Afraid of Virginia Woolf

by Perry Meisel

THE UNKNOWN VIRGINIA WOOLF. By Roger Poole. Cambridge University Press. $11.95.

BLOOMSBURY: A House of Lions. By Leon Edel. Lippincott. $12.95

THE LETTERS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF: Volume Four. 1929 – 1931. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $14.95.

Whether or not Virginia Woolf was mad no longer seems a seductive enough question to hang a whole book on, and yet Roger Poole has used it to write the most dramatic and provocative study of Woolf to appear in years – no small achievement in the continuing glut. Poole’s book rekindles the problem of Woolf’s madness by denying its existence; but instead of casting her as an R.D. Laing’s Mary Barnes, he explains her distress by tracing it to its origins. The result is an act of profound imaginative sympathy and the most sustained interior portrait of Woolf as a woman that I have ever read.

What about Quentin Bell’s authoritative biography or recent NBA nominee Phyllis Rose’s Woman of Letters? These are both sane, reasonable books, next to which Poole’s is obsessive in its intent, and apparently malicious in carrying it out. No wonder, since Poole’s argument is that Woolf was not “the ‘queen’ of Bloomsbury” at all, but, as he puts it, "its Antigone." That means we need a Creon, a rationalist enforcer, and he arrives, alas, in the person of Leonard Woolf, no longer his wife's saintly keeper, but, in Poole’s view, the domestic embodiment of the stifling effects of Bloomsbury-at-large on Virginia’s sensibility.

Poole argues that instead of being a hip bunch of pals, the male-dominated, Cambridge-educated Bloomsbury Group tended to slam its women against a wall. With little use for them sexually (Leonard became the frustrated exception), it found its pleasure in abusing them intellectually. As disciples of the Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore, nitpicking positivist and rationalist par excellence, male Bloomsberries like Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and Woolf himself were accustomed to testing intelligence with the technique of Moorish interrogation, responding to Virginia's flights of conversational fancy with the perennial retort, "What exactly do you mean by that?" They believed, says Poole, that she was simply "talking nonsense." "Far from being the most brilliant adornment of Bloomsbury," he concludes, "Virginia Woolf was working like an undercover agent in enemy-occupied country. The strain on her was terrific."

Thus the famous move from Kensington to Bloomsbury in 1904 following the death of Virginia's father, the eminent Victorian (and Cambridge) rationalist Sir Leslie Stephen, is no longer, as the usual argument goes, a moment of liberation. Instead, it was a renewal of the same grip in which she had passed her childhood: The supposedly liberated Bloomsberries embodied the "rationalist-reductive consciousness" of her father's Cambridge all over again - the precise kind of consciousness, argues Poole, that her visionary and largely subjective art sets out to explode.

Why Virginia periodically flipped, then, can be traced to the same root that caused her to write so much: the wish to escape the brutality of an emotional and intellectual confinement every bit as suffocating in mature life as it was in childhood. For Poole it is her writing that constitutes "the only strand holding her sense of identity together," and it is to her writing and reading ("morphia," as he calls them) that she learned habitually to fly as a respite from the tormenting atmosphere in which she had to live out her daily life. Poole sets out with telling force the familiar conflicts between "fact" and "vision" in the fiction - Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, Septimus and the psychiatrists in Mrs. Dalloway, Bart and his sister Lucy in Between the Acts - with the primary effect less a reduction of the novels to biography than the heightening of biography through the aid of fiction.

Accompanying the tyranny of rationalism in Poole's casebook are those genuinely traumatic events in childhood and youth that Woolfians have known about for some time, the sexual molestations by Virginia's half-brother Gerald Duckworth when she was barely pubescent, and further assaults during late adolescence and early womanhood by her other Duckworth half-brother, George. "Her body is not really hers," says Poole. "It is public property."

Hence her frigidity when it came to men, Leonard included, a frigidity that seemed to melt (exactly how much, it is difficult to say) when she found herself enthralled with women - most famously, Vita Sackville-West, or, in the period covered by the new, fourth volume of Letters, Ethel Smyth. That Virginia's mind and emotions thawed along with her body in the presence of such women is added grist for Poole's case, a case the new Letters confirm with distressing clarity when we see Virginia reflecting in a 1931 letter to Smyth on the need to keep her mouth and heart shut in the company of those with whom she was supposedly most at home:

"Everyone I most honour is silent - Nessa [her sister Vanessa], Lytton, Leonard, Maynard: all silent; and so I have trained myself to silence; induced it also by the terror I have of my own unlimited capacity for feeling . . . I find that you are perhaps the only person I know who shows feeling and feels. Still I cant [sic] imagine talking about my love for people, as you do. Is it training? Is it the perpetual fear I have of the unknown force that lurks just under the floor? I never cease to feel that I must step very lightly on top of that volcano."

From this point of view, Virginia's apparent jokes in other letters about her "lack of reasoning power" should be read as expressions of that "I," as she puts it in another letter to Smyth, "in whom Cambridge has bred a large measure of unalloyed melancholy." Or witness this sarcastic series of remarks to Saxon Sydney-Turner, arch-Bloomsberry and Cambridge personified, whom Virginia seems to be paying back for verbal abuses suffered at his hands:

"I suppose in these 5 days you would have read Plato through. What a pity it is that we cant pool our reading! - I mean, if I could attach a little sucker to the back of your neck and drink through it without any effort, all your knowledge, I should be able to die content. . . . I heard of you making the Baboons howl at the Zoo with Roger [Fry]. How much does it cost to become what you are?"

Poole's radical perspective not only deepens the possibilities of meaning in the Letters, but deepens them, too, in the already rich psychoanalytic world of Leon Edel's broader (and infinitely more artful) portrait of all the citizens of Bloomsbury in his long-awaited House of Lions. If Poole's masterstroke is the Laingian/phenomenological discovery of Virginia's concrete victimization, Edel's is the more classically Freudian discovery of the displacements and repositionings at work in the already complicated structure of the Stephen family romance. Here we can see how Bloomsbury reconstituted in still another fashion the structure of Virginia's childhood, this time in the curious way that Vanessa and Virginia's older brother Thoby recreated the image of Virginia's parents when they became the heads of the new household at 46 Gordon Square following Sir Leslie's death in 1904 - the new Bloomsbury life, at least at the start, as an exponent rather than a resolution of Virginia's Oedipal anxieties. And when Thoby died young, of thyphoid, in 1906, the repetition is raised to a higher power still again - the father dies a second time, much as the mother, Julia, had already died a second death with the passing of Virginia's half-sister Stella in 1897.

The links that Edel only implies between Virginia's "powerful anger" and her "inability to love" may be linked in turn to Poole's interpretation of Virginia's coldness and withdrawal in later life as veiled protests against Leonard's rationalist belief in her insanity and his perpetual alliance with that string of psychiatrists who refused to listen, as a psychoanalyst might have, to the details of her thoughts and visions. "That there was something wrong with Virginia, I do not for a moment deny," writes Poole; "but no attempt seems to have been made to discover what was wrong with her, and how she saw her own situation." Given that Leonard had been supervising James Strachey's translation of Freud since 1924, his refusal (or was it Virginia's?) to seek psychoanalytic rather than psychiatric aid is especially ironic. It suggests that Leonard held Moorish rationalism to be a finer instrument than Freud throughout his life.

The pitilessness of the Cambridge point of view grows terrifying as Poole details Virginia's interview with her last doctor only days before her suicide in 1941. "Frightened, afraid of the power of doctors to order rest cures, Virginia, half-undressed, tries to bargain with her judge. Here is one of the subtlest and most perceptive minds of her time being treated just like a child, threatened with a hated rest cure, and 'being sent up to bed.' " Yet careful as he is to be true also to Virginia's manifest love for Leonard, Poole interprets her famous suicide note to him ("I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been") as "the most generous fraud, and the most magnificent deception, in modern literature"; a successful attempt to assure Leonard of his innocence and to assure posterity that theirs really was a marriage of true minds.

To call the famous suicide note a "fraud," of course, makes the end of Virginia's life sound something like the end of Heart of Darkness, when Marlow intentionally lies to Kurtz's Intended to keep the living happy while the dead sleep. Poole's detractors, however, will want to insist on the difference between fact and fiction, although to insist on the facts here will land them just where they don't want to be - squarely in Poole's trap. For despite numerous lapses in the construction of Poole's analysis (apparent haste in composition, occasionally excessive reduction of the work to clinical data, intrusive bursts of phenomenological and Lacanian vocabulary), it has the kind of rhetorical playfulness and effect we usually expect only from fiction.

It is the issue of Leonard, however, that keeps itching, although to deal with this requires not so much an appeal to the usual facts as it does an appeal to the discoveries Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey made in the rhetoric of biography proper. However sloppy it may be, Poole's book is, after all, part of a literary mode that includes Woolf's Orlando, Strachey's Eminent Victorians, and Freud's case histories, all of them progenitors in turn of the climate that has produced in our own day the New Journalism, the nonfiction novel, and a contemporary notion of biography itself as what Phyllis Rose calls "imaginative understanding," "the recognition that a life is as much a work of fiction - of guiding narrative structures - as novels and poems." To want only the righteous truth about the Woolfs as friends and relatives knew it is to propose that the official Victorian biography be reinstated, and that one of Bloomsbury's most significant - and most genuinely shared - achievements be discarded entirely.

Originally published in The Village Voice, July 16, 1979

Sample view:

"Difficult Love"

THE PUSHCART PRIZE, III, ed. Bill Henderson. Yonkers, N.Y.: The Pushcart Press, 1978. Pp. 552. $15.00, hb.

by Perry Meisel

In addition to its already traditional role of providing a public forum for younger and relatively unknown writers who publish their work in the little magazines, the now-annual Pushcart Prize anthology also provides one of the best opportunities we have for assessing the state of North American writing at large on a regular basis. The major thrust of the third and newest volume is to confirm the growing but still unpopular belief that anti-realism is no longer the only virtuous method for fiction to follow or criticism to endorse. True to the links Bill Henderson's introduction drew between the Pushcart project as it began in 1976 and the little-magazine activity of the Paris of Pound and Joyce, the primary burden of the first Pushcart anthology three years ago was the "modernism" that had belatedly invaded American letters in the 1960's, an invasion that intrigued Morris Dickstein in the volume's representative critical essay, and a critical concern mirrored in the abundance of experimental writing in the volume's fiction. If the 1977 anthology suggested a partial move away from the experimentalism dominant in 1976, the 1978 entry makes that move relatively complete. Today experimentalism for its own sake has been severely curtailed; black humor indulged only incidentally; and straightforward referential writing restored to health and veracity.

What Mark Strand has called "difficult love" is the concern that unifies the volume's decidedly realist enterprise and that distinguishes its very best fiction and poetry. The traditional theme is hardly what it used to be, though, since the clarification we demand today of the muddle we are in in love means new notions about the very nature of human relationships, especially marriage. Ten years ago stories like Andre Dubus's "The Fat Girl" and James Crumley's "Whores" would've been called immoral for their refusal to celebrate communion, but today they simply mark the distance we have come from thematic modernism, too, particularly Lawrence's enthusiasm for meaning and fulfillment through the embrace. For women writers in particular, love is no longer a search for union with an other but a means of defining and strengthening the self. Hence Lynne Sharon Schwartz's "Rough Strife," a close examination of pregnancy and the male's utter alienation from it, celebrates not so much a marriage renewed by childbirth as the power of a woman to express a common private experience in the public terms of prose. In Margaret Atwood's "The Man from Mars" and Mary Peterson's "To Dance," even the figure of the lover is no longer sought as a double or sharer (indeed, Atwood's suitor is manifestly disagreeable and motivates the story for that very reason), but as what Atwood calls an "interpreter." Instead of the means to an end to "modernist" isolation, here (as in "The Fat Girl") the lover becomes merely the circuit through which a woman learns to read herself.

The anthology's verse is best, too, when thickened by the particularity of experience rather than when its language is emptied out or whitened by the lingering pressure of its own anti-representational imperatives. Though experimentation lives on in the poems more than in the fiction, those poems that are anchored to something more than the page recommend themselves to something more than theoretical meaning. "It isn't such a bad thing / To live in one world forever," writes James Galvin in "Everyone Knows Whom the Saved Envy," a reinvestment of the quotidian whose transcendence is mocked by the poem's very title. Hence too Robert Burlingame's anatomy of the specific in "Some Recognition of the Joshua Lizard," where the claim that what is "catalogued" is what is real also keeps the poet's faith in language as honest as - and as identical with - his faith in nature itself. Indeed, the volume's best poem, Michael Dennis Browne's " 'Talk to Me, Baby,' " maintains its faith in both the quotidian and the linguistic at once by refusing to lament the withdrawal of the divine from human life (the occasion is a fish that refuses to become the transcendent Symbol it was for "young Willie Yeats"), filling the void instead with Browne's attempted triumph over Yeats within the medium of poetry itself.

Not so Pinchas Sadeh, however, the Israeli writer whose search for the real Moses in a story/essay from Tri/Quarterly constitutes a regressive quest for the divine as such, a quest made doubly ironic by his obvious delight in the indeterminacies of the Biblical interpretations of which his own text is composed. Such a style of delight is what Alvin Rosenfeld describes as the Kabbalistic aspect of Jewish tradition in an excellent essay here on Harold Bloom, a tradition that forecloses the presence of what even the sacred letter refers to in favor of a reduction of the divine to a metaphor for what always escapes the desire for a messianic ending to interpretation. Sadeh's failure to recognize this means that he has not yet substituted the literary for the theological, believing like a Christian that language can uncover more than just a name.

Such imaginative failure would seem on the face of it symptomatic of the problem of the volume's realist enterprise as a whole. For even if Sadeh is not himself a realist in the traditional sense, his assumptions about language as a transparent instrument to the divine - to something outside the literary game that would explain it - mean that he shares conventional realist assumptions about language as a mere window on the world.

Ironically, though, the volume's best realists, like its best poets, share no such assumptions, nor is their work to be identified with the intentional critical innocence of an essay like John Gardner's "Moral Fiction," the most well-known piece in the volume as well as the only one that endorses without scrutiny the instrumental view of language practiced by Sadeh. Gardner's insistence that a linguistically-oriented criticism or fiction like William Gass's is utterly at odds with a healthy realism may be true of his and Gass's own antithetical notions about language, although both are surely more narrow-minded than they have to be, especially in light of the academic skirmishes over structuralism that lie behind their own more public debate.

Indeed, the best essays in the volume show by their very practice why it is that realism and formalism can and ought to be continuous. Adrienne Rich's stunning essay on Emily Dickinson not only rescues the poet from patriarchal myths of neurosis by accenting her power and self-possession, but also concludes that her poems are a "poet's poems" and so reach "beyond mere self-expression." Similarly, Robert Hass's otherwise psychological essay on Robert Lowell claims that the "Quaker Graveyard" is "not a place in time . . . but a place in imagination," while the interview with Ralph Ellison toward the volume's close shows us an exemplary artist whose grounding in social reality is nonetheless consistent with his renewed assertion here that "novels are made from other novels."

After all, to say that "novels are made from other novels" is by no means the exclusively formalist claim it may seem to be. For to say that novels are about novels and poetry about poetry is only to say that the artist's work, like everyone else's, is interpretative rather than expressive. Thus the anthology addresses its chief thematic issues, notably "difficult love," by finding the terms of its appeal in a notion of experience itself as a set of common texts. Though the old modernist myths teach us to think that we live and love alone, we do so according to common patterns every bit as learned as the poems of Yeats or the novels of Joyce. There is as much hope in such a claim as there may be despair, since even the most agonizing loneliness is thereby effected through circuits of reference and meaning common to us all. Much as the poet writes from poems and the novelist from novels, so our personal lives are lived and measured in terms of the accommodations each of us makes with a general and common reality. Like Ellison's vision of American life as the web of its discourses, the anthology's best work figures manners, morals, even desire, as discourses, too: the "bestsellers" in Walter Abish's "Parting Shot" that have already inscribed the lives whose "texts" he narrates; the manifest codes of desire that structure Louise's struggle with obesity in "The Fat Girl" ("Will he like me?"); or the notes and photographs in "The Man from Mars" that redouble the story as it describes them. And what appears to be no more than a formalist's technical sensitivity to language and its mobile articulation becomes an illuminating interpretation of the indeterminate structure of love itself in the Ascher/Straus Collective's "Even After a Machine is Dismantled, It Continues to Operate, With or Without Purpose."

In such cases what we call realism and experimental formalism converge in a double capability that exploits the linguistic fund of experience itself the way the experimentalist exploits the fund of language proper. Experimentalism for its own sake obscures the possibility of these salutary alliances and even has the ironic effect of reconstituting the realist illusion as it tries to shatter it - the illusion that there is a world independent of language from which language might wish to flee. The richest writing, as the Victorians knew, plays both games at once, recognizing that each one requires the other. Pushcart III's best work exemplifies the combination, and the sign of its success is the apparent artlessness, the apparent innocence, of stories plainly told.

Originally published in The Ontario Review, Spring-Summer 1979

What Foucault Knows

Review of Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard (Cornell Univ. Press, 1977)

by Perry Meisel

Although Roland Barthes once characterized Michel Foucault's writing as an example of what it describes - "uneasy," said Barthes in 1961, "uneasy" like the relations between reason and unreason in Madness and Civilization - what is most striking about Foucault's achievement today is the unfailing poise and lucidity of its narrator in a remarkably stable and unified series of historical studies over the last seventeen years. Despite some shifts in accent and tone, even Foucault's intentions have remained very largely continuous as he maps from different coordinates at different points in his career the history of post-Renaissance culture and the rules by which it produces knowledge in a variety of specialized but homologous discourses. Psychiatry, economics, medicine, penology, sexology - these "disciplines" are rarely linked as Foucault links them by discerning their common functions and effects - their common structure - in producing the determinations of the social matrix that Jacques Lacan has called the Symbolic and that Foucault himself calls the episteme. Each of Foucault's major books is even built the same way and ornamented by the same rhetorical habits in a regularity of design that seems to duplicate on the level of style the "discursive regularities" that are the objects of Foucault's self-announced quest for a "typology of discourse" at large.

If there is any rupture in Foucault's thought within this otherwise continuous movement, it comes in the form of a punctuation of determinism inaugurated by the 1971 Discourse on Language, and signals what is after all a rather serious disagreement with the "structuralist" enterprise, at least as it has come to be embodied in the utopian aesthetic of Barthesian jouissance. This latter position - to encourage the polyphonic possibilities of a text, to coax the signifier to float, as Foucault himself does in The Order of Things - is what Foucault calls in the Discourse the "monarchy of the signifier," and it is the reign of its play that he wishes to depose. Rather than ask "What various things can a text mean?" Foucault wants to know "Why this meaning and not another?" And with this determinism emerges his insistence, too, that the episteme of a given period is a positive formation rather than a negative one, not an apparatus that limits or represses knowledge but one that produces what knowledge there is, that constitutes its subjects and objects alike in a single gesture of thought. Hence his project has shifted in name from a "typology of discourse" to "a morphology of the will to knowledge," with the power carried by knowledge - discourse as action in its own right - a growing preoccupation in the recent Birth of the Prison and Histoire de la sexualité.

This decisive shift in attention toward the "monarchy" instead of a given episteme, however, makes the status of Foucault's own discourse particularly problematic, magnifying as it does the imbalance that secretly accompanies his work from the start. If, as Foucault maintains, only one episteme is operative at any one time in history, how can any knowledge, even his own, be more than "epistemic," or, in the Althusserian variant that lies behind it, ideological?¹ Here Barthes's notion of Foucault's writing as itself "uneasy" may be re-examined, even though it is clear that Foucault does not formally redouble the problematic space of knowledge the way Barthes himself sometimes does by producing graphically excessive texts like S/Z or Fragments d'un discours amoureux, or even as Jacques Derrida has done by producing graphically shattered texts like Glas. No, Foucault's writing as writing bespeaks the space it occupies by situating its apparent self-possession and certitude at the horizon of discourse as a practice, at that horizon of discourse known in France as the Limit.

Foucault points all this out in the essays to be found in Donald Bouchard's selection and translation (with Sherry Simon) of a number of Foucault's shorter pieces over the years, the first such collection of Foucault to appear in either French or English, and among the relatively few instances in Foucault's already considerable body of work in which we can find him reflecting overtly on the problem of discourse as such. The particular value of Bouchard's collection lies in the degree to which it allows us to see how Foucault's own methods as a writer redouble the methods of knowledge he narrates, as though knowledge of knowledge, discourse about discourse, can only find its mark if it rediscovers its real object in itself. Except for the 1969 Archaeology of Knowledge, with its tendency to self-parody, and the Discourse, with its curious personal debts and polemical tone, these essays are the only theoretical Foucault we have, and they show us Foucault as an active practitioner of the Limit at which he claims the discourse of all knowledge to be situated.

The opening essay in the collection, Foucault's 1963 hommage to Georges Bataille, "Preface to Transgression," is probably the volume's best active account of the Limit as the space within which all "works of language" play, with the "transgressive" Bataille the exemplar of such linguistic practice, even if his centrality for Foucault tends to bind the notion of the Limit a little too exclusively to its associations with the theory and practice of contemporary French fiction. From a historical point of view, though, what Bataille transgresses is "the limitless reign of the Limit" that is called into being with "the death of God," the Limit that tells us there is no limit, no boundary at all, to the void into which culture's fall from an earlier (and doubtless mythical) neo-classical plenitude has precipitated us since the seventeenth century. Only by transgressing this limit - to make it produce the Limit it does not possess on its own - does the Limit itself come into being, as an effect of its own lack or absence. "The limit and transgression depend on each other," says Foucault, "for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were not absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows."

Discourse situated at the Limit, however, is not simply Bataille's special property, nor does it need Bataille's explicitly sexual context to resonate. It is in fact the kind of metalanguage that best characterizes the condition and status of all language, and the kind of metalanguage that is best suited to Foucault's own particular purposes. If madness, disease, criminality, perversion are the transgressors that bring the Law into being in Foucault's historical books (madness/the asylum, disease/the clinic, perversion/sexology: all these pairs emerge reciprocally at one and the same moment in history), so it is Foucault's own transgression of the space in which thought is possible that brings thought's rules into relief as an effect of their violation. By attempting the impossible, Foucault brings the outline of the possible into being. How knowledge emerges and how that emergence is to be narrated are, as it turns out, reflexive procedures. Knowledge can only know itself by transgressing the conditions that constitute it, although those conditions are constituted and defined in turn by their transgression. "The limit," says Foucault, must "find itself in what it excludes." It is "the questioning of language by language in a circularity" that opens up a zone where "philosophy" itself "is realized in language and in the movement where it says what cannot be said." And it is this originary difference, this necessary inability of Foucault's project to coincide with itself, that opens up the peculiar space in which it is to be situated.

The category that emerges to account for, to describe, to be this paradoxical site in which language establishes its sovereignty is, of course, "literature," and, like the birth of the Limit of which it is the formalizer according to Foucault's historical mythology, it emerges as an institution at the same moment in history that God and neo-classical plenitude become worn out. The 1963 "Language to Infinity" describes this "literary" space and its derivation with admirable clarity, and if the language of difference is by now a customary enough "structuralist" topos, it is still astonishing to rediscover its articulation at so relatively early a date and with such compelling dramatic effect. Here Foucault's desire is for a "formal ontology of literature" that would map the mode or conditions of literature's existence as a discourse, and, by implication, the conditions of discursive practice as a whole. And whether Foucault is entirely serious about his chronology or not (English epic and the Italian sonnet are among the best examples of the language of the Limit in all "literature"), he nonetheless delineates with singular efficiency the "literary" status of all discourse, and the space in which "the literary" is to be situated and defined as such.

The decisive epistemic transformation by which "literature" emerges in "Language to Infinity" and in the 1969 "What is an Author?" is the shift from a world of neo-classical Rhetoric to what Foucault calls the world of the Library or Archive that appears in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. If, in an argument that parallels that of The Order of Things, the "double chain of Rhetoric" links the chain of language proper to the chain of a divine language inscribed in things (language in this sense is representational, since it speaks "of" something which is apart from it), the Library is a world of language only, a language no longer representational but one whose own internal differences produce a new and self-generating world of interiority for which Romanticism has been our traditional sign. Language, in short, becomes constitutive rather than expressive.

In the 1967 "Fantasia of the Library," it is Flaubert who helps Foucault to codify this "internal" and decidedly "literary" space. Flaubert "opens a domain of depth," says Foucault, the "depth" of language's internal resonances as they are symbolized by the Library in whose Archive an "art is erected" that remains "indefinitely open," "open" since its possibilities are as infinite as the number of relations language can establish with(in) itself. Here "speech discovers the endless resourcefulness of its own image," says Foucault in "Language to Infinity," "and . . . can represent itself as already existing behind itself, to infinity." And to see language "naturalize" its reign (to find a new metaphysical legitimacy for the lost one of a divine order in things), we have only to remember that language's turning back and "in" on itself as "literature" is paralleled by the simultaneous emergence of a domain of interiority on a material level, too - in the body as an inward, anatomical space in The Birth of the Clinic, and the mind as a psychological space in The Birth of the Prison, both in turn already prepared for, as Foucault will argue in his next two books in the Volonté de savoir series, in the "literature" of Protestant interiority and Catholic confession alike.

But despite Foucault's claim as a historian that this differential or literary space emerges only after the neo-classical age, there are nonetheless two examples of it in Bouchard as early as the classical age proper. In "Language to Infinity," for example, Foucault finds Ulysses already enacting an exemplary version of the language of the Limit in The Odyssey by averting the fulfillment of the disasters that threaten him by means of a "fictive speech" that "borders death but is also poised against it." "Headed toward death," says Foucault of Ulysses's discourse, "language turns back upon itself; it encounters something like a mirror; and to stop this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power: that of giving birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits."

And in "Theatrum Philosophicum," a 1970 review-essay of Gilles Deleuze's Logique du sens and Diffèrence et rèpétition, Foucault endorses what may be read as Deleuze's own establishment of such a literary space in the renversement of Plato - inaugurated, says Deleuze, by the discordances in Plato himself. For Deleuze, the distinction Plato erects between the Simulacrum and the True Copy of the Model of Truth is an untenable one, for there is in fact no Model to be true to except insofar as it can be established by belated induction from the Copy that is true to it. In fact, the model comes into being as the absent origin to which the Copy (must) refer(s), with this act of reference really the consequence of an originary difference opened up by the notion of the Copy itself, and one that produces truth only as an afterimage or index. "Truth," as Foucault puts it in a 1971 course outline from the Collége de France that Bouchard includes here along with some recent interviews, "becomes merely an effect - the effect of a falsification that we call the opposition of truth and falsehood."

Hence Foucault's rejection of all teleology in the 1971 "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History," especially his overt request there for "the abandonment of 'adolescent' quests" for origins and ends, wholeness of being, integrity or truth of self. "Genealogy" or "effective history," says Foucault in his Nietzschean profile, is the "search for descent," an activity not to be confused with a search for origins, since it is not taken up in the name of "erecting . . . foundations; on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself."

Ironically enough, Foucault's familiar insistence on neo-classical plenitude is just such a myth of "foundations," and one he puts plainly into question by recognizing through Deleuze that representation comes to an end at least as early as Plato, and by asserting in "Language to Infinity" that even Homer practices a language of the Limit every bit as "modern" as Bataille's. And if Foucault's own manifest classicism as a stylist belies in turn what seems to be his shared position with Barthes, Phillippe Sollers, and Bataille himself that the new novel and its aftermath are the telos of modern literature and the desired form of practice for prose today, Foucault's very erection of a telos for discourse in the transgressive discourse of Bataille and the new novel is itself in contradiction with the teleology he abjures. Teleology nonetheless invades Foucault's history at virtually every turn despite his contention that notions of development and morality are both to be eschewed by the "effective" historian: modern imprisonment is more sinister than classical torture in The Birth of the Prison; "more" of the body is colonized under psychoanalysis than under medieval sexology in the Histoire de la sexualité; madness is in fact a more privileged discourse than reason in Madness and Civilization; above all, neo-classical Rhetoric points to a plenitude in The Order of Things that Deleuze and "Language to Infinity" both defer in the light of difference in the golden age itself.

Indeed, these telltale ironies are redoubled in the very overarching paradox of Foucault's work, for the "apocalyptic objectivity" of the conventional historian that Foucault rejects in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History," is, of course, reconstituted in the transcendental ideality of Foucault's own search for a "typology of discourse," for something outside the game that will explain it. Of course, this telos is itself put in question by Foucault's figuration of history as an Archive of texts (a sedimentation, according to the archaeological metaphor) whose classification and analysis render the historian an interpreter who may fold or slice his material in so many different ways at once that his method opens itself up to those very perils of the signifier that the Discourse wishes to guard against.

Of course, all such contradictions are, as Foucault argues, really paradoxes, and stand for the paradoxical conditions - the "ontology" - of the mode of existence of "works of language" at large. As a work of language in its own right, Foucault's discourse answers its call for an account of discourse to itself by redoubling on the level of its own discursive practice the paradoxical situation in which discourse appears as such. Hence Foucault arrives at knowledge by crossing the limits his own laws set up for its constitution, redoubling the kind of space knowledge itself is by producing knowledge as an effect of its own transgression. This "literary" situation in which Foucault's knowledge of discourse/discourse of knowledge locates itself is best described by his own notion of "the book" in "Language to Infinity," another emergence of the late eighteenth century that is still with us, and one that characterizes as well as any notion can the active and self-accounting logic at work in Foucault's own prose: "if we make a book which tells of all the others, would it or would it not be a book itself? Must it tell its own story as if it were a book among others? And if it does not tell its story, what could it possibly be since its objective was to be a book? Why should it omit its own story, since it is required to speak of every book? Literature begins when this paradox is substituted for the dilemma, when the book is no longer the space where speech adopts a form (forms of style, forms of rhetoric, forms of language), but the site where books are all recaptured and consumed: a site that is nowhere since it gathers all the books of the past in this impossible 'volume' whose murmuring will be shelved among so many others - after all the others, before all the others."

1. I have intentionally elided Foucault's well-known distinctions among various kinds of knowledge - savoir, connaissance, and science all alike - since to do so is only to follow out Foucault's suggestion that all forms of knowledge are finally ideological or epistemic only, necessarily determined by the rules of possibility by means of which its various statements are enunciated.

Originally published in Salmagundi, Spring-Summer 1979

Albert Collins: Texas Blues Again

by Perry Meisel

The way Albert Collins tore up the Other End last Tuesday night, you'd figure the rugged blues modernist from Texas had all but forgotten the days he drove a truck in Houston for $1.13 an hour. But even though Collins has one of the most formidable underground reputations of any Texas bluesman, he's thinking about getting a truck again as we sit in the dressing room after the gig. At 46, an anxious Collins is talking security as well as blues. Underground reputations, after all, can make you immortal a little too fast, and Collins's career has been as mercurial as the explosive and unpredictable guitar that's made him a gunslinging legend. Back in the '60s, Collins released a series of hit-single instrumentals (songs like "Frosty," "Sno-Cone," "Don't Love Your Cool," and more) that codified his icy, burning sound. In 1968, he moved to L.A. so Canned Heat's Bob Hite could produce and book him, but by 1972 the LPs had stopped even if the gigs did not.

Not that material fluctuations have done anything to erode Collins's passion as a musician. The only real difference between the old hits and his return to recording with the recent Ice Pickin' (on Bruce Iglauer's excellent Chicago Blues label, Alligator) is simply the difference a decade has made in standard recording equipment. Collins is still the same bone-crusher at 46 that he was at 35, a blistering barber of soul with an ax for a razor. And, for the first time on disc, Ice Pickin' gives us Collins the singer, too, a cool and sardonic character whose antic angst used to be reserved for gigs alone.

Although there's nothing especially new about Collins's musical ideas (no riff that's associated with his name like the Albert King shock-stutter, no exact guitar tone like the special sweet one we associate with B.B.), there's a nervy rasp to his playing and singing that makes even Buddy Guy sound staid. The groaning, hissing, buzzing universe on which Collins's amp is a metaphorical window is no Delta dawn or brooding Mississippi, but a raw oilscape of technological power controlled by the bluesman as engineer. Texas also means the feel of rhythm and blues bound rather strictly to the 12-bar grid, with the characteristic groove more a funky thing than the regulation shuffle or slow blues. But no matter the groove, Collins's phrasing is in all cases the exaggerated stutter, the way he falls over backward in that blurting, apparently uncontrolled fashion that gets shaped and stylized in Cornell Dupree or the late King Curtis (both Texans from Fort Worth and both close to Collins in age as well).

That phraseological propensity has a history that suggests in miniature the network of influences at work in the Texas groove as a whole. A principal clue is that Collins plays with his fingers instead of with a pick, phrasing in an almost country style even though his head is full of a swinging rhythm section underneath. The yield of the conflict is the churning funk groove itself, a kind of compromise-formation between country and swing like his hottest new song, "Honey, Hush," the opener on Ice Pickin' and the serene eye of the storm at last week's gig.

The swinging imperatives in Collins's sound can be traced back to the guy usually credited as Collins's principal precursor, the legendary but largely forgotten Texas guitarist Gatemouth Brown. Gatemouth has cowboy airs, and his jumping guitar smokes halfway between Django and the Chuck Berry who had yet to arrive on the scene. Collins's groove is thus a rhythmic structure that can be felt in more than one way. Jazzies can conjure swing riffs when they listen to him; funkophiles can hear Memphis horns; rockers can hear Berry, too, especially when Collins, a la Gatemouth, leans on the fat end of his strings and gets the punctuated drone stylized these days by the Ramones.

To mention the Ramones is not entirely whimsical, since an intentional minimalism seems the only explanation for the rawness of a latter-day bluesman like Collins compared to the relative sophistication of the earlier Gatemouth. For if Collins should be read against the tradition of Texas and the territory jazz bands, what the comparison produces is the recognition that orthodox blues has experienced an ironic kind of chastening or self-curtailment over the years. How else can you explain why Texan latecomers like Collins, King Curtis, or even the Austin rockers are all rawer or simpler than the Bob Wills, the Ben Websters, the Gatemouths? Instead of imperial expansion, development seems to mean contraction and economizing, even though its secret victory is the amalgamation of a series of rhythmic styles in a single-pressured groove.

Or is that called rock and roll?

Originally published in The Village Voice, May 7, 1979

Sample view:

from Collier's Encyclopedia, 1979:

ROTH, PHILIP (1933 - ), American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, whose work reflects the problems of assimilation and identity among American Jews. Like Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, with whom he is usually linked as a chief interpreter of the Jewish-American experience, Roth is a major figure in contemporary psychological realism. However, much of his later work explores the nature of sexual desire and self-understanding through literary techniques borrowed from the fantastic and the grotesque. The formal trademark of Roth's fiction is the confessional monologue, told with a riotous humor and hysterical energy most often associated with the hero and narrator of his best-known novel, Portnoy's Complaint (1969).

Roth was born in Newark, N.J., on Mar. 19, 1933. After graduating from Bucknell University in 1954, he taught literature at the University of Chicago until 1957. He then left teaching to review film and television for The New Republic. From 1960 to 1962 he taught at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and was writer-in-residence at Princeton from 1962 to 1963. In 1959 Roth published his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, a collection of short fiction that received the National Book Award in 1960. His other work includes the novels Letting Go (1962), When She Was Good (1967), The Breast (1972), The Great American Novel (1973), My Life as a Man (1974), and The Professor of Desire (1977); the political satire Our Gang (1971); and a collection of literary criticism, Reading Myself and Others (1975).

Although Roth was hailed as a major new literary voice throughout the 1960's, the frank sexuality and the sarcastic treatment of Jewish life in Portnoy's Complaint created a furor in literary circles, alienating some of Roth's earliest admirers even as it established him as a novelist of power and originality. In the years since Portnoy, Roth's fiction has taken a darker and more difficult turn, questioning not only the causes of personal unhappiness but also the psychoanalytic terms by which it is addressed in modern culture.

PERRY MEISEL

from Collier's Encyclopedia, 1979:

CHEEVER, JOHN (1912 - ) American short-story writer and novelist, whose reputation as a master of the short story is unsurpassed among living American authors. His early novels present the mythic, pastoral world of his ancestral New England and its slow extinction by the forces of modern technological society. His later, best-known fiction centers on suburban life and its discontents.

Cheever was born in Quincy, Mass., May 27, 1912, and was schooled at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. In 1935 The New Yorker published his first story, "The Brooklyn Rooming House," and, ever since, Cheever's name has been associated with the magazine, which has published more than 120 of his tales. His collections of stories include The Way Some People Live (1942), The Enormous Radio (1954), The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1959), Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel (1961), The Brigadier and the Gold Widow (1964), and the The World of Apples (1973). In 1958, Cheever received the National Book Award for his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957). His second novel, The Wapshot Scandal (1964), was a sequel to The Wapshot Chronicle. His other novels are Bullet Park (1969) and Falconer (1977).

Cheever's central theme is the loneliness and isolation of the individual, whose personal desires are frequently at odds with the prevailing social order. Although these concerns are most overt in Cheever's tales of suburbia, where the loss of a harmonious New England past is seen as a prelude to the alienation of modern corporate life, the theme of confinement is already present in the apparently pristine world of the Wapshot novels. Here the Wapshot sons, Moses and Coverly, feel the need to break away from the inbred society of St. Botolphs despite the compensatory comforts that make it a paradise lost. Like John Updike, with whom he is often associated in his celebration of a fading community of Protestant values, Cheever thus organizes his fiction around the rhythms of flight and homecoming in the lives of his characters. In Falconer he moves toward a total rejection of confinement as a symbol for the condition of the soul. Ezekiel Farragut is put in a real prison only to find that there are no "fields of paradise on the other side of the wall." Farragut escapes from jail at the novel's close to discover that what is confining in the social order is in fact what defines life and gives meaning to it.

PERRY MEISEL

Pazz & Jop Product Report 1978

"Each critic votes for between zero and 10 'yea' records per month and awards each one 10 (masterpiece), 8, 7 (recommended purchase), 5 (borderline), 3, 2, or 1 (shades of listenable) votes."

Perry Meisel's votes:

January 2, 1978:

YEA: Boz Scaggs: 'Down Two, Then Left' (Columbia) 7; Merle Haggard: 'A Working Man Can't Get Nowhere Today' (Capitol) 5; Eric Gale: 'Multiplication' (Columbia) 5; 'Stan Getz Presents Jimmy Rowles: The Peacocks' (Columbia) 5; James Talley: 'Ain't It Somethin' ' (Capitol) 5; Steve Khan: 'Tightrope' (Columbia/Tappan Zee) 3; Odyssesy: 'Rare Gems' (Casablanca) 3.

February 6, 1978:

YEA: Joe Tex: 'Rub Down' (Epic) 7; Kool and the Gang: 'The Force' (De-Lite) 5; Art Garfunkel: 'Watermark' (Columbia) 3; Muddy Waters: 'I'm Ready' (Blue Sky) 3; Elvis Costello: 'My Aim is True' (Columbia) 2; Bette Midler: 'Broken Blosssoms' (Atlantic) 1.

March 6, 1978:

YEA: 'The Best of Jerry Lee Lewis, Volume II' (Mercury) 8; Elvin Bishop: 'Raisin' Hell' (Capricorn) 7; Fenton Robinson; 'Hear Some Blues Downstairs' (Alligator) 5; Vibrators: 'Pure Mania' (Columbia) 5; Muddy Waters: 'I'm Ready' (Blue Sky) 5; Johnny Rivers: 'Outside Help '(Soul City) 3.

NAY: Manhattan Transfer, 'Pastiche' (Atlantic) -2.

April 3, 1978:

YEA: Allen Toussaint: 'Motion' (Warner Bros.) 7; Original Texas Playboys: 'Live and Kickin' ' (Capitol) 7; Maria Muldaur: 'Southern Winds' (Warner Bros.) 5; Average White Band: 'Warmer Communications' (Atlantic) 5; Little Feat: 'Waiting for Columbus' (Warner Bros.) 3; 'Foster Sylvers' (Capitol) 3; NRBQ: 'At Yankee Stadium' (Mercury) 3; Delbert McClinton: 'Second Wind' (Capricorn) 3; Dexter Wansel: 'Voyager' (Philadelphia International) 2; Bobby Womack: 'Pieces' (Columbia) 2.

May 1, 1978:

YEA: Ramones: 'Rocket to Russia' (Sire) 8; 'Ramones Leave Home,' (Sire) 7; 'Ramones' (Sire) 7; Elvis Costello: 'This Year's Model' (Columbia) 5; 'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols' (Warner Bros.) 3; Tower of Power: 'We Came to Play' (Columbia) 3; Tower of Power: 'We Came to Play' (Columbia) 3; 'Cornell Dupree's Saturday Night Fever' (Versatile) 2.

June 5, 1978:

YEA: Elvis Costello: 'This Year's Model' (Columbia) 8; The Band: 'The Last Waltz' (Warner Bros.) 8; 'Ellen McIlwaine' (United Artists) 7; Brian Auger and Julie Tippetts: 'Encore' (Warner Bros.) 7; Wings: 'London Town' (Capitol) 5; Aretha Franklin: Almighty Fire' (Atlantic) 5; Willie Nelson: 'Stardust' (Columbia) 3; Edie Hinton: 'Very Extremely Dangerous' (Capricorn) 3; Bonnie Bramlett: 'Memories' (Capricorn) 3.

July 3, 1978:

YEA: Charlie Parker: 'The Very Best of Bird' (Warner Bros.) 10; Koko Taylor: 'The Earthshaker' (Alligator) 8; Graham Parker & the Rumour: 'The Parkerilla' (Mercury) 7; Freddie Hubbard: 'Super Blue' (Columbia) 7; Rolling Stones: 'Some Girls' (Rolling Stones) 5; Bruce Springsteen: 'Darkness on the Edge of Town' (Columbia) 5; Dave Mason: 'Marlposa de Oro' (Columbia) 3; David Sanborn: 'Heart to Heart' (Warner Bros.) 3; George Duke: 'Don't Let Go' (Epic) 2; Wendy Waldman: 'Strange Company' (Warner Bros.) 2.

NAY: Ry Cooder: 'Jazz' (Warner Bros.) - 3; John McLaughlin: 'Electric Guitarist' (Columbia) - 3.

August 7, 1978:

YEA: Bob Dylan: 'Street-Legal' (Columbia) 10; 'Carlene Carter' (Warner Bros.) 7; Merle Haggard: 'Eleven Winners' (Capitol) 7; Cheap Trick: 'Heaven Tonight' (Epic) 5; Teddy Penergrass: 'Life in a Song Worth Singing' (Philadelphia International) 5; 'Larry Carlton' (Warner Bros.) 5; Rahsaan Roland Kirk: 'Boogie-Woogie Stringalong for Real' (Warner Bros.) 5; 'DMZ' (Sire) 3; Billy Cobham/Steve Kahn/Tom Scott/Alfonso-Johnson: 'Alivemutherforya' (Columbia) 3; John Abercrombie/Dave Holland/Jack DeJohnette: 'Gateway 2' (ECM) 2.

September 4, 1978:

YEA: 'David Gilmour' (Columbia) 8; Screamin' Jay Hawkins: 'I Put a Spell on You' (Versatile) 8; Saints: 'Eternally Yours' (Sire) 7; Jesse Winchester: 'A Touch on the Rainy Side' (Bearsville) 7; Criminals: 'The Kids Are Back' (Sing Sing single) 7; Debby Boone: 'Midstream' (Warner Bros.) 5; Bill Chinnock: 'Badlands' (Atlantic) 3; Ohio Players: 'Jass-Ay-Lay-Dee' (Mercury) 3; Jim Krueger: 'Sweet Salvation' (Columbia) 3; 'The Writers' (Columbia) 2.

October 9, 1978:

YEA: 'The Pop' (Automatic) 7; Talking Heads: 'More Songs About Buildings and Food' (Sire) 7; Willie Nelson: 'Face of a Fighter' (Lone Star) 7; Zwol: 'New York City' (EMI/America single) 5; Frankie Valli is the Word' (Warner Bros.) 5; City Boy: 'Book Early' (Mercury) 3; Dixie Dregs: 'What If' (Capricorn) 2; Billy Cobham: 'Simplicity of Expression-Aptness of Thought' (Columbia) 2.

November 6, 1978:

YEA: Dexter Gordon: 'Manhattan Symphonie' (Columbia) 8; Pete Christlieb/Wayne Marsh Quintent: 'Apogee' (Warner Bros.) 8; Son Seals: 'Live and Burning' (Alligator) 7; Bryan Ferry: 'The Bride Stripped Bare' (Atlantic) 7; Carl Perkins: 'Ol' Blue Suede is Back' (Jet) 5; 'The Very Best of Dave Mason' (ABC) 5; Tom Scott: 'Intimate Strangers' (Columbia) 3; Boston: 'Don't Look Back' (Epic) 3; Pierce Arrow: 'Pity the Rich' (Columbia) 2.

December 4, 1978:

YEA: The Clash: 'Give 'Em Enough Rope' (Epic) 8; Ramones: 'Road to Ruin' (Sire) 8; 'Bob Mover' (Vanguard) 7; Southside Johnny & the Asbury Dukes: 'Hearts of Stone' (Epic) 7;

Stan Getz: 'Another World' (Columbia) 7; Billy Swann: 'At His Best' (Monument) 7; Elvin Bishop: 'Hog Heaven' (Capricorn) 5; Kool and the Gang: 'Everybody's Dancin' (De-Lite) 5.