Contradictions of Human Agency From Victorian Cosmopolitanism to Postmodern Eclecticism

Niven Kumar and Lucyna Swiatek

Contradictions of Human Agency from Victorian

Cosmopolitanism to Postmodern Eclecticism

Abstract

The liminal subject inhabits a space between two social structures, neither disconnected

and separate from the previous, nor fully accepted and entered into the next. Globalisa-

tion reinforces the legacies of colonialism by imposing a new system of capitalist hierar-

chies and privileges, a system that Derrida argues displays a “tendency to obstruct”, and

acts as a barrier to those without the vocabulary that enables access to hegemonic dis-

courses of power and wealth. Traditionally, the postcolonial hybrid subject occupies this

position of liminality, yet with the dismantling of imperialistic western ideas of empire

and the changing ideas of decolonisation in both the fin de siècles, representations of the

Occident’s cultural concerns and aesthetic preoccupations reveal its subjects to be strug-

gling with the tensions between their allegiance to nationalistic scaffolds of identity for-

mation and the emerging moral relativism of cosmopolitanism, a tension between city

and State, the local and the global. Through an exploration of the works of George Eliot,

D.H. Lawrence and Samuel Beckett this tension, it will be argued, has characterised the

West’s engagement with the Other, and the consequent representations of Western

subjectivity.

“Where have we received the image of cosmopolitanism? And what is happen-

ing to it?”1

Derrida’s opening questions in his essay on international law and the duty to

hospitality2 frame a manifestation of a discrete, cosmopolitan self, one that

wanders restlessly in search of its origins as it faces an uncertain future in an

era of rapidly dissolving boundaries between “the City and the State”.3 Ac-

cording to Derrida, cosmopolitanism is closely tied, with ideas of hospitality

and tolerance. This in turn must take into account conceptions of self in its

relation to the Other. Thus, a cosmopolitan stance already presupposes a

moral and ethical relationship with the Other which is shaped by two

strands: the obligation we have to others, and the interestedness with which

we deal with particular members of the world community.4 It is grounded,

then, in the development of “habits of coexistence: conversation in its older

1 Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. by Mark Dooley and Mi-

chael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2010), p.3, original emphasis.

2 Ibid., p.3.

3 Ibid., p.3.

4 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,

2006), p.xv.

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162

meaning, of living together, association”.5 Therein lies the problematic na-

ture of the term ‘cosmopolitanism’.

The development of habits of coexistence must, fundamentally, require a

thorough interrogation of tolerance, since the term ‘tolerance’,

is always on the side of the ‘reason of the strongest’, where ‘might is right’; it is a

supplementary mark of sovereignty, which says to the other from its elevated po-

sition, I am letting you be, you are not insufferable, I am leaving you a place in

my home, but do not forget that this is my home6

In other words, tolerance, in the parlance of a modern cosmopolitan world,

is not a pure tolerance, but acts as a limit to our conceptions of hospitality,

where we accept the foreigner, the other “up to a certain point”.7 Tolerance,

rather than being an unconditional embrace is, in actual fact, “circumspect”.8

This circumspection is not anomalous with the Enlightenment ideals of

hospitality. Indeed, Kant argues, for instance, that a “nation is not (like the

ground on which it is located) a possession (partrimonium). It is a society of

men whom no other than the nation itself can command or dispose of.”9

This is the bulwark of the laws of tolerance and hospitality. The State, itself

a conception intimately tied to Hobbes’ idea of the Unity of man, and which

lays the ground for the notion of toleration,10 must be defended as an inal-

ienable right and a bastion of Western conceptions of selfhood and nation-

hood.

As such, a ‘pure’ cosmopolitanism, what Derrida calls “an unconditional

hospitality”, becomes a chimera because “no state can write it into its

laws”.11 Derrida charts a genealogy of hospitality, dating back to Hebraic

traditions, “cities which would welcome and protect those innocents” from

violent politics, through to medieval traditions of sovereignty where a city

would determine its own laws of hospitality, eventually arriving at the cos-

mopolitique tradition attributed to “Greek stoicism and Pauline Christianity”,

a tradition that demarcates a “world co-citizenship”.12 Boundaries that once

marked areas for refuge, escape or even redemption, boundaries that under-

5 Appiah, p.xix.

6 Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in the Time of terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p.127.

7 Ibid., p.128, original emphasis.

8 Ibid., p.128.

9 Immanuel Kant, To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, trans. by Ted Humphrey

(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003 [1795]), p.2, original emphasis.

10 Johnathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.545.

11 Borradori, p.129.

12 Derrida, p.20.


163

line a human, universal, ethical basis for hospitality, are now hijacked by and

transmuted into free trade agreements, bringing with it political and eco-

nomic obligations that outweigh the moral and ethical rights of the displaced

and the stateless. The development of a trans-bordered and globalised world

has not been achieved through the transgression of traditional laws of hospi-

tality mentioned above, but through the prioritisation of the economic im-

perative. Although Kant’s ideals of a universal hospitality, which form the

ballast of the Enlightenment principle of tolerance13 speak of world citizen-

ship, the laws of hospitality, written into the foundational pillars of the Enlighten-

ment, work to define and re-affirm national boundaries in order to enact and enable

the offer of refuge. So the laws, at once, both emphasise the difference from

the Other as well as attempting to offer dissolution.

Therefore, the new cosmopolitanism, with its concomitant images of

globalisation and networked institutions of information, has as its motiva-

tion the economic imperative of globalising markets, not citizenry. Given

this state of affairs, how can a cosmopolitanisation work if its inherent prob-

lematical nature is compounded by a governing nexus of economic ‘coor-

peration’ which offers a semblance of toleration and hospitability? In posing

this question, we must also interrogate definitions of self. How, for instance,

is the project of selfhood achieved or fulfilled within the competing preoc-

cupations of national identity and the presence of a multiplicity of identities

beyond the boundaries of statism and nationalism? What are the implica-

tions of the Western need to conceive of itself as an autonomous, unique

entity when all around it is sheer flux? This paper, therefore, maps a trajec-

tory of the development of a unique contemporary form of cosmopolitan-

ism masquerading as a logical progression of the Kantian and Enlightenment

project through the exploration of the works of George Eliot, D. H. Law-

rence and Samuel Beckett, thus positing a trajectory of Western conceptions

of self and cosmopolitanism from the late nineteenth century to late twenti-

eth century.

Middlemarch: Identity and the Fear of Rootlessness

‘Victorian cosmopolitanism’ may seem, at first, paradoxical. The Victorian

preoccupations with imperialism and nationalism preclude notions of multi-

plicity and diversity. However, set against a backdrop of ideas that resist

synthesis, including Benthanism, Darwinism, Imperialism and a growing

secularism, we find the Victorian sensibility challenges its own longing for

13 Derrida, p.24.

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164

social and personal order and unity. For Walter Houghton, the “moral ear-

nestness and optimism” goes hand in hand with anxiety, rigidity and dogma-

tism.14 This fragmented intellectual landscape forms the scaffolding of sub-

jectivity, a subjectivity that strives to formulate relations between the cosmos

and polites, individualism and society. The scaffolding, then, is fundamentally

heterogeneous. How does the Victorian conception of self take place within

the bracketed contextual frameworks of the discrete, universal outline of the

Enlightenment individual and the Modernist conception of subjective mul-

tiplicity?

As a study on the growing Victorian contextual preoccupation with secu-

larism and the move toward a geopolitical conception of self, George Eliot

herself is an apt departure point. The dissolution of religious principles in

light of the rapidly developing scientific and philosophical movements gives

rise to a space of absence, one that was framed as a looming threat to the

existence of civilized Western society, and what Nietzsche proposed was a

vast receptacle for creating new meaning.15 This space becomes a site within

which the Victorians created new interpretations of the secular self and

identity, a self that, in a Freudian sense, is split open, erasing any sense of

unity. Eliot’s abandonment of orthodox Christian beliefs evoked a textual

critique that posits a religion of humanity, using Christian notions of moral-

ity to sustain her narratives and elevate the contextual discussion surround-

ing the aesthetic, psychological, political and moral consequence for human

existence after the deconstruction of religious faith.16 John Beers proposes

that Eliot’s advanced views went beyond that of the Unitarians of the time,

heretical in terms of doctrine, but retaining a reverence for the Word and

the emphasis on the Bible’s simple human message. Eliot was aware of intel-

lectual currents that critiqued assumptions behind the text, the self-

contradictory nature of the text, and she was drawn to a philosophical re-

14 Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870 (New Haven and Lon-

don: Yale University Press, 1985), p.xiv.

15 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (London: Pen-

guin, 1974 [1882]), p.181.

16 Peter C. Hodgson argues that Eliot’s texts are a vast resource of narratives that

explore the possibilities to speak meaningfully of the presence and action of God in a

secular society, and that the plots of her narratives are deeply embedded with reli-

gious and theological meanings, not in the sense that they interrogate ideas of religion,

but rather, the affirmation of these ideas. He does, however, make it clear that he is

“not a literary critic but a theologian” and is writing principally for “non-specialists”,

his project to entice re-readings of Eliot within a Christian framework. Peter C.

Hodgson, Theology in the Fiction of George Eliot (London: SCM Press, 2001),p.ix.


165

sponse along the lines of Strauss and Feuerbach.17 For Eliot, art is “a mode

of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men

beyond the bounds of the personal lot”.18 The task of the artist, then, is

sacred, as he attempts to paint the life of the ‘people’. Our sympathy should

be with the “perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the hu-

mour in [...] life”,19 and it is this humanistic ethos that critics say pervades

Eliot’s fiction.20

Yet David Kurnick is suspicious of Eliot’s brand of narrative cosmopol-

itanism. While she effortlessly negotiates a diverse intellectual terrain, and

preaches for the dissolution of boundaries that separate us from the ‘other’,

the trauma of this confrontation never seems to take place.21 Cosmopol-

itanism is a “distinctly liberal project”22 and therefore limited within the

liberal vision, challenging the very heart of what a truly geopolitical, trans-

national vision entails. Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda (1876) is clearly a site of

discussion for notions of race and identity, Mordecai’s passionate injunc-

tions of national identity a mouthpiece for proto-Zionist views. The ethnic

separatism evident in Daniel Deronda is symptomatic of a critical view that

regards Eliot as a nationalist, one who believes only allegiance to our ethnic

past will achieve true parity on the geopolitical stage.23

Eliot’s earlier attempts at challenging the boundaries of individualism

take place within her 1859 novella The Lifted Veil, a narrative that explores

the relationship between art and science, and deconstructs the borders of

subjectivity, borders that include linear time, the self and other, the state

between life and death. Latimer, a sensitive aesthete and misanthrope, dis-

covers that he is involuntarily subject to clairvoyant powers, and has pre-

scient visions of the future, coupled with telepathic insight to the thoughts

and feelings of those around him. The dissolution of these boundaries,

however, only achieves alienation, the disclosure of internal monstrosity

17 John Beers, Romanticism, Revolution and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2009), pp.200-01.

18 Essays of George Eliot, ed. by Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press,

1963), p.271.

19 Essays of George Eliot, p.271.

20 See Gary Whil’s article ‘Republican Liberty in George Eliot’s Romola’, Criticism, 51.2

(2009), pp.247-62 for a reading of her political humanism; Paul Sawyer argues in

‘Views from Above and Below: George Eliot and Fakir Mohan Senapati’, diacritics, 37.4 (2004), pp.56-77, that Eliot’s novels demonstrate an inclusive vision of human

interconnectedness.

21 David Kurnick, ‘Unspeakable George Eliot’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 38 (2010)

489-509 (p.489).

22 Ibid., p.490.

23 See Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and her Politics of National Inheritance (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1994).

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166

within his own wife, “a cruel immortal, finding her spiritual feast in the

agonies of a dying race”.24 Thus Eliot’s confrontation within the breakdown

of Schopenhauer’s principum individuationis25 pushes a sympathetic imagina-

tion to breaking point, closing the narrative with the impending death of

Latimer. This representation of a failed attempt to harness the scientific

imagination in order to lift the veil from the Other, an attempt to achieve a

truly cosmopolitan standpoint, only provides answers which contradictorily

provoke more questions, an endless dialogue between two conflicting drives,

a longing for death, and the terror of accepting its “chill hand”. The trans-

gressive nature of this earlier text anticipates the dichotomous aesthetic

framework of the local/global in her later works, a framework that contains

within itself a bipolarisation of self, one that explores the ethics of toleration

and introduces the individual ethos to the geopolitical landscape.

Middlemarch (1874), famously considered by Virginia Woolf to be “one of

the few English novels written for grown up people”,26 studies the complex-

ity of parochial life set against a backdrop of a slow dissolution of nationalis-

tic boundaries. The line drawn between English culture, self-regarding and

absolute, and the other is firmly entrenched, transgression serving to isolate

its inhabitants, offering a new moral and ethical framework. Take, for exam-

ple, Dorothea’s wedding journey with Causabon. The encounter of their

first fight in Rome becomes an exaggeration of trauma, set apart from the

“ordinary life among their neighbours”27 in Lowick. The “express object” of

the wedding journey is to:

isolate two people on the ground that they are all the world to each other [...]. To

have changed your longitude extensively and placed yourselves in a moral soli-

tude in order to have small explosions, to find conversation difficult and to hand

a glass of water without looking, can hardly be regarded as satisfactory fulfilment

even to the toughest minds.28

The displacement of longitudinal coordinates evokes ‘solitude’ within the

moral compass, implicitly denying moral awareness in geography outside the

densely integrated imperialist framework. Irony, of course, neutralises the

imperialistic notions embedded in the language. As morality rests squarely in

24 George Eliot, The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob (London: Penguin Books, 2001 [1859]),

p.40.

25 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover Publica-

tions, 1966 [1859]), I, p.353.

26 Virginia Woolf, ‘George Eliot’, The Times Literary Supplement, 20 November 1919;

repr. in The Common Reader (London: The Hogarth Press, 1925), p.213.

27 George Eliot, Middlemarch (London and New York: Norton, 1977 [1874]), p.140.

28 Ibid., p.140.


167

the domain of the British, transnational trade is seen through the eyes of Mr

Brooke as necessary and vital to the continuing success of the parochial. He

addresses the crowd of Middlemarch in his candidate’s speech to stand for

Parliament:

I am a close neighbour of yours, my good friends – you’ve known me on the

bench a good while...It won’t do, you know, breaking machines: everything must

go on – trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples – that kind of

thing – since Adam Smith that must go on. We must look all over the globe: -

‘Observation with extensive view,’ must look everywhere, ‘from China to Peru’,

as someone says- Johnson, I think, ‘The Rambler’, you know. This is what I have

done to a certain point – not as far as Peru; but I’ve not always stayed at home -

I saw it wouldn’t do. I’ve been in the Levant where some of your Middlemarch

goods go – and then, again, in the Baltic. The Baltic, now.29

The disruption of his speech by raising an effigy, along with a hail of eggs on

Mr Brooke’s shoulders, is testament to the impatience of the crowd regard-

ing Brooke’s auto-ethnographic ruminations. Bruce Robbins argues that the

rejection of Brooke’s stylistic ramblings are, at the same time, a repudiation

of his cosmopolitanism30 (seen here as somehow linked with economics –

“where some of your Middlemarch goods go”) as he has been characterised

as a man who “had travelled in his younger years, and was held in this part

of the country to have contracted a rambling habit of mind.”31 The ‘contrac-

tion’ of this incoherence speaks of the space of infection, a realm drawn

from places outside that of the imperialist code, supported by the motif of

disease. Mr Farebrother “had looked on at a great deal of gambling in Paris,

watching it as if it had been a disease”,32 and the “imminent horrors of

Cholera”33 haunt the contextual locations of the text. This same suspicious

sentiment toward cosmopolitanism was expressed as early as 1809 when

Coleridge wrote of a “false philosophy that would persuade … that cos-

mopolitanism is nobler than nationality”.34

The mind, for Eliot, is a discrete entity, both, as Michael Davis argues,

“connected to and separate from the world”.35 This singularity of English

29 Eliot, Middlemarch, p.349.

30 Bruce Robbins, ‘Victorian Cosmopolitanism, Interrupted’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 38 (2010), 421-25 (p.421).


32 Ibid., p.462.

33 Ibid., p.381.

34 Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.35, original omission.

35 Michael Davies, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Psychology (London: Ashgate, 2006),

p. 5.

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168

psychology is paradoxically drawn by Eliot as a complex system of interrela-

tions, seen in the numerable references to the ‘web’ throughout the novel.

Her notion of “unravelling certain human lots”, deconstructs how they were

“woven and interwoven”, concentrating on a “particular web”, and rejecting

the demands of a more universal “range of relevancies.”36 The focus on the

national, articulated in Will Ladislaw’s five-year dream of “public life was

going to be wider and more national”37, stops short at the dissolution of

nationalistic political boundaries. Mary Wilson Carpenter argues that Eliot

“abhorred”38 the notion of rootless cosmopolitanism of the day, articulated

in her characterisation of Nicholas Bulstrode, on whom she casts an imagi-

nary form of Cholera. Bulstrode is a stranger to Middlemarch, lacking ori-

gins: “[R]easoners among them wished to know who his father and grandfa-

ther were, observing that five and twenty years ago nobody had ever heard

of a Bulstrode in Middlemarch”.39 But he is English, an individual who

moves effortlessly between cultures, a banker who is symptomatic of the

economies of the developing trans-bordered globe. His “sickly aspect” is

not attributed to a “yellow, black haired sort, but rather “pale blond skin and

thin grey-besprinkled brown hair”.40 The direct address critiques the reader’s

and inhabitants of Middlemarch’s assumption of Orientalism, yet does not

quite neutralise the narrator’s complicity in this assumption.

The operation of sharply drawn nationalistic borders of self prevent any

real transgression, or once transgressed, the individual falls into a vast,

amoral realm, Nietzsche’s proposition of a Godless void.41 And it is within

this void that the rejection of absolute cosmopolitanism takes place. With

the overturning of Christian doctrines, the Victorian subject is left at the

mercy of its environment, and struggling to regain a sense of direction. The

death of God transacts a rupturing or a splitting of consciousness; evoking

the bipolarity of fear, a neurosis that disturbs the operational and functional

constructs of the self. The expectation of traditional cosmopolitan hospital-

ity demands an ethical engagement with the other, yet this striving for a tan-

gible ‘sympathetic imagination’ is compromised by the psychosis of a self

36 Davies, p.96.


38 Mary Wilson Carpenter, ‘Medical Cosmopolitanism: Middlemarch, Cholera, and the

Pathologies of English Masculinity’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 38 (2010), 511-28

(p.513).


40 Ibid., p.83.

41 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random

House, 1974 [1887]), p.181.


169

stranded in an “infinite nothing [...] feel[ing] the breath of empty space”,42 as

it recoils from the murderous consequences of scientific progress.

The Plumed Serpent: From Being to Performativity

This Victorian bipolar oscillation renders the Western self incapable of mov-

ing forward, caught in a circular traversing between finitude and infinitude, a

movement that at once speaks of generation and regress, of empire and

worldliness on the one hand, and the fear of rootlessness and disease on the

other. At the foundations of this circular movement is a fundamental need

to interrogate the rhetoric of belonging that colours the Victorian concep-

tion of self. This interrogation flows onto the changing climate heralding a

modernist approach, faced as it is with vestiges of a world now crumbling

away, and the emergence of one that breaks up into multiplicities. If the

Victorians struggled with a definition of a self that must increasingly take

into account the rising prominence of the ‘other’ in European cultural life,

the modernist must come to terms with an increasingly ‘othered’ European

cultural life, a fragmentation that can only be resolved by an embrace of an

‘internationalism’.

The modernist claims of ‘internationalism’ are of a piece with its appar-

ently worldly attitude via which the artist approaches the world. This world-

liness entails, as Bain argues, “an understanding of the scales of belonging

within modernity and of the necessity of narrating the simultaneous attrac-

tions of roots and rootlessness, nation and globe”.43 Yet these “scales of

belonging” challenge any notion of a universalist embrace of difference im-

plied by a cosmopolitan position. In other words, if cosmopolitanism is seen

as a “universalist detachment”,44 a rejection of nationhood and national

allegiance for a more atmospheric or cosmic allegiance, it does not necessar-

ily allow for the multiplicity of voices to be heard, but instead, resorts to an

imperialistic identification with self and being. Such identification posits the

self as autonomous and sacrosanct, stable and well-defined, and immune to

the fragmentary impact of the world around it. This conception of the self

must struggle and buck against a steadily neutralising system of barriers that

keep the self stabilised and contained. Modernism itself is an anomaly when

considered in relation to cosmopolitanism. It is characterised by the paradox

“that almost without exception the Other is considered to be part of the

42 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p.181

43 Alexander Bain, ‘Cosmopolitics of Modernism’, Novel: a forum on Fiction, 35, 327-29

(p.328).

44 Ibid.

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170

narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be considered constitu-

tive”.45 Susan Friedman argues, for example, that modernist universalism

was a “movement back and forth between alterity and mimesis, between

sameness and difference that is embedded in the double meaning of the

term identity (meaning the same as, but also relationally different from)”46.

The fragmentation that underpins literary modernism (implicit in the

“movement back and forth”), while de-centering sites of meaning, becomes

emblematic of an inclusionary modernist worldview seeking to move away

from the hegemony of state and empire towards a kind of visible hybridity,

borne out through costume.47 Ezra Pound’s antidote to provincialism, for

example, posited as an “ignorance of the manners, customs and nature of

people living outside one’s own village, parish, or nation” and as a “desire to

coerce others into uniformity”,48 a traditionalist state and empire-bound

ideological stance, is a cosmopolitanism that signifies “otherness in their

bodies, locations, and speech”.49 Pound’s assessment of the modernist’s

propensity to intellectual cosmopolitanism is borne out in D. H. Lawrence’s

own establishment of a utopian colony, ‘Rananim’, where money, and thus

capitalist greed, a symptom and symbol of worldly cosmopolitan appropria-

tion, is abolished. In a sense, Lawrence’s utopian vision is an attempt to

retreat from ‘progress’ towards a more universalistic equity. Yet, he argues

that “[w]e will be aristocrats, and as wise as the serpent in dealing with the

mob. For the mob shall not crush us or starve us nor cry us to death. We

will deal cunningly with the mob, the greedy soul, we will gradually bring it

to subjection”.50 Lawrence solidifies difference while approaching sameness

thus: “Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There

must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a

Ruler, a Kaiser, no Presidents and democracies”.51

In effect, the movement away from the mob, from capitalistic sycophant-

ism, towards a universalist or cosmopolitanist detachment maintains the

strict definitions of self and selfhood. Such a costuming of self, or rather,

45 Celena E. Kusch, ‘Disorienting Modernism: National Boundaries and the Cosmopo-

lis’, Journal of Modern Literature, 30.4 (2007), 39-60 (p.39).

46 Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998), p.143.

47 Kusch, p.40.

48 Ezra Pound, ‘Provincialism the Enemy’, New Age, 21 November 1917, 244-45

(p.245); qtd. in Kusch, p.40.

49 Kusch, p.40.

50 Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, ed. by Harry T. Moore (New York: Viking, 1962),

p.317.

51 Ibid., p.352.


171

performativity of otherness, in modernist cosmopolitanism does nothing to

eradicate the boundaries between the Other and the I.

The same tendency, argues Mark Antliff, is seen in the fascist opposition

to “Enlightenment ideals and capitalist precepts”52 while at the same time

displaying an eagerness “to absorb those aspects of modernity (and modern

aesthetics) that could be reconfigured within their antirational concept of

national identity”, a tendency Jeffrey Herf labels “reactionary modernism”.53

It is clear that while the emergence of a modernist impulse heralded a retreat

from and dissolution of traditionalist modes of thought not only revolving

around nation-state and empire, but also, as a consequence, of the concomi-

tant defined perceptions of the Western self - in effect, an indifference to

national and politico-legal distinctions - the enquiry into new forms of self,

forms that no longer retained an “inalienable” right or “ability to exchange

experiences”54 by virtue of their fragmentation, invariably already contain

“the nostalgic longing for a whole self”.55

Seen in this light, the modernist project, at least in terms of literary mod-

ernism, is an attempt to extricate “an image of an autonomous subjectivity

from intractable communal norms”.56 Further, Levenson argues that the

“dense web of social constraints”57 that plague modernist milieux conse-

quently leads to a palpable “motif of exile”58 which finds its expression not

so much in flight and escape, but a withdrawal to the liminal spaces of culture

and identity. Marlow, for instance, leaves his native country to travel to

another, through the Congo, in order to retrieve an estranged member of his

community in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). Lambert Strether

embarks on a mission, on behalf of his wealthy fiancée, to seek out her son,

and save him from the clutches of a dangerous woman in Henry James’ The

Ambassadors (1903). Like Marlow, Strether is forced to reconsider his mis-

sion. Similarly, Kate Leslie in Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (1926) travels to

the serpentine and raw Mexico in search of new beginnings, and a new cul-

tural stance.

The examples above crystalise for us the essence of the ‘modern malaise’,

pointing towards a groundless-ness and a disorientation that motivates and

52 Mark Antliff, ‘Fascism, Modernism and Modernity’, The Art Bulletin, 84.1 (2002), 148-

69 (p.149).

53 Jeffrey Herf qtd. in Antliff, p.149.

54 Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.1.

55 Michael Levenson, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.xii-xiii.

56 Ibid., p.xii.

57 Ibid., p.xii.

58 Ibid., p.xii.

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172

makes imperative Pound’s performativity mentioned above. That is, moder-

nity is underpinned by a performativity of universalism in order to deal with

the disorientation resulting from the oscillation between alterity and differ-

entiation. In this performance lies the roots of an intellectual cosmopolitan-

ism, one that relies on subjective definitions which must be wrest from

communal norms that resist such action. The tug and pull so highlighted

situates the self at the centre of the modernist struggle to conceive of a

Eurocentric, uniquely Western awareness of being. Unlike the Victorian

cosmopolitan outlook, which sought the Other in order to configure itself,

the modernist project concerns the formation of a discernible self from the

debris of cultural fragmentation in order to conjoin with the Other. How-

ever, in seeking the self in order to embrace the Other, the distinctions re-

main solidified, unable, it would seem, to resolve the inability to “exchange

experiences”.

Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (1926), a novel written in his supposed

“third period”, or in his leadership phase,59 enunciates, according to some

critics, a need “to vindicate a mode of personal relations” and an attempt at

“point[ing] a way to salvation”.60 Others suggest the novel reiterates Law-

rence’s resistance to a “mother-centered” society and a belief, already pro-

posed in his Fantasia of the Unconscious, in the “brilliant male-spark”,61 and the

restoration of the father figure to his rightful place at the top, although Jad

Smith reads the novel as a “much-noted moment of vacillation in his politi-

cal thought”.62 To this effect, Kimberley Van Hoosier-Carey, moves away

from the leadership theme, and suggests that the novel seeks to represent

female experience in new forms.63 Donna Przybylowicz argues that Law-

rence criticises the destruction of humanity’s inner life as a consequence of

its engagement with a commercialised and technological world,64 whereas

59 Judith Ruderman, ‘Rekindling the “Father-Spark”: Lawrence’s Ideal of Leadership in

The Lost Girl and The Plumed Serpent’, in The Critical Response to D.H. Lawrence, ed. by

Jan Pilditch (London: Greenwood Press, 2001), pp.125-39 (p.125).

60 H.M. Daleski, The Forked Flame: a study of D.H. Lawrence (London: Faber and Faber,

1965), p.213.

61 D.H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious/Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (London:

Penguin, 1977), p.30.

62 Jad Smith, ‘Völkisch Organism and the Use of Primitivism in Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent’, D.H. Lawrence Review, 3.3 (2002), 7-24 (p.7).

63 Kimberley Van Hoosier-Carey, ‘Struggling with the Master: The position of Kate and

the Reader in Lawrence’s “Quetzalcoatl” and The Plumed Serpent’, in The Critical Re-sponse to D.H. Lawrence, ed. by Jan Pilditch (London: Greenwood Press, 2001), pp.

153-65.

64 Donna Przybylowicz, ‘D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent: The Dialectic of Ideology

and Utopia’, boundary 2, 13.2/3 (1985), 289-318 (p.295).


173

Neilson argues that the text attempts to test the limits of “colonial inti-

macy”.65

While all these approaches to The Plumed Serpent identify quite correctly

the embedded preoccupations in Lawrence’s writing, none of them have

highlighted the fundamental implications of the novel that seem to an-

nounce themselves through these other preoccupations already summarised

above, save for Neilson. The Plumed Serpent establishes the initial problematic

as a confrontation between “organic connection and mechanical fragmenta-

tion”.66 Yet, the organic, in this instance, is not only the vitalist essence of a

Lawrentian being, it is also the earthy, mythic concupiscence for a world of

the Other, a realm of raw emotion and sensuality, represented by the Mexi-

can Gods. Kate Leslie, for all purposes a literary avatar for Lawrence him-

self, bemoans the state of the world filled with “ugliness, the cynicism, the

emptiness”.67 A woman detached from the world she belongs to, an almost

Woolfian disinterestedness enunciated in her very presence, Leslie wishes

“for the unknown gods to put the magic back into her life, and to save her

from the dry rot of the world’s sterility”.68 The world of “widdershins” which

move in the opposite direction of the natural course of life on earth is anath-

ema to her, wishing instead to “believe in some human contact”.69

Leslie’s revulsion for “disintegration and anti-life”70 is made palpable at

the opening of the narrative, where the Spanish bull fight, with all its animal-

ism, repels her to the extent that she must leave the arena, while her two

companions, Villiers and Owen, remain to enjoy the spectacle. Once free of

the butchery, we are told “she was glad to get to her corner in the tea-house,

to feel herself in the cosmopolitan world once more, to drink her tea and eat straw-

berry shortcake and try to forget”.71 Yet, this cosmopolitanism, manifest in the

strawberry shortcake and the tea, is resonant with an Othering that allows

for no exchange, a turning away, a disinterestedness that recalls Virginia

Woolf’s own contemplations about the placement of self in the world: “As a

woman, I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world”.72

Indifference, she claims in Three Guineas, is the best route to cosmopolitan-

65 Brett Neilson, ‘D.H. Lawrence’s “Dark Page”: Narrative Primitivism in Women in

Love and The Plumed Serpent’, Twentieth Century Literature, 43.3 (1997), 310-25 (p.316).

66 John Humma, ‘The Imagery of The Plumed Serpent: The Going-Under of Organicism’,

in The Critical Response to D.H. Lawrence, ed. by Jan Pilditch (London: Greenwood

Press, 2001), pp.140-52 (p.148).

67 D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (New York: Penguin, 1981 [1926]), p.112.

68 Ibid., p.112, emphasis added.


70 Ibid.

71 Ibid., p. 29, emphasis added.

72 Berman, p.115.

Contradictions

174

ism, the best way to resist the cultural systems that “both deprive women of

direct influence and contribute to the national habit of war mongering”.73

Woolf does not imply political lethargy. “From this indifference certain

actions must follow”,74 she says. Indeed, this is precisely what Leslie wishes,

a political action that engenders human contact.

The human contact she seeks, she receives aplenty. The Mexican woman

who runs her house, Juana, is not by any means Kate’s equal. She, Kate

thinks, had a “bottom-dog insolence about her”.75 She was “dark-faced and

centreless”.76 In fact, according to Kate, the natives “have no centre, no real

I”.77 Unappealing though this is for her, she harbours a fascination for them

– “they had blood in their veins: they were columns of dark blood. Whereas

the other bloodless, acidulous couple from the Mid-West, with their nasty

whiteness…!”78 Then further on, we hear this:

Superficially, Mexico might be all right. …Until you were alone with it. And then

the undertone was like the low, angry, snarling, purring of some jaguar spotted

with night. There was a ponderous, down-pressing weight upon the spirit: the

great folds of the dragon of Aztecs, the dragon of the Toltecs winding around

one and weighing down the soul.79

Kate Leslie embraces, then retreats from the world, a movement away and

towards and away, an interminable vacillation. More importantly, however,

she wishes to be free of this tug and pull, of this “automatism”, a somnam-

bulistic80 temperament that renders all “half-made.” “Men and women had

incomplete selves, made up of bits assembled together loosely and some-

what haphazard. Man was not created ready-made”.81 The incompleteness is

symptomatic of the mechanical fragmentation made palpable when Kate

Leslie encounters a world so irrevocably different to her own. Mexico is as

revolting as the world from which she is ‘exiled’. In effect, she is in exile

from her own self, though she constantly reverts to the old culture of the

empire:

So, she was able to put Juana and the girls away from her, and isolate herself from

them. Once they were put away, their malevolence subsided and they remem-

73 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, 1938), p.109.

74 Berman, p.115.

75 Lawrence, Serpent, p.119.

76 Ibid., p.120.

77 Ibid., p.46, original emphasis

78 Ibid., p.53, original omission.

79 Ibid., p.55, original omission.

80 Ibid., p.114.

81 Ibid., p.115.


175

bered what Kate wanted. While she stayed amiable, they forgot. They forgot to

sweep the patio, they forgot to keep themselves clean. Only when they were

shoved back, into isolation, did they remember again.82

In her Woolfian indifference to the borders imposed by nationalism and

Empire, she seeks what is not there. However, the ‘that-which-is-not-there’

where she now sits, isolated through the very indifference towards defini-

tion, is a site from which she now resurrects these same definitions. Is this

not the battle between centre and periphery, between empire and colony? Is

this not the oscillation between alterity and mimesis? Fundamentally, how-

ever, Kate Leslie’s cosmopolitanism, her worldliness is performed, through

her embrace of the Mexican rawness, through the admission of Juana and

her family into her circle. However, this performativity is never complete, or

whole – she pushes them away, to be isolated within herself, or else, to be

immersed in a surge where she becomes pure being, amongst other pure

beings. Still, she needs to achieve contact with the blood columns, a human-

ness, a sense of completion, a re-definition of self.

This re-definition must come in the form of all that is beyond the me-

chanical, and organic, mythic force. Don Ramon’s cult of the Quetzalcoatl

offers her “that which we must get from beyond”:

All that of me which is assembled from the mighty cosmos can meet and touch

all that is assembled in the beloved. But this is never the quick. [...] If we would

meet in the quick, we must give up the assembled self, the daily I, and putting off

ourselves one after the other, meet unconscious in the Morning Star. [...] But

without transfiguration we shall never get there.83

For Lawrence, the self has to be re-configured, born again from the ashes of

the rising Quetzalcoatl. This “quick” is the wrench that tears asunder the

half-made being, the mechanical automatism via which this being is made.

Leslie attains the first glimpse of this standing at the brink of a Quetzalcoatl

marriage to Cipriano, Don Ramon’s lieutenant in the fight to reclaim the

Mexican soul from institutionalised, and therefore dry-rotted, Catholicism:

The common threads that bound her to humanity seemed to have snapped. The

little human things didn’t interest her any more. Her eyes seemed to have gone

dark, and blind to individuals. [...] Only at the very centre of her sometimes a lit-

tle flame rose, and she knew that what she wanted was for her soul to live. The

life of days and facts and happenings was dead on her, and she was like a corpse.

But away inside her a little light was burning, the light of her innermost soul.

And once it was lighted the world went hollow and dead, all the world-activities

82 Lawrence, Serpent, p.159, emphasis added.

83 Ibid., p.265-66.

Contradictions

176

were empty weariness to her. Her soul! Her frail innermost soul! She wanted to

live its life, not her own life.84

Kate Leslie cannot achieve the world-embrace, the embrace that establishes

a confluence of selfhood, in effect, an absolute Hegelian consciousness of

the Absolute, without first divesting herself of her manufactured self, her

mechanical notion of her self. Once divested, she begins to understand “the

shadowy world where men were visionless, and winds of fury rose up from

the earth, [...] [where the] living male power [was] undefined and uncon-

fined.”85 Kate must marry Cipriano, marry him submissively, give herself to

this “phallic mystery”86 and it is here in this “prone submission [...] [b]eneath

an over-arching absolute”87 that she must find true life.

Don Ramon’s cult of the Quetzalcoatl is the cult of the Essence, a cult

of the Becoming-God where, unconscious, one joins in with other uncon-

scious pure beings to form a Community of pure beings, a pure, cosmopoli-

tan gathering. Yet, there is a contradiction here. The self, in order to be

conjoined with other selves in one Absolute, must transfigure itself to the

point of unconsciousness. For Kate, this means submission, this means

relinquishing her soul, which she inevitably resists:

Yet, she could not be purely this, this thing of sheer reciprocity. Surely, though

her woman’s nature was reciprocal to his male, surely it was more than that!

Surely he and she were not two potent and reciprocal currents between which

the Morning Star flashed like a spark out of nowhere. Surely this was not it?

Surely she had one tiny Morning Star inside her, which was herself, her own very

soul and star-self!88

Kate Leslie epitomises the modernist retreat or withdrawal into its own

undefined self, away from the promise of a conglomeration of souls, away

from the world-embrace, as intended by Don Ramon’s Quetzalcoatl move-

ment. Her capitulation notwithstanding, her final plaintive cry of the novel

seals for us the despair of the entrapped modernist self: “‘You won’t let me

go!’ she said to him”.89 The Plumed Serpent, in keeping with Lawrence’s pro-

ject of destabilising “the old stable ego”90 intensifies the individual’s desire

for a self fast disintegrating, an inward looking desire that finds the multi-

84 Lawrence, Serpent, p.319-20, original emphasis.

85 Ibid., p.324.

86 Ibid., p.324.

87 Ibid., p.325.

88 Ibid., p.403.

89 Ibid., p.462.

90 Letters, ed. by James T. Boulton, and others (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979), I,

p.526.


177

tude “abhorrent because it is multitudinous, because it is everywhere, cover-

ing the world, making human depravity conspicuous and suppressing extra-

human value”.91

While she finds Don Ramon’s cult and the native Indian intoxicating at

the most primal and essential level, while she sees the sublime beauty in a

mystical worldliness symbolised by the theosophical framework of the

Quetzalcoatl men, and while she rejects the “mechanical automatism” of

Western society as debilitating and life-negating, she, like Lawrence himself,

defends ‘real individuality’, or as Kate terms it, “the little star of her own

single self”92 over everything else. This need for an “autonomous subjectiv-

ity,” therefore, underpins the modernist conception of self, a subjectivity

that is increasingly retreating into a kind of technological miasma. The pur-

suit of the disappearing I leaves no room for a committed engagement with

the Other.

How It Is: The Submerged I and the Proliferation of Authorial An-

ti-Representations

This retreating away from the Other, it seems, has come at a price. The

orgiastic explosions of various “models of representation”,93 where the self

becomes liberated from the shackles of a collective subjectivity into hun-

dreds and thousands of autonomous subjectivities, has consequently led to a

kind of anti-representation of self, the multiple avenues of autonomy clash-

ing and blending into each other. The I, the self as Author disappears into a

cacophony of self-representations, leaving a vacuum. Such a state of affairs

recalls for us Michel Foucault’s challenge to a new trans-bordered modernity

in his essay “What is An Author?”:

It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has

disappeared. For the same reason, it is not enough to keep repeating that God

and man have died a common death. Instead, we must locate the space left emp-

ty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches,

and watch for the openings this disappearance uncovers.94

91 Levenson, p.146.

92 Lawrence, Serpent, p.403.

93 Jean Baudrillard, Transparency of Evil, trans. by James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993),

p.2.

94 Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. by James D. Faubion (Lon-

don: Penguin, 2000), p.209.

Contradictions

178

This Foucauldian gauntlet brings into sheer relief the rapidly increasing

visibility of presences, and the equally rapid fading borders of meaning,

filling the space with a plethora of voices and conceptions of self, a

marketplace of contesting and conferencing paradigms. Yet, this also heralds

a dissolution, one that calls forth a post-nihilistic stance. That is, while it is

true that a global cosmopolitanising context breaks down categories so that

the self and other are no longer distinguishable, this indistinction is not

merely an eradication or an erasure, but a form of becoming, a potentiality

that demands a re-ordering of our epistemological systems, a herculean

project that characterises the oeuvre of Samuel Beckett.

Beckett defies categorisation both in terms of his narrative style as well as

his epistemological roots. His work transcends any attempts to effect a

logical understanding and instead deals with what J. M. Coetzee argues is the

exploration of the fact that we are “a body plus a mind”.95 Adopting an

ambivalent stance, Beckett’s work brings to the fore this problematic of

humanity’s dualism, expressed by Coetzee as follows:

But what is it exactly that is absurd: the fact that we are two different kinds of

entity, body and mind, linked together; or the belief that we are two different kinds

of entity linked together? What is it that gives rise to Beckett’s laughter and

Beckett’s tears, which are sometimes hard to tell apart: the human condition, or

the philosophical dualism as an account of the human condition?96

Coetzee’s account of Beckett’s philosophical stance underscores clearly the

dissolution of categories and limits, focusing instead on the metaphysics of

knowing. In other words, how do we know? Through what faculty do we

comprehend the world, and how reliable is this knowledge? The tragic

absurdity that undercuts all of Beckett’s work lies in this last point. How It Is

(1961), for instance, reiterates this fatality when the unnamed narrator states

“my life last state last version ill-said ill-heard ill-recaptured ill-murmured in

the mud”,97 pushing us towards a precipice of inconsequentialities and

insignificances.

Critics such as Raymond Federman98 have argued that Beckett’s works,

and in particular How It Is, enunciate the deterioration of Western man, of

form, and of language, resulting in a representation of meaninglessness and

95 J M Coetzee, ‘Eight ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett’, in Borderless Beckett, ed. by

Minako Okamuro, and others (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp.19-31 (p.19), emphasis

added.


97 Samuel Beckett, How It Is (London: John Calder, 1996 [1961]), p.7.

98 Raymond Federman, ‘How It Is With Beckett’s Fiction’, The French Review, 38.4

(1965), 459-68 (p.467).

Niven Kumar and Lucyna Swiatek 179

chaos, reflecting the critical support for the text as a metaphor for human

suffering, cruelty and loneliness. Gary Adelman argues this “difficult and

puzzling text”99 has elicited a multiplicity of responses from commentators,

including readings through the lens of philosophy, an illustration of Beck-

ett’s own brand of aesthetics, and the creation through torture of a social

human being. All underscore the futility of the compulsion to impose unity

and meaning on human experience, and by consequence the futility ascrib-

ing unity and meaning to that which we call the self. By default these writers

inadvertently point towards an underlying motif in Beckett’s work of a re-

moval of dysfunctional structures of definition of the self. The circularity of

Beckettian narratives attempts to establish a structure-less structure, a new

cosmopolitan view of the trans-bordered self as opposed to a self bordered.

How It Is was written almost a decade after Beckett’s last major prose

work, Texts for Nothing. The grammatical experimentation of Texts for Nothing

is furthered in How It Is, the syntactical subversions echoed in the structural

interrogation, abolishing, as Porter Abbott suggests, the traditional epic

thematic of “how it is and how it began” to establish “an ontology of new

beginnings”.100 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit argue that language is incor-

porated by humankind as a command: “speak, and this is all it says to us, it

originally sends no other message”.101 Language itself is a form of torture,

the “precondition for being humanized”.102 Bersani and Dutoit argue that

when language is posited, there is an injunction to speak, and How It Is sepa-

rates the process into two stages – the imitation of sounds and the following

self-identification. Language, for Beckett, is a system of signifiers, a Scho-

penhauerian veil that needs to be removed in order to access another realm

of being / non-being: “[M]ore and more my own language appears to me

like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or Nothing-

ness) behind it”.103 The tormentor in How It Is is mute, language tortures the

human body into “repeating itself as mind, as a conscious self”.104 If

language is the vehicle which permits Being, a conscious Being in the uni-

99 Gary Adelman, ‘Torturer and Servant: Samuel Beckett’s How It Is’, Journal of Modern Literature, 25.1 (2001), p.82.

100 H. Porter Abbott, ‘Texts for Nothing and How It Is’, in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, ed. by John Pilling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp.106-23

(p.113).

101 Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, ‘Beckett’s Sociability’, Raritan: A Quarterly Review 12.1

(1992), 1-2 (p.1).

102 Bersani and Dutoit, p.1.

103 Samuel Beckett, ‘German Letter’, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. by Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder, 1983), pp.51-54 (p.59).

104 Bersani and Dutoit, p.1.

Contradictions

180

verse, then how does one create a semiotic system which overthrows all

traditional language constructs, yet still allows access to consciousness? How

It Is embarks on the description of a communication system, which has

divested itself of traditional forms and structures. The events taking place

and the mode of the delivery are carefully put together to suggest a violent

overthrowing, a diabolical rendering of a language system that tears and

rents, symbolically borne out in the actions of the tormentor- victim rela-

tionship: “first lesson same theme nails in armpit cried thump on skull /

silence end of second lesson all that beyond my strength.”105 Beckett’s narra-

tor clearly states the intention to erase language and tradition, ending in

“good moments”:

all I hear leave out more leave out all hear no more lie there in / my arms the an-

cient without end me we’re talking of me / without end that buries all mankind

to the last cunt they’d be / good moments in the dark the mud hearing nothing

saying / nothing capable of nothing nothing106

The desire for the extinction of long-held conventional ways of formulating

a definition of the nature of Being and the self is encapsulated in the longing

for the extinction of language, hearing nothing, saying nothing, without even

the capability for action. The absence of language is also the replacement of

language, a replacement of silence, darkness and stasis, which in turn con-

tributes to a quiet sense of fulfillment, a “good moment in the dark”,107

amounting, in effect, to a substitution of a mode of expressing self-hood.

The text can be read as an attempt to exhaust the sovereign language; in

Beckett’s terms, an “ontospeleogical”108 quest – the excavation beneath the

surface of language to locate the nature of being itself, but not in its tradi-

tional conception. Rather, as Steven Connor argues, Beckett attempts to

“find a way to write of and from the proximal heart of being”.109 This prox-

imity reveals a paradoxical relationship between language and self: how does

one express or say something about that which resists expression, since it

has no language? Further, how is it possible to speak of that which defies

unity?

105 Beckett, How It Is, p.69.

106 Ibid., p.68.

107 Ibid., p.69.

108 Beckett qtd. in P.J Murphy, Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p.63.

109 Steven Connor, ‘Beckett and Sartre’ in Beckett and Phenomenology, ed. by Ulrika Maude

and Matthew Feldman (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing

Group, 2009), pp.56-76 (p.74).


181

Beckett, then, seems to be reflecting, through form, through narrative

structure, through absurd concatenations, the fragmented linkings we estab-

lish with the world, and hence with this elusive self. While Eliot and Law-

rence seem to insist, in fundamental agreement, of a discernible core within

the individual and national psyche, a core of self, it becomes, in the “puz-

zling” structures of Beckett’s How It Is, a shining chimera which is inex-

pressible. Yet, despite the fact that “there is nothing to express, nothing with

which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no

desire to express”, there is also “the obligation to express:”110 “here then part

one how it was before Pim we follow I quote the natural order more or less

my life last state last version what remains bits and scraps I hear it my life

natural order more or less”.111

The fragmentation of the narrative, not only stamps the desperate

obligation to reach the outside of language, a Foucauldian aesthetic of

language where Literature is placed under pressure, it further begs the

question of voice. Who or what now speaks? The fragmented voice, with its

ever changing locus, Maurice Blanchot’s neuter that “neither reveals nor

conceals”,112 becomes a virulent ‘presence’. It is part of a palimpsest of

voices belonging to a vague indecipherable world. Gone is the centrality of

meaning; there is only the mark of the absence of a presence, a lack at the

origin that engenders the origin, a sort of bubbling, an agitation, a

movement of miniscule proportions. In his bleak, mud-ridden gloom of

beings, there is nothing more than a constant movement, not a ‘movement

to…’ but a ‘movement of…’, there is no goal to be reached that can be

reached, but an idea of a destination that may or may not be there. Yet

movement is necessary, a purgatorial limbo that entices and persuades all

who trespass this space to enter, to linger, only to find comfort in one’s own

deconstructedness.

How It Is eliminates all conventional narrative apparatus, leaving only a

scaffolding of plot structure and temporality,113 “the voice time the voice it

is not mine the silence time the silence”.114 The concept of a journey pro-

vokes anticipations of beginning and origins, and How It Is, like Molloy, para-

doxically narrates a journey with no end or beginning:

110 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit 1949 (London: John

Calder, 1999), p.103, emphasis added.


112 Maurice Blanchot, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader (Barrytown: Station Hill Press,

1999), p.468.

113 Mark Pedretti, ‘The Space of a Moment’, Journal Of Beckett Studies, 10.1 (2000), 69-88

(p.75).


Contradictions

182

with my sack my / tins in the dark the mud crawl in an amble towards Pim [...]

part one before Pim the journey it can’t last it lasts I’m calm / calmer than you

think you’re calm and you’re not in the lowest / depths and you’re on edge I say

it as I hear it and that death / death if it ever comes that’s all it dies.115

The journey is impossible, ‘it can’t last it lasts’. How It Is is an interminable

odyssey that defies logic, signposts of reality are identified on the journey,

the narrated / narrator sees a crocus in a pot, the sun creeps up the wall, a

yellow flower with a string but these are merely “rags of life in the light”,116

casting the reader back to the life before this one. There is room for his-

toricity, a vague framework of the ‘life before this one’, but also the implica-

tion of a previous life and one before that. This echoes the overarching

motif of Nietzsche’s principle of eternal recurrence:

all things recur eternally, and we ourselves too;, and that we have already existed

an eternal number of times, and all things with us [...] there is a great year of be-

coming, a monster of a great year, which must, like an hourglass, turn over again

and again so that it may run down and run out again; and all these years are like

in what is greatest as in what is smallest; and we ourselves are alike in every great

year, in what is greatest as in what is smallest.117

This allegory of unification and becoming logically unravels itself – in this

portrayal of endless revolutions without meaning or goals is the pledge to

discover a superhuman act of will that consummates the overcoming of

nihilism, thus creating a goal, or destination. How It Is emphasizes this para-

dox, an eternal recurring formula that the characters adhere to, within the

meaninglessness.

Beckett’s work heralds a new form of meaning structure, one that is dia-

metrically opposed to a structure based on a discernible, defined self, upon

which Eliot and Lawrence rely, a new cosmopolitanism that constructs

meaning upon dissolution, upon a trans-bordered alterity whose locus is

constantly changing. In other words, Beckett’s work, and How it is in par-

ticular, already posits in its dissolution of a defined I an inherent duality that

cancels each pole and embraces a new ontological structure.

The duality is demonstrated in the narrator / narrated of How It Is, a term

used in a letter by Beckett in reference to How It Is,118 who speaks of itself

and others, Pim and Bom, yet eventually states that there is no other, that

Pim / Bom is itself: “no never any Pim no nor any Bom no never anyone


116 Ibid., p.23.

117 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York:

The Modern Library, 1995 [1883-1885]), p.220.

118 Hugh Kenner, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (New York: Farrar, 1973), p.94.


183

only me yes”.119 One discovers a speaker who splits between a conscious-

ness that strives and reaches for the emulation of God, eternal and spiritual,

of him who God knows who could blame him must sometimes / wonder if to

these perpetual revictuallings narrations and / auditions he might not put an end

without ceasing to maintain / us in some kind of being without end and some

kind of justice / without flaw who could blame him”,120

and one that recognizes and despairs its connection to the material

world:

“and thus linked bodily together each one of us is at the / same time Bom and

Pim tormentor and tormented pedant and / dunce wooer and wooed speech-

less and reafflicted with speech / in the dark the mud nothing to emend

there”.121

This “bodily” linking belies the collapse of the walls of a hyper-modern

capitalist cosmopolitanism. The text screams out its frustration at the per-

ception of a lack of progression, a result of the alienated soul torn, divided

and doubled upon itself, giving an impression of stasis: “and this business of

a procession no answer this business of a / procession yes never any proces-

sion no nor any journey no / never any [...]”.122 Yet, paradoxically, the

speaker recognizes the split nature of its structure. He facilitates the obser-

vation of the notion of freedom of thought and the act itself. The act is the

immediate witness of pure thought, of consciousness, a consciousness that

is inherently and essentially absolute.

The narrator / narrated portrays the impossibility of searching for indis-

putable truths, a belief that there are things that exist, and in the process

reflects a constant flux of becoming. Beckett’s assertion that one can never

define a text also mirrors the constant flux of becoming that a text under-

goes – if definition is pinned down, the text loses potential for process. The

speaker is acutely aware of himself as a historically located subject, crawling

through a phenomenal world, aware of vast tracts of time seemingly un-

touched by movements of temporality. It is stressed in part two that Pim

does not exist. P.J. Murphy argues that “Pim is the creative aspect of the self

that can only be brought to life by the suffering that leads to communica-

tion”.123 The ritualistic torture seems mechanical, and there is an inter-


120 Ibid., p.152.

121 Ibid., p.153.

122 Ibid., p.159.

123 P.J. Murphy, Reconstructing Beckett, p.66.

Contradictions

184

changeability of self: “I let him know that I too Pim my name Pim”.124 Not

until one is tortured does one achieve possession of a name, and conse-

quently, a voice. The dialectical nexus of pain and relief from pain is a mark-

er of time, it calls into being the consciousness of our mortality, the almost

Nietzschean impulse to embrace both pain and suffering, to combine the

Apollonian and Dionysian elements of the human psyche in order to move

forward.125 This moving forward is not ‘progress’, but an overcoming borne

out of becoming something other than that.

Towards a New Episteme: Borderless Selves in Trans-Bordered

Spaces

The trajectory of cosmospolitan subjectivity charted above, focusing on

three major works by George Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and Samuel Beckett,

clearly indicates a dynamic movement. Yet, it is not a movement forward, as

is stipulated in the discursive practices of a new modernist conception of the

west and its position as centre. Eliot epitomises the paradox of desire and

definition. The Victorian struggle to claw itself out of the miasma of a new

world epistemology only leads to a vacillation between two poles. It is not

until the fin de siècle that the West begins to see some light paving a possible

path out of this miasma.

Yet, even here, in an iconoclastic reading of the world and the self, the

struggle is still present, indeed, more pronounced. For, in the retreating away

or the exile from a burgeoning marketplace, a celebratory metaphor for the

still untouched integument of the Enlightenment ideal, in order to reconfig-

ure traditional conceptions of self, there appears a deep distrust of the other,

a cosmopolitan circumspection, a conditional hospitality very much in keeping

with Enlightenment procedures, but now coloured in some way under the

auspices of the great Trading Companies of Imperialist ilk.

This exile leads nowhere. It is mud-riddled and circular, and characterised

by the indistinguishability of truths. Beckett’s iconoclasm is total, for it calls

for a post-Nietzschean re-evaluation, and announces the untenability of a

pure conception of self. The cosmopolitanist beliefs of the modern era, its

mondialisation, as Derrida terms it,126 therefore, is merely a performative con-

struction of unity, since it is marked by a deep and irrevocable series of fault

lines that are constantly erupting.


125 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. by Ronald Speirs (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1872]), p.15.

126 Borradori, p.124.


185

The West’s rhetoric of international human rights falls short of its in-

tended scope, a problem already posited in 1967 by Hannah Arendt whom

Derrida quotes:

the attempts to obtain new declarations of human rights from international or-

ganisations [...] transcends the present sphere of international law which still op-

erates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states;

[...] a dilemma [which] would by no means be eliminated by the establishment of

a ‘world government’.127

What Arendt is implying is the experience of How It Is: the virulent desire of

self-definition and categories of meaning precludes all notions of a border-

less or trans-bordered Western self. We are mired in this virulence, which

ironically offers us no satisfaction. Faced with the ever-changing borders of

the episteme, Beckett seems to suggest, along with Derrida and Arendt, that

the search for self, as with the search for a common humanity amongst

individuals and nations and states, that is, a collective sovereignty can and must

only come with a reconfiguring of the mechanisms of that very search.

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Contradictions of Human Agency From Victorian Cosmopolitanism to Postmodern Eclecticism

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