Communities in Fiction

1. THEORIES OF COMMUNITY: WILLIAMS, HEIDEGGER, AND OTHERS

1. Raymond Williams, Keywords, Revised ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 75–6.

2. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 96–107, 165–81, 197–221. Page numbers in the text refer to this edition.

3. Wolfram Schmidgen, in a brilliant, original, and learned recent book, tells a somewhat different story from Williams’s. (See Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]). Smidgen places eighteenth-century English fiction against its “backgrounds” in actual social conditions of that time and place. For Smidgen, however, the determining factor was land-owning, owning of “immobiles,” already well in place for centuries, as regulated by British common law, even as the new capitalist economy of “mobiles,” such as stock shares and other investments, was beginning to take over and to require regulation by new laws. Schmidgen takes issue with J. G. A. Pocock’s influential interpretation of the relation of land-owning to community in eighteenth-century England. See J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). A huge secondary literature has studied these issues—for example, work by Fredric Jameson, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard, to list just three scholars. My setting Williams against Heidegger is not meant to be inclusive but as an expedient to establish two clear alternative paradigms as a basis for my readings of some nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels.

4. Here are references to some of these: Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962); Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (Frankfort am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983); Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Random House, 1983); Jean-Luc Nancy, Être singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996); Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); Georges Bataille, L’Apprenti Sorcier du cercle communiste démocratique à Acéphale: textes, lettres et documents (1932–39), ed. Marina Galletti; notes trans. from Italian by Natália Vital (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1999); Maurice Blanchot, La communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983); Maurice Blanchot, The Inavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988); Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986); Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Giorgio Agamben, La comunità che viene (Turin: Einaudi, 1990); Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, La religion (Paris: Seuil, 1996); Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); Julián Jiménez Heffernan has presented in “Togetherness and Its Discontents” an admirably inclusive account of Western ideas of community from Hobbes through Hegel, Marx, and Tönnies down to Nancy and others in the present. He does this in a long, brilliant, and learned introduction to a collection of fourteen essays by various scholars from Córdoba and Granada in Spain entitled Into Separate Worlds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Their essays are about community in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century fiction in English. One valuable point is that in the novels they discuss, characters are sometimes shown as belonging to multiple (imaginary) communities at the same time.

5. See Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925)—for example, Chapter IV, “The Eighteenth Century,” and Chapter VI, “The Nineteenth Century.”

6. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), 211, henceforth BT, followed by the page number; ibid., Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967), 167, henceforth SZ, followed by the page number.

7. For an extended discussion of Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories of community, see the opening chapter of my The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3–35.

8. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. II, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 8–9; ibid., Séminaire: La bête et le souverain, Volume II, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (2002–2003) (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 31.

9. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 87; also in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 51; ibid., “Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison,” in La Religion: Séminaire de Capri sous la direction de Jacques Derrida et Gianni Vattimo, ed. Thierry Marchaisse (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 69. I have discussed Derrida’s thinking about community in For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

2. TROLLOPE’S THE LAST CHRONICLE OF BARSET AS A MODEL OF VICTORIAN COMMUNITY

1. “Perhaps one is a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading [ein Lehrer des langsamen Lesens].…—this art does not easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers [sie lehrt g u t lesen, das heisst langsam, tief, rück- und vorsichtig, mit Hintergedanken, mit offen gelassenen Thüren, mit zarten Fingern und Augen lessen],” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Preface,” Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 5, trans. slightly altered; ibid., “Vorede,” Morgenröte, Vol. III of Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 17.

2. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, ed. David Skilton (London: Penguin, 1996), 153. Henceforth AA, followed by the page number.

3. Henry James, Roderick Hudson, The Novels and Tales, 26 vols. (Fairfield, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971–79: a reprint of the New York Edition), 1: vii.

4. Note again the occulted masturbatory figure, of which I doubt Trollope was consciously aware, any more than he was about the implications of novel writing as sitting with the pen in his hand. The terms “habit” and “dangerous mental practice” reinforce the implications.

5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968); for private languages see 258 ff. An enormous amount of philosophical literature about the question of private language of course exists. For two essays, see A. J. Ayer, “Can There Be a Private Language,” and Moreland Perkins, “Two Arguments Against a Private Language,” in Wittgenstein and the Problem of Other Minds, ed. Harold Morick (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 82–96; 97–118.

6. See Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); ibid., Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre: Perspektiven literarische Anthropologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). “Charting literary anthropology,” by the way, is not a literal translation of the German subtitle, which means “perspectives on literary anthropology.” I have discussed Iser’s book in the first annual Wolfgang Iser lecture, given in Konstanz in July 2011: “Should We Read Literature Now, and, If So, How? Transgressing Boundaries with Iser and Coetzee,” now out as a small volume from the University of Konstanz Press.

7. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 11. I have elsewhere investigated at length de Man’s theory of ideology in “The Resistance to Theory.” I read de Man’s idea of ideology in the context of Marx’s The German Ideology, to which de Man explicitly refers. See my “Reading Paul de Man While Falling into Cyberspace: In the Twilight of the Anthropocene” (forthcoming in a book coauthored with Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook).

8. In “Self Reading Self: Trollope,” The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 89.

9. Sigmund Freud, Lecture XXIII, “The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms,” in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Part III, 1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1963; Vintage Random House reprint, 2001), 375–7.

10. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, 2nd ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

11. These are reprinted in Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1969), henceforth CH, followed by the page number.

12. Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, intro. Sophie Gilmartin, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 861, henceforth indicated by page numbers only.

13. See Nicholas Royle, “The ‘Telepathy Effect’: Notes toward a Reconsideration of Narrative Fiction,” The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 256–76; also available in Acts of Narrative, ed. Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 93–109.

14. See my For Derrida (New York, Fordham University Press, 2009), 104–5.

15. Jacques Derrida, seminar given in Paris December 2, 1992, my trans., used by permission of the author, from a computer file in my possession that he gave me. Because a computer file does not have fixed page numbers (since its format may be altered), I cannot give a page reference. The discussion of the sentence “je t’aime” continued in the seminar of December 9, 1992. Both sessions may be consulted in the Derrida Collection at the Critical Theory Archive in the library of the University of California at Irvine. Derrida, by the way, resisted to the end any Husserlian half-escape from my isolation within my own ego. In his last seminars, on The Beast and the Sovereign, he expressed this resistance forcefully, apropos of a discussion of Robinson Crusoe:

Between my world, the “my world,” what I call “my world”—and there is no other for me, as any other world is part of it—between my world and any other world there is first the space and the time of an infinite difference, an interruption incommensurable with all attempts to make a passage, a bridge, an isthmus, all attempts at communication, translation, trope, and transfer that the desire for a world or the want of a world [mal du monde], the being in sickness of the world [l’être en mal de monde] will attempt to pose, to impose, to propose, to stabilize. There is no world, there are only islands. (Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. II, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011], 9, trans. slightly altered; ibid., Séminaire: La bête et le souverain, Volume II, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud [2002–2003] [Paris: Galilée, 2010], 31.)

16. Gianni Vattimo, La società trasparente (Milan: Garzanti, 1989); ibid., The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press; Cambridge: Polity, 1992).

17. See, among much other work, my Illustration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

19. See my “Unworked and Unavowable: Community in The Awkward Age,” Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 106–8, for a discussion of Gyp’s narrative techniques.

20. Maurice Blanchot, “La voix narrative (le ‘il’, le neutre),” in L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 556–67; ibid., “The Narrative Voice (the ‘he,’ the neutral),” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 379–87. Given what Blanchot argues in this essay about “the neutral,” a better translation of “il” in this case, would be “it,” though the word can mean both “he” and “it.”

21. Jane Austen, Emma, R. W. Chapman edition, intro. Lionel Trilling, Riverside Editions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 261–2.

22. Ibid., 268–9. William Cowper (pronounced “koo-per”) (1731–1800) was an eighteenth-century English poet and hymnodist. Austen cites a line from Book IV, “The Winter Evening,” of Cowper’s widely read poem, The Task (1784).

23. For a discussion of this disagreement and the complex interaction of the various texts involved, see my For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 33 ff.

24. I have discussed in Black Holes this strange pattern of falling in love without knowing it or being able to remember the moment of its inception, as it is strikingly dramatized in Trollope’s Ayala’s Angel (1881). See J. Hillis Miller, “The Grounds of Love: Anthony Trollope’s Ayala’s Angel,” in Black Holes, with Manuel Asensi’s J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 185–311, odd-numbered pages.

25. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervillles, New Wessex ed., Paperback (London: Macmillan, 1974), 107–8.

26. CH, 302.

27. See “The Grounds of Love: Anthony Trollope’s Ayala’s Angel,” 297, 299 for one example of gradual change in a Trollope heroine.

28. See endnote 14.

29. Jacques Derrida, “Limited Inc a b c …,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Limited Inc (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 91–2.

30. “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen,” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/5740-pdf.pdf, 162, accessed April 13, 2013).

31. “The Courts of Assize, or assizes, were periodic criminal courts held around England and Wales until 1972, when they … replaced by a single permanent Crown Court” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assizes, accessed April 13, 2013).

32. For a brilliant extended working out of an alternative set of assumptions, based on Paul de Man’s writings, especially on de Man’s way of reading Kant on the sublime, see Claire Colebrook’s long essay, “The Geological Sublime,” forthcoming from the Open Humanities Press, along with essays by Tom Cohen and myself, in The Twilight of the Anthropocene. Few theorists have had Colebrook’s courage and percipience to follow out the implications of de Man’s writings for understanding and responding to our situation today (catastrophic climate change, financial meltdown, fallacious anthropmorphism of Gaia or “Mother Nature,” and so on). Here are some challenging sentences almost at the end of her essay:

Alternatively, de Man’s ‘material sublime’ would shift sublimity from the quickening of the subject’s powers, and would seem to de-activate or paralyze thinking. It would be a sublime without Idea. It would also be a sublime without Latour’s to-be-composed public, and without Derrida’s other. Such a sublime would be aesthetic in de Man’s sense not because it has to do with art and composition, but because it would propose a mode of seeing without sense or teleology.

Why, outside of literary theory would one want to exacerbate Latour’s problem of the absence of a public? Surely we want enabling notions, and ways of making our world manageable? Only a restriction into a narrow disciplinary frame of high theory (and de Man high theory at that) would warrant such a strategy, and it is precisely that disciplinary myopia that—it might seem—has done nothing to help the practical task of facing twenty-first century crises. But I would argue quite the contrary: what is required is neither the connectedness of composition, nor the hyper-ethical investment in the absolute singularity of every person’s world. It would only be with impersonality—when it is not the face, affective force or empathetic life of the other—that sublimity might be approached, and the approached may no longer be moral or ethical but pragmatic. What if we could look at all forces with the eye that is not detached from “the world” but is confronted with decomposition, fragmentation and detachment tout court. There would be no other, no humanity, no “us” deemed immediately worthy of survival, but the question would then finally be posed: what calls to be saved? Is saving, surviving, and living on a prima facie value? (cited from manuscript)

3. INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY IN THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

1. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (New York: Random House, 1971), 144; henceforth “Millgate,” followed by the page number.

2. Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 342.

3. See my “Prosopopoeia in Hardy and Stevens,” in Alternative Hardy, ed. Lance St. John Butler (London: MacMillan Press, 1989), 110–27.

4. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, New Wessex Edition (London: Macmillan, 1974), 35; henceforth, page numbers in parentheses.

5. J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 52–3, text slightly modified.

6. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 242.

7. I thank Rosemarie Morgan for sending me this citation from the first edition.

8. Rosemarie Morgan informs me that the phrase in question appears in E. B Tylor’s Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871). Though these volumes are not listed in the Max Gate catalogue of Hardy’s books (http://www.library.utoronto.ca/fisher/hardy/hardycataz.html, accessed May 30, 2013), Hardy may nevertheless have known Tylor’s book. Most likely he just made up the phrase as a pseudo-Biblical formulation. Tylor may also have been a source for the term or the idea of “fetichistic.”

9. The word, Rosemarie Morgan tells me, is used in August Comte’s Religion of Humanity to name a characteristic of Comte’s first stage in his three-stage theory of the development of human culture. The book is not, however, in the Max Gate library catalogue, though two other books by Comte are. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_three_stages (accessed June 1, 2013): “Fetishism—Fetishism was the primary stage of the theological stage of thinking. Throughout this stage, the primitive people believe that inanimate objects have living spirit in it, also known as animism. People worship inanimate objects like trees, stones, a piece of wood, volcanic eruptions, etc.”

10. J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970).

11. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupid_and_Psyche, accessed May 15, 2013.

12. See Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. G. Cox (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970) for a selection of the early reviews. Henceforth “Cox,” followed by the page number.

13. See Walter Pater, Greek Studies (London: Macmillan, 1910), 100: “But there are traces of the old temper in the man of to-day also; and through these we can understand that earlier time—a very poetical time, with the more highly gifted peoples—in which every impression men received of the action of powers without or within them suggested to them the presence of a soul or will, like their own—a person, with a living spirit, and senses, and hands, and feet; which, when it talked of the return of Kore to Demeter, or the marriage of Zeus and Here, was not using rhetorical language, but yielding to a real illusion; to which the voice of man ‘was really a stream, beauty an effluence, death a mist.’ ”

14. I have commented in detail on this recurrent solar drama in “Prosopopoeia in Hardy and Stevens,” listed in endnote 3.

15. For a reproduction of these on facing pages, see my Topographies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 22, 23.

16. Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy: 1840–1928 (London: Macmillan, 1965), 220.

17. Hermann Lea, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex (London: Macmillan, 1913). I am deeply grateful to Rosemarie Morgan, the President of The Thomas Hardy Association, for expert help with this and with other queries. I am also grateful to Ian Rogerson, with whom she consulted about the photographs. I have obtained the eText version of Lea’s book, complete with the book’s 240 photographs, 9 of which illustrate Lea’s chapter on the “originals” of places in The Return of the Native. The Anniversary Edition reproduces four of these. The eText costs less than ten dollars and puts into PDF format the definitive book on these originals.

18. Thomas Hardy, Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences, ed. Harold Orel (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1966), 169.

19. Timothy O’Sullivan, Thomas Hardy: An Illustrated Biography (London: Macmillan, 1975), 85.

4. CONRAD’S COLONIAL (NON)COMMUNITY: NOSTROMO

1. In Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 88.

2. Henry James, “The New Novel,” in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 147.

3. Joseph Conrad, “Note,” Nostromo (New York: The Modern Library, 1951), 1. All references to Nostromo are by page numbers to this edition, with “Note” added for citations from that. The “Note” is paginated in Arabic numbers and then the pagination begins again for the novel proper. I have used this edition because it reprints the first book version and has some passages Conrad later cut.

4. See Cedric T. Watts’s succinct account of Conrad’s sources in “A note on the background to ‘Nostromo,’ ” in Letters to Cunninghame Graham, ed. Cedric T. Watts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 37–42. A fuller account is given in Cedric T. Watts, Joseph Conrad: Nostromo (London: Penguin, 1990), 19–51. For other accounts of Conrad’s sources and his uses of them, as well as for a few of the multitudinous readings of Nostromo as well as of Conrad and imperialism, see, for example, Eloise Knapp Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963); Avrom Fleishman, Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967); Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Ian Watt, Joseph Conrad: Nostromo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Peter Lancelot Mallios, “Untimely Nostromo.” Conradiana 40.3 (2008), 213–32; Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1983); Stephen Ross, Conrad and Empire (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004).

5. See C. T. Watts, Joseph Conrad: Nostromo, 21, and his footnote there to John Halverson and Ian Watt, “The Original Nostromo: Conrad’s Source,” Review of English Studies (New Series, X, 1959), 49–52.

6. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record (London: Dent, 1923), 98, henceforth PR, followed by the page number. A Personal Record is in the standard Dent edition in the same volume as The Mirror of the Sea, but with separate pagination.

7. “An Interview with Edward Said,” conducted by Peter Mallios, in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Mallios, and Andrea White (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 293.

8. Eloise Knapp Hay, “Joseph Conrad and Impressionism,” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34, no. 2 (Winter, 1975), 139.

9. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (London: Dent, 1923), vii, x.

10. Benita Parry, “The Moment and Afterlife of Heart of Darkness,” in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century, 39.

11. Robert Hampson, “Conrad’s Heterotopic Fiction: Composite Maps, Superimposed Sites, and Impossible Spaces,” in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century, 121–35.

12. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 165.

13. See my “Philosophy, Literature, Topography: Heidegger and Hardy,” in Topographies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 9–56, especially 26–9.

14. Henry James, The Ambassadors, The Novels and Tales, 26 vols. (Fairfield, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971–79: a reprint of the New York Edition), 21: 3.

15. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, The Novels and Tales, 19: 3.

16. Henry James, The Golden Bowl, Novels and Tales, 23: 3.

17. Joseph Conrad, Almayer’s Folly (London: Dent, 1923), 3.

18. Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea (London: Dent, 1923), 3, henceforth MS, followed by the page number. The Mirror of the Sea is in the standard Dent edition in the same volume as A Personal Record, but with separate pagination.

19. Andrzej Warminski has written a brilliant and already classic essay on this phrase in its context. See Andrzej Warminski, “ ‘As the Poets Do It’: On the Material Sublime,” in his Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For De Man (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 38–64, henceforth “Warminski,” followed by the page number. Warminski’s essay is inspired by Paul de Man’s “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 70–90, henceforth AI, followed by the page number. More recently, Claire Colebrook has returned once more to Kant as read by de Man in order to argue that the proper attitude in these days of catastrophic climate change is a material sublime that sees nature as fragmented, mechanical, and indifferent, as against personifications of Mother Nature. See Colebrook’s superb extended essay, “The Geological Sublime,” forthcoming from the Open Humanities Press in Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller, The Twilight of the Anthropocene. “Such a sublime,” says Colebrook, “would be aesthetic in de Man’s sense not because it has to do with art and composition, but because it would propose a mode of seeing without sense or teleology. … What if we could look at all forces with the eye that is not detached from ‘the world’ but is confronted with decomposition, fragmentation and detachment tout court” (Colebrook, 103–4).

20. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, in Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories (London: Dent, 1923), 93.

21. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1979), 10: 196; ibid., Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 110–11, translation slightly altered.

22. Tom Cohen has written powerfully in analysis and defense of de Man’s “materialism” in “Toxic assets: de Man’s remains and the ecocatastrophic imaginary (an American Fable),” in Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller, Theory and the Disappearing Future (London: Routledge, 2012), 89–129.

23. Cited AI, 81, by de Man from Kant, Logic, Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 6: 457. This is the edition of which I have used the paperback version of 1979, referred to in endnote 21.

24. See Gérard Genette, “Discours du récit,” in Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 65–278; ibid., Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin, foreword Jonathan Culler (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980). The best interpretation of Conrad’s work from a narratological perspective is Jakob Lothe, Conrad’s Narrative Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

25. See Nicholas Royle, “The ‘Telepathy Effect’: Notes toward a Reconsideration of Narrative Fiction,” The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 256–76; also available in Acts of Narrative, ed. Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 93–109.

26. See Lothe, Conrad’s Narrative Method.

27. See endnote 2.

28. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Random House, 1983).

29. See endnote 4.

30. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of Williams on community.

31. Joseph Conrad, Letters to Cunninghame Graham, 57.

32. Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986), 11; ibid., The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 1, trans. modified.

33. The text has “roots,” as does the Dent edition, but surely that is a misprint for “roofs.” “Palm-leaf roots” doesn’t make sense.

34. Aristotle, Poetics, 1451b, in Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts, critical text, trans., and commentary, S. H. Butcher (Dover, 1951), 35.

35. F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition, first published in 1946, makes a strikingly similar claim for the relevance of Nostromo to understanding the history of Leavis’s own time. Speaking of “Charles Gould’s quiet unyieldingness in the face of Pedrito’s threats and blandishments,” Leavis says this episode “reinforce[s] dramatically that pattern of political significance which has a major part in Nostromo—a book that was written, we remind ourselves in some wonder, noting the topicality of its themes, analysis, and illustrations, in the reign of Edward VII [1901–1910]” (Leavis, 218). I owe this reference to Jeremy Hawthorn. I am no Leavisite, but am, nevertheless, happy to find myself in agreement with Leavis about Nostromo’s perennial relevance, though I do not agree with Leavis’s implied admiration for Gould’s political ideology. Leavis, moreover, would no doubt have had little sympathy with my insistence on the way Nostromo is “parabolic,” that is, “imaginary (but true).”

36. Watts, 68. Watts cites George M. Barringer, “Joseph Conrad and Nostromo: Two New Letters,” Thoth, X (Spring 1969), 20–24. The quotation is from p. 24 in Barringer’s essay.

37. W. B. Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” ll. 27–32, The Variorum Edition of the Poems, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 630.

38. John Ruskin, “The Pathetic Fallacy,” Modern Painters, III, location 2,926 of Kindle (with images) eBook, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38923, accessed August 10, 2013.

39. Laurence Davies, “ ‘The Thing Which Was Not’ and The Thing That Is Also: Conrad’s Ironic Shadowing,” in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, 223–37.

40. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (London: Dent, 1923), xiii.

41. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, 165.

42. Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory,” in The Resistance to Theory, 11.

43. Conrad underlines this word by repeating it several times in the passage speaking for Emilia Gould’s sadness toward the end of the novel: “The word ‘incorrigible’—a word lately pronounced by Dr. Monygham—floated into her still and sad immobility. Incorrigible in his devotion to the great silver mine was the Señor Administrador,” and so on (582). “Incorrigible” names the impossibility of curing people of their ideological infatuations either with someone they love or with “material interests.”

44. Joseph Conrad, Victory: An Island Tale (London: Dent, 1923), 176.

45. Decoud succeeded in this better than did Conrad himself, who, absurdly or perhaps unconsciously/deliberately, botched his suicide attempt in 1878. He was in despair over debts he could not repay. He shot himself in the chest, durch und durch, through and through, as his Uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski wrote in a letter, without damaging his heart or any other vital organ (Watts, 8). If his aim had been “better” we would not have Nostromo or Lord Jim or Heart of Darkness, or any other of Conrad’s fictions. That would be an irreparable loss about which we would know nothing.

5. WAVES THEORY: AN ANACHRONISTIC READING

1. Ian McEwan, Atonement (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), henceforth A, followed by the page number.

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Connolly, accessed June 16, 2013.

3. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1923), in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (London: The Hogarth Press, 1950), 91.

4. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

5. See Walter Benjamin, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” in Illuminationen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1955), 61. Harry Zohn’s translation as “intended object” and “mode of intention,” with its phenomenological use of the word “intention” to express the orientation of a word toward its referent, is a little misleading. See “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 74. For a discussion of this distinction and a claim that meaning and mode of meaning (hermeneutics and poetics) are not complementary, see Paul de Man, “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’ ” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 86–8.

6. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), 98–102.

7. Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: The New American Library [Signet], 1968), 148, henceforth D, followed by the page number.

8. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London: The Hogarth Press. 1963), 211; further references to The Waves will be by page numbers only.

9. Maurice Blanchot, “La voix narrative (le ‘il’, le neutre),” in L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 556–67; ibid., “The Narrative Voice (the ‘he,’ the neutral),” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 379–87. As I have said in an endnote in Chapter 2, given what Blanchot argues in this essay about “the neutral,” a better translation of “il” in this case, would be “it,” though the word can mean both “he” and “it.”

10. Gerald Levin, “The Musical Style of The Waves,” in Virginia Woolf: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 215–22, reprinted from The Journal of Narrative Technique 13, no. 3 (Fall 1983).

11. See http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/secular-masque (accessed June 12, 2013), line 77.

12. I thank Jessica Haile for calling my attention to these passages.

13. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1985), 67, henceforth MB, followed by the page number.

14. See Paul de Man, “Kant and Schiller,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 137. Here is part of that page: “… the relation between them, between the mathematical and the dynamic, is a discontinuity. It is not a dialectic, it is not a progression or a regression, but it is a transformation of trope into power, which is not itself a tropological movement, and which cannot be accounted for by means of a tropological model. You cannot account for the change from trope to performative, you cannot account for the change from the mathematical sublime to the dynamic sublime in Kant—I argued at least [in ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,’ ibid., 70–90]—you cannot account for it according to a tropological model.”

15. I have elsewhere discussed in greater detail all five. For Husserl and Derrida, see J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida and Literature,” in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 66–68. For Henry James, see J. Hillis Miller, Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 157–60. For Iser and Blanchot, see J. Hillis Miller, “Literature Matters Today,” in SubStance, Issue 131, vol. 42, no. 2 (2013), 26–31.

16. Edmund Husserl, L’origine de la géométrie, in Jacques Derrida, Introduction à “L’Origine de la géométrie” de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962); ibid., The Origin of Geometry, trans. David Carr, in Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 157–80.

17. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1971), vol. 23 of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (Reprint of the New York Edition of 26 vols.) (Fairfield, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971–79), xiii–xiv.

18. Maurice Blanchot, “Le temps et le roman,” in Faux Pas (Paris: Gallimard. 1943), 282–6; ibid., “Time and the Novel,” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 248–51.

19. Maurice Blanchot, “Two Versions of the Imaginary,” in The Gaze of Orpheus and other literary essays, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981), 79–89; ibid., “Les deux versions de l’imaginaire,” in L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 266–77.

20. Maurice Blanchot, “The Song of the Sirens,” in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–24; ibid., “Le chant des Sirènes,” in Le livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 7–34.

21. Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, trans. David Henry Wilson, Wolfgang Iser, et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); ibid., Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre: Perspektiven literarische Anthropologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991).

22. Iser (1993), xvii; not present in the German “Vorwort.”

23. Iser (1993), 3; Iser (1991), 21.

24. Jacques Derrida, “The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations,” in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug & Others (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 116; ibid., “Ponctuations: le temps de la thèse,” in Jacques Derrida, Du droit à la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 443.

25. Jacques Derrida, “Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison,” in La Religion: Séminaire de Capri sous la direction de Jacques Derrida et Gianni Vattimo, ed. Thierry Marchaisse (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 9–86; ibid., “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 42–101. For de Man, on belief see his “Allegory of Reading (Profession de foi),” in Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 245: “If, after reading the Profession de foi, we are tempted to convert ourselves to ‘theism,’ we stand convicted of foolishness in the court of the intellect. But if we decide that belief, in the most extensive use of the term (which must include all possible forms of idolatry and ideology) can once and forever be overcome by the enlightened mind, then this twilight of the idols [a reference to the title of a book by Nietzsche] will be all the more foolish in not recognizing itself as the first victim of its occurrence.”

6. POSTMODERN COMMUNITIES IN PYNCHON AND CERVANTES

1. This chapter is a revision, expansion, and reorientation of a lecture that was originally given in Córdoba, Spain, at a conference celebrating the four-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote, Part One in 1605. The conference was focused on one of Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels, “The Dogs’ Colloquy” (El Coloquio de los perros). I thank Julián Jiménez Heffernan and Paula Martín Salván for the invitation and for many kindnesses. My paper was subsequently revised, translated into Spanish by María Jesús López Sánchez-Vizcaíno, and published as “El Coloquio de los Perros Como Narrativa Posmoderna,” along with many other papers from the conference. My essay appeared in La Tropelía: Hacia el Coloquio de los Perros, ed. Julián Jiménez Heffernan (Tenerife; Madrid: Artemisaediciones, 2008), 33–98. My translator called the readers’ attention in notes to a number of places where the translation by Walter Starkie I used missed nuances of the original Spanish, for example the translation of presta (“ready”) as “nigh.” I have incorporated most of her comments in the present revision and have changed my readings to fit the Spanish original more closely. I have also incorporated phrases from the original here and there in my citations to give the flavor of Cervantes’s Spanish.

2. Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner: Early Stories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985). Future references to this text will include page numbers only.

3. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

4. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

5. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 54.

6. Jameson, ix.

7. For this difficult distinction in Kant, see Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 70–3. “Metaphysical principles state why and how things occur .… Transcendental principles state the conditions that make occurrence possible at all .… Ideologies, to the extent that they necessarily contain empirical moments and are directed toward what lies outside the realm of pure concepts, are on the side of metaphysics rather than critical philosophy” (71, 72). Most literary and cultural study, insofar as it is “historical” in the Jamesonian sense, is in the realm of what Kant calls “metaphysics,” not in the realm of “critical philosophy.”

8. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 82, 87; ibid., “Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison,” in La religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 62, 69.

9. Jacques Derrida, “Fifth Session: February 5, 2003,” in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 193.

10. Jacques Derrida, “Cinquième séance. Le 5 février 2003,” in Sémimaire La bête et le souverain II (2002–2003), ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, Ginette Michaud (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 193.

11. See Derrida, 2011, 131: “Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment on, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, a bookstore, in cellars, urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of a Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by reanimating it.…”; Comme toute trace, un livre, la survivance d’un livre, dès son premier instant, c’est une machine mort-vivante, sur-vivante, le corps d’une chose enterrée dans une bibliothèque, une librairie, dans des caveaux, des urnes, noyée dans les vagues mondiales d’un Web, etc., mais une chose morte qui ressuscite chaque fois qu’un souffle de lecture vivante, chaque fois que le souffle de l’autre or l’autre souffle, chaque fois qu’une intentionnalité la vise et la fait reviver en l’animant. … (ibid., 2010, 194). Derrida’s word “machine” here is important. The survivance of a book or other trace happens mechanically, for example by way of those monster programs and servers that collect the NSA’s metadata, or, for that matter, the information collected in the same mechanical way about our choices and tastes by Amazon or Google for “targeted marketing” purposes.

12. See Eric Lichtblau, “In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.,” New York Times (July 7, 2013). See also the four essays gathered under the rubric of “The End of Privacy: What we have to fear from the new surveillance state,” in The Nation (July 8/15, 2013).

13. Miguel de Cervantes, “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” in The Deceitful Marriage and Other Exemplary Novels, trans. Walter Starkie (New York: The New American Library [Signet], 1963), 247; ibid., “El coloquio de los perros,” in Novelas ejemplares (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1997), 40. Henceforth page numbers only, with the Spanish first, followed by the English.

14. Derrida’s wonderful discussion of why the phrase “je t’aime” (I love you) is a performative utterance, not a constative one, ran through the third and fourth seminars of the sequence on “Témoignage or Attestation [Witnessing]” given in Paris in 1992–3. I heard Derrida give the English version in Irvine as a single two-hour lecture in the spring of 1993. He gave me a disk of the whole seminar sequence at that time. So far as I know, this seminar has not yet been published in either French or English, but I am told an illicit text is circulating in cyberspace. I discuss this seminar briefly in several places in my For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 37, 38, 153, 172.

15. See Friedrich Schlegel, “Critical Fragments,” no. 108: “To a person who hasn’t got it [irony], it will remain a riddle even after it is openly confessed. It is meant to deceive no one except those who consider it a deception and who either take pleasure in the delightful roguery of making fools of the whole world or else become angry when they get an inkling that they themselves might be included,” in Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow, Foreword by Rodolphe Gasché (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 13; Wer sie [ironie] nicht hat, dem bleibt sie auch nach dem offensten Geständnis ein Rätsel. Sie soll niemanden täuschen als die, welche sie für Täuschung halten, und entweder ihre Freude haben an der herrlichen Schalkheit, alle Welt zum besten zu haben, oder böse werden, wenn sie ahnden, sie wären wohl auch mit gemeint (“Kritische Fragmente” in Kritische Schriften [München: Carl Hanser, 1964], 20).

16. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, 165.