The Form of Politics

by Perry Meisel

I.

It is, of course, a deconstructive commonplace to observe that the singular or the unique is the function or the effect of a relation. And yet a political and intellectual climate like ours in America today – a New Sanctimony, if you will, a recall of transcendental categories by Left and Right alike – too often propounds the singular as a value in itself, whether it is ethnicity, gender, or oppression as such. Our climate needs to be reminded of this deconstructive commonplace, not only to explain to Neo-conservatives why and how deconstructive relativism is actually very systematic indeed, but also to distinguish deconstruction from the neo-centrisms of the Left (a self-contradictory description that is itself an example of the problem). These latter impulses, astonishingly enough, reconstitute the binarisms of black/white, male/female, power/oppression that gird tyranny, and that are under presumable siege as categories.

What is perennially misconceived about deconstruction (Harold Bloom's term "weak misreading" well accounts for the surprisingly literal response to Derrida that we all know) is that its procedure for deracinating essences, absolutes, transcendental categories of all kinds is not in the service of an anarchic play of signifiers. Nor is it designed to prioritize the historically repressed or marginalized side of an opposition. Deconstruction is a highly exact mode of reading designed, not to throw texts or the world into chaos, but to show how the world we think we find only gets – and has gotten – made in the shapes and terms that we take for granted as given, self-evident, natural.

American criticism may perhaps wake from its dogmatic slumbers by remembering what Anselm Haverkamp states in his introduction to this conference – that America is difference. This is the crucial tie between deconstruction and America despite deconstruction's French (and Germanic) ground of philosophical emergence (here, too, though, we should recall that both America and deconstruction share, after all, a place in the tradition of the Enlightenment despite a difference in the epistemological deposition of the subject that Enlightenment Romanticism was invented to sustain following the first death of God).

As Jonathan Culler points out, the performative or constitutive nature of discourse, together with its chiastic ground-making, is particularly plain in American life; indeed, it is American life's singular virtue. If marginal America constructs itself as a difference from dominant America, we should remember that dominant America constructed itself as an enabling difference from Europe, thereby preparing a common and originary ground for American life at large, based, not on European – read logocentric – notions of identity or sameness, but, in principle if not always or altogether in practice, on difference. This common epistemology of American life ironically guarantees freedom by requiring everyone to deal with influence.

Hence the ease with which we allow ourselves to be swayed by the language of the singular – of the essentiality of the ethnic, the gendered, the this, the that – is precisely what a deconstructive reassessment of the political asks us to question. Without aesthetic theory – I use these terms with Kant in mind – and without a deconstructive reimagination of the categories involved, a dangerous epistemological lassitude will continue despite the need for its correction.

Consider, for example, the category of the ethnic. What is its status as a notion? In 1992, the Poetics Institute of New York University and the Cardozo School of Law sponsored a conference with Jacques Derrida that allowed me to address the problem then. The Greek ethnos, I argued at that time, emerges in the Septuagint as a means of translating the Hebrew goyim, which has the sense of "heathen" – those who do not believe in the Jewish God. Only in the nineteenth century does the word gain the more specific sense of race with which we associate it still in this century. This way of reading ethnos as designating biosemiotic traits, sometimes derived iconically through or from the language a person speaks, well suited nineteenth-century ideological needs, particularly those of nationalism. The less-than-various array of ethnic nationalisms, from Mazzini to Herzl, sought a justifying physicalism familiar in nineteenth-century reasoning from phrenology to ethnography. Ethnography and ethnology alike emerge as disciplines of study contemporary with the growth of nationalist feeling, the first in 1834, the second in 1842. Lexicons record a hazy relation between ethnos and ethos, too, the latter meaning custom, although the nature of the relation is unclear. This muddy proximity is the very nature of the relation, which motivates what is merely customary among people by divining a mystic bond among them and elevating it, that is, reducing it, to the status of an innate rather than a derived characteristic.

The ethnic as a trope, then, rests, or fails to do so, on a paradox whose structure is a familiar deconstructive site constituted by the play between inclusion and exclusion. That which is without value – those who do not believe, those who are goyim or heathen – becomes precisely that which is of, that which is, value – the inherent, often racially construed trait that assigns and defines one at a presumably fundamental level. The ethnic or racial – that denigration or impropriety that defines goyim – is also the trope designed to signify the pure, the essential, the very opposite of the unclean or the improper that it originarily signifies in the history of its usage. It should be noted, too, that ethnos also originarily signifies the notion of "one's own" – of what is, properly speaking, proper to one – a notion whose like paradoxical structure has also long been familiar to us. Curiously enough, then, the otherness that structures the heathen or the unruly – the excluded – is also the properness, the inherence that structures what is included.

If a narrative were to be constructed from this play of the trope's senses, it would find its telos in the scientific racism and eugenics of the Nazi era, even if it might also find an epistemological counterpart in soil-Zionism, African-American separatism, or feminism of the essentialist variety. Democratic thinking, by contrast, describes the truth of the universality it declares by virtue of its erasure. Freedom of worship, for example, has as its implication that which guarantees the possibility of its emergence: a constitutional indifference to the very religions it frees.

Any contemporary articulation of the ethnic rolls and rocks on the lip of this paradox. Its negation is the repressed that returns late in the twentieth century with the revalorization of those ethnic categories that the century's civil and human rights revolutions, especially in the United States, supposedly put in question. The rise of multiculturalism in the United States and the end of the socialist ideal in the Soviet Union are, from this point of view, similar reactions against and repressions of the non-ethnic ideals of both political constructions.

II.

Any deconstructive reassessment of the political depends today, then, on a series of new assumptions about both society and subjectivity. Here deconstruction maintains its historical relation to psychoanalysis and Marxism alike, although by now these relations are so implicit that the crucial term in each case remains largely silent throughout the conference.

The unconscious is the conference's enabling notional secret, an Althusserian notion of the unconscious that understands subjects and ideology, texts and their reception, in reciprocal rather than exclusive terms. Avital Ronell's "testing" is a superb psychoanalytical representation of the subject. "Testing" suggests what the ego and any shape at all have in common – the doing and undoing of frames, edges, outlines, borders. "We exist in sway," says Ronell, linking Kant with Freud and Lacan, and linking epistemology with psychoanalysis.

The conference's second chief notion, ideology, is well described by Barbara Johnson without being named. By asking "what speaks?" rather than "who speaks?," Johnson efficiently points out the dynamic and constitutive relation between ideology and the unconscious, and the way in which this relation fashions the ground of self and society alike. When Judith Butler asks, "Why do words wound?," the answer is that the unconscious is structured like a language.

III.

In order to elaborate a deconstructive reassessment of the political, let us read a familiar and even topical text at some length. No twentieth-century text is more alluring for its presumable gender allegory than Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928). And yet no twentieth-century text is also more strategically plain about its own deconstructive rather than irreducible notion of gender than Orlando is. Everyone knows the popular conception of Orlando – even the movies attest to it: an allegory about how perfect a human being would be could s/he combine the qualities of both genders. The emblem for Orlando's apparently synthetic project is the book's hommage to androgyny, borrowed from Coleridge's picture of a harmonious imagination in the Biographia Literaria (1817). Woolf literalizes, or so it seems, Coleridge's idealizing descriptions of rich imaginative figures such as Shakespeare by switching Orlando's gender about halfway through the book. Woolf thus simultaneously preserves and changes Orlando's character as the rival demands of soul and history struggle beneath the full-throated ease of both the plot and Woolf's seamless use of language.

Culler's notion of performativity is dazzlingly evident as Woolf's text provides a virtual object lesson in how semiosis makes subjects from the ground up. What language brings into being in Orlando is gender as such. Even to call it "as such" is, of course, problematic, since gender's suchness or givenness is the function of a difference or a relation. Under the pressure of Woolf's language, Orlando's presumably central notion of gender splits its husk.

The key to the novel, as the saying goes, lies in the sometimes odd structure of Woolf's prose, which as a rule is so well sutured that the means of its production slips by. In the novel's third chapter, the narrator announces, with an apparent straight face, that "everything, in fact, was something else" (143).¹ How can what is "in fact" be "something else"? By definition, a "fact" is what it is – just the fax, ma'am – but here, quite ironically, the self-evidence ordinarily associated with "fact" is also taken away from it by virtue of how its self-evidence is represented – as "something else."

This kind of rhetorical oddness occurs again and again in the texture of the book's language, often structuring sentences in uncannily similar – and equally disturbing ways. "Everything was different," says the narrator early on (27), trying to give us a picture of the Elizabethan past by negation, even in a catalogue of vegetables, climates, and poets. How can a statement of nonidentity be a properly representational or descriptive one? "The arras" in "the hall" at Orlando's ancestral home "moved always" (45) – "moved always" is an oxymoron. Or, says the narrator, meditating on Orlando's future in the book's first chapter and thinking vaguely of official roles for him, he "was cut out for precisely some such career" (15). How can what is "precisely" also be "some such"? Similarly, if "openness . . . was the soul" of Orlando's "nature" (189), as the narrator says it is, then the outside – "openness" – and the inside – "soul" – are perilously and curiously identified.

The seeming imprecision in Woolf's language is, in fact, a rhetorical pattern – a principal one throughout the novel, and the way the novel itself goes about estimating as well as representing oppositions such as fact and fiction, text and world, and, of course, one gender and another.

The rhetorical pattern has as its counterpart the novel's larger structural pattern, which requires a similar transgression of the reader's assumptions once they have been put in place. Much as Woolf's sentences ask the reader to believe opposing or different kinds of propositions simultaneously, so, too, does the structure of the novel's fundamental illusionism. Orlando is at one and the same time the same person despite her change of sex midway through the book – her subjectivity is essential behind even gender. And yet Orlando is also a function of history, changing as she does in accord with the changes through which she lives. To define and represent gender, Orlando – and Orlando – both invoke history and deny it.

Rather than a problem, such structural irreconcilability is a strategy or device. Time must be invoked to describe something as timeless – Orlando's personality, for example – since the timeless can only be conceived of in its relation – its nonrelation – to time. And history can be thought of only in relation to a timelessness that is its foil or counterpart. In Orlando, everything, then – and remember, everything is something else – is as a rule put in place by its transgression. This strategy or device, both rhetorical and structural, I shall call Woolf's cross-writing – the transgression or crossing over of assumptions even as they are put in place.

Woolf theorizes cross-writing in Orlando by telling us that Orlando's own mind works in "violent see-saws" (46), not unlike Woolf's own clashing metaphors, "stopping at nothing," she says, "in between" (46). Sounding like Saussure (and Keats), Woolf gives cross-writing a differential model: "Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy" (45). Of course not: to know one means to know its difference from the other. To accent this relativist or relational semiotics, Woolf uses the same metaphor that she uses in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) to show how difference works to constitute sameness: the clocks in London are off line, each ringing the same hour a bit differently from the others (1925, 60 - 61).² Woolf's description of Shakespeare early in the novel also matches the structure of her cross-writing: "his mind was . . . a welter of opposites" (22). Queen Elizabeth, too, is drawn according to the same plan: qualities such as "innocence" and "simplicity" were "all the more dear to her for the dark background she set them against" (23).

Woolf tells us in the book's preface to be prepared for this double rhythm or movement. "The book," she says, "will inevitably wake expectations in the reader which the book itself can only disappoint" (viii). Expectation and disappointment, disappointment and expectation – this is a fair estimate of the semiotic rhythm the novel employs to have its way with us. The play of expectation and disappointment on the reader's part is necessary for any horizon or circumference – any edge or margin or frame that situates an object as such, whether animate or inanimate – to emerge at all, and as a function of compounding, of difference. Readers know, says Woolf, how to "make . . . up from bare hints dropped here and there the whole boundary and circumference of a living person; can hear in what we only whisper a living voice; can see, often what we say nothing about, exactly what he looked like, and know without a word to guide them precisely what he thought" (73).

Woolf reminds us of the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand at work here by calling our attention to it and its mechanisms. "The most poetic" kind of "conversation," she says, "is precisely that which cannot be written down" (253). This creates not simply awe at the depth of the conversation in question (a conversation between Orlando and her nineteenth-century lover, Shelmerdine), but also awe at the fact that such "repletion" or fullness, as Woolf puts it (253), can be the effect of "a great blank here" (253). Even the opposition between life and literature is handled – is simultaneously established and undone – by crossover rhetoric. While life and literature are on the one hand distinct ("Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another" [17]), on the other hand, the Queen "read him" – Orlando – "like a page" (25).

When Orlando's change of gender comes, the way in which Woolf represents it, rhetorically at least, slides over us without a hitch. "He was a woman" (137). The fictional illusion succeeds despite – perhaps because of – the rhetorical impossibility. This is, as it turns out, simply a hyperbolic instance of the mixed metaphors that Woolf uses to describe practically everything. Even the novel's plot is made, ironically, out of transformation.

Far, then, from being a self-evident singularity, gender – like ethnicity, or like subjectivity itself – is always already the function of a relation in Orlando. A commonplace of structural feminism, it is interesting to see it rehearsed as early as 1928. Even androgyny is not fusion, but a structure of difference. One doesn't fuse the genders by crossing them – one puts them in place that way, and always has. To be fused, the genders must be different. Gender is a difference, not an essential characteristic, an elementary semiotic activity in all cultures that, in one way or another, is part of the basis upon which a given culture's world, and its subjects, are formed. Gender is pure difference, a "pure performative," as Barbara Vinken puts it, whose role is merely paradigmatic, structuring a fundamental difference out of a formal necessity that is also necessarily political. As Orlando's confirmation of her new gender in the mirror suggests (138), form is itself always already political. The equivalence of politics and form is among the most provocative of the notions to which a deconstructive reassessment of the political leads. What is a politics of form?

Notes

1. All references are to Virginia Woolf, Orlando, rpt. (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1973).

2. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, rpt. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1953).

Originally published in Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995).

Introduction to The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels

by Perry Meisel

The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels. By Henry James. New York: Signet Classics, 1995.

Henry James's short novels provide a representative account of James's career as a whole, and serve as an excellent introduction to the peculiar unity of his singular imagination. Although the difference between James's early and later fiction is alone striking – simply compare the opening paragraphs of The American (1877) and The Ambassadors (1903) to see the movement from Victorian realism to the modern psychological realism of which James is the acknowledged master – it is probably more accurate to say that James's career is one of continuity and refinement rather than one of abrupt changes. Whether in his long novels or his shorter ones – nouvelles, as he liked to call the latter, six of which are collected in the pages that follow – James's fiction is always concerned with the play of impressions upon the mind and heart. While a gradual shift in perspective over the years heightens point of view and diminishes the description of faces, objects, and scenes at which the early James grudgingly excels, James's focus remains the extraordinarily specific circumstances that structure the self, and the ways in which the structure of experience and the structure of narrative are very often the same.

In the autumn of 1897, the year before The Turn of the Screw was first published, James had moved into Lamb House, Rye, after more than twenty years of residence in London. James had settled in England in 1876 (he became a British subject in 1915, the year before his death), and soon achieved critical triumph within the same English tradition that had once burdened him as a young American writer. The influence of James's own writing upon twentieth-century fiction is, of course, inestimable. James's psychological realism remains so influential even today that it is, to use James's own description of the success of the fictional poet Jeffrey Aspern in The Aspern Papers (1888), "part of the light by which we walk." Almost every modern writer of fiction in English carries the scars of James's influence, and almost every major English and American novelist in the generation following James's own – E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, even Hemingway and Fitzgerald – can be measured by their respective turns from a strength at once enabling and potentially fatal in the decisiveness with which it reinvents the writing of fiction.

Why is James so influential? What is the nature of his power? The short novels collected here allow us to see what it is in efficient and delicious miniature. The Turn of the Screw (1898) is James's most famous and widely read short novel. Despite its unique extravagance, it contains the principal elements of James's customary world both early and late: interpretative uncertainty and an uncannily vivid sense of solitary and reflective human sadness. The Turn of the Screw shows us a writer fully at home with his powers, and one consciously concerned with central questions about the imagination and its determinations. Bly, the tale's country house, is a haunted house, and the tale a haunted tale. But haunted by what? Are the former governess and the former valet who loom as apparitions fantastic projections of the new governess's imagination? Or are they genuine ghosts, spirits of a past day? Ghosts represent both the past and a past way of thinking in as decisively secular a world as James's is. Surely the ironic brother of the philosopher William James, notorious freethinker and pragmatist, little fancied ghosts as such. Why, then, are we afraid? By means of what power does the tale promote the shudders that it does? We are afraid not only because James has the powers of illusion to do with us whatever he likes, but also because he has the power to do so while suspending all judgment as to what these witnesses of his power may mean. Testimony to James's audacity as a writer, the tale is poised between a series of interpretative alternatives that raise more questions than James thinks it right to answer. The Turn of the Screw is the turn, as it were, that reveals the archaeology or the unconscious of James's own sense of himself as a writer.

As a literary allegory, the tale is also poised between two very real alternatives as it mediates upon questions of imaginative priority. Is James's writing merely a ghost of past writing, or is it testimony to the splendid originality of his own imagination? As a writer of fiction who began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, James had to control Romanticism itself. Like his unnamed governess-narrator (what, by the way, is the status of gender in James?), James is tormented by Romanticism's representatives. Who are Peter Quint and Miss Jessel? They are strangely familiar figures; he is the Romantic male in the visionary tower and she the house-haunting madwoman, whose only place of repose seems to be the attic. Leon Edel, James's biographer, notes the indirect allusions to Jane Eyre in The Turn of the Screw, and the narrator herself wonders out loud whether "an insane, an unmentionable relative" is being "kept in unsuspected confinement." As the governess's fear and malaise attest, however, James himself is interested in neither figure; these Romantic counterparts represent ghostly and offensive burdens that his own fiction will circumvent in favor of a new kind of literary character based upon figures like the depressive governess-narrator here or the scholar-narrator of The Aspern Papers ten years earlier, milder figures for whom vision and madness alike are unacceptable, even unavailable alternatives. Life is after all too sedentary an affair for prose realism to give the glamor of either stance any credibility.

What is left, then, for the novelist to do? Uncertainty and its causes and effects are the major and unifying concerns of James's career, and his use of them as materials allows him to link style and subject, form and theme in dauntingly clear ways. What James's other short novels share with The Turn of the Screw is the pressure of situations and the overriding question within them of what the truth in each case may be. Of course, what the truth is in James's world is a legal or juridical question – a question of evidence, argument, and negotiation among alternatives – not a metaphysical one.

In The Aspern Papers (1888), the question of what the truth may be is the narrative's overt theme. Are the poet Aspern's papers hidden in the Missess Bordereau's house in Venice or not? What is the effect of each move planned by the now shrewd, now bumbling narrator as he tries to extract the truth from the situation? Toward the possession of what objects, as he himself wonders, are these feints directed? The very components of the story sound like the techniques involved in writing one. What frustrates the narrator thickens the illusion for the reader. It is the wonder that the story itself creates – the secret that it puts in place by not disclosing – that is both its motive force and its very subject. Concealing a secret is proof that there must be one. The sense of a fugitive truth gives the narrative and the lives of the characters within it goals that structure and organize both alike whether or not either receives a proper resolution. Tita Bordereau's admission at tale's end that she burned the papers after her aunt's death is part of the mystery, not an answer to it.

If James's career is one of continuity and refinement, then even the early Daisy Miller (1878) – the book that made James famous – must, like Daisy herself, be far less plain and innocent than it seems to be. Here the early James is already exploring the interior as he paints a world presumably external to private states of mind, a world to which characters seem only to react. But the legendary split between an omniscient early James and an entirely subjective later James is partly a myth. Like all of James's work, Daisy Miller is a moral tale. Its lesson is that form does indeed matter; its nonobservance can lead, quite literally, to death. Daisy's flouting of the customs of Rome results in her dying from malaria. But this experiential moral is of a piece with the epistemological lesson that the story also presents, the kind of lesson we tend to associate only with the James of the late phase. With the "ruin" and "inscriptions" of Rome's archaeology serving as the story's site, James shows that "the common forms," as he calls them in The Aspern Papers, are essential to everyone's interior life, the shared assumptions or "pretexts," as he calls them in Daisy Miller, that are one's unconscious connection to the external world. There is some irony in the fact that even solitude and loneliness are made up of social materials (how do I measure myself, for example, except in relation to others?), but it is also this kind of irony that makes James so inconsolable and his world often so torpid.

An International Episode (1878), as early a work as Daisy Miller, is by contrast a tale of ambiguity and questioning despite its fierce realism. What happens between the lovers at tale's end? It is hard to tell; many explanations are implied, but none confirmed. Ten years before The Aspern Papers, James is already writing a kind of interactive fiction, asking the reader to get involved in construing the story itself even though the reader may feel that he or she is simply observing it. However politically incorrect, one reacts, says James, according to one's "preconceptions." Thus "reference," he says, speaking technically of his use of language in the tale, is "reference to a fund of associations," "associations" or "preconceptions" that implicate the reader in the same network of assumption (the figure of the web or mesh is among James's favorite metaphors in his criticism) as the text and its characters.

While The Altar of the Dead (1895) is likely James's most moribund tale of human loneliness and uncertainty, it is also among his frankest, since it provides an undisguised model for what narrative and subjectivity actually share. In the process, James's fiction also comes to discover the nature of its own technique, and dramatizes it with even greater clarity than usual. Its key is temporality, and it is the structure of temporality that identifies experience and narrative so exactly. When George Stransom, James's dubious hero, realizes that his female friend has been grieving for the old mutual friend who did him an unspecified wrong many years before, the shock of belated recognition changes his perspective, requiring him to drop her. "It had been all right so long as she didn't know," reflects Stransom, "and it was only now that she knew too much." The slightest difference can make an enormous one. Belated knowledge that alters one's view of the past is the crucial link between the structure of experience and the structure of narrative. Let Stansom explain:

There were subtle and complex relations, a scheme of cross reference. . . . In this way, he arrived at a conception of the total, the ideal.

Whether it is the self, a story, or an idea, if the parts shift their relation to one another, the whole shifts, although one sees it all only "afterward," as James describes it. So efficient is James that story and technique coincide with remarkable ease. The structure of Jamesian subjectivity is identical with the structure of Jamesian narration, and with the structure of the Jamesian sentence in particular. Like the relations among the elements in a character's life or among those in a porous Jamesian story, the components of a Jamesian sentence don't make entire sense or show surpassing beauty until the reader completes them. James's style and the effect of impressions upon the mind are structured the same way. This is James's reflexive realism, a realism whose representation of the self is at one with the active logic of the writing that describes it.

If an early tale like Daisy Miller is epistemological as well as moral, a late one like The Beast in the Jungle (1903) is moral as well as epistemological. Indeed, The Beast in the Jungle joins the two, showing how the later James really is the refinement of the identity between narrative and experience, between the reflexive and the realistic, the formal and the thematic. The belatedness of John Marcher's shock of recognition is its primary characteristic, and the source of both the story's sadness and Marcher's own. What is the beast, the secret that Marcher fruitlessly awaits his whole life long? That there is no secret, that all is as blank as the face of a grave? Or is there also another, plainer meaning? Like Stransom (François Truffaut combines The Beast in the Jungle and The Altar of the Dead in his film The Green Room), Marcher has also grown old with a friend and companion without having the brains or the nerve to see that there is a durable love between them. "She," says James, "was what he had missed." Marcher is "fit indeed," says James in his postscripted preface to The Altar of the Dead in the complete edition of his works, "to mate with Stransom." The story shows us that Marcher is, in his own words, "an ass." Like the luster of the Jamesian sentence, the shock of Jamesian recognition comes only after the fact, securing some shard of memory and desire, but leaving behind forever, as the price of knowing it, the possibility of ever having actually held it. Even the most painful cases offer the sole and ironic compensation of belated appreciation for the losses involved. "Belated," writes James, "the pain . . . at least . . . had something of the taste of life."

What the Reader Knows; or, The French One

by Perry Meisel

Though we customarily honor Katherine Mansfield for her craft, we too often let its mechanisms elude or escape us. Let us pay homage to Mansfield, then, by trying to be clear – a little bit clear anyway - not only about how her texts provoke, assuage, upset, and pacify but also about the way they are made as narrative structures. Two stories will do better than one, especially if they are very different.

First published in 1919, Mansfield's ironic and unforgiving tale "Je ne parle pas français" may strike us as galling and even cruel, certainly in comparison with the almost superhuman pathos of a tale like "Bliss," first published in 1918. If we read the stories in relation to each other, however – they were begun, by the way, less than two weeks apart, in late January and early February, 1918, respectively – we may be surprised by the kind of implicit dialogue they conduct, and in the process discover something precise about the way Mansfield's stories function, both as moral exercises and as narratological ones. Indeed, it may well be the case that narrative economy of the highest order – the kind of economy for which we customarily celebrate Mansfield's peculiar kind of genius - is the identity, or at least the parallelism, of the moral and the narratological. I will try to elaborate that identity or parallelism in Mansfield's work.

While "Bliss" is, of course, well known, "Je ne parle pas français" presents special and unexpected complexities. The story itself is simple enough: Raoul Duquette, a twenty-six-year-old French writer of astonishing pretension and surprising success, befriends a foreigner visiting Paris, an English writer named Dick Harmon. Raoul secures rooms in Paris for Dick on his next visit, which he makes in the company of a beautiful and delicate woman - his fiancée, as it turns out - who, at least by her own testimony, does not speak French; as she puts it, in the only line delivered in French in the story, "Je ne parle pas français." The kick of the tale comes when Dick deserts her, leaving behind a letter that she shares with Raoul, and with us, giving as the reason for Dick's desertion his mother's unwillingness to accept the match. The beautiful and delicate woman - she is given no proper name, only the generic nickname Mouse - is left desolate and alone in Paris, with only the dubious friendship of Raoul. But though Raoul promises to return on the morning after Dick's flight, he fails to do so. He announces his decision to us with a perverse pride in collapsing all decency of feeling - the kind of pride that marks his attitude toward everything in his derisive monologue, which is at one and the same time out of all whack with our customary sense of Mansfield and yet somehow peculiarly representative of certain impulses in her fiction.

The story's real tradition is not so much that of the reflexive or self-conscious récit –a story about writing a story, though it has sure elements of that – as it is of the bad or unpublished tale. The story is a sort of burlesque on both bad fiction and the pop mythology of the rakish aesthete which is among the very raw materials of the Parisian demimonde – the "submerged life," as Mansfield describes it - that the story represents. It particularly mocks the unsavory Raoul, against whose ugly nature we rather automatically react.

In what direction does the story's viciousness cut? Where is its irony to be located? Or to put it another way, where does its irony locate its reader?

One way of answering such a question is to say that what the reader knows in "Je ne parle pas français" are all the things that the story itself derides: an innate sense of compassion, a sense of human worth, a sense of human sharing. All the things that the pretentious narrator maintains are the case are not the case, cannot possibly be the case; all our decency says no. Central here is Raoul's notion that people are, as he puts it, like portmanteaux, or suitcases. "I don't believe in the human soul," says Raoul. "I never have, I believe that people are like portmanteaux - packed with certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away, dumped down, lost and found, half emptied suddenly, or squeezed fatter than ever, until finally the Ultimate Porter swings them on to the Ultimate Train and away they rattle." Echoing E.M. Forster's indictment of modern life as the "civilization of luggage" in Howards End, of 1910, Raoul's metaphor reduces people to inhuman parcels, and their mortal care, or lack of it, to a kind of indifferent and haphazard registry.

Only such a cynical belief would allow for the callousness of Raoul's behavior, and yet it is a belief that is sustained throughout by a consistent if distasteful vision of how experience is structured. Raoul elaborates, through the logic of his figures of speech, an entire theory of character that is extraordinarily cogent from an abstract point of view.

"People are like portmanteaux," like pieces of luggage, devoid of innate or indwelling essence, because life, or at least our perception of it, is structured in or by a temporal chain whose functioning requires the contrast and comparison of what Raoul calls "moments" or "instants" one with another. "You never do recover the same thing you lose," says Raoul. "It's always a new thing. The moment it leaves you it's changed." While this may sound, on the one hand, like a lovely theory of the constant freshness of experience – and in some degree it is – it is, on the other hand, really a grindingly desperate theory of the evanescent flux of all things beneath our feet. Only by the play of relations, between one moment and another, or between one "habit" and another, can what we ordinarily call an essence or an absolute quality be established as such. The theory of signification implicit here is one familiar to structural linguistics under the name of difference, and to psychoanalysts under the name of deferred action, even though Mansfield's own vocabulary derives from the Romantic tradition of Walter Pater and his privileged moments, and, before him, of William Wordsworth and his "spots of time" in Book 12 of The Prelude. Raoul even explains, disparagingly though logically enough, that his bitterness against life is, as he puts it, the "direct result of the American cinema acting upon a weak mind" – that life is a function of the ideologies into which we are inscribed rather than of any indwelling sanctity it may be said to muster from beyond the bounds of culture. "Everything," says Raoul, "is arranged for you – waiting for you." Hence one's character is, from the ground up, a "pose," as Raoul puts it, which becomes a "habit"; even poor Dick doesn't just "look . . . the part," whatever part that may be; "he was the part."

Such a perspective deracinates all notions of authenticity, not just in the temperamental way we might expect of Raoul but in a seriously persuasive way no matter our moral evaluation of Raoul himself. Authenticity of self – or of world – is no more than a fiction, no less real for being so but surely less secure metaphysically. Indeed, self and world are, from Raoul's point of view, almost entirely without any metaphysical dimension whatsoever.

How far we are from the delectable universe of Bertha in "Bliss," where the human soul, as Mansfield puts it, has a "shower of little sparks coming from it." In Bertha's "bosom," says Mansfield, "there was still that bright glowing place." The difference could not be more exact; Bertha's tropes - "shower of sparks," "bright glowing place" – insist on a human essence, recalling Wordsworth's wishful image of the human spirit in the Intimations ode as well as a whole tradition of Platonic signs for the soul that stands behind it.

At the same time, though, "Bliss," too, is structured by irony. If "Je ne parle pas français" makes us feel, by dint of the reactive thinking irony classically induces as a rhetorical device, that just the reverse of its assertions is true – that there is a human soul, not just people as portmanteaux – then "Bliss" also requires an equal and opposite reaction: the feeling that despite its manifest claims, there is no Wordsworthian or Platonic "shower of sparks." In fact, poor Bertha is disabused of precisely the comforting notion that there is when her recognition of Harry's secret arrangement with Miss Fulton – an almost high-Victorian moment of knowledge, perhaps the reason Virginia Woolf felt obliged to criticize it – punctures her bliss at tale's end.

If in "Je ne parle pas français" the reader is all love and goodness, in "Bliss" the reader is all worldly guile and suspicion. The very first line of "Bliss" makes us prophets of contingency and caution; Bertha's pace is so breathless – like her running in the scenes she imagines – that we want to slow it down for fear she will fall and hurt herself, as she indeed does at the story's close. The story finds the suspicion in us by the force of its negation: "Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, and to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at – nothing – at nothing, simply." By contrast, the opening lines of "Je ne parle pas français" fill us with the kind of gray rain we later associate with Jean Luc Godard's early hommages to film noir; the story finds the sunshine in us by the force of its negation: "I do not know why I have such a fancy for this little café. It's dirty and sad, sad. It's not as if it had anything to distinguish it from a hundred others – it hasn't."

In "Bliss," what the reader knows is that people are indeed like portmanteaux. Despite Bertha's radiant optimism, they do not wear their essences on their sleeves; their sleeves are packed away in boxes of signification – in portmanteaux like those Raoul describes – that are the rhetorical tokens by means of which narrative allows us to know them and by which it allows Bertha to know them through a painful education. Bertha's fatal blindness or innocence of vision is in reading her surroundings, her husband included, too straightforwardly, reading them as though there were no necessity for reading – until the secret is made so palpable as to shock her into her realization. In this sense the story is an allegory of reading, disabusing the reader as well as Bertha of the notion that the notion of a human essence – whether in life or in a story – is secure.

But in "Je ne parle pas français" what the reader knows is that people are not at all like portmanteaux; that is the tug of the heart against which the story works. We can go up and back like this all day. It is as though Bertha's wishes are fulfilled by the negation of Raoul's view of the world, and Raoul's wishes fulfilled by the negation of Bertha's view of the world. This kind of dialogical play between the two stories is endless. But how can both these claims be true? How can the reaction prompted by one tale be the opposite of that produced by the other? How can one writer exhibit so discordant, so internally divergent a sense of what we ordinarily call character? How can Bertha's naïve Platonism give way to a darker sense of the instability of essences, while Raoul's nasty sense of the instability of essences give way to a brighter, perhaps even genuinely Platonic, sense of the real stability of essences?

Well, if each reaction produces its opposite in the play of the reader's mind, it is likely the case that each category in fact needs the other to be what is. Both can be true at the same time because each claim – so Mansfield's epistemology goes – needs the other for what coherence each may be said to have. One is reminded of Harold Bloom's paradox that if God created the world out of nothing, then he must have created the void at the same time that he created the world. In a curious but implacable logic, Raoul's irony requires its violation by a duplicitous world. Each notion of character depends for its sense upon the other.

In both cases, too, what is dramatized is not so much discordance as the calculated disposition of the structuring trope of irony in a very precise sense: the enactment of the reverse of what is narrated in what the reader knows rather than in what the character shows or tells. Each story represents a falling away from the state that it names. "Bliss" is so named because that is not what the story transacts – not bliss but its sudden opposite. "Je ne parle pas français" is so named because what the story does is speak French, even while announcing that it does not.

Speak French, even while announcing that it does not. Mansfield thereby gives us a wonderfully appropriate figure for the operation that is responsible for what the reader knows. Recall that in the Parisian story the words spoken by the fiancée – "Je ne parle pas français" – are the only words spoken in French in a story that, by all logical implication and necessity, must of course be written in French. It is, after all, a story by the French writer Raoul Duquette, even though it is of course written in English, since it is really a story by the Anglophone writer Katherine Mansfield.

The real but absent text of "Je ne parle pas français" – the French one – is, I would argue, a sign or cipher for the structure of Mansfield's reader, in whom resides the necessary illusion of a French text that finds its prior cause in Mansfield's English text. A French text is what the reader ultimately presumes – a text that exists nowhere but that has to exist everywhere if Mansfield's story is to sustain its illusion. The French one must be supposed: the real text that is missing, that has somehow been translated but that "retains" – the very word choice conveys the sense that there really is a French text – an aura of presence, like the one that attends the Greek whose authoritative absence Virginia Woolf will similarly lament, in a different context, some six years later.

For Mansfield, moreover, the importance of the reader's activity cannot be overestimated. It is the reader that is the instrument or channel supplementing what is lacking in both texts. The reader is a kind of supplemental intersection between the text and the characters that it pretends, as part of its strategy, to be separate from, merely transcribing their self-sufficient essence, even though, as with all literary figures – as distinct from what we call historical ones – there are, strictly speaking, no such originals in fact. Bertha, Raoul, Harry, Mouse, even the Norman Knights, who humorously enough invade Bertha's home in "Bliss" – these are all figures in the reader's mind. They are the result of the work the reader does to exact from the text a stable illusion of character, which exists nowhere but in the reader's apprehension. By this unconscious work on the reader's part, the story takes on what mimetic attributes it may have, the result, not of an unmediated mimesis, but of Mansfield's technique of writing, and of writing her real text – her French one – through the orchestrated play of her reader's moral assumptions.

After all, narrative at large – and Mansfield in particular – constructs readers and, through them, worlds; it does not express, through a discourse of simple correspondence, characters that it projects as real and with whom the reader, as the saying goes, identifies. Rather, narrative opposes, through a discourse of transaction, the image of characters against whom the reader measures himself or herself. It is this revisionary ratio – the one between the reader and the subjective others he or she confronts in the narrative – that structures what the reader knows, and it is here that narrative finds its true destination.

What makes Mansfield so special, then, is the precision with which she both exploits this ratio and clarifies its nature as the active pivot or mechanism of the art of fiction. She shares with some of her contemporaries – D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis especially – an identifiable Modernist strategy of alienating her reader in calculated and specific ways. The difference, however, is that Mansfield's technique is finally a conservative one that exploits the reader's unconscious and its assumptions rather than upbraids them.

Originally published in Centennial Essays on Katherine Mansfield. Ed. Roger Robinson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

Lives on the Couch

by Perry Meisel

Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology. By Alan C. Elms. 315 pp. New York: Oxford University Press. $25.

Few topics in the history of ideas are as provocative as psychobiography, and few are as vexing. Mindful of widespread popular opinion about psychobiography's notorious reductionism (the notion, say, that Shakespeare's psychosexual organization engendered the content of his plays), Alan C. Elms states without reservation that "psychobiography has become a dirty word." In Uncovering Lives he sets out to vindicate the practice with a series of his own psychobiographical portraits - of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, B.F. Skinner, Isaac Asimov, Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Saddam Hussein, Henry Kissinger, and Alexander Haig.

Mr. Elms, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, relies on a combination of ego psychology (modeled on the work of Erik Erikson) and academic psychology (based on the work of Gordon Allport, the personality psychologist, and on that of Allport's mentor, Henry Murray, who pioneered American personality theory). But while Mr. Elms's eclecticism is refreshing, his research rigorous and his portraits sometimes stimulating, his book Uncovering Lives throws psychobiography's difficulties into relief all over again.

Mr. Elms first looks at Freud's 1910 study of Leonardo da Vinci to find the classical source of historical psychobiography. The trouble is, he seems to expect that Freud, as a good scientist, would have been above it all. Mr. Elms, for instance, concludes that "Freud's 'Leonardo' is not representative of psychobiography in general because its crucial errors" - particularly Freud's identification with Leonardo - "derive from idiosyncratic factors bound up in Freud's personal conflicts." What else is new? Freud's errors only prove Mr. Elms's point - that it is impossible to write anything, even a psychobiography, without unconscious motivation.

Mr. Elms is nonetheless an admirable scholar. He impressively documents the history of what he calls "one of the autobiographical masterpieces of the 20th century," Jung's posthumous Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963). Paragraph by paragraph, he describes the changes made to Jung's original manuscript, and then elaborates the stories behind the changes, especially the reasons for the bowdlerizations by Jung's family and supporters even before Jung's death in 1961.

But it is Mr. Elms's chapter on the behaviorist B.F. Skinner that steals what show there is in Uncovering Lives. Mr. Elms not only provides intriguing biographical information (including Skinner's unfulfilled plan to write a book on the psychology of literature); he also gives a fascinating account of the psychological issues at work in Skinner's life and career. In Mr. Elms's telling, Walden Two, Skinner's 1948 utopian novel, was "Skinner's response to a major midlife crisis," and behaviorism itself was the resolution of Skinner's inner conflicts. Skinner's life work happens to be a superb example of what Mr. Elms (silently building on a notion from Melanie Klein) calls the "restitutive function" of work - the way that writing or scholarship, for instance, can provide the individual a psychological link to the objective world, the glue that allows him to put the elements of his life together.

Mr. Elms's chapters on the fantasy writers Isaac Asimov and L. Frank Baum (the author of the 1900 children's classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) are also rich with fresh biographical material, and they carry more psychoanalytic punch than the other psychobiographical readings in the book. Mr. Elms argues that the galactic spaces of Asimov's fiction are a well-wrought defense against his acrophobia, "a creative engagement between his talents and his fears." Elsewhere Mr. Elms posits that if one early Baum work - a manual on chicken breeding - signals an infantile fear of "maternal inattention," then Baum's invention of "Father Goose" in 1899 was a prescient and appropriate restitutive response to his childhood anxiety.

However, Mr. Elms's attempt at "applied political psychobiography" is far less effective. The "restitutive function" is apparently not at work in the careers of Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Henry Kissinger and (not surprisingly) Alexander Haig and Saddam Hussein.

One of the book's most serious problems is that it is not sensitive enough to the implications of its most cogent idea. Mr. Elms suggests that restitution provided by work may well carry a person "beyond defensiveness." But he leaves one important question unattended: how have writers and psychobiologists, for instance, restructured the fields in which they work? Mr. Elms seems to believe that psychobiography is designed to demonstrate psychological laws rather than to enrich the study of culture as a whole.

Can one assess Mr. Elms's book psychobiographically? Do the book's formal characteristics reveal anything about its author? Does Mr. Elms's studiously casual tone disguise anything troubling about his childhood? How can one test the validity of such claims? The question of whether or not the writing of psychobiography is a sufficiently restitutive enterprise for Mr. Elms himself is, of course, beyond the judgment of literary criticism.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, November 27, 1994

Introduction to It Can't Happen Here

by Perry Meisel

It Can't Happen Here. By Sinclair Lewis. New York: Signet Classics, 1993.

It Can't Happen Here is unique among Sinclair Lewis's major novels, and very likely among his best. Although the book's appearance in 1935 was a topical response to the advent of fascism in Europe (Mussolini had come to power in Italy in 1922, Hitler in Germany in 1933), its depiction of a fascist future for the United States has a force that grows stronger with each passing year. Rather than criticize America for its provincialism as he did in the novels that had made him the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930 - Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929) - Lewis now celebrated America by writing a cautionary tale rather than a satiric one.

The urbane Europe of Dodsworth was no longer urbane when Lewis began work on It Can't Happen Here in 1934. His wife, Dorothy Thompson, was a journalist, and had published a book called I Saw Hitler in 1933; Lewis obviously knew what was afoot. His predilection for moral disgust was doubtless kindled by tales of Hitler. He had little patience with presumptive authority, and now found that what he hated about American provincialism - its gullibility - was mirrored by the success of the Nazis. It gave him an entirely fresh aesthetic perspective. Despite received critical opinion (Mark Schorer, Lewis's biographer, has said that after 1930 Lewis was "finished" as a "serious writer"), It Can't Happen Here marks a singular advance in Lewis's art as a novelist that transforms the assumptions of his earlier work into the problems of the new, and that leads to a startling self-reassessment that crowns his career.

Although It Can't Happen Here is as a rule compared to George Orwell's 1984 (1949) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) in its representation of a totalitarian future, its best analogue is Nathanael West's A Cool Million, published just a year before Lewis's novel in 1934. West narrates the rise of an American fascism by showing the grotesque violence that brings to power Shagpoke Whipple, a dishonest banker and former president modeled upon Ronald Reagan's preferred precursor, Calvin Coolidge. Whipple puts America - and West's hero, poor Lemuel Pitkin - under the boot of his Storm Troops to secure the triumph of his National Revolutionary Party.

Lewis's plot is not dissimilar, but it has a wonderfully logical ease compared to West's Kafkaesque fantasy (there is some irony in the fact, too, that Jack London, to whom the young Lewis had sold plots in 1910-11, had in 1907 published the first of what Erich Fromm later called the "negative utopias," The Iron Heel). Unlike Orwell and Huxley, Lewis portrays not an achieved state of totalitarianism whose protocols the novel's characters take for granted, but a slow, altogether believable process whereby the America we all of us know crosses a line that we didn't realize was there. While Orwell and Huxley largely override the specificities peculiar to British culture as part of the nature of the fascist nightmare, Lewis takes advantage of specificity by employing American customs and conventions that we know by heart to stoke the loud realism that makes his story so extraordinarily vivid. The novel charts the rise to power of Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a right-wing demagogue modeled on Huey P. Long of Louisiana, and whose partisans, who call themselves the "Corpos," have persuasive heirs in today's New Right.

Lewis focuses on the American electoral process in an outlandish and uncannily prophetic way, presaging the media campaigns that we now expect in American politics, and mixing, like Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe, fact and fiction when, for example, Windrip beats Franklin D. Roosevelt out of the presidential nomination at the 1936 Democratic national convention. The campaign, too, is utterly convincing to American readers of any generation, especially those who saw Ronald Reagan's presidency, although the climactic Democratic rally at Madison Square Garden in New York the night before the election adds to the clatter of familiar American sounds and images the ominous centrality of the Minute Men, Windrip's storm troopers who, like West's Storm Troops in A Cool Million (they dress in Davy Crockett uniforms), use the virtues of a pioneer image in order to refashion it.

The story is told from the point of view of Doremus Jessup, a sixty-year-old newspaper editor in the small town of Fort Beulah, Vermont. Happiest when he is alone in his attic study amid "an endearing mess," as Lewis puts it, of books - novels, the complete works of Jefferson, the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon - Doremus is, unlike Babbitt, say, or the more heroic Martin Arrowsmith, a fair surrogate for the novelist himself. What Doremus learns over the course of the novel is that the "cackle" of the world, as Lewis describes the clutter of contending voices and opinions that makes up America, is not at all unlike the "endearing mess" of books in his study. Society, too, is a motley of speech, a "mess" of variegated languages of thought and feeling that its members expound. The novel and the world are continuous rather than different in kind. America is a particularly manifest example of social life as a tissue of dialects in its own right. It is not a question of who is Right and who is Left, who is right and who is wrong. Each side needs the other for a sense of identity. America is like the "patchwork quilt" under which the fugitive Doremus sleeps in the house of strangers who at the novel's close give him refuge.

It Can't Happen Here is an aesthetic breakthrough for Lewis because his novel shows us the real relation between politics and literature. They are overlapping worlds, not separate ones. Both are signifying pageants, dazzling patchworks of language. This is precisely what the novel as a form uniquely enjoys among other discourses. It is also what the novel as a form shares with democracy as a form. It is Lewis's achievement in It Can't Happen Here to have grasped, after a long and successful career as a satirist, this critical identity, and to realize the thickening of illusion that it can technically effect. No longer a sarcastic onlooker, Lewis has risen from the satirist's chair of the 1920s to a more farcical realist stance in which all the attitudes are equally credible and equally preposterous. He delights in a play of multiple idioms unknown to him before despite a history of critical reception that praises him for tuning single American dialects to perfection.

The polarities that satire structurally requires (if something is stupid and evil, then I who show it to you must be smart and virtuous) are among the kinds of conflict or opposition that Lewis's shock of recognition leads him to override in favor of a more telescopic realism bent on discovery rather than judgment. Lewis now sees that his earlier satiric mode pivoted on the kinds of distinctions that he is no longer willing to make. In Arrowsmith in particular (Lewis had turned down the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1926 because, as Schorer describes it, he didn't believe in the legislation of taste such prizes represented), Lewis crystallized the implicit assumptions of Main Street and Babbitt by opposing, plainly and absolutely, the will to truth and the will to dominion.

The simplicity of the opposition - indeed, the opposition itself - is no longer an assumption in It Can't Happen Here. Through Doremus, Lewis realizes that the languages that people speak - the satirist's included - are actually languages of belief rather than of any sort of established truth, each vying for a purely documentary priority, whether Karl Pascal's Marxism or Shad Ledue's resentment. In It Can't Happen Here, Communists and Corporatists, Left and Right, are alike "theocratic," as Lewis puts it, thereby dismantling the presumable opposition between the two, and finding instead a common bond between them in the wish to believe in something. As Orwell argues in his famous essay, "Politics and the English Language" (1946), no language is, despite our "belief" in it, a "natural growth." West's Shagpoke Whipple is blunter still: "This is not a matter of opinion, it is one of faith." Any "loyalty," Doremus concludes, is "religious." He, too, finds himself wanting "a church," as he calls it, to redeem America from fascism. Indeed, winning the Resistance is couched in overtly religious terms - as a redemption from tyranny in an inescapable typology based in a tradition of faith (the Communists refuse to join the Resistance in order to vouchsafe their own purity of belief). The world is dangerous not because people don't mean what they say, but because they do. Belief is somehow inevitable; theocratic piety even attends the use of language as such, since grammar presupposes a stability of relation between subject and object that the world itself may not possess, but in whose name it gets transfigured nonetheless.

Thus the political dangers that the novel shows us are also literary dangers. Lewis's focus on Lee Sarason, Windrip's secretary of state and chief adviser, is decisive in establishing the link between American life and American fiction that is the book's chief invention. Although Sarason is eventually unwise enough to seize power from Windrip as the book steams toward its end (he, too, gets toppled in turn), he is Windrip's speechwriter, press agent, and the real author of Zero Hour, Windrip's version of Mein Kampf, "the Bible," as Lewis calls it, of Windrip's "followers." Sarason's "smoking typewriter" is what is ultimately responsible for the fascism that Lewis describes. "It all made dazzling reading," thinks Doremus of the whole political situation late in the novel. "There had never been a more elegant and romantic fiction."

Windrip is not, however, without his own skills, too. Like Sarason's bewitching typewriter, Windrip's oral ability to entrance his audience has its counterpart in the novelist's ability to absorb and fascinate his or hers. A politician with the rhetorical talents of Windrip is, like Sarason, a kind of novelist in his own right, although a very different one from the surrogate novelist presented by the figure of Doremus. This is the second model of authorship or governance that the novel offers, and it is clear which of the two it prefers despite the irony of having to choose. The danger, in literature as in life, lies in taking any illusionism, any language at all, for "gospel," as Lewis puts it - in believing in it rather than simply appreciating it and weighing its role in a balance of values.

Hence It Can't Happen Here is a particularly relevant text for any assessment of American culture at the present time. After all, Lewis portrays what we can very reasonably call a multicultural America in the book as a whole, and in its concluding image of the patchwork quilt. The principal question he raises is, how do you read a world, or a novel, full of contending tongues without succumbing to the fascism or theocracy of either Left or Right, or to the kind of "message" literature that Zero Hour, for example, recommends to control the polyphony? One guards against the fixities of belief to which Left and Right, and sociological literature, alike aspire by insisting, as Lewis does, on America as a poetic fiction - a poem by Whitman, if you will - and on its endless self-invention rather than on anything self-evident in its constitution. America's precise and paradoxical virtue is that it is decidedly artificial, imagined rather than found.

Lewis conjoins politics and the novel by showing that both are dialogues, unlimited conversations between readerly assumption and writerly surprise, conducted in order to make up what world there is. This is Lewis's reflexive realism - his ability to show the similarities between reading the world and reading a text. This is also a vision of politics itself as ultimately aesthetic, like his account of the campaign, a proleptic Warholesque view of life as television well before the fact. Lewis had been an aesthete in college, writing imitations of Swinburne as a Yale freshman before growing more topically inclined as a writer of prose. This repressed aestheticism returns in It Can't Happen Here, a presumably political novel from a sociological writer, but one in which the certainties of satire wane in favor of a renewed aesthetic irony poised enough to let the sensation of every position, every language, every belief have its effect.

Like its insistence on endless dialogue in both life and literature, the novel's own superb plot does not conclude with the melodrama of either a successful overthrow of fascism or its absolute dominion. Rather, it simply stops with the start of a struggle between the Corpos and New Underground, leaving the story's destiny open. The play of dominion and defiance in America's yielding to Windrip is reflected in the novel's own technique of engaging the reader in a dialogue or, if you prefer, a Socratic dialectic between belief and resistance, expectation and amazement. Debate is the only freedom and dialogue the only art. This is decidedly American writing. The grand image of the patchwork quilt not only links America; it also links Lewis with other American writers of his time such as Willa Cather, for whom the image of the quilt is like testimony to a shared vision of a multicultural America. Indeed, the patchwork quilt has become a popular image for such a vision during the last quarter of this century. If It Can't Happen Here is still real to readers more than half a century after it was written, it is because Sinclair Lewis has identified the precise tensions that structure both democracy and the art of fiction.

Sweet Ottoline

by Perry Meisel

Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale. By Miranda Seymour. Illustrated. 452 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

She was, said Virginia Woolf, "Helen of Troy." "She gave me a complete mental reorientation," said Aldous Huxley. She was, in a less hyperbolic assessment by Lord David Cecil, "a creative artist of the private life." With her mane of red hair, her six-foot frame and her dazzling and eccentric mode of dress, the beautiful Lady Ottoline Morrell, niece of the Fifth Duke of Portland and wife of the Liberal politician Philip Morrell, ranked among London's chief literary hostesses from 1907 until her death in 1938. Lady Ottoline has, as a rule, also been subject to "grotesque caricature," says Miranda Seymour in her new biography, and it is time to rediscover the real woman behind the myth of the vain aristocrat seeking admission to esthetic circles.

D.H. Lawrence's portrait of Ottoline as Hermione Roddice in Women in Love (1920) is just the kind of image Ms. Seymour wishes to challenge in Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale, although it is the Bloomsbury set that she holds principally responsible for Ottoline's bad historical reputation. Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey - all flattered Ottoline, then joked about her behind her back. With full access to Ottoline's papers for the first time, particularly her letters to Bertrand Russell (an earlier biography by Sandra J. Darroch appeared in 1975 without benefit of them), Ms. Seymour tries to produce a fresh Ottoline beyond the haze of Bloomsbury distortion.

Born in 1873, Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish Bentinck weathered a painful Victorian childhood. After her father's death in 1877, her mother turned her into an emotional "slave," as Ms. Seymour puts it, passing along to her daughter a penchant for both nervous suffering and religious enthusiasm. Following the death of her uncle in 1879, Ottoline's half-brother Arthur became the Sixth Duke of Portland, and the family moved to ancient Welbeck Abbey in Notthinghamshire.

Educated at home, Ottoline was free to roam in nearby Sherwood Forest after lessons. Here her awakening sense of physical beauty began to clash with her precocious religiosity, foreshadowing a series of tensions later in life between the "puritan" and the "artistic" sides of her nature, as Ms. Seymour calls them, and between her aristocratic background and her bohemian propensities. She felt, Ms. Seymour tells us, like an outsider in both of the worlds she inhabited. "I could never learn my proper part," she confessed to her diary.

The conflict between Ottoline's spirituality and her love of sensual beauty found a perfect resolution in a religion of art based on the estheticism of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, then still fashionable. By 1907, Ottoline had discovered her true vocation as a patroness of the arts, "the chance," as Ms. Seymour describes it, "to live a life of active benevolence outside the conventions." She and Philip Morrell had moved into 44 Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, in 1906; by the following spring she was sending off invitations for what became her famous Thursday Evenings. By 1910, she was helping Roger Fry choose the paintings for the first Post-Impressionist exhibition in London; by 1911, she was in the opening rounds of a stormy relationship with Bertrand Russell that lasted for the rest of her life.

Her marriage to Philip Morrell in 1902 was a devoted union but also an open one. "Too weak a character to dictate the form a marriage should take . . . he was putty in her hands," says Ms. Seymour. Of her serious lovers, however, only Russell was as important to her as her husband. With Russell, she could play out, openly and endlessly, the split in her nature between the spirit and the flesh, by turns enduring and enjoying Russell's vaunted sexual appetite, and always enjoying his mind.

If Bedford Square was Ottoline's court, then Garsington, the country house in Oxfordshire which the Morrells acquired in 1914, was her Forest of Arden. Like all of her houses, Garsington was, as Juliette Huxley put it, "a habitual work of art" (Ms. Seymour's book is illustrated, and the proof is manifest). Garsington was a "romantic theater," as Ottoline herself described it, renowned for its picturesque Italian garden and the "Shakespearean intrigue," as Ms. Seymour nicely phrases it, among the guests (during World War I, the house and surrounding farm also served as a refuge for conscientious objectors performing alternative service). So esthetically luxurious was Garsington that, on a good day, Ottoline could talk books with Lytton Strachey, then fetch D.H. Lawrence for a walk through the countryside.

Ottoline's sincerity and her capacity for suffering are Ms. Seymour's chief evidence in a case that is unnecessary to make. Ottoline vindicates herself, not as a journal writer (the extracts Ms. Seymour gives us are rather bland), but as a lovably infuriating character who would be far more comfortable, and far more vivid, in a crossover historical novel.

This potential Ottoline gets lost, however, amid all the documents on Ms. Seymour's desk. As estimable as Ms. Seymour's revisionary project may be, its successes and its shortcomings go, oddly enough, hand in hand. Ms. Seymour aspires to comprehensiveness rather than to shape, but the very abundance of her materials often turns her biography into an unwitting historiographical farce of the kind Ottoline's friend Lytton Strachey specialized in writing: the sardonic romance of the wide-eyed historian looking to separate fact from fiction (in her introduction, Ms. Seymour refers directly to Strachey's own words on the subject in Eminent Victorians), only to be swallowed up by a mass of evidence whose organization is beyond his powers unless he succumbs to generic melodrama.

The melodrama to which Ms. Seymour succumbs is drab hagiography. Bloomsbury's "duplicity," she argues, hurt Ottoline, making her feel the childhood dread of being the outsider all over again. Ms. Seymour wisely allowed herself novelistic liberties in her 1989 book on Henry James; here she takes advantage of the strategy only occasionally, although with superbly dramatic results when she does so. "How could it be designing," she has her hostess wonder, "to want to help people?" The indirect style is characteristic of Flaubert, and well suited to a persuasive representation of Ottoline. It also leaves the reader free to make an independent response. How indeed?

Ottoline Morrell was really a female dandy in the grand 19th-century tradition. She feminized estheticism as surely as Virginia Woolf did. She also gathered within herself the dandy's entire history by combining its aristocratic origins at the court of George III with its bohemian destiny after Baudelaire and Wilde. An aristocrat, she was languid and affected; a bohemian, she was passionate, flouting the very conventions that sustained her as Lady Ottoline. Like any good biographical subject, she eludes the hand that tries to grasp her.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, June 13, 1993.

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Freudian Trip

by Perry Meisel

Freud, Jung, and Hall the King-Maker: The Historic Expedition to America (1909). By Saul Rosenzweig. Illustrated. 477 pp. Seattle. Hogrefe & Huber Publishers. $27.50.

Among the few official distinctions awarded Sigmund Freud during his lifetime was an honorary degree from Clark University in Worcester, Mass. in 1909. The occasion was the 20th anniversary of Clark's opening, a celebration for which the university's president, G. Stanley Hall, had organized an international scientific conference and invited Freud as a speaker. It was a landmark event not only for Freud but also for Carl Jung, who was given an honorary degree, too.

For Hall, a pioneer of American psychology and an early enthusiast of psychoanalysis who was designated the "kingmaker" by Freud himself, it meant being host to a historical figure, "the source of it all," as he later put it. For the embattled Freud, who was then 53 years old, it meant vindication. After facing years of criticism, he had gained some form of world recognition. "As I stepped onto the platform at Worcester to deliver my 'Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis,'" he wrote in his Autobiographical Study in 1925, "it seemed like the realization of some incredible daydream; psychoanalysis was no longer a product of delusion. It had become a valuable part of reality." For Jung, who was only 34 at the time, the conference confirmed his status as Freud's presumable heir; on returning to Zurich he changed his stationery to reflect his honorary degree.

Saul Rosenzweig, a professor emeritus of psychology and psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis, has written an extraordinarily rich and absorbing account of Freud's only American trip that reveals unexpected patterns in the history of both psychoanalysis and American psychology. For Freud, Jung, and Hall the King-Maker, Mr. Rosenzweig not only did 40 years of research but also edited the correspondence between Freud and Hall and retranslated the five lectures that Freud gave at Clark.

Freud arrived in New York Harbor by steamship on Aug. 29, 1909, accompanied by two of his disciples, Jung together with Sandor Ferenczi. Although the exact details of the invitations are irretrievable, even to Mr. Rosenzweig, we do know that Hall invited Freud twice before he accepted, that Freud himself asked Ferenczi to join him, and that Hall invited Jung only after he had already invited Freud - not simultaneously, as Jung maintained in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963). While the weeklong event at Clark did not focus on psychology alone (there were 27 other guest speakers and degree recipients besides Freud and Jung, including two Nobel laureates, the physicists A. A. Michelson and Ernest Rutherford), Mr. Rosenzweig says that "Freud was to Hall the leading light of the celebration."

Beneath the manifest camaraderie, however, an unconscious storm between Freud and Jung was gathering. With a candor refreshing in psychoanalytic studies, Mr. Rosenzweig shows that even in 1909, when their mutual opportunism kept them friendly, the differences that would drive the two men apart by 1913 were already emerging.

In 1906, three years before the Clark visit, Freud, who was then often lampooned as a Jew bent on corrupting Aryan ideals, welcomed Jung's eager and appreciative response to his theories. Indeed, he prized the pastor's son from Zurich as his potential successor - his "crown's prince," as he began to call him in 1909 - largely because Jung was not Jewish.

But if Freud "overvalued" Jung's "non-Jewishness," so did Jung. Although Jung's "Aryan sympathies during the Hitler regime" are well known, says Mr. Rosenzweig, he demonstrates just how early what he calls Jung's "Aryan bias" really was, and how central it turned out to be in his thinking. In a stunning set piece, he also shows that the rise and fall of Freud and Jung's friendship, from 1906 to 1913, roughly coincided with the years of Adolf Hitler's residence in Vienna; he also compares prose passages from Hitler and Jung, with provocative success.

The book's key dramatic moment is the walk Freud and Jung took in Central Park on Aug. 30, 1909, the day after they landed in New York and a few days before they set off for Worcester. Freud reported to his wife that they had observed the city's ethnic mix, including signs in the park in German, Italian and Yiddish as well as English. But Jung reported to his wife that they had talked about "Jews and Aryans," and how "one of my dreams clearly pointed up the difference." Jung's Aryan bias, his love of the occult and his belief that the unconscious was a spiritual rather than a sexual or social realm all put him at odds with Freud's fierce secularity and historicism. So did Jung's constitutional inability to play the role of follower.

The power struggle is certainly evident in a story Jung related to Mr. Rosenzweig with "special satisfaction" in 1951, about a mishap he saw Freud suffer while in New York on Sept. 2, just before leaving for Worcester: Freud, while gazing at the Palisades across the river from the city, accidentally wet his pants. He told Jung he was afraid he would wet himself during his upcoming lectures and agreed to let Jung analyze the event. But when Freud produced a telling dream, and Jung, who had already interpreted Freud's pants-wetting as a need to draw attention to himself whatever the cost, pressed Freud for more intimate details, Freud declined and said he could not "risk his authority."

The differences between Freud and Jung are remarkably similar to those between Hall and his principal American rival, the psychologist and philosopher William James. Once again, Mr. Rosenzweig's historiography is both sound and ingenious. James and Hall - "the two great pioneers of early American psychology," as he calls them - were old friends, and represented the two opposing directions of the young science in the United States. James, like Jung, favored psychical research, whereas Hall favored earthly experimentalism.

Hall, who received the first American doctorate in psychology in 1878, from Harvard, was an avid Freudian. His correspondence with Freud shows a genuine devotion. Originally trained as a minister, he concluded that "spiritism," as he called the belief in a spiritual realm, was "ruck and muck." He was, however, fascinated by the experimental verification of psychological concepts.

James, on the other hand, was, like Jung, searching for a "cosmic consciousness" or the sort of "universal spiritual realm" that Freudian thinking prohibited as a wish fulfillment. Despite, or perhaps because of, pragmatism, James, like Jung, wanted something "larger than the mundane individual life that Freud invoked." And, like Jung, James took a momentous walk with Freud in 1909.

James came to Clark for the conference "to see," as he put it, "what Freud was like." This is Freud's recollection of their private meeting: "I shall never forget one little scene that occurred as we were on a walk together. He stopped suddenly, handed me a bag he was carrying and asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch up with me as soon as he had got through an attack of angina pectoris which was just coming on." Mr. Rosenzweig interprets this famous attack as an unconscious response to Freud's theory - an anxiety attack over an extramarital affair, stirred up by one of Freud's lectures.

Although much of the drama of Freud's visit to America seems to have taken place outside the conference, Freud's lectures - delivered more or less extemporaneously, in German - were a delightful performance. The Boston press covered them; Emma Goldman attended them; Hall described them as "masterpieces of simplification, directness, and comprehensiveness."

The lectures, the first popular exposition of Freud's theories, are luminous largely because of the marvelous images and metaphors that Freud employed to dramatize his concepts. Mr. Rosenzweig says that "they still represent the best available outline by Freud of his theory in its essence." Unfortunately, though, Mr. Rosenzweig's new translation of the lectures loses some of the linguistic specificity of James Strachey's translation in the Standard Edition, which captured both the cohesiveness and the extravagance of Freud's narrative devices. Perhaps Mr. Rosenzweig retranslated the lectures in order to include them legally in the present volume. If that is so it was well worth the effort, since the inclusion of the lectures lends his book poetic unity and makes it a pleasure to read.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1993.

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