The tree of death

Flies.

Les mouches, from les Mouchards.

“In defense of Brissot, it should be remembered that "spying" for the police could take the form of reporting on the mood of certain sections or milieux of the city rather than betraying friends. Spies, often called mouches (a term apparently derived from the name of the no- torious sixteenth-century agent Antoine Mouchy), buzzed like flies around the cafes and public places where gossip was to be gathered.”

In Robert Darnton’s essay about whether Brissot was, as his Jacobin enemies claimed, a police spy, Darnton weighs the evidence and concludes that probably he was. In that parenthesis he affirms a doubtful etymology. It is an interesting case study, this etymology. Voltaire spread the idea that Mouchy, who was not an agent, but a theologian/inquisitor, gave birth to the many maggoted mouchards, or spies – mouches being the word for fly – that buzzed around and gathered information for the police. Abbe Coblet, in the nineteenth century, should have put a stop to this etymological myth. He showed that the mouchard and the mouche were pure Picardy inventions, coming from the found of the French language. Even those who’d doubted the Mouchy etymology had claimed that in Latin, the word musca, fly, was used for police spies. But as Coblet points out, there is a world of difference between those who trap the words you speak and those who trap you. The musca was a gossip, the mouche was a spy whose delicate task it was not only to report the news to the police, but often to “encourage” the news.

Mouchy lived in the sixteenth century, when the religious wars started a whole new era in the secret history, or history of secrets, that exist under our history. It is a sewer of betrayal and tears, and it feeds the tree of death – the gibbet or the guillotine.

Nemesis lives in the sewers.

The other side of the happiness culture is the culture of fear. We cannot dispense with or minimize fear and its production when trying to get a sense of the human limit.

According to V.A.C. Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree, some 30,000 people were condemned to death in England and Wales between 1770 and 1830. 7,000, he estimates, were actually executed. This compares favorably with the estimated 73,000 executed between 1530 and 1630 – the secret religious war – but very badly with the number hung between 1701 and 1750. In the 1820s, Gatrell says, the hanged break down like this: two thirds were hung for property crimes, a fifth for murder, a twentieth for attempted murder, and the same percent for rape and sodomy. By the strange fruit of the tree shall ye know them. As Gatrell points out, while capital punishment was becoming extremely rare in Prussia, Russia, Scotland and Ireland, in England and Wales, it was enjoying a golden age.

Let’s end this post with a quote from George Cruikshank:

“At that time I resided in Dorset Street Salisbury Square Fleet Street and had occasion to go early one morning to a house near the Bank of England and in returning home between eight and nine o clock down Ludgate Hill and seeing a number of persons looking up the Old Bailey I looked that way myself and saw several human beings hanging on the gibbet opposite Newgate prison and to my horror two of these were women and upon inquiring what these women had been hung for was informed that it was for passing forged one pound notes The fact that a poor woman could be put to death for such a minor offence had a great effect upon me and I at that moment determined if possible to put a stop to this shocking destruction of life for merely obtaining a few shillings by fraud and well knowing the habits of the low class of society in London I felt quite sure that in very many cases the rascals who forged the notes induced these poor ignorant women to go into the gin shops to get something to drink and thus pass the notes and hand them the change.”

a traveller in a wood

Both Gilles Deleuze and Stephen Gould had trouble with structures that were perfectly tree-like. The central trunk of a theme, and then subsidiary branches, diminishing towards the top. Gould objected to the old tree of evolution, which put man on the very top of the tree (although his superiority consisted in coming down from the tree altogether – and yet, in dreams, yes, he wants to be at the top). Deleuze objected to universal history erecting its tree on every shore of every ocean, Europe, or the West, on top, encouraging the other branches to follow – and in the meantime, boosting their fruit. Such were the problematic trees.

Of course, both wrote in the shadow of the flaming Christmas trees, Yggdrasil, of the great echt deutsch Christmases remembered by Sebald, ah the advent calendars with the pictures of ss men, ah the chocolate swastiksa, the address by Rudolf Hoess with the family gathered around the tree, all hope and purity upon which were hung, as ornaments, the fates of the peoples, Jews, Gypsies, Ukranians, Serbs, burning away until Goethe’s death cry rang out – more light! – and so it was, so it was, trees of flame lighting up all the cities, Hamburg, Hannover, Leipzig, Dresden, all must celebrate Christmas and the tree, all must be part of the communal ash, all must sacrifice. Gunter Grass knew what he was doing when he made Santa the Gasman in the Tin Drum.

Still – the human limit is arboreal. Two trees stand in this wood – the tree of happiness and the tree of this world. Branch enjambs with branch. By 1815, the planting is dome. Comes the growing.

And me, the chronicler of this two tree forest that grows over the face of the world – I’ve gone from trunk to branch and root to twig, tree drunk, sap blessed. As the artificial paradise is laid down (and what is paradise without the tree?), those in the branches experience the most curious feeling of ilinx – as though the world were not under the trees at all, but somewhere in a crook of the branches. This is the effect of the artificial paradise, and it is compared by all who resist it – from Marx to Tolstoy to G.B. Shaw, among so many others – to intoxication, vertigo, opium poisoning.

I have a long way to go. The branches are so thickly clustered that I can’t see the stars.

Further notes on solitude

... I started out last month positing a tentative binary – individualism vs. solitude – that I took from Rousseau. It seemed to me then that Rousseau could not bring together his view of civil society founded on a fundamental equality and his view of the continuing dependence of women The contradiction imploded in his narratives. And the move, late in Rousseau’s life, to elevate solitude seems to me to be a political move, or hold the seeds of a politics. Contra Todorov, Rousseau did not represent his solitude as an exception. It was, potentially, the right to solitude, the development of solitude, that provides us with a whole new view of the relationship between the self and society. Solitude is a social development.

This made me wonder about the right to solitude of women. Solitude, as I am trying to understand it, is not the right of the property holder who can shut the door on the public sphere and stay at home. That kind of privacy does fit with an emerging individualism. But solitude has aspects that are strikingly different from the ideal individual of the individualist ethos.

I’ve held solitude on the margins, so to speak, as I’ve been looking at the culture of respectability, and the question of the condition of England – that is, why England’s greater political freedom was embedded in a palpable moral narrowness, as Herzen, among many other foreign observers, noted. A longstanding story about Britain claims that it was the first developed country to develop a strong, modern sense of privacy. Privacy, self-improvement, order were the hallmarks of respectability. De Stael, for one, attributed the English excellence in the novel to the greater role played in England by the private life. To her, the novel introduces epic proportions into the bedroom and the study, so to speak.

Now, are these rooms of someone’s own the equivalent of solitude?
This is where my binary should help me a bit. I want to associate solitude with extremes, with limit cases – with the sublime that Edgeworth condemns. The extremes are either the retreat from enlightenment to the archaic, or the leap over the enlightenment to the revolutionary. The equal right to solitude, from the point of view of the culture of respectability, muddies the divisions between the public and private sphere. It brings the question of equality, which is the question of justice, into the dimension of how we are to live, here, on our beds, in our chairs, as well as in our work, in our laundry tubs, offices, mines. A right to solitude, rather than a right to property, would give us a much different political discourse, and a much different sense of where politics is going on, and what it is for.

Can solitude bear this weight?

….
The England de Stael sees in 1793 and in 1814 was, perhaps, passing through its most European phase. It isn’t surprising that German philosophy, sentimentalism, and romantic poetry were creating a cult of solitude, making it one of the central motifs of romantic poetry. Peter Conrad’s in a brilliant essay I need to discuss has claimed that the movement in English literature is to pastoralize epic themes, to release the poem from the heroic in order to celebrate the private. But I think this use of the private, like de Stael’s, is a way of drawing a division between the public and private sphere that goes against the grain of solitude.

In fact, as the modernists of the nineteenth century came to recognize, solitude is more naturally connected with the crowd – as Hoffmann, Poe and Baudelaire saw.

oh I assure you, cried she, he is the best of men

This letter was sent from Juniper Hall Dorking Surrey in 1793:

“When J learned to read english J begun by milton to know all or renounce at all in once J follow the same system in writing my first english letter to Miss burney after such an enterprize nothing can affright me J feel for her so tender a friendship that it melts my admiration inspires my heart with hope of her indulgence and impresses me with the idea that in a tongue even unknown J could express sentiments so deeply felt my servant will return for a french answer J intreat miss burney to correct the words but to preserve the sense of that card best compliments to my dear protectress Madame Phillipe.”

The writer is Madame de Staël, who is learning English by reading Milton. Perhaps a method that is not as abstruse as it sounds, for who is more Latinate than Milton? And by our etymological roots shall we embrace each other, brothers and sisters.

I began this thread by thinking of an encounter that did not take place: the one between de Staël and Austen. We know that Austen was invited to meet de Staël in September 1814 and refused – although we know this from Austen’s brother, whose memoir of her is intended to project an image of such respectability that she could be excused for the offence against it that consists in being a genius.

The visit in 1814 was the second time de Staël visited England. The first, when the note was written, happened because her lover, Narbonne, had chosen to exile himself in England. As it happened, her coming to see Narbonne put her in proximity to another lover, Tallyrand. Fanny Burney, in 1793, was famous as the author of Evilena and Cecilia. As a girl, she’d known Samuel Johnson. As a woman, she was to know Napoleon Bonaparte. But in 1793, she was not to know de Staël for too long, after Burney’s father disclosed that de Staël was Narbonne’s lover. .

One would think that Burney’s father’s influence would not be so decisive to a woman who was, as Burney was, 41. In fact, meeting the Juniper Hall circle led to the daring act that divided her life in two and got her out from under her father’s wishes – for among them there was a genteel but poor French soldier named D’Arblay, a former aide de camp to Lafayette. He tutored her. He married her. Her father did not attend the wedding.

Her letters about the émigré set are fascinating, and revolve around her point of view:

“New systems I fear in states are always dangerous if not wicked. Grievance by grievance wrong by wrong must only be assailed and breathing time allowed to old prejudices and old habits between all that is done….”

Therre is a famous passage in a letter from Burney, one of those anecdotes so beloved by Calasso – perhaps he includes it in The Ruins of Karsch. At the height of Burney’s fascination with de Stael, she attended a dinner – this was after the execution of Louis XVI had depressed the spirits of the émigré group, who saw it as the end of their own lives. It was in the shadow of the execution of the King that Burney’s romance with D’Arblay was enacted –perhaps it was only through the tragic glamour cast on the group by a grief at once so public and so existentially and financially devastating that allowed the 41 year old Burney, the obedient daughter whose sense of respectability had been reinforced, as by Pavlovian shocks, when she attended George III’s wife at court, to burn down her scruples and actually marry the poor French officer. In any case, she sat next to de Stael at the table:

”M. de Talleyrand opened at last with infinite wit and capacity Madame de Stael whispered me How do you like him Not very much I answered but I do not know him Oh I assure you cried she he is the best of the men.
I was happy not to agree… “

…

De Staël was a writer in the sense that Voltaire was a writer – she mixed her experience into her writing and her writing into her experience so as to make a sort of scroll of her existence. Unlike Voltaire, however, whose observations were still rooted in a Plutarchian sense of character, de Staël had a sense of larger groupings – she had a sociological imagination, rather than a moraliste’s. She was one of the first person to understand literature not as an ornament of character or a fund of moral observations, but as a form of social self-reflection. Perhaps she owes part of this idea to Herder. In 1793, she had not yet formed it. While the king was on trial in Paris and Narbonne was considering going back and testifying for him – which would have put an end to Narbonne - de Staël was writing on the passions. The stars form their constellations for the wise shepherd, and themes fall helplessly into speech on the page when one has a Gnostic sense of history: de Staël read part of her book to Fanny, the part entitled: On happiness.

the dark image of respectability

LI, a scared pigeon when all is said and done, said yes yes yes to everything last month, fearful that he was otherwise going to swallow his last mouthful of food and shrivel up. It turns out that saying yes yes yes means much less time to direct the all powerful mental rays at the problem of respectability. Besides which, my original idea about respectability has been somewhat changed by reading Pride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth Bennet becomes a larger and larger figure as respectability turns out not just to be a static regime of outward signs put in place in reaction to the old order (as I was thinking naively thinking of it), but as a much more interesting modality of passions - the inward signs of certain collective feelings, especially about shame. As I’ve often pointed out, the total social fact of happiness is opposed, dialectically, not to unhappiness, but to nemesis. It is, surprisingly, nemesis that one sees in operation in Pride and Prejudice.

I don’t have time for this thread. Instead, let me quote from Maria and Richard Edgeworth’s book on Practical Education, a bestseller in 1795. The Edgeworth’s created a sort of codebook of respectability, with much advise about running a household and raising a child. When it comes to cultivating the aesthetic sense, the Edgeworth’s lodge a caution:

“We have hitherto spoken of the taste for what is beautiful; a taste for the sublime we should be cautious in cultivating. Obscurity and terror are two of the grand sources of the sublime; analyze the feeling, examine accurately the object which creates the emotion, and you dissipate the illusion, you annihilate the pleasure.”

The Edgeworths quote a poem by Akenside about a village beldame who tells a ghost story to show two things: first, the sublime preys on the imagination of children, depriving them of sleep and debilitating them; second, the sublime comes into the household from that vector of superstition, the servants. At the same time the Grimm brothers were discovering or inventing the peasant world through the tales of servants, Edgeworth was warning against it:

“No prudent mother will ever imitate this eloquent village matron, nor will she permit any beldam in the nursery to conjure up these sublime shapes, and to quell the hearts of her children with these grateful terrors. We were once present when a group of speechless children sat listening to the story of Blue-beard, "breathing astonishment." A gentleman who saw the charm beginning to operate, resolved to counteract its dangerous influence. Just at the critical moment, when the fatal key drops from the trembling hands of the imprudent wife, the gentleman interrupted the awful pause of silence that ensued, and requested permission to relate the remainder of the story. Tragi-comedy does not offend the taste of young, so much as of old critics; the transition from grave to gay was happily managed. Blue-beard's wife afforded much diversion, and lost all sympathy the moment she was represented as a curious, tattling, timid, ridiculous woman. The terrors of Blue-beard himself subsided when he was properly introduced to the company; and the denouement of the piece was managed much to the entertainment of the audience; the catastrophe, instead of freezing their young blood, produced general laughter. Ludicrous images, thus presented to the mind which has been prepared for horror, have an instantaneous effect upon the risible muscles: it seems better to use these means of counteracting the terrors of the imagination, than to reason upon the subject whilst the fit is on; reason should be used between the fits.[66] Those who study the minds of children know the nice touches which affect their imagination, and they can, by a few words, change their feelings by the power of association. “

The intrusion of this gentleman, the turn of the conversation from death to laughter, the ridiculing of Bluebeard’s wife – in this complex of motives I see the dark image of respectability itself.

PS I'll add something to this tonight. Like a blind surgeon, I often feel in a text something under the skin that I cannot see, and knowing that it is there I make what cuts I can to get it out. Of course, I don't want to make messes of my texts, but words must follow the hand, here, instead of the eye. And so it is with this gentleman who interrupts the Bluebeard tale and a certain moment in Pride and Prejudice. It is when Lady Catherine begins to inquire about Elizabeth Bennet’s education. From the point of view of the novelist, there’s an interesting choice to be made here, a sort of dare. For, on the one hand, Elizabeth Bennet could, like many another heroine, discuss her education, her upbringing – what brought her, as the character she is, to this point – with a normal gesture towards a tutor, a governess, a school. But what happens, instead, is much more audacious – Austin opts for presenting Elizabeth as an ex nihilo creature, someone whose education comes, like Emile’s, from no set institution at all – springs from book, or a book, the one in which she is written, itself:

Why did not you all learn? You ought all to have learned. The Miss Webbs all play, and their father has not so good an income as yours. Do you draw?"
"No, not at all."
"What, none of you?"
"Not one."
"That is very strange. But I suppose you had no opportunity. Your mother should have taken you to town every spring for the benefit of masters."
"My mother would have had no objection, but my father hates London."
"Has your governess left you?"
"We never had any governess."
"No governess! How was that possible? Five daughters brought up at home without a governess! I never heard of such a thing. Your mother must have been quite a slave to your education."
Elizabeth could hardly help smiling as she assured her that had not been the case.
"Then, who taught you? who attended to you? Without a governess, you must have been neglected."
"Compared with some families, I believe we were; but such of us as wished to learn never wanted the means. We were always encouraged to read, and had all the masters that were necessary. Those who chose to be idle, certainly might."
"Aye, no doubt; but that is what a governess will prevent, and if I had known your mother, I should have advised her most strenuously to engage one. I always say that nothing is to be done in education without steady and regular instruction, and nobody but a governess can give it. It is wonderful how many families I have been the means of supplying in that way. I am always glad to get a young person well placed out."

Here, of course, under cover of helping Elizabeth, Lady Catherine shows her claws. She is perhaps the most dangerous creature in Pride and Prejudice. Though she confines her tyranny to her little corner of England, she has money, connections, prejudice, and an invincible sense of right. This conversation, with its ripe hint of Elizabeth’s proper place in the hierarchy and the not-rightness – the lack of respectability – in her upbringing signals the great confrontation between these two near the end of the book.

So anyway, why, blind as I am and without one plea, do I feel some affinity under the surface between the Edgeworth story and this moment in which Lady Catherine tries to put Elizabeth in her place as a nobody? That moment in which Elizabeth wins every reader's heart by claiming nobody as her very place? Who is the gentleman who demystifies Bluebeard? – who knows how to separate the dead from the living, the human from nature, and the foolish wife from her neurotic fear – all the cards, all the old worn cards we play with century after century? And here’s a phase in the game between common sense and sublime in the English novel, which is all too ready to end in laughter at serious things put in the wrong place. In the culture of respectability, the true sight of the enemy is this disjunction and unholy alliance between archaic and the revolutionary, the old nurse and the young romantic - this skipping over present comforts and known incomes. There will be no rescue: Bluebeard is simply a retired businessman, and Mrs. Bluebeard an hysteric, fearing the cold, owning touch of Bluebeard’s fat fingers as he does the allowed business in the marriage bed.

Yet, of course, ex nihilo Elizabeth Bennet is not a condemner of respectability – rather, she is a figure of it, with a deeper sense of Bluebeard than one might think.

pps - on an entirely different topic, all people of goodwill should visit Rough Theory today for her post on the joy, the sheer joy, of incompetence

the damnation of Mr. Bennet

In his great essay in defense of Robert Owen, Alexander Herzen remarks of 1850s England:

”The Continent, politically enslaved, is morally freer than England: the mass of ideas and doubts in circulation is much more extensive.They have become habitual and society does not shake with either fear of indignation before a free man – Wenn er die Kette bricht.

On the Continent, people are powerless before authority: thgey endure their chains, but they do not respect them. The Englishman’s liberty is more in his institutions than in himself or in his conscience.”

This is, I think, a nice way to begin a series of posts that alternate between M. de Staël and Jane Austen. In this way, I can get to the question of the condition of England.

Why England?As de Stael said in On Literature(1801), England is the country in the world where the women are most truly loved. Between De Stael’s statement and Herzen’s, something is happening. Perhaps they are both right.

De Stael thought Pride and Prejudice was vulgar, and Jane Austen, apparently, though De Stael was vulgar. But De Stael was, perhaps, the first to see what literature meant in modernity – and Jane Austen was a great plumber to the very depths of whether and how women are most truly loved.

…

So perhaps we should start with the beheadings. D.W. Harding, in the 40s, wrote a famous essay on Jane Austen that, I think it is safe to say, changed the way critics read her. It was called Regulated Hatred, and it takes up Virginia Woolf’s suggestion that there was a fiercer beast running through these novels than was reckoned by the culture of faux gentility and nostalgia. Harding begins by asking about a discrepancy between the image of Jane Austen – the preferred reading material for retired public servants, the much lauded writer of an idyll – and his own reading of Austin’s texts. In those texts, he believed he found a clue to her method of writing in such a way that her writing was, in crucial ways, overlooked – her decapitations were executed so that they disturbed no one who chose not to be disturbed.

What, he asked himself, was going on?

‘She has none of the underlying didactic intention ordinarily attributed to the satirist. Her object is not missionary; it is the more desperate one of merely finding some mode of existence for her critical attitudes…

As a novelist, therefore, part of her aim was to find the means for unobtrusive spiritual survival, without open conflict with the friendly people around her whose standards in simple things she could accept and whose affection she greatly needed.” [13]

We shall return to the satiric spirit without the missionary point – for this is a characteristic which has a wider application than he may realize. What is interesting, here, is how Harding’s 1940 idea of a double utterance, a code unobtrusively dropped into another code, is so like James Scott’s idea of the hidden transcript – or to use the vocabulary of my last post, it is a way of disguising lateral talk with vertical talk, of respecting a hierarchy while putting into words the anguish of one’s experience of it, in all its corrupting glory. Harding reproduces several passages where he will leave out a phrase, making them seem innocuous or funny, and then put the phrase back in, which makes us see the Jane Austen who could be Michelet’s Sorciere.

A good example of this is in Pride and Prejudice occurs in a passage in book II, after the terrific scene when Elizabeth rejects Darcy’s first proposal. Elizabeth is going through a conversion process in which she sees, as though for the first time, the world righted – the way things really are. And, as Darcy has told her, one of the things that really are is that her family is bizarre, eccentric, and not at all respectable. In particular, her two sisters, Kitty and Lydia, have made spectacles of themselves in the village, throwing themselves at the officers quartered there. Now Lydia, 16, has been invited to stay with friends at Bath, where the soldiers have been quartered next. Elizabeth pleads with her father to prevent this. Her father puts her off with a joke:

"Lydia will never be easy until she has exposed herself in some public place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so little expense or inconvenience to her family as under the present circumstances."

As we know, Mr. Bennet’s words will come back to haunt him. Austen begins the next chapter with this explanation:

“Had Elizabeth's opinion been all drawn from her own family, she could not have formed a very pleasing opinion of conjugal felicity or domestic comfort. Her father, captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her. Respect, esteem, and confidence had vanished for ever; and all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown. But Mr. Bennet was not of a disposition to seek comfort for the disappointment which his own imprudence had brought on, in any of those pleasures which too often console the unfortunate for their folly or their vice. He was fond of the country and of books; and from these tastes had arisen his principal enjoyments. To his wife he was very little otherwise indebted, than as her ignorance and folly had contributed to his amusement. This is not the sort of happiness which a man would in general wish to owe to his wife; but where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.”
One could draw a line between that absolutely scathing glimpse of the marriage in the center of a family and Christina Stead’s The Man who Loved Children and Doris Lessing’s African novels, or The Golden Notebook. The male case was made out later by Hardy, but Jude, in spite of his marriage, earns our respect. Mr.Bennet doesn’t cheat on his wife – he cordially despises her. In this one paragraph, which quickly moves on and moves us into the business of getting Elizabeth and Darcy back together again, we see, as in a flash, the skull under the skin, Mr. Bennet and his wife and daughters stripped bare, like souls damned in a Memlinc painting – except who does the damning here? Hell has been filled in, and social relations, infinite social relations, have been built on top of it.

the of course

We are not utterly cut off.

There was, for instance, Mary Collier. An agricultural laborer, a washerwoman, and a poet. She was taught the crude elements of reading and writing and, in the midst of her toils, took some precious time out of the day to read. She read, for instance, Stephan Duck, another peasant poet, and noted his disparaging words about women “sitting in the fields” rather than swinging their scythes. She cried out against the lie here in her own poem, The Woman’s Labour an epistle to Stephan Duck, which was published in 1739. Collier gives us first hand an account of standing outside in the cold winter dark of early mourning, waiting for the maid to get up and let her and other washerwomen into the house, so they could begin the laundry.

But when from Wind and Weather we get in,
Briskly with Courage we our Work begin ;
Heaps of fine Linen we before us view,
Whereon to lay our Strength and Patience too ;
Cambricks and Muſlins, which our Ladies wear,
Laces and Edgings, coſtly, fine, and rare,
Which muſt be waſh'd with utmoſt Skill and Care ;
With Holland Shirts, Ruffles and Fringes too,
Faſhions which our Fore-fathers never knew.
For ſeveral Hours here we work and ſlave,
Before we can one Glimpſe of Day-light have ;
We labour hard before the Morning's paſt,
Becauſe we fear the Time runs on too faſt.

AT length bright Sol illuminates the Skies,
And ſummons drowſy Mortals to ariſe ;
Then comes our Miſtreſs to us without fail,
And in her Hand, perhaps, a Mug of Ale
To cheer our Hearts, and alſo to inform
Herſelf, what Work is done that very Morn ;
Lays her Commands upon us, that we mind
Her Linen well, nor leave the Dirt behind :


In Collier’s account, the labour is overwhelming. Duck had compared the endlessness of it to Sisyphus – and Collier replies:

“While you to Syſiphus yourſelves compare,
With Danaus' Daughters we may claim a Share ;
For while he labours hard againſt the Hill,
Bottomleſs Tubs of Water they muſt fill.”

What Collier complains of most, in the end, is

Our Toil and Labour's daily ſo extreme,
That we have hardly ever Time to dream.

It is being cut off from something vital that is felt to the very root of one’s wet being. And these nattering ghosts can’t be put down, then, by the utilitarian faith that the market will eventually make all parties happy. I’m making a wager that the vital portion is not the philosopher’s individuality, but Rousseau’s solitude – a flashing, unstructured portion of life upon which the community worth having – the community dreamt of by the aliens from happiness culture, the community in which there is time to dream – must be built.

And so she passes by – one of the obscure. Although not by Virginia Woolf’s standards.



“Ann married Mr. G., of course—of course. The words toll persistently through these obscure volumes. For in the vast world to which the memoir writers admit us there is a solemn sense of something unescapable, of a wave gathering beneath the frail flotilla and carrying it on.”

Virginia Woolf’s stunning essay on the literature of the Obscure is not about the literature of the working woman or man, not about the Mary Colliers, but that of the midlevel, that of families in the very cage of respectability, like Jane Austin’s Bennets, who sense how precariously they are perched. If we search for what has been left behind – what dirt, what voice, what soul – in order to reconstruct the wave gathering underneath these routines, we have to have an ear for lateral communication – those moments when the obscure speak to obscure in their own ever twisting language.

We are not utterly cut off.

“The atmosphere of London is so charged with particles of carbon and black smoke that if you hang up a white cloth in a current of fresh air, you will find it, at the end of two hours, entirely covered with little plack spots, and the white vest that you put on in the morning is dirty before the hour of dinner.” –A year in London, Auguste Jean B. Defauconpret, 1819 – my translation.

In Domination and the arts of resistance, Scott wisely sees that the very form of Hegel’s presentation of the master-slave relationship is politically coded. It is a dyadic form, master on one side and slave or servant on the other. This face to face form has been inherited by philosophy since, and even considered the nucleus of revolutionary thought, but… as Scott points out … the dyad is the master’s preference. ‘The politcal symbolism of most forms of personal dominance carries with it the implicit assumption that the subordinates gather only when authorized to do so from above.” And though we have been told that his personalized struggle for recognition is the very essence and myth of liberation, what is avoided here is the lateral, the association, the crowd. When the slave, in the great myth, faces the master, what is pre-emptively excluded is what Scott calls the hidden transcript, and what I would call lateral communication.

‘One has only to imagine a feudal lord noticing a large number of his serfs advancing unsummoned to his manor, a large number of beggarts (masterless men by definition) moving through the countryside, or even a large crowd of factory workers gathered near the plant manager’s office to recognize the possibilities.” (63)

These two modes of conversational direction – vertical and lateral – are, of course, our old friends from school, our first sense of disciplinary space. Lateral speech, at the wrong time, is punishable.

It may seem a long stretch from masterless men to the Bennet daughters, attending a ball in Pride and Prejudice, but I think that the novel, and especially the novel as the symptom of female insubordination or corruption, participates in this grid. Of course, lateral speech happens at the top as well as at the bottom – and the English novel, supremely, wants to make a place in the middle for it. However, even at the top it is felt to be somewhat lowering when it is exposed, as if the masters speaking among themselves go down the hierarchical scale and gossip. They reveal secrets, they lose the mask – and these secrets are precisely what they are accused of by the slave. It is not all recognition, you see.

The pathos of the obscure, the heavy “of course” that Virginia Woolf correctly sees as forming all the motion that sweeps the obscure across history, is lodged in the fact that the secrets aren’t interesting. That so and so slept with x, that uncle y was a drunkard – all of this, in the memoirs that Woolf picks up, has faded away. It has lost our interest. Such is the difference between synchronic interest, in which busy-ness itself engages us, and diachronic interest, in which only the heroic engages us. One definition of revolution is that it is the time when the arms, so to speak, of the synchronic and diachronic are squeezed together, imposed one on top of the other, so that the obscure becomes heroic, the complaints (doleances) of the blanchisseuses of Marseilles exert an oversocial force that is as riveting as the beheading of a king. Obviously, here, too, the forms of vertical and lateral communication correspond, in some way, link up with the synchronic and diachronic sense of interest.

Time, as Hamlet points out, is out of joint. Time, as Derrida points out, quoting Hamlet in Specters of Marx, is out of joint.

No, we are not utterly cut off. We are wired in.

It is this revolutionary energy to which Woolf unconsciously refers when she says that ‘Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off.”