THE IDIOM OF THE TIME: THE WRITINGS OF HENRY GREEN Roderick Mengham Presented in fulfilment of the DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY University of Edinburgh 1980 w m 1ýb  Z) Abstract of Thesis This study enlarges on the peculiarities of texture in Green's writing, demonstrating how and where conventional ideas of narrative method are superseded by the irregular condition of other constraints, as often-as not stemming from "conditions of knowledge". This means that all of Green's books are related, in chronological succession, to the intellectual and social history. of the time. Use is.. made of manuscripts and typescripts to clarify his working methods. Blindness is seen as a compromise, on one level between the disclosure and concealment of desire, and on another level between conflicting ideas of the novel. Living is shown to be organized around a number of unco-ordinated polarities (of class, gender, and age) which .derive from D. H. Lawrence's in a work sense categorizations like Psychoanalysis *and the Unconscious. Green has confirmed the impact of Lawrence upon his early work, and it is in this context that Living can be seen as the eloquent expression of relatively crude determinants. With Party Going, the writing makes common cause with psychoanalysis; is controlled by the fascination with a threshold of meaning, and is in a critical relation with the image-repertoire of the Thirties (eg. the 'frontier', the 'border'). With the autobiography, Pack RX Bag, the reproduction of details of a .: career gives way to an obsessional structure. The chapter on Caught deals with changes in writing, reading, and publishing practices during a period when Green was consciously trying to perfect an "idiom of the time". Green's ambition that his writing should in some sense be a reading of other writings, bringing in question the motives behind them, is most palpable in Loving, which employs a technique of engrossing fragments of other literary works and forms; among the most striking examples are certain of Shakespeare's plays, the tradition of the Country. House Ideal, and elements of the Fairy Tale. The analysis of Back covers problems of interpretation which connect the issue of demobilization with certain dissociations of language. Concluding is seen as advocating a simultaneity of levels of organization, rather-than a hierarchy of levels of organization, in our knowledge of the world. The final chapter argues that Green's developed method of recycling the material-of_a text rigidifies; in Nothing and Doting; and a number of his prescriptive writings about the form of the novel are compared with the narrowing of scope in the novels themselves..  C, ii Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis is my own work, that it -has been composed by myself, and that no portion of the work referred to in this thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification. a-  IaZ iii Table of Contents Declaration ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements iv Introduction I Blindness, Livin : The Living Idiom 6 II Party Goin :A Border-line Case 51 III Pack mv Bag: The Poetics of Menace 86 IV Caught: The Idiom of the Time 108 "V Lo ving: - A Fabulous Apparatus 172 VI Back: The ProstheticArt 247 VII Concluding: The Sea-Change 2 85 VIII Nothing, Dotin : Something Living Which Isn't 323 'Bibliography 337 .7,. 6  IV Acknowledgements I would like to express my thanks. to a number of people who have helped towards the writing of this thesis.. I was extremely fortunate in having Dr.. Valerie Shaw. as a postgraduate supervisor; her wise attention to my work has proved invaluable, and I owe her a great deal. I am also indebted to Professor W. W. Robson, who guided me through the early stages. I am grateful to the Librarians and staff of the following libraries for their assistance: Edinburgh University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Cambridge University Library, and Birmingham Reference Library. Thanks are due to Elizabeth Yates, for typing the manuscript at such short notice. My work was sustained by the interest of many friends, among whom I should particularly mention Geoffrey Ward--a devotee of Green--who gave me a number of useful ideas to play with.. My parents were unstintingly generous in their support. . And I do not-know where to begin in thanking my wife, Dr. Catherine Neale, both for the quality, and for the quantity, of her encouragement, inspiration, and practical help.  I 0 INTRODUCTION The public at whom [the artist] aims is not given; it is a public to be elicited by his work. The others of whom-he thinks are-not empirical "others" or even humanity conceived as a species; it is others once they have become such that he can live with them. - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 86. i  2 "Henry Green" was the riom de plume of the industrialist Henry Yorke: an industrialist who, according to his own son, wrote during the lunch-hour; he was an obsessive man who preferred not to be photographed, except from behind. With or without this minimum of information, one tends to come from a first reading of any of Green's works with the feeling that something has been withheld, that the writing is an elaborately organized ruse, that to a greater extent than is perhaps normal, it simply does not mean what it says. The approach taken by this study is that one should distrust such a feeling of distrust; that if anything is being concealed by Green it is not the essential meaning of his text but the nature of a reader which only his text will be able to elicit. I mention the circumstances of Green's life only to make it perfectly clear that this study is not biographically- based. If a number of correspondences between the life and the work are subsequently maintained, these are not in view of anecdotal material but of typical strategies, such as-the use of the pseudonym. The continuities in Green's work which I do want to bring out are not in respect-of biographical reference or of theme, but of what attracted me to the writing in the first place: the peculiarly recreative quality of the prose, whereby those passages which seem most irregular, * bizarre and superfluous in terms of story, and characterization, seem also to be the most important and irreducible units of the text, because so much more intense, resourceful, and enlivening. I regard  J Green's work as bringing a kind of leaven to the compara- tive inertness of the novel with its cautious regard of figural invention. However, this is not a structuralist study of specific texts in relation to the poetics of the novel, but a process of accounting. for the recreative element of each text in terms of "conditions of knowledge" (Empson's phrase). "Conditions of knowledge" vary, of course, from text to text, and. so each one is handled in chronological' succession. The repeated emphasis is on finding a means, issuing from'a broad view of the social and literary context, to account for the waywardness of awriting procedure. This account cannot be rule-governed, because the writing edges its way across a whole range of different, conflicting versions of contemporary history. No attempt is made before Chapter Four to formulate the "idiom of the time"; (the. phrase is Green's, and appeared. in an essay in the autumn of 1941). - There is a tendency in. preceding chapters-to regard the earlier work as in some sense pre-adapted for the "idiom of the time"; but this should become obvious only in retrospect. To begin with the -"idiom of the time" is implicit rather than explicit so that, to begin with, there are certain dis- crepancies of critical approach. In the first chapter, for instance, psychoanalysis is used to a greater extent and advantage than elsewhere; the result is, properly a 'wild analysis', but this is because I have speaking, not been concerned to give a psychoanalytical reading of  4 a text: rather to submit a few elucidating ideas to a particular textual constraint. I have also introduced at decisive points ways of thinking more recent than those of the conditions of knowledge with which I am mainly concerned. This is not simply justifiable in the view that Green was ahead of his time, that we are now ready to be the public elicited by his work; although in-all sincerity this can be held to be part of the answer. The important point is that Green's work is not simply reflective of its time, and that its least reflective part, what for the moment I am calling a kind of leaven, is precisely what brings in question received ways of thinking, so that to juxtapose ways of thinking which do not synchronize with one another is to produce exactly the same kind of differential which gives _ýý---- this writing its edge. Green's. work deliberately sets out the. limits of ruling perspectives; and in this connection, it is animated by a composite idea involving optics and representation. From the beginning, the obstruction of vision is explored as a means-of_interfering with a dominant point of view. The logical terminus of interference comes in Concluding, which contends for the absence of any dominant point of - view anywhere in the universe. The writing has a strong sense of being within a field of vision, and the desirability of not being within it. And just as the man did not want to be photographed, so the author prefers to disappear from his work: if you are trying to write something which -"...  5 has a life of its own, which is alive, of course the author must keep completely out of the picture. I hate the portraits of donors in medieval triptychs"-' This remark preserves the visual context of a dislike of being caught in position and scrutinized. Visibility is felt to correspond to, and indeed communicate with, the biographical accountability of so much fiction. In his own "interim autobiography", Pack, Green tries to maintain an alternative self, one that can rival his own', which remains hidden. This persistent removal of perspectives. and lines of approach cuts short the possibilities of interpretation. Readers who have enjoyed a long acquaintance with Green's work, and who value this situation, may be dismayed by the exhaustiveness of my analysis. But I have tried to cover details, -~' everything, all the to take account of everything in order to leave it free from explanation. The leavening quality remains finally inscrutable. Every critical method inevitably abstracts what it needs from its chosen object. And it is in the knowledge of this, and with the desire to do so. as little as possible, that I have framed my work in the-cause, not of-interpretation, but of a description of strategies, -devices, intensities, and proportions. In a sense I have wanted to write a continuation of Green: on a different level, and in a different accent, but in acknowledgement of the principles on which the writing!. df Henry Green have been based. 1 "The Art Terry Southern, of Fiction--Henry Green", Paris Review, 5 (Summer 1958).  r' CHAPTER I Blindness, Living: The Living Idiom ROSS : Could you define the compulsion behind your writing? GREEN: Sex. Alan Ross, "Green, with-Envy". The London Magazine, Vol. 6 No. 4,. (April 1959), p. 23. .  7 Henry Green's first novel, Blindness, is largely the work of a schoolboy. Not surprisingly, it lacks the peculiar savour of his later work; there is no manifold syntax, no leading motif, no refulgent texture, no cherished surplus of data. Blindness is mostly unoccupied with these and other elements of a later idiom; but where it does join with the other work is in being somehow unduly evasive, and shy of its own meanings. It combines reluctance with extravagance, wariness with magniloquence, in the manner besetting all the later work which is written almost to escape being understood, found out, and is totally committed to a method of the unexplained. The entire work was drafted, and then typed, under the title of Young and Old; this was-subsequently emended to Progression. ' The developmental option is upheld through. the tripartite division of the book into sections headed "Caterpillar", "Chrysalis", "Butterfly". But, as will be seen, the text-itself tends toward retardation, and its cross-purpose can be detected in the replacement, or qualification, of these titles and headings. The scheme canvassed by the description of contents is in fact a ruse. The first part,. "Caterpillar", which takes the form of a diary by schoolboy John Haye, seeks to establish the immaturity of John, allowing the reader to anticipate maturation. But the writing is essentially disconcerted by obsessional previews of the blindness itself, and of-the 1British Library Loan 67/1 consists of a typescript with the pencil addition, "Early typescript of Blindness". accident that will cause it, when a small boy throws a stone to smash the train window behind which John is seated: "it is 'the thing to do' now to throw stones at me as I sit at my window.... Rather a funny thing happened while fielding this afternoon. I had thrown myself down to stop a ball and I saw waving specks in my eyes-for two minutes afterwards" (p. 7); "An awful thing happened. It was towards the end when I was so tired I could hardly see" (p. 12). The writing is in a sense inundated by this project which leaves a trace of its intentions, like a sediment, on the level of casual phrase: "Very interesting... in fact a great eye-opener" (p. 6); "the athletic type, who sink their whole beings into the school and its affairs, and are blind and almost ignorant of any. world outside their own" (p. IO). The diary section is really only there to prefigure blindness, and the reading which enquires after blindness for its effect on Johns "''ýý development is usurped by one which turns on the discursive figure of-blindness itself, along with its adjuncts. Thus, a reference to "the sound of disturbed water"-although inadvertently given is nonetheless attentive to the following chapter, where the now blinded John finds himself encompassed by the sounds of falling rain and running water. And the weight of this manner of reading is borne during moments which seem even more remote from its pressure: 29 January But surely this is most beautiful: The trills of_a lark fall drop by drop down an unseen aery ladder, and the calls of the cranes, floating by in a long string, like the ringing notes of silver  9 bugles, resound in the void of melodiously vibrating ether. He is a poet: and his book is in very truth a poem. It is Gogol. (p. 25) The context of this fragment of Dead Souls involves the return of a young landowner to his country estate, which he fails to become a part of--it provides an unexpected parallel to the situation of John Haye--but the nature of the description is even more to the point; in the Russian novel, "the entire countryside had been transformed into 2 sounds". The excerpt from Gogol is a silent reference to what will be the most audible enigma of the book--the rustlings and murmurings of nature. In Blindness, the loss of sight corresponds to a very specific kind of openness to noise, an oversensitiveness to the sounds of nature which are characteristically whispered ýý`'`---I and indistinct, only partially given: "The air became full of messages" (pp. 132-3); "the wind brought things from afar to hang for a moment in his ears and then take away again" (pp. 244-5). The inconclusiveness of these disclosures is less a product of reluctance, or indecision, than of furtive"obscuration: "The air round was stealthy. It was all so full of little hints.; the air carried up little noises and then hurried_them away again" (p. 151); "For the trees. crowd"about us, and their branches roof us in slyly, 2 Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol, tr. David : 4agarshack, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 276, my emrphasis. The, Everyman edition of 1915, which is mentioned elsewhere in the typescript of Young and Old, is less succinct: "the neighbourhood would seem to have become converted into one great concert of melody" (London: Dent, 1915), p. 272.  10 with sly noises that one can just hear" (p. 184). The secrets of nature are clearly not to be shared but are meant to remain secret, they are confidences withdrawn as soon as given; the intimacy for which. they show their desire is defined by a sense almost of shame. This retraction that is literally 'in the air' is equalled by the evasiveness of John himself: "'... you are always like that, you know, John, always hiding things... "' (p. 41). And his own "secretiveness" is affected by the same correlation of desire and shame; its focal point, an obsession with the image of his own mother, holds the text in a claustrophobic embrace. Before he is anything-else, before he is even the potential writer, John is a son; the first story he manages to write is actually called Sonny. His mother, who is in fact dead, is virtually the only mother in the book; she takes. dramatic precedence "there -ý'-- over the step-mother, who resents the fact that was -I always her between them" (p. 47). Joan's mother, also'dead, serves nearly-entirely as a type of John's. Several of the village mothers are periodically remembered but never featured in any important sense. -In effect, the only other mother made conspicuous is'in the authorial dedication of the book. John's mother is supposed to have "whistled most beautifully". (p. 156), - a trait which coincides with the` -typically sibilant communicativeness of nature. John imagines that "she must have linked everything up with it" (p. 156), although the Nanny had regarded it as "senseless" (p. 173); like nature, the whistling is endowed with vital  11 meanings both proposed and rejected. But it lacks the 'slyness', the 'stealth', or any connotation of guilt, despite the. fact that the mother's image is quite obviously the focus of an erotic desire: "so tantalizing, so feminine. Mummy would have been like that" (p. 50). As his mother had died giving birth to him, John has never actually seen her, and. so his image of her is a total fiction; he pictures her as a woman of about his own age, eternally youthful and ideally beautiful. Elsewhere in the text, erotic interest-is-gauged by a kind of 'light in the eyes': "There would be something behind his honey-coloured eyes, a strong hard light" (p. 114); "There had been a queer light at the back of Mother's eyes . about then--how she understood that light now! " (p. 130). This light is what gives one away, betrays the nature of one's desire; it presupposes the scrutiny of some external agency--a threat-of exposure that could come from anywhere. The mirror in John's bedroom, for example, although. useless once he has been blinded, nevertheless remains on the look-out, "mimicking the-chalky white, and waiting for something else to mimic" (p. 40). In effect, John is blind to, prevent the. discovery of his desire. At the same-. time, blindness allows the guilt suffered over the phantasy of his mother to be converted onto a physiological basis--thi. s. is the punishment which he feels he deserves; the complete removal of both eyeballs is the symbolic equivalent of a; retrib'uti've castration. And even after their removal, his. eyes are still under the observation of the nurse: "they  12 were now in spirits on the mantelpiece of her room at home in the hospital. When she got back she was going to put them just where she could see them first thing every morning" (p. 58). This sense of being-persecuted, continually -and from every quarter, requires a further displacement of . guilt, onto the correspondingly ubiquitous and inexhaustible whisperings and murmurings of nature; they are the constant reiterations of a compromise between the disclosure and concealment of desire. At one and the same time, blindness punishes'and gratifies; it privileges the sense of touch, which is the'means of only contact with the dead mother: "And now that he was blind he had come to treasure little personal things of her own, a prayer-book of hers, though that, of course, was mistaken; a pair of kid gloves, so soft to touch, and they had a faint suggestion of her about them, so faint, that gently surrounded them and made them still more soft" (p. 156). But the major'compensation comes from allowing the image dead to flood the field of'the mother entire of vision, obscuring the actual presence of living surrogates; the reality-in which an incestuous desire is forbidden is simply eclipsed in its entirety: "Then'it was lucky perhaps that he could'not see any more, that the little boy had taken his sight away. For she was'nearer than she had ever been beföre, - now that he was blind" (pp. 161-2). By a curious paradox, John's sexual gratification shifts entirely into the realm of seeing; blindness enables an exclusive investment in the image of the mother while  13 reducing the likelihood of a physical union with anyone else. The step-mother dwells on the idea that "he would not meet any nice girls now, he could never marry" (p. 71). One of the diary-entries excised from. the published version provides a gloss on this situation:. April 20. In my tiny experience women are so very much nicer to-look at and to vaguely romanticise over than to get acquainted with. Surely just as exquisite and certainly a more durable emotion could be gained-through the soul than through materialism. Corot had a soul. (TS, p. 65) The allusion to Corot is exemplary in its indirectness-- giving the main point of the sententia as an afterthought. Corot had the reputation of great secretiveness and celibacy; his voyeurism took the form of an exceptional possessiveness over his own figure paintings, which were kept locked up in his studio until after his death. There is no doubt that he abhorred his own father, and his paintings 'are filled with'images'of truncation. Gout kept him in-the studio for long periods of time when, like John Haye, he would invent the landscapes he could not see; the work for which he was known during his lifetime shows a predilection for remembered landscapes: "Souvenir de Mortefontaine", 3 "Souvenir d'Italie':: Castelgandolfo", etc. 'The editing-out of this allusion, its absence from the final version, is further evidence of a strategy of compromise invading all levels the text. --The intimations of other literary work of which would, so to speak, give tr e game away, are 3 (Lugano: The Uffici See Yvon Taillandier, Corot Press;, n. d. ) .  14 intermittently both acknowledged and denied. Another example of their denial is a quotation from King Lear, excluded from the final version, which is unavoidably explicit in connecting loss of sight with sexual passion: Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back; Thou hotly lust'st to use her in that kind For which thou whipst her. The lines quoted are preceded in King Lear by an advertence to the topic of obstructed vision, a figure to which the play is addicted: What! art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears: see how yond justice rails upon yorid simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places, and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?... 4 Blindness is determinative of punishment, and this circumstance is the foreground of a quotation laying stress on a passion which is categorically unlawful; (the apostrophe ý--_ 1 is addressed to any "rascal beadle"). By obstruction of .. ý vision, one set of criteria for lawfulness is replaced by another, cutting out reality as effectively as death; indeed, throughout Blindness, blindness and death emerge as equal means-of emptying the sphere of the real in order to fill it with. the'imaginary. The fantasy can only be sustained if the mother is dead--this is grasped in one of the moments of acknowledgement, an-allusion to Browning which- is retained in the final version. John remembers the poem, "Porphyria's-Lover", in which the loved one is throttled because the-lover can only completely-possess her once she 4 Shakespeare, King Lear, Muir, The Arden ed. Kenneth Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1964), IV. vi, 1.151f.  15 is dead. 5 Death limit marks the of change and allows the fantasy to stabilize around the chosen image; blindness answers the need to arrest the image and makes it extremely difficult to do much else but attend to it. John maintains the ambition of writing, 'but delays that . any performance would mean a distraction from the central work of the fantasy. The developmental aspect the text is of subject I to a progressive diminution. It is in desire's own interest to retard everything not itself, and the narrative dreams itself into an impasse from which it can only escape by means of an epileptic fit. The ambition of writing is never allowed-to recede; '--.nor is the writing achievement of others, even though the published version omits the catalogue of forty nine titles, "A List of the Library of'John Haye by the end of the Easter Term at Noat" (TS, p. 71). The habit of anticipation -' 'and the bookish allusions both serve the work of the fantasy. The literary hyperaesthesia is part of the same strategy of evacuating the real; desire confounds the weakness of its unlawful position by making unlawfulness the means of its strongest support. - It derives authority for its'. own' transgression- from other literature, ' sounding " for precedents among a set of criteria which only apply in the world of the text. Within a community of writings, the fantasy can assume another kind of lawfulness. The special prominence of Crime and Punishment gives ground for the Robert Browning, Poetical Works 1833-1864, ed. Ian Jack, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 399.  16 interaction of criminality and delay. But, in a more submerged aspect, the project centres on a mythography with even greater leverage, the Oedipal theorem, and it reaches back via Oedipus to the most inevitable of all laws, Fate; wants to arrive at the ultimate sanction for its -desire unlawfulness, as if the constraints upon it were the business of an oracle. All the mutilations of Oedipus are reproduced in John: the ruined eyes, the scarred visage and, in the form of hammer-toes, the swollen foot implied by the Greek name. Both characters are fostered by aged couples, in John's case by his own grandparents. The Oedipal career, turning from exile to'a marginal position at Colonus, (he is both accepted and rejected in a place outside Athens but within its jurisdiction),, is mirrored by John's retreat to the ' instatement in the city, where he is 'ý__ country-before partial neither insider nor outsider in his temporary lodgings. The transfiguration at Colonus corresponds to the epileptic fit. The division of the book into three parts representing three developmental stages becomes more plausible as a reflection of the Sphinx's riddle concerning three-ages of man. In_John's. evocation-of the strangling of Porphyria, he. changes the. loosely wound string of "all her hair" into a pigtail, reinforcing comparison with the 'plaited noose' hangs the Sophoclean Jocasta. 6 that The specifically Oedipal relationship of mother and son colonizes the entire text, and there is no significant 6 Eci7 LS: U&UTOUf -rl p&W0S, 1.1264, Sophoclis TTAEKTIXLS Fabulae, ed. A. C. Pearson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928  17 divergence from its pattern in any of the other relationships. portrayed. That between John and Joan contracts for as long as it lasts, since Joan is basically a type of John; she is virtually his doppelgänger. Her face is similarly scarred, the injury likewise inflicted with broken glass, and in her case the father is direct punitive agent; "a marked dissatisfaction is the result of his refraining from punishment on other occasions: "She feels cheated. He had been so mad underneath. Why hadn't he battered at the door? What a shame. All that trembling for nothing" (p. 134). The Oedipal lameness is transformed into the birthmark on her leg, -and although she is not afflicted with hammer-toes, she does'remember one occasion when she had dropped a real hammer onto her toe. The lesion of her thumb, a kind of transposed castration, is paralleled by John skinning his knuckles and running a splinter into his finger. Joan's __I memory of her own mother is only a reduplication of John's memory of his; both women had been sexually promiscuous, and Joan's mother had taken'as her lover the postman named- John. The fluidity of names--'John' being as close as possible to 'Joan'--is enhanced by his deliberately mistaking, her name as 'June'. The text operates by a constant metastasis of the Oedipal disposition' into one . circumstance after another; Entwhistle is the type of John as Oedipus at Colonus, 'dependent on Antigone / Joan. He occupies a liminal position, on the borders of the community ' from which he has been expelled, earning himself the nickname of "the Shame". Although his eyesight is  18 intact, the windows of his house are broken, or "stare vacantly with emptiness behind their leaded panes" (p. 98); the generally "neuter" aspect of the house suggests an eradication of desire on the strength. of the usual metaphor-- Joan is no longer attacked by her father because "the light in him had gone out" (p. 134). Like John, Entwhistle is a "poet" who adopts the same line of deferred action, failing to write his-own "great book". The purpose of writing for Entwhistle is "to link everything into a circle" (p. 111), a desideratum supposedly shared by the whistling of Mrs. Haye--the two codings are themselves linked by a circularity whose connecting medium here is, the Entwhistle name. Taken together, Entwhistle and John accommodate the symptoms ultimately diagnosed as epilepsy.. Both are prone to imagined levitations, interpreted as spiritual advance. Entwhistle is featured "rising on a tide of knowledge" (p. 133) with the, facility due to alcohol, while the rising sensation of epilepsy assures John that "he would know all" (p. 253). The ascent to omniscience-fortifies the text's oracular pretensions. (The ancient epistemology, unable to account for epilepsy; explained it. as inexplicable, as "the sacred disease"). 7: The credentials this knowledge of are all _ variations of insight and vision; John's feeling of elevation in a religious, setting is the implicit basis of ever being able to see: "The church music went round and round the 11s, Hippocrates, "The Sacred Disease", in the edition of W. H. S. Jones, (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1931), Vol. ii, p. 129 segq.  19 and then rolled along the ceiling till the shifting notes built walls about you till you were yourself very high up, so that you could see" (p. 150, my emphasis). This. is the frame of reference for his characterization of Dostoevsky, "with his epileptic fits which were much the same as visions really" (p. 33). Epilepsy is a kind of superior vision whose reparation of blindness has a specifically religious overtone; vision partakes of the Creation, blindness loses it, -blindness is atheistic. ' (This may seem a wayward hypothesis, but in 1749 the implications looked radical enough for Diderot to be imprisoned for linking godlessness with sightlessness in his essay La lettre sur les aveugles)"8 Blindness represents an estrangement from the world of the Father, and from a lawfulness that would underlie John's punishment by his own father; epilepsy is the metaphor of reunion--on the very last page of thei., novel, John treats it as a kind of return to Ithe world of the father: "They tell me I have had some sort of a fit, but it has passed now. Apparently-my father was liable to them, so that anyway I have one behind me after this.... I have had a wonderful experience. 'I am going to settle down to writing now, I have a lot to tell... "' (p. 254). Entwhistle is an unfrocked priest, which means another isolation from the world of the Father. These reproductions of the fall from God's grace authenticate the ambiguity of nature, as it -8 See. Jeffrey Mehlman, "Cataract: Diderot's Discursive Politics, "l749-1751", in Glyph Two, ed. Sussman and Weber, (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 37.  20 constantly falters in the attempt to regenerate itself. But if nature cannot be reclaimed, it may be tranquillized, as the text implies in a rearguard action of allowing itself to be invaded by the word green. Blindness often leaves itself no option but greenness, as if greenness were the only occasion for writing; it appears overwhelmingly in trees and plants and leaves, but also in clothes and the decorative arts, -and in descriptions where it 'really has no place at all: "the blue that lay overhead was green" (p. 124). It partly conveys a hope of salvation; Entwhistle had always preached "out of-the green book on the second shelf in the old study" (p. 134), while his inspired drinking is punctuated by renditions of the hymn, -"There is a green land far away". But this vague utopianism cannot restore the world of the Father, and the only salvation whose success is feasible must be like the amnesiac's fugue: "A long way away there might be a country of rest, made of ice, green in the depths, an ice that was not cold, a country to rest in. He would lie in the grotto where it was cool and where his head would be cool and light, and where there was nothing in the future, and nothing in the past". (p. 95). Greenness is thus associated with a gap in normal consciousness, replacing the agnostic with the anaesthetic--its elisions are identical to those of blindness itself. In fact, the setting for the revelation of John's blindness is almost totally green: "Beyond, the door, green, as were the thick embrasures of the two windows green, and the carpet, and the curtains" (p. 39). The verbal  21 superabundance is made even more obtrusive in its control over several names; there are Mrs. Green, Greenham, Green the draper's, and Lorna Greene. But the acme of interference is reached in the exchange of the author's nom de plume; in the typescript of Young and Old this had been Henry Browne-- a name which retains the final e of the author's real surname, Yorke. 9 The supersession Green, through the of approached incidence of greenness in the writing, is one indication of a career itself invested with the signifying potential of a text--later on, Green would motivate his own name in a different light. In'Blindness, green stands for something like anaesthesia, but the film of obliviousness which it spreads over the whole text is'unable' to swallow entire the burden of guilt; it requires afinal convulsion, ' with a profound gap in consciousness, ' to achieve that. ý'''--_. According to Freud: "The earliest physicians described coition as a minor epilepsy, and thus recognized in the sexual act a mitigation and adaptation of the epileptic 10 The method of discharging stimulus". epileptic attack-in Blindness is preceded by the most intensely erotic episode of thebook: ' He leant forward further to where he felt her presence the stand. Her. breath burned in his face for a and moment and bathing in her nearness he leant further forward still, in the hopes of finding her, but she dropped his hand and it fell on the slick edges of the pot in which the lily grew. Despair was coming over 9 7%sdoes the fictional name Haye, and the name of the central character of Caught, Roe. 10 Sigmund Freud, "Dostoevsky and Parricide", Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. J. B. Strachey, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), Vol. 21, p. 180.  22 him again, it was too awkward, this pursuit of her under alily, when all at once her arm mysteriously came up over his mouth, glowing and cool at the same time,. and the scent was immediately stronger, tangible almost, so that he wanted to bite it. (pp. 241-2) This brings passage to a head those libidinal tensions which start to break out in punctual form: "and then presences _now would glide past leaving a snatch of warm scent behind them to tantalise.... and then mysteriously from below there floated up a chuckle; it was a woman and someone must have been making love to her, so low, so deep it was. He was on fire at once" (pp. 243-4). These erotic incentives, like the messages of nature, are always 'in the air', more or less unattached--the recurring adverb "mysteriously" implies the lack of control over them. Their leakage undermines the method of sublimation and compromise, which is suddenly and violently overtaken by a method of discharge. In the same way, the writing all at once overlaps onto the textuality of Crime and Punishment, whose effect on John is "like dynamite" (p. 34). Although it has an idea of . itself as a novel-of-continuous advance ("Progression")., Blindness comes to a stop with the energetics of conversion. Green was later to refer suggestively'to the Russian novelists as .the "novelists of'persecution", a formulation whose premise-of hysterical guilt makes it suitable for his first book. ll Blindness is fiction; its own a changeling fantasy of parentage is matched by a fantasy of literary tradition--epilepsy is the perfect metaphor for its seizure 11 Harvey Breit, "Talk with Henry Green--and a P. S. ", New York Times Book Review, (February 19,1950), p. 29.  23 of another lineage. The literary progenitor, Dostoevsky, identifies the source of the attack in his own interpretation of his own epilepsy: The best account of the meaning and content of his attacks was given by Dostoevsky himself, when he told his friend Strakhov that his irritability and depression after an epileptic attack were due to the fact that he seemed to himself a criminal and could not get rid of the feeling that he had . a burden of unknown guilt upon him, that he had committed some great misdeed, which oppressed him. 12 Blindness ignores the lineaments of c3evelopmental time in opening up a discursive space; it is least like a novel in the blind paroxysm of its finale--it substitutes for analepsis, epilepsis. Its writing is deliberately 'blind', in the way of disinheriting itself, giving up the expansionist freedoms of a more seemingly legitimate tradition of the novel in favour of going 'unseen' to combine with its own illicit desires. The book is technically inferior to the _ý`'`-- rest of Green's work, but its obsessional. structure is the of later refinements; it is already anticipative of _-basis the maturer work in its sense of the inhibitions on a given literary-form. The mutation in Greens writing between Blindness and Living Is surely-greater than between any other two of his subsequent novels. This extremism of change is equal. to the about face in his way of life; after two years as an undergraduate at oxford, he moved to Birmingham to serve a 12, Freud, op. cit., p. 187, n. 2.  24 three years engineering apprenticeship. The difference this makes to Living consists in a fascination with working class speech, and in the emulation of this speech by the narration-itself. The authorial voice is submitted to the. inflexions, constructions, and the anecdotal pace, of inordinate talk: "And Dale asked him why he went röund with Tupe then and Mr. Gates said, me'never and Dale said'he seen him and-Joe Gates answered it might have been once" (p. 29). Instead of correcting deviance and excess, it seeks to exploit it, rejecting the business of moderation, embracing the formalism of a waste of breath: "Yes man in front said turning back to him, yes all the evening but people in front cried ssh: band was playing softly, softly" (p. 59). The narration abuses punctuation and, to all intents and purposes, authorial intent: "'It's those that don't want a honest ýý`''--- day. 's work I'm for getting on. '... 'No but are you going? "' (pp. 12-13). There is a measured emphasis on continuatives--"and... and... and... and"--which gives the impression of lending equal weight. to every clause, of a reduction in the sense of controlling objectives, both locally within a sentence, and generally. Attributions of speech, which are proof of nothing if not an imposed control, are adapted into a similar pattern, made otiose, or sent out of control in-a kind of exponential runaway: "Once she had said to Mrs. Eames she had said it made you had said walking with him, yes she had said ridiculous she that to Mrs. Eames" (pp. 41-2, my emphasis). In short, the commonest mechanism of the text is  25 co-ordination; and this occurs frequently in a form that is unusual for a novel, but which is typical of chronicles. Only three years before the publication of Living there had been a striking example of the chronicle in fictional form, in Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (London: Brentano's, 1926). Loos's favoured continuative had been "so", and her sophisticated artlessness cleared a way for Green's experimentally uncouth style. Living has a trick, of continually forcing the writing back to the present tense of anecdote, which is according to the poetics of the chronicle with its successive instalments of the historic present:. "She says what, only that much? He says yes and if that isn't enough well she doesn't have any, and snatches it back again" (p. 191). There is a sharp sense in Living of the relations of between the ý-ý_ chronology narration and the narrated events. And it is this sense exactly which Gertrude Stein appeals for in her "Composition as Explanation", a lecture delivered in 1926 in'Oxford when Green was still an undergraduate there, and published in the same year by the Hogarth Press, which was subsequently to publish Living. Stein argues that the contemporaneity of a writer should be measured by the intensity of his address to the problem of a ratio between time in the composition and time of the composition:. In the beginning there was the time in the composition that naturally was in the composition but time in the composition comes now and this is what is now troubling everyone the time in the composition is now a part of  26 distribution and equilibration. 13 Stein adduces her own The, Making of Americans as the prototype for a continuous present whose distribution and equilibration is achieved through "beginning again and . again". Her method of repetition with slight variations is simply usurped on occasion in Living: "But he was sincere in his thinking the old place-wanted a rouser and in his thinking he was always building, always building in his thinking" (p. 57). This is little more than the garbled imitation of a routine, but on another level the sense of a continuous present is subliminally extended through the reconstitution of other, sometimes quite distant, parts of the text: - her sanity, what there was of it, so it ebbed and, -So she was drifting back again to the gentle 'undulations which heaved regularly with her breathing like the sea, and was as commonplace. (p. 106, my emphasis-), So sometimes when you work, daze comes over you and your-brain-lies back, it rocks like the sea, and. as-. commonplace. (p. 149, my emphasis) This circularity indicates that while Living's alertness to the idiom of factory speech may have a documentary inspiration, its writing does not possess a mimetic interest on the model of Social Realism, but is rather concerned to incorporate the living idiom and make it internal to its -textuality. -- The dust-jacket for the Hogarth Press edition of the book cites the Times Literary Supplement's assertion that 13 "Composition as Explanation", collected in Look at me now and here I am: Writings and Lectures 1911-1945 (London: Peter Off, 1967 29. , p.  27 "Living introduced a whole school of proletarian literature" and yet it contrasts strongly with many of those novels of the Thirties which followed realist and even naturalist- procedures in their evocations of working class life. The Hogarth Press itself was to publish the kind of writer for whom there was "the time in the composition that naturally was in the composition"; in John Hampson's Saturday Night at the Greyhound, for example, (a relatively popular book, which went through at least three impressions in its first month of publication in February, 1931), the time-sense of the narration itself is as far as possible eclipsed by the chronology of the narrated events, or characters' trairs of thought. *The equation between the form of the novel and a suspension of disbelief in the illusion of reality would have been pronounced in the light of Green's own practice of reading on a synthetic basis--according to John Russell, who__'--- has had access to a book of manuscript notes which pre-date Living,, "a general recollection of books was what, in 1926, he argued that he ought to achieve. He seemed to be himself too'bound in 14 cautioning about-getting up artifacts". Livin 'is persistent in its attempt to bring in question the generality of-a realist contract; in one of the episodes set in a cinema,. confusions of reference make the activities of the audience seem continuous with those on screen, so that any idea of a formal presentation being continuous with 'life' itself is shown to be a kind of delirium: Later they got in and found seats. Light rain had been falling, so when these two acting on screen walked by 14 John Russell, "There It Is", Kenyon Review 26, (Summer, 1964), p. 444.  28 summer night down leafy lane, hair over her ears left wet on his cheek as she leant head, when they on screen stopped and looked at each other. Boys at school had been singing outside schoolroom on screen, had been singing at stars, and these two heard them and kissed in boskage deep low in this lane and band played softly, women in audience crooning. (pp. 14-15) In another such episode, the house lights stay on all through the performance, thus defeating any possibility of illusion; the screen is visible-as a'screen. And a comparable effect is obtained by studding the text with Arabic numerals to demonstrate the material nature of writing. There is evidently a close observation of film form, countering the illusion of reality with a simulation of blatantly artificial effects such as rapid montage: 'Oh' she whispered, 'Oh' and he felt quite transported. . Just then Mr. Dupret died in sleep, died, in sleep. I Ow are ye Albert? ' 'Middlin' Aaron. The sweat was dropping from off me again last night from the pain. ' (p. 124) There is also the studied emulation of cinematic lighting - effects, particularly in the dramatic intensity with which industrial work is portrayed: Arc lamps above threw their shadows out sprawling along over floor and as they worked rhythmically their rods up and down so their shadows worked. -(p. 34), The writing is constrained less by any given 'reality'- than by the features of another discourse; Green had specialized in artificial lighting. effects even at school--one of the Eton Society of Arts. puppet shows had been "a strange amalgam based nii the'story of Hansel and Gretel, put into verse by Alan Clütton-Brock, the scenery designed and created by myself, the actors created by Mark Ogilvie-Grant, the music  29 by Tchaikovsky (the Nutcracker Suite) and electric lighting effects by Henry Yorke, I cannot remember who declaimed the 15 While Oxford, film, words". at Green was a devotee of in 16 What is reputedly spending every afternoon a cinema. especially revealing about these cinema visits is that they immediately preceded his daily attempts to write: "I felt extremely'ill and every day went alone to a cinema after which I tried to write" (Pack EX Bag, p. 201). Living conscripts the novel with'the film to exemplify a textuality in which the intelligible world is not simply the object of attention over an attitude of style, but material-in the formal play with a set of conventions. The rhetoric of the film is brought in as a catalyst for the parsing of literary language; syntax is openly manipulated--grammatical rules are regarded as conventions to be modified: "She met Mrs. Eames who stood to watch potatoes on trestle table there" (p. 17, my emphasis). The treatment of the verb 'to stand' as an auxiliary is a typical irregularity. The word order is habitually irregular, but saved'from quaintness by a tireless impetus: "With all senses fixed'on it yet in a sense he played with the job" (p. 195). ' Punctuation seems virtually arbitrary, as if needed merely to dampen energy: We shan't be up to ... much work not when you've been a man for long so you'll look to our comfort when we'll have worked to see you come to 15 Sir Colin Anderson, in Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure, ed. Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster, p. 121. 16 See Goronwy Rees, A Chapter Accidents (London: of Chatto & Windus, 1977).  30 strength" (p. 24). The syntax is not held by one or another constant design but shifts to meet new demands. The sentence has a contorted logic which forms under the impression of a complex agency: "Mr. Craigan's face was striped with black dust which had stuck to his face and which the sweat, in running down his face, had made in stripes" (p. 34). This construction turns smartly through 180 degrees of agency; the predilection for internal bracing tends to make the hierarchy of subject and object a shadowy presence: "Sparrows flew ]ay belts that ran from lathes on floor uff. Lo shafting above hy skylights" (p. 3, my emphasis). The deliberate variety of prepositions necessitates a fluctuating stress which distributes the attention. The sentence forces the exploration of a space, enacting perception instead of registering something perceived. Perhaps the most celebrated excess of Living is the frequent absconding of the article: a deprivation apparent at the same time in poems written by Auden, in connection it to be known 'telegraphese': l7 with whose work came as Green has provided his own explanation of this device: Iwanted to make that book as taut and spare as possible to fit the proletarian life I was then leading. So I hit on leaving out the article. 18 But the affected tautness and spareness is just as precociously maintained in passages dealing with the ruling class as. in those concerned with anything "proletarian". 17 See Auden, Preface to Collected Shorter Poems 1927; -1957-(New York: ' Random House, 1967)-. 18 Terry Southern, "The Art Fiction XXII, Henry Green", of in Paris- Review, 5, (Summer, 1958) pp. 61-77. ý. ,  31 And its abstemiousness is even more emphatically the hallmark of writing which simulates the absence of any organizing intelligence: Evening. Was spring. Heavy blue clouds stayed over above. In small back garden of villa small tree was with yellow buds. On table in back room daffodils, faded, were between ferns in a vase. (p. 11) In fact the writing is the more severe and meagre in proportion to its assigned detachment from anything living: Water dripped from tap on wall into basin and into water there. Sun. Water drops made rings in clear coloured water. Sun in there shook on the walls and ceiling. As rings went out round trembling over the water shadows of light from sun in these trembled on walls. On the ceiling. (p. 40) Vacancies left by the departure of 'the' are often filled with alternations of 'this' and 'that'; the resultant tension is first of all a constant reminder that any definitive version of reality is spurious. And the opposing deictics seldom establish any differentiation of place in the referent--they are more often contradistinctive only on the level of articulation. The efficacy of the procedure is less as. a reflection of a given way of life, as Green would suggest, than as a reaction against a particular discourse; the defaced language clearly operates as a type of antidote.. What the inflexions of 'spareness' or 'tautness'.. share is an unmistakably Anglo-Saxon character; there is a partiality for. short clauses, co-ordinated rather than subordinated, for parataxis, even for an Anglo-Saxon word 19*"Each life dully lived and the life next it, order: 19-See Ian A. Gordon, The Movement of English Prose (London: Longman, 1966), for. the Anglo-Saxon element in modern English.  32 pitched together, walls between built, dully these lives went out onto streets promenaded dullness there" (p. 228, my emphasis). It is worth pointing out, in connection with this Anglo-Saxon interest, and in view of the chronicle approach, that fragments of'the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in Sweet's An Anglo-Saxon Reader (1876):; would have been required reading for every Oxford undergraduate reading did. 20 English, as Green The type of discourse which 'spareness' counteracts is present in a series of elaborate, over-blown conceits: the ungainly stock-in-trade of a 'classical' style that will even attempt epic simile; on two separate occasions, the problem of Bert Jones's relationship with Lily is "as it might be foreman had given him a job" (p. 195). The one simile uses up over five hundred words of text. A florid and laboriously unfolded comparison between the ailing " :. factory owner, Dupret, and a sinking submarine is brazened out over half a page. The analogues are juxtaposed as abruptly as the vying Anglo-Saxon and 'classical' styles: "Mr. Gibbon said after he had done the Holy Roman Empire he felt great relief and then sadness at old companion done . with. ` Mr. Dale wanted to, feel relief but felt only as if, part of him was not with him, and sadness of a vacuum" (p. 12l). The allusion to Gibbon animates a distinction between a 'classical': eighteenth century historiography, with its periodic sentences, and what is virtually the 20 See Green's "interim autobiography", Pack a ýBa "I had taken English at my school and that meant learning Anglo-Saxon" (p. 213).  33 polar opposite, the austerity of an Anglo-Saxon chronicle. The awkwardness surrounding the interventions of a 'classical' author sponsors mistrust in an agency of regulation which can also reveal itself as either dogmatic flippant: "... it is not known for certain... " (p. 90); _or "... --how shall I say--... " (p. 134); "But stretch this simile,.. "'(p. l'68); "... I don't know:.. " (p. 189); "... how do I know? " (p. 228). A sense of authorial intrusiveness is encouraged by the frequent parenthesizing of informational comment: "Then, as if she wanted to explain asking her into the front parlour, (formal entertaining of so young a girl compared-with Mrs. Johns)... " (p. 193). The parenthetical remark has the passing status of an ethnographical note, as if the authorial tone was balanced in the interests of social research; and yet the most confidently authoritative passages in the book are also the most prejudiced--deeply _1 = scored with an acidulous misanthropy: Thousands of lamps, hundreds of streets, each house had generally a mother and complacent father, procreation, breeding, this was only natural thing ,, there in that miserable thing home, natural to them -because it was domesticated. Procreating was like having a dog, in particular spaniels. Fido who I'm so grateful to. Miserable people. (p. 228) The graceless satire devalues what pretends-to have a special faithfulness' to authorial responsibility. And yet this most self-conscious display of imposed control is in fact a 'pastiche of The Waste Land--its real authority derives from'the imperative of style: he wants a good time ... And if you don't give it him, there's others will, Isaid. ............. Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.  34 Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night. 21" By gad didn't know-it was so late well better be getting along now or the wife won't have it eh, think I'm up to some of the old games what well old chap I'll say goodnight now oh I say no I say old man did you see your wife give me a kiss well perhaps it was a good thing you didn't what, Gracie you're the sweetest little woman, with another of course oh, that well dash it all that ever was. Well goodnight and God bless you all--... (p. 229). Giorgio-Melchiori, in his essay on. "The Abstract Art of Henry Green", indicates a further parallel between Living and a separate part of Eliot's poem, "The Fire Sermon". Eliot's river images provide a setting in which Elizabeth's pleasure barge is echoed by a "party from Maidenhead in launch up the river, men and women, a silver launch" (p. 114), watched. by the young Richard Dupret (one of Eliot's "loitering heirs of City directors"): "Still flowed river Thames and still the leaves were disturbed, then were loosed, and came down on to water and went by London where (p. 115). 22 `he, was going, by there and out into the sea" The author, or as much of an author as Living allows, is exposed as a wholly literary invention. And the manifestation of the author is politicized: through*a-closeness, in both its accents and its sentiments, - to the attitudes of Richard Dupret, the young ruling class male representative of the greater part of Henry Green's -experience: 21 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), p. 69. 22 The Tightrope Studies Giorgio Melchiori, Walkers: of Mannerism in Modern English Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), p. 194. 4  35 And what was in all this, he said as he was feeling now, or in any walk of life--you were born, you went to school, you worked, you married, you worked harder, you had children, you went on working, with a good deal of trouble your children grew up, then they married. What had you before you died? Grandchildren? The satisfaction of breeding the glorious Anglo Saxon breed? (p. 187) Living itself sprang from Green's own commitment to a new way of life, ("to work in a factory with my wet, podgy hands")"; 23 the living idiom is and energy with which the . pursued is generated out of a tension between loyalty to one class and the conventions of thought derived from another. The theme of class division draws attention to the way the text is constructed on a basis of discursive oppositions obtained by discursive means; in the transition from one passage concerned with the upper class Hannah Glossop to another concerned with the working class Lily Gates, there is a moment when the feminine pronoun "she" is unassigned to either of these women: "Another night. She . 1-.had cleared table after supper. She went off out" (p. 118). The grammar allows us to briefly read Hannah in Lily's place--we hear elsewhere of her dilettantish interest in domestic chores: "... she enjoyed washing up... " (p. 121).. Hannah's attitude can be matched by Richard, who is, as his mother describes him, "appreciative" in the face of heavy industry. He*attributes a "wild incidental beauty" to the machinery in the factory, striking the attitude of a posturing connoisseur--in fact, he reacts no differently to any sort. of claim on his attention: "'When I am with. her I 23_ John Russell, op. cit., p. 442.  36 echo as a landscape by Claude echoes"' (p. 35). He does, however, experience the odd revulsion at his own class: "For in their games they sublimated all passions, all'beliefs" (p. 138). This sublimation is sufficiently profound for Hannah Glossop to suffer a nervous breakdown when her doctor's chauffeur, a complete stranger, is killed: "nothing had ever been near her before" (p. 117). Hannah's general apathy and total lack of responsibility-mean that any and every experience is capable of trivialization: "she had enjoyed enormously General Strike" (p. 117). The book resorts to obsessively focussing on the material decay: of-the human body, as a constant dissolvent of class divisions. The name 'Dupret', carried by successive generations who inherit the factory, offers an illusion of perpetuity; it is a point of absolute fixity in language. But towards it is ý-- as a gesture repudiating material change - a hollow compensation when Dupret is reduced to the common state: "Whenever he spoke it was about the needs of his body" (P. 91). . The title, Living, is in itself redolent of. process and change; as opposed to the conceptual 'life'. All the older male characters decline remarkably in the course of events. At the outset,. a great amount of play is made out of Tupe's falling over.. Dupret also falls ignominiously, "after slipping on dog's mess" (p. 56), and dies after an ensuing, protrac±ed illness. Craigan takes to his bed and approaches his dotage; the storekeeper Albert Milligan. is in and out- of hospital; and Hannah Glossop's father "also had been sick" (p. 117). The most vivid compression of this collective  37 emphasis is given in the introduction at an early point of the image of a man "that had lengths cut out of his belly" (p. 5). This violent decomposition is too visible, all displaying the kind of equality normally hidden. Craigan's -senility is the vehicle of an apt allusion to the dying body of Falstaff: for after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play ... with flowers, and smile upon his fingers' end... 24 He fell to picking at his coat. Then he held up finger squinted at it. '(p. 161) Falstaff is perhaps the most expressive example'in English Literature of what might be termed the Rabelaisian body, which is'primarily an organic complexion rather than a visible structure. Obviously indicative of its hidden organs, and openly äppetitive, the Rabelaisian body is crucially involved in a mutual transaction with the processes 25 ý- of the world. It is of course the contrary aspect, of. - the body as visible and separate from the world, which strikes. Richard Dupret on his initial round of the factory floor-- Young man passed by Mr. Dupret and works manager. 'What a beautiful face. ' (p. 3) --an observation which is nonsense to the working class manager-Bridges: "What? -Eh? Well I don't know". Class divisions hold good only in the divergent approaches to illness; Dupret becomes severely taciturn, while Craigan grows more freely responsive, to an extent that "So much 24 Shakespeäre, Hen V, ed. John H. -Walter, The Arden Shakespeare, (London: Methuen, 1954), II. iii., 11.14-15. 25 See'Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. H. Iswolsky, (New York, 1968).  38 talk from him frightened her" (p. 94). And while Craigan increasingly feels the need for Lily's, affection, the ailing Dupret is to be consoled with a prostitute. With these incessant pronunciations of mortality, the polarity of working class and ruling class is inevitably superimposed with the conflict of old and young. More or less acute, the succession of generations is never less than a disturbance: "'Why do we bring kids into the world, they leave you so soon as they're grown, eh? "' (p. 24). One generation does not simply follow another, but actively replaces it: during the course of the book, the older workers are made redundant en masse. And antagonism is enforced between generations--an obscure resentment is clarified by dividing them sharply into two age groups: 'I don't know what 'e's told Tupe: V,' said Mr. Gates, 'but there's only men of 'is age and young men in that place, so trouble's bound to be between 'em, the younger lot trying to push the older out of the light. There's none that comes between 'em, speakin' of aae_ _ _' (D_l5l) It is safe to suppose that this gulf would have been a"leg_acy of the Great War. And the division between the age groups is augmented by the fact that while all the younger men have been born and brought up in the city, Craigan, Gates, Tupe,:: änd Aaron' Connolly, all older workers, came originally from the country. The destructive competitiveness is concentrated in the outright hostilities'of father and son relationships; of Mr. Dupret "pater", who is fifty years his son's senior, and of Bridges and Tarver: "Later Mr. Tarver was saying 'Yes sir' and Father said 'my boy' often then" (p. 47).  39 Considerable prominence is given to the way in which most of the male characters perpetually wish one another dead; this unblinking mercilessness is even more transparent when its object is a parent: "Why could not the old man die? " (p. 110). The insistence of the son replacing the father is always right on the surface; Bridges' remark, "'Can you work with a man like that, and when he's old enough to be your son" (p. 67), includes a revealing slip of the tongue. In place of the expected''when he's young enough to be your son', the substitution., 'betrays an underlying fear of 'when he's old enough to supersede you'. This undeviating pressure creates widespread instability. All the older males take fright at the prospect of an impending helplessness that would justify their replacement: "'Don't do that my wench' Mr. Craigan said, 'I can still do that for myself"' (p. 141). Whoever fills the role of --ý__-- 'father' is bound to retreat from the competition he is meant to lose; Craigan spends a disproportionate amount of his spare time in the isolation of his wireless head-set, even when the broadcasts are in a language he cannot understand: "... 'e'd listen to the weather reports so long that 'e wouldn't tell what it was doin' outside, rainin', snowing or sleet "' (p. 120). Bridges prevents recognition of any threat to his position by the simple expedient of "always rushing out when he's crossed" (p. 82). Bridges suspects almost continually that he is being persecuted,, ("'What? Eh? What d' you mean? How do you know anyway? "), and-his anxiety is directly linked to physical degeneration  40 by recurring images of body-infraction: "... I don't know what's the matter with me but I feel like someone had given me a cut over the brow with a e spanner. Worry, I', ve 'ad enough of that washing about in my head to drown a dolphin.... Ah, so it goes on, every day, and then one day it breaks, the blood comes running out of your nose as you might be a fish has got a knock on the snout.... " (p. 17) "... 'ow can you do your work conscientiously and be 'eld up, like this and a pistol put to your heart... " (p. 30) The waiting till you got back, that was the rub of it, ' was like having your arteries cut and watching the life blood spouting out. (p, 135) And Bridges'-alarmism is cruelly manifested in a moment-of actual physical weakness, when his poor hearing converts "defeatist" into "diabetes" (p. 185). But the reader. '. s own narcissistic security is threatened when Bridges' ridiculous obsession with Siam, associated with his own ruin, is suddenly substantiated by the unexplained arrival from Siam of Tom Tyler, an usurper in another context. rejection of one generation by another is further -The h-differentiated in terms of gender; which tends to complicate the settled oppositions of class. The working class Craigan is a, repository of regressive conservatism: "'If I 'ad a son I wouldn't educate him above the station 'e was born in"'; None--ol-. the women folk go to work from the house I inhabit' he said" (p. 13). Lily's internal resistance to these obsolescent values finds expression in physical energy, ("'Yoü. got a appetite' he said"), and her rebelliousness has a constructive ambition, while Richard's innovations at the factory are callous. Lily's dynamism provides a direct contrast in respect of class with-the debilitation of Mrs. Dupret, who finds a sense of purpose only when her husband  41 falls ill; once. the starts to revive and to reassert his control she reverts to "her old helpless. self again" (p. 105). Her relations with the working class are limited to the distribution of tips, the regulation of which obsesses her. The same principle governs Hannah Glossop's distribution of kisses-. -even kisses are given an exchange value: "She made little rules about this for herself, one was she must not kiss him too often but let him kiss her" (p. 155). The multiple polarities in. Living (of class, gender, and age) are strongly reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence's vague, but precisely classified, levels of the psyche; Green has admitted the impact of Lawrence on his early work, and the interlocking mutual attractions and-repulsions of Living are not inconsistent with the categories of Lawrence's scheme of consciousness in a work like Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, which was first published in 1923, six years ~ý, _ 26 before Living. Green's compulsion to-demarcate, throughout his text, thinking""in, feeling" from thinking "in mind", answers to the modes of "primal subjectivity" and "mental subjectivity" in Lawrence. And a general inclination to impose negativeness. on male characters, and positiveness on female characters, is worked out along the lines of Lawrence's discrimination between a "sympathetic mode of communion" and a "voluntary separative mode of communion"; the first of these. is. ä "love which gives its all to the beloved", 26 See "An Unfinished Novel", Vol. 6, London Magazine, no. 4, (April, 1959), pp. 11-17, for Green's acknowledgement of Lawrence.  42 while the second "has its root in the idea: the beloved is a mental objective, endlessly appreciated, criticized, 27 different scrutinized, exhausted". For Lawrence, these modes are successive stages of the same activity of consciousness, but in Living they are separated out into exclusive agencies. Richard is the medium for an undiluted narcissism; he is found time and again picking his nose, often in close juxtaposition to the scenes of courtship between Lily and Bert Jones. His infatuation with Hannah Glossop is"really a pretext for further self-indulgence--a mesmerised repetition of stagnant phrases, "over and over again darling, darling, darling, 'like that, so like those old men squatting on the mountains" (p. 84). The love between Lily and Bert is conversely identified with a renewed purposefulness: "When she was with Bert it was like she had just stretched, then ý--- waked, then was-full of purposes" (p. 77). Lily and Richard ''react in an absolutely contrary fashion to the same refrain, "Your eyes are my eyes / My heart looks through"; he "felt quite transported" (p. 124) while for her it means "Horror" (p. 227). Richard is of course predisposed to static formulae;. his recitation of "darling, darling, darling" is succinctly offset by Lily's reiteration of the word "yea'in conversation with her lover: -"'Yes, and don't: they keep the roads beautiful... Yes it's a pleasure... Yes it is... Yes we all went.. Yes because you can get right out into the country... -. Yes,. Yes that's what he says... Yes sometimes I wish*I could . 27'-Psychoanalysis (London: Heinemann, and the Unconscious 1961), p. 227.  43 go outside... "' (pp. 45-6). The same word is elevated in the closely similar context of Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end 'of Joyce's Ulysses. On different occasions, Joyce made varying calculations as to its effect. To Jacques Benollst-M6chin he said, "The book must end with yes. It 28 must end with the most positive word in the human language"; while to Louis Gillet he averred, "-In Ulysses, to depict the babbling of a woman going to sleep, I had sought to end with the least forceful word I could possibly find-. I had found the word 'yes', which is barely pronounced, which denotes acquiescence, self-abandon, relaxation, the end of all 29. language is resistance". The of active affirmation also the language of passive assent; this ambivalence cuts to the heart of Living's implied politics of gender. The energy released in Lily is transformed into an acquiescent energy, and the disaffection which had seemed to potentiate -her for so much is retrospectively allayed in, the serenity of prospective motherhood. The definitive polarization of male and female, which occurs when Richard and-Lily pass one'another unnoticed in the street, turns on the question of reproduction: What will they grow up to he thought in mind--they'll work, they'll marry, they'll work harder, have children arid go on working, they'll die. He shuddered. Then he forgot all about them and thought about himself. But Lily coning through the gate saw'children running and those mothers and she stood and watched them, feeling out of it. 'I must have babies, ' she said then, looking, at baby in mother's arms. (p. 188) 28 Richard Elfmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 536. 29 Ibid., 725. The change of mind is pointed out by p. Frank Kermode in The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), of Narrative pp. 66-7.  44 This conceptual rigidity could be an extra fruit of reading Lawrence, who reserved his most rhapsodical cogency for propagandizing the relationship of mother and child. Love between adults is always liable to cerebration, while the union of mother and child is galvanized by a "lovely polarized vitalism", a nervous form of electricity conducting an "unconscious sapience". In Living,. the satisfaction of motherhood is forcefully located on a semi-conscious level: "Baby howled till mother there lifted him from bed to breast and sighed most parts asleep in darkness.... She was not quite woke up and said you wouldn't believe, she was so happy now" (pp. 13-14). And a particular limpidity is, uppermost in the writing which celebrates the harmony of natural with maternal bounty: "When the blossom was out the missus and I came along-and sat under it of a Sunday with the-baby" (p. 48). most extended lyrical passage in the _The book is concerned with the birth of a son to Arthur Jones, 'whose elated singing draws an universally positive response: "Soon each one in this factory heard that Arthur had begun and, if he had 2 moments, came by iron foundry shop. to listen.... each one was glad when he sang" (pp. 89-90)... There is nothing. to suggest that the novel's third term-- an implicit urgency, implicitly female, to transform the world--has not receded behind the-comprehensive image of motherhood, unless there is a possibility of its having been transmuted into another aspect-of the text. There is evidence of the hysterization of women being an aim-inhibited satisfaction, in the suggestion of immense pressures in areas  45 other than the question of female sexuality. At the end of the book, the almost mysterious quietness of the crowd on its way to the football match is an obvious reflection of the daily march to work which opens the book. The crowd's restraint exacerbates theesübsequent effect of mass hysteria in the football stadium, an hysteria whose undirectedness is pointed by the indifference of "11 men who play the best football in the world. These took no notice of the crowd, no notice" (p. 266). On balance, the violence of the crowd reaction is the measure of a negative satisfaction. The writing is positive each time it transmutes itself with an imagery of birds: He saw these and as the sun comes out from behind clouds then birds whistle for the sun, so love came out in his eyes.... (p. 163) Then, as after rain so the sky shines and again birds rise up into sky and turn there with still movements so her sorrow folded wings, so gently crying she sank deeper into the bed and was quieted. (p. 239) ,=-,Both these examples are reminiscent of Milton's epic simile in Paradise Lost, Book II: As when from mountain tops the dusky clouds Ascending, while the north wind sleeps, o'erspread Heaven's cheerful face, the louring element Scowls. o'er the darkened landscape snow, or shower; If-: chance the radiant sun with farewell sweet Extend his evening beam, the fields revive, The birds their . herds, notes renew, and bleating Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings. 30 This 'classical' bias is corrected elsewhere by an Anglo-Saxon bias, shortly to be discussed; the recurring figures of birds transmute every species of discourse. 30 Milton, Paradise Lost, (London: ed. Alastair Fowler, Longman, 1971), p. 112,11.488-495.  46 Among so many figurations, there is one where a bird trapped between the upper and lower sashes of a window may be taken'to represent Lily,, Craigan, Gates and Dale are all . helpless to set it and her free. It is up to Mrs. Eames to release::. the bird and to supposedly liberate Lily by her example of purposeful motherhood. But this symbolic interlude is only .a momentary diversion fröm the series of very fitfully connected images of birds which is otherwise scarcely concerned to justify its determined hold over the text. The aspirations of every sort of character are subsumed in a vision of overseas, of Australia, Canada, and "the East"; the text is correspondingly invaded by sensational metaphors and similes connecting birds with ocean travel: She walked in misery. She tried not to think of -him. But as sometimes, coming across the sea from a ý--- cold country to the tropics and the sky is dull so the sea is like any other sea, so as you are coming tropical birds of exquisite colours settle to rest on the deck, unexpected, infinitely beautiful, so things she remembered of him came one by one back to her mind. And as the ship beat by beat draws nearer to that warmth the birds come from, so her feeling was being 'encompassed then by'the memory of him and it was so warm she sat down on the wet ground and cried. (p. 156) The imagery. seems primed for the merest pretext on which to present. a_maximum inconvenience to narrative exposition; its virtual independence of reference is so intensified that it can afford to make gratuitous forays into the text, ("How can you darn when as it might be a bird is in your hand"). The writing is constantly waylaid by this imagery following a circular path; the living idiom evolved in complicity with the subject-matter of factory life starts to predicate material of its own.  47 But although it is not anchored in the tendentious formations of the text--and indeed it appears to sublimate them--this versatility does obliquely touch upon the tendentious design. The first bird image of the book is a slight glance at Bede's comparison of the life of Man with the flight of a sparrow: Sparrows flew by belts that ran from lathes on floor up to shafting above by skylights. (p. 3) "... when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter's day with your thanes and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry' world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing... " 31 this ----'---_1 The epigraph to the novel is only a concise version of analogy in the perfected form of a double-barrelled question: "As these birds would go where so where would this child go? " And the-very title of Living is paraphrastic of the "present life of man on earth". The same combination of bird and child,. with bad weather, is the melodramatic hinge of Lily's dream, which covers a vista--literally a 'bird's eye view'-- of industrial life: Yes, and blackbird fled across that town flying crying and made noise like noise made by ratchet. Yes and in every house was mother with her child and that was grey and that fluttered hands and then that died, in every house died those children to women. Was low wailing low in her ears. (p. 108) 31 A History the English Church People, tr. Leo of and Sherley-Price (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 127.  48 The weird pungency of the whole passage seems to confer with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of dream visions, and its formal miniaturism is of the same order as Bede's little parable. Giorgio Melchiori considers that Green's bird imagery "reaches at times the intensity of a symbol, but-lacks all 32 is true, precision of reference and consistency". This but the flight of birds in Living should be approached in the spirit of augury, where consistency is otiose; it calls rather for a method of reading which is organized around the anomalous, and the inadjistable. The only common factor in the repertoire is the bird in flight,. on the wing, rejecting solidity for'weightlessness; there is consistency here, consistency with the example set once again by Lawrence, whose "Preface to the American Edition of New Poems" (1920) has a wholesale devotion to the preoccupying imagery of Livin : The bird is on the wing in the winds, flexible to every breath, a living spark in the storm, its very flickering depending upon its supreme mutability and power of change. Whence. such a bird came; whither. it goes; from what. solid earth, it rose up, and upon ., what solid it will its, wings . earth close and settle, this is not the question. This is a question of before and after. Now, now,. the bird is on the wing in the winds. 33 Lawrence reproduces the tension of "whence" and "whither" used by Bede in order to defuse it. But the attraction to vast scales of time in itself gives a kind of infinite backing to the "now"; Lawrence is concerned for an eternal 32. Melchiori, op. cit., p. 193. 33 "Preface to the American Edition New Poems", . of collected in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1936), p. 222.  49 now, and the time-sense in and of his text refers to a temporality which simply flows over the text, sweeping away all questions of distribution and equilibration. Living, on the other hand, is closer to Gertrude Stein's requirements for a continuous present; when its epigraph reappears in the body of the text, it is in immediate proximity to a Stein-like procedure: Is nothing wonderful in migrating birds but when we see them we become muddled in our feeling, we think it so romantic they should go so far, far. Is nothing wonderful in a woman carrying but Mrs. Eames was muddled in her feeling by it. As these birds would go where so where would this child go? (p. 246) The method of "beginning and beginning again" is precisely what takes the text out of eternity and into history. And the'Lawrentian crusade makes extraneous use of a bird imagery which Living incorporates with such thoroughness that its recurrence is the medium for presenting the text with its own history; the historic present of itself. The increasingly independent dilatations of the text suddenly contract to the same space in the final scene: When he came back he put grain onto hood of the pram and one by one pigeon fluttered off the roof onto hood of this pram. As. they did so they fluttered round heads of those people in the yard, who kept heads very still. (p. 269) Purely in terms of its own'textuality, the book appears to finish on a contradiction; the textual inertia of motherhood is contraposed to the textual volatility of birds. The transubstantiation of a desire for change into an audacious metaphor is overtaken by the articulation of a more complacent sense, which can rely on the conventions of the novel for its superior intelligibility. On balance,  50 Living fails to provide a satisfactory solution of its problems; indeed, its epigraph asks an insoluble question. But Green has discovered in the process of writing a new textuality, less conventionally readable, which he was to struggle to develop over the seven or more years that went to the making of Party Going. 4  CHAPTER II Party Goin :A Border-line Case ac W R,  52 He has said that his third book, Part Going, required nine or ten beginnings and became the novel hardest to write. ý 1 The difficulty involved in writing this book corresponds to a certain stubbornness of texture which is the striking feature of any reading. The opening pages which bear the final brunt of "nine or ten beginnings" seem to overtax the resources of a 'novel; -we read with a hypnotized exposure to details, to an irreversible definiteness, which at first sight seems to communicate little more than the strength of a cryptic determination: For Miss Fellowes, as they soon saw, had drawn up her sleeves and on the now dirty water with a thin wreath or two of blood, feathers puffed up and its head sideways, drowned along one wing, lay her dead pigeon. Air just above it was dizzy with a little steam, for she was doing what she felt must be done with hot water, turning her fingers to the colour of its legs and blood. (p. 9) The deliberate attentiveness of the writing ought to reward a deliberate attentiveness of reading with a corresponding degree of purposed meaning. But the accepted _ means to achieve semantic cohesion--to condense these vaporous meanings--are used with a complete inadvertence. The organized weight of interpretation is forced into a startling texture which changes its line of pursuit, diverts it from "knowledge: She turned and she went back to where it had fallen and again looked up to where it must have died for. it was still warm and, everything unexplained, she turned once more into the tunnel back to the station. (p. 7) 1 John Russell, "There It Is", Kenyon Review 26, (Summer 1964), p. 443.  53 An obsession with motive is replaced by a4 fascination with narrative where everything is "unexplained". On the other hand, there is an intense preoccupation with motif, which is perverse, since it does not inform any method of integrating 0 but generates incomprehension effects a rising as the writing returns with an awkward persistence to the imagery of this incident: "If he was a bird, " he said, "he would not last long. " (p. 64) "Go on if you like and pick up some bird, alive or dead. " (p. 159) That is what it is to be rich, he thought, if you are held up, if you have to wait then you can do it after a-bath in your dressing gown and if you have to die then not as-any bird tumbling dead from its branch... (p. 195) Lying in his arms, her long eyelashes down along her cheeks, her hair tumbled and waved, her hands drifted to rest like white doves drowned on peat water... (p. 226) In each case the image of a dead bird is superfluous; the I- bird is a kind of negative counterpart to the albatross in .. "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere". Both of these birds appear suddenly out of afog: At length did cross an Albatross, 'Thorough the Fog it came; 2 Fog. was so dense, bird that had been-disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead,. at her feet. --(p. 7) In the poem the Mariner shoots the albatross, and so precipitates a narrative of guilt depending on a final redemption., This determined-zcheme, which culminates in 2, '*Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere", Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett & A. R. Jones (Edinburgh: Constable, 1965), p. 12.  54 the explosion of 'truth', is reversed by Party'Goin ; with the pigeon already dead, "it did seem only a pious thing to pick it up" (p. 25). Miss Fellowes's impulse is equivalent to 'blessing it unaware'--the spontaneous compassion which brings redemption to the Mariner. But in Party Gbing the pigeon becomes a morbid threat from this point onward, and a pattern of reference is developed to reject the-implied ambition of Christian narrative, to revoke its solution and expose a problematic of crisis and questioning. The poem includes a competition between "LIFE-IN-DEATH" and her "Pheere"; the Mariner is followed by the spirit "from the land of mist and snow" and hears two voices. Miss Fellowes holds an imaginary argument with the waitress who was indifferent to her: "It might have been an argument with death" (p. 125). She has a "familiar spirit" in the house detective who can employ a bewildering range of accents and-_...,, who also appears to have a special relationship with death: "And as he talked of death his speech relapsed into some dialect. of his own" (p. 205). The dead bird is robbed of its interpretational value and returns the narrative to an ("As idle / "). 3 impasse as a painted Ship Upon a painted ocean. The formulation is., an apt one in the context of a highly "3 artificial portrait of the 'idle party'. A parallel with the ship on the ocean is enforced by the crowd which converges on the station: ""Now they came out in ones and threes and now a flood was coming out and spreading into streets round. "(p. 14). Julia leans over "stagnant water", which is like the "slimy sea" of the poem, and sees three seagulls: "She thought those gulls were for the sea they were to cross that evening. "(p. 19). It seems appropriate that the wedding guest is 'party going' when he is stopped, and the narrative condition is given prominence: "The wedding guest he beat his breast, / Yet he cannot chuse but hear. "  55 The 'party' is unable to 'go' because the train has been immobilized by fog. The pigeon is comparably inert; like the albatross around the neck of the Mariner, it is a dead weight, 'burdening the narrative so that its removal brings a similar sense of relief: "She felt better at once... she thought how wonderful it's gone, I feel quite strong again" (p. 12). But unlike the albatross the pigeon is immediately retrieved, -and the measure of guilt implicit in the literary reference is not confined to an individual but transferred into a general unease: "Few people passed her, and they did not look up, as if they also were guilty"(p. 16). Instead of destroying a bird, Miss Fellowes (as the embodiment of her name) has demonstrated a 'fellow feeling', and it is this characteristic which makes her a dead weight on the hands of the party. Their response to every such liability is exemplified by Julia when she chooses to ignore a screaming--.. __' woman in the crowd: "'After all, " she said, "one must not . hear too many cries for help in this world"' (p. 100). ' The indefinite pronoun is chillingly impersonal. 'Fellow feeling' becomes an issue projected into class.. division; the crowd can encourage a harmony and spontaneity: "No it's fellow feeling that's what I like about it. Without so much as a by your leave when she sees- hankering after a bit of comfort? God bless someone 'er, she gives it him, not like some little bitches I could name, " he darkly said, looking up and over to where their hotel room would be. (p. 162) Thomson, who has just received a spontaneous kiss from a contrasts this example of "fellow feeling" complete stranger, the behaviour of members of the party; for Julia and with Angela, kissing is chiefly a means of regulating social  56 relations: "As for Julia she had kissed Max to keep him sweet so to speak, and so, in one way, had miss Crevy kissed her young man" (p. 115). Among the members of the party there is no question even of class loyalty-- far from being attentive to each other's needs they often simply do not listen to each other: "She looked round and saw her husband was not listening... And then, more embarrassing still, she realized 'Amabel was not listening" (pp. 141-2). The extreme to which this indifference can lead is shown by mention of a past incident when Julia herself had fainted and Max had left her to her own devices. Alex rejects any sense of community: "not that even if it did mean fellow feeling" (p. 195). Kissing is no longer a pleasure shared -but the quintessential act of insecurity: "Is it gold? " she said, putting her hands up to it. "It is, " he said and coming to sit by her on the stool in front of that looking glass he lightly kissed-,, the hair _ above her ear. As he did this he looked into the glass to see himself doing it because he was in that state when he thought it incredible that he should be so lucky to be kissing someone so marvellous. (p. 127) This narcissistic apprehension is shadowed by a more general testing of the significations of the body; and the particular focus of this general mood is on the illness of Miss Fellowes, which-persists for the length of the novel. Illness, as a means of articulating social complexities, is pressed into service again and again in the writing of the-Thirties; indeed, the intellectual history of the time can hardly be separated from the theoretical course of psychoanalysis and related studies. Kenneth Burke,. writing on literary form in 1941, summarizes a decade of finding  57 out the implications of symptomatology: The accumulating lore on the nature of "psychogenic illnesses" has revealed that something so "practical" as a bodily ailment may be a "symbolic" act on the part of the body which, in this materialization, dances a corresponding state of mind, reordering the glandular and neural behaviour of the organism in obedience to mind-body correspondences, quite as the formal dancer reorders his externally observable gesturing to match his attitudes. 4 At the beginning of the decade, in The Orators (1932), Auden included a "Letter to a Wound" to be read as the sign of political crisis. The founder of psychosomatic medicine, Georg Groddeck, had maintained in an essay published in 1925,. that "the meaning of illness is the warning 'do not continue living as you intend to do'... the patient is out to test every one of the doctor's measures for its usefulness towards its object of remaining ill. "5 The need for a change of regime, both physical and political, is The Orators its imperative 6 what gives consistently mood. The sociality of illness had also been demonstrated in Kafka's Metamorphosis (published in translation in 1933). In Kafka's story, the family of the patient develop an increasing self-reliance conditional--on the death-of the patient, but in Party Going, the problem is unresolved; the argument would run that Miss Fellowes remains ill because she reveals her unconscious in being ill, she has 4 Kenneth Burke, The Phi°lbsophy of Literary Form. Studies in symbolic action. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941), pp. 10-11. 5 Georg Groddeck, "The Meaning of Illness", re-printed in The-Meaning of Illness, Selected Psychoanalytic Writings, tr. Gertrud Mander, (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), p. 199. 6 On is p. 72 of Party Going there a catalogue of illnesses with a general effect on the constitution.  58 an interest in remaining ill to warn of a danger: If it is true that the meaning of illness is among other things a warning of danger, then the question is what is this danger that is common to all mankind. Everybody will think of the inescapable danger, death. 7 In Party Going, death has a kind of regional presence; it is a substratum into which the writing periodically strays or intrudes. The fog is more than once a "pall" or "appalling" as it hangs over the luggage which is "like" an exaggerated grave yard" filled with "mourners" or "the dead resurrected in their clothes". Alex and Julia feel compelled to imagine ä state of death: "he likened what he saw to being dead and thought of himself as a ghost driving through streets of the living" (p. 37); "what they saw was like a view from the gibbet" (p. 87). The emphasis here is not on the absence of the grave but on a haunted awareness, the anxiety of purgatory--the fear of a thresh- hold: "She thought it was like an enormous doctor's waiting room and that it would be like that when they were all dead and waiting at the gates. "(p. 59). What Julia feels is a. sense of vulnerability before the impending. verdict, a quite precise form of uncertainty which would seem to have been endemic. throughout the Thirties. At the . start of The Orators Auden gives a diagnosis of society which makes-use of a comparison with Dante: In the second book of this poem, which describes Dante's visit to Purgatory, the sinners are divided into three main groups, those who have been guilty 7 Groddeck, p. 200  59 in their life of excessive love towards themselves or their neighbours, those guilty of defective love towards God and those guilty of perverted love. 8 Here again the crucial issue is 'fellow feeling' and its violation, which in Party Going takes the form of sexual intrigue: "You know that thing of making up to someone else -- so as to make the one you really care about more mad. about you" (p. 94). Any sexual relationship is thought provisional; it is an arrangement to be manipulated, invariably by the use of a third party. Angela uses Alex to make Robin jealous, and. Amabel does the Alex Max. 9 same with and 8 W. H. Auden, The Orators, in The English Auden: ' Poems., Essays, 'and Dramatic Writings, '1'927=1939,. ed. Edward Mendelson, (London: 1977), p. 62. -Faber, 9-An joke is constructed elaborate on the number three. Whenever an 'arbitrary' number is called for, it is always determined as three: "in ones and threes", "three seagulls", "under the clock.. there were three", "every third person", "at that three things happened", "three sitting rooms", --, ý "three men", "if I whistle three times", "three people", '` - "three deep", "these three bits", and although there are two hotel porters, Max believes there are three. See Bruno Bettelheim on the significance of this choice, .in The Uses of Enchantment: the leaning 'and 'Importance 'of Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978): Three is a mystical and often a holy number, and was so long before the Christian doctrine of the Holy - Trinity. It is the threesome of snake, Eve, and Adam which, according to the Bible, makes for carnal knowledge. In the unconscious,, the number-three stands for sex, because each sex has three visible sex characteristics: penis and the two testes in the male; vagina and the two breasts in the female. The number three stands in the unconscious for sex . in the -also a quite different way, as it symbolizes oedipal-situation with its deep involvement of three persons with one another--relations which, as the story of "Snow White" among many others shows, are more than tinged with sexuality... Thus, three s3fi^bolizes a search for, who one is biologically (sexually), and who one is in relation to the most important persons in one's life. Broadly put, three symbolizes the search for one's personal and one's social identity. From his visible sex characteristics and through his relations to his parents and siblings, the child must learn with whom he ought to identify as he grows up, and who is suitable to become his life's companion, and with it also his sexual partner. (pp. 219-220)  60 I The mythical Embassy Richard--another third party to Max and ': Amabel--is nothing if not the embodiment of intrigue based on secrecy and guilt: He did not shake, he pressed as thcugh to make secrets he would never keep, as thoughto embrace each private thought you had and to let you know he shared it with you and would share it again with anyone he met. As against this, when he spoke it was never to less than three people. It may have been tact, or that he was circumspect, but he paid no attention to Amabel. '.. (p. 254) The second of three pictures in one of the party's hotel rooms is. an image for the loose, shifting trianges of sexual involvement: Another was one of those reproductions of French eighteenth-century paintings which showed a large bed with covers turned back and half in, half out of it a fat girl with fat legs sticking out of her nightdress and one-man menacing and another disappearing behind curtains. (p. 92) The use of a partition is extensive; both Robin and Alex the door 'ý-ý, 1 wait on outside of a closed which obstructs _._, knowledge: "When Alex came to an end she had not properly heard what he had been saying so she said something almost under her breath, or so low that he in his turn should not catch what she had said, but so that it would be enough to tell him she was listening" (p. 172). The partition is there to revoke knowledge, to restore the state of incomplete- ness or ignorance: "'Oh, but they'll come up here and be dirty and violent, " and she hung her handkerchief over her lips and spoke through it like she was talking into the next room through a curtain. "They'll probably try and kiss us'or something"' (p. 235). To ward off the kiss of knowledge, Julia interposes a threshold beyond which it is  61 forbidden to pass, like the original veto on the apple: "He could not hold that kiss she had given him as it might be an apple in his hand to turn over while he made up his mind to bite" (p. 203). Sex is a 'fall' into knowledge and mortality--"He stood in front of her and she fixed him with her eyes which drew him like the glint a hundred feet beneath and called on him to"throw himself over" (p. 215)-- a fall which is self-destructive, combining the desire for knowledge with. a simultaneous need to suppress that knowledge in oblivion. This double meaning is at the heart of psychoanalytic and psychosomatic theory: If-there really is a fear of death and it exists universally, then there must be a longing for also death univeiaýa lly; for fear is a wish, a repressed wish... The (reeks, who were better at understanding the It than we are, gave the God of Death the same features as the God of Love... In reality we die when we love; our personality is wiped out-in these rare moments of life... man has a longing for death because he longs for love, and a longing for love because he craves death, the mother's womb... after the union the man is no longer male, -but child; he buries himself in the woman's lap... And illness, the meaning of illness, is this death wish-and love fear, love wish and death fear. 10 Party Going maintains-the punning sense of this 'burying in the woman's lap'; as well as giving access to what-is dead, -.it incorporates a recession of cavities. The train is relinquished in favour'of the enclosing vault with its entrance tunnels; ä damp and sticky fog which surrounds the warm, comforting hotel. The journey with a destination is replaced by a wandering through corridors, up and down stairs, in and out of rooms and into tunnels. The only 10 Groddeck, pp. 200-201.  62 travelling is done by Miss Fellowes--"She looked as if she had been travelling" (p. 244) --and this happens 'inside her own body. The crowd is "like those illustrations you saw in weekly papers, of corpuscles in blood, for here and there narrow stream of people shoved and moved. in lines. three -a deep and where they did this they were like veins" (p. 86). The station is an arterial labyrinth whose perspective- as in The Castle, The Trial and The Burrow, of Kafka-- recedes to an inner sanctum. This regressive movement is repeated everywhere in Party Going; a "guardian" is needed for the underground lavatory, "and those stairs had LADIES lit up over them" (p. 8), where Miss-Fellowes fills a basin with hot water to rinse the blood from her pigeon. The 'innermost' room of the hotel is where Miss Fellowes lies on her bed, -attended by "those nannies, like the in Greek (p. 72). (The bed is like an altar-- ýý-- chorus plays" --I the focus of the curving, hollow structure of the Greek theatre. ) It seems unlikely that the book is not complicit with psychoanalytic theory: She was in a long hall with hidden lighting and, for ornament, a vast chandelier with thousands of- - fglass drops and rather dirty., It was full of people and-those who had found seats, which were all of them too low, lay with blank faces as if exhausted and, if there was anything to hope for, as though they had lost hope. Most of them were enormously fat. One man there had a cigar in his mouth, and then she saw he had one glass-eye, and in his hand he had a box of matches which now and again he would bring up to his cigar. Just as he was about to strike his match he looked round each time and let his hands drop back to his lap, his match not lighted. Those standing in talked low and were bent there was groups rather and a huge illuminated clock they all kept looking at. Almost every woman was having tea as if she owned the whole tray of it. Almost every man had a dispatch , filled daily newspapers. She thought it case with was like an enormous doctor's waiting room and that it would be like that when they were all dead and waiting at the gates. (p. 59)  63 The long hall with "hidden lighting" is like the darkness of the womb. Psychoanalytic theory suggests that there is vision in the womb, but no eyesight--the eyes are "for ornament"; the glass eye and the glass drops are redundant because vision is not 'outsideLinwards' but'inside-outwards' like that of the .'seer', whose eyesight is repressed to cut the inessential, in to 11 out order analyse a, predicament. The hall is "an enormous doctor's waiting room", outside the inner sanctum where Miss Fellowes lies sick; it combines the idea of suspension before birth with the purgatorial aspect present in the exhaustion and hopelessness of the passengers. The people standing are "rather bent" as if, confined by the womb; as the embryo grows there is an increasing awareness that 'the time will come' and hence the "huge illuminated clock". Infantile theories of pregnancy--"most of them were enormously fat"--are coupled with the denial of sexuality; the man who fails to light his cigar is like a screen memory which repeats the imagery of sexual' arousal to censor it guiltily ("he looked round , each time"). - Moving slightly beyond the quoted passage, this censor- ,. ship is projected, in the sealing of the hotel entrance which, although it has "RECEPTION lit up over it" (p. 56), is converted to an "impenetrable entrance" (p. 61). Both foetal and purgatorial aspects are combined in the notion of "waiting at the gates". 11 Repressed vision had been associated with Oedipal guilt in Green's first novel, Blindness.  64 In an essay published in Some Versions*of Pastoral in 1935, William Empson had analysed "The Rime'of the Ancyent Marinere"'in the context of arguing the synthesis of "unusually intellectual with unusually primitive ideas; thought about the conditions of knowledge with a magical idea that the the by thought". 12 adept controls external world The crucial text for Empson is "The Garden" by Marvell, and in an examination of Marvell's symbolization of the mind as an ocean, he had made emphatic use of psychoanalysis: "On the Freudian view of-an Ocean, withdraws would make this repose in Nature a return to the womb. "13 Psychosomatic theory also conceives of the sea as "the mother symbol of all human beings" (Groddeck). And in Party Going, the' feeling which is "common to all of them" is' a longing to return to the sea: -But when it was fine and you sat on the terrace for dinner looking over a sea of milk with a sky fainting into dusk with the most delicate blushes--Oh: she cried in her heart, if only we could be there now. (p. 72) 12 William Empson, "Marvell's Garden",, ' in. Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935), p. 120. 13 Empson, "The , p. 128. See the relevant stanza of Garden": _ Meanwhile the mind, from pleasures less, Withdraws into its happiness: The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find, Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas, Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade. Andrew-Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 101.  " 65 The sea is inextricably connected with the mother's bounty of blood and milk, and the reversion to this memory is covert and guilty since it is a relapse from knowledge: If they did not mention it, it was why they were in this hotel room and there was not one of them, except of course for Miss Fellowes and the nannies who did not every now and again most secretly revert to it. (p. 72) Fluid security is found in a number of annexes, in several images of containment. Behind closed doors, Amabel makes a ritual of, her hot bath, and this oblivious amniotic comfort is what Julia reverts to: "her feeling was just what she had when in a hot bath so exactly right she could not bear to wonder even" (p. 151). For Max the ideal woman the warm, fluid, encompassing female--"When they had _is been together she had warmed him every side" (p. 176)--under the influence of which he "had come back to them, 'unseeing... his thoughts hatching up out of sleep" (p. 176, my emphasis). Even the fog "came out of the sea", to become "dim whirling waters" inside the station. The subject of centripetal forces, Miss Fellowes withdraws into her own body which she imagines as a violent sea that sweeps her from head to foot: As this tumulus advanced the sea below would rise, most menacing and capped with foam, and as it came nearer she could hear the shrieking wind in throbbing through her ears. She would try not to turn her eyes down to where rising waves broke over rocks as the nearer. that black mass advanced so fast the sea rose little was left between her and those and ate up what Each time this scene was repeated she wild waters. then it was menacing and she felt so frightened, and into'her throbbed as it was all forced unbearably, head; it she thought each time the was so menacing  66 pressure was such her eyes would be forced out of her head to let her blood out. (p. 76) A tumulus is the perfect image of a chamber to indicate -the symbolic relationship of the sea-womb with death. A representative image of birth trauma is superimposed with the attempt to undo that birth: to replace the outside-inwards inside-outwards 14 (in the sight with the original vision. very last stage of revising his text, Green had deleted the sentence, "Alex wondered could Miss Fellowes be having a baby, and then he wondered if she would not be too old for that". )15 The illness comes in waves--"She waged war with storms of darkness which rolled up over her in a series, like tides summoned by a moon" (p. 72)--which the infant observer would relate to the loud breathing of desire. The notion of the soul as the inspiration of breath is conventional, and in the description of Amabel--"under --., softly beaten wings of her breathing" (p. 176), and "breathing : -, like seagulls settled on the water" (p. 226)--it rejoins the Christian imagery of "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere" where the albatross is "an it were a Christian Soul", and of "'The Garden" (although Marvell takes a Platonic route to the Christian figure): I 14 John Haye's epileptic fit in Blindness: cf. -"it was as if there were something straining behind his eyeballs to get out" (p. 252). 15 British Library Loan 67/2 consists of: (A), one complete typescript with manuscript corrections and additions; (B), pp. 1-62 of an earlier typescript with manuscript . entitled Going In A Party; and a few assorted corrections to a very early plan of the novel-- manuscript pages relating to which the group of friends actually arrives in according by the Chapter Two. The the South of France start of sentence I have quoted is from TS(A), p. 90.  67 My soul into the boughs does glide; There like a bird it sits and sings, Then whets, and combs its silvery wings; And, till prepared for longer flight, - Waves_in its plumes the various light. Empson in his commentary on this passage employs'a selection of terms which surface intact in Party Goin : The bird is the dove of the Holy Spirit and carries a suggestion of the rainbow of the covenant. 16 Then three seagulls flew through that span on which she stood and that is what happened one of the first times she first met him, doves had flown under a bridge where she had been standing when she had stayed away last summer. She thought those gulls were for the sea they were to cross that evening. (p. 19) Although the doves are here transformed as seagulls, Julia forgets this later on and "thought they had been doves and so was comforted: " (p. 161). The span of the bridge repeats the arc of the rainbow, which is 'arc-en-ciel"' in French.. and referred to later as "that promise of the birds which had flown under the arch" (p. 151). 17 The ship which she, expects to board in the evening recalls the. Ark of the covenant. This cluster of symbols is familiar enough, apart from its allocation here; but if we take into account the date of the essay (and the fact that the novel "required nine or ten beginnings"), the close attention it pays to "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere" and a keen interest in Freudian theory, it may look like something more than an accident, when Empson roots his argument in a reading of 16 Empson, p. 127 17 In version of the quoted passage, the an earlier doves "do that through an arch" (TSCB], p. ll)..  68 the couplet, Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade. because the essay goes on with an exhaustive account of twenty-four occurrences of greenness in the work of Marvell. If a dependence on the poem might seem over-determined, the relationship between the novel and the essay is 18 The from concerted. most striking co-ordinates arise Marvell's connection of greenness with oceans--which gives it a magical security--and with mirrors and the partial knowledge of the mind. It is as well to remember at this point that Green is a pseudonym, the writer's real name being Henry Vincent Yorke. In other words, Green has once more been able to motivate his own name. In the text of the novel, the word 'green' attracts the notions of containment, fluidity, and reflection: Electric lights had been lit by now, fog still came in by the open end of this station, below that vast green vault of glass roof with every third person smoking it might all have looked to Mr Roberts, ensconced in his office away. above, like November sun striking through mist rising off water. (p. 28) . The most radical interaction is indicated by the phrase "green thought" which might be a compressed example of Green's. own practice; Empson brings out the palpability of this figure: - The sea if calm reflects everything near it: the, mind as knower is a conscious mirror... the unconscious is 18 It is feasible that the essay provides even the names of-the two most neurotic characters--Julia and Alex-- in the following citation: Only for him no cure is found,, Whom Juliana's Eyes do wound-. ............... every Mower's wholesome heat Smelled like an Alexander's sweat.  69 unplumbed and pathless, and there is no instinct so strange among the beasts that it lacks its fantastic echo in the mind. In the first version thoughts are shadows, in the second (like the green thought) they are as solid as what-they image; and yet they still correspond to something in the outer world, so that the poet's intuition is comparable to pure knowledge. 19 By an element of surprise the similes of Party Going "are as solid as what they image"; the simile is already a lateral investment in language, but in Party Going it takes on a desultory extravagance, a manifest deviance away from the context: So that to be with her was for Angela as much as it might be for a director of the Zoo to be taking his okapi for walks in leading strings for other zoologists to see or, as she herself would have put it, was being grand with grand people. (p. 140) -it It becomes almost impossible to return to the'context of this figure without exerting some degree of force; and so the writing goes on, seeming to define itself'by the width of its gap between discursive relations and representational'-''-, '__ reference: Aromatic steam as well from her bath salts so that if her"maid had been a negress then Amabel's*eyes might have shone like two humming birds in-the tropic airs , she glistened in. - (p. 154) These two screamed now like rats smelling food when they have been starved in empty milk churns. (p. 178) Empson interprets the couplet as combining "the idea of the conscious mind, including everything because understanding it, and that. of the unconscious animal nature, including everything because in harmony with it. "20 In this double 19 Empson, p. 125. 20 Empson, p. 119.  70 articulation is the history of difference. Representation is perspectival--based on the eyesight it confirms the distancing of the conscious mind from its environment, and it suppresses the memory of interaction with the environ- ment, blots out that history which is continually present in the unconscious. The collapse of representational depth allows an entry to the dialectic of "harmony" and "understanding", and its collateral expression of nostalgia for unity with the assertion of difference. As a foil to what Empson refers to as "the Orpheus idea, that by delight in nature when terrible man gains strength to control it", Party Going includes the illustration of another musician who is futile in the face of nature when terrible: One of these was of Nero fiddling while Rome burned, , He stood to his violin on a marble terrace. and ý`'-- eight fat women reclined on hattresses" In front while -- behind was what was evidently a great conflagration. (p. 92) The picture of irresponsible privilege, and. flirtation set against an apocalyptic background, invites comparison with- Max. He is prone to merge his identity with "Amabel's'in the attempt to retrieve an original harmony, to reunite- with the. mother, he made himself breathe with her -"as breathing,. as he-always did when she was in his arms to try and be more with her" (p. 225). The decisive point of consciousness must be the actuality of division; and the unconscious will form a neurosis to protect: itself and withdraw. to a stage before division: "Illness is the the wish to be small, to be given help, to expression of  71 have a mother, to be blameless". 2'1 The fascination with a threshold includes this manoeuvre within its scope; as a compulsive repetition of the awareness of division, its concentration on what is constituted as 'unseen" because it is implicitly known, is like a sophistication of the` principle behind the child's game of 'see-saw', which could be an unconscious dramatization of the separation from the mother. There are several marks of infantility among the characters Party Going. 22 Miss Fellowes drinks the because of whisky she remembers having it as a small child after hunting, and this is what motivates the bizarre image of her on an antelope between rows of giant cabbages, because "she was having a perfectly serene dream that she was riding home, on an evening after hunting" (p. 104). The unconscious does not recognize any age differences: "But the voice asked why she had washed it and she felt like when she was ß(p. 126). very small and had a dirty dress" Alex's voice goes up to a higher pitch, like a child's, when he feels he is about to be penalised. After the early death of his mother, to whom he had been "simply devoted"' he-grows timid before the opposite. sex: "she was probably extremely powerful. and he always had thought women were more powerful 21 Groddeck, p. 200 22 In. Freudian analysis the house is ,a symbol of the woman's body: an association which surfaces in the popular notion of the windows as the eyes of a house; the hotel has "lidded windows" (p. 145) and there may be a reference to the infantile theory of sexuality in the fact that Miss Fellowes is carried up "the back way" (p. 59).  72 than men" (p. 191). The importance of 'fellow feeling' to this complex is clear when at the end of the book Julia sinks into the memory of a childhood happiness provided by Miss Fellowes. Robert shares with Julia a childhood fantasy concerning a patch of bamboo ("asparagus really"): When small he had found patches of bamboo in his parents' garden and it was his romance at that time to force through them; 'they grew so thick you could not see what temple might lie in ruins just beyond. 23 His imagination of a buried treasure in the heart of a maze-like undergrowth conforms to the obsessional image of sepulture in a labyrinth, while Julia buries in the same spot a number of objects which have no meaning apart from their very secrecy. These are her "charms" which are complementary symbols of the sexual organs--a wooden pistol and a hollow egg painted with red rings containing three 24 little ivory elephants. Their burial has a dual purpose: ---..,, ___ censorship (sex is a 'secret' which everyone knows about, while the knowledge of it is a 'white elephant') in the form of re-entry to. the womb. The charms are directly linked with her mother ("of course"): "I don't know how I first got them, " she said, for she was not going to tell anyone ever that it was her mother, of course, who had given them to her and who had died when she was two years old. (p. 108) 23(p. 47) See Green's autobiography, Pack My Bag: "We could not often go to this place and when we did it was as if to an assignation, a lost world stretching back to the time we were children and had a corner in the shrubbery which we had made ours, behing where Poole used to: burn dead leaves" (p. 141). 1 24 See'Pack MY Baca: "I had gone for this odd hat which I had painted in alternate rings of red and yellow" (p. 111). In an earlier version, the collection of charms had included "two glass eyes" (MS).  73 And she relies upon them completely: "it would be hopeless to go without them. "(p. 18). In a childhood incident when the wind, caught in the umbrella she was holding, had seemingly lifted her "as far as from cliffs into the sea" (p. 110. my italics) the only thing saving her from this experience of flight (another common symbol for sex) had been the hollow egg. Without it she is too nervous to use the hotel lift. The bamboo patch is the last moment before knowledge, and hence Julia's fixation with her charms; they represent knowledge at the same time as the pretence not to know, - just as the text diagnoses the novel as a fetichistic process--faced with irrational drives it constructs a reasoned alibi, it replaces the dissipation of meaning with of compatibilities. The individual "who could not a system or would not light his cigar" (my italics) demonstrates the ambivalent motive of the fetish. Robert's. apparent precognition of Miss Fellowes, a subliminal recognition producing an involuntary reference, is like the compulsion to narrativize. Just as the rules of narrative are sub- liminal, so we involuntarily read every situation in terms of narrative. The conditions of narrative are made Party Going evinces a certain willingness to prominent; when all its characters are assembled: "So now at proceed last of this party is in one place, and, even if they all have not yet all of them come across each other, their, baggage is collected in the Registration Hall" (p. 39).  74 It is the novel itself which is in the Registration Hall, observing the rules of a narrative contract by which the text is the only site of certain correlations; it establishes special relations which exist only for the duration of the text. - The first word in the novel is "Fog", which spreads through the entire book, providing an image of opacity which stands for a continuous metaphoric expansion which the text contains. Fog has a symbolic presence almost identical to that in Bleak House through the obstruction of 'fellow feeling' and the 'deadlock' of fully comprehensible 25 Both different kinds of diffuse narrative. novels employ syntax: Where hundreds of thousands she could not see were now going home, their day done, she was only starting out and there was this difference that where she had been nervous of her journey and of starting, so that she said she would rather go on foot to the station to walk it off, she was frightened now. (p. 16) We expect. "this difference" to supply more information about the difference between "hundreds of thousands... going home" who "was instead of which it and Julia only starting out"; refers to a change in her own state: "where she had been nervous... she was frightened now". The usual method of guided invention by which we make sense of a narrative relies directness and coherence, but here the syntax upon is involute and oblique, and our small constructions of knowledge are shaken apart by a constant obscurity of reference, which loses us: It 25 bears comparison with the lowering winter also weather of The Castle, its callous officials and narrative contradictions.  75 As a path she was following turned this way and that round bushes and shrubs that hid from her what she would find she felt she would next come upon this fog dropped suddenly down to the ground, when she would be lost. (p. 16) The misleading path is reminiscent of the bamboo patch, which is difficult to penetrate (the diction of that passage is appropriate: "it was his romance at that time to force through them"). The text"is frequently punctuated with numerous images of obscurity and inaccessibility, the dispersion of focus: K In her silence and in seeming-, Xnapproachable it ... seemed to him she was not unlike ground so high, so remote it-had never been broken... that last'field of snow before any summit... (p. 144) 26 Through those lidded windows... there faintly whispered through to them in waves of sound as in summer when you are coming on a waterfall through woods and it is still unseen... (p. 149) Although those windows had been shut there was a continual dull roar came through them from outside, --,., and this noise sat upon those within like clouds upon a mountain so they were obscured and levelled and, as though they had been airmen, In danger of running" fatally into earth. (p. 175) At the junctures of dialogue the characters incessantly "lose track" or "change ground" or "lose the thread". Then there is the imposition of a barrier in the context of sexual intrigue; the text-is overwhelmingly coerced by a principle of interruption at the verge of knowledge. It joins the image-repertoire of the Thirties, transferring attention from the destination of a journey to its nature 26 See Pack a Bag: "But, we, a year or two past puberty... imagined women as one dreams at one's desk of a far country unvisited with all its mystery of latitude and place. "(p. 116)  76 as an obstacle-course: All-she wanted from him was something reasonable like a password which would take her along without humiliation past frontiers and into that smiling country their journey together would open in, their hearts as she hoped, the promised land. (p. 224), The frontier is negotiated, the fog dispelled, the object revealed, the destination reached, the sentence completed, the sense achieved, by a "password". By a "reasonable" passage to the referent, language would open up a perspective, travel a distance into the heart of meaning. The inter- position of a frontier is a sublimation of meaning, creating "thought about the conditions of knowledge" below the threshold of promised meaning. That the 'border' was a Thirties myth is apparent from a glance at the titles, On the Frontier (Auden and Isherwood), Journey to the Border (Upward), "Across the Border (unfinished novel by Graham Greene); the phrases "smiling country" and "promised land" are like the standard properties of a style based on what was most imitable in the characteristic work of Auden and those associated with him, Besides availing itself of the myths already in circula- tion, the text invents such additional figures as the Embassy Richard incident, is "discussed at length -which and sustained "in correspondence columns in everywhere" the Press" (p. 21). The entire effort to establish the - fact of the matter is itself the mythologizing process. also has a mythical status; her face is familiar -Amabel to "shop in Northern England" because she "had been girls by constant printed references as though it sanctified... what she looked like" (p. 145). was *of general concern  77 Myth has been characterized as the transmutation of what is historical into what is thought to be natural: In it, history evaporates. It is a kind of ideal servant: it prepares all things, brings them, lays them out, the master arrives, it silently disappears; all that is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from. 27 The representation of the relations between man and his ,. world is given. a normalized form: "There were in London at this time more than one hundred rooms identical with these" (p. 133). Max's and Amabel's flats are identical, and such . is the extent of mythologization that "in Hyderabad the colony knew the colour of her walls" (p. 14O). It is the re-presentation of these forms, by constant printed references, that makes them increasingly natural, until: "if their turns of phrase are similar and if their rooms done up by the. same firm and, when they are women, if ---ý`_ are they go to the. same shops, what is it makes them different, Evelyna asked herself" (p. 145). If "they" try to appear one another out of fear of seeming different, normal-to then Evelyna's train of thought is leading, towards an ironic misappropriation of the idea, of a 'taboo of personal-isolation', discussed by Freud:, Crawley, in terms that are hardly distinguishable from those employed by psychoanalysis, sets forth how each individual is separated from the others by. 'taboo of personal isolation' and that it is a precisely the little dissimilarities in. persons who are otherwise alike that arouse feelings of strange- ness and enmity between them. It would be tempting 27 Barthes, Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers, Roland (Frogmore: Paladin, 1973 p. L. 51. 1 .  78 to follow up this idea and trace back to this 'narcissism of small differences' the antagonism which in all human relations we sea successfully combating 'feelings of fel'löwship and the commandment of love towards all men. 28 Freud is considering how such taboos may be taken as evidence of a force that opposes 'fellow feeling' by rejecting the opposite sex as strange and threatening. Alex, who is impotent with women of his own class but not with Amabel's maid, considers that "there was a sort of bond between the sexes and with these people no more than that, only dull-antagonism otherwise" (p. 195); "these people" are the ones in the room--"that is what it is to be rich, he thought. " Evelyna puts much the same con- struction on the situation in answering her own question-- what makes them different is "money"; the "narcissism of small differences" is schematized as the outcome of social disparity, and in Party Going narcissism is absolutely associated with capital, ownership, nominalization. The central narcissistic image is that of Aiaabel in her bath; the walls are of looking-glass clouding over with steam, and through this opacity she scores her name. 29 An incident in her past has set the link between the name and ownership on a grotesque footing: "Even those who went to bed with 28 "The Taboo of Virginity", tr. Joan Sigmund Freud, Riviere, Collected Papers IV (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), p. 224, my emphasis. 29 While Green was a member of the Society at Eton, of Arts, a club of aesthetes dominated by Harold Acton and Brian Howard. According to one writer, "imagery of fishes, aquariums, and baths is dominant in all Harold Acton's imaginative work. It is clearly enough appropriate to his highly relaxed and contemplative kind of narcissism; the central experience it returns to is the sensual pleasure of lying in a bath. " Martin Green, Children of the Sun (London: Constable, 1977), p. 193.  79 her never were allowed to see her with no clothes on, because someone quite early in her life had carved his initials low on her back with an electric-light wire" (p. 155). Sexuality is based on relations of direct exchange; Am. abel is transformed into property: "looking down on her face which ever since he had first seen it had been his library, his gallery, his palace, and his wooded fields he began at last to feel content and almost that he owned her" (p. 226). Angela's face in a mirror "had its ticket and this had marriage written on it" (p. 197). 'Amabel gazes at the . reflection of her face through the written initial letter of her name--an emphasis which refers her narcissism back to its representational origin: She bent down to look at her eyes in the A her name began with, and as she gazed at them steam or her breath dulled her reflection and the blue her eyes were went out or faded. (p. 171) The single letter A is starkly reminiscent of Hester Prynne's "token of infamy"-in The Scarlet Letter, where - it stands primarily for 'adultery'--a suitable connotation in-view of Amabel's fondness for-sexual intrigue. The last sentence of Hawthorne's novel, "ON AFIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES", isFin point of fact a modification of the last line of Marvell's "The Unfortunate Lover's--"In a field a lover gules". 30 The poem actually includes sable an image of giving birth. in a stormy sea "as at the funeral of'the world". The disappearing A, with its hint of successively veiled texts, is thus an emblem of the 30 See Frank Kermode, The Classic (London: Faber'& Faber, 1975), p. 111.  80 importance of subliminal meanings. The "steam or her breath", which falls over the mirror as a screen, dissolves the illusion of the nominative and replaces one kind of perception (outside-inwards) with another (inside-outwards). Vision itself is construed as a gambit to gain control of the sexual identity of another. The ultimate power of the eye-- l"Oh d'you remember, " she went on, "that time we were out at Svengalo's"'(p. 182)--is hypnotism; like the sexual act itself it removes identity. Amabel's eyes intimidate Max; he shrinks from the kind of proletarian fellow feelings of Ed, "'It's her eyes enfold me and uphold me" was his gallant answer. '(p. 177), turning his gaze to 'Annabel's feet instead. What-he sees there is "remembered beauty". The foot can be the object of a fetish which crystallizes the moment when the inquisitive boy is on the point of glimpsing the woman's 'member' from below. "When the fetish comes to life, so to speak, some process has been suddenly interrupted--it reminds one of the abrupt halt made by memory in traumatic amnesia. "31 In Party Going, memories are summoned up to freeze or stabilize character, to 'buried' identity. 32 In the Julia "it unearth a case of was her part she had to play to evoke good times" (p. 198) and Max is reassured by the consistency of his own behaviour: 31 Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism" International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, IX part 2. April 1928, p. 163. 32 They establish a context of fixed relations which depends on strict contiguity: "They had all, except for Angela Crevy, been in that same party twelvemonths ago to the same place. " (p. 71, my italics). The spatial investment is part of the attempt to give memory a hard surface.  81 "Can't have it" he said cheerfully, as people do when they are living up to their own characters" (p. 189). But a converse practice of memory as a means of displacement is surmised in two generic sentences: Memory is a winding lane and as she went up it, waving them to follow, the first bend in it hid her from them and she was left to pick her flowers alone. Memory is a winding lane with high banks on which flowers grazand here she wandered in a nostalgic summer evening in deep soundlessness. (p. 198) 33 A generic sentence is one in which the speaker asserts the truth of the predicate in respect of all possible referents of the subject noun phrase; but here-the subject is repeated with variations to effect a de-stabilization of memory. The technique is similar to that of the memoryless -texts of Gertrude Stein--a diffraction of meaning which finds a visual counterpart in the prism: "He felt as though he was gazing into a prism, and he could see no end to it" (p. 127). Summary, which is the periodic reassertion of memory, is here made completely inept: "Now both Julia and Angela had kissed their young men when these had been cross, when Mr Adams had made off down in the station and when Max had stopped chasing Julia to sit in his chair" (p. 114). Any 'privileged' information is deliberately banal--"People, in their relations with one another, are continually doing similar things but never for similar reasons" (p. 114)--and its redundancy makes it phatic, with little meaning except the maintenance of the narrative contract. 33 See Pack ly Bag: "Every lane so it now seems was sunken, tufts of grass and wild flowers overhung our walks" (p. 42).  82 The novel is consecutive without rationale; out of a formal condition it develops the pressure of an absent narrative which it elaborates with a groundless precision: And this affected them, for if-they also had to engage in one of those tunnels to get to where they were going it was not for them simply to pick up dead birds and then wander through slowly. (p. 8) The narrative condition is very conspicuous, but the narrative purpose has been subtracted and replaced by a circumstantial purpose: Miss Crevy had hat-boxes and bags and if her young man was only there to see her off and hate her for going and if Miss Fellowes had no more to do than kiss her niece and wave goodbye, Miss Angela Crevy must find porters and connect with Evelyn Henderson, who was also going and who had all the tickets. (p. 8) This grammaticality is a deliberate imposture of grammar; the emphatic conditionals are purely technical--for her young man to see her off and for Miss Fellowes to kiss her niece are not the ostensible reasons. that Angela must find porters. - The subjunctive is weakly qualified; the ostensible reason that Angela must connect with Evelyn. Henderson-- because she had all the tickets--becomes only the casual inclusion in a relative clause. Even the conjunction is made to play a decisive role: Already both had been made to regret they had left such-and such a dress behind and it was because he felt it impossible to leave things as they were with Angela, it was too ludicrous that she should go off on that note, that kiss on his nose, he must explain, that Robin came back to apologize. (y. 29, my emphasis) In a standard grammatical conformation, we would extricate from this one sentence the submerged two which would normally shrink from contact. But the principle of  83 construction is not subordination but co-ordination, and even the logic of selecting the means of co-ordination (and or but? ) recedes: "Of course she did not know them well enough to say things of that kind he thought, ' and he was wrong" (p. 44, my italics). Peculiarities of syntax impede the allocation of contextual meaning, instances of which are supplanted by a persistent metonymic disorgani- zation: Fog darkened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they. stood and waited. (p. 199) This sentence with its mania for precision risks an unreasonable description of shoes, demonstrates the timidity of a conventional realism which aims to depict a world whose relation to language is assumed to have a finished form. This writing declares the work of language to be unfinished; it forces itself to ignore the rationale of literary conventions, preferring its own reality, which deposit 34 takes place with the rising of grammatical marks: As pavements swelled out under this dark flood so that if you had been ensconced in that, pall of fog, looking down below at twenty foot deep of night illuminated by street lamps, these crowded pavements would have looked to you as if for all the world they might have been conduits. (p. 14) If the ideal writing-is to suspend of representational disbelief in a three-dimensional picture of. reality,. this sentence is a paraphrase of that reality, and.: establishes its distance from such a delusion by pushing upýa rival set 34 is hotel off (and Although the completely sealed this fact is continually mentioned) Ariabel somehow manages to get in; the only available access is by way of fiction.  84 of dimensions; it aggravates the rules of its own economy, straining against the prescribed limits with a substantial inflexion, a design whose stress falls variably on the. generation of, different tenses and grammatical moods: the constant secretion of figures of speech: "an aeroplane high up drones-alternately loud then soft and low it is so high" (p. 149, my italics). This kind of productivity had perhaps been more apparent in The Orators than in any other English text of the Thirties; a brief glance at the Aiden text might help in defining the nature of Party Going's brinkmanship. The Orators is saturated with a competition of meanings, a massive display of contradiction:; its prodigality is an evasion of everything that it is not--a crushing simplicity. Critics who ask is it Fascist or not' miss the point, because the text is constructed on the very question of whether or not to be Fascist. The Orators is literally tantalized by Fascism. Its prolific surface shows a proclivity for subordinate noun phrases--the repression of the agency function founds a history of subjection. If the writing is in flight from a central dominion of meaning, -it does nevertheless present itself as under such a threat--that-of the universal submission to a single agency. This universality, 'turning towards one meaning', whether it be accepted or rejected, is precisely what is absent from the nomadic practice of a liminal text. Party Going has a distributive order:  85 Where ruins lie, masses of stone grown over with ivy unidentifiable with the mortar fallen away so that stone lies on stone loose and propped up or crumbling down in mass then as a wind starts up at dusk and stirs the ivy leaves and rain follows slanting down, so-deserted no living thing seeks what little shelter there may be, it is all brought so low, then movements of impatience began to flow across all these people and as ivy leaves turn one way in the wind they themselves surged a little here and there in their blind search behind bowler hats and hats for trains. (pp. 201-2) The intricacy and angularity of syntax conceal from each other the. blurred subject and predicate; and as the syntax is neither prospective nor retrospective the experience of reading is not one of finding a position in relation to the other parts of the sentence. The sentence and by extension the text is really utopian in that it does not place'the subject it includes. The subject 'floats', is subject to the flow of the text (there is an extensive use the dative of agency). The writing which takes place ----__, j I of is superfluous to the novel; its highly visible construction is what detaches it from the history of the novel, and is what gives the novel that history. l  CHAPTER III Pack My Bag: The Poetics of Menace 4,  8.7 I was born a mouthbreather with a silver spoon in 1905, three years after one war and nine before another, too late for both. But not too late for the war which seems to be coming upon us now and that is a reason to put down what comes to mind before one is killed, and surely it would be asking too much to pretend one had a chance to live. (p. 5) From start to finish, Pack py Bag is taxed by the prospect of death. Mustard gas, bayonets, and sirens, are among its paraphernalia; mementoes of a future to which the writing continually reverts. This premonitory quality gives the life under review a spurious completeness; within the absolute limits of birth and. death a life can be made into a career, and so answerable to certain conventional methods of inquisition. But why have completeness at this particular time? Why, at the age of thirty four, make an autobiography out of what "otherwise would be used in, novels" (p. 5)? In asense, the general understanding of in the events Thirties seemed to read its haphazard experience in the terms of a looked for proof of consistency for the time-being postponed--it was unconsciously writing itself in the terms of biography. The Thirties as a decade was felt to be moving towards some sort of objective: There is a sense'in which patterns await events, and in the 1930s the pattern of war grew darker and clearer-with'every month. It awaited the actual event so that in the end war. itself came almost as a relief. The reality was better than fear and anticipation. But in this thickening atmosphere, at the time of Munich, there was little chance for imaginative writing of any kind. 1 1 Hugh "An Epilaugh for Surrealism", Sykes Davies, Times Literary Supplement, (January 13,1978).  88 In the months following "the time of Munich", the President of the Publishers' Association, Geoffrey Faber, was particularly well placed to observe the paralysis which more and more writers were to: submitting For the last year shrewd observers... have been noting a progressive decline in the quantity and quality of worthwhile manuscripts. The reason is easy to see. Ever since Munich the atmosphere of Europe has grown more and more unfavourable to creative literary work.... "How can I write with the world in this state? " is a cry I have heard more than once in the past few months. 2 There was a widespread anticipation of the impossibility of imaginative writing after the crisis; and it was this sense exactly which prompted the hurried composition of Green's book. But the resulting text is not so rigorously inductive as its predeterminants would lead one to expect: As I write now a war, or the threat of war, while ý"ý-_. still threatening seems more remote; a change of wind and the boat is blown in, there is nothing to do but tie up and call it a day. (p. 54) In biography, time is spatialized but here it forms unmeasured distances without intervals. The account is only roughly chronological; each section has an obsessional structure rather than a serial development. The whole book only drifts to the present; the conventional idea of narrative method is to be disappointed by the irregular condition of. another constraint, another urgency, which is "the mystery of sex". 2 The Spectator, (September 15,1939); by cited Robert Hewison in Under Siege: Literary Life In London 1939-1945 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), p. 9.  89 1`I The unusual inflexions of this self-presentation are inflexions in the present tense of desire, authorized by the moment of writing; moments in a life are not supposed to be converging on a terminal point but emerge like tributaries opening onto an aimless, ramifying flow of diversified impulses which they simply interrupt. The interpretation of an individual's history is not attendant on the establishment of any facts, but is produced in the material work of writing--the supposition that lessons are to be drawn from experience is unambiguously repudiated: Most people remember very-little of when'they were small and what small part of this time there is that stays is coloured it is only fair to say, coloured and readjusted until the picture which was there, what does come back, has been over-painted and retouched enough to make it an unreliable account of what used to be. (p. 8) The text becomes a series of substitutions, in which the clarity of testimony recedes under the addition of colour-- a colourist principle of superposition which is reflected in the syntax: But while this presentation is inaccurate and so can no longer be called a movie, or a set of stills, it does gain by what it is not, or in other words, it does set out what seems to have gone on; that is it gives, ýas far as such things can and as far as such things can be interesting, what one thinks has gone to. make one up. (p. 8) The transmission of information begins to look neurotically provisional; strengthening the position of the text as its own place, apart from the self, not merely an extension of it: IfI say I remember, as it seems to me I'do, one of the maids, that poor thing whose breath smelled, come in one morning to tell us the Titanic had gone  90 down, it may be that much later they had told me I should have remembered at the age I was then and that their saying this had suggested I did remember. (p. 8) The construction of an identity, as the objective of experience, fails and the. absence of an authorizing self is replaced by the presence of the text as a rival self: no longer dependent on a single retrospective viewpoint, but open to the transversal of persistences, "the just once more again" (p. 9). The attempt to recapture the for self identity will be dispersed by the urgency and insistency of desire. In fact, writing and reading are virtually co-opted into a main project of giving oneself over to, of losing oneself in, desire. Without the "great stimulus" of sex, Green speculates, "a boy could have gone through school and not have read a single book outside of his lessons" (p. 125). The simultaneous inception of his own writing and love-making is so formulated as to suggest an equation of the two: "I began to write a novel. /I began to meet girls" (p. 172). The writing becomes a kind of chemical solution, breaking up those homogeneities which, during the Thirties, had asserted themselves with such violence. Throughout the decade, it was. Fascism which offered the most powerfully and influentially maintained conspectus based on rigid distinctions of sex and race; according to Hitler, "There are two worlds in the life of the nation, the world of men world 3 and the of women". The men identified themselves 3 Cited by Virginia in (Harmondsworth: Woolf Three Guineas Penguin, 1977), p. 62.  91 by martial tendencies, the women by their usefulness in healing the wounds of the men; a demarcation which, if it sounds too generalizing, is appropriate for that reason because, as Virginia Woolf insists, "there are so many versions 4 It is and all are so much alike". a representation of Fascism derived from German and Italian sources, "but it is curious", Mrs. Woolf continues, "to find how easy it is to cap them from English sources". Evidence of Fascist preoccupations can be found in the early unpublished version of Green's first novel, Blindness, where diarist John Haye questions himself as to whether prayer can weaken the "really strong man" (TS, p. 60). For Green's_generation, their obsession with death--an obsession very close to the surface in Pack j Bag--seemed to reach back to a sense of guilt over the sacrifice which 1ý'--- had been made for them by the victims of the First World -' War. In his autobiography of the period, Isherwood relates that "we young writers'of the middle 'twenties were all suffering, more or less subconsciously, from a feeling of shame that we hadn't been old enough to take part in the 5 European War". Brian Howard, a contemporary of Green's a fellow-member of the. Society of Arts at Eton, and apostrophizes the victims of the War in verses written and published while both he and Green were still at school: "Oh, we will fight for your ideals--we, who were too young 4 4. Ibid., p. 197, n. 18. 5 Lions Shadows (London: The Hogarth Press, 1938), and p. 74.  92' to be murdered with ". 6 With you... Green himself, this feeling of belatedness, of having the time, come at wrong is transformed into a sense almost being tempore: of ex "I felt I had to make up for lost time I had had which not time to lose" (p. 196). By some obscure means, a whole generation has been "falsified" by the turn of events; and the knowledge of having fallen short--in every way--is further complicated by a rejection of the authority which had demanded actual sacrifices. Green regarded his two older brothers as hero-types, although both of them had been too young to, fight. When his brother Philip died, he developed a nervous condition: "I had a great sense of shock whenever Philip's name was mentioned and for some months had difficulty'in-not crying" (p. 82). This was the outlet for self-pity at the "menace" of corporate doctrines--the attitude of a society which was felt to exact death as a necessary sacrifice, a tribute to its values. The set-text for this youthful animus would have been Wilfred Owen's "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young", in which Abraham is advised by an angel to substitute for Isaac the'"Ram of Pride". Unlike his Biblical-precursor, the twentieth century. patriarch refuses: "But the old man would not-so, but slew his son, / And half the Europe, 7 seed of one by. one". Green's brothers represented to him a kind of war-generation, 6 "To the Young Writers and Artists Killed in the War; 1914-18", -The Eton Candle, Vol. 1,1922. 7 Collected Poems, ed. C. Day Lewis (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), p. 42.  93 coming between himself and his parents; and according to Anthony Powell, his attitude towards his parents was that they both 8 the feeling, were extremely selfish. He retained however submerged, that some form of initiation was expected of his generation: We may have revolted against fear but it is more likely we thought for once the world was ours who were so young we did not have to mourn the dead, who did not guess the price we in our turn might have to pay for other boys to celebrate the victory by, that which our lives must buy today sooner than tomorrow, no doubt to. turn the worms again. (p. 104) Isherwood perpetuated for himself the myth of a "Test" in which he had never been required to prove himself. This persistent apprehensiveness suggests that conditions of knowledge from the First War had prolonged themselves ex tempore, and were still available to a generation about to engage in a Second War. Pack Ey Bag, although written in anticipation of this Second War, certainly reads like a memoir of the First, because Green's family home had been used as a hospital for wounded officers, so that for some years he had grown up in that same "atmosphere of death, and of the dying" (p. 77) which pervades his text of 1938/9: "They had been so close to death they had a different view of life.... They-were people meant to die... " (p. 65). Another contemporary of Green's, Arthur Gwynn-Browne, is quite demonstrative about this continuation of "the last war in our feeling-of it": When it ended, that is when an armistice was made it did not end it just stopped the fighting just stopped the rest went on, I was thirteen and'I have often been 8 Infants of the Spring (London: Heinemann,. 1976), p. 68.  94 surprised my mother saying I did not remember it I was too young. I was not too young and none of my generation was too young and none of this young living generation is too young to remember what war is in their feeling of it... My generation knew that in its feeling of the last world war that the struggle had begun. It almost seemed that afterwards it might perhaps be defined and they tried to define it but'it could not be defined. It is growing. It is not formed but it is growing it is not articulate but there is a feeling for it that it is growing and that in growing that it will evolve and come. 9 This Second War memoir, written in imitation of Gertrude Stein, is clearly in accord with Stein's own. thesis in "Composition as Explanation" that military thinking, as a model for consciousness, is always behind itself. 10 one war But the Gwynn-Browne of 1942 reinforces the-Stein of 1926 by the idea of "the struggle", or "Kampf", with its overdue "Test", and likely sacrifice. This was, the danger of Fascism for a guilty generation--the new focus it gave to ýý self-sacrifice: the replacement of a "falsity", with a ýýý ý1 "reality", of guilt: What almost everyone refuses to acknowledge is that the fascist machine, in its Italian and German forms, became a threat to capitalism and Stalinism because the masses invested a fantastic collective death instinct in it. By reterritorializing their desire onto a leader, a people and a race, the masses abolished, by means of a phantasm of catastrophe, a reality which they-detested and. which the revolutionaries were either unwilling or unable to encroach upon. For the masses, virility, blood, vital space, and death took the place of a socialism that had too much respect for the dominant meanings. 11 9 F. S. P. (London: Chatto, 1942), pp. 32-5. 10 Collected in Look at me now and here I'am: Writings and Lectures 1911-1945 .(London: Peter Owen, 1967), pp. 21-30. 11 Felix Guattari, "Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist", Semiotext(e), 11,3, (New York, 1977), p. 96.  95 What the rise of Fascism allowed was the reality of a timely death; "Better a terrible end than an endless terror" was an actual slogan of the Nazi Party in Germany. 12 emerging It suggests a fulfillment of the same. wish animating those soldiers billeted with Green's family in 1914-18: "He was no longer human when he came to us... he had haunted eyes as though death to which he was still so close and which walked arm in arm with him through our meadows could be a horror worse than what he was still suffering" (p. 66). This purgatorial awareness--Party Goinn 's""waiting at the gates"--had become an indissoluble part of conditions of knowledge. The expectation of war which, as'Hugh Sykes Davies says, "awaited the actual event", is like the "aggressivity of the slave whose response to the frustration his labour is for death". 13 of a-desire The phantasm of a ýý° catastrophe was almost indispensable to a generation whose pubescent experience of discipline had revolved on the question of forbidden knowledge, of an absolute uncertainty whose only adequate correspondent was the absolute certainty of death: Sex was a dread mystery. No story could be so dreadful, more-full of agitated awe than sex. We felt there might almost be some connection between what the Germans were said to have done and this mysterious urgency we did not feel. (p. 47) 12 Cited in Mass-Observation's report, War Begins at Home, edited and arranged by Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge (London: Chatto, 1940). 13 Jacques "The function Lacan, and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis", in Ecrits. A Selection, tr. Alan Sheridan, (London: Tavistock, 1977).  96 The urgency of incipient desire becomes compounded through having no specific objective: "Boys think of sexual gratification long before they know what it is all about" (p. 116). Left to its own devices, this searching ignorance will conceive of satisfactions more impressive than any future performance: "This kiss which was not exchanged has lasted on where others given or received would have escaped the memory" (p. 91). Desire outgrows the capacity for its fulfilment, finds itself on a transversal which it can never cease to follow, 'always at one remove from knowledge, while credulous of a contextualization that memory'will eventually provide: -"Then it is almost impossible not to remember adolescence, the imminent feeling that soon everything will be made known" (p. 138). . But the adolescent consciousness is already totally possessed by ignorance--an ignorant ýý'- which the introduction of 'a sexuality produced congestion outside of its awn obsessions will fail to clear. Green's own self is in a limbo of frustration: "All through my life 'l have been plagued by enjoying first experiences too much" (p. 63). The only decompression magisterial enough to cover the extent of repression is the inviting catastrophe: And was it'then or some time later that, as our school was-on the south coast, some formation of the hills round brought no louder than as seashells echo the blood pounding in one's ears noise of gunfire through our windows all the way from France so that we looked out and thought of death in the sound and this was us than rollers tumbling on a beach. (p. 40) sweeter-to Although it was--"Fascism that seemed to provide a catch-point for this instinct of self-destruction, it'was also Fascism which banalized the catastrophe: "Fascism was brought back  97 to these same dominant meanings by a sort of intrinsic bad faith, by a false provocation to the absurd, and by a whole of hysteria 14 theatre collective and debility". The youthful Green excised all Fascistic notions from his first novel when revising it for publication, at a time when he must also have been reviewing the educational system through which he had just passed; the adult Green could reject Fascism together with the authority it would overthrow because of their communication with one another along the channels of repression: I believe the whole system of government in Germany is founded on that evolved through centuries at the greater British public schools. (p. 94)- As far as Green was concerned, school was an experience penal servitude: "We were almost prisoners from ourselves... " of (p. 21); "There are terms of imprisonment and terms even at kindergartens" (p. 24) ; "We had calendars and each boy marked--`-, off every day which brought him closer to term's end, as prisoners notch the walls" (p. 49). He goes as far as to claim that. the school engenders a type of paramount convict, ("purer types, more perfect examples of liars thieves and crooks"), as a direct result of the opportunities for relentless scrutiny by authority, greater than elsewhere: "there were no. thoughts or feelings we ought to have and if there were things we could not say then it was a crime" (p. 24). Every transaction in this context-is interpreted with to a criminal code. It is a society that forces reference the self into an enclosure of meaning containing the 14 Guattari, op. cit., p. 96.  98 impulses which traverse it; forcing it to dispose itself into precipitates of meaning, so that any divergence or attempt to readmit those impulses and emancipate them is criminal, the infringement of a rigid. code. Out of the intelligence which knows these limits--out of the circumscription of a memory which is retributive and punitiver-the writing erupts with desire, leaps over the constituted individual, and is transferred to the individuating world of the text. The fear that imaginative writing will be impossible in- these highly conditioned circumstances is transformed into a demonstration that the only free conditions are those of artistic production. Writing is not the sedimentation of personal marks, but the gradual attrition of a hard surface formed by corporate doctrines which have a binding power. _1~ It becomes a process of restoring the self to a critical state, of unlearning: "In my case it has been a long and in the end successful struggle to drive out what they taught me there and afterwards" (p. 22); of disassembling a 'corpus' of knowledge; "Their corporate doctrines teach one ugly sides and it is when one has forgotten to be as they taught that the-experience begins to be worthwhile" (p. 22). . School represents the institutional magnification of biographical accountability--the history of the individual must be explicable: "Any secret, our old tyrant had warned us, must be guilty, the secrets we were not allowed to have for fear they might be sexual" (p. 46). The only recess in this constant inquisition is in sleep:  99 Home seemed a heaven and that we were cast out and seventy five little boys when there was no more light lifted those lids to hide their letters back amongst their clothes and turning over went to sleep at once in the arms of whoever it was they had who loved them wherever the place was they called home. (p. 29) The scene prefigures that of the girls' academy in the totalitarian state of Concluding: "throughout the dormitories upstairs, with a sound of bees in this distant sanctum, buzzers called her girls to rise so that two hundred and eighty nine turned over to that sound, stretched and yawned" (p. 19). The image has been turned inside out and the girls, statistically reduced, are waking up, to resume their allotted places under the surveillance of Miss Edge. The limit of this administration is reached in its attempt to regulate sexuality, where it is bound by the terms of its own hold over the boys' imaginations, forced to resort to "a warning against unspecified vice so appalling that I was as one who has heard too huge a noise, too vast a something -that has been disclosed; it was too much to take in and I was left, -in no wise the worse for not knowing, in a void of unmentionables, or as they say all at sea" (p. 37). The partial revelation drowned by disappointment will reappear elsewhere-, intact by its incompleteness, so long as it is fragile-enough to withstand systemization. To go beyond the enclosure-of meaning involves an act of transgression, almost any transgression; Green became an outrageous liar: "I, could not help myself in railway carriages, and it took a form-so obviously extravagant and false that I could never hope I should be believed" (p. 126). And thieving was widespread in the schools he attended; only the chests in  100 which were stored letters from home--"those secrets of tenderness"--were "sacred". But the most extreme - transgression of all was betrayal, as the inverse of sacrifice: ' "I, who had been so full up to that time of the story of Judas, I believe it haunts all little boys, went in after them to stand up for my friend" (p. 85). Towards the end of the book, the General Strike disposes Green to leave Oxford in sympathy with its aims; but when an elderly neighbour rings up seeking volunteers for "national" work, the circumstances of Country House life entail a reserve of guilt that'is bound to forestall the youthful-Green's betrayal of his class: "I had been eating the strawberries when I was told this man was asking for me" (p. 235). Later in his career, Green renegues on the 'falseness' of his position, rarely allowing himself to be photographed without turning his head, as much as to say, "the true self is not there to be seen, but at least the false self will not be seen either". And he has trimmed the explanation of his attitude at the time of the General Strike to a simple observation that "for some time I had been unable to look a labourer in the eye" (p. 234). There is evidently a physiognomy of reluctance and capitulation--* "toadying alters the expression of the face in extreme cases" (p. 108)--which engenders the strategy of the back of the head, -a form of self-sacrifice that is equal and opposite to the adaptative variety. Already as a schoolboy, Green had cultivated a-distaste for any living space that was not devoid of possessions, "or anything to give any line on what I was like" (p. 179). And a further correlation is  101 implied in the, obviously inveterate, pseudonymous impulse: the nom de plume Henry Green being preceded by Henry Browne, and before that by the unlikely Henry Michaelis (p. 163); an impulse whose bearing on the need for betrayal constitutes the outspokenness of anonymity: We might interpret symbolic parricide as simply an extension of symbolic suicide, a more thorough-going way of obliterating the substance of one's old identity--while, as we. have said before, this symbolic suicide itself would be but one step in a process which was not completed until the substance of the abandoned identity had been replaced by the new substance of a new identity. Hitler's voting himself a "blood stream" distinct from that of the Hebrew patriarchs is a symbolic transubstantiation of this sort--while an attenuated social variant of reidentification is to be seen in the legal adoption of a new family name, or in pseudonyms, noms de plume etc. 15 Green expects-to die in the war; in the "absolute bewilderment of 1939" he faces the prospect of the "Test" he had taken pains to circumvent years before by resigning from the school cadet corps: "There was no valid argument me, no war was threatened, we lived then in the against fool's paradise of a peace the old fools had dictated" (p. 162). In case his death should be falsely interpreted, he kills himself off beforehand--suiciding the "falsified" in a history of its formation. Autobiography is a self form of-internalized surveillance; Green kept a diary at preserving "exactly that sensation of being school, (p. 112). Pack jýy Bag is accordingly the watched" form unlearned; the presentation of the autobiographical 15 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form. Studies in symbolic action (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941), p. 41.  102 back of the head; a transubstantiation of self into writing, rather than a transcription of self, under pressure from the dialectic of sacrifice and betrayal. Betrayal suggested, to the generation that had been haunted little boys, the purest means of exonerating desire, and Green's analytical unlearning can be matched by the more symbolic revocations of certain of his contemporaries. Burgess-and Maclean, who were of a generation only slightly younger than Green's, and products of the same milieu, were both anti-Fascist and both (Burgess in particular) notoriously given to transgressive sexualities. Auden said that he had gone to America for the same reason that made Guy Burgess defect to Russia--it was the only way-finally to repudiate England. Green recounts that his earliest memory is of a complex "disloyalty" to his mother; within his adult milieu, for those who were not already homosexual, a temporary homosexuality was almost obligatory as a representation of disloyalty: a means of betraying the parental generation. Femininity was explored as the only available means of expression adequate to the realities of desire: "We were feminine not from perversion although it is true that we were preoccupied by sex, but, from a lack of any other kind of self expression" (p. 113). Since the imposed sexuality was'one"of Fascist virility, the 'underground' society of the school was adversely feminine: "the general feeling... as it'cannot be in the larger world'outside, was feminine" (p. 96). To escape from a body which has been confined to  103 a certain meaning it is first necessary to restore a radical inquisitiveness whose research can extrapolate a different meaning: -"Bodies should be objects of curiosity and it is a comment-on the way we were brought up that we should find them exciting because forbidden" (p. 124). The official misuse -of the body depends on an armature of meaning, which is removed by dematerializing that body. There is a" remarkable celebration of the female body given a latitude, rendered fluid to become itself a medium of expression: It was their skin got me which I had never touched except on hands and which I thought to be softer than I afterwards found, that skin down from the neck coming out of flowering summer dresses which sent me back to my room to read Spenser. It was their eyes I never looked into I was too modest and'too modest by far to fall in love, their arms which I thought were cold and-which I could not think they ever used to help them kiss, their lightness I did not know the weight V of, the different way they moved and literally then it seemed as though they were walking in water up over their heads along the glaring street, all this bemused me although I had been reading Herrick. (p. 119) The writing ramifies, refusing to solidify in a body which it melts into several effects; it does not accept the body as the objective of a determined meaning, -it reads the body with reference to reading; and it sees the body as if with a compound eye, its vision forming with the loss of perspective. The visual. sense in Pack mv Bag is of a loss of consistency, a loss of conclusiveness; the eye experiences the shifting of surfaces, planes, and depths-- the eye behaves rather as an organ of touch. In a certain sense, the'body that is sensible to its touch is to the male view, because a "female language unrecognizable of phantasm... could not be represented or circumscribed z  104 within a framework dominated by sight"--according to the feminist psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray, for whom the genesis of a female language is synonymous with the unlearning, the forgetting, of male language: For, a feminine language would undo the unique meaning, the proper meaning of words, of nouns; which still regulates all discourse. In order for there to be a proper meaning, there must indeed by a unity somewhere. But if feminine language cannot be brought back to any unity, it cannot be simply described or defined: there is no feminine meta-language. -The masculine can partly look at itself, speculate about itself, represent itself and describe itself for what it is, whilst the feminine can try to speak to itself through a new language, but cannot describe itself from. outside or in formal terms, except'by identifying itself with the masculine, thus by losing itself. 16 The feminine can only find itselfhdissolving the homogeneities of the male. The unitary power-of the eye disappears; and so does the unitary power of the nominative, from a text that is spreading out to give a latitude to its own subjectivity: Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, -and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can ever go. (p. 88) Leaving out the names "makes a book look blind", a circumstance which Green considers "no disadvantage" (p. 88). In the-'novel he had actually titled Blindness, the undoing of proper names had been-interrelated-with a total blankness in the male domain; the indistinctness of names, John, Joan, June, in a context'of bisexualism, of the'mutual -occurred replication of male and female characters. This sustained disunity, this simultaneity of opposites, is what the writing 16 "Women's Exile", Ideology & Consciousness, no. 1, (May, 1977), p. 65.  105 of Pack EX Bag accomplishes in the question of a supposed propriety or impropriety of its meanings. The 'improper' meanings are those which resist integration in their discursive context; and among them the most beautiful, as well as the most refractory, are those with a littoral setting: As I see things it is sex in little'boys makes them shrill out at times like these. They are so feminine they go on like women on the sands even when they can see no man within miles, scream after scream echoing up cliffs to the deserted top over which, and over a boy watching behind his tuft of grass a blade of which gets up his nose, sea-gulls soar on their white wings diagonally set to the sun-blue sky. (pp. 34-5) The court was out at the back by stables which were built round three yards, brick buildings over cobblestones the colour in sunlight of dried seaweed on white marble with the smell so like but not the same as when under a hot sun the small wind blows inland the bite of sea on a temple grown over and uncovered at low tide. (p. 173) In this way the bells, so overdone they soon lost their charm, by never leaving one alone seemed, as the sea eats out a temple to cover it with weed, to have bitten into the black porticos and walls their sound was forever lapping. (p. 200) The littoral scene, with its ruined temple being eaten away, half on the land and half in the sea, is precisely suggestive of an incomplete stage of unlearning with an equal vantage on solidness, associated with the male, and fluidness, associated with the female. The sex-act itself is thought of as "a marriage with sympathetic swans" precisely because this takes place "in an element like-the air I could not fly in and was half a stranger to" (p. 120, my emphasis). The sexuality of the book is half-familiar, half-strange; it is the autobiography of half a stranger--one who does not .  106 even have a proper name. The writing is withdrawn from an isomorphism with the masculine sex; it is no longer the expected accumulation of traits, evidence of an identity, that will-constitute authority but the elaboration of a text in which the author is discomposed. The account and the author are fictions together being produced during the writing. The conditions of bilateral meaning, so alien to the conventions of autobiography and biography, are recognizable as those which. are adduced for the psychoanalysis of hysterical phantasies: In psychoanalytic treatment it is*very important to be prepared for a symptom's having a bisexual meaning. We need not then be surprised or misled if a symptom seems to persist. undiminished although we have already resolved one of its. sexual meanings; for it is still being maintained by the--perhaps unsuspected--one belonging to the opposite sex. In the treatment of such cases, moreover,. one may observe how the patient avails himself, during the analysis of the one sexual meaning, of the convenient possibility of constantly switching his associations, as though onto an adjoining----, into - track, the field of the contrary meaning. 17 The "contrary meaning" fielded by Green takes the form of the anonym:. the true confessions of a cover-up; the conditions of knowledge as of 1939 have the readability of a "strip-tease", with people "saying good-bye to what they could use to drape their hearts where everyone now wears his in the stress of the. times, on his sleeve, not naked as hearts will be when the war comes, still covered but in a kind of strip-tease with rapidly changing, always fewer and ever more diaphanous clothes" (p. 186). Green reveals no more 17. "Hysterical Sigmund Freud, Phantasies and. their Relation to Bisexuality", in On Psychopathology, The Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 10 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 94.  107 than the back of his head, since he cannot reveal the face of a woman. Pack EX Bag is an effacement, and the process of a disclosure in which one can hide. When he departs school for Oxford--"It was like getting out of prison"-- at least in its cruder form, comes to an end, -surveillance, and yet the account becomes more opaque; Green shows even less of himself, and resorts to the camouflage of a literary exemplum: The experience for those who have not had it can best be described by the picture of a traveller who has come some of the way and now finds himself bewildered, suspicious and rather tired because he has not found the sort of country he has been seeking, part of'his difficulty being that he is not sure quite what climate or kind of scenery is necessary to his-peace of mind. He comes to a place where the winding track he follows through nettles breaks into two and there above a great number of-broken bottles are a profusion of signposts obviously false, giving details of the amenities offered by following the direction indicated. The day is hot, the way has been long, flies and wasps have been troublesome, and all the time there-has been a persistent knelling in the distance to work up a 1-: - feeling of foreboding. Also the sense is strong that it will soon be too late. At the intersection of this track however he comes-upon a tall-gaunt figure dressed neatly as if for London but with something untidy about him, perhaps in the uneasy protuberance of his eyes. He appears to be resting without discomfort just off one of these paths with nettles about but it is plain -" that in his case they do not sting because he outstings them and there are no flies on him. He speaks first... (pp. 203-4) And so on,. for another three hundred words. There could be less particular and individual than this little nothing allegory, this miniature Pilgrim's Progress, the formal equivalent of the back of the head. And yet its reversal expectation is no less than should be expected from a of text which starts at the end--with the prospect of death-- with a beginning: "now... there was love" (p. 246). and ends  109 With the final onset of war on the Home Front, with the Black-Out, aerial bombardment, and a prolonged dislocation of routine, there seemed to be a simultaneous crisis in the attitude of both readers and writers towards the novel. One way or another it was being uncertainly rejected as a contemporary form: The actual number of fiction titles published fell from 4,222 in 1939 to 1,246 in 1945, which, taking into account the total decline in book production, means a fall from about a third to a fifth of the total-of all volumes published annually--but this says nothing about the contents or quality of .the work that was accepted, or refused. Whatever their eventual decision, publishers had fewer manuscripts to consider, good or bad. 1 ý.'.;., :'The biggest change was the sudden popularity of collections of short stories by one author, or, better-still, anthologies. Before the war these-- 'had not been popular with publishers or public, but that quickly changed. This was not just the result . for writing of circumstances of production, and reading habits also changed during the war. 2 The short story seemed an obvious resort-for the reader in need of a current for his imagination when the illusion of continuity which had made the novel so persuasive, and which his sense of his own life had confirmed, suddenly desisted. Replacing it was the experience of the Black-Out, 'which the editors of Mass-Observation described as "this contradiction in our civilization, the unlit city": lRobert Hewison, Under Siege: Literar' Life in London 1939-45 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1976), p. 83. 2 'p. 80. Ibid.,  110 On dark it is .k nights really a matter of groping one's way with nerves as well as hands held out into the future of the next second. 3 Among writers, it was almost as if the novel itself had suffered physically from the disruptions; as if its role in the equation 'text is continuous with world' could only ever be passive and secondary; as if the novel would survive only on its ability to efface every unexpected difficulty. Now that there was nothing in the 'world' to invest with the claims of longevity, the novel was thought to be correspondingly inoperative: These years rebuff the imagination as much by being fragmentary as by being violent. It is by dislocations, by recurrent checks to his desire for meaning, that the writer is most thrown out. The imagination cannot simply endure events; for'it the- passive role is impossible. Where it cannot dominate, it is put out of action. 4 In other words, the imagination can only demonstrate the r'. impossibility of its taking a passive role, by instrumenting the passivity of certain forms. It was indeed the case that many novelists, including Elizabeth Bowen herself, did not publish a novel during the war. But among those that did appear, the more remarkable--like Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton, and The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene--invalidate altogether the terms of Bowen's distinction.. In general, it was the short story-- 3 Mass-Observation, War Be ins'at Home, edited and arranged by Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge (London: Chatto, 1940), p. 187. 4 Elizabeth Bowen, "Contemporary", review of In a Good Books by V. S. Pritchett, New Statesman, (23 May 1942)  111 categorically the form of the 'part', as opposed to the 'whole'--which tacitly accepted the passive role: to an extent, 'at least, that when one reads Henry Green's short stories of the period one is made aware of a scandalous measure of independence from the convenient form adopted elsewhere. On the whole, a story was being regarded as a kind of evidence which the reader might use in his struggle for meaning: The pre-war New Writing had set the style for a form of documentary story that simply required the author to choose a situation, and describe it. For preference the situation was social rather than emotional, to do with work or class. 5 As such, the story was most complete in seeming incomplete-- its real meaning was elsewhere. Provided one treated an experience with apparent accuracy, it could be broken up for the sake of a resolution that was deferred. An alternative was to hallucinate a" meanin g. Fra gmentäriness ' could be overcome, appropriately enough, by exploding a situation; that way one could engross'a particular detail in. order to exhaust it. A noted example 'of this was William Sansom's The Wall, which expands the moment in which the wall of a burning house collapsed. But even in this experiment the writing is likewise concerned to take the measure of its own accuracy: - -.. Eventhe speed of the shutter which closed the photograph on my mind was powerless to exclude this notion from a deeper consciousness. The picture appeared static to the limited surface senses, the eyes and the material brain, but beyond that there 5 Hewison, p. 89.  112 was hidden movement. 6 These aversions to the systematic requirements of the novel were a means of keeping its requirements unchanged-- they avoided the need for a special. resourcefulness, for the novel to be as fully adequate to the contemporary situation as it apparently had been before. With the promise of meaning after the event, the novel was released from the'necessity of developing a different kind of social propriety, sinceafter the event it would come back into its own, as it was. And in poetry, there was a leading example of this kind of literary endeavour, where the writing refers to a recapitulation, in-the four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Its publication was met with a great deal of accord; Edwin Muir pronounced it "the most original contribution to poetry that has been made in our time". 7 four The composition over many years'of the poems which comprise the whole sequence was a process of reserving its meaning for a final resorbency: Evert 'Burnt Norton' might have remained by itself if it hadn't been for the war... you remember how the conditions of our'lives changed, how much we were in on ourselves in the early days? 'East -thrown Coker' was the result--and it was only in writing 'East Coker' that I began to see the Quartets as a set of four. 8 ". Eliot's appropriation., of a past work for inclusion in a 6 William Sansbm, Fireman Flower and other stories (London: Hogarth Press, 1944), p. lll. 7 Edwin Muir, -Review of Four Quartets, New Statesman, (20, February 1943). 8 T. S. Eliot, "The Genesis of Four Quartets", New York Times Book Review, (29 November 1953).  't , 113 r. ý. t ,' I. r project governed by the promise of ultimate meaning is ý i, the outstanding illustration of a consensus regarding literature; the contemporary response was regulated on this axis: Time will give our confusion a perceptible character of its own. When to-day has become yesterday, it will have integrated, into however grotesque a form. Until then,, the desire for the whole picture must be satisfied by the contemplation of such whole pictures as already exist--in fact, of works of art that came into being either when there was a present that'could be got into focus or when time had had time to act on what was already the past. ' 9 The most popular novel of the war was, rather predictably, the most totalizing of all novels, War and Peace. Trollope was very widely read for some years. The appeal of these books was clearly that of "the whole picture", of a comprehensive image of society, able to feed the bewildered mind with a cogency it missed. In direct opposition to such a mood--which sought to revert to conditions in the past which it looked to resume in the future--Green welcomed the immediate challenge to the novel: The truth is, these times are an absolute gift to the writer. Everything is breaking up. A seed can lodge or sprout in any crack or fissure. 10 His own short stories The Rescue and Mr Jonas both deal with the rescue by firemen of trapped individuals: one down a man-hole, the other inside a burning house. Greeu was an auxiliary-fireman himself, and his own experience of the Phoney War and the Blitz contributed directly to 9 Bowen, op. cit. 10 Henry Green, letter to Rosamond Lehmann, quoted in Lehmann, "An Absolute Gift", Times Literary Supplement, (6 August 1954).  114 the Caught, 11 the two both settings of and of stories, of which are distracted from the documentary style in passages of convoluted description. Neither of them makes any concession to the idea of a deferred meaning, the ending in each case being painstakingly offhand: The injured man was taken away in an ambulance.. We have not heard anything of him. He may have died. 12 When the other crew took over we had fought our way back to exactly the same spot above that hole out of which, unassisted once he had been released, out. of unreality into something temporarily worse, apparently unhurt, but now in all probability suffering from shock, had risen, to live again whoever he might be, this Mr Jonas. 13 One receives the impression of a definite recalcitrance, as if there was implicit the pressure to simplify the account and render it more soluble. In his essay "The 11 (MS, p. 22) At one point in the manuscript of Caught, the name Sebastian is written in the place of Christopher. Sebastian is the name of the writer's own son, to whom the novel is dedicated. In this analysis, several references are made to the manuscripts and typescripts of Caught in the British Library. These papers are not yet in order. Among them are one incomplete typescript-pp. 1-349, with manuscript corrections and additions, which I refer to as the typescript. There are also pp. 1-90 of a manuscript representing an earlier stage of composition, which I refer to as the manuscript. Apart from these two series of papers there remain miscellaneous fragments of manuscripts and typescripts representing different stages of composition again. When a reference is made to any of these,. an attempt is made to specify it by one means or another. 12 "A Rescue", in Penguin New Wri. ting, 4 Henry Green, (March 1941), p. 93. 13 "Mr Jonas", in Penguin New Writing, 14, Henry Green, (July-September 1942), p. 20.  115 Natural Man and the Political Man"14 which drew a great deal of attention from other writers, Edwin Muir maintained that a stage was reached'in literature where a "simplification of the idea of man" had been evolved. This'state of affairs was not confined to literature, which "has not initiated but merely reflected" a gross reduction of human life to compliance with a given environment--what Muir contends is a "mythology". It is a line of thinking which bears out the assessments of contemporary psychology. Between 1940 and 1942 there were many published attempts to ascertain the links between war and mental illness. A number of these were alive to, the fact that psychoses were at least partially induced by the social idea of reality: The form of the illness is to be conceived as a product of inner factors in the patient, and of factors imposed by the environment. As the theories entertained by the observer are an important part of the environment, it follows that changes in theory and form will be closely related. 15- . The psychotic illness appeared in some measure as the accelerated form of a process at work'in society as a whole--the circulation of "theories entertained by the observer", which'were excessively contrived. Among the governing influences on. the social idea of reality, the official sources of`information were heavily censored, increasing'the amount of uncertainty behind the disuse of 14 Muir, "The Natural Man and the Political Man", Edwin in New Writing and Daylight (London: Hogartb Press, 1942). 15 R. D. Gillespie, Psychological Effects of War on Citizen and Soldier (London: Chapman & Hall, 1942), p. 33.  1.16 i all but the more submissive forms of literature: This state of bewilderment and uncertainty helped to make people over confident, to make them give vein to their wishful-thinking inclinations. 16 According to Mass-Observation, an unprecedented state of mind developed for which the current term was in fact "wishful thinking": By wishful thinking we mean interpreting events to suit an individual's wish. This may result in extreme optimism (the commonest form), sometimes, however, alarmism and a tendency to welcome catastrophe. The latter type of wishful thinking helps to satisfy more obscure emotional needs. 17 The construction of reality that.; "wishful thinking" was meant to elide had become drastically overshadowed by the threat of aerial bombardment. The prevalent fantasies of -air-raids were so horrifying as to be practically inadmissäble to the balance of the collective mind. The official expectation was of a "knockout blow", with 600,000 killed and 1,200,000 wounded in the first six -..months : The estimate was thus an overestimate by fourteen-fold... Madness on a huge scale was expected... In 1939 the Mental Health Emergency Committee reported that psychiatric casualties might exceed the physical by three to one: that is to say, between three and four millions of people would suffer from hysteria and other neurotic conditions. 18 Caught-is set largely in the Phoney War period, and dealing the Fire Service it refers directly to the structure with 16 Mass-Observation, p. 70 17 Ibid. & 18 Consantine Fitzgibbon, The Blitz (London: Allen Wingate, 195'7) pp. 6-7.  117 of feelings outlined above. Its main character, Richard Roe, 'is in the habit of retailing the myth of catastrophe in the hope of having it explained away. He is like many people in the place and time under consideration--"in this book only 1940 in London is real"--who were caught in the version of their existence which was forced upon them. It needs a foreigner, the Swedish girl Ilse, to disabuse him of his "wishful thinking": As he told Ilse, while enjoying a return to this oft-told horror story, he was watchful, expecting the'usual "Oh, you will be all right, we shall all be. " So that he was daunted when she said, "Yes, and it is my thought that your people in this country have not done enough, not nearly, no, you are such a long way to go even yet, you will not realize, " she said. "I was so surprised, " she said, "to see those death bodies, skeletons, up there, such a lot think bombs do not explode, because they come from Czechoslovakia... " (pp. 70-71) This concern for 'a guarantee corresponds to the way in ý~ý which literature was being contained. One of the few serious novels to appear-at an early stage of the war, Night Shift (1941) by Inez Holden, is a_skilful evocation in the documentary manner of a factory waiting for the inevitable bomb, which comes. Regressing to the simple determinism of the bomb was a means of finding a position which made grim sense; it sponsored the survival of meaning'unaffected by change among the social conditions in which it is produced, and as such was equal to a desperate nostalgia taking place elsewhere. Henry Reed, in his survey of the novel between 1939 and 1949, remarked  118 19 on how often the theme of childhood occurred. And among psychologists, there was no shortage of explanations for that: The civilian has no really powerful check to the desire for self-preservation; indeed, he is licensed to consider his own safety to an extent that no soldier can be. The flood-gates are therefore open to desires for self-preservation which can take a form that is primitive and not well adapted to a reality situation. There is a real danger that he will seek, not security, but infantile security. 20 The search for infantile security seems to haunt the imaginative writing of the time. It pervades Hangover Square (1941) and The Ministry of Fear (1943). The narrator of Sansom's Fireman Flower, reverting to scenes of his past life, more or less repeats the programmatic statement of Elizabeth Bowen: One wishes to envisage the future; one cannot; one casts around for a substitute; one substitutes the picture of the past, sufficiently alien from the present, a vision--yet one that can be controlled. 21 - The overall drive was formulated simply by Stephen Spender at the beginning of his "September Journal": During these first days of the war I have tended to live in the past, 'partly because the present is so painful, partly because it is so fragmentary and undecided. 22 19 (London: Henry Reed, The Novel Since 1939, British Council, 1949) . 20 W. R. Bion, "The 'War of Nerves': Civilian Reaction, . in The Neuroses Morale and Prophylaxis", in War, ed. Edmanuel Miller, (London: Macmillan, 1940), p. 185. 21 Sansom, p. 15O i 22 Stephen Spender, "September Journal", in The Thirties and After, (London: Fontana, 1978), p. 122.  1 11 119 In sum, the self in 1940 looked to be in a position of fundamental eccentricity, and the novel was too concerted a form for the time; surely it could not provide a guarantee of meaning? The memory of a time when the self did occupy a more concentric position in its world insisted on reproducing itself, either by way of refusing access to the novel-form or by immobilizing it. This persevering memory provides Caught with its moment of intervention among the conditions of knowledge of "1940 in London" through writing in which the novel-form is given the disconcerting element it needs. Each character'in Caught is captivated by a memory which provides him with the image he fixes upon himself. The adapted image provides a basis for the flights of "wishful thinking" that each character, imperilled by the disorder into which he is thrown, uses to imagine himself in control of a situation--to introduce order into it. For Roe, the central image is the scene in the rose garden; for Pye, it is the incestuous encounter with his sister, extremely, adapted. These are the most effective images in the book, but there-is a constant activity of 'picturing': She had. so often imagined what she would do... (p. 145) She pictured at the back of her eye the descent she was going to make... (p. 83) As usual he pictured himself involved in argument. (p. 84) As he pictured her she was pale... '(p. 85)  120 This urge to float over the present with an effective delusion is the result of failing to come to terms with it; the present gets submerged in the attempt to "create memories to compare" (p. 63), which is the identical stimulus behind the increase in short stories--providing a record of memories with a future purpose: She meant to make the few days they were to have together as much a memory to the boy as they would be to the father. (p. 29) Roe is found giving his past memory the same treatment, providing it with a hard surface to make it unimpressionable in the face of present threats to the order he contrives: "he crystallized in his imagination a false picture of his home life had been" (p. 92). -what This, tendency to "disremember" is purveyed as being characteristic: the term is used with unconscious irony by Mary Howells, fabricating another memory: "she would never forget, ever, and never disremember the sight of Brid standing. at the door" (p. 82). Roe's obsession with the disremembered rose garden, associated with his wife, is given extra force by virtue of his. wife being dead. This was not the case until a very late stage in the composition of the novel, when Dy, the wife, became Dy, the sister-in-law, with a minimum amount of correction. With his wife dead, Roe is unable to realize. a situation in which he "imagined, as has been described, agreat deal going on all round between girls men. What he might be missing haunted him. " (p. 99) and  121 Arid he eclipses the possibility of realization with his carefully nurtured image. The scene in the rose garden is artificially prompted; this is reflected in the forced growth of its description: The roses, when they came to the rose garden, were full out, climbing along brick walls, some, overpowered by their heavy flowers, in obeisance before brick paths, petals loose here and there on the earth but, on each bush and tree of roses, rose after rose after rose of every shade stared like oxen, and came forward to meet them with a sweet, heavy, luxuriant breath. f (p. 64) ý; The roses are coerced, like the fruits and flowers of (ý 23 ý, Marvell's The Garden; they are forced to participate in s.. Y. ý the world created by his own need. Nature is made to seem "enchanted by terror into immobility as the two of them halted, brought to a full stop at the corner round which this impermanence caught them fast" (p. 64). The impermanent i event is the basis of a fixation which persists in the ýýý memory; it can attain a permanence because it has been brought to a full stop. This 'permanence' interrupts every attempt to realize a situation, tinting it with the same hue. Prudence, disturbing his reverie, is described ý' as "infinitely young" (my emphasis). In this way, the yi 23-See. lines 33-40' "The Garden" ýi of : What wondrous life is this I lead! Ripe apples drop'about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; 'The nectarene, and curious peach, Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons, as I pass, Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass. Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 101. ýý. ý ,:. ,ý  122 fascination with a threshold of meaning reasse3ts itself: But this day a permanence of rain softened what was near, and half hid by catching the soft light all that was far, in the way a veil will obscure, yet enhance the beauty of a well-remembered face or, in a naked body so covered, sharpen the sight. In such a way this stretch of country he knew so well was made the nearer to him by rain. (pp. 8-9) The inevitable re-imposition of a veil, a screen on which to project what is already known because it is "well-remembered", predisposes the apprehension of knowledge. A manuscript addition to the typescript pointedly substitutes "permanence" for "veil" (TS, p. 8); elsewhere, "brilliant sapphire blue" is changed to the "permanence"of sapphire" in the following passage (TS, p. 17): The walls of this store being covered with stained glass windows which depicted trading scenes, that is of merchandise being loaded onto galleons, the leaving port, of incidents on the voyage, and then the unloading, all brilliantly lit from without, it follows-that the body of the shop was inundated with --. brimming, _ý colour, and this colour, as the sea was a 'predominant part of each window, was a permanence of sapphire in shopping hours. (pp. 12-13) This brimming colour is described as "fatal" (p. ll)--"odd" in, the manuscript. The oceanic blue, colour of the amniotic sea of oblivion familiar from Party Going, fascinates the boy who has lost his mother. The purposive veil takes effect as an always insidious, and sometimes treacherous, snare: He wished it had- allbýen less, as a man can search to find he knows not what behind a netted brilliant skin, the eyes of a veiled face, as he can also go with his young son parted from him by the years that are between, from her by the web of love and death, or from remembered country by the weather, in the sadness of not finding. (p. 9)  123 In this way the time for father and son passed quickly. ' Neither was much with the other, the one picking up the thread where the war had unravelled it, the other beginning to spin his own, to create his first tangled memories, to bind himself to life for the first time. (p. _34) Christopher is strangely attracted by the "trap" for rooks. In their walk through the grounds, father and son stop by a "domed triangle of concrete" padlocked fast, which is supposed to contain ice kept intact "against the summer", unaffected by the real climate. Roe is trapped by his deafness, a kind of'veil enabling him to retreat from his ý- real surroundings. The deafness has some link with a ý, incident in ýý boyhood Tewkesbury Abbey where Roe, on a ledge ý., forty feet above the ground, had been mesmerized by the --flood of colour'from stained glass, paralyzed by "that height'calling on the pulses and he did not know'why to his ears" (p. 12) Memory commutes the effect of a fixation . that paralyzes the real present--a paralysis reproduced in the design of future "tangled memories". ' Character is .. made the vehicle of a kind of infinite memory: Now that he was back in this old life only for a few days, he could not keep his hands off her in memory, now that he did not see her every evening, rather . as gentle as he had been curt mocking, aloof, always, the touch of her white rose petal skin an unchanging part of what his life had been before, her gladness when she had been-with him a promise of how they still had each other, and of the love they would yet hold one another in, the greater by everything that had gone before. (p. 33) In response to this idea, the syntax loosens itself, in a by which the different tenses appear to blend-in . suffusion an "unchanging" confluence.  124 The rose garden scene in Caught seems to be overlaying a passage of E1iot's"Burnt Norton": What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. ,But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know. Other-echoes Inhabit the garden. Shallwe follow? Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, Round the corner. Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow The deception of the thrush? Into our first world. There they were, dignified, invisible,. Moving. without pressure, over the dead leaves, In-the autumn heat, through the vibrant air, And. the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting. So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, Along the empty alley, into the box circle, To look down into the drained pool. Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, , And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light, And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. Go, said the bird", for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, 'containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What. might have been. and what has been Point to one-end,. which is always present. 24 There is what is virtually a compressed version of this in The Family Reunion: 24 T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton", I. in Collected Poems, (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), pp. 189-190.  125 I only looked through the little door When the sun was shining on the rose-garden: And heard in the distance tiny voices And then a black raven flew over. 25 "Round the corner" is the point where reality intrudes. In Caught, Roe stages the scene by throwing over it a compliant immobility, even though he is on the very brink of undeceiving, himself "at the corner": at the corner round which this impermanence caught ... them fast. He turned to her and she seemed his in her white clothes, with a cry the blackbird had flown and in her eyes as, speechless, she turned, still a stranger, to look into him, he thought he saw... (p. 64) The cry of the blackbird is almost a signal to refer to the cry of the thrush in "Burnt Norton", or to the raven in The Family Reunion. As in Party Going, the twisting and turning of a path represents a threshold of knowledge, the point of sublimation. The echoes of "Burnt Norton" seem part of an effort to -ý, ý revoke the kind of use Eliot subsequently made of it, '.. implanting it in Four Quartets where it must be read with reference to a religious arrival at the point "where we "know 26 started" in order-to the place for the first time". With Caught, we revert to the true effects of "what might have been", the trajectory of a compulsion, the infinite memory of the unconscious. In an essay entitled "The Lotus and the Rose", Giorgio Melchiori has shown how, dependent the imagery of Burnt " 25 T. S. Eliot, "The Family Reunion", in Collected Plays, ,. (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), pp. 106-7. 26 T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding", V, in Collected Poems, g. 222. -  126 Norton is upon the Preface to the American edition of New Poems (1920) by D. H. Lawrence: 27 The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness. The whole tide of all life and all. time suddenly heaves, and appears before us as an apparition, a revelation. We look at the very white quick of nascent creation. A water-lily heaves herself from the flood, looks around, gleams, and is gone. We have seen the incarnation, the quick of the ever-swirling flood. We have seen the invisible. We have seen, we have touched, we have partaken of the very substance of creative change, creative mutation. If you tell me about the lotus, tell me of nothing changeless or eternal. Tell me of the mystery of the inexhaustible, forever-unfolding spark. Tell me of the incarnate disclosure of the flux, mutation in blossom, laughter and decay perfectly open in their transit, nude in their movement before us. 28 Although ideologically opposed to him, Eliot held that Lawrence was able "to communicate, in visionary flashes, the sensuous fullness of the moment". As Melchiori points out, it was natural that he should turn to Lawrence when seeking to present "the moment in and out of time" in t_ sensuous images. On his part, Green has separate recourse to this same Preface: the final sentence of the quoted in details in Caught: 29 passage surfaces particular 27 Walkers: Studies in The Tightrope of Mannerism Modern English Literature, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956). -The-Lawrence text is, of course, the one featured in my analysis of Living. 28 D. H. Lawrence, "Preface to the American Edition of New Poems", in Phoenix, (London: Heinemann), p. 219. 29 And the in the company of rose-coloured water-lily, steam, bobs up to Lhe surface of the text in "Mr Jonas": It was as though three high fountains which, through sunlight, would furl their flags in rainbows as they fell dispersed, had now played these up into a howling wind to be driven, to be shattered, dispersed, no longer to fall to sweet rainbows, but into a cloud of steam rose-coloured beneath, above no wide water-lilies in a pool, but into the welter of yellow banner-streaming flames.  127 he thought he saw the hot, lazy luxuriance of a ... rose, the curling disclosure of the heart of a rose that, as for a hornet, was his for its honey, for the asking, open for him to pierce inside, this heavy, creamy, girl turned woman. (p. 64) These points of verbal contact tend to release the scene from-the hold of Eliot's religious mysticism. Elsewhere in the text, religious terms are used pejoratively, linked with self-deception: "He had forgotten that he used to take office worries home at night. He remembered only the beatitude of those evenings" (p. 93); "In a sort of holy falseness he bade them farewell" (p. 43). The entire rose garden scene is also visually reminiscent of Lawrence's "The Shadow in the Rose Garden", where the'garden provides the essential memory of a past love-affair. Caught tries to contain the shadows of both versions of time in order to maintain their difference and to superimpose the claims of its own obsession with ''what might have been". At this point, the syntax has an-irresolute quality, as if to support an awareness of the alternative form it might have assumed: The afternoon, it had been before tea, was hot, swallows darted low at the level of her thighs, a blackbird, against three blooms bent to the height of its yellow beak, seemed enchanted by terror into immobility as the two of them halted, brought to a full stop at the corner round which this impermanence caught-them fast. (p. 64) _ It forms itself around several features which seem incidental to one another, preferring a sense of improvidence, as if the experience was barely "caught" by a certain sentence-formation and "brought to a full stop". The  128 writing eschews both the instantaneous yield of meaning, and the promise of a fixed meaning; it remains permanently provisional, as evidence of an improvised world prolonged in memory for which the rose, with its verbal occurrence throughout the book, is an emblem, after the fashion of Proust's Japanese paper flowers: And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. 30 In one respect the whole novel resembles the dehiscent form of a flower when it seems to open itself with the treatment of these events which anchor the memory--pretending to reveal its secret meaning at moments of great internal pressure, in passages remarkable for a pictorial intensity: Roses had come above her bare knees under the fluted skirt she wore, and the swallows flying so low made her, in his recollection, much taller than she had ever been. (p. 64) , This image underlies the first serious jolt to Roe's fantasy, once it has been transmuted into another skirt in another setting: "This light, reflected up the bell of her skirt, made her translucent to the waist" (p. 50). In the 30 Swann's Way, tr. C. I:. Scott Moncrieff, Marcel Proust, (London:. Chatto, 1966), p. 62.  129 flat shared by Prudence and Ilse,. sensuous plants like the rose are supplanted by alien, metallic forms: "in a scarlet bowl, was a cactus, painted white" (p. 50). Ilse makes artificial flowers out of sardine tins. The mellow light of the garden is obliterated by the relentless white of "an acetylene lamp triangle of sunlight" (p. 50). Roe's fingers "like strings of raw pork faggots", his "sweat-charged clothes", "vinegar-coloured palm" and "four-day growth of bristle" combine to expel him from the garden; he begins to imagine a different picture of himself: "he thought he recognized that he was now a labourer" (p. 51). Prudence and Ilse are wintry girls, *almost inhuman in their distinct hardness and coldness. Prudence is "knife I sharp compared to the opulence his darling had carried about in her skin, " (p. 65) and even in laughter her eyes are "lapped with melted ice" (p. 71). Ilse is a Swede - "whose cold country could have given her, so he thought, no such memories as his own" (p. 69). Roe connects his wife with Spring, although this. is another example of disremembering: "It seemed to him it had been in April, but the afternoon she asked to be shewn round his parents' country place was in July" (p. 64). The summer and autumn are reserved for association with Hilly: "the bloom, as he said to himself, of a thousand moist evenings in August on her soft skin and, on the inner side of her lips, where the rouge had worn off, opened figs wet on a  '! 130 3 ý: ýY , {ýýý L ýý 31 Motifs Autumn, fruition, wall". of often of stand also for a more general burgeoning of sexual availability; when r 3 a Pye is returning on the bus from his first visit to the a g4 asylum, he is aroused by a girl passenger, and this ýP, 1ý ý' i.cý ý , attraction is relayed through images of harvest: "he ýý ý' caught sight of one protuberant, half-transparent eye, sideways, blue, hedged with long lashes that might have been scythes to mow his upstanding corn" (p. 142, my emphasis). Mistaking Summer for Spring, Roe converts the past into a season of infinite promise. In effect, he dissimulates the kind of paradisiacal innocence which Pye finds it natural to recall: "When I was a lad, me and my sister $. a". p. kingcups, ý; used to go out in the soft of an evening after ýý ý,ý supper, and make gold chains we put about the other's r neck" (p. 77). Pye frames his sister in a 'prospect' of flowers that suggest innocence, as opposed to the rose with its erotic associations. But a submerged recognition that this innocence does imply a fall, is in the verbal 31 Hilly's body is a winter landscape On one occasion, suddenly brought to life: "The relief he experienced when their bodies met was like the crack, on a snow silent day, of a branch that breaks to fall under a weight of snow, as his hands went like two owls in daylight over the hills, moors, and wooded valleys, over the fat white winter of her body" (p. 117). Roe is taking possession of her body, just as Max does of Annabel in a comparable image in Party Going: "Looking at her head and body, richer far than her rare fur coat, holding as he did to these skins which enfolded what ruled him, her arms and shoulders, everything, looking down on her face which ever since he had first seen it had been his library, his gallery, his palace, and his wooded fields he began at last to feel content and almost that he owned her" (p. 226) .  131 reflection of Hilly's mouth, offering itself to be kissed: "She thought she made her mouth a sort of loving cup" (p. 112). The incest scene embodies Pye in the image he takes to represent his true self. It is a strong projection, an attempt to suspend all claims of the "system we live under" (p. 38). But the system is invested in him; because it operates through his own conscience, the extent to which he depends on the image in some measure determines the severity of his breakdown--once he has convinced himself that the image disguises a fact of incest. Richard Roe knowingly indulges in a self-deception, so that his roses remain blooms. But for Pye, they turn into the counterpart, the "twining briars" which afflict his sister. Unlike the corners in paths which represent a critical stage in Roe's construction of his own identity, and which cause him--and the syntax--an amount of fluctuation, Pye's "winding lane"__` '-- --p always leads back to the same place, "in colour blue" (p. 40). Only when the image has been de-sublimated is the conceit of a threshold of meaning--now a vertiginous abruptness--reassumed: "He thought he was going to come on it any minute round the next corner, as he was" (p. 132). Before that, the crisis remains sublimated in the picture infused with blue--a colour which generates a sense of infantile security; several passages are filtered through this connotation. The situation in which Christopher gets lost is drenched with*a play of colour dissolving, his problems ("He enjoyed teasing and was careful no-one should he felt" (p. 5)) know what with an interlacing series of  132 references to the sea, to lakes, and to the boats upon them. He is "lost in feelings", immersed in the "Aegean", anxiety dispelled by the immobile permanence of "those boats fishing in the senses" (p. 13),. which in the manuscript are "those ships of the senses, becalmed (MS, p. 9, 32 Father forever" my emphasis). and son are both fascinated by a veil of colour whose projection in any circumstances induces this comatose effect: For both it was the deep-colour spilled over these objects that, by evoking memories they would not name, and which they could not place, held them, and then led both to a loch-deep unconsciousness of all else. (p. 12) In this diffusion of any awareness, they can empty themselves of all personal history, all co-ordinates. This state of willing captivity submits to a condition like the fetish, which is instituted to relinquish 1" ý``' unwanted information in a form that reproduces the circumstances of the information first coming to light. 32 In the published version of the-novel, several emendations to the typescript have removed a compulsive extension of this marine imagery in the character of Richard Roe: Published version: "... and, as he clutched at her arm, which was not there, above the elbow, he shook at leaving this, the place he got, back to her nearest, his ever precious loss. " (p. 34) Typescript: "... and he clutched at her arm, above the elbow, he would be leaving this, who was now, by all she . to him, the stretch, the lake under the mountain, the was ship that bore him. " (TS, p. 56) Published version: "... the scene was his wife's eyes, wet with-tears he thought, her long lashes those black railings, everywhere wet, ' but, 'in 'the air... " (p. 37) Typescript: "... the scene was the colour of his wife's the wet about might have been machined steel and over eyes, was that stretch, the trough of lake=water grey light all joining earth and sky, but, in the air... " (TS, p. 61)  133 In such a way, Christopher is "held to ransom by the cupidity of boys" as much as by any cupidity on the part of Pye's sister; the abduction is successful when he accepts her because she is captured-by "the world his need had made" : But when she pulled at his jacket, he did look up and saw nothing strange in how she was, -caught full by the light from those windows, so that her skin was blue and her orbs, already sapphire, a sea flashing at hot sunset as, uneasy, she glanced left, then right... Caught in another patch of colour... Furtively she glanced right, then left, but when, to make him do as she wanted, she caught full at him with her eyes that, by the ocean in which they were steeped, were so much a part of the world his-need had made, and so much more a part of it by being alive, then he felt anything must be natural, and was ready to do whatever she asked. (p. 14, my emphases) The night which includes a parallel to this abduction, when Pye encounters a prostitute and then a lost boy whom he takes to the Fire Station, is saturated with. the same ~-ý_ ýý shifting variants of blue and red: _ on the other side', were triangular dark sapphire shadows... out of the blue... the milk moon stripped deep gentian cracker paper shadows off his uniform... he ogled the dark purple nipple, the moon full globe that was red Indian tinted by the bulb... he spoke suggestively to gentian hooded doorways... the mucus `reappeared, almost Eton blue... (pp. 162-6) The way in which the characters are affected by colour patterns-equal to "the world his need had made" offers a model. for`reading a text whose title would seem to privilege the hermeneutics of being "caught"--a mode of rendering the novel by which any substance built up is nothing but a shadow cast by the need to substantiate. Correspondingly, the absence of colour is confounding;  134 Ilse has an intractable presence in the book which stems from her lack of colour: Declining light, in which there was no sun, reduced her-body. She: Uay dim, like a worm with a thin skeleton, back from a window, pallid, rasher thin, her breasts, as she lay on her back, pointing different ways. (p. 142) She is not metamorphosed by coloured light but uncovered by lamps "in their logic", with no subjective associations: sterile, devoid of any meaning. The revelation of Ilse's body as meaningless because f: the colour has been washed out of it--it is bleached like the "objects thrown up on a beach"--diverts Prudence from her own fascination with Firemen: "So it came about that Prudence went off Pye" (p. 143). And Christopher rejects a toy boat because it is uncoloured'. "a tanker, painted tropic white, that Christopher hurled away from him not three weeks later" (p. 17). This detail is a refinement on the typescript version, where the tanker remains blue. In short, the book. is not motivated in the way we expect. of a novel, if the kind of measures by which a novel. is enclosed in the, sense familiar to Elizabeth Bowen can only operate on the understanding that some forms of writing are pressed into service while others are not. The unwritten literary history of the period is dominated by the question of legitimate practice, of the indirect resistance-to change. The-Second World War-was a total war, directly involving the whole of society, civilian  135 population as well as the'armed forces; social change was rapid and total. Among many practising novelists there was an unformulated commitment to the novel as a surrogate for social stability. Where the work was directly addressed to contemporary life, more often than not the war was a back-cloth for inveterate attitudes. 'The social upheaval of evacuation merely enhances the comedy of Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Fla s, which does little to adjust the class-consciousness prevalent before it. A novel like Nancy Mitford's Pigeon Pie could be written precisely because its attitude to the Blitz was so flippant. As long as the novel is understood as being informative, it can represent society without having to interpret the modes of its formation. Caught proceeds to resolve the fixed representations that impound the novel with the fixed representations, that impound society. It provokes a disunity in the self constituted by both novel and social world in a consideration of incestuous activity-- illegitimate practice-to a full extent. According to Freud, the barrier against incest is "essentially a cultural demand made by society. Society must defend itself against the danger that the interests which it needs for the establishment of higher social 33 units may be swallowed up". Wilhelm Reich, in his 1932 study (enlarged in 1935) The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality, concluded that a 33 Sigmund Freud, "The Transformations of Puberty" (1905)-, On Sexuality, volume 7 of the Pelican Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 148.  136 dynamically excessive incest wish is found where there is too great an interest in the incestuous object because of a general restriction of instinctual life. And in their subsequent findings, Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan agree that, in its ordering of'sexual relations according to laws of preferential marriage alliances and forbidden relations, incest prompts the exchange of women between nominal lineages, "in order to develop in an exchange of gifts and in an exchange of master-words the fundamental. commerce and concrete human societies 34 discourse on which are'based". Incest is prohibited because it is unserviceable: it does not allow the exchange which is crucial to society, just as the difficulty of Caught lies in its contravention of the novel as a mutual grant of equal interests between reader and text--the strange intensities of the text are unequalled by the reader's ability to manipulate them. Incest is a powerful force which society is unable to employ in the pursuit of its own logic. Incest becomes unthinkable. There is a parallel moment in the reading of a novel, caught up in an accustomed equilibrium of forces, where adaptation is unconditional--transgression is literally meaningless. But this was a total war; in 1940, professional observers were relaying acute misgivings as to how society 34 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, Alan Sheridan a Selection, tr. (London:, Tavistock Publications, 1976), p. 142.  137 would be seen to have justified its specific encroachments: The average person surrenders part of his cultural individuality with every new act of integration into a functionally rationalized complex of activities. He becomes increasingly accustomed to being led by others, and gradually gives up his own interpretation of events for those which others give him. When the rationalized mechanism of social life collapses in times of crisis the individual cannot repair it by It his own insight. Instead his own impotence reduces him to a state of terrifying helplessness... It seems. to me that the more slavishly subjected to the will of the state the individual has been, the greater the collapse is likely to be either into panic or into apathy. 35 Virginia Woolf, taking aerial bombardment as her pretext, and writing of the way that women are ideologically placed within a rationalized mechanism of social life, makes it her purpose to supply an awareness of how such political liabilities are fully sexualized: Let us try to drag up into consciousness the subconscious Hitlerism that holds us down. It is the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave... If we could free ourselves from slavery we should free men from tyranny. Hitlers are bred by slaves. 36 At the same time, recognition of the dependence on representations took the form of frantic specific solicitation for reliable sources of information. In his extravaganza Shaving through the Blitz (which was comic serially in Penguin New Writing), George Stonier published makes this the basis of a farcical indirection: People say in these times it doesn't matter what newspaper you read, but that is a mistake; you should always read the same newspaper, through thick and 35 Karl Mannheim, Man Society, (London: Routledge and & Kegan Paul, 1940). 36 Virginia Woolf, "Thoughts of Peace in an Air Raid", in Essays, IV, (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), p. 174. Collected  138 thin, so as to be able to read between the lines. In the Tube carriage, for example, where I am wedged between intruding elbows, every man has a paper spread on his lap or held up in front of him. And nearly every one is squinting over his neighbour's sheet for the news he doesn't find in his own. Somewhere, these hungry eyes seem to say, if only one could put one's hand on it, there is news, real news, the whole story. 37 Because the "whole story" was withheld, "wishful thinking" and, grossly inflated, rumour took hold. A striking example occurred on 7 May 1941, after the last big Blitz on Liverpool when the city centre was 'temporarily sealed off to ease, traffic congestion; within hours the rumour was running, in London that martial law had been enforced. In a climate of such apprehension, there is a faintly bridling tone to the very first sentence of Caught: "When war broke out in September we were told to expect raids" (my emphasis). The, first person plural pronoun invites 11 the reader to decide whether to assent to, or dissent from '- an account which, claims to be able to speak for him. As its first consideration, the book appeals to a memory that can be shared and so regulated. This is of course to read the rest of the book into the first sentence: in its subsequent practice the book does give rise to a definite impression of the novel as a'form providing the reader with the shape of his own history in return for obedience, a filial dependence--an impression which is being constantly-translated into glimpses of a separate form by writing as a diverting technique which cites its own material-in a kind of forbidden, or incestuous, union. It 37 George Stonier, Shaving through the Blitz (London: Cape, 1943) p. 46.  139 is as if the novel-form were bounded. by a horizon beyond which writing begins to lose its meaning, and this horizon is what Caught dissolves in its re-orientation of the reader. It'demonstrates how the subject is caught up in a formation which necessitates his captive presence for its own survival: We are fascinated by the growth of freedom from powers 'outside ourselves and are blinded to the fact ofýinner restraints, compulsions, and fears, 'which tend to undermine the meaning of the victories freedom-has won against its traditional enemies. 38 "Freedom"-is reactivated as a concept that depends on the subject assimilating himself to a unified image of his own co-ordination. All the emphasis is on a consistency of the subject for which the prototype is the strong visual image he fixes upon himself. This developed sense in which the individual is present to himself only operates in a fixed context. The prolonged dislocation of normal living conditions provides an interval in which this context can be seen to have sustained itself with. a spurious momentum: If he (the civilian) is threatened with air-raids he is at a disadvantage in picturing what this threat means. The soldier can form a"tolerably accurate picture which is drawn from experience of related phenomena; the novice tends to be flooded with emotions which arise from phantasies that are set in motion by-the threat, and which he cannot check by appeals to fact. Therefore there is a danger that the aggressive component of these emotions will be . his own side rather than towards the enemy or towards towards hostile objects in reality, as would be the 38 Erich Fromm, The Fear Freedom, (London: Kegan of Paul, 1942), p. 91.  140 case if it were a conscious aggression. 39 With the lapse of an authorizing context, it was in fact the case that "juvenile delinquency increased, which increase can be largely attributed to the break-up of 40 family life". At one point in Caught, the Auxiliaries discuss a newspaper report of a case of theft by a. Regular's sister. In fact, several references in the typescript to thieving by members of the Fire Service. have been suppressed in the published version. In the typescript, the two Regulars, Wal and Chopper, who "were always in the bar" (p. 47), steal glasses from it (TS, p. 79). And when Hilly has left some silk stockings at-the Station, Roe reports_"they'll have gone by now". She assures him that-in the event of fire in her own home, "I'm going to lock everything-up before I put through my firecall" (TS, "p. 96). More significant were the growing signs of what the editors of Mass-Observation described as "consider- able moral abandon! " There was, at the least in the minds of observers; an atmosphere of sexual availability which clings to Caught. The general sense of disaffiliation is siphoned through this into an aptly indiscriminate grammar: This was a-time when girls, taken out tonight clubs by men in uniform, if he was a pilot she died in his arms.. Limp, dancing as never before entirely to his move- ments, long-haired sheaved heads too heavy for their bodies collapsed on. pilots' blue shoulders... (p. 49) 39 Bion, ", p. 184. op. cit. 40 Fitzgibbon, p. 133.  141 The undetermined agency of these sentences is mechanical; moral abandon is automatic, a candle to the girls who are "moth deathly gay, in a daze of giving. " (p. 49) -Richard Roe has to "prompt" his feeling, reminding himself of the - part he has to play, "caught up in what he understood to be the way other people acted at this time" (p. 50, my . emphasis). The new sense of independence is compulsory: the outcome of a morality-machine driven by the logic of its own dynamism and turned into its opposite--a compulsive immorality. In, its night-club setting, this aura of sexual freedom is a "forced communion, this hyacinthine, grape 41 dark fellowship of longing The seduction of the will by expert discoloration begins to suggest the utter blankness of a putative ideal subject, origin of his own actions: The music floated her, the beat was even more of all she had to say, the colour became a part, alive and deep, making what they told each other, with her but in silence,. simply repeatedly plain, the truth, over and over again. (p. 112) The night-club is steeped in various shades of blue, "violet steep purple... intense blue... dark blue" (p. 107). shades.. . With the additional lulling of music, the familiar submersion becomes a volatile surrender. The editors of Mass-Observation, summing up reactions to'the increased of jazz, concluded that it "reaffirms, reassures, popularity in the soft, enveloping arms' of the Mother'or (now) 41 In Who's Who, Green defines his recreation p. 112. as "Romancing over the bottle, to a good band".  142 42 Again. disinters Motherland". and again the writing those compulsions the reader would localize and secure, scattering what he would concentrate, allowing a desultory recourse to the same accretions of colour and image. Hence the women are imbued with marine characteristics: "with sea flower fingered hands" (p. 108),, "dressed as if she was in diamonds fathoms under the sea" (p. 110). And a studied eroticism is assigned to the sensuous fig, the fruit that was kept alive in the dead of winter through artistry--in the glass-house that Roe and Christopher had strayed into: Her lips' answer, he felt, was of opened figs, wet at dead of night in a hothouse. (p. 111) The description is overbalanced by the metaphor; the text is always fastened in knots using the same threads and fibres found elsewhere. At the same time, the prevailing colour is modified by a comparison with "stained glass window light" (p. 111) recalling the abduction scene. The "storied glass" of'the department store'is echoed by the spot light which "spread a story over her body". These are attenuations of a narrative mediation such as Proust's magic lantern hints at, with the story of'Golo which "transubstantiates" the mundane. There is a constant sensation of phantasmagoria in Cau ht, of'the indistinct survival of other parts of the 42 Mass-Observation, p. 251. N  143 text, coalescing and flaking away again: She had been wafted off, was enchanted not entirely by all she had had to drink and which was released inside her in a glow of earth chilled above a river at the noisy night harvest of vines, not altogether by this music, which, literally, was her honey, her feeling's tongue, but as much by sweet comfort and the compulsion she felt here to gentleness that was put on her by these couples, by the blues, by wine, and now by this murmuring, night haunted, softness shared. (p. 108) This stylistic contraband includes that "honey" which is the gift Roe exacts from his wife ("his for its honey, for the asking"); the glowing earth at a night harvest of vines which, along with the "grape dark fellowship of longing", recalls Christopher's_"pink cheeks grape dark in the glow" (p. 13) when he is'abducted; and a closeness to the earth which Pye broods over in his recollection of the incest scene, and which Roe mentions in his attempt to "get the whole thing" (p. 180). It amounts to no more than a ýy Lawrentian notion of natural desire, which only requires the lifting of restrictions, but the powerless image seems to be proof that even a perverse desire is preconditioned. A direct connexion- is made with the anonymity of the dark incest scene; Roe can make out the audience "only as the love by "toying if less dark", and he tries. making to Hilly with her arm" which he cannot see. There are the same opportunities for mistaken identity: "he thought it wild that the touch of the unseen inside of her arm should have been so, and saw her not as she was" (p. 112). With its strange conflations, the book is haunted by the thought of being open to a specific form of  144 interpretation; the unnatural intensities are meant as points of departure from this configuration, attempts to release a desiring production that could erase the memory of it. Sibling incest tries to erase the memory of a sexuality of reproduction, a sexuality based on the family as prototype of social, sexual and other relations. Sex between siblings does the most violence to a sexuality measured by the degree of success in identifying inner restraints with external laws: Analysis shows that conscience rules with a harshness as great as external authorities, and furthermore that frequently the contents of the orders issued by man's conscience are ultimately not governed by demands of the individual self but by social demands which have assumed the dignity of ethical norms. The rulership of conscience can be even harsher than that of external authorities, since the individual feels its orders to be his own;. how can he rebel against himself. 43-- If the self is unable to-escape its familiar inhibitions, it can-only protect the integrity of its own designs at its own expense in A : negative gesture. Thus, in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compson commits suicide from'the same moral disposition which forces Pye to gas himself. death before the Blitz infers that socially -Pye's is a more-potent force than unconditioned conditioned-anxiety fear. In-Hangover Square, George Harvey. Bone accounts the murder of Netta a necessary preliminary to infantile reunion with his sister, who is in fact dead. The book 43 Fromm, pp. 143-4.  145 finishes with his arrival in Maidenhead, associated with his sister, where he gasses himself after war is declared. The alternative to suicide is-to seal off the moral universe by an abdication of will--the self inflicting on itself the punishment of estrangement from a consciousness that still retains its assent. Pye's sister incurs the guilt of having perverted her child-bearing role, and shelters the offended moral system by inverting external blame into the obsession which insulates her, by which' , she is "caught" ("Being caught is the word for having a She tries"to-retrieve "her child" child, sometimes"44)" by abducting Christopher; she reproduces the darkness of the incest scene--"She did not turn on the light" (p. 15)-- her face as if trying to her-identity in and hides conceal a re-enactment of that night: before ~r ýt` She snatched away her hands which, outspread her face, wrists against mouth, fingers'pointing at him, shook with urgency. (p. 16) She put both hands over her mouth, which was wide open, and so left, in the shadow, a dark hole between firelit fingers over a dark face. (p. 16) She covers her mouth, as if there was an opening that should have-remained closed; in this attitude, she gives a "sly at the entrance of Pye. The relation of 'mother' smirk" to 'child' is given a sudden erotic charge: Christopher's face-is "round, red and so round that both eyes disappeared in his frown. His pointed tongue curled up, dull red" (p. 16). 44 Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 154.  146 It becomes a permutation of the rose, a curling disclosure, red, round and furrowed, a projection of the sexuality "caught" in the Oedipal vendetta. Brid, the daughter of Mary Howells, is mentally unbalanced precisely because she is called Brid--because she is a bride; her derangement focusses on the neglect of her child, and this reverses the obsession of Pye's 45 sister--both cases are subject to the same moral pressures. In one sense, Brid is also a child who has been abducted. Her repeated "don't" when she suspects her mother of poisoning her, is the same interdiction used by Christopher. Equally, when Pye tries to quell the lost boy excited by his display of temper, he repeats the interdiction used by his sister to pacify Christopher: "For Christ's; sake, hush" x d (p. 169) . 4 "_ý_ v; The selfhood is abject, contracted to a morality that ýk s tý threatens eviction as the penalty for default, reduction to lack. Pye observes his sister "creeping an uninventive he was but löwer, more like a wild animal" (p. 41); her as matches the antics of the deranged hound bitch cringing that "crouched with love" (p. 31). -45 Elsewhere, the marriage vow is satirically twisted into, a seal of promiscuity: "he saw them hungrily seeking man', oh they were sorry for men and they pitied another themselves, for yet another man with whom they could spend last hours, to whom they could murmur darling, darling, darling it will be you always; the phrase till death do us being, for them, the short ride next morning to a part station" (p. 63). railway  147 From. this evidence, it becomes possible to reconstitute a certain topography of the mind, directing the text in a rigorous prepossession which is never explicated as programmatically as it is characterized in a sentence, from one of the short stories', which preserves the organizing imagery of Caught: Accustomed, as all were, to sights of this kind, there. was not one amongst us who did not now feel withdrawn into himself, as though he had come upon a place foreign to him but which he was aware he had to visit, as if it were a region the conditions in which he knew would be something between living and dying, not, that is, a web of dreams, but rather such a frontier of hopes or mostly fears as it may be in the destiny of each, or almost all, to find, betwixt coma and the giving up of living. 46 Coma is an unconscious manoeuvre, suspending a contrariety that seems to actuate the environment, while it leaves the self still within the horizon of a certain set of moral imperatives--a horizon-which is merely obscured by the neurotic web of dreams. Suicide affords the only final means to surpats such a frontier of hopes or mostly fears. ._ This analysis has maintained the reference to an historical moment when the self was overtly represented as being critically aware of its own alienability,. of a threat to its unity--the general sense in which "there was not one amongst us who did not. now feel withdrawn into himself, as though he had come upon a place foreign to him but which he was aware he had to visit. " This awareness may be traced further in the imaginative writing of the time. 46 Green, "Mr Jonas", pp. 15-16.  148 In The Ministry of Fear, published in 1943--the same year as Caught--the chief character is curiously but appropriately named Rowe (and the author is named Greene). Rowe is preoccupied with the dead wife he killed out of pity; he suffers an amnesia, in effect a resourceful metaphor for suicide, allowing him to erase the self adapted to condone the appeasement of a pitiless fascism: "... this is rather a dingy hole. We've come to terms with it of course. " "What frightens me, " Rowe said, "is knowing how I came to terms with it before my memory went... " 47 His new persona is "the kind of man the boy he remembered have become". 48 As with Pye and Roe both, "what would might have been" is entirely successful in captivating the self because 'what has been' is inadmissable. This dualism affected the composition of Spender's September Journal, where a first-person account of his support for Chamberlain is contradicted in a switch to - the second person: There you. are, you analyse your hatred of fascism and it comes to a desire to be left alone. 49 In Hangover Square, 'the protagonist is schizophrenic, alternating between a state of complete docility and the compulsion to murder Netta, "the net", and her fascist lover. This intention is paradoxically the vehicle of 47 Graham Greene, The Ministry (London: of Fear Heinemann, -1943), p. 163. 48 Ibid., p. l: 4. 49 Spender, p. 102.  149 'natural' feelings, and specifically of the same kind of pity which motivates Rowe: "He would never forgive himself if he hurt them. In fact the whole thing would be off if doing 50 The murder there was any question of so". coincides with the radio transmission of Chamberlain's declaration of war against Hitler. it is in common with all this attention to a disjunction in the self, that Caught insinuates into the character of Richard Roe a basic mutual repulsion of instinct and. reason: He had never felt war was possible, although in his mind he could not see how it could be avoided. (p. 28, my emphasis) Roe equates feeling with an unquestioned falsity: He kept on saying, falsely, and over and over, that he was to rejoin his wife. (p. 28) This nervous insistence, his conscious difficulty in maintaining one image of himself, is ultimately in collusion with the unitary idea of the self: It was he who had changed, who dreaded now, with a- hemlock loss of will, to evoke how once he shared these scenes with no one, for he had played alone, who had then no inkling of the insecurity the'war would put him in, and who found, when confronted by each turning of a path he knew by heart but which he could never call to mind when he closed his eyes, that the presence, the disclosure again of so much that'had not changed and shewed no immediate signs of changing, bore him down back to the state he wished to forget; when he was his son's age and had no more than a son's responsibility to a father. (p. 32) His need to regain the consistency of "the presence, the disclosure" which he has had constantly to improvise 50 Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square, (London: Constable, 1941), p. 193.  150 through his obsession with "the curling disclosure of the heart of a rose" is a conscious subterfuge. He thinks that he understands how he plays himself false and why; but the sentence has an introverted. side in which falsity is re-located. The "hemlock loss of will" is a textual rumour of Pye's suicide, an implicit recognition that the dictates of conscience are an artificial frontier, and this is, represented once more as the "turning of a path he knew by heart but which he could never call to mind" (My emphasis). The syntax is accordingly eccentric; it seems to proceed by driving out the will to provide a centre, it falters "when confronted by each turning of a path" and re-forms. _ The text is subversively alert to the presence of a frontier of "hopes or mostly fears" which Roe's neurosis attempts to obscure. In direct contrast, it is the clarity with which he suddenly perceives this frontier that destroys-Pye: In a surge of blood, it was made clear, false, that it might have been his own sister he was with that night. (p. 40, my emphasis) The immediate corrective, "false", interrogates the dense clarity-of an assumption, rquestions the meaning of a incest; as the unanswered challenge, it acts prohibition"of. as a pivot balancing the alibi of unproblematized innocence against a survival of incestuous desire. This desire is secreted in the 'unconscious' of the text, where it is almost visible in the ambiguities of grammar:  151 Yes, he had been close to the earth then, and it led him back to the, first girl he had known, not long before his father took them away from the village in which their childhood was passed, for that too was of the earth. (p. 40) "Them" is intended to refer to Pye and his sister, but it conveys this sense only very weakly in the face of a rhapsodical insistence on Pye and his first girl. He is indeed "close to the earth" in both relationships, but the nature of such congruency is only unconsciously acknowledged--it is not at the disposal of his "wishful thinking" self; his dilemma is precisely that "he had always known, and never realized" (p. 40). More often than not, incestuous desire survives in its negative counterpart of. guilt. Pye's own vision is "warped by his need" (p. 40), but the moonlight is "blind" as well because it is like a potential witness, and must be 51 The dream which his first visit '' disarmed. anticipates --- to the asylum is critically disturbed by the demand for Pye's family history: "'Is there any history in your family, Mr. Pye? ' ''Istory, what d'you mean, 'istory? "' (p. 86). When the same demand is actually made on the visit, his self-possession ebbs away: "'Now I second understand, ' Pye said slowly, with dread" (p. 138). On the first visit; he makes his sister a present of " a comb with rose. briars painted on the top"; ("rose briars" is a alteration to the typescript which has "little manuscript 5.1 By the roses in the rose garden "stared" . contrast, in order to fall in with Roe's designs.  152 roses") (MS, p. 152/p. 87). Afterwards, he suppresses the interview with her because she pleads with him to "bring her child. But it had all been so strange that he was ready next day to reject any version left him of what she may have said" (p. 87). At the same time, his own dreadful suspicions assume the image of a child of a forbidden union, "suckling on an ulcer the sickly, sore-covered infant of his fears, " (p. 169) The residual presence of desire is most striking in the account of the asylum dream. The words "dry" and "wet" are absent from the manuscript; their subsequent addition, and their conjunction, instance a kind of Freudian 'PostScript, that gives the real meaning. In the typescript and published version, Pye, having entered the asylum, passes "dry striped men" and "the dry yellow man", (in the manuscript there is a "whitecoated attendant"). The surroundings change abruptly with<the demand for "history", from dry to wet. The superintendent, "wet through, in full rig, dripping water, " had - been simply "in full rig" in -the manuscript. The modifications may be attuned to a Biblical canon-- , Hortus conclusus_soror meat sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons if so, could be on the true path to explain signatus"--and it. The same dictum, with the same proviso, intercepts the orbit of imagery pertaining to the garden secluded in the mp.aory. It seems pertinent that depriving Roe of his puts him in a special relationship with his sister-in- wife law. -  153 The second visit to the asylum coincides with the height of public hostility to the Fire Service; the revelation of incest augments a generalized paranoia. In his official account Ordeal Fire (1941), Michael Wassey's chapter on the Phoney War--"Waiting, waiting, waiting"--is obsessed with this public contempt. He tries to rehabilitate the Service with bitter objections to the Sickness and Injury Scheme. Incest is not the absolute cause of Pye's breakdown, which is first conceived in the conflicts arising from his promotion; it is as a result of his first official disgrace that "Pye was never the same" (p. 80). He rationalizes his sister's madness as the penalty demanded. by "the system we live under", which he feels is crudely bent on destruction: "but the instinct in the 'uman animal to save - itself is stronger than the ruling class can credit" ----. _ (pp. 22-3)'. He obviates a sense of his own guilt through resentment of the ruling class. In'consequence,. his own promotion is critical because the bad external object i's introjected, and he is "caught" in a demoralizing ambivalence, torn between class loyalty and official duty: "... The moment they get the report from hospital to say she's been admitted then I'm caught. " (p. 89, my emphasis)- - Pye was caught if he was detected. (p. 90, my emphasis) "if old Pye's a man 'e'll take 'is punishment when 'e's caught... " (p. 126, my emphasis) This excessive consternation strains the popular conception of everyone pulling together; on this view, the unrestrained  154 mixing of classes during the Blitz would have served to disunite as much as it seemed to harmonize the relations between them. Another contemporary writer certainly exposes a definite antagonism: For the first time in our neighbourhood's history the landlord did not show up--whether through fear of the bombs or the tenants' possible wrath in the face of rent demands for homes they were scarcely occupying, it is difficult to say. What is notable is the sinister effect his absence lent to the daily happenings; it intensified the feeling that a place from which the landlord did not even think it worthwhile to collect his rent, was indeed beyond salvation... One aspect of it, I would say, was the discovery of the inflexibility of. the existing class distinctions here in England. 52 This tension was in fact exacerbated by the first propaganda poster issued by the Government after the declaration of - war: YOUR COURAGE YOUR CHEERFULNESS YOUR RESOLUTION WILL BRING US VICTORY ýý- ý. Intended to unite the nation, the wording was felt to be divisive; Mass-Observation, conducting a survey to monitor reactions to its publication, discovered that a majority of the public read the-poster in this light: "The courage, cheerfulness, and resolution of you workers will bring victory-to us capitalists". But this-interpretation of events has barely survived. Tom Harrisson, one of the editors of Mass-Observation, has demonstrated the transformation of attitude in his own 52 Willy Goldman, "The Way We Live Now", Penguin New , Writin 3, (1941). ,  155 observers, comparing their recollection of events with the original records of thirty years before. In every case, memory distorts and does not corroborate the evidence: For most surviving citizens the major effect has been (as often) in two opposite directions, both processes in 'reality obliteration': either to be unable to remember anything much (with no wish to do so), or, more usually, to see those nights as glorious.. There is not much in between. But in between is where most of the unpublished evidence points--the evidence, that is, written down and filed immediately, without any intention of publication. 53 The process of "glossification" as Harrisson calls it, the impulse to mythologize the blitz, "has largely determined the public record since". The myth of solidarity has usurped the uneasy proximity of two classes, casually yoked together in the textual gadgetry of Caught: the names Pye and Roe combine as the two syllables of pyro, the root for Greek words connected with fire. Similarly, ý'° the names Pye and Piper together suggest 'Pied Piper'-- the fairy-tale figure who abducts the children of Hamelin. (Initially, Piper, whose skin'is. "dry and pied" (p. 21), is. the only other person in the Station who shares with Pye Roe the knowledge of the abduction). ' But these and relationships are symbiotic in the sense which Erich Fromm, in a contemporaneous analysis, gives to that term: [Symbiosis1 in this psychological sense, means the union of one individual self with another self (or any other power outside of the own self) in such a way as to make each lose the., integrity of its own self and to make them completely dependent on each other. The sadistic person needs his object just as 53. Living Through the Blitz, Tom Harrisson, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 321.  ( 156 much as the masochistic needs his. Only instead of seeking security by being swallowed, he gains it by swallowing somebody else. In both cases the integrity of the individual self is lost. In one case I dissolve myself in an outside power: I lose myself. In the other case I enlarge myself by making another being part of myself and thereby I gain the strength I lack as an independent self. '54 The constituency of the self which has come to appear natural predominates by subduing otherness to its own pattern, obscuring the frontier of hopes and mostly fears, retarding otherness by conducting its uncommitted energy into predetermined forms--by rationalizing its own demands. Roe's uncontrolled outburst-- He felt :a flash of anger. It spread. know this, " he announced in what, to him, was -"I direct answer, "you've always been most unfair to Pye. " (p. 194) --is the articulation of his own guilt, struggling to re-establish Pye-in a prescribed condition, working to standardize his otherness. No distance at all has been -`'`ý crossed between his early self-righteousness at Pye's assault on the class system--"It's sheer provocation" (p. 57)--and his final distaste for "that awful local school" (p. 185). This is mere squeamishness compared to Pye's deep vulnerability--"Her educated accents cut him" (p. 151). Pye's symbiotic relationship with Piper is characterized by the old man's echoing of his words: a confounding, hollow repeat of his own isolation. Glossification, or rationalizing, is the terminus of a process in which the self is governed by the promise of 54 Fromm, p. 136'.  157 meaning after the event. As Fromm expressed it, "rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality, but a post-factum attempt to harmonize one's own wishes with 55 In "when today has existing reality". other words, become yesterday, it will have integrated"56; the obsolescent self is driven by a need to rationalize. The object of formal experimentation in Caught is to dismantle the type of novel constructed by an obsolescent self to satisfy that need. Caught does have an element of pure recreation, in passages that resist integration by the production of excess material; And the sails, motionless, might have been stretched above a deeper patch of fathomless sea in the shade of foothills as though covered with hyacinths in that imagined light of evening, and round which, laden, was to come the wind that would give them power to move the purple shade they cast beside the painted boat they were to drive. 57 The' extravagance of this writing-i's optative, (nothing happens, but it all 'might have'); by choice it avoids the laws of exchange basic to the composure of reader and writer, the synthetic values which determine whether a narrative unit is justified; by desire it hypothesizes a 55 Fromm, p. 168. 56 Bowen, op. cit. 57 p. 13. One can see the germs of thin sentence in Blindness--"the sea with violet patches over grey where the seaweed stained it, silver where the sun rays met it" (p. 83) in the adolescent prose poem, "Barque", which Green --and (p. 164). reproduces in Pack My Bag  158 separate forte, which can erase the memory of this value apparatus in an intense otherness. The circuit of meaning produced in a novel is broken with the presence of recurrent intensities, which have, the quality of affects: sometimes strictly predictable, at other times they seem freakish and illegitimate. Thus, the pub where: Richard and Hilly meet is called The Rose and Crown; Mrs Howells' teapot is "covered with pink roses", and fires are inevitably depicted as showers of rose petals: "a flickering reddish light, as though in a shower of rose petals" (p. 16); "the light of his coal fire from which rose petals showered" (p. 120). The obsession with marine imagery slips a knife into the hands of the psychiatrist which is "carved at one end like the figure head beneath a bowsprit" (p. 138). Hilly croons to herself, "This man's my gondola" (p. 120). ýý--- ý And in Doncaster, Mrs Howells strikes up an acquaintance ý. with a man who "was white-haired, and lived with a sister" (p. 114). The sister is distinctly introverted: "The sister was next him, she hardly spoke" (p. 114). Successive revisions to manuscript and typescript were often made for the extension of this trait: eyes that were "brown, grey or green" in the typescript, became "blue, and blue, and blue" (p. 49) in the published version. Green has explained his procedure in an interview: "I have to make my opening statement and for the remaining 58 It seven-eighths of the novel revolve around it". will 58 Harvey Breit, "Talk Henry Green, a P. S. ", with and New York Times Book Review, (19 February 1950). 3.  159 be remembered that Party Going required nine or ten beginnings. In a later interview, the construction of a novel is seen as a_process of re-writing: INTERVIEWER: How much do you usually write before you begin re-writing? GREEN: The first twenty pages over and over again-- because in my idea you have to get everything into them.. So as I go along and the book develops, I have to go back to that beginning again and again... It's all a question of length; that is, of proportion. How much you allow to this or that is what makes a book now. It was not so in the days of the old three-decker novel. As to plotting or thinking ahead, I don't-in a novel... I let it come page by page, one a day, and carry it in my head. When I say carry I mean, the proportions... 59 This process of reconciling the text to its otherness is an unbroken sequence of coadjustments, a chain reaction which skims over the coagulations of narrative. The phrase "under which, on sunny days" (TS, p. 16), becomes "under which, on sun-laden evenings" (p. 12). Similarly, "ä rose, held close, smells of those heavy, sun-laden evenings after tea, " (TS, p. 21), becomes "a rose, held close, holds summer, sun-laden evenings at six o'clock" (p. 15). "The half seen tower at dusk, " (TS, p. 16), becomes "the half seen tower at six o'clock" (p. 12). In the excursion of re-writing, what would be the production of immoderate waste in the economy of a novel is the assertion of different size, the book carrying its own proportions which are not those of a novel. In the first of the book, Christopher takes charge of a bonfire, eighth emulating his father. He insists on taking along a 59 "The Art Terry Southern, of Fiction, XXII--Henry Green", Paris Review, 5, (Summer 1958).  160 scarlet handcart that resembles a fire engine. Correspondingly, Roe is given charge of a ship in the Blitz on the docks. The bonfire, which is "glancing rose in places with the wind" (p. 26) is in the "pied garden", ("pied" is an addition to the typescript). It can be seen that the text is not occupied with symbols but symptoms, organized intensive states whose meaning is inaccessible to the rationalizing self. The text has a reserve material, of images, textures, colours, which is the only origin of its recurrent intensities: (What he did not know was the year after year after year of entanglement before her, the senseless nightingale, the whining dog, repeating the same phrase"over and over in the twining briars of her sense. ) (p. 42) Every inch of the path they followed slowly through the wild garden, which was no longer tended, would, -ýý at any time before this, have reminded him of so many small events he had forgotten out of his youth, of the wounded starling here, the nightingale there one night, the dog whining across the river one morning, while he stood, motionless behind that elm, to watch two cats from the stables. (p. 178) This reappearance gives an outrageous frisson. The first sentence refers to Pye and his sister, the second to Roe; shortly after this, "the air caught at his wind passage as though briars and their red roses were being dragged up from his lungs" (pp. 178-9). The use of imagery as appliqu4 seems aimless. Revolving around an opening statement, the writing aims at every possible resort. The generation of a text through textural equivalences, and not equivalences'of sense, is practiced on every level.  161 The name Roe is phonetically linked with 'rose', but also with the deer which, both in the wild, and in the department store--"the light caught red in their bead eyes" (p. 13)--are "heraldic". The epithet, which in both cases is added to the typescript, pronounces their over-determination. In the interests of proportion, the cousin with whom Christopher is so preoccupied becomes Rosemary, where in the manuscript she had been Josephine. And in the "winding lane" of the incest scene, the girl whom Pye imagined to be the first he had known was "Mrs Lane's little girl" (p. 42). The writing is neither wholly transitive, nor wholly intransitive. The functional movement of the text is a - principle of citation through and across its own material; 60 to borrow a term from Joyce, it is trancitive, carrying _`~' the reader through the history of a representation. While he was writing Caught,. Green published an essay, on Doughty's Ar_abia Deserta. What he means to bring to light'in this is the style, because it is "not clear": that is, impervious to methods of elucidation applied by the rationalizing self, a self which the true contemporary idiom has to embarrass: "Doughty without doubt wrote in 60 "Verb umprincipiant through the trancitive spaces! ", James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, (London: Faber & Faber, irr), ýa3ý p. 594.  16 2 idiom the Arabia, 61 the of real and not of Araby". The essay is intended to intervene in the practice of writing at an'historical moment, because the need for an "idiom of the time" has been given a special impetus: Now that we are at war, is not the advantage for writers, and for those who read them, that they will be forced, by the need they have to fight, to go out into territories, it may well be at home, which they would never otherwise have visited, and that they will be forced, by way of their own selves, towards a style which, by the impact of a life strange to them and by their honest acceptance of this, will be pure as Doughty's was, so that they will reach each one his own style that shall be his monument? 62 Although Green traps himself into an ornamental flourish, this does not efface an impressive grasp of the fact that writing is pressed "by way of their own selves" to articulate a mutation in the self--both in writers and those who read them--which can only be expressed in something other than story. But the "idiom of the real Arabia" has to multiply inside the "idiom of Araby" so as to expose it as a form inadequate to the self shifting through-the history of its own realization--forcing itself into the idiom of the time. In-Caught itself, the first description of a blitz (pp. 95-8) is virtually a tableau of these complementary 61 "Apologia", Henry- Green, Folios of New Writing, (Autumn 1941), (London:. Hogarth Press), p. 51. In his own practice, Green can be seen re-writing to increase the degree of unclearness: in the manuscript, the phrase "the silence once broken, by a warplace flying low the tops of trees" is rearranged to be more discomforting: over "the silence once broken, flying low over the tops of trees, by a warplane. " (MS, p. 6) 62 Green, "Apologia", pp. 50-51.  163 pressures on the narrative. The Black-Out is shattered by a lighted gas main, which fills the scene with unreal clarity of detail: he was able to pick out details of brickwork and ... stone facings more easily, and in colours more natural, than would have been possible on a spring morning, in early sunlight. (p. 95) But the extreme precision is given a certain remoteness by insertions of a fairy-tale atmosphere--a straighforward appeal to the tone of Araby. The wrecked buildings are like "a palace in a story, the story of ruin" (p. 95). A flare is "dropped by magic" (p. 96), (in the typescript, "dropped by magic in the Thousand and One Nights" TS, p. 167). Roe stumbles into an air-raid shelter: And in the near corner a girl stood between a soldier's legs... Man and girl were motionless, forgotten, as though they had been drugged in order to forget, as though'he had turned over a stone and climbed down stairs revealed in the echoing desert, --ý these two were so alone. (p. 97) `'- - When Chopper emerges from the same shelter, "he might have come from seeing a Prince and a Princess" (p. 97). This combination of precision and remoteness is typical of the way-in which character has been defined through the mechanisms of fixation; the impulse to disremember, to threats to an established sense of order, rationalize engenders a-system-of floating over the present with an effective delusion, avoiding the necessity to realize a situation in which "He had been kissing her mouth, so that it was now a blotch of red" (pp. 96-7). The idea that Prudence has--"War, she thought, was sex" (p. 19)--is given  16 4 a scenario in the transformation of this red blotch: At that moment two ambulance men carried a stretcher up. They laid it down. The twisted creature under a blanket coughed a last gushing, gout of blood. police brought past a looter, most of his _Two torn heels dragging, drooling blood clothes off, at the mouth, out on his feet from the bashing he had been given. (p. 97) The red blotch is also found across Pye's mouth: "And a smear of jam must have been across one corner of his mouth, for the first he knew was when she mouthed it off" (p. 141). The scene is transfigured by separate chains of association, . and by separate forms of organization that occupy the same space: the idiom of Araby, which reminds the reader of a stance from which to approach the text with self-assurance, and the idiom of the real Arabia, with its translocation of the reader through the text, a theoretically limitless movement that maintains the predicament of the self. The one is forced to recognize the other which suddenly and literally materializes within it as a countermand. The true contemporary, idiom has 'an essential readiness, in a situation where the widespread desuetude of the novel is a result of flagrant unreadiness--nowhere more evident than in those features from which the novel derives its authority, its claim to be able to know more than the reader who, on. contact with the text, finds himself caught in a web, held in position where he depends already the novel as a source of information about society, a on portrayal of 'the way we live now'. Caught parodies the informative accents of a novel; the circumspect tone of an is brought to bear on trivial items--"It is possible author  165 that he was confused by the [of he was amount sweets] getting" (p. 7)--or is used pointlessly: "It is unnecessary to say how Christopher spent the days" (p. 33). The text is punctuated with a series of crass intimations of an omniscient author: How utterly harmless you are, thought Richard, . sleepless, and how wrong he was. (p. 42) Later on he carried out his promise. He was to regret it. (p. 47) But in this he was wrong twice, both times. (p. 66) But he was wrong. (p. 105) "Yes; " he went on, speaking as refined as he knew how and with an utter lack of interest that she shared, the bed was all they had, and were. not to have much longer, in common... (p. 119) But the peril was drawing closer and heavier about Pye... (P. 122) It was the beginning of the end. (p. 132) These inflexions of a privileged acquaintance with a range of information extend to the recall of historical events: He was too disturbed to notice the invasion of Norway. (p. 153) The invasion of the Low Countries had begun. (p. 154) But the Germans were to be quicker than that. (p. 155) Although it was hardly mentioned, each man in this group outside was aghast at the news, for the evacuation of Dunkirk was on. (p. 163) In its more blatant manifestation, the text resolves a sense of its own proportions as a novel with the social consensus regarding the pattern of events: This was how the story got around, in bits and pieces, and it was in this way that it grew, and grew in a  166 short time, 'for there Was' not much time left. (p. 150, my emphasis) The imagination is seen to be captivated by a guarantee of meaning. In his own attempt to "get the whole thing", Roe admits to the way in which the self'is orientated towards the recapitulation of its experience: "The extraordinary thing is, " he said, "that one's imagination is so literary. What will go on up there to-night in London, every night, is more like a film, or-that's what it seems like at the time. Then afterwards, when you go over it, everything seems unreal, probably because you were so tired, as you begin building again to describe to yourself some experience you've had. (p. 174) The constant activity of 'picturing' re-unites the self with the framework it needs to function within a horizon of imperatives, normally obscured by the webs of neurosis, or rationalizing--a whole repertoire of attempts to empty the self of its history: a history which can be restored when the disruption of this web allows a breach through which to release desire running counter to the inertia of the self, clarifying the frontier of hopes or mostly fears. With regard to the binding power of representations, this opposition of obscurity and clarity is stated in a short story of Elizabeth Bowen's, published while Caught was being written: "We can no longer express ourselves: what we say doesn't even approximate to reality; it only -. approximates to what's been said. I say, this war's an awful illumination; it's destroyed our dark; we have to see where we are. " 63 63 Elizabeth Bowen, "Summer Night", in Look at All Those Roses, (London: Cape, 1941), p. 194.  16 . 7 Stephen Spender includes the identical theme--the fireman relating his own experience of the Blitz--in his autobiography World Within World, and "literary" description is seen as the most inherent means the self has of formulating its congruity to the world: One man, Ned, had a secret cause of shame. He could not read or write. For this reason, he was never asked to keep the log. Ned had an energetic face full of expression, particularly in the large brown eyes and the mouth like a tense bow. Because of his illiteracy he was the only man in the station who told the truth about his fire-fighting experiences. The others had almost completely substituted descriptions which they read in the newspapers or heard on the wireless for their own impressions. 'Cor mate, at the docks it-was a bleeding inferno, ' or 'Just then Jerry let hell loose on us, ' were the formulae into which experiences such as wading through streams of molten sugar, or being stung by a storm of sparks from burning pepper, or inundated with boiling tea at the dock fires, had been reduced. But Ned had read no -accounts of his experiences and so he could describe them vividly. 64 "Literary" descriptions are modes of representation'that can avail themselves of stereotypes, among which the novel is only the most fully comprehensive source of order: With the closing down of football--a leading peace-time talk topic--the war was also much talked about in terms of the sports news. 65 Despite his bid for a hard-won sagacity, Roe's own attempt to "get the whole thing" is a self-conscious move toward-accuracy that only reverts to another stereotype, the supposititious faithfulness of documentary. With its 64 Stephen Spender, World Within World (London: Readers Union, 1953), p. 236. 65 Mass-Observation, p. 148.  168 . first-person directness, it is unavoidably reminiscent of the multitude of testimonials published in a hurry only months after the first Blitz. Dy considers the result. is a rather sedentary performance: "how very dull his description was... this inadequate. description... there was nothing in what he lad spoken to catch her imagination" (pp. 177-8). What her imagination is "caught" by is a commonplace 'literary' image: "'Our taxi was like a pink beetle drawing a peppercorn... '... the bit about the beetle had drawn her attention because she thought it vivid" (p. 179). According to the omniscient author, "It had not been like that at all" (p. 176 & p. 180). But the scheduled account of what it had been like is drenched with a violent assortment of colour that the text can barely hold: This fan, a roaring red gold, pulsed rose, at the outside edge, the perimeter round which the heavens, set with stars before fading into utter blackness, ---. were for a space a trembling green. (p. 177) What he had seen was a broken, torn-up dark mosaic aglow with rose where square after square of timber had been burned down to embers, while beyond the distant yellow flames toyed joyfully with the next black stacks which softly merged into the pink of that night. (p. 180) This polychromatic density is a systematic derangement of the'perspicuousness of an eye-witness account: A barge, overloaded with planks, drifted in flames across the black, green, then mushroom skin river water under an upthrusting mountain of fox-dyed smoke that pushed up towards the green pulsing fringe of, heaven. (p. 182) The prismatic style exceeds the range of "literary" description by the sheer exorbitance of its effects,  169 disconcerting the ambition of clear reportage. Its intensity is girded in with brackets, which aggravate the discordancy between two competing idioms. This element of discomposure was reinforced"by an extensive strain of violent abuse and obscenity in the dialogue, lost to the published version but unadulterated in the typescript. Although Roe can lay claim to some shrewdness in his recognition that "one's imagination is so literary", he only alleges this; in fact his perceptiveness is obscuring another kind of misapprehension: "He had been talking to her as though she was her dead sister" (p. 174). He is evidently still trying, to create a future memory, re-adapting the image of his wife, so that the past "will have integrated". Unconscious of his own manoeuvre, he stalks up and down the length-of the garden, even though Dy has planned a walk beyond it: "Now they were coming to '' -, that stile again. She wondered if she could get him out decaying (p. 184). 66 of this beastly place" In the typescript, Dy the wife appreciates that "the garden was not the proper place. She made up her mind that if he seemed to be getting upset she would take him off to bed at once" (TS, p. 335). He becomes aware of the garden, and of the fact that it no longer affects him in the same way, once he has effectively 66 It is ground was under snow" (p. 172)-- winter--"the it was on Roe's previous visit when the memory of his as wife was distorted into a spring setting. The seasonal balance resembles that of Four Quartets, where the autumnal of "Burnt Norton" is-revised in the winter episode landscape of "Little Gidding".  170 misconstrued the past by alternative means: He had forgotten his wife. Even when, twelve months later, he had begun to forget raids, and when, in the substation, they went over their experiences from an unconscious wish to recreate, night after night in the wet. canteen, even then he found he could not go back to his old daydreams about this place. It had come to seem out of date. (p. 178) 0 This is a further example of disremembering--the other side of "glossification": "to be unable to remember anything much (with no wish to do so)". Roe is only converting his memory into a different form on the same level of tolerance. The narrative culminates in a display of damaging aggression: "God damn you, " he shouted, releasing everything, of get on my bloody nerves, all you bloody women with all your talk. " It was as though he had gone for her with a hatchet. She went off without a word, rigid. He felt a fool at once and, in spite of it, that he had got away at last. Then his son came up, gravely looked at him. He said to Christopher, for the first time: "Get out, " and he added, "Well, anyway, leave me alone till after tea, can't you? " (p. 196) In this aspect, Roe's character illustrates how the self is regulated on the axis described with a rather sinister pragmatism by the editors of Mass-Observation: In order to conduct a war thoroughly, we must then turn certain passive feelings into active feelings, and externalize violent hatreds which are ordinarily turned inwards within civilized individuals in this country. 67 Roe does understand that something is lacking, that despite his avowed intentions, he is simply unable to know any 67 Mass-Observation, p. 424.  171 means of communicating the truth of his experience: "Yet I suppose it was not like that at all really. One changes everything after by going over it. " "But the real thing ... is the picture you carry in your eye afterwards, surely? It can't be what you can't remember, can it? " "I don't know, " he said, "only the point about a blitz is this, there's always something you can't describe, and it's not the blitz alone that's true of. Ever since it happened I feel I've been trying to express all sorts of things. " (pp. 179-80) What he needs, and what is at work in the text, is a method of historization, a practice which gives him charge of his own history by -de-rationalizing the environment from within which he is unable to countenance any re-formation of the self by a perverse activity. Historization disperses the fog of "wishful thinking". It is the reverse of those practices governed by the provision of meaning after the event, materially exceeding the integrity of such forms in the effort to forget them. The idiom of the time is a -ýý_ present articulation of the past according to future needs. Instead of directing the self to be paralyzed by a fixed memory of past turning-points, ißt re-introduces. these-to the creative life of the self by its future purpose of freedom, the intense desire of otherness. The true idiom of the time actuates a theoretically limitless chain of recurrent intensities, through which the self may be translocated, achieving in this movement a perpetual possibility of historization. Y  2 CHAPTER V Loving: A Fabulous Apparatus -ý  173 After the London Blitz of Caught, Loving is set in a country house in Ireland; the contrast between the two locales--which is virtually that of the difference between pastoral and anti-pastoral--is almost immediately established: "For this was in Eire where there is no blackout. " (p. 5). This is the first indication of a negative inference of an unseen, but not unheard, background of war against which the conduct of affairs inside Kinalty is called in question. When Raunce's Albert struggles over his options during a picnic by'the sea, a very precise alterity makes him see the landscape not in terms-of natural. features but bluntly as 'Ireland', conceptually opposed to 'England': For answer he rolled over onto his stomach and faced inland, all Ireland flat on a level with his clouded eyes. (p. 131) -'ý _,-- He turned over onto his stomach again, facing Ireland. (p. 135) The principal challenge to the Irish life is the implied duty of each member of the household to return to England for war-work: a challenge which is doubly intrusive since nearly all the servants are English. But duty towards what, -exactly, or to whom? And is the implied motive one of preservation or change? The book has an uncanny vigilance with regard to the organization of the household, and its relations of power. It may seem an overpowering assumption to readers won over by the lustrous texture and delicate cunning of the book, but its  174 brilliant-resourcefulness has to be understood as an adversary success; it is pitched against a corporate identity formed by certain relations of power. The new and energetic commitment on a national level is an unpossessed concern until it bears with it an understanding of the distribution of interests in society, and a. key to that understanding is found through examining the Country House; as one investigator of the 'Country House Ideal' in the literary tradition has it, All but the largest provincial cities were under the wing of the lord of the manor. The network of such families and houses, spread over the face of England, might be thought to represent the greater part of English society. 1 The network'survived, and in one respect, the Irish Country House was a more uncompromising version of the English case, since the isolating of an English household had the effect of allowing its peculiar structure to become more prominent and vivid. Elizabeth Bowen, who was born into the landed gentry of Ireland,. describes the "intense, centripetal life" of the Irish house: Come on round the last turn of its avenue, or unexpectedly seen down a stretch of lawn, any one of these houses--with its rows of dark windows set in the light facade against dark trees--has the startling and abstract clearness of a house in a ----meaning print... 2 y. s is a visual impression of. self-declaration, but the 1-Howard Erskine-Hill, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pie (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 283. 2 Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen's Court (London: Longmans, 1942), p. 20. .-  175 same characteristics apply in a description of the social abstractness of the same house: The land around Bowen's Court, even under its windows, has an unhumanized air the house does nothing to change. Here are, even, no natural features, view or valley, to which the house may be felt to relate itself. It has set, simply, its pattern of trees and avenues on the virgin, anonymous countryside. Like Flaubert's ideal book about nothing, it sustains itself on itself by the inner force of its style. 3 The force of style is never enough in Loving. Kinalty Castle is filled with the results of an excessive pretension to a Poynton-like project of self-sustainment. The effect is one of overweight: "Why my cluster ring Violet, " she said going over to an imitation pint measure also in gilded wood and in which peacock's feathers were arranged. She lifted this off the white marble mantelpiece that was a triumph of sculptured reliefs depicting on small plaques various unlikely animals, even in one instance a snake, sucking milk out of full udders and then she blew at it delicately through pursed lips. (p. 205) The snake is singled out, and it certainly could be - emblematic of the unnatural, even parasitic vainglory of the decoration. Actual physical contact with the artefacts seems to produce ever more bizarre instances of "the magnificence and the gilt": Edith... steadied herself round a turn of the Grand Staircase by holding the black hand of a life-sized negro boy of cast iron in a great red turban and in gold-painted clothes. (p. 112) - Then she reached for the latch which was a bullock's horn bound in bronze. (p. 169) She replaced into its niche a fly-whisk carved out of a block of sandalwood, the handle enamelled with reddish silver. (p. 207) 3_Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen's Court (London: Longrnans, 1942). p. 21.  176 ' There is a virtual abuse of natural materials in displays of pointless artifice; organic materials, surrounded by this over-ripe decoration, ' can only achieve diminished growth: Charley went straight over to a red mahogany sideboard that was decorated with a swan at either end to support the top on each long curved neck. In the centre three ferns were niggardly growing in gold Worcester vases. (p. 14) The rose, which had been transformed almost into flesh in Cam, is present here in the shrivelled petals of a pot-pourri, "the dry bones of roses" (p. 61). The disharmony is finally grotesque in a counterpoint between needless ostentation and what is literally the call of nature: Michael-ran forward to catch Punch's droppings before these could fall on the gravel which he had raked over that very morning. (p. 31) Even the owner of the house is like a display item or curio,, remarkable for gaudy plumage like the two hundred or more peacocks (status symbols since antiquity)4 which stalk through the grounds: She had moved over to the open window with this man's wife and stuck her rather astounding head with its blue-washed silver hair out into the day, as though she were a parrot embarrassed at finding itself not tied to a perch and which had turned its back on the cage. (p. 187) The dovecote which is a model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, ludicrous reproduction in "jagged cement" of a and the ruined classical temple give the extravagance a visual of precariousness, perhaps hubris, easily association disposed*to co-ordinate with a moral flimsiness. 4-See, for Columella, Re Rustica, VIII. xi. 3, example, Rerum Rusticarum, III. vi. ^De and Varro,  177 The house has neither the aura of style, nor the humanized aura of a Howards End. In the terms of the Country House Ideal, specifically of Ben Jonson's poem "To Penshurst", it is an example of "envious show". Neglect of the culture from which it stands aloof is not just one inevitable concomitant of the sort of wilful viability that Evelyn Waugh supports: More even than the work of-the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artist's pride and the Philistine's vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman. 5 This is. the antagonistic version of the aura which comes from patrician continuity. Elizabeth Bowen silently neglects the question of community in order to preserve the wistful appeal of this idea: "What runs on most through a family living in one place is a continuous, semi-physical-. _ -ter dream. "6 But in the Country House Ideal. this continuity is the prior basis for direct-involvement with the community; it is a social role, not an unproblematical aura, that emerges from "the succession of the title from holder to holder while the property each is steward of remains the same. The effect of Jonson's powerful imagination is to turn the material basis, as the Marxists would say, into a spiritual idea, an image of the good life. "7 5 Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (London: Chapman and Hall, 1945). 6 Bowen, p. 451. 7 H. A. Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959', p. 274.  178 Without this continuity, the Tennants hold their position by an empty prerogative. As the name suggests, there is no profound link between the family and the estate, and . their tenure is of the most superficial kind; they are interested in the material basis to the precise detriment of the spiritual idea: "Did Jack's stepfather live.: here much before he. died? " "Edward would never be away from the place when he first rented it, " Mrs. Tennant replied. "But once he bought outright he seemed to tire. " (p. 187) Within the family itself the line of succession (from stepfather to stepson) is not absolutely clear, and there . seems barely a chance of its security in future: "... I look on myself simply as a steward. We could shut Kinalty up tomorrow and go and live in one of the cottages. But if I once did that would your darlings ever be able to live here again? I wonder. " (pp. 186-7) A. handful of narrative indiscretions give us the ultimate fate of the house--destruction by fire, like Poynton--but the heritage. on offer is in any case-no more than merely property, without the greater privileges and responsibilities the role that Jonson almost hallows by its tenure of of "the mysteries of manners, armes, and arts": Jonson... sees the country house as performing an integrating service in society, as the focus of a culture. based on the countryside. 8. The centre-piece of Kinalty's spectacular vacuousness is a complete travesty of this culture based on the 8 Mason, p. 278.  179 countryside, a "fabulous dairy of a drawing room". Under a vaulted roof "painted to represent the evening sky at dusk", articles of everyday farmyard use are translated into priceless bric-a-brac: As she rubbed the shoulder of her husband's mother she was surrounded by milking stools, pails, clogs, the cow byre furniture all in gilded wood which was disposed around to create the most celebrated eighteenth-century folly in E;ire that had still to be burned down. (p. 203) The house itself stands metaphorically for the spoliation of a culture based on the surrounding countryside. In' this same "fabulous dairy", the plaque of a snake sucking milk out of full udders suggests a spiritually toxic return for material drains on the community. The workmanship is indigenous: "'It's French know ". 9 An not even all you article like the hammock "fashioned out of gold wire" or the pitchfork, "a gold instrument... a museum piece", is the symbolic token of sucking gain from the host body of peasant life, an extreme parody of the ideal co-existence . found in poems of the Country House tradition: These poets see the country house as accommodating a cross-section of the whole community. Society is hierarchically conceived, but in the country house this stratification seems to mean not segregation, but-familiar contact between different levels of an ostensibly integrated'community. 10 Far from being-integrated, the Kinalty community is absolutely divided: "'We're really in enemy country here you know'" (p. 11). 9 The decor is to that comparable of the Vidame de Poitier's house,, as described by Madame de Crequy in a passage that Green was later to incorporate in the text of Back-(p. 95). 10 Erskine-Hill, p. 282.  180 The Tennants see themselves as on a war-footing, but opposed to the element with which they ought to be maintaining familiar contact: ".. But in a way I regard this as my war work, maintaining the place, I mean. Because we're practically in enemy country here you know and I do consider it so important from the morale point of view to keep up appearances... " (p. 186) The "morale" endorsed here rides on the general sense of an appeal for solidarity but its application is narrower than that. Mrs. Tennant interprets her duty to be "keeping up appearances"; in the context of a nationally invoked defence of a way of life, war-work is seen as the upkeep of envious show in danger from a lack of the right sort of education. Familiar contact is'replaced by a violent disassociation from enforced ignorance; the real threat is the invasion'of the ramshackle, and the defence ý~` which is down is the "ruined wall which shut this demesne from tumble-down country outside" (p. 29). The Tennants are equally remote from their own servants--"'What do we know about the servants? "' (p. 187)--whom they regard with the same degree of contempt: "'Whether it's never having been educated or whether it's just plain downright I 'don't know"' (p. '183). But the English servants stupidity themselves are hostile to their native counterparts: "'Gawd save us from 'em, they're foreigners after all"' (p. 177). And in fact their phobic rejection of the Irish is a good deal more hysterical; an Irishman will live in "pig sty'of a hovel" (p. 141), the instrument of an a altogether unacceptable religion:  181 "No Roman Catholics thank you, " Miss Swift said- sharp. "Yes, " Miss Burch agreed, "we don't want those fat priests about confessin' people or taking snuff. " (p. 123) Neither servants nor employers can interpret the Irish accent of. "sibilants and gutturals"; (only Kate bridges the gap--only through affection for Paddy). The situation is virtually colonial, social disparity being governed by the conflict between a language of dominance and a language of subjection, and Mrs. Tennant's detachment from the Irish-- "'But my dear it's not for us to understand O'Connor'" (p. 207)--is simply a more acute degree of the exclusion practised on her own servants. The inequality of, English-speakers and Irish-speakers is blatant; and the social order is maintained through generalizations of the same prejudicial principle, being geared by an. unwilled consensus to the knowledge of -ýý.. certain practices with. the limits set upon them--demanding the possession of an elected language where the acquisition of. (limited) power is the outcome of, learning to read it. This. is taken quite literally when Raunce captures the black and red notebooks which reveal how to operate the system -_of fiddles and perks: By keeping open a Cellar Diary which had also to be shown each month to Mrs. Tennant and by comparing the two, he was able -to. refer from one to the other. Thus much that would otherwise have been obscure became plain. (p. 42) The Irish themselves--especially those with an inside view-- are soon adepts in the same manner of exploiting the Tennants:  182 One hundred donkey cart loads of washed gravel from Michael's brother's pit had been ordered at Michael's suggestion to freshen the rutted drive where this turned inward across the ha-ha. Gravel sold by Michael's brother Patrick and carted by Danny his mother's other son who had thought to stop at the seventy ninth load the donkey being tired after it was understood that Mrs. Tennant would be charged for the full hundred. (p. 31) Social transactions are in the worst faith. Eldon, whom Raunce succeeds as butler, had had his greatest success in blackmail, having "touched the Captain for larger and larger amounts". The free exchange of products common to the Country House poems is replaced by outright extortion: "'She's been over to lunch. many a time since and he'll have had the old dropsy out of her"' (p. 34). From within a circuit of unnatural retention--"dropsy"--Raunce is notably aggressive as he forwards the gains to his mother: As he licked the envelope flap after putting in the Money Order he squinted a bit wild, and this was shocking with his two different-coloured eyes. (p. 35)ý'ý--- A reciprocity of greed is the illustration of a concern not to inculpate a particular agent, but to uncover the institutional basis. The house itself is a vast, impersonal monitor in which everyone is under surveillance, and Eldon's blackmail is only the most obvious exercise of betrayal when each member of the household is in the condition to inform on everyone else. There is an atmosphere of oppressive perspicuousness, recognition of being exposed to scrutiny: "The a general passage carpet was so thick you never could hear anyone coming". (p. 19). The house could have been planned for a  183 maximum ease of surveillance, and its inhabitants always consider how audible they are: Before going on Miss Burch waited until Raunce, who was leaving Mrs. Jack's room, should be out of earshot. (p. 21) "The old cow, " Charley remarked once she was out of earshot. (p. 69) Ruled by a pretence of the uncounted moment, they will drop the voice or soften its tone, creating a climate of hugger-mugger. Edith is typically obsessed, with her repeated enjoinder to "Hush... someone'll hear". These reclamations of a confidential'space, as modestly conspiratorial as they are, look pathetic in the face of prevenient control. Each person is subject to an irresistible, invisible gaze of unspecified but superior provenance. When one is not being physically watched one still behaves as if one is: He paused to look over his shoulder with his hand on a leaping salmon trout in gilt before pressing this lever to go in. There was no one. Nevertheless he spoke back the way he had come. "They'll break it, " he said aloud as though in explanation... (p. 62) This is evidence of an. unbroken submission to the controlling gaze. - Raunce has to answer for his every movement: "It was about your ring Madam, " he went on taking his time. He gazed at her as though hypnotized. (p. 170) Mrs. Tennant, exercises that kind of power, but the ultimate power of the eye is in the hypnosis of institutions. Under supervision, the only means of self-assertion is to establish a vantage-point of one's own: Mrs. Welch moved over to perforated iron which formed a wall of the larder, advanced one eye to a hole and grimly watched. (p. 50)  184 The household regulates itself on the principle of trying to see and hear without being seen or heard, ("'with that mad Irishman with his ear to'every keyhole"')'. Everyone adopts a superintendent role in the hope of transferring suspicion from himself to another: "Yes, " she went on dark, "I've watched their thievin'. Raunce an' that Edith. Not to mention Kate with what she gets up to... As I've witnessed times without number from me larder windows. (p. 168) Mrs. Welch (whose name is indicative of treachery)ll provides the most active examples of a common need to'inform on others. This tendency is irrevocably competitive: "It was Albert told my young ladies. That little bastard had it from Mrs. Welch. There's no other word to describe the lad. " (p. 195) "It was young Albert again who else? I promise I never told 'im nothin'. I wouldn't do such a thing. And then in addition Mr. Raunce went and informed about that peacock Mrs. Welch had in the larder... " (p. 196) { The mutual treachery is not serving special interests; there is no advantage to the ruling class, and in fact the -- most spectacular failure in survivorship is Mrs. Jack: Hearing this from inside the room Mrs. Jack cowered, put a trembling hand over her lips, and pushed the tray to one side. (p. 84) If she is indeed the most thoroughly demoralized person in the book, this is not entirely due to fear of concerted by the servants; she is equally apprehensive about action the manoeuvres, of Mrs. Tennant, whose assumption of the overseeing role is certainly the most self-conscious to be found: I 11 See the O. E. D.: "Welsh, v. Racing. Also welch (Of obscure origin. ) trans. To swindle (a person out of money laid as a bet. )".  185 "I shall get to the bottom of it, " Mrs. Tennant announced. For an instant she sent a grim smile at her daughter-in-law's back. "I shall bide my time though, " she said, then quietly left that chamber the walls of which were hung with blue silk. Mrs. Jack swung round but the room was empty. (p. 207) But in spite of her sinister faculty for having the edge on everyone else, Mrs. Tennant is prone to the same anxieties herself: "That is to say what I really came for was to ask your advice, " Mrs. Tennant countered, looking again to make sure the kitchen door was shut. (p. 178) And of course her suspicions are well-founded because on the far side of the door "Jane and Mary went crimson outside, began to giggle" (p. 180). It is clearly impossible--for members of either class-- to infiltrate to anything like sanctioned power. And in fact there is no essential potency that could be obtained and directed; at best one can negotiate a position of --ý advantage within the apparatus that maintains itself respect for office. Specific agents are even -- without occasionally obscured, as if to dilate a sense of menacing impersonality: "'Now you girls hurry with that washing up, ' the dreadful voice... " (p. 37). This minatory said is disembodied, out of nowhere. In fact it premonition stems from the pathetic and farcical alcoholism of Mrs. Welch. The most forceful image of pre-emptive surveillance is provided by the weathervane: This was fixed on top of the tower and turned with a wind in the usual way. Where it differed-from similar appliances was that Mr. Tennant had had it connected to a pointer which was set to swing over a  186 large map of the country round about elaborately painted over the mantelpiece. (p. 43) This is-the remaining sense in which the house is a focus for the surrounding countryside; the weathervane with its map is like a symbolic panopticon; -it suggests an absolute capability of observation' which nothing escapes: As Charley stood there it so happened that the pointer was fixed unwavering E. S. E. with the arrow tip exactly on Clancarty, Clancarty which was indicated by two nude figures male and female recumbent in gold crowns. (p. 43) Charley is surprised in this attitude by Mrs. Jack, disadvantaged by the conditions which make for ease of surveillance: "The carpets were so deep Raunce did not hear her". But Mrs. Jack does not keep the advantage, she is in turn the victim of surveillance by her supposition that the two nude figures represent her lover and herself. The subject is exposed to the point of nakedness; Raunce later --_.ý to the Army Detention Barracks as a "glass 'ouse" refers this term projects the sense of total visibility into and The function of one institution a frankly penal context. is liable to bear directly on that of another through the conspicuousness of its subjects: "It's wicked the way they spy on you, " "They've been raised-in a good school, " he remarked. (p. 223) Any aptitude- recognized by an institution is one that will the reproduction of its own forms of containment ensure it is worth remembering the controlled and superintendence; regimes of the schools in Pack My Bag and Concluding. Of the strongest point of surveillance is in its course, property; the servants are taken aback by connection with -  187 the arrival of Mike Mathewson, an "enquiry agent" for the Irish Regina Assurance. Raunce mistakes the initial letters of this company for those of the Irish Republican Army, but it's all the same--the methods of coercion and manipulation are transposable from one organization to another. Meanwhile, not even the professional operative can avoid the usual discomfort: "He came quiet and Mike Mathewson did not hear him" (p. 148). Much play is later made of the "inthinuations" made by Mathewson; his lisp is an attempt at guilelessness which fails to conceal a clear implication of the word, that all surveillance is inherently deceitful: indirect, devious, winding, it is like the treacherous serpent in the Garden of Eden, linked with the original crime of 'loving'. Surveillance intends a systematic coverage of eventualities: "'Holy Moses look at the clock, ' he went on, 'ten to three and me not on me bed. Come on look slippy"' (p. 8). The characters are obsessed with the strict observance of a code-of conduct by which experience is completely covered. Raunce adheres to this system with a determination: "'I'm going to get the old head paranoid down, it's me siesta. And don't forget to give us a call sharp on'four thirty"' (p. 9). The success of coverage depends on a segregation of functions; emphasis is laid on the cellular structure of the household. It is divided into "kingdoms", with dominant characters holding sway'in each "kingdom".  188 One and all, they are sensitive to the conflicting spheres of influence, and to the 'no-man's-land' in between: He went out, shutting the mahogany door without a sound. After twenty trained paces he closed a green baize door behind him. As it clicked he called out... (P. 8) Among the servants, a premium is set on having "a place you can call your own" (p. 121). On the ocular model offered by surveillance,. the household is organized along the lines of perspective within which nothing has meaning or presence except with regard to fixed co-ordinates. In effect, the moment surveillance makes itself felt, the subject adapts to the line of sight: Right to the last meal Mr. Eldon had taken in this room it had been his part to speak, to wind up as it were, almost to leave the impress of a bishop on his flock. This may have been what led Charley to echo in a serious tone... (p. 34) Raunce is accepted once he adapts himself to a geometral point, within the perspective, known as 'butler': "In this way for the first time she seemed to recognize his place" (p. 34). The vital irrelevance to these concerns is the love-affair between Raunce and Edith; but even here, Edith's seduction is bound up with a capitulation to 'place': "Well even if you can't tell whether you're comin' or goin' I know the way I'm placed thank you. " "Look dear I could fall for you in a big way, " he said and he saw her back stiffen as though she had begun to hear with intense attention... "You tell that to them all Charley. " (p. 110) The first thing Edith wants when love has been declared is to make it improve her standing with the others. Despite her obvious concern-for Raunce's health, she encourages  189 him to sit in the Red Library, out of a hankering for 'place': "She seemed to have no thought to the draught" (p. 141). It is the proper setting to stage a married scene. The idea of a marriage between Raunce and Edith would seem to exploit the animation of 'loving' --inciting it precisely to accentuate a sedation along the lines of the ruling perspective. Raunce and Edith otherwise pose a threat of friction with the conjugations of power; their affair is secretive and improper, a misalliance in terms of the dispensation that supports itself by methodically reconnoitring. But the institution has first to attract it 12 the imagination needs to restrain: "I've got no hold on your old imagination, not yet I haven't. " "What d'you mean not yet? " "I mean after we're married, " she whispered, her voice gone husky. "After we're married I'll see to it that you don't have no imagination. I'll make --ý_ý everything you want of me now so much more than you ever dreamed that you'll be quit imaginin' for the rest of your life. " (p. 191) 12 the of Mark Girouard in Life in the cf.. analysis English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (y- a university Press, 1978) : The peculiar character of Victorian servants' wings was the result of early-nineteenth-century arrangements . being to make them more moral and more revised efficient. Efficiency involved analyzing the different functions performed by different servants, giving each function its own area and often its own room, and grouping the related functions into territories accessible to the gentry part of the house which they serviced. Morality meant--in addition to compulsory attendance at daily prayers and Sunday church-- separation of the sexes except when they were under suspicion... (p. 276, my emphasis) 4  190 Lath the marriage threshold crossed, the expanding horizon of promise will contract; and this re-definition of boundaries means that passion is outlawed. At first encouraged to speak, it is now enjoined to silence, within the same co-ordinates of moral blackmail that will tolerate a mutual exploitation of classes. Legality becomes a function of discretion: "But there's no place for valuables like this object, " he went on. "You've got to see that dear. Why you'd gum up the whole works. " (p. 128) The absolute priority is always the efficiency of a system. It simplifies the running of the household if Raunce is dubbed 'Arthur', ""as every footman from the first had been (p. 8)'. Once he is promoted to butler he regains -called" his own name, but the very facility of the change emphasizes how a servant's being given a new name is a form of recognizing his function which arrogates his real self. The whole business is a matter of caprice to Mrs. Tennant: "'... I don't like that name. ' Her voice had taken a teasing note. 'I think we shall have to it don't you? "' (p. 21) On the other side, the change . servants-find some revenge in reducing her to a cipher: "Mrs. T.. " Points of-unease occur to withstand the efficiency mandate when Raunce's Albert periodically gives way to fits of shaking and trembling. Where demeanour is so fully circumscribed, evident resistance like this seems forestalled; critical excitement is glossed as the  191 admission of guilt, but not only that--it is also the effect of actually suffering it. Mrs. Jack demonstrates the working of this 'double-bind in her blatant diversions . and displacements, trying to counter the supervision of Mrs. Tennant: "Was it the beginning or the end of June Jack wrote that he expected to get leave?... I'm so glad for you both. It's been such a long time. I expect you'll go to London of course. " "Simply look at the daffodils, " her daughter-in-law exclaimed. (p. 24) "When d'you think he'll let you know dear? " Mrs. Jack showed irritation. "No Badger no, " she said. On being spoken to the dog made as if to leap up at her. "Down damn you, " she said. (p. 25) Under these conditions of knowledge--the cult of accountability--no offered resistance would be possible except in the role of scapegoat. The consequential, foreshortened action has to resort to subterfuges like the conspicuously blank face: exchanges take place "with no change in expression", "without a flicker", "from an ._ expressionless face", "without a sign of any kind". The punctiform mask is intended to prove an adaptation to the controlling gaze; it is the alibi for efficiency, and as such is singled out by Mrs. Tennant, ironically in praise of Mrs. Jack: "... your contemporaries have all got this amazing control of yourselves. Never showing I mean. So I just wanted to say once more if I never say it again. Violet dear I think you are perfectly wonderful and a very lucky man. " (p. 203). 'lack's But there is no easily-made distinction between a tactical self-negation and the full identification with a  192 conferred role; as long as the self must answer to a constantly required adaptability along the lines of ruling perspectives, the most 'efficient' activity is going to be mimicry. There are very few situations in which one character does not imitate another: Moira and Kate "quote" Nanny Swift while Edith "quotes" Miss Burch; towards the end of the book, Edith is "beginning to speak like" Raunce (p. 219) while he "quotes" the mannerisms of Mathewson; Raunce even mimics himself: "You leave all the brainwork to your old man. Lucky Charley they call him, " he said in a threadbare return to his usual manner. (p. 224) This example confirms that the aim of mimicry is not the projection of a counterfeit image but the retroactive insertion of the mimic in a given situation or function: ý_. _, The boy looked speechless at him. "Oh get on with your work, " Raunce quoted from another context. (p. 58) Albert's speechless look is an accusation, the model of surveillance; against-it Raunce repeats the form of Mrs. Jack's resistance to-his own surveillance: "Oh-get on with your work, " she said appearing to lose control and half ran out. (p. 44) Mimicry is-the systematic extension of the 'picturing' exposed in Caught; it is even more easily the guarantee of cheap meaning, abandoning the personalized image, conceding everything for the sake of coming to terms with a disjointed self. It is rooted in the principle of coverage; no matter what the outcome, mimicry provides a safe  193 transition in terms of knowledge from one coverage to another. Edith imitates Miss Burch in her aspiration to 'place': And because Miss Burch was still indisposed Edith as though by right took this woman's place at table. "Well what are we waiting for? " she asked quite natural in Agatha's manner. (p. 208) The function by which Miss Burch can be expressed is given as a language which it is possible to master. Correspondingly, Miss Burch can be imagined apart from her function when its language is dropped: ""E's puttin' 'is shirt on, ' was all Miss Burch said, shocked into dropping her aitches" (p. 76). The same is true for Miss Tancy; it only needs Raunce to overhear her "momentary brogue" (p. 31) for Albert to be told on her next visit to "Put 'er in the Red Library an' don't leave till I come or something might missing" (p. 144). _go Nearly all the characters join in the imitation of Mike Mathewson; but his mode of delivery is already a form of camouflage. The dialogue in general proceeds by substituting one language for another out of the many distributed throughout the text. By deliberately lisping, Mathewson proposes that his character is readable--he asks to be included in a function of harmlessness: "'Jutht had a tooth out that'th why I thpeak like thith'" (p. 146). But although he is suggesting his potency has been removed, (his bark is worse than his bite), he is also the-official "enquiry agent" and strongly reminiscent  194 of the "house-detective" with a fluctuating accent in Party Going. The house-detective had seemed to have a special relationship with death, and Mathewson certainly interrupts the proposal of marriage like a symbolic interdiction of desire. His arrival is timed to reflect on Edith's later assumption of the lisp: "Oh give us a kiss do, " he begged. "If you behave yourthelf, " she said. (p. 192) This is the occasion when she threatens Raunce with the end of "imagination". By lisping she inserts herself in a function of manipulation; Mathewson's role is already understood as an attempted insertion in a further function of harmlessness. While Edith does provide'a most forcible outlet for 'loving', she can also be its means of degeneration into a social attitude which presupposes the existence of "calf love", a sedative function marked by association with 'indifference': -- She seemed altogether indifferent. (p. 132) "Now Albert, " Edith remarked indifferent. (p. 133) "Just let 'im be, " Edith said indifferent. (p. 136) Kate is on hand to reinstate the-erotic imperative: "Calf love you-call that? Why you talk like you was your young lady. We got no time for calf love dear as you callit. We're ordinary workin' folk... " (p. 139) An implicit violence of feeling is at odds with its own conversion into a standard excitement and a moderate betrayal of 'reasonable' behaviour. - The same corruption makes Mrs. Welch behave "like an established favourite" (p. 116).  195 And Mrs. Jack regains the favour of Mrs. Tennant with the act of "a spoiled child" (p. 185). The most protean exponent of mimicry is Raunce, (his variability is reflected in his differently coloured eyes), but his repertoire seems anchored by the accents of Mrs. Welch's Albert: "I tell you this won't do, " he answered. "Put'm back where you found'm. " (p. 127) When Raunce senses he might be placed in a 'criminal' situation, he resorts to imitating Albert. Just as the name 'Arthur' is synonymous with 'footman', so 'Albert' is absorbed into a definite meaning; Mrs. Welch and Mrs. Tennant can discuss "Albert's" crimes referring to two different boys because they are interchangeable in a function of criminality for which 'Albert' is simply the name. Albert the proletarian evacuee is also the 'invader': ". 'Children is all little 'Itlers these days... the little storm trooper'" (p. 47). Evacuation is. the real threat to privilege; it brings the dissolution of boundaries between existing orders of society, -. (Miss Evelyn begins to speak [p. 111)). "with -a trace of cockney accent" The evacuee is regarded as the criminal counterpart of the guest made unwelcome in a situation deplored by the Country. House Poems: "... There's one thing about evacuees, " he said. '-No matter what the homes are they've come from they're like fiends straight up from hell honey after they've been a month or more down in the country districts... " (p. 174)  196 Albert certainly does seem to portend the destruction of envious show, throttling "one out of above two hundred" peacocks (p. 47). But he is also the principal informer; and this makes the point that criminality is not tied to specific acts or agents, it is an effect produced by a generalized mechanism of surveillance of which there is no inside knowledge--the most effective informers are the innocent: "I must tell Miss Evelyn and Miss Moira. " "That's been the cause of half the trouble in this place. Once they get hold of something it's taken right out of control. " "But it wouldn't be right. Why they're innocent. " "Ow d'you mean innocent? " he enquired. "There's a-lot we could lay to their door. " (p. 226) Raunce, in describing Mrs. Welch as a "diabolical mason" (p. 218), pays tribute to the sense in which everyone is under suspicion, victimised simply through being in the line of sight of a masonic conspiracy to which there are no initiates: * But detethtable's right. It is detestable and distasteful if you like, to have been put through what we've been as if we were criminals, " he said. (p. 210) Raunce employs the words of Mathewson, but mimicking the accents of power to ridicule its hold over them immediately removes him to a defensive stance, that of 'criminal'. The universal cult, 'efficiency', extends to an advertised construction of the text; its conspicuous aspects are coterminous with the disciplinary code. On the face of it, the text requires the author to*efface himself, and this destitute figure is the blank face of  197 writing; the narrative inserts itself directly in the language of the characters, giving the adverb an adjectival form, substituting for a proper noun the argot usage, (a cup of "you-and-me"). The geometral point of 'author' is caught up as the incidental to an overall perspective: So she sat down alongside him although this must have seemed rather noticeable, seeing that it was nearly time to start work. (p. 161) Apart from the author, who is not entirely sure,, "it" in . this context can only be "noticeable" to a general function of surveillance. When the stance of an author can by identified, it is under the aspect of a locum tenens--of a callow deputy . who over-values the badge of office: "I'm fed up with you, " Mrs. Welch said to her Albert at this precise moment... (p. 91) At this precise moment out by the dovecote... (p. 146)-. This pedantic assertiveness alternates with a sense of lame authority, marked by frequent interpolations of the qualifiers "perhaps" and "probably". Self-confidence reverts to insipidity--or fatuous certainty (with qualifiers like "obviously"). Narrative abandons its power of registration; although "Raunce looked for the person Edith said she had heard" (p. 46), it is a fact that Edith said no such thing, she only behaved "as though she could hear somebody". The account only awkwardly determines the extent of its own self-knowledge: "So nobody saw this car drive up but Edith. She noted in it not the lady above referred to but a stranger, a man, a grey homburg hat" (p. 144, my emphasis).  198 The authorial function is largely taken up with the labour of deduction: On which she must have recognized that he wad naked. (p. 76) It must have been she could not help herself. (p. 86) But she must have understood. (p. 89) This must have been a reference to the fact... (p. 201) It is as though the author will only risk himself in interpretation based on the accruements of surveillance, of what is accountable because it can be seen: They stood looking down and from the droop of her shoulders it could be assumed that her rage had subsided. (p. 129) This paranoid cautiousness would suggest that some sort of reputation is at stake: Also there was a rainbow from the sun on a shower blowing in. from the sea but you could safely say she took no notice. (p. 84, my emphasis) The author suffers to an equal degree the sense of insecurity which dogs the characters; he is enrolled in -- the text where it is turned towards the light, subject to a controlling gaze that will insert him in his function; what the text is producing is the mimicry of an author. on-the other side--what can be thought of as the dark side--of the text, there is a corresponding intensity of covert action. The characters themselves experience a clandestine urge: Raunce put a finger to his lips... Then Miss Evelyn and Miss Moira each put a finger to their mouths, as they went on bowing to each other... They saw Kate and Edith in long purple uniforms bow swaying towards  199 them in soft sunlight through the white budding branches, fingers over lips. Even little Albert copied the gesture back this time... (p. 53-5) The purpose of this conspiracy is to escape the attention of Miss Swift; as she recites a fairy tale she represents the narratorial function, but she is deaf, with closed eyes--a retrograde image of the oppressively candid. Secrecy is dependent on the cover of darkness: But at the mention of a name and as though they had entered on a conspiracy Edith blocked even more light from that window by climbing on the sill. (p. 22) Throughout the work of Green, the panoramic aspect of the novel is recognized as a type of despotism; the . generation of viewpoints will impound the reader in the stance of 'master of all you see'. It follows that. disengagement from the practice of the overbearing text involves confusion of the line of sight, the angle of is diffusion diffraction, ý'ý- vision; freedom synonymous with or or even deliberate obfuscation. In the schools of Pack My Bag and Concluding the only resort is sleep, away from the treachery of light coincident with power. Loving stresses the position even below the level of its own ability: "Miss Swift she come down to have a chat and Jane and me gets out of the light thinking there will be ructions but not a sound come past that closed door not one. " (p. 36) To be inconspicuous is specifically to be "out of the light". The. game of blind man's buff, which is after all a mimicry of 'loving', takes place in conditions of "another darker daylight" and "before witnesses in bronze  200 in marble and plaster" (p. 117). The writing is slightly out of the way to emphasize a positive advantage--"witnesses" who do not see. In the same order, windows may be disarmed, made "blind" or "muted", to demote them from their panoptic role. in the game of blind man's buff, Edith "moved her arms as though swimming toward them" (p. 117), and covert action is commonly associated with a sort of watery environment: The sky was overcast so that the light was dark as though under water. (p. 38) Edith lay still with closed eyes. The room was dark as long weed in the lake. (p. 40) "Ah but she's deep our Edith, deep as the lake there. " (p. 90) These hints add up to a problem; simply retiring from the light is no real opposition, it ultimately inclines to the absolute repose of the inorganic--"But there were two humps of body, turf over graves under those pink bedclothes" (p. 76) --because absorption with the inorganic offers the only lasting means of resolving what seems an incontrovertible tension: Her arm that was stretched white palm upwards along deep green moss struggled to lift itself as though caught on the surface of a morass. (p. 135) This moves in the vicinity of Party Going's equation (after Marvell) of greenness with unity: a nostalgia, moreover, in which one is liable to get 'caught'. Fragments of the image of a drowned girl recur, and are repossessed by the text of Concluding (equally reminiscent of Ophelia and of the allusion to Ophelia in Stephen Dedalus's vision of his  201 decay). 13 Loving is mother's suffused with a measure of fatalism; it succeeds the failure of opposition in kind to surveillance and its debasement of the self. The first page of the text is filled with instances of a regressive decay. The butler, whose name "Eldon" connotes the sere and antiquated, takes to his deathbed murmuring the name "Ellen"; this wish for reunification is slyly reinforced by the approximation of the two names. In a similar fashion Kate mutters the name "Paddy" in her drowsiness connected with inorganic, repose, ("as though caught on the surface of a morass"). Raunce, whose name connotes the stale and rancid, is described on this first page as a "pale individual, paler now", having withdrawn to the extent of staying indoors for three years; his pantry boy is "yellow" and "looked sick". At the end of the book, ý`"' Raunce is reproducing Eldon's symptoms; he is "noticeably - paler even", and "weak with. exhaustion", starting to vomit and to move like an old man. The mimicry is so complete he even calls out Edith's name, using "exactly that tone Mr. Eldon had employed at the last when calling his Ellen. 'Edie' he-moaned" (p. 229). There is finally a progressive concentration on his shutting eyes: "he squinted terribly... in a weak voice, with closed eyes... He closed his eyes... He let his eyelids shut down over his eyes... " (p. 223-8). This form of retreat is the ostrich's answer to surveillance. 13!'She will drown me with her eyes and hair, lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my :heart, imy:. soul. -Sält , green'-death. " James Joyce, Ulysses (London: The Bodley Head, 1960), p. 230.  202 Nanny Swift, narrator of the fairy-tale, indulges in the same delusion. Besides being rheumatic she is deaf, and she frequently exploits her deafness; her condition is interesting in view of the personal history of 'Jonathan Swift, another narrator, also based in Ireland. Swift had Merniýre's disease, an affliction of the inner ear which produces deafness and faulty balance; a connexion between the two symptoms is made strongly in Caught. 'Both Nanny Swift and Richard Roe deploy a sort of veil to obscure that transparency felt as oppressive. But the infiltration of decay is general. We are told that Albert's father died of a cancer, and both Miss Swift and Miss Burch take to their beds; neither appears except by allusion during the course of the last fifty pages of the book. If these massive deteriorations are the symptoms of a ~``1-- backward resistance to exposure and control, they are also sheltering under a more symbolic purpose. Nanny Swift's ._ anecdote of little Lancelot offers to identify a seat of corruption--Lancelot was a child of privilege who had something stuck in his gullet: "It was as black as pitch" (p. 119). 14 If this is unduly grotesque, then the peacock's corpse "swarming with maggots" is even more demonstrative of a hidden decay that could be lihked to the upkeep of envious show. 14 "Lancelot" is a legendary name, associated with the "old kings", and connoting betrayal. Little Lancelot is reminiscent of the man in Living "that had lengths cut out of his belly... Black it was" (p. 5).  203 The corpse is disinterred by the greyhound "Badger"; and this canine retribution borrows the sense of Eliot's figure in The Waste Land:. 'That corpse you planted last year in your garden, 'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? 'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? 'O keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, 'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again! 15 The peacock is furtively buried, it has sufficient, backing S as a symbol of moral declension and as in Eliot, the dog will bring this to account; the resulting text can give the cliche the strength of its own concerns: "Would you advise me to have Raunce in and get to the bottom of things I mean? "... "Not if I were you, " she said. "Let sleeping dogs lie. " (p. 184) "Then Violet you don't really consider I need do any more? " "Well I don't see why. I'd let sleeping dogs rest. " (p. 185) Mrs. Jack has more to fear from a final reckoning. And -- there is every appearance of a final reckoning--closing the book is the sudden, ominous return of the dog: "He opened his eyes and found Badger wagging his tail so hard that he was screwed right round into a crescent" (p. 228). The writing at this point is more conducive to Eliot's other, more rhetorical association of the dog with death as a poetical figure, -("Those who sharpen the tooth of the Death"), 16 dog, -meaning 15 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), p. 65. 16-T. S. Eliot, "Marina", op. cit., p. 115.  204 But the overwhelming retribution is the fire by which the house is doomed to destruction: For this house that had yet to be burned down, and in particular that greater part of it which remained closed, was a shadowless castle of treasures. (p. 61) The conflagration is augured with a reminder that Kinalty is a partly disused warehouse of extravagance and irrelevance. The seasonal drought would be a contributory factor to fire, but it is noted more than once that "huge fires were kept stoked all day to condition the old masters" (p. 141). If this were the cause of the house burning down, it would give a pysical dimension to the sense in which "envious show" leads directly to the extinction of-the Country House and its ideals. Loving interrogates the residual role of the Country House; and its implication of unfulfilled responsibilities is set in Ireland--which is the actual setting of Green's interrogation of his own responsibilities when faced with the prospect of war. In the essay "Before the Great Fire", not published until 1960 and originally intended as the prelude to a factual account of the London Blitz, Green describes a visit made with-his wife to Ireland on the eve of war: "My London at war in 1939 begins in Eire in 1938. "17 "Before the Great Fire" opens with a beach episode as dilatory as could be imagined, but its obliquities are 17 "Before the Great Fire", The London Magazine, Vol. 7 no. 12, (December, 1960).  205 coindicant with those of Loving; there is an erotic tableau provided by a naked couple, and an old woman "like a fairy story witch", (it will be seen how largely a fairy story element looms in the earlier text). The presence of the naked couple means that the beach is "not this time untenanted" (my emphasis). -This supercharge--and its here for casual work--is a good example of the -admittance way Green writes through distending the circumstantial, across long intervals, working out of a reserve of textural points. The essay is comprised of feelings of guilt as the other guests at the hotel are recalled for-active service. Green and his wife "turn a blind eye, on officers leaving for home and mobilization". This voluntary myopia is of course a reaction to prolonged and supposedly hostile observation with the familiar, concomitant threat of betrayal: Indeed, as so often at such times, their being the wives of officers made it seem as though'they guarded secrets with their virtue and that they might report one if, by ill chance, one asked any sort of a question which might seem to call for a knowledgeable answer. -- The pronounced hesitance to identify with the war effort is fed-by a disturbing evenness in the way these coercive expectations are found to inform opposite pretexts for war: What between hope one week, despair the next, it was as-if Hitler was at an end of the seesaw, with oneself at the other dominated by the eyes of this maniacal genius with a hypnotic stare out of every published photograph; one would be up one moment, down the next, and completely at the mercy of these ups and downs, with nothing to be done except join one of the Services.  206 This image coindicates with Party Going the see-saw imposition and removal of an obstruction to knowledge: knowledge of the history of the self: the moment of knowledge realizing a perspective onto a previous ownership of the self revealed in the act of transference to other ownership, which has the possessiveness of a hypnotic stare. It is the ultimate reference for surveillance as the coefficient of 'duty'. On these terms, the assumption of civic responsibility is a-form of mimicry, like opting into a function for which one has been chosen in the first place: Meanwhile, over in England, unbeknownst to us, Committees had already been sitting for years to decide what, in time of war, was to be done with and for civilians such as ourselves. Foreshortening the range of action gives a plausibility of self-determination to what is effectively the lost resistance to a hypnotic stare. The actual occasion of Green's self-debate bears on a decision whose issue is relatively trivial: So now we were torn two ways. We had our only child, a son, in London, and it did seem right to get back to him. On-the other hand we had paid for the car in advance, and had a few days in hand. But the basic sense of dilemma is over-dramatized to allow a consideration in broader terms of exactly what one is fighting for. As co-operative writing, Loving projects back to this period of "waiting for the worst", rehearsing the grounds of a decision. The text is conceived as the answer to a question which its own practice will allow to emerge from  207 a context of social and cultural constraints. The idiom of the time is made out of debris from closed forms (as with Caught) reviving the sense of 'what might have been' as the critical moment of the text itself; this moment reasserts a continuity between a certain perspective on events and a perspective within the novel which moves the reader to particular interpretative acts. Its own disordination of the novel liberates a pre-history of the same constraints-that will relativize those interpretative acts; on one hand, there is a strategic impersonation of an entrant in the tradition of writing about the Country House; there is also a resumption of the position of "Meditations in time of Civil War". Yeats's sequence of that title is headed by the poem "Ancestral Houses", whose scenario is reproduced in Loving almost down to the last point: the gravelled ways, the straying peacocks, the invading mice all recur, together with a conviction that. the glory which is merely inherited has no future: And maybe the great-grandson of that house, For all the bronze and marble, 's but a mouse. 18 "... But if I once didýthat'would your darlings ever be able to live here again? I wonder. " (p. 186) Yeats is-of course concerned with an Irish setting; the, life which the house represents (admittedly viewed more out of concern for a social charisma) has disappeared. in of what is behind the residuum men and women a time war, are meant to defend? 4 18 W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, Second Edition (London: Macmillan, 1950), p. 132.  208 When Loving is read as a. novel, the pre-history of conditions out of which it arises and which it articulates, leads a very hidden life indeed. An effective break with the novel's hypnotic stare depends on confounding its line of sight, overwhelming the transparent medium for its steady and co-ordinated vision with an obliterating light which it is difficult to situate. This brilliant illegibility is identified with 'loving', as highly inefficacious in a system which calls to account whatever is productive of excess; the primary source for its emanations is Edith, the medium for "brimming light" (p. 108): At this moment she flung round on him and his hangdog face was dazzled by the excitement and scorn which seemed to blaze from her. (p. 110) Raunce is the object of this rout; Albert is also overthrown by her radiance, and his infatuation leads to a faint glimmer*in response--"His weak eyes shone" (p. 41). The incontinent light is correlative with the natural effulgence on which no limit or-horizon can be set: Against the everlastingly hurrying ocean with its bright glare from the beginning of the world, he wandered with the donkey drooped to his tracks as if he was a journeying choirboy. (p. 138) With the suggested backing of infinite resource, Edith'can look "straight up at that sky without wrinkling the skin her eyes" (p. 139) in a mutuality of resistless about 'glares'. Laughter, which abandons restraint as much as 'loving', appears in "a waste of giggling behind their eyes" (p. 34 & p. 87), another expanse where no bearings are this aspect of firmamental depth is continually taken set; up:  209 His white face was shot with green from the lawn. "I haven't said yes'have I? " she countered and looked straight at him, her heart opening about her lips. Seated as she was back to the light he could see only a blinding space for her head framed in dark hair and inhabited by those great eyes on her, fathoms deep. (p. 142) The oceanic dimensions to Edith's eyes are like the "other seas" of Marvell's "The Garden", and there is a distant infusion of greenness here. As in Party Going, the partnership of greenness with oceans commutes the Empsonian dialectic of "including everything because understanding it", inviting the passage from transitive to 'trancitive', following a collapse of representational depth which is perspectival--based on the eyesight. The obliterating, "blinding" light further removes a sense of place or any possibility of perspective: "No that's right, " he murmured obviously lost. (p. 143) Under the influence of 'loving', Raunce is unable to 'picture' himself: "I can't properly see myself these days, " Raunce went on looking sideways past her at the red eye of a deer's stuffed head. '(p. 163) The deer's eye could seem to retrieve his. perspective--it reverts to the bead eye of the heraldic deer in Cam; while the. portentous phrase "her heart opening about her lips" is a verbal mimicry of the anterior "the curling disclosure of the heart of a rose" (Caught, p. 63). But the living eye is the instrument of irrefutable light. In Edith's case it is invincibly "shining", "sparkling", or "hot to glowing", even "dazzled dazzling"--its resourceful  210 incidence empowering a text where the sense can refract, and enter a medium of different density (including the fatuous) : "There's more in this than meets the eye, " she suggested. (p. 157) "... I'd've told within a second, like in the twinklin' of an eye... " (p. 158) Conversely, the eye as detective is like the stare of the novel, as piercing as a gimlet: ... she dropped her gimlet eyes. (p. 83) "How's that Edie? " Kate asked opening her gimlet eyes. (p. 137) Her gimlet eyes narrowed. (p. 208) Constant directions of penetrating light are abused with oblique and scintillant points; and the more influential image for the'eye is of a compound organ whose facets hide surreptitious pin-pricks of desire: With no change in expression, without warning, she began to blush. The slow tide frosted her dark eyes, endowed them with facets. (p. 7) This is the functional movement of the text--an erotic flush: Her eyes left his face and with what seemed a quadrupling in depth came following his to rest on- those rectangles of warmth alive like blood. From this peat light her great eyes became invested with rose incandescence that was soft and soft and soft. (P. 142) Edith's eyes are enlivened by rose incandescence spreading behind a. faceted surface; it is the same light that Raunce is trying to exclude: Lying back he squinted into the blushing rose of that huge turf fire as'it glowed, his bluer eye azure on which was a crescent rose reflection. (p. 142)  211 Raunce habitually squints in the face of unyielding brilliance; the full splendour is treated like the first revelation of sex, and squinting is the anxious imposition of a screen: Then the wind sent her hair over her vast double-surfaced eyes with their two depths. As she watched him thus, he might have felt this was how she could wear herself in bed for him, screened but open, open terribly. (p. 131) For both Albert and Raunce, it is an unmanageable excess, (on a less fraught level, it makes Mathewson "goggle"); the eyes are endued with forbidding harshness in a repercussion of the imagery of archaic menace familiar from Swinburne or Mallarme's Herodiade; when Mrs. Tennant is portrayed as-having jewel-like eyes, it is their hardness which is emphasized: There was something hard and glittering beyond the stone of age in that other pair below the blue waved tresses. (p. 205) This image, in counterpoint with Edith ("soft and soft and soft") informs a direct contrast made between the loving gestures of servants and employers. Edith's comfort for the weeping Kate consists of "stroking", while there is more abrasive contact between Mrs. Tennant and Mrs. Jack; the'latter rubs the point'of the older woman's shoulder, then grips it, 'and digs in her nails: "Good heavens, " the young woman exclaimed gazing at the impression her nails had made on Mrs. Tennant's shirt and with trembling lips. (p. 204) Although her own flirtation with the Captain gives her a certain brilliance, this is subdued to a damaged aspect:  212 With a sort of cry and crossing her lovely arms over that great brilliant upper part of her on which, wayward, were two dark upraised dry wounds shaking on her, she also slid entirely underneath. (p. 76) The "wounds" are inflicted by a brutal gaze; but the brilliant 'loving' which surveillance seeks to oppress emerges in secret throughout. Its surviving want of steadiness belongs to a ::°Mallarmean text: Les mots, d'eux-meines, s'exaltent ä mainte facette reconnue la plus rare ou valant pour l'esprit, centre de suspens vibratoire; qui les percoit independamment de la suite ordinaire, projetes, en parois de grotte, tant que dure leur mobilite ou principe, etant ce qui ne se dit pas du discours: prompts tous, avant extinction, ä une reciprocite de feux distante ou presentee de biais comme contingence. 19 Taken in isolation, this describes a text whose faceting insures it against the loss of meaning apart from its historical constraints--a meaning in secession. But in Lovin it has a converse ability to imply the motivation , through which the writing derives inflexions from historical circumstance; faceting is a mode of alertness to political exigencies, which determines which moments in the pre-history of the same constraints are reflected in a present text: The operation of meaning has its own internal side of which the whole flow of words is only a wake, an indication - of only-its cross-points. But established significations contain the new signification only as a trace-or a horizon. The new signification will later recognize itself in them, but even when it takes them up again it will forget what was partial and naive in them. The new signification only relights 19 Stephane Maliarme, "Quant au Livre" in Oeuvres Completes, ed. Mondor and Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 386.  213 sudden flashes in the depths of past knowledge, touching past knowledge only from a distance. From the past knowledge to the new signification there is an invocation, and from the new signification in turn there are a response to and acquiescence in past knowledge. 20 Merleau-Ponty's description of "a new system of expression" juxtaposes the Joycean practice of the 'wake' and a Mallarmean practice of reciprocal reflections in a strategy whose purpose can be read in the mutual concessions of text and pretext which hold one another in view, subject to a faceting which disconcerts the medium of an evenly maintained stare. As in the counterpoint of "Araby" with "real Arabia" in Caught, the uninterrupted donation of meaning from a given stance is the obverse action of a text which principally reverts to a side-slipped "idiom of the time". In Loving, the fairy-tale atmosphere is thicker, but is not this time in a measured opposition ý---ýý to internal dissent; fairy-tale motifs and procedures are explored instead as a means of extruding the torpid coherence of information which a conventional view of the novel accepts: The fairy tale clearly does not refer to the outer world, although it may begin realistically enough and have everyday features woven into it. The unrealistic nature of these tales (which narrow-minded rationalists object to) is an important device, because it makes obvious that the fairy-tales' concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner processes taking place in an individual. 21 20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, tr. O'Neill, (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 132. 21 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meanin and Importance of Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 25.  214 This introversion is formalized and given a further twist by incorporating another fairy tale in the body of the text: "Once upon a time there were six little doves lived in a nest... " (p. 53) The recitation is subsequently back=dated to "that first afternoon of spring" (p. 188), which is traditionally the occasion on which romances are set. Even the "outer world" of Ireland is suspended in a fairy tale cocoon: "Do they still believe the boys get carried off by fairies? " (p. 26). The house itself (fancifully named Castle) is .a partitioned into "kingdoms"; the movement from one to another is described as the passage "into yet another world" (p. 67). - When Kate and Edith open the door into Paddy's "kingdom", they admit light in the manner of Psyche illumining the sleeping Cupid. A period of inertia--___"__ and preparation is a frequent component of fairy tales, it appears in the figures of Sleeping Beauty and the 'once and future king'; Paddy's snoring frame is firmly associated with the "old kings": "the floor of cobbles reflected an old king's molten treasure from the bog" (p. 52). It is the same legendary past which attracts Captain Davenport, who "Digs after the old kings in his bog" (p. 30); (he and Mrs. " Jack are the "two humps of body, turf over graves"). Kate and Edith want to accoutre Paddy as an. "old king": "If I make a crown out of them ferns in the corner, " Edith said, "will you fetch something he can hold? " (p. 52)  215 There is a suggested past of equestrian action, compatible with Yeats's vision of the national heritage: "What they saw was a saddleroom which dated back to the time when there had been guests out hunting from Kinalty" (p. 51). But the opening and closing lines of Loving provide the shrewdest of collusions with the textuality of fairy tales: Once upon a day an old butler called Eldon lay dying in his-room attended by the head housemaid, Miss Agatha Burch. (p. 5) Over in England they were married and lived happily ever after. (p. 229) According to Bettelheim, these neutral-sounding phrases are progressive, not regressive, means of reassuring an anxious child: An uninformed view of the fairy tale sees in this type of ending an unrealistic wish-fulfillment, missing completely the important message it conveys to the child. These tales tell him that by forming a true interpersonal relation, one escapes the separation anxiety which haunts him (and which sets the stage for many fairy tales, but is always resolved at the story's ending. ) Furthermore, the story tells, this ending is not made possible, as the child wishes and believes, by holding onto his mother eternally. If we try to escape separation anxiety and death anxiety by desperately keeping our grasp on our parents, we will only be cruelly forced out, like Hansel and Gretel. 22 In this context, the beginning and ending of Loving ironize a fairy tale resolution of separation anxiety; at the end, Raunce is nearer to death than ever before, and he is literally returning to his mother: 1"We'll go straight to Peterboro', where my mum'll have a bed for you... "' (p. 228). The book meticulously charts his regressive acts. Immediately after writing to his mother he curls up to in a foetal position; his letters harp on'about the sleep 22 Bettelheim, p. 11  216 desirability of an Anderson shelter--his need for a foetal security is so intense that he never strays out of doors: "'... Charley Raunce hasn't shoved his head into the air these three years it must be"' (p. 24). His motivation for proposing marriage is explained by an anxiety to "'get my old mother over out of the bombers"' (p. 142). And his proposal is "toneless"--the erotic is subtracted from it. An apt illustration of his insecurity is the over-cautious method used for actually writing letters home: first making a draft in pencil, then tracing this in with a pen. By contrast, Edith never writes to her mother; before the proposal she is keen to return to England but afterwards she is content to stay, regarding a proposal of marriage as the guarantee of her independence. And Kate is in Ireland solely because "-'I wanted to get away-from 'ome"' (P" 102) . -'. ý" Raunce's plan to retrieve his mother and install her in Ireland is rebuked by the mother herself: "'She writes she that would be cowardly or something"' (p. 22O). reckons Her letter effectively awards him his independence, but on receipt of it he goes into a Groddeckian decline to the responsibility just given, reverting to the abdicate condition of-an infant which relies on a mother's care. His eventual return to England is not a case of social but an attempt to clear his honour in his commitment eyes. His own brand of 'loving' is socially mother's immature, a failing betrayed in his prim distaste at the liaison of Paddy and Kate: "'... all I can say is that's  217 disgusting, downright disgusting... why a big, grown girl like her an' that ape out of a zoo... Why it's unnatural"' (p. 226) . Raunce's assumption of civic responsibility is only apparent; he is effectively resuming a filial dependence on every count. The distance from adulthood is marked by a self-conscious pretence of adulthood; he encourages Edith to more or less play at 'families': "'Come to father beautiful"'; their habitual retreat to the fire in the Red Library is to the hearth which symbolizes the sanctity of the home. Raunce likes to imagine the domestic household as "all one family" with himself at the head (p. 157). By mimicking the grown-up role, he prevents a legitimization of it in his own person; he is simply appended to his own mother, identifying so completely with her desire, it only remains to recreate himself as the object of it. This behaviour is_linked by psychoanalysis to a stage of 'primary narcissism'; the child attempts to be the phallus (the complement of what is lacking in his mother) instead of assuming his place in society through possessing a phallus (as the father does). Raunce is given the unmistakable characteristics of a phallic role; his preferred möde. of action is to "look slippy" or to "look sharp": "He'slipped inside like an eel into its drainpipe" (p. 12); "He'appeared to ooze authority" (p. 34); "he made his way smooth" (p. 44); "he whipped out" (p. 45); "He slipped up behind" (p. 45); "He came smoothly out, automatic" (p. 46); "he glided softly out" (p. 61); "he said advancing  218 smooth on Edith" (p. 115). It is revealing that Mrs. Welch bans Raunce from her kitchen. The other characters suspect that Albert the evacuee is her own illegitimate child; she herself calls him a "bastard imp" immediately after observing that Edith is "'runnin' in double. 'arness with that Raunce" (p. 168). Her sudden excitement, ("'I'll tan the 'ide right off of you... "'),, associates 'loving' with illegitimacy; her obsession with security and "double locking" and her prohibition of Raunce imply that she identifies him with a phallic threat. Phallic traits are more infrequent after Raunce's Albert declares his intention to join up, because the assumption of responsibility forces Raunce to assess his own position. But he subsequently reverts, and at the the book the phallic symbolism has'a convulsive end of renewal: At this he began to flush. The colour spread until his face had become an alarming purple. (p. 228) In a state of advanced morbidity, on the verge of regaining his mother, Raunce is "stretched and tested" by this event. His mimicry of the phallus is an extreme form of adaptation to external power; his own choice of epithet-- "'Trust little Charley'" (p. 105)--is the unconscious / _.. of a punctiform role. (Edith mimics the acceptance phrase--"'Trust little Edith"' p. 137 --in a moment of submitting to Raunce's will). He deprives himself of his own self-presence, engrossing the mother's desire in becoming a blank or lack; the unwillingness to have a  219 phallus (as opposed to being one) compounds the. fear of punitive action by the father into classic castration fear--Raunce's illness focusses on the swelling at his neck, and this affliction is constantly juxtaposed with images of decapitation or of damage to the head or neck. He first appears with a bandaged neck in a "low room of antlered heads"ý(p. 95). His phallic stealth embodies the same threat: "He went so soft he might have been a ghost without a head" (p. 14). At the dinner table, the inverse image applies: "He carved savagely like a head-hunter" (p. 31). This abrupt association of food and mutilation is continuous with an extensive strain of violent orality. Fear of the opposite sex as strange or threatening is exaggerated until the relationship between them is. vampiric. After being kissed by Edith--"her. lips sucked at him warm and heady"--Raunce is found "standing as he was like he hadýbeen drained of blood" (p. 201). Edith is replete with blood: "'She should go and-give one of them blood transfusions they are asking for, she's got too much'" (p. 65). -The same notion of primitive incorporation is behind the sexual ritual of the doves: "the fat bird, grown thin now, had his head deep down the other's neck which was swallowing in frantic gulps that shook its crescent body" (p. 57); This spectacle is unnerving to Evelyn and Moira; oral incorporation of the head and neck is the violence proposed by Albert the evacuee (who also throttles -a peacock), and his aggression offers to thrust sexual. knowl'edge on the two little girls: "'Tell you what',  220 Albert said to Moira as they loitered to follow, 'I'll bite 'is little 'ead off'n " (p. 57). The inspiration for this act is a further example of decapitation: "'There was a man there bit the 'eads off of mice for a pint"' (p. 58). 23 But while Edith seems to sexually engorge Raunce, his own oral response is severely conditioned. She remarks on the fact that he never takes the first opportunity of stealing a kiss when she brings him his early morning tea--a reserve that can be explained with reference to his tediously reiterated principle, "'Clean your teeth before ever you have anything to do with a woman"'. For Raunce, sexuality is recovered by intense preoccupation with the oral, and this is entirely consistent with the immersion in a phallic role; an excessive orality is the symbolic reversion to a state of dependence on the mother's breast '- -. (which is all-sufficient), it is an'avid return to exemption from the need for individuation. Something of the same fixation is evident in Mike Mathewson, whose breath is scented with acid of violets; his and Raunce's fastidiousness invite a contrast with Paddy's "great brown teeth" (p. 89). Green himself has gone on record insisting that Loving sprang from an anecdote that vividly fused the voluptuousness of sex and food: 23 Both of Green's stories, "The Rescue" and "Mr Jonas", are concerned with the danger of engulfment, and the title of the second of these refers to a specifically oral incorporation: that of Jonah and the Whale.  221 GREEN: I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: "Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers. " I saw the book in a flash. 24 In the finished work, the entire household succumbs to oral greediness: the closest reason for not returning to England is because "'They're starving over there"' (p. 48). When the peacock's corpse is found in the larder, Miss Burch condemns the sabotage in moral terms but what really distresses her is the thought of it "'infecting all our food"' (p. 122). Her own idea of a comfortable life is to sleep "'in your own bed with a fresh joint down in the larder for dinner every day"' (p. 124). When Edith steals a number of peacock's eggs to treat her skin with, Mrs. Welch supposes that the real reason is because "'they're "ý-- _ starvin' over the other side the ordinary common people are begging your pardon mum"' (p. 179). Once again, the intestine motions of the book escape the postures of a novel, they elevate the haphazard; . Mrs. Tennant incidentally connects mutilation and food in her complaint that the servants are "'simply eating their heads off"' (p. 182), a remark that would bear translation as 'who is nibbling at my little house? '. As a providential source of food, Kinalty Castle is like the Gingerbread House--a projection of oral craving--in the fairy tale of 24 Terry Southern, "The Art of Fiction, XXII--Henry Green", Paris Review, 5, (Summer 1958)  222 Hansel and Gretel. The fairy tale divulges the cannibalistic aspect of orality in, the figure of the witch, and there are several parallels between 'it and Loving. The two children are guided to the Gingerbread House by a white dove (they are guided back by a white duck); although they do not cross an expanse of water on their way there, they do have to negotiate one on their return (as Edith and Raunce have to cross the Irish Sea); the episode may be understood as a kind of baptism, or, transition to a higher state, ironized by Loving. The witch is eventually pushed into her own oven and burned to death; 'Kinalty Castle is burned down. Finally Hansel and Gretel inherit the witch's jewels; the persistent problem for Edith and Raunce is a question of what to do with Mrs. Tennant's sapphire ring. The ring is clearly intended as a symbol of female sexuality; Edith secretes it in the lining of a chair, giving it the status of a 'charm', like the complementary symbols of sex organs which Julia had buried in Party Going. According to Vladimir. Propp, the exchange of a jewel or a ring is, equivalent to the branding or marking of the hero in a. folk tale, and in Loving this equivalence is maintained; the bandage-about Raunce's neck represents a ring around the finger, and the description of him tampering with the bandage carries a precise verbal t reflection of Edith trying to retrieve the ring: He hooked a finger into the bandage round his throat as though to ease himself. (p. 141) He approached doltish while she hooked with her finger in the tear. (p. 143) 7  223 At the start of the text, Edith appears bearing further symbols of the female sex, "a glove full of white unbroken eggs" which she also keeps to herself. And when Albert the evacuee acquires the ring, he conceals it 'inside the 1 shell of an egg, an occultation increased by imposing an oath of secrecy on the two little girls; the symbol of female sexuality remains hidden as long as their "lips is sealed" (p. 147). Meanwhile, Albert the pantry boy, who is besotted with Edith, tries to obtain the 'charms' for himself; he reminds Edith that "she had still to return him that gauntlet glove" (p. 137); his pretence that he has stolen the ring is a symbolic means of claiming possession of her. The ring (which is generally elusive) is a "big sapphire cluster", an image of the faceting by which the text seeks to elude the official line of enquiry of a- novel normally concerned with the security of strong., ; points of meaning which from time to time go missing in Lovin when the text effectively 'blinks'. The novel maintains. a bearable light, the light of reason, which Lovin dissociates through intermittence and excess; the ring is equally either a "blaze of blue" (p. 146) or is seen to have-"winked-and glittered" (p. 127), augmenting the sense-in which it will "gum up the whole works" (p. 128). Edith seems .to reinforce the correspondence of. 'loving' and 'brilliance' by throwing the. ring into the fire--into the heat of passion.  224 But the ring is also a 'charm' in the magical sense; Albert occults it with a bizarre ritual 'spell': "'While break a cock's egg over your mouth you say, 'My lips is _I sealed may I drop dead,,, (p. 147). For Raunce, 'loving' is specifically a form of enchantment which-leaves him "bewitched and bewildered". His own proposal of marriage has the effect of a 'spell' under which the peacocks "stood pat in the dry as though enchanted" (p. 141). By contrast, the married state itself evidently dispels: "'... now Raunce an' me's come to an understanding I got no time for charms"' (p. 197). It is the veil before knowledge--seducing without disclosing--which is spell-binding. Edith teases Raunce with a black silk. transparent nightdress: "She put a hand in at the neck so that he could see the veiled skin" (p. 199). Raunce is derogatory, but his abuse of the garment as a "piece of cobweb" is an involuntary recognition of its power as a -- snare--he is aroused by its concealment which activates a of hidden knowledge. This '*spell' is like Albert's sense 'spell' a revocation of sexual difference (female sexuality is hidden by a contradiction in terms, a "cock's egg").. The ambiguous response obscures the 'frontier of hopes or mostly fears' with a veil that stands for a hymeneal barrier removed when the bride has been carried over a threshold into marriage, breaking the spell of indistinct knowledge in order to 'come to an understanding': "No'; " she cried, "you stop where you are. I'm goin' to punish you. What d'you say if we took this  225 for when we are married. How would I look eh Charley? " And she held that nightdress before her face. -"Punishment eh? " he laughed. If it had been a spell then he seemed to be out of it for the moment. (p. 200) The fascination with partial knowledge is also put into the form sustained in-Caught, where the deflection of a path or the turning of a corner figuratively precludes a cognition or realization: With a swirl of the coloured skirt of her uniform she turned a corner in front along this high endless corridor. The tap of her shoes faded. (p. 14) Edith is again teasing Raunce; the glimpse of something fading. from certain knowledge becomes the fulcrum of a desire on which no term is set, (its trajectory is "endless") . Seduction is unmistakably linked with a dispersion of focus, and any reading which attempts to clarify the text -ýý by regarding it in the light of the novel is un-focused - an interposed veil of secretions from other texts which "by compose a pre-texture, an apparel of image and colour which acts as a kind of literary pretext for seduction and 25 The bed in which Mrs. Jack and Captain Davenport rape. are found is "boat-shaped black and gold with a gold oar at the foot" (p. 33), like the barge at Cydnus.; --scene of by Cleopatra. 26 The purple sails of Antony's seduction Shakespeare's text reappear as "pink silk sheets"; the silver oars and "cloth of gold, of tissue" are transmuted 25 What I mean by "pre-texture" is according to the sense in which a new text relights certain details in the texture of an earlier one. To further paraphrase Merleau-Ponty: the earlier texture is there in the event its containing the later as a trace, or a horizon. of 26 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. M. R. Ridley, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1965), I1. ii. 190 ff.  226 into a gold oar and "sheets like veils"; the "strange invisible perfume" becomes the scent which clings to Mrs. Jack's clothes. But there is also a funereal aspect to the scene in Lovin ; Edith handles the sheets, and lights the lamps "softly gently as someone in devotion", so that the bed is also like a funereal barge, such as the one which carries Arth-Ur (an 'old king') to Avalon. Shakespeare's "pretty. dimpled boys, like smiling cupids" form a constant inlay to the later text: In one of the malachite vases, filled with daffodils, which stood on tall pedestals of gold naked male children without wings, he had seen a withered trumpet. (p. 11) The indication of what is not there--male children without wings--is a negative inference of "smiling cupids"; although the hieratic pedestals are perhaps even more closely reminiscent of their counterparts in Cymbeline: The roof o' th' chamber With golden cherubims is fretted. Her andirons (I had forgot them) were two winking cupids Of silver, each on one foot standing, nicely Depending on their brands. 27 These are appointments of Imogen's bedchamber, which Jachimo describes to support his false claim that he has ravished her, they are part of another pre-texture of seduction; Imogen's tapestry depicts' Proud Cleopatra, when she net her Roman, And Cydnus swelled above the banks... 28 The "gold naked male children without wings" are also by colour with the "golden Cupidons" in "A Game of matched 27 Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed.. J. M. Nosworthy, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1955), II. iv. 87 ff. 28 II. iv. 70-1 Ibid.,  227 Chess", also a pre-texture of seduction whose particular tableau of rape is "The change of Philomel"; Eliot's own notes to The Waste Land confirm that Antony and'Cleopatra is a strong presence behind a section of the poem that readmits the evasiveness of reflected light, glittering jewels, synthetic perfumes, and lamplight. "A Game of Chess" individually complies with the texture of 'Lovin : Huge sea-wood fed with. copper Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, in which sad light a carved dolphin swam. 29 She pushed the ashtray with one long lacquered nail across the black slab of polished marble supported by a dolphin layered in gold. (p. 11) Lovin 's objet d'art has conceivably been forged from Shakespeare's prosopographical note: "his delights / Were dolphin-like, they showed his back above / The element they lived in. "30 In any case, the-details of envious show transferred from earlier pre-textures of seduction are. frequently revised in Loving by the addition of gold, so that the presence of gold generally testifies to the imminence of sex: "'I. got those sheets from the Gold Bedroom to mend. I wish the people-they have to stay would cut their toenails or lie quiet one or the other"" (p. 37).. Mythic support is'delivered in the scene where Kate-and Edith. irrupt into Paddy's 'kingdom', ("O'Connor's life was opened"); the light they introduce is atomized like the golden shower in which Zeus raped Danae: "the 29 T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land", op. cit., p. 66,11.94-6 30 Anton and Cleopatra, V. ii. 88-90  228 shafted sun lay in a lengthened arch of blazing sovereigns" (p. 51). Paddy is prone and passive by a textual device which inclines towards the image of Gulliver, bound by the hairs of his head: "It might have been almost that O'Conor's dreams were held by hairs of gold binding his head" (p. 51). It is interesting to remember that in The Battel'of the Books by Swift the modern case is defended by the spider which spins a web out of its own bowels, representing a text which constantly draws on its own resources. As if to proclaim a textual schematics, the cobweb here is "caught" in a reflection of golden light: "Caught in the reflection of spring sunlight this cobweb looked to be made of gold" (p. 51). When these further texts are within sight, they are glimpsed through details which only oscillate the imagery of Antony and Cleopatra; the central permission for a pre-texture of seduction comes from this text, which is -placed under an obligation to Loving as a part of"the pre-history of its own constraints. Just as Raunce is' diverted from martial duty in England by the enchantment of Edith, so Antony is distracted from a Roman perspective of martial achievement by-"this enchanting queen", "this great fairy", "my charm", "thou spell"; he is "the noble - ruin of her magic". The first six lines of the play announce that his line of sight has bent and turned from the business of war to Cleopatra's "tawny front". Rome is contrasted with Egypt as conceptually as England with Ireland, ("He was disposed to mirth; but on the sudden /  229 A Roman thought hath struck him"). The oral greediness which blights the English in"Ireland is parallel to "gourmandizing" in Egypt, "That sleep and feeding may prorogue his honour", (Raunce's obsessiveness is expressed through his religious observance of the siesta). Cleopatra herself is described as an "Egyptian dish". Raunce and Antony both have a tendency to bluster and expostulate, and both are superannuated lovers: Antony has grey and white hairs while the elopement of the forty year old ailing Raunce is preposterous. But each relationship has a 'brilliance' which induces 'oblivion'; and Mrs. Welch evokes a Shakespearean stature in her dismissal of Raunce and Edith as "the almighty lovers they make out they are but no more than fornicators when all's said and-done" (p. 178). ýý`- Behind the preparatives for seduction there is also a --Y threat of violent restraint; the fear of invasion is ultimately a fear of rape, contracted from a wider risk of oral attack: "'They're famished like a lion out in the desert them fighting 'men'll (p. 96). The explicitation of sex entails a corresponding oral retreat: "... drawing'a hand across'her mouth" (p. 77). This suppressed violence periodically released through bouts of screams, screeches -is The text is frequently punctuated by and shrieks. shrillness of one kind or another; Kate and Edith shriek when emboldening one another in predominantly discussions of sex. But equally vociferous are non-human  230 objects like the squeaking door. through which Raunce comes to interrupt the erotic tableau of blind man's buff. Another screamer is the mouse trapped in the mechanism of the weather-vane; it responds in kind to Edith's alarm: At this Edith'let a shriek with the full force of her lungs. A silence of horror fell. Then even over the rustle of Kate hurrying up a paper-thin scream came as if in answer from between the wheels. (p. 46) The mouse is specifically "caught between those teeth" (p. 46, my emphasis) just as it is held by, the interlocking correspondences of the text to. allow an erotic, influence on the way it "gums up the whole works", literally--it impedes the operation. of the symbolic panopticon. Edith afterwards refers to the incident in a gross exaggeration of the oral threat: "'Just because when I see a mouse caught by its little leg in a wheel and he opens a great mouth at me... I" (p. 139) But the decisive corollary of . the human shriek is the call of the peacock: "At some distance peacocks called to one another, shriek upon far. shriek" (p. 188). Besides being aggressively oral--"most greedy of all birds", (p. 222)--the peacock is already _. culturally linked with erotism; the Ancients associated it 31 in Flaubert's Bouvard with salaciousness; and Pecuchet it provides-the central-erotic event: A sudden gust of wind blew up the sheets, and they saw two peacocks, male and female. The hen was standing still, legs bent, rump in the air. The cock strutted round her, spreading out his tail, preening himself, gurgling, then jumped on her, dragging his 31 for Columella, VIII. 5. See, example, op. cit., xi.  231 feathers round her like an arbour, and the two great birds shook with a single shudder. Bouvard felt it in Madame Bordin's palm. She loosed herself quickly. In front of them stood Victor, gaping and almost petrified as he watched; a little further away Victorine, stretched on her back in the sunshine, was sniffing at the flowers she had picked. 32 Bouvard and Pecuchet inspects among many other things the residual role of the Country House; the two friends move out to a country district where they distinctly don't fit in, and take over a large estate which they proceed to ruin; their proteges, the mischievous Victor and 'innocent' Victorine might almost have been the models for Albert and Moira and Evelyn. The mythical explanation for the multiple eyes on the peacock's tail is that they are the metamorphosed eyes of Argos Panoptes; even more remarkably, Argos was set to guard Io from one. of Zeus's attempted rapes, and the form of his death was decapitation by the god Hermes. In Loving, the peacock is still in the service. of surveillance, "'It's wicked the way they spy on you'll (p. 223), and Edith mimes the mythic defeat of Panoptes by her surreptitious theft of peacock's-eggs and of the feather she-wears in her hair: "'Their eggs 've got to be lifted when there's ' not, a soul to witnessl"'(p. 22) Raunce gives her a pair . of oculate feathers as"'charms', with the original panoptic purpose of keeping a jealous watch. But the peacock can also express the erotic 'brilliance' through its iridescent 32 Gustave-Flaubert,, Bouvard and Pecuchet, tr. A. J. Krailsheimer, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 262.  232 plumage and actual eyes, which are faceted: "their eyes had changed to rubies, their plumage to orange" (p. 52). The same is true of the single eye of the dove, which is multiplied to increase the pavonine-effect: "The lad himself was shaded by that pierced tower of Pisa inside which a hundred ruby eyes were round" (p. 146). In the classical tradition, the peacock's plumage is a standard topic in the illustration of reflected light. In Pliny's Historia Naturalis it is also 'jewelled': gemmantes laudatus expandit colores adverso maxime ... sole, quia sic fulgentius radiant; simul umbrae quosdam repercussus ceteris, qui et is opaco clarius micant, conchata quaerit cauda, omnesque in acervum contrahit pinnarum quos spectari gaudet oculos. 33 And in a distinction between 'use' and 'ornament'., Cicero conducts an argument in which the peacock and the dove are interchangeable: "alia autem nullam ob utilitatem quasi ad quendam ornatum, ut cauda pavoni, plumae versicolores 34 The conjugation to be ready-made; columbis". seems and it probably does derive from a passage in Lucretius. (to whom Cicero is elsewhere in debt) which approves the same examples in a description of the origin of colour which equally anticipates the Historia Naturalis with its 'repercussive' light: qualis enim caecis potent color esse tenebris? lumine quin ipso mutatur propterea quoll recta auf obliqua percussus luce'refulget; M pluma columbarum quo pacto in sole videtur, quae sita cervices circum collumque coronat; 33 Pliny, Historia Naturalis,; X. xxii. 43. 34 Cicero, De Finibus, III. v. 18.  233 namque alias fit uti claro sit rubra pyropo, interdum quodam sensu fit uti videatur inter curalium viridis mescere zmaragdos. caudaque pavonis, larga cum luce repleta est, consimili mutat ratione obversa colores; qui. quoniam quodam gignuntur luminis ictu, scire licet, sine eo fiert non-posse putandum est. 35 Colour depends on the incidence of light; it succeeds a change of perspective--the result of clinamen, which throughout the De Rerum Natura is the basis of generation. "the inclination 36 Clinamen is or turning aside of a thing", the mode of deflection in the path of atoms which leads to productive friction, a transaction which is practically convergent with Lovin in its generation of a text through forms of faceting, refraction, brilliance, *enchantment and disorientation. The insistent. divorce from a straight line of evaluation is condensed in images of curvature: They were wheeling wheeling in each other's arms heedless at the far end where they had drawn up one --. `, of the white blinds. Above from a rather low ceiling five great chandeliers swept one after the other almost to the waxed parquet floor reflecting in their hundred thousand drops the single sparkle of distant day, again and again red velvet panelled walls, and two girls, minute in purple', dancing multiplied to eternity in these trembling pears of glass. (p. 62) The rotations of the waltz do not comprise a sequence of movements with start and finish but an open, self-perpetuating form which rebounds further in the faceting of the chandelier; it resists the textual; aspect of the clear course with images of unmeasured depth: "single sparkle" is "multiplied to eternity". The only level on which it can in fact be 35. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 11,798-809. 36 Lewis Short, 'A Latin Dictionary, (Oxford and University Press, 1879).  234 sounded is one of corroboration through the text, because the scene itself is a recurvation of the moment when Edith seductively gyrates in front of Raunce: With for her an altogether extraordinary animation she fairly danced up... She began once more to force her body on his notice, getting right up to him then away again, as though-pretending to dance. Then she turned herself completely round in front of his very eyes. (p. 79) And this is on the same textual loop as the. courting 'dance' of the doves, with the same advances and retreats; the airborne dove affects a flight of "spiralling" and "circling", a revolving ascent or descent which is the crucial image (along with the coiled valve of a seashell) in Concluding, a text which is more distinctly symmetrical-- twisting itself around a number of motifs, tightening towards the centre, loosening towards the edge. The roundabout dance narrowly appears in the game of blind --ý, man's buff: "She stumbled about in flat spirals" (p. 113). The dove 'is normally associated (especially in the Christian era) with superior benevolent powers, but its courting ceremony here consists of "quarrelling, murdering and making love" (p. 57). This culminates in the engorging ritual mirrored by Edith's vampiric effect on Raunce's neck; her own little ballet of flirtation is in outline the dance of Salome (Dance of the Seven Veils), the employment of a seductive means to achieve a decapitating end. The scene in the ballroom is one of a number of tableaux marked with outstanding detail, a visual specificity that  235 is bathed in light. If the novel can be understood as a text that is turned towards the light, these descriptive promontories seem possessed of a luminosity, a textuality of glamour which is the final product of a process of patiently eliminating extraneous matter, the exhaustive coverage of a restricted field of vision which is none other than the writing of continuity in the cinematographic sense: In the morning room two days later Raunce stood before Mrs. Tennant and showed part of his back to Violet her daughter-in-law... She could not see Violet because he was in the way... With her back to the light he could not see her mouth and nose. (p. 10) He cut off the head with a pair of nail clippers. He carried this head away in cupped hand from above thick pile carpet in black and white squares through onto linoleum which was bordered with a purple key pattern on white until, when he had shut that green door to open his kingdom, he punted the daffodil ahead like a rugger ball. (p. ll) -ý`'ý- The scrupulous recording of dispositions, the pacing and - spacing of an action, the itemisation of stage properties-- writing as precise mensuration--creates an overestimation of the novel's debt to engrossing observation; the writing of continuity is already the intensification of a literary production in which the novel is the radiance of information: that is. its-only interest. Its ulterior purpose, of ensuring the means of revaluing a text, is pursued by the characters themselves--always contriving to inject the immediate circumstance with a stage value. Edith can be seen manoeuvring launce into a position from which to , propose: She hardly seemed comfortable however... she let out careless in a low voice ... She seemed overexcited...  236 she echoed as though dumbfounded... she gave him a look as if to say the sky always rained at weddings... she said as though beside herself. (pp. 126-8, my emphasis) As a result, social intercourse becomes a spectacle, ultimately constricted to the walk-on part, the 'extra' who is there in the first place as an exhibitionist: And while he heartily kissed Kate's mouth her right eye winked at Edith under one of his outstanding ears. (p. 46) In a saturated continuity, one that is absolutely unsparing of visual detail, human action is accountable to an extent which detaches it from the human agent; the animation of the body is an excuse for the parsimoniousness of expertise--an aggrandizement only of what may be seen, on a-textual plane which does not care to elevate the human: He followed with his eyes and did not turn his head. As a result for a full minute one pupil was swivelled almost back of the nose he had on him whilst the other was nearly behind a temple but he grinned the while. (p. 89) Kate is the object or patient of this operation like the 'panning' of a camera for which Paddy is not the agent but the instrument, reduced to the vacuous function of swivelling eyes, under pressure of another panoptic scanning: that of the author as panoramist. The situation is doubled-up; it is the over-production of a novel, the over-exertion of a tendency towards the priority of panoramic effects--a long exposure during which everything has to behave itself, composing an optimum state of "immeasurable'stillness" (p. 12), a mimicry of the absolute  237 repose of the dead. The desire of the panopticon is for the gratification of the fetish--it is easier to absorb its object in conditions of immobility; inertness will contract the field of interpretation, facilitate the authorization of a meaning under control: .. The girls stood transfixed as if by arrows between the Irishman dead motionless asleep and the other intent and quiet behind a division. (p. 53) This extinction of movement is. the focal point of. another tableau. Raunce is "the other", actually in the next room, behind a glass-fronted cupboard against the dividing wall part of which has been cut away to allow an uninterrupted view. He is enclosed in a frame, effectively a show-case; the tableau seems to be mounted in the same way, -cut out from the text surrounding it by a splendour of detail. It is a fragment like the fetish object, a ýý` morsel offered to the greed of continuity, which utterly consumes a confined space. : It corresponds to a mode of key-hole surveillance which perfects the need to observe without being seen; when Mrs. Welch spies on, Kate and- Edith through the perforated iron, a spot-light is trained upon them: "the great shaft of golden sun which lighted these girls through parted cloud" (p. 50). Raunce confirms the. voyeuristic aspect of the encased regard: "'Why there's all those stories you've had, openin' this door and seeing that when you were in a place in Dorset and lookin' through the bathroom window down in Wales... "', (p. 79). The spectacle is always delimited by-a surround: a door, a window, or picture-frame. It is hardly surprising that  238 Raunce! s own idea of envious show is to line his walls with prints and photographs. The terms of his admiration for Edith are those of a looker-on who evaluates his object, setting it within a frame: "'With those eyes you ought to be in pictures. "" (p. 13). She is: mounted and imprisoned, brought into sharp focus, picked out by exclusive light--it is all an attempt to harness the 'brilliance' of "those eyes"--preeminently in the tableau concluding the book, ("it made a picture"): She began to feed the peacocks. They came forward until they, had her surrounded. Then a company of doves flew down on the seat to' be fed. They settled all over her. And their fluttering disturbed Raunce who reopened his eyes. What he saw then he watched so that it could be guessed that he was in pain with his great delight. For what. with the peacocks bowing at her purple skirts, the white doves nodding on her shoulders round her brilliant cheeks and her great eyes that blinked tears of happiness, it made a picture. (p. 229) ý`"°' The passage appears to proclaim it is self-sufficient, it seems to be part of a book that can afford to ignore the thought of any depth by over-compensating for the loss with a 'surface textuality that is exceptionally well-lit and sumptuous. By an extraordinary bonus it is more than a novel, more like an anthology of purple-passages from one. Each excerpt foreshortens the book, seeming to conserve an imaginary quintessence; the whole anthology is a panorama of texts which enables a perspective, allows the reader to take bearings and feel in control of a heterogeneous body of work. A text initially unreadable can be read with the help of anthological placing, and the excised portion is picturesque, with newly emergent lines of  239 force adventurously curvilinear--these are the insinuations of newness that introduce an acceptable modicum of challenge to the rectilinear novel of the "whole picture" 37 kind. But on its darker side, the passage does have depth and it is not an anthological text; although it is self-consciously projected as an image of bounty it thwarts the satiety required of a peep-show text, dispersing its concentration and abducting it elsewhere; it disesteems the tableau by giving an external origin to every one of its parts, by means of a clinamen whose warrant is the combination of peacocks and doves bowing and nodding in the characteristic movement of the courting dance. At what would be the vanishing point is a brimming light, the faceting of tear-filled eyes and "brilliant" cheeks. The visual allure is a decoy, used to envelop the eye with a textuality that blinks. The three-dimensional scene revealed in a beam of light is superseded by a spectrum of words and particles of phrasing, whose aggregation is the texture of the work. The aperture of is not to review a scenography (through a reading but to diffract the light of a novel, perspective-glass) breaking it-up into its constituent parts. This different textuality is sporadic. It blinks: within the apparatus that reveals the moments of past knowledge it includes as it seizes up, there are slight arrests that nearly only 3.7 See on Caught, "The Idiom of the Time". my chapter  240 go unnoticed, fractions of a standstill that ensure the lubrication of its progress with a writing that prevaricates and dazzles, which seduces but does not convince; to convince, it would need a perspective on past knowledge to secure the accumulation of a value, or supremacy, that Lovin actually eludes. The associations which attach to configurations which it excavates from the pre-history of its own constraints seem to be served up with more or less indifference; the writing, is irresolute in terms of imported power out-of commitment to the proportions of its own illegal force. It is constantly tempted to cut corners, to redeploy its own material first, pursuing a course of action unredeemed by readings of the novel-form: at one point Raunce is given a "hangdog" face on account of the greyhound which promptly appears with the peacock's corpse; his idea of forestalling the rape they connect with invasion--What I had in mind was a cartridge each for you ladies"' (p. 97)--is precipitously used to add piquancy to an unrelated claim: "'Killed her it did'as if she had been blown in smithereens with a shotgun"' (p. 98); the metaphor designed for Edith's hair, "bells without a note"--(p. 113), is thoughtlessly counterbalanced in a description_of red fuchsias, whose "bells swung without a note" (p. 130); and there is no obvious justice in the visual accord between the statues in the mock Greek temple and the windswept figures of. Edith and Kate (p. 131). All these detours are by way of texture alone; they are without knowledge of the covert irritations of meaning for which  241 the writing sometimes does prepare itself. What they specifically counteract is the sort of confidence enjoyed by Edith: "'Because I know Miss Evelyn and Miss Moira like I've read them in a book"' (p. 174). The glibness of consorting with texture alone is measured against the coherence in line with 'reading a book', an efficiency which is equally gratuitous because it is over-insured; Mrs. Tennant and Mrs. Jack provide a little drama of the fretfulness and alarm in-a situation which cannot be solved by reading it as a book: "... At all events you've got your ring back haven't you? " "Yes but I don't like having things hang over me. " "Hanging over you? " "When there's something unexplained. Don't you ever feel somehow that you must get whatever it is cleared up?... Violet don't you find that everything now is the most frightfuldilemma always?... " (pp. 184-5) In Loving, it is precisely a dilemma by which the text regenerates itself; its wasted meanings (those which are not 'cleared up') are conducted back as a kind of potential incoming current of material whose availability for writing is what sustains the work, continually producing these slight, material assiduities which are extra and out of turn; their only meaning is to write. This practice of recycling is the eruption onto a written surface of the poetics of the version: of the turning about of material, the aggravation of detail with tried alternatives that characterizes the reproduction of an anecdote: "And he had to listen to the whole thing embellishments that he had never heard, again, and with  242 that even he must have doubted" (p. 130). Raunce is being subjected to another version of the Captain Davenport / Mrs. Jack scandal. What-Edith departs from is the impeccable finality of continuity; the value which continuity undertakes, what it promises to reinstate and solidify is precisely what her embroidery dissolves. The anecdotal material is like the written material of Loving- repeatedly shaken into motion, required or encouraged to run elsewhere, gaining solidity and presence only when it is left to stand in a text which asseverates by its practice the impossibility of transcribing what the eye can see without creative interference by the process of writing it down; the eye-witness account is a contradiction in terms, a dilemma which Loving inflames by ratifying its own blindness, writing inside-outwards rather than outside-inwards. Its internal figure for the narratorial function is Nanny Swift, who fabulates "behind closed and the wall of deafness" (p. 54), "shuteyed and deaf" eyes (p. 55). Myopia and deafness: on different occasions, Green has'ascribed to either a crucial role in the composition of his work: GREEN: 'Non-representational' was meant to represent a-picture which was not a photograph, nor a painting on a photogra2h, nor, in dialogue, a tape recording. For instance, the very deaf, as I am, hear the most astounding th4Lngs all round them, which have not, in fact, been said. This enlivens my replies until, through mishearingi, a new, level of communication is reached. My characters misunderstand each other more than people do in real life, yet they do so less than I. Thus when writing, I 'represent' very closely what I see (and I'm not seeing so well now) and what I hear (which is little) but I say it. is 'non-representational'  243 because it is not necessarily what others- see and hear. 38 Alan Ross: Imperfect sight, it has recently been . argued, affected certain painters' view of colour. Do-you think that imperfect hearing has affected your view of character, and that the constant failure in communication between your characters is a consequence-- not an entirely unhappy one--of it? Henry Green: Can't tell you. When you get very deaf you retire into yourself. But as a writer it would be easy to pretend to hear, wouldn't it? I have as I think short-circuited communication but because I'm so deaf I don't know if I've done it well. 39 These two interviews are roughly contemporaneous. In the first, Green refers to a textuality which is the outcome of defective naturalism--a procedure which he totally obviates in the second interview with the contention that "it would be easy to pretend to hear, wouldn't it? ". This contrariness is of the kind he relished both inside and outside his work.. Earlier on in the first interview, Green_. answers the charge that his writing is unacceptable to an American audience because it is too "subtle", by ,- 'mishearing' it, converting subtlety into its opposite, a particularly violent form of. flagrancy: . GREEN: I don't follow. Suttee, as I understand it, , forbidden--of is the suicide--now a Hindu wife on her husband's flaming bier. I don't want my wife to do ...that when my time comes--and with great respecty as I-know her,, she won't-- INTERVIEWER: I'm-sorry, you misheard me; I said I-subtlel--that the message was too subtle. , GREEN: subtle. How dull! 40 -Oh, In both the written work and the work of producing 'Henry Green' (quite different from the real Henry Yorke) 38 Terry southern, -op. cit. 39 Alan Rossi, "Greenj, with Envy; Critical Reflections 'Interview"j, The London Magazine, Vol. 6 no. 4, April, 1959. and an 40 Terry Southern, op. cit.  244 deafness and blindness become the means, of invention, ridiculing the assumption that the reproduction of data Is never less than enough. Green presents either an excess or an insufficiency of data. With regard to the author of the work, it is a case of not enough; Green's public face is almost never seen--as a rule he declined to be photographed except from the rear three-quarters view. Within the text of Loving itself, sensory data are forced into second place; description, which commonly defers to them, is dismissed into areas of what cannot be described: "She was brilliant, she glowed as she rang her curls like bells without a note" (p. 113). The writing 'describes' what cannot be seen ('brilliance') in terms of what cannot be heard; its rejection of the novel as hearing-aid, surveillance device--a general perviousness to the means of being called to account--is discharged through a practice of 'loving' which deserts the powers of observation and deduction for those of seduction; the aperture through which it focusses the attention it aims to diffract is the game-of blind man's buff. The clamorous game takes place in the mock Greek temple which ricochets with light and sound--there is no single source for either, (the skylights are slempty", and the walls produce an echo effect). Ths condition of 'loving' is that of on.-- who does not see; the victim is blindfolded with the scarf printed with the words""I'love you I love you", a sensory deprivation more confident of success without the privilege of 'witnessing':  245 Blinded as he was by those words knotted wet on his eyes he must have more. than witnessed her as his head without direction went nuzzling to where hers came at him in a short contact, and in spite of being so , short more brilliant more soft and warm perhaps than his-thousand dreams. (p. 114-5) The 'brilliance' of 'loving' is completely independent of visibility: "He seemed absolutely dazzled although it had become almost too dark to see his face" (p. 115). 'In a sensey the textuality of Loving is that of one *who neither sees nor hears, 'of a reader who is frequently 'in the darkIr whoin order to realize the predicament is obliged to consider the book as something other than a novel and himself as something other than the novel requires him, to be. This otherness does not even restrict its impairment to the organs of perceptiont it approves. the economy of a body deprived of all regulatory functions, articulated through an idiom of short-circuiting, dyspepsia, and regressive decay--courting the disaster of unreadability, of unacceptability because it is too 'subtle' (the inadequacy of the term reveals the degree of helplessness). Green is alert to the possibility that "Any work of art if it is alive, carries the germs of its death, like any live thing,. around with it"; the more closely it interrogates the residual role of a-literary form--the more it enlivens it--the closer it removes to a subcutaneous abyss of silence, "the black cap on the whole projected work inexorably pronounced for a total lack of sympathy or the 41 Loving has to communication with reader". seduce -4_1 Henry Green# "An Unfinished Novel",, The London Magazine, Vol. 6 no. 4, (April, 1959).  246 I this reader, by distracting the trained eye and ear; it looks and sounds like a novel, but it does not have the consciousness of one. The perspective within the form which advances a perspective on events--the apparatus by which the novel is something to look through, from a given point, in a limited scope of interpretation--is surprised by a brilliant connivancep the exhilaration of the nondescript, a clinamen or faceting, which sends the writing back to itself. I- "ýý ý`, - ý --  CHAPTER VI Back: The Prosthetic Art  248 If Loving works by turning back in a curve upon its own material, the same is even more true of Back, which is incurably addicted to the sense and sound of the word 'rose'. This one-word refrain overturns the-subtle biases of Loving--Back's central character, Charley Summers, is psychotically fixated on the image of his dead girlfriend, Rose, and the resultant blind spots in his perception of the world endorse the writing's specialization. its reconditioned idiom is unanimous with the time--CharleY's instability, resembling Pye's in Caught, augments an already-existing, general disorientation, which bears on the demobilization of troops; the idea of-the text being "back" originates with the soldier's return from war. Almost from the outbreak of hostilities, demobilization was one of the issues uppermost in the public mind; the. troops. back to they _~ý-- would-come a society would not recognize, with more women working than ever before, replacing men in industries geared to a war effort whose cessation could lead to massive unemployment. There was the hotly disputed question of how rapid or protracted demobilization ought to be; if the process became unreasonably lengthy, the impatience of the troops would in all likelihood bring on a revolution. -Demobilization was in many respects the the future. ' key-note to uncertainty about "'We all of us came back to what we didn't expect "' (p. 26),, is the reaction of Arthur Middlewitch. A peacetime My account is derived from Mass-Observation's report on demobilization, Ed. Tom Harrisson and H. D. Willcockr The Journey Home (London: Advertising Service Guild, 1944).  249 analogy for repatriation is the rehabilitation of a prisoner, but in Back they form one and the same problem; the fact that both Middlewitch and Charley have been prisoners-of war--Charley for the duration--concentrates their bewilderment, abstracted as the recognition of "difference": "'... you'll find conditions very different to what you remember of when you went off"' (p. 33).. Their alienation is almost hyperbolized in the shape of physical incapacity; both men are equipped with artificial limbs, which 'are themselves bad matches--Charley is a multiple misfit, "a young man with a wooden leg that did not fit" (p. 7). This circumstance unsettles a routine figure of speech: "Therewere plenty'still over on the other side would give the cool moon to stand in his shoes" (p. 9). The remorseless irony accepts just how extreme was the 'ý. bitterness involved'in coming "back". ` The recalcitrance. of the new Home Front environment is dramatized in the confrontation with a wanton mass of initial letters: E. N. Y. S.,, I. T., B. R. N. Q. V. B. S., p. M. V. 0.,, j, C. E. C., P. B. H. R., H. R. O. N. 0, A. R. B. S. E. P. T., S. E. C. O., r S. E. V. E., M. A. P., A. E. P.. r C. E. G. S., C. A. B. 'r O. C. A. M. O. L.... F Britain 1944 is'literally unreadable; the crucial -in disadvantage returning servicemen is the inability to -'for . identify and decipher-the messages received. Almost in variably,, Charley misreads the ýenor of a conversation; anxiety is compounded when the interlocutor deliberately -his misreads the messages sent by Charley himself: "Naturally  250 Summers had not ref used to meet the man. Hearing this made - him confused" (p. 136). Since the messages he thought he had sent appear not to have arrived, Charley begins to doubt having sent them in the first place; his abject taciturnity stems from a growing mistrust of his own competence at making any acceptable sense of the world: "He felt and felt what to say. He said nothing. " (p. 68) As he stumbles round the country chutchyard, he exclaims inwardly, "Oh, he was lost in this bloody graveyard" (p. 9). The silent outburst is actually stimulated by "the coupon question"; Charley possesses only one suit of clothes, "the rest was looted", and the, management of his clothing coupons. is a constant source of disquiet--coupons represent one more facet of being "back", which he fails to understand. The Britain of 1944 is the. "bloody graveyard" of everything he had known and thought he could trust in. According to Mass-Observation, the common approach to the problem of demobilization was in terms of its reflection on the past: "the past is the only future on I whichthey can build, the only future they can clearly 2 At the the fear the visualize". start'of war$, of unknown had led,. to absorption in_the past by way of "wishful thinking", but as a means in the avoidance of the future, thinking about demobilization led to pessimism. The precedent on everyone's mind was the end of the First War its disastrous outcome of unemployment: "the with 2 Mass-Observation, p. 111  251 underlying principle which most people want to be demobilization's aim, is the prevention of unemployment". 3 The characters of Back refer automatically to the First War, and its social casualties: "'There were plenty like it after the last war. Sat about and moped"' (p. 34) ; "They're coming back nervous cases, like they did out of the last, war, ' he repeated to himself, and thought that, in that case, then everything. was hopeless" (p. 111) Mr. Grant, . Rose's father, broaches the subject in typically manipulative fashion; the, situation which redounds to his credit is somehow made reproachful in Charley's case: "'Because what you have to remember, Charley boy, is that you're one of the, lucky ones. You're back. I know I . reminded myself of that, come the finish of the last war, when I couldn't seem to understand at times, just after I got out of France"' (p. 79). Grant's wife is an amnesiac who believes that Charley returning from the Second War is in fact her brother John returning from the First. Her condition is traced to the shock of losing her daughter-- she surmounts the death of Rose by rejecting the memory of her life, but the eliding of this episode of her own life involves disavowing the. relationship with her husband as well. This apparently causeless side to the amnesia seems to require further explanation: "Charley_ noticed that she never seemed to address Mr. Grant directly" (P. 18). So -far only one thing is certain; whatever the cause of the 3-Mass-Observation, p. 86  252 amnesia, its effect is to prevent any misinterpretations at the hands of Grant. Charley's own flight from the unintelligibility of the world is an attempt to retard the hands of the clock: "all he was after was to turn them back, the fool, only to find roses grown between the minutes and hours, and so entwined that the hands were stuck"Ap. 9). Rose is exactly synonymous with the pre-war period, having died "six years back" (p. 47, my emphasis), and as such is a talisman for c6herence; but the conditions of incoherence under which Charley now suffers derive ultimately from his liaison with Rosep the history of which is to blame for intensifying his disablement, now a -psychosis that can to some extent shelter under the more general, loss of bearings. The threshold of his decline is the sudden and unexpected marriage of Rose to James; the latter accepts that Charley and Rose "'... were old pals, knew each other - long. before we ever met... "' (p. 128) and the unaccountable swap to James excites a maladjustment in Charley's - conditions of knowledge: '"II didn't trust her quite the same""-(p. 204). His inefficiency at reading human behaviour is subject to the terms-of trust and betrayal--his sense of the opposition of these terms has been completely atrophied by the duplicity, first of Rose, and then of her father,, Grant: "'Never divulge a confidence... tell you it pays hand over fist, keeping a confidence.... You see e I trusted you. It's not everyond I'd give her address.  253 And I trust you still, if I may have been mistaken in one respect"' (pp. 78-9). In a situation where he is in the wrong, Grant pretends that he has extracted a promise from Charley which Charley has broken; and although resistant at first, Charley is eventually persuaded of this. The perverse disquisition on "confidence" (a word suggestive more of collusion than frankness), is distantly interrupted by Mrs. Grant,, as if in accusation of her husband's own real treachery: "... And it's paid me. Many's the time, even when I couldn't see what Value there might be. I still keep silent. For why? Because it was a trust. " A voice quavered from the house. "Gerald, " it called twice, thin and fretful. (p. 78) Both Grant and_Rose are adepts in a form of manipulation which recalls the "double bind" of Gregory Bateson: nthe individual is caught in a situation in which the other person in the relationship is expressing two orders of 4 message and one of these denies the other" 'When Grant . communicates with Charleys, the latter is forced into a of weakness from which any resistance is turned position to. the former's advantage; Grant establishes conditions under. which every piece of bad behaviour on his part is reclassified--he. is the wronger acting like the wronged: 'He, said I.. this in'such a way as to make it appear that he blamed Charley for the last visit...