Beckett’s fidelity to the event, then, is paradigmatic in its rigour and intransigence, in the persistence of its commitment to what undoes all persistences. But this, the most crucial of Beckettian paradoxes – the determination not to give up on what disempowers, on what calls self, will and ego most radically in question – makes strenuous if not inexorable demands. Such a postmodern ethics may appear to reinstitute the paternal command, the categorical imperative or superego. Doesn’t it threaten a return to constraining insistences on discipline and duty (constraining in that a dutiful response to alterity is clearly not a sufficient response)? How does such an ethics differ, in this respect, from a Christian or a Kantian ethics? Is it not a deontological ethics, and thus at odds with the critique of deontology as articulated by Cornell that I accepted in my introduction? What makes such an ethics postmodern at all? Is it desirable to conceive of an allegedly postmodern ethics in such terms? Need such an ethics be formulated in such a way, or proceed from such a point of departure?
An openness to the event is surely not in principle to be imagined as an arduous self-dedication. Lyotard has rather repeatedly described it in terms of passibilité, a disposition, even, paradoxically, a will to be moved. It is precisely the power of being affected rather than affecting that, in the closing section of this book, I shall be putting forward as the relevant ‘point of departure’. Isobel Armstrong has recently been calling for an aesthetic, to emerge in the wake of post-structuralism and post-modernism, that would be properly ethical in that it would be ‘free from the rage of the ego to possess the world through symbol by rejecting alterity’.1 Crucially, what Armstrong sees as cardinal to such an aesthetic is precisely a process whereby ‘the power of affect’ is rethought ‘in a cognitive space’.2 Armstrong’s italics are very important, here: her case is principally against the epistemological delusions endemic to a supposedly detached, objective (predominantly masculine) rationalism within which the category of the aesthetic is actually ‘the last bastion of the private self hubristically conceived as omnipotent creator … the ultimate aggrandisement of the transcendent subject as master of its world’ (WBM, p. 63). Armstrong insists that a specific construction of ‘reason’ must be made to yield to its other, and to become other, itself, in the process of yielding.3 But this is not to argue for emotivism, a ‘culture of feeling’ or a return to impressionism. Indeed, the ethical dangers of any celebration of a naive, untutored responsiveness or argument for what Empson once called a ‘doctrinaire irrationalism’ should be self-evident.4
My last two chapters, then, set out towards an ethics of affect, but with what I mean to be a pronounced, sustained, deconstructive caution. It may even seem as though little progress is being made. In particular, I want to reconsider two key concepts in past and recent literary theory and criticism, sensibility and reception. I shall argue that, radically rethought, both concepts may now take on an ethical significance. Sensibility is a richly suggestive term, not least historically In particular, of course, from the early eighteenth century onwards, it meant quickness or acuteness in emotional apprehension, a particularly keen susceptibility to emotional influence, indicating a specific kind or quality of emotional capacity, ‘the soft sense of the mind’ that Mackenzie regarded as feminine or feminizing.5 This is sensibility as a disposition to refined or delicate emotion, including compassion. In fact, the more significant conception of sensibility implies Bildung (in a very particular sense), an education in or formation of feeling. At its most sophisticated, the concept of sensibility invokes a subtilization or complexification of feeling, a mode of feeling in the midst of feelings. But, at the same time, the term properly designates an ethical faculty. Sensibility is to be understood as distinct from cognition in that it does not direct itself at an object with the intention of mastering it, but is rather characterized by a mode of openness and attentiveness. It might effectively be thought of as a capacity for being mastered, a receptiveness which even precedes cognition and makes cognition possible.
But there is a problem with the history of sensibility, and that is the very currency the term enjoyed in Anglo-American criticism from the 1920s to the late 1960s. The principal source of the modern concern with ‘sensibility’ is of course T.S. Eliot’s 1921 essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, in which Eliot famously argued the existence of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in the seventeenth century, according to which the ‘unification of sensibility’ in the poetry of the early decades gave way to a situation in which later poets ‘thought and felt by fits’.6 A Milton, a Dryden, and subsequently a Gray, Tennyson or Browning can only either feel or think, never both together. Eliot’s theory spawned innumerable articles over four decades which argued the case for or against a dissociation of sensibility in the work of innumerable writers. In retrospect, however, the popularity of the concept can be seen as representing, not a new valuation of sensibility nor its rethinking in a cognitive space, and certainly not the ‘shattering’ of the rationalist subject which Armstrong favours (TH, p. 410), but precisely a new abstraction of sensibility, and thereby a decisive gain for the cognitive intellect within modernity. For there is no question but that Eliot privileges cognition over sensibility. For Eliot, a unified sensibility is one in which the real power and control are always with thought, in which thought supervenes upon feeling, in which a given ‘mode of feeling’ may always be ‘directly and freshly altered’ by ‘reading and thought’ (TMP, p. 286).7 The point is still clearer in the apparent source for Eliot’s concept of sensibility, Rémy de Gourmont’s Le Probléme du Style, where de Gourmont argues for ‘le raisonnement au moyen d’images sensorielles’ as opposed to ‘le raisonnement par idées’, not so much categorically distinct activities as distinct modes of the same activity. Indeed, the former mode is to be preferred partly because it actually involves a repudiation of feeling in the service of intellect: ‘le sentiment inutile,’ writes de Gourmont, ‘est rejeté comme une cause de trouble et l’on obtient ces merveilleuses constructions qui semblent des pures oeuvres intellectuelles’.8
What we see, then, from de Gourmont to Eliot to Middleton Murry, Read and the numberless hordes of Eliot’s followers, is not a sustaining emphasis on sensibility within modernity, but rather a decisive triumph over and subjection of sensibility, a modern transformation, intellectualization, even professionalization and thereby a comprehensive derogation of sensibility, the effects of which are still widespread. This shift is part of a larger movement of thought that gives us the code of the new ‘toughness’, Empsonian rigour and discipline, analysis as ‘hard’ interrogation, and, later, finally produces the scholarly blockbuster, research as information overkill and/or pre-emptive strike, as in the work of Richard Ellmann. Yet at the same time, the word ‘sensibility’ also retains something like its older sense, still means something like susceptibility. As such, however, it has become a negative term, designating a power of feeling that remains after the fall, after the cataclysm of dissociation, an altogether cruder and more negligible faculty. This is sensibility as recalcitrant to thought and intellect, and therefore a difficult and dangerous force. The two meanings of sensibility for modernity are nowhere more evident than in Leavis, who repeatedly oscillates between them: sensibility as in ‘the line of wit’, unified, urbane, mature, poised, fine and complex, ‘supremely civilized’, ‘toughly reasonable’, endowed with ‘a spirit of good sense’,9 and ‘sensibility’ as in Shelley: ‘ecstatic dissipation’, ‘emotion in itself, unattached, in a void’, ‘the kind of inspiration that works only when critical intelligence is switched off’.10 This latter is a ‘sensibility’ antipathetic ‘to any play of the critical mind’ and thus given over to ‘viciousness’, to ‘the grosser, the truly corrupt gratifications’ (R, pp. 202, 207). It is sensibility as dangerous lure, a chronic and disastrous weakening of will and intellect.
Whether sensibility is assimilated to intellect, however, or represented as a force for degradation, the effect is always the same: a relegation of sensibility in relation to cognition and critique. In fact, sensibility – the power to be affected – repeatedly turns out to be the problematic other of criticism as will to power, a will that is actually that of criticism itself, but that it insistently descries in the literary work. The advent of theory hardly changes this configuration at all. Rather, the modern subjection of sensibility is precisely completed by theory, not only because of the triumphant prioritization of intellect in the theoretical discourses dominant in the 1970s and 1980s, but because the concept of affect that is dominant in theory – in Foucault, Deleuze and much of Derrida and Lyotard – is of affect as ‘force’ or ‘libidinal economy’, repeatedly theorized in post-Nietzschean, Dionysian, unremittingly virile terms as an active violence, a movement outwards towards an object, rather than susceptibility or openness to the event. In effect, theory presides over a final eclipse of sensibility. The term virtually vanishes from all but the most conservative critical discourses for two decades and more.
Over against this neglect, however, I would want to explore the persistent, ethical significance of the concept of sensibility in Levinas’s work, connecting it with a similar persistence in Bataille. For Levinas, the concept of sensibility is intimately linked to a notion of the subject ‘independent of the adventure of cognition, and in which the corporeality of the subject is not separable from its subjectivity’ (OB, p. 78). ‘As a sensibility of flesh and blood’, I am ‘on the hither side of the amphibology of being and entities’ (OB, p. 79). Sensibility has the pre-phenomenological anteriority that I considered in my first chapter. It comes before cognition and ontology alike. Thus Levinas reverses the modern formulation of sensibility as it appears in Eliot and Leavis. In Levinas’s earlier work, however, sensibility is conceived of as ungenerous. It does not ‘make its way outward’ (TI, p. 135). It is rather the very ‘mode of enjoyment’, the mode in which ‘the sensuous element … is savoured, is assimilated’ before that element is ‘taken as so much data for cognition’ (EE, p. 19). Sensibility is not open to the infinite, but is rather a movement that ‘comes incessantly from me’. It is thus not only ‘essentially naive’, but fundamentally and irreducibly self-sufficient, ‘the very narrowness of life’ (TI, p. 138). It is the mode in which the ego wraps itself up in itself. In the later Levinas, however, the concept undergoes a radical transformation, becoming, not a closure of the self upon itself but ‘a pre-originary susceptibility’, a ‘pre-original involvement’, ‘the incessant event of subjection to everything’ (CPP, pp. 146–47). As sensibility, ‘one is always coram, disturbed in oneself to the point of no longer having any intention’ (OB, p. 92). This means that sensibility does not and cannot ‘congeal into a structure’ (OB, p. 82). It is irreducible to a state and not conceivable as an entity. It appears as a ‘for the other’ that is ‘total gratuity’, a ‘breaking of interest’ (OB, p. 96). This is not a question of ‘the psychological event of compassion’ (CPP, p. 146), however, but a constant ‘exposure to the other’ that is made ineluctably, ‘without holding back’ (OB, p. 15). It is characterized by an ‘immediacy on the surface of the skin’ (OB, p. 64). Levinas associates it with ‘uncovering’ (CPP, p. 146), exposure to wounds, vulnerability: vulnerability, however, explicitly construed, not as a passive reception of stimuli, but as a positive ‘aptitude’ (ibid.). Hence sensibility cannot be distinguished from the power of suffering: it is ‘the nakedness of a skin presented to contact, to the caress, which always … is suffering for the suffering of the other’ (ibid.). A substitution for the other, then, is ‘proper to sensibility’ (OB, p. 77), and the latter has ‘the very modality of dis-interestedness, the form of a corporeal life devoted to expression and to giving’ (OB, p. 50). Once again, it is opposed to the ‘scornful subjectivity’ of the ego (CPP, p. 146), to the ‘imperialism of consciousness’ and its intransigent grasp of the world (OB, p. 92). In Levinas’s conception of sensibility, indeed, we witness an insistence both on the death of the subject and on the birth of a new subjectivity. Sensibility itself becomes ‘the subjectivity of the subject’; but only in involving ‘a defection or defeat of the ego’s identity’ (OB, p. 15). As sensibility, subjectivity has only the fragile, ambivalent status of a being that never returns to itself. ‘No one is at home.’ The ego is always held hostage.
What Levinas means by sensibility bears an interesting relation to Bataille’s concept of an unrestricted or general as contrasted to a restricted economy, to his theorization and valuation of exuberance, excess, expenditure without reserve. In Bataille’s terms, Levinasian sensibility is a kind of radical economy of the self that is profoundly distinct from the more familiar economies determined by modern Christianity, capital, ‘practical judgment’ and ‘utility’. As Richardson suggests, Bataille consistently maintains that there are ‘essential psychological and sociological characteristics which respond not to self-interest, but to a principle of pure expenditure and loss’.11 As, for Levinas, sensibility is in some sense prior to cognition, so, too, for Bataille, expenditure is prior to accumulation and production, prodigality or generosity to calculation, the general to any restricted economy. There is a will to give which has priority over the contrasting drive, the will to withhold or retain, and which is the ‘material basis’, the play or sheer ‘effervescence of life’ itself.12 Furthermore, to insist on a shift in emphasis from ‘the perspectives of restricted economy to those of general economy’ is to gesture towards the possibility of ‘a Copernican transformation: a reversal … of ethics’ (AS, p. 25). This latter precisely involves a new valuation of sensibility or, more accurately, in Bataille’s terms, ‘archaic sensibility’:
The sun gives without ever receiving. Men were conscious of this long before astrophysics measured that ceaseless prodigality; they saw it ripen the harvests and they associated its splendour with the act of someone who gives without receiving … In former times value was given to unproductive glory, whereas in our day it is measured in terms of production. Precedence is given to energy acquisition over energy expenditure … But, dominated though it is by practical judgment and Christian morality, the archaic sensibility is still alive.
(AS, p. 29)13
Bataille goes on to suggest that archaic sensibility reappears in ‘the romantic protest against the bourgeois world’ (ibid.). But the important point is evident enough. With the rise of bourgeois culture, loss, display, the sumptuary spectacle must either be sacrificed to ‘the economic principle of balanced accounts’ or take place ‘behind closed doors’.14 (The process is precisely dramatized in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.) The regime of good sense insists with ever greater rigour on reserve, calculation, practical judgment, the will to retain or withhold. Sense takes the side of taboo as contrasted with transgression, work as opposed to eros, as a rational economy to which ‘detachment’ is crucial and which promises a delayed reward, deflecting the subject from ‘immediate solicitations’ and ‘the violence of desire’.15 Equally, the very ‘mode of existence’ of ‘discursive thought’ increasingly becomes that of ‘project’, a utilitarian, calculative thought that looks to ends and puts existence off ‘to a later point’.16 Nonetheless, however insistently repressed by modernity – by modern Christianity and utilitarianism – sensibility remains more fundamental than either, and continues a kind of clandestine work. It remains for a postmodern ethics to reassert archaic sensibility within the rational economies, to put the sensibility back into sense.
The beauty of Levinas’s conception of sensibility seems to me to be hardly contestable. It is remarkable not least for its emphasis on bodily apprehension. The questions proliferate at once: how might this concept of sensibility contribute to a postmodern mode of ethical reading? What difference might it make to reading novels? How might sensibility be described insofar as it manifests itself in literature? What are the modes of its insertion into literary texts? How does it manifest itself differently in different texts? How is sensibility articulated against other modes of relation to the world – not least cognition – in literary texts? How do the differences between these articulations involve questions of ethical value? What kinds of transformation are needed in our theoretical and critical discourses in order for us to be able to articulate questions of sensibility?
Yet, from the outset, the beauty of Levinas’s conception of sensibility needs not only to be profoundly sustained but also, if not interrogated, at least set in certain proportions or given certain limits. One obvious problem with it is its apparent universalism. Levinas never appears to ask the question ‘Whose sensibility?’ What differende might context or positionality make to the ethical value of sensibility? Does not an ethics that privileges vulnerability run the risk of acquiescing in and confirming the threat of violence, exploitation, immiseration and oppression to which vulnerability is constantly exposed? Is not Levinas’s ethics of sensibility an ethics of more importance to oppressor than victim; in fact, a partial ethics? Won’t all the familiar questions of positionality be involved in any adequate reflection on the place and value of sensibility in any given literary text? To focus specifically, again, on gender relations: some feminist scholars (Chanter, Ainley, Chalier) have discovered in Levinas a wholesale feminization of philosophy.17 Chanter suggests, for instance, that Levinas is of crucial importance in conferring a philosophical positivity on the invisibility and suffering that have historically been women’s. But isn’t she in danger, in the very act of an ethical valuation, of freezing that invisibility, that suffering and the power relations that produce them in place, as though they cannot be changed, only revalued? Irigaray’s account of women’s déréliction – a destitution or lack of an identity that has still to be made – is well known.18 For Irigaray, one of the ways of negotiating déréliction is the ‘masquerade’, a play of provisional identities as part of a progress forwards.19 A Levinasian ethics, by contrast, an ethics which collapses identity into sensibility, would seem to be an ethics of déréliction itself, an ethics of some importance insofar as it might be acknowledged by men, but one which arguably threatens to confirm women in a position of subordination and deprivation.
For the present, then, the value of sensibility is finally undecidable. As I have already underlined, Isobel Armstrong writes of thinking affect in a cognitive space. So too, crucially, in his most important work, at least, Bataille does not actually oppose general to restricted economy, expenditure to retention, excess to moderation, any more than he opposes sex to work. Rather, he sees their complex interdependences and fragile states of equilibrium, their need for completion by the other.20 As contrasted with the understanding of the term in the Eliotic and Leavisite traditions, Levinas’s might indeed be thought of as a ‘feminized’ conception of sensibility. Insofar as it is made into an ethical value in literary criticism, it may also tend to privilege a canon of female writers. But there is an immediate danger, not only of hypostasizing sensibility as ‘essentially female’, but, in doing so, of confirming an order in which sensibility is likely to be proportional to powerlessness. In other words, there is always a problematics of sensibility. This is nowhere better articulated than in the work of women writers themselves. In Jean Rhys’s fiction, sensibility is privileged, intensely valued as an ethical mode of attending to the world, valued above other such modes. But it is also articulated through discursive practices which call in question the particularity of its cultural construction, of its place in a given web of social relations. The heroines in Good Morning, Midnight and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie might be thought of as heroines of sensibility. They live primarily as sensibility, as subject to ‘the winds of emotion and impulse’.21 In Rhys, sensibility is precisely valued in contrast to a kind of closure within the cognitive endeavour that characterizes the men in her world, in particular, and that all too easily breeds Bataillean calculation and mean prudence. ‘He had more than once allowed himself to be drawn into affairs which he had regretted bitterly afterwards,’ thinks Mackenzie to himself, ‘though when it came to getting out of these affairs his business instinct came to his help’ (ALM, p. 19). Julia, by contrast, is above all susceptible, open to affect, in sudden, surprising and sometimes obscure ways: ‘But much too strong – the room, the street, the thing in myself, oh, much too strong.’22 Rhys’s heroines are characterized by their power of constant involvement, of gratuitous disinterest, their disposition to self-expenditure. It is precisely this – Levinasian sensibility, expenditure without reserve – that Mackenzie cannot credit in Julia:
Almost he was forced to believe that she was a female without the instinct of self-preservation. And it was against Mr Mackenzie’s code to believe that any female existed without a sense of self-preservation.
(ALM, p. 20)
Sensibility is not to be confused with compassion, though Rhys’s heroines are susceptible enough to others’ pain, as when Julia suddenly and reasonlessly cries ‘for the old woman with the bald head, for all the sadness of this damned world, for all the fools and all defeated’ (ALM, p. 25). For compassion implies distance and a measure of deliberation, and Rhys’s women are actually given up to an unwilled and unrelenting exposure. This is less effectively registered in Julia’s tears for the old woman than in all the tiny, incidental vignettes of women’s pain, grief, anger, drudgery and difficulty the novel is strewn with. Julia simply registers all these little moments ‘on the surface of her skin’, the point precisely being that the moments in question are not given any peculiar emphasis or marked significance. For to endow them with such weight would be to opt for a kind of static focus which would at once betray the movement of sensibility itself.
Here, too, as in Levinas, the power of sensibility is intimately tied to a non-coincidence in subjectivity, a dissolution of anything that might be grasped as identity. ‘I have no pride,’ says Sasha, ‘no pride, no name, no face, no country’ (GMM, p. 48). The corollary, however, is a raw, acute vulnerability, where exposure to affect is also constant exposure to the sheer random violence of suffering. The exemplary woman of sensibility is also in danger of becoming the exemplary victim, constantly prey to casual cruelties and wanton injustices. Here, surely, I seem to be tracing the limit to Rhys’s ethics of sensibility: the drive to self-exposure inexorably leads the woman to degradation, defeat and tragedy. Indeed, under patriarchy, it is never clear that the will to self-exposure is not in fact inverted power, power wedded to hopelessness and therefore issuing in a will to self-destruction. But, of course, Rhys does not need me to trace the ethical limits of sensibility in her work. She traces them herself. Whilst sustaining a commitment to sensibility as ethical value, she also refuses to grant it any finality. In fact, Rhys puts sensibility into play as part of what Irigaray means by ‘masquerade’. Here, I am taking my cue from Nancy Harrison. For Harrison, openness or susceptibility is characteristic of Rhys’s heroines. But the texts are also marked by a particular practice which Harrison calls ‘staging’. ‘Staging’ is the most important of the gender-specific, formal strategies in novels by modern women writers. The novel becomes a performance, a ‘gestural presentation’ of the lives of the characters in which discourse is perceived as shaping those lives on the page. Rhys’s novels, thus, are best thought of as ‘spectacular’, as exhibiting a gestural significance in their very self-display
In Harrison’s version of it, though, is ‘staging’ fully distinct from the more familiar forms of self-reflexivity in modern and postmodern fiction? Her account of it might appear to posit the formal strategies in women’s writing as activating a reflexive critical intelligence taking sensibility as its object. This in turn would take us back to that ‘play of the critical mind’ that, for Leavis, is the most crucial ethical activity in a novel. Doesn’t this bring us back precisely to the relegation of sensibility to secondary status that has been characteristic of the Anglo-American critical tradition? But Harrison argues that ‘the self-consciousness of the woman writer is different from the self-consciousness associated with male novelists in this century’:
The performative aspect of the woman’s novel, the feminine gesture that distances for perspective and at the same time invites the reader to personal participation, allows the drama of women’s writing to surface in form as well as content. For the woman reader, the woman’s novel invokes an audience whose response is communal, though private – ‘communal’ because it is perceived by each reader as private and personal.23
The first part of this quotation, however, is surely more compelling than the second. Within a conception of Rhys’s performative strategy as paradoxically a mode both of invitation and distanciation, narrative contradictorily draws us into the world of a story that it also tells us is not whole, or not the whole story. This is surely an appropriate description of what is most distinctive in Rhys’s narratives. But how can Harrison be certain that Rhys’s novels also generate a communal response? How can a novel evoke a communal response because it evokes a personal one, other than in terms of the universal truths of the human (or female) heart? Doesn’t this argument merely resort to a familiar metaphysics that always sees the general ‘within’ the particular? Here, Harrison is open to the kind of critique that Drucilla Cornell directs at Rorty and Gadamer: she fails to take account of the play of difference across identity, and can therefore still believe in a ‘we’ who share a tradition or a conversation.24 As Cornell insists, explicitly agreeing with Levinas, the basis of ethics cannot be ‘identification with those whom we recognize as like ourselves’ (PoL, p. 66). If Harrison is resistant to the thought of difference, she is so, not least, to the self-difference of Rhys’s texts. She reads the Rhys text as fundamentally self-identical, and as summoning the reader herself to an act of identification.
But textual or narrative self-difference is surely crucial, not only to Rhys’s strategy of ‘staging’ but to her treatment of sensibility and the suffering that is so often its consequence. The constant slippages in narrative focus, angle or point of view in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, for example, are not mere instances of reflexive distancing whereby Rhys informs us that sensibility is only one attitude towards the world. Sensibility is Rhys’s commitment. Rather, in breaking up the narrative, in converting it into a series of ‘gestural presentations’, the shifts and slippages disrupt, displace, even deconstruct the flow of sensibility itself. As Julia herself refers to her life as made up of ‘disconnected episodes’ (ALM, p. 129), so, too, the narrative in which she appears is ‘episodic’:
The central heating was not working properly and she felt cold. She dressed herself and then went and stood by the window to make up her face and to put kohl on her eyes, which were beautiful – long and dark, very candid, almost childish in expression.
Her eyes gave her away. By her eyes and the deep circles under them you saw that she was a dreamer, that she was vulnerable – too vulnerable ever to make a success of a career of chance.
(ALM, p. 11)
There is a check in or revision of the narrative, here, in the shift from third to second person narration, the transition from free indirect discourse to an exterior point of view and the abrupt ‘deepening’ effected by the second paragraph. Narrative breaks of this kind occur throughout the novel, ensuring that sensibility manifests itself insistently, but also unpredictably and often fleetingly. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, sensibility has no consistency, ‘no identity’, and is brought to no completion. Paradoxically, the disruptions of the flow of sensibility ensure its continuing mobility and free passage. Pace Harrison, suffering in Rhys is intensely particular. But it is also always likely to enter into composition with other possibilities and is never final:
Julia had abandoned herself. She was kneeling and sobbing and wishing she had brought another handkerchief. She was crying now because she remembered that her life had been a long succession of humiliations and mistakes and ridiculous efforts. Everybody’s life was like that. At the same time, in a miraculous manner, some essence of her was shooting upwards like a flame. She was great. She was a defiant flame shooting upwards not to plead but to threaten. Then the flame sank down again, useless, having reached nothing.
(ALM, pp. 94–95)
Julia’s assertion of her ‘essence’ is precisely a particular, defiant ‘gesture’, in Harrison’s specific sense. As gesture, it underlines the conditional character of Julia’s suffering whilst not in the slightest denying its force.
In Rhys, then, narrative serves insistently as both a record of and an escape or movement on from suffering. Conversely, suffering itself has both a drearily repetitive and yet also a provisional aspect. There are divisions and shifts in the narrative voice and mode in Good Morning, Midnight, too:
‘Now, where shall we go?’ He puts his arm through mine and says, in French: ‘Now, where?’
Well, what harm can he do to me? He is out for money and I haven’t got any. I am invulnerable.
There we are, arm in arm, outside the Closerie des Lilas and when I think of my life it seems to me so comical that I have to laugh. It has taken me a long time to see how comical it has been, but I see it now, I do.
‘You must tell me where to go,’ he says, ‘because I don’t know Paris.’
(GMM, pp. 64–65)
Once again, the separation of different paragraphs and distinct tones is familiar. It constitutes a refusal to ‘put everything on the same plane’, in Rhys’s phrase (GMM, p. 12). But if the experience of the heroine of sensibility is presented on different planes, the effect is to render it both searingly vivid and spectral. Ghostliness recurs in Rhys’s novels as both theme and metaphor. Her heroines repeatedly meditate on their own ‘ghostliness’, the dream-like unreality or arbitrary strangeness of their lives. If Rhys’s narrative practices shift constantly from one mode of representation to another, the result is that representation itself is increasingly traversed by a principle of instability. ‘If I could get to the end of what I was feeling,’ says Julia, ‘it would be the truth about myself and about the world and about everything that one puzzles and pains about all the time’ (ALM, p. 41). But representation in Rhys starts out from the premise that there is no such truth and no such end, no end to the life of sensibility. In thus inserting the principle of spectrality into the practice of representation, Rhys’s novels continue to argue the need for ethics and for justice. In other words, behind all the suffering in Rhys’s world, there is an obstinate insistence on the unreality of what is represented and the possibility of what Sasha calls ‘a world that could be so different’ (GMM, p. 89).
Far from being reducible to mere narrative self-consciousness, then, ‘staging’ may be glossed, in the terms of Drucilla Cornell’s ethical feminism, as an original articulation of the material suffering of women in a kind of writing that is adequate to women’s difference, disrupts the tyranny of ‘established reality’ and continually affirms the possibility of a different version of a given story. Sasha’s word is ‘could’ not ‘might’. Rhys’s concern is with what Cornell has repeatedly referred to as ‘the unerasable moment of utopianism’ (PoL, p. 8). For Cornell, this latter is chiefly guarded in specific practices of writing associated with Derridean deconstruction, postmodern ethics, ethical feminism and certain women writers and novels by women. Rhys’s is one such practice. It keeps alive a version of the woman’s story which recognizes how far sensibility, vulnerability, expenditure without reserve do not of themselves have to mean humiliation, exploitation and victimization. The implication, nonetheless, is that an ethics of sensibility is not sufficient in itself, that it must have a proleptic dimension. This case is more explicitly evident in the more extravagant, flamboyant, even ecstatic mode of ‘staging’ to be found in the fiction of Anaïs Nin. A more protracted account of Cornell will be helpful in making this clear.
Cornell articulates the world inhabited by women as a hinterland or middle ground between fiction and fact, representation and materiality, writing and ‘the fundamental empirical reality of actual women’.25 This world is quite distinct from what Cornell calls ‘reality’, the real as historically constructed by patriarchy. It is thus that Cornell justifies a writing committed to the ‘elaboration of the suffering of women as unique to women’. There can be no ‘indifference’ to the specificity of that suffering (BA, pp. 4, 6). But there is also the constant danger, in the production of narratives of women’s lives and sufferings, in the very expression of women’s difference, of lapsing back into the terms of the masculine imaginary or the masculine symbolic, and thereby also into ‘the law of the replication of existing gender identity’ (BA, p. 9). In particular, if the writing of women’s history is extremely important, the backward look involved in such writing risks a continuing imprisonment within ontology, foundationalism and their foreclosure on possibility. The crucial point is that, as ‘the feminine is precisely what is denied the specificity of a “nature” or a “being” within the masculine symbolic’, so ‘the Other to the gender hierarchy is not now a reality’.26 An adequate feminist ethics will therefore be extremely attentive to the ethical significance of questions of representation and discourse. An engagement with ‘the full disruptive power of the imagination’ is finally crucial to ethics (T, p. 35). The challenge to patriarchy must also be a challenge to established modes of representation and writing, insofar as these have always evolved under and therefore been contaminated by patriarchy.
Ethics, then, is ‘beyond accommodation’ with the masculine symbolic (T, p. 64). Ethical feminism will therefore look to the Good as the latter might lie beyond the deconstruction of foundationalist philosophy. In that respect, ethical feminism deals in a utopianism that specifically opens up with postmodernity (BA, p. 18). But ethics itself will always be concerned as much with what is to come as with what has been. Since ‘the Good is beyond any of its current justifications’, in any appeal ‘ “back” to what has been established’ we must also ‘look forward to what might be’ (PoL, p. 110). It is precisely thus that – with brilliant clarity – Cornell reads Levinas:
The call of the Good in Levinas’s sense commits us to the not yet of what has never been present, cannot be fully recalled, and therefore cannot be adequately projected in an all-encompassing positive description of the Good or of Justice.
(PoL, p. 94)
Ethics cannot be confined to the description of values deemed to exist prior to any account of them. Thus in literature as in jurisprudence, representation that is both feminist and ethical will seek to give a name to hitherto unnamed and unnoticed ‘harms’ (of which date rape in law would be a simple instance, PoL, p. 21). Ethical feminism recognizes the performative nature of language and adduces new metaphors, providing terms where none existed before. It insistently thinks the possible, is intrinsically concerned with ‘the imagined ethical expression of another mode of being with the Other’ which is ‘given play as the embodiment of an explicitly utopian longing’ (PoL, p. 8). Of course, it is crucially important to break the silence that has kept the history of women, ‘in all its variations, from being heard’. But ‘we also need to recognize explicitly the “should be” inherent in accounts of feminine sexual difference’ (T, p. 59). The goodness and justice that ethical feminism ardently desires are not to be found in the past and can only be imagined, as, at the present time, the good and rational society – the society that is just to women – seems appallingly remote. Here ethical feminism resembles and draws on deconstruction and even shares its temporality: we are prisoners of the most dismaying and extraordinary madnesses beyond which there is no immediate and decisive progress. For that very reason, ethical feminism and deconstruction alike must continue to invite us to ‘new worlds’ – however far off these latter may seem – as part of the very commitment to reason (PoL, p. 107). Both enjoin an obligation to patient labour in the preservation of the unerasable, utopian moment.
In this respect, Cornell’s case interestingly resembles some of Christopher Norris’s recent arguments, but is ultimately far more compelling than the latter, caught as they are in the discursive traps of an Anglo-Saxon moralism. Both deconstruction and ethical feminism do not so much break with as radically reformulate the Enlightenment project. They express a desire for what lies, not beyond the Enlightenment itself, but beyond ‘the current definition of Enlightenment ideals’ (PoL, p. 11, italics mine). Thus ethical feminism produces a challenge to the containment of women which also keeps open the future of sexual difference, holding a consciousness of suffering in tension with creativity and hope. Indeed, ethics in itself is a function of imperfection or – in a term of Cornell’s that was also in play earlier in this study – ‘inadequation’. It is precisely their insistence on inadequation that makes ethical feminism and deconstruction utopian (BA, p. 107). For that insistence is also an insistence on the emergence of future constructions, and therefore on creativity and the possibility of radical transformation. This is a marked emphasis in Cornell’s account of the women novelists who have attracted her attention. In Cornell’s terms, for example, in Marguerite Duras’s women, we get the measure of a suffering that ‘tracks women down in a masculine-dominated society. Mourning becomes an all-encompassing despair or grief because there can be no location of feminine identity’ (BA, p. 57). Yet, at the same time, for Duras, ethically, the absence of such a location is also an opening or opportunity. Duras turns aside from the search for female identity itself and looks ‘to the subversive power of the holes in discourse’ that point beyond the order of the masculine symbolic to a feminine that is shut out of it and has still to be articulated or created (T, p. 79). Likewise, in Cassandra, Christa Wolf articulates a female past that is not exactly an expression of ‘the truth of woman as she is or was’. It is rather a mythical past and, as such, a celebration ‘of the utopian potential of the feminine’ (T, pp. 109–110). Myth is one instance of a mode of narrative that is suited to the ethical feminist in that it inhabits a hinterland between actuality and possibility: the world presented in myth cannot be separated from the metaphoric power of language (T, p. 109). Fantasy is another such narrative mode in that it affirms ‘the feminine as performance’ and evokes ‘a different way of being altogether that challenges gender hierarchy’ (BA, p. 19). So, too, modes of narrative that disrupt ‘the linear narrative of masculine discourse’ and its orientation ‘towards the coherent expression’ of a pre-ordained message can be deployed in elaboration of ‘a utopian ethical moment from within women’s actual experience’ (BA, pp. 43, 45, 47).
In Rhys’s work, the effort to preserve that ‘utopian moment’ functions chiefly as a refusal to let the utopian horizon disappear utterly. It insistently breaks up the threnody, refusing to let grief have the last word, proclaim itself as the ineluctable fate of sensibility. By contrast, Nin’s fiction effects a more sustained balance between ‘ethical moment’ and ‘actual experience’. Nin herself is abundantly explicit about the importance of the utopian drive in her work, the need to try ‘to create a world in which one can live’.27 This is crucial to what is made of sensibility within the fiction. There is a point to specifying Nin’s fiction, here. In the 1980s and 1990s, most of the criticism has concentrated on the Diary.28 That preoccupation, however, merely corresponds to a critical disposition in favour of positive description or the backward look, documentary, reportage or narrative aspiring to the condition of either. Its corollary is deafness to the kind of narrative mode exemplified in the fiction. For the mode of that fiction – notably the five novels that make up Cities of the Interior – is one, again, that holds ‘actual experience’ in tension with utopian possibility. Sensibility, suffering and the relationship between them are elaborated precisely in the terms of that tension. The emphasis on an art which looks towards the future, in which representation is powerfully transformed by the proleptic impulse, is recurrent throughout Nin’s essays and theoretical work. As Deduck suggests, the essays insistently stress the construction of ‘the world of tomorrow’ as opposed to what Cornell calls ‘reality’ and Nin calls decadence, defining it as ‘the systematic repetition of forms’. 29 At the same time, they repudiate mimesis both in the neo-Aristotelean sense and as what Nin calls ‘photographic realism’. For the mimetic premise ‘discounts all possibility of change, of transformations, and therefore does not show the way out of situations which trap human beings’.30 The diary form ‘[exposes] constantly the relation between the past and the present’ (NF, p. 159). By contrast, the novel is a mobile construct in which ‘the lens of the camera eye … each time catches new aspects, new territories of experience’ or new ‘elements’, on which the reader is therefore ‘forced to concentrate’.31 This is not to say that the novel should deal in fantasy or dispense with experience, that it can cut itself off from ‘the chamber of horrors we call history’ (IFSM, p. 17). It rather simultaneously inflects the genre backwards and forwards: backwards, in that it returns the novel to its ‘original’ function as evident in ‘the Italian novella’; forwards, in that that function itself is the production of ‘the never-before-experienced’ (NF, p. 90). It is thus that the novel may become ‘a dynamic form serving as a catalyst for future transformation’ (Deduck, RR, p. 90).
Such a ‘dynamic form’ tends to open up ‘fissures in reality’; not just in ‘reality’ as Cornell understands it, but in the reality to which the novel in some sense remains tied.32 Within this reality, what chiefly traps Nin’s women is precisely the problematics of sensibility. The protagonist in House of Incest, for example, lives primarily as sensibility, being given to ‘loving without knowingness’ and possessed of a power of ‘secret soft yielding’ (HI, pp. 178, 182). House of Incest is a prose poem on sensibility as an intensity or even a surplus of ethical consciousness, on ‘hearing far too much and seeing more than is humanly bearable’ (HI, p. 188). Yet here, once more, openness to affect is also constant exposure to violent and arbitrary pain. Nin’s women might appropriately be described as prodigies of sensibility. The erotica are not perhaps the best example of this.33 Yet Nin’s own preface to Delta of Venus precisely stresses its distinctiveness as a ‘feminine treatment of sexual experience’ where ‘masculine language’ – in Cornell’s terms, the masculine symbolic – has proved ‘inadequate’.34 Indeed, where such a transformation of erotic discourse is discernible in Delta of Venus and Little Birds, it is so inasmuch as the writing takes on a utopian dimension. Nin was well aware that the world of pornography is essentially rarefied: the exclusive focus on ‘the sexual life’, she wrote, ‘is not natural’.35 Having recognized that fact, however, what she does is to take the artificiality of the pornographic mode and both feminize and transform it precisely by shifting it decisively in a utopian direction. In effect, Nin’s erotica produce a world in which women can venture all without risking exploitation, pain, rejection or domination. The lavish accounts of sexual feeling, the rush and profusion of passionate and erotic precisions, the luxuriant dwelling on modes of openness and responsiveness are versions of the movements of sensibility as seen from a utopian perspective. But the very condition of pornography in Nin’s transformative version of it is that sensibility can be sheltered from eventual devastation.
This is what separates the pornography from the serious fiction. While the former illuminates the latter, it does so only in a minor mode. Sensibility is arguably the most distinctive feature of the women who dominate the novels of Cities of the Interior. A ‘power of absorption’ and ‘receptivity’ – a ‘principle of great love, as a hunger of the eyes, skin, of the whole body’ – go hand in hand with an acute ‘vulnerability and sentience’ and the capacity of experiencing ‘the pain of the whole world’.36 Sensibility does indeed take on extraordinary dimensions, becoming ‘mythical’, in Cornell’s sense:
You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this … What the soul so often cannot say through the body because the body is not subtle enough, you can say.
(CI, p. 434)
Thus Donald to Sabina, in A Spy in the House of Love. Sensibility is given a Levinasian priority over the cognitive endeavour to which patriarchy commits itself. ‘in the drunkenness of caresses history is made, and science, and philosophy’ (CI, p. 277). But sensibility is necessarily and profoundly ethical: ‘No hurt will come from me,’ thinks Lillian to herself. ‘No judgment. No woman ever judged the life stirring within her womb’ (CI, p. 53). Nin’s women have no truck with what Cornell calls the myth of impenetrability, of the self-enclosure involved in ‘the relegation of the Other to pure externality’ (PoL, p. 54). For Cornell, the denial of ‘the “trace” of the Other’ in oneself involves a ‘hubris of the myth of safety’ and a choice of certainty as opposed to generosity. If such an option is at all available to Nin’s women, it is so only transiently. In Nin’s world, the denial of self-difference, of the stranger within, is principally masculine and equally manifests itself as a denial of sensibility and its ethical power. In this respect, Nin’s most sustained account of the collision of masculine and feminine principles emerges in the middle section of Winter of Artifice. What troubles Stella is precisely her father’s self-enclosure, his refusal to recognize her, to ‘take her in’. That selfenclosure is matched by the systemic self-enclosure of the masculine symbolic, the ‘man-made world’ which offers Stella no place other than on its own terms.37 The father is condemned to fixture:
It was something like pain for him to move about easily in the realm of impulse. He was now as incapable of an impulse as his body was incapable of moving, incapable of abandoning himself to the great uneven flow of life with its necessary disorder and ugliness.
(ibid.)
The daughter, by contrast, is associated with a principle of fluidity which insistently takes her out elsewhere, towards the other, and indeed towards her father:
To leap out freely beyond the self, love must flow out and beyond this wall of confused identities. Now she is all confused in her boundaries. She doesn’t know where her father begins, where she begins, where it is he ends, what is the difference between them.
(WI, p. 91)
It is precisely on this contrast – a contrast that never lapses back into essentialist or oppositional logic, since one of its terms is never stable – that Winter of Artifice hinges its critique of patriarchy, and the defeat of sensibility that is the inseparable accompaniment of patriarchal authority.
Elsewhere in Nin’s fiction, the division between genders is less clearcut. The men rather suffer from the Vronsky syndrome: beyond a certain point or at a critical juncture, they fail to keep pace, a failure obliquely expressed by Tolstoy in the detail of Vronsky’s fall in the horse race in Anna Karenina. In Cities of the Interior, beyond a certain limit, Nin’s men recoil into detachment, return to a principle of self (or self-sameness). This movement may effectively be involuntary. It nonetheless represents a failure in sensibility relative to the heroines, as in the case of Jay and Lillian and the collapse of their relationship in Ladders to Fire:
No noise, no care, no work undone, no love scene unresumed, no problem unsolved, ever kept him awake. He could roll over and forget … He just rolled over and extinguished everything.
(CI, p. 54)
Nin’s men are hardly the less loveable for this failure, to the heroines. And yet, for all their closeness to Nin’s women, they remain infected by a patriarchal principle that correspondingly infects their relationships and limits their power to give. Furthermore, if we extrapolate from that infection to its larger social context, we arrive at the ‘bigger world full of cruelties, dangers and corruptions’ that Djuna senses just outside her room (CI, p. 168). This latter is Rhys’s world, the world of ‘the father, authority, men of power, men of wealth’ where ‘one sells one’s charms, one’s playfulness, and enters a rigid world of discipline, duty, contracts, accountings’ (ibid.). Out there, with an exact and remorseless logic, suffering lies in wait. But equally, the rarefied world of the room, the private space, the ‘city of the interior’ cannot remain immune. For the possibility of suffering at once invades with the other towards whom sensibility is ineluctably turned. The fate of sensibility in this respect, its parallel consequences in both public and private worlds, is nowhere better demonstrated than in The Four-Chambered Heart. Djuna is finally driven desperate by giving unstintingly, first to her lover Rango, then to him and his wife. She flees to England for rest, only to be awoken on the boat by the fearfully needy grand blessé de guerre, who immediately and instinctively feels that she is the very ‘woman I can talk to’ (CI, pp. 316–17), and drains her of those scant resources she still has left.
Faced with the seeming inextricability of sensibility and suffering in the world she evokes, Nin responds with a variety of differing narrative and aesthetic strategies. Rather than ‘fleshing out’ her fictional world and bestowing an ‘authenticity’ upon it, she works to strip it of ‘reality’ and ‘conviction’, to open up those ‘fissures in reality’ that I referred to earlier. She thereby attempts to preserve a sense both of utopian possibility within the world she evokes, and of the latter’s contingency. Thus for example with her abandonment of the principle of linear development. In her introduction to Cities of the Interior, Nin herself points out that the separate books are interchangeable in position, like the parts of a mobile, and can be read in any order (CI, p. xii). The effect is precisely to deny the conviction of a fixity (to the text, in this instance) that is preordained and always requires the backward look, a conviction that is apparently well-nigh intrinsic to the masculine imaginary. The abrupt breaks and lateral shifts in Nin’s narratives likewise introduce a principle of irreducible self-difference which means that neither narrative present nor narrative future is likely to be entirely comprehensible in terms of narrative past. So, too, with characterization: Nin’s women are not altogether separate, ‘fully individualized’ figures. They are always becoming, do not petrify into being, exist primarily as sensibility precisely for that reason. The heroines thus continually cross boundaries and threaten to resemble each other more than they do themselves. But the shifts and transformations in narrative mode, the digressions and narrative excursions can have another consequence, too, as with the account of the sirocco in Ladders to Fire (CI, p. 36). Since it is Djuna’s feelings that are really at issue in this passage, what the latter makes possible is a remetaphorization of the woman’s experience which – again – becomes an exploration of the boundaries of the masculine symbolic. The struggle to remetaphorize is evident everywhere in Cities of the Interior. In that respect, the novels look forward, not just to a qualitatively different world, but to a new expressive repertoire that it will call forth. The dominant style and discursive mode in Cities of the Interior markedly privilege abstraction and generality over empirical documentation, the symbolic over the literal and, in Genette’s terms, the ‘iterative’ over the ‘singulative’ and ‘summary’ over ‘scene’. This reflects Nin’s commitment to what she calls ‘mythological’ as opposed to ‘factual’ discourse. ‘You never ask the kind of question I hate’, says Sabina to Lillian in Ladders to Fire, ‘What city? What man? What year? What time? Facts. I despise them’ (CI, p. 97). The novels turn negligently aside from questions of ‘factuality’ and empirical precision. In effect, they are characterized by a strenuously feminist anti-positivism which drastically reduces the status of positive knowledge so that ‘only the important dates of deep feeling may recur again and again each time anew through the wells, fountains and rivers of music’ (CI, p. 238). In other words, Nin’s novels offer us the life of sensibility as the significant life. At one point in The Four-Chambered Heart, Djuna rails against
novels promising experience and then remaining on the periphery, reporting only the semblance, the illusions, the costumes, and the falsities, opening no wells … Teaching nothing, revealing nothing, cheating us of truth, of immediacy, of reality.
(CI, p. 272)
The ‘reality’ in question, here, might seem to be a visionary one. But the word does double duty. What all the novels referred to in the quotation have also avoided is the reality of ‘the crises, the pitfalls, the wars, and the traps of human life … the naked knowledge of the cruelties that take place between men and women in the pit of solitary nights’ (ibid.). No passage more clearly gives us both an account of the problematics of sensibility in Nin’s work and an indication of the connection between it and the aesthetic strategies she adopts. These strategies do not merely serve to register or display the problem. Rather, they set to work on it, deconstruct it, explore its limits along with its possibilities. In that sense, like Cornell’s, like Rhys’s, though in a less ambivalent mode, Nin’s work constantly reaches towards a future in which the fate of sensibility – like that of women themselves – might be constitutively different.
In Rhys’s novels, then, there is a ‘staging’ of the problematics of sensibility that works to keep hold of ‘the unerasable moment of utopianism’. In Nin’s fiction, a deconstructive elaboration of sensibility holds open an utopian horizon. These are just two particular instances of analytical distinctions that could doubtless be multiplied, principally with regard to the work of women novelists. This is because, historically and for historical reasons, the ethics – and the ethical predicaments – of sensibility have more frequently been women’s concerns. Don’t men need to turn to and learn from the ethics of sensibility in women’s writing? May not such writing now be a primary means of sustaining political hope? The questions seem the more pressing in the context of Cornell’s warning, as long ago as 1991, that we are presently seeing the gender hierarchy ‘restored’, and ‘anything associated with the feminine … disparaged, devalued, feared and, ultimately, repudiated’.38 One of the problems with a literary theory and criticism that seeks to identify itself with a grand political project is that the conviction and sense of urgency inspired by the latter are likely to serve as a seemingly imperious justification – again – for a deontological morality as distinct from an ethics. As I suggested in my introduction, Eagleton’s work would be a conspicuous example of this. A more reflective concern with sensibility may be one way of countering this drive. Indeed, it is the literature of sensibility – principally as practised by women writers – that may now be one of the most crucial means of keeping alive a plausible, radical vision. The difference to that vision is the extent to which it begins in openness rather than closure. Above all, however, it is a vision that begins in ethics.
ALM After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Jean Rhys
AS The Accursed Share, Vol. 1: Consumption, Georges Bataille
BA Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law, Drucilla Cornell
CI Cities of the Interior, Anaïs Nin
DoV Delta of Venus, Anaïs Nin
GMM Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys
HI House of Incest, Anaïs Nin
IFSM In Favour of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays, Anaïs Nin
JR Jean Rhys and the Novel us Women’s Text, Nancy R. Harrison
NF The Novel of the Future, Anaïs Nin
PL The Provocation of Levinas, Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds)
PoL The Philosophy of the Limit, Drucilla Cornell
R Revaluation, F.R. Leavis
RR Realism, Reality and the Fictional Theory of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Anaïs Nin, Patricia A. Deduck
SE Selected Essays, T.S. Eliot
T Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference, Drucilla Cornell
TH ‘Textual Harassment: the Ideology of Close Reading, or How Close is Close?’, Isobel Armstrong
TMP ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, T.S. Eliot
WBM ‘Writing from the Broken Middle: The Post-Aesthetic’, Isobel Armstrong
WI Winter of Artifice, Anaïs Nin
1. Isobel Armstrong, ‘Writing from the Broken Middle: The Post-Aesthetic’, Women: A Cultural Review, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring 1998), pp. 62–96, hereafter WBM; p. 72. See also ‘So What’s All This about the Mother’s Body? The Aesthetic, Gender and the Polis’, in Judith Still and Michael Worton (eds), Textuality and Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 218–36.
2. Armstrong, ‘Textual Harassment: the Ideology of Close Reading, or How Close is Close?’, Textual Practice, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1995), pp. 401–20, hereafter TH; p. 403.
3. For an indication of how Armstrong herself has such a principle condition her practice, see her Charlotte Brontë’s City of Glass (the Hilda Hulme Lecture, 1992; London: University of London Senate House Printing Services, 1993), pp. 11–19.
4. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963), p. 15.
5. Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 116.
6. T.S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, hereafter Eliot, TMP, in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), hereafter SE, pp. 281–91, p. 288.
7. Eliot, ‘Philip Massinger’, SE, pp. 205–20, p. 286.
8. See Rémy de Gourmont, Le problème du style: questions d’art, de littérature et de grammaire (third edition, Paris: Société de Mercure de France, 1902), p. 70. For the influence of de Gourmont on Eliot, in this respect, see F.W. Bateson, ‘Contributions to a Dictionary of Critical Terms II: Dissociation of Sensibility’, Essays in Criticism, Vol. 1, No. iii (July 1951), pp. 302–12, pp. 305–8.
9. F.R. Leavis, ‘The Line of Wit’, in Revaluation (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1978), hereafter Leavis, R, pp. 17–45, esp. pp. 37–38.
10. Leavis, ‘Shelley’, in R, pp. 191–224, pp. 200–201.
11. Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 69.
12. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vol. 1: Consumption, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), hereafter AS; pp. 21, 10.
13. Compare MT, p. 34 for a Levinasian account of a similar conception of the generosity of being in Heidegger.
14. Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–39, ed. and tr. Allan Stoekl (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 117, 124.
15. Bataille, Eroticism, tr. Mary Dalwood (London: Calder and Boyars, 1987), p. 41.
16. Bataille, Inner Experience, tr. with an introd. by Leslie Ann Boldt (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 46.
17. Tina Chanter, ‘Feminism and the Other’, in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds), The Provocation of Levinas (London: Roudedge, 1986), hereafter PL, pp. 32–56; Alison Ainley, ‘Amorous Discourses: the Phenomenology of Eros and Love Stories’, in PL, pp. 70–82; and Catherine Chalier, ‘Ethics and the Feminine’, in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, Re-reading Levinas (London: Athlone, 1991), pp. 119–29.
18. See Luce Irigaray, Ethique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1984), p. 72 and passim.
19. On the female masquerade, see for instance Margaret Whitford (ed.), The Irigaray Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 135–36.
20. Cf. Steven Connor’s account of Bataille’s work as foreshadowing Derrida’s ‘deconstructive project’, Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 71–80, especially p. 79; and Derrida’s own deconstructive account of Bataille, ‘From Restricted to General Economy: a Hegelianism without Reserve’, in Writing and Difference, tr. with an introd. and additional notes by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 251–77.
21. Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), hereafter ALM; p. 18.
22. Rhys, Good Morning; Midnight (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), hereafter GMM; p. 108.
23. Nancy R. Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), hereafter JR; p. 4.
24. Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (London: Roudedge, 1992), hereafter PoL; p. 35.
25. Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law (London: Roudedge, 1991), hereafter BA; p. 3.
26. Cornell, Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference (London: Routledge, 1993), hereafter T; p. 6.
27. Anaïs Nin, ‘The New Woman’, in In Favour of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), hereafter IFSM; pp. 12– 19, p. 12.
28. See Philip K. Jason, ‘Introduction’, The Critical Response to Anaïs Nin (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1996), pp. 1–7, p. 3.
29. Patricia A. Deduck, Realism, Reality and the Fictional Theory of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Anaïs Nin (Washington: University Press of America, 1982), hereafter RR; p. 33.
30. Nin, The Novel of the Future (New York: Macmillan, 1968), hereafter NF; p. 199.
31. Nin, Diary, Vol. V (London: Peter Owen, 1974), pp. 55–56.
32. Nin, House of Incest (London: Peter Owen, 1974), hereafter HI; p. 191.
33. The erotica were written to order – as Nin understood matters – for a male ‘collector’, and Nin herself seems to have agreed to republish them only at the instigation of badgering males. See John Ferrone, ‘The Making of Delta of Venus’, in Sharon Spencer (ed.), Anaïs, Art and Artists: A Collection of Essays (Greenwood, Florida: Penkevill, 1986), pp. 35–43.
34. Nin, Delta of Venus (London: W.H. Allen, 1978), hereafter DoV; p. xvi.
35. Nin, Little Birds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 70.
36. Nin, Cities of the Interior, introd. Sharon Spencer, with a pref. by Gunther Stahlmann (London: Peter Owen, 1978), hereafter CI; p. 28, 12–13. All references to the five novels are to this composite edition.
37. Nin, Winter of Artifice (London: Peter Owen, 1974), hereafter WI; p. 71.
38. Cornell, ‘The Philosophy of the Limit: Systems Theory and Feminist Legal Reform’, in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 68–94, p. 69.