticon for instance, are presented by Michel Foucault as ‘many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualised and constantly visible.’1 Insofar as the Panopticon is an architectural reification of disciplinary surveillance, it is not however the generalizable mode by which the prison may be figured as operating within the arena of performance. Foucault’s seminal text Discipline and Punish charts the transition from public spectacle to private surveillance, that is, from the highly visible ‘ceremonies’ of execution, in which the populace were called upon as ‘spectators’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, towards an imposition of permanent visibility within the ‘total institution’ of the modern prison.2 Yet Foucault’s construction of punitive mechanisms in general as being embedded in theatrical codes does not explore actual theatrical representations of prison, and the complications that arise when the private experience of incarceration explodes onto the public domain of the stage – in other words, when that which has been traditionally excluded from view or omitted from social reality is suddenly made visible. This study therefore confronts the performance of prison in Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe (1982) and Athol Fugard’s The Island (1973), as two examples of prison plays. This engagement with metatheatricality highlights the extent to which the prison functions not only as a site of omission, but is further displayed as visual spectacle on stage. Catastrophe and The Island are metatheatrical in Lionel Abel’s originary sense: they are self-consciously ‘aware of their own theatricality.’3 We might further see theatre as the spatial configuration of the body’s presence as corporeal

1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 200. 2 Foucault, pp. 32–69; Erving Goffman, Asylums (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 11. 3 Lionel Abel, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), p. 60.

97 double vision, split gaze exhibition, as an object whose status is not only circumscribed but predicated upon being watched and hence ‘theatricality’ as the result of a visual dynamic between spectator and actor. Josette Féral affirms: ‘this active gaze constitutes the condition for the emergence of theatricality.’4 The metatheatrical enactment of a simultaneous doubling of vision and splitting of gaze opens up a nexus of viewership and visibility from which disciplinary carceral power is made manifest. In Catastrophe, Beckett confronts the performance of omission by presenting a rehearsal scene in which a Director and an Assistant manipulate and manoeuvre a single Protagonist on stage. Originally written in French and subsequently translated into English by the playwright, Catastrophe was not only dedicated to the then-imprisoned Czech playwright Václav Havel, but was moreover Beckett’s contribution to the International Association for the Defence of Artists’ night of solidarity for Havel at the 1982 Avignon Festival. The simplification and commercialisation in the West of Havel’s plays as dissident literature and of his political position as one of visible anti-Communism in an era of fraught Cold War politics has lent credence to the citation of Catastrophe as Beckett’s most overtly political play. Yet while Catastrophe is undeniably a direct response to Havel’s imprisonment and hence an explicit gesture of support for the freedom of (artistic) expression, the play’s political import remains highly contested. Emilie Morin traces various critical interpretations: ‘a solipsistic reflection upon the dispossessed body;’ ‘a rumination on the mechanics of theatrical spectacle;’ ‘an exposition of the tyranny practised by Soviet Communism;’ and ‘an examination of the enduring power of dissent in the face of oppression,’ to name a few.5 Building upon Morin’s account of the play’s complex considerations of the body, theatrical spectacle, and tyrannical oppression, this study argues that the circumstances of Catastrophe’s genesis call for greater attention to the function of the prison specifically in these explications. Thus, while Beckett was never a prisoner, locating the play broadly within the framework of ‘prison writing’ allows for a more nuanced exploration of aesthetic representations of prison. As part of this analysis and hence inextricable from the central tensions of penality, this study points to a metatheatrical reappraisal of the power dynamics that underpin representation in Catastrophe. Conversely, The Island, set explicitly in ‘a cell on Robben Island,’ is firmly situated within a wider tradition of South African prison drama.6 Shane Graham argues, ‘In the 1970s and 1980s, theatre in South Africa became an important and increasingly militant vehicle for engaging in the cultural struggle against

4 Josette Féral, “Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language”, SubStance, 31.2/3 (2002), 94–108, pp. 97–98. 5 Emilie Morin, Beckett’s Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 243. 6 Athol Fugard, ‘The Island’, in Township Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 195.

98 susan zhang maginn apartheid,’ adding that prison plays in particular function as ‘testimonial dramas, enacting and bearing witness to the collective impact that a sustained programme of violent repression has on entire communities.’7 While Graham recognises that tropes of the prison had undoubtedly permeated the South African theatrical imagination, his codification of apartheid prison plays as ‘testimonial’ deserves closer scrutiny. The Islandwas devised in improvisational workshops between the white director Athol Fugard, and his black co-dramatists – Xhosa actors of the Serpent Player theatre company – John Kani and Winston Ntshona.8 This collaborative playwriting process both rejects apartheid segregationist dictum in its interracial interactions and enacts a hybridised form of theatre that incorporates elements of African traditions of oral storytelling and ritual performance alongside its Western influences. While neither Fugard, Kani, nor Ntshona were ever imprisoned, the play draws from the first-hand account of prison experience on Robben Island by fellow Serpent Players actor Norman Ntshinga. Alluding to the traumatic compulsion to remember, repeat, and work through, Fugard recalls that immediately following his release from prison, Ntshinga ‘talked almost non-stop, acting out his hilarious-terrible stories about life on the Island.’9 The play thus enacts a self-consciously theatrical extension of prison ‘testimony’ by staging the prison as a site of omission. The Island is not merely a prison play, but a prison play within a prison play, and hence emphasizes the singularly theatrical dimension to incarceration. A metatheatrical engagement with The Island thus presents an alternate perspective on critical considerations of prison experience in South African drama, and allows for the exploration of new sites of transgression and resistance.

Catastrophe

From the outset, Catastrophe problematizes the theatrical production and consumption of a visual image. By linking the degradation of the Protagonist to the pleasure of audience consumption – ‘Terrific! He’ll have them on their feet,’ – Beckett presents the relation between the audience and the stage as mediated by a dialectics of desire. 10 This is further reinforced by the Protagonist’s silence –

7 Shane Graham, ‘Private Trauma, Public Drama: Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona’s The Island and Maponya’s ‘Gangsters’, English Studies In Africa, 48:1 (2005), 107–123, pp. 107–109. 8 Fugard will henceforth be referred to as the author of The Island but the reader should bear in mind that the play was co-devised between Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona. 9 Freud’s 1914 essay titled ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’ first coined this particular phrasing, but concept behind it now exists as one of the fundamental tenets of psychoanalytic psychotherapy; Athol Fugard, Notebooks: 1960–1977 (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1983), p.151. 10 Samuel Beckett, ‘Catastrophe’, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p. 461.

99 double vision, split gaze the omission of voice – which appears to be a gesture towards the imprisonment and censorship of dissident Czech playwright Václav Havel to whom the play is dedicated. By extension, the Protagonist’s silence also calls attention to the many political prisoners to whom no play is dedicated – those who remain culturally unspoken for and omitted from normative discourse. Yet Beckett undercuts the straightforward parallel that might be drawn by highlighting the fact that the Protagonist’s silence is performed whereas Havel’s is enforced:

A: [Timidly.] What about a little…a little…gag? D: For God’s sake! This craze for explicitation! Every i dotted to death! Little gag! For God’s sake! A: Sure he won’t utter? D: Not a squeak.11

The rejection of a ‘gag,’ the pre-eminent visual symbol of suppression, coupled with the Director’s confidence, ‘Not a squeak,’ signals that the Protagonist’s silence need not be enacted for it is already constitutive of his function as visual (rather than verbal) icon. Close scrutiny of this crucial exchange also illustrates that the fear is not that the Protagonist might speak, that is, verbally signify or import meaning, but as ‘utter’ and ‘squeak’ imply, that he might make any sound at all. Consequently, it is voicelessness rather than censorship that evokes the Protagonist’s abjection and produces the performing subject as visual spectacle. As Foucault explicates, ‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes”, it “represses”, it “censors”, it “abstracts”, it “masks”, it “conceals”. In fact, power produces; it produces reality’.12 It is the production of theatrical reality via Beckett’s self-referential construction of the Protagonist as aesthetic image that foregrounds the power dynamics of representation. It is no coincidence that heightened visibility via the exposure of the Protagonist’s flesh induces suffering – we are told twice ‘He’s shivering.’13 By situating the audience as willing participants in an economy of theatricalised violence, Beckett suggests that theatre, like prison, proceeds through spectacle. In fact, the main disciplinary strategy of the prison is also the foundation of theatrical representation: the gaze is produced as the locus of authority and the means by which power may be exerted. Consequently, Beckett points to the impossibility of transcending the carceral logic of representation, for the articulation of prison experience ultimately turns inwards towards a performance of theatricality itself.

11 Beckett, p. 459. 12 Foucault, p. 194. 13 Beckett, pp. 458–459.

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Twice when the Assistant moves to expose the Protagonist, the Director instructs her rather to ‘Say it,’ to remain within the hermeneutic circle of representation rather than unveil the real itself.14 In reproducing the performer as theatrical sign, Catastrophe emphasizes the corporeal presence of the Protagonist’s body on stage. In particular, Catastrophe stages the gradual exposure of flesh as the core manifestation of the Director’s power:

D: Could do with more nudity. […] Bare the neck. [A undoes top buttons, parts the flaps, steps back.] The legs. The shins. [A advances, rolls up to below knee one trouser-leg, steps back.] The other. [Same for the other leg, steps back.] Higher. The knees. A[ advances, rolls up to above knees both trouser-legs, steps back.]15

The public removal of the Protagonist’s clothing is a physical manifestation of the symbolic divestment of individual sovereignty and agency. More specifically, it is the material reality of the Protagonist’s physical body that generates the force of imprisonment in the play, as Beckett restores visibility to that which has been omitted from social discourse, namely punishment as the main instrument of penal repression. Though Foucault charts the transition towards a ‘non-corporal’ penitentiary system in the early nineteenth century, Catastrophe reminds us that ‘imprisonment has always involved a certain degree of physical pain,’ as the physical containment of the body in a prison cell or on stage already performs an act of violence: the Protagonist is ‘standing on a black block 18 inches high.’16 This emphasis on material presence paradoxically draws attention to the penal body ‘sous rature’ (under erasure) as presence is always on the verge of breakdown: the Protagonist’s hands are ‘Crippled’ due to ‘Fibrous degeneration.’17 Thus while the use of scientific discourse throughout the play (such as ‘chronometer’ and ‘cranium’) ostensibly serves to disguise and thereby legitimise the instruments of penal oppression, in fact it brings to light the functionalization of the prison- machine as a calculated gaze.18 The institutionalisation of observation splits the

14 Beckett, pp. 457–458. 15 Ibid., p. 460. 16 Foucault, p. 16; Beckett, p. 457. 17 More specifically, Jacques Derrida’s development of Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘sous rature’. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology explains: ‘Heidegger’s Being might point at an inarticulable presence. Derrida’s trace is the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience.’ Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. xvii; Beckett, p. 458. 18 Beckett, p. 458; Beckett, p. 459.

101 double vision, split gaze individual into his component parts: ‘feet’, ‘face’, ‘skull’, ‘hands’, ‘toes’, ‘neck’, ‘legs’, ‘shins’, ‘knees’.19 Power relations exhibited in Catastrophe are sustained not by brute force but through the speculum of theatre – for theatre enables precisely the hierarchized inspection and dissection of the displayed body. Beckett’s meta- commentary upon the production of theatrical signs engages with the primary disciplinary methods of the prison system, that is, the configuration of the corporeal body as an oppressive function of visibility.20 Metatheatre also enables Beckett to directly confront and thus subvert the power dynamics inherent in theatrical and carceral looking relations. By constructing the actors on stage as viewers of a spectacle, Beckett collapses the actor/spectator binary to foreground the problematic layers of mediated voyeurism. The first words of the play, ‘Like the look of him?’ are not only addressed to the spectating Director but also to the spectating audience, as we become aware that we are watching actors watch other actors.21 Immediately, metatheatre sets up a bifocal vision by which the audience’s gaze is split into two: the outer play of the Director and Assistant and the inner play of their observations – that is, the Protagonist’s body on display. Moreover, the audience’s view of the inner play compared to the outer actors’ view is in Homi K. Bhabha’s terms, ‘almost the same but not quite.’ 22 When the Director claims, ‘I’m sitting in the front row of the stalls and can’t see the toes,’ the fracturing of spectator gaze paradoxically induces a double vision by which two plays are being conceived of as simultaneously separate visual events and in dialogic tension.23 It is through this double vision that Catastrophe introduces the possibility of resistance, as Bhabha explicates: ‘Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which “appropriates” the Other as it visualises power.’24 As the connection between ‘double articulation’ and the visualisation of power makes clear, spectating spectatorship deconstructs specular and spectacular authority on stage, emphasising how the body (the ‘Other’) is framed by the ways in which it is seen. Our view of the Protagonist is not simply direct (from audience to stage) but also, as is the case when the Assistant claims, ‘He’s shivering,’ simultaneously refracted through the lens of the Director and Assistant on stage.25 One response to Slavoj Žižek’s assertion that ‘there is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with [violence],’ might be that ‘direct’ confrontation with violence is in some sense impossible: (re)presentations of violence are mediated through

19 Beckett, pp. 457–461. 20 For more on physical exposure and punishment, see: Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 21 Beckett, p. 457. 22 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004) p. 127. 23 Beckett, p. 459. 24 Bhabha, p. 122. 25 Beckett, pp. 458–459.

102 susan zhang maginn layers of spectatorship.26 The splitting and fragmentation of the individual’s subjectivity is thereby induced by a viewership that constantly multiplies, which is of course repeated and re-enacted by the audience: disciplinary carceral power thus manifests itself as an exercise in visibility. The virtual lacuna between theatre and prison opens up an ontological chasm wherein the limits of representing aestheticized violence are articulated precisely by staging the representation of representation. The performance of theatrical rehearsal enacts a shift from ‘mere’ simulation to meta-simulation, as Catastrophe negotiates the interplay between theatrical illusion and theatrical production. We are made acutely aware in the ‘Final touches to the last scene’ that the end product of performance is constructed from a series of power plays:

D: […] Why the plinth? A: To let the stalls see the feet. [Pause.] D: Why the hat? A: To help hide the face. [Pause.] D: Why the gown? A: To have him all black.27

As the anaphoric repetition of ‘Why’ accentuates, individual creative decisions in theatrical productions operate as signifiers to be decoded. Furthermore, the props and costumes chosen are all explicitly designed to produce or omit visibility: ‘see’, ‘hide’, ‘all black’. Beckett therefore suggests that theatricality is predicated upon the disciplinary mechanisms of exposure and concealment, particularly in regards to the performing body. The staging of rehearsal facilitates Beckett’s unveiling of the processes of production that constitute theatrical performance, processes that Beckett hints are inherently violent. When the Assistant asks of the Protagonist’s hands, ‘What if we were … were to … join them?’ her casual suggestion enacts a form of punitive discipline upon the Protagonist’s already abject body, forcing him into an unsustainable position of incredible pain.28 The audience thus witnesses in ‘real time’ the effects of minute alterations upon the body on stage, whereby the infliction of actual pain upon the actor’s living body produces a double vision of the performing subject as both semiotic enactment and material embodiment. Paradoxically then, metatheatre contains within itself a dialectical tension of self-referential theatricality and what Martin Puchner terms ‘anti- theatrical impulse.’29 Puchner’s formulation of anti-theatricalism revolves around

26 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), pp. 3–4. 27 Beckett, p. 457. 28 Ibid., p. 459. 29 Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 2.

103 double vision, split gaze the troubling presence of actual human actors on stage: ‘What seems particularly objectionable in the theatre is that it presents, displays, and exhibits not objects but humans.’30 Evidently however, this form of anti-theatricalism can no longer be seen as simple opposition to theatre, but must be seen as an integral part of metatheatre’s self-commentary, and in the case of Catastrophe, self-critique – for the staging of rehearsal reveals the arbitrary cruelty of theatrical design upon the Protagonist’s real abject body. The ‘Distant storm of applause’ at the end of the play crucially enacts a moment of profound rupturing, as the various levels of metatheatre collide.31 The play seamlessly transitions from rehearsal to performance, as the Protagonist faces a virtual audience, and from the fictional performance of rehearsal (a character playing an actor) to the actual performance of fiction (an actor playing a character playing an actor). The sound of the virtual audience’s applause inCatastrophe is therefore both associative and disassociative: our sympathetic identification with the virtual audience precipitates our ‘real’ applause, transforming the performed rehearsal into performance itself; simultaneously, because the virtual applause ‘falters, dies,’ we are conscious of the virtual audience’s unreality, which has, in the process of breaking down the fourth wall, transformed us into unreal spectators of an unreal performance.32 These shifting thresholds of liminality re-enact what Monika Fludernik calls ‘carceral topography’: the spatial containment of the prison cell in relation to imagined boundaries for transcendence such as walls, windows, or doors.33 The Director’s claim, ‘I’m sitting in the front row of the stalls,’ problematizes the basic act of distinguishing the boundaries of the stage.34 The transgression of split binaries such as inside/outside, actor/spectator, theatre/ reality in metatheatre thereby illustrates how the struggle with the fourth wall as an ontological barrier between stage and audience might metaphorically (re) present the spatial tensions of incarceration. Similarly, the reversal of the gaze as the final image of the play punctures the frames of representation so that the fourth wall, hitherto porous, overturns itself to present mirrored reflection. When ‘P raises his head, fixes the audience,’ the uni-directional control over the gaze from audience to stage is suddenly reversed.35 Not only does this reversal undermine the political power structures concealed in visuality, it also re-determines the position and hence identity of the observer and the observed. Klaas Tindemans avers, ‘the spectator accepts the structural divorce between himself and the stage – he even demands this divorce – as a condition for

30 Martin Puchner, “Modernism and Anti-theatricality: An Afterword.” Modern Drama, 44.3 (2001), 351–361, p. 358. 31 Beckett, p. 461. 32 Ibid., p. 461. 33 Monika Fludernik, “Carceral Topography: Spatiality, Liminality and Corporality in the Literary Prison”, Textual Practice, 13.1 (1999), 43–77, p. 46. 34 Beckett, p. 459. 35 Ibid., p. 461.

104 susan zhang maginn signification in the context of the artistic representation he witnesses.’36 In a single moment the audience must therefore conceive of themselves as both an audience watching a play and as one now being watched. The transition from observer to observed corresponds to a destabilisation of the spectator’s conception of selfhood as their control over agency and directionality has been stripped from them. Returning to Fludernik’s conception of carceral topography, we may note that the spatial containment metaphor functions not only upon a schema of inside/outside the prison cell, but also directionally: power is exerted from the external institution upon the internal subject. Reversing the direction of power and hence agency thereby explodes the spatial containment of the prison so that an unambiguous, totalising spectatorship of the stage performance becomes impossible. By stripping the audience of their invisibility and calling attention to the applause that ‘falters, dies,’ Catastrophe thereby indicts the audience’s participation in theatrical voyeurism.37 Indeed, the audience’s transformation in Catastrophe might be seen as paralleling that of Sartre’s voyeur who finds himself the object of the Other’s look. Sartre avers, ‘“Being-seen-by-the-Other” is the truth of “seeing-the-Other.”’38 The audience’s recognition of their own status as objects to be looked at engenders self-awareness hitherto unconscious of one’s own existence as lookers. The existential shame invoked by the faltering virtual applause that condemns one’s own real applause is thereby invoked by the metatheatrical ‘irruption of the self’.39 As Jim Hansen succinctly puts it, ‘I do not bear witness to P’s shame so much as P bears witness to mine.’40 Not only is the Protagonist’s pain a product of the Director’s domination, Beckett suggests in the Protagonist’s act of defiance that specular consumption affirms, sustains, and reproduces the spectacle of violence. Though Hansen dismisses the use of the word ‘resistance’ in relation to the Protagonist’s only voluntary act in the play, it explicitly subverts the totalising control of the Director who had unequivocally rejected even ‘a trace of face’ in the rehearsal.41 The Protagonist’s gaze then is not simply the reversal of spectacle but the rejection of spectacle itself: in the words of Jean-Luc Marion, the icon ‘tolerates no gaze’.42

36 Klaas Tindemans, “The Fourth Wall, or the Rift Between Citizen and Government: Another Attempt at a Conceptual Synthesis of Theatre and Politics”, in Robrecht Vanderbeeken, Christel Stalpaert, David Depestel and Boris Debackere, (eds), Bastard or Playmate? Adapting Theatre, Mutating Media and the Contemporary Performing Arts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 31–42, p. 38. 37 Beckett, p. 461. 38 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (London: Metheun, 1957), p. 257. 39 Sartre, p. 260. 40 Hansen, pp. 668–669. 41 Jim Hansen, “Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe and the Theatre of Pure Means”, in Matthew Hart and Jim Hansen, (eds), Contemporary Literature and the State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 660–682, p. 661; Beckett, p. 459. 42 Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford, CA: California University Press, 2002), p. 232.

105 double vision, split gaze

The Island

According to John Kani, The Island is about ‘a place we never talk about, no one can write about, the press cannot talk about, not even white South Africans, free as they are, can talk about […] That is Robben Island.’43 To articulate the culturally omitted and repressed is to threaten the maintenance of dichotomies such as speakable/unspeakable; indeed the very notion of a ‘prison play’ interrogates the facile invocation of an unrepresentable violence by exteriorising and making visible the dark psychic space of the prison, the ‘place we never talk about’. The opening sequence of ‘an image of back-breaking and grotesquely futile labour’ is above all an exercise in visual representation: the textual reader will note that it is specifically an ‘image’ of intense carceral suffering that is produced, whereas the theatre audience is similarly subjected to a ‘mime’ wherein ‘The only sounds are their grunts as they dig, the squeal of the wheelbarrows as they circle the cell, and the hum of Hodoshe, the green carrion fly.’44 Like in Catastrophe, the omission of speech foregrounds the dominance of visual culture whereby the performing subject becomes an ‘image’ to be produced and consumed, that is to say, a visual spectacle. More specifically, by positioning the prisoners’ body as the primary vehicle for signification,The Island gestures towards the hypervisibility of the imprisoned body as an object of knowledge in a carceral context. To some extent then this extended mime sequence, which in some performances lasts up to forty minutes, enacts a palpable embodiment of prison experience. 45 Alan Shelly argues that ‘by the understanding that this repetitive dumb show is the play […] they, the spectators, are on the island and witnessing these fruitless labours.’46 Of course, it must be stressed that the theatre audience are as ‘imprisoned’ as the actors playing the role of prisoners on stage, that is to say, the feelings of captivity generated by the confined space of the stage and the contents of the play are metaphorical.47 It is only in the context of endless theatrical re-enactment that ‘Their labour is interminable.’ 48 The Island self-reflexively calls attention to the modes of theatricality that underpin potential representations of the prison. Indeed, this framing of the play (which itself frames the inset play Antigone) by a Sisyphean

43 Russell Vandenbroucke, Truths the Hand Can Touch: The Theatre of Athol Fugard (Craighall: AD. Donker, 1986), p. 171. 44 Fugard, p. 195. 45 For instance Peter Brook’s 1999 staging of The Island at his Paris theatre, Bouffes du Nord. 46 Alan Shelley, Athol Fugard: His Plays, People and Politics (London: Oberon, 2009), p. 141. 47 For an interesting study on the metaphorical structures of theatricality, consider Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 48 Fugard, p. 195.

106 susan zhang maginn theatre of the absurd activates a metatheatrical double/split gaze whereby the performance of prison (the Sisyphean mime), the performance in prison (the play-within-the-play Antigone), and the performance of a performance in prison (The Island) are simultaneous but not identical theatrical events. Metatheatricality in The Island, most prominently manifested in the play- within-the-play, serves to heighten the inherent doubleness of theatre whereby the performing subject constitutes both actor and character, occupying a real and simulated time-space. When John ‘stuffs on the wig and false breasts and confronts Winston,’ he asserts, ‘behind all this rubbish is me, and you know it’s m e .’ 49 That an actor lies ‘behind’ the props and costumes designated as ‘false’ by extension splits the gaze into two and produces theatrical experience as a simulation of an illusion. The play calls attention to itselfas a play, and not a prison cell, when John counters Winston’s reluctance to play a woman with an ostensibly straightforward bifurcation of the real from representation: ‘this is Th e at re .’ 50 Paradoxically, the acknowledgement of the theatrical world of the play and of oneself as a performer shifts the realm of representation from the unreal to the real. The Island continually negotiates the interplay between theatricality and reality as co-creators John Kani and Winston Ntshona share their names with the characters they act. The intrusion of the real by name but not by experience – Kani and Ntshona were never imprisoned – suggests that the actors play not themselves but simulations of themselves. Hence the dismantling of an illusion- making apparatus, such as the wig and false breasts that constitute performed identity rather than John’s self-perceived essential identity (the ‘me’-ness he feels confident Winston will ‘know’), unveils the actor playing a character to be an actor playing an actor. Similarly, the double vision that John engenders with his claim that ‘Behind all this rubbish is me,’ is a key performance strategy for resistance in his penal context as it enables him to affirm a strong sense of self in spite of the ‘rubbish’ he wears. In fact, Caoimhe McAvinchey posits a direct link between a prisoner’s uniform and an actor’s costume: ‘the prisoner’s uniform […] became a costume which contributed to the reiteration of this identity and, through its shape, texture and pattern, contributed to the punishment of the offender.’51 We are not only told that John and Winston ‘wear the prison uniform of khaki shirt and short trousers,’ it is also figured as one of the many emasculating tactics of the prison that aim ‘to make me a “boy”’.52 As Foucault argues, one of the primary exertions of carceral power is the calculated manipulation of the body; uniform thereby subjects the prisoner to a state of ‘compulsory visibility’ that inscribes the individual as an object of knowledge and power.53 John’s refusal to internalise

49 Fugard, pp. 209–210. 50 Ibid., p. 208. 51 Caoimhe McAvinchey, Theatre & Prison (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 30. 52 Fugard, p. 195; p. 208. 53 Foucault, p. 187.

107 double vision, split gaze not merely prison uniform, but costume in general, as constitutive of his identity, thus produces the body as a site of potential resistance, capable of exerting its own forms of self-inscription. The centrality of performance in The Island vindicates the power of theatre and role-playing specifically as the locus for self-definition and representation. One of the crucial ways in which John and Winston resist the desubjectification of imprisonment is through mutually sustained performances of imaginary scenarios. We are told that the night before, Winston ‘took’ John to bioscope to watch ‘“Fastest Gun in the West,”’ and we witness John’s reciprocation in the form of a fictional phone call with friends back home.54 These simulations enable the pair to transcend the boundaries of the prison cell to the world outside and metaphorically leave the panoptic surveillance of Hodoshe and the penal system more generally. Consequently, imaginative role-play demands a level of realistic detail, as John makes explicit in his complaint of the film: ‘You were bullshitting me a bit, though. How the hell can Glenn Ford shoot backwards through his legs? I tried to work that one out on the beach.’55 These performances are not merely exercises in the imaginative faculties of the prisoners, or strictly entertainment – John continues his simulated phone call well beyond the point of ‘excitement and fun’ as Winston ‘crawls heavily to his bed and lies down’ – but rather they insist upon the importance of storytelling as an act of self-representation.56 The Island invests acting with a potential for resistance, both as a strategy for survival, and as a self-reflexive response to the imposition ofrole in the prison- prisoner power dynamic, which permeates interaction in the prison sphere. John reminds Winston, ‘When Hodoshe opens that door tomorrow say “Ja, Baas” the right way.’57 The prisoner’s subjectivity is thus omitted; it is rather informed by his relation to the prison guard, both in tone of voice which must be ‘the right way,’ and in codified diction: the Afrikaans word Baas‘ ’ meaning master or boss, contains within itself a deference to the white man’s pre-emptive superiority. While Fugard does explore the wider implications of role-playing as the general condition of apartheid society, The Island operates within a specific framework of theatrical performance whereby role-play and the ability to voice one’s self, in the specific context of the prison, is a profound manifestation of personal agency. John and Winston are not merely actors but become in the process of theatrical construction, active producers of meaning:

JOHN: [He pulls out three or four rusty nails from a secret pocket in his trousers. He holds them out to Winston.] Hey, there. WINSTON: What? JOHN: With the others.

54 Fugard, p. 204. 55 Ibid., p. 204. 56 Ibid., p. 206. 57 Ibid., p. 204.

108 susan zhang maginn

WINSTON: [taking the nails.] What’s this? JOHN: Necklace, man. With the others. WINSTON: Necklace? JOHN: Antigone’s necklace.58

The slippage of the signifier, that it isthree ‘ or four’ nails that are produced, coupled with Winston’s repeated incomprehension regarding the object of investigation, ‘What? […] What’s this? […] Necklace?’ hints towards a poststructuralist destabilisation of the signifier-signified relations that might unfold in the prison space.59 But more significantly, the ‘half-completed necklace made of nails and string’ demonstrates the resilience and creative imagination of the prisoners, as the basic prison artefact is transformed into a symbol of commitment towards the performance.60 Indeed, the inadequacy of such a makeshift costume imparts upon us the restrictive materiality of the prison, as well as the prisoners’ creative ability to overcome the site of omission. The play-within-the-play enables the rehearsal of alternate identities. Winston’s objection to playing Antigone, ‘I didn’t walk with those men and burn my bloody passbook in front of that police station, and have a magistrate send me here for life so that he can dress me up like a woman,’ is pregnant with dramatic irony, for the audience will note, in his defiance of the state, Winston’s situation parallels the character he initially refuses to play.61 It is no coincidence that Winston’s crime is in essence an omission of state assigned identity, for Fugard configures acting as a similar transgression of the formal codified structures of identity under apartheid. The articulation of theatre inThe Island thereby posits a splitting of identity-formation, not merely from one’s self as it takes on various roles, but fundamentally as an oppositional subject. As Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins postulate, ‘the splitting of the colonial subject’s self into several varied entities enables him/her to split from the general site of disempowerment.’62 The systematic fracturing of subjectivity enacted upon the prisoners by the state, that is, both the racialized legal infrastructure of apartheid and the repressive strictures of the penal system, is thereby (re)presented in metatheatrical doubling as an exertion of counter-discursive re-inscription. This is particularly evident in Fugard’s metatheatrical re-playing of Antigone in The Island. The incorporation of a classical European text in a South African antiapartheid play invites us to question the cultural hegemony of a Western Christian humanist tradition, as subtle reworkings assume a subversive dimension

58 Fugard, p. 198. 59 The idea that the prison space radically destabilises linguistic signifier-signified relations is an interesting one that the text supports, but ultimately lies beyond the scope of this study. 60 Fugard, p. 198. 61 Ibid., p. 211. 62 Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 231.

109 double vision, split gaze of ‘writing back’.63 John explains to Winston, ‘Between me and you, in this cell, we know she’s Not Guilty. But in the play she pleads Guilty.’64 The double-edged threat of mimicry is thus made visible in this split between the dominant hegemonic discourse of Antigone and the ‘hidden transcripts’ of prison resistance in The Island: ‘in this cell’ as John notes, reality is configured differently, in part because it ‘takes place “offstage,” beyond direct observation by powerholders.’65 Crucially, The Island gives us, but not Hodoshe, access to the ‘hidden transcript’ of prison- reality by staging the ‘offstage’ activity of preparing a theatrical production, that is to say, by staging that which has been hitherto omitted from view and thereby legitimate existence. Tompkins asserts, ‘Hodoshe sees only the end product, not how John and Winston use the Antigone fragment to resist apartheid.’66 Yet it should be noted that though we witness Winston’s reluctance to perform, the actualised performance in the fourth scene is as new to us as it is to Hodoshe. Moreover, Fugard is at pains to portray the Antigone fragment not merely as a means of resistance but as fundamental to the prisoners’ strategy of survival:

[Winston almost seems to bend under the weight of the life stretching ahead of him on the Island. For a few seconds he lives in silence with his reality, then slowly straightens up. He turns and looks at John. When he speaks again, it is the voice of a man who has come to terms with his fate, massively compassionate.]67

It is only when Winston faces the true reality of his abjection that he identifies with the fate of Antigone; at this point, despair is reconfigured as acceptance and he exclaims the Xhosa rallying cry, ‘Nyana we Sizwe!’ – ‘Son of the Land’.68 For Fugard then, to act in a theatrical sense forms the basis for political action. Winston’s renewed sense of commitment permeates the fabric of the play-within- the-play, as his South African prison reality merges with the text of the Greek tragedy. Winston-as-Antigone declares, ‘if I had let my mother’s son, a Son of the Land, lie there as food for the carrion fly, Hodoshe, my soul would never have known peace.’69 Fugard thus generates levels of intertextuality whereby Antigone’s exultation of brotherhood and denigration of Hodoshe constitutes a doubling of Winston’s and vice versa. Hence Winston’s performance of Antigone enacts not

63 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature (London: Routledge, 2002). 64 Fugard, p. 201. 65 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 5. 66 Joanne Tompkins, ‘Spectacular Resistance: Metatheatre in Post-Colonial Drama’, Modern Drama, 38.1 (1995), 42–51, p. 43. 67 Fugard, p. 221. 68 Ibid., p. 221. 69 Ibid., p. 226, emphasis added.

110 susan zhang maginn simulation but political self-expression. In his final act of defiance,Tearing ‘ off his wig and confronting the audience as Winston, not Antigone,’ Winston splits from his character and is consequently both acting and not-acting.70 The stripping off of the costume and the metatheatrical blurring of inner and outer play merges theatrical representation with the reality of prison, suggesting that the act of self- representation in performance entails a subversive or liberating impulse that might provide new sites of challenge to oppressive instruments of control over individual subjectivity. The play-within-the-play explodes the stable dichotomy between stage and audience such that invisible spectatorship becomes impossible. As the stage directions make explicit – ‘John comes forward and addresses the audience’ – the theatre audience performs the role of the absent stage audience.71 Consequently, Fugard draws the spectator into the realm of the play itself, as we become ‘Captain Prinsloo, Hodoshe, Warders, … and Gentleman!’ to whom the inner play is expressly addressed.72 The deliberate subversion of an audience’s ‘absorption’ in the play, predicated as it is upon the beholder’s nonexistence, is for Michael Fried an intrusion of ‘theatricality’.73 While Fried maps the opposition of absorption/ theatricality onto painting as a visual medium, it is nonetheless a useful mode for analysing the functionalization of the gaze in theatre; The Island not only exhibits a self-conscious awareness of viewership, in fact it demands the inclusion of the spectator. The use of direct address and the repetition of ‘you’ in John-as- Creon’s opening soliloquy of Antigone locates the theatre audience in a liminal space between spectator and actor, whereby the boundaries between play and reality are continually shifting. When John exclaims, ‘My good people, I am your servant,’ we become acutely conscious of the multiple layers of performance text whereby the line is said at once to the people of the unnamed ‘State’ of the inner play, to the absent stage audience, to Hodoshe as the metonymic presence of apartheid state oppression, and to the real theatre audience.74 John’s ironic assertion of his own servility establishes the relation between the stage and the audience as inextricably bound with issues of agency as spectatorship assumes a position of power over the acting ‘servant’. Graham therefore misses the point in his assertion that ‘The fact that the warders are never seen also forecloses any possibility that the audience might sympathise with the guards instead of the prisoners.’75 Rather, the omission of the warders in The Island forces the audience’s identification not merelywith but as the guards, and thereby implicates the gaze as the means by which John’s subjectivity as a prisoner and actor may be framed and defined. John’s claim that the play performed is ‘for your entertainment’ is

70 Fugard, p. 227. 71 Ibid., p. 223. 72 Ibid., p. 223. 73 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. 74 Fugard, p. 223. 75 Graham, p. 114.

111 double vision, split gaze deeply ironic.76 While it ostensibly gestures towards the audience’s voyeuristic desire for visual spectacle, in fact the contents of the inner play move beyond the pleasure principle of the theatrical to forge a theatre of potential resistance. John declares, ‘There’ll come a time when they’ll stop laughing, and that will be the time when our Antigone hits them with her words.’77 What is at stake here is not merely the power struggle between Antigone and Creon, or the oppression of John and Winston by the prison guards, but rather the refraction of apartheid’s authoritative looking relations via ‘words’, or more specifically, the staging of a play-within-a-play. Metatheatre in The Island is therefore the site and strategy of visual dislocation, whereby the continually multiplying layers of viewership facilitate the fracturing and hence subversion of a panoptic total gaze.

***

By engaging with questions of omitted, split, and doubled viewership, metatheatricality responds to one of the central mechanisms of the penal disciplinary apparatus: the exercise of gaze over the subject. This configuration of a self-other relation in the spectator/actor thus produces the body as a vehicle for specular identification. We must note then that to watch and to be watched is not neutral for the apparatus of the gaze is in itself an exercise of power. Whereas Beckett scrutinises in Catastrophe the theatrical production and consumption of the Protagonist’s body as a visual spectacle in order to problematize the relation between the audience and the stage and thereby deconstruct the dialectics of desire and agency in the production and reproduction of violence on stage, Fugard counters this paranoid vision of anti-theatricalism, whereby theatricality is necessarily an instrument of coercive power, by showcasing the subversive potential of performance and role-play in a penal context. The doubleness of theatre, as manifest by the inset play Antigone, fractures the spectating gaze and occasions a split between actor and character; in The Islandthis potential source of anxiety is transfigured into the site and strategy of resistance. The scope of this study, which includes plays about prison – that is, plays set in prison and plays contextually informed by prison, but not plays performed in prisons – specifically puts pressure on normatively sociological or autobiographical approaches to existing scholarship surrounding prison writing. A close examination of Catastrophe and The Island as two examples of prison plays highlights the extent to which theatre is not merely the metaphorical means by which prison might be conceived of, articulated, or represented, but is more fundamentally the juridical superstructure’s modus operandi in that there is a distinctly theatrical quality to the performance and enactment of punishment. In particular, an interrogation of the ideological hegemonic coordinates that

76 Fugard, p. 223. 77 Ibid., p. 209.

112 susan zhang maginn underpin theatricality and penality further suggests that the two operate within similar frameworks of visuality and visibility. It is therefore unsurprising that imprisonment, whether literal or metaphorical, emerges as a recurring trope in drama. Consequently, the self-reflexivity of metatheatre, which dismantles stable mimetic codes and enacts a (con)fusion of various levels of theatrical play, offers a pertinent prism through which the signification of carceral violence may be effected. The staging and performance of prison experience and the manifestation of carceral power in Catastrophe and The Island thus articulates the central paradox of prison writing: unless currently imprisoned, access to prison experience is mediated through representation. Ultimately then, we might construct the penitentiary as existing in cultural imagination as an eruption of the violent Real rather than in some ‘real reality’.

113 double vision, split gaze

Bibliography

Primary Texts Beckett, Samuel, ‘Catastrophe’, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), pp. 455-461. Fugard, Athol, ‘The Island’, in Township Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 193-227.

Secondary Texts Abel, Lionel, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963) Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature (London: Routledge, 2002) Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004) Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) Féral, Josette, “Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language”,SubStance , 31.2/3 (2002), 94-108 Fludernik, Monika, “Carceral Topography: Spatiality, Liminality and Corporality in the Literary Prison”, Textual Practice, 13.1 (1999), 43-77 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) Fried, Michael, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) Fugard, Athol, Notebooks: 1960-1977 (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1983) Gilbert, Helen and Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London: Routledge, 1996) Goffman, Erving,Asylums (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) Graham, Shane, “Private Trauma, Public Drama: Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona’s The Island and Maponya’s Gangsters”, English Studies In Africa, 48:1 (2005), 107- 123 Hansen, Jim, “Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe and the Theatre of Pure Means”, in Matthew Hart and Jim Hansen, (eds), Contemporary Literature and the State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 660-682 Marion, Jean-Luc, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford, CA: California University Press, 2002) Morin, Emilie Beckett’s Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) McAvinchey, Caoimhe, Theatre & Prison (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Puchner, Martin, “Modernism and Anti-theatricality: An Afterword”,Modern Drama, 44.3 (2001), 351-361 —, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002)

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Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (London: Metheun, 1957) Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) Shelley, Alan, Athol Fugard: His Plays, People and Politics (London: Oberon, 2009) Tindemans, Klaas, “The Fourth Wall, or the Rift Between Citizen and Government: Another Attempt at a Conceptual Synthesis of Theatre and Politics”, in Robrecht Vanderbeeken, Christel Stalpaert, David Depestel and Boris Debackere, (eds), Bastard or Playmate? Adapting Theatre, Mutating Media and the Contemporary Performing Arts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 31-42 Tompkins, Joanne, “Spectacular Resistance: Metatheatre in Post-Colonial Drama”, Modern Drama, 38.1 (1995), 42-51 Vandenbroucke, Russell, Truths the Hand Can Touch: The Theatre of Athol Fugard (Craighall: AD. Donker, 1986) Žižek, Slavoj, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008)

115 116 Reviews

Greta LaFleur, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) ISBN: 9781421426433 (Hardcover); 304 pages; $54.36

Greta LaFleur wrote The Natural History to improve how scholars have studied sexuality in the early modern period of the United States—from approximately the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. Experts of that period, she claims, have glossed over the way British North American colonists collapsed human sexuality into race: The history of sexuality, and queer studies more generally, has been roundly criticized for its persistent inattention to race; and the history of race, in turn, has not directed much of its energies toward the study of sexuality. In what follows, I bring those critical frameworks together.1 I should warn that LaFleur’s research materials, from as early as the sixteenth century, harbor racist ideologies; her work, however, deconstructs these ideas rather than revitalizes them. For example, she begins her book with a seventeenth- century travel narrative by William Davis to demonstrate how colonists imbricated race and sex. While fishing on an English ship, Davis records his observations of Algiers in Northern Africa: ‘Turks […] are altogether sodomites’.2 LaFleur follows up with the obvious question: ‘How can someone be a sodomite without engaging in sodomy?’3 There and throughout her work, LaFleur interrogates how colonists viewed sex as a symptom of, and inextricable to, race. To support her findings, she draws on seventeenth and eighteenth-century popular narratives. These works are not necessarily defined in The Natural Historyas texts that had wide readership in the colonies. Popular narratives, LaFleur delineates, are more accurately texts that circulated in print—as opposed to those that circulated in longhand. LaFleur focuses on four types of popular narratives: captivity narratives, execution narratives, cross-dressing narratives, and antivice narratives.4 True to their names, the first three subgenres tell the stories of British colonists who were captured and enslaved by pirates in the Atlantic, colonists executed for crimes such as murder or rape, or colonists revealed for dressing as the opposite sex. The last subgenre—antivice narratives—denoted moral writing by religious figures

1 Greta LaFleur, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), p. 7. 2 Ibid., p. 1. 3 Ibid., p. 1. 4 Ibid., p. 5.

117 reviews who wanted to ‘reform’ their communities.5 Although popular narratives include other types of print, these four are of particular concern to LaFleur because they explore the ‘sexual politics of racialization’.6 In other words—the way colonists depicted people who were not white, the acts they chose to criminalize, and the acts they chose to glorify, all contain information about the concept of sexuality during that time. LaFleur claims to contribute to the field of sexual history by suggesting a different way to categorize these four subgenres: separating those that draw on nature and those that do not. She calls the former group—those informed by natural history—emblematic of an ‘early race science’.7 By focusing only on traditional popular narrative genres, she suggests, sexual historians have not recognized how colonists believed the natural world could determine one’s identity. Narratives of natural history, in her view, drew on climate, geography, and floral metaphors to make sense of human sexuality and race. For example, in chapter four LaFleur writes how a U.S. colonial woman—Deborah Sampson— dressed as a man to fight in the American Revolutionary War. After suffering from a bullet wound and being discovered as a female, people called her ‘unsex’d’, ‘indigenous’, ‘miraculous’, ‘a new breed’, ‘natural’, and other labels. These floral descriptions are not mere semantics. LaFleur explains how they point to the colonial preoccupation with three environmental theories: humoral theory, climate theory, and stadial theory (or ‘four stage theory’). She considers a popular narrative to be about natural history if it included any of these three theories. The first two argue that one’s climate or environment could change one’s nature or essential identity. For example, the heat of the sun molded a person’s habits, ‘complexion’, desires, disposition, and religion. Instead of ‘complexion’ denoting skin and hair color, as it does in the twenty-first century, ‘complexion’ in the seventeenth century included more fundamental and ontological aspects of a person: their desires, vices, and spirituality. Stadial theory, LaFleur’s third category, claims that human societies develop through four stages: hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. This hierarchical idea allowed colonists to make apocryphal connections about cultures based on where those cultures resided and how they interacted with the world. I would emphasize that LaFleur reconstructs the colonial network of ideas between nature, race, and sex not to revitalize those ideas, but to show the racist logic underwritten in colonists calling Sampson ‘indigenous’ or Williams calling a nation of people ‘sodomites’. Her work illustrates how these ideas about identity began to structure colonial societies; in chapter one, for example, she delineates

5 LaFleur., p. 187. 6 Ibid., p. 5. 7 Ibid., p.22.

118 reviews how environmental theory enabled colonists to conceptualize the human body as porous and malleable. Here she quotes J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, 1782:

Men are like plants. The goodness and flavor of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow. We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit, the government we obey, the system of religion we profess, and the nature of our employment.8

LaFleur’s citation here and throughout The Natural History shows how colonists viewed human identity, including sexual behavior and race, as tied not only to the natural world, but also to government, religion, habit, and other constructed aspects of one’s surroundings. From the colonist’s perspective, these identity categories were interrelated and could be pinpointed on a map. As a result, any person who held different religious, political, or cultural ideals could be seen as the ‘other’. I would suggest that LaFleur’s unveiling of these ideologies also reveals how concepts of sex, as Foucault argues in his oeuvre, have historically served as a mechanism of power. By recognizing how the ‘[natural] sciences of racialization provide[s] an optic through which sexual behavior can be newly seen and anatomized’, LaFleur provides a unique argument about the early workings of race theory.9 It seems intentional that LaFleur’s chapters move chronologically toward the present, concluding with a chapter about the vice districts in nineteenth-century Boston called ‘Negro Hill’. The implicit timeline of her work enables her audience to draw connections between early modern racial, sexual ideologies and present- day urban realities. For example:

Both blackness and sexual behavior acquired a spatial dimension with the development of urban public health infrastructure in the early nineteenth century, in the years just before sexual behavior became a discrete object of scientific study and was captured and organized into sexology, the immediate precursor to the emergence of modern sexuality.10

She goes on to explain in chapter five how the spatial aspects of vice enabled city planners to make ideological connections. The Boston City Council, for example,

8 LaFleur, p. 32. 9 Ibid., p. 6. 10 Ibid., p. 9.

119 reviews argued that ‘vice, crime, and poverty’ were ‘inseparable’, having a ‘propensity for one vicious trait’ meant having a bent for others, and ‘poverty was the result of indolence, sensuality, and vice’.11 Such associations developed into a biopolitical mode of thinking, clustering miscegenation, prostitution, and disease into one part of the city, which enabled ‘policing and terrorizing’,12 as well as zoning to keep those city districts separate.13 Even if these colonial ideas are outdated, LaFleur’s audience will finish the book disturbed about their residual effects in modern-day America—particularly in the chapter about racial politics in Boston. Despite its implicit political bent, The Natural Historywill intrigue scholars in a range of disciplines connected to history, literature, sex, and race.

luke doughty

11 LaFleur, p. 171. 12 Ibid., p. 172. 13 Ibid., p. 215.

120 Review Essay Is Bad Logic Bad Logic?

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Daniel Wright , Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) ISBN: 9781421425177, 219 pages; £40.50

n November 1847, two British mathematicians published books that redefined the discipline named in their titles. The works, Formal Logic by Augustus De Morgan and The Mathematical Analysis of Logicby George Boole, both aimed Ito systematize what is often called ‘Aristotelian’ logic: a deductive method that adopts premises, then tests which conclusions necessarily follow. By beginning to pare away the language involved in deduction and moving towards mathematical formulation, De Morgan and Boole would later be canonized as the vanguards of ‘symbolic’ logic. But neither work was an initial success. De Morgan’s theory was deemed too piecemeal, without a coherent synthesis, while Boole’s lacked sufficient justification. He proposed, for instance, that a proof for ordinary algebra simply required checking the commutative (AB = BA) and distributive (A[B+C] = AB+AC) laws. It would, eventually, require a great deal more. Victorian readers were more concerned, however, with a book that had been published a few weeks earlier: Jane Eyre. Today, Charlotte Brontë’s novel is celebrated for its first-person narration that anticipates the modernist stylings of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, prescient critique of female gender roles, and dark romance between the eponymous protagonist and the brooding Mr. Rochester. On its release, however, it was deemed ‘a very narrow representation of human life’ by The Spectator,‘revolting and improbable’ by the North British Review, and ‘an anti-Christian composition’ by the Quarterly Review.1 Jane Eyre’s blasphemy was of a scale and type far beyond a logician’s unfinished proof-work; its October scandal, presumably, had little to do with the November one of De Morgan and Boole. Not so, according to Bad Logic, in which Daniel Wright proposes that erotic language, in both Jane Eyre and the broader tradition of Victorian realist novel, is very much caught up in the transition from deductive to symbolic logic. To get a flavour of his argument, you’d best skip the book jacket, which is unfortunately

1 Anon., ‘Jane Eyre’ The Spectator, 6 November 1847, pp. 1074-5; James Lorimer, ‘Noteworthy Novels’ North British Review 11 (August 1849), pp. 475–93; Elizabeth Rigby, ‘Vanity Fair—and Jane Eyre’ Quarterly Review 84.167 (December 1848), pp. 153–185.

121 review essay blatantly misleading. It cites Jane’s line, ‘Reader, I married him’, then intimates that her union with Mr. Rochester might be an irrational choice ‘after all he’s put her through’. Next it states that Bad Logic will analyse ‘forms of reasoning that seem fuzzy, opaque, difficult, or simply “‘bad”’. The marketing strategy sets up two false expectations: that ‘reasoning’ will refer to a character’s actions and that some of that reasoning behind those actions is simply bad. Luckily, Wright lays out a crystalline method in the first pages of the introduction, so one need not proceed far from the jacket to grasp the actual, and subtler, project of the book. First, he locates ‘logic’ not in action but in language, not in the fallible decisions characters make regarding potential spouses or romantic trysts but rather in the formulations they use to reflect on desire. Second, he does not present ‘bad’ as a general deficiency, a catch-all for terms like ‘fuzzy, opaque, difficult’. Instead, he draws on theories from twentieth-century thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy to isolate four precise species of ‘bad logic’: contradiction, tautology, vagueness, and generality. The four chapters pair each type with a canonical Victorian novelist: contradiction with Charlotte Brontë, tautology with Antony Trollope, vagueness with George Eliot, and generality with Henry James. What brings the cases together is the type of situations in which ‘bad logic’ arises. ‘The longing to give desire the rational form of logical language’, Wright proposes, ‘is most acute in situations where desire presses upon us as an ethical consideration or where we’re called upon to make our erotic impulses intelligible to others or to ourselves’.2 ‘Bad logic’ intervenes, in these novels, not because desire is inducing irrational behaviour, but because, as both a moral and a romantic phenomenon, it is usually hard to express. The problem of enunciation is perennial, but Wright argues that it collides in the Victorian period with the shifting definition of ‘logic’ signalled by De Morgan and Boole. Realist novels, he claims, engage in both symbolic logic’s promise – ‘a commitment to the form-giving magic’ – and its threat – ‘a trepidation at how those forms might bind us to a particular idea of clarity’.3 If desire resists being put into words, the thinking goes, then a logically-perfect language presents itself as a panacea. Yet stringent mechanisation also risks eliding all that makes desire desire in the first place – its evasive, erotic, and affective dimensions. That double-bind can exist on multiple scales, in the language of one person as well as that of a social group. George Orwell would bring out the latter in his 1946 ‘Politics and the English Language’. The essay bemoans the decline of English, bloated as it is with vacuous expression, euphemism, and dead metaphor. But it also warns against systematization, which might cause political conformity and the loss of individual expression. Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 played out the

2 Daniel Wright, Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), p. 12. 3 Wright, p. 3.

122 colton valentine disastrous consequences of systematization through the totalitarian language ‘Newspeak’. This state-controlled dialect pares down the options for elocution under the guise of efficiency, but by restricting the mode of expression it ends up also restricting thought. As Orwell explains in his appendix to the novel, ‘free will’ is supressed through subtly redefining the word ‘free’. Whereas in ‘Oldspeak’ it could refer to the speaker’s own will, in ‘Newspeak’ it can only be applied to situations that are non-present, like ‘The dog is free from lice’. This is the most extreme, political outcome of what Wright calls ‘a particular idea of clarity.’ The Victorian realists of Bad Logic, however, negotiate this concern in a fashion more personal than political. Rather than invent fictive societies ruled by logical language, they place logic in the everyday language of desire – and they make it ‘bad’: contradictory, tautological, vague, and general. The argument’s crux is the difference between a logician writing ‘A is A’ on whiteboard, a male-protagonist informing his spouse ‘A wife is a wife,’ and a drag queen singing ‘I am what I am’. All three are tautologies, but the second two express a localised state of affairs; they make claims on identity, and they exert power. A line that might be simply ‘bad logic’ in the discipline of philosophy has narrative effects once it has been embedded in speech. Bad Logic is at its best when it stays closest to that speech, such as in the one- line close readings that commence each chapter. Take that of chapter one: From Catherine’s briefest pronouncement in Wuthering Heights – ‘Nelly, I am Heathcliff’ – Wright builds a compelling case that contradiction serves to articulate desire.4 Clearly, equating oneself with another person is a contradiction. If we turn ‘I am Heathcliff’ into symbolic logic, setting I to A and Heathcliff to B, we have: ‘A is B’ but ‘B is not A’ and thus ‘A is not A’. The second two steps might seem superfluous, but they are essential because ‘A is B’ is quite often a valid proposition. German logician Gottlob Frege gives the classic example in his 1892 Über Sinn und Bedeutung: ‘The morning star is the evening star’, in which both terms refer to Venus.5 Unlike Venus, however, Catherine experiences desire. So she has the sensation of no longer being Catherine, her thoughts and feelings becoming so intertwined with Heathcliff that A starts looking less like A and more like B. Contradiction, by this thinking, is endemic to romantic experience. If the self never extended beyond the self, if A were only ever A, there would be no desire at all, only solipsism. ‘Bad logic’ enters, then, as the perfect linguistic tool for Catherine to voice such an ineffable, paradoxical sentiment: ‘The contradiction in this case becomes a resource rather than an obstacle for meaning’.6

4 Wright, p. 33. 5 Gottlob Frege, ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, Zeitschrift für Phiosophie und philosophische Kritik 100 (1892) [Accessed 10 February 2019], pp. 25–50. 6 Wright, p. 34.

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This is all good bad logic. But the case grows weaker if we start testing it in terms of causality and chronology. Like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights was published in late 1847, yet they were both written in the preceding years and thus not directly informed by De Morgan and Boole’s books. The status of ‘logic’ seems to have shifted from Wright’s introduction to his close-readings.It is no longer a field of contestation among Victorian mathematicians and philosophers that informed the era’s novelists. Instead, it is a retrospective interpretive method – a set of categories borrowed from De Morgan and Boole, but more directly from Wittgenstein, being mobilized to parse how peculiar speech acts function in narrative. This is an entirely valid scholarly approach, what we might call strategic anachronism, but Wright avoids openly declaring such a method. Instead, he straddles the two approaches, one more historical that posits nineteenth-century networks of influence, the second more theoretical that mobilizes concepts freely across epochs. One effect is that the chapters proceed by making a set of parallel points – a close-reading, then a historical gloss of the ‘bad logic’ in question, then further close-reading – which end up positing, without ever stating, a high level of author intentionality. We are left with the sense that these novelists knew about the debates on deductive and symbolic logic and that they actively played with the theories in their works. Yet only with the Eliot case study are some of the linkages spelled out. The introduction notes that a review of Boole’s The Laws of Thought was published in the Westminster Review on Eliot’s oversight and that her subsequent essay ‘The Natural History of German Life’ waxes on similar concerns with universal language.7 But soon after, the argument through parallelism returns, as Wright adds that the treatment of language as a Morse Code in Trollope’s Autobiography ‘aligns with Eliot’s desire’.8 When we come to the Trollope chapter, the terms of interest have been firmly de-historicised; the passages in Can You Forgive Her? become a way to ‘see what is at stake, then, in the triangulated relationship between tautology, sexuality, and moral accountability’.9 Tracing more lines of influence would have strengthened these arguments. Instead of citing Henry James’s relationship with Charles Peirce, for instance. Wright could have called on Gregory Phipps’s recent study Henry James and the Philosophy of Literary Pragmatism. Unfortunately, the writer for whom this lineage would have been easiest to trace is, by virtue of genre, excluded from the book: Lewis Carroll. A Mathematical Lecturer at Oxford’s Christ Church, Carroll – né Charles Dodgson – was directly immersed in the debates amongst thinkers like De Morgan and Boole. His 1886 The Game of Logic represented propositions and inferences on a board game structure and included counters so readers could test their hands at solving syllogisms.

7 Wright, p. 27. 8 Wright, p. 33. 9 Wright, p. 81.

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Unsurprisingly, it was not quite the crowd-pleaser of Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass,in which Carroll had more subtly woven parodies of logic into his nonsense games. But he remained unfazed and kept trying to popularize the discipline: when sales were lacklustre for his 1897 treatise Symbolic Logic, he asked the editor to enlarge the font on the word ‘Elementary’ printed on the cover. Carroll makes a brief appearance in Wright’s introduction, but only as a counterpoint to the corpus of interest: realist novels. He cites scholar Andrea Henderson’s argument that symbolic logic in Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno is a ‘recompense’ for moral relativism, then proposes, instead, that the ‘bad logic of the realist novel often seeks to recover something of the referential meaningfulness of form itself’.10 What is lost here is not just a fertile case study on the relationship between symbolic logic and Carroll’s writing – for that we have Gillian Beer’s recent book Alice in Space – but rather a chance to discuss the dark ethical side of bad logic. This absence hits home when Wright turns to the chapter ‘Bourne Along by the Tide’ in Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss. In this passage, the virtuous but ever- tempted Maggie Tulliver finds herself once more coaxed by Stephen Guest. The two are sailing on the Floss’s ethereal currents, a space beyond social constraint, indeed beyond verbal specificity: ‘they spoke no word; for what could words have been but an inlet to thought? And thought did not belong to that enchanted haze in which they were enveloped’.11 But, as Wright perceptively notes, Guest does turn to words, not as an inlet to open thought, but as a way to turn the environs’ vagueness into seduction strategy: ‘See how the tide is carrying us out – away from all those unnatural bonds that we have been trying to make faster round us – and trying in vain’.12 Almost identical imagery appears in the closing poem to Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. ‘A boat beneath a sunny sky’ wafts through an a-temporal dreamscape:

Ever drifting down the stream Lingering in the golden gleam- Life, what is it but a dream?13

But for all its blithe indistinctness, Carroll’s poem has a perturbingly factual origin. The letters ‘E-L-L’ that begin those three lines are the end of an acrostic spelling out the name of Alice Liddell, the questionably-aged object of Carroll’s photography. The poem commemorates a real-life afternoon they spent on the

10 Wright, p. 26. 11 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss [1860] (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), p. 430. 12 Eliot, p. 431. 13 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass[1865, 1871] (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 241.

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Thames when Alice was ten, along with her two sisters (ages eight and thirteen) and Carroll’s friend Robinson Duckworth. The exact nature of their relationship remains murky, Carroll’s diary entries from the years of their contact having mysteriously disappeared. But there is no question that a voyeuristic grown man sailing with under-aged children beyond the usual forms of social contact is, for the modern reader, ethically suspect. Be it toyed with or intentionally wielded, the use of ‘vagueness’ by an adult toward a child can become an instrument of moral obfuscation. The fact that ‘A boat beneath a sunny sky’ itself glided so smoothly into the literary canon only confirms its disquieting power. Critically engaging with Carroll would have allowed Wright to tackle bad logic’s serious ethical perils – perils that are one thing with a character like Stephen Guest, but quite another with a flesh-and-blood author. Yet this is a tumble down the rabbit hole Bad Logic explicitly avoids. Wright repeatedly and usefully lays out his antagonists, and the most opposed are those who pathologise desire. ‘Bad logic,’ he insists, is not the logic of Freudian psychoanalysis in which a contradictory speech act might signal repression.14 Nor is it the Foucauldian ‘Logic of Sex,’ defined here as a rationalised and mechanised approach to desire.15 Nor is it a smattering of more recent logics – from the ‘negativity’ noted in Douglas Mao and Rebeca Walkowitz’s introduction to Bad Modernisms and Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings to the ‘failure’ in Kent Puckett’s Bad Form.16 (Wright’s summaries can tend toward the cursory.) Indeed, ‘bad logic’ in the Victorian novel is explicitly not bad from an ethical point of view. It is bad like a counterfeit penny or decaying piece of fruit (his metaphors) because it can be exchanged and manipulated to give voice to desire. Wright does signal certain threats in those manipulations, such as Stephen’s, but he repeatedly drives home an ethically redemptive thesis: that, tautolophobes be damned, ‘A is A’ empowers the drag queen to declare ‘I am what I am’. This is a worthwhile project, and it sits well with today’s scholarly sensibilities – our cold feet with what Paul Ricœur called the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, our warming to surface reading.17 But a commitment to redemption risks underplaying cases when ‘bad logic’ has coercive undertones, like the case of Carroll, or, more simply, when the novelists themselves adopt subtler positions. In the Eliot chapter, for instance, Wright presents metaphor as her ‘solution’ to navigating vagueness – which seems hard to square with Eliot’s own sceptical remarks on the device’s drawbacks. Take the stunning apostrophe in The Mill on the Floss: O Aristotle! if you had had the advantage of being “the freshest modern” instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical

14 Wright, pp. 15-17. 15 Wright, p. 29. 16 Wright, pp. 10–11. 17 Paul Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation [1965], trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 32.

126 colton valentine speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor, – that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else?18 Eliot’s narrator lands here somewhere between wholesale rejection and embrace of metaphor; it is a device deserving both ‘praise’ and ‘lamentation’. That she casts lamentation as ‘modern’ and praise as ‘ancient’ might seem to position the Victorians, if anything, more firmly on the side of the critic. On the other hand, the sceptical apostrophe was itself prompted by several intermingled metaphors, and those iconic, reflective conclusions to the Eliot chapter also tend to employ the device:

These were the mental conditions on which Mrs Tulliver had undertaken to act persuasively, and had failed: a fact which may receive some illustration from the remark of a great philosopher, that fly-fishers fail in preparing their bait so as to make it alluring in the right quarter, for want of a due acquaintance with the subjectivity of fishes.19

In a sense, these equivocations on metaphor cohere perfectly with Wright’s more general diagnosis on symbolic logic, the comingled ‘commitment to the form- giving magic’ and ‘trepidation at how those forms might bind us to a particular idea of clarity.’ But in the Eliot study, he downplays ‘trepidation’ to focus only on ‘magic,’ and we lose the book’s subtler point: literary texts can embody and voice multiple perspectives in tension. That penchant for rigidity comes through most notably in the harsh chapter partitions. For while the one-author-per-one-logic structure is a blessing in this murky conceptual territory, it can end up eliding key passages, particularly those that show how often these four ‘bad logics’ overlap. Take, for instance, the discussion of tautology in Trollope’s novel Can You Forgive Her?. Turning to the chapter ‘Diamonds are Diamonds’, Wright plays out another case in which A is not just A. When Alice spurns the gems, Lady Glencora responds with not one but two tautologies: ‘Diamonds are diamonds, and garnets are garnets; and I am not so romantic but that I know the difference’ – which Wright considers a way to ‘concretise the finality of Alice’s marital decision and to prevent the continued wavering of her desire’.20 Usefully extending the corpus of analysis, he summons the image of Jane Eyre rebuffing Rochester’s jewels. Here, the phrase ‘Jewels for Jane Eyre’ evinces her anxiety at the precise reduction we see befalling Alice in Trollope’s novel. Since ‘for’ can signify both ownership and substitution, the Brontëian contradiction becomes a strategy to reject tautological entrapment.

18 Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 131. 19 Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 236. 20 Wright, p. 86.

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Why, we must wonder, was the opening chapter of Eliot’s Middlemarch, perhaps the most celebrated lapidary scene in the Victorian canon, left absent? In this passage, protagonist Dorothea meets the first test to her moral character as she and Celia partition the family jewels. After first decrying the vanity of taking a single glinting heirloom, Dorothea falters. For though she is tempted by a ring and a bracelet, she feels beholden to her moral imperative and remains unsure how to proceed. Celia is confident that she will ‘renounce the ornaments, as in consistency she ought to do,’ expecting a firmness of character.21 But she misses the mark. Dorothea seizes those two jewels, then rapidly sends the remainder away. ‘I cannot tell to what level I may sink’, she adds, and Celia repeats ‘to herself that Dorothea was inconsistent: either she should have taken her full share of the jewels, or, after what she had said, she should have renounced them altogether’.22 By all accounts, the passage seems made for Wright’s conceptual framework. It uses the terms of logical boundaries and rules to clarify identity and, if not erotic, at least material desire. But the passage also evades his chapter-structure. Dorothea’s concern over the lapidary slippery-slope, her fear that taking two jewels would lead her to ‘sink’, is closer to the concern with ‘vagueness’ that Wright pairs with Eliot in chapter three. Celia’s obsession with ‘consistency’ and the ‘inconsistent’, however, would belong in chapter one’s study of Brontëian contradiction. Indeed, the closer we look at these novelists, even at Wright’s lifted phrases, the more they seem to belong to multiple chapters. In chapter four, the porous relation between James’s character Nanda Brookenham and ‘everything, literally everything, in London’ is classed as generality, but it’s hard to distinguish the effect from the Eliot-vagueness discussed just before: ‘the sense that all is interconnected, that no true lines can be drawn, and that no valid taxonomies exist’.23 Might assigning one bad logic per novelist deprive both the logics and the novelists of some of their complexity? What makes Bad Logic at turns brilliant and frustrating is that so many of the discussed passages turn on articulations, in the speech of both narrator and character, that vocalize more ambiguity than the study’s structure permits. Take the epigram plucked from Isabel Archer in James’s The Portrait of a Lady, ‘I’m on the side of both. I guess I’m a little on the side of everything’.24 Wright classifies the line as a case ‘generality’ that shows Isabel erroneously surpassing the limits of modern set theory, in a ‘fantasy’ that both ‘sustains’ and ‘threatens to debilitate her as well’.25 Certainly, the line contributes to our portrait of a wishful-thinking

21 George Eliot, Middlemarch [1871] (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 14. 22 Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 14. 23 Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 137. 24 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady [1880–1] (Mineola: Dover, 2006), p. 126. 25 Wright, pp. 156–157.

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Isabel, but, placed back in context, that portrait turns on a detail more overtly political, followed as it is by the lines: ‘In a revolution—after it was well begun—I think I should be a high, proud loyalist. One sympathises more with them, and they’ve a chance to behave so exquisitely. I mean so picturesquely’.26 Though Wright observes that Isabel is responding to Mr Touchett having asked if she lands on the side of the ‘old’ or the ‘new’, he elides the actual referents of those terms. Far from a colloquial rephrasing of the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, they pertain, in James’s novel, to the very particular threat of political revolution. Mr Touchett has just noted he came to England because he thought it was a ‘safe country’ to which Isabel exclaims ‘Oh, I do hope they’ll make a revolution […] I should delight in seeing a revolution’.27 The full force of her naïveté emerges when we recall how as a child she responded to the Civil War with ‘passionate excitement, in which she felt herself at times (to her own extreme confusion) stirred indiscriminately by the valour of either army’.28 One of the key contributions in Wright’s book is to place ethical concerns back into the issues of romantic enunciation – noting for instance that Isabel’s thoughts are similarly general whether they pertain to ‘ethics or politics or erotic desire’ – so more precise scrutiny of the exact ethics and politics in question would have strengthened the project. A nod to Adrian Poole’s take on social power in Henry James, New Readings or the contributions to the volume Henry James in Context would have filled out this ‘side’, touched only cursorily by Wright, which the Jamesian novel is quite robustly ‘on’. Of course, to gloss over a ‘side’ or two is the nature of any scholarly work, and the gaps in Wright’s account are generally benign. Yet there is one place in which the desire to make texts conform to his conceptual categories strikes a worrying note. It comes early in the introduction, when as a transition into his discussion on queer theory, Wright begins: ‘That both Wilde and James, the objects of my readings so far, were gay men…’.29 I must admit, I considered shutting the book. To find James’s complex sexuality reduced to ‘gay’ in a prefatory, dependent clause is alarming, given the rich debate it has spawned from Richard Ellmann to Eve Sedgwick to Hugh Steven, more recently in Michèle Mendelssohn’s Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Aesthetic Culture and this year in Michael Anesko’s Henry James and Queer Filiation. What is odd is that in the James chapter, Wright does brush on some of these sources – writing for instance: ‘Michèle Mendelssohn […] has recently called into question the myth of James’s internalized homophobia by calling into question the equally

26 Henry James, p. 68. 27 Henry James, p. 68. 28 Henry James, p. 39. 29 Wright, p. 9.

129 review essay persistent myth of his homophobic rejection of Oscar Wilde and aestheticism’.30 But then he reverts in the afterword with another of those sentence-starting clauses: ‘Henry James, a gay novelist whose fiction has felt so closeted to so many readers’.31 Such phrases seem a remarkable oversight in a study concerned with how our simplest statements, the linking of a seemingly self-evident adjective to a name, exert narrative and identitarian power. Unlike the book jacket, these lines cannot be blamed on a publisher. In 1903, two years after the reign of Queen Victoria came to a close, another publishing coincidence took place: James gave us The Ambassadors,and Bertrand Russell offeredThe Principles of Mathematics. Russell’s book introduced his eponymous paradox and furthered Boole’s thesis that logic could be defined in mathematical terms, a position that would culminate in the magisterial Principia Mathematica he would co-write with Alfred Whitehead. James, meanwhile, was deep in his ‘late-phase’ and awash in convoluted elocutions. His sentences had started wandering so prodigiously far from their pronouns that they elicited this response from his brother, the famed philosopher and psychologist William: ‘You can’t skip a word if you are to get the effect, and 19 out of 20 worthy readers grow intolerant. The method seems perverse: “Say itout , for God’s sake,” they cry, “and have done with it”’.32 Is there a link between the bad logic of James’s perverse method and that of Russell’s paradox? Perhaps. But if so it might best be made by embracing strategic anachronism, not by making a historical claim, and it probably has little to do with James being a ‘gay novelist.’ Labels like these wield ‘bad logic’ toward the end of reduction, not liberation. They refuse to let writers be, like Isabel Archer, ‘a little on the side of everything’ – and say all too quickly: ‘A is A; you are what you are’.

30 Wright, p. 154. 31 Wright, p. 178. 32 William James, The Letters of William James vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Outlook Verlag, 2018), p. 191.

130 colton valentine

Bibliography

Anesko, Michael, Henry James and Queer Filiation: Hardened Bachelors of the Edwardian Era (London: Palgrave, 2018). Anon., ‘Jane Eyre’ The Spectator (November 6, 1847). Beer, Gillian, Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass [1865, 1871] (New York: Penguin, 1998). Eliot, George, Middlemarch [1871] (New York: Penguin, 1994). — The Mill on the Floss[1860] (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008). Frege, Gottlob, Über Sinn und Bedeutung, Zeitschrift für Phiosophie und philosophische Kritik 100 (1892) < http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/ book/show/frege_sinn_1892 > [Accessed 10 February 2019]. James, Henry, The Portrait of a Lady [1880-1] (Mineola: Dover, 2006). James, William, The Letters of William Jamesvol. 2 (Frankfurt: Outlook Verlag, 2018). Lorimer, James, ‘Noteworthy Novels’ North British Review 11 (August 1849). Mao, Douglas & Rebecca Walkowitz, Bad Modernisms (Durham: Durham University Press, 2006). McWhirter, David, ed., Henry James in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010). Mendelssohn, Michèle, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Aesthetic Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007). Ngai, Sianne, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Orwell, George, Politics and the English Language [1946] (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006). — 1984. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949). Phipps, Gregory, Henry James and the Philosophy of Literary Pragmatism (London: Palgrave, 2016). Poole, Adrian, Henry James New Readings (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). Ricœur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation [1965], trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Rigby, Elizabeth, ‘Vanity Fair—and Jane Eyre’ Quarterly Review 84.167 (December 1848), pp. 153–185. Wright, Daniel, Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2018).

131 132 Special Feature A Little Gay History – Professor Richard B. Parkinson sophie barber

Little Gay History is a relatively small volume by Professor Richard B. Parkinson. Its front cover informs us that the pages within contain an account of ‘desire and diversity across the world’, a cultural tour of how Alove and lust are expressed. Emerging from a series of earlier projects, the book was published by the British Museum in 2013 as a short history which accounted for often-overlooked expressions of desire, utilising artefacts from around the world. An exhibit at the British Museum soon followed, and eventually came to the Ashmolean here in Oxford, where people could see the items they read about up close. ‘No Offence’ commemorates the 50th Anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act, which finally decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men in England and Wales (although this didn’t extend to the armed forces, or to women). The exhibit left Oxford on the 2nd December 2018 to tour other cities across England, but before it departed I had the opportunity to take a look round, accompanied by the man responsible for A Little Gay History. Professor Richard Bruce Parkinson works on Egyptology at the Queen’s College in Oxford. His interests lie mainly in Ancient Egyptian poetry of the classic age (1940-1640 BC), focusing on issues of performance practice, cultural power, and sexuality in Ancient Egyptian culture. He is delighted to tell me about a particularly amusing chat-up line translated from hieroglyphics, the first recorded of its kind, between two male Egyptian Gods. It’s the Ancient Egyptian equivalent of telling someone they have a nice bum, only far raunchier. Professor Parkinson explains that it has often been excised from history, or altered to be palatable to its audience’s cultural expectations of sex and love. The exhibit, then, aims to recover some of the lost narratives of queer history that have been buried by the implementation of heteronormative desire.

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One of the first things I ask Professor Parkinson is what his favourite piece in the collection is. He immediately takes me to a display case in the middle of the room which contains a tapestry displaying bright red appliqué beadwork in the shape of a looped red ribbon, the symbol which now represents AIDS awareness campaigns. The tapestry, produced by Native American artist Christopher Gomora as part of the Native American AIDS Project in San Francisco, was modified for its exhibition in the British Museum. It is a reminder that what is often considered a modern phenomenon is inextricably linked with the past, and it is easy to see why the bravery it represents makes it one of Professor Parkinson’s favourites. Completed in 2002, it originally featured the names of those who lost their battle with HIV, but its remake for this exhibition removes those names at the request of their families. This is an omission by choice, a symbol of the lives and stories lost to such a devastating disease. Their absence is made more poignant when one remembers the many other stories of the LGBTQ community, ones that have been excised by a society that often fails to represent diverse narratives. The history of the LGBTQ community is filled with gaps, spaces where missing stories and missing individuals could shed some light on the multifarious ways love and desire manifest themselves. Love seems always at the mercy of societal pressures; it is culturally defined and therefore represents the predominant sexual ideology of the time. I ask Professor Parkinson what he thinks is responsible for our changed relationship to sexuality: his simple answer is Christianity. He explains that propagation of the Christian faith meant an adherence to its doctrines on love and sex, explicitly condemning anything outside of one man and one woman in their marital bed. The expansion of the British Empire and its missionary work around the world helped cement these narrow relationship parameters. But Professor Parkinson also notes that it started much earlier than this, when the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great accepted Christianity through the Edict of Milan (313 AD). Ten years later, it was the official religion of the Roman Empire. A normative sexuality prescribed by Christianity began to form, and after the Greeks, the representation of same sex desire in a positive light started to disappear. Love stories were ostensibly concerned with heteronormative relationships. In the opening pages of his book Professor Parkinson partially attributes this to socioeconomic factors; when ‘types of sexual relations can go against the concerns for property and breeding that underlie the social norms in many (if not all) cultures’, those cultures seek to suppress them.1 Homosexual relationships did not procure property or produce children, and so appear largely absent to us when we look back at societies past. These relationships still existed, but were forced into hiding, only visible to those who knew where to look.

1 Richard B. Parkinson, A Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity Across the World (London: The British Museum Press, 2013), p. 11.

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It wasn’t always this way. Professor Parkinson shows me to one of the most explicit pieces in the collection, that dates back to the Roman Empire. The Warren Cup (Palestine, c. AD 10) is a silver drinking cup decorated in relief with two sets of male lovers having sex. Male affairs were common in Rome; the society was patriarchal and older men would often take a younger lover. This was never a sign of ‘gayness’, in our modern sense of the word, but a perfectly normal symbol of power and status. Once Christianity became widespread there was a decrease in representations of sexual diversity, because it privileged normative male/female relationships over all others. The Warren Cup caused controversy with many collectors and curators; it was often left out of collections because of its overt homosexuality. In fact, it wasn’t until the late 20th century that it began to emerge into certain museum exhibitions. The omission from collections of Roman history and art reveals a dedication to the concealment of sexualities which did not fit with the dominant conservative ideology. Such artefacts vanish from history for a time, and we lose a bright thread of the story by denying its existence. When asked about what we must rely on to uncover such stories, Professor Parkinson tells me a lot of it comes down to luck. People discover something in their domestic space and are kind enough to donate to museums, but this can rely heavily on chance. He also points out that the further back you go the harder it becomes to find objects that tell a story. Many people simply don’t have access to ancient heirlooms or old family artwork, which means exhibits run the risk of presenting only an elite version of Queer history. Women are often excluded too, and glimpses of women can be shaped by men. Take, for example, the terracotta lamp from Turkey, first century AD. Two women are seen engaging in an intimate sex act, but we have no way of knowing anything surrounding their story, or if it was even real. Professor Parkinson tells me it matters who is producing the art and who is viewing it. Is this a product for male titillation, crafted by men and so shaped to service their lust? Or is it a snapshot of authentic love between females, created as an expression of personal desire? The truth remains elusive. These figures are representations, and without knowing their story we cannot confidently know they were lesbians. So, we come to another omission – that of the everyday lesbian relationship. Gay women are even harder to find in history, and those who are potentially present are again from the elite classes. Consider how Katherine Phillips, the seventeenth century poetess, praises female relationships with a fervour that is more than platonic. Professor Parkinson shows me the ceramic figurines fashioned by Augusta Kaiser, who worked with her life partner Hedwig Marquardt creating small, delicate sculptures in twentieth century Germany. The figures are abstract female bodies, hinting at female desire in their nakedness, but not so explicit that they become pornographic. All three of these women hint at same-sex love, but their lesbianism is never confirmed; the ambiguity of their art was a necessary condition of a repressive society. Educated,

135 a little gay history upper-class ladies were afforded more opportunities for cautious self-expression, which makes one wonder at the infinite stories lost to lack of education and untapped artistic potential. What great loves would have been expressed if more people could write, paint, or sculpt? Each of these examples represents an anthropological account, a case study of an individual story. Each love is unique, and Professor Parkinson advises us to resist the urge to generalise history; we can spot trends, but relationships are unique. In trying to recover a Queer history we often create an overarching narrative of the past and this, he warns, can lead us to lose nuance. Even the contemporary audiences of some of these artefacts could not be certain about what they represented; the necessity for concealment requires double meanings. This is why it can be so difficult to write an artefact’s history with any degree of accuracy, particularly some of the older pieces. Professor Parkinson points to a small, unassuming stone object mounted on the wall: The Ain Sakhri figures of Palestine, c. 9000 BC. Relatively worn and harder to recognize, they are said to represent a couple embracing or making love. They come from the ancient Natufian culture, and specialists consider it a representation of sexuality and fertility. Professor Parkinson dedicates a page of his book to the couple, noting that they are ‘extremely phallic, suggesting that it might be concerned wholly with masculinity.’2 Does this now change our perspective of the relationship depicted? How do we know this is a heterosexual relationship? Could they not just as easily be two men? There is no way to say for sure, and it is this vagueness that makes for such exciting possibilities. The ambiguity of the past leaves room for many different narratives to unfold. History has the potential to be far queerer than we expect, and omission of so much LGBTQ+ history leaves vast gaps to be explored. Artefacts can only tell us so much: Professor Parkinson reminds us that love is an emotional response that cannot be fixed to a painting or a sculpture. Such objects record moments and by removing the blinkers of strict heteronormativity we unlock their potential stories.

2 Parkinson, p. 34.

136 Special Feature The Art of Omission in Theatrical Practice

An Interview with Professor K.S. Rajendran by Lakshmi Priya Balakrishnan

‘ f a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated Ithem. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water’, said Ernest Hemingway in these oft-quoted lines fromDeath in the Afternoon of what came to be known as the ‘iceberg theory’ or ‘theory of omission’.1 The art of omission is a leitmotif in Hemingway as he practiced and theorized it frequently, as for example in the essay ‘The Art of the Short Story’ where he says, ‘If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened’.2 But as the first quote above suggests, far from being a complete excision, Hemingway’s omission is rather a symbolic site of meaning construction that is predicated upon a shared knowledge of the reader, who, taking a cue from the visible iceberg, is playfully invited to partake in the excavation of the deeper layers of meanings. A corollary process—albeit a more complex one—can be found to take place in the theatrical realm where the playwright, director, actor, and audience together partake in a creative omission: an omission that not only generates plural meanings, but also one that triggers a Brechtian critical consciousness as opposed to a passive effacement of meanings. In this interview, Professor K.S. Rajendran, an acclaimed director of plays in various Indian languages, discusses some of these processes and tells us how omission becomes an inevitable presence in his theatrical practice. An alumnus of the National School of Drama, New Delhi, where he also taught Dramatic Literature, Professor Rajendran worked extensively with the Chennai- based theatre repertory Koothu-p-Pattarai and, in 2007, founded the New Delhi Theatre Workshop. Besides directing Sanskrit classics byKalidasa, Bhavabhuti,

1 Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (Scribner, 1932), p. 132. 2 Ernest Hemingway, ‘The Art of the Short Story’,The Paris Review, 79 (1981) < https:// www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/3267/the-art-of-the-short-story-ernest-hemingway > [accessed 21 February 2019]

137 interview and Shudraka, his directorial work ranges from adaptations of Shakespeare, Brecht, Ionesco and Genet to contemporary Indian playwrights and authors such as Omchery N.N. Pillai, K.G. Shankara Pillai, H.S. Shiva Prakash, Vijay Tendulkar, Satish Alekar, Chandrashekara Kambar, Indira Parthasarathy, and Lalit Mohan Thapliyal. eTh interview took place over a series of emails between December 2018 and January 2019.

In adapting a play to stage from a text, be it Indian or Western, omission must be an integral part of the process. What are the factors that, in your view, govern omission in theatre?

When you look at a painting, your immediate attention goes to a very specific detail that attracts your attention—you may see the rest later. The same phenomenon happens when you look at a person: some features of the man or woman hold your attention and we omit the rest. It is a common aspect of all human beings’ ways of comprehending what they observe. The same phenomenon applies too for a text that you take up for performance. The difference here is that you look at the text keeping the audience in your mind. If you don’t omit a part, the audience will omit it anyway.

Are omissions in your productions deliberate or accidental?

Some of them are deliberate. For example, when I discuss a play with my actors, they may not agree with certain lines as they have differences with the way in which a character is represented at a given moment. Unconscious omission happens during the course of the enactment when the lines are actually performed. Sometimes, the length of the play and repetitions within it become grounds for omission. In other cases, it is the political ideology that guides the performers to determine what to retain or omit. The journey from page to stage is a complex one. There is no singular meaning to a text—it is always multiple. Just as the play means the same thing for no two members of the audience, so too it is for the actors who embody the text in their plural, individualistic ways. The existential ground of a performance is the actor’s body. Omission also happens unconsciously in emphasis, tone, and presentation. They are too subtle to pinpoint.

Do the actors also take part in this process of omission?

Yes, the actors too do their share of omissions. An author does not begin to write spontaneously by taking a pen and paper. A creative process takes place in the artist’s mind, which is then put down in writing. That process, however, does not necessarily apply to the actors who first comprehend the text by applying their mind, which they then go on to embody. In this process, the text undergoes many changes which was not intended by the author. Actors’ bodies communicate the

138 lakshmi priya balakrishnan text in an entirely different context. A fixed meaning to the text is an impossibility in performance as many aspects get omitted and new meanings emerge in new contexts of the performances. Drama as an art form is more social than any other. A group of people come together to rehearse a play before it is presented to a live audience. The members of the audience do not receive the play in the same way. A third text is created by the audience, and in this pluralistic domain, they omit many aspects and absorb others that appeal to them.

How would you characterize your experience of adapting a Western or an Indian play in a multicultural country as India?

All my productions of Western plays are Indianized versions in the first place. Utpal Dutt famously said that Shakespeare is more of a Bengali playwright than any other Bengali playwright. How is it that the bard became Indian? Adaptations are processes of omissions and commissions. Interculturalism addresses this issue very deeply. India is a multilingual, multicultural society. If there is anything that is not ‘multi’ in India, then it is not anything at all. In such an atmosphere, the text—any text for that matter—takes multiple meanings.

Omission in the theatrical process must, presumably, be intertwined with politics and ideology…

Yes, absolutely. When adapting classical Sanskrit plays especially, one interprets and reinterprets them taking into account the contemporary concerns. It is equally applicable to Shakespeare or Molière too, and therefore while the text remains the same, its meaning cannot remain so.

Does theatre have the potential to challenge existing power structures? For example, in Defence of Theatre: Aesthetic Practices and Social Interventions, Naila Keleta-Mae writes that ‘theatre can also address systemic omissions in dominant epistemes—namely in history, scholarship, and education’.3 Do you agree with this?

Yes, theatre has been reinterpreting historical incidents in new light. The accepted historical ideas and notions of the dominant strata of society are questioned by minorities. The theatre of the Dravidian movement in South India questioned the Brahminical values, hierarchy, scholarship, customs, and rituals. What is the place of theatre in a digital era dominated by films? I am reminded of Susan Sontag in this context who makes interesting observations about the transition of different art forms in ‘Film and Theatre’ and critiques the tendency

3 Naila Keleta-Mae, ‘Performance as Reappearance: Female Blackness in History and Theatre’, inIn Defence of Theatre: Aesthetic Practices and Social Interventions, ed. by Kathleen Gallagher, Barry Freeman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), p. 131.

139 interview of what she refers to as ‘the quest for the definitive art form’, whereby critics had compared theatre to cinema and had declared the former as obsolete with the advent of films. She traces this tendency to the case in an earlier time of a similar comparison between photography and painting where the former was supposed to have rendered the latter obsolete. However, that was averted when painting experimented with abstraction and so she observes: ‘Painting and photography evidence parallel developments rather than a rivalry or a supercession. And, at least in principle, so have theatre and film.’4 What differentiates theatre from film is the live contact of the performers and spectators: an invisible thread binding both sets of people in the auditorium. First, with the advent of films, people said theatre will become obsolete. Later, when television invaded into our drawing rooms, they said theatre is certainly going to be obsolete. But it refuses to be! Why? Because it is very volatile in nature. Fire is dangerous but we still want to play with it. The opening chapter of the ancient dramatic treatise Natyashastra tells a story where, in the first production, after carefully observing all the rules and conventions of dramaturgy, its author Bharata stages a play that becomes a disaster. Theasuras (demons) obstructed the performance and paralysed the actors because they were not happy with the way they were portrayed. This episode in theshastra is a warning about the nature of theatre: Volatility! The comparative study Sontag undertakes here is based on the ‘proscenium theatre’ because that is the predominant structure that the West is familiar with. The proscenium theatre was introduced to Asia only during colonization and therefore it would be an uneven comparison. For my production of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade, I converted a proscenium theatre into an intimate performance space bringing the audiences close to the performers to kill the illusionist effect of proscenium stage. It is a picture- frame stage. Cinematic language has undergone tremendous changes with the advances in technology. It is an industry now, manufacturing dreams for the masses. Theatre destroys such illusionist games and pulls you down to see your life with all its beauty and ugliness. Sanskrit theatre is played on empty space. There are no sets and lights. It is an organic theatre where everything flows in and out of the actor’s body. His gestures, postures, glances, gaits, speeches, songs, and movements create his world, and this theatre cannot be compared with cinema.

In the same essay, Sontag proceeds to add that in the early years, theatre exerted a powerful influence on cinema, whereas it became the other way around with the progress of time. How would you respond to that?5

4 Susan Sontag, ‘Film and Theatre’, The Tulane Drama Review, 11 (1966), 24–37 (pp. 33–34). 5 Ibid., pp. 34–35.

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In modern India, when the talkies were first introduced, they were originally staged performances that were filmed. In South India, the political plays of the theatre of the Dravidian movement were later filmed. Theatre influenced films in a substantial way. Films could not have any impact on serious art theatre. In the present times, video art is integrated into live performances. Just like spot lights and sound technology, film is also a component of theatre now.

Finally, are ambiguities of the texts retained in performance? For example, In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon writes: ‘The difficulties of dramatizing such verbal elements as irony, ambiguity, metaphor, or symbolism pale in comparison with the problems faced by the adapter who has to dramatize what is not present. Absences and silences in prose narratives almost invariably get made into presences in performance media.’6

Theatre makes the invisible visible—but not through mechanical representations of visual realization of absences and silences. One of the significant aspects of modern playwrighting is long pauses and silences in the spoken parts of dramatic characters. It is a typical modern phenomenon. Suddenly, a character is stuck and is in a loss of words to express the predicament. The audience fills up that silence. These silences are more eloquent than well-written rhetorics. It invites the audience to participate in the performance and not just remain as a passive spectator. This is similar to reader-response theory in literary studies. In Mohan Rakesh’s Adhe Adhure, a modern Indian play, most sentences spoken by the characters end half-way through and is never completed. In my recent production of Bhasa’s Dootaghatotkacham, Abhimanyu is absent, but the entire play is about him. You realize Abhimanyu fully only through his absence. Absences are an essential part of dramaturgy. Silence in theatre is more eloquent than spoken words.

6 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 71.

141 142 Notes on Contributors fernanda lai completed her M.Phil in European, Latin American, and Comparative Literatures and Cultures in 2018, focussing mainly on German continental philosophy. After a brief stint in consulting, she is currently working as an art writer at a start-up in Copenhagen. colton valentine is currently completing an MSt in English (1830–1914) on the Ertegun Scholarship. His research focuses on portrayals of cosmopolitanism and the translation and reception of French literature in the Victorian period. This fall, he will begin his PhD in English at Yale University. susan zhang maginn completed her postgraduate degree in English literature at St John’s College, the University of Oxford. Her research mainly focuses on Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s collaborative works. She recently published her article ‘Cultivating the Conrad “Industry”: Private Printing and the Collectors’ Market in Conrad’s Later Years’ in the Conradian 43.2 (Autumn 2018). carissa ma was an MSt student in English (1900–present) at Somerville College, Oxford. She will embark on a PhD at the Ohio State University this autumn. She is interested in researching Indian literature in English and transmedia storytelling by contemporary women writers and artists. madeleine mitchell received her Master of Studies in World Literatures in English from the University of Oxford in 2018, and her Bachelor of Arts in English from the Johns Hopkins University in 2017. She is currently based in Washington, DC, where she works as a Litigation Paralegal for international law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. stephen turton is a second-year DPhil student at Merton College, Oxford. The focus of his research is the changing representation of gender and sexuality in English dictionaries from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. s. luke doughty is a Masters student in English & American Studies at Oxford University writing his dissertation about Alain Locke’s modernist air during the Harlem Renaissance. He plans to attend law school. sophie barber is studying for an MSt in English Literature (1700–1830) at Mansfield College. She is particularly interested in the early Gothic and its male readership.

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