“Don’t forget what happens to the audience at tragedies, will you? Even while they’re weeping, they’re enjoying themselves.”
“Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment.”
—Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground2
The interwar fictions of Patrick Hamilton and Jean Rhys describe strikingly similar realms from different points of view, both from the margins of late modernism. Their lower middle-class, working-class, and bohemian characters totter through urban landscapes of menacing streets, dingy rented rooms, bars, pubs, cinemas, A.B.C. teashops, and Lyons Corner Houses. Hamilton is best known for his drama Rope (1929), which Hitchcock adapted for the screen in 1948. His interwar novels, including The Midnight Bell (1929), The Siege of Pleasure (1932), and The Plains of Cement (1934)—published as a trilogy called Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935)—as well as Hangover Square: A Story of Darkest Earl’s Court (1941) and Slaves of Solitude (1947), are tales in which women take financial advantage of men, men drink away their wages, and all narcotize themselves at the “local” and the cinema. Hamilton views the tug of war between the sexes primarily from a victimized man’s perspective, while Rhys focuses on women who are perpetually displaced and impoverished. Hamilton’s stories cluster tightly around a fifty-mile radius of London,3 while Rhys ranges around England, France, the Netherlands, and the West Indies, but all of their protagonists inhabit a claustrophobic psychic terrain, “another place which was perpetually the same.”4 These “drunken, deracinate”5 figures view themselves as casualties of fate, buffeted about by a cruel world and more powerful others who act upon them. It is challenging to come to terms with such apparently unrelenting bleakness and often unsympathetic characters who sabotage themselves. Contrary to the common understanding of Hamilton’s and Rhys’s novels as narratives of disempowerment and depression, this chapter will make the case that pleasure—of an idiosyncratic texture—is a dominant concern of their texts. Both authors convey a strong sense of civilian interwar culture as shadowed by the past war and threatened by the gathering storm of fascism. Their characters’ affects—including boredom, frustration, disorientation, and paralysis—reflect a time of uncertainty, dread, and helplessness. Writing in the wake of the depression and alongside Hitler’s rise to power, Mussolini’s breach of the Abyssinian border in 1935, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and the local appearance of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists rallying in Hyde Park, Rhys and Hamilton register the deepening fear of the years leading up to World War Two, but in a different way than more explicitly political writers such as Auden, Spender, Huxley, Orwell, and Isherwood. Hamilton and Rhys capture the dysphoria of their moment by registering a protest against pleasure.
Like Huxley, Lawrence, Joyce, and others from the period, Rhys and Hamilton rework the concept of pleasure, but from a different angle than the writers I have considered so far. Both authors are consumed by efforts at cultural distinction and individuation; their refusal of bourgeois values and facile amusement is characteristically modernist. But while other writers favor cerebral, complex pleasure at the expense of easy embodiment, Rhys and Hamilton present an overwhelmingly somatic world in which distinction is won through the ability to resist pleasure entirely. Unpleasure here is a response to the construction of accessible mass culture as a source of corrupt consensus, but without a concomitant advocacy of high culture or intellectual pleasure. On the one hand, Rhys’s and Hamilton’s characters’ pride in living a superior kind of misery is continuous with modernism’s demand that its readers embrace difficulty and discernment; on the other, the vehemence of their outsider position entails a rejection of both “elite” and mass sensory pleasure. For Hamilton and Rhys, there is no realm of Kantian or Eliotic disinterest into which to withdraw—or rather, when it is offered, the characters refuse it.
While Joyce’s masochism and Lawrence’s female submission, for example, are impulses toward unpleasure, those authors both maintain the horizon of conventional (easy, simplistic, somatic) as well as valorized (analytical, aesthetic, transformative) pleasure. For Hamilton and Rhys, by contrast, unpleasure is a spectrum ranging from ennui to jouissance that is shadowed by anhedonia, an extinction of pleasure entirely. In some respects, these affects resemble what Sianne Ngai calls “ugly feelings” (including envy, irritation, and disgust), which are “dysphoric or experientially negative, in the sense that they evoke pain or displeasure” (Ugly Feelings, 11). Like other ugly feelings, Hamilton’s and Rhys’s states of unpleasure are signaled textually by “a general state of obstructed agency,” “situations of passivity,” and inaction charged by attraction. These two authors, along with contemporaries such as Samuel Beckett and Djuna Barnes, express “at the same time pleasure and a sense of terrible anxiety”6 in the apprehensive interwar period.
When Hamilton’s and Rhys’s protagonists do experience what could be called pleasure, it is almost always slightly inept: excessive, off kilter, or something fleeting that has happened in the past and is gone forever. Pleasure is a zero-sum game, usually belonging to the other: the greedy prostitute or the sociopathic man (in Hamilton) or the wealthy male patron (in Rhys), while the hapless main characters wallow in their misfortune. Most contemporary critics view Rhys and Hamilton as exposing the dystopic realms they depict, in which characters are traumatized or disenfranchised by their class, gender, racial, or national marginality. Interpretations of Hamilton and Rhys as empathetic and melancholic necessarily underplay what is determinedly intransigent in their work. As Ngai remarks, unlike “potentially ennobling or morally beatific states like sympathy, melancholia, and shame (the emotions given the most attention in literary criticism’s recent turn to ethics),” ugly feelings “are explicitly amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release” (Ugly Feelings, 6). There is a persistent complicity with and tropism toward misery and pain in Hamilton’s and Rhys’s characters. As Trilling sees in Notes from Underground a character who “has arranged his own misery,” Hamilton’s and Rhys’s characters are drawn to obliteration, repetition, debasement, and self-destruction.7 Unpleasure here is not so much a by-product of political disenfranchisement or personal trauma as it is a chosen attraction. If pleasure, from the classical Greeks through Freud and beyond, has been defined as a lowering of tension, Rhys and Hamilton’s characters seek to amplify conflict and diminish satisfaction and tranquility. They do not, however, perform a simple inversion: that is, they do not simply substitute pain for pleasure, but rather alter the value of each.
From Plato onward, pleasure has been anatomized according to class, and this is a strong element of most modernist discussions of pleasure. Rhys and Hamilton illuminate the ideological underpinnings of pleasure and how they are class- and gender-inflected. They both position their down-and-out protagonists as more sympathetic than their upper-class characters, but this sympathy is earned by individuals through their inability or refusal to take part in collective pleasure. While Hamilton perpetuates the long-standing gendering of repudiated sensational pleasure as female, Rhys calls attention to the way the female body is aligned with frivolous, dangerous, and devalued delight.
Like other writers of the period, Hamilton and Rhys are attuned to vernacular culture as the main vehicle of collective, somatic pleasure. Both authors depict a repertoire of distractions, including the cinema, romance novels, and popular songs, as well as immediate and physical experiences that are not mass-produced, such as drunkenness and prostitution, but show them as having unpleasant effects on the characters. For example, in their alcohol-sodden tales, Rhys and Hamilton literalize one of the master metaphors of modernist scorn for mass culture: intoxication. In Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Julia remarks that “no place is a place to be sober in” (261); nearly all of Hamilton’s characters frequent “Hangover Square.” (Both authors were themselves alcoholics. Hamilton titled his unfinished autobiography Memoirs of a Heavy-Drinking Man; David Plante’s portrait of the aged Rhys, in Difficult Women, might well be called Memoirs of a Heavy-Drinking Woman.8) In their fictions, Rhys and Hamilton realize the modernist fear of narcotized contemporary life through scenes of embodied immediacy that cannot be classified as pleasure in any simple sense.
Formally, Hamilton’s and Rhys’s narratives enact the intersection of pain and pleasure that their stories thematize. Their recursive, uneventful plots consist of monotonous, aggravating, frustrating repetitions and stalemate, a condition that I will call the impasse of pleasure.9 These texts are negative, anticathartic, and politically ineffectual, defying the idea that pleasure—or literature—must have a particular use-value. In presenting the case of outsiders and marginal, self-destructive underdogs, they produce unsettling reading effects, including black humor, that push readers to their limits of tolerance. In their paeans to misery and debasement and their moments of unexpected whimsy and absurdity, Rhys and Hamilton generate a readerly affect of mixed despair and delight even as they renounce the pursuit of pleasure.
“PLEASURE ITSELF HAS BEEN FOUND WANTING”: PATRICK HAMILTON
Although Hamilton is cursorily included in some literary histories of the late modernist period, his work had not received much in-depth critical attention until quite recently. He has often been dismissed as a forerunner of Bukowski, a depressive bard of alcoholism and urban squalor. Terry Eagleton pronounced Hamilton “sub-Dickensian,”10 picking up on an argument Orwell made in his 1935 review of Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, which faulted Hamilton for his “Priestleyan assumption that ‘real life’ means lower-middle class life in a large town and that if you can pack into your novel, say, fifty-three descriptions of tea in a Lyons Corner House, you have done the trick.”11 The comment, which others have noted is a fair description of Orwell’s own novels of the period, points to the insistently materialist nature of Hamilton’s prose, detailing the tightly circumscribed and repetitive nature of his characters’ lives. Recent critical interest in Hamilton largely hinges on claims that his work offers a dialectical materialist critique of England. (Eagleton argues that Hamilton’s “satiric anatomy … was thoroughly political in intent.”) This view renders Hamilton more ideologically coherent and constructive than the fiction itself bears out. The Marxist argument that Hamilton’s characters are alienated cogs in an exploitative system also fails to recognize the contorted kinds of bliss that his characters gain from that position.
For all his interest in depicting his characters’ manners and the details of their environment that evokes a kind of kitchen-sink realism or naturalism, Hamilton reflects many modernist concerns and effects what Gerard Barrett calls a “low-key modernism” characteristic of the “second wave of modernist writers” such as Henry Green and James Hanley.12 Hamilton carries out a variety of formal experiments, ranging from stream of consciousness and collage in Hangover Square, to the “ballooning” of his 1939 dystopic fantasy novel Impromptu in Moribundia. Here the narrator time- and space-travels, via a vaguely described contraption, the “Asteradio,” to a world modeled on the worst of the English middle class. When characters spout clichés and advertising jingles, or when they think something that is particularly determined by mass culture or bourgeois idiocy, their words are presented in drawn dialogue balloons, as if issuing from their mouths. The culture industry has run rampant in Moribundia: “Nearly every other building … was either a cinema or a place of entertainment, and I have never seen so many cars, so many greyhounds, so many fur coats, so many silk stockings and so many idle people bent on pleasure in my life.” Alongside these broad attacks on familiar modernist targets, Moribundian writers are themselves parodies of contemporary luminaries. “Toile S.T.,” “Ecyoj,” “Yelxuh,” and “Ecnerwal” are said to be narcissistic, inward-looking, and sterile, and their work is “meaningless masturbation.”13 Hamilton sets himself apart from both the middle class and what he presents as the cultural elite, but the working class culture of Moribundia has no more to recommend it.
Patrick Hamilton, Impromptu in Moribundia
Copyright © 1939 Patrick Hamilton. Reprinted by permission of A. M. Heath & Co Ltd.
For all this, Hamilton has an ease and fluency with vernacular culture. For example, in Hangover Square, the main character’s sudden sociopathic moods are likened to “watching a talking film, and all at once the soundtrack had failed” (15). The return to outmoded silent film is as disorienting as the original transition to the talkies had been in the late 1920s; Hamilton extends the metaphor of this jarring shift to reflect his character’s schizophrenia. Later, the physical attraction of a toxic aspiring film starlet, Netta, is described through the technology of radio:
She was something of which he was physically sensible by some means other than that of sight or sound: she was sending out a ray, a wave, from herself, which seemed to affect his whole being, to go all through him like a faint vibration. It was as though she were a small amateur wireless station, and he alone was tuned in to her and listening.14
The inverse of the silent film analogy, which is a retrogressive stripping away of one sense (hearing), radio introduces an entirely new somatic dimension. In both cases, Hamilton’s interest is not the message of the medium so much as the somatic effect on its audience. Here and elsewhere, Hamilton supersaturates vernacular culture with significance that is ultimately grounded in the body. Noticeably, however, he does not characterize vernacular culture as uniform or straightforwardly pleasurable.
The first novel in the Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky trilogy opens with Bob, a waiter at the pub that gives the novel its title, The Midnight Bell, near Euston and Warren Streets, dreaming that he is on a ship at sea, departing for a “momentous voyage.”15 He wakes up disoriented in “his little hovel of a room” and finds himself fully dressed and sickened as a result of getting “drunk at lunch again.” It’s an event, the regretful hangover, that appears ad nauseam in Hamilton’s novels and signals the long tail of dysphoria that inevitably follows pleasurable excess. “The burden of cold and ever-recurring existence weighed down his spirit. Here he was again” (4). The scene underscores the irony of the title’s play on Jules Verne’s adventure-packed Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Bob had once been a sailor, but the drama of the London streets he treads is hardly so daring. Rather, “the small fish in the weird teeming aquarium of the metropolis” are “uncanny, grotesquely adjusted, and obscurely motivated.”16 This urban fishbowl’s equivalents of the great squid that grips the Nautilus are alcoholism, economic parasitism, and frustrated desire.
Bob’s routine for his day off from work is a roll call of formulaic urban amusements: he walks across town to have tea at a Lyons, smoking “three cigarettes, and strangely enjoying the electric-lit, spoon-clinking liveliness of the place” (41), he browses bookshops, drinks at a bar, has a meal at the Corner House, and goes to the cinema. The real story begins when he falls in love with a prostitute, Jenny Maple, who is perpetually low on rent money. Bob, proud of the fact that he has saved eighty pounds, offers her money, which “gives him a strange thrill … almost as though he were making love” (76), although that is exactly what he is not doing. Jenny remains beyond his reach. Hamilton’s pairing of “strange” with “enjoying” and “thrill” indicates the equivocal texture of Bob’s pleasure. Repeatedly, with the regularity of a metronome, Bob declares that he will stop squandering his money on Jenny, but then he draws out more from his dwindling bank account to woo her. It comes as a surprise to him every time. “Would this ever end?” he wonders. “It seemed as though she were some alluring and irresistible pilot, leading him on and downwards (for his sins and weakness) through every circle of hell” (191). Not just the pilot but also the route is irresistible to Bob. At the end of the novel, after promising to take a trip to Brighton with him on Boxing Day, Jenny stands Bob up at Victoria Station. He goes on a wild drinking binge and ends up, having been robbed, in a doss house in Soho surrounded by vagrants. Devastated and financially wrecked, he thinks, “It could never have been otherwise. He had merely essayed the impossible and failed” (220). Yet he is also elated, as if this bottoming out has vindicated him.
The novel ends on an inexplicably upbeat note as Bob decides to become a sailor again; the narrator hopefully observes that “after all he had suffered, and after all he had lost, Bob was yet able to glow in this manner and resolve to go to sea” (221). But Bob is no Captain Nemo. Formally, the conclusion circles back to the novel’s opening scene, the urban sailor washed up on the shore, but there is no reason to expect a heroic transformation or forward movement. (Rhys draws comparably claustrophobic narrative circles in her novels.) Indeed, the next two novels in the trilogy backtrack chronologically to tell similarly dejecting tales about other characters, and the final installment recapitulates many of the events from Bob’s narrative involving other characters whose stories intersect with his, reinforcing the impression of stasis and the sense that Bob has not really departed. (These internal repetitions no doubt contributed to Orwell’s pronouncement that Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky is “as shapeless and inert as a clot of frog-spawn” [390].)
The second novel in the trilogy, The Siege of Pleasure, describes how Jenny became a prostitute, tracing her downfall to one drunken night. The Plains of Cement focuses on Ella, the kindhearted barmaid at The Midnight Bell who is hopelessly love with Bob but, in lieu of his affection, becomes semiengaged to a comically pompous man she doesn’t particularly like (Ernest Eccles). The trilogy is framed by two stories of unrequited love. In The Midnight Bell, Siege, and Plains, as well as Hangover Square, characters tell themselves that they want to do the sensible, bourgeois thing (save money, get married, stay sober), but they consistently do just the opposite: the thing that makes them most miserable.
For a body of work that has been characterized as “shabby, depressed” (Widdowson) and “grimy, graceless, bleak, ugly” (Doris Lessing17), Hamilton’s novels are remarkably loquacious about pleasure. Ian Sinclair notes that “The key Hamilton terms are … cement, plains, pleasure. Those three words recur endlessly, as he describes the slate and limestone city.”18 John Bayley explains the apparent contradiction in the following way:
The [London] Times was moved to comment in its obituary that Hamilton was “a genuine minor poet of the loneliness, purposelessness and frustration of contemporary urban life.” Handsome as it seems, the tribute is misleading. Urban life is the same everywhere, and always has been, and only during the last century has it become a fashionable cliché to refer to it in these terms. Where Hamilton is concerned, it would be equally true to say he is a connoisseur of the excitements, obsessions and enjoyments of urban life, for his characters are submerged in these, as they are in the pubs, the cinemas and Lyons Corner Houses, and all the rituals and consolations of such places.19
In fact, it is not a matter of one or the other: frustration or enjoyment. Hamilton’s fiction teeters on an edge between the two. For a more accurate description, we might shift the terms chiasmatically: Hamilton writes about the frustration of enjoyment and the enjoyment of frustration. It is no coincidence that the center of the trilogy, and the chiasmatic structure, is The Siege of Pleasure. Systematically and relentlessly, Hamilton’s characters create impasses and obstacles to pleasure, orienting themselves toward “strange thrills” and “strange enjoyments” that undercut the notion of the pleasure principle, that people seek pleasure and avoid pain.
In a chapter on hedonism in Principia Ethica, G. E. Moore asserts that “The things we enjoy and the things we do not, form two unmistakable classes.”20 If only it were so clear. Hamilton’s characters are in a constant state of apparent befuddlement about what they do or do not enjoy. As Freud describes it, unpleasure delays, reroutes, inverts, or distorts, but does not exclude, pleasure. Masochism and the less pathological repetition compulsion are his primary examples (although his description of erotic “fore-pleasure” versus “end-pleasure” in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality suggests a similar dynamic). Freud posits that such repetitions are aimed toward mastery or overcoming of a painful experience: an end point that produces pleasure by extinguishing tension. By this account, the goal of Hamilton’s characters is reaching the lowest point—the empty bank account, the complete humiliation—that proves that the world truly is cruel after all, and that the individual really has no power, or rather, only has power to bring about misery. It is the dubious triumph of vindication that things are, indeed, as bad as one thought. However, Hamilton’s characters suggest that the path to the end point itself, which maintains a steady level of frustration and tension, is more connected to pleasure than Freud allows.
“The masochist is morose,” Deleuze writes, but this pose is “related to the experience of waiting and delay” that is, along with suspense and disavowal, key to masochistic pleasure. For Deleuze, the idea of a “pleasure-pain complex” or “pleasure in pain” does not describe masochistic pleasure adequately: “masochism is not pleasure in pain, nor even in punishment.”21 Rather, the masochist desires tension and waiting: “pleasure is now a form of behavior related to repetition, accompanying and following repetition, which has itself become an awesome, independent force” (12). Deleuze proposes that the masochist’s pose of powerlessness is an underhanded strategy: “What insolence and humor, what irrepressible defiance and ultimate triumph lie hidden behind an ego that claims to be so weak” (124). The masochist’s manipulations are characterized by humor and theatricality that foregrounds elaborate and apparently unwilled suffering.
The formal qualities of masochistic display that Deleuze highlights (“Fundamentally, masochism is neither material nor moral, but essentially formal,” 74) certainly characterize Hamilton’s and Rhys’s work. Both oeuvres have a stalled quality at the same time that they are strikingly theatrical. Even though their main focus is the interior, psychological angst of their characters, their narratives unfold through scenes of externalized conflict, disaster, and failure that are often darkly funny. Hamilton sets his male protagonists against female succubi who keep men in a state of erotic suspension: a predicament that the male characters themselves have a hand in bringing about. The ironies and frustrations that Hamilton and Rhys set up for their readers, the behavior that strains credibility and sympathy, and the formal repetition and stasis include masochistic dynamics but, more than that, they are achieved through strategies that are integrally related to the historically specific interwar discourse of pleasure. Both Hamilton and Rhys elevate contorted, self-defeating unpleasure while casting conventional pleasure as unethical, dispassionate, or amoral. Significantly, both authors self-consciously deploy contemporary vernacular culture to establish dysphoria.
Hamilton’s representations of intoxication and prostitution, central experiences around which the trilogy revolves, illustrate his attitude toward pleasure. Writing against a backdrop in which “recreational” pleasures of the body and mass culture are commonly interpreted as intoxicating false pleasures, Hamilton and Rhys both suggest that drinking produces irresistible unpleasure. Inebriation here promises initial release from woe, but the giddiness of the first drink inevitably gives way to uncontrolled consumption and the narrative careens out of control. For example, when Bob steps out with Jenny for the first time, things begin well: “She was phenomenally desirable, and he was proud of her. He had never had such a delightful evening. He was drunk” (53). But then “everything grew more and more confused…. The place was beginning to reel; she was speaking with amused disparagement of her other partners; he was finding himself strangely gratified by the disparagement, and trying to order some more drinks” (54). The scene becomes chaotic as Jenny dances with other men and finally, the evening ends with Bob realizing how little is left in his wallet: “It was hard to credit that you could spend all that on so innocent an evening. She could hardly have extracted more from him if she had been a harpy. It occurred to him that she had never thanked him” (55). Their successive meetings follow the same pattern. At the end of another date, Bob has a fight with Jenny, and he rages about prostitutes: “they got what was coming to them. There was, after all, a God. They rotted in their own sins and diseases…. In the meantime, it would be best to get drunk. … He did so” (127–128). After the chapter break, he wakes up “sick and heavy … giddy but horribly lucid…. The truth was that he was letting himself go. He was becoming debauched” (128).
For Hamilton’s (and Rhys’s) characters, intoxication quickly crosses over from excitement to excess. The chapter in Plains of Cement that recounts Jenny’s fall into prostitution, for example, details her feelings as she imbibes port with a man she has just met: “Of course she’d have another drink. She liked drink. She’d have as many more as she wanted. At last she was abandoned. She was going to have some pleasure for once. Pleasure—that was the thing—pleasure for once!” Within a half hour, “enthroned in lucid joy” (289), she has quit her job and is on the path to prostitution. Hamilton’s representation differs from modernist condemnations of metaphorical intoxication in that he depicts drunkenness as complex and unstable: a pleasure that inevitably turns to unpleasure, which is actually part of its attraction.
Erotic pleasure too teeters on this edge for Hamilton’s characters. Although the three main narrative lines in Twenty Thousand Streets depict vectors of desire among young, unmarried men and women, there is almost no sex. Most sexual encounters occur in the context of prostitution. Bob is intensely ambivalent about prostitutes, referring to “them” and “these women.” He can only account for Jenny through clichés, noting her “utmost simplicity and tragedy. Beautiful, illeducated, foolish, weak, miserable, well-meaning, her beauty had been her downfall” (136). In this disingenuous framing of Jenny’s story as a tragedy, to which I will return, Bob views her as both a “virgin” and a “siren” (93). She is “as inaccessible, almost, as a princess” (99), but also “A little vulgar soul with a little white body, that walked about the West End and sold itself” (128). When she rebuffs Bob, he falls back into his original position and rages, “Fancy, at his age, imagining there was a resemblance between a harlot and a human being!” (127). Even as Bob’s desire for Jenny is the motor driving this narrative, the text rarely signals any pleasure, sexual or otherwise, in their interactions. What we see instead is misery, manipulation, and frustration. The most physically intimate scene between Jenny and Bob, when he visits her Wardour Street boardinghouse, suggests depressing and pestilential sex. A “dark passage which chilled Bob’s soul” (169) leads to her filthy, cramped room (“In the confined, crowded, low-ceilinged space you could hardly move” [170]), which is lined with portraits of men left by previous occupants. “Disease and delinquency were in the air: no one had ever cleaned it out…. Only those who had fled from toil—only unemployed servant girls, and the spoiled beauties of the slums, had filled it with the lotus odour of their indolence and unhappiness” (171). A jug and basin in the corner, which should be “a source of cleanliness,” is “easily the dirtiest thing in the room” (170). Except for a kiss and dancing, this Zolaesque episode is the closest Bob gets to Jenny’s body, which the language of the scene casts as grimy and polluted.
Why, then, does Bob continue to pursue Jenny? His desire for her clearly parallels the structure of addiction: “How had she gained this hypnotic ascendency over him—how, from being a rather pretty and piteous little wretch, had she subtly developed into an erotic and deadly drug now utterly indispensable alike to his spiritual and nervous system?” (155–156). Jenny is the epitome of accessible, commodified, bodily pleasure, yet Bob cannot seem to get it, which begs the question of whether he really wants it. For Hamilton, prostitution is a compromised, parasitic kind of voluptuousness: falling in love with Jenny can only produce misery for Bob. The point, however, is that misery is itself a motivation for him. Jenny has insight into the structure of both of Bob’s addictions. Noting how her customers need to get drunk before a sexual encounter with her, Jenny “marvelled, as she always did, at these little men, to whom an evening of delight, apart from the money they paid for it, entailed such strenuous mental suffering” (227). “Delight” and “suffering” are closely aligned for Hamilton, in both intoxication and prostitution. Suffering is the attraction: part of the “strange enjoyments” that motivate his characters.
If sexual pleasure is elusive in Twenty Thousand Streets, by contrast, an explosive—even orgasmic—moment of pleasure occurs around a different kind of commodity. When Jenny takes Bob’s money and dismisses him yet again, he ponders “The brutality, the low-down servant-girl meanness of her. He would never forgive her. She had betrayed and humiliated him” (125). His mood plummets and then suddenly soars as he decides to withdraw more money from the bank. “He could not, of course, humiliate himself any further”—in fact, he could and he does—“but he would have a gamble. He did not know what had come over him lately—he had been getting wild. Let him have one last fling, and then succumb. If he wooed her rightly, might [she] not be his own again?” (129). Smashed by now, he plots his next move and finds, suddenly, that he is ravenous. It is “the false hunger of the drunkard. He could eat and eat.” His famished mind turns to something completely unexpected. “Turkish Delight. He could eat pounds and pounds of Turkish Delight. A blind soul, surrounded by the darkness of the infinity of the cosmos, lay throbbing with orgiastic desire for Turkish Delight! What a life!” (130). This is one of the most libidinally charged, yet comical, passages in Hamilton’s work. The cause of the outburst is a popular mass-produced candy that capitalized on orientalist fascination, a comestible companion to mass-market novels and films such as The Sheik. Fry’s introduced its Turkish bar in 1914 as “full of Eastern Promise”; Cadbury’s describes its Turkish Delight bar as a “mystical, exotic treat that lets you escape from the everyday.”22 Bob sublimates his sexual desire in a fantasy of gorging himself on the sweet, sticky, exotic treat. (C. S. Lewis would exploit Turkish Delight for the same purpose in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe [1950], as an emblem of hedonism. The White Witch presents young Edmund with several pounds of “enchanted” Turkish Delight: “anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves.”23) Having had this vision of an absurdly banal sublime that he isn’t even able to execute, Bob instead settles for a spartan meal of bread, butter, and cheese foraged from the bar downstairs before he passes out in his lonely bed, the prelude to yet another hangover.
The imagined orgy of Turkish Delight, like the scenes of Bob’s tipsy glee before he careens into heavy inebriation, along with his desire/repulsion for Jenny, can be correlated, at least theoretically, with jouissance. As Lacan puts it, “It begins with a tickle and ends in a blaze of petrol.”24 Jouissance flouts the traditional hydraulics of pleasure, in which tension is undesirable, and instead involves an increase of tension to a point that is unbearable. It is a feeling “closer to pain than pleasure,” Frank Kermode writes; “pleasure is identified with ‘cultural enjoyment and identity,’” whereas “jouissance shatters that identity and is not to be identified with enjoyment.”25 That said, jouissance is not quite the right word for Bob’s paroxysms. Hamilton’s revision of the pleasure principle is not only highly comic (it reads more than a bit like a parody of “Ecnerwal,” with his orientalist eroticism), but also points down a dead-end, raptureless street. Bob’s Turkish Delight fantasy only emphasizes his foolishly selfcreated deprivation.26
In contrast to Bob’s imagined sugar binge or drunkenness, the cinema is an unexpectedly anhedonic zone for Hamilton, despite the fact that his characters are frequent filmgoers and idolize cinema stars. Before Jenny becomes a prostitute, she rents a room above a pet shop and has a single picture of Rudolph Valentino on the wall: “The charmer’s drooping lids and sensuously ominous gaze followed her around the room.” Bob has a passionate crush on a leading lady, a “large-eyed, slim and shingled blonde,” and Ella “dreamed submissive dreams” of the actor Richard Dix.27 However, the overall cinematic experience is disconnected from “amusement” or “fun.” For example, when Ella and Bob go to the pictures at the new Madame Tussaud’s cinema, there is an opulent, “decidedly Eastern” atmosphere and doll-like attendants—“seductresses” (80)—seat them. The promise of excitement fades when the film begins.
In a few moments they were a part of the audience. That is to say their faces had abandoned every trace of the sensibility and character they had borne outside, and had taken on instead the blank, calm, inhuman stare of the picturegoer—an expression which would observe the wrecking of ships, the burning of cities, the fall of empires, the projection of pies, the flooding of countries with an unchanging and grave equanimity. (81)
The cinema renders its viewers depersonalized, each face a banal, blank reflection of the screen in front. At another point, Bob goes out alone on a foggy day “in a wild mood and meant to go to the pictures again,” and experiences the same flattened lack of feeling. “He went to Tussaud’s cinema, took a one and threepenny seat, and had no pleasure. There was a fog even in the cinema” (89–90). Hamilton reiterates popular conceptions of cinema as a technology of enforced passivity, but against the widespread contemporary concern that it was stimulating people with the wrong kind of mass-produced narratives, Hamilton presents a cinema that hardly stimulates at all, and instead renders the audience indifferent and docile (“the fall of empires” is no more serious that “the projection of pies”). Unlike alcohol, prostitution, and the frenzy of Turkish Delight, all of which heighten tension, cinema dissipates tension but leaves the spectators feeling nothing.
Two notable cinema scenes in the second and third installments of the trilogy emphasize conventional vehicles of amusement that fail to produce pleasure. At the outset of The Plains of Cement, which describes the period before Jenny becomes a prostitute, her suitor, Tom, takes her to a Lyons restaurant and the cinema. He spends beyond his means, foreshadowing her relationship with Bob. In fact, Bob’s object of “orgiastic desire,” Turkish Delight, plays a starring role in the episode. Although he cannot afford it, Tom is certain that “if he did not get Turkish Delight [for Jenny] the entire evening was endangered. For it was an axiom that, amid all the varied delights that generous nature showered, to Turkish Delight Jenny was most consistently faithful” (248). Jenny’s faithfulness is as dubious as the supposed cornucopia of delights. As soon as she and Tom are seated in the cinema, “all at once, a delicious, almost salacious little rattle took place in the darkness, and Tom knew she had begun” (249). Little else in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky comes near to being “salacious.” As in Bob’s fantasy of cramming his mouth with Turkish Delight, the narrator notes the alacrity with which Jenny dispatches the sweets: “A pound an hour was Jenny’s usual speed with Turkish Delight.” Finally Tom obtains his reward: “As far as Jenny was concerned, sensuousness advanced little beyond the realms of Turkish Delight … although she still allowed him to hold her hand. She did not as a rule like being ‘touched.’ But an exception was always made at the pictures, and he was happy because, though she in no way surrendered to him, she was placid and aquiescent” (249). As with the earlier scene, the cinema and the candy produce an anesthetization of sensation, which is required here for Tom to hold Jenny’s hand. The sweets and the trip to the cinema are not pleasures freely given but rather the price of attaining sensual contact: a transaction that echoes the structure of the profession into which Jenny soon falls. Her compulsive consumption of Turkish Delight illustrates her selfishness (she is “faithful” to nothing but her own desires) and her incipient whorishness: her joyless, obligatory giving of as little of herself as she can to Tom in return for spending his money. For Bob, Turkish Delight is a fantasy consolation for otherwise unattainable delights.
The most sympathetic characters in Hamilton’s fictions feel everything—except conventional pleasure—while his despicable characters, whose hearts are toughened, are mercenary hedonists. Denying oneself pleasure, then, becomes a principle and a mark of distinction. This is demonstrated by another cinematic sugar jag near the end of the trilogy. In the final pages of The Plains of Cement, Ella learns that Bob has left The Midnight Bell and London. Heartbroken, she buys herself “four ounces of Italian Cream,” for which she has a “passion.” Italian Cream evokes fantasies of imported splendor just as Bob’s Turkish Delight alludes to the exotic Orient. She goes to the Capitol cinema, which is “a tremendous extravagance, as she knew you could not get into the Capitol under one-and-six, but she was beyond caring about extravagance, and she had to have some distraction” (518). She seeks distraction: the classic modernist description of mass culture’s effect. Ella also hopes to make a decision about breaking up with the horrid Earnest Eccles.
Hamilton frames this scene with an awkward departure from the free indirect discourse that characterizes most of Ella’s narrative and the intimate representation of most of his characters’ emotions. In removed omniscient narration—and using the same word, “grave,” as he does in the earlier cinema episode with Bob and Ella to explain the audience’s affect—Hamilton comments:
It is a sad pass when a solitary young woman in London is so low in spirits and miserable in her thoughts that she decides she must buy herself some sweets and go by herself to the pictures and sit in the gloom, to hide from the roaring world, and try to divert her mind from its aching preoccupations by looking at the shadows. You will sometimes see such lonely figures, eating their sweets and gazing gravely at the screen in the flickering darkness of picture theatres, and it may well be that they are merely other Ellas, with just such problems and sorrows in their grey lives as hers.
It is the sweets which give the tragedy to the spectacle. To have reached such an age, to have fought so strenuously all along the line of life, and yet to have come to a stage of hopelessness and isolation wherein the sole remaining consolation is to be found in sweets! Yet this was Ella’s predicament the next afternoon. (518)
Throughout the trilogy, Hamilton details the minutiae of his characters’ lives—and particularly their feelings of angst and frustration. They may be identifiable as types (the barman, the barmaid, the prostitute), but they are individualized. For this scene of conventional distraction, however, Hamilton shifts to melodramatic, sentimental, and clichéd language (“It is the sweets which give the tragedy to the spectacle”), oddly combined with the high-handed voice of the sociologist that deindividuates and departicularizes his heroine (“merely other Ellas with just such problems and sorrows in their grey lives as hers”). As soon as Ella breaks free of this objectifying, flattening narrative—which she does, importantly, by seeing herself as apart from “the other Ellas”—the narrative shifts back to the usual Hamiltonian voice that aligns itself with the underdog who cannot partake in vernacular pleasure. “She had no sooner entered the imposing, lavishly mirrored portals of the Capitol than she had a feeling that her impulse to entertain herself had been a mistaken one” (519). She “tried to … enjoy her Italian Cream,” but “she had to be careful not to make herself sick” (519). Gustatory pleasure gives way to fear of nauseating gluttony: the same degeneration of pleasure as in drinking. Rather than experiencing the diversion and amusement that cinema is supposed to deliver, Ella’s heart sinks “in sudden unexpected lurches, which left a slow ache behind…. [Bob] had struck, as it were, a blow upon her soul which had been transmitted to her physical being.” This metaphysical hurt is matched by a comically external one: “Moreover she had come in in the middle of a picture, and the children behind her kept on kicking her in the back.” Her heart and body battered—and seasick, like Bob, “as though the ship of her lovelorn condition had entered even rougher water” (519)—she flees the cinema into a “teeming, roaring, grinding, belching, hooting, anxious-faced world” (520).
For characters such as Bob and Ella, there is no refuge in this type of distraction or other conventional amusements. A standard modernist complaint is that cinema is all too effective in diverting people from their problems, feeding them delusions and narcotizing them. For Hamilton’s sympathetic characters, cinematic pleasure fails, but in the way that they like to fail. Ella goes to the cinema ostensibly expecting “distraction” and instead receives “a blow upon her soul” and a shower of kicks on her back. However, this timid character who holds herself back from sensuous Italian Cream, who never acts on her real desire for Bob and instead enters into an excruciating courtship with the buffoonish Earnest Eccles, is not a pushover. She is quick-witted and firm with the raucous clientele at The Midnight Bell. She lives independently. She is not the waif Hamilton makes her out to be in his soapbox passage. Could it be, then, that this character is doing what she wants? Is she enjoying her “tragic” loss of Bob by the fact that cinema can’t distract her?
One reason it is difficult to put one’s finger on what is driving Hamilton’s characters is that they constantly insist they are not to blame for anything that happens to them. Bob tells himself that “From the first moment he had met her, to the last time he had seen her, he had never made one conscious move towards either wooing or winning [Jenny]. Indeed, he had done nothing but retreat. And yet here he was stuck with her—fully committed. Agencies beyond him had been at work” (120). Ella lets Mr. Eccles court her even as “the dungeon of his shameless and enwrapping personality” (477) repulses her. Jenny blames others for her drunken night: “It wasn’t fair—them making her drunk like that” (305). Hamilton’s characters “find” themselves in the same situation over and over, and make the same self-defeating decisions over and over. Hamilton once wrote,
There is only one theme for the Hardy-cum-Conrad great novel—that is, that this is a bloody awful life, that we are none of us responsible for our own lives and actions, but merely in the hands of the gods, that Nature don’t [sic] care a damn, but looks rather picturesque in not doing so, and that whether you’re making love, being hanged, or getting drunk, it’s all a futile way of passing the time in the brief period allotted us preceding death.28
This might describe the surface of Hamilton’s fiction, or the narrative that his characters tell themselves, but the stories themselves tell otherwise. His characters do have and make choices, and moments of volition are foregrounded throughout the novels. Bob could choose to break off with Jenny and romance the good-hearted Ella. Ella could ditch the odious Mr. Eccles much earlier than she does. Both of them have jobs and a place to live, and their circumstances are not so desperate (although Ella has the threat of spinsterdom pressing upon her) until they make them so. Jenny’s moment of choice is most glaring of all, as Hamilton carefully details the scene in which one glass of port leads her into prostitution.29
With disavowal and underhandedness, Hamilton’s characters do what they want, even as they deny that is so. They swear to do one thing, and then, in strikingly quick succession (sometimes in the same sentence), do the opposite. For instance, when Bob discovers that Jenny has skipped out on her rent and is grifting her landlord as surely as she is grifting Bob, he vows for the umpteenth time to cut his losses and stay away from her. “Was it relief? Was this his chance of escape?” (158). To the contrary, he immediately goes to the area of the West End that is her turf and begins looking for her: “he discovered himself in that quarter, as he invariably did on Thursday evenings, and was willing to submit to fate and accident” (158). Obviously, this is no function of fate or accident. He pitifully asks Jenny why she failed to keep their last date and she flatly tells him that she didn’t want to meet him (again, it is the unsympathetic characters in Hamilton who are able to be open about their desires). “This was hopeless—an impasse” (161, italics in original), he thinks. “Were there any lower circles, he wondered, to which he might descend in hell?” (163). The question is not rhetorical: Bob goes on to find an even lower circle and to abase himself still further. If we read these texts literally—if we look at how the characters act—the narratives suggest that the impasse is exactly where they want to be. The impasse, a point at which a character is impeded or blocked, represents the collision of forces (pleasure and pain), a place of pressure or tension without release, that defines unpleasure. No exit.
The patterns of these texts—their repetition, the characters’ avowed helplessness and refusal of responsibility and agency—reflect a determined desire for abasement, tension, and deadlock. For example, when Jenny stands Bob up for the final time, at Victoria Station, he retreats to a restaurant where
he sat there quietly contemplating his own drama…. He ordered a double whisky. That step was obvious. He drank it rather theatrically and rather theatrically ordered another. For the moment he could regard himself theatrically. He was, perhaps, almost enjoying himself. (210)
In moments like these, Hamilton tips his hand, indicating the payoff, the delectation of suffering, and how these experiences are selfconsciously staged and narrated by the “victims” with a note of what can only be called triumph or “enjoyed discomfort.” If the repetition of “theatrically” suggests Bob is not exactly trapped because he is able to observe and savor his own performance, it is more precisely a moment in which he fully admits his motivations and his desire for defeat.
Here and throughout his work, Hamilton implies that conventional pleasure is dishonorable. The characters who suffer are held up as morally superior, and misery is a mark of negative distinction. Bob’s self-conscious viewing of himself as wretched and victorious mirrors the reader’s view of him, and also Hamilton’s. The protagonist who can’t or won’t participate in mass culture, at least not in the usual ways, serves as a figure for the reader who is consuming a text that is frustratingly and unrelentingly oriented toward defeat, that thwarts narratives of fulfillment, redemption, and progress as well as modernist narratives of cultural competency. All parts of the reading process are drawn into this promotion of failure, refusal, and negation.
The performance of defeat and the reader’s witnessing of it takes another form at the conclusion of Midnight Bell. Bob tells himself, “He believed it was not [Jenny’s] fault. Existence had abused her and made her what she was: poverty had crushed him and made him unable to help her” (220). “Poverty had crushed him”: let us not forget that at the beginning of The Midnight Bell Bob had a steady job and a healthy sum in the bank. His last-minute forgiveness of Jenny is as disingenuous as his dismissal of his own hand in the drama. Not just the characters but Hamilton’s narrator too is given to this kind of theatricalization of suffering, in the passage describing Jenny eating sweets in the cinema, for example, and in the conclusion of the trilogy. The narrator praises Bob, for “after all he had suffered, and after all he had lost, Bob was yet able to glow in this manner and resolve to go to sea.”
For there is this about men. You can embitter and torment them from birth…. You can trick them and mock them with all the implements of fate—lead them on, as Bob was led on, only to betray them, obsess them with hopeless dreams, punish them with senseless accidents, and harass them with wretched fears. You can buffet them, bait them, enrage them—load upon them all evils and follies in this vale of obstruction and tears. But, even at that, there is one thing you cannot do. You can never make them, under any provocation, say die. And therein lies their acquittal. (221)
One can almost hear the violins—or the Greek chorus—in the background. But the unpersuasive coda, which shifts the blame away from the characters to cosmic forces, is at odds with the rest of the novel and the events that led to this point. Here, as in the scene with Ella eating Italian Cream in the cinema, which is also said to be a “tragedy,” there is a strong authorial address to the reader (“you”) and a solicitation of sentimentalism and clichés (the “vale … of tears,” Bob’s having been ostensibly “led on,” and the final, triumphant “acquittal”) that Hamilton’s narrative otherwise rejects. Like Lawrence and Huxley surreptitiously imitating exactly what they critique in Hull and Glyn, Hamilton cannot resist the redemption of suffering, the deliverance from the bleak world he has otherwise so consistently depicted. As in the Italian Cream scene, in which Ella becomes like “other Ellas,” Bob becomes just like other unfortunate men. The passage contradicts the spirit of these characters’ struggles for individuation and distinction through debasement and failure.
To the reader who has been enculturated into Hamilton’s narrative world in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, this redemptive frame, with its evocation of tragedy, rings false. Aristotle specifies that there is an oikeia hedone or “proper pleasure” in the audience’s response to tragedy, an emotion of “enjoyed discomfort.”30 Freud points to this as one of the culturally sanctioned forms of unpleasure: “the artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults, which, unlike children’s, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators … the most painful experiences and yet can be felt by them as highly enjoyable.”31 The mere word “tragedy” carries the nimbus of dignity and seriousness of purpose. However, Hamilton’s characters do not fulfill the classical definition of tragic actors; they themselves want their downfall too much. And the feeling produced by Hamilton’s novels is nowhere near cathartic. Instead, the off-key final pages of the trilogy, with its clumsy reach toward salvation, sounds a last note of uncomfortable dissonance, a bad aftertaste that lingers like one of Bob’s hangovers or the cloying powdered sugar of Turkish Delight.
Hamilton’s last major works, Hangover Square: A Story of Darkest Earl’s Court (1941) and The Gorse Trilogy (published from 1952 to 1955), are even more critical of conventional pleasure and take that critique in a political direction. The simmering resentment of cruel, parasitic women in Twenty Thousand Streets tips over into overt misogyny and violence. In Hangover Square, the male protagonist’s hopeless relationship with the actress-grifter Netta is similar to Bob’s crush on Jenny in Twenty Thousand Streets, but it is more aggressively angry, as Bone fantasizes about killing Netta and eventually does so. Netta is drawn to a political force that is not available to Hamilton’s earlier characters—fascism: “It might be said that this feeling for violence and brutality, for the pageant and panorama of fascism on the Continent, formed her principal disinterested aesthetic pleasure. She had few others” (154). The phrase “disinterested aesthetic pleasure,” associated with Kant and Eliot, links modernist detachment to fascism. Yet Netta’s attraction is hardly disinterested: “She liked the uniforms, the guns, the breeches, the boots, the swastikas, the shirts. She was, probably, sexually stimulated by these things in the same way as she might have been sexually stimulated by a bull-fight” (153). Fascism, Hamilton suggests, is the point at which the worst of popular and elitist pleasures converge; it offers immediate, embodied, aestheticized attractions to characters who crave stimulation and excitement, as well as a philosophy of detachment and cruelty.
Hamilton’s Rope (1929) is perhaps his most concentrated exploration of the rejection of pleasure cast explicitly in terms of modernist aesthetics. The play leaves behind the seedy bars of Euston Street for the Mayfair home of a wealthy Oxford undergraduate, Brandon, who along with an accomplice, Granillo, has strangled a classmate and hosts a dinner party served on the trunk containing the corpse. Telescoping the claustrophobia of Hamilton’s novels, the drama unfolds in one room and tightly focuses on one act of violence and its intellectual justification: a ghoulish parody of aestheticized pleasure. The “passionless … bloodless and noiseless murder,”32 as Brandon characterizes it, is an act of pure will and intellect. Brandon declares that its “beauty and piquancy” are expressed in their arrangement of the gathering that follows (5). It is a daring and difficult stunt just to see if they can get away with it. (This is echoed in Hitchcock’s decision to shoot a feature film in what seems like one single, continuous take: a formal feat that did not serve any real narrative purpose, but was its own justification.) Most of the party is dominated by the interests of “unintellectual humanity” (6), in opposition to the self-declared übermenschen. The guests chatter about film stars, fiddle with the wireless, and dance to the gramophone; the victim, Ronald, met his death after a trip to the Coliseum Music Hall. Brandon, Granillo, and Rupert—a “damnably brilliant poet” whom Brandon and Granillo almost invite to join them in staging the murder because they feel he “might have seen this thing from our angle, that is, the artistic one” (6)—profess ignorance or distaste for the cinema. Rupert unconvincingly remarks, “I once went to the pictures and saw Mary Pickford” (23). Brandon says, “I simply abhor the things myself…. They simply make me go to sleep. And all those places are so infernally stuffy” (23). Vernacular pleasure, rejected by the characters who think of themselves as exceptional men and embraced by the glibly sybaritic partygoers, is the background to the stealthy, aestheticized, and intellectualized act of violence at the center of the party.
The liquor flows as heavily throughout the play as in any Hamilton novel. Rupert arrives already drunk and proceeds to get more inebriated, although it does not seem to impair his sharp perception. While the other characters dance in the next room, Rupert peruses Conrad’s last novel, The Rover, and discovers the dead man’s ticket to the music hall, which leads him to unmask the murder. After the other guests leave, Rupert plays a game of cat and mouse with the hosts and eventually discovers the body. Brandon tells him,
Listen. I have done this thing. I and Granno. We have done it together. We have done it for—for adventure. For adventure and danger. For danger. You read Nietzsche, don’t you, Rupert? … And you know that he tells us to live dangerously … And you know that he’s no more respect for individual life than you, and tells us—to—live dangerously. We thought we would do so—that’s all. We have done so. We have only done the thing. Others have talked. We have done. Do you understand? … For God’s sake tell me you’re an emancipated man. (63-64)
Rupert may be intellectually on the side of modernism (Conrad, Nietzsche, modern poetry), but his “emancipation” stops short of Brandon and Granno’s cerebral exhilaration. Earlier in the evening, he concedes that he has “done murder” himself in the war, but there was no thrill to it. He berates Brandon and Granillo for their “cruel and scheming pleasure” that led them to commit “a sin and a blasphemy against that very life which you now find yourselves so precious” (64).
Like other Hamilton protagonists, Rupert rejects pleasure on both sides of the great divide. When the other party guests have left, he makes a lyrical speech about the hour: 10:35, the last call for pleasure. “It’s a wonderful hour,” he sighs. “I am particularly susceptible to it”:
Because it is, I think, the hour when London asks why—when it wants to know what it’s all about—when the tedium of activity and the folly of pleasure are equally transparent. It is the hour in which unemployed servant girls, and the spoiled beauties of slums, walk the streets for hire…. It is the hour when jaded London theatre audiences are settling down in the darkness to the last acts of plays, of which they know the denouements all too well…. For others, further horrors are awaiting. The nightclubs and cabarets have not yet begun but they will do very soon…. Five-and-twenty to eleven. A horrible hour—a macabre hour, for it is not only the hour of pleasure ended, it is the hour when pleasure itself has been found wanting. There, that is what this hour means to me. (55–56)
Here Rupert acts as the omniscient narrator for Hamilton’s interwar oeuvre, vacillating between tedium and folly, pain and pleasure (he even uses a phrase from Bob’s visit to Jenny’s squalid room: “unemployed servant girls, and the spoiled beauties of the slums”; Bob also speaks of prostitutes as representing “the glamour and beauty of the macabre” [42]). Baffled, Brandon asks, “My dear Rupert, do you see no earthly object in living?” “I fear not,” Rupert replies, demanding another drink (56). It is always 10:35 in Hamilton’s textual universe, the hour when the drinkers are about to be ejected from the pubs, the hour when Jennys begin to trawl for customers, “The hour when pleasure itself has been found wanting.” And it is this, the evacuation of pleasure, that Hamilton’s favored characters crave.
“FOR GOD’S SAKE WATCH OUT FOR YOUR FILM-MIND”: JEAN RHYS
Critics regularly refer to “the Rhys woman”: a narcissistic, self-defeating, financially dependent victim who makes dubious decisions and declares the world a hostile conspirator against her. Like Hamilton’s characters, Rhys’s women drink often; the effect is a temporary giddiness that inevitably gives way to crying, unsteadiness, and “making a scene.” They rarely get a lucky break, and when they do, they squander it.33 In Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha Jensen ends up in an awful room in an awful hotel; she thinks, “Only I would have landed here, only I would stay here” (364). There is a basic disjunction between Rhys’s characters’ declared desires and their actions. In Voyage in the Dark, after Anna sleeps with Walter for the first time, he gives her cash. “I meant to say, ‘What are you doing?’” she recalls. “But when I went up to him, instead of saying, ‘Don’t do that,’ I said, ‘All right, if you like—anything you like, any way you like.’ And I kissed his hand” (23). Her impulse toward independence gives way to exaggerated subservience and a self-imposed loss of agency. Similarly, in Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha tells herself: “I’m not going to any beastly little bar tonight. No, tonight I’m going somewhere where there’s music; somewhere where I can be with a lot of people; somewhere where there’s dancing. But where? By myself, where can I go? I’ll have one more drink first and then think it out…. Not the Dôme. I’ll avoid the damned Dôme. And, of course, it’s the Dôme I go to” (388). Rhys’s work is full of such moments, when desire and will are overruled by a counterforce of self-destruction: a dynamic that has typically been read as passivity but in fact suggests determined negation.
The general critical perception is that there is little pleasure in Rhys’s fiction, but rather inertia, numbness, and misery. Pleasure does exist for Rhys, but it is often cast in the past tense: for example, the sensuous opening of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie and Good Morning, Midnight’s account of Sasha’s happy period with Enno in Paris or very fleetingly in the present, in the interval between the first and the second Pernod. Pleasure has a dangerous dimension. “Don’t get excited. You know what happens when you get excited and exalted, don’t you?” Sasha reminds herself. “So, no excitement…. Not too much drinking, avoidance of certain cafés, of certain streets, of certain spots…. No trailing around aimlessly with cheap gramophone records starting up in your head” (351). Pleasure, for Rhys, represented by urban pastimes such as drinking in cafés, flaneuserie, and “cheap gramophone records,” is always on the verge of getting out of hand.
Rhys’s characters exist in a world where women are expected to provide pleasure: mistresses find money in their bags after a sexual encounter, chorus girls are assumed to be sexually available, manicurists are asked to “be a bit nice” to their clients, and “amateurs” are part of an economy of pleasure that is far more complex than conventional prostitution in terms of agency and desire (“People are much cheaper than things,” a chorus girl remarks in Voyage in the Dark [28]). Mass-produced vernacular culture—popular songs, films, and romance novels, for example, which are coded as feminine, passive, and somatic—gives women mixed signals about pleasure. Rhys’s protagonists are unable or refuse to participate in this economy of conventional pleasure that serves male desire and stays within the boundaries of acceptable behavior for women. Pleasure for them is not release (as in the Freudian model) or escape through prefabricated fantasies (the dominant understanding of vernacular culture). Like Hamilton’s characters, Rhys’s characters are irresistibly drawn toward the impasse: a deadlock of movement, a heightening of tension.34
As with Hamilton, in Rhys the impasse has political and historical implications. Her protagonists are displaced and poor, and their stories are set in the dramatic moment, as Jane Marcus describes it, of “the end of empire and the rise of fascism colliding.”35 Yet Rhys focuses on intimate experiences, interior landscapes, and uneasy affect rather than overtly political interventions. Shari Benstock has argued that Rhys, along with Djuna Barnes and Anaïs Nin, chose “privacy over public activism,” but that their fictions nevertheless “render the sense of impending catastrophe in terms of a forbidding urban landscape to be negotiated by female characters.”36 Subsequent critics have excavated the ways Rhys, like Barnes in Nightwood, gestures toward historical crises of colonialism and empire in texts that feature self-absorbed protagonists on the margins of society. Veronica Gregg, for example, maintains that “The reiterative character of Rhys’s portrayal of the outsider is underwritten by the writer’s insistence on a stubborn, unas-similable otherness” that includes “othered races, sexualities, and genders.”37 Likewise, Maren Tova Linnett has suggested that Rhys’s Jewish characters reflect her protagonists’ own “alienation and pain” at a time that anti-Semitism was fueling the most vicious political regimes.38 Rhys also deploys her protagonists’ capacities for pleasure in such a way as to mark them as apart from, and resistant to, oppressive consensus and conformist consolidations of national, racial, and sexual identity that would reach a terrifying pinnacle with Nazism.
Rhys and her characters have been diagnosed by critics as depressed, melancholic, schizophrenic, borderline personality, and, perhaps most commonly, masochistic. Some critics are put off by her representation of masochism, while others recuperate it as a strategy of selfrepresentation; some see it as the dominant cultural narrative for women, and others argue that it stemmed from Rhys’s personal history.39 All of these readings locate Rhys’s masochism in trauma and cultural disenfranchisement. Certainly, her characters are masochistic; however, like Hamilton, Rhys does not just recycle her own traumatic experiences but self-consciously constructs unpleasure in response to dominant narratives of pleasure and desire, particularly in vernacular culture.
Although diagnostic readings of Rhys’s masochism describe, some more convincingly than others, the extravagant debasement throughout her work and its general lugubriousness, they are less persuasive when it comes to the other tonal ranges that Rhys explores. Like Hamilton, Rhys reads vernacular culture as a source of negative identification, but she also employs humor and irony in ways that run counter to the interpretation of her texts as numb or depressive. For example, in one of the exuberant periods of Good Morning, Midnight, when Sasha is pregnant, before her baby dies and her husband abandons her, she has dinner in her apartment with her friend Lise, a cabaret singer. In high spirits, “chuckling madly,” Sasha tells Lise a story about her life in England. A man tried to pick her up in Kensington. “Can you resist it?” he asks her. “Yes, I can,” she drolly recalls her reply, “I can resist it, just plain and Nordic like that, I certainly can” (427-8). Fuming, he insists on waiting with her for her bus.
We are standing by a lamp-post, in dead silence, waiting for the bus, and what happens? My drawers fall off. I look down at them, step out of them neatly, pick them up, roll them into a little parcel and put them into my handbag. What else is there to do? He stares into vacancy, shocked beyond measure. The bus comes up. He lifts his hat with a flourish and walks away. (428)
This is a markedly theatrical vignette of absurd physical comedy. Told in the present tense, as if the scene is unfolding in front of our eyes as well as Sasha’s, the woman who first refuses the man’s advances—the ice maiden, the ball-breaker—is immodestly exposed, perhaps punished for her haughtiness, by her wayward lingerie. She tries to retain her dignity through nonchalance and wittily details her cool response: she steps out of her drawers “neatly” and “roll[s] them into a little parcel.” Meanwhile, the man is transformed from a rake to a prude by her scandalous display: perhaps he wanted to see her drawers, but not this way. Despite the provocative actions, both figures are affectless: Sasha’s behavior is deadpan and the man “stares into vacancy” although he is “shocked.” The scene is awkward and cryptic as well as funny, but it is a joke without a punch line.
There is a punch line of sorts in the scene that follows. The next day Sasha, realizing “that it is I who have lost ground,” and feeling “awful about everything,” calls the man. He says that he is “very vexed” about what happened but will send her a box of Turkish Delight. “Well now, what is it, this Turkish Delight?” she wonders. “Is it a comment, is it irony, is it compensation, is it apology, or what? I’ll throw it out of the window, whatever it is” (428). The scene ends there, leaving the reader to picture the defenestrated candy scattered about like Sasha’s perplexed questions. As with Hamilton, Turkish Delight is a substitute for the pleasure that the characters are not having. Here it is symptomatic of English reserve, a gesture to avoid confrontation and to smooth over the awkward exchange in the street, in which it is not clear who should apologize to whom. To Sasha, Turkish Delight is a cipher or shorthand for something unknown. It defies interpretation. “Is it comment, is it irony … or what?” might well be asked of Rhys’s work in a more general sense. Her protagonists are often unsure whether they are reading the world correctly, and if they are capable of behaving correctly (laughing at the right spot in the cinema, not crying in cafés, keeping their drawers up, etc.). Pleasure is something Rhys’s protagonists find especially bewildering and unstable, and vernacular culture is anything but the simple, easy, standardized experience presented in the usual modernist discourse. In her representations of popular literature, songs, and especially film, Rhys points out that interwar vernacular culture is preoccupied with women’s bodies and the confusing social scripts that mandate their behavior; indeed, she demonstrates how women’s conformism is what secures these texts’ pleasure.
Rhys continually stages vignettes with a staccato rhythm, non sequiturs, tonal disjunctions, inappropriate affect, a lack of narrative explanation or continuity, and jokes that draw attention to the female body and turn on the female protagonist’s humiliation, debasement, or confusion.40 The sequence with the falling drawers and the Turkish Delight is strongly visual and suggestive rather than narratively cohesive or conclusive. Fragmented form is a classic feature of modernism, but Rhys’s constructions also reference theatrical structures. Rhys herself worked as a chorus girl, actress, and film extra during her early years in England.41 Louis James contends that the distinctive structure of music hall influenced Rhys’s sense of narrative structure, pacing, and tone: “changes of mood and use of refrain” as well as “juxtaposition of fantasy and tawdry reality.”42 The same was true of early cinema. Just after World War One, when the music hall was waning and film was still a new medium, cinematic programs perpetuated the music hall structure as short films and live performances were combined in one “bill.” Rhys’s scene with the falling drawers strongly recalls a saucy music hall skit, where undergarments were always good for a laugh (this could be Benny Hill). The staging is pitch-perfect cliché British (underneath a Kensington lamppost) and the man’s stylized exit is also theatrical. However, both characters’ feigned affectlessness is unusual in the context of theater and early film, where exaggerated emotions, double takes, and over-the-top reactions were the norm. Rhys frequently incorporates pleasure-driven vernacular culture into her narratives, but she does so to display her protagonist’s estrangement from popular scripts of pleasure.
One major assumption about vernacular culture is that everyone—except those cultural critics who stand apart from “the crowd”—responds to it the same way. Both Hamilton and Rhys focus on characters who read vernacular culture in a way that is out of synch with those around them. While this is structurally similar to general modernist skepticism about mass culture, Rhys’s constant mixing of highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow texts—classic English and French literature, music hall and jazz songs, popular women’s literature—suggests that her characters are similarly heterogeneous in their class identifications. They are not exactly highbrows, although they read: Sasha defines herself as a “cérébrale”; Anna reads Madame Bovary. Their cultural identifications are as complex as their racial and national senses of self. Just as Rhys uses race or national difference as a means of establishing her protagonists’ outsider identities, she uses vernacular culture to define her protagonists through negation of its supposed pleasures.
This often happens with songs. In Voyage in the Dark, for example, the unremittingly sunny “Camptown Races” becomes a dark commentary on Anna’s unlucky romantic life in which “nobody wins” (95). At the opening of Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha is at a restaurant and is listening to a woman hum “Gloomy Sunday,” otherwise known as “The Hungarian Suicide Song.” Sasha says, “I like that song,” but it causes her to weep so much that she must retreat to the “lavabo” (347). Rhys frequently uses the metaphor of music to explain encroachments of painful memory: “I walk along, remembering this, remembering that, trying to find a cheap place to eat—not so easy round here. The gramophone record is going strong in my head: ‘Here this happened, here that happened’” (352).
Rhys’s representation of her protagonists’ responses to film is more elaborate and significant. In keeping with contemporary views of filmgoing, Rhys’s cinema is largely a female space and its narratives are preoccupied with questions of female desire. Anna Snaith writes, “Rhys’s evocation of modernist London … features the cinema, which, like the department store, was seen as a dangerous site of mass culture, appealing to and corrupting of women. Often called ‘dream palaces,’ cinemas were thought to indulge passively women’s fantasies in distracting and morally harmful ways.”43 Rhys’s cinema scenes typically have two features: the films’ narratives highlight tensions around gender and desire, and in these scenes, Rhys emphasizes conflicts between the novel’s protagonist and the rest of the cinema audience. Like Hamilton’s characters, Rhys’s women go to the movies as a means of retreat or an escape that never turns out to be so. The cinema is a place of negation that extinguishes conventional delight.
In Good Morning, Midnight, filmgoing represents other people’s pleasures. One way Sasha manages to keep herself in line is by drawing up a disciplined schedule, which includes going to “a cinema on the Champs Elysées, according to programme. Laughing heartily in the right places. / It’s a very good show and I see it through twice” (352). She is proud of herself for responding appropriately and successfully subverting her destructive impulses. Later, when she wants a drink in a restaurant, she uses film as a ruse, asking the waiter “to tell me the way to the nearest cinema. This, of course, arises from a cringing desire to explain my presence in the place. I only came in here to inquire the way to the nearest cinema. I am a respectable woman, une femme convenable, on her way to the nearest cinema” (409). As she orders a second Pernod, the pretense of normalcy fails. As with Hamilton’s characters, the inevitable inebriation sends her resolve off track. “Now the feeling of the room is different. They all know what I am. I’m a woman come in here to get drunk. That happens sometimes” (410). Her masquerade also fails when Sasha goes to the Cinéma Danton. At first she is able to fall into line with the crowd. The comic film centers on “a good young man trying to rescue his employer from a mercenary mistress” (410). Rhys’s protagonists are often mistresses, but they only take what they are given and pay dearly even for that. The film’s final joke turns on the young man interrupting the employer, “a gay, bad old boy who manufactures toilet articles,” and the mistress who leaves, announcing with annoyance that she’s on her way to fetch “suppositoires.” “Everybody laughs loudly at this,” Sasha notes, “and so do I. She said that well” (411). The gold-digging mistress is stripped of her sexual power and becomes a coarse comedian. Sasha chuckles with the crowd: so far so good. When the man accidentally flings an engagement ring into a pond and “makes too wild a gesture,” Sasha identifies with the predicament—“Exactly the sort of thing that happens to me”—and laughs wildly until she weeps. “However, the film shows no signs of stopping, so I get up and go out” (411). Like her drinking, which starts as a feeling of pleasure but careens into drunkenness, Sasha’s response to the film tips over into uncomfortable excess. She turns back to liquor. “Another Pernod in the bar next door to the cinema. I sit at a corner table and sip it respectably, with lowered eyes. Je suis une femme convenable, just come out of the nearest cinema. … If I have a bottle of Bordeaux at dinner I’ll be almost as drunk as I’d hoped to be” (411).
Rhys’s cinematic narratives are figurative projections of her characters’ conflicts. In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Julia’s trip to a women-run cinema leaves her weeping at the “old fashioned” romance of the film: a plot that is unavailable to her, arguably, because she chooses circumstances that make it impossible. Another woman in the audience loudly proclaims the movie “dingo” (259). Later, in a cinema on Edgware Road, Julia is equally out of synch with the rest of the audience as she watches a “comic film” of male athletes running around a track who are then joined by women, “at which the audience rocked with laughter” (301). The image of women exhausting themselves by emulating men renders the contemporary bid for gender equality comical to the audience, but it is disappointing to Julia: it is “a strange anticlimax.” Screen femininity is equally maladroit in the film Hot Stuff from Paris. Despite its title, Julia observes that “The girls were perky and pretty, but it was strange how many of the older women looked drab and hopeless, with timid, hunted expressions. They looked ashamed of themselves, as if they were begging the world in general not to notice that they were women or to hold it against them” (273). Although the cinema of this period was commonly understood as an escapist space of communal, collective, female experience and a primary locus of women’s pleasure, Rhys emphasizes the rifts in spectatorship and the venue’s coercive nature.
Voyage in the Dark features an especially telling cinema scene. The novel’s protagonist, Anna, who comes to England from the Caribbean, is often ill and feels like a ghost or as if she is in a dream.44 After she is cast off by her wealthy lover, Walter, Ethel Matthews convinces her to go to the Camden Town High Street cinema to distract her from her woes. They go to see the silent film “Three-Fingered Kate, Episode 5. Lady Chichester’s Necklace.” The ensuing scene draws a contrast between Anna’s response and that of the other cinemagoers, and Rhys constellates the film with two other intertexts about female pleasure. The Three-Fingered Kate film begins with a series of observations about the cinematic atmosphere.
The piano began to play, sickly-sweet. Never again, never, not ever, never. Through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. …
The cinema smelt of poor people, and on the screen ladies and gentlemen in evening dress walked about with strained smiles. (67)
Rhys introduces the cinema scene with the usual musical accompaniment and also with a line from classic English poetry, “Kubla Khan.” It is a reflection of Anna’s hopelessness: just before the cinema scene, Anna has been thinking about drowning and despair after Walter has rejected her (61, 65). Coleridge’s vision of the pleasure dome intersects with many of Rhys’s images. The luscious garden “Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree” is an orientalist Eden that physically resembles Anna’s descriptions of her native Caribbean island. Rhys closes the section with a soothing flashback: “my lovely life … a garden with a high wall round it—and every now and again thinking I only dreamt it it never happened” (84), repeating Coleridge’s idea of a paradise dreamed up and lost. Pleasure is inherently unruly for Coleridge; its negative energies include a gothic “woman wailing for her demon lover,” an image that resonates with Rhys’s unhappy female protagonists in Voyage, Quartet, After Leaving, and Good Morning, Midnight, and strikingly anticipates Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys draws suggestive parallels between Coleridge’s romantic sublime and contemporary unpleasure.
The film that “Kubla Khan” prefaces in Voyage is a tale of rebellious female desire chastised. The tale of Three-Fingered Kate is wildly appealing to Anna’s fellow cinemagoers but dysphoric to her. She observes, “On the screen a pretty girl was pointing a revolver at a group of guests”; she robs the society people, taking a pearl necklace. “When the police appeared everybody clapped. When Three-Fingered Kate was caught everybody clapped louder still.” The screen announces the next installment in the series: “Three-Fingered Kate, Episode 6. … Five Years Hard. Next Monday.” Anna resents the audience and their reactions: “‘Damned fools,’ I said. ‘Aren’t they damned fools? Don’t you hate them? They always clap in the wrong places and laugh in the wrong places’” (67). Although the audience in the cinema smells “poor,” there is no class alliance here; they side with the aristocrats and their protectors, the police, against the female outlaw. As Celia Marshik points out, “Anna’s eventual criminality is prefigured by her sympathy for ‘Three-Fingered Kate. … When Anna curses the crowd that applauds Kate’s capture, readers can see the novel’s own sympathies in miniature” (191).
Anna’s sympathy for Kate is even more significant given Rhys’s departure from the actual Three-Fingered Kate series. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller notes that “Rhys describes two Three-Fingered Kate films that never actually existed.”45 The real films, produced between 1909 and 1912, “pit Kate against the wealthiest and most privileged members of her society: bankers, barons, colonels, and lords. The goods she steals are luxury items of the rich: jewelry, art, and priceless colonial loot” (118). Analyzing the one extant film in the series, Miller reads Kate’s adversary, Baker Street detective “Sheerluck,” as a “protector of bourgeois property, clients, and values,” while Kate is “the female consumer gone criminal, the lady shopper gone mad” (116, 123). Thus far, Rhys’s fabrication stays close to the original. However, Miller observes, “In the tradition of the populist outlaw, Kate’s crimes do not alienate audiences, but attract them” (118). Rhys “presents the series as conservative and moralizing, which it wasn’t. … The actual films were firmly on the side of Kate rather than the police” (Framed, 121–122). Indeed, Alex Marlow-Mann characterizes the Kate series as anomalously sympathetic to the female outlaw, “an arch-criminal and mistress of her own destiny.”
Each episode ends with a final shot, completely extraneous to the story as a whole, in which Kate defiantly raises her mutilated hand to the camera. In “The Wedding Presents,” having committed her robbery she repeats the gesture with her hand turned the other way—a far more vulgar gesture directed at her victims and the forces of order. Kate, then, is a daring, ironic, proto-feminist criminal, far ahead of her time.46
Kate is a grinning, swaggering female Robin Hood. She aggressively pursues her desires and hoodwinks the bourgeois order, giving it the finger(s). Kate’s missing digits, displayed so prominently in the last shot of each film, imply that Kate is somehow phallic and castrated at the same time. The footage from the sole existing film—Kate Purloins the Wedding Presents—presents her flouting that most sacred of heterosexual institutions, as well as the telos for women’s popular romance narratives.
Three-Fingered Kate would seem to be a very apt figure of identification for Rhys’s protagonists. Why, then, does the author fabricate a punishing conclusion for Kate and reverse the audience’s sympathies? Miller speculates that “Rhys reimagines the films to accentuate her society’s penchant for punishing wayward women.” She does this by dramatically separating Anna’s spectatorship from her peers’. Ethel’s response to the French actress who played Kate—“she had this soft, dirty way that foreign girls have,” while “An English girl would have respected herself more” (68)—and the ensuing conversation about sex suggest that there is something lascivious about Kate. She is perceived not just as a legal outlaw but as a lewd sexual presence on the screen. Anna identifies with Kate as a “foreign” woman; other characters insinuate that her Caribbean background sets her apart, racially and sexually, from the English—e.g., “The girls call her the Hottentot” (7). Like Kate, who is missing two digits, the Hottentot Venus (an African woman who was displayed as a freakish attraction in nineteenth-century Britain) was perceived as a physiognomic oddity whose bodily features denote her lustfulness.
Cinematic narratives are alienatingly conventional to Rhys’s protagonists, and as such confirm their outlier spectatorship. Despite desultory attempts to assimilate to their surroundings, they do not fully desire conformity: they seek out this alienation. As Ford Madox Ford comments in his preface to The Left Bank, Rhys has “a terrifying insight and a terrific—an almost lurid!—passion for stating the case of the underdog.”47 For Rhys, there is no pleasure without negation; for her characters, to share the same popular pleasures as everyone else would compromise the ways they are marked and identify as outsiders.
There is still more to the Three-Fingered Kate scene from a narrative point of view. Like the falling drawers scene, Kate’s story is one episode—one “turn”—in a sequence that needs to be read together. “Three-Fingered Kate” is followed by “a long Italian film about the Empress Theodora, called ‘The Dancer-Empress.’” Empress Theodora was a scandalous figure of sexually voracious power. In his posthumously published Secret History, Procopius tells a scurrilous story of “Theodora-from-the-Brothel” who rose from working as an actress/dancer/prostitute to the Empress of Byzantium as the wife of Justinian I. Procopius insists on Theodora’s nymphomania and tells stories of her enormous sexual appetite and numerous abortions, along with her outrageous stage acts.48 Less sensational accounts confirm the basic trajectory of her life but point out the conflation of female entertainers (actresses and dancers) with prostitutes at Theodora’s time—not so different from Rhys’s time. Though she was an historical novelty, Theodora was no doubt, like Kate, an analogue of the New Woman, a figure of exaggerated sexual appetites and newfangled freedoms who seemed “modern” in her independence, sensuousness, and mobility. Rhys does not describe the film in any detail, other than noting that Anna watches all of “The Dancer-Empress.” Theodora’s combination of professions echoes Anna’s own drift through the female pleasure industry, from a chorus girl/actress/dancer, to a manicurist who is told to “be a bit nice” to the men, to a prostitute (an “amateur”): a bitter inversion of Theodora’s ascent to the throne.
Many critics have commented on how Rhys elides actual sex in her narratives, even as her female characters are caught up in an economy that turns on their status as sexual commodities.49 I suggest that the cinema is one important place where Rhys explores the dangers and pleasures of female sexuality. In her work on cinema history, Linda Williams observes that “for women, one constant of the history of sexuality has been a failure to imagine their pleasures outside a dominant male economy.”50 This makes itself felt in the cinema, and particularly in pornography, as a preoccupation with the mystery of women’s sexual pleasure driven by, Williams argues, a lack of visual “proof” signifying women’s orgasm—unlike the visible male “money shot.” Women’s pleasure—both sexually and more broadly—is a conundrum for cinema. Of course, neither “Three-Fingered Kate” nor “The Dancer-Empress” is pornography, but both films feature women of aggressive libidinal appetites (kleptomania and nymphomania) who are coded as criminal or pathological. The double-feature in Voyage in the Dark projects the conflict between female rebellion and the demand for conformity with which Rhys’s protagonists struggle. Together the films create a complicated picture of female pleasure that is (at least in the first film) defined by negation and punishment—punishment that is, importantly, invented by Rhys in her rewriting of the Three-Fingered Kate serial. Here and elsewhere, punishment becomes constitutive of female pleasure for Rhys. The end of Good Morning, Midnight foregrounds questions of female sexual pleasure through the vehicle of cinema. Sasha tells Réne, a gigolo who tries to hustle her, “‘Don’t tell me that I’m like other women—I’m not. … I’m a cérébrale, can’t you see that?’” René goes on to define a cérébrale as “a woman who doesn’t like men or need them … a woman who likes nothing and nobody except herself and her own damned brain or what she thinks is her brain.” In her interior monologue, Sasha comments, “So pleased with herself, like a little black boy in a top-hat. … In fact, a monster” (443). For René, a cérébrale is a woman without other-oriented pleasure, who “likes nothing and nobody except herself.” Such a woman (thinking, independent, refusing all but narcissistic pleasure) is compared with a black boy in fancy dress; both are regarded as equally anomalous and bizarre. Like many of Rhys’s protagonists, Sasha identifies with blackness, which she associates with oppression and cultural liminality. Both monsters, then, including the cérébrale who doesn’t like men—and especially who doesn’t need men—appeal to her.
When René tells Sasha, “I want absolutely to make love to you,” she dismisses him, suggesting that she is uninterested in sex: “I told you from the start you were wasting your time.” He insists that he can overcome what she has described as frigidity. “‘What I know is that I could do this with you’—he makes a movement with his hands like a baker kneading a loaf of bread—‘and afterwards you’d be different’” (452). In her mind, Sasha transforms René’s sexual proposition, which she calls “an unimportant thing,” into a lurid vision that takes up the earlier one of a black boy wearing a top hat: “I watch the little grimacing devil in my head. He wears a top-hat and a cache-sexe and he sings a sentimental song—‘The roses all are faded and the lilies in the dust.’” Sentimentality, the trade of romantic love, is rendered irreverent, derisive, and obscene; a g-string calls attention to what it is supposed to hide (“cache-sexe”). As they travel to her hotel in a taxi, René whistles the song of the Foreign Legion, an organization that invites national border-crossing; it triggers a fantasy in Sasha’s mind of herself in a “whitewashed room,” warmed by the sun, wearing a short black dress. She waits—the suspenseful posture of masochism—for a man who
ill-treats me, now he betrays me. He often brings home other women and I have to wait on them, and I don’t like that. But as long as he is alive and near me I am not unhappy. If he were to die I should kill myself.
My film-mind. … (“for God’s sake watch out for your film-mind. …”)
“What are you laughing at now?” [René] says.
“Nothing, nothing. …” I do like that tune. Do you think I could get a gramophone record of it? (452–453)
The story produced by Sasha’s “film-mind” unfolds in a distinct narrative mode. Most obviously, it is in the first person—like Rhys’s account of films and theatrical episodes such as the falling drawers scene—and Sasha is both the narrator and the starlet.51 While the story starts in the present tense, like Sasha’s descriptions of the films she sees on the screen, she also uses the historical present to give background (“He often brings home other women and I have to wait on them”), which indicates that this is an ongoing tale or a serial, like the installments of films such as Three-Fingered Kate or The Perils of Pauline. Unlike the films onscreen, in which the motivations behind the actions are opaque to Sasha, here she explains the feelings behind the images. But—as with the real films—her response is incongruous. She laughs.
The sadomasochistic feature that Rhys’s “film mind” plays is strongly related to what Rhys critics refer to as “the Mr. Howard story,” a sequence that appears in a notebook, known as the Black Exercise Book (BEB), which critics have dated to when Rhys was composing Good Morning, Midnight.52 Rhys prefaces the Mr. Howard episode dramatically: “I was just at this stage when it happened—the thing that formed me made me as I am” (BEB). When she was fourteen, “a handsome old English man of about seventy two or three” visited her family. She was “captivated by this elegant speech.” Mr. Howard takes her out for a walk and they sit on a secluded bench:
He says
How old are you? I’m fourteen. Fourteen he said fourteen—quite old enough to have a lover. … A lover. I hadn’t much about lovers & then very ignorantly. … A lover—a lover is tall and beautiful and strong. A lover smiles at you And hurts you.
I feel [“I feel” crossed out]. My dress [“My dress” crossed out] buttoned. … his hand touches my breasts.
I sit perfectly still staring at
I’d flirted with [crossed out] (BEB)
The scene, critics agree, is a sexual violation. Rhys describes it as a repressed memory with the characteristics of a trauma: “What happened was that I forgot it [“!” on top of “?”] It went out of my memory like a stone.” While there was clearly a physical violation, Rhys calls the experience a “mental seduction.” She emphasizes that as the walks continued, they revolved around Mr. Howard spinning out what Rhys calls an “intoxicating … irresistible” narrative, a “serial story.” She recounts one episode. “We were living He + I in a large house on one of the other islands. … I saw the huge rooms smelt the flowers that decorated them heard the venetian blinds flap saw the moon rise over the hills the bats fly out at sunset. … My arms were covered with bracelets my hands with rings I laughed and danced but I was not happy or unhappy I was waiting doomed Sometimes I sat at the long table decorated with flowers My bracelets and tinkled when I moved sometimes quite naked I waited on the guests” (qtd. in Rosenberg, 10). This story bears a clear resemblance to the narrative produced by Sasha’s “film-mind” in Good Morning, Midnight. Both accounts are very sensuous, focusing on smell, hearing, and sight. The girl’s role is subservient; in both narratives, she waits, held in suspense, for the man’s attention (“I am watching for the expression on the man’s face when he turns round”).
Most critics have taken this fantasy as a “painful” and “dissociated” replaying of the Howard trauma.53 The scenes are also full of markers of Rhysian pleasure and unpleasure. For a start, Rhys is not just an actor in this memory: she takes over the narration from Mr. Howard. In the Black Exercise Book, where she might well have used reported speech, she uses the first person, and this carries over into Sasha’s narrative, where it is attributed to her “film-mind.” In both, the narrator emphasizes her complicated reactions to the experience.54 Rhys writes in the Black Exercise Book that the installments of Mr. Howard’s story have an narcotizing effect on her: “After two or three doses of this drug because thats what it was I no longer struggled.” Pleasure and punishment are inextricably linked in Sasha’s fantasy and the Howard narrative:
I only rebel enough enough to make it fun to force me to submit
Cruelty submission utter submission that was the story—I see now that he might have made it alot worse this rare & curious story.—After all Id been whipped alot. I was used to the idea—
He could be nice too Mr Howard. Probably with someone healthier like water off a ducks back.
But the terrible thing was the way something in the depths of me said Yes that is true—pain humiliation submission that is for me.
It fitted in with all I knew of life with all Id ever felt It fitted like a hook fits an eye.
However she felt in the original moment, Rhys produces a kind of satisfaction through the narrative repetition of this story. For example, her comments in the Black Exercise Book that “Sometimes too my mind would sidetrack a bit” while she was listening to Mr. Howard, and “these dresses for instance Id like to hear a bit more about them,” imply a narrative detachment as well as a relish in embellishing the details of the scene. Similarly, “Sometimes listening to him … my lover was no longer Mr Howard no he was young and dark and splendid like—the man in Quo Vadis,” suggests a distance from the scenario in which fantasy was generated. In both the Black Exercise Book and the scene of the girl in the short black dress in Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys casts the sadomasochistic fantasy as mediated by intertextuality. Just as Sasha attributes the fantasy in Good Morning, Midnight to her “film-mind,” and therefore correlates it with the narratives of female repression elsewhere in the novel, Rhys connects the Howard story in the Black Exercise Book to popular sadomasochistic narratives. Henryk Sienkiewicz’s popular novel Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero, which was made into film versions in 1912 and 1924, features a strong man devoted to a young girl and is replete with sadomasochistic imagery (Moran, 108). In the Black Exercise Book, Rhys also associates the Howard memory with reading High Wind in Jamaica: “I was reminded of myself as a child. The little Creole girl who is beaten in the thoroughgoing West Indian fashion is … whom the sailors use as a prostitute loathed and finally … I think throw overboard. It is good. The whole book is good. But he makes her idiotic. That is a mistake.” Rhys often mentions how much she enjoyed narratives of female subjugation. She claimed that her favorite book was Robert Hichens’s 1904 novel The Garden of Allah, a forerunner of Hull’s The Sheik.55 Like Hull’s Diana Mayo, whose tale is one of learned gender polarity and erotic subjugation, Hichens’s Domini begins as an all too independent woman, but in the desert, she falls in love with a mysterious dark man to whom she learns to submit.56
Rhys seemed proud of what she called her “kink” that set her apart from other women (BEB), just as her protagonists resist most mainstream narratives of pleasure while embracing others. There was, as we saw in the case of The Sheik, a widespread interwar appetite for books about women’s eroticized subjugation. Rhys’s comment in Smile Please that “the whole business of money and sex is mixed up with something very primitive and deep. … It is at once humiliating and exciting,”57 reflects the sexual politics of contemporary vernacular narratives as much as it does Rhys’s own psychology. This may be the key to Sasha’s sly laughter at the end of the whitewashed room fantasy. As she attributes the sequence to her “film-mind,” like the “cheap gramophone records starting up in [her] head” (351), Sasha’s laugh suggests there is a conscious and ironic kind of narration at work. It implies that she knows she is a product of the clichés and gender stereotypes she has seen up on the screen. She may fancy herself a woman apart from others—it is crucially important to Rhys’s characters that they not experience what she depicts as conventional pleasure—but her fantasy also draws on popular narratives.
Significantly, in both the Black Exercise Book and Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys is equivocal about the affect of the girl in the scenario: “I was not happy or unhappy I was waiting”; “I am not unhappy.” This state of being in thrall and in between extreme emotions (pain, pleasure, “!/?”) is replicated in the frame of Good Morning, Midnight. The novel’s opening sequence assembles a series of oppositions, beginning with the polarities of Emily Dickinson’s poem of soured romance that serves as the epigraph: “Day got tired of me—... Morn didn’t want me” (346). Rhys’s first image is a room with a big and a smaller bed for madame and monsieur, respectively, that poses another set of opposites: “‘Quite like old times,’ the room says, ‘Yes? No?’” The answer is both yes and no—what follows will be more of the same, but also new, a pulse of unresolvable opposition. Appropriately, “the street outside is narrow, cobblestoned, going sharply uphill and ending in a flight of steps. What they call an impasse” (347). The architecture of the impasse, its relation to pleasure, and the gendered nature of this relation, are striking in Dickinson’s poem, which resolves in the paradoxical “Good morning, Midnight!” and “good night, Day!” Rhys’s characters actively seek that architecture. “The room welcomes me back. / ‘There you are,’ it says. ‘You didn’t go off then?’ / ‘No, no. I thought better of it. Here I belong and here I’ll stay’” (367). Rhys’s characters not only find themselves in the impasse, they gravitate toward it. It is a place where they are “very passive” (349) in terms of momentum, but active in terms of narrativizing that experience. There is a strong correlation with the Mr. Howard story. However psychologically debilitating the experience was, Rhys insists that it was central to her creative powers. The energy of her writing is derived from these moments of paradox and impossibility, when pleasure and unpleasure are bound together though narration. (“Tristesse, what a nice word!” Sasha rhapsodizes. “Tristesse, lointaine, langsam, forlorn, forlorn. …” [372])
The final, puzzling scene of Good Morning, Midnight, which has been interpreted as variously as a murder and transcendence, is Rhys’s most chilling representation of the impasse.58 When René follows her back to her hotel, she is initially excited but then put off and tells him to go. He refers to her refusal of him as an act, a “comedy” (455), and accuses her of performing a trick, a “good truc … women like you, who pretend and lie and play an idiotic comedy all the time” (456). He describes a gang rape while they struggle on the bed. Finally, he leaves. Sasha weeps and imagines a voice jeering at her: “Well, well, well, just think of that now. What an amusing ten days! Positively packed with thrills. The last performance of What’s-her-name And Her Boys or It Was All Due To An Old Fur Coat. Positively the last performance. … Go on, cry, allez-y. Encore” (458). Like Bob’s performance of debasement in the bar near the end of The Midnight Bell, Sasha splits herself between spectator and performer. She takes up René’s theatrical metaphor to belittle herself as an aging, grotesque music hall star who refuses to leave the stage. Tunes running through her head, she tells herself “I mustn’t sing any more—there you are. Finie la chanson. The song is ended. Finished” (458). Although there is, as with Bob, a kind of detached irony as well as self-effacing black humor (structurally in keeping with Kantian disinterested—and modernist—pleasure), the scene immediately goes in a different direction of harrowing immediacy and embodiment.
There is another act: the voice in Sasha’s head calls it “the sequel” (459). In taking the awful commis voyageur, with his “mean eyes,” to her bed, Sasha withdraws completely from the economy of pleasure. This man has frightened and disgusted her throughout the novel, reminding her of death itself. With René, despite the violence and exploitation between them, she is attached to and energized by their game of cat and mouse. With the commis voyageur, Sasha becomes anesthetized. Her final words, “I put my arms round him and pull him down on to the bed, saying: ‘Yes—yes—yes …, ’” signal an act of anhedonic calculus. Her words of affirmative punctuation and the language of lovemaking contrast with what we know to be her repulsion for and fear of this man. Unlike Hamilton, whose conclusion to Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky finally capitulates to the tyranny of pleasure, bringing his distinct characters into line with narratives of optimism and progress that are otherwise foreign to his texts, Rhys presses the distinction of negation and unpleasure to its furthest point. She concludes on an unsettling note between negation and affirmation: violence in sex, disaster in stasis, death in life.
If there is to be disaster, at least let there be tragedy. No such luck. The conclusion of Good Morning, Midnight is profoundly anticathartic. Barthes proposes that “of all readings, that of tragedy is the most perverse” because it entails “an effacement of pleasure and a progression of bliss” (Pleasure of the Text, 47, 48). This is a fair description of Hamilton’s and Rhys’s readerly affect. However, neither conforms to classical tragedy but rather to the modern “tragicomedy” of authors such as Beckett, which denies any kind of catharsis except textual performance and the savoring of lacerating negation.59 While Hamilton and Rhys challenge readers to see the world through their characters’ perspectives, they also actively block readerly identification and sympathy by their characters’ intractability, which is compounded by belittling comedy. When Mr. Mackenzie condescendingly tells Julia, after leaving her, “Surely even she must see that she was trying to make a tragedy out of a situation that was fundamentally comical. The discarded mistress—the faithful lawyer defending the honour of the client. … A situation consecrated as comical by ten thousand farces and a thousand comedies” (After Leaving, 250–251), he denies her both the enjoyed despair of tragedy and the energizing destruction of nihilism. Instead, he diminishes her situation as a generic farce or comedy. Again and again, Rhys prevents us from running the tragic narrative of the woman who has no choices and must live a life of pain and misery. Her characters do exercise choice; however, they make choices that steer them away from pleasure and happiness. At the same time, the “comical” elements of these narratives are corrosive and further increase the protagonists’ alienation. As Katharine Streip points out, Rhys’s humor preserves a distance between the reader and Sasha. “It is unlikely that Sasha means for us to share her vision, or her laughter, with any enthusiasm,” and “we remain spectators with an uneasy feeling that our response to Sasha contributes to her exhibition of unhappiness as well” (130). As if watching the Hottentot Venus displayed on the stage or the woman with her drawers falling down under the lamppost, readers are kept at an uncomfortable distance from Rhys’s protagonists. At the same time that readers are inside Sasha’s head, her interior monologue, Rhys stages scenes in which we “see” her from the outside. The foreignness these characters feel in relation to the culture around them extends to readers; their unpleasure is singular and ours is too. Even as Hamilton’s and Rhys’s narratives are unconstructive, noncathartic, and fiercely individualistic, their implicit critique of the consensus that they see as the basis of contemporary vernacular pleasure can be read as an argument against the political regimes whose enforced conformity gained frightening power in the mid- to late thirties.
In a discussion with Frank Kermode about pleasure and literary canonicity, John Guillory called for critics to pay “renewed attention to the formal properties of literary works as aesthetic works, which means taking account both experientially and theoretically of their aims, including the aim of giving pleasure.”60 But why do we assume that pleasure is the goal of writing or reading? In Freud’s (and Plato’s) terms, constant tension is experienced as unpleasure, and pleasure results from the elimination of tension. But there are works—like those of Celine, Beckett, Barnes, Hamilton, and Rhys—in which the baseline of tension and negativity challenges the notion that readers seek conventional textual pleasure, catharsis, or closure. If these worlds are depressing, they are also testaments to the creative and malleable nature of bliss. If the lives that Rhys and Hamilton depict seem stiflingly narrow and limited, the texts themselves are expansive in their ingenious contortions of pleasure.
I try to decide what colour I shall have my hair dyed, and hang on to that thought as you hang on to something when you are drowning. Shall I have it red? Shall I have it black? Now, black—that would be startling. Shall I have it blond cendré? But blond cendré, madame, is the most difficult of colours. It is very, very rarely, madame, that hair can be successfully dyed blond cendré. It’s even harder on the hair than dyeing it platinum blonde. First it must be bleached, that is to say, its own colour must be taken out of it—and then it must be dyed, that is to say, another colour must be imposed on it. (Educated hair. … And then, what?) (Good Morning, Midnight, 375)
To shift from the world of Rhys and Hamilton to the world of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is to step almost through the looking glass. Rhys’s Sasha agonizes over her hair and, predictably, decides to impose “the most difficult of colours” upon herself. Once she is in the salon chair, she is surrounded by women’s magazines that mock her: “No mademoiselle, no, madame, life is not easy. Do not delude yourselves. Nothing is easy” (382). By contrast, Loos’s characters seem to have sprung from those magazine pages like blonde Venuses for whom everything is easy, education is a joke, and pleasure is their birthright. (“Because I’m worth it” might be their motto.) A recurring theme of the previous chapters has been a reactionary stance to pleasure, and a valorization of unpleasure as a defense against forms of culture that seemed to be threatening literature, the life of the mind, and individuality. Loos represents a conspicuous shift. Working in both literature and cinema, as well as creating a space in between, Loos developed a comedic voice that combined innovation and unabashed triviality, in which brazenly shallow entertainment exists alongside sharp, self-reflexive wordplay. It is not surprising that this voice emerged in America, and specifically in Hollywood, which was, for many modernists, the locus of low pleasure. What was perhaps surprising was that the idiom Loos devised was one that many modernists, and particularly those most invested in the exercise of distinction, found irresistible.