9. Notions of truthfulness or accuracy of representation characterize the entire spectrum of critical/political positions; thus Marxists like Jameson or Moretti value Ulysses for its reflection of a certain phase of capitalism (although Jameson had earlier found in Lewis a more objective image of his time than in Joyce--Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 57-58 and passim), while Leavisians such as Goldberg value it for its complex instantiation of human experience.
10. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), 107. Pound, interestingly, appears in 1933 to have agreed with Lewis's complaint that the content of Ulysses is conventional (though he finds the technique sufficiently valuable): "Mr. Wyndham Lewis's specific criticism of Ulysses can now be published. It was made in 1922 or '23. 'Ungh!' he grunted, 'He [Joyce] don't seem to have any very new point of view about anything.' Such things are a matter of degree. There is a time for a man to experiment with his medium. When he has a mastery of it; or when he has developed it, and extended it, he or a successor can apply it." (Deming vol. 2, 596; from English Journal, May 1933)
11. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), 36.
12. D. H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (London: Heinemann, 1967), 149. Underlying Leavis's and Lawrence's intra-cultural judgments is a strongly extra-cultural sense of the importance of literature, of course; writing that is truly alive is also writing that has the power to revitalize what they see as a dying social body.
13. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition, 319; Richard Ellmann, James Joyce rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 529; and Karl Jung "Ulysses: A Monologue," in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, trans. R. F. C. Hall, Collected Works, vol. 15 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 114. When the bored critic looks for an adjective to describe the book, it is usually "dull": thus Edmund Wilson, for all his admiration, comments: "There must be something wrong with a design which involves so much that is dull--and I doubt whether anyone will defend parts of Ulysses against the charge of extreme dullness" (Deming, vol. 1, 228; from The New Republic, 1922). Harold Nicolson, in 1931, states: "At moments Joyce becomes almost overpoweringly difficult to read and, as such, almost overpoweringly dull" (Deming, vol. 2, 562; from The Listener, 1931).
14. Jung, "Ulysses: A Monologue," 120. Jameson, in an odd echo of Jung, finds the boredom induced by "Eumaeus" and "Ithaca" not a failure on Joyce's part, but a success: "It is as though Joyce meant here to force us to work through in detail everything that is intolerable about this opposition"--that is, the opposition, hardened under capitalism, between the subject and the object ("Ulysses in History," 139).
15. Austin Briggs provides a corrective to the prevalent idea that West was unremittingly hostile to Joyce; see "Rebecca West vs. James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and William Carlos Williams," Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis: Essays, ed. David Norris (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), 83-102. He also quotes her statement, appropriate for this chapter, that we have a "duty of listening to our geniuses in a disrespectful manner" .
16. Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931); hereafter cited in the text as SN.
17. After this bad start, it doesn't seem likely that Joyce will emerge with much credit; but in fact by the end of the essay West has tipped the scales a long way in the other direction, and Ulysses is serving as one of her examples of what she calls "the necessity of art."
18. One exception is Lukács, whose objections in 1957 arose from what he saw as technique for its own sake in the interior monologue of Ulysses, by contrast with Thomas Mann's use of a similar method in Lotte in Weimar, where its purpose is to allow the author "to explore aspects of Goethe's world which would not have been otherwise available" ("The Ideology of Modernism," 18).
19. Samuel Goldberg, The Classical Temper: A Study of James Joyce (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961); hereafter cited in the text as CT.
20. Samuel Goldberg is more outspokenly critical in his volume on Joyce in the "Writers and Critics" series, James Joyce (London & Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1962): "He was still dogged by the self-image of the 'fabulous artificer,' the technical virtuoso. And the result lies visible in the more superficial, mechanical, merely cerebral aspects of Ulysses, in the obvious, laborious 'brilliance' that he over-valued--and that led many critics into over-valuing as well" .
21. Raymond Williams, who writes of Ulysses' "greatness" in The English Novel, is probably reacting similarly when he relates his reservations about Finnegans Wake to "the strains already evident in the later sections of Ulysses (before the last monologue)" .
22. Leo Bersani, "Against Ulysses," Raritan 8.2 (Fall 1988): 1-32; also The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 155-78; hereafter cited in the text as CR.
23. In "Is There a Case Against Ulysses?," in Joyce in Context, ed. Vincent Cheng and Timothy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 19-39, Denis Donoghue defends the book against two critics, Bersani and Jameson. He conflates their two very different responses (Jameson, as we have seen, offers a positive assessment in his only extended discussion of Ulysses), and reads them as if they were echoes of early Stalinist objections to the book's preoccupation with its characters' subjective experiences. If this were the case being made against Ulysses by either Bersani or Jameson, there would be simpler rejoinders than Donoghue's trawl through Saussure, Deleuze and Guattari, Levinas, Derrida, Barthes, Benveniste, and Marcuse to find an account of language that does not assume a punctual origin in the subject.
24. Interestingly, Moretti makes the opposite argument: that the author of Ulysses "considers the aesthetic sphere incapable of being either an example to, or a compensation for, the state of the world" ("The Long Goodbye," 208).
25. See Derek Attridge, "Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other," PMLA 114.1 (January 1999): 20-31.
26. Morris Beja pointed this out in his introduction to a panel on "Hostile Responses to Joyce" at the 1992 Dublin Symposium--one of the rare instances of counter-voices being given a space within the Joyce establishment, even if Joyce tended to emerge triumphant once again (see "Approaching Joyce with an Attitude," in Morris Beja and David Norris, eds. Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis, 71-75).
27. I am quoting from the advance description of James Joyce's "Ulysses" in Hypermedia, directed by Michael Groden, announced by the University of Pennsylvania Press for publication in 2000. Reports have appeared of a similar project being supervised by John Kidd at Boston University.
28. In The Renewal of Literature Poirier argues, like Bersani, against a notion that the reading of literature can be a source of cultural renovation; but he adopts a very different attitude to the technical feats of modernist writers, including Joyce. Of the latter he writes, "No one more brazenly celebrates his own sheer capacity for what James called 'doing'" ; but this is in the context of a claim that the reading of such works is "an activity by which with great difficulty we can become conscious that any structure, technique, code, or system of signs is likely to prove no more than extemporized and transient" . Poirier is surely correct to insist that "it is not the substance but rather the act of allusiveness or of schematization which should occupy the reader" , but it may be that the act of reading Ulysses, at least as an advanced student or professional scholar, is no longer the vigorous, demanding, chancy business that Poirier celebrates.
29. Eliot was a notable exception, but there is every indication that he was responding to the idea of Ulysses (or his idea of Ulysses), and not to the text, and that few others shared his sense of the book's culturally wholesome character.
30. It's evident, I trust, that I am not finding fault with these and other guides and reference books; my concern is only with their unintended effects. Most of them represent meticulous labors that have been of inestimable help to me and to a myriad other readers. And perhaps one should note that it only takes a group of astute readers, armed with all the reference books, to tackle a few paragraphs of Ulysses to discover how much remains speculative and challenging.
31. Although most of the work being done on Joyce's notebooks and other draft material is continuous with the grand exegetical project that dominated Joyce criticism in the twentieth century, some of it has had the very different aim of defamiliarizing the published text and raising fresh questions about what it means to "read Joyce"--notably the ITEM group in Paris.
32. In "Two Words for Joyce," Derrida describes the discomfort of inhabiting Joyce's memory, "which is henceforth greater than all your finite memory can, in a single instant or a single vocable, gather up of cultures, languages, mythologies, religions, philosophies, sciences, history of mind and of literatures," Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 147. He continues: "I don't know if you can like that, without resentment and jealousy."
33. See ch. 7 ("Unpacking the Portmanteau, or, Who's Afraid of Finnegans Wake?") and ch. 8 ("Deconstructing Digression: The Backbone of Finnegans Wake and the Margins of Culture") in Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988).
This paper was written in response to two different and in their ways equally vivid experiences. The first was an encounter with a monotype by Degas in the Art Institute of Chicago, a work from the mid-1880s, measuring approximately eight by sixteen inches ( 1). 1 To make a monotype the artist normally draws in printing ink directly onto an unabsorbent surface, such as an unmarked engraving plate. The plate is then put through a press, transferring a single clear image directly onto paper. Since the image is unfixed, this process effectively erases it, though sometimes a sufficient residue of ink is left on the plate to permit a second and fainter impression to be made. Where Degas recovered a second impression in this manner he would frequently work over it in pastel, developing the motif substantially as he did so, sometimes adding paper to extend its margins and thus to enlarge the original pictorial space. He was to do just that with a second proof of the monotype from Chicago, adding strips of paper at top and bottom to make a nearly square overall image, in the process locating the represented re at a more conventional distance from the picture plane, and thus transforming the effect of the composition. It is with the first and unaltered impression that I am principally concerned, however, since its very containment and darkness are crucial to its individuality.
In this case Degas worked in negative, covering the entire plate with a film of ink, then scraping, wiping and dabbing at the oily surface to produce an image. This image takes a moment to discern, as if we had to adjust our eyes to the darkness before it will come clear. What it shows is the nude body of a woman, reclining on a couch with her right elbow and forearm close up to the picture plane at its lower edge, her raised left knee breaking the picture's upper edge, and her legs extending into the deepest part of the pictorial space at the top right-hand corner. At the lower left corner a circular area has been wiped clean of ink to signify a table lamp. This forms the picture's only light source. The re's head is particularly difficult to make out. This difficulty may be partly accounted for by the dazzling effect of the lamp, but there is also a suggestion that the head is as it were too close--too nearly identified with the picture plane itself--to bring properly into focus. It was this suggestion in particular that brought me up short when I first saw the monotype a few years ago. When combined with the literal and rative darkness of the image, the effect was of something analogous to a failure or deprivation of the sense of sight. My first motive for this paper, then, was to explore and to explain that sense of failure or deprivation. I shall take a long way round in the attempt to do so, but I shall come back to the monotype in the end.
There is one last point I should make in introducing the image in question. As if to underline the uniqueness of the impression, the artist marked it not simply with a signature but with a dedication, "Degas à Burty." Philippe Burty was a writer sympathetic to the work of the Impressionists and a major collector of modern prints, Degas' very much included. This was not a work conceived for exhibition, then. It was a gift to a male friend, as were three other related monotypes showing nude female res, each of which is named for a different recipient. 2 In the climate of art history and art criticism that now surrounds the work of Degas there is an uncomfortable implication to be drawn from these dedications. It is best that we face it squarely. It concerns the meaning of the work's privacy. The almost inescapable suggestion is that images such as this circulated outside any public view precisely because their combination of artistry with indecency destined them for the secluded enjoyment of men of a certain sophistication. In other words, the intended function of the monotype was to supply an expensive taste for erotica. I mean in the end to argue against this view, but its apparent plausibility should nevertheless be faced when we consider how the effects of the image are in fact produced. If left unacknowledged, assumptions about the functions of works of art are all the more likely to inflect inquiries into their composition. Possessed of an unexamined certainty that a given work was designed to serve the interests of fantasy, we are less likely to look for the kinds of effect that might produce a realistic self-consciousness in the spectator.
This takes me to the second experience by which this paper was prompted--in this case the effect produced by a body of interpretation. Over the course of the past twenty years or so, Degas' pictures of women have been subject to extensive re-examination in the light of a wider feminist re-reading of modern art. 3 It is through the initiative of feminist art historians in particular that the viewer's psychoanalysable response to the individual work of art has come to be accorded a deciding role in inquiries into its meaning and even into its value. And since it is a fundamental assumption of psychoanalysis that we must respond differently according to the differences in our gendering, it follows that considerations of the relativities of gender must play a large part in such inquiries. So long as differences of gender were not held to be of any account in the interpretation of art, it could be assumed that it was differences of opportunity or disposition alone that stood in the way of an equal enjoyment of images such as Degas' pictures of bathers ( 2). To analyze an artistic composition was traditionally to show how these differences might be overcome in principle; that is to say, it was to elucidate a structure of effects that were conceived of as aesthetic, and thus as potentially open to experience by all. In the memorable words of Clive Bell, "To appreciate fully a work of art we require nothing but sensibility. To those that can hear Art speaks for itself." 4 As so often, however, it transpired that the illusion of universal agreement was simply a consequence of women's voices being silenced or going unheard. Nowadays, where the analysis of effects is at issue, a vigilant feminism encourages us to ask "effects upon whom?" And once that question has been asked we can no longer take it for granted that the pleasures art has to offer are potentially pleasures for all. Claims for objectivity in aesthetic judgement have of course been troubled since the nineteenth century by reflections on the effects of cultural difference and by the findings of class analysis. But it is one thing to acknowledge the significance of cultural familiarity or the relative advantages of education, class, money and leisure when it comes to the appreciation of art; it is quite another to say of a work of art that its responding spectator is necessarily male.
This point has been well rehearsed in readings of late-nineteenth century French painting. It takes an emphatic form in the recent literature on Degas' bathers, occasioned as this has been by a series of major exhibitions in which these works have featured. 5 Heather Dawkins, for instance, describes one of her several papers on the artist as "a study that negotiates my displeasure in studying an artistically heterosexual drive." 6 In the view of a second writer this drive is both prurient and punitive. What Anthea Callen regards as the artist's "tortured twisting and dislocation of female anatomy," suggests to her "not only the pain of shame but its punishment." The shame is the shame occasioned by men's prostitution of women, the punishment women's reward for serving as the objects of men's desire. 7 Griselda Pollock proceeds further along similar lines. "As a woman viewer," she writes, "I am forced to take up the proffered sadistic masculine position and symbolically enact the violence of Degas' representations, or identify masochistically with the bizarrely posed and cruelly drawn bodies"--bodies "which in social exchange he debased and abused, and which in aesthetic practice he punished and tortured." 8
It was the experience of these voices--voices speaking in virtual unison--that provided the second prompting for this paper. The coincidence of these two promptings is clearly problematic. At the least I am bound to reflect on the nature of my fascination with the monotype and on the pleasure I generally take in Degas' pictures of women. Analyses such as those I have cited are not to be swept aside either by reference to the artist's incorrigible genius, or because they threaten men's sense of themselves as civilized beings. On the other hand if we are honest about our responses to works of art we must acknowledge that we can't just haul them into line with some supposedly virtuous position. We can't just like what we may think we ought to like. In this particular case, I find myself drawn involuntarily into a game of high stakes. It is not simply that I have been happy to accept Degas as a significant re within the modern period. He appears to me now as one of the principal artists of the entire Western tradition. Of course, this would be no problem if the man who painted could be kept safely apart from the man who lived an examinable social and moral life--if we could say that ethics has nothing to do with aesthetics; that Degas' pictures could be the over-determined products of an abusive and sado-masochistic obsession and nevertheless be admirable. There are indeed those who believe that the matter of an artist's social conduct is irrelevant to his artistic practice--and by extension, presumably, that the personal predilections of the spectator play no part in a properly "aesthetic" response. Unfortunately I am not one of these. I have to allow that if the writers I have quoted are justified in their reading of Degas' work, then my liking for it must be an incidence of bad taste--evidence, in other words, of deficiency or failure of the critical imagination.
So I propose to look again at Degas in the light of the feminist case. I should make clear that my primary aim in doing so is not to claim a position in academic debates on his work, but rather to respond to an implied critique of those such as myself who esteem his images as pleasurable, and to re-examine the grounds of that esteem and that pleasure. There are two connected charges which it seems that the work in question must be made to answer. The first is that it is implicated in processes of prostitution; the second that its effect is to leave its viewers caught between a sadistic voyeurism and a masochistic empathy.
I should first establish some undisputed common ground. The broadly feminist account of late-nineteenth century French painting is clearly justified in two important respects. The first is in drawing attention to the tendency for pictorial compositions to be oriented towards an imagined male spectator. The second is in alerting us to the fact that the question of how women look and are looked at is a significant concern in rative art during the period. In fact I think that these two points can be brought together to construct a stronger claim than is generally made by feminist art history itself. It is this: that during the first period of development of modernism in painting--say in the fifty years between 1860 and 1910--the matter of how women look was an issue so central to work done by male artists that it was decisive for the character of that development. 9 So far as art is concerned, there seems little point in talking about development at all unless what we are addressing are changes in the criteria of aesthetic success and failure. The implication of the claim, then, is that the question of how women look was a matter of such moment to the early modern practice of painting as somehow to bear upon the aesthetic merit of any relevant work. Of course this is not a hypothesis that anyone should be asked to accept without considerable elaboration. In particular we need to know just how it is that the success of the artist's work is affected and decided. And before we can properly address that question we need a clearer sense of just what it is that is supposed to be doing the affecting; what it is, in other words, that is included in the question of "how women look." These issues are best understood by reference to examples. Suppose, for instance, that one was asked to decide on aesthetic grounds between Degas' Combing the Hair in the National Gallery, London, and Luke Fildes' near-contemporary An Al-fresco Toilette in the Lady Lever Art Gallery (. 3 and 4). What kinds of difference in observation, imagination and composition might one have to take into account in explaining one's judgement?
There is clearly an ambiguity at the heart of this matter. It revolves around the passive and active senses of looking. To ask how women look is to consider both what women look like and what it is like for women to look. This ambiguity is so firmly built into our language that it is hard to dislodge. In our ordinary social experience there is a typical moment upon which the resulting confusion bears down to vivid effect. It is the moment at which the one looked at looks back; when someone is caught looking. The resulting exchange is one with potentially infinite social and psychological content. One's gender, one's sexuality, one's age, one's class, one's race, one's relative financial power--all these are at play and at stake. And what typically happens is that the relations in question are resolved in an instant, leaving one or other party relatively empowered, one or other looking away.
Moments with infinite content are meat and drink to the art of painting. In the 1860s and 1870s the exchange of glances becomes of all painting's potential themes the one most diagnostic of its modernity (if not of its modernism). Both the ambiguity and the vividness of such exchanges are clearly caught in a number of memorable and canonical images. The women in Manet's Olympia ( 5) and Renoir's La Loge ( 6) are carefully described as the bearers of a specific self-consciousness. And in each case we are instructed by the organization of the composition to furnish an appropriate cause. The look of the women will only make sense, that is to say, when we see them as appearing under the regard of an imagined male. And it will be a matter critical to the effect of the painting in question whether or not this regard is seen as returned, and how the relative powers are then seen as distributed. Of course, it tells us nothing we don't already know about social and sexual relations in nineteenth-century France to observe that the female party in any actual exchange was generally the one obliged to look away, or that the woman who failed to do so was in danger of being deemed immodest. But we should not assume that the art of painting will conform straightforwardly to the kinds of generalization that may be supported through social and historical research. The production of modern aesthetic effects may depend on modes of critical self-consciousness which are opaque to such researches precisely to the extent that their causes are private, inescapable, [Begin Page 65] and thus realistic. In fact the ability to bring some social and psychological complexity to the exchange of glances is a noticeable measure of modernity in relevant paintings from the mid-1860s until at least the end of the century.
It should be clear that this was not simply a matter of differences in subject matter; of picturing one type of woman or one social situation rather than another. The more significant differences were compositional. That is to say they were differences in the means by which the spectator's imaginative activity was stimulated and structured by the painting. There is an important implication here. If it is true that a preoccupation with how women look bears down in some general way on the development of painting as a medium in the later nineteenth century, then certain technical changes noticeable in paintings which are pictures of women are of relevance to the evaluation of modern painting in general, whether or not women are pictured.
These are difficult issues to grasp in the abstract. They may be best considered through a relevant comparison. I am as certain as I can be that Auguste de Molins' painting The Coming Storm, which appeared on the London art market in the mid 1980s, is the work exhibited in Paris in 1874 in the first independent exhibition of the group that was to be known as the Impressionists ( 7). The title was listed in English in the original catalogue. 10 The artist was one of that cohort of relatively conservative independents that art history has for the most part forgotten. The paradigm spectator to whom the painting caters is someone practiced in the relatively unsophisticated business of seeing the joke, which here concerns the relationship between the weather conditions described in the background and the trio of res isolated in the foreground, each of whom represents a type easily enough exemplified in the 1870s both in literary fiction and on the actual streets of Paris: the colorless ranks of the bourgeoisie at the hour of promenade; the publicly respectable and privately lecherous gentleman; the interloper in whom the identities of decadent artistocrat and aspiring plutocrat are purposefully confused; and, crucially, the enticing re of the well-dressed woman in whose image another confusion is strategically maintained--those of the fashionable bourgeoise and the glamorous prostitute. The respectable gentleman is about to lose the game the picture plays out. It is coming on to rain and he has no umbrella. The woman has only a parasol. The picture implies that she is open to offers. The interloper has a waiting carriage with a hood, and thus a decisive advantage, as he clearly knows. He is going to get the woman, though he may not know what woman it is that he will actually be getting. To the small delight of its prospective consumer, the painting plays upon topical themes of sexual opportunity and of social and economic competition, of prospective conquest versus on the one hand and of jealousy and affront on the other. Pleasure, for this consumer, lies in observing the human comedy from a position safely this side of its surface.
Also contributing to the same independent exhibition was the now better known painter Auguste Renoir. The work called Les Parapluies was begun some years after that exhibition, and my guess is that it was prompted in part by a memory of de Molins' work, conscious or not ( 8). For what Renoir has done is to take something very close to the same topical theme and to modernize it. As in the earlier painting, rain is falling at the hour of promenade. The well-dressed working girl at the left of the picture appears to be the object of speculative attention from the gentleman behind her, who in this case is equipped with an umbrella, as the girl is not. Where, then, is the second gentleman, whose presence is required in order to bring an animating tension and urgency to the pictorial drama? The answer, of course, is that his position must be occupied by the imaginary spectator, who thus becomes what Richard Wollheim has called the "spectator in the picture." 11 It is he who is seeing what the picture shows.
For the sake of my argument, there are two particular points to note; the first is that the presence of this spectator is cued or required not only by the curious outward stare of the little girl at the right of the painting, nor simply by the angle of vision to which the entire composition submits, but more poignantly by the carefully described self-consciousness of the woman in question, around which the effects of the painting are thus made to revolve. The second point is that these effects are of no real account unless they construct an answering and thus implicated self-consciousness as it were on this side of the picture plane. 12 Renoir has sophisticated the mode of reference to the topical theme of sexual speculation by rendering the spectator both an imaginary occupant of the social world described, and an active imaginative agent in its conduct. He has managed this by taking the narrative components out of the fictional depth of the pictorial space, where de Molins has them safely embedded, and redefining them as features of the spectator's social and psychological world. To become a competent spectator of Renoir's painting, then, one begins by occupying this world in imagination as someone disposed and equipped in the precise terms that the work itself defines. This means that one occupies it as a man--a flâneur perhaps--whatever may be one's actual gender. But if someone is to argue that the effect of this is to privilege the male spectator, I would ask them who will find it hardest to occupy the flâneur's position: the well-read middle-class woman, or the iconoclastic working-class male? Note that Renoir offers no guide to the outcome of the exchange of glances, nor any judgement upon its ethical character. What he does is to define with consummate pictorial skill the specific character of that "moment with infinite content."
It was fashionable a few years back to condemn Renoir as a kind of male chauvinist. Much was done to draw attention to the implicit gendering of the spectator and to the regressive attitudes to women discovered in such pictures as this. We need to be careful, however. In art as in literature it often turns out that the painting or the text has got there before us, and that that which we think we have exposed in it was always a part of the content which it had taken into itself and reflected back in critical form, had we only been assiduous enough readers to notice. It is one thing-- proper to all critical activity--to revise the bases upon which we make our judgements and accordingly to review the objects of traditional admiration. But we need to be sure that any naivety we think we have discovered in the works in question was not actually our own. The admonishing finger we point at the moral life of the artist may otherwise miss the target of the work by a distance that must in the end be embarrassing to ourselves. The moral character of the producer may indeed determine the aesthetic character of the production, but it will not necessarily do so in ways conforming to our own self-images as moral beings. Renoir might well have fallen short of our contemporary notions of correctness in sexual relations. But if his painting pictures the exploitable female as a potential object of consumption, it also allows us to experience in imagination what it is like both to look and to be looked at like this. It is thus edifying irrespective of the gender we actually inhabit.
Though the two paintings here compared are indeed paintings that include pictures of women, what the comparison crucially reveals is a revision in the priorities according to which the surfaces of paintings are conceptualized and developed. In other words, if the forms of self-consciousness involved in the development of a modern art are indeed largely learned and practiced in paintings that are pictures of women, once the relevant changes are effected they become conditions of modernism and of aesthetic adequacy in painting as a whole. Beyond a certain point, in other words, it becomes impossible for a painting if it is to be modern to evade the issue of who it is that the pictured world is supposedly being seen by, and how it is that it is therefore being seen. Indeed, I would suggest that by the 1870s the modernity of a painting's composition could be recognized in the following terms: that it was so ordered and distinguished as to pose the question, "Who is supposed to be seeing what this picture shows?" and to do so as a necessary part of its effect. Of course, to say that this was a question raised by the typical modern painting is not to say that it was a question to which all spectators necessarily responded.
It's time to return to Degas. His painting Au Café (also known as L'Absinthe) was painted in the late 1870s ( 9). Its evident focus is upon a woman sitting alone at a café table--or at least we take her to be alone, her isolation being suggested by the palpable absence of any sense of contact with her neighbor at the table. Viewed thus the picture can be seen as testifying to that documentary interest that the patrician realist maintains in the lives of those beneath him. As the supposed author of such a picture, Degas stands as it were outside its world looking in. This was the Degas whom many of his contemporaries likened to the misanthropic scientist, whose disengagement from the human tragi-comedy ensures the dispassionateness of his findings. Of course, it was with regard to his pastels of women bathing that this combination of misanthropy with disengagement was particularly observed. These are pictures of prostitutes, it was assumed, since only a prostitute would allow herself to be shown in the process of intimate ablution. Poverty and prostitution are degrading, so the argument went. Furthermore, the woman whose business is the arousal of men is no better than an animal. It follows that the ugliness and bestiality of the women is a guarantee of the accuracy--the truth--of the artist's vision. 13 To be outside looking in is also to be in the position of the voyeur; of the man, that is to say, who consumes the appearances of others from a distance that ensures his own safety. Thus the late-nineteenth-century reading of Degas the misanthropic realist prepares the ground for the late-twentieth-century reading of Degas the abusive and sadistic voyeur. The advocates of the latter are the natural heirs of the proponents of the former. In the first case, the ugliness of the women is attributed to the brutalizing effects of their existence and the animal nature of their trade; in the second, it is attributed to the sadistic operations performed by the artist upon their bodies. But in both cases it is the (mis)perceived ugliness of the women that produces the reading.
We may gain a better understanding of Degas' picture if we set beside it another in the same vein--or in what Fernand Lungren, who painted it, no doubt thought of as the same vein ( 10). The contrast serves to draw attention to those formal and technical properties of Degas' work which may go unremarked even as its ostensible subject is noted. Lungren's picture has an emphatically conventional viewpoint and perspective, its tables ranged neatly parallel to the picture plane. The effect is to locate an imagined viewer at a socially and psychologically normative distance from its represented subject--just where we might expect to find the male this female's presence invites. What the comparison makes clear is that the organization of Degas' picture actually presupposes a viewpoint virtually within the picture plane, which its nearest table intersects. The angle of vision is oblique, the perspective unsettled. Where Lungren's picture is painted with a consistently sharp focus, Degas learns a lesson from photography and employs change of focus as a compositional device; sharp on the features of the woman, so blurred on the objects near at hand that their identities are in doubt. And once that difference of focus has registered in relation to the viewpoint, the sense of a viewing position outside the represented scene collapses totally. It transpires that the position of the imaginary viewer is as inescapably located within the world depicted as is the woman herself. In which case, what price the supposed distance between viewer and viewed? We are now in a better position to appreciate the apparently intrusive and ambiguous shapes with which the foreground of Degas' picture is populated. They are indefinite because they are found at the margins of the imagined spectator's consciousness, where newspapers and matches would be for someone looking up and across the café. Their function is both to define that consciousness and to locate it. Degas' educated contemporaries placed themselves outside the world of the picture because they could imagine themselves nowhere else. But that is not where the picture places its own imagined spectator. This latter spectator is the product of the painter's artifice. To the question, "Who is seeing this?" the painting's actual spectator answers unthinkingly, "I am." Yet it would actually be nearer to the truth of the painting to say, "She is." In other words, the imagined viewer occupies a position which is far closer to that of the pictured woman than it is to that normally assumed by the fascinated or condescending bourgeois male.
If we want to explore the implications of Degas' work, we could do worse than to look to the younger artists who worked under his shadow. During his so-called Blue period, the young Picasso in particular produced a number of perceptive paraphrases of Degas' inquiries into the nature of looking and representing (I think particularly of the damaged Portrait of a Man from the winter of 1902-03, now in the Musée Picasso in Paris). "Who is this and who am I?" he seems to ask with regard to the res he paints, but also "What is it to be an artist? Does my vocation keep me apart from these others, so that I remain in my world, regarding the evidence of their poverty with an interest which is academic, touristic, voyeuristic. Or are artists fellow denizens of Bohemia? Could such images show how I too am seen? Are they really forms of self-portraiture that I am painting, so that the demand these pictures will in the end make of their spectators is that each realigns his or her self-consciousness with the image I am describing?"
There is one last point to be extracted from the example of the woman in the café. What we have done is to put the various elements of the composition in place as means not simply to define a woman in a certain situation, but more tellingly to identify the represented moment with another imaginary consciousness--the consciousness of someone also present at that moment. Yet of course, this sense of the woman as seen and experienced serves both to qualify and to deepen our sense of her. In the end the apparently arbitrary detail in the foreground of Degas' picture proves indispensable to the poignancy of the image. But what if we had viewed this detail from the point-of-view of a more conventional representation? For instance, imagine what would happen were we to insinuate into Lungren's picture a device like the newspaper invading Degas' composition from its left-hand edge. The effect, I suspect, would be one of dissonance and dislocation. Lungren's composition speaks to a kind of naturalistic mind-set in which such disruptive pictorial events have no place.
Viewed from within just such a mind-set, Degas' portrait of Carlo Pellegrini shows a picture of a man so cruelly tortured and monstrously distorted that his left foot grows directly out of his right shin ( 11). Of course, it is actually nothing of the sort. Carlo Pellegrini happened to be a very small man. The conventional means of making a man look small would be to show him in relation to something measurable, like a doorway. Degas does something different: he shows how Pellegrini might look to a man of normal height standing beside him. Such a person would be looking down at a steep angle, the ground plane would appear sharply inclined, and the small man's feet would appear placed as they do in the picture. By this means the property of smallness is attributed by the viewer to Pellegrini and becomes as it were his pictorial possession--a possession he is allowed to carry with a certain style. But a considerable risk is taken in the process, for the extraordinary profile that Degas creates around his re is not one we can easily confirm by reference to our ordinary perceptions. It is a significant difference between quotidian sight and artistic representation that the mind tends to adjust for angle of vision even before such effects are registered, so that images such as this remain as it were unseen. The risk, then, is that we will fail to trust the picture's interest in its subject; that we will accordingly refuse to follow the imaginative instructions of the composition, and that we will insist on seeing the image literally, which is to say as distorted. (His readiness to take such risks is a factor serving significantly to distinguish Degas' drawing not only from the academic practice of the time but also from the work of all his avant-garde contemporaries with the exception of Cézanne.)
It may help to make clear the direction of my argument if I recapitulate the points these various examples are intended to convey. First I have proposed that the question of how women look is central to the development of modern painting. Second I have proposed that this question is typically addressed not simply through the picturing of women, but more significantly through the evocation of complex states of self-consciousness on the part of an imaginary viewer. Third, I have intended to show that if the actual spectator is to gain imaginative access to these states it will not be enough just to see what the picture depicts. What will be required is response to the work of art in its entirety, and particularly to its composition and technique. It is only once the purposes of composition and technique have been properly taken into account, I suggest, that we can safely speak of distortion and dislocation, let alone read in motives for such distortions as we may observe. Fourth, then, if the case against Degas is to rest upon the supposed distortions practiced upon women in his pictures, the very least we should ask of those making the case is that they be well guarded against the dangers of literalism in their readings of pictures (that they are not art history's equivalents for Mr Partridge at the performance of Hamlet: unable, for the purposes of criticism, to distinguish between naturalistic reactions and the effects of artifice). 14 We need to be sure, for instance, that they are not imposing as conditions of psychological hygiene what are in fact no more than the normal habits of vision, entrenched as these tend to be in conservative canons of pictorial naturalism. In Degas' work, in particular, it is through the very disruption of conventions of naturalism that pictured res are endowed with imaginary life and individuality. 15
The suggestion to which I have been leading, then, is this. Where Degas' contemporaries saw the realistic observation of degradation, and where some of our own contemporaries see the abusive vision of the sadist, there may actually be something at work in Degas' mature pictures that is stranger than either; something indicated primarily by the highly idiosyncratic nature of their drawing and their compositions. They are driven, I think, by a curiosity which is neither academic nor self-preserving. "What is it like?" they ask, "What is it like to look like this?" I will acknowledge that there is nothing in the early critical commentary on Degas' work that I can use in direct support of this suggestion. But then we have little reason to suppose that the literate bourgeois male of the time would have been likely to entertain such a question in front of a picture of a woman. And it is a part of the burden of my thesis that Degas' work was highly exceptional.
I turn now more directly to the subject of Degas' nudes and to the question of their implication in the prostitution of women, and more explicitly the relationship between those works that are quite clearly identifiable as scenes from the brothel and those that show individual women washing, bathing, toweling themselves, brushing their hair and getting into bed. The relationship between these two sets of works is a matter for open inquiry. According to one view they are categorically distinct. 16 Thus we might regard the brothel scenes as restricted to works produced as monotypes and on a small scale, none of which was publicly exhibited in Degas' lifetime (at least so far as can be established from the available evidence). And we might place in an entirely separate category those works that show single res in apparently private settings. These were for the most part executed in large format in pastel, and some of the earliest of them were publicly displayed at the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886. According to another point of view, however, the two sets of work overlap and are mutually implicated. For writers of this persuasion, the technical distinction between monotypes and pastels is not to be fudged into a distinction between prostitutes and honest women. The intimate subjects of the pastels are not such as Degas could have studied in the decorous confines of a bourgeois home, or even in a studio conducted according to the decorum of the time. In order to gain a pictorial access to the life they represent, so the argument goes, he either paid prostitutes to pose for him, or effectively prostituted his models, which amounts to the same thing. 17 These, I take it, would be among the forms of abusive and debasing social exchange to which Griselda Pollock refers.
We can deal first with the more clear-cut cases. Several of the extant monotypes are clearly based on observations made in brothels. The largest of them is little more [Begin Page 75] than two feet square, the majority only six or eight inches across. They show women waiting in the salon, greeting potential customers ( 12), partying for the benefit of clients, offering themselves for sex, and in a few cases actually engaged in sex, though it is sex of a thoroughly desultory sort. Some show women washing or dressing their hair while clients watch, thus encouraging a reading of the larger pastels as representations of sights seen by voyeurs ( 13).  Indeed, they are not posed at all. These are rapidly executed monotypes, we should remember, not studied studio drawings. Some of the women are characterized as tired, worn and middle-aged. When we consider modern art's inquiry into the matter of how women look, then, these images too are to be taken into account ( 14).
As for the men, they could hardly be said to profit by the comparison. As Degas shows them they are for the most part ugly, aging, balding and uncomfortably overdressed, and they are always absurd. It is all much as one might expect. Yet it is easy to understand that such pictures could not have been publicly shown in the later nineteenth century. They would presumably have been condemned as obscene. They are not obscene, however. What they are is both more matter-of-fact and more richly steeped in the materials of irony than any public discourse on sexual morality is ever allowed to be. Technically they combine decorative vitality with an incisiveness of observation that continually skirts the margins of caricature. But whatever they are, they are not scenarios that Degas was responsible for inventing. Nor are they pictures of distorted women. Indeed, I can see nothing in Degas' drawing of these res to justify the suggestion that he was involved in the degradation and abuse of the women they depict. Rather these images seem refreshingly resistant to the easy assumption that prostitution is just one thing, making just one kind of stain on the social tableau, a prostitute just one kind of person engaged in just one form of activity. 18 As Norma Broude has noted, if Degas was not himself a feminist, there were those among his acquaintances who were. One of these, Diego Martelli, was actively engaged in campaigning both for the liberalization of laws by which prostitutes were persecuted, and, more tellingly, for recognition of the extent to which women in general were effectively prostituted by marriage. 19 Martelli lived for thirty years with a woman he had met in a brothel. His picture by Degas hangs in Edinburgh. We look in vain for signs of the sitter's shame or the artist's disapproval.
Before we leave the brothel scenes there is one point worthy of note. A few of them show women relaxing in what appear to be off-duty moments. But either the women appear in twos and threes, or if alone they are represented in such a way as to assume a viewpoint directed upon them. In none of the brothel scenes, in other words, is a woman shown to be the sole occupant of her own space. What Degas' pictures make clear is that whatever the prostitutes are doing in them, even if they are literally doing nothing, they are always and everywhere available to be looked at ( 15).
The pastels are for the most part much larger. In some of them the res are almost life-size. Yet these res are generally set much closer to the picture plane, they occupy far more of the total represented space and, crucially, they tend not to be prefaced by the kinds of situational cues by means of which the position of an imaginary spectator would normally be established. I should try to make clearer just what I mean. In the Dancer in her Dressing Room in Winterthur the half-open door at the right serves to define a position outside looking in, and thus to render the dancer the explicit object of an interested regard--very much the same kind of regard, in fact, as that to which the single res of prostitutes are subject in their moments of quasi-isolation ( 16). We might go so far as to say that it is not so much the dancer herself as the experience of seeing her that the picture is concerned with. If we now compare the Bather with a Towel from the Metropolitan Museum in New York I think we will find it much harder to separate sensation of the re from the re seen ( 17). There is no cued external position to help us prize the two apart. Unlike the door, the towel attaches to the woman's torso; it remains, as it were, a condition of the body's imagined sensation of its own surface. In fact the more we look at the pastels of bathing women the clearer this difference becomes. All those pictorial furnishings and foreground devices that normally serve to orient the spectator relative to the pictured re are here made to serve a quite different end: they function, in fact, to suggest, to define and to qualify the sensuous self-absorption of the represented re. Thus, in the large pastel in the National Gallery, London ( 2), as in the related picture in the Courtauld Institute, the ensembles of re, towels, [End Page 77 Begin Page 79] and tub chair constitute an enclosed and self-sufficient tactile world. Similarly, in each of the long series of drawings of a woman bending to dry her feet, the position of her buttocks relative to the rim of the bath is established with minute care, as if the vitality of the re as a whole were assured by the sensation of their contact ( 18).
I will try to be explicit in the conclusion I draw from these various observations. In the matter of how women look, there was no equal distribution of powers in Degas' day. This inequality was exploited in a great deal of painting produced in the later nineteenth century, much of it trivially meretricious, some of it seriously absurd. 20 In the work of a few remarkable artists, however, the inequality was acknowledged and its conditions laid open to imaginative reconstruction. In the work of Manet and Degas it was made clear that the exchange of glances was never an exchange conducted on level terms. 21 Each in his own way worked to imagine and to represent what it must be like always to be looked at. Each in his own way questioned that hypocritical system of thought according to which a prostitute could not be allowed to be attractive ( 19). Each, in allowing the represented prostitute to appear human, offered the actual male viewer an image of himself as the imaginary abuser. 22 But Degas, I think, went further. The evidence is there in the pictures if we can only read them on their own terms. I will make my point in the form of a question. Given the conditions we have been considering--conditions in which the look of women was an issue bearing crucially upon the success or failure of a painting--what if an artist took it in mind to paint a woman who was not being looked at? A woman, that is to say, who was allowed to be the unselfconscious possessor of her own space, her own body? How might he go about it? Of course the enterprise would be deeply paradoxical and ambivalent, since the end result must always be a visible image. But it might be possible, at least, to counter the presupposition of the eternal male spectator in the picture; to fill his conventional place with other stuff; to summon up whatever normally served to indicate his presence and to replace it; even, if necessary, to employ a chaperone to displace him. 23 But what would first and foremost have to be achieved is an almost unprecedented act of imagination enacted by means of a highly practiced technique. There could be no effective dislocation of the spectator unless the pictured woman were shown--albeit quasi-metaphorically--to be in possession of herself; unless her self-absorption could be convincingly rendered.
This rendering would require two distinctive forms of competence. Firstly, it would require knowledge--knowledge sufficient to produce a realistic re in the absence of that re's supposed referent in the actual world. And how could such knowledge be gained without an apparently obsessive working and reworking of the body's real appearance? It is highly significant in this respect that the great majority of Degas' finished pastels of women are complex variations on life studies or photographs, often derived from successive tracings. That is to say, they are made from other pictures, not directly from posed models. 24 Secondly, it would require that the literal surface of the picture be endowed with extraordinary metaphorical potential--the potential to evoke another's bodily sensation. It was to this end, I think, that Degas so busily animated the surfaces of his pastels. It mattered less that they should capture the naturalistic conrations of the body than that they should convey that body's radiant warmth, its tension and relaxation, its balance or stability, its own responsiveness to texture and to touch.
It is a supreme and ghastly irony that when these works were first exhibited the commentators for the most part read their surfaces literally. What they saw was the labored texture. They saw it as blotchy skin--"the streetwalker's modern, swollen, pasty flesh," to quote one writer on the Impressionist Exhibition of 1886. 25 You throw a stick for a dog. The dog fails to follow the trajectory and looks back at you expectantly. You point at the stick. The dog looks fixedly at the tip of your finger.
It was the same, of course, with the reading of the res' poses. What the viewers saw was res in poses they were unable to recognize as natural.  In fact the reason the viewers were unable to see the women as ordinary was not that their poses were unnatural in the sense of having no straightforward biological or aesthetic justification; it was because they failed to conform to the conventional means of organizing women into pictures. Of course, this was precisely the point. How is a woman to be shown in art as if she were alone and not being seen? The answer is that she must be shown as not arranged to be seen, not displayed, not already aestheticised--she must appear, in fact, as if not posed. Hence the unusual requirements that Degas made of his actual models; the traditionally comfortable and sustainable poses of the studio were just those that his enterprise must rule out. We may feel some sympathy for those actual women who were conscripted into an endeavor they are unlikely to have understood. But only an eagerness to condemn could lead us to conceive of that endeavor as a debasing and abusive social practice.
In fact for some of his most uncanonical res Degas used photographs. The extraordinary work from Philadelphia is a case in point ( 20). 26 The nature of the artist's interest in photography may be used to advance my argument. There were two significant aspects to this interest. On the one hand, Degas made use of what would have been considered at the time the accidental effects of the photograph: the blurring of a limb in movement, the disappearance of a detail into a halo of light, the cropping of a re caught moving into or out of the frame. On the other, he informed himself of the scientific work of Muybridge and Marey. The particular relevance of this work is that it employed photographic techniques as a means of studying a world beyond the normally visible. Like those amateurish snapshots that caught res in accidental movement, what the images of Muybridge and Marey recorded was a range of movements and positions outside those canonized in normal vision. 27 The end that photography served for Degas was thus to furnish him with powerful resources for the critique of naturalistic conventions. For example, it clearly went against the taste of the time to conceive of the pastel now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York as a naturalistic picture of an ordinary woman entering a bath ( 21). But photography will show, and an unbiased eye will eventually learn to see, that this is indeed how a conventionally attractive woman may look. The re is neither debased by the effects of prostitution nor distorted by the artist's misogyny. She is simply uncanonized, unposed, and thus not being seen.
It is nearly time to return to the monotype with which I began. There is one last issue to address. It concerns Degas' motivation. This question is most urgently raised, I think, by those images that seem to fall somewhere between the brothel monotypes and the large pastels. Though smaller and less heavily worked than the latter, they lack the appearance of spontaneity and near-caricature by which the former tend to be distinguished. One of the most remarkable of them is a small image developed in pastel over the faint second impression of a monotype. It shows a woman washing at a bidet--a moment that the typical male imagination holds as paradigmatic of feminine physical privacy ( 22).
There are two different kinds of conclusion we might draw from such images. If it is allowed that the pastels can justifiably be regarded as attempts to explore how women look when they are not being seen, this would still leave the matter of the "heterosexual drive" to be answered. It might be said that all I have done is add substance to the very view I was concerned to oppose: the view that what these pictures do is bring artistic sophistication to the proclivities of the voyeur. In other words, for all that the skills involved may be exceptional, what they are being used for is to pry into the most private of moments; to appropriate even the woman's own bodily sensation, and to render it consumable by the male spectator.
The main objection to this conclusion is that voyeurism, as conventionally understood, is by its very nature unsympathetic. That's to say its aim is not to recognize the distinctive nature of the other's experience, but rather to conscript that experience as a form of exciting narrative within one's own. Whatever artists may or may not wish to do, aesthetic success and failure are at any given time relative to certain material conditions. If I am right about the conditions bearing down upon the French art of the later nineteenth century, a predisposition to unsympathetic voyeurism would not have been an advantage. My contention is that by the mid 1880s the ability to represent the female re as the sole possessor of her own space and body was an aesthetic requirement that the work of Degas and others was bound to face. (It may be significant that it is at around this same time that Degas' dancers tend to step out of the spotlight and into the wings, where, out of sight of the audience, they become pre-occupied with the details of their costumes and their coiffeurs. For examples, compare the Curtseying Danseuse with Bouquet of 1878, in the Musée d'Orsay, with the Danseuses bleues of ca. 1890 from the same collection or with the Red Ballet Skirts of ca. 1897-1901 from the Burrell Collection.) I suppose that what I am saying in the end is that the issue gets decided aesthetically, on the basis of results. Aesthetic achievement, then, would have to be seen as a measure of avoidance of voyeurism. If that is indeed the case, then a reading that would insist on the implicit violence of these images is one that must deny such aesthetic properties as they may have in order to protect assumptions about their motivation.
I return, then, to the question of what it is that drives this art--if it is not an ultimately voyeuristic and prurient interest. My answer would be that they are driven both by desire and by imagination. A desire that that which they show might be capable of being seen; and an imaginative insight into the conditions required if that possibility were to be realized. It may well be that in the 1880s only a woman who was a prostitute could have allowed Degas to see that which is pictured in the image of the woman at the bidet. But a picture for which a prostitute models is not necessarily a picture of a prostitute, any more than the sad woman in the café was a portrait of the actress Ellen André, who actually posed for it. In fact what the worked-over monotype shows is a sight now open to association with the conjugal intimacy of a shared bedroom, rather than the hygiene of the prostitute. In this respect we are perhaps luckier than the men and women of Degas' day. Time has passed. Of course paintings cannot predict the future. What they can do, however, is to show what is lacking from the present, though in the process they may render their critical content virtually imperceptible to their contemporary spectators. It is for this reason that the testimony of the artist's own time proves so frequently unreliable as a guide to interpretation. Is it so inconceivable that Degas could have understood the grounds of his own misfortune; understood them and tried to imagine them realistically transformed? Might it not be that this is what his mature pictures show? That if a woman's intimacy were really her own, then an equal exchange of intimacies might realistically be imagined and the "moment with infinite content" might become more than just a glance. Degas was certainly clear enough in his earlier work about what life must be like where there is neither empathy nor true intimacy. The conclusions are unmistakable both from his formal family portraits (see The Belleli Family, Musée d'Orsay) and from the two essays in genre painting known respectively as Interior (or more dramatically and probably misleadingly as The Rape) and Sulking (respectively, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Museum of Art, Philadelphia). 28 It is also very clear from the evidence of his work that he could imagine what it was like when the absence of self-possession left women condemned to a public isolation ( 23).
I should perhaps try to put some form of theoretical scaffolding under the conjectural aspects of this paper. Of course it would be a nonsense to claim that we could now straightforwardly recover what was not visible to the contemporary spectator of Degas' work. It may be, however, that we can recover it as a form of understanding of what it was that was then not to be seen. To the extent that it is sensible to talk in such terms, we exercise a kind of interpretive competence which the painting may originally have put itself beyond. Of course there are limits on the competences we can bring to bear, as there are on our capacity practically to imagine, for example, what it is like to inhabit the body of another. But it is precisely at the limits on and of the imagination that art does its most indispensable critical work.
The argument may be put in the form of a series of theses. The intensional properties of a painting, or, if we avoid pandering to a prissy prejudice, its qualities are produced properties. They are constitutive and definitive of the painting. These properties are not necessarily to be identified with such properties as may be predicated of the painting or attributed to it, since they may be such that they are not to be seen in advance of some transformation in the spectator, some self-critical process or other process of edification. The painting whose properties are not to be seen (by the spectator) will be described and interpreted (by that spectator) as that which it is not. To perceive that a description or interpretation of a painting is a description or interpretation of that which it is not, is to act under an intuition of that which is not to be seen. We might call this intuition "aesthetic." This intuition implies some convergence between that which is not to be seen (or said of) the painting, and that which is not to be seen in (or said of) the world of the spectator. It does not follow that the properties of the painting are relative to what may be seen and said in the world of the spectator. A painting may serve to divide its spectators into (i) those who cannot see it and will not see it and who must therefore describe it as that which it is not; (ii) those who cannot see it, but who nevertheless do not describe it as that which it is not (and who are thus pre-transformational from the point of view of the painting); (iii) those who can see it and who are thus post-transformational from the point of view of the painting. The transformation involved is one that the painting specifically requires by virtue of its produced properties. The process might be thought of as the coming-to-awareness of an unconscious intention, where intention is conceived of as a historical rather than merely psychological category. The possibility of transformation in the spectator may entail the capacity to imagine himself or herself either as pictured or as seeing what is pictured (or otherwise represented), or both. Imagination of this order has conventionally been conceived of as a form of empathy. However, we need a way of thinking of the mechanisms involved that does not tend to sentimentalisation of the forms of experience at issue, and that is not diverting--as empathy tends to be--from the formal and pictorial instruction of the relevant imaginative activity, i. e. from the painting's effect. Any effect we attribute specifically to painting will be a function of some playing on the relationship between picture plane and literal surface. To talk of painting as an art is to imply that this game is such as in turn to problematize the relations between (i) that which is normally to be seen and represented according to the culturally available resources of expression in the practical world from which the painting issues, and that which is not; (ii) the painting in question and other paintings; (iii) the spectator and other paintings; iv) the world of that which the spectator can see (and describe and interpret) and that which he or she cannot see (and etc.). To imply that a painting produced at time T1 can have as one of its produced properties the capacity to challenge resources of expression at time T2 would be to attribute to paintings the capacity to predict the future. The challenge in question may be conceived of as a constant property only to the extent that the need to represent that which is not to be seen is discoverable under different social and historical conditions. These may also be the limits according to which what has been called aesthetic experience may justifiably be conceived of as a constant in human cultures.
Finally, then, to the monotype which started all this. It may by now how have become clear where my argument has been leading, and how I mean to explain the sense of blindness that the monotype momentarily induced in me. Of course, it would be easiest to step back and to play the voyeur, with all that that would imply for our understanding of the artist's desire in producing his picture--and for all that it might suggest about the nature of his exchanges with his friends. But in fact the composition offers us no space to retreat to. There is even less than in the large pastels. It is not simply that this is an image without an external spectator, though I think it is certainly and crucially that. This is a body seen from the virtual position of its own head. And what would it mean for the male spectator to occupy that position? To look down the body of the other as if from within its own imagined self-consciousness? What would it be like to look like that? Rather than writing from certainty either about the artist's mentality or about our own appearance, perhaps, like Degas, we should try to see.
Charles Harrison is Professor of the History and Theory of Art and Staff Tutor in Arts at the Open University and has held appointments as Visiting Professor at the Universities of Chicago and Texas at Austin. He is editor of Art-Language and author of English Art and Modernism 1900-1939 (Yale University Press, 1981/1994); Essays on Art & Language (Blackwell, 1991) and Modernism (Tate Gallery, 1997); and co-editor of Art in Theory 1900-1990 (Blackwell, 1992) and Art in Theory 1815-1900 (Blackwell, 1998).
*This essay is based on a lecture given at the National Gallery, London, in June 1996, in connection with the exhibition "Degas Beyond Impressionism," and at the University of Bristol in October 1998, in the series "Impressionism Re-viewed." For conversation on relevant issues I am particularly grateful to Martha Ward of the University of Chicago and to Paul Smith of the University of Bristol. My interest in the picturing of that which could not be seen was initially aroused in the studio of Art & Language.
1. Eugenia Parry Janis, Degas Monotypes (Cambridge: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1968), cat. no. 137. The related work in pastel over a second and extended proof of this monotype, mentioned below, is in a private collection in Chicago (Paul Andre Lemoisne, Degas et Son Oeuvre [Paris: Paul Brame et C. M. de Hauke, 1946], no. 752).
2. The recipients of these three other dedicated monotypes were the ceramicist P. Rosanna, the collector Henri Michel-Lévy, and Vicompte Lepic, whose picture Degas painted against the background of the Place de la Concorde.
3. Norma Broude claims with some justice that "The issue of gender was first introduced as a site of conflict in modern Degas studies in the mid-1970s" by her own article, "Degas's 'Misogyny,'" first published in the Art Bulletin, March 1977; see her review of Dealing With Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision, ed. Richard Kendall and Griselda Pollock (New York: Universe, 1991), in Woman's Art Journal 6.2 (Fall 1995/Winter 1996): 35-40 . The 1977 article sought to question the assumption of Degas' misogyny which had been prevalent since the first exhibition of his "suite de nues" in the 1886 Impressionist exhibition. The later review notes the reinstallation of a Degas "framed as the perverted instrument of society's power structures and obsessions" in some recent writing by feminist art historians . The review provides a useful summary of some of the issues raised in interpretation of Degas' work, with references to some relevant publications.
4. Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto & Windus 1914), 98.
5. A major exhibition of the work of Degas was shown at the Grand Palais, Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts, Ottawa and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, between February 1988 and January 1989. "Degas: Images of Women" was shown at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, in 1988. A symposium organized in connection with the latter exhibition resulted in the publication Dealing With Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision, cited in note 3. "Degas beyond Impressionism" was shown at the National Gallery, London, May--August 1996, and at the Art Institute of Chicago, September 1996--January 1997.
6. Heather Dawkins, "Grief and Fascination," in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4.3 (Fall 1992): 66-90.
7. Anthea Callen, "Degas' Bathers: Hygiene and Dirt--Gaze and Touch," Dealing With Degas, 175. Callen has given more extensive attention to Degas' bathers in her recently published The Spectacular Body: Science, Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas (London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
8. Griselda Pollock, "Degas/Images/Women; Women/Degas/Images: What Difference Does Feminism Make to Art History?," Dealing With Degas, 33. This article was subjected to a particularly devastating analysis in the review by Norma Broude cited in note 3.
9. For further discussion of this claim, see my "Cézanne: Fantasy and Imagination," 4.3 (September 1997): 1-18.
10. Auguste de Molins, The Comming Storm [sic] is listed as no. 92 in the catalogue printed for the first exhibition of the Société anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs etc. in Paris in 1874.
11. Wollheim's concept of the "spectator in the picture" is discussed at length in ch. 3 of his Painting as an Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). His claim is that there are certain paintings that have "a representational content in excess of what they represent" and that this is to be accounted for by the presence of an imaginary spectator who, though unrepresented, is "internal" to the given picture. That is to say, the picture may be imagined as showing not only what this spectator sees but how he or she sees it. Wollheim characterizes the "spectator in the picture" as a "protagonist" to whom a "repertoire" is assigned by the artist . "The external spectator identifies with the internal spectator, and it is through this identification that he gains fresh access to the picture's content. In a licensed way he supplements his perception of the picture with the proceeds of imagination and does so so as to advance understanding" . As Wollheim applies the concept of the "spectator in the picture" it is subject to a problematic and conservative limitation: it is established solely through the rative scenario of the given picture. It is thus not clear how the effect of the picture's factive aspects might combine with the effect of the external spectator's identification with the internal spectator to produce understanding of the picture. The question is a crucial one where Degas' pastels are concerned. In no pictorial work--with the possible exception of Cézanne's--is the repertoire of the "spectator in the picture" so clearly qualified or challenged by the expressive properties of the literal worked surface. Yet if the spectator in the picture could be allowed to meet this qualification or challenge there seems no reason why the concept should not be extended to such non-rative paintings as those of Rothko, to which it seems highly appropriate.
12. This painting was discussed by Neil MacGregor, Director of the National Gallery, London, in the first program of the televised series Making Masterpieces on BBC2 on 20 October 1997. Drawing upon a recent examination by the gallery's scientific department and conservation studio, MacGregor noted the alterations by which Renoir had "dressed down" the main re to lower her class and to make more poignant her apparent discomfort at the attentions of the man behind her. "Is this the first politically correct painting?" he asked, concluding, "It may well be." The sound-bite gets the painting half right. But, pace Wollheim, we need to remember that a picture is always first and most crucially seen by the person who both makes and imagines it from a position this side of its surface. If I am justified in my reading of the painting and its critical connection to de Molins' earlier work, it is to the man in front of the pictured woman that we should look for the true--and more complex--source of her discomfort. It is his motivated inquisitiveness about the girl's social and economic position that the alterations to her costume and her bodily demeanor serve most tellingly to establish. (See the clearly managed review of MacGregor's program in David Lister, "A Study in Sexual Politics," Guardian, 16 October 1977, "Eye on Thursday section," 1.)
13. The locus classicus for this reading is Joris-Karl Huysmans' essay on the pastels, first published as "Degas" in his Certains (Paris: P. V. Stock, 1889); trans. in C. Harrison, P. Wood, and J. Gaiger, Art in Theory 1815-1900 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 893-95. Huysmans writes of the artist's "painstaking cruelty and unshakeable hatred." Martha Ward has provided a thorough analysis of critical responses to the showing of Degas' "suite de nues" at the eighth Impressionist exhibition in 1886, demonstrating how assumptions about the artist's misogyny were variously connected to characterizations of the poverty, ugliness, and amorality of the represented women, with the typical consequence that the images were read as harshly "realistic." See "The Rhetoric of Independence and Innovation" in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886, ed. Charles S. Moffett (San Francisco: The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1986), 421-39.
14. The reference is to Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, bk. 16 ch. 5.
15. Anthea Callen writes of "anatomical distortions which flatten and fix the re into a shallow pictorial space," cataloguing the "distortions" in various pictures by reference to an assumed biological naturalism. She then explains the distortions in question in terms of a desire on Degas' part both to contain female sexuality and literally to manipulate the female anatomy ("Degas' Bathers: Hygiene and Dirt--Gaze and Touch," 168-70). In her more sophisticated treatment of the same issue, Heather Dawkins remarks that ". . . as many have noticed, Degas' sense of the body, especially from the 1870s, was very tenuous: anatomies under tutus are implausible, legs join to torsos problematically, women stepping in or out of baths threaten to split up the middle, and so on." Sensibly opposing those who would attribute the "tenuousness" of Degas' sense of the body to "lack of representational skill," Dawkins explains it rather in terms of "the necessity for a constant deferral of gratification in fantasy . . . met in part by the necessary phobic avoidance of the object in projection" (Dawkins, "Frogs, Monkeys and Women: A History of Identification across a Phantastic Body," Dealing with Degas, 206-10). That psychic projection played some part in Degas' work seems plausible enough. It presumably does in everyone's. The point at issue is how we are to isolate the significant effects of that projection, in the absence of some adequate theory of artistic style and some relevant account of its development (i.e. without some possibility of eliminating the effects of our own projections). To put the matter bluntly, with such theoretical instruments to hand, what might someone not make of the work of Picasso or Matisse or Dali or etc. in the 1920s? We should also bear in mind that the Wollheimian concept of the spectator in the picture has considerable potential to damage interpretations such as those of Callen and Dawkins, based as these are on the assumption that it is the artist's unreflected motivation that the forms of his pictures express (see note 11).
16. See, for instance the discussion of the issue in Norma Broude, "Edgar Degas and French Feminism, ca. 1880," originally published in The Art Bulletin 70.4 (December 1988): 640-59; reprinted in N. Broude and R. Garrard eds. Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 268-93 and in particular 285-88.
17. This position was argued by Eunice Lipton in "Degas' Bathers: The Case for Realism," Arts Magazine 54.1 : 94-97; see also ch. 4, "The Bathers: Modernity and Prostitution" in her Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 151-56.
18. "These women, officially classed as 'other,' have indeed been debased and commodified by the lives in which they have been economically trapped--they have become what patriarchal society intended them to be used for. Yet it is striking that Degas provides us with images that attest not only to their exploitation but also . . . to their humanity, affection for one another, and solidarity," Broude, 281.
19. Broude, 281, discusses Degas' revision in 1880 of his twenty-year old Spartan Girls Challenging Boys in the context of the emergent feminist movement in France and of the artist's friendship with Martelli.
20. Powerful evidence of misogyny and sadism is certainly there to be found in the French painting of the nineteenth century. The imaginative anticipation of acts of rape was regularly on offer in paintings exhibited at the Salon, from Marc Gleyre's deeply unpleasant Roman bandits of 1831 (now in the Cleveland Museum) to Paul-Joseph Jamin's fatuous The Brennus with his Share of the Spoils of 1893 (now Musée des Beaux-Arts, La Rochelle). Unwillingness to make discriminations on aesthetic grounds is often raised to the status of a principle in cultural studies. I would want to propose, however, that aesthetic difference is the surest guide to other kinds of difference between pictures such as Gleyre's and Jamin's on the one hand and those of a Manet or a Degas on the other.
21. Confronted with Degas' sketch of Woman With a Lorgnette (ca. 1866 British Museum, London) in the 1988 exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, Griselda Pollock interprets it and its related studies of a woman looking directly out of the picture not as indications that Degas might possibly have got there before her in critical reflection upon the distribution of powers in "the Gaze and the Look," but as further evidence of the artist's need that the look be "captured and tamed" ("The Gaze and the Look: Women with Binoculars--A Question of Difference," Dealing With Degas, 106-130). One is reminded of the policeman so secure in his knowledge of the suspect's guilt that any old evidence will do to confirm it.
22.  While it breaches the decorum for a respectable portrait, the explicitly self-conscious expression of the woman lifts it out of the category of a mere life study from a professional model. In the 1870s there were few other social categories to which the woman could be assigned apart from that of prostitute.
23. As with my earlier reference to Picasso, I suggest that circumstantial support for this reading of Degas' endeavor is provided by those ensuing works by Pierre Bonnard which are clearly designed to explore just this possibility. I have specifically in mind those works, such as La Table de Toilette of 1908 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), The Bathroom Mirror also of 1908 (Pushkin Museum, Moscow), Dressing Table and Mirror of 1913 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) and The Mantlepiece of 1916 (Margoline Collection), in which a mirror above a washstand or mantlepiece is made to reflect a nude female re just where the presence of the artist-as-viewer might be expected.
24. There is considerable evidence that Degas associated the conventions of direct life study with a tendency for loss of expressive potential in the whole re. His notebooks of 1877-83 record the following "studio projects" in the form of admonitions to himself. "Set up tiered benches round the room to get in the habit of drawing things from below and from above. Only be allowed to paint things seen in a mirror so as to instal a hatred of trompe l'oeil. For a portrait have the re pose on the ground floor and have to work on the first floor to get used to keeping a grasp of the forms and expressions, never drawing or painting directly." (Author's translation from Art in Theory 1815-1900, 567.)
25. Henry Fèvre, "L'exposition des impressionistes," La Revue de Demain, May--June 1886, cited by Martha Ward in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-86, 431.
26. The photograph in question, attributed to Degas, is preserved in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu and is reproduced in Richard Kendall, Degas: Beyond Impressionism (London: National Gallery Publications in association with the Art Institute of Chicago, 1996), . 20, 29.
27. I am indebted to Joel Snyder of the University of Chicago for alerting me to this aspect of the work of Muybridge and Marey and to its relevance for Degas' work on the bathers; specifically to his paper given to the Art History Graduates Association of the University of Chicago, Spring quarter 1996, under the title 'Beyond the Visible.' Speaking of Marey's chronophotographic pictures, Snyder suggested that "If a phenomenon is that which must appear to someone, these pictures show what cannot appear to anyone." (My italics).
28. For discussion of these latter pictures see John House, "Degas' 'Tableaux de Genre'" in Dealing With Degas, 80-94. This article goes some way to correct the account given in Theodore Reff, 'Degas' "Tableau de Genre,"' Art Bulletin 54.1 (September 1972): 316-37, which is more consistent with the traditional belief in the artist's misogyny.
Does it have a politics? Wouldn't we all like to know, more than seventy-five years later? But we have little chance unless we give up the pleasures of the heavy club and the coarse concept: running dog/subversive cat--reaction/revolution. The pre-Waste Land Eliot knew the difficulty well, writing with wry self-irony that he found himself a Conservative in the United States but a Labourite in London. 1
What happened back there was a poetic improvisation within a social convulsion, and my aim is to restore The Waste Land to a distinctive conjuncture that we have casually let dissolve. It has been too tempting for too long to assimilate the poem to the events that came later in the decade, even shortly later, to see it as safely predicting the dispositions of the mid and late twenties: the poem as proto-Anglican, crypto-classical, or neo-monarchist. Eliot himself uttered the best warning when he wrote:
Only from about 1926 did the features of the post-war world begin to emerge--and not only in the sphere of politics. From that date one began slowly to realize that the intellectual and artistic output of the previous seven years had been rather the last efforts of an old world, than the first struggles of the new. 2
Whether or not he meant to be writing of himself, we can certainly say that the features of his own postwar world only emerged "from about 1926" and that the immediate period after the war marked a epoch in its own right--the years 1919 to 1921 or 1922 have a density more often found in decades. Accordingly, to put the question of politics to The Waste Land must be to put it to this brief but decisive historical moment.
When Eliot settled in London, he moved steadily into an infatuation with his new home. "I like London better than before"--"I like London very well"--"I have been to a cubist tea"--"I want to live in London"--"I love to be in London" (LOTSE, 55, 57, 77, 107, 122). Still, within the chanting, crooning enthusiasm, he remained acutely conscious of the strains on a foreigner. It's no surprise that his affection for the city grew in proportion to the successful spinning of a social web. He repeatedly counts the number of friends in those early months; he needs those friends because, as he later put it, "getting recognized in English letters is like breaking open a safe--for an American" (LOTSE, 392).
By 1919 Eliot can boast that he has "more influence on English letters than any other American has ever had, unless it be Henry James. I know a great many people, but there are many more who would like to know me . . ." The possibility of returning to the United States lingers: Charles W. Eliot, the ex-President of Harvard, asks how his kinsman "can forego the privilege of living in the genuine American atmosphere--a bright atmosphere of freedom and hope" (LOTSE, 323). But whatever the attractions of freedom, London has the allure of power: "if one is to do anything in literature this is the best place to be," and this because "London imposes her acceptance of a man's work on all the English speaking world and . . . accepts no other standard than her own" (LOTSE, 107, 102). On this point Eliot is clear, convinced, and self-delighted: London is the imperial capital of culture, and to break open its safe is to uncover riches that can be redeemed in any literary market.
The "safe" is, of course, a resonant re of speech for a young banker, resonant but not suprising, because we certainly misread both Eliot's modernity and his urbanity if we ignore his role as a practitioner of economics, working amid various subtle currencies. 3 What appears in one guise as the question of war reparations, shows itself in another as a problem in the economies of literary reputation. From the start of his London life he understands and accepts the material conditions of success, the economy of reputation. It is essential, he concludes, that a writer "should establish solid connections with at least one important paper" (LOTSE, 358)--and there follows the coldly unsentimental insight:
There are only two ways in which a writer can become important--to write a great deal, and have his writings appear everywhere, or to write very little . . . I write very little, and I should not become more powerful by increasing my output. My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event. (LOTSE, 358)
This is a canny exercise in what might fairly be called cynical literary reason. 4 It suggests that Eliot's banker's understanding of writing markets led him to administer his reputation carefully within a robustly modernized urban culture. 5 He will write that he is intent to keep his book of criticism short: "I want it small," he writes, "in order to make it a single distinct blow" (LOTSE, 355). In choosing to follow the little way, the terse way, Eliot acknowledges the power of cultural mystery, of the reticent perfectionist, who locks the safe he has broken open, and who, to change res, creates hunger by feeding the public so sparingly. At the same time he opens a connection between the conditions of reputation and the forms of literary experiment practiced in those early London years. The suppression of a narrative continuity that was still flickering in "Prufrock" and "Portrait of a Lady," the burnishing of smaller fragments, the violent shift in attention between verse paragraphs, the movement to the greater difficulty of the quatrain poems, "Gerontion," and climactically The Waste Land--all this occurs within the complex cultural universe that Eliot seeks to command through the economic resources of the "single distinct blow," whether it take the form of a short critical book or a self-standing poetic conceit: "A woman drew her long black hair out tight." 6
Through the grimness of the war years, Eliot sought and quickly felt the mastery of the imperial literary summit. In the spring of 1919 he writes, "I am getting to know and be known by all the intelligent or important people in letters" (LOTSE, 285). And yet through the course of that year Eliot felt a sudden dissolution of the carefully prepared edifice of mastery. The wartime metropolis had been a depleted city, where literary activity had been reduced to a low simmer. Even as some modernists fought and died--T. E. Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska among them--those who stayed home in London had found an urban culture small and pliable enough to yield to literary activism. Surely it's telling that the great moment of crisis in Eliot's work coincides with the recovery of peace. The postwar metropolis became the saturated city again, but for Eliot the vigorous city was a new difficulty. "London has never been so full," writes Vivien Eliot, "the crowds are so enormous, everywhere, in the streets and public places, theatres restaurants . . . one sees Americans at every turn" (LOTSE, 265).
Written so soon after the carnage of the war, the poem has naturally been understood as an engagement with the civilization of violence. But a burden of this argument is that The Waste Land needs to be located within the immediate surround of the postwar city, the city cursed not by military violence, but by hectic peace. It's the city of the dead, as we have always known, but these are peculiar corpses: they twitch so spasmodically. Eliot's London letters for The Dial and his private correspondence describe "the putrescence of English literature" (LOTSE, 431), but the accumulating picture is one of a seething putrescence, a frantic routine. The drafts of "The Fire Sermon" are searing.

Phantasmal gnomes, burrowing in brick and stone and steel!
(TWL, 31, 106-7, 112-13).
It's the roiling capital of peace that consumes Eliot, the boom town that haunts him as the war never did: the noisy, swarming town, not conscious enough to know that it's dead. The urban destruction in The Waste Land--London bridge falling down, the collapsing towers of the European capitals--takes on a peculiar valence: a tone of perceptible relief that lives within the catastrophe. 7 What the poem both dreads and desires is the annihilation of the city as apparatus, what Eliot calls "the postwar machinery of life" with its "horrible waste," the city as the relentless wheel (LOTSE, 410).
John Maynard Keynes published The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919 as a bitter polemic against the Peace Treaty agreed at the Paris conference. Having attended the conference as an official of the British Treasury, Keynes was witness to the working of power at its most lofty summit. What he saw was the fatal emptiness of the grand Parisian bargain. Gazing at the faces of the world's great leaders, of Wilson and Clemenceau, he came to doubt whether they "were really faces at all and not the tragi-comic masks of some strange drama or puppet-show." 8 "The nerve center of the European system" was haunted by "dreadful specters."
Paris was a nightmare and everyone there was morbid. A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous scene; the futility and smallness of man before the great events confronting him; the mingled significance and unreality of the decisions; levity, blindness, insolence, confused cries from without . . . (ECP, 5)
More than Jessie Weston, more than The Golden Bough, The Economic Consequences of the Peace anticipates the ghostly modality of The Waste Land, the spectral insight into the fictions of modernity. Keynes's Paris is the unreal city of peace: there are no living people there, only the heavy masks of insubstantial men, flapping the artificial wings of leadership. Since the work of Eleanor Cook we've had reason to ponder the connection between Eliot and Keynes, and reason to connect Keynes' book to Eliot's labor at Lloyds Bank, where he described himself as "dealing alone with all the debts and claims of the bank under the various Peace Treaties" (LOTSE, 451). 9 But The Economic Consequences of the Peace must be read as more than a textual impetus to the writing of The Waste Land; it must be seen as a canny instrument for stitching the relations of politics, economics and poetry at an uncanny juncture.
Power absconditus--that is the savage Keynesian insight: those who have been entrusted with the world's fate have withdrawn into the fantasy of an untenable peace. It is all like Tolstoy, shrieks Keynes, it's like Hardy's The Dynasts, this spectacle of "events marching on to their fated conclusion uninfluenced and unaffected by the cerebrations of Statesmen in Council" (ECP, 6).
Here is the first cold perception that we need to bring to the politics of The Waste Land, exactly the perception of power absconditus. There was an Archduke who once took Marie out on a sled. There was a Coriolanus, now broken. There were loitering heirs of city directors, now departed, having left no addresses. There was a Fisher King. All these powers have receded, creating a landscape in which fearful selves are left to wander, at the mercy of forces no longer governed by once formidable authorities, Kings and Generals, Directors and Dukes.
 Such is its genius. 10 The epigraph from Heart of Darkness, discarded in the late stages of revision, belongs to this pattern of abandonment. Kurtz is yet another recent leader whose recession will abandon events to their own blind course. And yet we know that the agony of Kurtz's retrospection--his horror, his horror--is both a crisis in social power and a crisis of subjectivity. No doubt the allure of Conrad's Kurtz for Eliot, as an exemplary, epigraphic re, depended on the productive confusion of realms: personal agony indistinguishable from political catastrophe.
The Waste Land, with all its toppled towers of authority, displays power persisting. It persists in the opportunities within the zone of personal intimacy, in the micro-power of intersubjectivity.  Eliot envisions the local dyad, two flailing, flirting subjects, as a little system of submission and hierarchy, obedience and control. As the glimpsed idyll in the poem's final movements puts it, "your heart would have responded/ Gaily, when invited, beating obedient/ To controlling hands" (TWL, 146, 420-22). Give, sympathize, and control--these are the overcharged imperatives of regulated subjectivity.
"It is terrible to be alone with another person,"--so Eliot had written (in "The Death of the Duchess," TWL, 105, 25), and the ferocity of this insight is everywhere abrasive in The Waste Land. Two people make their own politics. Whether they give or control, either in silence or in howling eroticism, the mere human pair are already expert in the administration of power. "What is to be done?" demanded Lenin. In the drawing-room politics of The Waste Land this becomes, "What shall we do to-morrow? What shall we ever do?" (TWL, 138, 133-4) All through the poem runs the appalling compound of bottomless demand ("Stay with me," "Speak to me," 138, 111-12) and endless refusal ("I can't bear to look at you," 146). This is what Beckett will exploit and exhaust: this scene of two creatures alone, begging, clutching, biting, tickling, loving, loathing, without even the solace of a frame around the misery.
What the micro-politics of intimacy lacks is a world to inhabit, a society stretching out around the desperate dyad, a political context within which helpless subjectivity might orient itself. In a universe where "each man fixed his eyes before his feet" (TWL, 136, 65), even the intelligibility of space disappears. You trace the steps of the one in front of you, or you find yourself in a closed car; you follow the current of the city streets, or you drift with the river; but you never assemble a coherent or stable milieu that might be called an "outer world." These grammatical subjects can finally do little more than testify to their victimage: "I read much of the night" (TWL, 135, 18); "After the event/ He wept" (143, 297-98); "I can connect/ Nothing with nothing" (143, 301-2).
And how could she? How could she connect her suffering to the political incoherence of The Waste Land moment--of 1921, that year of "incessant strain and stress", a year of starvation in Russia, of Irish militancy, of unprecedented unemployment, of a coal strike in Britain from April to June described as "the greatest dispute and cessation of work ever recorded in any country." 11 For res in The Waste Land the legitimacy of government is only a memory, not a frame or a background or a confirming world picture. 12
The disappearance of the background of conviction, the dissolution of a world-picture--Keynes is at his most searching when he describes their loss. We never noticed, he writes, that what we took as natural and permanent, namely, the political life of the West in the fifty years before the war, was in fact "intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, [and] temporary." The end of the war has exposed the truth: that what Europe understood as the order of things was a recent contrivance whose collapse leaves us on a "sandy and false foundation" (ECP, 3). The great rise of European capital depended on naturalizing an artifice as something "normal, certain, and permanent" (ECP, 12). But now Europe must live with the dissolution of the norm, the decay of the natural.
What happens then to politics when its "nature" can no longer mystify, when the great statesmen stand revealed as puppets, when potent events overwhelm paltry agents, and when paltry agents are left to exercise power on their own? The answer for Keynes, and no less for Eliot, is that politics devolves into an economics, where economics is the name for the play of interests and desires when they are no longer veiled (or constrained) by the theatrics of political deception. The system of Europe had depended on the "double bluff," by which the great capitalists agreed to invest, not to consume, and workers were persuaded that they somehow had a stake in the wealth of others. After the war the bluff has been exposed; politics descends into the unsentimental truths of economics, the truth of the power in material interests.
In its crowds on the bridge, in its hooded hordes, The Waste Land tersely acknowledges the class basis of the disenchanted postwar world, but just as the London crowd resolves into Stetson, so the poem makes its sharp turn toward individuals, and public concerns gather around personal pronouns: my ruins, my lands. But in this Waste Land to remain alone is exactly not to escape the politico/economic crisis of those first postwar years, the crisis Keynes identified with the insight of Lenin, who thought that "the best way to destroy the Capitalist system was to debauch [its] currency." A "debauch" is just what the Times called it, this period of startling inflation built on the quicksand of rising prices. The cost of living rose month by month, climbing to a peak at the end of 1920, and the difficulty wasn't scarcity of goods: the problem was "scandalous profiteering," middlemen with ample supplies unwilling to bring prices down, intent to enjoy, for as long as they could, the artificial boom. 13 The government was seen as helpless--bands of shoppers, hoodless hordes, took matters into their own hands, organizing boycotts against the profiteers. When the Eliots looked for a new flat in 1920, they found that the "fantastic" rents were running "from two to four times what we pay now" (LOTSE, 406, 390). The sagging poet complained to his mother that though his salary had risen to £500, "which would have seemed a fortune . . . four years ago" (LOTSE, 353), now it is worth scarcely more than £250.
The notorious young man carbuncular in The Waste Land is, notably, a small house agent's clerk, who (the drafts explain) "flits" from "flat to flat" with clients like the Eliots (TWL, 45, 157-58). He is a case worker in the inflationary epidemic--a middleman within the system of profiteering. If he has a bold stare like a Bradford millionaire, that is because in the city of flowing money, numbers now change their meaning. As Keynes caustically put it, "Where we spent millions before the war, we have now learnt that we can spend hundreds of millions and apparently not suffer for it" (ECP, 4).
As for the clerk's metropolitan bride, the typist home at teatime, she has already led a semi-lustrous life in Eliot's correspondence, where in describing the world of Lloyds Bank, he had written, "I have half of a room, two girls, and half of a typist" (LOTSE, 232), and then goes on to explain the problem with typists. The trouble is that some of them "don't have to work:" they just "want something to do" (LOTSE, 204). In The Waste Land, of course, this turns into the something-to-do of sexuality. The end of the war brought the arrival of single women in public places, on the bus and in the squares. Peter Walsh in Mrs. Dalloway returns to London from India and swoons before the women on the street: "even the poorest dressed better than five years ago surely; and to his eye the fashions had never been so becoming; the long black cloaks; the slimness, the elegance, and then the delicious and apparently universal habit of paint . . . this taking out a stick of rouge or a powder-puff, and making up in public." 14 Eliot himself has known the subterranean tie between London and libido.  One walks about the street with one's desires, and one's refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches" (LOTSE, 75). But it's in the period of the twenties that the sexual heightening becomes conspicuous and inescapable; it appears as its own form of inflation, product of and counterpart to the inflation in prices, incomes and rents; and it appears up and down the social ladder.
He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. (TWL, 138-39, 148-50)
And, there is. That is the economic insight, the insight into a fevered economy, a sexual economy where there is more money chasing more bodies; in an apt Keynesian aphorism: "the war has disclosed the possibility of consumption to all and the vanity of abstinence to many" (ECP, 22). Or: "Others can pick and choose if you can't" (TWL, 139, 154).
Costing more and offering less, sex and commerce entwine in the city of raging peace. When the clerk and the typist clutch, fidget, and discharge, they perform their desires at the intersection point of this double coercion: money and libido. Mr. Eugenides may be unshaven but his traffic in currants yields enough cash for a lurid weekend. Those heirs to banking directorships may not yet have come into their plush offices on Threadneedle Street, but their silk handkerchiefs and cigarettes can still beguile the nymphs on the upper Thames. Such res are the postwar successors to Fisher Kings and Archdukes, dispersed modern powers who can ride the crest of easy money. When "Death by Water" records the forgetting of the "profit and loss," it not only suggests a transring death, it enacts the poem's own disengagement with bad currencies.
The headnote to "What the Thunder Said" evokes the "present decay of Eastern Europe" as one of the three leading themes in the poem's final movement (TWL, 148). If the phrase is taken only, or even chiefly, as a reference to the Russian revolution--and this has too often happened--then we acquire a distorted view of both the poem's historical situation and its political impulses. 15 Here is where the connection between Eliot and Keynes is most urgent. The last section of The Economic Consequences of the Peace forces attention to the breakdown of Central and Eastern Europe after the war, not as a problem of workers' revolution but as a sign of the collapse of world economic order. Keynes pleads for recognition of the "the menace of inflationism," which "is not merely a product of the war, of which peace begins the end. It is a continuing phenomenon of which the end is not yet in sight" (ECP, 248). The systematic disease is ravaging not only Russia but also "Turkey, Hungary, [and] Austria, where the most dreadful material evils which men can suffer--famine, cold, disease, war, murder, and anarchy--are an actual present experience" (ECP, 255). Nothing in these pages sees the crisis as revolution in Russia. The desperate problem is rather the structural collapse of nineteenth-century capitalism. Far from calling for the repression of revolutionary movements, Keynes remarkably identifies "the replacement of the existing governments of Europe" as an "almost indispensable" step, if we hope to deliver ourselves from this world predicament (ECP, 256). If, on the other hand, we set ourselves against Russia,--and if we aim
deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsion of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation. (ECP, 268).
The only hope lies in recognizing that "the solidarity of man is not a fiction" (ECP, 268) because actions taken in one part of the world system will determine effects in every other. In the long run everyone will be affected by "the bankruptcy and decay of Europe" (ECP, 296).
Eliot's formulation of the "present decay of Eastern Europe" may well have grown from this last phrase in Keynes; more importantly, the general political disposition of The Waste Land seems to owe a great deal to the terrible Keynesian vision: bleak, bitter, frightened, and more anti-capitalist than counter-revolutionary. Only a blurred historical focus can permit the thought that Eliot in 1921-22 is "sympathising with the Russian Tsars." 16 On the contrary, he is responding directly to an anarchic capitalist economy, and to the extent that he can imagine a positive social act, it lies not in imposing discipline on revolutionary hordes, but in accepting responsibilities here in one's own waste capital: "Shall I at least set my lands in order?" (TWL, 146, 425).
The drafts reveal what the finished work more subtly indicates: the extent to which The Waste Land becomes an anti-finance poem. Eliot had entered London banking at a time when the City, the financial square mile, was still at its extraordinary apogee. Through decades of industrial decline, finance was the prop and stay of the economy, and as Eliot constructed the London of his poem, the City was the resistless magnet, drawing the laboring crowds on buses and underground trains. The streets of the district--Cannon Street, Lower Thames Street--give the poem its determinate geography. 17 The enervated citizens of Hampstead go on Monday to the City; in "The Fire Sermon" the abandoned "Thames maiden" from Highbury has a father with an "anxious business" "somewhere in the city" (TWL, 51, 6, 5). The specter of "brick and stone and steel," rhyming with "bound upon the wheel" (TWL, 37, 7, 9), is the poetic precipitate of a half-century of unprecedented power for finance capital on its ancient Roman ground. 18 In the years after the war, the City brought in new workers--clerks, managers, typists--at a prodigious rate. The call of the high-shouldered banks with their imperial reach enticed the citizens of London much like the erotic scent wafting through the postwar streets. The falling towers in the last part of The Waste Land totter within the determinate context of banking brick, commercial stone, and financial steel.
In a plaintive letter, Eliot had groaned in the face of the titan: "So very few of one's acquaintance realize what it means to have sold . . . all of one's days,--except at most a month a year--and old age--to a huge impersonal thing like a Bank" (LOTSE, 374). The echo of "Tradition and the Individual Talent"--with its "Impersonal theory of poetry" calling for a "continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality"--is surprising and unmistakable. 19 The poet-critic who had enshrined the demands of impersonality, the submission to a grand tradition, sighs here beneath the weight of this "thing," the impersonal Bank that swallows the individual employee. The echo and the asymmetry can be taken as a trace of the politics that most deeply animate The Waste Land, and that will serve as a last point here, to be approached through one final marker of the inflationary crisis.
This is the inflation of discourse, of text, forced out by the machinery of journalism. During a very few years there had appeared new organs of literary and critical writing, new organs or new editors of old organs: among many others The Athenaeum of J. Middleton Murry, a new Art and Letters, The Dial under Scofield Thayer, Eliot's own Criterion, and most notably for Eliot, the London Mercury of J. C. Squire. The Mercury becomes the ponderous exemplar of the journalistic apparatus that keeps churning out text. Squire, says a grudging Eliot, is "the cleverest journalist in London," whose influence "controls or affects the literary contents and criticism of five or six periodicals already" (LOTSE, 358). And while he takes solace from the fact that "the Mercury has no standing among intelligent people," that it is socially looked down upon . . . ," Eliot sweats oil and tar at the thought of the culturally crowded London as a sharply divided field, where the waves of "semi-education" overwhelm the apostles of subtlety. In the first number of the London Mercury, Squire had taken unnerving aim at the young experimentalists, who had conducted "an orgy of undirected ab-normality," and he will continue a campaign against poetry that has mastered the "trick of incomprehensibility." 20 In his review of The Waste Land he will be merciless, describing it as "a vagrant string of drab pictures which abruptly change . . ., interspersed with memories of literature, lines from old poets, and disconnected ejaculations." "A grunt would serve equally well." 21
In the face of the massive challenge of Squire, and such as Squire, Eliot gives a withering appraisal of the economics of discourse.
We have in modern society a huge journalistic organism the "critical" or Review press which must be fed--there simply is not enough, nowhere near enough, good creative work to feed the "critical" machine, and so reputations are manufactured to feed it, and works born perfectly dead enjoy an illusory life. If the whole journalistic fabric collapsed, as the economic fabric collapsed in Russia, innumerable "creative" writers would go down with it.
At present I see no sign of the journalistic machine collapsing. It is a quite suitable member of modern industrial society. I see no reason why it should not go on for some time developing, unifying and ramifying like Lever Bros. Ltd. Accordingly, you see, I consider a paper like Art and Letters a most valuable stand against it. (LOTSE, 355-56)
Sex, rent, and journalism, or, if you prefer, desire, commerce, and discourse--these are the intertwining, mutually seductive entrapments of the modernity born out of war. They are the insurgent powers, forgotten by governments, rampant through the city, beckoning and disappointing. In the face of their lure, and in the midst of the demoralization of 1921, Eliot thought enviously of Joyce, as the one who could live apart from the apparatus of modernity, who "seems to be independent of outside stimulus, and who therefore is likely to go on producing first-rate work until he dies" (LOTSE, 450). "Stimulus" is the evocative word for this Keynesian vision of events uncontrolled by agents, a postwar network of dispersed powers that press and caress, entangle and abandon.
The voice of eerie calm in the final lines of the poem--"I sat upon the shore/ Fishing, with the arid plain behind me" (TWL, 146, 423-24)--tries to imagine a place outside the overstimulated city, city of inflated desire and bloated currency. But this is not a voice that can sustain itself. When it dissolves, breaking into the last antic string of quotations, it confirms the poem's most determined strategy as that of wrapping exposed subjectivities in the thick robes of culture. Particular selves, named or not, remain caught within the politics of intimacy; they have nowhere to go, and no rhetoric of their own strong enough to repair their loss; they can be nothing but poor subjects. In place of their poverty, the poem chooses the wealth of culture.
The Waste Land is not a poem of exile, no matter how far it strays from London, but a poem that stays at home in the library. Its most radical event is to change the terms of understanding: to turn from politics and economics to culture, from big banks to the long literary tradition. If politics has become unreal, then where better to look if not to the authentic unreality of the literary past? The poem's web of reference appears as nothing less than an alternative civil society: the quotations are citizens in an ideal community. Where the human "characters" in the poem collide and disperse, suffering the emergencies of modernity, the fragments from Shakespeare and Spenser, Baudelaire and Bradley, meet and mingle. They can be shored against the ruins, in part because their glory is cheap at the price, stubbornly resistant to the inflation of other commodities. More substantially, they create a universe of discourse, reaching from English to Sanskrit, as wide as the universe of finance. It may have been a struggle in postwar London to afford a flat, to command a desire, or to publish writing that offended J. C. Squire's idea of the beautiful, but the quoted past is affordable and available. The heavy monuments of culture turn out to be quick and mobile as well as radiant. The weak currency of postwar modernity is challenged by the gold standard of poetic tradition--in place of banknotes, footnotes.
A waste land is dry and barren, but it is also an open space, the space cleared in the fifth part of the poem which offers a desert and a culture, a dry land and a moistly fertile tradition. At the last the poem devastates the urban vortex of sex, money and J. C. Squire, and it compensates with Dante, Tennyson, Kyd.
Is this right, or is this left? You can turn it as you please for another one hundred years. But for those of us who believe that, in Squire's time and our own, dire threats come from the attempt to regulate the morality of literature and to police the freedom of experiment, The Waste Land remains not a defeatism but a defiance.
Michael Levenson, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of A Genealogy of Modernism and Modernism and the Fate of Individuality (1991; both from Cambridge University Press) and co-author of The Spectacle of Intimacy (forthcoming from Princeton University Press). He has recently edited the Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
1. T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988), 1: 171; hereafter abbreviated as LOTSE.
2. T. S. Eliot, "Last Words," Criterion 18 (January 1939): 271.
3. Lawrence Rainey has given the decisive account of the economic life of early modernism. See his richly detailed narrative of the negotiations leading to the publication of The Waste Land. "The Price of Modernism: Publishing The Waste Land," in T.S. Eliot: The Modernist in History, ed. Ronald Bush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 91-133.
4. See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
5. Leonard Diepeveen discusses Eliot's management of his reputation through the active construction of an audience responsive to his forms of difficulty. Diepeveen reconstructs Eliot's tactic of creating "a small, qualified audience of good readers for modern writing. They form part of a small group who are willing to undergo the hard work and training required for reading modern writing, which is difficult, but necessarily so. The purpose of this narrowing down is not first of all to exclude readers (although it certainly does do that), for the maligned audience is not present. Rather, it is to encourage a small group of readers in a tendency that was encouraged by the sorts of magazines they read: to imagine themselves as part of a professional elite, as included in the appreciators of good writing, writing that looks remarkably like The Waste Land." "'I Can Have More Than Enough Power to Satisfy Me:" T. S. Eliot's Construction of His Audience," Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, ed. Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 52.
6. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 145, ln 377. Hereafter the work is abbreviated in the text as TWL followed by page and line number.
7. In Kenner's well-known argument, the evolution of the poem runs from the city of Dryden in the early drafts to the catastrophic anti-metropolitan tableau of "What the Thunder Said." The "center had become the urban apocalypse, the great City dissolved into a desert where voices sang from exhausted wells . . ." Hugh Kenner, "The Urban Apocalypse," Eliot in His Time, ed. A. Walton Litz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 46.
8. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920); hereafter abbreviated in the text as ECP.
9. Eleanor Cook notes of Keynes's book that it is "contemporary with the poem; its sheds light on some of the allusions in The Waste Land, ties the poem to post-World-War-I history, and incidentally relates Eliot's work at Lloyds Bank to his poetry." She further observes that "the phrasing in The Economic Consequences of the Peace evokes an apocalyptic foreboding, and sense of nightmare very like that in The Waste Land." "T. S. Eliot and the Carthaginian Peace," ELH 46 : 347-48.
10. Here, of course, see Foucault on the filiations and imbrications of Power. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979).
11. Times, 31 December 1921, 6.
12. The disorienting political geography of Eliot's postwar world is captured well by Cook, who unfolds the suggestions within the analogy between London after World War I and Rome after the Punic Wars. She invokes Augustine's gloomy account of Roman decadence: "after the destruction of Carthage there came the highest pitch of discord, greed, ambition, and all the evils which generally spring up in times of prosperity" ("T. S. Eliot and the Carthaginian Peace," 350). David Roessel locates Mr. Eugenides within the context of the postwar struggle between Turkey and Greece over the national identity of Smyrna, noting that "Trade with Smyrna played an important role in discussions over the city in the English newspapers . . ." See "'Mr. Eugenides, The Smyrna Merchant,' and Post-War Politics in The Waste Land," Journal Of Modern Literature 50.1 (Summer 1989): 173.
13. Times, 7 September 1921, 7.
14. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 79-80.
15. For an influential reading that helped to establish this identification see F. R. Leavis, who moves all too quickly from Russia to humanity in general. New Bearings in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1950), ch. 3, "T. S. Eliot," 90-114.
16. David Craig, "The Defeatism of The Waste Land," Critical Quarterly 2.3 (Autumn 1960): 251.
17. Kenner observes that "One novelty of the new poem was to be a new specificity: a public focus on his new environment, the City of London." See "The Urban Apocalpyse," 27.
18. In his analysis of City banking between 1890 and 1914, Youssef Cassis describes the "concentration within the financial sector of the British economy, due as much to the formation of giant banking and insurance companies as to overlaps of directorships and multiple family ties between the heads of companies large and small." He goes on to offer this relevant portrait of the "modernist" banker:
The English banker at the heart of the financial centre of the world finally bore little resemblance to the "big capitalist" of the imperialist era, in whose hands both banking capital and industrial capital were concentrated. He appears, on the contrary, to have been very much a gentleman, half businessman, half man of independent means, who at the limit devoted no more time to his bank than an aristocrat to the management of his estate, their comparable lifestyles perhaps explaining their social rapprochement. (City Bankers, 1890-1914 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 314).
19. T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), 7.
20. London Mercury 1.1 (November 1919): 4; and London Mercury 1.4 (February 1920): 388.
21. J. C. Squires, London Mercury 8 (October 1923): 655-56.