Craig A. Gordon Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community in Early 20th Century Britain ...

Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community in Early 20th

Century Britain

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Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community in Early 20th

Century Britain

Craig A. Gordon


LITERARY MODERNISM, BIOSCIENCE, AND COMMUNITY IN EARLY 20TH

CENTURY BRITAIN

© Craig A. Gordon, 2007.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any mannerwhatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embod-ied in critical articles or reviews.

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

List of Abbreviations ix

Introduction 1

Part 1 Germ Cultures: D. H. Lawrence and the Vital Question of the Tubercular Body

1 Where “Life Joins Hands with Death”:Lawrence, the Sanatorium, and the BareLife of the Tubercular Body 23

2 Unraveling Lawrence’s Vital Web of Dynamic Consciousness: Incorporating the Work of Community or Assembling a Multitude? 81

Part 2 Atoms Upon the Mind: Virginia Woolf and the Nervous Body at the Limit of Community

3 Organizing the Nervous Body, Regulating the Self: The Psychological Production of National Community in Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves 129

4 Breaking Habits, Affecting the Neuropsychological Body: Toward the “Unsubstantial Territory” of Disorganized Community 161

Appendix 207

Notes 211

Works Cited 223

Index 231


Acknowledgments

My most sincere gratitude is due to both Kim Michasiw and Thomas Loebel,whose consistently acute commentary and substantial patience fundamentallyshaped this work at an early stage. The project has also benefited enormouslyfrom the insights of Lauren Gillingham, Jennifer Henderson, and JulieMurray, who have offered me the benefit of both general dialogue and veryspecific and detailed readings of my work. It equally has been a privilege, anda source of inspiration, that they have so generously shared their work withme and have provided sustaining friendship when I needed it most.

I also want to thank Keith Denny, Chris Douglas, Rob Hemmings, LoriKiefer, Phil Kiff, Peter Sinnema, Lisa Sloniowski, and Janet Wesselius for theirintellectual comradeship and friendship. They each deserve more specificthanks than I am able to render here, and I can only hope that they will allowme to attend to that debt in other ways and at other times. In having sharedwith me their humor, intelligence, and energy, not to mention countless mealsand drinks, they have made life much more than merely livable and havedemonstrated to me, in innumerable ways, the value of the communities inwhich I am fortunate to participate. Most of all, I would like to thank AlisonLee. Thank you for your insight, intelligence, support, and patience. Thankyou for talking and listening. And thank you for making life fun.

Finally, it would be impossible to adequately acknowledge the debt I oweto my parents, Elaine and Murray. Through their interest, curiosity, encour-agement, sympathy, friendship, confidence, and periodic anxiety, they haveallowed me to trust my abilities, affirmed my ambitions, and reminded meof the much broader perspective within which those ambitions are most pro-ductively contemplated. Without their love and unflinching support, thisbook would have been utterly impossible.

My initial preparations and the early writing of this manuscript were sup-ported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities ResearchCouncil of Canada, and the final stages of the work were supported by agrant from the College of Arts at the University of Guelph. My work also


owes a debt to the expertise and assistance of the staff at the British Library,and the Wellcome Library, London, England. Parts of Chapters 3 and 4 werepreviously published in “Breaking Habits, Building Communities: VirginiaWoolf and the Neuroscientific Body,” which appeared in issue 7, volume 1,of Modernism/Modernity in 2000. They are reprinted here with the permis-sion of Johns Hopkins University Press. The cover image appears courtesy ofthe U.S. National Library of Medicine.

viii • Acknowledgments


List of Abbreviations

CE Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, 4 vols., ed. Leonard Woolf(London: Hogarth, 1966–67).

F D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious andFantasia of the Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2004).

MD Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1992).

MM Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter(New York: The Modern Library, 1955).

PS D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (Quetzalcoatl), ed. L. D.Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

PT [1910] David C. Muthu, Pulmonary Tuberculosis and SanatoriumTreatment: A Record of Ten Years’ Observation and Work inOpen-Air Sanatoria (London: Baillière, 1910).

PT [1922] David C. Muthu, Pulmonary Tuberculosis: Its Etiology andTreatment: A Record of Twenty-two Years’ Observation and Workin Open-Air Sanatoria (London: Ballière, 1922).

RDP D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine andOther Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988).

S Donald O. Stewart, Sanatorium: A Novel (London: Chatto andWindus, 1930).

W Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1992).


Introduction

Writing in 1922, D. H. Lawrence rails that “science is wretched inits treatment of the human body as a sort of complex mechanismmade up of numerous little machines working automatically in a

rather unsatisfactory relation to one another” (F, 95). “Our science,” heinsists, “is a science of the dead world. Even biology never considers life, butonly mechanistic functioning and apparatus of life” (F, 62). Eight years later,Virginia Woolf claims that “with a few exceptions . . . literature does its bestto maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plainglass through which the soul looks straight and clear” (CE, 4:193). Despitethis literary occlusion of the somatic, she argues, “All day, all night the bodyintervenes. . . . The creature within . . . cannot separate off from the bodylike the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must gothrough the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfortand discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness” (193). As a con-sequence, she calls not only for “a new language . . . more primitive, moresensual, more obscene,” but also for “a new hierarchy of the passions.” Love,she demands, “must be deposed in favor of a temperature of 104; jealousygive place to the pangs of sciatica; sleeplessness play the part of the villain,and the hero become a white liquid with a sweet taste—that mighty Princewith the moths’ eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names is Chloral”(194–95). Sharing an interest in the human body and its relation to biomed-ical science, Lawrence and Woolf approach the questions posed by that rela-tionship from opposite directions. Whereas Lawrence identifies a deficiencyin the procedures of bioscience, which he seeks to redress through his liter-ary elaboration of what he calls “subjective science” (F, 62), Woolf indicatesa lack in literary discourse, which she attempts to supplement, in part, withrecourse to the language of bioscience.

This interest in questions of embodiment as they are articulated in andbetween literary and bioscientific cultures shares pride of place in Lawrence’sand Woolf ’s late work with their persistent interrogation of problems of


community. For Lawrence, the complex theory of affective embodiment heelaborates most fully in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) is intertwined with,and indeed forms the foundation for, his thinking and writing about commu-nity. This conjunction is, moreover, by no means limited to the Fantasia,widely considered a relatively minor piece, even amidst the large, if generallyunderconsidered, body of Lawrence’s nonfiction prose. The relationshipbetween bodies and different forms of community is an almost obsessive con-cern in Lawrence’s essays from at least 1920 on, forming a significant basis ofeverything from his Study of Thomas Hardy, “Reflections on the Death of aPorcupine,” and Studies in Classic American Literature to more obviously top-ical pieces such as his Review of Trigant Burrows’s “The Social Basis ofConsciousness,” “Individual Consciousness vs. the Social Consciousness,”“Education of the People,” and “Democracy.” It is equally important to hisfictional corpus. The embodiment of community is a major problematic ani-mating Women in Love and becomes an almost single-minded object ofinquiry in the late novels such as The Plumed Serpent, Aaron’s Rod, andKangaroo. If embodiment is a fairly self-evident thematic focus in a corpus ofwriting so consistently engaged with problems of subjectivity, sexuality, andaffective relations more broadly conceived, the relevance of community to aconsideration of Lawrence’s work may be slightly less obvious—in partbecause of the notorious imprecision of that word. I will return shortly to thetheoretical implications of different concepts of community, but for themoment suffice it to say that in Lawrence’s case that imprecision is also partof its power, insofar as community potentially refers to a wide variety of socialformations—from intersubjective and familial relations to much larger-scalenational and geopolitical configurations. In terms of Lawrence’s thought, thisrange of relations is intimately intertwined: his constant concerns with inter-subjective dynamics or the family are inseparable from his utopian imagin-ings of Rananim or his responses to problems of national identity and theshifting formations of global politics. And all of these entangled forms ofcommunity are, for Lawrence, equally inseparable from his thinking aboutembodiment. His approach to problems of incorporation in terms of whatJonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter refer to as “the finer grained processesof embodiment—those strategies through which human life combines with,and assimilates, the minute, shifting, often invisible patterns and rhythms ofthe concrete historical milieus within which it unfolds” (14)—cannot bedivorced from his exploration of the other register on which Crary andKwinter ask us to understand the processes of incorporation: “the integrationof human life forces into . . . larger-than-human systems of social and tech-nical organization” (14).

2 • Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community


Though Woolf ’s literary preoccupations and political commitmentsarguably take very different forms from Lawrence’s, this double logic ofincorporation also animates her work. The problems of embodiment areapparent everywhere in her writing: from the materialist feminism of A Roomof One’s Own and Three Guineas, to Orlando’s shifting morphology, to heranalysis of the consequences of medical scientific language and institutionsin Mrs. Dalloway or “On Being Ill.” For Woolf, it is an area of concern toopervasive to necessitate (or easily accommodate) a brief summary. Woolf ’ssimultaneous, and related, interest in questions of community are equallymanifest: from the familial permutations of To the Lighthouse, to thepost–Word War I critique of patriotic national identity offered by Mrs.Dalloway, to her participation in and writing about the Women’sCooperative Guild, to the only slightly pre–World War II response to thedemise of customary forms of English community in Between the Acts (nam-ing only a few of the most obvious examples). Throughout her career, Woolfintensely focuses not only on the critique of extant communal forms, butalso on the call to renovate or reimagine the demands of community—whatshe often refers to as the difficult necessity of “coming together.”

To return, then, to the two quotations with which I began, they gestureto a cultural field within which the human body lies at the crux of intersect-ing literary and bioscientific discourses, and as such frame the broadest con-tours of this study. I want, in other words, to examine the interrelation ofliterary and bioscientific cultures in early twentieth-century Britain as animportant way of understanding how the comprehension, representation,and manipulation of the human body becomes crucial to the imagination,formation, and maintenance of different forms of community. If the periodbetween 1900 and 1940 is, as Tim Armstrong has suggested, one withinwhich “the body is re-energized, re-formed, subject to new modes of produc-tion, representation, and commodification” (2), it is also one in which thequestion of community is subject to an equally profound and variedupheaval at both macro- and micropolitical levels. Whether one considersthe global transformations entailed in the decline and dissolution ofEuropean empires, the frenetic and widespread attempts to define, redefine,and contest various national formations and their relations to the institutionsof the state, or the more local attempts to come to terms with the new andshifting social forms produced by the demands of increasingly industrializedand commodified urban existence, the problem of understanding and artic-ulating structures of collectivity is nearly unavoidable. The questions posedby both the body and community can, thus, be understood equally as prob-lems of incorporation, in the double sense that Crary and Kwinter give that

Introduction • 3


term. A historically situated exploration of this double logic of incorporationis, more precisely, the project that I undertake in the pages to come.

Because the early twentieth century is marked by the increasing consoli-dation of the cultural prestige and epistemological authority of biomedicalscience and the vital sciences more broadly, the comprehension and represen-tation of various somatic modes is materially crucial (if not always explicitlyso) to understanding the mechanisms through which large- and small-scaleforms of community literally incorporate themselves. Medical and scientificdiscourses that take the body, and life in general, as their focus come to havean unprecedented role both in the conceptualization of human subjectivityand in the incorporation of individual subjects within a broader social fab-ric. As such, raising the question of the social body in the context of thehuman bodies that are constituted as objects of inquiry by bioscientific andmedical disciplines, situates the period’s bioscientific culture as a particularlypowerful means of approaching the individual bodies that different commu-nal projects inevitably seek to grasp as their objects.

Divided into two parts, Literary Modernism, Bioscience, and Community inEarly Twentieth-Century Britain pursues this project by articulating a web ofhigh modernist and popular literature; public health pamphlets; and med-ical, bioscientific, and psychological texts that is punctuated by four exem-plary figures. The work of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf serves tosituate different types of literary modernist production, while the tubercularbody and the nervous body thematize particular convergences of medical andbioscientific projects. More specifically, Part 1 examines the relationshipbetween Lawrence and the medical science that organizes itself around thetubercular body, while Part 2 turns to the literary example of Woolf in rela-tion to the bioscience constellated around the nervous body. In terms bothof bodies and communities, these discursive conjunctions are characterizedby varying degrees of competition and collaboration within and between thespheres of literature and bioscience. As the opening juxtaposition ofLawrence and Woolf suggests, this discursive nexus is one in which starklydivergent examples of modernist literary production—animated, nonethe-less, by a shared object of interest—condition, and are conditioned by, con-temporaneous bioscientific culture. If these examples of literary modernismare marked by significant divergences (both aesthetically and politically), therelated bioscientific discourses fail to offer a notably higher degree of una-nimity or discursive consistency. Consequently, my exploration of these twospheres of culture proceeds on two registers at once. On the one hand, I pur-sue those moments in which literature and bioscience converge and collabo-rate in the consolidation of norms and regulative regimes governing the



intelligibility of different forms of embodiment and the incorporation ofindividual bodies into (or their exclusion from) various structures of collec-tivity. On the other hand, attention to instances of dissonance both withinand between literary and bioscientific cultures makes visible the emergenceof logics of incorporation that both contest those that were historically dom-inant and provide conceptual resources whose usefulness extends beyond thehistorical moment of their articulation. More specifically, my approach inwhat follows engages simultaneously in historical analysis and theoreticalspeculation—or, rather, it seeks to theorize the embodiment of communityby analyzing and responding to the logics of incorporation that are articu-lated within a historically situated sample of discursive production. It is myhope that the historical work involved in mapping the discursive relays byway of which various forms of cultural production articulate or contest spe-cific logics of incorporation will provide resources to develop theoreticalframeworks that will both help us to understand the embodiment of com-munity at this moment early in the twentieth century, and provide tools withwhich to explore the double problem of incorporation as it continues tounfold with ever-increasing variety, force, and urgency in the latter half of thecentury and beyond.

If this study is committed to the analysis of a historically situated culturalfield, it is simultaneously oriented by examples that gesture beyond their his-torical moment and toward a still-unfolding history of the logic of incorpora-tion. Commenting on the centrality of “the very problem of ‘life’” to ourunderstanding of “twentieth-century modernity,” Crary and Kwinter observethat, to the extent that “a specifically biological modality” has become largelyunavoidable, “it is an indication of the vast transformations in techniques ofknowledge that continue to occur since the demise of the mechanical modelof explanation in the nineteenth century” (13–14). Though my analysis islimited to the period between 1900 and 1940—during which the effects ofthe “mechanical model of explanation” continued to be felt—its contours,and the choice of examples that sustain it, are partially determined by a glanc-ing recognition of this broader trajectory of transformation. More precisely,the pages that follow are conceived as a contribution to a genealogy on thebasis of which we might approach the problem of incorporation as it onlyincreases in intensity and scope. In our moment early in the twenty-first cen-tury, the technologically mediated manipulation of the very substance of lifeat ever more minutely differentiated levels, the problems of immunology andcontagious disease, the regulation of our communities by social medicine, andthe prominence and pervasiveness of what Nikolas Rose refers to as the “psy”disciplines all constitute unavoidable sets of coordinates that profoundly

Introduction • 5


shape our experience and understanding of our bodies, selves, and placeswithin various social forms. The proliferation and complication of these coor-dinates equally indicate the processes of transformation that continue to pro-duce new and different forms of bodies, selves, and communities, which weare only learning to experience, the potential and limitations of which we arejust beginning to assess. As such, various manifestations of the tubercularbody and the nervous body in the early twentieth century present importanthistorical antecedents to aspects of bioscientific culture that have becomealmost incalculably pervasive by the end of the century. If the corporeal formsthat this study explores are determined by substantially different historicalforces than those which condition our situation at the beginning the twenty-first century, they are nonetheless not separated from us by an absolute chasmof historical discontinuity. Though I am able to but gesture toward the tra-jectories of development, differentiation, complexification, and divergencethat might link the period, which is the object of this study, to our place inthe present, it remains my hope that a detailed exploration of a cultural for-mation that profoundly marks the early part of the past century will providecertain resources for attempts to approach those links and discontinuities.

Histories of Incorporation, Histories of Modernism

Let me begin, then, with the historical stakes of the study. The contours ofmy analysis, and specific choice of examples, are largely determined by thetwo types of bodies around which the study is organized. Neither “the tuber-cular body” nor “the nervous body” refer, however, to singular or neatlyspecifiable somatic manifestations. Rather, both designate contested bodilyspaces traversed by a variety of discursive regimes, the analytic potential ofwhich derives in large part from their sociocultural prominence in the firstdecades of the century. Both types of body enjoy a degree of popular visibil-ity that makes them virtually ubiquitous, and they are certainly unavoidablein functioning to localize concerns about both bodies and communities. Theextravagance of Roy Porter’s claim, for example, that until the middle of thetwentieth century tuberculosis occupied a singular place as the “greatestcatastrophe, the greatest catalyst of political perturbation in the WesternWorld” (“The Case of Consumption,” 179), gives some indication of theimpact of the tubercular body. Similarly, Michael North’s observation that by1922 “the enthusiasm for things psychological was so extreme, both in theUnited States and in Great Britain, that it might quite reasonably haveseemed a psychological symptom itself ” (66) attests to the cultural centralityof the nervous body.



More specifically, these two exemplary somatic spaces function (at leastimplicitly) to articulate the two parts of the book insofar as they are funda-mentally shaped by, and comprehended in terms of, many of the same diag-nostic categories and therapeutic procedures. Tubercular and nervous bodiesare frequently understood as bespeaking a susceptibility to the deleteriouseffects of overstimulation (whether understood in terms of moral laxity orthe demands of an increasingly frenetic modern world), and as a result thetechniques of the rest cure and the sanatorium treatment figure prominentlyin relation to both. Indeed, tubercular and nervous somatic forms are fre-quently copresent in individual bodies to the extent that nervous conditionssuch as neurasthenia and hysteria are often prominent sequelae to a tubercu-lar diagnosis. Similarly, it is telling that Joseph Breuer’s contribution to theunderstanding of hysteria—arguably the cornerstone of the period’s mostwidely influential approach to the nervous body—positions his researchthrough direct analogy to medical scientific research on tuberculosis. “Iregard hysteria,” he observes,

as a clinical picture which has been empirically discovered and is based onobservation, in just the same way as tubercular pulmonary phthisis. . . .Aetiological research has shown that the various constituent processes of pul-monary phthisis have various causes: the tubercle is due to bacillus Kochii, andthe disintegration of tissue, the formation of cavities and the septic fever aredue to other microbes. In spite of this, tubercular phthisis remains a clinicalunity and it would be wrong to break it up by attributing to it only the “specif-ically tubercular” modifications of tissue caused by Koch’s bacillus and bydetaching the other modifications from it. In the same way hysteria mustremain a clinical unity even if it turns out that its phenomena are determinedby various causes. (“Studies on Hysteria,” 261)

This diagnostic and therapeutic proximity is particularly significant insofaras it foregrounds a certain structural isomorphism of the tubercular body andthe nervous body in relation to the discursive fields they serve to organize:they both function as hinges between the narrowly somatic and the commu-nal. The space of the tubercular body is contested, on the one hand, by med-ical scientific disciplines, such as bacteriology and immunology, whichapproach individual bodies as organic machines governed by physical andchemical laws, and accessible by technologically enhanced scientific proce-dures at the level of increasingly minute constituent components. On theother hand, it is a principal site for the mobilization of the hygienic impulsesof social medicine, which are directed less at individual bodies per se, than atcertain types of bodies that provide the occasion for the exercise of programs

Introduction • 7


aimed at the formation and maintenance of particular kinds of communities.Similarly, the nervous body is traversed simultaneously by psychologicalprojects that are heavily marked by neurological and neurophysiologicalresearch—approaching individual bodies, once again, as physical systemsaccessible to positivist intervention—and group-psychological theories thatseek to comprehend the ways in which those bodies (and the psyches thatthey bear) are organized within different collective forms. The contestedsomatic spaces I have designated the tubercular body and the nervous bodyfunction as exceptionally powerful examples, in other words, preciselybecause they localize the lines of force along which regimes directed at thecomprehension and manipulation of individual bodies fold over into projectsaimed at the articulation, production, and maintenance of various structuresof collectivity. Increasingly prestigious and influential bioscientific disci-plines provide citizens of the early twentieth century with new ways of visu-alizing their bodies (often from the inside out) and new languages withinwhich to imagine and represent their embodied existence. As I suggest inwhat follows, these new means of seeing, conceiving, and speaking about thebody are absolutely crucial to the simultaneous attempts of these same citi-zens both to understand and locate themselves within the various forms ofcommunity within which they participated, and to imagine alternate formsof community to those they found already in existence.

In literary historical terms, approaching these questions in relation to thework of Lawrence and Woolf is explained easily enough in terms of theirbiographical proximity to the bioscientific discourses under interrogation.Their life experiences rendered them all too intimate not only with the pop-ular perceptions of tuberculosis and nervous disorders, respectively, but alsowith the details of the relevant medical and scientific practices, procedures,institutions, and theories. This familiarity has a profound (if not alwaysexplicit) impact upon their literary negotiations of the problems associatedboth with human embodiment and community. Without entirely dismiss-ing the significance of this biographical proximity, I should emphasize thatmy consideration of Lawrence and Woolf in relation to bioscientific cultureis neither strictly biographical nor hermeneutic nor thematic. My interestdoes not lie in the attempt to trace the infusion of life experience into liter-ary texts, nor in positioning aspects of bioscientific culture as crucial inter-pretive keys to Lawrence’s and Woolf ’s texts. Still less do I seek simply toelaborate the lines of influence along which their texts present literaryrearticulations of phenomena evident in other spheres of culture. Rather, Iaddress the ways in which examples of the period’s literary production par-ticipate in the more broadly cultural processes through which logics of



incorporation are articulated, consolidated, and contested. Though such aproject inevitably entails the negotiation of literary attempts to represent orthematize certain kinds of bodies and communities, the emphasis falls notupon the adequacy of such attempts to an underlying reality (a realitydefined, for instance, by scientific discourse) but upon the logics by whichthey are supported. Beginning by discerning the logics implicit in Lawrence’sand Woolf ’s approaches to the body and its relations to structures of collec-tivity, one can then ask to what extent those logics are marked by, convergeor collaborate with, depart from, or pose challenges to the logics of incorpo-ration produced in bioscientific culture and elsewhere.

Beyond the fact that Lawrence’s and Woolf ’s texts participate in the dis-cursive formations situated around the tubercular body and the nervousbody, their exemplary status also derives from their different, even divergent,positions within the critical history of British literary modernism. This studyis conceived, in part, as a contribution to the rapidly expanding body of lit-erary scholarship that attempts more adequately to situate literary mod-ernism within a broader cultural horizon. In the context of an attempt totrace some of the links between modernist literary production and contem-poraneous bioscience, Lawrence and Woolf constitute powerful examplesprecisely because, on most critical accounts, it would be difficult to locatetwo more divergent representatives of British literary modernism. Even asthis study is informed by recent work in what has come to be known as the“New Modernisms,” it is equally conceived as a critique of what I take to bethe not insubstantial limitations of the new historicist and cultural studiesmethodologies that currently dominate the field. Though the widespreadattempt to situate modernist literary production in relation to the social andcultural fields within which it is produced is undoubtedly important, manysuch attempts remain satisfied (intentionally or not) to articulate the rela-tionship between literary texts and other modes of cultural production in rel-atively crude terms: essentially according a simple privilege to either theliterary or the nonliterary in their interpretive strategies. Two recent stud-ies—Holly Henry’s Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science (2003) andJessica Berman’s Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics ofCommunity (2001)—whose projects intersect with my own in importantways, exemplify the opposing faces of this difficulty. Henry is very thoroughin tracing the links between Woolf ’s aesthetics and the science associatedwith developments in astronomy in the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, citing Bruno Latour’s work as providing an important modelwithin which to take up this sort of project. “Like Latour,” she says, “whoattempts to articulate the ‘imbroglios’ or networks of interconnection

Introduction • 9


between scientific practices and public and political discourse, I have set outto imagine the imbrication of advances in astronomy, emerging visualizationtechnologies, and popular science writing, with discourses among modernistartists that produced in part Woolf ’s experiments in fiction” (7–8). Even asshe invokes these “networks of interconnection,” however, Henry’s languagetellingly reduces them to one-way streets as she goes on to argue that“Woolf ’s texts demonstrate how the new vistas of space that emerged at thesame time that modernist writers were forging new literary forms that mightaccount for a modernist human decentering and re-scaling” (8). Thoughthere is a certain degree of referential imprecision in these key sentences, itseems clear enough that the nonliterary aspects of Henry’s discursive web areaccorded a significant explanatory privilege: they “produce” Woolf ’s fictionalexperimentation and become the basis on which one might “account for” thecontours of particular modernist projects.

Whereas Henry ultimately reduces the interrelation of the literary andnonliterary to a largely causal relation in which we understand literary pro-duction on the basis of scientific culture, Berman’s text takes the oppositetack. While Berman productively historicizes recent attempts to theorizecommunity, and cogently criticizes some of the more obvious liberal modelsthereof, her argument remains heavily invested in the transgressive power ofliterature. This historicization notwithstanding, community remains firmlytied to narrative, to the “stories of connection we have been told or are ableto tell about ourselves” (3). Though she is careful to offer the qualificationthat the “fragmented perspectives or experimental styles” of the writers shestudies “do not always coincide with the shattering of real-world political ver-ities” (21), her notion of “radically new forms of cosmopolitan communities”(27) is firmly linked to the formal “radicalism” of modernist narrative style.Despite the considerable sociohistorical detail within which Berman couchesher argument for the power of modernist fiction in “recasting the idea ofpolitical community” (21), she remains committed to the transcendence ofthat fiction vis-à-vis the material contexts within which it is situated.“Because,” she contends, “I argue that community is performed in its narra-tives and is not derived from an originary position or outside source, I restrictmyself to those narratives. Thus, while the James family, or Bloomsbury, orStein’s salon all make fascinating study, they rarely concern me here. I includethese ‘real-world’ communities as part of the conditions of authorship ofthese novels, but not as the benchmarks by which to judge them. In thissense too, I would claim, I avoid limiting the possibilities of communityenacted in these novels to the political positions espoused by their authors”(26). This desire to limit the notions of community elaborated in the texts



she reads neither to authorial intention nor to forms of community actuallyrealized at the time of their composition is salutary enough; however, inemphasizing the transgressive “radicality” of literary discourse, Berman sig-nificantly limits her own ability both to account for the ways in which liter-ary imaginations (and narrations) of radical forms of community interactwith the ostensibly less radical conceptions and realizations of communityextant in the period, and to theorize the material conditions through whichthe stories we tell come to influence the worlds in which we live.

To the extent, then, that Henry’s and Berman’s texts might be taken toexemplify particular permutations of the “New Modernisms,” the strategiesthey employ seem rather familiar: not unlike, respectively, “old historicist”and poststructuralist approaches to modernism. On Henry’s account, the lit-erary text is very largely determined by its historical context, whereas forBerman the literary is marked by its “radical” ability to transgress or tran-scend its historical conditions of articulation—an ability that seems to coin-cide with a certain proximity to more contemporary theoretical positions(notably, in this case, that of Jean-Luc Nancy). In turning to Henry’s andBerman’s studies as examples of the New Modernisms, I don’t want to over-state their limitations, as I largely share the historical and theoretical preoc-cupations that motivate their work. In fact, a stronger version of the NewModernisms, such as that provided by Michael North’s Reading 1922 (1999),is perhaps more properly the critical object of my argument here. WhileNorth’s text has been influential in shifting the focus of modernist literaryscholarship toward new historicist or cultural studies models, and instrumen-tal in indicating the richness of the discursive fields in relation to which theperiod’s literary production can be approached, it has the unhappy effect ofleveling the discursive playing field such that the various forms of discoursehe analyses become virtually indistinguishable one from another. North’sintention is, in part, to dislodge modernist literary production from itsostensibly high-cultural perch by demonstrating its links to various forms ofmass or popular culture. Contending that the “‘matrix of modernism’ . . . isgenerally constructed in temporal terms, as a genealogy, and is restricted toliterature and perhaps philosophy,” and that such an approach “produces . .. a modernism disconnected from all other varieties of historical crisis” (6),he asks: “But what of modernism as a social fact, as part of the lived experi-ence of a reader of The Waste Land or Ulysses . . . ? What connections mighthave been made in the mind of such a reader between literary modernismand the other innovations of the same year?” (6). It is in this sense that I char-acterize North’s work as a stronger form of “New Modernist” scholarship: heattempts more fully to trouble the interpretive primacy of literary discourse

Introduction • 11


and seeks neither to explain literary texts on the basis of, nor to demonstratethe radical difference of literature from, other forms of cultural production.Though the interpretive procedure through which North attempts to tracethe connectedness of modernist literature and other contemporaneous cul-tural phenomena is both powerful and instructive, his readings tend notmerely to locate literary production in relation to other forms of cultural pro-duction but to insist that there is virtually no difference between them.1 Inthe attempt to displace a hermetically sealed form of modernism, a mod-ernism “that lives primarily in the deepest imaginings of its most radical per-petrators” (6), he promotes a form of interpretive practice that implicitlyequalizes all forms of discursive production as bearers of sociological data andfails to account adequately for the specific discursive procedures and institu-tional contexts that differentiate—substantial connections and similaritiesnotwithstanding—different modes of cultural production.

Thus, in situating Lawrence and Woolf, I want to avoid treating the bio-science of the period merely as an explanatory context, or a source of influ-ence, and seek instead to locate their work within the discursive web that thestudy constructs and analyses—drawing attention to the fact that both liter-ary and scientific language has a particular material history. Given that unitsof language operate simultaneously in different cultural domains, the bordersof which are relatively permeable, attention to the vicissitudes of specific lin-guistic units—Part 1 focuses on the language of tuberculosis, while Part 2attends to the language of the nerves—allows one to trace a path marked bythe linguistic remnants of the processes through which different forms ofembodiment and community come to be articulated through the mutuallytransforming interactions of the ostensibly discrete discursive domains of lit-erature and medical science. To say that these domains are ostensibly discrete,however, is not to suggest that there are no distinctions at all, and thereby toposit a smooth surface of culture on which all discursive production becomesequalized as the repository of sociological facts. Rather, it is to insist on thenecessity of attending to the ways in which the boundaries between domainsare maintained or breeched. To the extent that instances of linguistic contam-ination or cultural proximity are insufficient to establish relations of strictand unidirectional historical causality, this study seeks neither to identify adetermining historical context for Lawrence’s and Woolf ’s literary productionnor to adduce its sociological or historical conditions of possibility or intelli-gibility. Equally uninteresting is the attempt simply to demonstrate the trans-formative effects of their literary practice upon other forms of culturalpractice. In positive terms, attention to the material history of language pro-vides a means of addressing the sociohistorical relations in which modernist



literature is embedded and of elucidating those relations as more than a nar-rowly determining set of conditions. It allows one, first, to ask to what extentliterary negotiations of the relationship between embodiment and commu-nity are strongly conditioned by their contact with bioscientific culture; sec-ond, to explore the ways in which literary interventions into the somatic andcommunal projects of bioscience enable us to think differently about theproblem of incorporation; and third, to consider the circumstances throughwhich literary and bioscientific cultures collaborate both in enforcing exis-tent logics of incorporation and providing the basis on which we mightimagine alternatives. Insofar as I seek to explore the ways in which variousforms of discursive production in the early twentieth century—both literaryand bioscientific—are able to do more than merely replicate the logics ofincorporation already realized in the period, I seek to do so not by positingthe power of some forms of cultural production to transcend their historicalconditions of articulation but by asking how those material conditions them-selves might produce new and unprecedented ways of thinking about theembodiment of community.

The Stupid Materiality of Bodies: Unthinking Communities

In briefly rehearsing some of the tendencies of the work which has come todefine the New Modernisms, my intention is not merely to quibble over theniceties of historicist approaches to modernist literature but to emphasize thetheoretical stakes of the kind of historical work I undertake in the pages tocome. To the extent that new historicist and cultural studies methodologiesthat largely define the New Modernisms tend either to explain literary textsin terms of other contemporaneous cultural phenomena or simply to effacethe distinctions between literary and other forms of cultural production, theyare good examples of what Tim Dean describes as “the tendency to treat aes-thetic artifacts as symptoms of the culture in which they were produced”(21). This symptomatic approach to aesthetics, he argues, “has become sowidespread in the humanities that it qualifies as a contemporary criticalnorm”—a norm according to which we “read literature, film, and other cul-tural texts primarily as evidence of the societies that made them” (21). Theimplications of Dean’s argument are that this symptomatic focus fails toaccount for the aesthetic as such and in so doing reduces the specificity andalterity of the aesthetic artifact by insisting on its familiar resemblance to thecultural fields out of which it arises. “This is an ethical problem,” he con-tends, “because it eradicates dimensions of alterity particular to art, makingany encounter with the difficulty and strangeness of aesthetic experience

Introduction • 13


seem beside the point” (23). While I share Dean’s general concerns, I am per-haps less sanguine about the efficacy of positing the aesthetic as a relativelyexclusive site of opacity or alterity that resists the hermeneutic drive to mas-ter texts by rendering them symptomatic of familiar cultural or ideologicalproblematics. My interest lies, rather, in exploring the ways in which both lit-erary and bioscientific texts must be understood simultaneously as sympto-matic and “opaque” in Dean’s sense.2 Inasmuch as I will insist on remarkingthe extent to which both literary and scientific cultures participate in thefamiliar ideological forms of the early twentieth century (Dean’s sympto-matic reading), my interest lies more fully with those moments in whichboth literary and scientific texts emerge as irreducible to the hegemonicforms organizing their discourse.

More specifically, the tension between symptomaticity and the ethicalimport Dean attributes to the opacity of the aesthetic provides a useful meansof framing the theoretical problematics that my study draws into focus. Ingeneral terms, the details of the historical analysis offered here are oriented bythe tension between two broad conceptual movements. I examine, on the onehand, the functioning of disciplinary regimes and regulatory mechanismsthrough which bodies are rendered intelligible and incorporated into (orexcluded from) various communal forms, and, on the other, I explore thepossibilities offered by a confrontation with somatic modes that intransi-gently resist cognitive grasp, and therefore function as instances of what I callsheer materiality. To refer to the emergence of bodies as instances of sheermateriality is not simply to make the “anti-constructionist” argument thatJudith Butler criticizes in Bodies that Matter: namely, that there must be somelevel at which the body is not merely construction. Or, as Butler ventrilo-quizes this position: “surely bodies live and die; eat and sleep; feel pain, pleas-ure; endure illness and violence; and these ‘facts,’ one might skepticallyproclaim, cannot be dismissed as mere construction. Surely there must besome kind of necessity that accompanies these primary and irrefutable expe-riences” (xi). While it will be important to address the ways in which whatButler (after Foucault) calls “regulatory ideals” have an impact upon the pos-sibilities for apprehending and/or comprehending the body, the analysis ofbodies as materialized through the regulatory ideals operant in various discur-sive systems periodically gives way, in the pages to come, to the question ofwhat is at stake in the confrontation with the body as impossibly material.

Exploring the tension between these two ways of thinking about theembodiment of community allows us both to consider the extent to whichthe discursive grasp (both literary and bioscientific) of different kinds of bod-ies participates in logics of incorporation already available in the period, and



to encounter moments in which bodies remain irreducible to those relativelyfamiliar logics and thereby demand new and different ways of thinking aboutincorporation. The first half of this tension I associate with post-Foucauldianapproaches to the body, perhaps the most influential example of which isButler’s work. While this theoretical tradition obviously provides a powerfulmeans of approaching problems of incorporation, my concern is that it isoften aligned in significant ways with what Dean identifies as the sympto-matic impulse of cultural studies methodologies: specifically, it frequentlyapproaches bodies as essentially transparent and knowable. To take Butler asan example, her insistent focus upon the materialization of bodies throughthe discursive inscriptions to which they are subject ultimately constitutesbodies as objects of knowledge. This aspect of her work elaborates Foucault’salignment of power and knowledge, and even those bodies to which sherefers as “unintelligible” or “unlivable” present no real challenge to the powerof cognition. Indeed, from Butler’s perspective, unintelligible or unlivablebodies can only be understood as such with reference to the epistemologicalregimes to which they have been subject. Certain kinds of bodies become“unlivable” under certain historical and cultural circumstances preciselybecause they have been known in specific ways through particular sets of dis-cursive procedures—procedures that are frequently instrumental in the pro-duction and maintenance of humans subjects through the disciplinaryinteriorization of their norms. As we inhabit discursive systems whichinscribe our bodies with the effects of particular regulatory ideals, certain ofour bodies are rendered intelligible and livable within the bounds of thesocial forms (or communities) guaranteed by those systems, even as thosesocial forms constitute themselves as coherent through the exclusion of cer-tain other bodies that it identifies as “unintelligble” and therefore unlivable.The point here is that these unlivable bodies are only unintelligible in a verylimited (which is not to say insignificant) sense: they are unintelligible withinthe bounds of the norms governing specific social forms—norms that arethemselves largely established and maintained by epistemological proce-dures. So, to take one of Butler’s prime examples, queer bodies may be unin-telligible and/or unlivable within the norms of our society, but their status assuch is the product of countless discursive regimes—psychoanalysis, psychol-ogy, medicine, biological science to name only a few of the most obvious—whose ways of knowing queer bodies render them unlivable. Or, to turn tothe examples which animate this study, tubercular and nervous bodies couldcertainly be considered both unintelligible and unlivable in the early decadesof the twentieth century, but their status as such is largely the product of thebioscientific, medical, and psychological discourses that take them as objects

Introduction • 15


of knowledge. In this sense, Butler’s unintelligible and unlivable bodies nec-essarily exist within a broader horizon of intelligibility.

This is not to say that the analysis of the ways in which bodies are discur-sively inscribed, or of the constitution of communal and social forms on thebasis of the inclusions and exclusions enabled by such inscriptions, is unim-portant. It is, however, to say that relying exclusively upon a theoretical modelaccording to which bodies are never truly unintelligible runs the risk of lim-iting one’s analysis to describing the existent and emergent regimes of regula-tory ideals to which bodies are subject, and to elucidating the means by whichthose bodies are incorporated into familiar ideological, social, and politicalforms. Indeed, I am committed, in what follows, to this sort of criticaldescription, convinced of the importance of specific and detailed analysis ofthe ways in which both bioscientific and literary discourse participates—through their comprehension and representation of the body—in the discipli-nary maintenance of various structures of collectivity available in the earlytwentieth century. However, I simultaneously seek to disrupt the rhythms ofthis critical description by attending to those moments in which the dis-courses I study come up against bodies that firmly refuse the demands ofintelligibility, bodies that manifest themselves as sheerly material. If Dean isconcerned with the ethical consequences of a critical practice that “eradicatesdimensions of alterity particular to art” and thereby makes “any encounterwith the difficulty and strangeness of aesthetic experience seem beside thepoint” (23), my concern lies with consequences for the ethics of community,of approaches to problems of embodiment that refuse to encounter the diffi-culty and strangeness of the bodies that come to be incorporated into thesocial body and on the basis of which the social body is frequently conceived.

The impossibly material bodies upon which I thus come to focus are sig-nificant not because they open onto a space of primal and incontestable bod-ily experience prior to discursive inscription, but precisely because they marka certain limit to thought in their resistance to cognitive appropriation. Theyexemplify, in short, Jean-François Lyotard’s claim that “matter is the failureof thought, its inert mass, stupidity” (The Inhuman, 38). Or, as Jean-LucNancy puts it:

Bodies are first masses, masses offered without anything to articulate, withoutanything to discourse about, without anything to add to them. Discharges ofwriting, rather than surfaces to be covered by writings. Discharges, abandon-ments, retreats. No “written bodies,” no writing on the body. . . . For indeed,the body is not a locus of writing. No doubt one writes, but it is absolutely notwhere one writes, nor is it what one writes—it is always what writing exscribes.(Birth to Presence, 197–98)



To refer to the body as an instance of sheer materiality, or to the impossiblymaterial body, is to invoke precisely this aspect of the body, as the stupidmass on the other side of which thought, discourse, or writing begins.Whereas the normative materialization of bodies through the mechanisms ofregulatory ideals is precisely an inscription of the body that renders it acces-sible within the bounds of various regimes of intelligibility—regimes whichinevitably function to produce and consolidate certain social forms—theemergence of bodies as instances of sheer materiality marks a point of resist-ance to such mechanisms, a limit on which they are undone. As such, theappearance of such impossibly material somatic manifestations marks thepoints at which I move from the analysis of the ways in which historicallyextant structures of collectivity are elaborated and maintained to the theoret-ical consideration of avenues along which the affirmation of alternative sub-jective and communal forms becomes possible.

Chapter 1 takes as its starting place Lawrence’s two long essays, Psychoanalysisand the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, and argues that despitea paucity of critical attention, they have the virtue of being his most extendedand systematic exploration of intersubjective and communal relations—anexploration that is especially important for insisting on the significance ofscience’s increasingly aggressive encroachment into the processes of life to theunderstanding of those relations. Though Lawrence’s call for a reexaminationof intersubjectivity renders unsurprising his titular choice of psychoanalysisand the notion of the unconscious as ostensible objects of critique, I ask whyhis elaboration of a “theory of human relativity” (F, 72) takes place in closerproximity to the bodily coordinates of bioscience than the psychic categoriesproper to psychoanalysis. Tracking Lawrence’s persistent and telling relianceupon a bioscientific tropology—the language of bacteriology looms espe-cially large in this respect—I argue that his polemic against psychoanalysis isultimately motivated by a more generalized attack on science, and the life sci-ences in particular, for which psychoanalysis comes to stand in. The elabo-rately schematic model of affective embodiment he describes as the “trueunconscious,” and upon which his understanding of intersubjective andcommunal relations is founded, more properly takes its contours from anengagement with the medical scientific culture (with which he was all toointimately familiar) surrounding tuberculosis.

Having identified this problematic in Lawrence’s text, the remainder ofthe chapter turns to the discursive field that organizes itself around the tuber-cular body in order to explore the latter’s function as a hinge between thepositivist tendencies of biomedical science and the community-formingthrust of public health activism and social medicine. Considering a range of

Introduction • 17


literary production (including the popular writing of Donald Stewart andJohn Ferguson, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and Andre Gide’sL’Immoraliste), alongside the writing of various bacteriologists, immunolo-gists, physicians, and public health advocates, I argue that on the one handthe tubercular body is approached as an organic machine whose functioningis assimilable by the reductionist procedures of positivist science, while onthe other it becomes little more than the occasion for the application ofhygienic regimes aimed less at the comprehension and treatment of the indi-vidual body than at the production and maintenance of a specific form of thesocial body. Describing a social field within which a variety of competing dis-courses at once presuppose and seek to fix the significance of the tubercularbody, I locate a number of important textual instances in which the tubercu-lar body discloses itself (and the human body more generally) as fundamen-tally and persistently resistant to meaning. More specifically, I argue that theconsistency of the various discursive regimes seeking to grasp the tubercularbody is dependent upon the occlusion of the latter as the instantiation of abodily non-sense, and that in papering over this wound of sense, scientificand social medicine collaborate to produce an organic corporeal modelwhose form ultimately underwrites a corporatist vision of community.

Chapter 2 returns to Lawrence’s work—providing extended readings ofthe Fantasia, The Plumed Serpent, and a variety of other essays such as“Education of the People,” “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine,”“Democracy,” and “Aristocracy”—and asks to what extent his articulation ofcorporeal and communal economies (and their interrelationship) is mediatedby the structures made available by the bioscientific culture surrounding thetubercular body and to what degree his texts produce discursive connectionsunrealized in the medical scientific field narrowly construed. Having identi-fied amidst the bioscientific and medical approaches to tuberculosis a persist-ently residual vitalism that offers alternatives—ultimately recuperated—tothe logic of organic totality governing the tubercular field, I critically recon-sider the possibilities made available by Lawrence’s vitalism. Perhaps the mostobvious (and often remarked) ramification of his vitalist logic culminates inthe processes of social and moral regulation that buttress the thoroughlyorganic subjective and communal modes familiar from my analysis of thetubercular field—not to mention the longstanding accusations of protofascisttendencies in his work. If this logic finds its most recalcitrant and macropo-litical articulation in the late novels, such as The Plumed Serpent, I argue thatit does not constitute the entirety of Lawrence’s engagement of bioscientificculture. Most clearly legible in the nonfiction prose is a competing elabora-tion of the vital, affective body that orients a logic of radical singularity, and



as such provides the resources necessary to approach the embodiment ofcommunity outside of Lawrence’s sometimes organicist framework. Thisnotion of singularity is especially promising insofar as it enables a critique oforganic subjective and communal totalities without retreating into positionsbased in atomistic particularity and dispersed multiplicity. The chapter con-cludes by developing Lawrence’s logic of singularity toward a notion of theMultitude, a form of social assemblage uniting a group of individuals (andthereby allowing a degree of universality) without sacrificing the singularityof the individual to a seamless collective whole.

Chapter 3 opens the second part of the study with a move from tubercu-lar bodies to nervous bodies, and from Lawrence’s work to that of VirginiaWoolf. The chapter begins by critically reconsidering two of Woolf ’s mostfamous and oft-cited statements, both taken from her essay on “ModernFiction”: namely, her claim that “for the moderns . . . the point of interest liesvery likely in the dark places of psychology,” and her call to “record the atomsas they fall upon the mind . . . [and] trace the pattern . . . which each sight orincident scores upon the consciousness” (CE, 2:107). I argue that these state-ments—more than merely figurative accounts of formal and stylistic princi-ples—deserve to be read rather more literally as indicating Woolf ’s abidingconcern with the reductionist preoccupations of turn of the century experi-mental psychology. If she seeks to explore and represent human psychology,she reminds us that the psychology of the day frequently sought to apply theprinciples of physical science to the human psyche and thus comprehendedphenomenological interactions in terms of determining alterations to the verysubstance of the body. Examining the neuroscientifically inflected work ofHenry Maudsley and William James, the chapter elaborates the corporealmodel underlying this psychological mode and considers its extension in themoral psychology of J. A. Hadfield. Turning to Mrs. Dalloway as Woolf ’s mostobviously thematic interrogation of psychological discourse, it explores herengagement of these psychological models with an eye to the ways in whichtheir bodily economies are implicated in the production and maintenance ofinteriorized subjective spaces. Her analysis of the regulatory function of thecharacterological project played out in the discourses constellated around thenervous body, especially as it is directed toward the maintenance of a patrioticnational community, is particularly important in this context. To the extentthat Mrs. Dalloway takes up the language and institutions of psychology, pri-marily as engaged in a project of moral regulation, the chapter concludes bybriefly turning to The Waves as a text that much more fully interrogates thesomatic modes articulated by nervous discourse. Exploring the implications ofpsychological theories of habit, Woolf approaches the models of somatic

Introduction • 19


organization that they represent as intimately linked to both the moral organ-ization of individual selves and the coordination of those selves within thecommunal space of imperialist nationalism.

Chapter 4 returns to The Waves in order to examine the relationshipbetween the habitualized neuroscientific body and the influential models ofthe social body elaborated in the group or mass psychologies of Gustave LeBon, William McDougall, and others. Carefully reading The Waves—perhapsthe apogee of Woolf ’s narrative innovation and a text whose almost poeticrepresentation of consciousness has frequently earned it a reputation as oneof her least political novels—I contend that it presents an extended consider-ation of the relationship between the human nervous system and structuresof communal and national identification. Interrogating the deterministiceffects of neuroscientific bodily schemas within which the nervous system isunderstood as little more than the medium through which the worldimprints itself on individual bodies—a medium whose plastic character facil-itates the formation and maintenance of discretely differentiated individualsubjects—the text figuratively appropriates the language of neuropsychologyto articulate an alternate mode of embodiment. The affective body at whichWoolf thus arrives provides the basis for a critique of reductionist scientificdiscourse and the atomistic individualism it bolsters; no longer functioningto separate and differentiate individuals, the nervous system is reconfiguredas a unifying web whose lines of force connect individual bodies. This incor-poration of the group runs the risk of lapsing into an organic communalarchitecture, and despite its critical efforts the text remains, in places, danger-ously close to fusional structures of imperialist national identification. Finally,though, Woolf ’s notion of affective embodiment marks the limit upon whichsuch identificatory subjective enclosures are undone and prompts the text topursue a narrative mode that troubles the mythic production of organic col-lectivity. If Woolf ’s articulation of affective embodiment in The Waves finallyfunctions primarily to mark a limit upon which organic models of nationalcommunity are undone, the chapter concludes by arguing that a more posi-tive attempt to articulate alternative structures of collectivity was already vis-ible in Mrs. Dalloway. In taking up the psychology of the crowd and theorganized group—in terms that share much with William McDougall’s grouppsychology—the earlier text turns to the unruly contours of the crowd andthe unpredictable flows of life through the heavily commodified urban spaceof London as the bases upon which to think both the disruption of the organ-izing processes that produce the national group and the production of con-testatory subjective and communal forms.



PART 1

Germ Cultures: D. H. Lawrence and the Vital Question of the Tubercular Body


CHAPTER 1

Where “Life Joins Hands with Death”: Lawrence, the

Sanatorium, and the Bare Life of the Tubercular Body

“We are all very pleased with Mr. Einstein,” begins D. H.Lawrence in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), “for knock-ing that external axis out of the universe” (72). “The

universe,” he continues,

isn’t a spinning wheel. It is a cloud of bees flying and veering round. . . . Sothat now the universe has escaped from the pin which was pushed through it,like an impaled fly vainly buzzing: now that the multiple universe flies its owncomplicated course quite free, and hasn’t got any hub, we can hope also toescape. We won’t be pinned down either. We have no one law that governs us.For me there is only one law: I am I. And that isn’t a law, it’s just a remark.One is one, but one is not all alone. . . . I am I, but also you are you, and weare in sad need of a theory of human relativity. We need it much more thanthe universe does. (72)

Producing his “fantasia” in response to this perceived need for “a theory ofhuman relativity,” the analogy Lawrence draws seems comprehensibleenough, even cliché: just as Einstein marks the subversion of the physicallaws that were thought to govern the relations between various componentsof the universe, Lawrence remarks the erosion of the laws that have hithertogoverned relations between humans and announces the necessity of develop-ing a new way of understanding such relations. The figural compression with


which the essay opens, however, complicates this schema. As the orderlymechanical metaphor of a spinning wheel is supplanted by the dynamicorganic figure of a swarm of bees, the pin which once formed the “axis,” the“hub,” of Newtonian physics simultaneously is refigured; in its new tropo-logical context it becomes the instrument of the bioscientist (or, at least, of acaricatural bioscientist gone bad, the bioscientist as sadistic enfant terrible)who seeks to immobilize, dissect, and taxonomize the organic machines thatconstitute various forms of life. The precise form of the analogy rendersLawrence’s gesture less easily comprehensible for it is neither the moralphilosopher nor the ethicist who is isomorphic with the Newtonian physi-cist, but the bioscientist, here personified by the entomologist. The demandfor a “theory of human relativity,” according to the logic of Lawrence’s trope,comes to be predicated not upon the subversion of longstanding moral, eth-ical, or political systems of value, but upon an escape from the forces exertedby a bioscience that cruelly seeks to pin us—or more specifically, our bod-ies—down. If Lawrence opens his text by proclaiming the need to rethinkintersubjective relations, this chapter will begin by asking why his project istaken up in relation to scientific discourses which take not the subject butthe body as their object. What is at stake in Lawrence’s insistence upon theclose proximity between a rethinking of intersubjective relations or structuresof collectivity and a rethinking of the body?

The trajectory of Lawrence’s psychological essays—Psychoanalysis and theUnconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious1—leads us from the body to atheorization of intersubjectivity and then toward a thinking of community.He ultimately posits a form of community predicated upon a “dynamic con-tact . . . a unison in spirit . . . [and] in understanding, a pure comminglingin one great work . . . [a] mingling of the individual passion into one greatpurpose” (F, 136) and describes a process by which individuality is surren-dered in the becoming “one of a united body” (F, 137). These concerns areobviously by no means peculiar to the psychological essays. The questions ofvitality, intersubjectivity, and scientific and technological development arepresiding concerns throughout Lawrence’s work, and the problem of com-munity all but dominates the work produced in roughly the last decade ofhis life. The so-called leadership novels—Aaron’s Rod (1922), Kangaroo(1923), and The Plumed Serpent (1926)—are key examples in this respect, asare a range of his late essays, including “Reflections on the Death of aPorcupine,” “Democracy,” the review of Trigant Burrows’s The Social Basis ofConsciousness, “Education of the People,” and “Aristocracy,” to mention onlythe most obvious. Despite the relative paucity of critical attention to the psy-chological essays, however, they have the virtue of being Lawrence’s most



extended and systematic exploration of intersubjective relations and struc-tures of collectivity, an exploration that additionally insists on addressing theimportance of science’s increasingly aggressive encroachment into theprocesses of life to the understanding of those relations and structures.

Setting aside for the moment the form of community toward whichLawrence moves in the psychological essays—a question to which I return indetail in Chapter 2—I will focus initially on the steps by which he arrives atthat community. Why does he choose psychoanalysis as his interlocutor, andwhy does the body become the terrain upon which his polemic takes place?The titular concern of the essays would seem to assign Freud a position inrelation to theories of human relativity not dissimilar to that occupied byEinstein vis-à-vis a general theory of relativity. Because Freud’s challenge toturn-of-the-century understandings of the human subject is commonplace,it seems unsurprising that Lawrence seeks to theorize intersubjectivity inrelation to psychoanalysis and specifically the notion of the unconscious. Assoon as he introduces us to his understanding of the unconscious, however,the Einstein-Freud parallel becomes somewhat more complicated. “Theunconscious,” he writes in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious,

is never an abstraction, never to be abstracted. It is never an ideal entity. It isalways concrete. In the very first instance, it is the glinting nucleus of theovule. And proceeding from this, it is the chain or constellation of nucleiwhich derive directly from this first spark. And further still it is the great nerve-centers of the human body, in which the primal and pristine nuclei still actdirect. The nuclei are centers of spontaneous consciousness. It seems as if theirbright grain were germ-consciousness, consciousness germinating for ever. Ifthat is a mystery, it is not my fault. Certainly it is not mysticism. It is obvious,demonstrable scientific fact, to be verified under the microscope and withinthe human psyche, subjectively and objectively, both. (38)

If the interest in the unconscious attested to by the titles of Lawrence’s essaysis fairly banal in the context of a well-remarked modernist fascination bothwith what Virginia Woolf calls the “dark places of psychology” (CE, 2:108)and with the problem of representing those dark places, the form of theLawrencian unconscious presents something more of a challenge to ourexpectations. Drawing less on the discourses of psychology or psychoanalysisthan on those of cellular biology and physiology, Lawrence theorizes anunconscious that is inextricably linked to the human body in its most minuteconstituent parts. Given this turn to the body, and to the bioscientific dis-courses that take it as their object, I want to ask what is enabled by his micro-scopic focus. And what is at stake in the purportedly scientific narrative of

Where “Life Joins Hands with Death” • 25


bodily genesis that takes his reader from the “first spark” of the “glintingnucleus of the ovule” to an elaborately schematic understanding of the affec-tive body as organized around the complicated interrelation of the “greatnerve-centers”—an interaction he describes as the “dynamic polarized inter-course of vital vibration . . . an exchange of wireless messages which are nevertranslated from the pulse-rhythm into speech, because they have no need tobe” (F, 106)?

These questions demand to be taken up on a number of different regis-ters: in relation to the critical reception of Lawrence’s essays, in terms of hismodel of community, and more generally with an eye to their symptomaticcultural significance. Much of the critical response to Lawrence’s foray intoscience, the psychological essays occupying exemplary status in that respect,tends to be dismissive of his claim that he is dealing with “demonstrable sci-entific fact” (38). With a nodding recognition of a generalized reactionagainst scientific and technological development, Lawrence’s engagement ofscience is most often understood primarily as a sort of creative borrowing.Scientific discourse becomes a new vocabulary that he pillages as a means ofdeveloping his artistic vision, and the interpretation of his appropriations ismost often pursued in the service of commenting upon his fiction. KatherineHayles, for instance, reads the psychological essays as a fairly vague critiqueof positivist science and a celebration of the only just unfolding “new sci-ence.” She notes that “in his own way [Lawrence] was wrestling with someof the same issues that were occupying the attention of contemporary sci-ence” and remarks that both his metaphysico-aesthetic system and the newphysics “are characterized by a movement from the ‘either-or’ categories ofCartesian ontology to the ‘both-and’ epistemology implied by theUncertainty Relation” (89). Positioning Lawrence as a somewhat ambivalentfellow traveler to the new scientists, her main critical task becomes an inter-rogation of the relation of his “‘metaphysic’ . . . to his fiction” (89)—asexemplified primarily by The Rainbow and Women in Love—and she is ledto conclude that his “theories are finally mystical rather than scientific”(108). Choosing a different scientific interlocutor for Lawrence, MichaelWutz follows a similar procedure. Locating Lawrence’s texts not in relationto the new science but to the Victorian field of thermodynamics, he elabo-rates the thermodynamic theory of “the circulation of energy within the sys-tem of a hot and a cold body” (89) as the key to understanding the genderedthematics of hot and cold within Lawrence’s fiction. David Ellis, in contrast,seeks to read Lawrence’s recourse to science in the psychological essays not asa key to the fictional texts but as a contribution, of sorts, to scientific discus-sion. Arguing for the intuitive psychological value of Lawrence’s theory, Ellis



attempts to set the polemic against Freud in context. Lawrence’s obvious dis-tance from Freud’s text and his rather creative use of scientific discourse—asort of poetic license that Ellis undifferentiatedly locates in Freud’s text aswell—becomes little more than a series of “problems of terminology” (89).In addressing these linguistic difficulties, Ellis ultimately argues that theyconstitute nothing more than “a temporary obstacle to the recognition thatwhat may not be scientifically valid can nevertheless serve as a valuabledescription of experience” (108).

If each of these approaches responds to Lawrence’s call for a theory ofhuman relativity by exploring his understanding of intersubjectivity, they areunable to account for the specificity of his position in the psychologicalessays. For Hayles and Wutz, science appears to be something that Lawrencehas largely absorbed from his cultural context and provides him with a newmeans of reiterating familiar themes. The polemic against the determinismof positivist science and the mechanism of technological advance is alreadywrit large in both The Rainbow and Women in Love, to take only the twomost canonical fictional examples. The Lawrencian unconscious with itsnerve centers and vital flows is little more than a synonym for “blood con-sciousness,” and Lawrence’s understanding of the flows which connect nervecenters in different bodies is simply an abstraction of the interpersonal rela-tions that are such a pervasive thematic concern in the fiction. There is, onthis reading, nothing substantially significant about Lawrence’s detailedengagement of scientific discourse. Ellis, on the other hand, ostensibly seeksto forestall this sort of collapse of the essays into the thematics of Lawrence’sfiction but is unable to account for the former as a meaningful encounterwith science. While he draws attention to Lawrence’s description of hisnotion of the unconscious as the “biological psyche,” he does not pursue theimplications of this term. Though he does not quite follow James Cowan indismissing Lawrence’s model of the body as “anatomical nonsense” (20), heconcludes that when one considers the rapidly changing state of science atthe time, it was more or less inevitable that Lawrence would ultimately bemisinformed or mistaken about scientific fact. Arguing that the self-consis-tency and explanatory power of Lawrence’s system is finally what matters,the relation of his text to either scientific or psychoanalytic interlocutorsbecomes largely inconsequential for Ellis.

In this context I want to explore the consequences of attending toLawrence’s engagement with scientific culture—and especially biomedicalscience—as a means neither of elaborating fictional thematics nor of adju-dicating the truth-claims of his theory. Without taking Lawrence’s periodicclaims to scientific validity too much at face value (it is clear enough from



his frequently sardonic tone that he does not) I want to ask, nonetheless,what it would mean to approach Lawrence’s texts as seriously engaged withthe scientific culture of his time. In so doing, I want ultimately to considerthe possibility that the intersection of bioscience and discourses of intersub-jectivity and community that characterizes Lawrence’s text bespeaks abroader cultural formation.

The Unconscious from Freud to Koch: Lawrence’s Bacteriological Turn in Psychoanalytic Theory

In order to specify the nature of Lawrence’s intervention in scientific dis-course, let me begin with the polemical context that explicitly frames both ofthe essays. Given that psychoanalysis is the most obvious target of Lawrence’spolemic, I want briefly to examine his relationship to Freud. If the object ofLawrence’s critique is the “new doctrine” of psychoanalysis—a doctrine thathe contends “has been subtly and insidiously suggested to us, gradually inoc-ulated into us” (F, 7)—the substance of his criticism, in its broadest strokes,would seem to be legible in his contention that “Freud is with the scientists”(67), and that “psychoanalysis [is] the advance-guard of science” (15).Warning that “psychoanalysts . . . have crept in among us as healers andphysicians; growing bolder, they have asserted their authority as scientists”(7), Lawrence makes the exasperated claim that “science is wretched in itstreatment of the human body as a sort of complex mechanism made up ofnumerous little machines working automatically in a rather unsatisfactoryrelation to one another. The body is the total machine; the various organs arethe included machines; and the whole thing, given a start at birth, or at con-ception, trundles on by itself ” (95). In short, the Freud against whomLawrence sets himself occupies the status of exemplary scientist, and the sci-ence he represents is characterized primarily by its deterministic and reduc-tionist mode. “The scientist,” Lawrence asserts, “wants to discover a cause foreverything” (67), and in this case, the search for causes manifests itself in thedesire to reduce the body to an ever more minutely differentiated system ofphysical processes—a reduction which renders the human body little morethan an automaton. “To my mind,” states Lawrence,

there is a great field of science which is as yet quite closed to us. I refer to thescience which proceeds in terms of life and is established on data of livingexperience and of sure intuition. Call it subjective science if you like. Ourobjective science of modern knowledge concerns itself only with phenomena,and with phenomena as regarded in their cause-and-effect relationship. I have



nothing to say against our science. It is perfect as far as it goes. But to regardit as exhausting the whole scope of human possibility in knowledge seems tome just puerile. Our science is a science of the dead world. Even biology neverconsiders life, but only mechanistic functioning and apparatus of life. (62)

Given this emphasis on the reductionism of science, Lawrence’s choice ofFreud as avatar would seem to suggest that his objections to psychoanalysiscan be located in relation to Freud’s contentious claims to scientific status,and particularly in those aspects of Freudian theory which have regularlybeen accused of biological determinism.

One might think, in this context, of the opening words of the prepsycho-analytic Project for a Scientific Psychology, where Freud avows his intention to“furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psy-chical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable materialparticles” (295). Though Freud famously disavows this early neurology-influ-enced work, its traces are legible throughout the psychoanalytic corpus.Rather than a considered response to the specifics of Freud’s work, however,Lawrence’s text seems to take its trajectory from a more general perception ofpsychoanalysis as an exemplar of reductionist science, and moreover as a par-ticularly galling example insofar as the object of its reduction is precisely theinstinctual realm.2 The appropriateness of Freud as embodiment of positivistscience, that is, depends less on Freud’s actual position than on the ways inwhich his name functions as a cultural signifier. Given the plethora of exam-ples of positivist science at whom Lawrence might have directed his polemic,however, the assimilation of Freud to “science” remains somewhat surprising,and is not well supported on the basis of the latter’s text. The trace of scien-tific discourse within psychoanalytic theory notwithstanding, Freud’s claimsof scientificity (as rendered by cognates of the German Wissenschaft) havemore to do with a drive to systematicity than with disciplinary allegiances.3

Without entering a detailed consideration of the vexed status of sciencewithin psychoanalytic discourse, one would need minimally to remark that,at least at the level of declared intention, the institution of psychoanalysis asa “science” is coextensive with a rejection of hard science (e.g., physiologyand neurology) as adequate to the task of psychological research.4 Even whenFreud appears closest to science—as in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”where he argues that “the source [Quelle] of an instinct is . . . the somaticprocess which occurs in an organ or part of the body” and admits that we “donot know whether this process is invariably of a chemical nature or whetherit may also correspond to the release of other, e.g., mechanical forces”(119)—he is at pains to remark a distance. While willing to grant science its



provenance and posit a determinative somatic source of the instincts whenhe writes that the “study of the sources of the instincts lies outside the scopeof psychology” and that the “instincts are wholly determined by their originin a somatic source,” these statements are quickly qualified by the claim that“an exact knowledge of the sources of an instinct is not invariably necessaryfor purposes of psychological investigation” (119–20). Freud seeks, that is, asystematic approach to the psychic for which brute somatic processes are notutterly irrelevant but equally not logically necessary preconditions. Leavingthe somatic largely to one side, Freud is concerned instead with the stimulusproduced by the body insofar as it is “represented in mental life by aninstinct” (119).

This aspect of Freud’s project, with its emphasis on processes of represen-tation, opens on to a competing movement within Lawrence’s critique.Despite his characterization of Freud as an example of positivist science, it isnot the determination of the mental by the somatic against which Lawrenceprimarily struggles. Rather than attacking the reduction of the mental to thecerebral, his understanding of the mind-brain relationship situates the brainin instrumentalist terms, and somewhat surprisingly places the mind withina second-order instrumentality. “The brain is,” he contends,

the terminal instrument of the dynamic consciousness. It transmutes what is acreative flux into a fixed cypher. It prints off, like a telegraph instrument, theglyphs and graphic representations which we call percepts, concepts, ideas. Itproduces a new reality—the ideal. The idea is another static entity, anotherunit of the mechanical-active and materio-static universe. . . . Ideas are the dry,unliving, insentient plumage which intervenes between us and the circumam-bient universe, forming at once an insulator and an instrument for the subdu-ing of the universe. The mind is the instrument of instruments; it is not acreative reality. (F, 41–42)

In what seems to be a stark opposition to his excoriation of positivist physi-calism, Lawrence here levels the charge of idealism. Instead of the reductionof the body to a series of mechanical processes (and by extension the com-prehension of the mind in terms of corporeal mechanics), the problem hasbecome the subsumption of something called “dynamic consciousness”—aform of consciousness that, as we will see, Lawrence seeks to present in rad-ically corporeal terms—under the abstract representational categories of themind. Translating these concerns into explicitly psychoanalytic terms, he askswhether “a repression [is] a repressed passional impulse, or is it an idea whichwe suppress and refuse to put into practice—nay, which we even refuse toown at all, a disowned, outlawed idea, which exists rebelliously outside the



pale?” (13); Lawrence thereby raises the possibility that the repressed contentof the Freudian unconscious is primarily ideational.

Psychoanalysis is thus located at the crossroads of two seemingly opposedLawrencian concerns. On the one hand, Freud functions as the embodimentof a positivist scientific enterprise that Lawrence criticizes for its materialistattempt to explain the body on the basis of mechanical processes. And on theother, psychoanalysis is rendered an idealist project that comprehends the“passional impulse[s]” of “dynamic consciousness” through the conceptualmediation of the mind. This tension becomes less contradictory, however,with closer scrutiny of Lawrence’s notion of idealism. Defining the latter as“the motivizing of the great affective sources by means of ideas mentallyderived” (14), he concludes that “an ideal established in control of the pas-sional soul is no more and no less than a supreme machine-principle. And amachine, as we know, is the active unit of the material world. Thus we seehow it is that in the end pure idealism is identical with pure materialism, andthe most ideal peoples are the most completely material. Ideal and materialare identical” (14). At least in relation to what he here calls the “affective soul”or the “passional soul,” the difficulties posed by both the materialist and ide-alist aspects he attributes to psychoanalysis are the same.5 Given Lawrence’sdesire to posit a form of “dynamic consciousness” that is characterized by itsimmediate vitality, and as a source of spontaneous creativity, both idealist andmaterialist impulses function as forces of determinism and automatization.The physicalist reduction of the body submits the latter to principles ofmechanical causation, simultaneously rendering it inaccessible as a source ofundetermined, spontaneous creativity and making it available to the concep-tual categories of cognition. Other idealist modes—other, that is, than thematerialist mode which, in this light, reveals itself to be idealist insofar as itfunctions positivistically to render the body accessible to thought—equallyoperate as forces of determining automatization in refusing the immediacy ofvitally corporeal “dynamic consciousness.” Firmly representational, idealismcan only recognize the “creative flux” of the biological psyche in the mediatedforms of “percept, concept, and idea,” and this process of representationalmediation robs the affective soul of its spontaneous vitality.

The elucidation of this janus-faced conjunction of idealism and material-ism is one of the cardinal moves in Lawrence’s argument. To be somewhatschematic for a moment, Lawrence’s engagement with psychoanalysis, or withthe figure of a Freud who bears only a tenuous relationship to the body ofwriting that inaugurates psychoanalytic theory, produces a stark series of con-ceptual oppositions. Reducing the standard opposition between idealism andmaterialism, Lawrence’s conceptual schema aligns scientificity, mechanism,



automatism, representationalism, and determinism in opposition to val-orized terms like life, vitality, spontaneity, immediacy, and freedom. At thecrux of this series of oppositions lies the body. For if Lawrence pits himselfagainst “science” (as the principle of materioidealism), it is in order to con-test the status of the body and the values or potentialities which are ascribedto, or allowed it. Working to produce a space in which “life” can escape themechanistically reductive grasp of “theory” or “science,” Lawrence articulateshis notion of the unconscious. If the “vicious” Freudian unconscious is theemblem of a scientific rationality that denies such a space insofar as it is con-stituted merely by the repressed ideational content of the mind, Lawrencegrounds his contestatory model of the unconscious in a form of embodimentaccessible neither to materialist reduction nor idealist representation.Defined in opposition to a form of experience that is direct, unmediated, andspontaneous, the automatism that Lawrence contests stands in stark opposi-tion to the force of “creative life” (43). It is this force to which Lawrencedevotes his attention, and the “true unconscious” is the very principle of thatlife in all its spontaneity.

I will, at this stage, defer until the next chapter a full-scale analysis ofLawrence’s model of the unconscious in its own right. Pausing at the pointof description, I return instead to the questions with which I opened: whatis at stake in Lawrence’s engagement with the discourses of science? and whatare we to make of his choice of Freud as exemplary scientist? Though thereare clearly specific reasons for Lawrence’s polemic against psychoanalysis,given the extremely generalized notion of science with which Freud’s name isfreighted I would suggest that when one considers the broad contours ofLawrence’s argument, Freud is ill-suited as an interlocutor. If, then, theresponse to my second question—what are we to make of Freud’s status asexemplary scientist?—is ultimately “very little,” we are returned to the stakesof Lawrence’s polemics against science in general. Are they a sort of creativeborrowing from the language of science? Are they an unfocused attack onrapidly expanding scientific enterprises of various sorts? Are they simply apretext for the elaboration of his notion of embodied consciousness—anotion which stands in relation to, but has little serious interest in, compet-ing understandings of either consciousness or the body? While all of thesepossibilities are at least minimally suggestive, I want to make the strongerclaim that Lawrence’s notion of embodied consciousness and the form ofcommunity that he predicates upon it are legible as an engagement with aspecific field of scientific discourse with which he was intimately familiar,though it makes only fleeting appearances on the margins of the psycholog-ical essays. Given that “idealism” (whether in its standard or “materialist”



guise) comes to be the principal charge leveled by Lawrence against the sci-entists, it is notable that this charge is itself repeatedly mediated by specificbioscientific tropes. We have already noted that Lawrence describes the “doc-trine of psychoanalysis” as having been “subtly and insidiously suggested tous, gradually inoculated into us” (7, my emphasis). In this light, his statementthat “Psychoanalysts . . . have crept among us as healers and physicians;growing bolder, they have asserted their authority as scientists” (7) takes onvaguely bacteriological tones (if the tones of a bacteriology gone wrong),whereby a purportedly therapeutic agent is introduced to the system only tofester and grow, finally making its reappearance as an ominous pathogen.

More than merely a throw-away jab at the psychoanalyst-cum-germ, thisbacteriological turn of thought, which graces the opening pages ofPsychoanalysis and the Unconscious, takes on an expanded significance in theFantasia as it both encompasses Lawrence’s criticism of idealism in generaland relates to a specific branch of the bacteriological enterprise. “To tell thetruth,” Lawrence insists in the Fantasia, “ideas are the most dangerous germsmankind has ever been injected with. They are introduced into the brain byinjection, in schools and by means of newspapers, and then we are done for.. . . And all is due, directly and solely, to that hateful germ we call the Ideal”(115). Pursuing this thought, he is led to ask, “By what right . . . are we goingto inject into him [the precious child] our own disease-germs of ideas andinfallible motive? By the right of the diseased, who want to infect everybody”(116). And finally, having laid out this dire picture of widespread infection,Lawrence concludes on an exhortatory note, reassuring his reader that:

We still have in us the power to discriminate between our own idealism, ourown self-conscious will, and that other reality, our own true spontaneous self.Certainly we are so overloaded and diseased with ideas that we can’t get wellin a minute. But we can set our faces stubbornly against the disease, once werecognize it. The disease of love, the disease of “spirit”, the disease of nicenessand benevolence and feeling good on our own behalf and good on somebodyelse’s behalf. . . . We can retreat upon the proud, isolate self, and remain therealone like lepers, till we are cured of this ghastly white disease of self-consciousidealism. (118)

Borrowing a page from a flourishing genre of medical self-help and advice lit-erature, Lawrence recasts his battle against idealism in the language of thepublic health crusade against tuberculosis. Taking up the rhetorical form madeavailable by antituberculist literature, Lawrence draws upon its model of self-policing behavior in his campaign against idealism. In the space of roughly sixpages that appear midway through Fantasia, the critique of idealism (and of



science as an exemplary instance of idealism), which has been developedthroughout the entirety of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and the firsthalf of the Fantasia, is abruptly refigured in terms of the discourses of bacte-riology and social medicine. We are not only introduced to the germ theoryof idealism, but are asked more specifically to understand idealism as “thisghastly white disease.” Indeed, when Lawrence turns his attention to the con-sequences of the derangement of dynamic consciousness, and to the type ofderangement preeminent in his society with its perverse over-emphasis of thespiritual and the ideal, he remarks a resulting “tendency now towards phthi-sis” (93). “Weak-chested, round-shouldered,” he laments, “we stoop hollowlyforward on ourselves” (93). In so doing, he points to both an actual preva-lence of tuberculosis and the preponderance of a body type that is absolutelyconsonant with the image of the tubercular diathesis, or habitus phthisicus, aphysical type that was thought to reveal, if not the presence of the disease,then at least a hereditary predisposition toward it.6 It is notable in this con-text that Lawrence’s model of the body, with its system of nerve centers thatconstitute dynamic consciousness, places a heavy emphasis on the impor-tance of the solar plexus. Though this is perhaps unsurprising in light of hispromotion of visceral “blood consciousness,” it resonates more specificallywith the period’s language of tuberculosis. If the prominent features of thetubercular diathesis included a shallow chest and protruding shoulder blades(bodily features believed to indicate reduced cardiopulmonary efficiency)individuals exhibiting opposite physical traits were thought unlikely to bevictims of tuberculosis; an 1887 commentator in the prestigious periodicalScience, for example, suggests that an individual “with large breast, and itsaccompanying small lungs, an enlarged and powerful heart, well-developedabdominal viscera, and a hearty appetite, rarely, if ever, becomes consump-tive” (Ott, 11). Given this emphasis on the importance of “well-developedabdominal viscera,” it is difficult not to hear in the Lawrencian valorizationof the solar plexus a response to prevailing notions of the tubercular body.

This, of course, begs the question of what work is done by Lawrence’srefiguration of his much-hated idealism in terms of tuberculosis, the infa-mous white plague. The most immediately available form of explanation isperhaps Lawrence’s biography. Famously tubercular, Lawrence was also spec-tacularly reticent about the disease that eventually killed him. Suffering fromchronic respiratory ailments since early childhood, he would have beenacutely aware of the specter of pulmonary tuberculosis. At a time when thedisease was still largely understood in hereditary or constitutional terms, andwhen the diagnostic capacity of clinical medicine prevented the accurate dif-ferentiation of various respiratory disorders (this undifferentiated diagnosis is



evident in the popular designation of tuberculars as “lungers”), the appear-ance of lung disease in early childhood would have at the very least raisedsuspicion of a tubercular predisposition (or diathesis), if not of the presenceof the disease itself.7 Although, as Wayne Templeton suggests, Lawrence“rarely referred to [the disease], and then . . . only in a decidedly abstruseway” (184–85), it is relatively clear that he considered himself to be suffer-ing from tuberculosis from as early as 1911. Templeton canvasses a variety ofbiographic sources in support of this date, and Brenda Maddox confirms it,usefully observing along the way that Lawrence’s response to this perceptionincluded an obsessive interest in the widespread self-help literature surround-ing the disease. “If the diagnosis was not yet consumption,” she writes,“Lawrence from January 1912 onward lived his life exactly as if it were. Shortof consigning himself to a sanatorium, he followed all the instructions laiddown in popular books such as Advice for Consumptives on how to behave.He sought the sun, the fresh air of sea or mountains; he stuffed himself withbutter, eggs, and milk; and as far as he could, he avoided cities” (87–88).

If this brief foray into biography establishes that Lawrence was familiarboth with tuberculosis and the medical scientific discourses surrounding it(at least as popularized in advice literature that explains the disease anddescribes therapeutic measures to the lay public), and that his general reti-cence concerning the disease might account for the fleetingness of its appear-ance in the psychology essays, it does not provide substantial resources forassessing the significance of these manifestations. Rather than pursuing thelogic of Jeffrey Meyers’ claim that “Lawrence’s life and character werestrongly influenced by the progress of his disease” (325) to the conclusionthat so profound an influence would inevitably make itself felt in his writ-ings, I will make a stronger claim for the figurative transmutation of this par-ticularly pervasive aspect of Lawrence’s personal experience. More thanmerely fortuitous eruptions of the experiential, Lawrence’s bacteriologicalmetaphorics indicate a particularly significant interlocutor for the essays.Whether or not Lawrence actively conceived the essays as (at least in part) aresponse to the bioscientific discourses surrounding tuberculosis, or to thesort of bioscience of which the discourses surrounding tuberculosis providea particularly forceful example, I shall argue that tuberculosis provides a pow-erful context within which to consider the stakes of Lawrence’s work in thepsychological essays—especially as it concerns the relation of the body tocommunity. This is not to say, however, that the discourses surroundingtuberculosis constitute the necessary background or context of Lawrence’sproject—the sociological key to the interpretation of his texts. Rather, bothtubercular discourse and Lawrence’s work share a cultural space in which an



interest in the body, its susceptibility to scientific explanation, and variousprojects of community formation collide or intersect.

This space is far from rarified, and my decision to consider Lawrence’selaboration of these questions in relation to the specific set of discourses asso-ciated with tuberculosis derives from the exemplary status of the latter. Onan individual level, the range of social forces circulating around tuberculosisclearly held a particularly strong affective charge for Lawrence, and thereforego some distance in explaining the persistent eruption of bioscientific tropesin a text that, at the level of argument, takes an extremely generalized andundifferentiated notion of science as its object. In more broadly culturalterms, it would be equally hard to underestimate the impact of tuberculosisand the discourses pertaining to its comprehension and treatment. Enjoyinga prominent cultural history and (despite expectations to the contrary gen-erated by the much-touted bacteriological advances of the closing decades ofthe nineteenth century) continually impressive effects on mortality rates,tuberculosis remained an unavoidable landmark on the cultural horizon wellinto the twentieth century.8 Discussing the cultural and political impact ofdisease, Roy Porter claims that until the middle of the twentieth centurytuberculosis occupied a singular place as “the greatest catastrophe, the great-est catalyst of political perturbation in the Western World” (“The Case ofConsumption,” 179), citing the fact that it “became for a couple of centuriesthe greatest single adult killer on both sides of the Atlantic” (180), and thatit “was still exceedingly virulent in the first decades of the present century,carrying off some 40,000 victims a year in Britain” (181). Or, as ArthurRansome makes the case on a more emotive register in the opening essay ofhis 1915 Campaign Against Consumption:

There is no need for me to give you a medical description of this fell disease.It is so common, that I venture to say that there is scarcely one amongst myhearers who has not had some one near and dear to him, a relative or a friend,affected by it. Most of you, then, know something of it, from its first insidi-ous onset to its final painful ending—the loss of strength, the short hackingcough, the want of breath, the wasting of the flesh, the deceitful lulls in thecourse of the complaint, then the fever, the sweating, the distressing paroxysmsof coughing and spitting, and finally, the last scene of all, in which the over-burdened spirit lays aside its worn-out garment of flesh. (1)

Tuberculosis, in short, functions as a crucial cultural relay, traversed by animpressive range of social forces and discourses. In medical scientific termsalone, tuberculosis marks the intersection in the early twentieth century of awide spectrum of residual and emergent understandings of the body and its



relation to society, a spectrum that ranges from the persistence of the stereo-typical romantic consumptive to the colonies of germs made visible by thebacteriologist’s microscope, from the politically variable hereditarianism ofthe eugenicist to the environmental emphasis of social medicine. More sig-nificant still though, is the fact that the near-ubiquity of tuberculosis (how-ever understood) as an element of personal experience further complicatesthis complex intersection of medical scientific discourses. More than merelythe object of contestation between various scientific approaches, tuberculo-sis marks a cultural space that was virtually unavoidable, a space in whichfluid and conflicted scientific models are engaged by, and engage, popularnotions of the body and its relations to community.

The Tubercular Body, Everywhere and Nowhere

As I have suggested, the sheer pervasiveness of tuberculosis as a social factrenders the cultural space occupied by the disease particularly expansive, aspace that is traversed by a formidable range of social and political forces. Inmedical scientific terms alone, it is a privileged site of what is certainlyamong the period’s most prestigious areas of bioscientific research. The bac-teriological enterprise of the likes of Pasteur and Koch provided especiallycompelling examples of a technologically enhanced, positivist biosciencewhose therapeutic promise was revolutionary. Simultaneously, tuberculosisproved to be a key locus for the burgeoning of social medicine and the con-cern for public health, a context in which the microscopic niceties of thetubercular body took a back seat to questions of social reform along hygieniclines. As a point of convergence between bioscientific procedures that takethe body’s most minute constitutive components as their object and the com-munal focus of social medicine, the tubercular body, thus, becomes anunusually powerful example of the interanimation of modes of embodimentand forms of community—an example whose relevance to Lawrence’s con-cerns in the psychological essays should be clear. It is with an eye to examin-ing this interanimation that I turn to the question of how the tubercularbody was understood by, and represented in, the literary and medical scien-tific writings of the early twentieth century. Because Lawrence does not rep-resent the tubercular body as such in his writing, I will focus for theremainder of this chapter on the relationship between a range of medical sci-entific texts and a number of both popular and high literary texts for whichthe representation of tuberculosis is an explicit concern. Having explored thisdiscursive formation, I will return in the next chapter to the question of itsimplications for Lawrence’s project.



If the cultural space marked by tuberculosis has a particular power in rela-tion to the understanding of embodiment and community in the period, itis a power that is bound up with the historical evanescence of the tubercularbody around which that space organizes itself. What I refer to as the “tuber-cular body,” that is, did not exist at the turn of the century in any fixed ordefinitive form. Katherine Ott is emphatic on this point in her compellinghistory of tuberculosis.9 “There is neither a core ‘tuberculosis,’” she writes,“constant over time, nor a smooth conceptual trajectory leading from thelungs of ancient Greeks, to the AIDS ward of a modern hospital. What wecall ‘tuberculosis’ was not the same disease in 1850 that it was in 1900 oreven 1950” (1).10 Writing in a more circumscribed historical context, sheinsists that in the late nineteenth century “there were nearly as many con-sumptions as there were patients” (9), an observation that, when paired withthe contemporaneous commonplace that “everyone is sometime or anothera little bit consumptive” (Ott, 1),11 leaves one with a sense that tuberculosisis at once everywhere and nowhere, that the tubercular body has very specificforms and almost any form at all. This insistence not only on the fluidity ofthe meanings of disease and the experience of illness over time but also onthe multiplicity of such meanings and experiences within a given historicalmoment is particularly telling when we turn our attention to the first decadesof the twentieth century, for in some sense that historical moment is markedsimultaneously by diachronic diversity and synchronic multiplicity.

Indeed, it is precisely this compression that, for my purposes, constitutesthe discursive space of the tubercular body. With the ascendancy of the germtheory of disease (punctuated by Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus, ormycobacterium tuberculosis, in 1882), and the ensuing development of bacte-riology and scientific medicine more generally, there is a shift in the under-standing of the disease at the turn of the century away from that ofconsumption as a constitutional disorder (which is to say a disease that is atonce physical and spiritual) and toward tuberculosis as a disease with a partic-ular bacterial aetiology. Despite the shift in medical-scientific paradigms, thefirst decades of the twentieth century are marked by the persistence of thenineteenth-century model of the disease within the emergent bacteriologicalframework. As Sander Gilman suggests in his discussion of the social signifi-cance of tuberculosis as it relates to notions of race at the turn of the century:

Two concepts that should have vanished with Robert Koch’s discovery of thetuberculosis bacillus nonetheless powerfully persist in the medical literature ofthe age. . . . [Assumptions regarding the predispositional and constitutionalnature of the disease] would seem dispensable once the etiology of tuberculo-sis is established, but they stay in the discourse of tuberculosis after Koch,



where they had been for centuries before him. . . . [W]hile the new bacteriol-ogy did restructure the image of the disease and of the patient, older modelsof disease were also adapted within the new model, continuing pre-Kochiannotions. (171)

As a result, the “tubercular body” both marks the space within which thesecompeting discourses intersect and collide, and functions as the object thatthey attempt to grasp in a variety of ways. It acts as a hinge between emer-gent and residual discourses which variously address the relationship betweenthe body and the formation or maintenance of communal structures.

If Ott and Gilman (among others) are at pains to remark the historicalcomplexity of the disease we now know as tuberculosis, their observationsalso raise important theoretical questions. In particular, what is the status ofthe tubercular body in the midst of these shifting paradigms and conceptualsystems? Given that the “tubercular body” occupies a place within a varietyof codes that would attempt to fix its significance in particular ways, a num-ber of questions become pertinent: What are the ideological functions of dif-ferent attempts to capture the “tubercular body”? How is the tubercularsociosymbolic field reorganized by the various discursive regimes whichattempt to fix its meaning? To what extent, and in what ways, do tubercularbodies escape capture by these different regimes of significance? And if the“tubercular body” designates what José Gil calls an “indeterminate zone” ofculture, what are the codes that it straddles, and what lines of semioticallyimpossible energy or force does it make manifest?

In order to describe the contours of the sociosymbolic field that organizesitself around tuberculosis at the turn of the century, and thereby preliminar-ily to map the indeterminate significatory zone to which the “tubercularbody” corresponds, I will turn to two examples of the period’s literary pro-duction that take tuberculosis as a thematic concern: John Ferguson’s Thyrea:A Sonnet Sequence from a Sanatorium (1912), and Donald Stewart’sSanatorium: A Novel (1930). Though neither of these texts enjoyed any sig-nificant literary or popular reputation, their representation of tuberculosisand its treatment interestingly compresses a range of contemporaneous dis-course—literary, popular, and medical-scientific—concerning the disease.

To begin with Thyrea, Ferguson himself (though less than poeticallyinspiring) seems acutely aware of the sanatorium as precisely a sort of limi-nal space, insofar as his text repeatedly locates the sanatorium at a number ofsignificant sociocultural interstices. The opening two sonnets of the sequence(see Appendix I), with their prayerful pleas for the strength to endure “Theeverlasting sameness of the days, / The never-ending sadness of the nights, /



The weariness each rising hope that blights, / The fevered restlessness thatslowly slays” (1.1–4), harken back to nineteenth-century notions of the dis-ease and invoke the cult of the good death.12 The poems present their readerswith the image of the slowly wasting consumptive submitted to a purifyingpurgation of the flesh that renders him progressively closer to his spiritualessence and leaves him anticipating the moment at which that purificationwill finally and completely absolve him of his fleshly dross. Yet, by the thirdsonnet of the sequence the somewhat anachronistic framing of tuberculosis asan essentially spiritual matter is abruptly displaced by the introduction of thevocabulary of social medicine’s environmental focus. We here find ourselvesremoved from the “sounding deeps and starry heights” (1.6) of divinity andresituated in the resolutely material context of “this grim dwelling, bare, andclean, and cold” (3.3). Narrating a case history in iambic pentameter, thepoem begins with the arrival at the sanatorium of a patient who “caught achill in Leicester” and “came here with his little store of gold” (3.1–2).

Relentless in its material emphasis, the text first gives voice to the antitu-berculist focus on the causative role of poor hygienic conditions associatedwith industrial urban existence when it identifies the patient as a product of“Leicester’s city drear” (3.5); it then proceeds to articulate the gross bodilyeffects of the disease in the description of a hemorrhagic “flood” of “warmcrimson” that “down his garment rolled” (3.6–7); and concludes with anindictment of the economic opportunism of the sanatorium movement, asthe patient leaves not because cured, but “Because his little store of gold wasdone” (3.10)—“My God!” the speaker exclaims (if a bit naively), “I knew notgold and life were one” (3.11). The transcendent tone of the first two poemsthreatens to resurface in the third sonnet’s representation of the sanatoriumas the threshold across which “life joins hands with death, and hope withfear” (3.4), but the fourth sonnet continues its predecessor’s emphasis on themateriality of the disease as it resituates the question of life and death.

In this poem we are introduced to the sanatorium ward and the scientificmedical model that functions there. Representing the nocturnal death of oneof the poet’s compatriots, the text presents us with the strictly partitionedward, in which each patient is “screened from [the] sight” (4.5) of the oth-ers, and through which the doctor makes his rounds, “sounding” (4.12) thepatients in turn—the latter a reference to stethoscopic auscultation, the firstmajor clinical advance in the systematic diagnosis of tuberculosis.13 Thoughthese allusions to the clinical practice of the sanatorium staff seem a minoraspect of a poem that is at least initially preoccupied with the representationof the ominous approach of “Death,” the metaphysical tones of the octaveare predictably reversed in the sestet.



The poem opens with the recollection that “There was a shuffling ofstrange feet last night / Along the naked corridor of stone; / Dull creakings,and much talk in undertone / In the next room to mine; [where] Death’s chilland blight / Lay on my brother” (4.1–5); the poem thus lends to the banalobservation of movement on the ward, the sense that the “strange feet”whose “shuffling” the speaker hears belong as much to an approaching“Death” as to members of the sanatorium staff. And though the turn fromoctave to sestet consists of the overwrought outburst: “And I all wakeful inmy chamber lone, / Quailed in the deathful dark, and longed for light. / OGod! that some should stumble by the way—” (4.7–9), the final five linesrecontextualize the preceding meditation on the approach of death. “Theydo not like us to die here, we know,” the speaker resumes, “They talk aboutthe credit of the place— / The Doctor, when he sounded me today, / Saidnever a word about last night, and lo / Her customed smile lights up theNurse’s face” (4.10–14). Less a metaphysical problem than the extreme man-ifestation of the disease as material fact, death becomes, on this account,merely a distasteful factor in the managerial calculations of the superintend-ing physician, and the theologically freighted “light” for which the speaker“longs” in the poem’s seventh line is refigured as a superficial feature of thenurse’s hypocritically reassuring face. Situating both the spatial organizationof the sanatorium and the scientific clinical techniques of the sanatorialistwithin a disciplinary economy, the sonnet’s emphasis once again falls on theindictment of a bankrupt system of social management whose concerns ulti-mately lie less with the treatment of its patients than with the maintenanceof its institutional authority.

This focus on social control is absolutely consonant with the position ofprominent sanatorialists. Arthur Latham, for instance, in his 1903 PrizeEssay on the Erection of “The King Edward VII Sanatorium” for Consumption,rationalizes his detailed architectural plans largely in terms of the controlafforded by segregation (including the separation of the sexes, patients of dif-ferent social classes, and patients in differing stages of illness),14 a principlethat finds its most sweeping formulation in his statement that “sanatoriumtreatment is based upon a careful regulation of a patient’s life in all itshygienic and medical details. . . . In order to direct a sanatorium efficiently,the physician must have absolute power; he must be an autocrat, and hisword must be law” (58–59). Whereas sanatorialists like Latham justify thisautocracy on medical grounds, Ferguson’s text places it in a less flatteringlight by connecting it to the doctor’s overriding concern for “the credit of theplace.” Though the management of death was always part of the sanatoriumtreatment, and was frequently explained in terms of patient morale and the



avoidance of unnecessary excitation, as the open-air cure was increasinglychallenged by scientific medicine this managerial role came overtly to serve astatistical function. Seeking to protect the credibility of their therapeuticmodel, many sanatorialists sought to bolster the perception by both theirpatients and the population at large of the efficacy of the open-air cure—adrive which led to the occlusion of examples of unsuccessful treatment andat its extreme to the routine discharge of “moribund patients” as a means ofavoiding the association of their imminent deaths with the sanatorium.

Insofar as Ferguson’s sequence represents an experience of tuberculosis inthe early decades of the twentieth century, that experience is mediated by anumber of different cultural paradigms and founded upon an understandingof the tubercular body that is consequently highly variable. If the very pro-duction of the poems invokes (and unwittingly gainsays) the persistentromantic type of the consumptive genius whose tubercular body becomesthe basis of heightened creative capacity, the first, second, and fifth sonnetsthat frame the sequence recall another aspect of the nineteenth-century con-figuration of the disease. In their prayerful supplications and theologicaltones, they bespeak an approach to the tubercular body notable for itsemphasis on the progressive disappearance of the latter, at once remarkingthe grossest material aspect of the disease—the literal consumption or wast-ing of the body—and sublimating that materiality into a spiritual teleology.Adjacent to, and in some measure competing with, these residual tubercularformations are the emergent approaches to the tubercular body representedin the third and fourth sonnets and exemplified by social and scientific med-icine. In the case of the former, the body as such is rendered relatively incon-sequential as it is comprehended, on the one hand, as an index ofenvironmental conditions and, on the other, as the object of disciplinarycontrol. In contrast, the tubercular body which becomes the object of med-ical science is grasped precisely at the level of its material being. It is reducedto an organic mechanism to be “sounded,” systematically penetrated by tech-nologically mediated practices aimed less at the body as a whole than at aseries of disarticulated and quantifiable interior states. The only major ele-ment of tuberculosis discourse that does not find itself represented in thebrief sequence is eugenic hereditarianism.

In its dispersion of the tubercular body across a range of discursiveregimes, Ferguson’s representational project is in no way unique. DonaldStewart’s Sanatorium presents an anatomy of tuberculosis whose general con-tours are remarkably similar. Narrating its protagonist, Clive’s, arrival andsubsequent life at Whitcombe sanatorium, the novel provides a more exten-sive articulation of many of the features of Ferguson’s account. Rudimentary



in its plotting, the novel proceeds more or less chronologically from the pointof Clive’s discovery of his illness through the years of his stay at “the san.”Itself an instantiation of one of its character’s desire to write a book that“would be different from most of the others, . . . a glorified clinical historyof an illness” (233), Sanatorium is notable for its detailed and frequentlytechnical account of tuberculosis. If the aspiring novelist Baxter reacts to hisperception that “disease is almost taboo in literature” as anything other thana “subsidiary element” (234), and imagines a text in which tuberculosis itselfbecomes the main character, “each chapter . . . start[ing] with a temperaturereading and a pulse rate or a chest diagram, something to give the keynote ofthe chapter” (233–34), the impulse would seem to be one that Stewartshares. As a result, the relative paucity of attention to the “human relation-ships and psychological changes” that Baxter disparagingly identifies as the“principal subject” (234) of conventional literature finds some compensationin the novel’s obsession with the medical details that form the substance ofthe clinical history, a genre whose virtues Baxter’s devoted reading of TheLancet leads him to extol as “a genuine form of literature” (232).

Ventriloquizing the full range of tuberculosis discourse in turn, the novelunsurprisingly includes residual nineteenth-century notions of the diseasealongside those native to the early twentieth century. The persistent type ofthe romantic consumptive once again makes its appearance, predictablyembodied by the protonovelist, Baxter. “If you treat it carefully,” he contends,“sickness can give you a new character. It can give you a new viewpoint, a phi-losophy of living—especially tuberculosis. It’s most conducive to high think-ing. You can live for years with it and get endless sympathy andencouragement for the development of your philosophy. I suppose that’s whythe best people choose it—Chopin, Tchekov and Gissing and KatherineMansfield. It’s so aesthetic and imaginative” (170–71). In addition to this ges-ture to the aesthetic potential of tuberculosis, Sanatorium shares much withFerguson’s sonnets in offering its readers an introduction to, and critique of,the practices of the sanatorialists. In his focus on the management of death,and its conjunction with concerns for the maintenance of institutionalauthority, Stewart presents a scene that is remarkably similar to that ofFerguson’s fourth sonnet. In a case where one of the patients “had died sud-denly and created a great deal of excitement,” Clive informs us that, return-ing from breakfast, he finds that the staff “had arranged a passage of screensbetween the bed and the door so that they could get the stretcher out unseen”(129). And if there is any doubt regarding the motivation for this disappear-ing act, the text has already prepared its readers for this scene with Clive’s pre-ceding comment that “the bed cases were like the deaths which occurred from



time to time, and which made a reluctant appearance on the reports. The OldMan [the superintendent] detested death on the premises, and usually man-aged a transfer to a hospital for the moribund patient. A death at Whitcombewas a form of personal affront” (79). While the patients’ denomination of thesanatorium superintendent as “the Old Man” bespeaks the absolute authorityof the paternal autocrat much valued by the sanatorialists, the text remainsunwilling to accept a purely medical account of that valorization.

Moving through the usual contenders in debates over tuberculosis, thenovel opens, for instance, with a nod to the eugenicist’s notion of the dis-ease as based in an inherited constitutional predisposition. Having arrivedat the san, Clive remembers the moment of his diagnosis and imagines that“it was as if he had been prepared years beforehand for this August eveningin the doctor’s consulting-room. It was as if his whole life had been a prepa-ration, a leading up to this encounter. . . . That being so,” he asks, “howcould one regard the doctor’s verdict but as the most natural and expectedthing that could have happened?” (5). This hereditarian emphasis on theinevitability and naturalness of disease is quickly succeeded by its hygieni-cist opposite, and we are confronted with the environmental and educa-tional emphases of social medicine as Clive is made to reflect that: “They saythat the atmosphere [at the san] is very much like that of a school. . . . Aschool where, as one might say, good health is the only subject taught” (10).Reflecting the sanatorialist move toward a self-policing internalization of aregimentedly hygienic lifestyle (what Sir Robert Philip refers to as the“supreme value . . . [of ] the incessant promulgation of the principles ofhealthy living—the practical re-creation of the ordinary dwelling on physio-logical (sanatorium) lines” [3]), Baxter comments that “there’s only onetreatment for tuberculosis—and that isn’t a treatment really. There are notreatments and no cures. But there’s one thing which can be a tremendoushelp, and that’s discipline” (S, 97).

The text is equally interested in the bodily materiality of tuberculosis, anemphasis that is manifest in its representation of the therapeutic models towhich the characters are subject. On the one hand, Clive’s illness is graspedthrough the model of the rest cure with which the sanatorium is perhaps mostclosely associated. Predicated upon a vitalistic model of the body, and avaguely humoral model of disease, the rest cure comprehends tuberculosis asthe product of overstimulation and the resulting depletion of vital energy,which makes the individual less able to resist the encroachment of disease.15

Clive’s initial hemorrhage, for example, is understood to be the effect, andexternal sign, of the excessive excitation to which his journey to, and arrival at,the sanatorium have subjected him. As a result he is immediately prescribed a



course of complete rest designed to eliminate both physical and emotionalexcitation (and the toxins they were thought to produce), thereby replenish-ing his body’s reserves of vital energy. This complete rest is then followed by acourse of controlled exertion, a treatment predicated upon a protoimmuno-logical model of autoinoculation. Presuming that excitation released tubercu-lar toxins into the body, sanatorium physicians frequently sought to draw onthe body’s own resources by prescribing exercise in small, gradually increasingincrements in order to release controlled amounts of toxin, which would intheory provoke the body into the production of antitoxins.

Founded in a vitalism that was rapidly receding by the turn of the century,this therapeutic regime shares some elements with the emergent scientificmedical model to which Clive is subject in turn. Specifically, the apprehen-sion of particular bodily manifestations (the hemorrhage is the most dramaticexample) as signs of internal bodily states is a feature of the rest cure that sci-entific medicine takes up and seeks to transform. The introduction of ther-mometry as a key element of the rest cure is an important example in thisrespect, for if Clive’s hemorrhage is the first sign of his overexcited body, thesanatorium physicians immediately turn to the finer, more carefully calibratedset of signs provided by the thermometer. Correlating febridity with levels ofdisease activity, the Old Man reads Clive’s progress in the detailed charts oftemperatures that are taken on a regular basis. Perhaps the most canonical lit-erary representation of tuberculosis and sanatorium treatment at the turn ofthe twentieth century, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain provides anexemplary account of the role of thermometry. In an early chapter, appropri-ately entitled “The Thermometer,” Mann articulates Hans Castorp’s induc-tion into the culture of the sanatorium in terms of his reluctant acceptanceof the imperative that he purchase a thermometer of his own and take up theregime of charting the fluctuations in his temperature. As the text makesclear, thermometry occupies a crossroad of two distinct approaches to tuber-culosis. On the one hand, it functions within the disciplinary economy ofsocial medicine as a means of regulating lifestyle, or of making the disease aprimary work of life (the typical regime includes the measurement andrecording of temperatures at regular intervals, at least four times a day), andon the other it finds a place within the scientific medical model. Behrens (thesanatorium superintendent) is notably an expert with the stethoscope, x-raymachine, and scalpel (regularly performing artificial pneumothoraxes on hispatients), and it is within this positivist approach to the tubercular body thathis attention to temperature charts also finds a home. While this recourse tographic representations of internal states plays its role within the regime ofthe rest cure, and contributes to the disciplinary regulation of life at which



social medicine aims, it also opens on to the positivist thrust of scientificmedicine and its bacteriological impetus.

Approaching the body mechanistically and microscopically as the relationbetween micro-organisms and the larger bodily structures with which theyinteract, the scientific medical approach to tuberculosis is largely uninterestedin the body as a totality and instead apprehends the tubercular body only inbits and pieces. As Ott explains, “The bacillus as seen through the microscopeprovided an image of a peculiar and disembodied entity, not obviously relatedto any human being. . . . In scientific journals, the image of the bacillus beganto substitute for the identity of the consumptives themselves” (64). Thisprocess of substitution is, in fact, one by which Clive is eventually affected, asthe Old Man proves to be, more than merely an autocratic regulator oflifestyle, a champion of the new scientific approach to disease.

The diagnostic techniques that begin with the introduction of the stetho-scope and thermometer, and eventually come to include the microscope andradiography, bear witness to an approach to the body that is no longer con-tent to read the signs of disease on the body’s surface and aims instead at pen-etrating its interiority, discerning the functioning of its mechanism, andquantifying the information thus obtained. This impetus finds its therapeu-tic analogue in the development of surgical techniques that sought to treatthe tubercular body through physical intervention into its functioning.Emerging at a time when the rest cure was the dominant, if only pseudo-sci-entific, therapeutic regime for tuberculosis, rudimentary thoracic surgery—the predominant forms of which were artificial pneumothorax orthoracoplasty—sought to appropriate the principles of the latter, whiledetaching them from their ambiguous foundation in nonmechanistic, vital-ist theories of the body. If the rest cure aimed at reducing the overstimula-tion of the body as a whole, thereby replenishing its reserves of vital energy,the thoracic surgeon sought to apply the principle of rest at a mechanicallevel. In the case of artificial pneumothorax, various gases (or in some casesother foreign objects such as ping pong balls) were injected into the spacebetween the two layers of pleura, thereby deflating the affected lung andforcing it to rest. Thoracoplasty sought the same end through much moreradical (not to say gruesome) means. As Vere, another sanatorium patient,luridly describes it:

The operation’s so severe . . . that they have to do it in three stages. There’s onlya few men in England can do it successfully. Naturally, they’re rather pleasedwith themselves. First of all, they cut the phrenic nerve in your neck [whichcontrols the movement of the diaphragm]. That’s nothing, just a preliminarycanter. Then, when you’ve got used to being without that, they get down to



the job properly. They turn you over on your face and split you right downone side as far as your seat nearly. Then they saw off yards and yards of rib,and, if you’re still alive, they sew you up again. The idea is, roughly that thefree ends of the ribs will knit together and, in the process, pull the diseased sideof your chest right in. (81)

One of the few, self-satisfied men to whom Vere refers, the Old Man finds inClive a perfect candidate for surgical intervention, and though he proves notto require thoracoplasty, he reluctantly becomes one of the “AP” (artificialpneumothorax) patients upon whom the Old Man bestows a privileged sta-tus within the san hierarchy. Indeed, the occasion of his AP leads Clive toreflect upon the therapeutic crossroads at which he finds himself located.“Laying there with the air pouring steadily into his side,” the narratorinforms us, “Clive wondered what was going on inside. What were the T.B.’sthinking of this new move on the part of the enemy? It was unfair really, thesudden introduction of mechanical aids in a hand-to-hand fight” (251).Employing the martial figures of speech common to the vitalist rest cure(with its emphasis on the body’s vital power of resistance and its ability torepel microscopic invaders), Clive remarks the shift away from such vitalisminitiated by the “introduction of mechanical aids.”

Both Stewart’s and Ferguson’s texts, thus, bear witness to a certain mobil-ity of the “tubercular body” as a signifier. They at very least evince its inde-terminacy as a product of historical processes. Within the same momentand space (in both cases the sanatorium performs this localization) bodiesdesignated “tubercular” are understood through a range of more or less dis-continuous discourses. If I have described these somewhat schematically asthe spiritualizing teleology of the residual nineteenth-century models, thehygienicism of the social medicine, the hereditarianism of the eugenicists,the positivism of the scientific medical model, and the vitalism of the restcure, this schematism unjustifiably suggests harder distinctions and greaterdegrees of discursive self-consistency than there are to be found in fact.Rather than distinct positions, these tendencies bleed into one another incomplex ways. If one attends to the details of any of these discursiveregimes, one discovers less a spectrum or a progression, than a web in whicheach regime is articulated by its connections to a variety of others. BothThyrea and Sanatorium demonstrate how tubercular bodies move throughthis discursive web, at times marking the intersection of multiple discursivestrands, and at times finding themselves disjunctively situated in the spacesbetween competing strands, bordered by their lines of force but unassimil-able to any particular line. If this dispersion bespeaks the historical process



of transformation to which the understanding of tuberculosis was subject atthe time, the body produced by these discursive relays as their impossibleobject is also symptomatic of a cultural formation that is not simplyreducible to changes in medical-scientific paradigms.

Making Non-Sense of the Tubercular Body; or, Sometimes You Hack Up the Strangest Dings

Though there is, in certain instances, a degree of overlap or cooperationbetween discourses, it would be misleading to characterize their relationshipas one of benign coexistence, or of simple contradiction. Though Stewartand Ferguson admirably represent the complex and contradictory discursiveweb that inhabits the sanatorium, their texts stop short of analyzing themode of relationship between the individual discourses that constitute thatweb, a mode in which each discursive regime attempts to capture the tuber-cular body and fix it within a particular sociosymbolic formation. Thisprocess tends, moreover, to be one in which competing regimes are eithercompletely overthrown or somehow assimilated. The hygienic and environ-mental emphases of social medicine, for instance, attempt to overcome theconstitutional and hereditary focus of a eugenicist account of the disease;though bacteriological approaches to tuberculosis are viewed as potentiallycomplementary to the hygienic model, their role remains subsidiary. Almostprecisely the opposite position is maintained by the eugenicist, for whomhygiene and germs are not utterly irrelevant but occupy the status of con-tributing factors that might be taken into account after the question ofgenetic predisposition has been addressed. Similarly for bacteriology, com-peting accounts of the disease come to have at best a secondary role in rela-tion to the all-important germ.

We might understand the sociosymbolic field thus constituted and con-tested by tubercular discourse in terms of the “ideological quilt” that SlavojZizek describes in The Sublime Object of Ideology as “the multitude of ‘float-ing signifiers’, of proto-ideological elements, [that are] structured into a uni-fied field through the intervention of a certain ‘nodal point’ . . . which ‘quilts’them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning” (87). In this context, it isclear enough that a variety of tubercular discourses attempt to structure andunify the sociosymbolic field they occupy in different ways, and that in sodoing they fix upon different signifying elements from within that field as thenodal points which perform the quilting. The hygienicist quilting of the ide-ological field might totalize itself around “sputum” as its nodal point, whereasthe field might be bacteriologically quilted by “mycobacterium tuberculosis” or



“tubercle bacillus,” and a eugenicist quilt might be punctuated by “tuberculardiathesis.” Zizek contends that “the point de capiton is . . . the word which, asa word, on the level of the signifier itself, unifies a given field, constitutes itsidentity: it is, so to speak, the word to which ‘things’ themselves refer to rec-ognize themselves in their unity” (95–96). Though the nodal point ostensi-bly derives its ideological function from the qualities to which it refers, fromits power to describe or encapsulate a certain aspect of reality, the ideologicalquilting performed by any particular point de capiton does not simply dependon this reference to a series of qualities. Capitonnage, to the contrary, does notoccur until those aspects of reality apparently described by the nodal pointcome to find their identity through the image it presents.16 This model of ide-ological totalization finds examples in each of the tubercular points de capitonI have suggested. “Sputum,” for instance, arguably connotes a series of qual-ities associated with tuberculosis: a vector of disease transmission, the possi-bility of uncontrollable and unpredictable contagion, the specter ofunsanitary conditions, the confusion of boundaries distinguishing bodilyinteriority from exteriority, the disorganization of bodily structures (such asthe striated tissue which envelops tuberculous matter in closed tuberculosis)in the chaotic eruption of tubercular lesions in open, or active, tuberculosis,etc. The totalization of a hygienic ideological quilt occurs, however, notthrough this power to describe the disease, but at the moment when thetubercular, or potentially tubercular, subject comes to find its identity as theproducer of sputum—as the dreaded promiscuous expectorator or the well-disciplined owner of the spit flask. A similar chain of tubercular signifierscould, of course, be stabilized into a different ideological configurationshould they come to refer to a different nodal point. The substitution of“tubercle bacillus” for “sputum,” for instance, puts the qualities to which thelatter ostensibly refers to a different sort of ideological use. Rather than themaster signifier to which the tubercular signifying chain refers, “sputum”becomes, in this instance, just another fact of tuberculosis that takes its mean-ing from “tubercle bacillus”—the point de capiton of the bacteriological quilt.Sputum becomes significant as a substance that possibly reveals the presenceof the dreaded bacterium. While “tubercle bacillus” once again ostensiblyderives its power within the tubercular sociosymbolic from the qualities itconnotes (e.g., tuberculosis as a microscopic phenomenon, tuberculosis as adisease governed by physical and chemical laws, as susceptible to explanationand treatment in terms of those laws, etc.), the function of “tubercle bacillus”as nodal point is once again located not in its ability to encapsulate a certaindescription of the disease but in the extent to which the experience of beingtubercular comes to be identified with that signifier. Such an identification



can be located, for example, in the popular substitution of the microscopicimage of the germ culture for the image of a human patient as the dominantrepresentation of the disease. Obviously, the totalization performed by thisprocess of identification fixes the tubercular sociosymbolic very differentlythan that performed by the expectorative identification.

Rather than tracing the particular ideological ramifications of these differ-ent attempts to totalize the tubercular sociosymbolic, however, I want tofocus on their general symptomatic significance. Instead, that is, of taking upthe implications of the different meanings to which the “tubercular body” ismade to refer, I want to pursue the significance of the very attempt to stabi-lize such references. This symptomaticity is to be conceived in the strong(not colloquial) sense: as designating “a formation whose very consistencyimplies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject” (Zizek 21). Inkeeping with this logic of the symptom, it is necessary to consider the extentto which the struggle to totalize the tubercular sociosymbolic, to fix themeaning of the “tubercular body” (regardless of the specific form of the total-ization or of the particular meaning assigned) indicates a necessary epistemo-logical lacuna upon which the consistency of the totalized formation ispredicated and which constitutes its limit. In this sense, the various forma-tions of the tubercular sociosymbolic order, the different meanings to whichthe “tubercular body” is attached, rely for their consistency upon the occlu-sion of the possibility that the tubercular body is persistently and fundamen-tally resistant to meaning, or that tuberculosis as a mode of embodimentexposes the body as a sheer material fact. Whereas the discourses surround-ing tuberculosis tend to understand themselves as competing to discover orestablish the true character of the tubercular body, the consistency of theregimes of significance at which they arrive are founded precisely on theirnon-knowledge of tubercular bodies insofar as the latter reveal a persistentand profound lack of meaning—an instance of sheer, stupid existence overwhose void of sense symbolic determinations of the “tubercular body” arepapered. In this light, the tubercular body and its resistance to symbolic cap-ture (to which both Thyrea and Sanatorium attend) appear as an index ofmore than historical vicissitudes in the experience and understanding oftuberculosis or of an incompletion in the state of relevant knowledge.Disjunctively sliding through the web of tubercular discourse it traces thelocus of bodily non-sense around which those historical processes organizethemselves and upon the ignorance of which their constitution depends. Therepeated attempt to inscribe the meaning of the tubercular body, to compre-hend that form of embodiment, announces the body as precisely that whichcannot be inscribed—neither a surface upon which meaning can be written,



nor the source of meaning to be inscribed—and in so doing exscribes (to useJean-Luc Nancy’s term) the body as a wound of sense, the limit of thought.17

This process of exscription notably takes place in relation to questions ofvitality and mortality, questions to which Ferguson points in describing thesanatorium as a space within which “life joins hands with death, and hopewith fear” (3.4) and its inhabitants as “this death-o’er-shadowed crew” (2.10).One might recall, in particular, the centrality to both Ferguson’s and Stewart’stexts of mortality, a phenomenon whose exploration ranges from the meta-physical to the managerial. This is admittedly a fairly banal observation vis-à-vis the representation of a disease whose diagnosis was little more than a deathsentence, yet the form and localization of this preoccupation are noteworthy.Specifically, Ferguson’s and Stewart’s shared interest in the sanatorialist desireto occlude manifestations of death through the carefully managed proceduresfor the removal of corpses and the frequent expulsion of “moribund cases”from the sanatorium is in no way peculiar to their texts. It also figures promi-nently, for example, in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, whose protag-onist, Hans Castorp, is increasingly disturbed by these managerial practicesand finally is led to complain: “We live up here, next door to the dying, closeto misery and suffering; and not only we act as though we had nothing to dowith it, but it is all carefully arranged in order to spare us and prevent ourcoming into contact with it, or seeing anything at all—they will take away thegentleman rider [a deceased comrade] while we are at breakfast or tea”(295).18 Notwithstanding the therapeutic and statistical gentrification of theseprocedures by the sanatorialists (or critiques thereof ), the significance of thedrive to occlude or domesticate death must be reconsidered in light of theprocesses of figuration through which death itself repeatedly is approached.

The elementary form of this figural practice is available in the openinglines of Ferguson’s third sonnet:

He caught a chill in Leicester, he came here;—He came here with his little store of gold,To this grim dwelling, bare, and clean, and cold.Where his life joins hands with death, and hope with fear:He told us how in Leicester’s city drear,On coughing, down his garments rolledThe warm crimson flood. . . . (3.1–6)

A quick reading of this passage might suggest the interpretation implicit inmy hasty quotation from it above: one in which death is understood as aquality that generally permeates the space of the sanatorium. The first two



lines’ repetition of the deictic “he came here,” followed by the third line’sdeathly qualification of the sanatorium as “grim,” “bare,” “clean,” and “cold,”easily leads one to read the “where” with which the fourth line opens as acontinuing reference to the space of the sanatorium. The punctuation withwhich the fourth and fifth lines conclude, however, complicates an attemptto read the fourth line as simply describing the sanatorium. The period at theend of line three grammatically separates the subsequent introduction of thespace in which “his life joins hands with death” from the preceding descrip-tion of the sanatorium, a grammatical separation confirmed by the colonwith which the fourth line ends, and which suggests that the space in whichlife comes to feel death’s grasp is yet to be defined. The locus of death’s fear-some encroachment upon the hopefulness of life is, as the fifth and sixthlines indicate, ultimately less that of the sanatorium than of the patient’slungs themselves. Making its appearance on the stage of life from the con-vulsing enclosure of the pulmonary system, death arrives in the form of the“warm crimson flood” which “down his garments rolled.”

This figuration of death in terms of the violence of a pulmonary hemor-rhage is hardly surprising, nor is the absolutely canonical status of thetrope—the hemorrhage is, after all, the tubercular symptom par excellence.The full significance of this central tubercular figure, and the conjunction ofthe body and mortality it performs, is, however, obscured by Ferguson’sunderstated, not to say insipid, diction. A characteristic of this metaphoricembodiment of death, which is given voice only in terms of Ferguson’s some-what anaemic “fear,” is more fully developed in other instances of themetaphor. The requisite representation of the hemorrhage in Stewart’s text is,for instance, markedly more eloquent in this respect. Immediately uponClive’s arrival at the sanatorium, the vaguely diathetic signs of his disease areunequivocally replaced by a violent hemorrhage. Musing on this momentousevent, the narrator informs us that

sooner or later there arrives a moment when you may look in the bowl andface the bright blood with indifference, with contempt, sometimes with a sortof queer pride. But the first experience is overwhelming. Rarely can you sub-due the feeling of panic, of being submerged in a flood tide of death. With agreat effort Clive took the handkerchief away from his mouth. He dropped hishand to his lap and stared down at it. It seemed to him that a part of himselfwas crushed up in this square of linen. . . . Death washed back about him ingreat waves. (12)

This description shares its fundamental element with that of Ferguson: thehemorrhage is once again the “flood tide of death.” Whereas for Ferguson the



hemorrhagic embodiment of death is merely characterized as a source of“fear,” however, Stewart’s text understands it as “overwhelming” and a causeof “panic.” The significance of these qualifications should not be underesti-mated, insofar as they bear witness to an experience of both death and thebodily function with which it has been identified as cognitively ungraspable,even monstrous. It is not only incomprehensible but provokes a completeexclusion from consciousness. The monstrosity thus indicated comes, more-over, to take on a definite form as we witness Clive look down at the hand-kerchief in his lap and are told that “it seemed to him that a part of himselfwas crushed up in this square of linen.” Framed in its isolation there, Clivesees a coagulating mass, a wound that has detached itself from his body andtaken up a sort of separate existence, haunting the body to which it belongswith its refusal to be integrated into the meaningful corporeal totality. A partof that which is most properly his own lies staring back at him, an incom-prehensible, non-sensical, monstrous thing—a manifestation all the morehorrifying for raising the possibility that it cannot be domesticated as a per-verse exception to the presumed norm of bodily significance.

If Stewart’s text remains slightly reticent in its attention to this monstrous,sheerly material bodily remainder that is unassimilable by those symbolizingprocesses that would grant the body its meaning, the language of a text likeAndré Gide’s L’Immoraliste is more explicit. Another example of the period’salmost stock representation of the tubercular hemorrhage, Gide has his pro-tagonist, Michel, narrate the event:

It filled my mouth . . . but it wasn’t a flow of bright blood now, like the otherhemorrhages; it was a thick, hideous clot I spat onto the floor with disgust. Istaggered a few steps. I was horribly upset, trembling with fear and rage. Forup till now I had thought my recovery would simply happen, step by step; allI needed to do was wait. This brutal accident was a step backward. Strangelyenough, the first hemorrhages had not affected me; I remembered how theyhad left me almost serene. Then what was causing my horror, my fear now?The fact that I was beginning, alas, to love life. I turned back, bent down, tooka straw and raising the clot of spittle, laid it on my handkerchief. I stared at it.The blood was ugly, blackish—something slimy, hideous. (25)

Whereas Stewart suggests that the fully incomprehensible initial eruption ispossibly subject to a familiarizing process of recognition that would reinvestthe body with meaning, even rendering it the source of a “sort of queerpride,” Gide represents the initial hemorrhages as innocuously consonantwith the rationality of a “step by step” recovery, a meaningful bodily teleol-ogy that is suddenly interrupted by its exposure to the “hideous,” deathly



thing. This reversal of trajectory aside, Gide’s representation of the hemor-rhage as the conjunction of embodiment and mortality is consistent withStewart’s and strongly emphasizes its monstrosity. The description of theevent as a “brutal accident” remarks its irrationality, while the “disgusting”character of the resulting object (the “ugly, blackish, . . . slimy” body that isthe clot) situates the latter as radically unassimilable by the body as a totality.Signifying, as it does, in relation to notions of ingestion, assimilation, intro-jection, and incorporation (not to mention the commonplace figural exten-sion of this gustatory paradigm to a range of relations between the subject andits world), “disgust” offers an especially powerful means of approaching thehemorrhagic thing. Insofar as disgust typically signifies the body’s (and thesubject’s) inability to assimilate a foreign object or instance of alterity, theeffects of the disgusting hemorrhagic mass are even more profound: no longersimply designating the limits of the body’s capacity to incorporate a form ofotherness reassuringly marked as external, in this instance the body finds itselfinhabited by, and belonging to, the object of disgust, the embodiment of hor-rible, deathly otherness, that exposes and divides it.

A final, and especially instructive, articulation of this figural schema isprovided by Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Immemorially operating underthe sign of mortality, Hans Castorp loses both his parents to death in earlychildhood, followed shortly thereafter by his custodial grandfather. Thoughlargely beyond the scope of memory, this series of deaths makes its impres-sion upon Hans, an impression that provides the key coordinates for his sub-sequent exploration of mortality. These early encounters with death areencapsulated in Hans’s recollection of his grandfather’s funeral, an event thatleads him precociously to reflect on the tension between the “aspect [of ]death [as] a holy, a pensive, a spiritual state, possessed of a certain mournfulbeauty,” and that in which it appears as “precisely the opposite, . . . very phys-ical, . . . very material” (27). Struck by the sense of spiritual permanence pro-voked by the dead body of his grandfather as it lies in state, Hans nonethelessunderstands the function of the funeral rituals in embellishing thisdemeanor, as that of “palliat[ing] the other aspect of death, the side whichwas neither beautiful nor exactly sad, but somehow almost improper—in itslowly, physical side—to slur it over and prevent one from being conscious ofit” (27). Approaching death as that which is at once one’s ultimate destinyand that which one is radically unable to make one’s own, the text simulta-neously associates this “impropriety” of death with a gross bodily physicality.What is more, the tension between death’s two “aspects” is incapable of con-taining the insistence upon the senseless character of the dead body. The lat-ter finally becomes a wound which must be “palliated”; affecting the living



body as well, it exposes the presumption of corporeal significance as littlemore than an attempt to “slur over” a profound lack of sense.

The childhood connection of death and the body as limits to thought iseventually confirmed by Hans’s arrival at the sanatorium, even as the gener-ality of the initial meditation on the relationship between embodiment andmortality is given a more specific form. Indeed, Hans’s inaugural experienceof the sanatorium draws him immediately back to his youthful reflections.As his cousin introduces him to the grounds and buildings of the sanato-rium, we are informed that

Hans Castorp suddenly stopped, rooted to the spot by a perfectly ghastlysound coming from a little distance off round a bend in the corridor. It wasnot a loud sound, but so distinctly horrible that Hans Castorp made a wry faceand looked wide-eyed at his cousin. It was coughing, obviously, a man cough-ing; but coughing like to no other Hans Castorp had ever heard, and com-pared with which any other had been a magnificent and healthy manifestationof life: a coughing that had no conviction and gave no relief, that did not evencome out in paroxysms, but was just a feeble, dreadful, welling up of the juicesof organic dissolution. (12)

So striking is this horrifying tubercular symptom that Hans is led to exclaim:“It isn’t a human cough at all. . . . It is just as if one could look right into himwhen he coughs, and see what it looks like: all slime and mucous” (12).Though Mann’s figuration of the deathly tubercular body does not return usto the scene of the hemorrhage, his description of the cough—as “ghastly,”“horrible,” even “inhuman”—clearly belongs to the same figural project. Thecough, like the hemorrhage, is an unthinkable bodily manifestation. Havingbeen confronted by the sound of the cough, Hans immediately resorts to tax-onomy in an attempt to impose a sense of order and familiarity: “There aredifferent kinds of cough,” he begins, “dry and loose, and people always saythe loose one is better than the other” (12). This attempt is, however, ulti-mately futile, and Hans is forced to admit that his language is inadequate tothe task—with each new denomination he is compelled to confess that “thatis very far from being the right word for it” (12). As with the hemorrhage,the monstrously unrecognizable character of the cough resides in its exposureof the body as subject to a sort of senseless, mechanical existence. Whatseems most to horrify Hans is the notion that the cough serves no purpose;as the body is racked by uncontrollable convulsions, which “gave no relief,”the presumption of bodily significance is once again given the lie. Instead ofan inherently meaningful organic whole, Hans is confronted by a bodymarked at its core by a tendency toward mindlessly repetitive eruption.



The particular power of Mann’s articulation of the relationship betweenincarnation and mortality is the clarity of its refusal to make the tubercularbody (or the diseased body more generally) into an exceptional form ofembodiment. When Hans feels that the sound of the cough allows him tosee into the slimy, mucous-filled interior of the body, the state of “organicdissolution” he finds revealed there becomes the essential feature of, morethan merely the tubercular body, the body in general. If the psychic discom-fort produced by Hans’s shocking introduction to the sanatorium is limitedby his ability to locate the monstrous cough at some distance from himself,ongoing attempts to contain its effects quickly prove futile. Within a day ofhis arrival, Hans is led to complain:

If I only knew why I have palpitations the whole time—it is very disquiet-ing; I keep thinking about it. For, you see, a person ordinarily has palpitationof the heart when he is frightened, or when he is looking forward to somegreat joy. But when the heart palpitates all by itself, without any reason,senselessly, of its own accord, so to speak, I feel that’s uncanny, you under-stand, as if the body was going its own gait without any reference to the soul,like a dead body, only it is not really dead—there isn’t any such thing, ofcourse—but leading a very active existence all on its own account, growinghair and nails and doing lively business in the physical and chemical line, soI’ve been told. (71)

Given Hans’s oft-proclaimed health, it is especially troubling to find theessential features (if not the symptoms) of the coughing tubercular bodyreplicated in his own. Whereas the tubercular cough derives its horrificpower from the inability to locate its mechanical repetition within a mean-ingful schema, Hans finds the same propensity for meaningless activitywithin his own ostensibly healthy body. The palpitations of his heart are “dis-quieting” not because he fears they have some determinate sinister signifi-cance, but precisely because he suspects their utter lack of significance. He isunsettled to discover the possibility that his body has a life of its own, that itgoes on “without any reason, senselessly, of its own accord.” Pinpointing thesource of a profound insecurity, Hans’s cousin, Joachim, admits that “it mayeasily be that one involuntarily tries to find an emotion which would explain,or even half-way explain the [body’s] goings-on”(72). Unable to sustain anunderstanding of the body as an essentially rational system that is periodi-cally subject to malfunction, both Hans and Joachim speak to the possibilitythat the body’s rationality is produced as an “involuntary,” and frequentlyunsatisfactory, reaction to the manifestation of the body’s senseless “goings-on.” Indeed, Joachim’s description of the “involuntary” process of explaining



the body’s aimless activity neatly encapsulates the symptomatic function ofthe competing attempts to quilt the tubercular sociosymbolic order.

In following this figural trajectory that announces the body’s exscription,we initially find the lungs (as synecdoche of the tubercular body) articulatedas excretory organs whose excreta is that of a monstrous, death-permeatedhemorrhagic object. To the extent that this objectal embodiment of death isunderstood as a form of excretion, it might be taken not as a limit to thebody as a meaningful totality but as an unassimilable remainder whose expul-sion confirms the rationality of the system from which it has been excluded.Mann’s extension of the figural schema, however, explicitly to include notonly pulmonary excreta but the excreting organs themselves, confirms theimpossibility of thus separating the horrible hemorrhagic (or in Mann’s case,sputal) object from the body that produces it. The power of Mann’s articula-tion of the tubercular cough, as an embodiment of death that shares the logicof the hemorrhagic clot, lies in its insistence on presenting this class of bod-ily manifestation as intractably bound to the body as a presumably meaning-ful whole. The monstrous tubercular thing becomes—rather than aresolutely senseless object whose exclusion from the corporeal system guaran-tees the rationality of the latter—a fundamentally non-sensical aspect of thebody which underlies, and is the cause of, that aspect which would lend tothe body the appearance of a rational system. What is more, Mann’s textreveals that this mode of embodiment establishes a paradoxical relationbetween life and death. Whereas Ferguson’s figuration of the tubercular lungsas that space “where . . . life joins hands with death, and hope with fear”immediately suggests an opposition between the tangible mortality of thetubercular body and the vitality of the healthy body, Mann’s exploitation ofthe same figural schema allows Ferguson’s image to be read on a different reg-ister. No longer held in opposition to the forces of life, the hemorrhagic“flood tide of death” comes to be isomorphic with the body (healthy or dis-eased) understood as an organism that simply “goes on,” an instance of some-thing like “bare life.”19 It is within this logic that we must finally approachthe tubercular body as the space in which “life joins hands with death.”

The tubercular body, thus, instantiates the exposure of the body, and ofthe discursive regimes that both presuppose and attempt to fix its signifi-cance, simultaneously to the limits of death and bare life. If the confronta-tion with the first of these limits to, or fault lines within, the consistency ofthe tubercular sociosymbolic order results in the attempt to occlude manifes-tations of mortality, the reaction formation produced by the manifestation ofthe second limit is the transmutation of bare life into works of life—the work-ing over of bare life. Stewart’s Sanatorium is once again exemplary in its



exploration of this process. We have already noted that the hemorrhagiceruption formalizes Clive’s induction into the space of the sanatorium andintroduces the figural conjunction of the disease’s most material manifesta-tion with the forces of life and death. If, however, the hemorrhage is the mostwell-known and dramatic sign of tuberculosis, the extended period of com-plete rest to which Clive promptly is assigned provides the occasion for hisintroduction to an only slightly less classic embodiment of the disease: theexpectorating tubercular body. Making the acquaintance of the san’s mostenduring and persistent patient, Vere, Clive’s initial impressions find theirfocus in the spit flask that is his comrade’s constant companion. With an“expression of wonderment” Clive receives Vere’s proud proclamation:

This is my second bottle to-day. I filled one this morning. . . . Oh, I can spitquite well when I set my mind to it. It’s strange, isn’t it, how energetic the bodycan be when it’s sidetracked from the main purpose. After a lifetime of driftingI’ve found a single aim in existence—filling these bottles. And I work harderand more disinterestedly at this than I’ve ever done at anything else. My wholebeing is devoted to the work. I eat and sleep and rest solely that I may spit. (54)

This strange rearticulation of the Cartesian cogito at once reinforces the text’slocation of a tubercular ontology in gross bodily eruption and provides acounterpoint to the metaphoric conflation of the hemorrhagic flow with the“flood tide of death.” Anxieties regarding tuberculosis frequently found theirmost intensely charged object in the unregulated production of sputum. Evenin the absence of an accurate understanding of the vectors of disease transmis-sion, the expectorative expulsion of bodily fluids generated a particularly hys-terical response, one notable manifestation of which was the drive of publichealth reformers to secure legislative regulation of “promiscuous expectora-tion.” If transition from closed to open tuberculosis is marked by the break-down of the striated tissue that once encapsulated and contained tubercularlesions, this invisible breaching of bodily boundaries and disorganization ofbodily structures finds its visible and affectively charged analogue in thechaotic eruption of bodily interiority into environmental exteriority that iscommonly known as spitting.20 Seizing one of the most socially volatileaspects of the disease, the text presents the bodily processes of sputum produc-tion as a well-regulated work of life—a work that, as Vere’s insistence that hehas “worked harder and more disinterestedly” than ever before suggests, mustbe understood simultaneously in the terms of physical and aesthetic labor.

Both sputum and the hemorrhage are, thus, particularly resonant mani-festations of tuberculosis insofar as they function simultaneously on two



registers: they are, on the one hand, symbolic of social chaos and, on theother, unsettling reminders of the bare life of the body, a sort of bodily anar-chy. Whereas the hemorrhage is overwhelmingly associated with death, andunderstood as an event that is visited upon the passive sufferer, however,expectoration becomes a perfectible activity and a work of life—as Vereinsists, “My whole being is devoted to the work. I eat and sleep and restsolely that I may spit.” This modulation of expectoration as a work of self-production is perhaps most immediately comprehensible within the discipli-nary program of social medicine, and the antituberculosis movement morespecifically. Focusing on the role of the National Association for thePrevention of Tuberculosis ([NAPT], founded in 1898), Linda Bryder’sanalysis of the antituberculism in Britain at the turn of the century includesthe compelling argument that while the NAPT sought to downplay eugenicinquiries into hereditary predisposition to the disease in favor of an empha-sis on environmental influence, it studiously avoided advocating direct socialreform (aimed at eliminating living conditions productive of deleteriousenvironmental factors) and pursued instead an educational campaign thatsituated the problem at the level of individual responsibility (19–21). Centralto this educational program was the production of propaganda, prominentamong which were a wide range of self-help pamphlets instructing themasses in the prevention and treatment of the disease. Popularizing currentbiomedical knowledge regarding tuberculosis, these texts played a crucial rolein effecting the antituberculosis movement’s dominant belief that the diseasecould be most efficiently combated through the education of potential andactual sufferers. A particularly interesting example of this phenomenon inthe literature is F. E. Eaton’s The White Demon and How to Fight Him (1909).Vaguely Dickensian, Eaton’s text takes the form of a children’s morality talein which young Sheilah Murphy (an impoverished Irish lass) is visited by the“Spirit of Light” and her attending “faeries”: “Cleanliness,” “Fresh Air,”“Nourishing Food,” “Good Temper,” and “Perseverance.” Appalled by thedingy and decrepit family home in which Sheilah is doomed to live, theSpirit takes the occasion of a parental absence to instruct young Sheilah inthe principles of proper hygiene, an education she is expected to transmit toher family. The model of compassion in commenting on the death of aneighboring tubercular child, the Spirit is led to proclaim: “All this is verysad, . . . as far as that particular child is concerned, but there is to my minda much more serious side to the matter. If one child chooses to throw awayhis life it is bad enough. In a great many cases—I do not say all—he has him-self to blame; but, unfortunately, this particular child does not stop there. Itold you he had become dirty and careless, and when he coughs, his mouth



is filled with SPUTUM—. . . .” (6). As the exhortation elliptically concludesby receding into an eloquent significatory fullness, the emphasis is distinctlyremoved from the social situation of an impoverished working-class Irishfamily within which the dreaded “SPUTUM” plays its role and falls insteadon the fulfillment of individual responsibility (whether it be Sheila’s respon-sibility to compensate for the hygienic lack of her parents, or the irresponsi-bly “careless” behavior which constituted the now-deceased child’s choice tothrow away his life and endanger those of others). A perfectly canonicalexample of the widespread paranoia regarding the socially deleterious effectsof wanton sputum production, Eaton’s text makes the regulation of the anar-chy it represents a matter of individual self-regulation, the logical extensionof which is the ubiquitous presence of the spit flask.

This regulation of promiscuous expectoration (via the self-regulation ofthe expectorator) takes its rationale not from the perfection of the physicalbody but of the social body. Of no therapeutic value, the discipline of the spitflask is a measure designed to reduce contagion, the social chaos with whichsputum is symbolically permeated. The logic of this regulatory program is,however, more than merely hygienic in the limited sense of being governedby the desire to curtail contagion. It involves the reorganization of individ-ual character, or the production of character, in the habitualization of spit-ting: dutifully filling one’s flask does not merely save one’s neighbors frompossible contagion, but changes one’s mode of identification. Understandingthe work of expectoration in disciplinary terms too narrowly conceivedobscures the aesthetic register on which expectoration functions (at leastwithin Stewart’s representation thereof ). The work of self-production forwhich Vere’s expectoration provides the occasion, after all, casts the discipli-nary procedures of moral regulation in terms of aesthetic production andappreciation. Drawing on the category of disinterestedness, whose aestheticgenealogy ranges at least from Kant to Arnold, the text articulates the pro-duction of both life and character in terms of the work of art. It is necessary,in this context, to approach the “work” at which this formation aims simul-taneously as the labor of production and as the object produced (the work oroeuvre as a complete and self-enclosed totality).

To be somewhat schematic, the double logic of the work runs as follows.In laboring at spitting, one engages in a self-perfecting activity through whichone produces oneself as a work. The essence that guarantees the completenessof this work is a form of perfectibility, and since the incurable nature of thedisease precludes the possibility of locating this perfection within one’s ownbody (there is not even the pretense that the regulation of spitting has anytherapeutic value), the horizon of perfectibility is found at the level of the



social or communal. Frequently understanding its mission as the promotionof “national efficiency,” social medicine strives for an ordered and efficientsocial body. Insofar as the notion of efficiency implies the ideal of a transpar-ent and frictionless mode of relation between the constituent components ofthe system, the form of community it promotes is organic (in the sense Jean-Luc Nancy gives to the term).21 The chaos represented by promiscuousexpectoration constitutes a threat to that order and efficiency, and thereforethe disciplinary regulation of spitting becomes a priority. When one consid-ers the character-forming aspect of this regulation, however, the essentiallyorganic form of community for which social medicine strives becomes theessence of the worked-over individual. I work, in other words, at fashioningmyself into a work, and the essence that I realize in that process of self-fash-ioning is the essence of community. As the tubercular sufferer becomes his orherself through the identification with the essence of community, the iden-tity of the individual becomes that of the community. This working over oflife for which the expectorating body provides the occasion thus mediatesbetween the ontological and the social. On the one hand, the work of lifeopens onto the domestication of the ontological insecurity to which theexpectorating body—as an instance of bare life—bears witness, and on theother it draws our attention to the disciplinary procedures that aim to regu-late the social body. Or, more precisely, the structures of identification inher-ent in the working of life deploy the disciplinary regimes that produce andmaintain the organic form of the social body as a means of compensating theontological lack made palpable by the bare life of the tubercular body.

This community-forming mode of identification is, moreover, not lim-ited to the example of sputum regulation and extends to a variety of tuber-cular technologies and therapeutic techniques. The culture of thermometryprovides another key example that is amply represented in both Stewart’sand Mann’s texts. One might additionally consider, for example, the ways inwhich modes of surgical intervention (artificial pneumothorax and thora-coplasty) and radiology function within, or provide the basis for, similarprocesses of identification. Mann, for instance, eponymously devotes a cru-cial early chapter to “The Thermometer.” From his first encounter withHofrat Behrens, Hans’s interaction with the sanatorium superintendent cen-ters on what Behrens calls “the quicksilver cigar” (47). Addressing Joachimon the occasion of this inaugural meeting, Behrens prescribes some limitedexercise followed by a temperature-taking. “And be good enough to write it[the temperature] down,” he says, “Saturday I’ll look at your curve [temper-ature graph]. Your cousin better measure too. Measuring can’t hurt anybody”(47). Though Hans initially resists this interpellation into the culture of



thermometry, he eventually succumbs and reluctantly replaces his belovedMaria Mancini cigars with a red leather- and velvet-encased thermometer ofhis own. If febridity lacks the degree of cultural resonance with which spu-tum is endowed, it provides another example of the commodification andfetishization of therapeutic instruments: the thermometer-as-luxury-item sit-uates the discipline of temperature taking as a substitute pleasure and work oflife. Once interpellated, Hans becomes increasingly obsessed with his “curve,”and the measurement of his febridity comes to be a crucial function of hisexistence. The temperature curve becomes, more than merely a representationof the disease, an image in which he is led to find himself reflected. Differentfrom the spit flask insofar as the levels of febridity it measures have some diag-nostic value as an indication of disease activity, the thermometer and the tem-perature charts it is used to generate nonetheless provide another basis for thedisciplinary self-regulation of the tuberculosis sufferer. Though the tempera-ture chart is literally a graphic representation of bodily disorder—Joachim, infact, cites “fever” as another example of the bodily “goings-on” that his cousinfinds so disturbing (72)—the act of quantifying that disorder at regular inter-vals, and fixing it in the stable form of a curve, functions to domesticate thethreat of irremediable corporeal chaos. Synecdochically representing theprocess of ordering the anarchic body, the temperature curve provides animage with which the patient is led to identify. In so doing, the diseased bodyis put to work in the process of meaning making. If disease marks the break-down of bodily meaning, and this lack cannot be papered over by the teleol-ogy of the healing process, it must be accommodated through other means.Precisely because the incurable nature of tuberculosis forecloses upon thepossibility of actually reinstituting bodily order, of locating a source of mean-ing within a strictly bodily economy, a principle of order or organizationmust be located in another (i.e., noncorporeal) register, primarily that of thesocial body. As with the spit flask, the meaning provided by the temperaturecurve lies less in a therapeutic teleology than in the ordering effects of self-regulation it produces, effects whose significance derives from the efficientcommunity into which the well-disciplined sufferer is inserted.

Retracing Nature’s Path: The Vital Economies of the Sanatorium and the Open-Air Cure

It is, of course, no coincidence that Ferguson, Stewart, and Mann all locatethis process of working life within the space of the sanatorium. In additionto its general cultural status as the most widely recognizable symbol of tuber-culosis and its treatment, the sanatorium is notable precisely because it



remarks the persistence of vitalistic understandings of the disease in the faceof the advances in medical science that dominate traditional histories. LindaBryder, for instance, pursues this disjunction when she queries the extent towhich the rise of the antituberculosis campaign of the early twentieth cen-tury is actually attributable to Koch’s discovery. She views concerns for“national efficiency” as the driving force, and her suspicion of the causativeforce of bacteriological advance finds support in Ott’s claim that

Koch found the bacteria that initiated the tubercle-making process to be asso-ciated with pulmonary consumptions, but its discovery had little practicalinfluence outside a small circle of researchers. . . . [R]esearch was marked byfailed attempts to produce germicides and vaccines. For those who whole-heartedly embraced it, Koch’s discovery created both a theoretical and techni-cal void rather than any insight into therapeutics and prophylaxis. Mostphysicians gradually integrated the theory into their medicine bags as an addi-tional “exciting cause” of the disease, without adjusting their practice. Theconcept of bacterial causation competed with stronger beliefs in environmentand personal constitutional proclivity and so never totally dominated etiologyand therapeutics. (53–54)

This process whereby physicians “gradually integrated [scientific medical]theory into their medicine bags” finds an institutional analogue in the sana-torium. Though the diagnostic and therapeutic procedures most closelyrelated to the bacteriological revolution find themselves represented in thepractices of the sanatorium (increasingly so in the ‘20s and ‘30s), this inclu-sion does not radically alter the ways in which the disease is understood.Emphases on environment, education, and vitality continue to have pride ofplace in this respect. If literary examples of tubercular discourse clearly afforda certain centrality to the category of life, I turn to the writings of D. C.Muthu, a British physician and sanatorium superintendent, as a means ofexploring a parallel phenomenon in the medical literature. Of particularinterest will be two monographs (published in 1910 and 1922 respectively)entitled Pulmonary Tuberculosis and Sanatorium Treatment: A Record of TenYears’ Observation and Work in Open-Air Sanatoria, and PulmonaryTuberculosis and Sanatorium Treatment: A Record of Twenty-two Years’Observation and Work in Open-Air Sanatoria. While not quite simply subse-quent editions of the same text, the bulk of their argument is substantiallythe same. One of the most notable differences is that, by 1922, the medicalscientific models of which Muthu is so suspicious have become sufficientlyinstitutionally entrenched and validated that they require a more thoroughaccounting. Beyond encapsulating the sanatorialist project, and functioning



as an index both of its historical transformation and of the impact of med-ical scientific developments upon the sanatorium, his texts are particularlyvaluable insofar as they make visible a logic implicit, if not extant, in a broadrange of sanatorialist discourse. Though the spiritualist vitalism governinghis writing places Muthu toward the margins of mainstream medical opin-ion, the question of life or vitality to which his text is so attentive remains,nonetheless, a crucial discursive relay through which the bulk of tuberculardiscourse circulates. The vitalism of which Muthu is a proponent had been,by the time of his writing, significantly contested by widely accepted scien-tific doctrine. There is, however, a notable distance between laboratory andclinical cultures, which makes it difficult to simply deem Muthu’s positionanachronistic. If vitalism and its frequently spiritualist trappings can belargely assimilated to a reactionary response to the materialism of science, itnonetheless figures prominently in medical culture well into the twentiethcentury. This is particularly the case within a clinical culture that remainedskeptical of the therapeutic value of medical science and persistently coun-tered the emergent understanding of medicine as applied science with theview that medicine is best understood as the art of healing.

At its most simplistic, the vitalism to which Muthu subscribes functionsin the service of a relatively conventional reaction to the mechanism anddeterminism that he views as the culturally dominant consequence of nine-teenth-century scientific advance. Writing in a short monograph entitledScience and Religion (1930), he voices the canonical complaint that

this wonderful advancement of scientific knowledge has had the effect of cre-ating a mechanical outlook on life in the minds of many scientific men whoconceived matter as something solid and real and as the sole ultimate of theuniverse. They held that the mind was a kind of emanation of matter and theunseen world an illusion, and fondly believed in the possibility of a mechani-cal explanation of life and the universe. (7)

Especially troubling are the implications of this outlook for bioscience.Taking physiology as his example, he laments the fact that “materialists haveconfidently claimed that the laws of mechanics, physics, and chemistry wereapplicable to living matter, that chemical actions and processes would explainvital phenomena” (11). The turn–of-the-century scientific developmentsassociated with the likes of Thompson, Rutherford, Heisenberg, and Einsteinprovide solace, however, in their complication and subversion of the mechan-ical principles that had hitherto grounded the materialist viewpoint. Makinga leap from the contention that recent scientific advance had unsettled extant



scientific dogma by demonstrating the existence of phenomena as yet inex-plicable, to the assertion that this shaking of scientific foundations reveals thefundamentally inexplicable character of the physical world, Muthu arrives atthe vitalist claim that bioscientists recognizing the true nature of this scien-tific revolution will justly reach the conclusion that “the phenomena of lifecannot be explained in mechanical terms” (11). “The physical basis of life,”he concludes, “has not only no basis of fact, but is discarded by all the resultsof modern science” (11).

Muthu’s dubious account of the state of scientific knowledge in 1930aside, the protocols of his argument reiterate those of his earlier treatises onpulmonary tuberculosis and the sanatorium treatment. In those texts he pro-ceeds from the mutable and inconclusive character of scientific knowledge(specifically that pertaining to tuberculosis) and contends that

the factors that go towards the causation of tuberculosis, the different modesof the spread of the disease, the sources and degree of infection, the part playedby the tubercle bacilli and other organisms, the attitude of the human organ-ism towards the microbes, the various means of cure, the social and economicagencies set in motion towards its prevention—all these problems are so com-plicated and interwoven that it is impossible to come to any definite under-standing concerning them from the present state of our knowledge. (PT[1910], 1–2)

More than merely a description of a technical impasse, the impossibility ofunderstanding at which Muthu’s account arrives finds its ultimate ground inhis assertion that the key to the disease lies in the vital energy of organic life,a force that is in principle inaccessible to thought. “It is,” he writes, “aboveman’s reach and reckoning” (35); “The real cause of health or disease is whatwe cannot see. . . . The unseen creates and controls the seen. Life cannot beexplained from a physical basis, and disease cannot be explained by physicalagencies alone. Behind resistance is vital force, which is identical with man,the chief factor in the causation of tuberculosis” (PT [1910], 36).

It is important to note Muthu’s qualifying claim that “disease cannot beexplained by physical agencies alone,” for his recourse to vitalism does notmerely ignore the competing explanatory schemas that inhabit the sanato-rium. Instead, the notion of vital force that he articulates functions to com-prehend and synthesize the range of complicating factors that his textrecognizes at its outset. This synthetic drive is writ large in the very structureof his text: the introduction seeks primarily to posit the importance of “vitalenergy” to the understanding of tuberculosis, the second chapter accountsfor “The Predisposing Factors of Tuberculosis,” while the third and fourth



chapters turn respectively to the questions of “Micro-Organisms in Healthand Disease” and “The Relation of Tubercle Bacilli to Tuberculosis,” beforethe fifth chapter proclaims “Man the Final Factor in Tuberculosis”—aproclamation that, in its assertion that “vital force . . . is identical with man”(36), closes the circular trajectory inaugurated in the introduction.Accounting in turn for the hereditary emphases of eugenics, the environmen-tal focus of social medicine (both of which fall under the aegis of“Predisposing Factors”), and the positivist approach of medical science, thequestions begged by the spectrum of discourses pertaining to tuberculosisultimately find their answers in the vital force that is, for Muthu, the essenceof humanity. Indeed, the totalizing power of “vitality” resides in its ineffablenature. Deeming the lack of explanatory power exhibited by the range ofcompeting discursive regimes insurmountable, Muthu’s text interprets thatlack as an unavoidable necessity. A position that recognizes, indeed foundsitself upon, this lack is therefore able to incorporate those positions thatblindly seek their realization in anticipated cognitive progress.

Bacteriology—Muthu’s main polemical target—provides a prime examplein this respect. The germ theory of disease, he argues, “has not satisfactorilyexplained all the problems of the disease. The presence of the tubercle bacil-lus is not a decisive factor in the development of tuberculous processes” (PT[1922], 13). Indeed, he continues: “We have made too much of microbesand too little of man in the causation of tuberculosis, which more truly lieswithin the body than outside. There is no valid proof that the widespreadprevalence of the disease is brought about by its contagious character” (13).Not denying the existence of the bacterium, or even its role in the disease,Muthu seeks to limit its explanatory power as causative force, an agency hereserves for the all-important vital energy. In so doing, he draws upon andincorporates recent advances in bacteriological and immunological research.Specifically, it had been discovered that there is no necessary correlationbetween the presence of the bacterium in the human body and disease activ-ity. In fact, a far greater percentage of the population had been exposed tothe bacterium (would have tested positive for its presence) than had beendiagnosed with active tuberculosis. This discrepancy between the presence ofthe bacterium and the presence of the disease did not, of course, pose theproblem for medical scientific research that Muthu suggests and actually pro-vides the basis for immunological research: the practice of inoculation ispredicated precisely upon this differential, which opens the possibility thatthere are certain conditions under which the introduction of bacteria intothe body can produce beneficial, rather than pathogenic, effects.Microorganisms, he contends, “are really our friends . . . [but] they have



taken advantage of our weakness and lowered vitality and have becomeabnormally active and virulent, and have pounced upon our flesh and bloodto our destruction” (PT [1910], 5). It would, in other words, be foolish toexpect that the inability of bacteriology to “satisfactorily explain” or to pro-vide “valid proof” might be overcome with further scientific advance, for thatwhich medical science seeks to explain lies not “out there” in the quantifiablespace of the petri dish, but inside the body, in the ungraspable vital force thatflows through it. “If man were mere body,” Muthu insists, “the methods ofdiagnosis and treatment worked out in the laboratory would be both rationaland legitimate. But man is more than body, life more than serum and leuco-cytes” (PT [1910], 12). This line of argument, moreover, is not reserved forthe narrow-mindedly materialist medical scientist and is applied in turn tothe eugenicist and the practitioner of social medicine with whom Muthufinds himself more closely aligned. Admitting, on the one hand, that“although . . . there is a tendency to minimize the evil effects of heredity, Ibelieve it is an important factor in the predisposition of tuberculosis” (16)and, on the other, “the relation of social conditions to tuberculosis” (19),Muthu is clear, nonetheless, that “Man is not the creature of circumstanceentirely. His personality or vital energy can neutralize any evil tendency” (17).

Muthu’s argumentative procedure is notable not because he seeks polem-ically to overcome competing positions regarding the nature and treatmentof tuberculosis but because of the manner in which he does so. Within thediscursive network described by Stewart and Ferguson—the same networktraversed by Muthu—we have already noted the existence of competingexplanatory schemes and of the procedures through which they attempt tototalize the tubercular sociosymbolic. That Muthu’s text engages in preciselythis sort of procedure and attempts to account for all competing models ofthe disease in the terms of the vitalistic open-air cure is fairly unexception-able. The factor that differentiates Muthu’s approach, however, becomesapparent when we consider the status of the tubercular body.

As I have suggested with respect to Stewart and Ferguson, an importantfeature of the discursive space of the sanatorium is the very significant degreeto which the tubercular body ultimately eludes capture by the discursive linesof force mobilized by various explanatory schemes. In its elusiveness, thetubercular body functions to remark a locus within the sociosymbolic spaceof the sanatorium around which the discursive regimes that constitute thatspace organize themselves but which they are unable to assimilate or fix.Whereas the tubercular body’s status as a sort of impossible object typicallyposes a problem insofar as it marks the limit of any particular discursiveregime’s ability to totalize the tubercular sociosymbolic field, Muthu’s text



founds its totalizing power precisely in a notion of the tubercular body asessentially ungraspable. Disease, that is, cannot be accounted for in materialterms precisely because the invisible, the unseen, the mysterious vitality ofthe body is paramount. What, then, is at stake in this series of rhetoricalmaneuvers by means of which Muthu’s text seeks at once to totalize thetubercular sociosymbolic order and to do so with reference to a resolutelyunknowable object? If the gesture of totalization is familiar from the dis-courses that Muthu’s polemic engages, is it significant that the object whichfacilitates Muthu’s act of totalization is in principle indescribable, beyondcognitive grasp?

Given the pivotal role played by Muthu’s notion of vitality, it will be nec-essary more carefully to attend to its derivation and functioning within histext. The contours of Muthu’s argument take their shape from the vaguelyRousseauvian State of Nature that he posits when he argues that

the study of tuberculosis takes us back to the early history of a nation’s life.Disease seems to be the outcome of man’s nonconformity to his environment,without and within. The primitive man, while living the open-air life, wasmore or less free from disease; but as soon as he began to put on clothes andbuild houses he stepped into a new environment. Clothes made the skin sen-sitive to external influences, and thus man was deprived of Nature’s protection.. . . Life in the open air gave the savage an immunity from disease which helost when he built houses that shut out pure air and sunlight. (PT [1910], 2)

Disease is, in short, “the outcome of civilization, [and] tuberculosis is dis-tinctly a product of our social and civilized condition” (2). This valorizationof the natural is common to the antiurban leanings of the public health andsanatorium movements, and predictably leads Muthu to a mimetic therapeu-tic logic. Positing a fall from a natural state of grace, the first step in this logicis the contention that “wrong living, carried on for centuries, the inheritanceof ages of strenuousness and mental strain, the curse of riches and poverty, ofovercrowding and underfeeding, of misery and despair, have weakened[man’s] vital energy . . . and brought an instability and loss of resistance whichhas prepared the soil for tuberculosis and other diseases” (4). Whereas diseaseis “brought about by departure from Nature and her laws,” “health can onlybe restored by retracing our way to her” (10); unsurprisingly, the sanatorium’sopen-air cure, with its imitative return to Nature’s ways, is ideally positionedto become the agent through which paradise might be regained.

Within sanatorialist discourse at large, this return to nature can belocated in the sanatorium treatment’s rejection of the cramped unhygienicenclosures and the material, nutritional, and emotional excesses endemic to



urban civilization. Insisting instead on constant exposure to the open air andregularity of nutritional, exertional, and affective states, the therapeuticmeasures of the sanatorialists sought to reproduce the qualities of (an appar-ently disease free) preindustrial and preurban existence—an existence there-fore in accordance with Nature’s law. In Muthu’s interpretation of thissanatorialist logic, however, the question of the nature of the “Nature” whoselaws the sanatorium treatment seeks to replicate is complicated, a complica-tion which lies precisely in the extent to which the standard therapeutic prin-ciples of the sanatorium are translated directly into vitalistic terms. Relativelyunconcerned with the intrinsic value of the external environmental factorsthat his antiurban rhetoric foregrounds, his focus ultimately lies with theinteriority of vital processes. Whereas his initial recourse to a disease-freestate of nature might lead us to locate a mimetic therapeutic logic in theattempt to reproduce the external details of a precivilized, and thereforeostensibly natural, existence, Muthu’s text finally suggests that the environ-mental regulation at which the sanatorium treatment aims has value prima-rily insofar as it facilitates internal transformation. “Vitality,” Muthu insists,

is outside man, and, like solar energy, comes from the great Author of all life.It is the free gift of Nature (Nature only represents the Source of all life), and,like fresh air, it depends upon our capacity to receive it. The capacity is mod-ified according to environment. Man receives it according to his own measure.It flows in proportion as his vessels are kept clean. (8)

In this formulation, “Nature” designates not a set of environmental condi-tions associated with a preindustrial, preurban way of life, but simply thesource of “life” or vital energy; the external states that the open-air cure aimsto produce are of little intrinsic value and are significant only to the extentthat they increase one’s capacity to access vital energy more effectively.Altering the standard sanatorialist emphasis on poor environmental condi-tions, Muthu comprehends the familiar argument for the deleterious effectsof industrial urban life not simply in hygienic terms but in terms of adecreased receptivity to vital force. Access to the open air, good nutrition,and psychological regularity are productive of health only at a remove andprimarily function to keep the body “efficient for the vital energy to flowthrough” (8). Rather than replicating a set of external conditions associatedwith a natural state of health, Muthu’s project seeks to reproduce a “natural”corporeal state—natural insofar as the vital energy that has become synony-mous with Nature can flow unrestricted.

There are, then, two broad movements to Muthu’s argument. Mostimmediately he seeks to counter medical scientific approaches to the body,



and to disease, by developing a notion of the vital body, a body whose defin-ing characteristic renders it beyond the ken of a positivist grasp. Secondarily,his articulation of the vital force that comes to define the human body allowshim to incorporate the hygienic and environmental impulses of social med-icine. While not absolutely inconsonant with the latter, his formulation ofthe sanatorium treatment nonetheless subordinates them to his vitalistframework. The significance of this bipartite operation becomes particularlyclear if we consider the social implications of the relationship between scien-tific and social medicine and their approaches to the body. These twoapproaches to the disease are usually held in strict opposition in the period’sliterature on tuberculosis—an opposition that Muthu encapsulates using thecommonplace distinction between “the specific and the social school, theseed and the soil school” (PT [1922], 13). Perhaps the profoundest tensionwithin the tubercular discourse of the period, and the sanatorium movementin particular, is that which exists between the emphases of a positivism thattakes the body to be ultimately graspable as a mechanism that is the objectof medical scientific technique and those of a hygienically oriented socialmedicine that remains comparatively uninterested in the body as organism,even as it identifies the body as the primary site for its disciplinary exer-tions.22 Whereas the “seed school” grants primacy to the implantation of thegerm and its interaction with the mechanisms of the body, the “soil school”insists that a range of predisposing factors, from social and physical environ-ment to the legacy of heredity, provide the key to the disease. In short, thereis an oscillation between the somatic and the communal or social. At onepole reside those approaches that claim to grasp the body as such, for whichthe body appears in its literality, and at the other pole lie those that take thebody as the occasion for social management, those for which it is metaphor-ically transfigured into a model of society.

Despite the canonicity of this opposition, it would be more accurate tounderstand the relationship between these two tendencies as one of interan-imation. Though scientific medicine claims no overt communitarianimpulse, the mechanical model of the body it produces is both affected by,and comes to affect, the pedagogical and communitarian focus of social med-icine. This relationship is visible, for instance, in the development ofimmunology. Summarizing the strengths of an immunological approach, W.Carnac Wilkinson writes, in The Principles of Immunity in Tuberculosis(1926), that in certain diseases,

the cells of the body produce a substance that neutralizes the toxin secreted bythe specific (infective) agent. The substance is, therefore, called an antitoxin,



which is formed by the reaction of tissue and discharged into the blood. Bythis antitoxic substance in the blood, the toxins in the circulation are deprivedof their sting and remain inert. This is the simplest mechanism of immunityby which the disease is brought to a standstill. (62)

Bearing all the hallmarks of medical science, immunology seeks to addressthe processes of disease at the cellular level in terms of the chemical and phys-ical character of intercellular relationships. When it comes to the question of“permanent immunity,” however, the language of cellular chemistry recedes,and Wilkinson suggests that the former is “secured because, should theseinfective agents again attack the body, the cells trained by a past experience(previous infection) promptly and effectively respond so that infection isresisted” (62, my emphasis). The scientific model of the body—with its cells,toxins, antitoxins, infective agents, in short its “mechanism of immunity”—is ultimately understood through the language of social medicine, with itspedagogic project and hygienic protocols. Just as social medicine seeks tosecure the lasting health of the social body, not through direct intervention,but through the training of its constituent members in the principles of effi-cient and hygienic living, scientific medicine pursues the lasting health of thephysical body through the processes that “train” its constituent units to effec-tively combat pathogens.

The lines of influence between the two approaches are not, however, uni-directional. The educational focus of social medicine can as easily be seen toborrow its logic from immunological practice. Advances in inoculation, forinstance, proceeded by way of an extraction of malignant organisms from thebody in order to alter them such that, upon their reintroduction, they pro-voke the body into the production of antibodies against that organism. Ananalogous logic governs the public health movement insofar as it aims—either figuratively or, in the case of the sanatorium movement, literally—toextract diseased individuals from the social body’s prevailing economy, less inorder to return them to a state of health than to alter them through hygieniceducation such that, upon reintroduction into the social body, they willfunction to educate other members of the body in the means of combatingdisease. As Muthu puts it in a moment that is absolutely consonant with thishygienic logic:

When patients have been educated in a sanatorium as to the right modes ofliving, and have returned home, they in turn become teachers to their ownhousehold, showing them the benefits of living in the country, and of sleepingwith open windows. Thus each patient, as with ruddy cheeks and returnedhealth he faces a circle of friends, becomes an apostle of fresh air and sunshine,



and silently helps to bring about a revolution which aims at the happiness ofhome and the community. (PT [1922], 224)

Or, continuing in his bucolic mode: “Like a stone dropped into a still lake,[the sanatorium treatment] will set in motion influences and reforms whichwill extend with ever-widening circles, transforming the habits of life and thecharacter of man and society, so contributing to the physical and moral effi-ciency of the nation” (225). As this introduction of the category of “effi-ciency” makes clear, in this instance the pedagogical impetus of socialmedicine is ultimately understood via the machinic logic of the medical sci-entific body, and the education of individual members of the social bodybecomes a fine tuning of an organic system.23

Beyond remarking the fact of discursive traffic across disciplinary bound-aries that is facilitated by this structure of interanimation, it is important tonote that the relationship between the bodily formations of medical scienceand the communitarian formations of social medicine is systematicallyaffected by a shared logic—a logic that pertains precisely to the “organic”character of the systems it addresses. In the case of medical science, it mayseem counterintuitive to characterize as organic the bodily systems it takes asits object. Much of the polemical import of Muthu’s argument, forinstance—in this he is exemplary of a widespread concern about the deter-ministic implications of the scientific approach—lies in its opposition of anorganic model of embodiment to the mechanization produced by medicalscience. If the medical scientific model of the body is frequently attacked (asit is by Muthu) on the basis of its mechanicity, and if it is therefore opposedto a more organic model of the body, it remains, nonetheless, resolutelywithin the logic of organicity. In order to substantiate this claim, it will benecessary to distinguish between the colloquial and technical senses of the“organic.” The former is, for instance, operative in the standard charge lev-eled against science: namely, that its taxonomic drive disarticulates the body,dissects it (literally or figuratively), renders its component parts exchangeableor prosthetizable, and thereby undermines its natural unity. In this context,the “organic” quality of the body lies in the supposedly natural unity that sci-ence undermines. The scientific model of the body remains profoundlyorganic, however, insofar as our understanding of organicity as a signifier ofthe natural is not limited by its opposition to mechanicity. Beyond that oppo-sition it can be understood more specifically in terms of what Jean-LucNancy refers to as an “organic totality”: that is, as “a totality in which thereciprocal articulation of the parts is thought under the general law of aninstrumentation which cooperates to produce and maintain the whole as



form and final reason of the ensemble” (Inoperative Community, 76). To theextent that medical science supposedly fragments the colloquially organicwhole of the human body, the fragments (and relationships between frag-ments), which become its objects, continue to be thought within the logic ofthe whole, which is to say, thought as a technically organic totality. Installinga horizon of epistemological perfectibility, the taxonomic drive of sciencerenders the body theoretically knowable, graspable, and articulable as a total-ity, and if the relations between the body’s constituent components are nolonger governed by a natural necessity, they are united within a communica-tionally transparent, and remainderless, closed system. Notwithstanding thefactual incompletion of scientific knowledge, the theoretical possibility ofepistemological perfection makes available the form of the self-enclosed,transparently articulated system as the horizon which delimits and unifies thebody as an organic totality.

Though social medicine is frequently at odds with scientific medicine, itscritique lies less with the latter’s understanding of disease, and of the bodiesit affects, than with the priority it affords them. Indeed, in its attempts toaddress the social causes and effects of disease, social medicine imports thescientific model of the body in its understanding of the social body. Whereasfor medical science, the physical body is circumscribed as an organic totalityby a horizon of epistemological perfectibility, the social body to which socialmedicine addresses itself is rendered organic by way of a horizon of pedagog-ical perfectibility. Mirroring the organic corporeal logic made available bymedical science, social medicine’s hygienic project aims explicitly at the edu-cation of the individuals that make up the social body; however, the modelof personal responsibility into which it seeks to insert individual members ofsociety ultimately finds its meaning at the level of the social totality. The ped-agogic and disciplinary operations performed by social medicine upon theindividual are finally significant within a communal economy—specificallythat of a corporatist model of community. The hygienic community at whichsocial medicine aims is almost invariably understood in conjunction with therhetoric of social or national efficiency; the ordered and efficient form ofcommunity it strives to produce is, thus, organic insofar as the pedagogicimpulse that forms it works toward the ideal of a transparent or frictionlesssystem of relations between the constituent components of the social body.

In the context of this organic model of community, which is the productof social and scientific medicine’s discursive interanimation, the possibilitiesoffered by Muthu’s vitalism begin to appear. If Ferguson, Stewart, and Mannall speak to the ways in which the bare life of the tubercular body operates asa fault-line in the sociosymbolic edifice—at once an impossible object that



tubercular discourse functions ideologically to occlude or domesticate andthe limit on which attempted ideological totalizations fail—Muthu’s textsalso arrange themselves along the same fragile margin. Within the horizonsof the working over of life through which tubercular discourse seeks toaccommodate eruptions of bare life, the notion of life in operation isextremely limited, serving as it does only to paper over the unassimilablethreat of a grossly material body which simply is but makes no sense. Thepromise of Muthu’s text lies, then, in the possibility of approaching life in aless restricted fashion. Despite being oriented, at the level of intention, by atotalizing project not dissimilar to any of the other tubercular discourses, thefact that Muthu’s act of totalization is enabled by a notion of the ineffablyvital body leads his texts in an importantly different direction. The ungras-pable vitality that becomes the cornerstone of his argument marks a limit onwhich the very possibility of totalization, and more particularly the logic oforganicity, is unworked. Rather than insisting on the body’s inherent signif-icance, or submitting a dangerously non-sensical body to a work that investsit with meaning, Muthu’s vitalism (at least theoretically) allows the body toexist as an outside to thought, a limit that cannot be put to work in the fash-ioning of organic community.

Though Muthu’s turn to vitalism offers the possibility of marking thelimit of organic bodily economies (both physical and social), and thereforeof thinking both body and community outside of an organic model, hisarticulation of the vital body ultimately fails to live up to its promise. Histexts finally return life to the realm of (the) work, economy, character, andorganicity. Mobilized, as it is, in opposition to the deterministic implicationsof science’s mechanical model of the body, the notion of vitality that Muthuoffers as an alternative is never thought outside the logic of the deterministicdiscourses it opposes. Given that the potential offered by the vital body liesin its resistance to cognitive appropriation, Muthu’s vitalism is severely lim-ited by the weakness of the notion of vitality that he presents. Muthu is sat-isfied, that is, to derive the ungraspable nature of vital energy from thecognitive limitations of a particular historical state of scientific knowledge,and he remains unwilling to pursue a logic of the ineffable not founded inhistorical contingency. The ramifications of this weak version of the vitalbody are manifest, moreover, in the ease with which it is ultimately reassim-ilated to the deterministic discourses it is designed to resist.

Even his fundamental assertion that health is dependent, not upon themechanisms of bacterial transmission and interaction, but upon one’s abilityto receive Nature’s gift of vitality—a gift that “flows in proportion as [Man’s]vessels are kept clean” (PT [1910], 8)—is posited within the model of a



mechanical system. Indeed, Muthu makes the metaphorical underpinning ofhis notion of vitality explicit when he comments that healthy living “keeps[the body] efficient for the vital energy to flow through, just as we keep anelectric machine bright and clean so that the electric energy may easily flow”(8). If the invisible, unthinkable vitality upon which Muthu relies to combatthe mechanism of science is mediated by the economics of physical systemson the one hand, it is transmuted into the terms of another economy on theother. Contesting the biological and social determinism of eugenics andsocial medicine, he argues that “Man is not the creature of circumstanceentirely. His personality or vital energy can neutralize any evil tendency, oradd his quota to the good” (17). Once again cast in opposition to the forcesof determinism, “vital energy” is, in this formulation, also rendered gram-matically equivalent to “personality,” and thereby translated into the terms ofmorality, character, and ultimately domestic economy.

Bringing together the model of the electrical circuit or machine with atheory of moral character, Muthu understands the role of vital energy prima-rily in terms of “resistance.” Posing the question, “Then, what is it that givesthe final determination to tuberculosis?” Muthu responds: “It is somethingwhich is peculiar and inherent in each individual, something identical withthe organism itself, that controls health and disease. We may call that some-thing vital force which creates resistance and immunity and controls suscep-tibility” (35). Following on from his assertion that this resistance-promotingvitality is a gift of Nature, he pursues a theory of the means by which this giftis made available, and in so doing turns his attention to the role of microor-ganisms in disease. Arguing against the position that some bacteria are essen-tially pathogenic, he arrives at something like a moral bacteriological andimmunological theory. “Micro-organisms,” he contends, “begin their life assaprophytes, and help in various natural processes of life; but vicious environ-ment changes their character, so that they take on new properties and becomepathogenic. In the same way man has potentialities for good and ill, the goodor bad predominating according to the environment in which he is placed”(23). Not satisfied with making pathogenic bacterial activity a product ofenvironment, Muthu goes on to assert that, in addition to the productivework of uncorrupted microorganisms, even in their degenerate form bacteriaultimately work for good. “In disease,” he writes, “they help man to regainhis health, for their very opposition stimulates the system to secrete anti-bac-terial substances which neutralize their toxins—in the same way that summerand winter, good and evil, prosperity and adversity, are beneficial to man—both conditions playing their part in developing his moral life and charac-ter”(23). In short, “As in health, so in disease, Nature has prepared herself for



any contingency that may arise. . . . Even when friends have become enemies,Nature makes use of them in her economy” (30).

This line of argument leads Muthu into a number of logical contradic-tions: his assertions that vital force should be understood as something“peculiar and inherent in each individual” and that “Nature’s economy”ensures the harnessing of even pathogenic activity for the production ofresistance and health would seem to run counter to his basic position that thegoal of the open-air cure is the promotion of increased receptivity to vitalforce. Whereas the first assertion suggests a sort of determinism that rendersthe promotion of increased receptivity irrelevant, the second introduces a cir-cular logic within which Nature is at once the source of vital force and theagent that assures its efficient reception, once again obviating the utility oftherapeutic intervention. In attempting to resolve these contradictions, thequestion of moral character—initially introduced as the terms of the analogythrough which he understands the role of microorganisms—comes to thefore. Drawing a distinction between “resistance” and “vital force,” Muthuintroduces an extended metaphor:

The connection between vital energy and resistance can be explained in thisway: If vital energy is represented by the income of a man, resistance wouldbe the salary he gets for the daily work he performs—say £200 a year. But thesalary does not actually represent all the source of his income, as he may havehis wife’s income and income from the investment of land, property, stocksand shares, etc. If he has a salary we know he cannot starve; he has somethingto live on. So where there is resistance there is vital energy, though it is inde-pendent of resistance, as the income is independent of a man’s salary.Resistance creates immunity, and where there is immunity there is less sus-ceptibility. If immunity is lost, susceptibility comes into play. But man standsabove all these forces, related in one way and unrelated in another—control-ling, vivifying all the processes of life, casting his final vote towards healthand disease. (36)

This foray into domestic economy goes some distance toward accountingfor these contradictions. To the extent that vital force is “inherent” in eachindividual, and that “Nature’s economy” works against unfavorable circum-stances to guarantee the presence of that vital force, we might understandthese propositions as referring to the vital baseline Muthu here distinguishesas “resistance.” But because “resistance” does not completely account forvital force, because “man stands above these forces” of resistance, immunity,and susceptibility, the need for the transformative project of the open-aircure remains intact.



In attempting to define this additional quantum of vital energy, whichsupplements the basic salary of resistance, Muthu introduces the case of “twobrothers (twins), born of the same parents, brought up under the same roof,eating the same food, living in the same environment, working in the sameoffice” (37)—in short, enjoying the same level of resistance. And yet, he asks,how is it that “one had consumption and the other escaped?” (37). The dif-ference is, he asserts,

something inherent and part of man. It is his own personality which is outsidethe pale of environment or micro-organisms. If environment controls man,man has the power of controlling environment and neutralizing any tendency,whether it be physical or moral. If it were not so man would be a mere machine,an automaton; virtue would have no reward and sin no punishment; goodnessand evil would be meaningless terms, and life an unbearable enigma. (37)

In many respects another instance of Muthu’s familiar opposition to theforces of determinism that would reduce the human being to an automaton,this passage introduces, nonetheless, a telling turn in the argument. The inef-fable vital energy that has hitherto been the crux of his opposition is heretransmuted into the all too familiar force of “personality,” the moral contentof individual character. Indeed, the turn to domestic economy with which hearticulates this aspect of vital force is far from incidental, for in anotherattempt to define the surplus vitality that exceeds the salary of resistance,Muthu relates the story of a young woman, hopelessly ill with tuberculosis,who prior to her admission to the sanatorium had cared for the motherlesschildren of her brother, to whom she was “passionately devoted.” Havingtried everything in his power to no avail, her physician finally tells her “thather brother’s children wanted her, and that she must live for their sakes, anddo her utmost to get well” (36). “The love of the children,” Muthu tells us,“acted like an electric stimulus. She said quietly, ‘I will get well for their sakes.’And she did” (36–37). The therapeutic model implicit here simultaneouslyassimilates the vital energy that holds the key to health and disease to a vol-untarist model of personality and exemplifies the substance of that personal-ity with recourse to the most predictable and regulative moral norms.

The general principle underlying these examples is also drawn from therealm of domestic economy. In a democratizing gesture that counters thesuggestion that some individuals might simply possess a greater income ofvital force than others, Muthu asserts that a sufferer’s “prognosis is to be reck-oned not so much on the amount of vital resistance that is brought to bearupon the disease, as upon the way that resistance is utilized to aid recovery”



(75). Returning to his economic metaphor, he suggests that “a man of largefortune may, in his habits of extravagance, spend the whole of it, and becomebankrupt in a very short time. But a man of very limited income, if he usesit economically, may live comfortably all his days” (75). Given that the bulkof sanatorium patients do not, on Muthu’s account, benefit from extraordi-nary vital wealth, the maximization of limited resources becomes key, andthe responsibility for such maximization lies squarely with the individual.“To a great extent,” he insists,

prognosis depends upon the patient’s own individual efforts. If he husbandshis resources, stops the leakages, and uses what he has to a wise purpose, hewill not only hold his own and recover, but will even overcome his disabilitiesbrought on by heredity, bad environment, etc., and turn them to his advan-tage and blessing. One of the secrets of the sanatorium treatment is that ithelps the patient to husband his strength, and utilize every particle of his vitalforce to the best purpose. (75–76)

Far from merely metaphoric vehicles useful in explicating the processes ofdisease and vitality, the discourses of moral character and domestic economybecome the very substance of Muthu’s sanatorialist project. If the moral char-acteristics of regularity and good husbandry are here articulated as the meansof optimizing the vital corporeal system, they have already been installed atthe other end of the equation as organizing the voluntarist model of “person-ality” with which vitality has been made equivalent.

The mimetic project of Muthu’s open-air cure, thus, finally plays itself outin a protocol of character formation—a protocol all too consonant with theorganic logic whose unworking his vitalism might have made possible. Thesanatorium treatment ostensibly encourages patients to return to “Nature’sway” and defines the Nature to which they must return as an ineffable vitalforce that is the essence of humanity but which is obscured or dismissed bythe deterministic and mechanizing drive of positivist science (whetherinstantiated by industrial civilization or scientific medicine). This essencethat patients are led to realize as natural, however, finally reveals itself to bea voluntarist and individualist notion of personality, and the therapeuticprinciples of the sanatorium function to provide the moral coordinates thatregulate the process of self-fashioning. Far from exposing an ungraspablemode of vital embodiment, Muthu’s project ends up working over life: hisexploration of vitality becomes the occasion for the submission of life to aproject that aims to transform “the habits of life and the character of manand society, [and thereby contribute] to the physical and moral efficiency of



the nation” (PT [1922], 225). More than merely a contributing factor in theefficient functioning of community, the morally regulated “personality” (theessence realized in the self-fashioning work of character formation in whichthe sanatorium patient is engaged) is in fact the essence of community. “Ifpersonality is not overwhelmed,” Muthu writes, “the organism can begin toneutralize the evils of environment, and proceed to repair the broken edifice.Though it may not succeed in completing the structure in its own lifetime,it will at least lay a foundation for the building of a new type” (PT [1910],38). According to this logic, in other words, one works to produce oneself asan efficient and morally well-regulated individual, and in so doing producesone’s essence as a human being; what is more, in producing this humanessence as one’s work, one produces that essence as the form of community.Working to fashion oneself, one simultaneously fashions a mode of commu-nity governed by the logic of the individual.



CHAPTER 2

Unraveling Lawrence’s Vital Web of Dynamic Consciousness:Incorporating the Work ofCommunity or Assembling

a Multitude?

It is in relation to the tubercular discursive network whose contours theprevious chapter explores that I would like to return to Lawrence’s liter-ary corpus. Especially pertinent from the preceding discussion is the dou-

ble articulation to which life is subject. On the one hand, the medical-scientific discourses constellated around the tubercular body function topaper over or domesticate a “bare life” that cannot be incorporated intoschemas of bodily significance, and on the other they are profoundly markedby a persistent vitalism that privileges an ineffable life force. Having arguedthat the working over of bare life functions in the service of an organic modeof community, and that the potential for the unworking of that communitar-ian form offered by a vitalistic impulse is contained by the practices and con-ceptual framework of the sanatorium and the open-air cure, this chapter asksto what extent Lawrence’s articulation of corporeal and communal economies(and their interrelationship) are shaped by the discursive relays of the biosci-entific enterprise his texts engage. To what degree is his incorporation of com-munity mediated by the structures made available by bioscientific culture,and to what degree do his texts produce discursive connections unrealized inthe medical scientific field narrowly construed—connections possibly lessamenable to the domestication of bare life? In order to engage these questionswe will need initially to focus on the issue of vitalism in Lawrence’s work.


Though hardly an unnoticed problematic, Lawrence’s vitalism has beenapproached most frequently in extremely general terms.1 It would, of course,be virtually impossible to engage the Lawrencian text without, for example,attending to his insistent privileging of visceral “blood-consciousness” over“mental consciousness” or to his repeated opposition to scientific rationalismand technological advance. These concerns animate (to greater or lesserdegrees) the bulk of Lawrence’s writing, and are frequently considered vital-istic in the sense that they remark an investment in the visceral, the instinc-tual, and the organic in the face of the perceived cultural dominance of theintellectual, the rational, and the mechanical; more precisely, a vitalist pro-gram is often detected insofar as Lawrence most frequently approaches theseoppositions by arguing that the second set of terms is unable adequately toaccount for the first. Given the scope of these animating concerns, it couldbe argued that almost the entirety of the critical response to Lawrence hastaken up his vitalism to some degree. Although this generalized approachundoubtedly responds to an important aspect of his thought, it tends to sit-uate his vitalism simply as a form of irrationalist metaphysics elaborated inreaction to late nineteenth-century scientific rationalism.

In thus forging a strong opposition between science and vitalism, how-ever, the danger arises of underestimating the extent to which the power andinfluence of vitalism as a cultural formation in the early twentieth century—Lawrence’s included—derives precisely from its scientific heritage. BruceClarke makes this point when he argues, in Dora Marsden and EarlyModernism, that

vitalism has powerfully inflected the literary sensibility of the last two cen-turies, and these cultural effects were empowered by the residual prestige vital-ism enjoyed from its discursive apprenticeship in the scientific academy. Thetransition of vitalism from science, to a scientific ideology, to a social ideologyshows this complex historical dynamic in action. As it issued into its social for-mation, vitalist ideology still operated as a metonymy of the science fromwhich it was in the process of being excluded. (28)

Drawing on Georges Canguilhem’s notion of “scientific ideology” to describethe movement of discursive formations from the purview of scienceproper—science as an institutional domain whose constitutive statements arestrictly policed and normatively regulated—to their more broadly sociocul-tural deployment, Clarke indicates the process whereby “that which fallsaway from the merit of science retains some of the glamour of science as itenters into its social formations” (26). Although the scientific validity of



vitalism had long been under serious attack by the turn of the century, it con-tinued to inhabit a lacuna in the rapidly developing state of bioscientificknowledge: “Until a genetics capable of expounding the structure and func-tion of DNA emerged, it seemed to many that life ‘forces’ would never beentirely opened to analytical comprehension. Vitalistic theories remainedplausible well into the twentieth century” (29).

Though clearly a response to excessive rationalism and the imperialism ofmechanistic reductionism, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuryincarnations of vitalism are thus best understood as operating (at least mar-ginally) within the realm of scientific discourse. This observation allows usboth to situate Lawrence and the scientists he challenges within the same dis-cursive space, and to consider the sociocultural impact of his “scientific”writing less in terms of its truth-value or verifiability than as a question of thefunctions and effects of his activation of scientific discourse and scientificnetworks. This is a question, moreover, no less relevant to the scientificorthodoxy Lawrence challenges than to his deployment of science itself. Forif Clarke draws our attention to the social activation of scientific prestige instatements that can no longer be considered strictly scientific, Bruno Latourhas demonstrated the extent to which science itself—despite its positivistpretensions to explain the functioning of segments of the natural worldthrough the closed, controlled, and repeatable procedures of the labora-tory—is profoundly marked by the disavowed necessity of effectively travers-ing and mobilizing cultural networks. Defining what he calls the “modernconstitution,” Latour describes a situation in which the constant prolifera-tion of networks that combine, link, and translate between the human andthe nonhuman, the cultural and the natural, the subject and the object mustbe disavowed by the “modern critical stance,” which operates throughprocesses of “purification” that produce and maintain a strict dichotomybetween those two realms (11). Modern science is exemplary of this consti-tution. On the one hand, it maintains the divide between the human andnonhuman, culture and nature, by claiming to concern itself only with thesecond half of the divide. It “discovers” the secrets of nature without refer-ence to human culture. But on the other hand, Latour points out, themedium through which such a purification takes place is the laboratory, andinsofar as the latter is a figure for the isolation from cultural contaminationof the “natural events” that are reproduced within its walls, it simultaneouslypoints to the cultural practices and institutional networks that enable theproduction and effectivity of knowledge. The universality that grants scien-tific statements their exceptional power is achieved only by “pulling away thesubtle network of practices, instruments, and institutions that paved the way

Unraveling Lawrence’s Vital Web of Dynamic Consciousness • 83


from contingencies to necessities” (120). In this context, a certain symmetryappears between cultural formations that mobilize the prestige of science anda science whose theoretical production is effected through the mediation ofcultural networks. Both operate with reference to what Latour calls the“quasi-objects” (51–55, 82–85) whose paths articulate the hybrid networksthat translate between the supposedly discrete poles of nature and culture.Both “cultural” projects like Lawrence’s and scientific projects like thosearticulated in relation to tuberculosis can thus be approached less in terms oftheir differing degrees of truth-value or ability accurately to comprehend thebodies that are their ostensibly natural objects, than in relation to the “quasi-objects” they articulate.

Vitalism and the Cellular Basis of the Lawrencian Unconscious

Having described in the previous chapter the ways in which tuberculosis con-stitutes a particularly powerful site of confrontation between competing sci-entific discourses, and of their socio-cultural mobilization, I would like toreturn to Lawrence’s text in order to assess his engagement of this conflictualfield. For as we have seen in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasiaof the Unconscious, Lawrence specifically frames his polemic against the mate-rio-idealism of science in relation to the bioscientific disciplines related totuberculosis, and it is in the name of “life” that he “scientifically” opposes thescientific impulse he finds exemplified there. We will remember that forLawrence, “Even biology never considers life, but only the mechanistic func-tioning and apparatus of life” (F, 12). Faced with the determining andautomatizing effects of scientific rationalism, with “life-sciences” that cannotapproach the life they claim to study and instead rely on the deadening reduc-tion of their object to physical and chemical principles, he seeks to establisha principle of spontaneous creative vitality. In so doing, he turns to the bodyas the repository of a force that “bubbles up in us, prior to any mentality . . .innocent of any mental alteration” (F, 212). Naming this “pristine” life prin-ciple the unconscious, he specifies (in a disarmingly tautological fashion) that“by the unconscious we wish to indicate that essential unique nature of everyindividual creature, which is, by its very nature, unanalyzable, undefinable,inconceivable. It cannot be conceived, it can only be experienced, in everysingle instance. And being inconceivable, we will call it the unconscious”(17). In opposition to the automatizing mechanism of the mind (of whichscience is the apotheosis), the Lawrencian unconscious is the very instantia-tion of spontaneity, and therefore provides a point of resistance against therelentless laws of cause and effect that govern scientific rationality.



Although Lawrence’s designation of the unconscious as the embodimentof vital force is somewhat unique, its function, and especially the oppositionto the materialism of science for which it provides the foundation, is consis-tent with a long tradition of vitalist thought. We have already noted a vital-ist resistance internal to medical science itself—as embodied in thetherapeutic principles of the rest cure or open-air cure. This medical vitalistreaction can, moreover, be located within a more broadly based cultural trendin the early twentieth century, perhaps most famously associated with thephilosophy of Henri Bergson, but also finding articulation (within a specifi-cally British context) in the work of Edward Carpenter.2 Indeed, Muthu’svitalism shares much with that of Carpenter. The recourse to a Rousseauvianstate of nature that underwrites Muthu’s position is very close to the nostal-gia for a Golden Age that animates Carpenter’s argument in Civilization: ItsCause and Cure. Diagnosing “civilization” as a disease of the social body,Carpenter anticipates Muthu’s correlation of social and bodily (metaphoricand literal) disease states when he suggests that the proliferation of ill-healthamong the members of “civilized” societies is directly attributable to the dis-eased social form that is civilization. Invoking the “savage races” as exemplarsof a natural state of health, he comments that even they “do not escape thebaneful influence.” “Wherever Civilization touches them,” he writes, “theydie like flies from the small-pox, drink, and worse evils it brings along withit” (16–17). In a moment that almost completely prefigures Muthu’s argu-ment, Carpenter elaborates the features of the lost Golden Age of which the“savage races” provide a reminder. Civilization begins, he suggests,

with the forsaking of the hardy nature-life, and it ends with a society brokendown and prostrate, hardly recognisable as human, amid every form of lux-ury, poverty and disease. He who had been the free child of Nature denies hissonship; he disowns the very breasts that suckled him. He deliberately turnshis back upon the light of the sun, and hides himself away in boxes withbreathing holes (which he calls houses), living ever more and more in dark-ness and asphyxia, and only coming forth perhaps once a day to blink at thebright god, or to run back again at the first breath of the free wind for fear ofcatching cold! (47)

For both Muthu and Carpenter, the mythic object of their retrospection ismarked by a general state of health that is the consequence of the unifyingeffects of an unfettered access to vital force. In fact, Carpenter argues that“health” should be understood as nothing more than the unified holistic stateproduced by the recognition of, and harmony with, the vital connectednessof the universe.



Rather than defining health negatively as an absence of disease, Carpenterinsists that disease should be comprehended as “the loss of unity. . . . The idea[of health],” he writes, “seems to be a positive one—a condition of the bodyin which it is an entirety, a unity—a central force maintaining that condi-tion; and disease being the break-up—or break-down—of that entirety intomultiplicity” (28–29). Given this definition of health, Carpenter also antic-ipates Muthu’s critique of medical science. Isolating specific bodily functionsas the object of its study, medical science (indeed, science more generally)takes as its fundamental methodological principle the very disintegration ofcorporeal unity, which is for Carpenter the hallmark of disease. Granting thatmedical science doubtless has very good reasons for its procedures, he con-tends nonetheless that it

makes a fetish of disease, and dances around it. It is (as a rule) only seen wheredisease is; it writes enormous tomes on disease; it induces disease in animals(and even men) for the purpose of studying it; it knows, to a marvelous extent,the symptoms of disease, its nature, its causes. . . ; its eyes are perpetually fixedon disease, till disease (for it) becomes the main fact of the world and the mainobject of its worship. Even what is so gracefully called Hygiene does not getbeyond this negative attitude. And the world still waits for its Healer, who shalltell us—diseased and suffering as we are—what health is, where it is to befound, whence it flows; and who having touched this wonderful power withinhimself shall not rest till he has proclaimed and imparted it to men. (38–39)

In short, though the understanding of disease provided by science has itsvalue, that value can only be subsidiary to a proper focus on the positiveforce of Health—a force that is coextensive with the unifying power of thevital principle. Due to its materialistic emphasis on the power of the humanintellect to decompose the world into constituent components, and toabstract laws governing the relations between those components, sciencewill remain unable to comprehend either that vital principle or the funda-mental state of unity and wholeness that is its principal ramification. To theextent that this language of health and disease functions primarily on ametaphorical register in Carpenter’s text, Muthu’s deployment of a similarline of argument as the foundation of therapeutic principles and proceduresconstitutes little more than a literalization of a vitalist logic like Carpenter’s.Or more precisely, Carpenter and Muthu present inverted forms of the sameargument. Carpenter’s use of the language of diagnosis and cure is princi-pally figurative insofar as he aims to describe “civilization” as a disease of thesocial body, albeit one that has literal biomedical correlates in individual



bodies. Muthu, on the other hand, takes the diagnosis of physical diseasestates as his primary object, while secondarily extrapolating social analoguesfrom his analysis of bodily disease.

Lawrence shares the general contours of his argument with the likes ofCarpenter and Muthu. The basis of his critique of science is the same, andthere are moments when he too looks back to an idyllic past in which life hadnot been domesticated or suppressed by the abstracting and mechanizingeffects of the modern scientific temperament. “I honestly think,” he says inthe foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious, “that the great pagan world ofwhich Egypt and Greece were the last living terms . . . had a vast and per-haps perfect science of its own, a science in terms of life” (62).3 If, however,Carpenter and Muthu’s positions are firmly grounded in this nostalgic his-torical logic—characterizing the present moment as one dominated by themodern scientific temperament, and hearkening back to a past that purport-edly exemplifies the vital principles that form the basis of resistance to themechanizing effects of science—that foundation is ultimately one to whichLawrence is less than fully committed. Notwithstanding his invocation of the“great pagan world” in the foreword, the principal movement of Lawrence’sargument seeks not to reach back to a pre-scientific past with which to resistthe effects of science, but to locate the point of resistance within the heart ofthe bioscientific enterprise itself.

Lawrence acknowledges the imperative that drives Carpenter and Muthuto position the vital order as prior to the forces of idealization and mecha-nization that are its corruption, but his articulation of that imperative is dif-ferent. Rather than turning to global history as guarantor of the priority ofthe vital, he finds it in the developmental history of individual bodies.Elaborating the originary logic that governs the bodily coordinates of the“pristine unconscious,” Lawrence appropriates the language of bioscience ashe narrates the genesis of the unconscious.4 Beginning with the ovule that isthe origin of human life, he argues that

in the first division of the egg-cell is set up the first plane of psychic and phys-ical life, remaining radically the same throughout the whole existence of theindividual. The two original nuclei of the egg-cell remain the same two origi-nal nuclei within the corpus of the adult individual. Their psychic and theirphysical dynamic is the same in the solar plexus and lumbar ganglion as in thetwo nuclei of the egg-cell. The first great division in the egg remains always thesame, the unchanging great division in the psychic and physical structure; theunchanging great division in knowledge and function. It is a division intopolarized duality, psychical and physical, of the human being. It is the greatvertical division of the egg-cell, and of the nature of man.



Then, this division having taken place, there is a new thrill of conjunctionor collision between the divided nuclei, and at once the second birth takesplace. The two nuclei now split horizontally. There is a horizontal divisionacross the whole egg-cell, and the nuclei are now four, two above, and twobelow. But those below retain their original nature, those above are new innature. And those above correspond again to those below. (F, 81)

Governed by the necessity that the bodily source of vitality—the uncon-scious—be pre-mental, that it “obviously cannot be ideal, cannot be cerebral,since it precedes any vestige of cerebration” (19), Lawrence locates its originat the very inception of life.

Arguing that the unconscious spins even “the nerves and the brain as aweb for its own motion, like some subtle spider,” he places its genesis at thecenter of the web, “in the first fused nucleus of the ovule” (19). At its mostschematic, the unconscious consists, for Lawrence, in the doubly polarizedinterrelationships of two pairs of nerve centers: the solar plexus and the lum-bar ganglion, and the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion. Whereas thefirst pair is located below the diaphragm in the abdomen, and designated the“subjective” plane of consciousness, the second pair (composing the “objec-tive” plane) resides above the diaphragm in the chest. In addition to theopposition between the upper and the lower planes of consciousness,Lawrence posits an opposition within each plane between the “sympathetic”centers, the plexuses, which are located near the anterior surface of the body,and the “voluntary” centers, or ganglia, located near the posterior surface.Though Lawrence primarily focuses on these four nerve centers and theirinterrelations, they do not account for his diagram of dynamic consciousnessin its entirety, and in fact constitute only what he calls its “first field” (132).Within the developmental scheme he provides in Fantasia, the first four cen-ters dominate until puberty, at which time normally a second set of four cen-ters are activated. The second field of dynamic consciousness consists of the“hypogastric plexus” and the “sacral ganglion,” and the “cervical plexuses”and the “cervical ganglia” (132). Also coordinated by their sympathetic/vol-untary and subjective/objective modes, the first pair are located “deep in thelower body” below the solar plexus and lumbar ganglion, whereas the secondpair are situated above the cardiac plexus and thoracic ganglion “in theregion of the throat and neck” (133).

These two additional pairs of nerve centers supplement the system of “sen-sual comprehension” (the lower centers) and the “spiritual” system (the uppercenters) of “dynamic cognition” respectively. Their function, however, is dif-ferent than that of the first field of dynamic consciousness. Whereas the firstfield governs relations between the child and its family (primarily its parents),



the second field makes its effects felt in the extrafamilial realm, with the sen-sual centers playing their roles in sexual relations and the spiritual centersregulating the drive to larger-scale social relations. Within the first years of achild’s life, the subjective plane of the first field of consciousness precedesthat of the objective plane, and indeed, Lawrence characterizes the energy ofthe former as calling the latter into operation. Similarly, puberty brings thesecond field of dynamic consciousness into play, and within that field thedark, sensual force of the lower plane calls for the activation of the upper,spiritual plane in response (see Figure 2.1).

Embodiments of a dynamic vitality present even in the most fundamen-tal elements of the body, the nerve centers and their functions are groundedin Lawrence’s rather anthropomorphic understanding of the process of cellu-lar division. Focusing on the sequence that generates the first eight cells ofthe human body, Lawrence begins with what he deems the original unity ofthe ovule, and remarks the first vertical division of that cell, a division that“as science knows, is a division of recoil. From the perfect oneing of the twoparent nuclei in the egg-cell results a recoil or new assertion. That which wasperfect one now divides again, and in the recoil becomes again two” (79). The


Figure 2.1

The Lawrencian Dynamic Consciousness

SYMPATHETIC MODES(Anterior surface of body)

VOLITIONAL MODES(Posterior surface of body)

UPPER SECONDARY FIELD

FIRST FIELD OF DYNAMICCONSCIOUSNESS

LOWERSECONDARYFIELD

OBJECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

SUBJECTIVECONSCIOUSNESS

[5] Cervical Plexuses(Spiritual) Striving toward social relations

[3] Cardiac PlexusObjective knowledge –Mode: Wonder (Caress)

[1] Solar PlexusPositive, self-knowledgeIndifferentiationIncorporation, unification

[4] Hypogastric PlexusSexual (broadly defined)relations

[5] Cervical Ganglion(Spiritual) Striving toward social relations

[3] Thoracic GanglionObjective knowledge –Mode: Curiosity,Instrumentality (Grasp)

[2] Lumbar GanglionNegative self-knowledgeDifferentiationLimitation, individuation

[4] Sacral GanglionSexual (broadly defined)relations

DIAPHRAGM


relationship between the two cells produced by this recoil is subsequentlyreproduced in the horizontal division of the initial pair into a foursome, andof that quartet into an octet. Largely uninterested in the ensuing processes ofdivision and differentiation that produce the various structures of the body,Lawrence is content to assert that each of these eight cells eventually comes tobe embodied in the eight primary nerve centers that form the basis of dynamicconsciousness. The initial cell corresponds to the solar plexus, while the cellproduced in the first, vertical division finds its realization in the lumbar gan-glion. Similarly, the cells produced by the second, horizontal, set of divisionscome to be embodied in the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion, and soon. This foray into cellular biology, such as it is, is significant insofar as it deter-mines the functions of the nerve centers. Beginning with the lower plane andits direct derivation from the pristine vitality of the ovule, Lawrence designatesit “subjective” insofar as it accounts for sheer consciousness of being. Havingderived from the profound unity of the two germ cells in the original cell, thesolar plexus is the basis of a consciousness of undifferentiated subjective iden-tity; it provides a form of dynamic, premental knowledge that “I am I.” Thismode of consciousness is, moreover, deemed “sympathetic” insofar as it is aconsciousness based in a fusion of self and other in a state of unified indiffer-entiation, which Lawrence finds first exemplified in the infant’s initial relationto the mother. In contrast, the lumbar ganglion (with its origin in the first cel-lular division that breaks the unity of the ovule) accounts for a subjective iden-tity grounded in separation, individuation, and the differentiation of self fromother. By way of the lumbar ganglion, says Lawrence, the individual is con-scious that “because I am set utterly apart and distinguished from all that is therest of the universe, therefore I am I” (80). This form of consciousness is under-stood as “voluntary” insofar as it involves a willful individuation that Lawrencefinds first exemplified in the child’s differentiation of itself from the mother.

In the case of the upper, “objective” plane of dynamic consciousness, theobject of consciousness is no longer the existence of the subject but that of theextrasubjective world. “Here,” says Lawrence, “I know no more of myself. HereI am not. Here I only know the delightful revelation that you are you” (82).Within this consciousness that “you are you,” the polarity between the sympa-thetic and the voluntary subsists, with the cardiac plexus governing a “sympa-thetic” movement toward the Other in the mode of wonder and the thoracicganglion facilitating a more reserved and instrumental approach to the Otherin the mode of curiosity. The sympathetic or voluntary qualities of each centeris additionally supported by a commonsensical recourse to gross physiology: forexample, the proximity of the solar plexus to the navel, the mark of the indi-vidual’s umbilical link to the mother, is suggestive of the sympathetic impulse



it controls, whereas the proximity of the ganglia to the spinal cord, and its cen-trality to motor activity, is easily assimilated to the individuating function ofthe voluntary system. As Lawrence puts it, “the vertical division between thevoluntary and sympathetic systems, the line of division between the spinal sys-tem and the great plexus-system of the front of the human body” constitutesthe key duality of dynamic consciousness: “It is the great difference between thesoft, recipient front of the body and the wall of the back. The front of the bodyis the live end of the magnet. The back is the closed opposition” (39).

I should pause briefly at this juncture to point out that the preceding reca-pitulation of Lawrence’s position falls (with only partial justification) into thelanguage of the subject—a subject, moreover, that constitutes itself primarilythrough the relationship between self and other. This is a fall that Lawrence’stext is itself not always successful in avoiding, and is symptomatic of a ten-sion in his project between two relatively distinct and competing movementsof thought. I will, in what follows, trace the consequences of this tensionbetween those moments where the logic of the Subject comes to the fore andcompeting moments wherein he seeks to approach a mode of consciousnessthat both precedes and exceeds the self as a subjective formation.

From the Ovule to the Individual and Beyond: The Developmental Dialectics of Communal Subjectivity

The stakes of this elaborate bodily schema for Lawrence’s thought areextremely high. By developing a notion of dynamic consciousness whosefoundation is consubstantial with the very origins of human life, Lawrenceensures that the source of vitality is ontologically prior to the mechanizingeffects of mental consciousness. Moreover, in translating vital force into cor-poreal terms he significantly functionalizes it. No longer simply concernedwith a vague and ubiquitous vital force, the “great affective centres” thatembody his notion of vitality “are primary, integral mind-centres, each of aspecific nature. There is a specific form of knowing takes place at each ofthese centres, without any mental reference at all” (RDP, 120). Counteringthe mortifying scientific drive to dissection, division, and differentiation,Lawrence’s model of dynamic consciousness foregrounds the unifying effectsof vital force and to that extent is consonant with the vitalist position artic-ulated by the likes of Carpenter and Muthu. The functions, the “specificforms of knowing,” facilitated by the various nerve centers are, moreover, notisolated, but exist in a state of communication mediated by flows of vitalenergy that are variously figured as wireless messages, circuits of electricalcurrent, or resonant vibrations. The motion of dynamic consciousness “arisesspontaneous,” Lawrence contends,



and is emitted in dark vibrations. The vibration goes forth, seeks its object,returns, establishing a life-circuit. And this life-circuit, established internallybetween the four first poles, and established also externally between the primalaffective centres in two different beings or creatures, this complex-life-circuitor system of circuits constitutes in itself our profound primal consciousness,and contains all our radical knowledge, knowledge non-ideal, non-mental, yetstill knowledge, primary cognition, individual and potent. (RDP, 128–29)

Because each nerve center is integrally linked to a group of organs and bod-ily functions, the “life-circuits” set up between the centers function to pro-duce an integrated corporeal whole.

And yet, the ramifications of dynamic consciousness clearly extend farbeyond the narrowly somatic to provide the basis of a full-fledged theory ofintersubjective and communal relations. To the extent that vital flowsaccount for the integrative relations between various parts of an individualbody, they also provide the medium of affective, nonmental communicationbetween the centers in different individuals. Not satisfied to limit this modeof relation to the intersubjective, Lawrence insists that his corporeal model isultimately the basis for a “lurch into cosmology” (F, 62). Arguing that vitalcircuits can be “established between the self and [any] external object:mother, father, sister, cat, dog, bird, or even tree or plant” (F, 152), he goesso far as to include the inanimate world and suggest that “there is a definitevibratory rapport between a man and his surroundings. Any particular local-ity, any house which has been lived in, has a vibration, a transferred vitalityof its own” (153–54). From the “glinting nucleus of the ovule,” in otherwords, Lawrence ultimately extrapolates a cosmology.

In short, Lawrence’s vitalist position is elaborated according to protocolsvery much like those governing Muthu’s project. Vital force is initiallydeployed in the context of the human body as a means of countering thereductionist impulse of medical science and then extended to provide thebasis of a communal form. In Lawrence’s case, the connection between thevitalist corporeal schema he develops, and the structures of collectivity towhich he turns is especially clear: more than merely a metaphorical basis forsocial forms, the body is quite literally their foundation. If vital force inte-grates the body—producing an organic whole that incorporates everythingfrom the minutely cellular to the broadly morphological—the intracorporealconnections it facilitates are extended to the intercorporeal realm, and itcomes theoretically to account for a broad range of social connections: fromthe intersubjective, to the communal, to the geopolitical. And if the vitalismexemplified by Muthu is ultimately limited by its inability to escape the logicof the scientific models it seeks to critique—finally submitting the supposedly



spontaneous and ineffable vital force to economic models and the coordi-nates of moral regulation in such a way that it becomes consonant with anorganic subjective logic—an important stream of Lawrence’s thought wouldseem to encounter the same difficulties.

Having appropriated the discursive formations of medical science,Lawrence too frequently seems unable to take sufficient distance from theirsupporting logic. This tendency is perhaps most evident in the extent towhich the vital force so central to his understanding of the body, and ofdynamic consciousness, continues to be articulated within the terms of botha biological schema of development and a teleology of social regulation.Despite the fact that the optimal (if admittedly utopian) bodily state envi-sioned by Lawrence is that of a dynamic equilibrium between the divergentfunctions embodied in the different centers of the unconscious (and ulti-mately between the unconscious itself and mental consciousness), he fre-quently seems unable to escape the hierarchizing effects of the developmentalmodel he employs in narrating the genesis of the unconscious. The intent ofLawrence’s polemic seems clear enough: having identified the deleteriouseffects (both individual and social) of fetishizing mental consciousness, heemphasizes the necessity of returning to the vitality of dynamic consciousness,and in so doing pragmatically privileges the latter over the former as a meansof returning their relationship to its proper equilibrium. Similarly within therealm of dynamic consciousness, Lawrence identifies an infelicitous over-emphasis upon the upper, spiritual centers: his era, he says, is marked by thefact that “we have tried as far as possible to suppress and subordinate the twosensual centres . . . [and] unduly insisted on and exaggerated the upper spir-itual mode . . . [such that] we have caused already a dangerous over-balancein the natural psyche” (F, 113). This diagnosis leads predictably toLawrence’s familiar privileging of the lower, sensual centers of dynamic con-sciousness, but it should be noted that this privilege is once again pragmaticrather than constitutional and arises in response to a historically specific dis-equilibrium. The hierarchical relationship between dynamic consciousnessand mental consciousness, and between the lower and upper centers ofdynamic consciousness, is, in other words, governed by the utopian desire fora state in which the hierarchy dissolves into a perfect equilibrium—the sen-sual balancing the spiritual, the subjective balancing the objective, the sexualbalancing the social, and so forth.

Despite Lawrence’s insistence that the “interplay of the . . . dynamic cen-tres follows no one conceivable law” (125), that the vital unconscious strivestoward an unpredictable state of equipoise, the narrative of genesis and ram-ification of the unconscious are marked by a clear teleology. The centers of



consciousness themselves are the physical product of elementary cellulardevelopment, and the functional relations of the resulting modes of con-sciousness are equally marked by a developmental trajectory. The differentphases and fields of dynamic consciousness are articulated through a develop-mental psychology that is, formally at least, fairly conventional. The func-tions of the first field of dynamic consciousness are, for example, delineatedthrough an account of infancy and early childhood. The subjective, sensualcenters (the solar plexus and lumbar ganglion)—as befitting their cellular pri-macy—correspond to the experiences of the mature fetus and the infant, andinitiate a dialogical progression. The “child in the womb,” writes Lawrence,“must be dynamically conscious of the mother,” and this vital exchange withthe mother “suffers no interruption at birth. . . . The child has no conceptionwhatsoever of the mother. . . . It knows her. But only by a form of vitaldynamic correspondence, a sort of magnetic interchange” (106). This sheersubjective knowledge of self, which makes no distinction between the infantself and the mother, is embodied by the “sympathetic centre,” the solarplexus; it is from the solar plexus that “the child rejoices in the mother andits own blissful centrality, its unison with the as yet unknown universe” (80).As the infant develops—primarily as marked by the progressive acquisition ofmotor skills—the sympathetic mode of sheer, subjective, monadic existencecalls forth the complementary mode of still- subjective, but now voluntary,consciousness (embodied by the lumbar ganglion). If the infant’s conscious-ness remains focused on itself, it begins to know that self in negative relationto the elements of its universe. This entry into self-consciousness throughnegation itself leads to an increased awareness of the external world, and sothe demands entailed by the development of the first, subjective poles ofdynamic consciousness call the second set of objective poles (the cardiacplexus and the thoracic ganglion) into operation. It is through this secondmode that dynamic consciousness of the objective world is attained.

At this point in the child’s development, dynamic consciousness remainslimited to the first field, but this is to change with the onset of puberty.“These first [four] poles constitute the first field of dynamic consciousnessfor the first twelve or fourteen years of the life of every child,” at which point“a change takes place” such that

deeper centres of consciousness and function come awake. Deep in the lowerbody the great sympathetic centre, the hypogastric plexus, has been acting allthe time in a kind of dream-automatism, balanced by its corresponding vol-untary centre, the sacral ganglion. At the age of twelve these two centres beginslowly to rumble awake, with a deep reverberant force that changes the wholeconstitution of the life of the individual.



And as these two centres, the sympathetic centre of the deeper abdomen,and the voluntary centre of the loins, gradually sparkle into wakeful, consciousactivity, their corresponding poles are roused in the upper body. In the regionof the throat and neck, the so-called cervical plexuses and the cervical gangliondawn into activity. (132)

The significance of this change resides primarily in the fact that with theawakening of the lower centers “actual sex establishes its strange and trouble-some presence within us” (132), and this presence itself will eventually neces-sitate the reciprocal awakening of the upper, spiritual level of secondarydynamic consciousness.

The elaboration of this developmental narrative clearly presents a wholeseries of problems for the vitalist impulse by which Lawrence’s argument ismotivated. In general terms, it seems that Lawrence’s biological psyche—purportedly an ineffable source of spontaneity and site of resistance to thedetermining effects of medical scientific discourse—is all too consonant withthe mechanistic model of embodiment he identifies as belonging to medicalscience itself. Superficially, at least, this consonance is manifest in the highlyschematic, systematic drive of Lawrence’s text, a drive that is consistent withthe taxonomic impulse of medical science. If Lawrence does not exhaustivelyand explicitly attempt to map the contours of the unconscious (detailing theminute functioning of, and relationships between, the bodily structures thatconstitute it), the schema he elaborates functions, nonetheless, as a sort ofsystematic calculus. Understanding the unconscious as a source of sheerspontaneity, then, becomes difficult insofar as that calculus theoreticallyaccounts in advance for the possible forms generated by an individual body(the different possible relationships between nerve centers and the structuresthey control) and its interactions with other animate and inanimate bodies.Moreover, the vital, embodied form of consciousness that Lawrence seeks topit against the deterministic consequences of scientific materioidealism andits reductionist tendencies is largely determined by physiological processesthat are eminently graspable by precisely the medical-scientific regime undercontestation. Though Lawrence does not unequivocally specify the nature ofthe relationship between the various stages of dynamic consciousness andbasic physiological facts, the developmental model he employs would seemto imply a fairly strict causality. The progression of the unconscious seemscausally to presuppose, or at least to prop itself against, different stages ofphysiological development: the relatively undeveloped sensory apparatus ofthe fetus and early infant produces the narcissism of sympathetic subjectiveconsciousness; the development of elementary motor skills conditions the



willful, negative mode of volitional subjective consciousness; a still moredeveloped sensorimotor apparatus and its increasingly nuanced access to theexternal world generates the two poles of objective consciousness; pubertyprovides the obvious physiological spur to the awakening of a broadly sexuallevel of dynamic consciousness; and the physiological effects of sexual rela-tions cause the emergence of the final communitarian impulse embodied inthe upper second field of consciousness. This causal connection between thevital force of the unconscious and the strict progression of physiologicaldevelopment ensures that the actual unfolding of the former is significantlydetermined by the latter. The vital force of the unconscious is thus submit-ted to the predictable, even normative, narrative of physiology—a discoursethat is among the key targets of Lawrence’s polemic. In fact, this would seemto bring Lawrence’s text dangerously close to a form of the mechanist reduc-tion that it is designed to resist: the ostensibly spontaneous, vital unconsciousis comprehensible in terms of, even caused by, the sort of bodily processesthat are eminently susceptible to scientific rationality.

Much like Muthu’s articulation of vital force in this respect, Lawrence’selaboration of dynamic consciousness is underwritten by the economics ofmachinic efficiency, an economics that is introduced, in Lawrence’s case, bythe operative ideal of a corporeal system that is directed toward a state ofdynamic equilibrium. His text seeks to correct a variety of common“derangements” of the unconscious caused by the overreliance upon, oroverdevelopment of, specific components of the bodily economy, and in sodoing posits an organic bodily system in which each individual componentis subsumed under, and takes its meaning from, the whole at whose realiza-tion it is directed. While Lawrence’s corporeal model is colloquially organicinsofar as its (natural) system of vital flows is articulated in opposition to themechanical scientific model, it is, moreover, technically organic in that thevital flows integrating all aspects of the body are oriented by the goal of pro-ducing a balanced, efficient system. In this system any overweening compo-nent parts claiming independent importance are returned to their properplace in an economy in which the function and significance of all parts arereciprocally articulated in the production and maintenance of the whole.

An important corollary of this turn to corporeal economics is the incor-poration of the resulting bodily economy into the economics of social regu-lation. Though Lawrence’s social ideals are clearly different than those ofMuthu or the practitioners of social medicine, for example, and though hisvision of social improvement does not coincide with their narrowly produc-tivist promotion of social and national efficiency, his efficient model of thebody is tied nonetheless to a project of social regulation that implies its own



economics of social (and even national) efficiency. This impulse is especiallyevident in the considerable textual space devoted to the question of educa-tion and educational reform. Lawrence proposes, for instance, a renovatedsystem of childhood education, and imagines a public notice proclaimingpedagogical changes on the basis that “it is the intention of this State to forma body of active, energetic citizens. The danger of a helpless, presumptuous,newspaper-reading population is universally recognized” (115). The face-tious tone notwithstanding, his reference to the perils of newspaper readingstands in contradistinction to his proposal for an education system that trainsthe bodies of young children without prematurely forcing them into mentalconsciousness, and this corrective is clearly directed by a form of improvednational efficiency.5

It is crucial to note the highly normative drive governing the form of socialregulation to which Lawrence’s understanding of the vital body contributes.While the kind of dynamic equilibrium toward which he imagines dynamicconsciousness tending might suggest a sort of nonteleological, self-regulatingsystem—a system in which the myriad and ever-shifting vital connectionswithin and between bodies spontaneously generate accommodating socialforms—Lawrence frequently constrains both bodily and social economieswith an eye to normative regulation. Certain forms of vital connection areconstantly promoted at the exclusion of others. This is nowhere more evidentthan in relation to questions of sex and gender. Lawrence’s absolute commit-ment to a particular understanding of sexual difference—“the great thing is,”he insists, “to keep the sexes pure” (195)—means that certain configurationsof the vital body and certain forms of vital connection are appropriate onlyto men or to women. Because he does not go so far as to claim that possibleconfigurations of dynamic consciousness are biologically limited by sex, theefficient functioning of the vital body and the social forms it mediates isensured by the regulatory insertion of individuals into normative categories.The effect of Lawrence’s discourse seems ultimately to be less the multifari-ous bodily and social ramification of vital force, than the channeling of vitalforce into particular social forms. Given his repeated claims for the cogni-tively ungraspable, lawless, nonteleological, spontaneous character ofdynamic consciousness, its physiological basis and normative constraintsensure that it remains rather uncomfortably within the realm of medical-scientific discourse against which it explicitly is posed. If Fantasia claims, inshort, to approach the unfolding of bare life, that bare life, it seems, is onceagain worked over (rendered a work of life) in the production of organicstructures of community. In calling his readers to engage in the personallyand socially therapeutic activity of allowing vital force to reemerge within its



proper provenance, his text in effect calls them to a labor of naturalized socialregulation in which the disruptive force of bare life is worked over.

If organic bodily and communal structures are evident even in the physi-ological basis of the unconscious, what is more telling in this respect is thefunctional teleology into which the various modes of dynamic consciousnessare inserted. While the narrative unfolding of the physiological structures ofdynamic consciousness is dialogical in form—each center eventually callingits reciprocal into existence—when we consider the functions ascribed tothose centers (especially the centers of the second field of consciousness), thenarrative becomes fully dialectical. Proceeding from the solar plexus, and itssheer subjective knowledge that “I am I,” the volitional mode of subjectiveknowledge is activated in the lumbar ganglion, and the infant begins todevelop a sense of itself as an individual through negation. This process ofindividuation does not, however, entail the simple abandonment of the firstsubjective mode. The latter, Lawrence insists, “continues all life long” (106),and so, rather than being surpassed in the process of subjective individua-tion, is incorporated within the second stage of dynamic consciousness.Similarly, with the invocation of the second and third centers of “objectiveconsciousness,” the child’s increasing awareness of the objective world doesnot do away with the initial stage of subjective consciousness but merelyfolds it into a larger system.

With the awakening of the lower secondary field, and the advent of sex-ual relations, dynamic consciousness is taken a stage further to account forextrafamilial, intersubjective relations. “There can be no vivid relationbetween two adult individuals,” writes Lawrence, “which does not consist ina dynamic polarized flow of vitalistic force or magnetism or electricity, callit what you will, between these two people” (134).6 Though he insists thatthis vital flow is not always narrowly sexual in nature, sexual relations areespecially important. “To the individual, the act of coition is a great psychicexperience, a vital experience of tremendous importance. On this vital expe-rience the life and very being of the individual largely depends” (134). Thesignal importance of the sexual relation derives precisely from the fact thatit is, for Lawrence, the dynamic synthesis of the two modes that constitutesthe first field of the unconscious. As dynamic consciousness progressessteadily away from the monadic subjective mode governed by the sympa-thetic force of the solar plexus, and toward increasing levels of individuationand objective awareness, the awakening of the sensual mode of the secondfield offers the mechanism through which the initial mode of consciousnessis sublated rather than simply surpassed. Sex is, for Lawrence, the irresistiblymagnetic attraction that sets itself up in the oppositely polarized blood of



two individuals—more specifically, of a man and a woman since by the timeof Fantasia the fascination with the homoerotics of the Blutbrüderschaft, aswe shall see in a moment, has been commuted fully into a spiritual form, andproperly sexual relations have been normatively rendered resolutely hetero-sexual. Sexual relations begin with an individualized mode of consciousness,and in the act of coition “the two seas of blood in the two individuals . . . asnear as possible, clash into a oneness” (134). This return to a mode of con-sciousness characterized by fusion, unity, and oneness instead of negation,differentiation, and individualization is, of course, only temporary, and the“two individuals are [ultimately] separate again” (134). Yet crucially, therenewed state of individuality is not the same as the one that preceded thesexual union. In their renewed state of individuality the blood of the manand the woman

is changed and renewed, refreshed, almost re-created, like the atmosphere afterthunder. Out of the newness of the living blood pass the new strange waveswhich beat upon the great dynamic centres of the nerves: primarily upon thehypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion. From these centres rise newimpulses, new vision, new being . . . . And so life goes on. (135)

Sexual relations thus serve to reincorporate the earliest mode of dynamicconsciousness into the more highly individualized form that characterizes itslater stages, a reincorporation which materially alters and renews that indi-vidualized mode.

This is not, of course, the last stage in Lawrence’s dialectic of the uncon-scious, for the “new impulses, new vision” that are the consequence of the sex-ual phase of the dialectic themselves call the final plane of the unconsciousinto activity. “The new thrills,” says Lawrence, “are passed on to the greatupper centres of the dynamic body,” and in this move from the lower sensualcenters to the upper spiritual ones the “heart craves for new activity. For newcollective activity. That is, for a new polarized connection with other beings,other men” (135). This new connection, Lawrence repeatedly and emphati-cally insists, is not sexual. The homoerotics evident in fictional texts like TheRainbow and Women in Love, yet notably excluded from the sexual phase ofdynamic consciousness as represented in Fantasia, are accommodated andsanitized in this final stage of the dialectic.7 “The whole polarity,” he claims,is different from that of the sexual connection; “Now the positive poles arethe poles of the breast and shoulders and throat, the poles of activity and fullconsciousness” (135–36). As opposed to the sexual union, this union betweenpassionately connected men is “a unison in spirit . . . in understanding, and



a pure commingling in one great work. A mingling of the individual passioninto one great purpose” (136). Significantly, this new form of vital connec-tion surpasses that which is available in sex. Whereas the latter is limited tothe individual, to the fusion and separation of two individuals, the former isfully communal. “We have got to get back to the great purpose of manhood,”writes Lawrence,

a passionate unison in actively making a world. This is a real commingling ofmany. And in such a commingling we forfeit the individual. In the commin-gling of sex we are alone with one partner. It is an individual affair, there is nosuperior or inferior. But in the commingling of a passionate purpose, eachindividual sacredly abandons his individuality. In the living faith of his soul,he surrenders his individuality to the great urge which is upon him. . . . [O]ncea man, in the integrity of his own individual soul, believes, he surrenders hisown individuality to his belief, and becomes one of a united body. (137)

This final stage of dynamic consciousness incorporates the creative energygenerated in the preceding sexual stage—the very energy that spurs it intoexistence—while overcoming the limited individualism that is its governingprinciple. Here we have a more thoroughgoing reemergence of the fusionalmode of the solar plexus; whereas sex represents a predominantly individualmode that remains significantly conditioned by the early monadic modes ofthe unconscious, this final stage represents an overcoming of individualismin favor of fusion in a united communal body, which nonetheless maintainsthe influence of individualized modes of consciousness. If the individual isled to sacrifice his individuality to “become one of a united body,” he“remains responsible for the purity of his surrender” (137). Once again it isimportant to remark that the progression to this final stage of dynamic con-sciousness is fully dialectical. The preceding sexual mode is not simply over-come, for “no great purposive passion [of social creation] can endure longunless it is established upon the fulfilment in the vast majority of individu-als of the true sexual passion. . . . You have got to base your great purposiveactivity upon the intense sexual fulfilment of all your individuals” (137–38).The force of sexual passion is, thus, raised up and incorporated into the com-munitarian passion to which it leads.

This dialectical narrative is completely consistent with the logic of theSubject, and in fact describes a fairly standard trajectory for subjective devel-opment: the individual subject comes into existence through a process ofnegation. In this case, the organic bodily architecture of the unconsciousgoes hand in hand, and provides the basis for, a full-fledged subjective logicgoverning both the individual and the structure of collectivity into which the



individual is eventually subsumed. The organicity of Lawrence’s model isespecially clear insofar as he describes individuals as realizing their essence inthe process of producing the community as closed and remainderless “work.”This form of community is, he writes, “a unison in spirit . . . in understand-ing, and a pure commingling in one great work” (136, Lawrence’s emphasis),and as such constitutes an organic totality. The entire process of individualdevelopment entailed in Lawrence’s schema of the unconscious tends towardthis point at which the individual subject simultaneously fully and essentiallyrealizes itself, and is led to sacrifice its subjectivity in the fusional fashioningof a communal form that is itself subjective.

Taken in conjunction with a number of Lawrence’s concomitant preoccu-pations—specifically, his fascination with the cult of the leader, his perceptionof pervasive decadence and social degeneration, his disparagement of democ-racy, his advocacy of a governing elite (what he calls aristocracy), and evidenceof anti-Semitism8—the line of thought that leads to this organic, subjectivecorporeal and communal framework is precisely that which has provoked var-ious critics to decry the troubling political consequences of his work and evento argue for its protofascist implications. The culminating fusion of individ-uals in communitarian purpose is, according to Lawrence, “not the relation oflove . . . nor of brotherhood, nor equality,” but instead “a relationship of mentowards men in a spirit of unfathomable trust and responsibility, service andleadership, obedience and pure authority” (191). “Men have got to choosetheir leaders,” he continues, “and obey them to the death. And it must be asystem of culminating aristocracy, society tapering like a pyramid to thesupreme leader” (191). Taken at face value, and in conjunction with theorganic corporeal and social economies his text elaborates, comments likethese make it easy to recognize the grounds of political concern.

This aspect of Lawrence’s thought arguably finds its most extreme articu-lation in what are generally referred to as the leadership novels (Aaron’s Rod,Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent).9 In the case of The Plumed Serpent, thisextremity lies largely in the particular forms given to the organic structure ofcommunity developed in texts like Fantasia. The Plumed Serpent is consistentwith Lawrence’s essayistic projects of the period and is animated by the sameimpulse as the psychological essays: in most general terms, the exploration ofsources of vital resistance to the mechanizing effects of materioidealism. Thebodily schema of the psychological essays is much in evidence as a means ofcharacterization,10 and the tensions between mental and dynamic conscious-ness, and between various aspects of the latter, are played out largely in termsof the relationships between characters that embody different aspects ofLawrence’s schema. In contrast to the psychological essays, however, the



novel relies heavily on a primitivist nostalgia in its understanding of the ori-gins of vital force and deploys that force in an explicitly geopolitical context.More specifically, the novel’s development of the importance of dynamicconsciousness renders the manifestation of vitality coextensive with theunfolding of a mythic nationalist community—a move that is especially sig-nificant when we consider that the organic form of community posited inFantasia remains comparatively independent of the parameters of the nationor the nation-state.

Whereas the psychological essays, as we have noted, eschew primitivistnostalgia (like that of Carpenter or Muthu) in order to pursue a more strictlybiological source of vital force, the hints of primitivism legible in the fore-word to Fantasia are pursued wholeheartedly in The Plumed Serpent, andtake on a distinctly racialist tenor. To the extent that the novel conforms tothe conventions of the bildungsroman in its exploration of Kate Leslie’s indi-vidual development, it does so in large part along a geopolitical axis: Kate is,at a fundamental level, the product and representative of Europe, and herdevelopment is spurred forward primarily by the confrontation between theEuropean aspects of her character and the influences of the “dark races” shefinds in Mexico. Though her Celtic heritage is the basis of some affinity withMexican culture—“Ah the dark races!” she thinks, her “own Irish were nearenough for her to have glimpsed some of the mystery” (148)—she is prima-rily the representative of European culture and is in retreat from the influ-ences of both Europe and the United States (the latter primarily embodiedby Owen Rhys and Bud Villiers, her companions in Mexico). Whereas theEurope she has left is a declining civilization given over to the deadeningeffects of mental consciousness, the United States represents the crass, fre-netic, commercial pursuit of the mechanical and the automatic under theguise of a drive to experience “Life” in its fullest. In this experiential quest formultifold manifestations of Life, however, the American temperament typi-cally mistakes banal spectacle for “Life”; as Kate reflects of Owen Rhys, “hewas a born American, and if anything was on show, he had to see it. That was‘life’” (8). In contrast, Kate finds a powerful vitality embodied by Mexico andits inhabitants. “Perhaps,” she speculates,

something came out of the earth, the dragon of the earth, some effluence,some vibration which militated against the very composition and the bloodand nerves in human beings. Perhaps it came from the volcanoes. Or perhapseven from the silent, serpent-like dark resistance of those masses of ponderousnatives whose blood was principally the old, heavy, resistant Indian blood.Who knows? But something was there, and something very potent. (55)



This racial distinction between the cultures of Europe and Mexico is nostal-gically historical. Mexico is, for Lawrence, an example of a precivilized cul-ture, and in terms of vitality represents a sort of Golden Age. We areinformed, for example, that Kate “had a strange feeling, in Mexico, of the oldprehistoric humanity, the dark-eyed humanity of the days, perhaps, beforethe glacial period” (414). It is the surviving vestiges of this prehistoric human-ity that lead Kate to question the value of the mental consciousness that dom-inates her European sensibility. In continental America, we learn, sometimes

the shadow of that old pre-Flood world was so strong, that the day of historichumanity would melt out of Kate’s consciousness, and she would begin toapproximate to the old mode of consciousness, the old, dark will, the uncon-cern for death, the subtle, dark consciousness, non-cerebral, but vertebrate.When the mind and the power of man was in his blood and his back-bone,and there was the strange, dark inter-communication between man and manand man and beast, from the powerful spine.

The Mexicans were still this. That which is aboriginal in America stillbelongs to the way of the world before the Flood, before the mental-spiritualworld came into being. In America, therefore, the mental-spiritual life of whitepeople suddenly flourishes like a great weed let loose in virgin soil. (415)

It is, of course, this flourishing and its social ramifications, that the novel pri-marily seeks to explore.

Both terrified by and attracted to this powerful vitality, Kate ultimatelyseeks to abandon her old life, imploring: “Give me the mystery and let theworld live again for me . . . ! And deliver me from man’s automatism” (105).This decision, in large part, is played out in her ensuing interactions withDon Ramón Carrasco and General Cipriano Viedma, the novel’s primeadvocates for a national renaissance premised on the rejuvenation of the pre-Columbian cult of Quetzalcoatl. Because the narrative of Kate’s bildung—anarrative dominated by her progress toward the realization of dynamic con-sciousness—is thus intertwined with that of the burgeoning Quetzalcoatlmovement, the text closely articulates its primitivist, racialized vitalism witha program of mythic (and in many critics’ eyes proto-fascist) nationalism.

Ramón and Cipriano seek cultural renovation at both an individual andcommunal level by recuperating ancient Aztec myth and religion as a frame-work within which to establish a renewed connection to the vital force of theunconscious—a force that is, for them, racially rooted in the Mexican psy-che but has been historically submerged beneath the weight of Christianityand the other cultural forms imposed by European imperialism. In so doing,social and political difficulties become almost completely coextensive with



the problem of Life, or rather, the former can only be addressed in the pur-suit of the latter. Articulating his basic position, Ramón claims that inattempting to solve “the problems of the people, we lose the people in a poi-sonous forest of problems” (361). For him,

Life makes, and moulds, and changes the problem. The problem will alwaysbe there, and will always be different. So nothing can be solved, even by lifeand living, for life dissolves and resolves, solving it leaves alone.

Therefore we turn to life; and from the clock to the sun and the stars, andfrom metal to membrane.

This way we hope the problem will dissolve, since it can never be solved.When men seek life first, they will not seek land nor gold. The lands will lieon the lap of the gods, where men lie. And if the old communal system comesback, and the village and the land are one, it will be very good. For truly, noman can possess lands. (361)

Ramón’s vision of a renewed form of community is thus predicated upon thepursuit of the vitality embodied in dynamic consciousness. At its most sim-ple, his politico-spiritual program is encapsulated in his pithy exhortation to“seek life, and life will bring the change,” an exhortation that also finds artic-ulation in the slightly less quietistic demand that his followers “fight for thevulnerable unfolding of life” (361).

The formless and apparently contingent character of this notion of cul-tural renovation, however, is rather misleading, for Ramón has very definiteideas regarding both the processes that will bring about this change, and theshape it will ultimately take. The “unfolding of life” for which he would havehis followers fight is structured by an elaborately organized program of cul-tural labor. Ramón’s villa becomes the heart of a sort of arts and crafts move-ment under the auspices of which the members of the Quetzalcoatlmovement labor to produce everything from traditional clothing designedwith an eye to its symbolic significance, to the icons around which that sym-bolism is organized, to the choreographed rituals and hymns that celebrateand give mythic form to the movement. In addition to promoting this emi-nently material labor of vitalistic cultural renewal, Ramón provides a detailedtheory of the communal form into which it will be channeled. “I would like,”he says to Cipriano,

to be one of the Initiates of the Earth. One of the Initiators. Every country itsown Saviour, . . . or every people its own Saviour. And the First Men of everypeople forming a Natural Aristocracy of the World. One must have aristocrats,that we know. But natural ones, not artificial. And in some way the world



must be organically united: the world of man. But in the concrete, not in theabstract. (248)

Though Ramón’s understanding of the “organic” unity for which he aimsseems premised primarily on its ostensible naturalness, it is fully organic inthe sense that the national community he works to create is predicated uponthe fusion of its members in the identity of the leader by whom it is embod-ied. Organizing for revolution, Cipriano encapsulates this sacrificial structureby organizing the members of the movement into cadres. “He divided hisregiment up,” we are told, “into little companies of a hundred each, with acenturion and a sergeant in command. Each company of a hundred menmust learn to act in perfect unison, freely and flexibly. ‘Perfect your hun-dred,’ Cipriano insisted, ‘and I will perfect your thousands and your tens ofthousands’” (366). The movement, thus, is organized functionally in a tieredhierarchy, with each tier a micro-communal structure based on the principleof efficient unification of its members under a leader, and each tier progres-sively incorporated into a superior level, all finally unified under the supremeleadership of Ramón, the “Natural Aristocrat.”

This final level of communal unification is succinctly captured on theoccasion of a mass rally whereupon the narrative reveals that:

With his words Ramón was able to put the power of his heavy, strong will overthe people. The crowd began to fuse under his influence. As he gazed back atall the black eyes, his eyes seemed to have no expression, save that they seemedto be seeing the heart of all darkness in front of him, where his unknowableGod-mystery lived and moved. (337)

The novel’s communitarian logic thus begins by calling individuals to “seeklife first” (361), to fight for the unfolding of a lost vital force that nonethelesswill have already essentially constituted their racialized individual character.This quest for life is then facilitated by the labor of producing the symbolicand mythic matrix through which individuals can access vitality, a labor thatproduces the structure of organic community as a work of self-realization.Having elaborated that structure of collectivity, the work of vital self-realiza-tion and the work of community are coordinated in a culminating momentof fusion wherein the individual sacrifices him or herself to the enclosed andremainderless commonality essentially embodied by the leader who can gazeback at his followers and, untroubled by any remnant of individuality, see onlythat undifferentiated substance in which he “lived and moved.” If there is anydoubt regarding the closed and remainderless nature of the communitarian



form toward which the novel works, it is dispelled in the oft-commentedupon scene of political retribution in which Ramón and Cipriano mobilizethe mythic framework of the Quetzalcoatl movement to “sacrificially” elimi-nate a number of traitors and would-be assassins. Presiding over the ceremonyin his role as the vengeful Huitzilopochtli, “the purifier” (384), Cipriano des-ignates the dissidents from the movement as “unclean” (377), as “men that areless than men” (379), and elicits from the mass of followers the demand fortheir sacrificial execution. This act of communal “purification,” moreover,remains incomplete until the traitors’ bodies are buried in “quick-lime, tilltheir souls are eaten, and their bodies, and nothing is left” (378).

The immediacy with which vitality itself is presented as the essence of com-munity makes the organic character of this communal form especially evident.Community is produced and maintained by a mythic structure that ultimatelyseeks neither to represent the specific form of community, nor to present par-ticular interests or political concerns as the shared basis of commonality.Functioning neither to communicate nor to represent, the myths and ritualsRamón and his followers labor to produce are instead forms of a power whoseinvocation or deployment is itself the taking place of community. Participationin the myth of community is not the realization of a substance shared in com-mon, but the delineation of a space that allows a group of individuals simul-taneously to be traversed by the vital force that is at once the realization of theiressence as individuals and the essence of community. With perfect tautologi-cal symmetry, the moment of fusion, thus, closes the loop of organic commu-nal logic. Ramón (as leader) is at once the exemplary embodiment of vitalforce and the operator of communitarian myth: his mythic words produce thatspace in which his followers identify with him as the apotheosis of vital force,and in so doing paradoxically realize their individual essences in the momentat which they are most thoroughly traversed and animated by the impersonalforce of Life. Finally, stripped of the superficial trappings of the personal intheir realization as temporary and shifting ramifications of the eternal flow ofvital force, they become the embodiment of that dark, undifferentiatedmedium in which Ramón “lives and moves”—that which has already beenestablished as the foundation of his identity as leader.

A Singularly Persistent Infancy: Unfolding Bodies, Constellating Multitudes

The Plumed Serpent is, thus, relatively unambivalent in its development ofthe organic corporeal and communal structures made available in the psy-chological essays; predicating the latter on the former, the novel works over



the ineffable life force so central to Lawrence’s understanding of the body, andfounds its thoroughly organic model of community upon this work of life. Itwould, however, be a mistake to view this novelistic elaboration of Lawrence’sthought as the culmination or inevitable conclusion of his exploration of therelationship between human embodiment and community. Rather, it marksonly the extremity of one stream of his thought. To the extent that the latenovels (and The Plumed Serpent in particular) are committed relativelyunequivocally to the playing out of this extremity, such a commitment con-stitutes the foreclosure of a powerful tension that shapes Lawrence’s positionin the nonfiction prose of the period (and especially the psychological essays).Indeed, this difference between the fiction and the essays is partially attribut-able to generic constraint. Lawrence’s elaboration of his position through thenovelistic development of fictional characters—not to mention the bildungsro-man structure that significantly organizes The Plumed Serpent—serves toenforce the subjective logic that supports his organic line of thought and isconsiderably less amenable to those elements of his thought that seek to moveoutside the bounds of the Subject (as both a personal and communal form).The essays, on the other hand, fully pursue Lawrence’s thoroughgoing distrustof cause-and-effect rationalism, and as such eschew the tyranny of logical con-sistency—perhaps one of the tendencies T. S. Eliot had in mind when he diag-nosed Lawrence’s “incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking” (AfterStrange Gods, 58)—in favor of a commitment to the productivity of a sort ofthought experiment that frequently relies on the force of violent juxtaposition.

The stream of thought that culminates in the organicism characteristic ofThe Plumed Serpent is not the only articulation available in Lawrence’s cor-pus of the relationship between the body and forms of community; withinthe psychology essays and his contemporaneous non-fiction, his vitalism isdeveloped simultaneously in a different direction—one that contests, andprovides resources for the unworking of, precisely that organicism. As I haveargued, Lawrence’s engagement with, and appropriation of, medical scien-tific discourse provides the impetus for the organic corporeal and communalstructures that he elaborates in the psychological essays and the leadershipnovels. Lawrence founds his vitalist project in the heart of the medical scien-tific enterprise he seeks to contest but, much like Muthu in this respect,seems unable to take sufficient distance from its governing logic. As a resulthe largely replicates the organic model of embodiment made available bymedical science and then founds his notion of community upon that corpo-real system. If this foray into medical science, thus, poses one of the greatestdangers for his project, it is also precisely the point at which an alternate tra-jectory remains most legible in his text.



To return to Lawrence’s developmental dialectic of dynamic conscious-ness in the psychological essays, we will recall that much of the texts’ organi-cist impulse derives from the logic of physiological development. Theorganic corporeal model the texts promote is predicated upon both the eco-nomics of efficiency implied by the notion of the body as a system tendingtoward balanced equilibrium, and the causal connection between the vitalforce of the unconscious and the physiological principles governing its gen-esis. If we turn, however, to Lawrence’s commentary upon the effects of var-ious possible derangements of dynamic consciousness—states ofdisequilibrium into which the system is prone to fall—a different line ofthought becomes apparent. As Lawrence considers the malfunctioning of hissystem, it becomes clear that the relationship between the unconscious andthe physiological processes of the body is not unidirectional, and morespecifically that the connections are not limited to the derivation of the for-mer from the latter. If dynamic consciousness finds its wellspring among themost fundamental units of the human body, it also has a profound effectupon the body from which it flows.

Taking very seriously his contention that the unconscious spins the“nerves and the brain as a web for its own motion” (19), Lawrence positslines of force that move from the nerve centers of dynamic consciousness tothe body’s organs, and grants a precedence to the vital force of the uncon-scious that affects the form of the body through which it flows and in whichit actualizes itself. This relationship is perhaps most clearly manifest in thetext’s brief taxonomy of the various pathological conditions resulting fromthe derangement of the nerve centers through the over- or understimulationof any given center. In the case of what Lawrence takes to be the preeminentpathological condition of his day, for instance, there is an overemphasis onthe upper, spiritual nerve centers at the expense of the lower, sensual centers.“Since we live terribly and exhaustively from the upper centres,” he contends,

there is a tendency now towards phthisis and neurasthenia of the heart. Thegreat sympathetic centre of the breast becomes exhausted, the lungs, burnt bythe over-insistence of one way of life, become diseased, the heart, strained inone mode of dilation, retaliates. The powerful lower centres are no longer fullyactive, particularly the great lumbar ganglion, which is the clue to our sensualpassionate pride and independence, this ganglion is atrophied by suppression.And it is this ganglion which holds the spine erect. So, weak-chested, round-shouldered, we stoop hollowly forward on ourselves. (93)

On this account the vital flows of the unconscious are not determined byphysiology, but actually shape the body through which they flow. In, thus,



reversing the developmental logic upon which he elsewhere relies, Lawrencespecifically engages a powerful medical scientific model whose effects were feltnot least in relation to the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis. Invokingthe “tendency towards phthisis” embodied by the physical type of the “weak-chested, round-shouldered” individual as the historically preeminent exampleof the way in which the derangement of the unconscious affects bodily mor-phology, Lawrence challenges the notion of physiological types extant in theclinical and social science of the day, and especially prevalent in the under-standing of tuberculosis. Applied in the attempt to establish or buttress iden-tity categories—wherein a certain set of physiological features distinguished aparticular identity (based, for example, on race, class, sex, or some more spe-cific characteristic like predisposition to a given pathological condition) andindicated a corresponding set of moral and psychological characteristics properto that identity—physiological typing played a major role in the understand-ing of diseases (like tuberculosis) that were thought to have a constitutionalbasis.11 In the case of tuberculosis, the body type that designated a predisposi-tion to the disease was referred to as the habitus phthisicus, and it is this typethat Lawrence clearly invokes in the image of the stooped, weak-chested indi-vidual.12 Whereas the medical science that draws upon this notion of the habi-tus phthisicus posits a determining causal relation in which the features of thebody dictate everything from susceptibility to disease to psychological andmoral predilections, Lawrence recasts morphological features as structures pro-duced by the flows of dynamic consciousness rather than causal agents.

Extending and schematizing this understanding of the relationshipbetween the unconscious and the body beyond the narrowly pathological,Lawrence goes so far as to claim that:

just as the fullness of the lips and the shape of the mouth depend on the devel-opment from the lower or the upper centres, the sensual or the spiritual, sodoes the shape of the nose depend on the direct control of the deepest centresof consciousness. A perfect nose is perhaps the result of a balance in the fourmodes. But what is a perfect nose!—We only know that a short snub nose goeswith an over-sympathetic nature, not proud enough; while a long nose derivesfrom the centre of the upper will, the thoracic ganglion, our great centre ofcuriosity, and benevolent or objective control. A thick, squat nose is the sen-sual-sympathetic nose, and the high, arched nose the sensual voluntary nose,having the curve of repudiation, as when we turn up our nose from a badsmell, but also the proud curve of haughtiness and subjective authority. Thenose is one of the greatest indicators of character. That is to say it almostinevitably indicates the mode of predominant dynamic consciousness in theindividual, the predominant primary centre from which he lives. (100–101)



The effects of the unconscious upon the body’s morphology, thus, are notlimited to the tubercular body, or to nasal or respiratory conditions moregenerally. Instead, Lawrence’s schema systematically accounts for the rela-tionships between the nerve centers and each of the five senses, not to men-tion a wide range of organs, major and minor. If one, perhaps, initially isseduced by the simple elegance and extensive classificatory reach of a rhi-nomorphic theory of character (and its possible analogues), it is important tonote that the relationship described therein is ultimately more than merelyexpressive or reflective. Though it clearly engages the characterologicalimpulse implicit in theories of physiological types, Lawrence’s model func-tions neither simply to map interior states and the values attached to them(here understood as the states of dynamic consciousness) onto the exteriorsurface of the body, nor simply to comprehend the visible features of bodilyexteriority as reproducing the character of internal systems. Sharing with thetypologists the belief that physiological features make legible elements ofindividual character, Lawrence parts company both in positing a significantdegree of physical mutability, and in comprehending morphology not as thedetermining instance but as determined by the variable flows of the uncon-scious. Rather than a relation of reflection or representation, dynamic con-sciousness and the body find themselves inserted in something like afeedback loop. If dynamic consciousness derives its force, and indeed thebasic contours of its functionality, from the body and its morphology, thisderivation cannot be understood on a foundational model insofar as thebody and its morphology are reciprocally susceptible (in very basic ways) toalteration by the forces of dynamic consciousness.

The ability of vital flows to affect physiological features of the body is, infact, a fundamental aspect of Lawrence’s understanding of dynamic con-sciousness. If, as we have noted, there are moments in which dynamic con-sciousness seems fundamentally determined by the laws of physiologicaldevelopment, in other moments Lawrence inverts the lines of causality, andphysiological development becomes the effect of the unfolding of dynamicconsciousness. This inversion is particularly evident in his elaboration of thesecond field of dynamic consciousness, paradoxically the element of hisschema in relation to which the developmental logic also comes most to thefore. Though puberty is, at moments, cited as the physiological change thatactivates the second field, Lawrence also contends that there “are obviousphysiological changes resulting from the gradual bursting into free activity”(133) of the upper and lower plexuses and ganglia—a logic he uses to explainpubertal development of the sex organs in addition to a variety of otherchanges such as the breaking of young men’s voices and the appearance of



facial hair. At its speculative extreme, this tendency leads Lawrence to won-der “why the growth of hair should start at the lower and upper sympatheticregions” (on the front of the body), a query to which he responds by consid-ering a number of possibilities:

Perhaps to preserve these powerful yet supersensitive nodes from theinclemency of changes in temperature, which might cause a derangement.Perhaps for the sake of protective warning, as hair warns when it is touched.Perhaps for a screen against various dynamic vibrations, and as a receiver ofother suited dynamic vibrations. It may be that even the hair of the head actsas a sensitive vibration-medium for conveying currents of physical and vitalis-tic activity to and from the brain. And perhaps from the centres of intense vitalsurcharge hair springs as a sort of annunciation or declaration, like a crest oflife-assertion. Perhaps all these things, and perhaps others. (133)

Whatever the case may be, all these options suggest that physiological changefundamentally derives from, rather than produces, the development ofdynamic consciousness. “With the bursting awake of the four new poles ofdynamic consciousness and being,” in short, “change takes place in every-thing: . . . the body resolves itself into distinctions” (133).

This second line of thought is more consistent with Lawrence’s polemicin the psychological essays. To the extent that the unconscious escapes adevelopmental logic and its vital flows affect the bodies they traverse, it canfunction as a site of resistance to the materioidealism of bioscience and itscorresponding model of the body as an organic machine governed by pre-dictable physical laws. Because, according to this second line of thought, theunconscious is not determined by these laws, it is able to function as thesource of spontaneity that Lawrence intends. But what are we to make ofthese two competing movements of thought that animate Lawrence’s text?Do they simply mark logical inconsistency or a contradiction that Lawrenceis unable to resolve? In order to address these questions it will be necessaryto consider the notion of infancy that arguably supports the essential con-tours of the Lawrencian unconscious. Exploring the figure of the infant pre-sented in the psychological essays will both provide a fuller elaboration of thesecond line of Lawrence’s thought and clarify the points of articulationbetween it and the organicist tendency in tension with which it stands.

Given Lawrence’s basic definition of the unconscious as “that essentialunique nature of every individual creature, which is, by its very nature,unanalysable, undefinable, inconceivable” (17), the infant is the essential fig-ure of the unconscious. Lawrence gestures in this direction in an essay enti-tled “Education of the People” when he asks, “Wherein lies the mystery of a



baby, for us adults? From what has grown the legend of the adoration of theinfant?” (RDP, 119). He responds to these questions by adducing the “factthat in the infant the great affective centres, volitional and emotional, actdirect and spontaneous, without mental cognition or interference” (RDP,119). This formulation remains within the bounds of a developmental logicinsofar as it is enunciated from the perspective of a stage at which this spon-taneity has been lost to mental consciousness, the perspective, in short, of themystified and adoring adult. The impulse animating this gesture finds a moreradical articulation, however, in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, whereLawrence claims that

The nature of the infant is not just a new permutation-and-combination ofelements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of theinfant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents. Somethingwhich could never be derived from the natures of all the existent individualsor previous individuals. There is in the nature of the infant something entirelynew, underived, underivable, something which is, and will for ever remain,causeless. And this something is the unanalysable, undefinable reality of indi-viduality. Every time at the moment of conception of every higher organisman individual nature incomprehensibly arises in the universe, out of nowhere.Granted the whole cause-and-effect process of generation and evolution, stillthe individual is not explained. The individual unit of consciousness and beingwhich arises at the conception of every higher organism arises by pure cre-ation, by a process not susceptible to understanding, a process which takesplace outside the field of mental comprehension, where mentality . . . cannotand does not exist. . . . Individuality appears in defiance of all scientific law, indefiance even of reason. (F, 16–17)

Though the appurtenance of developmental trajectories to the notion of theinfant threatens to circumscribe it within a sort of primitivist impulse thatwould attribute its power to developmental priority, Lawrence’s gesturedraws us beyond this logic. In addition to escaping forces of biological orhereditary determination, and existing outside the laws of cause and effectmore generally, as the essential instantiation of the unconscious the infantactualizes a moment of absolute novelty that is characterized as the“unanalysable, undefinable reality of individuality.” In the figure of theinfant, we find that “individuality appears in defiance of all scientific law, indefiance even of reason,” and as such localizes an instance of sheer, sponta-neous creation, the substance of which is “individuality.”

It is important to note that this notion of individuality upon which somuch comes to depend does not designate a subjective mode properly speak-ing. If the essence of the infant is its individuality, this is not to say that the



infant embodies a special form of subjectivity. Lawrence insists that theunconscious contains “nothing in the least personal, since personality, like theego, belongs to the conscious or mental-subjective self” (28); in this contexthe calls us to understand the individuality of the infant. Given that “the firstanalyses [of the unconscious] are, or should be, so impersonal that the so-called human relations are not involved” (28), infantile individuality appearsas an instance of absolutely impersonal, even inhuman, singularity.13 To theextent that the infant can designate the first stage in the development of theself-conscious human individual—an elementary being—it also, and morefundamentally, embodies that being as it is traversed by the actualization ofimpersonal and univocal Being, understood as the virtuality of vital force inthe process of its unfolding.14 The unconscious, and the infant, are forLawrence instances in which “life bubbles up in us, prior to any mentality”(15), and this “life” must be understood as an impersonal force that eruptswithin the human being, but cannot be comprehended as such. “It is no use,”says Lawrence, “talking about life and the unconscious in bulk. You can talkabout electricity, because it is a homogeneous force, conceivable apart fromany incorporation. But life is inconceivable as a general thing. It exists only inliving creatures” (15). This formulation suggests not that vitality is a state ofpossibility limited to its realization in actual creatures, but that it is existen-tially available only in the specific forms through which it actualizes itself; wemust attend, in other words to the relationship between “life” as an inconceiv-able, impersonal force (a virtuality) and the existential forms of its actualiza-tion. Alain Badiou provides a useful framework within which to approach thisdistinction. “To exist,” he writes, “is to come to pass on the surface of the Oneas a simulacrum and inflection of intensity. What results is that the One canindeed be, in what exists, the virtual of which the existent is an actualizationor a differentiation, and that under no circumstances whatsoever can it be sep-arated from the existent in the way that the possible is from the real” (49).Whereas the possible and the real are different only in their degree of reality—the possible designating a form that is copied in its realization—the virtualand the actual are not bound by this mimetic relation. The virtual is real(though not actual), and does not presuppose the form of its actualization.Thus, the actualization of the virtual necessitates the creative function soimportant to thinkers like Bergson, Carpenter, and Lawrence: the virtualmust create the forms adequate to its actualization rather than imitate preex-isting forms. In this context, the infant marks the point at which this essen-tially undifferentiated life force—the virtuality of Being—actualizes itselfthrough a process of self-differentiation, which produces an individual thatmust be understood as a singularity.



Lawrence’s position, in this respect, falls within a fairly well-defined vital-ist tradition. It is, for example, quite close to Henri Bergson’s notion of élanvital, as a form of pure, univocal Being in which difference exists not throughexternal relations of mediation or negation, but only internally as a processof self-differentiation. Life is, for Bergson, an essentially unitary virtual stateof Being, which differentiates itself through a process of actualization in amultitude of existential forms. As Michael Hardt suggests,

In effect, we do find a conception of pure being in Bergson: The virtual is thesimplicity of being in itself, pure recollection (le souvenir pur). However, pure,virtual being is not abstract and indifferent, and neither does it enter into rela-tion with what is other than itself—it is real and qualified through the inter-nal process of differentiation. . . . Being differs with itself immediately,internally. It does not look outside itself for an other or a force of mediationbecause its difference arises from its very core, from the “explosive internalforce that life carries within itself ” [“La conception de la différence chezBergson,” 93]. This élan vital that animates being, this vital process of differ-entiation, links pure essence and the real existence of being: “Virtuality existsin such a way that it is realized in dissociating itself, that it is forced to disso-ciate itself in order to realize itself. Differentiation is the movement of a virtu-ality that is actualizing itself ” [“La conception de la différence chez Bergson,”93]. (Gilles Deleuze, 14)

Edward Carpenter (with whose work Lawrence was clearly familiar) also pro-vides a useful articulation of this sort of problematic in his The Art ofCreation. “There is a distinction between Mind and Matter (as of two aspectsof the same thing),” he writes, “but no real separation. . . . We may say here,however, that the distinction between Mind and Matter forces us to conceive,or try to conceive, of a ‘stuff ’ prior to both—a something of which they aretwo aspects; and thus we come to the world-old ideas of primitive Being(before all differentiation, emanation, or expression)” (4–5). From the per-spective of Carpenter’s monadic philosophy, Life force is a name of the Oneand is understood as a unitary and universal “Self ” that differentiates itself inthe form of existentially realized “selves.” “We must believe,” he writes, “thefinal and real Self to be one and universal. . . . All our ‘selves’ consequentlymust be one, or at least united so as to be branches of the One—even thoughfor a time deluded by the idea of separation” (76). For Carpenter,

The fact is conceivable that the Self may become countless selves. The greatSelf is omnipresent in Space and Time; but if it appear [sic] or express itself atany one point of space and time (say as the ego of a single cell), then at once



and in that moment it has determined an aspect of itself; and the ego in thatcell is already an individual having within itself the potentiality of the whole,yet different from every other possible individual of the universe. (81)

In this formulation we can glimpse the problematic articulated by Lawrencein his notion of the unconscious. A unitary, universal, and ungraspable lifeforce erupts into time and space in the body of an individual human being,and in so doing produces an instance of absolutely singular individuality towhich Lawrence refers in his notion of the infant.

The monadic conception of Being shared by Bergson and Carpenter isalso evident in Lawrence. His notion of the unconscious—fundamentallysynonymous with life force—is essentially embodied in the “glinting nucleusof the ovule” (F, 38), and this first cell, as we have noted, is characterized pri-marily by its unitary state. Similarly, that the infant comes to be the primaryfigure for, and best example of, the unconscious derives from the fact thatwithin the schema of the unconscious infancy corresponds to the solarplexus: the source of that first monadic mode of dynamic consciousness inwhich one knows only that “I am I,” and the individual is not understood inrelation to anything or anyone else. Lawrence’s characterization of the statessubsequent to this original, unitary instance of vitality as ones in which theunconscious (as embodied in the ovule) “spin[s] the nerves and the brain asa web for its own motion” (19), thus, makes it plausible enough to under-stand the process he describes as the self-differentiation of life force. Theunconscious embodies the limit along which unitary Being and absoluteindividuality meet, and as such raises the question of how a conception ofBeing as completely univocal can be commensurate with instances of sheerindividuality. If Lawrence’s notion of vital force is predicated upon a univo-cal conception of Being, then are not the beings into which that vital forcedifferentiates itself merely instances of sameness rather than individuality? Itis important, in this context, to understand the individuality that is the pri-mary characteristic of the infant as a case of singularity in the sense thatGilles Deleuze gives to the term. The infant is, for Lawrence, clearly a beingdifferent from all others, but the source of this difference is key. Because theessential individuality of the infant—its absolute difference from all otherbeings—is an originary characteristic proper to its monadic unity, andbecause its individuality is resolutely impersonal, it does not rely upon theconstitutive interiority of a subject that both reflects upon itself and relatesto its objects in the mode of negativity. Infantile individuality cannot arise,therefore, as the product of any movement of mediation or negation. Its indi-vidual difference is, in short, not the effect of a relation between interiority



and exteriority, but is immanent to itself, and it is precisely in this sense thatthe infant can be understood as singular. As Michael Hardt suggests, singu-larity is “the correlate of efficient causality and internal difference: The sin-gular is remarkable because it is different in itself ” (63).15

The significance of the Lawrencian infant, and the notion of singularityit embodies, is multiple: it has implications for his model of embodiment,his understanding of the subject and intersubjective relations, and the struc-ture of collectivity that is their predicate. In relation to the organicist move-ment of Lawrence’s thought, the infant provides a crucial counterpoint.Rather than designating merely the first stage in a process of developmentand an embryonic form of consciousness that is eventually surpassed or over-come, infancy becomes a persistent mode of dynamic consciousness. Insofaras dynamic consciousness is the emergent ramification of life force, thoseinstances of pure creation in which dynamic consciousness affects an individ-ual body—or through a body, some other aspect of the world—constitute areemergence, or remarking of the persistence, of infancy. Given thatLawrence leaves uncontested “the whole cause-and-effect process of genera-tion and evolution” (17), and thereby grants science its provenance in theunderstanding of life, he simultaneously posits, in the figure of the infant, aprinciple that ultimately defies and supersedes the explanatory power of sci-ence. On Lawrence’s account, the child (understood as a developmental cat-egory and therefore distinct from the infant) is faced with an inevitable andprogressive entry into the instrumental order of cause and effect, habitualiza-tion, and adaptation to determining circumstances—the instrumental order,in short, from which mental consciousness derives its contours and withwhich it is designed to interact. “The brain is, if we may use the word, theterminal instrument of the dynamic consciousness,” writes Lawrence.

It transmutes what is a creative flux into a fixed cypher. It prints off, like a tele-graph instrument, the glyphs and graphic representations which we call per-cepts, concepts, ideas. It produces a new reality—the ideal. The idea is anotherstatic entity, another unit of the mechanical-active and materio-static universe.It is thrown off from life, as leaves are shed from a tree, or as feathers fall froma bird. Ideas are the dry, unliving, insentient plumage which intervenesbetween us and the circumambient universe, forming at once an insulator andan instrument for the subduing of the universe. The mind is the instrumentof instruments; it is not a creative reality. (41–42)

There is, thus, a fundamental tension between two orders of reality: the fun-damental creative flux of vital reality in which dynamic consciousness partic-ipates and the “mechanical-active, materio-static universe” produced by the



mortifying ossification of that vital reality as it is submitted to the linguisticand ideational constructs of mental consciousness. The material order is ineffect the accretion of static particles that have precipitated out of the fluxthat is the vital order; it is that which is “thrown off from life.”

Far from simply dismissing this material order, however, Lawrence admitsits inevitability—even necessity—but is clear that it represents only a limitedinstrumental approach to the totality of the real. We must interact instru-mentally with the world in order to satisfy material needs, and mental con-sciousness is the faculty that has adapted itself to that necessity. Indeed,mental consciousness and the “materio-static universe” are engaged in a rela-tion of reciprocal implication; if mental consciousness is designed to appre-hend and affect a material universe that is understood as a complex ofdiscrete, static units, it simultaneously presupposes the form of matter in itsoperational reliance on the idea—itself nothing more than “another staticentity”—and its focus on causal relations by which units of matter are tiedone to the other.16 The necessity of mental consciousness notwithstanding,its approach to reality constitutes a deadening reduction of the vital flux ofthe universe. Given the pervasive tendency of this mental approach tobecome dominant and occlude vital reality, Lawrence is at pains to articulatea vital point of resistance to the instrumental order. If the child cannot escapeits sacrifice to the “whole cause-and-effect process of generation and evolu-tion,” the state of infancy it initially embodies is emphatically not the prod-uct of that process, and, moreover, constitutes a force that is inconvertible bythe operations of that process. Though the form of consciousness representedby the infant may be occluded or displaced by mental consciousness—indeed, Lawrence clearly argues that this occlusion has become hegemonic inhis culture—the latter cannot incorporate the former within its operations.Rather than a stage in a developmental progression toward mental conscious-ness, infancy designates a persistent mode of dynamic consciousness whoseeruption within a hegemonic regime of mentality and the material order ofreality it reflects Lawrence seeks to remark or facilitate.

The mechanism of this eruption is notable, for the vital order of theunconscious does not exist in complete isolation from the materiostatic uni-verse of mental consciousness. Though “the unconscious is the creative ele-ment,” writes Lawrence, “and though . . . it is beyond all law of cause andeffect in its totality, yet in its processes of self-realization it follows the lawsof cause and effect” (F, 18). More specifically, the

processes of cause and effect are indeed part of the working out of this incom-prehensible self-realization of the individual unconscious. The great laws ofthe universe are no more than the fixed habits of the living unconscious.



What we must needs do is try to trace still further the habits of the trueunconscious, and by mental recognition of these habits break the limits whichwe have imposed on the movement of the unconscious. For the whole pointabout the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving forward, beyondthe range of its own fixed laws and habits. It is no good trying to superimposean ideal nature upon the unconscious. We have to try to recognize the truenature and then leave the unconscious itself to prompt new movement andnew being—the creative process. (18)

Drawing a distinction between the unconscious and the “individual uncon-scious,” Lawrence thus explains a fundamental ambivalence in his usage ofterms like the unconscious or dynamic consciousness, which are at times virtu-ally synonymous with vital force itself, and at times name the elaborately dif-ferentiated faculty attuned to the vital order. Like mental consciousness andthe materiostatic universe in this respect, Lawrence’s use of the unconsciousreflects a relationship of reciprocal implication between the vital order andthe system of consciousness that participates in it: if the unconscious funda-mentally designates the emergent actualization of vital force, it also refers tothe mode of consciousness produced in, and shaped by, that actualization.Importantly though, this vital mode of consciousness is subject to a kind ofentropic slide toward material stasis and mental consciousness, an importantform of which would be the misrecognition of the individual unconscious asan immature stage in the progression toward fully mental consciousness. Inhis notion of infancy, then, Lawrence appropriates a term that normally cor-responds to the first stage in just such a developmental teleology in order todesignate the “creative process” of the unconscious whose persistent eruptionwithin ossified and habitual material forms (such as the logic of develop-ment) ensures the production of “new movement and new being.” Whereasthe conceptual framework of mental consciousness would fix ideal forms tobe replicated in the realization of the vital force of the unconscious, theinfant figures the properly virtual character of the unconscious, andLawrence’s insistence that the actualization of that virtuality proceeds notthrough the reproduction of preexistent forms but through the creative pro-duction of new forms adequate to its differentiation—what he refers to as theprocess through which the unconscious is “all the time moving forward,beyond the range of its own fixed laws and habits.”

If the infant is, thus, the basis of Lawrence’s critique insofar as it manifestsa point of resistance to the hegemony of mental consciousness and the mate-rial order of reality with which it interacts, it is no less critically powerful inrelation to the less salubrious tendencies of Lawrence’s own text. Given hisargument that the “self-realization” of the unconscious is inevitably affected



by the laws governing the materiostatic universe, and as such is subject to arigidifying habitualization, we need look no further than the organicistmovement of his own text for an example of this process. Ironically,Lawrence’s recourse to the language of habit seems especially appropriate indescribing, for example, the way in which his own schema of dynamic con-sciousness comes to function as a systematic calculus that theoretically deter-mines in advance all possible ramifications of vital force. Similarly, hisdialectical model of development and the regulative norms in whose servicehe places dynamic consciousness arguably constitute its ossification into adegraded, habit-bound state. In this light, the taxonomic drive evident in hisschematic rendering of dynamic consciousness, and the developmentalmodel in which it sometimes issues, appear as effects of what Lawrence him-self describes as the infelicitous yet inevitable drift toward mental conscious-ness and its instrumental approach to reality. Lawrence’s own text, in otherwords, unwittingly plays out precisely that tendency it seeks to diagnose, andthis complicity in the cultural formation it critiques is nowhere more evidentthan in Lawrence’s organicist line of thought.

Given that the organic structures through which Lawrence sometimesarticulates his vitalist corporeal model constitute a form of complicity in themechanical material order his vitalism is intended to resist, the second lineof thought that runs through his text and culminates in the notion of theinfant provides resources for the unworking of precisely those organicist ten-dencies. In light of his notion of infancy, for instance, Lawrence’s schema ofdynamic consciousness appears less as a systematic calculus than a diagramof differentiation, a generator of singularities and their possible conjunctions.The dialectic of development equally appears as an effect of the materialorder of reality, and as such is confronted by the singularity of the infantinsofar as the latter both remains unassimilable to a teleology of develop-ment, and challenges the subjective logic it instantiates. More than merelyinverting the developmental model, and the lines of causality between thebody and dynamic consciousness that it implies, the infant constitutes anopening up of its closed system. Rather than bodies composed of discretematerial units interacting within closed corporeal systems that support theconsciousnesses of discrete individuals, which themselves enter into a com-plex of intersubjective and communal relations predicated primarily uponstructures of negation and identification, Lawrence’s notion of infancydemands that both bodies and selves be approached outside of such a spatial-ized subjective formation. The body and the self must equally be understoodin terms of the infant’s singularity: as temporary and shifting forms throughwhich vital force undergoes its self-differentiation, a process that necessitates



the creation of new and unpredictable forms in which the virtuality of lifecan become actual. The mode of selfhood produced by the self-differentia-tion of vital force is not predicated upon a constitutive interiority (object ofself-reflection, and of mediation in its relations to instances of alterity), butis constantly open to the force of infancy and as such cannot properly beunderstood as a subject. Not a subject, this self is, one might say, subject toinfantilization. Selves must be understood, in Badiou’s terms, as “localdegrees of intensity” on the surface of Being, or “inflections of power that arein constant movement and entirely singular” (25); to the extent that theyexhibit interiority, it must be thought as the effect of a fold in Being, wherebya “folding of the outside . . . creates the inside of a self ”—an interiority that,“far from being constitutive, is itself constituted” (81). Though this vitalistform of the self is vulnerable to ossifying entropic swerves toward the mate-rial order (in which subjective formations find a more congenial home), theeffects of that tendency represent a distortion of its essential character.

This opening up of the subject as an individual form by the genuinely cre-ative force of infantile singularity is a process to which subjective communalforms, such as organic community, are equally vulnerable. If the communalramifications of his notion of infancy are relatively underdeveloped in thepsychological essays, Lawrence had already explored them at length in aroughly contemporaneous essay, entitled “Democracy,” originally publishedin 1919. His consideration of what he takes to be the preeminent and greatlyidealized political form of his time reflects the divided nature of reality thatis central to his consideration of the individual. The tension between thematerial and vital orders also manifests itself in relation to structures of col-lectivity, and for Lawrence the prevailing notion of democracy belongs firmlyto the former. Democracy, he argues, is fundamentally predicated upon “theLaw of the Average. . . . Upon this law rests all the vague dissertation con-cerning equality and social perfection. Rights of Man, Equality of Man,Social Perfectibility of Man, all these sweet abstractions, once so inspiring,rest upon the fatal little hypothesis of the Average. Since Man writ large isjust the Average Man” (63). This “Average Man” is, in the fullest sense, theideal democratic citizen: he is purely ideal, abstract, “the reduction of thehuman being to a mathematical unit” (63). Democracy is, thus, fully conso-nant with the material order of reality, a product of mental consciousness.Even in corporeal terms, the Average Man is divorced from the vital body; heis a “little organism . . . a very complicated organ, a unit” that has a “func-tional purpose” (63).

In this light, democracy is clearly an unsatisfactory political form giventhat it properly belongs to the material order of reality and works to repress



the vital order. Yet Lawrence is not simply dismissive. Even though the“Average Man,” the “Man-in-the-Street,” is merely the “image and effigy ofall your equality” and simply “represents what all men need and desire, phys-ically, functionally, materially, and socially” (65), Lawrence is clear that suchmaterial needs are significant. For after all, “People must live together. Andto live together, they must have some standard, some Material Standard”(69). “This is where the Average comes in,” he argues,

And this is where Socialism, and Modern Democracy comes in. ForDemocracy and Socialism rest upon the Equality of Man, which is theAverage. And this is sound enough, so long as the Average represents the realbasic material needs of mankind—basic material needs—we insist and insistagain. For Society, or Democracy, or any Political State or Community existsnot for the sake of the individual, nor should ever exist for the sake of the indi-vidual, but simply to establish the Average, in order to make living togetherpossible: that is, to make proper facilities for every man’s clothing, feeding,housing himself, working, sleeping, mating, playing, according to his necessityas a common unit, an average. Everything beyond that common necessitydepends on himself alone. (65–-66)

Just as science has its place in the understanding of the individual humanbody and its relations to the world, Democracy and other political formshave their role in the functioning of the social body; in both cases, however,they are pertinent only to the functional material order of existence. Thedemands and needs of material existence are obviously significant, andrequire mechanisms suited to their negotiation, but the problem predictablylies in the extent to which these mechanisms have arrogated to themselves allaspects of existence. Misrecognizing themselves as universally applicable, themechanisms of the materiostatic universe suppress the vital order and effec-tively promote the conflation of the material order with reality in its entirety.In the case of democracy (and other political mechanisms like socialism, notto mention the state and the nation more broadly), Lawrence argues that asystem suited to sustain the material aspects of collective existence has beenwidely mistaken as an adequate expression of the entire communal impulse.“The proper adjustment of material means of existence: for this the Stateexists,” he rails, “but nothing further. The State is a dead ideal. Nation is adead ideal. Democracy and Socialism are dead ideals. They are one and alljust contrivances for supplying the lowest material needs of a people” (66). Inthus hearing Lawrence toll the “death” of these political forms we must besomewhat literal minded: rather than relegating them to the dustbin of his-tory, his statement limits their provenance to that of the dead material order.



Like science in this respect, they function in relation to the mortified reduc-tion of the vital order but are inadequate to the demands of life itself.

This inadequacy derives primarily from the understanding of equalityupon which Democracy is based. In claiming to respect and grant equal priv-ilege to the rights of each particular individual, Democracy ironically rendersitself unable to account for individuality in its most meaningful sense: thatproduced by the vital order. Contrary to the democratic impulse, Lawrenceargues that because “every individual is, in his first reality, a single, incom-mutable soul, not to be calculated or defined in terms of any other soul, therecan be no establishing of a mathematical ratio. . . . We cannot,” he continues,

say that all men are equal. We cannot say A = B. Nor can we say that men areunequal. We may not declare that A = B + C.

Where each thing is unique in itself, there can be no comparison made.One man is neither equal nor unequal to another man. When I stand in thepresence of another man, and I am my own pure self, am I aware of the pres-ence of an equal, or of an inferior, or of a superior? I am not. When I standwith another man, who is himself, and when I am truly myself, then I am onlyaware of a Presence, and of the strange reality of Otherness. (80)

Democracy, in short, is unable to discern the crucial difference between “twosorts of individual identity.” Whereas “Every factory-made pitcher has itsown little identity, resulting from a certain mechanical combination ofMatter and Forces,” and these “material identities” are susceptible to the sortof quantitative equivalence that is the basis of Democracy, the “identity ofthe living self ” (73) cannot be grasped in mathematical terms. Anticipatinghis articulation of singular individuality in the psychological essays,Lawrence contends that “every living creature is single in itself, a ne plus ultraof creative reality, fons et origo of creative manifestation,” and that this singu-larity is incommensurate with the quantitative register on which one might“abstract and generalise and include” (73). Although, “in its material reality”every individual “submits to all the laws of the material universe”—lawspremised on abstraction, generalization, and quantification—in its true, vitalidentity the individual “uses these laws and converts them in the mystery ofcreation” (73). The significance of this distinction lies in the different formsof community with which each type of identity is associated. The reductionof singular individuality under the regime of quantitative equality (materialidentity) leads to the progressive loss of the “faculty for collective self-expres-sion” (66). More precisely, the promotion of quantitative distinctions, andthe material order organized in terms of such distinctions, facilitates struc-tures of collectivity based on fusion of individuals into a unified whole. The



insistence on understanding individuals as discrete quantifiable units ineffect renders individuals “functional units” (69) within a mechanical system,and thus allows groups of individuals to be incorporated into homogenizingtotalities—a process that ultimately leads to “the ideal of Oneness, the unifi-cation of all mankind into the homogeneous whole” (78). These states of“Oneness, and collectiveness” are, however, “our lesser states, inferior; ourimpurity” (72); indeed, the “En-Masse is a horrible nullification of true iden-tity and being” (77). “At best, our en masse activities can be but servile,”writes Lawrence, “serving the free soul. At the worst, they are sheer self-destruction. Let us put them in their place. Let us get over our rage of socialactivity, public being, universal self-estimation, republicanism, bolshevism,socialism, empire—all these mad manifestations of En Masse and OneIdentity” (77). On its face, this litany seems to suggest a rather scatteredattack on an idiosyncratically selected group of “isms,” but taken in contextit suggests that the organic forms of community, articulated in their horrify-ing extremity in a text like The Plumed Serpent, do not constitute an excep-tion realized only under fascist or other totalitarian regimes but ratherconstitute the horizon of modern politics more generally. On Lawrence’sanalysis, a range of sociopolitical programs, which includes everything fromdemocracy to bolshevism to imperialism, find their foundation in forms ofmaterial identity that promote organic structures of collectivity.17

The singularity of living identity, in contrast, is absolutely incommensu-rate with the quantitative equality of Democracy, and more generally withany structure of collectivity founded upon the fusion of individuals into agreater whole. When he writes of living identity, Lawrence contends that“not in any oneness with the rest of things can we have our pure being, butin clean, fine singleness,” and turns instead to “the myriad, mysterious iden-tities, no one of which can comprehend another. They can only exist side byside, as stars do” (72). Imagining the “new Democracy,” he insists: “Not peo-ple smelted into a oneness . . . [b]ut people released into their single starryidentity, each one distinct and incommutable” (73); the “great desire is thateach single individual shall be incommutable himself, spontaneous and sin-gle, that he shall not in any way be reduced to a term, a unit of a Whole”(78). Indeed, for Lawrence, it is not an exaggeration to say that “the greatdevelopment in collective expression in mankind has been a progress towardsthe possibility of purely individual expression. The highest Collectivity hasfor its true goal the purest individualism, pure individual spontaneity” (66).It would be a mistake, however, to hear in these statements a retreat from theproblem of collectivity into an atomistic individualism, for in his paradoxi-cal formulation of pure individualism as the highest form of collectivity,



Lawrence once again recalls his understanding of the individual as a singu-larity—an instance in which the self-differentiating movement of vital forceis constrained to a genuine creativity in the production of new forms for itsactualization. Rather than fusional totalities, Lawrence posits both absoluteindividuals and their constellation as singular creations produced by theunfolding of vital force, and these constellations figure the form of collectiv-ity proper to the vital order.

A particularly comprehensive articulation of this problematic appears in“Education of the People”:

Instead of finding our highest reality in an ever-extending aggregation with therest of men, we shall realise at last that the highest reality for every living crea-ture is in its purity of singleness and its perfect solitary integrity, and thateverything else should be but a means to this end. All communion, all love,and all communication, which is all consciousness, are but a means to the per-fected singleness of the individual being.

Which doesn’t mean anarchy and disorder. On the contrary it means themost delicately and inscrutably established order, delicate, intricate, compli-cate as the stars in the heaven, when seen in their strange groups and goings.Neither does it mean what is nowadays called individualism. The so-calledindividualism is no more than a cheap egotism, every self-conscious little egoassuming the unbounded rights to display his self-consciousness. We meannone of this. We mean in the first place the recognition of the exquisite arrest-ing manifoldness of being, multiplicity, plurality, as the stars are plural in theirstarry singularity. (138)

In this moment, Lawrence evades both the drive to organic totality and theretreat into atomistic particularity. He does not, however, evade the necessityof thinking collective relations. Rather, drawing on his understanding of sin-gularity, he approaches a form of collectivity adequate to Life, a form whichI will (following Michael Hardt’s reading of Deleuze) refer to as the Multitude(Gilles Deleuze, 110–11, 120–21). The Multitude, as Lawrence understandsit is a form of totality, a whole, composed in the assemblage of multiple sin-gularities, but rather than a closed transcendent form into which individualsare incorporated or subsumed, it is a whole that is itself produced as a singu-lar form through which vitality actualizes itself. The Multitude, as a totalitythat assembles singularities into a constellation, itself exists on the same planeas the singularities themselves as another local intensity in the self-differenti-ating movement of vitality. As such it functions to create new forms of life inthe combinations of individuals that it actualizes, but it can never become aclosed remainderless system. The Multitude remains a fundamentally open



form—open to, and opened up by, the innovating force of unfolding life—insofar as it is constantly traversed by the shifting forms of, and antagonismsbetween, the singularities it composes. The Multitude does not reduce themultiplicity of different individuals it assembles—its fundamental principleis that “no man shall try to determine the being of any other man, or of anyother woman” (RDP, 80)—but makes possible something absent in a sheermultiplicity. In assembling a multiplicity of singular individuals it actualizesforms that would otherwise remain unthinkable, and in effect makes theconstellated multiplicity more powerful. This empowerment of the multi-plicity is manifest in Lawrence’s exhortation to:

Have done, let go the old connections. Fall apart, fall asunder, each into hisown unfathomable dark bath of isolation. Break up the old incorporation.Finish for ever the old unison into homogeneity. Let every man fall apart intoa fathomless, single isolation of being, exultant at his own core, and apart.Then, dancing magnificent in our own space, as the spheres dance in space,we can set up the extra-individual communication. Across the space comes thethrill of communication. There is an approach, a flash and a blaze of contact,and then the sheer fiery purity of a purer isolation, a more exultant singleness.Not a mass of homogeneity, like sunlight. But a fathomless multiplicity, likethe stars at night, each one isolate in the darkly-singing space. (RDP, 135)

In the constellation that produces the moment of contact between two sin-gular individuals there is no reduction of one by the other, and instead some-thing arises as the result of their coming into relation that would not havebeen actualized in their sheer separation: there is a “purer isolation, a moreexultant singleness.” “Though man is first and foremost an individual being,”as Lawrence suggests, “yet the very accomplishing of his individuality restsupon his fulfilment in social life. If you isolate an individual you deprive himof his life: if you leave him no isolation you deprive him of himself. Andthere it is! Life consists in the interaction between a man and his fellows,from the individual, integral core in each” (RDP, 114).



PART 2

Atoms Upon the Mind: Virginia Woolf and the Nervous Body at the Limit of Community


CHAPTER 3

Organizing the Nervous Body,Regulating the Self: The

Psychological Production of National Community in Mrs.

Dalloway and The Waves

This second part of the book will turn from the discursive nexus artic-ulated by the interanimation of Lawrence’s writing and the medicalscience organized around the tubercular body in order to examine a

different, if closely related, confrontation between modernist literary produc-tion and the bioscience of the period. Specifically, I will focus in what fol-lows on the relationship between the writing of Virginia Woolf and thebioscientific discourses—neurophysiology, neurology, psychology, psychia-try, and psychoanalysis—that, to be slightly imprecise, take the nervous bodyas their object. This imprecision is due partially to the fact that the bodiesapproached by these disciplines are at least slightly different in kind. Thesedisciplines share an interest in the body insofar as it is traversed by a systemof nerves, but they differ in their specific approaches to the enervated body:some are firmly founded in the study of the nervous system, some seeklargely to discount the nervous system in the study of psychic phenomena,and still others occupy a middle ground between the two.

Another means of characterizing more precisely the nervous body aroundwhich my argument will turn in the following two chapters would be withreference to the repertoire of diagnostic categories, prominently includingneurasthenia, hysteria, and shell shock or war neurosis, through which it isunderstood in the period. Though the nervous body might be understood as


a general category that subsumes a variety of more specific somatic types, Iwill approach it instead as a highly visible and contested corporeal space thatvariably takes on the contours of a number of especially prominent diagnos-tic regimes. The neurasthenic body, for instance, makes its almost ubiquitouspresence felt in the early part of the century as the example of the nervouscondition that was seen both quintessentially to define, and be defined by,life under the frequently overwhelming demands of the increasingly freneticand ever-accelerating conditions of urban industrial modernity.“Neurasthenia was introduced in the medical literature for the first time in1869,” writes Tom Lutz, “but it became more and more common throughthe beginning of the century. By 1903, neurasthenic language and represen-tations of neurasthenia were everywhere” (2). Similarly, the hysterical bodycan lay its claim to status as the representative locus of the period’s fascina-tion with all things psychological. Less site specific than neurasthenia, inso-far as it enjoys a prominent place in medical history that stretches back toclassical antiquity, hysteria nonetheless becomes newly prominent in itsrearticulation at the turn of the century, not least because it is famously thefoundation upon which the definingly modern (and perhaps even mod-ernist) edifice of psychoanalysis—publicly lauded and reviled in turn—isconstructed. Indeed, the centrality of both the neurasthenic and hystericalbody is only confirmed in the wake of World War I with the visibility ofthousands of returning soldiers manifesting the effects of combat in the formof shell shock, that newly minted syndrome that drew heavily on theories ofboth neurasthenia and hysteria in attempting to come to terms with the psy-chological trauma inflicted by the war.1

To insist, nonetheless, upon the nervous body as the site of my analysis—rather than a body defined more precisely as neurasthenic, hysterical, orshell-shocked, for example—is indubitably to seem somewhat anachronistic,for the nerves and their pathological cognates, such as nerve disease, nervousillness, and nervous temperament, surely find a more comfortable home inthe biomedical and cultural lexicons of the eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies than in the highly scientific psychological atmosphere of the latenineteenth century, let alone the subsequent period over which Freud loomsso large. As Peter Logan suggests, the “nervous temperament,” which finds itsmost canonical medical articulation in Thomas Trotter’s 1807 A View on theNervous Temperament, constitutes perhaps the “characteristically lateGeorgian condition” and encapsulates “different strands of Georgian think-ing about the nervous patient . . . that would persist throughout the nine-teenth century” (15–16). If the language of nervous temperament reflects asomaticist disposition that focuses on the physiological structures of the



nervous system and identifies an organic aetiology for mental disease—ifonly in positing a susceptibility to a variety of deleterious stimuli—thisimpulse seems at odds with the resolutely psychogenic emphases of psycho-analysis, arguably the quintessential early twentieth-century incarnation ofthe psychological enterprise. The constitution of psychoanalysis as such, afterall, takes place in Freud’s rejection of the neurological approaches to hysteriathat mark his own early work and find perhaps their most famous examplein the pathoanatomical methods of Jean-Martin Charcot. These approachessought, as Roy Porter suggests, “to pin down nervous phenomena to organiclesions, and thereby to bring regular system [sic] to general paralysis, neural-gias, seizures, epileptiform fits, spastic symptoms, tabes dorsalis, and, notleast, hysteria” (“The Body and the Mind,” 257).

The somaticism that supports the understanding of nervous illnessthroughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries does not, of course,evaporate with the dawn of the twentieth century and persists, for example,in the diagnostic categories and therapeutic procedures relevant to neurasthe-nia—a nervous diagnosis first introduced in the late nineteenth century, pop-ularized to a great extent by the American physician George M. Beard, andincreasingly in evidence by the turn of the century. In general terms, the aeti-ology of neurasthenia presupposes a finite reserve of nervous energy within anindividual human body and posits the overtaxation of those limited resourcesas the cause of mental illness. This overtaxation can be related to any numberof sources of excessive stimulation, but one of the reasons that the diagnosisbecomes increasingly popular in the early twentieth century is that it allowsnervous illness to be seen as the result of the demands posed by the unprece-dented forms of modern existence. Though, by the turn of the century,neurasthenia covers much of the same symptomatological ground as hysteria,the former posits a combination of environmental and somatic factors as thechief causal agents in disease, whereas the diagnosis of hysteria increasinglyaccounts for a similar set of symptoms as the somatic effects of a psychictrauma, which plays the primary causal role. Even by their 1893 Studies onHysteria, Freud and Breuer are confident that their observations “establish ananalogy between the pathogenesis of common hysteria and that of traumatic neu-roses, and . . . justify an extension of the concept of traumatic hysteria” (56).Pursuing this analogy, they reason that because in “traumatic neuroses, theoperative cause of the illness is not the trifling physical injury but the affectof fright—the psychical trauma,” it follows that “many, if not . . . most, hys-terical symptoms, [reveal] precipitating causes which can only be described aspsychical traumas” (56). This turn in the theorization of hysteria constitutesthe first steps in the process through which, as Porter somewhat flippantly

Organizing the Nervous Body, Regulating the Self • 131


describes it, “Freudianism [comes to represent] a final if backhanded vindi-cation of the ultimate sovereignty of consciousness” (“Barely Touching,”45)—a process in which, according to Dianne Sadoff ’s more measuredanalysis, “By surpassing physiological reductionism, Freudian psychoanalysisjoined psyche and soma through a theory of representation (in which onerealm stood for, indicated, or implied the other). . . . Pathological psychicalstructures were thus,” she argues, “inscribed in and upon or represented tothe organism; the body, in turn, represented these mental structures and reg-istrations as disordered perception, cognition, and subjectivity” (4).

If the notion of the nervous body initially appears both unnecessarilybaggy and somewhat anachronistic, its heuristic compensation is that it isexpansive enough to indicate a corporeal space that is traversed and contestedby multiple discursive regimes. It can incorporate both the historical disjunc-tions between residual and emergent medical scientific formations, and thetensions between contemporary formations that collaborate and compete intheir attempts to grasp the bodies they take as their objects. If neurastheniaand hysteria present two exemplary and competing turn of the century formsof nervous embodiment, they equally instantiate a historical disjunction intheir attempts to grasp the nervous body. Neurasthenia itself presents anessentially residual aetiological formation insofar as its somaticist foundationrelies on increasingly antiquated understandings both of nervous energy (andthe nervous system through which it flows) and of the constitutional natureof disease. Whereas the model of nervous exhaustion reflects a fairly directtransposition of an economic model derived from the study of mechanicalsystems, the constitutional model derives from a broadly positivist approachto the body and its interaction with its physical and social environments. Thepsychoanalytic construction of hysteria, on the other hand, constitutes anemergent form of nervous embodiment, rejecting as it does the reductionistinvestments of bioscience as adequate grounds for the understanding andtreatment of nervous illness. This tension will be central to my argument inwhat follows, as I shall be interested primarily in how Woolf ’s engagementof nervous embodiment takes up the residual formations made available byturn-of-the-century neuropsychology.

The decision to take the nervous body as the locus of my analysis is basedadditionally on its overwhelming popular visibility, a visibility due both to thegrowing prestige of disciplines that might loosely be described as psychologi-cal, and to the prominence of the pathologized bodies those disciplines fre-quently take as their objects of study. Like the tubercular body in this respect,it would be difficult to overestimate the sociocultural impact of the nervousbody and the plethora of competing discourses dedicated to its cartography,



definition, explanation, treatment, or manipulation of various other sorts.Michael North, for example, comments persuasively on both the general cul-tural (and specifically popular) significance of psychology in the early part ofthe century, and the special place of psychoanalysis within this formation.Psychoanalysis, he writes,

had become, in the words of the New York Evening World, “our most popularscience”. . . . The science that seemed to put so much emphasis on the innerworkings of the individual had become the focus of intense public attention,and the unconscious had become, mainly by virtue of its supposed inaccessi-bility, almost ubiquitous. Malinowski found the appropriately ironic term forthis sort of popularity when he criticized psychoanalysis as “the popular crazeof the day.” And, indeed, the enthusiasm for things psychological was soextreme, both in the United States and in Great Britain, that it might quitereasonably have seemed a psychological symptom itself. (65–66)

By 1922, he concludes, “the practice of psychology had itself become a fac-tor in group psychology, and widespread self-consciousness about psycholog-ical matters had begun to redound upon itself and upon the science in waysthat it could not have foreseen and perhaps could not explain” (67). Thispandemic obsession with all things psychological, in other words, producessomething of a feedback loop. In addition to the scientific protocols bywhich different psychological theories and practices variously impact oneanother and the bodies they study, the popularization of that scientific lan-guage itself becomes an important factor in those interactions. For the pur-poses of my discussion, then, the nervous body designates the space withinwhich human bodies, the competing medical scientific discourses that graspand shape the contours of those bodies, and the popular perception thereof,all come into contact. Moreover, as North’s analysis suggests in a limited way,the nervous body (again, much like the tubercular body in this respect) is ofparticular interest insofar as it functions as a hinge between the individualand the communal, the narrowly somatic and the social bodies into whichindividual bodies are incorporated. At its broadest level, my analysis in whatfollows will be dedicated to the exploration of this hinge as it is constitutedby the interanimation of psychological discourse and Woolf ’s literary pro-duction. How do the vicissitudes of the nervous body thematize theprocesses through which medical scientific projects directed at individualhuman bodies and their constitutive components become articulated with—even form the foundation of—various structures of collectivity?



Streams and Drainage Ditches: Rearticulating Woolf’s “Dark Places of Psychology” and the “Daily Drama of the Body”

Perhaps the simplest connection between the nervous discourse of the periodand Woolf ’s work is biographical. As was the case with Lawrence, however,my turn to bioscience is certainly not motivated by an attempt to explainbiographical fact; rather, the fact of what Hermione Lee warily refers to in achapter title of her biography as Woolf ’s “madness” will function only toindicate Woolf ’s intimate familiarity with the nervous discourse of theperiod. As Lee points out, “During her life she, and Leonard on her behalf,consulted at least twelve doctors” (182) regarding her mental illness—a sam-ple of medical opinion that ranged from a number of general practitioners tothe eminent neurologist Henry Head. By no means a passive object of med-ical scientific intervention, Woolf was actively engaged with the question ofher illness: “It affected her body as much as her mind” suggests Lee, “andraised the insoluble and fundamental question, which she spent a great dealof time considering, of the relation between the two: ‘What connection hasthe brain with the body? Nobody in Harley Street could explain’” (175). Farfrom simply a theoretical problem, of course, Woolf ’s experience was funda-mentally marked by the material effects of the nervous discourse with whichshe interacted. Perhaps the most persistent example in this respect, thoughonly one of many, was her repeated subjection to various forms of the restcure that resulted from her almost invariable diagnosis as neurasthenic. If themost extreme manifestation of this therapeutic regime was her confinementto a sanatorium in 1910 and 1913, its more general effects derived from thefact that “all her doctors recommended rest cures, milk and meat diets forweight gain, fresh air, avoidance of excitement and early nights” (183).

Though biography provides a useful bridge between Woolf ’s work andthe period’s nervous discourse, it is, nonetheless, somewhat superfluous inso-far as there is ample evidence in her literary production itself of her interestin psychological questions. Her fiction momentarily to one side, Woolf ’sengagement of psychology is absolutely central to two of her most importantessays—“Modern Fiction” and Three Guineas—texts that, published in 1919and 1938 respectively, roughly bracket her career as a writer and also serve tomark a shift in emphasis from the individual to the social. It is, of course, in“Modern Fiction” that Woolf programmatically announces that “for themoderns . . . , the point of interest . . . lies very likely in the dark places ofpsychology” (108), a statement that positions the depths of human con-sciousness, and more specifically the problem of representing them, at theheart of literary modernism. Nineteen years later, only three years before herdeath, the publication of Three Guineas makes it clear that the psychological



has lost none of its importance. Indeed, psychology arguably founds virtuallythe entirety of Woolf ’s position in that text. Though she is careful to distanceherself from a certain form of psychology, insisting that “we need not haverecourse to the dangerous and uncertain theories of psychologists and biolo-gists” (132), her position is, nonetheless, firmly psychological. Consideringthe possible motivations of her interlocutor’s appeal to an “educated man’sdaughter” for help in the prevention of war, she speculates that it is due to hisbelief that “human nature, the reasons, the emotions of the ordinary man andwoman, lead to war,” and concludes that on these grounds his appeal is just,for “happily there is one branch of education which comes under the head-ing of ‘unpaid-for education’—that understanding of human beings and theirmotives which, if the word is rid of its scientific associations, might be calledpsychology” (120). It is, of course, this group psychological project, the analy-sis of what she calls the conscious and unconscious desires that lead to war(161), that animates Three Guineas, not to mention much of her late fiction.

Because I explore the communal implications of Woolf ’s psychologicalengagement in Chapter 4, I will curtail further analysis of Three Guineas andconcentrate for the moment on her earlier confrontation of psychology.“Modern Fiction” is among the most well-known and frequently cited piecesof Woolf ’s nonfiction prose, and is widely mentioned as a key, almost man-ifesto-like, Anglo-American articulation of the literary modernist project. Itis a text in which, as Suzette Henke puts it, “Woolf raises a clarion call to anew aesthetics of psychological realism” (“Modern Tradition,” 623), and hasthe dubious distinction of being something of a critical locus classicus forarguments concerning modernist “stream of consciousness” narrative tech-niques.2 As it is in this context that Woolf ’s statement regarding the “darkplaces of psychology” most immediately becomes significant, a brief recapit-ulation of her argument—though its broad lines are generally familiar—is inorder. Situating herself, and her fellow “moderns,” in stark opposition to theunfortunate Edwardian trio of Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy, Woolf con-denses her grievance into a single word: “materialist.” “It is because [thesethree] are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have dis-appointed us,” she writes, “and left us with the feeling that the soonerEnglish fiction turns its back upon them . . . and marches, if only into thedesert, the better for its soul” (104). Admitting the technical accomplish-ment of a writer like Bennett, Woolf is led to ask, nonetheless:

Can it be that, owing to one of those little deviations which the human spiritseems to make from time to time, Mr Bennett has come down with his mag-nificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two on the wrong side? Life



escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while. It is a confessionof vagueness to have to make use of such a figure as this, but we scarcely bet-ter the matter by speaking, as critics are prone to do, of reality. Admitting thevagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion thatfor us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often missesthan secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or real-ity, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be containedany longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. (105)

Though it is clear enough that she calls for a new form of fiction, the sub-stance of the “life” to which this new form would be more adequate remains,if confessedly, rather vague. Nor is this vagueness greatly lessened by Woolf ’snotorious declaration that “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetricallyarranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding usfrom the beginning of consciousness to the end” (106). If it is the “task ofthe novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribedspirit, whatever aberration and complexity it may display” (106), and if Mr.Joyce is exemplary in his “spiritual” concern to “reveal the flickering of thatinnermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain” (107), Woolf ’slanguage remains reticent in characterizing the stuff of “life.” Based on thisminimal articulation we can do little more than associate “life” with humanconsciousness, and suggest that the brain is apparently the space in which itis most at home.

Perhaps it is largely due to the persistently figural nature of Woolf ’s lan-guage throughout this text that readers have been willing to accept a rathervague notion of how she understands the “dark places of psychology” or,more precisely, to assume that it is simply her intention to characterize thepsychological stuff of life, the object of truly modern literature, as vague,dark, shifting, ineffable—in short, as the ever-varied, intricately complexstream of human consciousness. Indeed, the move from the geometrical pre-cision of symmetrically arranged gig lamps to the conceptual fuzziness of the“luminous halo” and “semi-transparent envelope” would seem to bear outthe suggestion that vagueness is precisely the characteristic Woolf seeks toconvey. This reading, after all, dovetails rather nicely with the critical com-monplace that modernist literature is fundamentally shaped, if not by anexplicit engagement with Freudian theory, then by the purportedly unprece-dented and deeply unsettling discovery that Enlightenment reason mustshare its home in the human mind with the disruptively irrational force ofsomething like the unconscious. Michael Bell, for example, in his contribu-tion to the Cambridge Companion to Modernism (1999), entitled “TheMetaphysics of Modernism,” succinctly reiterates this position by invoking



the familiar troika of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as central critics ofEnlightenment rationalism, the lines of thought associated with whom arecrucial to the “intellectual formation” of modernism (9). “Freud,” he writes,“investigated the inner realm of the psyche and showed how . . . conscious-ness may itself act as a sophisticated barrier to recognizing the true nature ofinstinctual desire. And this is not just a personal problem to be diagnosed, itis the necessary basis of civilization” (9). Under the weight of discoveries suchas this, he concludes, the “very principle of reason collapses unnervingly intopossible rationalization while reason remains the only means of negotiatingthis recognition” (10). And perhaps it is in this spirit that Woolf ’s exhorta-tion to “record the atoms as they fall, let us trace the pattern, however dis-connected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scoresupon the consciousness” (107) has generally been received: one more in astring of clever metaphors through which she issues her “clarion call” to psy-chological realism.3 Her text certainly abets such a reading. The valorizationof the spiritual in the face of limited Edwardian materialism, the figures ofthe “luminous halo” and the “innermost flame,” and the celebration ofJoyce’s “courage” to disregard both “probability” and “coherence” in his rep-resentation of that which one “can neither touch nor see” (107) all work tosuggest that the interiority of consciousness to which Woolf addresses herselfresides at some distance from the bioscientific disciplines that might alsoclaim some expert knowledge of those dark places. The psychology in whichWoolf is interested, that is, would seem to be one that addresses narrowlypsychical phenomena to the detriment of the physical processes that mightbe the object of a more materialist psychology. This privileging of the spiri-tual and psychical over the material and bodily is, in short, isomorphic withthe theoretical move that is instrumental in situating psychoanalysis amongthe most culturally forceful psychological projects of the period: the somati-cist emphases on the determining influence of the body on the mind so cen-tral to much turn-of-the-century psychology are overturned in the assertionof psychic preeminence.

This reading has much to recommend itself insofar as it situates Woolfwithin the broad confluence of the highly influential reconsiderations ofhuman consciousness undertaken by the likes of Freud, Bergson, and James,to name only three of the most obvious examples. In reductively generalterms, Freud clearly made the dark places of the mind central to his psycho-analytic project, and Woolf ’s description of the ever-varied complexity ofconsciousness shares a sort of family resemblance to Bergson’s exploration ofthe experience of ineluctable temporal flux that he calls “duration.” Indeed,Woolf ’s description of the form of consciousness that she approaches in the



essay also shares much with James’s assertion—opening his chapter of ThePrinciples of Psychology on “The Stream of Thought,” in relation to which“Modern Fiction” is so often, if loosely, situated—that “consciousness, fromour natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations” (224).And yet, thus to take the “spirituality” of Woolf ’s psychology at face value,and to understand the principal movement of her argument as the sheerinsistence upon the elusive complexity of human consciousness, remainsunsatisfying on a number of levels.

Most immediately, such a position fails to account for the language ofWoolf ’s text, an inability that is particularly glaring in the context of an essaythat so explicitly thematizes its author’s acute awareness of her terminologi-cal choices and the effects of her tropes. Her replacement of the figure of thegig lamps, and her insistent use of “life” in place of “reality” despite theadmitted vagueness of the former, both suggest that Woolf chooses her lan-guage carefully here. In this light, it is significant that her most positive artic-ulation of the modern novelist’s task is cast in terms of recording “atoms asthey fall on the mind” and tracing “the pattern . . . each sight or incidentscores upon the consciousness” (107); these terms reiterate the central tropeof her earlier statement that “the mind receives myriad impressions—trivial,fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sidesthey come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms” (106). Precisely at themoment in her argument that she most forcefully moves from elucidatingthe limitations of her predecessors to elaborating her understanding of whatit means to approach the dark places of psychology, Woolf turns to the sur-prisingly materialist language of turn-of-the-century psychology, a psychol-ogy that frequently sought to apply the principles of physical science to thehuman psyche.4 She, thus, resituates her assertion that the development offiction as an aesthetic form will necessitate the exploration of the dark placesof psychology such that it eerily converges with another clarion call, issuedin 1902 by the prominent British psychologist William McDougall, to theeffect that “if the psychologist wishes to advance his science, he must descendinto the dark places of physiology, and become himself a neurologist”(Hearnshaw, 186). Having set up the “spiritual” project of modern fiction,Woolf chooses to approach the space of psychological interiority upon whichso much rides in terms not simply of the mind, but of the atomic interac-tions that constitute the bodily processes upon which consciousnessdepends—a decision she reinforces a few sentences later in choosing todescribe the “innermost flame” that Joyce so adeptly captures as flashing itsmessages not through the mind but the brain. Rather than mysterious anddisembodied mental or spiritual phenomena, the stuff of consciousness must



be understood, she suggests, as the effect of interactions between minute andelaborate bodily mechanisms and the external world. Far from insisting onthe narrowly psychical, Woolf ’s understanding of human consciousness, itwould seem, seeks to engage the relationship between the psyche and thenervous body that is its support.

Indeed, if Woolf ’s characterization of the psyche recalls James’s stream ofconsciousness, the language through which she does so indicates the extentto which the figure of the stream functions on two different registers withinthe psychology of the period. Describing consciousness as ineluctably com-plex and ever-changing, Woolf evokes a sense of the Heraclitean streamJames undoubtedly has partially in mind when speaking of the “stream ofthought”; and yet when she writes of sensory and perceptual experience scor-ing patterns upon the mind, she draws our attention to the fact that forJames, as for many of his peers, the stream of thought is no ephemeral entity,detached from the physical processes of the body.5 James is extremely clearthat thought is affected by, and effective upon, physiological processes.“Whilst we think,” he contends, “our brain changes, and like the auroraborealis, in its whole internal equilibrium shifts with every pulse of change.The precise nature of the shifting at a given moment is a product of manyfactors” (234). Among these factors is the influence of habit, a notion thatJames treats in detail five chapters before his analysis of the stream ofthought, which posits the processes of thought as altering the physical char-acter of the nervous system in fundamental ways. I will return shortly to thequestion of habit in some detail, but, briefly, Woolf is not in the least fanci-ful in suggesting that sensation “scores [patterns] upon the consciousness.”For James (and in this he is representative of much turn-of-the-century psy-chology), the flow of nervous energy through the body actually grooves outprogressively deeper pathways in the nervous tissue itself, and in this contextthe metaphor of the stream takes on distinctly different tones. “A path oncetraversed by a nerve-current,” James argues, “might be expected to follow thelaw of most of the paths we know and to be scooped out and made more per-meable than before; and this ought to be repeated with each new passage ofthe current. Whatever obstructions may have kept it at first from being apath should then . . . be swept out of the way, until at last it might becomea natural drainage-channel” (108). James borrows this drainage metaphorfrom G. H. Schneider, who renders it in somewhat more florid detail. “Torecur to a simile,” writes Schneider,

imagine the nervous system to represent a drainage-system, inclining, on thewhole, toward certain muscles, but with the escape thither somewhat clogged.



Then streams of water will, on the whole, tend most to fill the drains that gotowards these muscles and to wash out the escape. In case of a sudden ‘flush-ing,’ however, the whole system of channels will fill itself, and water overfloweverywhere before it escapes. But a moderate quantity of water invading thesystem will flow through the proper escape alone. (James, 113)

In short, by the time James introduces the stream of thought, any temptationto locate the figure in too idyllic a setting has long since been preempted bythe rather less pristine figure of the drainage-channel upon which it depends.

If, for James, it is an unavoidable fact that “we think; and as we think wefeel our bodily selves as the seat of the thinking”(241–42), this would seemto be a position that Woolf shares. Indeed, she articulates the same necessityin her 1930 essay “On Being Ill,” when—seemingly at odds with her earlierskewering of the Edwardian materialists—she laments the fact that “with afew exceptions . . . literature does its best to maintain that its concern is withthe mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soullooks straight and clear, and, save for one of [sic] two passions such as desireand greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent” (193). “On the con-trary,” she insists,

the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharp-ens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tal-low in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through thepane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheathof a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the wholeunending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort,hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitablecatastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said)escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People writealways of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come into it; its nobleplans; how the mind has civilized the universe. (193–94)

Far from a revisionist insight at which Woolf arrives in the last decade of herlife, I would suggest that her exploration of the inseparability of body andmind is legible in her text from at least 1919 on. If, then, I want to insist thather invocation of the language of neuropsychology in “Modern Fiction”demands to be read rather more literal mindedly than is usually the case, Ido so for a number of reasons.

Most locally, such a reading establishes a trajectory of thought that artic-ulates early preoccupations with the representation of consciousness withincreasingly pressing later concerns over questions of embodiment. Wrylylamenting “the poverty of the language” that “hinder[s] the description of



illness in literature,” Woolf wonders at the fact that “English, which can expressthe thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiverand the headache” (CE, 4:194). “It has all grown one way,” she continues,

The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speakher mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doc-tor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. Heis forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lumpof pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the begin-ning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.Probably it will be something laughable. . . . Yet it is not only a new languagethat we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierar-chy of the passions; love must be deposed in favour of a temperature of 104;jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica; sleeplessness play the part of the vil-lain, and the hero become a white liquid with a sweet taste—that mightyPrince with the moths’ eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names isChloral. (CE, 4:194–95)

This call for a language of illness—a language of embodiment, really—takesvery much the same form, and addresses many of the same problems, as thecall for a new form of fiction in “Modern Fiction.” If we take seriouslyWoolf ’s engagement of neuropsychology in the earlier essay, however, thesimilarity ceases to be merely formal and the two essays become legible as asubstantial continuation of the same project. More broadly, my insistenceupon pursuing Woolf ’s neuropsychological language remarks the extent towhich her advocacy of linguistic innovation—a new form of fiction, a newlanguage of illness—is firmly embedded historically and culturally.Notwithstanding her characterization of the Babelian task of the suffererforced to forge a language from nothing, or at best from a collection of con-fused and inarticulate sounds, Woolf clearly understands that the languageshe seeks will not be produced through any willful act of ex nihilo creation,but through the negotiation of a complex cultural matrix that includes thelinguistic, the scientific, the social, and the political. If her turn to literaryhistory—whether embodied by Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy, orShakespeare and Keats—is minimally suggestive of her insistence on thematerial history of language, I would suggest that her engagement of psy-chology constitutes a much more expansive space of negotiation across whichwe can trace the interanimation of literature and science. It allows us toexplore one of the sites within which the period most forcefully articulatesnot only questions of individual embodiment but also of the incorporationof individual bodies into structures of collectivity.



“Scraped, Hurt in the Spine”: The Nervous Body at the Altar of Proportion

Turning to Woolf ’s fiction, perhaps the most obvious place to begin tracingher interactions with psychology is Mrs. Dalloway. It is certainly the text inwhich she most obviously thematizes mental illness and the institutionalpower of psychology as a clinical discourse. Writing in her diary of her plansfor the novel, Woolf famously describes her desire to “adumbrate . . . a studyof insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side”(Writer’s Diary, 77). This interest in psychology and insanity, of course, findsits primary representation in the figure of Septimus Smith, the shell-shockedex-soldier whose frequently psychotic postwar existence culminates in his sui-cide. In its execution, though, the narrative attends only intermittently toSeptimus, and is largely constructed around the crucially interlinked focaliz-ing presences of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus, those two charactersbetween whom, though they never come into direct contact, the text worksso hard to articulate a tenuous connection. To the extent that this connectionis forged in narrative terms through the web of consciousnesses that the textweaves, and in thematic terms through the geographical intersections of theirrespective trajectories through London, I want to argue that it is also pro-duced through the representation of a shared mode of nervous embodiment.

At least initially, this corporeal convergence is fairly superficial and isachieved through the deployment of a shared tropology in their physicaldescription. Even as Clarissa makes her first appearance in the novel’s open-ing pages, for example, we are told that there is “a touch of the bird about her,of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious” (4), and she herself laments the factthat “she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous face, beaked like a bird’s”(12). Similarly, the text’s first mention of Septimus simply describes him as“aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed” (18). If this reliance on avian fig-ures in the initial description of the novel’s two central characters forges a ten-tative connection between them, and anticipates the more substantial, if stillmysterious, moment at the end of the narrative in which Clarissa experiencesa profound somatic and spiritual connection to the unknown young manabout whose suicide she hears, it provides no access to their psychic interiors.While this sort of superficial description functions formally to mark a simi-larity between the two characters, it does not so much as hint that this simi-larity finds a thematic basis in a shared sensibility. Indeed, the palpable socialgap between the refined, self-controlled, and respected society hostess, andthe alienated, raving psychotic is one that the text rarely ceases to maintain.

Yet, Clarissa’s and Septimus’s shared avian morphology is indicative of amore substantial shared mode of embodiment. When the narrator remarks



upon Septimus’s “pale-faced” demeanor, this is a physical sign to which thereader has already been introduced in the text’s opening commentary onClarissa’s appearance: she had grown, we are told, “very white since her ill-ness” (4). Though the text remains reticent about the precise nature of this ill-ness, it is clearly consistent with the diagnosis of neurasthenia, for in one ofthe few instances in which her illness is mentioned, the narrative informs usthat she has been banished to a “narrow bed” in the attic because “Richardinsisted, after her illness, that she must sleep undisturbed” (40). This ratherdiluted form of the rest cure to which Clarissa is subject, thus, anticipates thetherapeutic regime Sir William Bradshaw, the Harley Street nerve specialist,will seek forcibly to visit upon Septimus and provides an important contextwithin which to read the physical characteristics shared by the two characters.Insofar as this fleeting reference to Clarissa’s rest cure seems a slight basis uponwhich to argue that she shares with Septimus a state of mental ill-health—therest cure was, after all, prescribed for a fairly wide range of conditions and wasby no means limited to nervous illness—the text, once again in its descrip-tion of their bodily modes, provides corroboration. For if Woolf initiallydraws our attention to a commonality between Clarissa and Septimus bycharacterizing them both as bird-like, pale, and ill, she quickly turns to thelanguage of the nerves, a language whose terms she applies equally to both.

During situations of heightened emotion, both are described as having aform of experience that is directly connected to the nervous body.Confronted, for instance, with the loathsome figure of Miss Kilman, herdaughter’s tutor and companion, Clarissa is wracked with feelings of intensehatred. “It rasped her,” we are told,

to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! To hear twigs cracking andfeel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, thesoul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brutewould be stirring, this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power tomake her feel scraped, hurt in her spine [and] gave her physical pain. (15)

Similarly, in the moments leading up to his psychotic episode in Regent’sPark, Septimus is urged by his wife to take in the bustling activity aroundhim—“Look, look, Septimus!” she harps, in an attempt to follow Dr.Holmes’s advice that her husband must “take an interest in things outsidehimself ” (27)—and his attention is drawn in particular to the extraordinarysight of a plane skywriting an advertisement. As one of the onlookers spellsaloud the letters of the airborne ad-copy, the narrative makes its way intoSeptimus’s consciousness and informs us that he “heard her say ‘Kay Arr’



close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness inher voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sentrunning up on into his brain waves of sound, which, concussing, broke”(28). Whereas Clarissa’s experience of the nervous body, of being “scraped”or “rasped” in the spine, is fairly limited, in Septimus’s case the effects of thisform of nervous embodiment are profound. The initial rasping of his spineleads him to the “marvellous discovery . . . that the human voice in certainatmospheric conditions . . . can quicken trees into life” (28), a discovery heexperiences quite physically as being “beckoned” by the trees. “Leaves werealive; trees were alive,” he thinks, “and the leaves being connected by millionsof fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; whenthe branch stretched he, too, made that statement” (28). And if we are leftin any doubt that the fibres by which Septimus finds himself attached to theunusually vital trees are the very fibres of his nervous system, at the height ofhallucinatory intensity he turns to the explanatory power of medical sciencefor a moment of insight into his condition. “But what was the scientificexplanation,” he wonders,

(for one must be scientific above all things)? Why could he see through bodies,see into the future, when dogs will become men? It was the heat wave presum-ably, operating upon a brain made sensitive by eons of evolution. Scientificallyspeaking, the flesh was melted off the world. His body was macerated untilonly the nerve fibres were left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock. (88)

Clarissa’s inhabitation of the nervous body never achieves this extremity—abody reduced to its nerves and perilously at the mercy of a world full of stim-ulating impulses—yet she is, nevertheless, represented through the samenervous discourse that the novel employs in its characterization of Septimus.

This recourse to the nervous body is crucial to the elaboration of Mrs.Dalloway’s two central characters, and the connection it establishes betweenthem is ultimately significant in terms of the structures of collectivity that thenovel works to explore—a question to which I return at length in Chapter 4.In this text, however, Woolf examines in detail neither the cultural matrixthat makes intelligible the nervous body she invokes nor the ways in whichthat body functions. The relationship between the language of the nerves shedevelops and the dominant understanding of the nervous body elaborated bymedical science remains unexplored insofar as the representations of nervousembodiment scattered throughout the novel are largely contained as productsof Septimus’s hallucinatory vision. This is not, obviously, to say that Woolf isuninterested in medical scientific approaches to the nervous body, but



beyond establishing a link of commonality between Clarissa and Septimus,the novel pursues the nervous body primarily as the object of clinical andinstitutional forces rather than as a somatic system per se.

It is, of course, something of a critical commonplace that, in Mrs.Dalloway, Woolf interrogates the nervous body as the site of moral regula-tion. The coordinates of the regulatory schema scrutinized by the novel canbe traced back from our final, heavily ironized glimpses of the eminent SirWilliam Bradshaw as the text represents his arrival at and departure fromClarissa’s party. Bradshaw’s arrival is remarked by Clarissa as he stands talk-ing to her husband: “They were talking about this Bill. Some case SirWilliam was mentioning, lowering his voice. It had its bearing upon what hewas saying about the deferred effects of shell-shock. There must be some pro-vision in the Bill” (240). This observation is shortly followed by the text’sfinal word on the eminent physician in its description of his departure: as he“stop[s] at the door to look at a picture,” the text coolly informs us that “SirWilliam Bradshaw was so interested in art” (253). As these two touchstonessuggest, Bradshaw’s therapeutic mission is both civic and cultural insofar ashis role as arbiter and promoter of properly cultivated sensibility is directedby the goal of the national good. Though less tinged with ridiculous pom-posity, Bradshaw’s parliamentary machinations are clearly of a piece with theaptly named Lady Bruton’s eugenically motivated promotion of national andimperial health through her “project for emigrating young people of bothsexes born of respectable parents and setting them up with a fair prospect ofdoing well in Canada” (141).

The novel’s infamous examples of medical authority, Dr. Holmes and SirWilliam (despite the professional distinction that separates them) are bothbasically promoters of moral, rather than physical, therapy—a therapeuticregime that is ultimately directed at the production and maintenance of anefficient national community. For Holmes, the somewhat antiquated generalpractitioner for whom medicine is less a science than the art of healing,Septimus’s illness is all but nonexistent as an organic phenomenon. “There[is] nothing whatever the matter” (118), he insists as he “brushe[s] it allaside—headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams—nerve symptoms and noth-ing more” (119), he declares. Vaguely invoking a diagnosis of neurastheniaand the principles of the rest cure, his therapeutic response comes in the formof the reflection that:

If Dr Holmes found himself even half a pound below eleven stone six, he askedhis wife for another plate of porridge at breakfast. . . . [H]ealth is largely a mat-ter in our own control. Throw yourself into outside interests; take up some



hobby. . . . Some hobby, said Dr. Holmes, for did he not owe his own excel-lent health (and he worked as hard as any man in London) to the fact that hecould always switch off from his patients on to old furniture? (119)

Implying that, as one of the busiest and hardest working men in London, heshould be eminently susceptible to the nervous exhaustion he diagnoses inSeptimus, Holmes sings the therapeutic praises of an extra plate of porridgein mild deference to the rest cure’s regime of rich and fatty diets. Little con-cerned with the somatic condition of his patient, the principle supporting hispaean to porridge, self-control, and old furniture is rather the policing of adomestic sphere that revolves around a properly English form of masculinity.Greeting the news that Septimus has talked of suicide to his wife, Holmesproceeds from the penetrating observation that his patient is “in a funk” tothe exhortation that, especially given Rezia’s Italian heritage, Septimusshould consider the possibility that his behavior might “give her a very oddidea of English husbands” (120). “Didn’t one owe perhaps a duty,” Holmesinquires, “to one’s wife” (120).

If Holmes’s vague diagnosis is indebted to the notion of neurasthenia andhis therapy pays lip service to the rest cure, the more scientifically orientedSir William confirms the diagnosis and turns in response to the principles ofthe sanatorium treatment—that therapeutic regime whose contours we havealready examined in the context of tuberculosis. Averring that “he never[speaks] of ‘madness’; he called it not having a sense of proportion” (125), SirWilliam is more systematic, and thus substantially more sinister, than thebumbling Holmes in his ardent promotion of the core domestic values at theheart of the national economy. “Worshipping proportion,” we are told, “SirWilliam not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded herlunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made it impossible for theunfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion”(129). In this capacity, Bradshaw fervently wields the sanatorium as his pri-mary tool. Laying bare the institutional apparatus that supports his socialmission, the narrative reveals that

Sir William had a friend in Surrey where they taught, what Sir William franklyadmitted was a difficult art—a sense of proportion. There were, moreover,family affection; honour; courage; and a brilliant career. All of these had in SirWilliam a resolute champion. If they failed, he had to support him police andthe good of society, which, he remarked very quietly, would take care, downin Surrey, that these unsocial impulses, bred more than anything by the lackof good blood, were held in control. (132–33)



Based in a constitutional notion of disease, Bradshaw’s practice predictablycombines broadly physical therapeutic principles with social pedagogy.

In physical terms, therapy is largely a question of “rest, rest, rest; a longrest in bed” (125). Syllogistically invoking the governing imperatives that“health we must have; and health is proportion” (129), Bradshaw proceedsaccording to the simple yet extensive principle that

when a man comes into your room and says he is Christ (a common delu-sion), and has a message, as they mostly have, and threatens, as they often do,to kill himself, you invoke proportion; order rest in bed; rest in solitude;silence and rest; rest without friends, without books, without messages; sixmonths’ rest; until a man who went in weighing seven stone six comes outweighing twelve. (129)

Consistent with the diagnosis of neurasthenia (and, more broadly, the notionof asthenic disease) the nervous body is, in short, little more than a machinewhose source of energy has been depleted, and the combination of rest anda diet designed to produce a weight gain of roughly five stone in six months’time is sufficient to overcome this physical deficit. The period of rest, as wasthe case with the tuberculosis sanatorium, additionally provides the occasionfor the ultimately much more important therapeutic process of education.Sir William assures Septimus that, at the sanatorium, “we will teach you torest” (127), but the substance of this pedagogy is clearly far less physiologi-cal than moral. Removing the sufferer from a deleterious social context thatincludes family and friends, the good doctor and his institutional prosthesesinduce the patient to participate in the work of healing that, notwithstand-ing the trappings of a therapeutics directed at the depleted somatic system,which is ostensibly the organic cause of disease, is principally engaged ineffecting his or her subjection to the system of social values so succinctlyencapsulated in the Bradshavian watchword: proportion. Having successfullyundergone this process of moral regulation, the patient can then be returnedto society at large, presumably eager to participate alongside the likes of SirWilliam and Lady Bruton in the project of “making England prosper.”Beyond the immediate benefit of reincorporating a once-diseased individualwithin the social body, this therapeutic model additionally functions with aneye to collateral social benefits that include the reformatory influence of theerstwhile sufferer upon the social milieu that initially participated in the pro-duction of his or her disease. In Septimus’s case, for instance, one imaginesthat such activity would include the rectification of his wife’s skewed impres-sions of English husbands, and thus the assimilation of a potentially disrup-tive foreign influence into a properly English domestic sphere.



It is important to note that the characterological therapeutic regime repre-sented by Woolf has specific correlates in the psychology of the day, and is, forexample, fully consonant with the framework laid out by the British psychol-ogist J. A. Hadfield in his Psychology and Morals: An Analysis of Character(1923). Hadfield’s application of psychological procedures to the moral ques-tion of character is especially apposite insofar as it is largely animated by theprinciple of psychological organization—a category that will be central tomuch of my argument not only in the remainder of this chapter but also inChapter 4. Specifically, his discussion hinges on the notion of the “organisedself,” a vaguely super-egoic entity that constitutes a limited subsection of theentire psychological individual, manifests itself in the form of “Will,” and gen-erally acts in opposition to the collection of frequently undesirable and anti-social impulses, instincts, desires, and complexes that constitute the remainderof the individual. The “organised self,” for example, “consists of all the senti-ments for home, family, and country, of the love of beauty, the love of thegood, the love of the true, and such dispositions as sincerity, a tolerant andcourageous spirit” (69), and designates that “part [of the whole psychologicalindividual] which stands over against our impulses and desires” (69–70).“This is the self as organized,” writes Hadfied, “which is a very important con-ception of the self from the practical and moral point of view” (70).

Drawing on an explicitly and resolutely organic model, Hadfield arguesthat the “self,” as an “organization of all the sentiments and dispositions,”finds its essential function in its ability to direct an otherwise disorganizedpanoply of psychological tendencies “towards a common purpose” (70).Drawing alternately on the examples of organic systems offered by physicaland social bodies, he suggests that

[w]e call it the “organized self ”, because it is that part of our whole individualwhich, on account of having common interests and a common purpose, isorganized into a whole. It is because it functions as one. Every organism is anorganism because the elements of which it is composed work together for acommon purpose; it is, indeed, this which constitutes it as an organism. . . .So the individual “self ”, psychologically considered, is constituted of a largenumber of sentiments and dispositions, each of which has its own life, and ofthem alone. But because they have interests in common, and work towards acommon end, they form the organization which we call the self. It is onlybecause the self works as one that it coheres as one; otherwise when it ceasesto move towards a common purpose it disintegrates: this is the unifying prin-ciple. The “self ” is a unity more in function than in structure. This function ofthe “Self ” we shall call the Will. The Will is the activity of the self; it is the “self ”in function, the “self ” moving towards the aims and ends of the personality as



a whole. The quality and nature of these aims and ends determines our char-acter, good or bad. (70–71, original italics)

The possibility of the disintegration of the self, of course, raises the questionof psychopathology, and according to Hadfield’s framework, it occurs prima-rily in situations where unrestrained impulses overcome the organized selfand the Will in which it is manifest. Generally speaking, the conditionsunder which the Will is rendered impotent to dominate the impulses arethose in which there is an “absence of an adequate ideal or stimulus to thewill,” an absence that frequently corresponds to “times when we have under-gone some great strain” (77). “In such times,” Hadfield argues, “whether offear, of grief, of failure, or of the fatigue of war, our self is weary and power-less to make an effort, and tends to become disintegrated, and our actions areleft to the mercy of our impulses. These are often therefore the precipitatingcauses of a neurosis” (77). In therapeutic terms, however, “Such a disintegra-tion may be prevented by the presentation of an ideal which has the powerto arouse the will once more, and restore the power of the self, which is thenable to rise above its misfortunes, weather the storm of its difficulties, andonce more become master of its fate” (77). The “ideal” that, thus, plays sucha central role in organizing, and maintaining the organization of, the self is,according to Hadfield, “the idea or object which leads to the complete realiza-tion of the whole individual” (82–82, original italics). “A man’s whole life andcharacter,” he concludes, “as well as his mental health and happiness dependupon his having the right aims, ends and purposes in life—in other words,the right ideals. By right ideals we mean those which by their nature are capa-ble of mobilizing, co-ordinating and directing all the potentialities of the per-sonality towards its completeness and integration” (82–83).

In this context, the Bradshavian invocation of proportion becomes legibleas the sort of “organizational” therapy that Hadfield envisions. “Proportion”incorporates the range of values—family, career, beauty, valor, courage, patri-otism—that Hadfield argues are central to the organized self; in relation to acase of psychological disintegration such as Septimus’s, proportion functions asthe ideal designed to revitalize the will in the face of antisocial drives, and ulti-mately to restore psychological completeness and integration. This “propor-tional” reorganization to which Bradshaw is dedicated, notably has its effectsboth upon the individual self and the community. “When a large body of indi-viduals, having interests in common,” writes Hadfield, “combine for commonpurposes to a common end, they form an organization” within which the con-stituent members “remain one only in so far as they contrive to functiontogether; as soon as they cease to act as one they cease to be one” (71). Because



the psychological individual and the social body are defined isomorphically interms of an organizational model, the organization of the self contributes tothe organization of the collectivity, for it is through “proportional” organiza-tion that the individual is inserted into the well-organized community.

If Woolf scrutinizes the ultimately unsuccessful—or perhaps, brutally effi-cient—therapeutic procedures employed in an attempt to organize the irra-tional presence embodied by Septimus within the normative social formssymbolized by the ideal of proportion, she is, of course, equally attentive toClarissa’s more subtle subjection to the same communitarian regime. Thoughnot obviously subject to the ministrations of Holmes and Bradshaw,Clarissa’s nervous body nonetheless plays an important role in the discipli-nary mechanisms that maintain women like her—one thinks also of the piti-ful Evelyn Whitbread whose innumerable and highly euphemized “ailments”mean that while “other people came [to town] to see the pictures; go to theopera . . . the Whitbreads came ‘to see doctors’” (6)—within a properly fem-inine domestic sphere. Clarissa’s nervous body is clearly central to the pro-gression that takes her from the youthful radicalism she shares with PeterWalsh and Sally Seton to her primary role as social booster for her husband’smediocre career as a Tory member of Parliament, and denies her access evento the limited parapolitical realm inhabited by the likes of the questionablyfeminine Ladies Bruton and Bexborough or the mackintosh-clad MissKilman. If, however, Woolf invokes the nervous body as the basis, orenabling condition, of the communitarian project she so ably analyses andcritiques in Mrs. Dalloway, she remains at some distance from both thesomatic processes that constitute that body, and the medical scientific tech-niques designed to grasp it. Whereas the text verges upon the domain ofmedical science in its deployment of the language of the nerves, its analysisof the implication of the nervous body within a nationalist communitarianproject turns not to medical science narrowly conceived but to a form ofsocial medicine that engages with the individual body primarily as a meansof affecting the social body into which it is incorporated. Like the socialmedicine it critiques, in other words, Mrs. Dalloway seems ultimately satis-fied to remain within the realm of what Sir William calls an “exacting sciencewhich has to do with what, after all, we know nothing about—the nervoussystem, the human brain” (129).

The Problem of the “Raw, the White, the Unprotected Fibre”:“Bright Arrows of Sensation” and the Habituated Body

Mrs. Dalloway, thus, pursues the interest in neuroscience inaugurated in“Modern Fiction” by introducing a particularly physiological figure of the



nervous body, but stops short of tracing the contours of that somatic modebeyond locating it as the largely unknowable site upon which the organiza-tional production of the individual takes place and within which the disci-plinary procedures of nationalist communitarian impulses are played out.This marks the end, however, neither of Woolf ’s exploration of the neuropsy-chological body nor of her interrogation of the implication of that body inthe production of structures of collectivity. For an extension of this project,we must turn, somewhat surprisingly, to The Waves, a text whose broad crit-ical reception would seem to suggest that it is notable primarily for its repre-sentation of a thoroughly disembodied form of consciousness and its paucityof political engagement.

Even among critics exploring the political stakes of Anglo-American liter-ary modernism—or, more narrowly, of Virginia Woolf ’s literary produc-tion—The Waves has been read persistently as a highly aesthetic (andtherefore apolitical) experiment in the representation of consciousness.6 Themuch commented upon experimental nature of the text is, of course, evidentfrom its opening pages: the disembodied narrative voice of the first italicizedinterlude, with its abstract and highly figural description of an unlocatablelandscape, gives way in the first chapter to the cacophonic intermingling ofthe personalized yet significantly indistinguishable voices that emanate fromwithin the unstable circumferences of individual characters—or, perhapsmore accurately, that are attached to proper names that designate differentbut overlapping spaces of enunciation. Yet even as we immediately are con-fronted by the formal properties that arguably constitute the apogee ofWoolf ’s narrative innovation, the text’s opening interlude introduces a figuraltrajectory that draws us beyond the purview of the aesthetic, narrowly con-ceived. Describing a seascape at dawn, the text posits an original state of rel-ative indifferentiation in which “the sea was indistinguishable from the sky,except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles on it” (W,3). Sundering this state of indifference, the sun rises and “the air,” we are told,“seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickeringand flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bon-fire” (3, my emphasis). This state of fibrotic differentiation is, however, onlymomentary, for we immediately read that “gradually the fibres of the burn-ing bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence”—a unity that isitself quickly qualified by the statement that this incandescence “lifted theweight of the woolen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atomsof soft blue” (3). A high degree of abstraction notwithstanding, the openinginterlude thus frames the novel by drawing our attention to a conceptualmovement from indifferentiation to individualization to a renewed form of



wholeness or collectivity that is understood as a state of fusion that paradox-ically maintains or supports a constellation of discrete atoms.

It is, broadly speaking, this trajectory that Michael Tratner takes up in thechapter of Modernism and Mass Politics devoted to The Waves. Arguing theneed to resituate British literary high modernism in the context of a varietyof collectivist projects that were widely influential in the early part of thetwentieth century, Tratner’s reading of The Waves productively understandsthe text as exploring a politically left collectivism.7 Whereas he turns prima-rily to the group psychology of Le Bon, Freud, and McDougall as the histor-ical frame within which to approach the tension between individualism andcollectivism in Woolf ’s text, however, I will suggest that the text itself iden-tifies a different terrain upon which to explore structures of collectivity.Though The Waves is undeniably interested in questions of psychology, it isnot preeminently in terms of the mind (whether of the group or the individ-ual) that Woolf elaborates her understanding of collectivity or community.To do so, she turns instead to the bodily categories provided by neuroscien-tific discourse.8 To that end, it will be crucial to interrogate the text’s preoc-cupation with what it describes as “the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre”(178) of the human nervous system—a figure that is, as we have noted, pow-erfully if fleetingly introduced in Mrs. Dalloway—and to explore the variousregisters on which this figure functions. If The Waves inaugurates the figurein a nonphysiological mode in its opening page through the repeateddescription of the process of differentiation as one of increasing fibrosis, Iwant to pursue the trajectory suggested by this initial interlude in arguingthat the text quickly redeploys this naturalistic metaphor and takes a differ-ent sort of fiber, that which constitutes the human nervous system, as thecontext within which to explore a movement from differentiation to fusion,from individualization to the fashioning of collectivity. Whereas Mrs.Dalloway pursues the relationship between individualization and collectivityprimarily in terms of the production and maintenance of moral character,The Waves seeks to explore the incorporation of community more literallythrough the interrogation of those scientific discourses that understand bothindividuation and the fashioning of collectivity as substantially determinedat the level of narrowly somatic structures and processes.

Beyond allowing me to trace a line of thought whose trajectory marks awide range of Woolf ’s texts, this situation of the nervous body as the termaround which forces of individualization and structures of collectivity circu-late draws into relief a significant methodological problem. Specifically, theinterrogation of Woolf ’s nervous tropology in relation to contemporaneousneuroscience functions to extend and complicate the sort of historicist



analysis practiced, for example, by Tratner. Whereas his reading convincinglydraws out thematic continuities between the novel and the work of varioustheorists of collectivity (including Harold Laski, Leonard Woolf, and R. H.Tawney), attention to the text’s engagement of neuroscience makes TheWaves legible as more than a literary presentation of social problems thatsimultaneously find articulation in other modes of intellectual work. IfGillian Beer has argued that Woolf “was fascinated by communities,” andthat “the deep value which she accords to communality . . . has to do withher practice of writing out of the mass and out of the body” (85, 87), I wouldadd that by thinking community through the bodily categories of neuro-science The Waves functions as an example that calls us to theorize not onlypossible forms of collectivity but also the mechanisms through which com-munal projects of the early twentieth century literally incorporate them-selves. The body becomes, in this context, more than merely a figure eitherfor society or for those affective elements of experience that are markers ofthe intensely individual. In addition to its resonance on these figural regis-ters, the body must be considered rather more literally: as it is constituted asthe object of inquiry by a variety of increasingly prestigious bioscientific dis-ciplines. By raising the question of the social body in this way, The Wavestakes up the interest in neuropsychology evident in texts like “ModernFiction” and Mrs. Dalloway but moves beyond those texts in insisting that wemust approach bioscience as a particularly powerful means of accessing andcomprehending the individual bodies that communitarian projectsinevitably seek to grasp as their objects. To the extent that The Waves asks usto consider how historically extant structures of collectivity are incorporatedin their bioscientific grasp of individual bodies, it simultaneously demandsthat we theorize the communitarian implications of a body that resolutelyrefuses to be assimilated by the language and procedures of bioscience. Inexploring this affective body, a body that opens up and exposes the interior-ized subjective space of the neuroscientific body, I will attempt to remark thelimit on which an ethical collective impulse announces itself. More specifi-cally the remainder of this chapter will examine in some detail Woolf ’sengagement of the neuroscientific body, before turning, in Chapter 4, to thecommunal implications of this engagement.

If the opening interlude of The Waves frames the text’s overarching trajec-tory when it describes a movement from brute indifferentiation, to individ-ualization, to a renewed state of indifference in fusion, the opening chaptertakes up the first phase of that movement on a psychological register.Commencing with a series of short declarative sentences conveying basicsense-data—“I see a ring,” “I see a slab of yellow,” “I hear a sound” (5)—the



text introduces the characters as young children whose phenomenologicalexistence initially is limited to rudimentary sense perception. Still within theconfines of its first page, the chapter quickly represents a move from sensa-tion to cognition, and the short declarations are supplanted by comparisons:“The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears,” Susan tells us,and Louis chimes in with the observation that “a shadow falls on the path . .. like an elbow bent” (5). This progressive differentiation of perceptualobjects leads in turn to some measure of differential identification on the partof the speaking subjects themselves, and by the third page Louis defines him-self in relation to the presence or absence of others, suddenly realizing that“Now they have all gone . . . [and] I am alone” (7). The text’s opening pages,in short, present an extremely compressed developmental schema that takesthe characters from a stage of barely developed perceptual consciousness to alevel of significant cognitive ability and individualization, and that reaches itsapogee in a scene so crucial that it will have been revisited four times by theend of the novel. If the language of the first chapter mimetically parades thecharacters through a process of psychological development, the chapter con-cludes with a scene that thematizes the inevitable procession toward individ-uality, and recounts the moment at which the characters “troop upstairs likeponies . . . stamping, clattering one behind another to take [their] turns inthe bathroom” where Mrs. Constable awaits, “girt in a bath-towel” and bran-dishing her water-soaked, “lemon-coloured sponge” (19). Submitted in turnto this at least nominal representative of the Law, Bernard tells us that “hold-ing [the sponge] high above me, shivering beneath her, she squeezes it. Waterpours down the runnel of my spine. Bright arrows of sensation shoot oneither side. I am covered with warm flesh” (19). In interesting contrast topost-Freudian models, Woolf understands the processes leading to individu-alization not primarily in visual or linguistic terms but in terms of the phys-iological mechanisms that produce the “bright arrows of sensation.” The lawto which the children are submitted is not social but somatic, and as a resultWoolf ’s interrogation of individualism takes place in close proximity to thecorporeal model articulated by turn-of-the-century neuroscience.9 That thisphysiological law has social correlates with which it collaborates—a questionto which I will return shortly—is suggested by a scene that follows quitequickly upon the encounter with Mrs. Constable. The characters havingembarked upon the process of their formal education, the text returns to thelanguage of the ordered march. Instead of “trooping” upstairs to Mrs.Constable, however, Louis narrates an occasion on which the boys “march,two by two . . . processional, into chapel.” “I like the dimness that falls as weenter the sacred building,” says Louis, “I like the orderly process. . . . Now all



is laid by [the Headmaster’s] authority, his crucifix, and I feel come over methe sense of the earth under me, and my roots going down and down till theywrap themselves round some hardness at the centre. I recover my continuity,as he reads, I become a figure in the procession, a spoke in the huge wheelthat turning, at last erects me, here and now” (25–26). Equally a scene ofindividuation, the laws of physiological organization are here succeeded andsupplemented by an institutional embodiment of social law, which con-tributes to the habitualizing production of the individual.

To briefly indicate the salient features of this neuroscientific model, I referprimarily to the widespread reductionist impulse evident in the psychologyof the period. Technological development that increasingly allowed the bio-scientist to decompose the body into ever more minute constituent compo-nents, and to establish the chemical and mechanical relations between thesecomponents, frequently resulted in the assumption that questions of themind could be answered through appropriately scientific attention to thebody. Programmatically encapsulating this orthodoxy, for example, HenryMaudsley’s extended argument in Body and Mind is premised on the generalprinciple that

The development of the senses . . . has been, as the progress of science proves,the foundation of intellectual advance; the understanding has been developedthrough the senses, and has in turn constructed instruments for extending theaction of the senses. . . . By the microscope [for example] the minute structureof tissues and the history of the little world of organic cells have been madeknown. (221–22)

Extrapolating from this principle, Maudsley demands: “Surely it is time weput seriously to ourselves the question whether the inductive method, whichhas proved its worth by its abundant fruitfulness wherever it has been faith-fully applied, should not be as rigidly used in the investigation of mind as inthe investigation of other natural phenomena” (14). Indeed, shifting fromthe interrogative to the declarative, he is led to assert that “to begin the studyof mind with the observation of its humblest bodily manifestations is astrictly scientific method” (14). In its broadest contours, this positivistimpulse is directed by the belief that

[s]o intimate and essential is the sympathy between all the organic functions,of which mind is the crown and consummation, that we may justly say of it,that it sums up and comprehends the bodily life—that every thing which isdisplayed outwardly is contained secretly in the innermost. We cannot trulyunderstand mind-functions without embracing in our inquiry all the bodilyfunctions and, I might without exaggeration say, all the bodily features. (29)



This drive to apply the principles of physical science to the psychologicalrealm finds a home in the bulk of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-cen-tury psychology and is manifest in the work of figures as diverse and influ-ential as Sigmund Freud and William James. Whereas Freud opens hisprepsychoanalytic Project for a Scientific Psychology with the avowal that it ishis “intention to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is,to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of speci-fiable material particles” (295), James introduces The Principles of Psychologywith the dual claims that “a certain amount of brain-physiology must be pre-supposed or included in Psychology,” and that the “psychologist is forced tobe something of a nerve-physiologist” (5).

Given this recourse to neurology and neurophysiology, the model of thenervous system made available by those disciplines is, in very simple terms,that of a series of relays conducting impulses from the bodily periphery tothe center and then again to the periphery, with the central nervous systemfunctioning as a switching station between sensation and motivity. Afferentnerves are understood to carry sensory excitation to the central nervous sys-tem, which then discharges the quantum of nervous energy to the peripheryin the form of motor activity. Most contentious in this schema was the roleof the central nervous system in determining by which path, among a mul-titude of possibilities, any given nervous impulse would be discharged.Suspicious of appeals to volitional categories in the explanation of this deci-sion-making process, and in many cases attempting to account for supposedacts of will in physiological terms, neuroscientific models turned instead tothe physical characteristics of the nervous system. Fairly representative in thisrespect is James’s description of the “plasticity” of nerve tissue and the notionof habit that becomes its predicate. “Plasticity,” James writes,

means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, butstrong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilib-rium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraor-dinary degree of plasticity of this sort; so that we may without hesitation laydown as our first proposition the following, that the phenomena of habit in liv-ing beings are due to the plasticity of the organic materials of which their bodiesare composed. (105)10

Insisting that “the philosophy of habit is . . . in the first instance, a chapterin physics,” and that habit is “at bottom a physical principle” (105), Jamessuggests that the nervous system is physically altered by the nervous energyit transmits. Once a given type of afferent impulse is discharged via a specific



motor pathway, the system is altered such that subsequent impulses of thattype will be more likely to be discharged in the same way. Approvingly quot-ing William Carpenter’s Mental Physiology to the effect that repeated patternsof transmission and discharge literally “leave organic impressions” (112) onthe substance of the nervous system, James goes so far as to suggest that “itis not simply particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of discharge,that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain” (126).11

Beyond remarking the deterministic implications of this model, accordingto which patterns of behavior are physically scored into the nervous system, itis worth noting that James is also fairly representative in terms of the conclu-sions to which his psychophysiological model leads. On his account, the“physiological study of mental conditions is . . . the most powerful ally of hor-tatory ethics. . . . The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, isno worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fash-ioning our characters in the wrong way,” he warns. “Could the young but real-ize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they wouldgive more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning ourown fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke ofvirtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar” (127). Habit is, for James,

the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. Italone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the chil-dren of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents thehardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those broughtup to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea throughthe winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to hiscabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us frominvasion by the natives of the desert and frozen zone. It dooms us all to fightout the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and tomake the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for whichwe are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social stratafrom mixing. (121)

The model of the nervous system exemplified by James’s psychology, thus,has dual implications. In the first instance, it provides a physiological groundfor the formation of moral character and the production of individual sub-jects, and in the second instance, it functions to differentiate individualsfrom one another through the maintenance of a rigid social structure thatextends from the narrowly communal to the global. The nerves, and theforms of habit they facilitate, provide the key to understanding both themechanical formation and functioning of individual subjects and the ways in



which such individuals are integrated as distinct constitutive componentsinto the machinery of larger scale social bodies.

More specifically, habit constitutes a process of physiological organizationthat corresponds to the moral organization central to Hadfield’s charactero-logical project. As William Carpenter suggests, even “the cerebrum [is no]exception to the general principle that . . . each part of the organism tendsto form itself in accordance with the mode in which it is habitually exercised”(James, 112), and this process of formation or organization can equally takeplace under the influence of volition, environment, or (at least on someaccounts) heredity. Maudsley, for instance, insists that “if all mental opera-tions are not in this world equally functions of organization, I know notwhat warrant we have for declaring any to be so” (54). On the one hand, helaments that “multitudes of human beings come into the world weightedwith a destiny against which they have neither the will or the power to con-tend . . . and groan under the worst of all tyrannies—the tyranny of a badorganization” (43); and on the other he corroborates James’s ethicophysiolog-ical translation of gather ye rosebuds while ye may, by contending that “actsconsciously designed at first may, by repetition, become unconscious andautomatic, the faculties of them being organized in the constitution of thenerve-centres” (19). If, in short, the moral psychology exemplified byHadfield and represented by Woolf in the figure of Bradshaw employs theprinciple of organization as the crux both of individuation and communityformation, the neuropsychology of the period understands the body as sub-ject to a physiological principle of organization that is directed toward thesame bipartite goal. It is precisely these twofold ramifications of the neuro-scientific body that The Waves interrogates. For if Bernard’s individualizingencounter with Mrs. Constable is represented initially as the source of avaguely pleasurable ambivalence, as the narrative proceeds, its rememorationand rearticulation increasingly cast it in a different light. By Bernard’s sum-mation in the final chapter he revisits that event, and its myriad subsequentanalogues, and is led to conclude that: “Sometimes indeed, when I pass a cot-tage with a light in the window where a child has been born, I could implorethem not to squeeze the sponge over that new body” (W, 200). This desireto protect the infant is indicative of Woolf ’s analysis of the bodily regime inwhich Mrs. Constable’s sponge is only the first step. The end result of theprocess inaugurated by Mrs. Constable, in contrast, is articulated by Neville.“Change is no longer possible. We are committed. Before, when we met in arestaurant in London with Percival, all simmered and shook; we could havebeen anything,” he laments. “We have chosen now, or sometimes it seems thechoice was made for us—a pair of tongs pinched us between the shoulders.



I chose. I took the print of life not outwardly, but inwardly upon the raw, thewhite, the unprotected fibre” (178). Or, as Bernard suggests in a similar vein,

It was different once. . . . Once we could break the current as we chose. Howmany telephone calls, how many post cards, are now needed to cut this holethrough which we come together, united, at Hampton Court? . . . We are allswept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shade; .. . and in this unconsciousness attain the utmost freedom from friction andpart the weeds that grow over the mouths of sunken channels. We have to leaplike fish, high in the air, to catch the train from Waterloo. And however highwe leap we fall back again into the stream. (180)

In both these cases, Woolf articulates the threat posed by Mrs. Constable’ssponge with direct reference to the language of neuroscience. Both Nevilleand Bernard represent the consequences of a determining somatic mode.Whereas for Neville change and choice are no longer possible because he hasbeen pinched between the shoulders, taken the print of life on the fibers ofhis nervous system, Bernard feels at the mercy of the unassailable torrent ofthe familiar, the habitual. Drawing on the commonplace neuroscientifictrope of the nerves as a riverbed whose channels are progressively deepenedby currents of nervous energy, the freedom he describes is not that of choicebut of the freedom from choice produced by habit. Moreover, Bernard’sstatement makes manifest an antagonistic relationship between this model ofembodiment and the possibility of community. Aligning the habitualizedbody with forces of individuation and differentiation, he suggests that it isonly to the extent that the frictionless flow of the familiar can be resisted thatcommunity is possible, that the characters can “come together, united.”

Partly through choice and partly through circumstance, claim Neville andBernard, the somatic process begun by Mrs. Constable has been extended inthe habitual production of discrete individuals who are left at the mercy ofthe increasingly rigid physical organization of their nervous systems. By wayof conclusion, it should be remarked that this claim constitutes a significantextension of the critical project upon which Woolf embarks in “ModernFiction” and Mrs. Dalloway. The Waves moves substantially beyond Woolf ’scall in “Modern Fiction” to “record the atoms as they fall on the mind” inorder not merely to replicate the neuropsychological processes of humanconsciousness, but to examine the consequences of those processes for theformation and understanding of the self. Whereas Mrs. Dalloway interrogatesthe psychological mechanisms that play a key role in the production andmoral regulation—the organization—of individual subjects, The Waves goesso far as to suggest that these processes are substantially predicated upon



determining modes of somatic organization, which are directed toward theformation of increasingly discrete individuals whose bodies render them pro-gressively less free. In so doing, The Waves explores in detail a culturally pow-erful corporeal model that collaborates with, indeed provides a foundationfor, the broadly moral matrix of individuation analyzed in the earlier novel.Indeed, to the extent that Mrs. Dalloway underscores the function of moralregulation in the constitution of community—and national community inparticular—the neuroscientific discourse of habit clearly maintains thatprocesses of somatic organization are in no way at odds with those moral andcommunal coordinates. And yet if Woolf seems to dissent from this lastpremise in Bernard’s contention that, rather than contributing to the forma-tion of community, the habitualized body presents an obstacle to the charac-ters’ “coming together, united,” I will argue in what follows that this apparentopposition of individualism and community constitutes the problematic thatis indispensable to her exploration of the relationship between the neurosci-entific body and structures of collectivity (both extant and possible). In con-sidering this exploration in my final chapter, I shall be particularly interestedin the extent to which Woolf ’s analysis contends that historically extantforms of community (and again, forms of national community in particular)remain entirely contained by the logic of the individual, a contention thatrenders Bernard’s mourning of a diminished capacity for collective experi-ence legible as a call to think community beyond the individual.



CHAPTER 4

Breaking Habits, Affecting theNeuropsychological Body: Toward

the “Unsubstantial Territory” ofDisorganized Community

Ihave argued in the preceding chapter that Woolf ’s engagement of thenervous body—and of the neuroscientific discourse within which thatbody finds one of its principal articulations at the turn of the century—

moves from an interest in the coordinates of a moral psychology aimed at theregulation of individuals and their insertion into structures of collectivity, toan exploration of the principles of somatic organization that are presupposedby, and collaborate with, such mechanisms of moral organization. To theextent that Mrs. Dalloway provides a critique of the procedures throughwhich the nervous body becomes the occasion for the psychological and psy-chiatric regulation of individual selves with an eye to their incorporation intoa specifically nationalist form of community, The Waves extends this critiquein its examination of the nervous body as the physical substance throughwhich both individuals and communities are quite literally incorporated.Whereas the characterological discourse examined in Mrs Dalloway is predi-cated upon broad (and fairly predictable) analogies between the human bodyand the social body, The Waves approaches the former not merely as fodderfor communitarian metaphor but as the physiological system—constituted,for example, by nerve fibers and reflex arcs—elaborated by the neuroscienceof the day. In pursuing this trajectory, Woolf is especially attentive to the roleof habit as a mode of somatic organization that is instrumental in the pro-duction of the interiorized space of discrete, individual subjects.


Having focused primarily upon the relationship between Woolf and neu-roscience as it pertains to the elaboration and contestation of that somaticspace I have referred to as the nervous body, I want, now, to turn more fullyto the question of how that body is imbricated in the production of differ-ent structures of collectivity. To what extent and in what ways does the nerv-ous body provide the foundation for group psychological projects? How isthe nervous body related to the extant forms of community Woolf criticallyexplores? And to what degree does Woolf ’s engagement of the nervous bodyprovide the space within which to think alternate structures of collectivity?In addressing these questions, I will begin by returning to Bernard’s claim, inThe Waves, that the habitualized body—so instrumental in the production ofdiscrete individual subjects—is actually antagonistic to community, to thepossibility of the characters “coming together, united” (180). Though thisclaim of antagonism appears somewhat paradoxical in light of the evidenceadduced by Woolf ’s own texts to the effect that the habitualization of thebody clearly contributes to the formation of community—to wit, patrioticnational community—the apparent paradox is reduced when we considerWoolf ’s analysis of the relationship between individualism and national com-munity. Insofar as the extant forms of community she critiques are predi-cated upon individualism, and, even more fundamentally, are governed bythe logic of the individual, the pursuit of alternatives must, indeed, confronta contradiction between the force of the individual and the possibility of“coming together.”

Unsettling the Habitual—A “Great Society of Bodies”

Before returning to the critique of existing structures of collectivity articu-lated in The Waves, however, it will be necessary to consider the alternativesposited in the text, for despite the lamentation of progressively habitualizedatomization offered by characters like Bernard and Neville, it is precisely thepossibility of coming together that constitutes one of Woolf ’s key concerns.She is not content merely to replicate positivist science’s mechanical modelof the body, a body in which, as Bernard puts it, “muscles, nerves, intestines,blood-vessels, . . . make the coil and spring of our being, the unconscioushum of the engine . . . [which] function[s] superbly. Opening, shutting;shutting, opening; eating, drinking; sometimes speaking—the whole mech-anism seem[s] to expand, to contract, like the mainspring of a clock”(217–18). Throughout The Waves, she is equally at pains to articulate analternate model of embodiment—a model most clearly represented in hercharacterization of Jinny—and to explore its communal ramifications. Early



on in the text we are given an account of Jinny’s participation in a tennismatch after which she tells us:

Everything in my body seems thinned out with running and triumph. Myblood must be bright red, whipped up, slapping against my ribs. My soles tin-gle, as if wire rings opened and shut in my feet. I see every blade of grass veryclear. But the pulse drums so in my forehead, behind my eyes, that everythingdances—the net, the grass; your faces leap like butterflies; the trees seem tojump up and down. There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe.All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph. (31)

Reveling in the connective force of her pulsing blood, Jinny resides tri-umphantly in her body. Standing in stark contrast to both the rigidifying andordering effects of neuropsychological habit and Bernard’s clockwork body,Jinny is defined by her body’s vital capacity to function as a source of spon-taneity. Both her self-perception and her perception of the world around herare shaped by the dance of her blood: “there is,” as she says, “nothing staid,nothing settled, in this universe.” In addition to the spontaneity it generates,Jinny’s mode of embodiment is equally defined in opposition to the dissec-tive impulse of positivist science. Regarding herself in a mirror, for instance,she announces:

So I skip up the stairs past them, to the next landing, where the long glasshangs and I see myself entire. I see my body and head in one now; for even inthis serge frock they are one, my body and my head. Look, when I move myhead I ripple all down my narrow body; even my thin legs ripple like a stalkin the wind. I flicker between the set face of Susan and Rhoda’s vagueness; Ileap like one of those flames that run between the cracks of the earth; I move,I dance. I never cease to move and to dance. (32)

Though the statement that she “sees herself entire” literally refers to the factthat she has just moved from a small mirror, in which only her head is visi-ble, to a full-length mirror, it also remarks a certain allergy to the experienceof somatic disintegration. Jinny must see her body as “entire”—as a wholethat is integrated by the “rippling,” “flickering,” “leaping,” and “dancing”presence of vital force—and will not tolerate the influence of a technology(however rudimentary) that reduces it to constituent components. By coun-tering the neuroscientific body in this way, Woolf ’s representation of Jinny’sform of embodiment is consonant with a well-established tradition of vital-istic reaction to the deterministic effects of positivist science—a traditionthat, as we have noted, includes such prominent contemporaries as EdwardCarpenter, Henri Bergson, and D. H. Lawrence.

Breaking Habits, Affecting the Neuropsychological Body • 163


Consistently represented through this metaphorics of dance, Jinny’s vital-istic mode of embodiment is extended to articulate a structure of collectiv-ity. For Jinny there is “a great society of bodies” (49), which, when they comeinto contact, call out to one another. “Our bodies communicate,” she claims,and the form of this communication finds its example in dance. “We yield,”Jinny says,

to this slow flood. . . . In and out, we are swept now into this large figure; itholds us together; we cannot step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt,its perfectly encircling walls. Our bodies, his hard, mine flowing, are pressedtogether in its body; it holds us together; and then lengthening out, in smooth,in sinuous folds, rolls us between it, on and on. (82)

The form of community predicated upon Jinny’s embodied subjectivity is,thus, less a form of relation between fixedly discrete individuals than aprocess of merging in a dynamic flow of a corporate body. If the type of flowexemplified by both Jinny’s blood and the dance stand in contrast to the pro-gressively more strictly and efficiently channeled flows of nervous energy inthe habitualized body, Woolf ’s challenge to the individualizing and deter-ministic discourses of neuroscience becomes overt during the two dinnerparty scenes in which the six characters literally come together to form acommunity of sorts. Explicitly appropriating the language of neuroscience,Woolf has Jinny respond as follows to Rhoda’s observation that “one thingmelts into another”: “Yes, . . . our senses have widened. Membranes, webs ofnerve that lay white and limp, have filled and spread themselves and floatround us like filaments, making the air tangible and catching in them far-away sounds unheard before” (110). No longer limited to their role as long-since-fixed relays between sensation and action, the nerves become, in thisrearticulation—an articulation, incidentally, that rehabilitates the hallucina-tory image deployed in Mrs. Dalloway of Septimus’s body violently reducedto a web of nerves—an extensive web that makes possible new forms of sen-sory experience and structures the melting of one thing into another.Extending this refiguration of the nervous system, Neville supports Louis’sclaim “that these attempts to say, ‘I am this, I am that,’ which we make, com-ing together, like separated parts of one body and soul, are false” (112), byrepresenting the nerves as the basis of a sort of encompassing communalarchitecture. Shifting abruptly from his sense that “change is no longer pos-sible” because he has taken “the print of life . . . upon the raw, the white, theunprotected fibre” (178), he declares: “I am merely ‘Neville’ to you, who seethe narrow limits of my life and the line it cannot pass. But to myself I am



immeasurable; a net whose fibres pass imperceptibly beneath the world. Mynet is almost indistinguishable from that which it surrounds. It lifts whales—huge leviathans and white jellies, what is amorphous and wandering” (178).No longer functioning to individualize and separate, the nerves as Nevilleimagines them mark a collective space not dissimilar to what we have seenJinny describe as the “perfectly encircling walls” of the dance. Within thisspace, the lines that divide one character from another, or the characters fromthe world that surrounds them, are no longer distinct.

It is important to note the extent to which Woolf predicates this possibil-ity of collectivity upon a mode of vital affective embodiment. Whereas thenovel consistently associates forces of individualization and differentiationwith taxonomic and traditionally narrative linguistic modes, the affectivebody remains unassimilable to the organizational regimes of these represen-tational projects and as such provides a basis for community outside theparameters of the individual. If Jinny’s vital body places her at odds with theordering effects of narrative language—“I cannot follow any word throughits changes,” she says, “I cannot follow any thought from present to past”(32)—Louis presents perhaps the most obvious example of the taxonomiclanguage of the individual. Armed with his businessman’s red pen and ledgerbook, he is driven to locate all aspects of life on their proper line and column,literally to account for the world in which he finds himself. Even the trivial-ities of day to day existence are submitted to this drive, and he insists that:“With my Australian accent I have sat in eating-shops and tried to make theclerks accept me, yet never forgotten my solemn and severe convictions andthe discrepancies and incoherences that must be resolved” (167). His use oflanguage aims at classifying and fixing that which is both without andwithin; perceptual processes, for instance, become the occasion for represen-tational ordering as he announces: “This I see for a second, and shall trytonight to fix in words, to forge a ring of steel” (30). Insistently functioningto differentiate himself from, and situate himself in relation to, that whichsurrounds him, Louis’s endless taxonomies culminate in the moment atwhich he tells us: “on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, andagain I” (141), and in so doing exemplifies the process through which “all thefurled and close-packed leaves of [his] many-folded life are now summed upin [his] name; incised cleanly and barely on the sheet” (138).

It is this reiterative solidification of the “I” through which incoherences,negations, and multiplicities are compressed and unified within the space ofthe subject—a sort of linguistic analogue to the habitualizing and individu-alizing force of repeated patterns of nervous discharge—that must be over-come, the text suggests, if the possibility of community understood outside



of the model provided by the individual is to be realized. The two dinnerparty scenes once again provide the clearest instances of such an overcoming.On the occasion of the first dinner, Louis himself is led to claim that:

It is Percival, . . . sitting silent as he sat among the tickling grasses when thebreeze parted the clouds and they formed again, who makes us aware thatthese attempts to say, “I am this, I am that,” which we make, coming together,like separated parts of one body and soul, are false. Something has been leftout from fear. Something has been altered, from vanity. We have tried toaccentuate differences. From the desire to be separate we have laid stress uponour faults, and what is particular to us. But there is a chain whirling round,round, in a steel-blue circle beneath. (112)

In the face of the individuating and qualifying force of language—insistentlycompelling claims of “I am this, I am that”—Louis posits the possibility ofan underlying state of unifying commonality, beyond all particularity, andfigured by the perfect symmetry of a “whirling . . . circle.”

If Louis can only posit this form of collectivity, it is Neville who reminds usof its grounding in the affective body. Taking up Louis’s theme, he muses that

these roaring waters . . . upon which we build our crazy platforms are morestable than the wild, the weak and inconsequent cries that we utter when, try-ing to speak, we rise; when we reason and jerk out these false sayings, “I amthis; I am that!” Speech is false.

But I eat. I gradually lose all knowledge of particulars as I eat. I am becom-ing weighed down with food. These delicious mouthfuls of roast duck, fitlypiled with vegetables, following each other in exquisite rotation of warmth,weight, sweet and bitter, past my palate, down my gullet, into my stomach,have stabilized my body. I feel quiet, gravity, control. All is solid now.Instinctively my palate now requires and anticipates sweetness and lightness,something sugared and evanescent; and cool wine, fitting glovelike over thosefiner nerves that seem to tremble from the roof of my mouth and make itspread (as I drink) into a domed cavern, green with vine leaves, musk-scented,purple with grapes. Now I can look steadily into the mill-race that foamsbeneath. (113)

Another instance in which the nerves come to figure an encompassing,organic communal architecture, this passage makes explicit the embodiedbasis of community. Describing the sequence of events through which he isgradually drawn from the realm of reason, language, and individual identityto that of affective embodiment, it is only with the complete abandonment



of the former that Neville can access the dynamic collective source of stabil-ity that subtends his existence. Eschewing language and its normative func-tion of individuation and particularization, he loses a sense of individualityas he sinks into a gastronomically induced affective state in which he “grad-ually lose[s] all knowledge of particulars.” Positing this tension between lan-guage, reason, and particularity on the one hand, and affect, embodimentand unity on the other, the text once again is consistent with a tradition ofvitalistic thought. To reinvoke Bergson, Carpenter, and Lawrence in passing,it is worth noting that despite significant differences—differences that areespecially apparent in terms of their communal implications—their projectsall articulate an understanding, shared by this aspect of Woolf ’s text, of thevital order as a fundamental unity in relation to which supposedly discreteunits or identities are viewed as the distorting, if necessary, effects of intellec-tual operations.1 If, as I argue in Chapter 3, The Waves interrogates the deter-ministic implications of the neuroscientific articulation of the nervous bodyas it functions to produce individual selves, it is clear that it also appropriatesthe language of neuroscience in an attempt to elaborate a vitalistic mode ofembodiment that provides the basis for a form of community not predicatedupon the logic of the individual. If Woolf equally moves beyond mere cri-tique of historically extant structures of collectivity (such as the imperialistnationalism she examines in both Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves) in anattempt to theorize a somatic basis of community that does not share thecoordinates delineated by medical scientific discourse, it remains to ask towhat extent she is successful, and to explore the limitations and possibilitiesoffered by the collective impulse predicated upon the vitalistic form ofembodiment at which she arrives.

Affecting the Work of Organic Community

Given that Woolf turns the language of neuroscience against itself in anattempt to think and write community, the question remains: how are we toassess the vitalistic form of community her text articulates? In order toapproach this question it will be necessary slightly to reframe Woolf ’sengagement of the neuroscientific body and more sharply to distinguishamong the modes of community the novel presents. One such mode, as JaneMarcus has argued, is the patriotic English nationalism and its supporting“myth of individualism and selfhood” (137) that The Waves works to criti-cize. Michael Tratner makes a similar point when he draws on LeonardWoolf ’s understanding of imperialism as the principle of individualismtransposed into the geopolitical sphere to argue that Virginia Woolf ’s critique



of individualism goes hand in hand with her critique of nationalism andimperialism. Given this alignment of individualism with a particular form ofnationalist community, the text’s interrogation of the individualizing func-tion of the neuroscientific body would seem to support the line of argumentadvanced by Marcus and Tratner. Beyond articulating the individualizingfunction of the habitualized body, neuroscientific discourse itself makes thelink between individualism and an explicitly conservative communal project.In James, as we have noted, the habitualized body functions to preserve bothclass distinctions between “the children of fortune” and the “envious . . .poor,” and racialized distinctions between a presumably civilized Europeanreadership and the hostile “natives of the desert and frozen zone” (125).Unsurprisingly, Maudsley’s project supports, indeed presupposes, a similarsocial model. In outlining his “inductive” approach to the “investigation ofmind,” he contends that: “we ought certainly to begin our inquiry with theobservation of the simplest instances—with its physiological manifestationsin animals, in children, in idiots, in savages, mounting by degrees to thehighest and most recondite facts of consciousness” (148). By extension, then,the turn to the affective vital body and the form of community that becomesits predicate (a community not grounded in the individual) can be seen as anattempt to imagine a more desirable structure of collectivity.

When, however, we return to the scene of the first dinner party as thefullest articulation of this alternate communal mode—in so doing, it will benecessary to differentiate more carefully between the novel’s two dinner partyscenes than I have hitherto—it becomes clear that this affective communityitself is not without its liabilities. If the text’s refiguration of the nervous sys-tem is attractive insofar as it provides the basis for a communitarian projectthat ostensibly stands in opposition to nationalist community and its cult ofthe great individual, the model of community at which it arrives remainsdangerously close to what Jean-Luc Nancy has described as “organic commu-nity.” Suppressing social difference and leaving no place for an experience ofbeing together in which the enclosed totalities of individual subjects areexposed on the limit of an unshareable alterity, this form of community iscorporatist and manifests itself either in the subsumption of individual mem-bers under the figure of a leader whose body signifies the unity of all thosein whose place it stands or in the sacrifice of individual subjectivity in an actof fusion that forms the higher-level totality of the community as Subject.2

Organic community is, for Nancy, “not only intimate communicationbetween its members but also its organic communion with its own essence.. . . [I]t is made up principally of the sharing, diffusion, or impregnation ofan identity by a plurality wherein each member identifies himself only



through the supplementary mediation of his identification with the livingbody of the community” (9). Perhaps his most succinct definition of thiscommunal form is as one governed by “the goal of achieving a communityof beings producing in essence their own essence as their work, and further-more of producing precisely this essence as community” (2). Important hereis the polyvocal sense of “work,” for if organic community is the product ofits members’ labor, the form of that product is that of a work of art, under-stood as the self-enclosed remainderless totality of the oeuvre.3

It is the imperative of the work, in this double sense, that governs theform of community that the first dinner party works to produce, an imper-ative encapsulated in the characters’ projective creation of Percival, the absentcenter around which the text revolves. Absent from the text except in thememories and thoughts of the other characters, Percival exists only as theproduct of his friends’ imaginative and identificatory labor; in working tofashion the social space enabled by the proper name “Percival,” the charac-ters produce him as the essential embodiment of their being-in-common. Itis Percival who, as Louis reminds us, “makes [the characters] aware that theseattempts to say, ‘I am this, I am that,’ which [they] make, coming together,like separated parts of one body and soul, are false” (W, 112). And if Louisremarks the realized work of community with his announcement that“Something is made,” Jinny gives form to this vague “something” when sheimplores: “Let us hold it for one moment, . . . this globe whose walls aremade of Percival” (118–19). The communal space that has hitherto beenarticulated with recourse to the language of the vital affective body is, in thisinstance, substantially embodied by “Percival,” a mythic production of thecharacters in which they initially recognize idealized versions of themselvesand which ultimately constitutes the structure of collective space to whichtheir individual selves are sacrificed. Indeed, the dependence of this structureof collectivity upon the vital affective body is apparent in the characters’ pro-jective qualification of Percival as another example of that somatic mode.Neville, for instance, complains that

when I read Shakespeare or Catullus, lying in the long grass, [Percival] under-stands more than Louis. Not the words—but what are words? Do I not knowalready how to rhyme, how to imitate Pope, Dryden, even Shakespeare? But Icannot stand all day in the sun with my eyes on the ball; I cannot feel the flightof the ball through my body and think only of the ball. I shall be a clinger tothe outsides of words all my life. (32)

Despite—or more precisely, because of—his mastery of language and hismimetic prowess, Neville, like Louis, feels he is denied access to a vital form



of existence and understanding that is directly linked to a state of affectiveembodiment. Succinctly connecting the sporting culture of the cricketfield—training ground of imperial leadership—to the affective body, Nevilleinterprets Percival’s linguistic ineptitude as bespeaking the ability to graspsomething more in the poetry he hears than his friends. His understanding,Neville speculates, is based not upon a superior comprehension of the wordsbut rather upon his vital somatic state. Lacking his ability to “feel . . .through [his] body,” Percival’s companions are doomed to the surfaces madeavailable by language, while he is able to dwell in some mysterious and vitalinteriority. To return, in this context, to Tratner’s linking of individualismand imperialist nationalism, it will be important to take some distance fromhis somewhat too hasty valorization of collectivism as a sufficient counter-measure. For in sacrificing their particularity as individual subjects to mergein a form of collective consciousness, the form of collectivity the charactersfashion remains Subjective. Distinguishing between the citizen and the sub-ject, Nancy captures some of this tension when he writes that: “The citizenis, first of all, one, someone, everyone, while the subject is, first of all, self, thatis, the circling back through which a one raises its unicity to the power ofunity. The citizenship comprises numerous unicities, subjecthood comprisesan identificatory unity” (Sense of the World, 104). The sacrifice of individual-ity to the community formed through the first dinner party can be under-stood, in this context, as the conversion of a number of unicities into theessential unity of a communal subjecthood. Though the communityachieved in The Waves’ first dinner party, and predicated upon the affectivebody, functions to counter an atomistic individualism, it does not escape thelogic of the Subject—a logic all too compatible with both nation and empire.

If the mythic fashioning of Percival is initially emblematic of the prob-lems potentially entailed by the vitalist mode of embodiment and correspon-ding structure of collectivity to which the novel turns, by the occasion of thesecond dinner party Percival—or more precisely, his death—will havebecome central to Woolf ’s response to these problems. Percival’s death is, ofcourse, literally central to the narrative progression of The Waves; occurringmidway through the text, it is announced by the short shocking statement:“He is dead” (124). While Percival’s death is key to Woolf ’s satirical attackon what Marcus calls “the cultural narrative of ‘England’ . . . created by anEton/Cambridge elite who (re)produce the national epic . . . and elegy . . .in praise of the hero” (137), his ignominious demise should not be read asmerely ridiculous or pathetic. Notwithstanding the irony of having Percival,knight errant and imperial champion, meet his end in an accidental fall fromthe back of a flea-ridden mare, his death initiates a critical reconsideration of



both the affective body and the structure of collectivity it enables. Followingquickly on the heels of the first dinner party, Percival’s death calls the char-acters to ask what is at stake in the representational schema that fashionshim. Having produced the myth of Percival as the myth of community, theymust now reflect upon the ramifications of their labor and its product.

In speaking of Percival’s “mythic” status, it will be important to recallNancy’s understanding of “myth” or “fiction” as those linguistic modes thatdo the work of organic community and produce the community as theirwork. “Absolute community—myth—” he writes,

is not so much the total fusion of individuals, but the will of community: thedesire to operate, through the power of myth, the communion that myth rep-resents and that it represents as a communion or communication of wills.Fusion ensues: myth represents multiple existences as immanent to its ownunique fiction, which gathers them together and gives them their common fig-ure in its speech and as this speech. (57)

Myth is, thus, distinguished not primarily by its referential status but by theextent to which it operates to produce community. Rather than representingcommunity to a group of individuals, or communicating some informationabout community, which its members then hold in common, mythic speechis itself the operation of community—it is through the very act of mythicspeech that community takes place. Given this tautological loop in whichmyth and community are locked—whereby myth can be said to communicateonly itself as the taking place of community—it becomes impossible to thinkof community without myth, or blithely to pursue a project of demytholo-gization. If, in Nancy’s formulation, all community necessarily takes placethrough the operation of myth, and that operation is independent of myth’sreferential function, critical approaches that seek an unmythic form of col-lectivity through the exposure of a given myth’s suspect referential statusfinally will retain only slight critical purchase and only perpetuate the oper-ation of mythic community. In this context the limitations of a reading thatunderstands The Waves as simply engaged in satirizing imperialist nationalcommunity—what Marcus characterizes as Woolf ’s “merciless parody” of the“myth of individualism and selfhood” (137) and of the figure of the imperialhero who is its manifestation—become evident, for the force of satire or par-ody lies in its ability to expose as ridiculous, to demythologize, its object.

Woolf ’s text undoubtedly engages in this sort of satire, the height ofwhich is encapsulated in the circumstances of Percival’s death, and in sodoing critiques the ideological ramifications of the historically particular



form of community he represents. This aspect of her project, it should benoted in passing, is consonant with her ironic treatment, in Mrs. Dalloway,of the regulatory efforts of the redoubtable Drs. Holmes and Bradshaw.Woolf does not, however, limit herself to this critique, and the sheer event ofPercival’s death allows her to pursue the logic of mythic community to thepoint of what Nancy calls its “interruption.” Beyond its demythologizing tac-tics, the text develops a mode of writing that gives voice to this interruptionand remarks a limit on which the work of community—its individual mem-ber subjects and the logic of the Subject itself—is opened up and exposed bythe interactions of singular beings that cannot be put to work in the opera-tions of myth. This “voice of interruption” is most audible in the characters’reactions to Percival’s death. Uninterested in what the myth of Percival rep-resents, and unable to find language adequate to the fact of Percival’s death,Rhoda, for example, is led to ask, “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’—but what isthe thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? Now that lightninghas gashed the tree and the flowering branch has fallen and Percival, by hisdeath, has made me this gift, let me see the thing” (134). No longer the“something [that] is made” (118) in the work of mythic community, he is,in death, merely “the thing” to which myth is inadequate and that constitutesits interruption.

Faced with the unthinkable event of Percival’s death, Rhoda rejects Louis’sresponse, aware that “If we submit [Louis] will reduce us to order . . . [and]smooth out the death of Percival to his satisfaction” (132). She decidesinstead to go to a music hall, and her description of the vocal performanceshe witnesses is extraordinary:

Swollen but contained in slippery satin, the seagreen woman comes to our res-cue. She sucks in her lip, assumes an air of intensity, inflates herself and hurlsherself precisely at the right moment as if she saw an apple and her voice wasthe arrow into the note, “Ah!”

An axe has split a tree to the core; the core is warm; sound quivers withinthe bark. “Ah!” cried a woman to her lover, leaning from her window inVenice. “Ah, ah!” she cried, and again she cries “Ah!” She has provided us witha cry. But only a cry. And what is a cry? (133)

Unwilling to “smooth out” Percival’s death in the process of representation,narration, or mythologization, Rhoda recognizes, nonetheless, her obligationto bear witness to the “thing” he has manifested to her, and in the momentof the vocal performance she finds a means of understanding her obligation.Instead of the “‘like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like,’” of representation, she is confrontedwith the “‘Ah!’ and ‘Ah!’ and ‘Ah!’” of the vocalist’s “cry,” an utterance that



returns Rhoda to the affective body without allowing that mode of embodi-ment to become the basis of a communitarian myth. The affective charge ofthe singer’s cry is pregnant with a significance that it cannot signify, and assuch allows Percival’s death to open onto a communal mode that is consonantwith neither imperialist nationalism nor the organic affective community ofthe first dinner party. The language of the cry refuses to qualify his death, tomake it comprehensible through the memorializing production of a commu-nal fiction; it does, however, inarticulately indicate the sheer fact of his death,a fact that the characters share in common even as they are confronted by thepainful insistence that they can neither properly make Percival’s death theirown nor make it the ground of a shared subjective space.4

In a parallel moment, Bernard responds to Percival’s death with a visit tothe National Gallery. Equally scornful of Louis’s desire to “smooth thingsout,” he insists:

But I still resent the usual order. I will not let myself be made yet to accept thesequence of things. I will walk; I will not change the rhythm of my mind bystopping, by looking; I will walk. I will go up these steps into the gallery andsubmit myself to the influence of minds like mine outside the sequence. Thereis little time left to answer the question; my powers flag; I become torpid. Hereare pictures. Here are cold madonnas among the pillars. Let them lay to rest theincessant activity of the mind’s eye, the bandaged head, the men with ropes, sothat I may find something unvisual beneath. Here are the gardens; and Venusamong her flowers; here are saints and blue madonnas. Mercifully these picturesmake no reference; they do not nudge; they do not point. Thus they expandmy consciousness of him and bring him back to me differently. (104–5)

Rejecting the sequentializing effect of the phrases he so constantly produces,Bernard finds solace in the sheer affective force of the pictures he views. Thepaintings make no appeal to the representational faculty of his “mind’s eye,”but present him with something “unvisual.” Areferential and nonindexical,the images do not inscribe Percival within a fiction of unity and foundationalstability but “bring him back to [Bernard] differently.” This difference pro-duced by Bernard’s affective experience pertains not only to Percival but toBernard himself. If Bernard’s experience in the gallery brings Percival backdifferently by manifesting the persistent necessity of remembering himbefore and beyond the work of memorializing fiction, it also installs a differ-ence within the subject, the “me,” to whom Percival returns. Exposing theindividual to the singularity of an otherness that it can neither incorporatewithin the closure of the subject nor render the basis of a higher subjectivemode (a “We”) to which it can sacrifice itself, the demands of remembrance



thematized by Bernard’s experience are also the demands of an impossiblecommunity—a community based not in the dedifferentiating fusion of itsindividual members in a transcendental whole, but precisely in their com-mon exposure to, their sharing of, that which properly can be neither com-municated nor shared.

Turning from the affective body as a vital principle of integration andorganic unity, to an understanding of the affective body as manifesting thelimit remarked by the singularly unrepresentable “thing” that the charactershold in common but can never properly share, by the occasion of the seconddinner party The Waves insists that the desire for community must be nego-tiated on a very different register, and in a different language, from that ofthe characters’ first “coming together.” In Bernard’s experience in the gallery,for instance, the language of the affective body is forcefully present, and yetit is made to signify outside of its normative usage, or more precisely, to sig-nify a lack of sense. Sitting in the gallery, Bernard feels:

The silence weighs on me—the perpetual solicitation of the eye. The pressureis intermittent and muffled. I distinguish too little and too vaguely. The bell ispressed and I do not ring or give out irrelevant clamours all jangled. I am titil-lated inordinately by some splendour; the ruffled crimson against the green lin-ing; the march of pillars; the orange light behind the black, pricked ears of theolive trees. Arrows of sensation strike from my spine, but without order. (129)

Appropriating the quintessential figure of neuroscientific embodiment inthis articulation of the affective body, the text returns us yet again to thescene of Mrs. Constable’s sponge and the resulting “arrows of sensation.” Inthis instance, however, those arrows, far from presaging processes of somaticorganization, bespeak only a lack of order, and bear witness to a somaticforce that fundamentally resists organizational programs of any sort.Closing in Bernard’s voice, Woolf equally refuses the mythologizing narra-tive of the “summing up” (199), the linguistic principle of organization thatwould be proper to an organic notion of community. Instead, she has himarticulate a series of questions: “What is the phrase for the moon? And thephrase for love? By what name are we to call death?” (199). “I do not know,”Bernard responds,

I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as chil-dren speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing andpick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need ahowl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I liein the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes



down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoesthat break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts, making wild music,false phrases. I have done with phrases. (246)

Forcing us to conceive community in terms of the demands of the “brokenwords, inarticulate words” (161) of a “howl” or a “cry,” Woolf rejects thetotalizing fiction of organic community, and is able to exclaim with Bernard:“Heaven be praised, . . . we need not whip this prose into poetry. The littlelanguage is enough” (219).

Traversing the Surfaces of Life: Disorganized UrbanFlows and the “Unsubstantial Territory” of the Crowd

The Waves thus functions simultaneously to critique an existing form ofimperialist national community, and to mark the limit of community as suchby giving voice to its interruption. On the one hand, Woolf interrogates thehabitual processes of somatic organization that support the production ofindividual subjects and provide the coordinates for their insertion into anational community. These processes, as I have suggested, function in collab-oration with more broadly institutional communitarian forces: the medical-ized psychology of moral regulation in Mrs. Dalloway or the culture ofeducation in The Waves.5 By interrogating both the cultural formations thatenable the production of Percival and the form of community that crystal-izes around him—a project whose institutional aspect she develops at lengthin Three Guineas—Woolf is able to critique existing forms of nationalistcommunity. On the other hand, however, Woolf does not simply dismisswhat Marcus describes as the elegiac production of national communityaround the figure of the hero. More precisely, while she does reject themythopoetic memorialization and monumentalization of the imperial heroas the identificatory crux of national community, The Waves remains elegiacto the extent that Percival’s death constitutes a call to a sort of immemorialremembering and necessitates a “little language” that can bear witness notsimply to a loss but to an incommunicable and unshareable limit uponwhich the interiority of the Subject in both its individual and communalincarnations is unfolded and exposed. The form of elegy to which the textultimately turns, that is, approaches death not as the moment in which indi-viduals and groups must mournfully conserve the presence of an objectwhose loss threatens their integrity but as the occasion of a silence throughwhich the slight and inarticulate call to what Nancy refers as the “(k)not” ofcommunity must be allowed to become audible.



This “(k)not” describes a social tie that

involves neither interiority nor exteriority but which, in being tied, ceaselesslymakes the inside pass outside, each into (or by way of ) the other, the outsideinside, turning endlessly back on itself without returning to itself—the link ofmêlée and intrigue, confrontation and arrangement, need and desire, con-straint and obligation, subjection and love, glory and pity, interest and disin-terest. The tying of the (k)not is nothing, no res, nothing but theplacing-into-relation that presupposes at once proximity and distance, attach-ment and detachment, intricacy, intrigue, and ambivalence. (Sense, 111)

Adequate as they would need to be to the demand of a communal bondunderstood as a “disjunctive conjunction,” the politics implied by the (k)notwould entail an “incessant tying up of singularities with each other, over eachother, and through each other, without any end other than the enchainmentof (k)nots, without any structure other than their interconnection or interde-pendence, and without any possibility of calling any single (k)not or thetotality of (k)nots self-sufficient (for there would be ‘totality’ only in theenchainment itself )” (111–12). Faced with the organic subjective logic intowhich the neuroscientific body inserts itself, it is precisely this sort ofenchainment of singularities toward which Woolf gestures in appropriatingthe figure of the human nervous system to represent a web of links betweenselves and the world they inhabit. The text’s articulation of this nervousenchainment is, however, rather precariously poised. On the one side, thereis the psychological organization of bodies, selves, and communities that,though it operates predominantly according to a mechanistic rationality, isfirmly organic. Whether addressing itself to the cells and structures of thehuman body, the instincts, dispositions, and sentiments that constitute theself, or the subjects that compose a group or community, the psychology withwhich Woolf engages proceeds by way of a systemic logic whereby independ-ent individuals are organized into larger units insofar as they are coordinatedby the telos of the whole. One need only recall J. A. Hadfield’s concatenationof organized bodies, organized selves, and organized communities for anencapsulation of this discursive trajectory. On the other side, lies the modelof vital affective embodiment to which Woolf turns in an attempt to circum-vent the discursive relays of neuroscience. Though this somatic mode escapesthe mechanistic presuppositions of the theorists of habit, the form of com-munity that becomes its predicate teeters on the edge of organicism nonethe-less. Whereas the organic character of the communal forms toward whichneuropsychological discourse tends is a function of the instrumental coordi-nation of discrete individuals, the affective community elaborated in Woolf ’s



text is susceptible to an organicism achieved in the sacrificial fusion of indi-vidual subjects into a subjective social totality. The movement from the(k)notting of collective ties to the fusion of organic community is nowheremore apparent than in the moment in which the figure of the web of nervesgives way to Louis’s rather more static, stable, and substantial figure of the“chain whirling round, round in a steel-blue circle” (W, 112)—an enclosurethat becomes visible beneath, and ultimately eliminates, the confusion ofparticularity and difference. In this moment the mode of enchainment sug-gested by the incomplete, amorphous, and ever-changing nervous web whosesurface places the characters in relation without enclosing them, rigidifiesinto the literality of a steel chain wherein the inflexible enclosures of individ-ual links are not so much tied together as firmly bound, and ultimatelybecome indistinguishable in the spinning form of the larger unitary enclo-sure they constitute. If, in short, Woolf ’s appropriation of neuroscientific dis-course provides the resources for thinking the (k)notting of community, TheWaves finally is most powerful in thematizing the risk of that (k)not becom-ing the cruel bond of organic community it seeks to undo. The Waves doesnot so much provide a positive articulation of this other communal form,that is, as allow it to become visible at the limit on which organic commu-nity is undone. This limit, as I have suggested, is constituted primarily inrelation to the event of death that resides at the novel’s core. It is the con-frontation of death that engenders the affective experiences that finally pre-vent the text’s alternate structure of collectivity from contracting into anorganic, subjective enclosure.

The tension that, thus, largely animates The Waves is encapsulated inBernard’s early intimation that “when we sit together, close . . . we melt intoeach other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantialterritory” (11). Woolf attempts to think a form of community that is under-stood as an “unsubstantial territory”—a form of social enchainment that tiesand unties relations between singular selves, and tenuously connects thatwhich is, in Neville’s words, “amorphous and wandering” (178)—and yetthis territory is always haunted by the threat of an all too substantial fusion,a melting of each self into another. If The Waves eschews the task of imagin-ing in positive terms the (k)notted nervous community toward which it ges-tures, choosing instead to safeguard its possibility in attending to the eventof death as the limit on which organic community is undone, the risk of apositive articulation is one that Woolf had already taken (and taken in termsof life) in Mrs. Dalloway. By the publication of The Waves, the abstraction ofBernard’s “unsubstantial territory” had already been explored in much moreliteral and material terms in the ambulatory encounter with the urban space



of London in Mrs. Dalloway—an encounter that is extended in crucial waysby essays like “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” and “The LondonScene” (both published roughly contemporaneously with The Waves).Similarly, characters’ repeated recourse, in The Waves, to the eternal figure ofthe steel ring, symbol of order and organic unity, can only appear nostalgicin light of the plethora of rings—all thoroughly temporal, fleeting, and evencrassly commercial—that had already played such an important role in theconfiguration of urban collectivity in Mrs. Dalloway.

Having argued that Woolf ’s exploration of community in The Waves sig-nificantly revolves around the central statement that “He is dead” (124), Inow return to Mrs. Dalloway in order to examine its elaboration of commu-nity—an elaboration that is intricately bound up with an equally brief andcentral statement: “they loved life” (MD, 5). The problem of life, which istaken up, as we have noted, in the vitalistic tendencies apparent in The Waves,is absolutely central to Mrs. Dalloway and to the structure of collectivity thatWoolf pursues therein. This centrality is manifest almost from the openingpage, for even as Clarissa steps off the curb in front of her home inWestminster and embarks upon her excursion to buy the flowers for thatevening’s party, we are confronted with the following extraordinary passage:

For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? Over twenty,—onefeels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive,a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but thatmight be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes.There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour irrevocable. Theleaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossingVictoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so,making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every momentafresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps(drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Actsof Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing,tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars,omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrelorgans; the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aero-plane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June. (4–5)

Enmeshed in the tumult of urban existence, its “bellow” and “uproar,” its“traffic” and its commercialism, Clarissa is overcome with the question of“why one loves it so.” The unspecified “it” that one loves, sees, makes, builds,tumbles, and creates is, of course, finally qualified as “life,” and ultimatelythis love of “life” is no singular passion but one that is shared with “them,”



the people that she encounters as she walks through the city. Taking up onceagain the term that is so crucial, if admittedly vague, to her argument in“Modern Fiction,” life in this articulation designates something substantiallymore than the impact (to be recorded by the novelist) of the world upon thehuman sensoriperceptual system. It is, undoubtedly, that, but it is also more:life is not simply a force of whose blows one is the passive recipient, but issomething in whose creation and manipulation one is active. And mostimportantly, it is something that one shares and by which one is shared out.

As much as this articulation of life is intricately conditioned by the mate-rial details of urban existence, it is not simply synonymous with the flow ofthe city—the ever-changing interactions of people, machines, objects, sounds,sights, smells—but designates a specific interruption and configuration ofthat flow. Life, that is, seems dependent upon what the narrative describes asa “particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense” (4): towit, the shocking interruption of the chaotic flow of the city by the strikingof Big Ben. The novel, of course, is famously punctuated by the repeatedchiming of Big Ben, which marks the passing of the twenty-four hour periodthe narrative represents; with each occasion upon which the clock imposesitself, the narrative remarks that “the leaden circles dissolved in the air.” Thisfiguration of the passing of time speaks less to temporal flow, however, thanto a momentary arrest and functions as a sort of narrative freeze-frame. Thefigure is, in fact, simultaneously temporal and spatial. While the expandingcircles of sound take on a certain leaden substance, a heaviness that allowsthem to circumscribe a sort of enclosure and mark perspectivally determinedgeographical sections of the city within whose circumference a random groupof individuals is momentarily connected, the connections forged in thisprocess are tentative and temporary in the extreme. Despite their leaden solid-ity, these circles are not the eternal steel rings of The Waves, for even as theycome into existence they are constituted by the temporality of their immedi-ate and progressive dissolution. The figure of Big Ben’s leaden circles of sound,in short, articulates an evanescent urban topography characterized by a net-work of overlapping circumferences of connection, for if the flow of urban lifethrough which Clarissa makes her way is momentarily interrupted such thata temporary space of connection becomes recognizable to her, the clock’schimes hold the same potential for all those within its auditory range. The lifethat Clarissa so loves, then, is not so much a sheerly chaotic mass of urbanexperience but specific moments in which a shocking interruption allows oneto participate in that chaos so as to realize a fleeting connectedness.

Indeed, the text itself enforces the evanescence of the connectedness of“life,” for no sooner than it posits this unexpected and exceptional social tie,



it returns (in the very next paragraph, in fact) to the realm of the conven-tional social bonds that support a sense of national identity. Moving quicklyfrom her revelry in the shared love of life, Clarissa’s thoughts shift abruptly,and somewhat inexplicably. They turn first to the thankful reflection that“the War was over” (5), and from there make the short leap to the consider-ation of female acquaintances who lost sons to the war—one of whom, LadyBexborough, admirably refused to allow the tragedy to deflect her from theexecution of her duties, for she “opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegramin her hand, John, her favourite, killed” (5). From this example of steadfastpatriotism, Clarissa is led to a comforting reflection upon the signs ofrestored national order: “It was June. The King and Queen were at thePalace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, astirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelaghand all the rest of it” (5). In its opening pages, the novel, thus, posits a starkcontrast between two competing modes of collectivity. On the one hand, weare presented with the random and fleeting connections produced by life,and on the other, we are confronted by the rather more stable and persistentinstitutions of national identification. By articulating this tension, Woolfenters into a crucial area of psychological debate in the early part of the cen-tury: namely, the psychology of the crowd and the group. While the connect-edness to which she gestures in positing urban life as a form of collectiveexperience bears a certain resemblance to the unruly contours of the crowd,the institutional apparatuses of nation find their place in the theories of morehighly organized incarnations of the group.

Perhaps the most well-known contribution to the psychological literatureon this subject is Gustave Le Bon’s La Psychologie des Foules, but prominentBritish contributions to the discussion include Wilfred Trotter’s Instincts of theHerd in Peace and War and William McDougall’s The Group Mind: A Sketchof the Principles of Collective Psychology with Some Attempt to Apply Them to theInterpretation of National Life and Character. For the purposes of my argu-ment, McDougall’s articulation of group psychology is especially useful for anumber of reasons. Most immediately, his understanding of group psychol-ogy is explicitly structured by the comparison of the unorganized group, orcrowd, and the highly organized group best exemplified by the nation. Interms of my extended argument, his framework is of special interest becausehe insists that the psychology of the group is an enterprise that grows directlyout of, and constitutes the proper culmination of, neuropsychologicalresearch. Anticipating The Group Mind in his slightly earlier and extremelypopular Introduction to Social Psychology (first published in 1908, by 1926 ithad gone through twenty editions), McDougall launches a polemical attack



on competing social scientific disciplines—from cultural anthropology topolitical science and sociology—by arguing that human society can only beproperly (which is to say, scientifically) understood on a psychological basis.“Among students of the social sciences,” he suggests,

there has always been a certain number who have recognized the fact that someknowledge of the human mind and of its modes of operation is an essentialpart of their equipment, and that the successful development of the social sci-ences must be dependent upon the fulness [sic] and accuracy of such knowl-edge. These propositions are so obviously true that any formal attempt todemonstrate them is superfluous. . . . It is, then, a remarkable fact that psychol-ogy, the science which claims to formulate the body of ascertained truths aboutthe constitution and working of the mind . . . has not been generally and prac-tically recognized as the essential common foundation on which all the socialsciences—ethics, economics, political science, philosophy of history, sociology,and cultural anthropology, and the more special social sciences, such as the sci-ences of religion, of law, of education, and of art—must be built up. (1)

Seeking to remedy this situation, Social Psychology argues that the “depart-ment of psychology that is of primary importance for the social science isthat which deals with the springs of human action, the impulses and motivesthat sustain mental and bodily activity and regulate conduct; and this, of allthe departments of psychology, is the one that has remained in the mostbackward state, in which the greatest obscurity, vagueness, and confusion stillreign” (2). McDougall wants, in other words, to bring to bear the moredeveloped aspects of the psychological project—those dealing with “the rela-tions of soul and body, of psychical and physical process, of consciousnessand brain processes” (3)—upon these social psychological questions.According to this logic, whereby any study of social forms presupposes someunderstanding of individual psychology, and Psychology is, therefore, theonly discipline capable of articulating a scientifically grounded analysis ofsocial forms, experimental psychology and social psychology are situated inan inevitable progression toward group psychology as the enterprise that willsecure Psychology its rightfully preeminent position among the social sci-ences. While The Group Mind is rather more speculative than McDougall’sscientistic rhetoric might lead one to believe, it remains useful for our pur-poses insofar as it presupposes that the principle of organization can be trans-lated across somatic, moral, and social spheres. Understanding theneurophysiological organization of the body and the moral organization ofthe self are, in short, preliminary steps leading to the comprehension ofgroup organization.



As the subtitle of his text suggests, McDougall’s group psychology isdirected toward an analysis of the nation, that form of group that is, for him,the most highly organized (and thus the most desirable). Contrary to themore widely held view—articulated by Le Bon, for example—that grouppsychological phenomena typically entail collective intellectual and moralcapacities well below the average level exhibited by the individual members,McDougall insists that while this deterioration may mark the unorganizedgroup (the crowd), in the case of a highly organized group like the nation,“the whole is raised above the level of its average member; and even, by rea-son of exaltation of emotion and organised co-operation in deliberation,above that of its highest members” (Group Mind, 74). Predictably, thesemoral and intellectual dividends are directly attributable to the principle oforganization; highly organized groups, in which the formation of what hecalls a “group mind” is possible, are understood on the model of the organicsystem exemplified by the organized body. Among the preconditions for theexistence of organized groups, McDougall insists upon the importance of“some degree of continuity of existence of the group”; the formation of“some adequate idea of the group, of its nature, composition, functions, andcapacities, and of the relations of the individual to the group”; “the existenceof a body of traditions and customs and habits in the minds of the membersof the group determining their relations to one another and to the group asa whole”; and the “organisation of the group, consisting in the differentiationand specialisation of the functions of its constituents” (69–70). Like organicbiological systems, that is, the organized group is marked by the habitualizedcoordination of individual constituent components whose identities arereciprocally determined by the telos of an enduring whole. Especially tellingwith respect to the thoroughly organic character of the organized group isMcDougall’s contention that in cases in which organization is imposed fromwithout, and relies on the authority of an external power, the group is littlemore than a simple crowd. The truly organized group, in other words, mustgenerate internally the basis of its organization.

While the examination of the “group mind” made possible by these con-ditions is McDougall’s primary interest, his ostensibly positivist approachdemands that he proceed from the simplest examples of the group to the mostcomplex, and it is in this capacity that his text opens with an examination ofunorganized groups. Seeking to determine the degree to which the principlesof group organization are discernible in even the most minimally organizedgroup, McDougall tentatively approaches the crowd. However, “Not everymass of human beings gathered together in one place within sight and soundof one another,” he warns, “constitutes a crowd in the psychological sense of



the word” (33). In an attempt to mark this important distinction, hedescribes a scene that dramatizes the genesis of the crowd from within thechaotic mass. “There is,” he reports,

a dense gathering of several hundred individuals at the Mansion HouseCrossing at noon of every week-day; but ordinarily each of them is bentupon his own task, pursues his own ends, paying little or no regard to thoseabout him. But let a fire-engine come galloping through the throng of traf-fic, or the Lord Mayor’s state coach arrive, and instantly the concourseassumes in some degree the character of a psychological crowd. All eyes areturned upon the fire-engine or coach; the attention of all is directed to thesame object; all experience in some degree the same emotion; and the stateof mind of each person is in some degree affected by the mental processes ofall those about him. (33)

While this scene effectively encapsulates, in the elementary form of thecrowd, what are for McDougall the “essential conditions of collective mentalaction”—namely, “a common object of mental activity, a common mode offeeling in regard to it, and some degree of reciprocal influence between themembers of the group” (33)—it is especially interesting insofar as Woolfreplicates its contours in exacting detail in Mrs. Dalloway.

In describing Clarissa’s excursion to the shops, the opening pages ofWoolf ’s narrative present an elaborate example of the phenomenonMcDougall describes, whereby an amorphous mass of people is transformedinto a crowd. As Clarissa is comfortably ensconced with her Bond Streetflorist, her horticultural decisions are suddenly disrupted by what she ini-tially takes to be a pistol shot outside the shop. Modifying this mispercep-tion, the narrative informs us that “the violent explosion which made MrsDalloway jump and Miss Pym go to the window and apologize came froma motor car which had drawn to the side of the pavement precisely oppositeMulberry’s shop window. Passers-by, who, of course, stopped and stared, hadjust time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the dove-greyupholstery, before a male hand drew the blind” (MD, 17). If the sound ofthe explosion initially transforms the jumbled mass of shoppers and shop-owners into a fleeting crowd, the severely limited endurance of the sound asan object of common consciousness is quickly supplemented by the fascinat-ing presence of the car’s mysterious occupant—variously identified as thePrince of Wales, the Prime Minister, or (despite the fleeting presence of the“male hand”) the Queen. What would have been a crowd in only the mostlimited sense, doomed to dissolution almost concomitant with its constitu-tion, is solidified and prolonged by the presence of a more substantial object



of common consciousness, an object, moreover, more likely to produce the“common mode of feeling” McDougall deems necessary.

As the car pulls away from the curb, Woolf embarks upon a virtuoso nar-rative performance whereby her text weaves its way through various of theconsciousnesses that compose the crowd and mimetically traces McDougall’sprinciple of “reciprocal influence” as it is configured by the shared sense that“greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street” (MD, 20). Following thecar’s progress over a number of pages, the narrative performs the constantreconstitution of the crowd as its contours change in relation to the geo-graphical position of its ambulatory object. Lest we are apt, however, tounderstand the force of this episode by analogy to the effects of Big Ben’sleaden circles of sound, and their simultaneous constitution of a multifariousnetwork of overlapping, perspectivally determined sites of social linkage, thetext pauses self-consciously in the wake of the car. “The car had gone,” weare informed,

but it had left a slight ripple which flowed through glove shops and hat shopsand tailor’s shops on both sides of Bond Street. For thirty seconds all headswere inclined the same way—to the window. Choosing a pair of gloves—should they be to the elbow or above it, lemon or pale grey?—ladies stopped;when the sentence was finished something had happened. Something so tri-fling in single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable oftransmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration; yet in its fullnessrather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in all the hat shopsand tailors’ shops strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; ofthe flag; of Empire. (22)

Though the physical constitution of the crowd changes with the movementof the car, there would seem to be an almost utter homogeneity of responseto the common object, and thus the character of the crowd remains stable.Indeed, as this remarkable homogeneity suggests, rather than a simple repro-duction of McDougall’s example of crowd formation, Woolf ’s narrative rep-resents both the genesis of the simple crowd, and the progressiveorganization of that crowd along the lines of force provided by powerfulsymbols of nationalist ideology.

Even as the novel’s opening celebration of life seems definitively assimi-lated by the homogenizing production of the organized group—women,men, and members of all social classes alike “thrill . . . at the thought ofRoyalty looking at them; the Queen bowing; the Prince saluting; at thethought of the heavenly life divinely bestowed upon Kings” (24)—the nar-rative progression is once again shockingly interrupted. The very moment in



which the enraptured attention of a segment of the crowd that has gatheredat the gates of Buckingham Palace is about to find its satisfaction within theradiant ambit of the approaching car, we are told that “suddenly Mrs Coateslooked up into the sky” (25). The expectant atmosphere is shattered by the“sound of an aeroplane [that] bored ominously into the ears of the crowd.There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind,which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making letters in thesky! Everyone looked up” (25). The process by which the unruly and sociallydeleterious force of the crowd is organized and contained as part of a nationalgroup, in short, is disrupted at its apogee. Or more precisely, the newlyorganized group finds itself suddenly and shockingly distracted, its sharedattention redirected by a startling embodiment of debasedly superficial andcrassly commercial mass culture: the members of the crowd find themselvesentangled in the virtually indecipherable loops of smoke formed by theplane’s skywritten advertisement.

Tracing this scene back to the unprecedented demonstration of skywrit-ing which took place in the skies over London on Derby Day 1922 at thebehest of the Daily Mail, Michael North situates Woolf ’s novel within theadvertising culture of the early twentieth century. Convincingly arguing thatthe “public constituted by advertising is finally not so very different from theintersubjective public that is coterminous with the novel itself,” he drawsattention to the skywriting as “but one of a number of devices” (includingthe regal automobile and Big Ben’s leaden circles) “deployed by the novel toknit together subjectivities” (84). Commenting upon the fact that the “inte-rior worlds of [Woolf ’s] individual characters . . . are always connected byvarious threads to the many others who make up the outer world,” North isled to conclude that

Part of the mingled tragedy and exaltation of the end of Mrs. Dalloway comes. . . from the fact that people are never actually complete, because the threadof acquaintance and intimacy connect each individual to a wider group that isalways changing and expanding. . . . Mrs. Dalloway also suggests what any sen-tient citizen of the twentieth century knows, that these threads of commonaltyare often made up out of public materials, even commercial ones, so that eventhe most blatant advertising scheme can provide the point of contact for dis-parate individuals. (84)

North’s reading is persuasive, and while I certainly agree with his basic pointthat events like the skywriting function to forge connections between variouscharacters, his argument is seriously inadequate to the specificity of Woolf ’stext in a couple of important ways. The somewhat strange combination of



his nostalgic wistfulness regarding the inability of mass commercial cultureto “complete” the subjects it connects, and his slightly smug assertion thatthe works of “psychologically adept practitioners of the advertising art . . . arenot so utterly distinct from those of the great modernists as they may appear”(86) suggests both that Woolf ’s understanding of collectivity is simply deter-mined by the at least mildly impoverished terms made available by the mas-sified public sphere, and that there are few distinctions to be made betweendifferent configurations of that sphere. I want to insist, to the contrary, boththat there are important distinctions to be drawn (distinctions, moreover,that need not enforce an absolute divide between sleazy ad-men and “greatmodernists”), and that Woolf does not simply acquiesce to the available artic-ulations of the public sphere, valiantly making the best of a bad situation inan attempt to imagine social connections. The various devices employed byWoolf to represent the forging of connections are not, as North suggests,assimilable one to the other but, as I have attempted to demonstrate, presup-pose different understandings of the group, and of collectivity more broadly.The fact that Woolf turns to the form of connection produced by the sky-writing in order to disrupt the form of connection produced by the car sug-gests that while she draws upon resources made available by earlytwentieth-century urban existence (including consumer culture), she does soselectively and with an eye to the exploration of specific forms of commu-nity. In what follows, I will suggest that Woolf ’s turn to consumer culture asa means of articulating collective ties is far from reluctant. Though they donot simply celebrate commodity culture, her texts nonetheless approach it asproducing potentially valuable possibilities for the imagination and realiza-tion of community.

Exposing an “Enormous Eye” to the Urban Marketplace: EnervatedConsumption and the Communal Potential of Commodity Culture

Precisely because the appearance of the skywriter disrupts the increasingorganization of the crowd along nationalist lines and returns that homoge-nous group to the realm of the inconsistent and unruly crowd, I want to sug-gest that the scene of that airborne drama can be taken as exemplary of thestructure of community that the novel works to articulate. Before turningfully to that scene, however, it is important to note that even at the height ofpatriotic identification produced by the passing car, Woolf ’s treatment ofthat national group is not unambiguous. While the manifest drive of the textin this respect is critical—aligning this constitution of the group with othermechanisms of nationalist identification that it interrogates—Woolf



nonetheless seizes the opportunity to remark a moment of disidentificationthat opens on to a contestatory articulation of community. The explosiveannunciation of the car, which sets the entire sequence in motion, is, afterall, the first instance of contact between Septimus and Clarissa. They areboth arrested by the sound of the backfiring motor: “Mrs Dalloway, comingto the window with her arms full of sweet peas,” the narrative informs us,“looked out with her little pink face pursed in inquiry. Everyone looked atthe motor car. Septimus looked” (18). The semantics of this descriptivesequence effectively places both Clarissa and Septimus on the periphery ofthe crowd; though they are engaged in the same activity as “everyone” else,they remain grammatically unassimilated to the nascent collective.

This disjunction is most evident in Septimus’s case, for his response standsin stark contrast to the homogeneity of patriotic reverie to which the rest ofthe crowd is apparently inspired. Rather than indulging the sharply curtailedmetonymic skid that leads the crowd seamlessly from the details of the car tothe symbols of national glory, Septimus is arrested precisely by the materialdetails of the car. “There the motor car stood,” he thinks, “with drawnblinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree . . . and this gradual draw-ing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror hadcome to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him” (18).The foreboding appearance of the arboreal pattern in the decorative detail ofthe blind commences the train of thought that culminates, under the influ-ence of the skywriter, in his recognition that “the human voice in certainatmospheric conditions . . . can quicken trees into life” and the accompany-ing perception that “they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. Andthe leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there onthe seat, fanned it up and down” (28). Though, in this context, Septimus’spsychosis provides the most obvious explanation for his exclusion from theprogressively more organized crowd, far from merely an hallucinatoryepisode, his attention to the car forges a connection with Clarissa and con-firms an alternate form of social connection that the text had already articu-lated in relation to her. Septimus’s perception of the trees, that is, takes upthe language of Clarissa’s consciousness, made available in a previous scenewherein she makes her way to the Bond Street florist’s shop and wonders:

Did it matter then . . . did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely;all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become con-soling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streetsof London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter sur-vived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees athome; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part



of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people sheknew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift themist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. (11)

Even as the identificatory machine whose regulatory ideals organize thecrowd begins its work, both Clarissa and Septimus share a sense of connect-edness—a connection that the text performs in the randomness of theiranonymous and unwitting confrontation on either side of the car—based inthe pervasive force of an impersonal vitality. Though this connection, asClarissa expresses it, shares the same conditions of possibility as the crowd,its form is different. Based, like the crowd, in the coincidence of geographi-cal convergence—“the ebb and flow of things, here, there [in the streets ofLondon]”—both of “people she had never met” and “the people she knewbest,” the connection she feels is clearly not that of the incorporative identi-fication of the group. Rather than assimilation into the interiority of a col-lective subject defined by the “group mind” its constitutive members share,Clarissa posits a collective form in which her sense of self and of connectionare constituted in a process of being shared out. Instead of the organizationalmodel of the group, the text turns to the figure of a “mist” whose particlesare concentrated and dispersed by the shifting flow of life on whose surfacethey reside and by which they are configured. This figure, thus, forces us tothink the self and the collectivity simultaneously, for Clarissa’s sense of self isthat of a collection of particles sufficiently concentrated to form a discreteentity (a mist) and yet sufficiently diffuse that it can be characterized neitheras homogeneous nor pure. Just as she feels that “she” survives as part of thosepeople (strangers, friends) and things (trees, houses) with whom she bothpurposefully and contingently has become entangled, those people andthings survive in her. We arrive, in short, at a notion of selfhood in which theself paradoxically exists largely outside of itself, surviving in the shared sub-stance of an intermingling network of connections produced by the unpre-dictable undulations, the “ebbs and flows,” of an impersonal “life.”

If this structure of collectivity—posited even as the text dramatizes theorganization of the crowd into a patriotic group—is initially realized only asan extradiegetic product of Woolf ’s narrative technique, it becomes theobject of thematic concern with the concussive appearance of the skywriter.I have already suggested that the sound of the plane distracts the group fromits rapt and near-homogeneous attention to the car as the object of its patri-otic common consciousness. As the text exclaims, “Everyone looked up”(25), and due to their new object of attention “the car went in at the gatesand nobody looked at it” (26). While, in McDougall’s terms, this shift in



focus does not dissolve the crowd, and merely substitutes one object of com-mon consciousness for another, it clearly disrupts the nascent group intowhich the initial crowd had become organized. The ideal of patriotic com-mitment that had provided the organizing principle of the group—encom-passing two of McDougall’s prerequisites for the existence of the group mindin suggesting both an “adequate idea of the group” and a “body of traditionsand customs and habits” (Group Mind, 69–70)—is replaced by a spectacularobject of common attention that is notably without any fixed or consistentideational content. Whereas the car had provoked a virtually homogeneousresponse, and signified almost exclusively within an extremely restrictedsemiotic domain, the skywriter provokes something of an orgy of speculativeresponse. Even more than the plane itself, the letters it produces are what fas-cinates the crowd. ‘Wherever it went,” the narrative reports, “out flutteredbehind it a thick ruffled bar of white smoke which curled and wreathed uponthe sky in letters. But what letters?” (25). In response to this universal ques-tion, the unfocalized narrative voice asks “A C was it? An E, then an L? . . .a K, and E, a Y perhaps?” (25). “Blaxo” (25), posits Mrs. Coates. “Kreemo”speculates Mrs. Bletchley, followed by the observation “That’s an E, . . . or adancer—” (26). And Mr. Bowley decides, “It’s toffee” (26). More expan-sively, the plane contributes to Mrs. Dempster’s thoughts of unfulfilledromantic aspirations, provoking her both to wager that “there’s a fine youngfeller aboard of it,” and to reflect that she had “always longed to see foreignparts” (5). And for Mr. Bentley, cutting turf at Greenwich, it becomes “anaspiration; a concentration; a symbol . . . of man’s soul; of his determination. . . to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought” (36).The convergence of these varied speculations is, however, persistentlythwarted by the plane’s performance. “Only for a moment did [the letters]lie still,” the narrative insists, “then they moved and melted and were rubbedout in the sky” (25); no sooner than the skywritten message is formed, “thesmoke faded and assembled itself round the broad white shapes of theclouds,” which “moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East on amission of the greatest importance which would never be revealed” (26).

Though the crowd constituted by the skywriter resists the process ofhomogenizing organization characteristic of its predecessor, Woolf is ambiva-lent about the effects of the spectacular promotional drama on its members.Mrs. Bletchley, for example, is said to murmur her interpretation of the let-ters “like a sleepwalker” (26), and Mrs. Coates is reported to respond to thescene “in a strained, awestricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby, lyingstiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up” (25–26). This somnambulis-tic, even infantile response—in her “awestricken” state, after all, Mrs. Coates



perfectly mimes the action of the baby she holds in her arms—is a form ofhabitual action and suggests that the members of the crowd have beenreduced to an automaton-like state. Subject as they are to an unprecedentedmarketing tactic, the members of the crowd are effectively constituted asalmost ideal consumers, at least within the terms of what Rachel Bowlbydescribes as the period’s emergent discourse of “consumer psychology” or the“psychology of selling” (Shopping, 96). As Bowlby argues, the psychologicalanalysis of consumer behavior is ultimately directed toward the moment ofthe sale, that moment in which the consumer chooses to buy. Ironicallythough, the “moment of choice, or the exercise of the will, is in fact a relin-quishing of the will; the whole task [of the salesperson] is to get the prospectto the point of capitulation, when there is no longer any question. Action isthen spontaneous, irresistible; the mind has become purely biological ormechanical (the automaton)” (108). In this light, the mass marketing tech-nique Woolf describes would seem to be an unqualified success, for even inthe absence of an identifiable brand name, let alone an actual commodity,the members of the crowd are reduced to the physiological state that, accord-ing to the theorists of consumer psychology, is the arduously and only inter-mittently achieved goal of the salesperson. In, thus, explicitly setting thescene of the crowd’s reincarnation as one of mass consumption, and indescribing the state of its members as akin to that of consumers at the pointof making a decision (“a point,” as Bowlby suggests, “at which both controlover actions and mental conflict—a tension between ideas—are eliminated”[109]), Woolf is clearly not uncritical of the collective form she invokes.

Describing the form of collectivity produced by the skywriter as she does,Woolf invokes popular notions both of the consumer as object of mass-market-ing techniques and of the crowd—notions, incidentally, that share many of thesame psychological premises. If the consumer is frequently seen as inordinatelysusceptible to the persuasive techniques of advertisers and salespeople—fromthe perspective of advertising psychology even the purportedly rational mind ofthe responsible consumer “is considered to be no less subject to influence orsolicitation: it simply has to be persuaded that its wants are not whimsical butsensible” (Shopping, 100)—the crowd is typically understood as excessively sug-gestible, driven by instinctual impulses, and prone to the contagious spread ofpowerful emotions. Despite this awareness of the limitations of both the crowdand the commodity culture of the mass market, it is precisely this conjunctionof the two, I want to suggest, that forms the basis of Woolf ’s attempt to con-ceive communitarian alternatives to the nationalism she critiques. More thanmerely functioning as a sort of shock effect that disrupts the formation of thenational group, the scene of the skywriter and its spectatorship constitutes a



terrain that Woolf explores as simultaneously exposing the limitations ofexisting communal norms, and harboring the resources necessary for theaffirmative articulation and production of alternative subjective modes andforms of social linkage.

The contours of this affirmative articulation once again become mostimmediately apparent in relation to Woolf ’s characterization of Septimus. Ifthe general response to the skywriter is irreducibly idiosyncratic, Septimus’sresponse famously represents the height of that idiosyncrasy. Participating inthe hermeneutic frenzy unleashed by the plane’s acrobatics, Septimus’s inter-pretive efforts are ultimately played out in cosmological terms.

So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed inactual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plainenough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he lookedat the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing uponhim, in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness, one shape afteranother of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him,for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears randown his cheeks. (MD, 27)

Despite Septimus’s belief that the as yet undecipherable language of theadvertisement bears a private personal message directed at himself, his initialresponse is not hermeneutic but aesthetic. Appealing less to his cognitive fac-ulties than his senses, the promotional drama is primarily a bearer of beauty,not meaning. Though I will need to return shortly to the question of com-munication—in relation to Septimus’s sense both that he is the object ofcommunication and that he has a duty to communicate with others—it issignificant that his primary response is directed less by the reception of infor-mation than sheer aesthetic pleasure. In this respect, Septimus’s behavior onceagain mirrors that of Clarissa, for in the earlier scene of consumption, stagedat Clarissa’s florist, she too is swept away in sheer aesthetic pleasure. Revelingfirst, “with her eyes half closed,” in the varied scents of the flowers, and thensoaking in the visual luxury of the myriad colors, she feels “as if this beauty,this scent, this colour . . . were a wave which she let flow over her” (16).

Beyond yet again forging a connection between Septimus and Clarissa,this aestheticized response to the commodity culture of the metropolis sug-gests a particular form of relation to the urban space they both inhabit.Indeed, this relation is one that Woolf explores in detail in her nonfictionprose. Representing another foray into London’s commodity culture in“Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” Woolf has her narrator, not unlikeClarissa Dalloway in this respect, embark on an excursion to the shops.6 As



its narrator’s ambulatory quest—ostensibly motivated by her desire to pur-chase a pencil—begins, the text reports:

We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house . . . we shed theself our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army ofanonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’sown room. For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually expressthe oddity of our own experience. . . . But when the door shuts on us, all thatvanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to housethemselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others is broken, andthere is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of percep-tiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at oncerevealed and obscured. . . . But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on thesurface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure.It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhapsas it looks. (CE, 4:155–56)

Venturing out into the streets, the narrator is literally transformed into “acentral oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye,” which glides “smoothlyon the surface” of the urban stream by which it finds itself supported.Indeed, the superficiality of the eye’s approach is something of an imperative.“Let us . . . be content still with the surfaces only,” the narrator implores, andthe surfaces to which she refers are precisely those provided by commodityculture: “the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendourof the butchers’ shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks; the blueand red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of theflorists’ windows” (157). A generalization of Clarissa’s experience in theflorist’s shop, the enormous eye into which the narrator of “Street Haunting”has been transformed is characterized by what Bowlby refers to as its “spon-taneous aestheticism” (Destinations, 211); in Woolf ’s words, it “rests only onbeauty” (CE, 4:157).

Crucially, this transformation of Woolf ’s narrator is effected through analteration of her sense of self. As Bowlby suggests, “The move outsideinvolves the removal of individuality for anonymity, and the shift from sta-bility—one fixed place—to mobility, a peaceable ‘army’ on the move”(Destinations, 210). More specifically, this shift remarks another stage inWoolf ’s ongoing negotiation with psychological discourse. The passage fromprivate to public space, and the corresponding transformation of self, withwhich “Street Haunting” commences is a passage from one mode of con-sciousness to another, the first defined as an interiorized space, while the sec-ond is understood as the exposed perceptual surface of the “oyster of



perceptiveness,” the “enormous eye.” More precisely still, this transition fromthe home to the streets represents a move away from habitualized conscious-ness. The self that is left at home is the habitual self, a self defined by a fixedenvironment and material possessions that express the determining force ofpast experience, an experience whose “oddity” (155) suggests degrees ofatomism, distinctness, and particularity that cannot be held in common. Ifthe enclosed space of the home produces and maintains this habitual form ofexperience, domestic interiority finds its somatic analogue in the image ofthe “shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves.”A trope that Woolf will redeploy in The Waves as a means of interrogating theneuroscientific body—much like Neville’s sense that he has “taken the printof life,” Bernard feels that a “shell forms upon the soft soul, nacreous, shiny,upon which sensations tap their beaks in vain. On me it formed earlier thanon most” (W, 213)—the “shell-like covering” of the soul bespeaks the indi-vidualizing force of physical organization. Habit produces an interior spaceof the self that, predicated as it is upon progressively rigid somatic organiza-tion, closes itself off to contact with that which is outside in any terms otherthan those of the routinized processes by which it is constituted. In contrast,the urban flow of the streets and contact with its crowds opens up this cara-pace of the self and transforms it into the exposed surface of the “enormouseye,” a figuration of consciousness that, once again, will be redeployed in TheWaves insofar as it anticipates the mode of consciousness at which Rhoda andBernard arrive following Percival’s death. Much like their sheerly affectiveexperiences in the music hall and the National Gallery respectively, the enor-mous eye sticks to the surface of things, registering the effects of the city’skinetic force without indulging in processes of perceptual ordering.Significantly, it is the effects of these surfaces that rearticulate the figure ofthe stream. Woolf ’s repeated figuration of urban flows and flows of commer-cial culture as a stream that carries observers and consumers alike, representsan important appropriation of the psychological language of the stream ofconsciousness whereby human consciousness is comprehended as fundamen-tally supported, shaped, and conditioned by the material surfaces of a per-cussive urban space. No longer the stream of consciousness per se, the streamof commodified surfaces that supports the enormous eye is coincident withits soporific effects upon the brain. The transformation of the narrator’s pri-vate self is effected, that is, by the impact of the superficial urban flow uponthe somatic apparatus of the habitualized self. Feeling herself floating“smoothly down a stream,” the narrator suggests that “resting, pausing, thebrain sleeps perhaps as it looks” (CE, 156). Tellingly referring not to themind or the soul, but the brain, Woolf suggests not that the stream of urban



life simply produces a state of unconsciousness, but that it provides respitefrom that form of habitualized consciousness determined by the organizationof the nervous system, and therefore that it opens the possibility of differentperceptual processes, different kinds of consciousness.

If “Street Haunting” suggests that the superficiality of the urban streamis at least partially a product of individual choice—that the “surface look-ing” Woolf ’s narrator advocates “does not imply that there is no depth, butthat its evasion is part of what defines the pleasure of all-eye looking”(Bowlby, Destinations, 211)—another of Woolf ’s essays, “Oxford StreetTide,” locates that superficiality more firmly in the constitution of the mas-sified sphere of commodity culture.7 Devoted to an aspect of “The LondonScene” with which Clarissa and Septimus (and the narrator of “StreetHaunting”) would be intimately familiar, “Oxford Street Tide,” as its titlesuggests, can be read as an extended gloss on Clarissa’s sense of being sub-merged in a wave of sensation produced by the commodity culture withwhich she interacts. Beginning rather bluntly, Woolf warns that “OxfordStreet, it goes without saying, is not London’s most distinguished thorough-fare” (“London Scene,” 113).

Moralists have been known to point the finger of scorn at those who buy there,and they have the support of the dandies. Fashion has secret crannies offHanover Square, round about Bond Street, to which it withdraws discreetly toperform its more sublime rites. In Oxford Street there are too many bargains,too many sales. . . . The buying and selling is too blatant and raucous. But asone saunters towards the sunset . . . the garishness and gaudiness of the greatrolling ribbon of Oxford Street has its fascination. It is like the pebbly bed ofa river whose stones are forever washed by a bright stream. (113)

Extending Clarissa’s rather localized wave of sensations to account for a muchlarger geographical space (similar, once again, to that traversed by the narra-tor of “Street Haunting”), the entire street becomes a conduit for the flow ofgaudy perceptual stimuli. If Oxford Street is definitively not the site of sub-limity, despite its brash commercialism and abundance of unrefined, glar-ingly artificial eye-candy, it clearly holds a certain “fascination.”

Indeed, part of the fascination, part of the beauty Woolf repeatedly attrib-utes to commodity culture, would seem to lie precisely in its blatant andsuperficial artificiality. Even the architecture of Oxford Street, thoroughlydetermined by the demands of consumption, has the air of a poorly executedstage set. It “cannot be denied,” Woolf writes, “that these Oxford Streetpalaces are rather flimsy abodes—perching-grounds rather than dwelling-places. One is conscious that one is walking on a strip of wood laid upon steel



girders, and that the outer wall, for all its florid stone ornamentation, is onlythick enough to withstand the force of the wind” (115). Lest this observationbe taken as a simple criticism or dismissal of the aesthetic and cultural debase-ment effected by the forces of the mass market, Woolf once again invokes thefigure of the moralist as a thematic embodiment of precisely such scornfuldisapprobation. “And again the moralists point the finger of scorn,” shereports, for “such thinness, such papery stone and powdery brick reflect, theysay, the levity, the ostentation, the haste and irresponsibility of our age” (115).In contradistinction to this snobbish traditionalism, Woolf suggests that

the charm of modern London is that it is not built to last; it is built to pass.Its glassiness, its transparency, its surging waves of coloured plaster give a dif-ferent pleasure and achieve a different end from that which was desired andattempted by the old builders and their patrons, the nobility of England. Theirpride required the illusion of permanence. Ours, on the contrary, seems todelight in proving that we can make stone and brick as transitory as our owndesires. We do not build for our descendants, who may live up in the cloudsor down in the earth, but for ourselves and our own needs. We knock downand rebuild as we expect to be knocked down and rebuilt. It is an impulse thatmakes for creation and fertility. Discovery is stimulated and invention on thealert. (115–16)

Framing once again the trappings of commodity culture as a source of aes-thetic pleasure, different though it may be from more traditional forms, inthis articulation Woolf ’s approach to the consumption-driven public sphereis not limited to aesthetic concerns. Or, more precisely, questions that are ini-tially cast in aesthetic terms quickly reveal themselves as indicative of a pro-found shift in social and cultural formations. The flimsy temporariness of thearchitecture of commodity culture serves, on Woolf ’s reading, to release avitality that has hitherto been imprisoned in the infrastructure of perma-nence and tradition. Here consumer culture is the engine of innovation.Despite its crassness, the mass market is fertile with possibilities for “discov-ery,” “invention,” and “creativity.” Not simply reflective of sociohistoricalchanges produced by the advancing forces of capitalism, the massified pub-lic sphere typified by Oxford Street—the stream of urban life that it com-poses—holds a potential for the creation of subjective and social forms thatare strictly limited neither by the residual structures of tradition nor theemergent terms of the market.

To the extent that the urban geography produced by the mass market isdefined by its changeability and impermanence, it finds its human corollary ina sort of nervous temperament that is both conditioned by, and contributory



to, the same cultural formation. Surveying the scene, Woolf admits that “tak-ing all of this into account—the auctions, the barrows, the cheapness, theglitter—it cannot be said that the character of Oxford Street is refined”(114). Rather,

It is a breeding ground, a forcing house of sensation. The pavement seems tosprout horrid tragedies; the divorces of actresses, the suicides of millionairesoccur here with frequency that is unknown in the more austere pavements ofthe residential districts. News changes quicker than in any other part ofLondon. The press of people passing seems to lick the ink off the placards andto consume more of them and to demand fresh supplies of later editions fasterthan elsewhere. The mind becomes a glutinous slab that takes impressions andOxford Street rolls off upon it a perpetual ribbon of changing sights, soundsand movement. Parcels slap and hit; motor omnibuses graze the kerb; the blareof a whole brass band in full tongue dwindles to a thin reed of sound. Buses,vans, cars, barrows stream past like the fragments of a picture puzzle; a whitearm rises; the puzzle runs thick, coagulates, stops; the white arm sinks, andaway it streams again, streaked, twisted, higgledy-piggledy, in perpetual raceand disorder. The puzzle never fits itself together, however long we look. (114)

Returning to the language of the nervous body, Woolf describes the humanparticipants in the Oxford Street tide in terms that are not dissimilar to thoseinaugurated in “Street Haunting.” Rather than the “central oyster of percep-tiveness” or the “enormous eye,” the form of consciousness proper to OxfordStreet is that of the “glutinous slab that takes impressions” from the “perpet-ual ribbon of changing sights, sounds and movement” to which it is exposed.Though this conception of the mind is quite close to the impressionable nerv-ous body of The Waves—the body defined by the “raw, the white, the unpro-tected fibre” of the nervous system upon which life imprints its determiningmark—it remains distinctly different. The “glutinous slab” of the mind is notgoverned by the somatic economy of habit. It is not the stage upon which thedrama of Mrs. Constable’s sponge is played out. The difference between thetwo forms of embodiment seems to lie less in physiology than in environ-ment. Like the enormous eye of “Street Haunting,” which comes into exis-tence only once the interior space of domesticity has been left behind, themind only “becomes” a glutinous slab through its exposure to the commer-cialized public space of the city. It, like the barrage of sensation and informa-tion that it both “consumes” and “demands” with unheard of frequency andin unprecedented quantity, would seem to be “unknown in the more austerepavements of the residential districts.” Precisely because of its sheer velocityand variability, the flow of urban life as it is conditioned by the mass market



is not simply a habitualizing force of somatic organization. Instead, it impactsupon the human nervous system with such rapidity and force that it resistsprocesses of organization pertinent to both the physical and social body.Fragmented and random in the extreme, the stream produced by the OxfordStreet tide persistently bursts any routinized banks that would channel itsflow. The culture of consumption, that is, produces a space of “perpetual raceand disorder” within which the “puzzle never fits itself together, however longwe look,” and it is precisely insofar as it eschews the integrative drive towarda closed totality in favor of a network of contingent and shifting connectionsthat it is able to function as a force of creative innovation.

Because Woolf seeks to explore the urban culture of mass consumption asa site of creativity and innovation, as productive of new forms of selfhoodand social linkage, we should not therefore assume that her exploration isunequivocal. The commodity culture she represents is no utopia, conceivedthrough an effete act of foreclosure upon the limitations imposed and costsexacted by the high capitalist mode of production by which it is driven. Noris she a liberal celebrant of the creative force of the market unbound. Theambivalence of her engagement with the commercialized space of the city ismanifest, for example, even in the fundamental figure of the mind as a gluti-nous slab. Hardly glamorous or naively celebratory, though Woolf ’smetaphor functions to open up certain possibilities, it simultaneouslybespeaks the extent to which the mass market reduces consumers to formlessapparatuses of extreme impressionability, scarcely able to resist its numbingbarrage. Similarly, even as she posits the innovative force of the Oxford Streettide, she takes a certain ironic distance when she comments on the vendorswho, driven by the supreme exigency of the sale, “boldly attempt an air oflavishness, opulence, in their effort to persuade the multitude that hereunending beauty, ever fresh, ever new, very cheap and within the reach ofeverybody, bubbles up every day of the week from an inexhaustible well”(116). Satirizing the language of the marketing pitch—a language whoseresiduum she cannot entirely avoid in attempting critically to articulate thecreative vital force of the metropolis—she insists that we must take the trou-ble to distinguish between the genuinely and unpredictably innovative con-sequences of this emergent sociocultural formation and the illusion ofnovelty that is the all too predictable product of the marketing machine.Woolf is acutely aware of the thoroughly determining effects of high capital-ism upon the space she describes. The thousands of “queer, incongruousvoices” (116) whose random convergence holds so much potential for thearticulation of new and contestatory forms of social linkage are, nonetheless,“all . . . tense, all . . . real, all . . . urged out of their speakers by the pressure



of making a living, finding a bed, somehow keeping afloat on the bounding,careless, remorseless tide of the street” (117). Unlike the moralist, for whomOxford Street presents a luxuriously spectacular object for his leisured con-demnation, the bulk of those who participate in Woolf ’s scene do so out ofnecessity. Indeed, the class differential that she, thus, remarks is one that isalready clearly legible in Mrs. Dalloway. We need only recall Doris Kilman’sexcursion to the Army and Navy Stores, accompanied by her privileged stu-dent, to be reminded of the situatedness of Woolf ’s sometimes aestheticizedcelebration of consumer culture’s creative possibility.

Perhaps the most forceful recognition of the social determinants and con-sequences of commercialized urban culture comes, however, in “StreetHaunting.” Confronted by that segment of the “vast republican army” thatshe refers to as “the maimed company of the halt and the blind,” Woolf ’s nar-rator is in the process of speculating (perhaps somewhat hopefully) that:“They do not grudge us . . . our prosperity; when suddenly, turning the cor-ner, we come upon a bearded Jew, wild, hunger-bitten, glaring out of his mis-ery; or pass the humped body of an old woman flung abandoned on the stepof a public building with a cloak over her like a hasty covering thrown overa dead horse or donkey” (159). “At such a sight,” the narrator comments,“the nerves of the spine seem to stand erect; a sudden flare is brandished inour eyes; a question is asked which is never answered” (159). There can beno doubt, in the light of this flare, that the cost at which the commodity-laden urban space is achieved must be reckoned in terms of incomprehensi-ble human suffering.

The equivocal character of Woolf ’s response to the life of the city isabsolutely crucial, for it suggests that her analysis is based simultaneously inthe recognition of the violently alienating and oppressive effects of the socio-economic system by which it is fundamentally shaped, and in the attempt todiscern and elaborate the ways in which that system itself produces contesta-tory alternatives. On the one hand, she analyses the forms of life, bothsomatic and social, that are constituted as the object of the institutional anddiscursive operations of medical science, operations largely oriented by thelogic of organization, consistent with organic forms of community, anddirected toward the efficient maintenance of the structures of imperialistnationalism. Her analysis in this respect attends, first, to the institutionalaspects of the medical scientific project whose procedures of moral regulationcorrespond to what Foucault has called disciplinary society; second, to thedistribution of those regulatory mechanisms through the very substance ofthe human body; and third, to the intense interaction and coordination ofthose bodies within the space of the city and the culture of consumption.



Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s reading of Foucault’s distinctionbetween disciplinary society and the society of control is instructive in thiscontext. “Disciplinary society,” they write,

is that society in which social command is constructed through a diffuse net-work of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits,and productive practices. . . . Disciplinary power rules in effect by structuringthe parameters and limits of thought and practice, sanctioning and prescribingnormal and/or deviant behaviours. . . . We should understand the society ofcontrol, in contrast as that society (which develops at the far edge of modernityand opens toward the postmodern) in which mechanisms of command becomeever more “democratic,” ever more immanent to the social field, distributedthroughout the brains and bodies of the citizens. The behaviours of social inte-gration and exclusion proper to rule are thus increasingly interiorized withinthe subjects themselves. Power is now exercised through machines that directlyorganize the brains . . . and bodies . . . toward a state of autonomous alienationfrom the sense of life and the desire for creativity. (Empire, 23)

The dynamics of Woolf ’s work to which I have been attending are, thus, sit-uated on this “far edge of modernity.” Her analysis straddles the shift fromdisciplinary mechanisms to their dispersion and immanence in the socialfield, and her examination of urban space and the social forms produced bythe expansion of consumer culture is clearly related to what Hardt and Negriidentify as the society of control. On the other hand, Woolf turns from theorganization of social life effected largely by the medical scientific grasp ofthe elementary biological substance of the body and toward those aspects ofurban life that produce new subjective and social figures which—notwith-standing the fact that they are marked by the violence of the socioculturalmatrix from which they have arisen, and that they remain susceptible toforces of organization—resist and contest the dominant norms. Just as herengagement of neuroscience makes available somatic figures that are irre-ducible to the regulative force of the organized nervous body, Woolf ’s inter-rogation of urban life remarks those spaces within which violent andoppressive communal forms constitute unforeseeable sites of communicationand cooperation not governed by dominant social values.

To return to Mrs. Dalloway by way of conclusion, these alternative sites ofsocial linkage are most visible in the contingent connections betweenstrangers produced by the chaotic and superficial flows of urban life, whatPeter describes, for example, as Clarissa’s “odd affinities . . . with people shehad never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter”(200). Indeed, in a text that is so obsessively concerned with the question of



connection, it is precisely this sort of random conjunction produced by thevagaries of urban existence that Woolf persistently places in contrast to moremotivated and traditionally valued forms of sociality, whether those of fam-ily, friendship, or established social networks. Exploring the marital connec-tion between Richard and Clarissa, for example, the text presents anextended scene that commences with Richard’s pained recognition of theirrelative estrangement. Prompted to attempt a rapprochement, he decidesupon a surprise visit after lunch and sets off across London, armed with abouquet of roses and a firm determination that he will “say to Clarissa in somany words that he loved her” (150). As he makes his way home, his ran-dom thoughts (ranging in topic from the dereliction of duties common toLondon policemen, to the “problem of the female vagrant” [152]) are repeat-edly punctuated by the reaffirmation that “he would tell Clarissa that heloved her, in so many words” (152). Arriving home just as Big Ben strikesthree o’clock—tellingly one of the only occasions upon which the clock’schimes are not glossed by the familiar refrain that “its leaden circles of sounddissolved in the air”—Richard predictably is able only to brandish his bou-quet sheepishly while the narrator parenthetically informs us: “(But he couldnot bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words)” (154). In theface of this pathetic and unmitigated failure to revivify a fundamental andsanctified social bond, Clarissa finds herself alone only a short while later asBig Ben strikes the half hour and, looking out the window to see an oldwoman in a neighboring house, thinks:

How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching to see an old lady (they hadbeen neighbours ever so many years) move away from the window, as if shewere attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had somethingto do with her. Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the finger fell,making the moment solemn. She was forced, so Clarissa imagined, by thatsound, to move, to go—but where? Clarissa tried to follow her as she turnedand disappeared, and could still just see her white cap moving at the back ofthe bedroom. She was still there, moving about at the other end of the room.Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that’s themiracle, that’s the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see goingfrom chest of drawers to dressing-table. She could still see her. And thesupreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might sayhe had solved, but Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had the ghost of anidea of solving, was simply this: here was one room; there another. (166–67)

Strikingly, this wordless, nearly anonymous, random encounter is exalted farbeyond Richard’s abortive declaration of love, and takes on an air of mystery



and miraculousness. It is, indeed, an emblematic encounter, encapsulating asit does the “supreme mystery”—the mystery perhaps of life, or of humanconnections—in the simple fact of geographical proximity; “here was oneroom; there another.”

It is precisely the value Clarissa attaches to the miracle and mystery of thissort of connection that motivates the party by which much of the plot isdriven and which ostensibly constitutes its climax. Theorizing the love of lifethat the novel opens by representing, the narrative enters Clarissa’s conscious-ness as she attempts to justify the parties in which she is so invested:

What she liked was simply life. ‘That’s what I do it for,’ she said, speakingaloud, to life. Since she was lying on the sofa, cloistered, exempt, the presenceof this thing which she felt to be so obvious became physically existent; withrobes of sound from the street, sunny, with hot breath, whispering, blowingout the blinds. But suppose Peter said to her, ‘Yes, yes, but your parties—what’s the sense of your parties?’ all she could say was (and nobody could beexpected to understand): They’re an offering; which sounded horribly vague. .. . But go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how super-ficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean toher, this thing called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in SouthKensington; someone up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair.And she felt quite consciously a sense of their existence; and she felt what awaste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be broughttogether; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create, but towhom? An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift.Nothing else had she of the slightest importance. (158–59)

The elusive “it” to which Clarissa addresses herself in the novel’s openingpassage—finally identifying “it” as “life”—here manifests itself as “this thingwhich she felt to be so obvious,” and that becomes “physically existent” asthe sounds of the street intrude upon her cloistered domestic space. Withthis intrusion, she finds herself reminded of the vital sense of connectednessshe had experienced that morning as she made her way to the florist’s shop,and, addressing herself to life itself, comes to understand the parties shethrows as a form of creative participation in the processes of life. Life is, forher, essentially a state of connectedness, and in her role as hostess she worksto bring individuals together, “to combine, to create.” Despite her insistencethat she is not motivated by a desire to “impos[e] herself . . . [or] to havefamous people about her” (158)—that her party is a gift in the strong senseof the word, existing outside of an economy of investment and return—thelinks Clarissa works so hard to produce do not participate in the vital, and



truly innovative, creation of social ties that the text closely associates with thepublic spaces of the city.

Clarissa’s desire to “combine, to create,” in short, is thwarted by the deter-mination of the social space she attempts to manipulate. Her communalefforts can never be truly creative precisely because the individuals she seeksto bring together are already defined in relation to each other. Their relationsare determined, for example, by their status as Richard’s professional col-leagues or superiors, or as members of the youthful scene at Bourton, thatalmost obsessive object of Clarissa’s nostalgic remembrance. These preexist-ing social bonds ultimately prove too much to overcome and constitute thecrux upon which Clarissa’s creative project fails. On the one hand, the numb-ing parade of dignitaries, major and minor, with whom she has “six or sevenwords . . . each,” reduces Clarissa to an unexpressive and nearly inanimate“post,” “a stake driven in at the top of her stairs” (223). On the other, her oldfriends from Bourton offer no more promise of meaningful connection.Peter Walsh, the youthful idealist, political radical, and erstwhile lover ofClarissa, cuts a poor figure in his middle age: a failure as both a minor colo-nial administrator and a philanderer, and unfortunately still attached to thetelling habit of nervously fingering his pocketknife in public places.Similarly, Sally Seton, the object of Clarissa’s youthful, homoerotic attach-ment, is unable to live up to Clarissa’s idealized remembrance of their rela-tionship as defined by a “purity” and “integrity” of feeling, unlike “one’sfeeling for a man,” in being “completely disinterested,” and enjoying a “qual-ity which could only exist between women, between women just grown up”(43–44). In contradiction of Clarissa’s nostalgic reconstruction, Sally makesher unexpected appearance at the party as Lady Rosseter, wife of a northernmanufacturer who has provided her with “myriads of servants,” “ten thou-sand a year” (246), and, as she announces in her sole communication withClarissa, “five enormous boys” (225).

If Woolf, thus, remarks the limitations of normative structures of collec-tivity in representing the failure of Clarissa’s party, the failure of her gift oflife, the failure is, nonetheless, not absolute. For even in the infamousmoment—wherein the Bradshaws dare to “talk of death at her party”(241)—that for Clarissa constitutes the nadir of her project, the text presentsone of its most forceful articulations of an alternate form of social linkage.The announcement of Septimus’s suicide at the party, of course, initiatesClarissa’s oft-commented upon, if still rather mysterious, process of identifi-cation with the young man she had never met. Her initial somatic identifi-cation and detailed visualization of his suicide—“Always her body wentthrough it, when she was told, first, suddenly, of an accident; her dress



flamed, her body burnt” (241)—is quickly followed by a moment of reflec-tion. Having retired from the party to a private room, Clarissa is led to think:

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced,obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. Thishe had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate,people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically,evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture fade; one was alone. There was anembrace in death. (241–42)

Returning once again to the consideration of the elusive “thing” that in hervocabulary consistently designates the ungraspable force of life, Clarissa’sreflection on Septimus’s death reaffirms her commitment to life as “that[which] mattered.” Cognizant of the social gathering she has momentarilyleft behind, she feels that whereas she has allowed that thing to be “defaced”by “corruption, lies, chatter,” Septimus had preserved it in his death. Becauselife is, for Clarissa, essentially defined as a state of connectedness, and becauseshe understands Septimus’s final act as “an attempt to communicate,” hisdeath paradoxically bears witness to his commitment to life, a commitmentClarissa shares. Her reception of this communication tends to cast it in themystified terms of a thwarted attempt at “reaching the centre,” and to processit by way of an almost fusional identification. The vaguely focalized passagerecounting Clarissa’s imagination of his death, after all, renders the violenceof the railing’s “rusty spikes,” “blundering [and] bruising” their way throughhis body, followed by the “thud, thud, thud, in his brain,” and the final “suf-focation of blackness” (241), an experience that she shares as part of her vis-ceral reaction to the news of his death.

Even at the height of this identificatory reverie, however, the text makesavailable another set of terms within which Clarissa, and the reader, canapproach Septimus’s final act of communication. As she pauses, goes to thewindow, and parts the curtains, Clarissa’s train of thought is interrupted asshe exclaims, “Oh, but how surprising!” (243). Once again at a crucialmoment, she finds herself confronted with the figure of the “old lady” in theadjacent house:

In the room opposite the old lady stared straight at her! She was going to bed.. . . It was fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing theroom, coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating with peo-ple still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch that old woman,quite quietly, going to bed alone. She pulled the blind now. The clock beganstriking. The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him; with the



clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she did not pity him, with all thisgoing on. There! the old lady had put out her light! (243–44)

Caught up, as she was first thing that morning, in the contingent networksof connection produced by the clock’s leaden circles of sound, Clarissa findsherself placed fleetingly in communication with the anonymous old lady.Even as this sudden and surprising link to a virtual stranger interrupts hersheer identification with Septimus, it provides a context that is more ade-quate to his communication. For if Clarissa is placed in communication withthe old lady, that communication is founded upon neither a preestablishedform of sociality nor some substance, information, meaning, or sense thatpasses between them. Clarissa, after all, cannot even be sure that the old ladysees her. The social tie dramatized by this scene, in short, shares much withwhat Nancy, quoting Giorgio Agamben, describes as a “politics of commu-nication” wherein “‘each communication is, above all, communication not ofsomething held in common but of a communicability’ . . . [and] consequently,sense is not what is communicated but that there is communication” (Sense,114). The scene of Clarissa’s second encounter with the old lady is once againexplicitly set apart from those in which normative collective forms dominate.Aware of the “laughing and shouting” in the adjoining room, a noise thatbears witness to the failure of her gift of life, Clarissa is able, nonetheless, toparticipate in the flow of urban life that had animated her preparations forthe party earlier that day. Ironically, if her party, her attempt to “combine, tocreate,” is itself a failure, Clarissa’s mundane preparations for the party cre-atively produce the conditions for a form of “combination” or social linkagethat is adequate to the “thing” both she and Septimus love so dearly.

Clarissa’s tenuous and senseless communication with the old lady isfounded upon neither the nostalgic reconstruction of past intimacies nor theties of family nor the broader social system encapsulated by the party, pro-foundly marked as it is by the politics of nation and empire—whether in theform of Lady Bruton’s concern for the “state of India” (236) and her relent-less promotion (even to the Prime Minister himself ) of her eugenic plan foremigration; Richard’s committee work on the situation in Armenia (orAlbania, Clarissa can never be sure); or Sir William Bradshaw’s various activ-ities as the guardian of proportion and the national good. Clarissa’s connec-tion to the old lady is not predicated upon categories of identity—wife,friend, lover, British citizen—but represents the placing in communication oftwo singularities, a very small section of the vast networks of social (k)notsmade visible by her earlier perambulations. This connection, moreover, pres-ents a means of approaching the social value produced in another social tie,



no less contingent and anonymous, that Woolf ’s text articulates betweenClarissa and Septimus. For even as she is surprised by the fascinating presenceof the old lady staring across the darkness between houses, Clarissa unwit-tingly realizes the conditions of Septimus’s final gift, his final communication.

Septimus is, of course, the novel’s primary communicator, desperatelyopposing his belief that “communication is health; communication is happi-ness” (122) to Bradshaw’s unwavering dictum that “health is proportion”(129), and pursuing a prophetic sense that he has been charged with the taskof giving voice to a crucial message. Yet, just as the skywriter produces itseffects despite the illegibility of its letters, the communication that Septimusfacilitates is not limited to his “message,” that largely garbled body of infor-mation he is finally unable to articulate within the normatively enforcedbounds of social significance. Failing to communicate his message of socialreform, Septimus nonetheless opens up a space of communicability in hisdeath. Preparing for his defenestration, he anticipates the normative recuper-ation of his impending act when he thinks of the “tiresome, the troublesome,and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing him-self out. It was their idea of tragedy; . . . Holmes and Bradshaw liked that sortof thing” (195). His suicide, however, will not be assimilated to the narrativeof tragedy, for he affirms that “he would wait till the very last moment. Hedid not want to die. Life was good” (195). Beyond indicating the reluctancewith which he performs his final act, this pause is crucial, for in the instantbefore his plunge Septimus looks across the street from his perch on the win-dow sill and sees that “coming down the staircase opposite an old manstopped and stared at him” (195). No sooner than this has happened, ofcourse, Holmes bursts into the room, and Septimus throws himself out ofwindow crying, “I’ll give it you!” (195). If this ambiguous final utterance canbe read as an act of defiance directed at the approaching Holmes, it is equally,and perhaps more productively, legible as addressed to the stranger, theanonymous old man who has unwittingly become a spectator to the grue-some scene, and the recipient of Septimus’s final gift.

The text has forged, from its opening pages, a strong connection betweenthe indefinite object of Septimus’s final sentence and the flows of life thatconstantly tie and untie a network of ever-changing links between singularindividuals. In this context, his utterance can be read quite literally as the giftof life that Clarissa also desires to give. Even in this moment of absoluteextremity, his singularity about to be reduced in its violent assimilation to avariety of socially normative narratives—the generic scripts of tragedy ormelodrama Septimus anticipates, the moralistic charge of cowardice thatHolmes levels even as his patient plunges to his death, the story of the “sad



case” (240) that Mrs. Bradshaw tells at the party, or the more thoroughlymedicalized language of a “case” of the “deferred effects of shell-shock” (240)that her husband favors—Septimus affirms the value of the most fleeting ofconnections with a complete stranger. In so doing, he communicates noth-ing else but the potential of communicability. What is more, both the futu-rity of his utterance and the indeterminacy of its addressee ensure that it isnot constrained to the locality of his final scene. Instead, his gift is cast for-ward into the future and produces an effect not unlike that of Big Ben’s dis-solving circles of sound. The nonspecificity of the you to whom Septimusgives his gift, suggests that his act of communication is not to be understoodas a particular transaction between two individuals but as articulating a vari-able space of communicability within which an indefinite number of singu-lar beings can find themselves (k)notted together. Septimus’s gift is a call tothe affirmation of the value produced in this form of social linkage. It is a callthat Clarissa receives as she responds to the news of a stranger’s death andthat she affirms in turn as she realizes a connection to another stranger, theold lady who unwittingly participates in, and conditions, Clarissa’s momentof communication with Septimus. It is, perhaps most importantly for Woolf,a call to which her texts repeatedly seek to respond and that she would havereverberate beyond their limits.



Appendix

Ferguson, John. Thyrea: A Sonnet Sequence from a Sanatorium. London: AndrewMelrose, 1912.

Sonnet No. I

The everlasting sameness of the days,The never-ending sadness of the nights,The weariness each rising hope that blights,The fevered restlessness that slowly slays—How heavy is my heart! O Thou Whose waysAre in the sounding deeps and starry heights,Illume my faith that in Thine Arm which smitesI may behold the Arm that will upraise.Calm and subdue this peevish spirit of mine,Bid me be noble for her sake, whose cry—“Christ on the Cross, I would not have him die!”Like everlasting incense rises to Thy Shrine.Dear God! Let me be noble for her sake,Lest, disappointed, her brave heart should break.

Sonnet No. II

“Let me be noble”—God forgive the prayer;Yet each man prays of this abandoned throng,And I prayed also; but I did you wrong,Peculiar brothers of my own despair.I would retract my words with scrupulous care,And to the Altar bring a gift of song;The pleas for pity unto you belong,The lengthening miles of Sorrow’s road who fare.


A little longer in this dolesome place,Companioned by this death-o’er-shadowed crew,Only a little longer, it is true,Not mine the wasted frame, the hopeless case?The pleas for pity, brothers, are for you—And yet I pled for pity, God of grace.

Sonnet No. III

He caught a chill in Leicester, he came here;—He came here with his little store of gold,To this grim dwelling, bare, and clean, and cold.Where his life joins hands with death, and hope with fear:He told us how in Leicester’s city drear,On coughing, down his garments rolledThe warm crimson flood; and oft he toldHow softly he would tread from year to year.His wife came for him, and he left to-dayBecause his little store of gold was done;My God! I knew not gold and life were oneTill he shook hands with us and went away:His limbs all fever-thinned, and hope all gone—O Christ in Heaven, how he longed to stay!

Sonnet No. IV

There was a shuffling of strange feet last nightAlong the naked corridor of stone;Dull creakings, and much talk in undertoneIn the next room to mine; Death’s chill and blightLay on my brother, who tho’ screened from sight,Was by his ominous cough endeared and known;And I all wakeful in my chamber lone,Quailed in the dreadful dark, and longed for light.O God! that some should stumble by the way—They do not like us to die here, we know,They talk about the credit of the place—The Doctor, when he sounded me today,Said never a word about last night; and loHer customed smile lights up the Nurse’s face.

208 • Appendix


L’Envoi: To the Lord God

O Thou to Whom our glorious fanes we rear,Unto Whose praise pontifical psalms are sung,And prayers of perfume rise from censors swung,And in Whose Presence angels tremble and fear:—I, strangely daring, crave Thy compassionate ear,Thy pity on these hearts by suffering wrung,So old in Sorrow, they, and yet so young,My hopeless brothers lying prostrate here.Not unto me, O Lord, but unto themThy tender mercy and compassion show,Their destined road of dole and death who fare—Whose tremulous hands are stretched forth to the air,If haply they may touch Thy garment’s hemAnd from Thy Being virtue still may flow.

Appendix • 209


Notes

Introduction

1. I pursue this line of argument vis-à-vis North’s text in more detail in Chapter 4.2. Dean acknowledges that the alterity or opacity he attributes to aesthetic arti-

facts is not their exclusive purview, and suggests that: “otherness is a propertyof discourse, and the enigmas of otherness are exacerbated by art. We mighteven say that art’s purpose lies in intensifying those aspects of alterity that oth-erwise remain dormant in everyday discourse and conventional intersubjectivecommunication. From this perspective, the disruption of normative communi-cation would signal a proximity to aesthetic experience, and art would bedefined less as the secluded reserve of high culture than as the practice or expe-rience of disruption through which something like the enigmatic signifierbecomes palpable” (38).

Indeed he goes so far as to suggest that “we call ‘aesthetic’ those experiencesin which meaning is disrupted by an encounter with alterity” (38). I sympathizewith the general thrust of his argument in this respect but am unsure that eventhis more generalized sense of aesthetic experience does not unnecessarily riskreplicating one form of the problem that Dean seeks to criticize. If one consid-ers that historicist hermeneutics—one prominent form of the symptomaticreduction he criticizes—frequently rely on the opposition between aesthetic arti-facts and other forms of discourse, implicitly or explicitly treating the latter asthe relatively transparent basis on which to demystify the ideological operationsof the former, it is perhaps more productive to avoid reinscribing the opposition,even in an attenuated form.

Chapter 1

1. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious was originally published in 1921, andFantasia of the Unconscious was originally published in 1922. All references tothese two works are from D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconsciousand Fantasia of the Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).


2. As David Ellis suggests in a footnote to his chapter entitled “Poetry and Sciencein the Psychology Books” in D. H. Lawrence’s Non-Fiction: “No one has yet beenable to name any one book or article by Freud which it is even reasonably cer-tain Lawrence read. His opportunities for hearing about Freud came not onlyfrom Barbara Low, Jones and the Eders but also from Frieda. Before meetingLawrence, Frieda had had a long affair with Otto Gross, an important if eccen-tric figure in the early days of the psychoanalytic movement” (182, n. 28).

3. If one wished to specify more concretely the source of Lawrence’s understand-ing of psychoanalysis, one might turn to the popularizing work of someone likeBarbara Low (with which Lawrence was clearly familiar). The first major sectionof her Psychoanalysis: A Brief Account of Freudian Theory (published in 1920 witha prominent introduction by “Ernest Jones, M.D., M.R.C.P., President of theBritish Psycho-Analytical Society”) is entitled “Psycho-Analysis a Science” (19)and seeks to situate “Freud’s discoveries in comparison with some of the greatscientific discoveries of the past” (19). While Low’s account does suggest, inplaces, that the scientificity of psychoanalysis consists in the “systematicmethod” (20) employed by Freud, this approach to Freud’s claims for psycho-analysis-as-Wissenschaft are heavily overshadowed by a fairly crass notion ofempirical science. Aligning Freud’s work with the “great epoch-making discov-eries of the past, for instance, Newton’s theory of Gravitation, or the Darwiniantheory” (18), Low insists that “Psycho-Analysis belongs to the realm of Science,not to that of Philosophy, Metaphysics or Ethics,” and contends that “we arebound to accept Freud’s own definition of his own work, namely that hisapproach is scientific, that he has worked along scientific lines, and has tested allhis conclusions by scientific methods” (19). The “special characteristic of Freud’sviewpoint and method of investigation” is, for Low, the fact that “it is estab-lished on an Empirical Scientific basis” (19–20).

4. For an extensive account of the relationship between psychoanalysis and science,see Frank J. Sulloway’s Freud, Biologist of the Mind. For a text which interestinglylocates the question of the scientificity of psychoanalysis in relation to debateswithin the philosophy of science, see Isabelle Stengers’s “Black Boxes; or, IsPsychoanalysis a Science?”

5. Lawrence’s approach to the ultimate object of his inquiry is marked by a highdegree of terminological inexactitude. In referring to the mode of consciousnesswith which he confronts the “vicious” Freudian unconscious (itself, as we shall see,merely a disguised form of “mental consciousness”), Lawrence variably uses thefollowing terms: the “passional soul,” the “affective soul,” the “true unconscious,”the “pristine unconscious,” the “living unconscious,” “primal consciousness,”“dynamic consciousness,” “spontaneous consciousness,” or the “biological psyche.”In what follows, my redeployment of these terms aims only for contextual consis-tency or stylistic variation and does not seek to suggest conceptual distinctions.

6. See Katherine Ott’s Fevered Lives, pp. 11–20, or Sander Gilman’s Franz Kafka:The Jewish Patient, pp. 196–217, for extended discussions of this diagnosticphenomenon.

212 • Notes


7. Katherine Ott provides a concise account of this diagnostic vagueness.“Physicians,” she writes, “used the term ‘consumption’ to identify several varietiesof wasting disease that involved weight loss, fever, and lung lesions, indicated bycoughing and expectoration. The relational pattern defined as a consumptioncould be further broken down into catarrh, empyema, phthisis, tubercle, and soon, depending upon the exact symptoms and signs. In a sense, there were nearlyas many consumptions as there were patients. Practitioners used the term ‘tuber-culosis’ to refer to a condition in which elastic lung fibers, called tubercles, werecoughed up. What people called tuberculosis throughout most of the nineteenthcentury was not the bacterial condition that came to be called by that name later.As one physician explained, pulmonary tuberculosis was ‘a great constitutionalmalady, which plays its most prominent part in the lungs’” (9).

8. Paramount among the bacteriological advances relevant in this context wasRobert Koch’s isolation, in 1882, of the tubercle bacillus as the cause of the dis-ease. Despite the widespread celebration of Koch’s discovery as the imminentbeginning of the end for tuberculosis, advances in medical science that illumi-nated (under the microscope) the hitherto invisible face of the enemy had onlylimited effects on the mortality rates, popular perceptions, and clinical practicesrelated to tuberculosis. Writing in 1922, David C. Muthu (a physician and sana-torium superintendent) laments that “more than a generation has passed awaysince Koch made his epoch-making discovery. The measures taken against thecontagion of tuberculosis have not produced such a reduction in its morbidityas his followers had expected” (Pulmonary Tuberculosis [1922], 8). In a similarvein, R. C. Wingfield feels the need (in his 1924 medical textbook on tubercu-losis) to make a “confession of failure—a confession that as yet we do not knowof any specific cure for tuberculosis” (41). Commenting on the disjunctionbetween bioscientific advances and popular perceptions, Charles Rosenburgargues that “though the causative organism [of tuberculosis] was discovered in1882 (a discovery widely and instantly publicized in both lay and medical cir-cles), tuberculosis continued for some time to be seen [in accordance with pre-bacteriological models] as an essentially constitutional disease” (163). (See alsopp. 170–71 of Gilman for a similar argument.)

9. Other important historical accounts of tuberculosis include: Linda Bryder’sBelow Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-CenturyBritain; Barbara Bates’ Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis,1876–1938; Georgina Feldberg’s Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shapingof Modern North American Society; Roy Porter’s “The Case of Consumption,”and “Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society?”; Sheila Rothman’sLiving in the Shadow of Death; Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz’s collection FromConsumption to Tuberculosis: A Documentary History; and F. B. Smith’s TheRetreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950.

10. As a point of information, tuberculosis is now understood as an infectious diseasecaused by the mycobacterium tuberculosis. The primary vector of transmission ofthe bacterium is the inhalation of aerosolized particles of sputum produced by the

Notes • 213


coughing of infectious individuals. Contrary to earlier models of transmission,which were predicated on the belief that the hard, waxy coating of the bacillusallowed it to survive for long periods outside of living bodies (and thereforefocused, for instance, on dust containing particles of desiccated tubercular spu-tum as an important vector of transmission), it is now known that the bacteriumcan survive only brief exposure to the environment, and therefore that it is com-municable primarily in the context of direct interpersonal contact. If, since themass production of antibiotics around midcentury, tuberculosis has been per-ceived in the West as a disease of the past, it has remained a major force in thedeveloping world. Moreover, as recent media attention to the rise of drug-resist-ant “superbugs” indicates, tuberculosis has recently begun to make a comeback inthe West, with the appearance of strains of the bacterium that are resistant to oneor more of the antibacterial drugs used to treat the disease. It has also resurfacedas a common opportunistic infection in those who are immunocompromised.

11. Sander Gilman traces the following variation on the commonplace to JuliusCohnheim: “After all, everyone has a bit of tuberculosis” (200).

12. See Patricia Jalland’s Death in the Victorian Family for an extended discussion ofthis phenomenon.

13. See Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, particularly the section (pp.306–20) of chapter XI (“Scientific Medicine in the Nineteenth Century”) thatsets Laennec’s 1816 invention of the stethoscope within a larger trajectory.

14. The standard layout of the sanatorium in Britain consisted of four long two-story wings, forming an X in their intersection at a central administrative build-ing. Each wing was typically composed of a series of small wards separated bynursing stations, with the more serious cases located in closest proximity to thecentral block. Needless to say, female and male patients were not housed in thesame wings. An additional feature of some sanatoria (especially those that werenot operated on a strictly charitable basis) was a number of small wards locatednear the center of the complex, designed to house what Alexander Foulerton andLangton Cole call, in their A Model Sanatorium for the Treatment of PulmonaryTuberculosis, those patients of “the more necessitous classes” (4). Foulerton andCole are very clear that the main difference in accommodation for the differentclasses of patient lies in the assumption that the “better classes,” being morehighly educated, will be less in need of coercion to accept their treatment.Though the narrow, squat, extended, wings of the sanatorium ostensibly func-tion to maximize exposure of the wards to the open-air, this design feature hasthe added benefit of ensconcing individual patients in a state of relative isolationfrom the patient population at large and of rendering impossible unsurveilledmovement around the complex.

15. See Ott, pp. 32–34, for a useful account of this asthenic model of disease andits vitalist analogues. “Consumptions,” she writes, “made good asthenic sense.According to asthenic doctrine, the human body could stand only so muchexcitement before breaking down. A person with a tubercular diathesis (that is,already in jeopardy) who had over-stimulating habits and emotions could not

214 • Notes


hope to avoid the disease. An organism strained beyond its capacity inevitablysuccumbed. Since over-stimulation lowered one’s vitality, the logical treatmentwas sthenic, or excitative. Physicians did not drain or deplete bodily fluids butsought to stimulate vitality and to invigorate the humors” (32).

16. Zizek’s illustration of this process centers on the example of the Marlboro Man,an image which seemingly derives its ideological function from the qualities towhich it refers. The Marlboro Man, Zizek admits, “‘connotes’ . . . a certainimage of America (the land of hard, honest people, of limitless horizons . . .)”(96). Yet, he insists that the ideological quilting performed by “the MarlboroMan” does not simply depend on this reference to a series of qualities and sug-gests that “it does not occur until ‘real’ Americans start to identify themselves(in their ideological self-experience) with the image created by the Marlboroadvertisement—until America itself is experienced as ‘Marlboro country’” (96).

17. See, in particular, “Corpus” and “Exscription” in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Birth toPresence.

18. Linda Bryder points to the historical development of this drive to occlude man-ifestations of death in her discussion of the tuberculosis dispensary when shecomments on the architectural exigency of providing a means of inconspicu-ously disposing of the bodies of recently deceased patients, a necessity all themore pressing with the increase in surgical intervention (see p. 176).

19. In designating this form of bodily going-on as “bare life,” I have in mindGiorgio Agamben’s use of the term in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life(1998). Agamben articulates his notion of “bare life” by drawing on the classi-cal Greek designation of zoe as “express[ing] the simple fact of living commonto all living beings,” and as distinct from “bios, which indicated the form or wayof living proper to an individual or a group” (1). For Agamben, “the entry of zoeinto the sphere of the polis—the politicization of bare life as such—constitutesthe decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the polit-ical-philosophical categories of classical thought” (4).

20. Katherine Ott succinctly captures the pervasive symbolic power of spit: “Therevulsion of spitting that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-turies was partly fear of illness and partly anxiety over the anarchy it symbolized”(118–19). Ott’s fifth chapter, “Goods for the Medical Marketplace and InvalidTrade,” provides a compelling argument regarding the regulation of this poten-tial anarchy symbolized by promiscuous expectoration through the commodifi-cation of the disease. The mass production of a wide variety of spittoons,disposable sputum envelopes, spit cups, and spit flasks (much like that sportedby Vere), ranging from the merely functional to the ornately decorated, provideda means of disciplining the much-dreaded promiscuous expectorator.

21. Writing in The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy describes organic com-munity as follows: “Distinct from society (which is a simple association anddivision of forces and needs) and as opposed to emprise (which dissolves com-munity by submitting its peoples to its arms and to its glory), community isnot only intimate communication between its members, but also its organic

Notes • 215


communion with its own essence. It is constituted not only by a fair distributionof tasks and goods, or by a happy equilibrium of forces and authorities: it is madeup principally of the sharing, diffusion, or impregnation of an identity by a plu-rality wherein each member identifies himself only through the supplementarymediation of his identification with the living body of the community” (9).

22. See David Armstrong’s Political Anatomy of the Body for an extendedFoucauldian analysis of the disciplinary procedures of the dispensary system (theinstitutional structure that historically succeeded the sanatorium but thatarguably represents a fuller realization of the latter’s logic).

23. Linda Bryder’s Below the Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis inTwentieth-Century Britain, makes a compelling and extended argument for thecentrality of the logic of efficiency—particularly that of national efficiency—tothe constitution of the antituberculosis movement.

Chapter 2

1. Bruce Clarke’s work in Dora Marsden and Early Modernism (1996) and EnergyForms (2001) is a notable exception in this respect.

2. Though Carpenter is perhaps best known for his The Intermediate Sex, he makesan important contribution to turn-of-the-century vitalist thought, and his workanticipates important aspects of Bergson’s project. Carpenter is especially signif-icant in this context, as his work strongly influences Lawrence’s vitalism andprovides a precursor for the latter’s turn to the “Great Sympathetic” nerve sys-tem as an embodiment of the vital principle. The standard account of the rela-tionship between Carpenter and Lawrence is Emile Delevenay’s D. H. Lawrenceand Edward Carpenter: A Study in Edwardian Transition. For an analysis ofCarpenter’s relationship to vitalist tendencies in British modernism morebroadly (and in Lawrence in particular), see Bruce Clarke’s Dora Marsden andEarly Modernism (especially pp. 26–46, 146–171).

3. This is, as we shall see, the position to which Lawrence turns rather moreunequivocally in The Plumed Serpent.

4. Christopher Heywood argues in “‘Blood-Consciousness’ and the Pioneers of theReflex and Ganglionic Systems,” that Lawrence’s “physiological thinking” (104)is heavily indebted both to Bichat’s ganglionic theory of the nervous system andthe work on the reflex arc (a competing theory) pioneered by the British physi-ologist Marshall Hall.

5. One aspect of this drive to national efficiency is developed in connection withLawrence’s postwar perception that contemporary civilization was undergoing aperiod of destruction and dissolution such as those that were the undoing ofancient Greek, Roman, and Persian civilizations. “But this time,” he writes, “wehave consciously and responsibly to carry ourselves through the winter period,the period of death and denudation: that is, some of us have, some nation evenmust” (189). It is at least partially in service of this desire to ensure a nation

216 • Notes


capable of surviving and protecting contemporary civilization that Lawrenceturns to dynamic consciousness and the forms of social regulation it entails.

6. While my analysis here focuses on Lawrence’s interactions with bioscience, state-ments such as this, which understand the body’s vital flows in terms of electric-ity (or his reliance elsewhere on the language of vibration), suggest the extent towhich bioscientific discourse is not easily separable from physical science. BruceClarke productively explores (in both Dora Marsden and Early Modernism andEnergy Forms) the relationship between the period’s biological and physical sci-ences. His discussion, in Energy Forms, of the ways in which Lawrence’s vitalismis informed by theories of the ether is exemplary in this respect.

7. This is at least the case for male homoeroticism, insofar as the desire for a pas-sionate male-male connection gets played out in the context of a spiritual com-mingling in communitarian purpose. The possibility of female-femaleconnection, on the other hand, remains unaccommodated by Lawrence’sschema, and indeed the development of dynamic consciousness in womenseems to end with the sexual phase of the dialectic—an observation regardingLawrence’s project that dates back at least to Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis offemale immanence and male transcendence in The Second Sex.

8. With respect to Lawrence’s anti-Semitism, it is notable that in the psychologicalessays the two exemplars of science are Freud and Einstein. Both psychoanalysisand the Theory of Relativity are ultimately understood as products of the“Jewish mind” or the “Jewish intellect,” which, writes Lawrence, “for centurieshas been picking holes in our ideal system—scientific and sociological” (190).While this is a “very good thing for us,” the “Jewish mind” to which both Freudand Einstein are assimilated ultimately tends toward “anarchical conclusions”and “nihilism” through which “we” must find a way (190).

9. See Barbara Mensch’s D. H. Lawrence and the Authoritarian Personality for anextended analysis of the leadership novels; though her reading of particular nov-els is limited in its attempt to conduct a sort of litmus test wherein a psycholog-ical profile of the “authoritarian personality” is applied to various of Lawrence’sfictional characters, the opening chapters present a thorough historical survey ofcritical responses to Lawrence’s politics. See also Chapters 2 and 3 of LeeHorsley’s Fictions of Power in English Literature: 1900–1950, for extended read-ings of the politics of the leadership novels. Chapter 3, in particular, attends tothe relationship between sexuality and politics in The Plumed Serpent. For amore general account of Lawrence’s politics and their reception, see RickRylance’s “Lawrence’s Politics” in Rethinking Lawrence.

10. For example, the novel’s Mexican characters (and particularly those of nativeMexican descent) are consistently represented as having strong spines. Kateobserves at one point that “no men in the world can carry heavier loads on theirbacks, for longer distances, than these Indians. She had seen an Indian trottingdown a street with a piano on his back: holding it, also, by a band round hisforehead. From his forehead, and on his spine he carried it” (152). This physio-logical mode of characterization is consistent with the corporeal schema of

Notes • 217


Fantasia insofar as the novel understands the “dark races” as dominated by thenegating force of “will,” the volitional mode of the unconscious associated withthe ganglia located along the spinal column.

11. Sander Gilman explores the intersection of racial categories and disease states(especially that associated with tuberculosis) in Franz Kafka, the Jewish Patient.In examining the importance of physiological types, Gilman gives the exampleof research by Francis Galton—one of the key figures in the British eugenicsmovement—into the racial type of the Jew. Focussing on what he called “Jewishphysiognomy,” Galton produced composite photographs capturing the “typicalfeatures of the modern Jewish face” (Gilman, 66). Galton took an extensiveseries of photographs of Jewish schoolboys in London, in order to superimposethe individual images and produce composites that purported to present theessential features of the Jewish face. Having established the norms of Jewishphysiology, this theory of types sought to establish the set of moral and psycho-logical correlates that necessarily accompany the specified morphology.

12. See Gilman, pp. 206–17, for an illuminating account of the habitus phthisicus.13. Lawrence provides a corollary to this formulation of impersonality when he

writes of “democracy”: “No personalities in our Democracy. No ideals either.When still more personalities come round hawking their pretty ideals, we mustbe ready to upset their apple-cart. I say, a man’s self is a law unto itself: not untohimself, mind you. Itself. When a man talks about himself he is talking about hisidea of himself in his brain. When a man is conscious of himself he is trading inhis own personality” (RDP, 77).

14. My analysis of the problematic of infancy, and in what follows my reading ofLawrence’s vitalism based on that problematic, is indebted to Gilles Deleuze’sreading of Bergson’s vitalism in Bergsonism and the two Cinema books. An exem-plary and systematic exploration of this aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy is pro-vided by Alain Badiou in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being; also helpful in thisrespect is Michael Hardt’s Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy.Particularly important to my argument in what follows is Deleuze’s distinctionbetween the virtual and the actual, and more specifically his notion of univocalBeing as an instance of “virtuality” that undergoes a process of self-differentia-tion in its multiple and fluctuating actualization.

15. Badiou comments on this problematic as follows: “In each form of Being, thereare to be found ‘individuating differences’ that may well be named beings. Butthese differences, these beings, never have the fixedness or the power of distri-bution and classification that may be attributed, for example, to species or gen-eralities, or even individuals, if we understand by ‘individual’ something thatcan be thought under a species, a generality, or a type. For Deleuze, beings arelocal degrees of intensity or inflections of power that are in constant movementand entirely singular” (25).

16. We might see here a parallel to Bergson’s distinction between intelligence andintuition, wherein the former proceeds from a spatial view of reality andaddresses itself to matter as a complex of static entities, while the latter is that

218 • Notes


faculty that proceeds from a properly temporal view of reality, and because of itsimmersion in the constant change of real duration participates in the vital, cre-ative flux of the universe.

17. Jean-Luc Nancy makes a similar point in his analysis of organic (or “immanen-tism”) community when he writes: “A community presupposed as having to beone of human beings presupposes that it effects, or that it must effect, as suchand integrally, its own essence, which is itself the accomplishment of the essenceof humanness. . . . Consequently, economic ties, technological operations, andpolitical fusion (into a body or under a leader) represent or rather present,expose, and realize this essence necessarily in themselves. Essence is set to workin them: through them, it becomes its own work. This is what we have called‘totalitarianism,’ but it might be better named ‘immanentism,’ as long as we donot restrict the term to designating certain types of societies or regimes butrather see in it the general horizon of our time, encompassing both democraciesand their fragile juridical parapets” (The Inoperative Community, 3).

Chapter 3

1. Shell shock, or war neurosis, was itself a heavily contested category, whose con-tours were highly variable due to a number of related factors. The status of suf-ferers depended, for instance, on the attitude toward the war held by theclinicians who treated them, with the military establishment tending to view thecondition as a thin veil for what should more properly be understood as themalingering evasion of cowards unprepared to do their duty in the war. Wherethe disorder was not dismissed out of hand, the diagnostic categories applied tothe condition also depended significantly upon the social class of the sufferer.Officers suffering from shell shock were typically seen to display the symptomsof a general nervous exhaustion similar to that of the neurasthenic, while privatesoldiers were much more regularly assimilated to the discourse of hysteria inso-far as they were more likely to present classically hysterical symptoms such aslocalized paralysis.

2. Bonnie Kime Scott, for example, reinvokes this well-worn critical tendency inRefiguring Modernism (vol. 1), where she situates Woolf in “a tradition of psy-chological realism identified by May Sinclair’s criticism,” and argues that prin-cipal among Woolf ’s literary commitments was the “probing of the depths . . .of the mind” (236). “Woolf is well known,” she asserts, “for the stream of con-sciousness of To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and A Room of One’s Own” (237).

3. Even a text like Alex Zwerdling’s Virginia Woolf and the Real World—whichclaims to focus on Woolf ’s “complex sense of how historical forces and societalinstitutions influence the behavior of the people she describes” (3) and to mapWoolf ’s interest in “the forces of ‘the real world’” (6)—participates in this criti-cal tendency. Citing her call to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind,” herelies on the rather unreal, or at least heavily decontextualized, notion of the

Notes • 219


stream of consciousness in his gloss. “Thought is more important than speech inWoolf ’s fiction, unsorted impressions more important than systematic thinking”(10), he claims, and goes on to argue that: “The most complete embodiment ofthis vision is Woolf ’s novel The Waves. It is a book almost entirely written in solil-oquies recording the thoughts and impressions of its six major characters. . . .What matters is the interior monologue of the isolated character” (10). As Iargue in what follows, Woolf ’s engagement with the material of the human nerv-ous system, most notably in The Waves, moves a good distance beyond merelymimetically recording the thoughts and impressions of its characters.

4. Judith Ryan’s The Vanishing Subject presents an important exploration of therelationship between what she refers to as “early psychology” and literary mod-ernism. Her analysis is, however, oriented primarily by an interest in the rela-tionship between psychological accounts of sensori-perceptual mechanisms andvarious impressionist and postimpressionist aesthetics.

5. James explicitly invokes Heraclitus in arguing for the constantly changingnature of thought. However “we might in ordinary conversation speak of get-ting the same sensation again,” he writes, “we never in strict theoretic accuracycould do so; and [we should have to confess] that whatever was true of the riverof life, of the river of elementary feeling, it would certainly be true to say, likeHeraclitus, that we never descend twice into the same stream” (233).

6. See Chapter 9 of Michael Tratner’s Modernism and Mass Politics for a genealogyof this critical trend.

7. Other important considerations of community in Woolf ’s writing (and of TheWaves in particular) include Jane Marcus’s “Britannia Rules The Waves,” andGillian Beer’s “The Body of the People in Virginia Woolf.”

8. My somewhat anachronistic use of “neuroscience” to describe the discursivefield I seek to examine is intended to encompass a group of disciplines in rela-tion to which psychology understands itself at the turn of the century. The textsthat I approach as examples of “neuroscience” could more properly be describedas psychological but represent a form of psychology that develops out of latenineteenth-century experimental psychology and therefore draws heavily uponneurological and neurophysiological research. As such the psychological cate-gories they mobilize are heavily implicated in the positivist presuppositions andprocedures of a scientific approach to the human body.

9. It is important to note that (as was the case with Lawrence’s recourse to bio-science in characterizing the vital flows traversing the body), one cannot neatlyseparate biological science from the physical sciences. Woolf ’s metaphor herepoints to the extent that the bioscientific discourse of nervous physiology isentangled with contemporaneous developments in the physical sciences.Characterizing the flows of nervous energy as “bright arrows” clearly draws usinto the realm of optics, and, of course, the science of wave forms—and moreprecisely the analysis of light simultaneously in terms of particles and waves—isone of the text’s principal tropological sources, from the title on.

10. Emphasis original.

220 • Notes


11. James’s understanding of this process is in no way exceptional. Maudsley, forexample, deploys a similar framework when he declares that “we are daily wit-nesses of, and our daily actions testify to, the operation of that plastic law ofnervous organization by which separate and successive acquisitions are com-bined and so intimately blended as to constitute apparently a single and unde-composable faculty: we observe it in the formation of our volitions; and weobserve it, in a more simple and less disputable form, in the way in which com-binations of movements that have been slowly formed by practice are executedfinally as easily as if they were a single and simple movement” (55).

Chapter 4

1. For fairly programmatic articulations of this problematic see: Henri Bergson,Creative Evolution or Matter and Memory, or Edward Carpenter, The Art ofCreation: Essays on the Self and Its Powers. Of particular interest in this context isCarpenter’s articulation of this tension in his understanding of the relationshipbetween individual selves and what he calls the universal Self of the vital uni-verse. In Carpenter’s view humanity resides predominantly in a state of con-sciousness (closely associated with the operations of the intellect and a scientifictemperament) that emphasizes identity and distinction, and thereby rendersinaccessible the realization of a vast vital connectedness that underlies such dis-tinctions. In a passage whose similarity to Neville’s figuration of the nerves as aweb that subtends and unifies all of existence makes it difficult not to read it asWoolf ’s source, Carpenter imagines the overcoming of this intellectual state ofconsciousness as follows: “This body, in fact, is the expression and grows out ofthose great creative feelings of which I have just spoken. Through Love itbecomes a body built into the lives of others, and positively sharing their organiclife and vitality. Since Faith and Courage inspire it, it is well based, firm to standthe shocks of Time and Accident; extending its domain over the elements; incor-porating in itself the sea and the wild creatures, and so unafraid of them; sur-rounding Chance and taking it captive. Its consciousness of immense Extensionin time and space indicates its ethereal character; its consciousness of Powerindicates its strongly material composition; its consciousness of Knowledge, thepenetrating subtle quality of it. And so we forebode, beside and within the verylocal body which we know best (and which is expressive of our more localselves), another body expressive of our more universal nature—a body built ofswift, far-extending ethereal elements, subtle and penetrating, yet powerfullymassive and material; closely knit in itself, not easily disturbed or dislocated,enduring for æons; yet sensitive in the highest degree, and twining its nerves andfibres through all Creation—sharing the life of all creatures” (232–33).

2. Writing of an alternate model of community in “Finite History,” Nancy suggeststhat “Community is the community of others, which does not mean that severalindividuals possess some common nature in spite of their differences, but rather

Notes • 221


that they partake only of their otherness. Otherness, at each moment, is the oth-erness of each ‘myself,’ which is ‘myself ’ only as an other. Otherness is not acommon substance, but it is on the contrary the nonsubstantiality of each ‘self ’and of its relationship with the others. All the selves are related through theirotherness, which means that they are not ‘related’; in any case, not in any deter-minable sense of relationship. They are together, but togetherness is otherness”(Birth to Presence, 155).

3. Glossing this definition, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe writes that: “In immanen-tism [organic community] it is the community itself, the people or the nation,that is the work (oeuvre) following the conception acknowledged byRomanticism of the work as subject and the subject as work: the ‘living artwork’indeed, though this in no way prevents it from working lethally” (Heidegger, Artand Politics, 70).

4. This presentation of the vocalist’s “cry” shares much with Jean-FrançoisLyotard’s understanding of avant-garde aesthetics in The Inhuman. He claims,for example, that “the aim for the arts, especially of painting and music, can onlybe that of approaching matter [the latter defined as ‘the failure of thought, itsinert mass, stupidity’ (38)]. Which means approaching presence withoutrecourse to the means of presentation. We can manage to determine a color ora sound in terms of vibrations, by specifying pitch, duration and frequency. Buttimbre and nuance (and both terms apply to the quality of colours as well as tosonorities) are precisely what escape this sort of determination” (139). He goeson to describe timbre and nuance in terms of “a singular, incomparable qual-ity—unforgettable and immediately forgotten—of the grain of a skin or a pieceof wood, the fragrance of an aroma, the savour of a secretion or a piece of flesh.. . . All these terms are interchangeable. They all designate the event of a pas-sion, a passibility for which the mind will not have been prepared, which willhave unsettled it, and of which it conserves only the feeling—anguish and jubi-lation—of an obscure debt” (141).

5. Drawing on Althusser’s elaboration of ideological state apparatuses, for example,Tratner argues that “Percival represents a central part of the ideological systemof England at the turn of the century” (226); The Waves thematizes, he suggests,“the alteration of ideology resulting from schools replacing churches: instead ofan image of God, an image of the schoolboy such as Percival becomes theunique and central subject, the most important thing taught in school” (226).

6. My reading of “Street Haunting” in what follows is indebted to Rachel Bowlby’scomprehensive reading of the text in an essay entitled “Walking, Women andWriting” (Destinations, 191–219).

7. “Oxford Street Tide” is one of a series of six articles, collectively entitled “TheLondon Scene,” Woolf published in Good Housekeeping in 1931 and 1932.

222 • Notes


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Wicke, Jennifer. 1996. “Coterie Consumption: Bloomsbury, Keynes, andModernism as Marketing.” In Marketing Modernisms: Self Promotion,Canonization, and Rereading, edited by Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt,109–32. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Wilkinson, W. Carnac. 1926. The Principles of Immunity in Tuberculosis. London:Nisbet.

Wingfield, R. C. 1924. Modern Methods in the Diagnosis and Treatment of PulmonaryTuberculosis. London: Constable.

Woolf, Virginia. 1967a. Collected Essays. 4 vols. Edited by Leonard Woolf. London:Hogarth.

———. 1967b. “Modern Fiction.” In Collected Essays, vol. 2, edited by LeonardWoolf, 103–10. London: Hogarth.

———. 1967c. “On Being Ill.” In Collected Essays, vol. 4., edited by Leonard Woolf,193–203. London: Hogarth.

———. 1967d. “Street Haunting: A London Adventure.” In Collected Essays, vol. 4,edited by Leonard Woolf, 155–66. London: Hogarth.

———. 1978. A Writer’s Diary. Edited by Leonard Woolf. London: Grafton.———. 1992a. Mrs. Dalloway. Oxford: Oxford University Press.———. 1992b. The Waves. Oxford: Oxford University Press.———. 1993a. The Crowded Dance of Modern Life: Selected Essays: Volume Two.

Edited by Rachel Bowlby. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.———. 1993b. “The London Scene.” In The Crowded Dance of Modern Life: Selected

Essays: Volume Two, edited by Rachel Bowlby, 107–32. Harmondsworth,England: Penguin.

———. 1993c. Three Guineas. In Three Guineas and A Room of One’s Own, edited byMichèlle Barrett, 117–325. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.

Wutz, Michael. 1995. “The Thermodynamics of Gender: Lawrence, Science andSexism.” Mosaic 28, no.2:83–108.

Zizek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.Zwerdling, Alex. 1986. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of

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Works Cited • 229


Index

Please note that a page number appearing in italics indicates an endnote.

affective body, 153, 165–67, 168–75,176

Agamben, Giorgio, 215Althusser, Louis, 222Armstrong, David, 216Armstrong, Tim, 3

bacteriology: Lawrence and, 33–37;medicine and, 38–39, 46, 48–49,63; Muthu and, 66–67, 74–75; psychoanalysis and, 33–34; tuberculosis and, 36–39, 48–49

Badiou, Alain, 113, 120, 218bare life, 57–61, 73–74, 81, 97–98Beard, George M., 131Beer, Gillian, 153Bell, Michael, 136; “Metaphysics of

Modernism, The,” 136Bergson, Henri: Being and, 114–15;

Carpenter and, 115, 216; Deleuzeand, 218; élan vital and, 114; onintelligence vs. intuition, 218–19; thevirtual and, 113; vitalism and, 85,167, 218; Woolf and, 137, 163, 167

Berman, Jessica, 9, 10–11; ModernistFiction, Cosmopolitanism, and thePolitics of Community, 9

Bowlby, Rachel, 190, 192, 194Breuer, Joseph, 7Bryder, Linda, 59, 63, 215, 216Burrows, Trigant, 2, 24; Social Basis of

Consciousness, The, 24

Butler, Judith, 14–16; Bodies thatMatter, 14

Canguilhem, Georges, 82Carpenter, Edward; Art of Creation,

The, 114; Being and, 114–15;Bergson and, 216; Civilization: ItsCause and Cure, 85; intellect and,221; Lawrence and, 87, 91; on civi-lization, 85; on disease, 86; the vir-tual and, 113; vitalism and, 85–87,91, 102, 216; Woolf and, 163, 167

Carpenter, William, 157, 158; MentalPhysiology, 157

Charcot, Jean-Martin, 131Clarke, Bruce, 82, 83; Dora Marsden

and Early Modernism, 82Cohnheim, Julius, 214Cole, Langton, 214commodity culture, 186–206; in

“Oxford Street Tide,” 194–96; in“Street Haunting,” 198–99; nation-alism and, 190–91; urban societyand, 191–98

communal subjectivity, 91–106community: consciousness and, 32;

crowds and, 176–78; habitualizedbody and, 162; identity and, 61,122–23; in Mrs. Dalloway, 145,149–50, 160, 186–87; in ThePlumed Serpent, 104–6, 107; in TheWaves, 152–53, 158–59, 164–67;


individuality and, 167; infancy and,120; Lawrence’s psychological writ-ings and, 24–26, 28; medicine and,61, 73; nationalism and, 102, 161,175; organic, 73–74, 81, 97, 101,167–75; organization and, 158; per-sonality and, 79; tuberculosis and,35–38, 62; urban life and, 198

Cowan, James, 27Crary, Jonathan, 2, 3, 5crowds, 175–78, 182–89; community

and, 176–78; McDougall on, 184,188–89; Mrs. Dalloway and, 183, 187

Dean, Tim: embodiment and, 16; onaesthetics, 13–14, 211; on culturalstudies, 15

Deleuze, Gilles, 115, 124, 218democracy: collectivity and, 120,

121–23; individualism and, 120–22;Lawrence’s view of, 101, 120–23, 218

dynamic consciousness: fields of, 94;human development and, 94–96,116; in The Plumed Serpent, 103–4,108; infancy and, 116, 117; mentalconsciousness and, 101; monadicmodes, 115; nerve centers forming,90, 93; “objective” plane of, 90–91;poles, 94; ramifications of, 92; real-ity and, 116; schema of, 88–89, 119;sexuality and, 97–100; unconsciousand, 109–11, 118; vitality and, 91,93, 96, 102. See also unconscious

Eaton, F.E., 59–60; White Demon andHow to Fight Him, The, 59

Einstein, Albert, 23, 25, 64élan vital, 114Eliot, T. S., 107Ellis, David, 26–27, 212embodiment: affective, 2, 17, 20; com-

munity and, 2, 5, 8, 12–13, 14, 19;dynamic consciousness and, 95, 104;hemorrhage and, 53–54; humanembodiment, 107; incorporation and,

2, 5; infants and, 113, 116–17; lead-ers and, 105–6; mechanistic modelof, 95; mortality and, 52–53, 55, 57;Muthu and, 72, 78; social body and,16; tuberculosis and, 37–38, 50, 52,56–58, 109; the unconscious and, 85,93, 94, 115; vitality and, 85, 89–90;Woolf on, 1–2, 3

Fantasia of the Unconscious (Lawrence),2, 17, 18; community and, 24,101–2; consciousness and, 88, 97;critique of idealism and, 33–34, 84;sexuality and, 99; theory of relativityand, 23; vitalism and, 87

Ferguson, John, 18; mortality and, 51,52–53; sanatoriums and, 39, 41,43, 48, 62; Thyrea, 39, 47, 50;tubercular body and, 47, 52, 57,73; tuberculosis and, 39, 42, 67;vitality and, 51

Foucault, Michel, 14–15Foulerton, Alexander, 214Freud, Sigmund: collectivism and, 152;

Ellis and, 212; Enlightenmentrationalism and, 137; “Instincts andtheir Vicissitudes,” 29; Lawrenceand, 25, 27, 28–29; Low and, 212;natural science and, 156; positivistscience and, 29, 31; Project for aScientific Psychology, 29, 156; psy-choanalysis and, 29–30, 130–32; theunconscious and, 31–32; Woolf and,136, 137, 154

Galton, Francis, 218Gide, André, 53–54; L’Immoraliste, 53Gil, José, 39Gilman, Sander, 38, 39, 214, 218

habit: disciplinary society and, 199;group psychology and, 182, 189–90;individuality and, 155; infants and,116; James on, 139, 156–58; nerv-ous system and, 157–58; neuroscien-tific discourse and, 160, 168;

232 • Index


plasticity and, 156; somatic organi-zation and, 161, 175, 193–94,196–97; The Waves and, 158–60,162–65; unconscious and, 117–19

habitus phthisicus, 34, 109Hadfield, J. A., 148–49, 158, 176;

Psychology and Morals, 148Hardt, Michael, 114, 116, 124, 199,

218Hayles, Katherine, 26, 27Head, Henry, 134Henke, Suzette, 135Henry, Holly, 9–10, 11; Virginia Woolf

and the Discourse of Science, 9Heywood, Christopher, 216homoerotics, 99, 217hygiene: Eaton on, 59–60; Ferguson

on, 40–41; health and, 86; Lathamon, 41–42; sanatorialism and,68–71; social reform and, 37,47–48, 68–73; Stewart on, 44;tubercular body and, 48–49

hysteria, 58, 129–32. See also neuras-thenia

idealism, 30–34incorporation: community and, 81; cor-

poreal economics and, 96; dynamicconsciousness and, 98–100, 117;individuality and, 123–24; tubercu-lar body and, 53–54, 81; uncon-scious and, 113; vital force and, 92

individualism: community and, 24,167; democracy and, 120–22; habitand, 155; incorporation and,123–24; Mrs. Dalloway and,152–53; Tratner on, 167–68, 170;“Street Haunting” and, 194; tuber-culosis and, 59–61; unconsciousand, 84–87, 100–1, 117–18; Waves,The and, 160, 162, 167

intersubjectivity, 24–25, 27–28, 92, 98,116, 119

James, William: Heraclitus and, 220; onconsciousness, 138; on habit,

157–58; on nervous system, 156–57;on plasticity of nerve tissue, 156,221; physical science and, 156;stream of thought and, 139–40;Woolf and, 137, 139

Joyce, James, 136, 137, 138

Koch, Robert, 37, 38–39, 63, 213Kwinter, Sanford, 2, 3, 5

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 222Laski, Harold, 153Latham, Arthur, 41Latour, Bruno, 9, 83–84Lawrence, D. H., 1–4, 8–9, 12, 17–19;

Aaron’s Rod, 2, 24, 101; Carpenterand, 87, 91; community and,24–26, 28; “Democracy,” 120;democracy and, 101, 120–23, 218;dynamic consciousness and, 103–4,108–11, 118; “Education of thePeople,” 111, 124; Freud and, 25,27, 28–29; Kangaroo, 2, 24, 101;mental consciousness and, 82,91–97, 102–3, 112, 116–20; Muthuand, 96, 102, 107; positivist scienceand, 26, 27; Psychoanalysis and theUnconscious, 24–25, 33, 34, 84, 112;Rainbow, The, 26, 27, 99;“Reflections on the Death of aPorcupine,” 2, 18, 24; Studies inClassic American Literature, 2; Studyof Thomas Hardy, 2; tuberculosisand, 33–35; the unconscious and,94–96, 111–13; vitalism and, 24,31–32; Women in Love, 2; writingson infancy: embodiment and, 113,116–17; habit and, 116; identityand, 90, 94–95, 98; unconsciousand, 94, 111–13, 115–20. See alsoFantasia of the Unconscious;infancy; Plumed Serpent, The

Le Bon, Gustave, 180, 182; LaPsychologie des Foules, 180

Lee, Hermione, 134Logan, Peter, 130

Index • 233


Low, Barbara, 212Lutz, Tom, 130Lyotard, Jean-François, 16, 222

Maddox, Brenda, 35Mann, Thomas: Magic Mountain, The,

45–46, 51, 54–57; mortality and,51, 54, 55–56; sanatoriums and, 62;thermometry and, 45, 61; tubercularbody and, 55–56, 57, 73

Marcus, Jane, 167–68, 170, 171, 175Maudsley, Henry, 155, 158; Body and

Mind, 155McDougall, William: crowd formation

and, 184, 188–89; Group Mind,The, 180–82, 188–89; group psy-chology and, 180–84; Introduction toSocial Psychology, 180–81; on “darkplaces” of psychology, 138; on socialsciences, 180–81; “reciprocal influ-ence” and, 184; Tratner and, 152;Woolf and, 184

mechanicity, 72–73Mensch, Barbara, 217Meyers, Jeffrey, 35“Modern Fiction” (Woolf ): James and,

138; life and, 179; Mrs. Dallowayand, 150; neuropsychology and,140, 141, 153, 159; psychology and,134–35

modernism, literary: bioscience and, 4,129; collectivism and, 152; con-sumer culture and, 186; Freud and,136; Henry on, 10–11; “ModernFiction” and, 135; North on, 11–12;psychology and, 130, 134; TheWaves and, 151; tuberculosis and, 9;unconscious and, 25

Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf ): class and, 198;collectivity and, 20, 152–53, 167,172, 177–78; community in, 145,149–50, 160, 186–87; consumerculture and, 191–92; crowds and,183, 187; embodiment and, 3;human body vs. social body in, 161;individualization and, 152–53;“Modern Fiction” and, 150; moral

regulation of community in,159–60; nervous body and, 144–45,150, 161, 164; neuroscience and,150; North and, 185; organic com-munity and, 177–78; psychology in,19, 142, 175; urban life and, 199

Multitude, 124–25Muthu, D.C., 63–79; bacteriology and,

66–67; Carpenter and, 85–87;hygiene and, 71; Lawrence and, 96,102, 107; nature and, 69; PulmonaryTuberculosis and SanatoriumTreatment, 63; resistance and,76–77; sanitoriums and, 77–79;Science and Religion, 64; sociosym-bolic order of tuberculosis and,67–68, 70; tubercular discourse,63–64, 65–66; vitalism and, 64–65,66, 68–69, 73–75, 91, 92

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 11, 16, 51, 61, 72; citi-zens and, 170; community and, 175,204, 219, 221–22; myth and,171–72; organic community and,168, 171, 215–16; otherness and, 222

national efficiency, 61, 63, 74, 96–97nationalism: community and, 102, 105,

145–46, 150–51, 161–62, 175;crowds and, 186–87, 190–91; socialmedicine and, 96; The PlumedSerpent and, 102–3; Woolf and,167–71, 175, 180, 184–85, 198

Negri, Antonio, 199nervous body: Mrs. Dalloway and,

142–47, 150, 161–62, 199; psychol-ogy and, 129–33, 139, 162; “StreetHaunting” and, 196; The Waves and,151–52, 161–62, 167

neurasthenia: hysteria and, 131–32;medical history of, 129–32; Mrs.Dalloway and, 143, 145–47; ThePlumed Serpent and, 108; Woolf and,134. See also hysteria

neuroscience/neuropsychology: commu-nity and, 176–77; embodiment and,174; Freud and, 29, 131; hysteriaand, 131; nationalism and, 167–68;

234 • Index


nervous body and, 161–62, 199;physical science and, 156; socialbody and, 153, 158; The Waves and,161–64, 167, 193; Woolf and,129–32, 140–41, 150–56, 159–60

New Modernisms, 9, 11, 13North, Michael, 6, 11–12, 133,

185–86; Reading 1922, 11

open-air cure, 42, 62, 67, 68, 69, 76,78, 81, 85

organic community, 167–75, 177–78; inThe Plumed Serpent, 106–8;Lawrence and, 81–82, 97–98, 100–2,119–20; Nancy and, 168, 171,215–16; nationalism and, 102, 105,123; nervous body and, 166; socialmedicine and, 61, 65, 72–74; vitalityand, 105–6. See also organic dissolu-tion; organic totality; organicity

organic dissolution, 55–56organic totality, 72–73, 123–24organicity: consciousness and, 97–100,

108, 119–20; embodiment and, 24,42, 72, 92, 96, 106–8, 111;Lawrence and, 23–24, 93, 116, 119;medicine and, 131, 147–48,155–57; Muthu and, 65, 73–74, 78;tuberculosis and, 42, 55–56. See alsoorganic community; organic dissolu-tion; organic totality

Ott, Katherine, 38, 39, 46, 63; on con-sumption, 213, 214–15; on sym-bolic power of spit, 215

Pasteur, Louis, 37Plumed Serpent, The (Lawrence): com-

munity in, 2, 18, 24, 106; embodi-ment in, 106–7; politicalcommentary in, 101–2, 123

Porter, Roy, 6, 36, 131–32positivist science: Freud as embodiment

of, 29–31; Lawrence on, 26, 27;Muthu and, 66, 70, 78; tuberculosisand, 37, 45–46, 47

psychoanalysis: consciousness and, 137;cultural significance of, 133, 137;

Ellis and, 27; hysteria and, 130–32;Lawrence and, 25–37; nervousbody and, 130; Woolf and, 129. See also Freud, Sigmund; hysteria;neurasthenia

psychology: moral, 161, 175, 181–82,194–95, 198; of the crowd, 175–78,180–89; social, 180–81

public health, 33–34, 37, 58, 68, 71.See also social medicine; tuberculosis

Ransome, Arthur, 36; Campaign AgainstConsumption, 36

rest cure, 47, 85, 134, 143, 145, 146Rosenburg, Charles, 213Ryan, Judith, 220

Sadoff, Dianne, 132Sanatorium: A Novel (Stewart):

Ferguson and, 43; tubercular bodyin, 47, 50, 57–58; tuberculosis in,39, 42–43

sanatorium treatment, 62–72, 146;Latham on, 41–42; Mann on,45–47; Muthu on, 77–79; open-aircure, 78, 85; rest cure, 85. See alsosocial medicine; tuberculosis

Schneider, G. H., 139–40scientific ideology, 82scientific reductionism: democracy and,

120–22; Freud and, 28–32;Lawrence and, 92, 95–96; vitalismand, 83, 84, 92

Scott, Bonnie Kime, 219sexuality: dynamic consciousness and,

93, 95–100; nerves and, 89; pubertyand, 110; unconscious and, 98–99;vitalism and, 97

sheer materiality, 50, 53–54shell shock, 130, 219social medicine: bacteriology and,

38–39, 46, 48–49, 63; communityand, 61, 65, 72–74; Lawrence and,34, 36–37; nationalism and, 96;organicity and, 131, 147–48,155–57; vitalism and, 70. See alsopublic health; tuberculosis

Index • 235


sputum, 49, 58–62, 213–14Stewart, Donald, 18; expectoration and,

60; hemorrhage and, 52–54; mortal-ity and, 51; sanatoriums and, 48, 62,67; thermometry and, 61; tubercularbody and, 39, 42–43, 47, 57, 73;tuberculosis and, 67. See alsoSanatorium: A Novel

stream of consciousness, 135–40“Street Haunting: A London

Adventure” (Woolf ): commodityculture and, 191–92, 198; individu-ality in, 194; nervous body in, 196;urban space in, 178, 192

Tawney, R. H., 153Templeton, Wayne, 35Tratner, Michael: Althusser and, 222;

on individualism, 167–68, 170; onThe Waves, 152–53, 222

Trotter, Thomas, 130; View on theNervous Temperament, A, 130

Trotter, Wilfred, 180; Instincts of theHerd in Peace and War, 180

tubercular body: Ferguson and, 47, 52,57, 73; Mann and, 55–56, 57, 73;Stewart and, 39, 42–43, 47, 57, 73

tuberculosis: the body and, 37–43; cul-tural space and, 38–39; currentunderstanding of, 213–14; Fergusonand, 41–42, 48, 52; Gide and, 53;identity and, 61–62; impact on soci-ety, 35–37; Lawrence’s battle againstidealism and, 33–35; Lawrence’sbiographical writings and, 35; litera-ture and, 39–40; Mann and, 55–59;Muthu and, 63–68, 70, 73–74, 75,77; NAPT and, 59; sanatoriumsand, 62–68; sociosymbolic and, 50;Stewart and, 42–47. See also socialmedicine

unconscious: the body and, 108; bodymorphology and, 110; in ThePlumed Serpent, 103; individualityand, 100–1, 117–18; infants and,112–13, 115; Lawrence and, 94–96,

111–13; mental consciousness and,93; physiological basis of, 98; sexual-ity and, 99; vitalism and cellularbasis of, 84–91; vitality and, 108–9

vitalism: and cellular basis of theLawrencian unconscious, 84–91;Ferguson and, 51, 57; Lawrence and,24, 31–32; medicine and, 70;Muthu and, 64–65, 67, 69–70,73–74, 78; nature and, 69; sanatori-ums and, 63, 69, 78; science and,64–65; tubercular body and, 67, 74

Waves, The (Woolf ): Big Ben in, 179;collectivity and, 152–53, 162; com-munity and, 170–71, 174, 175,177–78; consciousness and, 151,193; embodiment and, 162; individ-ualization and, 160, 162, 167; nerv-ous body and, 161, 167, 196;neuropsychology and, 158, 159

Wilkinson, Carnac, 70–71; Principles ofImmunity in Tuberculosis, 70

Wingfield, R. C., 213Women’s Cooperative Guild, 3Woolf, Leonard, 153, 167Woolf, Virginia, 1, 3, 4, 8-10, 12, 19-

20; Bergson and, 137, 163, 167;Between the Acts, 3; Carpenter and,163, 167; Freud and, 136, 137, 154;James and, 137, 139; “LondonScene, The” 178, 194; McDougalland, 184; Orlando, 3; “Oxford StreetTide,” 194–98; Room of One’s Own,A, 3; Three Guineas, 3, 134–35, 175.See also "Modern Fiction"; Mrs.Dalloway; "Street Haunting: ALondon Adventure"; Waves, The

Wutz, Michael, 26–27

Zizek, Slavoj, 48–49, 215; SublimeObject of Ideology, The, 48

Zwerdling, Alex, 219–20

236 • Index


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