New Writing: Modernism, Punctuation, and the Intermedial Text

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NEW WRITING: MODERNISM, PUNCTUATION, AND THE INTERMEDIAL TEXT

SUSAN SOLOMON

B.A. UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT, 2001

M.A. UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT, 2005

A.M. BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2009

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY

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CURRICULUM VITAE

Susan Solomon was born in 1979 in New London, Connecticut. She graduated with a

B.A. from the Honors Program at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she majored in English and German and minored in Women’s Studies. She spent 2001-2002 at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin as a Fulbright Student. In 2003, she returned to the

University of Connecticut to earn an M.A. in English, where she also taught freshman writing seminars. In 2005, she entered the graduate program in Comparative Literature at

Brown University and received her A.M. in 2009. In 2008-09, she participated in an exchange between Brown University and the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen. At

Brown she served as a teaching assistant and instructor for the Department of

Comparative Literature, and as a proctor for differences in the Pembroke Center for

Teaching on Women and Gender and the Modernist Journals Project in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. Her essay, “Turning Points: Periodizing New Writing,” received the 2013 Albert Spaulding Cook prize for best comparative essay by a graduate student from the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would not have completed this dissertation without the extended fellowship support I received from the Graduate School, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Modernist Journals Project/ Modern Culture and Media Department at Brown University. I am extremely grateful to Karen Newman, Robert Scholes, Kenneth Haynes, Susan Bernstein, Esther Whitfield, Susan Davis, Charles Auger, and Dean Brian Walton for their efforts in helping me to this end. I must acknowledge Carol Wilson-Allen and Charles Auger for their regular assistance in navigating the tangled administrative paths of the university and for their daily kindness. I am thankful to all of the graduate students in comparative literature with whom I have studied, learned from, and been supported by during my time at Brown University, especially those in my entering cohort; extra thanks to Signe Christensen for her unequalled friendship and comraderie. I would like to express my gratitude to Dana Gooley for teaching me to listen to the music Adorno wrote about, to Zachary Sng for his always thoughtful comments, and to Karen Newman for the opportunity to teach an undergraduate seminar related to this project as well as for her guidance and encouragement. I am grateful to Arnold Weinstein, from whose lectures I have learned a great deal about modernism, and more recently to Michelle Clayton, whose teaching of Ulysses energized my last months here. My heartfelt thanks to Margaret R. Higonnet for introducing me to comparative literature, teaching me to be a scholar, and for her dedicated mentorship over the past 14 years. I owe limitless thanks to my committee members, each of whom I deeply admire as scholars and teachers. Thank you to Ravit Reichman for her advice and encouragement since this project’s earliest phase as a short paper in her Modern Novel seminar and for acting, unknowingly, as a wonderful role model. I am grateful to Kevin McLaughlin, Robert Scholes, and Susan Bernstein for the massive amount of time they have dedicated to this dissertation by reading, commenting on, and discussing it in its various pieces and forms over the past four years. To Kevin for his guidance and intellectual inspiration since my first semester at Brown, for his patience, and for persisting as an advisor despite tremendous responsibilities as Dean of Faculty. To Susan for her patience, attentive reading, encouragement, and for her high standards. And to Bob for his generosity as a teacher, employer, and friend, for insisting that I include James Joyce in this project, for his confidence in me, and for continuing as an active member of this committee even in his retirement. Thanks to my mother for being a loving parent and for teaching me to read closely. To my father, in memoriam, for being proud of me and for teaching me never to take the easy way. To Wyle, Sung-Hee, Moise, Stephanie, Carly, and all of my family, including Oskar, for being supportive. And to Nick for putting up with me throughout this process and always believing in me.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction...... 1 Chapter One: Counterpoints: Music, Language, and Intermediality ...... 1 Chapter Two: Turning Points: Periodizing New Writing...... 60 Chapter Three: Joyce, Adorno, and the “Perverted Commas” of Unreality...... 114 Chapter Four: Keeping Time in the Space of To the Lighthouse ...... 167 Works Cited ...... 202

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INTRODUCTION New Writing: Modernism, Punctuation, and Intermedial Text. This dissertation sets its eye on the sliding index of the “new” in the advancing motion of avant-gardism and in the very idea of modern-ism during the early twentieth century. Punctuation, I argue, plays a central but paradoxical role in the modernist premise of making it new. Its significance operates on the levels of structural and visual form and on the levels of the logical and temporal syntaxes of writing. It produces seams or reveals ruptures between and within the mediums of literary writing, music, and pictorial art. It is punctual and it periodizes; it serves as an instrument and a symbol of modernism’s temporal self- awareness. I understand the avant-garde as a subset of modernist art that has an extreme interest in the historicity of its form. However, in the context of modernist studies, the term “avant-garde” has been used in a very precise way to denote art that does not submit to the paradigm of aesthetic autonomy, which from one point of view applies to precisely the opposite of what I intend by the term. I will dwell on this point briefly, in part because this line of criticism traces itself to the work of Theodor Adorno, whose writings on newness, new music in particular, supply a basis for this project’s title and likewise play a vital role in the present study.

Modernism and the Avant-garde

For Adorno, new art not only defines itself against the past, but against its contemporary society: all art, he emphasizes, “is defined by its relation to what it is not”

(“Sie bestimmt sich im Verhältnis zu dem, was sie nicht ist”; 3; Ästhetische 12). Art, writing, and music become linked to their contemporary culture by means of their antagonism to it. He stresses the importance of form in this social connection, “Die ungelösten Antagonismen der Realität kehren wieder in den Kunstwerken als die immanenten Probleme ihrer Form. Das, nicht der Einschuß gegenständlicher Momente, definiert das Verhältnis der Kunst zur Gesellschaft” (“The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society”; 160; Aesthetic 6).1 This is to say that the art’s medium registers and reflects its surroundings more authentically than its representation does. This would also suggest, for example, that the form of an avant- garde manifesto conveys as much about itself and its period as the content it supports.

Peter Bürger and Andreas Huyssen entirely discard the category of newness both from their definition of modernism and of the avant-garde, because the new fails to distinguish between the two entities. “[T]he historically unique break with tradition that is defined by the historical avant-garde movements” (60), writes Bürger, should not be reduced to the “developmental principle of modern art as such.” Both he and Andreas

Huyssen classify modernism as autonomous aestheticism maintaining the boundary between art and life, “which for the most part insisted on the inherent hostility between high and low” (Huyssen viii), and the avant-garde, in contrast, as a force working to

1 The German text will be supplied before English, unless it is incorporated into the syntactical structure of my own sentence. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted with a page number.

3 collapse that border “often by incorporating elements of mass culture into the work of art or by promoting specific political programs” (“avant-garde,” Columbia).2

Both scholars draw heavily from Adorno’s writings on artistic autonomy, and

Huyssen even describes Adorno as “the major theoretician of the Great Divide” (x). As a result, many readers have interpreted his vision of autonomous art as a proposal for

“hibernation” (Schulte-Sasse xviii) from a hostile society and have seen his view of other sorts of cultural production to be “kitsch” conformities to the culture industry that he and

Horkheimer had theorized in the 1940s. Yet Adorno clarifies his concept of autonomy repeatedly, for instance by stating, “Vermöge ihrer Absage and die Empirie—und die ist in ihrem Begriff, kein bloßes escape, ist ein ihr immanentes Gesetz—sanktioniert sie deren Vormacht” (“by virtue of its rejection of the empirical world—a rejection that inheres in art’s concept and thus is no mere escape, but a law immanent to it—art sanctions the primacy of reality”; 10; Aesthetic 2). This empirical reality one may see as the “life” to which Huyssen refers. Put differently, the impulse toward autonomous aesthetics (and away from society) is seen by Adorno as a reaction against and therefore engagement with society. The artwork thus bears the negative imprint or impression of the society from which it is supposed to seek refuge.3

Whereas Adorno assumes that all art is produced by the impulse of having an inverted relationship to society, Bürger argues that the “historical avantgarde” intended the opposite. Because appraisals like Schulte-Sasse’s above presume a stable opposition

2 Despite its applicability to certain aspects of Futurism and Symbolism, when applied to a broader national and historical scale the high-low distinction within global and local concepts of modernism has meanwhile been very convincingly dismantled. 3 The question that arises is to what extent this art is determined only by that society as its negative imprint and to what extent it also expresses more.

4 between the social-historical and the aesthetic realms, it does not recognize those aspects of avant-gardism organized around innovative form or the extent to which modernist form relates to its social-historical contexts. Their conclusions, in other words, would preclude the basis of much of this dissertation. Discounting form from definitions of avant-gardism, Jochen Schulte-Sasse writes, benefits the goals of periodization. It “gives us a historically concrete and theoretically exact description of the avant-garde” (xiv).

Huyssen likewise cites the historical precision of defining avant-gardism in this way: it manages to “distinguish the historical avantgarde from late-nineteenth-century modernism as well as from the high modernism of the interwar years” (viii). It is interesting that their readings are motivated by a desire to precisely date the movements they study or to isolate them into categories. The same impulse drove the self- proclaiming and periodizing manifestos of the early twentieth century.

In their desire to give unity to the movements they seek to identify, their approach tends to eliminate as irrelevant those traits that contradict their thesis. Such demarcation performs in the context of literary history what Samuel Weber has described as the logic of isolation at work in disciplinary fields. Drawing from Sigmund Freud's analysis of this dynamic in the psyche of the individual subject, Weber writes that drawing such borders serves “to keep away not only what is irrelevant or unimportant, but above all, what is unsuitable because it is contradictory” (Freud qtd. in Weber 29; my italics). In order to maintain clear borders—in this case those of a particular literary movement that begins and ends at a specific historical moment and that shares a set of characteristics— contradiction must be eliminated. Otherwise, from this point of view, conceptualizing the literary historical field is impossible. Thus in forming definitions of modernism and the

5 avant-garde as two distinct entities, Huyssen and Bürger’s works also isolate a single component of Adorno’s philosophy—the autonomy of the work of art—from its place in the complex dialectical constellation of tensions in which his writings locate it.

By contrast, unresolved contradiction is the driving force of Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectic. The anxieties expressed by Bürger and other critics about historical precision and categorical exactitude obscure the tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes that most concerned Adorno and that also characterize the broad phenomenon of modernism.4 The risk that the avant-garde would lose its unique characterization is hardly an issue if different avant-garde generations react against not just a static “bourgeois culture” and aesthetics, but a perpetually developing and historically specific set of aesthetic standards and artists. In other words, the move to a methodology requiring stable historical categories necessarily distorts Adorno’s writing and his understanding of it as a process of thinking through. His writings on modern art, which influence this project generally, appear to treat the categories of avant-gardism and modernism interchangeably.5 This is not to say that his work treats the principle of innovation as the sole motivator behind the break with the “old.” Instead he analyzes the dialectical process in which innovation and traditional elements come into contact in works of art. Precisely this aspect of his analysis is excluded from both Huyssen’s and Bürger’s accounts of the two entities. Such delineation exemplifies the stable conceptualizations and universalized principles that Weber critiques. This project understands the phenomenon of modernist

4 See Scholes, Paradoxy of Modernism. 5 “Was Beckett an Philosophie aufbietet, depraviert er selber zum Kulturmüll, nicht anders als die ungezähltenn Anspielungen und Bildungsfermente, die er im Gefolge der angelsächsischen Tradition der Avantgarde zumal von Joyce und Eliot” (“Versuch Endspiel” 281).

6 writing to encompass conservative and avant-garde approaches to form, and it sees technically new ways of writing to play a constitutive or provocating role in all of them.

Punctuation, perhaps the most formal aspect of writing’s form, would logically be foregrounded in such a study.

Certainly, Adorno’s criticism has its own limitations, which derive from the very quality that lends it its most distinctive character: dialectical thought. From the point of view of modernist studies, his polarization of autonomous art and mass culture, in which art’s authenticity is defined by its resistant and antagonistic relationship to the mass culture surrounding it, has been the most problematic. Not all art aims, intentionally or unintentionally, at an oppositional relationship. As we have seen, this indirect relation to society is often perceived in a manner that invokes a division, instead of a network, of tensions. Of most interest to this study is the extent to which such tensions are located in a larger constellation of factors and conditions. In the case of lyric poetry, Adorno writes that the medium of language “establishes an inalienable relationship to the universal and to society” (“die unabdingbare Beziehung auf Allgemeines und die Gesellschaft herstellt”; “Kulturkritik” 56), through its history of social usage, even if it resists that history. This is also to say that its social significance lies in its medium and the historically contingent associations embedded in it, not its representational content or the intention of its creator. It is through the dialectical inversion that this possibility emerges in Adorno’s writing. What interests me is not merely that art signifies by not signifying, but that the nonsignificative features of art have significance. For instance, Adorno’s condemnation that popular protest lyrics such as Joan Baez’s are incapable of serving as

7 authentic political protests appears to foreclose interpretive possibility.6 However, at the same time, it leads to the question of where else protest, as one category of social meaning, might lie. Consequently, nonsignifying art forms such as music emerge as a carrier of meaning, as a place where art’s mediated and antagonistic relation to society might be interpreted. Adorno was in fact among the first musicologists to study how music’s formal make-up bears traces of the social and conceptual.7 This dissertation has no interest in excluding certain styles of works from serious scholarly consideration.

Rather it views the challenge of locating meaning elsewhere as well and not necessarily instead of to guide its own analysis of literary form.

Punctuation Marks

Theodor W. Adorno extends this pattern of interpretation to his Notes to

Literature essay “Satzzeichen,” which implicates punctuation in larger dialectical patterns of history and identifies its role in building tension and critique within propositional language. For example, in a reading of the semicolon, Adorno describes how in German the mark is a sign of complex thought, because it enables syntactic complexity. He laments the disappearance of both, which he attributes to capital-driven publishing and editing practices. These cater to a “marketplace” of readers who have not been conditioned to put forth the effort required to read long sentences or process complex thought by extension. Concepts like “lucidity, factual stability, and terse precision” (“Ideologien wie die der Luzidität, der sachlichen Härte, der gedrängten

6See undated recording of television interview: 7 See Subotnik, Rose. Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

Präzision”; 110) are its defining “ideologies,” he writes. The result is a “simple registration of facts” ‘bloße Registrierung der Tatsachen’ resembling “meeting minutes”

‘Protokollsatz’. This writing refrains from using the “syntax and punctuation” that have hitherto “articulate[d] facts, give[n] form to them, practice[d] criticism on them” (“diese zu artikulieren, zu formen, Kritik an ihnen zu üben“). Not only is language a precondition of thought, but the punctuation and syntax that organize verbal language are as well. The limitations embedded in certain conventions of writing, therefore, articulate correspondingly limited modes of thought: “Mit dem Verlust des Semikolon fängt es an, mit der Ratifizierung des Schwachsinns durch die von aller Zutat gereinigte

Vernünftigkeit hört es auf” (“It begins with the loss of the semicolon, and it ends with the ratification of idiocy through rationality that has been cleansed of every ingredient”; 110-

11). He thus considers punctuation according to historical dialectics, its connection to societal shifts, and its role in the formation of meaning and critique of language. In this view punctuation is both bound to and resistant of convention, where conventions can be worthy either of preserving or attacking. Along these lines, this dissertation seeks to orient its discussion of punctuation’s formal impact in writing among aesthetic, social, and historical concerns.

Short, generally overlooked, and at times more playful than his better-known essays and volumes, “Satzzeichen” has been described as an example of Adorno’s atypically “light-hearted criticism” (Litvak 34-35), dealing with straightforwardly

“trifling matters” (36). But others, especially those reading his work in its original language, have considered it evidence of the importance of “matters of language and presentational form” to his theory of aesthetics (Nicholson ix). His translator Shierry

Weber Nicholson argues that in “Satzzeichen,” along with other Noten zur Literatur chapters “Der Essay als Form” and “Fremdwörter,” “Adorno is virtually explicating his own mode of writing.” In fact the entire essay reverberates with concerns found in his better-known publications: his meditations on different marks resemble case studies of his broader theories. Sitting on the margins of his canon, it appropriately locates the issues most important to Adorno’s philosophy in the “minutiae” of writing (Buck-Morss

74). This focus is hardly unusual for Adorno, who, according to Susan Buck-Morss, believed that “a microscopic analysis which could identify the general (i.e., the bourgeois social structure) within the particular (the details of bourgeois philosophical texts) could indicate more than the social function of ideas (Ideologiekritik); it promised to make possible statements of objective truth, albeit historically specific” (76). Moreover, “the very words and their arrangements, apparently insignificant details, became meaningful, releasing a significance not even intended by the author. Indeed, ‘unintentional truth’ was precisely the object of Adorno’s critical inquiry.” Though not “words,” the seemingly

“insignificant details” of punctuation marks under consideration certainly serve as suitable objects of such a hermeneutic. Perhaps because they are not words, but are involved in words’ arrangements and phrasing, punctuation provides music and language with an affinity to one another. By remarking upon this in “Satzzeichen,” Adorno situates it in dialogue with his other essays on music and language and within the philosophical heart of Noten, the title of which is a self-conscious pun on musical notes,8 as well as with later volumes like Philosophie der neuen Musik and Ästhetische Theorie.

8 Adorno describes how his title Noten—not Notizen—zur Literatur is a play on the musical note in his essay from that collection, “Titles:”

Let us consider a concrete example of how punctuation marks may be involved in literary experiments with aesthetic and social significance, by glancing briefly at the short prose work “Die Zwiebel,” or “Merzgedicht 8,” by Kurt Schwitters, the Hanover Dadaist best known for his sound poetry and collage work. The Merz poem is one of a range of

Merz forms, the name of which Schwitters would have derived from Kommerz, or commerce. Thus, we can see from its subtitle alone that it has no interest in cutting itself off from commercial life, which is consistent with Huyssen and Bürger’s views of the avant-garde. Yet at the same time it is impossible that this work would have been

Auch in ‘Noten zur Literatur’ war es nicht an der Wiege gesungen, daß sie das wurden. Ich hatte sie, nach der ¨Uberschrift einer Aphorismenfolge, die ich vor der Zeit des Hitler in der Frankfurter Zeitung veröffentlichte, ‘Worte ohne Lieder’ getauft. Mir gefiel das, und ich hing daran; Suhrkamp fand es zu feuilletonistisch und zu billig. Er grübelte und stellte eine Liste zusammen, aus der ich nichts annehmen wollte, bis er verschmitzt als letzten Vorschlag ‘Noten zur Literatur’ anmeldete. Das war unvergleichlich viel besser als mein etwas dümliches Bonmot. Was mich aber daran entzückte, war, daß Suhrkamp, in dem er meine Idee kritisierte, sie festhielt. Die Konstellation von Musik und Wort ist ebenso gerettet wie das leise Altmodische einer Form, deren Glanzperiode der Jugendstil war. Mein Titel zitierte Mendelssohn, der Suhrkampsche, einige Etagen höher, die Goetheschen Noten zum Diwan. An der Kontroverse habe ich gelernt, daß anständige Titel solche sind, in welche die Gedanken einwanderten, um darin unkenntlich zu verschwinden. (“Titel” 328-29) Nor was it ordained at birth the the Noten zur Literatur [Notes to Literature] would be called that. I had christened them Words without Songs, after the title of a series of aphorism I had published in the Frankfurter Zeitung before the Hitler era. I liked that, and I was attached to it; Suhrkamp found it too feuilletonistic and too cheap. He mulled it over and put together a list, no item on which I was willing to accept, until he slyly announced Notes to Literature as his final suggestion. That was incomparably better than my somewhat stupid bon mot. But what delighted me about it was that Suhrkamp had retained my idea while criticizing it. The constellation of words and music is preserved, as is the slightly old-fashioned quality of a form whose heyday was the Jugendstil. My title cited Mendelssohn, while Suhrkamp’s, several levels higher, cited Goethe’s notes to the Divan. From the controversy I learned that decent titles are the ones into which ideas immigrate and then disappear, having become unrecognizable. (“Titles” 6)

11 produced with commercial profit in mind. Nonetheless, the processes of commerce and exchange are at work in the story between the areas of art and society as well as of literature and visual art. In it, the narrator of “The Onion,” Alves Bäsenstiel, relates his own execution, disembowelment, and reconstruction; in spite of its content, this plot line is fairly conventional. Appearing in 1919, we might view this also as the motion of the prewar avant-garde, which shared the Great War mentality that destruction would give way to renewal.

Beginning with the second sentence of the story, Bäsenstiel’s voice is interrupted by diverse interjections, which at first are enclosed in parenthesis marks. These then appear to escape the marks’ isolating enclosures to infiltrate the primary narrative. The relationship of these interruptions to the main narrative becomes at times inverted: that is, the digressions become so dominating that they too are interrupted by one another and by reports on the progress of the plot. It hardly requires saying that this method applies

Schwitter’s visual montage work to the textual medium.9 Of course, collages often included text among their materials, so it is difficult to characterize any linear sequence or priority from one art to the other. Because Schwitters was deeply invested in experiments of applying “techniques and subject matter [. . .] developed in one genre to another” (Dietrich 71), his montagist literary work relies to some extent on the conventional function of parentheses and full stops to realize its form. Punctuation draws boundaries to enforce prioritized forms of logic, sequence, and propositionality. Yet for

9 According to Patrizia McBride, “Merz poetry [like Merz painting] is abstract in the sense that it aims at establishing unconventional relationships among the broadest range of materials. This is obtained by playing off words against each other, as well as any available, preformed linguistic units, which represent the equivalent of the sundry materials Schwitters used for his visual collages” (254).

12 this very reason, the symbol can be repurposed to open different forms of logic, order, and expression.

The interjections vary in theme and type. Many evoke the types of phrases found in popular magazines. For example, from the first paragraph: “(Fürchte dich nicht, glaube nur!)” ‘(Don’t fear, just believe!)’, “(Andenken an die Konfirmation)” ‘(Memento of the confirmation)’; and range from the commercial brand of soap “(Sunlight)” to the magazine title “(Zeitschrift für Haus- und Grundbesitz)” ‘(Journal for Home and Property

Ownership)’, to the kinds of empty moral phrases that served propagandistic purposes during the First World War—“(Die Opfer der Mutterschaft)” ‘(The sacrifice of motherhood)’, “(Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung)” ‘(faith, love, and hope)’ (299). Acting as another style of quotation mark the parenthesis facilitates a multivocal narrative. Still, the boundary-drawing lines of the parenthetical brackets visually and functionally resemble the cut edges of the pasted collage piece. The language is drawn from newspaper headlines, advertisements, greeting cards, and political slogans, but these are not only infiltrating the singular voice of the narrator. Isolated from their contexts, they become infiltrated as well as parodies of themselves. While the story progresses, the type of insertion the parentheses enclose varies, as does the relationship or lack thereof to the material it interrupts or modifies. In turn, the digression or interruption often goes unmarked. The result is paratactic juxtaposition, which transforms the interrupted plot line and blurs its boundaries. The importance of togetherness in Schwitters’ story, the taking apart and putting back together of the human body it narrates, and the ultimately unsystematic use of parentheses to mark or leave unmarked digressions is indicative of how Schwitters assaults linear thinking in the story. By using the mark inconsistently, he

13 stages a narratological revolution in which the rebels are self-acting fragments of discourse that are both different and the same. The dual movement of imposing and obscuring boundaries takes place on the level of syntax, content, and genre.

Crucially, the montaged assembly of language in “The Onion” mirrors the narrative of the execution and reconstruction of the narrator’s body. At the moment his skull is broken, which is the turning point of the story, he collapses or “bricht zusammen.” Harriet Watts translates it “collapsed, lapsed lapsed lapsed” (86), but

Schwitters’s word is zusammenbrechen, which provides the counterpart to the later movement in the story, when he is ‘”zusammengesetzt” or reassembled. When he writes,

“Zusammenbrechen zusammen zusammen zusammen” the reiteration of zusammen or together emphasizes not a lapse, but the “co-” or togetherness of the collapse. Alves

“breaks together”—not apart. Punctuation is instrumental in the patterns of relationship portrayed in the story, which have clear applicability to the concept of intermediality, which will be discussed shortly. Indeed even the content of the story is indirectly ekphrastik. We could easily call it an allegorical narration of the collaging process. Used as a disruption of convention that directs attention to the written medium, punctuation serves both to delineate and to collapse borders between historical periods, cultural spheres, and aesthetic mediums.

Punctuation, History, and Modernity

“PUNCTUATION (Lat. Punctus, “point”). A system of nonalphabetical signs that express meaning through implied pauses, pitch shifts, and other intonational features” (“punctuation,” The New Princeton 1006). punctuation, n. 1.†a. The action of marking the text of a psalm, etc., to indicate how it should be chanted; = pointing, n. 4 Obs. rare. b. The insertion of points indicating vowels, accents, etc., into Hebrew and other Semitic texts; the system by which such points are inserted. 2. a. The practice, action, or system of inserting points or other small marks into texts, in order to aid interpretation; division of text into sentences, clauses, etc., by means of such marks; (occas.) an instance of this. Also: these marks collectively. (Now the usual sense.) †b. In reading or speaking: the observance or articulation of appropriate pauses and phrasing, as indicated or as if indicated by punctuation in a text. Obs. c. fig. The fact of occurring or being distributed at intervals throughout an area, period, etc., in the manner of punctuation marks in a sentence; something which occurs or is distributed in this way. †3. The action of marking something by pricking or puncturing; spec. tattooing. Obs. 4. Zool. = punctation n. 2. Now rare. †5. A form of percussion massage using the tips of the fingers. Obs. rare. 6. Biol. Rapid or sudden evolutionary change, esp. speciation, as suggested by the theory of punctuated equilibrium; an instance of this. (“punctuation” Oxford)

Over the last twenty years, the dominant scholarly approach to punctuation within

Anglo-American literary studies has been concerned with its wide-scale historical development and its role in delimiting interpretive possibility. The pioneering study of this sort is M.B. Parkes’ 1993 Pause and Effect, which, opposed to linguistic and grammatical treatments of the topic, makes the claim that punctuation’s “primary function is to resolve structural uncertainties in a text, and to signal nuances of semantic significance which might otherwise not be conveyed at all, or would at best be much more difficult for a reader to figure out” (1). Thus Parkes’ volume takes a historical and what he calls a rhetorical approach to punctuation, which attends to punctuation’s

15 development since antiquity vis-à-vis oration and silent reading:10 The first marks of punctuation that Parkes studies are in Latin texts from the first six centuries A.D., in which the insertion of points belonged to the process of interpretation. Because these texts were written in scriptura continua, the reader divided the text into segments, or words and sentences and noted appropriate pauses to guide his performance, particularly his breath and intonation. Towards the end of this period, punctuation and line division increasingly were inserted in advance by scribes to guide the understanding of readers in

England, for instance, where literacy was limited and Latin was a second-language. Into the Middle Ages, scribes developed the graphic organization and notation of liturgical and non-liturgical manuscripts into a refined artistic and interpretive, disambiguating undertaking. With the rise of Humanism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, punctuation’s grammatical and logical functions and the symbols of which it made use continued to evolve. At the same time, with the rise of print culture and rationality during the Enlightenment, these practices became increasingly standardized—literally cast into type and circulated—, and the role of syntactical or logical relationships among sentence segments came to dominate the punctuation of texts, which were intended primarily for silent readers. As Cecilia Watson points out, it was during this time that punctuation was incorporated into studies of and handbooks on English grammar. In languages such as

German and Russian this wave of rationalization coalesces in orthography reforms at the

10 Parkes identifies two modes of analysis: grammatical and rhetorical. The grammatical study may be found in debates on editorial intervention in ancient texts, in which the introduced marks adopt one literal interpretation of an extinct language over another by identifying one grammatical structure over other potential ones. The other is rhetorical analysis: “With its emphasis on pauses for breath this mode of analysis has been preoccupied with bringing out correspondences between the written medium and the spoken word” (4). This is visible in Parkes’ own study of novelistic depictions of dialogue, for instance.

16 turn of the twentieth century.11 Meanwhile, according to Parkes, novelists revived punctuation’s rhetorical past as they sought to communicate the rhythm and intonation of spoken dialogue to the silent reader.

In conjunction with this history, Parkes redefines in pragmatic terms the measure by which punctuation is defined and understood: “The fundamental principle for interpreting punctuation is that the value and function of each symbol must be assessed in relation to the other symbols in the immediate context, rather than in relation to a supposed absolute value and function for that symbol when considered in isolation” (2; my italics). This can only make sense, given the lack of any widespread codification before the eighteenth century. Likewise, in a monograph on the history of parentheses in

English verse, John Lennard rejects the institutional definitions of the round brackets that surround parentheses:

The repetitive insistence of grammarians and lexicographers that

parenthetical clauses are subordinate makes the idea of emphatic lunulae

strange to the modern reader; but lunulae only distinguish. Their valency,

whether that which they distinguish is subordinate, neutrally isolated, or

emphatic, is determined by the pressures of use, definition, and convention

on the context in which they are employed: and there is nothing in

11 Orthographic reforms Russia and Germany perhaps contributed to the visibility of the silent features of text, in particular because they were suddenly subject to regulation and reformation by law. In Russia the debate over plans to eliminate the letter Yat (Ѣ) from the Russian alphabet, were initiated in the Academy of Sciences (1885) and officially eliminated shortly after the 1917 revolution. In Germany the 1901 Staatliche Orthographie-Konferenz adopted the Duden’s standardized rules of spelling and punctuation. Around the same time debates over retaining gothic script or adopting Latin also gained intensity.

principle or practice to prevent them from being as inevitably emphatic as

a box drawn around an item on a list. (But I Digress 5)

Although it is difficult to perceive how “immediate” Parkes and Lennard intend the context to be, both downplay the role of regulated contemporary conventions, which are present in the context of modern literature. In the twentieth century it is sure that established systems ruling the use of punctuation marks had some impact on the interest and significance of such marks in literature. The litotes of the parenthesis could not achieve its turn of irony if it did not turn away from the marginalizing institutional use of round brackets. Virginia Woolf, I will argue in Chapter Four, creatively draws from the institutional and editorial function of square brackets in her instrumentation of them to represent loss. When Andrei Bely litters the pages of Petersburg with ellipses, he creates substance and rhythm out of elision. Likewise, it is how he transforms and revises the single period mark, and the logic and state of completion it entails with its multiplied form in the open ellipsis that interests me in Chapter One. Although culturally-inflected grammatical norms are evolving and even arbitrary, the use of punctuation is influenced by and understood in their context.

Studying related movements associated with a single historical period reveals a different category of findings from those produced by tracing historical progressions.12

While these histories include analyses of modernist authors, the tendency has been to treat these as representative case studies of the entire period. Lennard iterates that concentrating on “individual use can be regarded as diagnostic of variations in the

12 One benefit of the historical approach is outlined in Anne Henry’s survey of the ellipsis, where she shows that its use in modernism is hardly unique. Instead, “it was the achievement of modernism to transform ‘. . .’ from a mark of the aberrant or climactic narrative occurrence to a symbol of everyday speech” (138; my emphasis).

18 personally and historically generated pressures” (But I Digress 9), yet this structure implies a continuous linear development of such use.13 As a result, Parkes’ reading of

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, for example, is determined by its position in a chronological narrative of genre development. He interprets Woolf’s punctuation as a commanding guide to readers that offsets the lack of an authoritative, central narrator.14

Punctuation appears here as a compensatory element that controls, rather than opens, interpretive possibility. Instead of positioning prose by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein,

Andrei Bely, James Joyce, Italian and Russian Futurists, and Theodor Adorno in a genre history concerned primarily with form, I am interested in how these authors’ formal styles respond to historical forces as well as to conventions of genre.

A common characteristic of research on punctuation has been its attribution of authorial intent as well as its focus on single works by individual authors. In Lennard’s words, the author “exploits convention,” by responding to it with “unconventional punctuation [. . .] made potent by the expectation which it thwarts” (But I Digress 9).15

13 The historical breadth—from the Renaissance into the twentieth century—of Lennard’s monograph illustrates the fascinating variation with which lunulae and the language they enclose may be used. Chapter by chapter, the volume builds a chronological narrative from the representative cases it selects, which however imply a continuous development. As a result, the study of Eliot’s modernism is influenced by the narrative in which it is positioned. The chapter can hardly account for the diversity of modernist writing, as the present dissertation at least begins to. 14 For example, Parkes emphasizes repeatedly how “the reader is encouraged to” (95); the marks “alert the reader to the fact that direct speech [. . .] is being represented;” “the unusual pauses also arrest the attention of readers, thus encouraging them to relate back to the image of [. . .]” (95). 15 This perspective is repeated in countless articles. Rachel May calls it “the author’s visual tool for manipulating the reader’s response” (4). Sarah van den Berg goes so far as to say that Ben Jonson’s “distinctive punctuation of his works, in print as in his handwritten signature, is an important vehicle for the creation and maintenance of his authorial presence. The body of his texts is kept alive, maintained, by the breath of punctuation, the illusion of the time and motion of utterance” (25).

Punctuation plays a decisive role in how the reader’s mind processes logical connections among the words on the page. It stays off ambiguity by partitioning sentences and phrases into determined units of logical meaning. This controlled approach to art is a significant aspect of modernism. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, particularly during the

Imagist phase of Eliot’s objective correlative, used strategies of “authorial power” to communicate subjective emotion and experience to their readers (Scholes, Parodoxy

103). Influenced by contemporary marketing strategies and graphic design, many authors made more expressive, persuasive use of font, punctuation, and compositional layout to achieve particular effects on their readers. This important aspect of modernism notwithstanding, it is only one side of a larger story. There were good reasons to refuse such techniques of control as well, precisely because they aim to force a perfect communication between author and reader. Parkes’ account of Virginia Woolf does not consider her resistance to the totalitarian aesthetics of the devastating century in which she lived and wrote.16 Instead of directing, she characterizes her style as “rhythmical,” which, as Chapters One and Four will explore, likens writing to music. My approach attends to the place of punctuation in a larger rhythmic tendency in her work, which introduces a musiclike, nonverbal element to her novels. 17 The project examines how

16 See Schulze. 17 Gertrude Stein’s well-known comments on the comma and period reinforce the suspicion that punctuation was also employed for noncommunicative purposes. Periods, by her account, are not among the author’s ready tools. Instead, they “have a life of their own a necessity of their own a feeling of their own a time of their own” (“Poetry and Grammar” 218). Rather than using the mark to fix authorial intent and close the production of meaning, Stein celebrates it as a symbol of independence. Her view of the comma, on the other hand, acknowledges that punctuation may be used to guide reader interpretation. However, on this basis she rejects it: “A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead” (219-20). Marks such as this one “enfeeble” language and

20 such intermedial treatments of punctuation negotiate the pauses, silences, and interstitial dimensions of language and how they direct our attention to issues outside of the supplemental and signifying utility of writing that Derrida associates with logocentrism.

The methodology and underlying assumptions of this dissertation differ from those of the research mentioned above in crucial ways. First of all, this is a study of modernism. In place of historical breadth it examines works from roughly the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, in selecting this focus, I do not mean to imply that experimental or interesting uses of punctuation are unique to this period. As indicated, an array of existing studies testify to this long history and to its impact on modern and contemporary writing, and my own work is indebted to these. The present study investigates, in contrast, how punctuation is itself brought into theories of the modern.

Theories, that is, through which artists and critics engage narratives of historical continuity and discontinuity.

Intermediality and the Text

Punctuation’s uses to interrupt thought, disrupt the order implicit in syntax, undermine propositionality, or impose silent space take on especial prominence and relevance in modernist texts. If modernism as a general category thematizes rupture, displacement, and shock (where the general tendency is, paradoxically, to resist generalization), then punctuation marks are an apt device in achieving this on numerous impose unnecessary “care” and “help” onto words, thereby lessening their “force” (220). Stein’s ideal reader therefore is not in the passive position of receiver, is not standing by for commands dictating his or her interpretation. He or she must reckon with the forceful sentences alone. In this view, commas are at odds with something fundamental to Stein’s conception of writing: its movement, its vital rhythm, the spontaneity of its operation, and the interactivity it enables between writer, text, and reader.

21 levels. Visually abstract, evocative of rhythmic sound, and wordless, they produce seams or ruptures between and within the mediums of literary writing, music, and pictorial art.

When used in a manner that draws attention to itself, punctuation interrupts and suspends the forward motion of the sentence’s train of thought. It impacts pacing, slows the motion of the reader’s eyes across the page,18 and distracts his or her attention away from the content signified. Perhaps what makes punctuation interesting is that its meaning can be understood according to multiple referential frameworks. The period which marks completion in grammar indicates the opposite as a decimal point in mathematics. In liturgical texts of the Middle Ages, it signifies “inhale.” In the iconic language of emoticons, it represents a human eye. As a “point” and “dot” it may be interpreted metaphorically or metonymically in association with those terms’ attendant applications.

The uses of punctuation in graphic design and logos, for instance, are not determined or even associated with the function attributed to them in writing handbooks.19 Along these lines, John Lennard elaborates on the “deictic” or “emphatic” element of punctuation.

Constituents of the latter class “are neither usually regarded nor widely understood as being punctuation at all” (“Mark” 1) and include spacing, pagination, or typeface. He proposes an alternative understanding of punctuation, based on an “axis of analysis [. . .] which can accommodate these variant understandings, and supplement the received analysis by function” (5). The levels begin with “letter-forms” to “mise-en-page,” and proceed up to the “book itself punctuating space.” The upper, “bibliographic” levels in particular point to the close relationship between research into literary punctuation and

18 Hirotani, Masako, Lyn Frazier, and Keith Rayner. “Punctuation and intonation effects on clause and sentence wrap-up: Evidence from Eye Movements.” Journal of Memory and Language 54 (2006): 425-443. 19 See Rössler.

22 word/image studies, which encompass punctuation marks among the many graphic characteristics peculiar to a (usually original and authorized) text. The basic premise they share is that while literature is made up of words, those words are communicated by the textual material of punctuation marks, paper, and page layout.20 These themselves have been influentially recognized by scholars such as Jerome McGann and Gerard Genette as languages in themselves.

As Parkes’ history indicates, while punctuation marks were not necessarily believed to have been modeled after speech, they are said to have originated in the

Greco-Roman tradition to aid the spoken delivery of texts to an audience. Here punctuation and text layout have been utilized to bridge a perceived gap between the written “record” and the spoken word and to support vocal and bodily gestures that accompany and support the intended message. Where the points indicate pauses for breath or variations in intonation to guide the orator’s performance, they are intended to direct his interpretation (in both senses of making meaning and bodily performance) of the disembodied and impersonal text. This style of performative encoding is visible in features of theatrical scripts, musical scores, and dance notation. In verbal text, the marks are soundless in themselves, but they are involved in the indexical operation of modifying

20 See, for instance, the well-known example of the interference of contemporary editors in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Publishers found its aberrent form, including its punctuation, so illegible that they considered their revisions a precondition of publication. Only in the twentieth century (with modernism, in fact) did editors begin to return her poems to their original states—titleless, in the order she stitched them together into fascicles, following the layout she spelled out in her own hand, and with the unconventional punctuation she used to structure it. Mc Gann writes of her poetry in its original form, “openings to alternative sense arrangements emerge principally because of the text’s visual structure” (31) and advocates reading it at “face value, to treat all her scriptural forms as potentially significant at the aesthetic or expressive level” (38).

23 the tone of the words they accompany. The realistic dialogue that Parkes identifies in his study of the novel, in which punctuation communicates the rhythm and intonation of fictional spoken dialogue to the silent reader, could be seen as drawing from the dramatic script, where on-stage delivery is often directed through intervening parentheses, dashes, or ellipses. The nonverbal materiality of punctuation marks gesture away from the disembodied text to the empirical, three-dimensional world of bodies and objects. Yet the idea is that these are also textual, not the ends toward which writing and punctuation marks are the means. Thus in discussing embodied language acts, I am not privileging them as pure or unified, prior or prioritized, but recognizing the body’s value as a linguistic medium. If writing has been seen as the accessory of speech that turns out to be both necessary and ubiquitous, punctuation bears this same relationship to writing.

Thus the present study’s premise of intermediality, a term meant to encompass both the traditional interartistic comparisons and adaptations that cross between distinct genres and arts, as well as the view of media that the interarts have given way to: as W. J.

T. Mitchell writes, “all media are mixed media” already (Picture Theory 6). Whereas the interarts generally derive from classical premises of unity, harmony, and correspondence, intermediality does not affirm any given aesthetic taxonomy or system. It locates the image- and music-like element of literature in its own mediation, not in a crossing, mixing, or totalizing action between painting, music, and writing. What Deppermann and

Linke describe as the “aesthetic, pragmatic-social, normative, and affective qualities and functions” of language in written or spoken form are not accounted for by language’s entity as an “abstract system.” These can only be attended to through language’s

“materiality, as visual, acoustic and bodily appearance and its respective concrete situatedness” (ix).

The name of Kurt Schwitter’s prose form (Merzgedicht) raises already a difficulty in terminology, which I can only acknowledge, rather than resolve: that between poems and works of short prose, between writing and other genres of expression, whether that be speech, instrumental performance, musical notation, or visual art. The same holds true of the term “text,” which extends far beyond the physical page into the world of signifiers that constitute human experience. Still, the chapters that follow concentrate on literary texts, not works of visual or musical art. The analysis here explores interactions, commonalities, and overlaps among genres and mediums, but it does not erase those distinct identities. Thus a similar difficulty arises with my use of “text” in the title, which is intended to delimit the area of research to literary arts. At the same time its use acknowledges that there is no outside of the text, il n’y a pas de hors-text, that the illimitability of text or the legibility of perceptible experience provides the basis for intermedial study in the first place. This appears particularly crucial when intermediality is emerging from the textual features of punctuation.

Modernism and History

Like Lennard, I observe a broad view of punctuation as it attends to the traditional

“marks” as well as their spacing and typeface. Yet this move is hardly groundbreaking. In

1935, Gertrude Stein commented on capitalized letters alongside remarks on punctuation marks in her lecture “Poetry and Grammar,” and Theodor Adorno’s 1956 essay on

“Punctuation Marks,” includes a line on the German Fraktur typeface (107). This is to be

25 expected, given both writers’ interest in the suggestive impact of the symbols’ shapes.

Adorno, for instance, compares the effect of a horizontal dash or a vertical parenthesis mark on the aside that either could be used to surround, and Stein calls quotation marks and exclamation points “ugly” (“Poetry” 215). The former example of Fraktur is worth pausing upon, because it illustrates a dimension of punctuation that has received very little attention from scholars: its aesthetic involvement in questions of social and political import.21 Although calls to assimilate (what came to be known as) Deutsche Schrift to romanized type were voiced in Germany as early as the Renaissance, by the turn of the twentieth century, Fraktur was perceived by many as a symbol of a German identity that was likewise endangered by pressures of modernization and internationalization. In response to a 1911 hearing in the Reichstag, writers of (the American) Monatshefte associate the campaign against Fraktur with the suppression of German racial pride by

Rationalist proponents of a world citizenry: “Tatsächlich entbrannte der Kampf gegen die

Fraktur zum erstenmal, als das deutsche Rassenbewusstsein unterdrückt war und unter dem Einfluss des Rationalismus das Streben nach Weltbürgertum alle Schranken der

Stammesart zu verwischen drohte” (“Der Sieg” 15). Antiqua font, they argue, may be appropriate for scientific and scholarly publications, but not for German literature:

Anders, wenn das künstlerische creativity, die Eigenart des Innenlebens,

kurz, das eigentliche Wesen des Volkes in Wort und Schrift zum

Ausdruck kommen will; in diesem Falle wird sich ein nach innen reich

21 Recent exceptions of general interest are Jennifer Devere Brody’s chapter of Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play on “Hyphen-nations” and Cecilia Watson’s discussion of the Semi-colon Law in “Points of Contention.” On German typographic history, see Howes and Paucker, Hartmann, Killius, Kapr.

begabter und scharf ausgeprägter Volkscharakter auch nach außen

eigenartig zu gestalten wissen. (16)

It is different when artistic creation, the uniqueness of inner life, in short

the true essence of the (German) people intends to be expressed in speech

and writing; in this case, the bountifully gifted and sharply impressed

inward character of the people knows how to take its outwardly unique

shape.

The passage, first of all, uses the language of print (Ausdruck, ausgeprägt,

Volkscharakter) to describe the very content it is supposed to mediate, and this is precisely the point: the two are inseparable, the writers insist. In their view, the pure form of the font carries national and cultural meaning. For the very same reason, during the

Weimar Republic publishers used Roman font to distance themselves not only from a strict national identity but also from old-fashioned tradition. In effect typography served to market their modern identity. Even Hitler advocated Latin, or Normalschrift, as the typeface appropriate for the age of “Stahl und Eisen” and associated gothic script with a hitherto Jewish influence on German printing (Hitler).22 In these cases, typeface is itself working, like the traditional purpose of punctuation, to divide and disambiguate. It is seen by German nationalists as a positive circumscription of their cultural identity and by modernists and Hitler alike as a demarcation drawn between the past and the present. Yet at the heart of this conflict is the iconic and visual impact of punctuation and font, and its

22 When the Nazi party finally abolished Fraktur from textbooks in 1941, however, he did so as much for practical as for symbolic reasons. Although he suddenly associated it with Jewishness, it seems likely that the change was made to improve communication with the Third Reich’s expanded or conquered territories, where inhabitants were unaccustomed to reading the typeface. Fraktur interfered with the effectiveness of National Socialist propaganda.

27 ability to speak as loudly as the content it is supposed to be merely mediating. The awareness of and interest in punctuation marks among modernist writers must be as varied as their philosophies, politics, and aesthetics are diverse. Indeed, as I have suggested, punctuation cannot be separated from these influences.

Overview of Chapters

Chapter One, “Counterpoints: Music, Language, and Intermediality,” begins by examining literary treatments of the interarts, as exemplified in essays Edgar Allen Poe and Andrei Bely. These demonstrate how the figure of music especially serves as an aesthetic ideal, through which writing aspires to give form to a timeless creative spirit.

From a critical point of view, the chapter goes on to establishes the idea of intermediality, which it differentiates from the closed, hierarchical system upon which many experiments in and studies of the interarts operate. In this regard I look to ways in which literature may cultivate its likeness to music by way of its own medium and form.

Theodor Adorno’s essays “Punctuation Marks,” “Music, Language, and their

Relationship in Contemporary Composition,” and “On Some Relationships between

Music and Painting” provide the chapter with the heart of its material on this subject.

Adorno proposes that the arts of literature (including philosophy), painting, and music are conjoined through language, more specifically writing. Most of the texts by Adorno that I analyze are essays, themselves both a critical and literary genre. As we follow the track of his arguments, particular note is given to how the syntactical and compositional structures of his writing actualize the arrangements it describes. Instead of an unchanging and static aesthetic system, we recognize through our analysis that these media are

28 interconnected through their evolving historical nature. The dialectical succession of one written code after another constitutes another level of writing, and this writing, however, is ambivalent to the ideal of unity. The great metaphysical aim is always deferred and

“not here,” but it appears to operate as a motive in art and Adorno’s philosophy alike.

Locating significance in the accidentals of punctuation does not only follow the well- established critical reversal of center and margin, or of essence and accident, within material hermeneutics. Rather, its accidental status as a nonintentional, even dissonant, language of its own ruptures the classical privileging of unity, essence, and wholeness, a rupture modernist aesthetics sought to act out more generally. On this point we turn to an example of how punctuation is involved in modernist intermedial experiments, where they are integral to the staging of a prerevolutionary terrorist plot in Andrei Bely’s

Petersburg. The novel’s material form is orchestrated to this purpose as an extension of the author’s existing theories of the arts. However, the tempo measured out in the novel through the repetition of both structuring and disjointing series of dots is one of entropy, as the narrative builds with anticipation towards the detonation of a ticking time bomb delivered by the son (even wrapped in a newspaper) targeting the father. It can hardly be a coincidence that Leo Trotsky described the 1905 Revolution as beginning over a punctuation mark, in which striking typesetters demanded a pay scale based on the number of characters laid, including punctuation. Revolution, both political and aesthetic, is in other words staged typographically. These are also seen as part of the novel’s depiction of a Dionysian-Apollonian tension, which is in turn thematized in the generational, historical, and political conflicts that brought about the 1905 revolution (a first step in the direction of the revolution that would follow twelve years later).

If modernism is itself an event or rupture into a new era in correlation with new aesthetic principles, the second chapter, which is entitled “Turning Points: Periodizing

New Writing,” argues that temporal and syntactical segmentation or periodization appears as a central topic and practice in modernist writing as well as in writings about modernism. It thus explores avant-gardism as an extreme instantiation of the desire for the new and as itself a formalized militarism that pairs the perceived emergence of a modern era with new technologies of motion and typographic and syntactical revolt. In general, Futurist writings initiate this drive unabashedly in exclamatory self-postulations by writers like F.T. Marinetti (who announce the “future starts here!”). Their example supplies a foil and object lesson for other modernists, such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude

Stein, and Theodor Adorno in their own writings about how modernism happened, or put differently, how it is written and rewritten. In this context, Stein and Woolf remark on the form of their own writings and their relation to their notions of temporality and change.

The second part of the project investigates how similar reflections are also built into novels by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In Chapter Three, “Joyce, Adorno, and the ‘Perverted Commas’ of Inauthenticity,” I situate Joyce’s use of punctuation and other accidentals in his fiction vis-à-vis intersecting tensions between literary realism and linguistic experiment, literature and journalism, speech and print, and repetition and originality. The chapter traces how essays by Theodor Adorno in debate with George

Lukács turn to the recurring example of Joyce Joyce’s work as they break down the traditional aesthetic opposition between essence and accident, a step that Adorno traces in the modernist rejection of realism. Unlike the model of newness typically found in avant- garde aesthetics seen in the previous chapter, Ulysses exemplifies for Adorno the linkage

30 between the rebellion against the realist novel and that against signification. Modernism reacts to the replacement of realist fiction by entertaining reportage, he holds, by emphasizing its own mediation. This calls attention to how the concept of realistic reportage depicted in the novel’s seventh episode intersects with the experimental forms it introduces and adds definition to the roles played by commercial journalism, orality, writing, and the epic. Yet, if “Aeolus” supplies an added basis for the opposition between art and reportage, it also scrutinizes it. In this context, Joyce’s famous renunciation of quotation marks not only loosens demarcations among voices in the narrative, but also rejects the underlying premise of enclosing unique, original, or spoken language and setting it apart from the rest of the narrative.

In contrast to the concept of originality proposed in the very idea of the avant- garde, Joyce represents aesthetic change as an historical fold. I argue that the linguistic and textual experiment of the “Aeolus” chapter chiastically inverts and recasts existing convention (as it is established in the novel) in a pattern that resembles the alternative genealogies between Stephen and Bloom or Hamlet and Shakespeare in other sections of the novel. In this way, Joyce stages the intersecting shift from realism to experimental modernism within the novel’s framework. Set in the building of a newspaper company, the implicit realism of journalism overlaps and contrasts with the Dadaist montage evoked by the chapter’s division under newslike headings.

The project concludes with “Keeping Time in the Space of To the Lighthouse,” which reveals how Woolf’s innovations in To the Lighthouse spatially register temporal change in its narrative and its typographic form. Virginia Woolf uses parentheses and square brackets to register the passing of time, specifically the passage into modernity, in

31 the changing space of the novel. The vacation home in which the novel is set and the painting created by its character Lily Briscoe serve as architectural and visual doubles for the novel in this regard. In the novel’s material composition, the losses are betrayed in the revisions Woolf made to the “Time Passes” section, in which she entered bracketed passages to abruptly mark the most dramatic events of the ten-year interlude. On one hand, the rounded parentheses used throughout the novel are associated with physical presence and communal closeness, as they enclose intimate encounters such as Minta and

Paul’s kiss on the beach or descriptions of physical movements interjected into stream-of- consciousness sequences. On the other hand, the passages surrounded by brackets include information of the deaths of three of the characters, the square mutilation of a fish, the publication of a volume of war poetry, and the reading of Virgil. As a result, death, the empty space it leaves behind, the historical trauma of World War One, and the workings of literary representation are bracketed together, so to say, in an operation resembling the rhetorics of musical motifs and spatial composition. In fact Woolf’s brackets provide an inverted link between the novel and its epic predecessor, alluded to through a volume of

Virgil and Mr. Ramsay’s failed embrace of his absent wife, a scene loosely drawn from the Aeneid. Through its conventional association with editorial deletion and its visual continuity with the empty extended arms of Mr. Ramsay and Aeneas, the bracket performs this shared scene typographically. Through punctuation, the novel’s connection to epic is likewise represented as an absence that connects.

It should be mentioned, finally, just how rapidly scholarship on punctuation has developed since I first began my research in 2008. A number of full-length studies based

32 in philosophy, aesthetics, or interdisciplines have been published recently in the U.S.,

Germany, and France.23 Collectively, however, they have hardly been in dialogue or formed a field, given their disparate foci and the languages in which they are printed.

Many of these studies express the desire to raise the visibility of punctuation marks. The modernist authors with whom this dissertation engages were seeking to do the same. The present dissertation, “New Writing: Modernism, Punctuation, and the Intermedial Text,” though far more focused than most of the publications listed in the footnote, still counts itself among this wave of new, more capacious approaches to the topic of punctuation.

My purpose here is to supply a deeper view of the role of punctuation in writings about modernism as well as the writing of modernism, where its interconnections with formal innovation and intermediality become apparent.

23 In the U.S., Jennifer Devere Brody’s interdisciplinary book Art, Politics, and Punctuation combines the study of textual punctuation with its incarnations in performance and visual arts. Her expansive approach to sculpture and performance art, as well as literary text, suggests that the rhetorical, grammatical, and deictic categories are still far from exhausting the spectrum of punctuation’s possible incarnations. Christine Abbt and Tim Kammasch, the editors of the 2009 Punkt, Punkt, Komma, Strich: Geste, Gestalt und Bedeutung philosophischer Zeichensetzung bring together more than twenty theorists to meditate on the philosophical dimension of punctuation as well as the role of those symbols in philosophical thought. The anthology is unique in stressing that its essays do not consist of linguistic or stylistic studies of single authors. Instead each contribution is dedicated to to an individual symbol, with readings of the marks’ individual usage. Die Poesie der Zeichensetzung: Studien zur Stilistik der Interpunktion (2012) was the product of a team-taught lecture of the same name at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Dedicated by and large to punctuation in German-language literary texts, it covers a range of theoretical approaches to the topic of punctuation from the early modern period to the present. In France, Isabelle Alfandary’s study of the materiality of the letter and punctuation mark in American modernist poetry, La risque de la lettre (2011), brings Lacanian concepts of drives and and the Real to bear on stylistic analysis of poems by Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and John Cage. Isabelle Serça’s Aesthetique et le Ponctuation (2012) explores the concepts of temporal and spatial punctuation as they are used in cinema, painting, architecture, and music, as well as in modern French prose, and Peter Szendy’s A coup de points: La ponctuation comme expérience, a study of punctuation and the Lacanian subject, will appear in 2013.

CHAPTER ONE: COUNTERPOINTS: MUSIC, LANGUAGE, AND INTERMEDIALITY

“Every branch of art strives to express in images something typical, eternal, independent of place and time. It is in music that these vibrations of eternity are most successfully expressed”—Andrei Bely

Comparative readings of the arts have traditionally treated music, architecture, dance, sculpture, drawing, and literary genres as individual arts capable of adapting and assimilating the methods and features of one another. From this perspective they are discrete entities and their interartistic relationships are viewed as border crossings into alien territory or as foreign infiltrations. The study of collaboration and influence, for example among visual artists and authors, often presumes more differences among these modes of expression than it does similarities. From another direction, Richard Wagner’s theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk celebrates the ideal of completely eliminating these borders. Yet this total work of art affirms the aesthetic system that delineates these borders to begin with, by merging the individual arts into a single unitary form.

Inquiries into the interarts descend from a critical tradition classifying them according to the higher and lower orders of the Great Chain of Being. According to

Herbert Schueller, eighteenth-century aestheticians often studied the “correspondences” among the arts with the aim of accessing a rational connection to the harmony of the divine order. From the parallels they traced, they drew the outlines of what they supposed

2 to be a universal, supreme, and unchanging theory of aesthetics.1 Beginning with the

Romantic period, theorists and artists alike modified this view and emphasized the inclusion of human emotion into the system, which, although it was still considered timeless and Absolute, was constantly unfolding and instantiating itself.2 Many modern appreciations of the correspondences are therefore rooted in a metaphysically and spiritually inflected aesthetics organized around the concept of harmonic unity. In this sense, by believing that the categories of each individual art could be transcended to culminate in the Gesamtkunstwerk, the Romantics were even more idealistic than their predecessors. Edgar Allen Poe and early modernist authors such as Charles Baudelaire,

Stéphane Mallarmé, the early Stefan George, and Andrei Bely were influenced by these ideas, even as they introduced new aesthetic standards that modified existing perceptions of the system.3

Within this ideology, music serves as a figure of artistic autonomy and aesthetic purity. In his lecture “The Poetic Principle” (1848), Edgar Allen Poe turns to music as poetry’s ideal aspiration. The concept of musically-inspired poetry is removed from the

1 See, for instance, Du Fresnoy, Charles Alphonse De arte graphica (1688); Dryden, John “Parallel of Poetry and Painting” (1695); Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766); Jones, William. “Essay on the Arts Commonly Called Imitative” (1772); Mason, William. “Instrumental Church Music” The Works of William Mason 3 (1811):285-326; Krause, Karl Christian. Darstellung aus der Geschichte der Musik (1827); Etienne Souriau. La corespondance des arts. 1947; Brown, Calvin. Music and Literature (1948); Munro, Thomas. The Arts and Their Interrelations (1949). 2 See Coleridge, Fragment 2035 and “Lecture Four”; Ruskin, John. Poetry of Architecture (1838) and Modern Painters (1843); Richard Wagner. “Kunstwerk der Zukünft.” (1849); J. W. von Goethe. “Zur Farbenlehre” (1869); See also Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. (1953); 3 For examples, see especially Charles Baudelaire’s “Correspondences,” Roger Fry’s New Directions translation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Poems, Stefan George’s Hymnen, and Andrei Bely’s essay “The Forms of Art.” Edith Sitwell’s “Some Notes on My Own Poetry”; T.S. Eliot’s “The Music of Poetry”

3 fluctuating concerns of daily life and elevates the poet’s attention away from his or her social surroundings. Poe orders both arts into a harmonious aesthetic when he comments,

“An immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man is thus plainly a sense of the

Beautiful. [. . .]. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above” (91-92). He continues, “it is in Music that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles—the creation of supernal Beauty” (93). Instrumental, lyricless music is framed in this instance as an abstract, nonrepresentational extreme of poetic form and in such a way that presumes the correspondences between art forms correlate also to timeless aesthetic truths.

Although Poe’s ideas were very influential on French Symbolism, the Russian

Symbolist, Andrei Bely identified him as an “illusionist” (“Symbolism and

Contemporary Russian Art” 105) and insisted on attending to both the conditions of modern life and the “vibrations of eternity” through the idea of music (“The Forms of

Art” 179). In a 1902 essay, “The Forms of Art,” Bely wrote that “Каждый вид искусства

стремится выразить в образах нечто типичное, вечное, независмое от места и

времени. В музыке наиболее удачна выражаются эти воления вечности” (“Every branch of art strives to express in images something typical, eternal, independent of place and time. It is in music that these vibrations of eternity are most successfully expressed”;

103; 179). Though both writers’ works aspire toward a “supernal beauty,” Poe calls on poets to do away with the world “before us” altogether in their writing. Bely, on the other hand, believes the earthly and the eternal belong to the same universal system and that the underlying structure of their enigmatic relationship can be explored through the interarts.

More specifically, Bely describes how (“В музыке нам открывают тайны движения,

его сущность управляющая миром” (“In music the secrets of movement are opened up to us, the essence of movement that governs the world”; 102; 178). In his novel

Petersburg, which will be discussed in the final section of this chapter, he seeks to capture the great through the minute, the timeless through the hours of a day, and the universal through specificity of place. However, the correlation he draws between the modern world and the eternal is not mimetic, but indirect. Bely seeks to acknowledge the artist’s situation in an imperfect, not totalized, modernity, although he does not give up on the unified and ideal system in which he positions it.

According to Bely, the order of the universe is characterized by an inner,

“unfathomable” (бездонность) structure (181). Unlike the mimetic arts, music, he imagines, engages with the intervening constitutive motions of daily life as well as the order that rules it: “Зодчество, скулптура и живопись заняты образами

действительности, музыка—внутренней стороной этих образов, т.е. движением,

управляющим ими” (“Architecture, sculpture and painting are concerned with the images of reality, music—with the inner aspect of those languages, i.e. with the movement that governs them”; 100; 175). All art is deeply concerned with its relationship to empirical reality for Bely; that is, experience provides the sustenance without which art could not be created. However, the more abstract the art form, the stronger its relationship to both reality and the “eternal” is. Music, therefore, is distinct from other art forms not only because of its mode of mediation, but because what it represents or expresses is altogether different. Rather than expressing ideas or images, it expresses what he calls their timeless essence by capturing their “movement” (движение) and

“rhythm” (ритм). This is notable in view of the role of tempo and time in Petersburg, which is dominated by the ticking of a time-bomb. He comments,

В музыке постигается сущность движения; во всех бесконечных

мирах эта сущность одна и та же. Музыкой выражается единство,

связующее эти миры, бывшие, сущие и имеющие существовать в

будущем. Бесконечное совершествование постепенно приближает нас

к сознательному пониманию этой сущности. Надо надеяться, что нам

возможно приблизиться в будушиваемся к этой сущности . . . (101;

ellipses in original)

In music the essence of movement is apprehended; in all infinite worlds

this essence is one and the same. It is music that expresses the unity which

links all these worlds, those that have been, those that are, and those that

have yet to be in the future. The infinite process of perfection is gradually

bringing us closer to a conscious understanding of that essence. We have

to hope that it will be possible for us to come close to such an

understanding in the future. In music we listen unconsciously to that

essence. In music we can catch hints of a future perfection. (176)

As he repeatedly writes, “Музыке—о будущем”; ‘music is about the future’ (101; 177).

The verbal and participial basis of the Russian word for future implies an ongoing action of “will be-ing”: the noun is itself a verbal form. As a temporal art, music is never still or stable, which it shares with the idea of the future’s present unfolding, where the future is necessarily deferred.

Thus Bely believed that by “incorporating a musical structure into a work of literature,” he could access a higher form of art “sought by the Symbolists more generally” (Janacek, “Rhythm” 12). To this end, he wrote four prose narrative

“symphonies” between 1902 and 1908. Like the symphonic form, the overarching structure of three of these narratives is arranged into four movements. These themselves are divided into subsections, consisting of as few as one and as many as 35 numbered sequences. Each of these segments range from one sentence to a paragraph in length.

Their text resembles free verse in its visual layout, and as Gerald Janacek points out, repeated patterns in the language have the effect of a leitmotif (12). He remarks further,

“Of course, significant internal details of symphonic form, such as contrasting tempos and keys, are missing, since they are unrealizable in a literary medium.” The unrealizable and “unfathomable” was, however, precisely the aspect of music that interested Bely. The musical quality for which he aimed had very little to do with sound. Instead, it involved an evocation of what he hoped to be an eternal structure, which in the case of the

Symphonies and Petersburg manifests in the layout of the literary page. In fact, the qualities of music that Janacek identifies as most inaccessible to literary narrative are precisely the elements to which Bely dedicates his attention by enhancing his attention to the visual nature of his texts. By attending to the mise-en-page that would normally be treated as invisible during the process of novel reading, he extends a temporal-spatial link between the traditional arts of music, literary narrative, and pictorial depiction. Whether or not it was successful, his rejection of the paragraph form in favor of grouped and numbered sentences was an attempt at literary tempo and compositional coherence. These serve, in place of the conjunction and logical transition inherent in narrative, to establish

7 a paratactic pattern within the work and to relate it to a larger symbolic order. The use of spacing, punctuation, and page layout furthermore function in Bely’s literary works as a bridge between the temporal and the spatial arts. Bely’s method of accessing the musical in his novels makes use of the very medium that differentiates the two arts most, the story’s written form. In this way, the unresolvable difference between the two media is made use of. The ideal that all arts are the expression of a great creative force, or God, persists as the motive behind his experiments.

This chapter treats punctuation, broadly defined, as a modern intermedial device, a term I use in place of interartistic. The model of interrelation that the typical idea of the sister arts depends upon hierarchizes forms of human expression and privileges music’s abstraction as providing a particular link to a divine or utopian order. Even if the interarts transgress traditional boundaries between themselves, their crossings identify and affirm the distinction between art genres by necessitating the imitative crossing or absorption in the first place. In my use of the term intermediality, I suggest that as W. J.

T. Mitchell writes, “all media are mixed media” (6) to a certain extent already, which is not the same as saying that they are the same. My selection of Andrei Bely’s example is not coincidental. In the readings of essays by Theodor Adorno that follow, I trace how the musiclike element of literature emerges from its own written medium, not from a crossing, mixing, or totalizing action. Locating significance in the accidentals of punctuation does not only follow the established critical reversal of center and margin, or essence and accident. Rather, its “accidental” status as a nonintentional, even dissonant, language ruptures the classical privileging of unity, essence, and wholeness, a rupture modernist aesthetics sought to act out or engage more generally.

“In keinem ihrer Elemente ist die Sprache so musikähnlich wie in den Satzzeichen” —Theodor Adorno

In “Über einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei” (1965), Theodor

Adorno critiques the practice of imitative or merged art forms when he writes that “Das

Wagnersche Gesamtkunstwerk und seine Derivate waren der Traum jener Konvergenz als abstrakte Utopie, ehe die Medien selbst sie gestatteten. Es mißglückte durch

Vermischung der Medien, anstatt des Übergangs des einen ins andere durchs eigene

Extrem hindurch” (“Über einige” 637); (“The Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk and its derivatives were the dream of that convergence as abstract utopia, before the media themselves permitted it. It failed by mixing media, instead of making the transition from each to the other by way of its own extremity”) (74). Here he identifies the

Gesamtkunstwerk as a purely theoretical and abstract construct, which is the offspring of a dreamlike utopianism. It prematurely forces distinct media together, which produces a hybrid, mixed-medium, not the coherent and unified form intended. On the other hand,

Adorno’s own ideal of intermediality consists of each medium having an extreme through which it passes into the other. These clauses are difficult to paraphrase, first because one has the choice of interpreting “extreme” in two very different ways. Is the extreme an extremity, an outer limit or border of music where it ceases to be itself? Or is it extremely itself, as in extremely loud, or as musical as music can be? The second difficulty is that

Adorno manages to sketch this without any predicate. Another, more literal translation of the clause would be: “instead of the segue of one into the other straight through its own extreme.” The segue, like any transition, bridges two musical compositions together while maintaining their independence from one another. The passage is made

10 emphatically with the “durch […] hindurch.” My understanding, which will be supported by further passages, is that painting and music meet in a connecting crossover that lies in the midst of their respective mediums. This crossover, we will see, is writing. By reading these related essays side-by-side, we will gain a far more complex understanding of the epigraph above, which states that language is its most musiclike in its punctuation marks.

Aside from the model of relation described above, Adorno observes two opposing trends among the interrelation of media: first, the method of treating one art as if it were the other; and second, a reaction to the first, of attempting to purge an artistic genre of all external influences. In contrast, his own commentary pursues these tendencies until the demarcations around which they are organized collapse. Even in regard to the inscrutable difference between music as a temporal art and painting as a spatial one, he shows the obvious ways in which each is fundamentally impossible without the other. Put differently, the perceived orientation of music and painting each around a single dimension is exaggerated. He claims instead, “Konvergieren Malerei und Musik nicht durch Anähnelung, so treffen sie sich in einem Dritten: beide sind Sprache” (“If painting and music do not converge by means of growing similarity, they do meet in a third dimension: both are language”; 633; 71). The junction, segue, or crossover from the former passage is identified in this latter one. The convergence is not an absorption, but an intersection that is conducted through a third intervening medium. Music and painting each constitute language, in the singular, which is to say that they are not merely brought into contact through their shared status as languages of sorts. We will return to this triangulation later in this section after establishing more clearly what sort of language is being designated.

Let us turn to another essay, written almost ten years earlier, in which Adorno had traced similar connections in regard to music and language. In “Musik, Sprache und ihr

Verhältnis im gegenwärtigen Komposition” (1956), he specifies a series of linguistic devices shared by the two media. These structural features also share the same names of the same language:

Nicht nur als organisierter Zusammenhang von Lauten ist die Musik analog

zur Rede, sprachähnlich, sondern in der Weise ihres konkreten Gefüges.

Die traditionelle musikalische Formenlehre weiß von Satz, Halbsatz,

Periode, Interpunktion; Frage, Ausruf, [Parenthese;]4 Nebensätze finden

sich überall, Stimmen heben und senken sich, und in all dem ist der Gestus

von Musik der Stimme entlehnt, die redet (649; [“Fragment” 251]).

(Not only as an organized relation of sounds is music, in analogy to

discourse, languagelike, but in the manner of its concrete structure. The

traditional musical theory of form/morphology knows of the sentence,

phrase, period, punctuation, question, exclamation, [parenthesis;]

subordinate clauses find themselves everywhere, voices rise and fall, and in

all of these things the gesture is taken over from the music of the voice that

speaks.)

The actual features described by the shared terms derive, he speculates in the last sentence, from the common ancestor of the voice. Yet the opening introduces the sequence of similarities as clearly exceeding acoustical likeness. The languagelike elements listed do not have independent sounds; in themselves they are silent. Instead

4 “Parenthese” or parenthesis is included only in the shorter, first publication, “Fragment über Musik und Sprache” (1953).

12 they are the tools by which pieces or units of the composition are inflected and brought together, or are concretely gefügt. In fact, these analogies are drawn between the musical forms that correlate with those syntactical and rhetorical forms marked by punctuation in literary writing. They are designated by the non-phonetic and silent graphemes in written language. The compositional analogies are enriched by their components’ shared names.

Consequently, the terms illustrate not only the overlapping rhetorical purposes of the linguistic and musical forms, but how the shared vocabulary—in German, as in

English—used to describe them contributes to the coincidence, ambiguity, or intercourse between them. Although there are some words music and language are not obliged to share, Adorno makes no effort to avoid the language of language to describe music.5

These compositional features and the words by which they are named guide the listener through a process of reading. What they tell us is that the coherence of the composition and its concrete fabric in music and language are analogous to one another. The two are not fused as a single musicolinguistic entity, but co-positioned alongside one another through their shared language of composition, which composes even their relationship to one another.

This bears some scrutiny. The overlapping diction in the following excerpt illustrates that languagelikeness is a determining factor in making music musical, not mere sound, because it lends it a sensible and regulated system of organization. By the same token, music can become too predictable as a result:

5 For example, he writes, “Sprachähnlich ist sie als zeitliche Folge artikulierter Laute, die mehr sind als bloß Laut. Sie sagen etwas, oft ein Menschliches. Sie sagen es desto nachdrücklicher, je höher die Musik geartet ist” (“It is language-like as a chronological sequence of articulated sounds, they are more than mere sound. They say something, often something human. The higher the style of music it is, the more emphatically they say it”; “Musik, Sprache” 649; my italics).

Sie benutzt wiederkehrende Sigel. Geprägt wurden sie von der Tonalität.

Wenn nicht Begriffe, so zeitigte diese doch Vokabeln: vorab die stets

wieder mit identischer Funktion einzusetzenden Akkorde, auch

eingeschliffene Verbindungen wie die der Kadenzstufen, vielfach selbst

melodische Floskeln, welche die Harmonie umschreiben.

It uses returning ciphers. They became imprinted by tonality. If not

concepts, they at least brought about vocabulary: first the chords inserted

again and again with the same function, used up combinations like those

of the steps of cadence as well, often even the melodic clichés that

indirectly describe the harmony. (649-50; my italics)

The scheme of tonality has been the defining system of composition within modern western music. In it, chords are structured around a referential tonic, which in effect

“manage[s] expectation and structure[s] desire” (Hyer). With the twentieth century, however, composers began breaking with this tradition more dramatically. For Adorno, it has stood as a symbol of arbitrary authority, institutionalized and thereby naturalized as the system upon which compositions were to be unquestionably based. Because its materials always served the same function in the composition, they had taken on an ossified predictability. Exposing it as mere second-nature, the Viennese classical composer Arnold Schönberg replaced it with atonal compositional concepts and techniques lacking “contextual definition in reference to triads, diatonic scales or keys” and in some cases came close to abolishing the “hierarchical distinctions among pitches” altogether (Lansky). Schönberg’s innovation again and again exemplifies in Adorno’s writing the breaking of existing aesthetic standards, the precise timing of which makes it

14 meaningful. In the passage above tonality is characterized as a languagelike system that lends music coherence and meaning, by stamping music’s components as signs within the compositional structure. They actually become meaningless empty phrases, he explains, because their encoded signification arises from their repeated use. Yet the possibility of transforming these conventions is also languagelike and is suggested on one hand through

Adorno’s own defamiliarizing treatment of language in the two passages above.6 The dual applicability of terms used in the comparisons—such as sentence, punctuation, and phrase—repeatedly draws attention to the fact of their intermedial co-incidence, in excess of their applications in the context of one art or the other. As a result, the two contexts are con-fused with one another, as is the question of where their similarities in structure and name begin and end. In other words, although Adorno refers to the languagelikeness of music, the analogy moves in both directions. The ambiguous play of names releases the words from the determinacy associated with their naming function and as a result reveals what is considered their musiclikeness.7 This confusing language, which gives way from one medium’s system of composition to the other’s is beginning to sound a great deal like the écriture of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, certainly not only in its status as writing, but

6 See Paddison. 7 Susan Bernstein writes of the music-language comparison that “music becomes a dummy figure for reflecting language, a figure for language’s failure or inability to explain itself linguistically” (Virtuosity 55). Furthermore “this musical character plays an important part in the critique of metaphysics emphasizing the historicity of articulation and the materiality of subjectivity.” Peter Dayan similarly remarks, “Music provides a privileged vocabulary drawing on the history of interpretation of music that understands it as disruptive of a logocentric organization of meaning – a disruption that privileges precisely the discursive extension of enunciation. The critical potential of musical analogy lies in the nonoppositional and nonhierarchical relationship between composition and performance. Yet these terms tend to be immediately co-opted by a linguistic orientation and are called in to mend a linguistic problem encountered in binary terms” (52).

15 in its deconstructive operations and effects on closed systems of composition and aesthetics. Adorno’s understanding of new music develops out of this class of writing. As the example of the scheme of tonality above suggests, what is at first viewed as an unchanging and universal principle of form may give way to new compositional principles (which in turn become the new norms in need of overturning). The next paragraphs will show how the materiality of this writing, its typeface, punctuation, and compositor-related constituents, serve as a powerful figure and instrument in the process of aesthetic reform, or in identifying the opening through which the new can emerge.

The title of the essay, “Music, Language, and their Relationship in Contemporary

Composition,” implicates “composition” (Komponieren) in the relation between music and language. This activity (the German term is a gerund and does not refer to the composed product) refers to the rhetorical assembly of words in oratory and writing, the

“due arrangement of words into sentences, and of sentences into periods; the art of constructing sentences and of writing prose or verse” (“composition, n”). Precisely this activity—if we recall from this document’s Introduction—constituted the earliest practices of punctuation in the Greco-Roman tradition of letters. Punctuating consisted of segmenting scriptura continua texts into paragraphos, comma, colon, and periodos. In drawing or painting, composition is used in the service of “arranging in due order the parts [. . .] to form a harmonious whole.” In music, it similarly describes the act or art of composing a musical work, often vis-à-vis canonical rules of harmony. In each of its artistic senses, it is conducted in concert with established principles of “wholeness” and

“harmony.”

In fact, as we will see, the composition history of this essay—from what can be divined from its publications—itself dramatizes the music-language analogies this chapter has been outlining. The essay (which for simplicity’s sake will be referred to as

“Composition”) was written as a reproduction and extension of the 1953 “Fragment über

Musik und Sprache” (hitherto known as “Fragment”). The implication is that his second publication was a type of musical reinterpretation of the first. Publications of

“Composition” do not only continue as the sequel to the “Fragment,” but reproduce the initial work in its first twelve paragraphs, which undergo minimal revision. Two blank lines follow the textual reprise to indicate an ambiguous demarcation of difference between it and the fourteen new paragraphs that follow. Judging from the 1956 change in title, the fragmented nature of the first essay and its subject would, one would expect, be completed through the introduction of modern musical composition into the investigation, particularly because of composition’s association with canonical, harmonic form. Ironically, “Composition” did not replace its predecessor; instead “Fragment” has maintained its autonomy from the latter essay. Though the second version was satisfactory enough to Adorno to be printed twice in a single year, he selected the original fragment for inclusion in his 1963 volume Quasi una fantasia. Consequently it remained the more authoritative version, while the other was only posthumously included in the appendix of the third volume of Musikalische Schriften. Its editor Rolf Tiedemann remarks that the choice to include the full version of “Composition” in this way (“diese anhangsweise mitzuteilen”) was determined by the interest of its content (“sachliche

Bedeutung der vollständigeren Version”) on one hand and its possible incompleteness

“[E]rgänzungsbedürtig[keit]” and what Heinz-Klaus Metzger called its “dubios” status on the other (680).

The confusions accompanying the essays’ publications reflect the difficulties posed by the so-called musical element of writing, particularly in Adorno’s oeuvre.8 The revision of the fragment is paradoxically both “vollständig,” complete, and possibly in need of completion—“ergänzungsbedürftig.” Adorno writes in these very works that to treat language as though it were music would be to treat it as “a broken-off parable”

(“Musik, Sprache” 651). As an illustrative story that does not succeed in demonstrating an external principle, a broken-off parable must be the narrative equivalent of an empty signifier. It follows that the “Fragment,” as a literary form, would be considered at least music-like insofar as it does not fully disclose itself or come to completion. The scrutiny of the authoritative and complete status of the revised version makes also the extension of the fragment fragment- and therefore music-like. Read together, the echoes of key phrases and formulations shared by the essays (sprachähnlich, musikähnlich, musiksprachlich) vary on one another and mark out an approximate and unconcluded territory characterized by their potential likenesses (and not by a dialectical absorption realized with a third term). The essays on music and language, themselves essais or

“attempts,” appear in more ways than one to be musikähnliche linguistic forms.

In correlation to the aesthetic principles associated with the term “compose” are the material counterparts of the arts, where physical objects are arranged, ordered, joined, and built in spatial relation to one another. This class of positioning is also denoted in the term more generally. In writing, notably, it designates the technical arrangement of

8 See Gillespie.

18 setting type or “composing [] pages of matter for printing” (“composition, n”) as well.

Our interest in it lies in its dual nature as aesthetic and conceptual on one hand and material or even mechanical on the other. In view of nineteenth-century anxieties regarding mass print production (which, it will be shown, is echoed in the threat of mass revolution in Petersburg), Susan Bernstein writes that “Perhaps the printer’s composition

[…] must be understood as a metaphoric double of what comes to be called the ‘ideal’ composition of the poet or musical composer” (Virtuosity 22-23).9 This metaphor, in other words, privileges the creative genius of the ideal composer and renders the material compositor its unequal, mechanical double. We are discovering instances here, on the other hand, in which the two acts of composition become indistinguishable and the hierarchy upon which they are positioned collapses, particularly when the discourse concerns comparisons of music, painting, and language. Even in the text of Adorno’s essays and their translations, language and music come together through their composed inscriptions (i.e. musikähnliche Sprache, sprachähnliche Musik, musiksprachlich), in the togetherness of compound word forms, in the flexibility of German word construction, and in the hyphens that join “language-” and “like” in English.

It has often been noted that Adorno’s style of writing dramatizes on a formal level much of what it posits in a propositional manner.10 In this way, the language assembled to

9 Jerome McGann pursues this not as a metaphor, but as an “analogy between ‘composition’ as it concerns the typographer and ‘composition’ as it concerns the visual artist. [. . .]. ‘Composition’ is an activity of musicians, and the printed page may equally be produced as a kind of musical score, or set of directions for the audition of verse and voice” (Black Riders 83) 10 In Negative Dialektik Adorno writes, “was in ihr zuträgt, entscheidet, nicht These oder Position; das Gewebe, nicht der deduktive oder induktive, eingleisige Gedankengang. Daher ist Philosophie wesentlich nicht referierbar. Sonst wäre sie überflüssig” (44); (“it is what happens in philosophy that is decisive, not a thesis or position; its fabric, not the

19 describe the languagelikeness of music itself appears musiclike. Of the very few revisions made to the section of “Composition” that had previously appeared in “Fragment,” the revision of the following sentence rearranges the relationship between music and language represented in its earlier version through a compositorial change. Adorno changes “Gegenüber der meinenden Sprache ist Musik eine von ganz anderem Typus”

(“Opposed to intentional language, music is one of a completely different type”;

“Fragment” 252) to “Gegenüber der meinenden Sprache ist Musik Sprache nur als eine von ganz anderem Typus” (“Opposed to intentional language, music is language only as one of a completely different type”; “Musik, Sprache” 650; my italics). On a visual level, the insertion of “Sprache” beside “Musik” brings the two words side-by-side on the page for the first time in the essay, which forms an initial step toward the compound formation of musiksprachlich introduced in the second part of the essay. If typographically the two approach one another, symbolically they are separated from an equating or metaphorical

“is” by the “as” of simile. In the first version music is a completely different type of language, but a language it is. The revised sentence signifies more forcefully by identifying “eine,” but at the same time a distance is inserted: instead of being a language, music is as or like a language of a completely different type compared with intentional language. The double movement is a variation on the dialectical tension traced everywhere in Adorno’s writing and that his own writing praises in music. This is single-track train of thought, whether deductive or inductive. For this reason it is essential to philosophy that it is not summarizable. If it were, it would be superfluous”; qtd in Jarvis 128-29). Many scholars (see Nicholsen, Gillespie, Tiedemann) have described Adorno’s writing as musical, in the sense that, as Simon Jarvis describes it, “Both philosophy and music have a constitutive internal organization, whose articulation is as essential to the meaning of a philosophical text or musical composition as the individual propositions or thematic elements without which there would be no composition at all” (129).

20 reinforced with the term Typus, which refers to categories of mediation and connotes the material type of the page. Music and symbolic language would be like two different types, typographies, alphabets, or styles of Schrift. By association, the kind of language with which music is aligned is the language of material type. This material writing, instead of serving as a supplement to or record of intentional or signifying language, binds and differentiates literature and music. Pursuing this briefly, we recognize two counterbalances: the type’s language/the intentional language (as terms and as descriptors of the sentences) and is/as (as metaphor and analogy). All are equally at work in the process of revision.

The “als” inserted is a cornerstone of Adorno’s writing and its repetitions collaborate with the “ähnlich” compounds of these two essays to establish a logic of simile. Both works begin as follows: “Musik ist sprachähnlich. Ausdrücke wie musikalisches Idiom, musikalischer Tonfall, sind keine Metaphern. Aber Musik ist nicht

Sprache. Ihre Sprachähnlichkeit weist den Weg ins Innere, doch auch ins Vage. Wer

Musik wörtlich als Sprache nimmt, den führt sie irre” (“Music is languagelike.

Expressions like musical idiom and musical intonation are not metaphors. But music is not language. Its languagelikeness leads us in the direction of the inside, but also somewhere vague. Who takes music literally/by its word as language will be led into confusion by it”; 649). On one hand, the words shared by language about language and language about music draw our attention to the similarity, but language here does what it always does, it signifies something that exceeds itself, that is not identical with itself (as performed music would do). Here it names music as its foil or as a figure of language’s

21 own incommensurability.11 If the reader mistakes words as equivalence and treats music as a word—wörtlich—literally as a naming language, the “Inner” he or she pursues turns out to be “Irre.” “Inner” becomes “Irre” when the similarity between n and r is treated as identity. The resemblance between the two words has to do with their wordliness, their material, their letters, and the type from which they are composed, but not what they might signify.

At the same time the music-language relation dramatized in his writings also takes place on a propositional level. The two essays on music and language are collected in

Musikalische Schriften, a title which Rolf Tiedemann, the editor of Adorno’s Collected

Writings, describes as “kaum zufällig” (674) and writes that Adorno himself selected it as the subtitle for both Klangfiguren (Sound-figures)and Quasi una Fantasia (after

Beethoven Op. 27 No. 1 and 2). According to Tiedemann it would be a mistake to call the essays collected in the 16th volume of the collected works, Schriften über Musik or

Aufsätzen zur Musik, (Writings on or about Music or Essays to/on Music). He cites

Heinz-Klaus Metzger:

seine Musikbücher sind keine Bücher über Musik. Nie hat Adornos

Philosophie ihren Anspruch dahin zurückgenommen, die Alternative

zwischen dem musikalischen Denken und dem Denken über Musik

11 In considering the dilemma of music-language comparisons in Romantic texts, Susan Bernstein premises that “The problem of talking about music, entrenched as it is in issues of performance, repetition, broadcasting, transmission, and vibration, mirrors a problem of language more generally, a difficulty in speaking about language’s own performance” (3). Music and language serve as foils for one another. For the present purposes, what is most notable is how neither music nor literary language cross into one another, but rather underscore the less attended features that resemble the other already existing in each. Perhaps for this reason, Bernstein resists translating what Adorno calls musikähnlich or sprachähnlich as musical or linguistic, but instead as music- or language-like.

anzuerkennen [. . .]. [. . .]. Einzigartig steht Adornos oeuvre dafür ein, daß

Sache und Begriff nicht äußerlich einander zuzuordnen, sondern in der

Anstrengung des dialektischen Prozesses durcheinander zu vermitteln

sind, soll ihre Identität, welche ihre Erkenntnis heißt, irgend aufblitzen.

(qtd. in Tiedemann “Editorische Nachbemerkung” 675)

his music-books are not books about music. Adorno’s philosophy has

never yet withdrawn its claim to recognize the choice between musical

thought and thought about music [. . .] Adorno’s oeuvre uniquely vouches

that thing and concept aren’t to be artificially assigned to one another, but

are to be mediated through one another in the tension of the dialectical

process, should their identity, which is the name of their

realization/cognition, flash somewhere.

Here the emphasis is on how the volume’s title reflects not merely the content of its essays, but the nature of their thought process. Both Tiedemann’s and Metzger’s formulations are suggestive of the difference between the adjective form and the form mediated by the prepositions über or zu. The adjective form indicates not merely that the books’ essays are about music, but recapitulates how the writings are modified by their content. What we are left with are musical writings, writing that is itself musical. The present discussion has been emphasizing the intermedial form and process of this

“Denken” or “thought.” To be precise, it takes place in writing—writing, as a process of thinking with material as well as signifying qualities, that is, as a process that is both music-like and language-like. Adorno writes dialectic at the same time that he describes it. Tiedemann also draws attention to the noun Schriften by distinguishing between

23 writings and essays. Schrift (writing, or script) is far more ambiguous and therefore evocative than Aufsatz or (Metzger’s) Buch. Musikalische Schriften could also be paraphrased as musical “systems of signs.”

In “Fragment” and “Composition,” writing is clearly foregrounded as Adorno develops the comparisons between language and music. In continuation of the passage that opens the essay discussed above, Adorno explains that interpretation is not

“accidental to music,” but is an integral component of it (“Darum gehört die Idee der

Interpretation zur Musik selber und ist ihr nicht akzidentell”; “Musik, Sprache” 651). Its performance requires the ability “to speak its language correctly” (“Musik richtig spielen aber ist zuvörderst ihre Sprache richtig sprechen”), yet “this demands imitation, not deciphering” (“Diese erheischt Nachahmung, nicht Dechiffrierung”). The languagelikeness of music then extends into the ways in which it is understood and received. Whereas reception is usually considered secondary to the work, Adorno insists that interpretation is essential to music. This is, of course, incontrovertible in the case of instrumental performance. What he is getting at, slowly, is the determining and inscribing role of understanding more generally, which recalls the work of early scribes who used punctuation as an interpretive instrument as they copied. The following quote likens the advanced reading of music to “silent reading” and states finally that a musical treatment of language would be the equivalent of copying its text by hand:

Nur in der mimetischen Praxis, die freilich zur stummen Imagination

sublimiert sein mag nach Art des stummen Lesens, erschließt sich Musik;

niemals einer Betrachtung, die sie unabhängig in ihrem Vollzug deutet.

Wollte man in den meinenden Sprachen einen Akt dem musikalischen

vergleichen, es wäre eher das Abschreiben eines Textes als dessen

signifikative Auffassung. (651)

Music is accessible only through mimetic praxis, which could still be

sublimated into a silent imagination in the manner of silent reading; never

through an observation that it independently refers to in its performance. If

one wished to compare an act in intentional language to a musical one, it

would be more of a transcription of a text than its significative

understanding.

The musiclike treatment of language involves its textual rather than spoken transmission.

The comparison centers on script, rewriting as an understanding, or understanding as reinscribing. In the essay “Voraussetzungen” (1960), Theodor Adorno offers a similarly intermedial mode of reception. He interprets Hans Helms’ musicolinguistic text Fa:

M’ahniesgwow by focusing on the features it shares with nonrepresentational arts and reads the experimental post-modernist text without documenting an explanatory and definitive “understanding” of it. “To translate [art] into concepts,” he explains, would be to fully “misunderstand” it (431). An alternative approach to interpretation results when the reader is “immersed in [the work’s] immanent movement” (“in seiner immanenten

Bewegung darin ist”) or when the work “is recomposed by the ear in accordance with its own logic, repainted by the eye, when the linguistic sensorial speaks along with it”

(“sobald es vim Ohr seiner je Eugene Logic nacho nochmals komponiert, vom Auge gemalt, vom sprachlichem Sensorium mitgesprochen wird”; 97; 433). He describes this mode of reading as a following, a repetition, or tracing, rather than a translation or explanation. The extreme experiments of Helms’ work place Adorno’s intermedial

25 method (not exclusively concept-driven) of reading into relief, but the implication remains that all literary texts could be approached in this way.

Writing also emerges in the comparison of music and painting. In the piece with which this section began, “Über einige Relationen über Musik und Malerei,” Adorno introduces a narrower category of shared language: écriture, a term drawn from Daniel-

Henry Kahnweiler, the Parisian art dealer and critic to whom the essay is dedicated.

Painting, Kahnweiler theorizes in his monograph on Cubist painting, is a form of writing, an encoded and decipherable écriture. Audiences find Cubism illegible, he explains, because they are unfamiliar with its iconic vocabulary. The subjects of realist painting are also recognized through a system of references and not simply because of the image’s resemblance to its content. Kahnweiler holds that the painting’s viewer processes and translates the work’s two-dimensional language into his or her knowledge and experience of objects in a three-dimensional empirical world. Écriture, for him accordingly, constitutes the pattern of references by which a work of music or painting is communicated, or according to which it is composed and received (Confessions esthétique). This system of references is replaced and renewed (“deformed”) with each new movement. In other words, it is not a universal or historically stable set of signs, but is repeatedly established. Adorno explains, “Darum ist écriture geschichtlichen Wesens: modern. Sie wird frei kraft dessen, was man in der Malerei, mit einem fatalen Ausdruck,

Abstraktion zu nennen sich gewöhnt hat, durch Absehen von der Gegenständlichkeit”

(“écriture has a historical character; it is modern. It is set free on the strength of what in painting, with a devastating expression, people have taken to calling abstraction, through distraction from its representationality”; 634; 71-72). Écriture traces new paths of

26 correlations between the painting and the objects the painting represents.12 In the context of Kahnweiler’s position, the historical nature of écriture, as Adorno uses it here, consists of its replacement of existing convention, which is also écriture. Ever changing, it is characterized by successive artistic movements and the codes they adopt. By extension, music and painting resemble one another in the processes by which their languages are written and rewritten. We will consider if the pattern of this process is also writing.

To relate back to Derrida’s writing of the same name, in Adorno’s discourse the writing of the writing, or the historical language by which écriture is rewritten, is in itself a performance of difference and temporal deferral. In his own tracing of these, Adorno inevitably locates the movement of dialectic in innumerable variations. Even in its negative form, it dictates a predetermined path and pattern by which history develops.13

The historical movement by which conventions succeed one another is the very pattern that music’s form captures. It appears that the dialectic that Adorno uncovers may itself be a variation of the very universal ideals valorized by Poe and Bely at the start of this chapter. This is to say that dialectic constitutes an eternal tempo. Through its series of

12 See also: “In jüngeren Debatten zumal über die bildende Kunst ist der Begriff der écriture relevant geworden, angeregt wohl durch Blätter Klees, die einer gekritzelten Schrift sich nähern. Jene Kategorie der Moderne wirft als Scheinwerfer Licht über Vergangenes; alle Kunstwerke sind Schriften, nicht erst die, die als solche auftreten, und zwar hieroglyphenhafte, zu denen der Code verloren war und zu deren Gehalt nicht zuletzt beiträgt, daß er fehlt. Sprache sind Kunstwerke nur als Schrift” (“In recent aesthetic debates, especially in the fine arts, the concept of écriture has become relevant, inspired probably by Klee’s drawings, which approximate scrawled writing. Like a searchlight, this category of modern art illuminates the art of the past; all artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content. Artworks are language only as writing”; Ästhetische Theorie 189; 124) 13 My understanding of this is indebted to Lacoue-Labarthe’s “Caesur de la Spéculation” and an unpublished essay, “Characterization, Animation, and Physiognomy: Adorno’s Method and Script” by Susan Bernstein.

27 dialectical reversals, the path of each essay is also prescribed, even if it is ongoing. The pattern by which his thought proceeds follows a rhythmic and agonistic back-and-forth and to that extent remains always already predetermined and composed within his vision of it. For him, this writing traces the pattern of the dialectical process that all arts follow.

Like Derrida’s écriture, it follows a sequence of deferrals and displacements; however it leads, ultimately and implicitly, to the very utopian unity or telos that deconstruction opposes. Yet still, insofar as Adorno’s negative dialectic reiterates deferral, destabilization, reversal, and unresolvability, its process resembles Derrida’s écriture itself.

The same essay goes on to a long citation of Walter Benjamin’s “Über Sprache

überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” which is among the essays that Adorno had edited in 1955 (Schriften I-II). Here Benjamin also writes of an intermedial language.

He speculates that the language present in plastic and pictorial arts

etwa in gewissen Arten von Dingsprachen fundiert sei, daß in ihnen eine

Übersetzung der Sprache der Dinge in eine unendliche viel höhere

Sprache, aber doch vielleicht derselben Sphäre, vorliegt. Es handelt sich

hier um namenlose, unakustische Sprachen, um Sprachen aus dem

Material; dabei ist die materiale Gemeinsamkeit der Dinge in ihrer

Mitteilung zu denken. (Benjamin qtd. in Adorno 633-634)

may be grounded in certain kinds of object languages, that in them what

we find is a translation of the language of things into an infinitely higher

language, but perhaps, after all, one that belongs to the same sphere. We

have to do here with name-less, non-acoustic languages, languages from

the material; here one should reflect on the material commonality of things

in their communication. (Benjamin qtd. in Adorno 71)

This Dingsprache resembles the nonintentional, immanent, and material meaning Adorno locates in writing. The material commonality is teilt mit, communicated, but also shared and divided. Adorno continues to say that writing acts as a “figure” of painting and music’s “essential form” (“die Figuren ihres Durchgebildetseins sind ihre Schrift”; 634); the individual work “speaks” through its form and through the “way [it is] constructed”

(“Sie sprechen durch ihre Beschaffenheit, nicht dadurch, daß sie sich vortragen”). Its

“character as writing” has nothing “concrete to be expressed” (72), but its expressive element moves the work “toward something that is not its own phenomenon and that cannot be hidden in symbolic unity”; (“was sein Phänomen nicht selbst ist und was auch weder in symbolischer Einheit in ihm sich versteckt”; 635). In other words, although it is described as speaking and is materially present, Dingsprache’s signification performs deferred difference rather than vocal plenitude. It exceeds propositional signification and seems to speak out in spite of itself as its own side-effect.

It is worth pausing to attend more closely to the Benjamin essay from which

Adorno draws. There Benjamin calls language “das auf Mitteilung geistiger Inhalte gerichtete Prinzip in den betreffenden Gegenständen” (“the principle directed toward communicating/sharing/dividing the spiritual contents of the objects concerned”; “Über

Sprache” 140). He proceeds, “der größere oder geringere Bewusstseinsgrad, mit dem solche Mitteilung scheinbar (oder wirklich) verbunden ist, kann daran nichts ändern, dass wir uns völlige Abwesenheit der Sprache in nichts vorstellen können” (“the greater or lesser degree of consciousness that is apparently (or really) involved in such

29 communication cannot alter the fact that we cannot imagine a total absence of language in anything”; 141; 315). Words and the act of naming constitute the language of man, whereas the language of things wordlessly communicates (mitteilt, shares with, divides into parts with) their mental entities. However, Benjamin suggests that the latter language bears traces of the human practices of naming and pronouncing prophecy, which was coextensive with the identification and interpretation of the signs man located in patterns in the sky or in the creases of the hand, for instance.14 Although these points and lines in nature have no intention or subjectivity of their own, a predetermined future is thought to be communicated through them. In this way inscription is a form of reading, a marking and encoding of metadata on the actual objects observed. In the story of Oedipus, for instance, Teiresias’ prophecy amounts to an inscription that propels the events of the story. He interprets objects and other living beings in nature as signs inscribed by humans for human-centered interpretations. These do not merely represent the future; they set the events they predict into motion through their pronunciation/naming.

Writing, Benjamin notes in a related essay, bears the traces of this history: the

“unsinnliche Ähnlichkeit” ‘nonsensuous similarity’ (“Über das mimetische” 212; 335) of language’s written form to what it signifies, whether that be the spoken word it phonetically represents or the signified of both, is in part shaped by the object languages described above. In particular, the study of handwriting, or graphology, treats the medium of script as a communicative object independent from the words it records by attending to the shapes of its letters. Just as mood or even the creator’s identity are perceived in the brushstrokes of an Impressionist painting, the nature of the strokes and strikes of a pen

14 See McLaughlin, 123-139.

30 are also interpretable. This process of reading derives from preceding practices of extracting mythic, magical, predetermined meanings from “things.” He writes, “Die

Schrift ist so, neben der Sprache, ein Archiv unsinnlicher Ähnlichkeiten, unsinnlicher

Korrespondenzen geworden” (“Script has become like language, an archive of nonsensuous correspondences”; 213; 335). These objects retain some residue of their past interpretations as they go on to be named and renamed. As one language gives way to the other, it undergoes a translation resembling that between Dingsprache and the language of man. Benjamin postulates, “Alle höhere Sprache ist Übersetzung der niederen, bis in der letzten Klarheit sich das Wort Gottes entfaltet, das die Einheit dieser

Sprachbewegung ist” (“All higher language is a translation of those lower, until in ultimate clarity the word of God unfolds, which is the unity of this movement made up of language”; Über Sprache 156; 332). For Benjamin, the process and phenomenon of writing itself connect this discourse to a utopian, metaphysical plenitude. However, instead of extending outward, language opens into an interior infinity: “Denn gerade, weil durch die Sprache sich nichts mitteilt, kann, was in der Sprache sich mitteilt, nicht von außen beschränkt oder gemessen werden, und darum wohnt jeder Sprache ihre inkommensurable einziggeartete Unendlichkeit inne” (“Precisely because what is communicated in language cannot be communicated through language and will not be externally limited or measured; therefore within every language its own incommensurable, uniquely constituted infinity resides”; 143). The similarity or nonsensuous correspondence appears in the “bearer” of naming language in a spatio- temporal formation, “like a flash” ‘blitzartig’ (335; 213).

Such shocks, shakes, or flashes are represented also in Adorno’s texts, and they have an effect similar to the “segue” with which this section began, through which painting makes its way into contact with music. In view of the subject at hand, these junctures are produced by the collapse of one art into itself and onto the other. The interruption moves beyond, for instance, the musical phenomenon musically and thereby converges with painting without imitating it. In literature, the collapse also interrupts the promise of representation, but more generally it suspends the compositional and representational system’s authority. Adorno describes this coinciding self-interruption as a “crackling” ‘knistern’ (72 ; 635), simultaneously percussive and visual in nature. It is the closest thing to “the work’s character as writing” and “the convergence of painting and music.” It is “seismographic,” because “it is induced by the distant, similarly premonitory trembling during catastrophes. In reaction to it, the arts are startled; the traces of these startle reflexes, retained in the works, are the graphic character in them”

(“Bewirkt wird er vom fernen, auch vorwegnehmenden Erzittern bei Katastrophen. Im

Reflex darauf zucken die Künste zusammen die Spuren solcher Zuckungen, welche die

Werke bewahren, sind die Schriftzüge an ihnen”; 72-73; 635). This authorless writing works as an “involuntary” index of empirical events on art generally. It exemplifies the

“early mimetic behaviors that precede all objectivized art and that all art dreams of objectifying” (“Also solche Seismogramme von Unwillkürlichem markieren sie den

Durchbruch jener frühen mimetischen Verhaltensweisen, die aller objektivierten Kunst vorausgehen und die zu objektivieren insgeheim alle Kunst träumt”; 73; 635-636).

Linking the marks to facial expression, ritual dance, and to myth, Adorno identifies the same logic that Benjamin locates in reference to the language of objects, in which the

32 interpreter determines the very meaning she or he is reading. This logic consists of decoding nonintentional language as a sign of an event that has either taken place or is immanent. They represent an entity or event that is not co-present; however, their codification and ritualization expresses a belief in such plenitude, it appears. He compares these traces to art inspired by the usually undesired, emotional, and irrational expressions of the human body such as “blushing or gooseflesh” ‘Erröten oder der

Gänsehaut’ and the “graven images” ‘Eingegrabene Charaktere’ that “lend them duration, without surrendering them to the seemingly objective rationality of the prevailing signs”

(“zur Dauer, ohne sie doch der dinghaften Rationalität des gängigen Zeichens zu

überantworten”; 73; 636). These body signs, as language, are important not because they embody the ideal of full-presence, but because they serve as material signs of some unknown through their choreographed figuration. Like Schrift, there are a material language that do not name.

Similarly, in his essay on punctuation marks, Adorno tries to distinguish punctuation marks from “names in language.” “Satzzeichen” (1956) opens with the statement that, viewed in isolation, a punctuation mark behaves in the opposite manner of

“names” by having its own “Stellenwert” (status; positional value) or “Ausdruck”

(expression) (106).15 Its interest is further distinguished by the partial independence of its expression from the system of writing in which it serves. Instead its autonomous expression emerges from what Adorno terms its “physiognomic” character, a reference to

15 “Je weniger die Satzzeichen, isoliert genommen, Bedeutung oder Ausdruck tragen, je mehr sie in der Sprache den Gegenpol zu den Namen ausmachen, desto entschiedener gewinnt ein jegliches unter ihnen seinen physiognomischen Stellenwert, seinen eigenen Ausdruck, der zwar nicht zu trennen ist von der syntaktischen Funktion, aber doch keineswegs in ihr sich erschöpft” (106).

33 the pseudoscientific system of reading the human face. The subsequent passage illustrates by drawing a series of playfully self-reflexive comparisons between the expressivity of punctuation marks, bodily gesture, and facial features: “Gleicht nicht das

Ausrufungszeichen dem drohend gehobenen Zeigefinger? Sind nicht Fragezeichen wie

Blinklichter oder ein Augenaufschlag? [. . .] Das Semikolon erinnert optisch an einem herunterhängenden Schnauzbart;” 16 (“Does the exclamation point not resemble the menacingly raised index finger? Are question marks not like camera flashes or a wide- eyed glance? [. . .] The semicolon visually evokes a hanging-down whisker;”; 106). The implication, which has some currency in the age of emoticons, is that the punctuation of a disembodied text can evoke the gestures of the human body that is always absent from its linguistic communication across time and space. The bodily nature Adorno imagines in punctuation differs from the symbolic work of names in language on one hand because its meaning is only suggested or even imagined. On the other hand, as embodied expression it suggests the symbolic unity of signifier and signified, to which metaphysical language is supposed to aspire. However, the examples cited serve a purpose quite distinct from that of dance performance or even the exaggerated hand and facial expressions of silent film, in part because the adjective he uses to classify them recalls the deterministic encoding of physiognomy, an obsession with knowing that went terribly wrong. The problem with physiognomy is that it naturalizes as innate what it inscribes.

16 Schnauzbart is translated as “moustache” by Shierry Weber Nicholsen; German- English dictionaries identify it as an old-fashioned term for large, handle-bar, or “walrus moustache” (Pons) “moustachio” (Oxford). Because the use of Schnauz (Schnauze means muzzle) instead of the usual Schnur (Schnurbart: moustache) evokes an animal quality, my translation is “whisker.” This word choice prepares the German reader for the gamey or wild taste of the semicolon; following the standing translation, the English reader might be more likely to this clause as “dark” or “cannibalistic” (Litvak 35).

Punctuation, a term signifying the insertion of material points on the page, derives from the act of “distinguish[ing] by pointing” (“punctuation”), a phrase that encompasses both the inked points on a page and the pointing motion of the index finger. In this way, punctuation itself signals back to the body and away from it at the same time, because the index finger signifies something else. As we have seen, historically, punctuation has served the rhetorical function of indicating the rhythmic pauses a public reader should place between words or when to take a breath. In the development of writing, punctuation and text layout have been utilized to dictate oratorical delivery and from another point of view to allude to the materiality of verbal intonation, facial expression, and haptic gestures in an embodied rhetorical performance.

Notably, the visual resemblances Adorno identifies between the symbols and the human body exceed, but do not always leave behind, their syntactical functions: the resemblance of the vertical exclamation mark to an upheld finger, for instance, is reinforced by the German grammatical rule that requires it for the imperative function.

The raised finger becomes directing or threateningly commanding especially because of the mark’s syntactical service. Likewise, the question mark’s rounded curve resembles the opening of an eye, but its function of marking the open question directs an exposing flash of light or an expectant eye at the reader. Though he writes that “all are traffic signals” (Verkehrssignale)—“Exclamation marks are red, colons green, the dash commands stop (Ausrufungszeichen sind rot, Doppelpunkte grün, Gedankenstriche befehlen stop)”—punctuation marks do not direct the motions of the reader’s interpretation, the essay continues. “Instead in a hieroglyphic manner, they serve the traffic that unfolds in the core of language itself, in its own tracks” (“sie dienen nicht

35 beflissen dem Verkehr der Sprache mit dem Leser, sondern hieroglyphisch einem, der im

Sprachinnern sich abspielt, auf ihren eignen Bahnen”; 106). Punctuation thus emerges in an undecipherable dimension of language. A sacred system of inscription considered more primitive than current writing systems, the hieroglyph recalls the early “graven images” and ritual behavior that Adorno associates with écriture and Benjamin’s language of things in “Über einige Relationen.” Immune to the contemporary language of man, this spiritual language is preserved in the inner sanctum of writing, where writing is itself something to be signified. As a result, its communication remains indeterminate, suggestive, and incomplete, despite the concluding pause or resolution it is so often used to mark.

In this regard, it is interesting to return to the epigraph with which this section began. Theodor Adorno calls punctuation marks the most “music-like” (musikähnlich) element of language: “In keinem ihrer Elemente ist die Sprache so musikähnlich wie in den Satzzeichen” (106). What could Adorno have meant by identifying punctuation marks as the most musiclike, as opposed to the most graphic component of language? On one hand, punctuation’s resemblance to music lies in its difference from names. The referential operation attached to the marks is iconic rather than phonetic. Because they correspond with rhetorical intonations, such as the elevated voice of a question or a pause after the completion of a thought, Adorno’s statement seems to suggest that punctuation supplies the musicality of speech in written text. He goes on, in fact, to list specific correlations between individual marks and features of musical composition, in a sequence that resembles the analogies drawn in “Musik, Sprache, und ihr Verhältnis” earlier in this chapter:

Komma und Punkt entsprechen dem Halb- und Ganzschluß.

Ausrufungszeichen sind wie lautlose Beckenschläge, Fragezeichen

Phrasenhebungen nach oben, Doppelpunkte dominantseptimakkorde; und

den Unterschied von Komma und Semikolon wird nur der recht fühlen,

der das verschiedene Gewicht starker und schwacher Phrasierungen in der

musikalischen Form wahrnimmt. (106-107)

The comma and period correspond to semi-cadence and perfect cadence.

Exclamation marks are like soundless clangs of the cymbal, question

marks, upward crescendos,17 colons dominant seventh chords; and only

one who realizes the different stresses of strong and weak phrasing in

musical form will feel the difference between a comma and semi-colon.

The comparisons’ importance lies in their similarity as compositional devices that signal suspense, transition, and closure to the listener and reader, not in their corresponding sounds. For example, cadence (similar to the period) leads to resolution or pause and signals conclusion within musical works conforming to harmonic standards. The German terms for cadence and semi-cadence, Halbschluss and Ganzschluss particularly invite the comparison to the period or “full stop,” since Schluss also means conclusion or closing.

In classical European composition, the dominant seventh chord is used to build tension through dissonance and to shift between keys; thus it correlates to the colon through its signaling of suspense or transition. Finally, notes composed according to strong phrasing are tightly unified, whereas weak phrasing grants the notes more independence, just in

17 This compound word is not defined as such in any of the dictionaries I have consulted. “Phrasen” means phrase, in its linguistic and musical capacity. “Hebung” means accentuation, strong beat, raising of the voice; rhetorically it means antithesis.

37 the way the semi-colon impacts the clauses it separates more strictly than the comma does. Adorno concludes the analogy by stating that the possibility of punctuation in language being comprehended at all is contingent on an understanding of its counterparts in music.

As already indicated, Adorno acknowledges punctuation’s historical emergence in relation to the voice in this essay, but he differentiates the modern punctuation mark from its earlier oratorical uses when he concludes the essay:

Denn die Satzzeichen, welche die Sprache artikulieren und damit die

Schrift der Stimme anähneln, haben durch ihre logisch-semantische

Verselbständigung von dieser doch gleich aller Schrift sich geschieden

und geraten in Konflikt mit ihrem eigenen mimetischen Wesen. Davon

sucht der asketische Gebrauch der Satzzeichen etwas gutzumachen. Jedes

behutsam vermiedene Zeichen ist eine Reverenz, welche die Schrift dem

Laut darbringt, den sie erstickt. (112-13)

Because punctuation marks, which articulate language and thereby

assimilate the writing of the voice, have by means of their logical-

semantic independence parted with this and all writing and come into

conflict with their own mimetic nature. In this way the ascetic use of

punctuation seeks to redeem something. Every carefully avoided mark is

an offering of reverence paid by writing to the sound it smothers.

If punctuation at one time mimicked the “writing of the voice,” it now does the opposite by “smother[ing]” “sound.” Adorno’s use of the term musikähnlich, clearly, has not merely to do with invoking the rhythms of speech on the textual page. The likenesses

38 among musical and literary compositional devices at stake lie in the patterns by which meaning is inscribed into their forms by changing aesthetic principles and not in their compositional forms alone. The pattern he identifies alternates between similarity and difference, but also between polarization and intersection. In other words, even though he points out parallels almost identical to those found in classical treatises of the interarts,

Adorno draws correspondences between musical devices and writing without privileging the concepts of aesthetic unity and totality.18 Instead, he calls for a denaturalization of what were at times considered natural, divinely granted characteristics of art forms.

Because punctuation shares with music an ability to reproduce, negotiate with, or pose resistance to those second-nature conventions of form in writing, Adorno explicitly links musical tonality to punctuation in writing: “Kaum jedoch wird man es für Zufall halten können, daß die Berührung der Musik mit sprachlichen Satzzeichen an das

Schema der Tonalität gebunden war, das unterdessen zerfiel” (“But one can hardly take it as a[n] accident/coincidence that music’s contact with linguistic punctuation marks was bound to the scheme of tonality, which meanwhile disintegrated”). Like the dominating scheme of tonality, the rules of punctuation serve a normative function in literary syntax.

The particular use of punctuation that breaks from the rules, however, can undo and reform prose composition and serve as an expression of the creative subject. Like the scheme of tonality in classical European music discussed above, each language system is characterized by what Adorno calls “frail” (hinfällig) and “abstract norms” of

18 According to the eighteenth-century theorist William Mason, “as no stanza can read pleasingly, unless proper pauses be introduced, and these arranged with variety ;we usually find various rests, as the strain proceeds, answering to commas in verbal punctuation; and many half-cadences, like semi-colons and colons, before it concludes : a perfect cadence then marks its termination, similar to that full point, either in verse or prose, where the sense is completed, and which is called a period” (291-292).

39 composition. Though these rules are somewhat arbitrary and transform over time, they regulate the mode and form of written propositions and determine when thoughts are complete and how relationships among them are to be marked. The quote above chiastically continues “nor is it an accident that the concern of new music could be presented as one of punctuation marks without tonality” (“daß man die Mühe der neuen

Musik recht wohl als eine um Satzzeichen ohne Tonalität darstellen könnte”; 107).

“Punctuation marks without tonality,” as a representation of new music, symbolize the possibility of breaking free from prescriptive systems of composition in both writing and music. Instead of serving (tonal) convention, such punctuation would protest against music’s normative language-likeness and the expectations of its listeners at the same time that it asserts music’s status as the writing of a nameless language.

Like atonality in music, punctuation figures prominently in the foregrounding of form in modernist writing. It facilitates experiments in syntactical arrangement seeking to defamiliarize literary language and make it look, sound, signify, and operate in new ways. Because the symbolism of punctuation does not function phonetically, its silence supplies specific transformative possibilities to the literary sentence. When used to mark parataxis or rupture, it seems to target the very concept of harmonic perfection. The caesura, the structuring pause used in Homeric verse onwards and whose silence is often represented by a blank space or || on the typographical line, itself traverses rhetorical delivery, inscribed symbol, and spacing. It notates the momentary absence of words, and its role in meter recalls literature’s song-like features. Its structural pause in poetry thus designates “a break or joint in the continuity of the metrical structure of the line […] and so concerns the division of lines into distinguishable cola” (“caesura” Princeton 159). As

40 a poetic device, it is integral in the history of traditional literary form, that is, it is hardly a revolutionary innovation. Conceptually, however, it signifies a cut (caes) and is associated with an opening or a birth, particularly with the so-called unnatural delivery of

Caesar, named after the caesarian section of his birth. As a “joint” or “break,” the caesura constitutes a formal transition, change, division, and distinction; in this way its form becomes thematically interesting for theories of modernism.

For Adorno, the caesura serves as a figure of the modern revolution against compositional norms. For instance “Verklärte Nacht” is one of several works by Arnold

Schönberg to repeatedly exemplify modern artistic expression for Adorno. In this piece,

Schönberg purposely breaks the prevailing rules of harmonic composition by reversing the ninth chord and the tonic.19 This inversion, Adorno writes, “produces caesuras in the idiom” (“[Diesel wechselnder Auflösungen fatigue Accord] bewirkt Zäsuren im Idiom”;

655; my italics). The suspension of formal convention exemplifies the expression of the new in modernist music, but the deviation is placed in analogy to art and writing as well, made evident in Adorno’s word choice. In “Parataxis” and “Fragment über Musik und

Sprache,” he describes Hölderlin and Kafka’s innovations in their own genres in similar terms, but in this regard the caesura has a more specific significance for Adorno. It serves not only as a figure of aesthetic change and transition, but as an ongoing resistance to perfected unity and wholeness in its application to the singular work of art as well as to

19 Specifically, “in einem seiner ersten Werke, der heute allzubeliebten ‘Verklärten Nacht,’ spielt ein Akkord seine Rolle, der vor sechzig Jahren heftig schockierte. Er ist nach den Regeln der Harmonielehre unerlaubt: der Nonenakkord in Dur in einer Umkehrung, welche die None in den Baß legt, so daß der Auflösungston, die Prim zu jener None, über diese zu liegen kommt, während die None doch angeblich als bloßer Vorhalt vor dem Akkord erscheint in der ‘Verklärten Nacht’ wiederholt, und zwar an entscheidenden Einschnitten der Form, absichtsvoll anorganisch” (655).

41 the systematization of the arts and interarts generally. Because the caesura elides logical conjunction and moves through a transition without the conclusion of a closing mark, it resists the propositional form (based on complete units of thought) as well. Thus, Adorno writes, “Musiclike is the transformation of language into a series whose elements are conjoined otherwise than in a proposition” (Adorno qtd. and trans in Gillespie 57). In this sense the “Fragment” and “Composition” essays discussed earlier are brought together musically with an open typographical line marking the transition from the first section to the second. Because of their paradoxical status of incompletion, they resemble Adorno’s view of musiclike meaning following a pattern of persistent deferral.

In “Satzzeichen,” he postulates that the caesura is represented in the dash, or

“Gedankenstrich” (thought-line, -stroke, or -cut). While the systematic norms of writing demanding clarity and conclusion “link sentences to one another by logical particles, despite the fact that their logical powers would not apply” (“Ihre Produkte haken die

Sätze durch logische Partikeln ineinander, ohne daß die von jenen Partikeln behauptete

Beziehungen waltete”; 108), the dash exposes classical definitions of unity as an imposed and forced second-nature. In effect, by slicing into this constructed totality, it exposes a broader view of the “whole” than classical definitions of unity and harmony offer. The achievement of unity requires an efficient organization that necessarily excludes. The

Gedankenstrich implies that there is more than the sentence can say, but the more can not be named and is only suggested by the empty space left open for it, like the seat left vacant at Passover Seder for Elijah. Likewise, the invitation of this vacancy simultaneously expresses both the loss associated with exile and the hope of Elijah’s messianic prophecy. In aesthetic terms, Adorno writes of harmony in “Kulturkritik und

Gesellschaft” (1951) that “Gelungen aber heißt der immanenten Kritik nicht sowohl das

Gebilde, das die objektiven Widersprüche zum Trug der Harmonie versöhnt, wie vielmehr jenes, das die Idee von Harmonie negativ ausdrückt, in dem es die

Widersprüche rein, unnachgiebig, in seiner innersten Struktur prägt” (“According to immanent criticism, the form is successful, not so much by deceptively reconciling objective contradictions to harmony, but rather by expressing the idea of harmony negatively, by which it purely and adamantly stamps the contradictions into its innermost structure”; 27). Because it is indexed by a “negative impression” of what it is not,

Adorno’s harmony might be criticized for being merely a derived expression of what it replaces. Likewise, the unreconciled tension which opposes conventional harmony becomes an essential constitutive of the new and unrealized idea of harmony. This, perhaps, merely affirms the ideal against which the process was aimed. On the other hand, the caesura can also be seen, structurally, as a pause and suspension. In this regard, it is worth recalling Friedrich Hölderlin’s description of the caesura (which Adorno studies in “Parataxis”): “the pure word, the counter-rhythmic intrusion, becomes necessary in order to meet the racing alternation of representations at its culmination, such that what appears then is no longer the alternation of representations but representation itself” (Hölderlin qtd. in Lacoue-Labarthe 234). Its stillness interrupts the dialectical motion traced everywhere in Adorno’s writings with a pause, implying the limitations not only of the harmonic system, but also the dialectic which negates and expels. In this view, the caesura does not only resist concepts of wholeness and unity, but it also suspends the dialectical conflict that Lacoue-Labarthe finds complicit in and ultimately affirming of harmonic, ordered wholes. Lacoue-Labarthe invokes Hölderlin’s

43 statement as a neutralization of dialectic that does not oppose, absorb, and expel. The caesura “does not do away with the logic of exchange and alternation. It simply brings it to a halt, re-establishes its equilibrium” (234-235). To do away with it would be to fall further into the synthesis and sublation of dialectic. Instead it stills the progression toward absolute Idealism and abstains from the cathartic sacrifice that the Aufhebung of Hegelian dialectics requires. Adorno’s later writings examined in this chapter actually allow for this—or question the operations of purification and sacrifice required by the dialectical process. They do not relinquish the regular push and pull of his variation of dialectic, however.

Not all punctuation marks mark a caesura. On the contrary, “Satzzeichen” depicts punctuation in a series of images involving the ingestion and absorption that Lacoue-

Labarthe critiques. In other words, it parodies the dialectical progression just described.

The colon, for instance, is described as opening its mouth, which the author is obliged to

“feed”: “Doppelpunkte sperren, Karl Kraus zufolge, den Mund auf: weh dem

Schriftsteller, der sie nicht nahrhaft füttert” (“Colons, according to Karl Kraus, stretches the[ir] mouth open: woe to the author who does not feed them with nourishment”; 106).

The root verb of the opening, aufsperren, refers to textual spacing. The author is described as feeding the symbol itself; however, the sustenance fed does not disappear.

The relation between the author and the writing is uneasy, in which punctuation is a site of unresolved struggle and contested mastery. Although the writing resembles a domestic animal requiring nourishment, the author’s obligation to feed it properly is a form of service itself. Texts call for punctuation, Adorno implies when he writes that the “body of language” ‘Sprachleib’ feeds on their “incorporeal presence” ‘körperloser Gegenwart’.

This exchange takes place independently of the author, and following the metaphor of sustenance above, if the author must feed punctuation, it is for the sake of language, which in turn feeds on punctuation. Although the colon never does swallow and close its mouth, Adorno portrays the quotation mark as having enjoyed a triumphant meal:

“Dummschlau und selbstzufrieden lecken die Anführungszeichen sich die Lippen”

(“Cleverly silent and self-satisfied, the quotation mark licks its lips”). The trickster quotation, which is both dumb and clever, has consumed something, but its clever silence conceals the identity of what. In this case, the quotation has truly eliminated its opponent; a synthesis has occurred, leaving no trace of what preceded it. Adorno, however, does not endorse this step. He criticizes the quotation mark, as we will see in the third chapter, for eliminating dialectical critique. Instead, as in the case of the colon, he believes the dialectical struggle should remain in an unresolved state of tension.

Petersburg is the fourth dimension which is not indicated on maps, which is indicated merely by a dot.—Andrei Bely

This final section turns to Andrei Bely’s 1916/1922 novel Petersburg, where the subjects of interest traced above (music, language, and punctuation; the upending of aesthetic norms; and the actualization of the new) are also at work.20 As discussed early in this chapter, Bely clearly subscribes in his essay “Forms of Art” to the metaphysical view of music as the highest of the arts, as a disembodied embodiment of an “eternal rhythm” of the universe. However, set in 1905, punctuation and mise-en-page stage the

20 The novel was revised into its present state after its first publication. For detailed studies of these revisions and the novel’s publication history, see Ivanov-Razumnik and Janacek “Rhythm.”

Russian Revolution of that year in the very pages of the novel. The tempo measured out with the repetition of both structuring and elliptical series of dots and extreme variations in margination is one of entropy, as the narrative builds with anticipation toward the detonation of a ticking time bomb delivered by a son (even wrapped in newspaper print) targeting his own father. The anticipation is intensified by the reader’s awareness of the impending Russian Revolution of 1905, to which this single assassination attempt belongs. As Bely surely was aware, the events of 1905 were said to have been set into motion by a typesetters’ strike in Moscow, in which workers demanded a per character pay rate that would include punctuation marks. “This small event,” in Trotsky’s account of it, “set off nothing more nor less than the all-Russian political strike—the strike which started over punctuation marks and ended by felling absolutism” (85). Petersburg’s perspective on revolutionary change, which had been idealized in the same Marxist theorizations of dialectic that had influenced Adorno, combines this political and historical concept with the concerns of music and language hitherto dealt with in this chapter. Notions of aesthetic rupture, generational conflict, and intermediality are depicted and formalized at the same time that they address novelistic concerns regarding compositional principle, unity, tempo, and typography. As in his earlier Symphonies, the punctuation and page arrangement of Petersburg are influenced by the author’s idealization of music in his Symbolist theory of the interarts. Directly related to this, I argue, is the employment of the novel’s material elements in its thematics and plotline, which culminate in the detonation of the time bomb. The idea of music in writing that motivates Bely’s formal experiments in his Symphony narratives extends into the later

Petersburg, as well as its revised second edition. Instead of imitating the symphonic

46 form, this novel approaches music in the rhythms and movements of the city and the characters that it communicates. Compared with other symphonic treatments of the urban collective, such as the film Berlin: Sinfonie einer Großstadt, the novel’s emphasis on an unfathomable gap clearly resists the fully composed, complete, and therefore closed system of harmony within the conventional musical work. As a “full-stop” that periodizes and implies completion and fullness, the period mark that the following analysis concerns serves as an apt device of both closure and opening in systems of aesthetics, politics, and history.

The central tension in Petersburg is between its main character, Nikolai

Apollonovich Ableukhov, a somewhat directionless young man with an interest in liberal politics, and his father, a conservative upper-level government bureaucrat named Apollon

Apollonovich Ableukhov. The son Nikolai Apollonovich is not a committed revolutionary, although he has friends and contacts who are. Through these he had been challenged to pledge his willingness to assassinate his own father for the cause, which, the narrator tells us, Nikolai had perhaps assumed was a joke. However, when he is called upon to carry out the task with a 24-hour bomb, he passively accepts the explosive, brings it into his home, and only ponders throwing it into the river. He is paralyzed from responding in one way or the other. Instead the strange and aimless young man is preoccupied by his infatuation with his best friend's wife and with a different kind performative project: sightings of him disguised as a red domino around the city produce a scandal in the news.

Nikolai’s father, Apollon Apollonovich, is associated as his name suggests with an aestheticized order (Nietzsche’s Apollonian Kunsttrieb) and continued tradition (his

47 patronymic shows he carries the same name of his own father).21 Apollon’s preoccupation with ninety-degree angles, symmetry, and linearity exemplifies the alliance of conventional aesthetics with bureaucracy in the novel:

Аполлон Аполлонович Аблеухов покачивался на атласных подушках

сиденья; от уличной мрази его отграничили четыре перпендикулярные

стенки; так он был отделен от людей и от мокнущих красных оберток

Журнальчиков, прадаваемых вон с того перекрестка.

Гармонической простотой отлтчалися его вкусы.

Более всего он любил прямолинейный просрект; этот проспект

напоминал ему о течении времени между двух жизненных точек. (32;

my emphasis)

[AAA] was cut off from the scum of the streets by four perpendicular

walls. Thus he was isolated from people and from the red covers of the

damp trashy rags on sale right there at this intersection.

Proportionality and symmetry soothed the senator’s nerves, which had

been irritated both by the irregularity of his domestic life and by the futile

rotation of our wheel of state.

His tastes were distinguished by their harmonious simplicity.

Most of all he loved the rectilineal prospect; this prospect reminded him of

the flow of time between the two points of life. (10; my italics)

For Apollon Apollonovich, life consists of only two points or tochki—birth and death— which are connected by a single, straight line. The path from life to death is

21 See Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872).

48 superimposed onto the plan of the city; unlike a country road that develops over centuries and in coordination with the natural features of the landscape, the urban prospects are direct, unwavering, and constructed according to a determined plan for a determined purpose, just as the city of Saint Petersburg was in reality projected onto an unaccommodating swampland. Opposed to Apollon's order are images of formless rags and masses of laborers on the streets, who threaten revolutionary chaos. Of course the largest threat to Apollon Apollonovich and his worldview is the time-bomb held in his son’s possession. Not coincidentally, the bomb is built on Vasilievsky Island, housed in a sardine can, and carried to the Ableukhov’s home in the packaging of a newspaper. The first half of the novel anticipates the setting of the bomb and the second measures its countdown to detonation. This is of course the “movement” and “tempo” of the novel and these, I argue, are represented in the sequential and evenly spaced points that structure the prose and narrative. These along with other rounded images, as we will see, constitute the opposing force to Apollon. They are not so much a motif associated with Nikolai as they are with the impending revolution, at this point only a terrorist plot, that claims him as an agent. In the 1922 version this looming is extended and weighted with the even more distant October Revolution. The narrator conveys this point by relating, “Уууу-ууууу-

уууу: так звучало в пространстве; звук—был ли то звук? Если то и был звук, он был

несомненно звук иного какого-то мира; [. . .] Слышал ли и ты октябрёвскую эту

песню тысяча девятьсот пятого года” (Oooo-oooo-oooo: such was the sound in that space. But was it a sound? It was the sound of some other world. And it attained a rare strength and clarity. [. . .] Have you heard this October song: of the year nineteen hundred and five?”; 100; 52). Opposed to the emotional distance, form, and epic-order of the

Apollonian, this intoxicating and destructive Dionysian force, itself associated with music, has swept up even Apollon’s own aimless son. The Dionysian element associates its otherworldly music with the revolutionary sphere that antagonizes Apollon’s preference for lines and angles.

Active in this central tension is the period mark, which in series of three and four litter Bely’s prose, and in series of eight interrupt the sub-chapters.22 In conjunction, as the novel progresses, its pages become characterized by an increasing amount of open space. Both ellipses and wide margins either impose a transitioning silence, measure and count a movement, or mark an “unfathomable” (as Bely calls it in “Forms of Art”) opening in the plot or sentence. In addition, the full-stop or period proves to be of considerable importance to the content of the novel as its narrator depicts the mark as a possible access point that unifies and harmonizes the trivial with the momentous, the detailed with the universal, and the earthly with the cosmic. The spherical form of the period’s point, which could be viewed as simultaneously abstract and material, is a recurring motif in the novel’s diction, thematic patterns, and plot movements. Opposed to the conventional plot line, according to Nina Berberova, Bely described the structure of

Petersburg as two adjacent circles, each sectioned into seven sections.23 Translators

Robert Maguire and John Malmsted have similarly pointed out that the Russian word- root for “sphere” (shárik) is repeated countlessly in the novel’s prose. It becomes a

22 This occurs in both the 1922 Berlin edition and the English-language Maguire- Malmsted translation of that edition. The Russian divisions are however aligned to the left and not centered as they are in the English. The 1913-14 Russian edition also has tochki, but the sequence of nearly thirty points that extend across the width of the page has no suggestive correlative as the later Berlin edition has. 23 The sketch does not survive, but Berberova, who witnessed Bely produce the explanatory drawing in 1923, has documented her recollections of the manner in which the circles were sectioned off and how each figure glossed the other.

50 material motif “so prominent as to constitute yet another level of reality with which we must reckon” (xviii).

Its [sharik’s] primary dictionary meaning is ‘corpuscle’; and it is a

‘neutral’ word in the sense that in ordinary contexts, no Russian stops for a

moment to think of its literal meaning, ‘little sphere.’ But in the context of

this particular novel, the reader is bombarded with other sounds made up

of the same or very similar sounds: shar (sphere), shirit’sya (expand),

rasshirénie (expansion, dilation). Typically spheres are shown as

expanding — a point made as much by the phonic similarity of the roots

shar-/shir- (they are not related otherwise), as by outright statement. The

ear pulls shárik into this same phonic pattern; and then we are likely to

remember that the primary component is shar. (xviii-xix)

Though they identify this instance as only “one handy example” (xviii) of Bely’s patterned attention to the sounds of words, they later acknowledge that, “established here is the pattern that underlies the entire novel: a sphere, or circle, that widens and brings about disintegration and death” (xxi). Their observations on Bely’s complex style are easily related to his interest in music, where the phonic similarities among words—not their literal signification—form an underlying theme. Furthermore, in this case, the sound patterns suggest a circular visual form, which supplies its own spectrum of meaningful associations to the narrative.

From the first lines of the novel’s “Prologue,” the narrator connects the importance of circularity in the novel’s plot, diction, and symbolic structure to its

51 volume’s material constitution. The sphere, which at its outer limits extends to universal proportions, occupies in its most compact form an inked and rounded point on a map.

Как бы то ни было, Петербург не только нам кажется, но и

оказывается — на картах; в виде двух друг в друге сидящих кругов с

черной точкою в центре; н из этой вот математической точки, не

имеющей измерения, заявляет он энернично о том, что он — есть:

оттуда из этой вот точки несется потоком рой отцечатанной книги;

несется из этой невидимой точки стремительна циркуляр. (24; my

emphasis)

However that may be, Petersburg not only appears to us, but actually does

appear—on maps: in the form of two small circles, one set inside the

other, with a black dot in the center; and from precisely this mathematical

point, which has no dimension, it proclaims forcefully that it exists: from

here, from this very point surges and swarms the printed book; from this

invisible point speeds the official circular. (2; my italics)

The geographical and earthly spaces of Saint Petersburg the city momentarily collapse with its inked cartographic representation as two circles surrounding a “period mark” or point (tochka) on a paper map. The visible mark on the map is then collapsed with an invisible and mathematical point in a spaceless, theoretical realm, since (like the form of music, as Bely writes), it is without dimension. From this mathematical tochka derive the two-dimensional pages and lines of the novel and the mundane “official circular” alike.

In this instance, neither tochka, krug, or stirkulyar bear a phonic resemblance or share a direct word root in common with shar- or shir-. Instead the resemblance underlying the

52 visual motif is established semantically. The circulation of language performed by and depicted in the novel, the material circles that situate its setting cartographically, and its theoretical spherical point of origin become powerfully linked.

The circle that in its smallest form is a mere dot manifests itself also in the narrator’s unifying and circular reasoning: “Petersburg, or Saint Petersburg, or Pieter

(which are the same) [. . .]” (“Петербург, или Санкт-Петербург, или Питер (что то

же)” (1; 23). In its logical and lexical collapse, the tautology does not necessarily return to its point of departure; rather it moves forward by binding together as “the same” in the curved and circular shape of the parentheses not only the different names — official and unofficial for the city, but the city Saint Petersburg and the novel Petersburg. The novel stands from this moment onward as a figure for the city and the city for the novel. For example, the lines or numbered liniyi of Vasilievsky Island, where the bomb is built, correspond to the lines of text in the novel, and the blocks of buildings and wide prospects correspond to the paragraph forms. In turn, both the novel and the city correlate, in Bely’s imagination, if not directly, at least “tangential[ly]” to an “immense astral cosmos” in the words of the character Alexander Ivanovich:

‘Petersburg is the fourth dimension which is not indicated on maps, which

is indicated merely by a dot. And this dot is the place where the plane of

being is tangential to the surface of the sphere and the immense astral

cosmos. A dot which in the twinkling of an eye can produce for us an

inhabitant of the fourth dimension, from whom not even a wall can protect

us. A moment ago I was one of the dots by the window sill, but now I

have appeared . . .’ (207; my italics)

“Петербург: четвертое измерение не отмеченное на картах,

отмеченное лишь точкою; точка же—место касания плоскости бытия

к шаровой поверхности громадного астрального космоса—точка во

мгновение ока способна нам выкинуть жителя четвертого измерения,

от которого не спасает стена; так за минуту я был — в точках, у

подоконника, а теперь появился я . . .” (239-40; my emphasis)

Ivanovich connects the point of intersection between Petersburg and the universe, himself, and the specks of dust in his apartment to the very dots on the page, which fail to conclude his discourse or draw the circle to a close. The correspondences between what is represented and marked in something else and what emerges in itself is played upon in a series of translations transmitted in the figure of the dot.

Crucially, the tochki constitute the structuring element of the novel’s syntax on both micro and macro-levels. They are used in the conventional manner to conclude sentences and are posited nearly as frequently in sequential profusion to produce a number of unconventional effects: the impressionistic opening of the ellipsis, the visual representation of the steady ticking of the time bomb; and, in collaboration with the colon and dash, it marks Nikolai’s (belated or simultaneous, it is unclear) cognition of the annihilating and silencing explosion. Sequences of tochki also structure and interrupt the sections of prose in a manner reminiscent of the numbered paragraphs or lines in Bely’s

Symphonies. The eight spaced points that separate Bely’s section breaks in the Berlin edition reproduce the pattern of division in the novel itself, which is portioned into eight

54 chapters.24 The tautological reasoning reproduces itself ad infinitum, hence the importance of the eight books, which in its Arabic numeral representation appears as two circles that meet at one point, and symbolizes, when turned on its side, infinity. If the tochka is Petersburg, and Petersburg is the same as Petersburg, then the novel itself is metaphysically duplicated on infinite levels with each posited point.

Like the rectilineal prospects of the bureaucratic center of Saint Petersburg, the paragraph blocks of the novel begin more or less in conformity with the ideals of the father, Apollon Apollonovich’s, self-contained and unified view of the world. As the novel progresses, the paragraph forms become increasingly, though not steadily and progressively, irregular. Specifically, in the first chapter, three paragraphs are interrupted by dashes and their remainder is tabbed to the right. In chapters four, five, and six, there are two, three, and one dashed and indented paragraph, respectively. Finally in chapters seven and eight, eleven and thirteen paragraphs are distorted. They deviate from quadrilateral form, break into parts, marginalize into cordoned off sections, thereby creating additional angles and lines of text, and sometimes diverge entirely from right angles (see for instance pages 225-226 of the McGuire and Malmsted translation). At the same time ellipses and serial points appear more frequently and more profusely on the page. This progressive disordering of the Petersburg/Petersburg of Apollon Apollonovich culminates in the explosion in chapter eight.

24 This occurs in both the Russian Berlin edition and the English-language Maguire- Malmsted translation of that edition. The Russian divisions are however aligned to the left and not centered as they are in the English. The 1913-14 Russian edition also has tochki, but the sequence of nearly thirty points that extend across the width of the page has no suggestive correlative as the later Berlin edition has.

The repeated positing of serial tochki in the midst of chapters and sentences works to undo the certainty of linear bureaucratic space and exposes it instead to the dangers of infinite, undelineated space and destabilized, intersubjective boundaries. The tochki are to the text what the islands are to the city:

Аполлон Аполлонович островов не любил: население там —

фабричное, грубое; многотысячный рой людской там бредет по утрам

к многотрубным забодам; [. . .]: острова — раядавить! Приковать их

желозом огромного мосто, проткнуть проспектными стрелами. . . (33)

Apollon Apollonovich did not like the islands: the population there was

industrial and course. There the many-thousand human swarm shuffled in

the morning to the many-chimneyed factories. [. . .] The islands must be

crushed! Riveted with the iron of the enormous bridge, skewered by the

arrows of the prospects. . . . (11)

The islands, in his view, are unruly and disconnected—unpunctuated. With rivets and skewers securing them in place, Apollon could order and straighten the islands in correlation with the prospects of the main city and its connecting bridges. He feels repeatedly threatened by what he calls their Mongol-like lack of definition and delineation. The narrator also associates the circle with the shapeless crowds of the city and with the threat of mass revolution. In the subchapter “Nevsky Prospect,” the boundaries between individuals completely break down through the globular image of salmon eggs, which adhere together in a sticky slime.

Что такое икринка?

Там тело влетающих на панель превращается в общее тело, в икринку

икры; тротуары же Невского — бутерсродное поле; мысль влипла в

мыслительность многоногого сушества, пробегающего по Невскому.

[. . .]

Не было на Невском людей; но — ползучая, голосящая многоножка

была там; сырое пространство ссыцало многоразличие голосов — в

многоразличие слов; все слова, перепутавшись, вновь сплетались во

фразу; и фраза казалась бессмысленной; повисла над Невским;

повисла над Невским; стоял черный дым небылиц. (210-11; my

emphasis)

What is a grain of caviar?

There the body of each individual that streams onto the pavement becomes

the organ of a general body, an individual grain of caviar, and the

sidewalks of the Nevsky are the surface of an openfaced sandwich.

Individual thought was sucked into the cerebration of the myriapod being

that moved along the Nevsky. [. . .]

There were no people on the Nevsky; but there was a crawling, howling

myriapod there. The damp space poured together a myria-distinction of

voices into a myria-distinction of words. All the words jumbled and again

wove into a sentence; and the sentence seemed meaningless. It hung above

the Nevsky, a black haze of phantasmata. (178-79; my italics)

Their mass identity threatens not only the state, but lexical order as well: the varied voices of the crowd on the street coalesce into a scriptura continua, a singular utterance

57 characterized by the indistinguishability of its components. The sentence then hangs above the street like a printed string of words that likewise become surreally obscured into a “cherniy dim.” The printed page is superimposed onto the city; and its visual appearance is imagined in terms of undelineated ambiguity. The boundaries of Apollon

Apollonovich’s vision implode as the correlations among these patterned entities multiply. This reproduction transforms the closure of the period into an opening.

“And — here we put a full stop.” (289); “И —сдавим здесь точку.”; 323). With this sentence the movement of the novel comes to a halt. Its tempo and tense transform completely: from anticipation to retrospection. The explosion has taken place, the anticipatory ticking of the clock mechanism is exhausted, and the text that follows reads like an appendix to the novel. The chapter is broken into a new section, in which the aftermath of the explosion is briefly glossed over from a distant and reconstructed point of view. Shortly afterward the epilogue details the wandering life of Nikolai

Apollonovich over the course of years and years. The narrative as we knew it concludes with the punctuating sentence cited above. The “stop” it narrates and posits must be read in opposition to the countless sporadic tochki sequences that precede it. Apollon’s vision appears in this way to have triumphed. The chaotic clutter of ticking ellipses are put to an end. If the novel originates in a tochka in space, it also returns and concludes with one on the page. However, the novel does not end, since the altered narrative persists for several more pages. In other words, it does not “close” or “stop” “full[y].” Remarkably, the bomb is accidentally carried to its intended destination by Apollon himself; yet it is an unsuccessful assassination. No one is injured, and while Apollon knows it is his son who brought it to the house, he never confronts him. The two do part, never to speak again:

58 the younger goes abroad and the elder retires to the country. The explosion does not generate, but separates.

The narrator/writer’s statement that “here we place a full-stop,” depicts the scene of writing and the embodied penned or typed performance that it entails. Its enhanced attention to typography draws attention to the narrative’s mediation and its status as a produced object. The emphasis ironically draws attention to the nonverbal and material languages of the narrative that are usually treated as invisible: that is, the language of intermedial writing that we traced in Adorno’s essays on language, music, and painting.

This writing connects the visual, aural, and narrative arts without merging or crossing between them. Therefore, at the same time, their similarity reflects the incommensurability of their respective mediums and resists the interartistic and totalitarian ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

In Bely’s vision of the future, with which he associates music, aesthetics aspire to synthesis, but in the meantime he finds a unifying harmony even in the conflict, clash, and explosion of the modern world. Like the newspaper wrapping transporting the explosive sardine can, the daily “throwaway,” to borrow from James Joyce, is integral to the “vibrations of eternity” ‘волнения вечности’ detected in the bomb (179; 103). In

Petersburg, Andrei Bely employs print materiality to perform, theorize, and narrate the novel’s own formal and historical break into modernity. Whereas the profusion of ellipses in the narrative evoke the regular ticking of the time mechanism attached to the patricidal bomb, the final break in the narrative between son and father (or the modern and the old) following the explosion is signified with a single period, which the narrator places and asserts verbally. Because the modernist break or rupture with tradition was

59 understood as both an historical moment and an aesthetic principle, we have discovered how Bely’s critical revisions of narrative and punctuation convention comment on the novel’s own position in a larger social and historical narrative. The punctuated view of literary history, where the new begins with a certain point in time, is in this way metonymically linked to experimental treatments of punctuation in prose and, as such, constitutes a central role in the intermediality of new writing. The following chapter,

“Turning Points: Periodizing New Writing,” addresses precisely this dilemma.

CHAPTER TWO: TURNING POINTS: PERIODIZING NEW WRITING

And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about December, 1910, human character changed. —Virginia Woolf

Das Meer des nie Geahnten, auf das die revolutionären Kunstbewegungen um 1910 sich hinauswagten, hat nicht das verheißene abenteuerliche Glück beschieden. —Theodor W. Adorno

“About December, 1910, human character changed.” This famous account of modernism from Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” is echoed 45 years later in the opening passage of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. As Woolf explains it, the turning point she identifies necessitated her own turn to new methods of characterization in novel-writing (“Mr. Bennett” 96). At the same time, it led to more dramatic experiments in language and genre by writers like James Joyce and T.S. Eliot

(116). The focus of Adorno’s statement, on the other hand, is on the avant-garde introduction of new techniques themselves. Still, through the shared date of 1910 both writers introduce the concept of an historical break in connection with modernism, where modern art is either an impetus for, a response to, or itself a rupture. One could speculate about what the event might be. Certainly, a number of important events did take place

61 around that year, and even around December.1 Despite the possibility that both authors have the same unnamed event in mind, Adorno most likely is subtly citing Woolf, which is unexpected, given that her work has no presence in his writing otherwise. The two not only have the year 1910 in common. They also share a skepticism of the said moment, this chapter will show, as they go on to undercut the precision of this periodization (“on or about”; “around”), and of the avant-garde movements proclaiming their breaks with convention as historical turning points in themselves. Both also portray this aesthetic transition as a vehicularized journey: one pending arrival and the other departing. Woolf, by extension, scrutinizes whether some “youthful” literary experiments were unnecessarily farfetched in their anticipation of the train’s final stop; and what Adorno at first implies to be an optimistic ship voyage turns luckless and without destination.

The motion or turn to which both writers refer has been, perhaps incorrectly, described as the imperative to “MAKE IT NEW,” a phrase borrowed from Ezra Pound’s

1934 collection of essays and his later Canto 53, where it is scrawled in the bathroom of the Chinese Emperor Tching Tang.2 The same era saw what is believed to be the beginning of recorded history in China (18/17th century BC). This is when, in other words, Chinese lettering was actually new and in its earliest stages of formation. “It,” the

1 In London, for instance, an audience gathered at the Lyceum Club witnessed the Italian Futurist F. T. Marinetti’s first performance in England. Weeks earlier in November an important exhibit of Manet and the Post-Impressionists opened in London’s Grafton Gallery (the title of which echoes Mallarmé’s essay “The Impressionists and Edouard Manet,” where he writes, in a similar vein, that “the eye should forget all else it has seen, and learn anew from the lesson before it. It should abstract itself from memory, seeing only that which which it looks upon, and that as for the first time” [29]). Months before, George V had succeeded his father Edward VII to the royal throne; and in Münich, in January 1911, Wassily Kandinsky first encountered atonal music in a performance of Arnold Schönberg’s Drei Klavierstücke Op. 11, which would stimulate a new phase of his painting. 2 See also Rasula, “Make It New.”

62 provocative, imperative event—which neither Woolf nor Adorno names or definitively dates—is a foundational premise of the newness of modernism; “it” is seen to prompt a widespread pursuit of intentionally new aesthetic practices whose rejection of existing conventions in turn defined artistic identities. As Virginia Woolf explains in reference to her generation and its realist predecessors, “But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death”

(“Mr. Bennett” 110). Modern British authors, she specifies, could not use Edwardian techniques to portray the world they perceived and wished to portray (103). Self- differentiating rejections of existing aesthetic methods manifested to varying extents and in differing ways as an ideology of the modern and were hardly limited to writers of

Britain and its empire. At its extreme, the experimentation to which Woolf refers is exemplified internationally in Futurist movements. The founder of Italian Futurism,

Filippo Tommasi Marinetti, describes the great works as having lost their expressive power through desensitizing overuse with an analogy to music, “Too often stimulated to enthusiasm, haven’t our old ears perhaps already destroyed Beethoven and Wagner? It is imperative, then, to abolish whatever in language has become a stereotyped image, a faded metaphor, and that means nearly everything” (“Technical Manifesto” 16-17). The new emerges, in this model, from casting away the old. For him, all of the arts must adapt to their changing environment by rejecting their aesthetic legacies and by following the rules dictated by modernity instead. Historical shift and renewal of artistic technique is thus a central trope in modernism’s theorization of itself. Even where the premise of abrupt change is rejected, as we will see ultimately in essays by Virginia Woolf and

Gertrude Stein, both still engage with and contemplate at length the aesthetic transition into modernism.

The tendency of placing particular value on the unprecedented, or on forging ahead of contemporary culture through innovative thinking and experimental form, have been labeled, suitably, as avant-garde. As its name suggests, the avant-garde imagines itself as following no one. According to the word history the Oxford English Dictionary provides, this French expression for a military frontline was introduced into English sometime in the fifteenth century (“avant-garde”). Yet only with the turn of the twentieth century was it adopted to denote “the pioneers in any art in a particular period” (my italics). Certainly, authors, artists, and composers had been innovating in their respective forms for centuries, but the avant-garde impulse of early twentieth-century modernism is dedicated to the idea as well as the act of innovation. By extension, the practice of new art is a self-consciously modern phenomenon that considers even its idea of the new to be novel. In this regard, the four authors studied in this chapter—F.T. Marinetti, Theodor

Adorno, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf—contemplate periodization as a defining factor in the form and self-conceptualization of modernist literature.

Sitting astride the fuel tank of an airplane, my stomach warmed by the aviator’s head, I felt the ridiculous inanity of the old syntax inherited from Homer. A raging need to liberate words, dragging them out from the Latin period. Like all imbeciles, this period, naturally, has a prudent head, a stomach, two legs, and two flat feet: but it will never have two wings. Just enough to walk, take a short run, and come up short, panting! —F. T. Marinetti

The revolutionary view of cultural history to which Woolf and Adorno allude is epitomized in the radical temporal break with tradition initiated by the founder of Italian

Futurism, F. T. Marinetti, who created countless manifestos, the chosen genre of the avant-garde, to announce Futurism’s isolation of itself from its Romantic and Symbolist predecessors. Although Marinetti’s movement grew to be increasingly nationalist in Italy, its founding manifesto, which appeared in French on the cover of the Parisian periodical

Le Figaro in 1909, had repercussions on European and Transatlantic modernisms and inspired similar movements in Russia, Eastern Europe, Spain, and England. Martin

Puchner writes, “The manifesto is the genre of the break: it announces and produces a rupture in the historical continuum, guided by a belief in the value of the future and the impossibility of returning to the past” (“Aftershocks” 47).3 This literary form acts as a punctuating partition in time, as if it were placing a full-stop to conclude the line of thought that precedes it and positing its own capitalized thesis. As a genre, it assumes a bombastic rhetoric, and in the twentieth century it seeks through its own publication to define a new era, separating one artistic and historical period from another. Following this, anthologies like Maynor Hardee’s Manifestoes and Movements, for instance, use the manifesto as an organizing principle to approach literary history.

The impetus that Marinetti cites as setting the Futurist movement in motion was a violent stop, an automobile collision that he had experienced on October 15, 1908 in

Milan. While no one suffered serious injury during the accident, the vehicle did overturn into a ditch. In his “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” a few months later, which

3 Of course manifesto writing, as a genre, is itself a a tradition. See also Amidon and Yanoshevsky.

65 appeared in French in Le Figaro, he describes this event as a baptism, from which he emerged into the Futurist frame of mind:

Je virai brusquement sur moi-même avec l’ivresse folle des caniches qui

se mordent la queue, et voilà tout à coup que deux cyclistes me

désapprouvèrent, titubant devant moi ainsi que deux raisonnements

persuasifs et pourtant contradictoires. Leur ondoiement stupide discutait

sur mon terrain. . . Quel ennui! Pouah ! . . . Je coupai court, et par dégoût,

je me flanquai—vlan!—cul pardessus tête, dans un fossé. . .

Oh, maternel fossé, à moitié plein d’une eau vaseuse ! Fossé d’usine ! J’ai

savouré a pleine bouche ta boue fortifiante qui me rappelle la sainte

mamelle noire de ma nourrice soudanaise! Comme je dressai mon corps,

fangeuse et malodorante vadrouille, je sentis le fer rouge de la joie me

percer délicieusement le cœur. (“Le manifeste du Futurisme”)

I spun my car as frantically as a dog trying to bite its own tail, and there,

suddenly, were two bicyclists right in front of me, [. . .] wobbling like two

lines of reasoning, equally persuasive and yet contradictory. Their stupid

argument was being discussed right in my path . . . What a bore! Damn! . .

. I stopped short, and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch, with my

wheels in the air. . . .

Oh! Maternal ditch, nearly full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I

gulped down your bracing slime, which reminded me of the sacred black

breast of my Sudanese nurse. . . . When I climbed out, a filth and stinking

rag, from underneath the capsized car, I felt my heart—deliciously—being

slashed with the red-hot iron of joy! (50)

Marinetti’s biographer has described the event as a “deep trauma” in the author’s life

(Salaris qtd. in Rainey, “Introduction” 5), but Lawrence Rainey rightly expresses skepticism when he concludes that “Whatever it was that drove him, Marinetti now set out to rework a modest traffic accident into an event of mythic stature, the birth-scene of a traumatic yet emancipating modernity” (5). Drawing from religious ritual, Futurism develops its own myths of origin. If the auto accident recalls the baptismal birth, another exemplary scene of modern experience retold in the 1912 “Technical Manifesto of

Futurist Writing” carries echoes of Moses’ receiving and inscription of the commandments on Mount Sinai. In this scene, the narrator first conceives the need for syntactical freedom aboard an airplane:

Sitting astride the fuel tank of an airplane, my stomach warmed by the

aviator’s head, I felt the ridiculous inanity of the old syntax inherited from

Homer. A raging need to liberate words, dragging them out from the Latin

period. Like all imbeciles, this period, naturally, has a prudent head, a

stomach, two legs, and two flat feet: but it will never have two wings. Just

enough to walk, take a short run, and come up short, panting! (15)

It is worth emphasizing that the plane’s flight signifies freedom from the past made possible by modern technology. Notably, this technology correlates to what may be called the technics of writing. Following the parallel between the technology of flight and the technical aspect of writing—both of which, it should be added, are treated as crucial, active, and creative elements—Marinetti suggests that a revolution in writing is similarly

67 capable of freeing language from its foundation. In the same way that technology enables men to fly and experience the world from new perspectives, technical innovation in writing makes a metaphorical flight of consciousness possible. Beyond this analogy, the new syntax is also called for by modern experience: the plane, itself a symbol of forward, upward motion, literally dictates the necessity of writing in new ways to the narrator, and the dim-witted and physically unfit “Latin period” can only watch Futurist flight, as its own feet remain firmly planted on the ground. The old sentence in this parable, named by the point that concludes and nails it down, can not keep up with modern demands. Thus both the syntax of conventional logic and the punctuation that facilitates it are targeted as an obstacle to freedom. The new laws of writing are commanded to him by the engine of the plane, the new, man-made God.

The Futurist break was itself understood as a forward motion out of the past and into the future, which symbolically aligned technically novel ways of writing with technologically new ways of moving in automobiles, faster trains, and the airplane. In particular, Marinetti opposes dynamism in writing to the “static ideal” of the French

Symbolists and describes instead how “the typographical revolution that I’ve proposed will enable me to imprint the words (words, already free, dynamic, torpedoing forward) every velocity of the stars, clouds, airplanes, trains, waves, explosives, drops of seafoam, molecules, and atoms” (“Destruction of Syntax” 150). This crucial “movement” is expressed and “imprinted” by the words’ arrangement, which are “without the connecting syntactical wires and without punctuation” (146). These either pose an obstacle to the expression of modern, liberated experience or prevent it from coming into being altogether. The “Technical Manifesto” addresses how “punctuation is also annihilated

68 within the variable continuity of a living style that creates itself, without the absurd pauses of commas and periods. To accentuate certain movements and indicated their directions, mathematical signs will be used: + – x : = >, along with musical notations”

(120). Although the manifesto itself intends to bring its predecessors’ motions to a halt, the Futurist idea of unceasing motion incorporates these mathematical relations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, analogy, equality, and succession in place of a still pause. He goes on to say that a single page may be printed in multiple colors of ink and use as many as twenty different styles of typeface, which are meant to “double the expressive force of words” (“Destruction of Syntax” 146) by way of their intermedial written materiality.

For the Futurists, the existing conventions of what proves to be an arbitrary syntax forces writing into unvarying, logical relationships, thus forming an imprisoning wire around human consciousness. Writing emancipated from traditional syntax instead produces what he calls the “Wireless Imagination” or “Words in Freedom,” in which words are rearranged to forcefully reveal what he understands as new, more authentic meanings. He writes:

Syntax has been a kind of abstract cipher which poets have used in order

to inform the masses about the color, the musicality, the plasticity and

architecture of the universe. It has been a sort of interpreter, a monotonous

tour-guide. We must suppress this intermediary so that literature can

directly enter into the universe and become one body with it. (“Technical”

124)

According to this, conventional syntax distinguishes literary from other expressive arts by contributing to writing’s signifying linguistic nature, which suppresses its status as a material feature of the empirical world. “It is not necessary to be understood” when it comes to unmediated wireless language, writes Marinetti. Words liberated from their

“abstract” signifying powers are instead free to express through their unified material performance. Similarly, Russian Futurists from the same period developed what they called заумь or заумный язык, which is commonly translated as “transrational,”

“transmental,” “beyond reason” or “beyond mind” language.4 Zaum’ not only expresses

“emotional meanings” with “relations of sound” (Ziegler 305), but rids poetry of traditional marks of punctuation. Instead, it makes more expressive use of bibliographic materials—through illustration, hand-printed font, and punctuating use of page breaks.

Not only the musical sound-relations and onomatopoetic expression of the new coinages, or the visual character of abstract illustrations, but also the material features of book volumes rendered them objects of art—albeit ones that rejected the precious bindings and fine paper of the nineteenth-century art book.5 Zaumnoe poetry attended to the musical

4 See Gerald Janacek, Zaum’ and Elizabeth Beaujour for detailed discussions of the concept of zaum’. The Russian movement differed from its Italian counterpoint insofar as this “new” language described a category of words that has been thought in part to have sources in “sectarian glossolalia, folk spells and incantations, and certain principles of poetic word formation” (Akhapkin 244). Thus its break with traditional language has been related to a mythic, backward turn that only rejected the more immediate past. 5 Jerome McGann sees continuity between Futurism and the “late nineteenth-century’s Renaissance of Printing” (41). By drawing attention to the “scene of writing,” McGann claims that 19th-century literature concerns itself with the material, physical aspect of writing and text. William Morris, he writes, “foreground[s] textuality as such, turning words from means to ends-in-themselves. [. . .]. This text declares its radical self- identity” (74). “The work forces us to attend to its immediate and iconic condition, as if the words were images or objects in themselves, as if they were values in themselves (rather than vehicles for delivering some further value or meaning)” (75).

70 and visual expression of its publications and operated according to the assumption that music is a higher, more emotionally authentic art form than poetry. In this fuller sense transrational expression should be understood as a “sign system which should be comprehended with other faculties than reason” (Nilsson 139). In this way it is akin to intermedial aspects of Gertrude Stein’s writing, which we will discuss shortly. Drawing from the previous chapter, a pattern of intermedial comparison is evident already in the few passages cited in these first pages. Writings about new ways of writing turn to other arts as symbolic and material foils, because they seem to offer it alternative modes of operation.

For Marinetti, the intuitive “wireless imagination,” replaces rationality. In

“Destruction of Syntax—Wireless Imagination—Words-in-Freedom” (1913), he describes how this literary or compositional form is inspired by a state of human shock:

imagine that a friend of yours, gifted with this kind of lyrical faculty,

should find himself in a zone of intense life (revolution, war, shipwreck,

earthquake, etc.), and should come, immediately afterwards, to recount his

impressions. Do you know what your lyrical friend will do while he is still

shocked? . . .

He will begin by brutally destroying the syntax of his speech. He will not

waste time in constructing periodic sentences. He could care less about

punctuation or finding the right adjective. He disdains subtleties and

shadings, and in haste he will assault your nerves with visual, auditory,

olfactory sensations, just as their insistent pressure in him demands. The

rush of steam-emotion will burst the steampipe of the sentence, the valves

of punctuation, and the regular clamp of the adjective. Fistfuls of basic

words without a conventional order. Only preoccupation of the narrator, to

render all the vibrations of his ‘I.’ (145)

In this scene, “intense life” is exemplified as life under threat or in contact with its own absence. Like his own auto crash—the foundational myth of the Futurist movement—a violent and shocking event demands this new, unwired language. The thinking subject is traumatically confronted with its own fundamental material nature in this near-death experience, which demonstrates the perceived inadequacy of grammatically regulated writing to the task of expressing modern human experience. He depicts the sentence as a machine that is unfit for this level of belligerent energy. The force of the experience and the forcefulness with which the shock demands to be expressed overcome the resistance posed by the rules of logical proposition.

The very periodo he leaves behind on the ground in the “Technical Manifesto” is both an historical and syntactical construction. Aristotle writes that in rhetoric a period

“has a beginning and end in itself, and a size which can be seen as a whole” (qtd. in

“period” 896). It is complete in its “sense” and its “rhythm” or “meter” (“period” 896) and it “may be composed in cola or simple. A sentence in cola is one which is complete, has subdivisions, and is easily pronounced in one breath” (Aristotle qtd. in “period” 896).

In modernity, its mark of punctuation makes the very premise of a logical thesis (also a period) possible. As Christian Benne writes, the full-stop “markiert […] in der

Philosophie die kleinste Denkeinheit, nämlich die Aussage“ (“marks the smallest unit[y] of thought in philosophy, namely the proposition”; 42). “Der Punkt definiert, was gesagt

72 und gesetzt wird. Was eine Aussage ist. Sein könnte. Oder sein soll“ (“It defines what is said and posited. What a proposition is. Could be. Or should be”). Indeed this very logic

(ironized by Benne’s three incomplete sentences) is what Marinetti opposes, along with the syntax that lends it durability and stability.

For Marinetti’s Futurism, the sudden violence of modern experience reveals an intuitive truth that the logical structures of syntax suppress, and it requires a writing appropriately capable of revealing and representing its speed, bodily sensation, and authenticity as unmediatedly as possible. Further, the closure of a period or comma would signify the pausing of thought and sound, whereas the dynamism of Futurism requires ongoing continuity, the speed and pattern of which might change but never stops. Instead, he calls for marks that encourage the “direction” of movements. Thus his use of mathematical and musical notation. This writing effaces its own forms in an attempt to achieve an unmediated effect, but it does so, paradoxically, by attracting attention to its medium.

The “freedom” supposedly provided by rebellious syntax is, however, contradictorily offset by Marinetti’s own style. The “Technical Manifesto” presents

Futurist techniques of writing with a ream of violent imperatives. The first of the eleven

(10+1) command(ment)s Marinetti receives from the plane propeller in the manifesto is that “It is imperative to destroy syntax and scatter one’s nouns at random, just as they are born” (119). The dictating voice is reinforced by a heavy framework of numbered bullets, bold-faced font, and dashes. Paradoxically, while the numbered bullets and structure of the imperatives command the reader to set language free, the grammatical mood of that appeal seeks to deny the reader-writer of free agency. Thus, Futurism demotes the human

73 subject at the same time that it calls for its expression. This is also indicated in the second article of the manifesto, which describes how verbs can be freed from their grammatical subjects by being left in the infinitive. Thus, “the verb can be elastically adapted to the noun and not be subordinated to the I of the writer who observes or imagines. Only the infinitive can give a sense of the continuity of life and the elasticity of the intuition that perceives it” (120). Yet because the Italian infinitive takes the same form as the imperative, freedom from old rules only amounts to the erection of new ones—which celebrate their own dictation to the followers of Futurism.

Along similar lines, when Marinetti proclaims, “I want to seize [ideas] brutally and fling them in the reader’s face” (“Destruction” 150), he frames linguistic communication as a direct, violent assault on its audience, instead of as a symbolic, mediated action. The physical and material emphasis of his theorization of writing, however violent, is related to the aim of bringing art in total contact with physical life. In part because Futurism had later connections to the development of Italy’s fascist totalitarian dictatorship, Marinetti’s program exemplifies how aesthetics and politics converge. Reflecting on “Battle of Tripoli” (1912), in which Marinetti praises war’s

“beauty,” Walter Benjamin remarks, “Ihre Selbstentfremdung hat jenen Grad erreicht, der sie ihre eigene Vernichtung als ästhetischen Genuß ersten Ranges erleben läßt. So steht es um die Ästhetisierung der Politik, welche der Faschismus betreibt” (“[Mankind’s] self- alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic”; Das Kunstwerk 176; 242). Lawrence Rainey takes this up when he writes that “in twentieth-century culture, Futurism is the litmus test for probing the

74 relationship between art and power, aesthetics and politics—the birth scene of aesthetic modernity” (“Introduction” 2). Marinetti’s totalizing aesthetics befriend totalitarian politics, and moreover the violence rendered against conventional language coincides with and celebrates human slaughter. This alliance might also be to what Adorno refers when he speaks of the unhappy failure of the avant-garde departure in his opening to

Aesthetic Theory. A military term used figuratively to describe artistic movements considered ahead of their times, the avant-garde retains its combativeness as it connotes the frontline assault of an army against a target. Futurism, whose name certainly expresses the concept of being ahead of its time, broke free from the existing grammars of all of the arts with an extremism that evoked cautious distance from other modernists seeking aesthetic change.

Similar to Woolf’s statements from the chapter’s start and Marinetti’s above,

Russian Futurists Viktor Khlebnikov, David Burliuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Alexei

Kruchenykh disown the Russian cultural and literary tradition as outdated and alien in a

1912 manifesto: “Академия и Пушкин неонятнее гиероглифов. Бросить Пушкина,

Достоевского, Толстого и проч. с парохода Современности” (“Academic art and

Pushkin are harder to understand than Egyptian hieroglyphs/ Let us throw Pushkin,

Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., off the steamship of modernity”) (Пощечына общественному

вкусу; “A Slap in the Face” 120). Like Marinetti’s plane, the image of the ship implies a departure from the speakers’ immediate predecessors and their contemporary audience.

Although the self-described avant-garde asserts a connection between itself and its modern age, its art is still considered ahead of its time, because the tastes of

75 contemporary audiences had been conditioned according to past convention. Many avant- garde groups therefore expressed opposition to existing norms and to the contemporary audiences accustomed to them, as the title of the manifesto cited above, “Пощечына

общественному вкусу” ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste', announces. The slogan

“Making No Compromise with the Public Taste” later adopted by the American Little

Review magazine is tame in comparison.

The metaphor of the Russian Futurist steamship furthermore suggests that new art is a vehicle towards a transformed future, as though their movement were a boat heading for an aesthetic New World. In the citation from Aesthetic Theory offered earlier in the chapter, Theodor Adorno responds to precisely this pattern of optimistic leave-taking among the avant-garde. To repeat, he writes that around 1910, “revolutionary art movements set out into the sea of the formerly inconceivable” (“Das Meer des nie

Geahnten, auf das die revolutionären Kunstbewegungen um 1910 sich hinauswagten, hat nicht das verheißene abenteuerliche Glück beschieden”; 1; 9). Crucially, however, the emphatic content of the sentence’s main clause states that the trip “did not bestow the promised happiness of adventure” (1) in the way one would perhaps anticipate. Although

Adorno’s volume is concerned chiefly with the implications of this adventure for the theory of aesthetics on a broad scale, the absence of happiness might perhaps allude to the later association of Futurism with fascist movements and its unabashed embrace and aestheticization of military bloodshed. On the other hand it might also be continuing the reference to Woolf—through an allusion to the incomplete and eponymous trip to the lighthouse—in order to represent the lack of fruitfulness or satisfaction that landing at that signaling location would be imagined to bring.

In formal terms, to pursue the above analogy a bit further, the ship does not arrive to steady ground but remains at sea. Its abstract status, as that which signifies what is not old, remains the same and therefore also outdated. Thus in a 1931 lecture Adorno writes,

“expressionism, constructivism, futurism, cubism, atonality, surrealism—as empty, banal, and programmatic as they appear—may remind you of that shock as it was manifested at the time those artistic tendencies were emerging” (“Why is the New” 127). New is an indexical term, which is always contextually defined. Like the meaning of the spatially oriented indexical “there,” which depends in part on the location of the speaker “here,” the “new” is doubly deictic, because its meaning relies on the identification of what it excludes, the old and/or the “now” that is always “then.” The new is by definition previously unrealized and unknown; as a result, its significance is always changing and never affirmed in a positive identification. In a reading of Aesthetic Theory’s opening passage, David Ferris alternately chooses to translate it as “the sea of the unforeseen”

(192). He relates the “unforeseen” or “inconceivable” sea to the Futurist imperative “to know nothing of it, nothing of the past” (“The Founding Manifesto” 5) when he expands that “To set out on the sea of the unforeseen [. . .] is to foresee a future whose significance resides in its promise of the new. [. . .] Oriented toward the impossible knowledge of the unforeseen, Futurism can only promise that the continuing significance of art alone resides in the future” (Ferris 192). This is the profound limitation of defining art by its newness or advancedness. Marinetti is unaware of this or is unconcerned with it.

Stein and Woolf, as later sections explore, engage this irony as they look to circumscribe the boundaries of their own literary invention. The danger for Adorno, Ferris explains, is how, unhinged from the unchanging universals of past tradition, art has no prerequisite

77 foundation for its theorization. Because art is no longer regulated by stable rules of composition, there are no sure measures against which it can be classified or understood.

However, the motion of modernism and the dynamism to which art like Marinetti’s aspires constitute another sort of aesthetic principle. Indeed, as Adorno writes, “Deutbar ist Kunst nur an ihrem Bewegungsgesetz, nicht durch Invarianten. Sie bestimmt sich im

Verhältnis zu dem, was sie nicht ist” (“Art can be understood by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants. It is defined by its relation to what it is not”;

Ästhetic Theorie 12; 3). As the motif of vehicular motion that we have begun to observe implies, while the point of arrival is always deferred for art focused on the unprecedented, some significance dwells in its departure and passage.

“So the twentieth century had come it began with 1901”

“Beginning again and again is a natural thing even when there is a series. Beginning again and again and again explaining composition and time is a natural thing.”—Gertrude Stein

In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf laments an obstacle to new art: that its contemporaries are unprepared to receive it, because they are accustomed to the very norms of tradition new art rejects. In her own case, because her treatment of character differs from that of the older “Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett and Mr. Galsworthy,” she imagines that the British public objects to her character Mrs. Brown: “how are we to believe in her? We do not even know whether her villa was called Albert or Balmoral; what she paid for her gloves; or whether her mother died of cancer or of consumption”

(113-114). The Futurist solution proposed in pamphlets like “Slap in the Face of Public

Taste” and commented upon in Adorno’s “Why is the New Art Hard to Understand”

78 would be to force art onto its audience. Gertrude Stein’s 1926 lecture “Composition as

Explanation,” which was printed by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, comments on precisely this dynamic.6 It points out the relativity of the concept of being

“ahead of one’s time,” which depends not only on the innovation that sets one’s work apart, but on one’s contemporaries’ unpreparedness to appreciate it. She writes, “No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept” (407).

Although the new art corresponds to its time of composition, its contemporaries are only ready to acknowledge and accept its beauty and aptness once they have become conscious of the distinct age in which they live. Stein suggests society only recognizes an era’s cultural identity, its unique constitution or composition, retroactively. She writes,

“Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical. That is the reason why the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.” The change is understated, not extreme; and it takes place without a radical break imposed by the author or artist. Instead of taking place only in the creation of new art, it occurs just as profoundly in its contemporary reception. The shift from the illegitimate to the classic appraisal is hardly revolutionary: it occurs “almost without a pause;” it is “almost not an interval” (408).

6 After its delivery to students in Cambridge and Oxford, “Composition as Explanation” was published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf within the second series of the Hogarth Essays. In the first series “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” had appeared two years earlier.

Similar to Woolf’s identifying December of 1910 as an approximate moment of change, Stein proposes that the modern turning-point was “the period of the beginning of

1914,” several months prior to the start of the Great War. Although she sees the war having profound cultural consequences particularly on the reception of art, locating the rupture before the war’s outbreak certainly has an unexpectedly anticlimactic effect.

Years later she mocks the attempt to precisely date twentieth-century modernity when she writes, “So the twentieth century had come it began with 1901” (Paris France 25). To describe what “makes each and all of them then different from other generations”

(“Composition” 407), Stein draws a comparison between aesthetic change and the emergence of modern warfare:

Lord Grey remarked that when the generals before the war talked about

the war they talked about it as a nineteenth century war although to be

fought with twentieth century weapons. That is because war is a thing that

decides how it is to be when it is to be done. It is prepared and to that

degree it is like all academies it is not a thing made by being made it is a

thing prepared.

The introduction of new technologies defined the Great War and set it apart from previous conflicts. However, war was not invented in 1914, and it was not determined only by its leadership. This foreshadows a passage in Aesthetic Theory to be discussed shortly, in which a child sitting at a piano who desires to innovate an unprecedented chord is still limited by the pre-established technology of the piano. The possibilities for innovation are already limited by the instrument. More than anything, the technological weapons with which the war was fought left it with little resemblance to its predecessors.

Stein proceeds to write that “Writing and painting and all that, is like that [war], for those who occupy themselves with it and don’t make it as it is made.” The analogy acknowledges the existing military-aesthetic association of the vanguard, but it is not pursued further. She offers no indication that new art assaults its audience, or that it arises in opposition to enemy movements in order to overthrow them. On the contrary, she proposes that a society under threat is more likely to become aware of its era and therefore also of the art produced in it. In this respect Gertude Stein sees the Great War having had an impact: it influenced the reception of new art because people were aware that times had changed:

[. . .] because of the academic thing known as war having been forced to

become contemporary made every one not only contemporary in act not

only contemporary in thought but contemporary in self-consciousness

made every one contemporary with the modern composition. [. . .]. And so

war may be said to have advanced a general recognition of the expression

of the contemporary composition by almost thirty years. (411)

The particularity of modernism, she proposes, is how the temporal lapse between a work and its appreciation collapsed with the war. The war produced a widespread cognizance of now being very new. As a consequence, Stein postulates, modernism is recognized by its contemporaries instead of only by its future audiences. The war reduces the distance between the vanguard and its contemporary society and therefore allows new art a more perceptible impact on its audience of the time.

The paradoxical result of defining “modern art” according to its interest in the new is that the rigid laws of form that modernism was supposed to undo may be merely

81 replaced by a new universal law based on novelty rather than critique. Yet from another point of view, Gertrude Stein writes, “Beginning again and again is a natural thing even when there is a series./ Beginning again and again and again explaining composition and time is a natural thing” (408). The sparse punctuation, opposed to the Expressionist exclamation mark that will be discussed shortly, implies an absence of rupture; and what would be the break of a new “beginning” is offset by its repetition and pairing with

“again.” With this tautology, Stein celebrates the endless repetitions of new beginnings without critique. Indeed the repetition is presented as natural law (“a natural thing”).

Along these lines, novelty itself belongs to a structural narrative that purports to repeat itself unproblematically ad infinitum. For Theodor Adorno, by virtue of this recurrence, modernism actually embodies the opposite of its initially intended purpose. The resulting stasis, Oleg Gelikman holds in his commentary on the dilemma, provides the dialectical

“counterpart to the velocity of modernist innovation” (156). Yet as Martin Jay writes in response, few modernists were ever interested in “abstractly negating tradition” (173). In fact, authorial intentions aside, the modernist break was always situated in a nexus of forces extending beyond the isolated domains of new and old. The indexicality of the new or its repeated sequence of beginnings actually necessitates its expanded appraisal.

Recognizing this, Adorno turns the paradox implicit in newness into a generative dialectic: “Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Kunstwerke ist fusioniert mit ihrem kritischen.

Darum üben sie Kritik auch aneinander. [. . .] die Einheit der Geschichte von Kunst ist die dialektische Figur bestimmter Negation” (59-60). (The truth content of artworks is fused with their critical content. That is why works are also critics of one another; […]; the unity of the history of art is the dialectical figure of determinate negation”;

Ästhetische Theorie 59-60; 35) Unlike the fluid model displayed in Gertrude Stein’s sentences, for Adorno the new and the tradition or contemporary historical context are mutually modified through reciprocal negative reactions. Thus, the new is a “blind spot”

‘ein blinder Fleck’, as he at one point calls it (20; 38), only when it is reified and isolated from the tradition that directly or indirectly brought it about, or when it is successful in an absolute sense. Even unintentional innovation is determined by the materials in which it takes place, as Adorno later describes,

Das Verhältnis zum Neuen hat sein Modell an dem Kind, das auf dem

Klavier nach einem noch nie gehörten, unberührten Akkord betastet. Aber

es gab den Akkord immer schon, die Möglichkeiten der Kombination sind

beschränkt, eigentlich steckt alles schon in der Klaviatur. Das Neue ist die

Sehnsucht nach dem Neuen, kaum es selbst, daran krankt alles Neue. Was

als Utopie sich fühlt, bleibt ein Negatives gegen das Bestehende, und

diesem hörig. (55)

a child at the piano searching for a chord never previously heard. This

chord, however, was always there; the possible combinations are limited

and actually everything that can be played on it is implicitly given in the

keyboard. The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself: That is

what everything new suffers from. What takes itself to be utopia remains

the negation of what exists and is obedient to it. (32)

In Adorno’s model, the new is not pure invention or the erasure of the old to which it responds; that response is itself determining. Rather, “Die Spuren im Material und

Verfahrungsweisen, an die jedes qualitativ neue Werk sich heftet, sind Narben, die

Stellen, an denen die voraufgegangenen Werke mißlangen” (“The traces to be found in the material and the technical procedures, from which every qualitatively new work takes its lead, are scars: They are the loci at which the preceding works misfired”; 59; 35). This simultaneous subjection to the old and avant-gardist desire for the new characterizes the manner in which this project understands modernism.

In ihr hat der Expressionismus sich verbrannt; mit den Ausrufungszeichen hat er die eigene Wirkung sich gutgeschrieben, und darum ist sie in ihnen verpufft. Sie gleichen, in expressionistischen Texten, heute den Millionenziffern auf Banknoten der deutschen Inflation. —Theodor Adorno

In his brief and underattended essay on punctuation marks, “Satzzeichen,”

Adorno offers the example of the exclamation mark to illustrate the historical variability of aesthetic convention and meaning. In terms of its syntactical function, it acts as a variation on the period, marks a statement’s closure more emphatically, and suggests the speaker’s voice and voicing, whether by acoustic volume or individual affect. For

Adorno, its excessive use breaks the rules of literature too drastically and reflects the tendency of the subject to dominate his or her artistic material. The innovative treatment of punctuation in writing can only be meaningful in view of the convention and material it engages and critiques, and it by definition can not be perpetually new. Consequently, the use of the exclamation mark became as outdated as the tradition its users had worked to overthrow. He writes, “Das geschichtliche Wesen der Satzzeichen kommt daran zutage, daß an ihnen genau das veraltet, was einmal modern war. Aufrufungszeichen sind unerträglich geworden als Gebärde der Autorität, mit der der Schriftsteller von außen her einen Nachdruck zu setzen versucht, den die Sache nicht selbst ausübt” (“That what was once modern about punctuation marks becomes obsolete brings to light their historical nature. Exclamation points have become unbearable as gestures of authority, with which the writer attempts to make an emphasis from outside in, an effect which the thing can not perform alone”; 107-08). What was first a novel feature in Expressionist writing and a visible mark of the exuberant and spontaneous individual soon became a practically obligatory staple of Expressionist style. In 1956, when the essay was written, the

85 reference to the “gestures of authority” recalls that in German the exclamation point is used to punctuate the imperative mode. This is highlighted in the essay when the mark is compared to a “menacingly raised index finger” (106). Although Expressionism shared no association with National Socialism, its exclamation marks evoke their recent use in the forbidding signs of the Third Reich.

This association is also implied through Adorno’s likening of the exclamation mark to the inflated currency of Weimar Germany, which preceded—and is frequently attributed as facilitating the emergence of—the Third Reich. Sequences of them appeared in as much inflated profusion as the zeros on bank notes and likewise gained no additional purchase. Rather than acting as the symbols of authority they were intended to be, they therefore appear “helpless” and desperate.

In ihr hat der Expressionismus sich verbrannt; mit den Ausrufungszeichen

hat er die eigene Wirkung sich gutgeschrieben, und darum ist sie in ihnen

verpufft. Sie gleichen, in expressionistischen Texten, heute den

Millionenziffern auf Banknoten der deutschen Inflation. (108)

In this [gesture] Expressionism burned itself; with exclamation points

[Expressionism] credited itself for its own effect, and therefore through

them [the gesture] disappeared into smoke. They resemble today, in

Expressionist texts, the one million numeral mark on bank notes of the

German inflation.

By tracing reciprocal stages of the symbol’s use and reception, the essay underscores the historically-determined social meaning of punctuation marks. Adorno goes on to draw a contrast between it and what he identifies as its counterpart in music, the sforzato, which

“heute noch so unentbehrlich ist wie zu Beethovens Zeiten, als es den Einbruch subjektiven Willens ins musikalische Gewebe markierte” (“is today still as indispensable as it was in Beethoven’s times, when it marked an irruption of the subjective will into the musical fabric”; 107-08). Both devices voice the role of the expressive subject’s disruption of compositional norms in the musical and literary work. In contrast to his depiction of the textual symbol, Adorno praises Beethoven’s use of the compositional device elsewhere for producing immanent “moments of form and expression” (Beethoven

54). Though the sforzato and exclamation point appear to create the same formal inflection, their diverging significances illustrate the historical contingency of formal meaning.

In contrast to the inflated use of the exclamation mark, Adorno praises formal developments in music and writing that proceed carefully and in response to individual contexts rather than by principle. He advises writers to follow the example of musical composers who tread lightly on existing rules as they introduce new sounds or compositional moves:

Zu raten wäre allenfalls, man solle mit den Satzzeichen umgehen wie

Musiker mit verbotenen Fortschreitungen der Harmonien und Stimmen.

Einer jeden Interpunktion, wie einer jeden solchen Fortschreitung, läßt

sich anmerken, ob sie eine Intention trägt oder bloß schlampt; und,

subtiler, ob der subjektive Wille die Regel brutal durchbricht oder ob das

wägende Gefühl sie behutsam mitdenkt und mitschwingen läßt, wo er sie

suspendiert. (112)

The best recommendation would be that one should treat punctuation the

way musicians treat the forbidden progressions of chords and registers.

Just like each progression, each punctuation reveals whether it carries an

intention or just does so sloppily; and more subtly, whether the subjective

will brutally breaks the rule into two when it suspends it, or whether the

weighing feeling lets itself carefully follow the rule’s logic and swing

along with it when it suspends it.

In order to be such, the new acquires a tension between itself and its context; and for

Adorno it ideally represents a balanced collaboration between the artistic subject, his or her material, and the conventions of composition. It “shocks” its audience with

“unfamiliarity and strangeness” (“Der Schock [. . .] ist nicht bloß, wie die gutartige

Apologie es möchte, dem Ungewöhnten und Befremdenden als solchem zuzuschreiben, sonder einem Aufstörenden und selber Verstörten”; “The Aging” 181;143). The new art achieves this effect by “revealing in its isolation, the very cracks that reality would like to cover over in order to exist in safety” (“Why is the New Art” 131). Expressive punctuation also calls attention to the reality of textual mediation, by emphasizing the lines and points on the page’s surface, and destabilizes conventional logic through its rearrangement. Crucially, punctuation’s embeddedness in convention associates it both with the normative and with rebellions aimed against norms. As an indirect consequence, its style signifies its relation to historically-specific artistic trends. This surely is the case with Dada and Expressionism.

“the name was not new but the thing being alive was always new” —Gertrude Stein

By 1934, when she conducted a lecture tour of the U.S., Gertrude Stein had become a household name, whose style of writing was playfully and mockingly imitated even in popular newspapers.7 By this time, she had already been included as the only female author in Edmund Wilson’s 1931 study of French, Irish/British, and American modernist—or “imaginative”— literature, Axel’s Castle. The Autobiography of Alice B.

Toklas, which Stein published in 1933, enjoyed huge popularity, but her place in the landscape of modernism had been long established, beginning with the publication of

Three Lives in 1909, Tender Buttons in 1914, the lesser-known and experimental

Geography and Plays (1922), The Making of Americans (1925), and How to Write

(1931), as well as the famed status of her Paris salon as a site visited by other cultural figures, including F. T. Marinetti.

Despite the continuous vision of aesthetic history expressed in the passages in the last section, Gertrude Stein’s writing is as formally experimental as any. As such, her work has been understood according to a vocabulary of rupture. Indeed, Marjorie Perloff compares Stein’s treatment of language with Marinetti’s when she points out that “[t]he

‘destruction of syntax’” of Futurism “was, of course, also Stein’s project,” but achieved differently (Wittgenstein’s Ladder 89). Jonathan Levin describes her work as a “leading example of what might be called modernist anti-modernism: a protomodern sensibility struggling against modernist aestheticism and pointing the way beyond modernist impasses” (146)—a description attributed by Peter Bürger and Andreas Huyssen to the

7 See “Reporter Tells in Stein Style the Stein Style.” Chicago Daily Tribune. Oct 25 1934: 17 or “But Stein is a Stein is a Stein.” New York Times Nov. 18 1934 BR10.

89 avant-garde rejection of High Modernist aestheticism. Following their reading of avant- gardism as an anticipation of post-modernism, many scholars of the last decades have called Stein’s writing a postmodernist poetics “ahead of its time” and have concentrated their appreciation of her work around the signature influence it had on the

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement, for example.8 Stein was perceived by her contemporaries according to a similar vocabulary. One most likely pen-named

8 In 1985 Wendy Steiner calls Lectures in America “a veritable index to the leading aesthetic ideas of our day. Indeed, the training in paradoxical thinking that pop art and deconstruction recently have provided tends to normalize Stein’s writing to a striking extent” (xi). Other notable examples include Marjorie Perloff’s inclusion of Stein in 21st Century Modernism and Marianne DeKoven’s comparison of Stein’s resistance to phallogo- and logocentrism to the work of Derrida, Irigaray, and Kristeva (A Different). Others have resisted this comparison by pointing out aspects of Stein’s linguistic philosophy that conflict with postmodern linguistic theories: Jennifer Ashton argues instead that Stein’s view of words, and the name in particular, is “absolutely devoted to [. . .] the determinacy it entails” (Ashton 582). But scholars like Jonathan Levin show that what has been perceived as a “prescient commitment […] to postmodern values,” as Jennifer Ashton skeptically describes it, descends from “a distinct history in American writing, not only in pragmatism’s general embrace of open-ended experience but even more specifically in Emerson’s conception of self-reliance as a form of abandonment, the more marginal the better” (146). Stein found in the novels of Henry James “the beginning of an abstract method which would foreground the nonrepresentational dimensions of language” (147) and “recognized in James’s peculiar obscurity, and especially in his habit of endlessly delaying and qualifying his subject through the course of a paragraph, a form of abstraction that detached and broke down the continuities of social and cultural life” (149). Of equal importance was the influence of William James’s Principles of Psychology, which demonstrates through abstract word games that “[the reader] will soon begin to wonder if it can possibly be the word he has been using all his life with that meaning. [. . .] It is reduced, by this new way of attending to it, to its sensational nudity” (James qtd. 151). Her attention to the nonsignifying aspects of words, their material appearance and sound, though especially resonant for poetic experiments later in the century, were not at all ahead of their time, but as Norman Weinstein and Marjorie Perloff have also pointed out, they were deeply entrenched in the science and philosophy of the turn of the century. Norman Weinstein has observed that the inadequacy of traditional views of language embedded in Aristotelian logic was evident especially to Gertrude Stein: “A linguistic logic based upon laws of direct causality and linear time cannot authentically correspond to a universe of possibilities such as James describes” (5).

90 contemporary noted of her in 1934, “She has managed [. . .] to make many writers look upon the English language as something that has unlimited possibilities, as something malleable” (Schriftgiesser B5). And “she deliberately and definitely showed how to get rid of the old-fashioned, Victorian sentence. She constructed a new framework for a world that was beginning to have new thoughts.” The possibilities opened by Stein remain unelaborated by this observer; her work is celebrated for no other quality than its being so “previously unforeseeable” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 1) and its paving the way for more innovations. However, even if Stein created this revolutionary opening in

English literature, her experiments are hardly severed from its past.

On the contrary, Stein cites Shakespeare and other authors of the “great works” without a trace of contempt, because she appreciates how they revolutionized the English language in their own eras. She, herself, aspires to the same achievement when she states,

“I want to be historical” (qtd. in Stendhal 31). Rather than rejecting cultural heritage per se, Stein’s works appear to target methods of instruction that labor to maintain the grammatical and linguistic status quo. In this sense, it is worth briefly considering the connection between forms of writing, institutional authority, and education, as well as the role this connection plays in Stein’s approach to writing. As implied in a half-page

Washington Post article subheaded with the line “People Who Educate People Might as

Well Be Stopped, Decides Stylists; Finds a Lot of Education in New England” (“The

Pity”), teachers are seen to enforce a rigid structure of either right or wrong, and logical or irrational, an approach to learning which violently stunts the free and creative impulse of youth, itself, as we have seen, a meaningful symbolic category for modernists.

Education not only stunts individual genius, she suggests in the article, but also

91 generational genius through its conformity to institutional norms over the demands of a new age. The site of this restraint is often the composition notebook, where the thoughts of students would be formulated and recorded in writing, the very type of notebook in which Stein handwrote her work before it was typed by her partner Alice B. Toklas.

Thus in her 1931 book How to Write, Stein cites and dramatically revises the writing primer’s language of instruction in order to ironize it. 9 Taking the title and keywords that mark the conventional form of such books, Stein replaces and inverts its contents. Writing is reduced to letters and lettering, it seems, which produces a different level of meaning entirely. In fact, just as Tender Buttons has been described as a poetic revision of the English dictionary (Kaufmann), Sharon Kirsch has suggested that How to

Write is a revision of Edwin A. Abbott’s How to Write Clearly, a standard handbook used at Harvard during the time Stein studied there. In keeping with standard usage, the title of the volume reads as an imperative statement (write in this way!), yet as Jacques Lezra notes, it could also read as an interrogative pleading (how is one to write at all?) (117).

Such subtle ambiguity would be clarified by the use of conventional punctuation marks, as suggested by the parenthetical supplements above. The ambivalence voiced through the title’s unpunctuated close is essential to its significance. Commenting on this aspect of Stein’s writing, Jonathan Levin writes, “to understand this writing too well would be to miss its meaning, or perhaps more accurately, to miss the way in which it stages the production of meaning. [. . .] The challenge of reading Stein’s poetry and prose is in

9 As Sharon Kirsch has argued in her study of Stein’s college compositions, “Stein certainly experienced the ‘red pencil of the section man,’ particulary when she received comments from her instructor focused solely on the mechanics of her writing: ‘You are careless too about punctuation . . . the quotation marks . . . should be single—not double.’ Her professor continued, ‘It will pay you to review those parts of the textbook which treat of sentences and paragraphs” (293).

92 attending to the movements of words as they enact the transitional processes that make meanings” (166). Although what Adorno envisions in his remarks on the semi-colon scarcely resembles the sentences produced by Gertrude Stein, his comments on

“Ideologien wie die der Luzidität, der sachlichen Härte, der gedrängten Präzision

(“ideologies like lucidity, uncompromising facts, condensed precision”; “Satzzeichen”

112) nonetheless illustrate how writing conventions hinder certain ways of thinking and the extent to which clarity can in fact obscure.10 In place of a strict definition of comprehension, Stein offers “enjoyment” as a type of understanding. In a radio interview she declared, “If you enjoy something you understand it, and if you understand it you enjoy it” (Hall). Similarly, a journalist who had asked her to clarify the sentence

“Supposing no one asked a question, what would be the answer?,” reported her as responding, “‘It’s very simple,’ said the authoress. ‘Don’t you see? It’s right there—that girl understands.’ And Miss Stein pointed to a young woman who was giggling”

(“Gertrude Stein Arrives”). By leaving a pleasurable set of impressions that might otherwise be considered inarticulable, Stein’s sentences operate differently from those espoused in grammar handbooks. In this way their expression is often likened to that of nonverbal arts; Stein’s texts still convey meaning, even if that significance is not predetermined.11

10 See pages 7-8 of introduction and Adorno, “Skoteinos.” 11 Edmund Wilson observed in his chapter on Gertrude Stein that “she seems to be groping for the instinctive movements of the mind which underlie the factitious conventional logic of ordinary intercourse, and to be trying to convey their rhythms and reflexes through a language divested of its ordinary meaning” (241). Marianne DeKoven attributes a feminist resistance to logocentrism to this aspect of Stein’s writing: “This linearity is not innocent. It has been instituted at the expense of repressing what Derrida calls ‘pluridimensionality,’ which is, as we have seen, the central feature of Steinian experimental writing” (“Gertrude Stein” 88). Many readers have found comparisons

The effect of passages like the following from “In Narrative” cannot be paraphrased: “He first added fed and way and weighed and followed from and first and first added weighed and wait and first added followed he first added followed first and wait weighed and first he first added followed first and weighed and wait and wait” (How to 233). Although some might find this passage an example of material writing divorced from any significative function,12 Stein insists more than once that it is “impossible to avoid meaning” (71). The eyes of the reader might not only scan the sentence once from left to right, but might also jump between the repeated words, leading the reader to compare how words like “first” change or remain the same in each contextual instance.

The reader may note near-homonyms like “wait” and “weighed” and ponder the potential relations of meaning between them. The ways in which arrangement and signification interact inspire a nonlinear mode of reading. Stein repeats the word “first” with playful irony as it in fact always “follows” other words. If the repeated use of “added” and “and”

between Stein’s writing and other arts like music and painting to be a useful tool in explaining, relating to, or understanding her nonlinear work, particularly in regards to the “sensational nudity” exposed by her Jamesian word games, that is, precisely those material aspects of language of which her experimental writing makes use. However, the comparison so frequently made between her writing and cubist painting treats her writing as a merely imitative art and directs attention away from the “expanded possibilities of literature” Stein’s linguistic experiments actually invite (82). “[T]he danger of calling Stein’s experimental writing literary cubism,” Marianne DeKoven reminds us, is that it confuses words with images. William Gass, in directing attention to a sentence in The Making of Americans where “[t]he sound shifts throughout follow and reinforce the sense” (viii), holds on the other hand that “[i]f we look at this line (not merely read it), we shall find out how important looking as well as listening are to the understanding and appreciation of prose” (vii). Gass’s comments remind us that these musical and visual features are not external to and superficially adopted by the written medium, but rather an aspect of it conventionally neglected by readers and writers. These features are not in conflict with sense or understanding, but, as Marianne DeKoven writes, form and content can be in “sympathy” with one another “in the sense that both arise from and express the same essential vision” (“Landscape” 223) in Stein’s work. 12 See Pladott.

94 in this passage recalls the “+” of Marinetti’s new punctuation in asyntactical poetry, one can see how differently the relations of words operate when placed in an open grammar and how consistent this grammar is with Stein’s overall view of literary history.

During her lecture tour in the U.S. then, Stein addresses the challenge modern writers and artists encounter in the face of tradition. By extension she distinguishes her writing from the similarly radical and widely-known “destruction of syntax” of the militant avant-garde. Among these lectures, which shortly afterward appeared together in the volume Lectures in America, was the essay “Poetry and Grammar.” Like other explanations for the need for new art, Stein rejects traditional literary form in order to recapture what those forms no longer express. For her the modern challenge is not only a matter of syntax and genre, but moreover of the linguistic medium. When a language is still young and new, its very first poets, she writes, are “drunk with nouns,” and their poetry is consequently the “state of knowing and feeling a name” (233). Yet by the nineteenth century (241), nouns had begun to grow stale in a new era, because they have

“been the name of something for such a very long time” (214). Although the reciprocal relations surrounding an object and lending it meaning change, its name does not, which falsely implies that its condition and the perception of it have persisted.

If prose, as Stein writes in “Poetry and Grammar,” has the task of expressing motion in space, nouns merely denote static objects. What objects do and how they change over time, she claims, makes them interesting in prose. She begins the lecture with the question, “A noun is a name of anything, why after a thing is named write about it. A name is adequate or it is not. If it is adequate then why go on calling it, if it is not then calling it by its name does no good” (209-210). Because it identifies objects that are

95 merely there, the work of naming is redundant and has fixing and determining qualities for Stein. Similar to the emphasis on vehicles mentioned already, her opposition to nouns at this stage of the lecture is related to her interest in writing’s involvement with action, whereas writing concerned with naming does not act, modify, or “do.” As she reiterates,

“generally speaking, things once they are named the name does not go on doing anything to them and so why write in nouns” (210). If a historically stable and deterministic language poses an unavoidable obstacle to the new writer, its syntax and punctuation provide a manner of reinvigorating it with fresh expressive power. In the context of this frustration, punctuation takes on added significance in new writing, because it offers the possibility of simultaneously retaining and transforming language.

The name and the noun therefore represent particular ways of using language that, according to Stein, inventory: “just naming names is alright when you want to call a roll but is it any good for anything else. To be sure in many places in Europe as in America they do like to call rolls” (210). Stein does not elaborate, but roll calls, generally, are tools used in institutional settings that comprise a daily inventory, especially of students or soldiers subordinate to the authority of the roll-caller. Instead of serving a generative purpose, it uses record-keeping language to ensure stability and account for loss: that everyone and everything is where it ought to be at an appointed time and, especially during wartime, deduce a count of casualties based on those who do not arrive. Instead of creating, altering, or giving form to the immaterial workings of the mind as she demands of language, roll-called names amount to a tally of bodies. It represents the militarism of the avant-garde without its ideal of forceful advancement.

Despite her impatience or dissatisfaction with names, Stein has no intention of inventing a new language as Marinetti or the zaumnie poets did. Marjorie Perloff indicates that instead Stein, consistent with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, used its syntactical context to playfully produce meaning. Perloff suggests that

Stein “may well be thinking of a particular example of roll calling: namely, the parole in libertà of F. T. Marinetti and his Futurist cénacle” (Wittgenstein’s 89). Stein’s unpublished 1917 poem “Marry Nettie,” postulates Perloff, parodies the listing of nouns and their isolation from their “specific context” (98). Marinetti’s poem, “Balance of

Analogies,” for instance, is composed of four “sums” and consists at times of asyntactical series of nouns, which is to say there is no determined sequence or “grammar.” The following is exemplary of his refusal to relate nouns to one another linguistically:

“around Adrianople + bombardment + orchestra + colossus-walk + factory widening concentric circles of reflections plagiarisms echoes laughs little girls flowers whistles-of- steam waiting feathers perfumes” (435-36).

In the same essay, Stein writes that proper nouns introduced or individually bestowed onto individual, living, temporal beings evoke on the other hand how “lively” nouns can be: “the name is only given to that person when they are born, there is at least the element of choice even the element of change and anybody can be pretty well able to do what they like” (214). By celebrating this relative freedom (relative because one’s name is bestowed by the previous generation, after all), Stein exhibits sympathy with

Futurist and Expressionist experiments in word-invention. Yet she also underscores the impossibility or futility of the linguistic rupture introduced by the onomatopoetic extremes of Marinetti’s “Zang Tumb Tumb” or the transrational language of Russian

97 experiments. She stresses that such coinages have “nothing to do with language” (238), because they lack history. In contrast, “[l]anguage as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation” (238). Instead of inventing an entirely new language, she emphasizes the importance of historical as well as syntactical contexts, “every one must stay with the language their language that has come to be spoken and written and which has in it all the history of its intellectual recreation.”

The first section of the lecture on “Poetry and Grammar” shows how, from one perspective, tradition can be oppressive and deterministic. Literary art is held in place by the obstinate hold of an aged, even prohibitive, language on poetic expression, she implies when she writes, “They the names that is the nouns cannot please, because after all you know well after all that is what Shakespeare meant when he talked about a rose by any other name” (212-13). This allusion to the words of Juliet in William Shakespeare’s

Romeo and Juliet recalls the lines, “What's in a name? that which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet.” Comparing the name of the rose with the object of the rose itself, Juliet refers to the insignificance of the name, its inability to influence the rose or to capture the sensory impressions its scent, color, and touch make on the observer.

She then asks what Romeo’s character has to do with the Montague name, as she laments the fate their family names have dictated to them.13 In spite of the family feud, that is, the

13 JULIET: 'Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,

98 inherited hatred of each for the other’s bequeathed name, they have fallen in love. The couple is of course not successful in casting off their names to live and love in freedom.

Their example insists that love, brought up a number of times in the lecture, is not predetermined by language, even if the material outcome of the couple’s relationship is.

On the contrary, as Stein’s discussion of the form of poetry in the same essay reveals, the feeling of love resists forms of literary expression as well as the reverse in the case of her own relationship with Alice B. Toklas (where there is no established language for romantic love between women).14

Just as Juliet sought to find a new word for the object of her love that would release it from its name in order to possess it fully, Stein writes that modern poetry “is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun” (231; my italics). Her poetry seeks to find a name for an object as new as her passion for it and asks how it is possible to “mean names without naming,” to make a thing “named without using its name” (236), because “the name was not new but the thing being alive was always new” (237). The motion,

Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name, And for that name which is no part of thee Take all myself. (II.2 ll. 42-53) 14 Her discussion of the apostrophe is erotically suggestive and again relates the essay to the theme of love. It “has a gentle tender insinuation that makes it very difficult to definitely decide to do without it” (216) and “from time to time I feel myself having regrets and from time to time I put it in to make the possessive case.” Yet she only has this feeling if it is “put in” between the word and its “s” and never on the end after the plural form: “but inside a word and its s well perhaps, perhaps it does appeal by its weakness to your weakness. At least at any rate from time to time I do find myself letting it alone if it has come in and sometimes it has come in. I cannot positively deny but that I do from time to time let it come in.”

99 progress, and dynamism of Futurism become, for Stein, a characteristic of a continuous temporality, of the ongoing history of an active, living language. Although Stein did not endorse the term “automatic writing,”15 she in fact conducted significant research on continuous writing as an undergraduate at Radcliffe.16 The “going on” of writing not only refers to physical movement, but also to stream of consciousness, a phrase first coined as such by her Harvard professor William James in Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe a mindful awareness of the unceasing activity of the human mind. This consciousness, of course, is made aware of itself through the act of writing.

Her view of the advent of modern art pronounces a desire for change without rupture. Instead of positing a break between her experiments and the literary precedents with which her work differs, she locates both concurrently. The move forward is also a reversal. Marjorie Perloff warns that this history of poetry should be “taken with a grain of salt” (Wittgenstein’s 90), and it is in many ways unconvincing. Whether Stein actually believed what she wrote or whether her writing’s humorous nature discounts its validity is impossible to say and in any case less important than the writing itself. More significant is that she writes this history to begin with. Her account exhibits that unlike the typical avant-garde stance toward the past, Stein situates her experiments in a genealogy, made up of the attitudes of authors to their languages over the course of history.

15 “Writing for the normal person is too complicated an activity to be indulged in automatically” (Stein qtd. in Meyer 221). 16 Together with Leon Mendez Solomons she published “Normal Motor Automatism.” Psychological Review 3.5 (September 1896): 492-512 and “Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in Relation to Attention.” Psychological Review 5.3 (May 1898): 295-306.

100

Periods have a life of their own a necessity of their own a feeling of their own a time of their own. And that feeling that life that necessity that time can express itself in an infinite variety that is the reason that I have always remained true to periods so much so that as I say recently I have felt that one could need them more than one had ever needed them.—Gertrude Stein

In the same lecture, Stein identifies a similarly problematic schema for some marks of punctuation. Like names that signify instead of modify, she considers the question mark to be superfluous:

It is evident that if you ask a question you ask a question but anybody who

can read at all knows when a question is a question as it is written in

writing. Therefore I ask you therefore wherefore should one use it the

question mark. Beside it does not in its form go with ordinary printing and

so it pleases neither the eye nor the ear and it is therefore like a noun, just

an unnecessary name of something. A question is a question, anybody can

know that a question is a question and so why add to it the question mark

when it is already there when the question is already there in the writing.

(214-15)

Rather than opening an inquiry, the question mark produces closure. Nor does it modify the sentence it punctuates but like a name identifies that which is already there. Her objection is not to its redundancy with the grammatical mode it formalizes per se, because she is hardly an economic writer, but to the way in which the question mark leaves the impression that it is required for the question to be such. The interrogative mode in writing is represented already in its word arrangement, she suggests, and attentive readers and writers can recognize and create a question from words and their

101 arrangement alone. She implies that punctuation is a supportive element that is external and alien to language, and she demands that prose writing itself “do” and not merely represent the action of objects in space or of thought. Writing does not only signify the speed of planes and cars, it seeks to perform and act out its own moving presence.

Depending on the mark, she implies, punctuation can still this motion or perform it independently.

Stein offers a counterpart in “Poetry and Grammar” to Marinetti’s crashing automobile, his dictating plane, and even to Woolf’s railway coach (to be discussed shortly) when she describes an exchange between a group of people standing near a rail and the driver of a train passing on it. Drawing from the established symbolic role of modern transportation technologies to represent the freedom for which she aims in her writing, she compares her sentences to the American locomotive: “when a train was going by at a terrific pace [a foreign observer had told her] and we waved a hat the engine driver could make a bell quite carelessly go ting ting ting, the way anybody playing at a thing could do” (225). She proceeds, “Perhaps you see the connection with that and my sentences.” According to this analogy, her sentences do more than execute the purpose she intends for them, as they spontaneously respond to the greetings of their readers while remaining on track. They take on, she writes, “a new balance that had to do with a sense of movement of time included in a given space which as I have already said is a definitely American thing” (224). Emphasizing the sentence over the isolated noun, she suggests that her writing performs independently of her own authorial command. This offers a dramatic contrast to the “disinterested” model of the “observer” and, on the other hand, the work of art criticized by Adorno, in which “the beholder disappeared into the

102 material; [. . .] in modern works that shoot toward the viewer as on occasion a locomotive does in a film” (“umgekehrt verschwand der Betrachter in der Sache; erst recht ist das der

Fall in modernen Gebilden, die auf jenen zufahren wie zuweilen Lokomotiven im Film”;

Aesthetic Theory 13; 27). Instead it foregrounds the reader’s process of making meaning.

Many readers have commented on the significance of punctuation for Stein, particularly concerning its absent role in her writing. Isabelle Alfandary, for example, points out how the punctuation mark interferes with the Steinian imperative “to go on.”17

For her the power of punctuation is inversely exhibited by Stein’s avoidance of it: it “is considered to be that much more powerful in that it finds itself dismissed” (70). Fredric

Jameson observes that the absence of punctuation “has the effect of excluding skimming or speed reading, reading for the ‘ideas’ rather than the words, or if you like, reading for content” (343).18 Both emphasize the role of form in Stein’s sparing use of punctuation and its impact on content. Surprisingly, even though periods posit stops and closures in writing that is meant to “go on,” Stein nonetheless accepts and appreciates them in

17 “Les difficultés qu’éprouve Gertrude Stein avec al ponctuation tiennent à la scansion. [. . .] La ponctuation freine par définition le défilé du signifiant sous la plume, ralentit le cours de la parole en instituant des pauses plus ou moins définitives, des inflexions plus ou moins marquées. À l’exception du point qui trouve grâce à les autres marques de ponctuation marques de ponctuation ne lui inspirent que défiance. Accessoire de la langue en écriture, la ponctuation est jugée contraire au désir steinien d’une parole sans fin et sans interférence. Loin d’être sous-estimé, le pouvoir d’impression de la ponctuation est jugé si puissant que celle-ci s’en trouve révoquée” (“The difficulties that test Gertrude Stein with punctuation are due to scansion. [. . .] Punctuation by definition impedes the stream of signifiers under the pen, slows the flow of speech by instituting more or less definitive pauses, more or less marked inflections. With the exception of the period, which finds grace in the poet’s eyes, the other marks of punctuation only inspire her distrust. Incidental to the language of writing, punctuation is judged to be contrary to the Steinian desire for a speech without end and without interference. Far from being underestimated, punctuation’s power of impression is considered to be that much more powerful in that it finds itself dismissed”; 69-70) 18 See also Cordingley.

103

“Poetry and Grammar” on another basis. They escape the problems of other marks, because they are what she calls independent “happenings” in the text. She considers their visual appearance pleasing, and despite her desire that writing go on endlessly, the period marks the pauses that she acknowledges one necessarily has to make on occasion. In this sense they resemble her own historical treatment of modernism as an event.

Inevitably no matter how completely I had to have writing go on,

physically one had to again and again stop sometime and if one had to

again and again stop sometime then periods had to exist. Beside I had

always liked the look of periods and I liked what they did. Stopping

sometime did not really keep one from going on, it was nothing that

interfered, it was only something that happened, and as it happened as a

perfectly natural happening. I did not believe in periods and I used them. I

really never stopped using them. (217)

Embedded in Stein’s fluid, undialectical manner of writing are underlying tensions between her use of words such as “begin” and “again” or “stopping” to use the full-stop.

Because the stop, the “breaking up [of] things,” marked by a period is “arbitrary,” not prescribed by a grammar, and one instead uses it as one wants, it does not burden writing.

Its interest lies in that it “acts” and “thinks” on its own. They both use and are used. They

“happen” as temporal events. In other words they periodize, are periodic, are formal points and historical transitions. Acknowledging the look of the marks, she refuses to demote print to a merely transparent medium and carrier of significance. Instead she treats it as an expressive component of writing. The autonomy of periods from the rules

104 of writing and needs of writers gives them a multiplicity of uses and expressive possibilities:

periods had come to have for me completely a life of their own. They

could begin to act as they thought best and one might interrupt one’s

writing with them that is not really interrupt one’s writing with them but

one could come to stop arbitrarily stop at times in one’s writing and so

they could be used and you could use them.

Periods have a life of their own a necessity of their own a feeling of their

own a time of their own. And that feeling that life that necessity that time

can express itself in an infinite variety that is the reason that I have always

remained true to periods so much so that as I say recently I have felt that

one could need them more than one had ever needed them. (218)

The division between individual theses or the conclusion of a “complete” thought traditionally marked by the period becomes arbitrary for Stein, because for her no thought ever is complete. Instead of using it to fix authorial intent and close the production of meaning as scholars of literary punctuation often observe of it, Stein celebrates the period as a symbol of freedom and independence. In this way one can see how even the stops of the period have a self-propelling movement and “an infinite variety” of their own.

While periods are independent and enfranchised and have a “necessity of their own,” Stein calls commas “servile” with “no life of their own.” They are “dependent upon use and convenience” (218-19) and aligned with the oppressive pedagogical red ink

105 of her student years at Harvard.19 Commas, which execute the commands of writing manuals, neither inspire nor express feeling, but serve “practical purposes” instead. Like the newspaper editors whom Adorno describes as rejecting complex, semi-coloned sentences,20 Stein thinks that commas weaken writing by increasing the reader’s ease and passivity. They simplify the potential meaning carried by combinations and sequences of words:

As I say commas are servile and they have no life of their own, and their

use is not a use, it is a way of replacing one’s own interest and I do

decidedly like to like my own interest my own interest in what I am doing.

A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on

your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead

and to me for many years and I still do feel that way about it only I do not

pay as much attention to them, the use of them was positively degrading.

(219-20)

Commas “enfeeble” language and impose unnecessary “care” and “help” onto a syntactical form that would be otherwise characterized by its “force” (221). They interfere with the knowledge that “you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath.” In stating this she negates the accepted historical service of punctuation marks to aid the orator-reader by dictating when to breathe for rhetorical effect and also implicates

19 See p. 122, footnote 10. The instructors’ comments on Stein’s college compositions, which are housed at the Beinecke Library and were kept by Stein among her papers until her death, foreshadow the phrasing of Stein’s concerns in her texts on writing. Stein recognized that “rules of usage—just like any usage itself—carry with them an ideological framework that empowers some to invent and others to follow rules” (Kirsch 287). 20 See pages 7-8.

106 the reader in the power relations of producing meaning. To illustrate the problem with commas, she refers to the long sentences in her 925-page experimental novel The Making of Americans, where the powerful effect of words repeatedly piled upon one another would have been compromised by conventional punctuation. Regarding these sentences, she “felt the passionate need of their taking care of themselves by themselves and not helping them, and thereby enfeebling them by putting in a comma” (221). More precisely, the insertion of commas limits the potential connections between words and clauses that a reader might make:

I have liked dependent adverbial clauses because of their variety of

dependence and independence. You can see how loving the intensity of

complication of these things that commas would be degrading. Why if you

want the pleasure of concentrating on the final simplicity of excessive

complication would you want any artificial aid to bring about that

simplicity. (220)

Commas degrade this flexibility and make sentences artificially simple instead of letting sentences communicate the simple truth of the complicated relation of stream of consciousness. They ossify and fix meaning, when that meaning could remain free and flexible for both the author and reader, in which case the writing itself would hold a variety of performative possibilities. In this way, we are reminded again of the earliest punctuators, who inserted marks into scriptura continua as a method of (sensical and oratorical) interpretation. In fact, Stein’s approach to punctuation is very like that of

Marcus Tellius Cicero, who was rather outspoken about scribal interference. As Malcolm

Parkes notes, “Cicero was scornful about readers who relied on punctuation, asserting

107 that the end of a sentence ‘ought to be determined not by the speaker’s pausing for breath, or by a stroke interposed by a copyist, but by the constraint of the rhythm’” (12).21

This scribal division, as we have seen in the last chapter, is itself called “composition.”

The explanatory nature of composition, to allude to the former lecture discussed above, moves in both directions between the interpreting reader and the writer. In fact, if I may follow my own train of thought for a moment, Stein’s famous “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” poem (1913), if viewed in scriptura continua, could also be interpreted phonetically as “Ro Cicero cicero cicero c,” whose bust she rather resembles in Francis

Picabia’s rendering of her (Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1930), hanging in the reading room of the Beinecke Library. The insertion of commas would eliminate precisely this class of interpretive process. Commas are in this view at odds with something fundamental to Stein’s conception of writing: its movement, its vital rhythm, the spontaneity of its operation, and the interactivity it enables between writer, text, and reader. She asks, “And what does a comma do, a comma does nothing but make easy a thing that if you like it enough is easy enough without the comma” (221). Yet there are commas in the very sentences in which Stein opposes their use. In the latter passage, the comma therefore confuses meaning; that is, it does the opposite of what Stein’s words attribute to it. Its mark acts out against the sentence’s content and the names it uses, rather than clarifying and assisting them. The difficulty posed by the text’s status as a

21 An important difference between Stein’s unpunctuated sentences and scriptura continua is that her writing is not intended as a record of spoken language, as the continous flow of scriptura continua is meant to be to speech. In the case of this essay, it is the opposite: a script from which she read, as she lectured to audiences.

108 lecture plays no role here.22 This comma, like most of the others, is in the same hand and ink as the rest of the text. Its silent placement demonstrates again how Stein’s texts are capable of operating in actively complex and unfixed ways that engage or return the hail of the active reader, who must reckon with the forceful sentence on his or her own.

The feeble are tempted to outrage, and the strong are led to destroy the very foundations and rules of literary society. Signs of this are everywhere apparent. Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated; as a boy staying with an aunt for the week-end rolls in the geranium bed out of sheer desperation as the solemnities of the sabbath wear on.—Virginia Woolf

In differentiating modern writers from their predecessors, Virginia Woolf offers the image of a speeding train rapidly arriving at modernity in her essay “Mr. Bennett and

Mrs. Brown,” which she had first prepared as an invited talk “about modern fiction”

(“Character in Fiction”) in 1924 to the Cambridge Heretics Society (“Mr. Bennett” 94).23

The metaphor of the train recalls both Marinetti’s plane and Adorno’s ship, as it transposes a temporal schema onto a spatial one. What changes with modern literature, for Woolf, is that author-passengers begin to notice that they are in the company of the mousey Mrs. Brown, who is probably of the same age as, if not older than, Woolf’s chosen representative of the older generation of writers, Arnold Bennett. Mrs. Brown, it appears to Woolf, demands a method of characterization other than the realistic conventions offered by Bennett’s generation of novelists: “There she sits in the corner of

22 “Poetry and Grammar” was not a transcript of a talk but prepared in writing before being delivered. Moreover, the notebooks in which the lecture was hand-written exhibit that the text underwent little change between the time it was first written, its many deliveries, and its publication. Not only this, but it was evident from the outset that they would be published in print form. 23 See Rachel Bowlby for a brilliant thematization of this essay.

109 the carriage—that carriage which is travelling, not from Richmond to Waterloo, but from one age of English literature to the next, [. . .], it is the novelists who get in and out— there she sits and not one of the Edwardian writers has so much as looked at her” (109-

10). Instead of being spatially or temporally divided, the generations are brought into contact through the shared space of a train compartment. While not all generations sit in the carriage at once, Mrs. Brown’s presence is constant, and this contact as well as the ride itself provide them with a common experience. As the train makes “stops” at stations and authors enter and exit the car, its trip promotes a more complex view of literary history, punctuated in its own manner. Despite the snobbish tone of some of the essay’s passages, the speeding vehicle of the train, which takes on a value symbolic of the progress of English literature, offers a less isolated and class-privileged vehicle than the airplane or personal auto of Marinetti. Structurally, the train is segmented into a series of linked cars; and instead of setting apart and dividing, complete strangers suddenly come into close contact with one another within its coaches. In this case the strangers include the many novelists of English literature and the character of “Mrs. Brown,” who represents the dramatically changed human character of 1910.

Instead of emphasizing departure, Woolf expresses a sense of urgency imposed by the threat of the train’s arrival, implying that literature is running out of time:

“Meanwhile the train was rushing to that station where we must all get out. Such, I think, was the predicament in which the young Georgians found themselves about the year

1910.” She continues hyperbolically,

At whatever cost of life, limb, and damage to valuable property Mrs.

Brown must be rescued, expressed, and set in her high relations to the

110

world before the train stopped and she disappeared for ever. And so the

smashing and the crashing began. Thus it is that we hear all round us, in

poems and novels and biographies, even in newspaper articles and essays,

the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction. (114)

This “smashing” and “crashing” allude to the more extreme experiments of early twentieth century avant-gardism. In England this may be a reference to the Futurist- influenced movement of Vorticism, its publication Blast, or even Marinetti’s own visits to London (the first of which took place in December, 1910). In addition to differentiating her style from her predecessors, Woolf distinguishes her writing from peers of her own generation. Yet, she reflects, the violence of the train’s arrival was less important than it perhaps seemed at the time. It turns out that the radical rejection of certain conventions had been a measure not only of the new generation’s dislike for the

Edwardian tools and conventions available to them, but of their immaturity as well:

The literary convention of the time is so artificial—you have to talk about

the weather and nothing but the weather throughout the entire visit—that,

naturally, the feeble are tempted to outrage, and the strong are led to

destroy the very foundations and rules of literary society. Signs of this are

everywhere apparent. Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated; as a boy

staying with an aunt for the week-end rolls in the geranium bed out of

sheer desperation as the solemnities of the sabbath wear on. The more

adult writers do not, of course, indulge in such wanton exhibitions of

spleen. (115-16)

111

If these radical modernists’ innovations amounted to infantile tantrums for the sake of merely seeing what would happen and drawing attention to themselves, Woolf shows there were still more mature modernists like herself who were equally frustrated with

“the method that was in use at the moment” (113). Nonetheless, to “violate,” “outrage,” or “destroy” was an undesirable and unnecessary extreme from her point of view. The essay ironically describes the “breaking and falling, crashing and destruction” of such rupture as “the prevailing sound of the Georgian age” and compares the English language under this age’s treatment as an “eagle [held] captive, bald, and croaking” (114-15)—that is to say, not set free from its “wires” as the Futurists would hold.

Nonetheless, the statement that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed” (“Mr. Bennett” 96) has been interpreted according to the codes of the avant- garde manifesto, which, like the essay in which the phrase appears, differentiates generations of artists from one another. Galia Yanoshevsky, in a survey of scholarship on the genre, concludes that it invariably belongs to a class of “polemical and critical” writing, involves a rhetoric of “rupture and crisis” (263) and “aspires to change reality with words” (264). Deriving especially from the revolutionary discourse of the

Communist Manifesto, “[t]he conception of knowledge that is at stake is that of foundational, even epiphanic knowledge” (Millot translated and qtd. in Yanoshevsky

265). Many readings of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” emphasize the essay’s polemical nature and its place in Woolf’s written feud with Arnold Bennett, who had recently dismissed her Jacob’s Room in a book review.24 Paul Goetsch describes December, 1910

24 Mitchell Leaska therefore introduces the essay as a “controversial” defense, a “kind of literary manifesto” (192) that announces its independence from the outdated standards of her reviewer, which is seconded by Eve Sorum, who also calls it, in her bibliographic

112 as “[t]he date which she chose to regard as a turning-point in the history of the novel,” and identifies the opening of the London art exhibition organized by Roger Fry, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, one month prior as the stimulus. He continues: “the revolution in the visual arts encouraged her to think that a similar revolution ‘would as effectively take place in the literary world’” (188). Yet as Martin Puchner points out in a different context, Three Guineas arose out of Woolf’s decision not to sign her name at the bottom of an anti-war manifesto. Instead, “Woolf subjects the context of the manifesto, the culture and society that gave rise to it and enabled its political intervention, to critical scrutiny” (Puchner, Poetry 277). In fact “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” differentiates itself from the Futurist manifesto and its revolutionary logic by critically commenting on the notion of rupture rather than essaying to incite, mark, and validate it. It should consequently be understood as a negotiation with the manifesto genre resembling what

Puchner attributes to Three Guineas. Like that later pacifist work, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs.

Brown” inverts typical forms and discourses of the manifesto and the militarist aspect of avant-gardism. By extension, it offers an alternate view of modernism’s relation to the event of modernity and aesthetic experiment.

Still, Woolf invites and complicates the idea that she would be making a “boldly asserted” “thesis” about 1910. Whereas many references omit how the “thesis” is

study of the many appearances of the essay in its various forms and contexts, a “literary- political manifesto” (155). Robert Scholes calls it a manifesto of “High, Experimental, and Hard” Modernism against the “Low, Conventional, and Soft” (275). These interpretations are supported by the similar reception of other works by Woolf. Julian Hanna for instance describes “the Virginia Woolf of Three Guineas” as a “produce[r of] numerous individual manifestos on art” (124). Stevens Russell Amidon draws a direct comparison between Woolf’s and Marinetti’s writing when he writes that the exhibit and Woolf’s 1938 manifesto Three Guineas were as much shots against British tradition as Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto was against the Italian tradition” (133).

113 prefaced, the full sentence, “[a]nd now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about December, 1910, human character changed,” has a decidedly less provocative effect (“Mr. Bennett” 96). It remains a self- described “assertion,” but a “disputable” one, which is merely “hazard[ed],” and approximated as being simply “to the effect that.” The proceeding sentence continues to lessen the proposition’s boldness, “[t]he change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nonetheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.” Then, of course, she is also making her 1910 speech fourteen years after the said moment.25 An added element of Woolf’s engagement with the manifesto genre lies in how she critically inverts its temporality. The essay is belated and retrospective, not inciting; and its attempt at locating a punctuated turn in history is ironically obscured again and again. Whereas Marinetti’s manifestary view of modernity and modern writing is aggressive and dramatic and Stein’s fluid and repetitive, Woolf repeatedly undermines the view of modernity she has summoned by complicating the radical moment of rupture that manifestos by definition would emphasize. Were we to associate the periodic style of each author with a mark or two of punctuation, we might see Marinetti’s as an interruptive— followed by ! , Stein’s as a misplaced . , and Woolf’s perhaps as an ironic reversal of the .  . . ..

25 Were she performing a belated manifesto on modern literature to the Heretics, she would have, after describing the two camps of authors—the modern Georgians (Forster, Lawrence, Strachey, Joyce, and Eliot) and the Edwardians (Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy), attributed to that date the publication of a radically new and influential work by one of the new generation. She also would have included herself as a speaker for the new camp, or at least a member. Also unorthodox is that the year has no direct significance for the new generation, but rather for the Edwardians, all of whom had novels appear in 1910. The first signs of the “1910” change, she writes, appear in the works of writers who fall into neither camp: Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw.

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CHAPTER THREE: JOYCE, ADORNO, AND THE “PERVERTED COMMAS” OF UNREALITY

Set in the Freeman’s Journal Ltd. building, the seventh episode of Ulysses recounts the workings of the company’s presses, doings of its workers, and banter of the various men assembled in the editor’s office. Thus the rhetorical use and reproduction of language, in both its written and spoken forms, are among the chapter’s foremost concerns. It opens to the busy noontime commerce of city trams, sacks of outgoing mail, and shipments of beer kegs in the area of Dublin surrounding Nelson’s Pillar, before entering the narrative’s primary location: the building housing the offices of both the

Freeman’s Journal and the Evening Telegraph newspapers. Here Leopold Bloom discusses the design and placement of a tea and coffee merchant’s advertisement in the

Freeman’s Journal with Red Murray and then meets the reporter Hynes near the printing machines, the operation of which he observes in some detail. Nearby he finds Nannetti, the business manager of the Freeman, with whom he likewise discusses the ad amidst the deafening noise of the press. The setting and tone shift slightly when Bloom stops in the

Evening Telegraph office to place a phone call and speak with Myles Crawford, the editor, about the ad. As he enters, Ned Lambert is mockingly reading to Simon Dedalus and the professor from the paper, which has printed a nationalist speech delivered the day

115 before. Throughout the rest of the episode, men enter and leave an ongoing discussion united by its commentary on Irish law and politics, the quality of various pieces of journalism and oratory, and the clever rounds of exchange among the men themselves, which form the bulk of the “encyclopedia of rhetorical devices” that “Aeolus” has been called (Gifford 635). Midway through the scene of narration, Bloom departs to consult with the merchant; Stephen Dedalus, who is delivering an article by a superior at the school where he teaches, replaces Bloom among the remaining Lenehan, MacHugh, and the editor. The men finally leave to join Simon Dedalus and Ned Lambert, who were already at the pub. On the way, Stephen describes a work of fiction he is writing, and

Bloom returns to ask the editor if the merchant’s terms are acceptable. He is seemingly refused. This is the first chapter of the novel to share its time between both characters.

Not only is the content of “Aeolus” concerned with language, but its textual history is itself also evidence of the involved linguistic revisions Joyce made to the novel between its serial and bound publications. The author had meanwhile devised a system that assigned a unique set of symbolic motifs to each episode of the volume. According to the schema he supplied to Stuart Gilbert, each episode is associated with its own organ, art, color, symbol, and technique, as well as a set of correspondences between the episode and its eponymous book of the Odyssey. “Aeolus”’ symbolic structure consequently incorporates the lungs, the art of rhetoric, the color red, and the symbol of the editor— each associated with language as well. Its technique, furthermore, is enthymemic, a logical construction that relies on an implicit assumption instead of overt proposition.

The schema also draws correspondences between the Odyssean character Aeolus and the editor Myles Crawford; his home, Floating Island, and the press; and his children’s

116 incestuous marriages and journalism. These schematic interests, together with the direct content of the chapter, work to incorporate the accidental or material aspects of both spoken and written language into the essential substance of the novel.

In terms of the episode’s central “art,” at least 119 instances and 113 types of rhetorical figure have been identified in “Aeolus” (Gifford 635). As such, rhetoric has traditionally emphasized vocal delivery, which explains the particular attention paid to orality in the section of the chapter set in the Evening Telegraph. In addition to the clever turns of phrase, riddles, and limericks pronounced by the men assembled, three speeches are also repeated within the narrative. Ned Lambert reads aloud from the newspaper to repeat Dan Dawson’s nationalist speech. Later J. J. O’ Molloy recalls that “one of the most polished periods I think I ever listened to in my life fell from the lips of Seymour

Bushe,” who had years before invoked the difference between Mosaic and Roman systems of law for his defense of a client accused of murder (7: 747-748). Before

O’Molloy begins to cite a few lines, Lenehan, in a manner that resembles the silence imposed by the overwhelming noise of the press from earlier in the chapter, demands

“Silence” of the group (759). In a memorable passage—the only one from Ulysses that

Joyce allowed himself to be recorded reading—Professor MacHugh repeats from memory John F. Taylor’s speech in favor of “reviv[ing] the Irish tongue,” in which

Taylor had invoked Exodus and Moses’ receiving and engraving of God’s commandments.1 The scene from the Old Testament is alluded to earlier in the chapter with Bloom’s recollection of his father’s yearly reading of the Haggadah. Further, the lungs, the only of the bodily organs listed in the novel’s schema to relate to language,

1 See pages 101-102 of Chapter Two regarding the same scene in Marinetti’s “Technical Manifestos.”

117 reinforce the art of rhetoric, through their instrumental role in oral delivery. Just as the

Aeolian harp is played by the wind to produce music, the storyteller’s voice is produced by the lung’s forcing of breath across vocal chords. In each of the cases above the relation between inscription and speech is rendered mutually contingent, with neither taking precedence over the other. Certainly rhetoric concerns linguistic figuration and device in writing as well as in speech, and as Giovanni Cianci has argued, when it comes to writing, Joyce may have believed that the “art” of rhetoric also included the visual art of typography and page layout.2

The editor appears twice in the schema: first by his personal name, Myles

Crawford, as the counterpart to the Odyssean character Aeolus, and second, as the symbolic “editor,” with the emphasis on the occupation. In addition, the episode’s ruling color red may be the color of correction used by the editor and Nannetti to pen their instructions to the typesetters. On a symbolic level the editor’s hand guides and amends the authorial voice that would otherwise, in the case of speech, remain simultaneous and embodied. The editor is a silent partner in the production of printed text and a gateway granting the author access to a readership. His is supposed to be an anonymous and unidentifiable voice that intervenes only in the accidentals, which are supposed not to carry meaning, aesthetic or otherwise. Editorial work is done with the aim of making the author’s content-based intentions more clear and forceful for the readers, rather than of interfering with them.3 Myles Crawford, editor of the Evening Telegraph, has, on the

2 See pages 159-162 and footnotes 7-9 for more on Cianci’s argument. 3 Joyce was certainly familiar with the effects of intervening editors, typists, and compositors on the final printed form of his own literary work by the time he was writing Ulysses. His correspondences together with accompanying correction lists reveal how dissatisfied he was with nearly every printed product of his work. And yet the difference

118 contrary, a very distinctive voice and forceful presence: he opens his office door

“violently” to show his “scarlet beaked face crested by a comb of feathery hair” (344-

345). “The bold blue eyes stared about them and the harsh voice asked: —What is it?”

(346-347). In the first pages following his entrance, his statements are consistently concluded with exclamation marks as he “crie[s],” “shout[s],” and “crow[s].” Like the figure of Aeolus, he is kind to Bloom, lets him make his call, and sends him off with the command, “Begone! [. . .] The world is before you” (435). To Stephen, he says “You can do it!,” earning his phrase a heading and two of the only quotation marks in the novel, as he invites him to write a piece for the paper. The irony perhaps is that Stephen does not desire to join the “pressgang” (625) but to become an artist. His story of the two sisters atop the tower is not meant for the Evening Telegraph as the professor implies when he introduces Stephen’s story to Crawford as “Something for you” (1004).

Though no attention is paid directly to the accuracy and clarity of journalism in this episode (the details the paper gets wrong emerge in “Eumaeus”), this is the implicit and primary factor in news reporting. That accuracy remains an unspoken concern should hardly divert attention from it, recalling the role of enthymeme in the chapter. Thus the newsroom’s occupation with realistic reporting is positioned within the fictional

between “authorial commissions” and “scribal ommissions” (Gabler 1867) is in his case often far from clear. His endless changes imply an editorial dimension of the author and authorial dimension of the role of editor, leaving the two positions far from distinct. “There are mistakes in the current printings of Ulysses that originated with Joyce himself, words that he did write, but, in the light of Gabler’s research, did not intend to write. [. . .] the corruption that occurred in the process of Joyce’s handcopying his text from one draft to the next, the corruption that asks for critical judgement as to its nature more than other kinds of errors, the corruption that puts into doubt the very notion of ‘error’” (Bollettieri 8). See also Creasey, Gabler, Groden, Sandulescu and Hart, Senn.

119 framework of Ulysses’ already most self-reflexive episode. The nesting of the one within the other brings to the novel’s surface questions about art and reality, or fiction and accuracy, that form the basis of so many theories of aesthetics. More specifically, the tensions’ emergence in relation to the newsroom, where writing is characterized by its factual depiction as well as its factitiousness, lies at the heart of many theories of modern art, perhaps most prominently that of Theodor Adorno. In his writings on Joyce and other twentieth-century authors, Adorno investigates the modernist novel’s relation to scientific knowledge and the reportage and realist fiction that seek to communicate it. In fact, he calls the tension between realist reportage and modernist experiment the defining feature of the modern novel as a category.

In addition, the implicit concern with textual materiality and the accidentals of writing within Adorno’s work is brought out through its association in the present chapter with “Aeolus.” By taking the news building as its setting and featuring details of the mechanical printing press, type-setters, and editor who work there, the episode gives voice to the nameless co-creators of any published text. Interestingly, those machines and human workers with a hand in the publishing process remind the reader of their presence and involvement through error, distortion, and misprint. All four—the editor, the lungs, the correcting color of red, and rhetoric—share marginal support-roles that aid or interfere with meaning, but are supposed not to produce it independently. In its simultaneous positioning of reportage vis-à-vis fiction writing, and of oratory vis-à-vis print, Ulysses investigates the mimetic nature of writing that plays such a defining role in these genres. Hence it queries truth and fiction at the same time that it asks what is new, authentic, or original and what is copied.

120

Set against the backdrop of journalistic production, interestingly, is the first dramatic instance of linguistic experiment in Ulysses. In fact “Aeolus” creates a turning point, an experimental crossroads between the relatively realist nature of the first six chapters and the increasingly experimental ones that follow it. Its abrupt stylistic transformation, this chapter shows, performs the emergence of the aesthetic changes associated with modernism within the narrative framework of the novel. Typifying what is described as Joyce’s “initial style,” the prose leading up to “Aeolus” maintains

“character, verisimilitude, and a continuing human story” as its primary concern (Groden

16) and is characterized by a consistent style comprising a combination of past-tense, third-person narration and first-person, present-tense monologue. With the seventh episode, the novel begins to broaden its repertoire: an encyclopedic range of rhetorical figures are built into the chapter’s narrative, as it is broken up with headlines in capitalized, bold-faced typeface. At this point, as Karen Lawrence writes, “language begins a kind of insurrection, as style becomes increasingly opaque and self-dramatizing”

(12). The following episodes become increasingly experimental, disorienting, or even nonrepresentational. The writing becomes propelled by interweaving patterns working within and between the different episodes rather than according to the logic of traditional narrative. 4

4 Michael Groden observed that Joyce “passed through three distinct stages (rather than two, as has been thought)” between 1914 and 1922, “with the middle stage serving as a bridge between his early interest in character and story and his late concern with schematic correspondences” (4). During the first stage he wrote “Telemachus” through “Scylla and Charybdis,” the first versions of which were characterized by his style of interior monologue. The tenth through the fourteenth episodes (“Wandering Rocks”— “Oxen of the Sun”) were written in the second stage. At this point, he began experimenting with the monologue before substituting “it for a series of parody styles that act as ‘translations’ of the story.” The final stage brought the final episodes and the

121

In his references to Joyce’s novels between 1954 and 1960, Theodor Adorno similarly explores the dynamic between realistic reportage and modernist experiment that plays such an important role in “Aeolus.” It is surprising that more work has not been done in joint treatment of the two writers, considering Adorno’s interest in Joyce and the overlapping themes of their work.5 In his 1954 essay “Standort des Erzählers im

revision of those written already, including “Aeolus.” However, most recently, Eli Lassmann’s study of notebooks related to “Aeolus” held at the National Library of Ireland questions the exact process outlined by Groden. “The appearance, in ordered groupings, of many of the headlines that Joyce entered on the first set of placards displays how Joyce drafted them. Since many of the headlines are already in the order in which Joyce entered them on the placards, it is likely that he drafted them on a document still earlier than the notebook” (317). Specifically, notebooks which Groden had placed in the late period “correspond to additions made to to the texts of ‘Proteus’ and ‘Aeolus’ relatively early in the composition process” (302). 5 Although Adorno cites the work of James Joyce alongside that of Arnold Schönberg, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and others with whom scholars frequently link him, inquiry into the relation between Adorno and Joyce’s writings to date consists of only a handful of article- and chapter-length studies. Within Joyce studies the focus has been on Adorno’s objections to the “culture industry.” For instance, Michael Walsh reads Joyce and Adorno together as contemporaries in order to investigate the question of whether “modernism is merely coincidental with mass culture or genuinely coterminous with it? If we opt for the latter,” he concludes, “we can imagine a model that reckons with the way in which modernism is both predicated on mass culture and yet polarized against it—at least in the critical thinking of its own period” (40). R. B. Kershner establishes a common ground between the two writers, not only as contemporaries but through the speculation that Dialectic of Enlightenment’s use of the Odyssey as a structuring element was influenced by Joyce’s novel. Nonetheless, he too dwells on the premise that “the popular culture that makes up so much of the daily furniture of Ulysses” would receive “Adorno’s indictment” (156), despite Adorno’s own statement in relation to Joyce that “these products fall outside the controversy over committed art and l’art pour l’art, outside the choice between the philistinism of art with a cause and the philistinism of art for enjoyment” (“Position” 35-37) in the very essay Kershner bases part of his argument on. Similarly, Martin Ryle and Kate Soper write of Adorno’s view of Ulysses as a “relentlessly ‘horrified’ view of the world. Joyce was aware of the ‘nightmare’ that was history, but his sense of how human lives might run their course within it was a good deal more comic and less judgemental than the phrase ‘essential horror’ implies,” they write (29). The passage they refer to, from “Erpreßte Versöhnungen,” reads as follows in the original: “Er fingiert, trotz aller irischen Folklore, keine Mythologie jenseits der von ihm dargestellten Welt, sondern trachtet deren Wesen oder Unwesen zu beschwören, indem er

122 zeitgenössischen Roman,” Adorno theorizes that the modernist novel is defined by its narrative point of view, a reaction against the purported objectivity of realism and great epic. In doing so, he draws from the early work of Georg Lukács, who had argued that the historical conditions that had defined great epic were unattainable for the novel. Late in his career, Lukács found these conditions to be accessible to the realist novel within

Soviet socialist society. During this period, he describes the ideal of a broad and totalizing perspective as “Gestaltung,” which, balanced between the objective and subjective extremes of “reportage” and “psychological inwardness,” produces an aesthetically complete depiction of society in all of its interrelated complexity.

For Lukács, “modernist ideology” and the style it dictates resists social reality through “psychological inwardness,” and it is epitomized in Joyce’s novels.6 Adorno on

sie selbst, kraft des vom heutigen Lukács gering geschätzten Stilisationsprinzips, gewissermaßen mythisiert” (260). Their criticism solely relies on Shierry Weber Nicholsen’s translation of “Wesen oder Unwesen” as “essence or its essential horror” without any research into the original German terms. Nicholsen translates the same phrase, also in relation to Joyce, in “Standort…” as “essence or its antithesis.” “Unwesen” means at its most horrific “a dreadful state affairs,” and is otherwise simply defined in English as “tricks” or “mischief” (“Unwesen” Oxford). The phrase is typical of Adorno’s style of writing, which adopts contrapuntal inversion, repetition, and variation that mirror the content it traces. Stuart Allen’s study of Adorno and Joyce appears unaware of this feature of Adorno’s writing or of Adorno’s own writings on Joyce. It argues that studies of music and the body in Sirens reinforce a division between philosophy and art or language and music. Turning to Dialectic of Enlightenment to understand this separation, he finds Adorno and Horkheimer to “argue that reason gradually separates itself from ‘sensuous experience in order to dominate it’” (456). He also argues that to oppose music and language along a binary between the sensual body and the rational mind in readings of Sirens fails to acknowledge that musicality “is a kind of thinking itself” (443). He does not pursue the extent to which this binary is problematized in Dialectic, nor does he recognize the awareness and presence of musical thinking in Adorno’s individual works. In regard to Joyce, in fact, Adorno writes that the two extremes of the “novel today” and “literature as pure sound” are perfectly balanced (“Presuppositions” 100). 6 Robert Scholes was the first to introduce to Joyce studies Lukács’ treatment of Joyce in his critique of modernism. “For Lukács,” he summarizes, “Joyce acquired the proportions

123 the other hand understands the shift from realist to modernist depiction as a reaction to the emergence of new media technologies. He attributes the modernist perspective and style to the emergence of “reportage” and its instrumentalized “media of the culture industry” (“Standort” 41), where reportage takes over the objective and epic tendencies in literature. In contrast to reportage, the novel consequently turns to a more subjective and interpretive view of its content. Integral to Adorno’s understanding of the literary practices of modernism is the analogous practice within other arts and media. To illustrate his claim, Adorno compares the changing relation of the new novel to the depiction of reality on one hand with the new roles and interests painting took on in response to the advent of photography on the other hand. Since the camera was purported to be completely objective, a division of labor emerged in which photography served to accurately represent reality, while painting intended to alter it through subjective—and as he later describes, immanent and formal—techniques. Thus the specific virtues and qualities of painting’s unique medium were drawn out, reflected upon, and emphasized as the form became increasingly abstract and even nonrepresentional.

For Adorno, the modern novel invites an interrogation of its linguistic make-up, in part through a consideration of its likenesses with other arts in terms of composition and reception. Specifically, it rebels against the aspects of its medium that resemble factual reportage by emphatically exploring those aspects that either resemble or diverge from visual art and music. Put differently, its relation to accurate linguistic representations of scientific knowledge finds its analogy in the difference between abstract painting and

of the archmodernist, whose works displayed an exaggerated concern with form, style, and technique in general, along with an excessive attention to sense-data, combined with a comparative neglect of ideas and emotions” ( “x/y” 176).

124 documentary photography. Hence, literature’s nonconceptual aesthetic features, which are consequently integral to its identity as art, are perceived via comparisons to music and painting. These correlations come together in “Aeolus’s” most striking experimental feature: its division into brief headed sections.

By setting the experimentalism it ushers into the novel at the newspaper office,

“Aeolus” affirms the dynamic between realistic reportage, modernist experiment, and the role of formal self-reflection in distinguishing the latter from the former. The narrative is broken into short sections, each headed with a title of sorts, which is also set in bold-face, capitalized print. These were introduced in revisions to the episode between its printing in the avant-garde magazine The Little Review in 1918 and the first book edition of 1922.

The result evokes the layout of the newspaper page, thereby absorbing to a certain extent the forms of its narrative setting.

Above all, the visual impact of the headings immediately distinguish the chapter from those preceding it.7 Many scholars have observed that the page consequently supersedes the voice of human speech. “The art of rhetoric” Joyce indicates in the Gilbert

7 It was often through the experimental use of accidentals that avant-garde movements often broadcasted themselves. With Joyce also, Giovanni Cianci writes, “it is the visual effect of the chapter, that is, the way in which it presents itself to the reader, that announces its experimental structure” (16). Thus “Aeolus” draws attention to its experimental effects in its featuring “not only of the deafening ‘language’ of the printing press, but also of its iconicity, the non-verbal communication which results from handling typographical characters and their spatial arrangement in the line and in the frame of the page” (16-17). Cianci’s argument, like many others having to do with the accidentals of Ulysses, was occasioned by the publication of the 1984 edition: “The Garland edition, by toning down the showy effects, makes the page aseptic, compromising the scandal and disruptive effects. [. . .]. It seems to me that this normalization betrays the essential character of Aeolus which is bound up with the feverish and audacious temper of early Modernism. The typographical experiment of Joyce, forming part of its time, to the point of being a ‘period piece’, should have been respected” (19).

125 schema, Giovanni Cianci notes, “does not at all exclude those visually persuasive effects achieved by the boldface of the headlines. In the newspapers, manifestos and avant-garde reviews, the verbal devices of the old rhetoric are often updated and transformed into the visual devices of experimental typography” (19). In other words, the classical art of rhetoric, which includes vocal intonation and bodily gesture is visually and typographically adapted into modernist literary text. Karen Lawrence also writes how

“the boldfaced print [of the first edition] [. . .] represents writing’s way of claiming its authority when the power of the speaking voice has disappeared” (64). She points out, for instance, how “Joyce plays with the distance between the written marks on the page and a speaking voice in certain headings that could not possibly be produced by a human voice, such as the series of question marks and the abbreviations. [. . .]. Joyce reminds us that this is printed language representing vocal tone.” However, much of the time, the headings’ visual likeness to newspaper headlines, supported by the chapter’s depiction of a gang of street-vending newsboys, in fact summons the oral nature of the news headline.

In 1906, as in 1922, headlines served not only to entitle articles, but as advertisement for each issue of the paper, as newsvendors loudly recited them to potential buyers who passed in the street. The headings therefore are not strictly a typographic and visual feature, but simultaneously imply orality. The headlines called out by the individual boys throughout the streets of Dublin derive from the original of a text rather than the other way around. Similarly, Ned Lambert reads aloud from the newspaper a speech delivered by Dan Dawson the day prior. The speech recited by MacHugh alludes to Moses’ receiving and engraving of God’s spoken commandments. The same is evoked when

Bloom recalls the Passover ritual of reading and repeating the words of the Haggadah

126 generation after generation. In each case the relation between inscription and speech is rendered mutually contingent. Words are reproduced orally as well as textually and performed repeatedly by way of memory or inscription.

At the same time the literary-journalistic pairing extends to the more radical experiments of modernism’s supposed other “other,” the avant-garde, as the headings also evoke the contemporary use of newspaper aesthetics by avant-garde writers, painters, and collagists.8 They thereby complicate the tension between experimental modernism and realism or reportage, where the headline evokes factual reportage as well as avant-garde writing and montage. As Cianci has argued, the typographic shift between text and heading and the mediating presence of empty space, particularly in the first book edition, evokes the important role played by typography and page layout in Futurist,

Dadaist, and Cubist manifestos and periodicals. He writes, “In Joyce’s decision to fragment the narration into anonymous sections preceded by flashing headlines one feels a continuity with the gusto and experimental charge of the typographical adventure of the avant-garde” (18). Furthermore, the use of headlines, if we are to accept these headings as such, to fragment the narrative also make allusion to the contemporary use of newspaper text in collaged and mixed-media works of visual art within Dadaism particularly.9 Of course, despite personal contacts, Joyce’s aesthetic aims and political

8 Archie Loss and Giovanni Cianci identify the European avant-garde as a possible source of his use of headlines. Loss writes that their use of “headline-like materials” and “experiments in capitalization, like the earlier typographical experiments of Mallarmé, seem to correspond chiefly in appearance to what Joyce does in ‘Aeolus.” (Loss 175). 9 Loss sees the interspersed headlines as a style of collage art, which, he writes, “was generally accepted as a standard technique among modern artists and, for some of them (for example, Kurt Schwitters), the fundamental technique of artistic expression” (Loss 176). Cianci relates them to the “Cubist and Futurist canvases, from the papiers collés to the collages etc.” (Cianci 19).

127 orientation have little in common with movements like Futurism or Dadaism, so it is questionable that the relation between this episode and the avant-garde would be one of

“continuity,” as Cianci writes. Yet through that suggestive similarity, especially in the context of “Aeolus” appearing as the literal avant-garde of experimentation within the novel, Ulysses opens itself to inquiry in regard to Joyce’s own view on the nature of modernist aesthetic change. Its use of textuality effectually stages what is, from the reader’s perspective, a rupture in the novel’s narrative style. By evoking both the avant- garde method of montage and the newspaper layout equally, it complicates at the same time that it summons the binary between modernist art and reportage proposed by

Adorno and Lukács both.

The introduction of headings into the revised version of “Aeolus” constitutes the most prominent disruption of the novel’s until-then realist, if also impressionistic, depiction. The approach to narrative it employs reflects a world in which the reliable and objective narrator of the realist novel itself would be unrealistic. As Ulrich Schneider writes, “We do not find ‘life on the raw’, as one of the headlines puts it, but life mediatized through the printing press” (18-19). Instead of feeling absorbed into the mind of Stephen, Bloom, or some other narrative authority, the interposition of headlines within the seventh episode repeatedly reminds the reader that the story is mediated through a narrative, editorial presence as well as a material and mechanical process.

Unlike the realist novel, which aims to absorb its readers into its world as though their reading were not reading at all but immediate experience instead, Ulysses as a whole

128 exposes its complex set of relationships to reality by reflecting upon its genre, its linguistic medium, and also its print materiality. In its exploration and depiction of the printing press, “Aeolus” recalls the novel’s identity as a physically produced and bound volume, that is as a real object in the world.

If the modernist novel questions realism it logically also interrogates the corresponding use of language to achieve realist effect. James Joyce specifically, Adorno writes, “associated the novel’s rebellion against realism with one against discursive language” (“konsequent hat Joyce die Rebellion des Romans gegen den Realismus mit einer gegen die diskursive Sprache verbunden”; “Standort” 41-42). Yet this poses the question of whether a nondiscursive language would cease to be language. Despite language’s sensual likenesses with music and visual art, Adorno continues, language is always conceptual and significative no matter how much it embraces its expressive aspect. It always remains, he writes, “als eines diskursiven, signifikativen Mittels— primär der Kommunikation” (“a discursive, significative means—of communication first and foremost”; “Voraussetzungen” 434). In “Standort” he explains that when literary creation underwent this modernist reflection, it inevitably turned to its linguistic make- up, which was precisely where the analogy he makes between it and painting or music must break down: “Nur sind ihm im Gegensatz zur Malerei in der Emanzipation vom

Gegenstand Grenzen gesetzt durch die Sprache, die ihn weithin zur Fiktion des Berichtes nötigt” (“Yet in contrast to painting, language places limits on the novel’s emancipation from the object and forces the novel to a great extent [in]to [becoming] the report’s

129 fiction”; “Standort” 41-42).10 Due to their shared medium, the novel cannot escape falling into the same class of fiction as the report. Because the novel is composed of signifying language, it always reports on something and refers to objects beyond itself. Hence he highlights how the novel cannot escape the reality that reportage claims to reproduce: even if the object has been fictionalized, aestheticized, or altered, it cannot be divorced from the objective reality that inspired its creation. By acknowledging this relationship self-reflectively, Adorno then claims that the novel also exposes the factitiousness of factual reportage.

In this 1954 essay, Adorno differentiates Ulysses from the media that purport to represent and communicate reality, but he goes further by implying that its experimentalism opposes realist depiction by exposing what realism complicitly obscures.

Nicht nur, daß alles Positive, Greifbare, auch die Faktizität des

Inwendigen von Informationen und Wissenschaft beschlagnahmt ist,

nötigt den Roman, damit zu brechen und der Darstellung des Wesens oder

Unwesens sich zu überantworten, sondern auch, daß je dichter und

lückenloser die Oberfläche des gesellschaftlichen Lebensprozesses sich

fügt, um so hermetischer diese als Schleier das Wesen verhüllt.

(“Standort” 43)

10 The phrase “ihn weithin zur Fiktion des Berichtes nötigt” is awkward to translate into English. Shierry Weber Nicholsen translates it as “forces the novel to present the semblance of a report,” which removes the literary nature of “fiction,” extracts the verb “present” out of “zur,” and removes “weithin.”

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It isn’t simply that everything positive, tangible, and even the facticity of

interiority has been appropriated by information and scientific knowledge

that necessitates the novel to break with these and give itself over to the

representation of essence or its antithesis, but also because the more

densely and uninterruptedly the surface of social processes conforms, the

more hermetically it shrouds essence like a veil.

The modern novel does not represent observable social processes as Lukács says the realist novel should, nor is it merely a narration of the subjective and impressionistic experience of these external events. Rather it devotes itself to the representation of

“Wesen oder Unwesen,” what Shierry Weber Nicholsen translates with some definitional freedom as “essence or its antithesis” and whose phrase I adopt in my own translation.

The concept of essence has a long history within philosophy.11 For Aristotle, the essence of a substance is the specific nature that is necessary to its existence as such. Its opposite, the accident, is simply a secondary or incidental “property or quality not essential to a substance or object” (“accident, n.”). The original Greek term for essence, to ti ên einai, means what is intended to be, or literally “the what it was to be” (Cohen). Thus accidents often oppose essence through disfigurement, mismeasurement, or any other unintended deviation from the standard and expected. By describing the social processes as accidental to the essence they cover in the above sentence, Adorno reverses Lukács’ stance that the essential component of the novel is its representation of the full social world of its setting.

11 See Ross Hamilton.

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Yet in the passage above, Adorno does not use the word accident (Akzidens,

Zufall), but Unwesen, which translates into English as “dreadful state of affairs,” “tricks,”

“mischief” (Oxford), or “bad activity” ‘schlimmes Treiben’ (Wahrig). In a different albeit related context in “Erpreßte Versöhnung,” Nicholsen has translated the phrase “Wesen oder Unwesen” as “essence or essential horror” instead.12 Both translations acknowledge the significance of the lexical structure of Unwesen, which denotes a negation or reversal

(un-) of essence or Wesen, even if it does not literally mean “accident.” In this passage, the “or” between the antithetical Wesen and Unwesen appears not as an either/or but is inclusive and equating, where the antithesis of essence, the unessential, the aberration, which is also the “monstrosity” or “trick” that obscures and “veils” essence, is what is in fact essential. Both the essential and its inverse collapse. Exposing the modern world for what it is is supposedly the novel’s essential task, but this involves engaging what interferes with and veils essence.

Such exposure certainly takes place on the level of plot, as the first pages of this chapter demonstrate in the case of Ulysses, but Adorno describes it in terms of a turn from realist content to formal self-reflection within modernism. It is therefore relevant that essence is considered to be the metaphysical foundation of a substance and, as such, understood to be accessed cognitively through judgment. Accidents, on the other hand, traditionally involve the variable material and physical qualities and conditions perceived through the senses. These, which Aristotle describes as pertaining to quantity, quality, relation, action, passion, time, place, disposition, or raiment (Metaphysics 4.4), are considered incidental and secondary features. Whereas the essence of a substance exists

12 See footnote 5, page 156.

132 independently of its accidental attributes, the accident is predicated and dependent upon the substance it modifies. It is merely the shape or form taken by the substance at a particular time or place. As regards literature, for instance, the same essential narrative may be told or written, making the means by which it is delivered secondary. By way of illustration, the speech presented by Dan Dawson on June 15 is printed in the paper on the 16th for those who missed the event. But in the narrated scene the same words are sarcastically repeated by Ned Lambert as he reads aloud from the paper to the others in the room. This third mediation illustrates, if it was required, how essential meaning varies with its mode and agent of communication after all.

The opposition between essence and accident is very similar to that between content and form. Yet paradoxically, the positive “Greifbark[keit]” (“Standort” 43) that the novel turns away from resurfaces in the only tangible components of writing: its textual form. The reaction Adorno traces of the modern novel to traditional content implies that essence and accident become inverted and reversed (un), as in the relation between Wesen and Unwesen, where the latter is associated with what is considered a deceptive and accidental veil. The reflexivity of the story onto both also collapses the hierarchized binary between the categories of the essential and the merely accidental. On both a linguistic and a generic level, one can see how instead of obscuring its difference from reality, its identity as a written medium, the novel can draw attention to its own surface. In just this way Adorno suggestively italicizes his elaboration on the inverted realist work of the modern novel: “Will der Roman seinem realistischen Erbe treu bleiben und sagen, wie es wirklich ist, so muß er auf einen Realismus verzichten, der indem er die Fassade reproduziert, nur dieser bei ihrem Täuschungsgeschäfte hilft”

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(“Should the novel want to stay true to its realistic heritage and say how it really is, then it must relinquish a realism, which insofar as it reproduces the façade, only assists its operations of deception”; “Standort” 43). Once the supposedly superficial and unessential qualities of a written work are emphasized, which are so often forgotten during the engrossing experience of reading a novel, its realism vanishes for the reader: he or she ceases to be deceived by the illusory experience. This distracting aspect of writing would be classified as not essential to its narrative, or put differently, its written materiality by definition would be among its accidental qualities. But in this sense the unessential, or das Unwesentliche, becomes recognizable as the essential component, das Wesentliche, of a style of writing that aims to reveal another level of reality by emphasizing its own constructedness and the “trick” (Unwesen) of realism.

This approach to realism conflicts with Lukács’ in obvious ways. In his criticism of Joyce’s literary overprivileging of, and Adorno’s critical emphasis on, “form” and

“technique,” Lukács also evokes the vocabulary of the essential and accidental qualities of literature. For him Joyce’s method of stream-of-consciousness “dissolv[es] reality”

‘Auflösung der Wirklichkeit’ (“Weltanschauliche” 476) to such an extent that technique takes center stage at reality’s expense. Even the setting of Dublin becomes “only a secondary by-product, not an integral moment of the artistic essence” (“ein sekundäres

Nebenprodukt, nicht ein integrierendes Moment des künstlerisch Wesentlichen;” 472).

The modernist worldview (Weltanschauung) he sees motivating Joyce’s novels determines from the outset that the novel’s environment will lack meaning, be hostile to humanity, and that there will be no possibility of taking a developmental view of it. The contact that takes place between individuals in avant-garde modernism as a result is

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“superficial, accidental” ‘äußerlich und zufällig’ (470). The “lively interrelation”

‘lebendige[] Wechselbeziehung’ of the hero with his environment that drives his development and that is so essential to Lukács’s ideal of the realist novel is, from this point of view, perversely consigned by the subject- and form-obsessed modernist novel to its accidental and inconsequential features.13

In “Erpreßte Versöhnungen” (1958), Adorno’s direct response to Lukács, he critiques the subordination of form to content, again according to the conceptual framework of essential and accidental qualities. Lukács, he writes, “mißdeutet willentlich die formkonstitutiven Momente der neuen Kunst als Akzidenten, als zufällige Zutaten des aufgeblähten Subjekts, anstatt ihre objective Funktion im ästhetischen Gehalt selber zu erkennen” (“He willfully misinterprets the form-constitutive moments of the new art as accidentia, as an inflated subject’s accidental additions, instead of recognizing their objective function in the aesthetic substance himself”; 253). In “The Modernist

Ideology,” Lukács describes formal emphasis as an excessive stylistic flourish positioned on the subjective end of the continuum between subjective and objective art.

Accordingly, style that draws attention to itself is not only superfluous, but also coincidental and accidental, because it is based on the individual perspective and expression of one idiosyncratic subject. In contrast, Adorno draws the same continuum on a different axis, where art takes form in an objective manner, and its self-emphasis is an inherently objective component of the aesthetic make-up, only minimally influenced by the subject. In the passage above, Adorno links the term zufällig, which has surfaced already in a number of quotes, with that of the Latinate term, Akzidens. Both derive from

13 See Scholes “x/y.”

135 the Latin term accidens, which means to happen or occur. It breaks down to ad-cadere, to fall toward, or in German, zu-fallen. Akzidens is the term used in German translations of works on the topic by Saint Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle to denote precisely those

“zufällige Zutaten,” those accidental ingredients or contingent additions that are not considered essential qualities.

In this instance Adorno uses the term unquestioningly, without any reversal between it and essence, but by the time he revisits the topic two years later in

“Voraussetzungen,” he suggests that the accidental characterizes not the overpresence of the subject, but its momentary absence (as in the unintentional accident) and that accidentality is the essential component of modern art. For the time being the connection must be noted between Akzidens and its near homonym, Akzidenz, which is more than, or meaningfully, coincidental. Akzidenz, like the noun accidental in English, refers to an

“especially effectively arranged print, usually hand set; for example, newspaper headings, advertisements, private or business printed matter (“bes. Wirkungsvoll gestalteter meist im Handsatz hergestellter Druck, z.B. Zeitungskopf, Werbeanzeige, Geschäfts- oder

Privatdrucksache”; “Akzidenz, n.”). Certainly, the accidentals of writing could be subsumed under the philosophic category as its etymology invites. While Adorno is not specifically referring to the textual accidentals each time he writes about accidentality (or contingency, as it is usually translated) in modern writing, the suggestion emerges that these, as elements of form, occupy a very central place in his use of the word Zufall.

Headings, advertisements and the creative realm of editors and compositors of course occupy the setting and subject of Joyce’s “Aeolus” as well as the revisions he made to it.

In his own mind, Leopold Bloom reverses the relation between the accidentals and the

136 articles. He thinks, “It’s the ads and side features sell a weekly, not the stale news in the official gazette” (7: 89-90), before recalling the types of advertisements, illustrations and light entertainment segments that attract readers.

Yet the novel’s interest in the “sensory immediacy” of its own “contingent” accidentals has been criticized as a descent into meaninglessness (Jameson, “Ulysses”

140). Following Lukács, Fredric Jameson calls this “textualization,” which he describes as “autistic” and “depersonalized”: the story devolves to meaningless text, “simply [. . .] printed sentences” (152).14 Adorno’s use of the term Zufall, on the other hand, reveals a more complex approach to the philosophical binary of essence and accident.15 His work is

14 Jameson also connects “the increasing sense of the materiality of the medium itself” within writing to modernist art and music. However, he writes: It is paradoxical, of course, to evoke the materiality of language; and as for the materiality of print or script, that particular material medium is surely a good deal less satisfying or gratifying in a sensory, perceptual way than the materials of oil paint or of orchestral coloration; nonetheless, the role of the book itself is functionally analogous, in Joyce, to the materialist dynamics of the other arts. ( “Ulysses” 146-47) The intermedial comparison of writing with music and painting must be paradoxical, but in a dialectical sense that was endlessly fascinating for Adorno, as he returned to it again and again within his writings. Although both of Jameson’s essays on Ulysses (“Ulysses in History” and “Joyce or Proust” appear to revive the very concerns Adorno brought to his own readings of Joyce, Jameson departs from his predecessor on this point particularly. Instead the point of view represented above carries on Lukács’ approach to accident and contingency in Ulysses. Jameson applies Zufälligkeit to the accidentals of literary modernism, yet from a perspective that considers them to be mechanical, meaningless, and belonging to those antihuman products of human labor. The textuality Jameson describes is simply what Adorno considers the nondiscursive aspect of language, which Adorno distinguished from the extreme of automatic and fully objectivity-oriented art. Joyce’s work clearly never extended into this latter realm for Adorno. 15 In the essay “Ulysses in History,” Fredric Jameson uses the term “contingency” to describe what appears to be a critical concept similar to the Zufall dealt with by Lukács and Adorno. This is indeed the very term Adorno’s translator Shierry Weber Nicholsen provides in her English translations of the passages we’ve examined. For Jameson contingency describes a state of existential and philosophic meaninglessness characteristic of modernity.

137 less quick to announce where meaning does and does not lie. On this latter point rests one of the key differences between translating Zufall or das Zufällige as contingency or as accident. Both describe events and characteristics that are secondary, dependent upon some other event or quality, or unnecessary. Yet only accident denotes the unintended— either through the absence of directed intention or through an intervention between intention and outcome. In its application to the materials of writing, the accidental is “any scribal or typographical feature of a text that is not essential to the author’s meaning”

(“accidental,” n.). Traditionally the accidentals fall into the realm of the editor and compositor, where the alterations made are supposed not to interfere with authorially intended meaning, but to improve on its syntactical and typographical form. As Ross

Hamilton describes in relation to fate and chance in tragedy, determining what is accidental is always a matter of interpretation. Indeed, in terms of the textual accidental, it involves the questions of authorial intent, of what constitutes meaning, and of where it lies. However, associational logic and word play, basic components of rhetorical artistry, depend on a compromised intention: where the coincidental qualities of a word form or its accessory meanings take on an agency of their own independently of intended meaning. In relation to the interests of this study, these questions lie also at the heart of

Adorno’s intermedial comparisons and the associational dimension of Joyce’s language in particular.

Joyce’s close friend, the painter Frank Budgen, comments in his early book about

Ulysses that “one of the most effective of Joyce’s inventions consists in exaggerating the essential expression of a word and so stressing its descriptive gesture” (305). Adorno similarly writes that these associations, or “descriptive gestures,” produce the defining

138 movement of art: “Gelingt es der Dichtung, in ihren Begriffen die Assoziationen zu erwecken und mit ihnen das signifikative Moment zu korrigieren, so beginnen die

Begriffe, jener Konzeption zufolge, sich zu bewegen. Ihre Bewegung soll zur immanenten des Kunstwerks werden” (“If literature succeeds in awakening associations in its concepts and correcting for the significative moment with those associations, then the concepts begin, according to that conception, to move. Their movement is to become the immanent movement of the work of art”; 437) The word is freed from its strict significative service to a static concept. Its release from conceptual signification is never complete, however. As a result, its movement also sets the concept into motion. This loose play defines art and certain works of philosophy,16 which differentiates it from the documentation of facts and concepts.17 Implicit in such motion is the absence of closure or conclusion, the absence of a punctuating full-stop.18 Furthermore, the figure of motion likens writing to the nonconceptual medium of music. Adorno therefore turns to an intermedial analogy in which the reader must listen closely to the associations embedded in the words he or she encounters on a page. If one reads in the same way that one listens to music, the work’s unique qualities as an artwork become perceptible.

Den ist mit so feinen Ohren nachzugehen, daß sie den Worten selbst sich

anschmiegen und nicht bloß dem zufälligen Individuum, das sie hantiert.

Der subkutane Zusammenhang der aus ihnen sich bildet, hat den Vorrang

16See Adorno’s statements on this in relation to Hegel’s writing in “Skoteinos.” The same essay includes variations of the subsequent quotes, thereby linking the practice of reading modern prose to that of reading Hegel. 17Adorno is not the only to describe this modern freedom in art as a motion. See F. T. Marinetti and Gertrude Stein’s similar use of the trope in Chapter Two. 18See Christian Benne for more on the period as the orthographic prerequisite for the philosophical thesis as well as its excerptability and citability.

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vor der Oberfläche des diskursiven Inhalts von Dichtung, ihrer kruden

Stoffschicht, ohne daß diese doch ganz verschwände. (437)

The associations must be followed with such fine ears that they cling to

the words themselves and not simply to the accidental/random individual

concerned with them. The subcutaneous coherence which forms out of

them takes precedence over the surface of literature’s discursive content,

of its crude material layer, but without this completely disappearing.

This quality is not merely projected by the subjective reading experience of individuals, but is lodged in the words’ performative nature as well. The expressive, associational movement of language comes from language, is attached to its concepts, but is capable of dominating its discursive content and the discoursing subject. Although these features of the work are not communicated through a traditional significative schema, they are objective and meaningful features, particularly in regards to how Joyce treats language.

In Ulysses, Joyce’s attention to the full range of acoustic and textual linguistic expression is exemplified in the advertisement Bloom works to place in the seventh episode. The name of the tea and coffee vendor “Keyes,” whose business is advertised as

House of Keyes, operates as a triplicate and imperfect homonym comprising the noun key

(a recurring symbol in the novel), the proper name Keyes, and the governmental House of

Keys. The three are connected by an associational logic that capitalizes on their coincidental phonetic form. This overlap is signified by the parenthetical brackets used in the headline “HOUSE OF KEY(E)S,” where the parenthesis serves as a hinge or joint, allowing the word to take on two orthographies at once. The association between the three terms is marked by this liminal designation, which bridges the written difference

140 with the spoken likeness. In other words, the parentheses enable a release from determinate meaning, as they mark the accidental and associational connection that produces another class of meaning in art and advertisement alike. In this case they mark the difference between sounded-out words and their orthographical forms. The marks emphasize the meaningful associational freedom that serves as the operational basis for the riddles and puns that fill the pages of “Aeolus.”

While associations attached to the word “key” are literally capitalized upon by the orthographical and visual play in the advertisement, secondary meanings often call into question the necessity of an intending linguistic subject. In this regard, Adorno suggests that the individual author has only an accidental role in the work he produced when he writes that in Joyce’s fiction “nicht stets wird die Assoziation als notwendig evident, oft bleibt sie zufällig wie ihr Substrat, das psychologische Individuum” (“the association is not always clearly necessary, often it remains accidental like its substrate, the psychological individual”; 439). Both the nondiscursive associations and the individual mind through which they are formed are to a certain extent matters of chance. He reiterates, “Zufällig aber ist schließlich die konstitutive Subjektivität selbst, die dabei sein will, und auf die das Kunstwerk notwendig sich zurücknimmt” (“ultimately even the constitutive subjectivity—that wants to be present and from which the artwork necessarily holds itself back—is accidental”; 442) In this sense it is recalled that the terms Zufall and accident involve an unintentional outcome as well as an interpretive ambiguity. They describe those expressive elements outside of authorial intent.

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In a comparison of the arbitrary and accidental moment in Joyce’s novels with free atonality in Schönberg, Adorno indicates that these elements exist in music just as they do in writing, and that they are integral to the most modern features of both arts:

Ihre Selbstreflexion kontrolliert den Verlauf des Unwillkürlichen im Text,

um nur solches Zufällige zu tolerieren, dessen Notwendigkeit zugleich

einleuchtet. Nichts anders hat in der neuen Musik, auf der Höhe der freien

Atonalität, der Schönberg der ‘Erwartung’ dem Triebleben der Klänge

nachgehört und es dadurch vor dem behütet, womit die spätere Kunst sich

selbst kompromittierte, als die Parole des Automatischen beliebt ward.

(439)

Their self-reflection checks the progression of the arbitrary in the text in

order to accept only such accidentality whose necessity is immediately

clear. In new music, no differently did the Schönberg of “Erwartung” hear

the instinctual life of sounds, at the peak of free atonality, and thus

safeguarded it from that with which the later art compromised itself, when

the term ‘automatic’ became popular.

It is worth mentioning that both Akzidenz and Akzidens, like the English accidental, designate the characters used in musical notation to mark sharps, flats, and natural notes.

Within western music these of course are the notes that stray from the diatonic key signature and supply the central features of dissonant modern music. Both categories of accidentals relate to the “instinctual life” of the medium with which they work. On one hand they are related to the subjectivity of the modern novel—its randomness, chance, and exposure to accident in opposition to the objective coherence of the epic. At the same

142 time, that which is accidental is that which merely happens or that which escapes subjective intent. In relation to the associational logic that structures the stream of consciousness as well as the language games for which Adorno especially values Joyce, it is a feature immanent to the linguistic material. As he points out, “the moment of accidentality ‘das Moment des Zufälligen’ [. . .] is inherent in Joyce’s associative technique of linguistic construction (das [. . .] Assoziationstechnik des Sprachgefüges bei innewohnt”; 441). In fact accidentality, coincidentality, or contingency turn out to be the paradoxically essential and defining “shock” of modern art. Adorno claims that the illusion and artifice of art has also always been the illusion of a present authorial subject in control of the artwork’s meaning.

Jenes Moment der sich selbst hervorhebenenden Zufälligkeit, als des

nicht gänzlichen Dabeiseins des Subjekts im Werk, ist das eigentlich

Schokierende an den jüngsten Entwicklungen, im Tachismus nicht anders

als in der Musik und literarisch. Wie meist Schocks, zeugt auch dieser von

einer alten Wunde. Denn die Versöhntheit von Subjekt und Objekt, eben

das vollkommene Dabeisein des Subjekts im Kunstwerk, war immer auch

Schein, und wenig fehlt, daß man diesen Schein dem ästhetischen

schlechthin gleichsetzen möchte. (442)

That moment of accidentality that highlights itself, as the subject’s lack of

full presence in the work, is what is actually shocking in the youngest

developments, in Tachism no differently than in music and the literary.

Like most shocks, this one testifies to an old wound. Because the

reconciliation of subject and object, indeed the entire presence of the

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subject in the artwork, was always also an illusion, and there is little from

keeping one from wanting simply to equate this illusion with that of the

aesthetic.

Hervorheben, to emphasize, is also a typographic term to indicate the physical highlighting, underscoring, or italicizing of a textual passage. In effect, the subject’s absence from the text is registered on a material level. The emboldened accident recalls this as it acknowledges the illusory nature of all art. The illusion that the artwork existed as an expression of the subject and that the subject’s intentions could be assimilated by the work becomes as profound as the illusion of all aesthetics: that the work could ever be more than the mere appearance of the object it symbolizes. In emphasizing its mediatedness and in embracing the accidental qualities and processes that comprise it, the text is considered to be more authentic and honest than the veil of illusion hung by the realist novel: “Anstatt daß Zufälligkeit über den Kopf des Werkes hinweg triumphierte, gesteht sie sich als unabdingbares Moment ein und hofft, damit etwas von der eigenen

Fehlbarkeit loszuwerden” (“Instead of triumphing ‘behind the work’s back’ [Nicholsen]

[as traditional art has forced it to do], accidentality admits to being an indispensible moment and hopes in doing so to rid itself of some of its own fallibility”; 442-43) The emphatic reflection reverses the status of the unintentional accident as an error. On the contrary, its authenticity is certified by its italicization, because it directs attention to its materiality and thus fictionality.

I think the inverted commas used in English dialogue are most unsightly and give an impression of unreality.

—James Joyce

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Lukács refuses Adorno’s concept of modern authenticity, who takes the exact opposite stance. In contrast to the italics Adorno uses in “Standort des Erzählers” or the figure of emphasis described above, Lukács makes rhetorical use of quotation marks to characterize the modernist perspective on reality as constructed and aestheticized, which

Jameson echoes when he calls its method of storytelling “artificial” (Jameson “Joyce or”

172). Rather than acknowledging its construction as a material fact, textual emphasis in

Lukács’ writing only serves to highlight a subjective falsehood that stands in conflict with the objective reality represented by the text’s dominant voice. In Lukács’s 1932 essay, “Reportage oder Gestaltung,” he describes literary modernism as narrating from a subjective space of refuge against a reality it perceives to be “’mechanical,’” “’soulless,’”

“’unsubstantial’,” and “ruled by ‘alien’ laws” (“mechanisch,” “seelenlos,” von

“fremden” Gesetzen beherrscht […] “wesenlos”; “Reportage” 37). The strategy (which he uses consistently in his writings throughout his career) of surrounding terms he does not endorse himself with quotes does not only serve to cast those words in a different voice or to preface them with short-hand for “so-called.” The diacritical marks also highlight the problematic status of these terms: their inauthenticity in regard to the reality in which Lukács believes. Yet they achieve this effect by drawing attention to the written character, rather than the spoken, as quotes would do in fictional dialogue. For Lukács modernist formalism falsely draws attention to its own accidental textual features at the expense of the essence he thinks it ought to represent, and his use of ironic quotation echoes this formalism through a specifically textual mode of emphasis. Generally, the quotation mark has conflicting effects. On one hand it denotes authenticity, by identifying the language it brackets as the actual words used in some other spoken or written original.

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On the other hand, by announcing that this language originated elsewhere, the citation inserts a distance between it and the rest of the text. This distance develops into an ironic throwing of the authorial or narrative voice, where the word becomes deauthenticated, unauthorized, and dissociated from its conventional meaning. This echoes the distinction

Lukács theorizes between great epic and the novel.

In the essay “Satzzeichen,” Adorno demonstrates his own caution with the quotation mark and describes it as playing dumb or having cleverness in its stupidity

(dummschlau) (109). His word choice evokes the root of the German term for quotation,

Anführungszeichen, where anführen means not only to mention or quote, but in colloquial terms, to dupe or trick. He advises, “Anführungszeichen soll man nur dort verwenden, wo man etwas anführt, beim Zitat, allenfalls wo der Text von einem Wort, auf das er sich bezieht, sich distanzieren” (“One should only use quotation marks in the place where one quotes something, with a citation, at most where the text aims to distance itself from a word to which it is referring”). The marks can be used to surround language being treated as evidence or where specific language becomes the object of consideration in the sentence, but “as a means of irony they are to be spurned” (“Als Mittel der Ironie sind sie zu verschmähen”). Whereas irony ought to arise from an ambiguity detected in language, ironic quotation marks

[. . .]das Urteil über diese als vorentschieden hinstellen. [. . .] Die

Gleichgültigkeit gegen den sprachlichen Ausdruck, die in der

mechanischen Überantwortung der Intention ans typographische Cliché

sich kundgibt, weckt den Verdacht, es sei eben die Dialektik stillgestellt,

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die den Inhalt der Theorie ausmacht, und das Objekt werde ihr von oben

her, verhandlungslos, subsumiert. (109-110)

[. . .] present the judgment on it as predetermined. [. . .] The indifference

to linguistic expression, that announces itself in the mechanical

consignment of intention to the typographical cliché, arouses suspicion

that it might have silenced the dialectic that accounts for theory’s content,

and the object will be subsumed by it from above without negotiation.

Adorno, it appears, is critiquing the mimetic citational practice called to attention in texts by Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin by Kevin McLaughlin: “By miming commodity language Marx hopes to define it as a sign, to denaturalize it and subject it to a certain kind of reading. The desire is, in short, for a reading that will prove lethal—a reading that will destroy what has become a sign and mark a break with the social relations of which it was a product” (17). Such citation is a “displacement” and a “mode of ironic or even parodic quoting,” it “freeze[s]” and “holds up to critical scrutiny” (16), and it is opposed to the approach of “simply denouncing and criticizing in a straightforward manner” (17) represented in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung. The emphasis in

Adorno’s statement in “Satzzeichen,” however, is on the “typographic marks” themselves, whereas the quotation marks in Marx’s Kapital and Benjamin’s Arkaden remain “implicit” (16), but absent. Is Adorno criticizing the use of quotation marks as a tool to fix and enforce authorial intent and to determine interpretation? Or the strategy of using “mimetic disposition” as a form of “critique” altogether (19)? In this instance, it appears that the material dimension of writing is at odds with the language to which it gives form. It monopolizes and determines linguistic signification and eliminates the

147 dialectical nature of interpretation, the tension made implicit in language that has been

“displace[d].”

Punctuation marks are often approached according to the terms Adorno attributes to scare quotes, that is, read as carrying out an authorial intent more forcefully and leading the reader to a particular interpretation. But James Joyce’s practice of using or not using punctuation marks tends not to have this effect. Interestingly, the most distinctive and consistent typographic trait of James Joyce’s prose is the near absence of quotation marks. Instead a dash is used to introduce but not conclude spoken discourse,19 which leaves an ambiguity between speech and narration or indirect discourse. As a result, readers have difficulty distinguishing narration from dialogue. Peter De Voogd comments that

The result is a text in flux, forcing the reader to decide which “voice” any

phrase in it has, whether it represents direct speech, free indirect discourse,

authorial comment, or objective description. The indeterminacy that

follows from this withholding of typographical help is deliberate, and

partly responsible for the bewilderment felt by the unsuspecting reader

who is suddenly confronted by a text that does not guide his responses in

ways determined from the eighteenth century onward. (205)

Like other scholars, he points out how Joyce’s treatment of punctuation produces an ambiguity between the narrative voice and those of its individual characters and

19 This was only finally the case. Regarding the history of The Dubliners’ publication, Robert Scholes has noted how Joyce used the dash to begin and end paragraphs consisting “either in part or wholly direct discourse” (“Some Observations” 27). The published product did not conform to his intention. Instead the compositors used the concluding dash as though it were a quotation mark, that is, to surround speech and demarcate it from the narrator’s voice.

148 consequently requires its readers to take an active stance in relation to it. In other words, his use of the em-dash in place of the quotation is not motivated by a desire to communicate his intended meaning to the reader more clearly, (even if it is out of consideration for the reader’s eyes). This sparingness, the assumption that the reader will fill in the gap to determine the shift in voice recalls the earliest practices of reading, when the reader/orator inserted punctuation marks himself in those places in the text where he would pause to breathe, or before that, to decipher the word units of scriptura continua.

Thus these rhetorical marks were developed to aid oratorical delivery to a religious assembly and had no relation to the communication of authorial intent. Joyce’s use of punctuation to open interpretive possibility through textual indeterminacy calls attention to the mediated processes of writing and reading and thereby elevates also the latter from its contingent and accidental relation to the work.20

From his first exchanges with publishers of his prose, Joyce expressed the desire to control the typographic and editorial appearance of his work.21 In a 1906 letter to Grant

Richards (the would-be publisher of The Dubliners), he wrote: “On one point I would wish you to be careful. I would like the printer to follow the manuscript accurately in punctuation and arrangement. Inverted commas for instance, to enclose dialogue always seemed to me a great eyesore” (Letters II: 130-131). In calling the marks “an eyesore” and later “unsightly” (I: 75), Joyce assigns aesthetic significance to the visual appearance

20 See De Voogd, who notes the active stance Joyce expected of the reader: “he consistently played down the structure of his book, and forced the reader to find his way with difficulty on his own, without the helping hand of the typographer” (208). See also Adorno’s “Skoteinos oder Wie zu lesen sei” (1962) for more reading. 21 Examining documents related to the destroyed 1910 Dublin edition of “The Dead,” Scholes also notes that Joyce removed 300 commas and more than 30 hyphens between the galley proofs and page proofs (“Some Observations” 25).

149 of the typographical line and emphasizes the sensual experience of reading, where both descriptors imply optical discomfort for the reader. He repeats this message eight years later when he corrects Richards’ assumption that the dashes were due to the idiosyncracies of the printer: “As regards to the inverted commas the Irish compositors are not to blame. I myself insisted on their abolition; to me they are an eyesore. I think the page reads much better with the dialogue between the dashes” (I: 75). In briefly expressing his position on the two symbols, Joyce takes responsibility for the dashes and by extension corrects the assumption that the printer’s realm of accidentals would have no aesthetic importance for the author.

In the same 1914 letter to Richards, Joyce wrote of the marks having an unreal effect: “I think the inverted commas used in English dialogue are most unsightly and give an impression of unreality.” And in a 1924 letter to Harriet S. Weaver he goes on to call them “perverted commas” (III: 99). With these statements he assigns the marks with a powerful degree of significance: the relationship of his writing to reality and to the realist tradition takes place also on a diacritical and textual level. His preferred terminology is not only based on the visual appearance of single quotes as upside-down commas, which is common, but is also suggestive of how the marks connote perversion in place of accurate quotation. In a 1928 letter to Valéry Larbaud, who was assisting Auguste

Morel’s translation of Ulysses into French, Joyce elaborates his view of the mark:

As regards your questions I think the fewer quotation marks the better. We

would not write the phrase—the best of all possible worlds—in English

between ‘ ’. Or in the French version ‘M. de la Palice was alive etc.’ And

when the words half quoted are from an obscure writer p.e. ‘orient and

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immortal wheat’ (from Thomas Traherne) what does it help a French

reader to see ‘ ’ there. He will know early in the book that S.D.’s mind is

full like everyone else’s of borrowed words. The ‘ ’ are to be used only in

the case of a quotation in full dress, I think, i.e. when it is used to prove or

to contradict or to show etc. (263)

By asking that clichés, and other accepted and unoriginal expressions not be set off in quotes, Joyce anticipates Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia. He understands and in fact makes it his art of mining the shared, exchange-driven, or recycled nature of discourse. In turn he sees the quotation as an unliterary tool, as a device for scientific, evidence-based writing, that is, what Adorno would call scientific knowledge or reportage. Further, if quotation purports to represent reality, the actual words spoken, the quotation mark has an uneasy position in the work of fiction. As Anna Maria Marengo Vaglio writes in her short study of Joyce’s italics, “No distance, no spaces, no formally binding characters are allowed to nest within the work that interrogates itself endlessly. That is the reason why inverted commas, as a way of distancing, of expressing a reserve, as a presumption of quoting the ‘actual’ words, are not used” (112). Joyce suggests as much in Finnegans

Wake, where it is stated that to avoid being accused of misquotation, one might simply avoid using quotation marks: “Being tantamount to inferring from the nonpresence of inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks) on any page that its author was always constitutionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others” (108.

33-36). If realism and its reliable narrative point of view are no longer realistic for the modern novel that reflects upon itself, as Adorno writes, or if it would be untrue to represent them as true reproductions of an original utterance, then the accuracy and

151 centralized objectivity implied by the quotation mark is as irrelevant and implausible as an omniscient narrator.

One model of writing aspires to accurately represent or report on events and scientific facts, or in the case of Moses’ inscription of the decalogue, to record the word of God. The essence of literary art, Adorno argues on the other hand, lies in how it reshapes its contents through subjective intention. In other words, art describes qualities and circumstances instead of positing the existence of things:

Indem das Kunstwerk nicht unmittelbar Wirkliches zum Gegenstand hat,

sagt es nie, wie Erkenntnis sonst: das ist so, sondern: so ist es. Seine

Logizität ist nicht die des prädikativen Urteils, sondern der immanenten

Stimmigkeit: nur durch diese hindurch, das Verhältnis, in das es die

Element rückt, bezieht es Stellung. (“Erpreßte” 270)

Since the work of art does not have something immediately real as its

subject matter, it never says, as knowledge usually does: ‘this is so’ [‘es ist

so’]. Instead, it says, ‘this is how it is’ [‘so ist es’]. Its logicity is not that

of a statement with subject and predicate [predicative proposition] but that

of immanent coherence: only in and through that coherence, through the

relationship in which it places its elements, does it take a stance. (“Forced”

232; second bracket is mine)22

Suggestively, in the original German the logic is determined through assembly and placement: whether the statement says “das ist so” or “so ist es.” The alternative to the

22 In her translation, Shierry Weber Nicholsen documents the original phrases to be “es ist so” and “so ist es,” yet the Suhrkamp edition states “das ist so,” not “es ist so.” The arrangement is still a chiasmus, even if it is not a perfect one.

152 predicative statement is a syntactical form that does not privilege an acting subject. In a sense this syntactical and aesthetic approach is accidental, as its action is not predicated of a masterful subject. In traditional terms, the accidental features of placement and synonymity (es/das) cross over to make the essential difference. In re-ordering the words into the mirror image of one another (das ist so/so ist es), Adorno brings form and content together to perform his message. The emphasis on “how” instead of “what,” the crucial difference in their meanings, emerges through a chiastic inversion of the word order, just as text reverses the type of the press that imprints it. The relation of modern art to empirical reality is suggested here as one of inversion or even mirroring, where the mirror in fact reverses reality instead of reproducing it perfectly. The relation between the two phrases echoes the formal structure of the reflection that is always an inversion. As a rhetorical term chiasmus denotes

any structure in which elements are repeated in reverse, so giving the

pattern ABBA. […]. The c[hiasmus] may be manifested on any level of

the text or (often) on multiple levels at once: phonological (sound-

patterning), lexical or morphological (word repetition), syntactic (phrase-

or clause construction), or semantic/thematic. (“chiasmus” Princeton 183)

In Greek it means “a placing crosswise” and coincides with the pictographic Greek character, chi, X as well as the verb chiazein “to mark with the letter X” (“chiasmus”

Concise Oxford). Thus another way of translating chiasmus would be: a marking of the letter X. The interest of the term lies in the arbitrary and accidental visual form of the character and not the phonetic function it serves within a word structure. As a rhetorical device it is fascinating that the term may derive from inscription, where the morphology

153 of the letter provides the figure of speech its basis of identification and articulation. The

“X” is a letter, an image, and a figurative signifier of other classes of crosses and crossings. However, the mark of the “X” also reappears in the reader’s charting of chiastic sentences and phrases. As several guides point out, when the two chiastic halves are placed in vertical relation to one another, the reader can chart the inverted clauses with an X:

154

Das ist so

So ist es

In charting this pattern, the reader repeats, transcribes, reinscribes, and translates the rhetorical figure into the character X. By marking the X as an essential constituent of his or her interpretive reading, the reader’s practice resembles the intermedial reading spoken of by Adorno in “Voraussetzungen” discussed in Chapter One.23

To return to the self-emphasizing mediation described by Adorno in light of

Ulysses, one can see how with “Aeolus” the novel reflects on its own processes of production by way of the printing press, where its assemblers must read the words (and letters) that make-up the narrative as if they were inverted by a mirror. This reversed relation is crucial to the chapter’s interest in print. In the section “AND IT WAS THE

FEAST OF PASSOVER,” Leopold Bloom observes a “typesetter neatly distributing type. Reads it backwards first. Quickly he does it. Must require some practice that. mangiD kcirtaP. Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards with his finger to me. Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem” (7: 101). Ulrich Schneider finds the inverted blocks of type required to produce printed text to be symbolic of the textual medium’s “remove from reality” (19). The reversal recalls how representation and imitation are mediated and indirect processes. For Schneider errors associated with the process of print, such as the

23 See page 56.

155 misprinting of character’s names, call attention to and define the novel’s relationship to the empirical world. He writes,

typesetting in reverse may be seen as part of the intricate pattern of mirror

images introduced into the novel with Stephen’s aphorism on the “cracked

lookingglass of a servant” as “a symbol of Irish art” (Ulysses 1: 146).

These mirror images [. . .] point in the opposite direction [of mimeticism],

towards the self-reflection of the modern novel. As Paul de Man claims,

such mirroring techniques assert the separation of a work of art from

empirical reality and free literature from the “fallacy of unmediated

expression.” (20).

Schneider understands this as a cracked mirror, a flawed mimeticism, but on a self- reflexive level this flaw negates itself. In the former passage, the backwards type,

“mangiD kcirtaP,” is itself imperfect, because only the orthographical order of the letters are reversed and not their morphology. The blocks of type would be impossible to represent textually without inversion, or without forging special typeset for these two words only. The type and the print are not only reversed in order, but also in morphology.

It is as if the two were mediated by a mirror.

In traditional terms, the mirror provides a perfectly objective, accurate, and complete picture of reality. But once text is introduced into the reflective frame, the mirror’s own mediated nature is brought into relief. Its inversion of reality becomes apparent as the reflected characters appear in reverse exactly as the blocks of type laid by the typesetters do. That the mirror is acknowledged as a mirror (and mimeticism itself as a mediation) is only registered through the asymmetric form of certain characters of the

156

English alphabet. On a schematic level, the mirror reveals its relation to the original to be chiastic. In short, this treatment of type, its inversion in the print shop, and the typesetters’ backwards reading all remain related to the realist project Joyce introduced with The Dubliners when he described the volume to Grant Richards as a “nicely polished looking glass” of “the Irish people” (Letters I: 64). Chiasmus describes the difference between the work of art and the life outside of it that inspires it, and it does so in a reflexive manner that is specifically literary and textual. In other words, it characterizes the manner in which Ulysses reflects upon its genre, linguistic make-up, and material form in contradistinction to conventional definitions of realism. We might say that it adopts a realism that requires a wider frame, which accounts for the novel’s constructed involvement. Hence, through “the crystalization of its own law of form, not in the passive acceptance of objects,” “art intersects with the real” (“Nur in der

Kristallisation des eigenen Formgesetzes, nicht in der passiven Hinnahme der Objekte konvergiert Kunst mit dem Wirklichen”; “Erpreßte” 261). We can see this repeated on a narrative level: the newspaper, as the supposed antithesis of literary art, supplies the novel with an inverted image of itself in which it reflects on its own materiality and its own relation to reality as a work of fiction.

Among the many rhetorical figures used by Joyce in his revised version of

“Aeolus,” the only instance of chiasmus emerged from what is presumed to be a typographical error in the Little Review Ulysses (October, 1918):

“GROSSBOOTED draymen rolled barrels dullhudding out of Prince’s stores

and bumped them up on the brewery float.

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Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s

stores and bumped them up on the brewery float” (26).

The repetition as well as its inexactitude appear to be accidents committed by the printers: firstly, the “t” is missing from “dullhudding” in the first sentence, but is present in the second. Secondly, the sentence’s second instance is generally accepted as an entry error unintended by Joyce.24 Yet the error becomes more interesting when we see how

Joyce handles it by the time the novel appears in its first book edition in 1922. In this edition, the two sentences no longer introduce the narrative, but instead appear further down the page under the heading, “GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS.” More significantly they are revised as: “Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince’s stores” (Ulysses 7.21-24). Joyce corrects the misspelled of “dullhudding,” but instead of removing the repeated sentence, he absorbs it into the first paragraph together with the original (each stood alone in their own paragraphs before as reproduced above) and revised its sentence structure. The result was a chiastic inversion of the clauses of the first sentence, one of countless changes

Joyce made to the episode to register at least 113 types of rhetorical figures within its

24 Because the typescripts used in the Little Review publication have been lost, it is not possible to say that the repetition was an error with absolute certainty. Most recently, Ferrer writes that the chiasmus was “inserted as a holograph addition on the typescript. This seems to be derived directly from a typographical error in the Little Review publication of the episode, where the sentence is repeated twice, verbatim (see Groden 70). “The chiastic structure was simply superimposed on the mechanic echo” (Ferrer 196).

158 narrative. By transforming “what was unintended” into “what it was to be,” Joyce turns the accident into a central motif in the episode.

Chiasmus approached in its broadest sense helps one to recall that it is in this episode that the young artist and the ad-man coincidentally cross paths for a second time, a crossing with no instrumental impact on the narrative.25 The change in direction of the

Odyssey’s Aeolian wind in that inspires the episode also follows a chiastic motion. If the

X of chiasmus is divided into two mirrored halves, it appears as > <, that is, as two opposing arrows, signifying the opposing directions of the winds that blow Ulysses’ ship, as well as the inhalation and exhalation produced by the episode’s ruling organ, the lungs.

In fact the entire episode is saturated with thematic and semantic chiasmi.26 The revised book version opens at the intersection of O’Connell and Henry Streets—before Nelson’s

Pillar, which coincidentally is marked with an X in the map provided in Gifford’s annotations to the novel. At this crossroad we encounter intersecting railcars changing course and adopting a new electrical current before they follow tracks heading outside of the city. Analogously, in the next segment letters and packages are prepared for departure and the reader is told twice, in the chiasmus quoted above, how the barrels of Guinness are loaded for shipment. All of these actions represent Xs, that is, intersections, crossings, and networks that link together the motions of communication, transportation, and commerce. Although contingency has been less apt of a term to describe the accidental relationships traced in this chapter, it does overlap with my usage of accident, particularly

25 The first crossing takes place an episode earlier in Hades, in which Bloom catches sight of Stephen from the coach in which Bloom is riding with Stephen’s father. 26 Lexical and syntactical chiasmi abound in the episodes that follow.

159 in its Latin root as con-tangential, as coming into contact, that is, where two lines or tangents intersect.

The episode continues with a series of images that perpetuate the pattern. The pair of scissors used by Red Murray to cut out the advertisement are described as opening and closing, evoking the X-shape they form when open. Bloom’s comment, “scissors and paste,” echoes the same relation of simultaneous contact and disconnection that the X depicts. This phrase, being “proverbially referred to as the instruments used by the newspaper sub-editor or the mere mechanical compiler” (“scissors, n.” Oxford) and by extension “a compilation rather than an effort of original and independent investigation”

(“scissors-and-paste, adj.” Merriam-Webster), is used by Joyce in 1931 to describe his own authorial role in a letter to George Antheil. He writes, “I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description” (Letters I: 297). Thus, for him it also involves an overlap between the journalistic and the literary that takes place in the episode, and on a broader level, a self- view of modernist innovation characterized by unoriginality and repetition. Lines later, the image of the holy cross is summoned by Red Murray’s ambiguous statement, “Don’t you think his face is like Our Saviour?” (7: 49). Even the keys of the Keyes’ advertisement Bloom is working to place are intended to appear crossed. He says to

Murray, “He wants it changed. Keyes, you see. He wants two keys at the top” (26-27).

Bloom continues, “Like that, [. . .] crossing his forefingers at the top.” He crosses his index fingers, using his body to performatively signify the textual image he wants created. Towards the conclusion of the episode, as Stephen tells the story of the two sisters Anne Kearns and Florence MacCabe, he describes how the latter drinks “a bottle

160 of double X for supper every Saturday” (951). Because the first sister uses Lourdes water for her back pain, the professor responds “Antithesis” (952). These Xs mark the spot where antitheses meet: Bloom and Stephen, the editor and the creative genius, journalism and poetry, realism and modernism, body and text, the (material) signifier and the (real) signified, accident and essence, repetition and originality.

Reflecting in the printingshop, Bloom links the backwards assembly of type to a reverse chronology and genealogy. He thinks back in time to his own father’s “reading backwards” of the Torah, as he performed the Passover ritual, just as every generation of his family had done to commemorate their ancestors’ exodus from Egypt to the homeland promised to them by their God. Here, the repeated ritual of reading segments of text aloud conjoins and perpetuates this genealogy as it points back with nostalgia to another era and to the hope of returning to that premodern home. It follows the same structural pattern as the textual scissors-and-pasting, where a repetition recalls the past and extends it into the present and perhaps future. The Jewish diaspora of course also evokes the sense of homelessness that Lukács, Adorno, and Walter Benjamin find manifest in modern literature. A shared condition, solitude is the common experience of all modern individuals, an idea Lukács himself had once described as “universal homelessness,” but had since disavowed. This isolation occurs on an aesthetic level as well:

Genau das ist an den wahrhaft avantgardistischen Werken evident. Sie

objektivieren sich in rückhaltloser, monadologischer Versenkung ins je

eigene Formgesetzt, ästhetisch und vermittelt dadurch auch ihrem

gesellschaftlichen Substrat nach. Das allein verleiht Kafka, Joyce, Beckett,

der großen neuen Musik ihre Gewalt. In ihren Monologen hallt die Stunde,

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die der Welt geschlagen hat: darum erregen sie so viel mehr, als was

mitteilsam die Welt schildert. (“Erpreßte” 268-69)

That is exactly what is evident in the truly avant-garde works. They

objectify themselves in unreserved monadological immersion into their

own law of form, aesthetically and thereby also mediated in their social

substratum. That alone lends Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, and the great new

music their force. In their monologues resounds the hour (of the world)

that struck (in the world): for that reason they are so much more

provocative than that which portrays the world communicatively.

Time and historical place are not described or narrated, but their traces are sensorily encountered as if through the vibrations and tolls of a clock bell.27 The scheme of this encounter involves an acoustical mirror, an echo that spans lonely distances to connect.

Only heard, sensed in the vibrations of the eardrum, or felt beneath the feet, the vibrations supply a common and shared experience among individuals and between music and writing. Most significant in the passage is the model of temporality and the “truly” avant- garde’s relation to history as it is described by Adorno: instead of positing a rupture in time, it registers the shift indirectly but unmistakably.

In terms of historical progression, the concept of the accident, as Ross Hamilton has so usefully investigated, is typically thought of as a rupturing, unnatural, and unintended event. If “Aeolus” represents the beginning of experimental Joyce, its experimental change is one of retroactivity and revision (“scissors-and-paste”) instead of an avant-garde breakthrough. Joyce’s stages of writing are not distinct in a punctuated

27 This model of historical modernity and shared isolation strongly resembles the operation of Big Ben in Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway.

162 sense, rather “he retained the results of each stage he passed through, even after he had progressed into the next, so that he presented Ulysses as a palimpsest of his development from 1914 to 1922” (Groden 23). In other words, one style does not overthrow the other: realism is never absolutely discarded, but is overlaid and combined with the new writing introduced in Joyce’s revisions. If the shift from realism to modernism is historical in nature, as the “modern” of modernism implies, Joyce draws up a new genealogy, through which, like the father-son exchanges of Stephen’s thesis on Hamlet and Shakespeare or his own relationship to Bloom, the old gives way to the new and the new gives way to the old according to a chiastic causal sequence. Indeed “Aeolus”’ narrative arrives where it begins, with the central tram stop, but in the final instance (HELLO THERE, CENTRAL!) they remain motionless in contrast to the busy horsedrawn vehicles that continue to travel (7:

1042-1049). The pivotal position “Aeolus” occupies in the genetic transformation of the novel means that its study “cannot be isolated from the history of the whole book”

(Groden 195). Yet even the exact dating of the experimental phase of Joyce’s writing is now under scrutiny since new notebooks have surfaced, suggesting that the revisions to the earlier episodes involved a more gradual and developmental process than previously believed. These layers of correction and revision imply a temporally indistinct set of authorial subjectivities and intentions, a distributed authorial agency that was perpetually shifting and “in-progress” over the novel’s eight-year composition.

The introduction of the new within the novel’s narrative and within its compositional history is both rupturing and made up of retrospective tracings, revisions, or as Joyce describes his revision of “Aeolus” to Harriet Weaver, a “recasting.”

Interestingly enough, the term describes the formation of metal blocks of type as well as

163 literary revision and reorganization. Yet it is also one of the standard ways of understanding the difference between substance and accident. In sculpture, the essential substance remains as it is melted and recast into a different shape. In theatre, the same dramatic work is recast with new actors. If Joyce’s vision of aesthetic and historical change is composed of revision and recasting, one can see that this shift is one that hinges on verbs attached to the essence-accident distinction, where the same substance is recast into a new form. Yet the hierarchy implicit in these standard examples must be problematized if it has not been done clearly enough already. Joyce’s example of modernist change is characterized by accident, contingency, and form, where these are recuperated to the same level of significance as intention and content.

In the section of “Aeolus” entitled “ORTHOGRAPHICAL,” Joyce represents phonetic symbols as words, thereby literally transforming the accidental characters into essential content. Writing is given voice as its sound is depicted in the spelled out portions of the words “embarassment,” “unparalleled,” “gauging,” and “symmetry”: “the unpar one ar alleled embara two ars is it? Double ess ment of a harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry with a y of a peeled pear under a cemetery wall” (167-169). The characters are sounded out, producing a speech determined by inscription, where the “ar” and “ess” represent the names of the digits r and s phonetically. At the same time that it absorbs the material form of the words’ orthography into the narrative it underscores the high risk of error in spelling them correctly. Similarly, instead of simply printing out or reproducing the text of a letter found among other objects in a drawer in Bloom’s kitchen, the narrative voice of “Ithaca” describes it as “an infantile epistle, dated, small em Monday,

164 reading: capital pee Papli comma capital aitch How are you note of interrogation capital eye I am very well full stop new paragraph signature with flourishes capital em Milly no stop” (17: 1791-95). Writing out the marks of punctuation once again converts them from accidentals into significative language, constituting the essential content of the passage.

In line with the inventoried nature of “Ithaca,” the textual details provided are excessive, particularly because they do not represent any error or idiosyncrasy in the writing’s form.

The accident is defined not only by its lack of intent and necessity, but at times also by its interference with what is intended or deemed correct. In language, all mediation is capable of interfering with the speaker’s intended message. In writing, the processes of editing, typesetting, and reading each has the potential to obstruct meaning at the same time that it is necessary to its production. In traditional terms, if the accidental could be linked to a subjective intention, it would be the editor’s, whose hand guides and amends the authorial delivery as a silent partner in the production of print, and who acts as a gateway granting access to the press. His or her work in the text is done with the aim of making the author’s content more clear and forceful, rather than altering its meaning.

Whereas the literary author’s voice is traditionally considered singular and unique,

“Aeolus”’ central symbol, the editorial occupation, represents an anonymous, collective, and convention-driven voice that emerges most tangibly in the headlines that structure and interrupt the episode’s ongoing narrative. As Karen Lawrence notes, “the headings represent a discourse generated in the text that advertises the fact that it is ‘written,’ anonymous, and public—that is, cut off from any single originating consciousness” (62).

Joyce makes use of these aspects of his art instead of seeking only to suppress them. Yet his treatment of them comprises another category of intention, which at times produces a

165 deliberate ambiguity that makes productive use of the intervening effects of print, editorial alteration, typographic choice, printing errata, and misinterpretation.

The question of multiple categories of authorial intention drew a good deal attention with the first publication of the Gabler edition of Ulysses in 1984, where editors differentiated between Joyce’s dual role as an “author” and as a “scribe.” They accordingly corrected what they judged to be errors even when written in the author’s own hand.28 It is well documented that Joyce made endless alterations or corrections to the proofs of his first three volumes of fiction, and many of these were concerned with what he hesitated to call “misprints” (Letters I: 187). On one hand this together with his idiosyncratic requirements regarding the hyphenation or spacing of compound words and his removal of commas are evidence of an author obsessed with maintaining control over every detail of his production. From another view, the endless changes reveal varying intents. A number of changes involve his approval and (in the case of the chiastic pair of sentences) recuperation of error. Crucially, these changes were not motivated by a strictly communicative aim and by no means ease the interpretive experience of the reader.

Authorial intent directed at the category of writing described as its accidentals paradoxically uncovers another level of intention unconcerned with signification.29

Through our reading of Adorno, we have also seen how modernism breaks from realism not through an inflated subjective depiction of an otherwise objective reality, as

Lukács holds, but through the momentary failure or absence of the subject’s intention, sometimes itself intentionalized, which produces the essential accident. Ulysses

166 experiments with this through its depiction of the editorial and compositorial elements involved in the production of texts, which both aid and disrupt the dominance of a singularly determined set of meanings. We discover this productive tension at work in

Joyce’s treatment of the quotation mark, which, I argue, is influenced by his attitudes toward the concept of modernist originality, the tension between speech and print, and the role of authenticity and fictitiousness in modernist fiction.

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CHAPTER FOUR: KEEPING TIME IN THE SPACE OF TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Der Tod ist die Sanktion von allem, was der Erzähler berichten kann. Vom Tode hat er seine Autorität geliehen.—Walter Benjamin

In one of the last entries to her diary, Virginia Woolf recorded what she imagined would be the experience of being struck by an explosive, the passing from life to death, and then death itself. “Then a swoon; a drain; two or three gulps attempting consciousness—and then dot dot dot” (A Writer’s Diary 354). The first two events,

“Then a swoon; a drain;” are movements involving mind and body alike. The body collapses at the moment of lost consciousness before it drains of blood and life. But the last response, which leads into the state of death, are the “two or three” bodily “gulps” for air that “attempt consciousness.” Following a dash, these two or three gulps are finally echoed and answered with the tripled “dot.” This repetition is particularly appropriate since, as we have seen in previous chapters, the dot or period has, in its historical development, been conceived of as the textual signifier for breath in public reading.

Woolf’s refusal of the mark in this case evokes the last unsuccessful gasps for breath. The symbolic word involves an even more profound absence or remove from the living body.

Punctuation, a term signifying the insertion of material points on the page as well as the marks themselves, derives from the act of “distinguish[ing] by pointing”

(“punctuation”), a phrase that encompasses both the materiality of the inked points on a page and the pointing motion of the index finger, and through the latter the indexical. In 168 this way, the term itself categorically gestures back to the individual body and away from it at the same time (insofar as the finger points elsewhere). Historically, punctuation is a symptom first of written language, then of silent reading, and its implicit purpose has been to compensate, so to say, for the bodily and verbal gesture lost in the shift from speech to writing. Rhetorically, in languages like English, many marks indicate the rhythmic pauses a public reader should place between words, for rhetorical effect and to pronounce transitions between units of sense. In its early use the period marked when the reader should take a breath, which emphasizes the rhetorical dependence of the text on the live body of its orator. Here (and, as I will show, not only here) Woolf draws from this history in her written representation of human death. By representing the final moment of death not with the wordless and open mark of the ellipsis, but words signifying the mark, Woolf’s sentence reverses the conventional relationship between words and their textual mediation. In doing so she puts both the mind and the body, or both literary form and textual mediation, to work in a passage that is representational as well as self-reflexively performative.

The mark of the ellipsis, though expressive on its own terms, marks a lapse in language, a failure of words. Theodor Adorno relates the mark to Impressionism when he describes it as being used to “leave sentences meaningfully open” (“Sätze bedeutungsvoll offen zu lassen”) and to “suggest the neverendingness of thoughts and associations”

(“suggieren die Unendlichkeit der Gedanken und Assoziationen”; “Satzzeichen” 109). In her reading of that mark in Woolf’s Three Guineas, Shari Benstock describes the symbol as an “incessant turning and re-turning” indicating an “open[ness] to revision and rethinking” (138). In using written language to substitute for and signify the mark of the

169 ellipsis, Woolf refuses the unarticulated provisionality or the opening into an infinite afterlife that may have been suggested by the mark. In this instance she rejects the mark not in favor of its proper grammatical name (the ellipsis), but in favor of a thrice-repeated word emphasizing its materiality, “dot dot dot,” and not its conventional use.1

What divides and bridges the gulps from the dots, the body from the text, is the mark of the dash. For Adorno, unity appears in literary form through the device of the caesura, which is represented by the dash. He concludes, “An ihm wird der Gedanke seines Fragmentcharakters inne” (“In the dash, thought becomes conscious of its fragmentary character”; “Satzzeichen” 108). Suggestively, in Adorno’s formulation the writing subject is absent. Instead the marks, language, and thought take on a life of their own. In Woolf’s diary, the writing “I” records her own death, which is to say that with the dash the writer ceases to be the one writing. The parataxis or caesura the dash performs is the death as well as the loss it leaves behind. By the time the reader arrives at the “dot dot dot, ” the agency has shifted from the “I” to a new entity, language itself.

Subject (the writing “I”) has transformed to object (the written “it”), and signifying language, not the materiality of a mark, best represents this result. Written self- representations of subjectivity are always disembodied, first in their symbolic nature, and second in the writing’s travel away from the writing subject through space and time. Yet punctuation is not symbolic in the same way. Its materiality and historical service as a

1 In her chapter on Woolf, Shari Benstock does an intertextual reading of Three Guineas and Sophocles Antigone, where she notes that Antigone’s suicide “is marked by ellipsis, which leaves the violence itself as something to be understood, available only by its effects, a figure of incompletion or ‘falling short’—the action of suicide by hanging” (133). Woolf, who refers to Antigone’s relation to the law, also uses the mark as “both a threshold and a place of trespass. It announces a barrier of transgression, a moment of trauma and falling away, and it constructs a space where writing exceeds cultural limits to lift, momentarily, the veil of social (and linguistic) repression” (Benstock 139).

170 bridge between disembodied texts and the vocal gesture of living orators returns our attention to the presence and absence of human bodies. Woolf’s compact passage dramatizes these tensions, as she considers punctuation as word (“dot dot dot”) and material mark (. . .) in order to perform the self-negation of writing one’s death. The diary has a particular status in this discussion because it provides a medium in which the author does not intentionally address an outside reader. Instead the writing self addresses its temporally distinct reading self in a mode of writing committed to the author’s private relationship with language and its experiments.

I hold that this is just one instance of the way such play with the associative, structural, and nonsignifying features of writing informs Woolf’s model of narrative and of authorial subjectivity. In the following I argue that in cultivating the expressive nonverbal elements of writing, which do not operate as significative language does,

Woolf establishes a narrative voice in writing and authorial relation to writing that demands the reader’s active involvement more than it dictates predetermined meaning.

This stance resembles the compositorial interpretation invited by Gertrude Stein (Chapter

Two) and Adorno’s proposal of intermedial reading (Chapter One) and their attendant versions of the concept of understanding. This is not to say that Woolf did not desire to convey meaning in her writing or even to convey a particular meaning, but her approach to narrative (opposed to her essays and criticism) registers few if any traces of the persuasive rhetoric meant to elicit particular responses from readers (aside from admiration, which caused her great anxiety). Instead, as Chapter Two explored, Woolf consciously introduces modern formal strategies into the novel genre, which has a confusing and disorienting effect on readers accustomed to the conventional novelistic

171 techniques. As the next section will explore, attending to writing in this way on one hand connects it to modern developments in other media, but equally interesting is how

Woolf’s consciousness of the reader’s disorientation is thematized and formalized as a shift—a death or passing as I showed in the brief passage from her diary above, a rupture, a loss, or difference—which reflects on the generational, temporal, and formal difference connected to modernism that this dissertation has been examining.

Je weniger die Satzzeichen, isoliert genommen, Bedeutung oder Ausdruck tragen, je mehr sie in der Sprache den Gegenpol zu den Namen ausmachen, desto entschiedener gewinnt ein jegliches unter ihnen seinen physiognomischen Stellenwert, seinen eigenen Ausdruck, der zwar nicht zu trennen ist von der syntaktischen Funktion, aber doch keineswegs in ihr sich erschöpft.—Theodor Adorno

The following passage from “The Window,” the first book of To the Lighthouse, uses punctuation to represent surrounding patterns of sounds, others’ voices, and their interruption of Mrs. Ramsay’s train of thought:

The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the

putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not

hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the

terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted

now half an hour and taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds

pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden

bark now and then, ‘How’s that? How’s that?’ of the children playing

cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach,

which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her

thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat

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with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature,

‘I am guarding you—I am your support,’ but at other times suddenly and

unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task

actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of

drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the

destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her

whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all

ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and

concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears

and made her look up with an impulse of terror. (6)

This long sentence represents Mrs. Ramsey’s unfiltered subjective experience, and it dramatizes this experience with its punctuation. In an article studying translations of this novel, Rachel May comments on the English punctuation of this passage: “The theme of

Woolf’s sentence is not the sound itself,” she writes, “but the vulnerability of Mrs.

Ramsay’s mind to conflicting and overwhelming influences in the world around her, the ebb and flow of connection and detachment. The confused syntax and its complex punctuation aid in explaining—even depicting—her state of mind” (10). As we can see, in emphasizing the significance of form as well as content in modernist translation, May subordinates the pattern of musical figures to the punctuation itself. Yet the two are linked together in this passage in an important way, and even more so in their use to gather the “ephemeral[]” events of a life in a “measure,” from “cradle songs,” to sounds of children’s play, men’s conversation, “ghostly roll of drums,” and finally the

“destruction of the island” (To the Lighthouse 6). These are not narrated in the

173 chronological sequence of a single life, but we can discern from these sounds—which are conjoined with Mrs. Ramsey’s own thoughts by the punctuation May observes—the trajectory of life, from its “soothing” security to the fright of its passing. Mrs. Ramsay’s character, whose generation and perspective on life is associated with the Victorian past, is not in perfect harmony with this modern depiction of the world, and the “clash” and

“confusion” surrounding her in fact serves Woolf’s practice of characterization (May 5).

However, the relation between her and her surroundings does not fully typify a state of alienation or a direct conflict between the modern hero and its environment. The musical metaphor, which is associated with these stages of natural life, also produces an integrated dissonance that resists delineating stable borders between the subject’s interiority and its external surroundings.

Unlike May, I hold that the complex perspective depicted in the passage is structured and thematized by sound, rhythm, and musical metaphor and is facilitated by innovative punctuation, itself producing rhythmic units of prose. Rhythm is underscored in the musical figures of the “monotonous fall of the waves,” the “ghostly roll of drums,”

“the measure of life,” and the patterned light signals sent forth from the lighthouse— participates in the form and content of the novel (To the Lighthouse 6; my italics). In other works such as Roger Fry: A Biography2 and The Waves,3 scholars have identified the intermedial figure of discordant music as an integral narrative and stylistic device to

Woolf’s writings. Furthermore, in The Waves and Between the Acts, musicality is used as a structuring element of community, which groups rather than harmonizes disparate and

2 See Jacobs. 3 See Schulze, Clements.

174 dissonant parts into a symphonic whole.4 Regina Schulze, comparing Woolf’s structuring of the six perspectives in The Waves to Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system, calls

Woolf’s narrative “atonal,” which “allows for, as Schoenberg has put it, ‘the emancipation of the dissonance’” (19). This lends the novel a nonlinear form, a “design in motion” (13), just as Schoenberg’s atonal music did within the western musical tradition.5 To extract from the readings of Schoenberg by Theodor Adorno that were examined in previous chapters, it is clear how crucial the introduction of dissonant atonality is to modern critiques of conventional genre and the models of thinking implicitly embedded in their structures.

In Woolf’s work the modern human consciousness is often connected to its social and environmental surroundings through patterns of fragmentation and dissonance, which we see performed both in the rhythmical syntax and the visual form of the dashes, parentheses, semi-colons, commas, and single quotation marks segmenting the passage above. Yet its setting is natural, communal, insular, and protected. Mrs. Ramsay’s relation to the stimuli surrounding her is spatial and simultaneous, but we see from the sounds her mind registers and their nonlinear association with different stages of life that

4 Though Schulze points out that the narrative form of To the Lighthouse “has a definite beginning and a definite end” and “struggles against the abstract experimental possibilities posed by Lily’s picture” (9), the middle section of the “Time Passes,” she writes, is a “stab in the direction of Woolf’s perfect book.” Yet whether the novel attains the full equivalent of musical atonality to the extent that we can trace musical movements in the narrative composition is beside the point in the present examination. 5 See Clements, who has argued in two different articles for the influence of Beethoven’s Opus 130 on The Waves and the influence on Between the Acts of Woolf’s friendship with the composer Ethel Smyth. In both cases, Clements finds that music acts as a social force, as a structure beneath a model of community including harmony and cacophony alike.

175 the integral dissonance we have been discussing characterizes a temporal relationship as well.

During the time she was writing To the Lighthouse, she described her writing

“style” as “all rhythm” in a letter to Vita Sackville-West (The Letters III: 247). She elaborated,

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t

use the wrong words. But on the other hand here I am sitting after half the

morning crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge

them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm

is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave

in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my

present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has

nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in

the mind, it makes words to fit it: But no doubt I shall think differently

next year.

This flow of images and rhythms, she writes, gives way to the words. A notable aspect of this writing process is the suspension of authorial control it seems to involve: she positions herself not as the directing force behind the writing, but the one who must

“recapture” and guide it or “set this working.” That is, the rhythm, “as it breaks and tumbles in the mind” and “makes words to fit” (247), directs the writer. Woolf threatens with sarcasm that she will probably abandon this philosophy of writing, but she does not.6

The comparison serves her throughout her career and is often used to reflect on her

6 See The Letters IV: 204, IV: 303.

176 personal experience of writing. Also the painter Lily Briscoe, the novelist’s analog in To the Lighthouse, is carried away by what J. Hillis Miller calls “an impersonal transcendent rhythm which is beyond her yet in which she nevertheless participates” (153), as seen in the following:

but it [her brush] was now heavier and went slower, as if it had fallen in

with some rhythm which was dictated to her (she kept looking at the

hedge, at the canvas) by what she saw, so that while her hand quivered

with life, this rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with it on its

current. Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as

she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality

and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her

mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings,

and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring,

hideously difficult white space, while she modeled it with greens and

blues. (To the Lighthouse 159)

Instead of delving into the possible gender identities associated with different rhythms, or the formalist impersonality subject to this commanding beat, which has been done with success already,7 it is worth dwelling on the intermedial nature of this scene. The

7 Randi Koppen argues that “For all its body rhetoric, Hillis Miller’s radical perspective on Woolf can only be understood as a continuation of modernist readings in which the body/life is always subordinate or suspended, and ultimately transformed out of existence” (382). Instead, Koppen suggests, “this passage is […] about the close connection that exists between the artistic act, the rhythms of bodily movement, and the physical world—in other words, that what this passage performs is a much more direct translation of the body onto the canvas than Hillis Miller is prepared to consider.” It will emerge in this chapter that this is not an either/or dilemma.

177 rhythmic painter is positioned, not as a foil, but as a displaced figure of Woolf engaged in the same writing process. One aspect of the comparison lies in that artistic intentions regarding music and abstract visual art are directed more often towards the medium itself than towards communicating an end-oriented message to be received by the work’s audience. Woolf acknowledges precisely this in another letter expressing her concern that readers might not be carried along by her rhythmic narrative style: “I think that my difficulty is that I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot. Does this convey anything?

And thus thought the rhythmical is more natural to me than the narrative, it is completely opposed to the tradition of fiction and I am casting about all the time for a rope to throw the reader” (The Letters IV: 204). This passage demonstrates on one hand that her rhythmical writing style is at risk of not “convey[ing]” anything at all. Though she is concerned with her readers’ experiences of the text, she desires only “a rope to throw,” not to “control,” “alert,” or even “encourage” (Parkes 95) particular interpretations with punctuation. The opposition of this rhythmical approach to “plot” and “tradition(al) fiction” amounts to a formal critique of literary convention, itself inseparable from the political and social ideologies which Woolf rejected. Her rhythmic critique alienates her work from an audience whose tastes and expectations were formed by those conventions.8

8 Yet scholars like Malcome Parkes have seen Woolf’s use of punctuation marks as a formally conservative response to the alienating effect of her stream of consciousness style. For him, punctuation does not participate in the rhythmic critique, but serves to strengthen the communicative line between author and reader.

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Intermedial tropes appear in a countless number of letters and diary entries, and they have been the source of many scholarly chapters on the influence of other arts, especially the visual art of the Bloomsbury group, on her writing. When it comes to To the Lighthouse, the focus has been exclusively on the role of painting in the novel and with good reason.9 Lily Briscoe’s attempt to capture the abstract image of Mrs. Ramsay in life and death seems to represent, especially from an autobiographical point of view, the work of mourning for her mother that Woolf records having done in her writing of the novel.10 In view of Roger Fry’s influence on Woolf, many have observed a literary adaptation of the aesthetic tenets of the Bloomsbury painters in the detailed imagery of the writing itself together with the abstract narrative structure. Though musicality plays a more pronounced thematic and structural role in Woolf’s later novels such as The Waves and Between the Acts, its role in To the Lighthouse, I argue, is involved in an intermedial complex between vision and listening, motion and stillness, and presence and absence. In

9 Tammy Clewell argues that Lily’s painting demonstrates how art cannot replace or memorialize loss to the point of erasing it. The line Lily draws at the center of the painting recalls the way “Time Passes” separates the novel’s own prewar and postwar sections. At once a thematic and structural feature, this division highlights Lily’s awareness that past and present cannot be seamlessly joined together. Put differently, the painting’s central line distinguishes a time characterized by Mrs. Ramsay’s presence and another by her absence, inviting us to read Lily’s final gesture as a sign of the impossibility of fully assimilating the past in the name of a redeemed present. (218) The line that interrupts the unity of the canvas and the middle section of the novel, “Time Passes,” enacts a transition between absence or the past and the present. 10 “I used to think of him and mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse laid them in my mind” (Moments 81). Critics like Spilka and Showalter, for example, argue that if the novel’s writing was therapeutic, its oblique representation of loss and mourning suggests the process was unsuccessful or incomplete.

179 my use of the term intermediality here, I do not mean to exclude the traditional interartistic comparisons and adaptations that cross between distinct genres and arts.

However, my focus concerns the view of media that the interarts have given way to: as

W. J. T. Mitchell writes, “all media are mixed media” already (Picture Theory 6). Woolf does not draw labored connections between writing and music, but as was revealed in her letter to Bell, musical rhythm occasions and sets the language that flows from her pen in motion.

In her 1937 “Words Fail Me” radio series, Woolf also suggests that writing contains within itself the possibility of its own critique by intermedial methods. In “On

Craftsmanship,” which is surely an overt response to Gertrude Stein’s U.S. lecture tour on writing and the English language, she takes as an example the end-oriented and straightforward message on the sign in a railway car, which states “Do not lean out of the window.” Despite its clarity, its message becomes overturned by its reader:

At the first reading the useful meaning, the surface meaning, is conveyed;

but soon, as we sit looking at the words, they shuffle, they change; and we

begin saying, “Windows, yes windows—casements opening on the foam

of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.” And before we know what we are

doing, we have leant out of the window; we are looking for Ruth in tears

amid the alien corn. The penalty for that is twenty pounds or a broken

neck.

This proves, if it needs proving, how very little natural gift words have for

being useful. If we insist on forcing them against their nature to be useful,

we see to our cost how they mislead us, how they fool us, how they land

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us a crack on the head. We have been so often fooled in this way by

words, they have so often proved that they hate being useful, that it is their

nature not to express one simple statement but a thousand possibilities—

they have done this so often that at last, happily, we are beginning to face

the fact. (“On Craftsmanship”)

Here Woolf reflects how even when used very carefully and directly, the reader’s imagination rebels and transforms the assigned messages of verbal signifiers. The reader in this scenario expands the practice of reading to a contemplative “looking” that undoes the knot tied between signifier and signified. The placard is treated like visual art by its reader: it is viewed, but no longer read in a linear, deciphering fashion. Its words arouse new words and more new words, until the first message is productively perverted.

Intermedial critique of the political and social control embedded in verbal language emerges from the reception of writing as well as its formation. Looking as well as reading text brings out the stillness of the pauses, silences in the midst of the rhythmic motion of the train. These dimensions direct attention outside of the signifying and communicating utility of such notices. Woolf’s contemplation of them is instrumental in her configuration of authorship that collaborates with, rather than dictates to, its materials and its active readers.

From the first sentence of his essay “Punctuation Marks,” Theodor Adorno calls attention to how punctuation carries its own meaning when isolated from the language it usually modifies and supports. The fact of this expression implicitly threatens the autonomy and primacy of verbal language by suspending the logic that determines it. In

181 such cases it serves no syntactical or clarifying function, but communicates meaning through its visual and material character. Regarding the figurative comparison of music to literature, Susan Bernstein has written that the nonreferential system of music is used as a “critique of language’s binarisms: subject and predicate, inside and outside, origin and expression, center and extension,” in part because its “own theme comes forth contiguously with its movement, not in a propositional relationship that divides subject and object” (2). In this view, music as a figure for writing destabilizes not only binary views of language, but also the autonomy of the performing and composing I: “because music has no words, it is not structured by the orientational point of the word I. The constitutive iterability of the first-person pronoun, its availability for general use, obstructs its ability to ‘express’; because it is detachable from its user, it can never be unique” (44). I argue that like wordless music the rhythmic and intermedial nature of punctuation marks is implicated in the model of authorship suggested by Woolf. It recalls the workings of gesture, rhythm, and punctuation in embodied subjectivities that underlie the linguistic self. It is precisely this aspect of subjectivity that is lost in verbal mediations of the self.

In this regard, the materiality of punctuation plays a significant role in achieving a literary form characterized by disconnection, as Woolf evokes sound and corporeality in a text that must inherently lack them. As I will demonstrate in the final section of this chapter, Woolf uses punctuation to depict bodily experiences of loss and temporal shift in

To the Lighthouse. Like the marks and lines of Lily Briscoe’s paintings, punctuation marks are involved in reconstructing the past on the space of the page. Insofar as time and the progression of history are posited most powerfully in the musical rhythm and

182 punctuation of the novel, the marks keep time in To the Lighthouse literally and figuratively. It will become evident that this is one of the ways in which Woolf uses writing to confront and represent the era in which she lived, itself chiefly characterized by loss and disconnection. Thus punctuation marks become intermedial tools, whether literally by breaking language into rhythms, structurally by opening meaningful spaces, disjoints, and caesuras, or visually in the connotations of their graphic form. As in her depiction of abstract painting and rhythm, expressive punctuation’s bypassing of proposition poses an implicit critique of propositional language.

Walled Unity: Integral Parenthesis

Through the shared differentiation of walls and boundaries within the structure of

To the Lighthouse, parenthesis marks use disconnection as a unifying structure and question the boundary between center and margin at the same time that they appear to enforce it. This stitching action does not impose a “spurious harmony” as Adorno would call it, but one that allows for disconnection and differentiation. Parenthetical walls both divide and provide the structure of the greater work: in her 1922-25 plans for the novel, she articulates its narrative form as “two blocks joined by a corridor” (“Notes for

Writing” 48). A simple illustration follows below the phrase, itself a fragment (Figure 1):

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According to Woolf’s plan, the structure of the novel is multidimensional and formed by both horizontal and vertical lines fully enclosing the private interior space of the narrative. The block and corridor metaphor establishes the novel as an architectural form with each of the three books constituting distinct spaces.11 If we see the middle book or passageway of “Time Passes” as the parenthesis to the novel as a whole, we will find that this pattern is carried through to the novel’s syntax. As many scholars have established, the inner life and daydream provide the main clauses of the novel’s sentences, and orienting or situating events or details are inserted as digressions as they interrupt the ongoing thoughts. Interruption is an important stylistic device and motif deeply involved in the thematic concerns of Woolf’s novel. Parenthetical insertions surrounded in

11 As its title suggests, the novel is loosely organized around a trip to the lighthouse. The setting of all of the books takes place in the Ramsay’s Isle of Skye holiday home, whether bustling with life or vacant. The first pre-war book or block of the structure, “The Window,” covers the space of one day, in which Lily Briscoe begins a canvas painting of Mrs. Ramsay and the yard, and a trip to the lighthouse is discussed and thwarted by the threat of poor weather. The “corridor,” the second and shortest book, “Time Passes,” opens with the night following the day narrated in “The Window,” but in its twenty pages accounts for about a decade, including the passing of the catastrophic First World War. This book itself is interrupted by bracketed insertions reporting the most important events taking place. The insertions introduce loss into the novel as the main character of “The Window” and her two oldest children are killed off without ceremony or sentiment. Here the to the lighthouse theme is interrupted, since, though the lighthouse remains, the characters interested in traveling there are not. The house stands silent and vacant for years, and the human characters we encounter most are Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast, women commissioned to clean the house (and the remnants of the first book) in preparation for the third. It ends with the characters’ return the night before the day narrated in the third book. The final post-war block to which the corridor leads, “The Lighthouse,” returns to the form of the first book: it also takes place over the course of a day, beginning the night before (in mirrored symmetry to the first book). The surviving family members and friends return, the past narrated in “The Window” is reconstructed, the losses reflected upon, the painting finished even without its subject, and the trip to the lighthouse made as a “rite” (165) in memory of Mrs. Ramsay, this time perfunctorily without the joy or hope invested in it by her children years earlier.

184 parenthesis marks or dashes interrupt sentences. Chapter-breaks interrupt dialogues.

Thoughts trail off into silent ellipses.

Parenthetical marks do not create space for a pause, but disrupt language with more language. If the caesura-imposing dash inserts a pause between “placed-together events” (angezogenen Ereignissen) as Adorno calls them, the parenthesis literally places events to the side of one another. The very word parenthesis invokes the Greek roots of the word “para” and “thesis,” meaning place (thesis) alongside of (para) and not as part of or together with. The rest of the sentence or narrative is syntactically complete without the parenthesis. From a certain point of view, the reader pressed for time could easily skip over it with no practical loss. For Adorno, it is the mark itself that isolates and transforms the material it encloses: “die Klammer nimmt die Parenthese aus dem Satz ganz heraus, schafft gleichsam Enklaven, während doch nichts, was in guter Prosa vorkommt, dem Gesamtbau entbehrlich sein sollte“ (“the parenthesis mark or bracket completely removes the parenthetical clause from the sentence, establishes enclaves as it were, whereas, what we encounter in good prose should be indispensable to the structure as a whole”; “Satzzeichen 111). Style manuals contemporary to Woolf substantiate

Adorno’s aversion; they warn authors against using round brackets unless the content it envelops is “very remote from” (Manly 120) or “wholly irrelevant to” (Chicago 101) the rest of the sentence. The threat of dispensability introduced by the conventional use of the marginalizing parenthesis disturbs Adorno. For him, it ignores the rule of prose form and

“silently give[s] up linguistic form’s claim to integrity” (“geben die Klammern stillschweigend den Ausspruch auf die Integrität der sprachlichen Gestalt auf”; 111) by including that which it marks as unnecessary and marginal. But of course in a literary

185 context, this is never what happens. Parenthetical interruptions, like the corridor of “Time

Passes,” become necessary to the narrative they rupture.

It is puzzling that Adorno does not discriminate between round parenthesis marks and square brackets; instead he uses a blanket term (not unusual in German or British

English for that matter) Klammern, to discuss both. His treatment of them here is especially harsh, and it seems noteworthy that he omits them from his earlier discussions of the musical quality, physiognomic, linguistic, or syntactical expression of punctuation marks. Instead, he prefers that the Parenthese, the parenthetical insertion itself, be set off by dashes. The crucial difference, Adorno finds, is the visual aspect of the parenthesis mark, whose vertical lines offend his aesthetic sensibility. Though the horizontal dash divides, it bridges and connects the sentences it has “torn open” in visual continuity with the typographical line. For him, though the dash divides, its horizontal line is still an image of connectedness, and provides a negative evocation of an ideal harmony. It is puzzling that, while focusing in such detail on the visual character of other punctuation marks, Adorno does not consider the mixed message sent by the round parenthesis marks’ outward bulging curves. Its content visibly presses outward, confuses its demarcation, and resists its supposed containment and marginalization. By threatening to pour outward into the syntactically and coherently complete main sentence, or main narrative, its supplementary purpose often inverts itself. The indispensability of such supplementarity raises questions of the independence of the main sentence. After a parenthetical interruption takes place, the sentence is transformed, and we find the isolated enclave Adorno sees is, in fact, purely theoretical.

186

If Adorno calls the vertical walls of both square brackets and round parenthesis marks imprisoning, we might also see them as creating intimate enclosure. Certainly, their presence in To the Lighthouse would be well explained in these terms. In a novel whose subject is already very much concerned with enclosure, with the protective shells that separate humans from one another, and with the “division” of domestic life from public, brackets offer their vertical enclosure as an apt architectural instrument. Rather than creating an opening a moment of silent exposure, they appear to enclose and protect.

Woolf’s round and square brackets both participate in the dialectic between unity and fragmentation in a manner quite distinct from the caesura-enacting dash. They divide, interrupt, and territorialize not merely through the presence of their vertical image but by enabling language to disrupt language. In fact, to recall the first long passage discussed above in which Mrs. Ramsay is overwhelmed with sensations of safety and of doom, the round brackets in particular insulate, or establish an insular space, in the secure time of now, on the intimate island on which the holiday house is situated. The square brackets, as we will see below, are associated instead with a temporal disjunction and the intrusion of an annihilating force of time onto the life of the island.

In his discussion of Proust, however, Adorno finds that the author’s relationship to the content of his sentences sometimes call for parentheses. These leave a trace of the text’s production, and the authorial intent they mark is more complex than the readings provided by theorists who see punctuation as a direct imprint of authorial presence in the text: “Seine eingeklammerten Parenthesen, die wie das Schriftbild so den Vortrag unterbrechen, sind Denkmäler der Augenblicke, da der Autor, müde des ästhetischen

Scheins und mißtrauisch gegen die Selbstgenügsamkeit der Vorgänge, die er doch

187 ohnehin nur aus sich hervorspinnt, offen die Zügel ergreift” (“[Proust’s] bracketed parentheses, which interrupt the typographical image as well as the narrative, are memorials of moments, during which the author, tired of aesthetic appearance and distrustful of the self-reliance of events that he produces from within himself, openly grasps hold of the reins”; 111-12). Hardly the “master,” Proust, as Adorno has it, uneasily tries with his parentheses to “rein” in a narrative that has taken on a life of its own. The marks denote Proust’s struggle with a narrative almost out of his control. Though the parenthetical insertion provides a trace of authorial presence and of the text’s production, its most interesting qualities do not derive from its function as a communicative tool. In this case, Adorno admits the parenthesis mark is neither dispensable nor imprisoning.

Virginia Woolf surrounds identifying and clarifying phrases in parentheses, and it seems—as M.B. Parkes has noted—that these interruptions compensate for Woolf’s disorienting multiperspectival narrative. The majority of parentheses in To the Lighthouse do not mark temporal interludes or oblique parabasis as Proust’s do, but attribute speech or thought to a particular character: “(as Nancy put it)” (6) in the voice of the therefore marginalized narrator. Or even more interestingly, they insert simultaneous gesture or physical presence into the sentence: “Oh no—the most sincere of men, the truest (here he was), the best;” (46). This type of parenthetical insertion recalls the materiality of the writing subject and represents in an abstract manner the fictional bodies of the novel’s characters. Thus Chapter XIV of “The Window,” surrounded entirely in a set of parentheses, recounts the kiss between Paul and Minta that seals their engagement on the beach, the only instance of physical intimacy in the novel. Furthermore the direct address parentheses often contain carries privacy and intimacy. It intrudes upon the fictional

188 scene with an interjection of purported truth, like the aside to the audience in theater, and it reveals privileged information from an omniscient point of view: “But why show it so plainly, Mrs. Ramsay demanded (they looked at each other down the long table sending these questions and answers across, each knowing exactly what the other felt). Everybody could see, Mrs. Ramsay thought” (96). The point of view exposed here belongs to neither character alone, but reveals something of both as it marks itself off from Mrs. Ramsay’s thought. Each of the parenthesis marks designates an intimate space, in gestural terms, something like the curve of a hand directing a whisper. They unify the varied points of view though the voice of a knowing, detached narrator’s address to the reader. Woolf uses round brackets to integrate disparate voices and events into a whole, all the while allowing them disconnection from one another and their surroundings. This collective stream of consciousness is formally consistent with the dynamic of the characters, who are constantly approaching one another, repelling one another, attempting to merge with one another, but never removing the shell or wall that protects them from one another. In her commentary on Woolf’s writing and revision process, Susan Dick, editor of the To the Lighthouse holograph print, attributes a unifying, stitching, “oblique[ly] connect[ing]” function to Woolf’s parentheses; thus we might say these dividing walls are the only point of contact or connection the characters have to one another just as the structure of the novel is composed and united by walls and corridors. Woolf also achieves narrative coherence by suggestively juxtaposing unrelated observations, daydreams, dialogues, and outer events. This is not a method of forced integration, but of surprising intimacy. In fact its model of relationship anticipates the social groupings of individuals that she later narrates in The Waves.

189

Bracketing Out: Presenting War’s Excision12

It has been important to clearly establish what parenthesis marks do in To the

Lighthouse in order to demonstrate how square brackets function in a nearly opposite manner, particularly because the two marks’ functions have generally been confused. An article from as early as 1927 notes what must have been a common contemporary reading of them: that they serve to marginalize the content they surround. Frank M. Patterson writes in the English Record, “Each of the isolated statements [set off by brackets] deals with such earthly concerns as birth, marriage, death, booksellers, and fishing trips. This ordinary stuff of life had been the primary subject matter of novelists preceding Virginia

Woolf, but it was to play a small part in this highly symbolic and psychological novel”

(28). Patterson here describes them as performing a straightforwardly parenthetical function. On the other hand, modern scholars agree that Woolf places the important matter in the brackets, but they understand that move as an oblique reversal of center and margin. Tucked into “throwaway asides,” square brackets present death and historical trauma by what Marianne Dekoven calls “veiled representation” (“History” 149). More recently, Michele Barrett notes that brackets present their importance “obliquely,”

“cautiou[sly],” and with “deliberate buri[al].” Woolf’s use of them dramatizes her

“disposition to regard the marginal as central, by placing that which is crucial in the position of heavy parenthesis” (195). This scholarship still commits the same error as

Patterson by conflating the purpose of square brackets with curved parenthesis marks and

12 An earlier version of this section appears in Woolf Editing/Editing Woolf: Selected Papers from the Eighteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (Clemson UP, 2009) as “Editorial Deletion: Presenting Absence in To the Lighthouse.”

190 overlooking the distinction between the two according to their editorial functions and uses in the novel.

Theodor Adorno’s view of curved brackets as imprisoning applies much better to the more institutional and prison-like square brackets, whose sharp corners and straight lines straightforwardly box away and fail to exert outward pressure on the surrounding text. Whereas both square brackets and parenthesis marks participate in the fragmentation that characterizes Woolf’s prose, and both impose a vertical line in the horizontal textual line, square brackets always enclose sentence-length passages and never interrupt the sentence-level construction as the parenthesis marks often do. Instead, they set off entire paragraphs and in one case an entire chapter. Here the enclave that troubles Adorno when positioned around a clause fails to threaten the coherence of a sentence. It interrupts narrative, not syntax, and establishes autonomy for its enclosed language. The material enclosed in brackets is not dependent on the context surrounding it, though the context can certainly enrich its interpretation. Reading Woolf’s bracketing as ironic understatement, as many scholars have, is unnecessary if we look not only at the way it is used in the novel, but also at its institutional purpose, of which—as an editor and professional writer—Woolf was certainly aware. Style manuals contemporary to Woolf agree that the square bracket or square parenthesis is used for three main purposes: as providing explanation, as an editorial rather than an authorial interpolation, and as marking a correction or omission.13 That is to say, in contrast to parentheses, brackets

13 The British Eric Partridge calls the term bracket, common in the U.S. and Commonwealth, “something of a misnomer,” and prefers the term “square parentheses.” These “tell that writer that here is matter belonging not the writer of the letter, the memorandum, the newspaper article, the book, but to an outsider: matter that, in short, forms an interpolation” (68). They may also be used when the writer “interrupts himself

191 enclose the straightforwardly—in Adorno’s terms—“indispensable” insertion. In the case of translation, brackets often supply the original language as that which is already replaced and rendered readable. Editors bracket language they want removed. When the writer brackets the language he adds to a quote, he designates precisely what is not quoted. In contrast to the disruptively superfluous presence enacted in parentheses, brackets present and memorialize the part of the sentence that is not really there, that has been inserted by another hand and at a different time. This is crucial to understanding

Woolf’s square brackets, since the content of her novel is so engaged with empty space, loss, and temporal advancement.

In contrast to the countless examples of round parenthesis marks, there are only seven instances of the square use in To the Lighthouse—six of which are located in the middle book, “Time Passes.” In “Time Passes,” the following details about the characters from the first book are inserted in brackets: at the conclusion of the second chapter, we are told of the last light in the house to be turned off. It is the writer Mr. Carmichael’s.

At the conclusion of the third chapter, Mrs. Ramsay’s death is announced. Prue Ramsey’s marriage, her death in childbirth, Andrew’s death in battle, and the success of Mr.

Carmichael’s poetry during wartime are all individually bracketed in chapter six. Finally the two-sentence chapter six of the third postwar book, called “The Lighthouse,” is entirely in brackets. It narrates part of the boat trip to the lighthouse. None of these instances involve elaboration, illustration, or modification as parentheses do. Read

with matter too extraneous or remote, or too violently discrepant, for ordinary parentheses fittingly to contain.” George Summey points out that the marks were rarely even found on a typewriters and that they were almost “invariably editorial points, enclosing matter interpolated in an extract by way of substitution, explanation, or comment” (239).

192 collectively, I conclude, the symbol publicizes the parenthetical round bracket and extends the import of events beyond the domestic space as it changes the voice from the whisper of a parenthetical address to the metallic tone of a loudspeaker.

Rather than an emblem of authorial control, these insertions dramatize in a manner similar to Proust’s parentheses, the struggle of the author to control her material.

In Woolf’s case the presence of another hand is marked—the transformative editorial hand of history. The use of the bracket as an editorial, not authorial tool is noteworthy even as it is used by an author, because it distances the content within it from authorial intent and responsibility. The language takes on a different tone of voice—mechanical, public, and journalistic—resembling the loudspeaker of Between the Acts. Within these brackets, Woolf displaces authorship to the institutional authority of the state and military, whose hand has intruded upon and corrupted the domestic space of the novel. It is more than coincidental that the revision of the section “Time Passes,” from its (1926) version as a short story involved removing many of the references to the “ghostly presences,” which have generally been understood to represent the war, and inserted instead these bracketed passages. The war’s symbolic force in the house is literally excised in this editing process, and the isolated events, left unintegrated into the narratives they rupture, remain as memorials of the ghosts’ presence in an earlier version of the book.14 Even within the work’s compositional history, history becomes a force that inserts itself with the brackets and edits out the characters whose deaths they enclose.

The sixth chapter of the third book, “The Lighthouse,” is entirely bracketed. It interrupts the fifth and sixth chapters, in which Lily Briscoe discovers how intense her

14 See Haule.

193 grief for Mrs. Ramsay has remained: “For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing- room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty.) It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind” (178). Lily, as she struggles with representing on the canvas the space of Mrs.

Ramsay’s world without Mrs. Ramsay, battles also with a bodily grief that extends beyond words. This struggle recalls the passage from the Writer’s Diary discussed at the opening of this chapter, as well as Mr. Ramsay’s stumbling from the empty embrace after

Mrs. Ramsay’s death, which will be discussed shortly. At the close of the chapter Lily is still occupied with the empty space on the drawing room steps, the place where a living

Mrs. Ramsay would be sitting. She thinks to herself, “the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ she said aloud, ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ The tears ran down her face”

(180). This mirrors, of course, precisely the author’s dilemma in the novel: words do not summon absent bodies to life; words, like other representational media, are inadequate to loss, even if loss occasions this writing, as in the elegiac tradition. After the interruption of chapter six, which will be looked at in a moment, chapter seven opens with her continued cries: “’Mrs. Ramsay!’ Lily cried, ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ But nothing happened. The pain increased” (180). The pain she struggles to articulate comes through in the shape of the brackets that surround the interrupting chapter: “[Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was still alive) was thrown back into the sea.]” (180). The visual continuity between the square- shaped wound in the fish’s body and the pair of brackets suggests that the cut figuratively reenacts the work of the bracket on the novel. Macalister’s boy cuts into the body of the

194 fish, just as Woolf cuts into the narrative with brackets to represent in a manner that words cannot, the empty space left behind by the bodies of the dead. In this passage, brackets are interrupted with parenthesis marks, which enclose the literally vital information: despite the mutilation, the fish remains painfully alive and the text moves on. The living body is located in the parentheses, and its parts removed and mutilated with the square brackets. Here the events of the novel fall into conversation with their own formal vehicle. If writing borrows from other media in To the Lighthouse, it also improves upon them through its capacity to represent time and space in a way neither painting nor music could do alone.

In this way brackets perform the editorial excision style handbooks attribute to them when used to announce Mrs. Ramsay’s death: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]” The next sentence, following in the fourth chapter, returns to the vacation home: “So with the house empty and the doors locked [. . .]” (128-9). The graphic form of the brackets, which are involved in the architecture of narrative and textual construction, represents the emptiness housed by the walls of the vacation home as well as the faraway, outstretched and empty arms of Mr. Ramsay. The spatial articulation of loss invites the reader to take notice of the visual character of the brackets on the space of the page. James Krasner calls Mr. Ramsay’s stumbling feet and empty arms an embodied grief—a grief experienced in bodily and spatial terms, most clearly exhibited in amputees’ experience of phantom pain. There is no sentimental discussion of Mr. Ramsay’s mourning process; instead, his grief is displaced onto and articulated by means of this spatial description.

195

The box, like the fact of death, is composed of uncompromising lines, which sever away the life and body of Mrs. Ramsay. Unlike brackets, the curved shape of parenthesis marks has a bodily quality. Woolf interrupts dialogue and thought with their enclosed descriptions of the material world of the characters or the movements of their bodies.

How then can brackets be used to represent the kind of grief that Lily calls “one’s body feeling, not one’s mind” (178)? Rather than representing the body itself, the bracket presents its absence, which other bodies still feel. The bracket does not evoke for us the extended and empty arms of Mr. Ramsay. Rather it reminds us of the round parenthesis marks that would so suitably represent them were they embracing a living body. The sharp square angles of the square bracket do not represent bodily presence. Rather, by means of their institutional excising purpose, they represent its absence.

Like Mr. Ramsay’s encounter with the absence and space left empty by his wife’s death, the reader must navigate this strange marked-off space on the page. He or she stumbles over the narrative loss and spatial rupture of this passage. Thus, embodied grief might be enacted not only through the narration of the scene, but also through the materiality of the brackets on the printed page, which incite a textual phantom pain for the reader.15 Its physicality supplements verbal modes of signification as it communicates

“body, not mind feeling.” Like music, in which performance and expression are one and

15 In a published conversation with Jane Goldman, Randall Stevenson makes a related claim for this passage, by calling it “one of the most disturbing moments in twentieth- century fiction, for reasons aesthetic as well as emotional” (174). Readers, he writes, “are bound to register painfully the implications of those square brackets—the inconsequentiality of even the richest life. And what the brackets contain is disturbing in form as well as meaning.” This argument still hinges on the ironic effect of such marginalization.

196 the same, the bracket’s meaning is posited not “propositionally,” but “contiguously with its own movement” (Bernstein 2). This is to say, the bracket acts on its own simultaneously as both subject and verb without the agency of a distinct speaking or writing “I.” This subjectless action aligns the bracket with an anonymous editorial voice.

It also points to the method by which Woolf registers the historical event of World War

One in the narrative. War is not represented in a subject-verb relationship, rather it appears in the textual replication of its performed effect.

In this manner, brackets represent the lost bodies and lives of Prue and Andrew as they enclose the information of their deaths a few pages later: “[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they said, had promised so well.]” (132). On the facing page is: “[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them

Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]” (133).16 These brackets ominously present the absence left by the two children’s deaths by invoking the editorial use of brackets to mark words and the bodies they represent for removal from the page and narrative. The idea of marking for editorial deletion takes on a disturbing resonance when it is read in conjunction with the military use of the word. The term bracket also refers to “the (specified) distance between a pair of shots fired, one beyond the target and one short of it, in order to find the range for artillery; chiefly in the phrase to establish a bracket” (“bracket,” n.). The graphic enclosure of this information repeats Andrew’s bracketing by the enemy shooter. The grouping of Andrew and Prue’s deaths so close to one another links the private and intimate mourning of one spouse for another, or of a

16 In the definitive American imprint, suggestively, the two children’s deaths directly oppose one another in visual symmetry on facing pages.

197 parent for a child together with the public military death, with the almost anonymous death of Andrew Ramsey, who dies in a group of twenty or thirty. To bracket also means to classify or group. Thus the siblings’ deaths are bracketed interchangeably by the circumstances: during World War One motherhood was widely celebrated as the feminine form of military service.17 Thus, all of the bracketed passages are bracketed, in the term’s classifying sense, together. Mr. Ramsay’s loss, grouped with the passing of time that included the war, is bound to public losses experienced over that stretch of time.

All of the passages have been bracketed by the passing of time. Like the square window of the novel’s first section, brackets provide a threshold between public and private worlds, losses, conflicts, and actions. All are conflated and equated by the leveling work of time. In this way the bracket unifies and harmonizes disparate events scattered throughout the novel and seeks to take measure of the damage done.

In this sense it is necessary to forgive the British naming of brackets as

“parentheses,” as the term “parenthesis” is used figuratively to indicate “an interval, an interlude, a hiatus” (“parenthesis, n.”) or a temporal gap characterized by its difference from the adjacent materials. In such cases, it is positioned or inserted not only “aside” in terms of its content-matter, but of its temporal distinction. This certainly relates to the

Proustian digression, which enacts a chronological disruption, a flashback in memory or a flash-forward to the time of remembering in the narrative. In Susan Suleiman’s article on

Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, she finds that his narrator’s digressions achieve two purposes: they “distract the reader from the moment being narrated, thus acting not only as retarding elements in a sentence but also as a means of fragmenting the text—and

17 See Grayzel.

198 the reader’s attention; on the other hand they establish connections between widely separated sections of the novel, thus constituting ‘joints’ in the composition” (459). That is to say, they simultaneously break apart and bridge the reader’s temporal experience of the narrative and create continuity through the narrator’s digressive memories that loosely tie together disparate historical periods of his life. She writes further of the compositional joints, “The essential mechanism [of parentheses] is of rapprochement

[bringing closer]: between two objects in the metaphor, between two moments in involuntary memory, between two textual elements in the parenthesis. […] the parenthetical association links two textual fragments that remain, for all that, apart”

(Suleiman 468; my emphasis). The rapprochement is momentary, and lasts only as long as the digression. Nor is the bringing together of the rapprochement an action that can be carried through to completion. Despite the link, full unification can never be achieved, because the objects and memories remain unequivocally “different” and “separate.”

Instead of being brought together as one, she describes it as “la parenthèse, la transversale de la multiplicité textuelle” (468). Or, the parenthesis is the diagonal line traversing textual multiplicity. It does not eliminate multiplicity by unifying into narrative singularity. In her Writer’s Diary, Woolf reflected on whether she would conclude the novel with both Ramsay’s “climbing on to the rock” and with Lily and “Carmichael looking at the picture” (98). If the painting scene “intervenes between R. and the lighthouse,” she considered, “there’s too much chop and change, I think. Could I do it in a parenthesis? So that one had the sense of reading the two things at the same time?”

(98). Whether she meant this to mean a square or rounded parenthesis is impossible to say with certainty, but the pattern established suggests that square enclosures would be

199 used to achieve this temporal experiment. The bracketed events serve as joints in the narrative. They rupture the sequential basis of conventional narrative to form a plot structured by patterned repetitions of formal motifs. This temporal arrangement foreshadows Woolf’s later experiments, which work to adapt principles of musical composition into narrative form.

The bracket not only marks loss in a material way, but also performs a translation between public and private spaces and establishes a level of interchangeability among bracketed passages. Having this established, the first bracketed passage in the novel can now be read differently. It takes place early in “Time Passes,” in which Mr. Carmichael is the last person to fall asleep after the long and busy day in the vacation home.

Chronologically and thematically, it belongs equally to the world of the “The Window.”

The scene leading into the brackets depicts vague united forces of time, which, having just entered the structure, are disrupted and forced to a halt. Then the entranceway to another passage of the house is defensively closed off: “At length, desisting, all ceased together, gathered together, all sighed together; all together gave off an aimless gust of lamentation to which some door in the kitchen replied; swung wide; admitted nothing; and slammed to.” With this the chapter closes with the bracketed sentences: “[Here Mr.

Carmichael, who was reading Virgil, blew out his candle. It was midnight.]” (127). At the stroke of midnight, the day concludes, together with the world of “The Window,” a world prior to the loss, disruption, and war to follow in the next chapter. The kitchen door shuts itself, which is followed by the closed passage of the bracket, in which the lights are likewise extinguished. Mr. Carmichael’s book is presumably closed, and the space enclosed in darkness. The visual aspect of the bracket echoes and repeats the content of

200 the passage it frames. As the passage of the novel is formally closed off, the various objects in the house are also shut. Because it is grouped together with the other bracketed passages in the novel, this closing off must be recognized in more momentous, historical terms. The private, individual action becomes emblematic of an historical and narrative turning point. In view of the novel’s structure, it is the end of the prewar era, the end of life for several characters, and a suspension of life in the house as it is shut down and uninhabited for the following ten years in the next chapter, until the matronly Mrs. Bast returns to mend and prepare for the remaining characters’ returns.

The bracketing, attaching, detaching, and silencing work of punctuation marks represents the alienating loss of modernity in historical and aesthetic terms without adopting the forms of ideological unity. Inconspicuously positioned in this short, but pivotal passage is the detail that Mr. Carmichael is reading Virgil. John Lennard has argued, eccentrically, that we ought to consider the book-form itself as punctuation. If punctuation could be understood by its fundamental “interrupting” function, he holds, we might see the book-object as “a complete object punctuating space” (“Mark” 5-6). Mr.

Carmichael’s book, whose physical closing is replicated in the closing doors of the hallway and the closing brackets, becomes bracketed with his own book of war poetry,

Woolf’s novel, and the work of punctuation in it. The presence of Virgil in this momentous shift in the narrative extends the significance of brackets from their role as threshold between the public and private in the novel’s content to that between the historical and the aesthetic in its literary form. Virgil’s Aeneid is one of the founding stories of western civilization and a standard alluded to in most stories of battle. Its epic form is the literary model, as Georg Lukács famously argues in Theory of the Novel, of a

201 world in which the protagonist is fully integrated into the culture and environment of his natural home. The displacement from this prelapsarian form produces the state of homelessness that supposedly defines the modern novel. The failed embrace of Mr.

Ramsay—dramatized and materialized in the square bracket—reenacts the initial alienation of Aeneas’ failed or empty embraces for the ghost of his wife Creusa in the

Second Book of The Aeneid.18 The encounter takes place in his return to the ruined Troy in search for her. She inspires him to take the sea voyage to his destined home, to rebuild, remarry, and provide for their son’s rich future there. With this promised fate, he embarks on his exile. In To the Lighthouse, no founding of New Troy or Rome will follow the destruction of “Time Passes.” Nonetheless, the novel’s relationship to epic and to epic depictions of battle and loss is posited in its punctuation marks. Though the alienation of and from modernity persists, the Woolf’s “rhythmic” prose style integrates public and private worlds of modernity through punctuation, and it provides a critique of both the formal principles and the materials of the novel form. Her response to and incorporation of past tradition is performed in her choice of not naming the loss of modernity, but marking the loss and letting it unfold on its own.

18 Aeneas repeats the attempted embrace when visiting his father in the Underworld in Book Six, but the embrace with Creusa after the fall of Troy is more relevant to Woolf’s novel.

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