Books

'Capital' as Literature: Marx Against Himself. New York and London: Routledge, 2026. eBook, 2026.

Criticism After Theory from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf. New York and London: Routledge, 2022. eBook, 2022.

Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. Co-ed. with

Haun Saussy. By Ferdinand de Saussure. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. eBook, 2011.

The Myth of Popular Culture from Dante to Dylan. Oxford: Blackwell Manifestos, 2010. eBook, 2010. Portuguese translation, 2015 (Tinta Negra).

The Literary Freud. New York and London: Routledge, 2007. eBook, 2013.

The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and Roll. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. eBook, 1998.

The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924-25. Co-ed. with Walter Kendrick. With Introduction, Epilogue, and Appendices. New York: Basic Books, 1985; London: Chatto & Windus, 1986. Paperback, 1990 (Norton); French translation,1990 (Presses Universitaires de France); German translation,1995 (Verlag Internationale Psychoanalyse).

Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981. eBook, 2014 (International Psychotherapy Institute).

The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.

J. Hillis Miller's All Souls' Day: Formalism and Historicism in Victorian and Modern Fiction Studies

Specificity

    Foucault’s contribution to the reading of literature is a double one. His use of tropological inventories to show how rhetorical patterns structure texts through difference provides the reading of prose—both fiction and, as I will show with Melanie Klein and with Freud later on, non-fiction—a specificity of method ordinarily limited to poetry. But it also does more than that. It provides a way of finding history in texts through the avenue of form. This is what is so perplexing about the New Historicism’s appeal to Foucault as an antidote to deconstruction. Nowhere is this misuse of Foucault more prevalent than it is in the study of Victorian fiction, and nowhere is it more amusing. Victorian novels are, as I will show, splendid witness to the historicism implicit in deconstructive reading for a simple reason. Tropological inventories of novels include more often than not the trope of texts. Textuality is central to fiction, not because it makes fiction reflexive, but because it heightens its realism. Texts are not only a metaphor in novels. They are also a plain element in the concrete social worlds that novels represent. J. Hillis Miller’s deconstructive reading of Victorian fiction points out this doubleness with singular efficiency. The anguished New Historicist reaction to it reveals the truth of what it denies by unconsciously appropriating its key insights.

    “Bleak House,” writes Miller in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Dickens’s 1853 novel, “is a document about the interpretation of documents” (1971, 11). What does Miller’s easy, avuncular insight reveal? Text and world are no longer copy and original. Narration and story, récit and histoire are one and the same. Why? Because the world itself is made up of languages. Language, by definition, is part of the world rather than its dim and fugitive reflection.

    The swell of textuality that makes the unlikely reflexiveness of Dickens’s novels a template for Victorian fiction is not limited to Dickens alone. Casaubon’s fruitless search for the “key to all mythologies” in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) is, as Miller points out (1987), another locus classicus for the foregrounding of textuality in Victorian writing. The metaphor of reading makes the personal and the hermeneutical equivalent by virtue of the common activity of interpretation that they share. Casaubon’s brutality as a husband and as a scholar who falls short of nuance in both spheres of life is Victorian fiction’s most persuasive instance of what makes rudeness in one aspect of behavior an index of cruelty in the other. Dorothea is victim in love to what makes Casaubon’s intellectual project victim to a kin indecency. Casaubon’s failure as an interpreter lies in his lack of fluency as a reader. Despite the theological subject of The Key to All Mythologies, the work of the Higher Criticism is unavailable to him because he cannot read German. It leads to his fatal universalism as an interpreter. It also leads to his failure as a husband. He cannot read Dorothea either, whose attraction to him is based on an interest in his work whose details he will not share with her. It is no surprise that her interest in architectural renovation strikes no answering chord in him. Renovation, whether intellectual or personal, is the interpretative impulse whose absence on his part dooms his work and their marriage even before the failure of his heart dooms them both.

    Miller’s signature insight also allows one to see that Henry James’s indebtedness to Eliot proceeds from this starting point (2005). Dr. Sloper’s inability to understand his daughter’s desires in Washington Square (1880) is, like Casaubon’s inability to understand Dorothea, an inability to interpret as she does. James’s concern with the clash of the social codes of Americans and Europeans in Daisy Miller (1879) or “An International Episode” (1879) is also one that focuses on their lack of a common code of reading that underwrites their inability to understand one another. This is also what links the early, social James with the later, psychological James. Miller’s reading of James as a whole regards both personal and social interaction as a series of speech acts that move and persuade one’s thoughts and emotions. Its precondition is the notion that the psyche is a text. Here Miller’s unexpected appreciation of Steven Marcus’s edition of Freud’s letters to Fliess (1977) comes into focus as entirely logical. The unconscious, too, is, to borrow Jacques Lacan’s phrase, structured like a language.

Dickens en abyme

    It is customary to assign the source of Miller’s reading of Bleak House to his shift from the early influence of Georges Poulet to the later influence of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. The deconstructive Miller, however, is already implicit in the phenomenological Miller of Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958). Not only that. To read Miller’s early book on Dickens in the light of his later reading of Bleak House is to be doubly surprised. The familiar tradition of complaint that Miller is not a historical critic of Dickens is misconceived. Not only is his phenomenological approach already structural; his presumable formalism is also historical. How does the identity of récit and histoire lead to a historical approach to fiction? One customarily regards seeing narration and story as doubles as an infinite regress or mise en abyme—as two likenesses reduplicating one another forever, forsaking any referential function they may have and becoming endless, reflexive copies of themselves. Like Warhol’s lithographs of historical figures such as Mao or Marilyn Monroe, historicity is presumably emptied out at the moment of its evocation. Far from being a retreat into the formal, however, the mise en abyme or infinite regress is actually an opening onto history. No falling away into a mysticism of textuality, it is an entrance into textuality as the archive. Foucault (1966, 1969) before the fact rather than Blanchot after the fact (1955), Miller’s archive is the field of history in all its fugitive concreteness, the vortex of all the signs and their tokens left behind in the wake of time in its flight. Both specific and endlessly ungraspable, it is a reconceived resource for the critic and historian rather than a dead end.

    While Dickens’s fiction may seem to be a “self-contained entity” (1958, viii), says Miller, “it is” actually “a better clue than any biographical data to the writer’s intimate relation to the material world” (1958, ix). “A thousand paths radiate from the same center” (1958, 14). Pickwick Papers (1837), the entrance to Dickens’s world chronologically, is “a swarming” and “simultaneous plurality” of “centers” (1958, 13). Bleak House, later in Dickens’s career, is the ripe fruit of this early plant, a novel that adduces plural “perspectives from different viewpoints of a condition of reality too complex to be seen from any one perspective” (1958, 163). The doubling of récit and histoire in the novel is manifest, but it is in the service of discovering an archive, not a series of empty forms: “Characters,” chief among them the detective Mr. Bucket, “try to discover in the world an intelligible order” (1958, 167). Each character, Esther Summerson included, tries “to put together the fragments of the world into a coherent whole” (1958, 170). “The real detective” is “the narrator himself, attempting … to discover the laws of the world he sees” (1958, 176). Jarndyce and Jarndyce is no formal model; it is a profoundly concrete one. Although it will “never end”—indeed, “it is the permanent condition of life in Bleak House”—the “endless case … becomes a symbol in the novel of what it is to be in the world at all” (1958, 196). It is the very picture of the archive because it accounts for its complexity in terms of overdetermination, not closure: “The world of Bleak House,” says Miller, “is a vast interlocking system in which any change or action in one place will have a corresponding and reciprocal effect on any other place” (1958, 206). Hardly a phenomenological or formalist reduction, Miller’s reading employs the resources of both methods to produce something beyond them both: a model of fiction as a metatext that presents its own world as a model for discovering its plural relationships to the very real historical archives that prompt its production. The truth of this claim is played out in the subsequent history of Victorian criticism as it both accepts Miller’s influence and wrestles with the anxiety it provokes.

Influence and Anxiety in Victorian Studies

    Influence, as Harold Bloom reminds us, has a rocky history. It is marked not only by gratitude, but by quarrels that are not quarrels at all. They are the symptoms of indebtedness that provoke anxiety rather than gratitude. The movement of Victorian studies in fiction in the decades subsequent to Miller’s reading of Dickens reveals both. It also reveals how prescient Miller’s earliest work on Dickens is not only in relation to his later, deconstructive handling of Dickens in the infamous introduction to Bleak House. It also shows how much both kinds of readings enable the historicism that presumably comes to displace deconstruction.

    George Eliot is not the only major Victorian novelist who is part of the holistic paradigm for reading that Miller finds in Dickens. Walter Kendrick’s definitive study of Anthony Trollope, The Novel-Machine (1980), reveals an equivalent identity of textuality and manners in a writer presumably immune from such reflexivity. For Kendrick, a formalist approach leads to a formalist conclusion, or so it seems. Trollope’s conception of himself as a writer in his autobiography is that of a machine. He conceives of himself as an engine of production not unlike the world of industrial capitalism whose wealth and manners he represents, a world with which his writing is in point of fact identical as a project and an activity. Realism, according to Kendrick, has a surprising and unexpected precondition: “Writing,” he says, is “prior to the representation of reality,” not the other way around (1980, 3). Writing is primary, reality is secondary. Writing does not represent; it “transmits” (1980, 4). Kendrick appears to verify the notion that Miller’s formalism begets more formalism. But, as with Miller himself, Kendrick’s formalism contains a surprise. It is really an implicitly historical assessment of Trollope based on a theory of writing whose referential function derives from the psychological forms that reader and writer alike share at the level of their unconscious assumptions about Victorian life.

    Trollope’s novels do not therefore copy life. Their referentiality comes from elsewhere. They come from what Kendrick calls “conceptions” (1980, 8)—from an archive of ideas in Trollope’s mind. They are located in the novelist’s imagination and in the minds of Trollope’s readers. They meet in a field common to them both—an archive of assumption based on a knowledge of Victorian habits of mind. The Archdeacon Grantly in The Warden (1855), for example, is not a copy of anything real, but the result of Trollope’s own “consciousness” (1980, 19). The imitation is simultaneously reflexive and realistic. The imagination copies, as it were, itself. “Two things become identical”—the image and its representation—“without losing their difference” (1980, 20). “The result is duplication without imitation” (1980, 23). Trollope neither recollects nor imitates. Rather, he “brings his two halves”—half Trollope the writer, half Trollope his own reader—“by letting one sympathize with the other” (1980, 23). The novel exists in its prior conception and in its later reading. What is represented exists nowhere but in this relation. Writer and reader comingle in the archive that they both share. Novels convey reality precisely because they do not. Because life for Trollope is the life almost exclusively of the drawing room, its set of conceptions is extraordinarily strict and delimited. No wonder Lizzy Eustace in The Eustace Diamonds (1873) measures her own being in a fanciful relation to Shelley and to Byron (1980, 66). “The world is structured just as the mind is” (1980, 86), not as a merely psychological principle but as a representational one. “The world and the minds in it speak the same language” (1980, 87). “The Trollopian mind is a sort of internal debating society,” concludes Kendrick, “containing an audience and two speakers who compete for the reader’s attention” (1980, 87). Like Miller’s conception of the world of Dickens, “the structure of any particular novel is unimportant by comparison with the total structure to which each novel contributes a part” (1980, 87). Kendrick privileges He Knew He Was Right (1869) because it is a departure for Trollope. Its singularity exposes the methodical regularity of his other books because Louis Trevelyan’s madness exposes the single real danger to the novel-machine: “the boundless proliferation of signs that the novel is designed to contain and subjugate” (1980, 131). Here the threat of textuality to express itself and overwhelm the realist illusion reveals its endemic presence in the repression to which it is characteristically subject in Trollope’s other novels. Because madness is a proliferation of signs or “conceptions,” the result is the potential exposure of the endless textuality that Trollope ordinarily makes disappear. In this way, Trollope’s realism is always based on the textuality whose control is its repressed and preponderant condition.

    Even more explicit in showing the identity of world and texts is D.A. Miller’s study of Victorian fiction, The Novel and the Police (1988). While employing Foucault’s vocabulary from Discipline and Punish (1975) as a smokescreen, Miller the Younger is actually using Miller the Elder’s approach to Victorian writing. It is not surprising that he takes Miller the Elder’s reading of Bleak House as his polemical target. Miller the Elder’s view of the novel as “an interminable proliferation of signs” is “decisive” (1988, 67), but this “identification of form and content” (1988, 84) is insufficient to account for the novel’s wider activity. “The practices of the world” exceed “the practices of representing it” (1988, 84), particularly the mise en abyme of textuality into which novel and world alike are thrown by the insistence upon their isomorphism or shared technical structure. “Differentiating” the two spheres is required (1988, 84). Among the first of the New Historicist critics to employ Foucault’s use of Bentham’s Panopticon to explain narration in fiction, Miller the Younger exploits it to great effect. The Panopticon—the central tower in a prison occupied by a guard whose surveillance of the prisoners cannot be seen by them—is a screen onto which characters and reader, like Bentham’s prisoners, project their own fears and anxieties. This exposes the Victorian novel’s famed morality for what it is: a system of social tyranny and a fiction. Text and world are not the same. The world may employ textual practices—the control of society through duplicitous fictions—but they are not identical with narrative textuality. Narrative textuality is presumably unbiased, mimetic rather than tendentious, transparent rather than persuasive. Textuality and the social uses of representation may be similar, but they are also distinct.

    Miller the Younger gives us Wilkie Collins rather than Dickens to make his point. Far from identifying récit and histoire, Collins’s The Moonstone (1868 ) separates “the relevant signifiers from the much larger number of irrelevant ones” (1988, 33). Not everything counts, even if it requires measuring the difference between one signifier and another to do so. Sergeant Cuff, the official detective, knows this: “I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet” (1988, 35). Cuff fails because the novel’s strategies reach beyond the goals of detection—to the pursuit of a plot distinct from narration. There is no isomorphism between them. Textuality has as its project the discovery of an end to interpretation even though its real effect is to produce the proliferation of interpretation. Miller the Younger’s distinction is no distinction at all. Instead, it leads, ironically, to an identity between the Panopticon and the novel’s own narrative method—the very identity it presumably rejects.

    The exclusion of the official police in The Moonstone introduces policing of a different order in the margins of the text. The official police become the unofficial police to be found in the psyche of the characters and in the novel’s own narrative method, one which introduces unofficial policing in the reader. “The Moonstone dismisses the police altogether,” says Miller, “and the mysterious crime is worked to a solution by a power that no one has charge of”: the power of “gossip and domestic familiarity,” which themselves produce the effect of surveillance (1988, 49). Surveillance now occurs in “closed clubs and houses … . The intention to detect is visible only at a microscopic level,” not at a manifestly institutional one (1988, 49). The result is the creation of a new kind of institutional authority, one which, like the Panopticon, is everywhere and nowhere: a social authority produced by the effects of Collins’s writing. Here narration and story are redoubled in a way that may exceed isomorphism, but which requires it in order for it to be overcome. This is how The Moonstone satisfies “a double exigency: how to keep the everyday world entirely outside a network of police power and yet at the same time to preserve the effects of such power within it” (1988, 50).

    The same can be said of the novel itself. Its textual strategies both identify and distinguish between the two because, like the world it represents, it is also a Panopticon. Nor is the novel, as Miller the Younger claims, a “monological” text in Bahktin’s sense (1988, 54). On the contrary, because of “discontinuities and incoherencies” (1988, 56)—emblems of the blind alleys down which signifying chains of different authority or dialects may lead—the novel is, by definition, resolutely dialogical. Otherwise, the novel’s buckshot proliferation of anxieties and the fears that prompt them would be impossible to create in either the novel’s characters or in its reader. It creates them in order to control them both. Panoptical authority, by definition, exists everywhere and nowhere. Its effectiveness derives from the presence of its absence. Foucault’s Benthamite device is not an empirical one but a psychological one. Its power comes not from the guard’s actual surveillance of those incarcerated—whether or not there is even a guard on duty in the central tower is always an open question—but from the belief that he is. Surveillance is an effect of the Panopticon’s structure, not its cause. The same may be said of the role of the omniscient Victorian narrator, everywhere and nowhere at once. The narrator is an effect in which the reader believes, calculated by the text rather than by its speaker. Text and speaker are analogous to Panopticon and guard. The former creates the illusion of the latter. Their relationship may be distinct but, when all is said and done, it is also equivalent.

    This is not simply the structure of Victorian narration. It is also the story Victorian fiction tells, again and again. While presumably differing from Miller the Elder’s notion of narration and story, Miller the Younger reconstitutes it by means of its rejection. Miller the Younger’s anxiety of influencer redoubles the structure of authority that he finds at work in Collins. Miller the Elder’s authority returns as a repressed. Miller the Elder’s authority functions the way authority functions in The Moonstone. The strategic departure of the official police has as its ironic result the return of authority in a secret way that expands rather than inhibits its effects.

    D.A. Miller’s early New Historicism prefigures the far more thoroughgoing materialism of later studies of the Victorian novel such as Elaine Freedgood’s The Ideas in Things (2006). It is a fine example of both the difference from Miller the Elder’s pioneering work and its repressed continuity with it. Like D.A. Miller’s, Freedgood’s enabling rejection of Miller the Elder returns her to its theoretical assumptions. Like Miller the Younger, she, too, begins by claiming to move beyond the formalism of Miller the Elder, casting aside his reading of Dickens in order to do so (2006, 16–17). It allows her to return, consciously or not, to a heightened recapitulation of his enabling premise that texts are about the interpretation of texts. For Freedgood, a material approach leads to a formal one. Absorbing the influence of the New Historicism along with the influence of a reflexive reading of fiction, Freedgood’s focus on “things” shows how effective a materialist supplement to Miller the Elder’s approach can be. The most microscopic details of novelistic representation are mirrors, not of an object-world, but of an object-world that is itself a world of texts and representations. They disclose their historicity because they are parts of a discursive chain that reveals the endless signatures of their productive mechanisms, particularly the production of material goods. “Victorian novels’ penchant for the representation of the emblematic hodgepodge” of objects (2006, 6), she writes, reveals an “overdetermined material” history (2006, 5) that links the political, social, and mercantile in “a grammar of meaning” available to the attentive reader (2006, 6). This reader becomes a historical reader because this reader has already learned to become a formal reader trained in the belief that “documents” are “documents about the interpretation of documents.” A heightened formalism, as Roland Barthes once proposed, returns us to history in a fresh and vivid way.

    Like D.A. Miller’s, Freedgood’s argument is a clearer and more extraordinary one than her polemical assertions might lead one to believe. “Cultural knowledge is stored in a variety of institutional forms,” including “the word” (2006, 23). “The commodity is both a material object and a trope” (2006, 27). It is symbolic because it is real and real because it is symbolic. This kind of formalism produces “an interpretative open end of dizzying potential” (2006, 14) that allows the winds of real history to fill the novel with fresh life and lead to a new encounter with the real.

    The real, of course, is implicitly redefined in the process. It is the archive to which Miller the Elder is led in his early study of Dickens. Objects in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) are archives of their real histories of production, storehouses of meaning available precisely because they are texts to be interpreted. Freedgood’s particular focus is the “Negro-head tobacco” that Magwich smokes in Great Expectations, an object that is “a very particular kind of memorial” because it contains the history of both aboriginal genocide in Australia and imperial consumerism as a whole (2006, 83). The London press featured mass coverage of the atrocities in Australia alongside advertisements for products whose manufacture depended on the resources of colonialism whose protection depended on the violence of British military practice.

    Negro-head tobacco is, writes Freedgood, “a kind of unsupervised metonymic archive: a nearly infinite catalogue of compressed references to social facts” (2006, 84). The well-known and well-documented awareness in contemporary Victorian England of this history is one that the text of the novel assumes on the part of its reader. “It was part of,” says Freedgood, “the ‘hubbub’ of social discourse to which Dickens listened” (2006, 86). Freedgood’s New Historicism is the direct result of her close formalist reading, not a reaction to close reading but its best effect. Once again, Miller the Elder’s text within a text becomes the occasion for New Historicist specificity—precisely that which it presumably forecloses. What we today call “brands” are the sign and signature of a world of texts whose literal specificity is what realist fiction represents. In a hyperbolic realist like Dickens, these accents of the real have a feverish aura and an unexpected exactitude. They complete the vision of Dickens that Miller the Elder enables.

    Indeed, Freedgood’s title and the method it employs constitute a broadside deconstruction of the notion of immanence and of the thing-in-itself as a category. Despite the logocentrism of Bill Brown’s “thing theory” in A Sense of Things (2002), Freedgood’s critical practice is not only materialist, but also deconstructive. “No ideas,” says William Carlos Williams in Paterson, “but in things” (1927, 6), even as sensory entities. Things exist as ideas, but not because they are the phenomena that express the noumena of Platonic forms or inherent ideas. It is the other way around: Things exist as ideas because they are the tokens of the types conceived of by the production of material goods and the categories of pertinent perception, even in a pre-capitalist setting. The type/token ratio, as Umberto Eco calls it (1976), measures the way something concrete is the function of its satisfaction of the demands of a semantic inventory. A table is a table because it corresponds to the notion of what a table is. Virginia Woolf gives a familiar exemplification in To the Lighthouse (1927). When Lily asks what Mr. Ramsay’s work is about, his son Andrew advises her to “think of a kitchen table … when you’re not there” (1927, 38). This is not an idealist presentation of a thing-in-itself, but a presentation of the “thing” as it is presented by Freedgood. Victorian objects, like all objects, are “things” because they are parts of a protocol of sensory production whether mechanical or biological. The result is a formidable critical synthesis that is both formal and concrete, synchronic and diachronic, deconstructive and historical.

In Memoriam Virginia Woolf

    What lies beyond the archive? No metaphysical question, this, too, is a strictly material one. What lies beyond the archive is also what lies beyond its vortex: the ungraspable end to interpretation known as death. Here the continuity between Victorian and modern is, as it were, palpable. Without Miller to guide us, however, this palpability is evanescent and inexact. Like Jarndyce and Jarndyce, death, too, is not an end but a constant new beginning. Not the moment when there is no page left to turn, death is, like Borges’s “Book of Sand” (1975), a volume with no beginning and no end. It has new pages every time one consults it. What one consults is the book of death, which, for those left behind, becomes a book of new life. Those who are left behind to mourn are the readers. Virginia Woolf is the most eloquent exemplar of this new kind of life within death.

    Miller’s shocking essay on Mrs. Dalloway (1982), originally written a year before his introduction to Bleak House (1970), cleared away the customary assumption that the modern novel is characterized by the inner speech of its characters in favor of a radical assertion—that a novel like Mrs. Dalloway (1925) has, like a Victorian novel, an omniscient narrator. It also gave the notion of the omniscient narrator a new weight. The omniscient narrator is not simply an observer or even an interpreter. The narrator also has an additional role—that of the mortician. Contra Pater, art no longer aspires to the condition of music. It aspires to the condition of film. “It embalms time,” to use André Bazin’s words, “rescuing it from its proper corruption” (1945, 14). The narrator of Woolf’s novel gathers up all the novel’s characters, living and dead, in a loving embrace. This is true not only of Septimus, who has committed suicide, but also of the old lady whom Clarissa observes in the window across from hers as she imagines her imminent decline as the novel concludes. This Miller calls the modern novel’s funereal function as “the raising of the dead,” as he puts it in Distance and Desire (1970), his book on Hardy. Here the continuity between Victorian and modern fiction is made explicit in a way that throws special light not only on the modern novel but that also spells out the way the modern novel elaborates what is already at work in the nineteenth-century novel. 

    What Clarissa sees in the window is the continuity between herself and everything around her, living, dead, and about to die. Her act of sympathy is an epistemological one. So expansive is the field of determinations within which Woolf’s omniscient narrator situates Clarissa’s character that character as such—discrete, individualized, specific—ceases to exist. In the very act of exalting subjectivity to its presumably most decisive moment in the history of literature, subjectivity is in point of fact disassembled. No wonder Clarissa appears to die at the novel’s close. The machinery of both consciousness and its representation unpacks the coherence of both because it apprehends them both at their real moment of emergence in a social and a historical field—in an archive. This deconstructive turn in the procedure of the modern novel does not separate its achievement from the fiction of the past. It actually recapitulates the structure of the nineteenth-century novel in overdrive. The characteristic structure of the Bildungsroman is a double one, focusing on both the development of an individual and the grand sweep of historical events that underwrites birth, life, and death. Woolf’s narrator does precisely what its precursors in Dickens or Flaubert do, revealing a continuity with them that vitiates our customary assumption that a radical break accompanies the movement from one century to the next. This double focus is a dialectic, one that shows how the individual is a function of cultural forces and how cultural forces are processed through and by the agency of individual subjects. When Woolf expands character to the point of showing how it dissolves into the public force fields that constitute and determine it, she is simply drawing out the implicit dialectic of the Bildungsroman in an explicit way.

    Poised between specificity and oblivion, character inhabits the archive. Once again the infinite regress of textuality is not a hollow formalism, but its very opposite. The fall into the archive is not a fall into a vacuum but into a plentitude. This for Miller is Woolf’s “All Souls’ Day” (1970)—the condition of literary immortality. This literary immortality is located in the reader because the reader also is the archive. “The reader,” says Barthes, “holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted” (1968, 148). Generation to generation, the reader as archive is where the threads of literary memory are gathered.

    It is in To the Lighthouse that Miller’s insight is played out to greatest effect. Here Virginia Woolf’s own immortality is vouchsafed in an unparalleled instance of this funereal mechanism. To the Lighthouse registers the death of Julia Stephen in the death of Mrs. Ramsay. This is the classic understanding of the novel from an autobiographical point of view. It is Woolf’s way of mourning her mother and of terminating her melancholia. The novel is an act of Kleinian reparation—a forgiving of the mother because of her imagined cruelty to the child. Because the Duckworth brothers’ abuse of the young Virginia is the direct result of Julia’s death—the mother is no longer there to protect the child—Woolf retrospectively blames her mother for the abuse. She is not there to protect her because she is dead. Woolf unconsciously revenges herself upon her by disrupting her wholeness in her memory. Lily’s completion of her painting, as generations of critics have noted, is the sign and seal of the lifting of this revenge and the salutary closure of the daughter’s depression. Mourning replaces melancholia.

    After 1941, however, mourning takes on an entirely new and different status in the novel. In the light of Woolf’s own death, the novel’s object of mourning is no longer Julia Stephen, nor is the mourner Virginia Woolf. The mourner is now Virginia Woolf’s reader and the object of mourning is Virginia Woolf herself. To the Lighthouse becomes a mausoleum. The plural reality to which it is subject as a book of mourning requires us to conceive of it as an archive of souls. The distance with which the reader beholds the novel as Woolf’s mourning for her mother has a second kind of life when it becomes the longing the reader feels for the departed author. It gains speed as history speeds up and it is infinitely personal because it is not personal at all. We create the woman whose death we mourn. It leads to a new kind of archive—the myth of Virginia Woolf.

The Return of the Dead

    Woolf’s prophetic account of her own futurity returns us to Miller’s prophetic role in the later history of the study of Victorian and modern fiction. His enabling recognition that texts are about texts not only opens our awareness of the novel as a form to the reflexivity of its realism, whether the social realism of Victorian fiction or the psychological realism of modern fiction. It also enables the methodology of its presumable opposite, that of the New Historicist reading of fiction. Far from a formalist criticism, Miller’s criticism alerts us to the production of discourse as the key activity in both fiction’s representationalism and its represented worlds. Even more, it provides an enabling role for the reader that unlocks this daunting and endlessly provocative style of critical will. It is, moreover, a reflexive instance of what it describes. It enacts its principles in its own behavior as criticism. All influences gather in an empyrean not unlike the return of the dead in Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. Poulet, Derrida, Iser, Barthes, Austin, Foucault, even Freud and Lacan—all come to rest in his work.

"J. Hillis Miller’s All Souls’ Day: Formalism and Historicism in Victorian and Modern Fiction Studies". Reading Victorian Literature: Essays in Honour of J. Hillis Miller. Ed. Julian Wolfreys and Monika Szuba. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 284-296.

“Green They Shone:”: The Poem As Environment

The Romantic Context of Modern Poetry

    It is a simple step from Orientalism’s miscalculation of ethnicity to Romanticism’s customary assumptions about nature. They are, as M.H. Abrams reminds us, one and the same. Both regard their subject matter as transcendental. Modern poetry’s wish to dethrone its Romantic precursors makes the influence more difficult to shed and makes it repeat Romantic assumptions with an unlikely tenacity. Neither subaltern populations nor landscape are exotic wonders. Like diversity, nature, too, is a complex of discursive systems. Environmentalism’s belief that nature is sacred misses the point it presumes to make. Nature does not lie beyond culture; culture lies within nature. The meaning of “culture,” as Terry Eagleton reminds us (2000), is husbandry—the dialogue between the human species and the natural world. Their relationship is not one of subject and object but of continuity.

    Modern verse is characterized by one very particular habit of Romantic mind that it cannot dispel: the habit, from Wordsworth and Keats to Swinburne and Hardy, of employing landscape and objects as projections of the poet’s state of mind. D.H. Lawrence’s poems are revolutionary because they present what Sandra Gilbert calls “an alternative modernism” that disrupts Romantic and modernist practice alike (2001, 238). They constitute an epistemological break not only from Romanticism but also the flight from it of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D. They do not repeat either one but go beyond them both. What emerges instead is something distinct: an environmental relation to nature—I will be specific about this—rather than a use of nature as a screen for imaginative projection or a presumable rejection of the natural world in favor of timeless poetic “monuments,” to use Yeats’s phrase, “of unageing intellect” (1928, 8). For Lawrence, by contrast, the poem is an environment and the environment is a poem. To see Lawrence’s “complex position within modernism,” as Holly Laird puts it (2015, 40:3), requires a brief description of Lawrence’s Romantic context before taking up Eliot, Pound, and H.D. as foils to Lawrence himself.

    Keats’s first Hyperion fragment is a template for Romantic procedure. The landscape is a measure of the poet’s imaginative crisis:

        No stir of air was there,

        Not so much life as on a summer’s day

        Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass,

        But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. (1818–1819/1820, 7)

    This is the world behind the world of the poem, its hidden, and toxic, garden, the place of growth that has lost its generative powers. Here the “leaf”—the fact and the instrument of growth and dissemination—is “dead.” “Not one light seed” can travel through the air because the air does not “stir.” Even Wordsworth falls into a Keatsian idiom when his focus is on a microscopic nature, although, because it is Wordsworth, the metaphors are confident rather than depressed:

        Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up

        Fostered alike by beauty and by fear:

        Much favored in my birthplace, and no less

        In that beloved Vale to which erelong

        We were transplanted—there were we let loose

        For sports of wider range.                                                           

                                                                                                                         (1850, 1:301–6)

    The seeds are “let loose,” free to disseminate. They are not “dead,” as they are in the constrained and defeated Keats. The tropology, however, links them in a common predisposition to regard nature as a screen for the imagination, a habit of mind that persists as the nineteenth century unfolds.

    Its specificity is disarmingly precise. In Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine” (1866), the stance is Keatsian, even if the setting is Wordsworthian. Indeed, the relation between the two is the poem’s very subject. The sonorous conclusion to the poem converts possibility into defeat through a slow transformation from Wordsworthian to Keatsian topography. The dramatization of failure is played out in the poem’s splendid technique. A consummate poetic control takes its own loss of control over its subject matter as its theme:

I am weary of days and hours,

Blown buds of barren flowers,

Desires and dreams and powers

And everything but sleep … .

And all dead years draw thither

And all disastrous things;

Dead dreams of days forsaken,

Blind buds that snows have shaken,

Wild leaves that winds have taken,

Red strays of ruined springs … .

Then star nor sun shall waken,

Nor any change of light:

Nor sound of waters shaken,

Nor any sound or sight:

Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,

Nor days nor things diurnal;

Only the sleep eternal

In an eternal night.                                

                                                                                        (1866, 13–16, 67–70, 89–96)

    Hardy’s likeness to Swinburne is well-known. Note how exact the likeness is in both tropology and thematic concern in an early poem like “Neutral Tones” (1867), written only a year after “The Garden of Proserpine”:

We stood by a pond that winter day,

And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,

And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;

They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

                                                                                                                                            (1867, 1–4)

    Like Swinburne’s “blown buds,” Hardy’s seeds will not even have a chance to grow in this landscape; it is too cold to allow anything to grow. Like Swinburne’s “wild” and “wintry leaves,” Hardy’s “leaves” are without life. They are “starving.” Like Keats’s “dead leaf,” they have no nourishment in this cold climate that offers the poet little more than a reflection of his imaginative despair. Nor is the frosty “pond” simply a mirror of the poet’s imaginative poverty. “Neutral Tones” is also a poem about a personal relationship that is as dead as the scene that surrounds it. No happy issue is likely in this dual landscape of loss.

Eliot, Pound, H.D.

    This same rhetorical environment is still in place in High Modernism. There is no more baleful landscape of the interior than that of The Waste Land (1922). To find it throughout the poem is not surprising. Eliot’s “broken” “tent” (1922, 173) is the poet’s own imagination in pieces, an apostrophe rather than a reflection of the toxic effects of real life. The imagery of the poem’s opening lines is familiar.

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

                                                                                                                                             (1922, 1–4)

    The “land” is, as it is in Hardy and Swinburne, “dead”; the “stirring” of “roots”—we already know this, too—is impossible. For Eliot, as for all our poets, this presumable crisis in communication is actually an opportunity to have a new subject to write about: the image of nature as a cipher for failure and loss. Eliot’s “objective correlative” (1919a, 145) is Ruskin’s “Pathetic fallacy” (1856, 3: 148) in modern dress. 

    Pound, by contrast, effectively departs from Romantic practice by focusing instead on what Douglas Mao calls “solid objects” (1998) that stand apart from the poet as material wholes reflecting neither the self nor nature. The result, however, is the same—Pound’s objects, like Keats’s urn or Yeats’s Byzantium, are also projections of a poetic ideal. A short lyric such as “Medallion,” the concluding poem of the Mauberley sequence (1920), imitates in its concrete language and austere design the autonomous object it represents and to whose simulation it aspires. When the “solid object” is drawn from nature, however, the Romantic illusion is undone like a trick of magic. It is the real project of “In A Station of the Metro” (1913):

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough. (1–2)

    Here the natural image of “petals on a wet, black bough” is called in to elucidate the urban, photographic image of the “faces in the crowd” with which the poem begins. The result is the laying of one snapshot upon another, much as the “petals” lie upon the “black bough.” The natural metaphor doesn’t elucidate the urban one so much as it redoubles its intentional structure as a metaphor. Rather than make the “faces” more vivid, it makes the “petals” in the metaphor more vivid than what they represent. The metaphor’s sequence is the representation of its first representation. For all Pound’s efforts—he brooded over the poem’s composition for almost a year—the result is a Romantic one: The natural image succeeds in redeeming the dreary city by refreshing it through its use as art. The “solid object” is undone by the method of its construction.

    Nature remains a dominion for use even when the poet is H.D. Hieratic and imperious, she, too, finds in nature the sermons that she puts there. The speaker of “Oread” (1914) invokes the turbulence of the sea as a source of power. Although the personae is a classical nymph of the ocean, the speaker is really the poet seeking inspiration for her song. Being overwhelmed by the waves is afflatus, not dejection. It prompts the speaker to assign to the sea attributes from another order of nature, those of the “great pines” whose “green” may match that of the sea in color but whose qualities are different from it as phenomena. The poet has come back to life, thanks to the Romanticism he presumably abjures. The “pools of fir” that the sea becomes in the conceit with which the poem concludes are a metaphor for a metaphor twice removed from a scene that was never anything but a prop for making a poetic object. As it does for Pound, nature remains a source for the poet’s image of a poem.

    Even if one is to grant to Pound’s Imagism the lack of interest in nature for which it is customarily celebrated, a more familiar problem remains. The cost of Imagism’s revolution requires it to distinguish sharply between form and vision, even if vision is secured, as it is in H.D., as a heightened function of form. This is, to be sure, the Romantic distinction between nature and speaker in a different register, but it is also the distinction between the ideal and the concrete that Saussure deconstructs at the same moment in historical time that sees the Imagist experiment in poetry. When Language Poetry invokes Imagism as a literary source, it is justifiable. When it links it to the Saussurean tradition, notably Derrida, it is not. This is, as I noted in the Introduction and in Chapter 1, the customary misreading of structuralism and deconstruction. Like Saussure, Derrida is no formalist, even if one uplifts him as a prior authority rather than regards him, as New Historicism does, as a foe. Nor is New Formalism’s distinction between confessional and formal poetry more reasonable. Confessional verse often opens new formal vistas as a direct function of its visionary impulses, an inevitability that becomes clear with the arrival of hip hop. Modernism’s more supple revolution in verse comes with the poems of D.H. Lawrence.

D.H. Lawrence’s Revolution in Verse

    Speaker and scene have a wholly different relationship in Lawrence’s poems than they do in those of Eliot, Pound, or H.D. What is Lawrence’s own revolution in verse? Lawrence reorganizes the customary relationship between speaker and scene by reanimating nature and personages in a fresh way. The Romantic practice of using nature as a projection of self is rejected in favor of reexamining the speaker’s relation to landscape. In “The Evening Land,” a poem included in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), the project is explicit:

And I, who am half in love with you,

What am I in love with?

My own imaginings? (80–82)

    Interrogating its surroundings, the self is a sequence of Paterian moments in constant dialogue with what lies outside it. Each dissolves into the other. The result is to loosen the distinction between speaker and scene, subject and object, undoing their categorical opposition by apprehending both in the sequence of time (Laird, 1988). “For Lawrence,” writes Marjorie Perloff, “there is no longer a distinction between subject and object, consciousness and the external world. Rather, the new space is one in which the mind and its objects are present in a single realm of proximity” (Perloff, 1985, 126–27).

    This transformation gives new life, not to the speaker—not at first, anyway—but to the environment that surrounds it. This shift in the relation between speaker and scene defines Lawrence’s poems and is their guiding principle. No victim of the fallacy of “expressive form,” as R.P. Blackmur calls it (1935), Lawrence places the speaker in a relation of active exchange with the environment. Above all, it grants the speaker agency. In the process—and in order to do so—poetic language is also reimagined. Its “metaphoricity,” as Fiona Becket puts it, is “radical” (1997, 46). By positing nature and its objects, including human ones, as radically external to the speaker, it prompts speaker and scene to interact.

    The shift is doubly surprising. Lawrence’s real tradition as a poet is neither Eliot’s apostrophic late Romanticism nor Pound’s empiricist modernism. It is pastoral in the strict sense (Empson, 1935; Williams, 1973a). Pastoral is best suited to Lawrence as a poet working to free himself from Romantic precedent. Pastoral is a contradictory literary condition that simultaneously idealizes nature and regards it as a site of working interaction between species and environment. Virgil splits the tension between the two in Theocritus’s Idylls by presenting an Arcadian landscape in the Eclogues and a landscape of labor in the Georgics. In neither case is nature the occasion for Romantic apostrophe—for the expression of imagination through landscape—but for the conversion of idealization to transaction. Lawrence exploits pastoral’s “double function,” as Terry Gifford calls it (1999, 52), by transforming the Arcadian idealization of nature into what Lawrence Buell calls an “ecocentric repossession of pastoral” (1995, 52).

    It is the poet, however, not the farmer, who does the work. Its effects change the environment it seems only to mirror or represent. Lawrence’s language is ecological, not solipsistic. It not only places the poet in the landscape—any subjective utterance does that. Its subjectivity creates, not foils for itself, but predicates that it interrogates and that pass from possibility to recognition, from sowing to harvest. Lawrence’s poetic labor gains agency for both self and other by shaking loose the lineaments of assumption about a scene and its objects the way a farmer—a husband, etymologically a tiller of the soil—shakes a harvest basket to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Husbandry, the working interaction of species and environment, the original meaning of the notion of “culture,” long precedes the ideological distinction between culture and nature that is, like industrial civilization, a product of the nineteenth century. Husbandry is the active work of pastoral as an environmental rather than a Romantic mode. It well expresses the capaciousness of Lawrence’s poetic project by yoking, etymologically, the relation of speaker and its objects in amorous as well as agricultural terms. It yokes the environmental preoccupations of Lawrence’s landscape poems to the erotic preoccupations of both Lawrence’s love poems and his fiction. Neither phallic nor gynocentric, Lawrentian “husbandry” is gender-smashing, “pansexual” in human terms and, mutatis mutandis, also faithful to Pan, the god of agriculture. Lawrence’s environmentalism is holistic. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, roots and stems are continuous; neither is more privileged than the other (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980).

Lawrentian husbandry finds its poetic analogue and source in Whitman. Lawrence’s long-acknowledged debt to his American precursor measures his difference, like Whitman’s own, from High Romanticism. The difference lies in the new relationship between speaker and scene that separates Whitman from Wordsworth, particularly the different status accorded nature despite the continuities in self-absorption and in the interest in common things that they share. For Whitman, nature is genuinely other, not because of a lamentable alienation of self from world, but because of an intentional poetic strategy that regards both natural and domestic things as nurturing and objective rather than as projections of states of mind. Whether it is “the daily housework” in “To Think of Time” (1891–92, VI:66) or “a spear of summer grass” in “Song of Myself” (1891–92, 1:5), what stands apart from the self is what aids in its survival and provides it with delight. Indeed, the link between erotic and agricultural husbandry is entirely explicit:

Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat,

 it shall be you!

Sun so generous it shall be you!

Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall

 be you!

You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!

Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub

 against me it shall be you!

Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak,

 loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you!

Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d,

 mortal I have ever touch’d, it shall be you.

                                                                                                                       (1891–92, 24:537–43)

    Lawrence’s poems repay close attention by revealing their common intent as discursive husbandry whether they are long or short, familiar or obscure, brutal or soft-spoken. They are revisions of the situations with which they begin, whether it is the revision of the speaker’s stance toward its objects, its assumptions about them, or its use of figuration to restructure its relationship to them. Let us take up each kind in turn, beginning with a canonical poem, “Snake,” and concluding with a very brief and presumably marginal one, “Green.”

    These poems come from different moments in Lawrence’s career—”Snake” from Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), “Green” from Look! We Have Come Through (1917)—but they share a stance despite the time of their publication, and they share a style. Keith Sagar has argued that Birds, Beasts and Flowers marks a shift in Lawrence’s verse defined by “a healthy purging of his hitherto … anthropomorphic relation to nature” and its replacement by a concern with “systems, interactions, and interdependencies”—with “what,” says Sagar, “we have come to call ecology” (2001, 14, 152.) This is true, to be sure, not only of “Snake,” but of other poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers such as “Almond Blossom” and “Cypresses.” Sagar, however, overstates the case. Lawrence’s concern with ecology rather than anthropomorphism is actually present in his verse from the start. Lawrence’s reassessment of the relation between speaker and scene is not a function of his development but part of a strategy that attends his poems as a whole. Indeed, the early “Green” is an even more radical reassessment of the relation between speaker and scene than those at work in the later “Snake” and “Almond Blossom.” Its syntactical specificity in elaborating this reassessment is extraordinary, and shows the constancy of Lawrence’s poetic design.

    “Snake” dismantles Romantic allegory before redefining it. The speaker’s sun-bleached encounter with the snake outside his house (“hus” or “house” is the first syllable of “husband”) is by turns tender, stark, and matter-of-fact. It requires little in the way of close or figural reading because of its almost novelistic directness, narrating the speaker’s shifting emotions as he and the snake exchange looks and measure one another, less to assess a course of action than to assess each other’s potential meaning for the other.

    Here allegory intervenes, not on the part of the poet but on the part of the reader. This is the real text of the poem, from which the reader is visibly absent. But the reader, of course, is, invisibly, everywhere, trying to make the poem tell a story that it does not tell. “Consciousness,” says Gifford, “is transformed into conscience” as the poet subdues his sense of the snake as evil, and, as this allegorical reading of the poem concludes, “awe is transformed into humility” (1999, 163). The dangers of reading “Snake” in this way, however, are what the poem enacts. Like Milton’s language of temptation in his descriptions of the Garden of Eden, assessing sense in “Snake” tests the reader, not the poet. Eve’s “ringlets” are “wanton” in a pre-fallen state (1674, 4: 306), not for our original parents, who are innocent, but for the postlapsarian reader, who, as Stanley Fish has pointed out (1967), is not. Similarly, the speaker in Lawrence’s poem is innocent. This is an open-ended encounter by a water-trough, although Lawrence’s reader is led, inevitably, into looking for significance where there is none beyond what is stated. Lawrence’s literalism is actually a high form of figuration. To recant a symbolic fall or slothfulness is the reader’s first duty. To do so is also to enact what the poem itself enacts—a shift from allegory in the traditional sense to one in the modern sense. Not a key that unlocks a door, the signifier “snake” is a key that unlocks every door, a process of reading whereby the reader forsakes reading by fixed codes in favor of reading signs as metalanguage. Allegory here, as it is for Angus Fletcher (1964) or Paul de Man (1979), means reading the signifier, not for what it means—not, that is, as a sign—but for what it may be said to mean—as a signifier. Lawrence shakes off the sign much as he does the water with which he bathes himself in the sun. What is separated from the sign or husk is the seed which is its real bounty.

    In “Cypresses,” Lawrence denies allegory while simultaneously resurrecting it. It is the reverse of the avuncular undoing of the snake’s allegorical trappings. Because the speaker denies that “a great secret” (6) is to be found among the cypresses, it grants them a new kind of meaning by virtue of its denial. Is there “a great secret” (6) to the Tuscan cypresses? They are “monumental” (10), but they have “shed their sound and finished all their echoing” (26). The natural image is a “monument” because it is not. The idealization allows Lawrence—quite unlike Keats and his nightingale or Hardy and his thrush—to plunge back into the environment rather than to stand apart from it:

They say the fit survive;

But I invoke the spirits of the lost.

Those that have not survived, the darkly lost,

To bring their meaning back into life again. (72–75)

    What is “monumental” is survival—the survival of the species, thanks to death, not despite it. Death is the principle of life, not its antithesis. It is the precondition of life in all its mutability. The poem, like the Etruscan cypresses, is an environment with which the speaker interacts, not a tableau of his imagination or a symbol for his conquest of time.

    In a poem such as “Almond Blossom,” Lawrence refashions allegory by collapsing the difference between nature and culture with which the poem begins. Its end is in its beginning. Tenor and vehicle are inappropriate categories with which to assess metaphors which are not, as it turns out, metaphors. Nor are their components distinct classes of external phenomena:

Even iron can put forth,

Even iron. (1–2)

    Far from hypostatizing the traditional battle between nature and culture for which Lawrence is customarily celebrated, the poem calls into question the stability of the opposition by subjecting “iron” to the same natural process of decay as that which assails the almond tree. The common force that binds them is what, in Pater’s words, “rusts iron and ripens corn” (1873, 234). Indeed, “iron” is also a natural element. It is listed on the table of elements. But, like the serpent, culture has enlisted it to signify its dominance over nature in the manufacturing age to which Nottingham, and Lawrence’s lungs, are witness and victim.

    The poem makes no bones about this double movement, granting to “iron” both its natural status and the cultural one for which it has become a second-order signifier—a “myth” in Roland Barthes’s sense (1957):

This is the iron age,

But let us take heart

Seeing iron break and bug,

Seeing rusty iron puff with clouds of blossom.

The almond tree,

December’s bare iron hooks sticking out of earth.

The almond tree,

That knows the deadliest poison, like a snake

In supreme bitterness. (3–11)

    Referring to his own work, Lawrence even likens the mythology of “iron” to that of the “snake.” “Like a snake,” iron has been socialized, as it were. The proof is its “supreme bitterness.” Iron’s literalness, exemplified by its variety of uses in the material world—“bare iron hooks”—is evacuated by the chain of transformations by means of which it is denaturalized as the line concludes—“sticking out of the earth.” Its literalness is vouchsafed by its subsequent figural destiny, which is, ironically, another kind of literalness, this one stemming, as it were, once more from its organic status. In a companion poem, “Bare Almond Trees,” the trees’ branches are also material—“like iron implements, twisted hideous”—but are once again, in the same figuration, “sticking out of the earth” as the line concludes (8).

    No wonder “trees suffer,” as Lawrence puts it later in “Almond Blossom” (25). They are “like races” (25). The comparison is discomfiting but logically consistent in the constant figural exchange. “Iron,” “trees,” “races”—categorically distinct, presumably, but neither epistemologically distinct in their behavior as signifiers, nor politically distinct in their behavior as elements in history. Iron and trees alike are “like drawn blades” that are “never sheathed” (27). Like “races” in history, they cross boundaries. They are “alien trees in alien lands” (28). They are characterized by their “prolixity” (35). Because, like “iron,” “trees” can mean many things, the myths of history and its ideas can subdue them into meaning only one thing. Meaning, to use Saussure’s words, “follows no law other than that of tradition, and because it is based on tradition, it is arbitrary” (1916, 74). Even “the Cross”(48) is a tree whose elemental status and its mythical one are at odds in the dual glory to which it pretends. It “steps out” of its own “sacred forthcoming” (56) as a religious sign or symbol to become “a naked tree of blossom” (57)—a migrant sème or floating signifier. The tree reveals itself to be a tree, not a Cross, naked and true not because of its symbolic glory but despite it. Its simplicity is inseparable from its symbolism since its sacredness is, by definition, a transcendence of its simplicity.

“Green They Shone”

    A brief and seemingly marginal poem such as “Green” allows Lawrence to engage in the kind of renewed agency for the poetic speaker that this heightened practice can produce in even the most miniature form. “Green” requires an allegorical reading more than “Snake” because it offers no first-order allegorizations. Like “Almond Blossom,” its focus is, despite its human result, on its materials. They are not even phenomena. The title of the poem designates its real actor (or, more precisely, its chief actant), the signifier “green.” Note the career of the signifier as the poem unfolds. Here is the text in full:

The dawn was apple-green,

 The sky was green wine held up in the sun,

The moon was a golden petal between.

She opened her eyes, and green

 They shone, clear like flowers undone

For the first time, now for the first time seen. (1–6)

    First, “green” is a predicate. It is what the subject “dawn” is (1). Then, it is an object—“the sky was green wine” (2). The color is assigned, not to the sky, as it is to dawn, but to the metaphor for the sky, “wine.” It is, in other words, now positioned wholly apart from the subject, as something that measures it, but measures it as something different and distinct from it at the very moment its intent is to heighten its specificity. Finally, “green” is, by virtue of the Latinate inversion which makes the color of the beloved’s eyes precede and even usurp the place of the eyes themselves, a subject in its own right—“green/They shone.”

    The poem as a whole is a reverse declension of the same signifier from object (“green” as a third position in relation to a subject, grammatically another person or thing) to subject—“green” becomes agent: “green/They shone.” The inversion or transplant from another language’s structure into English accomplishes a change in the architecture of the English expression itself, expanding its expressiveness by an act of rhetorical husbandry. Husbandry, by definition, is an activity that is both natural and cultural or, to put it more exactly, that is really neither one. It is both. When noun and adjective—“green” and “green”—trade places, substance and characteristic also do so. When they are aided in doing so, thanks to the fortuitous nature of rhyme—a pure coincidence of sound that appears to mirror sense without epistemological justification—the status of the identity of noun and characteristic as contingent is secured and erased at one and the same time.

    This paradox or deconstructive turn is precisely Lawrence’s point and advances his environmental agenda. The fluctuation in language and the fluctuation among its objects are also one and the same. The transposition of what is presumably external to speech is accomplished by a rhetorical transposition within speech. By virtue of his figural virtuosity, Lawrence resituates the object into a subject. Language effects a phenomenological change in the environment. It is the labor by which the poet actively engages the environment to produce a transformation in both the environment and himself.

    The inversion of “green” and “green” encapsulates wider and wider aspects of Lawrence’s art and even his life. As an act of figural husbandry, Lawrence’s art also transplants the Latinate—“the warm South,” in Keats’s phrase (1819, 15)—into his poetic diction, much as Lawrence transplanted himself into warmer and warmer climes, from the Mediterranean to New Mexico, to accommodate his illness. The same aim attends both his writing and his body: making the subject “green” or healthy, repositioning it from being an object or victim into being an active and living principle that redeems its own fate at the hands of time.

1. Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

2. Becket, Fiona. 1997. D.H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

3. Blackmur, R.P. 1935. “D.H. Lawrence and Expressive Form.” In Language as Gesture. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1974.

4. Buell, Lawrencee. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

5. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

6. De Man, Paul. 1979. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press.

7. Eagleton, Terry, 2000. The Idea of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. 

8. Eliot, T.S. 1919. “Hamlet and His Problems.” In Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1932.

9. Eliot, T.S. 1922. The Waste Land. In Collected Poems (1963). Rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970.

10. Empson, William. 1935. Some Versions of Pastoral. Rpt. New York: New Directions, 1974.

11. Fish, Stanley. 1968. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in ‘Paradise Lost.’ Second Edition, 1998. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

12. Fletcher, Angus. 1964. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

13. Gifford, Terry. 1999. Pastoral. London and New York: Routledge. Gilbert, Sandra M. 2001. “Apocalypse now (and then), Or, D.H. Lawrence and the swan in the electron.”

14. Gifford, Terry.The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence. Ed. Anne Fernihough. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 235-52.

15. Hardy, Thomas. 1867. “Neutral Tones.” Collected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1968.

16. H[ilda] D[oolitle]. 1914. “Oread.” In Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1988.

17. Keats, John. 1818-19/1820. Hyperion: A Fragment. In Selected Poems and Letters. Ed. Douglas Bush. Boston: Riverside, 1959.

18. Keats, John.“Ode to a Nightingale.” In Selected Poems and Letters. Ed. Douglas Bush. Boston: Riverside, 1959.

19. Laird, Holly. 1988. Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D.H. Lawrence. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2015.

20. Laird, Holly.“Introduction: A Poet for the Ages.” D.H. Lawrence Review. 40:2 (2015), 1-10.

21. Lawrence, D.H. All references and citations are from The Works of D.H. Lawrence: The Poems. Vol 1. Ed. Christopher Pollnitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

22. Mao, Douglas. 1998. Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

23. Milton, John. 1674. Paradise Lost. In Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York, The Odyssey Press, 1957.

24. Pater, Walter. 1873. “Conclusion.” In The Renaissance. New Library Edition. London: Macmillan, 1910.

25. Perloff, Marjorie. 1985. “Lawrence’s Lyric Theater: Birds, Beasts and Flowers.” D.H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. Eds. Peter Balbert and Philip L. Marcus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 108-29.

26. Pound, Ezra. 1913. “In A Station of the Metro.” In Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1957.

27. Pound, Ezra. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. In Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1957.

28. Ruskin, John. 1856. Modern Painters. Vol. 3. Rpt. London: J.M. Dent, n.d. Sagar, Keith, 2001. “The Resurrection of Pan: Teaching Biocentric Consciousness and Deep Ecology in Lawrence’s Poetry and Late Nonfiction.” In Approaches to Teaching the Works of D.H. Lawrence. Eds. M. Elizabeth Sargent and Garry Watson. New York: Modern Language Association, 2001, 146-156.

29. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. Eds. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

30. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. 1866. “The Garden of Proserpine.” In Selected Poems. Manchester: Fyfield Books, 1987.

31. Whitman, Walt. 1891-2. “To Think of Time.” In Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michel Moon. New York: Norton, 2002.

32. Whitman, Walt. 1891-2. “Song of Myself.” In Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michel Moon. New York: Norton, 2002.

33. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press.

34. Wordsworth, William. 1850. The Prelude. In Selected Poems and Prefaces. Ed.Jack Stillinger. Boston: Riverside, 1968.

 

 “‘Green They Shone:’: The Poem As Environment.” The D.H. Lawrence Review 43, no. 1/2 (2018): 66–80.

The Feudal Unconscious: Capitalism and the Family Romance

by Perry Meisel

          Psychoanalysis is not only a science of the individual; it is also a historical science. Well beyond Freud’s familiar excursions into psychohistory and psychobiography—one thinks of Moses, for example, or of Leonardo—lies another Freud, one whose texts make a surprising historical argument by virtue of their metaphors. Drawing from a series of wider historical dialogues, the vocabularies of psychical process exceed the history of the individual. Mikhail Bakhtin alerts us to their specificity and functions in Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, composed with his friend Valentin Voloshinov and published under Voloshinov’s name in 1927. There, Bakhtin demonstrates that Freud is a historical thinker because of the tropes he employs:

The family, that castle and keep of capitalism, evidently has become a thing economically and socially little understood and little taken to heart; and that is what has brought on its wholesale sexualization, as if thereby it were made newly meaningful or “made strange,” as our formalists would say. The Oedipus complex is indeed a magnificent way of making the family unit “strange.” The father is not the entrepreneur, and the son is not his heir—the father is only the mother’s lover, and his son is his rival!1 

The fantasy world of the family romance and the real conditions of capitalism mystify or distort one another thanks to their different metaphors. They are distinct, they are systematic, and they are at odds. The father is, in bourgeois fact, an “entrepreneur,” but in infantile fantasy he is his son’s “rival” in a medieval romance, the antagonist in a quest-romance of love won and lost. 

          Bakhtin’s stunning description of the family as the “castle and keep of capitalism” is especially helpful. From a Marxist point of view, the family romance has a familiar structure. The grant of authority to the father for the sake of protection is, after all, feudalism. It is a feudalism of the unconscious, a mutualism of vassal and lord, knight and king. It is the baleful landscape of Harold Bloom’s Romanticism, the internalization, as Bloom puts it, of quest-romance (1968).2 For the modern subject—the subject as such—feudalism is the Imaginary mode of thought that misreads or represses the Symbolic order of capitalism. The family romance thus preserves feudalism in the bourgeois home by making every man a king. Value or authority, in wealth or in kinship, is in capitalism no more than a position in a system of exchange. The feudal unconscious—the term with which I concluded a discussion of representation at the close of The Literary Freud—masks the symbolic in a more grounded mythology of rule.3 Its sociality is radically historicizing. Freud—modernity—structures the psyche by putting the discursive modes in conflict. Their strife provides us with a picture of the psyche by providing us with a picture of the psyche’s social history. Primary process is feudalism; secondary process is capitalism. The tension between them is, from the point of view of literary models, the tension between, in Bakhtin’s terms, epic and novel.

         Freud’s tropes describe what they declare. If the life of the family is the epic world of the “castle,” its “keep” is the modern world of contending tongues and the free marketplace that surrounds and isolates it—the world of the “entrepreneur,” of finance and exchange, of parliamentary democracy and applied science, and of colonialism, its source of raw materials or, in the psychoanalytic variant, of somatic impulses ready for conversion, like natural resources, into the products of the ego and modern trade. If Romanticism internalizes quest-romance, capitalism externalizes it in a new way. Freud’s well-known description of himself as a “conquistador” in a letter to Fliess in 1900 is a gaudy example of the second system of tropes that structure Freud’s description of the mind, the tropes of colonial conquest that inaugurate capitalism and dramatize the subordination of primary process by secondary process, of the id by the ego, of the past by the future, as the individual, like civilization, proceeds upon its rocky and dubious path of progress through repression.4 

  Andrew Cole’s reading of Hegel shows Freud’s historical argument emerging in statu nascendi at the dawn of Romanticism and the beginning of the passage into the industrial capitalism with which we customarily associate the nineteenth century. Hegel’s split subject is already Freud’s own. Hegel’s metaphors are no less historical and no less exact than Freud’s psychoanalytic ones. Indeed, Hegel’s metaphors signify the moment of their emergence in real time. For Hegel, the transition from the implacable reciprocity of lord and bondsman under feudalism to the plastic mutuality of self and other under capitalism is, as Cole points out, “the specific political structure and social arrangement within which modernity and freedom are realized.”5 Like Freud, Hegel uses metaphor in more than an ornamental or supplementary way. It designates a specific historical regimen and mode of human praxis. Feudalism and the unconscious are the scaffolding upon which capitalism and consciousness are respectively propped. 

  Hegel enshrines his ghostly other as a permanent feature of subjectivity. Like Freud’s feudal unconscious, Hegel’s Middle Ages may slip away into time, but they do not disappear. This, of course, is Hegel’s “double-consciousness,” the alterity that is the condition of the psychological subject, or, in its historical variant, the feudal past that persists in the modern present.6 Hegel’s feudal ghosts have their contemporary counterpart in the haunted tombs and graveyards of the Gothic Revival in England that accompany the High Romanticism of Wordsworth’s mournful churchyards. Freud has his own contemporary counterpart in the haunt- ed tombs and graveyards of German expressionism, particularly those of German cinema. No wonder “double-consciousness” is a premonitory version of Freudian melancholia, the implacable “shadow,” as Freud calls it, “that fell upon the ego”(1917) thanks to the infantile identifications of family life whose ghosts persist into adulthood.7 

  Nor is the melancholia of double-consciousness an individual affair. It has brutal results politically. A century after Hegel’s, W.e.B. DuBois’s “double-consciousness”—“this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”—is what Paul Gilroy calls “post-colonial melancholia.”8 The psychological other is also the colonial subaltern. In The Ego and the Id (1923), the great metaphor of the ego as a “frontier-creature” patrolling the boundary between the psyche and the external world is also the “frontier” between feudalism and the global capitalism that succeeds it.9 The “romance” of Orientalism that serves as colonialism’s apology is another form of nostalgia for feudalism.10 Orientalism, like feudalism, is a metaphor for primary process. Wearing the garments of global or anthropological feudalism—the costumes of the east or those of Africa, the Native Americas, or the black south—Orientalism is also a return of the feudal repressed, another way of making capitalism’s medieval past strange or unfamiliar. Its atavism is aristocratic. Like Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko or Cooper’s Native American heroes, its literary champions are, in Dryden’s memorable phrase, “noble savages.”11 

  Freud employs his two systems of metaphor to describe primary and secondary process throughout his career. Having introduced the terms primary process and secondary process late in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) to refine what he at he time calls the difference between consciousness and the unconscious, Freud maintains his historical metaphors even after this difference becomes less important.12 For the purpose of describing Freud’s two vocabularies and the historical argument they make, the difference between early and late Freud is therefore a negligible one. such continuity is rare in Freud: Typically notions from the first phase undergo major revisions, particularly regarding consciousness and the unconscious, and between the ego and libido. When, beginning with the metapsychological papers and formalized with Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud shifts his system from a “topographical” to an “economic” or “dynamic” one, the ego becomes both libidinal and largely unconscious. What stands against it is no longer what is unconscious but what is repressed. yet Freud’s system of historical metaphors nonetheless conforms to both models. If the unconscious is feudalism in the first model and consciousness is capitalism, in the second model capitalism is the ego and feudalism the repressed. The feudal unconscious and the feudal repressed are one and the same. 

  The Freudian unconscious is a history of the terms of which it is composed conceptually. It is social, political, and linguistic, scarred by the influences it absorbs and redistributes.13 It does so by making the psyche as a whole a system of unconscious agencies, each one obscuring the terms of the other, and each one reflecting the tropes of a historical period. As a tropology, psychoanalysis instantiates the phenomenology it describes. Indeed, it makes its literary and philosophical sources an example of the mental functioning it narrates by embalming them in its language, expunging its anxieties of influence by entombing them in what it represents. This is as true of Freud’s precedents in clinical psychology as it is of his philosophical precedent in Hegel, whose double-consciousness finds additional analogues in Pierre Janet’s double conscience and Charcot’s condition seconde, both of which furnish psychoanalysis with prototypes for its notion of the unconscious in scientific terms no less concrete than the historical prototype provided by Hegel.14 

  Psychoanalysis guarantees what it proposes not despite its literary form but because of it. Its récit is the residue of the tropes with which its histoire is identical. Clear and consistent to an unlikely fault, Freud’s double system of metaphor needs to be teased out of his texts in a careful way. If Bakhtin is too impatient to do so, and too tendentious with regard to his dialogical project to let Freud speak for himself, it is no matter: Freud does so on his own with little resistance.

Two Languages in The Interpretation of Dreams

  A brief survey of The Interpretation of Dreams will show us how the two vocabularies behave and prepare us for an examination of how their historicism functions in Freud’s work early and late. Although Freud revised The Interpretation of Dreams with each new edition, as he did the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), both before and after the shift in his model, these revisions do not, as Strachey’s comprehensive footnotes show, import the vocabulary of either feudalism or capitalism into the dream book from a later point of view. They are there from the start. Primary process (or the realm of unconscious wishes) is feudal, and secondary process (or the machinery of consciousness or distortion) is capitalist. 

  What secondary process adds to the dream by distorting the infantile or primary-process wishes beneath it is a system of a different metaphorical order than the feudal one of a “scene” in which, as in a play, something is “represented” or “experienced”—a system of “speculations” and “mutual relations,” of proposition and assignment (p. 534). This is the tropology of the capitalist marketplace and system of credit. Indeed, in “hallucinatory dreams”—dreams with striking iconic imagery such as the images of royal personages—“excitation moves in a backward direction” (p. 542). This backwardness is historical in both a real and psychological way—its imagery is feudal. By contrast, “the direction taken by psychical processes arising from the unconscious during waking life”—the distortions of secondary process—are “progressive” in their defensive impetus to mask what is “regressive” in their character (p. 542). Here distortion “might be described,” says Freud, as “a substitute for an infantile scene modified by being transferred on to a recent experience” (p. 546). The present moment screens or alters the past because it follows it, not because its nature is different. secondary process, that is, shifts the vocabulary or metaphoricity of primary process into another lexical register, replacing an earlier metaphorical system (feudalism) with a later one (capitalism). This substitution or transvaluation is not unlike a system of fluctuating values or credit of the kind familiar in modern money. Precious coins are the currency of kings; money and credit, the currency of capitalists. 

  Marx describes this movement as it unfolds in real time: 

When a coin leaves the mint, it sets out on the road to the melting pot. During their currency, gold coins get worn, some more, others less. The name of gold and the substance of gold, the nominal content and the real content, begin to part company. Gold coins bearing the same name come to have different weights. Gold as medium of circulation differentiates from gold as standard of prices, and thus ceases to be an actual equivalent for the commodities whose prices it realizes. The his- tory of coinage during the Middle Ages and during the modern era on into the eighteenth century, is the history of these confusions. The natural tendency of the process of circulation to transform the essentiality of gold in the coin into the semblance of gold, to transform the coin into a mere symbol of its official content in metal, secures recognition in the latest legislation concerning the degree of wear which will suffice to demonetize a gold piece, to make it unfit for legal tender. The fact that, as the outcome of the currency of money, a severance ensues between the real content and the nominal content of a coin, between its actual metallic existence and its functional existence, discloses to us a latent possibility that the function of metallic money in coinage may be taken over by tokens or symbols of some other material.15 

This transformation of “the essentiality of gold” into a symbol—the severing of “the real content and the nominal content”—is precisely the difference between primary and secondary process in the psychoanalytic model. While Freud is less sanguine about the natural status of primary process than Marx is about the sensuality of feudalism, the structural homology is nonetheless striking. These different systems of exchange signify “the progressive control exercised upon our instinctual life by our thought-activity” as time goes by.16 Here one is “inclined to renounce as unprofitable”—this metaphor is decisive—“the formation and retention of such intense wishes as children know” (p. 552), much as coins lose their value. While the metaphorical differences may seem to be offhand—decorative rather than substantive, dramatic rather than systematic—the very reverse is true. A new system of value is required for both culture and the individual. The difference in metaphor augurs the historicism of Freud’s unspoken argument about the mind’s relation to the real events of a past broader than that of persons, and of a past whose own record returns with the history of each individual mind. 

  Even Freud’s single figures of speech split in a way that allows them to con- tain the two metaphorical systems simultaneously. Most decisive is Freud’s term for representing the way in which primary and secondary process communicate or interact, the German Bahnung—the “pathway” or “facilitation,” as Strachey various- ly translates the term—between the two systems (p. 611). That Bahnung can be translated as both “pathway” and “facilitation” evinces the doubleness and pliability of Freud’s vocabulary in both the German original and in the interpretative splitting its translation requires. each translation is sound, although “pathway” leans toward the feudal, evoking a path through an imagined forest peopled by ogres, while “facilitation,” by contrast, is a technological metaphor drawn from the vocabulary of applied science. The same may be said for the connotative structure of the German Schicksal, which Strachey translates, in a quantitative flourish, as “vicissitude” in the key metapsychological essay of 1915, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.” and yet Schicksal also means, in high literary fashion, “fate,” “fortune,” or “destiny.” Once again, a quantitative or scientific metaphor coexists with a feudal one in the same signifier. Both examples recall, too, the infamous debate over the years about Strachey’s translation throughout Freud’s work of Seele— “soul”—as “psyche.”17 

  More to the point is that the two models also account for the clinical behavior of the mind. In primary process, symbolization is fixed. In secondary process, it is mobile. This is why in the analytic scenario the fixed symbolizations of primary process or childhood may be reassessed and fixed bonds loosened and remobilized, allowing the patient to revise the determinations of primary-process ideation. Feudal wealth, as it were, becomes no more than another currency. As “capital” rather than as coin, primary process is fungible, subject to change through mature reflection as an accommodation to the sadness of bourgeois life rather than as a feckless capitulation to the brutal terms of the feudal unconscious. Psychical energy is “the quantity at the disposal of the entrepreneur”18 (p. 561)— that is, of the capital supplied to him. Strachey’s footnote reminds us that “capital” is not to be construed as though the wish were simply an unconscious thought—as a quality—but as a quantity.19 Unlike the feudal metaphor of royal dramatis personae, “capital” evokes no scene, even as it prompts the intensity of one. Feudalism’s tropology is evocative, imagistic, dramatic, painterly—its style is in accord with the passionate arts and iconography of its day. Capitalism’s tropology, by contrast, is dry, quantitative, dispassionate; its style, too, is in accord with its lack of spectacle and its measured protocols. 

Feudalism and the Family Romance 

  Freud’s feudal metaphors for primary process, particularly the personages whose images people it, take center stage in “Family Romances” (1909), a relative- ly early and brief essay on the subject originally published in a collection of essays on myth edited by Otto Rank. The term “Oedipus complex,” the customary synonym for the term “family romance,” makes its first appearance a year later, in “A special Type of Object-Choice Made by Men” in 1910, although “family romance” is more rather than less exacting, highlighting the fluid and situational way in which its positions come to be established. Clinically, the term explains the ease with which Oedipal formations occur regardless of anatomically conceived notions of gender, as, for example, with same-sex parents. Historically, it has the advantage of describing more accurately the role feudalism plays in Freud’s imagination. As he writes in “Family Romances”: 

The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development. It is quite essential that that liberation should occur and it may be presumed that it has been to some extent achieved by everyone who has reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations.20

  The individual’s development—indeed, the emergence of the “individual” as such—is nothing less than his or her “liberation” from absolutist or religious authority. No wonder the “progress of society” as well as of the individual depends upon it. The very movement of history is one from a feudal or absolutist condition to a parliamentary or democratic one. It is therefore not surprising that “for a small child his parents are at first the only authority and source of all belief” (p. 232). Like a vassal under the dominion of a lord and master, the world is defined by a system of single allegiance to a single authority, an allegiance that is also “the source,” in a decidedly religious metaphor based on a notion of faith, “of all belief.” The child’s world is, simply put, a feudal one. When that world is sur- mounted over time, it nonetheless remains because it is the world in memory of infantile sexuality, the individual’s unconscious. 

  The “mental impulses of childhood,” which the world of the “family romance” both is and represents, also “enable . . . us to understand the nature of myths” because myths feature the same political arrangements as infantile sexuality (p. 238). Both are part of a world based on the absolute “authority” of a ruling family and “unquestioned belief” in its values. Christianity is nothing new, it simply refines the specifics of family interaction. even, perhaps especially, a child of “humble parents”—the baby Jesus, for example—will compare his parents to “aristocratic” ones (p. 240). Though this is done initially to begin the process of free- ing oneself from parental authority, the net result of the upwardly mobile fantasy is an ironic one. By means of the comparison, “the child is not getting rid of his father but exalting him” (p. 240). The images of the “new and aristocratic parents” for whom the child exchanges his real ones “are derived entirely from real recollection of the actual and humble ones” (p. 240). By deferred action, even “humble” parents therefore become feudal masters and mistresses. so absolute is this action of the unconscious as the child proceeds into presumable maturity that 

the whole effort at replacing the real father by a superior one is only an expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women. He is turning away from the father whom he knows to-day to the father in whom he believed in the earlier years of his childhood; and his phantasy is no more than the expression of a regret that those happy days have gone. Thus in these phantasies the overvaluation that characterizes a child’s earliest years comes into its own again.21 

  Capitalist metaphors are, to be sure, present in “Family Romances,” but they linger at the horizon of the essay, and there are far fewer of them than when he about adult life, as in The Interpretation of Dreams. And if, in “Family Romances,” Freud’s feudal metaphors are blunt, so too are his capitalist ones, even if they are used only as passing figurations for maturity. The feudal unconscious, as one might expect, features dramatis personae, while secondary process resembles a face- less, assembly-line world of talk and mass production. The notion that the individual’s “progress” and that of society as a whole are both couched in the metaphor of political process—of “liberation” from “authority”—is the essay’s first alert that a parliamentary or democratic politics underwrites what seems to be a metaphor for the individual alone. The building of an unconscious based in infantile sexuality resembles the movement from feudalism to capitalism. “Dissatisfied” and “critical,” the individual “acquires the right to doubt,” especially “to doubt the incomparable and unique quality” once attributed to the parents in the individual’s psycho- logical prehistory (p. 237). Rather than given or implicit, as with kings, queens, princes, and princesses, individual “right” is “acquired,” much as capital or property is. Rivalry, originally of a sexual kind, predominates, not simply as a courtly affair but as a fully public mode of behavior and motivation. “Rivalry” leads to “get- ting free from the parents” (p. 238). Their authority is overcome in a world of competition between free individuals on a level field of play. 

  Development or “progress,” however, has, as any presumptions of chronology or objective time always do in Freud, a backspin or regressiveness attached to it. “Getting free” is enabled by fantasies the growing child develops. These are once again feudal, although now they are tainted by the language of capitalism. The child attributes to his mother as many fictitious love affairs as he himself has “competitors” for her attention (p. 240). “Competitors” is a term derived from the free marketplace, although by thinking of himself as “the hero and author” who “returns to legitimacy . . . while his brothers and sisters are being eliminated by being bastardized” (p. 240), the child also returns to the world of romance and the court. In the blink of an eye, competition becomes the stuff of “imaginative romances,” with the mocking result that the father who is to be gotten rid of ends up becoming once again the “noblest” of men, and the mother “the dearest and loveliest” of women (p. 241). “Progress” or “liberation” has as its regressive result the return of the feudal repressed. The unconscious of capitalist “freedom” is the vassalage of bondage to feudal models of feeling, the quality of attachment characteristic of infantile ideation. 

  The feudal trend in Freud’s metaphors well accords with classical accounts of feudalism. In Marc Bloch’s epochal Feudal Society (1931, 1939), the faith of the vas- sal to his lord is the model for family relationships, not, as one might expect, the other way around.22 By the same token, vassals also came to wage war against their kings, just as kings might turn against their vassals (pp. 235, 237). From a modern point of view, one asks whether the ambivalence that structures the Oedipus complex finds its real source in these arrangements rather than prompts them. 

Indeed, for Bloch, the presumably collateral bonds of vassalage in the “first” feudalism of the early Middle Ages “were,” as he puts it, “ordinarily put on the same plane” as those of kinship relations, “each one lending a fundamental authority to the other with equal precedence” (p. 124). For Perry Anderson, the “reciprocal ties of fealty” from which the lord drew his authority are feudalism’s key social achievement, and the moment at which its dialectical components coalesced.23 

The political theology of divine right makes feudalism’s resemblance to the family romance clearer still. The conversion to Christianity across northern Europe not only drew tribal principalities together under monarchies in the “second” feudalism of the later Middle Ages. The doctrine of divine right that sustained them also formalized the structure of the family romance that it prefigures. For all its fine dress, divine right simply recapitulates the arrangements of early feudalism in a higher key. As Ernst Kantorowicz reminds us in The King’s Two Bodies (1957), the monarch represents not God but Jesus Christ—not the father but the son. The king’s lordship is defined not by his absolute authority but by his own subservience to another. He is, in other words, defined by his status as a son in his own right, owing fealty to the Creator just as his heirs owe fealty to him. A mystical conjunction of father and son from the point of view of religion, it is a constitutive paradox from a psychoanalytic point of view. The political and the religious are one and the same in the psychological sociology that both reflect. Much as the son is obliged to bow to the father in the family romance, the father is also obliged to bow to the son. As shakespeare is at constant pains to remind us, neither has his status without the other. “How art thou a king,” says York to the king in Richard II, “but by fair sequence and succession?” This is the logic of the Oedipus complex. Indeed, feudalism is arguably the source of the Oedipus complex in Freud’s Christian unconscious, to use Paul Vitz’s phrase, and undoubtedly its source, biography aside, from the point of view of intellectual history.24 

By such a definition, feudalism applies not simply to medievalism but to any social structure guaranteed by religion, whether Western, African, or Asian. such relationships are what Freud means by the “universal.” The “universal” is historical not because it is unchanging but because it is Freud’s cipher for the feudal. Here Freud’s understanding of “primitive” systems of kinship in his “prehistorical” allegories, notably Totem and Taboo (1912), is not so much “universal” in a synchronic sense as it is a way of gauging the status of culture when it is infantile, when it is without the superimposition of the defense mechanisms of secondary process. even Bloch cannot disagree. Feudalism, he writes, citing Voltaire, is “a type of society.” It includes “Egyptian feudalism, Achaen feudalism, Chinese feudalism, Japanese feudalism—all these forms and more are now familiar concepts.”25 For Bloch, Western feudalism and its other global and historical permutations recur as a rule to “a type of society” that remains universal in Freud’s own sense—one grounded in the filial faith between lord and vassal. Indeed, the brothers of the primal horde in Totem and Taboo aspire to the condition of feudalism in their wish to murder the father, and do so when they accomplish the deed. establishing the totem is the equivalent of inventing religion—in this case, a thinly veiled kind of Christianity—and of organizing infantile desire by attaching it to an image that socializes it in the child’s mind. This is the process that Freud describes in “On Narcissism” (1914) and the process that recapitulates in Freudian mythology the triumph of the “first” feudalism over the chaos of the Gothic tribes. No wonder feudalism appeals so strongly to our imaginations. Whether the kingdoms of the Middle Ages, the tribes of Africa, or the empires of ancient Asia, feudalism is a mirror of the gratifications of primary process. 

It is worth pointing out that a familiar derogation of Freud’s feudal metaphors for the family romance, the term “romance” chief among them, is not so much a successful dismissal of an outmoded aspect of Freud’s conception as it is proof that what is outmoded in the metaphor is precisely the metaphor’s claim upon us. I have in mind, of course, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972). To Deleuze and Guattari’s objection that the family romance resembles nothing more than a vulgarized Holy Family, the response is a simple one. Deleuze and Guattari identify not a problem but the solution to why infantile sexuality is structured like a myth, romance, or fairy tale. It is structured that way because it is a feudal vestige, the residue of a form of thought and government left behind in the empirical life of the present but still alive in mind and in memory. 

“Constancy” and Capitalism

Although Freud’s capitalist metaphors for secondary process are present throughout his work, they are, not surprisingly, foregrounded in the second phase, with its especially elaborate account of secondary process. Freud’s modern or “capitalist” metaphors derive from applied science and technology, the means by which industrial production regulates the constitutional state. They give indus- trial production its infrastructure and, in Freud’s language, give unconscious wish- es their motive force. 

  Freud’s chief metaphor for the nature of psychological drive, particularly in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is the metaphor of psychical “energy.” Only coming into common use, in both German and english, in the nineteenth century, the term is rooted in scientific discoveries with specific applications to industrialism, particularly thermodynamics. Freud’s source for this vocabulary, of course, is Hermann Helmholtz’s notion of the conservation of energy, an application of the theory of thermodynamics to physiological and mental processes.26 Helmholtz employs the notion of “energy” as both a scientific assumption about the behavior of the nervous system and as a metaphor regarding matter and motive force in life as a whole. Thermodynamics not only provides Freud with his principal scientific figurations but also provided capitalism with the theory required for the applied science that led to the technology of mass production. The link is direct—mass production leads to the concrete material conditions necessary for a market economy. Transformations between primary and secondary process are like a system of exchange based upon not only contract but credit. something is left over that accumulates in addition to its original value. Free, mobile “energy” becomes “bound” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, depending upon circumstance and the agreement of affect and association. Bindung is one of Freud’s favorite words for the mind’s control of itself. Fixed, or at least momentarily fixed, value—price, as it were—is energy fixed on the run. Here Gustav Fechner’s addition to Helmholtz— “the principle of constancy,” by means of which energy seeks equilibrium rather than discharge—not only provides Freud’s dynamic notion of the mind a principle of equanimity but also an additional metaphor by means of which value can be stabilized. It seeks to bring constancy to a volatile marketplace. Like a good trader or investor, the ego is a manager or chief executive officer of its capital. Freud’s feu- dal vocabulary for primary process has its counterpart in his capitalist vocabulary for secondary process. 

The relation of secondary process to primary—the movement of binding—is one of deferred action. It reflects the tale Freud himself has to tell. The future captures the past, reconfigures it to its own uses so that the past itself becomes “bound” as a function of the freedom of the present. The clinical implication is once again of a piece with its rhetorical presentation: No longer bound by the past, the patient undoes its determinations and revalues them.27 

          Scientific metaphors introduce and sustain Freud’s description of the mind throughout Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Note this particularly decisive passage: 

The phenomena of organic development must be attributed to external disturbing and diverting influences. The elementary living entity would from its very beginning have had no wish to change; if conditions remained the same, it would do no more than constantly repeat the same course of life. In the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of organisms must be the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun. . . . The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state. It was still an easy matter at that time for a living substance to die; the course of its life was probably only a brief one, whose direction was determined by the chemical structure of the young life. For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated détours before reaching its aim of death. These circuitous paths to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us to-day with the picture of the phenomena of life.28 

The biologistic description is at bottom a thermodynamic one. Its notion of “organic” elasticity (p. 30) rests on the assumption of an “energetics” among the instincts, to use Paul Ricoeur’s term, the measure, as it were, of their “vicissitudes,” as Freud calls this “elasticity” during the metapsychological phase.29 

But despite the changes the new, “economic” model has wrought in his system, Freud also keeps his old “topographical” model in place and thereby does what he always does—he makes the earlier formulation a part of the unconscious processes he describes: 

The ego now found its position among sexual objects and was at once given the foremost place among them. Libido which was in this way lodged in the ego was described as “narcissistic.” This narcissistic libido was of course also a manifestation of the force of the sexual instinct in the analytical sense of those words, and it had necessarily to be identified with the “self-preservative instincts” whose existence had been recognized from the first. Thus the original opposition between the ego- instincts and the sexual instincts proved to be inadequate. A portion of the ego-instincts was seen to be libidinal; sexual instincts—probably alongside others—operated in the ego. Nevertheless we are justified in saying that the old formula which lays it down that psychoneuroses are based on a conflict between ego-instincts and sexual instincts contains nothing that we need reject to-day. It is merely that the distinction between the two kinds of instinct, which was originally regarded as in some sort of way qualitative, must now be characterized differently— namely as being topographical.30 

The shift in Freud’s thinking doubles the shift in the psychoanalytic system. Like the psyche, it is historical. The shift, or presumable shift, shows how Freud’s writing is a history of its own vicissitudes. Its earlier assumptions become its own unconscious. Clinically, it resolves a paradox less easily. Although secondary process frees or mobilizes the determinations of primary process or infantile ideation—much as capitalism is a liberation from the bondage of feudalism—it is also a distortion of the frightening clarity of infantile fantasy, its inhibition or repression as well as progress beyond it. This is the double bind in which the patient is situated, and the double bind that analysis as both a cure and a form of writing is designed to assess and accommodate. The book’s conclusion is, ironically, an accommodation of the new theory to the earlier one in almost comic fashion. By definition, the pleasure principle’s energy seeks discharge, and therefore a relief in quantitative excitation. This is precisely what the death instinct is—the consummate path to pleasure: 

The pleasure principle, then, is a tendency operating in the service of a function whose business it is to free the excitation or to keep the amount of excitation in it constant or to keep it as low as possible. (p. 62) 

“Constancy” is a “business” whose “function” is “to free” the mind rather than restrict it. Thus “the pleasure principle seems actually,” says Freud, “to serve the death instincts” (p. 63). The circle is complete. Bondage and freedom engage one another reciprocally or dialectically. Past and present remain commingled despite the passage of time. The pleasure principle and the death instinct are both required to concede to the reality principle. Like the patient, the psychoanalytic system maintains constancy or stability by virtue not of discharging but of preserving the assumptions of its earlier theory as proof of—as capital for—its newer one. 

Freud, Marx, Keynes

In The Ego and the Id, the shift from a feudal accent to a capitalist one is even more pronounced. This is because the shift in metaphor accelerates to include not only the sciences but the bureaucratic and political worlds as well. Here the ego— the new focus because so much of it is now understood to be unconscious, a function of secondary rather than primary process—is rendered in metaphors of a distinctly bourgeois kind. While the ego of the early phase reigns, or tries to reign, over a sovereign realm subject to the insurgencies of the unconscious, now the ego is drawn in managerial terms that modernize the unconscious of which it is a part. It “supervises” its “constituent” elements.31 It manages, as a chairperson would. The metaphor is also parliamentary: The ego governs its assembly of representatives. And—before we can even reach the end of this sentence—these constituents also function, in a scientific metaphor, not as persons but as “processes”: 

We have formed the idea that in each individual there is a coherent organization of mental processes; and we call this his ego. It is to this ego that consciousness is attached; the ego controls the approaches to motility—that is, to the discharge of excitations into the external world; it is the mental agency which supervises all its own constituent process- es, and which goes to sleep at night, though even then it exercises the censorship on dreams. From this ego proceed the repressions, too, by means of which it is sought to exclude certain trends in the mind not merely from consciousness but also from other forms of effectiveness and activity. In analysis these trends which have been shut out stand in opposition to the ego, and the analysis is faced with the task of removing the resistance which the ego displays against concerning itself with the repressed. (p. 17) 

What is repressed is not primary process but the conditions of existence. It is these that analysis seeks to disclose. 

Democratic epistemology, unlike feudalism’s, resembles secondary rather than primary process. It is based not on faith but on contract—on the consensual value of the signified rather than on an inherent meaning it may be presumed to have. It is a system of mobile valuation, like currency, which under capitalism has the form of fixity while retaining the function of change. even a gold standard, according to John Maynard Keynes, is a legal fiction because, as he puts it in A Tract on Monetary Reform (1924), “the value of gold depends” not on its inherent features but “on the policy of the Central Banks.”32 

Marx remains the best guide. Under feudalism, social relations appear, oxy- moronically, “in their natural guise as personal relations” despite “the masks in which the different personalities strut,” in a shakespearean flourish, “upon the feudal stage.”33 Under capitalism, by contrast, social relations become “dressed up”—as though they were not already—as commodities, “as social relations between things,” between the products rather than the processes “of labor” (p. 51). Despite Marx’s lingering naturalism—his nostalgia for a preindustrial human essence remains undiminished even in the shift from the 1844 manuscripts to the later Capital—the structural identity between the political and the psychical remains intact. Under capitalism, only the regulation of currency allows commodities to acquire “objective fixity” in the sea of exchange value, and therefore to acquire a “general social validity”:

When this happens, the particular kind of commodity with whose bodily form the equivalent form is socially identified becomes the money commodity, or serves as money. Thenceforward, the specific social function (and therefore the social monopoly) of this commodity is that it plays the part of a general equivalent among commodities at large. (p. 42) 

The objectification of labor in commodities, money chief among them, is the equivalent and insuperable condition in Marx of the splitting of the subject in Freud, a splitting that Marx, unlike Freud, is unwilling to accept or negotiate. Like libido, labor cannot be said to exist except in the objects it endows. They are witness to the subject that produces them, not the other way around. Like libidinal objects, labor’s objects retroactively constitute their makers, much as the objects of desire fashion the subject whose concrete dreams they are. Labor and libido are the life forces in Marx and Freud, respectively, each with the same epistemological structure and each with the same productive rather than expressive relation to empirical reality. 

Keynesian capitalism, with its emphasis on the state regulation of money and the stabilization of economies through government policies, is the best instance of how the regulation of currency is capitalism’s chief metaphorization of secondary process. The stabilization of currency by the regulating agency of government doubles the regulation of the infantile drives by the ego. The vocabulary of science— of an energetics—mediates between the psychical and the economic, giving them a shared tropology and a common project. “The fluctuations in the value of money since 1914,” writes Keynes in Monetary Reform, reflecting on the dysfunction of economies after World War I, is a “disequilibrium,” as he puts it, from which the social order, like the ego in the psychoanalytic analogue, should be cured.34 The stability in currency value throughout the nineteenth century, like the relative stability of endlessly shifting treaty arrangements in politics, rested on promises honored until the cataclysm of the Great War. The strong hand of government in stabilizing economic disequilibrium resembles the ego psychology of Freud’s second, postwar phase. “As always,” writes Keynes, “the balance of payments must balance every day.”35 “Instability” (p. 141)—the pun is now obvious—is to be avoided at all costs. Like psychical mechanisms, inflation and deflation have their respective roles in the regulation of economy, financial or therapeutic, each one playing a part as specific circumstance requires, whether for the social formation or the individual psyche. “Violent shocks to the existing equilibrium”—trauma in the finances of postwar Europe as well as in its shell-shocked veterans—require “readjustment” (p. 161), whether the goal is economic or psychological stability. Indeed, Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money from 1936 revises “classical” political economy by controlling precisely those factors that free markets leave unattended—the surplus value, for example, that divides wages from profits—regulating them into a coherent, if perpetually fluctuating, whole. As in psychoanalysis, here, too, the topographical—a sharp divide between classes— gives way to the dynamic—a coherent economy with a presumable rapprochement between top and bottom. Both manage a fluctuating system whose fixities are illusory and ideal and require intervention for their functioning to proceed. It is worth noting that Keynes lived on the floor above his Bloomsbury friend James Strachey at 41 Gordon square while, for decades, Keynes presided over the British treasury and Strachey over the english translation of Freud. Keynes was, as it were, also translating Freud. 

The scientific metaphors of Beyond the Pleasure Principle persist in The Ego and the Id, too, as does the new historicism of the psyche’s organization. “The character of the ego,” writes Freud, “is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and . . . contains the history of those object-choices.”36 even the Oedipus complex—the family romance—now “originates” (p. 32) from these later mnemic structures rather than causes them. The feudal unconscious, in other words, is the retroactive product of the capitalist unconscious. Its power is held in check by the shift in metaphor by means of which the ego funnels its value from the feudal materials of its prior force. Its value is a dividend flowing from an accumulated wealth that now functions as capital. Historicity, even the historicity of the unconscious, is derived through the belated lens of a future looking back- ward. Time is beneficial as well as ruinous. As in shakespeare, history becomes the possibility of its own revision. The Oedipus complex is a “precipitate in the ego,” the “residue” of “the earliest object-choices of the id”—of infantile sexuality rather than their originals. This is because secondary process fuels the ego’s “energetic reaction-formations against these choices” (p. 34). The transit of the original Oedipus complex—its feudal character—into its modern or adult char- acter comes about only after the components of the family romance have been changed into modern terms. Now the family romance is known by virtue of what it leaves behind, that is, after its passing. The feudal character of primary process has been transformed into a modern enterprise for the purpose of ordering its overdeterminations and reducing its sway. 

This “reaction-formation” is, of course, the newly invented “superego,” which now “confronts” the ego as capitalism does feudalism. This process is no less static than anything else in this decidedly historical dynamic. The superego is not only a “residue” of the Oedipus complex but one with an active relation to the past that it represents. As an “energetic reaction-formation” to the id’s original object-choices, it carries forward the parents’ prohibitions in a new way—as a manager in a system of exchange rather than as a vassal in a system of faith. Once again the metaphors are decisive, this time revealing the link between the language of science (“energetic reaction”) and the language of capitalism (“choices”). “The infantile ego fortified itself” against the father—here the metaphor is once again feudal (“fortified”) as the child moves forward in time—by “erecting,” amusingly enough, a barrier within itself by virtue of its identification with the father. “It borrowed strength to do this,” says Freud, “from the father” in the form of a “loan” (p. 34). The historical circuit is metaphorically complete. “Borrowed” and “loan” are financial metaphors that progress from simple moneylending to a more modern form of credit. even the id is less biological than it is historical. It is another kind of “residue” with an unexpected origin in the experience of egos past: 

The experiences of the ego seem at first to be lost for inheritance; but, when they have been repeated often enough and with sufficient strength in many individuals in successive generations, they transform themselves, so to say, into experiences of the id, the impressions of which are preserved by heredity. Thus in the id, which is capable of being inherited, are harbored residues of the existences of countless egos; and, when the ego forms its super-ego out of the id, it may per- haps only be reviving shapes of former egos and be bringing them to resurrection. (p. 38) 

Freud sums up the ego’s component relationships in metaphors that describe not only the history of the ego itself but the history, as it were, of history. The political metaphors are especially striking: 

Our ideas about the ego are beginning to clear, and its various relation- ships are gaining distinctness. We now see the ego in its strengths and in its weaknesses. It is entrusted with important functions. By virtue of its relation to the perceptual system it gives mental processes an order in time and submits them to “reality-testing.” By interposing the processes of thinking, it secures a postponement of motor discharges and controls the access to motility. This last power is, to be sure, a question more of form than of fact; in the matter of action the ego’s position is like that of a constitutional monarch without whose sanction no law can be passed but who hesitates long before imposing his veto on any measure put forward by Parliament. All the experiences of life that originate from without enrich the ego; the id, however, is its second external world, which it strives to bring into subjection to itself. It with- draws libido from the id and transforms the object-cathexes of the id into ego-structures. With the aid of the super-ego, in a manner that is still obscure to us, it draws upon the experiences of past ages stored in the id. (p. 55) 

The scientific metaphors—“processes,” “discharges,” “transforms”—produce a technological vocabulary with which to describe the mind, much as applied science produces the technological infrastructure of capitalism. The ego’s transformations, designed to control its energies and their sources, result in its being likened to “a constitutional monarch,” a feudal personage at the mercy of parliamentary oversight. No wonder the ego is “like a politician,” required “to mediate between the world”—the present and future—and “the id”—the past (p. 56). 

To describe the ego as a “constitutional monarchy” is to describe it, of course, as a compromise-formation between feudalism and capitalism. Freud’s second model of mind makes his double tropology explicit. It resolves the difference between the topography of the first phase and the dynamism of the second by including the topographical within the dynamic as a graveyard—as the ego, “a precipitate,” in the language of the mortuary, “of abandoned object-cathexes” (p. 29). In “Mourning and Melancholia,” the figures of the patient’s past are ghosts, per- sons known to be dead. Presiding over this graveyard, the ego is a sexton, a night watchman, a gravedigger to its own Hamlet, who looks on in perplexed fascination at his own past. Late Freud retains landscape by reimagining it as a cemetery of lost causes. These include the pernicious idealizations of the family romance and feudalism alike. Feudalism and the family romance are one and the same. The presumption of a galvanized maturity based on mourning rather than melancholia is no presumption. What is dead is dead. What lives is a perpetually precarious present, mindful of the past and careful not to repeat its derelictions. 


1.     V. N. Voloshinov, Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, trans. I. R. Titunik (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 90–91.

2.     See Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest-Romance” (1968), in Poetics of Influence, ed. John Hollander (New Haven: Henry R. Schwab, 1988), pp. 17–42.

3.     See Perry Meisel, The Literary Freud (London: Routledge, 2007).

4.     Sigmund Freud, Letter of February 1, 1900, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey M. Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 398.

5.    See Andrew Cole, The Birth of Theory (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 71.

6.    G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper, 1967), p.
251.

7.    Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol . 14, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953–1974), p. 249.

8.     W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. 5; and Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia (London: Routledge, 2004).

9.    Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), in Strachey, vol. 19, p. 56.

10.    Edward said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

11.    John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada (1672), in Dryden: The Dramatic Works, vol. 3, ed. Montague summers (New York: Gordian Press, 1968), p. 35.

12.    Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in Strachey, vol. 5, p. 601.

13.     As in Hegel, dialectic governs psychical activity. As in Fredric Jameson, the unconscious is “political”: The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). As in Jacques Rancière, its terms are “aesthetic” because desire, in a Lacanian object-les- son, is governed by language: The Aesthetic Unconscious, trans. Debra Keates and James Swenson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009).

14. See Alfred Binet, On Double Consciousness: Experimental Psychological Studies (London: Open Court, 1890).

15. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: J. M. Dent, 1930), pp. 105–06.

16. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in Strachey, vol. 5, p. 532.

17. For summaries, see Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick, eds., Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924–25 (New York: Basic Books, 1985); and Adam Philips, “After Strachey,” London Review of Books 29, no. 19 (October 4, 2007), pp. 36–38.

18. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in Strachey, vol. 5, p. 532.

19. See Strachey in ibid., p. 561, n.2.

20. Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances” (1909), in Strachey, vol. 9, p. 237.

21. Ibid., pp. 240–41.

22. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, Vol. 1: The Growth of Ties of Independence, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 232–33.

23. Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso, 1978), p. 151.

24. See Paul Vitz, Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious (New York: Guilford, 1988).

25. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, Vol. 2: Social Classes and Political Organization, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 441.

26. Hermann von Helmholtz, “The Conservation of Force: A Physical Memoir,” in Selected Writings, ed. Russell Kahn (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), pp. 3–55; and Helmholtz, “The Application of the Law of the Conservation of Force to Organic Nature,” in Kahn, Selected Writings, pp. 109–91.

27. The notion of Bindung is hardly new in second-phase Freud. It is also at the center of the early Project for a Scientific Psychology, which, well before Freud’s elaboration of his political metaphors, even in The Interpretation of Dreams, theorizes the way in which psychical energy is both “free” and “bound” because its nature is “mobile.”

28. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in Strachey, vol. 18, pp. 38–39.

29. See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. D. savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

30. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Strachey, vol. 18, p. 52.

31. Freud, The Ego and the Id, in Strachey, vol. 19, p. 17.

32. John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform ( London: Macmillan, 1924), p. 170.

33. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 51.

34. Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform, p. 2, p. 111, p. 193.

35. Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform, p. 109.

36. Freud, The Ego and the Id, in Strachey, vol. 19, p. 29.

Perry Meisel, "The Feudal Unconscious: Capitalism and the Family Romance," October, 159 (Winter, 2017), pp. 19-36. © 2017 by October Magazine, Ltd. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission of the MIT Press. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/octo