Daring and deliberately provocative, the program of the "Technical Manifesto," for one critic, "stands behind or anticipates virtually ever ism" of the first half of the twentieth century. 2 It outlines, one art historian has stated, nothing less than "a new concept of the . . . work of art as an ideal synthesis . . . in which the practice of collage play[s] a dominant role."  Here, in short, is the birth-scene of aesthetic modernism, the initial formulation of principles widely held to stand at the foundation of twentieth-century experimentalism. 4 Moreover, the "Technical Manifesto" happens to be published at exactly the moment when Picasso is creating the famous Still Life with Chair-Caning (May 1912), and several months prior to the making of Braque's first papier collé that September, Fruitdish and Glass, the two works traditionally thought to point ahead to the great achievements of collage in the later cubism to follow. 5 As prescient as it is provocative, the "Technical Manifesto" is a path-breaking work that suggests voyages of artistic discovery whose endpoints have not yet been reached.
Although critics have rarely agreed upon a precise definition of collage, a rough consensus has nevertheless emerged about some of its essential traits in both literature and the visual arts. In textual collage, David Antin tells us, the "logical relations between word groups" give way to relations of equivalence, similarity, and identity, just as in visual collage a single coherent picture gives way to relations of juxtaposition and difference. 6 In both, writes Marjorie Perloff, "hierarchy gives way to parataxis" and "there is no longer a central ordering system" (FM, 75). Collage, Rosalind Krauss urges, enjoins "a systematic exploration of the conditions of representability entailed by the sign," a procedure in which presence is replaced by discourse, a "discourse founded on a buried origin." 7 Such remarks implicitly commend collage as an oppositional practice, a process of "systematic exploration" and "radical questioning" (FM, 75) which undermines received assumptions about the foundations of representation and thereby works "to break down existing economic and political structures and to transcend nationalist barriers" (FM, xviii). Yet these increasingly common observations may obscure as much as they reveal, slighting other dimensions of collage--or at least Marinetti's version of it in the "words-in-freedom" endeavor--that cannot be easily assimilated to a straightforwardly emancipatory project, but that harbor something more conflicted and compulsive, something more disturbed and disturbing. That haunted something, I shall argue, has much to do with the way that Marinetti's project concerns the formation of new subjectivities at the intersection of technology, language, and the body--at once textual, corporal, and social--in which the writing of modernity might be transcribed. Mapping that intersection more clearly, I shall also suggest, can help us take a different look at the much discussed question of Futurism and Fascism, a politicized aesthetics and an aestheticized politics.
A cursory glance at Marinetti's prescriptions for the new "words-in-freedom" suffices to suggest how much his project is indebted to the practice of automatic writing, writing which, to adopt for the moment the synoptic description of Richard Ellmann, "has many of the characteristics of dreams, being full of images, fragmentary, run together, by turns coherent and incoherent." 8 The affiliation of Marinetti's project with automatic writing is thematized in the manifesto's opening vignette, the short narrative that precedes the more famous rules and prescriptions. The vignette, we recall, depicts the narrator/speaker as he sits astride the fuel tank of a biplane which is soaring over the city of Milan. As he glances at the urban panorama below, he declares his ambition to destroy "the Latin period," a type of sentence he then characterizes with metaphors of the body: the classical period has "a head, a stomach, two legs and two flat feet, but," he adds proleptically, "it will never have two wings" (LMM, 92; TIF2, 46). 9 Quite suddenly, however, the narrative changes direction. The speaker abruptly disclaims his own authority and ascribes his statements to another source. "This is what the swirling propeller told me as I was speeding along at two hundred meters above the smokestacks of Milan. And the propeller added . . ." (LMM, 92; TIF2, 46). Then follows the manifesto proper, with its familiar list of instructions and interdictions. Yet the narrative vignette merits further attention: for while it plainly alludes to the familiar trope of the poet taking dictation from the muses, a trope which has been updated to portray the poet/aviator receiving his text from the airplane, it just as plainly rehearses what might be termed the primal scene of automatic writing, the scenario of taking dictation at a spiritualist seance, a scenario which has also been updated to give the role of "dead spirit" to the "swirling propeller" of modern technology and the role of "medium" to the speaker who vanishes in a machinic trance. Albeit briefly, the narrative vignette sketches a complex of critical metaphors that inform "The Technical Manifesto" and recur throughout Marinetti's early writings, a complex that involves mediums and automatic writing, analogies between the body and language, and, as we shall see, a metaphorics of shock, trauma, and pathology--a complex that Marinetti mobilizes in the service of an anxious engagement with questions about identity and authority, the self and technology, and the possibilities of representation under the regime of modernity.
Marinetti, of course, was not the only author to be intrigued with automatic writing at the beginning of the twentieth century. Automatic writing was studied or practiced by authors as different as Yeats, Gertrude Stein, and the Surrealists, and its appeal to writers seemingly so diverse from one another may owe much to its hybrid origins and early evolution. In early 1848 Margaret and Kate Fox of Rochester, New York, announced that they were conversing with spirits from the afterlife by a system of signs that consisted of rapping noises. To answer "no" or "yes" to their questions, a spirit would respectively rap once or twice; to respond to more complex enquiries, the spirit would allegedly rap at the appropriate moment as the sisters called out the letters of the alphabet. A few months later the Fox sisters acquired two accessories to their supernatural talents: one was a press agent and business manager named Eliab W. Capron; the other, a capacity to turn specters into public spectacles through their discovery that spirits could also relocate furniture, levitating tables and similar objects with ease. Their first series of public exhibitions (admission, 25 cents) was staged in Rochester in November, 1849. Capron, whose introductory lecture preceded the demonstrations, situated the "manifestations" at the conjuncture of two discursive traditions. One was scientific: the communications were like "'telegraphic dispatches' from the spirit land," while the new mode of communication was comparable to "the substantial discoveries and inventions" of "Galileo, Newton and Fulton." The other was the heritage of the marvelous: the new communications were "wonders," a term that evoked Biblical accounts of miraculous events and a broader tradition of interest in the marvelous. 10 His account of the exhibitions was printed two weeks later in the New York Daily Tribune, then reprinted a week later in its national edition, The New York Weekly Tribune, both edited by the famous Horace Greeley. Six weeks after that, in January 1850, Capron published a small book on the Fox sisters, and it too was favorably and prominently reviewed in both editions of the Tribune. Spiritualism's rise to national prominence and rapid diffusion were inseparable from modern communications media, so much so that the term itself, "medium," which was ultimately assigned to the role played by the Fox sisters, was typically used at the time to characterize the modern newspaper. 11 Four months later the Fox sisters set out on their first tour, stopping in Albany, Troy, and then New York City, where they became an object of ceaseless coverage by the contemporary press. 12 To our own age of copy-cat murders, the result may seem to have been predictable: "The phenomenon," one contemporary noted, "began, as it were, to propagate itself, and to be witnessed in other families." 13 Two years later witnessed the first American spiritualists, Mrs. Hayden and Mrs. Roberts, who went to England, and soon there were manifestations of the new movement reported in Germany and France, with seances held in Strasbourg, Bourges, and Paris. 14
Historians have typically viewed the rise of spiritualism as a response to the increasing secularization of Euro-American culture, while American historians, in particular, have accounted for the Fox sisters and their success by citing the earlier religious history of upstate New York, grouping it with the Mormon revelations of Joseph Smith, the region's strong strain of Shakerism, or its recent experience of Millerism. But closer focus on the city of Rochester may be more revealing. For during the period 1846 to 1848, the city's leading citizens, galvanized by the visionary dreams of their former postmaster and newspaper editor, Henry O'Reilly, were pouring their capital into a risky venture that planned to capture the westward corridors deemed vital to the fate of a novel communications technology to which they had also purchased the rights, the telegraph. In 1855, after crushing or buying out all their rivals, they would reorganize under the name of Western Union. 15 (Their counterparts on the Atlantic seabord were centered in New York and created the firm that became AT&T. "In New York. . . all the takers were newspaper proprietors. The most substantial sum apparently came from Horacy Greeley, a warm supporter of the invention from its infancy.") 16
Automatic writing, from its inception, was a mimetic counter-language, a way in which people restaged new forms of subjctivity increasingly shaped by contemporary changes in communications and transcription technologies. Appropriately, the first spiritualist newspaper would be titled The Spiritual Telegraph. The link between telegraphy and spiritualism survived even the long journey to Europe; as Allan Kardec, the major theorist of French spiritisme would write in 1857:
Mediums are simply electrical machines that transmit telegraphic dispatches from one point which is far away to another which is located on earth. Thus, when we wish to dictate a communication, we act upon [nous agissons sur] the medium just as the telegraph employee does upon his apparatus. 17
People, in short, were now being transformed into an "apparatus," a machine; while machines, for the first time, could now speak.
The technology of automatic writing underwent a rapid evolution already in the early decades of spiritualism. At first the primitive rapping procedures were supplanted by others associated with table-moving or levitation, as seance participants would attach a pencil or crayon to a table's leg, then place a sheet of paper beneath it and wait for the desired message to appear. Still a rather clumsy procedure, it too was rapidly supplanted by other practices. On the one hand, there appeared a series of machines, as if to embody in material terms the linkage between automatic writing and contemporary technology, machines which ranged from relatively simple devices ( 1) that translated table movements into the letters of the alphabet to more elaborate contrivances ( 2) that performed the same task but whose design more fully bespoke the contemporary fascination with the marvels of engineering. Some bore a suspicious resemblance to contemporary telegraphs, such as this one ( 3) used by Western Union from 1848 through 1855. On the other hand, practical issues of transportability led to the creation of devices much simpler and more amenable to mass production, such as the planchette ( 4), which first appeared in France around 1853. It consisted of a small, triangular piece of wood (in short, a miniaturized table) that was supported by two rolling casters and a pencil, a structure that let it move under the slightest impulse from seance participants. 18 (Much later, in 1898, an ambitious businessman named William Fuld in the U.S. would design a variant of it called "OUIJA, the MYSTIFYING ORACLE," a product which was soon launched to great success and still turns up at adolescent slumber parties, where it is consulted to predict romantic and marital destinies and similarly important affairs.) 19 Most mediums, however, dispensed with the use of machines and wrote directly on paper; after all, as Kardec had said, they themselves were machines, and it was also more practical and swifter. Historians have no doubt been right in noting that spiritualism offered its followers the promise of consolation and revelation from another world, a promise that had much to do with its diffusion among a substantial public; but it may be equally true that its success had much to do not with the content of spiritualist messages, but with the tacit allure of their form, their mode of transmission, the way in which they were rendered in idioms that were derived not from an other world, but from this one--idioms that were uttered in the silent syntax of advancing capital, murmured in the rhythms of its relentless machines.
Automatic writing might have remained only a footnote in the history of spiritualism had it not been integrated into contemporary discussions about the mind and human identity, discussions that were laying the foundations for the so-called modern "dynamic" psychologies taking shape between 1875 and 1900. The medical history behind these debates presents a rich and complicated interaction between an array of competing practices and overlapping theories. While much is inevitably lost in the cursory summary that follows, four related developments were crucial. A useful starting point might be the famous case, first publicized in 1876, of Félida X, a woman who would spontaneously lapse into a cataleptic state in which she exhibited a curious array of symptoms, chiefly anesthesia or hyperesthesia and enigmatic pains that had no discernible cause. Félida was found to have two distinct and alternating personalities, a condition that was soon characterized with the term dédoublement, doubling of the personality. 20 (In more modern parlance, she is the first example of multiple personality.) As it happened, Félida was "discovered" just when there was a revival of scientific interest in a second issue, hypnosis and the nature of hypnotic states, and it was not long before it was urged that "magnetic" or "induced somnambulism" (the state of hypnosis) presented important analogies with the "natural" or "spontaneous somnambulism" into which Félida lapsed, posing similar questions about the nature of identity, memory, amnesia, and will. 21 Contemporaneous with these was a third development, the enormous wave of scientific and public fascination elicited by Charcot's famous studies of hysteria; Félida, in fact, would have been classed by her contemporaries as having hysteria, a term that was expanding to encompass ever more symptoms throughout the period 1850 to 1910. 22 And fourth, there was the notion of trauma, a term acquiring its characteristically modern sense during exactly this period. Prior to roughly 1860, trauma had always designated a strictly physical lesion, an identifiable wound; it was in the later 1860s that trauma began to take on its modern sense in connection with injury claims that stemmed from railroad accidents. 23 It soon became the term of choice to designate a cluster of symptoms that evidently indicated genuine illness yet failed to correspond with discernible injuries or physical lesions, symptoms that included amnesia and mysterious pains like those experienced by Félida. Trauma, in other words, seemed to offer suggestive analogies with multiple personality, hypnosis, and hysteria, whose puzzling etiology remained an open question. Thus, the same period also witnessed a new taxonomy of hysteria that now included the category of "traumatic hysteria," a hybrid term suggesting the multiple analogies that late-nineteenth century psychologists discerned in an array of disturbing phenomena. 24 The outcome of this vast discussion was the gradual formation of what Ian Hacking has called "a free-floating sequence of associations"--an overlapping set of descriptive habits that coalesced in a metaphorics of hysteria, shock, and trauma. 25 The thread that would link these diverse pathologies to one another would be automatism, a concept elaborated in conjunction with automatic writing.
Of all the early psychologists who worked on these questions, none was more influential than Pierre Janet. Just when researchers were seeking a paradigm in the sense made famous by Thomas Kuhn, a matrix that could gather together the multiple debates surrounding hysteria, trauma, amnesia, and doubling of the personality, Janet provided one with the notion of automatism, a descriptive concept that he developed through his clinical experience with automatic writing. In a celebrated essay that he published in 1886 ("Unconscious Actions and the Doubling of Personality During Hypnosis") Janet reported his experiments with Lucie. 26 His starting point had been an observation already noted in previous studies of hypnotism: when in a posthypnotic state, Lucie would execute commands that he had given her while hypnotized. But Janet pushed his enquiries further. He began to give Lucie tasks that required her to execute complex mathematical calculations, actions that demanded not just rote or passive obedience, but forms of intelligent reflection. When these proved successful, he instructed Lucie to write letters, a task that she also performed with ease, still without knowing that she had done so. Finally, he began to ask Lucie to answer in writing, while in her waking state, questions that had been posed to her under hypnosis, questions that concerned the traumatic events whose repressed memory was the source of her hysterical fits. When he showed a sample of her script to a colleague, he was surprised to learn that it resembled that of spiritualist mediums. Janet, in short, had discovered an experimental counterpart to the automatic writing of the spiritualists, writing governed by a mysterious and hidden self that existed independently of normal consciousness, a "second state" as Jane would term it, that was produced "by a certain doubling [dédoublement] of consciousness." The effect of this discovery was to turn automatic writing into the thread connecting multiple personality, hysteria, dissociation, somnambulism and hypnosis, shock and trauma. Three years later Janet published L'Automatisme psychologique , a work that elaborated the concept of automatism and endowed the practice of automatic writing with new importance for discussion about the nature of consciousness. 27 Devoting an entire chapter to spiritualism, Janet concluded that mediums were "simply hysterics," and "almost always" what he termed "névropathes" (suffering from a neuropathological condition) (Ap, 404). The moment when the medium was possessed represented an hysterical convulsion, and at the core of the seance was "a violent nervous crisis" ("une violent crise de nerfs," Ap, 405). The medium's ability derived from "a morbid state analogous to one that generated hysteria or insanity" (Ap, 406); and at great length he detailed "more precise analogies between the states of mediumism and hypnotism" (Ap, 406). Janet, in short, had established a resonant chain of analogies that centered on the notion of automatism, strands of repressed memory and identity formed in response to traumatic experience and functioning like machines, independent of consciousness, the self, or the ego.
This is not the time or place to detail Janet's enormous influence on his contemporaries, among others William James and Morton Prince in Boston, W. F. H. Meyer and the Society for Psychical Research in Cambridge and London, or the early Freud in Vienna, who respectfully cites Janet seven times in his Studies on Hysteria . Janet's prestige remained undiminished until well into the mid-1920s in France and Italy, where Freudian psychoanalysis was initially greeted with significant skepticism, some of it sparked by Janet himself. 28 Likewise, one can only allude to Marinetti's extensive engagement with French culture--his education at a French collège in Alexandria, his baccalauréat in Paris, his residence in the city (alternating with spells in Milan) from 1895 to 1909--and the likelihood that he had read Janet's most important and widely publicized work. 29 Yet the particulars of Marinetti's engagement with Janet's work may matter less than a broader phenomenon, his sharing the implicit notions formed by a cultural metaphorics that articulated urgent themes of scientific and educated public culture. Marinetti's ambivalent achievement was to take that cultural metaphorics and turn it into the foundation of an aesthetics of shock and trauma, an achievement that he transmitted to the entire historical avant-garde. 30 Doing so, Marinetti constructs an imaginary and discursive space in which Futurism restages the critical themes of automatic writing and the problematics of modern subjectivity. It is not an accident, in other words, that the famous "Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism" begins with a gripping narrative vignette that recounts the domestic version of technological mishap, an accident, the overturning of a car which proves to be the traumatic birth-scene of the Futurist aesthetic. 31 Nor is it an accident that the sequel to that incident, in the long run, turns out to be the repetitive publication of manifesto after manifesto which announces yet another form of Futurist novelty, a mode of production that might almost have been designed to exemplify Freud's famous thesis in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, his attempt to reconsider the notion of trauma in the wake of World War I, that the chief characteristic of traumatic neurosis is a type of repetition compulsion, one which indexes a failure of symbolization--an incapacity to render unbearable experience into the symbolic language of dreams or mentation. 32 Over and over, with hypnotic uniformity, the Futurists issue manifesto after manifesto, each charged with recreating for reader and writer the traumatic experience of shock. By a strategy of mimetic assimilation, Futurism becomes a trauma machine. Which brings us back to the "Technical Manifesto," a work in which the reproduction of shock is now codified in the minute workings of syntax.
Marinetti's intention, as he candidly avers, is to "destroy the 'I' or 'ego'" of bourgeois subjectivity (LMM, 95; Tif2, 50), and consequently much of his attention goes to the noun, the syntactical unit that occupies the position of grammatical (and logical) subject. So much so that the manifesto offers three different precepts for the noun, each displacing the previous one and further dissolving the subject. Initially the manifesto enjoins a syntactic dédoublement: "every noun must have its double, that is to say, must be followed immediately by another noun to which it is related by analogy" (LMM, 92; Tif2, 47), a codification of the steps whereby traumatic experience was thought to initiate a process of psychological dédoublement, the creation of a "second self" that exists independently of the subject or his will. Yet this initial formulation proves inadequate, insofar as it hints at a survival of the original self (the first term or noun) and still adumbrates a principle of relatedness (analogy) that gainsays the notion of dissociation. Whence it is supplanted by a second injunction to "deliberately confound the object with the image that it evokes" (LMM, 92; Tif2, 47), a precept that more effectively dissolves the boundary between the primary noun/self and the secondary one. Still, this injunction also hints at a residual survival of the original term, however attenuated, and therefore it too is supplanted by a more astringent imperative, "to suppress all the first terms of our analogies and render no more than an uninterrupted sequence of second terms" (LMM, 97; Tif2, 53). Now the original noun/self is wholly effaced by the creation of a second self, a haunting specter that uniformly signifies the absence of its original referent, its self.
Though much briefer, the propeller's treatment of the verb turns around the same thematics of self and syntax. "The verb should be used in the infinitive form, because the infinitive adapts itself elastically to the noun and doesn't subject it to the ego of the writer who observes or imagines" (LMM, 92; Tif2, 47). Here again the object of suspicion is reflective consciousness and the distance it marks between the subject and reality, whether external (observed) or internal (imagined). The infinitive, in this account, is transformed into a variant of speed and velocity, that quintessential Futurist re for whatever most swiftly traverses the gap between reality and the self--or more accurately, that new and dissociated self which has been engendered by traumatic experience.
Perhaps the most notorious injunctions of the "Manifesto" concern the use of onomatopoeia, a practice more fully defended in a contemporary work by Marinetti, "Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and Numerical Sensibility," where he thematizes the link between onomatopoeia and violence:
Our growing love for matter, our will to penetrate it and know its vibrations, the physical sympathy that links us to motors, push us to the use of onomatopoeia. Noise, after all, is the result of solids, liquids, or gases that are in rapid motion and are either in friction with one another or crashing against each other. Onomatopoeia, which reproduces noise, is necessarily one of the most dynamic elements of poetry. As such it can substitute for the verb in the infinitive form, especially when one onomatopoeia is opposed to two or more others. [LMM, 109; Tif2, 105]
Onomatopoeia, in this view, recapitulates the primal syntax of shock, epitomizing and restaging the violent conflicts held to underlie all of matter, a universe of atoms whose continuous collisions are enlisted to lend "natural" sanction to the mechanical jolts of modern technology. Onomatopoeia, it turns out, can also substitute for the verb in the infinitive, for both are the syntactic counterparts of technological violence that is now projected as an attribute of nature, because both epitomize a common refusal of the human and a regression to the state of inorganic matter itself.
Nowhere is the premise that underlies the program of Marinetti more clearly delineated than in a passage from the manifesto "Destruction of Syntax--Wireless Imagination--Words in Freedom," in which Marinetti illustrates how the "words-in-freedom" are meant to function:
Now imagine that a friend of yours, gifted with lyrical ability of this kind, should find himself in a zone of intense life (revolution, war, shipwreck, earthquake, etc.) and should come, immediately afterwards, to recount his impressions. Do you know what your lyrical friend will instinctively do while he is still shocked (commosso)?He will begin by brutally destroying the syntax of his speech. He wastes no time in constructing periodic sentences. He could care less about punctuation or finding the right adjective. He disdains subtleties and shadings, and in haste he will assault your nerves with visual, auditory, olfactory sensations, just as their insistent pressure in him demands. The rush of steam-emotion will burst the steampipe of the sentence, the valves of punctuation, and the regular clamp of the adjective. Fistfuls of basic words without any conventional order. 33
Here is a perfect depiction of the trauma victim who is compelled by overwhelming events--epitomized here by technological accidents and warfare--to repeat the auratic experience of violence; who, because he cannot integrate his experience into the temporal orders of narrative and memory, is subject to a form of repetition compulsion that obliges him to assault his auditor with the violent sensations of the traumatic occasion, sensations endowed with talismanic significance through their sheer resistance to ordered structures of meaning. Images will now be scattered with a "maximum of disorder" ("TM," Tif2, 50), 34 gathered into what Marinetti calls "a net of images" (LMM, 94; Tif2, 49) in which each acquires an equal space that is free of a central ordering system--a counterpart of the dissociated psychic nuclei that have split off from the ego--and all of them presented without punctuation, reinforcing the levelling of syntactic hierarchies.
All of which brings us back to the narrative vignette at the beginning of the "Technical Manifesto," with its metaphorical circuits connecting the "members" of the sentence with the limbs of the body. In another essay from this period, "Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine" , Marinetti sketches his vision of the new body to be engendered by modernity. Man, he urges, will soon "externalize his will and make it into a huge invisible arm . . . he will be endowed with surprising organs" such as "a prow" that will emerge directly from the breastbone and be "the more marked the better an aviator the man of the future becomes." Indeed, Marinetti declares, "We believe in the possibility of an incalculable number of human transformations, and without a smile we declare that wings are asleep in the flesh of man." To explicate these images, Marinetti turns to the world of automatic writing and spiritualism: "You can easily understand these seemingly paradoxical hypotheses by studying the phenomena of externalized will that continually reveal themselves at spiritualist seances" (LMM, 99; Tif2, 299-300). Marinetti here is referring to a phenomenon that is largely forgotten today, but was then receiving significant media attention. From the bodies of some mediums, a strange foamy or filmy substance dubbed ectoplasm ( 5) would seem to condense and form mysterious limbs: oddly shaped arms, twisted hands, or distorted heads. The most commonly reported and widely discussed phenomena were two: hands that would emerge from the medium's chest or bosom (. 6, 7), and a "second head" that would appear just above or behind the medium's own ( 8). Produced by the same hysterical mediums [Begin Page 136] once studied by Janet, they are the somatic counterpart of automatic writing, a histrionic language of the body and a prototype for the new limbs of "multiplied man," the Futurist who will at last possess "organs adapted to a world of ceaseless shocks" (LMM, 99; Tif2, 299); and in turn they are the model for the members of the new syntactic corpus that Marinetti proposes at the outset of the "Technical Manifesto," new limbs that will finally be expressive of "all the brutal sounds, all the expressive screams of the violent life that surrounds us" (LMM, 97; Tif2, 53). It is this hysterical and putatively female body-language that serves as paradigm and metaphor for the program of "words-in-freedom"--an automatic writing of shock in which the normalized, expressive subject of liberal humanism is replaced with a collective writing of dissociated selves.
This image of textual production, to be sure, is not without elements of paradox. When Marinetti praises the medium who generates automatic writing and ectoplasmic limbs, he does so by urging that the new organs exhibit the force of her "externalized will"--a paradox, of course, because the one trait that supposedly distinguished automatic writing was the lack of volition involved in its production, the absence of will. Elsewhere, too, Marinetti vacillates on the question of will and its relation to the new writing of Futurism. 35 In a subsequent defense of the "Technical Manifesto" he describes his own experience when writing "words-in-freedom," a passage in which the motifs of the dissevered hand and floating head are mingled with the question of volition:
It is impossible to identify exactly the moment in which unconscious inspiration comes to an end and lucid will begins . . . The hand that writes is seemingly dissevered from the body and its activity is prolonged in freedom from the brain, a brain that itself has become detached from the body in some way and become airborne, observing from on high, with frightening lucidity, the unforeseen sentences that issue from the pen.Does this domineering brain passively contemplate, or does it actually control, the leaps of imagination that excite the hand? It is impossible to know. In such moments, I have observed, from a physiological standpoint, nothing more than a great void in the stomach. 36
Such a passage holds at bay a set of insoluble tensions which recur throughout Marinetti's writings, tensions between a state that simultaneously entails passive enthrallment and a sense of narcisstic omnipotence. Narcissism, of course, is an especially troubled concept in the heritage of psychoanalysis, beginning already with Freud's classic essay "On Narcissism" , which postulates a first and primary stage in human existence, within the womb and immediately following birth, a stage in which the psychological distinction between subject and object has not yet crystallized, in which all needs are gratified (and hence there are no desires, which are generated by a lack of gratification)--in short, a condition of pure pleasure, free of all conflict. 37 Postulating such a state, however, poses immense difficulties for the basic foundations of classical drive or instinct theory as previously constructed by Freud, grounded in the irreducibly conflictual dynamics of sexual and ego instincts, pleasure principle and reality principle. Freud's response to that difficulty was to postulate the existence of narcissistic libido, which would somehow take the narcissistic ego itself as its object. But this solution may have been no solution at all: it failed to specify how desire could arise in a state without want, or how it could become attached to an object (narcissistic ego) during a stage ostensibly characterized by a lack of subject/object differentiation, or how the individual would ever evolve from this monistic state of unity to the instinctual dualism otherwise presupposed by Freud. "Narcisstic libido," in other words, displaced but did not resolve the questions posed by the postulate of primary narcissism. Those questions reappear several years later in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. There, as Daniel Greenberg has argued, they are once again displaced by transforming narcissistic libido into an instance of a new and mysterious drive which Freud postulates for the first time, the death instinct, an innate impulse seeking to restore an earlier state of the unity of all things, specifically, "the unity of the inorganic" prior to the creation of life, or the organic. Freud, in effect, "projects the 'unity' of primary narcissism backwards in time, to the beginning of 'the organic,'" and in doing so he transforms it into a biological problem, the manifestation of a cosmic force inherent in every living thing, rather than a psychological one, and hence he effectively makes "the question of the specifically human implications of this 'unity' disappear from view." 38 More important, from my viewpoint, Freud does so in what is ostensibly an attempt to account for repetition, and in particular the kind of repetition compulsion that arose in response to shell shock, or traumatic neurosis, the encounter with technological violence. We need not, in other words, endorse Freud's untenable hypothesis of a death instinct, nor attempt to resolve the many dilemmas encapsulated in his notions of primary narcissism and narcissistic libido, so much as to recognize how those overlap with the kinds of mental states articulated in Marinetti's meditations on writing, technology, and the self, states in which a regressive urge to reestablish an earlier state of unity manifests itself by a dual impulse to merge and unite with the world of objects (the life instinct, or sexuality, in Freudian terms) and a concommitant desire to eliminate the self altogether, to vanish amid the dissevered ego nuclei that are themselves the outcome of technological violence. On the one hand, that impulse may owe much to our abiding ambivalence about modern communications and transcription technologies, which simultaneously promise narcissistic enhancements of the self and yet achieve them by processes that seem to efface individual agency. On the other hand, it also suggests a dynamics of identification and misidentification with the object world of technology, dynamics which have been probingly explored, admittedly in less social and more strictly psychological terms, in Lacan's account of the mirror stage, itself an outgrowth of his meditations on Freud's essay "On Narcissism." 39 But how might those dynamics be restaged, or reenacted, on a wider social scale?
The Great War produced a revival of public interest in spiritualism in every major country of Europe. The appalling quantity of dead combatants left behind a vast population of mourners seeking consolation and comfort, the assurance of continuity in the face of irremediable loss. The situation was no different in Italy, where the number of casualties had been especially high and certain features of Catholic tradition, with its cult of saints as intercessors and divine patrons, easily converged with the basic practices and motifs of spiritualism. Public disappointment with the meager gains achieved after such sacrifice crystallized in the myth of the "vittoria mutilata" which won such wide credence (i.e., the belief that Britain, France, and the U.S. had betrayed the territorial promises made in 1915 to Italy in order to secure its entrance into the war) and exacerbated an understandable need to find meaning and significance in the otherwise senseless slaughter.
Mussolini was already a celebrity by the time of the Great War's end, a re whose journalism was remarkably popular, and whose public identity had been solidified by his highly publicized break with the Socialist Party over the issue of interventionism and the serial publication of his Diary during the war years. With the meteoric rise of the Fascist Party in the course of 1920 and 1921, he acquired a status that can only be defined as stardom--he was often described at this time as the stellone, the great star--, status which is distinguished by the visual representation of personality. 40 Some of the earliest representations of Mussolini appear in postcards, a genre that is especially revealing, insofar as they were neither authorized nor produced by the Party (or later, the government), but were typically produced by smaller and more local entrepreneurs who appealed to genuinely popular markets. To that extent they offer a rare and important glimpse into popular representations and understandings of Mussolini. 41
Already in 1921, Mussolini's head, dissevered from his body and floating like a nocturnal apparition, appears in two postcards (. 9, 10) that enjoyed enormous popularity, harbingers of much to come. In 1922, shortly after Mussolini's seizure of power, another postcard designed to commemorate the "March on Rome" further elaborates these motifs ( 11). Mussolini's head is now a celestial apparition and serves as the composition's focal point. The long lines of marching citizens, which all converge toward the ghostly head, are ostensibly composed of party members, but their military helmets also transform them into reincarnations of the soldiers killed in the war. Mussolini is a tutelary deity who has redeemed their sacrifice, the spirit of those who have died, and, simultaneously, an ectoplasmic projection of whose who are alive. Balancing the head is a solitary hand raised in Fascist salute, which, while plainly connected to a young re in the foreground, might almost be a projection from the body politic of the anonymous files marching below. Images depicting Mussolini as a spirit who redeems the sacrifice of the trenches will recur throughout the life of the regime.
The regime itself also made use of such imagery, especially in the 1930s, images which forcefully connect the private body of trauma with the traumatized subject of the body politic. Consider, for example, Xanti Schawinsky's vintage poster entitled, 1934--XII, a collage designed for the 1934 referendum ( 12). A mass of individuals has been rendered into an abstract grid, on top of which il Duce's head is superimposed. "The undifferentiated masses function as the symbol of the breakdown in traditional markers of identity, such as class," Jeffrey Schnapp has astutely noted, while the superimposed head of state symbolizes the establishment of "a distinctively modern form of identity" and individuality established in the politics of illusory immediacy. "The communion of revolutionary masses and the head of state is wholly mediated by new image and print technologies," mediation that is emphasized by the prominence granted to the white screening dots that make up Mussolini's head, which in turn are mirrored--and in a Lacanian sense--by the white faces of the heads that make up his body. 42 The head of state becomes a spectral and specular projection of collective desire, one which is, literally and ratively, mass produced. Schawinsky's constructivist montage, however stylized, furnishes a depiction of a scene that was symbolically and literally reenacted at party rallies throughout the nation, as seen, for example, in this photo ( 13) of a mass rally in a town piazza, where a photo banner of Mussolini's head drapes the wall of a building and floats above the masses. The vast rally has been transformed into a collective seance in which the body politic is haunted by its "hidden self," its ghostly double.
Another contemporary photograph ( 14) records a party induction ritual in the famous "Casa del Fascio" in Como, transforming it into a species of living collage as the image triangulates three distinct elements: first, there is the line that is formed by the heads of the Party's new recruits, which leads upwards and right to culminate in the second element, a stylized head of Mussolini depicted on transparent glass above them, a head that now serves as their spectral emanation and looks down toward the third element, the marble monolith which symbolizes the regime. Its transparent text, written by piercing the stone, echoes the transparent glass depicting Mussolini's head, and it consists of three nouns, "Order Justice Authority," each a double of the other, with the whole creating what Marinetti might have called "an uninterrupted sequence of second terms." As urged in the "Technical Manifesto," the nouns are not connected by syntax or punctuation. Any identifiable grammatical subject has now vanished: now the only subject that speaks these disconnected terms is the state, which has become, in the words of one Fascist theorist, "a mystical subject that transcends all."
In another contemporary work, a bas-relief ( 15), we see a dissevered hand that is poised in Fascist salute, one attached to no body, an ectoplasmic projection of the totalitarian state, which in turn is counterbalanced by the geometricized fasces that serve as its spectral double. To the left is a list of three verbs in the infinitive which are otherwise unconnected by syntax or punctuation, a perfect embodiment of the precepts outlined in the "Technical Manifesto": TO BELIEVE TO OBEY TO T. Yet as speakers of Italian will know, the verb in the infinitive can also be used, as it is here, with the value of an imperative that is directed to everyone in general (i.e., BELIEVE OBEY T). It serves as a "mass imperative," so to speak, a grammatical construction which is conspicuous because it doesn't specify the subject whom it addresses. In effect, the individual subject has disappeared within the amorphous mass body of what was called "the corporative state." This construction, it should be added, is a specifically modern usage, one without precedent before the late nineteenth century, and one that comes into prominence under the Fascist regime. 43
The new syntax of the regime could also be transformed into new forms of writing, a somatic script written directly onto the body politic, as seen here ( 16) in a postcard from 1931 designed by Giulio Parisio to commemorate Mussolini's visit to Naples that year. Just as the ectoplasmic head that floats behind the above the medium can be converted into automatic writing, so here the head of state--and Mussolini's official title was "capo," or "head" in Italian--is transformed through the medium of technology into a rewriting of the corporative masses.
The ubiquitous head of the head of state floats everywhere above the masses in thousands of contemporary postcards and photographs, and it is not an anachronistic imposition or a fanciful collocation to connect these images with spiritualist mysticism. In early 1930, as part of its attempt to create a new elite that would restore and refresh the party, the regime established the "School of Fascist Mysticism," an entity located in Milan which operated under the direct patronage of Mussolini's brother, Arnoldo. Intended as a training ground for future publicists and propagandists, the School sponsored classes and lectures, a monthly magazine, biweekly radio programs, and occasional conferences (among the latter, one by Marinetti, 13 April 1939, on "The Revolutionary Function of Art"). Its most distinguished student, Fernando Mezzasomma, would become Minister of Popular Culture in the late Republic of Salò. Its task was to articulate the metaphysics of "reality" defined as "infinitely multiplex, flowing, imponderable . . . in which we feel . . . vague suggestions of mysterious forces that transcend us, obscure powers that remain inexplicable to our self or ego." 44 For the individual, as another Institute member explained, "has never existed as an historical reality: the individual is merely a conventional fiction never found in the real life of man . . . the subject is exalted to the degree that stringent hierarchical and disciplinary connections annihilate in him that freedom of action, that independence so dear to individualists." 45 The state, as another theorist put it, had become "a mystical subject, a worldly archangel." 46 Or in the words of yet another member of the School, "The nation is always a mystical body . . . and because it is a mystical body, it possesses us." 47 Nor were these merely idle statements. Notoriously, the regime's most sustained and successful attempt to commemorate itself was the "Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution" held in 1932, a massive and collective work dominated by Futurist designers which proved so popular that it became a permanent museum. Arranged as a historical narrative of Fascism's triumphs, it culminated in the so-called "sacrarium of martyrs," a circular crypt that culminated in a great cupola. Above a blood-red pedestal hung a metallic cross which was "bathed in a mysterious light in the close atmosphere." As the catalogue explained:
[Here], in response to the tacit evocation of the living--in the bluish gloom of the Sacrarium, behold the Martyrs who respond with, "I am here." There are thousands and thousands of voices that echo in the glimmers that infinitely repeat the speech of those who have sacrificed their lives and who now guide implacable legions on their path. 48 [Begin Page 148]
Perhaps the most forceful example of Fascism's capacity to reinscribe the members of the body politic within new languages are found in a series of photographic postcards (. 17, 18), which depict hundreds of school children whose bodies have been arranged to form a somatic script that bespeaks the new syntax of fascism. That somatic language, of course, cannot be deciphered by the citizens who have been, quite literally, conscripted into its making; it is legible only to the eyes of the great cameraman ( 19) who has directed and photographed the scene; discernible only by "the Duce, pilot of Italy," as he is termed in this postcard of 1942 ( 20), who now flies--well, over head. Here the corps morcelé of the body politic achieves its specular identity with the airplane that flies above, identity now written in a script that can be deciphered only by the master aviator, the one who has dictated it.
Inevitably we ask ourselves: what is the "hidden self" that speaks in the mysterious dictations received by spiritualist mediums, that murmurs through the propeller of Marinetti's airplane, or that inscribes the new language of automatic writing? Or again: what are we to make of the mysterious head that floats behind the "hysterical" medium, or that hovers above the "hysterical" masses of Fascist modernism? Some critics have urged us to see the "doubled" heads and ectoplasmic limbs of spiritualist mediums as part of a protofeminist language of the body, a somatic expression of all that has been repressed by patriarchal culture, a mirror image of libidinal desire. Yet most of us viewing the ubiquitous multiplication of Mussolini's head will doubtless think of the head's traditional association with reason and control, and especially here, with notions of seeing and surveillance, notions most typically linked with patriarchal ego or superego. Perhaps we err in supposing that we must choose one view over the other. Fascism was a form of politics that called into question the basic polarities of liberal thought--it was a politics of the marvelous, modernizing and yet archaizing, revolutionary and yet conservative, merging together the public and the private, blurring the traditional opposition between desire and authority. 49 Fascism promised to unleash the individual and the masses, to restore the primacy and authority of desire; just as it also promised to instill a culture of mass discipline, a desire for authority. In doing so, it may have only articulated, in a characteristically extreme form, a paradox central to modernity itself: the way in which it promises to enhance (in part through technology) individual autonomy and to enrich human agency, versus the way in which that promise has inexorably given way to a disturbing practice of collective conformity and increasing enthrallment. That same contradiction, after all, is the central paradox informing the rhetorical structure of Marinetti's "Manifesto." It is a work that offers the reader the promise of "words-in-freedom." But that promise can be realized only if the reader submits to the discipline of its rules--only if he agrees to keep taking dictation.
Lawrence Rainey is the Chair in Modernist Literature at the University of York. His new book, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture will appear this fall (Yale).
1. F. T. Marinetti, "The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature," in R. W. Flint (ed.), Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings [of] F. T. Marinetti, trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1991; 1st edition under the title Selected Writings [New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1972]), 92-97, here 92; hereafter cited as LMM. Since I have altered the phrasing of the English translations in order to correct mistakes or underscore pertinent connotations, references to the edition by Flint are meant only to help readers locate what is presently the one translation available in English. For the the text in Italian see Luciano de Maria (ed.), Teoria e invenzione futurista, 2nd edition (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), 46-54, here, 46; hereafter cited as Tif2.
The early publication history of the manifesto has been a subject of some confusion. The "Technical Manifesto" is conserved as a leaflet dated 11 May 1912 which is housed among the papers of F. T. Marinetti at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Whether or not the work was actually published on that date is unclear; notoriously, the Futurists often gave their manifestos dates that had symbolic rather than strictly chronological value. The earliest published reports of the "Technical Manifesto" appeared on 7 July 1912 in two Parisian newspapers, both of which describe the manifesto as an independent leaflet; see Novella Novella, "Contributo ad una bibliografia della fortuna del Futurismo in Francia (1909-1920)," in P. A. Jannini (ed.), La fortuna del futurismo in Francia (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979), 242, entries 157-58. It is presumed that the version sent to French newspapers was a French one. However, it should not be assumed that this French version was a translation made only after composition and publication of the original in Italian, for it is well known that Marinetti frequently composed his works first in French and only thereafter translated them into Italian. Lacking more precise information from Marinetti's extant correspondence, little of which has been collected or published, one can only assume that the date of 11 May is generally an accurate indication of the Manifesto's composition, surmise that it was first written in French and then translated into Italian, and trust that publication of the manifesto as an independent manifesto took place in May or June 1912, with copies of the French leaflet being received by Parisian newspapers in the first week of July.
2. Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988), 56; hereafter abbreviated FM.
3. Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 204.
4. For example, Perloff, FM, 51-64, who discusses the manifesto as the key document in "The Invention of Collage" (FM, 44-79); and David Antin, "Some Questions about Modernism," Occident 8 (Spring 1974), 21-32. Discussion of the "Technical Manifesto" that do not take up the question of collage include Filippo Bettini, "Forma e contenuto nel 'Manifesto Tecnico,'" unpublished paper read 12 March 1993 at the conference on "Parole in Libertà Futuriste: Futurist Literature," University of California at Los Angeles; and Jeffrey Schnapp, "Propeller Talk," 1.3 (September, 1994), 154-76
5. On the chronology of Braque and Picasso's invention of collage, see William Rubin's discussion of "The Transition of 1912: Paper Sculpture, Collage, and Papier Collé," in his Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 30-41; see also his chronology, 400-13. Rubin shows beyond doubt that Braque's first papier collé was made between 3 and 13 September 1912, though he cautions against the view that collage issues directly from this experiment. Instead, he notes, the impetus toward its development stemmed from four different sources: the lost paper-sculptures that Braque began making in the spring of 1912, the principle of non-heterogeneous materials developed in Picasso's Still-Life with Chair-Caning, from May 1912; Braque's first work in papier collé in September 1912, and Picasso's experiments with the cutaway structure of the famous Guitar in October 1912.
6. Antin, "Some Questions About Modernism," 21.
7. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 34, 38.
8. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: E. P. Dutton, n.d.; 1st edtn. 1948), 222. Ellmann deploys this description in relation to the writing of Georgie Hyde-Lees.
9. Marinetti is obviously alluding to the ancient rhetorical trope in which the sentence was divided into membra; on this tradition see Josef Martin, Antike Rhetorik: Technik und Methode (Munich: C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1973), 317-19.
10. The exhibitions took place on four evenings, 14 through 17 November (Wednesday through Saturday), 1849, at Corinthian Hall, a public assembly hall in Rochester which had opened a few months earlier and could hold 400 people. Advertisements for the exhibition were headlined: "WONDERFUL PHENOMENA, AT CORINTHIAN HALL" (Rochester Daily Advertiser, 14 November 1849, 2, col. 5; Rochester Daily Democrat, 2, col. 7). All quotations are from Anonymous, "A Ghost!" Rochester Daily Democrat, 16 November 1849, 2 col. 3, which summarizes Capron's lecture and places "telegraphic dispatches" in quotation marks as if to indicate that they are a direct quotation. The Daily Democrat's is the most extensive contemporary account of the exhibitions not written by a participant. It would appear that attendance at the exhibitions was slack: after those of 14 and 15 November were advertised at 25 cents per person, the price was cut in half (to 12 and 1/2 cents) for those of 16 and 17 November, a strategy that was evidently successful, since "four or five hundred persons" attended the final exhibition of 17 November. (See advertisement, Rochester Daily Democrat, 16 November 1849, 2, col. 8; advertisement, Rochester Daily Advertiser, 17 November 1849, 2 col. 7; and "Mysterious Knocking," Rocehster Daily American, 20 November 1849, 2, col. 5.) Apart from the account in the Rochester Daily Democrat, mentioned earlier, news coverage of the exhibitions was limited to brief notices comprising two or three sentences ("Mysterious Knocking, Again," Rochester Daily American, 15 November 1849, 2, col. 3; "And Still It Raps," Rochester Daily American, 16 November 1849, 2, col. 3; "Knock! Knock!! Knock!!!" Rochester Daily American, 17 November 1849, 2, col. 3). The most extensive accounts are Capron's own, detailed in the next note.
11. Eliab W. Capron and George Willets (Capron's collaborator in organizing the Rochester exhibitions), "Singular Revelations: Communications with Spirits in Western New York," New York Daily Tribune, 29 November 1849, 2 cols. 1-2, dated 22 November 1849; and Eliab W. Capron and Henry D. Barron, Singular Revelations: Explanation and History of the Mysterious Communion with Spirits . . ., (Auburn, NY: Finn and Rockewell, Printers, 1850), 49-54 for discussion of the Rochester exhibitions, 51-52 for a transcription of most of the piece that had appeared in the New York Daily Tribune. One example of the use of "medium" in this period must suffice: "This paper was instituted as you are already aware, for the purpose of having a free medium for the dissemination of principles deemed true and sacred . . ." (William Fishbough, "To the Friends of Our Paper," The Univercoelum and Spiritual Philosopher 2, no. 15 [10 March 1848], 234). The quotation is especially pertinent because The Universcoelum was the first newspaper anywhere to report on early spiritualism, in "Strange Manifestations," The Univercoelum and Spiritual Philosopher 3, no. 10 (3 February 1849), 155.
12. The beginnings of spiritualism have been recounted in many works, but most are unreliable because they wish either to attack or defend the Fox sisters. More scholarly treatments have set their activities solely against the background of contemporary religious history in upstate New York, slighting the relations between early spritiualism and the telegraph or the extent to which its rapid diffusion depended on contemporary media and spectacle. For an early account of the Fox sisters see [Epes Sargent], Planchette; or, the Despair of Science (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869), Chapter Two. See Geoffrey K. Nelson, Spiritualism and Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, 3-6; R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 7-8, 12-13, 15, and 19. The best account is by Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Botson: Beacon Press, 1989), whose study of the links between spiritualism and early feminism is exemplary, though inadvertently her focus slights the Fox sisters, who had no interest in feminism, and the role of the contemporary press in shaping spiritualism's fortunes.
14. On the journey of Mrs. Hayden to England see Oppenheim, The Other World, 11; and Nelson, Spiritualism and Society, 89-91. On the rise of spiritualism in France, see Christine Bergé, La Voix des Esprits: Ethnologie du spiritisme (Paris: Éditions Métaillié, 1990), 27-28; and Régis Ladous, Le Spiritisme (Paris: Éditions Cerf, 1989), 27-30.
15. The best history of the telegraph industry in the U.S. is Menahem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Informaiton in America, 1844-1897 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). Among earlier accounts, the most circumstantial is still James D. Reid, The Telegraph in America (New York: for the author by John Polhemus, 1886), 152-78, 256-67, 300-26, 455-71. Also useful is A. R. Brewer, Wester Union Telegraph Company, 1851-1901: A Retrospect (New York: Western Union Telegraph Company, 1901).
16. Blondheim, News Over the Wires, 42.
17. Allan Kardec, Le Livre des Médiums (Paris: Éditions Dervy, 1994; rept. of 2nd edition, Paris, 1857), 289-90. The original reads: ". . . leur tâche est celle d'une machine électrique, qui transmet les dépêches télégraphiques d'un point éloigné à un autre point éloigné de la terre. Ainsi, quand nous voulons dicter une communication, nous agissons sur le médium comme l'employé du télégraphie sur son appareil."
18. [Sargent], Planchette, 2; Kardec, Le Livre des Médiums, 176-82, and 190-94 on the various predecessors and contemporaries of the planchette. Kardec, 180, also notes that several of the early writing machines, all of which he knows only "par les dessins et par les descriptions qui en été publiés en Amérique," resemble "des cadrans des télégraphes électriques."
19. Anonymous, "What is Planchette?," Scientific American 19 no. 2 (8 July 1868), [17]-18; and Gina Covina, The OUIJA Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 102-104. In 1966 William Fuld, together with his brother Isaac, sold the OUIJA board to the toy manufacturing company, Parker Brothers. In the decade 1969-1979 the company sold more than seven million boards.
20. Félida's case was publicized by Dr. Eugène Azam. A full bibliography of his writings on her appears in Ian Hacking The Rewriting of the Soul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 298-99, who also gives an exemplary discussion of her case, 159-70.
21. See Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 363-369. Gauld summarizes: "As may be supposed, Azam holds that spontaneous and induced somnambulism (hypnosis) are essentially identical" .
22. "Every French case of dédoublement was described as hysteric," Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, 162. For a comprehensive discussion of the debate that has accumulated around the question of hysteria in the last two decades, see Mark Micale, Approaches to Hysteria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). For scholars of English literature the most familiar discussion is still that of Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady (New York: Penguin, 1987; 1st edition, 1985). Two works that have appeared since the publication of Micale's book are Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) and Sander Gilman et al., Hysteria Beyond Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
23. See Esther Fischer-Homberg, Die traumatische Neurose: Vom somatischen zum sozialen Leiden (Bern: Verlag Hans Huber, 1972).
24. The term "traumatic hysteria" is devised by Harmine Oppenheim in the late 1880s; see Schivelbush, The Railway Journey, 142, and Fischer-Homberg, Die traumatische Neurose, 29-36.
25. Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, 184.
26. Pierre Janet, "Les Actes inconscients et le dédoublement de la personnalité," Revue philosophique 22 (Dec. 1886): 577-92.
27. Pierre Janet, L'Automatisme pychologique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1889); hereafter abbreviated AP.
28. Notoriously, Janet repudiated psychoanalysis in August, 1913 in a lecture given at the Seventeenth International Congress of Medicine held in London; his lecture was published as "La Psycho-analyse," Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique 11 : 1-36, 96-130. A comparison of their respective views is given by Claude M. Prévost, Janet, Freud et la psychologie clinique (Paris: Payot, 1973); see also Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, 195-97. On the French reception of psychoanalysis, see Jean-Pierre Mordier, Les Débuts de la psychanalyse en France, 1895-1926 (Paris: Libraire François Maspero, 1981) and Elizabeth Roudinesco, La Bataille de cents ans: historie de la pschanalyse en France (Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1982); on the Italian, Michel David, La psicoanalisi nella cultura italiana, 2nd. edtn. (Turin: Boringhieri, 1970).
29. The only biographical accounts of Marinetti are the unreliable work by Gino Agnese, Marinetti: una vita espolsiva (Milan: Camunia, 1990), and Giovanni Lista, F. T. Marinetti: l'anarchiste du futurisme: biographie (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Seguier, 1995).
30. Breton would write that Surrealism was defined by its ability to find images "endowed with a persuasive strength rigorously proportional to the violence of the initial shock they produced." See his Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 88. The original reads: "De telles images, dont les plus beaux spécimen se recontrent chez Lautréamont, son douées d'une force de persuasion rigorureusement proprotionnée à la violence du choc initial qu'elles on producit" (uvres complètes, ed. Margueritte Bonnet, vol. 2 [Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, 1992], 755.) As for Surrealism's notrious interest in the notion of "chance," that too may be seen as contiguous with the genesis of Futurism by an "accident." Likewise, I suspect that much of Dada's interest in shock derives from Marinetti and, of course, from the broader interest in shock that resulted after the outbreak of World War I.
31. F. T. Marinetti, "Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism," LMM, 47-52, Tif2, 7-14. The manifesto contains other allusions to automatic writing. Before the Futurists take their ride in an automobile, they are described as "blackening many pages with frenteic writing" and are proleptically compared with a ship's firemen before their furnaces, "black phantasms." When the narrator and his companions go outside to the car, he stretches out on it "like a corpse on its bier."
32. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psyco-Analysis, 1953-1974), vol. 18.
33. F. T. Marinetti, "Destruction of Syntax--Wirless Imagination--Words in Freedom," Tif2, 70; English translation in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 70. The Italian term, commosso, like its French counterpart commotioné, from which its modern sense may be said to be derived, is a medical term meaning specifically "shocked, traumatized."
34. The passage is omitted from LMM, 95.
35. In "Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine" , Marinetti observes: "You surely must have heard the remarks that owners of automobolies and factory directors commonly make: motors . . . seem to have personalities, souls, or wills" (LMM, 99; Tif2, 298; ellipsis mine). The rhetoric of this passage asserts mechanical volition, but simultaneously attentuates the claim with the verb "to seem."
36. F. T. Marinetti, "Risposte all obiezioni" (11 August 1912), Tif2, 56; this essay has never been translated into English, although it accompanies the "Tehcnical Manifesto" in every edition for which Marinetti was responsible, apart from the original leaflet verssion.
37. Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism" , The Standard Edition, vol. 14, 67-102. Malcolm Bowie points out that Freud actually entertained two theories of narcissism, an earlier and a later. See his Freud, Proust and Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 15-16, and Lacan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991, 33. I omit consideration of the later notion of narcissism in Freud.
38. See Daniel E. Greenberg, "Instinct and Primary Narcissism in Freud's Later Theory: An Interpretation and Reformulation of 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle,'" International Journal of Pyscho-Analysis 71 , 271-83. I am indebted to Greenberg's essay throughout my discussion of narcissism.
39. Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I," in Alan Sheridan, ed., Écrits (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 1-7; on Lacan and Freud's "On Narcissism," see Bowie, Lacan, 34-35, and Jonathan Scott Lee, Jacques Lacan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1991), 25-27, 111-12.
40. In 1915 Mussolini's newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia, had a circulation of almost one hundred thousand; see Max Gallo, Mussolini's Italy, trans. Charles Markmann (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 39. Nancy Cox-McCormack, an American sculptor who lived in Rome from January 1922 to July 1923, later remembered that, "Every artist I knew . . . was enthusiastic about the 'stellone' (great star) who had appeared in the sky 'to save Italy from utter ruin'" (Nancy Cox-McCormack, unpublished typescript titled "An Italian Memoir," Amherst, MA, Smith College, the Sophia Smith Collection, Nancy Cox-McCormack Papers, Box 8, Folder 1, ts. 19.
On the star system, which some see as specific to film and whose emergence is typically dated to circa 1910, see Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979), and Heavenly Bodies (London: British Film Institute, 1987), as well as Richard de Cordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1990). Stardom, though doubtless influenced by the movies--and Hollywood movies overwhelmed Italy in the post-war years, virtually destroying the native film industry--should be more generally considered an effect of the development of the mass media. It is no accident that Mussolini, the editor of a newspaper and later the head of a regime which evinced great interest in the mass media, should have acquired "star" status.
41. Enrico Sturani, Otto milioni di cartoline per il Duce (Turin: Centro Scientifico Editore, 1994), 17-62. This exemplary study also offers an indispensable repertory of popular imagery during the regime, and it is genuinely a landmark volume in studies of fascism. Nothing comparable exists for Nazi Germany.
42. Jeffrey Schnapp, "Heads of State," Art Issues 24 (Sept./Oct. 1992): 23-28; here 26.
43. Margrit Huber-Sauter, Zur Syntax des Imperativs im Italienischen (Berne: A. Francke Ag. Verlag, 1951), 239-42; Monique Jacqmain, "Vicende dell'imperativo," Studi di grammatica italiana 3 : 233-248; Miklós Fogarisi, Grammatica italiana del novecento, 2nd edtn. (Milan: Bulzoni, 1984), 77-78; Pavao Tekavcic, Grammatica storica dell'italiano, vol. 2 Morfosintassi (Bologna: il Mulino, 1972), 413-21.
44. V. Piccoli, "Il centenario di Hegel," Gerarchia 11 (October 1931): 853-59; quoted in Daniele Marchesini, La scuola dei gerarchi: mistica fascista: storia, problemi, istitutzioni (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976), 61. Marinetti's lecture is detailed in Marchesini, La scuola, 27 n. 1.
45. A. Gracis, "Non individuo ma 'soggetto,'" Dottrina fascista 2 (January 1938): 197; quoted in Marchesini, La scuola, 106-107.
46. Camillo Pellizzi, "La iniziativa individuale nella politica fascista," Gerarchia 19 (December 1931), quoted in Emilio Gentile, Il culto del littorio: la sacralizzazione della politica nell'Italia fascista (Bari: Laterza, 1993), 119.
47. N. Padellaro, "Tradizione antirazionalistica e antiintellettualistica del pensiero degli italici," Dottrina fascista 4 (Jan.-Mar. 1940): 532; quoted in Marchesini, La scuola, 40.
48. D. Alfieri and L. Freddi, eds. Mostra della rivoluzione fascsta, guida storica (Bergamo: Partito Nazionale Fascista, 1933), 227-229, quoted in Gentile, Il culto del littorio, 226.
49. "We allow ourselves the luxury of being aristocrats and democrats, conservatives and progressives, reactionaries and revolutionaries, legalist or illegalist, depending on circumstances of time, place, and situation, in a word, "of history," in which we are obliged to live and act." The original reads: "Noi ci permettiamo il lusso di essere aristocratici e democratici; conservatori e progressisiti; reazionari e rivoluzionari; legalitari e illegalitari, a seconda delle circonstanze di tempo, di luogo, di ambiente, in una parola, "di storia", nelle quali siamo constretti a vivere e ad agire." Benito Mussolini, Il Popolo d'Italia, n. 70, 23 March 1921, viii; reprinted in Opera omnia, eds. Edoardo e Duilio Susmel (Florence: La Fenice, 1955), vol. 16, 212.
.
In 1936, Gertrude Stein was invited to England to lecture at Oxford and Cambridge. She prepared two talks for the occasion, one of which was called "What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them." 1 Like all of her theoretical pronouncements, this text is a bravura combination of speculative audacity, adroit playfulness, and flagrant self-promotion. It is, in other words, a miniature attempt to produce her own version of precisely that class of object whose extreme rarity the lecture's title asserts. However few the number of genuine masterpieces, Stein is not only certain that they exist and are worth striving to create, but, more interestingly, she is equally sure that her audience shares the same convictions for reasons wholly independent of any particular works she might invoke. Indeed, her lecture scarcely bothers to mention, let alone analyze, any specific examples at all--apart, of course, from her own writings, along with passing glances at Hamlet and Robinson Crusoe. To Stein, the features of individual masterpieces are almost incidental compared to the overwhelming significance of the category as such.
Paradoxically, though, in spite of Stein's near hypostatization of the masterpiece, she deliberately avoids drawing on the rhetoric of the sublime when defining it, relying instead on the unemphatic, homespun verb "to make." No word occurs more frequently in Stein's writings, or resonates with more obvious authorial self-identification. Even in the charged context of defining of the masterpiece, she depends wholly on the notions of deliberate intention and repeated labor suggested by the workmanlike concept of making. For all their self-evident and timeless authority, masterpieces are not the result of some transcendent revelation or supra-rational inspiration; masterpieces are made, rarely and against extraordinary odds, but, like other, more ordinary works of human days and hands, they must nonetheless be made. Through this insistence, Stein enables us to hear, behind its post-Enlightenment, idealist sublimation, something of the term's more prosaic history.
Unlike most of our critical vocabulary that emerged from a subtly nuanced Graeco-Latin philosophical and aesthetic discourse, the word "masterpiece" is entirely medieval in origin and first appeared in the context of regulatory legislation governing artisanal activity. 2 The exercise of a profession during the Middle Ages necessitated admission to a guild or corporation, confirmed by the candidate's recognition as a master, usually through the production of a chef d'oeuvre or Meisterstück that had to conform to strictly defined criteria and was subject to an official examination by the senior members of a guild. Such a requirement is mentioned for the first time in Etienne Boileau's Livre de métier, which is datable between 1261 and 1271 and contains the statutes governing the corporations in the city of Paris. As the record amply demonstrates, "the most striking feature of the Medieval institution of Masterpiece-making was its wholly artisanal purpose. Masterpieces were executed not just by goldsmiths and tapestry weavers, where a certain 'artistic' quality might be assumed, but also apothecaries, carpenters, rope-makers, barbers, locksmiths, tailors, and cooks" (M, 5). 3 My favorite example of such officially mandated masterpiece making, one that a dedicated connoisseur of the dinner table like Gertrude Stein surely would have applauded, is the following list of dishes required of a candidate for master chef in 1576 in Calais:
a turkey in rum and vanilla sauce, three partridges in a pâté, a milk-fed kid roasted on a spit, a boar with lard, a tart with jellied filling decorated with fleurs-de-lys of different colors, a basket made with candied sticks interlaced and variously colored, a lion carved in jellied cream, an imitation bunch of grapes made of jelly and an almond tart [M, 5-6].
Stein, of course, is not the only modernist who would have found such a list imaginatively compelling. To a remarkable extent, the modernists were fascinated by catalogues and lists of every description, and when they incorporated lengthy inventories into their own texts, it was not just because doing so was the easiest way to signal an affinity between their work and classical epics. Such catalogues also functioned as affectionately parodic microcosms of the project of producing encyclopedic masterpieces. A list may be the most primitive of all transcriptions, but it also has the potential to be the most peremptory and willful affirmation of a text's power to incorporate anything at all into its own unfolding. 4 The scarcely veiled proprietary relationship of the list maker to the objects itemized makes the creation of lists like an ever-expanding appropriation of the world's physical and imaginative commodities. Insofar as we are all both story tellers and story dwellers, we rely on syntax and plot to impose some order on the heterogeneity of experience. Lists, however, often flourish by flamboyantly demonstrating their arbitrariness, and they can suggest entirely new patterns of meaning without any discernible story line or grammar. Similar to a connoisseur's collection of cherished objects or texts, a catalogue need not be based on any prior consonance among its components, nor need it be organized according to fixed hierarchic principles established before the items on the list were invented or found; it is sufficient that at one time each element pleased the cataloguer. Precisely because the rules governing the placement and sequence of a list's elements seem so strict, although never explicitly stated, lists compel their reader to work at divining the intention of the listmaker. Indeed, seen in this light, Stephen Dedalus's famous account of the quasidivine nature of the artist resembles nothing so much as a description of a particularly adroit maker of lists: "the personality . . . finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak . . . The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." 5
Although the most minimal of structuring devices, the list's apparent conceptual poverty is compensated for by its capacity to marshal the potentially infinite richness of montage, where, as Richard Sieburth has pointed out, any term "may enter into sudden adjacency with another" and generate new meanings out of the juxtaposition. 6 Whether the catalogues are sovereignly comic like James Joyce's, or deeply melancholic like Walter Benjamin's, it is striking how thoroughly the logic of list making crystallizes the modernist masterpiece's ultimate ambition. In all such lists, the randomness and contingency of history and the memorializing impulse of the library intersect, bringing everything, from the culture's canonical topoi to arcane, almost forgotten citations, and from contemporary, public controversies to the writer's most personal, private concerns, into a meaningful, new narrative order.
Early in his Cantos, almost as a manifesto of the poem to come, Ezra Pound offers a terse catalogue of what he thinks the modernist masterpiece must incorporate and make new:
And they want to know what we talked about?
"de litteris et de armis, praestantibusque ingeniis,"
Both of ancient times and our own; books, arms,
And of men of unusual genius,
Both of ancient times and our own, in short the usual subjects
Of conversation between intelligent men. 7
Beneath their lapidary assurance, there is an extraordinary amount of aggression in these lines, a preemptive dismissal of all those skeptical of such princely modes of cultural transmission. The record of heroism and luminous intelligence kept vivid by a small band of "intelligent men"--and in Pound, the gender of the speakers is axiomatic--will always remain a source of suspicion and fear to the "they" who must ask from outside what "we talked about." The aggression itself, however, is cunningly balanced by a flattering seduction of the reader. "Learn to cherish the same values and cultural highpoints as we do," so the implicit promise runs, "and you too will become worthy of being included in the conversation." The threat of exclusion from, and the prospect of admission to the charmed circle work together to try to captivate the reader and make him into the poem's studious acolyte.
The Cantos' defiantly hierarchic vision, although enormously influential, is far from the only or even the most widely imitated model of what a twentieth-century masterpiece might encompass. Against Pound's story of a small, permanently endangered, permanently renewed community quickened into thought and action by the inspiration of the finest moments of its past, it is tempting to invoke such counterexamples as Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The domestic heroism of Joyce's ad-canvasser and sleeping publican are undoubtedly admirable, but we are unlikely to confuse them with Sigismundo Malatesta's ferocity, and their conversation, if endearing and alert, scarcely seems comparable to the quattrocenteschi civilities Pound celebrates. Most of Joyce's characters, that is, would never be able to identify what Pound called his poem's foundational "list of beautiful objects," and they surely do not possess the kind of virtù required to be included in The Cantos' catalogue of world-transforming artists, thinkers, and builders of cities. 8
Such a ready-to-hand antithesis is largely spurious, however. As most readers know only too well by now, the speech of even Joyce's least educated characters is as resonant with literary echoes as anything in The Cantos, and almost every paragraph of Joyce's novels contains multiple references to "books, arms, / And men of unusual genius, / Both of ancient times and our own." The more basic distinction, it seems to me, is that all of the major res in The Cantos are alert to their historical and literary antecedents; their self-consciousness consists precisely in first acquiring and then striving to make new the instigation of their cultural heritage. Although its readers require enormous assistance in tracking down the poem's many references, these are usually fully present to the characters who either articulate or incarnate the indispensable cultural wisdom. We have trouble understanding the sense of numerous passages, but no one within The Cantos faces a similar plight. In Ulysses, on the contrary, none of the characters, whether highly cultured or semiliterate, is fully aware of the extensive provenance of his words and actions. Such knowledge belongs to the consciousness shaping the work as a whole, and, to a significantly lesser extent, to the novel's painstakingly instructed readers. Even for those who enjoy rendering such judgments, it cannot be an easy matter to determine whether Joyce's network of disguised allusions, shared between author and reader over the heads of the fictional characters, is more complicitous with a hierarchic and totalizing system of culture than are, if the oxymoron be permitted, The Cantos' openly arcane references.
More pivotal than these distinctions between Pound's and Joyce's references is how their texts require students, a trait common to a whole constellation of modernist masterpieces, but quite different from the scrupulously attentive readers demanded by even their most intricate predecessors. An explosion of citations and a deliberate effort to thwart an unworked-for comprehension on the part of their audience characterize many of the most significant modernist works and are direct consequences of their makers' drive to create a new kind of encyclopedic masterpiece. Both formally and biographically, this urge predates the realization of any specific works and constitutes the horizon of expectation for each fresh attempt. The pressure to produce such a masterpiece has a complex history of its own, and I now want to focus on the relationship between that history, the nature of the need it answered, and its consequences for ensuing generations of artists.
Perhaps the most succinct way to begin mapping the complex trajectory whose end result is a theory of modernist masterpieces is to go back to two nineteenth-century writers whose programmatic declarations at first glance would seem to share little with one another, and still less with Pound, Joyce, or Stein.
In February, 1844, Honoré de Balzac wrote a characteristically emphatic combination of love-letter and self-description to his lover and future wife, Éveline Hanska:
This, in sum, is the game I am playing. Four men will have had an enormous life: Napoleon, Cuvier, O'Connell, and I intend to be the fourth. The first one lived the life of Europe; he engrafted himself to it through his armies! The second wedded the whole globe! The third made himself the incarnation of a people! And I--I shall have carried an entire society in my head! 9
What I want to emphasize here is the carefully chosen range of Balzac's self-comparisons. First, there is Napoleon Bonaparte, the parvenu whose conquests showed the virtually limitless potential of genius to make a single individual's will the active principle of European history. 10 Second, there is Baron Cuvier (1769-1832), the celebrated naturalist whose work in comparative anatomy and systems of zoological classification led to novel ways of ordering, and thus understanding, life itself. 11 Third, there is Daniel O'Connell, the champion of the disenfranchised, whose political gifts and moral passion made him "the incarnation of an entire people." Finally, there is Balzac himself, the prodigious novelist whose ambition encompassed nothing less than the creation of a parallel, self-contained social and political totality. This imaginative project's challenge was, at its most grandiose, "to compete with civil society" ("faire concurrence à l'Etat-Civil"). 12 The terms of Balzac's comparisons are no more accidental than is the all-embracing, epic title, The Human Comedy, that he finally chose for his sequence of novels. I want to suggest that by placing himself last in the list, he was also indicating both that his own work would unite, in a fundamentally new way, the distinctive energies of all three preceding res, and that The Human Comedy would eventually be seen as the summa of the century's most decisive accomplishments and aims.
Against this colossally ambitious self-definition, I would like to balance Stéphane Mallarmé's equally provocative announcements in "Crise De Vers":
Languages are imperfect precisely because there are several of them; the one supreme language is lacking . . . the very diversity of idioms on earth prevents one from uttering the words which otherwise would be, by a single articulation, the fullness of truth itself. This prohibition exists expressly . . . to eliminate any grounds for fantasizing oneself God. 13
It is a critical commonplace that no two writers could be further apart in method, craftsmanship, or intended audience than Balzac and Mallarmé. Yet when one reads their various programmatic declarations, what stands out is the unprecedented insistence with which they both claimed for their art the power to create a separate world that is as comprehensive as the realm of quotidian reality. Or, as Mallarmé put it with characteristic absolutism, "everything in the world exists to culminate in one book" ("tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre"). 14 Not in "a book," as the words are invariably translated, but rather in one unique, all-encompassing text that would absorb not just all prosaic objects and events, but also all prior artistic creation. I have argued elsewhere that, unlike for Pound or Joyce, for Mallarmé the poetic text is neither the discoverer nor even the celebrant of previously extant values. Instead, it is their sole originator, at once the source and locus of meaning. The words of such a poem must be the noumenal meaning absent from the concrete realm of human activity, and the relationship between text and values is not one of embodiment but of absolute identity. 15 In rethinking Mallarmé's project from the perspective of Joyce's or Pound's texts, however, what now strikes me as crucial is how the sheer multiplicity of poems and languages is an implicit rebuke to Mallarmé's aspirations. In principle, there can only be one ultimate text, "Le Livre," and hence only one language in which the entire, anarchic raw material of separate human discourses would be incorporated, transformed, and made whole again, an ultimate poem purer even than Homer's work, of whose epics Mallarmé was to complain that they represented a "fall" (déchéance) from the magical plenitude of Orpheus's verses. If the decline into separate texts is a permanent reminder of how far we are from divinity, it also issues what amounts to a cosmic challenge to undo the Fall by inventing a new tongue in which the lost totality of separate discourses could be synthesized anew. It also contains the rather startlingly antinomian implication that such inventiveness would be quite literally a God-like act.
For all their intransigent absolutism, Mallarmé's formulations undoubtedly owe a great deal to the discourse by and about Wagner that marked French aesthetic theorizing for over four decades, beginning in the spring of 1861 with Baudelaire's epochal essay on the composer. 16 Mallarmé, much like Joyce a generation later, was both spurred on and left profoundly apprehensive by Wagner's attempt to create a Gesamtkunstwerk or "total work of art" in which music, verse, and spectacle were united into a single aesthetic creation. Mallarmé saw in such forms the most potent, and hence dangerous, competitors for the poet's prerogative to be the alchemist of the new totality, and any full treatment of this topic would necessitate an extended evaluation of both Beethoven's and Wagner's roles in a theory of the modernist masterpiece. 17 Even if we restrict ourselves to pondering Mallarmé's statement from "Crise de vers"--"Languages are imperfect precisely because there are several of them; the one supreme language is lacking"--it is impossible not to be reminded of the linguistic inventiveness of Finnegans Wake or The Cantos' mixture of different languages, hieroglyphs, musical notations, and Chinese ideograms. In "Canto 86," Pound tells us "It can't be all in one language," but if this modestly suggests that different cultures each have something of value to contribute to humankind's self-understanding, then it also implies, with more truculence, that the new masterpiece itself ought not to be written in a single language (C, 563). In order to be a masterpiece at all, it had better strive to become the one, central book containing the essential wisdom, the talismanic "piths and gists," of all cultures.
I am far from introducing the absurd claim that earlier artists had not been concerned, programmatically and self-consciously, with the creation of enduring works. From Horace's certainty that his lines would outlast the ruler and city they ostensibly celebrate to the innumerable Renaissance variations on the topos of the poet's bestowing immortality on an all-too transitory lover, it would be fatuous to recite the list of earlier texts that carry clear evidence of their makers' hopes for a measure of permanent cultural centrality. There is, however, something essentially different about the terms in which modernist writers conceived of the project of masterpiece making. In defense of the criticism aimed at the apparently haphazard ordering of The Cantos, Pound retorted that, unlike Dante, he had no "Aquinas map," no culturally shared, philosophical-theological system by which to plot the progression of his tale of the tribe. 18 He kept up a steady stream of prose essays, letters, and public pronouncements designed both to justify his procedure and to help his readers make sense of the work in progress. For similar reasons, although in a characteristically more hidden but also more systematic way, Joyce helped create a critical framework for Ulysses by providing carefully chosen admirers with the various schema for the novel from which we all, no matter what the ambiguities and questions, continue to benefit. The very need, however, for such efforts underlines the severity of the dilemma both Pound and Joyce confronted. 19 Their task was not really commensurate with the efforts of even their most ambitious predecessors, in part because the category of the whole had become essentially arbitrary. One could accept, in other words, the abstract principle of a Gesamtkunstwerk, but since there was no longer cultural agreement on what constituted a coherent totality in the first place, each artist was compelled to work out his own, particular, and thus necessarily idiosyncratic selection. The logic of a representative masterpiece makes any acknowledgment of its arbitrariness inadmissible, however, so the text must not only select its materia poetica from a range of possibilities and with an absence of generic guidelines hitherto unthinkable, but it must also do so in such a way as to make that selection appear simultaneously inevitable and complete. In the hope of making the stakes--and the strains--of such a project more explicit, I want to conclude by offering a series of imperatives, illicitly modeled on Wallace Stevens's categories in his Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, the most lucid example in American writing of a modernist masterpiece composed as an interrogation of the very possibility of its existence. My argument, to express the matter as concisely as possible, is that it was essential for the modernist masterpiece to claim to fulfill these imperatives--that they are, in fact, its necessary categories--but that for powerful logical and historical reasons they remain, in actuality, impossible to satisfy. What emerges out of the tension between the fulfillment and the frustration of these demands is precisely what we have come to recognize as the characteristic triumphs and particular problems of the modernist masterpiece.
In resonance, implication, and significance, the modernist masterpiece must make clear that no matter how gritty with the texture of local details its narrative, and no matter how autobiographically determined the selection of its specific settings and themes, its true reach is global and transhistorical. Thus, for example, Joyce has to insist that "Ulysses/Bloom is the only complete all-round character presented by any writer," 20 and Pound needs to assure us that "with one day's reading a man may have the key [presumably to a just society and a wiser life] in his hands" (C, 427). In this regard, one can regard Sigmund Freud's project as the creation of a special sort of modernist masterpiece. Freud's theorizing increasingly laid claim to an all-inclusive understanding of human nature and civilization, not just of his patients' individual psyches. Freud's Standard Edition is thus not only his encyclopedic masterpiece, but it is also a remarkably Balzacian one. Throughout the Freudian corpus, a few specific res, the "Case Histories", function both as exemplary instances and pedagogic models for a theory of humanity as a whole so that Dora, the Wolf Man, Little Hans, and the Rat Man have a very similar function in Freud's Standard Edition to the one occupied by Rastignac, Vautrin, César Birotteau, Louis Lambert, and the other central characters in the The Human Comedy.
One way to enact this balancing act between the local and the universal is to establish an apostolic succession in which the new work is seen as the rightful successor of the masterpieces that preceded it. The early years of this century showed an unprecedented use of classical myth for just this purpose. The modernists' widespread reliance on mythological materials is ultimately less important for its specific thematic or even structuring function than as a means of asserting two indispensable, general claims, namely that the new masterpiece is the legitimate, present-day incarnation of the culture's foundational texts and topoi, and that its alertness to the contingencies of the present is congruent with its status as an incipient classic. Baudelaire defined the secret ambition of modern art in exactly these terms, "it longs to be worthy of itself becoming antiquity." 21 Linked to this strategy, but logically independent of it, is the decision to make the text's universality palpable by creating a new kind of language for it that will embody in its very articulation the universal claims of the narrative. Ultimately, not just the work's characters and events, but even its language will be drawn, in the wonderful formula of Finnegans Wake, from "all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history." 22
However, no matter how widely an author casts the net of his thematic concerns, nor how polyglot his textual inclusions, the ambition to show and tell the epoch's fundamental truths is a desperately hopeless gamble. The felt obligation of providing his readers with the "key" to unlocking these truths places an intolerable pressure on the masterpiece maker. The increasing shrillness of texts like the Cantos, or the accelerating fragmentation into incompatible plot outlines of Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities, is due in part to the writer's recognition of his task's impossibility. In the case of Pound or Louis-Ferdinand Céline, one solution to the crisis of an unattainable universality is a retreat into a paranoid style and vision. When the author's truth finds no echo in the larger community, the sole accessible model of totalization is the resentment-riddled sense of being an unrecognized sage whose indispensable but unheeded wisdom is blocked by the age's stupidity and malevolence. In brief: the encyclopedic dream of "showing and telling all" requires an omniscience that can decline quickly into the eccentricity of the crank or the political complicity of the demagogue.
Perhaps the most peculiar and historically unprecedented corollary of my first category is that the modernist masterpiece must desire the annihilation of any possible rival. Céline was only the most brutally honest modernist masterpiece maker when he replied to an interviewer's question by declaring, "Why do I write? I'll tell you: to make the others unreadable." 23 Moreover, this need has very little to do with merely wishing for the success of one's own texts, and still less with anything resembling so thin a concept as "the anxiety of influence." As the example of Joyce makes clear, the requirement for sole supremacy is not even genre specific, but rather follows from the imperative of universality. In this agon, there are no parallel universes, and so there can only be one ultimate winner. Ulysses, for instance, was intended not merely to render every earlier novel obsolete, but to obliterate music as well by absorbing all of its affective power. This is clearly what Joyce meant when he told Georges Borach, "I've finished the Sirens chapter during the last few days. A big job. I wrote this chapter with the technical resources of music . . . Since exploring the resources and artifices of music, and employing them in this chapter, I haven't cared for music anymore. I, the great friend of music, can no longer listen to it" (JJ, 459). The unrealizability of Joyce's claims is, I suspect, why he reacted with such anger when those claims were resisted, as though the whole status of his text were thrown into doubt if other works could exert a comparable power. After reading "Sirens" to Ottocaro Weiss, for example, Joyce and Weiss went together to a performance of Die Walküre. Joyce listened to Weiss praise Wagner during the intermission and then broke out with, "Don't you find the musical effects of my Sirens better than Wagner's?" When Weiss replied, "No," Joyce at once turned on his heel and did not show up for the rest of the opera (JJ, 460).
Everything in the text must be presented so as to remove any sense that an individual author's temperament, interests, and background are responsible for the inclusion of just these details, for the selection of just these puns, ideograms, or mythic parallels. The belated critical catch phrase, "death of the author" is best understood not as a global pronouncement about writing or subjectivity as such, but as a specific technical device intended to safeguard the authority of the work from any trace of a "mere individuality" that must always, in this context, carry the mark of an unacceptable arbitrariness. 24 Hence it is instructive, as well as amusing, to watch Pound and Joyce after the early days of their alliance reciprocally accuse each other of eccentricity and obsessiveness. 25 More fascinating still is the breakdown of the impersonal finish and the reinscription, often in the accents of a threnody, of the author's individual, partial, even confessional voice once the project's contradictions have overwhelmed its willed and indispensable self-deception.
If the imperative of impersonality might still be seen as a self-conscious attempt to recreate the "objective" tone of traditional epic narratives, there is another, strictly modernist conception of the relationship between the artistic ration of a consciousness and any actually lived, biographical identity.  Leo Bersani has coined the phrase "the culture of redemption" to describe the idea that art exists to give value to, and thus to salvage, an otherwise meaningless existence. Only art, in the form of a timeless masterpiece, can restore and make whole all the suffering, triviality, and wastefulness of life. 28 From Mallarmé's longing to absorb the world into a single Book, to Stephen Dedalus's explicitly theological formulation: "time's ruins build eternity's mansions . . . in woman's womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away," the bedrock certainty about the redemptive power of great art remains constant. 29 Although the disruptions, incompleteness, and fragmentation of so many modernist masterpieces function as a kind of immanent critique of the project, they do not ironize it through humor, but rather, through the darker topoi of failure and the fear of failure. The modernist masterpiece, that is, can ironize everything except its own desire to be one. Masterpieces may be pluralistic texts, but faith in masterpieces, it turns out, is the strictest of monotheisms. 30
"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." 31 Literary critics are continuing to pile up hecatombs of explanatory volumes that demonstrate the rightness of Joyce's words. But his comment must once have rung far odder than we can easily recognize today. The changing role of the university and the very success of the modernist masterpiece have tended to "naturalize" Joyce's longing to be argued over by academics and obscured just how far-fetched Joyce's hope was when he first uttered it in 1921. At that time, contemporary novels--whether under accusations of incoherence and obscenity or not--were not part of any university curriculum and not likely to become such either. At Oxford, for example, it was not until 1970 that any works published after 1900 could appear on the English Honors Syllabus. Nor were matters all that different in the United States, where William Lyon Phelps, a distinguished Yale English professor, found that his 1910 study On Modern Novelists elicited "astonishment" from reviewers "that a book of essays on contemporary writers should come from a university professor." 32 When Joyce "put in his enigmas and puzzles," he, like Pound and Eliot, was not so much anticipating, but to a significant degree actively creating the situation his phrase seems only to describe. All of these texts were composed from the outset with the intention of being studied, not just read, and their way of advancing such seemingly preposterous expectations required what one might call "a strategy of presumptive immortality" (M, 122). 33 Modernist masterpiece making entails making an entirely new scholarly and critical context in which the works will be received, and this requirement is a constituent part of the whole project, directly affecting the composition of the piece itself.
In a paradoxical return of the repressed, the values of bourgeois probity and industriousness against which artists had proclaimed themselves in rebellion throughout the nineteenth century were transferred largely intact to the aesthetic sphere. Instead of the sprezzatura valued by earlier periods, modernist masterpieces were expected to exhibit the scars of an intense and agonizing labor. The only realm in which Marx's labor theory of value seems entirely convincing is in the domain of the modernist masterpiece, where the artist's labor earns the right to exact a reciprocal effort from the reader. Ultimately, the reader's willingness to undertake that labor depends on his already having accepted the principle that a masterpiece is entitled to make such extraordinary demands. Whether any particular work merits the designation of a masterpiece is open to debate, but the existence of the category itself is not. Joyce's motif of the artist-as-God works precisely because in the unprecedented breadth, depth, and extent of his representation of his characters' existence, he can make them totally legible, and, correspondingly, leave his readers subservient to the fullness of his knowledge. 34 What makes this situation particularly strange, however, is that although the necessary fiction of texts like The Cantos and Finnegans Wake is that we are being taught to read a new kind of universal idiom, what we are actually acquiring is a discrete and nontransferable fluency in a series of heterogeneous, radically incommensurable works. Indeed, learning how to make sense of one modernist masterpiece is of remarkably little help in being able to understand a different one. It is as though the effort to acquire even a preliminary interpretative competence with any particular work encourages a self-protective, mutually confirming consumer loyalty to a product in which both artist and audience have already heavily invested. The Absolute Artist now requires something like an Abject Reader whose devotion to the modernist masterpiece is both self-abnegating and all-consuming. 35 Or, as Joyce said, not all that playfully, to Max Eastman, "The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works" (JJ, 703).
The oxymoron here is deliberate. The modernist masterpiece simultaneously seeks to escape and to incorporate both the historical-social world from which it springs and the literary tradition whose summa it intends to be. It must, that is, stand in an explicitly dialectical relationship to all previous texts, resolving their antitheses and partialities into the final synthesis of its absolute form. The initial thrust of the much contested and increasingly threadbare catch phrase "postmodernism" arises from the systematic subversion of all of the imperatives I have just listed. Such a critique dismisses the idea that art can redeem lost time or damaged lives, and counters assertions of the masterpiece's universality with an insistence that every work explicitly acknowledge its own historicity and partiality. At its most radical, postmodernism throws into doubt the category of the genius, which from Immanuel Kant to Marcel Duchamp, and especially in Marcel Proust, Pound, Stein, and Joyce, grounded and justified the artist's exempla whose universality was guaranteed precisely and tautologically because they were discovered by a genius. 36
If Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind crystallized the ideology of the universal in the formula, "Truth is the whole," (das Wahre ist das Ganze) the skepticism of the countermovement is admirably captured in Adorno's negative reformulation, "The whole is truth" (Das ganze ist das Unwahre). 37 Often our contemporary rereadings of the modernist masterpieces are grounded in critical perspectives that see only the emancipatory, joyful implications of Adorno's aphorism without recognizing that he is also defining the tragic loss of a utopian dimension once embodied in the categories of aesthetic wholeness and intelligibility. We proceed, that is, as though the gaps and fissures in the modernist masterpieces were simply invitations to a celebratory playfulness rather than scars of an impossible struggle to hold dissolution at bay. Near the end of his poem, when Pound cries out, "And I am not a demigod, / I cannot make it cohere," it is the possibility of a comprehensive modernist masterpiece whose collapse he is confessing (C, 796). We are right to be grateful for that collapse, to prefer the fragments and radiant moments that survive amidst the "errors and wrecks" of Pound's failed attempt at a new, totalitarian synthesis (C, 796). Pound's admission of defeat, however, like Musil's inability to finish his great novel, can move us only if we take seriously the stakes for which both writers were contending.
In the end, perhaps the most riveting feature of the modernist masterpiece is how its imaginative energy is distributed so uncannily between the antithetical movements of integration and dispersal, between a rage for order and a search for what can survive the death of the dream to impose that order. The modernist masterpiece shuttles continuously between a totalizing project it intermittently recognizes as inaccessible, if not outright paranoid, and a contradictory attentiveness to the particular moment and the purely local, contingent realization. If the first impulse is encyclopedic and epic, then the second can be thought of as essayistic, flourishing precisely by refusing to subordinate its curiosity to any larger systems. Essayism's complete absorption in the immediate and local resists subordination to the lure of the whole, and the strain of shuttling between the epic and the essayistic fractures the modernist masterpiece as it is producing it. So, to complete my catalogue, the last imperative ought to encompass the impossibility of accomplishing all the earlier ones, and might read something like: "It Must Resist and Yield To Its Own Essayism Almost Successfully." The realization that, in Musil's wonderful phrase, "even God probably preferred to speak of His world in the subjunctive of possibility . . . for God creates the world and thinks while doing so that it could just as well be done differently," is one that the modernist masterpiece, whose creator's aspirations are more absolutist than those of Musil's imagined Deity, cannot afford to admit until its own splintering compels it to do so, thereby abandoning its claims to an unconditional universalism. 38
University of California, Berkeley
Michael André Bernstein is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic , Prima della Rivoluzione , Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero , and Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History . He is currently completing a novel entitled Progressive Lenses.
* An early version of this essay was presented as the 1997 Charles Mills Gayley Lecture at The University of California, Berkeley, and I have profited from the suggestions of my colleagues on that occasion. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1. Gertrude Stein, "What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them," in Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1911-1945, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (New York: Penguin Books, 1971), 148-56.
2. See Walter Cahn, Masterpieces: Chapters on the History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 3-10; hereafter abbreviated M. My discussion throughout this paragraph is taken directly from Cahn's fascinating study.
3. The sole occurrence of the word "masterpiece" in Shakespeare perfectly captures both its older, artisanal sense, and the emerging Renaissance meaning in which "masterpiece" is the ultimate term of praise designating "a production of masterly skill; a consummate example of some department of art or skill, or of some particular kind of excellence." (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s. v. "masterpiece.") In Act II, scene 3, of Macbeth, Macduff announces his horrified discovery of Duncan's murder by crying out, "Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!"
4. My discussion of lists here is heavily indebted, in both argument and phrasing, to Francis Spufford, introduction to The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings: Lists in Literature (London: Chatto and Windus, 1989), 1-23.
5. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 215.
6. Richard Sieburth, "Benjamin the Scrivener," Assemblage 6 : 14.
7. Ezra Pound, "Canto 11," in The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1975), 51; hereafter abbreviated C.
8. Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 109.
9. The original reads:
En somme, voici le jeu que je joue. Quatre hommes auront eu une vie immense: Napoléon, Cuvier, O'Connell, et je veux être le quatrième. Le premier a vécu de la vie de l'Europe; il s'est inoculé des armées! Le second a épousé le globe. Le troisième s'est incarné un peuple. Moi, j'aurai porté une société toute entière dans ma tête!" [Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1951), 1:ix.]
The phrase "il s'est inoculé des armées" is rather unusual and my translation is only one way of making sense of it. Graham Robb, Balzac's most recent English biographer, offers this version of the sentence: "The first one lived the life of Europe, with armies instead of blood" (Graham Robb, Balzac: A Biography [New York: W. W. Norton, 1994], 346).
10. See G. W. F. Hegel's dictum that Napoleon was "the world-spirit on horseback" (der Weltgeist am Pferd).
11. As a student in Paris, Balzac had been enthralled by Cuvier's lectures, and he maintained his devotion throughout his adult life. At the beginning of The Wild Ass's Skin, for example, Balzac speaks of Cuvier in reverent terms and asks, "Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century?" (Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass's Skin, trans. Herbert J. Hunt [New York: Penguin Books, 1977], 41).
12. Honoré de Balzac, Comédie humaine, 1:6.
13. The original reads:
Les langues imparfaites en cela que plusieurs, manque la suprême: . . . la diversité, sur terre, des idiomes empêche personne de proférer les mots qui, sinon se trouveraient, par une frappe unique, elle-même matériellement la vérité. Cette prohibition sévit expresse . . . que ne vaille de raison pour se considérer Dieu. (Stéphane Mallarmé, "Crise de vers," in Oeuvres complètes [Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1945], 363-4).
It is instructive to notice how this passage in Mallarmé prompted some of Walter Benjamin's most searching comments on the nature of language in his essay, "The Task of the Translator." Benjamin, too, was haunted by the dream of "integrating many tongues into one true language" (Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," in Selected Writings Vol. 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996], 259).
14. Stéphane Mallarmé, "Le Livre, instrument spirituel," in Oeuvres complètes, 378. The italics in the translation are mine. It is worth noting here that I am not denying a strong element of irony on Mallarmé's part; indeed, Mallarmé's whole formulation at the beginning of this piece suggests an ironic distance from his own apothegm, but I believe that by an entirely characteristic Mallarméan turn, the irony only intensifies, rather than undermines, his theoretical absolutism.
15. See my The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 3-25.
16. Charles Baudelaire, "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris," in Curiosités esthétiques, l'art romantique, et autres oeuvres critiques, ed. Henri Lemaitre (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1962), 689-728.
17. I am uncomfortably aware of how much my discussion slights both music and the visual arts since these omissions undoubtedly qualify the reach of my argument. I can only hope that scholars with greater knowledge in these domains will add their own rectifications and insights to the perspective I am advocating here. At least since Diderot's salons, the nature of the modernist masterpiece has been a central theme in art history, and Baudelaire's numerous essays on the question still define many of the most important ways of addressing the topic. Although relatively few musicologists seem to have been concerned with the problem, composers, like painters and sculptors, have produced a steady stream of self-reflective texts from precisely this vantage point. Recently, though, Mark Evans Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), and more pertinently still, idem, After Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996) have made clear how significant a notion deliberate masterpiece making was for nineteenth-century composers. Consider these fascinating references in Bonds's examination of the nineteenth-century symphony:
"Since Beethoven's nine masterpieces," the aesthetician Ignaz Jeitteles observed in 1837, "it has become a colossal undertaking to write a symphony." As the highest, most ambitious genre of instrumental music, the symphony was perceived to carry the special responsibility of addressing the metaphysical in music. A symphony was no longer considered merely a matter of entertainment, but of embodying the highest ideals of instrumental music and thus of all art. A symphony, according to Mahler at the end of the century, "must have something cosmic within itself, must be inexhaustible like the world and life, if it is not to make a mockery of its name." [Mark Bonds, After Beethoven, 16]
18. Ezra Pound, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971), 323.
19. See John Whittier-Ferguson, Framing Pieces: Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf, and Pound (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
20. Joyce stressed this point repeatedly, and in a famous discussion with Frank Budgen pointed out Ulysses' (and by implication, Bloom's) literary uniqueness, calling him the sole "complete all-round character presented by any writer" (Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 15-17; quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 435-6, hereafter abbreviated JJ). Joyce explicitly rejected Christ, Hamlet, and Faust as possible contenders for the role.
21. The original reads, "Que touts modernité soit digne de devenir antiquité." Charles Baudelaire, "Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne," in Curiosités esthétiques, l'art romantique, et autres oeuvres critiques (Paris: Editions Garnier Frères, 1962), 467. For a discussion of precisely this motif, see Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso Books, 1983), 81-3.
22. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1958), 186.
23. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, interview by Pierre Audinet, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 6 July 1961. Quoted in J. H. Matthews, The Inner Dream: Céline as Novelist (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1978), 55.
24. The concept of "the death of the author" is largely a critical refraction of Mallarmé's insistence that "The pure work implies the rhetorical disappearance of the poet who abandons the initiative to words." The original reads, "L'oeuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poète, qui cède l'initiative aux mots." Stéphane Mallarmé, "Crise de vers," in Oeuvres complètes, 366.
25. For more specific examples of their reciprocal accusations, see, Pound/Joyce: the Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound's Essays on Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (New York: New Directions, 1967); The Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1957-1966); and James Joyce's Letters to Sylvia Beach, 1921-1940, ed. Melissa Banta and Oscar A. Silverman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
26. The original reads, "il me tuera, et il tuera ma femme, mon enfant, toute la baraque, mas ce sera un chef-d'oeuvre, nom de Dieu!" Emile Zola, L'Oeuvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 303. The most useful one-volume survey of the artist re in French literature remains Theodore R. Bowie, The Painter in French Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950).
27. "The Choice," in Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 242.
28. As Bersani defines his term:
A crucial assumption in the culture of redemption is that a certain type of repetition of experience in art repairs inherently damaged or valueless experience. Experience may be overwhelming, practically impossible to absorb, but it is assumed--and this is especially evident in much encyclopedic fiction--that the work of art has the authority to master the presumed raw material of experience in a manner that uniquely gives value to, perhaps even redeems, that material. (Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990], 1)
29. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1986), 320.
30. When the horrors of history have become so cataclysmic that any idea of their being somehow "redeemed" through art seems obscene, then the foundation of the modernist masterpiece is cast into doubt. In a strong sense, the Shoah has fundamentally undermined our sense of art's all-absorptive, all-transring power. The death factories and killing fields of Nazi Europe have become boundary lines marking the limits of art's imaginative authority. Auschwitz, to paraphrase Adorno, can never be the subject of a modernist masterpiece. In the face of total annihilation, a radical transformation of the basic relationship between speech and silence becomes the minimum condition for any ethically coherent response. Beyond Paul Celan's concern about the use to which his poem "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue") was put in postwar Germany, the work's stunning and seemingly effortless technical mastery is, surely, the deeper reason for his ambivalence and his harsh judgments about what he came to think of as the gaudiness of much of his early verse.
31. Joyce said this to Jacques Benoîst-Méchin, the French translator of "Penelope," quoted in JJ, 521.
32. William Lyon Phelps, quoted in Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 124. In spite of the importance of the subject, apart from Graff's excellent study, surprisingly little useful empirical research has been devoted to the academic institutionalization of literary studies. Trying to find out, for example, when various modernist texts began to be regarded as possible subjects of university syllabi offers an instructive, if frustrating, lesson in how many gaps still exist in our understanding of modernism's contexts. Some of the specialized works that I have found helpful include: Burton R. Clark, The Academic Life: Small Worlds, Different Worlds (New Jersey: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1987); Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1977); D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); Gail McDonald, Learning to be Modern: Eliot, Pound, and the American University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); The Twentieth Century, vol. 8 of The History of the University of Oxford, ed. Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Charles Firth, Modern Languages at Oxford 1724-1929 (London: Oxford University Press, 1929); and the essays collected under the general title, "American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines," in Daedalus 126, no. 1, (winter 1997).
33. Cahn uses the term to describe the rhetorical strategy of eighteenth-century critics, rather than artists themselves, but it seems to me to apply with still more justice to the creators of the modernist masterpieces.
34. In this sense, writing the modernist literary masterpiece is remarkably consonant with the gigantic political and social projects in agriculture, city planning, and compulsory "villagization" recently described as "high modernism" in James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
35. I owe to my friend and colleague, Alex Zwerdling, the suggestion that I balance the earlier study of "the Abject Hero" in my When the Carnival Turns Bitter: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), with a consideration of "the Abject Reader" as the intended audience of the modernist masterpiece.
36. The best summary of the ideology of the genius is Stephen Dedalus's proud assertion: "A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." (Joyce, Ulysses, 156)
37. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Gerhard Göhler (Frankfurt: Ullstein Verlag 1970), 22; T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951), 80.