We reach the corner of the Rue de Seine, where we turn, Nadja no longer wishing to continue straight ahead. She is still quite distressed [distraite, distracted], and tells me to follow a line slowly traced across the sky by a hand. "Still that hand." She shows it to me, as a matter of fact, on a poster, a little beyond the Dorbon bookstore. It so happens that there is, high above us, a red hand with its index finger pointing, advertising something or other. Nadja insists on touching this hand . . . which she succeeds in slapping with her own.  She falls silent for a while, I suspect she has tears in her eyes. Then suddenly . . . virtually stopping me, with that extraordinary way she has of calling me, the way you might call someone from room to room in an empty castle: "André? André? . . . You will write a novel about me. I'm sure you will." (N, 100/116-17; first two ellipses mine, third ellipsis author's]
Through Breton's recollection we learn that Nadja must correlate the hallucinations she projects from inside with the piercing assault of stimulation that comes in from outside. Likewise Breton the author struggles to make sense out of his own projection, the character "Breton," whose life depends upon the movement of the narrative scene. Who does Nadja call by name when she accusingly says "André? André? . . . You will write a novel about me"? Who moves within the narrative and who keeps the narrative moving? A silent voice resides, ghost-like, in the elliptical space that marks the distance between "André" and the narrative he will write about Nadja. The question of narrative form becomes, in the psychopathology of trauma, a question of life and death.
Whether we refer to the psychopathological researches of Henri Ey, inflected by his sympathy for Surrealism, or to the contemporary researches of psychoanalysts such as Fédida or Schneider, there is remarkable continuity in the description of the phenomenology of the experience of effraction and place (lieu) as "the sensible support (insofar as it is 'lived' by my body) of the sense of these exchanges; but it disappears under the sense of its sense." 27 The sense of support, however, is one of the necessary illusions one must conjure to cope with the trauma of bifurcated identity. Such an understanding of voice in relation to place necessarily bypasses a conventional understanding that would confer to voice a phallic, dynamic capacity for penetration into an implicitly passive, fixed place. As the montage of photographs, song snippets, and juxtapositions of recurrent images as both hallucinations and memories suggest, the narrative events in Nadja (and indeed, in Nadja) do not just happen in the city, they occur through them.
It is impossible to articulate the dynamism of place because this dynamism, this active engagement in real time, cannot be contained in narrative structure or identity construction. Absence and presence (in lost real time, in remembered events, in dreams, in projections and hallucinations) must be understood in terms of correspondence, where the presence of one image might presuppose the juxtaposition of other images in all instances of their reoccurrence. The recurring images of waving hands, fixed handrails, closing eyes, open windows, and hidden tunnels suggest an "Originary otherness from which one cannot withdraw oneself, since it is inseparable from the possibility of being alive" (Pdl'O, 143). In her study of "Claire," Monique Schneider claims that the question of presence and absence in place cannot be resolved by positing place as "the invisible posited as the antithetic of the visible." Rather, place is what makes the emergence of recognizable forms possible. Place is where correspondences can be drawn between interior forms and exterior stimuli:
Place could in no way embody the invisible posited as the antithetic of the visible; it participates in the deployment of the visible, but without emerging as recognizable form. It could not moreover be confused with that which is designated as ground; it is situated on the side of the support, and not on the side of that which is in relief--whence the matriciel dimension of transporting space; the earth as transporting place occurs in the prolongation of what can be attributed to shadow understood as an internal place from which emerges whatever is going to be brought into relief, or appear on stage. [Pdl'O, 141]
("Matriciel" is a pyschoanalytic term indicating whatever fulfills for the feminine the function that the phallic fulfils for the masculine; it indicates a form of causality that is non-symbolic and non-paternal, in time that is not linear but cyclical, and is situated at the pre-oedipal level.) 28
According to Monique Schneider, another mark or emplacement of trauma can be found in screams and cries: "The scream is as much in complicity with the effraction of space as with the passionate movement aiming to essay the erection of a bridge capable of binding together the banks which glance at the menace of emptiness. Will the scream arrive at this other bank, in which the gesture awaited on the part of the other consists?" (Pdl'O, 113). The effraction of identity finds its middle, bridging term in silence before and after a cry, an impassioned, pained cry that courses like an arc from beginning to end in Nadja. Cries and screams incise the tragic experience of return and repetition as a confrontation with effraction and proximity to death. Silence is one mark of trauma that cannot be drawn into the logic of narrative structure directly but which can nevertheless convey the sense of vertiginous, horrific confrontation with an effraction of identity that so closely approximates death. Such cries mark events, enclosing them in an interior or psychic (Breton might claim feminine) place. The close of the play Les Détraquées, for example, culminates in an "unforgettable scream" ("le cri inoubliable") (N, 49/53)--an event that draws a correspondence between the non-discursive mark of ineffability in the cry and the head of a "missing" child whose presence is shockingly revealed in the opening of a cabinet door: "The child's bloody corpse appears, head downward, and falls onto the floor" (N, 49/53). 29 The vulnerability of rationality, the fragility of the structures that allow rational, causal correspondences to be drawn, is showcased in the re of the inverted, falling head. In another episode, Breton attempts to embrace Nadja but "suddenly, as I am kissing her, she screams. 'There (pointing to the top of the window), someone's there. I just saw a head upside down--very clearly'" (N, 107/126).  M. Delouit is partially aphasic, incapable of remembering certain things such as numbers and certain proper names. He comes to rent a room at a hotel and informs the assistant of his condition:
"Excuse me, I have no memory at all. If you please, each time I come in, I'll tell you my name: Monsieur Delouit. And each time you'll tell me the number of my room."-- "Very well, Monsieur." Soon afterwards, he returns, and as he passes the desk says: "Monsieur Delouit."--"Number 35, Monsieur."--"Thank you." A minute later, a man extraordinarily upset, his clothes covered with mud, bleeding, his face almost not a face at all, appears at the desk: "Monsieur Delouit." "What do you mean, Monsieur Delouit? Don't try to put one over on us! Monsieur Delouit has just gone upstairs!"--"I'm sorry, it's me . . . I've just fallen out of the window. What's the number of my room, please?" [N, 155-56/183-84; ellipsis in original)
The fall and presumed screams of M. Delouit are not explicitly described in the contents of the narrative itself, but are implied by Breton's judicious use of narrative techniques both within and outside of this story within a story. The ellipses that frame this account as well as the dashes and ellipses internal to the story mark the ineffable traces of trauma on M. Delouit's body and the subsequent effraction or effacement of his identity.
The tragic effacement of M. Delouit correlates with the thematics of doubling as mime and mimicry (no less than the problem of identity in relation to language); the drawing of correspondences enacts a mechanism of substitution that can ultimately endanger a cohesive sense of identity. When Nadja mimics Mme. de Chevreuse she ". . . gracefully . . . conceals her face behind the heavy, nonexistent plume of her hat!" (N, 108/127). The allure of the face of an actress mimicking another face is, in such a scene, the allure of Melusine, Medusa, or the Siren. The 'killing look' is the reflection that one obsessively seeks out yet must avoid if one is to survive the encounter intact. The mimicked image and the ineffable cry are traces of inscription, the sometimes horrifying evidence of an attempt to forge a direct link to what Fédida and Schneider have called the feminine (jouissance) as place.
The city landscape is such a place, a backdrop that functions much like the screen in the analytic situation. The screen (itself a surface of multiplicities) becomes a protective shield that both the analyst and the analysand need to sustain the therapeutic dialogue. We can find the city allegorized as a screen in Nadja, in the chapter of Magnetic Fields which is titled "In 80 Days," in Louis Aragon's novel Paris Peasant, as well as in Desnos's Liberty or Love. 30 Surrealist painters such as Miró (Musique, Seine, Michel, Battaille et moi) and Man Ray (L'étoile de mer) also allegorize the city as the backdrop that makes it possible for its inhabitants to sustain their necessary illusions. Nadja's body, whether extended to the drawings or situated in the city, navigates along the fault line between dynamic interior stimuli and exterior excitation. The distance between Nadja and Breton, as well as the disjunction between the two characters and the city they inhabit, is the mark of their effraction. Nadja's interactions with the city are increasingly pathological close calls with city emplacement as jouissance; observing "that hand on the Seine" across the sky (N, 85/98), she threatens to tear away the very screen that protects her freedom of movement. She is in danger of immobilizing herself by staring directly into the face of Medusa, that is, by seeing herself as nothing more than a character that has been frozen into the logic of narrative space.
The photograph of the wax model from the Musée Grevin suggests the dangers inherent in the enactment of mimetic substitution by correlating emplacement with jouissance. Breton included this photograph in the 1963 edition of Nadja and described it as ". . . an adorable wax-work re in the Musée Grevin . . . a woman fastening her garter in the shadows, and it is the only statue I know of with eyes, the eyes of provocation" (N, 152/177-79). Importantly, the photograph of the wax re found in Nadja is cropped in such a way that our attention is drawn not to the re's adorable "eyes of provocation" but towards two busy, fastening hands that are fumbling with a garter. The "eyes of provocation" that have gone missing from the photograph of the wax re correlate implicitly and uncannily with Breton's description of Nadja's "fern-colored eyes" (N, 111/130), while the garter directly recalls the character Solange in Les Détraquées as she lifts her skirt, "revealing a beautiful leg . . . a little above the black garter" (N, 45/49), the role played by Blanche Derval, "the only actress of the period" (N, 49/55; emphasis in original).
Nadja's own city play can be correlated to trauma as is red by Pierre Fédida, who provides a phenomenological account of analytic experience in the context of the psychopathology of informe conditions: "It is clear that every effraction of the protective shield--every perforation of the separating membrane protecting the inside from the outside, which brings about a linkage of the two--is, in the first instance, the basic sense of traumatic experience." 31 Breton conveys Nadja's experience of the outside by shrouding the sequence of events in ambiguity. The narrator forges a sense of continuity by presenting events not in chronological order but through repetition and through correlation. For example, Nadja's rejoinder that she "no longer wish[es] to continue straight ahead" ("résistant à aller plus loin") (N, 100/116) echoes an earlier meeting with Breton where Nadja, refuses "to go any further" ("d'aller plus loin"):
As we walk along the quais, I feel that Nadja is trembling all over. . . . She is very abandoned in her behavior, very sure of me. But she is looking for something, she insists that we walk into a courtyard, a courtyard of some police station, which she rapidly explores. "It's not here. . . . Listen, tell me why you have to go to prison? What is it you're going to do? I've been to prison too. Who was I? It was ages ago. And you, then, who were you?" [N, 84/97; first ellipsis mine, second in original]
In this passage Nadja ushers Breton into a courtyard and asks him "tell me why you have to go to prison? What is it you're going to do?" Breton uses Nadja's accusation to foreshadow his responsibility (as author) for her subsequent disappearance. Nadja's question "Who was I?" is anything but rhetorical when we consider the scene as a staged confrontation between Breton the author and Breton as character/projection. The protective screen that allows this confrontation to take place also turns Nadja into an agent who, in turn, becomes a medium for Breton, though each permits this to happen unconsciously. The possibility that Nadja and Breton might forge a reciprocal understanding of each other as co-inhabitants of the same city landscape is thus foreclosed; Breton turns Nadja's insistence that they stop moving forward into an occasion to interrogate, via Nadja's questions of identity, his own success or failure at producing a reliable translation of true events. Thus, the authenticity of Breton's narrative is guaranteed through his disclaimer that Nadja is, or was, a living person whose presence can be felt in those textual aporias that have, in psychoanalytic discourse, been closely correlated with death.
Nadja's close proximity to death is also correlated with her fear of abandonment, red as the threat of free-falling, uncontrolled motion. Before she and Breton visit the courtyard that becomes the scene that foreshadows the crime of her disappearance, Nadja describes the sense of vertigo she felt when surveying a high window from the perspective of another high window. She echoes the sense of dislocation invoked in the hypnogogic phrase, "There is a man cut in two by the window," that features in the "Manifesto of Surrealism" ("MoS," 21/325): "'It was there, from a window in the Hôtel Henri IV, and my friend, the second man I told you about, was about to leave. And there was a voice saying "You're going to die, you're going to die." I didn't want to die, but I felt so dizzy. . . . I'd certainly have fallen if he hadn't held me back'" (N, 84/97; ellipsis in original). The unnamed man who "held her back" is replaced, in the following passage, by Breton, a man with whom Nadja refuses to move forward until she has surveyed, to her satisfaction, a low-lying window that overlooks a moat:
Now we are walking along the iron grill railing again, when suddenly Nadja refuses to go any further. Here on the right, is a low window that overlooks the moat, and she cannot take her eyes off it. It is in front of this window which looks so forlorn that we must wait, she knows that much. It is from here that everything can come. It is here that everything begins. She holds on to the railing with both hands so that I will not pull her away.  She has not forgotten about the underground tunnel and probably imagines she is at one of its exits. She wonders who she might have been, in Marie Antoinette's circle. The footsteps of passers-by make her shudder for a long time. [N, 84-85/97-98]
The window overlooking a great divide is a pivotal allegory of bifurcated identity in the narrative that grants Nadja, in Nadja, her identity. But like the dislocating and vertiginous heights of a window, this fragile identity is itself dislocated from its own surroundings. The footsteps of nameless, faceless passers-by invoke for Nadja a horror that time can march on without her. Yet who or what is responsible for Nadja's increasingly disjunctive and fragile state? She implicates Breton himself during their third encounter, where "She seems to be suffering from a certain inner conflict, but suddenly she surrenders, closes her eyes for good, offers me her lips. . . . Now she tells me of my power over her, of my faculty for making her think and do whatever I desire, perhaps more than I think I desire. Because of this, she begs me to do nothing against her. She feels she has never had any secrets from me, long before knowing me" (N, 79/92; ellipsis in original). Breton makes his own authorial anxiety and sense of guilty remorse a feature of these scenes, for it is when Nadja most emphatically implores Breton to stop moving that the narrative drives relentlessly forward. When Nadja stops moving, Breton explores the duality of identity at the core of the question of communication. The questions "Who were you?" and "Who am I?" recriminate a culpable author residing outside of the narrative space. Ironically, the recrimination is like a certificate of authenticity beguiling the reader into believing that the story of Nadja is a story sans artifice. When the story invokes the fluid temporality of dynamic events, the problem of voice becomes not only the problem of translation but the problem of ventriloquism ("She tells me of my power over her").
As Fédida suggested in his analysis of trauma, the successful communicative exchange involves a sacrifice, namely, the fixing of the dynamic movement of events within the frozen time of narrative. And as we have seen earlier, Nadja's talent for mime and mimicry makes clear that her body must necessarily be subordinated to the narrative voice--even as this body, as corpse or as corpus, provides the grounds or place through which this narrative voice might speak. The problem of projection becomes, in the construction of the narrative, a ventriloquist's act. Such ventriloquism shadows the movement of the analytic dialogue, where projection is used to identify (and thereby contain) the trace or memory of trauma. When the narrator claims that the real Nadja once said "You will write a novel about me. . . . You have to," Breton the author is acknowledging the necessity for using Nadja's voice, through Nadja the character or projection, to suture himself back together again. Yet Breton also realizes that in his recollections what he captures or contains is never the biographical person behind the name Nadja, but the complex projection that he needs to maintain his own variety of necessary illusions.
During their meeting of 10 October Nadja identifies André as the man who will have a hand in her undoing (and subsequent literary redoing when she claims that he will one day write a novel about her). The reality of the author's story is confirmed in a broken exchange, but only, as we have seen before, by casting a long shadow of doubt over the stability of the narrator's sanity as well. Breton the author carefully explores the anguish that motivates Breton the character to justify his chronic storytelling, via Nadja's tacit blessing that he must write a novel about her. Breton's anguish continues to register through Nadja long after she is gone; the literary marks of silence (the ellipses, the dashes, the caesuras) voice those questions that Nadja can no longer ask directly: whose story is being told? for whom is this story being told? and what is necessarily missing?
Breton and Nadja begin their romantic exchange full of the possibility offered by the dynamic landscape of the city. But as Breton realizes that he is incapable of loving Nadja the way he believes she needs him to love her, Nadja is increasingly absorbed into the fabric of city space. The temporary fascination that draws Breton to Nadja is no match for the permanent power that yokes Nadja to Breton: "How does she regard me, how does she judge me? It is unforgivable of me to go on seeing her if I do not love her. Don't I love her? . . . In her condition, she is certainly going to need me, one way or another, and suddenly" (N, 90/104). For Breton, the city landscape continues to function as a backdrop and as a screen, providing him with the cover he needs to sustain the necessary illusions that drive the otherwise disjunctive narrative forward. Breton's narrative ends with allusions to the technologies of escape, to planes, trains and automobiles. But as Nadja's fate unfolds, her range of motion is increasingly constricted and finally ends in the confinement of a lunatic asylum. Nadja too is like the landscape of the city, a screen upon which the main players will enact their drama of identification vis à vis her embodiment of that necessary, distancing silence. In the literary space of Nadja, the interaction takes place within the traumatized, bifurcated identity of Breton himself as he faces the repercussions of creating a story sans artifice.
The passivity characteristic of Nadja's construction is a device through which Breton, though now separate from her in time and place and yet still traumatized by the "irreparable disaster" that has overtaken her, seeks to encounter Nadja herself, or Nadja as she might have been. The effects of his experience with her continue to leave their mark on the writing of Nadja, and it is only in the act of writing that he begins to understand her. It is as if Nadja's madness, her borderline state, is her insight into the mechanizations that lie beyond the confines of her own frozen, atemporal world; the narrative must move on, even though she continues to hope that something will remain of her experience shared with Breton.
The anonymous footsteps march ahead; the particulars of time and place are, Nadja recognizes, in themselves immaterial. The French play on "pas," meaning both "footsteps" and "not" is lost in translation in the English edition. In the French, the step that is taken can suggest the foreclosure of all other possibilities of movement: a journey as a narrowing down of possibilities. The anonymous footsteps remind Nadja not only that time moves on without her, but that she herself may one day become a voided and anonymous "not" (or "has-been"). Breton's guilt in this scene is doubly correlated to Nadja's tragicomic mourning ritual: he knows that Nadja is doomed in her "madness" to remain, in Nadja, an embodiment of projection. She may be removed from the narrative scene, but Nadja will never entirely disappear. She is doomed to remain in a perpetual free fall towards death. We can find traces of Nadja in the textual marks of silence that return us to the problem of construction and to the enigma, Qui vive?  Is it you, Nadja? Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?" [N, 144/177]
By insisting that Breton must write a novel because "'everything fades, everything vanishes. Something must remain of us . . .'" Nadja confirms the narrator's authorial power to reconstruct a journey that begins with the question "Who am I?" But even as the narrator invokes, in the book's final section, technologies that facilitate movement and travel, Breton's journey is suspended by a question that must elude his powers of recollection. In the textual marks of silence, in trauma, there is a persistent enigma "neither static nor dynamic" (N, 160/190) that eludes both death and the freeze of narrative time; namely, the question: "Who was she?"
The life of a city can be represented by a documentary image. That is what I have attempted to do for Paris. Indeed, no city could lend itself better to an effort of this sort.
Marcel Poëte 32
When we experience a transition from consciousness to expression or from perception to consciousness, a radical failure of symbolization such as silence can seemingly turn the body into the only available medium for responding to the world or perceiving it, at least in psychopathological conditions. The unforgettable scream in Les Détraquées, Nadja's trembling, or her sense of being observed from behind (the latter two common schizophrenic symptoms) capture this sense of alienation and emptiness. Both Nadja and Breton experience the dislocating bifurcation of identity that is concomitant with traumatic experience, but they do not share the same experience or sense of temporality. While Nadja straddles between the world of dynamic events and the realm of frozen time characteristic of narrative structure, Breton experiences a temporality that is related to, yet never wholly coincides with, hers. Yet the "concordant views," those rare but breathtaking possibilities of communicative exchange evoked by Breton, occur only in the negativity of just such moments, those intervals that are also the basis of temporality in narrative/identity construction. To better understand Breton's invocation of such possibilities for communicative exchange or dialogue, we can look to his use of photographs and song fragments in Nadja, devices related to a motif of enigmatic traces that is discernible not only in Nadja but throughout Breton's oeuvre, beginning with "The Unsilvered Mirror" and "Seasons," the first two chapters in Magnetic Fields .
The most telling critical responses to Nadja have been those of Maurice Blanchot and Michel Beaujour. 33 Blanchot's essay has been less influential among art historians, while key themes and terms from Beaujour's essay have influenced both art historians and literary critics, especially his arguments about classifying the photographs and more generally the role of photography within Nadja. Breton, in order to construct a story sans artifice, that is, a work intended not to be a novel (romanesque), deploys a procedure of modal patterning that groups smaller anecdotes into larger structures which, as they aggregate, develop into coherent and cohesive patterns. An organizational structure similar to that of retinal memory develops, despite self-evident discontinuities. Such structures suggest the "existence of a network wherein each element, by its proximity to another one, takes up and confirms the authenticity both of the other elements surrounding it and of the system as a whole" ("QqN," 785). As new elements become attached to this montage, the illusion that these fixed images continue to correspond to the lost continuous time of real events is created to "bring about multiple regroupings. This is the role which has devolved to the forty-seven photographs of the revised edition"("QqN," 785). 34
Beaujour's comments have been modified by those of Arrouye and Ades. Jean Arrouye's study of photography in Nadja recognizes certain trans-iconic themes which are disclosed through the photographs: the themes of what he calls "the regard" and "departure," both subsumed in a broader theme of "recommencement." For Arrouye, the photographs function as "an activator of the imaginary" in Nadja. 35 Dawn Ades describes the non-literary function of the photographs which record the irrational nature of events in Nadja. She especially focuses on the almost complete absence of people in the photographs depicting the city. "At the risk of overdetermining these images," she urges, "I think that the avoidance of the bustle of human activity and city life is deliberate and relates to a preoccupation referred to on the cover of the fourth issue of La Révolution surréaliste, which bore the photograph of a mannequin ascending a curved staircase. The caption runs: 'And War on Work.' What was implied there is stated clearly in Nadja." 36 But much earlier than the "War on Work" is Breton's fascination with De Chirico's empty squares, above all The Engima of a Day . We can find a conspicuous nod to the empty squares motif already in the first photograph to appear in the book, a statue of Rousseau standing before the Hôtel des Grands Hommes, its sharp relief accentuating the flat grid of windows behind it. Another model for the diction of emptiness in Nadja's photographs are the haunting pictures of Vieux Paris taken by Atget, some of which were published in the journal La Revolution surréaliste. 37
Breton's notorious distaste for work or labor does indeed find expression in Nadja, as Ades argues, but it is not in the photographs. They, instead, engage the question of absence, and do so in relation to issues of voice and the problem of place as it appears in the narrative construction. There can be no conception of place, whether in metaphysics, phenomenology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis or deconstructive reflection, that is separable from a conception of memory. 38 This is especially true for a notion of psychic or an interior sense of place, which inevitably depends on a notion of the past as the trace of experience, as memories which are lodged in the unconscious. Breton explicitly links memory to the way anachronic traces are structured in psychic or interior space; the fragility of this link between memory and psychic place is one of the organizing themes that give rise to the narrative structure of Nadja as a series of repetitious events and correlating, juxtaposing images.
It was partly as a consequence of his view of memory that Breton shared the skepticism toward photography that was common in the culture of Surrealism. The title of Miró's painting, Photo: ceci est la couleur de mes rêves (Photograph: This is the Color of My Dreams), wittily dismisses photography in a manner which Breton would easily have endorsed. 39 Photography, it says, cannot capture the color of dreams. Similarly, when discussing Man Ray, Breton would reflect: "The photographic print, considered in isolation, is certainly permeated with an emotive value that makes it a supremely precious article of exchange . . . nevertheless, despite the fact that it is endowed with a special power of suggestion, it is not in the final analysis the faithful image that we aim to retain of something that will soon be gone for ever." 40 Photography, in short, cannot fulfill the functions of memory. No photograph could capture, for example, the "low window that overlooks the moat" which so absorbs Nadja's attention that she "cannot take her eyes off" it (N, 84/97). No photograph could reproduce the hallucination she experiences in the Place Dauphine, "Where only two or three couples are at this moment fading into the darkness, she seems to see a crowd. 'And the dead, the dead!'" (N, 83/94-96). Nor did Breton's mistrust of the medium hinge on the difference between straight (or realistic) and experimental photography, at least if we understand the latter to mean adopting procedures that foreground the unmotivated nature of the sign. For such procedures would be irrelevant for Nadja, since movement in its narrative is always motivated, as is any psychic movement that is matriciel. For this reason, signs that mark the transition from interiority to exteriority or vice versa, including voice, cannot be merely a function of a discursive field; instead they mark the very limit of the discursive, even call for its reconration. The motivated nature of the sign entails a relation to memory, however tacit or unconscious, one that conjoins the orders of the audible (voice) and the visual (the photographs) insofar as both negate the discursive and stand on the brink of its reconration. The trace or mark looks forward, one might say, to an object or event that is about to happen (the reconration of discourse), even while it registers the sense of risk experienced and relived in memory, through construction.
Breton was strongly attracted to the idea that dreams epitomized a world of pure continuity, conceiving of them much as Lacan later defined the Real, or that which lies outside the symbolic process, when he wrote that "The Real is without fissures." 41 Memory, in contrast, is a violation of such continuity, a form of negativity not unlike death. As Breton writes in the "Manifesto of Surrealism": "In the limits where they operate (or are thought to operate) dreams give every evidence of being continuous and show signs of organization. Memory alone arrogates to itself the right to excerpt from dreams, to ignore the transitions, and to depict for us rather a series of dreams than the dream itself" ("MoS," 11/317). Surrealism, instead, introduces its practitioners into the secret society of death: "It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins" ("MoS," 32/334), alluding to the French word for death, la mort. Earlier in his "Carnets," when speculating on memory, observation, and imagination and their relation to past, present, and future, Breton envisages the possibility that memory might be conceived as a function of imagination and the future, a viewpoint which would turn the present into an evanescent point: "Substitution doesn't even exist, why. Negation of death." 42 Such a notion would effectively dissever time from any sense of direction; the present instead would belong to the order and experience of place (a point), one which would admit no sense of movement either toward or away from.  It is between place and event that the photographs of Nadja occur.
Shortly after Breton raises the possibility that people might "exchange a few incredibly concordant views above the smoking debris of old ideas" (N, 111/130), and shortly after he senses "the irreparable disaster" that is engulfing Nadja (N, 114/136), he resolves that he will persist in his effort of recuperation and reparation vis à vis Nadja, but pursue a different strategy:
It would be futile to multiply here instances of unusual happenings which apparently concern only the two of us and dispose me, for the most part, in favor of a certain finalism which might permit us to explain the particularity of anything, happenings, I say, of which Nadja and I have been the simultaneous witnesses or of which only one of us has been the witness. I no longer wish to remember, as the days go by, any but a few of her sentences, spoken or written spontaneously in my presence, sentences in which I best recapture the tone of her voice and whose resonance remains so great within me. [N, 115/137]
Breton goes on to record nine sentences, but the first two are especially pertinent: "'With the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours'" (N, 115/137); and "'If you wish, for you I would be nothing, or merely a trace'" (N, 116/137; translation modified). These maxims fall within the understanding of Lacan's la parole fondatrice, that use of dialogue which hinges on the movement of pronouns as the medium of subjective repositionings whereby the participants are changed by virtue of their participation. 43 But they also open up another possibility. Breton, when he recounts the story of his rapport with Nadja, consistently notes that their mutual but distinct temporalities remain in a shadow dialogue with each other. His decision to persist in his pursuit of Nadja, "quite beyond any question of luck" (N, 91/105) and quite beyond anecdote or story into mere transcription of her aphorisms, is a logical extension of the way in which the narrative construction has recorded the effects of negativity. Consider such phrasing as "the tone of her voice," its "resonance . . . within me," "the end of my breath," or "a trace" (N, 115-16/137). These capture a growing sense of the tenuous and insubstantial, while simultaneously offering a promise of life, the hope that people can communicate "concordant views" despite the gaps that divide them. Each phrase, too, captures the sense of an experience in negative ("end of my breath," or to be "nothing, or merely a trace"). Placed in their perlocutionary context, however, where the narrator uses them like a gesture to summon up Nadja's presence, the aphorisms become quasi-silent counterparts to the photographs; in them, memory functions as a non-temporal place (lieu anachronique), just as the song fragments will function as a form of death, a non-temporalizing event (événement anachronique).
There are many moments in Nadja that allude to Breton's earlier prose poem, "Soluble Fish," or which echo its sonorities. The most dramatic occurs on 6 October, a little prior to Nadja's "distractions" or hallucinations. Heading for the Rue Dauphine, Nadja and Breton wander instead into the Place Dauphine, "where," Breton goes on to explain, "curiously enough, another episode of 'Soluble Fish' occurs: 'A kiss is so quickly forgotten'" (N, 80/93). 44 Breton is alluding to section 24 of "Soluble Fish," in which lyrical evocations of a day are woven round the refrain to a forgotten popular song, "A Kiss Is So Quickly Forgotten." The allusion creates a vertiginous montage of memories. Breton is carried away from Nadja and the Place Dauphine to an episode in "Soluble Fish," but it is never clear whether he has made a simple allusion to a literary work or whether, indeed, one experience has connected with another, with the memory of the "lady friend" ("mon amie") in "Soluble Fish" who "speaks in aphorisms" like those of the later Nadja. 45 Section 24 of "Soluble Fish" contains several registers of fragmentation, and each is linked with a mode of presenting the feminine in a way that recalls the presentation of song fragments in Picasso's hermetic Cubism: the speech of the beloved in sententious form; a song fragment that is the refrain for a song which is never named; or the dissolution of song into water, "so that in the morning all that was left of us was that song . . . that lapped a bit of night water in the center of the square" ("SF," 87/380). The dissolution of song into water turns into the movement of water in defined forms: "We passed by unnoticed by the curves down there, sinusoids, parabolas, geysers, rains" ("SF," 88/380), leading to the final presentation of the body via metonymy, faces and hands that persist amid the disappearance or effacement of interacting bodies since: "We in turn put on the garments of pure air" ("SF," 88/381). The movement of memory begun cannot stop here, not least because it opens onto another dimension of experiencing the feminine. The recounting voice of "Soluble Fish" declares: "My eyes were the flower of a hazel tree, my right eye the male flower, my left the female flower" ("SF," 87/381). That passage is plainly echoed in Nadja when Breton discusses The Lovers' Flower, Nadja's drawing which depicts an intertwining pair of eyes: it was "essentially under this sign that the time we spent together should be placed" (N, 116/140). Such imagery and diction is overdetermined in a way that would have disposed Breton to feel such transpositions as significant; after all, at the close of "The Unsilvered Mirror" (chapter one of Magnetic Fields) he had envisaged "plants of the greatest beauty, male rather than female and often both at once" (MF, 30/33). Elsewhere in Magnetic Fields moments of plenitude are rendered in terms that link the register of the audible with a sense of the body being suffused, as in the following passage from "Seasons": "The elephant tusks lean on the star-rise steps so that the princess can descend and the bands of musicians step out of the sea. There is nobody but me now on this sonorous scale-platform, the equivocal wavering of which is my harmony. Ah! to descend with one's hair down and limbs in disarray in the whiteness of the rapids" (MF, 36/39-40). The sustained development of the register of the audible--of intensive focal listening, a passivity in which sound approaches its own spatiality as touching upon, becoming one with space--goes together with the kind of fragmentary movement in image clusters which characterizes automatic writing. 46 Thus, again in "Seasons," we are told: "I have so much sand in my ears, moreover, that I do not know how I shall learn your language" (MF, 37). In such listening (l'écoute automatique), in which attention hovers uneasily between inside and outside and objects of thought are rendered indistinct, the tendency to fragmentation not only preempts the presentation of whole objects, it tends to make the object pulse, blink, fold, peek, and dematerialize into waves, rhythms, or intervals which are encircled by sonorous auras. The subject of attention, meanwhile, is returned to the matriciel dimension of place in which time is essentially cyclical, so questioning the phallic dimension of spatiality. Or as Rousseau put it, recalling the dear old nurse who had attended his birth, "The hands which opened my eyes at birth will be able to close them for me at death" ("Les mains qui m'ouvrirent les yeux. . ."). 47
Rousseau's thought bears on the song fragment and the status of recollection in Nadja. Breton begins one of the unpublished divisions of "Soluble Fish": "A memory doubtless the first and the one that prompted the stars to flower, to open their hands" (". . . fleurir les astres, ouvrir les mains)." 48 The text evokes tones that recall Lacan's Imaginary order, one of mirror-images, identifications, and reciprocities, with images of shadowed deflections that make up the elements and part-objects of fantasy and instinct, especially in the juxtaposition of delight and threat. Deploying diction that echoes the ending of "The Unsilvered Mirror" in Magnetic Fields, a scene in which children's frenzied activity is calmed by gentle erotic hypnotism, the text of "Soluble Fish [II]" describes a psychic state in which: "The appetites are calmed by struggles, the anxieties the doors under which slips a serpent. This memory, pacified, bruised, worked like an iron grill, sometimes cedes its place to a pellet of poison" ("SF [II]," 515). Those who solicit this memory "are big. But the garden of persecutions closes its gates on them and they remain trapped by hosts with spider feet" ("SF [II]," 515). The texture of the work of memory--an iron grill--calls to and transposes the presence of water emblematic of the interior life: "Sheet of water that the interior life, devoted to traces and to calls of moving sand" ("SF [II]," 516). It is in this register that the most telling aspect of the realm of imaginary identifications in Breton's sensibility is presented. For the ensuing equivocations not only dramatize the anachronic or timeless aspect of the unconscious and make clear the implicit relation between the emergence of temporality and the feminine in experience; they stage thinking in relation to the feminine as something inescapable, a state of enchantment and hypnotic fascination. Thus, in a scene that works under the form of a metonymic presentation of tears and joyous melancholy, we come upon: "But a female silhouette inscribed in heart-rain, an encirclement of butterflies in a thought, there it is, which detours the forked time of our pedestals of white frost" ("SF [II]," 516). The obliquity of the "female silhouette" ("silhouette de femme") presages a structure of shadows. In another section of the unpublished "Soluble Fish," one which presents a Judgment of Paris scene and begins, "You are a shadow, nothing but a shadow that is descending from a bell tower" ("SF [II]," 552) the text urges that "there is also a strange rain that resembles death" ("SF [II]," 553). Time, in this passage, is encompassed along with memory and light and the shapes identified in Breton's conception with thinking, above all, the curve such as in the earlier poem "Sunflower": "Had I business with the ambassadress of saltpeter / Or the white curve on the black background we call thought." 49 In the following passage from "Soluble Fish," it is the movement of light, water, and shadow in relation to memory and temporality that is telling: "Through pierced towers, under the wing of vegetal flags which signal nature's barrack to the humans in transit, subsequent to spaces and by the force of things, the shadow regains somewhat the terrain that we had made it yield" ("SF [II]," 516). The prepositional structure of this passage ("Through . . . under . . . subsequent to . . ."; "Au travers . . . sous . . . par la suite . . .") not only textures the movement, but also shapes the structure of shadow extending from the "female silhouette" to the "vegetal flags," from "spaces" into "the shadow [that] regains somewhat the terrain that we had made it yield." The prose poem closes by personifying memory, which now appears partly as projective identification, partly as waiting, and partly as desire and anticipated loss: "It is in this wasteland that I await memory maddened from all the rendez-vous to be had on the surface of the earth. A beam dances on the crystal molehill and from this molehill memory issues like a sheaf of irises, for the greatest satisfaction of the senses crumpled before opening up like gravestones" ("SF [II]," 516). Memory, in this view, comes from a mixture of light ("a beam") and darkness ("a molehill"), a mixture which is given texture and volume ("des sens chifonnés," or "some rumpled meanings") ("SF [II]," 516) and hence an element of the timelessness of the unconscious (anachronique). In another section of "Soluble Fish [II]," the relationship between memory and death which Breton perceived is suggested by evoking ephemerality: "You have not the sombre air of reason in your brilliant closing, beautiful as the root of passions, you do not know why ardor comes to light. You are the only bird for each one of us, the bird which throws itself into the assault of the precipice and which must live but for an hour" ("SF [II]," 553).
If Breton, as I have argued, conceived of memory as a place, and place as feminine, then it should come as no surprise that certain places, especially those most connected with Nadja or most evocative of "Soluble Fish" (the work which most directly explores the texture of the maternal), should prompt ambivalent reactions on his part. When he accidentally wanders into the Place Dauphine he comments: "The Place Dauphine is certainly one of the most profoundly secluded places I know of, one of the worst wastelands in Paris. Whenever I happen to be there, I feel the desire to go somewhere else gradually ebbing out of me, I have to struggle against myself to get free from a gentle, over-insistent, and, finally, crushing embrace" (N, 80/93). Here we recognise the register of panic prompted by the texture of the maternal, a texture that subtly evokes the threat associated with the Sirens, that of immobilization.
The intricate patterns of metonymy and synechdoche in Nadja point to a notion of the feminine which is linked to cyclical temporality. We have explored several forms of encirclement, cyclic return, and frozen time in Nadja, including the tragic repetition compulsion of Solange, a circular form psychosis; M. Delouit's more pathetic compulsion to enact repeatedly his own effacement; the many song fragments (nursery rhymes or chansons); the urban wandering of Nadja and Breton, or Breton's own return to the places haunted by Nadja; and, at the comic level, Brenton's account of the film The Grip of the Octopus, in which "a Chinese who had found some way to multiply himself invaded New York by means of several million self-reproductions," a work "which has affected me far more than any other" (N, 32, 37/38). The image of Solange's skirt "revealing a beautiful leg" (N, 45/49) in a frozen time is but one expression of the jouissance which is linked to psychosis, the troubles de la pensée ("mental troubles") of Solange, and the "crushing embrace" of the Place Dauphine. The grounding support for these encirclings is the city, but the city conceived as maternal imago. The city as feminine place acts as a protective or supporting screen, enabling Breton to reconstruct an identity of sorts in his confrontation with the effracting voice of trauma. Throughout "Soluble Fish," the relationship between thinking and the substance of the feminine is imagined as the interplay of light and shadow, while death is linked to the primitive, archaic memory of the womb. The material is nearly always linked to emergence and to place. 50 It is well known that Breton did not care for music; but he shared with Valéry a profound sense of the music of poetry, for what we hear in Nadja and its fragments is a highly chromatic music of the pathos of place.
The kind of memory which is triggered by the song fragments moves uneasily between the reorganization of a past characteristic of après-coup, that sort of retrospective interpretation which stabilizes the past, and the unorganized timelessness which is the passé anachronique of the unconscious. That oscillation continues all the way to the end of the book, crystalized in the image of the falling bridge and the nursery rhyme "Sur le pont d'Avignon" to which Breton makes oblique reference (N, 154/182). 51 When we see the extent to which identity, effraction, temporality, and death have been situated within la substance du corp féminin (the substance of the female body), we can more fully appreciate the degree to which the canonic definition of Surrealism as "automatisme psychique pur" ("pure psychic automatism," "MoS," 26/328) has been shaped by that key category of nineteenth-century psychiatry in France, troubles de la pensée, a term that covered general failures of attention. The pathology of troubles de la pensée was always gendered feminine. In part of that move in which essentially Symbolist concerns are reinscribed within Freudian terms, Surrealism rejects the ideology behind the category troubles de la pensée. But with Freud's meta-psychology it takes up, consciously and unconsciously, a way of exploring the experience of thought that could not evade either the matriciel dimension of place or the internal relations holding together movement, thought, temporality, and death. This is the level of the archaic which is glimpsed in the haunting silence of the construction in Nadja, in that radical experience of failure.
Michael Stone-Richards Assistant Professor Michael Stone-Richards teaches twentieth-century European Art at Northwestern University. He has recently completed two book-length manuscripts on Surrealism: Voice and the Enigma of Place and Place and Liminality: Studies in Surrealist Art. He is currently working on the French moralist tradition and Guy Debord.
1. Monique Schneider, "Le cri e l'avènement d'un espace courbe," La Part de l'ombre: approche d'un trauma féminin (Paris: Aubier, 1992), 112; hereafter cited within the text as Pdl'O, followed by the page reference.
2. Pierre Fédida, "Temps et négation: La création dans la cure psychanalytique," Pyschanalyse à l'université 2, no. 7 , 444, n. 11.
3. Ruth Leys, "Death Masks: Ferenczi and Kardiner on Psychic Trauma," Representations 53 (Winter 1996), 45.
4. John Forrester, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 151.
5. For Charcot's studies, see Désiré-Magloire Bourneville and Paul Régnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Paris: Progès Médical, 1876-1880), vol. 2 , plates 19-29. For an early example of a study prompted by an experience with trauma, see André Breton, "Sujet" ("Subject"), in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Marguerite Bonnet, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1988-1992), 1:24-25.
6. Monique Borie, Antonin Artaud: Le théâtre et le retour aux sources: Une approche anthropologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 59.
7. See note 5.
8. André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 122 (Breton's discussion) and 124 (the drawing in reproduction); in French, see Nadja (Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1964), 143-46 (Breton's discussion) and 147 (the drawing in reproduction). Hereafter all references to this work are given in the text with the abbreviation N, followed by page references to first the English, then the French editions. The original French is quoted in parentheses and italics immediately after the English translation only in cases where it is explicitly made a subject of discussion within the essay.
9. In the English translation made by Richard Howard in 1960, which is based on the 1928 edition of Nadja, the drawing appears as plate 36, where it simply follows the sequence of other drawings by Nadja (plates 27, 29-35). But in the revisions that Breton made to the book two years later in 1962, and yet again in 1964, which are followed in all French editions of the work, the drawing was separated from the others by Nadja and moved to a position immediately following what is currently plate 43 in the Richard Howard translation.
10. Sigmund Freud, "Construction in Analysis," in Collected Papers, vol. 5 (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 360. Whereas the analyst normally makes his or her construction while the patient is present, the case of Breton and Nadja is different, because she is no longer present when he is writing the book. On the temporality of the construction under such circumstances, see the important article by Pierre Fédida, "Le discours à double entente" , in his book Le Concept et la violence (Paris: 10/18, 1977), 185-96. I am particularly indebted to this essay and to what I have learned in discussions with Fédida.
11. André Breton, Conversations: the Autobiography of Surrealism, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Marlowe and Company, 1993), 10 (translation modified); Entretiens (Paris: Gallimard, 1952; reprinted 1969), 25. In a memorial volume dedicated to Valéry upon his death, Eliot famously reported an encounter with Valéry in which he declared, "L'Europe est finie." It is certainly to this volume that Breton is referring. See T. S. Eliot, "Leçon de Valéry," in Paul Valéry vivant (Marseilles: Cahiers du Sud, 1946), 74-81.
12. André Breton, "Le merveilleux contre le mystère," Minotaure 9 : 25-31.
13. Sigmund Freud, "A Note on the Mystic Writing-Pad," in Collected Papers, vol. 19 (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 225-32.
14. The difference between passé anachronique and après-coup, in this context, can best be understood as follows: après-coup is an act of interpretation through recovery that stabilizes form, the present-to-past in a reversibility, the reconration of the past. It is well understood that such an act of stabilization is not in principle permanent. Passé anachronique, the Zeitlos of the unconscious, on the other hand, is a constitutive and founding negativity, whose absences (through the degrammaticalization of the governance of time) are what is reconred in the translation of après-coup. See Pierre Fédida, "Passé anachronique et présent réminiscent: Epos et puissance mémoriale du langage," L'Écrit du temps 10 (Autumn 1985): 23-45.
15. This, of course, is the justly famous account of Rousseau given by Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l'obstacle (Paris: Plon, 1957), 279-85.
16. For Jung's preference for symbol over language, and thereby a certain conception of silence, see Willian McGuire, ed., The Freud/Jung Letters, trans. Ralph Mannheim and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 245-52; and C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia, trans. R. F. C. Hull, The Collected Works of Carl Gustav Jung, vol. 5 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956).
17. And maybe this is the meaning of Blanchot's statement concerning "this ideology of the continuous from which we are just beginning to disengage ourselves, and for which Surrealism (reduced by some to a kind of Bergsonism) is less responsible that it is its victim, as was Freud." Maurice Blanchot, "Tomorrow at Stake," in his The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 406-21, here 411 (translation modified); "Demain à joueur," L'Entretien infinie (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 596-619, 601.
18. John Forrester, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), 111.
19. John Forrester, ibid. "Freud took the silence of the symbol just as he took the silence of the transference, as creating a practical exigency: the necessity of connection. But the symbol and the transference phenomenon--the two occasions for silence-- lay at the opposite ends of a spectrum: to find the symbolic connection a detour via the most alien--alien to the patient-- associations, and very often, as we shall see, via the most obscure linguistic forms, was found to be necessary. Whereas, with the transference, what was required lay close at hand, too close at hand, a silence signifying the danger of proximity, of 'overconnection.'"
20. For this concept of boredom and place, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), 134-48, and Pierre Kaufmann, L'Experience emotionnelle de l'espace (Paris: Libariarie Vrin, 1967), 30-32, 117-21.
21. André Breton, "Sujet" ("Subject"), in Oeuvres complètes 1:24.
22. André Breton, "The Manifesto of Surrealism," in Manifestos of Surrealism, trans Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969, rpd., 1972), 34; hereafter cited within the text with the abbreviation "MoS."
23. André Maury, "De certains faits observés dans les rêves et dans l'état intermédiaire entre le sommeil et la veille," Annales médico-psychologiques, vol. 3 , 158.
24. On the avoidance of the anguish of death in Freud, cf. J.-B. Pontalis, "Sur la douleur (psychique)," Entre le rêve et la douleur (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 255-69.
25. André Breton and Philippe Soupault, The Magnetic Fields, trans. David Gascoyne (London: Atlas Press, 198em), 51; Les Champs magnétiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 51. Hereafter this work is cited within the text by the abbreviation MF followed by page references to first the English, then the French edition.
26. Her sensitivity to the voice's sound is matched by her inability to endure "the sight of a mosaic strip" (N, 89/103).
27. Henri Ey, Consciousness, trans. John Flodstrom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 72; La Conscience, 2nd. ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 90. One passage will give a sense of Ey's interest in the psychopathology of hallucinated voices: "We here arrive at the level of hallucinatory consciousness, which we must now describe. This experience of voices is a mode of experiences which is not compressed in the ration of an event, but rather in the sense of a sense (Erwin Straus)--that of lived experience which, once again, sends us back to a disordering of the lived space of the representation" (Ey, Consciousness, 72; La Conscience, 87).
28. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981, rpd. 1984), "Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini," 239.
29. This is followed by the parenthetical comment: "In the performance it was considered advisable to inform the audience that the actor playing the child was over seventeen. The important thing is that she seemed about eleven" (N, 49/532-54). Curiously, no indication is given which would enable the reader to distinguish between the shocked response of the actors and that of the audience.
30. See Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, 1994; or in the current French paperback, Le paysan de Paris (Paris: Gallimard 1953). See also Robert Desnos, Liberty or Love!, trans. Terry Hale and Stanley Chapman (London: Atlas, 1993); or in the original French edition, La liberté ou l'amour! (Paris: Aux Éditions du Sagittaire, 1927).
31. Pierre Fédida, "Temps et négation: la création dans la cure psychanalytique," Psychanalyse à l'université, vol. 2, no.7, : 444.
32. Marcel Poëte, "Une vie de cité par l'image," Une Vie de cité. Paris de sa naissance à nos jours. Vol. III. Album (Paris: Auguste Picard, 1925), v.
33. Maurice Blanchot, "Tomorrow at Stake," in his The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 406-421; Michel Beaujour, "Qu'est-ce que Nadja?" Nouvelle revue française 15 (no. 172) (April, 1967), special issue on André Breton et le mouvement surréaliste: 780-99; hereafter cited within the text as "QqN." Also influential has been the important commentary of Roger Cardinal, which gives a precise exposition of the Surrealist movement in terms of objective chance and a perceptive critique of the personal dimension of Breton's impact on Nadja's psychosis. See Roger Cardinal, Nadja (London: Grant and Cutler, 1986).
34. Beaujour continues: "It would be tiresome to analyze them in detail, but one can easily classify them into categories: portraits, places where the plot unfolds, found objects and works of art, documents such as letters, a page from a work by Berkeley, a film announcement, Nadja's drawings." Jean Arrouye accepts, more or less, this categorization whilst correctly observing, that "The boundaries are far from being strict between these categories." Jean Arrouye, "La Photographie dans Nadja," Mélusine, 4, Le Livre surréaliste (Lausanne: L'Âge d'homme), 129.
35. Jean Arrouye, "La Photographie dans Nadja," 134.
36. Dawn Ades, "Photography and the Surrealist Text," in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingstone (eds.), L'Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington and New York: the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Abbeville Press, 1985), 163.
37. See Molly Nesbit, Atget's Seven Albums (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 65-66. Some of the photographs were commissioned by Marcel Pöete, chief curator of the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris. See D. Calabi, "Marcel Poëte: pioneer of 'l'urbanisme' and defender of 'l'histoire des villes,'" Planning Perspectives 11, no.4 (October 1996): 43.
38. For an overview of the intellectual history informing the notion of place, as opposed to space, see Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: a Philosophical History (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
39. A color reproduction of Miró's painting titled Photo: ceci est la couleur de mes rêves can be found in Carolyn Lanchner, Joan Miró (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1993), 131.
40. André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (London: MacDonald, 1972), 32.
41. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, Seminaire II (1954-1955): Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1978), "Introduction à l'Entwurf," 122.
42. André Breton, "Carnets," in Oeuvres complètes, 1:456; the essay originally appeared in Littérature, n.s., no. 13 (June, 1924).
43. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques- Alain Miller, Seminaire III (1955-1956): Les psychoses (Paris: Seuil, 1981), "Metaphore et metonymie (II)," 261.
44. The verse "Un baiser est si vite oublié" is, whether in Surrealism or Cubism, a commonplace (un lieu commun). Its fragmented presentation, like that of a banality, demands repetition as a means of activation, as Breton observes in "MoS," 341. Banality is not something to be overcome, but to be transformed within the key of unsuspected potential.
45. André Breton, "Soluble Fish," in Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969, rpd., 1972), 87; the original French is in Oeuvres complètes, 1:380. Hereafter the work is cited within the text with the abbreviation "SF," followed by page reference to first the English, then the French edition.
46. On the kind of spatiality implicit in auditory models of apprehension, see Peter F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959), 59-86.
47. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, ed. Jacques Voisine (Paris: Garnier, 1980), 7.
48. The unpublished portions of "Soluble Fish" ("Poisson soluble") were given the title "Poisson Soluble [II]" by the editor of Breton's Oeuvres complètes, Marguerite Bonnet, and published by her for the first time in 1988. See André Breton, "Poisson soluble [II]," Oeuvres complètes,1:515; hereafter cited as "SF [II]," followed by the page reference. All translations are mine.
49. André Breton, "Sunflower," in Earthlight, trans. Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993), 76; or in French, "Tournesol," in Oeuvres complètes, 1:187.
50. It would require further argumentation to elaborate the Surrealist attitude to the distinction between the maternal and the feminine. The Surrealist attack on representations of the female body can be viewed as an attack against the sign of woman-as-property under patriarchy. See Xavière Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
51.
[Refrain: Sur le pont d'Avignon . . .]Les belles dames font comme ça,
Les belles dames font comme ça.
[Refrain: Sur le pont d'Avignon . . .]
When Helen and Ridley Ambrose jostle their way through London's narrow streets toward a ship bound for South America in the opening pages of Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, Ridley momentarily becomes "entangled . . . with a man selling picture postcards." 1 When Rachel Vinrace, another passenger on board the Euphrosyne, attempts to recall London life while strolling through a South American town, she begins by acknowledging the kind of entanglement Ridley tries to leave behind: "First there are men selling picture postcards" (VO, 91). It makes sense that Rachel's effort to think her way back into England should begin with the selling of postcards, for by 1915 a craze for picture postcards had made them a prominent feature of everyday life. The first picture postcards apparently emanated from the Paris Exhibition of 1889, and many more were produced in England for such large-scale exhibitions as London's Imperial International Exhibition in 1909 and the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. This essay situates the story of Rachel's education within the cultural politics propagated by colonial postcards and imperial exhibitions, and argues that the novel's culminating scene of cross-cultural encounter uses race to address issues of gender and sexuality that are part of Rachel's baggage on her voyage out of England. 2
Written during the so-called golden age of picture postcards, The Voyage Out follows Rachel up the Amazon in search of a place "where none but natives had ever trod" (VO, 225). What she discovers instead is the difficulty of disentangling herself from a characteristically modern form of cultural expression. Thanks in part to new postal regulations, postcards circulated in unprecedented numbers in England at the turn of the century, and millions more were sent home by English travelers exploring the boundaries of empire. Far from mere exotic throwaways, widely-collected colonial postcards contributed to imperial stereotyping by disseminating primitivist images of indigenous peoples during the most jingoistic period of England's global dominance. Images of the native other were also imprinted onto the English imagination by domestic postcards printed for imperial exhibitions. Underlying the early-century vogue for picture postcards, as well as the concomitant resurgence of imperial romance, was a desire for authenticity attached to exotic locales. In a historical moment increasingly self-conscious about the inescapably mediated nature of reality, colonial postcards satisfied the desire for the authentic (i.e., the seemingly immediate) even as their cataloging of exotic images contributed to the English sense that the realm of the unexplored was rapidly shrinking. 3
The process of globalization in the early twentieth century was not yet far enough along to require the late-century coinage "globality" to describe the economic integration of a wholly interconnected world. But The Voyage Out registers an impression of impending globality by linking the crowded banks of the Thames to the exotic streets of Santa Marina through the ubiquity of the picture postcard: Ridley's literal entanglement becomes Rachel's imagined one. Part Bildungsroman, part imperial romance, Woolf's first novel sometimes res Rachel's journey to South America as an attempt to voyage out of culture and history altogether, but her engagement to Terence Hewet while traveling up the Amazon in effect turns the South American journey into a trip back into England. Given that Woolf never set foot in South America, it is not surprising that the mossy path running alongside the Amazon begins to resemble "a drive in an English forest" or that her description of native women up the Amazon appears to be informed by the popular ethnography of colonial postcards and imperial exhibitions (VO, 257). Richard Dalloway, who along with his wife Clarissa makes his first appearance in The Voyage Out, finds the spread of Englishness deeply satisfying: the "unity of aim, of dominion, of progress" spreading under the Union Jack, he tells Rachel, makes all the world a stage for British power (VO, 57). Although Rachel feels "her small world becoming wonderfully enlarged" under Richard's influence, her subsequent encounter with the indigenous women suggests that her world actually remains quite small: as if transplanted from the pitch at Wembley, this scene of ethnographic exhibition reproduces the complex dynamics of spectatorship that obtains when one's only real knowledge of the other comes from looking at picture postcards or people on display (VO, 75). 4
The Voyage Out has been understood as a straightforward critique of empire, but Woolf's pivotal scene upriver reveals a more complicated meditation on the potential entanglement of Englishwomen in the norms of gender, sex, and race that empire underwrites. 5 Rachel's initiation into Richard's imperial Englishness raises an issue that Woolf would pose more pointedly in Three Guineas in connection with new economic opportunities for women: "how can we enter the professions and yet remain civilized human beings?" 6 Inasmuch as a woman's success in "the patriarchal system" runs the risk that "the words 'For God and the Empire' will . . . be written, like the address on a dog-collar, round your neck," Woolf worries that Englishwomen already colonized under patriarchy "like slaves in a harem" may become colonizers in their turn as they follow "the procession . . . of educated men" into the public sphere (TG, 64, 74, 70). Although Woolf's critique of war and empire in Three Guineas is more univocal and forceful than the implicit critique worked out in Rachel's story, The Voyage Out probes more deeply into the gap between gendered and racial identities that the polemical invocation of "slaves in a harem" obscures. For Woolf's struggle with racial difference in her first novel's culminating scene of exhibition brings her to the brink of acknowledging the imperial grounding of her own whiteness, and the depth of her affective engagement makes race a crucial feature of her work, for the first and last time. 7
Much like the vogue for posters that hit London and Europe at the turn of the century, picture postcards, first used in Great Britain in the 1890s, quickly became highly prized objects for English collectors and the general public. 8 An astonishing range of cards suffused all levels of culture: images of new technology, photos of actresses, Boer War battle commemorations, novelty cards, and popular crazes from ping-pong to roller skating. The state, along with political groups of various stripes, quickly found a new agent of propaganda, and topical postcards began to enter into debates about suffrage, tariff reform, and imperial policy. The advertising industry capitalized on the new form so effectively that by 1903 a man sending a South African postcard of an African woman washing a young child with the caption "O dirty boy!" to his sister on the Isle of Wight suggested it would be "a very good adv. for Pears Soap/you ought to send it to the firm"( 1). 9 The postcard evinces not only the deep link established by the turn of the century between advertising and postcards, but also the degree to which both, spreading along paths cut by empire, were mediating English views of the world.
This new mass cultural form spread so quickly owing in part to changes in British and international postal regulations. In 1899 British postal regulations permitted the standard-sized card already used in Europe to circulate freely, and a special postal rate of one halfpenny for domestic delivery encouraged Edwardians to send postcards on the slightest pretext: "'Hope to be in time for tea this afternoon!'" 10 Just as journals arose around the poster phenomenon, so monthly publications such as The Picture Postcard & Collector's Chronicle (1900-1907) and The Postcard Connoisseur for Postcard Collectors sprang up to serve the needs of avid collectors. "During the quarter of a century that preceded the Great War in 1914," according to one historian of the postcard, "it would have been hard to find anyone who did not buy postcards from genuine pleasure. People preserved them carefully in their albums, or they posted them to their friends or relations, in the expectation of receiving others in return." 11 Royalty was more cautious yet not immune: Queen Victoria asked a relative to compile an album for her.
Not everyone was pleased with this sudden suffusion of images. As in contemporary fears about the rise of consumer culture, women in particular were red as both victims and carriers of a new cultural disease. 12 An article in the Standard in 1899 observes dryly that "The illustrated postcard craze, like the influenza, has spread to these islands from the Continent, where it has been raging with considerable severity. Sporadic cases have occurred in Britain. Young ladies who have escaped the philatelic infection or wearied of collecting Christmas cards, have been known to fill albums with missives of this kind from friends abroad" (quoted in PPO, 60). A few years later the Glasgow Evening News worried that "In ten years Europe will be buried beneath picture postcards." As if to confirm these fears, a drawing in the Illustrated London News (October 16, 1909) shows Germans in an open-air restaurant buying cards for immediate posting from a postman with a letterbox on his back. 13
Although fears of a Continental invasion sound a familiar note of English xenophobia, pundits were right to sense in the postcard signs of profound cultural changes, for "at the height of the industry's boom, postcards were virtually everywhere in the world." 14 Among contemporary commentators, James Douglas, writing in 1907, captured the peculiar modernity of postcards best when he imagined thirtieth-century archeologists fastening on "the Picture Postcard as the best guide to the spirit of the Edwardian era": "Every pimple on the earth's skin has been photographed, and wherever the human eye roves or roams it detects the self-conscious air of the reproduced" (quoted in PPO, 79). The "self-conscious air of the reproduced": the phrase nicely evokes a range of experiences of modernity, from Walter Benjamin's ambivalent eulogy for the auratic in an age of mechanical reproduction to the growing desire for the exotic in late imperial romance. Viewed from the twenty-first century, then, the picture postcard begins to look like an emerging modernist form--displacing the formal conventions of epistolary style with now familiar vacation shorthand; eschewing the totalizing expansiveness of Victorian narrative in favor of fragmentary utterances and the primacy of the image; subordinating authorship to mechanical reproduction; and seeking authenticity beyond the artifice of civilization. 15
Indeed, the modern problem of authenticity helps account for the pervasive circulation of picture postcards. The thrill of the postcard, Susan Stewart has argued, derives from a hunger for a sense of authenticity attached to location. 16 An unprecedentedly public form of communication, postcards paradoxically function as a guarantor of the authentically personal. "Here I was," the postcard declares to the recipient, thus bringing into being the "I" as both familiar sender and exotic locale, the two temporarily equated through the metaphor of location. The picture postcard thus participates in a process of subject formation marked by empire. For the uncanny subject produced by the postcard implies a dual relation to the pictured site that restages (in a less threatening register) the precarious dynamics of colonial exchange: the tourist assumes the subject position of the colonizer by appropriating the exotic site and returning it to the metropole; yet with its articulation propped on the authenticity of "being there," the familiar subject also appears to have "gone native" by merging with the space of the exotic, a transformation typically triggered within the recipient as well, who gazes at the image as if through the sender's eyes.
Woolf was undoubtedly attuned to the increasingly inescapable circulation of picture postcards and its influence on the public imagination. Like everyone else, she sent picture postcards, requested others to send them to her, and complained about them as well, sometimes because she didn't receive enough from friends abroad, sometimes because she did and would have preferred a letter. 17 Woolf mocked the older generation for their belief that postcards were killing the art of letter-writing, believing instead that the penny post was making letter-writing less studied and more sincere--which is to say more modern (EOVW, 2:182). In 1930 Woolf even wrote a caption for a National Portrait Gallery postcard of George Eliot. 18 Yet she also saw picture postcards as emblems of transience and diminishment, writing of Ellen Terry that those who saw her only in a recent relatively undistinguished role would remember only "a picture postcard compared with the great Velasquez in the gallery" (EOVW, 4:67). In Jacob's Room Fanny Elmer's stylized "idea of Jacob," which for "two months" is "sustained entirely upon picture post cards," indicates that her memory and imagination, like Rachel's when imagining England from abroad, are marked by Edwardian society's newest mass cultural form. 19 The Waves registers the diminished cultural visibility of picture postcards--the craze subsided with the end of World War I--in Neville's thoughts about Percival: "He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unanswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card." 20 Bittersweet tokens of neglect, postcards here seem to speak of their own evanescence.
Woolf was also well-versed in the Edwardian culture of exhibition. In 1909, when Woolf was laboriously reworking the manuscript that would become The Voyage Out, the Imperial International Exhibition in London brought several native settlements to Shepherd's Bush. Like colonial postcards, imperial exhibitions collapsed the distance between periphery and center by reproducing versions of colonized life on English soil. But where the dynamics of postcard circulation subtly mimed the process of imperial subject formation, imperial exhibitions materially reproduced the operations of power by bringing actual bodies back to England, where they became human exhibits within reconstructed native villages. As many have shown, such exhibitions were designed to consolidate belief in imperial superiority, most obviously in the evolutionary vision that emphasized the enlightened progress from benighted colonies into the aptly named White City, the main exhibition center in England from 1907 to 1914. 21 From the 1890s to 1914 the rising number of simulated native villages created a species of "human showcase": "people from all over the world were brought into sites in order to be seen by others for their gratification and education. . . . [an] audience would pay to come and stare." 22 With the whole world (in the form of the assembled peoples and objects) spread out before their controlling vision, spectators would watch one another watch the spectacle and thereby become part of the human showcase. But the English spectators became part of the display only in a privileged way: by seeing from an empowered position even as they were seen, spectators came to understand themselves as belonging to a particular kind of national community (ROM, 69). At one moment visitors might travel over the grounds by electric railway or enjoy a simulated trip to Paris through the long-planned "chunnel"; the next they might wander into a Mongolian camp where twenty horsemen, "uncouth allies of a civilized power," engage in "a mimic battle" over "the body of a goat." 23 Designed to persuade the metropolitan spectator that the "there" of colonial space had become the "here" of domestic English experience, such villages sharpened the contrast between England's technological modernity and the backwardness of outlying colonies by plunging the spectator into a form of "state-sponsored hallucination." 24 Here's what we are and will be, the Hall of Science might say; here's what we might have been once but are no longer, say the native villages. To lock in a clearer sense of the place of the picture postcard within early twentieth-century modernization, then, we can say that postcard collections epitomize the effort of imperial exhibitions to assemble a complete image of the emerging global system even as individual cards herald the fragmentation of the totality that such exhibitions sought to represent.
Woolf's essay on the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, "Thunder at Wembley," suggests that she had attended imperial exhibitions before, possibly the 1909 London exhibition, and recognized their power to absorb the spectator into an artificially transformed world. 25 The official guide to the Imperial International Exhibition describes what Woolf would have experienced in the hallucinatory space of the Dahomey Village:
. . . we are at once transported to Western Africa, the land of the Dahomeys and the Amazons. The beating of tom-toms, the panigan clanging, and the grinding roar of the rattle greet us. Only a few years ago these sounds meant the call to human sacrifices, but in this instance they announce that these dark-skinned men and women and children are anxious to entertain us by dance and song. Over 150 Dahomeys have taken up their residence here, and reside in thatched huts just as they did before they left the Dark Continent for the White City. [DP, 49-50] 26
Magically transported, the spectator is asked to see West Africa as at once out of history and modernized: the thatched huts may be unchanged, but barbaric violence is transformed into civilized spectacle, blood-thirsty savages into anxious entertainers. The official guide's strolling observer encourages an expansion of the exhibition's sphere of influence: "Purchasing some picture-postcards from one of the many stalls here, we plunge into the Post Office on our right, and despatch them to unfortunate friends who have not seen the exhibition" (DP, 10). 27 Whether Woolf ever received such a postcard (see, for instance, 2) is impossible to say, but "Thunder at Wembley" reveals that she thought deeply about the propagandistic effects of such exhibitions.
Woolf's relation to exhibition culture evolved over the years, and her essay on the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley reads like a halfway house between the later optimism of The Waves and Between the Acts and the early pessimism of The Voyage Out. Reading Woolf's career in reverse, one can see that her belief in these late novels, that spectacles can catalyze change, is steadily displaced by worry over the seductive power of state-sponsored spectacles, and her confidence in the power of individuals to deflect or transform ideological conditioning decays.
Bernard's fantasy of Percival in India in The Waves produces a sharply satiric perspective: "'I see India,' said Bernard. '. . . I see the gilt and crenellated buildings which have an air of fragility and decay as if they were temporarily run up buildings in some Oriental exhibition'" (TW, 135-36). Within this imagined scene of exhibition, Percival, wearing his sun helmet, solves "the Oriental problem" of "the uselessness of human exertion" in a trice by "applying the standards of the West" (TW, 136). The "air of fragility and decay" suggests that the power of such displays has passed--they function now only as metaphors--and secures Woolf's ironic distance from the imperial values implicit in "Oriental" exhibitions. A decade later in Between the Acts Woolf turns to a pageant play to explore the deploying of spectacles for progressive ends. Miss La Trobe's historical pageant culminates in a late modernist assertion of fragmentation--not only its inevitability but its potential power--when in its closing moment the players hold up shattered mirrors to the audience. By pushing spectators "between" versions of themselves--or "jerk[ing] the ball out of the cup"--La Trobe produces a moment of radical defamiliarization from which new possibilities or "unacted parts" can emerge. 28 "What a small part I've had to play! But you've made me feel I could have played . . . Cleopatra!" says Lucy Swithin, an elderly woman unlikely to be mistaken for the Queen of the Nile (BA, 153). Feeling neither here nor there, La Trobe's audience begins to re-examine their national past in light of a transformed present, and her play becomes Woolf's trope for the power of spectacle to loosen an audience's otherwise secure ideological moorings.
Woolf's attitude towards ideological spectacles is less assured and more equivocal in "Thunder at Wembley" . E. M. Forster predicted that while millions spend their money on the pitch at Wembley, "a few highbrows will make fun." 29 Woolf doesn't entirely disappoint. Her only extended description of exhibition-going anticipates the satiric tone of The Waves by pitting the ideological hold of empire, located in a display of global commodities, against an apocalyptic vision of nature rising up in the form of a sudden summer thunderstorm. The storm ultimately breaks the imperial "spell" and purges the world of the exhibitionary blight, but Woolf suggests that "Nature" also asserts herself in the individuality of spectators able to resist the show's blandishments. The failure of the exhibition's ideological project leads to Woolf's dry observation that perhaps the Duke of Devonshire, who praised the goal of the exhibition in The Times, should have denied entrance to all natural forces. 30 The essay closes with a mock prophecy: "The Empire is perishing; the bands are playing; the Exhibition is in ruins" (EOVW, 3:412, 413).
The "dissolving" pagodas and general "decay" of Woolf's Wembley probably are the originals for "the fragility and decay" of the "temporarily run up buildings" in Bernard's vision of Percival. Yet Wembley's attractions are not without effect. For if the "dignity" of Woolf's stubbornly independent compatriots makes them "a product to be proud of," they are also "a little languid perhaps, a little attenuated," even docile as they "stand in queues to have their spectacles rectified gratis . . . gaze respectfully into sacks of grain; glance reverently at mowing machines" (EOVW, 3: 413, 411). The idea of having one's vision corrected while studying commodities at an imperial exhibition implies that the "product to be proud of" may actually be precisely what Woolf says it is not: one product circulating among others, a mass-produced, mesmerized English collectivity "trailing and flowing" between the "coffee-grinder" and the "cream separator" (EOVW, 3:412). Woolf's description of previous exhibitions at Earls Court and the White City raises comparable questions about her own immunity. In the earlier exhibitions, "The area was too small; the light was too brilliant. If a single real moth strayed in to dally with the arc lamps, he was at once transformed into a dizzy reveler; if a laburnum tree shook her tassels, spangles of limelight floated in the violet and crimson air. Everything was intoxicated and transformed" (EOVW, 3:411). Given Woolf's well-known trope of the moth as the artistic spirit, this example of the exhibition's absolute mastery of nature suggests the danger that state propaganda might be able to intoxicate and transform even her own imagination.
Yet "Thunder at Wembley" also implies that Woolf is protected from dizzy revelers by her class position, for both ends of the class spectrum seem insulated from the ideological hailing of the state, epitomized mockingly by a man banging a "bladder" while imploring spectators "to come tickle the monkeys" (EOVW, 3:412). At one end of the spectrum is a lower middle-class woman "in the row of red-brick villas outside the grounds" who wrings "a dish-cloth in the backyard" (EOVW, 3:412). Situated beyond the boundaries of the exhibition, this woman remains unswayed by imperial propaganda. At the other end is an obvious surrogate for Woolf, a thrush to which Woolf attributes the "cynical reflection, at once so chill and so superior," that the spectators surely could not be seduced into tickling monkeys or otherwise responding to the siren song of the exhibition. The song of the thrush does for exhibition-goers what Woolf wishes to do for her readers: it undermines the efficacy of the official message by calling attention to the beauty of nature--"a whole chestnut tree with its blossoms standing . . . ordinary grass scattered with petals"--that was transmogrified by earlier exhibitions (EOVW, 3:412). Nevertheless, the suspicion underlying "Thunder at Wembley" is that the vast middle class lying between the chill superiority of the thrush and the unwitting washer of dishes may be inclined to settle into the posture refused by the sky: in an otherwise inexplicable negation, the sky, Woolf informs her readers, is not found "lying back limp but acquiescent in a green deckchair," and therefore never becomes "part of the exhibition" (EOVW, 3:412). Insofar as other spectators, foils for the rebellious sky, presumably do become part of the scenery, the vision of the empire in ruins belongs only to the thrush and Woolf. 31
Woolf's surrogate in The Voyage Out is more vulnerable to the hailing of empire, for the critical distance enjoyed by Woolf and Forster at Wembley is unavailable to Rachel. In the novel's opening chapter, London's West End, with "its electric lamps . . . vast plate-glass windows . . . carefully-finished houses, and tiny live res trotting on the pavement," is described as "a finished work" produced by the "enormous factory" of east London (VO, 8). This is more than a familiar modernist lament over the increasing regimentation of modern life. The plate-glass windows, equally suitable for the display of goods or antiquities, metonymically invoke the convergence of consumerism and exhibitionary culture, and the English urbanites, far from resisting the propagandistic display of consumer goods, themselves become commodities, "tiny live res" manufactured to populate the streets of the West End showcase (VO, 8). As the Ambroses pass through this scene on their way to the Euphrosyne, they can expect "neither help nor attention," we are told, from "a world exclusively occupied in feeding waggons" (VO, 8-9). Woolf hints that Rachel is similarly helpless; she may even be part of her father's inventory: when Rachel later sighs over the "poor goats" her father is shipping to South America, Woolf is coyly alluding to her own family nickname, "Goat." 32
As the ship sets out, England is reduced to a "shrinking island in which people were imprisoned" (VO, 26). It is in this oppressively commercial prison that Ridley Ambrose momentarily finds himself entangled with a man selling picture postcards. And it is this crowded space that Rachel reinvokes when her imaginative reconstruction of England begins with postcards. South America, always an imaginary realm of the exotic for Woolf, ought to be different. 33 But as Rachel is educated abroad, London's human showcase rematerializes across the ocean and up the Amazon, transforming native women into ethnographic exhibits and Rachel into an object destined for enjoyment by a young Englishman.
Rachel's education is supervised by Helen at the request of Rachel's father, who wants a polished hostess around the house to further his Tory ambitions. Early in the novel Woolf links Rachel's education to colonial exploration by framing Helen's realization that she would like to teach her niece "how to live" with allusions to Helen's embroidery (VO, 76). As if weaving the expedition up the Amazon that will shape Rachel's fate, Helen works at "a great design of a tropical river running through a tropical forest, where . . . a troop of naked natives whirled darts into the air" (VO, 27). 34 The alliterative repetition of "tropical . . . tropical . . . troop" suggests the status of Helen's embroidery as trope, and her "great design" grows more capacious as the novel unfolds: it includes, among other things, her hopes that Rachel will marry as well as her entrusting of Rachel's education to Hirst, Terence's arrogant friend. From this point on The Voyage Out combines conventions of the Bildungsroman with those of late imperial romance in order to narrate Rachel's painful struggle to disentangle herself from "the pattern" of everyday life. This pattern, alternately a source of consolation and frustration, falls into a rhythm of expansion and contraction as Rachel tries to grasp her world.
Politics always inform Rachel's education--not just the cultural politics implicit in any education but the imperial politics governing England's vision of the world as well. Well before Hirst lends her his copy of Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Rachel learns about empire from the Dalloways, who initiate her informal education when they board the Euphrosyne in Lisbon. Catalyzing Rachel's suddenly intense desire to know the world--"'Please tell me--everything.' That was what she wanted to say"--the Dalloways offer formative lessons in culture, empire, and sexuality (VO, 50). Clarissa, "a fascinating spectacle," strikes Rachel as a gallery exhibit: "she was astonishingly like an eighteenth-century masterpiece--a Reynolds or a Romney" (VO, 40). Consonant with her initial impression, Clarissa's lessons, like her first comment to Rachel, are primarily cultural: "'It's so like Whistler!' she exclaimed, with a wave toward the shore" (VO, 34). Cultural capital represents enormous power to Rachel, and Clarissa seems able to make "the enormous globe [spin] round this way and that beneath her fingers" (VO, 40).
Richard, who offers nearly simultaneous lessons in empire and sexuality, also strikes Rachel as a fascinating spectacle with virtually global power. Like a display from the Palace of Industry viewed from a patently erotic perspective, he comes from "the humming oily centre of the machine where the polished rods are sliding, and the pistons thumping" (VO, 40). His political beliefs, he tells Rachel, can be summed up in "one word--Unity. . . . The dispersion of the best ideas over the greatest area" (VO, 57). Clarissa is nearby during Richard's first lesson about sexuality but apparently does not overhear him speaking to Rachel about sexual desire: "Girls are kept very ignorant, aren't they?" he notes, as Rachel grows increasingly agitated (VO, 61). Just as she confesses her ignorance, they are interrupted: "Warships, Dick!" Clarissa calls out. Even if we do not hear "warships" as "worships," the exclamation is suggestive enough. As Rachel watches Richard raise his hat to "two sinister grey vessels," Clarissa squeezes her hand and exclaims: "Aren't you glad to be English!" (VO, 62). Upset by Richard's probing, Rachel remains quiet, looking "queer" and "flushed." Clarissa's enveloping enthusiasm, however, gathers into Englishness a link between empire and sexuality that receives increasing attention as the narrative unfolds.
With Clarissa absent, Richard becomes a more hands-on instructor in the pleasures of being English. Having shared his dream of consolidating the world under the aegis of the British empire, Dalloway later drops into Rachel's cabin and impulsively kisses her. "You tempt me," he explains (VO, 68). Though his kiss produces a passing pleasure, only then does Rachel begin to realize, to her shock and horror, why women cannot walk alone in public. From this moment until her death she is haunted by a dream in which she walks down a "long tunnel" with "damp bricks on either side" that opens into "a vault," where she is "trapped" with "a little deformed man who squatted on the floor gibbering"; the "wall behind him oozed with damp" (VO, 69-70). The sexual revulsion expressed here is the last stage of Rachel's response to Dalloway's kiss: "physical pain" leads to a numbing "chill of mind and body" and then to a "strange exultation," before Rachel finally becomes "merely uncomfortable, as if she and Richard had seen something together which is hidden in ordinary life" (VO, 69). Trapped at once by her own sexuality inside a damp womb and by an internalized cityscape evocative of an underpass or the Underground, Rachel's sudden sexual awareness seems to put her on the street along with the women she had never before recognized as prostitutes. What Rachel has discovered "hidden in ordinary life" are desires she cannot trust, her own and those of the men around her.
Dalloway's kiss also bears on Helen's efforts to teach Rachel about the ways of everyday life, for it is the revelation of Rachel's sexual innocence that persuades Helen to arrange for her to stay in Helen's brother's seaside villa instead of continuing inland with her father. Explaining that Dalloway's overture is "the most natural thing in the world," a "small thing that gets on one's nerves," "like noticing the noises people make when they eat, or men spitting," Helen affects Rachel in contradictory yet equally profound ways (VO, 74). On one hand, by trying to help Rachel work through her upsetting experience, Helen draws her young charge into a normative vision of heterosexual relations that Rachel finds stifling. When Helen confirms that "those women" in Piccadilly are prostitutes, Rachel suddenly sees "her whole life for the first time a creeping hedged-in thing, driven cautiously between high walls, here turned aside, there plunged in darkness" (VO, 74). On the other hand, by demystifying the Dalloways' allure, Helen helps Rachel experience an expansive "vision of her own personality . . . as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable" (VO, 77). It is characteristic of Woolf's ambivalent presentation of Helen that Helen explicitly rejects the connection between sex and politics that Rachel intuits. (Why else would Rachel run to read about public res in Who's Who right after coming to terms with Dalloway's kiss?) Discounting "this confusion between politics and kissing politicians," Helen continues to stitch at her embroidery, unaware that her great design helps propagate Dalloway's vision of a unified world (VO, 76).
When the Euphrosyne arrives in Santa Marina, Richard's imperial ideals are immediately reinvoked. English sailors in "Elizabethan barques," we learn, had established a "great British colony" only to be displaced by Spanish galleons: "All seemed to favour the expansion of the British Empire, and had there been men like Richard Dalloway in the time of Charles the First, the map would undoubtedly be red where it is now an odious green" (VO, 81-82). In the years prior to their arrival a second chance has developed in the form of "a small colony" of English "in search of something new" who found in Santa Marina a place "full of new forms of beauty," including "strangely beautiful" natives and "primitive carvings coloured bright greens and blues" (VO, 82-83). The desire to find something new ushers the reader into the attenuated exoticism of The Voyage Out's invocation of imperial romance.
Reinvented for nineteenth-century fiction by Sir Walter Scott, modern romance literature represents modernity's uncanny vision of the worlds it has superseded. By the late nineteenth century, romance had to work hard to recover traces of what might have existed prior to the global reach of capital. Hence Marlow's lament in Heart of Darkness that all the blank spots of the map had already been colored in by colonial powers, a trope echoed as the Euphrosyne arrives in Santa Marina in the "odious green" of Spain's holdings in South America (VO, 82). 35 Woolf organizes Rachel's South American experience around three excursions, each of which draws on romance conventions: the journey from England; the picnic ascent of Mt. Rosa; and the trip up the Amazon.
The ascent of Monte Rosa locates the story of Rachel's growing intimacy with Terence within a vision of global domestication and elaborates the link between sexuality and politics already implicit in Rachel's ambivalent response to Dalloway. As Evelyn and Alfred Perrott, two relatively minor characters, overlook the South American plains from the summit, Evelyn announces that if she were a man, she would "raise a troop and conquer some great territory": "I'd love to start life from the very beginning as it ought to be" (VO, 127). Poor Perrott, clearly overmatched, can muster only a weakly literal-minded rebuttal: "conquer a territory? They're all conquered already, aren't they?" (VO, 127). Perhaps a young Edwardian gentleman could be forgiven for supposing that all lands had been claimed, most of them by England, but Evelyn sighs in response: "It's the idea, don't you see? We lead such tame lives" (VO, 127). Through the re of Evelyn, a parodic archetype of woman as colonizer, the novel repeatedly links the domestication of women to the domestication of the globe: at one moment Evelyn is turning down yet another marriage proposal, in the next she fantasizes about becoming a second Napoleon.
The rest of the chapter sustains the tension between Evelyn's bracing vision of unexplored worlds and the prospect of a wholly domesticated globe by counterpointing Rachel's impulse to withdraw from society with the sense that rituals of social engagement are inescapable. Two moments mark opposite ends of the spectrum: the sudden connection between Helen and Mrs. Thornbury forged by the discovery of a single common acquaintance--"Mrs. Parry's drawing-room, though thousands of miles away, behind a vast curve of water on a tiny piece of earth, came before their eyes"--and the closing words of the previous chapter, in which Terence asks Rachel what she is looking at as she reclines away from the others: "She was a little startled but answered directly, 'Human beings.'" (VO, 136). Since Rachel tends to position herself like an ethnographer outside her own culture, it is fitting that she first sees Terence while peering in through a hotel window. The plot, however, soon pulls Rachel into hotel society, where she plays the piano at an engagement dance. If Evelyn wants to remake civilization "from the very beginning" on her own terms, Rachel evidently has good reason to feel increasingly trapped within a culture always ready to materialize, like Mrs. Parry's drawing-room, wherever two Englishmen meet, even across "a vast curve of water."
Rachel's personal encounters in the chapters leading up to the river expedition heap up more reasons for wishing to step outside her culture. Unfolding like a series of experiments, these relationships elaborate the pattern of confinement and expansion that begins with Rachel's ambivalent response to Richard and Helen and continues into her relationship with Terence. With Terence Rachel feels alternately at ease and trapped. When she tells him about her shuttered life in Richmond with her aunts she finds her way to a "childlike state of interest and pleasure"--until Terence explains that her everyday life interests him because as a fledgling novelist he craves information about women. Suddenly "under observation," Rachel experiences his "determination to know" as a form of bullying, and indeed, his perception of her body during their conversation foreshadows the increasingly domineering role he will play after their engagement (VO, 201). Although Terence sees "a young woman's body not yet developed . . . and thus interesting and even lovable," Woolf betrays Terence's need to see Rachel as undeveloped and dependent by reminding us a few sentences later that she is twenty-four years old (VO, 196).
The social pressure on Rachel's body intensifies when she finds herself caught up in a series of obscurely instructive and ambiguously erotic encounters with other women in the hotel. Evelyn captures Rachel first, and her aggressive challenge to Rachel to seize the day--"We don't do things. What do you do?"--takes on an erotic cast when she places her hand on Rachel's knee, which Rachel finds "exciting" and "also disagreeable" (VO, 236, 237).  Rachel recoils from the violence and is immediately gathered up by the spinster Miss Allan, who shepherds Rachel into her room on the chance that she might want to "add a new pleasure to life" (VO, 241). "I make it a rule to try everything," Miss Allan remarks as Rachel spits out some preserved ginger the older woman had urged on her (VO, 241). Rachel is then introduced to Miss Allan's regular traveling companion, a bottle of crême de menthe two years older than Rachel named Oliver, which a female friend bestows on her whenever she travels abroad. In a kind of dream logic, the decapitation of the chicken colors the subtly unsettling scenes with Miss Allan and Evelyn on either side, as if to say that any role available to women requires a sacrifice, a sacrifice Rachel will later embody while dying of fever.
The tension between a muted eroticism urging untried experiences and the insistent banality of existence intensifies Rachel's sense of being trapped in an increasingly familiar pattern. Leaving Miss Allan's room, Rachel soon finds herself in "a complete block in the passage" when they run into Mrs. Paley (VO, 245). The hallway being lined with shoes set out for cleaning, Miss Allan tries to make conversation with the nearly deaf older woman by repeating three times: "I was just saying that people are so like their boots" (VO, 244). She is about to repeat this home truth for a fourth time when Rachel bolts away to a cul de sac at the end of the hall, where she is gripped by a vision of the world "in its true proportions": "She disliked the look of it immensely--churches, politicians, misfits, and huge impostures. . . . For the time, her own body was the source of all the life in the world, which tried to burst forth here--there--and was repressed now by Mr. Bax, now by Evelyn, now by the imposition of ponderous stupidity, the weight of the entire world" (VO, 245). Mr. Bax has earned Rachel's anger with a sermon on the duty the English owe the colonized that translates Dalloway's imperial vision into a Christian imperative: properly practiced, Christian sympathy, like a drop of water falling into the ocean, "alters the conration of the globe" (VO, 220). Once again, Woolf links Rachel's everyday life to a sense of global interrelatedness, weaving Christianity along with English imperialism, marriage, and patriarchy into the great design shaping Rachel's confused maturation.
The "weight of the world," "the conration of the globe": against pressure of this magnitude Rachel's desire for release grows. It is thus not surprising that Mr. Flushing's exotic picture of what might await them up the Amazon captures Rachel's imagination: ". . . wonderful treasures lay hid in the depths of the land. . . . there might be giant gods hewn out of stone in the mountain-side; and colossal res standing by themselves in the middle of green pasture lands, where none but natives had ever trod. . . . Nobody had been there; scarcely anything was known" (VO, 225). Far from entering the "lost world" of Conan Doyle's South America, however, the expedition party will travel into a world to which, as in the vision of India in The Waves, "the standards of the West" have already been applied. The native women they meet upriver resemble the postcard images of native woman that flowed into England from South America and Africa, and the circulation of such postcards, I will show in the following sections, both reinforced and undermined the imperial stereotypes that Rachel must negotiate as she follows English culture out into the world and attempts to establish her identity.
The image of Rachel's body trying to burst free from "ponderous stupidities" illustrates her resistance to the "machinery of representation" that also governs picture postcards. 36 In their insistent framing and arranging of the female body, colonial postcards propagate a normative vision Richard Dalloway would find congenial. Rachel's struggle with normalization continues in her journey upriver, which culminates in three tightly-linked scenes: her engagement, a scene of partially erased sexual dissidence, and her encounter with the native women.
Postcards featuring native women often operate as a form of colonial denigration that reinforces normative values at home. 37 In an early century card from Peru, three bare-breasted women, all of whom are short, heavy, and sullen by prevailing European standards, earn the title "las tres gracias de las Indias Piros" ( 3). Circulating with huge numbers of cards displaying English actresses, music hall performers, and famous courtesans, this card hardly bothers to disguise the snicker behind the cross-cultural gesture of its caption. The imposition of a Western frame is often more stark, as in a card bearing the caption "A Zulu Masher" ( 4). Dated by hand February 14, 1905, the card shows a smiling young Zulu woman whose native beads and belt are supplemented with top hat, monocle, jauntily held cigarette, and stylish walking stick. Given the common Western assumption that Africans, particularly women, were oversexed, a male recipient might construe the card as a mocking performance of his masculinity in blackface. 38 Yet if cross-dressing often disrupts cultural norms, the cross-racial and cross-gender masquerade in this exchange seems more likely to have reinforced traditional roles. Addressed on Valentine's Day to a "Miss F. Southwell" by "Georgie Southwell" (a playful joke at a sister's expense?), the card implies that a woman's failure to rein in desires may subject her to ridicule.
Less satiric cards sometimes inscribe non-white women into English culture as objects of genuine aesthetic and erotic appreciation. In an early-century card collected in Kenya ( 5), a woman from the Boran tribe is posed to display her visual appeal; similar cards sometimes use the caption "A Native Beauty." In other cards a more [Begin Page 59] stylized composition produces a kind of formal portraiture that further aestheticizes the women, abstracting them from the scene of colonial encounter. In a card from Natal ( 6), for instance, the symmetrical arrangement of trees and women doubly framing a Zulu woman made to stage her toilet for the camera partially transforms the indigenous environment into the artificial space of a studio. The effacing of the indigenous setting is complete in other cards, such as Eduardo Polack's shot of a "Bella India" in Peru ( 7), which whites out any trace of the model's own environment. Insofar as these women become interchangeable with images of English actresses and courtesans circulating in England, the photographic abstraction blurring the differences between the English and "the native" begins to resemble a form of symbolic acculturation: in Elizabethan times women were imported into Santa Marina's first settlement; these cards complete the exchange by shaping women into objects suitable for export (VO, 82).
The sexual and racial meanings disseminated by such cards depends in part on the interplay between production and circulation. In an early-century example from Natal ( 8), three signs plot the card's itinerary: the postmark (July 24, 1904), the address to a Miss Ashby in Yorkshire, and the message inscribed on the front: "I am feeling better again. Will write next week." With the angles of her right arm balanced by the angles formed by her left arm and the banjo, the "native musician" is virtually abstracted. The subordination of the body to an angular design is both heightened and complicated by the musical instrument, for the banjo does not simply complete the triangular motif established by the women's right arm: in origin an African instrument, the banjo would have been recognized by European and American audiences as a signifier of race owing to its incorporation into minstrel shows. 38 In fact, this complex articulation of a racialized body within a Western design, in circulation just over a year before Picasso began to "Africanize" les Desmoiselles d'Avigon, constitutes a popular anticipation of the vogue for primitivism that would transform European high art over the next decade. Race is thus inseparable from the abstraction, as is the prurient interest in the woman's nudity, the pose evidently being dictated as much by the desire to have her breast lifted toward the camera as by the formal requirements of symmetry. The suggestiveness that would have been activated by any sexual innuendo in a message sent to a man is mitigated here by the banality of the inscription and the fact that the addressee is an unmarried woman. Instead, consonant with the emergence of museum culture, the image takes on a certain clinical quality, an effect amplified in the ethnographic perspective solicited by the printed caption, "A Native musician." The card's trajectory from Natal to Yorkshire thus partially erases the erotic investment in the exotic other that shaped the production of the card in the first place. While in many staged photographs a glimpse of the reality of the models' lives shows through, in this instance the rescripting through exchange (the inscription and mailing of the card) of a body already scripted within the colonial scene of production (the photographer's arranging of the model) results in an overdetermined cultural coding that obliterates any sense of the historical body prior to its entry into the studio. A token of exchange, the model is transformed into an image of racialized sexuality sanitized for export to England.
Without this coding, the strict norms regulating English sexual expression at home (although under siege from many quarters) never would have permitted the open circulation of bare-breasted women in postcards. 40 (A related domestic postcard strategy covered naked women with white powder and posed them as classical statuary.) These norms find distinct expression in The Voyage Out in the banishing of a prostitute seen late at night in the hotel corridors and in the instant decoding of the significance of Susan Warrington and Arthur Venning's first embrace: "Well, we may take it for granted that they're engaged," Terence remarks (VO, 130). The frank sexuality attributed to non-white women under the cover of the ethnographic alibi in postcards provided a form of licensed titillation while also throwing into relief the relative virtue of respectable Englishwomen, whose sexuality remained bound by marriage. Filtering native life through English concerns, other cards reinforced these norms by highlighting images of socially-sanctioned sexuality. Card after card evinces a need to identify images of far-flung domesticity. A representative Cape Town card postmarked July 1908 shows a reclining woman breast-feeding a child over the caption "A Native Woman and Child" ( 9); an early-century card from Lagos ( 10) showing a woman holding a small child is labeled "Motherhood." A British East African card showing three adults and seven children grouped casually on the ground before a hut is labeled "A Kikuyu Family" ( 11), but who is to say what brought them together in the frame? Like the nostalgic images of Edwardian idylls in domestic cards and pastoral novels, the fascination with native mothers and families is symptomatic of a cultural need to ease anxieties in a time when falling birthrates were thought to presage the decline of England's imperial power. 41
Against this backdrop, the potential dissidence of Rachel's desire in the scene of her engagement and its immediate aftermath becomes all the more striking. When the excursion party pauses for lunch not long before arriving at the native village, Rachel and Terence wander together through an oddly charged landscape in which they kiss for the first time and thus discover themselves engaged. The nearly surreal [Begin Page 64] quality of the scene clearly derives in part from a resurfacing of the sexual anxiety Rachel felt in response to Dalloway's kiss. Woolf's biography offers ample evidence of her own ambivalence toward heterosexuality, from the sexuality frigidity of her relations with Leonard to her affairs with other women, and it is easy to discover similar feelings in the images of churning water that accompany Rachel's response to her first embrace of Terence: "Terrible--terrible," she murmurs (VO, 258). 42 The churning of Rachel's desire, moreover, recalls the "river torrent" in Helen's embroidery, thus underscoring the erotic character of their penetration into the jungle.
But the scene also feels peculiarly dislocated because their engagement takes place in a jungle landscape that seems at once cleansed of all meanings and suffused with cultural significance. On one hand, the alien quality of a world unarticulated by conventional categories renders the lovers "unable to frame any thoughts" and their voices join "in tones of strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words" (VO, 258). Seemingly numbed by a world resistant to consciousness, they talk like aliens encountering the idea of love and marriage for the first time, and their affectless repetition of conventionally appropriate words ("We love each other") sound like incantations designed to explain their experience to themselves. On the other hand, their walk through the jungle is laden with established meanings: Hirst cautions them against snakes, for instance, and Terence chooses to break the silence by flinging a "red fruit" into the air and watching it fall to the ground (VO, 257). 43 The implied fall narrative also resonates with crucial moments in Rachel's life, thus re-narrativizing a moment of unanchored being that would otherwise drift away from plot. To cite just one example among many, a path "hedged in by dense creepers" that "burst here and there into star-shaped crimson flowers" recalls Rachel's anxious vision of her life as "a creeping hedged-in thing" as well as her angry response to the disciplining of her body, which "tried to burst forth here--there--and was repressed"; the knottedness of the creepers also resonates with Rachel's sense that Austen's marriage plots--urged on her by Clarissa--are too like a "tight plait" (VO, 257, 245, 51). The deep tension within the scene thus derives not simply from an unresolved wavering between heterosexual and lesbian desire, as many critics have argued, but from an encompassing anxiety about any fixing of desire.
Only a glimpse of potentially dissident desire survives in the surreal dislocation of a scene sandwiched between Rachel's engagement and her entry into the native village. Without warning or explanation "a hand . . . abrupt as iron" knocks Rachel to the ground; her fragmentary impressions gradually reveal that Helen is "upon her" rolling her about in tall grasses that whip across Rachel's eyes and fill her mouth and ears. 44 The ur-scene in Melymbrosia, a reconstructed earlier version of the novel, is much clearer and more explicit: Helen chases after Rachel through tall grasses until Rachel suddenly stops to open her arms; Helen then rolls her down into the tall grass and proclaims her love. 45 Melymbrosia's intensely realized moment of desire--simultaneously lesbian, sororal, and maternal--survives in The Voyage Out only in an elliptically ambiguous form: looking up to see Terence and Helen standing over her kissing, Rachel raises herself up, and "she too realized Helen's soft body" (VO, 269). Although Rachel's embrace of Helen moves her in a way Terence's kiss does not, Helen's perspective (and thus her declaration of love) disappears altogether, leaving only Rachel's subjectively-rendered experience of confusion, which distorts potentially errant desires almost beyond recognition.
 The process of normalization is completed when they follow Mr. Flushing into the native village, "falling into line" in his wake (VO, 259, 269). The domestic tableau they encounter suggests that all roads now lead to home, "the goal of their journey" (VO, 270).
In Rachel's response to the native women, issues of gender and sexuality implicit throughout the novel come to the foreground and are mapped onto race. 46 Following immediately after Rachel's tumble in the grass with Helen and heavily revised and expanded from earlier drafts, the encounter reads like an account of the Dahomey Village in London's Imperial International Exhibition. 47 But an instability of the ethnographic frame alters the usual exhibition dynamics in a way that comments implicitly on the partial erasure of dissident desire in the preceding scenes. Rachel, Terence, Hirst, Helen, and the Flushings walk together into the village:
Stepping cautiously, they observed the women, who were squatting on the ground in triangular shapes, moving their hands, either plaiting straw or in kneading something in bowls. But when they had looked for a moment undiscovered, they were seen, and Mr. Flushing, advancing into the centre of the clearing, was engaged in talk with a lean majestic man, whose bones and hollows at once made the shapes of the Englishman's body appear ugly and unnatural. The women took no notice of the strangers, except that their hands paused for a moment and their long narrow eyes slid round and fixed upon them with the motionless inexpressive gaze of those removed from each other far far beyond the plunge of speech. Their hands moved again, but the stare continued. It followed them as they walked, as they peered into huts where they could distinguish guns leaning in the corner. . . . in the dusk the solemn eyes of babies regarded them, and old women stared out too. As they sauntered about, the stare followed them, passing over their legs, their bodies, their heads, curiously, not without hostility, like the crawl of a winter fly. As she drew apart her shawl and uncovered her breast to the lips of her baby, the eyes of a woman never left their faces, although they moved uneasily under her stare, and finally turned away, rather than stand there looking at her any longer. When sweetmeats were offered them, they put out great red hands to take them, and felt themselves treading cumbrously like tight-coated soldiers among these soft instinctive people. [VO, 270]
Bennett argues that as exhibition spectators watch one another watch the spectacle, they become a self-regulating crowd that consolidates its national identity through their mutual regard (ROM, 69). Here, confusing pronoun references that Woolf introduced in revision suggest not a sense of shared English superiority to the "soft instinctive people" on display, but a breakdown of boundaries between English subject and native object. By the end of the description of reciprocal staring, the "they" of "although they moved uneasily under her stare" momentarily seems to refer back to "the eyes" of the native woman rather than to the strolling tourists. In the next sentence, the "great red hands" seem to belong to natives who reach out to accept English confections, but the next clause reverses the relation by identifying those receiving the sweetmeats as the tourists, "treading cumbrously like tight-coated soldiers." 48 Mr. Flushing literalizes the breakdown of the frame by entering the clearing, where the contrast between his body and the conventional majesty of the noble savage makes the Englishman part of the spectacle. Soon afterwards Flushing and his wife acknowledge another blurring of boundaries when they question whether the artifacts they bought from the natives do not show "signs here and there of European influence" (VO, 271). Eventually the rest of the party joins Flushing within the frame and is "absorbed" into the life of the village (VO, 270). For all but the Flushings, who remain impervious to introspection, their absorption into the village coupled with the intensity of the returned gaze proves deeply unsettling. Terence and Rachel begin to feel "very cold and melancholy"; Hirst feels embittered, unhappy, and alone; Helen worries like an anxious mother over "the delicate flesh of men and women" (VO, 271). Far from reinforcing a sense of racial and cultural superiority, Woolf's exhibition unnerves her central characters.
Yet Rachel's positioning within the scene of exhibition complicates Woolf's apparent critique of the imperial hierarchy that normally would preserve European privilege. On one hand, insofar as the narrative equates Rachel and the native women, patriarchal and colonial oppression coincide to produce a critique of colonialism. On the other hand, by transforming the native women into a mere backdrop for Rachel's inner drama, Woolf partially reproduces the imperial hierarchy the novel otherwise attacks. These claims require more detailed attention.
Woolf clearly indicates that the gender politics informing Rachel's life also govern the native village. Like the description of Rachel and Terence moving into the uncanny space of their engagement, the expedition party's movement into the native village weaves together phrases linked to the marriage plot that has increasingly circumscribed Rachel's life. The women's "plaiting of straw," for instance, echoes the knotted creepers binding the trees at the site of Rachel's engagement as well as Austen's "tight plait." The image recurs after they return from the expedition and sit listening in the afternoon heat to Terence reading aloud Milton's marriage masque, Comus: the water nymph "sitting / Under the glassy cool translucent wave, / in twisted braids of lilies knitting / the loose train" of her hair gives Rachel the headache that portends her protracted death over the last three chapters of the novel (VO, 310). As water laps at the foot of Rachel's bed during her first day of fever, these lines haunt her, suggesting both the symbolic threat of Milton (author of the first domestic epic) and the more palpable threat of domestic life with Terence. Before the engagement Evelyn says approvingly that there's "something of a woman" in Terence (VO, 235), but afterwards he tries to silence Rachel's music by suggesting that her playing of a Beethoven sonata is unnatural. 49 Similar gender politics obtain in the native village. In Melymbrosia the native women carry goods back and forth to Mr. Flushing; but when Mr. Flushing moves into the clearing to conduct business in The Voyage Out, the native women remain literally and ratively at the periphery. The implied structural parallel between Rachel and the native women suggests an equality in subjection. 50