AGAINST the EVENT This Page Intentionally Left Blank Against the Event

AGAINST THE EVENT This page intentionally left blank Against the Event

Th e Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative

MICHAEL SAYEAU

1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Michael Sayeau 2013 Th e moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–968125–9 As printed and bound CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. For Julia and Clara, that their days be as eventful or uneventful as they desire This page intentionally left blank Contents

1. Introduction: In the Anteroom of the Event 1 What is the Everyday? 6 What is an Event? 14 Literature and the Event 28 Anti-Evental Modernism 35 Th e Emergence of Modernist Narrative 3 9 2 . “ Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor”: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the Everyday, and Style 49 “As though in the grip of a ghastly terror” 51 A Book about Nothing, an Exercise in Style 55 Th e Nouveau and the Genre 62 Emma’s Everyday 66 Skipping: An Aesthetics of Uneventful Existence 80 Homais’s Cross of Honor: Flaubert and History 9 2 3 . Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress: H. G. Wells’s Th e Time Machine and the fi n de siècle Everyday 109 Th e Catastrophic Status Quo: Empire, Economics, and Sex at the End of the Nineteenth Century 110 A Universal Tendency to Dissipation: Overproduction and Heat Death 115 “After the Battle Comes the Quiet”: Wells’s Ambivalent Modernity 122 “My Story Slips away from Me”: Th e Narrative Impulse versus Social Stasis 133 Everyday Apocalypse and the Morlocks ex Machina 137 4. “His Occupation Would Be Gone”: Unemployment and Time in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 147 Th e Invention of Unemployment: Conrad’s Careers 153 Marlow’s Discourse and the Temporality of Work 159 Th e “Helpers”: Th e Belgian Congo, Forced Labor, and the Posthuman 173 Conrad’s Unemployment, the Narrative Event, and Modernism 181 viii Contents

5. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies: Th e Atomic Form of Fiction 189 Th e Manuscript Epiphanies of 1900–1903 191 Dubliners: Th e Critique of Pure Epiphany 205 Portrait and the Temporality of Impersonality 217 Back to the Strand: “Nausicaa” 230 Modernism, the Everyday, and Auerbach’s “Very Simple Solution” 245

Bibliography 249 Index 261 1 Introduction: In the Anteroom of the Event

A brief exchange toward the end of the 2002 fi lm Adaptation , directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman, encapsulates at once comi- cally and vividly one of the central contradictions that haunt and animate modern narrative writing. In the fi lm, “Charlie Kaufman” (the character played by Nicholas Cage, and a stand-in for the screenwriter) is suff ering from what can only be called a massive case of writer’s block as he attempts to convert a non-fi ction work (Susan Orleans’s 1998 Th e Orchid Th ief ) into a compelling fi lm script. In the scene below, Charlie has sunk low enough to attend a screenwriting seminar led by Robert McKee, the author of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwrit- ing, a distillation of its author’s pragmatically hard-nosed approach to fi lmmaking.1 We cut into and out of the conference, listening with Char- lie as McKee dispenses such nuggets of wisdom as “So . . . what is the substance of writing? First, last, and always the imperative is to tell a story” and “You cannot have a protagonist without desire, it doesn’t make any sense. Any fucking sense!” Finally, at the Q&A session that closes the seminar, Kaufman works up the courage to ask his question: kaufman Sir, what if a writer is attempting to create a story where nothing much happens, where people don’t change, they don’t have any epiphanies. Th ey struggle and are frustrated and nothing is resolved. More a refl ection of the real world— mckee Th e real world? kaufman Yes, sir. mckee Th e real fucking world? First of all, if you write a screenplay without confl ict or crisis, you’ll bore your audience to tears. Secondly: Noth- ing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day! Th ere’s genocide, war, corruption! Every

1 It bears mentioning that the book and its author are both real, though McKee is played by the actor Brian Cox in the scene. McKee’s book Story is often referred to as the “bible of screenwriting,” and can be found regularly on the syllabuses of creative writing courses. 2 Against the Event

fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifi ces his life to save somebody else! Every fucking day someone somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People fi nd love! People lose it, for Christ’s sake! A child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! Someone goes hungry! Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman! If you can’t fi nd that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life! And why the fuck are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don’t have any use for it! I don’t have any bloody use for it! kaufman Okay, thanks.2 Since we are simultaneously watching a fi lm about Kaufman’s struggle to write the adaptation and the adaptation itself, once the struggling screenwriter has metabolized McKee’s advice, the fi lm turns on itself, abandons its navel-gazing preoccupation with Kaufman’s neuroticism and block- age, and plunges toward a baroque pastiche of a “Hollywood ending” involving an Internet porn site, attempted murder, and a sort of halluci- nogenic aphrodisiac somehow distilled from the essence of the ghost orchid. (McKee again: “Tell you a secret. Th e last act makes the fi lm. You can have an uninvolving, tedious movie, but wow them at the end and you’ve got a hit. Find an ending.”) Adaptation , and in particular the scene above and its aftermath, is an absurdly performative evocation of the vicissitudes of modern writing as it negotiates with the everyday and the event. Th e negotiation is informed by a spectrum of realist mandates—mandates that arrive variously from the literary marketplace, editorial establishments, the strictures of genre, the ethos of verisimilitude, and artistic aspiration. In the dialogue excerpted above, we cannot help but have the feeling that both Kaufman and McKee have a point. On the one hand, a movie in which nothing much happens, in which people do not have epiphanies, does indeed seem to be more “a refl ection of the real world” than the usual sort of Hollywood production. But McKee is right too—there are more than enough examples of genocide and homicide, romantic devastation and natural disasters, to supply as many fi lms as could ever be made. Adaptation plays out this bind for comic eff ect. But, in truth, the dilemma that it takes up in this scene echoes one of the formative contradictions of not only modern narrative, but modern experience and thought as well. We have long been taken by a pervasive and contradictory sense that our times are somehow characterized by incessant change and dramatic developments and a listless uneventfulness at one and the

2 Spike Jones, director, Adaptation , DVD (Culver City, CA: Columbia Tri-Star Home Video, 2003) . Introduction 3 same time. On the one hand, both the history of the modern era and the personal lives lived within it seem to be subject to an ever-increasing tempo of transformation. On the other, and for a variety of persistent reasons, we as individuals and our culture as a whole have been haunted by a specter of terminal stasis that manifests itself along a scale that runs from personal boredom to one of the many registrations of the “end of history.” Th e coursing acceleration of life seems to provoke, somehow, a corollary sense that the world’s rate of real change has dropped to zero. It is no wonder then that the period’s eff orts to understand itself, as materialized in its intellectual productions, have continually taken up the issue. A central thread of European philosophy and theory has long been preoccupied with the relationship between the event—both its nature and its possibility in the fi rst place—and the ground out of which it arises. Most recently, the term has found a central place in the works of Alain Badiou, and plays a very important part in the works of many of his predecessors and contemporaries, including most prominently Jacques Derr- ida and Gilles Deleuze. Th e occurrence that takes us by surprise, that could not have been foreseen, that breaks with the status quo—the event is that which features as a fundamental change in a situation or system in which change seems at fi rst diffi cult if not impossible to imagine. Often, of course, the sort of “event” under consideration in the works of such thinkers is specifi cally political. It is the revolutionary moment that breaks, sometimes messianically, the nation or the world away from the continuation of past organizations of power that is of direct or at least implicit interest in these works. But, on the other hand, such discussions of the event are rarely restrictively political, as they almost always depend upon either foundational ontological work and/or analogies to other domains of human experience. In their preoccupation with the event, these theorists in turn show themselves to be the heirs of a long tradition of modern philosophical thought. Even leaving aside the many descriptions of time and change from the classical period, the early development of modern philosophy revolved in great part around such issues. For instance, a signifi cant section of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is given over to the analysis of the relationship between events, time, and our intuition of causality—that is to say, the relationship between the way that events happen and the ways that we perceive them.3 Hegel’s philosophy is marked by a persistent engagement with the relationship between the eternal and the evental (generally, in his terms, “contingency” (zufällig )) as well, of course, as the

3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (Buff alo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990) . 4 Against the Event predicted cessation of “events” as such with the coming of the so-called end of history.4 Further, some of Nietzsche’s most important work is caught up in the consideration of a central, if ambiguous, event: the so- called death of God.5 Th e more closely we examine the modern philosophical tradition, the more examples do we fi nd of some conception of the new and its relationship to the ground from which it emerges. And, in particular, the evental emergence of the French Revolution and other revolutions that came in its wake hovers over the European philosophical tradition of modernity, whether or not explicitly political or historical. I will have more to say about the history of philosophical and theoretical engagement with the event (and eventlessness) below. What is most important for now is simply to appreciate the importance of the consideration of these issues—in whatever guise or framed in whatever terms— to the modern history of philosophy. It follows that a great deal of scholarly and theoretical attention has been given in recent years to philosophy’s engagement with the event—its role, for instance, in the formulation of political philosophies. But it is worth noting that, while issues of philosophical import are often translated into attention to literary texts, relatively little attention has been given to the way that literary texts engage with, perform, or describe events. Against the Event attempts to redress this situation, but in doing so fi nds that the perspective that we gain by examining these issues in light of their literary instantiations brings into focus a diff erent sense of eventfulness and its absence than that to which we are generally accustomed. It is my argument that a certain set of literary works—namely, a few important prose fi ctions that form part of the pre- or early history of the modernist novel—take a very diff erent vantage point on the notion of eventfulness than we are used to fi nding in philosophical works. Th e overarching thematic concerns of narrative fi ction and continental philosophy often enough overlap. But, because of the diff erent generic presuppositions at play, the implicit purposes the two genres are meant to serve, as

4 Andrew Benjamin, Th e Plural Event: Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger (London: Routledge, 1993), provides an incisive if episodic description of modern philosophy’s engagement with the event—in particular, as in the cited section, of Hegel’s engagement with it. 5 As David Owen writes in his essay “Nietzsche’s Event: Genealogy and the Death of God” (Th eory and Event , 6/3 (2003), 1 ), engagement with Nietzsche’s depiction of the “death of God” allows us to see that “the distinction that Nietzsche draws helps to understand why doing justice to the event (in this case, the death of God) is philosophically signifi cant, namely, that it allows the event to arrive, where this means that it allows us to make sense of the event and of ourselves as subject to its occurrence. Second, attending to the case of Nietzsche enables us to see the connection between doing justice to the event and genealogy by clarifying the sense in which genealogy is one mode of this philosophical activity.” Introduction 5 well as the structural demands that ensue from both, they tend to arrive at diff erent solutions (or at least suggestions or intimations of solutions) to the question of the relationship between the event and the everyday. In short, for a variety of disparate but related reasons, the authors that I focus on in Against the Event privileged the everyday over the event— tended to see the world as one that runs on a rhythm defi ned by banal continuity rather than accentuated series of revolutionary shocks. In doing so, their works are emblematic of broader literary developments across the period and fi eld that we describe today as “modernism.” Th ese works manifest a resistance to what we might call the “metaphysics of the event”—a resistance grounded in a distinctly overdetermined distrust of novelty itself. It is not simply a matter of chance or even unanchored cultural symptomaticity that this distrust emerged. Just as the recent philosophical preoccupations that I began to describe above, and will deal with in more depth below, arise as a particular modern turn on old (even the oldest) philosophical questions, the modernist everyday is a particularly literary category—one that rises out of and in response to long- standing issues of narrative thematics and form. For the novel, from its very start, has been structured by a rhythm that moves between the continuities of ordinary life and their disruption by or eruption into signifi - cant occurrences, crises, events. As the novel developed in England (and elsewhere) out of prior forms such as the romance and the memoir, it came to fi nd a default shape defi ned by such temporal patterns.6 As I will argue, the evolution of modernist narrative forms and themes is in large part a matter of coming to new terms with these old mandates. In the end, my analysis of these issues in the works that I have selected lead on to two major fi ndings. First, given its generic predispositions, the modern novel can shed distinctive light on the various theories of eventfulness and its absence. As I will discuss below, many modern philosophical speculations about time carry within them an implicit and under-examined narrativization, what might almost be called a romantic or novelistic shape that structures their fi ndings. As the modern novel demonstrates a tendency to bring the romantic demands of the form to the fore in order to subvert or at least defamiliarize them, rethinking the everyday and the event according to the novel can aid us in becoming more aware of the storylines that underwrite our positions on these issues.

6 Ian Watt’s Th e Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957) is of course a foundational discussion of the emergence of the novel as a form during the early eighteenth century. Watt’s work has been updated and augmented in many recent works, but perhaps most notably (and succinctly) in Catherine Gallagher’s essay “Th e Rise of Fictionality” and Franco Moretti’s “Serious Century” in Moretti’s edited collection Th e Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) . 6 Against the Event And, in particular, the temporalities deployed in these “everyday” works form in each case a specifi c but related tension with the historical scenarios and developments of the time in which they were written. Second, but just as important, is the fact that the import of what we fi nd when we examine the deployment of the everyday and the event in proto-modernist and modernist fi ction goes beyond a merely critical register. As I will show, the development of certain tendencies in the fi ction of the period suggests a transvaluation of the everyday and the event themselves, or even an attempt to think and write beyond the evental organization of time. In particular, again given the presuppositions of the form, these narratives are particularly useful in working through the relations between (or, often, our entanglement of) diff erent registers of time, the personal and the historical, the romantic and the political. Once these relations have been understood, I believe that all of these fi ndings even suggest, if very complexly, a nascent, atmospherically implicit politics of the everyday lurking between the lines in modernist narrative, one that is as radical as it is diffi cult to describe. First, however, I will describe what the terms “everyday” and “event” have meant for philosophers, theorists, and literary critics, in order to clear some space for my own, modifi ed defi nitions of the terms as they apply to modernist literature.

WHAT IS THE EVERYDAY?

It takes a special set of historical conditions for a concept like the everyday to emerge in the fi rst place. Without an alternative frame of reference, a notion of a more eventful mode of time, the everyday is simply cotermin- ous with life itself—and as such needs no name. Th e everyday or parallel concepts generally come to light during periods of heightened intensity or complexity. Somewhat paradoxically, busy periods elicit a greater awareness of ordinariness, repetition, banality, and the like. It follows that the everyday is an especially though not exclusively modern concept, one bound up with the pace of news events, but also the relative speed and segmentation of lived experience. As counter-intuitive as it may at fi rst seem, then, it is no wonder that we have seen a blossoming of an academic subfi eld that might be called everyday studies during the tumultuous decades at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-fi rst. While the intensifi cation of commercialism and the banalizing eff ects of ever-increasing consumption, as well as the announced arrival of the “end of history” and along with it ideological competition, certainly had something to do with it, the publication of several key theoretical texts was a direct spur to the arrival Introduction 7 of the everyday as a preoccupying topic in the humanities. Th e 1984 English translation of the fi rst volume of Michel de Certeau’s Th e Practice of Everyday Life and its enthusiastic reception in Anglo-American academia seem to have set a process in motion that subsequently led to the gradual republication of Henri Lefebvre’s works in English as well as the works of related theorists.7 Th e re-emergence of the Frankfurt School, with their persistent attention to the everyday, as the dominant theoretical lens- makers for those invested in the study of modernity played an important role as well. Recent years have seen an outpouring of works invested in and informed by this body of theoretical work. From Michael E. Gardiner’s Critiques of Everyday Life, Ben Highmore’s Everyday Life and Cultural Th eory: An Introduction , to Michael Sheringham’s Everyday Life: Th eories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present , these accomplished studies examine philosophical and literary engagements with the everyday during the modern period. But, if literature departments have been the place where theoretical work on the everyday found its most enthusiastic welcome, it is only within the last few years that direct and sustained engagement with the relationship between the quotidian and literature itself has begun to appear in full-bodied form—for instance, in Bryony Randall’s Modern- ism, Daily Time, and Everyday Life of 2007 and Liesl Olson’s Modernism and the Ordinary of 2009. 8 One of the greatest diffi culties about writing about the everyday is coming up with a coherent defi nition of the concept, one that accurately captures its distinctiveness as a lens of analysis. Adding literature into the mix, so that the question is not simply what the everyday is, but rather how literature deals with it, makes the critic’s job easier, as the object of study is given a materiality that it otherwise lacks. But, even so, in these recent studies of the everyday and literature, this temporality has primarily been approached as a philosophical or sociological phenomenon that is vividly emblematized in literary works, rather than as primarily an issue of form, though one that bridges the gap between the literary and the social. I will have more to say about these recent works on the everyday and literature later in this chapter. But for now it is worth noting the ways that these explorations of the everyday are the inheritors of a long philosophical and sociological tradition of engagement with the topic.

7 Michel de Certeau, Th e Practice of Everyday Life, i, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984) . 8 Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) , and Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) . 8 Against the Event Augustine begins the section of Th e Confessions focused on time with something of a stumble: “What then is time? Provided no one asks me, I know. If I wanted to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.”9 I t i s tempting, in dealing with the everyday, to follow Augustine’s example and begin with an expression of the ineff ability of the concept. We know the everyday when we see it, even if it is diffi cult to say what we are seeing or even to know exactly when we are seeing it. It is also tempting to unleash a stream of synonyms for it, to describe all the things and concepts that it is like rather than attempt to name the thing itself. Th e ordinary, the quotidian, the same, empty time, boredom, banality, and stasis, would just be the start of the list. But while each of these terms brings us a step closer to understanding what we mean by the word, the everyday is not, in my usage, simply a synonym for “ordinary life,” nor any of these other terms, even if it borders on all of them. Th ere is an obvious problem with any positive defi nition of the everyday. Th e ordinariness of things is very much a matter of the eye of the observer. My routine days, each one seemingly indiscernible from the next, of composing this book on my computer in my offi ce at the university might well seem utterly exotic and eventful to someone accustomed to living and working diff erently, just as the ordinary lives and activities of many other people would seem exotic and unordinary to me. Th e ordinariness of life is never just “ordinary,” but it always appears in relation to signifi cant structures of power, ideological frames, and politics both local and global. Th ink, for instance, of those staples of English consumption during the twentieth century—tea, tobacco, sugar—and the vast and bloody imperial history that brought these items to the table. To speak of “ordinary life,” in other words, is almost always to speak either tautologi- cally or deceptively. Th e philosophical examination of the everyday has from the fi rst been marked by its entanglement in this epistemological problem. Th e fi rst volume of Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, which appeared in 1947 and heralded the breaking-away of the consideration of the everyday from its genealogical predecessors in the Hegelian and Marxist philosophical traditions, registers this instability in a subtle way.10 While Lefebvre uses the word quotidien confi dently throughout the book, the concept is at the same time haunted from the start by basic questions about its knowability and even its very existence. In the foreword to the

9 Augustine, Confessions , trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 230 . 10 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life , i, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991) . Introduction 9 second edition, Lefebvre describes “a certain obscurity in the very concept of everyday life ” and asks: “Where is it to be found? In work or in leisure? In family life and in moments ‘lived’ outside of culture?”11 Under the infl uence of the alienating eff ects of industrial capitalism, it turns out that the everyday is broken away from itself, transformed into a complex combination of mystifi ed reality and utopian projection. As Lefebvre says elsewhere in the volume, everyday activities “contain within themselves their own spontaneous critique of the everyday. Th ey are that critique in so far as they are other than everyday life, and yet they are in everyday life , they are alienation. Th ey can thus hold a real content, correspond to a real need, yet still retain an illusory form and a deceptive appearance.”12 I n Everyday Life in the Modern World, published over two decades later in 1968, this internal fi ssuring has been renamed but still bears the same structural ambiguity: the everyday “is the residuum (of all the possible specifi c and specialized activities outside social experience) and the product of society in general; it is the point of delicate balance and that where the imbalance threatens.”13 Lefebvre’s descriptions of the everyday speak to the fact that it is a concept that is coherent only when rendered in relation to what is not everyday—that is to say, as a moment in a process, a temporal complex, from which it cannot be severed without loss of meaning. It is a present that can be known only through reference to what has come before it and what might come after, to the past that it repeats and the future rupture that is always yet to come. Th e everyday is when it is just like it was yesterday. Th e everyday is when something might happen tomorrow or even today,

11 Lefebvre, Critique , i. 38. 12 Lefebvre, Critique , i. 40. 13 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovich (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 32. A more contemporary example, from Alice Kaplan and Kristen Ross’s introduction to their infl uential 1987 issue of Yale French Studies (73 (Eve- ryday Life; 1987), 3) , devoted to the everyday, demonstrates the consistency of this issue over the course of the development of the fi eld. “Quotidie : how many times a day? How many days? Th e quotidian is on the one hand the realm of routine, repetition, reiteration: the space/time where constraints and boredom are produced. Far from being an escape from this realm, segmented leisure time such as the weekend is rather a fi nal cog permitting the smooth functioning of the routine. Even at its most degraded, however, the everyday harbors the possibility of its own transformation; it gives rise, in other words, to desires which cannot be satisfi ed within a weekly cycle of production/consumption. Th e Political, like the purloined letter, is hidden in the everyday, exactly where it is most obvious: in the contradictions of lived experience, in the most banal and repetitive gestures of everyday life—the commute, the errand, the appointment. It is in the midst of the utterly ordinary, in the space where the dominant relations of production are tirelessly and relentlessly reproduced, that we must look for utopian and political aspirations to crystallize.” Clearly infl uenced by Lefebvre, their everyday here is at once the routine and an intimation of escape from routine, as it harbors “the possibility of its own transformation.” It is at the same moment the oppressively ordinary and a signal of possible transcendence. 10 Against the Event but has not happened yet. Th e everyday, in this sense, is a name for a mode of temporal experience marked by stasis, emptiness, and meaninglessness that occurs only in the shadow of the event—whether past, future, or never to arrive. It is a “structure of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams’s term, that arrives as a side eff ect alongside the more familiar temporal eff ects of modernity: progress, acceleration, and teleological directedness.14 While the everyday is not, in its essence, exclusively modern, the nature of modern experience and the structures of modern life provide a particularly welcoming environment for it to sprout and spread. In Th e Society of the Spectacle , Guy Debord defi nes the “spectacular time” of modernity as a product of the co-presence of two contradictory temporalities. In ancient societies the consumption of cyclical time was consistent with the actual labor of those societies. By contrast, the consumption of pseudo-cyclical time in developed economies is at odds with the abstract irreversible time implicit in their system of production. Cyclical time was the time of a motionless illusion authentically experienced; spectacular time is the time of a real transformation experienced as illusion.15 Th e everyday, like Debord’s temporality of the spectacle, is defi ned by the intermixture and eddying of seemingly incompatible forms of time: that which Benjamin labels “homogeneous, empty time” in his theses “On the Philosophy of History,” the time of progress whose endpoint is infi nitely deferred, and the striated heterogeneous time punctuated by events, turning points, and meaning.16 Th is pattern repeats itself across the social and experiential spectrum: from the anxiety perversely generated by affl uent boredom to the failure of revolutionary impulses the “day after,” and from worries about automation’s threat of universal unemployment (a situation that hovers nervously between utopia and dystopia), to the perpetual crisis of imperial and commercial expansion, whose every step forward is a step toward a destabilizing crisis of fulfi llment. Beyond defi ning what the everyday is, there is also the question of what it means —what its appearance tells us about the world from which it emerges. It is a rogue temporality, a side eff ect of progress so acute, persistent, and pervasive that it becomes unclear in the end which, progress or the everyday, is in fact the side eff ect and which the primary cause. It oscillates between the utopian and dystopian registers, standing

14 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35 . 15 Guy Debord, Th e Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 113 . 16 Walter Benjamin, “On the Philosophy of History,” in Selected Writings, iv, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 395 . Introduction 11 at once as a manifestation of the promise of modernity—the calm tran- quillity of a life without struggle and catastrophic change—and the fulfi llment of the most pessimistic prophesies about it. Distinct instances that seem to fall under the rubric of the everyday, whether drawn from individual experience or the trajectory of culture at large, hover ambiguously between the two registers. Th e mass practice (anti-practice?) of night after night spent bored and regretfully uncertain in front of a tel- evision set—is this the epitome of the suff usion of the everyday into private life, a harbinger of the cessation of personal events in toto , or is it rather a world-historical event in disguise, an opening masked as slov- enly closure? Is the repeated prediction or declaration of the “end of history” an announcement of the everyday’s victory over history itself, or is it rather, paradoxically, the undoing of the everyday, an announcement of the reopening of historical progression on very diff erent terms from those to which we are accustomed? Th e everyday is a phrase that enables us to account for modernity in ways true to the strange rhythms and paradoxical logic of the period itself. For, as much of the most incisive work on the topic suggests, modernity can be defi ned just as much by what failed to happen and what could no longer happen as by the actual occurrences and events that are normally seen to constitute it as a historical period.17 Th e danger of such a complex defi nition is that it can come to seem like no defi nition at all. Fortunately, though, there is another, more concrete way to examine the everyday that reduces the abstractness of the concept without eliding its complexity. As I suggested above, while a number of recent studies have examined the thematic presentation of the everyday in literary works, particularly those of the modern period, very little has been written about the literariness of the everyday as a concept. It is not simply the case that literature is a vessel that bears the everyday; rather, the everyday can best be understood as at base a literary phenomenon, a type of temporal experience entangled from the start in the application of narrative models to lived time. It follows then that narrative works that engage with the everyday provide particularly useful access to its dynamics.

17 A useful instance of this genre of discussion can be found in T. J. Clark’s response to Perry Anderson’s Th e Origins of Postmodernity and Jameson’s Th e Cultural Turn —in particular the distinction that they forge between modernism and postmodernism—in his “Ori- gins of the Present Crisis,” New Left Review, 2 (March–April 2000), 96. At issue in all three works is the question of whether the advent of “postmodernism” marks the extinguishing of modernist openness, or, as Clark persuasively argues, modernism was from the fi rst marked by a “transcendence doomed to collapse.” 12 Against the Event Still, the problem with using the concept of the everyday as a lens onto literature is that, once you name it, cite an example of it, in a sense it disappears—“it” is no longer everyday, but a signifi cant occurrence, a meaningful example, an event. In a tormenting inversion of the idée reçue about pornography—that you know it when you see it—we no longer know the everyday once we have seen it, especially once we have said that we have seen it. In his essay “Everyday Speech,” Maurice Blanchot captures the double bind implicit in this situation. On the one hand, what he describes as the everyday is “what is most diffi cult to discover,” as, in the course of the very act of discovering it, noticing it, and representing it, it tends to disappear.18 Th e everyday allows no hold. It escapes [ . . . ] In this consists its strangeness—the familiar showing itself (but already dispersing) in the guise of the astonishing. It is the unperceived, fi rst in the sense that we have always looked past it; nor can we introduce it into a whole or “review” it, that is to say, enclose it within a panoramic vision; for, by another trait, the everyday is what we never see for a fi rst time but can only see again, having always already seen it by an illusion that is constitutive of the everyday.19 Because the everyday “belongs to insignifi cance” according to Blan- chot—it is the name we give to what remains unmarked, undiff erentiated, ordinary beyond noticing—to notice it is to transform it into something else, something not quite everyday. On the other hand, despite the ontological diffi culties that come of dealing with it, Blanchot identifi es the everyday as something that we cannot quite do without: “it is a category, a utopia and an Idea, without which one would not know how to get at either the hidden present or the discoverable future [ . . . ] Man [ . . . ] is at once engulfed within and deprived of the everyday.”20 However, and for whatever reason, we aspire to this utopia of eventlessness, the mandate of this literary logic is doubly unbreakable. Not only is the author obligated by the mandates of genre and readerly expectation to make something happen , but, even if she or he decided, out of purposefulness, perversity, or ineptitude, to attempt not to fulfi ll this obligation, the work would proceed to fulfi ll it anyway. Simply by virtue of being encased within the frame of the literary work, what might have otherwise been uneventful is marked as signifi cant, worthy of attention. In a sense, it is literally, even structurally, impossible for something not to happen in a work. Even the most extreme experiments in this line,

18 Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” in Th e Infi nite Conversation , trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 238–9 . 19 Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 242. 20 Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 239. Introduction 13 such as those of Alain Robbe-Grillet and the other authors of the so-called nouveau roman , cannot help but retain an evental structure, even if one of an unconventional stripe.21 Literature cannot settle comfortably into the everyday for the structural reasons that Blanchot evokes as well as for the more pedestrian issues of readership and reception. Yet we nonetheless retain a strong sense that it is there—and that the word everyday is the right one to describe, to borrow Blanchot’s words, “a category, a utopia and an Idea” that is a signifi - cant element in both the construction of texts and the historical development, especially lately, of literature as a whole. Th e trick is, then, how to get at the everyday as it appears, if only ever transiently or aspira- tionally. In this book, rather than settling for a reifi ed notion of everydayness as a set of thematic contents or as atmospheric temporality, I will examine it through the lens of a specifi c and traceable formal dynamic, albeit one that manifests itself in various aspects of texts from the individual sentence to the overall plot architecture of a work. In short, I will examine the everyday through an analysis of that which opposes or negates it: the event. What constitutes an event in a literary text changes over the years and centuries, and diff ers from genre to genre. From Aristotle’s discussion of peripeteia and anagnorisis in his Poetics forward, the literary event is an action or revelation that serves as a turning point that breaks against the continuity of the text, even if at the same time it fulfi lls that continuity. It is a moment of change and development that opens an alternative (something else could have happened but instead, this ) and/or signals the arrival of new meaning. Th e everyday, on the other hand, is the temporal ground where the event occurs and which it breaks. It was a day like any other but then . . . It is, as far as literary structure goes, the time and material that fi lls the space between events. But it is also the dialectical partner of the event, which would have no backdrop against which to emerge if not for it. As I will explain below, when literary works tamper with the conventional rhythms of narrative—that is, when they somehow put out of order the customary pace of eventfulness—the everyday moves to the foreground and is registered as such. It was a day like

21 In his 1957 essay “On Several Obsolete Notions” (in For a New Novel: Essays on Fic- tion (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 33), Robbe-Grillet claims that the “disintegration of plot” began with Flaubert and continued through modernism. “Th e demands [ . . . ] are doubtless less constraining for Proust than for Flaubert, for Faulkner than for Proust, for Beckett than for Faulkner.” Still, though, he admits that “it is wrong to claim that nothing happens any longer in modern novels. Just as we must not assume man’s absence on the pretext that the traditional character has disappeared, we must not identify the search for new narrative structures with an attempt to suppress any event, any passion, any adventure.” 14 Against the Event any other. Full stop. Th e everyday is always there, but only begins to matter—and matter disruptively—when its rhythmical partner, the event, fails to arrive on time or at all.

WHAT IS AN EVENT?

As I will show, while it is not entirely without precedent to join the terms “everyday” and “the event” as the axial terms of a study, it is not as common as one might anticipate to fi nd the two words together. In part, this has to do with the diff erent frames of reference and discipline in which these terms fi nd their place. While the everyday is generally a term of sociological art, a word used by those—often Marxist to one degree or another—who would investigate the subjective experience or structural temporalities of modern capitalist society, the event is a term generally deployed by ontologically or existentially minded philosophers, those who investigate the nature of being and the place of novelty within or in some cases outside it. Philosophers of the event rarely or only passingly reference the everyday or its synonyms, whereas investigators of the everyday have tended with a few exceptions to sidestep the question of what it is that breaks the continuous rhythms of the quotidian. Th at said, the philosopher that we can most easily place at the start of this twentieth-century tradition, Martin Heidegger, is one who engaged seriously with both terms, or at least terms that can be translated into an approximation of them. In Being and Time , Heidegger’s monumental exploration of the “meaning of Being,” everydayness (Alltäglichkeit ) is “the kind of being in which Da-sein holds itself initially and for the most part.” 22 It is a mode of experience characterized by entanglement in the mandates of habit and a temporal blurring between futurity and the past. Everydayness means the How in accordance with which Da-sein “lives its day,” whether in all of its modes of behavior or only in certain ways prefi gured by being-with-one-another. Furthermore, being comfortable in habit belongs to this How, even if habit forces us to what is burdensome and “repulsive.” Th e tomorrow that everyday taking care waits for is the “eternal yesterday.” Th e monotony of everydayness takes whatever the day happens to bring as a change. Everydayness determines Da-sein even when it has not chosen the they as its “hero.”23

22 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State Uni- versity of New York Press, 1996), 338 . 23 Heidegger, Being and Time , 339. Introduction 15 Everyday inauthentic experience is characterized by an entanglement in a net whose nodes are “idle talk” ( Gerede ), the “ambiguity” (Zweideutigkeit ) that comes of such talk, and the “curiosity” ( Neuiger) that comes in turn of ambiguity and that fuels further empty talk and so on. Heidegger does not employ the term “event” or a near-synonym in Being and Time —that will come only in later works. But his discussions of the possibility of transcending the inauthentic everyday in that work do take a complexly evental shape. While he does not entertain the possibility of an end to the entanglement, a break in the everyday, authenticity is attained rather through a momentary disclosure of the nature of being itself: “authentic existence is nothing which hovers over entangled everydayness, but is existentially only a modifi ed grasp of everydayness.” 24 Th at is to say, authenticity is not attained by somehow leaping out of the entangling cycles of everydayness but rather by attaining a changed perspective on it. As he writes elsewhere in the same work: “What is decisive is not to get out of the circle, but to get in it in the right way.” 25 Later, he somewhat cryptically discusses authentic disclosure in terms of the arrival of a “Moment,” or, in German, Augenblick. 26 As he writes: We call the present that is held in authentic temporality, and is thus authentic , the Moment . Th is term must be understood in the active sense as an ecstasy. It means the resolute raptness of Da-sein, which is yet held in resoluteness, in what is encountered as possibilities and circumstances to be taken care of in the situation. Th e phenomenon of the Moment can in principle not be clarifi ed in terms of the now. Th e now is a temporal phenomenon that belongs to time as within-time- ness: the now ‘in which’ something comes into being, passes away, but as an authentic present it lets us encounter for the fi rst time what can be ‘in a time’ as something at hand or objectively present.27 Th e distinction that Heidegger makes in this paragraph between the “Now” ( Jetzt ) and the “Moment” is signifi cant in that the latter is described as something that takes place outside of or alongside time,

24 Heidegger, Being and Time , 167. 25 Heidegger, Being and Time , 143. 26 While “moment” is the standard translation of Augenblick and the one used in Joan Stambaugh’s translation of Being and Time , its literal meaning comes closer to “moment of vision” (as John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson have it in their translation (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1962) of the same work), as suggested by the compound construction of the word: Augen (eye) plus Blick (view). For more on the term, and in particular the infl uence that the works of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had on Heidegger’s use of it, see Koral Ward, Augenblick: Th e Concept of the “Decisive Moment” in 19th- and 20th- Century Western Philosophy (London: Ashgate, 2008). 27 Heidegger, Being and Time , 311. 16 Against the Event something that is somehow atemporal but that nonetheless allows awareness of or access to temporality itself.28 Only a being that is essentially futural in its being so that it can let itself be thrown back upon its factical Th ere, free for its death and shattering itself on it, that is, only a being that, as futural, is equiprimordially having-been , can hand down to itself its inherited possibility, take over its own thrownness and be in the Moment for ‘its time.’ Only authentic temporality that is at the same time fi nite makes something like fate, that is, authentic historicity, possible. 29 Th is attempt to think of novelty and at least something like eventfulness amidst the entangling grasp of time—of time as everydayness—by shifting eventfulness outside of time itself continues in Heidegger’s later work. Most prominently, in his Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning ) composed in 1936–8, the event itself comes to the fore. Or, at least, the term Ereignis—whose most obvious translation is “event” but which resists the use of this English word at every turn.30 It involves an appropriation (eigen means “own,” whereas the er prefi x implies the process of bringing something into a certain condition) that comes of unconceal- ment, and might be seen to be more the ground or condition of the event than the event itself. Heidegger’s initial defi nition of Ereignis in his Con- tributions begins to capture some of the dynamic at play:

28 In discussing another instance of Augenblick in Being and Time , Magda King extrapo- lates in A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time (ed. John Llewelyn (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 222), despite the vagueness of Heidegger’s conceptualization, a possible understanding of what it is that happens in the “Moment”: “Th e ‘instant vision’ of what meets us in the situation remains ‘enclosed’ or ‘held in’ the temporality of authentic care. Although Heidegger does not further explain how or why it is so, we may remember that death was shown earlier to be the certain possibility which is indefi - nite as to its ‘when’; it is at every instant [ Augenblick] possible.” Elsewhere in Being and Time , Heidegger discusses Angst , the uncanny apprehension of something not at hand, as a mode of attunement given to the arrival of such a Moment: “Angst can arise in the most harmless situations. Nor does it have any need for darkness, in which things usually become uncanny to us more easily. In the dark there is emphatically ‘nothing’ to see, although the world is still ‘there’ more obtrusively ” (p. 177). 29 Heidegger, Being and Time , 352. 30 Th e issue of the appropriate translation of the term has long been complex and controversial. Heidegger himself writes in Identity and Diff erence (trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 36, as cited in Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, “Translators’ Foreword,” in Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. xix ), the word Ereignis is “as little translatable as the guiding-Greek word kÖcor and the Chinese Tao . . . and is . . . a singulare tantum. ” As Rich- ard Polt has it in Th e Emergency of Being: Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 74): “We cannot grasp Ereignis simply by subsuming it under some everyday concept expressed in the word event . Everyday concepts are shallow, because they are suited only for everyday transactions with entities.” But, on the other hand, Polt admits that, without any trace of the everyday conception of the term, we are left with “no perspective on it” at all. As Polt continues, perhaps when Heidegger “speaks in noneventful language, he is insinuating a radically eventful thinking.” Introduction 17

Whenever a being is, be-ing must sway. But how does be-ing sway? But is a being? From where else does thinking decide here if not according to the truth of be-ing? Th us be-ing can no longer be thought of in the perspective of beings; it must be enthought from with be-ing itself . At times those founders of the abground must be consumed by the fi re of what is deeply sheltered, so that Da-sein becomes possible for humans and thus steadfastness in the midst of beings is rescued—so that in the open of the strife between earth and world beings themselves undergo a restoration. Accordingly, beings move into their steadfastness when the founders of the truth of be-ing go under. Be-ing itself requires this. It needs those who go under; and, wherever beings appear, it has already en-owned these founders who go under and allotted them to be-ing. Th at is the essential swaying of be-ing itself. We call it enowning . 31 Ereignis is what has already happened before what could be, but here is not, called an event—it is something like the extra-temporal condition of eventfulness itself. As Joan Stambaugh describes it in Th e Finitude of Being , Ereignis “cannot be thought as an event in the course of serial time, since it is the source of any kind of time as well as of everything else.”32 While there is not space here to do true justice to the complexity of Heidegger’s thought on the everyday and the pseudo-evental shapes that punctuate it, a certain dynamic at least becomes clear from my admittedly abbreviated descriptions. His work, fi rst to last, struggles to develop a sense of authentic transcendence that remains mindful of the nearly terminal facticity of life. Th e quasi-evental approach to the question of the meaning of Being, given the pervasive near-inescapability of inauthentic everydayness, is conceivable only through conceptions that sidestep the matter of temporality itself. As Slavoj Žižek has summarized it succinctly (if perhaps without suffi cient terminological care), Heidegger’s Event [is] the epochal disclosure of a confi guration of Being [ . . . ] For Heidegger, Event is the ultimate horizon of thought, and it is meaningless to try to think “behind” it and to render thematic the process that generated it—such an attempt equals an ontic account of the ontological horizon.33 In light of this discussion, Heidegger’s work, in particular Being and Time , might be said to resemble a Bildungsroman centered on a character named “Da-sein,” who struggles (and, in a signifi cant sense fails—hence, perhaps, the incompletion of Being and Time and the fact that Contributions itself

31 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 5–6 . 32 Joan Stambaugh, Th e Finitude of Being (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 154 , as cited in Polt, Th e Emergency of Being , 76. 33 Slavoj Žižek, “Notes on a Debate ‘From with the People,’ ” Criticism , 46/4 (2004), 664 . 18 Against the Event was written as a preview of a future work called Das Ereignis that would never be completed) to achieve an authentic mode of existence, an authentic relation to time, despite his immersive entanglement in the “pallid lack of mood that dominates the ‘gray everyday.’”34 As he says elsewhere in Being and Time , “basically nothing other is meant by everydayness than temporality.”35 Th e dynamic that Heidegger inaugurated (or at least developed into its full twentieth-century form) serves in turn as one of the major organizing themes of the century’s philosophical work. While there are a great number of fi gures that take part in this tradition, it is perhaps nowhere more clearly visible than with the French post-structuralists, who rose to importance during the 1960s. But it is important to note from the start that, while “the event” maintains its place of pride in these discussions, references to “the everyday” become less frequent and more marginal to post-structuralist thought. Th e event was a matter of central importance for Gilles Deleuze, as is particularly evident in his works Diff erence and Repetition (1968), Th e Logic of Sense (1969), and Th e Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque (1981). 36 Given his Spinozian rejection of the transcendental in favor of a sense of the universe as a plane of immanence, in which there is no inherent separation between things, and thus seemingly no gap through which the truly new might emerge, Deleuze’s work might seem an unlikely place to locate work on the event. For instance, of the plane of immanence he writes (with Félix Guattari) in A Th ousand Plateaus that Here, there are no longer any forms or developments of forms; nor are there subjects. Th ere is no structure, any more than there is genesis. Th ere are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds. Th ere are only haecceities, aff ects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages. Nothing develops, but things arrive late or early, and for this or that assemblage depending on their compositions of speed.37 Th e plane of immanence is defi ned, then, by dynamics rather than diff erence, and populated by “individuations” rather than subjects. Or again, as he has it in Negotiations :

34 Heidegger, Being and Time , 316. 35 Heidegger, Being and Time , 340. 36 Gilles Deleuze, Diff erence and Repetition , trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004); Gilles Deleuze, Th e Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Continuum, 2006) ; Gilles Deleuze, Th e Logic of Sense , trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Continuum, 2004) . 37 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Th ousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 266 . Introduction 19

All processes take place on the plane of immanence, and within a given multiplicity: unifi cation, subjectifi cations, rationalizations, centralizations have no special status; they often amount to an impasse or closing off that prevents the multiplicity’s growth, the extension and unfolding of its lines, the production of something new. 38 Temporalization and processes take the place of stably unifi ed identities, and it is further the notion of specialness or discretion that serves as a limit to “the production of something new” rather than our way of knowing it. In short, it would seem that to embrace the notion of the world as a plane of immanence would be to forgo the very notion of eventfulness for an amorphous and indiscernible concept of “genesis.” True, however, to the persistent dynamics of twentieth-century continental philosophy, Deleuze’s work turns on the question of how novelty and change emerge in (and despite) the “univocity of the real.” He begins with an inversion of the conventional notion of the relationship between identity and diff erence. If the standard notion is that diff erence is derived from or subsidiary to identity, Deleuze works in the opposite direction. As is implicit in the passages above, diff erence itself is fundamental, and identity is something that is imposed on the basis of this diff erence. Fur- ther, borrowing from Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution , the primordial- ity of diff erence and change in Deleuze’s work postulates a sort of élan vital that drives (or in fact is ) the incessant fl ux of “pure becoming.” But, if “pure becoming” is fundamental rather than stasis, what room is there for moments of discontinuity that would be worthy of the name “event”? Rather than breaks in time, stoppages, or Heideggerian episodes of transcendence, for Deleuze events are more like bends or turns, exacer- bations or overfl ows. As he writes in Th e Logic of Sense : What is an ideal event? It is a singularity—or rather a set of singularities or of singular points characterizing a mathematical curve, a physical state of aff airs, a psychological and moral person. Singularities are turning points and points of infl ection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, “sensi- tive” points.39 An event is an intensifi cation that leads from a quantitative augmentation to a tipping point wherein qualitative change occurs, such as happens when water steadily heats to the point that it begins to change from liquid to gas. In this sense, Deleuze’s concept of the event seems to avoid even

38 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1995), 146 . 39 Deleuze, Logic of Sense , 52. 20 Against the Event the aspirational transcendentalism of Heidegger’s work on the matter—as an event is a point of infl ection in a continuity rather than a discontinuity. As he continues in Logic of Sense : “If the singularities are veritable events, they communicate in one and the same Event which endlessly redistributes them, while their transformations form a history. ” 40 As Alain Badiou argues in Logic of Worlds, Deleuze’s notion of the event depends upon a quasi-religious vitalism. Deleuze’s events are events only because they, like everything that happens, are actualizations of a sort of primordial energy or power that is hard not to read as a quasi-theological conception. Vitalist logic, which submits the actualizations of multiplicities to the law of the virtual One-All, cannot perceive the purely religious character of the simultaneous assertion that events are sense, and that they possess, as Deleuze proclaims, “an eternal truth.” If sense eff ectively possesses an eternal truth, God exists, since he was never anything other than the truth of sense.41 In other words, as Badiou argues, Deleuze’s logic—and we might say in particular his logic of the event—relies upon a logic that is familiarly religious. Th at is, the postulation of a primal something (whether a divinity or a quasi-divine vitality or energy) that pre-emptively renders everything meaningful simply because everything is automatically a manifestation of this something and its power. Alain Badiou’s own works stand (as of now) as both a culmination of this tradition and a symptomatic indicator of the problematic nature of the question upon which the fi gures of this tradition have spent so much eff ort and thought. Th e centrality of the “event” in his work, especially given the way that he approaches the concept, retrospectively enables us to comprehend the overall trajectory of philosophical speculation on the event in that it provides an (obviously as yet) provisional “end” to the story that we have been tracing. Badiou’s work is too complex to allow for a summary in this chapter that does it full justice, especially since his methodology and infl uences are in part drawn from a fi eld, mathematical set theory, that would be unfamiliar to most readers. So my discussion will necessarily be tele- graphic if hopefully not reductive of the main points at play. What is most

40 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 53. It is worth noting in the context of my project that, in the original, histoire signals both “history” and “story.” In French, the passage in question is: “Si les singularités sont de véritables événements, elles communiquent en un seul et même Evénement qui ne cesse de les redistribuer et leurs transformations forment une histoire ” ( Logique de sens (Paris: Éditions de minuit, 1969), 68). 41 Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds (Being and Event, 2) , trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), 386 . Introduction 21 important about Badiou’s work, especially in the context of this monograph, is the fundamental shift that he eff ects in the key terms that he uses—terms including the “event. ” If both Heidegger and Deleuze (among others) struggle to clear space for eventfulness amidst the lines of continuity, echoes of reiteration, and impermeability of materiality, it is as if Badiou simply starts from the axiomatic assumption that events take place and works backwards from there to extrapolate the other factors and terms of his philosophy from this starting point. As with the rest of his ontology, Badiou’s conception of the event is founded in the fi rst place on the branch of mathematics known as set theory. It would be impossible for me to give a full description of both set theory and the role that it plays in Badiou’s work in the context of this introduction. But it is important for now to understand that Badiou’s discussion of the event is grounded in one of the founding axioms of set theory: namely, the null set axiom. Th ere is an empty set, one which contains no elements. ∃ x ∀ y ¬ ( y ∈ x ) It can be shown that there can only be one such set and so it will subsequently be denoted Ø.42 Th e presence of the void within any given set renders it impossible to establish a defi nite and orderly continuum of real numbers—that is to say, metaphorically and somewhat reductively, there is always something that exceeds an attempt fully to quantify and thus delimit a situation.43 A s Badiou has it in Being and Event, the “void of a situation” is the “suture to its being” and “the being itself of multiple-presentation.”44 But the presence of the void in any set is only axiomatic—that is it is one of the nine founding axioms of set theory as a branch of mathematics. Set theory

42 Mary Tiles, Th e Philosophy of Set Th eory: An Historical Introduction to Cantor’s Paradise (New York: Dover, 2004), 121 . 43 Peter Hallward (Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)) provides a lucid and extremely useful account of the role of set theory in Badiou’s work. 44 Alain Badiou, Being and Event , trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006), 55, 89. Jason Barker summarizes the relationship between the void and the event for Badiou in Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction ((London: Pluto Press, 2002), 67), thus: “Th e theorem of the point of excess dispense two types of multiplicities: ‘ordinary multiplicities’, ‘which have the property of not belonging to themselves’, and ‘evenemental multiplicities’ (multiplicités événementielles) ‘which have the property of belonging to themselves’. Th e event is the forbidden multiple, prohibited from being. It is being’s gap or interval. Here we recall the ‘empty intentionality, never fi lled’ that Lacan calls ‘metonomy’. What attains being (its ‘elusive signifi ed’) only actually does so ‘ “at infi nity” ’. In the Lacanian sense, the event would be the actual bar of subjectivity: /, which is invested in Lacan’s formula S/ s. For Badiou, this prohibition, though unrepresentable, at least has a name: ‘void’, or what is indicated by the mark Ø. Th e event cannot be, its non-being is unthinkable.” 22 Against the Event itself relies upon—and has long been criticized for—axiomatic construc- tionism, starting from decided propositions rather than a notion of self- evidence or empirical validity.45 In other words, and in short, the possibility of true novelty—a fundamental change in a state of aff airs that is sometimes even termed the everyday by Badiou—is itself grounded in an axiomatic decision—or at least his decision to embrace set theory. Th ere are events because I (along with the inventors of set theory) have decided that there is always room for them in any situation. It follows, then, that the event is what is “purely hazardous, and cannot be inferred from the situation,” as, if it could be, it would no longer be categorizable as such. 46 Th e event for Badiou then is exactly what could never have been derived from the situation in which it occurs, a true break away from what there is and what what there is suggests there should then be. Badiou’s reconception of the nature of the event leads in turn (but is also retrospectively informed by) a reworking of the notion of the subject. Rather than the thinking, feeling agent who enters into a situation bearing the precedents with which she or he will meet it, and then acts to make this or that occurrence happen, the subject for Badiou is only that which is formed in the event. Th ere are many diff erent iterations of the process of subject formation to be found across his works—one of the clearest comes in Th e Handbook of Inaesthetics : Th e event reveals the void of the situation. Th is is because it shows that what there is now was previously devoid of truth. It is on the basis of this void that the subject constitutes itself as a fragment of the processes of a truth. It is this void that separates it from the situation or the place and inscribes it within an unprecedented trajectory. It is therefore true to say that the ordeal of the void—the place as void—founds the subject of a truth, but this ordeal does not generate any kind of mastery.47 By shifting his defi nition of subjectivity in this way—the subject is formed as a response to the event, and does not precede it—he allows himself simply to sidestep all of the questions about the reiterativeness of experi-

45 Hallward (Badiou , 337) describes the axiomatic construction of set theory in his book on Badiou: “Th anks largely to the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, axioms are no longer generally understood in modern mathematics as self-evident truths or idealizations of empirical behavior. Th e truth of mathematics is no longer ensured through its correspondence to observable reality; for most mathematicians, ‘propositions are true at best insofar as they follow from assumptions and defi nitions we have made.’ An axiom, in the modern sense, is indeed something we make, something artifi cial or postulated. It is simply a rigorous convention accepted on the basis of its utility and its compatibility with other similarly accepted conventions.” 46 Badiou, Being and Event , 193. 47 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, CA: Stan- ford University Press, 2004), 54 . Introduction 23 ence, social construction, and the worldly entanglement of human psychology that have formed the entangling limit of previous philosophical engagements with the relationship between subjectivity, determination, and novelty.48 I will return later to the way that the structure of Badiou’s (anti)-ontology parallels various moments in the literary texts that I will discuss, but for now it is worthwhile to examine his analysis of specifi cally “evental” situations. A clear example comes in his Saint Paul: Th e Foundation of Universalism , in which the saint from Tarsus is valorized as one of the premier “poet-thinkers of the event” for the very reason that his conversion (according to Badiou’s argument) was unconditioned—not the result of a causal chain of events but rather a purely subjective matter of truth and fi delity to the truth: Paul’s general procedure is the following: if there has been an event, and if truth consists in declaring it and then in being faithful to this declaration, two consequences ensue. First, since truth is eventual, or of the order of what occurs, it is singular. It is neither structural, nor axiomatic, nor legal. Consequently, there cannot be a law of truth. Second, truth being inscribed on the basis of a declaration that is in essence subjective, no reconstituted subset can support it; nothing communi- tarian or historically established can lend its substance to the process of truth.49 Badiou even resists labeling what happened to Paul a “conversion,” as the term suggests contextual causality; it implicitly renders the transformation from Jew to Christian legible and explicable: Is the term “conversion” appropriate to what happened on the road to Damascus? It was a thunderbolt, a caesura, and not a dialectical reversal. It was a conscription instituting a new subject. “By the grace of God I am what I am [eimi ho eimi ]” (Cor. I.15.10) What this absolutely aleatory intervention on the road to Damscus summons is the “I am” as such.50 As I will discuss later, the phrase foudroiement , the original French of the “thunderbolt” in this passage, is a close synonym of one of Gustave Flau- bert’s favorite targets for satirical attention, the coupe de foudre .51

48 It is perhaps easy to see how the Badiouvian notion of the subject formed in and of the event might be put in service of a reformulation of the concept of the literary character. In his 2007 essay “Character and Event” (SubStance , 32/3 (2007), 107), for instance, Julian Murphet argues for “a radical ethical construal of ‘character’ as the incitement to subjective commitments in Alain Badiou’s extraordinary sense, but only in relation to the specifi c formal and medial conjunctures of a given textual moment.” 49 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: Th e Foundation of Universalism , trans. Ray Brassier (Stan- ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 14. 50 Badiou, Saint Paul , 17. 51 Th e paragraph in the original Saint Paul: La Fondation de l’universalisme ((Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), 18): “Le mot ‘conversion’ convient-il pour ce qui 24 Against the Event Badiou’s declaration of the event, necessarily ungrounded in any causality, explanation, or reason, seems here a lurch into the sudden and quasi-romantic temporality of decisionism, intentionally blinding itself to all of the conditions that might inform the decision itself. Like a theo- logian so desperate to believe that God exists despite a gnawing sense of the irrationality of this belief, whose work becomes more and more polemical as the lines of reasoning become more baroque, Badiou seems to be so intent on maintaining the category of the event that it falls into a sort of axiomatic, proleptic tautology. Th is concept of the event, that which comes of and is announced by a subjective decision, is itself the product of an axiomatic imposition—a decision that true decisions exist. Or, to put it another way, as Ricardo L. Nirenberg and David Nirenberg argue, Badiou falls with this move into what is known as a Pythagoric snare: in deducing philosophical and political consequences from his set-theoretical arguments, Badiou confuses contingent attributes of informal models with necessary consequences of the axioms (we will call this type of confusion a Pythagoric snare). Th e politico-philosophical claims that result have no grounding in the set theory that is deployed to justify them.52 Th e intensity of Badiou’s philosophical endeavor to describe eventfulness is perhaps most clearly visible in his insistence on the necessity of what he terms “la confi ance dans la confi ance ”—self-grounding confi dence .53 B u t this is also where, pace his criticisms of the religiosity of Deleuze, the onto-theology of the event shows itself in his own work. As Peter Osborne argues, Badiou’s theory of the event “provides a mathematical (= ontological) explanation of the possibility of what otherwise appears from the standpoint of a de-temporalized being as inexplicable: namely, novelty.”54 But because of the event’s utterly extrinsic nature, it is unknowable and unnameable, and thus available, according to Osborne, only via faith rather than knowledge. Further and relatedly, as much as it kicks against it, Badiou’s work seems deeply symptomatic of the historical situation in which it was produced. Between the eventually failed “revolution” of Paris

s’est passé sur le chemin de Damas? C’est une foudroiement, une césure, et non un retournement dialectique. C’est une requisition qui institue un nouveau sujet: ‘Par la grace de Dieu je suis qui je suis (eýli ∞ eýli )’ (Cor. I. 15.10). C’est le ‘je suis’ comme tel qui est convoqué sur le chemin de Damas par une intervention absolument hasardeuse.” 52 Ricardo L. Nirenberg and David Nirenberg, “Badiou’s Number: A Critique of Math- ematics as Ontology,” Critical Inquiry , 37 (Summer 2011), 586 . 53 Alain Badiou, Th éorie du sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 341 , as cited in Hallward, Badiou , 28. 54 Peter Osborne, “Neo-Classic: Alain Badiou’s Being and Event ,” Radical Philosophy , 142 (March/April 2007), 25 . Introduction 25 in 1968 through the rise of neo-liberalism with its incessantly cynical realism, and across the announcement of the end of ideological history, Badi- ou’s work rises to centrality only during a philosophical crisis that seems to many to mark the “death of theory.” One way to account for Badiou’s current popularity—and the fact that he seems to have overtaken Jacques Derrida as the French philosopher foremost on the minds of Anglo-American theorists—is that he would seem to rescue the event from exactly the ostensibly relativist undecidability famously associated with deconstruction. As Antonio Calcagno has it in his Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time , Badiou restores a possibility for maintaining the undecidability that comes about in the Derridean double-bind while still maintaining the possibility of events and the subjectivation that ensues from such interventions that are political. In fact, for Badiou, undecidability forces or pushes the subject to make a decisive political intervention . 55 Th at is to say, that undecidability itself lies at the basis of the event for Alain Badiou—that he works to establish the event and the subjectivation that comes of it out of the selfsame factors that informed Derrida’s reitera- tive, relativistic deconstruction of the event. Derrida’s work, anchored from its early stages by his concept of dif- férance, frequently engages with the event only to deconstruct its self- standing singularity and its internal coherence. A memorable example of this is his deconstruction of the signature as a singular event in “Signa- ture, Event, Context”: In order for the tethering to the source to occur, what must be retained is the absolute singularity of a signature-event and a signature-form: the pure reproduc- ibility of a pure event. Is there such a thing? Does the absolute singularity of signature as event ever occur? Are there signatures? Yes, of course, every day. Eff ects of signature are the most common thing in the world. But the condition of possibility of those eff ects is simultaneously, once again, the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibility of their rigorous purity. In order to function, that is to be readable, a signature must have a repeat- able, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to be detached from the present and singular intention of its production. It is its sameness which, by corrupting its identity and its singularity, divides its seal [sceau ]. 56

55 Antonio Calcagno, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time (London: Con- tinuum, 2007), 9 . 56 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeff rey Mehlman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 20 . 26 Against the Event Derrida’s deconstructive process, which fi nds within the purported autonomy of what he calls the signature-event the very mark of its reproducibil- ity and thus its impurity, is emblematic of the general thrust of his work, especially early in his career. In general, what would seem to be an event— an experience in the present—is haunted both by past precedent and by the anticipation of the future. Repeatability and thus non-originality rather than uniqueness emerge as the hallmark of experience. What we experience is structurally defi ned by the not-nowness of the now, the present by the past out of which it emerges as well as the future it suggests. As will become clear in the next section of this chapter, Derrida’s general conception of the event comes very close to that which characterized modernism and its inventors from Flaubert onward: his anti-evental dif- férance is highly reminiscent, for instance, of the erosion of the romantic occurrence in Madame Bovary. But this is not the end of the story. Derrida’s work, despite its rigorous critique of simple notions of eventfulness, originality, and novelty, also maintains the category of the event in a complex manner. As he writes in the 1998 essay “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Inc 2”: “To give up neither the event nor the machine, to subordinate neither one to the other, neither to reduce one to the other: this is perhaps a concern of thinking that has kept a certain number of ‘us’ working for the last few decades.”57 T o cite one of the most notable instances of this work, Specters of Marx remains preoccupied with the nature of the event, and in particular the slippage in Francis Fukuyama’s usage of the term or concept in his descriptions of the “end of history.” Depending on how it works to his advantage and serves his thesis, Fukuyama defi nes liberal democracy here as an actual reality and there as a simple ideal. Th e event is now the realization, now the heralding of the realization. Even as we take seriously the idea that a heralding sign or a promise constitutes an irreducible event, we must nevertheless guard against confusing those two types of event.58 Derrida continues that “A thinking of the event is no doubt what is lacking” from Fukuyama’s discourse. He later speaks of “a spirit of Marxism which [he] will never renounce [ . . . ] a more certain emancipatory and messianic affi rmation, a certain experience of the promise that one can try to liberate from any dogmatics and even from any metaphysico-religious determination, from any messianism. ”59 Th is spirit is a messianic

57 Jacques Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Inc 2,” in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 72 . 58 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx , trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 62–3 . 59 Derrida, Specters , 63, 89. Introduction 27 anti-messianism, a politics that attends an event that somehow is not one—a thought of the event that is, again if more complexly, in parallel with some of my fi ndings in the modernist texts that I will discuss in this monograph. Amidst the uneventfulness of the “end of history,” and true to the logic of Derrida’s work on Marx as a whole, the event that he describes is a spectral one, less a matter of present temporal plenitude than a sense that time itself is fruitfully out of joint. While Derrida’s engagement with the nature and possibility of the event comes closer to the literary examples I will discuss in Against the Event, it is clear that even his work—like that of Heidegger, Deleuze, and Badiou among many others—demonstrates a desire to maintain the notion or at least the possibility of a notion of the event while at the same time vividly registering the diffi culties with the concept itself. It should be said that the texts that I have described in this section are dealing with notions of the event and the everyday that are drawn from disciplines and traditions of discourse that are not necessarily directly consonant with those that obtain in literary works. Th ere is a signifi cant methodological gap, that is to say, between, for instance, a romantic event in a fi ctional narrative and Heidegger’s quasi-evental “disclosedness of being” or a Badiouvian “truth procedure.” Th e everyday of the sociologically minded theorists such as Lefebvre may seem to be more closely analogous, and certainly draws on literary texts to establish itself, but, on the other hand, its development relies upon the systematic elision of much that we would consider most “literary” about literature: the rhythms of plot, character development, and the like. On the other hand, the eff orts that I have delineated in the works of these philosophers and theorists, for all their diff erence in “direction” from the literary works, do serve an important purpose. Th e philosophical struggle to instantiate a non- or pseudo-causal explanation of change, to build a gap into the “plane of immanence” or the quid-pro-quoing of the everyday, is not only symptomatic of a period in which grave doubts emerge about human agency and subjective intentionality, but further stands as a symptomatic outbreak of the very literariness that literature itself would turn against with modernism. Examining the “anti-evental” turn of narrative during this period in the light of these philosophical endeavors not only sheds revealing light on the presuppositions and demands of both disciplines, but further indicates a path toward a new “thinking of the event,” per Derrida, with wide existential, literary, and political ramifi cations. Further, the philosophical arguments about the nature of the “event” are highly useful in that they aid us in identifying—in the context of my study—the diff erence between things simply “happening” in narratives 28 Against the Event and what should be labeled an event proper. Narratology, for instance, has long struggled with the diff erence between the one and the other because the basic structuralism of the approach renders qualitative distinction diffi cult.60 Th erefore “event” in the course of this study is not used in a narratological sense. It does not, here, simply mean, as Mieke Bal has defi ned it, “the transition from one state to another state, caused or experienced by actors.” 61 Rather, even if my focus is on the failure or avoidance of the event, by event I mean in this work something closer to what Heidegger, Deleuze, Badiou, and Derrida mean by the word than simply to “something that happens” in stories.

LITERATURE AND THE EVENT

I will return to the philosophical and theoretical notions of the everyday and the event and their relation to literary instances of the same later in this chapter. But for now, it is important to describe more clearly what I mean when I use the words everyday and event to describe certain features of modernist narrative. In order to do so, it is further necessary to explain why it is that these issues preoccupied these writers in the fi rst place. While, as I have said above, there are analogies to be drawn between the handling of temporalities in diff erent genres of writing, narrative modernism’s handling of this temporal matrix is informed fi rst and foremost by long-standing concerns that are particularly literary. My terms have received, as I have begun to show, substantial theoretical attention. But, rather than applying the philosophical models to modernist literature, my discussion will move provisionally and inferentially, drawing its concepts from the development of fi ction itself, before returning to the relationship of my notions of the everyday and the event to the philosophical deployment of the terms. It is only when we have understood these developments in light of the literary–historical context out of which they emerge that we can begin to consider most vividly the broader messages

60 For instance, Mieke Bal, in her Narratology: Introduction to the Th eory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), runs into diffi culty when it comes to the question of how one would distinguish between “signifi cant” narrative events and “everyday” ones. Having cited Claude Bremmond’s defi nition of narrative as that which “consists of a language act by which a succession of events having human interest are integrated into the unity of this same act,” she asserts that she will not discuss what defi nes “human interest” and continues to say that because “this diff erence is actually a theoretical issue, and, in fact, one of reception” she “will not discuss it further” ( Bal, Narratology , 192 ). 61 Bal, Narratology , 182. Introduction 29 or arguments hidden within them and examine other conceptualizations of these issues in their light. In short, we need to start with matters that derive from our intuitional understanding of what literature is and how it works. First of all, something is always supposed to happen in literature, even if what sort of thing it is that happens changes over the years and across genres. To start a story is to enter into an implicit contract with your listener or reader that, at some point soon, something will happen and this something will be meaningful, whether banally or profoundly, simply or complexly. Whether it be the episodic occurrences of the Odyssey ’s epic nostos or an epiphanic collision in a short story in a modern magazine, or even (if diff erently) the dramatic moment where chaos turns into clarity or tension into contradiction in the lyric poem, works of literature are predicated on eventfulness, whatever the specifi c dynamics of the form in question. It is no coincidence that the traditions of literary criticism and aesthetic philosophy originate in a document that takes this issue as its central concern. Aristotle’s Poetics engages repeatedly with the question of what it is that should happen in a literary text. Of the six elements that every tragedy must have—plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song—one, according to Aristotle, is pre-eminent: plot. And, while there are many ways that one might defi ne plot, here it means the “structure of the incidents,” or, more pointedly, a specifi c subset of incidents that are said to carry with them the power and interest of the work: Tragedy is not an imitation of persons, but of actions and of life. Well-being and ill-being reside in action, and the goal of life is an activity, not a quality; people possess certain qualities in accordance with their character, but they achieve well- being or its opposite on the basis of how they fare. So the imitation of character is not the purpose of what the agents do; character is included along with and on account of the actions. So the events, i.e. the plot, are what tragedy is there for, and that is the most important thing of all. Furthermore, there could not be a tragedy without action, but there could be one without character . . . the most important devices by which tragedy sways emotion are parts of the plot, i.e. reversals and recognitions.62 Even character, here, is subsidiary to actions—as if the human fi gures featured are called into full existence only by the series of events in which they participate. Events that yield reversal and recognition, change and meaning, are the foundational elements of the tragic drama for Aristotle. Later in the work, the philosopher considers briefl y the viability of another

62 Aristotle, Poetics , trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin, 1996), 11–12 . 30 Against the Event sort of work, one with what we might call an uneventful plot, before dis- missing it in favor of the conventionally incidental string of events. Some plots are simple, others complex, since the actions of which the plots are imitations are themselves also of these two kinds. By a simple action I mean one which is, in the sense defi ned, continuous and unifi ed, and in which the change of fortune comes about without reversal and recognition. By complex , I mean one in which the change of fortune involves reversal or recognition or both. Th ese must arise from the actual structure of the plot, so that they come about as a result of what has happened before, out of necessity or in accordance with probability. Th ere is an important diff erence between a set of events happening because of certain other events and after certain other events.63 Th e distinction between the because of and the after is signifi cant. In Aris- totle’s simple plot, something does happen but only barely—one thing after another occurs, but without the establishment of a chain of causality and the interest and signifi cance that such a chain entails. Th e action is “continuous and unifi ed,” and meaning is not derived from reversals and revelations as it is in complex plots. Th e rhythm of the simple plot, according to Aristotle’s formulation, is action without change, exposition without refl ection. We are not surprised when he says, a bit further into the text, that the “construction of the best tragedy should be complex rather than simple” as it is diffi cult to imagine the interest and meaning of a storyline of the simple variety.64 Of course, Aristotle is discussing a specifi c sub-genre of classical drama rather than literature in general, and each form and genre has its own distinctive structural requirements and acquired traits. And we might well consider whether diff erent forms have diff erent priorities—obviously the “sequence of events” is not nearly as important for lyric poetry as it is for the dramatic work. Still, any literary form that takes a narrative or even discursive form is to some degree aff ected by the mandate to make something happen. Th is is an essential characteristic of artistic works that take a temporal shape. Whether poetry or narrative fi ction or music, these works must manage a rhythm of intensity and non-intensity, “action” of one sort or another, as well as the idleness from which it emerges. Narratological theory can be seen, in one of its most signifi cant strands, to have taken the identifi cation and explanation of these rhythms of eventfulness as its central mission. Th e very “tellability” of fi ction is linked

63 Aristotle, Poetics , 18. 64 Aristotle, Poetics , 20. Aristotle later gives some examples of “simple” tragedies: “ Daughters of Phorcys , Prometheus , and plays set in the underworld” (p. 29). Introduction 31 by this school to the eventfulness of the narration. Just to cite a recent example of this branch of analysis, as Peter Hühn describes in his 2010 Eventfulness in British Fiction (an anthology deeply informed by narratological methodology), stories require something more crucial in addition to mere succession and change: an unexpected, exceptional or new turn in the sequential dimension, some surprising “point,” some signifi cant departure from the established course of incidents, what Bruner succinctly refers to in his formula: “canonicity and breach.” Recipients expect some such decisive change or turn, and a narrative lacking this kind of “point” will elicit the bored question “So what?” dreaded by every storyteller. Such decisive crucial turns will here be called “events” and accordingly this narrative text-type may be distinguished as “eventful narration” [ . . . ] Such a crucial “point” generally functions as the raison d’être of a narrative, constituting its “tellability” or “noteworthiness.”65 While what constitutes such an “event” that bears a “point” changes according to diff erent theorists and the diff erent texts and periods that they analyze, narratology as a methodology begins from the distinction between narrative and non-narrative texts on the basis of their eventfulness, the fact that change, development, and/or recognition occurs in them. But, even without engaging in a history of the rhythms and temporalities of the novel from its origins, it is not hard to develop a sense of the centrality of this “eventful” pattern to the form. Th e alternation between the establishment of characters and situations, on the one hand, and climactic revelations and actions, on the other, sets the tempo of narrative fi ction. As Ian Watt points out in Th e Rise of the Novel, one of the most revolutionary aspects of the emerging form was its openness to the cir- cumstantial and the ordinary—an openness that other literary modes simply did not possess. Th e novel’s detailed depiction of the concerns of everyday life [ . . . ] depends upon its power over the time dimension: T. H. Green pointed out that much of man’s life had tended to be almost unavailable to literary representation merely as a result of its slowness; the novel’s closeness to the texture of daily experience directly depends upon its employment of a much more minutely discriminated time-scale than had previously been employed in narrative.66 Noting the “a-historical outlook [ . . . ] associated with a striking lack of interest in the minute-by-minute and day-to-day temporal setting” characteristic not only of Shakespearian drama but also of the earliest

65 Peter Hühn, Eventfulness in British Fiction (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 2009), 2 . 66 Ian Watt, Rise , 22. 32 Against the Event manifestations of fi ction, Watt argues that the novel brings human time into the literary frame.67 But the “human time” in question is time of a very particular sort. Just as “daily experience” enters into the novel, the specifi c way that it is deployed translates it away from the very contingency and ordinariness to which the novel seems to off er representational space. As Watt notes, the developing genre of the novel is pre-eminently invested in what we might call biographical or contextual causality, the establishment of links between a present situation and the context and precedent out of which it emerged. Th e novel can be distinguished from prior forms, according to Watt, “by its use of past experience as the cause of present action: a causal connection operating through time replaces the reliance of earlier narratives on disguises and coincidence.”68 Th is causal logic retroactively translates uneventful daily experience into the causal grounds of “present action,” and in doing so establishes a structure that permits the ordinary or uneventful entry into the form, but only under the condition that it is structurally determined as the subsidiary backdrop against which signifi - cant, revelatory action can occur.69 As the history of the novel progresses toward its high period in the mid- nineteenth century, this pattern remains determinative. While the pace and relative impact of the events may be radically diff erent from one work to another—obviously some works move more quickly than others through their patterns of anticipatory lulls and dramatic turns—the basic rhythm of the narrative remains more or less the same. Th e relationship between the plot event and the ground of ostensible insignifi cance out of which it arises becomes in certain cases attenuated, unbalanced. Franco Moretti, in his essay “Serious Century,” which analyzes the relationship between what he calls “fi llers” and “turning points” in the nineteenth-

67 Watt, Rise , 23. 68 Watt, Rise , 22. 69 Th e retroactive determination of everydayness by the event in the early novel is reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s account of the structural determination of the seemingly contingent literary sign in his essay “Th e Reality Eff ect” (in Th e Rustle of Language , trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 148). Th e “referential illusion” is constituted by details that pretend to signify nothing at all, that posture as strictly denotative. But, as Barthes argues, within the framework of the literary work, the ostensible absence of signifi cation is itself a strong but subtle signifi er: “just when these details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they do—without saying so—is signify it; [ . . . they] say nothing but this: we are the real. ” While the driving point of Barthes’s essay is the demonstration that realism is a rhetorical eff ect, a “referential illusion,” a secondary though no less signifi cant implication of Barthes’s argument is that it exposes the contractual obligations that a detail takes on upon entry into a text. Th ere is no way for the detail to opt out of the mandate to signify, for that is simply the price it must pay for entry into a literary work. Introduction 33 century novel, off ers the following reduction of the plot of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice . A cardinal function is a possible turning point; fi llers no, they are what happens between a turning point and the next. An example. Pride and Prejudice (1813), Elizabeth and Darcy meet in chapter 3 , he acts horribly, she is disgusted: fi rst action with “consequences for the development of the story”: they are set in opposition to each other. Th irty-one chapters later, Darcy proposes to Elizabeth; second turning point: an alternative has been opened. Another twenty-seven chapters, and Elizabeth accepts him: alternative closed, end of the novel. Th ree turning points: beginning, middle, and ending; very geometric; very Austen-like. But of course, in between these three major scenes, Elizabeth and Darcy meet, and talk, and hear, and think about each other, and it’s not easy to quantify this type of thing, but I have done my best, and have found about 110 episodes of this kind. Th ey are the fi llers. And Barthes is right, they really don’t do much: they enrich and nuance the progress of the story, yes, but without ever modifying what the turning points have established.70 Moretti’s interest in the essay is to query the existence of the fi llers, but, given the equation that he has sketched here, we might as easily wonder about the necessity of the three “turning points,” given their sparse distribution across such a long text.71 Nevertheless, even the “loose baggy mon- sters” mentioned by Henry James in the preface to the New York Edition of Th e Tragic Muse, “with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary,” punctuate their streams of accident and arbitrary material with sense-making points of dramatic climax.72 At times, the tension between the artifi ce of plot-climax and the broader demands of purposeful realism comes to the fore registering itself quite clearly. Th e prayerful death of Jo in Bleak House , as sentimentally overwrought a plot event as we are likely to fi nd, culminates in a paragraph in which Dickens’s narrator seems to strain against his own mode of construction: ‘Jo, can you say what I say?’ ‘I’ll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it’s good.’

70 Moretti, “Serious Century,” 367–8. 71 Moretti’s ultimate claim about “fi llers” in this essay is that they serve a socially appropriate calming purpose in the novel ( Moretti, “Serious Century,” 381 ): “Why fi llers, in the nineteenth century? Because they off er the kind of narrative pleasure compatible with the new regularity of bourgeois life. Fillers turn the novel into a ‘calm passion,’ as in Hirschmann’s splendid oxymoron for economic interest; they are part of what Weber called the ‘rationalization’ of modern life: a process that begins in the economy and in the administration, but eventually pervades the sphere of free time, private life, entertainment, feelings [ . . . F]illers are an attempt at rationalizing the novelistic universe : turning it into a world of few sur- prises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.” 72 Henry James, Th e Tragic Muse (Scribner Reprint Edition; Fairfi eld, NJ: Kelley, 1976), p. x. 34 Against the Event

‘OUR FATHER.’ ‘Our Father!—yes, that’s wery good, sir!’ ‘WHICH ART IN HEAVEN.’ ‘Art in Heaven—is the light a comin, sir?’ ‘It is close at hand. HALLOWED BE THY NAME!’ ‘Hallowed be—thy—’ Th e light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead! Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day.73 Th e fi nal turn toward establishing Jo’s death as a metonym for the demise of countless others “around us” blurs the line between Moretti’s “fi llers” and “turning points,” just as it attempts to stretch the tight temporality of the passage into an aggregating “every day.” To consider why the pattern that I have been describing forms the temporal arrangement of narrative rather than any other possible organization might seem to slip us quickly into a series of childlike questions, a series of basic but unanswerable whys : why do things happen in stories? Why do we tell stories in the fi rst place? Wide cultural and ideological matrices inform general notions—a notion of the consistency of human character, a belief in the laws of causality, a sense (whether pre- or post-Freudian) of a relationship between the latent meaning and manifest appearance of things—that in turn dictate normative narrative architectures. Freud himself suggested, in the scattered papers that he left on literary themes, a relationship between plot construction and the logic of the dream. In the essay “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” he suggests that the story is a daydream with some of the narcissism polished out of it in order to avoid the familiar “repulsiveness” of the recounted dream. Th e events that happen in dreams, in turn, are complexly narrativized fantasies of change, the imagined fulfi llment of conscious or unconscious wishes and desires. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, Brian Boyd argues in his recent On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction that the form of storytelling is determined by complex patterns of biochemis- try, early learning, and adaptive play that privilege suspense and surprise for both physiological and social reasons. Repetition is the simplest form of elaboration, but since pure repetition dimin- ishes interest, repetition of a bold idea with variation off ers [a two-and-a-half- year-old boy] the best prospects of holding attention with the imaginative resources he has [ . . . ] Neurons in the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental

73 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Penguin, 2003), 734 . Introduction 35 areas of the brain secrete dopamine in reaction to the surprising but not to the expected.74 While quasi-scientifi c approaches such as Boyd’s often and ironically suf- fer from a faulty empiricism—deploying projective generalizations where close demonstration is in order—luckily there are other paths into the problematic relationship between narrative and the event. Th e struggles that shaped the development of modernist narratives—with their eff orts to evade or rework the basic mandate to be eventful—provide a revealing site from which to enter into basic questions surrounding fi ctional form and meaning. Here I will be focusing on a specifi c, relatively brief episode in the long history of literary representation, but what happens during that period raises vital, enduring questions about the nature of literary representation across history.

ANTI-EVENTAL MODERNISM

In a sense, the narrative event has always been a troubled and troublesome aspect of literary construction. Fredric Jameson, in his Sartre: Th e Origins of a Style, aligns the birth of the novel as a form with the emergence of a historically informed uncertainty about what “counted” as a signifi cance occurrence. With the breakdown of traditional life patterns, unquestioned ritual that lives developed along, and with the rise of boredom as a possible quality of life, the notion of an event, of an experience, of something really happening, becomes problematical: when not everything is real living, only certain things can be told and can constitute anecdotes or stories. Th e novel itself, in its beginnings, was just such a new category of the event, appearing at the moment of the breakdown of the feudal world; but in modern times even this form, which refl ected through its historical and national variations some of the homogeneity of middle-class society, has itself become questionable—there are no universally recognizable patterns of life that are worth telling.75 But even if Jameson is correct in this reading of the relationship between literary history and social time, it still remains clear that during modernism this originary crisis came to the forefront of narrative innovation.

74 Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), 182 . 75 Fredric Jameson, Sartre: Th e Origins of a Style (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 19 . 36 Against the Event While accounts of literary modernism, and in particular its relationship to the everyday, often locate the movement’s origins in mid-nineteenth-century Paris and writers such as Baudelaire, what happened between this initial fl owering of formal innovation and the arrival of high modernism during the interwar period has received less attention. Michael Sheringham, for instance, recognizes the start of the story of Surrealism in its practitioners’ adoption of Baudelaire’s insistence that the artist “recognize ‘le côté épique de la vie moderne’ (the epic side of modern life) in which the eternal and transitory are fi xed.”76 While Sher- ingham briefl y addresses other developments taking place during the “period between the publication of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris in 1869 and Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme in 1924,” we are nonetheless left with a familiar impression that the history of modernism is structured by a fi fty-fi ve-year gap.77 Conventional wisdom about modernism has long depended on similar stories. T. S. Eliot’s discovery while he was an undergraduate at Harvard of nineteenth-century French proto-modernism in Arthur Symons’s Th e Symbolist Movement in Poetry is another familiar rendition of the way this half-century leap came to pass. But, in truth, the evolution of modernism, and in particular modernist narrative, was a slower and more deliberate process than these epiphanically organized histories suggest. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a series of authors began to resist and subvert the mandates of narrative form that I have traced in the previous section. For a variety of reasons and to a variety of ends, these novelists disrupted the events that occur in their works, experimenting with forms that seemed to be nearly eventless or that at least displayed new and complex relationships to the notion of the event as such. In doing so, they accomplished several things at once. In resisting the event, they brought to mimetic light forms of time that were in various ways becoming culturally prevalent during their periods of composition. Fur- ther, they implicitly called into question the ideological, political, and philosophical aspects of literary form. Above all, in struggling to subvert if not break these mandates, they defamiliarized the intrinsic features of the novel itself. While it is notoriously diffi cult to come up with a discrete yet encom- passing defi nition of modernism, a shift toward higher degrees of aesthetic self-awareness underwrites many of the attributes that would appear on anyone’s list. Th is refl exivity, for instance, is bound up with a move

76 Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Th eories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 61 . 77 Sheringham, Everyday Life , 62. Introduction 37 toward psychological fi ction and its characteristic narrative forms— stream of consciousness narration, the style indirect libre. Th is self-awareness further tends to manifest itself in an uneasy relationship to the mandates of mediums and genres. In re-inhabiting these traditional forms with the diffi culty of doing so fully on display, modernist fi ctions performatively question the basic tenets of narrative art in general. Th e eff ect of alienation or estrangement that has long been attributed to literary modernism is as much a matter of the disruption of our sense of generic norms as our fi xed ideas about extra-literary reality. Modernist writers persistently resist the notion that works must be constructed according to a normative rhythm of eventfulness and uneventfulness. Th e most obvious example of this is the advent of the circa- dian, “single-day” novel, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which compresses the conventional temporal and thematic range of the realist novel into a few hours of an ordinary day during which little, according to usual literary standards, happens. From another direction, the production of extremely long works, such as Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu or Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage novels, test the boundaries of the form from the other direction, dissolving events into a swathe of time so broad that traditional architectures of narrative meaning become impossible. Th e somnolent ominousness of Franz Kaf- ka’s work depends upon a complex recoding of the narrative event, as throughout his fi ction seemingly serious turns occur but the characters fail to respond to them appropriately—fail to register them as events. Even as the disjunctive plot of Th e Trial bursts into its ex nihilo evental start, K. cannot help but worry about extraneous matters like his breakfast: He threw himself onto his bed and took from the nightstand a nice apple that he had placed out the previous evening to have with breakfast. Now it was his entire breakfast, and in any case, as he verifi ed with the fi rst large bite, a much better breakfast than he could have had from the fi lthy all-night café through the grace of his guards.78 Th e Trial, like Robert Musil’s Th e Man without Qualities and Th omas Mann’s Th e Magic Mountain , is thematically organized in relation to a climactic event that never quite arrives, at least not in the form that we would expect. Th ese are just a few broadly sketched examples, where the disruption in question is visible from the barest descriptions of the works. More generally, the interventions in narrative temporality take place on a more intimate, though no less signifi cant, scale.

78 Franz Kafka, Th e Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Press, 1998), 10. 38 Against the Event Several monographs have recently appeared that focus on the everyday in modernist literature. For instance, Bryony Randall’s recent Mod- ernism, Daily Time, and Everyday Life demonstrates the way that authors of the modernist period, “rather than fi ghting against the ephemeral quality of the present and searching for the exceptional moment to illuminate the everyday, instead fi nd new ways of imagining and representing the present, life now, ongoing daily time.” 79 In her work, Ran- dall examines the “alternative modernist temporality” explored and exposed by female authors in place of the “disruptive moment of Pater, Heidegger, Benjamin, et al . ” 80 But, despite the usefulness of her approach, what remains to be considered is an analysis of the emergence of the everyday as an intrinsically formal dilemma, a problem whose solution is in a sense modernist fi ction itself. Rather than simply an external temporality that modernist novels sought to represent, the everyday, in my formulation, organizes the history and drives the development of modernist narrative. Modernism’s turn against the event did not arrive from nowhere, and in fact has a long and traceable history. In Aesthetic Th eory, Th eodor Adorno cites Baudelaire’s abandonment of the dictates of plot as an inaugural moment in the development of modern literature. Baudelaire, the apologist of form no less than the poet of the vie moderne , expressed this in the dedication of Le Spleen de Paris when he wrote that he can break off where he pleases, and so may the reader, “for I have not strung his way- ward will to the endless thread of some unnecessary plot.” [ . . . ] Since that moment, the law of all art has been its antilaw.81 Th e law of all art has been its antilaw is a concise approach to a defi nition of modernism, especially the aspect of it that I am describing. It is important, however, to be clear, especially when investigating the genealogy of these formal developments, about just what the law is and how it was broken. In the introduction to Modernism and the Ordinary , Liesl Olson cites Moretti’s “Serious Century” in the course of advancing her own claim about modernism’s relationship to plot: Moretti claims that the nineteenth-century novel’s “only narrative invention” was “fi ller”—descriptive realist moments (the opposite of turning points) from which modernism, he argues, broke to develop other narrative forms (“Serious,” 379). But the twentieth century did not abandon the fi ller: an entire modernist novel

79 Randall, Modernism , 7 . 80 Randall, Modernism , 39. 81 Th eodor Adorno, Aesthetic Th eory , trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: Uni- versity of Minnesota Press, 1997), 224 . Introduction 39 might be fi lled with extremely minute details of everyday life, foregrounding the paradox of how the insignifi cance of the ordinary is examined with a wide-angle lens. Modernism makes the fi ller autonomous.82 Olson is correct to insist on the centrality of the “fi ller” within modernist works. Still, however autonomous these details become, it is important to note that modernist narratives did not simply turn toward fi ller in lieu of turning points. As becomes especially clear when we investigate its proximate genealogy, the modernist novel is not so much uneventful as anti- evental . Rather than simply abandoning evental forms in favor of unmediated, arhythmical content, modernism productively if subver- sively re-inhabits them. Th e evental structures are maintained in place, but are at the same time ironically undercut, eroded from within, and/or exposed as refl exive tropes through thematic and formal innovations. From Joyce’s ironic repurposing of the Bildungsroman in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Mrs Dalloway ’s distant but insistent impersonation of a romance and onward, the interest of modernist works is to be found as much in the way that old forms and conventional routines are disruptively maintained in them as in any unalloyed novelty they might produce.83

THE EMERGENCE OF MODERNIST NARRATIVE

Th e diff erence between the uneventful and the anti-evental becomes especially clear when we examine the history of the latter’s emergence. In Aesthetic Th eory , Adorno uses the term “moderate modernism” to describe (and critique) works that stop short of a full abandonment of generic conventions and presuppositions. Aesthetic rationality demands that all artistic means reach the utmost determi- nacy in themselves and according to their own functions so as to be able to perform what traditional means can no longer fulfi ll. Th e extreme is demanded by artistic technology; it is not just the yearning of a rebellious attitude. Th e idea of moderate modernism is self-contradictory because it restrains aesthetic rationality. Th at every element in a work absolutely accomplish what it is supposed to

82 Olson, Modernism , 18. 83 T. S. Eliot’s essay “Ulysses , Order, and Myth” (Selected Prose (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 177–8) might be seen as an inverted recognition of this situation. Eliot argues that the “mythical method” has replaced “narrative method” as “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a signifi cance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” What is taken for granted and un-discussed in the essay is not only why the “panorama” needs to be shaped and granted signifi cance, but also what eff ect Joyce’s borrowing has on the pattern that he took up. 40 Against the Event accomplish coincides directly with the modern as desideratum: Th e moderate work evades this requirement because it receives its means from an available or fi ctitious tradition to which it attributes a power it no longer possesses. If moderate modernists pride themselves on their honesty, which supposedly protects them from getting carried away with every fad, this is dishonest given the ways in which moderation makes things easy for them.84 As Adorno says elsewhere, “Modern art is questionable not when it goes too far—as the cliché runs—but when it does not go far enough, which is the point at which works falter out of a lack of internal consistency.”85 But this “faltering” out of internal contradictions—the contradiction between the impulse to innovation and the necessity of following the prescriptions of received forms—is in fact the defi ning characteristic of literary modernism as it actually developed. In a sense, all modernist narrative is moderate modernism, at least according to Adorno’s description, and this is especially true when it comes to the relationship between the everyday and the event that I have been delineating. But these developments are of course not simply a matter of context- less technical development. While literary works can serve well as archives of idiosyncratic historical content and psychologically infl ected illustra- tions of cultural and political transformations, they are also reperform- ances of, in Adorno’s phrase elsewhere in Aesthetic Th eory , these “unresolved antagonisms,” the cultural and ideological contradictions and antimonies of the world in which they were produced. 86 As such, they serve to document the place of this temporality within the wider world from which they arise. Despite the fact that we usually associate the modern period with progress, evolution, development, and shock, for every mode of acceleration we can also fi nd, when we look below the surface, anxiety about stasis—a stasis that arrives as a by-product or an unexpected side eff ect of the acceleration itself. At this time, increases in production and consumption led to a widespread sense of affl uent decadence, as society struggled to keep hold on meaning once the fulfi llment of basic needs became a given. Rapid expansion of international markets brought with it a realization that markets must continually expand or else face collapse. And the unprecedented extension of European and in particular British

84 Adorno, Aesthetic Th eory , 35. 85 Adorno, Aesthetic Th eory , 34. 86 Adorno in Aesthetic Th eory , 5–6 : “Th e basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil. Th e unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. Th is, not the insertion of objective elements, defi nes the relation of art to society. Th e complex of tensions in artworks crystallizes undisturbed in these problems of form and through emancipation from the external world’s factual facade converges with the real essence.” Introduction 41 imperial power over very nearly the entire world eventually gave rise to what we might call a crisis of the imperial “everyday.” What does one do once the map is completely fi lled up with the colors of the European powers? Where does one go next? In these, and so many other ways—changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality, advances in science and technology, political developments, and so on—Western civilization as a whole came face to face during the modern period with a crisis of narration distinctly parallel to that faced by the authors whose works I explore in this study. Who tells—who is left to tell—the story of modernization? How does it end—or begin? What tense do we tell it in? Th e struggle to bring “real time” into the novel mirrors a wider sense that the everyday itself is swallowing the very process of progressive modernization that brought it into the world. Most important, and I will have more to say about this as I continue, what is the relationship between these historical changes and the individual’s lived experiences—especially those characteristically modern experiences of restless boredom and ennui that seem to parallel on the level of the personal the temporality of the wide-scale eff ects listed above. A type of feedback loop comes into play, in which deformations of literary technique enact cultural anxieties about the everyday, while wider culture’s grappling with this emergent temporality encounters problems that are distinctly aesthetic, diffi culties of narrative form. Th is book begins with the analysis of works from the nineteenth century by Gustave Flaubert, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad, in order to trace this conjunction of fi ctional form and the anti-evental temporality of the everyday as it emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century and to follow it toward its grand scale embodiment in Joyce’s Dublin of June 16, 1904. As I show, the blossoming-forth of the everyday in the great works of the 1920s is not simply the result of a paradigm- shifting innovation on the part of a few twentieth-century modernist writers, but rather the continuation of a story that began at least as far back as Gustave Flaubert’s composition of Madame Bovary during the 1850s. As Walter Benjamin asserts in Th e Arcades Project , Paris, “the capital of the nineteenth century,” was wracked with boredom, at once obsessed with novelty and haunted by stasis.87 No author captured this contradiction better than Flaubert, both in Paris and in France more generally, and no one was more infl uential than he in transmitting it to British novelists, such as Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce. I begin with Madame Bovary , reading

87 Walter Benjamin, Th e Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) . 42 Against the Event its heroine’s entanglement in ideological reproduction and ravenous consumption as a baseline version of the anti-evental turn in modern literature. Less the dupe of romance than an artist of her own life, Emma Bovary narrativizes her own life using techniques that mirror her author’s stylistic innovations and temporal special eff ects as he attempts to escape the gravitational pull of the idée reçue, the specter of literary ordinariness that haunts novelistic realism. Flaubert’s novel chronicles both the impulse toward the event and its enervated failure to arrive. In Flaubert’s later L’ Éducation sentimentale , I track the temporality and psychology of the everyday as it moves with increasing intensity along (and against) the line of history. We learn something retrospectively about Madame Bovary as we follow Flaubert’s aesthetic into L’ Éducation sentimentale. Further, what we learn is vital to the analysis and overarching argument of Against the Event as a whole. My use of my two central terms has thus far been characterized by a slippage between registers of signifi cance, a blurring of the lines between the historical and the personal. An event might be a sweeping social change or the twist in a romantic plot, just as the condition of everydayness might take the shape of a macro-cultural malaise or a character’s episode of quotidian boredom. In my history of the period, this slippage has its vivid origin in the works of Flaubert. It is the relation between the revolution that forms the background scenery and the foregrounded issueless aff air between Frédéric Moreau and Madame Arnoux that helps explain the abortive temporalities and subtle historical detail of Madame Bovary. Rather than simply a wildly scalable leitmotif or metaphorical construction, as we shall see it is the articulation of this rapport between uneventfulness on the macro and micro levels that is of central formal and thematic interest in Flaubert’s œuvre. But it is not just Flaubert’s works that are animated by this tension. From this inaugural moment in France, I move on to the political and ideological context of Great Britain at the turn of the century. In these critical decades, many of the problems facing Britain had signifi cant temporal aspects, characterized by the collision of everyday repetition with progress or with catastrophe. Th e signs of this temporal crisis were everywhere: the economy was mired in a depression popularly attributed to overproduction; the expansion of the electorate provoked a fear of political vulgarization; and the empire threatened to collapse under the weight of its own acquisitions. While many of H. G. Wells’s other works might seem more likely candidates for inclusion in a work on the everyday—the bathetic bovarisme of Th e History of Mr Polly or the post-Dickensian ordinariness of Kipps: Th e Simple Soul (whose very title is a reference to Flau- bert) spring to mind among many others—I attend here instead to Th e Introduction 43 Time Machine . Th ough rarely included in the canons of modernism, despite infl uencing many works that are, it exposes, in an unlikely, genre- bending way, the anxieties about the everyday and eventlessness that arose out of the above crises, and in particular betrays a reservation about the socialist utopia that, as a political essayist, Wells was otherwise urging into existence. In the utopian everyday, the leisure society of the mindless Eloi signals the end of fi ction itself: not only have the Eloi lost the ability to create art, but the Time Traveller’s own story repeatedly threatens to evap- orate while in their company at the end of human (or posthuman) history. Wells further translates this temporal crisis from the social realm to the physical universe, as he evokes William Th omson’s troping of the Sec- ond Law of Th ermodynamics to imagine the “heat death” of the universe, an apocalypse wrought not by any catastrophe but merely by the terminal cessation of events. Th is foreboding sense of a static ending foreshadows later modernist renditions of apocalypse, such as is memorably captured at the end of T. S. Eliot’s “Th e Hollow Men”: “Th is is the way the world ends | Not with a bang but a whimper. ”88 It is not just an egalitarian distribution of wealth but also the exhaustion of fi ction that signals the enervated end of mankind, thought, and time. If Wells’s fi ction stages the collapse of a previous generation’s political ideals (and representational strategies) under the weight of the unbearable lightness of utopian leisure, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is organized by a parallel, if much more ominously tinted, juxaposition. Conrad—and this work in particular—might seem an even more unlikely choice for inclusion in a work on the everyday, given the “exotic” settings of most of his works, the residual romanticism of his outlook, and his tendency to angle his works around episodes of grinding existential crisis. But when we examine Heart of Darkness from an idiosyncratic but I believe appropriate new angle, something surprising emerges from between the lines of this novella—something that further has distinct bearing on his œuvre as a whole. In short, this work forecasts unemployment and its eff ect upon human experience as a defi ning preoccupation of modernism. It was during the 1890s, marked by the lingering ramifi cations of the fi rst “Great Depression” and proto-Taylorist workplace technologies, that the concept of unemployment emerged in economics and social policy. Th is is the context that strangely illuminates Heart of Dark- ness, from its key themes and plot structures, to such elements as Marlow’s joblessness at the opening of his tale, his obsession with “effi ciency,” the threat of Kurtz as an avatar of the “gang of virtue,” the harrowing situation

88 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1991), 82 . 44 Against the Event of African forced labor, and, more vastly, the aimlessness of empire. In all these sites, through Conrad’s distinctive narrative form, time is split into self-conscious idleness and mindless hyperactivity—a darkly intensifi ed version of the same everyday that I examine in Flaubert and Wells. Th e narrative is in turn fi ssured between a lyrical, irrational stream of consciousness, on the one hand, and, on the other, a highly impersonal reportage of actions and events. Even on the level of style, Conrad stages the social and economic formations that would come to defi ne the twentieth century, producing a literature of unemployment, even an unemployed literature, imbued throughout with the busy eventlessness of the worst-case version of the everyday. In my fi nal chapter, as I reach the period and works of high modernism, I examine the fi ction of James Joyce in the light of his early experiments with an unusual literary form, neither prose poem nor prose fragment, that we fi nd in his manuscript epiphanies of 1900–3. Most commentators on the “epiphanic” in Joyce’s work have sought to fi nd in this form “hidden depths” of a psychological or symbolic nature, guided perhaps by the deployment of the concept in Stephen Hero. Th is triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.89 Rather than following Stephen’s lead here, I read the epiphanies as perversions of normal narrative construction, which trade progressive revelation for stasis, the syntax of plot for recursive platitude, and deep characteriza- tion for the fl atness of surface. Th e early epiphanies emerge as an idiosyncratic genre that has issuelessness written into the DNA of the form itself. In a sense, they represent the fulfi llment of Conrad’s intimation of a literature put out of work, moving busily but to no end, simulating the received evental structure but without actually off ering the development or revelation that is supposed to come with it. Seeing the early epiphanies in this light in turn reframes our understanding of Joyce’s later works, particularly in terms of the relationship between temporality, experience, and narrative displayed in them. Read- ing the stories of Dubliners , for instance, as prolongations of the issueless construction of the epiphanies highlights the relationship between the social and psychological paralysis represented and the “scrupulous meanness”

89 James Joyce, Stephen Hero (New York: New Directions, 1963), 211 . Introduction 45 of their form, their failure to “turn” in the way that we expect stories to do. With Portrait, we seem to move back into the realm of progressive narrative as the novel traces the development of Stephen Dedalus toward what is ostensibly a climactic moment of aesthetic self-liberation. But when this Bildungsroman is read with the precedent of the early epiphanies in mind, we fi nd, not only an immanent critique of the “epiphanic” structure of Portrait itself, but also an emergent theorization of the relationship between artistic “impersonality” and narrative temporality. Th is theorization, which fi gures only critically in Portrait itself, bears fruit in Ulysses, and is rendered with particular clarity in the “Nausicaa” chapter, which stands as a revolutionary reinvention of one of the trademark “events” from modern literature’s storeroom: the urban chance encounter between a man and a woman. At this point, the texts and authors that I focus on in this monograph might seem to be a strange mixture of obvious examples and perverse choices. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and the works of Joyce are—and have long been seen to be—full repositories of “everydayness,” whatever the defi nition of that term at play. But, on the other hand, Wells’s Th e Time Machine and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness might well seem like very unlikely candidates for inclusion in a project like this one. In the case of Wells, as I mentioned above, there are other works more straightforwardly in touch with the everyday and eventlessness than his most famous “scientifi c romance.” Likewise, and again as I mentioned above, Conrad’s dark novella would seem at fi rst to be set literally a thousand miles away from the quotidian daily life of the metropole. But the seeming perversity of these textual selections is much to the point of my project. Th e everyday—the issueless, repetitive temporality that comes of anti-evental narrative—is not in the context of my analysis simply a sociological category nor is it just a literary theme. Rather, the everyday and the events that are complicated or canceled in order to arrive at it are both structural features of modernity as a whole and, it follows, aspects that those who represent this modernity most provocatively must inevitably take up. Th e fact that this temporality that I call the everyday can be encountered as readily in the Belgian Congo (if it is fair to say that Heart of Darkness is set there, despite the obliqueness of the work on this matter) as in a Dublin pub is exactly the point. Th e everyday, in this rendition, is for writers not a dilemma as profound as the diffi culty faced by modern philosophers as they attempted to conceptualize novelty in a world that seems staked against its emergence. Narratological theory, as I have mentioned above, links “tellability” with the eventfulness of narration. Th e works that I discuss here experiment with the “tellability” of the seemingly untellable—the eventless, 46 Against the Event that which defi es the fi ctional mandate for development that provokes recognition of some sort. In doing so, they forge a relationship between what we might call—again to borrow a term, this time from Badiou—the two central “conditions” or “generic procedures” of narrative fi ction: the cultural conditions that form the signifi cant backdrop of the story and the personal lives lived by the characters in focus.90 Whether it is the relationship between the platitude of post-revolutionary French society and the daily life of a provincial housewife, the stalled temporality of imperial capitalism (or, in the case of Wells, social imperialism) and the quotidian work tasks of its agents, or the paralysis shared out between Irish culture as a whole and the inhabitants of Dublin, the fi ctions explore what sort of narrative can be made once important aspects of narrativity itself have fallen—or have been pulled—out of the picture. Implicitly but distinctly, Flaubert’s, Wells’s, and Conrad’s texts deploy anti-evental narration in order to turn their stories subtly but signifi cantly “untellable” in the narratological sense. And this “untellability” in turn, as I will show in the chapters that follow, enables a critical representation of modernity in a variety of its aspects. With them, it comes to seem as if straightforwardly eventful narration would have been a case of mimetic bad faith, one that would corrupt the practice and purpose of their narratives. Further, while Joyce’s work would seem to be aimed from the start toward a critical goal parallel to those of the other authors that I discuss, as I argue in my chapter on him, there was also a counter and quasi- utopian tendency manifest in his work from the start of his career until its climax in dealing with the eventless everyday. Later authors and works would, of course, take this “untellability” further: Joyce’s own Finnegans Wake , the nouveaux romans of Alain Robbe- Grillet or Georges Perec, or the experiments of such American postmodernists as John Barth and others, all pushed narrative further toward or even well beyond the limits of legibility in the conventional sense. While these eff orts would certainly be worthy of an investigation similar to mine, the examples of Adorno’s “moderate modernism” that I examine here hold a special interest that is absent or nearly so in the later, more radical texts. While there are obviously metafi ctional eff ects at play in each of the texts that I examine, they each remain in a signifi cant sense “realist” and at least impersonate the conventional narrative organization

90 Th roughout his work, Alain Badiou speaks alternately of the four “generic procedures” or “conditions of philosophy,” where the production of truth actually takes place. As he writes in Being and Event, “there are four of them: love, art, science, and politics,” which are sites where “the complete traversal of the categories of being [ . . . ] and of the event” (p. 16) manifest themselves rather than in abstract philosophy itself. Introduction 47 associated with narrative realism. It is the fact that these texts are transitional—that they attempt to maintain to varying degrees the basic architecture of the bourgeois romance, the tale of exotic adventure, the realist fi ction, or the Bildungsroman , that endows them with their particular interest in this regard. If continental philosophy and cultural theory have focused a large amount of energy on the explanation of how events happen or how they might be made to happen, the implicit questions asked—and answered— by the literary texts I examine propose a rethinking of the relationship between meaning and eventfulness. Th ey call into question our modern human tendency not only to expect that meaning arrives eventfully— whether the event is a “revolution” of one sort or another or an “epiphanic” revelation—but further to valorize this shape as the only possible indicator of change or development. In other words, despite the infamous modernist predilection for “making it new,” the authors that I analyze here not only call into question the possibility of novelty, they further— especially when we reach the works of Joyce—begin to suggest an alternative model of meaning than the philosophers, one that does not depend upon the event, one more attuned to the everyday. In doing so, again of course implicitly, they beg important questions about the “literariness” of both the cultural and theoretical preoccupations with the event itself, in particular the almost neo-romantic vitalism or epiphanicness that I have noted in them above.91 But, because they maintain the contours of coherence and the basic architecture of fi ctional form intact, they would be better described to perform the possibility of everyday meaning than to call, as more radical works later do, the notion of meaning into question tout court. Fredric Jameson, early in his work on Sartre, examines the ways that La Nausée itself places the event, in a sense, out of order as it fi ssures the subjective apperception of the world from a sense that anything objectively meaningful occurs. Working from scenes in the novel in which the “description of a characteristic moment in which something happens without anything really happening,” Jameson explains the “nausea” that ensues from such a change in perception and the narration that contains it:

91 In a somewhat diff erent vein, Hayden White proposes his own sense of the critical and compensatory usefulness of the modernist dissolution of the event in his Figural Real- ism: Studies in the Mimesis Eff ect ((Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 82): “Modernist techniques of represention provide the possibility of defetishizing both events and the fantasy accounts of them which deny the threat they pose in the process of pretend- ing to represent them realistically and clear the way for that process of mourning which alone can relieve the burden of history and make a more if not totally realistic perception of current problems possible.” 48 Against the Event

Th e “nausea” [ . . . ] is the moment of feeling acutely that we exist; and yet since we always do exist, it is subjectivity, the historical fact of suddenly becoming aware of our existence, that lifts this uninterrupting existence to the status of a special moment in our lives. Th us a realisation which is not dependent on any content of our existence becomes content in its turn, and a feeling of existing that transcends any of the events of our existence becomes itself an event. Th is transformation is refl ected in the nature of nausea itself, an awareness that turns into a solid physical fact. 92 In Against the Event , through the examination of similar textual moments in which “something happens without anything really happening,” I will explore not only the “nausea” that comes of the abandonment of the event but, in the long run, the promise that this abandonment signals. In their attempts to maintain “tellability,” “legibility”—or in general the appearance of “narrativity”—while putting one of the fundamental aspects of fi ctional narrative out of work, these works I explore here off er complex if largely tacit argument on behalf of the eventless everyday as both a dystopian aspect of modern life but also an actual or potential bearer of signifi - cance, or even faint but real hope, in a world that was turning and would continue to turn against it.

92 Jameson, Sartre , 31, 33. 2 “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor”: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary , the Everyday, and Style

In a famous passage that I will return to later in this chapter, Emma Bovary, fresh from her initial sexual experience with her Rodolphe, confronts herself in her mirror and speaks. Elle se répétait: “J’ai un amant! un amant!” se délectant à cette idée comme à celle d’une autre puberté qui lui serait survenue. Elle allait donc posséder enfi n ces joies de l’amour, cette fi èvre du bonheur dont elle avait désespéré. Elle entrait dans quelque chose de merveilleux où tout serait passion, extase, délire; une immensité bleuâtre l’entourait, les sommets du sentiment étincelaient sous sa pensée, et l’existence ordinaire n’apparaissait qu’au loin, tout en bas, dans l’ombre, entre les intervalles de ces hauteurs.1 As I mentioned in Chapter 1 , this passage—and what comes in its wake with Rodolphe—might seem to have been tailor-made as a satire, in the tones of domestic melodrama—of Alain Badiou’s arguments about the event and the formation of the subject in its wake.2 In the wake of the coupling, she confronts herself in the mirror, naming both what has happened and, in a sense, herself in the same breath. As if she has experienced “another puberty,” she feels herself to have come into her own in this

1 Gustave Flaubert, Œuvres (Paris: Pléiade, 1951), i. 439; trans. Geoff rey Wall as Mad- ame Bovary (New York: Penguin, 1992), 131: “She kept saying to herself: ‘I have a lover! A lover!’, savouring this idea just as if a second puberty had come upon her. At last, she was to know the pleasures of love, that fever of happiness which she had despaired of. She was entering something marvelous where everything would be passion, ecstasy, delirium; blue immensity was all about her; the great summits of sentiment glittered in her mind’s eye, ordinary existence appeared far below in the distance, in shadow, in the gaps between these peaks.” 2 Badiou writes in Ethics (trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso: 2001), 42): “I shall call ‘truth’ (a truth) the real process of a fi delity to an event: that which this fi delity produces in the situation. For example, the politics of the French Maoists between 1966 and 1976, which tried to think and practice a fi delity to two entangled events: the Cultural Revolu- tion in China, and May ’68 in France.” 50 Against the Event moment of recognition, not unlike Badiou’s Paul on the road to Damas- cus. But the remainder of the novel works to undercut Emma’s unfaithful fi delity to this and every other occurrence in her life that seems even the least bit evental. And it does so not simply through the satiric movements of plot but via a fundamental deconstruction of the notion of eventfulness itself. Flaubert himself was never one for “fi delity” to occurrences, whether romantic or political. When it came to the latter, he seems to have been almost constitutionally allergic to politics as a whole. Th e ultimately doomed revolution of 1848, whose early days Flaubert observed as a sort of protest-tourist with his friend Maxime du Camp, in the long run served only to reinforce his pre-existing skepticism about both revolutionary politics and the power structures that they aim to replace.3 In citing a letter of Flaubert’s from 1853, Stephen Heath summarizes Flaubert’s position on revolution and the general direction of political change, which is characterized by an intense hatred of all politics, bearing witness to the process of disintegration that characterizes the contemporary history from 1830 to 1850 and beyond. What that history represents is the destruction of any possibility of belief in social renewal: ‘’89 demolished royalty and the nobility, ’48 the bourgeoisie and ’51 the rabble. Now there is nothing, only a rascally and imbecile rabble. We are all sunk at the same level in a common mediocrity. Social equality has entered the sphere of the Mind. Th ere are books for everyone, art for everyone, science for everyone, just as we build railways and heated public restrooms. Humanity has the frenzy for moral abasement. And I’m angry at it, because I’m a part of it’ (22 September 1853). 4 As Flaubert aged, the skepticism seemed only to deepen and to broaden. While there were many factors at play—personally, ideologically, and aesthetically—a series of letters written to George Sand during and after the Paris Commune of 1871 shed light on the fact that it was, in part, the understanding of revolutionary occurrences as “evental” that informed his disdain. As he wrote to Sand in March 1871, referring not to the Com- mune itself but to its famous ancestor:

3 Frederick Brown discusses Flaubert’s political ambivalence following the 1848 uprising in his essay “Flaubert in 1848” (Hudson Review , 58/2 (Summer 2005), 211) : “Flaubert, the affl uent bourgeois sustained by unearned income from farmland, had no use for egalitarian doctrine. He regarded utopian socialism as the worst tyranny. But with his animus against the bourgeoisie, neither could he stomach the proprietary claim to civilization of gentlemen who traded in received ideas. Still less could he tolerate the call for moral order now heard wherever conservatives spoke and destined to echo down the century like a mantra.” 4 Stephen Heath, Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 14 . “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 51

Il faut que la Révolution française cesse d’être un dogme et qu’elle rentre dans la Science, comme le reste des choses humaines. Si on eût été plus savant, on n’aurait pas cru qu’une formule mystique est capable de faire des armées.5 After the bloody end of the Commune, he again wrote in September: Nous pataugeons dans l’arrière-faix de la Révolution, qui a été un avortement, une chose ratée, un four “quoi qu’on dise”, et cela parce qu’elle procédait du Moyen Âge et du christianisme.6 Formulaicness couched as mysticism, repetition announced as the unan- nounced arrival of the new—he resists political developments on the same terms that implicitly inform his erosive exposure of romance to the grinding temporalities of the everyday. In this chapter, I will explore the anti- evental turn of Flaubert’s tale of provincial life, what this in turn shows us about the fundamental dynamics of narrative literature and the modern turn against them, and, fi nally, what these formal developments tell us about the relationship between the romantic “anti-events” satirized in Madame Bovary (as well as L’Éducation sentimentale ) and the socio-political context to which Flaubert was responding.

“AS THOUGH IN THE GRIP OF A GHASTLY TERROR”

Th e letters that Gustave Flaubert wrote during the composition of Madame Bovary revolve in large part around two primary themes. On one side, there are his famous pronouncements on the craft of writing— aphoristic blueprints of such technological innovations as “impersonal” narration, the concept of le mot juste , and the idea of the “book about nothing.” By codifying these aesthetic innovations, albeit in occasional form, the correspondence of this period can be seen as an infl uential mani- festo of literary modernism avant la lettre, coming as it did a half-century before the arrival of the novels of Conrad, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner.

5 Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance , iv. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 300 ; trans. P. H. Wetherhill in “Flaubert and Revolution,” in David Bevan (ed.), Literature and Revolution (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), 31: “Th e French Revolution must no longer be a dogma. It must come within the purview of science like all other human aff airs. If people had been more knowledgeable, they would not have thought that some mystic formula was capable of raising armies. (31 March 1871 to George Sand).” 6 Flaubert, Correspondance, iv. 376; trans. Wetherhill, “Flaubert,” 31: “We are still caught up in the backlash of the French Revolution, which was a fl op, a failure, a non- event . . . because it descended directly from the Middle Ages and Christianity. (8 Septem- ber 1871 to George Sand).” 52 Against the Event But the letters are far more than just a handbook of embryonic modernism. Equal, if not greater, attention is devoted to a nearly hysterical auto-diagnosis of the disease of writing, a malady that manifests itself here as much somatically (or, at least, psychosomatically) as psychologically. We read of the “bitter moments that almost make me scream,” and learn that if Louise Colet, Flaubert’s mistress, “knew how much I was torturing myself [she’d] be sorry for me.” Composition is variously equated with “long days spent on horseback,” an attack of palsy, and numerous other exertions and diseases. It is worth remembering Flaubert spent long periods of his childhood living in a hospital where his father, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, was chief surgeon. He suff ers from panic attacks, begins to lose his teeth and anticipates the loss of his hair, compares inspiration to a fever, and suff ers from back pain “like a man who has been fucking too much” as he writes the scene in which Rodolphe and Emma consummate their relationship. It might even be said that the two thematic axes of these letters coexist in a causal chain twisted into a recursive loop. Th e artistic contrivances are emollients devised to soothe the irritation of writing, to cure the root cause of the tenderness, but these in turn only increase the degree of diffi culty of the work in question, leading to ever more pain and self-loathing. In a letter to Colet dated December 27, 1852, however, Flaubert momentarily steps out of the cycle of physical pain and aesthetic innovation to describe another type of feeling, related to but diff erent in both type and cause from the full-body writer’s cramp that we repeatedly encounter in the other letters. Here, the sensation in question is terror — in particular, the terror of reading Balzac. Having just fi nished reading Louis Lambert fi ve minutes before sitting down to write, Flaubert has been shaken to the core by what he has found in this work. Je suis, dans ce moment, comme tout épouvanté, et si je t’écris c’est peut-être pour ne pas rester seul avec moi, comme on allume sa lampe la nuit quand on a peur. Je ne sais si tu vas me comprendre, mais c’est bien drôle. As-tu lu un livre de Balzac qui s’appelle Louis Lambert? Je viens de l’achever il y a cinq minutes; il me foudroie. C’est l’histoire d’un homme qui devient fou à force de penser aux choses intangibles. Cela s’est cramponné à moi par mille hameçons.7

7 Flaubert, Correspondance , ii. (Pais: Gallimard, 1980), 218; trans. Francis Steegmuller in Th e Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 177: “At this moment I am as though in the grip of a ghastly terror, and if I am writing you it is perhaps to avoid being with myself, the way one lights one’s lamp at night when one is afraid. I don’t know whether you are going to understand me, but it is very strange. Have you read a book by Balzac called Louis Lambert ? I fi nished it fi ve minutes “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 53 He writes to Colet out of fear, strangely described here as a fear of himself, of being alone with himself—even though the occasion of his terror is an encounter with another, with Balzac by way of his novel. But why this sense of dread? Flaubert continues: Ce Lambert, à peu de choses près, est mon pauvre Alfred. J’ai trouvé là de nos phrases (dans le temps) presque textuelles: les causeries des deux camarades au collège sont celles que nous avions, ou analogues. Il y a une histoire de manuscrit dérobé par les camarades et avec des réfl exions du maître d’études qui m’est arrivée , etc., etc. 8 Flaubert’s sense of déjà vécu in reading the novel plummets from the pleasure of recognition to the terror of the uncanny. He experiences a paranoid sense that the unique events of his life had been prerecorded, if not preordained, by a novel published in 1832 when he was still an infant. Anxiety of infl uence blurs into repetition compulsion, and Flaubert seems unsure whether to parse Louis Lambert ’s predicative quality as a prophecy of his own artistic greatness or something more sinister. But this is not all; there is yet “another case of similarity” described in the letter, this one having to do not with life but with writing . Autre rapprochement: ma mère m’a montré (elle l’a découvert hier) dans le Médecin de campagne de Balzac, une même scène de ma Bovary : une visite chez une nourrice (je n’avais jamais lu ce livre, pas plus que Louis Lambert ). Ce sont mêmes détails, mêmes eff ets, même intention, à croire que j’ai copié, si ma page n’était infi niment mieux écrite, sans me vanter. Si Du Camp savait tout cela, il dirait que je me compare à Balzac, comme à Goethe. Autrefois, j’étais ennuyé des gens qui trouvaient que je ressemblais à M. un tel, à M. un tel, etc.; maintenant c’est pis, c’est mon âme. Je la retrouve partout, tout me la renvoie. Pourquoi donc? 9

ago: I am thunderstruck by it. It is the story of a man who goes mad from thinking about intangible things. I cannot shake it off : it has grappled itself on to me in a thousand places.” 8 Flaubert, Correspondance , ii. 218; trans. Steegmuller, Letters 1830–1857 , 177 : “Th is Lambert is, in all but a few particulars, my poor Alfred. I have found some of our sentences (from years ago) almost word for word: the conversations between two school friends are our conversations, or analogous. Th ere is a story about a manuscript stolen by the two of them, and remarks made by the schoolmaster—all of which happened to me , etc. etc.” 9 Flaubert, Correspondance, ii. 219; trans. Steegmuller, Letters 1830–1857 , 178 : “Another case of similarity: my mother showed me a scene in Balzac’s Un Médecin de campagne (she discovered it yesterday) exactly the same as one in my Bovary : a visit to a wet-nurse. (I have never read that book, any more than I had Louis Lambert .) Th ere are the same details , the same eff ects, the same meaning. One would think I had copied it, if it weren’t that my page is infi nitely better written, no boasting intended […] In the past, I was annoyed by people who thought I looked like this person or that; now it is worse, it is my soul. I fi nd it everywhere: everything reminds me of it. Why, I wonder?” 54 Against the Event Flaubert discounts the possibility that either his life or his work is directly plagiarized from Balzac’s novels, at least in any simple sense, since he had never before read either of the two works in question. But what is he to make of his strange discovery? Is the unintentional similarity between Madame Bovary and Un Médecin de campagne a sign that Flaubert possesses a sort of congenital mastery or is it rather a terrible manifestation of his own derivativeness? What seemed most authentically his own, the words and themes of his work in progress, has revealed itself to have been already written, decades ago, and by the master of the genre that Flaubert intended to revolutionize with his own new style. In previous correspondence he had worried that Madame Bovary would take the shape of “a kind of chateaubriandized Balzac” and exclaimed, reeking with the hubris that comes of being a literary enfant terrible, “What a man Balzac would have been, had he only known how to write!”10 Most importantly, we note that the repetition anxiety is registered here as a sense that his very soul is not purely his own. He continues in the letter with a further disconcerting discovery, one that closes the circle of derivativeness that runs through both his life and his art: “Louis Lambert begins, like Bovary , with a fi rst day at school, and there is one sentence the same as one of mine.” Every- thing authentic and unique about Flaubert and his works appears in the refl ection of Balzac’s old novels as mere, but inevitable, citation, and his own language seems nothing more than a mobile army of idées reçues and clichés marching on a fi eld of generalized textuality. In other words, any hope Flaubert had for a singular, unique event is engulfed by patterns of repetition and banality, just as his singular individuality as an artist falls, if momentarily, into crisis. Th e interpenetration and entwining of literature and life, of the already written and the ostensibly new, is also, of course, a primary theme of Madame Bovary . Th ere we fi nd the same phenomenon, except the bearings are reversed. Instead of an anxious fl ight from the written, Emma’s greatest desire is to be translated into it, to make her life somehow romantic , in the full sense of the word. She desires, in short, to experience novelistic events within her “real” life—contingent experiences, aff airs that arrive by chance but that are, paradoxically, just what she was waiting for. But, just as her author is plagued to the point of illness by the struggle to make something very new out of the utterly commonplace, Madame Bovary is ultimately bent on the defl ation of the novelistic dependency on the event, on exposing its exhaustion as a bearer of interest and signifi - cance. From either direction—the character who would be literary or the littérateur who would be authentically himself—the net eff ect is the same:

10 Flaubert, Letters 1830–1857 ; trans. Steegmuller, 145, 176. “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 55 the new is blocked by the same, the event (of romance writing or just romance) sinks back into derivativeness, ordinariness, repetition. Mad- ame Bovary is, I will argue in this chapter, if not the origin of modernism’s turn against the event, at least the most signifi cant and infl uential moment of its early emergence. Th e vertiginous anxiety about inadvertent plagia- rism, the excursuses on the psychosomatic illnesses that come along with his work, are only secondary symptoms of a deeper dysfunction—a literary disorder bound up with the relation between the everyday and the event. As I will show, there are specifi c (if highly complex) reasons why this development happened in the way that it did—reasons that transcend both the image of Flaubert as a self-standing genius as well as the notion that literary developments are simply aesthetic echoes of socio- economic conditions. Further, undercutting the event and sinking the work (and the represented life of the character) into banality leave both the author and his character in diffi cult and parallel situations. In my view, how Flaubert—and Emma—handle what they do with themselves and their “plots” in the absence of events that would normally have brought shape and meaning to their stories is just as important as the fact of the “arrival” of a general preoccupation with the idea of the “everyday” in society and literature. Finally, this chapter will assess the ambiguous place where Flaubert leaves the question of this erosive temporality. On the one hand, the everyday is a pathological condition, a temporality that gives itself easily to alienation, distraction, and the failure of meaning. One would certainly be hard pressed to fi nd much optimism in Flaubert’s works. But, on the other hand, in an inversion of the perverse operation of an auto-immune disorder in which the protective response of the organism itself becomes the dangerous malady, the nihilistic banality of the everyday can be seen as a pathological condition that bears in itself its own remedy. It solves, in a sense, a problem with the literary that emerges vividly as a problem only once it is under threat. In this sense, the everyday in Flaubert represents at once a bleak portrayal of life under the regime of the same and a provocative (if subtle and ambiguous) suggestion of a new path for literature to take once the event has been left behind as the essential structural element of the plot.

A BOOK ABOUT NOTHING, AN EXERCISE IN STYLE

Before I examine the shape that the relationship between the everyday and the event takes in Madame Bovary , it is worth considering how Flaubert’s innovative approach to narrative arose. Explaining artistic 56 Against the Event developments through historical and psychological analysis is, of course, a complicated and controversial matter. And the question of the relationship between Flaubert’s work and Flaubert the man has long preoccupied critics, philosophers, and biographers. Jean Paul Sartre’s three-volume study of Flaubert, Th e Family Idiot , or Pierre Bourdieu’s Th e Rules of Art are just two of the many important works that are focused or signifi cantly staked on such issues.11 As Bourdieu writes in his preface: To seek in the logic of the literary fi eld or the artistic fi eld—paradoxical worlds capable of inspiring or of imposing the most disinterested ‘interests’—the principle of the work of art’s existence in what makes it historic, but also transhistoric, is to treat this work as an intentional sign haunted and regulated by something else, of which it is also a symptom.12 Th ere are many approaches that one could take in dealing with the issue from the point of view of the “literary or artistic fi eld.” One might employ a wide-angled lens, and examine the emergence of the stylistics of eventlessness via the rise and fall of genres, as Franco Moretti does in his most recent work.13 Th e dynamics of the literary marketplace, the rise and fall of popular or fashionable forms, and the related incessant shifting of literary paradigms are viable paths into the matter. Th e tremendous increase in profi tability and readership of the French book trade during the 1840s and especially the 1850s, for instance, might be seen as a context against which Flaubert’s aesthetic elitism could be framed. Th e author, after all, often railed against the widening of culture—characteristically not because he worried about the proletarianization of taste, but because he feared the working class would rise “to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeoisie.” 14 In the opening of Th e Rules of Art , Bourdieu argues that many of Flaubert’s distinctive stylistic developments (impersonality; the play of direct, indirect, and free indirect discourse; idiosyncratic deployments of verb tenses) are attributable to the author’s attempt to negotiate the gravitational fi elds exerted by the diff erent social spaces that defi ne the world of L’Éducation sentimentale. “Everything leads us to think that the work of writing (‘the torments of style’ that Flaubert so often mentions) aims fi rst

11 Jean-Paul Sartre, Th e Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821–1857, trans. Carol Cos- man, 5 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981–94) ; Pierre Bourdieu, Th e Rules of Art , trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 12 Bourdieu, Rules , p. xx. 13 For instance, Moretti discusses in Graphs, Maps, and Trees (London: Verso, 2005) the evolution of the style indirect libre as an eff ect of the impulses to stylistic convergence and divergence that he establishes as one of the principal logics of literary development. 14 Martyn Lyons, Reading Culture and Writing Practices in Nineteenth-Century France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 61 . “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 57 of all to master the uncontrollable eff ects of the ambivalent relation towards all those who gravitate within the fi eld of power.”15 Flaubert’s technical evolution, according to Bourdieu, is determined by his ambivalent entanglement in the nexuses of art and money, bourgeois pragmatics and bohemian idealism.16 While these factors are present and signifi cant, they are only part of the story. Flaubert’s turn against the narrative event and toward the everyday can best be illuminated through a more directly biographical approach to the origins of Madame Bovary. At the age of 26, in May 1848, Flaubert began work on the fi rst version of La Tentation de Saint Antoine . Inspired by his memory of Bruegel’s painting of the subject that he had seen at the Palazzo Balbi-Senarega while visiting Genoa, Flaubert composed a text formed almost entirely of dramatic monologue and fantasized dialogue, set exclusively outside the saint’s cave near the Nile, and so stuff ed with over-wrought lyrical intensity as to challenge even the most sympathetic reader’s attention span. Soon after fi nishing the work in September 1849, Flaubert read it aloud in four-hour segments over the course of four straight days to his friends Maxime Du Camp and Louis Bouilhet. Enid Starkie sketches the outcome of this event in her Flaubert: Th e Making of the Master. At midnight, after the last reading, when he had ended, Flaubert said to them: ‘And now tell me frankly what you think of it.’ Bouilhet, who was by nature gentle and shy, is said to have answered des- perately: ‘We think you should throw it in the fi re and never mention it again.’ […] Flaubert bounded up, uttering a cry of horror. Th en, Du Camp tells us, there began a serious conversation, of the kind only possible between friends who trust and love one another. Every sentence was gone through, word by word, while Flaubert tried to defend his writing. Th ey ended by advising him to choose a commonplace subject like, for instance, La Cousine Bette or Le Cousin Pons by Balzac. Th e struggle continued from midnight until eight

15 Bourdieu, Rules , 30. 16 Even sociologically inclined critics of Bourdieu’s reading of Flaubert have pointed to the absense of refl ection on the specifi cities of the latter’s form. In his essay “Bourdieu, Flaubert, and the Sociology of Literature,” for instance (Sociological Th eory, 25/2 (June 2007)), Jonathan Eastwood wonders whether Flaubert’s “seemingly near all-consuming preoccupation with literary form has been as reducible to nonliterary social considerations as Bourdieu suggests? Indeed, Bourdieu’s sociology of literature is […] so totalizing as to essentially undo the concept of literature itself” (p. 158). Later in the piece he continues that “Bourdieu’s approach obscures literature’s raison d’ȇtre, the very distinguishing mark of this particular form of cultural activity.” 58 Against the Event o’clock the following morning, and the night had gone by in their discussions.17 It is this recommendation of the “commonplace subject” that becomes determinative as Flaubert moves toward the composition of his new work. Again, in consultation with his friend Bouilhet, he took up a local contro- versy—the story of one of his father’s students, Eugène Delamare, who was an offi cier de santé (that is, not quite a doctor—he could not aff ord to continue his studies through to the terminal exam) in a town near Rouen. Delamare had married a pretty young farm girl, but she took up serial infi delity once she found herself in the oppressively boring milieu in which she had landed. Th e rough outline of Madame Bovary was all there, including even the husband’s utter blindness to his wife’s misdeeds and her eventual suicide under the pressure of debt and discovery.18 While Flaubert had always had much to say about the imbecility of the bourgeoisie, the subject matter still seemed unpromising.19 Nevertheless, he understood its potential as a corrective to the catastrophic excesses of Saint Antoine . And so, even as he continued to contemplate work on subjects such as Don Juan and Anubis, he increasingly shifted his atten- tions to this commonplace subject that he found so intolerable. It was intolerable enough, in fact, especially in light of his insistent belief that the baroque thematic excesses and antique setting of Saint Antoine were in a sense his natural subject matter, for Flaubert to conceive of his turn to the ordinary as no more than an experiment or even an exercise in self- limitation, an opportunity to improve his style by using it in the depiction of unpromising topics. Especially during the fi rst months of composition, this attitude toward his new project is distinctly self-thera- peutic, even self-punishing. As Steegmuller relates, Bouilhet urged his friend to think of his new project in just this way: the task might be less intolerable if he remembered to think of the book as an exercise. If it taught him the lessons of exactness, simplicity, and force which Bouilhet felt it would, and which he knew he needed, then later he could return

17 Enid Starkie, Flaubert: Th e Making of the Master (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson: 1967), 160–1. 18 For more on the origin of Madame Bovary, see Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert and Madame Bovary ((London: Macmillan, 1968), 218–23 ), and Starkie, Flaubert , 293–4. 19 Stephen Heath (Flaubert , 25) provides a useful gloss on just what the word “bourgeoisie” meant to Flaubert: “‘Th e bourgeois’ for Flaubert is not a simple political category, but the overall social-cultural reality, the triumphant universalisation of conclusions, stupidity at its height, spread everywhere by the mass-production of reading matter (Flaubert had a particular hatred of newspapers). Politically, therefore, there are no diff erences, everything is equally bourgeois, right down to socialism which is the very nadir of bourgeois stupidity, the exemplar of general moral besottedness.” “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 59 to the themes which he loved, and his writing on them would be all the stronger. To concern himself with the bourgeois in a novel that would take at least two years to write would be an ordeal, but he would suff er it. Since discipline was needed, he would discipline himself.20 When we keep this in mind, we are granted a revelatory perspective on some of the better-known descriptions of the narrative techniques that Flaubert was developing as he worked on Bovary. Th e famous moment in the letter of January 16, 1852, for instance, when Flaubert mentions his desire to write “a book about nothing, a book dependent upon nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style,” is brought into new light when we note that the book about nothing is conceived to be an alternative to or even the antithesis of Saint Antoine and its unanchored lyricism. Je t’ai dit que l’Education avait été un essai. Saint Antoine en est un autre. Prenant un sujet où j’étais entièrement libre comme lyrisme, mouvements, désordonne- ments, je me trouvais alors bien dans ma nature et je n’avais qu’à aller. Jamais je ne retrouverai des éperduments de style comme je m’en suis donné là pendent dix-huit grands mois. Comme je taillais avec cœur les perles de mon collier! Je n’y ai oublié qu’une chose, c’est le fi l. Seconde tentative et pis encore que la première. Maintenant j’en suis à ma troisième. Il est pourtant temps de réussir ou de se jeter par le fenêtre. Ce qui me semble beau, ce que je voudrais faire, c’est un livre sur rien, un livre sans attache extérieure, qui se tiendrait de lui-même par la force interne de son style, comme la terre sans être soutenue se tient en l’air, un livre qui n’aurait Presque pas de sujet ou du moins où le sujet serait Presque invisible, si cela se peut. Les œuvres les plus belles sont celles où il y a le moins de matière.21 We could easily imagine that the prescription here to be one predicative of a whole range of emptily repetitive works—from Huysman’s Là-Bas to Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie. But works about nothing are always ultimately

20 Steegmuller, Flaubert , 229. 21 Flaubert, Correspondance , ii. 30–1 ; trans. in Steegmuller, Flaubert , 247: “[I’ve said to you that Th e Education was an experiment.] St Antoine was another experiment. Th e subject was completely suited to my temperament, leaving me entirely unrestricted as to lyricism, movement, excesses of all kinds; all I had to do was to let myself go. Never again will I write with such recklessness and abandon as during the eighteen long months of the composition of Saint Antoine. How ardently I carved the stones for my necklace! I forgot only one thing—the thread. It was a second attempt, even less successful than the fi rst. Now I am busy on my third—and this time it is a question of succeeding or jumping out the window. | What I should like to write is a book about nothing at all, a book which would exist by virtue of the mere internal strength of its style, as the earth holds itself unsupported in the air—a book which would have almost no subject, or in which, at least, the subject would be almost imperceptible, if such a thing is possible. Th e fi nest books are those which have the least subject matter.” 60 Against the Event about something, and something diff erent in almost every case. Generally only the second part of this quotation is cited in scholarship on Flaubert, but taking note of the reference to Saint Antoine makes it clear that the “nothing” of the “book about nothing” is established against the precedent of a very particular something. “Nothing,” in this instance, and in light of Flaubert’s self-corrective stance, means here specifi cally the absence of “lyricism, movement, excesses.” Likewise style fi gures as a solution to the stringless necklace that was Saint Antoine—it is a supportive or even self-supportive structure, like that which makes it possible for the “earth to [hold] itself unsupported in air.” If the previous work was untethered momentousness—the evental parts swollen to fi ll the work as a whole— this new work would abstain altogether from the heightened moments and dramatic turns in favor of connectivity without connection, a backdrop without the foregrounded dramatic occurrence that is meant to play before it. Not surprisingly, all of the further stylistic advances that we associate with Flaubert develop during this time and via the same corrective process. For instance, in a letter to Louise Colet dated February 8, 1852, we can see some of the fi rst signs of the famous Flaubertian impersonality: J’ai le regard penché sur les mousses de moisissure de l’âme. Il y a loin de là aux fl amboiements mythologiques et théologiques de Saint Antoine. Et de même que le sujet est diff érent, j’écris dans un tout autre procédé. Je veux qu’il n’y ait pas dans mon livre un seul mouvement, ni une seule réfl exion de l’auteur. 22 It is this stylistic ascesis, this self-restraint and self-correction, against the natural path of his literary inclinations, that informs so much of his writing on psychosomatic illnesses and writing. Bovary is a rational rejoinder to the late-romantic excesses of his youth, an almost scientifi c enterprise whose sterile vulgarity has a limitless capacity to make the author ill. It often feels as if Flaubert is rendering the turn as an act parallel to sexual repression, and one that leads in turn, as repression is wont to do according to conventional wisdom, toward the emergence of hysterical symptoms: Ma jeunesse […] m’a trempé dans je ne sais quel opium d’embêtement pour le reste de mes jours. J’ai la vie en haine, le mot est parti, qu’il reste […] Je suis emmerdé de manger, de m’habiller, d’être debout, etc. […] Il y a des moments où

22 Flaubert, Correspondance, ii. 43; trans. Steegmuller, Letters 1830–1857, 155: “My gaze is fi xed on the mould of the soul—a long way from the mythological and theological fl amboyance of Saint Antoine. And, just as the subject is diff erent, I am writing in an entirely diff erent manner. I want my book to contain not a single agitated page, and not a single observation by the author.” “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 61 je crois même que j’ai tort de vouloir faire un livre raisonnable et de ne pas m’abandonner à tous les lyrismes, gueulades et excentricités philosophico-fantas- tiques qui me viendraient.23 Pierre Bourdieu, in the section of Th e Rules of Art that deploys Flaubert’s career as a “case study” illustrative of the development of the literary as a category, convincingly argues that Flaubert’s repeatedly stated desire during the composition of Bovary —to “write the mediocre well”—developed out of his negotiation with a literary realm that was split into two camps—realism and art-for-art’s sake aestheticism—to neither of which Flaubert felt complete allegiance. In fi nding a middle path between the two, Flaubert instead develops what Bourdieu labels a realist formalism out of the refusal and subsequent formalization of the mandates of both groups. 24 Th e work of writing leads Flaubert to objectify not only the positions to which he is opposed in the fi eld together with the people occupying them […] but also, through the relationships that link him with other positions, the whole space in which he is himself enclosed, and hence his own position and his own mental structures […] Flaubert objectifi es the structure of the relationship that unites him, as a writer, to the universe of positions constitutive of the fi eld of power or, what amounts to the same thing, to the universe of positions homologous with preceding ones in the literary fi eld. 25 In particular, he refuses at once the realist mandate to treat a certain subset of subjects—the vulgar, the demimondial, the bohemian—as well as the Parnassian demands to treat nothing at all, to over-privilege form to the point of transforming the work into nothing more than an ingrown language game. Stylistic developments such as the free indirect style become in Bourdieu’s rendition more than simply aspects of a new mimetic technology; rather, they are also the reifi cation of the distance that Flaubert maintained from the social and aesthetic parties whose oppositions shaped the cultural fi eld in which he dwelt: Th e distance from all positions that favours formal elaboration—it is the work on form that inscribes it into the work itself. It is the pitiless elimination of all ‘received ideas’, all the typical commonplaces of any group and all the stylistic

23 Flaubert, Correspondance , ii. 10–11; trans. in Steegmuller, Flaubert , 236: “My youth […] steeped me in an opiate of boredom, suffi cient for the remainder of my days. I hate life. Th ere: I have said it; I’ll not take it back. […] It bores me to eat, to dress, to stand on my feet, etc. […] Th ere are times when I think I am wrong to try to write a rational book at all, and in not abandoning myself to all the lyricism, violence, and philosophico-fantastic eccentricities which would come to me so easily.” 24 Bourdieu, Rules , 94, 107. 25 Bourdieu, Rules , 103–4. 62 Against the Event traits marking or betraying adherence to or support for one or another of the attested positions or position-takings; it is the methodical use of a free indirect style [ . . . that] leaves as indeterminate as possible the relationship of the narrator to the facts or persons of which the tale speaks.26 Following from Th e Rules of Art , then, we might say that Flaubert’s personal struggles with the novel that I traced above are in turn indices of wider socio-cultural developments and phenomena. Th e boredom of his friends at his reading of Saint Antoine , his persistent hankering to return to the stylized writing of that novel, Bouilhet’s suggestion that he take up the story of the Delamares, and his self-punishing asceticism in sticking with this “boring” topic, are all instantiations, according to Bourdieu’s theorization of the case, of wider changes in French society, its political atmosphere, and in particular its artistic and literary coteries and markets. But how Flaubert manages to make all of this work—how he turns this initial embrace of mediocrity, ordinariness, and uneventfulness into a legible novel—that proves to be the most revelatory and infl uential aspect of Madame Bovary.

T H E NOUVEAU AND THE GENRE

In light of this background, it is perhaps less of a wonder that Flaubert chose to begin his novel in the strange way that he did—not with Emma’s story but with Charles’s early childhood, rendered by a fi rst-personal plural narrator who sets us immediately in medias res. In my view, this opening can be seen as something of a metaphorical fi ction about the development of the work itself and in particular of Flaubert’s entanglement in the issue of genre and the time schemes implicit in them. It is almost as if, in the fi rst portion of the novel, Flaubert performatively enacts the diffi cult birth of his new form. While we might label the opening episode “Charles’s First Day of School,” a better caption, true to the submerged allegorical energy of the situation, would be “Th e Nouveau Broken by the Genre. ” Nous étions à l’étude, quand le Proviseur entra, suivi d’un nouveau habillé en bourgeois et d’un garçon de classe qui portait un grand pupitre. Ceux qui dor- maient se réveillèrent, et chacun se leva comme surpris dans son travail.27

26 Bourdieu, Rules , 111–12. 27 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 294 ; trans. Wall, Madame Bovary , 1: “We were at prep, when the Head came in, followed by a new boy not in uniform and a school-servant carrying a big desk. Th ose who had been asleep woke up, and every boy rose to his feet as though sur- “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 63 Th e nouveau arrives as a shock, awaking the narrating nous and initially pulling them up out of their desks and away from their work, most likely Latin declensions. Who exactly is this odd “we” that speaks here has been the subject of much critical speculation. As Jonathan Culler relates, Vic- tor Brombert found it to be “puzzling,” an improbable “discrepancy” in view of Flaubert’s mastery, while Culler himself describes the nous as a parodic and disruptive trick, aimed at undermining “the narrative convention whereby the observer recounts what he has experienced, adding background information where required for the edifi cation of readers.”28 Culler certainly is on the right track, but perhaps does not take this line of analysis far enough. Nous avions l’habitude, en entrant en classe, de jeter nos casquettes par terre, afi n d’avoir ensuite nos mains plus libres; il fallait, dès le seuil de la porte, les lancer sur le banc, de façon à frapper contre la muraille, en faisant beaucoup de pous- sière; c’était là le genre . Mais, soit qu’il n’eût pas remarqué cette manoeuvre ou qu’il n’eût osé s’y sou- mettre, la prière était fi nie que le nouveau tenait encore sa casquette sur ses deux genoux.29 In her Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity , Elissa Marder notes that “Flaubert himself puts both the word ‘genre’ and the word ‘nouveau ’ into italics, thereby calling attention to both words and setting up a possible relationship between them.”30 Th e nous is here cast as a defender of the genre , a word that has a double infl ection in French that it lacks in English. Not just a classifi cation of artistic form, it also refers to the social convention, the way things are done, in this case in the classroom. Th e speaking narrator, then, is the voiced representative of those most despotic bodies of social enforcement: schoolmates, ravenously awaiting an instance of spoken stupidity or infelicity of action or apparel.

prised in his labours” (p. 1). Wall’s English translation of this passage fails to capture the force of the “nouveau ” in the original. 28 Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: Th e Uses of Uncertainty, rev. edn. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1985), 111–12 . 29 Flaubert, Œuvres, i. 294; trans. Wall, Bovary, 1: “We had a custom, on coming back into the class-room, of throwing our caps on the ground, to leave our hands free; you had to fl ing them, all the way from the door, under the bench, so that they hit the wall and made lots of dust; it was the thing to do. | But, whether he had not noticed this manoeuvre or did not dare to attempt it, prayers were over now and the new boy was still holding his cap on his knees.” Wall’s translation once again does not capture the force of the italicized word, this time “genre. ” 30 Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 105 . 64 Against the Event But genre obviously also calls up another meaning more readily available to Anglophone ears. Just as Charles violates the unwritten rules of schoolboy behavior, so too does he, at the very opening of the novel, run up against the representational technologies of the novel’s form. First of all, he possesses an item of clothing whose famously absurd complexity challenges one of the central precepts of literary realism—that the things of the world are available to lucid and eff ective description. Th is item is, of course, his infamous hat, “une de ces coiff ures d’ordre composite, où l’on retrouve les éléments du bonnet à poil, du chapska, du chapeau rond, de la casquette de loutre et du bonnet de cotton” and so on.31 It is an impossible concoction of forms and materials, and the more detail we receive, the less clearly can we picture it. Nor is it Charles’s only violation of the genre. When his teacher asks him to rise and state his name, he commits another sin against social norms that strikes at the heart of the literary form of the work in which he has his existence. “Levez-vous,” reprit le professeur, “et dites-moi votre nom.” Le nouveau articula, d’une voix bredouillante, un nom inintelligible. “Répétez!” Le même bredouillement de syllables se fi t entendre, couvert par les huées de la classe. “Plus haut!” cria le maître, “plus haut!” Le nouveau , prenant alors une résolution extrême, ouvrit une bouche démesurée et lança à pleins poumons, comme pour appeler quelqu’un, ce mot: Charbovari. 32 Garbled by anxiety and his unschooled, provincial drawl, Charles’s incom- prehensible name provokes a riot of laughter and mimicry amongst his new classmates. Th e teacher resorts to asking Charles to spell his name out letter by letter and to read it back from the blackboard. His frustration at his new pupil’s improper articulation mounts, and Charles fi nishes the scene seated on “le banc de paresse,” the dunce’s bench, performing an exercise given to him as a punishment for his transgression of the genre —a

31 Flaubert, Œuvres, i. 294; trans. Wall, Bovary, 2. “It was one of those hats of the Com- posite order, in which we fi nd features of the military bear-skin, the Polish chapska, the bowler hat, the beaver and the cotton nightcap.” 32 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 294–5 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 2: —Stand up, said the teacher, and tell me your name. Th e new boy articulated, in a mumbling voice, a name that was inaudible. —Again! Th e same mumbled syllables were heard, submerged by the rumpus from the class. —Louder! shouted the master. Louder! Th e new boy, resolved to do his utmost, opened a gigantic mouth and with all his might, as if he were calling somebody, hurled out one word: Charbovari . “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 65 penance that fi ts the crime perfectly. He has to write out twenty repeti- tions of the conjugation of ridiculus sum. If the opening episode of Madame Bovary is seen as a parable of the breaking of the nouveau under the rule of genre through rote repetition, the other pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place. Th e nous that narrates this chapter is perhaps best described as a personifi ed fi gure of the typical realist third-person narrator. He is at once individualized, since the speaker is clearly a fellow student of Charles’s, but also oddly generalized, since we learn nothing at all about him. In fact, his appearance is so short lived that he disappears from the novel after this fi rst scene. Neither a discrete “I,” nor a heard but unseen “they,” it is an intermediate form, a “we,” that is both collective and invisible. It is as if Heidegger’s das Man , usually rendered in English as “the they,” has slipped from third to fi rst person and begun to speak.33 Th is nous is like the fetal form of the omniscient narrator, an embryonic embodiment of the omniscient voice that speaks but is not to be seen. Th e assumption into the realm of the impersonal that Flaubert describes in one of his most famous letters (“An author in his book must be like God in the universe”) is here restaged—but this time in reverse . 34 Th e airy god-like voice of social and aesthetic convention is pulled down into an incarnate personality, greeting novelty with contempt and stupidity with its own stupidly riotous laughter. But how is this opening scene, as I have claimed, an allegory of time, of the temporality of literary representation and social existence? Just as it tells the tale of the nouveau in confl ict with the genre , it also enacts the confl ict between two modes of temporality: interruption and repetition. Individuality is aligned with disturbance, a threat to the continuation of the status quo. Th e nouveau ’s entrance into the classroom is presented as a shock, which shakes the nous from its slumber and disrupts its school- work in order both to begin a new story and to trouble the story that is already in progress. Th ere is the way that the progress of the plot becomes

33 Heidegger’s das Man is the anyone, the everyone, the abstract embodiment of the world as a text: “Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. Th e they , which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another” ( Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 120 ). While Da-sein nominally exists in opposition to the they , in a self/other relationship with it, in the everyday mode of being of Da-sein it has surrendered itself to the they , is nothing other than an instantiation of the they , but one with the potential to become authentically itself. “As the they-self, Da-sein is dispersed in the they and must fi rst fi nd itself” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 121). In other words, “average everydayness,” for Heidegger, is the state of Da-sein’s entanglement and dispersal in the they , which is its status “initially and for the most part” (Heidegger, Being and Time , 15 ). 34 Flaubert, Letters 1830–1857 ; trans. Steegmuller, 173. 66 Against the Event entangled in the portrait of Charles’s hat, a description that threatens to knock the narrative off its tracks and into a morass of metonymy without end until it dissolves itself in the laughter of the class. Similarly disruptive is Charles’s stammering delivery of his own name—a strange revision avant la lettre of Althusserian interpellation in which the Ideological State Appartatus’s function is not so much to name you as to terrorize you into speaking that name clearly. 35 It is signifi cant that Charles’s penance takes the form of repetition—and further it seems that this disciplinary assignment has in the long run the desired eff ect. Th at is, Charles sinks under the pressure of repetition, learns to love his punishment as it were, and thus fi nds himself at the beginning of the path toward the study of medicine and a life of bourgeois normalcy and respectability. In this case, the they wins out over the individual, the temporality of repetition triumphs over the interruption, just as, according to Heidegger, it almost always does. Th ings are as they are, and the story of things as they are can proceed unimpeded. Th e event has been neutralized and the threat of the nouveau has been contained within a cliché. 36 Given all of this, it becomes easier to understand the structural purpose of the book’s opening. Perhaps Flaubert wanted to commence with a set-piece display- ing the proper operation of the genre in response to the threat of the nouveau. But, we shall see, not everyone is so compliant before the demands of the they .

EMMA’S EVERYDAY

Th e everyday, then, at least in the case of the young Charles Bovary, takes the form of a temporal eff ect of the pressure of social forms upon the individual. Setting a pattern that will prove to be a defi nitive one for the novel as a whole, Flaubert’s portrayal of the collapse of Charles’s personal-

35 In his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Appartatuses” (in Lenin and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971), 162–3), Louis Althusser describes the process of subjectivation through the image of a policeman hailing someone on the street: “I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’: or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’” 36 As Heidegger writes in Being and Time , 119: “Overnight, everything primordial is fl attened down as something long since known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes something to be manipulated. Every mystery loses its power. Th e care of averageness reveals, in turn, an essential tendency of Da-sein, which we call the leveling down of all possibilities of being.” “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 67 ity at the hands of the they is bound together with his presentation of time, in particular the repetitiveness of the everyday. As Henri Lefebvre has it in his 1968 work Everyday Life in the Modern World , everyday life, in part, “derives from the effi ciency of forms, is their result or resultant.”37 Still it is not, as Lefebvre proceeds to acknowledge, simply another name for the lived experience of some sort of all encom- passing social determinism. Where these forms operate, “residue” is also produced. In other words, there are aspects of subjectivity that are out of their reach. Product and residue, such is the defi nition of everyday life; forms simultaneously organize it and are projected upon it, but their concerted eff orts cannot reduce it; residual and irreducible, it eludes all attempts at institutionalization, it evades the grip of forms. Everyday life is, furthermore, the time of desire: extinction and rebirth. Repressive and terrorist societies cannot leave everyday life well alone but pursue it, fence it in, imprison it in its own territory. But they would have to suppress it to have done with it, and that is impossible because they need it.38 Th e question remains whether any given kernel of everyday autonomy is simply a delusive mirage devised by “repressive and terrorist societies” themselves, or whether there is ever truly a space where the long and dex- terous tentacles of force and form cannot reach? In light of the test case of Charles Bovary and his traumatic encounter with, and submission to, the genre, Emma Bovary stands as a far more complex and useful embodiment of the violent collisions of form and freedom, of the they and the individual. But, as was the case in her husband’s story, the territory up for grabs in these struggles is primarily temporal: the nature of lived time, repetition, and the arrival of or desire for the unique experience that escapes the dictatorship of the same that is the everyday. Recall the famous passage, probably composed not long before the letter about Balzac, which comes shortly after Emma and Charles’s wedding: Avant qu’elle se mariât, elle avait cru avoir de l’amour; mais le bonheur qui aurait dû résulter de cet amour n’étant pas venu, il fallait qu’elle se fût trompée, songeait- elle. Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l’on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion, et d’ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres. 39

37 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovich (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 182. 38 Lefebvre, Everyday Life , 182. 39 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 322 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 33: “Before her wedding-day, she had thought she was in love; but since she lacked the happiness that should have come from 68 Against the Event Th e passage, one of many from the novel that could serve here, is a text- book illustration of the psychopathology known as bovarisme , which Vic- tor Brombert defi nes in his 1984 essay “Flaubert and the Status of the Subject” as a “yearning for the unattainable, this confrontation of dream and reality.” As he says in that essay, “Emma’s fl aw is that she uses art to feed her dreams, instead of placing her dreams in the service of art.”40 Bovarisme is a double curse: Emma is faced both by the impossibility of “knowing” concretely what words such as these would mean in “life” and by the very need to know in the fi rst place, which renders her terminally distracted from her existence as it is. Every here-and-now is transformed into a blank page awaiting the imprinting of signifying text. While Brom- bert’s diagnosis of her condition is highly reductive, it does emphasize the fact that Emma’s malady is above all a reading disorder. Th rough her encounters with literary works, she becomes thoroughly written , and even worse, written in such a way that her only desire is to become ever more so, more thoroughly and meaningfully textualized. In this way, Emma’s predicament mirrors that of her creator—the more and better he writes, the more prefabricated he feels himself and his works to be. Just as Flau- bert is driven to terror by the call to conform to pre-existing models of literary genius and simultaneously to create works that are entirely new, a double-bind that entangles him in a sort of recursive loop of canceled out originality, his greatest character is likewise caught up in the abyssal teleology of an imperfectly—or all too perfectly—plagiarized life. But there is still something more to be said about this passage—and the specifi c way that Emma confl ates what she has read with how she lives— than what we fi nd in Brombert’s analysis, which is itself highly emblematic of the most persistent reading of her status by generations of critics right up to the present day. While Emma is certainly using literary models in order to understand her life and its disappointments, the way that she uses these models has long evaded critical attention. It is essential, in the instance of the passage above, to note exactly what discernments and distinctions Emma is making, in this case as we move from the beginning to the end of the cited passage. Th e intricate dance of temporalities on display in the fi rst sentence of the passage above—which moves from love in the past to disappointment in the present and back again toward revision

that love, she must have been mistaken, she fancied. And Emma sought to fi nd out exactly what was meant in real life by the words felicity, passion and rapture , which had seemed so fi ne on the pages of the books.” 40 Victor Brombert, “Flaubert and the Status of the Subject,” in Naomi Schor and Henry F. Majewski (eds.), Flaubert and Postmodernism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 113 . “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 69 of the past from the perspective of the present—marks a realization on Emma’s part about the failure of romantic causality, in particular the sense gleaned from books and, we would imagine, popular wisdom that love should in fact lead to happiness. While we do not fi nd her disavowing this causality per se, she does quickly abandon it in favor of another temporal arrangement. Rather than one thing leading to another, the italicized words deployed in the second sentence are drawn from a vocabulary of non-causal or extra-causal aff ect, feelings that exceed rather than faithfully fulfi ll the events or situations that provoke them. Felicity , for instance, is like happiness except with the added dimension of being lucky, unearned. Th ink of what we mean when we call an occurrence felicitous . Th e word retains the double determination of its Latin root, felix , which means both happy and lucky at once. Emma may well be a distracted woman in Flaubert’s rendering, never quite coming to terms with the basic fl aws in her literary approach to life, but, as is subtly visible in this passage, she is not the mindless, passive reader her critics have often argued that she is. But, in order to appreciate her complexity, it is fi rst worth spending some time understanding the parallels between her situation and that of Charles. In large part, Madame Bovary is the case study of a young woman learning to read or misread , a record of Emma Bovary’s navigation of the Bermuda Triangle of reading, boredom, and the epiphanic (non-)perception of the so-called event. From the fi rst, her encounters with texts are characterized by distinct category errors, mistaking fi ction and fantasy for reality and vice versa. It is not just a case of viewing her life through the lens of the romances that she reads, but also of over-attending to the reality of the texts in question. In the fi nal section of “On Some Motifs from Baudelaire,” Walter Ben- jamin describes the Faustian bargain the poet struck in order to represent his experience of the crowd, one of the fundamental experiences of modernity. Th is is the nature of the immediate experience [Erlebnis ] to which Baudelaire has given the weight of long experience [Erfahrung ]. He named the price for which the sensation of modernity could be had: the disintegration of the aura in immediate shock experience [ Chockerlebnis]. He paid dearly for consenting to this disintegration—but it is the law of his poetry. Th is poetry appears in the sky of the Second Empire as “a star without atmosphere.”41 When Erlebnis is transmuted into Erfahrung, or the subjective and inef- fable lived experience is rendered communicable, something is lost in the

41 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings , iv, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Har- vard University Press, 2003), 343 . 70 Against the Event translation. Th at something is the aura—the distance and ineff ability of the unique and unrepeatable occurrence itself. But, most importantly, the process—the slide from the ethereal vitality of the event to the aridity of the reproduction—has no origin and will never stop, for it is a structural attribute of a never-ending modernity, a permanent state of decline lacking the tipping point that would come with the catastrophe. Th e two elements, Erlebnis and Erfahrung , exist in a zero-sum economy of perpetual equilibrium. Th is economy of intertwining legible, and inexpressible modes of experience forms the understructure of Emma Bovary’s life. It is thus fi tting that, when the novel fi nally shifts, after fi ve chapters primarily rendered from Charles’s perspective, toward Emma’s story and subjectivity, Flau- bert opens the tale with a Bildungskapitel , a portrait of the reader as a young girl. And, as we shall see, from very early on Flaubert’s stylistic developments mirror and thus performatively intensify Emma’s temporal predicament, and in doing so begin to map the relationship between impersonality and the dissolution of the event. Th e sixth chapter, which immediately follows the passage above where Emma wonders about “les mots de félicité , de passion et d’ivresse ,” begins with Emma’s earliest reading experiences. As we might expect, these involve a heavy dose of exoticism, romance, and imaginary identifi cation. Elle avait lu Paul et Virginie et elle avait rêvé la maisonnette de bambous, le nègre Domingo, le chien Fidèle, mais surtout l’amitié douce de quelque bon petit frère, qui va chercher pour vous des fruits rouges dans de grands arbres plus hauts que des clochers, ou qui court pieds nus sur le sable, vous apportant un nid d’oiseau.42 Th rough a distinctively Flaubertian twist of the discourse, the text is modeled as an indirect description but is distinctly tainted by the subjectivity of the character. We overhear not only what Emma was reading as a child, but, just as importantly, how she was reading it. Th e present tense verbs that come at the end of the sentence clash with the past tense that we expect, and especially with the pluperfect tense of “avait lu” and “avait rêvé.” And, further, there is the strange introjection of the “vous” into the passage—the little brother does not so much bring the fruit and the bird’s nest to Virginie as to this you , the reading Emma. From the beginning,

42 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 323 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 27: “She had read Paul et Virginie and dreamed of the bamboo hut, Domingo the nigger, Faithful the dog, and especially of the sweet friendship of a dear little brother, who goes to fetch red fruit for you from great trees taller than steeples, or runs barefoot along the sand to bring you a bird’s nest.” “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 71 even before she has anything to escape from, reading is a mode of establishing the virtual presence of romantic scenery in an equally virtual present tense. Her convent education emerges as an indoctrination less into the dog- matic discipline of Roman Catholicism than into the nebulous sphere of spiritual mysticism. And reading, from the beginning, serves as a mode of escape from repetition and boredom. For instance, during chapel services, she distracts herself from the mass by looking at her prayer book: “Au lieu de suivre la messe, elle regardait dans son livre les vignettes pieuses bor- dées d’azur, et elle aimait la brebis malade, le Sacré-Cœur percé de fl èches aiguës, ou le pauvre Jésus, qui tombe en marchant sur sa croix.”43 H e r e , another weirdly present-tense fantasy, this time informed by the pictures in her missal, pre-empts the tedious Latin incantations of the mass. While Catholicism’s practice is in large part characterized by rote repetition, Emma redeploys its images and text to open up a present and unprecedented moment in which Jesus falls , rather than fell , on the page and before the eyes of her imagination. As she matures and her literary interests develop, Flaubert employs another technique to manifest exactly what Emma is reading for —the list. For instance, in rendering her fi rst experiences of the romance novel proper, he resorts to the inclusion of an encyclopedic inventory of romantic things and personages. Ce n’étaient qu’amours, amants, amantes, dames persécutées s’évanouissant dans des pavillons solitaires, postillons qu’on tue à tous les relais, chevaux qu’on crève à toutes les pages, forêts sombres, troubles du cœur, serments, sanglots, larmes et baisers, nacelles au clair de lune, rossignols dans les bosquets, messieurs braves comme des lions, doux comme des agneaux, vertueux comme on ne l’est pas, toujours bien mis, et qui pleurent comme des urnes.44 In other words, these books were, for Emma, only a collection of images, like photographic trading cards of sentiment and emotion. In a sense, we might even say that she translates the novels that she reads into micro- Saint Antoines as she reads. Plot progression, the development and resolu-

43 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 323 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 27: “Instead of following the mass, she would gaze in her book at the pious vignettes with their azure borders, and she loved the sick lamb, the Sacred Heart pierced by sharp arrows, or poor Jesus, sinking beneath the weight of the cross.” 44 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 324 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 28: “Th ey were about love, lovers, lov- ing, martyred maidens swooning in secluded lodges, postillions slain every other mile, horses ridden to death on every page, dark forests, aching hearts, promising, sobbing, kisses and tears, little boats by moonlight, nightingales in the grove, gentlemen brave as lions, tender as lambs, virtuous as a dream, always well dressed, and weeping pints.” 72 Against the Event tion of the tensions of the story, seem less important. Th e reading experience takes the form of a list of dynamic images at a standstill: per- secuted women swooning, dead horses and postillions, and well-dressed gentlemen. Broken out of the metonymy of cause and eff ect, Emma’s taste is for the thing or character as it is at the moment, in the here and now. When she develops a passion for historical novels, she dreams of “choses historiques […] bahuts, salle des gardes et ménestrels,” the souvenirs of history, the temporal bric-a-brac.45 She even fantasizes at one point about a bout of luxurious and well-apportioned boredom : Elle aurait voulu vivre dans quelque vieux manoir, comme ces châtelaines au long corsage, qui, sous le trèfl e des ogives, passaient leurs jours, le coude sur la pierre et le menton dans la main, à regarder venir du fond de la campagne un cavalier à plume blanche qui galope sur un cheval noir.46 It runs, perhaps, against our expectations that what Emma wants at this point more than anything is not so much the arrival of the knight in shin- ing armor, but the leaden moments of waiting for his appearance, “chin in hand,” scanning the tree line for his arrival. In Th e Pleasure of the Text , Roland Barthes defi nes readerly ennui , not as pleasure’s great antagonist but rather as a near neighbor of jouissance: “L’ennui n’est pas loin de la jouissance: il est la jouissance vue des rives du plaisir.”47 Likewise, for Emma, ennui itself is available for fantasy, as long as it is of the right sort, the stuff of novelistic fi ller, proximate to the event, to the arrival of the white knight of experience. She lusts to grasp time itself, full and palpable time, the loaded temporality of anticipation. It is a desire to live through the signifi cant, legible experience, to do the impossible: to erleben the Erfahrung . Emma, then, extends her imaginative grasp to include both the unnameable boredom of her life as a schoolgirl and wife as well as the boredom found in her novels’ romantic characters. Th is runs against our expectations, as we might anticipate the direction of Emma’s imaginative pul- sions to be unidirectional, away from ennui and toward the event. But, as Maurice Blanchot has said in Infi nite Conversation, boredom has a very

45 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 325; trans. Wall, Bovary , 28: “things historical, dreamed about coff ers, guard-rooms and minstrels.” 46 F laubert, Œuvres , i. 325 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 28–9: “She would have liked to live at some old manor-house, like those chatelaines in their long corsages, under their trefoiled Gothic arches, spending their days, elbows on the parapet and chin in hand, looking far out across the fi eld for the white-plumed rider galloping towards her on his black horse.” 47 Roland Barthes, La Plaisir du texte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973), 43 ; trans. Richard Miller as Th e Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 26: “Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.” “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 73 complicated relation to the everyday: “Boredom is the everyday become manifest: consequently, the everyday after it has lost its essential—constitutive—trait of being unperceived.”48 And, just as the everyday is for Blanchot both what we have lost and what we have far more than enough of, in Emma’s case, the complex economics of time, its scarcity and its surplus, is at the center of both her affl iction and her fantasized redemption. Flaubert repeatedly fi gures Emma’s stance on the unstable border between the written and the lived as a question of perception and percep- tibility. For her, the everyday is what disappears in the blind spot of proximity, while the fi ctional elsewhere remains tantalizingly visible. Th e temporal problem of everydayness slides into a perceptual pathology, an attack of blindness before the things of her ordinary life. For instance, immediately after returning from the Marquis’s ball at La Vaubyessard, which is perhaps the one properly “novelistic” event in Emma’s life, she is baffl ed by the objects that she fi nds back at home. La journée fut longue, le lendemain! Elle se promena dans son jardinet, passant et revenant par les mêmes allées, s’arrêtant devant les plates-bandes, devant l’espalier, devant le curé de plâtre, considérant avec ébahissement toutes ces choses d’autrefois qu’elle connaissait si bien. Comme le bal déjà lui semblait loin! Qui donc écartait, à tant de distance, le matin d’avant-hier et le soir d’aujourd’hui? Son voyage à la Vaubyessard avait fait un trou dans sa vie, à la manière de ces grandes crevasses qu’un orage, en une seule nuit, creuse quelquefois dans les montagnes.49

48 Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” in Th e Infi nite Conversation, trans. Susan Han- son (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 242 . 49 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 342 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 44: “Time went so slowly, the next day! She went for a walk in her little garden, up and down the same paths, stopping by the fl ower-beds, by the espalier, by the plaster curé , stupefi ed by the sight of all these old things she knew so well. How far away it seemed already, the ball! What force was it that sundered thus the morning of the day before yesterday from this evening? Her journey to La Vauby- essard had made a hole in her life, just like those great crevasses that a mountain storm will sometimes open up in a single night.” It is worth noting that this scene—where Emma is stunned by the presence of the mute banal objects in her garden the day after the ball— distinctly rhymes with the way that anything that would seem to be an “event” is presented in the novel. As Jacques Rancière has recently argued in his essay “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed” (Critical Inquiry , 34/2 (Winter 2008), 242) , what he calls the “real events” of the novel are almost always presented through the physical objects that accompany them: “Th ose ‘subtle innumerable embraces,’ those shells, strands of hair, and drops of water, together with sunrays, breaths of air, and grains of sand or dust whipped up by the wind make up the sensory framework of Madame Bovary. Th ey are the real events of the novel. Every time that something happens in the fi ction—notably the birth of a love—they are the real content of the event, the real cause of the emotion. Let us remember what happens when Charles fi rst falls for Emma: ‘Th e draught beneath the door blew a little dust over the fl agstones, and he watched it creep along.’ ” 74 Against the Event While the ball is a rare instance of the truly new in Emma’s life, the experience has marked her in such a way that she is baffl ed, not so much by the memory of what she has seen, but by the ordinary lawn ornaments she fi nds at home. Th e sight of the fl ower-beds and the espalier, the ridiculous plaster curé reading his breviary, are an occasion for “ébahissement,” amazement. Th e boring provincial surroundings, fi lled to the brim with bourgeois stupidity, would seem to be the norm from which she fl ees. But, paradoxically, for her they take the form of the exception. Implicitly, it would seem, the luminescent life at the ball is the new normal for Emma. Th e ball at La Vaubyessard was a shock experience, an event that “made a hole in her life, just like those great crevasses that a mountain storm will sometimes open up in a single night.” But this shock is only a negative image of another, stranger one—one that is like an inverted traumatic occurrence. Rather than invoking the forces of repression to hold the singular occurrence away from consciousness, the lightning bolt of literature become life as the occasion for blind amazement at the fi nite- ness of the event itself. What is most striking to Emma is the fact that arid continuity reasserts itself by the mysterious force of time, time that could tear away “the morning of the day before yesterday from this evening.” Th e trauma is the fact that life goes on afterward, that “le bal déjà lui semblait loin!” Th e ball at La Vaubyessard and its aftermath stands as a kind of metonymic allegory of Flaubert’s turn against the event in the work as a whole, as this “hysterical” blindness before the everyday, this repressive force of the here-and-now as a traumatic non-event, becomes an essential aspect of Flaubert’s rendering of Emma’s discontent. Later, having taken out a subscription to some Parisian women’s magazines, the force of “la vie nombreuse qui s’agitait en ce tumulte” of the metropolis pictured in these journals pushes her life at home in Tostes into the blind spot of her mind’s eye. Quant au reste du monde, il était perdu, sans place précise, et comme n’existant pas. Plus les choses, d’ailleurs, étaient voisines, plus sa pensée s’en détournait. Tout ce qui l’entourait immédiatement, campagne ennuyeuse, petits bourgeois imbéciles, médiocrité de l’existence, lui semblait une exception dans le monde, un hasard particulier où elle se trouvait prise, tandis qu’au-delà s’étendait à perte de vue l’immense pays des félicités et des passions.50

50 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 344–5 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 46: “As for the rest of the world, it was nothing, it was nowhere, it scarcely seemed to exist. Indeed the nearer things were, the more her thoughts turned away from them. Everything in her immediate surroundings, the boring countryside, the imbecile petit bourgeois, the general mediocrity of life, seemed to “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 75 We note again that Emma’s relation to her life and the texts that she reads is rendered in visual terms. Her thoughts “turn away” from the things that are closest in order to attend to the virtual Paris, city of happiness and passion, that extends as far as the eye can see. Further, this passage manifests the same paradoxical structure of the exception and the norm as the previous one. Th e conventional novelistic relationship between the event and the everyday is eff ectively reversed. Mediocrity and the banal arrive by chance, whereas the coup de foudre of the unexpected event, like the ball at La Vaubyessard, seems to be the norm from which the invisibility of the proximate everyday derives its exceptionality. In yet another passage a few pages later, Emma’s disappointment that a new invitation to another ball has failed to arrive is couched in terms of her sense that time works diff erently for other, more fortunate, people. Après l’ennui de cette déception, son cœur de nouveau resta vide, et alors la série des mêmes journées recommença. Elles allaient donc maintenant se suivre ainsi à la fi le, toujours pareilles, innombrables, et n’apportant rien! Les autres existences, si plates qu’elles fussent, avaient du moins la chance d’un événement. Une aventure amenait parfois des péripéties à l’infi ni, et le décor changeait. Mais, pour elle, rien n’arrivait, Dieu l’avait voulu! L’avenir était un corridor tout noir, et qui avait au fond sa porte bien fermée.51 Emma has begun to read her life in distinctly novelistic terms. Who else could the “autres existences” be aside from fi ctional characters? Her sense that a “single incident could bring endless twists of fate, and the scene would change” is informed by a sense of dramatic convention. Just as in the previous passage she thinks of mediocrity itself as exceptional, “a unique accident that had befallen her alone,” a romantic plot without exciting episodes and adventures would be an anomaly, a harbinger of a nouveau roman avant la lettre grounded in issueless metonymy, “bringing nothing.” By contrast, Emma views her life as illegible and even invisible, “empty,” and the future as a space only of blindness: “un corridor tout noir.” It is signifi cant, given my argument in this chapter, that in this scene the failure of Emma’s life to attain eventfulness is directly indexed be a kind of anomaly, a unique accident that had befallen her alone, while beyond, as far as the eye could see, there unfurled the immense kingdom of pleasure and passion.” 51 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 348 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 49: “After the annoyance of this disappointment, a blankness once more fi lled her heart, and now the days began their same old procession again. | One after another, along they came, always the same, never-ending, bringing nothing. Other people’s lives, however drab they might be, were at least subject to chance. A single incident could bring about endless twists of fate, and the scene would shift. But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! Th e future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.” 76 Against the Event and attributable to her literariness—as if the very thing that leads one to anticipate the signifi cant occurrence is, perversely, that which makes it impossible to attain. But even if the invitations had indeed come, we can safely guess what would have happened. Th ere’s a fi rst time for everything, but only one fi rst time. Th e balls themselves, if repeated, would eventually become clouded by regularity and repetition. Th is is the damning problem of the conjunction of reading and real life, of the anticipation of the event and its inevitable collapse into the ordinary, that structures Emma’s subjectivity in the novel. She longs to step outside of the fl ow of ready-made reiterations, the metonymic monotony of her vie en province , into the present tense full- presence of those romantic characters: the bored châtelaine in the moment before the white knight appears, the “martyred maidens swooning in secluded lodges,” and love in all its declensions and forms: “amours, amants, amantes.” But, whenever she nears the goal, the erosive power of time and the force of routine set her back in the thick morass of the everyday. Each relationship Emma enters into follows a similar pattern. Her marriage to Charles, which she had hoped might become an illustrated ency- clopedia of the symptoms of ideal love, is her fi rst case of disillusioned discontent. “Ses expansions étaient devenues régulières; il l’embrassait à de certaines heures. C’était une habitude parmi les autres, et comme un dessert prévu d’avance, après la monotonie du dîner.”52 And her aff air with Rodolphe, the closest thing she will ever fi nd to a romantic person- age outside of her novels, begins with an initial adulterous yielding that propels her momentarily into legibility and a sense of sorority with “the heroines from the books that she has read.” Th e evening after her fi rst taste of illicit lovemaking, we fi nd her before the mirror in her bedroom, saying the words that she has longed to pronounce. Elle se répétait: “J’ai un amant! un amant!” se délectant à cette idée comme à celle d’une autre puberté qui lui serait survenue. Elle allait donc posséder enfi n ces joies de l’amour, cette fi èvre du bonheur dont elle avait désespéré. Elle entrait dans quelque chose de merveilleux où tout serait passion, extase, délire ; une immensité bleuâtre l’entourait, les sommets du sentiment étincelaient sous sa pensée, et l’existence ordinaire n’apparaissait qu’au loin, tout en bas, dans l’ombre, entre les intervalles de ces hauteurs.53

52 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 331; trans. Wall, Bovary , 34: “His eagerness had turned into a routine; he embraced her at the same time every day. It was a habit like any other, a favorite pudding after the monotony of dinner.” 53 Flaubert, Œuvres, i. 439; trans. Wall, Bovary, 131: “She kept saying to herself’ ‘I have a lover! A lover!’, savouring this idea just as if a second puberty had come upon her. At last, she was to know the pleasures of love, that fever of happiness that she had despaired of. She “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 77 While the sexual experience was marked only by a cloudy sense of climactic internal transformation—“Rien autour d’eux n’avait changé; et pour elle, cependent, quelque chose était survenu de plus considérable que si les montagnes se fussent déplacées”—it seems as if access to the experience becomes available to Emma and the reader only with the pronuncia- tion of the magic words, “I have a lover! A lover!”54 Th e occurence becomes tangible only with and through repetition, by its transmediation from ineff able experience to masturbatory auto-narration, and in turn gives only the promise of future access to those aff ective qualities she has been seeking since the early days of her marriage. She is going to possess the joys of love and the fever of happiness; she is only now “entering into” something marvelous—she is not there yet. Th e atmospheric tense of the passage is the futur proche, the tense of the almost now but not yet that is the fl ip side of the not right now but not long ago of verbalized experience. And it is fi tting that, when Emma meets Rodolphe again, they make love in the same forest, with Emma “lui demandait, en le contemplant les paupières demi closes, de l’appeler encore par son nom et de répéter qu’il l’aimait.”55 Th e relationship quickly slides into pure repetitiveness, repeat performances of the same romantic gestures and acts of love, as Flaubert renders in brilliantly irregular verb tenses in paragraphs such as the following: Les rideaux jaunes, le long des fenêtres laissaient passer doucement une lourde lumière blonde. Emma tâtonnait en clignant des yeux, tandis que les gouttes de rosée suspendues à ses bandeaux faisaient comme une auréole de topazes tout autour de sa fi gure. Rodolphe, en riant, l’attirait à lui et il la prenait sur son cœur. Ensuite, elle examinait l’appartement, elle ouvrait les tiroirs des meubles, elle se peignait avec son peigne et se regardait dans le miroir à barbe. Souvent même, elle mettait entre ses dents le tuyau d’une grosse pipe qui était sur la table de nuit, parmi des citrons et des morceaux de sucre, près d’une carafe d’eau.56

was entering something marvelous where everything would be passion, ecstasy, delirium; blue immensity was all about her; the great summits of sentiment glittered in her mind’s eye, ordinary existence appeared far below in the distance, in shadow, in the gaps between these peaks.” 54 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 438 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 130: “Nothing around them had changed; and yet, for her, now, something had come to pass more awesome than if the very mountains had shifted about.” 55 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 440 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 131: “and watching him with eyes half shut, she insisted that he speak her name again, that he repeat the words of love.” 56 Flaubert, Œuvres, i. 441; trans. Wall, Bovary , 132: “Th e long yellow curtains, over the windows, softened the light to a dense golden blur. Emma would grope her way, eyes blinking, and the drops of dew hanging in her hair were just like a topaz halo around her face. Rodolphe, with a laugh, would draw her to him and press her to his heart. | She would 78 Against the Event Th is is one of Flaubert’s trademark techniques for rendering the everyday. Here, he describes a highly detailed action, too detailed to be precisely repeated again and again, in the imparfait tense, as if they were habitual actions.57 Passages such as these are challenges for translators, since they border on the absurd: were drops of dew really often hanging in Emma’s hair “like a topaz halo around her face”? Th ese magical moments of illicit love just keep happening, or so we are told, and it is no wonder that the thrill begins to fade almost immediately, especially for Rodolphe. After six months of this sort of thing, their romance has itself become like a marriage: “quand le printemps arriva, ils se trouvaient, l’un vis-à-vis de l’autre, comme deux mariés qui entretiennent tranquillement une fl amme domestique.”58 Emma’s relationship with Léon follows a similar trajectory. In this case, though, the romance emerges directly out of a shared passion for literature as well as a shared mode of reading this literature. During their fi rst meeting, when the Bovarys have just arrived in Yonville, Léon confesses to Emma that reading for him feels like a sort of hallucination that permits access to other identities and diff erent modes of time. On ne songe à rien, continuait-il, les heures passent. On se promène immobile dans des pays que l’on croit voir, et votre pensée, s’enlaçant à la fi ction, se joue dans les détails ou poursuit le contour des aventures. Elle se mêle aux person- nages; il semble que c’est vous qui palpitez sous leurs costumes.59 explore his room, opening the drawers, combing her hair with his comb and looking at herself in his shaving-mirror. Often she would pick up the big pipe from the bedside-table, where it lay beside a carafe of water, among pieces of lemon and lumps of sugar. She put the stem between her teeth.” 57 Flaubert uses this technique, writing what would seem to be a unique and highly specifi c event in the habitual and repetitive tense of the imparfait , throughout the novel. A brilliant example of this approach comes early in the novel, during Charles’s fi rst meet- ings with Emma while he is treating her father (Flaubert, Œuvres, i. 307; trans. Wall, Bovary, 17): “Elle le reconduisait toujours jusqu’à la première marche du perron. Lorsqu’on n’avait pas encore amené son cheval, elle restait là. On s’était dit adieu, on ne parlait plus; le grand air l’entourait, levant pêle-mêle les petits cheveux follets de sa nuque, ou secouant sur sa hanche les cordons de son tablier, qui se tortillaient comme des banderoles.” [She always went with him as far as the doorstep. Waiting for them to bring his horse, she stood there by him. Th ey had said goodbye, they had no more to say; the fresh air wrapped all about her, fondling the stray locks of hair at the nape of her neck, or tugging on the strings of the apron around her hips, fl uttering them like streamers.] 58 Flaubert, Œuvres, i. 447; trans. Wall, Bovary, 138: “when spring came around, they were, with each other, like a married couple tranquilly nourishing a domestic fl ame.” 59 Flaubert, Œuvres, i, 367 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 66. —Your head is empty, he continued, the hours slip away. From your chair you wander through the countries of your mind, and your thoughts, threading themselves into the fi c- tion, play about with the details or rush along the track of the plot. You melt into the characters; it seems as if your own heart is beating under their skin. “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 79 His interlocutor replies that she feels exactly the same way, and we note that this paragraph demonstrates the same intermingling of time, place, and identity that have structured Emma’s character throughout the novel. Reading, like love, creates an aperture on new modes of temporality and presents an opportunity to exchange your own identity for another. As Léon says, while entangled in the text, you become able to feel your heart beating under the clothes of another person. Emma in turn exposes that her particular reading kink leans more toward the forepleasure of plot development than toward the catharsis of the climactic fi nish: “j’adore les histoires qui se suivent toutes d’une haleine, où l’on a peur.”60 But, despite the enthusiasm of the opening scene, Emma’s aff air with Léon quickly degenerates into more of the same, another sheaf of blank pages where romantic excitement was meant to be inscribed. Ils en vinrent à parler plus souvent de choses indiff érentes à leur amour; et, dans les lettres qu’Emma lui envoyait, il était question de fl eurs, de vers, de la lune et des étoiles, ressources naïves d’une passion aff aiblie, qui essayait de s’aviver à tous les secours extérieurs. Elle se promettait continuellement, pour son prochain voyage, une félicité profonde; puis elle s’avouait ne rien sentir d’extraordinaire. Cette déception s’eff açait vite sous un espoir nouveau, et Emma revenait à lui plus enfl ammée, plus avide.61 Emma resorts to a new erotic brutality in a desperate attempt to rekindle their love and the novelty that it depends upon, but her eff orts only deepen the rising sense of emptiness between her and her lover. When Léon begins to sense the dissolution of their aff air, it arrives as a unnameable “something”: “il y avait quelque chose d’extrême, de vague et de lugubre, qui semblait à Léon se glisser entre eux, subtilement, comme pour les séparer.”62 Finally, this tragedy of recursive temporality fi nds its moment of anagnorisis with Emma’s dawning awareness of the infernal structure of desire, of the “instantaneous decay of the things in which she put her trust.”

60 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 367 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 66: “I adore stories that push on inexorably, frightening stories.” 61 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 548 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 229–30: “Th ey reached the stage of talking more often about things of no consequence to their love; and, in letters that Emma sent him, there was a great deal about fl owers, verses, the moon and the stars, naïve devices of a depleted passion, attempting to rejuvenate itself from external sources. She repeatedly promised to herself, from their next meeting, an intense happiness; then she realized that she was feeling nothing remarkable. Th is disappointment soon gave way to new hopes, and Emma came back to him more infl amed, more voracious.” 62 Flaubert, Œuvres, i. 549; trans. Wall, Bovary , 230: “Th ere was something excessive, something empty and lugubrious, which Léon felt sliding, imperceptibly, between them, as if to push them asunder.” 80 Against the Event

N’importe! Elle n’était pas heureuse, ne l’avait jamais été. D’où venait donc cette insuffi sance de la vie, cette pourriture instantanée des choses où elle s’appuyait ? […] Rien, d’ailleurs, ne valait la peine d’une recherche; tout mentait! Chaque sourire cachait un bâillement d’ennui, chaque joie une malédiction, tout plaisir son dégoût, et les meilleurs baisers ne vous laissaient sur la lèvre qu’une irréalisa- ble envie d’une volupté plus haute.63 Emma here begins to understand for herself what has been implicit in Flau- bert’s narrative economy of temporality and causality throughout the work. But there is still room for one fi nal move on Flaubert’s part, a move that reframes the entire story, allows a subtle subplot to break the surface of the novel and show itself for what it is. Shortly after the paragraph above, the voice of the narrator suddenly drops its impersonality to off er a rare morsel of commentary. “Emma vivait tout occupée des siennes, et ne s’inquiétait pas plus de l’argent qu’une archiduchesse.”64 Just as Emma has, from fi rst to last, mortgaged her future in return for a promise of present happiness, an episode of félicité that surely lies just over the horizon, the bill is about to come due for another, more literal, means of trading on the future.

SKIPPING: AN AESTHETICS OF UNEVENTFUL EXISTENCE

Emma’s desperate awareness of the abyssal temporality of desire and anticipation that underwrites her aff air with Léon speaks to a wider, though little noticed, issue in Madame Bovary. Many have argued, as does Stephen Heath, that the novel embraces a direly determinist viewpoint on human actions and agency: Flaubert is tormented by his “talent for causality”: everything is tied together, interdependent, concatenated; nothing is random, by chance, individual. So Madame Bovary is written “all in calculation”, to go “in a straight line”: the young woman taken from marriage through adultery to suicide; a study in provincial manners and the fault of fate.65

63 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 550 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 231: “No matter! She was not happy, had never been so. Where did it come from, this feeling of deprivation, this instantaneous decay of the things in which she put her trust […] Nothing, anyway, was worth that great quest; it was all lies! Every smile concealed the yawn of boredom, every joy a malediction, every satisfaction brought its nausea, and even the most perfect kisses only leave upon the lips a fantastical craving for the supreme pleasure.” 64 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 550; trans. Wall, Bovary , 231: “Th is was how Emma lived, quite immersed in her passions, and worrying herself about money no more than would a duchess.” 65 Heath, Flaubert , 90. “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 81 But, while it is tempting from the fi rst to read Flaubert’s novel as nothing more than an abyssally ironic rendition of this dystopian everyday described by Heath and so many others, the very absurdity that fl ows up out of this dystopian irony engulfs even this bleakly serious reading of the text. For there is something revolutionary in tying the strings of subjectivity and human temporality this tight—all while still going on with the writing and reading of it. In short, just as I have shown how material objects and scenery fi ll the gaps where the epiphanic is meant to arise, in terms of the work as a whole something has to take the space where the conventional dramatic architecture of the novel once stood. What Flau- bert intended was not ultimately a “book about nothing.” Rather, the drama of the text is translated from one form—the traditional narrative tension of what happens next? and what will it mean when it happens?— into an unconventional shape, a shape that will come, in the course of time, to serve as a central compositional template for modernist fi ction in general. Given Flaubert’s systematic dissolution of conventional notions of subjectivity, we might reasonably anticipate a novel populated with automatons robotically pacing about. But, of course, this is not the case. We would be wrong to consign Emma Bovary to the category of what Jonathan Culler calls Flaubert’s “empty vessels,” to treat her as a half- living cadaver just sentient enough to be put through some fi ctional mill of provincial life, adulterous desire, and social mores. Th is is because, far from being a simply “naturalistic” rendition of social and psychological determinism at work, Madame Bovary is focused just as centrally upon Emma Bovary’s resistance to the forces that would foreclose subjective agency. No “waif amid forces,” as Th eodor Dreiser labels the protagonist of his naturalist novel Sister Carrie, she is both trapped within and struggling against the currents of banality, social convention, and, most importantly, time. While it cannot be denied that the resolution of Flaubert’s novel enacts a sort of ritual of retribution against the heroine’s sexual and fi nancial sins, it is equally clear that Flaubert intends this tale to be more complex than his statements about its “morality” during his obscenity trial would suggest: “Je crois avoir fait un livre moral par son eff et, par son ensemble […] Je ne pense nullement à l’adultère, ni à l’irréligion, puisque je montre, comme tout bon auteur doit faire, la punition de l’inconduite.” 66

66 Flaubert, Correspondance , ii. 657 ; trans. Steegmuller, Letters 1830–1857 , 222: “I think I have written a book that is moral by its eff ect as a whole . . . I do not preach adultery or irreligion, since I show, as every good author should, the punishment incurred by immoral behavior.” 82 Against the Event Whatever her end, and whatever message we fi nd in that end, Emma’s mode of ensnarement in the everyday and her handling of it are ultimately a foundational evocation of the struggle of modern subjectivity to maintain itself amid a dizzying new world of mass culture and technological progress. In writing such a book, Flaubert moves us—and the literature of modernity—away from a straightforward ethics of fi c- tion, arranged along the either/or fault line of strict determinism and full autonomy, toward a more nuanced view that sees these twin poles as part of a mutually constitutive dialectical process. One never breaks free from textuality completely, just as agency and selfhood are never fi nally foreclosed, written out. Madame Bovary, also, however, it seems to me, points us toward a new conception of what characters and their authors are to do in a world in which older models of narrative movement and individual transformation have been rendered eff ectively obsolete. In this sense, Madame Bovary blurs the boundaries between literary aesthetics and what we might call the aesthetics of existence, an ethics of being in a world shaped by textual determination and the recession of the event. Th e model for my analysis of this transformation is found in the opening chapters of Michel Foucault’s Th e Use of Pleasure , the second volume of his History of Sexuality. Almost the whole of Foucault’s work before this volume was devoted to the unfl inching revelation of the work- ings of power behind every manifestation of truth, a line of analysis that culminates in the fi rst volume of the History of Sexuality , and ultimately cancels out any possibility of sexual agency. “Sex is the most speculative, the most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensation, and pleasures.”67 What seemed the most intimate and obvious avenue toward self-determination, he argues, is actually as deeply patterned by power as anything else. But when we enter into the second volume of the History of Sexuality , published eight years after the fi rst, we fi nd something very surprising. Foucault’s project, “the history of the experience of sexuality,” has been completely reframed, defl ected away from the exposure of sex as a ruse of power and toward subjective modes of negotiating with power, or, as he calls them, “arts of existence” and the “techniques of the self.” In short, the subject matter of Th e Use of Pleasure is “ethical work (travail éthique ) that one performs on oneself, not only in order to bring one’s conduct into compliance with a given rule, but to attempt to transform oneself

67 Michel Foucault, Th e Use of Pleasure , trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985), 155 . “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 83 into the ethical subject of one’s behavior.”68 Rather than disabusing the reader of the fantasy of the coherent subject, the ostensibly autonomous exception from the fi eld of power and discipline, Foucault here views the subject as an always incomplete entity, a process and a project rather than a stable presence. Th e self of Th e Use of Pleasure still lives in constant contact with social and moral norms and will assuredly never transcend them entirely, but nevertheless is able to enter into perpetual negotiation with these mores in order to carve out a place of its own within them. Th is paradigm shift in Foucault’s analysis of the relation of the self to disciplinary power urges us toward a re-evaluation of Emma Bovary’s character and actions—as well as Flaubert’s novel as a whole. Taking the concept of “aesthetics of existence” together with the novel’s evocation of gender inequality, are we able to see Emma as something other than an “empty vessel” caught in the fl ow of romantic textuality, commodity fetishism, and middle-class ennui and anxiety? In light of Foucault’s turn to the ethical register, can we redefi ne Brombert’s description of bovarisme as the erroneous and hubristic employment of “art to feed her dreams, instead of placing her dreams in the service of art” by adopting an approach that reimagines subjectivity as a process and inauthenticity itself as open to aesthetic resistance?69 As I have illustrated earlier in this chapter, regularity and repetition plague Emma from her fi rst appearance in the novel. Every excitement, every event, dwindles into routine, beginning with her marriage and spreading into each successive instance. But also from the fi rst, Emma is fi gured as a subject who is more than simply written by what she happens to read, something more than a blank page to be fi lled with text. As we see in the following passage describing Emma’s convent education, she is an artist, if a sentimental one, whose masterpiece is her own emotional education. Habituée aux aspects calmes, elle se tournait, au contraire, vers les accidentés. Elle n’aimait la mer qu’à cause de ses tempêtes, et la verdure seulement lorsqu’elle était clairsemée parmi les ruines. Il fallait qu’elle pût retirer des choses une sorte de profi t personnel; et elle rejetait comme inutile tout ce qui ne contribuait pas à la consommation immédiate de son cœur,—étant de tempérament plus sentimentale qu’artiste, cherchant des émotions et non des paysages.70

68 Foucault, Pleasure , 27. 69 Brombert, “Flaubert,” 113. 70 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 324 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 28: “Familiar with the tranquil, she inclined, instead, towards the tumultuous. She loved the sea only for the sake of tempests, the meadow only as a background for some ruined pile. From everything she had to extract some kind of personal profi t; and she discarded as useless anything that did not lend itself 84 Against the Event Verbs in this passage take the active voice—she “extracts,” she “rejects,” she “seeks,” and she “turns toward” the accidental. Moreover, the dic- tional atmosphere of the passage would be better described as economic or industrial rather than sentimentally romantic. At issue is the utility of things and feelings—whether they can be mined for Emma’s “personal profi t” and made available for “immediate consumption.” From her days as a schoolgirl onward, Emma is portrayed as an entrepreneur of the heart, a player in the new economy of reproducible emotions and communicable aff ect. Emma’s entanglement in, and escape from, the everyday are shadowed by active-mood verbs throughout the work. But it is a complex and paradoxical manifestation of activity, a struggle to encounter the unforeseen event that by nature transcends expectation itself. Time and again, we encounter instances when Emma wills herself to be unconscious of what is to come, self-consciously disengaging her awareness of the inevitable or what might be anticipated. During her fi rst dalliance with Léon, for instance, we overhear her purposefully looking away from what is right before her eyes: Quant à Emma, elle ne s’interrogea point pour savoir si elle l’aimait. L’amour, croyait-elle, devait arriver tout à coup, avec de grands éclats et des fulgurations,— ouragan des cieux qui tombe sur la vie, la bouleverse, arrache les volontés comme des feuilles et emporte à l’abîme le cœur entier.71 Meteorological metaphors like these appear in many of the passages describing Emma’s eff orts to play games with time, and for good reason. For an event to be an event, it must be unforeseen, come “out of the blue,” like a sudden summer thunderstorm. Placed in the paradoxical situation of willing something new to happen, which, if willed, would not be new in the sense that she desires, she has recourse to such practices as willed forgetting and the intentional suppression of forethought. As we see here, it is not only the contents of romantic literature that make Emma what she is. Like a novel-writer, she practices the methods of deferral and misdirec- tion to build up suspense in her own real life. Th e formal tricks of the novelist’s trade are thus translated into a set of “techniques of the self,” an “aesthetics of existence.” Consider the following passage in which Emma attempts to manage her dawning love of Léon. to her heart’s immediate satisfaction—endowed with a temperament more sentimental than artistic, preferring emotions rather than landscapes.” 71 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 382 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 80: “As for Emma, she never once ques- tioned herself to see if she loved him. Love, she believed, had to come suddenly, with a great clap of thunder and a lightning fl ash, a tempest from heaven that falls upon your life, like a devastation, scatters your ideals and hurls your very soul into the abyss.” “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 85

Mais plus Emma s’apercevait de son amour, plus elle le refoulait, afi n qu’il ne parût pas, et pour le diminuer. Elle aurait voulu que Léon s’en doutât; et elle imaginait des hasards, des catastrophes qui l’eussent facilité. Ce qui la retenait, sans doute, c’était la paresse ou l’épouvante, et la pudeur aussi. Elle songeait qu’elle l’avait repoussé trop loin, qu’il n’était plus temps, que tout était perdu. Puis l’orgueil, la joie de se dire: “Je suis vertueuse,” et de se regarder dans la glace en prenant des poses résignées, la consolait un peu du sacrifi ce qu’elle croyait faire.72 Here Emma plays a fort/da game with her love, suppressing the rising tide of love in order to prolong the emotion. Th e ambiguity of the situation resembles that described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle , when he discusses the infant’s game of throwing away an object only to experience its dramatic rediscovery. In accordance with Freud’s observations, it may be said that her departure had to be enacted as a necessary preliminary to her joyful return, and that in the latter lay the true purpose of the game. But against this we must consider the fact that the fi rst act, that of departure, was staged as a game in itself and far more frequently than the episode in its entirety, with its pleasurable ending. Freud’s conclusion is that the performance of departure, ostensibly and logically only a “preliminary” step on the way to the pleasure of discovery itself, might in fact be the raison d’être of the game as a whole. Th is peculiar phenomenon stands as a strange and signifi cant twist in the “pleasure principle.” What is sought in the game of fort without da is “a yield of pleasure of another sort but none the less a direct one.” 73 In fact, as Freud coyly reports, in the episode he is describing, he never actually observed a da to match the fort : “As a rule one only witnessed its fi rst act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act.”74 Likewise, with Emma, we are led to wonder whether what is really at stake in Emma’s aff air with Léon is her love for him or the pleasure of its suppression and deferral, the thrill of encountering the hazards and catas-

72 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 389 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 86: “But the more Emma became aware of her love, the more she suppressed it, to keep it from showing and to diminish it. She would have liked Léon to guess at it; and she imagined various coincidences and catastrophes that might have hastened discovery. Doubtless it was inertia or terror that held her back, and modesty as well. She fancied that she had pushed him too far away, that the moment was gone, that all was lost. But the pride, the joy of saying to herself, ‘I am virtuous,’ and of looking at herself in the mirror striking poses of resignation, consoled her somewhat for the sacrifi ce she believed she was making.” 73 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 16. 74 Freud, Pleasure , 14. 86 Against the Event trophes that line the path toward its fulfi llment. Th e trick, it seems, is to complicate the story and thus to prolong it without alienating her leading man. Like the novel form itself, Emma’s way of being-in-the-world is a testament to the centrality of the middle parts, the journey rather than the destination. Her libido is staked on—or, she stakes her libido on —the prolongation of foreplay rather than the climactic fi nish. And, in large part, these techniques are what render her so threatening to the social order as well as to the architecture of literary convention. In this vein, we might think of the passage from Th ree Essays on the Th eory of Sexuality in which Freud discusses the “danger” of forepleasure. Th e attainment of the normal sexual aim can clearly be endangered by the mecha- nism in which fore-pleasure is involved. Th is danger arises if at any point in the preparatory sexual processes the fore-pleasure turns out to be too great and the element of tension too small. Th e motive for proceeding further with the sexual process then disappears, the whole path is cut short, and the preparatory act in question takes the place of the normal sexual aim.75 What would seem to be a fairly innocuous act—at least during Freud’s and Flaubert’s time—is actually a grave challenge to the status quo. Th e hazard does not have as much to do with the act itself as with the possibility that forepleasure will prove a seductive detour, distracting enough to derail coitus—and, with it, insemination and reproduction. To open the possibility of a non-teleological pleasure, whether in Flaubert’s text or Freud’s, threatens the normal order of things by conjuring the specter of a deferral without end, a slowdown or stoppage in the cycles of reproduction, both biological and ideological. Not all of Emma’s tactics in her contest with time are directed toward decelerative lingering, however. In Th e Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes outlines an approach to the novel that speeds up the reader’s movement through the text rather than slowing it down: we boldly skip (no one is watching) descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversations; doing so, we resemble a spectator in a nightclub who climbs on to the stage and speeds up the dancer’s striptease, tearing off her clothing, but in the same order, that is: on the one hand respecting and on the other hastening the episodes of the ritual.76 In a sense, and in Barthes’s own terminology, the reader who skips translates jouissance out of plaisir , and vice versa, through her own textual

75 Sigmund Freud, Th ree Essays on the Th eory of Sexuality , trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 134 . 76 Barthes, Pleasure , 10–11. “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 87 practices. For Barthes, this skipping is not simply a degraded form of reading, but rather one of the primary sites and sources of textual enjoyment: “what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fi ne surface: I read, I skip, I look up, I dip in again.” 77 And it is potentially a ruse against power, breaking against the active inscription/passive reception binary so central to the smooth functioning of the textually mediated modern world. As Michel de Certeau describes the usual state of aff airs: “Th e social and technical functioning of contemporary culture hierarchizes these two activities. To write is to produce the text: to read is to receive it from someone else without putting one’s own mark on it, without remaking it.” 78 Th e abrasive reading practices described by Barthes, as well as by de Certeau elsewhere in Th e Practice of Everyday Life, are guer- rilla reworkings from below the conventional hierarchies of reading and writing. Th is sort of “skipping,” on the part of both the characters and the author himself, is of central importance in Madame Bovary. Emma is a persistent practitioner of this Barthesian maneuver, both in her reading and in her “real life.” In the passage that I examined above from her fi rst conversation with Léon, we note that one of the intimacies that they share is a mutual conception of reading as an opportunity to play games with time. As Léon puts it: On ne songe à rien, continuait-il, les heures passent. On se promène immobile dans des pays que l’on croit voir, et votre pensée, s’enlaçant à la fi ction, se joue dans les détails ou poursuit le contour des aventures. Elle se mêle aux person- nages; il semble que c’est vous qui palpitez sous leurs costumes.79 Emma answers, love-struck, “C’est vrai! c’est vrai!” For she too knows the joy of rushing through the plot to get to the good parts, what it is to get gloriously bogged down in the details, and above all, how to drown out the metronomic passage of ordinary time with the reveries of a romantic novel. And later, when Emma takes up the study of “serious” works for self-improvement, she fl utters from one book to another: “Mais il en était

77 Barthes, Pleasure , 11–12. 78 Michel de Certeau, Th e Practice of Everyday Life, i, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 169 . 79 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 367 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 66: “—Your head is empty, he continued, the hours slip away. From your chair you wander through the countries of your mind, and your thoughts, threading themselves into the fi ction, play about with the details or rush along the track of the plot. You melt into the characters; it seems as if your own heart is beating under their skin.” 88 Against the Event de ses lectures comme de ses tapisseries, qui, toutes commencées encom- braient son armoire; elle les prenait, les quittait, passait à d’autres.”80 When it comes to skipping in life itself, it is vital to note how Flaubert’s own writing of the novel mirrors the temporal practices of the characters. Often it prepackages all the leaping ahead and fl oundering in the middle of things that its reader would be tempted to perform. Some of the most famous passages in the work are examples of this phenomenon. Th e comices agricoles section, perhaps the birthplace of literary montage, oscillates between the tedious bureaucratese of a governmental representative’s speech and the feverish narrative of Rodolphe’s silver-tongued seduction of Emma. Th e rapid shifts between the two plots serve as both enactments of skipping and provocations for the reader to skip at the same time. Even better, there is the scene cited above in which Emma “abandons herself” to Rodolphe for the fi rst time, and in which the narrative eye jumps from the seduction scene straight to Emma’s post-coital reveries and fi nally, within the same paragraph, to the image of Rodolphe, “le cigare aux dents, raccommodait avec son canif une des deux brides cassées.”81 Or, at the end of the fi rst section of the novel, there is the arrival of Emma’s pregnancy out of nowhere—or, to be more literal, out of the anecdote about her burning Charles’s fi rst wife’s wedding corsage: Elle le regarda brûler. Les petites baies de carton éclataient, les fi ls d’archal se tordaient, le galon se fondait; et les corolles de papier, racornies, se balançant le long de la plaque comme des papillons noirs, enfi n s’envolèrent par la cheminée. Quand on partit de Tostes, au mois de mars, madame Bovary était enceinte.82 In these examples, Flaubert is playing a complex game with the rules and conventions of narrative temporality—a game not unlike Emma’s own. Th e unanticipated arrival of the new is rendered all too directly, in a manner that both mirrors the subjective temporalities of the characters and defamiliarizes by hyperbolic intensifi cation conventional models of fi c- tional progression. For instance, early in Emma’s career as a provincial wife, we fi nd a long passage detailing the intimate and ordinary non-

80 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 405 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 100: “But her reading went the same way as her needlework, cluttering the cupboard, half fi nished; she picked it up, put it down, went on to something else.” 81 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 438; trans. Wall, Bovary , 149: “Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, was mending one of the two broken reins with his little knife.” 82 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 353; trans. Wall, Bovary , 53: “She watched it burning. Th e little imitation berries crackled, the wires twisted, the braid melted; and the paper petals, wither- ing away, hovering in the fi replace like black butterfl ies, fi nally vanished up the chimney. | When they set out from Tostes, one day in March, Madame Bovary was pregnant.” “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 89 events of her existence, such as walking the dog and listening to the sound of the wind blowing in from the sea: Dans l’avenue, un jour vert rabattu par le feuillage éclairait la mousse rase qui craquait doucement sous ses pieds. Le soleil se couchait; le ciel était rouge entre les branches, et les troncs pareils des arbres plantés en ligne droite semblaient une colonnade brune se détachant sur un fond d’or; une peur la prenait, elle appelait Djali, s’en retournait vite à Tostes par la grande route, s’aff aissait dans un fauteuil, et de toute la soirée ne parlait pas. Mais, vers la fi n de septembre, quelque chose d’extraordinaire tomba dans sa vie: elle fut invitée à la Vaubyessard, chez le marquis d’Andervilliers.83 After paragraphs of baroquely virtuoso prose, the chain of description is broken by a non-sequitur. Out of nowhere comes “something extraordinary,” just as the extraordinary is wont to come, at least in terms of novelistic convention. Th e text, in its feigned awkwardness of transition and narrative fl ow, performatively evokes the very temporality of the event upon which Emma’s life is staked. Scenes like this call to mind Barthes’s analysis of the uncanniness of Flaubert’s work in Th e Pleasure of the Text : Flaubert: a way of cutting, of perforating discourse without rendering it meaningless […] narrativity is dismantled yet the story is still readable: never have the two edges of the seam been clearer and more tenuous, never has the pleasure been better off ered to the reader—if he at least appreciates controlled discontinuities, faked conformities, and indirect destructions. In addition to the success that can be attributed to an author, there is also, here, a pleasure of performance: the feat is to sustain the mimesis of language (language imitating itself), the source of immense pleasures, in a fashion so radically ambiguous (ambiguous to the root) that the text never succumbs to the good conscience (and bad faith) of parody (of castrating laughter, of “the comical that makes us laugh”).84 Just as Emma games with life by attempting to carve signifi cance out of passing time in spite of the waning of every auratic experience, Flaubert himself plays a kind of chess match with the novel form. Both character and author perforate the chain of reproduction and determination—even if this perforation is bound to close yet again in the passage of time.

83 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 332 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 35: “In the avenue, a dim green light fi ltered down through the leaves on to the smooth moss that crackled softly beneath her feet. Th e sun was setting; the sky was red between the branches, and the row of tree-trunks looked just like a brown colonnade against a golden background; seized with fear, she called Djali, hurried back to Tostes along the main road, slumped into an armchair, and spoke not a word all evening. | But, near the end of September, something extraordinary happened to her: she was invited to La Vaubyessard, home of the Marquis d’Andervilliers.” 84 Barthes, Pleasure , 8–9. 90 Against the Event Emma’s cottage industry of emotion-mining and sentiment-refi ning will eventually collapse, overburdened by debt. She has been living on credit, riding a shock-market bubble . Late in the work, for instance, when she is waiting to elope with Rodolophe, her attention is displaced from the present state of aff airs toward the promise of future happiness: “Mais elle n’y prenait garde, au contraire; elle vivait comme perdue dans la dégusta- tion anticipée de son bonheur prochain.”85 In the end, Emma’s economics of fantasy and novelty fail under the pressure of fi nancial and juridical bookkeeping. Th e everyday that has been the dialectical oscillation of boredom and excitement, time borrowed and time spent, reduces down, brilliantly, into the empty time of a single day—the twenty-fours hours that Emma has, by law, to pay her debts. Th e news comes as a court-order, and though Emma tries to “skip” once more, she fi nds that this document, unlike that of her life, prohibits a “writerly” reading in Barthes’s sense. En rentrant chez elle, Félicité lui montra derrière la pendule un papier gris. Elle lut: “En vertu de la grosse, en forme exécutoire d’un jugement …” Quel jugement? La veille, en eff et, on avait apporté un autre papier qu’elle ne connaissait pas; aussi fut-elle stupéfaite de ces mots: “Commandement, de par le roi, la loi et justice, à madame Bovary …” Alors, sautant plusieurs lignes, elle aperçut: “Dans vingt-quatre heures pour tout délai.”—Quoi donc? “Payer la somme totale de huit mille francs.” Et même, il y avait plus bas: “Elle y sera contrainte par toute voie de droit, et notamment par la saisie exécutoire de ses meubles et eff ets.” 86 Th is passage, which inaugurates the novel’s endgame, crystallizes many of its themes. Th e “judgment” against Emma arrives on paper, a fi nal text for her to read. She skips through the document, jumping from line to line, until she reaches the end, a fi nal prescription that precludes, in the name of the law and by order of the king, any further “delay.” Th e twenty-four hours given for the fulfi llment of the writ replace the malleable, subjective

85 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 469; trans. Wall, Bovary , 157: “But she was paying no attention to them, on the contrary; she lived as though lost in the anticipated relish of her approaching happiness.” 86 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 558 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 238: “When she got home, Félicité showed her a grey sheet of paper from behind the clock. She read: | By virtue of the order consequent upon the judgment … What judgment? Th e previous day, in fact, they had delivered another document which she had not seen; consequently she was astounded by the words: | By Order of the King, in the name of the law, to Madame Bovary . . . | Skipping several lines, she read: | Within twenty-four hours, without fail … What? To pay the sum of eight thousand francs. And further down the page: She will be constrained thereto by every form of law, and notably by the seizure of furniture and eff ects .” “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 91 temporality of the imagination with the standardized clocktime of bureaucratic legalism. Emma’s everyday, the everyday that escapes and exceeds itself, is buried under the fl at durations of social functionality. Th e end of the run is true to its start; from fi rst to last Emma’s battle with cultural restraint has been fought—and is about to be lost—on the fi eld of time itself. When she confronts her creditor, Lheureux, about the notice, his response mimics the same logic as that of the law: “Pensiez-vous, ma petite dame, que j’allais, jusqu’à la consummation des siècles, être votre fournisseur et banquier pour l’amour de Dieu? Il faut bien que je rentre dans mes déboursés, soyons justes!”87 Just as the novel itself must eventually come to an end, the irrational exuberance of Emma’s economy of experience cannot be sustained “until the very end of time.” We note that Lheureux’s words—the words of “Mr Happy,” the Doctor Feelgood of another time and place—could just as easily be those of a drug-dealer cutting off his supply to an overdrawn addict. And, while Flaubert’s novel eventually comes to an end, and with it Emma’s credit account with the bank of experience, can we really believe that “justice” has sealed all the holes, all the rents in the fabric of time, by bringing our anti-heroine back into the fold—or better, the fl o w ? Can we really accept, as does Roy Por- ter, that Madame Bovary’s hold over its readers is grounded in the fact that “It still leads its reader toward an end […] Although Madame Bovary submits its reader throughout to the various regimes of pleasure, it comes down in the end on the side of the currently despised phallocentric closure”?88 While in a sense we have to accept Porter’s argument—despite her best eff orts, Emma never quite generates the event that she desires, and in fact dies trying—Flaubert’s emphasis on the tactics and strategies that Emma deploys and the desperate intensity of her eff orts should color our understanding of the work as a whole. Th e diff erence between seeing Emma as a “waif amid forces” and a hubris-tinged artist of her own life parallels the diff erence between uneventful and anti-evental narrative that I describe in Chapter 1 of this book. Flaubert’s deformation of the romantic impulse still remaining at the heart of realism results not just in the ironic undercutting of the evental logic of the form, but rather, and perhaps more importantly, in a vivid portrayal of the force of this logic’s mandates—in

87 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 558 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 238–9: “Did you think, my little lady, that I was going to be your supplier and your banker until the very end of time, just for the love of God? I do have to recover my outgoings, you must admit!” 88 Roy Porter, “Madame Bovary and the Question of Pleasure,” in Naomi Schor and Henry F. Majewski (eds.), Flaubert and Postmodernism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 135 . 92 Against the Event this case, the force of the mandates on both the author and his protagonist. Madame Bovary enacts the failure of a form that it at once rejects and cannot quite shake. Further, when viewed against the backdrop of a steadily advancing tide of uneventful progress, especially as materialized in the person of Homais, we can begin to see the relationship of this literary and existential phenomenon to wider historical and political developments.

HOMAIS’S CROSS OF HONOR: FLAUBERT AND HISTORY

Th e conclusion of Madame Bovary renders very clear what is implicit from the start of the novel. Th e individual character’s struggle (in Emma’s case, struggle to the death) with time is one that is fought on two fronts simultaneously: that of the event’s inherent structural tendency to collapse into precedent and, at the same time, the social pressures that police access to eventfulness, embodied most concretely in the court order demanding Emma pay her debts. In a sense, the situation seems more than slightly paradoxical. Th ere are no events, and society makes very sure your access to them is limited. Th is crossing of the social and the ontological when it comes to the event will play an even more central role in some of Flaubert’s later works, in particular L’Éducation sentimentale , so a short detour before discussing Emma’s end is in order. Much of the novel is devoted to the (abortive, platonic) love aff air of Frédéric Moreau and Madame Arnoux, a romance marked by an idealism beyond even that of Madame Bovary, and which is dominated by a perverse logic of fetishistic substitution and erotic deferral that ultimately transforms the relationship into elaborate and repeated cycles of neurotic over-sensitivity. It is an aff air tinged with a mixed set of emotional responses to the promise (or threat) of the fi nalities of physical passion, where lust meets with a pre-emptive sense of disgust, a sense that the ideal nature of their platonic passion will be spoiled by the vulgarities of the sexual act. But, despite the preoccupation of the narrative with Frédéric’s ambivalent passion for Madame Arnoux, L’Éducation sentimentale is above all else a historical novel , albeit a historical novel of a very particular type. From fi rst to last it calls into question the relation between the seemingly everyday occurrences of the individual, historically insignifi cant life—occurrences such as, of course, falling in love—and the macro-historical events that mark cultural shifts and political transformation. While Madame Bovary might be said to develop an ethico-political portrait of an era out of a narrative situation touched only obliquely by history, L’Éducation “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 93 sentimentale moves in the opposite direction. Th e characters live in close proximity to large-scale social events, but the main impulse of the novel is to expose the distance that arises between the subject and event despite its nearness. And this distance is marked by several of the most familiar structural attributes of everydayness: boredom, distraction, and avoidance. A scene deeply emblematic of this, compressed as it is between everyday life and romance and political catastrophe, is found near the end of the second section of the novel, just as revolutionary fervor is breaking out in Paris. Frédéric waits on a street corner to meet Madame Arnoux for what might be an adulterous assignation and is feeling a bit guilty for avoiding a protest march that his friends want him to attend. A huge crowd of demonstrators appears, and he hides himself on a side street so that his friends will not see him and pull him away from his appointment with Madame Arnoux. Th e problem is, she does not come. Consequently, he wanders, keeping one eye on the mass of demonstrators, one eye out for his lover. And yet, despite these various distractions, both personal and public, Frédéric still quickly becomes bored. Waiting, here, is composed of a mixture of anticipation and frustrated indiff erence. First, we overhear him imagining Madame Arnoux’s journey to the appointed corner: “‘Ah! c’est maintenant!’ se dit-il, ‘elle sort de sa maison, elle approche’; et, une minute après: ‘Elle aurait eu le temps de venir.’ Jusqu’à trois heures, il tâcha de se calmer. ‘Non, elle n’est pas en retard; un peu de patience !’ ”89 Despite the fact that the 1848 Revolution is fi nding its Jetztzeit just down the street, he attempts to distract himself from the laborious passage of time by examining the goods for sale in the shops on the street. Et, par désoeuvrement, il examinait les rares boutiques: un libraire, un sellier, un magasin de deuil. Bientôt il connut tous les noms des ouvrages, tous les harnais, toutes les étoff es. Les marchands, à force de le voir passer et repasser continuellement, furent étonnés d’abord, puis eff rayés, et ils fermèrent leur devanture. Sans doute, elle avait un empêchement, et elle en souff rait aussi. Mais quelle joie tout à l’heure!—Car elle allait venir, cela était certain! Elle me l’a bien promis! Cependant, une angoisse intolérable le gagnait.

89 Flaubert, Œuvres , ii. 309; trans. Douglas Parmée as A Sentimental Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 302 : “‘Ah! It’s time!’ he said to himself. ‘She’ll be leaving her house and on her way here’; and a few minutes later: ‘She’d have had time to be here by now.’ Until three o’clock he endeavoured to stay calm. ‘No, she’s not late. Just be patient.’” 94 Against the Event

Par un mouvement absurde, il rentra dans l’hôtel, comme si elle avait pu s’y trouver. A l’instant même, elle arrivait peut-être dans la rue. Il s’y jeta. Personne! Et il se remit à battre le trottoir. Il considérait les fentes des pavés, la gueule des gouttières, les candélabres, les numéros au-dessus des portes. Les objets les plus minimes devenaient pour lui des compagnons, ou plutôt des spectateurs ironiques; et les façades régulières des maisons lui semblaient impitoyables. Il souff rait du froid aux pieds. Il se sentait dissoudre d’accablement. La répercussion de ses pas lui secouait la cervelle.90 Once he has expended this store of visual distractions, he turns to reciting poetry to himself and doing math problems in his head. Th e text lurches into parody as Frédéric seeks clues to her arrival in the “nombre des pièces de monnaie prises au hasard dans sa main, de la physionomie des passants, de la couleur des chevaux, il tirait des présages; et, quand l’augure était contraire, il s’eff orçait de ne pas y croire.”91 It is an experience familiar to all of us, that of visually consuming every inch of our locality when we are stuck waiting for someone’s arrival. But it is the epitome of Flaubert’s satiric audacity to have his character playing these games with time when, right around the corner, the political shape of France, and perhaps the world as a whole, is threatening to come undone. Th e techniques of self- distraction while waiting have strange subsidiary eff ects, and seem to spread from augury by counting coins to a blurring overdetermination of the spectacles occurring nearby. When Frédéric fi nally does display some interest in the mob of protestors, he does so only in order to search for a sign of Madame Arnoux.

90 Flaubert, Œuvres , ii. 309–10 ; trans. Parmée, Education , 302–3: “With nothing better to do, he kept looking into the few shops on the street: a bookshop, a saddler’s, a mourning outfi tters. Soon he was familiar with every book, every sort of harness and every kind of material. Seeing him going up and down in front of their establishments, the shopkeepers were at fi rst surprised and then so frightened that they put up their shut- ters. | No doubt something had held her up and she was feeling as miserable as he was! But it wouldn’t be long before they’d both be so happy! Because she was bound to come, that was sure! ‘After all, she gave me her word!’ But an unbearable feeling of distress was creeping over him. | On an absurd impulse, he went into the lodging house, as if thinking she might be there. At that very moment she could be coming down the street. He dashed out. Not a soul! Once again he began to pound his beat. | He kept gazing at the cracks between the paving stones, the lamp-posts, the spouts of the drain-pipes, the numbers over the doors. Th e most trivial objects were becoming his companions or, rather, mocking bystanders; the dull uniformity of the house-fronts seemed merciless. He could feel himself crumbling into hopelessness. Th e echo of his footsteps was ham- mering into his brain.” 91 Flaubert, Œuvres, ii. 310; trans. Parmée, Education, 303: “the random number of coins in his hand, in the expressions on the faces of the passers-by, in the colours of the horses; when the result was unfavourable, he tried to ignore it.” “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 95

Puis il se planta au coin de la rue de la Ferme et de la rue Tronchet, de manière à voir simultanément dans toutes les deux. Au fond de la perspective, sur le boulevard, des masses confuses glissaient. Il distinguait parfois l’aigrette d’un dragon, un chapeau de femme; et il tendait ses prunelles pour la reconnaître.92 Political insurrection becomes simply another spectacle, another hazy distraction, on Frédéric’s path toward what will never arrive—an erotic coupling with Madame Arnoux. Th e next day, this theme of violence as entertainment returns as he awakens to gunfi re and a battle upon the half-built barricades in the boulevards: “Frédéric, pris entre deux masses profondes, ne bougeait pas, fasciné d’ailleurs et s’amusant extrêmement. Les blessés qui tombaient, les morts étendus n’avaient pas l’air de vrais blessés, de vrais morts. Il lui semblait assister à un spectacle.”93 But Frédéric’s sense that the evental nature of the revolutionary pro- ceedings has somehow receded into a “spectacle,” a staged display, is not simply an idiosyncratic reaction on his part to the situation. Rather, what is true for Frédéric as an individual is just as valid, if in a slightly diff erent register, for the public as a whole, which consumes the occurrences as an entertaining diversion rather than a world-historical event. Comme les aff aires étaient suspendues, l’inquiétude et la badauderie poussaient tout le monde hors de chez soi. Le négligé des costumes atténuait la diff érence des rangs sociaux, la haine se cachait, les espérances s’étalaient, la foule était pleine de douceur. L’orgueil d’un droit conquis éclatait sur les visages. On avait une gaieté de carnaval, des allures de bivac; rien ne fut amusant comme l’aspect de Paris, les premiers jours.94 “As business was suspended”—rather than temporal plenitude, Flaubert shows us empty time, time off rather than full time. Th e entire revolutionary sequence, from Frédéric’s distracted anticipation of Madame

92 Flaubert, Œuvres , ii. 310 ; trans. Parmée, Education , 303: “Th en he resumed his post on the corner of the rue de la Ferme and the rue Tronchet in order to be able to keep an eye on both at the same time. Looking down the street, he could see massed groups of people lurching confusedly to and fro on the boulevard. From time to time he picked out the plume of a dragoon or a woman’s hat; he strained his eyes to recognize her.” 93 Flaubert, Œuvres, ii. 318; trans. Parmée, Education, 312: “Caught between two solid blocks of people, Frédéric was unable to move; indeed, he was fascinated and enjoying himself enormously. Th e wounded falling all around him and the dead lying on the ground didn’t seem really dead or wounded. It was like being at a show.” 94 Flaubert, Œuvres, ii. 325; trans. Parmée, Education , 319: “Since all business was temporarily suspended, idle curiosity and nervousness drove people out into the streets. Th eir casual dress tended to minimize class diff erences; any hatred was kept in the background and hope to the fore; the crowd was all sweetness and light. Faces glowed with pride at having achieved hard-won rights. Th ere was a festive mood of carnival and camp-fi res; it was fun living in Paris in those early days.” 96 Against the Event Arnoux’s arrival through to the images of the amused crowds through the barricaded streets, seems bent on leveling out the aff ectual topography of the novel and the life that it represents. And in doing so, it further serves as a precursor of the infamous fi nal sequence of the novel, in which any “value” accumulated in the course of the novel, whether on the part of the characters or of the reader, is held up for cancellation. While Madame Bovary ’s trajectory moves as if at gun- point toward the cathartic imposition of “justice,” which some critics argue renders the moral atmosphere of the novel ambiguous, L’Éducation sentimentale ends on such a fl at note of bathos and ennui that the entire work is retroactively blanketed with a sense of issueless impotence. In the fi nal scene of the novel, Frédéric and Deslauriers, long after their adventures in Paris are over, meet up a fi nal time and discuss their personal and career failures. Both have been abandoned by the woman that they loved, and both have been unable to maintain any sort of career. In the closing paragraphs of the work, the two friends fi nally revisit in their conversation an important event of their adolescence: their abortive attempt to patronize a brothel. Frédéric présenta le [bouquet], comme un amoureux à sa fi ancée. Mais la chaleur qu’il faisait, l’appréhension de l’inconnu, une espèce de remords, et jusqu’au plaisir de voir, d’un seul coup d’œil, tant de femmes à sa disposition, l’émurent telle- ment, qu’il devint très pâle et restait sans avancer, sans rien dire. Toutes riaient, joyeuses de son embarras; croyant qu’on s’en moquait, il s’enfuit; et, comme Frédéric avait l’argent, Deslauriers fut bien obligé de le suivre. On les vit sortir. Cela fi t une histoire, qui n’était pas oubliée trois ans après. Ils se la contèrent prolixement, chacun complétant les souvenirs de l’autre; et, quand ils eurent fi ni: —C’est là ce que nous avons eu de meilleur! dit Frédéric. —Oui, peut-être bien? C’est là ce que nous avons eu de meilleur! dit Deslauriers.95

95 Flaubert, Œuvres , ii. 456–7; trans. Parmée, Education , 463–4: “Frédéric held his [bouquet] out like a sweetheart off ering fl owers to his bride-to-be. But the heat, fear of the unknown, a vague feeling of guilt, and even the thrill of seeing, at one glance, so many women at his disposal, upset him so much that he went very pale and stood rooted to the spot, unable to speak. Th e women were all laughing, amused by his embarrassment; thinking they were making fun of him, he turned tail and fl ed; and since he was holding the money, Deslauriers was obliged to follow him. | Th ey were seen leaving the house; the scandal this aroused still lingered on three years later. | Th ey told each other the story at great length, each fi lling in the details left out by the other, and when they’d reached the end: | ‘Ah, that was our best time!’ said Frédéric. | ‘Could be? Yes, that was our best time!’ said Deslauriers.” “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 97 If Madame Bovary establishes the ball at La Vaubyessard as the single event that renders Emma unable to attain a sense of eventfulness as she moves forward through life, Flaubert’s approach to such matters is even more radical in L’Éducation sentimentale, as the best time occurred back before the start of the novel itself, before the beginning of the “education” (let alone the revolution) that should have, according to the title of the work, occurred within its pages. Th e narrative eff ectively ended before it even began. In a sense, then, the novel as a whole, from its fi rst page to the last, takes an anti-evental shape similar to that of Mad- ame Bovary, taking us through the motions of events only to undermine them later. It stages on a grand scale the dance of generic anticipation (a novel should mean something, meaningful things should happen in a novel) and disappointments that punctuate its predecessor. Madame Bovary comes to the same end, though it is more subtly rendered than in L’Éducation sentimentale . Th e novel is more than a neo- romantic rendition of a she-Faust against the world, for the “world” itself is shown to be entangled in a parallel dialectic of modes of time in mutual opposition—above all, the clash between progress and stasis. Th e entire social superstructure found in Madame Bovary mirrors the situation of the individual, of Emma, in its dance between the always the same and the eternally deferred arrival of the new. As Erich Auerbach describes the state of aff airs in Mimesis : Events seem to him hardly to change; but in the concretion of duration, which Flaubert is able to suggest both in the individual occurrence […] and in his total picture of the times, there appears something like a concealed threat: the period is charged with its stupid issuelessness as with an explosive.96 Th e “issuelessness” of this period—so fervent in its belief in and desire for progress—is manifested time and again in Madame Bovary . In fact, in a truly Flaubertian twist, the immobility of the times is never rendered so clearly as when someone speaks or acts as if the future is at the door. For instance, there is the speech of the councilor during the comices agricoles , whose sublimely bureaucratic banality is its own satirical undoing. He lyrically describes a state-managed movement toward the end of history— the July Monarchy as the revolution gone everyday, translated into the clichés of bureaucratic management, whose house argot is a stream of commercial banality free of “la discorde civile [qui] ensanglantait nos

96 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 491 . 98 Against the Event places publiques.”97 A world-transforming event is here dissolved into a quest for more and better manure, the breeding of an ever-improving stock of pigs and chickens: “Continuez! persévérez! n’écoutez ni les suggestions de la routine, ni les conseils trop hâtifs d’un empirisme téméraire! Appliquez-vous surtout à l’amélioration du sol, aux bons engrais, au développement des races chevalines, bovines, ovines et porcines!”98 But the wider form of this stasis is not limited to outwardly historical fi gures and institutions. Rather, the entire setting of the novel is drenched with it in an almost material way. At the opening of the second section of the novel, we hear of what “one sees” as one enters Yonville-l’Abbaye. Th e passage is written in a strange present-tense, pseudo-second-person mode of discourse, a formal choice that at fi rst seems to break with the logic of the work as a whole. “On quitte la grande route à la Boissière et l’on continue à plat jusqu’au haut de la côte des Leux, d’où l’on découvre la val- lée.”99 Th is awkward form of narration, whose tense breaks against the location of the rest of the novel in the past, has the feel of a pastiche of travel writing or newspaper reportage. Th e punchline comes only in the fi nal paragraph of the description: Depuis les événements que l’on va raconter, rien, en eff et, n’a changé à Yonville. Le drapeau tricolore de fer-blanc tourne toujours au haut du clocher de l’église; la boutique du marchand de nouveautés agite encore au vent ses deux banderoles d’indienne; les fœtus du pharmacien, comme des paquets d’amadou blanc, se pourrissent de plus en plus dans leur alcool bourbeux, et, au-dessus de la grande porte de l’auberge, le vieux lion d’or, déteint par les pluies, montre toujours aux passants sa frisure de caniche.100

97 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 421 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 114: “civil discord [which] smeared our public places with blood.” Anne Green, in “France Exposed: Madame Bovary and the Exposition Universelle” (Modern Language Review, 99/4 (October 2004), 915) vividly traces the relationship between the Comices section of Bovary (and many other scenes) to the highly publicized run-up to the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Flaubert detested the Exposition as a materialization of the banal bourgeois mediocrity of France. As Green reports, “Under the heading ‘Choses qui m’ont embêté’, Flaubert once drew up a list of irritants which included ‘les expositions universelles’.” 98 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 426; trans. Wall, Bovary, 118: “—Endurance! Perseverance! Heed neither the voice of habit, nor the over-hasty teachings of rash empiricism! Dedicate yourselves above all else to the improvement of the soil, to good manure, to the development of the various breeds, equine, bovine, ovine and porcine.” 99 Flaubert, Œuvres, i. 357; trans. Wall, Bovary, 55: “You leave the main road at La Bossière and you carry on along the slope as far as the top of the Côte des Leux, where you can see the whole valley.” 100 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 357; trans. Wall, Bovary , 58: “Since the events we are about to describe, nothing, indeed, has changed in Yonville. Th e tricolour fl ag made of tin-plate is still turning on top of the church-steeple; the fancy-goods shop still fl utters its two calico “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 99 Nothing has changed, through and even beyond the time of the novel, save for the fact, as we learned a few paragraphs before, the village ceme- tery has continued to expand into the potato fi eld of the church sexton, Lestiboudois. Th e text implies that the Yonville that the reader would see today, at the moment of reading, would be no diff erent from the town that Charles and Emma saw upon their arrival. And the images of this fi nal paragraph only underscore the technical eff ect: the banality-in-kine- sis of the tin fl ag atop the church, ever turning with the wind, and the eternal rotting of the preserved fetuses materialize the theme of modernization’s incessant activity devoid of change. Th is world, which swings between provincial stagnancy and vacuous cant in the service of progress, is populated by Flaubert with fi gures who embody the contradictions of the time. Th ere is, for instance, the linen- woman at the convent, who fi rst introduces Emma to romantic literature, thus setting the stage for everything to come. And, like the romances she distributes, she is a holdover from a rapidly disappearing past. She is a servant, but a servant who is a descendant of the nobility from before the revolution, an anachronistic person with anachronistic tastes in literature. And it is signifi cant that Emma’s taste for the printed page is enfl amed by an avatar of the oral mode of literary communication: “Elle savait par cœur des chansons galantes du siècle passé, qu’elle chantait à demi-voix, tout en poussant son aiguille.”101 In this sense, Emma Bovary’s entanglement in the very modern psychopathology of media-driven hallucination is enabled by an encounter with a fi gure left over from the feudal past. Likewise, the wet-nurse who takes charge of the Bovarys’ daughter, fi gured as a denizen of something like the maternal-feminine underworld, evokes the premodern past of femininity, and as such comes soaked in fl uids of every type: fetid water, milk, vomit, the diarrhea of the infants that she minds, brandy, and soap. Only ink, our heroine’s liquid of choice, is left out of the catalogue. And fi nally, as perhaps the most bizarre and horrendous image of the incessantly resurfacing past, there is the blind man who haunts the novel, appearing with increasing frequency as the plot moves toward Emma’s death. Th e visceral disgust that his appearance engenders in the other characters has as much to do with the way that he embodies the incompleteness of the project of social modernization as it does with the gruesomeness of his features. In particular, he is especially streamers in the wind; the foetuses in the pharmacist’s, like pale giant fungi, are rotting softly in their cloudy alcohol, and, above the main door of the inn, the old golden lion, faded by the weather, still displays to those below its frizzy poodle’s mane.” 101 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 324 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 28: “She knew by heart the love-songs of the last century, singing them to herself, as she plied her needle.” 100 Against the Event abhorrent to Homais, the pharmacist, since he is a walking refutation of his ameliorist world view and pharmacological boosterism. “Je ne comprends pas que l’autorité tolère encore de si coupables industries! On devrait enfermer ces malheureux, que l’on forcerait à quelque travail. Le Progrès, ma parole d’honneur, marche à pas de tortue! Nous pataugeons en pleine barbarie!”102 In this allegory of the collision of progress and the still quick cadavers of premodernity, Homais is clearly a representative of the Enlightenment, the rising bourgeoisie whose ascent is powered not by class warfare or political uprisings but by the active mastery of commerce and innovation. Homais’s self-improvement is dependent upon his precocious comprehension of an increasingly informational and technological economy. And, at the end of the novel, after the death of Emma, he begins to come into his own, diversifying his inventory into the fad products of the moment. (He is also able to arrange the blind man’s confi nement in an asylum, out of sight). And, while what is left of the Bovary clan, Charles and Berthe, falls into obscure proletarianism, Homais meets with a moment of triumph in the last lines of the work: Depuis la mort de Bovary, trois medicins se sont sucédées à Yonville sans pouvoir y réussir, tant M. Homais les a tout de suite battus en brèche. Il fait une clientele d’enfer; l’autorité le ménage et l’opinion publique le protège. Il vient de recevoir la croix d’honneur.103 Note that the line employs yet another unusual verb tense, this “vient de” construction staked in the present but fading into the recent past. Despite all the handheld camera work in the novel, locked in on a tight shot of Emma’s emotions and desires, the fi nal sentence turns the work on its head, prophetically detailing via its strange verbal construction just what survives past the conclusion of the novel. Homais’s promotion happened just now , in the past more proximate to the writing and reading of the book than the more distant past of the novel’s plot. With this line, the background Bildungsroman of a rising class of new men, men of progress, commerce, and science, steps to the fore. As Stephen Heath says,

102 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 564 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 244: “—I cannot understand why it is that the authorities still tolerate such scandalous activities. Th ose wretched people ought to be locked away and made to do some work! Progress, upon my word, goes at a snail’s pace! We are wallowing in the worst barbarism!” 103 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 611; trans. Wall, Bovary , 286: “Since Bovary’s death, three dif- ferent doctors have worked in Yonville without success, such has been the force of Mon- sieur Homais’s immediate onslaught. He is doing infernally well; the authorities handle him carefully and public opinion is on his side. | He has just received the Legion of Honour.” “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 101

Th e central social perception of Madame Bovary is of exactly this accomplishment of the middle class and its consequent existence as all-englobaling order and representation of the society it creates; the dominance of industrial and fi nancial capital and its values is accompanied by the development of an extended middle class—the middle classes—and the general elaboration of a social-moral reason, a whole ( petit- ) bourgeois culture.104 Th e teleological momentum of Madame Bovary skids past the closing of the book on Emma and her family and fi nds its non-conclusion in the present-tense triumph of the homogeneity encoded in the pharmacist’s very name. It is the prehistory of the quiet revolution of the same , the terminal blotting-out of diff erence, that is the continuance of the bourgeois revolution by other means, farcial normality rather than the bloody civil disorder disavowed in the councilor’s speech during the comices agricoles .105 Homais’s transcendence stands as a fi nal catastrophe in a novel full of melodramatic breakdowns and accidents of passion—an understated catastrophe that is disguised as merely the playing out of the way things happen . As Walter Benjamin puts it in the Arcades Project , “Th e concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. Th at things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given.”106 Th ese depictions of the issuelessness of the age, which bridge the gap between Emma’s personal temporal dilemma and the world in which she moves, further delineate a connection between the time of the novel’s setting and that of its composition. While much of what we know about Flaubert’s own relationship to the revolutionary events of 1848 and their aftermath is anecdotal, there is another work by another author whose parallels to Madame Bovary are instructive. 107 Karl Marx’s Th e 18 th Bru-

104 Heath, Flaubert , 56. 105 In a sense, this non-turn at the end is just the fulfi llment of the entire chrono-historical atmosphere of the novel. Heath makes the valuable point that the entire novel takes place in a timescape curiously devoid of historical markers. Despite the fact, he claims, that with diffi culty we can locate the start of Madame Bovary in the 1830s and its end in 1856, “apart from the gap between the detective work needed for such a reconstruction and the reader’s actual awareness of time in the novel, [there] is the avoidance in the main action of 1830 and 1848 […] it is as though the provincial life is held aside from the national history, which then in turn loses its signifi cance, represents no real change; with the present narration in the 1850s—as Flaubert writes his novel—confi rming this: nothing has changed” (Heath, Flaubert , 55). 106 Walter Benjamin, Th e Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 473 . 107 G e o ff rey Wall, in his biography of Flaubert (Gustave Flaubert: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 149), retells one of the better-known stories about Flau- bert’s participation—or lack thereof—in the events of 1848, in particular the events of February 23, when the worst street fi ghting took place: “By nine thirty they [Flaubert, Louis Bouilhet, and Maxime Du Camp] were out on the streets again. Th e boulevard des 102 Against the Event maire of Louis Bonaparte, written at almost exactly the same time as Flau- bert’s novel, is preoccupied from fi rst to last with the temporality of the faulty revolution and the tendency of men to rely upon borrowed language in order to hide from themselves the paltriness and/or bad faith of their ostensibly revolutionary actions.108 In Marx’s rendering, it is inevitable that the bourgeois revolution will fi nd its end depressed and stalking around its garden the long day after the night of the ball. Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm swiftly from success to success; their dramatic eff ects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit; but they are short-lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long crapulent depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period.109 Th e ecstasy of the event, already “everyday” right from the start, collapses into melancholic assimilation once the break in time has lengthened into the platitude of duration. And, just as in Madame Bovary , the problematic temporality of change is grounded in a conceptualization of the subject and her or his relationship to precedent. In a famous passage from the fi rst page of the text, Marx sets out a theory of history that has deep affi nities with the characterological and narratorial principles operative behind Flaubert’s novel. Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. Th e tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.110 While the nightmare for Emma is the precedental blur of borrowed romantic tropes, the structure of her situation is the same as is, in a deep sense, the eff ect described here. It is no wonder, when we press these con-

Capucines had been closed off , so they made their way along the rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin to the Foreign Ministry, Guizot’s ministry. Th e building was curiously dark. Over the heads of the assembled offi cers they could see dragoons in the background, their helmets and their sabres glinting in the gaslight. Nothing was happening, so the three men made their way back to Du Camp’s apartment. As they were opening the street door they heard a violent explosion only a hundred yards away. Flaubert said, ‘Th ey must have opened fi re. Let’s go and see!’ ‘Opened fi re!’ said Du Camp. ‘You must be mad. Th at’s just some children letting off fi reworks to celebrate. Let’s go upstairs.’ Th ey spent the rest of the evening sitting around the fi re, pleasantly fatigued, listing to Louis Bouilhet read aloud the fi rst section of his new long poem, Melaenis. ” 108 Karl Marx, Th e 18 th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publish- ers, 1988) . 109 Marx, Brumaire , 19. 110 Marx, Brumaire , 15. “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 103 temporaneous texts together in this way, that Marx is so preoccupied in Brumaire with the way that aesthetic forms can lead to self-deception, a condition we might call a sort of class bovarisme. In classically austere traditions of the Roman republic and [bourgeois societies] gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep their enthusiasm on the high plane of the great historical tragedy.111 In a chapter of Th e Th eory of the Novel entitled “Th e Romanticism of Disillusionment,” Georg Lukács claims that the novel is an artistic form uniquely in touch with time and its vicissitudes. In the following passage, he is not writing specifi cally about Flaubert, though the chapter is heavily focused on L’Éducation sentimentale as a paradigm of the novelistic form. Th e greatest discrepancy between idea and reality [in the novel of romantic disillusionment] is time: the process of time as duration. Th e most profound and most humiliating impotence of subjectivity consists not so much in its hopeless struggle against the lack of idea in social forms and their human rep- resentatives, as in the fact that it cannot resist the sluggish, yet constant process of time; that it must slip down, slowly yet inexorably, from the peaks it has laboriously scaled; that time—that ungraspable, invisibly moving substance— gradually robs subjectivity of all its possessions and imperceptibly forces alien contents into it. Th at is why only the novel, the literary form of the transcendent homelessness of the idea, includes real time—Bergson’s durée —among its constitutive principles.112 Th e novel, in this rendition, becomes the materialization of a slow-motion catastrophe, a catastrophe of the status quo that Benjamin describes. Aim- ing nowhere but at the grand idea, the meaning that will redeem all of the represented reality, the novel in Lukács’s model inevitably sinks back into the thing it is made of, time as duration. Duration without resolution, without the arrival of the redemptively evental “idea” that will make all of the time that has passed retroactively meaningful, is exactly what Flaubert is after in Madame Bovary, and at the core of my defi nition of the everyday. Flaubert’s anti-evental turn was both, then, a correlative of wider historical developments (or anti-developments) and one that emerged out of an idiosyncratic grappling with genre and his own previous failures as a

111 Marx, Brumaire , 16–17. 112 Georg Lukács, Th e Th eory of the Novel , trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 120–1. 104 Against the Event literary artist. Madame Bovary, as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, wears its tremendously innovative discoveries lightly. Just as Marx’s Brumaire takes as its aim the exposure of the farce that dresses itself as tragedy, Flaubert uncovers the stasis that runs underneath a time supposedly rife with revolutionary activity and rapid change. Th is turn against the event under the pressure of the everyday results in a novel that remains legible as a novel. To borrow from Barthes, Flaubert’s “way of cutting, of perforating discourse without rendering it meaningless” marks his novels, especially Madame Bovary, as transitional works in literary history, works ultimately appropriate to the stalled transitions of the period during which they were written. Th e nineteenth century can be seen, from this perspective, as a century—especially in France but elsewhere as well—of the revolutionary aftermath, when the tremendous leaps forward that had just occurred settled from novelty into normality. Flaubert’s work sets a literary standard that not only attempts to close doors on certain conceptions of novelistic construction but indicates as well what new literary possibilities come to light in the shadow of the emergence of the everyday. But we might at this point be left to wonder whether there is anything positive at all to be drawn out of Flaubert’s thorough decimation of eventally organized narrative and, implicitly, human experience as a whole. Is there any compensation for all that we seem to have lost in watching Emma lose and lose again? In his essay “Why Emma Bovary Has to Be Killed,” Jacques Rancière draws upon a concept from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Th ousand Plateaus to explain what it is that we receive instead of conventional events in Madame Bovary. As opposed to what we expect, we receive an eternal fl ood of atoms that keeps doing and undoing in new confi gurations. Much later, a philosopher fond of literature, Gilles Deleuze, will call such confi gurations haecceities. Th is is how he presents them in A Th ousand Plateaus : A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is diff erent from that of a thing or a subject. Th ey are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to aff ect and be aff ected. Th e decisive events of Madame Bovary are made of such relations of movement and rest. Th eir concatenation shows us what true life is: an impersonal fl ood of haecceities. Literature tells us the truth to the extent that it releases those haecceities from the chains of individualization and objectivication. […] Emma reinscribes the haecceities as qualities of things and persons; hence she reinscribes them in the turmoil of appetites and frustrations. Flaubert does the contrary: he “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 105 hollows out within the narration of her desires and disillusions what he calls “small apertures” through which we glimpse abysses.113 Rancière seems to be arguing through this redeployment of Deleuze’s concept of the “haecceity” that what is left after the event has been pre- emptively canceled, is just that which fi lls the gap where the event should have been. In many cases in Flaubert, it is aesthetic imagery, the depiction often moving materials from the physical world. According to the argument, this imagery is not simply a placeholder but a signifi cant replace- ment for what it has replaced. Perhaps the best of many examples of this comes in the scene when Emma and Rodolphe fi rst consummate their aff air in a clearing deep in the woods: Le drap de sa robe s’accrochait au velours de l’habit. Elle renversa son cou blanc, qui se gonfl ait d’un soupir; et, défaillante, tout en pleurs, avec un long frémisse- ment et se cachant la fi gure, elle s’abandonna. Les ombres du soir descendaient; le soleil horizontal, passant entre les branches, lui éblouissait les yeux. Çà et là, tout autour d’elle, dans les feuilles ou par terre, des taches lumineuses tremblaient, comme si des colibris, en volant, eussent éparpillé leurs plumes. Le silence était partout; quelque chose de doux semblait sortir des arbres; elle sentait son cœur, dont les battements recommençaient, et le sang circuler dans sa chair comme un fl euve de lait. Alors, elle entendit tout au loin, au-delà du bois, sur les autres collines, un cri vague et prolongé, une voix qui se traînait, et elle l’écoutait silencieusement, se mêlant comme une musique aux dernières vibrations de ses nerfs émus. Rodolphe, le cigare aux dents, raccommodait avec son canif une des deux brides cassées.114 In the brico-logic of this passage, its skipping movement from one aff ective or sensory register to another, we hear the cadences of an incipient impressionistic psychologism—a sort of “stream of consciousness” narration avant la lettre. But it is what this “steam” contains that is signifi cant here and in light of Rancière claims. Th e fi nal phrase of the fi rst

113 Rancière, “Bovary,” 243. 114 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 438 ; trans. Wall, Bovary , 129–30: “Th e woolen stuff of her dress caught on the velvet of his jacket, she stretched back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and, swooning, blind with tears, with a deep shudder as she hid her face, she yielded. | Th e evening shadows were falling, the sun on the horizon, passing through the branches, daz- zled her eyes. Here and there, all around her, among the leaves or on the earth, patches of light were trembling, just as if humming-birds, in fl ight, had scattered their feathers. Silence everywhere; strange tenderness coming from the trees; she felt her heart, as it began to beat again, and the blood fl owing in her body like a river of milk. And she heard in the distance, beyond the wood, on the far hillside, a vague and lingering cry, a murmuring voice, and she listened to it in silence, melting like music into the fading last vibrations of her tingling nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, was mending one of the two broken reins with a little knife.” 106 Against the Event paragraph, “elle s’abandonna,” gives way to yet another paragraph in which attention to natural objects and life take the place of a proper event. And, because the sexual act itself exists only in the caesura betweeen the paragraphs, the reader gets only a fragmentary montage of disparate images—the scattered feathers of hummingbirds, the sound of a cry in the distance, and Emma’s proprioceptive sense of her own heart beating, blood fl owing, and nerves tingling—but nothing about the erotic event itself. Just as, at this moment, Emma seems to have come into her own, her selfhood itself blurs into its surroundings, merges into the landscape. What would it mean to feel your own nerves, to become conscious of their “last vibrations” as they echo the fading and ambiguous cry from afar? Just as the passage formally foreshadows the various modes of “stream of consciousness” narration so characteristic of later modernist works, it also diagnoses the instability and dissolution of the subject, which is at base what informs that technical development. We fi nd here a lucid articulation of one of the defi nitive paradoxes of literary modernism: the more “subjective” the discourse becomes, devolving into a string of only par- tially connected sensations and images that ostensibly drift through the character’s consciousness, the more that subjectivity, the self, is called into question. Most importantly, Emma’s photographic faculty has gone endoscopic, auto-endoscopic, just like her creator’s discursive technique. Only after the fact later that evening, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, is Emma able to endow the impressionistic photography of this moment with a caption , and with it, retroactively legible signifi cance— “J’ai un amant! un amant!”115 It is Flaubert’s emphasis on the material world and its movements that leads Rancière in the direction of the Deleuzian haecceities. As he goes on to say in the essay discussed above: “All the diff erence lies in the manner of grasping the microevents that weave the impersonal fabric upon which ‘personal’ experience draws its plots.”116 Further, he distinguishes between what Emma wants of life and what Flaubert gives us in moments such as this one. “You can either tie them within the plot of a subject of desire— which is the way of the character—or weave out of them the fabric of an impersonal sensory life—which is the way of the artist.”117 Th ese “microevents” in Rancière’s argument—anti-events in mine—are suggestive of a diff erent model of fi ction, one founded upon an entirely diff erent (and in this case, less subject-centric) model of narrative meaning.

115 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 439. 116 Rancière, “Bovary,” 243–4. 117 Rancière, “Bovary,” 244. “Th e Future Was a Dark Corridor” 107 If this truly is compensation of sorts, as Rancière seems to suggest, it seems out of scale in Flaubert’s works with what it has replaced, but, as we will see in the next three chapters—especially the last dealing with Joyce but also, if subtly and indirectly, in those on Wells and Conrad—this transition toward the “haecceities” that come in place of the conventional subjectively oriented event—and a contextually informed sense of what they mean—become more pressingly vivid. This page intentionally left blank 3 Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress: H. G. Wells’s Th e Time Machine and the fi n de siècle Everyday

Near the opening of Aesthetic Th eory , Th eodor Adorno questions, in light of what he calls the “extinction” of its thematic appeal, what it is about Madame Bovary that still speaks to us today. Not just aesthetic forms but innumerable themes have already become extinct, adultery being one of them. Although adultery fi lled Victorian and early- twentieth- century novels, it is scarcely possible to empathize directly with this literature now, given the dissolution of the high-bourgeois nuclear family and the loosening of monogamy; distorted and impoverished, its literature lives on only in illustrated magazines. At the same time, however, what is authentic in Madame Bovary and was once embedded in its thematic content has long since outstripped this content and its deterioration.1 While adultery no longer holds the transgressive interest it once did, the form of the situation, Adorno seems to be saying, remains perennially pertinent.2 To take this claim one step further, we might nominate the everyday and the erosion of the event as just that surviving, “authentic” element. Flaubert’s everyday was born in a struggle with the romantic ideology adherent even in a developing literary realism, and thus fi rst came to light amidst the household melodrama of a provincial bourgeois woman caught in an existential crisis. But, true to Adorno’s claim, the

A previous version of this chapter was published as “H. G. Wells’s Th e Time Machine and the Odd Consequence of Progress,” Contemporary Justice Review (December 2005), 431–45. Copyright 2005, Taylor and Francis. 1 Th eodor Adorno, Aesthetic Th eory , trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4. 2 Stephen Heath in Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary ((Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 80) persuasively claims—citing Baudelaire, Balzac, and others—that there was a sense that the theme of adultery was already obsolescent even when Bovary was written and published. As he cites, Balzac wrote in 1840 of Musset’s Emmeline : “Misunderstood women have become ridiculous. Adultery in literature has been done to death for a while, though it still wends its way in the world.” 110 Against the Event anti-evental turn of Flaubert’s novel is predicative of much wider eff ects of modernity than those taken up in Bovary . As the nineteenth century progressed, the diffi culties both Emma and her author encountered in constructing a meaningful narrative would be mirrored, if indirectly and complexly, in other narratives of wider scope—from the economic and political to the scientifi c and beyond. As I will show, the everyday not only names a point of intersection between fi ctional form and experiential change, but also marks a collision between narrative fi ction and extra- literary conceptions of the modern condition. Th is chapter and the one that follows it will analyze some of these conjunctions as they are found in late-nineteenth-century works by H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad, but it seems to me useful to register fi rst the way that they function in Flaubert’s own post- Bovary work. While L’Éducation sentimentale begins to blur the line between personal temporalities and historical stasis, as it plays out Frédéric Moreau’s anti-education against the backdrop of the revolutionary failure of 1848, in Wells’s Time Machine and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness we fi nd versions of the Flauber- tian eventlessness staged in settings even further away from the locus classicus of the unevental—the bourgeois home and the heart of its proprietor or prisoner. But, as with Madame Bovary, historical and sociological developments—especially in the fi elds of economics, sexuality, empire, and labor—both dramatically inform the narrative organization of these works and display a set of narrative symptoms that mirror those in the novellas that they infl uence. As we will see, culture at large began to suff er more visibly from the vicissitudes confronting the uneventful in its own self-narrativizations just as late-nineteenth-century literature began to falter triumphantly into modernism. If the relationship between the eventfulness of history and the evental organization of the prose narrative was implicit and subtle in the works of Flaubert, with Wells (and Conrad) the issue comes to the front of the stage. Anxiety about the possibility of political or social novelty time and again is played out as (or at least in tune with) a problem of fi ctional emplotment.

THE CATASTROPHIC STATUS QUO: EMPIRE, ECONOMICS, AND SEX AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Th is chapter centers on the way that literary time and broader social conceptions of time play with and against each other in Wells’s Th e Time Machine. But, before turning to this text and its strange temporalities, it is important to clarify the ways that the everyday and the anxieties about Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 111 uneventful time manifested themselves across the culture during the period in question. Th e transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth was marked by changes far more substantive than that of the magical transformation of a 99 into a 00. Among all the changes, none is perhaps more signifi cant than an evolving sense of time itself. Th e fact that English- speakers still employ the Gallicism fi n de siècle, hovering as it does between the calendrical meaning of “end of the century” and the more ambiguously provocative sense of “end of an era,” is testimony to the centrality of the issue of time. We might say the same thing about “zeitgeist”—a term that, like fi n de siècle, became popularized during this era, and that also carries two meanings at once. Th e spirit of this time is founded upon and derived from its sense of the spirit and the nature of time itself. Famously, the dominant notion of time during the nineteenth century, at least in the developed world, was grounded in the notion of progress. Time was a ladder of signifi cant developments, causally related and vec- tored in the direction of improvement, often of the quantitative variety. But, especially toward the end of the century and across a wide range of fi elds and categories of cultural inquiry, seemingly stable conceptions grounded in notions of linear progression were routinely undercut by a variety of perverse and often unexpected consequences of the very linear temporality upon which they were grounded. Prior to this period, worry centered on external threats to systems—an economy disrupted by war or crop failure, for instance. But, as the nineteenth century neared its end, a very diff erent threat emerged. From literature to politics to less likely disciplines such as economics and science, we fi nd hints of a new, more self-conscious variety of anxiety, one that asked questions like: What if the collapse of the system is immanent within the system itself ? What if the catastrophe comes not of the disruption of the system, but from its uninterrupted operation? Rather than worrying about external threats to the stable operation of processes, anxiety shifted toward anticipations of the collapse of systems from within. Or, to begin to shift the terms in the direction of those that I have been using in this study, artists and other thinkers began to wonder if the disruption of linear progress came not from the arrival of an extrinsic event, but from the diminishing returns and unintended consequences of eventless continuity itself. Th e problematic horizon of the everyday at the century’s end is more than simply a question of detached ideological or philosophical mythology. For the specter of catastrophe—a catastrophe that is the everyday itself—was deeply woven into the social, political, economic, and scientifi c thought of the day. If conventional historical wisdom dictates that the nineteenth century was a period of optimism, of faith in human development and progress, the twentieth century is likewise defi ned by a profound and unshakable 112 Against the Event pessimism. But what do we fi nd in between the two moments, the two perspectives on modernity, its future and its present? Th e period from 1890 to 1910 in Britain was marked by what Nietzsche called a “transvaluation of values,” as what once seemed so promising about modern industrial capitalist society began to take on a sinister light. When we delve below the surface of many of the central political, economic, aesthetic, and ethical problems of the period in question, we repeatedly fi nd the issue of time. And the type of temporal disorder in question is the same one as that behind the fi ctional dilemmas and developments that I discussed in relation to the works of Flaubert. In short, and a bit reductively, if the middle part of the nineteenth century was an era of breathtaking economic and cultural development—at least in the vanguard nations of industrial modernity, especially the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the other nations of north-western Europe—the end of this century was plagued by a dawning but insistent sense that the “civilized” world’s remarkable successes tacitly augured collapses to come. To be sure, during the middle of the century, social and economic development was at all points shadowed by populations and practices that had failed to climb the ladder of improvement, the ladder that gives access to modernity. None- theless, even the most radical critics of the status quo appropriated a temporal schema grounded in the fact that today’s problems would give way to a diff erent and better tomorrow. All this would begin to change at the end of the century, when a combination of historical developments and ideological revisions exposed western civilization to a variety of new and ever more complex problems. Instead of the Enlightenment’s struggle with the persistently primitive, or modernization’s battle against the anciens régimes of thought and social organization, it began to seem as if progress itself was affl icted with a previously undiagnosed cancer, a disease that had arisen from within. In Th e Age of Empire, Eric Hobsbawm provides a lucid summary of the “contradictions” of this period, where each step forward seems also to be a step toward an abyss of chaotic entropy: It was an era of unparalleled peace in the western world, which engendered an era of equally unparalleled world wars. It was an era of, in spite of appearances, growing social stability within the zone of developed industrial economies, which provided the small bodies of men who, with almost contemptuous ease, could conquer and rule over vast empires, but which inevitably generated on its outskirts the combined forces of rebellion and revolution that were to engulf it [. . .] It was the era when massive organized movements of the class of wage- workers created by, and characteristic of, industrial capitalism suddenly emerged and demanded the overthrow of capitalism. But they emerged in highly fl our- ishing and expanding economies, and, in the countries in which they were Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 113 strongest, at a time when probably capitalism off ered them slightly less miserable conditions than before. It was an era when the political and cultural institutions of bourgeois liberalism were extended, or about to be extended, to the working masses living in bourgeois societies, including even (for the fi rst time in history) its women, but the extension was at the cost of forcing its central class, the liberal bourgeoisie, on to the margins of political power.3 Peace that signals war, affl uence that yields disorder, improvement that is staked on unsustainable exploitation somewhere else, just out of view. All of these social and economic contradictions and inconsistencies inform the tragic drama at the center of Hobsbawm’s work: the fall of the classical bourgeoisie at the very moment of its triumphal attainment of the apex of world history. It was an era of profound identity crisis and transformation for a bourgeoisie whose traditional moral foundation crumbled under the very pressure of its accu- mulations of wealth and comfort. Its very existence as a class of masters was undermined by the transformation of its own economic system.4 It is this story, about the fi nal days of the bourgeoisie and its world, that we fi nd in the literature of the period. And, at the forefront of these texts is the question: What becomes of a class when its social, political, and economic structures collapse from within, from under their own accumulated weight? We can fi nd analogues of this developmental perversity in almost any cultural or social sector of the period. For instance, with the rise of prophy- lactic technologies and the suff rage movement, the end of the nineteenth century was marked by a preoccupation with what we might call the potentially disruptive everydayness of sexuality. Embroidered intricately within the “woman question” of the period, as well as in the dawning threat of homosexuality, is yet another question of temporality: when the citizenry of a nation begins to liberate its sexual practices from history itself—history here meaning the family story, the chronicle of birth after birth after birth conventionally written in the front of the family Bible—a crisis of confi dence and conscience is bound to ensue.5 Th e bliss of the

3 Eric Hobsbawm, Th e Age of Empire 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage, 1989), 9–10. 4 Hobsbawm, Empire , 10. 5 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Th eory and the Death Drive ((Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 16–17), shows that the temporal threat of alternative sexualities is still available for polemical deployment. Edelman stages homosexuality as a threat to what he terms the “reproductive futurism” implicit in heterosexual reproduction and the politics it engenders. According to his argument, queerness and its non-futural temporality “should and must redefi ne such notions as ‘civil order’ through a rupturing of our foundational faith in the reproduction of futurity.” 114 Against the Event present moment breaks free from the chain that runs from past into the future, but with it, or so at least many feared, came possibly disastrous demographic results. Imperialism, similarly, was confronted during the period by its own fear of stasis that paradoxically emerged out of the European powers’ unprecedented success in appropriating so much of the world. Like capitalism itself, imperialism requires constant expansion—stasis in this endeavor leads only to unprofi table administration and the ever more costly defense of what has already been captured. As Vladimir Lenin claimed in Imperialism: Th e Highest Stage of Capitalism , the closing of the global frontier that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century leads to a fundamental transformation in the nature of the imperial endeavor itself. As there are no unoccupied territories—that is, territories that do not belong to any state—in Asia and America [. . .] we must say that the characteristic feature of this period [1876–1900] is the fi nal partition of the globe [. . .] in the sense that the colonial policy of the capitalist countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied terroritories of our planet. For the fi rst time the world is completely shared out, so that in the future only re-division is possible; territories can only pass from one “owner” to another, instead of passing as unowned territory to an “owner.” 6 Th e eff ects of this saturated condition extend beyond the realms of international diplomacy and market economics. Just as the acquisitive warpath twists into the cul-de-sac of quotidian management, the ideologies of imperialism, the “idea at the back of it,” in Conrad’s brilliantly indistinct formulation in Heart of Darkness , fi nd that their own implicit chronolo- gies have turned circular, recursive, and absurdly tautological.7 What becomes of the energies that drive an empire’s “manifest destiny” in the wake of the fulfi llment of that destiny itself? What begins with the glory of battle and the accompanying surge in nationalistic fervor at home dwindles into the dangerous, costly, and unpopular task of administration and management. And, in many cases, we fi nd that imperial ideology eventually transforms itself into anxiety about social or even racial “decadence” and “degradation,” neo-Darwinian or Spencerian renditions of the savage ecological irony of natural selection.8 In the imperial situation, as

6 Vladimir Lenin, Essential Works of Vladimir Lenin (New York: Dover, 1987), 227. 7 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness with the Congo Diary, ed. Robert Hampson (New York: Penguin, 1995), 20. 8 J. A. Hobson in Imperialism ((Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 182) cites in this vein the following passage from C. H. Pearson’s National Life and Character : “If these nations are no longer called upon to struggle for food, and check their growth of Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 115 with sexuality and economics, we can see the pattern of the everyday and the failure of the event that I have located in Flaubert’s work. Narratives that depend on evental punctuation—whether the conquest of a new territory or the birth of a child—threaten to become stuck in an issueless and eventless present. Material conditions, in part overdetermined by narrative considerations, take the shape of storylines that end up mired in the everyday.

A UNIVERSAL TENDENCY TO DISSIPATION: OVERPRODUCTION AND HEAT DEATH

While anxieties about sexual leveling and the future of empire certainly manifest themselves in Th e Time Machine , the fi elds that are most important to the particular shape that the “wider everyday” takes in Wells’s work are economics and science. Th e novella explores and intertwines the ramifi cations of both the crisis of “overproduction,” which had stalled western economies during the period, and various interpretations of the Second Law of Th ermodynamics, the principle that entropy increases in a closed system. And, interestingly, in both cases the problem of the “everyday” develops out of an uneasy negotiation between fact and story— between empirical evidence and an ideologically infl ected interpretation of it. During the late nineteenth century, the world was faced with an economic downturn—the fi rst coming of the “Great Depression”—that dramatically infl uenced the sense of social pessimism that we associate today with the fi n de siècle. But it was the novel nature of this economic crisis that made it particularly confusing and troubling. Rather than an outbreak of scarcity , during this period and for the fi rst time the world economy was threatened by its own increasing productivity, by an overwhelming abundance. None of the familiar culprits—crop failure, the devastating war, governmental or industrial incompetence—was to blame in this case. Instead the agent of collapse was the very effi ciency of the system of production itself. One of the stories written most deeply in our souls and psyches as humans is the story of labor and lack, the tale of life after Eden, after the Fall, the “always already” moment when homo sapiens became homo economicus : population while they increase their control over their material supplies, they will become eff ete for purposes of physical struggle; giving way to an easy and luxurious life, they will be attacked by lower races multiplying freely and maintaining their military vigor, and will succumb in the confl ict.” 116 Against the Event

cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Th orns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the fi eld; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (Gen. 3:17–19) Against all expectation, during the late-nineteenth-century depression, the economy stagnated despite the fact that industrial production continued to rise.9 Th e central paradox of the situation was that it was in large part the increased effi ciency of production itself, and of the distribution of the goods produced, that was crippling the world economy by holding prices down. D e fl ation cut into the rate of profi t. A large expansion of the market could more than off set this—but in fact the market did not grow fast enough, partly because the new technology of industry made enormous increases of output both possible and necessary (at least if plants were to be run at a profi t), partly because the number of competitive producers and industrial economies was itself growing, thus vastly increasing the total capacity available, and partly because a mass market for consumer goods was as yet slow to develop. Even for capital goods, the combination of new and improved capacity, more effi cient use of the product, and changes in demand could be drastic: the price of iron fell by 50 percent between 1871/5 and 1894/8.10 In other words, the root of this great depression was a vicious defl ationary cycle spurred by “overproduction,” or, in the terms preferred by economic historians of the left, “under-consumption.”11 Th e sense that the world economy was haunted by its own successes had wide-ranging eff ects in almost every social and intellectual fi eld. Th e political discussions of the day were infl uenced by the emergence of fears of “overproduction,” a development harnessed both by liberals advocating freer markets and by socialists encouraging an expansion of

9 Hobsbawm, Empire , 35. 10 Hobsbawm, Empire , 37. 11 Th e major left economic historians of this period—Hobsbawm, Hobson, and Lenin, among others—speak with one voice to denounce the very notion of “overproduction.” As Hobson says in Imperialism , 29, “Th ere can be no necessary limit to the quantity of capital and labour that can be employed in supplying the home markets, provided the eff ective demand for the goods that are produced is so distributed that every increase of production stimulates a corresponding increase of consumption.” Vladimir Lenin, in Imperialism: Th e Highest Stage of Capitalism (in Essential Works of Vladimir Lenin , 215–19 ), reframes the problem in terms of a “superfl uity of capital” rather than produced goods. And Stuart Chase, in Th e Economy of Abundance (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 10–11 , in describing the next “great depression,” launches a full-bore attack on the concept of “overproduction.” Despite this, I think it is safe to say that, even if we prohibit ourselves the use of the term “overproduction,” it clearly felt like that to those economists and laymen living at the time. Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 117 state management. Arguments for and against imperial expansion were routinely bound up in the question of whether empire was useful as a dumping ground for surplus commodities, or simply represented an expensive fool’s errand on behalf of fi nance capital. Th e rise of advertising and mass culture was clearly a response to the failure of demand— an ultimately successful attempt to trigger wants in populations that previously had only had the resources, if they were fortunate, to fulfi ll needs . Finally, the specter of overproduction drove economic thought itself away from the study of production to the analysis of consumption— in other words, from political economy to marginal economics. Th e labor theory of value yielded the stage to the enigma that is consumer demand. As Regenia Gagnier has it in Th e Insatiability of Human Wants , the economic and ideological transformations of the late nineteenth century informed a noticeable shift in the concept of Economic Man. Under political economy, Economic Man was a productive pursuer of gain; for Jevons and Menger, on the other hand, Economic Man was a consumer, ranking his preferences and choosing among scare resources [. . .] His nature, insatiability, was henceforth human nature itself. His mode, consumer society, was no longer one stage of human progress but its culmination and end, the end of history itself.12 Th is crisis of overproduction, this sense that affl uence itself could and would drive civilization into a savagely perverse penury, could well be described as a manifestation of the everyday in the realm of economics, as it is a crisis based on the absence of what had conventionally been understood as an economic event. It is a case of soft impoverishment, the more profound destruction that ensues when Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” is somehow blocked by sunk costs. Th e status quo truly is in this instance the catastrophe. Th e sense that the constant transformation that defi nes modernity has given way to blind accumulative increase— an increase that is increasingly diffi cult to consume, that threatens to reach the degree zero of the entropic end of value itself—is a pattern of thought not often previously encountered in the history of western culture. At this historical moment, purpose and trajectory suddenly turned vague and ambiguous, and the stories that people told themselves about work and money and the purpose of life under capitalism were harder and harder to bring into accord with economic reality. Th e dark irony of affl uence gone cancerous, the emergence of a sort of auto-immune disorder

12 Regenia Gagnier, Th e Insatiability of Human Wants (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 4. 118 Against the Event of capitalism, is one of the defi ning stories of the fi n de siècle as well as the century that followed it. Th e negotiation between empirical observation and ideological interpretation likewise runs through the center of the period’s scientifi c approach to the nature and direction of time. While the early twentieth century’s revolution in physics, which represented a major paradigm shift in the fi eld of temporality, was still to come, the world of the late nineteenth century was still traveling in the broadening wake of the major scientifi c advances of the middle part of the century. Darwin’s description of the process of evolution, of course, was the most signifi cant development, and one that forced the intellectual culture of the time to come to terms with a persuasive and secular version of “long” time. In the realm of the physical sciences, classical thermodynamics emerged as the middle term between Newtonian physics and the great leap forward that would come with Einstein and others at the beginning of the next century. But, just as Darwinian evolution spawned countless popularizations that applied, often with pernicious intent or eff ect, his and his followers’ fi ndings to fi elds well outside the frame of the natural world, thermodynamics spawned a welter of ambiguous, overdetermined messages about temporality, progress, and stasis in spheres far removed from the scientifi c consideration of the mechanics of the physical world and its objects. In a very telling way, Wells’s Time Machine was both informed by and itself one of these popularizations.13 Th e way that a culture imagines its own extinction is a revealing index of its deepest anxieties. During the late nineteenth century, scientists, writers, and philosophers continually showed themselves to be troubled by the ramifi cations of the Second Law of Th ermodynamics— and the vision of universal “heat death” that was seen to be its ultimate consequence. Th e First Law of Th ermodynamics, the law of the conservation of energy, was a formulation that pulled physical science out of

13 Elana Gomel argues that the central tension of Th e Time Machine is its incorporation of two confl icting models of time, that of the “Darwinian view of contingent evolution” and the “deterministic chronotope of time travel.” As she writes in “Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel” (Narrative , 17/3 (October 2009), 336): “ Th e Time Machine needs to be read not as a seamless inscription of a deterministic worldview but rather as a textual fi eld of confl icting interpretations of temporality. Th e novel contains not one but two chronotopes, radically at odds with each other. Th e deterministic chronotope of time travel is one of them. Th e second chronotope, which (following its contemporary incarnation) I will call the chronotope of alternative history, inscribes the Darwinian interpretation of evolution as a contingent and stochastic process and emphasizes the phenomenological distinctiveness of time and space.” Gomel’s argument is compelling, but ignores the presence of several other factors in the “overdetermination” of Wells’s plot—namely, thermodynamics, politics, and, above all else, the conventional demands of storytelling. Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 119 the cold Newtonian world of masses and forces and into the realm of energy. In a closed system, energy is neither generated nor is it destroyed— only transformed. It is a fi tting discovery for the nineteenth century, a period largely defi ned by the transformation of energy types—for instance, the potential energy of coal changed into mechanical energy to run a factory. But it is with the coining of the Second Law and the subsequent explorations of its possible cultural ramifi cations that the catastrophic face of the everyday begins to reveal itself in this fi eld of inquiry. According to Th omas Kuhn, the Second Law was framed, as is wont to happen in such disciplines, by two diff erent scientists during the same short period, 1850–1.14 According to this law, entropy increases irrevers- ibly in a closed system. Because this spontaneous process is irreversible, the system will eventually come to a frozen standstill when its energy is equally distributed across the system, leaving no imbalances to provoke further reactions. Th e law sounds harmlessly abstract at fi rst, especially when we imagine the closed system to be, say, a sealed container of air or water. But, as William Th omson, one of the two fathers of the Second Law, suggests in the conclusion of his paper “On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy,” if the universe itself is just such a closed system, it is well on its way toward what was subsequently termed heat death: Th e following general conclusions are drawn from the propositions stated above, and known facts with reference to the mechanics of animal and vegetable bodies:— 1 . Th ere is at present in the material world a universal tendency to the dissipation of mechanical energy. 2. Any restoration of mechanical energy, without more than an equivalent of dissipation, is impossible in inanimate material processes, and is probably never eff ected by means of organized matter, either endowed with vegetable life or subjected to the will of an animated creature. 3. Within a fi nite period of time past, the earth must have been, and within a fi nite period of time to come the earth must again be, unfi t for habitation of man as at present constituted, unless operations have been, or are to be performed, which are impossible under the laws to which the known operations going on at present in the material world are subject.15

14 Th omas Kuhn, Black-Body Th eory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894–1912 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 13. 15 Sir William Th omson, Mathematical and Physical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882), i. 33–4. 120 Against the Event Th e third point pictures the earth itself as a gigantic thermal engine, and one that is, like every other, inexorably heading toward terminal entropy, the state of catastrophic equilibrium. And it is no coincidence that such a man as William Th omson, whose political predispositions were highly conservative and whose theological leanings were toward fundamentalist Presbyterianism, would fi nd such a story encoded in the Second Law. “Th ermodynamic entropy,” as Bruce Clarke argues in his work Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Age of Classical Th ermodynamics , became cultural allegory by unveiling a scientifi cally plausible version of last things. In some circles the second law was interpreted as God’s withdrawal from the material universe. Operating in parallel with the theological doctrines of the Fall and the promised end, entropy became the cosmic metonymy for a God that has absconded from the physical world.16 Th e concept of heat death provided an eschatology that capped the translation of the physical world from the Newtonian empire of timeless immanence to an anxiously temporalized world well on its way toward frozen stasis. It is a deeply everyday version of the apocalypse, in which the world ends not in a sea of fl ames but rather by a gradual slowdown ending in the cessation of events predicated by a collapse of diff erence and distinction into the sameness of universal equivalence. “ Th is is the way the world ends | Not with a bang but a whimper .” During the late nineteenth century, these scientifi c hypotheses had entered into the sphere of wider culture by means of such popularizing works as Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait’s Th e Unseen Universe (1875) and Stewart’s Th e Conservation of Energy (1881).17 Th ese texts repeatedly suggest a less- than-metaphorical connection between the cooling of the universe and the decadence of culture, the fact that the economic system was on the verge of collapse because of the entropic redistribution of wealth, and the registration that God and his plans were orchestrating the entire aff air. Th e infl uence of this conjunction of the scientifi c and the social cannot be overstated. Consider, for instance, the following passage written by Herbert Spencer in 1858 to John Tyndall, another popularizer of heat death: Th at which was new to me in your position enunciated last June, and again on Saturday, was that equilibration was death. Regarding as I had done, equilibration

16 Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Age of Classical Th ermodynamics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 27. 17 Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait, Th e Unseen Universe: Or, Physical Speculations on a Future State (New York: Macmillan, 1894); Balfour Stewart, Th e Conservation of Energy: Being an Elementary Treatise on Energy and its Laws (London: Henry S. King, 1883). Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 121 as the ultimate and highest state of society, I had assumed your assertion that when equilibrium was reached life must cease, staggered me. Indeed not seeing my way out of the conclusion, I remember being out of spirits for some days afterwards. I still feel unsettled about the matter and should like some day to discuss it with you.18 As we will see in Wells’s Time Machine, Spencer was not the only thinker of the period to fi nd his sense of equilibrium (political, economic, or otherwise) thrown off by the fi ndings of the physicists. It is no great mystery why this amalgamation of physical science and sociological speculation would come to factor so centrally in Wells’s fi c- tional work. His teacher at the Normal School of Science in London, T. H. Huxley, increasingly invested himself toward the end of his career in the crossing of scientifi c developments and social analysis, drawing at times on thermodynamics in order to advance claims about human degeneration. In “Th e Struggle for Existence in Human Society” of 1888, for instance, Huxley explicitly, if not exactly coherently, links the prospect of heat death to “retrogressive” evolution: It is an error to imagine that evolution signifi es a constant tendency to increased perfection. Th at process undoubtedly involves a constant remodelling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the direction of the modifi cations eff ected shall be upward or downward. Retrogressive is as practicable as progressive metamorphosis. If what the physical philosophers tell us, that our globe has been in a state of fusion, and, like the sun, is gradually cooling down, is true; then the time must come when evolution will mean adaptation to an universal winter, and all forms of life will die out, except such low and simple organisms as the Diatom of the arctic and antarctic ice and the Protococcus of the red snow. If our globe is proceeding from a condition in which it was too hot to support any but the lowest living thing to a condition in which it will be too cold to permit of the existence of any others, the course of life upon its surface must describe a trajectory like that of a ball fi red from a mortar; and the sinking half of that course is as much a part of the general process of evolution as the rising.19 Th at the limit case of adaptation to apocalyptic conditions is not an entirely convincing proof of his theory of retrogressive evolution fails to register here for Huxley. Despite that fact, like Stewart and Tait before him, Huxley follows the path straight through from physics and biology to social editorializing. Later, the essay turns to what it calls the “true riddle of the Sphinx,”

18 Herbert Spencer, Political Writings , ed. John Off er (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 67. 19 Th omas Henry Huxley, “Th e Struggle for Existence in Human Society,” in Collected Essays (London: Macmillan, 1893–5), 199. 122 Against the Event the relationship between over-population and political economy, as he advocates a program of philanthropic assault on the ethical and industrial idleness of the underclasses coupled with educational reform.20 Th ere is no understating the infl uence that Huxley’s work had upon Wells’s, though the elder retired from the Normal School of Science (later the Royal College of Science) at the end of Wells’s fi rst year of study. Indeed a case could be made that his teacher’s departure at least partly informed Wells’s fi rst strides away from a scientifi c/educational career and in the direction of fi ctional production and political engagement.21 In any case, just before Huxley’s death and despite their limited contact at the Normal School, Wells sent Huxley a copy of Th e Time Machine along with a covering letter that rendered the infl uence of his old teacher’s ideas upon the novella clear: I am sending you a little book that I fancy may be of interest to you. Th e central idea—of degeneration following security—was the outcome of a certain amount of biological study. I daresay your position subjects you to a good many such displays of the range of authors but I have this much excuse—I was one of your pupils at the Royal College of Science and fi nally: Th e book is a very little one. 22

“AFTER THE BATTLE COMES THE QUIET”: WELLS’S AMBIVALENT MODERNITY

H. G. Wells fi ts only awkwardly within the genealogy of modernism. Unlike Flaubert, whose work features many of the forms and preoccupations that defi ne high modernism, such as the style indirect libre and a thorough interest in the interiority of characters, Wells’s work resists easy subsumption into the movement. In her essays, Virginia Woolf repeatedly classed him amongst the retrograde Edwardians—writers whose “materialism” damns them to obsolescence. For instance, in “Modern Fiction” she writes:

20 Huxley, “Existence,” 211–36. In their essay “Waste and Value: Th orsetin Veblen and H. G. Wells” (Criticism , 48/4 (2007), 453–75) , Patrick Brantlinger and Richard Higgins articulate the connection between capitalist overproduction and thermodynamics for Wells through attention to the role of the word (and concept of) “waste” in his work. Waste is what comes of the disconnection between supply and demand in economies, as well as both the engine and the product of the processes described in the second law of thermodynamics. 21 Michael Coren, Invisible Man: Th e Life and Liberties of H. G. Wells (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), 38–44. 22 Harry M. Geduld, Th e Defi nitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H. G. Wells’s Scientifi c Romance (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 5. Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 123

Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, and Mr Galsworthy have excited so many hopes and disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude largely takes the form of thanking them for having shown us what they might have done but have not done; what we certainly could not do, but as certainly, perhaps, do not wish to do. No single phrase will sum up the charge or grievance which we have to bring against a mass of work so large in its volume and embodying so many qualities, both admirable and the reverse. If we tried to formulate our meaning in one word we should say that these three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fi ction turns its back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul. Naturally, no single word reaches the centre of three separate targets. In the case of Mr Wells it falls notably wide of the mark. And yet even with him it indicates to our thinking the fatal alloy in his genius, the great clod of clay that has got itself mixed up with the purity of his inspiration.23 Whereas, in Woolf’s estimation, new writers such as Joyce, Forster, and implicitly herself capture life as “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end,” Wells’s work, like that of Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, remains mired in the externally oriented realism of the previous century.24 Inter- estingly, Wells seems to have come to terms with such criticisms. As he wrote in the preface to a 1930 monograph on his work by Geoff rey West: So far as I am concerned I fi nd that thinking about the qualities of my work and my place in the literary world, or the world at large, an unwholesome and unprofi table employment. I have been keenly interested in the discussion of a number of questions, I have been a haphazard and pampered prophet, I have found it amusing and profi table to write stories and—save for an incidental lapse or so—I have never taken any great pains about writing. I am outside the hierarchy of conscious and deliberate writers altogether. I am the absolute antithesis of Mr James Joyce.25 Wells’s writing is indeed less “conscious and deliberate” than Joyce or Flaubert; his discourse never attains the indeterminacy and tension of either. And yet, while this fact makes Th e Time Machine less amenable to the sort of close reading that I deployed in the previous chapter, it is nevertheless true that the formal nature of the work is paramount in

23 Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in Selected Essays , ed. Dacid Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6–7. 24 Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 9. 25 H. G. Wells, “Introduction,” to Geoff rey West, H. G. Wells: A Sketch for a Portrait (London: Gerald Howe, 1930), 13. 124 Against the Event importance. As Fredric Jameson writes of utopias in Archaeologies of the Future , the genre is far from lacking in formal interest. It is not only the social and historical raw materials of the Utopian construct which are of interest from this perspective; but also the representational relations established between them—such as closure, narrative and exclusion or inversion. Here as elsewhere in narrative analysis what is most revealing is not what is said, but what cannot be said, what does not register on the narrative apparatus.26 While Th e Time Machine is not a utopia, the “representational relations” that Jameson lists here very much apply. Further, and also true to Jameson’s formula, a central fact about the novella is that it cannot come to terms with its own narrative and thematic dilemmas. Th e narrative momentum of the work repeatedly encounters temporal eddies, scenarios of stasis, that it must force itself out of in order to continue the narrative of discovery that forms its understructure. Th e Time Machine stages a confrontation between conventional narrative pace—in this case, the particularly heightened pace of the adventure story—and degenerative temporalities of heat death and its sociological popularization. Th e text at once acknowledges the catastrophic incapability of these two conceptions of time, but nevertheless maintains its pursuit of a conventional narrative arc. It shows what it takes for a text not to give in to the everyday, what strain its author must exert to trigger narrative events despite his preoccupation with cata- strophically eventless time schemes. Paradoxically, when it comes to the everyday and fi ctional construction, Woolf may have been right: the value of Th e Time Machine is indeed that Wells has “shown us what [he] might have done but [has] not done.” What we have instead, in Th e Time Machine, is an illustration of what it costs a thoughtful and timely work of fi ction not to register fully the dimensions of the temporal situations that it encounters and thus to maintain itself as a “scientifi c romance” rather than a modernist performance of entropic stasis. In the opening section of the novella, the Time Traveller’s interlocutors in present-day England have no trouble coming up with reasons to employ the machine, even if most doubt that the device will actually work. “It would be remarkably convenient for the historian,” the Psychologist suggested. “One might travel back and verify the accepted account of the Battle of Hastings, for instance!” “Don’t you think you would attract attention?” said the Medical Man. “Our ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms.”

26 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: Th e Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 8. Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 125

“One might go get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato,” the Very Young Man thought. “In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. Th e German scholars have improved Greek so much.” “Th en there is the future,” said the Very Young Man. “Just think! One might invest all one’s money, leave it to accumulate at interest, and hurry ahead!” “To discover a society,” said I, “erected on a strictly communistic basis.”27 Th ey are rather absurd proposals, satirically intended by Wells, but still we note that there is no consideration of what it is about today that bears escaping. But even this conversation is cut short by the Time Traveller’s demonstration of the device, whose operation takes the form of a magic trick or special eff ect that mirrors the temporality of modernity itself, always accelerating, always leaving us behind a bit befuddled. We all saw the lever turn. I am absolutely certain there was no trickery. Th ere was a breath of wind, and the lamp fl ame jumped. One of the candles on the mantle was blown out, and the little machine suddenly swung around, became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for a second perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass and ivory; and it was gone—vanished!28 Th ese idle speculations about the usefulness of the past and future combined with a sort of techno-fetishism give way to the central narrative of the novel, the Traveller’s recounting, a week later, for the benefi t of his friends and us readers, of his exploits in the England of the year ad 802,701. Th is narrative primarily takes the form of two interlocking plots: on the one hand, we have a rather silly detective story that solves the mystery of the disappearance of the Time Traveller’s machine, and, on the other, a gradual discovery of what exactly the nature of this future society is. Th e plots are linked by a shared solution: the Morlocks are behind it all. A physical and conceptual hybrid of the urban proletariat and the colonial subject, they are alternately fi gured as albinos and black.29 Th ese denizens of the underground infrastructure are responsible for both the theft of his

27 H. G. Wells, Th e Time Machine (London: Penguin, 2005), 7. Th e second scenario proposed by the Very Young Man actually forms the foundational event of another work of science fi ction by Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes of 1899. Graham, the “sleeper” of the title, falls into a sort of coma in the present day, only to wake up centuries later in possession of the entire world thanks to the sound investment of his funds by friends and the benefi cently regular operation of the principle of compound interest. 28 Wells, Time Machine , 9. 29 Th e Traveller relates that Weena, his weird love interest, “dreaded the dark, dreaded shadows, dreaded black things. Darkness to her was the one thing terrible” (p. 43) But the actual objects of her fear are “white, ape-like creature[s],” “dull white” with “large greyish-red eyes” and “fl axen hair” (p. 45). 126 Against the Event machine as well as the answer to most of the nagging questions about the world of the Eloi—from their fear of the dark to the problem of population control. After adopting and then abandoning several theses about the world of the future, he fi nally settles on the following: Th e Upper-world people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants: but that had long since passed away. Th e two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship. Th e Eloi, like the Car- lovingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. Th ey still possessed the earth on suff erance: since the Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to fi nd the daylight surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs, perhaps through the survival of the old habit of service. Th ey did it as a standing horse paws with his foot, or as a man enjoys killing animals in sport: because ancient and departed necessities had impressed it on the organism. But, clearly, the old order was already in part reversed. Th e Nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping on apace. Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back—changed!30 In short, the Traveller discovers that the Morlocks are in fact eating the Eloi, who in their decadence are powerless to resist their aggressors. Th is vision of society and its future blends a “blowback” theory of Darwinian evolution—in which what had been translated from the biological to the social by Herbert Spencer and others is translated back into the biological by a system of class apartheid and the passage of 800,000 years—together with the ironic twist at the end of Hegel’s master–slave parable, in which the slave arrives at independence through the alienating work that was the condition of his enslavement.31 In the end, according to the imagined future history of Th e Time Machine, the fi rst shall be last, and the last shall eat the fi rst.

30 Wells, Time Machine , 57–8. 31 In Hegel’s parable of the master and the slave from Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)), the ironic twist at the end of the story is that the alienating work of the latter actually provides the foundation of independence: “Work, on the other hand, is desire held in check, fl eetingness staved off ; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing. Th e negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent , because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence. Th is negative middle term or the formative activity is at the same time the individuality or pure being-for-self of consciousness which now, in the work outside of it, acquires an element of permanence. It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence” (p. 118). Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 127 It is diffi cult to know what we are meant to conclude from Wells’s tale according to this rendition. Is it, for instance, simply a socialist horror story about the ultimate outcome of industrialization and class distinction? Or perhaps a dire warning to the moneyed population of Wells’s time that, without a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, the barbarian will always be at the gates—whether the barbarian in question is the white working class or the black victim of imperial policy? Or, fi nally, is it simply an allegory of modernization and its eff ect on natural selection, which sees each increase in the standard of living to be purchased at the price of a corresponding loss of the hardiness and fi tness of the race? Whatever we decide, Th e Time Machine is clearly a work steeped in ambivalence about modernity and the eventual outcome of technological progress. But what do its ambiguities and contradictions have to do with the aspects of the everyday that I described as symptoms of its era? When we step behind the curtain of what Th e Time Machine ostensibly “concludes” about the possible or probable future of humankind, we fi nd the everyday lurking, threatening to entangle the Time Traveller, Wells, and the novella itself within a storyless story, a narrative in which nothing happens and which cannot fi nd its ending. Wells’s work is, in other words, engaged with a struggle with eventless time itself. It stages a collision of the temporality of narrative interest with the stopped utopian time of the “automatic civilization and decadent humanity” that the Time Traveller fi nds amongst the Eloi.32 And, most importantly, many of these threats are projections or refl ections of the symptoms of the fi n de siècle whose everydayness I described above: overproduction, the issuelessness of modern sex, and what is perhaps the most direct literary deployment of the hypothesis of thermodynamic heat death until Th omas Pynchon’s Th e Crying of Lot 49 appeared in 1966. Behind the principal plotlines of the book—the Time Traveller’s quest to wrest his time machine back from the Morlocks along with the gradual refi nement of his understanding of the world of the future—we fi nd an even more complexly provocative horror story about the vampiric bite of the everyday upon the human spirit, historical progress, and literary production itself. Th is ambivalent relation to time is present from the fi rst pages of the novel. Th ere is, for instance, the time machine, which represents a materialization of the paradoxical nature of the temporality of modernity itself. Th e pseudo-scientifi c foundation of the invention of the machine is the discovery of the “fourth dimension”—that is, the discovery that time is a dimension of a sort diff erent from length, width, and depth only in our minds.

32 Wells, Time Machine , 41. 128 Against the Event

“Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Th ickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infi rmity of the fl esh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. Th ere are really four dimensions, three of which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. Th ere is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.” 33 Th e machine is a product of this fantasy of the fourth dimension, a machine that would allow us to transcend the mechanical succession of this after that which is a hallmark of modern temporal rationalization.34 But the escape is only an escape to more of the same, the nauseously accel- erated fl ipping-by of present moments. Th e fi lmstrip runs faster and faster until all that is left is a puddle of gray indistinctness. When the Traveller relates the visual experience of piloting the machine into the distant future, we recognize the “Un éclair . . . puis la nuit!” stage lighting so deeply associated with the experience of the modern city. Th e slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. Th e twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Th en, in the intermittent darkness, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of nights and day merged into one continuous greyness.35 Most important, upon arrival in the world of ad 802,701, this process by which acceleration slides into “one continuous greyness” is translated from the visual fi eld to that of social organization and human energy. It is absolutely vital to remember that, during a large part of the Time Travel- ler’s exploration of the future world, the Morlocks are nowhere to be found. Th eir fi rst distinct appearance in the work occurs just before the halfway point of the text. And, until their arrival, the Traveller is left alone with the Eloi, and what he has to say about them gets to the heart of many of the paradoxes and cruxes surrounding progress as they were understood by

33 Wells, Time Machine , 4. 34 For the organization and exploitation of time in modernity, see Foucault’s brilliant chapter “Docile Bodies” in Discipline and Punish (trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vin- tage, 1995), 157) : “How can one capitalize the time of individuals, accumulate it in each of them, in their bodies, in their forces or their abilities, in a way that is susceptible of use and control? How can one organize profi table durations? Th e disciplines, which analyze space, break up and rearrange activities, must also be understood as machinery for adding up and capitalizing time.” 35 Wells, Time Machine , 19. Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 129 H. G. Wells and many others in the late nineteenth century. With the achievement of the socio-economic perfection of humankind, whether through Marxist revolution or, as Wells generally preferred, gradual amelioration of a Fabian stripe, a new range of problems emerges. Strug- gle, resentment, and crisis give way to atrophy, ennui, and stasis. As the Traveller relates at one point: “Th e ruddy sunset set me thinking about the sunset of humankind. For the fi rst time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social eff ort in which we are at present engaged.” 36 Another name for that “odd consequence,” I would argue, is the eventless everyday. Upon his fi rst encounter—only at a distance at this point—with the Eloi, the Time Traveller is “seized with a panic fear” that humankind might have evolved in the intervening 800,000 years into a race of brutal Ubermenschen in whose eyes he would appear to be nothing more than a primitive, a “savage animal.” What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness—a foul creature to be incontinently slain.37 Th e truth, however, lies in the opposite direction. Th e Eloi are gentle, childlike, stupid, and ambiguously gendered. Th ey seem, moreover, to have lost the capacity for abstract thought: “Th eir language was excessively simple—almost exclusively composed of concrete substantives and verbs. Th ere seemed to be few, if any, abstract terms, or little use of fi gura- tive language.”38 And their culture seems to be organized along communistic lines—or, at least, they are the unthinking descendants of such a culture. Unlimited, laborless production aff orded by technological advance here meets a radically egalitarian mode of distribution. Th e Eloi appear to be the living fulfi llment of the most utopian social plans of Wells’s own period. Th e air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi; everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful fl owers; brilliant butterfl ies fl ew hither and thither. Th e idea of preventive medicine was attained. Diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay. And I shall have to tell you later that the process of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly aff ected by these changes.39

36 Wells, Time Machine , 31. 37 Wells, Time Machine , 22. 38 Wells, Time Machine , 39. 39 Wells, Time Machine , 31–2. 130 Against the Event In short, it seems to the Traveller that at some point between the late nineteenth century and ad 802,701, humanity had made the “adjust- ments” in social organization and techno-scientifi c advances necessary to launch themselves back into the garden of Eden—but an Eden of glori- ous communal housing projects and fantastic clothes. Social triumphs, too, had been eff ected. I saw mankind housed in splendid shel- ters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged in no toil. Th ere were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle. Th e shop, the advertisement, traffi c, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was gone. It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of social paradise.40 But all this progress, the emergence of an “automatic civilization,” exacts a severe price, a toll recorded in the invisible ledger of the human genome. Th e achievement of permanent hegemony of humankind over nature— the end of the history of labor and alienation that is, in eff ect, human history—is, in Wells’s rendition, the tipping point that heralds an evolutionary catastrophe. It is a fi nal perversion in the great chain of being, a viciously ironic fi nale written by Wells into the long story of what Her- bert Spencer called “the benefi cent working of the survival of the fi ttest.”41 And the Traveller, it seems, cannot stop talking about it. It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. Th e ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the fi rst time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social eff ort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. Th e work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure—had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Th ings that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw! 42 But with this change in condition comes inevitably adaptations to the change. What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelli- gence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision.43 Th e Traveller cannot shake a constant preoccupation with the Eloi and the concept of stasis, with, that is, a sense that, with these posthuman

40 Wells, Time Machine , 32. 41 Spencer, Writings , 131. 42 Wells, Time Machine , 31. 43 Wells, Time Machine , 31–2. Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 131 humans, time itself had come to a standstill. “For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.”44 Th is temporal slowdown and evolutionary reversion have their most telling eff ects in the fi eld of gender and sexuality. Th e Eloi are incessantly described as ambiguously gendered, which ultimately means not so much “ambiguously gendered” as feminine. For instance, note the terms in play upon the Time Traveller’s fi rst encounter with an Eloi. “He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature, but indescribably frail. His fl ushed face reminded me of the more beautiful kind of consumptive— that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so much.”45 And when describing male Eloi he cannot help but focus on the feminine delicacy of their features. And then, looking more nearly into their features, I saw some further peculiarities in their Dresden-china type of prettiness. Th eir hair, which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek; there was not the faintest suggestion of it on the face, and their ears were singularly minute. Th e mouths were small, with bright red, rather thin lips, and the little chins ran to a point.46 And, of course, this transformation of the sexes, this disappearance of masculinity, is attributed by the Traveller to the changed social conditions. Laborless production leads to limitless consumption, which in turn cancels out the necessity of war and aggression of any sort, and ultimately deals a death blow to “masculinity” itself. Under evolutionary pressure— or, in this case, a lack of such pressure—sexual diff erence breaks down, blurs into mere decoration. It is, in sum, yet another social transformation reinscribed in the book of life, the genetic blueprint of the Eloi. Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the diff erentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an age of physical force; where population is balanced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and off -spring are secure, there is less necessity—indeed there is no necessity—for an effi cient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children’s needs disappears. We see some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete.47

44 Wells, Time Machine , 32. 45 Wells, Time Machine , 23. 46 Wells, Time Machine , 24–5. 47 Wells, Time Machine , 29–30. 132 Against the Event Th e fi nal line of this passage sheds light upon the allegorical infl ection of the novella. Th e entire concept of progress is deconstructed into a vision of a zero-sum economy of dialectical evolution at a standstill. With the disappearance of need and contingency comes also the disappearance of human endeavor and imagination. In particular, the concept of time itself has become unavailable to the Eloi, as the Traveller repeatedly discovers. As they made no eff ort to communicate with me, but simply stood round me smiling and speaking in soft cooing notes to each other, I began the conversation. I pointed to the Time Machine and to myself. Th en hesitating for a moment how to express time, I pointed to the sun. At once a quaintly pretty little fi gure in chequered purple and white followed my gesture, and then astonished me by imitating the sound of thunder.48 Th is is perhaps the ultimate ruse of progress. Th e accumulation of experience in the form of history combined with the single-minded focus on the future and its betterment ultimately gives rise to a race of men that have lost the past and future both, who exist only in the amnesiac fl ow of the present. Recall for a moment the foundational discovery that informed the invention of the time machine itself. “But the great diffi culty is this,” interrupted the Psychologist. “You can move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in Time.” “Th at is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?”49 Th e time machine, following from this exchange, is simply a materialization of the essential human capacity to travel through time mentally, the ability to remember and to project. It is this ability, according to this description, which separates “civilized man” from “a savage or an animal.” It is also this ability that the Eloi have forever lost. A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their lack of interest. Th ey would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like children, but like children they would soon stop examining me and wander away after some other toy [. . .] I was continually meeting more of these men of the

48 Wells, Time Machine , 25. 49 Wells, Time Machine , 6. Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 133 future, who would follow me a little distance, chatter and laugh about me, and, having smiled and gesticulated in a friendly way, leave me again to my own devices.50 Chatter without access to abstraction, incessant distraction, sexuality divorced from or unconscious of procreation—the Eloi live in the pure present that bubbles up between the cracks in the global manufactory of the future, where the raw material of past precedent is forged by men like the Time Traveller into the shape of an improved world. Th ey are truly men and women of the everyday, the Eloi, the direct inheritors of western progress. What the Traveller fi nds in the England of 802,701 calls into question the project of modernization and techno-scientifi c process as such. In the economy of nature, every social advance, every step that humankind takes toward liberating itself from the necessity of labor and hardship, leads in turn to a softening of the species, a leveling- out of diff erence and individual prowess that would seem to be the very engine of innovation and progress. Each step forward is also a step back- ward; what seems to be the acceleration of time itself is only an ever- faster, ever-tighter, movement in circles. Th e irony is not lost on the Traveller: Th en suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion and anxiety to get out of it. I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap that ever a man had devised.51

“MY STORY SLIPS AWAY FROM ME”: THE NARRATIVE IMPULSE VERSUS SOCIAL STASIS

But for all the anthropological distance that the bulk of the Traveller’s descriptions of the Eloi exhibit, this is not the only posture that he takes in regard to the new world he has discovered. Taken as a whole, in fact, his report on these “little people” is marked by a deep ambivalence. For all the talk of escape from the mindless everydayness at the dusk of civilization, there are also many moments where we can sense that the Trav- eller is gravely tempted by the world that he has discovered. Wells takes pains to enact subtly the Eloi’s seductive hold upon his character, as in the following passage, where it factors as an afterthought, a casually uttered aside.

50 Wells, Time Machine , 28. 51 Wells, Time Machine , 39. 134 Against the Event

“Suppose the worse?” I said. “Suppose the machine altogether lost—perhaps destroyed? It behooves me to be calm and patient, to learn the way of the people, to get a clear idea of the method of my loss, and the means of getting materials and tools; so that in the end, perhaps, I may make another.” Th at would be my only hope, perhaps, but better than despair. And, after all, it was a beautiful and curious world. (Emphasis added)52 Th e Traveller even occasionally fi gures himself as evolutionarily inferior to the Eloi, a savage among civilized men. Note the following strange passage, in which he compares himself to an African in London for the fi rst time: Conceive the tale of London which a negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! What would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and postal orders and the like? Yet we, at least, should be willing enough to explain these things to him! And even of what he knew, how much could he make his untravelled friend either apprehend or believe? Th en, think how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of our own times, and how wide the interval between myself and these of the Golden Age! I was sensible of much which was unseen, and which contributed to my comfort; but save for a general impression of automatic organization, I fear I can convey very little of the diff erence to your mind. 53 Is the Time Traveller a man of science lost amid a crowd of children or a “negro, fresh from Central Africa,” a primitive dumbstruck by the metropolis? As he spends more time among the Eloi, the tone of his descriptions of life in the future gently slips from disgusted condescension to baffl ed fascination. Th ere were no shops, no workshops, no sign of importations among them. Th ey spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see how things were kept going.54 Th e “sunset of mankind,” the “odd consequence” of modernity, begins to take the shape of a land of Cockaigne, a post-economic and post-political land of easy affl uence. And, when the scene shifts again, we fi nd the Trav- eller in a position that suggests his struggle to understand—and escape— the mindless future is giving way to something else, a bemused and even quietly eroticized entanglement in it. For instance, there is the episode in which he rescues a drowning female of the species: “It happened that, as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with cramp and began drifting downstream.”55 In an act of

52 Wells, Time Machine , 37. 53 Wells, Time Machine , 41. 54 Wells, Time Machine , 41. 55 Wells, Time Machine , 42. Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 135 masculinized heroism unavailable to the Eloi, he dives into the current and rescues this doomed creature, whose name, he learns, is Weena. She rewards him with some fl owers and a kiss upon his hands, and, as we hear, “that was the beginning of a queer friendship which lasted a week, and ended—as I will tell you.”56 Th e Traveller’s “relationship” with Weena threatens to disrupt the progression of Wells’s adventure story. She stands as a strange materialization of the threat of the pure present that arrived, according to the novella, at the end of modernity. While the Traveller is not exactly sure what to make of his new “friend,” with her childlike appearance and her limited vocabulary, he “allows” her to sleep with him at night, fi nding mundane pleasures in her company that he seems to lack in the time from which he has come: until it was too late did I clearly understand what she was to me. For, by merely seeming fond of me, and showing in her weak, futile way that she cared for me, the little doll of a creature presently gave my return to the neighbourhood of the White Sphinx almost the feeling of coming home; and I would watch for her tiny fi gure of white and gold so soon as I came over the hill.57 Most importantly, on two separate occasions, the Traveller refers directly to Weena and his relationship with her as a threat to the continuation of his story itself. She is, it seems, a distraction on the verge of becoming softly, strangely irresistible, an impediment to both his scientifi c quest and the retelling of the tale upon his return to the present day. For instance, she wails when he leaves her each day to search for his Time Machine, and he seems to have to talk himself into leaving her behind. She was exactly like a child. She wanted to be with me always. She tried to follow me everywhere, and on my next journey out and about it went to my heart to tire her down, and leave her at last, exhausted and calling after me rather plaintively. But the problems of the world had to be mastered. I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature fl irtation. Yet her distress when I left her was very great, her expostulations at the parting were sometimes frantic, and I think, altogether, I had as much trouble as comfort from her devotion. Nevertheless, she was, somehow, a very great comfort. (Emphasis added)58 Later, her appeal seems more directly sexual, and the thought of it threatens to drive his story off the rails: “for fi ve nights of our acquaintance, including the last night of all, she slept with her head pillowed on my arm. But my story slips away from me as I speak of her” (emphasis added).59

56 Wells, Time Machine , 42. 57 Wells, Time Machine , 43. 58 Wells, Time Machine , 42–3. 59 Wells, Time Machine , 43. 136 Against the Event It is a bit diffi cult to understand, at fi rst glance, why exactly Wells chooses to include Weena in his novel at all. Her appearances in the work straddle the line between slight signifi cance and complete inconsequence, for she stands as the only character in the future world who is named, who receives any individual attention at all, while at the same time the Traveller’s relations with her fail to achieve the level of the romance, never become anything more than a distracting “comfort.” But this is, I think, exactly the point. Weena exists as a materialization, an embodiment, of the exact sort of temptation that the world of the Eloi presents. She is, like the world itself, both the promise and the threat of the end of narrative itself; she is, it seems, the end of the story. Th us the Traveller’s anxiety that his story “slips away” as he speaks of her is a refl ection of the ambivalence that runs through some of his passages of sexual anthropology. In hypothesizing early on about the eff ect that the disappearance of all danger must have had upon gender and sexual relations, he says: And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fi erce jealousy, the tenderness for off spring, parental self-devotion, all found their justi- fi cation and support in the imminent dangers of the young. Now , where are these imminent dangers? Th ere is a sentiment arising, and it will grow, against connu- bial jealousy, against fi erce maternity, against passion of all sorts; unnecessary things now, and things that make us uncomfortable, savage survivals, discords in a refi ned and pleasant life.60 Th e “ Now ” of the passage, italicized in the original, is as ambiguous as it sounds here out of context; it is unclear whether the condition that Wells is describing is that of the world of 802,701 alone, or also, in an embryonic form, that of 1895. And how does the Traveller—or Wells—feel about this social transformation? Th e passage seems at once anxious about the disappearance of what we would now call “family values” while in the same breath it labels these very values “savage survivals, discords in a refi ned and pleasant life.” But take another look at the Traveller’s list of “unnecessary things.” Jealousy, intergenerational bonds, “passions of all sorts”—these are more than just the glue that holds the nuclear family together. Th ey are the very stuff of novelistic fi ction, from its taproot in the medieval romance through to nineteenth-century realism and beyond. What sort of novel would result if sexual intrigue, the emotional transactions of the family, and the defense of the household against external threats were elided from the list of ingredients? Without “unnecessary things,” the “things that make us uncomfortable,” the “discords,” there would be no such things as novels at all, at least not in the sense that Wells could have imagined.

60 Wells, Time Machine , 32. Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 137 Weena and her world represent exactly this utopian promise, the promise of the everyday of thoughtless perfection, the real end of history, which also marks the end of narrative and narrative’s foundation, the event. It is diffi cult not to see this world as a refl ection of Wells’s own period, the fi n de siècle. It is no wonder that the scent of the fl eurs du mal of decadent aestheticism are strewn throughout the Traveller’s talk. No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was the outcome of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy of mankind before it settled into perfect harmony with the conditions under which it lived—the fl ourish of that triumph which began the last great peace. Th is has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay. Even this artistic impetus would at last die away—had almost died in the Time I saw. To adorn themselves with fl owers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight: so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more. Even that would fade in the end into a contented inactivity. We are kept on the grindstone of pain and necessity, and, it seemed to me, that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last.61 Th e achievement of this amnesiac paradise, whose imminence today is signaled by the industrial machines rapidly learning to think and do for themselves, has broken that grindstone turned by human fl esh—but it is also the grindstone upon which the material world is powdered into art. As Freud has it in Dora: “Neurotics are dominated by the opposition between reality and phantasy. If what they long for most intensely in their phantasies is presented to them in reality, they none the less fl ee from it.”62 In Th e Time Machine , Wells the prophet of improvement meets Wells the fi ction-writer at the crossroads of an ambiguously eventless modernity, and the question is: who should stay and who should go?63

EVERYDAY APOCALYPSE AND THE MORLOCKS EX MACHINA

Of course, the story does not end here, with the Traveller in the arms of Weena. First of all, we know from the fi rst that our narrator will evade the grasp of this automatic Eden eventually, since the entire story of the world

61 Wells, Time Machine , 33. 62 Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 101. 63 Utopia haunted by boredom is one of the permanent preoccupations of Wells’s work. For instance, in Meanwhile of 1927 (New York: George H. Doran, 1927), 40–1, long after he had left science fi ction behind for (mediocre) realism, we fi nd the following exchange about socialism: 138 Against the Event of 802,701 is constructed as a frame narrative, a story within a story that is related by the Traveller to his dinner companions once he has made his way back from the future. But the immediate cause of the resumption of the narrative—the impetus that forces the Traveller out of the arms of his Weena—is the arrival of the Morlocks on the scene. Th ey emerge only at the halfway point of the work, and their appearance has the eff ect of over- turning all of the Traveller’s ideas about the nature of this future world he has discovered. But, gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had diff erentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upper-world were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Th ing, which had fl ashed before me, was also heir to all the ages. I thought of the fl ickering pillars and of my theory of an underground ventila- tion. I began to suspect their true import. And what, I wondered, was this Lemur doing in my scheme of a perfectly balanced organization? How was it related to the indolent serenity of the beautiful Upper-worlders? And what was hidden down there, at the foot of that shaft?64 All of his conclusions about the entanglement of social amelioration and the future degradation of man have been complicated or canceled out entirely by the surfacing of this new factor. Th e end of history itself comes about with the materialization of the Morlocks, and we are left unsure of what to make of the “automatic civilization” of Eloi from the fi rst part of the book. Th e most obvious explanation for this sudden reorientation of the novel might be that it represents an enactment , a performance , of society’s tendency to turn a blind eye toward the laboring classes. Th rough this turn, Th e Time Machine performs the rediscovery of the hidden toil without

“But who wants to live in this world of prigs?” came the voice of Geoff rey in revolt. “I do for one,” said Mr. Sempack. “It would bore me to death.” “Lots of us are bored almost to violence by things as they are. More will be. Progress has always been a battle of the bored against the contented and the hopeless. If you like this world with its diseases and frustrations, its toil and blind cravings and unsatisfi ed wants, its endless quarrellings and cruelties, the pettiness of its present occupations in such grotesque contrast with the hard and frightful violence to which it is so plainly heading, if you like this world, I say, defend it. But I want to push it into the past as completely as I can and as fast as I can before it turns to horror. So I shall be against you. I am for progress. I believe in progress. Work for progress is the realest thing in life to me. If some messenger came to me and said with absolute conviction to me, ‘Th at is all. It can never be any better,’ I would not go on living in it for another four and twenty hours.” 64 Wells, Time Machine , 46. Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 139 which the egalitarian society of the surface world could not exist. Th e terminal equilibrium of Eloi life rests upon the unsteady pivot of social inequality. And, in line with this interpretation, when it dawns on the Traveller that the Morlocks are in fact eating the Eloi, the work takes on the distinctive markings of what we might call today a case study of “blowback.” Th en I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming upon me, by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfi shness. Man had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time Necessity had come home to him.65 Th at this intention on the part of Wells is at work behind the sudden emergence of the Morlocks is undeniable, but it seems to me to be more than this as well. In knocking the work out of terminal equilibrium, he simultaneously broadens the reach of Th e Time Machine as a socio-political allegory and fi nds a way to relight the spark of interest and adventure in the story—to render it once again evental. Just at the moment when the Traveller seems to be settling down with Weena in this “strange and beautiful world,” right when his story threatens to “slip away,” something happens . Try to imagine, for a moment, what sort of conclusion the narrative could have reached if not for the emergence of the “bleached, obscene, nocturnal Th ing.”66 I am not suggesting that Wells literally came to the middle of his work and found it, under the pressure of the utopian everyday, on the verge of plot collapse. In fact, the Traveller gives us hints all along that some element is missing from the world of the Eloi, that things are not as they at fi rst seem to be. Th ere is, for instance, the mystery of why there are so few Eloi, given the ease of their lives and the lack of any apparent threat to their lives. Possibly the checks they had devised for the increase of the population had suc- ceeded too well, and their numbers had rather diminished than kept stationary. Th at would account for the abandoned ruins. Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!67 Over and above these hints and whispers is, of course, the more atmospheric sense we get that the Traveller’s encounter with the Eloi is haunted by an imminent collapse. Th is is in large part fueled by the Eloi’s apparent ignorance about their situation. After all, they are barely even conscious of the threat, which they acknowledge only with fl eeting expressions of

65 Wells, Time Machine , 62. 66 Wells, Time Machine , 46. 67 Wells, Time Machine , 33. 140 Against the Event sharp but indistinct fear. Th ey are like animals, instinctually driven away from the danger of the dark, but incapable of leaping beyond their present-tense existence to anticipate what is in store for them. Even late in the book, the Traveller sees them in this light: I understood now what all the beauty of the Upper-world people covered. Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the fi eld. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs and their end was the same. 68 Utopia swallows narrative whole. It is the culmination of the everyday, the fi nal establishment of an eventless present that promises never to change, and under the eff ect of its magnetism the compass of the fi ction that approaches it breaks, indicates due north no matter what direction you point it. If Flaubert’s strange “realism” in Madame Bovary involves the confrontation of the everyday as it incessantly attempts to escape from itself, Th e Time Machine collides with an everyday that threatens never to end, that seems to have put the dialectical cycling of the event and eventlessness to an irrevocable stop. Th e Morlocks simply must appear in order for the story to be told at all. In a sense, this situation is refl ected, if complexly, in the story of the development and publication history of Th e Time Machine . Beginning with an early version entitled “Th e Chronic Argonauts,” which was published in Science Schools Journal when Wells was just 21 (1888), parts of the story then ran in the National Observer in 1894, and a year later as a monthly serial in the New Review , after which it fi nally began to attract a serious amount of public attention. 69 According to Bernard Bergonzi, there were as many as seven distinct versions of Th e Time Machine , of which only fi ve survive in manuscript form today.70 True to Wells’s evolutionary preoccupations, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in Th e Time Machine. Th e story settles successively into the world systems of the previous versions of the story, as the contents of the frame narrative repeat the unanchored time travel of “Th e Chronic Argo- nauts,” and the Traveller’s initial series of misapprehensions about the nature of the situation repeats the situations described in the National Observer and New Review versions of the story. Aside from “Th e Chronic Argonauts,” which fails to represent the future world at all, all of the earlier versions share a rhythm of idleness that breaks suddenly into eventfulness,

68 Wells, Time Machine , 78. 69 Robert M. Philmus, “Revisions of the Future: Th e Time Machine ,” Journal of General Education , 28/1 (Spring 1976), 23. 70 Bernard Bergonzi, “Th e Publication of Th e Time Machine 1894–5,” Review of English Studies , ns 11/41 (February 1960), 42. Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 141 as in each case the plot stalls into issueless description of utopian stasis only to be subsequently reactivated by a quasi-revolutionary revolt on the part of the underclasses.71 In fact, we might say that what is made most clear through an examination of the earlier versions is the fact that, while the contents of Wells’s politico-evolutionary prophesy were constantly under revision, the one persistent preoccupation across the various versions is the temporal rhythm itself, the pattern of affl uent plotlessness interrupted by a violent event. Th e leap forward that comes with the fi nal version of the work is the narrativization of these preserved phylogenic traces, as the novella successively stages the emergence of the true situation in the mind of the Traveller. And it further underscores the central importance of this rhythmic organization to Wells’s project to note that, even in the aftermath of the restarting of history by means of this Morlocks ex machina, when the Traveller has at last found his time machine and escaped from their clutches, Wells inserts yet another and wider rendition of the end of history at the conclusion of his work. Th is time the frame of reference has shifted from the socio-political backdrop to the physical, the universal. In his haste to leave the world of the Eloi and Morlocks, he accidentally pushes the machine further into the future—billions of days into the future. As he plunges forward in time, he notices a strange alteration in the fl icker of day and night that marks the visual experience of traveling in time. As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things. Th e palpi- tating greyness grew darker; then—though I was still travelling with prodi- gious velocity—the blinking succession of day and night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace, returned, and grew more and more marked. Th is puzzled me very much at fi rst. Th e alternations of night and day grew slower and slower, and so did the passage of the sun across the sky, until they seemed to stretch through centuries. At last a steady twilight brooded over the earth, a twilight only broken now and then when a comet glared across the darkling sky. Th e band of light that had indicated the sun had long since disappeared; for the sun had ceased to set—it simply rose and fell in the west, and grew ever broader and more red. All trace of the moon had vanished. Th e circling of the stars, growing slower and slower, had given place to creeping points of light. At last, some time before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat, and now and then suff ering a momentary extinction.72 It is a strange eff ect that the Traveller describes, where, as if against reason and every expectation, the faster he travels through time the more slowly

71 Geduld, Defi nitive Time Machine , 153. 72 Wells, Time Machine , 81–2. 142 Against the Event the physical world moves around him. Th e oscillation of night and day itself is slowing down and the sun hangs in the sky, never setting, as day and night have merged into a permanent state of twilight. Th e entire universe appears to be running in reverse, sliding towards stoppage, despite the fact that on the dials of the time machine’s dashboard “the thousands hand was sweeping round as fast as the seconds hand of a watch—into futurity.”73 As it turns out, the Time Traveller has plunged so far into the future that he actually encounters the early signs of the heat death of the universe, the ostensible outcome of the Second Law of Th ermodynamics. As I mentioned above, William Th omson’s landmark paper, “On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy,” argues that, because of the tendency of energy in a closed system to move inexorably toward equilibrium, toward terminal entropy, a state will eventually arrive in which no further reactions would be possible. And, as he says in the paper, the universe itself is just such a closed system: Within a fi nite period of time past, the earth must have been, and within a fi nite period of time to come the earth must again be, unfi t for habitation of man as at present constituted, unless operations have been, or are to be performed, which are impossible under the laws to which the known operations going on at present in the material world are subject.74 Th e Traveller has inadvertently arrived on the scene of this static apocalypse. Th e sun has grown larger, enormous, but also dimmer and its heat is dull. Th e constant transfer of energy from a center to the periphery, from the sun to the planets that orbit it, is fi nally nearing its end. From his dinner party at the nexus of an empire upon which the sun never sets, the Traveller has ventured to a remote England, the end of England and the world, upon which the sun literally, physically, simply hangs on the western horizon. He eventually brings his machine to rest on a beach, “thirty million years hence.”75 Th e darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white fl akes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying fl akes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air

73 Wells, Time Machine , 81. 74 Th omson, Papers , 33–4. 75 Wells, Time Machine , 84. Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 143 more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. Th e breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. Th e sky was absolutely black. A horror of this great darkness came on me. Th e cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me.76 Th e only life forms left at this late stage are the most primordial, “liver- worts and lichens,” and a strange creature that seems to indicate that the organic is nearing the terminus of its return trip back to the inorganic: “I fancied I saw some black object fl opping about on this bank, but it became motionless as I looked at it, and I judged that my eye had been deceived, and that the black object was merely a rock.”77 Th e uncanny horror of this end fi nally overwhelms him, he feels that he is about to faint, and leaps into the time machine to return to the present day. As Bruce Clarke informs us in his work on the representation of thermodynamics in literature, Wells would later apologize in his introduction to the 1931 reissue of Th e Time Machine for the conclusion of the novel as one informed by the bad science of a previous day: the geologists and astronomers of that time told us dreadful lies about the ‘inevitable’ freezing up of the world—and of life and mankind with it. Th e whole game of life would be over in a million years or less. Th ey impressed this upon us with the full weight of their authority, while now Sir James Jeans in his smiling Uni- verse Around Us waves us on to millions of millions of years.78 But while the science that informed the frigid conclusion of the work was outdated just thirty years after its initial publication, the fi nal chapters remain a fascinatingly provocative resolution to the temporal contradictions that inform the movement of the novella. Having staged the “suicide” of the human intellect that comes of a society of plenty and then “restarted” history through the emergence of the Morlocks, Th e Time Machine plunges itself into yet another episode of apocalyptic eventlessness, this time on the scale of the entire physical universe itself, and one that is fi gured by the chill of the perpetual twilight, a world in which the sun literally fails to rise or set. And, having returned to tell the story of the end of the world—or, the ends of the world—that he has seen, the Travel- ler sets out once again, seemingly never to return. Th e purpose of the narrative frame, in which an “I” named Filby tells us the story of the time

76 Wells, Time Machine , 85. 77 Wells, Time Machine , 84. 78 H. G. Wells, Th e Time Machine (New York: Random House, 1931), pp. ix–x. 144 Against the Event machine that he has heard from the lips of the Traveller, fi nally reveals itself. Without it, how could we learn of the fi nal disappearance of the “author” of the central narrative itself ? At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting for the Time Travel- ler; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. Th e Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.79 Filby speculates in the epilogue about where the Traveller has chosen to go, to stay. Has he headed backwards instead of forward, or perhaps headed “into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved?”80 Or, we might ask, was it back into the arms of a still living Weena that he launched himself, the twilight world of mindless consumption and fretless sex, the eventless everyday at the end of the world that just might be the end point for the runaway time machine that is modernity, that is progress? I will have much more to say about the frame narrative as a hybrid form—modernist and obsolete at the same time—in the next chapter on Heart of Darkness. But, in a sense, the construction of Th e Time Machine as a frame narrative permits Wells’s novella to sidestep the consequences of the temporal problems evoked by the text. As the narrative has twice encountered the end of history, once within a social frame and then on the plane of the natural world, the disappearance of the narrator of the text permits Wells to avoid the awkward matter of coming to terms with what we have just read, as the very man who should tell us is nowhere to be found. Because of the distracted industriousness of the Traveller and the story he tells, the massive temporal crises encountered are never translated into subjective crises, problems on the level of perception and refl ection that we are accustomed to associating with modernism. Th e fi nal disappearance of Wells’s protagonist-narrator, then, is one answer to the question that I implicitly asked above: this is what it costs a text to engage with the erosive temporality of the everyday, but not to adjust the basic architecture of its narrative form in response. But the precedent that Wells set in his engagement with the crisis of narratability that comes of the arrival of a world in which the progressive development of the nineteenth century had fl attened and eddied lives on in later works, works whose forms do struggle to keep up with their temporal contents, thematically and atmospherically. Wells’s hanging sun, for

79 Wells, Time Machine , 91. 80 Wells, Time Machine , 91. Th e “Odd Consequence” of Progress 145 instance, “red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat, and now and then suff ering a momentary extinction,” comes to feature as a recurring motif in English fi ction from Conrad to J. G. Ballard.81 [A] peculiarly London sun—against which nothing could be said except that it looked bloodshot—glorifi ed all this by its stare. It hung at a moderate elevation above Hyde Park Corner with an air of punctual and benign vigilance. [. . .] Th ere were red, coppery gleams on the roofs of houses, on the corners of walls, on the panels of carriages, on the very coats of the horses, and on the broad back of Mr Verloc’s overcoat, where they produced a dull eff ect of rustiness. 82 It is no coincidence, given the argument that I have been tracing throughout my book, that this description from Conrad’s Th e Secret Agent of a looming sun bathing the city in rust introduces the scene during which Verloc is ordered by State Councillor Wurmt and Vladimir to bring about an event , the bombing of the Greenwich Observatory, to break the ideological complacency of the British. As the former tells Verloc: “What is required at present is not writing, but the bringing to light of a distinct, signifi cant fact—I would almost say of an alarming fact.”83

81 Th e dying sun is a recurrent image in Ballard’s novels and stories. Just to cite one example, the fi rst paragraph of Th e Drowned World ((London: HarperPerennial, 2006), 7) features a “solar disc [that] was no longer a well-defi ned sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out across the eastern horizon like a colossal fi re-ball, its refl ection turning the dead leaden surface of the lagoon into a brilliant copper shield.” 82 Joseph Conrad, Th e Secret Agent (London: Penguin, 2007), 9–10. 83 Conrad, Secret Agent , 56. This page intentionally left blank 4 “His Occupation Would Be Gone”: Unemployment and Time in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Addressing the “literary speculation” that swirled around his surrogate narrator Marlow in the “Author’s Note” that accompanied the fi rst publication of Heart of Darkness in book form (1902), Joseph Conrad describes his relationship with his character in terms more appropriate to a spontaneous and intense friendship than a literary creation. Th e man Marlow and I came together in the casual manner of those health-resort acquaintances which sometimes ripen into friendships. Th is one has ripened. For all his assertiveness in matters of opinion he is not an intrusive person. He haunts my hours of solitude, when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great comfort and harmony; but as we part at the end of the tale I am never sure that it may not be for the last time.1 What he says next about this very modern relationship marked by instant intimacy and the specter of an abrupt conclusion is characteristically Conradian, as what seems at fi rst straightforward is in fact densely strung with allusion and complexity. Yet I don’t think that either of us would care much to survive the other. In his case, at any rate, his occupation would be gone and he would suff er from extinction, because I suspect him of some vanity. I don’t mean vanity in the Solomonian sense.2 It is possible to take Conrad’s quip here—that, with the disappearance of his creator, so goes Marlow’s job—as merely a bad joke, if one that

A previous version of this chapter was published as “Work, Unemployment, and the Exhaustion of Fiction in Heart of Darkness,” in Novel, 39/3 (2006): 337–60. Copyright, 2006, Novel, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the present publisher, Duke University Press. 1 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness with the Congo Diary , ed. Robert Hampson (New York: Penguin, 1995), 10. 2 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 10. 148 Against the Event anticipates later critical developments such as the emergence of the concept of the “death of the author.” But what are we to make of the fact that this somewhat glib allusion to his proxy’s potential unemployment occurs in the preface to a novella so fundamentally—and darkly—preoccupied with the themes of work, the extinction of work, and death? After all, near the beginning of his journey upriver, Marlow will encounter a set of fi gures who tread the line between work and extinction, but this time in a situation much less whimsical than that framed in the “Author’s Note”: Th ey were dying slowly—it was very clear. Th ey were not enemies, nor were they criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in the uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became ineffi cient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.3 Worked until they can work no more, until they “became ineffi cient,” these native laborers have been abandoned to an “extinction” far more dire than the one predicted by Conrad for his character. However jarring the comparison between the two situations, and however diff erent the tonal bearings of the two passages, in conjunction they intimate a subtle line of affi liation that in fact organizes the novella as a whole. If Conrad’s enigmatic remarks outline the conditions under which his character would become extinct, Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the signifi - cance of Marlow in Lord Jim hints that it might already have been too late. In Th e Political Unconscious , Jameson describes the surrogate narrator as a provocatively anachronistic formal gesture, one that runs against the social and literary currents of the time. Th e representational fi ction of a storytelling situation organized around Marlow marks the vain attempt to conjure back the older unity of the literary institution, to return to that older concrete social situation of which narrative transmission was but a part, and of which public and bard or storyteller are intrinsic [. . .] components.4 Jameson proceeds to suggest that the use of a such a narrator, a seemingly outdated technique during the period that saw the invention of such forms as Henry James’s perspectival organization of his texts, is actually a mode of postmodern resistance avant la lettre to such symptoms of modernity as the “ever intensifying alienation of the printed

3 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 35. 4 Fredric Jameson, Th e Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 219–20. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 149 book” and the instrumentalization of culture as a whole.5 In this reading, Marlow functions as an unpunctual avatar of the voice, the story, and the human in a world that is busy rationalizing all three out of existence. Notice the verb that Jameson uses in the passage above to describe the situation at hand: Conrad conjures back the storyteller. Marlow becomes in this rendition a ghostly visitor from the past, a reanimated dead form, whose summoning turns the history of the novel temporarily out of joint. But might the Marlow of Heart of Darkness be more usefully described, especially in the light of the “Author’s Note,” as obsolete rather than extinct, lingering on rather than resurrected? In this text, the narrator is recalled not from the tomb but from the lines at the unemployment offi ce. As we shall see, Marlow has not so much been killed off (and subsequently reanimated) but simply put out of work by the arrival of a new cadre of impersonal narrators—invisible, adaptable to current conditions, and ruthlessly effi cient when it comes to the seamless transparency that the market demands. Further, Conrad’s narrator is not the only aspect of Heart of Darkness to exhibit the symptoms of unemployment. While we are accustomed to understanding Heart of Darkness as at once a dramatic announcement of the emergence of literary modernism and a vivid, if ambiguous, evocation of European imperialism at its moment of peak expansion, I will be arguing in this chapter that it is also a profound and timely meditation on the changing nature of work at the turn of the century. In fact, it is Conrad’s engagement with the concept of work—and unemployment in particular—that enables us to understand most vividly the relationship between the novella’s innovative formal organization and its depiction of the dysfunction and depravity of the Belgian Congo. Unemployment, especially as we fi nd it in the book’s images of obsolescence, issueless eff ort, and frantic waiting, is not simply the absence of work, and it certainly has nothing at all to do with leisure. Rather, it is a term that lies in the broken middle between work and idleness, a structural feature of modern economic life that haunts those who have a job as palpably as those who lack a position. And, as the signs of unemployment spread from Marlow’s experience of work for the “Company” to the construction of the novella itself, Heart of Darkness forecasts a world in which consciousness itself— as well as its privileged literary home, the novel—have been served notice, have been deemed too ineffi cient to survive the irrational rationalization that characterizes capitalist modernity.

5 Jameson, Unconscious , 219–20. 150 Against the Event Viewing Heart of Darkness through the lens of work and unemployment makes possible a new understanding of the relationship between Marlow, the other Europeans, and the native African laborers who appear persistently, if sporadically, in the work. As Patrick Brantlinger argues in his essay “Victorians and Africans: Th e Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent,” nineteenth-century racist discourse, in instantiating and enforcing an unbridgeable distinction between the British worker at home and the native worker in the colonies, served both to mystify and to justify the naturalness of class distinction in Britain.6 And, true to form, if we take Marlow at his word (and in doing so, follow the lead of the bulk of critics working in the wake of Chinua Achebe’s 1977 essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”), the Africans in the novella are nothing more than avatars of primitivism, extras ringing the stage as, in Achebe’s words, “props for the break-up of one petty Euro- pean mind.” 7 But the reality of the relationship between the two groups is far too complex to be fully captured by a distinction between the primitive and the modern. Rather, for all of his bluster about the natives and their primitivism, in the scenes in which Marlow actually encounters the native Congolese at work—when he encounters them as workers —we fi nd a subtly rendered sense that their working situation diff ers from Mar- low’s less in its nature than in its intensity. Th e Africans stand in Heart of Darkness not so much as avatars of a prehistorical past as of a posthistorical future, even if Marlow himself cannot quite come to terms with this fact. Beginning with Marlow’s own work and unemployment and moving on to his partial, halting identifi cation with the native workers, this chapter will demonstrate that Heart of Darkness , in its grappling with the concept of labor, at least intimates a reversal of the racist mystifi cation described by Brantlinger. It is only through this jarring constellation of intensifi ed work and unemployment, white employee and black laborer, and, above all, narrative innovation and thematic concerns, that we can begin to understand the way that, for all its diff erences, Heart of Darkness stands as a frenzied fulfi llment of the temporal trajectory of modern narrative begun by Flaubert in Madame Bovary. In Th e Political Unconscious, Jameson attempts to forge an analysis of the interweaving of social basis and narrative form. He examines the way that Lord Jim seems to center on a

6 Patrick Brantlinger, “Victorians and Africans: Th e Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent,” in Henry Louis Gates (ed.), Race: Writing, and Diff erence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 7 Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ,” Massa- chusetts Review , 18 (1977), 788. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 151 narrative event (what happened on the Patna ) only to expend itself as a work in the destabilization and dissolution of that event. In the case of Lord Jim, the narrative construes the “event” as the analysis and dissolution of events in some more common everyday naïve sense. Th e “event” in Lord Jim is the analysis and dissolution of the event […] we have understood very little about this narrative unless we have come to realize that even that “real story” itself is for Conrad hollow and empty, and that there is a void at the heart of events and acts in this work which goes well beyond simple anecdotal mystifi cation.8 Jameson further suggests, though does not quite substantiate in the case of Lord Jim, that what is missing, what causes the event to become unstable and indeterminate, is at base a social phenomenon rather than simply an epistemological disorder on the part of the individual: however impossible the problem of the act may be at the level of the human subject [in Lord Jim ] it is evident that the social washes back across it, to transform it utterly […] the existential “extreme situation” […] is less a laboratory experiment designed to expose the inner articulation of the act and of the instant than the precondition for the revelation of the texture of ideology.9 According to Jameson’s reading, the instability of the narrative event gives oblique access to the “political unconscious” of the text. He hints at the idea that it has something to do with seafaring, “the confraternity of the sea,” but does not probe the specifi c situation in question more deeply than this. Heart of Darkness displays a similarly anti-evental structure to that of Lord Jim , but it is one with an even more solid and vivid relationship to its social context than that which is described by Jameson in regard to Conrad’s later novel. Th e preoccupations of this novella—imperial expansion, the schizophrenic fl ickering of the “light” of civilization between humanistic progress and barbarous exploitation, and the terrible adventures of those “Workers, with a capital you know” who supervise the whole aff air (28)—do not at fi rst register as likely to continue the evocation of the everyday temporalities found in Flaubert and Wells. But Con- rad’s preoccupation with unemployment informed his production of a distinctly anti-evental arrangement of narrative in Heart of Darkness , and it is no coincidence that this should be the case. From the plane of geopolitics to the psychological gestalt of the individual employee for a large corporation, the 1890s were a period marked by an anxiety about

8 Jameson, Unconscious , 257. 9 Jameson, Unconscious , 264–5. 152 Against the Event eventlessness and stasis across a wide range of issues. Th e “work” of imperial expansion, which constantly requires ever more expansion in order, as it were, to pay its bills, comes face to face with its own paradoxical logic at this moment in history, when what Marlow calls the “blank spaces” on the map of the world have all been tinted by the colors of the imperial powers. And, on the level of the individual, the increasing “rationalization” of labor and its management, as well as the concomitant valorization of “effi ciency,” leads to the arrival of perversely “irrational” threats to the stable self-consistency of the laboring individual. And most important of all, when dealing with Heart of Darkness ’s rendition of and relation to these socio-political themes, is the question of the sense of time evoked by Conrad’s manipulation of the technical architecture of the novel form. As opposed to the model of Wells’s Th e Time Machine, which arranges itself into a stark binary of realist prose broken by strangely threatening episodes of utopian everydayness, Conrad collapses the distinction between progressive time and idle immobility. As Marlow says to his listeners near the midpoint of his story: It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams . . .10 Th is “incredible” must be a matter of time, a temporality, as the “revolt” against being “captured” by it suggests being unwillingly dragged through this complex of “absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment.” Th e passage could in fact serve as an apt description of the eff ect of the narrative momentum of Heart of Darkness as a whole, as it at once rushes forward toward its “end” while paradoxically, despite its dizzying velocity, going nowhere at all, constantly circling back to the place that it has just left. When we consider the narrative rhythm together with the social changes represented in the novella, we will fi nd that Heart of Darkness provides a harrowing and profound glimpse into the nature of the “Work” of enlightened modernity, the work of the individual laborer adapting to new social arrangements, and the work of the modern writer straddling the line between plot-driven genre fi ction and the psychologically penetrating novel associated with modernism. Heart of Darkness , in other words, is a novella about unemployment that has itself been put out of work.

10 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 50. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 153 THE INVENTION OF UNEMPLOYMENT: CONRAD’S CAREERS

In order to understand the relationship between Conrad’s works and the everyday, we must fi rst delve into the cultural and biographical contexts that informed its development. Th e year 1898 was one of amazing productivity for Conrad, for during that year he completed Youth , continued work on Th e Rescue, began the fi rst version of Lord Jim, and very nearly fi nished Heart of Darkness . But, despite this abundant output, his letters from the period are strewn with evocations of the angst, strain, and futility that come from literary production, evocations that are highly reminiscent of those we saw in Flaubert’s correspondence. Th e general theme of these complaints and self-criticisms is extremely consistent: although he works constantly, nothing usable is produced. Take, for instance, the following letter of March 1898 to his friend Edward Garnett: I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours everyday—and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of 8 hours I write 3 sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren’t do it for fear of wak- ing that baby and alarming my wife.11 Conrad’s recurrent reference to the “working day of 8 hours” gives us a hint as to the drift of Conrad’s mind during the time—writing is work, almost manual labor. Th e 1890s were, after all, the period of the initial fl owering of a recognizably contemporary labor union movement, one that held as a central tenet the establishment of the “Eight-Hour System.” Later that same year, in a letter dated December 13, Conrad apologizes (if that is the word for it) to William Blackwood, editor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine —or Maga , as it was popularly known—for the tar- diness of his latest story, which turns out to be Heart of Darkness itself. And this is all I can say unless I were to unfold for the n th time the miserable tale of my ineffi ciency. I trust however that in Jan y I’ll be able to send you about 30000 words or perhaps a little less, towards the Vol: of short stories. Apart from my interest it is such a pleasure for me to appear in the Maga that you may well believe it is not laziness that keeps me back. It is, alas, something—I don’t know what—not so easy to overcome. With an immense eff ort a thin trickle of MS is

11 Edward Garnett (ed.), Letters from Conrad, 1895 to 1924 (London: Nonesuch Press, 1928), 126–7. 154 Against the Event produced—and that, just now, must be kept in one channel only lest no one gets anything and I am completely undone.12 On the surface, of course, this is just more of the same material about the laboriousness of writing, this time mobilized not to elicit the sympathy of friends and literary fellow-travelers like Garnett, but to hold off the frustration of his publisher—who has already made him a sizeable advance on the story. But when we listen carefully to the words that Conrad uses here to describe his struggles with composition, we sense something else at play. “With an immense eff ort a thin trickle of MS is produced”: almost every word in this line plays a part in a memorable moment of Heart of Darkness . “Immense” returns, among other places, in the map of the Congo (“an immense snake uncoiled”), in the remem- brance of Kurtz’s voice (“like a dying vibration of one immense jabber”), and of course in the last line of the work as a whole, where the Th ames seems “to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” 13 In contrast to Conrad’s ostensibly fruitless “eff ort” to fi nish the work, Kurtz, to the amazement of Marlow, produces language “without eff ort, almost without the trouble of moving his lips.” 14 Th e “trickle of MS” that is the yield of Conrad’s struggles mirrors the eerie trade imbalance that we are given a glimpse of at the Company’s station: “Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and departed; a stream of manufactured goods, rub- bishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire sent into the depths of darkness, and in return came a precious trickle of ivory.” 15 Most pointedly, Conrad’s trouble completing the manuscript is attributed to his “ineffi ciency”—a concept whose importance is perhaps second to none in Heart of Dark- ness , as it is the very thing that, in good faith or bad, distinguishes benevolent imperial administration from bloodthirsty plundering. Remember, for instance, the distinction that Marlow advances in the opening scene of the novel between “our” approach to empire and the “fascination of the abomination” that compels the Roman offi cer in Britain “nineteen hundred years ago—the other day”: And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. Th e fascination of the abomination—you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate […] Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves us is effi ciency—the devotion to effi ciency. 16

12 Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, Th e Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad , ii. 1898–1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 129–30. 13 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 22 , 80, 124. 14 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 98. 15 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 37. 16 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 20. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 155 Finally, in an uncanny echo of the topographical setting of his narrative, Conrad explains in his letter to Blackwood that his literary eff orts “must be kept in one channel only lest no one gets anything.” It is no coincidence that Conrad’s letters on writing—as well as the masterwork he was developing at the time—were so preoccupied with work and unemployment, especially when you consider the specifi c economic climate of his day. Th e lingering eff ects of the fi rst “Great Depres- sion,” which began in 1873 and which lasted more than twenty years, precipitated wild fl uctuations in the labor market and the economy that lasted well into the 1890s. In fact, it was the decade during which Conrad composed Heart of Darkness that featured the initial emergence of the very concept of unemployment in the fi elds of economics and social policy. Rather than an accidental eff ect, a manifestation of the lack of personal industry or gumption on the part of the jobless individual, it was quickly dawning on both labor and capital during this period that unemployment was a normal category of economic life, a structural eff ect of the wage system and modern industrial competition itself. In February 1895, for instance, according to John Burnett, the British government for the fi rst time authorized a general inquiry into the problem of joblessness, the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Distress from Want of Employment.17 As the economic historian Bo Strâth has it: “Th e ‘invention’ of unemployment occurred all over the industrial world at the end of the nineteenth century, although with great variety as to its precise form. Th e concept of ‘unemployed’ was constructed to express an understanding for deviations from a new emerging ‘normalcy’ involved in wage work and wage agreements. Unemployment, alongside sickness and old age, gradually came to be considered as a ‘normal’ form of work interruption.” 18 Th is shift in public policy was matched by a slow but insistent transformation of the science of economics itself, as it began to slide from neo-classical insistence that the market would automatically provide work to any individual who presented himself to it in good faith and with a certain amount of fl exibility in wage demands. But, even as late as 1935, John Maynard Keynes, in Th e General Th eory of Employment, Interest, and Money , would still be able to describe the concept of “involuntary unemployment” as a sort of Copernican turn incompatible with the still dominant strain of classical economics: “Th e classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines

17 John Burnett, Idle Hands: Th e Experience of Unemployment, 1790–1990 (London: Routledge, 1994), 153. 18 Bo Strâth, Th e Organization of Labour Markets: Modernity, Culture, and Governance in Germany, Sweden, Britain, and Japan ((London: Routledge, 1996) 11. 156 Against the Event for not keeping straight—as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring.”19 Further, the changing nature of the labor market and the emergence of unemployment during the period touched those at work as much as those out of it. According to Eric Hobsbawm, it was during this period that management “learned the rules of the game” by discovering “genuinely effi cient ways of utilizing their workers’ labour time.”20 Th e rules of the game in question, the fi rst draft of what would come to be known as “scientifi c management,” had a twofold focus: the intensifi cation of the eff orts of the individual worker and the cost-cutting deskilling of the work itself, the shift in emphasis from craftsmanship to the mechanized routines of the assembly line.21 And, very signifi cantly, these advances in the technologies of management, which demanded ever more of employees in exchange for ever less, would have been impossible to implement without a permanent well of unemployed workers—Marx’s “industrial reserve army”—from which to draw. It might seem a stretch at fi rst to embed Joseph Conrad and his Heart of Darkness in this particular historical scenario. After all, Conrad was not a factory worker, and his novels never venture anywhere near the dark satanic mills of industrial England. Before he was a novelist, he was a seaman—for the most part a junior offi cer, attaining at the very end of his career the rank of captain only for a single voyage. He was a man of the sailing ship rather than the machine shop, and furthermore a member of his industry’s managerial class, so there are enough disparities between his status and trade and that of the average British worker to render a direct connection improbable. Further, as Cedric Watts points out, Conrad’s maritime career was underwritten by fi nancial contributions from family back in Poland to the point that any fi nancial insecurity he endured was to a degree self-infl icted and much less severe than that of his unfunded colleagues.22

19 John Maynard Keynes, Th e General Th eory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1991), 16. 20 E. J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1964), 406–7. 21 Arthur J. McIvor, A History of Work in Britain, 1880–1950 (New York: Palgrave Mac- millan, 2001), 43–78. 22 Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994), 10–11. Watts further presents an anecdote about a visit to his Polish relatives and benefactors that captures this situation clearly: “In 1890, when Conrad visited him at Kazimierówka, Tadeusz presented his thirty-two-year-old nephew with the long and meticulous balance-sheet which is now known as ‘Th e Bobrowski Document’. Th e entry for 1887 states: ‘In view of the fact that in November you will reach the age of thirty, by which time everyone ought to be self-supporting, and moreover because the education of the late Kazimierz’s children is costing more, I told you that I must discontinue a regular allowance. Th is I intend to do and must do. Th us making a man out of Mr Konrad has cost— apart from the 3,600 given “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 157 Nonetheless, when we examine more closely the context of his employment on the seas, we fi nd that almost exactly the same dynamics were at work in both the condition of the industrial laborer and the master seaman during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Conrad’s career on the sea coincided with a moment of tremendous transition in the sphere of maritime technology and the labor that worked it. In short, sail-driven ships were being rapidly replaced by steam-driven vessels, a transformation that permitted the transportation of much larger quantities of cargo with much greater effi ciency—that is, with vastly lower labor costs. Th e dwindling number of sailing ships and the drive to staff them ever more conservatively in order to cut costs rendered the sail offi cer’s career increasingly intermittent and stressful as the nineteenth century ran to a close.23 And, in a manner analogous to that aff ecting the broader industrial sector, the combined pressures of competition and the rising rate of unemployment informed an intensifi cation of maritime work and the deskilling of maritime workers. Whereas sailing ships required an enormous amount of skill from their workers up and down the chain of command, steamers were more fully automated, soliciting mostly brawn power rather than brainwork from their employees.24 True to form, Conrad’s life bears vivid witness to the changing nature of maritime work during the period. Until his thirtieth year, he steadily you as capital—17,454 [roubles]’. At that time, ten roubles were roughly equivalent to one English pound. So ‘the making of a man out of Mr. Konrad’ had cost, on Bobrowski’s scrupulous reckoning, £1745, during a period in which an English working man with a family would be fortunate to earn £50 per year […] Th is was, of course, in addition to all the wages that Conrad had earned (often at appreciable risk to his life) during his arduous years at sea.” 23 Robert D. Foulke, “Life in the Dying World of Sail, 1870–1910,” Journal of British Studies , 3/1 (November 1963), 115–34. 24 Foulke, “Life,” 127. According to the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society ( J o h n Glover, “Tonnage Statistics of the Decade 1891–1900,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society , 65/1 (March 1902), 28) , while the total number of men employed in the British shipping industry increased by 10 percent between 1880 and 1900, the number of those employed on sailing ships rather than steamers suff ered a 58 percent decrease. Further- more, one of the unique aspects of the changing labor conditions of shipping that distinguishes it from unemployment on dry land was the fact that maritime unemployment, with its corresponding intensifi cation of work and deskilling of workers, aff ected the “managerial” echelons, the offi cers, as much as or even more than non-commissioned seamen. Under competitive pressure from steamship companies to reduce freight rates, according to Foulke (“Life ,”134), the owners of sailcraft attempted to press offi cers’ wages down, something that they were largely successful in doing since the “offi cers had no eff ective bargaining position. Too many offi cers were certifi ed for the decreasing number of berths available, and young men and foreign offi cers were willing to accept low salaries to get a berth.” While non-offi cers might be able to transfer their skill sets to a steamship, the elaborately arcane techniques of the sailing mate or captain bound him to this obsolescent technology. 158 Against the Event climbed the ladder of maritime rank, beginning as a mere apprentice seaman on the Mont-Blanc at the age of 17.25 His career peaked in 1887, when he was the commander of the Otago for a journey to Sydney, earning £14 a month, a wage he would never again equal. 26 But, as sailing ships were swiftly replaced by steamers in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Conrad began to fall back down the career ladder, spending ever longer periods on shore looking for a ship to hire him. According to Jeff rey Mey- ers in his biography of Conrad, At the end of 1897 there were forty-two fewer British ships than there had been in 1892. Steamers, which were replacing sailing ships, carried larger cargoes and smaller crews [… After 1894] Conrad was never able to secure another berth. Th ough he tried strenuously to get a command in Glasgow as late as September 1898, he fi nally realized that he had spent twenty years of his life mastering an art that was no longer needed.27 It might well be argued in fact that Conrad’s turn from the sea to novel- writing was encouraged (or at least informed) by his inability to fi nd ship- board work. And, above all else, even if the raw eff ect of the change was buff ered for Conrad by his personal wealth, his exposure to these transitions had a signifi cant eff ect on his later work, as I will show. As Meyers reports, when Conrad was asked by John Sutherland late in life why he made the transition from sailor to writer, he responded, after a long pause: “Well, Commander, I was a long time on shore.”28 An examination of his non-fi ction works of this period and afterward underscores the signifi - cance of this shift in the maritime labor market for Conrad, as he repeatedly fi gures this technological transformation as the occasion of a psychological, existential, and aesthetic crisis.29

25 J e ff rey Meyers, Joseph Conrad (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991), 34. 26 Jerry Allen, Th e Sea Years of Joseph Conrad (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1965), 254–6. 27 Meyers, Conrad , 114–15. 28 Meyers, Conrad , 115. 29 Just two of many possible examples: in An Outcast of the Islands of 1896 ((Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 12–13), the transition from sail to steam is rendered as a shift from beauty to greed, from heroism to calculation: “Th e hand of the engineer tore down the veil of the terrible beauty in order that greedy and faithless landlubbers might pocket dividends.” Further, the transformation spreads metaphorically from the industry to the sea itself: “Th e sea of the past was an incomparably beautiful mistress, with inscruta- ble face, with cruel and promising eyes. Th e sea of to-day is a used-up drudge, wrinkled and defaced by the churned-up wakes of brutal propellers, robbed of the enslaving charm of its vastness, stripped of its beauty, of its mystery and of its promise.” Much later, in his Notes on Life and Letters of 1921 ((London: J. M. Dent, 1949), 161) , Conrad writes of the “utili- tarian ugliness” of steamships and the suggestion that they are “a low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical toilers, conceited and without grace.” “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 159 Heart of Darkness bears many traces of its author’s entanglement in and eventual exclusion from the changing maritime labor market of the late nineteenth century, with its matrix of economic depression, technological innovation, drive for cost-cutting “effi ciency,” and emergent unemployment. In particular, these interlacing contexts inform the secret affi nity in the novella between unemployment, literal or metaphorical, and a particular mode of time that arises with it and that informs the narrative structure of the work. It is a temporality characterized by progression turned into stasis, linearity twisted into circularity, and the disjunction of current action from both past precedent and future eff ect. Th e time of unemployment is a festina lente temporality marked by the emptiness of the present despite its intensity, a slowdown that paradoxically has the feel of vertiginous acceleration. On the level of human subjectivity, it tends to squeeze out consciousness itself in favor of functionalized reception in distraction. Th rough his manipulation of the formal architecture of the novella—a manipulation that puts his own fi ction, in a sense, out of work—Conrad stages the emergence of the time of unemployment in modernity. If, as Althusser and Balibar assert in Reading Capital, “for each mode of production there is a peculiar time […], punctuated in a specifi c way by the development of the productive forces,” Heart of Darkness takes up the question of what form of time corresponds with non-production, with unemployment. 30

MARLOW’S DISCOURSE AND THE TEMPORALITY OF WORK

Th e relation between time and unemployment is incessantly fi gured in the novella by yet another relationship—between discourse and action. Th roughout Heart of Darkness, the relative degree of activity and idleness, eff ort and unemployment, has a direct bearing on the mode and tenor of the discourse that describes or accompanies it. Th e opening scene provides a perfect introduction to this arrangement, as perhaps nowhere else is the connection between activity (or, here, inactivity) and speech rendered so starkly. Th e work begins with a moment of immobility, of waiting: Th e Nellie , a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a fl utter of the sails, and was at rest. Th e fl ood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being

30 Louis Althusser and, Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 1998), 111, as cited in Fredric Jameson, “Th e End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry , 29/4 (Summer 2003), 707. 160 Against the Event bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.31 A group of men is assembled on the deck of this ship, men whose posture stands at the opening of the scene as a human correlative of the “mournful gloom, brooding motionless” that hangs over the estuarial Th ames at this moment. Th e Director, satisfi ed the anchor had good hold, made his way aft and sat down amongst us. We exchanged a few words lazily. Afterwards there was silence on board the yacht. For some reason or other, we did not begin that game of domi- noes. We felt meditative, and fi t for nothing but placid staring. Th e day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance.32 Th e narrative threatens to come to a stop before it has even properly begun, as Conrad begins with an in medias res whose res seem to be nothing more than speechless staring and leaden atmospherics. Th e cloud of stasis is so pervasive that it even seems to have absorbed change itself: “Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less brilliant but more profound.”33 When change comes, it paradoxically comes in the form of an even deeper stillness, a more profound sense of changelessness. Th en, out of nowhere, something does happen. Not an event or an action, but the emergence of a voice. Marlow, while remaining in “the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes,” begins to speak. “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth […] I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans fi rst came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day. . . . Light came out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a fl ash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the fl icker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”34 From the “placid staring” and ever more profound stillness of the men on the Nellie and their surroundings, Marlow leaps into this macro-historical, insistently abstract speech. It hinges on a dizzying abridgment of two millennia, underscored by the syntactic pun “nineteen hundred years ago—the other day . . .” Th e fi nal sentences of the passage above give a hint as to the aphoristic abbreviation that defi nes Marlow’s speech in this opening episode as a whole, where an exquisite deployment of sound is matched by the murky ambiguity of the meaning, too complex for the brief statement that bears it. Th e “Light” that fl ashes up, the

31 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 15. 32 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 16. 33 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 16. 34 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 18–19. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 161 “fl icker” we live in today, and the “darkness” that was here yesterday—we are swept along, increasingly unsure of where each term lines up on the schema of reference that seems to be in play. We learn in turn of the “fascination of the abomination” that plagues the mind of a Roman colonial administrator, of the conviction that it is “effi ciency—the devotion to effi ciency” that distinguishes “our” administration from that of the Romans, and fi nally of the “idea” behind the “conquest of the earth” as a whole: Th e conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a diff erent complexion or slightly fl atter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfi sh belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and off er a sacrifi ce to . . . 35 In this passage, which could serve as an epigraph to Heart of Darkness as a whole, Marlow traces out the equation that underwrites the entire practice of contemporary imperialism, at least on its ideological side. For all its intensity of articulation, however, it too is plagued by a central and disabling aporia, an unbridged leap in logic. In the fi rst sentence, the racist equation of human inequality is stripped of any euphemistic indirect- ness. In the next, after a “but” that is as implicit as it is unspoken, we hear of the redemptive power of the “idea”—an idea that is never defi ned, elaborated upon, but rather has only the empty availability of the fetish, devoid of any nameable content. Marlow’s discourse at the opening of the work, then, takes the form of broad generalization, pseudo-historical summary, and mot juste poeti- cism—all of it, though, untethered from any sort of grounding situation, any “objective correlative.” What exactly triggers Marlow’s leap into this lyrically masterful, if ambiguous, editorializing? Th e mere sight of the river Th ames at fl ood tide? But this ambiguity is exactly the point. What we fi nd in Marlow’s lyrical profusions is exactly that part of the novel that should have been rationalized out of existence under the pressure of James- ian perspectivalism or the neo-Flaubertian impersonality of the style indirect libre. But this return of outdated storytelling comes in a form that is all telling , no story . And, further, the construction of the scene itself, which turns from an atmospheric insistence on profound stillness and pervasive idleness, to this seemingly unprovoked, wide-angled, trans-temporal essayistic speech of Marlow, seems to insist on a secret affi nity between stasis and hyperbolic contemplation itself. If the setting of the scene

35 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 20. 162 Against the Event constructs a bridge between idleness and subjectivity, the disjointed nature of Marlow’s speech opens a corresponding gap between the twin faces of conventional narration—that is, between subjective contemplation and objective reportage. In short, the strange scene that opens Heart of Darkness —which seems to test the limits of fi ction itself in its align- ment of eventlessness and analysis of the greatest possible sweep—forces the reader to confront immediately the relationship between activity and discourse, a relationship that will structure the rest of the work. In the long and complex story of the development of what might be called the modern subject, the eff ect of the changing nature of work is a central strand that has not received the attention that it deserves. Among many other things, Heart of Darkness is a report back from the front- lines of this development—it is a “workplace fi ction,” even if the workplace in question might be a nightmarishly unconventional one. As the novella turns from the prologue set on the decks of the Nellie to Mar- low’s tale proper, the theme of idleness is translated from the realm of vague atmospherics into the domain of socio-economic reality. It is no coincidence that the story begins with a bout of unemployment on Marlow’s part. I had then, as you remember, just returned to London after a lot of Indian Ocean, Pacifi c, China Seas—a regular dose of the East—six years or so, and I was loafi ng about, hindering you fellows in your work and invading your homes, just as though I had got a heavenly mission to civilize you. It was very fi ne for a time, but after a bit I did get tired of resting. Th en I began to look for a ship—I should think the hardest work on earth. But the ships wouldn’t even look at me. And I got tired of that game too.36 In this passage, the concepts of idleness and labor, of employment and passivity, are subtly and tellingly intermingled in such a way as to blur these conventional binaries right from the outset of the story: Marlow seeks work because he is “tired of resting,” and fi nds that unemployment, paradoxically, is “the hardest work on earth.” Th e passage further contains an off hand joke—a rather inappropriate one in light of what is to come— which equates civilization itself with idleness, as if the European “heavenly mission” in Africa is an invasion aimed at teaching by example diligent workers how to loaf. Marlow eventually obtains a position through the intervention of “an aunt, a dear enthusiastic soul.”37 And, just before setting out on the French

36 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 21. 37 Th is turn of events that parallels Conrad’s recourse to his own “aunt” (in truth, the widow of his cousin) Marguerite Poradowska in order to turn a promised position into an actual one with the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Congo in 1890, as recounted “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 163 steamer that will bring him to the Congo, Marlow pays her a visit, in the course of which this well-connected relative advances a claim that her nephew’s new job has a value above and beyond the labor that he will perform or the salary that he will earn. I was going to take charge of a two-penny-half-penny river-steamboat with a penny whistle attached! It appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital—you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. Th ere had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about “weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,” till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable.38 In her eyes, what Marlow’s aunt has won for her nephew is more than simply a position and a salary, but a vocation, an opportunity to take part in a quasi-religious endeavor. He will be, as Marlow sardonically reports, “one of the Workers, with a capital—you know.” And when he ventures “to hint that the Company was run for profi t,” his aunt responds with a backhanded reference to the gospel of Luke: “You forget, dear Charlie, that the labourer is worthy of his hire.”39 When Marlow follows this conversation with the fl at statement that “It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are,” the joke, of course, is on him. His aunt has enunciated in succinct form the operating principles of the imperialist endeavor, the doublethink that permits the system to run relatively smoothly—that is, in which national and personal self- interest is insistently euphemized into benevolent intervention. But this is not all. Th e passage also splits the concept of work in two. Lower-case work is profi t-driven, materially productive activity; Work “with a capital” is the purpose-driven, almost vocational, defi nitely providential, labor of enlightened civilization. Th e aunt’s description of her nephew’s work is in Ian Watt’s Conrad and the Nineteenth Century ((Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 135). In November 1893, Conrad wrote a letter to Poradowska elaborating upon the psychological and existential eff ects of his bout of unemployment ( Joseph Conrad, Letters of Joseph Conrad to Marguerite Poradowska 1890–1920 , ed. John A. Gee and Paul J. Strum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), 54): “I hope you will kindly pardon my long silence. I have no excuse to off er, as I am now unemployed and, since my return from Poland have spent my days in disheartening idleness. You […] well know there are times when the mind is numb, when months slip by, and when hope itself seems dead. I am going through one of those times. It seems to me I have seen nothing, see nothing, and never will see anything. I could swear that there is nothing but the void outside the walls of the room where I write these lines. Surely this is like the beginning of hopeless imbecility.” 38 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 28. 39 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 28. 164 Against the Event like the Marxist theory of alienation run in reverse. What appears to be simply a matter of wage-earning, of the exchange of one’s labor-power for cash, is actually a matter of participation in the movement of the universal that is historical progress. Just at the moment when Marlow has escaped unemployment, Conrad allows the very concept of work itself to be blurred into defi nitional ambiguity, oscillating between the literal and metaphorical.40 Once Marlow’s work itself begins with his arrival in the Congo, we immediately notice an odd turn in the discursive structure of his narration—especially when it comes to its temporal pacing. Th e dance of the terms work and Work is mirrored by a parallel partition in the nature and experience of time in the novella, which we might provisionally label time and Time . On the one hand, there is the time of alienated labor, a temporality of bare repetition and in which any product or meaning obtained is a diminished thing. And, on the other, there is the time of providential history or “progress,” the time of the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and our world in which the here and now is always only a retrospective and prospective trace of what has been and what is to come. Marlow’s discourse materializes the tension between these two temporalities. For instance, as he describes the journey from the mouth of the river to the Central Station where the craft that he is to pilot awaits him, he begins with a denial that there is anything interesting to say about the march itself.

40 Marlow’s misogynist statement has received ample critical attention in recent years. See, e.g., Nina Pelikan Straus, “Th e Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Con- rad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’ ” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 20/2 (Winter 1987), 123–37, and Peter Hyland, “Th e Little Woman in Heart of Darkness ,” Conradiana , 20/1 (1988), 3–11. Most useful in the context of my argument is Sarah Cole’s “Conradian Alienation and Imperial Intimacy” (Modern Fiction Studies, 44/2 (1988), 267), which argues that the gender dynamics of the work—in particular the separation of women and men into separate spheres—has much to do with the theme of alienation and the destabilization of meaning in the novella. “It should be clear that the social structures whose absence so troubles the narrative are largely the province of men, since Marlow believes that women have always existed in their own world, and this status generates no sense of disturbance or crisis: ‘It is queer how out of touch with truth women are. Th ey live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be.’ Th e disjunction between the sexes reaches a culmination in the fi nal pages of the text, where the constitutive relation between failed male intimacy and the problem of alienation becomes absolute.” I will consider the role of women in Heart of Darkness more fully below. For now, I would simply augment Cole’s claim by arguing that it is women’s exclusion from the social structures of work that seems most operative. Th e fact that they provide work for men (in the case of the aunt) or drive them to it (in the case of the Intended) but do not themselves participate in it surely infl ects Marlow’s discussion of them. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 165

No use telling you much about that. Paths, paths, everywhere; a stamped-in net- work of paths spreading over the empty land, through long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude, a solitude, nobody, not a hut.41 What there is “no use telling” is told in the form of an eff ectively verb- less sentence, a sentence whose incantatory repetitiveness mimics the featureless landscape the caravan traverses. Th is pattern, of nouns without verbs or in other cases verbs without nouns, repeats itself throughout the paragraph: “Day after day, with the stamp and shuffl e of sixty pair of bare feet behind me, each pair under a 60-lb. load. Camp, cook, sleep, strike camp, march.” 42 Sentences such as these, composed only of either substantives or verbs telegraphically reduced beyond person and tense, literalize the disjunction of action and purpose. And a further disjunction is evident in the absence from this and similarly constructed paragraphs of any of Marlow’s trademark aphorisms or poetic strokes of self-conscious refl ection. In place of the elevated discourse, we receive a series of “inconclusive experiences,” each one having nothing to do with the next, each potential branching-off of the storyline taken up and subsequently dropped in the space of a sentence or two. As a whole, the fl at style of the paragraph connotes rapid movement without thought, the instrumentalized attention in distraction of laborious busyness, and the fl ickering temporality of experience broken into a chain of non sequiturs. Most signifi cantly, the single instance of Marlow’s self-refl ection that comes in this long description of the walk to the Central Station itself takes the form of a non sequitur. A feverous white man along for the journey is accidentally dropped by his carriers and demands that Marlow kill one of the Africans. Th e heavy pole had skinned his poor nose. He was very anxious for me to kill somebody, but there wasn’t the shadow of a carrier near. I remembered the old doctor—“It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot.” I felt I was becoming scientifi cally interesting. 43 We receive no explanation of what course of action Marlow would have pursued had there been a carrier present to punish, nor are we made to understand how or why he felt himself to be becoming “scientifi cally interesting.” What we do have, however, is this altered mode of discourse, this compressed style that fails to pull successive actions together into a coherent whole and that chatters profusely about occurrences that are “no

41 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 39. 42 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 39. 43 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 40. 166 Against the Event use telling.” Th e arrangement of the discourse itself serves as a materialization of the “mental change” in question—a psychological shift that occurs at the moment that work begins in the novel. And fi nally even this murky self-diagnosis is subsumed back into the alleged uselessness of the paragraph as a whole, as it is followed by the blank statement: “However, all that is to no purpose.”44 When Marlow fi nally arrives at the Central Station, the disconnection of eff ort and production, on the one hand, and self-refl ection and instrumentalized consciousness, on the other, is only intensifi ed. What was merely a discursive particularity becomes the defi ning characteristic of the enterprise as a whole. Th e Company’s employees are known only by their occupational titles, but these titles strangely seem never to correspond to any actual productive activity. Early on, for instance, Mar- low meets the camp brickmaker—who does not seem to make any bricks. “It seems he could not make bricks without something, I don’t know what—straw maybe.”45 Rather than labor, what Marlow fi nds at the Central Station is a frantic sort of waiting , talk instead of action, and intrigue in place of commerce. Not quite indolence or boredom, but a harried pursuit of something—something like the means of further pursuit. Th e inhabitants of the station seem to be participants in nothing more than a bizarre pilgrimage that can never quite get itself underway: they were all waiting—all the sixteen or twenty pilgrims of them—for something; and upon my word it did not seem an uncongenial occupation, from the way they took it, though the only thing that ever came to them was disease—as far as I could see. Th ey beguiled the time by backbiting and intriguing against each other in a foolish kind of way.46 Th e whole camp is defi ned by this paradoxical “occupation,” the job of waiting for a job, for something to do. Th e anxious pursuit of an opportunity to get out in the fi eld reduces all the false pretenses of the endeavor to mere background noise. “Th e only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading-post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages. Th ey intrigued and slandered each other on that account—but as to eff ectually lifting a fi nger—oh, no.”47 Almost immediately, as if infected by the absurdity and contradiction that hangs over the Station and its inhabitants, the fi ssure that runs between reportage and refl ection in Marlow’s discourse becomes ever more pronounced. In the following passage, for instance, note the sudden

44 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 40. 45 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 45. 46 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 45. 47 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 46. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 167 transition from the announced theme of the paragraph in the fi rst sentence to the increasingly shrill refl ections that follow: I went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that station. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the redeeming facts of life. Still, one must look about sometimes; and then I saw this station, these men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine of the yard. I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. Th ey wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. Th e word “ivory” rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.48 Th e passage begins with the sense that after all the travel, all the talk, Marlow is fi nally about to settle into his job. Labor is fi gured as a return to “the redeeming facts of life,” the uncomplicated comforts of raw instrumental logic. As such it requires him to turn his back on the Station and its Dantesque atmospherics. Yet, just as he declares this intention, Mar- low and his discourse turn back yet again, as if automatically: “Still, one must look about sometimes.” And what follows is another stream of imagistic discourse that fl ows from the merely anachronistic (the “faithless pilgrims” with their “long staves”) toward the dark arts of a sort of primitive fetishism (“You would think they were praying to it”) and onward to the apocalyptically baroque (“A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse”). Finally, the passage culminates on a note of War of the Worlds-type science fi ction, with the inhabitants of the station transformed into something like extraterrestrial intruders. By Jove! I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invisible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.49 Th is passage is a nearly perfect enactment of the breaking of the self- conscious consideration of actions, people, and processes away from work and its straightforward factuality. While Marlow begins with the intention to keep his “hold on the redeeming facts of life” through undivided attention to his work, the hold will not stick. He turns his eyes back to the camp and sets out upon this ascending scale of metaphoric notes on his way to the corpse smell and the “fantastic invasion.”

48 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 43–4. 49 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 44. 168 Against the Event As the months pass, Marlow is unable to obtain the spare parts necessary to repair his ship. Stuck in the camp, and absorbed into the anxious unemployment of his fellow employees, he becomes ever more “scientifi - cally interesting” as the polarity of the tension between the “redeeming facts” of work and distracted talk is reversed and intensifi ed. And this reversed polarity is manifested once again through a shift in his discourse. One day, for instance, as the brickmaker prattles on about Kurtz’s “universal genius” and the pragmatics of negotiating the hierarchical organization of the Company, Marlow’s mind is decidedly elsewhere. Did I see it? I saw it. What more did I want? What I really wanted was rivets, by heaven! Rivets. To get on with the work—to stop the hole. Rivets I wanted. Th ere were cases of them down at the coast—cases—piled up—burst—split! You kicked a loose rivet at every second step in that station-yard on the hillside. Rivets had rolled into the grove of death. You could fi ll your pockets with rivets for the trouble of stooping down—and there wasn’t one rivet to be found where it was wanted. We had plates that would do, but nothing to fasten them with.50 Suddenly, when under conversational pressure from the brickmaker to acknowledge that he can “see it”—an “it” that reverberates with the same sinister amorphousness as that in “the idea behind it” at the opening of the novella—Marlow here simply wants to “get on with the work.” While, from the fi rst days of his stay at the Station, the “need to look about sometimes” trumped his desire to keep his “hold on the redeeming facts of life,” the trajectory of Marlow’s consciousness now follows the opposite path, this time from nauseous participation in the paranoid chatter of the camp toward the numbing one-thing-after-another instrumental logic of work. Labor rather than comprehension, rivets in place of conversation—is this a marker of the “mental change” that he senses in himself? When the brickmaker fi nally takes his leave for the night, Marlow takes the opportunity to elaborate on this theme of work and its value. It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to my infl uential friend, the bat- tered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. I clambered on board. She rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No infl uential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to fi nd out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fi ne things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in

50 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 51. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 169 the work—the chance to fi nd yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. Th ey can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.51 Just as the text earlier proposed a distinction between work and Work , Marlow here off ers yet another split defi nition of the term, distinguishing between “work” and “what is in the work.” And what exactly is in the work seems to be a bizarre impersonal relationship between man and object, as Marlow speaks of his eff orts on this “tin-pot steamboat” in terms lathered with the terminology of romance. He has worked hard enough on “her” in order to “make me love her,” and “she” has brought out the best in him. Work, the most social of all human activities, is paradoxically fi gured in this passage as a means of accessing the pre-social or extra-social: “Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.” Moments such as these at the Central Station articulate a very modern variety of the dissociation of sensibility, a fi ssure separating one form of experience from another. On the one side, there is work, the chain of causality that runs inexorably from cause to eff ect, and the blind, concrete temporality of this process. On the other, the side of idleness and waiting, there is thought and abstraction, self-consciousness and ideology. Strangely enough, the former, which by itself presents a form of human endeavor too mechanical and mindless to live up to the word “human,” is nevertheless fi gured throughout as a means of maintaining one’s sanity and even humanity under the conditions manifest in the Congo. Likewise, the latter, which contains within it so much that is conventionally associated with the specifi c diff erences that make us human—speech and ideas, reason that transcends pure practicality, for instance—takes on an animalis- tic or even demonic shape in Marlow’s rendering of his time at the Station. And it is this distinction, between mindless eff ort and abstract idleness, that informs the split structure of Marlow’s narration of Heart of Darkness. Analysis of the “split” in Marlow’s discourse in studies of Heart of Dark- ness has shifted over the years from the aesthetic register to the ideological, but what is most interesting here is the way that work and unemployment and their correspondent modes of temporal experience organize the dif- ferent modes of narration.52 I n Heart of Darkness, the this-after-that of raw experience is broken off from the global perspective of the meaningful

51 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 52. 52 For instance, Benita Parry argues in Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers ((London: Macmillan Press, 1983), 28) , that no matter how we slice Conrad’s prose—whether we fi nd a gap between empiricism and skepticism or the power 170 Against the Event duration—time in the form of a mission, time that has a direction, a goal. Conventional novelistic discourse oscillates between reportage and refl ection, the description of actions and meditation about what the actions mean. But in this case, because of the fi ssuring of Marlow’s language, his editorializing is too disjunctive and disproportional to imbue the described actions with meaning. Th ings are happening, lots of things, but sundered from the continuity of a plot-line they take the shape of anti-events . Th ey are actions, but they quite clearly do not participate in a causal chain and thus do not yield cumulative meaning. In this light, the fact that the missing items that Marlow needs to repair his boat are rivets seems to take on a metaphorical luster. As Marlow says, he needs them in order to “get on with the work—to stop the hole.” In a sense, what is brought into play by the schizophrenic split in the world of the text between mindless work and chattering idleness is the question of what can “stop the hole” in time, what can forge a coherent duration out of a series of disparate instants, what can hold together the time of work and the time of refl ection. To put the matter in diff erent terms, the question is how to make Erfahrung out of Erlebnis , how to make a coherent, unifi ed experience out of the disparate moments of life. Or perhaps the larger question for Marlow is whether one wants to forge this transformation. In a passage from “On Some Motifs from Baudelaire,” Walter Ben- jamin describes the interaction of the isolated incident, experience, and consciousness in the following manner: Th e greater the shock factor in particular impressions, the more vigilant consciousness has to be in screening stimuli; the more effi ciently it does so, the less these impressions enter long experience [Erfahrung ] and the more they correspond to the concept of isolated experience [Erlebnis ]. Perhaps the special achievement of shock defense is the way it assigns an incident a precise point in time in consciousness, at the cost of the integrity of the incident’s contents. Th is would be a peak achievement of the intellect; it would turn the incident into an isolated experience.53 Given Benjamin’s defi nition, what happens in the fi rst part of Heart of Darkness takes on a strange aspect. In the chapter on Flaubert, I suggested that Emma’s impossible wish was to erleben the Erfahrung , to have an unmediated experience in the present of the mediated, written experiences to act and the faculty of mediation—underlying all of it is the ideological paradox that the deeds of ostensible champions of civilization represent the “negation of civilization itself.” Marlow’s narration breaks, according to Parry, under the pressure of its impossible charge, the “endeavor to devise an ethical basis for imperialism.” 53 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, iv, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 319. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 171 that she has found in her books. But, in the case of Marlow, rather than nostalgia for the lost ability to metabolize the incident into the coherent experience, the Erfahrung , Marlow turns to work in order to avoid the “long experience,” in order not to know what it is that he is involved with in his work (or Work) for the Company. If Emma longs to generate an event from incompatible materials, Marlow wants to avoid the evental altogether. In other words, Marlow the storyteller consciously seems to be performing the role of consciousness as a facilitator of repression, of shock absorption—the same role that it plays in Benjamin’s very Freudian description. It is a sort of bovarisme in reverse, which desires to repress the coherent and nameable by sinking into the repetitive and mundane. Some- what reductively, if Flaubert could be said to have forced a romantic sensibility into a banal milieu, Conrad ran this operation in reverse. As Cedric Watts explains: In ‘Heart of Darkness’ Conrad had developed to an extreme of thematic and symbolic complexity the basic method that he had been following from Almayer’s Folly onwards: that of taking the ingredients of popular romantic fi ction (and even of boys’ adventure-tales) and submitting them to unconventionally realistic, refl ective and ironic treatment. […] Conrad was fully aware of his own method, explaining it to Blackwood as the exertion of an immense transformative imagination on material which might at fi rst glance seem merely “the material of a boys’ story.” 54 Marlow, as Conrad’s agent in the same way that the impersonal narrator of Bovary is for Flaubert, himself performs and in doing so embodies this “immense transformative” work. Further, as if to underscore the affi nity between Benjamin’s analysis and Marlow’s mental state, we note that Benjamin describes the smooth operation of the system in terms that might have been Marlow’s own: the effi ciency of the vigilant consciousness echoes the “effi ciency—the devotion to effi ciency” that saves the men of commerce on the decks of the Nellie from the “fascination of the abomination.”55 Consciousness, for both Benjamin and Conrad, seems to be the site where what happens to us is torn away (or un-riveted ) from its place in the coherent story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Just before his arrival at Kurtz’s station, Marlow comes upon “a hut of reeds, an inclined and melancholy pole, with the unrecognizable tatters of what had been a fl ag of some sort fl ying from it, and a neatly stacked wood-pile.” 56 Th e timber seems eerily to have been left for him, as a

54 Watts, Conrad , 82–3. 55 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 20. 56 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 64. 172 Against the Event pencil-written sign delivers the message: “Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach cautiously.”57 But there is another message waiting for Marlow amidst the detritus of this crude camp. In the hut he fi nds a book, “an extraordinary fi nd,” entitled An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship and written “by a man Tower, Towson—some such name.”58 Th e book threatens to turn to dust even as Marlow handles it: “Th e matter looked dreary reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of fi gures, and the copy was sixty years old. I handled this amazing antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness, lest it should dissolve in my hands.”59 Marlow’s description of the contents of the book is quite telling: Within, Towson or Towser was inquiring earnestly into the breaking strain of ships’ chains and tackle, and other such matters. Not a very enthralling book; but at the fi rst glance you could see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages, thought out so many years ago, luminous with another than a professional light. Th e simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistak- ably real. 60 Th at the author is endowed with a proper name at all is a mark of distinction in Marlow’s story—Kurtz and Marlow’s predecessor Fresleven are the only other fi gures to receive such treatment. Yet the author’s name is at the same time already nearly forgotten, indistinct by the time the story is told on the decks of the Nellie . Is it Tower or Towson or Towser? It is as if the proper name is an emblem of a coherent selfhood that is no longer compatible with things as they are. And this coherent selfhood is the corollary of the writer’s style—the “singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work.” It is as if Marlow has found, in the middle of his journey, the very narrative—or anti-narrative—that he intended his own story to be. As he emphasized at the outset of his tale, “I don’t want to bother you much with what happened to me personally.”61 An impersonal rendering of the facts of the matter, the book is a novel of the sea reduced to the raw materials of “illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of fi gures,” the literary equivalent of a mind at work without distraction and disgust, without the noisy chatter of loose lips wired directly to an distracted eye. Unlike Marlow, the author of the Inquiry has no need to remind himself aloud and incessantly of the value of work, to narrativize its absence and return, to render lyrically his longing for it:

57 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 64. 58 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 65. 59 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 65. 60 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 65. 61 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 21. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 173 “I went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that station. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the redeeming facts of life.”62 And, if Marlow says at one point that he likes “what is in the work—the chance to fi nd yourself,” Towson’s mode of writing about work suggests that he had no need to fi nd a self because he had never lost it. 63 And it is perhaps the lack of such a nervously detached consciousness that informs the “another than a professional light” that shines from “these humble pages, thought out so many years ago,” of Th e Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship. Towson’s book is a utopian image of the second order. More than simply the anxious evocation of what has been lost in modernity, its unselfconscious approach to the craft of seafaring speaks to a world not yet haunted by the obsolete persistence of consciousness. Like the visual images in Lord Jim that Fredric Jameson describes as “waste products of capitalist rationalization” but that possess a utopian valence, in that they “open up a life space in which the opposite and the negation of such rationalization can be, at least imaginatively, experienced,” this discarded book, long out of date, is shot through with utopian (if nostalgically utopian) intimations of a period of full employment, both literal and metaphorical, material and psychological.64 T o w - son’s book functions as a strange alter-Heart of Darkness within Heart of Darkness itself, an alternative model of the nautical novel, eventless but unanxious, characterless but confi dent in its trade 65

THE “HELPERS”: THE BELGIAN CONGO, FORCED LABOR, AND THE POSTHUMAN

Are we, then, to read the novel in light of scenes such as this one as a nostalgic complaint against the present, a dystopian plea for a return to stabilities of the old order? An examination of Conrad’s letters and essays

62 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 43. 63 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 52. 64 Jameson, Unconscious , 236. 65 It should be noted that Conrad himself would later pen a document not altogether dissimilar from Towson’s book. In 1919, when he learned of the Holt Steamship Compa- ny’s plans to employ a sailing ship for the training of their young recruits, all bound for steamships, in the lost arts of seamanship, Conrad composed a memorandum (Last Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1926), 71) expressing his enthusiasm for the project and advice for its implementation. Still, of course, this memorandum is loaded with the defensiveness of an expert in a lost and all but forgotten trade. He reminds his readers that “It mustn’t be forgotten that seamen’s work was never looked upon or had the character of mere slavish toil, as some branches of labour on shore tend to become,” and further asserts that “any physical work intelligently done develops a special mentality; in this case it would be the sailor mentality.” 174 Against the Event would seem to support the idea that the author was often reactionary in matters political and economic, and thus it might seem very reasonable to read Heart of Darkness’s thematic preoccupation with unemployment and its formal insistence upon unmoored, hypertrophic consciousness as a nostalgic allegory of longing for the stabilities of yesterday in spite of their hierarchical inequities. Nonetheless, whatever the ideological predilec- tions of its author, and whatever analogous situations we can fi nd in his other texts, the historical directionality of Heart of Darkness is more complex than this reading suggests. It is Conrad’s deployment of race—specif- ically, his location of the novel in the Congo of Leopold II and his representation of the few black characters that make it into the novel— that brings this complexity to light. If we take Marlow’s statement that “Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world” at face value, we fall into an overhasty assumption that the novel is structured by a simple distinction between the Congolese as avatars of a surmounted past and Europeans who embody the present, modernity. 66 It is an assumption that is buttressed, of course, by the enormous infl uence of Chinua Achebe’s 1977 essay “An Image of Africa: Rac- ism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness .” Th e evidence, however, points in a very diff erent, more nuanced direction, especially given the pervasive attention to labor and unemployment in the work. And it is a direction that runs in parallel with the leading imperial and economic indicators of the day. As noted earlier, Patrick Brantlinger in his essay “Victorians and Afri- cans: Th e Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent” describes the way that racist discourse of the nineteenth century often served as a surrogate for discriminatory class-based ideologies that were eroding at home. In other words, changes at home caused something like a vacuum of diff erence, into which representations of the African “other” fl owed and fi lled, stabilizing the social imagination—and even reinvigorating shaky claims as to the “naturalness” of class distinction itself. As he says, “the ‘conquered races’ of the empire were often treated as a new proletariat—a proletariat much less distinct from slaves than the working class at home.”67 In the case of Heart of Darkness , however, Conrad runs the process in reverse. Rather than an opportunity for the renovation of a crumbling schema of diff erences, Marlow’s encounters with Africans work to expose a secret affi liation between the colonial employee and the colo- nized worker, especially in terms of work and the modes of temporal experience characteristic of it. Th e representation of Africans in Heart of

66 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 59. 67 Brantlinger, “Victorians,” 201. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 175 Darkness may well take a secondary position to the central narrative of Marlow’s journey toward Kurtz, at least in terms of the cast of speaking characters or even the number of words devoted to them. But when we trade the quantitative for the qualitative lens in our analysis of the text, it becomes readily apparent that some of the most resonant and haunting passages are those that deal explicitly with the native Congolese, and, in particular, the Congolese at work . 68 While there is no sidestepping the fact that Conrad’s novel seems largely preoccupied with the present and future of Europe and Europeans, whether on the level of the “existential” or, as in my reading, the socio-psychological, we might say that the most “modern” passages in the work, in terms of both stylistic innovation and thematic preoccupation, are those that deal with the native workers and the climactic evolution of their sense of time through forced participation in the work of “civilization.” It would be diffi cult to see them for what they are without a preliminary analysis of Marlow’s situation—of the role of the rivets and of Towson’s mysterious book—along the lines of the one I have just performed. But these workers, in turn, ensure that Marlow’s story itself represents something far more profound than, in Achebe’s words, “the break up of one petty European mind.” Rather, the African laborer’s work stands as an extreme case of the objectless eff ort that defi nes the temporality of the novel, its white characters, and perhaps the world in which it was composed. Nearly all of Marlow’s few interactions with blacks in the Congo focus on natives at work. Th ink, for instance, of Marlow’s admiration of the “savage who was a fi reman,” and his sense that the native shares not only his work ethic, but even the tendency to use attention to the details of work as a means to avoid awareness of the disturbing reali- ties: “the snags were thick, the water was treacherous and shallow, the boiler seemed to have a sulky devil in it, and thus neither that fi reman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.”69 But the most powerful encounter with the native Congolese is Marlow’s fi rst, at the Company’s fi rst station thirty miles from the mouth of the Congo, where he observes a group of workers apparently at work constructing a railroad.

68 Th e resonant and haunting passages about the Congolese workers are not, of course, the only ones that deal with the native populations. While a generation of feminist Conrad scholars (especially Nina Pelikan Straus, Peter Hyland, and Ruth Nadelhaft) have ably analyzed the depiction of the “savage and superb” native woman who approaches the steamer as it prepares to take Kurtz away and in particular her relationship (at a distance) with Kurtz’s Intended, the parallel affi nities between the native workers and Marlow himself have remained underemphasized. 69 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 64. 176 Against the Event

A horn tooted to the right, and I saw the black people run. A heavy and dull deto- nation shook the ground, a puff of smoke came out of the cliff , and that was all. No change appeared on the face of the rock. Th ey were building a railway. Th e cliff was not in the way or anything; but this objectless blasting was all the work going on.70 Th is string of unconnected impressions comes to a head in the fi rst statement that breaks the mode of raw reportage: “Th ey were building a railway.” But even the defi nitiveness of this statement is drained away by the sentence that follows, which realigns the “work” away from “building a railway” to “objectless blasting.” In this way, the passage itself performs the absurd uselessness of the described processes; it fails to construct its intended meaning just as the work on the railway is illogically divorced from actual production. Th is deconstruction of railway construction, which occurs on the level of the syntactic organization of Marlow’s sentences as much as the content of his description, is an essential preface to what comes next, his encounter with the African workers themselves. “A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head,” he says and then continues: Six black men advanced in a fi le, toiling up the path. Th ey walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets of earth on their heads, and their clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind wagged to and fro like tails […] all were connected with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking.71 Marlow’s description transforms the group of six into a sort of twelve- legged human timepiece. It is the “clinking” that fi rst alerts Marlow to the gang of “criminals,” a clink that keeps time with their steps. Every aspect of the men is marked by blank repetition, like the movement of the pendulum in a clock: clinking chains, wagging rags, stepping feet. Th e

70 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 32–3. Hunt Hawkins provides an excellent gloss on this railroad in “Conrad’s Critique of Imperialism in Heart of Darkness ” ( PMLA 94/2 (March 1979), 290–1): “Work on the railway from this fi rst station at Matadi up to the Central Station at Kinchassa began in March 1890, three months before Conrad arrived in the country. Th e 270-mile line was needed to bypass cataracts separating the lower from the upper river with its 7,000-mile system of navigable waterways. Without the railway, the vegetable products of the basin could not be profi tably transported to the coast. Th us the line became the one major capital improvement that Leopold attempted during his rule. Construction, however, was hampered by his political position and his lack of resources […] Demands for fresh capital caused repeated delays. After the four years allotted for the construction of the whole line, only twenty-six miles had been covered. Th e Congo railway was fi nally completed […] in 1898, eight years after it had been begun, and at a cost of sixty million francs.” 71 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 33. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 177 verbs that characterize their movement are exclusively those that denote repetitive, continued action; they are verbs of pure, objectless labor: “All their meagre breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quiv- ered, the eyes stared stonily up-hill.”72 It is impossible to divorce the temporality of their described movements from their chilling lack of aff ect as they pass Marlow at the end of the passage: “Th ey passed me within six inches, without a glance, with that complete, deathlike indiff erence of unhappy savages.”73 When Marlow turns again to the material manifestations of this “objectless blasting,” the perverse affi liation between the absurdity of the task and the situation of the humans participating in it becomes even more evident: I avoided a vast artifi cial hole somebody had been digging on the slope, the purpose of which I found it impossible to divine. It wasn’t a quarry or a sandpit, anyhow. It was just a hole. It might have been connected with the philanthropic desire of giving the criminals something to do. I don’t know.74 He decides to get out of the sun, and fi nds himself a shady grove next to the rushing river. In Marlow’s description of the scene, in which the “noise” of the stream fl ows into the motionless silence of the grove, the natural imagery points to something beyond itself—toward a collision of two incompatible modes of time, one characterized by nothing but relent- less forward moment, the other by utter inertia. Th e rapids were near, and an uninterrupted, uniform, headlong, rushing noise fi lled the mournful stillness of the grove, where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved, with a mysterious sound—as though the tearing pace of the launched earth had suddenly become audible.75 Th e “launched earth” seems to be both that which literally results from the “objectless blasting” as well as the earth as a whole, the world whose dynamics are becoming increasingly visible as Marlow moves through the camp. It is in this grove that the climactic moment of the scene takes place, when Marlow encounters a group of African workers who have apparently withdrawn in order to die from exhaustion. Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half eff aced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off , followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. Th e work was going

72 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 33. 73 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 33. 74 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 34. 75 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 34. 178 Against the Event on. Th e work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die. 76 What had been a collision of “rushing noise” and “mournful stillness” a moment ago is translated here into the stark break between the fi rst sentence, describing the “black shapes,” and the rest of the passage, in which yet another explosion reminds us, in a phrase that features a distinctively awkward participial pattern, that the “work was going on.” Th e strange exclamatory repetition of “Th e work!” foreshadows the more famous though equally ambiguous exclamation, “Th e horror! Th e horror!” later in the novella, just as the parsing of the Africans here into geometric “Black shapes” will be greeted by further abstraction in due course. Most importantly, Marlow’s discourse throughout this encounter with these dying workers is preoccupied, if subtly, with underscoring the temporal etiology of their condition. It is a slow death, an ineffi cient end for creatures rendered obsolete by overwork. “Th ey were dying slowly—it was very clear.”77 And Marlow’s direct diagnosis of the cause of their current status both intricately approaches and evades the central issue at once. “Brought from the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became ineffi cient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.”78 Th ough they die, according to Marlow, from exotic food and diseases, not overwork, “time contracts” are what brought them here in the fi rst place. Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence.79 Th is tableau vivant on the verge of becoming a tableau mort is once again characterized in terms of repetitive and useless action. What is it, after all, that is so “intolerable and appalling” about the fact that the fi rst “stared at nothing”? Th e “as if” that precedes “overcome with a great weariness” introduces another heavily ironized evasion into the description, for it is nothing but a “great weariness” that is killing these men. Th e comparison of the scene to “some picture of a massacre or a pestilence” has the same eff ect, establishing an “almost but not quite” relation of all this to genocide. Th e scene concludes in a fi t of amnesia toward all that Marlow has just witnessed. Having come quite close to a moment of epiphanic

76 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 34–5. 77 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 35. 78 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 35. 79 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 36. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 179 exposure or understanding, he becomes self-dismissive and abruptly leaves the scene. “I didn’t want any more loitering in the shade, and I made haste toward the station.” So abruptly are the dying natives left behind that it can be nothing else but deliberate repression on his character’s part that Conrad wants us to notice—repression informed both by a desire to escape the horrible sight of the dying workers and Marlow’s own need to get to work himself. In eff ect, the sentence is an understated echo of the twin poles of the workers’ lives and deaths: “loitering” and “haste.” Th is episode serves as a brilliantly succinct evocation of the situation of the Belgian Congo, which gradually developed from being “just another” imperial holding into a particularly vicious version of an imperial labor market. According to E. D. Morel, a Liverpool shipping clerk turned muck- raking critic of Belgian imperial practices, a brisk and non-compulsory trade in rubber and ivory was conducted between Europeans and natives in the years before the establishment of the Free State. Even in the fi rst years of Leopold’s involvement, “there is no doubt that had that trade been allowed to develop,” in Morel’s words from his 1906 Red Rubber , “its proportions to-day would have been very large. What a diff erent picture we should have had to contemplate.”80 But to Leopold II, the commerce that actually existed seemed only an intimation of how much profi t was potentially obtainable in the Congo. Th ere were, however, sticking points: the only obvious candidates for profi table enterprise were the exotic raw materials available for extraction—namely, ivory and rubber. But the problem of how to extract them was a serious one. Large-scale European emigration and colonization were out of the question, due in large part to the harsh climate and the prevalence of exotic disease, in particular the dreaded sleeping sickness spread by the tsetse fl y. Another hitch was that, in the absence of a pre-existing cash economy—and without the correlative mode of life that arrives with a market economy, driven by desire for consumer goods—simple wage payment and trade for manufactured goods did not serve to induce the Congolese to stray from their farms and take up the economically benefi cial task of harvesting natural latex or elephant tusks. In light of these issues, Leopold took other measures to accelerate the process: A secret decree dated September 21, 1891, and the measures taken by the King’s offi cials in Africa upon receipt of it, changed the whole outlook of aff airs in Cen- tral Africa, and revolutionised the actual and future situation of its millions of inhabitants. Th is decree laid down as the paramount duty of the offi cials of the “Congo Free State” the raising of revenue, “to take urgent and necessary measures

80 Edmund D. Morel, Red Rubber (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 30. 180 Against the Event to secure for the State the domainal fruits (anglicè , the produce of the country) notably ivory and rubber.”81 Th e ultimate fulfi llment of this decree was the imposition of a tax to be paid in labor itself, which was in most cases, according to Neal Ascherson, “commuted into a tax on produce, a system of forced delivery of wild rubber, copal, or food grains.”82 While a market economy could have been gradually developed by the Belgian occupiers, Ascherson concludes that “the lust to save overheads and the degree of political control which the exploiters held over the helpless population discouraged them from introducing one.” And it follows that “in such conditions, as outside observers could guess for themselves, forced labour and extortion were inevitable.” 83 Morel dramatizes the emergence of this tax regime in his 1904 King Leopold’s Rule in Africa in a passage that describes the arrival of the agents of “Bula Matadi,” the native name for the Congo state, in a small village. In each village soldiers come summoning the chiefs to attend the great palaver of “Bula Matadi.” Th ey enter the villages, do those soldiers, full of insolent swagger, and ere they leave, after delivering the message, have interfered with women, stolen fowls, and perchance robbed the plantations of a bunch or two of bananas. From all the villages around the chiefs and head men attend the great palaver in fear, knowing not what it may portend. Th ey are not kept long in suspense. Each chief is asked the number of able-bodied males in his village; the fi gure is put down by the representative of “Bula Matadi” in a book. Each chief is then told that his village must furnish so many baskets of rubber every moon, so many goats and fowls, so much cassava; all ivory must be taken to “Bula Matadi,” no ivory and no rubber must be taken to the white men at the factories; such is the order of “Bula Matadi.”84 Th e evolutionary great leap forward that the natives are forced to make, from the cyclic continuities of life to the violent compulsory labor and “time contracts” of imperial and industrial exploitation, comes to seem less and less diff erent from the transitions that Europeans are enduring as the structure of capitalism and its workplaces shifts around them. While the initial positions of the two groups are hugely diff erent at the start of the process—the Africans are accused of an inertia, an unwillingness to work by racist ideologies; the Europeans are haunted by unemployment

81 Morel, Rubber , 30. 82 Neal Ascherson, Th e King Incorporated: Leopold the Second and the Congo (London: Granta Books, 1999), 202. 83 Ascherson, King , 202. 84 Edmund D. Morel, King Leopold’s Rule in Africa (London: William Heinemann, 1904), 35. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 181 and ripped away from subjective self-consistency by deskilling and intensifi cation—the end result is nearly the same, distinct only in degree, not type. Against appearances, then, the native Africans are fi gured in Heart of Darkness not so much as sub-humans or pre-humans, but rather the posthuman result of the processes of modernity and its encroachments on lived experience with which the work is preoccupied from fi rst to last. Rather than embodiments of a primitive past that serve only as a dramatic backdrop and temporal background against which “the break-up of one petty European mind” takes place, the African workers in the novel stand as avatars of a bleak future for all, one marked by a harrowing oscillation between unemployment and over-employment, and the temporalities that grow in the gap.

CONRAD’S UNEMPLOYMENT, THE NARRATIVE EVENT, AND MODERNISM

Everywhere we look in Heart of Darkness , from the deck of the Nellie to our narrator Marlow, from the blacks constructing the phantom railway to Kurtz’s “management” of his camp, we fi nd the same phenomenon. Economic concerns, anxieties about work and joblessness, cross the frontier between the external, material world and the individual, his psychology, and his ability to retain narrative hold over situations. Th is thematic focus of Conrad’s text is a refl ection of many of the dominant socio- economic concerns of the fi n de siècle moment in which the work was written. Unemployment as a structural, rather than accidental, attribute of modern labor markets hovers behind the characters’ worries about work and profi t. Th e advent of “scientifi c management,” the fi rst draft of Taylorism, fi nds an echo in the “devotion to effi ciency,” whose limit-case takes the shape of Kurtz’s “unsound methods.” Most importantly, we almost always fi nd that this meeting between the social world and the interiority of the individual is conducted on the fi eld of time and the human experience of it, in particular narrativization. Conrad’s novella paradoxically emerges at this moment as a prototype of what might replace the novel in a rapidly modernizing world. But the development of this prototype is not simply a matter of a shift in subject matter. If the form of Heart of Darkness enacts and underscores a division between consciousness and labor—a division that is widening through incessant intensifi cation of labor under the pressure of unemployment and the promise of material reward—in doing so it simultaneously exposes a tension between two forms of time, between the temporality of forward progress and teleological directedness, on the 182 Against the Event one hand, and eddying, “empty” time, the time of waiting and repetition without change, on the other. It stages, in short, a confl ict between the time of plot and its events and the temporality that I have been labeling throughout this work the everyday. Th e novella not only incorporates the tactics and lessons of the past when it comes to this temporality, but more interestingly moves the issue in a new direction, toward a changed relationship between the text and the everyday itself. Th e simplicity of my description will belie the signifi cance of the shifted situation: if, for Flau- bert and Wells, the emergence of the everyday presents a threat to the forward progress of their narratives, when we arrive at Conrad’s novella, the polarities seem to have reversed. Th e incessant demand to keep moving up river, to get back to work, to plunge toward an ultimate and meaningful conclusion, ends up prohibiting any other form of time, and exterminating under the dual stipulations of profi t and effi ciency the time of contemplation without movement, the time of recursive retracing and analysis of the actions and events, the non-instrumental time of consciousness itself. Marlow, and the fi gures that he interacts with, never seem to have the time to stop and contemplate the structures that they are entangled in, the meanings and ramifi cations of the actions they perform. It is almost something of a tic on Marlow’s part, the incessant announcement that he had no time to stop and look or think or speak. I had no time. I had to mess about with white-lead and strips of woollen blanket helping to put bandages on those leaky steam-pipes—I tell you. I had to watch the steering, and circumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook. Th ere was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man.85 Th e wooded banks slipped past us slowly, the short noise was left behind, the interminable miles of silence—and we crept on, towards Kurtz. But the snags were thick, the water was treacherous and shallow, the boiler seemed indeed to have a sulky devil in it, and thus neither that fi reman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.86 I looked at [Kurtz] as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines. But I had not much time to give him, because I was helping the engine-driver to take to pieces the leaky cylinders, to straighten a bent connecting-rod, and in other such matters.87 Th e human being thrown into the world of this text does not possess time; time possesses him. Th e idle self-echoing of the Cogito , a self- echoing that has for centuries defi ned what it means to be human in the fi rst place, fi nds itself downsized, swept out of its job in the wake of the arrival of a

85 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 63. 86 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 64. 87 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 111. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 183 new management team, well schooled in the art of the scientifi c organization of human resources. And, if unemployment renders consciousness obsolete, it is not surprising that in a sense it puts the literary manifestation of consciousness in the form of narrative fi ction out of work as well. Heart of Darkness is a text that registers a sense of the obsolescence of its own form, even its potential extinction. Marlow’s broken discourse, in which the twin aspects of novelistic language, reportage and refl ection, are held apart, signals a schizophrenic turn for the genre itself. And likewise the hermetic circularity of the story as a whole—the way the novella plunges forward up the river only to fi nd another white man, a consortium production of “all Europe,” at the heart of “darkest Africa”—calls the plot and the purpose of plot itself into question. If the novel is conventionally a model of individual and social dynamism, in which initial situations are pushed into evental action and change, thus revealing dynamic truth, Heart of Dark- ness self-consciously stages itself as a series of “inconclusive experience[s],” whose end twists around to meet its beginning. Th e frantic immobility of unemployment as a lived experience in this way infects the machinery of the plot itself. Perhaps the most stunning announcement of the novella’s bearing toward the conventions of the form in which it is written comes in what is nearly an aside, easy to miss, late in the work. And it is a moment that underscores the fact that, just as Marlow’s tenure with the Company begins with a bout of unemployment, Kurtz’s endeavors likewise originate in a parallel situation of economic anxiety. Upon his return to the sepul- chral city, Marlow learns that it was “comparative poverty” that drove Kurtz to Africa—and perhaps ultimately precipitated the amalgamation of enlightened elegance and unthinkable brutality that defi nes his existence up river. Th is poverty, in fact, seems to have interrupted a more generically appropriate plot arc in favor of the dark tale that we receive in the novella. I had heard that [the Intended’s] engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn’t rich enough or something. And indeed I don’t know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there. 88 It is the most mundane and mundanely novelistic of situations, and one that parallels Marlow’s initial unemployment in London. A stunted, abortive romance lies at the opening of Heart of Darkness’s true chronology.

88 Conrad, Heart of Darkness , 120. 184 Against the Event Kurtz wants the girl, but the girl’s family thinks she could and should do better. And so he sets himself to work . . . And the novella dissolves itself into the work, leaving the romance as little more than an afterthought. Conrad cryptically writes in a letter of 1899: “A mere shadow of love interest just in the last pages—but I hope it will have the eff ect I intend.”89 It is hard not to imagine that the eff ect in question is for the reader to notice the marginalization of the Intended—for the reader to become momentarily aware that Heart of Darkness as a whole presents itself as a self-conscious substitution of a new set of thematic interests for the romance that had traditionally stood at the heart of the roman. Rather than the evental arrangement of this virtual alternative, Kurtz and his Intended , we receive the fl ipside in Marlow’s tale, an anti-evental rendition of the violent mundanities of the work Kurtz and others engage in in order to fulfi ll the plot-lines in progress back home. Finally, given the infl uence of Heart of Darkness upon the next generation of literary modernists, Conrad’s disjunctions of Work and work, thought and labor, narration and narrator, and above all the time of plot and work and the everyday in this novella should inform our reading of his other works. Sometimes the persistence of these preoccupations in Conrad’s later work is obvious. For instance, his repeated representation of the nautical “dead calm”—the stillness before the storm or in place of the storm is one that can be found again and again in Conrad’s most important works. In Typhoon of 1902, for instance, it fi gures as a sign of the danger to come, a reverse image of the fury of the tempest approaching the Nan-Shan. “It’s a dead calm, isn’t it?” “It is sir. But there’s something out of the common coming, for sure.”90 Another story in the same volume, “Falk: A Reminiscence” (1901), is a maritime narrative that focuses not on high-seas adventure but rather on one captain’s inability to be towed out of “a certain Eastern seaport.” Th is narrative contains a moment where Conrad tips his hand a bit toward one possible allegorical referent of the dead calm, when the speaking character voices an epiphanic theory of subjectivity and representation. Th ere may be tides in the aff airs of men which, taken at the fl ood . . . and so on. Personally I am still on the look-out for that important turn. I am, however, afraid that most of us are fated to fl ounder for ever in the dead water of a pool whose shores are arid indeed. But I know that there are often in men’s aff airs

89 Karl and Davies, Letters , 145–6. 90 Joseph Conrad, Typhoon and Other Stories, ed. Paul Kirschner (London: Penguin, 1992), 77. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 185 unexpectedly—even irrationally—illuminating moments when an otherwise insignifi cant sound, perhaps only some perfectly commonplace gesture, suffi ces to reveal to us all the unreason, all the fatuous unreason, of our complacency.91 As Paul Kirscher points out, the reference in the fi rst line of the passage is Brutus’ speech in Julius Caesar, an earlier instance in the long history of the deployment of tidal fl ows as a metaphor for human endeavor and its context—but one that takes a tack opposite to that of Conrad. Th ere is a tide in the aff airs of men, Which, taken at the fl ood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afl oat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. ( iv . iii. 216–19) Th e narrator’s revision of these lines from Shakespeare speaks to a change in approach on the part of the modern novelist. If the Elizabethan drama found its natural channel on the “full sea” of heightened experience, Con- rad’s strategy of representation focuses in on the “shallows,” the low-water points, where the insignifi cant takes the place that the ostensibly eventally meaningful once would have held. Nostromo of 1904, likewise, begins with the description of the Golfo Placido that forms Sulaco’s only means of intercourse with the outside world. Some harbours of the earth are made diffi cult of access by the treachery of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of the trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed tem- ple open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud […] On crossing the imaginary line drawn from Punta Mala to Azuera the shios from Europe bound to Sulaco lose at once the strong breezes from the ocean. Th ey become the prey of capricious airs that play with them for thirty hours at a stretch sometimes.92 Th e calmness of the gulf is a natural barrier to commerce and conversation with the outside world. And even if, in eff ect, Nostromo is an account of the incursion of modernity or even history itself into Sulaco (literally embodied in the steamships of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company,

91 Conrad, Typhoon , 183. 92 Joseph Conrad, Nostromo : A Tale of the Seaboard, ed. Martin Seymour-Smith (London: Penguin, 1983), 39–41. 186 Against the Event for whom still air is no obstacle at all), the work as a whole plays a strange game with the relationship between the revolutionary event and the dead calm that precedes it. As Fredric Jameson has it in his chapter on Conrad in Th e Political Unconscious , Nostromo is, like Lord Jim , the interrogation of a hole in time, an act whose inner- most instant falls away—proving thus at once irrevocable and impossible, a source of scandal and an aporia for contemplation. But the contemplation of Nostromo is a meditation on History. 93 Th e image of the becalmed seas—more dangerous, paradoxically, than the tempest or the rocks under the surface—is repeatedly deployed in Con- rad’s works as a fi gure for other instantiations of the complex relationship between the static and the eventful, whether on the fi eld of human character (as in “Falk: A Reminiscence”) or in the wider movements of history (as in Nostromo ). So often does the fi gure appear in fact, and it is put to so many varied uses, that it becomes a bit unclear in which direction the allegorical current runs: does the social or psychological “referent” lead the image, or is it the other way around? But the ramifi cations of the temporal turn that occurs in Heart of Dark- ness extend, of course, to less obvious aspects of Conrad’s contemporane- ous and later work. Th ink, for instance, not only of the “dissolution of the event” that Jameson registers in Lord Jim but further of the overall rhythm of the work, which plays a sense of “the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread” against a romantically shadowy, never quite substantial- ized sense of the “sinister violence of intention—that indefi nable something” that tinges the sea—and everything else—in the narrative.94 Th e abrupt shifts in register from one paragraph to another in the work, as well as the general tendency to avoid direct confrontation with the central “event” of the story itself, speak to the fact that Conrad’s preoccupation with anti-evental organization is one of the defi nitive elements of that novel’s construction as well. Perhaps, as I began to discuss at the end of the previous chapter, the clearest manifestation in Conrad’s later work of the conjunction between his anti-evental turn and unemployment comes with Th e Secret Agent. Vladimir’s “philosophy of bomb throwing” is a literal—if deeply cynical—philosophy of the event itself, starting from some of the same presuppositions about the almost inevitable cooptation of the new that informed the philosophical work that I discussed in Chapter 1 .

93 Jameson, Unconscious , 264. 94 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (London: Penguin, 2007), 50–1. “His Occupation Would Be Gone” 187

“A series of outrages,” Mr Vladimir continued calmly, “executed here in this country; not only planned here—that would not do—they would not mind. Your friends could set half the Continent on fi re without infl uencing the public opinion here in favour of a universal repressive legislation. Th ey will not look outside their backyard here.”95 As Vladimir continues, he discusses the sort of event he has in mind in terms that should remind us of the relation between novelty and pre- writtenness that we have encountered throughout my analyses, as well as Badiou’s resistance to the availability of the event to causal explanation or subjective preordination. “Now let us take an outrage upon—say a church. Horrible enough at fi rst sight, no doubt, and yet not so eff ective as a person of an ordinary mind might think. No matter how revolutionary and anarchist in inception, there would be fools enough to give such an outrage the character of a religious manifestation. And that would detract from the especial alarming signifi cance we wish to give to the act. A murderous attempt on a restaurant or a theatre would suff er in the same way from the suggestion of non-political passion: the exasperation of a hungry man, an act of social revenge. All this is used up; it is no longer instructive as an object lesson in revolutionary anarchism. Every newspaper has ready-made phrases to explain such manifestations away.”96 Of course, the general air of fi n de siècle social entropy that pervades the novel as well as the anti-climactic climax that organizes its plot partake of the same anti-evental sense of a time and a place that is somehow out of work. Further, these fi ndings about Heart of Darkness and Conrad’s work more widely should provoke us to reread the key texts of “high modernism” in light of unemployment. Th ink, for instance, of Joyce’s prob- ing of internal chatter in Ulysses , a novel that stages an inconclusive collision between a semi-employed ad man and an overqualifi ed school- teacher on the temporally fl atted fi eld of the single day, or Woolf’s evocation of both the surging streams of consciousness and the less- than-voluntary under-employment of her female characters. And, if Th eodor Adorno’s claim in his Aesthetic Th eory , mentioned in Chapter 1 , about the relationship between literary structure and social dysfunction is true—that the “unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form”—then attention to the way unemployment inscribes itself as a matter of narrative rhythm within Conrad’s novella should inspire a reevaluation of the construction of

95 Joseph Conrad, Th e Secret Agent (London: Penguin, 2007), 65. 96 Conrad, Secret Agent , 65–6. 188 Against the Event modernist writing itself.97 F o r Heart of Darkness, when considered as a sort of workplace fi ction, forces us to consider what it would mean to think of modernist literary technique as a practice whose distinctive temporalities are as much informed by the static depletions of the unemployment queue as by the unstinting shocks of the assembly line, by the frantically useless durations of everyday unemployment as much as the crystallizing instants of progressive, productive change.

97 Th eodor Adorno, Aesthetic Th eory , trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: Uni- versity of Minnesota Press, 1997), 6. 5 Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies: Th e Atomic Form of Fiction

Near the opening of his Ulysses and Us: Th e Art of Everyday Living , Declan Kiberd describes Joyce as a new kind of artist of the everyday, one whose works were grounded in the optimistic elevation of the quotidian rather than the satiric critique of it. From Baudelaire to Flaubert, much of the most powerful writing of the previous century contained corrosive critiques of everyday life, motivated by their authors’ rebellion against the repetitive character of city routines reduced to mere banality. Most persons who are bored to numbness cannot even perceive this malady, but Baudelaire and Flaubert set out to bring them to a consciousness of it. [ . . . ] But Joyce took a very diff erent line. He believed that by recording the minutiae of a single day, he could release those elements of the marvellous latent in ordinary living, so that the familiar might astonish. Th e “everyday” need not be average, but a process recorded as it is lived—with spontaneity and openness to chance. 1 While Kiberd’s description is somewhat reductive—in particular, it is only squarely applicable to Ulysses , not Joyce’s œuvre as a whole—the dif- ference that he describes between Joyce and his forerunners is both true and signifi cant. In this chapter, I will examine the deployment and development of the modernist everyday as it reaches an apex in the work of James Joyce. By examining how Joyce answers the questions about temporality, experience, and literary form brought to the fore by Flaubert, and then illuminatingly, if inconclusively, worked over by proto- modernists such as Wells and Conrad, we will be able to follow the everyday into the realm of high modernism, as it leapt from the margins of the work to the

A previous version of a section of this chapter was published as “Love at a Distance (Bloomism): Th e Chance Encounter and the Democratization of Modernist Style,” James Joyce Quarterly , 44/2 (2007), 247–61. Copyright, 2006, James Joyce Quarterly, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the present publisher, Duke University Press. 1 Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: Th e Art of Everyday Living (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), 11. 190 Against the Event determinative center. A novel like Ulysses can be said to be self-consciously “about” the everyday in a way that Th e Time Machine and Heart of Dark- ness are not. Wells’s and Conrad’s works are haunted by it, defensive reactions against it, attempts to write or live on despite it. Th e trajectory of Joyce’s work displays a diff erent if related relation to it—a relation grounded in an experimental reworking of the notion of the narrative event that Joyce conducted before his career proper had even begun.2 In this chapter, I will trace the history of the “epiphany” in Joyce’s work, from the actual written epiphanies of his earliest career, through their centrality (and suppression) in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , and fi nally toward what Ulysses has to tell us about the “epiphanic” at the high-water mark of Joyce’s career. Th e early development and later trajectory of this concept is grounded in a fundamental resistance to the narrative event, and is perhaps the most vivid and signifi - cant instance of anti-evental technique to be found in modern literature. At the end of this chapter, I will argue that Joyce draws out the ramifi cations of the epiphanic most acutely in the “Nausicaa” chapter of Ulysses , where his treatment of this concept exposes the radical implications found in many of modernism’s most notable forms: montage, stream of consciousness, episodic plot syntax, and in particular the style indirect libre . Th rough these artistic strategies, “Nausicaa” off ers an intimation of a new notion of the event—one that emerges through the avoidance or even cancellation of the conventional literary models of the event—and the literary forms that bear it. Further, while this modifi ed, “anti-evental” event bears some similarities to the philosophical concepts that I discussed in Chapter 1 , it more importantly points toward a provocatively diff erent model of the event, the subjects involved in it, and the meaning of the complex as a whole.

2 It should be noted that at least some other scholars have taken up the question of the “everydayness” of Joyce’s work—in particular Ulysses —and the role of the narrative event in it. Sara Danius, in her essay “Joyce’s Scissors: Modernism and the Dissolution of the Event” ( New Literary History , 39/4 (Autumn 2008), 1013) , begs the question of the uneventfulness of Ulysses , but rather than a thorough analysis “highlights” the issue as a provocative problem: “What is an event, narrative or otherwise? While the category of the event ( Ereignis , événement) is a recognized one in modern philosophy, in both the analytical tradition and the so-called continental one, this is not the case in literary theory. In fact, in literary theory it’s not a category at all. In highlighting the event, I hope to show that it deserves to be treated as a literary-theoretical problem in its own right.” Likewise, James Fairhall in James Joyce and the Question of History ((Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. xii) takes up the matter of the Joycean destabilization of the event: “Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake attack, or rather destabilise, the very basis of modern history—the idea that historical narratives can somehow tell ‘the truth’ about a complex event, can recount what ‘actually’ happened.” But Fairhall is more interested in the “event” as a point of negotiation between political reality and its fi ctionalization. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 191 THE MANUSCRIPT EPIPHANIES OF 1900–1903

Joyce’s epiphanies are a dangerous territory for the critic to take up. Th ere is a voluminous—and rather quarrelsome—critical heritage that surrounds these works. Indeed, the question of whether the term epiphany should be used at all to describe this subset of Joyce’s œuvre has been of central concern.3 While the academic study of Joyce has of late largely moved away from this debate, there are still unresolved questions about Joyce’s epiphanies and the role of the epiphanic in his work. How do we read the word “epiphany” itself, for instance? How do we reconcile the liturgical or theological origin of the term and the secular nature of its use by Joyce? Is it a borrowing from liturgical or theological contexts that names a group of deeply secular episodes? Or is it simply a synonym for “symbol”? Can we view the epiphanies as signifi cant in their own right, or merely as a repository of raw materials to be woven into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses ? Despite their opacity, these works from very early in Joyce’s career still do have something very important to tell us about paths taken and not taken by Joyce’s work and literary modernism as a whole. With characteristic “scrupulous meanness,” the epiphanies proff er an immanent theory about the changing notions of literary and experiential time that is unexpectedly and provocatively applicable to old and new debates surrounding the status of the subject in modernity, the future of literary art, and even, albeit very indirectly, the possibilities of a new temporal politics. I am primarily concerned with what it meant for Joyce to invent a new prose genre like this one, to write the pieces that he wrote in this form,

3 One signifi cant moment in the long debate occurred during the mid-1960s when Robert Scholes, in a note in PMLA (“Th e Epiphanies of Joyce,” PMLA 82/1 (March 1967) , 152) responding to a paper by Florence Walzl, argued that the contemporary vogue for the epiphany and the epiphanic in studies of Joyce had become an obstacle rather than an aid in the pursuit of Joycean interpretation. Further, the use of the term outside of a very limited context—the description of the sheaf of epiphanies themselves—was corrupted by a critical category error. “For Joyce the word ‘Epiphany’ designated a prose genre in which he worked and nothing more—rather than, it seems, a more general pattern of experience or representation, or a structural component of his later fi ctions […] Since Joyce himself pre- empted the term to apply to one of the genres in which he worked, it would seem appropriate for critics to follow his lead. To use his word to refer to an aspect of his work other than the one he intended by it is to gain a spurious authority for many a tenuous apercu , which might seem much less impressive if not cloaked in the borrowed raiment of Joyce’s phrase- ology.” In the article that Scholes is replying to, “Th e Liturgy of the Epiphany Season and the Epiphanies of Joyce” (PMLA 80/4 (September 1965), 437), Walzl reads Dubliners in light of the epiphany, in particular underscoring the liturgical origin of the concept dependent upon “the cyclic pattern of seasons in the Church year and its planes of symbolic meanings and correspondences.” 192 Against the Event and what precedent is set by their formal and generic qualities. Th e epiphany, in the literary sense, has long been seen as a consummate—and consummately subjective—manifestation of a narrative event. As Paul Friedrich has described the origin of the tradition of the epiphany and its continuation into the contemporary scholarship: Th e idea of epiphany in the Judeo-Christian tradition begins in the Bible—for instance, with Moses on the mountain or the apparition of Christ after his death to Mary Magdalene and to some of his disciples (John 20:11–31, 21). It breaks out in many passages in Homer as well. In recent literary studies and, at least potentially, in anthropological ones, the idea has expanded to include many sudden, dramatic turns when an image, event, or even an abstract idea becomes vivid and transcendently real.4 For the epiphanies, as I will show, are not simply petits poèmes en prose in which surface events make manifest psychological depths, but rather performative theorizations of modern narrative form and its limits. Th e epiphanies seem to have been for the most part composed between 1900 and 1903, when Joyce was in his late teens and early twenties. Th ere were at least seventy-one of them originally, though we possess only forty of them today. (Th e manuscripts are roughly split between the libraries at the University at Buff alo and Cornell.) While their appearance is easy to describe, what they are as texts, as atomistic bits of literary production, brings us face to face with their problematic signifi cance. Nevertheless, an early and infl uential defi nition of the epiphanies comes in Stanislaus Joyce’s My Brother’s Keeper of 1958. According to this work, the organizing principle of the epiphanies is that of the slip of the tongue that unin- tentionally reveals an inner truth. Jim always had a contempt for secrecy, and these notes were in the beginning ironical observations of slips, and little errors and gestures—mere straws in the wind—by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal. ‘Epiphanies’ were always brief sketches, hardly ever more than a dozen lines in length, but always very accurately observed and noted, the matter being so slight.5 Irony, brevity, and close observation are the primary characteristics of the form, but it is the conjunction of concealment and self-revelation that defi nes the form. Th ey are, in Stanislaus’s words, “manifestations or revelations” of the secret interior via the deformations of the surface, what is

4 Paul Friedrich, “Lyric Epiphany,” Language in Society , 30/2 (June 2001), 218. 5 Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 134. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 193 exposed in speech or action. Th e Freudian echo only intensifi es as Stanis- laus continues: My brother’s purpose was diff erent and his angle of vision new. Th e revelation and importance of the subconscious had caught his interest. Th e epiphanies became more frequently subjective and included dreams which he considered in some way revelatory.6 In Th e Psychopathology of Everyday Life Freud defi nes the parapraxis as an error speech or action that seems accidental, dictated only by chance, but that in truth is determined by unconscious motives and secret desires. Certain shortcomings in our psychical functioning [. . .] and certain seemingly unintentional performances prove, if psycho-analytic methods of investigation are applied to them, to have valid motives and to be determined by motives unknown to consciousness.7 It is interesting to note that both Stanislaus Joyce and Freud emphasize the necessary normality of these epiphanies or parapraxes. Just as Freud explains that the latter “must not exceed certain dimensions fi xed by our judgment, which we characterize by the expression ‘within the limits of the normal’” lest it become a symptom rather than a slip, Stanislaus claims that his brother was after the signifi cance of “unrefl ecting admissions and unregarded trifl es” as a means to probe the mind rather than the “noise and pomp of big events,” which are “so apt to mislead us.”8 While the epiphanies have proven to be a fruitful fi eld for critical argument over the past fi fty years, most commentators seem to endorse Stani- slaus Joyce’s sense that these short pieces in prose work on a surface/depth model, bringing the subconscious to light through detailed attention to manifest speech or conscious thought. Morris Beja, for instance, in his infl uential Epiphany in the Modern Novel of 1971, reads the epiphanies as “experiential rather than aesthetic in emphasis; they are manifestations of psychological truth, of character, of society, not manifestations of beauty.”9 More recently, Klaus Reichert, in his piece on “Th e European Background of Joyce’s Writing” in Th e Cambridge Companion to James Joyce , argues that, despite the fact that the young James Joyce probably was not aware of the work of Freud, something must have been “in the air” at the turn of the century to make Joyce’s concept of the epiphany turn out so close

6 Joyce, Keeper , 135. 7 Sigmund Freud, Th e Psychopathology of Everyday Life , trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1965), 306. 8 Freud, Psychopathology , 306; Joyce, Keeper , 137. 9 Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), 80. 194 Against the Event to Freud’s theory of the unconscious.10 And, as I will show later, even though their book is in part aimed against the overuse and misapplication of the concept of epiphany in the study of Joyce’s later works, even Scholes and Kain, in Th e Workshop of Daedalus, deploy the same model of latency made manifest in their analysis of the individual epiphanies.11 In short, the one thing nearly every Joyce scholar of the last half- century agrees on is that the epiphanies refer to something beyond themselves, beyond the seemingly ordinary situation evoked or described.12 Whether what is revealed is labeled the repressed, the meaning, the signifi cance, or the whatness of the thing, all seem to agree that some sort of depth shows forth through the surface. One fi nal example from the criticism: Ashton Nichols in Th e Poetics of Epiphany compares Joyce to Emerson, eff ectively transcendentalizing the former’s aesthetic. After quoting a passage on the “transformation” of experience via poetry from Emerson’s 1850 essay on “Shakespeare; or, the Poet,” Nichols articulates a working defi nition of the epiphany itself. [In] Portrait of the Artist, Joyce defi nes the artist’s role as that of a “priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life.” Th e daily bread—the commonplace— becomes revelatory and epiphanic at the point where it takes on the radiance of something beyond itself. Th is process occurs in the mind, where the raw data of consciousness are transformed into illuminated manifestations of meaning.13

10 Klaus Reichert, “Th e European Background of Joyce’s Writing,” in Derek Attridge (ed.), Th e Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 60. As Reichert writes: “his insistence on analysis, that is, on the cognitive procedures rather than on mystical empathy (even though the latter is not absent), his belief that latent entities can explain the specifi c appearance of manifest ones, or, more generally speaking, his search for hidden motivations of actions and expressions—all of this shows Joyce to be on the same ‘track’ as Freud, in spite of the lack of direct infl uence during Joyce’s formative years.” 11 Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, Th e Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965). 12 On the other hand, John Paul Riquelme in “Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Styles of Realism and Fantasy” (in Derek Attridge (ed.), Th e Cambridge Companion to James Joyce , 103) identifi es the impulse behind the epiphany, at least as it is discussed in Stephen Hero, as purely aesthetic rather than analytical. He reads Stephen’s defi nition of the epiphany in Stephen Hero (“a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself”) as evidence of a Paterian infl uence. “His interest in writing evocative prose vignettes, the sort that Joyce himself wrote, is wholly aesthetic.” 13 Ashton Nichols, Th e Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Movement (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1987), 10. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 195 Th e literary epiphany, according to this passage, partakes of the logic of the Roman Catholic liturgy—what is quotidian and human comes to be endowed with divine ideality. But of course this is not, as Nichols claims, Joyce’s defi nition so much as his character Stephen’s and as such is infected with the latter’s distinctly ambivalent post-theological thought patterns. When Joyce is quoted on this matter in My Brother’s Keeper, we fi nd a slightly diff erent infl ection. Don’t you think, said he refl ectively, choosing his words without haste, there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own . . . for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift, he concluded glibly.14 While we cannot, of course, be certain that Stanislaus’s transcription of his brother’s words is perfectly accurate, we can rest assured that Stanis- laus knew the relevant passage in Portrait and failed to reproduce it exactly. Th ere is an enormous diff erence between the transmutation of everyday experience into “the radiant body of everlasting life” and the transmutation of it into “something that has a permanent artistic life of its own.” In Stephen’s version, the epiphany is indeed transcendental; it reaches toward the beyond. But, in Joyce’s rendition, the “bread of everyday life” is not so much transubstantiated as preserved as it is—the everyday itself is granted an extended shelf life “of its own” through Joyce’s artistic packaging. Nichols’s slippage is emblematic of the standard critical interpretation of these pieces. In the epiphanies, the material of the everyday is transmu- tated (or transmutates itself) into a qualitatively diff erent register: the surface reveals the depths of the self or the heights of the ideal. But the problem with this interpretation—the interpretation shared by fi gures from Stanislaus Joyce through Robert Scholes and Morris Beja on to Nichols—is that it remains unclear how or even if these short pieces actually do reveal any hidden depths or invisible heights. While Freud’s Psy- chopathology of Everyday Life endeavors—one might even say strains —to bring the unknown motives of a whole catalogue of slips and errors to light, Joyce’s epiphanies routinely stop short of the revelation that we, as readers, know to expect. Th ey may well gesture beyond themselves, toward purpose, but in the end quite adamantly refuse to produce it, to follow the rules of literary purpose. Close attention to a few examples will show just what I mean.

14 Joyce, Keeper , 103–4. 196 Against the Event Th e epiphanies collected at Buff alo and Cornell were numbered in manuscript, with an order that seems to refl ect the sequence of their inclusion in Stephen Hero . Th e fi rst one will be familiar to readers of Portrait , in which it appears with only slight alteration. [Bray: in the parlour of the home in Martello Terrace] Mr Vance—(comes in with a stick) . . . O, you know, he’ll have to apologise, Mrs Joyce. Mrs Joyce—O yes . . . Do you hear that, Jim? Mr Vance—Or else—if he doesn’t—the eagles’ll come and pull out his eyes. Mrs Joyce—O, but I’m sure he will apologise. Joyce—(under the table, to himself ) —Pull out his eyes, Apologise, Apologise, Pull out his eyes. Apologise, Pull out his eyes, Pull out his eyes, Apologise.15 In Portrait, according to Scholes and Kain, this fragment “is used to present a dramatic foreshadowing of Stephen’s future, as he fi nds a refuge from authority in art and makes a poem out of his predicament.”16 Th is is certainly true when it comes to the reuse of the piece within the plot of Portrait , but what do we make of it in the raw form of the epiphany? Th e key issue here surrounds the question of where the event is in an epiphany? What is it that happens and where is the interest? And why was this moment selected by Joyce? With these questions in mind, we notice fi rst that the epiphany begins in medias res , with no indication of what it is that “Joyce” needs to apologize for. And, rather than a revelation of psychological depth, or even a properly fi ctional “turn,” we have here a skipping track. Th e conversation between Mrs Joyce and Mr Vance falls, as if automatically, unconsciously, into a rhyming pattern—the fl ash of metaphor, the hint of a mythological register, in Mr Vance’s second sentence is muted by the emergence of this inadvertent music. And, while Scholes and Kain are right about the foreshadowing signifi cance of “Joyce’s” incantatory speech at the end in the context of Portrait, if we view this epiphany as a concrete issueless fragment within itself, his words here are only an echo of an echo, a

15 Scholes and Kain, Workshop , 11. 16 Scholes and Kain, Workshop , 11. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 197 repetition of repetition. “Joyce’s” words off er no interpretation of or reaction to the initial conversation, but only repeat it in a way that whittles the conversation down to its musical core and then bending what is left only chiastically as if to underscore the closure of the discursive space—both of the “parlour of the house in Martello Terrace” and of the epiphany itself.17 Th is fi rst epiphany stands as a fi t introduction to those to come, as so many are defi ned by a substitution of repetition for signifi cance, static busyness for developmental progression. Another epiphany that plays an important role in Portrait , the third, is exemplary on this score. Th e children who have stayed latest are getting on their things to go home for the party is over. Th is is the last tram. Th e lank brown horses know it and shake their bells to the clear night, in admonition. Th e conductor talks with the driver; both nod often in the green light of the lamp. Th ere is nobody near. We seem to listen, I on the upper step and she on the lower. She comes up to my step many times and goes down again, between our phrases, and once or twice remains beside me, forgetting to go down, and then goes down . . . Let be; let be. . . . And now she does not urge her vanities—her fi ne dress and sash and long black stockings—for now (wisdom of children) we seem to know that this end will please us better than any end we have laboured for.18 When adapted for Portrait , the epiphany is, of course, inserted into a wider narrative, a chain of causality—the moment on the tram leads there to a moment of erotic paralysis when Stephen knows he could kiss her but does not—and further to an attempt to sublimate the whole aff air in a poem that never gets past its dedicatory title, “To E—— C——”.19 B u t

17 Derek Attridge provides an excellent gloss on “Apologise | Pull out his eyes” as it occurs in Portrait in his Joyce Eff ects: On Language, Th eory, and History (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2000), 69 : “Here the remainder of language overwhelms its rational communicative function: words are progressively emptied of their meaning through repetition, rhyming, and rhythmicization, and are transformed into the sounds of physical aggressive and vindictiveness. Th ough the source of the utterance is not identifi ed, it has all the markings of a children’s chant—another manifestation, that is, of the speech of the linguistic community rather than of a single individual exploiting the creative possibilities of language.” Attridge proceeds to note that in Portrait Joyce elides “the source of the chant: ‘Joyce—(under the table, to himself ).” It is a rare case in which an instantiation of an epiphany in Portrait is actually less contextualized, more ambiguous, than in the original manuscripts. Further, as Seamus Deane notes in his edition of Portrait ((New York: Pen- guin, 1992), 278) , citing Don Giff ord’s Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982) , the fi rst epiphany is itself a mangled citation of a previous text: song XXIII of Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children , which makes the epiphany itself a repetition with a diff erence that is also about repetition with a diff erence. 18 Scholes and Kain, Workshop , 13. 19 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , ed. Seamus Deane (New York: Penguin, 1992), 73. 198 Against the Event this formal distinction, between the self-standing epiphany and the narrative episode, is further thematized within the two diff erent versions of the scene. In Portrait , we are given access via Joyce’s free indirect discourse into Stephen’s “reading” of the situation, and, true to form, it is a reading that is thoroughly infected with the metaphoric impulse and the vocabulary of vocation. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or in revery, he had heard their tale before. He saw her urge her vanities, her fi ne dress and sash and long black stockings, and knew that he had yielded to them a thousand times. Yet a voice within him spoke above the noise of his dancing heart, asking him would he take her gift to which he only had to stretch out his hand.20 I will engage more thoroughly with Portrait shortly, but for now would like to note the diff erence between the rendition of this scene in the novel and in the epiphanies themselves. For Stephen, the moment on the tram represents a calling, a provocation that spurs internal discourse, and a spur to the furtherance of the story in which he is involved. Th e moment itself seems to the character to carry or suggest a meaning to come, if one that for the moment can be described only in vague “poetic” language. In the epiphany, on the other hand, while we do fi nd at the end of the piece an “interpretation” on the part of the I—or on the part of the I on behalf of the “we”—the reading that arrives moves in a direction entirely diff erent from that of Stephen in Portrait. “Let be; let be. . . . And now she does not urge her vanities—her fi ne dress and sash and long black stockings—for now (wisdom of children) we seem to know that this end will please us better than any end we have laboured for.” Just as the epiphanies shrug off the task of productive signifi cation, the characters on the tram learn here only the vanity of labor as they melancholically embrace the staticness of the moment. Th e pivotal action of the epiphany is deliberately anti-evental: the repetitive stepping of the girl up onto his step and back down again. If the version of the scene in Portrait is something like a pocket allegory of the way that scenes work in “normal” fi ction—in which events spur refl ection, which in turn spurs further events—this epiphany presents a perversion of the fi ctional impulse. In it, characters fall prey to their form, sink down into the recursive stasis of their moment within the confi nes of a literary mode that seems to have issuelessness written into the DNA of its form.

20 Joyce, Portrait , 72. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 199 Late in the manuscript of Stephen Hero , Stephen defi nes the epiphany as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in vulgarity of speech or of a gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.”21 Following from this defi nition, critics over the years have noted that the epiphanies themselves can be roughly split into two subsets. On the side of the “vulgarity of speech or of a gesture,” we have the “dramatic” epiphanies, which have characters or at least speakers clearly marked off from the narrator himself, and which generally represent “realistic” situations drawn from everyday life. Th e other subset, those that work upon “a memorable phase of the mind itself” and resemble prose poems or dream records, have been labeled the “lyrical” epiphanies. Th e two epiphanies I have analyzed so far are drawn from the “dramatic” set, although the second certainly has the qualities of the “lyrical” with its fi rst-person narration and drift toward self-commentary at the end. And, while the dramatic epiphanies might seem much more likely candidates for the performative perversion of fi ctional dynamics, when we examine the lyrical examples, we fi nd that they are also pervaded by a parallel set of temporal eff ects, a similar sense of issuelessness. Take, for instance, the sixth epiphany, which presents what seems to be a vision of hell: A small fi eld of still weeds and thistles alive with confused forms, half-men, half- goats. Dragging their great tails they move hither and thither, aggressively. Th eir faces are lightly bearded, pointed and grey as India-rubber. A secret personal sin directs them, holding them now, as in reaction, to constant malevolence. One is clasping about his body a torn fl annel jacket; another complains monotonously as his beard catches in the stiff weeds. Th ey move about me, enclosing me, that old sin sharpening their eyes to cruelty, swishing through the fi elds in slow circles, thrusting upwards their terrifi c faces. Help! 22 Th e scene is invested in building up a dramatic intensity, a melodramatic suspensefulness, that bathetically climaxes in the “Help!” at the end. But the sense of imminent crisis is complicated by the insistence on monotony and repetitiveness—the slow circles that the demonic fi gures trace, the droning grumbling of the fi gure. Th is may well be the fi rst instantiation of that favorite phrase of Joyce’s, “hither and thither,” which is itself a poetic materialization of oscillation, of movement without change or progress.23 Th e climax of the epiphany gets stuck here in a screeching

21 James Joyce, Stephen Hero (New York: New Directions, 1963), 211. 22 Scholes and Kain, Workshop , 16. 23 See, for instance, the “birdgirl” scene on the strand in Portrait , 186: “Th e fi rst faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither: and a faint fl ame trembled on her cheek.” 200 Against the Event participial holding pattern, where the sin is “sharpening” their eyes, “enclosing,” “swishing,” and “thrusting” toward him. But these participi- als seem unable to give way to a fi nite action, an end of the story. Th e temporality of hell, like the temporality most characteristic of the epiphanies themselves, is one of action without outcome, narration without sublimation. If the sixth epiphany is defi ned by a sense of crisis at once imminent and suspended, the twenty-ninth epiphany displays the antithesis of this mode of time. Rather than a hung circularity, the latter is written in the framework of a perpetuity incompatible from the start with fi ctional development. Th e foreverness of the piece is more reminiscent of the temporality of the “angel of history” fragment in Benjamin’s “Th eses on the Philosophy of History” than any short story or novelistic scene.24 A long curving gallery: from the fl oor arise pillars of dark vapours. It is peopled by the images of fabulous kings, set in stone. Th eir hands are folded upon their knees, in token of weariness, and their eyes are darkened for the errors of men go up before them forever as dark vapours.25 Here, in a sense, the very material of fi ction, the “errors of men” that make for the evental movement of narrative, is reduced down to an indistinct but ever-fl owing vapor, just as history appears as an ever-increasing pile of “wreckage upon wreckage” for Benjamin’s angel. It is a scene without beginning or end, only changeless fl owing in which fi fty-three words are enough to represent all of eternity. While I have chosen some of the clearest examples from the epiphany manuscripts, we fi nd evidence of this sort of perversion of fi ctional movement and time in the vast bulk of them. Th e seventh exposes with vicious irony the entanglement of the sacred with the secular, as the speaker breaks his pledge of everlasting adoration of the Virgin Mary because it is time to have breakfast. “Tomorrow and every day after I hope I shall bring you some virtue as an off ering for I know you will be pleased with me if I do. Now, goodbye for the present. . . . .”26 Th e eighteenth provides yet another example: Dull clouds have covered the sky. Where three roads meet and before a swampy beach a big dog is recumbent. From time to time he lifts his muzzle in the air and utters a prolonged sorrowful howl. People stop to look at him and pass on; some

24 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, iv, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392 : “His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us , he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet.” 25 Scholes and Kain, Workshop , 39. 26 Scholes and Kain, Workshop , 17. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 201 remain, arrested, it may be, by that lamentation in which they seem to hear the utterance of their own sorrow that had once its voice but now is voiceless, a servant of laborious days. Rain begins to fall.27 Th e epiphany locates itself in the duration between the darkening of the sky and the fi rst drops of rain—a discrete causal chain. But the material between the fl at declarative sentences that open and close the piece is characterized by a contagion of stasis and absurd recurrence. Th e dog’s rhythm of stillness and repetitive howling seems to infect those who see him at the crossroads. And the empty, if pathetic, actions of the middle lines clash against the vacant progression from clouds to rain traced in the atmospheric frame. As a whole, the piece serves as a subtle caricature of the fi ctional movement itself, the generic necessity to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.28 Likewise, and fi nally, epiphany 32 performs a similar micro-parody of fi ctional logic: Th e human crowd swarms in the enclosure, moving through the slush. A fat woman passes, her dress lifted boldly, her face nozzling in an orange. A pale young man with a Cockney accent does tricks in his shirtsleeves and drinks out of a bottle. A little old man has mice on an umbrella; a policeman in heavy boots charges down and seizes the umbrella: the little old man disappears. Bookies are bawling out names and prices; one of them screams with the voice of a child— “Bonny Boy!” “Bonny Boy!”…29 Out of the disjunctively staccato rendering of the fi gures in the crowd— the fat woman, the Cockney man, the bookies—the piece lapses into a participial standstill. Each character performs a single action, none of which has any relation to what the others in the crowd do. One “nozzles” an orange, another does tricks and drinks out of a bottle, the bookies scream. Th e sole instance of causally related and inter-individual action— that is to say, of plot—in this vignette is an exception that proves the rule: “A little old man has mice on an umbrella; a policeman in heavy boots charges down and seizes the umbrella: the little old man disappears.” Th e punctuation of this over-extended sentence, which lacks commas but rather leaves a semi-colon and a colon to handle the “episodes” of this tiny story, underscores the exaggerated bareness of the progression. X then Y then Z, and the story is over. Rather than characters woven into a storyline, here we have a hyper-minimalist storyline reduced

27 Scholes and Kain, Workshop , 18. 28 Interpreting this epiphany from a slightly diff erent angle, Stanislaus Joyce (Keeper, 136) claimed that the dog was, in fact, him. 29 Scholes and Kain, Workshop , 42. 202 Against the Event to equivalence with the issueless actions of the other members of the crowd. Th us, while it is tempting to argue that Joyce’s epiphanies must mean something—that is, the scenes must bear within them some deeper signif- icance—close attention to individual examples proves just the opposite. Joyce’s epiphanies resist the production of meaning and the manifestation of depth that normally accompanies a fi ctional event. To understand this is to fi nd ourselves in a bit of a quandary as to what exactly to do with texts such as these—texts that refuse signifi cance from the start in exchange for the repetitive, the empty, and the absurd. I am not the fi rst reader of the epiphanies to note this situation. A vivid recognition of the problem can be found tucked away in one of Scholes and Kain’s notes on an individual epiphany, this time 22, which describes a brief conversation between “Joyce” and “Skeffi ngton.” [Dublin: in the National Library] Skeffi ngton—I was sorry to hear of the death of your brother . . . . Sorry we didn’t know in time . . . . . To have been at the funeral . . . . Joyce—O, he was very young . . . . A boy . . . . Skeffi ngton—Still . . . . it hurts. . . . 30 As Scholes and Kain note, the brevity and opaque emptiness of this epiphany give us little to work with critically. Th ere is emotion, or at least the rhetoric of it, and a tonal posture that is unsurprising in such a situation. Skeffi ngton’s response to Joyce’s ellipsis-ridden elegiac speech may not live up to the pitch of the moment, but how could it? Would we really expect it to? Would Joyce? We are left at something of a loss. Is this epiphany, this showing forth, as empty as it seems? According to Th e Workshop of Daedalus , the answer to this question is key to understanding the epiphanies as a whole. Th e context in SH gives us our clue to its meaning, and the editor’s critical comments on other Epiphanies have been made with Joyce’s interpretation of this one in mind. In context, this dialogue is followed by Joyce’s comment, “Th e acme of unconvincingness seemed to Stephen to have been reached at this moment.” We can assume that many of these dramatic Epiphanies represented for Joyce the acme of something— vulgarity, banality, insipidity, triviality—but sometimes we must guess at a signifi cance too rarefi ed and personal for the reader to catch. In this case, however, the contrast between the perfunctory statements of Skeffi ngton in this Epiphany and the real emotion with which the speechless Joyce rises in no. 19 is meaningful and unmistaka- ble. Arranged in order, these Epiphanies reinforce one another by providing a

30 Scholes and Kain, Workshop , 32. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 203 context for the signifi cant contrasts Joyce liked to employ by way of unspoken commentary.31 Th e vagueness of the language, the struggle to describe this something that evades discrete description, gives way to material outside of the epiphany itself. Th is scene is contextualized in Stephen Hero, which provides a clue that this epiphany needs to be read in connection to those that precede it, namely 19, which describes “Mrs Joyce’s” discovery of “Georgie’s” illness and her anxious questioning of “Joyce” about what to do. In context, and only in context, it seems, what is “too rarefi ed and personal” to be profi t- ably read begins to yield meaning. Th at is, and following from the claims of Scholes and Kain, only when we read the epiphanies as a very strange sort of novel, or delve back into the manuscripts via a detour through Stephen Hero and Joyce’s other works, do they become meaningfully legible. Th e epiphanies, in this version, are revealed to be something like the atomic form of fi ction. Th at is, just as you never fi nd an atom, just a single one, in nature, but rather only in combination with other atoms in the shape of molecules (never simply O but only ever O2 or H2 O), according to Scholes and Kain these pieces only make sense, only work, when encountered in combination with one another or in relation to a longer narrative into which they have been folded. 32 Th e epiphanies are rendered more legible, the opacities and the elisions begin to fi ll with sense, when we examine them in light of their later instantiations or with and against other epiphanies. In context, at the opening of Portrait , the fi rst epiphany does foreshadow the entwined themes of guilt and artistic creation that will defi ne the novel. Likewise, we discover an undertone of sexual panic in epiphany 6 (“A small fi eld of still weeds”) only when it is reused in the wake of the retreat in Portrait . Almost all of the epiphanies reappear in one of Joyce’s later works, and it is certainly true that these reappearances shed light on the originals. But what is missing from Scholes and Kain’s analysis, I would argue, is fi delity to the epiphanies themselves. To reconstruct them into an episodic narrative is to elide the nature of their formal construction as well as the fact that they were indeed written and preserved in the form that they were. Scholes and Kain implicitly reduce the epiphany manuscripts to a

31 Scholes and Kain, Workshop , 32. 32 Morris Beja concurs on this point in Epiphany , 86 : “Th e primary interest of the manuscripts [ . . . ] must lie not in themselves but in relating them to Joyce’s fi nished work. In order to achieve something of permanent artistic value, Joyce had to recognize that his epiphanies were best treated as parts, not as wholes: he had to transform the fragmentary sketch and make it part of a broader canvas, just as a painter takes preliminary pencil sketches of a face, of arms and legs, and transforms them into a single portrait.” 204 Against the Event fetishized writer’s notebook, a storehouse of raw fi ctional content. But, if they are considered as individual pieces, these unconventional texts demand an unconventional mode of reading. Th ough they fail to produce meaning, they are formal experiments in prose that nevertheless off er themselves as meaningful through the very fact of their existence as independent texts. Th ey represent fi nite spots of time but spots that suggest a variety of signifying turns, turns that are characterized, time and again, by circularity and issuelessness. And while they seem to promise penetration into the interiority of individual subjects, they generally work only to destabilize the notion of the autonomous self in the fi rst place. Th ey are, it seems to me, a pure manifestation of the anti-evental mode of narrative that I have been describing throughout this book. Joyce’s epiphanies go through the motions of fi ction, only to fi nd that “fi ctionality” itself has slipped out between the cracks. If the everyday is a form of time defi ned by collapsed potentiality—a sense that something meaningful and new should happen, but is not happening , the epiphanies represent a raw distillation of that temporality. One after another they enact a stalling of narrative logic, a static dialectic.33 As I indicated above in my discussion of Scholes and Kain’s reading of epiphany 22, I am not interested in explaining the epiphanies via their contextualization in later works, in fi guring out the signifi cance of what happens on the level of the content via their subsequent elaborations in Joyce’s published stories and novels. Rather, the later works are of interest here, not as glosses upon the epiphanies, but because we can trace in them Joyce’s struggle to come to terms with these early fi ctional productions, works that press against the limits of narrative, that call into question the relationship between the temporality of experience and our ability to narrate it cogently. If Joyce is usually seen as an author who tested the boundaries of fi ction by infl ationary maximalization and sense-breaking complexity (as in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake , respectively), what might it mean to reverse the lenses and see the fi rst great issue of his literary career to be one of miniaturization, reduction, and simplicity?

33 While, as I will argue in this chapter, Joyce’s engagement with the anti-evental epiphany ultimately moves in a very diff erent direction, it is worth comparing Jameson’s description of “nausea” in Sartre: Th e Origins of a Style (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 33: “Th e ‘nausea’ […] is the moment of feeling acutely that we exist; and yet since we always do exist, it is subjectivity, the historical fact of suddenly becoming aware of our existence, that lifts this uninterrupting existence to the status of a special moment in our lives. Th us a realization which is not dependent on any content of our existence becomes content in its turn, and a feeling of existing that transcends any of the events of our existence becomes itself an event.” Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 205 DUBLINERS: THE CRITIQUE OF PURE EPIPHANY

After the composition (and partial destruction) of Stephen Hero , the term “epiphany” almost completely disappears from Joyce’s writings. Th ere are rare exceptions, exceptions that are nonetheless tonally consistent with the idea that Joyce had put the epiphany behind him. For instance, there is in Ulysses Stephen’s self-ironizing disavowal of his juvenile work and the ambitions that he once had for it. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahaman- vantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pieces of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once . . . .34 In “Joyce and the Epiphany: Th e Key to the Labyrinth,” Robert Scholes takes issue with those, such as Hugh Kenner, who have argued that the absence of the term “epiphany” in Portrait is an index of Joyce’s satiric intentions toward Stephen. Late in the essay, Scholes references Stephen’s self-critical turn in a passage derived from the manuscript epiphanies. 10 April : Faintly, under the heavy night, through the silence of the city which has turned from dreams to dreamless sleep as a weary lover whom no caresses move, the sound of hoofs upon the road. Not so faintly now as they come near the bridge; and in a moment, as they pass the darkened windows, the silence is cloven by alarm as by an arrow. Th ey are heard now far away, hoofs that shine amid the heavy night as gems, hurrying beyond the sleeping fi elds to what journey’s end— what heart?—bearing what tidings? APRIL 11. Read what I wrote last night. Vague words for a vague emotion. Would she like it? I think so. Th en I should have to like it also.35 Here, according to Scholes, Stephen is fi nally “given by Joyce the advantage of his own ten or more years of maturity since the Epiphany was fi rst recorded [ . . . ] Epiphany here is no longer a ‘spiritual manifestation’ but a piece of prose, subject to criticism like any other.”36 Rather than the uncritical reuse of the epiphany to stock his works with moments of transcendent uplift, Portrait in this reading traces the path of Stephen’s artistic development from his fi rst dealings with the epiphany to his last.

34 James Joyce, Ulysses , ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1983), 34. 35 Robert Scholes, “Joyce and the Epiphany: Th e Key to the Labyrinth?” in Philip Brady and James F. Carens (eds.), Critical Essays on James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: G. K. Hall and Co., 1998), 274. 36 Scholes, “Joyce,” 34. 206 Against the Event By its end, then, Portrait becomes a work as much about the epiphany as it is a container for them according to Scholes’s argument. On the surface, this approach seems in line with my reading of the manuscripts, but in fact, while Scholes feels Portrait cancels out the “spiritual manifestation” of the earlier works, my reading posits that the epiphanies showed themselves, if subtly, to be merely pieces of prose from the start. Further, while for Scholes the phrase “But a piece of prose” seems to be a diminu- tive, a marker of reduced importance, I believe that he mistakes a critique of the epiphany for a dismissal of it on Joyce’s part. As we will see, these later texts do not so much or simply make use of these early epiphanies as structure themselves as interrogations of the concept of the epiphany itself. Th ey are experiments in literary form and stance that are preoccupied, fi rst to last, with the questions evoked by the manuscript epiphanies. Th e “paralysis” of Dubliners and the literary modes that Joyce invokes to represent it, the ironic undercutting of the epiphanic or pseudo-epiphanic in Portrait , and, more complexly, the warp and woof of Ulysses and its world- containing single day, can all be traced back to the atomic forms of fi ction that we fi nd in those early works. Joyce’s texts could be thought of as forming a multi-volume Critique of Pure Epiphany . And, like Kant’s fi rst Critique, what seems at fi rst to be an exclusively negative approach may in fact have a positive intention when it comes to the concept of the epiphany itself.37 Th e stories in Dubliners have long elicited comparison to the epiphanies. In some cases the individual stories are described as epiphanies, while in other cases the stories are seen as bearers of epiphanic moments.38 I n a sense, Joyce himself inaugurated the tradition in a letter from 1904 to Constantine Curran, written upon the completion of the fi rst of the

37 From the preface to the second edition of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (Buff alo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990), 16) : “After a superfi - cial view of this work, it may seem that its advantage is negative only, warning us against venturing with speculative reason beyond the limits of experience. Such is no doubt its primary use: but it becomes positive , when we perceive that the principles with which speculative reason ventures beyond its limits, lead inevitably, not to an extension , but, if carefully considered, to a narrowing of the employment of reason, because, by indefi nitely extending the limits of sensibility, to which they properly belong, they threaten entirely to supplant the pure (practical) employment of reason.” 38 Scholes’s “Joyce,” 27, is mobilized in part against readings of Dubliners of the fi rst stripe: “Where Mr Levin says that Dubliners is a collection of epiphanies, Mr Tindall says that each story ‘may be thought of as a great epiphany, and the container of little epiphanies.’” For an example of a reading of the second variety, see Beja, Epiphany , 93–4 : “the works in this collection represent a new type of story which seems written almost in order to provide an introduction and background to an epiphany [ . . . ] the epiphany almost invariably comes at or toward the end and is fully prepared for by a meticulous writer.” Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 207 stories. “I am writing a series of epicleti—ten—for a paper. I have written one. I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.”39 As Richard Ellmann points out, “epicleti” is an error or compressed form of epiclesis or epicleseis , the Latin and Greek, respectively, for “an invocation still found in the mass of the Eastern Church, but dropped from the Roman ritual, in which the Holy Ghost is besought to transform the host into the body and blood of Christ.” 40 Th e metaphor is drawn from a eucharistic rather than epiphanic register, but it is close enough to the “sudden spiritual manifestation” that we examined in relation to Stephen Hero . Still, as Scholes and Kain point out, despite the fact that the term epiphany is often used to describe stories in Dubliners , “up to now not one known Epiphany has been discovered in that collection of stories.”41 If it is not a case of reusing the manuscript epiphanies, what is it about these stories that, quite understandably on an intuitive level, elicits the use of the term by critics? It cannot simply be that they work toward a terminal revelation, a glance inwards or upwards toward psychological manifestation or thematic meaning, as all fi ctions do this—or at least we expect them to. Instead, it is the way in which the stories echo the specifi c aspects of the manuscripts that I described above—the staticness, the circular closure of the original epiphanies—that warrants the comparison. Rather than contextualizations of epiphanic moments, which weave the signifi cant revelation into a rhythm of prose (and prosaicness), the temporal logic of the epiphany is simply prolonged , and thus intensifi ed, in Dubliners. If the question of the epiphanies was what to make of their viability as signifi ers, Dubliners presents us with a parallel problem: how to assess stories that fail to turn —that gesture toward formal and thematic development, but then fail to deliver the dynamism promised by the form itself. Th e clearest example of the affi liation between Dubliners and the epiphanies can be found in “Araby,” a story that, pace Scholes and Kain, does deploy an “epiphany,” albeit one drawn not from the extant manuscripts but from Stephen Hero . 42 While the specifi c details of the two

39 James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce , ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 55. 40 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 163. 41 Scholes and Kain, Workshop , 4. 42 In this case, it seems, the epiphany was written after the story—at least the only version of the epiphany that we possess today. “Araby,” according to Richard Ellmann in Joyce , 207, was completed in October 1905, while the twenty-fi fth chapter of Stephen Hero , from which this passage was drawn, was probably completed early in 1906, as Joyce states in a letter of March 16, 1906 ( Stephen Hero , 8 ) that he had “written a thousand pages of [ Stephen Hero . . . ] 914 pages to be accurate. I calculate that these twenty-fi ve chapters, 208 Against the Event instantiations are a bit diff erent, it is impossible not to notice the structural similarities between the two texts. In Stephen Hero , the scene in question is deployed as the inspiration for the collection of epiphanies as a whole. He was passing through Eccles St one evening, one misty evening, with all these thoughts dancing the dance of unrest in his brain when a trivial incident set him composing some ardent verses which he entitled a “Vilanelle of the Temptress.” A young lady was standing on the steps of one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leaning on the rusty railings of the area. Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to affl ict his sensitiveness very severely. Th e Young Lady—(drawling discretely) . . . O, yes . . . I was . . . at the . . . cha . . . pel . . . Th e Young Gentleman—(inaudibly) . . . I . . . (again inaudibly) . . . I . . . Th e Young Lady—(softly) . . . O . . . but you’re . . . ve . . . ry . . . wick . . . ed . . . Th is triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies.43 We recognize the particular cooperation of theme and form from the manuscript epiphanies here. Out of the paralyzed bleakness of the surroundings, a dramatic scene blooms, a conversation between a man and a woman. But the conversation yields only color, not depth, not self-refl ection, as we become stuck on the level of euphemism and the inaudible without egress.44 “Araby,” in a provocative move, splits this epiphany in two. It divides the two parts of the epiphany—the description of the scene and the conversation—and erects them as a sort of frame in which the remainder of about half the book, run into 150,000 words.” It is, of course, impossible to know if this epiphany had been previously written as an independent epiphany and was subsequently lost, or was originally generated for Stephen Hero . At any rate, the fact that in this case the version of the epiphany that we possess was likely composed after its use in a longer narrative does not seem to me to problematize my reading here in any signifi cant way, given the way that the epiphany is used in Dubliners . 43 Joyce, Stephen Hero , 210–11. 44 Morris Beja, in the short essay “Th e Incertitude of the Void: Epiphany and Indeter- minacy” (in Joyce, Th e Artist Manqué, and Indeterminacy (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1989), 32), reads the heavy use of ellipses in this passage from Stephen Hero and others as markers of an indeterminacy that characterize the sort of meaning that Joyce is communi- cating in his epiphanies and epiphanic works. Th e essay ends with an attempt to reframe the long debate about the value of the epiphanies as bearers of meaning: “For when faced with all those sudden spiritual manifestations in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture, critics have tended—almost defensively, I think—to dismiss them, and the idea of them, as having failed. But, as I tried to bring out at the start of my essay, if an artist conveys a sense of perplexity and mystery, he or she may not have failed to communicate. And after all, if the meaning and signifi cance behind an epiphany were readily or logically graspable, the experience of epiphany itself would be redundant.” Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 209 the story will play out. At the opening of the story, Eccles Street is transformed into North Richmond Street, a cul-de-sac, but the brown brick houses are retained (“Th e other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces”) as well as, of course, the Irish paralysis.45 At the end of “Araby,” the rendered conversation is a bit diff erent from that in Stephen Hero, and is now conducted between two men and one woman, but the euphemistic ambiguity and sexual undertones are very familiar. At the door of the stall a young lady was talking and laughing with two young gentlemen. I remarked their English accents and listened vaguely to their conversation. —O, I never said such a thing! —O, but you did! —O, but I didn’t! —Didn’t she say that? —Yes, I heard her. —O, there’s a . . . fi b!46 Th is format, where the discrete epiphany brackets the content of the story, is extremely signifi cant. “Araby” is not so much a contextualization of the epiphany, as a prolongation of it. It intensifi es the native temporality of the epiphany, rather than transforms it into a narrative continuity. Instead of inserting the epiphany as a prefabricated moment of transcendence or revelation—as a poetic punctuation of the otherwise prosaic—the content that fi lls the gap between the split halves of the epiphany in “Araby” only deepens the frantically static temporality that we noted in the manuscript epiphanies. If the epiphanies present, in a sense, the reverse image of our epistemic impatience as readers of fi ction, “Araby” evokes the opposite, performatively enacting our eagerness as readers. Just as we wait anxiously for a climactic turn, much of the story is itself occupied with the boy’s frustrated anticipation of a climactic revelation. He, for instance, becomes stuck in contemplation of the girl—his imagined projection of the girl—as the pressure for the story to move toward some resolving climax builds. Leaning my forehead against the cool glass, I looked over at the dark house where she lived. I may have stood there for an hour, seeing nothing but the brown-clad fi gure cast by my imagination, touched discretely by the lamplight at the curved neck, at the hand upon the railings and at the border below the dress.47

45 James Joyce, Dubliners (London: Penguin, 1992), 21. 46 Joyce, Dubliners , 27. 47 Joyce, Dubliners , 25. 210 Against the Event Th e boy’s impatience with the obstacles that defer his trip to the bazaar— the interminable “gossip of the tea-table,” his uncle’s drunken forgetful- ness and loquacity—foregrounds the sense that the content of this story is self-consciously posturing as fi ller , as that which delays the arrival of what should be, according to convention, the point. Even the tram that transports the boy from his home to the fair mimics the story form as a “vehicle” for bringing protagonists to their crisis, impersonating the rhythm of deferral and progress that defi nes fi ctional pacing. It somehow both creeps—“After an intolerable delay the train moved out of the station slowly. It crept onward among ruinous houses and over the twinkling river”—and runs express, plunging toward the goal.48 “At Westland Row Station a crowd of people pressed to the carriage doors; but the porters moved them back, saying that it was a special train for the bazaar. I remained alone in the bare carriage.”49 Th e end of the story presents, as we might expect now from an epiphanically infl ected text, immense challenges to interpretation. What is it about the overheard speech that causes the boy such a case of paralyzed panic? Is it that the tang of tawdry, barely buried sexuality in the overheard speech poisons his naive chivalrous quest? A sense of insuffi ciency before the barren, post-romantic world of imminent adulthood? Or does the ambient talk have nothing to do with his collapse—is it simply the music that plays in the background as he discovers the cheap carnival tchotchkes where the Arabian treasure hoard should be? Th e text teases us with the possibility of psychological penetration, only to deny us a fi nal understanding of the boy and his action. His fi nal speech—or should we say the fi nal paragraph of the adult narrator of his story—only makes things worse. I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real. Th en I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. Th e upper part of the hall was now completely dark. Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.50 Th e lights go out in the hall as abruptly as they go out upon the story itself, serving only to cut short the awkward interaction with the salesgirl, to cancel out the pretense that something is actually going to happen. True to the form of the epiphanies, the story stops short, breaks down right at the moment juste for the production of meaning. Or perhaps it stops

48 Joyce, Dubliners , 26. 49 Joyce, Dubliners , 26. 50 Joyce, Dubliners , 27–8. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 211 just after the opportunity for enlightenment has passed. Dominic Head notes that even the scenery conspires to render problematic the notion of epiphany at the end of “Araby”: Interestingly in “Araby” the religious motif of revelation confi rms the negative reading. Th e supposed moment of insight occurs in a darkened hall dominated by “a silence like that which pervades a church after a service”: if the “service” is over, then we can conclude that the moment of genuine epiclesis has been missed. 51 Th e fi nal sentence of the story calls to mind Eliot’s infamous critique of Hamlet for its failure to deploy an “objective correlative” worthy of Hamlet’s intensely expressed emotions. Th e closing scene of “Araby” seems unworthy of the feelings described, the boy’s “anguish and anger.” As Eliot might have said, the end of the story marks a failure of “artistic inevitability,” as there is nothing in the scene that would logically provoke the hateful self-awareness of the last line.52 Rather, the fi nal sentiment of the boy might best be considered a reaction to the failure of “artistic inevitability” itself. Like the reader of the manuscript epiphanies, the boy suff ers from the breakdown in the story itself, which makes him suddenly aware of his own vain presumptions about what stories, in this case, his own story, are supposed to do and how they are supposed to end. Th e “anguish and anger” that the boy feels sounds almost like an inversion of the pity and terror that the audience of a tragedy is supposed to experience. Rather than catharsis, “Araby” brings us and its protagonist something like its opposite: the unnameable feeling of being stuck in the issueless present. Rather than “processing” the epiphany into narrative’s rhythm of sense, then, “Araby” simply stretches the form out, prolongs it without breaking the form’s spinning stasis. In this, it is emblematic of the distinctive orientation of Dubliners as a whole. While the other stories in the collection are not as obviously invested in the temporality of the epiphanies as “Araby,” which at least leaves us the split epiphany from Stephen Hero as evidence of its origin, they do nonetheless follow the pattern set by that story, deploying seemingly “signifi cant” episodes only to refuse or subvert the very possibility of some sort of progressive revelation. Rather than

51 Dominic Head, Th e Modernist Short Story: A Study in Th eory and Practice (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 35. Emphasis added. 52 See the famous passage from Eliot’s essay “Hamlet and His Problems” (Selected Prose (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 48): “Th e artistic ‘inevitability’ lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is defi cient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.” 212 Against the Event metaphoric uplift or psychological penetration, the narratives fade into tautological fl atness. In the fi rst story of the collection, “Th e Sisters,” for instance, neither the characters nor the narrative is able to move beyond the recollected exposure of the priest’s breakdown, when he is found “by himself in the dark in his confession-box, wide-awake and laughing-like softly to himself.” Rather than processing this image into a revelatory conclusion, a means to penetrate the exact cause of the priest’s collapse, the speaker, one of the priest’s sisters, Eliza, circles back into unproductive repetition: Eliza resumed: —Wide awake and laughing-like to himself . . . So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think there was something gone wrong with him . . . 53 Th e story as a whole, like the malady that has killed Father O’Rourke, refuses to budge from the level of the unprocessed “something,” as the form of the work meets and marries the mentalities of the characters under the banner of “paralysis.” In a similar vein, “An Encounter” concludes with the voice of a character—in this case, the fi rst-person narrator, whose speech fails to fulfi ll what we might call the generic contract of the short story form itself.54 In this case, however, rather than numbing tautology we fi nd disjunction, a leap too far. Fleeing from the “queer old josser” in the wake of his schizophrenic turn from vicarious enthusiasm to sadistic fantasy, the story ends on a strange note: I went up the slope calmly but my heart was beating quickly with fear that he would seize me by the ankles. When I reached the top of the slope I turned round and, without looking at him, called loudly across the fi eld: —Murphy! My voice had an accent of forced bravery in it and I was ashamed of my paltry stratagem. I had to call the name again before Mahony saw me and hallooed in

53 Joyce, Dubliners , 10. 54 “ Th e Encounter” seems to have been modeled upon or at least drew upon the same source material as Epiphany 15 ( Scholes and Kain, Workshop , 25 ), which is centered on the encounter of two children with a potentially violent beggar. [In Mullingar: an evening in autumn] Th e Lame Beggar—(gripping his stick ) . . . . It was you called out after me yesterday. Th e Two Children—(gazing at him ) …No, sir. Th e Lame Beggar—O, yes it was, though . . . . (moving his stick up and down ) .. . . . But mind what I’m telling you ….. D’ye see that stick? Th e Two Children—Yes, sir. Th e Lame Beggar—Well, if ye call out after me any more I’ll cut ye open with that stick. I’ll cut the livers out o’ ye . . . . ( explains himself ) . . . D’ye hear me? I’ll cut ye open. I’ll cut the livers and the lights out o’ye. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 213 answer. How my heart beat as he came running across the fi eld to me! He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.55 Th e abrupt turn in an unexpected direction, into a pocket romance tinged at once with latent erotic interest and unexplained disdain, pulls the story off its tracks. Breaking away from the encounter with the strange old man, the fi nal paragraph seems like either the end appropriate to some other story, or the beginning of a new fi ction altogether. Th is mode of conclusion fractures the story, deprives it of the continuity that it requires in order to “process” the themes evoked, so that, rather than an event elaborated into a meaningful conclusion, we are left with two isolated elements: the encounter with the “queer old josser” and the terminal revelation of the narrator’s complex feelings toward his friend. Like the manuscript epiphanies, “An Encounter” deploys fi ctional elements—plot events—that seem meaningful, but fails to fuse them into a signifi cant pattern of interrelation. Episodes remain merely episodes, fragments of “story-ness” without the necessary connective tissue. To reuse my metaphor from above, episodes of the plot remain at the level of the atomic, are denied the opportunity to combine and interrelate into a workable molecular structure.56 “Araby” and “An Encounter” capture the defi ning characteristic of all the stories in Dubliners . Just as the manuscript epiphanies pose as “sudden spiritual manifestations” only to withhold the “spiritual” altogether, the narratives here pretend to be proper stories while leaving out the turn that we expect of even the most self-aware, self-ironizing works. In this light, the conclusion of “Th e Dead” comes into a new focus, as we see it actually narrativize the absence of a narrative. After pages and pages that stress the banality of the circumstances—the idle banter of the attendees at the party, the provinciality that they display (“And what are galoshes, Gabriel?”), and the overwrought conventionality of Gabriel’s speech—we might be well prepared for yet another Joycean anticlimax like those described above.57 And in a sense, that is exactly what we get—but it is

55 Joyce, Dubliners , 20. 56 It is perhaps no coincidence that, at one point in the story, the old man’s monomania- cal talk about young girls is described by the narrator in terms that might just as easily be applied to the epiphanies themselves ( Joyce, Dubliners , 18 ): “He gave me the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by heart or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit. At times he spoke as if he were simply alluding to some fact that everybody knew, and at times he lowered his voice and spoke mysteriously as if he were telling us something secret which he did not want others to overhear. He repeated his phrases over and over again, varying them and surrounding them with his monotonous voice.” 57 Joyce, Dubliners , 180. 214 Against the Event not all that we get. Rather than the monologically issueless ending like that of “Araby,” the conclusion of “Th e Dead” splits in two, pairing the desiccated ending that we have come to expect, by the end of Dubliners , with something else altogether: the rudiments of an actual story , even a tragedy. Th e story in question is a simple one, nearly gnomic, following a pattern that is at once utterly formulaic and, somehow, totally authentic, capable of provoking on Gabriel’s part “the failure of his irony.”58 When Gabriel asks his wife about her moment at the top of the staircase, Gretta unravels the tale of her doomed love for a boy during her girlhood in Galway. —I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta, he said. —I was great with him at that time, she said. Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly: —And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it? —I think he died for me, she answered.59 Th e story of Gretta’s tragic love for Michael Furey follows a narrative logic, complete with a beginning, middle, and an end. Th ey fall in love, she is to leave Galway, he tells her that “he did not want to live” without her, she leaves, and then he dies. In dying, what is revealed, of course, is the strength and authenticity of his love. It is this authentic emotion that emerges from Gretta’s narration here that sends Gabriel into a spiral of self-consciousness. Th e language that is assigned to him via Joyce’s free indirect narration makes it clear that he feels threatened by this powerful story precisely because it is a story , an actual story with tragedy and romance, whereas his own part in her life must be absurdly small: “So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life.” 60 His own response to this exposure, which forms the famous conclusion of “Th e Dead,” performatively evokes the nature of Gabriel’s problem itself: A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the fl akes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. Th e time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous

58 Joyce, Dubliners , 221. 59 Joyce, Dubliners , 221. 60 Joyce, Dubliners , 223. Cf. Gustave Flaubert, “Un Cœur Simple” Œuvres (Paris: Pléi- ade, 1951), ii. 592): “Elle avait eu, comme une autre, son histoire d’amour.” Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 215

Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. 61 Th e rolling cadence of the paragraph clashes with the near-emptiness of its content. While we can sense some relation to the wider themes of the story and Dubliners as a whole—Ireland is “buried,” and so on—the “snow was general all over Ireland” motif is closer to a euphemism without a cache, a circumlocution that circles no center, a paraphrase of what cannot for Gabriel quite make it into speech. Th e key to the passage is to read it in contact with its source within the story, as it is itself a reiteration of his aunts’ chatter. A few pages earlier, at the end of the gathering at their home, Gabriel’s aunts are taken aback by a curt response on the part of Bartell D’Arcy. —It’s the weather, said Aunt Julia, after a pause. —Yes, everybody has colds, said Aunt Kate readily, everybody. —Th ey say, said Mary Jane, we haven’t had snow like it for thirty years; and I read this morning in the newspaper that the snow is general all over Ireland. —I love the look of snow, said Aunt Julia sadly. —So do I, said Miss O’Callaghan. I think Christmas is never really Christmas unless we have snow on the ground. —But poor Mr D’Arcy doesn’t like the snow, said Aunt Kate, smiling.62 In this earlier passage, discussion of the weather, repetition of what the impersonal “they” says about it, functions as it does in all of our daily lives—to fi ll awkward conversational pauses, to hold off the embarrassment of having nothing more to say. Talking about the weather is the Lorem ipsum of interpersonal communication—language divorced from communicative ends, deployed solely to fi ll the container that we cannot bear to leave empty.63 Despite the poetic roll of the free indirect narration in the fi nal paragraph, we are left with the fact that, at the climactic moment of the story and the collection as a whole, Gabriel Conroy (and Joyce) deploy something like narrative fi ll where the synthesis should be, the borrowed discourse of the “they” where we would expect a refl ection of the most personal nature.

61 Joyce, Dubliners , 225. 62 Joyce, Dubliners , 212–13. 63 Lorem ipsum is the a body of “dummy text” used as a placeholder by printers and graphic designers. Th e most often deployed example of this placeholder text is a mangling of Cicero’s De fi nibus bonorum et malorum. “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipi- sicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua [ . . . ]” 216 Against the Event In Joyce Eff ects, Derek Attridge argues that what Dubliners ultimately demonstrates to its reader is the failure of the symbolic organization of reality under the burden of the stunted excesses of the quotidian itself. It is undeniable that Joyce scatters tempting clues to large symbolic structures throughout the stories of Dubliners , as he does throughout his other works; the question is whether any of these works can be reduced to a symbolic system, or whether, instead, what is being off ered is the temptation itself, a demonstration of the desire to invest quotidian reality with deeper signifi cance. If this is so, then what is equally important is the inevitable failure of such symbolic reductions, since quotidian reality—and the openness of the text to interpretation—will always exceed them. 64 Th ese stories, then, mirror back the reader’s own intuitive impulses toward the creation of narrative meaning, off ering to the reader symbols, but then quickly disabling them. In this way, Joyce implicates the reader within the broken logic of signifi cation. However, as I have shown in my readings of Dubliners here, it is not just “symbolic structures” that tempt and disappoint the reader, but also the very logic of narrative itself, the ground in which the symbolic is expected to grow. Rather than organizing noise into order, the stories bring us repeatedly to the brink of form, only to lower us back into the chaos of prose that refuses to sublimate itself. In an often-cited pronouncement about Dubliners, Joyce implicitly links his stories’ style to their principal representational or thematic focus. My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country, and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indiff erent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. Th e stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard.65 In my reading, “scrupulous meanness,” which is usually deployed as a gloss on Joyce’s incipient “impersonal” narration, here telescopes out to serve as a fi t description of the “meanness” of the stories as narratives. Th e melancholic paralysis exhibited by, say, Chandler in “A Little Cloud” or Gabriel Conroy before the window at the end of “Th e Dead,” are the thematic equivalents, the objective correlatives, of the narrative stiff ness of the works themselves. Where we expect crisis and culmination, we receive only duration, prolongation, and stasis. Th e stories of Dubliners

64 Attridge, Eff ects , 43. 65 Herbert Gorman, James Joyce (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939), pp. v–vi. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 217 are more than just diagnoses of the social and psychological disorder from which the denizens of the city suff er; they are performances of the disease and its temporality, a dystopian version of the everyday marked by the inability to expose individual depth through change or, perhaps more ominously, the inability to change through lack of depth. Th e narrative torpor of the stories mirrors the characters’ own inability to conceptualize change, to see their own stories through to new ends.

PORTRAIT AND THE TEMPORALITY OF IMPERSONALITY

In this light, then, we can read the stories of Dubliners as prolongations of the epiphanic form, prolongations that render clearly one infl ection of the form and its dark temporality: the exposure of paralysis on individual and wider social levels. When we turn to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , we fi nd a work that is just as preoccupied with the epiphany, but that engages with it in an entirely diff erent way and to very diff erent ends. For one thing, as I discussed above, the epiphanies in this work are embedded within a contextualizing narrative. Portrait outruns the recursive issuelessness that entangles the stories in Dubliners , and in doing so embeds the epiphany within ambiguous events that need metabolizing by the surrounding text. But, rather than simply redeploying the raw materials of the epiphany manuscripts as modular narrative events, the ironic refl exivity of the novel repeatedly undercuts the self-suffi ciency of these ostensibly revelatory events. Portrait is a novel, I would argue, that is self-consciously about the message—whether threatening or liberating—that the emergence of the epiphanic form bears in relation to literary art, individual experience, and the nature of the subject. And, in this, Portrait reveals itself to be a work of aesthetic theory costumed as a Bildungsroman . From its opening pages, Portrait traces the development of Stephen Dedalus’s relationship to language, beginning with infancy and the “Apol- ogize, Pull out his eyes” epiphany discussed earlier. I argued above that this scene not only presents a thematic foreshadowing of Stephen’s story as he becomes enmeshed in and attempts to free himself from the disciplinary nets of his world, but further stands out as a distinctive linguistic formation. While Scholes and Kain fi nd in this moment a prophecy of Stephen’s future as an artist, as he translates found discourse into an abstract linguistic object, we also need to attend to the tautological and ultimately depthless nature of the “poem” produced, whose principles of creation are nothing more than subtraction and chiasmus. Human discourse is 218 Against the Event emptied of meaning here as it is made to move according to a rhythm that is absurdly logical rather than intentional or fl eshly. Th e fi rst scene and its form hint at what is to come for Stephen in the course of his education. In the opening sections we fi nd several scenes in which Stephen confronts, or is confronted by, instances of discourse that tread the line between poetry and meaninglessness. For instance, very early on, we have Stephen’s strangely aesthetic response to a few lines from his spelling book: It was nice and warm to see the lights in the castle. It was like something in a book. Perhaps Leicester Abbey was like that. And there were nice sentences in Doctor Cornwell’s Spelling Book. Th ey were like poetry but they were only sentences to learn the spelling from. Wolsey died in Leicester Abbey Where the abbots buried him. Canker is a disease of plants, Cancer is one of animals. It would be nice to lie on the hearthrug before the fi re, leaning his head upon his hands, and think on those sentences.66 Th e stream of associational consciousness slips from a warm feeling in the Clongoes castle, “like something in a book,” back into the randomness and contingency of the spelling book’s instrumentalized language. As spelling books are wont to do, the lines are severed from context and signifi cation; what political or ideological content is encased in the evocation of Wolsey is not only unclear (is Wolsey’s death meant to be read here as a Roman Catholic martyrdom or a mark of Henry VIII’s power?), but is also neutralized by the conjunction to the canker/cancer comparison.67 But even murkier than what the sentences mean is how they feel —why is it that “those sentences” give Stephen so much pleasure? While we might understand his enjoyment intuitively—see that it resembles the strange delight that comes of, say, reading a foreign language phrasebook on vacation—it is diffi cult for us to locate the source of this aff ect with any degree of certainty. Th ere is an echo of Michel de Certeau’s theorization of “poaching” in Th e Practice of Everyday Life — “the tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong”—in Irish Stephen’s enjoyment from misusing a

66 Joyce, Portrait , 6–7. 67 According to Seamus Deane’s footnote in the edition of Portrait that I am using: “Th omas, Cardinal Wolsey (1475?–1530), fell from grace because he could not persuade the Pope to declare Henry VIII’s fi rst marriage void. He died at the Abbey of Saint Mary Pré, near Leicester, in England” (p. 280). Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 219 text designed to promote normative English usage, but this still does not make the nature of the pleasure itself any clearer.68 Th ere are many similar scenes, in which Stephen comes to terms with blocks of language that test the boundaries between sense and nonsense as well as those between prose and poetry, early in Portrait . A few pages later, we encounter a diptych inscribed on the fl yleaves of his geography book. He turned to the fl yleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was. Stephen Dedalus Class of Elements Clongoes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe Th e World Th e Universe Th at was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page: Stephen Dedalus is my name, Ireland is my nation. Clongoes is my dwellingplace And heaven my expectation. He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. 69 Th e discovery that ends this citation—that when Fleming’s doggerel is read backwards it is “not poetry”—sheds subtle, retrospective light on the passage as a whole. Stephen seems to mean that inverting the lines turns the rhyme scheme from ABCB to ABAC, which causes the poem to end on an off -kilter note that disappoints our musical expectations. But also at issue, especially in the conjunction of Stephen’s chain-of-being list and Fleming’s poem, is the question of poetic or discursive progression, how texts are supposed to develop and the patterns into which they can sensibly grow. Stephen’s discovery arrives as a non sequitur—why, exactly, would you want to read them backwards?—coyly hinting that the point of the comparison is that Stephen’s list is reversible. If his inscription of “his name and where he was” follows a blankly logical pattern, telescoping rather than turning, and thus can be read as sensibly from last to fi rst as

68 Michel de Certeau, Th e Practice of Everyday Life, i, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. xvii. 69 Joyce, Portrait , 12–13. 220 Against the Event from fi rst to last, Fleming’s inscription works diff erently. Because it changes register in the fi nal verse, moving from the geographical to the spiritual–psychological in order to achieve its satirical cut, it is not as cleanly reversible. And heaven my expectation Clongoes is my dwellingplace Ireland is my nation Stephen Dedalus is my name When read backwards, not only does the rhyme scheme skew into a dissonant form, but the “turn” in the poem comes fi rst, only to dwin- dle out into fl at exposition. In its failure to resolve properly, and thus in its impersonation of poetic operation without quite being poetry, Flem- ing’s poem read backwards should remind us of the construction of the manuscript epiphanies described above. It is an early and seemingly insignifi cant moment, this “but then they were not poetry,” but it bears heavily upon what is to come for Stephen, for his theory and practice of art, and for Portrait as a whole. He is starting to come to terms with the very formal issues that inform his creator’s work from the early epiphanies onward. Do “poems,” in his implicit childish defi nition, need to end on a chiming rhyme, and if so, why? Do works need to move toward the revelation of something “new” at their end, and again, if so, why? Similar examples of this abound. Consider, for instance, the scene in which Wells asks Stephen, “do you kiss your mother before you go to bed?” Th ey all laughed again. Stephen tried to laugh with them. He felt his whole body hot and confused in a moment. What was the right answer to the question? He had given two and still Wells laughed. But Wells must know the right answer for he was in third of grammar.70 Like Charles Bovary in the opening pages of Flaubert’s novel, what baffl es Stephen here is fundamentally a genre issue. For him, questions like this one should have a right answer and a wrong one. In a similar vein, a page or two later, Stephen experiences the defl ation of the apparently symbolic under the weight of accidental contingency. He becomes confused, for instance, when he discovers that Fleming has not intentionally colored the picture of the earth in his geography book green and maroon, the politically charged colors from Dante’s press, but chosen the colors only

70 Joyce, Portrait , 10–11. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 221 randomly—that is, by coincidence. “But he had not told Fleming to col- our them those colours. Fleming had done it himself.”71 It is a fi nding that echoes Derek Attridge’s point about the evanescence of the symbolic in Dubliners that I cited above, hinting at the “inevitable failure of such symbolic reductions” because of the corrosive infl uence of “quotidian reality” just as the epiphanies serially fail to bring forth the meaning that they seem to promise. As Stephen matures, the tension between his fi ctional expectations about the narrative of his own life (his bovarisme ) and the intractable staticness of real life itself comes to the fore. An adolescent reading of Th e Count of Monte Cristo prompts him to imagine before him “a long train of adventures, marvellous as those in the book itself,” an expectation that within a few pages builds into a solipsistic fantasy: Th e noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was diff erent from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. Th ey would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. Th ey would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfi gured. 72 Th e undiff erentiated “adventures” of the previous citation have turned into a more specifi c, and distinctly fi ctional, schema of expectation. Stephen now possesses an image—or is it the “premonition” of an image?—that somehow takes the shape of a romantic event and subsequent “transfi guration.” And the desire for this event and the change that would come of it is in turn deployed as a mark of Stephen’s distinct individuality: “he was diff erent from others.” In a sense, what Stephen has developed out of the collision of his reading habits and his developing sexuality is an abstract model of the romantic literary event. Just as Emma Bovary builds a theory of experience out of the melange of cultural materials that she encounters at school— Elles allaient donc maintenant se suivre ainsi à la fi le, toujours pareilles, innombrables, et n’apportant rien! Les autres existences, si plates qu’elles fussent, avaient du moins la chance d’un événement. Une aventure amenait parfois des péripéties à l’infi ni, et le décor changeait. Mais, pour elle, rien n’arrivait, Dieu

71 Joyce, Portrait , 12. 72 Joyce, Portrait , 65, 67. 222 Against the Event l’avait voulu! L’avenir était un corridor tout noir, et qui avait au fond sa porte bien fermée. 73 —Stephen’s expectations about life synchronize themselves with those that orchestrate the development of the novel itself. True to form, the most signifi cant episodes in Stephen’s growth are each preoccupied with the relationship between time and experience. His fall into sinful carnality, for instance, is registered as a manifestation of a sudden break from repetitive action, a turn inspired indeterminately by his own degraded will or the call of the prostitutes’ fl esh. “He would pass by them calmly waiting for a sudden movement of his own will or a sudden call to his sinloving soul from their soft perfumed fl esh.”74 Th ink also of the preacher’s eff orts to evoke the experience of hell during the retreat he attends. Stephen is temporarily “saved” by a sermon that centers on an absurdly baroque attempt to describe atemporal eternity through temporal and spatial imagery—the mountain of sand a million miles high and the bird that comes once every million years to carry a single grain away. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fi sh, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fi sh, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to

73 Flaubert, Œuvres , i. 348; trans. Geoff rey Wall as Madame Bovary (New York: Pen- guin, 1992), 49: “One after another, along they came, always the same, never-ending, bringing nothing. Other people’s lives, however drab they might be, were at least subject to chance. A single incident could bring about endless twists of fate, and the scene would shift. But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! Th e future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.” 74 Joyce, Portrait , 109. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 223 have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun!75 Or there is the following description of hell through the image of eternally repeated words. A holy saint (one of our own fathers I believe it was) was once vouchsafed a vision of hell. It seemed to him that he stood in the midst of a great hall, dark and silent save for the ticking of a great clock. Th e ticking went on unceasingly; and it seemed to this saint that the sound of the ticking was the ceaseless repetition of the words—ever, never; ever, never.76 In each selection hell is fi gured as a place where no change is possible, but in this case it is described narratively, as if it is a story without turn or end. Th e sermon that Stephen hears at the retreat is, like the manuscript epiphanies, strewn with fragmentary anti-evental fi ctions. Stephen’s exposure to these two temporalities—that of the sudden fall of sinful sexuality and the eternal eventlessness of hell—sets the appropriate backdrop for the (anti)climactic sections of Portrait , such as Stephen’s encounter with the girl on Sandymount strand. Rather than a moment of emergent autonomy or a decisive abandonment of the theological for the secular, I would argue that the scene—in all of its free-indirect irony—is most pertinent as a critique of the conventional fi ctional event, as it undercuts the authenticity of what is ostensibly a “sudden manifestation” in favor of an reverse-angle performance of the temporal logic of the manuscript epiphanies. In doing so, what appears to be an announcement of release from the dictates of the Church in favor of secular suddenness turns into an ever-deeper imprisonment in the always-the-same of the priest’s hell. Joyce takes great pains to expose the fact that Stephen’s “epiphany” on the strand is a self-generated one, one that merely mimics the rhetoric of contingency and unexpectedness. Set loose from the path that runs between Byron’s public house and the gate of Clontarf chapel, he feels called by something he does not yet understand. “Th e end he had been born to serve yet did not see had led him to escape by an unseen path: and now it beckoned to him once more and a new adventure was about to be opened to him.”77 It is something altogether less than a coincidence when that call comes within a few minutes: He heard a confused music within him as of memories and names which he was almost conscious of but could not capture even for an instant; then the music

75 Joyce, Portrait , 142–3. 76 Joyce, Portrait , 143. 77 Joyce, Portrait , 178–9. 224 Against the Event seemed to recede, to recede, to recede: and from each receding trail of nebulous music there fell always one longdrawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of silence. Again! Again! Again! A voice from beyond the world was calling. —Hello, Stephanos! —Here comes Th e Dedalus!78 Th e conversion of the yells and yelps of the swimming boys into an annunciation of his vocation—“Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy”—signals not only Stephen’s narcissistic translation of the things of the world into correlatives of his inner state, but further evokes the lack of distance that he has truly placed between himself and the discourse of Catholicism.79 “He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artifi cer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.” Stephen is beginning to get tripped up on his own models— “imperishable” is exactly the wrong word for at least one of Daedalus’s most famous inventions. Th e emphasis on Stephen’s self-consciousness and his psycho-ideological gymnastics places the “chance encounter” that forms the climactic moment of the scene—and the novel as a whole—in the proper light. A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the fl esh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.80 We know what Stephen cannot. At the very moment when he feels that he has transcended the everyday through an aesthetic epiphany, his own discourse exposes the inauthenticity of his escape. He believes that he has a hold on her quidditas , but what we hear is just how caught up he is in borrowed Paterian metaphors and rusty poetic tropes. It is one thing to see her as the “likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird,” but the lock- step continuation of the schema renders the moment utterly absurd: her legs are like crane’s legs, her drawers are like down, her skirts “dovetailed,” she has breasts like those of a dove, and so on. Th e paragraph is like a fi ctional performance of Paul de Man’s deconstruction of the romantic

78 Joyce, Portrait , 182. 79 Joyce, Portrait , 183. 80 Joyce, Portrait , 185. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 225 symbol in “Rhetoric of Temporality,” as the “instant of ecstasy” exposes its plagiaristic inability to evade impersonalizing derivativeness.81 It is an ostensibly authentic moment that can do nothing but speak its own inauthenticity—an event rendered everyday by Joyce’s ironic erosion of it. And it is only in light of this scene on Sandymount strand that we can comprehend the fi nal section of Portrait in its theoretical exuberance and hubris. Stephen’s discussions of Th omist aesthetic philosophy toward the end of the novel are notoriously wrought with inconsistencies, misquota- tion, and infelicitous readings. Umberto Eco, in Th e Aesthetics of Chaos- mosis , even speculates that Joyce might have read only excerpts of Aristotle’s Poetics , and perhaps had “never read directly from the texts of Aquinas.”82 But, as we shall see, the claims advanced in this section are not just undercut by poor scholarship. More important is the way that Stephen’s theoretical claims clash with the preceding situations in the novel. We cannot help, for instance, thinking of Stephen’s misapprehension of his encounter with the girl on the strand when he delivers his idiosyncratic equation of Aquinas’s claritas as quidditas : “You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. Th e radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas , the whatness of a thing.”83 Again, we know what he cannot: that that whatness he discovered in the girl was nothing more than an automatic pattern of banal poetic tropes.84 Furthermore, when we reach Stephen’s climactic passage on the history of literary forms, which culminates in his infamous description of artistic

81 Paul de Man, “Th e Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 208 : “Th e dialectical relationship between subject and object is no longer the central statement of romantic thought, but this dialectic is now located entirely in the temporal relationships that exist within a system of allegorical signs. It becomes a confl ict between a conception of the self seen in its authentically temporal predicament and a defensive strategy that tries to hide from this negative self-knowledge. On the level of language the asserted superiority of the symbol over allegory, so frequent during the nineteenth century, is one of the forms taken by this tenacious self-mystifi cation.” 82 Umberto Eco, Th e Aesthetics of Chaosmosis , trans. Ellen Esrock (Tulsa: University of Tulsa Press, 1982), 6. Hugh Kenner further provides a succinct description of the problems in Dublin’s Joyce ((New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 137): “In the Portrait the exposition, correct as far as it goes, has omissions dangerous for the reader interested in Aquinas rather than in Stephen. Th e absence of the crucial doctrine of the epiphanies, and the soft-pedaling of the location of the pulchrum in the ens , emphasize Stephen’s highly subjective bent; a technically-minded reader might conclude, as Joyce meant him to, that Stephen’s aesthetic is not Th omist at all but Neo-Platonist.” 83 Joyce, Portrait , 231. 84 Many critics have followed the precedent of William T. Noon, who, in Joyce and Aquinas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 45 , noted that Stephen’s discussion of integritas, consonantia, and claritas translated what Aquinas conceived of as qualities of the object itself into “‘stages’ or ‘phases’ of the mind’s act of aesthetic apprehension.” 226 Against the Event impersonality, something other than the simple confusion of sources and idiosyncratic personalization of scholastic theories of art is afoot. Th e personality of the artist, at fi rst a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fl uid and lambent narrative, fi nally refi nes itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. Th e esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purifi ed in and reprojected from the human imagination. Th e mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. Th e artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refi ned out of existence, indiff erent, paring his fi ngernails.85 Th e fi nal sentence is a poached elaboration of Flaubert’s description of impersonality in a letter of 1852.86 Th e fact that one of Stephen’s/Joyce’s most infl uential statements of artistic theory was in a sense plagiarized is not insignifi cant.87 While there have recently been a series of critical arguments that have considered this statement as a model of modernist authority, we still know—or at least we think we know—what Stephen (or his author) means on the level of artistic form.88 In the simplest formulation, impersonal writing shows rather than tells, as the characters betray themselves rather than being explicitly portrayed by the author.

85 Joyce, Portrait , 233. 86 From Gustave Flaubert, Th e Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857, trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 173 : “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere, and visible nowhere. Art being a second Nature, the creator of that Nature must behave similarly. In all its atoms, in all its aspects, let there be sensed a hidden, infi nite impassivity. Th e eff ect for the spectator must be a kind of amazement. ‘How is all that done?’ one must ask; and one must feel over- whelmed without knowing why.” 87 Scarlett Baron, in her 2009 essay “Flaubert, Joyce: Vision, Photography, Cinema” ( Modern Fiction Studies, 54/4 (2009), 710) succinctly explains the evidence of Joyce’s reading of Flaubert. “Th ere is evidence of Joyce’s early reading of Flaubert. A copy of L’Education sentimentale (1901) and of Madame Bovary (1900), both signed and dated (‘1901’ and ‘June 1901’ respectively) by James Joyce, survive to this day. In ‘Th e Day of the Rabble- ment’ (1901), Joyce refers to Flaubert and to Madame Bovary in particular (Occasional 51). In Stephen Hero, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce attributes the ‘beauty as truth’ theory of art to Plato, thus replicating a mistake made by Flaubert in a letter of 18 March 1857 to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie. It is from that same letter that Stephen quotes when he declares in A Portrait that ‘Th e author, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refi ned out of existence, indiff erent, paring his fi ngernails’ (181). Ellmann reports that in 1913 Joyce purchased the two fi rst volumes of Flaubert’s Premières Oeuvres (4 vols, 1913–1919), as well as a copy of La Tenta- tion de saint Antoine (edition unknown) (James Joyce, 779). In 1920 Joyce’s Triestine library included two other books by Flaubert: an English translation of Madame Bovary (n.d) and a French edition of Salammbô (1914). (Ellmann, Consciousness 108–9).” 88 S3.9 ptee, e.g., Leo Bersani’s “Against Ulysses ” in his Th e Culture of Redemption (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) , and Tim Dean’s response, “Paring his Fin- gernails: Homosexuality and Joyce’s Impersonalist Aesthetic,” in Joseph Valente (ed.), Quare Joyce (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 227 More technically, it is the general artistic mode under which narrative styles like the style indirect libre allow the author to maintain a presence in the work, but a presence that is camoufl aged in ambiguous indeterminacy. Rather than editorializing about Stephen’s bêtise in the birdgirl scene, Joyce allows Stephen’s own indirectly rendered discourse to give his character away. In the passage above, the genre typology is rendered as a historical progression, one that traces the gradual disappearance of the author from her or his text. Portrait is a portrait not only of its own creator, but also of the emergence of its own formal principals. Th is is just the clearest of many moments, some of which I have mentioned above, that dramatize the evolution of Joyce’s own aesthetic stance. When we examine this theory of impersonality a bit more closely, however, things become less clear and more interesting. For one thing, the theological metaphor at play is confusing. Is this God “invisible” or “refi ned out of existence,” for surely he cannot be both at the same time? Th e ambiguity of description mirrors an ambiguity in the artistic form itself. Impersonality, defi ned this way and practiced as it is in Portrait, is only ever a rhetoric of impersonality, an impersonation of the impersonal. True to the precedent set by Flaubert, the disappearance of the author is only an occasion for his triumphal return. To extend Stephen’s theological metaphor a few steps further, impersonality is not the literary analogue of the death of God so much as the announcement of a new sophistication on the part of the divinity himself, earned by passing through the gauntlet of the enlightenment’s creative destruction of ideologies and beliefs. Rather than the death of the author, impersonality merely hides him in a new, impregnable redoubt. One of the most novel developments of literary modernism blurs here uncomfortably into a mere refi nement of all that had come before rather than a qualitatively new discursive stance. But there is an even more important aspect of Stephen’s history of the emergence of impersonality that has largely escaped notice, an aspect that at once connects this passage with the manuscript epiphanies and, perhaps, indicates a way out of the double bind of the fi gure of the author as at once present but invisible and refi ned out of existence. Th e doctrine of impersonality cited above arrives at the end of a long paragraph that delineates a history of literary genres, a history defi ned in part by the progressive disappearance of the artist from the text. What we notice when we look carefully at the passage describing the transition from the lyric form to the epical is that it is not only a question of authorial disappearance, but also a transformation of the temporality of the work. Th e epical, in short, is marked by a prolongation of the lyrical moment. 228 Against the Event

Th e lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. Th e simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. Th e narrative is no longer purely personal. Th e personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, fl owing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea.89 Impersonality, still only partial in this case, is entangled here with duration—it is with the stretching-out of the lyrical event that the personality of the author is dispersed into the interstices of the text and vice versa. Th e lyrical event is prolonged into brooding refl exivity and encased within a contextualizing narrative: “Th e progress you will see easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero which begins in the fi rst person and ends in the third person.”90 Strangely, or perhaps symptomatically, when Stephen continues his discussion, the entire issue of temporality fades away. With the transition from the epical to the dramatic form, he discusses only the disappearance of the author without mentioning this prolongation. Th e dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has fl owed and eddied round each person fi lls every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. Th e personality of the artist, at fi rst a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fl uid and lambent narrative, fi nally refi nes itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. Th e esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purifi ed in and reprojected from the human imagination. Th e mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. Th e artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refi ned out of existence, indiff erent, paring his fi ngernails. 91 In light of the conjunction noted above, it is hard not to feel that the end of the paragraph breaks the equation begun above. If the epical is formed out of a prolongation of the lyric, what then is the temporality of the dramatic form? If Stephen hypothesizes here, via his “like the God of creation” construction, a perfected form of the dramatic—a text so impersonal that it is impossible to tell whether the artist is invisible or never existed in the fi rst place—we might imagine that the parallel temporal perfection of the

89 Joyce, Portrait , 232–3. 90 Joyce, Portrait , 233. It is important to note that Portrait reverses the shift in discursive person that Stephen fi nds in Turpin Hero , as it begins in the third person and ends in the fi rst. 91 Joyce, Portrait , 233–4. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 229 text would involve a fi nal dissolution of the literary event, the “instant of emotion” that inaugurated the lyrical form, into raw unmediated duration. Stephen’s history of forms resolves itself in an evocation of a sort of omega point of authorial personality, but it carries in its margins the intimations of the equation that it has neglected to solve, that of the omega point of literary temporality, of fi nal and total prolongation. While for Stephen the description of impersonality is only a strategy of consummate aesthetic mastery, it is when we draw the half-developed thread of temporality out of this paragraph that we can truly begin to understand its true signifi cance in the context of the novel—and Joyce’s work in general—as a whole. Th e fact that the language about the “instant of emotion” and the epical prolongation is absent from the archival precedents for this passage— most notably, the Paris Notebook of 1902–3, which traces the changing relationship between the artist and the “image” but not the temporality of the interaction—intimates that the change was intentional, contextually driven, and signifi cant.92 Who is it that fails to reach the conclusions implied by the fi rst part of the paragraph, Joyce or Stephen? Portrait , whose fi rst climactic scene blurs the seemingly authentic temporality of Stephen’s encounter with the birdgirl into the always already spoken clichés he summons to capture her, fi nds its second moment of climax in the deployment of a theory of literature that, between the lines and incompletely, intimates a theory of the relationship between the style indirect libre and the fl attening-out of narrative temporality. According to the logic of the passage, the disappearance of the author in the name of artistic impersonality is more than simply a matter of avoiding narratorial commentary on the characters and actions. Th e prolongation of the lyrical moment into the epical, and the further prolongation of the epical toward the zero-point of the dramatic, point toward a horizon of eventlessness. Even when the author has abandoned her or his capacity for editorializing interference in the storyline, she or he is still present in the crafting of the storyline itself—its arrangement into a pattern of events, a rhythm of signifi cance. Th e passage seems to suggest, if very subtly, that, if the style indirect libre and other discursive forms that work to dissolve the stable boundaries between both author and character and character and context are one facet of literary impersonality, the temporality of the text is another.

92 Scholes and Kain, Workshop , 54 : “Th ere are three conditions of art: the lyrical, the epical and the dramatic. Th at art is lyrical whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to himself; that art is epical whereby the artist sets forth the image in mediate relation to himself and to others; that art is dramatic whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to others.” 230 Against the Event Portrait emerges as a novel that, while exposing the inauthenticity of its protagonist, also cancels out its own development, undercuts its own crises, and straightens its own turns. But, as I have shown, not only does it do these things; it also teaches us how to take note of them in the fi rst place. Like Dubliners , but much more complexly, it is a text that is haunted by the experimental precedent of the manuscript epiphanies, as it reduces what could never fi t into that collection (an authentic experience of the girl predicated on an authentic individuation on Stephen’s part) into something fully compatible—the dwindling afterlife of the false event, the perpetual twilight of the coherent self dissolved into the stream of public discourse.

BACK TO THE STRAND: “NAUSICAA”

When we read Portrait in light of the temporal and formal precedents set by the manuscript epiphanies, the work emerges as something like Joyce’s summa of negativity, as its ironic critique and corrosive temporalities combine to render one essential element of fi ction after another out of order, uselessly obsolete: plot, character, climax, thematic meaning. His aesthetic, buried between the lines of Stephen’s philosophical ponderings, could in fact be called an anti-aesthetic as it deconstruc- tively reduces both the authenticity of experience and the striations of plot into anti-evental ripples of textual platitude. Th e subject, likewise, in the guise of the character, morphs into a placeholder who does not so much live in time as have time happen to him. And as a literary work, in which each crisis and climax dissolves into the everyday of the always already and the not quite yet, fulfi lls its destiny, described by Lukács and seconded by Benjamin, as the “literary form of the transcendent homelessness of the idea.”93 I f Dubliners , in its evocations of Irish paralysis, is

93 Georg Lukács, Th e Th eory of the Novel , trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 21. In section XIV of “Th e Storyteller” (Illuminations , trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 99–100 ) in which Benjamin quotes heavily from Lukács, Th e Th eory of the Novel, he speaks of L’Éducation sentimentale in terms that we might well apply to Joyce’s Portrait. “In the fi nal words of [L’Éducation sentimentale ], the meaning which the bourgeois age found in its behavior at the beginning of its decline has settled like sediment in the cup of life. Frédéric and Deslauriers, the boyhood friends, think back to their youthful friendship. Th is little incident then occurred: one day they showed up in the bordello of their home town, stealthily and timidly, doing nothing but presenting the patronne with a bouquet of fl owers which they had picked in their own gardens. Th is story was still discussed three years later. And now they told it to each other in detail, each sup- plementing the recollection of the other. ‘Th at may have been,’ said Frédéric when they had fi nished, ‘the fi nest thing in our lives.’ ‘Yes, you may be right,’ said Deslauriers, ‘that was Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 231 purgatorial on this point, Portrait is infernal, as it consigns the art of novel-writing and the art of living in the world into an incessant and doomed struggle to stake a claim on time, to possess a moment, in a world in which we are increasingly aware that this has become utterly impossible. In Ulysses, Joyce metabolizes the experimental precedent set by the manuscript epiphanies, as well as the lessons of Dubliners and Portrait , but puts these to a very diff erent use from what is seemingly legislated by their nihilistic overtones. In short, there are hints in Ulysses of a transvaluation, a redirection, of the temporality of secular epiphany that yielded only closure and critique en abyme in the earlier works. In this section, rather than working through the entirety of Ulysses, I will attempt to say something about it through the analysis of a single chapter, “Nausicaa,” which stands as emblematic as any other chapter of the processes of the novel as a whole. It represents a chance encounter in a work whose global architecture is centered on the unexpected meeting of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, thus repeating in small scale the mobilizing social dynamic of Ulysses . “Nausicaa” is an “issueless” episode that is not only reminiscent of the temporality of the manuscript epiphanies but further recapitulates the episodic rhythms of Ulysses as a whole. Th is chapter accomplishes the combination of narratorial impersonality and “prolongation” announced near the end of Portrait and which I discussed in the previous section. In doing so, as in his previous works, Joyce satirically undercuts the evental nature of the scene. But that is not the end of the story in this case. Despite the anti-evental orientation of the chapter, more than a hint of “utopian compensation,” to borrow a phrase from Jameson, slips into the picture. “Nausicaa” points toward a transvaluation of modern inauthenticity, of both of the dispersed subjectivity and everyday insignifi cance that we have followed from Flaubert through Conrad and into the early works of Joyce. Despite its Homeric origin, the situation we fi nd in “Nausicaa” is a consummately modern one in terms of both its temporality and the inter- subjective relations involved. Th e chapter is framed, after all, around one of the most common experiences of modern times—coming into contact, often quite close contact, with strangers with whom one does not speak. Georg Simmel thought that this sort of situation, muted and often

perhaps the fi nest thing in our lives.’” With such an insight the novel reaches an end which is more proper to it, in a stricter sense, than to any story. Actually there is no story for which the question as to how it continued would not be legitimate. Th e novelist, on the other hand, cannot hope to take the smallest step beyond that limit at which he invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life by writing “Finis.” 232 Against the Event awkward, was a benchmark experience of modernity, or, in his terms, of the “big city.” Someone who sees without hearing is much more uneasy than someone who hears without seeing. In this there is something characteristic of the sociology of the big city. Interpersonal relationships in big cities are distinguished by a marked preponderance of the activity of the eye over the ear. Th e main reason for this is the public means of transportation. Before the development of buses, railroads, and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one another.94 Th e chance, issueless encounter with strangers is a central theme in modern literature from Baudelaire’s “A une passante” through to Peter Walsh’s seeing (though not really seeing ) Septmus and Rezia on the park bench in Mrs Dalloway. In Simmel’s view, the idle temporality of waiting merges with silent proximity to inform a sensory transformation. Interactions between people in the modern city rely on the eye rather than the ear, the non-contact of looking rather than the intimacy of conversation. “Nausi- caa” tests the limits, both temporal and social, of this sort of fi nite encounter between strangers. In order to understand the implications of the chapter, and the way it both recapitulates and in a sense recuperates Stephen’s encounter with the birdgirl in Portrait , we need to explore very thoroughly the mechanics of the way Joyce destabilizes the evental nature of a chance encounter on the strand in Ulysses . In his lecture notes on Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov identifi es what happens between Leopold Bloom and Gerty MacDowell in “Nausicaa” as emblematic of Bloom’s situation as a whole . Just as chains and leather inevitably conjure up the names of that infernal pair, Chevalier Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade, this chapter represents, in Nabokov’s formulation, another entry for modernity’s casebook of epony- mous syndromes—Bloomism : Of the stream of Bloom’s thought little needs to be said. You recognize the situation: love at a distance (Bloomism ) . You recognize the stylistic contrast between the rendering of Bloom’s thought, impressions, recollections, sensations, and the vicious parody of literary girlishness in the fi rst part of the chapter. 95 But what exactly is “love at a distance”? Better yet, why love at a distance? For Freud, distance is the essential quality at play in perversions, whether

94 As cited in Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism , trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1997), 37–8. 95 Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1988), 348. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 233 we are talking about the physiological remove from the primary sexual organs or the teleological movement toward coitus proper and eventual consummation. Perversions are sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the fi nal sexual aim.96 “Nausicaa” renders these gaps between the sexual subject and object tangible, as Bloom’s engagement with Gerty is an aff air of the eye and mind more than of the genitals, and further remains content to linger at the level of the masturbational rather than plunging toward the “fi nal sexual aim.” But are these perversions of erotic space and time what Nabokov means by “distance” in his remarks on the chapter? We notice that the next line of his notes veers into the realm of “stylistic contrast,” the diff erence between Bloom’s discourse and that which is ostensibly Gerty’s. What would it mean to think of “Nausicaa” as just as much an intervention in the nature of linguistic or discursive distance as in the fi eld of erotic separation—an experiment that tests which distances in the inter- subjective fi eld of language can be overcome and which cannot? In a complicated but still defi nitive way, Joyce’s chapter works to dismantle these divisions and distinctions, traversing distances that seem at fi rst glance unbridgeable. Th e primary instance of Joyce’s blurring of the boundaries between the selves of Bloom and Gerty, and thus complicating our notion that this is a chance encounter in the fi rst place, is found on the level of the discourse itself. Nabokov, in the passage from his Lectures cited above, seems to be comfortable with allowing the fi rst part of the chapter to stand as simply a “vicious parody of literary girlishness,” a virtuosic, if straightforward, rendering of Gerty as a young girl who literally is what she reads . Th is description is more or less in line with the standard critical description of the fi rst part of “Nausicaa,” although more recent critics have couched their rendition in theoretically infl ected language. For instance, Garry M. Leonard’s essay “Advertising and Religion in Joyce’s Fiction” casts the relationship in terms of the production and consumption of commodities, of humans as commodities: In “Nausicaa,” the constellation of advertisement rhetoric swirling around Gerty MacDowell delimits her conscious subjectivity. She presents her body to Bloom

96 Sigmund Freud, Th ree Essays on the Th eory of Sexuality , trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 16. 234 Against the Event as a seductively packaged product that he must own to complete him“self”—and she does so in order to imagine herself as complete.97 In a limited sense, this analysis is right on; but still we must wonder what constitutes the “presentation” of her body to Bloom, other than the climactic revelation of what Bloom calls her “all” late in the encounter. Aside from her fi nal self-exposure, after all, very few of Gerty’s gestures are described. In my view, what Leonard and many other commentators on “Nausi- caa” miss is the ambiguous provenance of the discourse “assigned” to Gerty’s subjectivity, especially in the retrospective light of the revelation that the mysterious stranger on the strand is Bloom. While, as a whole, her half of the chapter reads as a convincing, if satirically exaggerated, portrait of the young woman as reader (a type descending straight out of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary into Joyce’s text), we must also note how deeply in sync much of this discourse is with Bloom’s pre-eminent preoccupations, fetishes, and desires. Th ere are too many hints, in short, for us not at least to consider the possibility that Gerty’s discourse might in fact be generated by Bloom. For instance, who is it that “speaks” or “thinks” or “writes” when Gerty repeatedly considers how an older man would be a vastly superior love object for her than any of her previous adolescent interests? No prince charming is her beau ideal to lay a rare and wondrous love at her feet but rather a manly man with a strong quiet face who had not found his ideal, perhaps with his hair slightly fl ecked with gray, and who would understand.98 Or what are we to make of the moments when Gerty considers the stranger’s marital status—passages that seem to tiptoe uncannily around every possibility except the one most applicable to Bloom? Th ere was the all important question and she was dying to know was he a married man or a widower who had lost his wife or some tragedy like the nobleman with the foreign name from the land of song had to have her put into a madhouse, cruel only to be kind. But even if—what then? Would it make a very great diff erence? From everything in the least indelicate her fi nebred nature instinctively recoiled. She loathed that sort of person, the fallen woman off the accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and the coarse men with no respect for a girl’s honour, degrading the sex and being taken up to the police station.99 Gerty’s tactful elision of Bloom’s degraded situation (“But even if—what then?) and her expressed abhorrence of “fallen women,” women like

97 Garry M. Leonard, “Advertising and Religion in Joyce’s Fiction,” in R. B. Kerscher (ed.), Joyce and Popular Culture (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1996), 132. 98 Joyce, Ulysses , 288. 99 Joyce, Ulysses , 298–9. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 235 Molly, bend this passage toward either eerie coincidence or Bloomian wish-fulfi llment. Moreover, even the “constellation of advertising rhetoric” that parasitically inhabits Gerty’s discourse, her self-presentation as a “seductively wrapped product,” in Leonard’s phrase, has an ambiguous location, somewhere between Gerty’s mind and Bloom’s desire. Here is another example, again from Gerty’s half of the chapter: Why have women such eyes of witchery? Gerty’s were of the bluest Irish blue, set off by lustrous lashes and dark expressive brows. Time was when those brows were not so silkily seductive. It was Madame Vera Verity, directress of the Woman Beautiful page of the Princess Novelette, who had fi rst advised her to try eye- browleine which gave that haunting expression to the eyes, so becoming in lead- ers of fashion, and she had never regretted it. Th en there was blushing scientifi cally cured and how to be tall increase your height and you have a beautiful face but what about your nose?100 When we read passages such as these, in connection with what we have learned of Bloom already—that he is also a furtive reader of women’s magazines and literature, that he is an ad-man with a special interest in the erotic component of marketing imagery—the subjective foundation of the passage is made even more ambiguous. Remember the following passage from “Lestrygonians,” where Bloom thinks back to a marketing strategy that he once proposed to the proprietor of a stationery store: I suggested to him about a transparent showcart with two smart girls sitting inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blottingpaper. I bet that would have caught on. Smart girls writing something catch the eye at once. Everyone dying to know she’s writing.101 In a characteristically Joycean touch, we learn in “Nausicaa” that Gerty fi lls her own “confession album” with “beautiful thoughts written [ . . . ] in violet ink that she bought in Hely’s of Dame Street”—the same stationery store that once employed Bloom.102 Further, there are instances in Bloom’s portion of the chapter in which elements of what was presumably Gerty’s private discourse reappear in Bloom’s mind. For instance, both use the word “Tableau! ” to describe something that would have been “a very charming exposé,” and Gerty’s phrase “something queer was fl ying through the air, a soft thing, to and fro, dark” comes back as “Something in the air. Th at’s the moon.”103 I n view of all this evidence, what appears in the chapter as Gerty’s section might in fact be something like a style indirect libre narration of her interior

100 Joyce, Ulysses , 286. 101 Joyce, Ulysses , 287. 102 Joyce, Ulysses , 298. 103 Joyce, Ulysses , 300, 301. 236 Against the Event discourse on Bloom’s part , with Bloom at the authorial helm, just as the language that we assign to Bloom and Stephen Dedalus throughout the novel is Joyce’s indirect rendering of his characters’ interior talk , for lack of a better word. Th at Gerty comes prewritten by advertisements and girls’ magazines is fully consonant with one of Bloom’s particular kinks: a desire to infi ltrate the feminine private language as much as, if not more than, the female private parts. And just as the “selling point” of Joyce’s particular brand of psychological realism is the so-called impersonality of his narration, the trick of appearing “absent” from the text that he has written, Bloom’s evident absence from the text of the masturbational fantasy of Gerty’s thoughts and internal speech could be described as the foundation of l’eff et du réel that brings the story, and Bloom, off . I do not mean to overplay this point. It is not that the discourse “assigned” to Gerty must be always and everywhere a literal transcript of a strange pornographic movie running through Bloom’s mind—Joyce leaves the question of who exactly speaks when she speaks undecided and unde- cidable. Rather, it is this ambiguity of the affi liation of the discourse that is the point—neither simply Gerty’s nor Bloom’s, and certainly not purely the narrator’s, although it is written in the third person. To take what Hugh Kenner calls the Uncle Charles Principle to another level, “Gerty’s” discourse may well be described as Joyce writing about Bloom “writing” Gerty as he would want her to choose herself to be written about.104 I n other words, it is not so much a question of whether Bloom auto-narrates an auto-erotic non-encounter with an assemblage drawn from his own experiences with “feminine literature” (of the sort that he procures for Molly earlier in the work, Th e Sweets of Sin), nor whether Gerty’s consciousness “really” is a montage of assorted mass-culture products. Rather, the discourse is perhaps best thought of as lying between the “both/and” and the “neither/nor” of these two possibilities. Yet, however overdetermined or indeterminate the stream of language might be, we note that the common denominator at the base of all the baroque linguistic architecture is still always the text , in this case fi rmly low-culture texts such as girls’ magazines and novels, without which such an “encounter” could never have taken place. Gerty faces the stranger by turning psychologically toward the mirror of advertising, and/or Bloom mentally constructs a girl immersed in a novelistic virgin/whore complex in order to enfl ame or sate (insuffi ciently, momentarily) his desire. Th e two terms of the equation are not mutually

104 I n Joyce’s Voices ((Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 18) Kenner defi nes the Uncle Charles Principle, a technique that Joyce employs throughout his career, as the principle that “the narrative idiom need not be the narrator’s”—i.e. the narration may employ the idiom of the character described, or another idiom altogether. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 237 exclusive, but perhaps we must exclude the possibility that either is not in play at any given moment. No matter what specifi c proportions of responsibility one allots to Gerty, Bloom, and Joyce for the discourse of the fi rst part of “Nausicaa,” it is clear that Joyce has constructed the text in such a way as to blur accepted ways of conceiving characters and subjects.105 Th e meeting between Gerty and Bloom on the strand is conducted without words, but on the fi eld of a text without authors or with innumerable authors where the question of subjecthood and objecthood has grown very murky indeed. And it should be clear, even at this point, the anti-evental eff ect of this ambiguity, one that harkens all the way back to Madame Bovary. Textual precedent—the archive of middlebrow source texts that would inform Bloom’s fantasy of Gerty just as it informed Emma’s desires— erodes the event, attenuates the event, reduces it to the level of idle fantasy. Th e chance encounter, in this model, is no encounter at all. Joyce himself hinted in this direction when asked by Arthur Power what exactly it is that happens between the two characters on the strand: “Nothing happened between them [ . . . ] It all took place in Bloom’s imagination.”106 It might seem, at this point, that we have landed in the same spot we were in with the birdgirl in Portrait , in which an event appears to take shape but then quickly dissolves into a banal stack of tropes. Is it simply yet another text bent on the continuation of the Flaubertian project, the emptying-out of the event and the subjects who would experience it? It certainly does undermine those conventionally solid constructions, the self and the other, identity, and the coherent assignment of discourse to a particular subject, to be sure. My sense is that, at the most basic level, the chapter simply does not feel like a devastating announcement of abyssal abjection. While critics have long found the discourse of Gerty’s section of the chapter, marked as it is by its ambiguous provenance and its com- modifi ed commonplaces, to be a refl ection of the diff erentiation and alienation that haunts the modern subject, I believe that there is some-

105 I n Joycean Temporalities: Debts, Promises, and Countersignatures ((Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001), 105, 107) Tony Th waites advances a similar argument about the provenance of the discourse in the fi rst section of “Nausicaa”: “Everything which has happened so far in the chapter now shows itself in another light: everything which at fi rst appeared to be Gerty now also works as Bloom. Every sentence now reveals itself, in retrospect, as capable of a double reading [ . . . ] Th e narrative appears to have been responding to at least two gravitational centres. Not just successive centres, for that would be nothing more unusual than a shift of focalization: what the collapse emphasizes in its rewriting of everything that has gone before is that they now appear to have been simultaneous .” As one can intuit from this passage, Th waites mobilizes this reading of “Nausicaa” in service of an argument about the “unstable and rapid oscillation” of points of view and address in this section and the temporality of character. 106 Patrick McGee, Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce’s Ulysses (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 86. 238 Against the Event thing more to be said about the sort of contact across a distance that occurs in this chapter and the complexly evental structure that it takes. For help in describing this unexpected ramifi cation of modernity, I turn to Georgio Agamben’s Th e Coming Community. 107 In this work Agamben attempts to think beyond the diff erentiation and alienation that are hall- marks of modernity as described by postmodern or poststructuralist theory and toward a new and radical form of community. In his view, such a community is not informed by a return of old social forms vanquished by capitalism, not full of “primitive” or organic conjunctions of stable selves, but rather is a result of the deracinating churn of modernity itself. Broken out of coherent individuality but not quite reduced to raw generality, Agamben describes the basic unit of his new community as the “singular” or the “whatever” (“qualunque ” in the Italian original text): Common and proper, genus and individual are only two slopes dripping down from either side into the watershed of whatever [ . . . ] Th e passage from potentiality to act, from language to the word, from the common to the proper, comes about every time as a shuttling in both directions along a line of sparkling alternation on which common nature and singularity, potentiality and act change roles and interpenetrate. Th e being that is engendered on this line is whatever being, and the manner in which it passes from the common to the proper and from the proper to the common is called usage—or rather, ethos . 108 Rather than a strict “either/or” scenario that casts entities as autonomously particular or subsumed into derivative generality, this passage postulates a “line” of being that runs between the particular and the general, the individual and the collective. Agamben’s vision of the “whatever” is premised upon a radical change in perspective that abridges the dispute en abyme between autonomy and derivativeness into a “both/and” formation that emphasizes the limitless interdependence of the two terms rather than the yawning gap between them. While Agamben’s text is too intricate to summarize with any sense of completeness here, it is important here to note that Th e Coming Commu- nity repeatedly suggests that there is a tipping point at which the processes of modernity and modern capitalism, which are normally conceived of as imposing an irresolvable break between the individual and the collective, actually begin to enable rather than restrict the involvement of the one in the other. And, especially in the context of my reading of “Nausicaa,” it is telling that one of the occasions of the fl eeting appearance of the “what-

107 Georgio Agamben, Th e Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 108 Agamben, Community , 19. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 239 ever” community described by Agamben is the arrival of the “society of the spectacle” itself—in Guy Debord’s terms, the moment when “the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings—tangible fi gments which are the effi cient motor of trancelike behavior.”109 But in Agamben’s version of this new world, what for Debord is “the locus of illusion and false consciousness,” of closure, secretly holds as well the “positive possibility” of the establishment of a new common space as well as a new conception of time. Th e extreme form of [capitalism’s] appropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. Th is is why (precisely because what is being expropriated is the very possibility of a common good) the violence of the spectacle is so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle retains something like a positive possibility that can be used against it.110 Th e Coming Community hints at a new mode of being-together, one that does not precede modernity, but is instead an unexpected product of it. Just as importantly, because Agamben is speaking of a utopian formation that can only for now present itself in a less than utopian world, the whatever community appears fl eetingly, as an intimation of escape that is incessantly subsumed back in the logic of the commodity form. In a section entitled “Dim Stockings,” for instance, he speaks of the way that pornographic images temporarily broke the human body “away from the double chains of biological destiny and individual biography,” only to end chained again in the arid prison of the world of images.111 “And yet the process of technologization, instead of materially investing the body, was aimed at the construction of a separate sphere that had practically no point of contact with it: What was technologized was not the body, but its image.”112 Technological reproduction informs for Agamben a rhythm of liberation and recapture, as it presents, only to withdraw again, the prospect of escape from atomized individuality. “Nausicaa” tells a parallel story about the libratory potential of modernity (as well as the ephemeral nature of any libratory epiphany), here allegorized in the form of the chance encounter and the mass cultural texts that provide a “common ground” between the characters. At the turning point of the chapter, just before the dividing line between what is ostensibly “Gerty’s” and Bloom’s part, the undecidability of the discourse

109 Guy Debord, Th e Society of the Spectacle , trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 17. 110 Agamben, Community , 79. 111 Agamben, Community , 47. 112 Agamben, Community , 49. 240 Against the Event bursts into full whateverness , leaving behind the ambiguities I have described above to expose itself as it really is. A fi reworks display begins off shore, and Gerty, caught up in her fl ushed excitement, leans back, as if looking at the explosions, to give Bloom “a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading” had ever looked before.113 And then we fi nd the moment of sexual climax, defi nitely Bloom’s and certainly something like an orgasm for Gerty, though it is hard to say. She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow, the cry of a young girl’s love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has wrung throughout the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!114 What was earlier in the chapter a subtle interweaving of discursive agency—is this Gerty’s Gerty or is this Gerty Bloom’s Gerty?—drops its pretense and exposes itself in a form of writing that is literally unprecedented. It is an example of the free indirect narration of neither a single subject nor a collective “we” or “they,” but of something entirely new: of two individuals at once. And the language of this passage bears the traces of its double object or origin. Orgasmic aff ect, ambiguously treading the gap between her body and his, is here captured as cadence, as a breakdown of a sentence that nonetheless runs on. Aff ect here is not so much described as materialized in the fl eshy continuity of the words themselves, the ground line against which the rhythm beats. Th e pre-symbolic un- word “O!” treads the fi ssure between language and the bodily exhalation of the single enraptured individual. In this passage we fi nd not so-called stream of consciousness discourse, but rather the river of language that runs in the channel of the encounter, a channel whose bends and eddies are marked out by the interests of the individual participants. As Bloom refl ects later, despite their lack of speech, “it was a kind of language between us”—a language of bodies at once held apart and brought into contact by the distance between them.115 And if in this scene Joyce hopes to render a sense of speech or discourse that transcends the musty category of the coherent subject, it is then far from coincidental that the climax of Bloom’s and Gerty’s encounter is staged against the montage backdrop of a fi reworks exhibition, a mass spectacle. Each recorded “O!” is also that of the crowd watching the explosions off shore, another (albeit

113 Joyce, Ulysses , 300. 114 Joyce, Ulysses , 300. 115 Joyce, Ulysses , 305. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 241 less complex) model of collective speech before the screen of images that is the modern world. Th ere is no doubt that we are on very strange ground here when it comes to the question of the narrative event. Uncertain whether we have just observed some sort of profanely mystical union at a distance or simply Bloom’s erotic fantasy, we are sure only of two things: that Bloom masturbates to climax and then Gerty abruptly leaves. If this has been an event, it is only just barely. If it represents a turn in the plot, it is simply a turn from excitement to drowsy fatigue—or, as Joyce put it in a schema of the chapter that he gave to Stuart Gilbert, from “tumescence” to “detumescence.” But, on the other hand, even if it certainly is not a case of deep revelation or abrupt peripeteia, Bloom’s orgasm is not nothing. Th e overdetermination of the scene throws us back on the minimal physical act that has happened. Again, it is no coincidence that the high point of the chapter is synchronized with a fi reworks display. While fi reworks are frequently deployed as a metaphor for eventfulness, they are not themselves meaningfully eventful in any intrinsic sense. Th ey are enjoyable, candy for the eyes, a sensory experience—but it is diffi cult to make them say anything more than: Th is is signifi cant! isTh is an occasion for fi reworks! Joyce has deployed the complex anti-evental techniques that I have been tracing throughout this section, not simply, as in the other cases I have examined in this book, to disrupt the eventfulness of the moment, but rather to throw us back on what has happened, as transient and minimally meaningful as it may be. While Th e Coming Community has less to say about the temporality of modernity than the forms of sociality that it promotes, Agamben does at one point deploy an image that can serve as an elucidating allegory of the relationship of “Nausicaa” to the everyday and the event. In the section entitled “Without Classes,” Agamben compares the life of the “single planetary bourgeoisie,” who have inherited the world in the wake of the rise of capitalist modernity and the arrival of secular nihilism, to an ad without products. With the dissolution of diversity, social identity, and meaning, they are brought face to face with the “phantasmagorical vacu- ousness” of inauthenticity without end: the absurdity of individual existence, inherited from the subbase of nihilism, has become in the meantime so senseless that it has lost all pathos and been transformed, brought out into the open, into an everyday exhibition: Nothing resembles the life of this new humanity more than advertising footage from which every trace of the advertised product has been wiped out. Th e contradiction of the petty bourgeois, however, is obstinately trying, against all odds, to make their own an identity that has become in reality absolutely improper and insignifi cant 242 Against the Event to them. Shame and arrogance, conformity and marginality remain thus the poles of all their emotional registers.116 Just as Agamben’s posthistorical actors go through the motion of acting out the ad, wistfully staring at the car in the garage (except there’s no car), ravenously devouring the entrée (except there’s no food on the plate), going to see the latest Hollywood blockbuster (except there’s nothing on the screen), anti-evental narrative brings the failure of the event “into an everyday exhibition” by going through the motions of the event that does not properly take place—that has lost its purposefulness or impact. If Agamben is suggesting in this passage that the abandonment of the anticipation of the arrival of the “product” that will retroactively endow the advertisement with meaning allows another sort of meaning to grow in its place, I believe that “Nausicaa,” if complexly, operates in a parallel fashion. Rather than the fl attened-out realm in which the social and linguistic stabilities have been irrecoverably fractured by the lightning strikes of Joyce’s deconstructive discourse, “Nausicaa” intimates something new and positive on the other side of the ruin of the coherent subject and her or his language. Most importantly, this “something” arrives not in spite of but by means of exactly the deconstructive tendencies of the text—and the world of which it is a refl ection. In other words, the abjection of the subject and the nauseous recognition of the textuality of everything that once seemed “real” and tangible are the very means by which Bloom and Gerty are able to obtain their experience of momentary communion. Just as a previous analyst of alienation and reifi cation never allowed himself to forget the fact that it was the very processes of capitalist modernity that set the stage for the emergence of a radical new form— Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fi xed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.117 —critics of modern literature must take care not to lose sight of the positive potentiality of such “modern” social forms and temporalities that appear at fi rst glance destabilizing or even destructive. Ultimately, this reconception of the “ends” of modernity is the project of Agamben’s Th e

116 Agamben, Community , 62–3. 117 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Th e Marx-Engels Reader , 2nd edn., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 476. Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 243 Coming Community, and it might also be said to be a primary thematic focal point of Joyce’s masterwork as well. As such, “Nausicaa” models a notion of eventfulness that engages with many of the same issues as the philosophical models discussed at the opening of Against the Event. First of all, it presents a model—against what we have seen in Heidegger—of a form of authenticity that operates through the channels of inauthenticity itself, a paradoxically authentic inauthenticity that aff ords contact despite itself. What happens on the strand seems to be a valorization (if a limited, circumscribed one) of a form of authenticity that operates on the very ground of entanglement in the everyday, of the inauthenticity of that triangle of idle talk, ambiguity, and curiosity that Heidegger describes in Being and Time . Secondly, and perhaps more per- tinently, while there are similarities to Badiou’s theorizations of the event and the subjects that come of it, this chapter works in the end in an entirely diff erent direction. Rather than standing as a breaking-off from the everyday, the moment of the emergence of the infi nite out of and away from the status quo, this event consists of a plunge into the heart of the everyday itself. Th at is rather than depending upon the void hidden in the set, it is a union based on plentitude—the fact that the set called “Dublin 1904” is so full that there is barely room for a gap between Gerty and Bloom, as diff erent as they are. Rather than the arrival of subjectivity through a decision, through fi delity, this occurrence is distinctly promiscuous—it ends nearly as soon as it begins and leads only to the exposure of the whateverness of the individuals involved. Instead of giving rise to subjects who stand beyond their situation, it depends upon the prior circumscription—the utter absorption—of the characters into their milieu. In short, if the event for Badiou is “purely haphazard, and cannot be inferred from the situation,” and if it is in this fact that its value lies, “Nausicaa” presents a scene that, while random, is not haphazard and can, as Joyce’s form takes pains to enact, certainly be “inferred from the situation.”118 Th e encounter between Gerty and Bloom entirely depends upon precedent, the presence of precedent—it is an event that does not distinguish itself at all from what we have been calling, from Flaubert onward, the everyday. Of course, Ulysses as a whole hardly shares Agamben’s messianic tone in its approach to the problem. While evocations of the changing nature of social relations pervade the text, utopian “whateverness” is permitted to fl icker up only in spots: for instance, in the postal aff air between “Henry Flower” and “Martha Cliff ord,” Bloom’s deconstruction of the organic community in “Cyclops,” and, of course, the entire extended “chance encounter” between Bloom and Stephen. But moments such as these,

118 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006), 215. 244 Against the Event ultimately, are no match for the persistent power of the older forms of relation that preoccupy the novel and the minds and hearts of its characters. Intimations of escape eventually yield the stage to structures of stasis, whether in the form of the “Amor matris: subjective and objective geni- tive” that haunts Stephen or that of Bloom’s dysfunctional marriage, which inverts the proximity across distance of “Nausicaa” into the distance despite proximity of the sexless marriage.119 Th e emergence of the “whatever” is never allowed to stand for long before the gravitational fi eld of the nostos pulls the story back toward the surface of inertia. In the end, what is blurred on the strand is not simply the stability of the selves on the scene, but the very notion of narrative chronology and causality. Just as Bloom and Gerty achieve a sort of contact through an embrace of inauthenticity, through an engagement on the level of the surface rather than a plunge toward depth, “Nausicaa” abandons the conventional modes of the narrative organization of experience, choosing the episodic over the progressive, anticlimax over the event, and content over form. Th e encounter with Gerty is as transient as Baudelaire’s with his “passante,” as it will lead to nothing further in the remaining chapters of Ulysses . Bloom himself at one point acknowledges the situation: Tired I feel now. Will I get up? O wait. Drained all the manhood out of me, little wretch. She kissed me. Never again. My youth. Only once it comes. Or hers. Take the train here tomorrow. No. Returning not the same. Like kids your second visit to a house. Th e new I want. Nothing new under the sun.120 Th e “Never again” might as well be a direct translation of the “trop tard! jamais peut-être!” of Baudelaire’s poem. And it is perhaps no coincidence that Bloom seems to have learned the lesson that Emma Bovary never quite could: “Take the train here tomorrow. No. Returning not the same.” Nor is it surprising to fi nd that “Nausicaa” features one of the manuscript epiphanies in its opening pages, as it is the fulfi llment of the formal and aesthetic provocation posed by those early fragments.121 If those early

119 Joyce, Ulysses , 165–6. 120 Joyce, Ulysses , 308. 121 Near the start of “Nausicaa,” Joyce includes one of the early epiphanies almost word for word ( Scholes and Kain, Workshop , 48 ). [Dublin: at the corner of Connaught St, Phibsborough] Th e Little Male Child – (at the garden gate ) . . Na . . o. Th e First Young Lady – (half kneeling, takes his hand ) – Well, is Mabie your sweetheart? Th e Little Male Child – Na …o. Th e Second Young Lady – (bending over him, looks up ) – Who is your Sweetheart? Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 245 epiphanies throw into relief the fi ctional rhythm in which characters are brought to crisis, which in turn triggers an anticipation of imminent revelation that the epiphanies fail to fulfi ll, “Nausicaa” bleeds its own climax dry and proff ers the surface itself as the only meaningful thing on off er. It is diffi cult not to read “Nausicaa” as a rewriting of the birdgirl scene in Portrait , but the diff erences between the texts speak more loudly than the similarities when it comes to the issues of time and interpersonal contact. While Stephen’s ultimately fruitless quest for the girl’s quidditas on the strand mirrors his desire to produce an authentic aesthetic moment, Bloom’s embrace of what we might call, following Agamben, Gerty’s quodlibitas mirrors the emphatically inauthentic temporality of the chapter and his life in the novel as a whole.

MODERNISM, THE EVERYDAY, AND AUERBACH’S “VERY SIMPLE SOLUTION”

Th e novels that I have examined in this book—not only Joyce’s earlier eff orts, but also those of Flaubert, Wells, and Conrad—share a particular dilemma: how to maintain the coherence of the text, a rhythm of meaningful experiences, in a world in which time itself seems to be fl attening out, softening into circularity, reiteration, and stasis. Or, from another direction, each author struggled with the problem of how to write a narrative according to the conventional standards of the form given the mounting pressure of new temporalities. While there are hints of an answer similar to that delivered by “Nausicaa” in these earlier works, in Ulysses Joyce draws much closer to an aesthetic that is adapted to, rather than resistant to, the everyday. It is perhaps an intimation of this new aesthetic that provoked Eliot’s panicky announcement of the “mythical method” as a means to make sense of Joyce’s chaotic novel. In using myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. [ . . . ] It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a signifi cance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.122 Pace Eliot, when examined in light of this chapter’s evocation of a post- individual whateverness and its groundbreaking everyday eventfulness, the Homeric model’s value for Joyce seems to stem not so much from the citational stabilities it provides but rather from Odysseus’s protean selfhood, the wandering, episodic nature of the plot, and the picaresque pace

122 Eliot, Selected Prose , 177. 246 Against the Event of the work as a whole. Especially when it comes to “Nausicaa,” the Odys- sey’s precedent is primitivistically deformative rather than restorative. Rather than a shoring of fragments against the confusion and contingency of the modern world, it represents a harkening-back to a moment before the accretions of formal mannerism had so fully determined the shape of literature. As I mentioned in Chapter 1 , early in his Aesthetic Th eory Th eodor Adorno describes the relationship between worldly antagonisms and the problems of artistic construction: “Th e basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil. Th e unresolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form.”123 In this chapter, as well as in this book as a whole, I have examined the history of modern literature’s exploration of a particular formal issue that mirrors an emergent problem of modern experience. Th e everyday is the word that I have used to link the two domains—art and life—together. In Joyce’s work, as with that of Flaubert, Wells, and Con- rad, we fi nd an astounding degree of technical complexity. I have argued that this complexity emerges in large part as a response to the formal challenges presented by empty time—time unchained from teleology and direction, the secularized time that both anticipates the event and dissolves it at the moment it arrives into more of the same. Th e coming of the distinctively secular epiphany in Joyce’s texts, and its fruition in Ulysses, are vividly if complexly glossed by the ambiguous refl ections at the end of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis .124 In the fi nal chapter, “Th e Brown Stocking,” Auerbach turns to literary modernism, and in particular Woolf’s To the Lighthouse , but what he fi nds in this text could just as easily be located in Joyce’s works. Here Auerbach connects the features of Woolf’s innovative technique to an openness to reality and its randomness. Th ere are the characteristic and distinctively new features of the technique: a chance occasion releasing processes of consciousness; a natural and even, if you will, a naturalistic rendering of those processes in their peculiar freedom, which is neither restrained by a purpose nor directed by a specifi c subject of thought; elaboration of the contrast between “exterior” and “interior” time. Th e three have in common what they reveal of the author’s attitude: he submits, much more than was done in early realistic works, to the random contingency of real phenomena; and even though he winnows and stylizes the material of the real world—as of course he cannot help doing—he does not proceed rationalistically,

123 Th eodor Adorno, Aesthetic Th eory , trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: Uni- versity of Minnesota Press, 1997), 6. 124 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis , trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). Joyce’s Anti-Epiphanies 247 nor with a view to bringing a continuity of exterior events to a planned conclusion.125 Th e Woolfean techniques that Auerbach is most interested in here are reminiscent of the Joycean practices that I have highlighted in this chapter. Resistance to rigid conventions of emplotment, the disjunctive evocation of the temporality of the character’s experience, and the “chance occasion” that gives rise to an outburst of consciousness are equally central to Joyce’s work. Up to this point, Auerbach’s reading of Woolf falls in line with the conventional critical assessment of modernist narrative, in which formal complexity and representational solipsism cancel out the simplicity and sociality of the previous realist traditions of the novel. But by the end of the chapter, Auerbach has turned his defi nition of modernism toward an entirely unprecedented set of fi ndings—fi ndings that the study of this period and its works have still never conclusively come to terms with. He begins to tease out of the random occurrence and the formal complexity that represents it an intimation of something very unexpected: a commonality, a simplicity. What takes place here in Virginia Woolf’s novel is precisely what was attempted everywhere in works of this kind (although not everywhere with the same insight and mastery)—that is, to put the emphasis on the random occurrence, to exploit it not in the service of a planned continuity of action but in itself. And in the process something new and elemental appeared: nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice. To be sure, what happens in that moment—be it outer or inner processes—concerns in a very personal way the individuals who live in it, but it also (and for that very reason) concerns the elementary things which men in general have in common. It is precisely the random moment which is compara- tively independent of the controversial and unstable orders over which men fi ght and despair; it passes unaff ected by them, as daily life.126 What is most individual—what emerges from the microscopic dissection of daily life and petty events—is, almost paradoxically, a manifestation of what is most common, what is most everyday. Th e tradition-shattering turn to the stream of consciousness, in Woolf’s case, or the style indirect libre and its accompanying narrative temporalities in Joyce, is not so much a symptom of emergent solipsism and correspondent anomie, but rather a quiet harbinger of commonality, of the presence of the general in the particular. In the last sentences of the chapter, Auerbach’s words take on a pro- phetic infl ection:

125 Auerbach, Mimesis , 538. 126 Auerbach, Mimesis , 552. 248 Against the Event

Beneath the confl icts, an economic and cultural leveling process is taking place. It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible. And it is most concretely visible now in the unprejudiced, precise, interior and exterior representation of the random moment in the lives of diff erent people. So the complicated process of dissolution which led to fragmentation of the exterior action, to refl ection of consciousness, and to stratifi cation of time seems to be tending toward a very simple solution. Perhaps it will be too simple to please those who, despite all its dangers and catastrophes, admire and love our epoch for the sake of its abundance of life and the incomparable historical vantage point which it aff ords. But they are few in number, and probably they will not live to see much more than the fi rst forewarnings of the approaching unifi cation and simplifi cation.127 Modernism signals the imminent emergence of a “very simple solution” that comes not in reaction to the complex dissipations of modernism, but as a result of them. We have for too long found in literary modernism—in the works of Flaubert and Conrad, Joyce and Woolf—the signs of a terminal stage of the disease modernity . Its ironies signal the yawning abyss opening up between the subject and herself or himself; its plot dysfunctions testify to the failure of experience, cognition, and understanding; and its insistence on novelty suggests that it was infected with the logic of the commodity right from the start. But via Auerbach’s cryptic pronouncement in Mimesis , we can catch sight of another possible message of modernism, an aesthetic and temporal simplicity whose objective correlative is “an economic and cultural leveling process” already begun, at least according to Auerbach in 1946. Despite the overarching existential bleakness that pervades the anti-evental works that I have analyzed in this book, the strange, always transient moments of contact that I have described—whether the Time Traveller’s aff ection for Weena, the fl ickering empathetic contact between Marlow and the black labourers he encounters, and Bloom’s rendezvous with Gerty on the strand—appear in this sense in a new light. Th e literature and social thought that has come in the wake of modernism has failed so far to listen carefully enough to the subtler messages of the period and its forms, focusing as they did, and continue to do, on complexity rather than simplicity, on echoing the surface of their predecessors without grasping what lay beneath. But perhaps we are now in a position to come to terms with the challenging simplicities of the everyday, the open secrets made available by the secular epiphanies of modernism, and the unifi cation and leveling they prophesize.

127 Auerbach, Mimesis , 552–3. Bibliography

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Achebe, Chinua 150 , 174 Barthes, Roland 33 Adorno, Th eodor 46 Th e Pleasure of the Text 72 , 86–7 , 89 Aesthetic Th eory 38–40 , 109 , 246 Th e Rustle of Language 32 n Agamben, Giorgio Baudelaire, Charles 26 , 189 Th e Coming Community 238–9 , Le Spleen de Paris 3 8 241–3 Beckett, Samuel 13 n alienation 9 , 37 , 55, 130 , 149 , 164 Beja, Morris 195 , 208 Althusser, Louis 66 Epiphany in the Modern Novel 193 , 203 n Reading Capital 159 Benjamin, Andrew anagnorisis 13 Th e Plural Event: Descartes, Hegel, Anderson, Perry Heidegger 4 n Th e Origins of Postmodernity 11 n Benjamin, Walter 10 , 69, 170–1, 200 Aristotle Th e Arcades Project 41 , 101 Poetics 13 , 29–30 Bergonzi, Bernard 140 Attridge, Derek Bergson, Henri Joyce Eff ects: On Language, Th eory, and Creative Evolution 1 9 History 197 n, 216 , 221 Bersani, Leo 226 n Auerbach, Erich Bildungsroman 39 , 47 Mimesis 97 , 246–8 Blackwood, William 153 Augenblick 15–16 Blanchot, Maurice 12 Augustine Th e Infi nite Conversation 72–3 Confessions 8 boredom 8 Austen, Jane Bouilhet, Louis 57–8 Pride and Prejudice 3 3 Bourdieu, Pierre authenticity 15 , 109 Th e Rules of Art 56–7 , 61 bovarisme 68 , 83 Badiou, Alain 3 , 24–5, 27–8 , Boyd, Brian 49–50, 243 On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Being and Event 21 , 48 Cognition, and Fiction 3 4 Ethics 49 n Brantlinger, Patrick 122 , 150 , 174 Th e Handbook of Inaesthetics 22 Breton, André 36 Logic of Worlds 20 Brombert, Victor 63 , 68 , 83 Saint Paul: Th e Foundations of Brown, Frederic 50 n Universalism 2 3 Burnett, John 155 Bal, Mieke Narratology: Introduction to the Th eory Calgano, Antonio of Narrative 29 n Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and Balibar, Étienne their Time 2 5 Reading Capital 159 Certeau, Michel de Ballard, J. G. 145 Th e Practice of Everyday Life 7 , 87 Balzac, Honoré de Chase, Stuart Louis Lambert 52–4 Th e Economy of Abundance 116 Un Médicin de champagne 53–4 Clark, T. J. 11 n banality see everyday Clarke, Bruce 143 Barker, Jason Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Alain Badiou: An Introduction 21 n Age of Classical Th ermodynamics 120 Baron, Scarlett 226 n Cole, Sarah 164 Barth, John 46 Colet, Louise 52–3 , 60 262 Index

Conrad, Joseph 41 , 51 , 158 , 245 140 , 144 , 182 , 189–90 , 193 , 195 , Heart of Darkness 43 , 45 , 110 , 114 , 199 , 204 , 217–19 , 224–5 , 230 , 241 , 144 , 147–56 , 159–84 , 186–8 , 190 243 , 245–8 Last Essays 173 n Lord Jim 148–51 , 153 , 173 , 187 Fairhall, James Nostromo 185–7 James Joyce and the Question of Th e Rescue 153 History 190 Th e Secret Agent 145 , 186 Faulkner, William 13 n, 51 Typhoon 184–5 fi n de siècle 111 , 115 , 118 , 137 , 181, 187 Youth 153 Flaubert, Gustave 13 n, 23 , 161 , 189 , Culler, Jonathan 63 214 n, 220 , 248 Curran, Constantine 206–7 Correspondance 51–4 , 59–61 , 65 , 153 , 226 n Danius, Sara 190n L’Éducation sentimentale 42 , 51 , 56 , 59 , Darwin, Charles 118 92–7, 110 de Man, Paul 224–5 Madame Bovary 26 , 41–2 , 45 , 49 , 51, Dean, Tim 226 n 54 , 55 , 57–8 , 62–92 , 96–107 , Deane, Seamus 197 n, 218n 109–10 , 150 , 221–2 , 226 n Debord, Guy 239 La Tentation de Saint Antoine 58–60 , Society of the Spectacle 1 0 62 , 71 Delamare, Eugène 58 Forster, E. M. 123 Deleuze, Gilles 3, 27–8 Foucault, Michel Diff erence and Repetition 18 History of Sexuality 82 Th e Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque 18 Th e Use of Pleasure 82 Th e Logic of Sense 18–20 free indirect style 37 , 56, 61–2 122 , 161 , Negotiations 18–19 190 , 227 , 229 , 235 , 247 A Th ousand Plateaus 18 , 104–6 French Revolution 4 Derrida, Jacques 3 , 25–6 , 27–8 Freud, Sigmund 34 , 137 , 194 , 233 Dickens, Charles Beyond the Pleasure Principle 85 Bleak House 33–4 Th e Psychopathology of Everyday diff érance 25–6 Life 193 , 195 Dreiser, Th eodore 81 Th ree Essays on the Th eory of du Camp, Maxime 50 , 57 Sexuality 8 6

Eastwood, Jonathan 57 n Gagnier, Regina Eco, Umberto Th e Insatiability of Human Wants 117 Th e Aesthetics of Chaosmosis 225 Gardiner, Michael E. Eliot, T. S. 36 , 39 n, 43 , 211 , 245 , 248 Critiques of Everyday Life 7 empty times see everyday genre 2 , 4 , 12 , 28–30 , 32 , 37 , 43 , 54 , end of history 3–4 , 6 , 11, 27 , 137 , 138 56 , 62–5 epiphanic see epiphany G i ff ord, Don 197 n epiphany 29 , 44–5 , 47 , 178–9 , 190–209 , Gilbert, Stuart 241 211–12, 217 , 223–4 , 231 , 239 , 246 Gomel, Elana 118 n Erfahrung 69–70 , 72 , 170 Guattari, Félix see Deleuze, Gilles Erlebnis 69–70 , 72 , 170 event 3 , 4–6 , 11 , 13 , 16–23 , 25–32 , 35–7 , Hallward, Peter 39 , 42–51 , 54–5 , 66 , 69 , 74–6 , 91–3 , Badiou: A Subject to Truth 21 , 22 n 97 , 102–3 , 105–7 , 109–10 , 124 , 137 , Hawkins, Hunt 176 140–1 , 144 , 151–2 , 160 , 162 , 170–1 , heat death see thermodynamics 173 , 182–7 , 190 , 192–3 , 196 , 200 , Heath, Stephen 50, 58 , 80–1 , 100–1 , 202 , 204 , 221 , 223 , 225 , 228–33 , 109 n 237–8 , 241–5 , 248 Hegel, Friedrich 3–4 , 126 eventfulness see event Heidegger, Martin 20 , 27–8 everyday 5–18 , 28 , 34 , 37, 41–6 , 48 , 51 , Being and Time 14–17 , 65–6 , 243 55 , 66–76 , 82 , 90 , 93 , 97, 101 , Contributions to Philosophy (From 103–4 , 109–11 , 124 , 127 , 130 , 133 , Enowning ) 16–18 Index 263

Higgins, Richard 122 King, Magda Highmore, Ben A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Everyday Life and Cultural World 7 Time 16 n Hobsbawm, Eric 156 Kuhn, Th omas 119 Th e Age of Empire 112–13 , 116 Hühn, Peter labor 44 , 110 , 115 , 130 , 131 , 133 , 150 , Eventfulness in British Fiction 3 1 152 , 155–7 , 162–3 , 164 , 167 , Huxley, T. H. 121–2 173–81 Huysman, Joris-Karl Lefebvre, Henri 7 Là-Bas 5 9 Critique of Everyday Life 8–9 Hyland, Peter 164n, 175 n Everyday Life in the Modern World 9 , 67 Lenin, Vladimir imparfait 78 Imperialism: Th e Highest Stage of impersonality 45 , 51 , 56, 60 , 70 , 80 , 161 , Capitalism 114 , 116 n 226–31 , 236 Leonard, Garry M. 233–4 inauthenticity see authenticity Leopold II 174 Lukács, Georg James, Henry Th e Th eory of the Novel 103 Th e Tragic Muse 3 3 Lyons, Martyn Jameson, Fredric 173 Reading Culture and Writing Practices in Archaeologies of the Future 124 Nineteenth-Century France 56 n Th e Cultural Turn 11 Th e Political Unconscious 148–51 , 186 McKee, Robert Sartre: Th e Origins of a Style 35 , 47 , 204 n Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Jonez, Spike Principles of Screenwriting 1 Adaptation 1–3 Mann, Th omas Joyce, James 41 , 47 , 51 , 123 , 189 Magic Mountain 3 7 Dubliners 43 , 190 , 205–17 , 230–1 Marder, Elissa Epiphanies 44 , 191–204 , 207 , 212 , 244 Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Finnegans Wake 46 Wake of Modernity 6 3 Paris Notebook 229 Marx, Karl 156 , 242 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Th e 18 th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Man 39 , 45 , 190 , 191 , 196–8 , 199 n, 101–4 203 , 205 , 217–32 Marxism 8 , 14 , 26 , 129 , 164 Stephen Hero 43 , 199 , 203 , 207–9 modernism 5–7 , 11 , 13 , 26–8 , 35–43 , Ulysses 37 , 45 , 190 , 191 , 230–48 46–7 , 51 , 55 , 81 , 106 , 110 , 122 , Joyce, Stanislaus 124 , 144 , 149 , 152 , 181 , 188 , My Brother’s Keeper 192–3 , 195 189–91 , 211 , 226–7 , 245–8 Morel, E. D. Kafka, Franz King Leopold’s Rule in Africa 180 Th e Trial 3 7 Red Rubber 179–80 Kain, Richard M. 204 Moretti, Franco 32–3 , 38–9 Th e Workshop of Daedalus 194 , 202–3 Graphs, Maps, and Trees 56 n Kant, Immanuel Murphet, Julian 23 n Critique of Pure Reason 3 , 206 Musil, Robert Kaplan, Alice 9 n Th e Man Without Qualities 3 7 Kaufman, Charlie Adaptation 1 Nabokov, Vladimir 232 Kenner, Hugh Nadelhaft, Ruth 175 n Joyce’s Voices 236 narratology 28 , 30–1 , 45–6 Keynes, John Maynard neo-liberalism 25 Th e General Th eory of Employment, Nichols, Ashton Interest, and Money 155 Th e Poetics of Epiphany 194–5 Kiberd, Declan Nietzsche, Friedrich 4 , 112 Ulysses and Us: Th e Art of Everyday Nirenberg, Ricardo L. and David 24 Living 189 nouveau roman 13 , 75 264 Index

Olson, Liesl Stambaugh, Joan Modernism and the Ordinary 7 , 38–9 Th e Finitude of Being 1 7 ordinary see everyday Starkie, Enid Orleans, Susan Flaubert: Th e Making of a Master 57–8 Th e Orchid Th ief 1 stasis see everyday Osborne, Peter 24 Steegmuller, Francis overproduction 115–17 , 127 Flaubert and Madame Bovary 58 n Owen, David 4 n Stewart, Balfour 120–1 Strauss, Nina Pelikan 164 n, 175 n Parry, Benita style indirect libre see free indirect style Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Symons, Arthur Boundaries and Visionary Th e Symbolist Movement in Poetry 3 6 Frontiers 169 Perec, George 46 Tait, P. G. 120–1 peripeteia 13 , 241 thermodynamics 43 , 118–22 , 127 , 142 Polt, Richard Th omson, William 43 , 119 , 142 Th e Emergency of Being: Heidegger’s Th waites, Tony Contributions to Philosophy 16 n Joycean Temporalities: Debts, Promises, Poradowska, Marguerite 162 n and Countersignatures 237 n Power, Arthur 237 Tiles, Mary progress 10–11 , 40–2 , 82 , 92 , 97 , Th e Philosophy of Set Th eory: An 99–101 , 111–14 , 127 , 132–3 , Historical Introduction to Cantor’s 144 , 181 Paradise 21 n Proust, Marcel 13n, 51 Tyndall, John 120 A la recherché du temps perdu 3 7 unemployment 10 , 43–4 , 148–59 , quotidian see everyday 162–4 , 167–9 , 173–80 , 183 , 184 , 187 Rancière, Jacques 104–7 utopia 12 , 13 , 43 Randall, Bryony Modernism, Daily Time, and Everyday Walzl, Florence 191n Life 7 , 38 Watt, Ian realism 47 , 61 Conrad and the Nineteenth Reichert, Klaus 193 Century 163 n Richardson, Dorothy Th e Rise of the Novel 3 1 Pilgrimage 3 7 Watts, Cedric 156 n, 171 Riquelme, Jean Paul 194 n Watts, Isaac Robbe-Grillet, Alain 13 , 46 Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language La Jalousie 5 9 for the Use of Children 197 n Ross, Kristen 9 Wells, H. G. 41 , 121–3 , 248 Th e History of Mr Polly 42 Sand, George 50–1 Kipps: Th e Simple Soul 42 Sartre, Jean-Paul Th e Time Machine 42–3 , 45 , 110 , 115 , Th e Family Idiot 56 118 , 122–45 , 190 Nausea 4 7 When the Sleeper Wakes 125 n Scholes, Robert 191 n, 195–6, 204 , 205 White, Hayden Th e Workshop of Daedalus 194 , 202–3 Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis set theory 20–2 Eff ect 47 n Shakespeare, William Williams, Raymond 10 Julius Caesar 185 Woolf, Virginia 51 , 122–4 , 187 Sheringham, Michael Mrs Dalloway 37 , 39 , 232 Everyday Life: Th eories and Practices from To the Lighthouse 246–8 Surrealism to the Present 7 work see labor ; unemployment Simmel, Georg 231–2 Spencer, Herbert 120–1 , 126 Žižek, Slavoj 17