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ETHICS AND AESTHETICS IN

EUROPEAN MODERNIST
LITERATURE

David Ellison’s book is an investigation into the historical origins and

textual practice of European literary Modernism. Ellison’s study
traces the origins of Modernism to the emergence of early German
Romanticism from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and empha-
sizes how the passage from Romanticism to Modernism can be
followed in the gradual transition from the sublime to the uncanny.
Arguing that what we call high Modernism cannot be reduced to
a religion of beauty, an experimentation with narrative form, or
even a reflection on time and consciousness, Ellison demonstrates
that Modernist textuality is characterized by the intersection, over-
lapping, and crossing of aesthetic and ethical issues. Beauty and
morality relate to each other as antagonists struggling for domi-
nance within the related fields of philosophy and theory on the
one hand (Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud) and imaginative
literature on the other (Baudelaire, Proust, Gide, Conrad, Woolf,
Kafka).

D A V I D E L L I S O N is Professor of French and Comparative Litera-

ture and Chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages and
Literatures at the University of Miami (Florida). He is the author
of The Reading of Proust (), Understanding Albert Camus (), and
Of Words and the World: Referential Anxiety in Contemporary French Fiction
().
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS IN
EUROPEAN MODERNIST
LITERATURE
From the Sublime to the Uncanny

DAVID ELLISON
University of Miami
         
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

  

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

© David Ellison 2004

First published in printed format 2001

ISBN 0-511-02903-9 eBook (Adobe Reader)

ISBN 0-521-80680-1 hardback
Kierkegaard faces the problem, whether to enjoy life aesthetically
or to experience it ethically. But this seems to me a false statement
of the problem. The Either-Or exists only in the head of Søren
Kierkegaard. In reality one can only achieve an aesthetic enjoy-
ment of life as a result of humble ethical experience. But this is only
a personal opinion of the moment, which perhaps I shall abandon
after closer inquiry.
Franz Kafka (quoted by Gustav Janouch in Conversations with Kafka)
 For Ellen, in the words of the poet

Ich hatt es nie so ganz erfahren, jenes alte feste Schicksalswort, daß
eine neue Seligkeit dem Herzen aufgeht, wenn es aushält und die
Mitternacht des Grams durchduldet, und daß, wie Nachtigallgesang
im Dunklen, göttlich erst in tiefem Leid das Lebenslied der Welt uns tönt.
 Contents

Preface page ix
List of abbreviations xiii

PART ONE KANT , ROMANTIC IRONY , U N H E I M L I C H K E I T

 Border crossings in Kant 

 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche”: the intricacies of textual
uncanniness 

PART TWO THE ROMANTIC HERITAGE AND MODERNIST FICTION

 Aesthetic redemption: the thyrsus in Nietzsche, Baudelaire,

and Wagner 
 The “beautiful soul”: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes
and the aesthetics of Romanticism 
 Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings 
 Textualizing immoralism: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
and Gide’s L’Immoraliste 
 Fishing the waters of impersonality: Virginia Woolf ’s
To the Lighthouse 
E P I L O G U E:
Narrative and music in Kafka and Blanchot:
the “singing” of Josefine 
Notes 
Works cited 
Index 

vii
 Preface

This book is an investigation into the historical origins and textual prac-
tice of European literary Modernism. My study does not extend to
Spanish modernismo, but limits itself to the interpretation of selected writ-
ings from the cultural spaces of France, England, and Germany, including
locations which, in their own individual ways, were in Germany’s philo-
sophical and literary orbit from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth
centuries – Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen and Kafka’s Prague. My project
is, at one level, comparative in the classical sense of that term, in that
I pursue the categories of the sublime (das Erhabene) and the uncanny
(Unheimlichkeit) across national borders, in the belief that the transition
from the first to the second of these terms is a determining factor in the
movement from Romanticism to Modernism. At the same time, how-
ever, the mode of my pursuit is not that of traditional intellectual history,
in which individual texts are mustered to exemplify the general concepts
under investigation, but rather the reverse: I begin and always remain
with individual texts and find, within them, the points of emergence of
the sublime and the uncanny, those areas that are inhabited or haunted
by these categories.
Both the sublime, in its Kantian definition, and the uncanny as the-
orized by Freud via E. T. A. Hoffmann, are hybrid notions in that they
are built upon the complex mixture and interplay of the aesthetic and
the ethical. Whereas both Kant and Kierkegaard, in their stylistically di-
verse ways, set the aesthetic against the ethical as separate, cordoned-off
areas equal in philosophical importance but dangerous to the integrity
of each other’s territory, imaginative writers from the period of German
Romantic irony through what we call high Modernism have found it
impossible not to break down the barriers separating the two hetero-
geneous domains. I shall be arguing that Modernist literature, from its
earliest origins in the convoluted arabesques of Romantic irony, is the
textual space in which uncanniness is both feared and desired, at times
ix
x Preface
censored and prohibited from exerting its power but at others allowed
to function freely, dangerously, diabolically.
The structure of my book has two dimensions. On the one hand, seen
from the point of view of literary history, it is linear and (with pedagog-
ical intent) straightforward in its presentation. I begin with a reading
of selected passages from Kant’s Second and Third Critiques with the
purpose of uncovering those areas of rhetorical complexity in which the
aesthetic and the ethical, despite the philosopher’s considerable efforts
to the contrary, do in fact overlap and contaminate each other’s theoret-
ical integrity. I continue with Kierkegaard, with an analysis of both The
Concept of Irony and Either/Or, and concentrate on the difficulties inherent
in the framing of the aesthetic by the ethical (this key notion of framing is
viewed both philosophically and narratively, as will be the case through-
out my study). And finally, the third essay of the book’s first part is a close
reading of Freud’s essay “Das Unheimliche,” with continual reference to
the text underlying Freud’s own: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann.”
Chapter three is the theoretical center of my book.
With the literary-historical and theoretical backgrounds established
in part one, I move on, in the next section, to five essays dealing with
the heritage of Romanticism and the transition to Modernist textual
practice. In chapter four I examine the Dionysian emblem of the thyrsus
as it emerges in the late Romantic works of Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and
Wagner. Chapter five is a reading of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes
in the light of the notion of the “beautiful soul,” a figure of considerable
philosophical importance which incorporates or symbolizes the mixed
mode of aesthetic morality. The universe of Alain-Fournier’s novel lies
at the threshold of Modernism, but does not cross over into it. Chapters
six to eight are devoted to the interpretation of texts by what literary
historians have designated as exemplary or canonical Modernist writers:
Proust and Kafka; Conrad and Gide; and Virginia Woolf. In each of these
chapters there emerges some form of textual uncanniness, and in each
case my analysis focuses on the points of intersection or overlap between
the categories of the aesthetic and the ethical. Throughout part two
I combine a narratological perspective with psychoanalytic theory in my
examination of intertextual linkages and uncanny textual echo-effects.
Following Flaubert’s excellent advice – “l’ineptie consiste à vouloir
conclure” – there is no conclusion to this book (no final totalizing frame)
but rather an opening outward, in the form of an epilogue on Kafka and
Blanchot. In this final essay I examine Kafka’s Modernist redefinition of
the sublime and his convergence with Blanchot in the conceptualization
 Preface xi
of death as unhomely home. If there were to be a conclusion, it would
be, with apologies to Freud: “The aim of all texts is death.” But “death”
here is to be taken in the spectral neutrality with which it is given to us
by both Kafka and Blanchot, as a place beyond places which we inhabit
but which will have always inhabited us.
The second dimension of my book’s structure is not based upon the
perhaps deceptively clear chronological trajectory extending from Kant
to Blanchot, but can be characterized as “musical.” The book as a whole
is a series of variations on the twin grand themes of the aesthetic and the
ethical in which certain Leitmotive (the sublime, the uncanny, the diabol-
ical, narrative framing, psychological ambivalence) and certain authors
(notably Proust and Kafka as uncanny Doppelgänger) recur with some fre-
quency, but change in their significance according to their insertion in
new contexts. There is Kant’s sublime but also Kafka’s sublime; there is
Freud’s uncanny but also Woolf ’s uncanny; Kierkegaard and Gide are
masters of a same-but-different narrative framing; the Proust of chapter
five differs from the Proust who inhabits the depths of chapter eight;
the Kafka twinned with Proust in chapter five is and is not the Kafka
associated with Blanchot in the epilogue. This book, in other words,
does not just describe the textual uncanny, but is pervaded by it. The
chronological guard-rail running from Kant and Kierkegaard to Kafka
and Blanchot is a framework of sorts, but by the time the book ends, the
shortcomings of framing as such should have become abundantly clear.
I leave it to the individual tastes of my reader to determine whether the
first or the second structural dimension of my study is more appealing,
more rhetorically convincing or enlivening.
Whether my reader’s inclinations take him or her in the direction of
literary-historical chronology or of structural musicality, in either case
there is one fundamental tension inhabiting my book that will be con-
stantly present, namely, the sometimes antagonistic pull or strain be-
tween conceptual generality and textual particularity. I have undertaken
a project whose scope is vast (more than  years of literary and philo-
sophical history) and whose intellectual effectiveness will depend upon
how well my reader is convinced of my manipulation of large and notori-
ously slippery categories such as the sublime, the uncanny, Romanticism,
and Modernism. The very nature of my project obliges me to deal with
large generalities. Yet the interpretive method I have chosen is that of
close reading, and, in particular, detailed scrutiny of the role of the sig-
nifier in the texts I analyze. It is precisely in the diabolical freeplay of the
signifier that the upsetting or unsettling of the grand categories of the
xii Preface
ethical and the aesthetic can be best observed. For this reason, I am asking
of my reader a certain patience, a willingness to dwell within the signifier
and its complex ramifications, a willing suspension of hermeneutical dis-
belief. My task will be to play Virgil to my reader’s Dante, and to lead him
or her through the textual “selva oscura” in the direction of the larger
questions toward which the works examined here point. There will be
signposts along the way, in which I remind the reader of the larger issues
and problems; but it is my conviction that these issues, these problems,
are only available, only ascertainable, after considerable interpretive
labor. And the locus of this labor is the detail, the fragment, the word,
sometimes the individual sound. To range between such smallness and
such largeness is difficult. Perhaps it is the reader’s active participation,
even collaboration, in elaborating the meanings of my book, that will
grant this study whatever value (aesthetic and ethical) it may contain.

The writing of this book was made possible by a generous sabbatical

leave granted me by the University of Miami in –. My thanks
go to Deans Paul Blaney and Kumble Subbaswamy, to Provost Luis
Glaser, and to my colleague and friend Celita Lamar, whose willing-
ness to assume the duties of department chairmanship during my
absence is much appreciated. I would also like to express my appre-
ciation to Greta West, whose clerical and computer expertise, as well as
gracious encouragement, were most appreciated throughout the various
compositional stages of this project.
I am grateful to Robert Norton and to the twist of fate that allowed
for a certain lunchtime conversation to take place some years ago – a
conversation that seems now to have produced two books. And there are
those who deplore the lack of intellectual dialogue in our “benighted”
times . . .
Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Linda Bree, Humanities Editor of
Cambridge University Press, for her guidance and support throughout
the final phases of the project. And my appreciation goes, as well, to
the two subtle readers chosen by Dr. Bree to read the manuscript. Their
comments and advice were both thought-provoking and of practical help
to me in the revision process.

Earlier versions of three of the chapters of this study were published in

Poétique, MLN, and Yale French Studies respectively. I wish to thank the
editors of these journals for permission to reuse the material in revised
form in my book.
 Abbreviations

ALR Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu

B Franz Kafka, Brief an den Vater
BT Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
C Franz Kafka, The Castle
CI Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony
CJ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
CPrR Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
CS Maurice Blanchot, “Le chant des sirènes”
D Franz Kafka, Diaries –
DS E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Der Sandmann”
DU Sigmund Freud, “Das Unheimliche”
DW The Diary of Virginia Woolf
E/O Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
F Grimm brothers, “Von dem Fischer und seiner Frau”
GT Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie
GW Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke
HD Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
I André Gide, The Immoralist
J Franz Kafka, “Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk
der Mäuse”
JMF Franz Kafka, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”
KPrV Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft
KU Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft
L Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father
L’Imm André Gide, L’Immoraliste
RTP Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
S Franz Kafka, Das Schloß
SE Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition
T Franz Kafka, Tagebücher

xiii
xiv Abbreviations
TL Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
TS E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman”
TU Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”
VN Maurice Blanchot, “La voix narrative, le ‘il,’ le neutre”
VW Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf
 PART I

Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit

 CHAPTER 

Border crossings in Kant

I CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT

If Hegel is the thinker of overcomings and supersession whereby dialec-

tical negation erases the boundaries between inside and outside, self and
other in the synthetic unity of consciousness, Kant is the tracer of bor-
ders and limits, the thought-surveyor par excellence. Not only was Kant’s
critical enterprise a careful navigation between the extremes of empiri-
cism and abstract metaphysical speculation in which clear limits were
set for the capacities of human reason, but each of his three Critiques
is characterized by the establishing of defining boundary-lines between
it and the two others, such that cognition, morality, and aesthetic taste
occupy, or seem to occupy, clearly delimited separate spheres.
Within Kant’s system there is a very precise architectonics of inter-
action, an elaborate scaffolding of the “faculties” which, according to
the treatise they happen to occupy, assume a dominant or subservient
role. The three Critiques are “about” three different areas of human
capability, and in this sense, up to a point, can be read as self-enclosed
texts. The temptation to do so has long been a staple of Kant criticism,
since, until relatively recently, scholarly consensus had it that the first
and most massive of these volumes to appear, the Critique of Pure Reason
( ), was by far the most important of the three – that the other two
might be viewed, despite their considerable intrinsic merit, as secondary
or ancillary. Yet it is apparent that Kant intended the three works to
be a system, and that this intellectual goal of his was achieved once he
found a way to integrate the Third Critique with the first two.
That it was, in fact, difficult for Kant to effect such an integration is
of no small importance in the history of philosophy and of aesthetics
as a branch thereof. Somehow the domain of the aesthetic (conceived
of as the territory within which judgments of taste, Geschmacksurteile, are
elicited) is problematic, its expanse difficult to measure with assurance.


 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
For Kant, given the structure and terms of his system, the problem could
be summed up in the following way: whereas in the first two Critiques one
faculty held sway and “legislated” over another, subordinate faculty, in
the Critique of Judgment () there is no one faculty that dominates. This
is because the attitude of aesthetic disinterest can only uphold itself in
what might be called an initial suspension of all established categories – a
suspension that presupposes the freeplay of the faculties among them-
selves. Gilles Deleuze puts it this way:

The three Critiques present a complete system of permutations. In the first

place the faculties are defined according to the relationships of representation
in general (knowing [Critique of Pure Reason], desiring [Critique of Practical Reason],
feeling [Critique of Judgment]). In the second place they are defined as sources of
representations (imagination, understanding, reason). When we consider any
faculty in the first sense, a faculty in the second sense is called on to legislate
over objects and to distribute their specific tasks to the other faculties: thus
understanding legislates in the faculty of knowledge [in the Critique of Pure Reason]
and reason legislates in the faculty of desire [in the Critique of Practical Reason].
It is true that in the Critique of Judgment the imagination does not take on a leg-
islative function on its own account. But it frees itself, so that all the faculties
together enter into a free accord. Thus the first two Critiques set out a rela-
tionship between the faculties which is determined by one of them; the last
Critique uncovers a deeper free and indeterminate accord of the faculties as
the condition of the possibility of every determinate relationship. (Kant’s Critical
Philosophy, )

Just as Kant reversed the commonly accepted way of thinking about

cognition (for him, we should think of objects as conforming to our modes
of knowing rather than the other way around), so Deleuze is inverting
the usual way of reading the three Critiques as a philosophical unity. He
is proposing that the Critique of Judgment, far from being a work that is
merely rich and complex but, finally, not susceptible of integration into
the critical system, is in fact the cornerstone, the “condition of possibility”
of that very system. Without the Third Critique, the other two certainly
would have constituted admirable argumentative structures on their own,
but the structure of the structure, so to speak, would have remained blind to
itself. The Critique of Judgment, in Deleuze’s view, would be the work by
which the system comes to know itself as system; the aesthetic would
no longer be relegated to secondary or tertiary status, but would be
that subterranean province that underlies the others, and, in the very
indeterminacy of its freeplay, opens up the possibility of lawful relations,
both theoretical and practical.
 Border crossings in Kant 
From an historical point of view, the Critique of Judgment, published in
, not only closes off Kant’s system as the end toward which Enlight-
enment thought had always tended, but also, in Deleuze’s interpreta-
tion, inaugurates Romanticism. In the preface to Kant’s Critical Philosophy,
Deleuze finds that the free and unregulated play of the faculties among
themselves, “where each goes to its own limit and nevertheless shows the
possibility of some sort of harmony with the others,” represents nothing
less than “the foundation of Romanticism” (xi–xii). He does not mean, in
the context of French literature, the sentimental Romanticism of Lamar-
tine, Musset and the early Hugo, but rather the revolutionary poetics of
Arthur Rimbaud, whose evocation of “the disorder of all the senses”
(le désordre de tous les sens) pushes Romanticism to its extreme limits and
ushers in the movements of French Symbolism and European Mod-
ernism. The idea, then, is that whereas the first two Critiques position
Kant as the grand synthesizer of the Aufklärung, the Critique of Judgment is
a work of open boundaries whose complexity and polysemic possibilities
make it a modern work.
What is intriguing, however, and of essential importance to any reader
who wishes to respect the guidelines Kant himself traces between and
among the three critical works, is the fact that the Third Critique also
functions as an intermediary, as a bridge-text between the Critique of Pure
Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason (), in that its primary agent,
reflective judgment, is, in Kant’s words, “the mediating link between
understanding and reason” (introduction to the Critique of Judgment, ).
More precisely, the faculty of judgment is capable of bringing about a
“transition from the pure cognitive power, i.e., from the domain of the
concepts of nature, to the domain of the concept of freedom, just as in
its logical use it makes possible the transition from understanding to rea-
son” (CJ ). According to this formulation, aesthetics is not the endpoint
of the system, but rather its articulating middle, its mediating drive, that
which might be, or should be, capable of overcoming “the great gulf
[die große Kluft] that separates the supersensible from appearances”
(CJ ; KU ). The faculty of judgment is such a bridge because it,
and it alone, furnishes the concept of the finality of nature, a teleological
structure within which aesthetics as such occupies its appropriate place:
It is judgment that presupposes [the final purpose of nature] a priori, and without
regard to the practical, [so that] this power provides us with the concept that
mediates between the concepts of nature and the concept of freedom [gibt den
vermittelnden Begriff zwischen den Naturbegriffen und dem Freiheitsbegriffe]: the concept
of a purposiveness of nature [einer Zweckmäßigkeit der Natur], which makes possible
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
the transition from pure theoretical to pure practical lawfulness, from lawfulness
in terms of nature to the final purpose set by the concept of freedom [von der
Gesetzmäßigkeit nach der ersten zum Endzwecke nach dem letzten]. For it is through this
concept that we cognize the possibility of the final purpose [die Möglichkeit des
Endzwecks], which can be actualized only in nature and in accordance with its
laws. (CJ –; KU )

In the original German text, Kant’s argument is woven around a

play on the word Zweck – goal or purpose. We are reminded that
Gesetzmäßigkeit, or the lawfulness of nature, is the domain of the First
Critique. Zweckmäßigkeit, or the purposiveness of nature, is developed in
the Third Critique as a “bridge” toward the Endzweck of the Second
Critique, the final purpose of man, which can only emerge in the super-
sensible territory of the law, of the “ought” which traces the boundaries
of the province of morality and exercises its rule in accord with our
freedom. In this scheme, which Kant elaborates carefully but quite con-
fidently in the final section of his introduction to the Critique of Judgment, it
is manifest that, in some fundamental sense, the aesthetic as such points
toward the ethical, that the ethical stands as the Endzweck of the aes-
thetic. In this precise sense, then, the endpoint of the Kantian system is
its middle, the Critique of Practical Reason, the place in which the moral
law instantiates itself. As we proceed now to an analysis of the points of
intersection between the Second and Third Critiques, it is important to
keep in mind the double position of the aesthetic in Kant: it is, through
the free and unregulated play of the faculties it allows, the limit toward
which the Kantian system pushes and exhausts itself; and it is also, in its
mediation between pure and practical reason, the passageway through
which the ethical makes its appearance, shines forth.
There are three paragraphs in the Critique of Judgment which deal quite
explicitly with the modality of the relationship between the beautiful
or the sublime, on the one hand, and the ethical, on the other. They
occur after the initial section, entitled the “Analytic of the Beautiful,”
in which judgments of taste per se are discussed and the domain of
the beautiful is assigned its boundaries. They are: “On the Modality
of a Judgment upon the Sublime in Nature” (par. ); “On Intellectual
Interest in the Beautiful” (par. ); and “On Beauty as the Symbol of
Morality” (par. ). The first two of these paragraphs occur within the
section called the “Analytic of the Sublime,” and the third, which is
the penultimate paragraph of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,”
concludes the “Dialectic of Aesthetic Judgment.” I think it is best to
 Border crossings in Kant 
begin with paragraph , since it encapsulates the previous remarks
Kant has made on the relation of the aesthetic to the moral or ethical
(the domain of Sittlichkeit). It is both the clearest and the most complicated
statement Kant makes in his writings about this relation.
On a first reading, paragraph  seems clear enough in that its argu-
ment leads toward a ringing assertion which defines the beautiful as
“symbol of the morally good”:
Now I maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good [das Schöne
ist das Symbol des Sittlich-guten]; and only because we refer the beautiful to the
morally good (we all do so naturally and require all others also to do so, as
a duty [Pflicht]), does our liking for it include a claim to everyone else’s assent
[Beistimmung], while the mind is also conscious of being ennobled [sich . . . einer
gewissen Veredlung und Erhebung . . . bewußt ist], by this [reference], above a mere
receptivity for pleasure derived from sense impressions, and it assesses the value
of other people too on the basis of [their having] a similar maxim in their power
of judgment. The morally good is the intelligible that taste has in view [worauf . . .
der Geschmack hinaussieht], as I indicated in the preceding section; for it is with this
intelligible that even our higher cognitive powers harmonize [zusammenstimmen],
and without this intelligible contradictions [lauter Widersprüche] would continually
arise from the contrast between the nature of these powers and the claims that
taste makes. (CJ –; KU )
The passage as a whole is characterized by two primary images: that
of the harmonizing of voices (Beistimmung, zusammenstimmen) as opposed
to the dissonance of contradiction (lauter Widersprüche); and that of the
ennobling elevation beyond the senses in the direction of the intelligible
(Veredlung, Erhebung, and the expression worauf . . . der Geschmack hinaussieht).
The notion of a harmonizing accord among the faculties confirms the
position of the Critique of Judgment as endpoint of the critical enterprise,
whereas the image of ennobling elevation places the aesthetic in a
mediating role, defining it as that which points beyond itself toward the
supersensible domain of the ethical. It would appear, in this strong declar-
ative moment, that Kant wishes to grant to the aesthetic both a final and
a mediating function, and that the interplay of imagery he uses here
constitutes a stylistics of synthesis – in the image of a resolved harmony
of elevation, where horizontal and vertical planes join each other in a
logically arduous but rhetorically effective merger. Thus the superficial
clarity of the declarative statement hides a complex rhetorical weave, in
which the reader discovers Immanuel Kant as stylist, whose words func-
tion not merely as the transparent conveyors of a philosophical argument,
but also as elements in a tropological discourse. Such a passage does
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
not simply “point beyond” the aesthetic in the direction of the moral; it
points toward itself as text.
This involutedness serves to complicate considerably the overt message
of the passage, which, in asserting that the beautiful tends toward the
moral in “symbolizing” it, brings the text dangerously close to the frontier
at which the beautiful effaces itself in favor of the moral, at which there is a
moralization of the aesthetic. Kant’s style, his poetics of harmonization
and elevation, in which the ethical becomes beautiful in its “noble” loftiness,
performs the opposite: namely, a rhetorically subtle aestheticization of
the moral. In other words, Kant anticipatorily but only momentarily
succumbs to the temptation to which Schiller will yield massively, perhaps
completely: that of bringing together the aesthetic and the ethical in
a dialectical play whereby “moral beauty” as such occupies the final,
synthetic moment.
It is not a coincidence, I think, that the declarative and somewhat em-
phatic passage I have just discussed exceeds, by its rhetorical complexity,
the straightforward assertion it (also) makes. Preceding this excerpt in
the earlier part of paragraph  is a development on the notion of sym-
bolization per se in Kant’s own technical terminology (we learn that
symbolism is, along with schematism, one of the two types of what Kant
calls hypotyposis), whose cryptic qualities have engendered reams of critical
commentary. The central problem for an understanding of paragraph
 as a whole lies in the problem of indirect language and, specifically,
analogy. In differentiating between schemata and symbols, Kant writes:
Hence, all intuitions supplied for a priori concepts are either schemata or symbols.
Schemata contain direct, symbols indirect, exhibitions of the concept [indi-
rekte Darstellungen des Begriffs]. Schematic exhibition is demonstrative. Symbolic
exhibition uses an analogy . . . Thus a monarchy ruled according to its own
constitutional laws would be presented as an animate body [durch einen beseelten
Körper], but a monarchy ruled by an individual absolute will would be presented
as a mere machine (such as a hand mill); but in either case the presentation
is only symbolic. For though there is no similarity between a despotic state and
a hand mill, there certainly is one between the rules by which we reflect on
the two and on how they operate [ihre Kausalität]. This function [of judgment]
[Dies Geschäft ] has not been analyzed much so far, even though it very much
deserves fuller investigation; but this is not the place to pursue it. (CJ ;
KU )

An analysis of this passage may be helpful in shedding light on the

critical debate surrounding the formula “the beautiful is the symbol
of the morally good.” Kant specialists from both the Continental and
 Border crossings in Kant 
the Anglo-American tradition divide rather neatly into two camps: the
“weak analogy” group, which finds in the comparison between the beau-
tiful and the morally good a tenuous, inessential linkage; and the “strong
analogy” contingent, which considers that the comparison functions as a
solid bridging device. Underlying these critical divergences is a certain
belief or non-belief in the capacity of the analogon to evoke its intended
referent, of the image to translate its concept with clarity, as well as a
trust or distrust in the epistemological possibilities of such a translational
movement (Übertragung, or metaphorical transport, is the word Kant uses
in par. , CJ ; KU ). Before one can ask the question “Is there a
strong analogy or a weak analogy between the beautiful and the morally
good,” one needs to ask “What is an analogy?” Are analogies, in and of
themselves, weak or strong? Are they capable, in their assigned role, of
presenting the concept adequately, convincingly?
Perhaps the best way to undertake such an inquiry is to begin with
Kant’s own examples in this passage: the monarchical state as repre-
sented by a living body; and a despotic state as symbolized by a “mere
machine” such as a hand mill. If the analogy is to function effectively, the
representational images must conjure up, presumably without ambiguity
or confusion, the concepts to which they refer: should they not succeed
in doing so, they must be viewed as failed or improperly symbolizing
symbols. Kant concedes that “there is no similarity between a despotic
state and a hand mill,” but he says, in a remarkably obscure statement,
that “there certainly is one between the rules by which we reflect on
the two and on how they operate.” What are these rules? Where do
they come from? Are they universal for all sentient beings? Is logic itself,
and even that most slippery form of “logic,” the rhetoric of analogy, a
rule-bound domain? Kant not only does not answer these questions, but
concludes the above passage with the brutal disclaimer: “this is not the
place to pursue [this matter].” One wonders: what better place than pre-
cisely here, when so much is at stake? For the beautiful to be the symbol
of the morally good, it is necessary that analogy as such function well and
not be suspect in its structure or constitution. One is tempted to wonder
if Kant was convinced by the validity of his own examples – and exem-
plarity, it goes without saying, is central to all philosophical discourse,
since the example must stand in a relation of metaphorical synecdoche
to that which it exemplifies, i.e., no part of it can exceed the bounds of
the whole to which it belongs.
The basis or ground (one can speak of analogies only by using
metaphorical language) of Kant’s comparison, and of his comparative
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
analogies, is the superiority of a monarchical state governed by laws over
a despotic state ruled by one person’s absolute (and therefore arbitrary)
will. How can this concept of superiority in the territory of politics be rep-
resented in an image or images? Kant chooses an “animate body” for the
law-based monarchy and a hand mill for the despotic system presumably
because an animate body will be recognized by all readers of Kant’s text
as superior to (i.e., nobler than) a hand mill, and because a functioning that
is merely mechanical and simply serves as a means toward a culinary
end does not evoke the same kind of dignity as that of a living body
(in the German, ein beseelter Körper – literally, a “soul-infused” body).
Leaving aside for the moment that the analogy can only work given
a traditional humanistic framework (once one undermines the “dignity
of man,” one can have surrealist imagery, in which a hand mill and a
“soul-infused body” might appear as equally uncanny “objects”), it is
necessary to remark that Kant’s analogy works best when we already know
both terms of the analogical relation. Unlike the poet, who only gives the reader
an image, from which that reader must discover the represented concept,
Kant gives us both sides of the symbolon, thereby de-activating the process
of interpretation. Kant’s analogy is, in fact, a logical illustration in the
form of an image, not an image whose analogical structure invites dis-
closure in an interpretive reading. His conclusion – that “this function
[of judgment] [dies Geschäft] has not been analyzed much so far” – is,
unfortunately, not just a general admission concerning the incomplete
state of scholarship in the field of rhetoric, but an implicit admission of
his own failure to confront directly and examine thoroughly the figural
dimension of discourse, including that of philosophical exposition.
Kant retreats in the face of the aesthetic as indirect discourse. Indirection,
which Kant himself says is the essential characteristic of the symbol, is
also that which poses the greatest threat to his own critical enterprise, to
his own Geschäft – a term we shall encounter later, in the context of his
ethical writings. Could it be that there are, in fact, two Geschäfte, two forms
of “business”: that of philosophy, on the one hand, and that of literature,
on the other? Philosophy, classically conceived, would be that discourse
which avoids indirection even when encountering it and defining it,
which flees the very territory (the figural minefield of aesthetics) it sets
out to map. The philosophical transit and level are based upon clearly
definable geometrical principles, upon mathematical laws, whereas what
lies within aesthetics, the indirect realm of analogy, is subject to rules
no one has discovered, rules that each work of art, on its own, must
discover for itself. Could it be that between philosophical aesthetics and
 Border crossings in Kant 
works of art in their praxis there resides a fundamental, foundational
“antinomy” in the literal Greek sense (a conflict of laws or rules), an
antinomy no amount of dialectical manipulation can overcome? This
is the direction in which the indirection of analogy has led. Beyond the
immediate Kantian context in question here, the problem is as follows:
in what ways can a theorizing discourse, a discourse of generalizing
concepts, contain what I should like to call the inside of the aesthetic, i.e., its
elusive figural dimension, when that inside is the indirect translational
movement of analogy, the tending-toward the to-be-discovered concept
which the reader must pursue in a series of individual and repeated
interpretive efforts?
What I am calling Kant’s retreat from the territory of the aesthetic
in paragraph  serves to clarify, retroactively, a number of his most
important and celebrated propositions concerning the beautiful and the
sublime. Thus, his observations on artistic design in paragraph  of the
“Analytic of the Beautiful,” which have led critics to attack him or
defend him for his “formalism,” can be seen as the philosopher’s
defensive reaction against the tortuous workings of art in its praxis: one
attaches oneself to the outward form when the artwork’s inner force is
too strong, too threatening, to be encountered on its own terms. What is
interesting in Kant, however, and also emblematic for formalist appreci-
ations of art in general, is that the fear of what constitutes or founds the
work in its innermost recesses – namely, its figural déviance – finds expres-
sion in the philosopher’s manifest distaste for what he/she represents,
metaphorically, as the farthest reaches of its “outside” – namely, the se-
ductive raiment in which the work of art clothes its design (color, sound,
rhetorical ornament). Because the labyrinthine inside of the work of art
is threatening in its very indirection, the philosopher/theorist re-configures
the work of art, presenting it as an aesthetic object and emphasizing its
form rather than its dangerous content. The philosopher then tells us
that this form is enveloped in a pleasing outer envelope, which is deemed
to be seductive in its appeal to the senses. It is easier to peal back the
envelope and reveal the geometry underneath than it is to encounter
seductiveness as danger within the workings of poetic language, in the
byways of indirect discourse. Kant’s most emphatic pronouncement on
the fundamental importance of form, on the superiority of form over the
“charm” of color, is to be found in paragraph :

In painting, in sculpture, and in all the visual arts – including architecture and
horticulture insofar as they are fine arts [sofern sie schöne Künste sind] – design is what
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
is essential [ist die Zeichnung das Wesentliche]; in design the basis for any involvement
of taste is not what gratifies us in sensation, but merely what we like because of
its form [sondern bloß, was durch seine Form gefällt]. The colors that illuminate the
outline belong to charm [Reiz]. Though they can indeed make the object itself
vivid to sense, they cannot make it beautiful and worthy of being beheld. Rather,
usually the requirement of beautiful form severely restricts [what] colors [may
be used], and even where the charm [of colors] is admitted it is still only the
form that refines the colors [und selbst da, wo der Reiz zugelassen wird, durch die erstere
allein veredelt]. (CJ  ; KU –)
As was the case in paragraph , paragraph  also depends upon a
rhetoric of ennoblement (Veredlung), whereby the enticing charms of the
sensible, when given over to the disciplining power of design, are lifted
above their own realm and are permitted entrance (werden zugelassen) into
the domain of beautiful forms. Colors are allowable, but only insofar as
they are muted by the rigors of form. It is difficult not to sense here a
strong trace of Kant’s Pietistic upbringing, a Protestant aversion to those
forms of iconic figuration that purportedly convey a diabolical allure.
One senses, in general, that Kant was not comfortable, not “at home”
in the domain of the beautiful, largely because this province, in and of
itself, remains too close to the merely sensual: it is in constant need of
ennoblement and elevation, of disciplinary supervision.
Kant was able to recuperate the fine arts not so much in his theory of
the beautiful per se, but rather in his original and multi-faceted medi-
tation on the sublime. To conclude my remarks on the crossings of
aesthetics and ethics in the Critique of Judgment, I shall examine selected
passages from paragraphs  and  of this work, in which the proximity
of the sublime to the moral law is posited and somewhat cryptically
developed.
In the long “General Comment on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflec-
tive Judgments” that occupies the center of paragraph , Kant delin-
eates, in an apparently simple contrast, the essential differences between
the beautiful and the sublime as they arise from his earlier exposition on
the two forms of aesthetic judgment:
Beautiful is what we like when we merely judge it [Schön ist das, was in der bloßen
Beurteilung gefällt] (and hence not through any sensation by means of sense in
accordance with some concept of the understanding). From this it follows at
once that we must like the beautiful without any interest.
Sublime is what, by its resistance to the interest of the senses, we like directly
[Erhaben ist das, was durch seinen Widerstand gegen das Interesse der Sinne unmittelbar
gefällt].
 Border crossings in Kant 
Both of these are explications of universally valid aesthetic judging and as
such refer to subjective bases. In the case of the beautiful, the reference is to
subjective bases of sensibility [Sinnlichkeit] as they are purposive for the benefit
of the contemplative understanding. In the case of the sublime, the reference
is to subjective bases as they are purposive [zweckmäßig] in relation to moral
feeling, namely, against sensibility [wider dieselbe (die Sinnlichkeit)] but at the same
time, and within the very same subject, for the purposes of practical reason.
The beautiful prepares us for loving [zu lieben] something, even nature, without
interest; the sublime, for esteeming [hochzuschätzen] it even against our interest
(of sense) [wider unser (sinnliches) Interesse]. (CJ ; KU )

It is important to respect the complexity of Kant’s argument in this

passage: he is positing that the beautiful and the sublime are both differ-
ent and similar; their relation is not that of a simple binary opposition.
They differ from each other in a subtle but essential way – the beautiful
pleases “without any interest,” whereas the sublime pleases “in resistance
to the interest of the senses.” The reader needs to take Kant’s idea of
opposition (Widerstand ) to the seductions of the sensible in its full active
sense, as a fight, a résistance planned and executed by a combatant. The
sublime is morally elevated or “ennobled” by the fact that it stands its
ground against the charm (Reiz) of the sensible, much as Odysseus braves
the song of the sirens. At the same time, however – and herein lies the
interesting difficulty of Kant’s line of reasoning – both the beautiful and
the sublime, in their specific and different ways, tend toward the goal of
the ethical. In Kant’s vocabulary, both are “purposive [zweckmäßig] in
relation to moral feeling,” a phrase that suggests an ethically grounded
teleology for the aesthetic. The aesthetic has its territory, which can be
surveyed by the aesthetician, but its borders are continually shifting
toward the neighboring frontier occupied, inhabited, by the moral law.
Art has its field, but if one views that field from the final perspective of the
ethical, from the ethical downward, so to speak, one is obliged to note
that art as territory is, in reality, a staging-ground, an area of “preparation”
for the moral. And the reason Kant’s own taste inclines him toward the
sublime more strongly than in the direction of the beautiful, is that the
former prepares us to esteem (hochzuschätzen) rather than “merely” to love
(zu lieben). Resistance to charm is also resistance to love. Kant retreats
from the beautiful as that area in which charm can lead to love, and
chooses to emphasize the sublime, where esteem emerges from initial
terror and places us in closest proximity to the moral good.
The sublime (das Erhabene) being that which lifts up or elevates (das, was
erhebt), the question arises as to whether it might tend to lift the human
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
being too high, beyond the finite limitations which are his or hers in the
world. Kant’s intellectual honesty compels him to address this problem
quite directly, in a development on the role of the sublime in its elevation
of one’s mental disposition above the plane of the sensible into what
might seem to be the threatening reaches of abstraction. Kant reassures
his reader as follows:

the sublime must always have reference to our way of thinking [die Denkungsart],
i.e., to maxims directed to providing the intellectual [side in us] and our rational
ideas with supremacy over sensibility.
We need not worry that the feeling of the sublime will lose [something] if
it is exhibited in such an abstract way as this [durch eine dergleichen abgezogene
Darstellungsart], which is wholly negative as regards the sensible. For though the
imagination finds nothing beyond the sensible that could support it, this very
removal of its barriers also makes it feel unbounded [ fühlt sich doch auch eben durch
diese Wegschaffung der Schranken derselben unbegrenzt], so that its separation [from the
sensible] is an exhibition of the infinite; and though an exhibition of the infinite
can as such never be more than merely negative [als bloß negative Darstellung], it
still expands the soul [die aber doch die Seele erweitert]. Perhaps the most sublime
passage in the Jewish Law is the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto
thee any graven image [kein Bildnis], or any likeness of any thing [irgendein
Gleichnis] that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth, etc. (CJ –;
KU )

For Kant, unlike Burke, the important stage in the experience of

the sublime occurs not during one’s awe or terror at the immensity of
nature, but rather in the final return to reason which takes place once
the imagination has faced its limits. Yet the originality of Kant’s theory
consists not only in this emphasis on the enveloping force of reason as
final resting-place of the sublime, but also in his description of the pathos
of the imagination, which, even though it can “attach itself ” to nothing
beyond the realm of the sensible, feels the exhilaration of its own bound-
lessness. This is one of the rare moments in Kant’s critical enterprise when
all limits fall and all boundaries evaporate, the moment of the unsayable
and unrepresentable infinite.
The concrete problem for art, for mimesis as such, becomes: how is it
possible to render, to make visible, the sublime – that which, in its very
infinite abstraction (or withdrawal: Abgezogenheit), can be nothing but a
negative exhibition or presentation? How does one represent the un-
representable? Kant’s answer to this question places the sublime in such
close proximity to the territory of the ethical that the frontier between the
 Border crossings in Kant 
two areas seems to disappear altogether. This answer appears abruptly,
just after the remarks on the “expansion of the soul” that is said to arise
from the experience of the sublime. We are told that the biblical ad-
monishment against the making of “graven images” is a quintessentially
sublime passage, the very model for the textual sublime. The linguistic
form of the sublime is that of the command, or, more precisely, of the
command in a negative or privative mode. The sublime participates in
the moral law in its earliest Old Testament guise, and shares with this
law its categorical, unambiguous character: no images, no likenesses of
anything, whether above or below the inhabited world. The command
is absolute; the moral authority of the textual statement is unquestion-
able, since it emanates from the mouth of God. But within this austere
environment, this sacred context, what remains of the aesthetic? No
image or likeness: nothing representational or rhetorical remains (Bildnis
can mean portrait as well as likeness; Gleichnis is a general term that can
signify image, simile, allegory, or parable – all of this disappears under
the privative power of the moral law). The negative imperative form is
the closest thing in language to non-language: it puts a stop to the flow
of narrative action, and in this particular case, to the process of figura-
tion itself. The threat of the figural is removed in the command. The
“expansion of the soul” which occurs within the sublime does so at the
expense of the aesthetic, which contracts to nothing.
Kant’s admiration for a certain Goethian form of “genius” (para-
graphs –) cannot hide from his reader the philosopher’s profound
distrust of art. In fact, Kant most often locates the aesthetic in nature
rather than in works of artistic creation, and it is impossible not to sense
that the “schöne Künste” are beautiful for him only insofar as they
approach (but never reach) the loveliness or awesome power of the natu-
ral realm. Thus, near the conclusion of paragraph  in the “Analytic of
the Sublime” entitled “On Intellectual Interest in the Beautiful,” Kant
associates authentic beauty with nature and art with deceit. He imag-
ines a scene in which a “jovial innkeeper” fools his guests into believing
that they are hearing the song of a nightingale when, in fact, a “roguish
youngster” is imitating the bird’s distinctive song with a reed or rush
(CJ ). Kant states the moral of his story before relating it: the kind
of artistic playfulness which consists in such an imitation of nature
ruins one’s further appreciation of the thing imitated. In this case,
it is no longer possible to enjoy the actual song of the nightingale
once it has been thus counterfeited. In Kantian terms, the intellectual
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
“interest” we take in the beautiful must be in the beautiful as it occurs in
nature:
But in order for us to take this interest in beauty, this beauty must always be that
of nature; our interest vanishes completely as soon as we notice that we have
been deceived, that only art was involved [es verschwindet ganz, sobald man bemerkt,
man sei getäuscht, und es sei nur Kunst]; it vanishes so completely that at that point
even taste can no longer find anything beautiful, nor sight anything charming.
(CJ ; KU )

Underneath the architectonics of the Third Critique, below Kant’s

theory of taste in the general sense, lies the philosopher’s distaste for art
as deception (Täuschung), for the non-natural aesthetic field as locus of
a playfulness whose moral dimension is suspect. Art, for Kant, will have
always been “mere art” (nur Kunst). Herein resides Kant’s lifelong admira-
tion for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Rêveries du promeneur solitaire located
beauty in nature rather than in “les tromperies de l’art” – the seductive
aesthetic Täuschungen that characterized, in Rousseau’s view, not only
the French theater of his time, but also the frivolous jeux de société staged
in the decadent Parisian salons. In the end, moral earnestness seems to
have separated Kant from the aesthetic in art. I am suggesting that this
is the conclusion one reaches on the basis of a rhetorical reading of the
Critique of Judgment, a reading which locates personal tastes and distastes
under the garb of a general Theorie des Geschmacks. In Kant, the aesthetic
is a precarious, fragile, and shifting field that risks losing its own territory
by annexation into the domain of the ethical. But the question remains:
just how stable is the ethical itself, just how safe is it from the incursions
of the aesthetic? Is the ethical a terra firma, or is it also subject to moments
of instability? This point cannot be examined from within the Third
Critique, but requires a brief foray into the Critique of Practical Reason.

II CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON

Commonplace intellectual usage has long held that the “pure” is to be

situated on a higher plane than the “practical,” which, at best, is related
to the former as its execution or application. Thus, in the domain of
literary studies, a “pure” narrative theory would be capable of generat-
ing principles that are universal, that are valid for all individual stories;
whereas applied or practical narratology would be the workmanlike ver-
ification, on individual texts, of certain hypothesized narrative laws. In
Kant’s philosophy, however, “practical reason” is not only not “lower”
 Border crossings in Kant 
than pure reason as described in the First Critique; it is, rather, the
extension of pure reason in the direction of the supersensible. The human
being who is capable of comprehending the laws of causality within the
sensible territory of nature – the domain staked out in the Critique of
Pure Reason – discovers, upon reflection, that “pure reason alone must of
itself be practical” (CPrR ). This practical pure reason, the intellec-
tual agency of the moral law, functions within the carefully prescribed
limits of the categorical imperative, of the universally legislating “ought”
which, while establishing the moral dimension of our world, calls us all
to live beyond the causality of the sensible, in freedom.
Fundamental to Kant’s conception of morality is the relation between
the desires of each individual and the moral law in its universality. The
author of the Second Critique distinguishes, from the beginning, between
“maxims” (which a human subject establishes as “valid only for his own
will”) and “practical laws” (which are valid “for the will of every rational
being”) (CPrR ). Maxims are, by definition, self-interested guidelines
in which the force of personal desire has not been tamed. The most
important of these is perhaps the maxim of self-love (post-Freud, we
would call this narcissism), which Kant singles out to contrast with the
moral law:
The maxim of self-love (prudence) merely advises; the law of morality commands
[Die Maxime der Selbstliebe (Klugheit) rät bloß an; das Gesetz der Sittlichkeit gebietet]. Now
there is a great difference between that which we are advised to do and that
which we are obligated to do. (CPrR –; KPrV )

To advise someone is to open up a direction of conduct for that per-

son, to lead him or her toward the obtaining of a certain advantage or
final goal. Advice is a rhetorical strategy not uncommonly associated
with deviousness and seduction: Mme de Merteuil gives Valmont much
advice in Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, to the peril of Mme de Tournon.
Advice given either by the self to others or by the self to the self occu-
pies the dangerous intellectual field of Klugheit, which does not mean the
“prudence” (Vorsicht) of a merely reactive form of self-preservation, as in
the cautious attitude one should manifest before crossing a street, but
rather cleverness, shrewdness, cunning. To return for a moment to Les
Liaisons: Valmont’s seduction of Mme de Tournon is more interesting in
its multiple strategies than in its final triumph, in its shrewd psychological
manipulations than in its achieved goal. The seduction is not so much
an accomplished action as an emerging (cruel) work of art, a cunning,
duplicitous aestheticization of an increasingly undermined moral code.
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
Unlike the advice-giving maxim of narcissistic self-gratification (which is
the true final goal of all seductions, the goal behind the “goal”), the law
of morality commands, which means that its message is univocal, under-
standable to all human beings. Everyone can obey an absolute order,
meaning, at the close of the eighteenth century, not just the worldly-wise
aristocracy. Just as Les Liaisons dangereuses is inconceivable as story outside
the highest (and therefore, most decadent) levels of society, so the moral
law would be inconceivable if it did not address itself, democratically,
to all citizens. Kant’s central notion of “duty,” the expression of each
person’s adherence to the moral law in its universality, is thus character-
ized by clarity, whereas the maxims of self-love and the mere pursuit of
happiness are hidden in obscurity:

What duty [Pflicht] is, is plain of itself to everyone, but what is to bring true,
lasting advantage to our whole existence is veiled in impenetrable obscurity
[in undurchdringliches Dunkel eingehüllt] and much prudence [Klugheit] is required
to adapt the practical rule based upon it even tolerably to the ends of life by
making suitable exceptions to it. But the moral law [das sittliche Gesetz] commands
the most unhesitating obedience from everyone; consequently, the decision as
to what is to be done in accordance with it must not be so difficult that even
the commonest and most unpracticed understanding [daß nicht der gemeinste und
ungeübteste Verstand] without any worldly prudence [Weltklugheit] should go wrong
in making it. (CPrR ; KPrV )

The moral law must be easy to understand, but it can only be expressed
in language. To express the moral law, therefore, one must render lan-
guage unambiguous; one must free it from all semantic slippages; one
must remove all its “veils” so that nothing but clarity remains. One can
see, then, that the kind of moral perversity characteristic of Laclos’s novel
goes hand in hand with artfulness, understood as the devious, polyva-
lent behavior of persons or personages who possess no conscience, who
refuse to engage in the economics of guilt and forgiveness, in the dialogic
universe of the forgiveness of sins. To act deviously, in Kant’s German,
is künsteln (this term is used in the philosopher’s discussion of the role of
conscience in moral behavior [CPrJ  ; KPrV ]) – a term that occu-
pies the same semantic field as Klugheit or Weltklugheit. To act according
to one’s advantage is, finally, to aestheticize life, to live it as if it were a work
of art, which is to say, a fictional universe of symbols in which meaning
itself is “veiled in impenetrable obscurity.” The worst imaginable enemy
of moral certainty would be the symbolist aesthetic of Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness, the artfully fashioned domain in which the Weltklugheit of
 Border crossings in Kant 
Kurtz progresses through Enlightenment philosophy toward the extreme
maxim-made-command: “Exterminate all the brutes!”
If we look (chronologically) forward now from the Second to the Third
Critique, I think it is possible to risk a few general remarks. In the Critique of
Judgment, we saw that the aesthetic tended toward the moral, especially in
Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime.” The moral could be seen as providing
a ground, perhaps the final ground, of the aesthetic. The lifting upward
of Erhabenheit as the sublime in nature, which is already massively present
as a properly moral force in the Critique of Practical Reason, provided
an antidote to what the philosopher saw as the dangerous charms of the
aesthetic in the sensuality of its ornamentation – in the colors and sounds
that enveloped, and possibly obscured, the formal design beneath. The
aesthetic is saved from itself, so to speak, by the pressure which the moral
exerts on the aesthetic in the experience of the sublime. In the Critique
of Practical Reason, we find that the moral must guard itself against the
unwanted intrusions of the aesthetic. The moral law, in order to establish
its universality, must suppress the primary danger lurking in human
language – that of subtlety, of ambiguity, of “prudence” understood in
the strong sense as the cunning of world-wisdom, Weltklugheit. But is this
guarding against the aesthetic from within the watchtower of Sittlichkeit
something that can be accomplished easily, in an act of the will accessible
to all humans – including philosophers? Put differently: is it possible to
write morally about morality, in such a way that literary style, with its
own manifold forms of “prudence,” does not aestheticize one’s clear-
sighted and straightforward purpose? To conclude my remarks on the
points of intersection between the ethical and the aesthetic in Kant, I
should like to look at one final passage from the Critique of Practical Reason
in which the philosopher, in a rare moment of first-person confidential
discourse, addresses the issue of the coherence of his critical project in
an ethical register, but with an interesting, and in Kantian terms rather
suspicious overlay, of self-involved, cunningly manipulated artfulness.
The rhetorically convoluted section to which I refer occurs in the final
paragraph of the “Analytic of Pure Practical Reason,” when Kant, having
concluded this part of his argument, pauses for a moment to reflect
upon how easily and naturally each structural articulation of the Second
Critique “fits” or “attaches to” (schließt sich an) the grand architectural
plan of the Critique of Pure Reason. This moment of Kant’s text is properly
self-congratulatory, with a tone verging on pride. The tending-toward-
pride expresses itself in a very interesting methodological statement, in a
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
theory of intellectual honesty and “openness” which is also a criticism of
those writers who fall short of this ideal. The question is whether Kant’s
text, in developing his theory of honesty, is itself honest. Following is an
excerpt from the final paragraph:
Here [bei dieser Gelegenheit] I wish to call attention, if I may [sei es mir erlaubt], to
one thing, namely, that every step which one takes with pure reason, even in the
practical field where one does not take subtle speculation [subtile Spekulation] into
account, so neatly and naturally dovetails [sich . . . anschließe] with all parts of the
critique of theoretical reason that it is as if each step had been carefully thought
out merely to establish this confirmation [als ob jeder Schritt mit überlegter Vorsicht,
bloß um dieser Bestätigung zu verschaffen, ausgedacht wäre]. This agreement [Eintreffung]
was by no means sought after . . . Frequent observation has convinced me that
once one has seen through such business [dieses Geschäfte], that which, when half-
finished, appeared very dubious in view of extraneous theories, is at last found to
be in an unexpected way completely harmonious [vollkommen zusammenstimmte]
with that which had been discovered separately without the least regard for
them [ohne Parteilichkeit und Vorliebe für dieselben], provided this dubiousness is left
out of sight for a while and only the business at hand is attended to until it is
finished [wenn ich diese Bedenklichkeit nur so lange aus den Augen ließ und bloß auf mein
Geschäft acht hatte, bis es vollendet sei]. Writers could save themselves many errors
and much labor lost (because spent on delusions [weil sie auf Blendwerk gestellt war])
if they could only resolve to go to work with a little more ingenuousness [wenn
sie sich nur entschließen könnten, mit etwas mehr Offenheit zu Werke zu gehen]. (CPrR ;
KPrV )

Kant’s emphasis on the spontaneous character of the “dovetailing”

between the architectural designs of the first two Critiques in their
minutest details foreshadows a fundamental aesthetic tenet of literary
Modernism – the superiority of instantaneous creative discovery over a
merely planned, laboriously and artificially conceived intellectual con-
struction (see Joyce’s “epiphanies” and Proust’s endorsement of mémoire
involontaire over mémoire volontaire). Like Joyce and Proust, however, who
may have based their novels on aesthetic theories of spontaneity but
who certainly also lavished extraordinary attention on the necessarily
voluntary constructedness of their respective fictional universes, Kant
may be protesting too much, indulging in what Freud called Verneinung,
when he tells his reader that he is agreeably surprised by the harmo-
nious coming together of the two Critiques. The reason he gives for this
purported surprise is of interest, nevertheless, whether one chooses to be-
lieve Kant’s own “ingenuousness” at this point in the text or not: namely,
that a domain of openness, honesty, and transparent communicability
(the “practical,” the moral) can attach itself so readily, so beautifully,
 Border crossings in Kant 
to the territory of “subtle speculation” (that of “pure” or “theoretical”
reason).
Much is at stake in this overlapping. First (logically): if the practical –
which must be evident to all persons – could not be attached to or
extended from the intellectual complexity inherent in the theoretical,
there could be no community of thinking citizens, only a fragmentary
assemblage of individuals separated by their variable talents rather than
united by the ends of nature. Second (at a higher level of rhetorical
complication): Kant, the author of the very subtle and speculative First
Critique, as he reaches the final sentences of his confidential aside, makes
it clear that, when he writes about morality, he does so morally (in the
mode of Offenheit), and that many writers would do well to follow his
example, instead of giving in to the “delusions” (Blendwerk) that are born
of the intellectual’s hubris-infused desire to erect theoretical systems in
an act of precipitous distraction. Not only should one proceed to one’s
work with no prejudgment of its eventual outcome (ohne Parteilichkeit und
Vorliebe), but one should concentrate on one’s “business” (Geschäft) while
closing one’s eyes to extraneous difficulties. Thus, one could paraphrase
the overt message of the passage as follows: “Writers, follow my example,
my maxim; concentration on the here-and-now of work, avoidance of
diversions, of Pascalian divertissement, will guarantee philosophical results
imbued with moral probity.”
But how does concentration, or focusing on one’s “business,” func-
tion textually? Kant is arguing for openness, which is the zero-degree
rhetorical mode of morality and the very antithesis of the speculative
subtlety one finds in theoretical knowledge (the First Critique) or in the
labyrinthine movements of aesthetic symbolization (the Third Critique).
Subtlety as such must be banished from the moral realm if the latter
is to remain on solid ground. But how can one characterize the final
stages of Kant’s argument in the “Analytic of Pure Practical Reason”
except by the term “subtle”? What happens, textually, as his argument
unfolds, is the following: in attempting to demonstrate that concentra-
tion on one’s work is a philosophical value in that it contributes to the
lifting of “dubiousness” and the founding of clarity, he resorts, curiously
and significantly, to the image of blindness. Indeed, in order for the
philosophical Geschäft to be in order, the thinker must close his eyes to the
outside, the “extraneous,” all that risks calling into question the integrity
of his system. The philosopher with closed eyes then immediately accuses
an undefined group of other writers of basing their own ideas on “delu-
sions” – in German Blendwerk, a term deriving from the verb blenden,
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
to blind, meaning frippery, mockery, and hocus-pocus, and suggesting
the kind of sleight-of-hand one associates with gaming houses, circuses,
and other places housing the lowest forms of illusion-making. Other writ-
ers are the ones who are guilty of “blinding” their reading public with
trompe-l’oeil devices, if one takes Kant’s argument in its overt earnestness.
The text’s rhetorical fabric glimmers in a different light, however,
and shows that the integrity of the system – in this case, the Kantian
critical system – rests upon the philosopher’s blindness to his own de-
vious argumentative strategies, to the self-blindness that allows Offenheit
to mask a writerly strategy of closed-mindedness. I do not mean any-
thing “negative” with this latter term. All systems of thought, whether
they be conceived architecturally as grand unities (Kant, Hegel) or as
self-annihilating and self-constructing fragmentary structures (Friedrich
Schlegel and the Athenaeum group), must necessarily pose themselves
in the very act of opposing the “outside” of their thought – namely, those
“other writers” against whom they construct their models and their the-
oretical discourses. But it is important not to forget that the very act of
intellectual decision-making, the tracing of categories and boundaries
for thought, which the philosopher would like to conceive as a resolution,
an Ent-schließen, is at the same time a closing-off, a seclusion, a roping-
off of the frontiers, an Ab-schließen. Kant, in trying to convince us that
his going-to-work is a moral “resolution,” is practicing a little Blendwerk
of his own, since the “ought” of the philosopher’s “I ought to work”
is the exterior form of his “I wish to work,” “I aim to convince,” and
“I am driven to write because writing itself (not morality, not the law as
supreme abstraction) compels me to enter the minefield of persuasive,
that is, rhetorical, tropological, discourse.”
If we now return to survey the landscape of the aesthetic and the ethical
in Kant from a more distant perspective than my micro-readings have
permitted, it becomes possible to reach some general conclusions. Kant
presents the overlapping of these two fundamental areas in both the
Second and the Third Critiques, and does so with considerable finesse
and (despite his moralizing intentions) subtlety. In the Critique of Judgment,
the aesthetic is in danger of encroachment from the ethical, from two
sides: first, from Kant’s elevation and ennobling of the province of the
sublime, das Erhabene, which draw it, Icarus-like, dangerously close to the
resplendence of the moral law in its supersensible domain; and second,
from the philosopher’s annexation and domestication of the hinterlands
of the symbolical or analogical. These areas of aesthetic play, which
 Border crossings in Kant 
belong most properly to Daedalus, labyrinth-constructor of infinite poly-
semic possibilities, are robbed of their “irresponsible” freeplay through
Kant’s ethically motivated imposition of a stable and recuperative form
onto the proliferation of seductive ornament. In the Critique of Practical
Reason, the moral becomes subject to encroachment from the aesthetic
from within Kant’s own writing style. Kant postulates the unity, clarity,
and transparence of Sittlichkeit (because the moral must be accessible to
all and without “subtlety”), but his rhetoric, in its subtlety, introduces
the aesthetic snake of seduction into the garden of good and evil. The
turn toward the self in the final paragraph of the “Analytic of Pure
Practical Reason,” in which Kant, like God in Genesis, is well pleased
with the beauty of his creation, presents itself as a paean to moral Offenheit.
Yet this philosophical song of praise cannot erase manifest traces of an
aesthetically articulated Selbstliebe, of the pride of an author who deserves,
and receives, our respectful admiration for the edifice he has formed, but
who also merits a skeptical survey of the fault-lines beneath his work’s
architectural splendor.
 CHAPTER 

Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically

Man has just as great a claim upon the poetic as the moral has a
claim upon him.
(The Concept of Irony)

I INTRODUCTION

The equilibrium between the aesthetic sphere and the domain of the
ethical emerges as a founding theme in the earliest stages of Søren
Kierkegaard’s writing career. The thinker associated with a complex
modern formulation of Christian existentialism needed to proceed
through the aesthetic and ethical stages before encountering his most
proper territory – that of revealed religion. And there is nothing perfunc-
tory in this propaedeutic, this necessary rite of passage without which
the religious as such would be ungrounded, abstracted from the combats
and conflicts of the human mind. Indeed, Kierkegaard wrestles with the
problematic interplay of the aesthetic and the ethical in both his theol-
ogy dissertation, The Concept of Irony ( ), and the wittily earnest double
work that first brought him intellectual notoriety, the twinned volumes
of Either/Or ().
In this chapter I shall concentrate almost exclusively on these two
works, since it is within their pages that Kierkegaard deals most explic-
itly with the aesthetic and the ethical per se. It should be noted, however,
that the religious is present from the beginning in Kierkegaard, that
his particular and unique conception of Christianity permeates all his
writings, even those which, according to critical consensus, “pre-date”
the creative explosion of his first religiously grounded works – Repetition
and Fear and Trembling (); Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of
Anxiety (). Thus, in the sentence quoted above from the penultimate
chapter of The Concept of Irony, the use of the word “claim,” in its associ-
ation with the logic of debt and redemption, calls forth in the reader’s


 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
mind the economics of guilt and forgiveness which undergirds the New
Testament as a whole. In fact, the etymological origin of the word “claim”
is the Greek kalein (later, Latin clamare), meaning “to cry out.” There is
an existential pathos of the claim whose riches Kierkegaard will mine
with considerable force in his later works; but it is important to note that,
as early as his dissertation, and within the limits of the poetic and the
moral, the fundamental question is what one can claim (or call forth) by
rights, and how one is claimed (or called upon) by a higher tribunal, an
instance supérieure. The apparent equilibrium of Kierkegaard’s formula (its
rhetoric of “just as great as”) serves to mask, or at least to attenuate, the
possible imbalance between claiming and being claimed. Does the act
of claiming, in and of itself, possess the same value as the moral claim
on the individual, since the latter originates in the realm of the Law and
instantiates itself in the mode of the categorical imperative? At what cost
is a balanced harmony between the aesthetic and the ethical achieved?
Like all serious writers, Kierkegaard elaborates his thought en situ-
ation, and one could say, using his own terminology in the subtitle to
The Concept of Irony, that he establishes his intellectual positions “with
continual reference” to Hegel and Hegelianism on the one hand, and
German Romantic irony on the other. In the time that separates the
Critique of Judgment () from Kierkegaard’s own works of  –,
there have been wild fluctuations not only in the exterior world of poli-
tics and governments (the French Revolution in its perplexing metamor-
phoses, the era of Napoleon, experiments with republicanism and the
renewal of monarchies), but also in the realm of letters, music, and the
plastic arts, where Kant’s complex and problematic legacy – Romanti-
cism – has reigned supreme for more than three decades. By the time
Kierkegaard writes The Concept of Irony and Either/Or, however, Roman-
ticism has passed through several phases (and several countries), and
is now subject to critique, both from its adherents and its adversaries.
Kierkegaard’s views on the interplay between aesthetics and ethics are
not only post-Kantian in that they presuppose Kant’s critical system as a
point of departure for modern thought, but also, in an important sense,
post-Romantic, in that they build upon Hegel’s often devastating attacks
on Tieck, Solger, the brothers Schlegel, and Novalis (and behind
Novalis, the figure of Fichte, whose influence on the theories and practice
of Romantic irony should not be underestimated).
Unlike Hegel, however, who so often accused the practitioners of irony
of placing themselves above life in a position of arrogant superiority but
who lambasted them from his own lofty stance of philosophical suffisance,
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
Kierkegaard descended into the ironical maelstrom and worked out his
critique of Romanticism from within, assuming multiple masks and play-
ing complicated narrative games with his readers. Kierkegaard’s mode
of writing is as important as the declarative statements he makes. Unlike
Kant, Kierkegaard is not only quite consciously aware of the rhetorical
deviousness that can creep into the thread of his conceptual argument,
of the ways in which ethical seriousness can be undermined and aes-
theticized by his own figural discourse, but he revels in this confusion
of categories, he delights in the perplexing overlap between the poetic
and the moral. What has changed most fundamentally since Kant is that
the aesthetic domain can no longer be imagined as a museum in which
works of art present themselves in their unadorned transparency to the
disinterested observer. One effect of the explosion of Romanticism was
to move art from the confines of closed spaces (the museum, the the-
ater, the recital hall, the salon) into the extensive and limitless sphere of
lived existence. For Kierkegaard, there is, pace Kant, an aesthetic inter-
est. For the Danish thinker, the crucial issue now is not so much how to
appreciate or to judge works of the imagination, but rather how to live
poetically. This is why what interests Kierkegaard, from his earliest writ-
ings, are certain exemplary figures – Don Juan, Faust, the Wandering
Jew – whose legendary careers possess far more than a simple didactic
function, and who incorporate various dimensions of the creative life-
force which stands at the origin of artistic production in all its diverse
manifestations. The problem of living poetically has its source in the
aesthetics of Romanticism, which, according to Kierkegaard as well as
Hegel, is an ironical aesthetics. But Kierkegaard, unlike Hegel, will try
to argue (in the second volume of Either/Or) that it is possible to conceive
of an ethically grounded poetic life. In order to follow the path that leads
to the working out of this proposition, however, we need to begin with
Kierkegaard’s own point of departure: Hegel’s unilateral condemnation
of Romantic irony in the name of moral seriousness.

II HEGEL’S AESTHETICS

In the section of the introduction to his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik

[Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art] () titled “Historical Deduction of the
True Concept of Art,” Hegel deals quite briefly and dismissively with
the subject of Romantic irony. This development, however truncated,
occupies an important narrative position within the Aesthetics, in that
Hegel must eliminate the Romantics from serious consideration before
 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
he turns to his own systematic exposition. Indeed, the all-important sec-
tion called “Division of the Subject” (in German, simply “Eintheilung”),
in which Hegel performs a preliminary survey of the territories he will be
exploring, follows immediately upon the passage on irony. This rhetor-
ical gesture of philosophical domination (the perfunctory disarming of
the enemy) repeats what Hegel had done in his earlier masterwork, the
Phenomenology of Spirit (), in which the all-important transition to the
chapter on religion was made possible by the philosopher’s annihilation
of the “beautiful soul” – the figuration of aesthetic morality which Hegel
associated with what he judged to be the vapid evanescence of Roman-
tic literature, especially Novalis’s poetry. In both works, the suspicious
blending of the aesthetic with the moral needed to be shunted aside
so that the Hegelian conceptual edifice could be constructed on a firm
foundation.
Standing behind Friedrich Schlegel and the other practitioners of
Romantic irony, according to Hegel, was the Fichtian philosophical sys-
tem. Fichte is the primary villain in Hegel’s conceptual psychodrama,
the target at which he directs his most stinging barbs. Following is a
stylistically complex passage from the “Historical Deduction of the True
Concept of Art” in which Hegel critiques Fichte’s key notion of the
ego, qualifying it as “throughout abstract and formal” (Aesthetics ) (the
opposite, of course, of “concrete and substantial” – Hegel’s own pos-
itively valued terms). It is the emptiness of the Fichtian ego which,
in Hegel’s view, allows for the development of irony as irresponsible
freeplay:

The ego is a living, active individual, and its life consists in making its individuality
real in its own eyes and in those of others, in expressing itself, and bringing itself
into appearance. For every man, by living, tries to realize himself and does
realize himself. Now in relation to beauty and art, this acquires the meaning of
living as an artist and forming one’s life artistically [als Künstler zu leben, und sein
Leben künstlerisch zu gestalten]. But on this principle, I live as an artist when all my
action and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever,
remains for me a mere show and assumes a shape which is wholly in my power
[nur ein Schein f ür mich bleibt, und eine Gestalt annimmt, die ganz in meiner Macht steht].
In that case I am not really in earnest either with this content or, generally, with its
expression and actualization. For genuine earnestness enters only by means of a
substantial interest, something of intrinsic worth like truth, ethical life, etc., – by
means of a content which counts as such for me as essential [Denn wahrhafter Ernst
kommt nur durch ein substantielles Interesse, eine in sich selbst gehaltvolle Sache, Wahrheit,
Sittlichkeit, usw., – herein, durch einen Inhalt, der mir als solcher schon als wesentlich gilt], so
that I only become essential myself in my own eyes in so far as I have immersed
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
myself in such a content and have brought myself into conformity with it in all
my knowing and acting. When the ego that sets up and dissolves everything out
of its own caprice is the artist [i.e., the Romantic ironist], to whom no content
of consciousness appears as absolute and independently real but only as a self-
made and destructible show, such earnestness can find no place, since validity is
ascribed only to the formalism of the ego [da nur dem Formalismus des Ich Gültigkeit
zugeschrieben ist]. (Aesthetics I, ; Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I,  –)

The first two sentences in the passage appear, at first, unproblem-

atic: what individual would not wish to express himself or realize her-
self ? The fundamental idea that the goal of life is self-realization or
self-actualization (“actualization” being also a grounding concept in
Kierkegaard’s writings) does not seem iconoclastic or in any way un-
usual. Although Hegel is purportedly expounding the views of Fichte
throughout this section of his treatise, the introductory part of this pas-
sage does not fly in the face of philosophical sensus communis. The prob-
lems begin with the third sentence, in which beauty and art are brought
into the picture. Whereas expressing oneself and bringing oneself “into
appearance” (sich zu äußern und zur Erscheinung zu bringen) are considered
the natural activities of humankind, to live as an artist (as a Romantic
ironist) is to indulge in arbitrary semblance and “mere show” (nur ein
Schein). Hegel is playing on the difference between Erscheinung and Schein,
in which the former designates the inevitable outward orientation of the
human being into concrete reality, whereas the latter connotes vague-
ness and irreality. The Romantic ironist does not truly express (äußern)
anything; his reveries and imaginings remain inner-oriented. In Hegel’s
line of reasoning, earnestness (Ernst) becomes associated with expression
as concrete exteriorization and with “actualization,” with what he calls
a “substantial interest.” Now this interest has intrinsic worth, since it
concerns itself with the very highest philosophical values, such as truth
and the “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit). Economically speaking, the genuine
philosopher is the creator of value, whereas the ironist is a counterfeiter.
The words gelten and Gültigkeit apply to the authentic thinker, never to
the artisan of idle and fanciful dream-visions.
As the passage develops, it becomes clear that the Romantic ironist
is, to use a good Nietzschean term, at the “antipodes” of the serious
philosopher, who is, by definition, the servant of Sittlichkeit. If we reverse
the qualities attributed to the ironist into their binary opposites, we obtain
a portrait of the genuine thinker (whose resemblance to Hegel is perhaps
not a matter of coincidence). Just as exteriorization and realization were
emphasized over the arbitrary artistic “forming” (Gestalten) of a poetic life,
 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
in the same way, in the latter stages of the passage, the “immersion” of
the self into an epistemologically sound or ethically grounded content is
valued over the “dissolution” (a favorite chemical metaphor of Friedrich
Schlegel) capriciously performed by the empty Fichtean ego upon his en-
vironment or world. The problem with the Romantic artist’s making or
techné is that it is unethical in its narcissism. In the terms of contempo-
rary literary theory, we would say that the creations and performances
of the Romantic ironist are self-referential, and that self-referentiality is
the greatest threat possible to seriousness – that philosophical attitude or
mood which determines and envelops the field of aesthetics as theoretical
domain. The involuted quality of ironic art, its specularity, is, properly
speaking, disorienting to the aesthetician. In Hegel’s interesting metaphor-
ical expression, earnestness “can find no place” (kann . . . keine Stätte finden)
in the ironically conceived poetic universe. Irony is the “place” of the
philosopher’s exile.
Hegel’s argument in this paragraph is not just that Romantic irony is
frivolous and empty in its unfettered playfulness, but that its frivolity and
its vacuity rest upon the inauthentically assumed and ethically suspect
superior attitude of the ironist, whose aesthetic mis-demeanor consists
in his arbitrary exercising of power (Macht). In political terms, the iro-
nist is a tyrant, a despot, in that he rules over a territory which he, by
rights, should carefully tend, nurture, and respect. One senses here that
Hegel is conflating irony with wit (Schlegelian Witz) or even sarcasm,
and that it is the tone of the writings of the Romantic ironists that is in-
imical to his (earnest) philosophical mind. The question, however, is
whether what Hegel says about irony has anything to do with irony as
it is practiced, not only by Tieck, the Schlegels, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and
others, but also by Kierkegaard, both in his dissertation and in the first
volume of Either/Or. Is the “essence of irony” or the “truth of irony” to
be equated with power over exterior reality, or does the territory of irony
lie at the antipodes of such a determined and mastered world? What
is the experience of irony? How can one describe or even engage in the
praxis of irony? What Kierkegaard has to say about these unwieldy but
aesthetically central problems is developed “with continual reference to
Hegel,” but constitutes a subtle and complex overturning of Hegelian
seriousness. As we move now to an examination of the final sections of
The Concept of Irony, the Hegelian condemnation of Romanticism in its
particular Germanic/ironic mode needs to remain in the background,
as the horizon against which Kierkegaard establishes his own aesthetic
theory.
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
III THE CONCEPT OF IRONY

Although the greater part of Kierkegaard’s dissertation focuses on

Socratic irony, the latter sections of the work are directed against Hegel’s
definition of irony as “infinite absolute negativity” (CI  and passim).
According to Kierkegaard, Hegel confused the notion of “negativity”
with what appeared to be the destructive or “dissolving” qualities of
Romantic irony, and had no understanding for the social and political
contexts that made the modern return to the ironic mode of writing pos-
sible, perhaps necessary. In his discussion of Tieck which occurs in the
chapter entitled “Irony after Fichte,” Kierkegaard, using his own distinct
brand of irony, writes:
But it must be borne in mind that Tieck and the whole romantic school stepped
into or thought they were stepping into an age in which people seemed to be
totally fossilized in finite social forms. Everything was completed and consum-
mated in a divine Chinese optimism that let no reasonable longing go unsatis-
fied, no reasonable desire go unfulfilled. The glorious principles and maxims of
habit and custom were the objects of a pious idolatry; everything was absolute,
even the absolute. One abstained from polygamy; one wore a stovepipe hat.
Everything had its importance. . . . Everything occurred according to the stroke
of the hour. One reveled in nature on St. John’s Eve [Midsummer], one was
contrite on the fourth Friday after Easter [Great Day of Prayer]; one fell in love
when one turned twenty, went to bed at ten o’clock. One married, one lived
for domesticity and one’s position in society; one acquired children, acquired
family worries. (CI )
In this interesting foreshadowing of Flaubert’s “bovine” universe –
Monsieur Homais, the dictionnaire des idées reçues, the apotheosis of bêtise
in the figures of Bouvard and Pécuchet – Kierkegaard proposes that
Romantic irony functions as a salubrious corrective to bourgeois medi-
ocrity and the secular religion of Rationalism. His litany of what “one”
does (a preliminary hint of what will become das Man in Heidegger) is,
on one level, what Søren Kierkegaard the human being was incapable
of doing. His final rupture with Regine Olsen occurred just days after
his dissertation defense, and conformity to the expected social norms of
marriage and family would never again become possible or imaginable
for him. On another level, it is clear that Romantic irony as a critical and
literary movement possessed, for Kierkegaard, the kind of imaginative
freedom that could produce a universe in which the generalized “one”
could be undermined and joyfully robbed of all pretense to dignity.
Yet Kierkegaard’s elective affinities with this particular, socially
grounded tendency of Romantic thought should not blind his reader
 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
to the reservations he shared with Hegel concerning the uncontrolled,
unbridled quality of the ironists’ conjectural flights of fancy. Digressing
briefly in the chapter “The World-Historical Validity of Irony, the Irony
of Socrates,” the Danish philosopher, having at first accused Hegel of
discussing irony “in a very unsympathetic manner,” goes on to state:
But just as the irony of the Schlegels had passed judgment in esthetics on an en-
compassing sentimentality, so Hegel was the one to correct what was misleading
in the irony. On the whole, it is one of Hegel’s great merits that he halted or at
least wanted to halt the prodigal sons of speculation on their way to perdition.
(CI )

The history of thought is, indeed, a history of progressive “correc-

tions.” The Schlegels correct aesthetic sentimentality; Hegel corrects
the excesses of irony; and Kierkegaard, while apparently agreeing with
Hegel on the importance of “halting” the wayward divagations of the
Schlegels and their group, also proceeds with considerable subtlety to
correct his philosophical master and adversary. He does so by assert-
ing that Hegel may well have been on target in his condemnation of a
particular kind of irony – that of the Schlegels – but that, in focusing
myopically on post-Fichtian irony, he was wrong concerning (nothing
less than) “the truth of irony, and by his identifying all irony with this
[its post-Fichtian articulation], he has done irony an injustice” (ibid.).
This fundamental distinction – between different forms of irony which
can occur at different historical moments, and irony in its truth – allows
Kierkegaard to give Hegel his due, but also to proceed on his own dis-
cursive path, as he moves, via post-Fichtian irony, toward his telos, the
short and cryptic final chapter entitled “Irony as a Controlled Element,
the Truth of Irony.”
The difference between Hegel and Kierkegaard concerning the
Romantic ironists can be expressed, in Christian terms, as the opposition
between paternal harshness on the one hand, and charity on the other.
Hegel’s wish to “halt the prodigal sons of speculation on their way to
perdition” expresses what might have been the first reaction of the father
to his younger (prodigal) son’s excesses in the New Testament parable
(Luke :  –), had he known of that son’s actions while they were
taking place. According to the biblical narrative, however, the sins –
disastrous “speculations” in the financial sense and immoral living –
become known to the father only after the fact. It is too late to “halt”
what has already taken place. Here, only condemnation or forgiveness
are possible as responses. Like the biblical father, Kierkegaard reacts
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
charitably: his dissertation as a whole is an effort to show the pedagog-
ical power and ethical limitations of irony in its Socratic form as well
as the unmastered speculative exuberance of post-Fichtian irony, all the
while remaining within the universe of irony, including and enveloping
it within his argument. The ironists have perhaps “spent too much” in
their intellectual speculations, but for this they will not be cast into outer
darkness by the writer of The Concept of Irony.
In the chapter “Irony after Fichte” Kierkegaard not only passes in
review representative works of Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, and Solger, but
also attempts to characterize what one might call the poetics of Romantic
irony – the sources and cultural traditions from which it draws, and its
mode of literary representation. The first point Kierkegaard makes early
in the chapter is that for irony “there really never was a past” because
it springs from metaphysical speculation rather than from the concrete
historicity of lived human existence (CI ). This means that irony “can
have a free hand” with history as such, and also, that ironical works will be
grounded, of necessity, in legend, myth, and fairy-tale, and will partake of
the symbolic or allegorical modes of narration (ibid.). The chronological
focus of irony is ever-changing. It moves from the “beautiful Greek sky”
to the “primeval forest of the Middle Ages,” with no specific interest in
either of these periods; and its involvement with philosophical schools
or religious thought is perforce a matter of whim, of caprice rather than
reasoned choice (ibid.). This is to say that irony is the realm of fiction, and,
as such, is defined not by its relation, however distant, to exterior reality,
but by its “hovering” quality: in the terms of German Romanticism,
it is das Schwebende. Kierkegaard expresses this idea in the image of
Hercules (as figure of irony) successfully overcoming the terrestrial force
of Antaeus (as representative of history). Irony is victorious over reality
in that it suspends the actual in a generalized hovering.
Like Hegel, Kierkegaard sees the ethical danger of such a suspension.
He accuses the Romantic ironists of living in a “totally hypothetical and
subjunctive way,” and of lacking all continuity in their inner lives: these
writers constantly “succumb” to the power of moods (CI ). Now it
may be that living poetically is the essential project of Romanticism, but
this kind of living, in its fictional or hypothetical mode, lacks all serious-
ness, all grounding (CI ). But Kierkegaard, although he sounds very
much like the author of the Aesthetics in these and other related passages,
adds a dimension that had been lacking in his predecessor’s analysis: na-
mely, the transcendental framework of Christianity. Whereas Hegel’s ar-
gument was structured according to the simple polar opposition whereby
 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
living poetically was the symmetrical, negatively valued opposite to the
positivity of living earnestly, Kierkegaard makes a distinction between
an inauthentic way of living poetically (that of the ironists) and an au-
thentic manner (that of the devout Christian). To live poetically in the
authentic sense is not to hover or be “placed in suspension,” therefore,
but to subject oneself to “an upbringing, an education” (CI ). Thus,
viewed in the light of Christianity, poetic action and what Kierkegaard
will call throughout his career “upbuilding” or “edification” (Opbyggelse)
can be the destiny of the same, ethically secure human being. Irony over-
steps itself in its desire to compose itself poetically, whereas the Christian
individual, in allowing himself “to be poetically composed . . . lives far
more poetically than many a brilliant intellectual” (ibid.). By this for-
mula Kierkegaard means that “the Christian comes to the aid of God,
becomes, so to speak, his co-worker in completing the good work God
himself has begun” (ibid.). The Christian does not hover over reality, but
accomplishes his or her moral duty within the human environment yet in
subservience to God, acting as a receptive vessel for the divine will. Here,
Søren Kierkegaard sounds very much like Judge William, the writer of
the edifying admonitions of Either/Or, Part II. One can see the stylisti-
cally dazzling project of Either/Or emerging from the serious-and-playful
academic prose of The Concept of Irony.
In a digressive interlude during his critique of Friedrich Schlegel’s
Lucinde, Kierkegaard returns to the idea of living poetically, and makes
clear what he means by the term poetry in its relation to the inwardness of
religious feeling. In order to distinguish between poetry as practiced by
the Romantic ironists and the religious experience as such, Kierkegaard
contrasts the notion of transfiguration to that of transubstantiation. The
following is an excerpt from the two-page passage on this point:
If we ask what poetry is, we may say in general that it is victory over the world;
it is through a negation of the imperfect actuality that poetry opens up a higher
actuality, expands and transfigures the imperfect into the perfect and thereby
assuages the deep pain that wants to make everything dark. To that extent,
poetry is a kind of reconciliation, but it is not the true reconciliation, for it does
not reconcile me with the actuality in which I am living; no transubstantiation
of the given actuality takes place . . . Only the religious . . . is able to bring
about the true reconciliation, because it infinitizes actuality for me. Therefore,
the poetic is a kind of victory over actuality, but the infinitizing is more of an
emigration from actuality than a continuance in it. To live poetically, then, is
to live infinitely . . . But an infinity such as that must cancel itself. Only when
I in my enjoying am not outside myself but am inside myself, only then is my
enjoyment infinite, because it is inwardly infinite. (CI )
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
The passage as a whole is based upon a stark contrast between images
of verticality ( poetry as victory over actuality and as the opening toward a
higher actuality) and of depth (religion as inward infinity). Poetry resem-
bles religion in that it, like religion, seems to offer a kind of reconciliation.
The subtle difference between an only apparent poetic reconcilation and
the true and profound reconcilation of religion is mirrored in the fun-
damental distinction Kierkegaard makes between transfiguration and
transubstantiation. Of these two profoundly mysterious events, the first
is the more obvious in its dramatic staging and external effects. The first
three books of the New Testament agree in depicting Jesus’ transfigu-
ration as a foreshadowing of his resurrection, and portray this moment
as an ascent: Christ goes up into a mountain to pray with Peter, James,
and John; his countenance is altered and his garments glow in dazzling
white; Jesus converses with Moses and Elijah; the disciples propose to
build tabernacles to these three chosen-of-God, but they refrain from
doing so when God reveals to the disciples that Jesus is not just one of
many anointed prophets, but rather His son; and Jesus asks the disciples
to promise not to reveal what they have seen and heard in this episode of
divine revelation (Matthew : –; Mark :–; Luke :–). As is
often the case in the New Testament, the new scene, that of the transfig-
uration as ascent into glory, mirrors an older episode, Moses’ climbing
of Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments (the presence of the
burning bush can be interpreted as a prefigurative element signaling the
brightness of Christ’s face and clothing in the transfiguration; and in
both cases, God’s voice is heard).
The transfiguration has become one of those moments in the life of
Christ most often chosen for pictorial representation, precisely because
of its chiaroscuro theatricality. Therein lies a problem, however, which
Kierkegaard diagnoses in a very Kantian vein: the exterior signs of the
transfiguration draw so much attention to themselves that the moral
content of the biblical passage risks going unnoticed. We as readers or
viewers see too much on the outside, and may be tempted not to attend
sufficiently to the message: i.e., what God is saying through the lighting of
Christ’s semblance. This is why Kierkegaard, following Kant (and antic-
ipating Ruskin), calls attention to the seductiveness of figuration as such,
its foregrounding of exterior ornament to the detriment of all ethical con-
tent. And this is why Kierkegaard, in preferring religion to poetry in its
Romantic guise, prefers transubstantiation to transfiguration, since the
former is purely internal and invisible: the bread and wine become the
body of Christ within the individual Christian. This “act” or “event” is,
 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
in the strict sense, not available to artistic representation, and is subject to
a purely mental and interiorized form of abstract figuration. We cannot
see the transubstantiation, but we must believe in it in the “blindness” of
our faith, in the unillumined darkness of our for intérieur. Transubstanta-
tion is the promise of content and of infinite inner enjoyment, whereas
in the moment of transfiguration only a deceptive infinity emerges to
charm our benumbed and disoriented senses.
The concluding chapter of the dissertation, “Irony as a Controlled
Element, the Truth of Irony,” is a complex, truncated section in which
Kierkegaard, within the space of a few pages, poses more questions than
he is able to answer. Not only does the final paragraph open out quite
brusquely toward the theme of humor, as if the candidate in theology
were in great haste to leave the troubled shores of irony, but it would
seem that, in order to control irony and convey to his reader the truth of
irony, Kierkegaard has had to redefine his concept, eliminating from it its
suspect irresponsibility and playful subjectivity. When he speaks of irony
in the final chapter, he invokes the serene “objectivity” of Shakespeare
and Goethe, praising them for having constructed imaginative worlds in
which
irony is not present at some particular point of the poem but is omnipresent in
it, so that the irony visible in the poem is in turn ironically controlled. Therefore
irony simultaneously makes the poem and the poet free. But in order for this to
happen, the poet himself must be master over the irony . . . To be controlled in
this way, to be halted in the wild infinity into which it rushes ravenously, by no
means indicates that irony should now lose its meaning or be totally discarded.
On the contrary, when the individual is properly situated – and this he is through
the curtailment of irony – only then does irony have its proper meaning, its true
validity. (CI , )
But how is it that irony as suspended disorientation, in its diverse
metamorphoses from the speculative fragments of the Athenaeum group
to the tales of Hoffmann and the carnivalesque dance suites of Robert
Schumann – how does this irony become oriented or “situated” without
losing its essence? Is it possible to affirm, with Kierkegaard, that irony
in the disorienting sense can be uplifted (aufgehoben), transmuted into
“controlled irony” with no uncanny residue being left behind or outside
of the writer’s all-enveloping poetic purview? What Kierkegaard has
done, at the conclusion of his treatise, is to transfigure irony so that he can
end his argument on the note of aesthetic redemption. There is a final
cleansing of the spirit made possible by irony in its second, situated and
situating, sense. Irony, in the end, is not a destructive but a corrective
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
mode of encountering the real; in it are united aesthetic freeplay and
moral seriousness in the perfect harmony of genius (only Shakespeare
and Goethe could be called upon here; no lesser figures would do).
When Kierkegaard asserts: “Even though one must warn against irony
as against a seducer, so must one also commend it as a guide” (CI ), it
is important to note that he is speaking of two different ironies here, the
seductive mode being characteristic of Romantic irony, whereas irony as
existential Leitfaden belongs to the ethical orientation and edification of
controlled irony.
In fact, Kierkegaard’s argument on irony is based on another poetic
figure, that of paradox. It is indeed paradoxical that irony should attain
its truth by no longer being itself, by leaving behind its multicolored
garb and assuming the sober new clothing of objectivity. To agree with
Kierkegaard’s conclusion in The Concept of Irony, one must accept and live
within his logic of paradox, which is not, in a strict sense, a dialectic,
but rather a jump, a logical “leap of faith,” which means a leap beyond
scholastic/academic argumentation. The conclusion of the dissertation
is quite disappointing in purely academic terms: it is too short and it
turns beyond and away from its subject. But this is because, already in
 , Kierkegaard was beginning his own turn toward the embracing
of paradox as the true logic of Christianity – a turn that will receive its
most elegant formulation in the “absolute paradox” of the Philosophical
Fragments. Irony as such will have been abandoned, but the process
of that abandonment leads beyond The Concept of Irony and through
Either/Or, where the discovery of religion as the chosen territory of the
paradoxical can only occur after the combat between the aesthetic and
the ethical is staged in its dramatic intensity.

IV EITHER / OR

The Preface and the Problem of Framing

The literary complexity of Either/Or has been universally acknowledged
by Kierkegaard’s readers, and any serious scholarly analysis of the work
necessarily begins with the following cautionary point: since Part I
(which contains the writings of an unidentified Romantic aesthete) is
simply juxtaposed to Part II (the repository of corrective and edifying
letters sent by the ethically serious Judge William to the enthusiastic but
immature author of Part I), it becomes very difficult to interpret the re-
lation between the twin tomes, especially if by interpretation one means
 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
choosing between and among conflicting semantic potentialities. With
Either/Or Kierkegaard begins what will become a lifelong experimenta-
tion with pseudonyms. The title page of the book’s first edition, published
by Bianco Luno Press in Copenhagen in , indicates that Either/Or: A
Fragment of Life was edited by a certain Victor Eremita: the author’s name
does not appear. To complicate matters further, Victor Eremita, whom
the reader is constantly tempted to identify with Søren Kierkegaard
(we do know, don’t we, that Either/Or is Kierkegaard’s “first important
work,” so we can attribute it to him – or can we?), is merely the edi-
tor of the papers he has assembled, and so might or might not wish to
claim responsibility for them. This, of course, by , was a well-worn
literary device which had experienced its most impressive elaboration in
the eighteenth-century epistolary novel. Kierkegaard, like Jean-Jacques
Rousseau in his preface to La Nouvelle Héloı̈se ( ), plays with the very
notion of the editor’s ethical responsibility toward the text he publishes,
and, like Rousseau, amuses himself by simultaneously identifying with
and distancing himself from the papers he is now offering for public view
and consumption. There is, however, a difference in the degree to which
the two writers face the problem of textual ethics and in the manner in
which they assume and remove their editorial masks. In his typically em-
phatic and moralistically self-serving tone, Rousseau writes, in the third
paragraph of his preface:

Any person possessed of honesty should openly acknowledge the works he pub-
lishes. Therefore I name myself on the title page of this book [as editor], not
in order to appropriate it for myself, but rather to accept responsibility for it. If
the book is evil, that evil can be ascribed to me; if it is morally good, I do not
wish thereby to honor myself. If the book is bad, I am the more obligated to
acknowledge it: I do not wish to be regarded as better than I am. ( Julie, ou la
Nouvelle Héloı̈se, ; my translation)

As is often the case in Rousseau, the writer is hardly self-effacing in

his proclamation of virtue: even though he purportedly did not write the
letters he publishes, he is magnanimous enough to accept responsibility
for any “evil” they might cause, including the moral danger they pose
to young virtuous girls, who should be strongly dissuaded from reading
this powerfully seductive work (La Nouvelle Héloı̈se, ). Although, unlike
Rousseau, Kierkegaard does not place his own name on the title page
of Either/Or, he makes clever use of the conditional mode of discourse
when, at the conclusion of his own preface written under the assumed
name of Victor Eremita, he not only asserts that it could be useful for
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
the reader to hypothesize that the two volumes were written by the same
person (and in this case, the temptation to read Kierkegaard, en palimpseste,
under his false name is very strong), but further, that the reader should
heed the admonitions of Judge William and follow the latter’s “well-
intentioned advice” (E/O I, ). Like Rousseau, who warns his public
against reading only the first, erotically charged letters of Julie and Saint-
Preux without pursuing the novel to its ethically secured conclusion, in
the same way Kierkegaard (as Victor Eremita) frames his double work by
suggesting, with no great ambiguity or subtlety, that Part II is a successful
answer to and overturning of the passionate excesses of Part I. The lack
of Kierkegaard’s name on the title page thus in no way indicates a lack
of moral guidance or (in Kierkegaardian language) “orientation” for any
reader who might be subject to interpretive waywardness.
What is interesting, however, and quite characteristic of Kierkegaard’s
considerable wit, is that one page before concluding on the note of Judge
William’s “well-intentioned advice,” he has Victor Eremita say:

Whether A [the young Romanticist] wrote the esthetic pieces after receiving
B’s letters [those of Judge William], whether his soul subsequently continued to
flounder around in its wild unruliness or whether it calmed down – I do not find
myself capable of offering the slightest enlightenment about this, inasmuch as
the papers contain nothing. Neither do they contain any hint as to how it went
with B, whether he was able to hold fast to his point of view or not. Thus, when
the book is read, A and B are forgotten; only the points of view confront each
other and expect no final decision in the particular personalities. (E/O I, )

According to Victor Eremita’s alternating comments, it would appear

that there are two ways to read Either/Or: an ethically grounded way,
which would privilege Judge William’s response to the Romantic aes-
thete, and a more properly “literary” way, which would leave the question
of semantic resolution open, without finite interpretive position-taking.
To choose between these two forms of reading is to decide how much
importance one should grant the notion of narrative framing per se. If
Victor Eremita’s preface is merely playful, just an hors d’oeuvre that can
be easily digested before moving on to the “main course” (the victory
of ethics over a certain irresponsible form of aesthetics), then narrative
framing is simply a device, a technique in the service of effective story-
telling. If, however, it should indeed prove impossible to decide between
A and B; if we confine ourselves to purely textual evidence; then the
multiple frames surrounding the work’s existential drama assume im-
portance in themselves – which means that the reader is in a world of
 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
dis-orientation, of mise-en-abyme, or, to use Eremita’s own terminology, a
dizzying maze in which “one author becomes enclosed within the other
like the boxes in a Chinese puzzle” (E/O I, ). This is not the world of
ethical security, but of uncanniness, of Unheimlichkeit.
If, at this juncture, I mention the notion of Unheimlichkeit (which I shall
develop at greater length, via Freud, in the next chapter), it is because
the early pages of Victor Eremita’s preface are characterized by that
particular kind of disquieting strangeness in which the frontiers between
inside and outside, the internal and the external, become subject to
bizarre and unsettling manipulations. In the very first sentence of the
preface, Eremita writes: “It may at times have occurred to you, dear
reader, to doubt somewhat the accuracy of that familiar philosophical
thesis that the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer” (E/O I, ). This
would appear to be nothing less than the “topic sentence” of Either/Or,
and since it is directed against Hegel and his philosophical system,
should we not be ethically obliged as readers to take it seriously, to see
it as the line of demarcation Kierkegaard is tracing in order to establish
his own thought contra Hegel? Doubtless, one should indeed take this
idea seriously (im Ernst), but one cannot avoid noting that the editor of
Either/Or also treats it with considerable playfulness, in that the grand
theme of the disjunction between the inner and the outer is mirrored
by the material fact that the papers of A and B are found in a piece of
furniture – a secretary which Victor Eremita purchases for its exterior
beauty, but in which he finds the papers that he will publish under the
title Either/Or: A Fragment of Life.
The thesis that the internal is not the external receives its most im-
mediate confirmation not in a structured philosophical argument pro-
pounded by an author (or editor speaking for a reflective subject in
control of the text), but rather in the uncanny material coincidence that
the inner contents of the secretary bear no resemblance to, cannot be
dialectically unified with, the stately external appearance of the object in
which the papers are enclosed, but from which they spill out in chaotic
profusion. The first pages of the preface read very much like Baudelaire’s
“Le Mauvais Vitrier” or Mallarmé’s “Le Démon de l’analogie,” ironi-
cally conceived prose poems in which weighty aesthetic issues are treated
in terms of the interference between the spiritual level of the poem’s alle-
gorized content and a diabolically constituted materiality that resists be-
ing subsumed under any “higher level” of figural significance. In the case
of Either/Or, the question becomes: can the ethical frame the aesthetic, or
will the aesthetic in its unruly materiality and resistance to all enclosure
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
constantly “spill out” and undermine the stability of Sittlichkeit? Is there a
fundamental incompatibility between the ethical as such and the essence
of narrative as framing machine? These questions cannot be avoided in
any attempted interpretation of Either/Or; they also subtend the entirety
of the book you, Dear Reader, are now perusing, my book, the book of
David Ellison, which purports to enclose and frame Kierkegaard among
other modern writers, and for which I take as much responsibility as the
conventions of literary criticism allow.

Part I: the value-free economics of seduction

Although the first volume of Either/Or is a veritable treasure-house of
Romantic motifs, a hodge-podge of forms and genres ranging from frag-
mentary poetic reflections to pseudo-academic essays, satiric orations,
literary criticism and an introspective and cynical diary, the theme that
predominates is that of erotic seduction, with its protagonist being Don
Juan in his ancient and modern incarnations. The two sections of the first
volume that are clearly not just experimentations with Romantic style
and parodic echo-effects of Schlegelian diction are the long essay “The
Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic” (–) and “The
Seducer’s Diary” (–), where the former is a paean to Mozart’s
Don Giovanni and the latter a contemporary staging of a Don Juanesque
seduction. These two textual blocks provide symmetry and solidity to the
volume’s construction, and they echo each other in obvious ways, but
they also differ from each other in one important respect: the essay on
Don Giovanni focuses on what A calls “immediacy,” whereas the “Diary”
is a grand series of variations on the theme of “reflection.”
A’s thesis is that Mozart’s greatness as a composer rests on his ability
to make opera purely musical, i.e., not dependent upon the spoken (or
sung) word for its significance. The character Don Giovanni is a bril-
liant creation precisely because he exists uniquely in the realm of the
musical, which A equates with the aesthetic in its essential, unalloyed
form. Don Giovanni’s seductive gestures and actions, his modus vivendi,
are completely enclosed within the aesthetic realm, and therefore are not
unethical, but pre-ethical. A describes the Venusberg as the territory
par excellence of Don Juan, the place in which he exercises his dominion:

In the Middle Ages, much was told about a mountain that is not found on any
map; it is called Mount Venus. There sensuousness has its home; there it has
its wild pleasures, for it is a kingdom, a state. In this kingdom, language has
 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
no home, nor the collectedness of thought, nor the laborious achievements of
reflection; there is heard only the elemental voice of passion, the play of de-
sires, the wild noise of intoxication. There everything is only one giddy round
of pleasure. The firstborn of this kingdom is Don Juan. But it is not said thereby
that it is the kingdom of sin, for it must be contained in the moment when it
appears in esthetic indifference. Only when reflection enters in does the king-
dom manifest itself as the kingdom of sin, but then Don Juan has been slain.
(E/O I, )

According to this argument, it is not quite correct to call Don Juan a

seducer, since seduction implies rhetorical deviousness – i.e., the mediate,
reflective, and conscious power of words. This is why A, a few pages after
the passage quoted above, states that the mythic Don Juan “does not fall
within ethical categories.” Since he lacks the consciousness “of craftiness
and machinations and subtle wiles . . . he does not seduce. He desires,
and this desire acts seductively” (E/O I, –). In other words, there is no
temporal distance between Don Juan’s desires and their accomplishment,
which means that his amorous career is pure repetition – as expressed,
notably, in the famous list which Leporello unfurls in the opera. And
a list is the negation of narrative as temporality. Aesthetic immediacy in
its musical purity is prior to narrative, before or beyond its chronological
lawfulness, its espacement différentiel. To call Don Juan a seducer is thus
to use language loosely or improperly, whereas in the “Diary” A will
trace the evolution of a seductive story in which the elapsing of time as
such is the medium in which seduction, properly (verbally, reflectively,
diabolically) speaking, takes place.
“The Seducer’s Diary,” like the first volume of Either/Or as a whole,
is framed by a prefatory passage in which the editor of the pages we
are about to read expresses his moral reservations about the “calculated
nonchalance” and “contriving heart” of one Johannes, the man who
will organize the seduction of a certain Cordelia (E/O I, ). We learn
from this initial editorial commentary that Johannes’s “life has been an
attempt to accomplish the task of living poetically,” and that his diary,
in reflecting this ideal, “is not historically accurate or strictly narrative;
it is not indicative but subjunctive” (E/O I, ). This is why, in the end,
his “punishment has a purely esthetic character, for even the expression
‘the conscience awakens’ is too ethical to use about him” (E/O I , ).
Thus Johannes, like Don Juan, is said to exist in a purely aesthetic realm,
prior to ethics as such, and therein lie his dangerous qualities. He will be
incapable of responding to any appeal emanating from the ethical realm,
and his “subjunctive” or hypothetical plan and execution of the seduction
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
are conducted in such a devious way as to leave no trace for any moral
detective who might wish to apprehend him. Unlike Don Juan, however,
who lived in aesthetic “immediacy” or transparency, Johannes calculates
every strategic move of his with quasi-military foresight and depends
upon the rhetorical power of his words and letters to stalk his prey with
greatest efficacy. In Kierkegaardian terms, therefore, he occupies the
territory of reflective and self-reflective discourse, which remains distant
from reality.
Johannes’s plan is to coerce Cordelia into an engagement with him,
then conquer her, then abandon her immediately thereafter. He succeeds
in this enterprise, and the process itself deserves far more scrutiny than
the limited scope of my investigation allows. What needs to be noted,
at least minimally, is that the goal is not marriage per se, but rather en-
gagement, since marriage, according to Johannes himself, has “ethical
reality,” whereas engagement, in his view, can be made to be “only a
simulated move” (E/O I, ). Following is what amounts to Johannes’s
philosophy of life (and of seduction as the affirmation of life in its aes-
thetically delimited sense):

The banefulness of an engagement is always the ethical in it. The ethical is

just as boring in scholarship as in life. What a difference! Under the esthetic
sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient; when ethics arrives on the scene,
everything becomes harsh, angular, infinitely langweiligt [boring]. But in the
strictest sense an engagement does not have ethical reality [Realitet] such as a
marriage has; it has validity only ex consensu gentium [ by universal consensus].
This ambiguity can be very advantageous for me. (ibid.)

The challenge Johannes faces can be best conceptualized or visualized

as the problematic encounter of two planes of existence that one nor-
mally finds in different frames of reference: the figural/fictitious (that
of Johannes as seducer) and the concrete/real (that of Cordelia, her
aunt and her entourage). The fictional and the real can interface only if
Johannes can frame the real within the fictional, only if he can weave his
web of seductive discourse around the concrete social situations in which
the “rake’s progress” must be undertaken. Whereas Paul de Man wrote
of the manifold ways in which critics have attempted to “defuse” the force
of irony, one could say that Johannes is the master of defusing the force
of reality through irony and his use of the hypothetical modality of living
poetically. Self-reflectiveness is pure inwardness as conditionality. The
internal envelops the external without engaging with its substance. The
inside contains the outside through the self-consciousness of a fictional
 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
narration, a narration over which the protagonist has total control, as he
states in the transitional moment after the successful engagement and
before he progresses to the seduction proper:
The aunt gives her consent; of that I have never entertained the remotest doubt.
Cordelia follows her advice. As for my engagement, I shall not boast that it
is poetic, for in every way it is utterly philistine and bourgeois. The girl does
not know whether she should say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; the aunt says ‘Yes,’ the girl also
says ‘Yes,’ I take the girl, she takes me – and now the story begins. (E/O I, )
The story of seduction passes through a number of theatrically or-
ganized scenes, only to culminate in the seducer’s boredom “after the
fact.” Economically speaking, the seduction in all of its stages is based
upon wasting, defrauding, cheating, and ultimate loss. One must take
the expression “nothing is gained” in its strongest sense when applying it
to the outcome of Johannes’s considerable efforts. Yet early in the story,
the protagonist relishes the apparent wasting of his time, realizing that
time is the element of seduction, that nothing must happen before the
important something comes to pass:
Everywhere our paths cross. Today I met her three times. I know about her
every little outing, when and where I shall come across her, but I do not use this
knowledge to contrive an encounter with her – on the contrary, I am prodigal
on a frightful scale. A meeting that often has cost me several hours of waiting
is wasted as if it were a bagatelle. I do not approach her, I merely skirt the
periphery of her existence. (E/O I,  )
Only a Philistine would confuse the generalized squandering charac-
teristic of the text’s early scenes with the frustration of a “true” waste of
time. What is being squandered here is counterfeit – the fictitious, in-
vented sentiments of Johannes, which are conjured up uniquely in view
of their rigorous teleological purpose. Once the goal has been achieved,
since there has been no real investment, no concrete capital expended,
it is not surprising that there should be “nothing left” – hardly even a
conclusion to a narrative that simply expires two paragraphs after the
triumph of Eros. Johannes writes:
But now it is finished, and I never want to see her again. When a girl has given
away everything, she is weak, she has lost everything, for in a man innocence
is a negative element, but in woman it is the substance of her being. Now all
resistance is impossible, and to love is beautiful only as long as resistance is
present; as soon as it ceases, to love is weakness and habit. (E/O I, )
The cynicism of this inconclusive conclusion serves as a perfect theatri-
cal foil for the earnestness and solid virtuous demeanor of Judge William,
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
which are just around the narrative corner. At the same time, Johannes’s
insistence on Cordelia’s absolute loss of innocence/value, coupled with
the playful, guiltless tone in which the seducer describes his machinations,
center the reader’s attention on the economic metaphorics that subtend
the text as a whole. The entirety of the “Diary” is constructed on the
relation between debt and guilt, which languages have been known to
conflate in one term (see the German Schuld and Danish Skyld for “debt”
in the bank and in the Lord’s Prayer; see the French devoir and the
Spanish deber for financial and moral obligation). Since Johannes refuses
to conduct his life on the terrain of the ethical, he cannot be guilty, he can-
not “owe” anyone anything; and therein lies the nullity of his existence.
In his case, Schuld cannot attach itself to anything substantial or real,
and is therefore, of necessity, evanescent, without content. “Woman’s”
absolute guilt is the absolute guilt of any person, male or female, who
falls under the category of the ethical. As we turn now to Part II of
Either/Or, it is important to keep in mind the degree to which the ques-
tion of ethics as such (one’s obedience or disobedience to its call) falls
under an economically expressed metaphorical discourse in which the
question of value, in order to “ring true,” must be posed seriously, that is,
authentically.

Part II: rendering accounts

The passage from Part I to Part II of Either/Or confronts the reader
with a radical discontinuity: one moves from the universe of polyphonic
ironic verbosity to the straightforward presentation of moral values by
the solidly grounded and not always imaginative Judge William. Al-
though critical consensus has it that the second volume is a corrective
to the excesses of the first, and that Kierkegaard’s authorial intention is
to give the final, authoritative word to Judge William and to his friend,
the Jutland pastor of the “Ultimatum” (E/O II, –), Judge William
cannot be viewed as an unproblematically transparent spokesman for
the text’s author. There are numerous passages in Part II in which the
judge sounds a little bit too much like Kierkegaard’s philosophical op-
ponent, Hegel – as, for example, when the upstanding married man
attempts to undermine A’s glorification of erotic love as passionate “first
love”:

[Marriage] is in the instant, sound and powerful; it points beyond itself, but in a
deeper sense than the first love, for the abstract character of first love is precisely
 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
its defect, but in the intention that marriage has, the law of motion is implicit,
the possibility of an inner history. (E/O II,  )
Or later, in the same vein:
First love remains an unreal an-sich [in itself ] that never acquires inner substance
because it moves only in an external medium. In the ethical and religious
intention, marital love has the possibility of an inner history and is as different
from first love as the historical is from the unhistorical. (E/O II, )
In reading Part II, one must constantly keep in mind that Judge William
is a character in a multi-framed fiction – honest, stodgy in his mimetic
Hegelianism, a trifle boring in his unrelenting Ernst – who is certainly
no match, stylistically speaking, for A’s aesthetic pyrotechnics. But herein
lies Kierkegaard’s own intellectual honesty, which consists in recognizing
that from an aesthetic standpoint the ethical is boring. Style itself is a turn, a
tropological field of deviousness against which the ethical must construct
a fortress of bland but powerful uniformity. As Johannes stated it in a late
“Diary” entry, there is a simple and amusingly paradoxical mathematics
of the aesthetic as it opposes itself to the ethical:
They say that it takes a bit more than honesty to make one’s way through the
world. I would say that it takes a bit more than honesty to love such a girl
[Cordelia]. That more I do have – it is deceitfulness. (E/O I, )
Deceitfulness (duplicity) is “more than” honesty in the sense that  is
greater than  . The aesthetic is double, whereas the ethical is single in
its focus; but one must be single (a bachelor) to indulge in aesthetic duplic-
ity, whereas one must be a couple to remain within the single-minded
purposefulness of Sittlichkeit. The ethical-serious is of necessity domestic,
whereas the aesthetic emerges in the waywardness of continual displace-
ment, in the wanderings of the Romantic traveler. Hence Judge William’s
repeated references to the fundamental contrast between the straight
path or direct route (the ethical) and the detour (or, as the French call
it, in a morally significant metaphor, the déviation – an aesthetically con-
structed signpost). See, for example, the biblical admonition, drawn from
Sirach : –, which Judge William appropriates for his scolding of A:
“He who acquires a wife begins to acquire his best possessions, for he has
acquired a helper and a support to rest upon. Where there is no fence, the
property will be plundered; and where there is no wife, a man will sigh and be
as one who wanders about. For who will trust an armed robber who skips from
city to city? So who will trust a man who has no home, and lodges wherever
night finds him?” (E/O II, )
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
This is a curious, metaphorically mixed passage of ethical condem-
nation, in which the wife, who is viewed essentially as property, is also
compared to the fence around property, and in which the bachelor, who
“wanders about” aimlessly, is also conflated with the plunderer of the
estate, a person presumably capable of pursuing and accomplishing a
nefarious goal. What counts here is not the rigor of a logical argument,
but rather the associative chain of the rhetoric: the ethical man will of ne-
cessity take a wife, who will ground his existence in domesticity and ward
off all marauders; the aesthete, the wanderer, is, in his deepest being, an
untrustworthy robber because he wanders. The guilt associated with being
a bachelor – which Kierkegaard and also Kafka had to write into their
creative fictions (are Regine Olsen and Felice Bauer ever absent from
their works?) – is the negative face of the coin (as Camus would say: its
envers) whose positive side, its endroit, is the stability of domestic enclosure.
To have an endroit, a place to live, is the conditio sine qua non of the ethical
life. Hence, as we shall see in chapter seven of this book, the figure of
Ménalque in André Gide’s L’Immoraliste () is already suspicious for
his peregrinations and his lack of material possessions before he actively
assumes the role of Michel’s anti-moral mentor, finally undermining the
latter’s bourgeois moral certainties.
The binary oppositions that organize the dramatic framework of
Either/Or can be summarized in the following way: aesthetic freeplay
portrayed as the irresponsibility of Romantic irony versus ethical re-
sponsibility as exemplified by the life and opinions of Judge William;
the waywardness of wandering versus the straight path that leads to-
ward marriage and the home; the antisocial behavior of the bache-
lor versus the social inclusion of the married couple. Yet Kierkegaard
shows the modernity of his thought in refusing to characterize the aes-
thetic as merely or only the negative face of the coin, the “evil” which
is overturned when the coin is turned over onto its “good” side. In
a central passage of the text, when Judge William defines what he
means by the expression “Either/Or,” he explains that the aesthetic
is not equivalent to evil, but rather to what he calls “indifference” or
“neutrality”:
Rather than designating the choice between good and evil, my Either/Or des-
ignates the choice by which one chooses good and evil or rules them out. Here
the question is under what qualifications one will view all existence and per-
sonally live. That the person who chooses good and evil chooses the good is
indeed true, but only later does this become manifest, for the esthetic is not
evil but the indifferent. And that is why I said that the ethical constitutes the
 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
choice. Therefore, it is not so much a matter of choosing between willing good
or willing evil as of choosing to will, but that in turn posits good and evil. (E/O
II, )

The aesthetic, in its Kierkegaardian formulation, is no longer the

domain of beautiful forms as it had been in the theories of the Enlight-
enment period, but rather an “indifferent” territory whose boundaries
are impossible to survey. The difficulty Judge William faces in his letters
to A is that, in his Herculean task of attempted moral conversion, his
opponent is not an earth-bound Antaeus, but a spirit of the air that may
or may not be reachable by ethical argument. It is not by chance that
we never learn whether the judge’s letters have any effect whatever on
their addressee. There is, in Kierkegaard’s cryptic and not extensively
developed notion of “indifference” an uncanny similarity to Maurice
Blanchot’s theory of le neutre, which is also based upon the field of the
aesthetic (or, more precisely, of narrativity as the aesthetic domain par
excellence) as that which possesses no reference-points, no points de repère –
without which, of course, surveying becomes impossible. In Blanchot’s
words:
the neutral word [la parole neutre] neither reveals nor hides anything. That does
not mean that it signifies nothing (by pretending to abdicate meaningfulness in
the form of nonsense); it means that it does not signify according to the manner
in which the visible-invisible signifies, but that it opens within language an other
power [un pouvoir autre], foreign to the power of enlightenment (or obfuscation), of
comprehension or of misunderstanding. It does not signify according to the optic
mode. (“La voix narrative, le ‘il,’ le neutre,” ; my translation)

Just as for Kierkegaard the aesthetic in its indifference or neutrality

falls outside of Enlightenment theory, so la parole neutre for Blanchot opens
up an uncanny area outside the boundaries of the theoretical as optical
mode of thought. And Blanchot takes his “insight” to the limit in his prose
fictions, where what is at stake in his world beyond or before lighting as
such lies outside of classical ethical categories, in an area to which no
Judge William can have access. In Either/Or, of course, although I am
suggesting that Kierkegaard touches upon a Blanchot-like modernity, at
the same time the ethical dimension of the text is all-pervasive, and the
textual stakes are, finally, ethical. In other words: although Judge William
may have no hold on the aesthetic in its essential neutrality, this will not
stop him (or Kierkegaard) from positing the original act of choosing as the
act that defines the humanity of man. Unlike the universe of Blanchot’s
prose fantasies, the world of Kierkegaard is suffused with the existential
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
pathos that comes from making that choice which his narrator calls “the
baptism of the will” (E/O II, ).
The introduction of Christian terminology and Christian theological
premises into Kierkegaardian ethics includes not only the “first act” of
baptism as analogon to the inaugural decision-making of the will, but also
the later phase of repentance, itself part of the transformative process that
leads to final redemption. The ethical Christian subject is in continual
self-reformation and metamorphosis; he or she, unlike the Romantic
ironist, is constituted by activity.
at the very moment he chooses himself he is in motion. However concrete his self
is, he nevertheless has chosen himself according to his possibility; in repentance
he has ransomed himself in order to remain in his freedom, but he can remain
in his freedom only by continually realizing [realisere] it. He who has chosen
himself on this basis is eo ipso one who acts. (E/O II, )
Or, in a variation on the same theme:
The task the ethical individual sets for himself is to transform himself into
the universal individual. Only the ethical individual gives himself an account
of himself in earnest and is therefore honest with himself; only he has the
paradigmatic decorum and propriety that are more beautiful than anything
else. (E/O II,  )
The ethical individual realizes his or her possibility through con-
crete moral action, and this action is, properly speaking, transforma-
tive. Kierkegaard expresses transformation in economic terms: one “ran-
soms” oneself, one buys oneself back by transmuting the negativity of
guilt/debt (Skyld ) into the positivity of self-realization in freedom. And
this self-realization is itself not only good, but also beautiful. The hon-
est individual possesses “decorum and propriety” and is therefore able
to live poetically in a more authentic sense than the Romantic ironist.
The central polemical point Judge William attempts to make in Part II
of Either/Or is that the ethical stance is superior to the aesthetic position
not only because the latter conceals nothing less than moral bankruptcy,
but because the living of the ethical life contains the promise of a higher
beauty than is available to the aesthete. At bottom, there are two kinds
of accounting: the aesthetic, which bases itself upon a narrative account,
or story, and which possesses only the surface attractiveness or charm
(in Kantian terms, Reiz) of all seductive story-telling; and the ethical,
a clear-sighted balancing of ledgers which allows a higher beauty to
shine through its apparently straightforward mode of presentation. This
higher beauty emerges most forcefully not in the ethical per se, but in the
 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
ethical as it is uplifted and metamorphosed into the religious, that sphere
in which the rendering of accounts takes on the poetic beauty of liber-
ated tropological play. The conclusion of Either/Or, which can also be
viewed as a transition toward Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Frag-
ments, is a sermon written by a pastor friend of Judge William, and which
the judge includes as an “Ultimatum” to his wayward friend. The sub-
ject of the sermon possesses a rigorous Protestant tone: its thesis is that
“In Relation to God We Are Always in the Wrong.” But this thought,
which appears so forbidding in its abstract formulation, in actuality con-
tains the solace of the Christian economics of salvation. In the simplest
terms:
wishing to be in the wrong is an expression of an infinite relationship, and
wanting to be in the right, or finding it painful to be in the wrong, is an expression
of a finite relationship! Hence it is upbuilding always to be in the wrong – because
only the infinite builds up; the finite does not! (E/O II, )
Kierkegaard’s rhetoric of paradox retroactively transforms the entirety
of Either/Or, and does so in its manipulation of the place of Skyld within
the work viewed now as a signifying totality. Whereas the upstanding
ethical man, unlike the spendthrift and speculative aesthete, is the man
of the ledger, the careful but uninspired accountant who is ethical in that
he pays his debts on time, the individual who transcends the ethical in the
religious understands that infinite speculation, infinite debt/guilt, is the
terrain on which the human as such can encounter the divine. We are,
from the beginning, in debt/in guilt, because Jesus Christ has already
died for the sins we shall surely commit. It is the terrible paradox of Christ
on the cross that stands behind the textual string of paradoxes animating
the sermon that concludes Either/Or. The irony of the paradox, so to
speak, is that stage three (the religious) resembles stage one (the aesthetic)
more than stage two (the ethical), at least in its figurative dimension. In
stages one and three there is infinite spending and also a freedom of
metaphorical discourse one does not find in stage two. In the religious
stage, the polymorphic language of aesthetics is reintroduced; the same
flowers of rhetoric are to be found, but in the context of man’s redemption
rather than decadent corruption. Thus, whereas Romantic “longing”
(the Sehnsucht or Længsel of the poets) is condemned by Judge William in
favor of domestic belonging, the mode of longing returns in the sermon,
but in the figural garb of an infinite soaring:
Every time the cares of doubt want to make him [the human being in his
sinfulness] sad, he lifts himself above the finite into the infinite, because this
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
thought, that he is always in the wrong, is the wings upon which he soars over
the finite. This is the longing with which he seeks God; this is the love in which
he finds God. (E/O II, –)

At the conclusion of Either/Or the opposed categories of the aesthetic

and the ethical recede, in favor of a religious discourse based upon the
tropology of paradox. The truth of Sittlichkeit is reached not within its
own boundaries, not within its own univocal language of earnestness, but
in a poetically constituted transcendental beyond, which is discovered
as the individual makes the most significant of possible turns. In the
words of the Jutland pastor to his flock: “Then your soul turned away
from the finite to the infinite; there it found its object; there your love
became happy” (E/O II, – ; my emphasis). The religious realm is
that of the Baudelairian “transports de l’esprit et des sens” in which the
final goal of the movement upward is nothing less than the communion
between the lowest (man as sinner) and the highest ( Jesus as redeemer and
savior, God as forgiver of all sins). Despite his distaste for the Hegelian
system, Kierkegaard presents his readers with an apparent dialectic:
thesis: the duplicity of Romantic irony and the irresponsible freeplay of
the aesthetic; antithesis: the singleminded Ernst of the ethical; synthesis:
the Aufhebung of the preceding steps in the final truth of religion, which
combines a higher form of tropological discourse with a solid grounding
for morality.
What distinguishes Kierkegaard’s logic from that of Hegel, however, is
that this apparent dialectic conceals an unbridgeable disjunction within
it, based upon a linguistic heterology. Each stage has its own language:
the aesthetic is ironical; the ethical is purely discursive or constative
(the unambiguous account-ledger); and the religious is paradoxical (the
lowest meets the highest in the twists and turns of metaphoricity). The
inexorable movement of sublation “works” in Either/Or (which means:
Kierkegaard can be assimilated to Hegel in this work) only if we pass over
the linguistic dimension in which each stage realizes itself, only if we treat
Kierkegaard’s rhetorical manipulations as accessory or ancillary to the
logic of Aufhebung. If we respect the linguistic virtuosity and multidimen-
sionality of the text, however, we are faced with three separate modes
of discourse that remain, in their essence, disjunctively related among
themselves. Although the religious of stage three “resembles” or mirrors
the aesthetic of stage one in an analogical fashion (the longing for God
reminds us of Romantic longing, but transported upward), one cannot
simply substitute the paradoxical for the ironical in the same way that
 Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically 
one substitutes spiritual for material elements within the same figure of
speech.
The paradoxical is not a “higher level” of the ironical, but a mode
unto itself; and it was the discovery of this particular mode, and its the-
orization in Philosophical Fragments just one year after the publication of
Either/Or, that allowed Kierkegaard to become himself as writer. The
religious contains both the aesthetic and the ethical at the level of con-
tent, but it supersedes both these categories in the language of paradox,
which alone clears an access to the lofty ideal of Christian upbuilding,
or edification, while preserving that “deep inner motion” within which
resides the guarded yet accessible truth:
Do not interrupt the flight of your soul; do not distress what is best in you; do not
enfeeble your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts. Ask yourself and keep on
asking until you find the answer, for one may have known something many times,
attempted it – and yet, only the deep inner motion, only the heart’s indescribable
emotion, only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs
to you, that no power can take it from you – for only the truth that builds up is
truth for you. (E/O II, )
 CHAPTER 

Freud’s “Das Unheimliche”: the intricacies

of textual uncanniness

I TEXT AND CONTEXTS

Until fairly recently, Freud’s essay “Das Unheimliche” [“The Uncanny”]

() did not receive as much attention as those works which had an
undisputed importance for the evolution of psychoanalysis as a disci-
pline, those writings that seemed to constitute major breakthroughs in
theoretical insight, such as The Interpretation of Dreams, Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, and Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, to name just three obvious
examples. “Das Unheimliche” is not only a short and, as we shall see, in
many ways truncated text; it also seems to be somewhat marginal in the
Freudian corpus, in that it deals with an issue whose aesthetic foundation
would appear to be at least as important as its psychoanalytic resonance.
It has the misfortune, as well, of preceding the genuinely revolutionary
Beyond the Pleasure Principle () by such a short time-span that Freud’s
interpreters have tended to “leap over” the essay on the uncanny so as
to meet the later text, with its intriguing theorization of the “repetition
compulsion” and the “death drive,” head-on. This situation changed as
of the s and early s, when both French and Anglo-American
scholars began to see in “Das Unheimliche” far more than its surface
argument exhibited. To use Sarah Kofman’s terminology, critics of var-
ious methodological persuasions began to read the essay symptomally.
Rather than merely comment on Freud’s arguments for the importance
of the uncanny as a concept within psychoanalytic theory, the newer
interpreters concentrated on the significant hesitations, contradictions,
and impasses that seemed to vitiate Freud’s efforts to control his own
text. “Das Unheimliche” came to be read as a self-deconstructing work
in which uncanniness as such was equated with the essence of the liter-
ary; and the literary was considered to be that destabilizing force which
doomed to failure all “reductionist” psychoanalytical attempts to under-
stand the uncanny.


 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
Since the mid-seventies, following the lead of Hélène Cixous and Sarah
Kofman, critics have tended to see in “Das Unheimliche” not so much
a discursive text about a subject of psychological interest as a “fiction”
(Cixous) or “theoretical novel” (Kofman) that Freud constructs in the vain
attempt to circumscribe his theme. Theoretical discourse as rationally
conceived, analytically organized “speculative” thought in the classical
sense gives way to a text that borrows its arms from the very domain –
that of the aesthetic – that it seeks to conquer. The Freudian text ends by
imitating the object of its scrutiny: the text “about” the uncanny is itself
uncanny. At stake, therefore, is the fundamental question of borders that
has been the central preoccupation of my book thus far. The uncanny
is that force, that energeia, which, in pushing beyond clearly established
boundaries of all kinds, ends up possessing the naively unsuspecting
would-be possessor (interpreter) just as the voice of the god penetrates
the body of the oracle. Allegorically speaking, the uncanny stands for all
texts exhibiting literariness, and Freud is one in a long line of readers,
all of whom are condemned to repeat the same mistake: that of trying
to master or control uncontrollable semantic proliferation, the polysémie
characteristic of literature.
From being read as merely one of several essays on aesthetic issues by
Freud, it is safe to say that “Das Unheimliche,” as we enter the twenty-
first century, has now achieved what might be called exemplary status.
“The Uncanny” is literature, literature as such, the literary in its essence.
Or, according to both Neil Hertz (The End of the Line) and Harold Bloom
(Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism), the uncanny is an avatar of the
sublime. The uncanny is the sublime for our age. Just as Romanticism
is impossible to understand without the sublime as one of its cardinal
points, in the same way Modernism (and beyond?) cannot be studied
independently of its figuration in the uncanny. To read Freud’s essay
“Das Unheimliche,” therefore, is not just any exercise: the stakes are
high, and the penalties for misreading, as we shall see, are not minimal
or inconsequential, even though misreading, in Bloom’s sense, may be
what the uncanny is necessarily and unavoidably “about.”

II FREUD’S ESSAY ‘‘ D A S U N H E I M L I C H E ’’

The overt purpose of Freud’s essay is to examine the strange territory

of the uncanny in order to discover its meaning and deepest implica-
tions for psychoanalytic theory. The essay itself is a crossroads at which
the uncanny, as aesthetic phenomenon, encounters the language of
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
psychoanalysis. In this scheme, the uncanny is the foreign or other, while
the (ever-developing) concepts of psychoanalysis are the familiar turf to
which Freud repeatedly returns, Antaeus-like, to regain strength and
comfort in his struggle with the elusive object of his scrutiny. At the same
time, the very notion of the uncanny is based upon a concatenation of
the foreign and the familiar, so that Freud’s agon as writer mirrors or
doubles the doubleness of the uncanny.
In concentrating my attention on selected passages of “Das Unheim-
liche,” I am essentially interested in Freud’s use of language and in the
recurrence of certain key terms or phrases which emerge “symptomally”
from his text. These expressions, in their turn, engage in a far-reaching
intertextual web which I shall examine later in this chapter. Since the
overall structure of “Das Unheimliche” has been analyzed painstak-
ingly in the critical literature (the most detailed treatment being that of
Cixous), I shall indicate only in passing some of its points of articulation
as I proceed to my interpretation.
The essay is divided into three parts, each of which possesses, at the
highest level of generality, a coherent focus. In the first part, Freud exa-
mines the linguistic field of “das Unheimliche,” giving us a preliminary
definition – “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads
back to what is known of old and long familiar” (TU ) – followed
by a remark on the ambiguity of the word heimlich: “In general we are
reminded that the word ‘heimlich’ is not unambiguous, but belongs to two
sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different:
on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the
other, what is concealed and kept out of sight” (SE –). And in
the concluding paragraph of the first section, we have this synthetic
statement: “Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in
the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite,
unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich
[Unheimlich ist irgendwie eine Art von heimlich]” (TU ; DU ).
The following sections of the essay build upon the linguistic data fur-
nished initially and, Freud hopes, illuminate with the “lenses” of psy-
choanalytic insight the curious complexity of Unheimlichkeit. The sec-
ond part is a complex concatenation of examples of the uncanny taken
from literature and from life experience (we shall return to the most
important of these examples in due course). And in the third part, Freud,
in attempting to respond to the objections his reader might have to his
methodology, makes a final effort at circumscribing the domain of the
uncanny by proposing a definition of it in psychoanalytical terms and by
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
distinguishing its literary manifestations from its appearances in everyday
reality.
Freud’s confidence in his interpretive enterprise is not constant
throughout the essay, however. The most consequential problem he faces
is a logical one – how to subsume the “examples” (the words Fall and
Beispiel recur with obsessive regularity) he chooses under the general laws
of the psychoanalytic theory he has been developing until the year .
When he says that “Unheimlich ist irgendwie eine Art von heimlich,”
not only is his statement completely lacking in assertive tone, but the
expression “eine Art von heimlich” – literarally, a “kind of heimlich” – is
not as precise or as “scientific” a phrase as the English translation (“a sub-
species of heimlich”) would have us believe. What Freud would like to do is
to make certain that all the examples of the uncanny he will cite in parts
two and three can be encompassed, included within his psychoanalytic
theory. Put the other way, the uncanny as such would be one of many
phenomena that would illustrate the truth of his theory by not exceeding
their status as “sub-species.” But what if there are so many “kinds” of
uncanny phenomena and situations that the very notion of uncanniness
becomes resistant to subsumption? If this were the case, of what use is
the psychoanalytic arsenal Freud brings to bear on the uncanny, which
includes, most notably, the Oedipus complex, the repetition compulsion,
and the omnipotence of thoughts? In strategic (military) terms, Freud at-
tacks the uncanny with weapons borrowed from psychoanalysis, but is
this very borrowing an innocent act of Wissenschaft, or does it, rather, pro-
ceed from the force of a desire – the impulse to dominate and reduce the
enemy (here, the uncanny) to servitude, to the tight reins of the concept?
If we return to the beginning of part one we read in the very first sen-
tence: “It is only rarely that a psycho-analyst feels impelled to investigate
the subject of aesthetics [Der Psychoanalytiker verspürt nur selten den Antrieb zu
ästhetischen Untersuchungen], even when aesthetics is understood to mean
not merely the theory of beauty but the qualities of feeling” (TU ;
DU ). From the start, we learn that Freud fears aesthetics as foreign
territory and makes his incursion onto this unfamiliar area only because
he is “impelled” or driven to do so (Antrieb is close to Drang, another term
we shall encounter later). We are not dealing here with the disinterested,
dispassionate search for knowledge (if such a thing exists outside of a cer-
tain rationalistic ideology of science), but with an impulse that carries its
human subject beyond his or her own field. In Greek, this is called hubris,
and not the least interesting feature of “Das Unheimliche” is Freud’s eth-
ical awareness of his hubris, his ambivalence about treading on foreign
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
soil, the inextricable combination of modesty and aggressivity that fuels
his speculative undertaking.
It is bad enough that Freud, to encounter the uncanny, must do so in
a field (that of aesthetics) which is not his own. Compounding his sense
of estrangement (and competitive Drang) is the fact that he is following in
the footsteps of a previous explorer, E. Jentsch, whose “Zur Psychologie
des Unheimlichen” had appeared in . Since, as we later learn in
Freud’s essay, the uncanny manifests itself in the troubling phenomenon
of Doppelgänger, the problem, from the outset, is that Jentsch, whether
the author of the  essay likes it or not, whether he acknowledges
it or not, is Freud’s own distorted image. Now in order to retain one’s
own ego-image when faced with an uncanny mirror-doubling, a rapid
and definitive act of differentiation is necessary: the “I” must split itself
forcibly and unambiguously from the other that resembles it too much
for comfort. This Freud does by characterizing Jentsch’s contribution
as a “fertile but not exhaustive paper” (inhaltsreiche, aber nicht erschöpfende
Abhandlung) (TU ; DU ). If Freud’s own paper is to go beyond
Jentsch’s insights, it must not only be rich in content (which it certainly
is), but, in some way, it must exhaust the field; it must not simply add
incrementally to Jentsch, but it must take from the domain of the uncanny
all of its rich nourishment. Here, of course, is an allegory of academic
scholarship which, to use the vocabulary of Unheimlichkeit, is a bit “too
close to home.” Each scholar writing on the uncanny after Freud (or
really, after Jentsch, or really, after E. T. A. Hoffmann, and so on in
infinite regress) will be guilty of attempting to exhaust a field which their
predecessor has not quite exhausted. There will always be something
left, even in a field that has been as picked-over as that of the uncanny.
It is significant, I think, that the verb erschöpfen recurs near the con-
clusion of “Das Unheimliche,” in a very interesting section where Freud
has been indulging in what might be called “fiction envy.” He has been
describing the poetic license of storytellers in envious terms, contrasting
the great freedom of the fiction writer with the limits imposed upon the
psychoanalyst as man of science by the experiential framework of the
uncanny as it is encountered within the confines of reality. With apolo-
gies for jumping forward somewhat in my analysis, I would like to quote
the passage that concludes this line of reasoning so as to emphasize the
problematic of “field exhaustion” in Freud’s essay:

We have clearly not exhausted the possibilities of poetic licence and the privi-
leges enjoyed by story-writers in evoking or in excluding an uncanny feeling
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
[Es ist offenkundig, daß die Freiheiten des Dichters und damit die Vorrechte der Fiktion in der
Hervorrufung und Hemmung des unheimlichen Gefühls durch die vorstehenden Bemerkungen
nicht erschöpft werden]. In the main we adopt an unvarying passive attitude towards
real experience and are subject to the influence of our physical environment. But
the story-teller has a peculiarly directive power over us [Für den Dichter sind wir aber
in besonderer Weise lenkbar]; by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to
guide the current of our emotions, dam it up in one direction and make it flow in
another, and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material. All
this is nothing new, and has doubtless long since been fully taken into account by
professors of aesthetics [Dies ist alles längst bekannt und wahrscheinlich von den berufenen
Ästhetikern eingehend gewürdigt worden]. We have drifted into this field of research half
involuntarily [Wir sind auf dieses Gebiet der Forschung ohne rechte Absicht gef ührt worden],
through the temptation to explain certain instances which contradicted our
theory of the causes of the uncanny. And accordingly we will now return to the
examination of a few of those instances. ( TU  –; DU –; translator’s
emphasis)

In looking back at the movement of his argument (in which, to add

clarity to his analysis, he had attempted to distinguish between the un-
canny in life and in literature), Freud is obliged to confess that he has
not “exhausted the possibilities of poetic licence and the privileges [die
Vorrechte]” of storytellers. In other words, in his examination of the practi-
tioners of the aesthetic, he has been no more successful than was Jentsch
in his survey of aesthetics as theoretical field: both readings end with-
out closure, without conceptual envelopment. There is an unmistakable
sense of melancholy, defeat, and perhaps even resentment (Ressentiment)
as “Das Unheimliche” reaches its ending. What Freud envies in the fic-
tion writer is his or her creative freedom, which he describes not as the
result of a struggle with artistic expression, but rather as a given right,
a Vorrecht, or right before all establishing of rights: Freud the commoner
versus literary aristocrats. Freud expresses his grudging admiration for
the literary artist by emphasizing the latter’s “peculiarly directive power,”
which is said to contrast with our “unvarying passive attitude towards
real experience.” This is a most curious statement, since it would be easy
to assert the exact opposite: that we live life, we struggle against it, we
work to succeed in it; whereas we are free to resist the charms of aesthetic
freeplay, which, after all, fall under the domain of our moods, the moods
we ourselves possess.
The power of the storyteller resides in a certain animistic energy.
When we fall under the spell of fictional narration, we participate in
what aesthetic theory calls “the willing suspension of disbelief ” – i.e.,
we are willing to be directed (wir werden lenkbar), we become passive,
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
in order to enter the story, in order to transgress the boundary be-
tween the real and the fictional. The difference between Freud the
psychoanalytical theorist and the writers he unwillingly admires is that
he has attempted to make the uncanny an example, a case for inclu-
sion within the field of psychoanalysis, while the tellers of tales fall into
the uncanny. The uncanny is that which cannot merely be an example
(ein Fall), but which is a fall (ein Fall ) into literariness – and which is
also a trap (eine Falle) for the analytical thinker as fabricator of clear
distinctions.
I am suggesting, therefore, that “Das Unheimliche” as (aesthetic) total-
ity is framed by the problematic of the not-to-be-exhausted field. Between
the initial confident comments on Jentsch’s analytical insufficiencies and
the concluding somewhat dispirited paragraphs, the large and rich mid-
dle section of the essay consists of manifold efforts to achieve this very
exhaustive analysis. Freud’s own essay is the compulsion to repeat – to
repeat the military gesture of exhausting the adversary’s (the aestheti-
cian’s) field. The best way to do so is to outdo the aesthetician on his or
her very own turf. If literary criticism is a “sub-species” of aesthetics, and
if criticism in its exegetical function serves to illuminate textual obscurity,
then the best way for Freud to triumph in his account of the uncanny
is to read an uncanny text (using the language of psychoanalysis) more
illuminatingly than the aestheticians can with their own paltry science
and insufficient vocabulary. Among the numerous examples (Fälle) of the
uncanny in part two of the essay, certainly the master-example is that of
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann” (), a short story which Freud
summarizes and, confining himself to a complicated footnote, ventures
to analyze in a highly cryptic manner. Since “Der Sandmann” happens
to be a prime instance, or, one might say, an exemplary example, of
Romantic irony in its dizzying practice, an examination of the echo-
effects it exhibits when juxtaposed to Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” is of
particular interest to my own argument in the first three chapters of this
book. If the uncanny is the unruly descendant of Kant’s sublime, it is also
the mode of Romantic irony, thereby possessing strong elective affinities
with Kierkegaard’s early writings. In the following section, I shall discuss
not only the way in which Freud used (or misused) Hoffmann’s story
to buttress his argument in “Das Unheimliche,” but also the peculiar
(uncanny) manner in which “Der Sandmann” anticipates, foreshadows,
and undermines Freud’s claims to analytic mastery and control, both in
his temporary function as reader of Hoffmann, and in his larger role as
clarifier of the uncanny.
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
III ‘‘ D E R S A N D M A N N ’’

E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ironical tale, notwithstanding its convoluted plot

and multiple narrative voices, is based upon one organizing polarity:
the classical opposition between physis (nature and the natural world)
and techné (cultural artifice and fictionality). The protagonist of the story,
Nathaniel, continually hesitates in his affections between Clara, a clear-
sighted (as her name indicates) orphaned young woman taken in by his
family and living in his house, and a certain Olympia, a creature of
exquisite but strange beauty who elicits his obsessive fascination but who
turns out to be an automaton – the unnatural, fabricated product of her
“father” Spalanzani, who made her body, and Giuseppe Coppola, who
gave her her eyes. Coppola, in his turn, is possibly the same person as,
or at least the “double” of a man named Coppelius, whom Nathaniel
holds responsible for his father’s death. The narrative is punctuated by
a number of articulated moments in which Nathaniel turns, alternately,
toward Clara or toward Olympia – which means, toward “real life” in its
natural rhythms or toward a fanciful, unreal entity that merely reflects
or instantiates Nathaniel’s own erotic projections.
Although the final and literal dismantling of Olympia occurs near
the end of the story, Hoffmann provides enough clues early on in his
narrative to indicate to the reader that the “mechanical” strangeness of
Olympia – her dead gaze, her stiff bearing, her “conversation” composed
only of exclamatory monosyllables – may reveal a mechanism in the
technological sense, a clockwork precision proceeding from her very
inhumanity. The uncanniness of “Der Sandmann” resides, first of all, in
the human-but-not-really-human appearance of Olympia. Nathaniel’s
hesitation between Clara and Olympia is a hesitation between clearly
defined nature on the one hand, and a nature-like artifice on the other.
Artifice (and art as such) owes its power not to its structural design (only
scientists / literary critics are interested in the inner mechanism of a
doll/text), but to its capacity to mimic the living, to adopt a deceiving
mask which allows it to pass as real. In the second half of the story, there
is a multiplication of subjunctive and conditional expressions: Olympia
inhabits the domain of the “as if ” in that she exists only in the deluded
eyes of Nathaniel. Her eyes are, in fact, dead, but, as Nathaniel views her
through his own telescope (or point of view, Perspektiv), they “change”:
He [ Nathaniel] had never in his life before handled a glass which brought
objects to the eyes so sharply and clearly defined. Involuntarily he looked into
Spalanzani’s room: Olympia was, as usual, sitting before the little table, her
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
arms lying upon it and her hands folded. Only now did Nathaniel behold
Olympia’s beautiful face [wunderschön geformtes Gesicht]. The eyes alone seemed
to him strangely fixed and dead, yet as the image in the glass grew sharper
and sharper it seemed as though beams of moonlight began to rise within them
[als gingen in Olimpias Augen feuchte Mondesstrahlen auf ]; it was as if they were at
that moment acquiring the power of sight [als wenn nun erst die Sehkraft entzündet
würde]; and their glance grew ever warmer and more lively [immer lebendiger und
lebendiger flammten die Blicke]. Nathaniel stood before the window as if rooted to the
spot [ Nathanael lag wie festgezaubert im Fenster], lost in contemplation of Olympia’s
heavenly beauty. ( TS ; DS )

R. J. Hollingdale’s smooth and readable translation passes over some

details of the German text that deserve emphasis. Olympia’s “beautiful
face” is, in fact, a “wunderschön geformtes Gesicht,” which introduces
into the portrait of her lovely appearance the suggestion of artifice: the
face has been formed, made, but by whom, and for what purpose? The
cascade of “as if ” clauses centers not just on the theme of light in general,
but on fire in particular, and on the mesmerizing quality of Olympia’s
flaming glances. Nathaniel does not so much stand at the window as lie at
its edge, incapable of movement, blinded by the brilliance of what he sees
as the power of her sight (Sehkraft). We are in the domain of magic or of
the fairy tale here, of sorcery and spells: Hollingdale’s “as if rooted to the
spot” renders the physical influence of Olympia on her admirer, but does
not convey the magical element which inhabits “lag wie festgezaubert.”
This descriptive passage is important not just in showing that Olympia
is an empty vessel into which Nathaniel pours a fanciful and literarily in-
spired “life,” but also in providing a subtle echo of the story’s beginning.
The allusions to fire and to the forming of inert matter into the false
beauty of man-made artifice remind the reader of the early scene in
which Nathaniel’s father and the repulsive Coppelius labor over an
“alchemical” fire in a secret and terrifying Promethean project.
Nathaniel hides to observe the night-time activities of his father and
companion (whom he identifies with the dreadful Sandman of a nursery-
story), but is caught by Coppelius. The latter, imitating the children’s
story, first threatens to tear out Nathaniel’s eyes, but respects the father’s
entreaty to spare them. Then, in Nathaniel’s words: “And with that
he seized me so violently that my joints cracked, unscrewed my hands
and feet, and fixed them on again now in this way, now in that”
(TS  –). Not only is Nathaniel’s life, like Olympia’s mechanical
“body,” constructed around the problem of the presence and absence of
eyes and the attendant thematic of vision in general, but the grotesque
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
scene of the detachment and rearrangement of his limbs foreshadows
Olympia’s fate in the latter stages of the tale, when Spalanzani and
Coppola, in fighting over her, finish by tearing her apart, by reducing
her to membra disjecta that can never be recombined into a totality, never
be made whole again. Thus, Nathaniel, who admires and thinks he loves
Olympia, who has her as the object of his deluded affection, is also quite
like her. The resemblance between a young poet and an automaton is
not the least of the story’s ironically turned uncanny effects.
This resemblance is of no particular interest to Freud, however, who,
as recent interpreters of “Das Unheimliche” have demonstrated, turns
his own gaze resolutely away from Olympia (and also Clara, and all other
female characters in the story) and focuses upon Nathaniel as a kind of
modern-day tragic hero. The theme of threatened sight, of removable
eyes and of blindness is, for Freud, a literary transposition of the dread of
castration, and therefore a sign of the protagonist’s Oedipal anxieties at
the hands of the text’s father-figures. In this scheme, Olympia is reduced
to “nothing else than a materialization of Nathaniel’s feminine attitude
towards his father in his infancy. Her fathers, Spalanzani and Coppola,
are, after all, nothing but new editions, reincarnations of Nathaniel’s pair
of fathers” (TU ). The short story as a whole inscribes itself in the
Oedipal triangle, or more precisely in the father–son conflict, while the
mother and the other women are shunted aside, shoved outside the nar-
rative with the imposition of Freud’s rigid and self-justifying interpretive
framework.
In the paragraph following his short and partial summary of the
story’s plot, Freud makes clear that “Der Sandmann” is being used to
score points in his polemic against Jentsch. Freud argues that the idea
of being robbed of one’s eyes (“really” castration, as only the knowl-
edge of the insightful psychoanalyst can show) is a more significant ex-
ample of the uncanny than “intellectual uncertainty” ( Jentsch’s central
thesis):
Uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate, which admittedly applied
to the doll Olympia, is quite irrelevant in connection with this other, more
striking instance [Der Zweifel an der Beseeltheit, den wir bei der Puppe Olimpia gelten
lassen mußten, kommt bei diesem stärkeren Beispiel des Unheimlichen überhaupt nicht in
Betracht]. ( TU ; DU )

A “symptomal” reading of Freud’s prose in this passage inevitably

uncovers a large dose of aggressivity which the author of “Das Unheim-
liche” allows to well up against the earlier explorer of the uncanny’s
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
territory, his frère ennemi. The problem for Freud is that the uncanny
manifests itself in various guises (perhaps disguises) throughout Hoff-
mann’s tale, and the psychoanalyst has the audacity to call his own
example – the eye motif and its association with castration – stronger
(stärker) than the uncertainty between the living and the inanimate, which
Jentsch had emphasized and which Freud must grudgingly admit to have
some (small) value: “Der Zweifel an der Beseeltheit, den wir bei der Puppe
Olimpia gelten lassen mußten.” If Freud is not aware of the violent ges-
ture with which he pushes aside his predecessor and arbitrarily prefers
his own example (Beispiel ) to that of Jentsch, his prose style conveys this
awareness and exhibits it as a symptom. It would appear that the only
way to control the proliferation of examples (Fälle, Beispiele) is to cast
some out, dictatorially, and choose others which illustrate more convinc-
ingly the already “proven” theories of psychoanalysis in its evolution
up to .
The theme of intellectual uncertainty, which looms large in Hoff-
mann’s “Der Sandmann,” whether Freud likes it or not, is a stumbling-
block for the psychoanalyst who attempts to deny its significance. Freud
states that this theme, which in his view belongs to Jentsch but in fact
belongs to Hoffmann, and before him to the textual uncanny in its mul-
tiple historical apparitions, “kommt bei diesem stärkeren Beispiel des
Unheimlichen überhaupt nicht in Betracht.” Intellectual uncertainty does
not “come into view” because Freud hides it from us, and he does this
because there is so much intellectual uncertainty in “Der Sandmann”
and in the uncanny that his own efforts at analytical mastery and con-
trol will have been undermined, from the beginning. The uncanny is a
hidden bomb which detonates each time an interpreter armed only with
the defusing device of his theory (in this case, psychoanalytical) makes
his naively unprotected entrance onto the mined territory. Freud’s theo-
retical “lenses” do not guarantee him from blindness any more than
Nathaniel’s telescope protects him from falling into delusion, and finally,
madness. The text Freud summarizes briefly and “analyzes” only in the
space of one highly concentrated footnote is far more dangerous than he
would let us latecomer-readers think; and it must have been perceived as
dangerous by Freud’s unconscious mind, given the extraordinary efforts
he makes to mask and bury its perilous qualities.
But what is it, then, about “Der Sandmann” as literary text, as example
of the uncanny, that is so threatening to Freud’s interpretive enterprise?
First, the uncanny, as exemplar of Romantic aesthetics, is a series of
disparate fragments that can be totalized only by an act of violence
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
(as we have seen: Freud’s preference of one form of the uncanny over
another; his battle with Jentsch). There are doubtless many instances of
the uncanny, but the field of das Unheimliche cannot be fully or definitively
surveyed. Each time one example of the uncanny is encountered, others
follow, uncannily – just as in “Das Unheimliche,” having demonstrated
to his satisfaction the ubiquitous insistent presence of the eye/castration
theme in “Der Sandmann,” Freud simply and blithely moves on to a
discussion of the “double,” which is, of course, another instance of the
uncanny. In a nutshell: Freud is trying very hard to write an analytical
essay in the classical sense, while the object of his scrutiny undoes his ef-
forts at conceptual clarity. Just as the multiplication of the old gentlemen
in Baudelaire’s Parisian poem “Les Sept Vieillards” causes the poet to
lose his bearings and cling to the remnants of his reason, the unwinding
of the string of uncanny examples in Freud’s essay exceeds the compass
of analytical discourse as conceptual envelopment.
Second, the threat Hoffmann’s story poses to Freud is not merely
that it ironically anticipates his every enveloping move, thus defeating
him in an intellectually refined game of hermeneutical chess; but it also
“speaks” to him and through him on a personal level about the value of
psychoanalysis as method of interpretation. “Der Sandmann” is uncanny
from a temporal perspective: it furnishes an anticipatory critique of the
very psychoanalytical tools which Freud brings to bear upon it. It speaks
through Freud in an act of marvelously strange ventriloquism. The father
of psychoanalysis becomes the dummy (a new Olympia) whose brilliant
insight is revealed to be as false and mechanical as the dazzling but dead
eyes of the automaton.
In what follows, I shall first emphasize certain areas of “Der Sand-
mann” which Freud passes over in silence; then I shall proceed to exam-
ine the ways in which Hoffmann’s story, in these very areas, uncannily,
bridges the gap between the self-referential fictionality of Romantic irony
and Freud’s own existential situation in . The story says far more
about Freud than Freud says about the story. Whereas Freud’s conscious
motivation was to illuminate a small corner of the field of aesthetics
with psychoanalytical insight, it is my contention that his fascination
with Hoffmann’s text, at the unconscious level, is grounded in the ana-
lyst’s narcissism. Freud sees himself in “Der Sandmann,” and beyond the
ironic tale he sees Oedipus – not the theorized “Oedipus complex,” but
Oedipus before theorization, a most dangerous and diabolical antago-
nist who comes back to haunt his interpreter and rock the foundations
of the psychoanalytical edifice itself.
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
IV ‘‘ D E R S A N D M A N N ’’ A S M I R R O R

At first glance, the narrative structure of Hoffmann’s tale bears no re-

semblance to the logical organization of Freud’s analytical discourse on
the psychoanalytical significance of the uncanny. As we have seen, “Das
Unheimliche,” when viewed at a distance and at the highest level of
generality, possesses a tripartite structure (indicated quite explicitly by
the Roman numerals I, II, and III in the text) which I have described as
follows: I. examination of the linguistic peculiarities of the words heimlich
and unheimlich in their interrelation; II. examples of the uncanny from lit-
erature and from life, the most important of which is “Der Sandmann”;
III. Freud’s responses to possible objections to his methods and conclu-
sions, along with a series of fine distinctions on the origins and types of
the uncanny. There is no apparent similarity between this quite classical
scheme of discursive presentation and the broad outline of the Romantic
novella, which Sarah Kofman describes concisely:
The complexity of the tale: it begins with an exchange of letters between
Nathaniel, Lothario and Clara (two characters to whom Freud pays hardly any
attention); it continues with a direct address by the author to the reader; finally
it unfolds according to the most banal narrative conventions. (“The Double
is/and the Devil,” )
In Kofman’s view, Hoffmann also opted for a tripartite organization,
but it is much more “complex” than that of Freud, in that there is a mixing
of heterogeneous narrative modes which follow each other in a purely
metonymic juxtaposition. We have, first, what appears to be an epistolary
novella, followed brusquely by the intervention of the “author” (let us
say, more prudently, the playfully omniscient narrator), and concluding
with what Kofman calls a final unfolding of the story “according to the
most banal narrative conventions.” (I shall leave aside, for the moment,
the important question of the “banality” of the conventions Hoffmann
makes use of, a “banality” which seems to disappoint Kofman but which
cannot be shunted aside with the désinvolture she allows herself here. To
make use of banal conventions is not necessarily to fall into banality, as
the works of Flaubert and Kafka consistently demonstrate.) Freud, in
writing about the uncanny, seems to be adopting a “simpler” form of
narrative presentation than Hoffmann, and in this sense, the form of
his essay confirms what he says in his essay about the greater freedom
enjoyed by the creator of fictions, whose poetic license allows him or
her to spin a convoluted web which can trap and hold a multiplicity of
disparate personages, actions, and voices.
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
Once one descends beneath the bird’s-eye view, however, once one
adopts a Perspektiv allowing a closer evaluation of both Freud and
Hoffmann, one finds a properly uncanny similarity between the two
texts at the level of what I shall call unconscious motivation. Both writers
are obsessed by the problem of narrative framing and closure, and both
strive relentlessly to enclose the uncanny within a logical structure. In
Freud’s case, we have the dogged efforts, in part three of “Das Unheim-
liche,” to distinguish between and among possible forms of the uncanny.
To classify a phenomenon properly and definitively is to neutralize the
unsettling power of that phenomenon. Yet Freud begins his essay with an
elaborate precautionary move (to paraphrase: “I as psychoanalyst now
enter a foreign territory, am impelled to do so, and the field is in any
case small, just a small bit of the aesthetic”), and concludes by evoking
the “ghastly multiplication” of trap-doors in Nestroy’s farce Der Zerrissene,
and the theme of ghosts in general as they relate to “the factors of silence,
solitude and darkness.” The final sentence of “Das Unheimliche” reads:
Concerning the factors of silence, solitude, and darkness, we can only say that
they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which
the majority of human beings have never become quite free. This problem has
been discussed from a psycho-analytic point of view elsewhere. ( TU )
The conclusion closes nothing, but, like Nestroy’s trap-doors, opens
outward to the large general problem of the human being’s imprison-
ment in infantile anxiety, and, as the editors of the Standard Edition inform
us in a footnote to the passage (ibid.), to Freud’s own Drei Abhandlungen
zur Sexualtheorie (), the textual “elsewhere” which contains further
(previously stated) remarks on the theme rapidly alluded to in the final
lines of “Das Unheimliche.” The desire to solve the analytical problem
of the uncanny expresses itself, metaphorically, as the unrealizable im-
pulsion to close doors, to shut off that which escapes logical containment.
Uncannily, this desire to close, to conclude by closing, this impulsion
(Antrieb, Drang) toward logical control, is also the driving force of “Der
Sandmann.” Hoffmann’s tale begins with the word “gewiß” (“certainly”)
and concludes, after Nathaniel’s death, with what appears to be a “banal”
happy ending, in which the narrator describes the domestic happiness
of Clara in the following terms:
Several years later, you could have seen Clara, in a distant part of the country,
sitting with an affectionate man hand in hand before the door of a lovely country
house and with two lovely children playing at her feet, from which it is to be
concluded that Clara found in the end that quiet domestic happiness which was
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
so agreeable to her cheerful disposition and which the inwardly riven Nathaniel
could never have given her. ( TS )
Nach mehreren Jahren will man in einer entfernten Gegend Klara gesehen
haben, wie sie mit einem freundlichen Mann Hand in Hand vor der Türe eines
schönen Landhauses saß und vor ihr zwei muntre Knaben spielten. Es wäre
daraus zu schließen, daß Klara das ruhige häusliche Glück noch fand, das ihrem
heitern lebenslustigen Sinn zusagte und das ihr der im Innern zerrissene Nathanael
niemals hätte gewähren können. ( DS ; my emphasis)
Just as the first line of “Der Sandmann” begins with the notion of
certainty, with the word “gewiß,” in the same way the last sentence con-
tains the verb “schließen,” which, in this context, means “to conclude,”
but which, used in the concrete setting of doors and windows, signifies
“to close.” This is, without a doubt, a “banal,” conventional ending to
a story that is far from banal. It presents itself as a quite deplorably
weak ending to an otherwise entertainingly upsetting narrative (which,
I think, explains Kofman’s critical remark). But has Hoffmann fallen into
the trap of conventionality, or has he used conventionality as a trapping,
the better to entrap his earnest interpreters (even the most astute stu-
dents of Freud)? A close reading of the German text cannot help but
highlight the conditional mode in which the vision of happy domestic-
ity is represented: “Nach mehreren Jahren will mann in einer entfernten
Gegend Klara gesehen haben,” and “Es wäre daraus zu schließen.” One
might, if one wished, if one should have such a wish, envision such
happiness. Hoffmann is as cautious in his final picture of fecund calm
(and of the home, the Heim) as is Freud in the beginning sentences of
“Das Unheimliche.” Hoffmann is just as doubtful about containing the
dispossessing effects of Unheimlichkeit as is Freud upon entering the remote
corner of the forbidden territory of the aesthetic which “houses” the
uncanny.
Freud’s problem – and it is no small problem – is that Hoffmann al-
ready knew that the uncanny could be contained only by the arbitrary
imposition of a worn-out narrative convention. In a story permeated
with death and ghastliness, the final “triumph of life” can only be read
ironically, in the same way that in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” the con-
cluding family outing into the countryside, with the revelation of Grete
Samsa’s blossoming womanhood, constitutes an ironical counter-image
to Gregor’s abjection and death. Hoffmann knew, in other words, that
the uncanny is the territory of death, of uncontainable, repetitious dying.
This is the territory into which Freud entered in , after the death-
trance of World War I, but which the psychoanalyst and interpreter of
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
texts also discovered, literarily transposed, in a Romantic fantasy written
one century before his time.
If, to use Freud’s own vocabulary, one might say that the conscious
purpose of his essay “Das Unheimliche” was to remove the uncanny
from the domain of the aesthetic and reterritorialize it within the field
of psychoanalytic theory, its unconscious motivation would seem to be
the instantiation of the repetition compulsion in a literary mode. Freud’s
writing style follows the impulse, the drive, to say again, and repeatedly,
what the uncanny has already said through a multitude of texts, in-
cluding, most strikingly, “Der Sandmann.” And what the uncanny says
or testifies to, ceaselessly, is death. Beyond the Pleasure Principle becomes
the retroactively deferred theoretical justification for the praxis of “Das
Unheimliche.” Beneath narrative appearances, beneath the contrast-
ing tripartite structures of Freud’s “theoretical fiction” and Hoffmann’s
fiction tout court, lies the pattern of narrative, which is the uncanny repe-
titiousness of the Antrieb or Drang.
Freud’s multiple hesitations, definitions, and redefinitions, his ambiva-
lent rhetoric of caution and aggressivity, in short, the intellectual uncer-
tainty emanating from the analyst’s inner divisions concerning his elu-
sive theme, mirror the articulated pattern beneath the overt structure of
Hoffmann’s tale. It is a pattern that can only strike fear into the heart
of a medical practitioner whose domain is the human mind: namely,
the falling in and out of health, the repeated apparent but deceptive
“cures” of the “patient” Nathaniel, which end in analytical failure and
the analysand’s death. It is perhaps no coincidence that Freud concludes
his description of the uncanny with an allusion to a work of litera-
ture entitled Der Zerrissene [The Torn Man], since the last words of
“Der Sandmann” describe the unfortunate protagonist as “der im
Innern zerrissene Nathanael” – the man who loved an automaton rather
than the clear-sighted and “lebenslustige” Clara. It is precisely the inner
division of Nathaniel, a split which tempts other characters in the novella
to make him whole, but which is, in fact, incurable, that provides “Der
Sandmann” with its narrative locomotion – a movement of fits and starts
that is uncontainable within any macro-structure, whether tripartite or
otherwise delimited.
Nathaniel’s first active intervention in his domestic environment oc-
curs when he decides to spy upon his father and Coppelius. This in-
tervention proceeds not from the clarity of a calm, conscious choosing,
but from an “irresistible urge”: “At length, impelled by an irresistible
urge, I decided to conceal myself within my father’s room and there
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
await the sandman” (Endlich, von unwiderstehlichem Drange getrieben, beschloß
ich, im Zimmer des Vaters selbst mich zu verbergen und den Sandmann zu erwarten)
(TS ; DS ). Like the Antrieb that motivated Freud to enter the for-
eign territory of aesthetics, the impulse to discover the unknown is at the
origin of Nathaniel’s assumption of his role as protagonist. Like Freud
the theorist, Nathaniel is in fact poised between two contrary forces:
on the one hand, an urge or drive coming from outside his conscious
mind that forces him to make an incursion into a hitherto protected
domain; on the other, the conscious power of decision-making, which is
expressed in the verb “to conclude” – beschließen. Just as Freud attempts,
with monotonous regularity, to conclude his essay on the uncanny, only
to be caught up in an ever-widening spiral of illustrative examples, in
the same way Nathaniel, despite his stated desire to solve the mystery of
his father’s evening occupations, will end his fantasy-existence spinning
out of control into madness. Hoffmann’s initial juxtaposition of the verb
treiben in the passive voice to the decisive beschließen establishes the ten-
sion out of which the novella in its entirety will evolve, as an alternation
between moments of calm and lucidity and the inevitability of the pro-
tagonist’s progression toward folly and death. When Freud read “Der
Sandmann” he not only found, at the conscious level of his analytical
thinking, a confirmation of his ideas on the fear of castration and the
Oedipus complex, but he also discovered a psychodrama that could only
heighten his anxiety about the real-world medical effectiveness of his
new discipline: namely, the story of a young man who, despite the loving
care and analytical lucidity of his best friends, cannot be cured.
If Freud’s essay imitates Hoffmann’s novella in its hesitation bet-
ween logical mastery and uncontrollable fragmentation, it is because
Freud sees himself in the story and cannot extricate himself from
Hoffmann’s narrative logic and from the fascinating power exercised
over the twentieth-century thinker by fictional characters from the pre-
vious century. Freud is possessed by Hoffmann’s text: he can only repeat,
but never truly alter, the oracular obliqueness of the “example” he uses,
among others, in his discourse on the meaning of the uncanny. Freud is in
the text, and he is “already Freud,” one might say, in the character of Clara,
whose clear-sightedness prefigures the analytical lucidity of the father of
psychoanalysis. This prefiguration is not based merely on the abstract
notion of lucidity or clarity, however: it inscribes itself into the very style
with which Clara speaks to her beloved Nathaniel, which is unmistak-
ably the style of the psychoanalyst. It is uncanny indeed to be quoted one
century before one has written about the uncanny, but this is what happens
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
in “Der Sandmann,” when Clara seeks to reassure Nathaniel about his
fears of Coppelius. The logic of her argument is based upon an unwaver-
ing distinction between the “inside” of Nathaniel’s brooding mind and
the “outside” of external reality. Nathaniel can find solace and be cured
of his anxious fantasies if he is able to recognize that his fears are merely
imaginary, that what he “saw” when he hid in his father’s workroom had
no basis in the real, but was the result of his own fanciful projections:
Let me say straight out what it is I think: that all the ghastly and terrible things
you spoke of took place only within you, and that the real outer world had
little part in them. Old Coppelius may have been repulsive enough, but it was
because he hated children that you children came to feel an actual revulsion for
him.
The frightening sandman in the nursery tale naturally became united
[verknüpfte sich] in your childish mind with old Coppelius; although you no longer
believed in the sandman, Coppelius was still to you a spectral monster especially
dangerous to children. The uncanny night-time activities with your father were
no doubt nothing more than secret alchemical experiments they were making
together [Das unheimliche Treiben mit Deinem Vater zur Nachtzeit war wohl nichts
anders, als daß beide insgeheim alchimistische Versuche machten], and your mother could
hardly have been pleased about it, since a lot of money was undoubtedly wasted
and, moreover, as is always supposed to be the case with such laboratory ex-
perimenters, your father, altogether absorbed in the deceptive desire for higher
truth [ganz von dem trügerischen Drange nach hoher Weisheit erfüllt], would have become
estranged from his family. ( TS –; DS  )
Like the psychoanalyst whose methods and vocabulary she anticipato-
rily borrows, Clara sets out to demonstrate that the “ghastly and terrible
things” in her patient’s mind do not correspond to facts and events in the
outer world, but have their origin in a union or “knotting” (Verknüpfung)
of affective imagery deriving from the frightening nursery tale of the
Sandman. This story has since become associated, in Nathaniel’s mind,
with the purportedly diabolical activities of the repulsive Coppelius, who
has seduced his father into pursuing certain strange night-time “expe-
riments.” Clara’s argument is a discourse of demystification in which the
uncanny quality of these nocturnal researches, das Unheimliche, is reduced
to “no doubt nothing more than secret alchemical experiments.”
Uncanniness is explained away as mere alchemy – in Kantian terms, bloß
Kunst, simply artfulness, a play with the elements that has no effect on
external reality, since, as we all know, alchemy, as pure wastefulness,
never works. As pure and irresponsible freeplay, and as a false promise
of transmutation of base reality into a higher essential form, alchemical
experimentation impels its adepts toward a deceptive higher truth. There
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
is a Drang toward truth, but the uncanny urging [das unheimliche Treiben]
destroys the family and the home [Heim]. Clara and Nathaniel’s mother
are enlisted to protect domestic tranquillity in the battle against male
hubris, which, in “Der Sandmann,” takes the form of a compulsion to
create artificially, to rob the gods of their fire in order to make some-
thing outside of or beyond nature. In this sense, the male union of
Spalanzani and Coppola, like that of Nathaniel’s father and Coppelius,
can only “produce” pure artifice – an automaton who bears no more
resemblance to a real woman than the “brightly gleaming substances”
(TS  ) in the father’s chimney do to real gold. The domain of techné
is that of the male artificer, whose “deceptive” (trügerisch) labyrinthine
labor poses a threat to ethical stability, to the straight path of nature and
nurture.
The central dramatic conflict of “Der Sandmann,” the conflict that
gives rise to the story’s narrative energy, is Nathaniel’s hesitation between
the clear-sighted Clara and the doll Olympia, whose eyes are a lifeless
reflective surface. In terms of literary representation, the male protag-
onist cannot at first decide between an ethically constructed world in
which the “inside” of the imagination is allotted a finite and restricted
space, and the universe of Romantic irony, in which the unbounded
power of the imagination’s projective capacities causes the young man
to find beauty and even life where there is, or has been, only a ghostly re-
semblance to life. At the beginning of the story, before Nathaniel assumes
his role as protagonist, while he is still only a child among children within
the family, the choice between ethical stability and aesthetic artifice is
posed, significantly, in the form of two different “readings” of the sand-
man fairy tale – one provided by his mother, and the other elaborated
by the old woman who cares for his sister. The phrase “the sandman
is coming” is used by the mother on those evenings when the father ap-
pears gloomy and when a stranger’s footsteps are eventually heard in the
house: it is a signal for the children to go to bed. Before Nathaniel has his
first encounter with Coppelius (before he can make his first association
of this man with the sandman), he asks the question: “Mama, who is this
sandman who always drives us away from Papa? [Ei, Mama, wer ist denn
der böse Sandmann, der uns immer von Papa forttreibt?]” (TS ; DS ). The
mother’s answer is as follows:
“There is no sandman, my dear child,” my mother replied. “When I say the
sandman is coming, all that means is that you are sleepy and cannot keep your
eyes open, as though someone had sprinkled sand into them [als hätte man euch
Sand hineingestreut].” ( TS ; DS –)
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
Unhappy with his mother’s prosaic answer, Nathaniel seeks another
interpretation from the old servant woman, whose folk-wisdom reply
contrasts sharply with maternal rationality:
[The sandman] is a wicked man who comes after children when they won’t go to
bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads
all bloody, and then he throws them into his sack and carries them to the crescent
moon as food for his little children, who have their nest up there and have crooked
beaks like owls and peck up the eyes of the naughty children. ( TS )

Hoffmann’s novella begins at a crossroads. Nathaniel must choose bet-

ween a demystified version of the folk story that “sees through” its crude
imagery, purifying it of all threatening violence, and the unsettling ver-
sion of the servant, which makes of the same “primitive” material a cau-
tionary tale for disobedient children. In linguistic terms, the difference
between the two readings resides in the interpreter’s skepticism or belief
in metaphorical transport as such. The mother’s neutral lucidity derives
from her linguistic agnosticism: she knows that the tale of the sand-
man is to be read conditionally or subjunctively, in the “as if ” mode of
the Konjunktiv (“als hätte man euch Sand hineingestreut”). She, like
Kierkegaard’s Judge William, sees clearly the artifice of figural discourse
and is not taken in by it. Much to his misfortune, however, Nathaniel
does not find his mother’s skepticism convincing or appealing, but is
swayed by the verbal picture painted by the servant woman – a picture
that now places itself within his consciousness: “Gräßlich malte sich nun
im Innern mir das Bild des grausamen Sandmanns aus” (DS ). For
Nathaniel, there is no “as if.” Like the young Romanticist in Part I of
Either/Or, the protagonist of “Der Sandmann” chooses to live aesthetically,
which means that he lives in and among figural discourse, believing in its
transformative power. The carrying up of the children’s eyes is metaphor
as transport (Übertragung), as the bridging of the distance between earth
and moon and the transmutation of dead eyes into nourishment by what
Rimbaud called l’alchimie du verbe. Unfortunately for Nathaniel, he, like
his father, is an alchemist, unable or unwilling to hear the reassuring ad-
vice of his mother or the subsequent psychological admonitions of Clara.
Nathaniel’s fall into aesthetics as the realm of unmastered figuration is
also a straying from the laws of nature and from human sociability in its
ethically centered domestic expression.
Throughout the novella Nathaniel is surrounded by what one might
call representatives of the ethical life, whose function is to bring him
back to a sense of boundaries, constraints, and his responsibilities as a
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
member of society. Clara and Lothario play this role most obviously, and
do so from the beginning of the story until its tragic conclusion. They
are not alone, however. When Nathaniel leaves his home for the last
time, thinking that he will return one year hence to find his mother and
to resume his happy relationship with Clara, he finds that his student
lodgings have burnt down (the alchemical fire of the father figures seems,
uncannily, to have contaminated the son’s life), and, providentially, moves
into a new dwelling directly opposite Spalanzani and Olympia. It is at
this point in the narrative, when Clara is no longer physically present for
Nathaniel, that Hoffmann introduces, quite brusquely, a new character
into his tale – a young man who, in his lucidity, his ethical demeanor, and
common-sense grasp of reality, is Clara’s male Doppelgänger. His name is
Siegmund. The reader first encounters him at a crucial juncture in the
text, when Nathaniel, while writing a letter to Clara, feels compelled to
look up from his desk, seize his newly acquired telescope, and observe
Olympia. At this very moment Siegmund intervenes and takes Nathaniel
away from his compulsive voyeuristic activity:

Now he sat down to finish his letter to Clara, but one glance through the
window convinced him that Olympia was still sitting there, and in an instant he
sprang up, as if impelled by an irresistible power [wie von unwiderstehlicher Gewalt
getrieben], and seized Coppola’s telescope; he could not tear himself away from
the seductive sight of Olympia until his friend and fellow-student Siegmund
called him to come to Professor Spalanzani’s lecture. ( TS  ; DS )

The leitmotiv of the Trieb or Drang appears once again later in the same
paragraph, and reaches its culminating point when Nathaniel, frustrated
at not being able to see Olympia behind the drawn curtain of her window,
“driven by burning desire” ( getrieben von Sehnsucht und glühendem Verlangen)
(TS ; DS ), flees into the countryside, where Olympia’s image
blots out all memory of Clara and erases all traces of physical/natural
reality. From a clinical perspective, Nathaniel’s problem can be summed
up as follows: when he is accompanied (the French would say encadré –
“framed”) and kept under control by Clara, Lothario, or now Siegmund,
the text holds out the possibility that the protagonist can be coaxed
back to a reasonable view of his circumstances and reintegrated into
the community. But when he escapes such control, when left to his own
devices, he succumbs to the unmediated power of poetic vision, a power
that leads toward final madness.
Siegmund not only replaces Clara as lucid interpreter of psychological
phenomena, but he also speaks for the community and for its sense of
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
decorum. It is Siegmund who, after Olympia’s “débutante ball,” speaks
in the name of the other guests at that event and declares:
We have come to find this Olympia quite uncanny [Uns ist diese Olimpia ganz
unheimlich geworden]; we would like to have nothing to do with her; it seems to
us that she is only acting like a living creature, and yet there is some reason for
that which we cannot fathom. (TS ; DS )

The uncanny is diabolical not just in the sense of aesthetic complexity

(narrative framings and unframings, the strange anticipatory mirror-
ing of “Das Unheimliche” performed by “Der Sandmann,” Freud as
Hoffmann’s Doppelgänger), but also in the ethical sense. Uncanniness is
a destabilizing threat to social norms and conventions, as Siegmund
is the first to recognize. One of the most humorous passages in “Der
Sandmann” occurs in Hoffmann’s description of the days following the
revelation that Olympia was, after all, only a doll. The consensus of pub-
lic opinion is that Spalanzani’s now dismantled artificial creation was “an
altogether impermissible piece of deception” (TS  ). Even members
of the legal profession become involved in the retrospective judging of
Spalanzani, finding his “cunningly conceived” (ibid.) automaton unac-
ceptable in the deviousness of its human-but-not-human appearance.
We find here the same register of moral outrage that obtained in Kant’s
critical reaction to the innkeeper who deceived his guests into believ-
ing they had heard the call of a nightingale when in fact a young boy
was imitating the bird’s song on a reed or pipe (CJ, par. ). Unlike
Kant, however, Hoffmann frames the expression of moral disapproval
with what might be described as “the revenge of the artificial over the
real.” The Olympia case is not closed with the mere enunciation of a
harsh verdict against Spalanzani’s artistic “crime.” Hoffmann concludes
his digression on the ethical implications of the automaton’s entry into
society with some observations on the “detectable mistrust of the human
form” (TS  ) that has now insinuated itself into many townspeople,
especially those engaged in courtship. In post-Olympia society, men wish
the female objects of their attention to dance with some irregularity, to
yawn intermittently rather than sneeze at clockwork intervals, in short,
to exhibit the imperfection of the human.
Spalanzani has effected a properly uncanny reversal: rather than eval-
uate the doll’s beauty by the closeness of its resemblance to the human
form, after Spalanzani one is obliged to redefine feminine beauty in
terms of its non-mimetic relation to the doll’s perfection. Imitator
and imitated exchange positions, and in so doing introduce an aesthetic
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
indeterminacy or indécidabilité into the community’s attempts to drive
away ( forttreiben) the artificial, to make Olympia and her “progenitor”
into scapegoats. Even when banished, Olympia lives on as a ghost among
the living, an obstacle to the finality of ethical reasoning, which can con-
trol her only by equating her dismantling with the absolute absence
of death. But the problem, as Hoffmann knows and Freud is repeated-
ly learning as he writes “Das Unheimliche,” is that an automaton can
never die. Perhaps what we call death itself in its unmastered Trieb – death
beyond the individual residing domestically in his or her ethical/social
frame – does not die, but is structured as an eternal/infernal repetition, a
Teufelskreis: that would be das Unheimlichste; that would be the lesson of the
uncanny.
If the uncanny, in its ghostly appearance, can be provisionally defined
as an unmastered force which passes between life and death, crossing
the boundary human rationality establishes between these two domains,
it represents that which exceeds the control of the agents of reason, that
which blinds those who possess even the strongest “lenses” with which to
observe and classify the world and its inhabitants. Thus it is not surprising
that even the faithful Siegmund cannot control Nathaniel’s madness
when the latter discovers that Olympia is an artificial creature: “Strong
though he was, Siegmund was unable to restrain the madman [Siegmund,
so stark er war, vermochte nicht den Rasenden zu bändigen], who continued to cry
in a fearsome voice ‘Spin, puppet, spin!’” (TS ; DS ). This is the
moment in Hoffmann’s story which must have been the most fearsome
for Freud, and the most uncanny, in the sense that a fictional character
possessing his own prized qualities – analytical insight, ethical demeanor,
the capacity for male friendship – is not able to control his “patient,” is not
capable of substituting for the “spinning” words of Nathaniel a logical line
of reasoning that would reestablish the boundaries of the real for a young
man falling into madness. The uncanniness is all the more uncanny, so to
speak, in that the fictional character and the distinguished practitioner
of the healing arts possess the same name, the only difference being that
the fictional Siegmund has all the letters necessary to enunciate the
symbolic value of Freud’s name: namely, the man who achieves victory
(Sieg) through the mouth (Mund ). This, of course, is the dream of Freud
the psychoanalyst – to gain victory over the dangerous fragmentation of
the human mind, to put back together the dismantled psyche, through
the power of the word, through the “talking cure.” But Freud’s problem in
, just as he is about to make what he thinks is an important theoretical
breakthrough (the discovery of the repetition compulsion, of the death
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
instinct), just as he is about to achieve another intellectual victory, is that
the very text which anticipates his essay “Das Unheimliche” (and in many
ways also, Beyond the Pleasure Principle) inscribes within its pages the final
defeat of the analyst, his undoing when faced with a mental complexity
and instability that threaten the foundation of his scientific project.

V THE OUTERMOST FRAME AND THE INNERMOST FRAMED

Put succinctly, one could conclude that the most striking result of a close
reading of “Der Sandmann” is a reversal of narrative frames. Whereas
Freud set out to use Hoffmann’s novella as one example among several of
the uncanny, thereby enclosing it within his own conceptual framework,
the textual uncanniness of “Der Sandmann” consists in anticipating,
ironizing, and enclosing Freud within its own strange narrative logic,
mirroring him in the figures of Clara and his eponymous Doppelgänger,
Siegmund. Like Der Zerrissene with its trap-doors, “Der Sandmann” con-
tains depths below depths into which the psychoanalyst gazes, only to
discover a distorted image of himself. There is, in a general sense, a
relation of analogy that obtains between the defeated would-be victor
Siegmund and Sigmund Freud, and this relation, at the unconscious
level, is at the origin of the seismic disruptions and hesitations that char-
acterize “Das Unheimliche” as an essay attempting but not succeeding
to master its own logical movement. But the uncanny linkages are not
limited to textual generality: they extend into the realm of the particular
and the real, into the real-world context in which Freud sat down to
write “Das Unheimliche.” To be more precise: the problem of victory
and defeat which emerges from a confrontation of “Das Unheimliche”
with “Der Sandmann” is also the problem that haunts Freud in his life
and at the farthest margins of his  essay, at the edges of the frame
that encloses his meditation on the uncanny within the Gesammelte Werke
and the Standard Edition as they appear to us today, in their bound and
definitive forms. I refer to the presence, at the end of both the German
and English volumes within which “Das Unheimliche” appears, of two
necrologies, two homages to adherents of Freud’s new discipline who
died during the Great War, and who are praised for their respective
contributions to the emerging field of psychoanalysis. They are James J.
Putnam and Victor Tausk. They, like Hoffmann’s Siegmund, mirror
Freud, but from the referential sphere, from an extra-textual area that
impinges, uncannily, on Freud’s essay and on his double obsession with
death and with victory.
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
The outermost frame: Putnam, Tausk, and Freud
The “Gedenkworte” (“memorial words”) devoted to Putnam and Tausk
were contributed, unsigned, by the editorial committee of the Interna-
tionale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and were included in the fifth volume
of that periodical () before being placed at the conclusion of vol-
ume XII of the Gesammelte Werke (–) (hereafter GW ) and volume
XVII of the Standard Edition (–)(hereafter SE ). Putnam and Tausk
appear as similar-but-different Doppelgänger. They are said to have pos-
sessed the same essential qualities, as representatives of the new science
of psychoanalysis (they were both compulsive achievers; they were lucid
in their analytical insight; they contributed to the diffusion of psycho-
analysis through distinguished publications and faithful membership in
international organizations). They were, in a sense, brothers in the faith,
separated by geography but brought together by a common belief in a
no-longer fledgling discipline. At the same time, however, the writer(s)
of the necrologies make clear that Putnam was the good brother, while
Tausk was the black sheep. In the most general terms, here are the
differences between the two men:

 . Putnam died a natural death at age , while Tausk committed suicide
at  (in , Freud himself was , closer in age to Putnam, closer
to the time at which one might expect or fear a natural death).
. Putnam’s career was characterized by a smooth progression. He be-
gan as a neurologist, then gradually embraced the new science of
psychoanalysis, and became the esteemed president of the “pan-
American psycho-analytic group” (SE XVII,  ). Tausk’s life was a
series of fits and starts. He was, successively: a magistrate in Bosnia, a
journalist in Berlin, an M.D. in Vienna, a participant in the War on the
German side, and finally, a mentally unstable person whose idiosyn-
cratic nervosity was seen as disruptive at the  Budapest Congress
on Psychoanalysis, and as a harbinger of his suicide one year later.
. The word “Würdigung” appears twice in the homage to Putnam
(GW XII, ), once to describe the esteem in which he was held by
his colleagues, and another time to foreshadow the appreciation or
evaluation of his writings on psychoanalysis which would be con-
tributed soon to the Internationale Zeitschrift by Ernest Jones. The clarity
and richness of his thought, the decisiveness of his engagement in the
international movement around Freud, go hand in hand, therefore,
with an “unimpeachable character” (SE XVII,  ). Tausk was valued
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
for “his straightforward character, his honesty towards himself and
towards others,” but his “passionate temperament found expression
in sharp, and sometimes too sharp, criticisms” (SE XVII ). In the
ethical balance, Tausk thus falls short of his Doppelgänger’s calm and
judicious demeanor.
. Putnam’s homage is shorter than Tausk’s, partly because Jones’s
forthcoming evaluation of the former’s works renders a detailed dis-
cussion of his ideas in the context of the “Gedenkwort” superfluous,
and partly because Putnam is pictured as a “man of one piece,”
whereas the divided (i.e. zerrissene) Tausk requires a more subtle, more
differentiated, description. There is one passage in Tausk’s necrology
which stands out as particularly nuancé, and which relates uncannily
to the central problematic of “Das Unheimliche” and to the driving
narrative force (Trieb, Drang) of Hoffmann’s novella as well. It concerns
Tausk’s ambition to combine philosophy with psychoanalysis, to give
a philosophical grounding to psychoanalytic observation:
His [Tausk’s] strong need to establish things on a philosophical foundation and
to achieve epistemological clarity compelled him to formulate, and seek as well
to master, the whole profundity and comprehensive meaning of the very difficult
problems involved. Perhaps he sometimes went too far in this direction, in his
impetuous urge for investigation [In seinem ungestümen Forscherdrang]. Perhaps the
time was not yet ripe for laying such general foundations as these for the young
science of psycho-analysis. (SE XVII, ; GW XII, )
Once again, we find the leitmotiv of the “impetuous urge” with which
Freud initiated his essay on the uncanny (the Antrieb to explore the foreign
territory of aesthetics) and which punctuates the entirety of “Der Sand-
mann.” As reader of the two necrologies, Freud had to wonder whether
he resembled Putnam or Tausk – which is to say, either a man of matu-
rity and ripened insights whose death, at , provided natural closure
to a life of manifold scholarly and ethical contributions; or an individ-
ual whose multiple careers, divided allegiances, premature drive toward
theoretical founding or grounding, and eventual suicide at , conjure
up a picture of incompleteness, of unredeemable fragmentation. Victor
Tausk, like Hoffmann’s Siegmund, is named for victory; yet he “achieves”
only defeat. He is the failed would-be philosopher of psychoanalysis,
the man guilty of what could be called theoria praecox. In this sense, his
is a most uncomfortable image for Freud to contemplate at the precise
moment the founder of psychoanalysis is about to initiate a complex and
counter - intuitive new theory – that of the “death instinct.” In ,
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
Freud had to wonder whether this new theory was destined to enjoy the
same eventual Würdigung by his disciples as his revolutionary conception
of dreams and his ground-breaking re-evaluation of the significance of
human sexuality in its earliest stages. What if the grand theory of the
“repetition compulsion” and the “death instinct” were to be formulated,
in  and , in a precipitous manner? What if Freud was about to
go too far and act before the time was ripe ? If this were the case, he
would most certainly resemble the failed non-victor Tausk more than
the successful and mature Putnam. Freud’s discomfort could only have
been exacerbated by the fact that Tausk, in his Forscherdrang, in the rep-
etitiousness of his immature and premature drives, in his final suicide,
also resembles Nathaniel. Looking deep into the necrologies, Freud therefore
finds himself, in double form: as a failed analyst and as a madman.
We know, from the biographical evidence, that Freud’s relation to
Tausk was delicate from the first, convoluted in its development, and
highly troubled in the end. In “Freud and the Sandman,” via a concise
summary of Paul Roazen’s Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk,
Neil Hertz addresses the issue of Freud’s possible guilt feelings vis-à-vis
his younger colleague, feelings which could have arisen from Freud’s
refusal to be Tausk’s analyst, from his decision to entrust the latter’s care
to a less experienced disciple, Helene Deutsch, who, it so happened,
was being analyzed by Freud at the time. A not-so-salubrious situation
ensued, wherein Freud’s sessions with Deutsch were consumed with talk
of Tausk, while Deutsch and Tausk talked about Freud. In the end,
Freud convinced Deutsch to terminate Tausk’s treatment, and it was
not long thereafter that Tausk committed suicide. Roazen is intrigued
by the possible crossover between Freud’s theoretical ideas in  and
the real-life conflict between Freud and Tausk. He wonders whether
Tausk might have been “acting out Freud’s newest, or even just barely
burgeoning idea,” or whether “the notion of a death instinct represen-
ted another way for Freud to deny any responsibility for Tausk’s situ-
ation.” At this juncture, Hertz intervenes judiciously, with the following
observation:
Well, we know the notion of a death instinct represents considerably more than
that in the economy of Freud’s thought, and we may find it easier, at this point,
to pull free: there is nothing like a reductive interpretation to break the spell of
a fascinating anecdote. ()

At one level, Hertz’s comment is well taken and of fundamental im-

portance for literary studies. Roazen’s naively formulated idea that there
could be a direct causal relation between a fact or event in Freud’s life
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
and a complex theoretical statement is, of course, “reductive” and dan-
gerous, in that it establishes a simple and crudely mimetic one-to-one
correspondence between the real and the process of theorization: Freud
was interested in the strange notion of a “death instinct”; Tausk suc-
cumbed to an impetuous death drive; Freud felt guilty about Tausk’s
death; therefore the Todestrieb as such derives from Freud’s guilt about
Tausk. Such a pseudo-syllogistic pattern of “reasoning” is quite reduc-
tive indeed, and in this respect one can only agree with Hertz. At the
same time, however, if one confines oneself to the way in which the refe-
rential sphere impinges upon the textual without succumbing to the
temptation of using Freud’s “guilt” as an all-encompassing explanatory
foundation, one is compelled (!) to note that the unsettling resemblance
of Freud to Tausk mirrors, in an uncanny way, the discomforting resem-
blance of Freud to Nathaniel, and in this sense, das Unheimliche in its most
diabolical form would be the odd, distorted, but spell-binding extension
of the real into the depths of the textual. Although Hertz is quite con-
vincing in his argument against interpretive reductiveness (and one is
certainly in more secure territory, hermeneutically speaking, with Hertz
than with Roazen), his desire to “break the spell” of the “fascinating,”
however admirable in its ethical intention, imitates the gesture of con-
ceptual purification with which Freud attempts, repeatedly, to reduce das
Unheimliche to a “sub-species” of das Heimliche, to bring it back to a clearly
delineated, theoretically circumscribed haven. We will never know with
any degree of certainty about Freud’s feelings of guilt (or lack thereof ) for
Tausk’s death; but I am suggesting that the Putnam-Tausk paratext, in
its function as frame for “Das Unheimliche,” brings the real perilously
and diabolically close to Freud’s unconscious anxieties as reader of “Der
Sandmann,” thereby adding a layer of resonance to what is already a
textual echo-chamber of uncontrollable uncanny effects. In sum: Freud is
everywhere implicated, everywhere involved and inscribed. Everywhere
he looks, he sees himself; and the mirrors point both beyond the texts
he reads and writes and deep into them. Both far outside and abysmally
deep inside, he finds multiple brothers, a procession of real and fictional
associates from whom he would like to dissociate himself, but whose
“spell” entrances him into an unsettling connivance.

The innermost framed: Oedipus before theory

Outside the borders of “Das Unheimliche” as theoretical essay lies the
territory of real-world fraternal resemblance-and-difference, in the form
of the Doppelgänger Putnam and Tausk. Inside the essay one finds two
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
sets of brothers as well: Lothario–Nathaniel, and Siegmund–Nathaniel.
Lothario provides active resistance to Nathaniel’s threatening violence by
saving Clara from death in the tower scene; and Siegmund furnishes an
intellectually formed, clear-sighted analytical opposition to Nathaniel’s
poetic excesses and eventual folly. As I now conclude, I would like to take
a final interpretive step toward that which, in my view, resides farthest
inside Freud’s unsettled essay: namely, the figure of Oedipus, a personage
also accompanied by a Doppelgänger, an infamous and tragic literary hero
whose legendary territory is that of the deceptively homelike non-home –
precisely and terrifyingly the unwelcoming realm of the uncanny.
Like many ancient dramas, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (c.  B.C.) is
based upon what, in today’s terminology, we would call a “conservative”
message: the necessity of counteracting the faithlessness of a people, of
restoring its belief in the prophecies and oracles of the gods. The fall into
unbelief has spawned the gods’ anger, which manifests itself in natural
disasters of all kinds, in the barrenness of the land and of its inhabitants.
It is in this situation of desolation that the play begins. The plot in its
unfolding reveals that Oedipus is the cause of these calamities, and he
will be the scapegoat whose expulsion beyond the city walls allows for a
return to normalcy – which means adherence to religion as the ultimate
guarantor of fertility and of political and social continuity. The Chorus,
with its collective “I,” expresses the problem cogently as it bemoans the
current sad state of affairs (as things stand before Oedipus’s entry into
the paradoxical darkness of blind self- knowledge):
No longer to the holy place,
to the navel of earth I’ll go
to worship, nor to Abae
nor to Olympia,
unless the oracles are proved to fit,
for all men’s hands to point at.
O Zeus, if you are rightly called
the sovereign lord, all-mastering,
let this not escape you nor your ever-living power!
The oracles concerning Laius
are old and dim and men regard them not.
Apollo is nowhere clear in honour; God’s service perishes. (–)

The Chorus’s plea is for the god of gods, Zeus, to restore the central
place of religion in the people by rendering manifest, in plain intelligi-
ble signs, the meaning of his prophets’ oracular pronouncements. What
has been lacking of late is the kind of sign “for all men’s hands to point
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
at” – i.e., a message that does not lend itself to misinterpretation and to
confusion. In Oedipus the King there are two moments of special hermeneu-
tic intensity. The first occurs before the action of the play proper, when
Oedipus deciphers the riddle of the Sphinx; and the second takes place
when the protagonist finally understands the meaning of the “oracles
concerning Laius” and his own tragic deeds as his father’s murderer and
his mother’s incestuous spouse. From the beginning of the play Oedipus
is an agnostic as far as traditional oracular wisdom is concerned. He
does not give credence to what he considers to be the superstitious be-
liefs of established religion, the pronouncements of seers who rely upon
the entrails of animals to signal future events in the world. It is precisely
in his role as decipherer of riddles that Oedipus opposes himself to the
tradition, in that he uses only his reason, his rational clear-sightedness, to
discover that the animal that walks on four “legs” in the morning, two at
noon, and three in the evening, is man. His mistaken preconception, as
the drama begins, is that this same capacity for reasonable thought will
allow him to discover clues that will lead to apprehending the man whose
crime has polluted the city. As Alain Robbe-Grillet wittily demonstrated
in his experimental novel Les Gommes [The Erasers](), Oedipus, before
his self-revelation, is essentially a detective.
But what gift of intelligence does it take, in fact, to decipher the
Sphinx’s riddle? Not so much reason, that mental capacity which permits
one to proceed naturally and inevitably from cause to effect, as a kind of
imagination or poetic intuition that allows one to understand the nature
of metaphorical language – in this case, the fact that the third “leg” re-
ferred to in the riddle is a cane, a false, artificial appendage, an Anhang
that is added on to the human body, that is attached to it metonymi-
cally, that resembles it but does not share its organic properties. Rather
than heed the resonance of signs at the gods’ dwelling in Olympia,
Oedipus is an artificer who, like Spalanzani and his creation of a false doll
named Olympia, is possessed of the hubris of the scientist, of the human
who reaches too far in his intellectual agon with the gods. Within every
would-be scientist, every rational being, within every Sigmund Freud,
there resides a poetic gift which, if taken too far or developed before its
time, can lead far beyond rational/theoretical knowledge and toward
the abyss of madness.
What is it that Oedipus does not know at the beginning of the play?
His crimes, of course, but also, most crucially, his origins. He is a man
who has found his home prematurely, before his time. He has made
an unfortunate, criminal incursion into a territory that is more familiar
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
than his clear consciousness recognizes. His Doppelgänger, Tiresias, the
man who is blind but sees (whereas Oedipus is the one who, in his initial
ill-conceived rationality, sees but is blind), reveals to him quite early in
the proceedings that the man who needs to be punished for the city to
regain its health is a Theban-but-also-foreigner, a man who is, uncannily,
both at home and away from home in his current place:
I tell you, King, this man, this murderer,
(whom you have long declared you are in search of,
indicting him in threatening proclamation
as murderer of Laius) – he is here.
In name he is a stranger among citizens
but soon he will be shown to be a citizen
true native Theban, and he’ll have no joy
of the discovery: blindness for sight
and beggary for riches his exchange,
he shall go journeying to a foreign country
tapping his way before him with a stick.
He shall be proved father and brother both
to his own children in his house; to her
that gave him birth, a son and husband both;
a fellow sower in his father’s bed
with that same father that he murdered.
Go within, reckon that out, and if you find me
mistaken, say I have no skill in prophecy. ()
The last two lines of Tiresias’s speech establish, with evident irony,
a clear dichotomy between the “reckoning out” (unriddling) of which
Oedipus is capable and the art of prophecy, which the unfortunate
protagonist, unlike his blind interlocutor, is far from possessing. What
Oedipus cannot understand is uncanniness, Unheimlichkeit in its various
diabolical forms: a son who is also a father; a mother who is also a lover;
a “sowing” which repeats, but in the mode of the unnatural, the very
“sowing” that begot him; an adopted land (Thebes) that is, in fact, a
native land (which replaces a false native land [Corinth] that turns out,
in retrospect, to have been an adopted land). And underlying all these
doublings, all this complicated and unsettling interchange of curiously
related elements, is one small and haunting detail. Oedipus’s imagina-
tive “discovery” of the meaning of the third leg as cane, which allowed
him to escape death in the claws of the Sphinx, belongs to a prophetic self-
understanding at the unconscious level in that, when he is driven from Thebes,
he will “go journeying to a foreign country / tapping his way before
 Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” 
him with a stick,” accompanied by his faithful daughter Antigone. The
cane which was necessary for the solving of a riddle worthy of a parlor-
game was meant for Oedipus himself, as an individual. The person who
finds an answer as noble as “man” to the riddle of existence is himself
subject to dark laws that exceed his ability to reason, that inscribe his
destiny in an eternal wandering.
The true home of Oedipus is neither Corinth nor Thebes: it is Mount
Cithaeron, where he was abandoned by his parents, who, fearing the
oracle, left their son alone to die. Oedipus’ life, between the moment
of his abandonment and his discovery of the truth, is a long reprieve, a
life-in-death which is ghostly, uncanny. This reprieve has allowed him
to participate in human activities – to reign as king, to have children –
but his is a usurped crown and his are unnatural progeny, destined for
rejection by society, for deprivation and eternal exclusion. Antigone can
only accompany the blind-but-lucid man as he taps his way, on three
legs, toward the next city.
In conclusion, then, beneath “Das Unheimliche,” “Der Sandmann,”
and the theme of blindness/castration is Oedipus the King and the self-
blinding of a man whose faith in reason alone ran up against the un-
canniness of death-in-life. Freud’s “Oedipus complex” is a cornerstone
of his theoretical edifice, and, in his capacity as theorist, Freud is in a
position to abstract himself from the human condition, to step momen-
tarily outside its bounds and show what he believes to be its psychological
truth: that all of us, as members of families, belong to, suffer from this
“complex,” which proves to be a fecund explanatory model. At the same
time, however, while about to contribute further theoretical insight into
human behavior – by laying bare the presence of a “repetition com-
pulsion” and a “death instinct” – Freud could no longer keep his dis-
tance, and fell into the Dränge and Triebe that he himself was attempting to
delimit conceptually. Reading through and beyond “Der Sandmann,”
Freud could only find himself, again, back with Oedipus. But this time,
at the unconscious level, he had to identify with the Greek tragic hero, a
figure whose rational abilities are undone by uncanniness and who, hav-
ing found what he thought was his home, was un-homed by final exile.
When, in his own years of English exile, Freud would compare himself to
Oedipus and his daughter Anna to Antigone, he experienced more than
the small pleasure others derive from literary allusion. Freud, through
“Das Unheimliche,” “Der Sandmann,” and Oedipus the King, here evoked
something far more terrifying than the mind of a scientific thinker would
 Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit
like to face: namely, the fear that the unriddling investigation of nature
or human nature is itself a pact with the devil, a form of unnatural med-
dling which will call forth the revenge of the supernatural in its most
primitive and devastating form – in the lifeless barrenness, the fruitless
artifice ushered in by the uncanny, that strange but familiar place where
only death is at home.
 P A R T II

The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction

 CHAPTER 

Aesthetic redemption: the thyrsus in Nietzsche,

Baudelaire, and Wagner

I POETRY AND IMAGINATIVE SYMPATHY

In the first three chapters of this book, I have presented the interplay of
the ethical and the aesthetic as a series of envelopments and overlappings
whereby now the one field, now the other achieves (temporary) domi-
nance. In the Kantian system, although the aesthetic occupies its own
distinct space as the self-standing Third Critique, the ethical inhabits it
and haunts it, most obviously in the theory of the sublime. And even
within the austere pages of the Second Critique, where the ethical holds
sway, the aesthetic emerges at the moment at which Kant pauses to con-
template the structural beauty of his conceptual edifice. In Kierkegaard’s
Either/Or, the ethical and the aesthetic are set up as equally powerful al-
ternative domains: it is up to us as readers to make the difficult, perhaps
impossible decision, as to which of these two territories should engage
our final assent or adhesion. Reading through E. T. A. Hoffmann into
the depths of the Oedipus myth, Freud, like Kierkegaard, finds the ethi-
cal located in nature and in the domestic sphere, whereas the aesthetic
erupts in the uncanny and sterile manipulations of techné. In each of these
cases, the aesthetic appears as that subterranean and potentially diabo-
lical force which constitutes a danger for the ethical; on this view, the
ethical expresses itself in lawful, Mosaic injunctions and acts as a control
mechanism working against the disruptions of the aesthetic.
The pattern I am describing will emerge, in various forms, throughout
this book, and constitutes one of the principal leitmotive of my textual
analyses. Yet it would be a sin against the complexity of intellectual
history to assert that the relations of the ethical to the aesthetic can be
reduced to the alternating rhythms I have just evoked, and that the two
domains necessarily coexist agonistically, in a never-ending movement of
narrative framings and unframings. There are moments in which either
the ethical or the aesthetic is foregrounded with such power that the other


 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
territory tends to disappear altogether, or to be in some way subsumed.
The most obvious example of this is when all pretense to the achievement
of artistic form is cancelled by a heavy-handed didactic or moral message,
as in the oxymoronic “Nazi art” of Hitler’s period, or in Soviet Realism.
When the boot of moral violence tramples the aesthetic and kills it, it is
not difficult, for readers unblinded by the political system that produces
such kitsch, to recognize and lament the demise of art as such. The
opposite situation – in which the territory of the aesthetic is said to
constitute, in and of itself, a more fundamental morality than the mora-
lity of laws and commandments – is more interesting, more complex,
and worthy of critical scrutiny. This is precisely what occurs during the
maturation of Romanticism, when the theme of the poetic imagination
takes center-stage in the reflections of that period’s theoretically inclined
writers.
Conceived as a rejoinder to Thomas Love Peacock’s The Four Ages of
Poetry in  , but not published until , Shelley’s A Defence of Po-
etry presents the creative imagination as a form of sympathy that binds
the poet to his fellow humans, to nature, and to his social environment,
and in so doing enriches him morally. Shelley asserts that this form of
enrichment precedes the codification of ethical precepts and laws and is
more fundamental to the moral improvement of the individual than are
these retroactively imposed rigid codes. On this view, Kant would doubt-
less appear as a Prussian schoolmaster, as formidable in his cold rational-
ity as the frosty compass-wielding Urizen in Blake’s imagined universe.
This is Shelley’s conception of the primordially constituted ethical
dimension of the aesthetic:
The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a miscon-
ception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement
of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and
propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life; nor is it
for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and
deceive, and subjugate one another. But Poetry acts in another and diviner
manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering the receptacle
of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil
from the hidden beauty of the world . . . The great secret of morals is love;
or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the
beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to
be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put
himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of
his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the
imagination.
 Aesthetic redemption: Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner 
The awakening of the mind by poetry thus stands at the beginning
of the moral education of the human being: the rationally organized
laws and negative commandments come afterward, and can be seen
as a perversion of the sympathy one human feels for another through
the power of poetic discourse. Implicit in Shelley’s argument is a notion
that will be developed at some length in the works of Nietzsche and
Heidegger: namely, that the language of poetry is ontologically prior to the
language of concepts – which is to say, the language of philosophy in
its classical idiom. As we shall see later in this chapter, in The Birth of
Tragedy () Nietzsche attempts to uncover the original Bildersprache
that tells the story of Apollo and Dionysos before Socratic philosophy
repressed and covered over this metaphorically elaborated story with
a conceptual veneer. In the same way, in his “Letter on Humanism”
(), Heidegger reflects on the necessity of “a thinking more rigorous
than the conceptual” () that would open up to the individual the
hermeneutical possibility of questioning the truth of Being, of initiating
a fundamental inquiry in a language that would be uncontaminated
by the scholastic accretions of philosophical discourse in its academic-
disciplinary form. What is being postulated, in both cases, is a return
to the intimacy and immediacy of poetic discourse (in Shelley’s terms:
the particular discourse born of the sympathetic imagination), to the
strange-but-familiar place that resides prior to the elaboration of ethics
as a philosophical system and prior to the theoretical reduction of the
aesthetic to the benign stasis of the disinterested gaze.
When Shelley states that the poet “must put himself in the place of
another and of many others,” he is not just enunciating an ethical the-
ory based upon sympathy, but is, in fact, delineating one of the primary
ways in which Romantic intertextuality functions. The era of Romanti-
cism sees a multiplication of homages, dedicatory prefaces, and artistic
salutes directed from one maker of texts to another, along with a remark-
able development of collaborative writing and composing. Throughout
the nineteenth century writers, painters, and musicians allow themselves
to be inhabited or haunted by their immediate predecessors and contem-
poraries; the notion of sympathy is not some vague formula, but amounts
to the very état d’esprit that presides over artistic creation as such. Yet in
the very act of paying homage, at the very moment in which one author
points outside him- or herself toward the human community, one finds
also a critical reflection on what separates the second creator of texts from
the first. In other words, in Romanticism there is also a thorough develop-
ment of what we now call literary theory. The tension between poetic
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
sympathy and critical distance can be expressed, with some economy, by
the juxtaposition of statements made by an early Romantic and a late
Romantic writer, each of whom created works of fiction and also wrote
important theoretical essays: Friedrich Schlegel and Charles Baudelaire.
In the passages that follow, both writers seek to describe what the act of
criticism should be, and both see criticism as occupying an important
position within literature. There is, however, a subtle difference in em-
phasis and in tone in the two texts. Schlegel, like Shelley, underlines the
necessary sense of sympathetic identification between the latecomer and
the poet he seeks to understand. Baudelaire, on the other hand, asserts
that the act of criticism originates in a rupture or “crisis,” in a moment
of disassociation of the interpretive reader from the creative writer he
scrutinizes. Schlegel writes, in :
Poetry can be criticized only through poetry. A critique which itself is not a
work of art, either in content as representation of the necessary impression in
the process of creation, or through its beautiful form and in the liberal tone in
the spirit of the old Roman satire, has no right of citizenship in the realm of art.
And this is Baudelaire in  :
It would be a novel event in the history of the arts if a critic should become a
poet, a reversal of all psychological laws, a monstrosity; on the contrary, all great
poets become naturally, inevitably critics. I pity those poets who are guided only
by instinct; I believe them to be incomplete. In the spiritual life of the former
[great poets] a crisis invariably occurs, in which they desire to reason about their
art, to discover the obscure laws by means of which they have created, and to
draw from this study a series of precepts whose divine goal would be infallibility
in poetic production. It would be prodigious for a critic to become a poet, and
it is impossible for a poet not to contain within himself a critic.
In this chapter, I shall turn my attention toward the period of late
Romanticism, when the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk dominated continen-
tal Europe not only in concert halls, but also in theoretical discussions
about the interrelations of the arts. I shall examine selected writings of
Nietzsche and Baudelaire that originated in an act of sympathetic lite-
rary homage – Nietzsche toward Wagner, and Baudelaire ostensibly
toward Liszt, though on a deeper level also toward Wagner. At the center
of my analysis will be Wagner and Liszt as human figures toward which
the texts of Nietzsche and Baudelaire direct their intentional energy.
At the same time, however, I shall be concerned with the poetic figure
of the thyrsus, which is evoked by Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner at
crucial points of articulation in their respective works. The thyrsus – a
 Aesthetic redemption: Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner 
staff tipped with a pine cone and entwined with ivy or vine leaves – is
the emblem of Dionysos. The thyrsus conjures poetry in an act of the
sympathetic imagination, but it also engenders theoretical discourse on
and in poetry. It is to this double function of the thyrsus, and to a fur-
ther investigation of the sense of theory as it emerges from within poetic
discourse, that this chapter will be devoted.
The thyrsus, which Dionysos agitated so that his followers might con-
gregate around him orgiastically, becomes an emblem of Romantic dis-
course (both philosophical and literary) and is used to bring together a
community of like-minded aesthetically inclined acolytes. The thyrsus
figures the notion of aesthetic redemption. The territory of the aesthetic is no
longer the Kantian domain of contemplation at a distance, but rather a
field of passionate encounter between work and reader, or music and per-
former, in which art promises nothing less than release from phenomenal
reality and earthly travail.

II NIETZSCHE’S VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF REDEMPTION

Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, is an overt act of homage to

the genius of Richard Wagner. The complex dialectical play of the Apol-
lonian and Dionysian forces which Nietzsche sees as engendering Attic
tragedy is directed teleologically toward the figure of Wagner, who, in
his Gesamtkunstwerk, has synthesized these forces and afforded them a “re-
birth” in the fusion of the visual and musical arts. Nietzsche’s labyrinthine
demonstration, which borrows a great deal of its conceptual ammuni-
tion from the philosophy of Schopenhauer, is, however, framed by a
short introductory essay written in  and entitled “Versuch einer
Selbstkritik”[“A Critical Backward Glance”]. Here, Nietzsche concludes
that his youthful enthusiasm for Wagner was misdirected, that the music
of Wagner is nothing but German Romanticism (both of these words
possess uniquely negative connotations in the vocabulary of the late
Nietzsche), and that the question of how modern music might become
truly Dionysian remains unresolved. The reader of The Birth of Tragedy
is in a somewhat unenviable position from the outset, in that he or
she is about to embark upon a dizzying dialectical journey with the
foreknowledge that this journey’s goal is false, that the god adored in
 has become (to use good Nietzschean terminology) a mere idol
in .
Nietzsche’s rejection of Wagner is not the simple result of a change in
musical taste (the emphatic praise of Bizet’s Carmen in the opening lines of
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
The Case of Wagner [], for example, is to be taken with several grains
of salt). I shall argue that Nietzsche’s turn away from Wagner, which
Heidegger, in , called “the necessary turning point of our history,” 
was, in fact, a rejection of synthesizing dialectical reasoning as such. What
is “wrong” in The Birth of Tragedy is not just that the admiring Nietzsche
fell into the trap of idolizing a master of masks and theatrical deception
whose narrow Germanness and strident anti-Semitism he grew to detest,
but that the young philosopher’s own mode of argumentation was in itself,
and from the beginning, fundamentally flawed. Nietzsche’s critical back-
ward glance allows him to see that, despite his polemic against Socrates
in his early work, he was himself proceeding far too Socratically –
that is, dialectically. He was attacking the enemy using the enemy’s arms,
and he was succumbing to the great temptation of all dialecticians: that
of reconciling opposites in a final, uplifting synthetic unity.
Like Nietzsche, I have framed my discussion with a proleptic indica-
tion of the direction in which my own argument is to proceed. However,
before moving too far ahead in the direction of Nietzsche’s rejection of
Wagner, I propose to concentrate my attention on two passages from
The Birth of Tragedy that are constructed on the kind of reasoning that
Nietzsche was later to find suspect: the very first paragraph of the work,
in which the Apollonian–Dionysian duality is introduced, and the con-
clusion of section , which relates the triumph of the Dionysian spirit
while invoking the figure of the thyrsus. Let us begin with the beginning,
with the paragraph that foreshadows and encapsulates the remainder of
the treatise:

Much will have been gained for esthetics once we have succeeded in apprehend-
ing directly – rather than merely ascertaining [wenn wir nicht nur zur logischen Einsicht,
sondern zur unmittelbaren Sicherheit der Anschauung gekommen sind] – that art owes its
continuous evolution to the Apollonian–Dionysiac duality, even as the propa-
gation of the species depends on the duality of the sexes, their constant conflicts
and periodic acts of reconciliation [Versöhnung]. I have borrowed my adjectives
from the Greeks, who developed their mystical doctrines of art through plaus-
ible embodiments [Gestalten ihrer Götterwelt], not through purely conceptual means
[in Begriffen]. It is by those two art-sponsoring deities, Apollo and Dionysos,
that we are made to recognize the tremendous split, as regards both origins
and objectives, between the plastic, Apollonian arts [zwischen der Kunst des
Bildners, der apollinischen] and the non-visual art of music inspired by Dionysos
[und der unbildlichen Kunst der Musik, als der des Dionysus]. The two creative tenden-
cies [Triebe] developed alongside one another, usually in fierce opposition [im
offnen Zwiespalt], each by its taunts forcing the other to more energetic produc-
tion [zu immer neuen kräftigeren Geburten reizend], both perpetuating in a discordant
 Aesthetic redemption: Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner 
concord that agon which the term art but feebly denominates: until at last, by
the thaumaturgy of an Hellenic act of will [durch einen metaphysischen Wunderakt
des hellenischen “Willens” ], the pair accepted the yoke of marriage and, in this
condition [in dieser Paarung], begot Attic tragedy, which exhibits the salient
features of both parents [das ebenso dionysische als apollinische Kunstwerk der attischen
Tragödie erzeugen]. (BT ; GT –) 

The primary tension (in Nietzschean terms: Zwiespalt) that inhabits

The Birth of Tragedy emerges clearly in this first paragraph. The problem
is that Nietzsche wishes not to conduct a logical argument in the usual
style of classical philosophy (with concepts, in Begriffen), but to arrive at
an unmediated certainty, using the “plausible embodiments” he derives
from the ancient Greek world – figures of the gods which, in an important
sense, antedate concepts as such. According to the Nietzschean view of
historical development, before there was dialectics (before the advent of
Socratic philosophy, Socratic irony, and the Platonic dialogue) there was
mythology; and the central mythic figures that interest him here, Apollo
and Dionysos, can be seen to engage in a primary struggle out of which
Greek tragedy will arise. In the simplest schematic terms, the progression
of the treatise as a whole runs as follows:  ) the world of myth, of Apollo
and Dionysos, begets Attic tragedy, notably the dramas of Aeschylus
and Sophocles; ) authentic tragedy degenerates into the merely repre-
sentational (no longer mythic, no longer religiously profound) theater of
Euripides, who has fallen prey to the rational perspective of Socratic phi-
losophy; and ) the moribund mimetic arts are finally uplifted, aufgehoben,
by Wagnerian opera, which rediscovers the force and value of myth in
its newly created fusion of the arts. This movement is, of course, that of
classical dialectics: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, in which the movement
(or work, or “strain”) of negation – in Hegel’s vocabulary, die Anstrengung
des Begriffs – culminates in a final reconciliation (Versöhnung) of contraries
at a higher level. Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk recapitulates the values of
Greek tragedy and synthesizes them at the advanced level of our moder-
nity (which is, of course, in its most authentic dimension, a rediscovered
antiquity).
One sees Nietzsche’s problem, which is a consequential one. In the
first paragraph of his work he tells his readers that he will be delving into
a mythic world, which is, in its essence, pre-logical, pre-philosophical. To
describe this world, Nietzsche resorts to metaphor, notably the metaphor
of sexual union (propagation, the “pairing” of masculine and feminine
principles, the “begetting” of tragedy). But he envelops his metaphorical
discourse within the framework of an overarching dialectical scheme.
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
Apollo and Dionysos, figures of myth and of metaphor, become trapped
within philosophy, within the kind of “logical insight” which Nietzsche
wished to supersede in an unmediated vision of mythic truth. Apollo
and Dionysos, initially Gestalten or Bilder in the Greek realm of myth,
become convenient illustrations, allegorical pseudo-concepts in a ratio-
nal argument.
Nietzsche’s dialectical method is further complicated by the fact that
the second, antithetical stage of the process (the degeneration of tragedy
into the mere representation of the “life-like,” an art of trompe l’oeil and of
rational clear-sightedness) resembles, in a degraded form, the category
of the Apollonian. In one of his most cogent juxtapositions of the
Apollonian to the Dionysian, Nietzsche makes the following distinction:
[Apollo and Dionysos] represent to me, most vividly and concretely, two radi-
cally dissimilar realms of art. Apollo embodies the transcendent genius of the
principium individuationis; through him alone is it possible to achieve redemption
in illusion [Erlösung im Scheine]. The mystical jubilation of Dionysos, on the other
hand, breaks the spell of individuation and opens a path to the maternal womb
of being [während unter dem mystischen Jubelruf des Dionysus der Bann der Individuation
zersprengt wird und der Weg zu den Müttern des Sein’s, zu dem innersten Kern der Dinge
offen liegt]. (BT ; GT )
What has happened with the advent of Socratic philosophy and
Euripidean drama is that the “principle of individuation” which, at the
transcendent level of the Apollonian, is said to lead to “redemption in
illusion,” has been counterfeited and brought down to the level of simple
mimesis, to the status of imitative characterization. Socrates becomes an
unheimlich double of Apollo, and his usurpation of the Apollonian prin-
ciple of individuation leads to the near-disappearance of Apollo in the
middle sections of The Birth of Tragedy. Indeed, although Apollo returns
in the final paragraphs of the treatise, the moment of greatest rhetorical
intensity occurs when Dionysos, by himself, triumphs over Socrates as
pseudo-Apollo. This passage, from the conclusion of paragraph , is of
particular importance to the argument of The Birth of Tragedy both in its
message and in its emphatic tone:
Indeed, my friends, believe with me in this Dionysiac life and in the rebirth
of tragedy! Socratic man has run his course; crown your heads with ivy, seize
the thyrsus [nehmt den Thyrsusstab zur Hand] and do not be surprised [wundert
euch nicht] if tiger and panther lie down and caress your feet! Dare to lead the
life of tragic man, and you will be redeemed [ Jetzt wagt es nur, tragische Menschen
zu sein: denn ihr sollt erlöst werden]. It has fallen to your lot to lead the Dionysiac
 Aesthetic redemption: Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner 
procession [dionysischen Festzug] out of India into Greece. Gird yourselves for a
severe conflict, but have faith in the thaumaturgy of your god! [aber glaubt an die
Wunder eures Gottes!] (BT ; GT )

In this passage, Nietzsche uses the term “redemption” (Erlösung) not in

reference to Apollo’s “Erlösung im Scheine,” but to the ultimate release
that can be obtained by the believer in Dionysos, by the practitioner of the
tragic life. It is through the defeat of Socrates and his rational philosophy
that the rebirth of tragedy can take place; it is through a decisive victory
over the father of Western philosophy as “man of theory” (theoretischer
Mensch) (BT ; GT ) that the procession from east to west, from
India into Greece, can begin. This procession is, of course, the Festzug of
Dionysos, the parade of Maenads congregated around the god of wine
and the thyrsus, symbol of Bacchic frenzy.
It is only too easy to imagine the pilgrimage to Bayreuth as a modern-
day equivalent of the Dionysian voyage, except that the Londoner or
Parisian would be travelling in the wrong direction, from west to east
(Nietzsche himself had great difficulty with this voyage, and was unable
to “stomach” day after day of Wagner’s music ). Most importantly for
our purposes, according to the universe of The Birth of Tragedy, Richard
Wagner is the new Dionysos leading a cast of pilgrims upward, toward
the temple of his “total art.” Like Dionysos, Wagner is a god: if one
believes in him and his power, one will be redeemed, and this redemp-
tion will occur, not as the effect of some ascertainable cause, but as an
unforeseeable, marvelous occurrence. It is significant that in section 
Nietzsche repeats the word Wunder, which he had used in the opening
paragraph of the treatise. In section , tragic man (the man of aes-
thetic enthusiasm, of Jubel ) defeats Socratic man through the marvels of
Dionysos, whereas in the opening paragraph of the volume, using the
Schopenhauerian lexicon, Nietzsche writes that the begetting of Attic
tragedy through the “pairing” of Apollo and Dionysos will take place
“durch einen metaphysischen Wunderakt des hellenischen ‘Willens’”. Al-
though Apollo is notably absent in section , having been replaced by
his shadowy double, Socrates, the meaning of Wunder is roughly the same
in both contexts: the term conveys, in a mythical register, the religious
phenomenon of the miraculous, that which transcends the bounds of the
rational mind and of sense certainty. One sees, then, that the notions of
Wunder and Erlösung are closely connected in Nietzsche’s early vocabu-
lary: they occur as expressions of the tragic and in opposition to mere
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
“logische Einsicht.” And the figure that instantiates the marvelous in the
early Nietzsche is Wagner, himself the “redeemer” of the German arts.
The transitional period in Nietzsche’s relation (or apparent disciple-
ship) to Wagner occurred between  and . As his visits to the
Wagner home multiplied, so did his reservations about the master’s aes-
thetic and political views. As Giorgio Colli remarks in his endnotes to the
first volume of the Kritische Studienausgabe, the fourth Untimely Meditation,
entitled Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (published in  on the occasion of
the opening of the Festspielhaus), requires what amounts to a double
reading. On the one hand, the published text itself appears to be an
unequivocal panegyric; on the other hand, the numerous drafts of the
“Meditation” contain clear indications of Nietzsche’s growing distaste
for a man whom he now considered to be an actor, a hypocrite, a master
of masks rather than an authentic redeemer. Colli notes astutely that
Nietzsche solved the problem of his ambivalence by citing the writings
of Wagner as much as possible, so that, in fact, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth
is less Nietzsche’s praise of his mentor than Wagner’s own appreciation
of himself.
It is safe to say that the figure of Wagner haunted Nietzsche until the
end of his productive career. Indeed, the final year of the philosopher’s
sanity, , begins and ends with reflections on Wagner: The Case of
Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner. Two other volumes written that year,
Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, share the same thematics, the same
recurring obsessions that originate in the problems posed by the works
and beliefs of the musician who had died five years earlier. On one level,
as Walter Kaufmann has observed, these final writings “are sometimes
dismissed as mere products of insanity, and they certainly manifest a rapid
breakdown of the author’s inhibitions.” They are polemical pieces,
Streitschriften in the strongest sense of the word, and their argumentative
structures (if one can even use this term) are often based on simple,
even crude dichotomies. Thus, in Nietzsche Contra Wagner, we have the
following:
WAGNER AND WAGNERIAN AESTHETICS (−) NIETZSCHE (+)
swimming dancing
chaos rhythm
decadence, decline the ascending life

These primary polarities, which simply stage what is negative in

Wagner in contradistinction to what is positive in Nietzsche, are then
 Aesthetic redemption: Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner 
associated with other related opposites, such as:
PASCAL AND FLAUBERT (−) GOETHE (+)
negators of life affirmer of life
In this and other similar cases, one senses that Nietzsche has reduced
the intellectual universe to a stark contrast between “good” and “bad”
works, “good” and “bad” writers – according (unsurprisingly) to how
close these works and these writers come to his own conceptions and
tastes. At a certain level, then, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, which is a com-
pendium of paragraphs lifted and modified from the author’s previous
works, is properly unreadable. It lends itself only to agreement or dis-
agreement, not to the dialogic structure of an active interpretation. It is
certainly not a dialectic; it moves disjunctively by the paratactic posing
of one thesis after another. And yet there is, at the very end of this hybrid
and meandering work, a cryptic epilogue which reintroduces a certain
Apollonian dimension, and thereby a certain promise of a final synthesis,
beyond the mere juxtapositions of Wagner and Nietzsche, negative and
positive, bad and good. In this epilogue the philosopher takes one more
“critical backward glance” at his life, and concludes that the pain he has
suffered, the sickness (physical and metaphysical) that he has endured,
are for a purpose, a higher (or, in his words, more profound ) purpose. He
confesses his amor fati, which is his “inmost nature.”
What does it signify to submit to one’s fate, or rather, to espouse one’s
fate with joy? It means that, out of the pain, from within suffering, comes a
rebirth. But this rebirth has nothing to do with Wagner, with redemption
in the Christian sense, or with the reawakening of German culture: it is,
rather, the discovery of what Nietzsche calls “a different taste – a second
taste”:
Out of such abysses [Abgründen], also out of the abyss of great suspicion, one re-
turns newborn [kommt man neugeboren zurück], having shed one’s skin, more ticklish
and sarcastic, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for
all good things, with gayer senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy
[mit einer zweiten gefährlicheren Unschuld in der Freude], more childlike and yet a hun-
dred times more subtle [hundert Mal raffinirter] than one has ever been before . . .
How the theatrical scream of passion now hurts our ears, how strange to our
taste the whole romantic uproar and tumult of the senses [der ganze romantische
Aufruhr und Sinnen-Wirrwarr] have become, which the educated rabble loves,
and all its aspirations after the elevated, inflated, and exaggerated! [sammt seinen
Aspirationen nach dem Erhabenen, Gehobenen, Verschrobenen]. No, if we who have recov-
ered still need art, it is another kind of art – a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
untroubled, divinely artificial light, which, like a pure flame, licks into unclouded
skies! [eine spöttische, leichte, flüchtige, göttlich unbehelligte, göttlich künstliche Kunst, welche
wie eine reine Flamme in einen unbewölkten Himmel hineinlodert! ] Above all, an art for
artists, for artists only! (Nietzsche Contra Wagner,  –; Nietzsche contra Wagner,
– )
The newfound innocence to which Nietzsche refers here is not the
result of a tripartite dialectical movement culminating in a final moment
of sublation. It is a simple two-step scheme, in which initial pain is shed,
in a natural, quasi-biological replacing of one “skin” by another. Just as
the snake is still the same snake after shedding its skin, in the same way
Nietzsche is still Nietzsche, but more so: the first part of the passage quoted
above abounds in comparatives – “more ticklish,” “more childlike and yet
a hundred times more subtle,” etc. The change is a matter of degree, not
a matter of negation or of the overturning of opposites into a higher
synthesis. It is because Nietzsche has discovered his “second,” more
refined taste (Geschmack in the physical as well as aesthetic sense) that he
is now able to look back at his initial admiration for Wagner and discover
in Wagnerianism a “theatrical scream of passion” and mere “romantic
uproar.” Having shed his first skin, Nietzsche now finds in Wagner a
muddled aesthetic of the sublime (Nietzsche uses the Kantian term, das
Erhabene, in this passage) that confuses the lofty with the hyperbolic, with
mere hystrionics. What Nietzsche proposes, in the final words of his
counter-statement to Wagnerian aesthetics, is an art for artists only –
which is to be taken as an urbane (cosmopolitan or pan-European) art
that is perforce not for the “people,” that does not have the ambition
to rekindle something like “essential Germanness” in the audience or
public.
The Case of Wagner begins where Nietzsche Contra Wagner concluded: with
praise for the “pure flame” of a serene, newly conceived Apollonian
art, with an evocation of the limpidezza of Bizet’s musical style (in con-
tradistinction, of course, to the muddiness, the fogginess of Wagner’s
all-too-German false profundity). Once again, Wagner is targeted: first,
for his badly executed aesthetics of the sublime (the sublime being a
quintessentially German intoxicant, according to Nietzsche); second,
for his theatricality (in this trait he is compared to both Victor Hugo
and Franz Liszt, figures to whom we shall return in due course); and
third, most emphatically, for his ethics of redemption, which, according
to Nietzsche, pervades nearly all of his operatic works. I shall give in to
the temptation of quoting an extensive passage on this point, since it is
 Aesthetic redemption: Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner 
both central to my argument and quite typical of Nietzsche’s mordant
and somewhat outrageous late style:
The problem of redemption [Erlösung] is certainly a venerable problem. There
is nothing about which Wagner has thought more deeply than redemption:
his opera is the opera of redemption. Somebody or other always wants to be
redeemed in his work: sometimes a little male, sometimes a little female –
this is his problem. – And how richly he varies his leitmotif ! What rare,
what profound dodges! [Welche seltenen, welche tiefsinnigen Ausweichungen! ] Who
if not Wagner would teach us that innocence prefers to redeem interest-
ing sinners? [daß die Unschuld mit Vorliebe interessante Sünder erlöst? ] ( The case
in Tannhäuser.) Or that even the Wandering Jew is redeemed, settles down,
when he marries? ( The case in The Flying Dutchman.) Or that old corrupted
females prefer to be redeemed by chaste youths? ( The case of Kundry [in
Parsifal ].) Or that beautiful maidens like best to be redeemed by a knight
who is a Wagnerian? ( The case in Die Meistersinger.) Or that married women,
too, enjoy being redeemed by a knight? ( The case of Isolde.) Or that “the
old God,” after having compromised himself morally in every respect, is
finally redeemed by a free spirit and immoralist? ( The case in the Ring.)
Do admire this final profundity above all! [Bewundern Sie in Sonderheit diesen
letzten Tiefsinn! ] Do you understand it? I – beware of understanding it
[Ich – hüte mich, ihn zu verstehn]. (The Case of Wagner ; Der Fall Wagner
 –)

Although Nietzsche is never more explicit or more ironical in his

condemnation of the notion of redemption than in this passage, this
condemnation (if Wagnerian terms can be forgiven here) is nothing less
than a leitmotiv in all the works he wrote in . In rejecting Wag-
ner, especially the late Christian Wagner, apostle of chastity and obedi-
ence, creator of Parsifal, Nietzsche also necessarily rejects the dialectical
move whereby the human subject as “sinner” is raised up, aufgehoben,
through the power of redemption. With the deconstruction of the very
notion of “sin” and with the overturning of dialectics, it would seem
that Nietzsche has prepared the way for a final triumph of limpidezza,
for a victory of “lightness of being” over the tragic view per se. How-
ever (and herein lies the complexity of Nietzsche’s late thought), the
figure of Dionysos, the procession of the Maenads around the thyrsus,
which had been associated with the living of the tragic life, do not disap-
pear entirely from view, but re-emerge, metamorphosed into a human
figure – that of Goethe. Dionysos is no longer the symbol of tragedy,
but of what Nietzsche calls “totality” – a notion that deserves some
scrutiny. The following lines come from paragraph  of Twilight of the
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
Idols (in German, Götzendämmerung, a rather nasty play on the Wagnerian
Götterdämmerung):

Goethe – not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt

to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent to the
naturalness of the Renaissance [durch ein Hinaufkommen zur Natürlichkeit der Renais-
sance] – a kind of self-overcoming [eine Art Selbstüberwindung] on the part of that
century. He bore its strongest instincts within himself . . . What he wanted was
totality [Totalität]; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling,
and will ( preached with the most abhorrent scholasticism by Kant, the antipode
of Goethe); he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself [er disciplinirte
sich zur Ganzheit, er schuf sich] . . . Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the
cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular
is loathsome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole – he does not
negate any more [Ein solcher freigewordner Geist steht mit einem freudigen und vertrauenden
Fatalismus mitten im All, im Glauben, daß nur das Einzelne verwerflich ist, daß im Ganzen
sich alles erlöst und bejaht – er verneint nicht mehr]. Such a faith, however, is the
highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus. (Twilight
of the Idols, –; Götzendämmerung, –).

It would be more correct to say that the same word – Dionysos –

has been used in two different baptisms and has represented, has fig-
ured, two different “faiths.” In the first instance, in The Birth of Tragedy,
Dionysos was the mythic figuration, the Bild or Gestalt of the contem-
porary “god” Richard Wagner evolving in the dialectical universe of
the tragic. In the second instance, in the late works after the turn away
from Wagner and dialectics, Goethe “becomes” Dionysos, takes on the
features of the Greek god, instantiates him, not in an imagined return
to antiquity, but in a reviving of Renaissance values. What has hap-
pened in the turn from Wagner, in the Nietzschean Kehre, is that the
highest value is no longer that of the aesthetic in its proximity to local
(i.e., German) political concerns, but rather a transnational valuation of
“life” as movement of natural ascension [Hinaufkommen zur Natürlichkeit].
Kant, who had been cited with deference in The Birth of Tragedy, now
becomes, to use Nietzschean terms, the antipode to Goethe: Kant, the
master analyst, the philosopher who separated and defined the faculties,
who particularized and pulled apart the domains of the epistemologi-
cal, the ethical and the aesthetic, thereby destroyed the essence of life,
which is totality. In the final form of his thought, Nietzsche replaces the
process of negation with its opposite, affirmation, and reintroduces the
notion of redemption into a non-dialectical framework, into the context
of amor fati, of adherence to one’s destiny and espousal of life in its
 Aesthetic redemption: Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner  
alternations of bitterness and joy. In the end, Nietzsche alternatively
offers the limpidezza of Apollonian serenity and newfound innocence,
and the “fatalistic” totality of Dionysian freedom: the two ancient Greek
figures appear in metonymic succession, not in the interplay of negation
and supersession.
Despite the considerable differences between the author of The Birth
of Tragedy and the late Nietzsche, there is one constant feature (one would
be tempted to say, using a musical metaphor, a Grundton) that subtends
the Nietzschean oeuvre from beginning to end: the rejection of rational
or theoretical man, whether it be the Socrates of The Birth of Tragedy or the
Kant of Twilight of the Idols. Just as the rebirth of tragedy through Wagner is
predicated on a victory over Socratic philosophy, in the same way Goethe
as modern Dionysos, as figure of totality, as genius, stands over Kant and
the “scholastic” dissection of the particular. The questions that remain,
however, are the following: in attacking Kant’s supposed scholasticism
in the name of totality, does not Nietzsche use Kant’s own definition
of genius to depict and define that totality? While he attacks Wagner’s
Romanticism, does not Nietzsche represent Goethe’s genius in Romantic
terms? Is there something more to be said about theory itself ? Might it be
possible to refine on Nietzsche’s conception of the theoretical as merely
the opposite of “Goethean” creativity? It is to these questions that I turn
now, as I move to a discussion of Baudelaire’s late poetic praxis.

III BAUDELAIRE’S ‘‘ L E T H Y R S E ’’: T H E D O U B L E

SENSE OF THEORY

I have suggested that an understanding of the fundamental shifts be-

tween the styles of the early Nietzsche and the late Nietzsche – the pas-
sage through and beyond dialectics – is best achieved by an examination
of how the figure of Richard Wagner metamorphoses between The Birth
of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Wagner is initially admired because his
musical drama lends itself to a dialectical overcoming, a final merging
of antithetical forces that remains unquestioned by Nietzsche in .
Wagner is later rejected because Nietzsche associates the seductions of
Wagner the histrion with the seductions of reconciliation and redemp-
tion, those enslaving false rewards imposed on the freedom of man by the
“priestly caste” and the Christian religion as such. Of primary interest to
my argument is the fact that Nietzsche’s evolution as thinker and writer
originates with the turn toward Wagner, and ends with the turn away from
Wagner; without Wagner as a figure toward whom one turns, there would
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
be no evolution at all, no writing. Nietzsche’s writing, in its essence, is to
be understood as a tropic or tropological movement, a turning-toward
which turns into its opposite.
In the case of Charles Baudelaire, whose poetic praxis is often consid-
ered to inaugurate European literary modernity, I would like to suggest
that his later poetry (the “Tableaux parisiens” in Les Fleurs du Mal and
the Petits Poèmes en prose/Le Spleen de Paris), which is, in many cases, self-
reflective (poetry about poetry, exercises in allegorical mirroring, in mise-
en-abyme  ), is also based upon a turning-toward, a properly intentional
movement whereby the Baudelairian text constructs itself in the very
process of its referring to an outside figure, either a person or a symbolic
representation. Thus, one of the most important and complex poems of
the “Tableaux parisiens” series, “Le Cygne,” points to Victor Hugo in
exile: this pointing, and the political implications of a dedication to the ex-
iled Hugo in , situate the poem, establish its horizon of readability.
In the same way, I shall argue that the prose poem “Le Thyrse” must be
read in and through its dedication to Franz Liszt. The thyrsus, itself at
one level a figuration of poetry as such, also addresses itself to the figure
of Liszt. Just as, in an important sense, Goethe is Dionysos for Nietzsche,
for Baudelaire Liszt is associated with the emblem of Dionysos, the thyr-
sus. In both cases, what is being represented is genius, but how genius is
defined and put into play differs from Nietzsche to Baudelaire; it is the
nature of this difference (as well as the relation of genius to theory) that
stands at the center of my reading of the poem.
Much has been made in the critical literature of the dedicatory letter
to the editor of La Presse, Arsène Houssaye, which frames Les Petits Poèmes
en prose. It is accepted practice to place this witty and double-edged
letter at the very beginning of the volume, doubtless because it contains
what seems to be a theoretical introduction to the works themselves,
formulated in unforgettable metaphorical terms. The series of poems is
compared to a serpent possessing “neither head nor tail” and that can be
cut up at will: “Remove one vertebra, and the two pieces of that tortuous
fantasy will reunite without difficulty.” The problem with this playful
comparison is that too many critics have taken it too literally: the poems
are most often read without respect for their narrative ordering; and
even within a particular poem, it would seem that Baudelaire’s letter to
Houssaye has been used to dispense critics from following the movement
of the text, from adhering to its structural constraints.
I shall be suggesting an interpretation of “Le Thyrse” that is based
upon the sequentiality of the poem, its rhythm, its hesitations and
 Aesthetic redemption: Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner  
interruptions as it progresses from the initial question, “What is a thyr-
sus?” to the final praise of Liszt’s genius. The poem as it appears on
the printed page is divided into two paragraphs of unequal length: the
first one, fairly long, is devoted to a complex series of definitions and re-
definitions of the thyrsus, while the second, much shorter, is an effusive
panegyric to Liszt. The central interpretive problem posed by the poem
is the nature of the relation between the two paragraphs – between a
symbolic figure, the thyrsus, and a human figure evoked for his repre-
sentative qualities, Franz Liszt. Because my argument is based upon a
detailed reading of the poem, I shall quote the poem in its entirety, first
in French, then in Edward Kaplan’s English translation. So that the
reader of this chapter can anticipate the direction in which my inter-
pretation will proceed, I have included parenthetically within the poem
numbers ( through ) which indicate where I find that the text begins
to move in a new direction. I divide the first paragraph into five parts,
and consider that the final paragraph constitutes part six:

LE THYRSE

A Franz Liszt
( ) Qu’est-ce qu’un thyrse? Selon le sens moral et poétique, c’est un emblème
sacerdotal dans la main des prêtres et des prêtresses célébrant la divinité dont
ils sont les interprètes et les serviteurs. Mais physiquement ce n’est qu’un bâton,
un pur bâton, perche à houblon, tuteur de vigne, sec, dur et droit. () Autour
de ce bâton, dans des méandres capricieux, se jouent et folâtrent des tiges et
des fleurs, celles-ci sinueuses et fuyardes, celles-là penchées comme des cloches
ou des coupes renversées. Et une gloire étonnante jaillit de cette complexité de
lignes et de couleurs, tendres ou éclatantes. Ne dirait-on pas que la ligne courbe
et la spirale font leur cour à la ligne droite et dansent autour dans une muette
adoration? Ne dirait-on pas que toutes ces corolles délicates, tous ces calices,
explosions de senteurs et de couleurs, exécutent un mystique fandango autour
du bâton hiératique? () Et quel est, cependant, le mortel imprudent qui osera
décider si les fleurs et les pampres ont été faits pour le bâton, ou si le bâton n’est
que le prétexte pour montrer la beauté des pampres et des fleurs? () Le thyrse
est la représentation de votre étonnante dualité, maı̂tre puissant et vénéré, cher
Bacchant de la Beauté mystérieuse et passionnée. Jamais nymphe exaspérée par
l’invincible Bacchus ne secoua son thyrse sur les têtes de ses compagnes affolées
avec autant d’énergie et de caprice que vous agitez votre génie sur les coeurs de
vos frères. – Le bâton, c’est votre volonté, droite, ferme et inébranlable; les fleurs,
c’est la promenade de votre fantaisie autour de votre volonté; c’est l’élément
féminin exécutant autour du mâle ses prestigieuses pirouettes. () Ligne droite
et ligne arabesque, intention et expression, roideur de la volonté, sinuosité du
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
verbe, unité du but, variété des moyens, amalgame tout-puissant et indivisible
du génie, quel analyste aura le détestable courage de vous diviser et de vous
séparer?
() Cher Liszt, à travers les brumes, par-delà les fleuves, par-dessus les villes
où les pianos chantent votre gloire, où l’imprimerie traduit votre sagesse, en
quelque lieu que vous soyez, dans les splendeurs de la ville éternelle ou dans
les brumes des pays rêveurs que console Cambrinus, improvisant des chants
de délectation ou d’ineffable douleur, ou confiant au papier vos méditations
abstruses, chantre de la Volupté et de l’Angoisse éternelles, philosophe, poète
et artiste, je vous salue en l’immortalité!

THE THYRSUS

To Franz Liszt
( ) What is a thyrsus? According to its social and poetic meaning, it is a sacerdotal
emblem to be held by priests and priestesses celebrating the divinity whose
interpreters and servants they are. But physically it is only a staff, a mere staff,
a vine pole for hops, a vine support, dry, hard, and straight. () Around that
staff, in capricious meanderings, stems and flowers play and frolic, some sinuous
and elusive, others tilted like bells or overturned cups. And an astonishing glory
bursts from that complexity of lines and colors, tender or dazzling. Doesn’t it
seem that the curved and spiral lines are courting the straight line and dance
around it in mute adoration? Doesn’t it seem that all those delicate corollas, all
those calices, explosions of odors and colors, are executing a mystical fandango
around the hieratic staff ? () And yet what foolhardy mortal would dare decide
if the flowers and vines were formed for the staff, or if the staff is but the pretext
for highlighting the beauty of the vines and flowers?
() The thyrsus is the representation of your astonishing duality, powerful
and venerable master, dear Bacchant of mysterious and impassioned Beauty.
Never did a nymph frenzied by the invincible Bacchus shake her thyrsus over
the heads of her crazed companions with as much power and caprice as you
wave your genius over your brothers’ hearts.
The staff, it is your will, straight, firm, and unshakable; the flowers, the
rambling of your fancy around your will: the feminine element executing around
the male its prodigious pirouettes. () Straight line and arabesque line, intention
and expression, tautness of the will, sinuosity of the word, unity of goal, variety
of means, all-powerful and indivisible amalgam of genius, what analyst would
have the hateful courage to divide and to separate you?
() Dear Liszt, through the mists, beyond the rivers, above the cities where
pianos celebrate your fame, where printing presses translate your wisdom,
in whatever place you may be, in the eternal city’s splendors or the mists
of the dreamy lands consoled by Gambrinus, improvising songs of delight or
of ineffable sorrow, or confiding your abstruse meditations to writing, singer of
 Aesthetic redemption: Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner  
Voluptuous Pleasure and Anguish eternal, philosopher, poet and artist, I honor
you in immortality!
Before suggesting an overall interpretation of this playful and complex
poem, I would like to follow it in its movement, step by step, according
to the six “vertebrae” of its serpentine sinuosity:
( ) Contrast between the dictionary definition of the thyrsus and its physical
appearance
In his own attempt to describe the thyrsus, the poet at first refuses to
accept the given definition – that is, what the thyrsus has come to mean
to humankind through the centuries. He gives us a first “moral and
poetic” meaning of the object, but then calls it into question, in his
insistence that we consider the object’s materiality. We move then in the
opposite direction of Baudelaire’s early poetics (the ascending passage
from the material to the spiritual that characterized the lyrical mode
of correspondances): in “Le Thyrse,” we pass from the spiritual down to
the material. The description offered in the poem’s third line is simple
and apparently univocal: the thyrsus is, materially, a stick and only a
stick, dry, hard, and straight. There is, however, an interesting subtle
suggestion of duality that appears alongside this simplicity: the thyrsus
can be either a “perche à houblon” or “tuteur de vigne.” This difference
does not appear significant at first, but once we have read the poem in its
entirety, we see that one of its organizing polarities is that of Germania
versus Romania, beer versus wine (in () Liszt is evoked both as Roman
pilgrim and citizen of the climes “consoled” by the inventer of beer,
Gambrinus). Thus, from the beginning, sotto voce, that which is straight
and uncomplicated already participates in a world of polar opposites.
() Poetic interruption on the possible meanings (connotations) of the thyrsus’s dual
construction
Here we have what might be called an explosion of polarities in freeplay,
with the feminized elements (flowers, vines) “dancing” around the
straight line of the stick. The dance itself has both religious and erotic
elements: the flowers move seductively around the stick, but they do so in
“mute adoration.” Although duality is almost uniquely emphasized here,
the poet does affirm that the dance of the meandering flowers around the
straight stick produces “an astonishing glory” (une gloire étonnante). Within
the “complexity” of the flowery figuration bursts forth ( jaillit, a verb
with strong sexual connotations, here suggesting ejaculation) a singular
energetic and creative force. There is, within this sentence, the promise
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
(but here, only a promise) of a possible combining of the contraries into
some final unity.

() First theoretical interruption

Here, in an ironical “aside,” the poet alludes to the philosopher or literary
critic of analytic persuasion (whom Baudelaire will derisively call, in
his own critical essays, a professeur-juré d’esthétique, and whom Nietzsche
designates by the emblematic names of “Socrates” or “Kant”), that
unfortunate “man of theory” who would be imprudent enough to decide
whether the flowers were made for the stick or vice-versa. It would seem
that the poet is attacking the act of critical dissection and implying that
the play of polarities that constitutes the poem should be left untouched,
unanalyzed. It is important to note here that the critic is referred to as
a “mortel imprudent,” whereas in (), in the closing line of the poem, the
poet salutes Liszt “en l’immortalité” – something to which we shall return
in a moment.

() The poet’s definition of the thyrsus: the center of the poem
Here the poet provides us with a first synthesis of the elements he had in-
troduced in the previous sections, lifting his description to a higher level
of abstraction – words like “représentation,” “dualité,” “fantaisie,” and
“volonté” replace the metaphorical language of the text’s first half. It is
clear that the poet’s own definition of the thyrsus is, at one level, merely a
restatement of the conventional definition in ( ), in that it emphasizes the
priestly function of the symbolic object and renders explicit its Bacchic
origins. But there is also an important shift. To use Baudelairian termi-
nology, the poet “peoples his solitude” by introducing an interlocutor:
the thyrsus is not simply the representation of an abstract duality, but
of the duality possessed by a figure, a master figure, who, we learn in (),
is Franz Liszt. All the metaphorical elements in (), notably the central
comparison between floral filigree and straight stick, now point to their
transcendental signified: the genius of Liszt. The stick is not merely a stick,
a material object; it is now lifted up to the spiritual level and given the
symbolic meaning of “votre volonté, droite, ferme et inébranlable.” In
the same way, the flowers are not merely evanescent decoration, they are
“la promenade de votre fantaisie autour de votre volonté.” All elements
have been raised up to symbolic abstraction, and they all refer to the
focal point of Liszt’s genius.
One would be tempted to say that, like Goethe for Nietzsche, Liszt is
Dionysos for Baudelaire, and that the genius of Liszt, like that of Goethe,
 Aesthetic redemption: Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner  
is characterized by totality, by a subsuming of all particulars within its
significant unity. But if one reads carefully the second sentence of (), one
notes that the comparison goes as follows: Liszt is not being compared
directly to Dionysos, but rather to the nymph “frenzied [exaspérée, ano-
ther term with strong sexual connotations in French] by the invincible
Bacchus.” Liszt’s genius is compared to the thyrsus; his genius is “waved”
over the “hearts” of his brothers in the same way that the nymph shakes
the thyrsus over her sister Maenads. But if the comparison is to hold, if
the analogy is to function fully, Liszt must himself be “frenzied” by some
master-figure like Dionysos; his genius is not in itself a totality, but the
emblem of a greater force that traverses him. It may be that this force is
that of Dionysos, but Liszt is, after all, a figure of Baudelairian modernity.
Could it be that his genius is “exasperated” by another figure, one that
participates in that modernity? This is another point to which we must
return.

() Second theoretical interruption

Here the poet repeats the idea expressed in () using the same form of
rhetorical question. Just as previously he had asked “what imprudent
mortel” would dare decide whether the flowers were made for the stick
or vice-versa, in the same way now he asks “what analyst would have the
hateful courage to divide and to separate” the masculine and feminine
elements in their oppositional freeplay. Each of the binary opposites –
arabesque line and straight line, intention and expression, etc. – would
appear to melt into the “amalgame tout-puissant et indivisible du génie.”
One should be careful with the term “amalgame,” however. Whereas
in English “amalgam” is generally taken to mean a “mixture of differ-
ent elements” without there being a negative connotation attached to
the notion of “mixture,” in French the figurative sense of the word is
“mélange d’éléments différents qui ne s’accordent guère.” Thus, the
question with which we are left as we move from the first to the second
paragraph of the poem is: what is the nature of the unity or totality to
which the thyrsus in its duality corresponds? Is there a unity beyond
frenzy, beyond metaphorical chaos, which offers more than a mixture of
discordant elements – a crucial question in a text which represents the
genius of a musician.

() Second paragraph: a salute to Liszt as musician and writer

The poem concludes in a lyrical flight (une envolée lyrique) – and the term
“flight” needs to be taken in a near-literal sense: we as readers are invited
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
to hover over the cities where pianos play Liszt’s works, where printing-
presses turn out his prose; we are alternately in Rome and in Germanic
regions, in a vertiginous atmosphere calling to mind the paintings of
Marc Chagall. Once again, the play of dualities, of polar opposites, builds
the entirety of the poetic structure: piano versus printing-press (music
versus writing); Rome versus the “pays rêveurs que console Cambrinus”;
songs of delight on the one hand, of sorrow on the other; voluptuous
writings on the one hand, anguished writings on the other. The only
element that introduces a slight change in this otherwise monotonous
series of dualities is the triadic characterization of Liszt as “philosopher,
poet and artist.”
The second paragraph is one long sentence (one remarkably flexible
“serpent”) beginning with “Cher Liszt” and ending with the exalted
words “je vous salue en l’immortalité!” The play of polarities occupies
the long central section of the sentence, and is subsumed by the warm,
even affectionate address to Liszt. The dualities form themselves within
a properly dialogic structure. The poem has moved, gradually, from a
series of definitions and rhetorical interruptions to a profound sense of
identification between the poet and the subject of his praise. What unifies
the poem appears to be, on the one hand, the genius of Liszt, and on the
other, the act of dialogue itself, in which both the interlocutor and the
poet receive the promise of “immortality” – the promise of the duration of
their respective works of art. The appearance of a triumphant Aufhebung
could not be clearer or more seductive than in this final paragraph, in
which the two artists, addressor and addressee, rise “above death.”

If one were to remain within the confines of “Le Thyrse” as individual

text, this conclusion would seem to impose itself as logical, irrefutable.
However, it happens that “Le Thyrse” is also an act of citation. The
poem originates in an earlier work of Baudelaire we encountered briefly
at the beginning of this chapter, entitled “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser
à Paris.” To be precise, it originates in a paragraph Baudelaire quotes in
that article from Liszt’s book on Wagner, Lohengrin et Tannhäuser de Richard
Wagner ( ). At a critical juncture of his essay, when Baudelaire wishes
to characterize the Wagnerian leitmotiv, he borrows from the language
of Liszt, prefacing the quotation itself by the following remarks: “Here I
humbly allow Liszt to speak [Ici je laisse humblement la parole à Liszt], whose
book Lohengrin and Tannhäuser I take this occasion to recommend to all ad-
mirers of profound and refined art. Despite his rather bizarre language, a
kind of idiom composed of fragments of several languages [espèce d’idiome
 Aesthetic redemption: Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner  
composé d’extraits de plusieurs langues], he manages to translate with infinite
charm the rhetoric of the master [Wagner]” ( ; my translation). Aside
from the interesting slight difference in tone between the “méditations
abstruses” of “Le Thyrse” and the “langue un peu bizarre qu’il affecte”
of “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser” (in which one sees that Baudelaire
may have had to force his admiration for Liszt as writer somewhat in
composing the prose poem), it is important to note that the “espèce
d’idiome composé d’extraits de plusieurs langues” is an excellent defini-
tion of amalgame in the French sense of that word. Although it is tempting
to see in Liszt’s genius as characterized in the poem the force permitting
a final reconciliation of opposites in eternity, in the prose piece we find
that Liszt combines bizarrely Romance and Germanic traits within the
discordance of his style. Beer and wine do not “marry” well.
Even more striking is the fact that Baudelaire seems to have borrowed
from Liszt’s vocabulary in Lohengrin et Tannhäuser de Richard Wagner for the
creation of “Le Thyrse” as a play of straight and meandering forces. In
the passage quoted by Baudelaire, Liszt writes that Wagner, “by means
of several principal phrases, has tied a melodic knot which constitutes
the drama as a whole. The folds (replis) made by these phrases, in bind-
ing and intertwining themselves around the poem’s words [en se liant et
s’entrelaçant autour des paroles du poème], provoke a stirring effect in the audi-
ence.” And later, in the same vein: “There are phrases . . . that traverse
the opera like a poisonous serpent, twining around the victims and flee-
ing their saintly protectors [comme un serpent venimeux, s’enroulant autour des
victimes et fuyant devant leurs saints défenseurs]” ( , ; my translation).
In describing the genius of Wagner, which consists of the merging and
melding of the arts, Liszt resorts to the metaphor of the serpent, which
is not only the prime metaphor of the dedicatory address to Arsène
Houssaye, but also the figure that subtends the meandering movement
of the flowers around the stick in “Le Thyrse” (one thinks, farther back
in time, of the serpent in Eden seducing Eve, then of the seductive Eve
“dancing” her temptation of Adam). It would be no exaggeration to say
that “Le Thyrse” is a series of brilliant variations on the theme proposed
by Liszt.
But what is this theme? It is not sufficient to say, abstractly, that it is the
“marriage of contraries,” because these contraries refer to and express
metaphorically the unity of genius. But whose genius? Who stands behind
Liszt? Whose “rhetoric” is Liszt attempting to translate in the amalgame
of his own “bizarre” language? The figure behind the agitation of the
thyrsus is Richard Wagner, who represents (emblematizes) for Baudelaire
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
what Goethe represents for Nietzsche – the god Dionysos. Wagner is
the protagonist behind the meandering, serpentine figurations of “Le
Thyrse”; Liszt is the interpreter of the god, his translator, his porte-parole.
It is Wagner who appears through the veil of Liszt’s genius.
There is, in this positioning of the god behind his priest, an uncanny
structural similarity between the delicate microcosm of “Le Thyrse” and
the portentous macrocosm of Wagner’s own Tannhäuser. In Act III, scene 
of the opera, when Tannhäuser relates his travails as pilgrim to Wolfram –
the sufferings he endured in what at first appears to have been a failed
effort at redemption for his sins – he describes the reaction of the pope
to his entreaties as follows:
“Hast du so böse Lust getheilt,
dich an der Hölle Glut entflammt,
hast du im Venusberg geweilt:
so bist nun ewig du verdammt!
Wie dieser Stab in meiner Hand
nie mehr sich schmückt mit frischem Grün,
kann aus der Hölle heissem Brand
Erlösung nimmer dir erblüh’n!”
“If thou hast shared the joys of Hell,
If thou unholy flames hast nursed
That in the Hill of Venus dwell,
Thou art forevermore accurst!
And as this barren staff I hold
Ne’er will put forth a flower or leaf,
Thus shalt thou nevermore behold
Salvation, or thy sin’s relief !” (–)

Despite his immediate intention, after the papal refusal, to return to the
Venusberg and finish his life in sensual oblivion, Tannhäuser, following
the death of Elisabeth (a martyr to “true love”), will obtain redemption
(Erlösung) in his own death. At the very end of the opera, a chorus of
pilgrims sings:
Heil! Heil! Der Gnade Wunder Heil!
Erlösung ward der Welt zu Theil!
Es that in nächtlich heil’ger Stund’
der Herr sich durch ein Wunder kund:
den dürren Stab in Priesters Hand
hat er geschmückt mit frischem Grün:
dem Sünder in der Hölle Brand
soll so Erlösung neu erblüh’n!
 Aesthetic redemption: Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner 
Hail! Hail! the Lord hath marvels wrought!
Redemption He to all hath brought!
One night in bless’d, propitious hour,
He left a sign of His dread power;
The barren staff of priestly rule
He made to bloom with summer’s green!
Now man’s curse doth the Lord annul,
His pitying love shall make us clean! ()

The decision of the pope to condemn Tannhäuser is overturned by

God. Redemption is granted at the last moment by the supreme power,
whose omnipotence cancels the arrogance of his priest (in an act that
could only please German Evangelicals, it is presumed). The flowering
of the staff, which Baudelaire may have had in mind in his flowering
thyrsus, is made possible only through an act of God (or of a god in the
pagan context). Redemption is not a matter for priests (representatives,
mediators, Franz Liszt), but for the power that shines through them in
transcendental (Wagnerian) totality.
The differences between Baudelaire and Nietzsche can be summed up
as follows: Nietzsche’s career evolves as a turning-toward and turning-
away from Wagner. When Wagner is praised in The Birth of Tragedy,
Nietzsche exhorts his readers to seize the thyrsus and follow the god in
his procession from east to west. When Wagner becomes an object of
scorn in the later works, an “antipode” to Nietzsche, Goethe replaces
Wagner and becomes Dionysos, symbol of genius, of totality. Goethe’s
all-encompassing works of the “ascending life” represent the ideal of
artistic expression, whereas Kant’s analytic disposition, his stance as
“man of theory” mark him as inferior, dry, stifling. Baudelaire shares
Nietzsche’s interest in the creative power of the Dionysian temper. His
prose poem “Le Thyrse” is in praise of genius – genius understood in
the Nietzschean sense, as totality. However, whereas Nietzsche is content
to juxtapose genius to theory in an unequivocal contrast of positive to
negative, Baudelaire creates a poem that stages the inevitable fall into theory
within poetry itself. Baudelaire includes, within the rhetorical sinuosity of
his prose poem, the moment of analytical decision and division. What
Barbara Johnson calls Baudelaire’s “second revolution” is based upon
the amalgame of poetry as imaginative sympathy and as theoretical re-
flection within the prose poem, and “Le Thyrse” illustrates this mixing of
modes as well as any text in Les Petits Poèmes en prose. Through my read-
ing of “Le Thyrse” I am proposing, however, that Baudelaire’s second
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
style (fragmentation, amalgame) is not merely the “antipode” of his first
style (Aufhebung of the sensual in the spiritual). I have suggested that the
figure of Wagner stands behind that of Liszt, that the god stands behind
and illuminates his priest. This would mean that the first style of the
poet, based on the reconciliation of opposites and the promise of a
final redemption, haunts the second style, shines through it as in a barely
visible palimpsest. “Le Thyrse” addresses itself to Liszt’s genius, but it is
traversed by the mute voice of Wagner, Baudelaire’s absent interlocutor.
Perhaps the superimposition of two styles in one poem renders the
very distinction of first from second style problematic. Nevertheless, it is
useful, if only for pedagogical (theoretical) purposes, to make such dis-
tinctions. The critic is, after all, a species of “man of theory.” But the
reading of “Le Thyrse” as both a poem of fragmentation (readable only
through analytic division) and a poem of redemption (emblem of a final
totality) may correspond to the antithetical sense of the primal word
theoria. Indeed, the first meaning of the Greek verb theorein is “to look at,
view, behold, observe; especially to be a spectator at the public games
and festivals”; it is only in its second, derived acceptation that the verb
came to be equated with the Latin contemplari in the philosophical sense.
Also, the noun theoros means “a spectator, observer, one who travels to see
men and things; an ambassador, sent by the state to consult an oracle.”
Thus, at its origins, the notion of the theoretical is associated not with
the disinterested gaze of aesthetic man, not with what will become the
presuppositions of Kantian philosophy, but with travel, discovery, and
the difficult deciphering of obscure meanings. In fact, in the most fun-
damental sense, theoria is not contemplation per se, not what Nietzsche
dismissively calls “theory,” but rather the sending of people abroad for
the purpose of a final understanding of the world. Thus, the thyrsus in
its Baudelairian guise is the theoretical – as the procession of devotees of the
god.
Perhaps the best way to understand “Le Thyrse” as a coexistence of the
fragmentary and the redemptive is to follow the serpentine procession of
the faithful, who, like readers of poetic texts, accompany the meanderings
of significance as amalgame, but also sense, in the space that separates
speaker from interlocutor, the pilgrim from his or her goal, the path of
the literary – which is so often directed toward absent figures that haunt
our strivings.
 CHAPTER 

The “beautiful soul”: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand

Meaulnes and the aesthetics of Romanticism

And has not form two aspects? Is it not moral and immoral at
once: moral in so far as it is the expression and result of discipline,
immoral – yes, actually hostile to morality – in that of its very essence
it is indifferent to good and evil, and deliberately concerned to make
the moral world stoop beneath its proud and undivided sceptre?
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

I BEAUTY AND MORALITY AT THE DAWN

OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In the second chapter of Death in Venice (), when describing the artis-
tic evolution of the protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, the narrator
emphasizes the increasing importance of formal rigor and discipline in
the writings of an author who has been canonized before his time by an
admiring public. This meditation on the creative act not only establishes
the foundation of our future appreciation of Aschenbach’s psychodrama
(the protagonist will undergo a progressive undermining of the aesthetic
order he has imposed on his life), but merits, in itself, the scrutiny of the
contemporary literary theorist. In the passage quoted above, Thomas
Mann raises a question which stands at the center of modern aesthetics
and at the center of this book: namely, what is the relation between the
work of art viewed as formal construction and the focus of that same
work on moral or ethical matters? In Mann’s metaphorical conception,
form has a Janus-like “double face.” As the result of the labor of transfor-
mation which the artist imposes on his materials, form seems to express
or incorporate a certain discipline. At the same time, however, the nar-
rator of Death in Venice affirms that it is in the very nature of form to
be “indifferent” (gleichgültig) to the moral ideas that it envelops and en-
closes in beautiful semblance, that it forces to bow under its all-powerful
“scepter.” The rhetoric of the passage makes clear that literary art can be
considered dangerous insofar as it can tend or turn toward the “second

 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
face,” that of moral indifference. This observation has a prophetic value
in the specific case of Death in Venice, a cautionary tale that carries within
its formal elegiac beauty a story of complex moral significance. This
work, whose surface mirrors the brilliant light of the Venetian cityscape,
rests on an interior drama, a darkly illumined stage where Apollo and
Dionysos struggle over the mastery of the protagonist’s mind and body.
Of especial interest is the fact that the content of Aschenbach’s story,
the evolution of his life in Venice, consists of the revenge of the subter-
ranean moral drama over the beautiful forms he had previously imposed
on his carefully choreographed existence. In other words, one might won-
der whether it is in the nature of form to master only apparently – that is,
by the trompe l’oeil of beautiful appearance – that force which emerges in
the combat between the moral and the immoral, and whose principal
quality is to always return, to call into question the aesthetic stability of the
text. One must ask whether the moral as such (the force of moral ideas
in their difficulty, their complexity) allows itself to be subsumed within
the aesthetic. This question will be at the center of the reading I am
proposing in this chapter for Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes and its
intertextual relations to Romantic and pre-Romantic texts.

II LE GRAND MEAULNES: A FIRST LOOK

Since this “novel of adolescence” is no longer as widely read in the

English-speaking world as it once was, I offer the following summary
and commentary:
Le Grand Meaulnes is set in the region of Sologne, an isolated area of
central France best known for its hunting and fishing, at the antipodes
of Parisian culture and decadence. The story begins with the arrival of
Augustin Meaulnes at the country schoolhouse which is also the home
of François Seurel (the narrator) and his parents. Meaulnes and François
are depicted as opposites throughout the narrative: Meaulnes is active
and adventurous; François is the passive observer. In part one, Meaulnes
has his most important adventure. Purely by chance, he discovers an old
château in which a curious festivity is taking place. It is in this “Mysterious
Domain” that Meaulnes meets not only Yvonne de Galais, the woman he
will eventually marry, but also, fleetingly, Frantz de Galais, her eccentric
brother, whose fiancée (Valentine) is strangely absent from the carefully
orchestrated fête étrange.
The two loose strands of the narrative – Meaulnes’s pursuit of Yvonne,
and Frantz’s pursuit of Valentine – do not come together until the
 The “beautiful soul”: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes 
third and final part of the novel, when we discover retrospectively that
Meaulnes, in his search for Yvonne, encounters Valentine and has an
amorous liaison with her. This relationship is described by Alain-Fournier
as sordid and disillusioning. When Meaulnes finally marries Yvonne to-
ward the middle of part three, his happiness is interrupted by Frantz,
who, appealing to an oath made by the friends during their adolescence,
asks Meaulnes to leave his wife and domestic tranquillity in order to find
Valentine. Meaulnes does so, no doubt in expiation of his “sin.” When he
returns, having accomplished his mission, he finds that his wife has died
in childbirth, leaving behind a daughter, who then becomes Meaulnes’s
companion for possible future adventures.
The central interpretive difficulty of Le Grand Meaulnes, which is also
the focus of the present chapter, is that of the considerable stylistic dif-
ferences between part one (the daydream atmosphere of the Mysterious
Domain, its melancholy charm) and parts two and three (a “fall” into
commonplace reality). The novel seems to change from romantic quest
to mere adventure: the modal identity of the work vacillates; and the story
divides itself into two apparently irreconcilable sections. This division,
or “faultline,” is the point of departure for my analysis.
The only novel completed by Alain-Fournier is in many ways problem-
atical, in large measure because of its success. Ever since its publication
in  it has been categorized as a “novel of adolescence,” and it is often
among the first literary works read by the youth of France: it is what one
might call a classic, but a classic judged suitable for novices, for readers
who have, in an important sense, no experience at reading. Its classifi-
cation as a classical or even canonical early twentieth-century novel has
become a good excuse for adult readers to not (or no longer) read it.
Those critics who have made the effort to return to Le Grand Meaulnes
during the last three decades have done so (if I my simplify somewhat
but not very much) for three essential reasons: first, because they have
found in the form of the novel either a more complex structure than had
been uncovered previously, or else the repetition of a grand archetypal
form; second, because Alain-Fournier’s novel shares certain aesthetic
tenets with other works of the Modernist period; and third, because the
novel exasperates the critic to such a degree that he finds it necessary
to unburden himself by writing ironically, nastily (méchamment) against
Alain-Fournier and his art. One should add to these three categories
one other, more recent approach, which is that of genetic criticism (critique
génétique) – a method which underlies, to differing degrees, the editions
by Claude Herzfeld (Nizet) and Daniel Leuwers (Classiques Garnier)
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
as well as the critical edition by Claudie Husson entitled Alain-Fournier et
la naissance du récit. If one takes into consideration the respectable number
of articles still being published on Le Grand Meaulnes and the editions and
re-editions of Alain-Fournier’s correspondence, it is easy to conclude
that this “novel of adolescence” continues to exert considerable charm
among informed contemporary French readers.
But against the background of this rich variety of methods and critical
approaches, at the very heart of the interest with which Le Grand Meaulnes
is greeted, the reader is compelled to face one aesthetic issue in particular
which seems to arise from the novel’s weakness – an issue one must
either ignore if one wishes to love the work and be its loyal defender, or
else illuminate with critical scrutiny if the love of the text is not to be a
criterion for the analysis of its meanings. This problem is that of the major
divergence – of tone and of generic character – between the first part
of the novel (centered on the quasi-magical, dreamlike discovery of the
Mysterious Domain by Meaulnes) and the second and third parts, which
are essentially an adventure novel set in the precise and prosaic milieu
of recognizable geography: the isolated stretches of Sologne in central
France. André Gide noted the problem in his Journal in January :

One loses interest in Le Grand Meaulnes, which extends over too many pages and
too much time, whose design is uncertain and whose most exquisite qualities
exhaust themselves within the first hundred pages. The remainder of the book
strives in vain to recapture this first virginal emotion. . . . I know that this vain
striving is the very subject of the book; but it is also its fundamental weakness, so
that it was not, perhaps, possible for the novelist to achieve a greater “success”
in his project.

Gide’s commentary has a double thrust. On the one hand, the author
of the Journal informs us of his displeasure as reader when confronting
a text that foils his expectations: the “exquisite” qualities of the novel,
those features that originally captivated him, do not manage to last.
On the other hand, however, he is forced to admit that the loss of
the ideal, the effacement of the exquisite and the virginal are the
subject of the book, and this subject, in being narrated, in assuming
a properly diegetic movement, can only lead to the reader’s sense of
deception. Did Alain-Fournier’s aesthetic error consist of attempting
to make of one poetic instant – the meeting of Meaulnes and Yvonne
de Galais – the evanescent center of a novel of disillusionment? Does
Le Grand Meaulnes necessarily appear to the attentive reader as an awk-
ward mixture of two incompatible genres – the poetic novel (or even a
 The “beautiful soul”: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes 
kind of long prose poem) and the adventure novel, Baudelaire/Laforgue
and Dickens/Stevenson?
This question of the fundamental difference between the beginning
of the novel and its succeeding sections has come to the surface once
again, and in highly dramatic fashion, in a book by Alain Buisine entitl-
ed Les Mauvaises Pensées du Grand Meaulnes (). In a subtle and orig-
inal psychoanalytical reading which should be taken seriously despite
its voluntarily outrageous style, Buisine asserts that Le Grand Meaulnes
is an “idealizing software package” () that “functions like a machine
to suppress and efface its second part” ( ). Buisine’s interpretive efforts
are directed toward the deconstruction of this machine, toward the un-
covering of its idealizing effects: the critic takes great pains to exhibit
the latent sexual content which makes of the text a vast tableau depict-
ing the anxious avoidance of female sexuality. Making numerous paral-
lels between Alain-Fournier’s novel and the real life of Henri Fournier,
Buisine arrives at the following general statement: “Fundamentally,
Le Grand Meaulnes is a novel about the impotent impossibility of assuming
reality” ().
Like Gide, Buisine places at the center of his critical preoccupations
the separation between the initial meeting of Meaulnes and Yvonne
de Galais in the Mysterious Domain and the protagonist’s subsequent
efforts to rediscover the lost world of this encounter. What Buisine adds
to Gide’s remarks is that the construction of an ideal dreamworld in
the first part of the novel is, in fact, a mask hiding reality rather than
a “virginal” image which the reader might feel justified in admiring for
its aesthetic purity. Unlike Gide, Buisine seems insensitive to the poetic
qualities of the first part, and much more attentive to certain passages
where the text’s “unconscious” manifests itself, where the text reveals the
fundamental ambivalence on which it is constructed.
Now it is worth noting that in one of the most convincing analytic
sections of his study, where Buisine emphasizes the conflict between the
apparent “Frenchness” of the novel (its nostalgic attachment to provincial
reality, to the terroir) and an unmistakable German or Germanic themat-
ics (–), he repeats, without acknowledgment, pertinent observations
made thirty years previously by the distinguished critic of Romanticism,
Léon Cellier, in his study entitled ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ ou l’initiation manquée
(). Cellier, who is closer to Gide than to Buisine in his appreciation
of the novel’s beginning section, reaches different conclusions from those
of Buisine, in that he accuses the novel’s characters not of not having as-
sumed their existential responsibilities, but rather of not having remained
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
faithful to the ideal as it appeared in the Mysterious Domain. But, like
Buisine, he is interested in the stratum of the text in which a certain
historically determined drama, originating in the Romantic era, plays
itself out between France and Germany. Despite obvious differences in
methodology and vocabulary – Buisine speaks in Freudian language
of “drives” ( pulsions) whereas Cellier emphasizes literary “models” – in
both cases the critics feel they have reached the center of the novel’s inter-
pretation once they have isolated and illuminated the France–Germany
dichotomy.
With an ironical verve equal in intensity to that of Buisine, Cellier
enacts what might be called, avant la lettre, a “deconstruction” of the
novel, subjecting Alain-Fournier’s text to a double reading. In a first sec-
tion, he shows that the archetypal scheme of the text, the fundamental
form that subtends it, is that of the quest novel: in this perspective, Alain-
Fournier’s modern work would be a rewriting of Chrétien de Troyes’s
Perceval. Meaulnes would be an initiate; his task would be to decipher
the mystery of the Domain; his adventures would constitute a series of
mystical ordeals on the path toward final understanding. But in a second
section Cellier attempts to demonstrate that the narrative progression
of quest and initiation stalls and stagnates: between the discovery of the
Domain and the pages that follow the novel undoes itself; it metamor-
phoses from quest novel to simple adventure novel, in which the theme of
remorse (or of sin, of Meaulnes’s moral waywardness) takes center stage.
Cellier’s erudition and reading experience allow him to discern in
Le Grand Meaulnes a novel that reprises not only the most ancient
archetypes, but also certain Romantic themes, and it is here, in the
context of the period he knows so well, that the critic’s judgment is par-
ticularly severe:

As concerns the novel’s Romanticism, it is of the cheapest sort. How can the
reader not be disappointed at the conception of Romanticism the novel implies?
Le Grand Meaulnes’s Frantz [one of the three major male characters] is but a car-
icature of the author of Sylvie; infantile behavior is not equivalent to a childlike
spirit; the extravagance of Frantz has nothing in common with moral complex-
ity; the hero of Sylvie does not marry Sylvie. As far as Meaulnes is concerned,
who would confuse this perverted, parvenu peasant with a Romantic hero? ( )

If Cellier condemns the novel, it is because Meaulnes has not been

equal to his task as would-be initiate, and because Frantz is but a pale
imitation of a Romantic hero. Le Grand Meaulnes, which is, at its deepest
level, an imitation of Perceval, is also, more visibly but no less unfortunately,
a rewriting of Gérard de Nerval’s evocative and elliptical Sylvie. But here
 The “beautiful soul”: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes 
as well, the modern novel runs aground, because Alain-Fournier allowed
Meaulnes to possess his dream, whereas, as Cellier remarks, Nerval does
not commit the aesthetic (and moral?) error of giving Sylvie as wife to the
narrator-protagonist of his novella. For Buisine, therefore, the characters
of Le Grand Meaulnes do not live enough; for Cellier, they do not dream
enough; in both cases, they fail, and their failure turns our reading into
an exercise in frustration and disillusionment.
If I have permitted myself to follow the interpretive paths of readers as
different as André Gide, Alain Buisine, and Léon Cellier, it is to indicate
that a reading of Alain-Fournier’s text necessarily passes through and
acknowledges the faultline that divides it at its center. Unlike Proust’s
novel, which appears to unfold or uncoil itself from the initial concen-
trated skein of the petite madeleine episode, Le Grand Meaulnes is divided,
disjointed, dismembered: its two sections can never meet. On the one
hand there is the momentary, ephemeral image of Meaulnes’s encounter
with Yvonne de Galais in the Mysterious Domain, characterized by an
atmosphere of purity and perfection; on the other hand we have the
desperate travels of the protagonist, his impossible search for an irreme-
diably lost purity.
But how can one explain this structural dichotomy, and what is the
origin of the novel’s incapacity to reach its own synthesis, its narrative
reconciliation? It is at this juncture, it seems to me, that one ought to
proceed beyond a simple declaration concerning the novel’s “failure”
toward an investigation that places Le Grand Meaulnes in its particular his-
torical context. Now this context, as Cellier has demonstrated, is that of
European Romanticism. To be more precise, one should say that those
texts that lie before and “underneath” Le Grand Meaulnes belong to that
brief period that immediately precedes and makes possible Romanti-
cism as such. Alain-Fournier’s early twentieth-century novel follows in
the wake of a number of fundamental texts which provide the basis and
critical accompaniment to Romanticism. A textually grounded interpre-
tation of Le Grand Meaulnes, notably of its central faultline, has a greater
chance of reaching a place other than that of the reader’s disillusion-
ment and anger if we follow those traces in the novel that indicate its
aesthetic provenance. I propose to initiate my own reading by citing and
commenting upon a passage from Le Grand Meaulnes, before beginning
an intertextual voyage which will first lead us far away in time and space
before returning us to our point of departure – the interpretive difficulty
inherent in this double, divided, schizoid work.
The passage I shall be citing is taken from the penultimate chapter
of the novel, from the moment at which the reader learns, thanks to
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
François’s transcription of Meaulnes’s schoolboy notebooks, the nature
of Meaulnes’s adventures during his absence from the text (essentially, his
liaison with Valentine, the young woman he encountered while searching
for Yvonne de Galais – a liaison which is at the origin of the protagonist’s
remorse). In the pages that precede the passage we learn that Meaulnes,
having discovered the letters from Frantz in Valentine’s possession, and
having thus discovered that she is the “fiancée” from the Mysterious
Domain who was unable to believe in Frantz’s extravagant projects and
hopes, separates himself from her and, in a certain sense, sends her to her
ruin. In his desire to find Valentine after this brutal separation, Meaulnes
rents a bicycle and rides to Bourges, but his efforts are in vain. He does
not find her, and returns home, discouraged:
The long voyage that remained for him was to be his last recourse against his
suffering, his last forced distraction before succumbing to unending anguish.
He departed. Next to the road, in the valley, he saw lovely farmhouses between
the trees, at the edge of the water, which exhibited their pointed gables decorated
with green trelliswork. No doubt, over there, on the lawns, attentive young girls
spoke of love. One could imagine, over there, beautiful souls [de belles âmes].
But for Meaulnes, at that moment, nothing existed except one particular love,
the unsatisfied love that had just been extinguished so cruelly, and the young
woman among all others [Valentine] whom he should have protected, saved,
was precisely the one he had sent to her ruin. ()
This return to Bourges, this voyage of disillusionment, is all the more
significant in that it has a rather curious narrative motivation. At this
moment in the story, François has strayed well beyond his role of editor of
Meaulnes’s diary: here, he grants himself the privileges of a third-person
omniscient narrator to relate not only the actions of Meaulnes, but also
the latter’s most intimate thoughts and desires. The phrases “no doubt,
over there, on the lawns, attentive young girls spoke of love,” as well as “one
could imagine, over there, beautiful souls,” are the narrator’s projections,
notions with which he fills the mind of the protagonist. François, in
examining the presumed fantasies of his culpable friend, has become (to
borrow from Nerval’s vocabulary), the creator of Meaulnes’s chimères. And
in the detailed scenic representation of the bicycle trip, François places
Meaulnes in the position that he, as secondary character and narrator,
usually occupies: that of passive and melancholy observer. The dramatic
contrast on which the passage is based rests on the absolute distance or
difference between the imagined purity of the “attentive young girls,”
of the “beautiful souls” engaged in a discourse on love, and the moral
fall of the protagonist, who has “sinned” in appropriating for himself
 The “beautiful soul”: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes  
a woman not destined for him, in showing himself to be incapable (as
Cellier would say) of rising to the level of the ideal.
This passage concentrates or distills the essence of the text’s fundamen-
tal conflict at the very moment that the narration reaches its conclusion.
There can be no more “distractions” for Meaulnes, since his spirit hesi-
tates between two visions of the world, two Weltanschauungen that share no
common element: either he can think of these young women discussing
love in an atmosphere of reflective calm, or he is condemned to relive
the remorse of his dalliance with Valentine. It is evident that the jeunes
filles en fleurs of Alain-Fournier, in their virginal simplicity, repeat, in an
ironic mode, the founding image of Yvonne de Galais as she appeared
in the Mysterious Domain. The fact that the young women are prop-
erly inaccessible to the protagonist is rendered by the repetition of the
expression “over there” (“là-bas”) – which emphasizes the distance be-
tween Meaulnes and these daydream-creatures. But it is important to
dwell on one detail in the text that gives it a particular historical reso-
nance: the use of the term “beautiful soul” (belle âme) to designate the
young girls. This term is not a simple variation or substitution for
the phrase “attentive young girls.” One should say, rather, that the pas-
sage from “attentive young girls” to “beautiful souls” constitutes what
one would call in German a Steigerung, a tonal amplification through the
use of a parallel, but stronger, expression. Now the notion of the beau-
tiful soul is historically and culturally marked, and carries with it the
historical baggage of Romanticism, or rather, as I have suggested, of the
rich period that precedes and renders possible the Romantic movement
per se. I propose now to survey the various transformations of the notion
of the beautiful soul during the last part of the eighteenth century and
the first years of the nineteenth, in order to return to Le Grand Meaulnes
and better interpret its constitutive break, its faultline. In the end, my
goal is to situate Alain-Fournier’s novel in the crucial transition that oc-
curs, in the period around , between the decline of Romanticism
and the explosion of new forms which constitute what is generally called
European Modernism.

III THE GERMAN INTERTEXT OF LE GRAND MEAULNES : THE

“ B E A U T I F U L S O U L ” A N D I T S H I S T O R Y 
The English expression “the beautiful soul” is the exact equivalent of
the term “die schöne Seele,” whose evolution in the writings of the
most important poets and thinkers of German Classicism and Idealism
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
conveys, in microcosmic manner, a certain conceptual drama that played
itself out in this period, notably concerning the problematic nature of the
relations between the aesthetic and moral domains. I shall limit myself
here to three authors – Schiller, Goethe, and Hegel – who write about
the beautiful soul quite explicitly in their respective discourses. To be
more complete, one would need to take into consideration the numerous
variations on this theme that can be found in other writers – in Wieland,
Kant, and Hölderlin, for example – but this would take us beyond the
purview of the present analysis.
In the German-speaking world, the term “schöne Seele” has its ori-
gin in Protestant Pietism; it surfaces first in the religious literature of
the late eighteenth century in Germany and Switzerland before being
“reconverted” into secular and philosophical discourse by Schiller, in the
clearest manner in his  essay “Über Anmut und Würde” [Grace and
Dignity]; Goethe, in his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship] (–); and Hegel, in Die Phänomenologie des Geistes [The
Phenomenology of Spirit] ().

Schiller
Schiller wrote “Über Anmut und Würde” just one year before Über die
ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen [On the Aesthetic
Education of Man in a Series of Letters] and two years before Über naive und
sentimentalische Dichtung [Naı̈ve and Sentimental Poetry] – the two masterworks
by which we know (and to which sometimes, unfortunately, we reduce)
the theoretical thought of the writer. These three studies were written in
the shadow of the critical philosophy of Kant, whose massive influence
is discernible throughout Schiller’s meditations. In a general sense, one
can say that Schiller attempted to emancipate himself from his mentor
especially in the elaboration of a new conception of moral duty. Whereas
Kant made a categorical separation between the domain of art and the
purview of moral decision and action, Schiller sought a synthesis of the
two areas, emphasizing the possibility of a “moral beauty” at work in
those human actions most worthy of our admiration.
It is against Kantian rigorism, therefore, against the notion of moral
duty conceived as an order imposed by a principled conscience on pur-
poseful human activity, that Schiller works out his dialectic of aesthetic
grace (Anmut) and moral dignity (Würde). And to render this dialectic ac-
cessible to the reader’s senses as well as intelligence, Schiller introduces
the notion of the “die schöne Seele.” The beautiful soul is characterized
 The “beautiful soul”: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes  
by the facility with which it submits itself to the most severe of moral
imperatives:

The beautiful soul has no other merit except to be. With an admirable lightness
[Leichtigkeit], as if acting only from instinct, the beautiful soul accomplishes the
most painful moral duties [Pflichten] given to man; and the most heroic sacrifice
to which it submits its natural drives [Naturtriebe] seems a freely chosen effect
[Wirkung] of these very drives. Thus, the beautiful soul is never itself conscious
of the beauty of its actions, and it never imagines that one could act and feel
otherwise.

In the context of Schiller’s synthetic presentation, the beautiful soul is

the figuration of the fragile reconciliation of human instincts or drives (the
word Trieb will, of course, be used by Freud in his psychoanalytical theory)
and moral duty (Pflicht). What distinguishes the beautiful soul, in this
formulation, from the rigors of the Kantian system, is that its “sacrifices”
are not equivalent to the abandonment of instinctual satisfaction under
the boot of moral duty. These “sacrifices,” in fact, appear as such only
to a distant observer, someone who, unlike the beautiful soul, does not
act with the ease or “lightness” (Leichtigkeit) of moral freedom.
Schiller inscribes the figure of the beautiful soul within a properly
dialectical movement which is developed beyond “Über Anmut und
Würde” in the more systematic essays included in On the Aesthetic Educa-
tion of Man in a Series of Letters. It is in this work that Schiller, in an ambitious
and sinuous argument, traces the history of human development through
distinct stages, in which he establishes a tripartite hierarchical scheme.
Beginning with primitive or “physical” man, who is characterized only by
a sensual drive [sinnlicher Trieb], we move to aesthetic man, who possesses
a form instinct or impulse [Formtrieb], and finally to moral man, who
synthesizes sensual drives and the form impulse in a unifying “instinct
to play” [Spieltrieb], guarantor of human liberty. One should not under-
estimate the seriousness of the argument advanced by Schiller when he
pleads for a central place for art and aesthetic sensibility in society. The
beautiful soul figures the ease with which one should be able to pass from
the aesthetic to the moral. In “Über Anmut und Würde” Schiller depicts
what one might call a graceful feminine “character” that incorporates
and renders visible the reconciliation of conceptual opposites toward
which the poet’s aesthetic philosophy is aimed. In the passage from the
physical to the aesthetic and then to the moral, the first step is by far
the more difficult: in other words, once one reaches the aesthetic stage,
morality is not far away. This is because the aesthetic stage predisposes
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
human beings to moral action: such is the conclusion Schiller reaches in
the twenty-third Letter, which is essentially an abstract repetition of what
he had said about the beautiful soul in “Über Anmut und Würde”:
It is therefore one of the most important tasks of culture to subject man to form
even in his purely physical life, and to make him aesthetic as far as ever the
realm of Beauty can extend, since the moral condition can be developed only
from the aesthetic, not from the physical condition . . . In a word, in the realm
of truth and morality sensation [Empfindung] must have nothing to determine;
but in the sphere of happiness form may exist and the play impulse [Spieltrieb]
may govern.

Goethe
Goethe develops the notion of the beautiful soul in the sixth book of
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship which is entitled “Confessions of a Beauti-
ful Soul” [“Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele”]. Already Schiller had
made use of the feminine gender of the word “Seele” to grant the
beautiful soul traditionally feminine attributes – lightness, grace, formal
beauty – but Goethe goes a step farther, in bestowing upon his “schöne
Seele” the gift of speech. The Beautiful Soul is a character in Goethe’s
Bildungsroman, and rather than being part of what I called a conceptual
drama, as was the case for Schiller, she now plays a central role in a
fictive psychodrama. The sixth book of Wilhelm Meister has always posed
problems for critics, for two related reasons: first, this section of the text
is a departure from the novelistic frame, in that it introduces a char-
acter, the Beautiful Soul, who does not participate in the plot of the
story (although her niece will marry Wilhelm at the end of the novel,
and it is through this family relation, no doubt, that Goethe could pla-
cate lovers of verisimilitude); and second, an attentive reading of this
book runs up against Goethe’s irony, an irony that does not manifest
itself in occasional bursts, but rather extends throughout the entirety of
the “Confessions.” In a word: what should one think of a figure whose
purity, whose “moral beauty” is such that she does not participate any
longer in what one generally designates by the word “life”? It is true that
some of the first readers of the sixth book were seduced by the purity of
the character, and saw in the Beautiful Soul a direct representation of
Susanna Katharina von Klettenberg, a Pietist friend of Goethe’s mother
whose correspondence with Lavater remains an excellent testimony to
the religious currents of the period. Since it seems that Katharina von
 The “beautiful soul”: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes  
Klettenberg helped Goethe overcome a “spiritual crisis” in his youth,
it was tempting to read the “Confessions” as a pious and unambiguous
homage to this extraordinary woman. Not only did Goethe’s mother fall
into this interpretive trap, but it would appear that Schiller himself was
taken in: perhaps he could only be insensitive to a pervasive irony that
called into question his own eminently serious conception of the beautiful
soul.
The story of the Beautiful Soul seems to be that of a progressive el-
evation, of a purification and elimination of those affective links that
bind the character to her environment. The “Confessions” tell of two
ill-fated liaisons. The first of these does not work out because of the im-
maturity of the young suitor (named, significantly, Narcissus); the second
ends abruptly when the rather mysterious “impurity” of a certain Philo
is discovered (as this name implies, the character loves; but he is not
loved in return). As the narrative progresses, the Beautiful Soul becomes
less and less happy in polite society (at one point in the story, she had
been a Stiftsdame (canoness) at the court), and, having had a mystical
experience in which she believes she has communicated directly with
Christ, she decides to retire from the world and its superficial pleasures.
Throughout all this what I am calling Goethe’s ironical point of view
might still remain a matter of interpretation. One reader might find in
the actions of the Beautiful Soul the proof of a superior morality; another
could well see in the progressive self-denial of the protagonist unmistak-
able signs of a singular incapacity to live and even a pronounced fear of
sexuality.
There is in the sixth book, however, a character who seems to be
Goethe’s spokesperson and who serves as a foil to the Beautiful Soul –
namely, her uncle, who plays a secondary but nevertheless crucial role
in “The Confessions.” His actions and moderate words contrast dra-
matically with his niece’s pious and increasingly supersensible vocation.
During a conversation in his castle, where he holds a distinguished col-
lection of paintings, the uncle initiates a discussion on the question of
aesthetic judgment and on the problem of the quality of works of art.
Whereas the Beautiful Soul refuses to succumb to the “temptations” of
the beaux-arts (the seductive beauty of color, harmony, and form), her
uncle demonstrates that creative genius, which evolves in the cultivation
of beautiful shapes and structures, is itself perhaps closer to moral per-
fection than the naı̈ve hymns and devotional literature that provide the
Beautiful Soul with her limited inspirational sustenance. In the remarks
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
that follow, one may well hear, filtered through the uncle’s discourse,
Goethe’s own corrective voice:

[My uncle] then drew my attention to some pictures that had not struck me
particularly, and tried to make me understand that only study of the history
of art can give us a proper sense of the value and distinction of a work of art.
One must first appreciate the burdensome aspects of technical labor that gifted
artists have perfected over the centuries, in order for one to comprehend how
it is possible for a creative genius to move freely and joyfully on a place so high
that it makes us dizzy.
With this in mind he brought together a number of pictures, and when he
explained them to me, I could not avoid seeing in them images and symbols of
moral perfection. When I told him this, he said: “You are absolutely right, and
one should not pursue the cultivation of one’s moral life [der sittlichen Bildung] in
isolation and seclusion. We are more likely to find that a person intent on moral
advancement will have every cause to cultivate his senses [seine feinere Sinnlichkeit]
as well as his mind, so as not to run the risk of losing his foothold on those
moral heights, slipping into the seductive allurements of uncontrolled fancy and
debasing his nobler nature by indulging in idle frivolities, if not worse.

One can see here how Goethe’s reflexions echo those of Schiller,
but with some notable differences. Whereas for Schiller, in the Letters,
the central point was to go beyond the level of mere sensual instinct
(Sinntrieb) in order to attain the infinitely superior and “noble” aesthetic
and moral stages, in the “Confessions,” Goethe suggests that one must
always cultivate what he calls one’s “more delicate sensibility” (seine feinere
Sinnlichkeit). It is the harmonization of this sensibility and of moral culture
(die sittliche Bildung) that produces the truly cultivated human being, in the
sense of the German gebildet. In the context of such reasoning, it is clear
that the mystical adventures of the Beautiful Soul can only represent
one step in the Bildung of the novel’s protagonist, who should see in the
“Confessions” not a model of conduct, but rather a warning against the
excesses of self-contemplation and self-involvement. Perhaps it is not a
matter of coincidence that the activity chosen by Wilhelm once he has
concluded his adventures, in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (), is that
of medicine (surgery as Handwerk) – an art of healing and of aid to others,
where science is allied with altruism. The error of the Beautiful Soul is
double: on the one hand she neglected the aesthetic specificity of works
of art and, in so doing, could not understand the moral content inhering
in them; and on the other hand she lived in ethereal regions where the
moral beauty she thought she perceived was nothing more than a pale
 The “beautiful soul”: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes  
aestheticization beyond all effective action and all concrete reality. To
conclude, one might say that the error of the Beautiful Soul consists in
not having made any errors: it is through the mistakes and mis-steps
along the route of one’s Bildung that apprenticeship take place.

Hegel
In a language quite different from that of Goethe in Wilhelm Meister, and
with a quite different distribution of roles in his drama of the development
of consciousness, Hegel nevertheless traces much the same story of Bildung
in the conceptual architecture of his Phenomenology of Spirit. In both cases,
the fundamental issue is that of evolution – whether it be that of a fictive
character representing the strengths and weaknesses of humanity, or
whether it be consciousness itself in its movement beyond sense certainty
toward morality, religion, and absolute knowledge. And this evolution
is told, takes on a properly narrative form. By coincidence, the “scene”
played by the beautiful soul in the Phenomenology, a short but decisive one
in the section concerning “Spirit that is certain of itself,” can be found in
the sixth section of eight, just as was the case in Wilhelm Meister. This is
to say that the moment of the beautiful soul comes toward the end, but
not at the end, of a process of refinement of consciousness. In Hegel’s
scheme, the stage of the beautiful soul must be overcome (aufgehoben, that
is, sublated), and this overcoming operates in Hegel’s construction in a
manner philosophically analogous to the way in which the resonance
of the Beautiful Soul is both negated and preserved in the seventh and
eighth books of Wilhelm Meister.
According to Hegel, the beautiful soul is the poetic figure of absolute
self-consciousness completely folded in upon itself and thus incapable
of all effective action in the world. This involution of consciousness is a
necessary moment of the spirit’s progression, but a moment that must
efface itself before the advent of a superior movement – that of “evil
and its forgiveness” – which concludes the sixth section of the treatise. In
brief: the beautiful soul is sublated at the moment at which consciousness
seeks the recognition of its convictions by another consciousness. In simple
terms, one might say that the human being cannot isolate him- or herself
from others, and that the need for recognition, which is universal, causes
one to leave the charming but restrictive enclosure of “moral beauty.”
In the same way that Wilhelm Meister, after the sixth book, will discover
the society of the Tower and finally turn toward an altruistic métier, here
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
the beautiful soul will dissipate in the movement of the recognition of
alterity.
As Hegel’s commentators have noted, it is probable that the pas-
sage on the beautiful soul constitutes a thinly veiled (if veiled at all)
polemic against the poetry and poetics of Novalis (and therefore also
against Fichte, whose philosophy, along with a certain kind of German
Romanticism, had influenced this poet). In any case, the rhetorical tone
of the passage which concludes the section on the beautiful soul is that
of irony – not Goethe’s serene irony, but rather a ferocious debunking.
The beautiful soul may be philosophically sublated, but it is then, in the
lines that follow, effectively destroyed (vernichtet):
Here, then, we see self-consciousness withdrawn into its innermost being, for
which all externality as such has vanished – withdrawn into the contempla-
tion of the “I = I,” in which this “I” is the whole of essentiality and exis-
tence . . . [Consciousness] lives in dread of besmirching the splendour of its in-
ner being by action and an existence; and, in order to preserve the purity of its
heart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willed
impotence to renounce its self which is reduced to the extremes of ultimate
abstraction, and to give itself a substantial existence, or to transform its thought
into being and put its trust in the absolute difference [between thought and
being]. The hollow object which it has produced for itself now fills it, therefore,
with a sense of emptiness. Its activity is a yearning which merely loses itself as
consciousness becomes an object devoid of substance, and, rising above this loss,
and falling back on itself, finds itself only as a lost soul. In this transparent purity
of its moments, an unhappy, so-called “beautiful soul,” its light dies away within
it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air.

IV RETURN TO LE GRAND MEAULNES : FROM ROMANTICISM

TO MODERNISM

In the brief period of time that separates “Über Anmut und Würde”
() from Phenomenology of Spirit (), the notion of the beautiful
soul underwent significant modifications. Schiller’s point of departure
was the desire to effect a dialectical unification of beauty and morality
through the creation of a figure – that of the “schöne Seele” – which
would combine aesthetic grace with moral dignity, thus overcoming the
division Kant had striven to establish between the separate domains of
aesthetic appreciation and ethical praxis. It seems in retrospect, how-
ever, that Schiller’s dialectic was not rigorous enough, at least in the
Hegelian sense, in that, with the creation of the figure of the beautiful
soul, sensual instinct (Sinntrieb) was not aufgehoben in the triple sense of
 The “beautiful soul”: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes  
negated/preserved/overcome, but simply abandoned and forgotten, effaced
by the more noble aesthetic and moral impulses. It is against this for-
getfulness, this abandonment of human sensuality and concrete reality
that Goethe and Hegel reacted, each in his own style, the former insist-
ing on the necessity of error in Bildung, and the other emphasizing the
fundamental role of negation/alienation in the development of human
consciousness. Jean Hyppolite’s description of the final goal of Hegel’s
Phenomenology can be applied also to Goethe’s conception of apprentice-
ship: “It is not the subjectivity of the beautiful soul, which embraces
within itself the entire substantiveness of spirit and reduces it to itself,
that is the last word of philosophy, but rather both this universal sub-
jectivity and the partiality of concrete action taken together.” What
was lacking in Schiller’s conception of the beautiful soul was precisely
this “partiality of concrete action,” and this partiality is at the center of
Goethe’s preoccupations in Wilhelm Meister.
In his own representation of the “belles âmes” holding court on a
pristine meadow, Alain-Fournier echoes Schiller rather than Goethe or
Hegel. When François Seurel enters into the mind of Meaulnes to say:
“No doubt, over there, on the lawns, attentive young girls spoke of love.
One could imagine, over there, beautiful souls,” it is to contrast the ir-
remediable moral degradation of the protagonist with the purity of the
imagined young women. In other words, to use Hegelian vocabulary,
these young girls who figure beautiful souls (and who, it must be empha-
sized, do not exist, are not real, are not in the visual field of Meaulnes) are
simply the dreamed result of an empty “yearning,” of a hollow nostalgia.
Instead of creating a hero like Wilhelm Meister who moves through life
and submits to its moral ordeals in order to transform himself, instead of
giving his protagonist the capacity to navigate between the extremes of
purity and defilement, Alain-Fournier divides his imaginary world into
two irreconcilable parts – on the one hand, a beautiful but inaccessible
realm of idealized love, and on the other hand, the domain of sin and
remorse for which, unlike in Hegel’s scheme, there is no pardon.
To return now to the question of Romanticism, one can see why
Le Grand Meaulnes bothered Léon Cellier so much. Alain-Fournier’s imag-
ination borrowed from Romanticism only one of its aspects: its most
obvious and overused theme, that of nostalgia for an impossible love.
The universe of Le Grand Meaulnes is characterized by solipsism, and this
solipsism is in reality the result of a bad or false reading of the first
Romanticism, of Romanticism before the development of a literature of
simple nostalgia. For Goethe and Hegel, writers who do not belong to
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
the Romantic movement properly speaking, but who live it in meditating
on Romanticism at the level of its most fundamental presuppositions, the
insufficiency of the figure of the beautiful soul resides in its detachment
from the human community, its separation from reality.
One of the most beautiful passages in Le Grand Meaulnes takes place
when the protagonist, an intruder in the Mysterious Domain, fortuitously
comes upon a scene which, in its aesthetic perfection, seems to escape
from the contingencies of human temporality. I am alluding to the the-
atrical tableau in which the narrator shows Meaulnes listening to a young
woman who is playing the piano in a room full of children:

It was a kind of small parlor; a woman or perhaps young woman, with a large
brown cloak thrown over her shoulders, her back to her audience, was playing
quite softly melodies from roundelays and comic songs. On the couch nearby,
six or seven young boys and girls all in a row as if portrayed in a picturebook,
obedient as are all children when it is late, were listening . . .
After this charming but frantic and loud evening . . . Meaulnes found himself
submerged in the most tranquil happiness imaginable.
Without noise, while the young woman continued to play, he went back to the
dining-room and sat down, and, opening one of the large red books scattered
on the table, he began, absentmindedly, to read.
Almost immediately one of the little boys who was on the floor came up to
him, leaned on his arm and climbed his leg to look on with him; another did the
same from the other side. Then it was the same dream he had dreamt before.
He could imagine for a great while that he was in his own house, married, on a
beautiful evening, and that this charming and unknown being who was playing
the piano nearby was his wife. (–)

What is striking in this lovely fixed image is the excessively immo-

bile quality of its staging: there is an uncanny (unheimlich) tone to this
fictitious domesticity, where the children are actors disguised in old-
fashioned costumes, and where the young woman at the piano turns her
back to us. Meaulnes’s imagination is focused on a dead image, or even
an image of death. Already here we have the figuration of the impos-
sibility of the realization of love, the effacement of woman as concrete
reality. The very rapid repetition of this scene in the seventh chapter of
part three (“Le Jour de noces”), where François hears Yvonne de Galais
playing the piano for Meaulnes, only adds to its fragile and melancholy
character.
In the light of our discussion of the beautiful soul and its history, a first
conclusion imposes itself: Le Grand Meaulnes, a novel published in 
just before World War I and the social, political, and artistic upheavals
 The “beautiful soul”: Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes  
of that period, remains firmly attached to a certain Romantic aesthetic –
that of melancholy, of nostalgia for a beautiful and irrecuperable past.
But it must be noted, at the same time, that Alain-Fournier’s novel does
not participate (as do the most lucid works of the Romantic period) in
a serious examination of the theoretical presuppositions on which it is
constructed and the lovely figures it employs to seduce its readers. The
faultline at the center of the novel which preoccupied Gide, Buisine, and
Cellier is not merely some lack of compositional talent on the part of the
author, but rather a line of absolute separation between the domains of
the aesthetic and the moral, and this separation undermines both areas
equally. The beauty of the book masks its existential immobility; and the
issue of moral complexity, the problem of choices and responsibility, as
well as the passage to adulthood, are all eluded, bypassed. Poetic imagery
(das Bild ) covers up and stifles moral progress (die Bildung).
In the perspective of modern literary history, a second conclusion
imposes itself: Le Grand Meaulnes, in being anchored to a merely nos-
talgic Romanticism, does not participate in the renewal brought about
by European Modernism, which, in its strongest moments, enacts what
Proust, in writing about the chronological distortions of the dreamworld,
calls “un jeu formidable . . . avec le Temps.” What appears already in
Du côté de chez Swann, published, like Alain-Fournier’s novel, in ,
is the transformation of memory from the handmaiden of impotent
regret into a method of knowledge and a primary motor in the con-
struction of narrative order. And the progression of the Recherche reveals
that the content of memory (and of specific memories) is not always
tinged with the alternation of euphoria and melancholy. The path of the
novel’s interiorized Bildung is punctuated by all the revelations concerning
Albertine, revelations that destroy the linear temporality of the work and
reveal its hidden and deviated byways. And this twisting of time has as
its essential result an illumination of the complexity of human relations,
which is made by the elaboration of a new aesthetic form but in an anal-
ysis of the moral labyrinth. Proustian memory is, in its deep structure,
simultaneously aesthetic envelope and moral content.
Returning now to the liminary quotation from Death in Venice with
which I began this chapter, I would like to offer a concluding comment on
Thomas Mann’s remarks concerning the interaction of the aesthetic and
moral realms. It is certainly in the nature of artistic form to tend toward
moral “indifference,” since form includes the moral question by thematiz-
ing it. But one should add that it is in the nature of the moral question,
when it is strongly problematized (for example, in Wilhelm Meister and
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
A la recherche du temps perdu, but not in Le Grand Meaulnes), to undo all
efforts at aesthetic mastery, to return to the surface of the text at the pre-
cise moment of the greatest narrative transparency – as in the Proustian
“intermittences du coeur,” and as in the Sinntrieb Rainer Maria Rilke puts
into action in the third Duino Elegy, written also, “by chance,” in .
What Rilke evokes in this poem dedicated to Neptune, “the blood’s
River-God,” is the force of chaotic ancestral drives that reside below all
formal constructions, all aestheticization of life, all beautiful flowerings.
In a manner emblematic of Modernism, Rilke no longer shows aesthetic
form modeling life, he no longer imagines a possible variation on the
“beautiful soul,” but traces the portrait of a man being thrust into ex-
istence (we are very close here to Heideggerian Geworfenheit) who, since
time immemorial, is “entangled” (verstrickt) in his destiny. The human
being is no longer the one who controls form from the outside, the one
who dreams of an immobile perfection, but he or she who, living on the
“fallen and mute ruins” of Time, is hurled into the dynamism of figures,
a novice participating in the deployment of images (“jagende Formen”)
which model his reality and constitute the inner space of his moral drama
(the luminosity of his “heart”):
Er, der Neue, Scheuende, wie er verstrickt war,
mit des innern Geschehns weiterschlagenden Ranken
schon zu Mustern verschlungen, zu würgendem Wachstum, zu tierhaft
jagenden Formen. Wie er sich hingab –. Liebte.
Liebte sein Inneres, seines Inneren Wildnis,
diesen Urwald in ihm, auf dessen stummen Gestürztsein
lichtgrün sein Herz stand.
So young and shy, how he entangled himself
in the spreading roots of events inside him,
twisted patterns, strangling tendrils, shapes
of preying animals. How he surrendered –. Loved.
Loved his interior world, the jungle in him, that
primal inner forest where his pale green heart stood
among the fallen and mute ruins.
 CHAPTER 

Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings

In the previous chapter I suggested that Le Grand Meaulnes stands at the

juncture between a waning Romantic sensibility and the advent of
Modernism, at a crucial crossroads in literary history just prior to World
War I. My conclusion was that the narrative faultline in the novel between
part one and parts two and three, between the domain of an aestheti-
cized dreamworld and the territory of ethical responsibility, constitutes
an unbridgeable gap for Alain-Fournier. The figure of the “beautiful
soul” appears in a moment of moral crisis and cannot save the protago-
nist from his remorse. The universe of Le Grand Meaulnes, despite its initial
promise of poetic charm, becomes mired in guilt and an unredeemable
melancholy. The uncanny figure of the woman at the piano with her
back turned to Meaulnes and to the reader serves as a negation of the
“beautiful souls” discoursing on love in the meadow. In his description
of the otherworldly calm in which Meaulnes listens to the woman at the
keyboard amid theatrically costumed children, Alain-Fournier brings us
close to, but not into contact with, the realm of Unheimlichkeit. We as
readers do not cross the threshold into uncanniness, just as the novel
itself does not cross over into Modernism.
In the three chapters that follow – on Proust and Kafka, Conrad and
Gide, and Woolf – I shall be locating what might be called the narra-
tive emergence of uncanniness as territory within representative works by these
writers. As we have seen in earlier chapters of this book, das Unheimliche
is the domain of death-in-life, a ghostly place or non-place in which
the aesthetic and the ethical cross into each other’s territories and dis-
rupt the boundaries separating the one sphere from the other. What
distinguishes the Modernist writers I am about to examine from Alain-
Fournier is that each of them, in his or her own distinct way, discovers
literature (the literary as such) while falling into the strange-but-familiar
territory of the uncanny. For Proust and Kafka, narrative movement
itself is inseparable from the uncanny reverberations present within the
 
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
signifier: to open up the diabolical potential residing within the signifier
is to liberate literary language and to release an infinite diegetic energy.
For Conrad and Gide, das Unheimliche lies beneath and upsets the simple
opposition between home territory (England, France) and the foreign
“other” (North Africa, the Congo): uncanniness, for both writers, is con-
ceived of as the inhuman, that area lying below and beyond all narrative
frames and all ethical control. In Woolf ’s fictional universe, the uncanny
is synonymous with the impersonal: the place of das Unheimliche is to be
found in a watery blurring of distinctions, in a generalized narrative
permeability that goes against the very logic of framing as such. The
Modernist texts I am reading here undermine formal symmetries and
moral certainties by opening themselves to the radical otherness of the
uncanny, an otherness that is ontologically prior to the classical binary
oppositions of self and other, home and foreign, physis and techné. Chap-
ters six, seven, and eight of this book are designed to be read together, as
variations on the theme of the uncanny in its unruly narrative manifesta-
tion, in its raising of the barriers separating ethical action from aesthetic
form.

I PROUST AND KAFKA ON FICTIONAL ORIGINS: RHETORIC

AND NARRATOLOGY

In traditional intellectual biographies of novelists, the central issue for

the biographer is to discover at precisely what point the novelist becomes
himself or herself. The formative events of childhood, the early readings
and first attempts at writing, lead toward the moment at which the creator
of fictions sheds external influences and discovers a personal style. This
moment is represented, in the intellectual biography, as a threshold, a
passageway between unrealized efforts and accomplished goals, between
juvenilia and authentic artistic creation. Of course, one might object that
the extreme clarity with which many traditional accounts of authors’
lives depict such a passage is achieved at the price of simplification: it
is no doubt easier for the biographer to trace an orderly career from a
retrospective point of view than it is for the writer to recognize, in life,
the threshold-moment when it occurs. Nevertheless, it is a fact that those
writers whose works have an autobiographical form or self-reflective
focus often insist (with energy equal to that of their biographers) upon
the absolute value of one moment, which they represent dramatically as
a beginning, a birth, or an opening into the space of writing.
For the two writers I shall be examining in this chapter – Marcel
Proust and Franz Kafka – the threshold-moment can be conceived, in
 Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings  
psychological terms, as a liberation from childhood anxieties. George
Painter, in his Marcel Proust: A Biography, sees the early stages of Proust’s
literary infatuations in cathartic terms, as the chapter headings “Salva-
tion through Ruskin” (in volume I) and “Purification through Parody”
(in volume II) indicate. Proust is free to write and “become himself ” once
he has shed the external literary influences of Ruskin and Sainte-Beuve,
on the one hand, and once his father and mother have died, on the other.
Proust lives once influences have been buried – and, Painter adds, once
he no longer must submit to the pressures of the Oedipal triangle in
which his psychological ambivalence has been nurtured. Ronald
Hayman’s Kafka: A Biography is even more obviously centered in a trans-
parent Freudian configuration. Hayman begins his book with a chapter
entitled “The Turning Point: ,” in which he describes the evening
of the composition of “The Judgment” (“Das Urteil”) – Kafka’s first sup-
posedly Kafkaesque narrative, where the all-determining relationship
between son and father jumps upon the page with theatrical intensity.
The maturity of Kafka’s biological life is “really” the beginning of his
creative life: for us readers of Kafka, the evening of  September 
slices like a blade between before and after, the inessential and the
essential, non-writing and writing.
It would be easy enough – I believe, too easy – to criticize both Painter
and Hayman for their naı̈ve, teleological “Hegelianism,” while granting
their studies a limited value as indispensable groundwork for the more
sophisticated textual analyses that interest many readers today. The in-
tellectual movement of classification/appropriation whereby the biogra-
pher determines exactly where the turning point is located in the life of
the fiction writer is far more universal than it might at first appear: it is,
after all, the expression of a desire widely shared by critics of divergent
persuasions – the desire to penetrate beneath the plane of what is given
to discover the source or origin of surface appearances. It is not difficult
to find, within the pages of even those critics and theorists we consider to
be the most sensitive to textual complexities, the same gesture of defini-
tion, the same peeling back toward origins, that strikes one as excessively
simple and categorical in traditional intellectual biographies. The critic
I have in mind, and the issues raised by his writing, will lead directly to
the topic of my essay and to the problem of narrative openings in general:
I am thinking of Gérard Genette, and specifically of the critical move
he makes at the end of “Métonymie chez Proust” as he prepares his
own transitional jump from the close analysis of rhetorical complexities
that characterizes this magisterial essay to his “Discours du récit” – the
methodical treatise of “narratology” that concludes Figures III.
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
The final two pages of “Métonymie chez Proust” are doubly transi-
tional: first, because Genette needs to justify the inclusion, within Figures
III, of a first section containing short critical studies and a second, far
more unified section on narrative theory. Secondly, on the level of subject-
matter, Genette needs to demonstrate how metaphor and metonymy can
coexist harmoniously within a literary text: this requires detailed demon-
stration since metaphor, according to Genette (via Jakobson), is the pole
of simultaneity, memory association as “frozen time,” and ecstatic immo-
bility; whereas metonymy, the mode of diachronic juxtaposition, is
the pole of narration. In asking how the opposites of metaphor and
metonymy can be reconciled within the higher unity of the text, Genette
returns to the threshold-moment which Proust himself designates as the
very matrix of his novel – the moment at which a series of involuntary
memory associations generates A la recherche du temps perdu as narrative. I
am referring to the well-known madeleine episode, which Genette de-
scribes as a coupure (cut) separating the first chapter of Du côté de chez
Swann [Swann’s Way] from the second:
There is indeed a striking cut [coupure], in the first part of Swann, between the
first chapter, almost exclusively devoted to that originary and obsessive scene
which Proust calls “my bedtime drama” [le théâtre et le drame de mon coucher],
a scene that had remained for a long time in the narrator’s consciousness as
the only memory of Combray which had not sunken into forgetfulness, an
immobile scene in which the narrative becomes enclosed and engulfed as if
drained of all hope of disengaging itself; and the second chapter, where, replacing
this vertical Combray of repetitious obsession and of “fixation” . . . arises the
horizontal Combray, with its extensive space, its “two sides” [“deux côtés”], its
alternating walks, its childhood geography and family calendar, which combine
to form the point of departure, the veritable beginning of the novel’s narrative
movement. (Figures III, ; my translation)

The madeleine section mediates between the vertical immobility of an

instantaneous revelation and the horizontal extensiveness of an incipient
narration. But it is important to note that for Genette the passage through
the disjunctive space of the narrative coupure is itself fluid rather than dis-
junctive, metaphorical rather than metonymical. Indeed, he imagines
the Recherche as a synthesis of lyric instantaneousness and narrative dis-
continuity in which the unravelling of the fictional story does not negate
or complicate its point of origin in atemporal reflectiveness, but rather
substitutes for it: narration does not destroy but merely replaces the poetry
of memory. Thus, the transition from “le théâtre et le drame de mon
coucher” to the telling of Marcel’s story in its chronological sequence
 Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings  
does not shock the reader’s sensibility or invalidate the aesthetic unity
of the novel. The wound in the text is only apparent; it is, paradoxi-
cally, within the narrative coupure that the novel takes its shape. Implicit
in Genette’s argument is the assumption that there is a higher unity
than that of discrete textual fragments (“chapters”), under which these
fragments can be subsumed. There must be a transcendental Text that
provides the horizon for both vertical and horizontal, metaphorical and
metonymical dimensions, in much the same way as traditional intellec-
tual biographies appeal to higher units of meaning (“the real Proust, the
mature author of the Recherche; the essential, post- Kafka”) within
which the successive, chaotic writing-traces of an author are ordered in
a hierarchical progression.
I do not make this comparison between the theoretician Genette
and the biographers Painter and Hayman in order to blur the essential
distinctions between differing methodologies, but to illustrate a general
tendency of critical thought: the movement toward the closing of inter-
pretive gaps through synthetic rhetorical manipulations. The two-page
passage at the end of “Métonymie chez Proust” is an interesting piece of
rhetorical writing that contains, on a lower level of poetic intensity, many
of the same complexities to be found in the Proustian text it analyzes;
but these complexities do not impinge upon the self-contained logical
validity of the “Discours du récit” that immediately follows in Genette’s
own “narration.” Indeed, Genette’s “technologie du discours narratif ”
stands on its own as a terminologically precise study of narrative defini-
tion, but by its self-sufficient metonymical extensiveness it distances itself
from the rhetorical convolutedness of Proust’s text. Narratology as
literary theory/technology may be, according to Heidegger’s descrip-
tion of techné in general, a falling away of thought from its element, an in-
strumental elaboration of systems destined to lose touch with its source.
My purpose in the following pages will be to return to that source –
the knot of figural entanglement at the gateway to the novel – in order
to study how the strategic opening of gaps and wounds in the text, the
crossing of the narrative threshold, generates the construction of literary
space.

II PROUST

Viewed as an interiorized Bildungsroman, A la recherche du temps perdu is

the story of a consciousness that comes to itself in writing, that discov-
ers, in a final act of retrospective understanding, an apparently simple
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
“fact”: that the fragmentary actions and reactions of its affective life
can be molded into a narration. As in all Bildungsromane, however, the
hero must traverse a wide space of inner and outer topography be-
fore he can understand the meaningfulness of what originally appeared
without form or purpose. Perhaps the best place to start, if one wishes
to measure or survey the distance that separates Marcel the “almost-
novelist” of Le Temps retrouvé from his embryonic self is not the madeleine
episode (in which the narrator is already middle-aged), but the section
“Noms de pays: le nom” [“Place-Names: The Name”] that concludes
Du côté de chez Swann. In this final chapter of the novel’s first volume
we encounter Marcel as a young boy fascinated with the evocative (or,
more precisely, associative) power of place-names. Not yet having trav-
eled himself, Marcel endows the outside world (which he knows through
the images of books and photographs) with symbolic significance. He
projects onto the unknown world all the grandeur he does not find within
himself:
I was curious and eager to know only what I believed to be more real than myself
[ce que je croyais plus vrai que moi-même], what had for me the supreme merit of
showing me a fragment of the mind of a great genius, or of the force or the grace
of nature as it appeared when left entirely to itself, without human interference.
(RTP I, ; ALR I, )
At this early stage in the development of the protagonist’s conscious-
ness, single words suffice to construct vast edifices of imagined reality. In
Jakobsonian terms, we are in the domain of metaphorical substitution,
of paradigmatic relations, in which names like “Balbec,” “Venise,”
“Florence,” “Quimperlé” are one-word lyric poems that freely replace
each other according to the arbitrary whims of Marcel’s mind. Here, we
are as far as can be imagined from the structures and laws of narrative.
The metaphorical fusion that characterizes the section on place-names
is based upon the possibility of uniting elements the adult (rational) mind
might keep categorically separate. Thus, when Marcel dreams of Balbec,
he combines two images of Normandy in one:
Thereafter, on delightful, stormy February nights, the wind – breathing into my
heart, which it shook no less violently than the chimney of my bedroom, the
project of a visit to Balbec – blended in me [mêlait en moi] the desire for Gothic
architecture as well as for a storm upon the sea. (RTP I, ; ALR I, )
Balbec is the place where the magnificence of nature and the prestige
of culture fuse, where Gothic art merges with tempestuous weather. It is
also, in the exaggerated words of the nature and culture snob, Legrandin,
 Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings  
the end of the Western world, the equivalent of Gibraltar in medieval
literature, the point beyond which no civilization exists:
“You still feel there beneath your feet,” he [Legrandin] had told me, “far more
than at Finistère itself . . . that you are actually at the land’s end of France, of
Europe, of the Old World. And it is the ultimate encampment of the fishermen,
the heirs of all the fishermen who have lived since the world’s beginning, facing
the everlasting kingdom of the sea-fogs and shadows of the night.” (RTP I, )
The two geographical poles that function within the associative logic
of the protagonist’s consciousness are Normandy (Balbec) on the one
hand, and Italy (Venice and Florence) on the other. East and West, Saint
Mark’s and Bayeux, Byzantium and the Norman world, form a panoply
of mixed images whose opposite origins are not initially felt to be in con-
flict, since the names “Balbec,” “Venice,” “Florence” are just names –
signifiers dissociated from their referents. However, the narrator of
“Noms de pays: le nom” is also the narrator of later episodes of the novel,
and he does not hesitate to divulge to his readers how fragile the young
Marcel’s system of analogical, a-geographical poetic relationships is:
But if these names thus permanently absorbed the image I had formed of these
towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating its reappearance
in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of this they made it more
beautiful, but at the same time more different from anything that the towns
of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be, and, by increasing the arbitrary
delights of my imagination, aggravated the disenchantment that was in store
for me when I set out upon my travels. (RTP I, )
Here, in a typically Proustian negation of suspense, the narrator fore-
shadows the reality of Normandy and Italy within the Recherche – a textual
“reality” we do not discover until well after “Noms de pays: le nom.” The
highly enigmatic and truncated Venice episode occurs in Albertine disparue,
two thousand pages after the section on place-names. And the first trip
to Balbec is separated from the original daydreaming on Balbec by a more
modest but still very considerable textual space of three hundred pages.
The important matter, the phenomenon worthy of examination, espe-
cially in the case of a novelist who so openly admired Flaubert’s use of
dramatic temporal blancs, is the very existence of the spacing between
the naming of Balbec (in “Noms de pays: le nom”) and the visit to
Balbec in “Noms de pays: le pays” [“Place-Names: The Place” – the
second “chapter” of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs]. The decomposition
of the associative, metaphorical, paradigmatic forms characteristic of
the place-naming episode occurs when the protagonist travels for the first
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
time – i.e., when he discovers the mysteries of topography. With the dra-
matically open coupure between name and place, episode and episode, be-
gins the metonymical accumulative network of events we call narration.
And the role of narration is to demystify the poetic charm of metaphor-
ical play, to reveal the irresponsibility of the freely circulating signifier
and its associative constructions. Indeed, when, after an exhilarating,
aesthetically and erotically charged train-ride, Marcel arrives at Balbec,
he finds that the dreamed word he presumed to denote a geographi-
cal unity in fact hides two radically different realities: Balbec-en-terre
(Balbec-le-vieux) and Balbec-plage (RTP I, ; ALR II, ).
The two elements previously associated in the protagonist’s mind –
the cathedral and the ocean – are now revealed to exist in separate con-
texts. Thus the movement of referential testing, the narrative quest for
the “truth” of Balbec, results in a splitting of signifier from signified, and
in a doubling of the signified itself: narration takes place in a spatial
disjunction (coupure) and itself enacts a coupure within signification. The
cutting of the rhetorical knot “Balbec” causes the progressive disentan-
glement of associated images. In a first step, the capacity of names to
contain or enclose the “idea” of a city (“these names thus permanently
absorbed the image I had formed of these towns”) is shown to be impossi-
ble, since the one designation “Balbec” is not monosemic. Consequently,
the individuality or personality conferred upon the imagined city by the
evocative power of the name no longer exists. What remains for the
observer to see is not a system of subjectively postulated, necessarily
related elements, but an amalgam of pure contingency, a group of arbi-
trarily juxtaposed objects whose chief attribute is resistance to synthetic
understanding. Rather than rise above the waves of a storm-battered
coast, the cathedral’s belltower
stood on a square which was the junction of two tramway routes, opposite a
café which bore, in letters of gold, the legend “Billiards” . . . And the church –
impinging on my attention at the same time as the café, the passing stranger of
whom I had had to ask my way, the station to which presently I should have to
return – merged with all the rest [faisait un tout avec le reste], seemed an accident,
a by-product of this summer afternoon [semblait un accident, un produit de cette fin
d’après-midi], in which the mellow and distended dome against the sky was like
a fruit of which the same light that bathed the chimneys of the houses ripened
the pink, glowing, luscious skin. (RTP I, –; ALR II, –)
It is significant that the accidental quality of the cathedral’s presence
on the town square, which indicates the unfounded nature of Marcel’s
dreams, is immediately negated and recuperated in the unified golden
harmony of the afternoon. The decomposition of a fragile metaphorical
 Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings  
system of resemblances yields, in the subtle transition from “accident” to
“produit de cette fin d’après-midi,” to a metonymic system of juxtaposed
illuminated objects, whose beauty is the result of a spatial or contex-
tual totalization. It is as if, for Proust, even in a moment of heightened
critical lucidity, the tendency of the mind were to continue constructing
associative frameworks as a defense against the threat of a significant
void.
In the end, however, the closer the protagonist observes the individual
detail of the mundane setting in which the cathedral is inscribed, the
more he is depressed by what Proust calls “the tyranny of the Particu-
lar” (RTP I, ). In particular, the statue whose reproduction the young
Marcel had studied and admired in Combray, la Vierge du Porche, now
appears “transformed, as was the church itself, into a little old woman in
stone whose height I could measure and whose wrinkles I could count”
(“métamorphosée, ainsi que l’église elle-même, en une petite vieille de
pierre dont je pouvais mesurer la hauteur et compter les rides”) (RTP I,
; ALR II,  ). The depth of disillusionment emerges not only in the
transparent reference to Baudelaire’s superb ironic poem “Les Petites
Vieilles,” but also in a somewhat more hidden allusion to Proust’s own
previous writing: the essay “Journées de pèlerinage,” written as part of
the preface to his Ruskin translation, La Bible d’Amiens. La Vierge du
Porche at Balbec is the inverted, parodied version of La Vierge Dorée,
the statue in the Amiens cathedral that, in the mind of the young Proust,
represented the inseparable oneness of cathedral and city. What was
celebrated with enthusiasm in “Journées de pèlerinage” – the “individu-
ality” and “personality” of the humanized statue – has become degraded,
transformed into grotesque caricature. Compare the “petite vieille de
pierre” of Balbec to Proust’s earlier formulation:
I sense that I was mistaken in calling it [La Vierge Dorée] a work of art. A statue
which belongs forever to a certain place on the earth, to a certain city, i.e., a
thing which possesses a name like a person, which is an individual, the equivalent
of which one can never find on the face of the continents, whose name railway
employees cry out to us, telling us precisely where we had to come to find it,
and which seems to say to us, without realizing it: “Love what you can never
see a second time” – such a statue is perhaps less universal in significance than
a work of art, yet it retains us by a stronger tie than that of the work of art itself,
one of those permanent ties by which only people and countries can bind us.
(“Journées de pèlerinage,” ; my translation)
In the final sentence describing Marcel’s encounter with Balbec-
en-terre, Proust inverts the contenant–contenu (container–contained) struc-
ture of absorption (“these names thus permanently absorbed the image I
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
had formed of these towns”) that characterized the dreamed images of
places in “Noms de pays: le nom.” Now, the name opens itself and releases
its contents to the outside: Marcel’s voyage of discovery culminates in
the imprudent intrusion into a taboo space:

but as for Balbec, no sooner had I set foot in it than it was as though I had broken
open a name which ought to have been kept hermetically closed, and into which,
seizing at once the opportunity that I had imprudently given them, expelling all
the images that had lived in it until then, a tramway, a café, people crossing the
square, the branch of the savings bank, irresistibly propelled by some external
pressure, by a pneumatic force, had come surging into the interior of those two
syllables which, closing over them, now let them frame the porch of the Persian
church and would henceforth never cease to contain them. (RTP I, )

The name of Balbec is a Pandora’s Box, a receptacle of illusory virtues

and beliefs which, when released, can never be reappropriated; and yet
the hope of a return to original harmony remains. The protagonist of
the Recherche will continue to think that “other towns still remained intact
for me, that I might soon, perhaps, be making my way, as into a shower
of pearls, into the cool babbling murmur of watery Quimperlé” (ibid.),
but the inexorable negativity of the novel will continue to demonstrate
the arbitrariness of the relationship between sign and referent, between
the poetically evocative “pearl” of Quimperlé and the actual appearance
of the city in its geographic prison.
The Ruskinian echoes in the Balbec-en-terre episode are very deep;
they transcend the level of superficial parody present in the Vierge Dorée
and Vierge du Porche mimicry. One senses, in following the complex
manipulations of contenant and contenu, the opening/closing of recep-
tive/resistant surfaces, that the base structure underlying all these varia-
tions is the “Open Sesame” motif of The Arabian Nights – a constant theme
in the Recherche that Proust borrowed from Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies.
The final sentence of the Balbec-en-terre section makes clear that the
opening and shutting of mysterious doors is a magical process of brusque
(sometimes painful) substitution, in which one contenu replaces another,
or even drives it out. The childhood images of Balbec are forever gone:
now the word “contains” its geographical reality; the word has become
anchored in topography.
Yet it would be a simplification to assert that the Recherche “is” the
movement of disillusionment from dream to reality, from vague poetic
association, via an ironic narration, to a clear view of “things as they are.”
First of all, what is this strange split city of Balbec? What happens if we,
like the young Marcel, pronounce its syllables and allow them to resonate
 Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings  
with associations? Balbec sounds a lot like BAALBEK, the ancient city, now
in Lebanon, whose name derives from Baal, the Phoenician sun god
(the Greeks called the city Heliopolis, city of the sun). The congruence of
names is so obvious as to be blinding. The curious thing is that Marcel’s
travel west, toward the end of the known world, Legrandin’s Finistère, is,
simultaneously, a move toward the rising sun, the cradle of civilization,
the world in which Scheherazade told her death-defying stories. What
appeared strangely and inappropriately exotic in the architecture of Bal-
bec’s cathedral – its “Persian” style – becomes logical enough once we
accept that Balbec/Baalbek is West and East, Normandy and the Orient.
This topographical conflation occurs more than once in the Recherche,
and is typical of those moments in the novel that stage the protagonist’s
search for hidden truths. The Balbec episode is the first in a series of
travel experiences, each of which compulsively repeats the same quest
of referential verification. Despite his many disappointments, Marcel
never ceases to believe that the world outside the self contains riches that
the self can appropriate and store within its inner treasury. However,
with each succeeding voyage outward, it becomes increasingly clear that
the discovered places – “Balbec,” “Florence,” “Venice” – are, in fact,
projections, interwoven images like those in a dream that radiate outward
from a common source: the childhood scene of Combray. Indeed, when
Marcel travels to Venice, in a second pilgrimage inescapably reminiscent
of Ruskin, he discovers not only that the city of the Doges, like Balbec,
is the point de rencontre of East and West, of Roman Christianity and
Byzantium, but also, perhaps even more uncannily, that Venice is a
“transposition” of Combray:
as beauty may exist in the most precious as well as in the humblest things – I
received there [in Venice] impressions analogous to those which I had felt so
often in the past at Combray, but transposed into a wholly different and far
richer key. (RTP III, )

The entire Venice episode falls under the category of the “uncanny”
as Freud defines it: “that class of the frightening which leads back to what
is known of old and long familiar.” On the one hand, Venice is strange,
exotic, “oriental,” a series of illuminated pages from The Arabian Nights:
My gondola followed the course of the small canals; like the mysterious hand
of a genie leading me through the maze of this oriental city, they seemed, as
I advanced, to be cutting a path for me . . . and as though the magic guide
had been holding a candle in his hand and were lighting the way for me, they
kept casting ahead of them a ray of sunlight for which they cleared a route.
(RTP III,  )
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
On the other hand, the more Marcel follows the path traced by the
genie, the more he feels, spiritually, close to the revelation of a secret, the
more he feels in possession of himself, the more he feels at home: “J’avais
l’impression, qu’augmentait encore mon désir, de ne pas être dehors,
mais d’entrer de plus en plus au fond de quelque chose de secret”
(“I had the impression, which my desire only served to augment, of
not being outside, but of entering more and more deeply into something
secret”) (ALR IV, ). Venice is thus another Combray. To travel from
Combray to Venice is also, simultaneously, to travel back to Combray,
back to the source, back to the Heimat, the native land. The liquid world of
Venice harks back to the maternal, intrauterine world of origins around
which Proust constructed his paradise: Combray.
In my analysis of the origin of narration in Proust, I have come up
against an apparent paradox. On the one hand, I have pointed out
how narrative spacing, as metonymical displacement, occurs with the
disassociation of metaphorical images and the discovery of the split sign in
Balbec. On the other hand, I have shown that this movement of temporal
difference (différance) is accompanied by the protagonist’s belief in (desire
of) the qualitative difference between the place from which he departs
and the exotic place toward which he travels, the place that may contain
a secret truth worthy of un-earthing. However, it turns out that this
other place is really the same, or, to use Freud’s terms, das Unheimliche (the
uncanny, the non-home) is really das Heimliche (the familiar, the homelike).
Narration in Proust – the movement away from lyrical sameness, through
metonymical spacing, toward an un-settling, disjunctive reunion with the
native land – reproduces the semantic displacements of the word heimlich,
which Freud describes in this way: “Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of
which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides
with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-
species of heimlich” (TU ). To probe further the structure of narration
as development “in the direction of ambivalence,” and to clarify the
paradoxical definition of the unheimlich as “in some way or other a sub-
species of heimlich,” I shall turn to the uncontested modern master of the
unheimlich, Franz Kafka.

III KAFKA

The uncanniness of Kafka’s world may be the only major point of con-
vergence in which critical studies of his works reach consensus. It is uni-
versally acknowledged that the protagonist’s labyrinthine wanderings in
 Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings  
the three novels, the bizarre bestiary of the short stories, and the extreme
self-deprecation of the letters, all create the effect of Unheimlichkeit: that is,
the reader of these writings feels far from home, uprooted, alienated. The
problem is to interpret what this mysterious uncanniness means, and it is
in the interpretation of the enigma of uncanniness that the Babel Tower
of Kafka criticism has grown to its present awesome heights. Much of
Kafka criticism can be described as an effort to allegorize the literal
surfaces of the writer’s stories, to bridge the gaps between fragmentary
textual blocks, to find the appropriate exegetical key that would unlock
the closed, crystalline surface of the author’s style, in order to uncover,
for lack of a better expression, “deep meanings.” In the bazaar of Kafka
criticism one can choose among theological, existential/philosophical,
psychoanalytical, Marxist, and, more recently, literary self-referential
interpretations – a great diversity indeed; but in most cases, to varying
degrees, the underlying assumption is that something exists “underneath
the language” that lends Kafka’s writings a far greater resonance than
they exhibit on their fluid, flatly harmonious, outward envelope.
What does not emerge in the majority of studies is the relation between
Unheimlichkeit and Kafka’s play with language – a linguistically immanent
uncanniness that has a great deal to do with the narrative construction
of the author’s works. Although much has been written, occasionally on
a high level of theoretical abstraction, about Kafka’s ambivalent (out-
sider’s) position vis-à-vis the German language, the specific, highly
idiosyncratic way in which Kafka manipulated words and repeatedly
combined certain privileged chains of signifiers needs more study. In
the following pages I shall examine the problematics of Kafkan narra-
tive through an analysis of certain key words and the variability of their
contextual inclusion.
If, like Genette interpreting Proust, we wish to find in Kafka’s writ-
ings the dramatization of the moment of passage from fragmentary day-
dreaming to narrative coherence, the most obvious equivalent of the
madeleine episode in intensity (and in centrality for the whole of Kafka’s
literary production) is the section of the Tagebücher [Diaries] that includes
“Das Urteil” – the work that Hayman and most critics consider to be
Kafka’s first “mature” piece of writing. In the midst of sometimes mun-
dane, often aphoristic remarks on his daily life, Kafka set down the
fictional story “Das Urteil,” which, he tells us in the entry directly fol-
lowing the story, was written at one sitting from  p.m. on  September
until  a.m. on  September . In this entry, Kafka relates his elation
at the continuity of his narration. Although his body had become stiff
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
from sitting at the desk, the writing flowed: “The fearful strain and joy,
how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water”
(“Die fürchterliche Anstrengung und Freude, wie sich die Geschichte
vor mir entwickelte wie ich in einem Gewässer vorwärtskam”) (D ;
T ). The quasi-miraculous outpouring of “Das Urteil” convinced
Kafka that his earlier writings were unimportant, invalid, mired in lite-
rary “lowlands”:
The conviction verified that with my novel-writing I am in the shameful lowlands
of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with
such a complete opening out of the body and the soul [mit solcher vollständigen
Öffnung des Leibes und der Seele]. (D ; T  ; translator’s emphasis)
This opening of the body and soul is an openness within the act of
writing itself. While composing his story, Kafka did not shut himself com-
pletely to all outside influences, but experienced “many emotions carried
along in the writing,” especially thoughts of other writers and writings,
including “thoughts about Freud, of course” (D ). It is tempting to
take this parenthetical remark as an (open) invitation to read “Das Urteil”
in a Freudian vein, as an Oedipal struggle between Georg Bendemann
(Franz Kafka) and his father (Hermann Kafka). I think one may find
it enriching to read the contextual frame of “Das Urteil” – the diary
entries before and after the story – in a “Freudian” manner, certainly,
but also in a Proustian manner, by allowing certain privileged words
and sounds to reverberate. Remembering the key words of the ecstatic
morning after writing, I now quote from Kafka’s diary two weeks before
the composition of “Das Urteil”:
It will be hard to rouse me, and yet I am restless. When I lay in bed this
afternoon and someone quickly turned a key in the lock, for a moment I
had locks all over my body [und jemand einen Schlüssel im Schloß rasch umdrehte,
hat ich einen Augenblick lang Schlösser auf dem ganzen Körper], as though at a fancy-
dress ball, and at short intervals a lock was opened or shut here and there.
(D ; T )
Clearly, the symbolism of opening and shutting, unlocking and lock-
ing, was for Kafka a concretization of the wide alternations between
inspired writing and creative closure. This lying shackled in bed in a
Houdini-like posture while, independently of one’s conscious will, locks
are opened and shut, provides a humorous mechanistic representation of
what Freud called the “unconscious,” and at the same time foreshadows
Kafka’s later coercive treatment of the human body – as in the stories
“In the Penal Colony” and “A Hunger-Artist”. But the symbolism of
 Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings  
opening and shutting, the allusions to keys and locks, are more than
illustrative metaphorical devices or thematic constructs: they structure
an undercurrent-discourse, a geheime Rede that flows from work to work,
from genre to genre, and that constitutes what might be called Kafka’s
language of the source.
To pursue this bifurcated language, I will turn now to the most concise
and self-contained of Kafka’s autobiographical writings, the Brief an den
Vater [Letter to His Father] – an undelivered message in which Kafka
explains his personality, career, and life-sufferings as a struggle against
his father. The Letter has always been a double-edged document for critics,
since, by providing them with the most serviceable of possible (Freudian)
keys to unlock the secrets of Kafka’s writings, it robs them of any claim
to original psychological insight. Kafka pre-empted his Freudian critics
and set in motion the psychocritical interpretation of his work with the
observation, located two-thirds of the way into the Letter:
My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what
I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long-drawn-out
leave-taking from you [Es war ein absichtlich in die Länge gezogener Abschied von Dir],
yet, although it was enforced by you, it did take its course in the direction
determined by me. (L ; B ).

Important in this statement is the association of writing with the move-

ment of flight. If Kafka could not struggle with his father on his father’s
terms, he could build and follow alternative paths, paths more complex
and less real than those of everyday existence. Throughout the Letter
Kafka describes the life of the writer in terms diametrically opposed to
those that characterize “normal” people, i.e., people with socially useful
occupations and with families. As is well known, the most dramatic and
pathetic organizing principle of Kafka’s life was his inability, despite re-
peated attempts, to marry. Unlike Proust, who knew his only permanent
relationship could be with the book he was composing, Kafka seemed to
be repeatedly drawn to and repulsed by the idea of joining with a woman
to engender children. In the passage that follows, we can see how Kafka
conceived of himself in relation to those people who, unlike the alienated
writer, were pursuing in an unquestioning way their biological destiny:
Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting
them in this insecure world and perhaps even guiding them a little, is, I am
convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all [das Aüsserste,
das einem Menschen überhaupt gelingen kann]. That so many seem to succeed in this
is no evidence to the contrary; first of all, there are not many who do succeed,
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
and secondly, these not-many usually don’t “do” it, it merely “happens” to
them; although this is not that Utmost, it is still very great and very honorable
(particularly since “doing” and “happening” cannot be kept clearly distinct).
And finally, it is not a matter of this Utmost at all, anyway, but only of some
distant but decent approximation [Und schliesslich handelt es sich auch gar nicht um
dieses Aüsserste, sondern nur um irgendeine ferne, aber anständige Annäherung]; it is, after
all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to
crawl to a clean little spot on earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can
warm oneself a little. (L –; B )
The writer-bachelor is thus a man without ground, a man who can
only hope, like the animals of Kafka’s short narratives, to creep his way
toward a limited place, a man of the cold who cannot hope to face the
rays of the sun (the power of the father). Later in the same section of
the Letter Kafka uses similar language in a more detailed account of his
failures to marry:
I will try to explain it in more detail [Ich will es näher zu erklären versuchen]. Here, in
the attempt to marry, two seemingly antagonistic elements in my relations with
you unite more intensely than anywhere else. Marriage certainly is the pledge of
the most acute form of self-liberation and independence. I would have a family,
in my opinion the highest [das Höchste] one can achieve, and so too the highest
you have achieved; I would be your equal [ich wäre Dir ebenbürtig]; all old and ever
new shame and tyranny would be mere history [bloss noch Geschichte]. It would
be like a fairly tale [Das wäre allerdings märchenhaft], but precisely there does the
questionable element lie. It is too much; so much cannot be achieved [Es ist zu
viel, so viel kann nicht erreicht werden]. It is as if a person were a prisoner, and he had
not only the intention to escape, which would perhaps be attainable, but also,
and indeed, simultaneously, the intention to rebuild the prison as a pleasure
dome for himself [die Absicht, das Gefängnis in ein Lustschloss für sich umzubauen]. But
if he escapes, he cannot rebuild, and if he rebuilds, he cannot escape. If I, in
the particular unhappy relationship in which I stand to you, want to become
independent, I must do something that will have, if possible, no connection with
you at all; though marrying is the greatest thing of all and provides the most
honorable independence, it is also at the same time in the closest relation to
you [in engster Beziehung zu Dir]. To try to get out of all this has therefore a touch
of madness [Wahnsinn] about it, and every attempt is almost punished with it.
(L ; B –)
As in the previous passage, to describe marriage Kafka uses super-
latives: “Das Äußerste,” “Das Höchste.” The writer remains in the
lowlands, in the realm of closeness and nearness (“eine anständige
Annäherung” in the first passage; here “Ich will es näher zu erklären ver-
suchen”); but he navigates his unsure way dwarfed by the outward
 Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings  
magnificence of the social institution of marriage. If it were possible for
the writer-bachelor to marry, he would be on an equal footing with the
father (literally, of equal birth – “ebenbürtig”). Because marriage leads
to the grounding of a family, the writer-turned-husband would parti-
cipate in the natural processes of biology and history. But it is precisely
this move that Kafka recognizes as impossible, unrealizable, as unreal
as a fairy tale (“Es ist zu viel, so viel kann nicht erreicht werden . . . Das
wäre allerdings märchenhaft”). Of especial interest is the fundamental
dichotomy between Geschichte (history) and Märchen. Geschichte is a causal
sequence of real events that one can choose to memorialize or forget:
Geschichte is the temporal setting and the mode of existence of both fam-
ilies and nations. Märchen, on the other hand, is the hypothetical, fictive
mode of the writer-bachelor; it is the mode of storytelling, of magic
transformation, of the Brothers Grimm and Scheherazade. It would be
märchenhaft for Kafka, the creator of modern Märchen, to be reconciled
with history. What is it that makes the writer-bachelor not susceptible to
assimilation into family history? Kafka answers the question in a striking
simile: “It is as if a person were a prisoner, and he had not only the
intention to escape, which would perhaps be attainable, but also, and
indeed, simultaneously, the intention to rebuild the prison as a pleasure
dome for himself.”
Writing is not simply a flight from the father: it is also a metamorphos-
ing process, whereby one’s prison becomes a castle. Or, to use Kafka’s
language, whereby the locks (Schlösser) on one’s body become a pleasure-
monument (Lustschloß). The transformation process, the escape mech-
anism, Houdini’s secret key, are within language itself, within the signif-
icant potential of the word Schloß, and its derivatives. On the level of
the signified, Kafka’s account of his plight is without positive solution.
To marry would seem to be the only way to independence and freedom,
yet it is also “in the closest relation” (in engster Beziehung) to the father,
so that all efforts to escape the existential prison are evidence of “mad-
ness” (Wahnsinn). Yet, on the level of the signifier, when the very word for
closure – schließen, Schloß – is opened, is liberated, is allowed to flee across
contextual boundaries, Kafka’s writing assumes the magical dimension
of the märchenhaft, in which all family relations, including the all-powerful
“engste Beziehung” to the father, are drained of historical-biological con-
tinuity and re-built (umgebaut) within the logic of the storyteller. Kafka’s
“place in the sun” will always be very small, because the father’s solar
energy radiates far and wide, but the writer does have his own “not very
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
comforting” territories, and these are not affected by (enclosed within)
the existential prison of marriage. Here, then, in appropriately unheimlich
terms, is Kafka’s Oedipal topography:

But we being what we are, marrying is barred to me because it is your very own
domain [So wie wir aber sind, ist mir das Heiraten dadurch verschlossen, dass es gerade
Dein eigenstes Gebiet ist]. Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out
and you stretched diagonally across it. And I feel as if I could consider living
in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your
reach. And in keeping with the conception I have of your magnitude, these are
not many and not very comforting regions – and marriage is not among them.
(L ; B )

The question of territory or territoriality is, of course, central to all

Kafkan fiction, the animal stories as well as the novels. Nowhere is it
more pervasive, more developed, or more explicit, however, than in his
final novel, The Castle, in which the protagonist, K., is a land-surveyor
(Landvermesser). The semi-autobiographical quality of The Castle is clear
enough (and I do not believe it necessary to trace a psychocritical scheme
of the one-to-one correspondences that might exist between events and
persons in Kafka’s life and the imaginary pseudo-events and “characters”
of the novel), but it should be noted here that The Castle is, in many
ways, a monstrous expansion of the image of the father stretched out
on the globe that we just saw in the Letter. A narrative expansion, but
also a multiplication of the father, who is incarnated, successively, in the
various unattainable paternal figures whose power emanates from the
Castle: Count Westwest (its owner, symbolic incarnation of the culture
and values of the setting sun), Klamm (often described in deific terms),
Momus, Erlanger, and Bürgel. K.’s role is to measure the distances that
separate the town from the Castle and himself from the luminous “truth”
of the father, which he seeks in complete blindness.
More than any of Kafka’s works, including The Trial, The Castle is a
dreamlike repetition, a staging and restaging of the unheimlich, under-
stood in Freudian terms: “that class of the frightening which leads back
to what is known of old and long familiar.” Like Proust’s Venice, the
anonymous town through which K. wanders is both strange and famil-
iar, exotic and homelike. The “genies” who guide the protagonist are,
in this case, young women toward whom K. harbors feelings of erotic
dominance and coercive desire: it is through their mediation that he ex-
pects an “Open Sesame” into the all-powerful bureaucracy of the Castle.
The impossibility of K.’s task (which echoes Kafka’s own expressions of
 Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings  
impossible achievement in the Letter – “Es ist zu viel, so viel kann nicht
erreicht warden . . . Das wäre märchenhaft”) is conveyed, from the very
beginning, by the German title of the novel: Das Schloß. As in Proust’s
Venice, the underlying goal of the protagonist is to unlock doors, to en-
rich the treasure-house of his experience; but the German title tells us
that the doors are already locked, the treasure-room closed to all desires of
penetration and acquisition.
On a psychological level, the resonance of the title is only too clear:
the novel will be an elaboration of the protagonist’s personal (Oedipal)
frustrations when faced with the multiple enigmatic appearances of the
Castle. But if one assumes that the words Schloß and schließen not only
relate to the human drama of an imaginary/pseudo-autobiographical
hero, but also to the very nature of the novel’s construction, if it is assumed
that the theme of closure might apply to the problematics of fictional
structure, then it is necessary to investigate the specificity of the novel’s
narrative organization. I turn now to an analysis of two passages from
Das Schloß that illustrate the dialectic of openness and closure within the
Kafkan novel. My purpose is not to be exhaustive, but to sketch in broad
lines a possible approach to a rhetorical reading (and not a narratology)
of Kafka’s storytelling.
In the first passage, which occurs in the second of the novel’s twenty-
five chapters, we encounter K. in the earliest stage of his quest, when he
still believes in the easy accessibility of the Castle. He has just arrived in
the unidentified small town, has found a room at the inn, and has met a
messenger, Barnabas, who is to “serve” him in his future undertakings as
land-surveyor. In the evening Barnabas comes to K. and walks with him,
arm in arm, through the snow and the darkness. While they walk, K. be-
comes so overcome with fatigue that he “lose[s] control of his thoughts”:
They went on, but K. did not know whither, he could discern nothing, not even
whether they had already passed the church or not. The effort that it cost him
merely to keep going made him lose control of his thoughts. Instead of remaining
fixed on their goal, they strayed. Memories of his home kept recurring and filled
his mind [Immer wieder tauchte die Heimat auf und Erinnerungen an sie erfüllten ihn].
There, too, a church stood in the market-place, partly surrounded by an old
graveyard, which was again surrounded by a high wall. Very few boys had
managed to climb that wall, and for some time K., too, had failed. It was not
curiosity that had urged them on; the graveyard had been no mystery to them
[Nicht Neugier trieb sie dazu, der Friedhof hatte vor ihnen kein Geheimnis mehr]. They had
often entered it through a small wicket-gate, it was only the smooth high wall
[die glatte hohe Mauer] that they had wanted to conquer. But one morning – the
empty, quiet market-place had been flooded with sunshine – when had K. ever
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
seen it like that either before or since? – he had succeeded in climbing it with
astonishing ease [gelang es ihm überraschend leicht]; at a place where he had already
slipped down many a time, he had clambered with a small flag between his teeth
right to the top at the first attempt. Stones were still rattling down under his
feet, but he was at the top. He struck the flag in, it flew in the wind, he looked
down and round about him, over his shoulder, too, at the crosses moldering in
the ground; nobody was greater than he at that place and that moment [niemand
war jetzt und hier größer als er]. (C –; S )

The passage as a whole is constructed on the effects of Unheimlichkeit.

K. is, “in reality,” in the unknown village, where he can see only dark
outlines of buildings, but the village bears an uncanny resemblance to
his home-town, and it is this likeness that triggers the remembrance
of a former boyhood “triumph.” The topographical analogy between
the unheimlich present and the remembered past of the Heimat not only
accounts for the logical coherence of the daydream, but also produces
a reassuring effect in the protagonist, who, upon refocusing on his real
situation, concludes:
The sense of that triumph had seemed to him then a victory for life [das Gefühl
dieses Sieges schien ihm damals für ein langes Leben einen Halt zu geben], which was not
altogether foolish, for now so many years later on the arm of Barnabas in the
snowy night the memory of it came to succor him. (C ; S – )

In narrative terms, K.’s sense of reassurance, and even fortitude,

derives from the belief that the “victorious,” “triumphant” content of
the daydream can spill out into the frame-story. Since it was possible, in
childhood, to climb the wall successfully and return home safely, then it
should be possible, now, to penetrate the walls of the Castle and ascer-
tain its secret. The “wall” between the main narrative and the framed
remembrance must disappear, or it must be easy to “climb,” if K. is to af-
firm, with justification, that the childhood experience is like a “foot-hold”
(ein Halt) that can give support to later undertakings.
The difficulty one has in following K.’s line of reasoning and in accept-
ing his optimistic conclusion is that the structure of the framed experience
does not resemble that of the frame: the triumphant memory is not sim-
ply the Urbild of the narrative that encloses it. All of K.’s efforts during the
main body of the narrative are directed at overcoming obstacles, opening
doors, lifting barriers, whereas within the childhood scene, the obstacle
has already been overcome, for him and the other children as well: “It was
not curiosity that had urged them on; the graveyard had been no mystery
to them. They had often entered it through a small wicket-gate, it was
only the smooth high wall that they had wanted to conquer.” The young
 Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings  
K. does not climb the wall so that he can enter a secretive or taboo
domain: what interests the daydreaming subject is surface, not depth,
smoothness (“die glatte hohe Mauer”), not resistance, the wall between life
and death rather than the hidden depth of being – the free circulation
of the signifier rather than the anchor-weight of the signified.
The framed memory sequence relates to its narrative frame as a wish-
fulfillment dream relates to waking life – not in the parallelism of a
metaphorical or analogical totalization, but in the more complex, less
comforting mode of a distorted mirror-concatenation of elements that
cannot be reduced to one common denominator. What the daydream
stages is, in fact, a radical impossibility for the Kafkan imagination: it
represents K. as achieving his easy phallic victory (i.e., the “masculine”
planting of the flag) within the power-radius of the father (expressed
poetically by the pervasive light that floods the city square) – whereas we
know, from Kafka’s Letter, that the most the son can expect is to “crawl to a
clean little spot on earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm
oneself a little”. Further, it is easy to see that the young boy’s claim to be
“greater” (or “bigger” – größer) than anyone else on earth at the ecstatic
moment of his triumph stands in direct contradiction to the measured
topographical scheme of the Letter, in which the father stretches out over
the earth, while the son must seek small, hidden places for his own
territorial space. In the end, the daydream cannot be integrated into the
rest of the story or anchored within the logic of the enveloping narrative:
it exists as a cyst, a resistant membrane within the textual substance.
When K.’s passive memory-associations of the Heimat cease, he dis-
covers that he is not, as he had hoped, in front of the doors of the Castle,
but on the threshold of Barnabas’s home. Hoping, in his conscious will,
to penetrate the secret (Geheimnis) of the Castle, he arrives, instead, at the
Heim of his servant, where he meets Barnabas’s two sisters – Olga and
Amalia, both of whom play a major role later in the novel. This peculiar
movement of the story, whereby the protagonist sets out to encounter
the Castle, but is directed away from it toward new “home-like” (heim-
lich/unheimlich) locations and new characters, accounts for the spiral-like
narrative structure of the novel, and no doubt for its final unfinished
form. The Kafkan novel ironizes the threshold chronotope through rep-
etition and displacement. K.’s problem is not that he has no thresholds
to cross or that it is impossible to cross them, but that they are always the
wrong passages, never opening out onto the Castle, constituting a series
of infinitely replaceable, analogous openings – onto nothing.
There is one episode of the novel, however, that seems to stand out-
side of the sequence of “false opening” thresholds: it is the long section,
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
told by Olga, that illustrates her family’s decline (C –; S –).
This part of Das Schloß is atypical not only because its linear form of
presentation bears little resemblance to the fragmentary and repetitious
constructions to be found elsewhere, but also because of its overt explana-
tory, clarifying function. This is the one point in the novel at which the
reader is tempted to feel that s/he might, finally, gain some access to the
mysterious social laws that govern the complex overlapping of town and
castle, and ultimately, to the inner workings of the Castle’s bureaucracy.
In the telling of her story Olga in fact reveals to K. the hidden causes
of certain actions and situations that had previously seemed enigmatic;
but the final result of her story is not the kind of explanatory narrative
closure that seemed to lie within the reader’s horizon of expectations.
The first chapter of the section, entitled “Amalias Geheimnis”
[“Amalia’s Secret”], explains the source of the family’s disgrace. Amalia,
who had attended a social outing at which she had been introduced to a
Castle functionary named Sortini, received a letter from him, the con-
tents of which are not precisely described by Olga, but which, apparently,
is full of urgent erotic requests and insults. Olga does take great pains,
however, to describe in theatrical terms the moment at which Amalia
received the letter, and her precise reaction:
Next morning we were roused from our heavy sleep by a scream from
Amalia . . . She was standing by the window holding a letter in her hand which
had just been passed in through the window by a man who was still waiting for an
answer. The letter was short, and Amalia had already read it, and held it in her
drooping hand . . . I knelt down beside her and read the letter. Hardly had I fin-
ished it when Amalia after a brief glance at me took it back, but she couldn’t bring
herself to read it again, and, tearing it in pieces, she threw the fragments in the
face of the man outside and shut the window [und schloß das Fenster]. That was the
morning which decided our fate [Das war jener entscheidende Morgen]. (C ; S )

As has been pointed out in the critical literature, Amalia’s gesture of

refusal is unique in a novel that depicts female characters as acquies-
cent and subservient to the dominant males of the Castle-hierarchy.
In effect, by refusing to respond to Sortini, by closing the window to
his advances (by refusing his messenger-service), she breaks the cycle of
epistolary exchange that defines the very essence of the Castle’s sway.
She chooses silence as her mode of being. This silence is not a passive
defense, Olga tells us, but a way of living with the truth:
I’m glad to say I understand Amalia better now than I did then. She had more
to endure than all of us, it’s incomprehensible how she managed to endure it
and still survive . . . Amalia not only suffered, but had the understanding to see
 Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings  
her suffering clearly; we saw only the effects, but she knew the cause [wir sahen
nur die Folgen, sie sah den Grund], we hoped for some small relief or other, she knew
that everything was decided, we had to whisper, she had only to be silent [sie
hatte nur zu schweigen]. She stood face to face with the truth and went on living
and endured her life then as now [Aug und Aug mit der Wahrheit stand sie und lebte
und ertrug dieses Leben damals wie heute]. (C ; S )

It is tempting to see in Amalia’s way of being a counter-example to

that of K., and in her decision to unbind herself from the Castle a way
out of the labyrinthine impossible quest pursued by K. and his letter-
circulating servants. One must be careful about succumbing to such an
interpretive temptation, however. One must not forget that this moment
of metaphysical grounding emerges from the giddy, verbose declarations
of Olga, whose trustworthiness is far from established; and it would be
difficult not to perceive an ironical tone in the excessive claims and high-
blown rhetoric of Olga: “sie hatte nur zu schweigen, Aug in Aug mit der
Wahrheit stand sie.” The silence of Amalia, her nearness to the Truth
in whose shadow she lives and whose “protectress” she is, sound like an
anticipation of the late Heidegger, but that is precisely the problem. In
this pseudo-philosophical “sounding-like” one detects the quarter-tone
discrepancy of literary-stylistic exaggeration.
The difficulty one has in settling on a coherent univocal interpretation
of the Amalia episode stems from the narrative organization itself. The
presentation of Amalia as silent Watcher over Truth can be persuasive
only if we can believe in the truthfulness of Olga’s narrative voice, only
if, unlike the structure of the boyhood Heimat sequence, the narrative
frame does not add a distortion-effect to the “picture” it encloses. The
fact that Kafka chose to have Olga frame an explanatory account of
origins and sources (the cause of the Barnabas family’s social ruin and
ostracism) does not mean necessarily that he, as author, believed in the
possibility of narrative grounding or closure. In fact, at the very end of
Olga’s intervention, just as the narrator is about to take charge of the
storytelling again, the linear narration (Geschichte) comes full circle, only
to open out again to the infinite possibilities of the märchenhaft. In the end,
Olga explains how Barnabas came to be K.’s messenger in the first place:
And now for the final confession: it was a week after your arrival. I heard
somebody mentioning it in the Herrenhof, but didn’t pay much attention; a
Land-Surveyor had come and I didn’t even know what a land-surveyor was.
But next evening Barnabas – at an hour agreed on I usually set out to go a
part of the way to meet him – came home earlier than usual, saw Amalia in
the sitting-room, drew me out into the street, laid his head on my shoulder,
and cried for several minutes. He was again the little boy he had used to be.
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
Something had happened to him that he hadn’t been prepared for. It was as if
a whole new world had suddenly opened to him, and he could not bear the joy
and the anxieties of all this newness [Es ist als hätte sich vor ihm plötzlich eine ganz
neue Welt aufgetan und das Glück und die Sorgen aller dieser Neuheit kann er nicht ertragen].
And yet the only thing that had happened was that he had been given a letter
for delivery to you. But it was actually the first letter, the first commission, that
he had ever been given. (C –; S –).
This revelation is a bitter one for K., who discovers, in a retrospective
ironical illumination, that the messenger in whom he put his trust at
the beginning of the story had had no previous experience in the deliv-
ering of messages. Although, in accordance with what the villagers say
throughout Das Schloß, one might assume that the mode of epistolary
communication was in use long before K.’s arrival, it is essential to note
that, for Barnabas at least, it is the intervention of the land-surveyor
in a land without surveyed bounds, an undiscovered, undifferentiated
paradise of sorts, that causes a loss of innocence and a plunge into the
alienation-effects of the letter (literariness) as such.
Olga’s description of the moment at which Barnabas becomes a mes-
senger (“es ist als hätte sich vor ihm plötzlich eine ganz neue Welt aufge-
tan”) repeats the dramatic threshold-experience of Kafka the writer on
the evening he composed “Das Urteil” (“Nur so kann geschrieben wer-
den . . . mit solcher vollständigen Öffnung des Leibes und der Seele”), but
in the mode of tragedy, or depression. The beginning of Barnabas’s mes-
senger service is an incipient enslavement to the scribal Law of the castle
hierarchy; the opening of body and soul to epistolary exchange involves
both happiness and anxiety (“das Glück und die Sorgen aller dieser
Neuheit”), which are distributed in an uncanny alternating rhythm. Das
Schloß as novel undermines the naive optimism of the temporarily tri-
umphant author of “Das Urteil” by staging a double irony: first, the
doors of all houses and inns are open, yet the door – to the Castle –
remains always closed; secondly, narrative closure is impossible in a novel
whose framing devices are continuously exceeded by the negative un-
ravelling energy of the episodes they contain. Das Schloß is the paradox
of an open-ended narrative conveying a sealed message.

IV CROSSING THE THRESHOLD: THE FLIGHT OF THE

SIGNIFIER

As innovative writers with distinct personal styles, Proust and Kafka de-
veloped their narrative gifts in directions that are unique and (in the
neutral sense of the term) incomparable. Narrative form in Das Schloß is
 Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings  
not the same as that of the Recherche; any rigorous comparative “narratol-
ogy” of the devices and techniques of the two novels will yield results that
simply confirm the irreducible individuality of each author. My purpose
in this chapter has not been to deny that individuality, but to descend
below the level of recognizable and classifiable narrative traits, in order
to uncover the point at which narration originates in both writers, the
threshold at which metonymical spacing (espacement) begins.
As I indicated earlier in this chapter, the very notion of threshold,
break, crisis, or coupure is part of the drama of a writer’s life as depicted
in the account of his/her biographer. The crossing of the threshold, the
passage through the existential or textual “wound” are seen as a liber-
ation from anxiety – whether considered in traditional Oedipal terms
or as the anxiety of literary influence. The writers themselves reinforce
the idea that there is one threshold to cross – Kafka in his description of
the exhilarating composition of “Das Urteil,” Proust in his ecstatic rep-
resentation of the madeleine episode. The major difference between the
fiction-writers’ description of the coupure and that of their biographers
is that the former locate the precise moment of the break within the
act of writing, whereas the biographers read “underneath” the dramatic
staging of the episode and tell us readers what hidden forces are at work,
what psychic configuration of energies subtends the observable textual
facts.
My goal in reading isolated but mutually resonant juxtaposed passages
from Proust and Kafka has been to demonstrate that the presentation of
the threshold-experience – whether by biographers or creative writers –
is a euphoric fiction masking a more complex truth: that the Kafkan and
Proustian texts have several entryways and plural exits, which originate
in the liberating linguistic potential of the signifier. For Proust, there
is much poetry but no novel until the word “Balbec” splits into two
opposed units – the cathedral town on the one hand, the beach resort
on the other – causing the protagonist to travel between the two places
as he attempts to unify them in his mind. With the coupure of the signifier
“Balbec” Proustian topography originates: the topos as such is born of the
displacements of the signifier. The novel after the opening of “Balbec”
will be a continual, repetitious attempt to link separate “essences.” The
theme of travel, of movement through space, is the fictional equivalent
of Proust’s theory of linguistic transport: metaphor.
I have noted, as well, that one place in Proust repeats, resembles, or en-
velops another: Venice is a “transposed” Combray; Balbec is “Baalbek,”
East and West, the rising and the setting sun. Topographical conflation
of this type makes of Proustian space a fictional working-out of Freud’s
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
“development towards an ambivalence”: Venice is the exotic and the
familiar, the unheimlich and a re-decorated Heim. For Kafka, the signi-
fier Schloß flees across contextual boundaries. The very word for closure
opens up narrative space, and creates for the son an uncanny landscape –
of deserts, islands, cages, walled expanses, and underground passage-
ways – in which he can escape and deaden the influence of the solar
father. Yet, as in Proust, the topos that seems most unheimlich itself always
contains reflections of home, so that the wanderings of K. are destined
to be endless and futile.
The non-ending, impossible quest for hidden, unavailable truths
makes of the Recherche before the thunderclap of Le Temps retrouvé, and
of Das Schloß in its entirety, negative images of the traditional Bildungsro-
man, where enlightenment and self-discovery result from the search for
meaning. It is easy enough to see in Das Schloß and in the twin volumes of
La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue preludes to Beckett’s trilogy or Céline’s
Voyage au bout de la nuit – especially if one reads them as existential alle-
gories. In this chapter I have argued that there is also an allegory of the
signifier, a coherent narrative in and of the signifier that accompanies,
en sourdine, the formal effects and significant themes of the novels. Proust
and Kafka lived with the discomfort of knowing that, in the realm of
the märchenhaft, all is (unfortunately) possible. Place-names weave a po-
etic fabric whose threads can be unwoven; a prison is a potential castle,
but a “castle” is also only a lock, which is, after all, only a word – site of
the novel’s infinite power of expansion, sign of an author’s incurable but
linguistically productive ambivalence.
 CHAPTER 

Textualizing immoralism: Conrad’s Heart

of Darkness and Gide’s L’Immoraliste

I INTRODUCTION: UNCANNY TEXTUAL RESEMBLANCES

For this chapter, I have chosen to compare two novellas – or, perhaps
more precisely stated, récits – which have an exemplary status as Mod-
ernist texts: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness () and André Gide’s
L’Immoraliste (). Both works possess the inwardness characteristic of
the Modernist era – Marlow’s serpentine hesitations about the sense
and value of Kurtz’s life and pronouncements; Michel’s tortuous self-
analysis – while, at the same time, they exhibit a remarkable formal
complexity and virtuosity of style. To use the terms that frame my
analyses in this book: aesthetic brilliance envelops an ethical labyrinth.
The mode of this envelopment will be the main topic of the current
chapter.
If I have chosen to juxtapose Conrad to Gide in an essay that appears
to be “comparative” in the most traditional sense of a comparative liter-
ature study – an examination of authors whose texts resemble each other
in some thematic sense but who write in different languages and within
different literary traditions – it is not so much because strong thematic
similarities, in outweighing linguistic or cultural differences, allow me as
critic to bridge a cultural gap that had previously been unbridged, but
rather because Heart of Darkness and L’Immoraliste bear what can only be
called an uncanny resemblance to each other, a resemblance that chal-
lenges the critic, that unsettles him or her as reader. The récits of Conrad
and Gide say nearly the same thing, but not quite: they mirror each other,
but with notable distortions; they are not-quite-perfect Doppelgänger. It is
this strange, disquieting closeness which will stand at the center of my
interpretive efforts.
In a nutshell (an image to which we shall presently return), the shared
elements that motivate a comparison of these short canonical texts of
literary Modernism are the problem of the referent; the novella as

 
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
quest; pedagogical exemplarity; the pedagogical employment of nar-
rative frames; and the issue of immoralism.

The problem of the referent

Both Heart of Darkness and L’Immoraliste are based upon the personal ex-
periences of their authors: Conrad’s seven-month assignment for the
Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo in , during which,
as commander of a steamer, he voyaged into the depths of Belgium’s
(i.e., King Leopold’s) central African preserve; and Gide’s several trips
to North Africa, including an important initiatory journey of sexual
liberation with his friend Paul-Albert Laurens in , and his honey-
moon with Madeleine (with whom he was to have a problematic and
notorious mariage blanc) three years later. The history of the critical re-
ception of both novellas is a vacillation between interpretive schemes
that “see the reality” underneath the artistic license and transposition,
and other hermeneutic constructions that emphasize the texts’ heavily
inflected symbolism and distance from the experiential sphere. Is the
referent of Heart of Darkness the particularity of Leopold’s Congo, or is
it the depth of the human psyche, the “unconscious” world of dreams,
which has a general significance for all human beings? Is the refer-
ent of L’Immoraliste the exotic Muslim world of eastern Algeria in its
specificity, or the ruminations of the protagonist, which, like the reflec-
tions of La Bruyère or La Rochefoucauld, address themselves to the
human community at large, beyond all limitations and borders? The
spectrum of critical readings of both works is quite broad, with manifold
variations on the theme of the vexed cohabitation of particularity with
generality.

The novella as quest

Even the least symbolically inclined of readers are obliged to recognize
that the voyages of Marlow and Michel resemble those mythical quests
in the Western literary tradition in which the hero, in search of an object,
person, or idea that can give greater significance to his life, is eventually
transformed. As is the case in classical representations of the quest,
there is a person or agent who serves as both model and mediator for the
protagonist: just as Virgil is necessary for Dante, so is Kurtz for Marlow
and Ménalque for Michel. The function of the model/mediator is both
similar and different in the two Modernist novellas; and the notion of
the model itself, as we shall see in due course, is complex and requires
clarification.
 Textualizing immoralism: Conrad and Gide  
Pedagogical exemplarity
There is a curious effect of specularity between what is at stake within the
two texts – the relative dosage of particular and general meanings they
contain; the exemplary character of the questing protagonists and their
mediator-models – and what has happened to them as they have been
received by their respective publics in the “outside” world of evolving lit-
erary history. Both texts are considered (and this is how I am considering
them, unproblematically, for the moment) to be the best possible mod-
els, examples, or even archetypes of Modernist writing. They are much
taught because of their purported exemplary character. In the terms
of classical rhetoric, these short works, as individual samples, stand in a
relation of metaphorical synecdoche to the whole of Modernism. Under-
graduates read both Heart of Darkness and L’Immoraliste as representative
works, and do so, increasingly, in editions which frame the original texts
in a wealth of critical commentary.
Heart of Darkness has not only appeared in three different Norton Crit-
ical Editions (, , ), but more recently in two successive
editions of the Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism published by
St. Martin’s Press (, ). The need for the continual updates
mirrors the rapidity with which Conrad criticism has evolved, and the
degree to which it reflects the chaotic diversity of contemporary criticism
in general. In the case of Gide, the  Macmillan Modern French Lit-
erature Series edition of L’Immoraliste edited by Elaine Marks and Richard
Tedeschi is also a model of its kind: although it does not contain critical es-
says, it has a well-written introduction, exhaustive explanatory notes, and
a full glossary. For countless undergraduate students of French in North
America, this edition has been, for nearly four decades, the framework
within which Gide’s récit is read.
It is not a matter of indifference, I think, that Marks and Tedeschi
chose L’Immoraliste as exemplary Gidian text because of its general or
generalizable human significance, as is evident from the editors’ peda-
gogical vocabulary, which all teachers will recognize:
Though freer from a kind of direct “moralism” than La Porte étroite, for example,
L’Immoraliste is a deeply ethical work. It raises those problems of responsibility
and freedom, experience and understanding, ethics and action, truth and mis-
representation, and sincerity and rationalization which are of concern to us all.
It is a book highly conducive to the best sort of classroom discussion.

The American editors’ introduction to L’Immoraliste is nothing less

than an abbreviated classical credo in the ethical value of literature. This
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
transcendental value is said to rise above and encompass the particu-
larity of the aesthetic form – in this case, that of the novella or récit –
chosen by the individual writer for the best possible expression of his
ideas. If a literary work can have a properly pedagogical import, it is
because its pages contain unmistakable references to the large issues
of responsibility and freedom, experience and understanding, and so
forth. In the particular case of L’Immoraliste, the text has value insofar
as Michel’s hesitation between his pious affection for Marceline and
the seductive qualities of Ménalque’s life-philosophy call forth, in the
mind of the reader (and thereafter, in classroom discussion) the gen-
eral problems of responsibility, sincerity, truth and misrepresentation.
One of the questions that will arise from the analytical sections of the
present chapter, is the following: what, if anything, is lost in this passage
from the particular to the general, from the immanence of narrative
form and rhetorical construction to the transcendence of general ideas?
Do the teacher and the class salvage meaning at the expense of liter-
ature itself – that is, the literariness of the literary, that which marks
the text as literary but without external appeal to the large abstrac-
tions which are traditionally assumed to lie “within” the text? Can a
text have value if it does not incorporate, or if it only seems to incorporate
within its representational modality, the questions of truth, responsibility,
sincerity, etc.? In short: is there room for irony – irony not in its correc-
tive or “mastered” guise as momentarily imagined by Kierkegaard the
dissertation-writer, but irony in the radical German Romantic sense of
textual negation and self-dissolution? To pose this question is to invoke
another uncanny resemblance between Heart of Darkness and L’Immoraliste,
namely, the techniques of narrative framing on which both texts are
constructed.

On the pedagogical usefulness of narrative frames

The most striking similarity between the novellas of Conrad and Gide is
their narrative situation – with this term taken in its strongest etymological
sense, as what one would call, in French, une mise-en-site. At the beginning
of Heart of Darkness we learn that Marlow, who is about to tell the story
of his quest for the obscurely discoursing Kurtz, is one of a group of
five men held together by “the bond of the sea” (HD ). He, along
with three other men who have only the most shadowy of identities –
the Lawyer, the Accountant, and the nameless narrator of the external
frame – are the guests of the Director of Companies on board the Nellie, a
“cruising yawl” () now at rest on the Thames. The moment described
 Textualizing immoralism: Conrad and Gide  
is one of hesitation between the light of day and the oncoming darkness,
between movement and repose – in the Bakhtinian terms introduced
in the previous chapter, a threshold-moment par excellence. Described
in the second paragraph of the text as resembling an “idol” () and in
the last paragraph of the story as a “meditating Buddha” (), Marlow
will relate his tale with an interesting blend of dispassion, objectivity, and
“impressionistic” descriptions of African exoticism, tempered with rare
but important outbursts of frustration at his inability to communicate
the ineffability of what he experienced in the “heart of darkness.” 
Of crucial importance to the narrative organization of the novella
is that Marlow’s tale addresses itself to a group of four men who, in a
fundamental sense, “stand for” the larger readership of the book. We
readers today are in the same situation as that of Marlow’s companions:
we are bound together, perhaps not by love of the sea, but by a love of
stories and storytelling. We are thus engaged and involved in Marlow’s
crepuscular act of remembering, and, in our capacity as implied inter-
locutors, share a certain ethical responsibility in making sense of these
complex and obscure images. This is also the case in L’Immoraliste, where
a group of three friends come together to hear Michel’s story, which, like
Heart of Darkness, is told at the threshold-moment of the crossing from
day to night, on a terrace (the transitional place between inside and out-
side, domesticity and foreignness or danger) overlooking the stark North
African landscape:
we went up to the terrace, the view from which stretches away endlessly, and
the three of us, like Job’s three friends, waited there, admiring across the fiery
plain the sudden decline of the day. (I )

As is the case in Heart of Darkness, the word “we” occurs at the very
beginning of Gide’s text, at its outermost frame, thus inscribing the reader
(or, in pedagogical terms, the classroom group) into the moral dilemma
which is about to appear in the slow unfolding of the narrative. On an
abstract structural level, the two texts are set up in the same way, in a
way so close to equivalency that the belated reader/critic necessarily
wonders whether Gide, whose text appeared three years after Conrad’s,
had not patterned his récit on the model provided him by his esteemed
Polish/English colleague. Literary-historical evidence does not support
this hypothesis, however. It would seem that Gide did not read Heart of
Darkness until after his first visit to Conrad at Capel House in , which
means that the close resemblance in the narrative structures of the two
novellas is a matter of pure (uncanny) coincidence.
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
Beyond the similarities in narrative structure as such, there is one fun-
damental difference between the two texts, which is a matter of rhetor-
ical intensity or, to use a word notoriously difficult to define, of tone.
Whereas the exterior narrator of Heart of Darkness says “We four affec-
tionately watched [The Director of Companies] as he stood in the bows
looking to seaward” (; my emphasis), then evokes “the bond of the
sea” (), thereby establishing an atmosphere of calm and harmonious
camaraderie, the tone of the first pages of L’Immoraliste is much more ur-
gent, evoking danger, risk, and, with the allusion to the book of Job, the
problem of divine judgment and retribution against human failings. The
friends come together not during a logical pause in the natural rhythms
of a river estuary, but because Michel, having fallen into a state of dejec-
tion, perhaps abjection, has lost all reference-points ( points de repère) that
might keep him attached to the norms and expectations of social dis-
course and action. The friends respond to a “pact” they had made as
adolescents to help each other in times of distress (I ).
The similar-yet-different quality of the two novellas emerges from the
subtle distinction between “the bond of the sea” and the pact of human
friendship. The bond is transpersonal; it envelops the individual human
within a larger natural entity – an entity to which the human being
responds intuitively. Seamen go to sea out of a love for the sea which
they do not (need to) understand – le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne
connaı̂t pas. The pact, on the other hand, is a human invention to defend
against what nature can inflict on a person in the form of that person’s
“fate.” Whereas Marlow’s tale begins with his interlocutors being merely
curious, perhaps merely interested in spending an evening of narrative
diversion, Michel’s confession, from its first words, has a menacing qual-
ity to it which, according to the exterior narrator’s analogy, resembles
the African desert in its “fiery” quality.
Because the rhetorical tone of the two stories is so different, because
Michel’s narrative is above all self-justification (despite all Rousseauesque
protestations to the contrary) while Marlow’s is the expression of amaze-
ment and admiration for the enigmatic Kurtz, the potentially interactive
quality of the narrative set-up remains problematic in both cases, but dif-
ferently problematic. Both stories, because of their narrative structures,
hold out the promise of dialogue. The friends surrounding Marlow and
Michel could, hypothetically, respond to the stories they are hearing, just
as undergraduates could, de jure, respond to the teacher in the discussion
of a text “highly conducive to classroom discussion.” The interesting
 Textualizing immoralism: Conrad and Gide  
problem is that, in both cases, this interaction does not, de facto, take place.
Both tales are set up as dialogues but function as monologues. Michel
engages his interlocutors/readers in a labyrinth of morally complex acts
the concatenation of which is impossible to break, thus rendering dia-
logic interventions, in their momentary character, difficult to formulate
and sustain. And the very lack of specificity of Marlow’s “Africanist dis-
course”  leaves his listeners very little common ground from which to
respond or object to his symbolic diction. One has to wonder whether
the creation of a community of readers implicit in the narrative modali-
ties of both texts can be conceived of as resulting from a bond or a pact,
and whether either form of relation can account for the textual praxis of
these Modernist fictions.

Immoralism
The fundamental ethical question posed by both texts is that of im-
moralism – understood in Nietzschean terms as the stance assumed
by the superior individual who, having rejected the introverted and
sickly morality of Ressentiment espoused by the priestly caste, has gone
“beyond good and evil.” (These ideas can be found in the text which is
itself entitled Beyond Good and Evil [], but are perhaps most cogently
and systematically expressed in The Genealogy of Morals, written in ).
But whereas Nietzsche develops his ideas on immoralism discursively
throughout his late works, in an aphoristically executed arrangement
of theme and variations, Conrad and Gide textualize immoralism: that is,
they create characters who incarnate immoralist philosophies and, most
importantly, live those philosophies within their respective texts. It is
perhaps not an exaggeration to say that the vital principle of both récits,
that which drives them forward narratively, is the self-actualization of
immoralist characters as it affects or “infects” other characters and the
reader him- or herself. Kurtz is the center, however hollow or blank, of
Heart of Darkness. His active influence is everywhere present, from his rep-
utation in the Outer and Central Stations, to the effect of his powerfully
devious essay-cum-footnote concerning the “Suppression of Savage Cus-
toms” on the Harlequin, to his haunting of Marlow’s mind throughout
the story – not to speak of the results of his “civilizing” mission as it plays
itself out, monstrously, on the inhabitants of the villages surrounding the
Inner Station.
In the case of L’Immoraliste the situation is, once again, the same yet
slightly different. The story is centered on Michel’s actions, thoughts,
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
and inner consciousness, and he is the immoralist referred to by the
tale’s title, the man who destroys his wife as he gains his own freedom
from moral strictures. At the same time, however, whereas it is Marlow
who tells the story of Kurtz from the outside perspective of a fascinated
and increasingly wary observer, it is Michel who tells his own story, and
who is himself at least momentarily influenced by another character –
Ménalque – who, in his own way, lives a life “beyond good and evil.” 
Michel is thus a character who, in the gradual process of constructing
himself, must face external influences, whereas Kurtz, whom we meet
after it is too late, so to speak, after he is completely formed as a character,
is presented as a closed surface, as an individual imprisoned in his own
dangerous conceptions.
Despite these important differences, when the reader reaches the con-
clusion of both novellas, he or she is faced with protagonists to whom,
in the most fundamental sense, one can no longer appeal in the name of
anything conventionally moral, fictional characters whose development
has taken them toward what Gide calls, at several points in his story,
the inhuman. The inhuman is that which lies outside the boundaries of
human discourse and action, outside the border-lines traced by ethical
thought. In narrative terms, the inhuman appears as the unframable, that
which, by its transgressive force, negates the separation between inside
and outside on which framing as such is predicated. But how does one
read the inhuman in or “beyond” novellas which are so obviously struc-
tured on the principle of framing devices? This is a question which is
answerable only if we attempt to analyze, with some care, the praxis of
narrative framing in both récits. It is to that task that I now turn.

II INSIDE AND OUTSIDE: NARRATIVE AND MEANING

IN HEART OF DARKNESS

It is a critical commonplace that “the point” of Heart of Darkness is the

encounter between Marlow and Kurtz, the moment at which the enig-
matic master of the Inner Station, having been found after the travails
of a long journey, begins his veiled discourse. On this view, the narrative
movement of the tale has a pre-established telos: the narrative itself exists
only as a means to the end of Kurtz’s opaque revelations, and indeed,
abolishes itself once his words have been uttered. It is perhaps not without
significance that once Kurtz dies there is no gradual or detailed account
of the journey back, but rather a brusque, transitionless textual “jump.”
The following is all Marlow has to say about the return navigation down
 Textualizing immoralism: Conrad and Gide  
the Congo and about the sailing back to Europe:
“No, they did not bury me, though there is a period of time which I remember
mistily, with a shuddering wonder, like a passage through some inconceivable
world that had no hope in it and no desire. I found myself back in the sepulchral
city.” (HD )
Marlow would thus seem to use his narrative with great skill but also
with great désinvolture to express the meaning toward which the story
moves. Once that meaning has been revealed, the narrative per se can
collapse; it will have been only a prop, a theatrical device, a necessary
but inessential element in the staging of a complex psychodrama – or,
in spatial terms, the evanescent outside that can be discarded once the
meaningful inside is opened up. The problem with this view, however, is
that the exterior narrator of Heart of Darkness appears to contradict it, in
a striking analogy which has been much commented upon in the critical
literature. The analogy itself runs as follows:
The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies
within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity
to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside
like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow
brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are
made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (HD –)
As J. Hillis Miller has pointed out in his essay “Heart of Darkness Re-
visited,” it would seem that the narrator is performing an exact reversal
of the traditional method of storytelling – that of the “yarns of seamen”
in their “direct simplicity” – and in so doing, has inverted the categories
of container (contenant) and contained (contenu). Whereas the entertaining
stories we are used to hearing from men of the sea give us characters
and narrative detail as an “inedible shell which must be removed and
discarded so the meaning of the story may be assimilated,” Marlow offers
us a story in which “the meaning now contains the tale” (). In the
classical rhetorical terminology used by Miller, we pass from metonymi-
cal synecdoche (the kernel, the Rabelaisian sustantificque mouelle, is, in
the critic’s view, merely juxtaposed to the outer shell) to metaphorical
synecdoche (the glow surrounds or contains the haze it “brings out,” the
moonshine envelops the misty halos in its spectral light). In philosophical
terms, we move from the realm of contingency and chance association
to a necessary relation. The “impressionist” and “symbolist” styles of
Conrad would thus serve, in their evocative power, as guarantors of nar-
rative necessity, with meaning standing outside of but in intimate relation
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
to the tale which conveys it. But does the narrator say this unambigu-
ously in this passage, and does the novella always, or even usually, depict
meaning as that which lies beyond the vicissitudes of narrative framing?
A closer examination of the passage indicates that the neat oppositions
between inside and outside, metonymical and metaphorical synecdoche,
contingency and necessity, are not so neat in Conrad’s own language.
I would suggest, first, that for the seamen telling their tales, the relation
between the shell and the cracked nut is in fact one of metaphorical
synecdoche, or of necessary inclusion: the kernel and the shell are both
parts of the same nut, made of the same essential natural ingredients;
and the “simplicity” of the tale consists in the fact that meaning nat-
urally resides within an outer shell which is easy enough to remove. It
is interesting to note that if one uses the pedagogical examples which
Miller proposes to illustrate the difference between the two forms of
synecdoche – “I see a sail” for “I see a ship” is metaphorical because the
sail is a part of the whole of the ship; “I drink a bottle” is metonymical
because one drinks the liquid in the bottle, and the liquid has a differ-
ent material composition from the glass which contains it – the relation
of the kernel to the shell is clearly metaphorical, not metonymical, in
Miller’s own terms. The kernel relates to the shell as the sail relates to
the ship, by a necessary link, not as wine relates to the bottle that merely
happens to contain it. The fact that a human being must remove the
shell to eat the nut’s appetizing interior should not cause us to forget that
both edible and inedible parts of the nut were formed during the same
developmental process and, unlike wine and the bottle that contains it,
are parts of the same naturally produced whole.
To further complicate the issue, to say that a glow “brings out” a haze,
or that moonshine in some way “envelops” misty halos, is not to assert
unambiguously that there is a necessary relation between these phenom-
ena, or that the outside element truly contains the inside element as the
whole of something contains its part. The glow and the haze, the moon-
shine and the misty halos, simply do not relate to each other according
to the mode of part and whole. The word “sometimes” in the phrase
“misty halos that sometimes are made visible” is also not terribly reas-
suring to the rhetorician or philosopher: what happens during “other
times” – does the relation change? And if so, how? Finally – and here
is where a question of logic disrupts the rhetorical scheme in a jarring
way – what can one make of the very curious parenthetical remark in
the sentence “But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns
be excepted)”? The critics who read the passage, despite the significant
 Textualizing immoralism: Conrad and Gide  
divergences in their critical methodologies, are unanimous in one thing:
in not reading the parenthesis – or, to be rhetorically correct, what is contained
within the parenthesis. Absent the parenthetical comment, we can con-
struct some kind of opposition between Marlow and other seamen, even
though, as I have just indicated, that opposition is not easy to make in
purely constative or neatly declarative terms. But with the parenthesis,
we have something quite a bit more complicated.
The logical consequence arising from this phrase is as follows: although
Marlow’s storytelling is qualitatively different from that of his friends in
that it inverts the relative positions of container and contained, it is still
the spinning of a yarn, as are all narratives, however “impressionistic,”
“symbolic,” experimental, or self-reflective. If we take the spinning of a
yarn, or narrative possibilities in general, as the whole within which the
methods of Marlow and most seamen are divergent parts, the parentheti-
cal “aside,” which has been ignored in the critical literature, now takes on
an unsettling significance: it cancels out the theoretical assertions of the
passage; it undermines the apparent solidity of the analogical scheme.
The passage “works” only if Marlow is different from the other seamen,
only if his storytelling is different from theirs. But if to narrate as such is al-
ways to spin yarns, of whatever variety, then Marlow, despite a contingent
superficial distinctiveness in his mode of narration, is typical because he also
spins yarns: he is typical at the level of necessity, or of “essences,” to borrow
from Proust. Even the narrator-performer who seeks distinction in the
inventiveness of forms is just one other narrator-performer subsumed
within the infinite extensiveness of narrative possibility, a transpersonal
expanse within which all distinctions are leveled.
If one should accept this interpretation of the parenthetical insertion,
the consequence for our overall understanding of the novella can be
summed up as follows. We will need to see Marlow as a divided figure:
first, as a remembered character possessing his own distinctiveness (his
own individual way of being, his own personal “accent”) who interacts
with other characters within the story; and second, as a remembering
consciousness subject to the general laws of narrative subsumption and
thereby dispossessed of any fundamental distinctiveness qua narrator. In
the early portion of the paragraph which concludes with the yarns of
seamen / cracked nut analogy, the exterior narrator asserts that Marlow
“did not represent his class” – he is not representative in that, unlike most
seamen, for whom their ship is their home, the protagonist is a “wan-
derer” (HD ). As character, not as narrator, therefore, it can be said of
Marlow that he “was not typical” (HD ). What I am suggesting here is
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
something seemingly curious: that the undifferentiated flow of narrative
exteriority, what Blanchot calls “le ruissellement du dehors éternel,” en-
velops without mastering or, strictu senso, containing, the clearly delineated
differentiations on which the dramatic content of the story is based. The
novella is full of untypical personages, ranging from the “hollow” manager
of the Central Station to the commedia dell’ arte “phenomenon” of the
Harlequin and the enigmatically discoursing Kurtz. They possess their
own distinctiveness, but are immersed in the indistinction of narrative
sameness.
The effect of this stark juxtaposition between an inside of dramatic
conflict and theatrical oppositions and the indifferent narrative outside
with which it cohabits but is incompatible, is that of uncanniness,
Unheimlichkeit. Narrative exteriority, in other words, does not provide
a home for that which it envelops yet does not, properly speaking,
contain. And its undifferentiated “glow” often brings out the “haze”
within the story, the areas of the story which are themselves not sus-
ceptible of integration within binary oppositions. Narrative exteriority
necessarily impinges upon the system of distinctions and differences it
envelops without containing, producing disjunctive moments in the
text, moments of upheaval in which effective communication among
characters, clear delineation among places, and relationality as such
becomes problematic, if not impossible.
The entirety of Heart of Darkness is set up as a potential dialogue, at three
essential levels: between Marlow the narrator and his interlocutors; be-
tween ancient civilized Europe and “blank” Africa; between Marlow the
character and Kurtz. If the novella holds out hermeneutical possibilities
for the reader, it is because the reader assumes there can and will be di-
alogic exchange at these levels, that relations of sameness and difference
will allow for the construction of his or her interpretive grid. The prob-
lem, however, is that the narrative contract or bond, to use Marlow’s ex-
pression, is, in fact, an unkept promise, a hypothetical framework which
contains nothing, which yields nothing to the pressure exterted on it
by the reader’s interpretive efforts. The possibility of dialogue, which is
nothing less than the potentiality within aesthetic form for the creation
of an ethically grounded interpretive community, rests on the interlocu-
tor’s (or reader’s) ability to appeal to a common ground on which both
he and his partner in conversation stand. Yet Conrad, in what amounts
to a devastating play on words undermining the very expression “com-
mon ground,” has Marlow say the following about Kurtz, at the very
 Textualizing immoralism: Conrad and Gide  
beginning of their verbal “exchange”:
“I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything
high or low . . . There was nothing either above or below him and I knew it. He
had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the
very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I
stood on the ground or floated in the air.” (HD )
It is important to remember this evocation of Marlow’s absolute,
“groundless” and “floating” disorientation when, just five pages later,
he asserts, with sudden (too sudden) confidence, that Kurtz’s discourse
amounted to “an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable
defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was
a victory!” (HD ). Not only does Marlow have no proof or clear justi-
fication of what he has just said, but more importantly, he has no basis,
no grounds, at the most primary level of communication, to assert any-
thing whatever about Kurtz – the figure to whom he bears no relation.
Marlow’s “loyalty” to Kurtz is thus, properly speaking, pure nonsense:
how can Marlow be the emissary of this personage, the repository for
his “universal genius” (HD ) when that genius is not communicable? The
ethical basis of Marlow’s posthumous companionship with the Inner
Station’s director is null and void, which is why his final lie to the
“Intended” is both logical and necessary. Lying is the mode of apparent
but unreal/fictional non-exchange, which is precisely the mode of the
“relation” between the protagonist and the man he idolizes. Marlow’s
final lie makes him as untrustworthy as the man whose ideas he admires
and represents to the world; Marlow ends by resembling, uncannily, the
object of his admiration, the “remarkable man.”
Just as the final resemblance of the initially differentiated characters of
Kurtz and Marlow is “too close for comfort,” in the same way the oppos-
ing poles of Europe and Africa on which the geographical symbolism of
the story is based prove to be strangely similar in their uncanny qualities.
Not only does Marlow use the term “uncanny” to describe one of the
“fateful” women who, like one of the Parcae, knits menacingly in the
Brussels office where he receives his appointment (HD ), but he also
describes the African soil in the same way when he emphasizes the lack
of relation between the Europeans and their hostile environment: “We
were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past
like phantoms . . . The earth seemed unearthly” (HD  ). Just as Marlow
cannot appeal to Kurtz, so the representatives of European civilization
cannot find a hold on Africa. But the convoluted irony on which Conrad’s
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
tale is constructed can be paraphrased thus: it is not because Africa is dif-
ferent from Europe that it is dark and incomprehensible, but because it
is part of the same extensive and undifferentiated uncanniness. At one of
the novella’s most dramatic moments, when the essence of Africa seems
to express itself most menacingly (Kurtz has temporarily escaped from
the steamer and attempted to return to the Inner Station, and Marlow
must enter the jungle to find him), Marlow remarks:
“I strode rapidly with clenched fists. I fancy I had some vague notion of falling
upon him and giving him a drubbing. I don’t know. I had some imbecile thoughts.
The knitting old woman with the cat obtruded herself upon my memory as a
most improper person to be sitting at the other end of such an affair.” (HD  )

The “obtruding” presence of the Brussels Parca is “improper” only if

one goes by the assumption that Europe and Africa are, in their essence,
polar opposites. From the unsettling narrative perspective of Heart of
Darkness, however, it is the same yarn, if I may be permitted the pun, which
stretches from Brussels into the Congo and which not only knits together
the two places, but dissolves their separate identities into a fundamental
and pervasive Unheimlichkeit. The critical debates that surround Heart of
Darkness, and which focus either on the textually self-reflective “inside”
(the novella as quest, as exploration of the unconscious mind) or on the
real-world referential “outside” (the story as expression of the author’s
purported racism), presuppose, for their rhetorical effectiveness, that
there are a discernible inside and a clearly delineated outside to which
one can appeal for purposes of interpretive consensus. If, however, we are
in a textual world which disrupts these distinctions, which is uncanniness
in its generalized pervasiveness, we are both everywhere and nowhere.
This very curious non-place not only does not allow for the equation of
Africa with something like the primitive id and Europe with the locus of
the clear-seeing ego, but it also evacuates the pathos with which a literal-
minded political reading attempts either to condemn or to condone the
content of Conrad’s thought. Uncanniness is both within and without,
in the “glow” and the “haze”: as we have seen on several occasions in
this book, it is the unsurveyable which readers inevitably and necessarily
attempt to survey.
It is the very pervasive quality of uncanniness, its capacity to blur the
boundaries of inside and outside, that calls into question the dividing
lines which allow for differentiation at the level of narrative structure –
in particular, for the clear-cut distinction, in Heart of Darkness, between
the outer frame provided by the exterior narrator and the inner frame
 Textualizing immoralism: Conrad and Gide  
constituted by Marlow’s tale of the search for Kurtz. Uncanniness, as
disruption of narrative boundaries, is a modern response to the classical
literary tradition, as embodied, for example, in Boccaccio’s Decameron
or Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, where the listeners, who them-
selves become storytellers in their turn, are given the opportunity, as
discussants, to judge the tale they have just heard for its moral as well as
aesthetic merits. The exterior frame often functions as a control mecha-
nism wherein a voice or voices of reasoned moderation engage in spirited
dialogue with a storyteller who may have exceeded the bounds of de-
cency or decorum. The reader of these tales becomes a virtual partner in
the dialogue, and must choose among the various interpretive solutions
offered, or else elaborate one of his or her own. The fundamental point,
whatever the diversity of the stories’ content or style, however tame or
outrageous their premises, is that the personages discoursing at the exte-
rior are active interpreters; and their interpretations enliven the framed
text, engage with it actively.
In Heart of Darkness Conrad provides us with a framework which is,
at the formal level of narrative technique, similar to what one finds in
Boccaccio or Marguerite de Navarre. That is, Conrad sets up a formal
apparatus which could function like its Renaissance models, and which
has led no less perspicacious a critic than Ian Watt to affirm, in what I
think can only be called the mode of wishful thinking:

Marlow’s memories of his lonely experiences on the Congo, and his sense of the
impossibility of fully communicating their meaning, would in themselves assign
Heart of Darkness to the literature of modern solipsism; but the fact that Marlow,
like Conrad, is speaking to a particular audience makes all the difference; it
enacts the process whereby the solitary individual discovers a way out into the
world of others. (Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, )

At the level of textual praxis, however, this “way out into the world
of others” is never realized. What is notable about the figures listening
to Marlow is that they are merely listeners and never interlocutors. The
narrative device of the external frame is just as hollow as Kurtz him-
self; like Kurtz, it is an empty shell “containing” a vacuous, seemingly
“eloquent” monologic voice. The exterior frame merely “envelops” the
primary narrative like a “glow,” and, in its indistinct contours, effaces it-
self. Conrad not only silences the potential interlocutors; he makes them
invisible as the night falls upon the voice of Marlow. Because the exterior
frame cannot contain its inside, because, unlike in the Renaissance texts,
there is no dialectic of interchange between the two, the exterior ends
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
by mimicking the interior – and this, most strikingly, in what one might
call the infectious quality of idolatry as theme.
In a nutshell (one more time): Kurtz, presented from afar as a kind
of European god who has come to evangelize the natives with his
Enlightenment culture, is revealed, progressively, to be an idol. Marlow,
who declares emphatically, but, in Freud’s language, with obvious Vernein-
ung, “Mr. Kurtz was no idol of mine” (HD ), in fact not only increas-
ingly idolizes this “universal genius,” but himself turns into an idol –
interestingly enough, of Eastern provenance. All readers will remember
the “meditating Buddha” of the story’s final paragraph (); the ini-
tial description of Marlow who, with “an ascetic aspect, and, with his
arms dropped, the palms of his hands outwards, resembled an idol”
(); or, curiouser and curiouser, also in the novella’s earliest pages, the
evocation of the teller of tales as “a Buddha preaching in European
clothes and without a lotus-flower” ( ). Marlow is thus presented
not only as an idol, which is to say, an empty or hollow god, but as
a metaphysical cross-dresser who preaches with the wrong (culturally
mismatched) accoutrements. From the very beginning, the “inside” of
European culture and the “outside” of exotic Otherness display, with
bogus theatricality, an unheimlich cohabitation. Inside and outside, here and
there, reigns the fantasm of a transvestite blending and covering of con-
traries whose result, hermeneutically speaking, will be a radical textual
undecidability.
What remains for the reader to do in these disconcerting, profoundly
unsettling circumstances? Is there a way, despite the collapsing of frames
and extensiveness of uncanniness, to read this text? Is there a reading of
undecidable texts? An answer, perhaps the best one enunciated within
Conrad’s literary-historical moment, was proposed, with considerable
wit, by Nietzsche in the preface to Twilight of the Idols ():

Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy affair, fraught with immea-

surable responsibility, is no small feat; and yet, what is needed more than cheer-
fulness [Heiterkeit]?. . . . Another mode of convalescence [the “mode” previously
mentioned was that of “war”] – under certain circumstances even more to my
liking – is sounding out idols [Götzen aushorchen]. There are more idols than realities
in the world: that is my “evil eye” for this world; that is also my evil ear.” For
once to pose questions here with a hammer, and, perhaps, to hear as a reply that
famous hollow sound which speaks of bloated entrails – what a delight for one
who has ears even behind his ears, for me, an old psychologist and pied piper
[Rattenf änger] before whom just that which would remain silent must become
outspoken [gerade Das, was still bleiben möchte, laut werden muss].
 Textualizing immoralism: Conrad and Gide  
The way to remain “cheerful” in the midst of interpretive “gloom” is
to come to a double understanding. First, the search for truth, meaning,
authenticity, for gods and universal geniuses, is doomed from the start
because there are “more idols than realities in the world.” And second
(logically following from this first realization), since one is faced with an
essential hollowness, one’s interpretive method should consists of sounding
out idols, of using the hammer (i.e., tuning fork) to bring out the resonance
inhabiting that hollowness. Heart of Darkness, with apologies to Ian Watt,
is a tale of modern or Modernist “solipsism,” in which the promise
of community is not kept; yet even the most forbidding and apparently
unreachable of empty spaces resonates with and because of its emptiness.
There may be no dialogue or interlocution in Conrad’s novella, but
there is a semantic resonance, to which the reader who has “ears even
behind his ears” must attempt, however unsuccessfully, to be attuned.
And once the tuning fork touches the string, the reverberating tones are
everywhere, within and without the instrument: they do not call for or
necessarily permit a dialogue in the same register, but they are released
toward the possibility of a responsible listening.

I I I F R A M I N G M O R A L D A N G E R : L ’I M M O R A L I S T E

Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, the protagonist of Gide’s récit is an im-

moralist insofar as he has “kicked himself loose of the earth,” insofar as
his life-philosophy and actions appear groundless, relationless, morally
unredeemable and socially irrecuperable. Michel is that individual who,
at the end of his story, poses the greatest of possible threats to society,
not so much because he has committed specific reprehensible criminal
acts for which a court of law could condemn him, but because he may
no longer, in any sense, be a part of the greater whole of the human
community: no synecdochic relation of any kind, metaphorical or even
metonymic, can be applied to him. As his wife Marceline says to him
in the final stages of her agony: “Vous aimez l’inhumain” (L’Imm ).
The entirety of L’Immoraliste is the gradual narrative progression toward
the category of the inhuman, toward that which lies “beyond good and
evil” in the Nietzschean sense. The fundamental difference between the
texts of Conrad and Gide, as I have noted, is that the reader encounters
Kurtz after he has become inhuman, and can only recognize, belatedly,
the external effects of that going-beyond. Marlow presents us with dis-
quieting signifiers pointing to the signified “inhumanity,” such as the
footnote “Exterminate all the brutes!” on the treatise for the Society
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
for the Suppression of Savage Customs, and the “round carved balls”
(HD ) on sticks serving as a fence for Kurtz’s domain and which turn
out to be human skulls. We infer from these signs that Kurtz has become
inhuman; we perform what Ian Watt has called the “delayed decoding”
of a text that shows us, in a first movement, the sheer unfamiliar ap-
pearance of things, followed by Marlow’s (or the reader/interpreter’s)
differed understanding of what motivates that appearance. In Gide’s
story, on the other hand, we see not Michel-the-immoralist, but rather
how Michel becomes an immoralist. It is Michel himself who obligingly
provides us with all the interpretive tools necessary to condemn him.
The narrator-protagonist often explicates how the signs of his increasing
personal liberty and detachment from social norms can only be under-
stood as representing his voluntary exile from the human community,
from its shared system of conventions and values.
In the case of Gide’s highly structured and symmetrical récit, narrative
is not the more or less transparent envelope containing a message that can
be called immoralisme or l’inhumain; rather, the movement or progression
of this narrative is, in and of itself, immoral and inhuman. In its slow
unfolding, in its gradual development, Michel’s narrative engages the
reader with the becoming of immoralism, a becoming from which the
reader cannot, at any precise point, extricate him- or herself. At the end
of the story, in our final return to the external frame, we hear:
Michel remained silent for a long time. We too said nothing, each of us struck
dumb by a strange uneasiness [ pris chacun d’un étrange malaise]. We felt, alas, that
by relating it, Michel had somehow legitimized his action. Not knowing where
to object to it, in his gradual accounting, made us almost . . . accomplices. We
were somehow involved in it [Nous y étions comme engagés]. He had completed his
story without a quaver in his voice, without an inflection or a gesture to reveal
that any emotion whatever disturbed him, either because he took a cynical pride
in not seeming moved, or because a kind of reticence kept him from moving
us by his tears, or because he simply wasn’t moved [soit enfin qu’il ne fût pas ému].
I can’t distinguish in him, even now, what is pride, or strength, or aridity, or
reserve [ Je ne distingue pas en lui, même à présent, la part d’orgueil, de force, de sécheresse
ou de pudeur]. (I ; L’Imm – )

What the external narrator is evoking here is that most unheimlich of

moments in literature – when aesthetics becomes inseparable from, indis-
tinguishable from, ethics; when aesthetic form, in other words, loses its ca-
pacity to contain, envelop, or frame the moral energy (no longer) “within”
it. Unheimlichkeit emerges in the “strange uneasiness” (étrange malaise) one
feels as a listener, and in the unusual combination of disorientation or
 Textualizing immoralism: Conrad and Gide  
dislocation and interpretive involvement. The reader feels himself to be
caught up in a text in which he is increasingly uncomfortable, in which
logical or hermeneutic distinctions as such have become impossible to
make. Hence the series of “either-or” (soit que . . . soit que) hypotheses con-
cerning Michel’s motivations; hence the listener’s quandary relating to
the roles which such character traits as “pride, or strength, or aridity, or
reserve” might play in the weaving of the narrative threads. Since we
readers, like Michel’s friends, hear the totality of the story from beginning
to end, and are aware of the degree to which the protagonist has left be-
hind his sense of solidarity with his fellow humans, we are likely to opt for
the most extreme of the hypotheses: namely, that Michel “simply wasn’t
moved” by his own story. And it is the neutral term sécheresse (translated
nicely by Richard Howard as “aridity,” evoking a correspondence with
the desert environment in which the tale is told) which best renders the
state of mind of the narrator, not pride, strength, or reserve ( pudeur), all
of which convey an unmistakable moral content. The ultimate irony of
the text is that Michel, who ends his quest for authenticity in a location
beyond morality as such, in an area drained of all ethical reference and
vocabulary, has managed to “infect” his readers with feelings of guilt. The
moral ideas and sentiments which Michel no longer has now possess the
reader and continue to exercise their influence within the reader’s inter-
pretive consciousness. Nature abhors a vacuum: that which is expelled
from Michel is not lost, but is ingested by his uneasy listeners, who have
been forced, throughout the récit, to inhabit the unhomely arid home
provided them by their erstwhile friend.
The resistance of the threatening ethical content of L’Immoraliste to
aesthetic domestication or enclosure has disturbed Gide’s readers from
 until the present. A detailed history of the story’s critical reception
would show that, until the advent of structuralism and narratology, most
readers found it difficult to take seriously the framing devices, which were
considered to be artificial and contrived “guardrails” borrowed, for the
sake of convenience, from the classical tradition. Gide himself, stung
by the violently negative reactions of some of his closest writer-friends
to the first printing of the book, inserted, for the second edition, a
prefatory statement which itself acts as an additional framework beyond
that provided by the fictional friends on the terrace, and which appears
to serve the purpose of an authorial guarantee against the text’s moral
disruptions and dangers. It is as if Gide, rereading his own work in the
light of contemporary readings of it, had retroactively realized that the
immoralist philosophy of his protagonist needed additional containment:
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
if the floodwaters break over one dike, another must be constructed.
It is the juxtaposition of this belated addendum to the passage I have
just analyzed on the moral “engagement” or “complicity” of Michel’s
friends in the framed narrative which will reveal both the aesthetic and
the ethical tensions on which L’Immoraliste as literary work is predicated.
Gide begins his prefatory remarks with an image which amounts to a
variation on the textually self-reflective comparison between the cracked
nut and the “yarns of seamen” in Conrad’s novella. Gide compares his
récit to a plant, a colocynth, which, native to the Mediterranean region,
bears a bitter and purgative fruit:
I offer this book for what it is worth [ Je donne ce livre pour ce qu’il vaut]. It is a fruit
full of bitter ash, like those desert colocynths which grow in parched places and
reward one’s thirst with only a more dreadful scalding, yet upon the gold sand
are not without a certain beauty. (I xiii; L’Imm )

Like Baudelaire’s celebrated title-image Les Fleurs du Mal, the container

(contenant) here is aesthetically pleasing (the beauty of the flower in its exte-
riority set against the background of the golden sand), but the contained
(contenu) is ethically threatening (the “scalding” taste of the flower’s inside
“ash,” with its evocation of infernal privations and torture). However dra-
matic the contrast between outside and inside, however uncomfortable
the cohabitation of the lovely flower and its bitter fruit, it is important
to emphasize that Gide is not in this context questioning the separa-
tion of the two domains or suggesting that they in any way overlap or
overflow each other’s boundaries. Unlike Conrad, Gide remains within
the classical representation of literary meaning as being contained by
the narrative form which conveys it on a temporal line. L’Immoraliste will
be disturbing in its contents, “hard to swallow,” but the author appears
confident, here, in the capacity of his text in its carefully crafted form to
contain the protagonist’s morally equivocal ideas within its envelope.
As the passage develops, Gide emphasizes the quasi-Flaubertian “in-
difference” or “neutrality” with which he has told his tale, and warns
his readers against the temptation of searching, within the récit, for the
author’s own definitive morally grounded opinion of Michel’s actions:
“But I wanted to write this book neither as an indictment nor as an apol-
ogy, and I have taken care not to pass judgment” (ibid.). The text offered
to the public by André Gide, as now illuminated by this explanatory
preface, presents itself as purely constative in its tone. If there are marks
within the story by which the reader can orient him- or herself toward a
moral judgment of Michel, those marks exist at the literarily immanent
 Textualizing immoralism: Conrad and Gide  
level of hermeneutical interaction between text and reader, and cannot
be seen as clues pointing to the author’s own existential situation. The
work of art, in the formulation of this preface, is not only self-contained
in its isolation from its author’s life; as aesthetic form, it also holds within
itself, without excess or remainder, the moral content of the narrative,
which it represents in the protagonist’s interactions with the other fic-
tional characters and allegorizes in his symmetrically organized journeys
through geographically symbolic regions. In Gide’s aphoristic formu-
lation: “To tell the truth [A vrai dire], in art there are no problems – for
which the work of art is not the sufficient solution” (I xiv; L’Imm ).
The “problems” to which Gide refers here are the moral lapses of
the protagonist, in whom, according to the preface, a number of readers
have seen only a “sick man” or a “strange case” (ibid.). By stating that
the work of art can solve the moral problems it contains, Gide is alleging
that aesthetics possesses its own morality. In telling the truth about Michel’s
lies, in residing within the aura of the truth and of authenticity, the work
envelops and contains all acts of perversity and deviousness, removing
their sting. L’Immoraliste as aesthetic whole is thus the generality within
which the particularity or peculiarity of Michel as “case” can be suc-
cessfully subsumed and neutralized. In Gide’s words, his precipitous and
superficial readers – those who have seen in Michel only a man who is
“sick” in the moral sense – have “failed to see that some very urgent ideas
of very general interest may nonetheless be found in [his drama]” (ibid.).
These readers have tasted the fruit of the desert flower, have reacted
with disgust to its taste, and have not sought the arduous truths behind
or beyond its bitter flavor. This thought leads Gide one step farther in
his argument, a rather unfortunate step which illuminates with brutal
clarity the author’s defensive posture. Indeed, in the penultimate para-
graph of the preface, having castigated his contemporary readers, Gide
appeals to those readers of the future who will have the requisite insight
to understand the complexity of his moral vision:

But the real interest of a work and the interest taken in it by the public of the
moment are two very different things. One may without too much conceit,
I think, prefer the risk of failing to interest the moment by what is genuinely
interesting – to beguiling momentarily a public fond of trash [On peut sans trop de
fatuité, je crois, préférer risquer de n’intéresser point le premier jour, avec des choses intéressantes –
que passionner sans lendemain un public friand de fadaises]. (I ; L’Imm )

At the end of the preface, we are left with one concrete problem that
we, as readers, need to solve: namely, what is the nature of the moral
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
problem or problems that inhabit the text? What is the moral danger
against which the récit seems compelled to erect multiple frames? Why
must the author himself intervene in his work in order to defend its
aesthetic integrity? What is it about the story’s troubled hero, or anti-
hero, that causes such consternation among the reading public?
Perhaps the most pervasively described and consistently disturbing
trait of Michel throughout the récit is his tendency toward dissimulation,
which manifests itself as a capacity to live a double life – on the one hand,
the seeking out of amorous adventures and ethically suspect activities on
the margins of society; on the other hand, the swearing of everlasting
devotion to the woman he “loves,” in the belief that he is capable of doing
both at the same time, that his life can and does “contain” these extremes.
In one of the rare moments in which Michel addresses himself directly to
his interlocutors, we have the following pathos-infused rhetorical flourish:
Oh, perhaps you think I didn’t love Marceline. I swear, I loved her passionately
[ Je jure que je l’aimais passionnément]. Never had she been, and never had she
seemed to me, so lovely. Illness had refined and actually exalted her features.
I almost never left her now, surrounded her with continuous care [l’entourais
de soins continus], protected, watched over her every moment of the day and
night . . . When sometimes I left her for an hour to take a walk by myself in the
country or in the streets, a loving anxiety, a fear she might be bored, quickly
brought me back to her . . . I would return, my arms filled with flowers, early
garden flowers or hothouse blossoms . . . Yes, I tell you I loved her dearly [Oui,
vous dis-je; je la chérissais tendrement]. But how can I express this – that insofar as
I respected myself less I revered her more – and who’s to say how many passions
and how many warring thoughts can cohabit in a man? (I – ; L’Imm )

The passage as a whole is built upon a desperate and wishful rhetoric

of self-persuasion. One senses that Michel swears his love for Marceline
so insistently, so “loudly” to his listeners, because he himself remains un-
persuaded of the authenticity of his sentiments. The repetition of “Je jure
que je l’aimais passionnément” and “Oui, vous dis-je, je la chérissais ten-
drement,” is a quintessential example of Freudian Verneinung whereby the
very emphatic quality of the speaker’s tone points to his anxious insincer-
ity. The words “Je jure que” and “Oui, vous dis-je” are referentially ori-
ented formulae by which Michel temporarily removes himself from the
inner frame of his story (in Emile Benveniste’s terms, the past-tense his-
toire he is relating in its regular temporal unfolding) in order to emerge,
brusquely, in the “real time” of the concrete narrative situation (the ter-
race, the friends), thereby drawing attention to the enunciative present of
his discours. It is when Michel breaks the frame that encloses the histoire as
such within his discours that the moral complexity of the narrative erupts
 Textualizing immoralism: Conrad and Gide  
with the greatest force. It is precisely when moral contradiction or du-
plicity (expressed here in the mathematical proportionality of the phrase
“insofar as I respected myself less I revered her more”) is revealed in its
most dangerous form that the aesthetic frame is least able to contain it.
Rather than “solve” the problems it contains, Michel’s narrative, in its
moments of greatest moral crisis, dissolves, leaving the reader to ponder
the unanswerable general question, worthy, in its pithy formulation, of
the pen of a seventeenth-century moraliste: “and who’s to say how many
passions and how many warring thoughts can cohabit in a man?” This
is by no means the kind of general question Gide the preface-writer
had in mind when he insisted upon the fundamental human signifi-
cance of Michel’s particular drama. The passage from the particularity
of Michel’s relation with Marceline to the generality of the “warring
thoughts” inhabiting “man” is accomplished in a moment of extreme
textual disjunction, and is, in fact, the excuse by which the protagonist
attempts, quite lamely, to justify his own unjustifiable dissimulations. We
have entered the moral labyrinth of speech-act theory, in which confes-
sional discourse and the making of excuses collapse the text’s purported
aesthetic self-sufficiency and engage it in the referential realm of moral
undecidability. The signals by which Michel tries to envelop his “love”
for Marceline in the beauty of an aesthetic envelope (“Je jure que,”
“Oui, vous dis-je”), like the flowers with which he overwhelms her, are
protestations masking (badly) a sadistic desire to destroy her, to be rid of
her stifling presence, protestations whose transgressive moral dimension
cannot be tamed by any tale, however artfully told.
Gide’s retroactive imposition of a preface as outside frame or con-
taining vessel thus runs up against the subversive potential of the text’s
“inside,” which resists final enclosure or domestication. In other words,
the story’s particularity, its irreducible moral complexity, cannot be sub-
sumed within an aesthetically elaborated generality. The author’s pleas
for us readers to see in Michel’s drama something more than a “bizarre
case,” something that transcends his individuality, are not convincing
when set against the text’s destabilizing rhetorical energy. In particular,
we are being asked to see Michel’s homosexual tendencies as part of a
greater whole, as one element among others that can be subsumed within
the general notion of immoralism. In this view, homosexuality, or, more
precisely, pédérastie, the love of young boys, is no more or less important
within the aesthetic totality of the text than those other health- or life-
enhancing drives (Freud’s Triebe applied to a Nietzschean philosophy of
self-affirmation) that turn Michel away from Marceline and from his
moral responsibility toward her. The question is, however: is this what
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
the text says; is this what the text in fact performs? Is the impulse toward
homosexuality merely one among other impulses in this particular text?
The answer to this question is, I think, an unequivocal No, and is
conveyed by the récit in unmistakable fashion, in what might be called
an unframing device. In the letter addressed to “Monsieur D.R., Président
du Conseil” by which Michel’s friends attempt to argue for the protago-
nist’s reinsertion into society despite what his narrative will soon reveal
about his past actions and current abject status, there is one interest-
ing detail that risks going unnoticed and that might seem to be, at first
glance, a mere concession to the fiction-writer’s allegiance to verisimili-
tude: namely, the remark, inserted into the description of Michel’s house
and its setting: “A Kabyl child ran away as we approached, scrambling
over the wall without a word” (“Un enfant kabyle était là, qui s’est enfui
dès notre approche, escaladant le mur sans façon”) (I ; L’Imm ).
This same child reappears in the last paragraph of the story, as Michel
breaks the spell of his now-finished histoire to address his friends directly.
Although the first words of his peroration are in the mode of despair and
urgency – “Drag me away from here; I can’t leave of my own accord.
Something in my will has been broken” (I ) – his final musings
revolve around the young Kabyl boy, named Ali, whom he prefers, for
intimate companionship, to Ali’s sister. It is she, says Michel, who laugh-
ingly “claims he’s what keeps me here more than anything else. There
may be some truth in what she says . . . ” ( ).
Ali is the detail, the particular, the unenclosable object of desire whose
narrative function is that of frame-breaking. The wall he climbs so natu-
rally and without fuss (sans façon) is the barrier set up, defensively, between
the outside and the inside, the general and the particular. He is, simulta-
neously, that energy which exceeds frameworks of all kinds, and also, that
individual who “keeps me here more than anything else,” who repre-
sents an antidote to the protagonist’s melancholy. He is both a Proustian
être de fuite in his narrative function, and also the individual, the one and
only individual, who establishes the possibility of staying, of dwelling.
Irrecuperable, but also the promise of a future recuperation beyond the
margins of society’s framed permissibilities.

IV FRAMES: HUMAN AND DIVINE

Both Heart of Darkness and L’Immoraliste are cautionary tales which relate,
underneath their portraits of immoralist characters, what might be called
the dangers of generalizing from the stance of admiration. Marlow admires Kurtz
 Textualizing immoralism: Conrad and Gide  
for his eloquence and his “genius,” but the particular words of Kurtz’s
discourse reveal nothing but emptiness, nothing but a moral vacuum.
Michel admires Ménalque’s pseudo-Nietzschean life-philosophy in its
rhetoric of exaltation, but in applying this doctrine to the particularity
of his relations with Marceline, he destroys her. Kurtz is said, on several
occasions, to be a “remarkable man”; and Gide chooses, for the biblical
passage that provides the first true frame of his story, a verse from Psalms
 which reads: “Je te loue, ô mon Dieu, de ce que tu m’as fait créature
si admirable.” What both novellas perform is a radical undermining of
the words “remarkable” and “admirable,” a draining and desiccation
of their moral meanings. Kurtz is “remarkable” only in the sense of
someone who imprints an image of excess or démesure on one’s eyes, not
in the moral sense of someone worthy of our admiration. In the same
way, Michel’s actions are “admirable” only in the sense of causing our
wonder or amazement, not in the sense of meriting our moral adhesion.
The King James translation of the Psalms verse is worth quoting, as
a final impetus for reflection: “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and
wonderfully made.” There is no wonder without fear, no general example
for human conduct that does not always contain its dangerous specificity.
“Man” himself is danger, understood as that entity which is unframable
by any text – unless it be God’s own.
It is not without significance, I think, that the thirteen verses leading
up to the Psalmist’s praise of God for his “wondrous” creation relate, ad-
miringly and fearfully, the impossibility of human escape from the infinite
framework constructed by the Almighty. Following is the very exemplar
of narrative framing which, in its sublime majestic inclusiveness, might
well serve as dissuasion against all merely human attempts to contain the
sinuous paths of moral progress and regress within the beautiful “glow”
of an aesthetic envelope:

PSALM  ( V E R S E S   )
To the chief Musician. A Psalm of David
O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me.
Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest
my thought afar off.
Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted
with all my ways.
For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest
it altogether.
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine
hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I
cannot attain unto it.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I
flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in hell,
behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost
parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand
shall hold me.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the
night shall be light about me.
Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night
shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are
both alike to thee.
For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered
me in my mother’s womb.
I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully
made: marvelous are thy works;
and that my soul knoweth right well.
 CHAPTER 

Fishing the waters of impersonality: Virginia Woolf ’s

To the Lighthouse

I PLUMBING THE DIARY’S DEPTHS

As readers of Virginia Woolf, we are fortunate to possess the literary

treasurehouse of her five-volume, ,-page Diary, which not only illu-
minates the constellation of her family relations, friendships, and literary
contacts (including the communal intellectual setting of Bloomsbury),
but also contains, contemporaneous with and in counterpoint to her
creative writing as it evolved, her own literary self-evaluations: her
uncompromising descriptions of her travails, of her efforts at overcoming
the technical limitations of narrative fiction as she had inherited it from
the Victorians, and, perhaps most interestingly, her passionate evocations
of those moments of elation in which she considered she had achieved
aesthetic success. Precisely because Woolf was so intellectually honest
and capable of a sober-minded, continual self-criticism, these moments
emerge from the surrounding landscape (or better, for reasons that shall
become clear presently: seascape) in dramatic fashion, as a triumphant
rising-above-the-waves, as a bursting-forth of fluid energy, as an uncon-
tainable overflow which carries along the writer in its wake. Thus her
ecstatic entry of  February , in which Woolf describes her feelings
of being happily submerged in the writing of To the Lighthouse, the novel
I shall be focusing on in this chapter:

I am now writing as fast & freely as I have written in the whole of my life; more
so –  times more so – than any novel yet. I think this is the proof that I was
on the right path; & that what fruit hangs in my soul is to be reached there.
Amusingly, I now invent theories that fertility & fluency are the things: I used
to plead for a kind of close, terse, effort . . . I live entirely in it [To the Lighthouse],
& come to the surface rather obscurely & am often unable to think what to say
when we walk round the Square, which is bad I know. Perhaps it may be a good
sign for the book though. (DW III, )

 
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
To describe what separates To the Lighthouse () from Jacob’s Room
() and Mrs. Dalloway (), Virginia Woolf makes use of a clear-
cut opposition between the “close, terse, effort” that characterized the
earlier works and the “fertility & fluency” of her current project, the
implication being that fertility and fluency are the signs or, one might
say, symptoms, of a writing style which elaborates itself in a natural flow –
in the French expression, un style qui coule de source. In terms of Woolf ’s
own literary-historical background and baggage as Modernist writer,
this would mean an overcoming of Symbolist aesthetics, of the “blanche
agonie” represented by the Mallarméan white page and the writer’s
doomed efforts to overcome his or her stylistic impotence. Modernism
would thus constitute an “advance” over Symbolism in its refusal of
excessive, overwrought stylistic artifice, and in its adherence to the laws
of nature, or even, the body. The fluidity of writing is a sure sign of the
writer’s being attuned to an inner rhythm, to which she releases herself
willingly, allowing it to dictate the ebb and flow of her sentences.
However relevant such considerations might be to an examination of
the crucial turn from Symbolist aesthetics to Modernist writing praxis,
it must be kept in mind that Virginia Woolf does not express herself here
in theoretical or rigorously conceptual terms, but metaphorically, and
also playfully: “Amusingly, I now invent theories that fertility & fluency
are the things.” The “theories” come after the fact of writing itself and
are expressed with ironical detachment. It is as if Woolf, in the very
moment of her aesthetic triumphalism, were compelled to express some
degree of caution about the force, or perhaps even the danger, of such
fertility and fluency – qualities which derive from a submerging of self
underneath the surface of everyday life. When she says that she “come[s]
to the surface rather obscurely,” it is as if, in the act of writing, she had been
in contact with a formidable darkness, the remnants of which cannot
easily be discarded, even when confronted with the light of (every)day.
Even the apparently life-affirming expression “what fruit hangs in my
soul is to be reached there,” most probably derives (as the Diary’s editors
obligingly indicate) from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, from lines which have
a cautionary resonance: “Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree
die!” (V v, ). The taking of the “right path” and the reaching of
that fecundity and fruitfulness which characterize Woolf ’s new style are
threatened, hemmed in by obscurity and death, insofar as these are the
forces lurking underneath the surface both of “life” and of an achieved
fluid and “natural” style.
 Fishing the waters of impersonality: Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse  
Although all of Virginia Woolf ’s novels can be said to contain personal
reminiscences and transpositions of her friendships and social interac-
tions, it is clear that To the Lighthouse is the most directly autobiographi-
cal, not only in the author’s view, but also according to her family and
contemporary readers. The line between fiction and autobiography is
tenuously thin in this novel, and it is the very thinness of this evanescent
and shifting boundary that accounts, I think, for the mixture of emo-
tions, for the properly uncanny sensations experienced by the author as
she vacillates between feelings of aesthetic mastery and intimations of
darkness and death. Not only has she allowed her childhood experiences
in St. Ives (Cornwall) to inform, quite transparently, the novel’s imagined
summerhouse in the Isle of Skye (Hebrides), but she has permitted her
liaison with Vita Sackville-West to permeate the book, to seep through
every aspect of Lily Briscoe’s love for Mrs. Ramsay, and even to serve as
a double or mirror for the new stylistic values she prizes:

Vita having this moment ( minutes ago – it is now ) left me, what are my
feelings? . . . She is not clever; but abundant & fruitful . . . Oh & mixed up with
this is the invigoration of again beginning my novel [To the Lighthouse], in the
Studio, for the first time this morning. All these fountains play on my being and
intermingle. (DW III, ;  January )

Woolf ’s feelings of invigoration derive from the ways in which a lived

relationship of reciprocated love can intermingle with the act of writing,
can become consubstantial with it. Abundance and fruitfulness are both
in Vita’s body (after being in her name, of course: Vita the giver of life) and
in Virginia’s new style of composition. The realization of this consubstan-
tiality produces the powerful image of “fountains play[ing] on my being.”
In the limited context of this particular diary entry, the eroticized surren-
der of the self to the play of rushing waters is unambiguously pleasurable.
The being-as-body gives itself over to the spray of water without fear; the
inviolability of the self ’s inner recesses is not threatened; there is playing-
on, not playing-in. Furthermore, fountains, as opposed to whirlpools,
for example, are notable for their upward thrust; the water lying under
the fountains’ play is mere residue for recycling, and has no significance
in itself. What causes fear is that which is hidden from view under an
expanse of water, that which comes to the surface without apparent
cause, producing an effect of uncanny fragmentation, of a haunting of
life by death. Thus, Virginia’s artistic accomplishment of making her
mother live again in To the Lighthouse, highly praised by Vanessa, is mixed
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
with an “upsetting” feeling. The rising to the surface of the mother in
fiction is a terrifying haunting:
The book [To the Lighthouse]. Now on its feet so far as praise is concerned. It has
been out  days – Thursday a week ago. Nessa enthusiastic – a sublime, almost
upsetting spectacle. She says it is an amazing portrait of mother; a supreme
portrait painter; has lived in it; found the rising of the dead almost painful.
(DW III, ;  May )

If the newly appeared novel is so successful as a work of art, it is because

it has risen from the past as an artefact of memory and has encapsulated
that past in a rigorously “true-to-life” fictional transmutation. It is doubt-
less no coincidence that Vanessa the painter should see the novel in the
terms of her own art form – namely, as a “portrait.” The power of the
portrait derives not only from its resemblance to Julia Stephen “her-
self,” but from the fact that Vanessa has had to live within its frame, has
felt herself enveloped in the narrative design which renders with painful
accuracy the reality of the family past. Now it may be true that the
best-known theories of what we today call “High Modernism” – Joyce’s
“epiphanies,” Woolf ’s own “moments of being,” Proust’s souvenirs involon-
taires – are based upon the instantaneous encapsulation of the depth of
experience through memory’s form-giving and symbolizing functions.
What these theories do not state, but what Joyce, Woolf, and Proust
in their very different ways illustrate in the praxis of their writing, is
that the recovery of the past brings with it the re-enacted pain of loss
and bereavement. The “exagmination” we as readers are forced to per-
form of Joyce’s late work brings to the surface the death that has always
inhabited life, the ghostly returns of repressed cultural memory that rise
to the surface of the everyday and tear the fabric of habitual activity. The
atemporal ecstasy of the first major occurrence of Proust’s involuntary
memory – the madeleine episode – is undercut considerably by a later
occurrence, the so-called intermittences du coeur, in which the narrator, in
the mundane act of tying his shoe, not only “sees” his dead grandmother
but is compelled to relive his ambivalent relation with her, to experience
once again, or rather, for the first time, her death. In the same way,
the aesthetic “success” of Mrs. Ramsay as character – the fact that she
resembles so closely her model, Julia Stephen – is at the same time, in
experiential or existential terms, a fall into Unheimlichkeit.
To the Lighthouse depicts better, more “faithfully” than any other book,
Virginia Woolf ’s home environment, the domestic haven in which she
lived. At the same time, however, in making the dead rise, it thrusts the
 Fishing the waters of impersonality: Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse  
reader into the domain of the un-homelike, the alive-but-also-dead re-
gion of the uncanny. In the elliptical diary entry of  May , we
slip from the sublime (“Nessa enthusiastic – a sublime, almost upset-
ting spectacle”) to the uncanny (“has lived in it; found the rising of the
dead almost painful”). Whereas in the experience of the sublime, in its
Kantian formulation, human reason, after an initial un-settling, does in-
deed return to itself, so that, once the power of nature is given its due, the
separation between self and nature, inside and outside, is restored; the
uncanny always presupposes the “intermingling” and interpenetration
of inside and outside, self and other, life and death. An uncanny work
of art, such as To the Lighthouse, always appears the most “lifelike” of all
works, but only in order to take the reader in, to erase aesthetic distance
and enclose and enfold him or her within an infinitely expansive discur-
sive space. Reading becomes a kind of drowning, whereby the reader’s
consciousness is invaded by foreign waters – a far cry, apparently, from
the benign fluency and fluidity Woolf imagined as the founding qualities
of her newly discovered style.
If the Modernist writer is not only the conscious creator of new forms
that go beyond or overturn the tenets of Symbolist poetics and the con-
ventions of the Victorian novel, but also the individual human who, in
life and art, recognizes the force of the uncanny, the question arises: how
can one come to terms with, or how can one find an adequate defense
against, the dispossessing energy of Unheimlichkeit? To open oneself com-
pletely to the ghostly exterior is to risk annihilation, the submerging of
subjective consciousness underneath the leveling effects of what Virginia
Woolf herself, in her diary entry of  July , calls “this impersonal
thing” (DW III, ) – i.e., the erosion of human individuality by the de-
struction of war, disease, and death, by the liquifying invasion of the house
in the central section of To the Lighthouse entitled “Time Passes.” It is not a
matter of coincidence, I think, that this stylistically brilliant middle part
of the novel’s structure, in which characters die within parentheses, is
itself placed within the larger parentheses of parts one and three, both of
which focus on the detailed psychological depiction of highly differen-
tiated characters, on their defeats and small triumphs as individuals. To
borrow from the devices and terms of war, one might say that the second
part of the novel is like the highly-concentrated explosive device that
must be contained within a large diffusion-box: the function of parts one
and three is to cushion the force of part two, to contain the destructive
quality of uncanniness as death-within-life, as the death that permeates
life just as the mists and moisture of the sea invade the house.
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
To guard against this invasion, therefore, the first method is that of
narrative framing. The expedition to the Lighthouse, imagined but de-
layed in part one, does take place in part three, and its mere occurrence
has been seen by a number of critics as proof of Woolf ’s faith in human
endeavor. Whether it be Mr. Ramsay’s successful landing at the Light-
house or Lily Briscoe’s completing of her painting, both activities are
accomplished despite all odds and are concluded in a final, satisfying
sense of repose after the expending of considerable effort. After tension,
there is détente, and two of the novel’s protagonists enjoy triumphs which
may be small in scale, but which the narrator describes scrupulously and
in great detail, with attention to their complexity and contextual mean-
ing. In the end, it would seem, the individual does have his or her place
on the earth, however restricted; and this sense of place emerges from the
framing of death by life, of destruction by creation, of the uncanny by the
final aesthetic conviction embodied in the tracing of a line at the center
of a painting. This, at least, is what the overall narrative conception of
To the Lighthouse suggests. Whether the reader is willing to accept such an
interpretation depends upon his or her trust in the diffusing capabilities
of the frames. The problem of the “stress” on the frames by the framed
inner core is one to which I shall return in due course, in my discussion
of the novel’s inscription of the act of reading.
There is, beyond the possible large-scale narrative solution to the con-
tainment of the uncanny, a second avenue of approach which is not
based upon the geometry of parentheses or frames, but rather on a highly
coherent and cohesive use of metaphorical language – the language of
catching, netting, and, in all senses of the word, fishing. If, in Virginia
Woolf ’s imaginaire, water is both pleasurable, as a fountain playing on
the body, and terrifying, as the dark element that can invade, overcome,
and destroy the boundaries defining the limits of the self, then netting or
catching a fish is the perfect image for the safeguarding of the self against
the dangers of the unseen unknown: the fisherman penetrates the sur-
face of the water and brings up from its depths one of its creatures, one
of its hidden treasures, but is himself at a comfortable remove from its
threatening undercurrents. With apologies to Carolyn Heilbrun, I won-
der if it might not be possible to see in the thin thread of the fishing-line
an irreverent Modernist variation on the theme of Ariadne’s thread.
The line plunging into the unfathomable deep is both a connection to
the loved and feared origin of all things (in Freudian terms, an um-
bilical chord leading back to the primordial maternal principle, to the
primal uncanniness inhabiting the place from which we all come) and a
 Fishing the waters of impersonality: Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse  
protection against becoming lost in the labyrinth of human existence.
The fishing-line or Ariadne’s thread is solidly attached to a pole held
by a figure who has reached dry land and is fishing from the land into the
water; this figure has “already” emerged from the water, has evolved out
of it, so to speak, and can speak of “catching” (or, in a variation on the
same theme, “netting”) even the most enigmatic of sea-creatures from the
safety of the shore. Thus Virginia Woolf in her triumphant exclamations
just after finishing The Waves ( ):

Here in the few minutes that remain, I must record, heaven be praised, the end
of The Waves. I wrote the words O Death fifteen minutes ago, having reeled
across the last ten pages with some moments of such intensity & intoxication
that I seemed only to stumble after my own voice . . . How physical the sense
of triumph & relief is! . . . I have netted that fin in the waste of waters which
appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell when I was
coming to an end of To the Lighthouse. (DW IV, ;  February  )

The netting of the fish which appeared to Virginia Woolf only as an

enigmatic “fin in the waste of waters” four and a half years prior to the
completion of The Waves is a striking symbolic representation of closure,
of the final artistic control that envelops the diverse narrative strands
of what is perhaps her most technically challenging novel. The fish-
as-fragment has been made whole by the aesthetic perfection of the
new novel’s polyphonic complexity. What was only a vague and strange
vision has taken on consistency, has deepened and darkened into a work
of art. The tone of the passage, like that of the Diary entries surrounding
To the Lighthouse, is once again that of elation (“intensity,” “intoxication,”
“relief ”).
Yet in the very moment of what Woolf describes explicitly and un-
modestly as a “triumph,” there is also a disquieting note of subjective
dispossession in the phrase “having reeled across the last ten pages,” as if
the act of writing, even in the phase of its greatest apparent mastery and
control, were, in its essence, a kind of inchoate stumbling. At the very
instant of reeling in the fish, the writer of The Waves reels across the page, leav-
ing the reader to wonder whether Woolf is the fisherwoman or rather the
fish, which, in being brought up from the water, lurches violently this way
and that, in the throes of the “Death” about which the narrator writes
so eloquently. Put succinctly: when someone pens the phrase “Against
you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” (The
Waves, ), is the act of writing about death equivalent to a netting or
envelopment of death’s pervasive power? Or, to use biblical language,
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
does writing about death remove the latter’s “sting”? In the end, are
the numerous expressions of physical and emotional elation contained
in the Diary and summed up in the image of landing a fish merely the
symptoms of the temporary sentimental delusion that insidiously takes
over the writer when he or she is emerging from writing, and therefore no
longer really in writing? If this should be the case, are those expressions of
“triumph” that punctuate a number of important episodes in To the Light-
house like a highly structured leitmotiv to be taken at face value or treated
with interpretive skepticism? Are we to believe Woolf when she seems to
assert, albeit with gentle irony, that Lily Briscoe has achieved her own
personal artistic vision, and that the incompletely intrepid philosopher,
Mr. Ramsay, in reaching the Lighthouse, has accomplished something
of note? These are thorny issues indeed, and cannot be answered in a
peremptory way, but, as a first approach to these questions as they are
developed in the fabric of the novel, it may be useful to cite the Diary
once more. This is from the entry for  September , at the point
at which Woolf sees “a fin passing far out” for the first time:

One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean?
Really there is none I think. The interesting thing is that in all my feeling &
thinking I have never come up against this before. Life is, soberly & accurately,
the oddest affair; has in it the essence of reality. I used to feel this as a child – couldn’t
step across a puddle once I remember, for thinking, how strange – what am I?
&c. But by writing I dont [sic] reach anything. All I mean to make is a note of a curious
state of mind. I hazard the guess that it may be the impulse behind another book.
(DW III, ; my emphasis)

This passage can serve, in Woolf ’s own terms, as the “sober” anti-
dote to the “intoxication” of the other passages we have read thus
far. To borrow from the vocabulary of speech-act theory, Woolf writes
here in a purely constative mode: and what she notes with dispassion is
the strangeness, the oddity, or what I have been calling, via Freud and
E. T. A. Hoffmann, the uncanniness of life itself. Life presents itself, when
viewed with sobriety, as an odd thing against which one stumbles or trips,
as a puddle over or around which there may be no obvious path, no possi-
ble bridge or even detour. And whereas in the previous passages we have
analyzed, the act of writing appears as that which promises a contain-
ment of the explosive power of the uncanny, here we have the disabused
statement “But by writing I dont reach anything” – devastating words
indeed coming from the creator of a protagonist whose most notable
achievement, since he has not reached R, is at least to have reached the
 Fishing the waters of impersonality: Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse  
Lighthouse! But what does it mean, as Virginia Woolf would say, to reach
the Lighthouse? An answer to these questions, however tentative, is only
possible if one leaves the relative safety of the Diary as writer’s haven for
an invigorating plunge into the murky waters of the novel – notably those
intertextual depths of To the Lighthouse in which the act of fishing as con-
trolled reeling-in and intoxicated reeling-across-the-page is thematized
with great virtuosity.

II WOOLF AND THE BROTHERS GRIMM, OR “ THE INADEQUACY

OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS ”

Among the various intertexts that nourish To the Lighthouse, none is more
crucial to the reader’s understanding of the character of Mrs. Ramsay
or the nature of her relationship with her husband than the Grimm fairy
tale entitled “The Fisherman and his Wife,” which enters the novel early
in part one, as a fragmented “scene of reading.” As in Proust’s depiction
of this same literary primal scene in the opening pages of A la recherche
du temps perdu, a mother (Mrs. Ramsay) reads to her son ( James). But the
intimacy of the moment is rendered precarious, just as it is in Proust,
by the threatening presence of the father – in this case the insecure
Mr. Ramsay, whose insistent demands for affection from his wife cause
his son to hate him (a theme which will be pursued, to great mock-
dramatic effect, in the concluding chapters of part three, during the
expedition to the Lighthouse). Proust lessens the Oedipal tensions of his
scene by removing the father, depicted initially as a gigantic but slightly
comical Abraham figure, from the action: it is his disappearance from
view that allows for the mother and son to be alone and for the act of
reading to take place. With the father absent, the child Marcel can enter
into what he himself imagines to be an inappropriate, “illicit” relation
with his mother, and, prompted by the plot of the George Sand novel
his mother is reading, François le Champi, can imagine, within the relative
safety offered by fictional transposition, the overcoming of the taboo on
incest. Marcel understands, even as a child, that this evening of reading,
of envelopment within the mother’s voice, is fragile, evanescent: such
evenings will not be the rule and may not happen ever again, but the
pleasure of the moment is intense, and the scene of reading, once it is
established, is uniquely pleasurable and uninterrupted.
Woolf treats the same essential scene quite differently. It does not take
place once within the narrative flow, but is fragmented into four discrete
occurrences spread over four successive chapters (part one, chapters ,
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
, , and ). As is the case in Proust, the embedded text shares obvi-
ous thematic affinities with the primary text, but Woolf is far more coy
than Proust in indicating to her reader what these affinities might be. It
becomes, therefore, a matter of ethical responsibility for the reader to go
back to the Grimm fairy tale and to open its pages again – in order to de-
termine the degree to which the Modernist novel is enlivened, enriched,
but also complicated by the “primitive” narrative of the folk’s collec-
tive unconscious. I shall begin with an examination of each reference,
however elliptical, to the Grimm intertext, with particular attention to
the context in which these references occur, to what the surface of the
primary text is concerned with as the Grimm tale rises from the depths
to inhabit it briefly. In a second development, I shall return to “The
Fisherman and his Wife” as narrative and analyze its structure and lan-
guage, in an effort to explore the somewhat hidden currents in whose
depths important differences from as well as clear resemblances to the
frame-novel can be found. Virginia Woolf used the Grimm story as a
sounding-board for To the Lighthouse, as a same-but-different Doppelgänger
whose relation to its brother/sister-text is itself uncanny.

“The Fisherman and his Wife” in context

The first time we hear of “The Fisherman and his Wife” is in the seventh
chapter of part one, in two casual phrases which are delivered, to borrow
from theatrical language, in the mode of a parte. In the first of these
allusions, enveloped in a long sentence to which we shall need to pay
attention, we have: “she [Mrs. Ramsay] had only strength enough to
move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, across the page
of Grimm’s fairy story” (TL ). One page later we learn the title of the
fairy story, but the narrator provides no commentary on its content or
significance to the novel’s characters. The scene of reading itself is posed
quite precariously within a larger, emotionally charged episode whose
principle theme is Mr. Ramsay’s demands for his wife’s sympathy and
her ability to soothe and placate him (not without considerable cost to
the tranquillity of her own psyche, however). The “exhaustion” to which
the first passage refers is the inevitable by-product of Mrs. Ramsay’s
successful efforts at calming her husband and restoring a sense of balance
and harmony to their relationship. It is in this chapter that Virginia Woolf
stages the “war between the sexes” in a particularly memorable way, by
depicting the male of the species as hard and sterile and the female
as life-giving and bountiful – a binary opposition which will subtend
 Fishing the waters of impersonality: Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse  
the entirety of the novel, thereby lending it an unmistakable feminist
tinge, even though Woolf ’s explicitly feminist writings were to begin
only in , two years after To the Lighthouse, with the publication of
A Room of One’s Own. James is not only the addressee of the fairy tale,
but also the witness to a scene which children should never see: namely,
a metaphorically-phrased enactment of sexual consummation in which
Mrs. Ramsay, who “seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once
to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray” (TL ),
finds herself obliged to submit to her husband:
Standing between her knees, very stiff, James felt all her strength flaring up to be
drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of the male, which
smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding sympathy. (TL )
It is this plunging and smiting that exhausts Mrs. Ramsay, that robs
her of her own energy but at the same time produces what can only
be described as the happy exhaustion of post-coital bliss. The scene of
reading and the text of the Grimm fairy tale are thus inserted into the
larger framework of the sexual act, with James looking on “stiffly” as
voyeur. This scenario is quite different from that of Proust, where the
evening of reading separates the narrator’s parents and prevents their
physical intimacy while allowing the child a fantasized union with his
mother. In Woolf ’s version, the act of reading can take place only after
the father has had his violent pleasure with his wife. Of great interest in
Woolf ’s mythic rendition of the male–female pairing is the apparently
curious fact that the male, who is arid and self-centered, can nevertheless
produce in the overwhelmed female what the narrator describes as “the
rapture of successful creation”:
Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in
another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only
strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion,
across the page of Grimm’s fairy story, while there throbbed through her, like
the pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases
to beat, the rapture of successful creation. (TL )
The reading of “The Fisherman and his Wife” occurs after the
metaphorical transcription of sexual climax, in the moments directly
following upon orgasm. The first, sexual invasion, of the female by the
male, is followed by a second invasion – that of the reader and listener
by the otherness of the text as it unfolds itself, as it gradually expands
into the shared consciousness of both participants. The fairy story, like
the physical union that preceded it in time, will have occasion, through
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
the following chapters, to “expand to its full width” and eventually flow
through the primary text. In her first presentation of the Grimm in-
tertext, Woolf thus suggests the possibility that the act of reading, by
following in the wake of a sexually expressed male–female conjugation,
by participating in its “throbbing” energies, may somehow share the
same properties: reading appears as a possible analogon to sexual union
understood as a properly invasive force. As we continue our investiga-
tion of the appearances of the folk story within the novel we must see
whether this analogous relation is merely the product of a momentary
textual coincidence, or whether something more fundamental to Woolf ’s
literary imagination is at stake in this early embedding of reading within
the “whole fabric” of sexuality.
The seventh chapter of part one moves from the language of ex-
hilaration and sensual fulfillment to Mrs. Ramsay’s distinctly melan-
choly conclusion concerning “the inadequacy of human relationships”
(TL ). Once the fervor and energy of the initial section have subsided,
Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts are haunted by the realization that the couple
she forms with her husband is based upon the hiding of “small daily
things” and upon her “not being able to tell him [Mr. Ramsay] the
truth” (ibid.) about the aggravating material difficulties from which she
would like to shield him, the unpractical philosopher. This particular
chapter raises the problem of the stark contrast between the flimsy qual-
ity of instantaneous gratification and the longer-term ethical dilemmas
which, when “papered over” and ignored, drive a wedge between hus-
band and wife, make them into separate creatures. Woolf ’s male–female
opposition is not without its complexity, in that the female, depicted in
positive terms as fecund and also altruistic (she “serves” both her hus-
band in sex and her son by reading to him), is also a dissembler and
a manipulator, someone who creates harmony in her household at the
expense of the telling of the truth. Mrs. Ramsay’s harmony, in other
words, is an aesthetic veil she throws over an ethical situation, a de-
nial of the poverty, both physical and emotional, in which she lives but
which she refuses to recognize. Here we begin to see, in shadowy form,
Mrs. Ramsay as the Fisherman’s Wife, but need to read further before the
points of convergence between the folk tale and the novel become fully
visible.
The second, quite cursory allusion to “The Fisherman and his Wife”
occurs in the following chapter, as Mrs. Ramsay, once again reflecting
upon “the pettiness of . . . human relations” (TL ) and upon her own
flaws of character, turns to the reading of the fairy tale for diversion, for
 Fishing the waters of impersonality: Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse  
relief from her pessimistic ruminations. For the first time, the narrator
of the novel quotes from the embedded story; and the chosen passage,
far from offering relief or diversion, corresponds directly to the ethical
problems adumbrated in the conclusion to chapter seven:
“The man’s heart grew heavy,” she read aloud, “and he would not go. He said
to himself, ‘It is not right,’ and yet he went. And when he came to the sea the
water was quite purple and dark blue, and grey and thick, and no longer so
green and yellow, but it was still quiet. And he stood there and said – ” (TL )

For readers of Woolf who remember their own mothers reading to

them from the Grimm story, it is not difficult to recall that the Fisherman’s
plight consists of carrying out his wife’s wishes despite his own moral
reservations. The key phrase in the passage is the simple statement “It
is not right.” At one level, the message of the fairy tale, like that of most
folk literature, is a conservative one: accept your place in society; do
not ask for too much; for if you do, nature will take its revenge upon
your excessive desires, upon your hubris. The ethical judgment “It is not
right” is inseparable from the dictates of a feudal society, in which class
hierarchies are immutable. At the same time, of course, “The Fisherman
and his Wife” can be seen as a folk formulation of misogynist literature,
in that it is the shrewish wife who is punished for her willfulness and “put
back in her place,” while the patient and long-suffering Fisherman, who
deserves better than the woman he lives with, accepts the constraints of
everyday reality and is thus the object of our pity rather than our scorn.
Perhaps the most obvious function of the embedded story, in its ap-
parent one-to-one correspondence to the frame narrative (Mrs. Ramsay
“is” the Fisherman’s Wife; Mr. Ramsay “is” the Fisherman), is to demys-
tify Mrs. Ramsay, to reveal beneath her idealized beauty and capacity
to “compose” people into harmonious groups (as in the Boeuf en Daube
episode) a much less admirable tendency to want too much and to run
other people’s lives. Her oft-repeated categorical imperative, “they [all
people of marrigeable age] must marry,” is based upon her own defen-
sive desires, upon her steadfast unwillingness to question the solidity of
her own marriage. Her directive “they must marry” is an interesting
parody of Kant and of his celebrated proposition, in the Critique of Prac-
tical Reason: “So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at
the same time as a principle establishing universal law.” The “maxim”
of Mrs. Ramsay’s will does not derive from a pure ethical thought, but
rather from a coercive desire: other people must do what she does, not
necessarily because they will find happiness in the married state (would
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
this be the case for Lily Briscoe?), but because misery loves company.
How far, one wonders, is Mrs. Ramsay’s imperative from Schadenfreude?
Throughout To the Lighthouse there is a complex vacillation between
what one might call the irruption of the ethical into the aesthetic, on the
one hand, and the aestheticization of the real, on the other. Thus, whereas
the first two passages containing references to the fairy tale emphasize the
problem of ethical thought and action as it emerges from underneath the
threatened intimacy of the reading situation in its contextual presentation
(lying or dissembling in the first case; the creation of a falsely grounded
imperative in the second), the third allusion to “The Fisherman and
his Wife” is pure idealization, pure aesthetization. It comes in chapter
nine of part one, where it is mentioned as part of an artistic vision, as
an element among others that contributes to the beauty of a domestic
scene. Here, Lily Briscoe is on the verge of criticizing the tyrannical
qualities of Mr. Ramsay to Mr. Bankes, when she notices that the latter is
overcome by “rapture” at “the sight of her [Mrs. Ramsay] reading a fairy
tale to her boy” (TL ). What has happened in this passage is that the
ethical dimension of the text (the rightness or wrongness of Mr. Ramsay’s
actions as potential subject for the moral adjudication of Lily and Bankes)
has quite simply disappeared, has been effaced by the blinding light of
a Modernist Madonna-with-Child image. “Rapture” has covered over
the ethical in favor of a beautiful representation. Significantly, at the very
moment of this aesthetic epiphany, the content of the fairy tale disappears from
view, becomes submerged. Whatever “The Fisherman and his Wife” can tell
the reader about human relations, about hubris, and also about To the
Lighthouse, has become invisible, has receded behind the closed cover of
the book, has lost its title as well as its inner structure and meaning.
The very act of transforming the scene of reading into a subject for
visual representation reduces the book – the means of interpretive trans-
action between addressor and addressee – to a prop, to an object whose
intrinsic value is lost as it gains a new, completely different value within
the aesthetic whole of a sentimental tableau. In economical terms, the
question becomes: what precisely is lost and what is gained in this trans-
formation? Does Bankes’s “rapturous” reaction to the scene of reading –
“that barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued” (ibid.) – indicate
that the reign of beauty begins only when we close the book, only when
we neutralize the energeia of reading as interpretive activity? Why is it
that reading as act (rather than image or icon) must be neutralized?
What kind of imperative lies behind or below this aestheticizing gesture?
These are questions to which we shall return after an examination of
 Fishing the waters of impersonality: Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse  
the novel’s fourth and final intertextual homage to “The Fisherman and
his Wife.”
It is in the tenth chapter of the novel’s first section that the fairy tale
is dealt with most completely, even though, once again, its reading is
often interrupted by the comings and goings of the characters and by
Mrs. Ramsay’s reflections and musings. In this chapter Virginia Woolf
continues to develop the narrative technique which is typical of the en-
tirety of To the Lighthouse, namely, the alternation between outer events
and inner thought – in this case, between the prolonged walk of Paul
and Minta and what Mrs. Ramsay assumes is Paul’s impending marriage
proposal, on the one hand, and the reading of the story, on the other.
Mrs. Ramsay thus ranges in her mind between the question of the young
couple’s marriage and her conveying of the ancient fable to James; and,
if we are to believe the narrator, she does so effortlessly. The following
passage is one instance of the mixing of the two narratives, in which the
transition from the outer frame to the embedded folk tale is made with
particular ease:
“And when he came to the sea, it was quite dark grey, and the water heaved up
from below, and smelt putrid. Then he went and stood by it and said,
‘Flounder, flounder, in the sea,
Come, I pray thee, here to me;
For my wife, good Ilsabil,
Wills not as I’d have her will.’
‘Well, what does she want then?’ said the Flounder.” And where were they [Paul
and Minta] now? Mrs. Ramsay wondered, reading and thinking, quite easily,
both at the same time; for the story of the Fisherman and his Wife was like the
bass gently accompanying a tune, which now and then ran up unexpectedly
into the melody. And when should she be told? If nothing happened, she would
have to speak seriously to Minta. (TL )
The image of the bass running up unexpectedly into the melody seems
to be, at first glance, nothing more than a graceful rhetorical ornamen-
tation meant to convey via analogy the simple contrast between real
life (human relationships, specifically marriage) on the one hand, and
literary diversion (the Grimm tale) on the other. Just as the bass in some
musical compositions can rise into the melody momentarily (obliging
the unfortunate pianist to cross hands in some cases – an unheimlich mo-
ment for those who have experienced it in certain pieces by Schumann,
for example), in the same way Mrs. Ramsay’s distracted thoughts
about “The Fisherman and his Wife” can overflow into her more
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
concentrated preoccupations concerning the future of Paul and Minta.
To pursue the musical analogy for a moment: all is well if the interrup-
tion is brief, if the bass then returns to “where it belongs”; but what if
the relation between the bass and the melody is itself one of uncanny
resemblance – what if the bass is the melody, or rather, is, so to speak,
the unconscious significance of a melody that does not “know itself ”? If
we look at the analogon of the relation between bass and melody, namely
the possible parallelism between the Grimm tale and the Paul–Minta
liaison, we have precisely such a disturbing state of affairs. The unhappy
relation between husband and wife in the embedded narrative, in which
the wife “wills not what I’d have her will,” is the precise prophetic ex-
pression of what Paul and Minta’s marriage will become – a dialogue de
sourds, a continual clashing of the wills which ends in failure. Hence the
appropriateness of the apparently brusque narrative elision between the
sentence, “Well, what does she want then? said the Flounder” and its
sequel, “And where were they now?” “They” are Paul and Minta, but
Paul and Minta as unwitting imitators of the Fisherman and his Wife. Outer
frame and embedded tale fold into each other: they tell the same story
of disoriented desire; they are textual Doppelgänger. The invasion of the
melody by the bass is thus less innocent, far more consequential narra-
tively and far more dangerous in its cautionary tone than Mrs. Ramsay
would like to think.
The balance of the chapter continues its quasi-metronomic alterna-
tion between Mrs. Ramsay’s meditations on Paul and Minta and the
progressive unfolding of the fairy tale, whose conclusion is reached in
the moment before the light in the Lighthouse flashes for the first time in
the evening sky – the Lighthouse Mrs. Ramsay realizes her son will not
visit on the following day. The embedded story concludes on the note
of repose and resolution traditional in fairy tales: “And there they are
living still at this very time” (TL  ), and is then enveloped by the larger
narrative framework, by the imagery of directed light but also by the
somber intuition that the expedition so hoped for by James will not take
place after all. Thus the fairy story is both more significant and less pow-
erful than its fictional readers imagine: more significant in that it reflects,
with an uncanny light, the existential plight of the novel’s characters; less
powerful in that, at the same time, it has no effect whatever upon other
events of the outside world, such as the vagaries of the expedition-halting
weather. Imaginative literature says more about the world than we would
like; it also does less to the world than we would hope. Such is the con-
clusion the reader of Woolf and the brothers Grimm might reach after
 Fishing the waters of impersonality: Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse 
following the “fin” of the fairy tale in the novel’s “waste of waters”. This
is, however, just a first step. I propose now to look beneath the waves into
the undercurrents, to go fishing in the ancient narrative for the strange
combination of sameness and difference that unites and separates the
font of folk wisdom from its Modernist appropriation, transformation,
and redirection.

“The Fisherman and his Wife” as told by the Brothers Grimm

Like the majority of folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm, “The
Fisherman and his Wife” is characterized by brevity, a simple and pre-
dictable narrative design, and a clear moral message delivered at the
conclusion of the tale. For the limited purposes of my analysis, the story
can be summed up as follows:
A fisherman goes down to the sea and catches a flounder, who turns
out to be an enchanted prince. Taking pity on the metamorphosed
human (who is possessed of speech and of a very reasonable discourse,
including the practical advice that, being human underneath his gills, he
would not taste very good), the fisherman throws him back and returns
home to his wife with nothing to show for his daily work. In an amusing
literarily self-referential moment, the wife, who must have read some
fairy tales herself, knows that in this kind of literature enchanted princes
are supposed to grant wishes: consequently, she instructs her husband
to ask that their squalid hovel be transformed into a cottage. No sooner
asked than granted: after making his request to the flounder-prince, the
fisherman returns home and finds a cottage standing in the place of the
hovel. As of now, the narrative pattern is established for the remainder
of the tale: the fisherman, driven on by the insatiable greed or cupidity
of his wife (in the German text, the word is Gier) will continue to ask
for ever-larger and more imposing dwellings to accommodate his wife’s
overweaning ambition (having acquired a castle, she becomes king, then
emperor, then pope), until the woman, like so many fairy-tale figures,
makes one wish too many, namely, to become “like God” (“wie der liebe
Gott”) (F ) and control the rising and the setting of the sun. After
the fisherman relays this wish to the flounder-prince, he returns home
to find the original hovel in place of the castle. It is here that he and his
wife have continued to live, up until “this day” (“Darin sitzen sie noch
heute, bis auf diesen Tag”) (ibid.).
Of course, this bare-bones presentation of the story’s narrative struc-
ture does not do justice to its considerable charm, which is based, in
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
large measure, on what might be called its “musical” mode of theme and
variations. Thus, as the castle keeps getting larger and larger to reflect
the increasingly prestigious rank and onerous duties of its female occu-
pant, the descriptions become correspondingly lavish: the king’s throne
is high, but the emperor’s is higher, and the pope’s is so lofty as to be al-
most invisible from ground level; the respective retinues of these officials
range from large to huge to gigantic; and the accoutrements of power
(crown, scepter, papal staff ) shine with the ever-increasing accumula-
tion of precious stones. The story as a whole, with its moral message
of cupidity punished, of the human being struck down for wishing to
become “like God,” and with its descriptive emphasis on the palace’s
dizzying loftiness, is a folk variation on the biblical story of the Tower
of Babel. At the same time – and herein lies the poetic originality of
the Grimm tale – there is an interesting correspondence between the
vertical upward thrust of the couple’s home and the increasingly high
and threatening waves out of which the flounder-prince rises to address
the fisherman. As the waves grow higher, so does the castle. But there is
an important difference here – a difference that will allow us, in a mo-
ment, to return to Woolf and to her fairy-tale-inspired novel. The castle,
a product of culture and of human ingeniousnous, of techné, is merely
the accumulation of one stone upon the other, of one ornament upon
the other: the pope’s abode is merely larger than the emperor’s, but not
different in kind; what is high simply becomes higher. In the case of the
waves, however, what is deepest becomes highest. One fears the waves
because, as they become stronger and more “unsettled,” they churn up
what lies at the bottom of the sea and bring it to the surface. The force of
nature, of physis, exceeds the designs of techné not in the superficial terms
of measurable height, but in the uncanny presentation of depths rising
above heights. Whereas the narrator tells us with obliging precision that
the emperor’s throne is “two miles high” (F ), the final description
of the waves is both less precise and more overpowering in its apocalyt-
pic tone:
The houses and the trees were blown down, and the mountains quaked, and
cliffs fell into the sea, and all of heaven became jet-black; there was thunder and
lightning, and the sea threw black waves into the sky as high as church towers
and mountains. (F )

What is it about the nature-versus-culture combat in “The Fisherman

and his Wife” that fascinated Woolf ? In what way does the elegantly sim-
ple progression of the folk tale hold a mirror to the Modernist writer’s
 Fishing the waters of impersonality: Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse 
complex experimental narrative forms? Certainly it seems plausible to
agree with the critics that Mrs. Ramsay is “like” the Fisherman’s wife in
her strong will and coercive desires. But Mr. Ramsay in no way resembles
the humble and uncomplicated Fisherman, and there is apparently no
flounder-prince in To the Lighthouse, at least not in immediately recogniz-
able form. Further, the ironic, deflated tone of the fairy tale’s conclusion
would seem to have nothing in common with the triumphant double
ending of the novel: Mr. Ramsay’s successful landing at the Lighthouse,
and Lily Briscoe’s completed painting. One-to-one correspondences bet-
ween specific characters and plot elements are therefore quite limited,
much more so than in the case of the strong thematic connection bet-
ween the characters and plot of François le Champi and the frame-tale of
Proust’s novel. I would suggest, however, that the deep, under-the-surface
resemblances of the Grimm story to Virginia Woolf ’s narrative lie in two
related areas: that of mediating structures and what can be called the
triangle of desire, on the one hand; and of indirect, figural language on
the other.
In To the Lighthouse Mrs. Ramsay is continually engaged in a combat of
wills with her husband, and although her strategies of domination (for
example, not saying “I love you” but indicating her affection in her own
way at the end of part one: “For she had triumphed again. She had not
said it: yet he knew” [TL ]) are subtle in the forms they take, they
emanate uniquely from her consciousness and are her own creation. In
the Grimm tale, however, the Fisherman’s wife accomplishes nothing
by herself: she needs both her husband as messenger and the flounder-
prince as enacter of her desires. It is the triangulation of desire that
produces the metamorphoses of the hovel into cottage then castle. The
male characters must be used; they must serve their “lady” for the verti-
cal ascent of the home to take place, for the unsatisfied woman to create
the dwelling of her never-ending dreams. At first sight, nothing of the
sort exists in Woolf ’s novel, but only at first sight. In fact, Mrs. Ramsay’s
own kind of creation, her aesthetic “genre,” so to speak – that of the
harmoniously and cohesively organized group of humans into a fragile
but beautiful community (the end-result of the Boeuf en Daube scene) –
depends upon a similar, but somewhat masked mediation. Because
Mrs. Ramsay takes credit for the social harmony she has worked so
hard to achieve, it is easy enough to repress the fact that it is the cook,
not Mrs. Ramsay, who prepared the delicious meal; and the cook, like
the fisherman and the flounder-prince, is merely used and obtains no
credit for her own labors.
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
Let us now proceed a step farther – an admittedly perilous step since it
involves entry into the troubled waters of what years ago would have been
termed the “biographical fallacy.” Let us assume that Virginia Woolf her-
self does not stand outside her book at the safe remove of aesthetic dis-
tance, but finds herself implicated in the fable of mediated desire which
unites, beyond all superficial differences, Mrs. Ramsay with the fisher-
man’s wife. What is it that the fisherman’s wife and Mrs. Ramsay achieve
in their respective homes? How do they transform their dwellings; how
do they metamorphose their surroundings? By the addition of ornamen-
tation, of decoration, to the actual bareness in which they are destined to
live. It should not be forgotten that the fisherman’s wife never moves: there
is no medieval equivalent to a real estate agent in her story. The hovel
becomes a cottage which becomes a castle which becomes a hovel again,
in the same place. The flounder-prince’s mode of discourse is that of the
peformative; word becomes deed immediately according to the logic of
tropic displacement. The castle simply replaces the cottage according to
the laws of metaphorical substitution, of metamorphosis in the sense of
Verwandlung. This means that, as the house grows out of all human pro-
portion, its walls become incrusted with more and more jewels. There is
an increasingly overwhelming but also stifling sense of over-decoration:
the “magnificent ornaments” ( prachtvolle Verzierungen) () make one for-
get the hovel underneath, the hovel to which one must return once the
enchantment is broken. In the same way, the Boeuf en Daube scene is
preceded by the ritual act of Rose’s choosing her mother’s jewelry; and
when Mrs. Ramsay descends the stairway, the narrator compares her to a
“queen who, finding her people [i.e. her “subjects”] gathered in the hall,
looks down upon them, and descends among them, and acknowledges
their tributes silently” (TL ). The dinner itself is a transformation of
the quotidian into an atemporal epiphany taking place under the aegis
of Neptune, god and guardian of the sea – a quiet Neptune placated by
the flower-offering placed as centerpiece on the dinner-table (TL ).
At an allegorical level, both “The Fisherman and his Wife” and To the
Lighthouse tell the story of craftswomen, of mistresses of techné, who, using
servant intermediaries, temporarily veil the emptiness of their existence
with brilliant decoration. The question is: can one not say that this is
the case for all artists, and for Woolf in particular, who, bringing back to
life her father and mother and family life, is also “guilty” of fabricating
Verzierungen, of weaving a brilliant rhetorical tapestry to cover the bare
walls of past reality? Does there not lurk in the mind of the intellec-
tually honest artist the suspicion that the flowers of rhetoric, like those
 Fishing the waters of impersonality: Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse 
of Rappaccini’s garden, are the false creations of artifice, and that the
carefully constructed aesthetic structure is really a vain attempt to veil
reality itself – an attempt that can be punished for its hubris, for its trans-
gression against ethics, ethos being understood in its original meaning as
the home. As in Kierkegaard, the only place for the ethical life is the
home, the home as it is, not as metamorphosed into the false semblance
of aesthetic seductiveness.
The sea is beautiful on its surface. As the ageless background against
which human endeavor deploys itself, it remains calm and, most impor-
tantly, flat. Yet it can also churn and rise, threatening to engulf the intre-
pid fisherman who will not remain at its edge, but will venture into
depths best left unexplored. The catching or netting which represents,
in Woolf ’s imagination, the successful solving of an artistic problem, the
achieved creation of the artwork as such, can only be imagined in this
triumphant way if the catch itself is robbed of its power, if the flounder,
the Plattfisch or flat fish, the aesthetic object, is flattened down and made
to serve as an icon within the geometrical abstraction of a tableau, just
as Mrs. Ramsay and James act as visual equivalents to the Madonna and
Child. But the flounder, if we listen to his words, says quite explicitly to
his would-be captor: “ich bin ein verwünschter Prinz” (“I am an enchanted
prince”) (F ). This means that he has his own story which is and will
remain completely invisible, completely unknown to us, like an enigmatic
“fin in the waste of waters” which disappears from view. And behind
that story, whatever it might be, there was a wish gone wrong, a wrongful
wish, a desire for aestheticization which was morally transgressive.
Enchantment (das Verwünschen) is, after all, merely the deviation of wish-
ing (das Wünschen), the false turn taken by a wish as it spins out of control,
as it transforms its author from human to inhuman creature, from prince
to fish. This uncanny metamorphosis, more powerful than the formal
beauty born of the writer’s ornamentations, pushes apart the carefully
constructed walls between life and art, between the sea and the shore,
and thrusts the prince-become-fish into the whirlpool of invading waters.

III LIFE AND ART INTERMINGLED, OR PLUNGING

INTO IMPERSONALITY

The story of “The Fisherman and his Wife” is based upon the suppres-
sion of a previous story which, although unavailable to the reader, must
have been based upon the same laws of enchantment and disenchant-
ment as the primary text. The flounder was once a prince; he must have
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
lived in the kind of palace that the fisherman’s wife, with his assistance,
wills into existence and temporarily inhabits. The fate of the fisherman’s
wife relates to that of the prince according to a chiastic structure: the
prince presumably began his life surrounded by the ornamentations of
wealth and class, only to find himself “enchanted” (verwünscht), trans-
formed, reduced into a flounder; the fisherman’s wife begins in just such
a flattened state, dwelling, according to the German text, not merely in a
“hovel,” but rather in an even more restricted space – “in einem Eimer”
(), in a proto-Beckettian trash can or dustbin, from which she grad-
ually emerges and swells up to the magnificent heights of her emperor’s
throne. Thus the moral of the story is contained in the beginning before
it is enunciated, again, at the end: if the fisherman’s wife had paid atten-
tion to the flounder-prince’s past, if she had “read” his life, she might
have understood the futility of her willfulness and the inevitability of a
return from the swollen state of excessive ornamentation to the flatness of
bare-bones reality. The narrative entitled “The Fisherman and his Wife”
springs from another narrative; and this previous literary source must
be kept under wraps for the Grimm tale to unfold. The flounder-prince,
despite the symmetry of his destiny with that of the fisherman’s wife, is
of interest to her only insofar as he can advance her cause, only insofar
as he can be called up from the depths to serve her hubris.
A variation on this scenario provides the fundamental narrative struc-
ture of To the Lighthouse. Like the flounder-prince, Mrs. Ramsay has her
own story (which, in Woolf ’s novel, is told in elaborate detail), but she
must disappear or be “flattened” in the “Time Passes” section in order
for Lily Briscoe to emerge as the second female protagonist and create
her art. As is the case in the Grimm tale, where the flounder-prince and
the fisherman’s wife are unwitting Doppelgänger, in the same way what
Lily accomplishes in part three of the novel is uncannily similar to what
Mrs. Ramsay did in part one. The work of both women is described
in exactly the same terms, as an ordering, an assembling, a bringing
together of disparate elements into an aesthetically pleasing whole, the
only difference being that Mrs. Ramsay exerts her efforts on individuals
within social groups and Lily on the elements that compose a painting.
And, like the fisherman calling the flounder from the depths of the sea
to accomplish his wife’s bidding, in the same way, at the emotional cli-
max of part three, when Lily is about to finish her painting, she calls
the name “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” (TL ) in acknowledgment
of her beloved friend’s ghostly apparition at the window. That Woolf, in
repeating the theme of the call, must have had in mind “The Fisherman
 Fishing the waters of impersonality: Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse 
and his Wife” as literary intertext, is evident, I think, from a humorous
clin d’oeil within the apparition scene itself:
Suddenly the window at which she [ Lily] was looking was whitened by some
light stuff behind it. At last then somebody [ Mrs. Ramsay] had come into
the drawing-room; somebody was sitting in the chair. For Heaven’s sake, she
prayed, let them sit still there and not come floundering out to talk to her. (TL  ;
my emphasis)

Ironically, of course, it is Mrs. Ramsay who, while living, while vital

and substantial in her beauty, had assumed the role of the fisherman’s
wife, and who now plays insubstantial and ghostly flounder to Lily, the
new fisherman’s wife. Lily does not call Mrs. Ramsay back into what in
English we would call “full-blown” existence, but rather into the pur-
gatorial, death-in-life state of Unheimlichkeit. It is only as misplaced and
displaced apparition that Mrs. Ramsay can fulfill her function as inspi-
ration for the enchantments of Lily’s art.
The deep moral, the moral from the depths, of both the Grimm
fairy tale and the Modernist novel is that the same character, the same
person or personage, can be alternatively fisherman and fish, addressor
and addressee of the call, in control as aesthetic master or mistress and
overwhelmed by the revenge taken on art as artifice by the powers of
nature. The alternating rhythm whereby aesthetic beauty builds itself
up only to be torn down should make us as readers of To the Lighthouse
think seriously about the perhaps too-perfect double resolution of the
plot. Does Mr. Ramsay’s reaching of the Lighthouse mean that human
effort is ultimately rewarded; that the drowned bodies Cam imagines,
via “The Castaway,” as lurking underneath their boat are neutralized
by the Ulyssean journey, by the overcoming of time and weather in the
successful expedition? Or can these dead bodies, summoned by some
tempest, return to the surface and haunt not only the pages beyond the
artificially closed borders of To the Lighthouse, but also the life of their
author? And does Lily’s triumph as artist and aesthetic theorist signify
that the existential drama of her life has been solved? Does the tracing
of a line down the center of a painting fully compensate for a life that,
like that of the flounder, is flat and barren? Is Virginia Woolf ’s incipient
feminism, in , strong enough as conceptual barrier to hold back
thoughts of human insufficiency in the face of childlessness? Remarkably,
in the recent critical literature I have had occasion to read dealing directly
with the relation of the Grimm story to Woolf ’s novel, no one mentions
the one most obvious difference between the willful Mrs. Ramsay and
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
the domineering fisherman’s wife: the former has numerous progeny,
whereas the latter has none. The ending of the fable, “Darin sitzen sie
noch heute, bis auf diesen Tag,” is the description of a sterile couple
doing nothing, accomplishing nothing. And what, finally, is the origin of
the cupidity, of the Gier that drives the fisherman’s wife? The fairy tale
provides a psychological explanation based upon the transformation and
deviation of desire that could easily have disturbed Woolf, the reader of
Freud. This is the moment at which, having become pope, the unsatisfied
woman wants even more:

“Dear wife,” he [the fisherman] said, “now be content. Now you are pope. You
certainly cannot become more than that [Mehr kannst du doch nicht werden].” “I will
think that over,” said the wife. Thereupon they went to bed, but she was not
satisfied [aber sie war nicht zufrieden], and cupidity prevented her from sleeping;
she kept thinking about what she wanted to become [und die Gier ließ sie nicht
schlafen; sie dachte immer darüber nach, was sie noch werden wollte]. (F )

The transparent message beneath the text is that the woman, instead
of making love (and children) with her husband, has transmuted her
sexual desire into Gier, an emotion which, unlike lovemaking, never pro-
vides a release or any sense of calm. She will never know happiness or
satisfaction (Zufriedenheit), but will always be driven on, indefinitely, to
become more. She refuses the home, the values of ethos, in favor of the infi-
nite metamorphoses, the seductive ornamentation, of her aesthetically
charged imagination. How could Woolf, from what we know of her bio-
graphy, have been insensitive to this stark and, by the cultural logic of
our contemporary thinking, primitively, reductively, and violently unfair
alternative: either be a mother and agree to stay (bleiben) within the ethi-
cal as the home-like; or choose the dangerous metamorphoses inherent
in rhetorical language, in the literary as such, the domain of continual
becoming, of werden, of Wandlung and Verwandlung. To choose the latter
course is to invite the revenge of the ethical, to risk, beyond all Moder-
nist fantasizing of aesthetic self-sufficiency as the “netting of forms,” the
feared final transformation of fisherman into fish, whereby one returns
to the depths of the sea from which one came.
The theme of the fish and the fisherman was nothing less than a
leitmotiv, not only in Woolf ’s writings, but also in her life. Hermione
Lee informs us that when Woolf began her affair with Vita Sackville-
West in December , shortly after To the Lighthouse had been begun,
the sight of “Vita striding into the fishmonger’s shop, wearing pink
and pearls . . . became a kind of password to intimacy” (VW ; my
emphasis). In speaking of her amorous success with Virginia, Vita wrote
 Fishing the waters of impersonality: Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse 
of “having caught such a big silver fish” (VW ); yet Vita also called
Virginia a “fish” for her reserve and lack of overt sensuality (VW ). It
would seem that Virginia Woolf, encouraged by her friends and relatives,
saw herself, in life, as both fisherman and fish: in her optimistic and aes-
thetically triumphant moments, as fisherman capable of netting images,
as creator of new forms; but in her times of depression, as flattened,
sterile, un-vital creature incapable of espousing life on its own terms, and
in danger of being submerged by its exigencies.
Yet in some of Woolf ’s letters to fellow writers, interestingly, the capa-
city to be submerged in writing is a sign of the authenticity of one’s work,
whereas didacticism is equated with floating on the surface. In a letter to
Elizabeth Bowen she says: “until we [contemporary writers] can write
with all our faculties in action (even the big toe) but under the water,
submerged, then we must be clever, like the rest of the modern stickle-
backs” (VW ); and to Stephen Spender: “your desire to teach and
help is always bringing you up to the top when you should be down in
the depths” (VW ). It would seem, then, that except in those raptur-
ously described moments of epiphany or “moments of being” in which
Woolf imagined, like other Modernist writers, that the aesthetic artefact
could enclose the essence of reality, in other, more demystified times of
reflection she saw the writer’s true habitat as being beneath the waves, in
the eddies and whirlpools which threaten to rise above the surface and
unsettle the ground on which the fisherman stands.
In her own way, then, Virginia Woolf, like Kafka, intuited, below
and beyond the level surface of her aesthetic creed, that the territory of
writing is unsurveyable, unmeasurable in its uncanny and fluid rising-
and-falling. To be engaged in writing is not to dominate through aesthetic
achievement, but to have fallen into the watery depths, to be caught in
the kind of vertigo that Blanchot equates with the act of writing in its
dispossessing essence. It is perhaps no coincidence that, in an acte manqué
that foreshadowed her imminent death by drowning, Virginia herself
suffered a disquieting but also strangely exhilarating fall, in which her
very sense of self was effaced, in favor of a Blanchot-like descent into
impersonality. In November , four and a half months before her
death, she wrote what Hemione Lee aptly calls “an ominous note” to
her friend Ethel Smyth, describing what occurred when she took a walk
into the recently flooded fields around her house:

Yesterday, thinking to explore, I fell headlong into a six foot hole, and came
home dripping like a spaniel, or water rugg (thats Shakespeare). How odd
to be swimming in a field! . . . how I love this savage medieval water moved,
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
all floating tree trunks and flocks of birds and a man in an old punt, and
myself so eliminated of human feature you might take me for a stake walking.
(VW –)
What Virginia Woolf had known all along, pace her Modernist aes-
thetic stance – namely, that writing is a descent into the maelstrom, a
losing of self to featurelessness, an espousing of the impersonal – be-
came, in the final months of her life, the ghostly knowledge with which
she wrestled before succumbing to its unhinging power. One of the last,
untitled, fragments that has been recovered from her writings, dated just
one month before her suicide, skirts the boundary-line between sanity
and madness, offering a bizarre arabesque of water and fish imagery:
The woman who lives in this room has the look of someone without any consec-
utive [?] part. She has no settled relations with her kind. She is like a piece of seaweed
that floats this way, then that way. For the fish who float into this cave are always
passing through . . . She inhabits a fluctuating water world . . . constantly tossed
up and down like a piece of sea weed [sic]. She has no continuity. The rush of
water is always floating her up and down. (VW ; my emphasis)
What had held together To the Lighthouse as work of art – those “bolts of
iron” underneath its “feathery and evanescent surface” (TL  ), to use
Lily Briscoe’s language – is now gone. No undergirding remains for a
world characterized uniquely by fluid indeterminacy, by time as limitless
passage, by the ceaseless alternating rhythm of rising and falling – in
short, by uncanniness as the unsettled dimension without borders or limits in
which the technician of language “dwells” in uprooted movement. As
all limits and all borders fade into featureless impersonality, the final
revenge of the uncanny occurs, in the “unnatural” inversion whereby
life imitates art. At the very end of her life, when she had no projects and
could no longer write nor even read with any enthusiasm, Virginia Woolf
scrubbed the kitchen floors, obsessively, willfully, energetically (VW ).
Perhaps without knowing it in her conscious mind, she was imitating
what the fisherman’s wife “should have done” instead of seeking the
power and glory of literary decoration and ornamentation, instead of
adding her own incrustations to the already incrusted palace of literary
tradition. But it was too late to rewrite the fable; and in any case, had
the fisherman’s wife remained contentedly ethically at home, there would
have been no beautiful story.
 EPILOGUE

Narrative and music in Kafka

and Blanchot: the “singing” of Josefine

The historical trajectory I have traced thus far, which leads from the
Kantian sublime to Modernist textual elaborations of Unheimlichkeit, tells
the story of the difficult points of intersection between aesthetic theory
and practice, on the one hand, and ethical complexity and danger, on the
other. If there is common ground between the sublime and the uncanny,
it is that both are depicted, by philosophers and writers, as unsettling
experiences in which the individual human subject, having set out to
plot the territory of beautiful forms, encounters, within these forms, the
moral labyrinth on which they are constructed. The various strategies
of containment and envelopment whereby the aesthetic and the ethical
alternately negate and destroy each other’s pretension to dominance
have been at the center of this book, from Kant to Woolf.
If I have decided to end the chronological survey of my study with
Woolf, it is because, in my view, her encounter with the dispossessive
energy of Unheimlichkeit structured not only her intimate psychological
struggles, but also her literary production. Woolf ’s fall into impersonality
is, in and of itself, a fall into the fundamental unhomeliness of literature,
of the literary as such. Yet it would be a simplification, I think, to conclude
that the only mode of encounter with the uncanny-as-literature is that of
fear and anxiety, whereby the individual subject, having lost her bearings
in a world of blurred boundaries, succumbs to madness and death. In
the present essay, I shall suggest that there is, at the extreme edge of
Modernism and in its legacy, a way of encountering Unheimlichkeit that
goes beyond the polar oppositions of life and death and that stages the
drama of uncanniness as life-in-death in a tone far different from that of
existential pathos.
The previous chapter can be considered a logical conclusion to my
historically based argument on the movement from the sublime to the
uncanny: Woolf, with her watery death, closes off a chapter in European
literary history. This epilogue, on the other hand, should be viewed as an
 
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
opening outward, as a suggestion of what the contemporary inheritance
of Modernist uncanniness might be. In what follows, I shall be comparing
Kafka’s textual practice to Maurice Blanchot’s theoretical meditations
on literature as impersonality – or what the latter calls, more precisely,
neutrality (le neutre). The point of convergence and disjunction between
Woolf and Kafka/Blanchot is the very notion of impersonality. For Woolf,
to disappear into the impersonal is to lose one’s self, one’s creative indi-
viduality, and one’s very life. For Kafka and Blanchot, the descent into
Unheimlichkeit, by which the individual does indeed lose his or her identity,
is a necessary process which opens up the dialogical domain of commu-
nity. The late short stories of Kafka and Blanchot’s récits and theoretical
meditations examine the question of impersonality without pathos, with-
out anxiety, with a calm indifferent tone worthy of close scrutiny.
If I were to stretch beyond the self-imposed limits of the present study,
I would suggest, “in a nutshell,” that the progression from Kant be-
yond Woolf to Blanchot might be characterized as the movement from
the sublime to the uncanny to the impersonal. The metamorphosis of
Woolf ’s impersonal into Blanchot’s neutrality would have a lot to do with
the passage beyond Modernism to contemporary experimental writings.
To document and substantiate this lapidary formula would require, of
course, another book.

I THEORY AND PRACTICE OF NARRATIVE UNCANNINESS

In his review of Blanchot’s early “fantastic” narrative entitled Aminadab,

Sartre found a resemblance between this strange tale and the uncanny fic-
tions of Franz Kafka, but noted in passing that Blanchot himself denied,
at that point, having read Kafka. Whether Blanchot was being entirely
forthcoming in his denial or merely coy, the resemblances between the
mysterious tone of Aminadab and a certain Kafkaesque atmosphere are
unmistakable. However, it is later in his career, when he had moved away
from fantastic or allegorical narratives and begun to compose his con-
centrated, elliptical récits that Blanchot, in my view, came much closer
to Kafka’s essential concerns as a writer. As the theoretician of L’Espace
littéraire (), Le Livre à venir (), and L’Entretien infini (), as the
writer of Au moment voulu ( ), Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas (),
and L’Attente l’oubli (), Blanchot distanced himself from the imita-
tive atmospherics of the “Kafkaesque” and began to participate in the
fundamental Unheimlichkeit of the narrative universe created by Kafka.
 Narrative and music in Kafka and Blanchot  
There is uncanniness in the récits of Blanchot, but there are also points
of narrative convergence between Blanchot and Kafka that can only be
called, themselves, uncanny. It is as if Blanchot, the surveyor of literary
forms, had “returned home” in reading Kafka; but this home presents
the strangest form of defamiliarizing familiarity, so that the encounter
(rencontre, a crucial notion for Blanchot) of the latter-day writer and theo-
retician with his predecessor has none of the coziness of tranquil domes-
ticity, but rather the expropriating dizziness of a confrontation with what
Blanchot, in his “Kafka et l’exigence de l’oeuvre,” calls “le ruissellement
du dehors éternel” (“the streaming of the eternal outside”).
In the pages that follow, I shall be concentrating on the relation be-
tween the act of narration and a certain kind of music (or “song”) in both
Kafka and Blanchot. I shall be analyzing in some detail the last short
story Kafka wrote, “Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse”
[“Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”], completed in , the
year of the writer’s death. It is my contention that this convoluted and,
in some ways, self-destructive tale marks the culmination of an idiosyn-
cratic narrative form that Kafka had been developing in the later years
of his life, and that Blanchot was able to mine the considerable theo-
retical possibilities thereof better than any other contemporary writer.
My analysis will unfold in three distinct stages. First, I shall concentrate
on the initial paragraph of “Josefine” in a close reading, then move on
to examine several of the interpretive problems raised in later sections
of the text; second, I shall turn to some of the crucial theoretical dis-
tinctions made by Blanchot in his discussions of narrative fiction as they
relate to Kafka (it is here that the points of encounter between the two
writers reach the level of properly uncanny similarity); and finally, I shall
discuss the enigmatic conclusion of “Josefine”, in which the constitution
of community is linked in a fundamental way to the effacement of the
protagonist, to her disappearance in death. In the end, I shall suggest
that Kafka’s late story is founded on the notion of forgetfulness (oubli) as
theorized and fictionalized by Blanchot.

II ‘‘ J O S E F I N E , D I E S Ä N G E R I N O D E R D A S V O L K D E R M Ä U S E ’’:

THE TEXT AS NARRATIVE UNWEAVING

Perhaps the best way to encounter a text as rich and as narratively

unusual as “Josefine” is to plunge in in medias res. Following is the story’s
first paragraph, which contains, in a highly concentrated declarative
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
(assertive) exposition, the essential elements of the narrative’s eventual
undoing:
Unsere Sängerin heißt Josefine. Wer sie nicht gehört hat, kennt nicht die Macht
des Gesanges. Es gibt niemanden, den ihr Gesang nicht fortreißt, was um so
höher zu bewerten ist, als unser Geschlecht im ganzen Musik nicht liebt. Stiller
Frieden ist uns die liebste Musik; unser Leben ist schwer, wir können uns, auch
wenn wir einmal alle Tagessorgen abzuschütteln versucht haben, nicht mehr zu
solchen, unserem sonstigen Leben so fernen Dingen erheben, wie es die Musik
ist. Doch beklagen wir es nicht sehr; nicht einmal so weit kommen wir; eine
gewisse praktische Schlauheit, die wir freilich auch äußerst dringend brauchen,
halten wir für unsern größten Vorzug, und mit dem Lächeln dieser Schlauheit
pflegen wir uns über alles hinwegzutrösten, auch wenn wir einmal – was aber
nicht geschieht – das Verlangen nach dem Glück haben sollten, das von der
Musik vielleicht ausgeht. Nur Josefine macht eine Ausnahme; sie liebt die
Musik und weiß sie auch zu vermitteln; sie ist die einzige, mit ihrem Hingang
wird die Musik – wer weiß wie lange – aus unserem Leben verschwinden.
( J – )

Our singer is called Josephine. Anyone who has not heard her does not know
the power of song. There is no one but is carried away by her singing, a tribute
all the greater as we are not in general a music-loving race. Tranquil peace is
the music we love best; our life is hard, we are no longer able, even on occasions
when we have tried to shake off the cares of daily life, to rise to anything so
high and remote from our usual routine as music. But we do not much lament
that; we do not get even so far; a certain practical cunning, which admittedly we
stand greatly in need of, we hold to be our greatest distinction, and with a smile
born of such cunning we are wont to console ourselves for all shortcomings, even
supposing – only it does not happen – that we were to yearn once in a way for the
kind of bliss which music may provide. Josephine is the sole exception; she has
a love for music and knows too how to transmit it; she is the only one; when she
dies, music – who knows for how long – will vanish from our lives. ( JMF )

The first paragraph of the story establishes the dramatis personae: there is
one character called Josefine who stands out from the rest of her “race”
(Geschlecht) as being talented in music, as being a singer, whereas the
remainder of the group (we later learn they are “mouse folk”), being
possessed only of a “practical cunning,” seem unable to “raise them-
selves” (sich erheben) to the lofty heights of the musical as such. Kafka
begins his narrative in the most classical way, with a dramatic opposition
between the mass of the people, devoted to everyday life (das Alltägliche),
and Josefine, servant of the sublime (the noun das Erhabene, the sublime,
being derived from the verb Kafka uses here, sich erheben). The para-
graph points to the eventuality of a tension between Josefine and the
 Narrative and music in Kafka and Blanchot  
mouse folk: they are so different in their fundamental outlooks that the
reader might easily imagine a conflict arising as the narrative develops,
the kind of conflict that nourishes or even makes possible the differen-
tial movement of narrative itself. When we find out, in the latter stages
of the tale, that Josefine is somewhat of a prima donna, critical of her
audience’s ignorance and capricious in the demands she places on the
material conditions of her performances, it would seem that the dramatic
potential of the first paragraph has been realized.
At the same time, however, in order for there to be the highest level
of conflict, drama, pathos, there must be oppositional pressure exerted
from both sides. Now it may be true that, late in the story, Josefine and
her retinue attempt to gain special favors from the mouse folk as a whole
(thereby proclaiming Josefine’s difference from the multitude); but their
efforts are met, not by polemic or contention, but by calm indifference –
an indifference that emerges subtly in the first paragraph, where the
narrator makes clear that the mouse folk’s inability to “raise itself ” to
the level of music is no matter of great concern. The narrator, who
speaks for the mouse folk (and this speaking-for is no innocent rhetorical
gesture), asserts not only that “stiller Frieden ist uns die liebste Musik” –
i.e., that silence, rather than music in the usual sense, is most appealing to
the mouse folk, but that, after all, it is not certain, not proved, that music
leads to happiness. The conditional mode of the narrator’s statement is
worth noting, and is typical of the modality of the story as a whole: “auch
wenn wir einmal – was aber nicht geschieht – das Verlangen nach dem
Glück haben sollten, das von der Musik vielleicht ausgeht” (“even supposing –
only it does not happen – that we were to yearn once in a way for the kind
of bliss which music may provide”).
From the very beginning of the story there is a fundamental narrative
skepticism about music – about its “essence” – as well as an interesting
indifference to the efforts of Josefine, both of which tend to complicate
the assertive tone of the remainder of the paragraph. On the one hand,
Josefine is presented as an exception, as a singer among non-singers,
as someone who not only communicates with a transcendental beyond
( Jenseits), but who is also capable of communicating it to the mouse folk:
“Nur Josefine macht eine Ausnahme; sie liebt die Musik und weiß sie
auch zu vermitteln; sie ist die einzige” (“Josephine is the sole exception;
she has a love for music and knows too how to transmit it; she is the only
one”). Thus it would appear that Josefine might mediate between the
unmusical folk and “the power of song,” that she might play a properly
pedagogical role in her society. On the other hand, however, it is not clear
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
from the first paragraph whether the mouse folk has enough interest in
music or in the performance activities of Josefine to accept or receive
this potentially mediated song. “Josefine” seems, at first glance, to be a
fine parable of Rezeptionsästhetik; but the question is whether the artistic
performance has any effect on its audience whatever.
The two key words of the paragraph may well be the first and the
last: “unsere” (“our” as in “our singer, Josefine”), and “verschwinden”
(“to disappear” – a verb that seems, in the first paragraph, to be a eu-
phemistic replacement for the starker “to die” or “sterben,” but that
has a prophetic ring to it, in that Josefine, at the end of the tale, does
indeed disappear, mysteriously and without a trace). Both words help to
define the ultimate effect Josefine has on her community in the narrator’s
telling of the tale. The use of the first-person plural possessive adjective
is unusual for Kafka: of the other longer stories, only the second version
of “Die Abweisung” [“The Refusal”] begins with the word “unser” or
“our,” with all other stories being fairly evenly divided between a first- or
third-person singular narrating voice. Although the use of the possessive
form can allow for intimacy and complicity in narratives that empha-
size the emblematic heroism of one member of a group, in the case of
“Josefine” the possessive emerges progressively as a form of envelopment
or containment whereby the protagonist’s difference is gradually effaced
and eradicated. In the end, although Josefine has manifested her desire
to be appreciated in her uniqueness, in the quality of her musicality, she
is fated (by the leveling-effect, the driving in-difference of the narrative
movement) to disappear, to vanish, along with her music – i.e., not to
die a tragic or pathetic or perhaps “operatic” death. She becomes sub-
sumed by the streaming multitudes of her ceaselessly proliferating people
(with apologies to Blanchot: le ruissellement du peuple éternel), enveloped in
a general forgetfulness.
At the conclusion of the first paragraph, the reader is left with two
related questions: First, what is music according to this story? What is
its significance, its content, its “inner essence?” Second, how will the
narrator develop Josefine’s relation to the mouse folk in the remainder of
the story? What kind of narrative progression will characterize this tale?
The first paragraph only alludes to “die Macht des Gesanges” – that
is, the powerful effect of song rather than the essence of song; and the
question of Josefine’s mediating influence on the mouse folk is merely
raised without being answered. At the very least, the text must, and does,
stage some of Josefine’s performances, and it is in the encounter of these
 Narrative and music in Kafka and Blanchot  
performances, where protagonist and folk are united in a community,
that the nodal points of the narrative are to be found.
The section of the story immediately following the first paragraph
is devoted to the narrator’s musings on the significance of music. But
these reflections never focus on the musical as exterior object of disin-
terested contemplation: rather, from the very beginning of the narrative,
it is clear that the phenomenon of music or musicality can only be un-
derstood in relation to the mouse folk and its interactions with Josefine.
The first sentence of the second paragraph is crucial in this regard,
as is its problematic translation by Willa and Edwin Muir (the reader
will note in passing that, as of the second paragraph, the narrator be-
gins to alternate between the first-person singular and first-person plural
forms, the former being used to express private thoughts which may
or may not correspond to the received opinions of the mouse folk as a
community): “Ich habe oft darüber nachgedacht, wie es sich mit dieser
Musik eigentlich verhält” (“I have often thought about what this music
of hers really means”) ( J  ; JMF ). The translators not only have
added the phrase “of hers” to the original text, but they have made the
Kafkan idiom more precise than it originally is in this context. They
have rendered the narrator’s cautious and, it must be said, rather vague
and inelegant phrase “wie es sich mit dieser Musik verhält” (which means
something like “how things stand with this music,” or “what is the case
with this music”) by “what this music of hers really means.” What the
Muirs have done is a very interesting case of what might be called trans-
lators’ (or readers’) wish-fulfillment: like all readers of “Josefine,” they
would like to know what the text is going to propose as the meaning of
music; they wish to penetrate the essence of music, its interiority, and
their wish is so strong that they mistranslate the Kafkan story, inserting
the verb “to mean” where it does not exist, where it is notably absent.
The narrator’s verb phrase wie es sich verhält is, of course, connected to the
word for relationship: das Verhältnis – and the issue of the story (issue in
the sense of topic as well as the sense of ending or final point), from
beginning to end, is the relation of the mouse folk to Josefine, who, in
some sense, represents or incorporates the mysterious phenomenon of
music.
As the story progresses, not only is the interiority of music increas-
ingly inaccessible to what one might call “mouse-consciousness,” but
the question arises whether Josefine is actually singing, or whether
she is merely piping – piping (das Pfeifen) being, in the narrator’s
  The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
pseudo-philosophical vocabulary, “die eigentliche Kunstfertigkeit un-
seres Volkes, oder vielmehr gar keine Fertigkeit, sondern eine charak-
teristische Lebensäußerung” (“the real artistic accomplishment of our
people, or rather no mere accomplishment but a characteristic expres-
sion of our life”) ( J  ; JMF  ). The narrative proceeds in a cascade of
descending logical hesitations that can be summed up as follows: Josefine
is the singer of the unmusical mouse folk ( J ); but does she sing or does
she pipe? ( J  –); does her song enrapture her audience, or is it the
silence that surrounds that song? ( J ); why does the mouse folk attend
her performances in the first place when it is clear that this community
is not only unmusical, but, in fact, incapable of unconditional devotion
(“bedingungslose Ergebenheit kennt unser Volk kaum” [ J ])?
The first section of the text leads from a highly skeptical dis-
cussion of Josefine’s supposed musicality (in German this would be
“angebliche Musikalität”) to an interesting development on the (almost-
Heideggerian) theme of care (Sorge). As the text moves forward, it be-
comes evident that the nature of Josefine’s vocal production (whether it
be artistic singing or everyday piping) will not be solved, which leaves
the philosophical question of the relation of art to life open, undecid-
able. At the same time, however, the very fact of Josefine’s performances
(i.e., the fact that they take place at all) gains increasing weight in the
story. At the midpoint of the tale, the narrator reaches what might be
considered an extreme point of skepticism when he asserts: “Es ist nicht
so sehr eine Gesangsvorführung als vielmehr eine Volksversammlung”
(“It is not so much a performance of songs as an assembly of the people”)
( J ; JMF ). But this is perhaps the essential turn or defining twist
of the narrative line, in which the text reveals to the reader what had
been present, sotto voce, from the beginning: namely, that the content of
the performance and the meaning of the song are unimportant in their
potential emptiness, but that the existence of the performance, its social
reality, is the one fact that counts. It is at this point of the narrative that the
title of the story – “Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse” –
becomes fully understandable. The story is about the mouse people as
much as it is about Josefine; it is constructed on their mutual devotion
(at the exact middle of the tale there is a comical sequence of paragraphs
in which the narrator describes how the people is convinced that it must
care for its beloved but demanding and not always pleasant Josefine,
whereas she is just as certain that her job is to protect her people from
the dangers of the outside world through the uplifting power of her song
[ J –]).
 Narrative and music in Kafka and Blanchot  
The second half of the text can be characterized as Josefine’s gradual
disappearing-act. In the first section, the protagonist vanishes from the
scene as the narrator describes in some detail the difficult existence
of the prolific mouse folk and its curious “prematurely old” but also
“ineradicably young” outlook ( J ). In the second section, we learn
of the various excuses for not performing and the demands for special
treatment Josefine makes on the mouse folk (including her proposal not
to work, in order to devote herself entirely to her art), all of which are
qualified as illogical or dismissed out of hand since Josefine, after all, is
no different from other mice in her questionable “singing,” which may
be nothing more than everyday piping ( J  –). And finally, in four
short paragraphs the narrator discusses her disappearance ( J –) – a
section to which I shall return later.
Viewed as a structural whole, “Josefine” is the story of the disappear-
ance of music and the unweaving of narrative. Put more precisely, one
should say that the primary narrative, at its most literal thematic level,
dismantles the protagonist’s pretentions to musicality as sublime artis-
tic activity, and in this gradual dismantling focuses increasingly on the
power of the mouse folk to contain or even eradicate Josefine’s defiant
individuality. The envelopment or swallowing-up of music in the pri-
mary narrative produces a secondary meta-narrative which is about the
unweaving of narrative as such. The text becomes self-referential in that
it tells the story of its own undoing, of its own impossible construction. In
“Josefine” Kafka has gone far beyond the pathos and high melodrama of
earlier stories such as “Das Urteil” [“The Judgment”](written in )
and “Die Verwandlung” [“The Metamorphosis”](), both of which
develop along a steady narrative line from an initial, clearly defined exis-
tential situation to a tragic conclusion. In negating pathos and peripeteia as
such in his later fiction, in replacing the bourgeois family milieu with the
strangeness of an animal kingdom, Kafka seems to be espousing what
might be called a pure hypothetical narration, which is, in a sense, an
anti-narration, or non-narration. And while there is a stylistic evolution
away from narrative progression in the classical sense (a progression
dependent upon the differentiation of the protagonist from his/her
milieu), there is also a shift from the emphasis on an individual’s struggles
with a family group toward a delineation of the relations that compose
a community.
At this juncture, I would like to leave the fictional universe of
“Josefine” for a while and turn to some of Blanchot’s theoretical writings
on narrative – which deal in various ways both with the possibility of a
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
pure narrative and with the relation of the aesthetics of storytelling to
the ethical issues involved in the inclusiveness of community. The use of
the possessive adjective “our” is not innocent; it may be violent; it is a
speaking for, on the part of a narrator representing his folk, that is also
a robbery of the individual’s voice. One wonders if it is on the basis of
that silencing of musicality that the community erects itself, or whether
the voiding of “music” and the vanishing of the individual into the in-
differentiation of the mass (the folk, the “race”) is merely, allegorically
stated, the quite natural and ultimately peaceful fate of the artist (who,
of course, may be no artist at all) as she returns “home.”

III MUSIC AND NARRATIVE IN BLANCHOT

I have suggested that the meaning of music or musicality remains an

elusive blind spot in “Josefine,” and that the question of music as such
emerges only in conjunction with, in relation to, the narrator and the
mouse folk who act as the protagonist’s audience. In Kafka’s story, the
content of music is beyond the reader’s apprehension, while the en-
actment of music is a constant factum in the lives of the mouse com-
munity. The various musical performances by Josefine punctuate the
narrative rhythm of the story; the bringing together of the mouse folk
around the heroine’s singing constitutes the narrative as movement.
Thus, any interpretation of “Josefine” must take into account the inter-
actions and intersections of musicality with narrativity as fundamental
themes.
Maurice Blanchot, whose interest in Kafka’s storytelling has been
constant throughout his long career, has written two essays that have a
direct bearing on the constellation of interpretive problems I have raised
up to this point. The first of these, “Le chant des sirènes,” is uncannily
close to the universe of “Josefine” in that it stages the act of singing
as performance within an exposition on the problematic of narrativity
per se. The second, entitled “La voix narrative, le ‘il,’ le neutre,” treats
the question of narrative voice in a way that prolongs the insights of
“Le chant des sirènes” and leads to the explicit thematization of the
possibility of a “pure” narrative – a notion that Blanchot develops theo-
retically through a discussion of Flaubert and Kafka and that subtends
his own experimental récits in their spectral abstraction. I shall discuss
both of these short essays in themselves before determining the ways in
which they apply to Kafka’s aesthetics in general and to “Josefine” in
particular.
 Narrative and music in Kafka and Blanchot 
“Le chant des sirènes”
The point of departure for Blanchot’s theoretical meditation is the
episode in The Odyssey in which Ulysses encounters the song of the Sirens,
or rather, does not encounter it, since, making use of his habitual wiles, he
stops his ears with wax and, by not hearing the enchanting singing, man-
ages to survive the episode and move onward in his navigation. Blanchot
is interested in the double-edged quality of this event/non-event, this mo-
ment of high dramatic intensity in which a difficult encounter both does
and does not take place. He sees in Ulysses’s victory over the Sirens the
inevitable result of the hero’s obstinence and prudence, which qualities
allowed him to “take pleasure in the spectacle of the Sirens, without risk
and without accepting the consequences, this cowardly, mediocre and
calm pleasure, measured, as it befits a Greek of the decadent period who
never deserved to be the hero of The Iliad” (CS  ). But this “victory”
is only apparent according to Blanchot, in that the encounter with the
Sirens is an attirance, a magnetic attraction, that causes Ulysses to fall into
narrative:
Although the Sirens were defeated by the power of technique, which will always
try to play without danger with unreal (inspired) forces, Ulysses did not escape
so easily. They [the Sirens] lured him to a place into which he did not want
to fall and, hidden at the center of The Odyssey now become their tomb, they
enlisted him and many others in this happy and unhappy navigation, which is
that of narrative [le récit], a song no longer immediate, but told, and rendered
in the telling only apparently harmless, ode become episode. (CS  –)
Thus Blanchot interprets the moment of the encounter between
Ulysses and the Sirens as an allegory of narrative in which the pro-
tagonist’s adventurous triumph (he manages to move beyond the Sirens,
and this moving beyond is the very forward rhythm that defines this
epic in its essence as a successful return, through and beyond all perils,
to the comforts of domesticity) is overturned in the very instant of the
encounter: without knowing it, Ulysses, like so many others, has fallen
into the narrative maelstrom. The song of the Sirens may not have been
heard, but it becomes told (“ode” becomes “episode”), and the loss of
immediacy that accompanies the transformation or translation of song
into narrative in no way destroys the power or authority of the récit as it
develops from within this central point de rencontre.
At the heart of Blanchot’s essay is one crucial theoretical distinction –
between roman (novel) and récit (narrative) – a clear polar opposition that
organizes his argument and that helps the reader to understand what is
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
at stake in Blanchot’s own narrative fictions. Blanchot does not deny the
importance of Ulysses’s ongoing adventures, nor does his emphasis on
the absolute quality of the moment of encounter with the Sirens negate
the power of the events that lead up to and beyond that moment. Rather,
he chooses to distinguish between the flow of narrative events as a whole,
which he calls roman, and the instantaneous explosive episode, which he
designates as récit. These are the definitions in Blanchot’s words:
With the novel [roman], it is the preliminary navigation that appears on center
stage, that brings Ulysses up to the point of the encounter. This navigation is
an entirely human story, it concerns human time, is linked to human passions,
really takes place and is rich and varied enough to absorb all the power and all
the attention of the narrator. (CS )

Narrative [le récit] begins where the novel does not go and yet leads through its
refusals and rich negligence. Narrative is, heroically and pretentiously, the telling
of only one episode, that of the encounter of Ulysses and of the insufficient and
enticing song of the Sirens. (CS )

A work as vast as The Odyssey is thus an amalgam of the roman and the
récit, a text in which the human time of the novelistic flow of events is oc-
casionally interrupted by the episodic immediacy of a decisive encounter
such as the Song of the Sirens. And when this interruption occurs, the
story turns, or metamorphoses, from its everyday human appearance
into a pure fictive construct. According to Blanchot, whereas the roman
advances through what he calls “the desire to allow time to speak” (time
understood here in its usual human dimension), the récit, on the other
hand, “progresses thanks to this other time [cet autre temps], this other navi-
gation which is the passage from real song to imaginary song” (CS ). In
the system of polarities that structures Blanchot’s theoretical argument,
all those qualities associated with the roman (human time, everydayness,
the song in its reality) are both more understandable to the reader and
also, quite evidently, less interesting to the critic than the more complex,
nearly ineffable attributes connected to the récit (an other time, the fall into
fiction, the song in its textual/imaginary recreation). What Blanchot has
done is to organize an expository theoretical discourse in a classical way –
by setting up contraries, dichotomies – in which each term appears to
have a clear opposite. The problem, however, is that whereas an inter-
pretive community might have a shared understanding of the meaning
of “human time,” the notion of an other time remains enigmatic; and it
does not help to say that this other time is “the opposite of ” human time,
whatever that might mean. In the same way, the fall into fiction and the
 Narrative and music in Kafka and Blanchot 
idea of an imaginary song are difficult to imagine: these notions hover,
metaphorically (or turn, tropically), around a central inexpressible void
that is the point of fascination of Blanchot the critic and writer of fic-
tions. There is, within the experience of the Song of the Sirens (which,
we have seen, is also a non-experience, a non-event), an abyss, a béance,
and it is the magnetic attraction of this nothingness that causes the récit
to coalesce, to take form. It is no surprise, given this scheme, that for
Blanchot, like Kafka, the center of the song is not a plenitude, but a lack:
“the enchantment [of the Sirens] awakened the hope and the desire of
a marvelous beyond, and this beyond only represented a desert, as if the
home region of music were the only place completely devoid of music”
(CS ). Narrative constructs itself around the nothingness of music, a
nothingness that it attempts to metamorphose into an imaginary textual
equivalent, or, in other words, a pure fiction.

“La voix narrative, le ‘il,’ le neutre”

Originally written in , Blanchot’s essay on narrative voice is perhaps
his most explicit and (if such a term is ever appropriate for this writer)
most systematic theoretical statement on narrative as such. It is in this
text that the notion of a pure narrative emerges with greatest clarity, and
it is no coincidence that this takes place within a discussion of Kafka’s
fictional works. Blanchot establishes, from the beginning of his argument,
that the matter of narrative voice should not be confused with the naı̈ve
conception of writing as a transparent representation of an individual
consciousness. Narrative always implies distance, and this distance entails
the impersonality of what Blanchot, in this essay as well as elsewhere,
calls le neutre (the neuter).
Crucial to Blanchot’s conception of narrative is the subtle passage or,
to use Michel Butor’s term, “modification” that takes place in the literary-
historical transition from Flaubertian aesthetics to the fictional praxis of
Kafka. Although Kafka did admire Flaubert (who, along with Goethe,
remained one of the Czech writer’s constant references in his letters
and diaries), Blanchot cautions against the temptation of enlisting Kafka
as a mere follower of Flaubert. Whereas aesthetic distance or “creative
disinterest” defines the position of the writer and reader vis-à-vis the work
of art for Flaubert, this same distance “enters into” the texts of Kafka:

The distance – the creative disinterest (so visible in the case of Flaubert since he
must fight to maintain it) – this distance, which was that of the writer and the
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
reader facing the work, allowing for contemplative pleasure, now enters, in the
form of an irreducible strangeness, into the very sphere of the work. (VN )
It is within the “irreducible strangeness” of this interior narrative dis-
tance that the neutre constitutes itself and acts to overturn the centrality
of subjective consciousness. Blanchot makes it clear that the neuter “il”
does not simply replace the classical third-person singular pronoun, but
calls it into question as subject. It is through the neuter “il” that the “other”
(l’autre) speaks, but this “other” cannot be reduced to the mere opposite
of the self. The neuter “il” can never be subsumed within a personal-
ized narrative, a narrative tethered to the foundation of human time and
events: it will always be outside the act or the subject in which it seems
to manifest itself. Hence the narrative voice as such has no place in the
work, but is the void around which the work constructs itself:
The narrative voice [voix narrative] ( I do not say narrating voice [voix narratrice])
owes its voicelessness to this exteriority. A voice that has no place in the work,
but that also does not dominate it from above . . . the ‘il’ is not the notion of
comprehensiveness according to Jaspers, but rather like a void in the work.
(VN  )
As was the case in “Le chant des sirènes,” in which the distinction
between récit and roman structured the theoretical argument, the essay on
narrative voice is organized around the foundational opposition between
voix narrative and voix narratrice. And since the voix narrative is the voice-
lessness of exteriority emanating from a central neutral void, since it has
no definable place in human time and reality, it is the narrative voice
of the récit. Although Blanchot never explicitly defines the voix narratrice,
it seems clear that this narrating instance is the “opposite” of the voix
narrative, and that it is the voice of the roman in the fullness of subjective
consciousness. Jacques Derrida confirms this hypothesis when he states
that, unlike the voix narrative, which has “no place” in its radical exteri-
ority, the voix narratrice can be situated within the theoretical discourse of
poetics precisely because it “derives from a subject who tells something,
remembering an event or an historical sequence, knowing who he is,
where he is, and of what he speaks.”
In philosophical terms, one would have to say that the notion of the
neutre is an a-conceptual concept: it slips between the logical oppositions
that organize rational or theoretical discourse. Thus, although once again
Blanchot’s argument is apparently based upon solidly-established polar
oppositions, the voix narrative, being without location, insituable, cannot
simply be called the contrary of the voix narratrice, the narrating voice of
 Narrative and music in Kafka and Blanchot 
individual human subjectivity. That which is without location is without
a ground, and in the void of its voicelessness it cannot merely be opposed
to the centrality of a voice present-to-itself. This is why any definition of
the neutre must necessarily take the apparent form of a logical paradox:
since the neuter is neither this nor that, but somewhere (where?) in be-
tween, it cannot be approached by a logic of simple assertive distinction
or differentiation. In this sense, the neutre is itself radically exterior to
the reference points upon which discourse as logical continuity is con-
structed:
the neuter word [la parole neutre] neither reveals nor hides anything. That does not
mean that it signifies nothing (by pretending to abdicate meaningfulness in the
form of nonsense); that means that it does not signify according to the manner
in which the visible-invisible signifies, but that it opens within language an other
power [un pouvoir autre], foreign to the power of enlightenment (or obfuscation),
of comprehension or of misunderstanding. It does not signify according to the
optic mode. ( VN )

Just as in “Le chant des sirènes” Blanchot had spoken of an “other

time” (autre temps) outside of human everydayness, here he alludes to the
“other power” (pouvoir autre) opened up within language by the neuter
word – a word which is foreign to the founding metaphorical principle
of cognition: the “light-darkness” imagery by which Western thought
expresses the accomplishments and frustrations of human understand-
ing. What Blanchot calls, with admirable economy, the “optic mode,” is
the very horizon of our logical discourse, the ultimate limitation within
which discourse as understandable human communication is inscribed.
To write (or to read), according to the voix narrative as it opens up the
strange space of the récit, is to find oneself beyond that horizon, in an
unheimlich no-man’s land, in the aridity of a desert which no land surveyor
can encompass. And it is in this unlocatable “place,” I would contend,
that Blanchot’s own récits, like Kafka’s “Josefine,” “take place.

Kafka in the light of Blanchot

If Blanchot’s theoretical meditations exhibit a certain relevance to the fic-
tional praxis of Kafka, it is in their insistence upon two essential points:
first, that at the center of narrative (understood rigorously as récit) lies
a void, a nothingness, which is untranslatable in the terms of rational
discourse but which generates the story in its radical exteriority; and sec-
ond, that the récit as expression of the neutre is “voiceless,” not attributable
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
to a consciousness as human individuality and not subject to the laws
of human time. The question that arises at this juncture is whether the
writings of Kafka in some way correspond to these points, and if so, to
what degree and in what manner. And, perhaps most crucially: which
writings of Kafka are in proximity to Blanchot’s theoretical concerns?
Because my book needs to reach closure, I will pass quickly over a
subject that merits more detailed consideration, namely, the evolution
of Kafka’s prose style and narrative structures from the time of his first
successful short story (“The Judgment,” ). As I have suggested ear-
lier, I think it could be demonstrated that the early stories, such as “The
Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis,” are constructed in a classical pro-
gression, a movement-toward-the-end that allows for melodrama and an
ultimate tragic resolution. In Blanchot’s terms, these stories would be the
product of the voix narratrice and would differ from the aesthetics of the
roman only in their concentrated length, only in the rapidity with which
they move toward their respective resting-places. “The Metamorphosis”
is really a short novel, quite untypical of the rest of Kafka’s literary pro-
duction in its clear tripartite structure, in its traditional theatricality. Most
importantly, although Gregor Samsa is becoming an insect, he retains his
very human consciousness, and the distance between his exterior appear-
ance and his interiority produces a kind of irony that still derives from the
aesthetic distance of Flaubert. In the case of “Josefine” – or “Forschungen
eines Hundes” [“Investigations of a Dog”] () or “Der Bau” [“The
Burrow”] () – however, the reader finds himself/herself immediately
thrust into an animal world from which all human points of reference
are absent. The voix narratrice cannot function because the human subjec-
tivity of which it is the reflection, the full expression, is no longer on the
narrative stage. My contention is that the literary evolution of Kafka can
be formulated, in Blanchot’s terms, as a gradual effacement of the voix
narratrice in favor of the voix narrative, as a final victory for the récit over the
roman. “Josefine” can be read as a textualization of Blanchot’s theoretical
points in that the protagonist’s song is, in fact, a void, an emptiness, a
problematic sound that may or may not “be” song; but this emptiness
generates the entirety of the narrative movement, which can be defined
as the impossible effort of the animal narrator to rationalize through
logical discourse that which is already situated in the realm of the neutre.
The point of the narrative is that what Josefine is producing is neither
song nor piping, but something else – in Blanchot’s terms, un autre chant.
The passage from the roman to the récit, from the human fullness of
the voix narratrice to the animal squeaking of the voix narrative, could not
 Narrative and music in Kafka and Blanchot 
have been an easy one for Kafka, who wrote with more anguish and less
serenity than Blanchot. The final ruminations of the philosophical dog,
the paranoia of the burrowing rodent, and the nervous exertions of the
singing mouse are the end-result not of a theoretical meditation, but of
a lived drama – Kafka’s own. Blanchot senses this when, in his probing
essay entitled “Kafka et l’exigence de l’oeuvre,” he shows from a close
reading of the Tagebücher [Diaries] that Kafka’s intense involvement in
Judaism (his learning of Hebrew and what may have been a more than
passing interest in the Zionist question) brought religion into conflict with
the exacting demands (l’exigence) of writing. For Blanchot, whose unique
allegiance is to writing, Kafka’s turn toward religion in his final days
created an existential conflict from which the creator of the animal stories
had difficulty disengaging himself. Proof of Kafka’s ambivalence can be
found in a haunting and much-cited diary entry from  January ,
in which the real world (the domain of families, of biological fulfillment,
and of achieved religious community) is contrasted with the “desert” in
which the writer wanders endlessly:
Why did I want to quit the world? Because “he” [my father] would not let me
live in it, in his world. Though indeed I should not judge the matter so precisely [So klar darf
ich es jetzt allerdings nicht beurteilen], for I am now a citizen of this other world, whose
relationship to the ordinary one is the relationship of the wilderness to cultivated
land (I have been forty years wandering from Canaan) . . . It is indeed a kind of
Wandering in the Wilderness in reverse that I am undergoing: I think that I am
continually skirting the wilderness and am full of childish hopes ( particularly as
regards women) that “perhaps I shall keep in Canaan after all” – when all the
while I have been decades in the wilderness and these hopes are merely mirages
born of despair, especially at those times when I am the wretchedest of creatures
in the desert too, and Canaan is perforce my own Promised Land, for no third
place exists for mankind [denn ein drittes Land gibt es nicht für die Menschen].

There is a striking dissimilarity between the nostalgic and despair-

ing rhetorical tone of this entry and the tranquil indifference of the
mouse-narrator in “Josefine” – a dissimilarity that marks the separation
between Kafka’s unmediated thoughts as expressed in his diaries and the
unearthly exteriority of his animal tales. In the passage quoted above,
Kafka has set up an either/or alternative from which there is no escape, a
polar opposition that exhausts all the possibilities, since we are told that,
beyond Canaan on the one hand and the wilderness on the other, “no
third place exists for mankind.” Having been expelled from the world
as “Promised Land” by his father, Kafka has been wandering in his
own arid territories, unhappily and with sidelong wistful glances toward
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
Canaan. Now this expulsion into the outside, the beyond, reminds one of
what happens to the dispossessed human subject when precipitated from
the roman into the récit, from the domain of the voix narratrice into the voice-
lessness of the voix narrative. Yet what separates Kafka the human subject,
author of the Diaries, from Kafka the writer, author of “Josefine,” is that
in the Diaires he has not found his way out of discursive logic, beyond
pathos, beyond immediate existential despair.
As presented in the entry of  January , the situation of the writer
emerges as the mere logical opposite of the supposed happiness and
fulfillment of ordinary humans, in which a note of self-pity is not absent.
What Kafka achieves in “Josefine” is to move beyond an indulgence in
differentiation (the representation of the artist as other, as sad foreigner,
as outcast from society) toward a rhetoric of in-differentiation ( Josefine
may be singing, may be piping, is both same and different from all other
members of the mouse folk). Yet it is just possible that the Kafka of the
Diaries recognized the melodramatic tone of his rhetoric, that, to borrow
from Proust’s terminology, his moi social intuited what his moi profond was
capable of achieving through writing. This can be seen, I think, in
a curious phrase that does not at first call attention to itself, a phrase
like many others one finds in Kafka’s writings that seems to express
the writer’s prudence in reaching a definite formulation, but which, in
this case, may be more than a topos of modesty: “Though indeed I
should not judge the matter so precisely” (“So klar darf ich es jetzt
allerdings nicht beurteilen”). What is interesting here is the presence of a
phrase that calls attention to the absolute quality of the polar oppositions
structuring the remainder of the passage, and that calls into question the
appropriateness of this very absoluteness. In other words: it may be that
the Kafka of the Diaries recognized that the stark contrast of Canaan to
the Wandering in the Wilderness is a theatrical simplification, the kind
of trenchant distinction that makes possible structures like the Oedipal
triangle and narrative order as such. Perhaps this kind of clarity is too
clear; perhaps the act of judgment (“Das Urteil,” beurteilen) necessarily
contains within itself a categorical separation in the form of a cut (Teil,
teilen) that is too neat. The evolution in Kafka the storyteller is from a
transparent Oedipal allegory of banishment by the father in “Das Urteil”
to the impossibility of sustaining a differential narrative and of making
aesthetic judgments (the undecidability of Josefine’s “song”) in his final
fictional work. There is a “third place,” which is beyond the horizon of
Canaan and the Wilderness, but it is not for humankind; it is for those
animals vocalizing within the atopical space of the neutre.
 Narrative and music in Kafka and Blanchot 
IV COMMUNITY AND DEATH IN KAFKA AND BLANCHOT

At the end of “Josefine” the protagonist disappears; her song is lost for
the mouse-people, who, in their practical slyness, will continue along
their habitual path. The final four short paragraphs of the story are
replete with the kind of logical hesitations and paradoxical formula-
tions that have characterized the tale throughout, but in this case the
narrator’s language focuses almost exclusively on the problem of his-
tory (“Geschichte”) as memory and forgetfulness. We are told, in the
final sentence of the story, that since the mouse folk has no interest in
history, Josefine, like the previous heroes and heroines of her race, is
bound to be forgotten. Since we are in the realm of the neutre, however,
since we are beyond the horizon of balanced polar opposites, this for-
getfulness of Josefine should not be equated with her “tragic destiny.”
That is: forgetfulness is not the negative opposite of memory (mem-
ory understood positively as the capacity of a people to sustain through
the interiorization of consciousness the essential life of its heroes). This
is why the final paragraph of the narrative exhibits a Blanchot-like
tranquillity:
Vielleicht werden wir also gar nicht sehr viel entbehren, Josefine aber, erlöst
von der irdischen Plage, die aber ihrer Meinung nach Auserwählten bereitet ist,
wird fröhlich sich verlieren in der zahllosen Menge der Helden unseres Volkes,
und bald, da wir keine Geschichte treiben, in gesteigerter Erlösung vergessen
sein wie alle ihre Brüder. ( J )
So perhaps we shall not miss so very much after all, while Josephine, redeemed
from the earthly sorrows which to her thinking lay in wait for all chosen spirits,
will happily lose herself in the numberless throng of the heroes of our people,
and soon, since we are no historians, will rise to the heights of redemption and
be forgotten like all her brothers. ( JMF ).
The notion of “redemption” (“Erlösung”), which in a Judeo-Christian
context would be linked to the preserving power of memory (when a
people is redeemed, that is, “bought back,” “ransomed” by a Savior, it
is exonerated of its sin and allowed to continue, to further its existence
and even, in certain scenarios, to obtain everlasting life), is here linked
to the notion of forgetfulness. Josefine will be redeemed insofar as she
is forgotten, insofar as her appeal for difference, her naı̈ve belief in her
identity as a “chosen spirit,” are subsumed within the in-differentiating
force of the masses. A detailed stylistic analysis of the verb tenses in the
final section of the story would show that there is no precise moment,
no dramatic point at which Josefine does, in fact, disappear. Rather, she
 The Romantic heritage and Modernist fiction
slips between the interstices of the narrative texture: she has, so to speak,
always been lost for the mouse folk.
In turning what the voix narratrice would have represented as the tragic
end-point of death into an unlocalizable “disappearance,” the voix nar-
rative may have recovered the spectral and uncanny truth of death, its
essential neutrality, its luminescent exteriority beyond the oppositions of
light and dark, inside and outside. Although, as Heidegger would have it,
I die my own death, which is mine and mine alone, there is an important
dialogic relation between the one who dies or disappears and the one(s)
who remain(s) behind; and it is in this relation and only in this relation
that what we call “community” can arise. The relation that binds to-
gether Josefine and the mouse folk – an indifferent forgetfulness – may
seem strange to the reader whose universe is that of the roman; but in
the récit, this relation (rapport) has, in Blanchot’s words, all the power and
meaning of the secret, of mystery. Let me conclude with a fragment from
Blanchot’s L’Attente l’oubli () that rewrites, in concentrated abstrac-
tion, the enigmatic ending of Josefine, the mouse singer, whose fate will
have always been to disappear within her people, to lose what has always
been lost – her precious identity:
Nous n’allons pas vers l’oubli, pas plus que l’oubli ne vient à nous, mais soudain
l’oubli a toujours déjà été là, et lorsque nous oublions, nous avons toujours déjà
tout oublié: nous sommes, dans le mouvement vers l’oubli, en rapport avec la
présence de l’immobilité de l’oubli.
L’oubli est rapport avec ce qui s’oublie, rapport qui, rendant secret cela avec
quoi il y a rapport, détient le pouvoir et le sens du secret. ()
We do not go toward forgetfulness, no more than forgetfulness comes to us,
but suddenly forgetfulness has always already been there, and when we forget,
we have always already forgotten everything: we are, in the movement toward
forgetfulness, linked to the presence of the immobility of forgetfulness.
Forgetfulness relates to that which forgets itself. And this relation, which
renders secret that to which it relates, holds the power and the meaning of the
secret.
 Notes

 BORDER CROSSINGS IN KANT

 I do not wish to oversimplify the chronology of Kant criticism by suggest-

ing that “only in recent years” have the Second and Third Critiques been
granted their due. More than eighty years ago, in his important study en-
titled Kants Leben und Lehre (in German, ; English translation as Kant’s
Life and Thought by James Haden,  ), Ernst Cassirer emphasized the im-
portance of the later works, especially the Critique of Judgment, discovering
in it the grounded and well-argued endpoint of the critical project. Per-
haps more typical of the majority opinion of Kant scholarship is the judg-
ment pronounced by The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (ed. Ted Honderich,
), which calls the Critique of Pure Reason “Kant’s greatest masterpiece”
(), and describes the Critique of Judgment as “an extremely rich and im-
portant, if frequently perplexing work” (). Whether the Third Critique
is merely “rich and important,” or whether it is also the cornerstone of
the critical edifice as such is a major bone of contention in current Kant
criticism.
 For a variation on the Kantian notion of objects as conforming to our modes
of knowing, see a later poetic formulation of a similar idea in Wordsworth’s
“Prospectus” to The Excursion ():

How exquisitely the individual Mind

(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted: – and how exquisitely, too –
Theme this but little heard of among men –
The external World is fitted to the Mind. (l. – ;
Wordsworth, Selected Poetry, )
The difference between Kant and Wordsworth in the description of the
subject–object relation is subtle but important. For Kant, objects must conform
to our modes of knowing, which means that they are subjected to our know-
ing, ruled by our conceptual apprehension of them. Wordsworth’s vocabu-
lary is less harsh: he speaks of a “fitting” of the Mind and the external World,
a pure reciprocity in which neither Mind nor World achieves dominance.

 Notes to pages –
 References are to Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. and introduced
by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), abbreviated C J; and
Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vorländer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag,
), abbreviated KU.
 On the importance of rhetoric and of linguistic play in general in Kant’s
works, and specifically, on the ways in which the materiality of the signifier
undoes the claims to the phenomenal cognition of the aesthetic judgment
in the Third Critique, see Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in
Kant,” in his Aesthetic Ideology, –.
 The “fall” from the philosophical rigor of Kant to the simplifying dialecti-
cal manipulations of Schiller is a leitmotiv in Kant criticism. Paul de Man
studies this “regression from the incisiveness and from the impact, from the
critical impact, of the original [ Kant]” in “Kant and Schiller,” in Aesthetic
Ideology, –. De Man’s rather unpolished statement (this article was de-
livered as a lecture, and the spoken style is everywhere apparent) – “So there
is a total lack, an amazing, naive, childish lack of transcendental concern
in Schiller, an amazing lack of philosophical concern” ( ) – echoes the
sentiments of a large number of Kant scholars. For a more sympathetic view
of Schiller’s contributions in the wake of Kantian philosophy, see Dieter
Henrich, “Beauty and Freedom: Schiller’s Struggle with Kant’s Aesthetics.”
An excellent, philosophically rigorous presentation of Schiller’s complex
relations to Kant (in which Schiller is given his due as independent thinker)
is to be found in Jacques Taminiaux, La Nostalgie de la Grèce à l’aube de l’Idéalisme
allemand: Kant et les Grecs dans l’Itinéraire de Schiller, de Hölderlin et de Hegel. And
finally, on the notion of “aesthetic morality” as such in its diverse Enlight-
enment manifestations, see the fine intellectual history of Robert E. Norton,
The Beautiful Soul.
 In this group are critics whose methodologies are quite divergent: Ernst
Cassirer, Jean-François Lyotard, and Paul Guyer. In Kant’s Life and Thought,
Cassirer finds that the philosopher’s analogy between the sublime and the
moral law runs the risk of erasing the “special aesthetic character” and the
“independent aesthetic value” of the sublime (). In Lessons on the Analytic
of the Sublime, Lyotard asserts that Kant’s argument, if carefully read, does
not allow for “any confusion, and even any continuity, between the ethical
and the aesthetic. Their relation must be maintained by the critique in the
form of an analogy” (). By “analogy” here, Lyotard clearly means only by
analogy, by the weakness inherent in analogical argument. And in Kant and the Claims of
Taste, Guyer writes: “Beauty is a symbol of the morally good only because there
is an analogy between aesthetic and moral judgment” (; my emphasis).
 One can include in this group Ted Cohen’s subtle article “Why Beauty
is a Symbol of Morality,” as well as Paul Guyer’s “Feeling and Freedom:
Kant on Aesthetics and Morality” (), in which the author of the 
study Kant and the Claims of Taste modifies his earlier position by asserting:
“The experience of beauty serves the purpose of morality most directly
by improving our propensity for moral feeling” (). In his  essay
 Notes to pages – 
“Kant’s Conception of Fine Art,” Guyer goes even further in his now positive
emphasis on the analogical relation between the aesthetic and the ethical
when he states that Kant’s “fundamental conceptions of morality become
part of the experience of art without actually being part of the explicit content
of individual works of art: his argument is precisely that the beautiful may
serve as the symbol of the morally good because there are key analogies
between the experience of beauty and the nature of moral motivation and
judgment” (; Guyer’s emphasis).
 The problem with the creating and reading of analogy extends beyond the
issue of its relative aptness (i.e., whether a hand mill is the “best” analogon
to a despotic state, given innumerable other illustrative possibilities). More
crucial than aptness or appropriateness is the difficult question of the trans-
parence or opaqueness of the analogical figure. In this case, for us as readers
to understand that a hand mill corresponds to a despotic state, Kant must
tell us that this is so, since the hand mill, on its own, could potentially call to
mind many other supersensible entities. The hand mill, if displayed in the
glass case of a museum, would need a descriptive tag, or étiquette, next to it,
indicating what it symbolizes. Its creator, Immanuel Kant, needs to point out
its significance for the analogy to be understandable.
 On the question of ornamentation in Kant, and on the complex manipula-
tions of the inside/outside polarity in paragraph  and beyond, see Jacques
Derrida, “Parergon,” in his La Vérité en peinture, –.
 The scholarly literature on Kant’s theory of the sublime has reached colossal
proportions, and, given the limited scope of my own inquiry, I shall not be
engaging in any detailed way the far-reaching critical debates that have
arisen around this topic in the last three decades. The reader wishing to
pursue this discussion might begin his or her research, minimally, with the
following: Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (the best close reading of Kant’s
sublime to date) and also The Inhuman, both by Jean-François Lyotard; Of the
Sublime: Presence in Question, a collection of essays translated from the French
by S. Librett that includes contributions by Jean-François Courtine, Michel
Deguy, Eliane Escoubas, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-François Lyotard,
Louis Marin, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacob Rogozinski; the careful historical
account by Dominique Peyrache-Leborgne entitled La poétique du sublime
de la fin des Lumières au romantisme; Paul Guyer’s Kant and the Claims of Taste;
and Frances Ferguson’s Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics
of Individuation. For an elegant presentation of the history of the concept of
the sublime, see Richard Macksey, “Longinus Reconsidered,” in which the
term is traced from its original use in Longinus through Burke and Kant up
to Harold Bloom and Paul de Man.
 The quintessential Modernist meditation on the problem that Kant raises
here – that of the graven image (Bildnis), of the image as sign, metaphor, or
sensible presentation of the Idea (Bild), and of the image as copy (Abbild),
is to be found in Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron (–). The fun-
damental theme of the opera is stated by Moses in Act I, Scene : “Kein
 Notes to pages –
Bild kann dir ein Bild geben vom Unvorstellbaren” (“No image can give
you a picture of the unimaginable/unpresentable”) (Karl Heinrich Wörner,
Schoenberg’s “Moses and Aaron,” Libretto, ). The combat between Moses,
man of thoughts (Gedanken) and Aaron, man of images (Bilder), is a directing
theme of the opera as a whole.
 The foray will be brief because my main interest, in this chapter, is the
examination of the areas of contact or intersection between the aesthetic
and the ethical in Kant, insofar as these nodal points are useful for my
further analyses of Modernist texts. My purpose, therefore, is not to offer
a survey, however concise, of Kant’s ethical theory, which would need to
be studied not only in the Critique of Practical Reason (), but also in the
Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals () and the Metaphysics of Morals
(). I shall not be analyzing the Second Critique as it is often read – as a
series of general propositions whose claims to universal validity need to be
examined logically and tested against situations of possible ethical conflict
in “real-life situations.” Instead, I am interested in the rhetorical fabric of a
text that seems, in its serious and univocal tone, to be based on the banishing
of rhetoric from philosophical textuality.
 References are to Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and
introduced by Lewis White Beck ( New York: Macmillan, ), abbreviated
CPrR; and Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft, ed. Karl Vorländer (Hamburg: Felix
Meiner Verlag, ), abbreviated KPrV.
 Kant’s clearest statement on the notion of freedom in its “transcendental”
sense runs as follows: “Now, as no determining ground of the will except
the universal legislative form can serve as a law for it, such a will must
be conceived as wholly independent of the natural law of appearances in
their mutual relations, i.e., the law of causality. Such independence is called
freedom in the strictest, i.e., transcendental, sense” (CPrR ).
 On seduction as “aesthetic action,” see my discussion, in the following chap-
ter, of Kierkegaard’s “The Seducer’s Diary,” which concludes Part One of
Either/Or ().
 The words Erhebung and erhaben occur throughout the Critique of Practical
Reason as a leitmotiv to characterize the “sublime” quality of the moral law
and of our dutiful actions in its behalf. Perhaps the most notable occurrence
of the word “sublime” used adjectivally is to be found in Kant’s celebrated
apostrophe to Duty, anglicized in the pathos of a quasi-biblical style in Lewis
White Beck’s translation: “Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name that dost
embrace nothing charming or insinuating but requirest submission [Plicht!
du erhabener großer Name, der du nichts Beliebtes, was Einschmeichelung bei sich f ührt,
in dir fassest, sondern Unterwerfung verlangst ], and yet seekest not to move the
will by threatening aught that would arouse natural aversion or terror . . .
what origin is there worthy of thy noble descent which proudly rejects all
kinship with the inclinations [welches ist der deiner würdige Ursprung, und wo findet
man die Wurzel deiner edlen Abkunft], and from which to be descended is the
 Notes to pages – 
indispensable condition of the only worth which men can give themselves?”
(CPrR ; KPrV ). It should be noted that Kant is seduced by the power of
his own rhetoric in this passage, in that he refers to the “noble descent” of
Duty. Kant has forgotten his own definition of the moral law as that which
is clear and simple, democratically available to all people. Duty here is an
aristocrat, a “world-traveller” of Sittlichkeit.
 In the preface to his final work on ethical theory, The Metaphysics of Morals,
Kant has nothing but scorn for those readers of his who, in his opinion,
have not understood him, and who, in their criticisms, merely “quibble with
words” (). He uses the Greek term logodaedalus, in a pejorative sense, for such
a class of people. One wonders, however, whether the study of literature must
not always be located in the realm of the word-artificer, the craftsman whose
effects, however masterful, partake always of some cunning. Joyce is not the
only Modernist, or the only artist, who comes to mind when the dédales of
artistic creation are evoked.

 KIERKEGAARD: ON THE ECONOMICS OF LIVING POETICALLY

 This phrase comes from the chapter “Irony after Fichte” in Søren
Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, edited
and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, ), . Throughout this chapter references
are to this edition, abbreviated CI.
 For a concise exposition of these two influences on Kierkegaard, see the first
two chapters of Sylvia Walsh’s Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthet-
ics. I am indebted to Professor Walsh for her presentation of the central
Kierkegaardian notion of “living poetically.” For a more detailed analy-
sis of the Hegelian intertext, see Niels Thulstrup’s Kierkegaard’s Relation to
Hegel. Although it is universally admitted that Hegel and Hegelianism are
clear and unequivocal targets of the Danish writer’s criticism, Kierkegaard’s
debt to and struggle with Kant may be more profound than is usually
assumed. On this point see Ronald M. Green, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden
Debt.
 For a rhetorically sophisticated reading of Fichte’s importance for the writ-
ings of Friedrich Schlegel in particular, see Paul de Man, “The Concept of
Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, –.
 See chapter five below for an interpretation of the abiding presence of the
“beautiful soul” as constitutive poetic figure in late Romanticism and early
Modernism.
 Sylvia Walsh cites this passage in Living Poetically, but her summary of its
content (“As Hegel sees it, then, romantic irony requires both poetic living
and poetic productivity on the part of the artist” []) is quite flat and
uninterpretive, in that it does not do justice to the rhetorical complexity of
Hegel’s ironization of irony.
 Notes to pages –
 This is not the only time Kierkegaard prophetically announces Flaubert. In
a footnote to the section “First Love” in Either/Or, Part I, he writes: “It is
altogether remarkable that there is no female counterpart to Don Quixote
in all European literature. Is the age not yet mature enough for that; has
not the continent of sentimentality yet been discovered?” (–). This
“continent” comes into full view with the creation of Emma Bovary, some
two decades after Either/Or.
 The use of the term “hover” (“schweben”) is, of course, not limited to
the German Romantics. For a cogent and theoretically astute description
of the “hovering” effects of the best poetry, see Coleridge, who admires
Shakespeare’s use of such phrases as “loving hate,” “heavy lightness,” “bright
smoke,” and “sick health” in Romeo and Juliet (I, i,  –). For Coleridge,
these oxymorons are not Renaissance préciosité, but rather examples of the
most sublime powers of the literary imagination. In these lines, we find “an
effort of the mind, when it would describe what it cannot satisfy itself with
the description of, to reconcile opposites and qualify contradictions, leaving
a middle state of mind more strictly appropriate to the imagination than any
other, when it is, as it were, hovering between images. As soon as it is fixed on
one image, it becomes understanding; but while it is unfixed and wavering
between them, attaching itself permanently to none, it is imagination . . .
The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called forth, not
to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind, still offering
what is still repelled, and again creating what is again rejected; the result
being what the poet wishes to impress, namely, the substitution of a sublime
feeling of the unimaginable for a mere image” (“Lecture VII” [ –], in
Selected Poetry and Prose, –; my emphasis).
 From a psychoanalytical point of view, one could argue that the transubstan-
tiation is of necessity invisible, since to render it visible would be to indicate
too clearly its origin in what could be termed its “primitive” substratum – in
ritualistic cannibalism. Even if this unpleasant reminder were to be avoided
by some form of artistic indirection, one could only imagine the depiction
of the transubstantiation as a form of kitsch.
 I shall deal with the late Romantic notion of aesthetic redemption in chapter
four, in a discussion of works by Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner.
 At the beginning of the third chapter of the Philosophical Fragments (),
as he elaborates his distinction between Socratic truth and the truth of
Christianity, Kierkegaard begins an examination of what he calls the “abso-
lute paradox” with the following remarks: “one should not think slightingly
of the paradoxical; for the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion,
and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry
mediocrity. But the highest pitch of every passion is always to will its own
downfall; and so it is also the supreme passion of the Reason to seek a col-
lision, though this collision must in one way or another prove its undoing.
The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something
 Notes to pages – 
that thought cannot think. This passion is at bottom present in all thinking,
even in the thinking of the individual, in so far as in thinking he partici-
pates in something transcending himself. But habit dulls our sensibilities,
and prevents us from perceiving it” ().
 References are to Either/Or: Part I and Either/Or: Part II , both ed. and trans.
by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, ).
 To illustrate Hegel’s thesis on the internal being the external in the truest
dialectical sense, the Hongs quote a passage from the Wissenschaft der Logik
[Science of Logic] on p.  of their notes to part one of Either/Or: “The inner
is determined as the form of reflected immediacy or of essence over against the
outer as the form of being, but the two are only one identity. This identity is
first, the substantial unity of both as a substrate pregnant with content, or the
absolute fact [Sache], in which the two determinations are indifferent, external
moments. By virtue of this, it is a content and that totality which is the inner
that equally becomes external, but in this externality is not the result of
becoming or transition but is identical with itself. The outer, according to
this determination, is not only identical with the inner in respect of content
but both are only one fact.”
 This is the enchanted place in which Tannhäuser experiences atemporal
ecstasy (or, put differently, erotic imprisonment). Richard Wagner’s opera
Tannhäuser was completed in , just two years after the publication of
Either/Or. The final redemption of the protagonist in the Wagner drama is
very un-Mozartian, and would not have pleased A, because this metaphysical
cleansing introduces a strong dose of the ethical into the territory of the
aesthetic.
 On this point, see W. H. Auden’s remark: “Don Giovanni’s pleasure in
seducing women is not sensual but arithmetical; his satisfaction lies in adding
one more name to his list which is kept for him by Leporello” (“Balaam and
His Ass,” The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, ).
 “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, –.
 This term is a codeword in German Romanticism. The new art ( poetry,
criticism, painting, and also music) was aimed against bourgeois aesthetic
values – as was the case, perhaps most notoriously and humorously, in Robert
Schumann’s invention of the “Davidsbündler” to do battle with the
“Philistines.” The Davidsbündler (Florestan, Eusebius and company) ap-
peared not only in literary form, in Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift f ür Musik
(first published in ), but also in his brilliant sequence of dances for the
piano entitled the “Davidsbündlertänze” ().
 In the Hongs’ translation, the phrase “for the esthetic is not evil but the
indifferent” renders quite literally the Danish original: “thi det Aesthetiske
er ikke det Onde, men Indifferentsen” (Enten-Eller II, ). Walter Lowrie
used the term “neutrality” rather than “the indifferent” in his earlier
Princeton University Press translation (original publication ; revised
 Notes to pages –
by Howard A. Johnson in  ) (II,  ). Both words place the aesthetic
in the domain of the neither/nor, which is why, in the upcoming section of
my argument, I draw a parallel between Kierkegaard’s aesthetic theory and
Blanchot’s notion of le neutre.
 I shall analyze Blanchot’s essay “La voix narrative, le ‘il,’ le neutre” in some
detail in the epilogue, in conjunction with the narrative pragmatics of Kafka’s
late fiction.

 FREUD’S ‘‘ D A S U N H E I M L I C H E ’’ : T H E I N T R I C A C I E S
OF TEXTUAL UNCANNINESS

 Kofman’s argument for a “symptomal” reading of “Das Unheimliche” can

be found in her The Childhood of Art, –.
 The critical literature on “Das Unheimliche” is by now quite extensive.
The three articles which, it seems to me, remain to this day the most brilli-
ant close readings of the essay are: Hélène Cixous, “Fiction and its
Phantoms”; Sarah Kofman, “The Double is/and the Devil”; and Neil
Hertz, “Freud and the Sandman” (in The End of the Line), all of which were
first published between  and . More recent noteworthy interpre-
tations include: Lis Møller, chapter five of The Freudian Reading ( );
Ruth Ginsburg’s feminist analysis entitled “A Primal Scene of Reading”
(); and Robin Lydenberg’s “Freud’s Uncanny Narratives” (),
which has the singular merit of combining the best features of a re-
view article of recent Freud criticism with genuine critical insights of her
own.
 Jacques Derrida has demonstrated that Freud gives a special “turn” to the
very notion of speculation in the peculiar narrative fits and starts of Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, and sees in the narrativizing of speculation a movement
of excess which undermines analytical discourse as such (see “Spéculer – sur
‘Freud,’ ” in La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà, –).
 References are to Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edi-
tion of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey,
vol. XVII (London: The Hogarth Press, ),  –, abbreviated TU;
and “Das Unheimliche,” in Gesammelte Werke Chronologisch Geordnet, vol. XII
(London: Imago, ), –, abbreviated DU.
 On the “essence of literature” as a certain kind of falling, see my reading of
Blanchot reading Camus: “Vertiginous Storytelling: Camus’s La Chute,” in
Of Words and the World, chapter one.
 References are to “The Sandman,” in Tales of Hoffmann, trans. R. J.
Hollingdale (London: Penguin, ), –, abbreviated TS; and “Der
Sandmann,” in Nachtstücke. Werke –, vol. III of E. T. A. Hoffmann:
Sämtliche Werke, ed. H. Steinecke and G. Allroggen (Frankfurt am Main:
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, ),  –, abbreviated DS.
 Notes to pages – 
 On this point, see Peter Brooks’s reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in
his essay “Freud’s Masterplot.” Brooks writes: “Narrative always makes the
implicit claim to be in a state of repetition, as a going over again of a ground
already covered. . . . This claim to an act of repetition – ‘I sing of,’ ‘I tell
of ’ – appears to be initiatory of narrative. It is equally initiatory of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle: it is the first problem and clue that Freud confronts” ().
 For an incisive feminist interpretation of the contrasting versions of the
Sandman story provided by the mother and the servant woman, and for
commentary on the latter’s marginal or liminal role in the family, see Ruth
Ginsburg’s “A Primal Scene of Reading,”  –.
 For the reader of nineteenth-century American literature, the fortuitous
physical arrangement pictured here – Nathaniel, as if by magic, transported
to a place directly opposite the window of a beautiful but artificial creature –
calls to mind a similar situation in Nathaniel (no comment) Hawthorne’s
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” (), where the young protagonist, Giovanni,
finds a room which overlooks the poisonous garden and from which he
can spy on Beatrice. Like Spalanzani, Rappaccini plays with the laws of
nature and produces unnatural offspring; and like Hoffmann’s Nathaniel,
Giovanni falls in love with a young woman who is not quite real (in the
case of Hawthorne’s imaginary universe, no longer real ). An uncanny atmo-
sphere reigns throughout “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and although the word
“uncanny” does not appear in the text, an English rendition of the French
translation of “das Unheimliche” – l’inquiétante étrangeté – does appear, in an
important expository section of the story. This passage through French is
perhaps not so unusual in a text supposedly penned by a certain Monsieur
de l’Aubépine (“aubépine,” in French, meaning “hawthorn”):
It was strangely frightful to the young man’s [Giovanni’s] imagination, to see this air of
insecurity in a person [ Beatrice] cultivating a garden, that most simple and innocent
of human toils, and which had been alike the joy and labor of the unfallen parents
of the race. Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world? – and this man
[ Rappaccini ], with such a perception of harm in what his own hands caused to
grow, was he the Adam? (; my emphasis).
Hawthorne’s commentary on the scientist’s garden, which turns out to
be a chemically produced act of hubris and a diabolical inversion of Eden,
reminds one, inevitably, of the perils of alchemy in “The Sandman.”
 For readers of German Romantic literature, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s emphasis on
Olympia’s mechanical perfection in dancing is bound to evoke Heinrich von
Kleist’s suggestive and playful essay entitled “Über das Marionettentheater”
(). In Kleist’s rapidly traced cosmic vision, postlapsarian reflective
man finds himself in an awkward middle position between the “grace”
(Grazie or Anmut) of the puppet, on the one hand, and of godlike perfec-
tion, on the other. Like Hoffmann, Kleist bases his argument on a reversal
of hierarchies: we readers of Kleist, like the inhabitants of post-Olympia
 Notes to pages –
society in “Der Sandmann,” are obliged to view human dancing as a poor,
insufficient and unachieved mimesis of the puppet’s or automaton’s geomet-
rically precise movements. For a clear overview of the position of Kleist’s
essay within German literary history, and for a discussion of the notion of
Anmut in Kleist, Goethe, and Schiller, see Benno von Wiese, “Das verlorene
und wieder zu findende Paradies: Eine Studie über den Begriff der Anmut
bei Goethe, Kleist, und Schiller,” in Walter Müller-Seidel, ed., Kleists Aufsatz
über das Marionettentheater, –. I discuss Schiller’s use of the term Anmut
in chapter five.
 The question of victory and defeat in  was not an abstract one. As
an American citizen, Putnam had been, after all, on the winning side of
World War I, whereas Tausk had actively participated in a losing effort. The
concrete difficulty for Freud as leader of an international intellectual move-
ment was to re-establish the forum for dialogue that had bridged national
boundaries prior to . It was of primordial importance that the unfor-
tunate events of – should not continue to separate an Ernest Jones
from a Karl Abraham or a Sandor Ferenczi in the war’s aftermath. Like
his concerned contemporaries, Freud witnessed the redrawing of national
boundaries with concern. In a letter dated  March , he wrote to
Ferenczi: “Today we learn that we are not permitted to join Germany, but
must yield up South Tyrol. To be sure, I’m not a patriot, but it is painful
to think that pretty much the whole world will be foreign territory” (quoted
by Peter Gay in Freud: A Life for Our Time, ; my emphasis). The prob-
lem of setting out upon foreign soil which structures “Das Unheimliche”
thus also occupies Freud’s thoughts as he considers a newly defined map of
German-speaking lands.
 Roazen, Brother Animal, ; quoted in Hertz, “Freud and the Sandman,”
–.
 This and further citations from Oedipus the King are from David Grene’s
translation, in vol. II of the Centennial Edition of The Complete Greek Tragedies
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), –.
 In his biography of Freud, Peter Gay writes: “In later life, Freud liked to
call his daughter Anna his Antigone. It will not do to press this affectionate
name too far: Freud was an educated European speaking to other educated
Europeans and had raided Sophocles in search of a loving comparison.
But the meanings of ‘Antigone’ are too rich to be wholly set aside. The
name underscored Freud’s identification with Oedipus, the bold discoverer
of mankind’s secrets, the eponymous hero of the ‘nuclear complex,’ the killer
of his father and the lover of his mother” (Freud: A Life for Our Time, ).
Underneath the “affectionate name” of Antigone is the cruel fate of a woman
who, through her father’s sin, is expelled from society and branded as the
unnatural, incestuous result of a criminal bond. One might be tempted to
wonder (even if this be the kind of pure speculation which, according to Peter
Gay, “will not do”) if Freud felt some guilt about his psychoanalytical work
having so absorbed his faithful daughter that the “quiet domestic happiness”
 Notes to pages – 
enjoyed by Clara at the conclusion of “The Sandman” () was denied her.
In this sense, Anna, like Olympia or Rappaccini’s daughter, becomes the
artificial progeny of scientific hubris who looks, but is not, fully alive.

 AESTHETIC REDEMPTION: THE THYRSUS IN NIETZSCHE,

BAUDELAIRE, AND WAGNER

 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley and Peacock, ‘A Defence of

Poetry’ and ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’, –.
 I do not have the space to elaborate this large theme within the confines
of this book. For a development on the poetic hommage in French Symbolist
poetry, see my article “A Reading of Mallarmé’s ‘Hommage’ (A Richard
Wagner).”
 This is no.  of the Lyceum aphorisms, quoted in Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue
on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, . For a discussion of the status of the literary
“fragment” in Schlegel, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy,
eds., L’Absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand, –.
 Charles Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris,” Oeuvres complètes,
II,  (my translation).
 Wagner is central to this chapter not “in himself,” but as figure, insofar as he
informs the writings of Nietzsche and Baudelaire. On the very question of
Wagner as figure, see the incisive study of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica
ficta: Figures de Wagner. In this work, Lacoue-Labarthe concentrates on four
“scenes” – readings of Wagner by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Heidegger, and
Adorno.
 For a discussion of Nietzsche’s views concerning a possible “music of the
future,” see Elliott Zuckerman, “Nietzsche and Music: The Birth of Tragedy
and Nietzsche Contra Wagner.” Zuckerman’s conclusion reads as follows: “But
if Nietzsche imagined the music of the future he imagined it, I think, as he
imagined the music of the past, with tonality in his ears. As an historian,
he failed to hear the ancient Dionysian as radically different from the great
music of modern times. And as a prophet, he failed to prophesy the advent of
a musical language that will be as radically different from tonality as tonality
was from the music it replaced” ().
 In his informative article on the stages of Nietzsche’s relation to Wagner,
“Nietzsche und Wagner: Stationen einer Beziehung,” Peter Wapnewski cites
one of the last letters Nietzsche wrote to Carl Fuchs, just seven days before
the onset of madness, as evidence of the philosopher’s ambivalent attitude
toward Wagner’s music: “You cannot get around Tristan: it is a capital work
and exerts a power of fascination that is without equal, not only in music, but
in all the arts.” Later in the same letter, Nietzsche admits that, in the opening
section of The Case of Wagner, he alluded to Bizet only as “ironical antithesis”
to Wagner: “What I said about Bizet should not be taken seriously” (quoted
by Wapnewski, ; my translation).
 Notes to pages –
 Quoted by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in the preface to his Musica Ficta:
Figures of Wagner, xvi.
 References are to “The Birth of Tragedy” and “The Genealogy of Morals,” trans.
Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, ), abbreviated BT; and
to Die Geburt der Tragödie: Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–I V, vol. I of the Kritische
Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: dtv/de
Gruyter, ), abbreviated GT.
 Nietzsche’s association of Dionysos with redemption has a mythical back-
ground: the story of the god’s descent into Hades to release his mother,
Semele, from the realm of the Shades. This story is alluded to in Hölderlin’s
magnificent poem “Brot und Wein,” where Dionysos is further associ-
ated with the Erlöser of modern man, Jesus Christ. The structure of “Brot
und Wein” is that of a movement from west (the Abendland, in particu-
lar the culturally reawakened Germany) to the east (the Morgenland, the
Orient, the source of culture) and back to the west again. The Festzug of
Dionysos is invoked in the context of this geographical symbolism. Thomas
Mann also alludes to the Dionysian procession from east to west in the
itinerary of the plague that progresses in that direction in Death in Venice, and
Aschenbach’s most fearsome dream is depicted as an irruption of Bacchic
rites into the increasingly threatened rational calm of the artist’s well-ordered
universe.
 For a detailed description of Nietzsche’s eight-day “flight” from Bayreuth
in August , see Peter Wapnewski, “Nietzsche und Wagner: Stationen
einer Beziehung,” – .
 Giorgio Colli, “Nachwort” to “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” Die Geburt
der Tragödie, Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–I V, Nachgelassene Schriften –,
–. In the same vein, Peter Wapnewski describes Richard Wagner in
Bayreuth as a collage or a palimpsest (“Nietzsche und Wagner: Stationen
einer Beziehung,” –).
 Walter Kaufmann, “Editor’s Preface” to Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable
Nietzsche, .
 Nietzsche Contra Wagner, in The Portable Nietzsche, .
 The original German texts of Nietzsche Contra Wagner, The Case of Wagner,
Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist are quoted from vol. VI of the Kritische
Studienausgabe ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: dtv/de
Gruyter, ).
 For another example of this theme, see section  of The Antichrist: “The
concept of guilt and punishment, the whole ‘moral world order’ was in-
vented against science, against the emancipation of man from the priest . . .
The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrine of ‘grace,’ of
‘redemption,’ of ‘forgiveness’ – lies through and through, and without any
psychological reality” (The Portable Nietzsche, ).
 Baudelaire’s evolution from a Romantic aesthetic of correspondances to the
modernity of the uncanny cityscapes depicted in both the “Tableaux
parisiens” and Le Spleen de Paris is not only to be understood in terms of
an increased poetic self-reflectiveness, but also as a turn away from lyricism
 Notes to pages – 
conceived of as the internalized domain of a subjective consciousness. This
point has been made both by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in Musica ficta:
Figures of Wagner and by Barbara Johnson in her study of Baudelaire’s prose
poetry entitled Défigurations du langage poétique: la seconde révolution baudelairienne.
 “Le Cygne” is one of Baudelaire’s most discussed poems. During the past
quarter-century, under the influence of Structuralism and a Formalist aes-
thetic in general, the poem has often been read in symbolic terms – “le cygne”
being, essentially, “le signe.” This kind of reading has been challenged by
Richard Terdiman in Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. In a powerful
reading that combines philological inventiveness with a thorough examina-
tion of the poem’s historical context, Terdiman sets out to prove “that the
relationship between the experience of dispossession ‘Le Cygne’ thematizes
and the poem’s reflection on the sign was intensely determined by Second
Empire history” ().
 Both Richard Klein (“Straight Lines and Arabesques: Metaphors
of Metaphor”) and Barbara Johnson (Défigurations du langage poétique)
read “Le Thyrse” in allegorical terms, as a poem about poetry, a
figuration of the figural. An interesting counter-reading to those proposed
by Klein and Johnson is that of Edward Kaplan (Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The
Esthetic, The Ethical, and the Religious in “The Parisian Prowler” ), who finds in “Le
Thyrse” a demystification of “the tyranny of solipsistic imagination” ().
In a general sense, Kaplan’s interpretation of the prose poems can be seen
as a questioning of Johnson’s strong emphasis on literary self-reflectiveness
(to the exclusion of ethical and religious considerations).
 I refer here to Edward K. Kaplan’s translation, The Parisian Prowler: Le Spleen
de Paris/Petits poèmes en prose by Charles Baudelaire, . I agree with Kaplan (who
places the letter to Houssaye at the end of the sequence, in an appendix) that
this convoluted dedication is less important theoretically than “Le Thyrse,”
and that Baudelaire’s ambivalence toward an editor who both helped him
into print and also wrote some very mediocre poetry makes of the letter a
rather disingenuous exercise in false praise, certainly less centered on poetic
theory or poetic writing than the poem to Liszt.
 The only recent exception is that of Edward Kaplan, whose aforementioned
Baudelaire’s Prose Poems analyzes each of the works in sequence, with an eye
toward Baudelaire’s progression from solipsism toward the ethics of com-
munity.
 Charles Baudelaire, “Le Thyrse,” Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Claude Pichois
(Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, ), –; and “The Thyrsus,” trans.
Edward Kaplan in The Parisian Prowler: ‘Le Spleen de Paris/Petits poèmes en
prose’ by Charles Baudelaire, (Athens and London: The University of Georgia
Press, ), –.
 This and the next paragraph are Kaplan’s creation (editorial decision). In
the original French version of the poem, the second and final paragraph
(which is Kaplan’s fourth) begins with “Cher Liszt” (“Dear Liszt”).
 The three senses of the word amalgam given in Webster’s New Universal
Unabridged Dictionary are: “ . any metallic alloy of which mercury forms
 Notes to pages –
an essential constituent part; . a native compound of mercury and silver
found in fine crystals in mines; . a mixture of different things; combination;
blend” (). I have taken the figurative meaning of amalgame from Le Petit
Robert I, . The quotation used to illustrate this sense of the word in
Le Petit Robert is drawn from Victor Hugo: “L’amalgame et la superposi-
tion de toutes ces extravagances.” One notes an interesting link between
the literal sense of the word – a blend involving mercury – and the mer-
curial aspect of “extravagance.” It could be that Les Petits Poèmes en prose
are neither Apollonian nor Dionysian, but Mercurial (that is, of course,
hermetic).
 The citations in both German and English are taken from Richard Wagner,
Tannhäuser: Grand Romantic Opera in Three Acts by Richard Wagner (New York:
Rullman, ).
 On this point, see the subtle analysis of Margaret Miner, whose book
Resonant Gaps: Between Baudelaire and Wagner provides an overview of the
Baudelaire–Wagner relation through a minute, step-by-step interpretation
of “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris.” In her discussion of Tannhäuser’s
conclusion, Miner writes: “In the Tannhäuser legend, this prophetic blos-
soming of the papal staff most immediately figures the Christian hope of
redemption springing from Christ’s death on the barren wood of the cross.
In the context of Richard Wagner, however, the flowering staff also vividly
calls to mind Baudelaire’s famous description of a thyrsus in the prose poem
‘Le Thyrse.’ Like the pope’s ‘dried-up stick’ [ bâton desséché] bedecked
with foliage, Baudelaire’s thyrsus is also made up of a priest’s staff [ bâton
hiératique] around which ‘stems and flowers play and frolic with each other’.
The priest in ‘Le Thyrse’ is of course Dionysos rather than the pope, but the
prose poem and the opera text both explore the relations between spiritual
discipline and sensual abandon” ().
 For a listing of the various meanings of theoros and theorein, see Liddell and Scott’s
Greek-English Lexicon, Abridged Version (London: Oxford University Press),
.

 THE ‘‘ B E A U T I F U L S O U L ’’ : A L A I N - F O U R N I E R ’ S L E G R A N D
MEAULNES AND THE AESTHETICS OF ROMANTICISM

 I quote from the translation by H. T. Lowe-Porter, in ‘Death in Venice’ and

Seven Other Stories, . The original version of the passage is as follows: “Und
hat Form nicht zweierlei Gesicht? Ist sie nicht sittlich und unsittlich zu-
gleich, – sittlich als Ergebnis und Ausdruck der Zucht, unsittlich aber und
selbst widersittlich, sofern sie von Natur eine moralische Gleichgültigkeit
in sich schließt, ja wesentlich bestrebt ist, das Moralische unter ihr stolzes
und unumschränktes Szepter zu beugen?” (‘Der Tod in Venedig’ und Andere
Erzählungen, ).
 See especially Marie Maclean, Le Jeu suprême: Structure et thèmes dans ‘Le Grand
Meaulnes’, for an excellent study of the novel’s formal construction; Michel
Guiomar, Inconscient et imaginaire dans ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’, for an analysis of
 Notes to pages – 
the “unconscious” structures of the work; and, for an interpretation of
Le Grand Meaulnes as “quest novel,” Léon Cellier, ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ ou
l’initiation manquée.
 On this topic, see H.-A. Bouraoui, Structure intentionnelle du ‘Grand Meaulnes’:
vers le poème romancé. Bouraoui contends that Alain-Fournier is attempting, in
his own way, the same search for an aesthetics of the novel that characterizes
Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
 See the second half of Cellier’s ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ ou l’initiation manquée and
also Alain Buisine, Les Mauvaises Pensées du Grand Meaulnes, which I shall discuss
below.
 What the French call critique génétique has had major repercussions for the
editing of texts, from the medieval to the modern periods. Grosso modo, the
genetic critic questions and problematizes the notion of a “definitive” work,
demonstrating instead that all texts have a history. What could be called the
becoming-of-the-text, the devenir textuel, is the proper focus of study for the
genetic critic. For an introduction to the field of critique génétique one may
consult the series of essays edited by Louis Hay entitled La Naissance du texte
() and the synthetic study by Almuth Grésillon, Eléments de critique génétique
().
 Especially notable in this category are the  volume edited by Alain
Rivière, Jean-Georges Morgenthaler and Françoise Garcia entitled André
Lhote, Alain-Fournier, Jacques Rivière. La peinture, le coeur et l’esprit. Correspon-
dance inédite; and the  collection edited by Alain Rivière and Pierre de
Gaulmyn called Correspondance Jacques Rivière–Alain-Fournier.
 This entry from Gide’s Journal is cited by Daniel Leuwers in the introduction
to his edition of Le Grand Meaulnes (Paris: Livre de Poche, ), iii. All
translations of French texts are mine.
 In his correspondance with Jacques Rivière, Alain-Fournier often mentions
the names of these writers, and seems conscious of the difficulties he is
about to encounter in writing a novel that owes its existence to a certain
poetic dream-quality and also to the conventions of novelistic realism. The
following are two examples among many others cited in Herzfeld’s edition
of Le Grand Meaulnes:
Yes, but how can I write it, this novel? . . . In searching I have found three categories
of responses: There is Dickens. There are the brothers Goncourt. There is Laforgue.
()

For the moment, I would like to proceed from Laforgue, but in writing a novel. It’s
contradictory; but it would not be if one made of the characters of one’s life, of the
novel with its characters, dreams whose paths cross. . . . There are errors in dreams,
false starts, changes of direction, and all of that lives, moves, meets, disengages,
reverses itself. (; Alain-Fournier’s emphasis)

 Buisine’s book is on the way to offending many of the more pious specialists of
Alain-Fournier’s oeuvre, who do not appreciate certain incursions Buisine
makes into the private life of the author of Le Grand Meaulnes. In particu-
lar, the analogy established by Buisine between the novelistic love-triangle
 Notes to pages –
(Meaulnes – Yvonne – François) and the real triangle composed of Jacques
Rivière, Isabelle Fournier/Rivière, and Henri Fournier, in which the critic
suggests that François Seurel, like Fournier, was afraid of sexual relations
and was jealous of his friend and his friend’s wife – all of this cannot be
pleasing to the defenders of the faith. Honesty compels one to admit that
Buisine’s analogy is more than convincing, but his formula – “Justement, ma
soeur, elle a épousé mon meilleur copain” (“In fact, my sister, she married
my best buddy”) (Les Mauvaises Pensées du Grand Meaulnes, ) – because of
its schoolboy style, risks deterring some readers from a critical study which
deserves close scrutiny.
 References are to Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes, ed. Daniel Leuwers
(Paris: Livre de Poche, ); translations are my own.
 The term modernisme is less commonly used and has a less precise significance
in France than does the word Modernism in the Anglo-American tradition.
In the Anglophone literary context, Modernism is associated, on the one
hand, with a certain “religion of beauty” as theorized by Pater and Ruskin
(and “imported” into France by Robert de la Sizeranne and Marcel Proust),
and practiced, in quite diverse ways, by Eliot, Yeats, James, and the Joyce of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; and on the other hand, with experimental
formalism in general (Pound, the Joyce of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Vir-
ginia Woolf ). For a solid recent study of the first tendency, see Leon Chai,
Aestheticism: The Religion of Art in Post-Romantic Literature. For an excellent re-
visionist analysis of the aesthetic presuppositions of Modernism, see Perry
Meisel, The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after
. And for an interesting study of Modernism as experimental writing,
notably of writing as “interruption,” see Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept
of Modernism. Ross Chambers has argued for the existence of a specifically
French Modernism in his book Mélancolie et opposition: Les débuts du modernisme
en France.
 The roots of the notion of the “beautiful soul” go back much further than
the works of the German writers I shall be evoking here. As Robert E.
Norton has pointed out in his account of the metamorphoses of the
“beautiful soul” throughout the eighteenth century, the archaeological
substratum of this concept is the ancient Hellenic idea of kalokagathia –
the fusion of the beautiful and the good (see chapter three of Norton’s
The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century, –).
Norton’s book is an admirable historical synthesis which goes far
beyond the schematic account of the German incarnations of the
“beautiful soul” that must suffice for my own interpretive purposes as I
read Le Grand Meaulnes and the passage from Romanticism to Modernism. A
more complete presentation of the “beautiful soul” in its eighteenth-century
guises would have to include its most famous French-language representa-
tion – in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloı̈se ( ), where
the heroine and Saint Preux are designated explicitly as “de belles âmes.”
 Friedrich Schiller, “Über Anmut und Würde,” Theoretische Schriften, – ;
my translation.
 Notes to pages – 
 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ,
 –; “Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von
Briefen,” , –.
 For a complete description of the origins of this friendship, and for a detailed
report on the evolution of von Klettenberg’s religious beliefs in their cultural
and historical context, see the introduction by Heinrich Funck to the volume
Die Schöne Seele: Bekenntnisse, Schriften und Briefe der Susanna Katharina von
Klettenberg. Since the notion of the beautiful soul is based on a correspondence
between the exterior beauty of a person and his or her moral qualities, the
presence of Lavater behind the scenes in the “Confessions” is by no means a
matter of coincidence. It is Lavater who developed the very precise system of
physiognomy by which the examination of a person’s features (the size and
shape of the nose, ears, mouth, and, especially, the cranium) might open the
door to his or her character. Balzac made ample use of Lavater’s theories in
his La Comédie Humaine.
 On this point see Funck, Die Schöne Seele, .
 Shortly after the publication of Wilhelm Meister in , Goethe’s mother
writes to her son and observes: “You should be grateful that, after so many
years, you were able to erect such a monument to the memory of the unfor-
gettable Klettenberg; now she can still do good after her death” (Letter quo-
ted by Funck, Die Schöne Seele, ; my translation). In his letter of  August
 to Goethe, Schiller remarks that the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul”
should be understood “in its pure form” as “representation of beautiful
morality [Darstellung schöner Sittlichkeit] or of the becoming-human of saint-
liness, and in this sense, [as] the only authentic aesthetic religion” (cited by
Hannelore Schlaffer in her “Nachwort” to Johann Wilhelm von Goethe,
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, ; my translation).
 See on this point Eric Blackall’s judgment: “She [ The Beautiful Soul] knows
the attractions of the world but shrinks from them into a cultivation of the
moral self and that only. She tells her story entirely from the standpoint of
what she has persuaded herself to believe. It is a consistent – and, at times,
frantic – piece of self-justification: and the statement at the end that she
knows no pride is hardly convincing. Nevertheless it is an ordered world –
but ordered only because it omits what is disruptive of its calm” (Goethe and
the Novel, ).
In an interesting psychocritical study of the “Confessions,” Frederick
Beharriell writes: “Goethe’s intention from the first was to incorporate into
the autobiography his own subtle exposé of the psychological roots of reli-
giosity. In addition to the surface meaning, the perceptive reader was to find
also a materialistic, psychological attack on, and explaining away of what
Goethe had come to regard as fanaticism. And this was to be done through
the words of the unsuspecting subject herself . . . Goethe seems, clearly, to be
saying that this Beautiful Soul’s pietism is a form of sexual neurosis, a sub-
limation, as Freud would later have said, of neurotically suppressed sexual
energy” (“The Hidden Meanings of Goethe’s ‘Bekenntnisse einer schönen
Seele,’ ”  , ).
 Notes to pages –
 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, ; Wilhelm
Meisters Lehrjahre, .
 On the issue of Novalis as “target” of Hegel’s reflections, see the notes of
Jean Hyppolite in his French translation La Phénoménologie de l’Esprit, vol.
II, –, as well as his detailed commentary on the paragraph on the
“beautiful soul” in Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Spirit,’ –;
and Charles Taylor, Hegel, –.
 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, , ; Phänomenologie des Geistes, ,
.
 Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Spirit,’ .
 It goes without saying that the names of Schiller, Goethe, and Hegel rep-
resent only one “branch” of this reflection on and about Romanticism. As
Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have demonstrated in their
magisterial presentation of the first German Romanticism, that of the broth-
ers Schlegel and the Athenaeum, the dialectic of “creation” and of “chemical”
reflection which inhabits Romanticism at its origins has produced what we
call literary theory today (see L’Absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du roman-
tisme allemand ).
 Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé, vol. IV of A la recherche du temps perdu, .
 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, , .

 PROUST AND KAFKA: UNCANNY NARRATIVE OPENINGS

 As will become apparent later in this chapter, the threshold-moments in

Proust and Kafka combine an elision or abolition of chronological time
with the creation of a fictional topography. With the beginning of narrative
temporality, there is spatial differentiation and definition. For a discussion of
the time–space continuum throughout the history of the novel, see Bakhtin’s
analysis of the chronotope, defined as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal
and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (“Forms
of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” ). My study of the opening of
narrative space in Proust and Kafka involves an examination of the threshold
chronotope, which “is connected with the breaking point of a life, the moment
of crisis, the decision that changes a life (or the indecisiveness that fails to
change a life, the fear to step over the threshold)” (ibid., ).
 Painter’s biography, published in two volumes in  and , remains an
excellent study of Proust’s life. Specialists of Proust generally agree, however,
that this account has now been superseded by Jean-Yves Tadié’s Marcel Proust:
biographie (), which is both less speculative than Painter’s study and richer
in primary documentation.
 For a close reading of “Das Urteil” which addresses the issue of the story’s
polyvalent significance (its “undecidability” and “abyss of meaning”), see
the second chapter of Stanley Corngold’s Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form,
entitled “The Hermeneutic of ‘The Judgment’ ” (–). Corngold’s book
is important not only for its imaginative readings of individual Kafka
 Notes to pages – 
texts, but also for its contextualization of Kafka’s writing within literary
history.
 The book Figures III () is composed of two distinct parts. The first con-
tains three essays that are related to each other only in a very loose thematic
way, entitled “Poétique et histoire” (–), “La Rhétorique restreinte”
( –), and “Métonymie chez Proust” ( –). The second part, “Discours
du récit” (–), is a self-contained expository development on narrative
which was translated into English by Jane E. Lewin in  as Narrative
Discourse: An Essay in Method, and soon became one of the foundational texts
of the field of narratology. The treatise provoked so much commentary that
Genette, in , published Nouveau discours du récit (English translation: Nar-
rative Discourse Revisited, ) as a rejoinder to his critics and as a refinement
of his theoretical terminology.
 Genette’s treatment of the polar opposition between the rhetorical figures of
metaphor and metonymy owes a great deal to Roman Jakobson’s ground-
breaking article “Deux aspects du langage et deux types d’aphasies.”
 This is the somewhat inflated term used on the back cover of Figures III to
advertise the book. Genette is much more modest, and also very conscious
of the dangers of teminological inflation, in his excellent cautionary “Après-
Propos” (–).
 In his “Letter on Humanism” (), Heidegger reiterates in shortened
and somewhat elliptical form what he had expressed in Sein und Zeit (),
namely, that in a philosophical search for the pure experience of Being, one
must free oneself from the utilitarian mode of thought as techné – “a process of
reflection in service to doing and making” (). Once philosophy becomes
a mere means to the end of practical living or acting, speech itself falls under
the technological imperative, which Heidegger describes as “the dictatorship
of the public realm” (). I am suggesting here that Genette’s practical
use of the Recherche as exemplification/illustration of narrative laws, despite
its considerable intrinsic merit, cannot retain the analytical nearness to the
source of Proustian rhetorical complexity that is achieved in “Métonymie
chez Proust.”
 References are to Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and
Terence Kilmartin,  vols. (New York: Random House,  ), abbreviated
RTP ; and A la recherche du temps perdu,  vols. (Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, –
), abbreviated ALR.
 For an examination of the Venice episode in the light of its avant-textes in
Contre Sainte-Beuve and Jean Santeuil, see my article “Proust’s ‘Venice’: The
Reinscription of Textual Sources.”
 I am referring here to Proust’s brilliant stylistic study of Flaubert’s revolu-
tionary use of time (narrative temporality), “A Propos du ‘style’ de Flaubert.”
Proust wrote his essay as a polite but firm polemical rejoinder to Albert
Thibaudet, who had declared, in his November  NRF article “Une
querelle littéraire sur le style de Flaubert,” that Flaubert was a poor stylist
and, therefore, not a great writer: “Flaubert n’est pas un grand écrivain
 Notes to pages  –
de race . . . la pleine maı̂trise verbale ne lui était pas donnée dans sa nature
même” (“Flaubert is not a great ‘born writer’ . . . he did not possess complete
verbal mastery in its essence”) (quoted in Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve,
, note ).
 Proust comments on this poem in “Sainte-Beuve et Baudelaire.” The author
of the Recherche was an admirer of Baudelaire’s poetic depiction of cruelty,
which he attempted to justify to his mother on purely aesthetic grounds in
the imaginary dialogue of Contre Sainte-Beuve: “I understand that you only
partially admire Baudelaire. You found in his letters, as in those of Stendhal,
cruel remarks about his family. And he is cruel in his poetry, cruel with infinite
sensitivity. His harshness is the more astonishing in that one senses that he
felt acutely and deeply the sufferings he mocks with such nonchalance” (;
my translation and emphasis).
 “Journées de pèlerinage” was first published in the Mercure de France, April
. Proust combined it with another essay, entitled “John Ruskin” (Gazette
des Beaux-Arts [La Chronique des Arts et de la Curiosité ], April–August ) to
form the bulk of the translator’s preface to La Bible d’Amiens. For critical
assessments of the essays “Journées de pèlerinage” and “John Ruskin,” see
the first chapter of Walter Kasell’s book Marcel Proust and the Strategy of Reading,
entitled “The Pilgrimage: Proust Reads Ruskin” (–); Richard Macksey,
“Proust on the Margins of Ruskin,” and his excellent critical introduction to
the volume Marcel Proust On Reading Ruskin; and the third chapter of my The
Reading of Proust, entitled “Proust Reads Ruskin” ( –).
 See Proust’s commentary on Ruskin’s thematic or “polyphonic” use of the
word Sesame at the beginning of the translator’s notes to Sésame et les lys. Proust
found as many as seven levels of meaning in the one word – an interesting
(possible) foreshadowing of Vinteuil’s Septet and the seven volumes of the
Recherche.
 No traces of the Phoenician colony of Baalbek remain today, but tourists
who have explored the archaeological riches of the Middle East know that
the Roman ruins of Baalbek are among the most impressive in the area,
notably the temples to Jupiter and Bacchus.
 The Venice section of Albertine disparue is everywhere tinged with the col-
ors of The Stones of Venice ( –), Ruskin’s powerful apocalyptic allegory
of artistic and civic decline. But whereas Ruskin was concerned with de-
picting the public pride and ruin of the city, Proust’s Venice is the site of
the protagonist’s private encounter with the retroactively revealed truth of
Albertine’s wayward existence. Venice is the third and final stage of Marcel’s
forgetting of Albertine, and the first step toward his discovery of an artistic
vocation.
 “The Uncanny,” . As we saw in chapter three, the word “uncanny”
translates the German “unheimlich,” which is linked etymologically to words
such as Geheimnis (secret), Heim (home) and Heimat (native-land). Thus the
uncanny – the exotic, that which inspires fear or repulsion – is connected,
through language, to that which is secretive, private, homelike.
 Notes to pages – 
 My translation. This phrase, and the longer sentence that surrounds it, are,
curiously, left out of the  Moncrieff-Kilmartin translation, even though
the sentence in its entirety is to be found in the  Pléiade edition of the
Recherche (III, ).
 Much of the theological criticism derives from the purported influence of
Kierkegaard on Kafka. The first (and still in some ways most powerful,
though debatable) assessment of the religious themes in Kafka’s writings
and of the turn toward religious thinkers in the author’s later years can be
found in Max Brod’s Biography, chapter six. For a detailed textual study of
“messianism” in The Castle, see W. G. Sebald. On existential/philosphical
questions, see the works listed in the bibliography by Douglas Angus,
Maurice Friedman, Judith Ryan, and Walter Sokel (“The Programme of
K’s Court”).
For English-speaking readers of Kafka, the best overview of the com-
plex Marxist debate on Kafka is contained in the collection of critical
essays edited by Kenneth Hughes, Franz Kafka: An Anthology of Marxist Crit-
icism. Readers with an antiquarian interest in politically motivated con-
textualizations of Kafka’s writings will wish to consult Hughes’s account
of the Kafka conference held in Liblice (near Prague) in , entitled
“The Marxist Debate.” See also Klaus Hermsdorf on the literary recep-
tion of Kafka in the erstwhile GDR; and Roger Garaudy on Kafka’s
“alienation.”
Beginning in the late seventies, one can find creative and revealing psy-
chocritical readings, including those by Charles Bernheimer (a structural
and psychoanalytical juxtaposition of Flaubert and Kafka); Hartmut Böhme
(on Kafka’s “narcissism”); Margot Norris (“Sadism and Masochism in Two
Kafka Stories”); Herman Rapaport (on the “relays of desire” in Kafka); and
Walter Sokel (“Freud and the Magic of Kafka’s Writing”).
More recently, self-referential interpretations have grown by leaps and
bounds, due to the influence of contemporary French critical thought, es-
pecially the writings of Lacan and Derrida. Notable readings of this sort
include those by Marjanne Goozé, John Kopper, Henry Sussman, and
Margot Norris (Beasts of the Modern Imagination).
 It is a critical commonplace that Kafka’s linguistic and cultural alienation
affected, or even “produced” his sober, unadorned prose style. For an espe-
cially cogent analysis of Kafka’s language as “minor literature,” or literature
of aterritorial intensification, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, chap-
ter three of Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. For an assessment of the way
in which Kafka treats the speech patterns of his fictional characters, see
Marthe Robert, The Old and the New, especially the chapter entitled “Momus
and Mockery.”
 I quote from the following: The Diaries of Franz Kafka: –, trans.
Joseph Kresh (New York: Schocken, ), abbreviated D; and Franz Kafka,
Tagebücher, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller and Malcolm Pasley
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, ), abbreviated T.
 Notes to pages –
 The Letter was not only undelivered, but, because of its brutal frankness
and accusatory tone, also undeliverable. It is intriguing to imagine how
Hermann Kafka might have responded, had he received his son’s message.
Nadine Gordimer (whose fictional universe is more often South Africa than
Central Europe) has attempted to recreate just such a response, in her ex-
cellent parody entitled “Letter from His Father.” Although Gordimer lends
Hermann Kafka a rather stiff, somewhat “literary” style, perhaps more in
keeping with some of his son’s fictional creations than with what is known
of the Prague shopkeeper’s expressiveness, the father’s “answer” is an elo-
quent, brilliantly ironical rejoinder to the son’s rather devious rhetoric of
lamentation/self-justification.
 References are to Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father (New York: Schocken
Bilingual Edition, ), for the English translation (abbreviated L); and
Brief an den Vater, ed. Joachim Unseld (Fischer, Facsimile Edition, ), for
the German text (abbreviated B). The facsimile edition is interesting not
only for its clear photographic reproduction of the letter in its original form
(in which one notices, among other things, with what obvious fluidity the
Letter was written – it contains very few corrections or false starts), but also
for Joachim Unseld’s informative “Nachwort” (–).
 In pursuing the dual meaning of the word Schloß, I treat it as an exemplum
of what Freud (following Karl Abel) called the “antithetical sense of primal
words.” For a good general discussion of Kafka’s “primal words” and the
connection to Freud’s notion of psychological “ambivalence,” see Marthe
Robert, As Lonely as Franz Kafka, –.
 References are to Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir
(Schocken, ) (abbreviated C ); and to the paperback edition of Das Schloß
published by Fischer in  (abbreviated S). The  edition, which is
described on the title-page as “in der Fassung der Handschrift,” is based
upon the critical edition of Das Schloß established in  by Malcolm Pasley
(also published by Fischer).
 Marjanne Goozé interprets allegorically (i.e., in the mode of textual self-
reflection) Amalia’s refusal to read: “The text, through the employment of
subjunctive mood and extensive narrative layers, does not permit one to
grasp the text as K. does Klamm’s letters. If one attempts to interpret as K.,
one gets just as lost and confused as he. Kafka’s text demands that the
reader, like Amalia, actively question interpretation and even the form of the
text itself ” (“Texts, Textuality, and Silence in Franz Kafka’s Das Schloß,”
).
 Das Schloß is the story of what one might call the absent presence of the scribal
law: writing, in the form of messages, delivered and undelivered, is infinite
in its extension but impossible to localize, impossible for the land-surveyor
to map. Kafka presents us with a quite different scenario in his short story
“In der Strafkolonie” [“In the Penal Colony”], where writing appears with
painful precision as an inscription on the body. Here, writing is again part
 Notes to pages – 
of the Law, but in this case we readers witness the “application” of the Law
as writing in the form of a mad, mechanical cruelty.

 TEXTUALIZING IMMORALISM: CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS

A N D G I D E ’ S L’I M M O R A L I S T E

 I refer to André Gide’s use of the term récit. In a diary entry of  July ,
while retroactively examining the not-so-apparent affinities that relate the
sulfurous L’Immoraliste to the much more pious La Porte étroite () and to
the playful tone of Les Caves du Vatican (), Gide distinguishes between
Sotie (originally a medieval allegorical/satirical farce; in Gide’s use of the
term, a literary burlesque), récit (short narrative), and roman (novel in the
classical sense): “Why do I call this book [Les Caves] Sotie? Why have I called
the three preceding ones récits? To establish with clarity that these are not
novels. Which explains why I concluded my prefaces with the designations
Soties, récits. Until now I have only written ironical [Gide’s emphasis] or crit-
ical books” ( Journal I, ; my translation). Ironical distance coupled with
conciseness of narrative design characterize all of Gide’s récits. In both Heart
of Darkness and L’Immoraliste critical or ironical distance is maintained by a
complex set of narrative frames – as we shall see in due course.
 The first critical reading that emphasizes the role of dreams and the “uncon-
scious” in Heart of Darkness is that of Albert J. Guerard, in his still-influential
Conrad the Novelist of , in which Marlow’s quest-journey is described
as a “night journey into the unconscious” (). Subsequent interpreta-
tions of Heart of Darkness often owe more, consciously or “unconsciously,” to
Guerard than they are willing or able to acknowledge, including, perhaps
most notably, Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now.
 Until the mid-s most readings of both L’Immoraliste and Heart of Darkness
tended to stress the works’ general appeal and to downplay those textual
specificities which had a potential for controversy or embarrassment in the
referential spheres of morality and politics (in particular, Gide’s homosexu-
ality as it is transposed, masked, alluded to in L’Immoraliste; and Conrad’s
ethnocentrically expressed anti-colonialism tinged with what, according to
contemporary sensibility, would have to be called racism).
In her  study André Gide, l’Insaisissable Protée, Germaine Brée asserts
that homosexuality is only one of “numerous other repressed tendencies”
in Gide’s récit, and that its function in the text is an ancillary one – that
of “revealing Michel’s immoralism” (–). The Verneinung of the the-
matic centrality of homosexuality in L’Immoraliste is even stronger in Albert
Guerard’s André Gide ( ; rev. edn. ). More recently, the books of
Emily S. Apter (André Gide and the Codes of Homotextuality, ), Patrick
Pollard (André Gide: Homosexual Moralist,  ), and Michael Lucey (Gide’s
Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing, ) emphasize the detailed textual inscrip-
tion of homosexuality.
 Notes to pages –
In the case of Conrad, whereas Ian Watt, in his  masterwork
Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, states matter-of-factly that Heart of Darkness
is not primarily concerned with racial issues and “is not essentially a po-
litical work” (), in  Chinua Achebe condemns Conrad as a “thor-
oughgoing racist” (see “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness,” ). In Ross C Murfin’s  edition of Heart of Darkness, Peter J.
Rabinowitz warns against the ethical danger involved in over-emphasizing
the purported general significance of the novella at the expense of the speci-
ficity of racism and colonialism (see “Reader Response, Reader Responsi-
bility: Heart of Darkness and the Politics of Displacement,” ).
 The most extended discussion of Heart of Darkness as quest is that of Jacques
Darras, in Joseph Conrad and the West: Signs of Empire. In the case of L’Immoraliste,
Michel’s self-liberation occurs in North Africa after a long and difficult
voyage south, following a bout with illness which itself has initiatory value.
 Robert Kimbrough’s third edition in the Norton series contains documents
on the Congo in the heyday of King Leopold’s rule; correspondence by
Conrad on his experiences in the Congo; and several critical essays on Heart
of Darkness, including excerpts from Ian Watt’s Conrad in the Nineteenth Century
and Chinua Achebe’s polemic against Conrad’s “racism.” Ross Murfin’s
edition for the St. Martin’s Press/Bedford Books series includes five critical
essays, each of which is itself a model, an archetype of five different modern
approaches to literary analysis: reader-response criticism; feminist and gen-
der criticism; deconstruction; New Historicism; and cultural criticism. In
Murfin’s framework, the novice reader will not only discover an exemplary
text of literary Modernism, but also exemplary readings of that text.
 From the forward to L’Immoraliste, ed. Elaine Marks and Richard Tedeschi
(New York: Macmillan, ), iii.
 References are to Heart of Darkness, ed. Ross C Murfin, Case Studies in
Contemporary Criticism, nd edn. (Boston and New York: St. Martin’s
Press/Bedford Books, ), abbreviated HD.
 I borrow this term from Ian Watt, whose subtle discussion of the stylis-
tic “impressionism” and “symbolism” (the two notions should not be con-
fused, as Watt lucidly demonstrates) in Heart of Darkness is one among many
strong interpretive moments in the fourth chapter of Conrad in the Nineteenth
Century.
 The most important of these outbursts, which in German rhetorical termi-
nology is called aus der Rolle fallen, occurs toward the end of part one, when
Marlow addresses his interlocutors thus: “[Kurtz] was just a word to me. I
did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him?
Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to
tell you a dream” ().
 References are to the excellent English translation by Richard Howard, The
Immoralist (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, ), abbreviated I;
and L’Immoraliste, in Romans, Recits et Soties; Oeuvres lyriques (Paris: Gallimard-
Pléiade, ), abbreviated L’Imm.
 Notes to pages – 
 The best comparative studies of Gide and Conrad, which deal with both
biographical and textual issues, are those of Walter Putnam – both his book
L’Aventure littéraire de Joseph Conrad et d’André Gide and his article “Marlow,
Michel et le silence des sirènes,” which describes the theme of narrative
dissimulation common to both Heart of Darkness and L’Immoraliste.
 I refer here to the important study of Christopher L. Miller entitled Blank
Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French, and specifically to the chapter “The
Discoursing Heart: Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ ” (–). “Africanist dis-
course,” like the literature of Orientalism as described by Edward Said, is
that language which the European inserts into the blankness or darkness
of the exotic Other, that Other which is conceived to possess no speech of
its own. As Miller says in a pithy formula: “If Africanist discourse had not
existed prior to the advent of the modern novel, one would have had to
invent it. There is a ‘blank’ in the science of narrating that can be filled with
any figure one likes and that ‘Africa’ has been made to fill with its emptiness”
().
 Critical consensus has it that the Ménalque of L’Immoraliste is not to be
confused with the character of the same name in Les Nourritures terrestres
(), but is rather, at least in part, patterned on Oscar Wilde, whose
wit and outrageous behavior were both fascinating and appalling to
Gide. Ménalque’s life-philosophy is certainly based in part on the famous
Gidian notion of disponibilité, but it also has a Nietzschean flavor, notably in its
emphasis on active forgetting. In his long nocturnal conversation with Michel,
Ménalque states: “C’est du parfait oubli d’hier que je crée la nouvelleté
de chaque heure” (“I create each hour’s newness by forgetting yesterday
completely”) (L’Imm ; I  ).
 The passage on the tales of seamen and the cracked nut is one of those
textual moments that calls for analysis and has certainly received its share of
diverse interpretations. For Patrick Brantlinger, who shares Fredric Jameson’s
views on Conrad’s “impressionistic” style as aesthetic obfuscation (see
Jameson’s reading of Lord Jim in The Political Unconscious), the narrator’s appeal
to “halos” and “moonshine” is a way of blinding the reader to more essential
worldly (moral and political) concerns (“Heart of Darkness: Anti-Imperialism,
Racism, or Impressionism?”). Peter Brooks interprets the same passage in
narratological terms and finds that the analogy serves as a “warning that
the structure of ‘framed narration’ used in Heart of Darkness will not in this
instance give a neat pattern of nested boxes, bracketed core structures, nuts
within shells” (“An Unreadable Report,” ). Certainly the most extensive,
if not exhaustive, commentary on the cracked-nut analogy is that of J. Hillis
Miller, in his essay “Heart of Darkness Revisited,” to which I now turn.
 Maurice Blanchot, “Kafka et l’exigence de l’oeuvre,”  . For an analysis
of this expression in narratological terms, see my essay “Blanchot: Com-
mentary, Narration, Reference.”
 Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, –; Götzen-Dämmerung, in the
Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. VI, –.
 Notes to pages –
 Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, .
 See, for example, Germaine Brée, who in her  study finds that the frame
provided by the interlocutor-friends is without clear aesthetic grounds, and
who writes of “the awkwardness of a beginning novelist” who was unable
to “justify Michel’s long oral confession” (André Gide, l’Insaisissable Protée, ;
my translation). More recently, two essays bearing the influence of nar-
ratology convincingly demonstrate the complexity of narrative framing in
Gide’s récit, a complexity that in no way betrays the lack of narrative skill
of a “beginning novelist”: Nathaniel Wing’s “The Disruptions of Irony in
Gide’s L’Immoraliste” () and Vicki Mistacco’s “Reading The Immoralist:
The Relevance of Narrative Roles” ( ).
 Perhaps the most violently worded of these reactions by Gide’s close acquain-
tances was that of Francis Jammes. Following are excerpts from a letter that
would merit close psychocritical scrutiny, which I shall leave in the original
French for its full effect to be appreciated, and which, for fear of muting
its rhetoric of outrage, I shall not translate: “Ah! comme se fût écrié ton
Philoctète: ‘Je sens qu’autour de vous la nature est malade.’ La charmille
amoureuse y [dans ce roman] est un hôpital, le marié [ Michel] un aliéné
lamentable qui n’a même pas la force du vice, sadique et pédéraste en vain.
Et comme il est bien situé dans cet abominable pays Biskri où le soleil sem-
ble un lange d’enfant mort-né, un cartilage de veau qui a séjourné dans un
marécage! Ce livre . . . est un cri que l’on redoute d’entendre, le gémissement
larvé d’un vieillard dans une cave, le sanglot d’un Rousseau lugubre. Ce sont
de terribles limbes, ce n’est qu’un vagissement. Jamais ni la vie ni la mort
n’existèrent moins qu’ici” (Letter of Francis Jammes to André Gide dated June
, reprinted in the “Notice” to L’Immoraliste in André Gide, Romans, Récits
et Soties; Oeuvres lyriques, –).
 For a detailed reading of the geographical symbolism in L’Immoraliste, see
Paul A. Fortier, Décor et dualisme: ‘L’Immoraliste’ d’André Gide ().
 It is in passages such as this that one regrets the heavyhanded arrogance
of Gide the serious auteur. Stendhal also fantasized, repeatedly, about what
readers would think of him a century or two after his death, but did so with
the light touch of humor, and with the quizzical uncertainty of a man who
knew he could not predict future fame.
 See Emile Benveniste, “L’Homme dans le langage.” Nathaniel Wing makes
good use of Benveniste’s theoretical terminology in the article I have previ-
ously cited, “The Disruptions of Irony in Gide’s L’Immoraliste.” Wing sum-
marizes Benveniste’s contrastive definitions as follows: “Histoire . . . refer[s]
to the narrated ‘events’ situated by the narrator in the past and which con-
stitute the content of the story to be related; discours . . . refer[s] to the act of
narration in the fictional present” ().
 Just one page after Michel’s self-justificatory direct address to his listeners,
at the moment of our return to the inner frame of the histoire, the protag-
onist relates his buying-spree at a flower market on the Piazza di Spagna
in Rome. He fills the hotel room with a profusion of bouquets, hoping to
 Notes to pages – 
cheer up his wife, only to be frustrated when she breaks into tears and
says: “Those flowers – the scent makes me ill.” Michel’s reaction to his
wife’s physical frailty is to destroy the flowers, and to make the interesting
“mental note”: “If even this little bit of spring was too much for her! . . .”
(I ).
 I quote from the King James translation of the Bible (Cambridge University
Press, ), –.

 FISHING THE WATERS OF IMPERSONALITY: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

 Here and elsewhere in this chapter, I refer to The Diary of Virginia Woolf,
 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie (New York:
Harcourt Brace/Harvest Books, –), hereafter abbreviated DW.
 Virginia Woolf ’s lifelong fear of penetration and invasion most probably
began with one particular traumatic experience – the sexual assault upon her
by her half-brother, Gerald Duckworth – which she describes unflinchingly
at the beginning of her “Sketch of the Past” in :
There was a slab outside the dining room door for standing dishes upon. Once when
I was very small Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this, and as I sat there he began
to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes;
going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would
stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it
did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking
it – what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong,
since I still recall it. This seems to show that a feeling about certain parts of the body;
how they must not be touched; how it is wrong to allow them to be touched; must
be instinctive. (quoted in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, )
In the writing of the present chapter, I have frequently, and always with
profit, turned to Hermione Lee’s recent biography Virginia Woolf (New York:
Knopf, ), hereafter abbreviated VW.
 In the twenty-third chapter of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee writes percep-
tively of the importance of the act of reading for the author of To the Lighthouse:
“At the heart of the pleasure of reading is the delight in a free union, like
a very intimate conversation or an act of love. That longing for loss of self,
entry into an other, is one of the deepest plots of her books” (). Woolf ’s
own description of her reading of Proust emphasizes what might be called
the erotics of reading, and serves as an interesting Modernist anticipation of
Roland Barthes’s Le plaisir du texte:
Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence.
Oh, if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration
and saturation and intensification that he procures – theres [sic] something sexual in
it – that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that.
Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me; it becomes an obsession.
(cited in VW )
 Notes to pages –
Hermione Lee informs us that Woolf was reading Proust while writing To
the Lighthouse (VW  ). In a later development of this chapter, I shall discuss
Woolf ’s “scene of reading” and compare it to Proust’s own depiction of that
same primordial or primal scene.
 See the sixth chapter of Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women, in which Heilbrun
theorizes that Joyce, in his creation of the modern Daedalus, imitated the
actions of Theseus by “forgetting Ariadne,” whereas “Woolf ’s eyes turned,
albeit metaphorically, to Ariadne, and the life she might make outside of the
labyrinth-palace. While Joyce’s characters remained in the ancient labyrinth,
the world of the old cosmology, led more and more magically, with more
and more Daedalean skill and artistry, through the mazes and passages of
the old life, Woolf searched for Ariadne and, looking back through
Ariadne to her mother, for the passion of Pasiphae, a daughter of the sun,
who began, perhaps, a new cosmology subsequently lost in the triumph
of the patriarchal culture founded by Theseus after his return to Athens”
().
 Although To the Lighthouse is not as heavily dependent upon intertextual
sources as the works of Eliot or Joyce, nevertheless these literary-cultural
echoes provide the novel with a certain effect of depth, a broadening of scope
from the idyllic locale of the Isle of Skye. The by now very large corpus of
criticism on To the Lighthouse includes some excellent studies of these influ-
ences. On the mythic undertones of the novel, see Anne Golomb Hoffman,
“Demeter and Poseidon: Fusion and Distance in To the Lighthouse”; Carolyn
Heilbrun, chapters six (on Ariadne) and ten (on Demeter and Proserpine) of
Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women; and Deborah Guth, “Virginia Woolf: Myth
and To the Lighthouse.” The allusions to Shakespeare and Tennyson have been
amply commented upon by numerous critics, but the important intertextual
presence of William Cowper’s “The Castaway” (notably, the lines uttered
as a pessimistic mantra by Mr. Ramsay: “We perish each alone: / But I
beneath a rougher sea, / And whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he”) had been
only touched upon until the important detailed article of Roger D. Lund,
“‘We Perished Each Alone’: ‘The Castaway’ and To the Lighthouse.”
 For the most part, the intertextual presence of “The Fisherman and his
Wife” within To the Lighthouse is acknowledged in cursory fashion by critics,
without regard to the context in which the fairy tale arises within Woolf ’s
narrative. The consensus opinion – which, it seems to me, is convincing as
far as it goes – is that the Grimm story is important in that it underlines
Mrs. Ramsay’s highhandedness and manipulation of people – the funda-
mental characteristics of the never-satisfied and domineering Fisherman’s
Wife. On this point, see, for example, chapter three of Maria DiBattista’s
Virginia Woolf ’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon,  –. Although Hermione
Lee also finds that the Fisherman’s Wife anticipates Mrs. Ramsay in her will-
fulness, the biographer goes on to indicate that the folktale has polyvalent
significant potential, that it contains “fluid possibilities” and “is not meant
to serve as a definite analogy to the novel” (VW ).
 Notes to pages – 
 References throughout this chapter are to To the Lighthouse, with a foreword by
Eudora Welty (New York: Harcourt Brace/Harvest Books, ), hereafter
abbreviated TL.
 In the Grimm story, the turning of the water’s color toward the unsettling and
violent hues of purple and dark blue echoes, in a painterly form of pathetic
fallacy, the anger of God as it develops, with increasing ferocity, against a
woman who wishes to be His equal. There is a subtle repetition of this color-
motif in part two of To the Lighthouse, when the death and destruction of the
Great War are evoked. English citizens going down to the beach during this
time of distress for rest and introspection are reminded, by the passing of
the occasional warship, of the events taking place across the Channel. This
interrupted meditation occurs in the erasure of the sublime by the welling-
up of bloody waters:
There was the silent apparition of an ashen-coloured ship for instance, come, gone;
there was a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had
boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath. This intrusion into a scene calculated to stir the
most sublime reflections and lead to the most comfortable conclusions stayed their
pacing. It was difficult blandly to overlook them; to abolish their significance in the
landscape; to continue, as one walked by the sea, to marvel how beauty outside
mirrored beauty within. (–)

 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, . See my discussion of this

proposition in context, in chapter one.
 My remarks on the Grimm fairy tale will be based upon the text “Von dem
Fischer und seiner Frau” as translated from the Low German (Plattdeutsch)
by Uwe Johnson. The story is included in the volume Deutsche Märchen, ed.
Elisabeth Borchers (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, ), –. References
are to this edition, abbreviated F. English translations of the Grimm tale are
mine.
 This theme-and-variations technique based upon increasing size is not
unique to “The Fisherman and his Wife,” of course, but is part of the stock-
in-trade of fairy tales. See, for example, Hans Christian Andersen’s “The
Tinder Box,” in which the soldier searching for money must encounter three
dogs: the guardian of the copper coins, whose eyes are as big as teacups;
the guardian of the silver coins, whose eyes are as big as millwheels; and
the guardian of the gold coins, whose eyes are as big as round towers (“The
Tinder Box,” The Complete Andersen,  –).
 Even otherwise perceptive critics have fallen into this trap. Anne Golomb
Hoffman, for example, asserts that Mrs. Ramsay “has labored long in the
preparation” of the dinner (“Demeter and Poseidon,” ). For an analysis
of the class bias that penetrates Woolf ’s treatment of servants in her novel,
see Mary Lou Emery, “ ‘Robbed of Meaning’: The Work at the Center of
To the Lighthouse.”
 Woolf returns to the Neptune motif humorously in the final chapter of the
novel, when she compares Carmichael (who is pausing with Lily to observe
 Notes to pages –
the successful landing of the expedition at the Lighthouse) to the god of the
sea: “ ‘He [ Mr. Ramsay] has landed,’ she [Lily] said aloud. ‘It is finished.’
Then, surging up, puffing slightly, old Mr. Carmichael stood beside her,
looking like an old pagan god, shaggy, with weeds and the trident (it was
only a French novel) in his hand. He stood by her on the edge of the lawn,
swaying a little in his bulk and said, shading his eyes with his hand: ‘They
will have landed,’ and she felt she had been right. They had not needed to
speak” ().
 The image of fishing is not just a principal organizing image of To the Light-
house; it also occupies center-stage in A Room of One’s Own. Perhaps the most
striking use of the image occurs near the beginning of the essay, when Woolf
describes her first attempts at wrestling with the theme that has been pro-
posed to her – “women and fiction” – and which she will take such a long
time arriving at (the theme of “women and fiction,” properly speaking, is
the constantly deferred goal of Woolf ’s thought-expedition, her (and the
reader’s) longed-for Ithaca):
The collar I have spoken of, women and fiction, the need of coming to some conclu-
sion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my head to
the ground. To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed
with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire . . . There one might have
sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought – to call it by a prouder name than
it deserved – had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute,
hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and
sink it, until – you know the little tug – the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the
end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it
out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked;
the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow
fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. ()
 On this point, see the first chapter of my Of Words and the World: Referential
Anxiety in Contemporary French Fiction, and also the epilogue to the present
study.

EPILOGUE: NARRATIVE AND MUSIC IN KAFKA AND BLANCHOT:

THE ‘‘ S I N G I N G ’’ O F JOSEFINE

 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Aminadab, ou du fantastique considéré comme un langage”

(Situations I, –).
 For an excellent analysis of the five texts Blanchot explicitly designated as
récits, see Brian T. Fitch, Lire les récits de Maurice Blanchot. In the second chapter
of his book, Fitch discusses the distinction Blanchot makes between roman
and récit – a distinction I shall be concerned with later in this epilogue.
 Maurice Blanchot, “Kafka et l’exigence de l’oeuvre,” originally published in
 and included in De Kafka à Kafka, –; all translations from Blanchot
are my own. Michel Foucault makes reference to the “ruissellement du
 Notes to pages  –  
dehors éternel” in his essay “La penseé du dehors.” For an English translation
of this essay in conjunction with a translation of Blanchot’s Michel Foucault
tel que je l’imagine, see Foucault/Blanchot.
 For reasons of economy I am focusing uniquely on “Josefine” in this epilogue.
A more thorough examination of the multiple meanings of music for Kafka
in his later writings would have to take into account the convoluted story
written in  entitled “Forschungen eines Hundes” [“Investigations of a
Dog”]. In this tale, the canine narrator’s investigations come into being after
he witnesses a “musical” performance by seven dogs. The term “musical”
must be used hesitantly because it is not clear, to the narrator or his readers,
whether what is being performed takes place in the world of sound or in
the domain of silence: “They [the seven great musical artists] did not speak,
they did not sing, they remained generally silent, almost determinedly silent;
but from the empty air they conjured music” (“Sie redeten nicht, sie sangen
nicht, sie schwiegen im allgemeinen fast mit einer großen Verbissenheit, aber
aus dem leeren Raum zauberten sie die Musik empor”) (“Investigations,”
 ; “Forschungen,” ).
The narrator’s conditional mode of discourse – his continual hesitations,
within the story, between music-as-sound and music-as-silence – anticipate
similar rhetorical moves in “Josefine,” where the narrator cannot assert with
any certainty whether the mouse folk “sings” or “pipes,” or whether Josefine
can be considered a singer or not. In my view, “Forschungen” is something
like a long and undisciplined first draft of “Josefine.”
 Quotations from the original German are from “Josefine, die Sängerin oder
das Volk der Mäuse,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. , ed. Brod ( Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, ), –, abbreviated J.
 For translations of the text into English, I shall refer to the version by Willa
and Edwin Muir in The Complete Stories ( New York: Schocken,  ), –,
abbreviated JMF.
 Most early critical readings of “Josefine” tended to emphasize the opposi-
tional relationship between the heroine of the story and the mouse folk,
while leaving in the dark the complex rhetorical position of the narra-
tor. In recent years, this has changed. Thomas Vitzthum finds that “the
narrator consciously and skillfully [uses] language to establish his art, or
his artful irony, in opposition to Josefine’s naı̈ve singing” (“A Revolution
in Writing: The Overthrow of Epic Storytelling by Written Narrative in
Kafka’s Josefine, die Sängerin,” ). Both Deborah Harter and Christine
Lubkoll emphasize the crucial creative role of the narrator as historian of
his people. Harter argues that the narrator is self-consciously concerned
with his own craft as storyteller and that it is he who controls the des-
tiny of the protagonist (see “The Artist on Trial: Kafka and Josefine, ‘die
Sängerin’.”). According to Lubkoll, the male narrator attempts to “domesti-
cate” the musicality of Josefine and to discredit her talents through descrip-
tions of her “hysterical” mannerisms (“ ‘Dies ist Kein Pfeifen’: Musik und
 Notes to pages –
Negation in Franz Kafkas Erzählung Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der
Mäuse,” ).
 Although “Josefine” is not commented upon as much as many of Kafka’s
earlier works, this story has been the object of increased critical interest in
recent years. In my view the best close reading of the text is that of Margot
Norris, “Kafka’s ‘Josefine’: The Animal as the Negative Site of Narration,”
in Beasts of the Modern Imagination, –. Norris’s analysis is an excellent
demonstration of the way in which the narrative movement of “Josefine”
cancels itself out through the erasing of differences: “Narrative depends on
the ability to sustain differences, and as Josefine’s experience illustrates, it is
impossible to maintain differences among the mice folk. The narrator, like
Josefine, fails, and instead of being told, Josefine’s story becomes negatively
inscribed in this failure of the narration” ().
 On the alternation of pronoun forms, see Thomas Vitzthum: “Though
the narrator identifies himself as one of the mouse-folk, he often seems
much too outspoken, knowledgeable, and curious to be counted among
their ranks. In fact, his confusing use of pronouns shows him to be some-
times one of them, sometimes not . . . Whereas in most cases the narra-
tor does use ‘wir’ or ‘unser’ to describe his relation to the mouse-folk, he
often seems to stand outside of or above the mouse-folk’s tradition. He is the
subverter of both the tradition and Josefine in that the very act of his writ-
ing undermines Josefine’s position as Singer” (“A Revolution in Writing,”
 –).
 It is only shortly before his death that Kafka added the second half of the
title to his story. In his Franz Kafka: Eine Biographie, Max Brod reports Kafka’s
explanation of this addition in the following terms: “Solche Oder-Titel sind
zwar nicht sehr hübsch, aber hier hat es vielleicht besonderen Sinn. Es hat
etwas von einer Waage” (“Such ‘or-titles’ are certainly not very pretty, but
in this case there may be a special meaning. There is something of a balance
[or scales of justice] here”) (quoted in Christine Lubkoll, “ ‘Dies ist Kein
Pfeifen’,” ; my translation). There is an interesting development on the
juridical connotations of the image of the scales in Lubkoll’s article.
 Until now I have concentrated on narrative issues raised by “Josefine,” and
have (purposefully) not suggested who the protagonist and the mouse-folk
might “symbolize” or “stand for.” Given Kafka’s well-documented interest
in Judaism, Zionism, and the Hebrew language during the last six years
or so of his life, Robert Alter’s proposal to equate the mouse folk with the
Jewish people in its historical reality is no doubt one of the more convincing
symbolic options: “The mouse folk, leading as it does a constantly precari-
ous existence, often in need of consolation, collectively childish yet prema-
turely old, haunted by a tradition of singing (‘in the old days our people did
sing’) though fallen into an era of unmusicality, presents a whole series of
correspondences to the Jewish people in its Diaspora history. Because of the
analogy intimated between the real singing of the old days and the grandeur
 Notes to pages – 
of biblical Israel, the narrator’s exposure of the true nature of Josephine’s
singing is not just a questioning of the possibility of sublime art but also a
critique of the idea of transcendent language (Benjamin’s or the Kabbalah’s
notion of Hebrew)” (Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in
Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem, ).
 Proof of this abiding interest can be found in the volume De Kafka à Kafka,
which contains eleven essays by Blanchot on Kafka spanning a period of
twenty-five years.
 References are to “Le chant des sirènes,” Le Livre à venir (Paris: Folio “Essais,”
), –, abbreviated CS. Translations of Blanchot are mine.
 In fact, the narrative situation is more complicated than Blanchot’s rapid
description indicates. When Ulysses passes by the Sirens, what he does not
hear is the Sirens’ own narrative summary of the Trojan War, which they
profess to “know” in its entirety and in its essence:
We know all the pains that the Greeks and Trojans once endured
on the spreading plain of Troy when the Gods willed it so –
all that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all!
(The Odyssey . –).
Thus it would be more accurate to say that we move from “episode” (the
cryptic telling of the War in its fundamental meaning to us readers, but not
to Ulysses) to “ode” to “episode.” There is, within the Sirens’ episode in The
Odyssey, a mise en abyme of narrative itself which Blanchot does not initially
“hear” before he passes on toward his own allegory of narrative.
 References are to “La voix narrative, le ‘il,’ le neutre,’ in De Kafka à Kafka
(Paris: Gallimard “Idées,”  ),  –, abbreviated VN.
 Jacques Derrida, Parages, ; my translation.
 Given the thematic parameters of this epilogue, and for reasons of discursive
clarity, I have decided to focus on two of Blanchot’s theoretical writings as
they relate to Kafka’s “Josefine,” without reference to Blanchot’s own fic-
tional texts, those constructs of the voix narrative that defy the “optic mode”
of critical analysis. The reader who would like to “see” the narrativizing of
le neutre as radical exteriority might wish to read the passage in Au moment
voulu ( ) in which the narrating voice finds himself/itself projected to
the “outside of things.” This section begins on p.  with the observation
“je compris que je me trouvai là-bas, dans le froid léger, calme, nullement
désagréable du dehors” (“I understood that I found myself over there, in
the light, calm and in no way unpleasant cold of the outside”) and con-
cludes on p.  with the interrogative gesture: “Et qu’étais-je donc si je
n’étais pas ce reflet d’une figure qui ne parlait pas et à qui personne ne
parlait, seulement capable, appuyé sur la tranquillité sans fin du dehors,
d’interroger, de l’autre côté d’une vitre, silencieusement le monde?” (“And
so who was I if I was not this reflection of a figure that did not speak and
to whom no one spoke, only capable, resting upon the infinite tranquillity
 Notes to pages –
of the outside, of questioning the world in silence from the other side of a
window?”).
 Franz Kafka, Diaries –, –; Tagebücher –, ; my
emphasis.
 For a development of the distinction between the writer’s social self
and his moi profond, see Marcel Proust, “La Méthode de Sainte-Beuve,”
–.
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 Index

Abel, Karl,  n.  alienation see alterity

abstraction, and the sublime,  Alter, Robert, – n. 
Achebe, Chinua, – n. ,  n.  alterity
action, moral, in Kierkegaard,  in Blanchot, 
actualization in Conrad, 
in Hegel,  in Freud, 
in Kierkegaard, – in Gide, 
adolescence, Le Grand Meaulnes as novel of, , in Hegel, –
– in Kafka, –, 
adventure novel, Le Grand Meaulnes as, , and the uncanny, 
–,  ambivalence, in Proust, –
advice, and moral law, – analogy
Aeschylus, and Nietzsche,  in Freud, 
aesthetics in Kant, – , ,  n. , – n. ,
bourgeois, ,  n.   n. 
ethical dimension of, – Andersen, Hans Christian, “The Tinder Box”,
in Freud, –, , ,   n. 
in Gide, – antinomy, and aesthetics, 
in Hegel, – Apollo, and Dionysos, , –, ,  , 
as indirect discourse, – Ariadne, and Woolf, – , , n. 
ironical, , –,  art, as deception, –
in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, –, , ,  artifice
in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, –, and nature, – , –,  , , –, 
,  and perfection, –, –, , –,
in Kierkegaard, v, ix–x, –, –, –, n. 
– Auden, W. H.,  n. 
and nature, –, –, , ,  authenticity
in Nietzsche, –,  in Gide, , –
and philistinism, ,  n.  in Kierkegaard, 
pre-ethical, –,  autobiography, and fiction, –
and the sublime, ix, –, , 
Symbolist, –,  Bakhtin, M. M., ,  n. 
as text,  Balzac, Honoré de, La Comédie Humaine, 
and the uncanny, ix, , ,  n. 
in Woolf, –, , , –, – banality, and Hoffmann, , –
see also ethics; redemption; Romanticism; Barthes, Roland,  n. 
uncanniness Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, , 
Africanism, in Conrad, ,  n.  and Alain-Fournier, 
Alain-Fournier see Grand Meaulnes, Le and Hugo, 
alchemy, and the uncanny, –,  –, and Liszt, , –, 
 n.  and Nietzsche,  –


 Index 
and Proust,  n.  in Kant, , –, –, 
and Romanticism, – n.  in Kierkegaard, 
and the thyrsus, x, ,  – in Woolf, 
and Wagner, , –, ,  n.  Bouraoui, H.-A.,  n. 
writings Bowen, Elizabeth, 
“Le Cygne”, ,  n.  Brantlinger, Patrick,  n. 
Les Fleurs du Mal, ,  Brée, Germaine,  n. ,  n. 
“Le Mauvais Vitrier”,  Brod, Max,  n. ,  n. 
“Les Petites Vieilles”,  Brooks, Peter,  n. ,  n. 
Les Petits Poèmes en prose, ,  , Buisine, Alain, –,  , – n. 
 n.  Burke, Edmund, 
“Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris”, Butor, Michel, 
, ,  n. 
“Les Sept Vieillards”,  Cassirer, Ernst,  n.  ,  n. 
Le Spleen de Paris, , – n.  castration theme
“Tableaux parisiens”,  –, – n.  in Freud,  , 
“Le Thyrse”, –,  nn. ,  in Oedipus the King, 
Bauer, Felice,  Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 
beauty see aesthetics Cellier, Léon, and Le Grand Meaulnes, –,
Beck, Lewis White, – n.   , , 
Beckett, Samuel,  Chagall, Marc, 
Beharriell, Frederick,  n.  choice, in Kierkegaard, –
Bell, Vanessa, – Christianity
Benveniste, Emile, ,  n.  in Kierkegaard, –, –, , –
Bizet, Georges, Carmen,  –, ,  n.  in Nietzsche, 
Blackall, Eric,  n.  chronotope, threshold, ,  n. 
Blake, William,  Cixous, Hélène, , 
Blanchot, Maurice, ,  Classicism, German,  –
and Kafka, x–xi, –, –, , closure
– in Freud, , , 
and le neutre, , , –, – n. , in Hoffmann, –
– n.  in Kafka, –, ,  , –, 
and music and narrative, – in Woolf, 
and the uncanny, , – cognition
writings in Kant, –, ,  n. 
Aminadab,  in Wordsworth,  n. 
L’Attente l’oubli, ,  Cohen, Ted,  n. 
Au Moment voulu, , – n.  Coleridge, S. T.,  n. 
Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas,  Colli, Giorgio, 
“Le Chant des sirènes”, ,  –, command, and the sublime, , 
,  community
L’Entretien infini,  in Blanchot, , 
L’Espace littéraire,  in Kafka, , , –, 
“Kafka et l’exigence de l’oeuvre”, , Conrad, Joseph
 and Gide, , ,  n. 
Le Livre à venir,  and immoralism, –, –, –
“La voix narrative, le ‘il’, le neutre”, , and irony,  –
– and narrative framing, –, –
blindness theme, in Oedipus the King, , – and threshold-moment, 
Bloom, Harold,  and the uncanny, x, , , , ,
Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron,  –
borders see also Heart of Darkness
in Freud, ,  n.  consciousness
in Hegel,  and the beautiful soul, –, 
in Hoffmann,  in Blanchot, , –
 Index
consciousness (cont.) Deutsch, Helene, 
in Hegel,  dialectic
in Proust, – in Hegel, , 
containment,  in Kierkegaard, , 
in Conrad, – in Nietzsche,  –, –, 
in Freud, – in Schiller, –, 
in Gide, –,  dialogue, in Heart of Darkness, –, – ,
in Kafka,  –
in Proust, ,  – Dickens, Charles, and Alain-Fournier,
in Woolf,  
content, and form,  – difference, in Kafka,  n. 
contradiction dignity, moral, , 
in Kant,  Dionysos
in Nietzsche,  and Apollo, , –,  , 
and Romantic irony,  n.  Goethe as, – , , , , 
conventionality, and the uncanny, –,  Liszt as,  –, –, 
Coppola, Francis Ford, Apocalypse Now,  n.  and redemption, –, ,  n. 
Corngold, Stanley, – n.  and the thyrsus, x,  , , , , –
Cowper, William, “The Castaway”, , Wagner as, , 
 n.  discipline, and form, 
criticism, literary, ,  discourse
genetic, –,  n.  confessional, 
of Heart of Darkness,  , –, ,  n.  and ethics, 
of L’Immoraliste,  indirect, –
of Kafka,  n.  distance
psychocriticism, , , ,  n.  aesthetic, , , –, 
of To the Lighthouse, ,  n. ,  n.  ironical,  n. 
Critique of Judgment (Kant), –,  n.  and poetic sympathy, –
and aesthetics, –, , ,  domesticity
and analogy, – and ethics, –, , ,  , , 
and ethics, –, –, ,  and the uncanny, 
and Kierkegaard,  Don Juan, and seduction, , –
and nature, –, –,  Doppelgänger
and Romanticism, ,  and Conrad and Gide, 
and the sublime, ,  , –, ,  n.  and Freud, , –
and textuality,  and Hoffmann, , , 
Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), ,  and Oedipus, , 
and aesthetics, –, ,  and Proust and Kafka, xi
and ethics, –, , ,  and Woolf, – , 
and nature,  see also doubling
doubling
Dante Alighieri, xii,  as uncanny, , , , , –, , –,
Darras, Jacques,  n.  –, 
de Man, Paul, ,  n.  see also Doppelgänger
death dreams, in Heart of Darkness, ,
and Freud, xi, , –, –, –, –  n. 
and Hoffmann, –,  drives
and Kafka, xi, ,  in Freud, , –, , 
and Woolf, –, –, ,  in Rilke, 
debt see guilt in Schiller, , –
deceit, and art, –, , , –,  duality see polarity
Deleuze, Gilles, – Duckworth, Gerald,  n. 
Derrida, Jacques, ,  n. ,  duty
n.  in Kant, , – n. 
design, in Kant,  – in Schiller, –
 Index 
earnestness and Freud, –
in Hegel, –, ,  and irony, , 
in Kierkegaard, –,  and reality, 
economics, and ethics, –, – figuration
ego, in Fichte, – in French Symbolism, 
Either/Or (Kierkegaard), – ,  , in Hoffmann, 
 n.  in Kierkegaard, –, , 
and ethics and aesthetics, –, – ,  “The Fisherman and his Wife” (Grimm
and immediacy, – brothers), – , –, 
and irony, ,  fishing imagery, in Woolf, –, , –,
and moral value, –, –  n. 
and narrative framing, x, –, – Fitch, Brian T.,  n. 
and the poetic life, , ,  – Flaubert, Gustave, x, , , ,
Eliot, T. S.,  n.  ,  n.   n. 
ennoblement, and the sublime, , ,  and banality, 
ethics and Kafka, , 
and aesthetics, –, –, , –, and time, , – n. 
 n.  forgetfulness, in Kafka, , , –
and categorical imperative,  form
as discursive,  and content,  –
as domestic, –, , , ,  and ethics, –,  –
and economic metaphors, – formalism
in Gide, –,  in Kant, 
in Hegel,  and Modernism,  n. ,  n. 
in Hoffmann, – Foucault, Michel, – n. 
and immoralism, – Fournier, Henri see Grand Meaulnes, Le
in Kant’s Critique of Practical Judgment, –, framing, 
–, , ,  in Conrad, –, –
in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, –, and frame-breaking, 
, ,  in Freud, , , –
in Kierkegaard, v, ix–x, –, , –, in Gide, xi, –, , –, ,
–, –,   n. 
and moral beauty,  – in Hoffmann, , , 
and narrative framing,  human and divine, –
and nature,  in Kafka, –
and philosophy,  in Kierkegaard, x, xi, –, –, 
and poetic imagination, – and pedagogical usefulness, –
and Romantic irony, – in Proust, 
and the sublime, ix, –, ,  in Woolf, –
textual, – France, and Modernism,  n. 
and the uncanny, ix, –, , –,  freedom
in Woolf, –,  and ethics, , , ,  n. 
Euripides, and Nietzsche, ,  and irony, 
exemplarity, in Conrad and Gide,  – and nature, –
existentialism and poetic licence, –, 
Christian, –, – Freud, Anna, , – n. 
and irony,  Freud, Sigmund
and Kafka, ,  n.  and aesthetics, –, , , , 
and ambivalence, –
faculties, human, and aesthetics, – and Hoffmann, ,  –, –, ,
fallacy, biographical,  , 
feminism, and Woolf, ,  and Kafka, 
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, , –,  and literary style, , 
fiction and narcissism, , 
and autobiography, – and primal words,  n. 
 Index
Freud, Sigmund (cont.) and the beautiful soul, x, – , –,
and the uncanny, ix, xi, , –, –, 
,  n.  France and Germany in, –
and unconscious motivation, ,  and Modernism, x, 
and Woolf,  as novel of adolescence, , –
writings as quest novel, , 
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, , , , , and Romanticism, –, ,  ,
n.  –, 
Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie,  summary and commentary, –
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety,  and the uncanny, , 
The Interpretation of Dreams,  Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, “The Fisherman
“Das Unheimliche”, x, –,  –, –, and his Wife”, –, 
–, –, ,  n.  Guerard, Albert J.,  nn. , 
see also drives; framing; Oedipus complex; guilt
Oedipus figure in Freud, –
in Le Grand Meaulnes, 
Gay, Peter, – n.  in Kierkegaard, , , –
generality and particularity in readers, 
in Conrad, , , – Guyer, Paul,  n. , – n. 
in Gide, , 
Genette, Gérard, –,  harmony, in Kant, –
genius Harter, Deborah,  n. 
in Baudelaire, –, –, – Hawthorne, Nathaniel, “Rappaccini’s
in Conard,  Daughter”,  n. , – n. 
in Goethe, – Hayman, Ronald, , , 
Geschäft, and indirection,  Heart of Darkness (Conrad), –, ,  n. 
Gide, André and Conrad criticism,  ,  n. 
and aesthetics and ethics, – and immoralism, –, –, –
and Conrad, , ,  n.  and the inhuman, –
and immoralism, –, – and irony,  –
and Le Grand Meaulnes, , , ,  and narrative framing, –, –
and narrative framing, xi, –, , and pedagogical exemplarity,  –
– and problem of the referent, ,  n. 
and threshold-moment,  as quest novel, ,  n. 
and the uncanny, x, , , – and threshold-moment, 
writings and tone, 
Les Caves du Vatican,  n.  and the uncanny, , , –
La Porte étroite,  n.  Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
see also L’Immoraliste and aesthetics, –
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von and the beautiful soul, –, –
and the beautiful soul, –, – and dialectic, , 
and irony, – and irony, , –,  , 
and Kafka,  and Kierkegaard, , , , , , , 
and Kierkegaard, – and Romantic irony, –, –
and Nietzsche, –, , , ,  writings
writings Aesthetics, –, 
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, –, , The Phenomenology of Spirit, , –, 
 ,  n.  Hegelianism, and Kierkegaard, , 
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre,  Heidegger, Martin, , , 
goodness see ethics and Kafka, , 
Goozé, Marjanne,  n.  and Nietzsche, 
Gordimer, Nadine,  n.  writings
grace, aesthetic, –, ,  “Letter on Humanism”, ,  n. 
Le Grand Meaulnes (Alain-Fournier), x, – Sein und Zeit,  n. 
as adventure novel, , –,  Heilbrun, Caroline, ,  n. 
 Index 
Hertz, Neil, , – imperative, categorical, , 
Herzfeld, Claude, ,  n.  impersonality
Hoffman, Anne Golomb,  n.  in Blanchot, , 
Hoffmann, E. T. A. in Woolf, , –,  –
“Der Sandmann”, x, , –, –, , incest theme, in Proust, 
– indifference
and intellectual uncertainty,  – and aesthetics, –, , –
and irony, , ,  and ethics, –,  –, 
and narrative framing,  indirection, in Kant, –
and the uncanny, ix, , –, –, , individuation, in Nietzsche, 
,  inhuman, the
and unconscious motivation,  in Conrad, –
Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, , in Gide, , 
 n.  inside/outside
Hollingdale, R. J.,  in Conrad, –, –
Homer, The Odyssey,  – in Gide, , –
homosexuality, and Gide,  –,  n.  in Hegel, 
Houssaye, Arsène, ,  in Hoffmann, –
Howard, Richard,  in Kant,  ,  –
hubris in Kierkegaard, , –,  n. 
and Freud, – in Woolf, 
and Hoffmann,  intertextuality
and Oedipus myth,  and Freud, 
and Woolf, –,  Romantic, , –
Hugo, Victor, , , ,  n.  and To the Lighthouse, –,  n. 
Husson, Claudie,  irony
hypotyposis, in Kant,  and aesthetics, , , –
Hyppolite, Jean,  in Conrad,  –
controlled, –
Idealism, German,  – and ethics, –
idolatry, in Heart of Darkness, – in German Romanticism, ix, , –,
image , 
as sign, , – n.  in Goethe, –
and the sublime, – in Hegel, , –,  , 
imagination ironical distance,  n. 
imaginative sympathy, – ,  in Kafka, , –, 
and the sublime,  in Kierkegaard, –, , –, , ,
and the uncanny, – , 
immanence, literary, – and negativity, 
immediacy, aesthetic, – and pedagogical exemplarity, 
immoralism poetics of, –
in Conrad, –, –, – Socratic, , 
in Gide, –, –,  and the uncanny, , –, 
L’Immoraliste (Gide), , ,  n. 
and ethics,  –, , , – Jakobson, Roman, , ,  n. 
and immoralism, –,  James, Henry, and Modernism,  n. 
and literary criticism,  ,  n.  Jameson, Fredric,  n. 
and narrative framing, , –, –, Jammes, Francis,  n. 
 Jentsch, E., –,  –
and pedagogical exemplarity,  – Johnson, Barbara,  , – n. ,  n. 
and problem of the referent, ,  n.  Jones, Ernest, –
as quest novel, ,  n.  Joyce, James, ,  n. ,  nn. , 
and threshold-moment,  and Modernism, ,  n. 
and tone,  writings
and the uncanny, , , – Finnegans Wake,  n. 
 Index
Joyce, James (cont.) and the beautiful soul, 
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,  n. , and borders and limits, , –, –, 
 n.  influence of, 
Ulysses,  n.  and Kierkegaard, ,  n. 
Judaism, and Kafka, , – n.  and literary style, –, –
judgment in Nietzsche, – , , 
aesthetic, – and the sublime, ix, xi, , –, ,
and analogy, – , 
in Gide, – writings
in Goethe, – Critique of Pure Reason, , , ,  n. 
in Kafka,  Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 
and nature and freedom, – n. 
and understanding and reason,  The Metaphysics of Morals,  n. , 
in Woolf,  n. 
see also Critique of Judgment; Critique of Practical
Kafka, Franz Reason
as a bachelor, , – Kaplan, Edward, ,  nn. – , 
and banality,  Kaufmann, Walter, 
and Blanchot, x–xi, –, –, , Kierkegaard, Søren, –
– as a bachelor, 
and Flaubert, ,  and ethics and aesthetics, v, ix–x, –,
and Freud,  –, –, – , , 
and Goethe,  and Hegel, , , , , , , 
and irony, , –,  influence of Kant on, ,  n. 
and Kierkegaard, v,  n.  and irony, –, , –, , , 
and music, –,  n.  and Kafka, v,  n. 
and Proust, xi and literary style, , 
and the sublime, x, xi,  and narrative framing, x, xi, –,
and the threshold-moment, –, –, –, 
, ,  n.  and paradox, , – , – n. 
and the uncanny, x, –, –, , and the uncanny, , 
– writings
writings The Concept of Anxiety, 
“Die Abweisung” (“The Refusal”),  The Concept of Irony, x, –, , –
“Der Bau” (“The Burrow”),  Fear and Trembling, , 
Brief an den Vater (Letter to His Father), Philosophical Fragments, , , ,  ,
–,  ,  nn.  ,  – n. 
The Castle, –, ,  n. , – Repetition, 
n.  see also Either/Or
“Forschungen eines Hundes”, ,  Kimbrough, Robert,  n. 
n.  Klein, Richard,  n. 
“A Hunger-Artist”,  Kleist, Heinrich von, – n. 
“In the Penal Colony”, , – n.  Klettenberg, Susanna Katharina von, –,
“Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der  nn. , 
Mäuse”, –, , –, Kofman, Sarah, –, , 
–
“The Judgment” (“Das Urteil”), , Lacan, Jacques,  n. 
–, , , , , , Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, Les Liaisons
– n.  dangereuses, –
“The Metamorphosis” (“Die Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe,  n. , –
Verwandlung”), , ,  n. ,  n. 
Tagebücher (Diaries), , – Laforgue, Jules, and Alain-Fournier, 
The Trial,  language
Kant, Immanuel of philosophy, 
and aesthetics and ethics, ix–x, –, –, of poetry, 
, –,  and primal words, ,  n. 
 Index 
Laurens, Paul–Albert,  and synecdoche, ,  , –, 
Lavater, Johann Kaspar, ,  n.  in Woolf, , 
law, moral,  metonymy
and Kant, , , –, ,  and metaphor,  , –, – , , 
and Kierkegaard,  and synecdoche, –, 
and pure reason,  Miller, Christopher L.,  n. 
as universal, –,  Miller, J. Hillis, –,  n. 
Lee, Hermione, , ,  n. , – n. , Miner, Margaret,  n. 
 n.  mirroring see Doppelgänger; doubling
Leuwers, Daniel, ,  n.  model, in quest novels, , –
life, ethical, in Kierkegaard,  Modernism
life, poetic/aesthetic and Romanticism, ix, ,  ,  , ,
in Hegel,   n. 
in Hoffmann,  and spontaneity, 
in Kant,  and the uncanny, ix–x, , –,  –
in Kierkegaard, , –,  –,  see also Conrad, Joseph; Gide, André; Kafka,
Liszt, Franz Franz; Proust, Marcel; Woolf, Virginia
and Baudelaire, , – motivation
Lohengrin et Tannhäuser de Richard Wagner, narrative, 
– unconscious, , 
and Wagner, , –,  Mozart, W. A., Don Giovanni, –
literary theory Muir, Willa and Edwin, 
and narratology, – Murfin, Ross C,  n. 
and Romanticism, – , , music
 n.  in Blanchot, –
literature and immediacy, 
and criticism,  in Kafka, –,  n. 
as impersonality,  in Kierkegaard, –
and indirect discourse,  and narration, ,  –
and the uncanny, –, –, in Nietzsche,  –, 
,  see also Wagner, Richard
love, and ethics,  mythology, in Nietzsche, –, ,  n. 
Lowrie, Walter, – n. 
Lubkoll, Christine,  n. ,  n.  Nancy, Jean-Luc,  n. 
Lyotard, Jean-Francois,  n.  narcissism, –, , 
narration, and music, 
Mallarmé, Stéphane,  narrative
“Le Démon de l’analogie”,  in Blanchot, –
Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice, –,  , in Gide,  n. 
 n.  and immediacy, 
Marks, Elaine,  and literary freedom, –
Marxism, and Kafka, ,  n.  and narrative voice, , , –,
maxims, , –,  ,  , 
memory and repetition, ,  n. 
in Kafka,  –,  and uncanny openings, –
in Proust,  , ,  unweaving of, 
in Woolf,  narrative framing see framing
metaphor narrative theory, 
in Baudelaire,  narratology, ,  n. 
in Conrad, – and rhetoric, –, 
in Kant, – narrator, role, –, ,  n. 
in Kierkegaard, – nature
and metonymy,  , –, – , , , and the aesthetic, –, –, , , 
,  and artifice, – , –,  , , –, 
in Nietzsche, – and ethics, 
in Proust, – ,  as purposive, –
 Index
nature (cont.) Painter, George D., , 
and the sublime, ,  paradox
and the uncanny, ,  ,  in Blanchot, 
Navarre, Marguerite de, Heptaméron,  in Kierkegaard, , , – , – n. 
Nazi art,  particularity and generality
negativity, and irony,  in Conrad, , , –
Neptune motif, in Woolf, , – n.  in Gide, , 
Nerval, Gérard de, Sylvie, –,  Pascal, Blaise, 
Nestroy, Johann, Der Zerrissene, , ,  Pater, Walter,  n. 
neutrality Peacock, Thomas Love, The Four Ages of Poetry,
and the aesthetic, –, , , – 
and Blanchot, xi perfection, and artifice, –, –, ,
and Kafka, xi – n. 
Nietzsche, Friedrich Philistinism, in Kierkegaard, 
and aesthetics, –,  philosophy
and Goethe, –, , , ,  and direct discourse, 
and immoralism,  and ethics, 
and Kant, – , ,  language of, 
and language of poetry,  and psychoanalysis, 
and redemption,  – Socratic, , –, 
and the sublime,  Pietism
and the thyrsus, x, , , –, ,  and the beautiful soul, , 
and Wagner, ,  –, –,  –,  , and Kant, 
 n.  place, sense of, in Woolf, 
writings place-names, in Proust, –, –
The Antichrist, ,  n.  poetic, the see aesthetics; poetry
Beyond Good and Evil,  poetry
The Birth of Tragedy, ,  –, – ,  and ethics, –
The Case of Wagner, , , – and imaginative sympathy, –
The Genealogy of Morals,  and literary criticism, 
Nietzsche Contra Wagner, –,  and religion, 
Twilight of the Idols, , – ,  Romantic, 
Untimely Meditation: Richard Wagner see also Baudelaire, Charles; thyrsus
in Bayreuth,  polarity
Norris, Margot,  n.  Apollonian-Dionysian, , –, , 
Norton, Robert E.,  n.  in Baudelaire, –
nostalgia, in Le Grand Meaulnes, – in Blanchot,  –, –
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), , , in Conrad, 
 in Hoffmann, 
in Kafka, 
The Odyssey (Homer),  – in Le Grand Meaulnes, 
Oedipus complex, in Freud, ,  , ,  in Modernism, 
Oedipus figure in Nietzsche, –
in Freud, , , –,  in Woolf, 
in Kafka, ,  ,  see also Apollo; Dionysos; inside/outside
in Proust,  politics, and aesthetics and ethics, , 
in Sophocles, – Pound, Ezra, and Modernism,  n. 
Olsen, Regine, ,  power, and irony, 
opening and closing, in Kafka, –, , Proust, Marcel
 , ,  and Baudelaire,  n. 
Orientalism,  n.  and incest theme, 
ornamentation and Kafka, xi
in Kant,  , ,  n.  and memory,  , , 
in Kierkegaard,  and Modernism, ,  n. 
in Woolf, –, , , ,  and reading theme, –,  
otherness see alterity and Ruskin, , ,  nn. , 
 Index 
and spontaneity,  in Kierkegaard, –, –
and the threshold-moment, –, , in Nietzsche,  –
–,  n.  in Wagner, –
and the uncanny, x, –, –,  referent, in Conrad and Gide, , 
and Woolf, – n.  reflection, in Kierkegaard, –
writings relationships, in Woolf, –
A la recherche du temps perdu, ,  –, religion
, –, –, ,  in Kafka, ,  n. 
La Bible d’Amiens,  in Kierkegaard, –, –, ,
“John Ruskin”,  n.  –
“Journées de pèlerinage”,  ,  n.  in Nietzsche, 
“Sainte-Beuve et Baudelaire”,  n.  and Oedipus, –
Psalms, and narrative framing, – and paradox, –
pseudonyms, and Kierkegaard, – and poetry, 
psychoanalysis remorse, in Le Grand Meaulnes, , – ,
and Kafka criticism, , , ,  , 
n.  repetition compulsion, , , , –, ,
and Le Grand Meaulnes,  , 
and philosophy,  rhetoric
and the uncanny, x, , –,  –, –, in Conrad, 
–,  in Gide, , – , 
Putnam, James J., , – in Hegel, ,  n. 
Putnam, Walter,  n.  in Kant, x, –, ,  –,  n. ,
 n. 
quest novel in Kierkegaard, , , –
Heart of Darkness as, , ,  n.  and narratology, –
L’Immoraliste as, ,  n.  and the sublime, , – n. 
Le Grand Meaulnes as,  and subtlety, 
in Woolf, , –
Rabinowitz, Peter J., – n.  Rilke, Rainer Maria, 
racism, and Conrad, , – n.  Rimbaud, Arthur, , 
rationalism Rivière, Jacques,  n. 
and ethics, – Roazen, Paul, –
and irony,  Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 
reading roman see récit
in Proust, , – Romanticism
in Woolf, , –, – n.  and Critique of Judgment, , 
Realism, Soviet,  and ethics of the aesthetic, , 
reason and intertextuality, 
and judgment,  and irony, ix, –, –, , , ,
and moral law,  , 
practical, , – and Kierkegaard, –, , –, 
pure, , – and Le Grand Meaulnes, –, ,  ,
and the sublime,  –, 
and the uncanny, ,  and literary theory, –
récit, ,  and the sublime, 
and roman,  –, , –, , , and the thyrsus, – , 
 n.  ,  n.  and the uncanny, –, 
see also Heart of Darkness; L’Immoraliste; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 
narrative Julie, –,  n. 
reconciliation, in religion and poetry, – Ruskin, John, , ,  n. 
redemption and Proust, , ,  nn. , 
aesthetic, ,  writings
in Baudelaire,  Sesame and Lilies, 
and Dionysos, –,  n.  The Stones of Venice,  n. 
in Kafka,  Russia, and Soviet Realism, 
 Index
Sackville-West, Vita, , – role of, xi–xii,  n. 
Said, Edward,  n.  and the uncanny, , –, , 
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin,  Sizeranne, Robert de la,  n. 
Sand, George, François le Champi, ,  skyld see guilt
Sartre, Jean-Paul,  Smyth, Ethel, 
schematism, in Kant,  Socrates
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, , and Apollo, , –, 
 n.  and literary criticism, 
and the beautiful soul, –, , – Socratic irony, , , 
and Goethe, ,  n.  Solger, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, , 
writings solipsism
“Über Anmut und Würde”, –,  and Baudelaire,  nn. , 
Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, of Heart of Darkness, , 
–,  of Le Grand Meaulnes, –
Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung,  Sophocles
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, , ,  – and Nietzsche, 
Schlegel, Friedrich von, , , ,  –,  Oedipus the King, –
Schoenberg, Arnold, Moses and Aaron, – soul, “beautiful”,  n. 
n.  in Goethe, –, –
Schopenhauer, Arthur,  ,  in Hegel, , –, –
Schumann, Robert, ,  n.  in Kant, 
seduction in Le Grand Meaulnes, x, – ,
as aesthetic action, –, ,  n.  –, 
and irony,  in Schiller, –, –
value-free economics of, – speech-act theory,  , 
self-love, – Spender, Stephen, 
self-realization spontaneity, in Kant, 
in Hegel, – Stendhal (Henri Marie Beyle),  n. 
in Kierkegaard,  Stephen, Julia, –
self-referentiality Stevenson, R. L., and Alain-Fournier, 
and Kafka,  n.  storytelling
in Romanticism, ,  and Blanchot, –
self-reflectiveness in Conrad, –, –, 
in Baudelaire, , – n. ,  n.  and Freud, –
in Conrad,  in Gide, –
in Gide,  Structuralism, ,  n. 
in Kierkegaard, – style, literary
and the threshold-moment, –,  n.  and Alain-Fournier, 
sensibility and Baudelaire,  –
and aesthetic judgment, –, ,  and Conrad, , ,  n. ,
and the moral law,   n. 
sentimentality, and Romanticism, ,  and Freud, , 
sexuality and Gide, 
in Freud,  and Kafka, , –, , 
in Woolf, –, – and Kant, –, –
Shakespeare, William, – and Kierkegaard, , 
and Woolf,  n.  and Nietzsche, 
writings and Proust, –
Cymbeline,  Symbolist, , 
Romeo and Juliet,  n.  and Woolf, –, 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, A Defence of Poetry, – sublime, the,  ,  n. ,  n. 
signifier and aesthetics, ix, –, –, , 
in Conrad, – and ethics, ix, –, , , 
in Kafka, , , , – in Kafka, ix, 
in Proust, –, , – in Kant, ix, xi, , –, , , 
 Index 
and reason,  tone, in Conrad and Gide, 
and Romanticism,  tragedy, Greek, –
and the uncanny, ix, , ,  – transfiguration, in Kierkegaard, –
symbolism transformation
in Conrad, , –,  –,  n.  in Hoffmann, 
geographical,  ,  in Kafka, –
in Gide, ,  in Kierkegaard, 
in Kant, –,  in Mann, 
Symbolism, French, , ,  transubstantiation, in Kierkegaard, –,
sympathy  n. 
imaginative, – ,  Troyes, Chrétien de, Perceval, 
and intertextuality, 
synecdoche, and metaphor and metonymy, , uncanny, the
 , –,  and the aesthetic, ix, , , –, 
in Alain-Fournier, , 
taste and alchemy, –,  –
in Kant, , –, ,  in Blanchot, , –
in Nietzsche, – and borders, , 
Tausk, Victor, , – in Conrad, x, , , , , –
techné and Doppelgänger, 
and aesthetics, , – and ethics, ix, –, , –, 
in Heidegger, ,  n.  in Freud, ix, xi, , –, –, 
and nature, – , ,  , – in Gide, , , –
Tedeschi, Richard,  in Hoffmann, ix, , –, –,
teleology, and aesthetics, –,  , 
Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron,  n.  and the impersonal, ,  –
Terdiman, Richard,  n.  as the inhuman, 
territory, in Kafka,  and irony, , –, 
Thibaudet, Albert, – n.  in Kafka, x, –, –, , –
threshold-moment, –,  n.  in Kierkegaard, , 
and Conrad,  and Modernism, ix–x, , –,
and Gide,   –
and Kafka, –, –, , , – and narrative openings, –
and Proust, , –, – and Oedipus, –
thyrsus in Proust, x, –, –, 
and Baudelaire, x, ,  – and Romanticism, –
definition of, , – and the sublime, ix, , ,  –
and Nietzsche, x, , , –, ,  in Woolf, x, xi, , –, , , ,
and Wagner, x,  –, 
Tieck, Johann Ludwig, , , ,  uncertainty, and the uncanny,  –, 
time unconscious, in Heart of Darkness, , ,
in Blanchot, ,   n. 
in Flaubert, , – n.  Unheimlichkeit see uncanny, the
in Gide,  Unseld, Joachim,  n. 
and irony, 
in Kafka,  n.  value, moral, in Kierkegaard, –
in Proust,  , ,  n.  Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), xii, 
To the Lighthouse ( Woolf ) Vitzhum, Thomas,  n. ,  n. 
as autobiographical, – voix, narrative and narratrice, –, ,
and ethics and aesthetics, – , 
and “The Fisherman and his Wife”,
–,  Wagner, Richard
and narrative framing, – and Baudelaire, , –, ,  n. 
and the uncanny,  as Dionysos, , 
and Woolf ’s Diary, – and the Gesamtkunstwerk, ,  , 
 Index
Wagner, Richard (cont.) and human relationships, –
and Liszt, , –,  and impersonality, , ,  –
and Nietzsche, ,  –, –,  –,  , and memory, 
 n.  and Modernism, ,  n. 
and the thyrsus, x,  and “moments of being”, 
Tannhäuser, – ,  n.  and narrative framing, –
Walsh, Sylvia,  nn. ,  and Proust, – n. 
Wapnewski, Peter,  n. ,  n.  and the uncanny, x, xi, , –, ,
water, as theme in Woolf, , , –, , , –, 
– , , –, –,  on writing,  –, –
Watt, Ian, , , , –, n. ,  writings
nn. ,  Diary, –
Wieland, Christoph Martin,  Jacob’s Room, 
Wilde, Oscar,  n.  Mrs. Dalloway, 
Wing, Nathaniel,  n.  A Room of One’s Own, ,  n. 
wit, and irony,  “Sketch of the Past”,  n. 
Woolf, Virginia The Waves, 
and aesthetics, –, , –, see also To the Lighthouse; water
– Wordsworth, William, “The Excursion”, 
and Ariadne’s thread, – n.  n. 
and ethics, –, 
and feminism, ,  Yeats, W. B., and Modernism,  n. 
and fiction and autobiography, –
and Freud,  Zuckerman, Elliott,  n. 