Let me pass over the theological subtext of this passage and focus instead on the fantasmatic and imaginary quality of the scene. 8 The passage stages a public spectacle of justice centered on a transcendent signifier. The prisoner's tortured body becomes a public locus for the formation of the community's collective body. This collectivizing force radiates from the prisoner's "transred" face, which is held to bear the mark of a master signifier--the signifier of justice--whose meaning, due to its other-worldly origin, cannot be uttered in ordinary language but must be revealed through its embodiment. The scene of torture, then, is staged as one of revelation, as the disclosure of divine Law. But note that this revelation does not result from the prisoner's deciphering of his wounds, however, but from the spectator's deciphering of the prisoner's facial expressions. In other words, transration occurs not through the metamorphosis of the body but by means of an interpretation that reads bodily changes in terms of transration. Indeed, so strong is the belief of the spectators in this transration of the body that "[m]any did not care to watch it but lay with closed eyes in the sand; they all knew: Now Justice is being done!" All of this underscores my claim, I believe, that the machine is part of a carefully orchestrated institutional fantasy of encryption and decipherment, it is, in a word, a cryptograph. The meaning of justice is not, as the fantasy wants us to believe, instantiated in a transred body; rather, it is the product of a mechanical ritual that stages the sacrifice of the body as a scene of transration. The fantasy of revelation emerges, in short, through the double determination of the private and inaccessible terrain of human pain on the one hand, and its decipherment in the spectacle of public reception on the other. Revelation, in short, is shown to be the removal of a veil that it itself has created. It is not a self-identical truth but a two-sided form, not a transcendent meaning located beyond a door but a complex spectacle that first produces the sense of an inaccessible beyond (the private terrain of pain) in order then to stage its public disclosure (the moment of decipherment).
So much, then, for the institutional fantasy of the Old Commandant. But what about the claim that this fantasy is not restricted to the old order, but is relevant as well to our understanding of both the penal colony and the Empire. To argue this point, I shall, as it were, briefly traverse Kafka's triple framing of the machine in reverse order, arguing first that the operations of the machine epitomize the workings of penal colonies as such; and second that the penal colony is the spatial actualization of a topological dimension immanent to Enlightenment law. As for the first move--from machine to colony--the oppositions between Symbolic and somatic, Law and body, structuring the working of the machine are repeated, at the level of the colony, in the opposition between oppressor and oppressed. Moreover, this analogy holds for the specific dynamic that links these terms. For what, after all, is the disciplinary purpose of a penal colony if not to inscribe into the oppressed, through a series of disciplinary operations, the character of empire? Seen in these terms, the colony too is a kind of semiotic machine akin to the cryptograph, and the reforms of the New Commandant will at best change the specific technologies of encryption, but not the fact of encryption as such.
As for my second claim--the structural connection between colony and empire--the case is more complex and requires a small detour. I want to suggest that the relation between colony and empire is equivalent to the relation between the ordinary course of events and the state of exception. Kierkegaard, whom Kafka admired, once wrote, "the exception explains the universal and himself, and if one really wants to study the universal, one only needs to look around for a legitimate exception. . . . The exception . . . thinks the universal with intense passion." 9 Recently, Giorgio Agamben, building on the work of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, has pursued this line of thought and developed a theory of power and law predicated on the notion of exception. 10 Every legal order, Agamben claims, is sustained by an element of extralegal violence. This violence brings order into existence in the first place, but persists throughout the law's normal operations, and is visible in the apparatus of law-enforcing institutions, like that of the police, without which no legal order can function. The topological structure of this extralegal violence--at once inside and outside the law--finds its purest embodiment in the re of the sovereign, who has the power, in moments of exceptional danger, legally to suspend the law in order to preserve the State and its Law. In such moments, the sovereign's word is Law: that is, it carries direct legal authority without the mediation of legal process. Borrowing a phrase from Gershom Scholem (which incidentally was coined to describe the nature of revelation in Kafka) Agamben says that the sovereign's words have the character of "being in force without significance." 11
Being in force without significance. Does this not describe exactly the structure of the Law in Kafka's machine, a Law that is devoid of meaning and semantic depth, and whose terrifying force is unhampered by legal mediation? And is not the Old Commandant, whose word is Law and whose rule is absolute, the re par excellence of the sovereign? The colony over which he exercised sovereignty, then, is the spatial actualization of a topological dimension immanent to Law. It is the territory of the exception, a space in which the extralegal--and hence meaningless--violence of the Law is rendered both visible and material. And to the extent that the cryptograph is the purest manifestation of this violence, the narrative passage through the triple frame--from empire to colony to machine--is an infernal descent from the apparition of Enlightenment reason to the reified force of a senseless legality.
Andreas Gailus is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. He has published articles on aesthetic theory, the emergence of the psychological novel, and the German novella. He is currently working on a book on the concept of crisis in German literature and philosophy around 1800.
This essay arose out of discussions with Russell Newstadt. I am indebted to him for his many incisive comments and for the title of the essay itself.
1. "Franz Kafka," in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Vol. 2. 1927-1934, ed. Michael Jennings et al., trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 811.
2. Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Colony," in The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), 195; hereafter abbreviated "IPC."
3. Franz Kafka, Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlaß (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1994), 237, my translation. The original reads: "Mit stärkstem Licht kann man die Welt auflösen. Vor schwachen Augen wird sie fest, vor noch schwächeren bekommt sie Fäuste, vor noch schwächeren wird sie schamhaft und zerschmettert den, der sie anzuschauen wagt."
4. Heinrich von Kleist,"Über das Marionettentheater," in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Vol. 2, ed. Helmut Sembdner (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1961), 338-49.
5. Ibid., 341.
6. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillian Publishing Co., 1989), 244-6; for a discussion of the ways in which physical pain shatters communication itself, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3-27.
8. "In the Penal Colony" seems to be unique among Kafka's texts in that it makes use of a concept of redemption that draws on both Jewish and Christian imagery. The story's emphasis on the public character of redemption is a defining feature of Messianic thought. According to Gershom Scholem, "Judaism, in all of its forms and manifestations, has always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community. It is an occurrence which takes place in the visible world and which cannot be conceived apart from such a visible appearance" (The Messianic Idea in Judaism, trans. Michael Meyer [New York: Schocken Books, 1972], 1). An even stronger Messianic language is sounded at the end of the story, in the proclamation engraved on the Old Commandant's tomb: "Here rests the Old Commandant. His adherents, who must now be nameless, have dug his grave and set up his stone. There is a prophecy that after a certain number of years the Commandant will rise again and lead his adherents from his house to recover the colony. Have faith and wait" ("IPC" 226). These Messianic references, however, are intermingled with Christological motifs. Not only does the machine's method of torture--the piercing of the body with needles--recall the crucifixion of Christ, but the importance of the sixth hour as the decisive turning point is also borrowed directly from Luke's description of Christ's passion (Luke 23:44). Indeed, the very notion of Justice the story puts forth seems to blend Jewish and Christological elements. On the one hand, the fact that the commandment is written onto the body is in keeping with Jewish thought, which stresses the necessary link between God's justice and its materialization in scripture. Yet on the other hand, the fact that justice is revealed through the transration of the sufferer's face strongly recalls a Christian conception, which breaks with the Judaic link between justice and scripture by claiming, according to Paul, that Christ's tortured body directly manifests "the justice of God without the Law" (Rom. 3:21).
9. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, in Fear and Trembling: Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 227.
10. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).
11. Ibid., 51.
Ideologies that have been superseded by more enduring political discourses and literary res who have been succeeded by greater authors are frequently relegated to the footnotes of cultural scholarship. But sometimes these lesser-known subjects of literary history, properly attended to, provide unique opportunities for a richer understanding of aesthetic developments. The study of British modernism, in particular, can benefit from a willingness to examine forgotten political-cultural relationships. Indeed, the period's extreme ideological complexity and cross-fertilization has served to mask the important political roles played by less celebrated artists in the formulation of modernist aesthetic doctrine. This is particularly true of Katherine Mansfield.
Most studies either neglect to include Mansfield in their accounts of modernism's emergence, or else try to correct this oversight by addressing her influence on Virginia Woolf. 1 She is largely thought of as someone who was "unaffected by contemporary literary trends and divorced from the great social, political and cultural events of her time." 2 Even those who contend that she participated in the development of a "female modernism" that gave literary voice to "an emerging feminist consciousness," as well as those who acknowledge that her stories explore "the theme of the exploitation of women," claim that Mansfield failed to do so in a perceptibly ideological manner. 3
Mansfield's earliest collected short stories, those published in the years 1910-11, have been particularly ill-served by prevailing views of her indifference to political and social controversy. These are frequently dismissed as aesthetically unaccomplished and politically naïve. By 1920, Mansfield herself regarded them as "immature," "juvenile," and "a lie." 4 Scholars have generally drawn upon these comments to argue that the stories simply mirror popular fears of German invasion or offer an unbalanced reflection upon her lonely confinement at a German spa in 1909, where she gave birth to a stillborn child. 5 Antony Alpers suggests that the stories, most of which were later republished in the volume In a German Pension , were influenced by the 1909 box office sensation An Englishman's Home, a "clumsy melodrama" that "gave crude expression to the warnings by General Roberts of German readiness for war." 6 Patricia Moran argues that the stories are lamentable instances of feminine "revulsion and self-loathing" for "the female body's materiality," that they "demonstrate how deeply devaluations of women cripple and deform women's estimation of themselves, even when women consciously resist and revise those demeaning cultural scripts." 7
Despite their lowly critical status, however, these works have a great deal to teach us about Mansfield's politically engaged role in the development of early British modernism. Originally published in the British socialist magazine The New Age, these stories--viewed in proper historical context--reveal that she contributed to one of the least acknowledged, but nevertheless most important, shifts in political outlook and literary taste of her time. Though not as fully achieved (or even as modernist) as her later fiction, their occasional stridency and callowness only serve to emphasize their transitional literary-historical nature. Through their criticisms of German imperial culture and maternity and formal rejection of plot and discourse, these stories served dual political and cultural purposes. First, they undermined the authority of the dominant Edwardian currents of state-governed socialism and suffragist feminism while encouraging alternative forms of worker-governed socialism and individualist feminism. Second, they initiated a closely related shift from an influential Edwardian aesthetics of materiality and discursivity toward a new modernist aesthetics of spiritual liberation and perceptual immediacy.
The New Age (1907-22) is of great relevance to an understanding of the early politics of British modernism. From 1907-14, this weekly magazine, which had a large and diverse circulation base of more than 3,000 readers was not only the most significant clearinghouse of anticapitalist thought in Britain, but it was also a site of culturally pivotal debate about socialism, feminism, and the arts. 8 Due to the fierce commitment to freedom of expression of the magazine's gifted editor, A. R. Orage, the publication secured contributions from many of the most influential intellectuals and artists of the Edwardian era, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Walter Sickert, G. K. Chesterton, Arnold Bennett, and Hilaire Belloc. In addition, Orage's no less pronounced editorial flexibility, love of controversy, and gifted eye for young talent, allowed the pages of The New Age to accommodate several important political and cultural movements that increasingly defined British intellectual life in the years leading to World War I.
Politically, The New Age was the birthplace of guild socialism, a short-lived political theory that combined an anarcho-libertarian hostility to state authority with a socialist commitment to communal ownership of the means of production. At the time of its founding in 1907, most of the magazine's contributors belonged to the Fabian Society, a small organization of prominent socialist intellectuals who wished to transfer property from individuals to the state through gradual parliamentary reform. However, beginning in 1908, Orage began soliciting articles from a range of dissenting strains of anticapitalist opinion, most notably from well-known men of letters Chesterton and Belloc. Out of the heated discussions which ensued, the contributors to The New Age eventually formulated guild socialism as an alternative socialist ideology. Unlike the Edwardian Fabians, who sought to redress capitalist ills through state regulated control of industry, employment, and social welfare, guild socialism encouraged workers to reject the systems of elected government, reject state interference in their lives, and seize control of industry through strikes.
The New Age was also the birthplace of an important strain of individualist feminism with close ties to both guild socialism and the anarcho-libertarian thought of Dora Marsden's magazines The Freewoman (1911-2), The New Freewoman , and The Egoist (1914-20), the latter two of which later served as equally important sites of modernist literary activity. When The New Age was rethinking its allegiance to Fabian state socialism, many of its contributors were simultaneously reexamining their support for women's suffrage and the organizations that promoted it. These contributors attacked what they perceived as suffragists' misdirected focus on celebrating motherhood, a stance they believed kept women intellectually crippled. And they also demanded that suffragists--like striking laborers--desist from placing all their hopes in the vote and take full responsibility for their own liberation.
Most significantly, The New Age was a key birthplace of British modernism. In conjunction with the magazine's efforts to combine a tenacious commitment to individual liberty with a larger project of collective political liberation, a related aesthetic shift took place. Initially, the magazine championed the writings of Fabian-affiliated authors Shaw, Wells, and Bennett, whose work was widely thought to be (however counterintuitive this may sound today) the most revolutionary and avant-garde of the period. But as Fabianism lost favor in the magazine, so did these authors, whose plays and novels were thought to share state socialism's indifference to matters of spirit and individual freedom. Increasingly embracing the work of younger and, at the time, relatively unknown literary res such as Katherine Mansfield, T. E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound, these artists' contributions to The New Age offered an attractive alternative to the work of Shaw, Wells, and Bennett and an equally attractive ideological basis for an antistatist political culture.
Mansfield's earliest published stories in The New Age, those that appeared between February and August 1910, participated in this political and cultural ferment through their prominent and forcefully negative portrayals of German imperial culture and maternity. By criticizing Germans and motherhood, they castigated a tendency among Fabian socialists, suffragists, and their respective fellow-travelers, to regard citizens as physical specimens and national commodities. As critics have often noted, these stories highlight the supposedly abhorrent corporeality of German culture. For example, "Germans at Meat" (3 March 1910) depicts a group of German diners at a rest cure pension as crudely voracious creatures obsessed with consumption, excretion, and conquest. When not dripping soup on their clothing or remarking on how well their digestive tracts "retain" certain foods, they make hostile sexual comments to the story's English narrator and unambiguously threaten her homeland with attack. At the beginning of the tale, while describing his prowess at consuming large English breakfasts, the aptly named Herr Rat boasts, "I have had all I wanted from women without marriage" (SS 37). Then, reinforcing the close relation of his unconstrained appetites for women and English cuisine, he stares at the young narrator in a manner that suggests a desire not just to rape her but to conquer England. "He fixed his cold blue eyes on me with an expression which suggested a thousand premeditated invasions" (SS 38). Later, another guest at the pension makes the link between sexual violence and German military attack even more explicit by casting the relationship between Germany and England as one between a powerful male and a defenseless woman: "'Don't be afraid,' Herr Hoffmann said, 'We don't want England. If we did we would have had her long ago'" (SS 40). 9
Mansfield's earliest New Age stories are also, as has often been recognized, fiercely antimaternal. They express anger and disgust with the physical traumas and disrements of pregnancy. The "Frau" in "The Child-Who-Was-Tired" (24 February 1910) complains that her "insides are all twisted up from having children too quickly" (SS 97). 10 The young waitress in "At 'Lehmann's'" (7 July 1910) can hardly bear the sight of the pregnant wife of her employer, regarding the woman's enormous swollen belly as "ugly--ugly--ugly" (ibid. 76). 11 And the narrator of "Frau Fischer" (18 August 1910) boldly declares, "I consider child-bearing the most ignominious of professions" (ibid. 55). 12
While some scholars have perceived that Mansfield's early fiction is anti-German and antimaternal, however, none has recognized the extent to which these aspects of her work are ideologically intertwined. In the context of prewar British cultural discourse Germany was not only regarded as an immediate military threat to Britain, but also considered a nation whose dynamic birthrate and economy posed long-term questions about the status of Britain as a great power. For many of Mansfield's contemporaries, Germany's military ambitions and birthrate were obverse sides of a single coin: if left unchallenged, they would together spell doom for Britain's imperial aspirations. These widely held cultural anxieties were of enormous concern to the milieu of Edwardian intellectual debate out of which Mansfield's stories emerged.
Although neither Shaw nor Wells expressed animosity towards Germany, they and other Fabian-affiliated intellectuals in The New Age believed that the nation represented a challenge to Britain. Shaw had long been concerned with preserving British imperial hegemony in the face of increasing foreign competition. As early as Fabianism and the Empire , he sought to stem national decline by laying plans for the "effective social organisation of the whole Empire." 13 And by the time he published Getting Married at the height of Britain's naval arms race with Germany, he expressed great concern at the "alarming rapidity" with which British marriage practices were "beginning to depopulate the country." 14 Wells, too, regarded German industry and population growth as threats to British imperial ambitions. In his novel The New Machiavelli , the protagonist direly warns that "Germany is beating England in every matter upon which competition is possible": "Germany, with a much larger population, a vigorous and irreconcilable proletariat, a bolder intellectual training, a harsher spirit, can scarcely fail to drive us at last to a realization of intolerable strain." 15
In fact, Germany was in many ways the model upon which Edwardian socialists sought to base their proposed reforms. Questions of "national efficiency" and racial fitness, of which Germany was considered a leader, became prominent concerns of the Fabian Society. 16 The Society, actively seeking to influence British governmental policy, quickly proposed a program of state regulatory control of industry, employment, housing, health, and sanitation. 17 It was thought that such interference with the free market would not only secure greater social justice, but also enable "the Englishman," in Shaw's words, to do what "the German can do in social organization." 18 In a less official context, Shaw and Wells promoted the role of eugenics in raising the birthrate and improving the nation's racial stock. 19 In Man and Superman , Shaw called for "the socialization of the selective breeding of man," and in The New Machiavelli, Wells's protagonist proposed to "biologize imperialism": "Women . . . must become more and more subordinated as individually independent citizens to the collective purpose" of "bearing and rearing good children." 20 Although these were more radical proposals than either man was willing to subscribe to in his more strictly political writings, they reflect a belief that biology and breeding were vital national concerns.
Mansfield was keenly aware of the perceived link between the German military threat and presumed British racial decline. In "Germans at Meat," the same uncouth Germans who blatantly threaten invasion make much of the fact that England's birthrate is declining.

"Why, yes; I have not eaten meat for three years."
"Im--possible! Have you any family?"
"No."
"There now, you see, that's what you're coming to! Whoever heard of having children upon vegetables? It is not possible.  Now I have had nine babies--though after the first one was born I had to--"
"How wonderful!" I cried."Wonderful," said the Widow contemptuously, replacing the hairpin in the knob on the top of her head. "Not at all! A friend of mine had four at the same time. Her husband was so pleased he gave a supper-party and had them placed on the table. Of course she was very proud."
"Germany," boomed the Traveller, biting round a potato which he had speared with his knife, "is the home of the Family." [SS 38-9]
These same Germans further suggest that England's soldiers are physically unprepared to counter a German attack. After the narrator assures her fellow diners that neither she nor her countrymen are afraid of invasion, Herr Rat responds, "Well, then, you ought to be. . . . You have got no army at all--a few little boys with their veins full of nicotine poisoning" (SS 40). 21
While Mansfield clearly regarded Germany as a military threat, she flatly rejected the idea that Britain needed to compete with Germany on its own terms. Not only are her stories unrepentantly antimaternal, they are also deeply critical of what she perceives as the Germans' obsession with the physical and the sexual. They suggest that Germans' preoccupation with bodily concerns makes them willing participants in their own spiritual debasement and social commodification. This is particularly evident in the case of the Widow in "Germans at Meat." By having this character pick her teeth with a hairpin while criticizing the narrator's vegetarianism and childlessness, Mansfield demonstrates that Germans' concern with carnality and breeding is inherently coarse and degrading. In addition, by having her blithely speak about babies being placed on a supper-table amidst a wealth of foodstuffs, Mansfield insinuates that Germans regard themselves and their children as little more than national and familial resources, a point confirmed by the jingoistic Traveller, who loudly proclaims Germany to be "the home of the family" while biting into his potato.
It is too infrequently noted that Mansfield regularly celebrated the efforts of women to escape this demeaning social model in her fiction. The same semiautobiographical narrator who fends off the slights and insults of her fellow diners in "Germans at Meat" equally vigorously defends her spiritual integrity and intellectual independence in other tales. In "The Luft Bad" (24 March 1910), she resists strong social pressure to define herself in physical terms. The story is set in an open-air German spa where men on one side of an enclosure are "chopping down trees and sawing through planks, dashing heavy weights to the ground, and singing part songs," and women on the other are encouraging the narrator to dress in "nothing larger than a handkerchief" and join them in sunbathing and talking about the "ailments and measurements and ills that flesh is heir to" (SS 79). However, after watching a young woman speak pantingly of how she is "perspiring so splendidly" and listening to "the brownest woman" she had ever seen talk of the benefits of eating only raw fruit, nuts, and vegetables, the narrator refuses to be shamed into parading around half naked or focusing exclusively on her weight or physical conditioning (SS 80). Turning her back on these women, she climbs on a swing and, in a brief moment of psychological and emotional freedom, ascends towards "white clouds trail[ing] delicately through the blue sky" (SS 81). 22
In "Frau Fischer," Mansfield's narrator similarly resists social pressure to define herself in terms of sex and childbearing. Throughout the story, the title character, a loud and overbearing widow, takes an intrusive interest in the marital status and sex lives of all the young women she encounters. When she first arrives at the pension where the narrator is staying, Frau Fischer upbraids a widowed pension employee for not having married off any of her eligible young daughters. Although Frau Hartmann, "in an ashamed and apologetic voice," explains, "We are such a happy family since my dear man died," Frau Fischer is decidedly unsympathetic to the idea that her daughters might be happier free of husbands (SS 50). "But these marriages--one must have courage; and after all, give them time, they all make the happy family bigger--thank God for that. . ." (SS 51). In keeping with the replacement of a picture of Jesus Christ by that of the Kaiser in Frau Fischer's room, the intrusive widow is concerned only that these daughters have lots of children. When she attempts to impose her views on the story's wedded but childless narrator, however, she meets with far more spirited opposition. Far from being intimidated by Frau Fischer's criticisms of her childlessness or the fact that she is staying at the pension without her husband, Mansfield's narrator boldly declares childrearing, as already indicated, "the most ignominious of all professions," casually claims to "like empty beds," and stiffly rebuffs the widow's efforts to draw her into further conversation (SS 55). 23
By thus repudiating the idea that citizens should be regarded as physical specimens, sexual vessels, and national commodities, Mansfield did more than criticize a purportedly German social ideal; she played a crucial and heretofore unacknowledged role in the discrediting and redirection of those Edwardian currents in The New Age that subscribed to this ideal. For example, she implicitly cast doubt on the wisdom of addressing capitalist inequities through the Fabian model of state regulatory control. This is particularly apparent when one compares her fiction with the contemporaneous political criticisms of Chesterton and Belloc, who did more than anyone else in The New Age to stir indignation against the Fabians. In his criticisms of the 1909 Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission (the Fabian Society's most detailed blueprint for the formation of a socialist welfare state) Belloc argued that this ostensibly humanitarian reform proposal sought to organize "the poor like a flock of sheep" . He revealed that clause 29 granted governmental committees control over "that province of enquiry that is most offensive to the poor (cross-examination upon their physical condition, interfering with domestic arrangements, the enforcing of compulsory vaccinations, etc.)" (ibid. 556). He also bitterly disclosed that clause 82 provided for "management" of "the able-bodied unemployed." Quoting from the report itself, he pointed out that if unemployed members of the proletariat could not find work through one of the proposed labor exchanges designed to eliminate unemployment, this clause "granted" these unfortunate members of society assistance in a labor "colony" where they were "'to receive' (by force of course) 'such physical and mental training' as the politician 'may think fit.'" (SS 557) 24 While Mansfield's stories were not so pointedly political, they no less vehemently rejected the idea that men and women should be regarded as material resources.
Mansfield's stories also undermined faith in Shavian and Wellsian eugenics, which enjoyed considerable popularity at the time among socialist intellectuals. By revealing the brutalizing and debasing effects of excessive interest in birth and sex in her stories, she added her voice to those of a variety of essayists in The New Age who sought to show that eugenicists were leading Britain down a path to barbarism. Like M. D. Eder, who in 1909 had described eugenics as a "criminal doctrine" that would lead to "slaughter" and the oligarchic division of humanity into two unequal classes--"leaders on one side, hewers of wood and drawers of water on the other"--she decried the application of principles of animal husbandry and slaveholding to free citizens. 25 She also echoed Francis Grierson, who in 1910 talked of the dangers of "'progressive' thinkers" denying "the psychic part of man." Pointing, like Mansfield, apprehensively toward Germany, "the hot-bed of modern materialism," he asserted, "Nothing but a hatch now separates us from primitive barbary. Underneath is the lair of the wild beast, whose growls are as audible and menacing as were those of the old Roman arena when Rome thirsted for blood." 26
Mansfield even aligned her fiction with The New Age's growing tendency to regard the spiritual liberation of rank-and-file laborers as the proper focus of socialist revolution. Her stories' celebration of female spirit and identity amidst demeaning social circumstances clearly paralleled the magazine's valorization of working class efforts to defend their industrialism and integrity in the face of capitalist exploitation and state socialist meddling. This is especially evident in Orage's commentary on the era's many wildcat strikes and work stoppages. If it was not yet clear that these spontaneous demonstrations of discontent could provide the basis for a worker-led reorganization of industry along guild lines, it was nevertheless obvious to him that they were an important sign of "social progress," the necessary precondition for the dawn of a "new age" of human freedom. 27 As he wrote in 1910 of one particularly unexpected strike,
We would have it observed that the material interest was completely lacking. Nothing save a point of honour was at stake. The humble excuse for all the trouble was neither to be dismissed, reduced or bullied; he was to be simply moved a distance of a few yards in the same station. What an almost aristocratic (in the real sense) occasion for a dispute! What noble pride! Almost the oligarchy might be persuaded that these brutes are men. 28
In short, the editor and contributors to The New Age--Mansfield in particular--regarded women's and workers' growing awareness of their innate psychological worth as offering an amplified scope for human endeavor, a model for social reconstruction not predicated on the brutish management of one's fellow citizens.
In addition to participating in the refashioning of Edwardian socialism, Mansfield's anti-German stories played a pivotal if still unrecognized part in the reformulation of mainstream Edwardian feminism, one that preceded the more celebrated contributions of Marsden by over a year. By suggesting that women who willingly embraced the "ignominious profession" of childbearing demeaned themselves and inhibited the development of untapped spiritual and mental faculties, she identified her writings with a combative new strain of individualist feminism. This is especially clear when one situates her fiction in relation to contemporaneous critical polemics by her friend Beatrice Hastings. Like Mansfield, Hastings and her feminist allies in The New Age mocked the idea that motherhood was an ideal that feminists should encourage or pursue, all well before Marsden raised the same issues in her magazines. 29 One contributor to the magazine found it appalling that suffragists claimed that they would use the "Power of the Vote" to "protect the mother and help the child," indeed to do their "duty to the race." "We wax very hot over the question of the mother and the child at our meetings," she commented in 1909, "and we pat ourselves on the back and tell ourselves we are doing something very heroic in getting so hot in so noble a cause." In her view, the physical experience of motherhood was far from ennobling: "It is a very pleasant sensation to suckle a child, if one can; so pleasant that the mother's sensuous enjoyment is frequently reflected in . . . the vacuous smile of one whose brain is empty and whose body is at ease." 30
Hastings was no less critical of feminist idealizations of maternity. Indeed she found it unconscionable that international feminist author Olive Schreiner could encourage women in her study Women and Labour to discover "the joy of giving life, the glory and beatitude of a virile womanhood." "The choice before the majority of women," commented Hastings in 1911,
is to enter the professions, arts, and crafts by force and in force or to degenerate. Olive Schreiner, however, is not content to give this plain and sensible piece of advice, but she must needs spoil it entirely by an unnecessary, a reactionary, and, indeed, an inconsistent addition. It is a great truth, she declares, "and one on which I should not fear to challenge the verdict of long future generations," that the endeavour of women should be "towards a higher appreciation of the sacredness of all sex relations." If that is to be the case then farewell to any hope of women taking all labour for their province and competing with men in professions, arts, and crafts. For the truth must be told that it is precisely by lowering his appreciation of the sacredness of all sex relations that intellectual man at any rate has won his position. Nor should we fear to challenge the verdict of long future generations that the same deflation of the importance of sex will prove necessary to women if they are to enter the intellectual spheres where men now labour.
In Hastings's opinion, by "exaggerat[ing] the importance of sex and parentage," Schreiner encouraged women to enter the professions with a crippling "mother-hunger still in their hearts," in short to be, as Mansfield's fiction suggested, insufficiently intellectual and serious in their pursuit of individual fulfillment. 31
The most important and lasting contribution that Mansfield's stories made was to the reconceptualization of what it meant to be aesthetically innovative. As her anti-German stories came to occupy an ever more prominent place in the magazine, Orage and other contributors increasingly accused the widely esteemed literature of Shaw, Wells, and Bennett--as Mansfield indirectly did--of being guilty of the "tendency . . . to deny the existence of [the] soul and to regard it as, at best, only a compound of the appetites, desires, and experiences of the mind." 32 The New Age's drama critic, Ashley Dukes, denounced Shaw for treating his plays' characters as the Fabians treated the working classes--that is, as little more than objects of national appropriation and maintenance. Excoriating Shaw's materialism in 1911, he remarked,
His eye is always on the commonwealth. He carries Socialism to its furthest extreme. He nationalizes his men and women the instant they are created. He expropriates their imagination. He municipalizes their emotion. He confiscates their surplus value. And he renders compensation to each by the gift of a flickering cloud-halo of wit which sometimes illumines, sometimes obscures, the individual re and the eminently social purpose. 33
In a close echo of Mansfield's "Germans at Meat," Orage criticized Wells in the same year for glorifying sexual experiences "no more fraught with meaning than eating or drinking or sweating." 34 An anonymous reviewer of Bennett's Hilda Lessways reproached the novelist for creating a female protagonist whose only intense feelings were for sex. 35 And in a column on "Modern Novels" from 1910, Orage implicitly denounced both authors for losing contact with the "soul" and the "atmosphere of men's minds, for focusing solely on surfaces and the "merely reproductive." 36
Mansfield's fiction also served as the leading edge of an effort to reconceive the early twentieth-century aesthetic avant-garde in psychological and spiritual terms. Although she is not generally discussed in relation to Hulme and Pound, who also wrote extensively for The New Age, she shared their desire to break with widely held materialistic conceptions of human nature. Like their groundbreaking Imagist poetry, which in Hulme's words sought through the expression of "individual idiosyncrasy" to give form to evanescent moments of consciousness that revealed the world to be a place of "freedom and chance," Mansfield's stories attempted to disclose vistas of intellectual and spiritual freedom that existed outside materially defined boundaries of identity. 37 What is more, her tales also set the oppositional terms by which Virginia Woolf and other major modern novelists would later lay claim to cultural authority. Long before Woolf's celebrated 1921 essay "Modern Fiction" took Bennett and Wells to task for being "materialists" concerned more with the "body" than the "soul," Mansfield's tales offered a comparable critique in more specifically political terms. 38
The other means by which Mansfield facilitated the emergence of new variants of socialism, feminism, and modern literature was more strictly formalistic. By rejecting plot and discourse and foregrounding the dangers of abstract conceptual language in her more self-consciously modernist stories of late fall, she criticized a widespread tendency among Edwardian socialists and feminists to encourage the political delegation of agency. In addition, she aligned her fiction with a contrasting movement to advocate self-government in politics and perceptual immediacy in aesthetics.
The two stories that best exemplify these concerns are the companion pieces "The Journey to Bruges" (24 August 1911) and "Being a Truthful Adventure" (7 September 1911). Like most of Mansfield's finest work, neither provides obvious plot development or conceptual focus. In paradigmatic modernist fashion, each story unfolds in an apparently random manner, without the benefit of the kind of orienting authorial comment that was so prominent in Edwardian and late Victorian fiction. In "The Journey to Bruges," for example, the semiautobiographical first-person narrator encounters a range of more or less ordinary individuals during her travels, none of whom becomes the subject of thematic scrutiny or plays a significant part in subsequent events. At the beginning of the story, the attention she directs towards two young men in her train compartment suggests that they will go on to play prominent roles. Their dialogue, which is reported almost entirely without comment, gives every indication of building towards a conflict that will require resolution. Playfully dubbed "the Enthusiast" and "the Mole" by the narrator--the former for his excited talk and the latter for his neutral, gray clothing--a tension almost immediately manifests itself between them upon their taking their seats:
"Look here, old man," said the Enthusiast, "I want to change all our places. You know those arrangements you've made--I want to cut them out altogether. Do you mind?" "No," said the Mole, faintly. "But why?" "Well, I was thinking it over in bed last night, and I'm hanged if I can see the good of us paying fifteen bob if we don't want to. You see what I mean?" The Mole took off his pince-nez and breathed on them. "Now I don't want to unsettle you," went on the Enthusiast, "because, after all, it's your party--you asked me. I wouldn't upset it for anything, but--there you are--you see--what?" Suggested the Mole: "I'm afraid people will look down on me for taking you abroad" [SS 14].
Despite the fact that the narrator tells us, "My heart yearned over the Mole's immediate future," this plot thread and potential source of thematic focus cuts off almost as abruptly as it begins (ibid. 15).  Although readers today would not find the story particularly disorienting, it would have challenged the expectations of readers of Shaw's, Wells's, and Bennett's works, which even at their most unconventional remained concerned with viewing life through an organizing lens of ideas. The story begins:
"You got three-quarters of an hour," said the porter. "You got an hour mostly. Put it in the cloak-room, lady."
A German family, their luggage neatly buttoned into what appeared to be odd canvas trouser legs, filled the entire space before the counter, and a homeopathic young clergyman, his black dicky flapping over his shirt, stood at my elbow. We waited and waited, for the cloak-room porter could not get rid of the German family, who appeared to be explaining to him by their enthusiasm and gestures the virtue of so many buttons. At last the wife of the party seized her particular packet and started to undo it. Shrugging his shoulders, the porter turned to me. "Where for?" he asked. [SS 13]
The tale commences in medias res, without any omniscient narrative voice to contextualize the porter's remarks or even to identify their intended recipient. Are the porter's words directed at a member of the German family that is introduced in the second paragraph? The tale's first-person narrator? The answer is not at first apparent or unequivocally ascertainable. Even after reference is made to the German "wife," ambiguity remains as to whether she is absolutely the "lady" in question. Likewise, it is not at first evident what causes the German family to frustrate the porter. The fact that there is a language barrier must be inferred from their impassioned "gestures" and baffling behavior.
Mansfield gives readers no more conceptual overview of events than her first-person narrator possesses at the time they take place. Like Hulme and Pound--her modernist compatriots in The New Age--she exhibits a close affinity with such turn of the century philosophers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, William James, and F. H. Bradley, who argued that reality lay in the immediate flux of sensory appearance and not in a rational, conceptual order beyond it. The disclosure of information in "The Journey to Bruges" is rigorously sensory and retains much of the unexplained and aleatory flavor of raw perception. No one's name is disclosed, the specific cause of the German family's agitation is never identified, and the "odd canvas trouser legs" that hold the family's luggage remain mysteriously foreign. Despite the fact that the narrator later remarks of the clergyman, "My sensitiveness glimpsed a symbol in his eye," we are never told the nature of this symbol (SS 13). 40 Nor does he or the German family play any subsequent role in the tale. Like the Enthusiast and the Mole, who also remain nameless, these res simply join a host of randomly encountered individuals in the story who enable Mansfield to represent the fragmentary and discontinuous quality of immediate, quotidian experience.
Although "Being a Truthful Adventure" is less rigorously antidiscursive than "The Journey to Bruges," it is much more overtly polemical. From the very beginning, the story dramatizes the false lures and perils of ideational language and thought. At the commencement of the tale, which picks up where "The Journey to Bruges" leaves off, the exhausted narrator has arrived in Bruges and is consulting a guidebook while awaiting a room at a hotel.
"The little town lies spread before the gaze of the eager traveler like a faded tapestry threaded with the silver of its canals, made musical by the great chiming belfry. Life is long since asleep in Bruges; fantastic dreams alone breathe over tower and medieval house front, enchanting the eye, inspiring the soul and filling the mind with the great beauty of contemplation." I read this sentence from a guide-book while waiting for "Madame" in the hotel sitting-room. It sounded extremely comforting, and my tired heart, tucked away under a thousand and one grey city wrappings, woke and exulted within me . . . I wondered if I had enough clothes with me to last for at least a month. [SS 18]
The gaping distance between the high-flown abstractions of the guidebook promising beauty, dreams, and comfort, and the more palpable realities of Bruges--which have already left the narrator's "tired heart" dampened under "a thousand and one grey city wrappings"--establishes the oppositional thrust of the story. As the narrative unfolds, she discovers that the "fantastic dreams" promised by the guidebook are nowhere to be found and that to entrust her "gaze" to this seductive verbal intermediary is not to achieve a swifter and more authoritative knowledge of her surroundings, but rather to keep herself ignorant, dependent, and perpetually disappointed. Instead of spending her stay, as the guidebook pledges, "filling [her] mind with the great beauty of contemplation," the narrator finds herself, while following its instructions, contending with a succession of insensitive and overbearing service employees whose efforts to "assist" her are more intrusive than helpful. This culminates with her taking on the services a surly boatman who insists, against her express wishes, on talking constantly, taking on unwanted passengers, and, worst of all, mechanically directing her attention to all the sights along the canals, "Turn your head this way--to the left--to the right--now, wait one moment--look up at the bridge (ibid. 22)." 41
What makes this critique political, and not simply the sour musings of a disillusioned aesthete or tourist, is the story's ending. There Mansfield links the perils of ideational language with the illusory promises of the vote. After escaping the obnoxious boatman's clutches, the narrator retreats to a meadow where she hopes finally to view Bruges through her own unaided eyes. No sooner does she start to examine the landscape around her, however, than an old school acquaintance, Betty Sinclair, and her recently wed husband--both of whom have their heads bent over the very same guidebook she has just abandoned--impose themselves on her:
"Katherine! How extraordinary! How incredible after all these years!" cried she. . . . "Where are you staying; have you been here long?  I'd have known you anywhere." She beckoned to the young man, and said, blushing as though she were ashamed of the fact, but it had to be faced, "This is my husband." We shook hands. He sat down and chewed a grass twig. Silence fell while Betty recovered breath and squeezed my hand. "I didn't know you were married," I said stupidly. "Oh, my dear--got a baby!" said Betty. "We live in England now. We're frightfully keen on the Suffrage, you know." Guy removed the straw. "Are you with us?" he asked, intensely. I shook my head. He put the straw back again and narrowed his eyes. "Then here's the opportunity," said Betty. "My dear, how long are you going to stay? We must go about together and have long talks. Guy and I aren't a honeymoon couple, you know. We love to have other people with us sometimes." [. . .] "Unfortunately I have to go home quite soon. I've had an urgent letter." [. . .] "But the quaint streets and the Continental smells, and the lace makers--if we could just wander about--we three--and absorb it all." I sighed and bit my underlip. "What's your objection to the vote?" asked Guy. [ . . . ] "I always had the idea that you were so frightfully keen on the future of women," said Betty. "Come to dinner with us to-night. Let's thrash the whole subject out. You know, after the strenuous life in London, one does seem to see things in such a different light in this old-world city." "Oh, a very different light indeed," I answered, shaking my head at the familiar guide-book emerging from Guy's pocket. [SS 23-4] 42
Although it might seem surprising at first that the story's independent young narrator, who travels by herself across Europe, should be so cool towards Betty and "the suffrage," she makes the grounds of her contempt clear by linking both with the discredited guidebook. Whereas the narrator has come to distrust the abstract language of the guidebook--regarding as specious its promise to provide a more satisfying and authoritative knowledge of her surroundings than she can achieve on her own--Betty remains its dupe, just as she also remains the gull of a woman's suffrage movement that makes equally abstract pledges on behalf of the vote. She has naïvely entrusted her gaze to this seductive text and gushes blithely about "quaint streets" and "Continental smells" of which she obviously has no first-hand knowledge.
This disabling delegation of authority to the guidebook parallels Betty's equally crippling delegation of feminist agency to women's suffrage organizations. Betty clearly believes that in order to be "keen on the future of women" one need only place one's trust in the suffrage cause, that voicing support for the vote will cure gender inequality and other feminist concerns far more quickly and effectively than any individual acts of her own. But as Mansfield is at pains to demonstrate, just as the abstract language of the guidebook leaves its readers fundamentally ignorant of Bruges, so too does Betty's voluble talk about the vote leave her unenlightened as to her own continued enslavement to gender conventions and male dominance. Excepting her attachment to the suffrage cause, she could not be more captive to custom. She has a young child, enthuses about lace, and bubbles over with sentimental prattle of a stereotyped "feminine" nature. Above all, she remains unable to imagine a role for herself outside her marriage. When Betty proposes that she and the narrator "go about together and have long talks," it never occurs to her not to include her husband Guy. She ironically takes pride in the fact that she and Guy "love to have other people with [them] sometimes," not realizing just how much such a comment reveals about her lack of independence. Similarly, when she talks about her enthusiasm for "the Suffrage," she always does so using the pronoun "we," as he uses "us," as if the cause were as much her husband's as her own.
The contrast between Betty and the narrator is particularly instructive in outlining the grounds of Mansfield's critique. The story ends by establishing a sharp contrast between two kinds of feminism, each shaped by a different approach to language. The first is of the type espoused by Betty. It is more a matter of talk than deeds, of having "long talks" about the vote and "thrash[ing] the whole subject out" over dinner. The second is quietly exemplified by the narrator, who has rejected not only mediated knowledge and agency, but also all idle speech. The narrator may never identify herself as a feminist, but it is clear from Betty's shock that she does not support the vote and by her fiercely independent actions that the narrator not only has a well-established reputation for feminism but that she also acts on her beliefs. By traveling alone, rejecting the authority of the guidebook, and refusing to be intimidated by Guy's "intense" questioning, she demonstrates that she will cede her autonomy to no one. What is more, her reluctance to give expression to her views or idly engage Betty in conversation attests to the deep seriousness of her commitments. In contrast to Betty's ceaseless shallow conversation, which is regularly punctuated by such empty phrases as "you know" and "my dear," the narrator's silent nods and terse statements bespeak a refusal to trivialize her feminist principles, to substitute talk for action.
By criticizing women's suffrage in these terms, Mansfield contributed in fundamental and heretofore unrecognized ways to the development of a new antistatist political culture. As with her criticisms of the German social ideal, her antidiscursive stories are an aesthetic elaboration of the political commentary of unlikely modernist forebears Chesterton and Belloc, whose criticisms of representative government, like their critiques of state regulation, played a key role in fostering a climate of hostility to Fabian socialism. In 1909, two years before "The Journey to Bruges" and "Being a Truthful Adventure" appeared in The New Age, Chesterton criticized parliamentary politics--in terms later taken up by Mansfield--for being overly abstract, insufficiently grounded in immediate experience. As someone who believed that property was the foundation of all power, he contended that Fabian faith in the efficacy of democratic political reform was fundamentally misguided. In his view, electing a socialist majority to Parliament would not lead (as many Fabians supposed) to the "taking away of the private fortunes" of capitalists. Instead, it would result in these same financial oligarchs, through the influence of their wealth, continuing under a socialist guise "to manage our yet more concentrated affairs."  43 Later, in 1911, Belloc expanded these arguments in The Party System, a book he coauthored with Chesterton's disaffected Fabian socialist brother Cecil. By affirming in her fiction that the vote was largely substanceless, Mansfield lent support to Chesterton and Belloc's arguments that, until socialists, laborers, and other enemies of plutocracy directed their attention to the foundation of capitalist power (property and money), any electoral victory won by Fabians or laborers would be purely illusory--the victory of "inapplicable theoretic abstraction." 44
In a similar manner, Mansfield implicitly supported Orage's calls for greater labor emphasis on strikes. Her rejection of the vote and encouragement of the direct seizure of sociopolitical independence by women was an extension of his efforts to encourage greater self-reliance among the working classes. As early as 1910, Orage had argued that organized labor did not have "anything whatever to gain by being in politics at all." He wrote,
All these late years we have been assuring the wretched wage-slaves that their votes were worth their weight in progress. It has been pretended that it mattered vitally and enormously to them, their children, their country, their king and their God, that they should vote for the right man. Well, they now begin to learn that it doesn't matter to any one of these things. 45
Calling attention to the steep decline in wages that had coincided with organized labor's entrance into party politics--much as Mansfield would later call attention to the feminist backsliding that attended women's involvement in suffrage politics--he advocated direct action in the form of strikes. "The governing classes are infinitely less afraid of the working-man's vote than of his strike," he declared, a point that would only grow in significance over the next year as wildcat work stoppages rocked Britain, terrifying capitalists and revealing fault lines between government and rank-and-file laborers that The New Age regarded as the promising beginning of a new, worker-led form of socialism and industrial reorganization. 46
As important a role as Mansfield's antidiscursive stories played in the early foundation of guild socialism, they performed an even more pronounced part in the continued propagation of individualist feminism. Like her critique of the German social ideal, Mansfield's critique of the vote is inextricably linked to the now critically underappreciated but at the time path-clearing model of feminist politics practiced by Hastings, who in conjunction with Mansfield's fictional endeavors, developed a modernist and libertarian-tinged strain of feminism that has mistakenly been thought to have been the sole creation of Dora Marsden. Beginning in 1909, when Marsden was still a loyal member of the Women's Social and Political Union, Hastings criticized suffrage politics--in a manner that Mansfield later embraced--for being every bit as disconnected from immediate, individual experience as conventional party politics. Under the pseudonym D. Triformis, one of several names under which Hastings wrote to give the illusion that her views were held by a critical mass of contributors, she mocked the leaders of the W.S.P.U. for promising, "in an orgie of chimerical benevolence," that the vote could protect "married women from rivalry" and provide for a "regular lien on the wages" of their husbands. While she admitted that "the position of all women would be improved by the removal of the sex disability in politics and that the vote [was] a symbol of the moral restoration of womanhood," she denied that the vote was anything more than a symbol. "Decidedly we object to the illusory hopes held out to the married woman that when such women as pay taxes shall have the vote the conditions of marriage will change for the better," she asserted. "The million and a half future women electors could not honestly promise any change at all, even if this million and a half were all bent in the same direction. 47
Like Mansfield, Hastings criticized suffrage politics for leaving its adherents fundamentally unaware of their own continued submission to gender conventions and male dominance. In a 1909 letter to the magazine under the pseudonym "Beatrice Tina," the name she used to publish her notorious feminist polemic Woman's Worst Enemy--Woman , she argued, "Some of the leading suffragists who hail Mary Wollstonecraft as their model would cut that free-living woman dead if they could meet her to-day in a social gathering." 48 Later, in 1910, she claimed that the leaders of the W.S.P.U. were more concerned with the reactionary strengthening of the bonds of marriage than they were with freeing women from custom and convention. In her view, the "payment of wives by individual men," the most ill-considered and unrealistic of the organization's promised reforms, was "a revolting idea." Far from being a possible step towards greater liberty for women, it was merely "a further scheme for protection." Until women took it upon themselves to assert their independence--a point emphasized by Mansfield in her fiction--the vote would accomplish nothing for them. To the plea that "the world is hard upon woman," she responded,
The world is not hard upon women: women are. Women make the conventions which are more cruel and rigid than any man-made laws. . . . Until domestic women themselves perceive their folly, their degradation, and the ill-effects of their home-made rules against each other, the more intellectual suffrage societies had better avoid them and their plaintive petitions and charters. 49
Finally, in order to gauge the full extent of Mansfield's identification of her early fiction with individualist feminism, the formerly unremarked parallels between her fiction and the feminist polemics of Women's Freedom League founder Teresa Billington-Greig must be disclosed. In January 1911, in a major coup for Hastings and Orage, "Truculent Teresa" quit the W.F.L., a splinter group of the W.S.P.U., and published in The New Age the first fruits of her long-simmering discontent with the women's suffrage movement. These scathing articles, which later formed the basis of her celebrated treatise The Militant Suffrage Movement--Emancipation in a Hurry , lent authority to Hastings's longstanding criticisms. Billington-Greig claimed, as Mansfield shortly would, that the W.S.P.U. had betrayed the cause of feminism, that in its exclusive pursuit of the vote it had forsaken more fundamental fields of feminist endeavor. She also contended that "feminist rebels" had initially rallied to the W.S.P.U. because they found in the organization's "abandonment of the worship of propriety" an "aggressive proclamation" of "the right of insurrection" and "the right of self-government." But now that the W.S.P.U., in its haste to acquire the vote, had reached out for the support of those respectable, tax-paying women who would be most likely to benefit from any initial reform of the franchise, the organization had succeeded only in reducing itself to something "quite commonplace and conventional"--"a movement of political revivalism." In commentary that could almost have served as a blueprint for Mansfield's criticism of Betty in "Being a Truthful Adventure," Billington-Greig argued that the W.S.P.U. sought to "impose a yoke of emotional control" and "mental and spiritual slavery" on its members that corrupted the entire suffrage cause. 50 "The women who succumb" to this yoke, she declared,
exhibit a type of self-subjection not less objectionable than the more ordinary self-subjection of women to men, to which it bears a close relation. The yoke is imposed by a mingling of deliberately worked up emotion, by the exercise of affectational and personal charm. . . . As with all emotional degradation its victims glory in it. Every woman snared ensnares her fellow and adds the weight of her obsession to the burden upon the minds of the rest. 51
In sum, her comments confirm that Mansfield's criticism of suffrage politics does not stem solely from personal experience--as the very title of "Being a Truthful Adventure" might suggest--but arises within and belongs to the most important antisuffrage critiques of the period.
Prewar British modernism poses a dilemma to those who wish to link its multifarious aesthetic experiments to a readily identifiable set of political affiliations. While it is not obviously conservative in outlook, neither is it identifiably leftist, liberal, or of the radical right. Scholars who attempt to place early modernists in any one of these camps are usually compelled to ignore evidence to the contrary. Mansfield poses particular problems in this respect. Not only is she often not properly admitted to be a modernist at all, but the tensions that are manifest in her fiction rarely seem ideological in any familiar sense. If one views Mansfield's fiction in the critically neglected intellectual context of The New Age, however, it is possible to begin to resolve this long-standing conundrum of modernist scholarship. Doing so demonstrates that prewar British politics frequently directed different lines of division than we are accustomed to encountering today. Socialism itself was more fluid and open to definition at the beginning of this century than our Cold War derived notions of "left" and "right" have led us to believe--or even enabled us to acknowledge. In short, her fiction discloses that modernist literary culture was antistatist more importantly than it was "left" or "right" in contemporary terms. In addition to including variants that envisioned a powerful role for the state, there also developed out of debates in The New Age an interest in formulating an antistatist variant of labor politics. And feminism was no less various. Thus, out of the debates in the magazine, there emerged a variant of radical feminism surprisingly hostile to the vote.
Analyzing Mansfield's stories in the context of The New Age provides strong, fresh evidence of the role that she played in the politically charged formulation of modernist aesthetic doctrine. It uncovers the crucial part her fiction played in the critical overturning of the politics and aesthetics of Fabian-affiliated literary titans Shaw, Wells, and Bennett and its anticipation of later arguments of Woolf and Marsden. Revealing that her fiction was at the center of heated discussions about labor organization, women's suffrage, imperial policy, and the role of the state in modern government also exposes her previously unanalyzed affinities with Chesterton, Belloc, Hastings, and Billington-Greig. Above all, it demonstrates that Mansfield is an insufficiently appreciated modernist pioneer.
Lee Garver is Assistant Professor of English at Butler University. He is currently editing volume eight of Brown University's online edition of The New Age and working on a book titled Lost Politics: The New Age and the Edwardian Socialist Roots of British Modernism.
1. See in particular Sydney Janet Kaplan's Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991). Kaplan persuasively argues that "Her innovations in the short-fiction genre (especially the 'plotless' story, the incorporation of the 'stream of consciousness' into the content of fiction, and the emphasis on the psychological 'moment') preceded Virginia Woolf's use of them, and they have been absorbed and assimilated--often unconsciously--by writers and readers of the short story" .
2. Pamela Dunbar, Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories (Ipswich, Suffolk: Ipswich, 1997), x. Dunbar rightly argues that this attitude has been further reinforced by "the formation of an unofficial Mansfield canon which favours apparently tranquil pieces like 'Prelude,' 'The Garden-Party,' and 'The Doll's House' while neglecting other, more patently disturbing works" (ibid.).
3. Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield, 7; Kate Fullbrook, Katherine Mansfield (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 38. Kaplan contends that Mansfield "did not connect her understanding of alienation and victimization with either a Marxist or a feminist political analysis. . . . She did not articulate her social critique of human suffering in recognizably political terms" (16-7).
4. Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Mansfield's Letters to John Middleton Murry, ed. John Middleton Murry (London: Constable, 1951), 467.
5. See C. A. Hankin, Katherine Mansfield and her Confessional Stories (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), 62-3.
6. Katherine Mansfield, The Stories of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Antony Alpers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 547.
7. Patricia Moran, Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 4, 3.
8. Wallace Martin, The New Age under Orage: Chapters in English Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 10.
9. "Germans at Meat," The New Age VI (3 March 1910), 419; The New Age will be hereafter abbreviated in the notes as NA followed by the volume number in roman numerals. Reprinted in Katherine Mansfield, The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield, ed. John Middleton Murry (New York: Ecco, 1983), 38, 37, 40; hereafter abbreviated in the text as SS.
10. "Bavarian Babies. The Child-Who-Was-Tired," NA VI (24 February 1910), 397. Subsequently shortened to simply "The Child-Who-Was-Tired" in In a German Pension .
11. "At 'Lehmann's,'" NA VII (7 July 1910), 226. Subsequently retitled "At Lehmann's" in In a German Pension.
12. "Pension Sketches. Frau Fischer," NA VII (18 August 1910), 368. Subsequently shortened to simply "Frau Fischer" in In a German Pension.
13. Fabianism and the Empire: A Manifesto by the Fabian Society, ed. George Bernard Shaw (London: Grant Richards, 1900), 6.
14. From the preface to Getting Married. Getting Married / Press Cuttings (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1986), 20.
15. H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1985), 266, 267.
16. The term "national efficiency" was introduced into public discussion by Fabian leader Sidney Webb in his widely read article "Lord Rosebery's escape from Houndsditch," Nineteenth Century 50 (September 1901): 366-86.
17. See Webb's article "Lord Rosebery's escape from Houndsditch" and his tract Twentieth Century Politics: A Policy of National Efficiency (London: The Fabian Society, 1901).
18. Fabianism and the Empire, 11.
19. This is not to say that the Fabian Society was unconcerned with the nation's birthrate. Although the organization never endorsed a eugenics program, it shared many of the same worries as its more outspoken members and allies. For details, see Webb's The Decline in the Birth-Rate (London: The Fabian Society, 1907), 6-7.
20. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (London: Penguin, 1946), 245; Wells, The New Machiavelli, 310, 308, 309.
21. "Germans at Meat," 419.
22. "The Luft Bad," NA VI (24 March 1910), 493.
23. "Pension Sketches. Frau Fischer," NA VII (18 August 1910), 367, 368.
24. Hilaire Belloc, "The Prevention of Destitution Bill," NA VI (14 April 1910), 556, 557.
25. M. D. Eder, "Eugenics and Human Sacrifice," NA V (9 September 1909), 359.
26. Francis Grierson, "Materialism and Crime," NA VII (11 August 1911), 341, 342.
27. A. R. Orage, Notes of the Week, NA VII (11 August 1910), 337.
28. Ibid.
29. Although maternity was not a primary focus of Marsden's editorials, she did recognize, as Les Garner has pointed out, that "there could be few Freewomen if they were continually pregnant." A Brave and Beautiful Spriit: Dora Marsden, 1882-1960 (Aldershot, Great Britain: Avebury 1990), 68.
30. Helen George, "Maternitis," NA IV (11 February 1909), 322.
31. Beatrice Hastings, "'Olive Schreiner's Women and Labour,'" NA VIII (2 March 1911), 413.
32. A. R. Orage, "The Selection of Experience," NA VIII (9 March 1911), 444.
33. Ashley Dukes, review of The Doctor's Dilemma, Getting Married, and The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, by G. B. Shaw, NA VIII (23 March 1911), 497.
34. "On Sexual Idealism," NA VIII (16 February 1911), 372.
35. Review of Hilda Lessways, by Arnold Bennett, NA IX (28 September 1911), 520.
36. A. R. Orage, "Modern Novels," NA VII (29 December 1910), 204.
37. "Searchers after Reality. Jules De Gaultier.--I. Philosophy is a Sign of the Times," NA VI (2 December 1909), 108. Reprinted in Further Speculations, ed. Samuel Hynes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 17, 16.
38. Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 104, 105.
39. Katherine Mansfield, "The Journey to Bruges," NA IX (24 August 1911), 401.
40. "The Journey to Bruges," 401.
41. "Being a Truthful Adventure," NA IX (7 September 1911), 450.
42. Ibid., 451-2.
43. G. K. Chesterton, "A Shriek of Warning. Part II," NA V (29 April 1909), 9, 8.
44. Chesterton, "A Shriek of Warning. Part II," 8.
45. A. R. Orage, Notes of the Week, NA VIII (9 February 1911), 339.
46. A. R. Orage, Notes of the Week, NA VII (1 September 1910), 409.
47. D. Triformis [Beatrice Hastings], "Feminism and the Franchise," NA VI (3 March 1910), 415, 416.
48. Beatrice Tina [Beatrice Hastings], letter, NA V (27 May 1909), 103.
49. "Lady McLaren's Charter," NA VI (7 April 1910), 533, 532.
50. Teresa Billington-Grieg, "Emancipation in a Hurry. I.," NA VIII (12 January 1911), 246, 247.
51. Ibid., 247.
--How does the flag sit with us, we who don't give a hoot for Betsy Ross, who never think of tea as a cause for parties?
John Cage, "Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas" 1
In a sketchbook for 1964, Jasper Johns began to make notes for his paintings Watchman and According to What. On one particularly tantalizing page, he makes a sketch for what would appear in both paintings as the wax cast of a man's lower torso, positioned on the seat of a chair, itself bisected vertically to accommodate the depth of the fragmented re ( 1). 2 Torso and chair are inverted so that the long left leg extends upward to meet the word "spy" at the lower margin of the enigmatic text, positioned as a reversed L-shape above it:
The Watchman falls "into" the "trap" of looking.
The "spy" is a different person
"Looking" is & is not "eating" & also "being eaten"
That is, there is continuity of some sort among
the watchman, the space, the objects.
The spy must be ready to "move," must be aware
of his entrances & exits.
The watchman leaves
his job & takes away
no information.
The spy must remember
and must remember himself
& his remembering.
The spy designs himself
to be overlooked. The
watchman "serves" as a
warning. Will the
spy & the watchman
ever meet? In a
painting named Spy,
will he be present?
The spy stations himself
to observe the watchman.
If the spy is a foreign object
why is the eye not irritated?
Is he invisible?
When the spy irritates, we try
to remove him.
"Not spying, just looking"--
Watchman.
[WSI 59-60]
In the square inside the L-shaped text, Johns has written: "Somewhere here, there is the / question of "seeing clearly." / Seeing what? According to what?"
What or who are watchman and spy? "If the artist is the spy (never depicted)," writes Francis M. Naumann in a 1992 catalogue essay, "the watchman is the spectator/critic, a member of the viewing audience. In his capacity as a spectator, the watchman remains momentarily inactive--seated--his disoriented position and fragmentation suggesting that he has, as Johns has predicted, fallen into 'the trap of looking.'" 3 And Michael Crichton takes the distinction even more literally, "The notes suggest that this is a picture about looking. They identify the cast of the leg and chair, inverted in one corner; that is the watchman (falling into the trap of looking?)." 4 But why would Johns, who always resisted allegorical readings of his work, refer to the "spectator/critic" as a mysterious watchman in seemingly endless struggle with an equally mysterious artist-spy? And why, to make matters murkier, would he use an encaustic cast of a leg, unconnected to a body, as a representation of something as specific as this "watchman"? A few pages earlier in Johns's sketchbook where the cast of the leg (not yet inverted) is outlined in the upper right, next to a hinge picture, we read:
One thing made
of another
One thing used
as another.
an arrogant object
Something to be folded or
bent or stretched.
(SKIN?)
Beware of the body
& the mind.
Avoid a polar
situation.
Think of the
edge of the city &
the traffic there.
[WSI 56; 2]
"Avoid a polar / situation": Johns always preferred the "traffic" at the "edge of the city"--a border situation--to binaries like artist/spy and spectator/watchman. In his Watchman note, an arrow points from the enigmatic phrase "'Looking' is & is not 'eating' & also 'being eaten,'" to the parenthetical comment "Cezanne?--Each object reflecting the other" (WSI 59). The reference is probably to Gertrude Stein's observation that "Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole." 5 For Johns, as for Stein, composition must be decentered, nonhierarchical, each part of the canvas as important as every other part.
Thus, unlike, say, Jackson Pollock's all-over drip paintings of the preceding decade--paintings that, however improvisatory their process of composition might have been, are characterized, in the words of Johns's friend Frank O'Hara, by their formal "balance, proportion, and controlled emotion"--Watchman ( 3 and front cover) [Begin Page 201] refuses to cohere. 6 What, for example, is the relation of the three-dimensional body cast (the inverted leg), attached to the chair to the wooden ball and stick at bottom left? How do both these "real" objects relate to the three horizontal brownish-grayish "abstract" sections of the canvas, bearing the partially hidden words "RED," "YELLOW," and "BLUE" (only their first letters are visible)--words that, confusingly, match not the color fields in which they appear, but the three rectangles on the right, as if to suggest that observation alone is never sufficient for understanding. When I look at Watchman, my eye moves down from the disturbing encaustic leg-cast to focus on the wide orange, white, and green brushstrokes that seem to replace the cast's missing upper torso, brushstrokes that don't blend, thus emphasizing the flatness of the canvas. As they cascade downward, they lose their color, giving way to a thin gray-brown wash dripping across a partially hidden newspaper page to the strip at the bottom, evidently made by dragging the stick at the left across the canvas through a layer of wet paint, leaving a black-through-white tonal scale covered with drips behind.
In studying the incongruous objects incorporated into Johns's paintings of the early sixties--for example, the two letters N and O, cut out of aluminum foil and suspended from a wire in NO, the ruler and tin cup in Good Time Charley ( 4), the broom, china cup, and towel in Fool's House--Leo Steinberg comments that for Johns, the canvas is "not a picture plane, not a window, nor an uprighted tray, nor yet an object with active projections into actual space; but a surface observed during impregnation, observed as it receives a message or imprint from real space." 7 In Watchman, the little wooden ball against which a stick leans diagonally is just such an imprint, a trace of impregnation that alters the surface. But what is the message and who is the spy?
Johns's own comments only compound the mystery. Interviewed by Yoshiaki Tono in August 1964, after the completion of the painting, he explains that "The idea for this work first occurred to me two years ago, when I visited Madame Tussaud's, in London. The image of flesh, the image of skin--images I had never used before. . . . The idea of the leg of a person sitting on a chair came to me about a year ago" (WSI 96). As for the verbal account of watchman and spy, Johns dismisses it as a "play on words." "I don't," he tells Tono, "want you to associate the essay with the picture" (WSI 96-7). When the latter presses, remarking that the poet Shin Ooka took the painting to refer to "the trace of something that had abruptly passed away . . . the end of a drama," Johns replies, "For me the picture implies the fall of something, an interpretation I think is clear from the leg's position in the overall composition." But lest we start reading the image allegorically as a fall from innocence or grace or as a wartime execution, he adds matter-of-factly: "The leg will naturally fall . . . if you cut the support that attaches the chair to the canvas" (WSI 97). And in an allusion to Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations Johns had been reading with absorption since 1962, he emphasizes his concern for the context within which meanings are made. 8 He writes:
For instance, there is the word "red." But what is "red" out of many shades of red, or which "red" is the real red, this red or that red? When we gradually add yellow, exactly how much yellow will turn "red" into "orange"? I find this way of seeing things very interesting. If you take up something, for instance, and you name it "something," then you and I can understand exactly what the other party means through this naming. This is useful and necessary in our daily life. If we come closer and closer to that "something" to identify it, however, we will begin to wonder whether that "something" is really "something" or not. [Ibid.]
Precision coupled with a respect for difference, Johns insists, is by no means equivalent to the materialism or objecthood practiced by Pop Art, which was then coming into vogue. Consider the following exchange, again in a 1964 interview (conducted by Jay Nash and James Holmstrand):
JN & JH: Although you deny being a Pop artist, you sometimes use such things as beer cans, light bulbs, etc. in your work. Doesn't this seem inconsistent?
JJ: No, I don't think of myself as a Pop artist. [The Pop movement] is technically more restrictive and deals mostly with images. I am not so much interested in dealing with images as working for form.
JN & JH: A number of painters--not only the Pop painters, but people like [Larry] Rivers and yourself--have concerned themselves with American subject matter (maps of the U.S., Confederate flags and soldiers, portraits of George Washington, etc.). Do you think this reflects an increasing nationalistic pride in artists?
JJ: I don't think so. I'm merely concerned with looking and seeing and not much else. I'm not involved in patriotism or politics. . . . [WSI 104-5]
Here again is a reference to "looking and seeing" (watchman and spy?), this time in contradistinction to an art of "patriotism or politics."
This seeming political disengagement has been defined, in a much discussed essay by Moira Roth, as the "aesthetic of indifference." 9 The Duchamp-Cunningham-Cage-Rauschenberg-Johns circle, she argues, responded to the oppressive Cold War climate of the fifties and sixties by adopting a stance of neutrality, passivity, and negation. Rauschenberg's White Paintings, Cage's Lecture on Nothing and notorious piano piece 4'33", and Johns's "monotonous" and "repetitious" Alphabets and Numbers--these, she argues, contain "no messages, no feelings and no ideas. Only emptiness" (D/I 41). Indeed, she writes, the work of the Johns circle testifies to
the bizarre disjunction of art and politics that emerged in the 1960s. The radical political movements of the 1960s had virtually no expression in the art of that time, an art that was strangely appealing and acceptable to the very forces--governmental, corporate and middle-class powers--that these radical movements opposed. [D/I 35]
Here Roth is referring to the role that the State Department and CIA have been shown to have played in the promotion and dissemination of New York painting--especially abstract expressionism--in the late forties and fifties. 10 But Johns, as a representative of the next generation and as the youngest member of the Cage-Cunningham circle (he was born in 1930), went, so she posits, beyond the legendary political indifference and negation she associates particularly with Duchamp:
More than any other artist, Johns incorporated in his early art the Cold War and the McCarthy era preoccupations and moods. This is not to imply that Johns did this consciously or single-mindedly . . . but what emerges out of a collective examination of his work is a dense concentration of metaphors dealing with spying, conspiracy, secrecy and concealment, misleading information, coded messages and clues. These were the very subjects of newspaper headlines of the period, reiterated on the radio and shown on television. . . . [Johns's] early work is a warehouse of Cold War metaphors. [D/I 43]
The argument for a subliminal presence of Cold War spying/concealment imagery in works like Watchman makes more sense than does the identification of watchman with viewer, spy with artist. But as Jonathan D. Katz points out in his provocative response to Roth's piece, published together with hers in Difference/Indifference , her essay (originally appearing in 1977) fails to account for the role sexuality played in the artistic choices made by the artists in question. Ironically, Roth herself referred to Cage, Johns, and Cunningham as models of "a new breed of artist, an alternative to the politically concerned abstract expressionists," and cites the sculptor George Segal's description of the "new" artist as a "slender, cerebral, philosophical, iconoclastic type," with "a dandylike elegance of body build and a manner which delighted in cool and elegant plays of the mind" (D/I 37). "Dandy" is of course a euphemism for gay, and she acknowledged that the artists in question were predominantly homosexual or, like Duchamp performing as Rrose Sélavy, bisexual. Katz, with the hindsight of twenty years, adds that, given the extreme homophobia of the postwar era, the "indifference" of the artists in question must be understood less as "passivity" than as an expression of what he calls the "double duty" of "camouflage and contestation" that characterized "the compulsory Cold War closet" (D/I 51). "What Roth refers to as 'an aesthetic of indifference,'" he writes, "can be more accurately termed 'a politics of negation,' wherein negation functions as an active resistance to hegemonic constructions of meaning as natural or inherent in the work" (D/I 63). The performance of "silence" (or White Painting), in this scheme of things, testifies to the awareness of the possibilities of "a newly destabilized and de-essentialized construction of self" (D/I 55). The "natural," always a mystification of the social, is replaced by the dandy's "narcissistic pleasures of performative fluency" (D/I 59).
 But Katz glosses over certain key differences among the artists inside the circle in question. To understand the role of Johns's "cool" art in the "activist" sixties, it is useful to read Johns's work against that of a closely related gay artist, or rather poet (and art critic)--a poet who was Johns's exact contemporary (born 1926) and, like him, a great admirer of John Cage, whose Music of Changes, as performed by David Tudor, he had introduced to a third poet-friend, John Ashbery, as early as 1952. 11 I am thinking of course of Frank O'Hara, whose poetry stands behind a number of important Johns compositions and vice-versa. At the same time, O'Hara's aesthetic, rooted as it was in the fifties, was to prompt Johns's own radical rethinking, in the early sixties, of what art could be, an art in which the "memory of [one's] feelings" gradually gave way to the memory of one's prior works, of what Cage had called, in a brilliant meditative essay on Johns's work, "structures, not subjects" (YM 75, emphasis added). Cage, Johns, O'Hara: the trio makes for an interesting rethinking of Cold War "difference" and "indifference."
In 1961, as is often remarked, Johns's work changed dramatically. As Kirk Varnedoe tells it:
a new emotional tone intervened in Johns's work, chill, dark, and bleak. Titles of negation, melancholy, or bitterness (No, Liar, In Memory of My Feelings--Frank O'Hara) underlined this altered mood. . . . Gray, formerly the guise of impassive neutrality, became an expressive cast of gloom and morbidity. This was now an art under pressure, and imagery of imprinting and smearing, along with thinned-out passages of staining paint and crusts of scraped residue, gave it a more troubled material and psychological life. 13
What had happened? In Off the Wall, Calvin Tomkins reports that Johns's long-term relationship with Rauschenberg broke up in 1961: "By the time the summer ended they were no longer together. The break was bitter and excruciatingly painful, not only for them but for their closest associates--Cage and Cunningham and a few others--who felt that they, too, had lost something of great value." 14 Johns began spending a large part of the year in a house he had bought on Edisto Island, off the coast of South Carolina.
One of the first paintings made after the move to Edisto was called In Memory of My Feelings--Frank O'Hara ( 5 and back cover). This is not, as the title might suggest, an homage to a new lover; quite the contrary. Johns and O'Hara had first met in 1957, but they were not immediately friends, possibly because O'Hara's primary allegiance, in his role as curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was to the abstract expressionists: he was exhibiting (and writing on) Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler. 15 Johns, for his part, remained aloof from these painters. Asked in a 1964 interview whether his "stylism" was "a logical step beyond abstract expressionism," he responded,
I tried to consciously avoid making statements that were already being made well. The 1940s did something valuable with the work of Pollock and others. In the 1950s there was a hangover where they were not producing private [pictures] but painting public pictures and refining statements. I am not interested in refinement. I try to avoid resemblances. [WSI 105]
There was also the question raised by Moira Roth and Jonathan Katz about the abstract expressionists' lifestyle: the loud and aggressively macho Cedar Bar scene was no more congenial to Johns than it had been to Cage, who recalls trying to avoid Jackson Pollock "because he was generally so drunk, and he was actually an unpleasant person for me to encounter. I remember seeing him on the same side of the street I was, and I would always cross over to the other side." 16 But despite such conflicting loyalties, by 1959 Frank and "Jap" were corresponding--O'Hara sent Johns a long, amusingly annotated list of books worth reading, both poetry and prose (FOH 15ff) and it is Jap who accompanies Frank to the Southampton weekend house party given by Kenneth and Janice Koch, where O'Hara and the dancer Vincent Warren become lovers, a weekend memorialized in the poem "Joe's Jacket":
Entraining to Southampton in the parlor car with Jap and Vincent, I see life as a penetrable landscape lit from above like it was in my Barbizonian kiddy days when automobiles were owned by the same people for years. . . . [CP 329]
"Joe's Jacket" ends on a note of pained resignation-"it will not be need, it will be just what it is and just what happens" (CP 330)--as the poet recognizes the impact his new relationship will have on his long-time companion Joe LeSueur. Perhaps Johns related this painful ending to his own break-up with Rauschenberg; in any case, his painting takes its title from O'Hara's earlier poem "In Memory of My Feelings."
Johns's hinged painting (5 is divided in half, but the two seemingly matching "halves" are discordant. In the right half, the "abstract" brushstrokes--predominantly black and blue with some white and a few color flecks of orange-red--don't blend: theirs is, in Steinberg's words, a "ceaseless overlap-interlace of re and ground; a paint surface like knitting or basketry. Not a shallow space but the quickened density of a film." The "M-W brushstroke" used here and in related paintings of the early sixties, "functions like the corrugated staples carpenters use." 17 In the left half of the painting, the blue-black paintstrokes thin out and drip onto the largely white area near the bottom. In the top half, the strokes are obliterated by a more smoothly painted brown-grey rectangle, reminiscent of Johns's earlier Canvas ( 6) and Flags ( 7). Suspended on a wire from a screw near the top of this rectangle is an ordinary silver spoon, oddly hung, not by its handle, but upside down, as is the fork whose prongs are just visible behind it. The fork's shadow, just to the right of the utensils, recalls a hand, with fingers closed. The well of the spoon intersects the bottom edge of the rectangle.
Before we consider the function of the spoon and fork, we should note that the lower edge of the canvas is unpainted, reminding us that painterly illusionism is not in order. And right above this unpainted lower strip, we read the stencilled letters of the painting's title "IN MEMORY OF MY FEELINGS--FRANK O'HARA" and, to its right, the signature "J. JOHNS" with the date "[19]61." This seeming authentication is misleading, for the painting in no way "illustrates" O'Hara's poem, of which more in a moment. Indeed, as Fred Orton puts it, [Begin Page 208]
the grey brushstrokes that dominate the right, and mark the white ground and turpentine-like-brown greyness of the left canvas are there not as the direct expression of feelings but as signifiers of the expression of feelings appropriated from the pictorial language of abstract expressionism. In the context of Johns's surface, they refer to the idea of the unmediated association of feelings and facture, but their very identity as appropriated signifiers inhibits our seeing and understanding them as marks directly expressive of Johns's feelings. 18
Brushstroke thus becomes ironic allusion, a kind of distancing device whereby overt emotion, whether the painter's own or that of the previous New York generation, is kept at bay. The suspended spoon and fork contribute to this sense of displacement. Orton speculates that Johns had in mind O'Hara's poem "Dig My Grave with a Silver Spoon," and that there is some private association between these little eating utensils and death. 19 But perhaps the most important thing to note is that Johns strips ordinary domestic objects like spoons of their normal associations, recontextualizing them so as to "make it strange." Spoons and forks are to eat with, not suspended from wires like stick res in a game of Hang Man. Spoons and forks are to be held by someone, one in each hand, not bound together as they are here, where the fork oddly hides behind (or couples with?) the suspended, phallically erect spoon (FOH xxii). And finally, the juxtaposition of these ordinary, everyday objects with the bluish-gray paint surface is curiously disorienting, challenging the viewer's notions of how a visual field should be organized.
The blue-black brushstrokes play yet another role: they almost bury the words "DEAD MAN" stenciled across the lower edge of both canvases: "D" on the left, "EAD MA[N]" on the right, and then above that, but only on the right canvas, again--this time in smaller letters--"DEAD MAN." 20 The thick paint strokes, as Orton points out, "completely cover the human skull that Johns pictured, probably with a crude stencil of his own devising, in the top right of the canvas." The naked eye cannot make out this skull; Orton is presumably drawing on Johns's sketchbook for 1961, which contains a page, at whose top we read "A DEAD MAN" and right below it:
Take a skull
cover it with paint
rub it against canvas
[WSI 29; 8]
The outlined canvas below these words (evidently a first sketch for In Memory of My Feelings--Frank O'Hara) has a skull and crossbones at the upper right and the words "DEAD MAN" in large block letters at the lower margin. The skull motif reappears in a larger shaded version beneath the rectangle and in the second sketch, this time covered with black calligraphic squiggles, at the lower left. In both cases, the skull also resembles a light bulb, thus recalling the sculpmetal and graphite renditions of light bulbs of the late fifties ( 9). 21 [Begin Page 210]
The reference to "DEAD MAN" appears curiously prophetic as O'Hara met his own death five years later, when he was only forty, in a tragic beach buggy accident at Fire Island. The commemorative volume published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1967 again bore the title In Memory of My Feelings. 22 But in 1961 O'Hara was very much alive, so the words "DEAD MAN" and the outline of the hidden skull must be construed otherwise. A hint is supplied in John Cage's collage essay "Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas," first published in the Jewish Museum catalog of the work of Johns early in 1964 and reprinted in A Year From Monday . In this text, in which the italicized passages are taken from Johns's own writings, Cage tries to recreate the artist's strange but highly disciplined ways of working and to define his aesthetic. Near the beginning, we read:
Beginning with a flag that has no space around it, that has the same size as the painting, we see that it is not a painting of a flag. The roles are reversed: beginning with the flag, a painting was made. Beginning, that is, with structure. [YM 74]
But not just any structure: "If it comes to his notice that someone else had one of his ideas before he did, he makes a mental or actual note not to proceed with his plan" (ibid.). Here is the fear of "resemblances" I talked of earlier, the need to See It New. And also the need to differentiate Johns from his contemporaries: "if only," notes Cage, discrimination "will make us pause long enough in our headstrong passage through history to realize that Pop Art, if deducted from his work, represents a misunderstanding, if embarked upon as the next step after his, represents a non-sequitur" (YM 75). And we recall Johns's own distinction between Pop Art's "dealing with images" and his own "working for form" (WSI 92).
Gay "concealment," it seems, can mean many different things: witness the obsession with object and image of that other famous gay sixties artist, Andy Warhol. For Johns, perhaps because of the rootlessness and isolation of his childhood, subjectivity becomes a matter of endless self-invention. In Cage's wonderfully dead-pan "bio" sketch:
He does not remember being born. His earliest memories concern living with his grandparents in Allendale, South Carolina. Later, in the same town, he lived with an aunt and uncle who had twins, a brother and sister. Then he went back to live with his grandparents. After the third grade in school he went to Columbia, which seemed like a big city, to live with his mother and stepfather. A year later, school finished, he went to a community on a lake called The Corner to stay with his Aunt Gladys. He thought it was for the summer but stayed there for six years studying with his aunt who taught all the grades in one room, a school called Climax. The following year he finished high school living in Sumter with his mother and stepfather, two half-sisters and his half-brother. He went to college for a year and a half in Columbia where he lived alone. [YM 78]
How do we interpret these "facts"? There is no simple answer. We may surmise, if we like, that Johns must have been lonely and miserable. But this would be to read normative values into the equivocal portrait, whereas it might just be possible, in Johns's particular case, that the absence of close family ties and a home produced a remark able self-reliance and resilience. Then, too, as Cage implies, there is, after all, one constant in the nomadic life described--namely, South Carolina, represented, in the present of Cage's essay, by Edisto.
A few pages later, Cage poses the question, "Does he live in the same terror and confusion that we do?" And he responds in Johns's own words, "The air must move in as well as out--no sadness, just disaster" (YM 80). This Buddhist note of acceptance (a faith Cage shares and hence writes about so movingly) culminates in the text's final paragraph, which refers to an afternoon of mushroom hunting in the local woods:
Even though in those Edisto woods you think you didn't get a tick or ticks, you probably did. The best thing to do is back at the house to take off your clothes, shaking them carefully over the bathtub. Then make a conscientious self-examination with a mirror if necessary. It would be silly too to stay out of the woods simply because the ticks are in them. Think of the mushrooms (Caesar's among them!) that would have been missed. Ticks removed, fresh clothes put on, something to drink, something to eat, you revive. There's scrabble and now chess to play and the chance to look at TV. A Dead Man. Take a skull. Cover it with paint. Rub it against canvas. Skull against canvas. [YM 84]
How do we reconcile the upbeat references to the evening's "reviv[al]"--eating, drinking, playing scrabble and chess, looking at TV after a hard day's work--with the death note of the final citation, "A Dead Man. Take a skull. Cover it with paint. Rub it against canvas. Skull against canvas"? Is man, in Johns's scheme of things, no more than this? Here it is useful to turn to the O'Hara poem that gave Johns his title, In Memory of My Feelings.
O'Hara's long autobiographical poem was begun on his thirtieth birthday; the immediate occasion may well have been the crisis of turning thirty and fearing that his vocation might never be realized. Indeed, as Bill Berkson speculates, the poem's sense of urgency may well have to do with the publication, that same year , of another long poem by a friend of the very same age--Howl by Allen Ginsberg. 23 "In Memory of My Feelings" opens as follows:
My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.
My quietness has a number of naked selves,
so many pistols I have borrowed to protect my selves
from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons and have
murder in their heart!
[CP 252-3]
The crisis O'Hara presents so movingly here is that of objectification by the other. At the outset, the poet's "naked selves" are endlessly victimized and terrorized: "A gun is 'fired,'" and "pink flamingoes" absurdly crush "one of me" "underneath their hooves," leaving behind "terror in earth, dried mushrooms, pink feathers, tickets" (CP 253). A little further along, "My transparent selves / flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing / without panic" (ibid.).  The poet's mind, trying to deal with these memories of victimization is "like a shuttered suite in the Grand Hotel / where mail arrives for my incognito, / whose façade has been slipping into the Grand Canal for centuries" (CP 254).
This last passage is characterized by the "performative fluency" that Katz speaks of, the campy power to construct alternate identities that allow one to survive. In the gay poetry of the sixties, a central strategy is humor: for much of this poem, O'Hara's narrator is able to laugh at his past exploits and at "the occasion of these ruses" (CP 257). Many of the "memories," moreover, far from being actual recollections, are based on various Hollywood films, as in the comic passage about Lord Nelson, where the "meek subaltern writhes in his bedclothes / with the fury of a thousand, violating an insane mistress / who has only herself to offer his multitudes" (CP 255). The resort to imaginary memories that are actually quotations from other works, thus distancing the reader from the poet's inner turmoil, distinguishes O'Hara from the Confessional poets of the fifties and sixties. "Personism," as O'Hara conceives of it, is not "personalism."
But in part 4, hallucination and burlesque give way to a moment of transcendence:
One of me is standing in the waves, an ocean bather,
or I am naked with plate of devils at my hip.
Grace
To be born and live as variously as possible. . . .
[CP 255-6]
And there follows the now well-known catalogue of assumed identities--
I am a Hittite in love with a horse. . . .
I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downstairs
in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall
I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole
[ . . . ]
I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain"
[CP 256]
--a series of ecstatic identifications in which the poet is able to get outside himself and act in various desirable or comically absurd and hyperbolic roles.
It is a brilliant performance but one that cannot last. The fifth and final section opens with the short line "And now it is the serpent's turn" (CP 256). How to reconcile the phallic serpent to "the heart / that bubbles with red ghosts, since to move is to love"? Fantasies of domination give way to a reprise of erotic/masochistic dreams, whether of "being shot / by a guerrilla warrior or dumped from a car into ferns," or a moment in which "The hero, trying to unhitch his parachute / stumbles over me. It is our last embrace" (ibid.). "The fancy," in Keats's words, "cannot cheat so well / As she is fam'd to do." Hence the poignancy and pathos of the poem's ending:
I could not change it into history
And so remember it, and I have lost what is always and everywhere present, the scene of my selves, the occasion of these ruses,
which I myself and singly must now kill and save the serpent in their midst.
[CP 257]
The integrity of the self--this time, a "real" or natural self--is preserved, but only at a very high cost.
There is much more to be said about this complex poem, but here I want to focus on its relationship to Johns's painting. 24 In both cases, meaning is created by juxtaposition of unlike items in an intricate network of metonymic images. In the poem, for example, the various unrelated scenes of hunting and war--whether remembered incidents or allusions to World War II films, or even pure inventions--play on the fear and paranoia of the poet, or again, the great-aunt's "blood vessels [that] rushed to the surface / and burst like rockets," can be related to the Grand Canal scene in Venice, where "rockets splay over a sposalizio" (CP 254), and then to the "fury of a thousand" in the Lord Nelson scene. In the same vein, while the painting has no focus or vanishing point, no re silhouetted against a ground, no symmetry between left and right halves, the shape of the spoon handle is metonymically related to paint shapes throughout, and the brushstrokes, as I have already noted, create structures of great intricacy. Or again, in Watchman, the little red stick at bottom left echoes the line of the chair back in the upper right, even as the black and white strip with its drips at the bottom of the frame carries on the rhythm of the vertical strip above it to create a T-shape. Each part of the canvas is as important as every other part, the principle being, again in Stein's words, "use everything."
Both poem and painting create tension between formal abstraction and the introduction of ordinary, everyday objects. "My quietness has a man in it," gives way to the particularism of O'Hara's absurdist catalogues, even as Johns's painting projects the suspended spoon and fork against a backdrop of thick and separate brushstrokes. The curious tension between the abstract and the "real" also produces a marked eroticism. In a comic allusion to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, O'Hara's
ardent lover of history hides,
tongue out
leaving a globe of spit on a taut spear of grass
and leaves off rattling his tail a moment
to admire this flag.
[CP 255]
And in the painting, that same "spear," in the form of the spoon, reappears as a blue, black, or white brushstroke, in many places "hiding" something reddish orange.
But what about Johns's hidden "DEAD MAN"? How does this reference relate to the "man" in O'Hara's first line--"My quietness has a man in it"--or to those later multiple "selves" who must, in the end, be "killed" so as to "save the serpent in their midst"? It is in their treatment of death that O'Hara and Johns part company. O'Hara is still very much a post-Romantic poet, yearning for presence, for a particular palpable self that is anchored in a particular body. However much his "I" clowns around, playing self-deprecating games with what Katz calls "performative fluency," however much he can laugh at his own past and present inadequacies and postures, the driving force of the poem is anxiety (which is also the title of one of his most moving poems--see CP 268), a free-floating fear whose ultimate object, death, is never far away, as in "A Step Away from Them," where not even the "beautiful and warm" avenue can dispel the thought that "First / Bunny died, then John Latouche, / then Jackson Pollock," or as in the last two lines of "Music," where the poet's buoyant mood is dispelled by the thought, "But no more fountains and no more rain / And the stores stay open terribly late" (CP 258, 210). O'Hara's most famous poem, let's remember, is the elegy "The Day Lady Died."
For O'Hara, death and petrifaction (as in the Medusa's stare in "In Memory") are omnipresent, threatening at every moment to destroy the fragile self. Evidently, Johns recognized this vulnerability: in In Memory of My Feelings--Frank O'Hara, he writes "A DEAD MAN" in big block letters, only to "cover it with paint. Rub it against canvas. Skull against canvas." John Cage, visiting Johns in Edisto Beach, where the latter had evidently undergone a bout of depression, catches this mood perfectly in Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas. 25 Contemplating Johns's map and flag paintings, Cage remarks, "Stupidly we think of abstract expressionism. But here we are free of struggle, gesture, and personal image. Looking closely helps, though the paint is applied so sensually that there is the danger of falling in love" (YM 83). This subtle distinction between personal gesture and the sensuality of the paint itself refers obliquely to the distinction between the gesture painting (or gesture poetry) of the fifties and the more conceptual art of the sixties (his present in the essay), when the erotic became, so to speak, a source of ideation rather than personal image. Indeed, to come back to the title, unlike O'Hara's memory of his feelings, Johns's "memory" is not of former "feelings" or the specific incidents, real and imaginary, that generated those feelings; the memory, rather, is of his earlier art works: flags, canvases, numbers, letters, targets. It is this particular continuity that gives comfort.
Cage, who declares himself somewhat intimidated by the "enigmatic aura of his [Johns's] personality," understands this perfectly (YM 73). "A Dead Man," he knows, could be used as well as anything else to give life to a given painting: "Take a skull. Cover it with paint. Rub it against canvas." The shape of a skull, as Johns depicts it, is not, after all, all that different from a light bulb. Indeed, the skull-rubbing exercise was soon to be taken quite literally. In May of 1962, Johns made Study for Skin, a series of four drawings made by pressing the artist's lubricated face on paper and then rubbing charcoal on the paper to render the oiled surface visible. The resulting images are strangely indeterminate. On the one hand, we can see them, especially No. 1 ( 10), as images of an eyeless face, flanked by hands spread on a pane of glass, behind which the man to whom they belong is somehow trapped. On the other, they are, in Cage's words, "Structures, not subjects" in their successive transformation of recognizable object into abstract form (YM 75). "He sometimes," says Cage, "introduces signs of humanity to intimate that we, not birds for instance, are part of the dialogue. . . . Finally, with nothing in it to grasp, the work is weather, an atmosphere that is heavy rather than light . . . in oscillation with it we tend toward our ultimate place: zero, gray disinterest" (YM 76). The "scene of my selves," to use O'Hara's phrase, is gradually occluded.
The "zero" drawing process culminates in the lithograph Skin with O'Hara Poem of 1965 ( 11). Here the imprint of hands and face is placed on the semitransparent, brittle drafting paper used by engineers, which, as Riva Castleman tells us,
provided an unusual and anonymous surface for the artist's uninhibited embrace of the [engraving] stone. The poem by O'Hara was added to the composition two years after the imprint was made, and remains the sole example from what was intended to be a portfolio of prints on unusual papers in a variety of shapes and sizes incorporating new works by the poet. 26
The relation of O'Hara's text to the picture in which it is embedded is itself quite strange. Reproduced as typescript above the very graphic and ominously black, extended right hand (the hand imprints have the look of X-rays), the poem "The Clouds Go Soft" is barely visible. 27 If it weren't for the title Skin with O'Hara Poem, one would hardly notice it. Given the title, however, the viewer looks for the text in what is a game of hide of seek. Here is O'Hara's poem:
The clouds go soft
change color and so many kinds
puff up, disperse
sink into the sea
the heavens go out of kilter
an insane remark greets
the monkey on the moon
in a season of wit
it is all demolished
or made fragrant
sputnik is only the word for "travelling companion"
here on earth
at 16 you weigh 144 pounds and at 36
the shirts change, endless procession
but they are all neck 14 sleeve 33
and holes appear and are filled
the same holes anonymous filler
no more conversion, no more conversation
the sand inevitably seeks the eye
and it is the same eye
[CP 474-5]
The poem, dated 11 July 1963, belongs to O'Hara's final years and is as dark as anything he wrote. Even its lines trail off inconclusively, one line never quite anticipating the placement of the following. The poet who had always celebrated change, motion, vitality, and openness, here cannot get beyond his obsessive death thoughts. Like Johns's charcoal "skin" rubbings, the clouds are said to "go soft"--an absurd remark since clouds are soft by definition, constantly change color, and inevitably sink, whether, as here, into the sea or behind mountains, trees, or buildings. The references to the moon launch and Sputnik in lines 5-11 only serve to intensify the poet's own isolation: "Sputnik," after all, means "travelling companion," wryly suggesting, in an echo of Philip Sidney's famous sonnet "With how sad steps, oh moon . . .", that even in outer space there must be more companionship than here on earth. Down here, even as the years tick off inexorably ("the shirts change, endless procession"), everything remains the same ("they are all neck 14 sleeve 33"), the armholes imperceptibly turning into graves. "No more conversion, no more conversation": nothing but the "zero, gray disinterest" Cage discerns with reference to Johns's drawings.
The last two lines of "The Clouds Go Soft" are especially arresting. Here it is not, in the words of the popular song, smoke that "gets in your eye" but sand that "inevitably seeks" it. Smoke is ephemeral whereas sand can cause permanent damage to the eye. And yet O'Hara's reference is also an in-joke, an allusion to the actual sand at Edisto beach. Just a few months earlier, in a letter-poem called "Dear Jap," O'Hara had written, "When I think of you in South Carolina I think of my foot in the sand." The reference is to Johns's Memory Piece (Frank O'Hara) begun in 1961 ( 12), made by placing a rubber cast of O'Hara's foot into the hinged lid of a small pine box, so that, when the box is closed, the cast foot makes an imprint in the sand in the top drawer. 28
Barely legible in the visual field of Johns's Skin with O'Hara Poem, "The Clouds Go Soft," is thus an apt analogue to the composition of body fragments--helpless, extended hands, palms against an invisible surface, flanking a smudged black facial contour, rather like an image of the Crucifixion or perhaps Veronica's Napkin--in the lithograph. But why did poet and painter never complete the originally projected portfolio of collaborations, of which Skin turned out to be the only exemplar? My guess is that the personal anguish expressed in this and related O'Hara poems of 1963 was one that Johns, having undergone a similar personal crisis, had schooled himself, probably with Cage's help, to submit to the discipline of formal structuration, thus depersonalizing the visual field. 29 Skin is a bleak, unsettling picture, but the source of pain is not specified: it might relate to war as readily as to the sorrows of lost love. "I'm interested," as Johns was at pains to tell David Sylvester shortly after exhibiting Skin, "in things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality" (WSI 113).
By 1964, in any case, Johns was spending more time than ever with Cage, Cunningham, and David Tudor. In March, en route to Hawaii and Japan, he traveled with Lois Long and Cage to San Francisco, where Cage performed with Tudor at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. It was at one of their performances that Johns noticed the spot of light on the ceiling--a reflection from the mirror in a woman's compact--that gave him the idea for the reflective light he was to use shortly in the painting Souvenir 2 ( 13)--a painting that incorporates a penny arcade self-portrait placed on cheap souvenir plate. After vacationing with Cage and some others in Hawaii in April, Johns left for Tokyo, where he painted Watchman. A new phase had begun.
In the notebook sketch for the painting, let's recall, Johns distinguishes between a watchman who "falls 'into' the 'trap' of looking" and a spy who "must be ready to 'move' must be aware / Of his entrances & exits." The watchman "leaves / his job & takes away / no information," whereas the spy "must remember / & must remember himself & his remembering." And further: whereas "The spy designs himself to be overlooked," "the watchman 'serves' as a warning." But a warning of what? Perhaps that the poetry of immediate presence of a Frank O'Hara, especially fetching and brilliant as it was in those poems of the late fifties like "Why I Am Not a Painter" or "Khrushchev is coming on the right day!" was no longer sufficient: "The spy stations himself / to observe the / watchman." Indeed, one way to understand such Johns works as In Memory of My Feelings--Frank O'Hara, Skin with O'Hara Poem, and Watchman, is as covert critique of O'Hara's "Personism," with its potential "fall 'into' the 'trap' of looking" and its "tak[ing] away" of "no information." 30 Against this particular posture, this "occasion of my ruses," Johns puts forward a "cool" Conceptualism that takes the mode of the painter's earlier Flags, Targets, Numbers, and Alphabets to its logical conclusion. But "cool" is of course itself a cover: the very absence of "personal" references or images of human life is itself a sign of pathos. And what could be more "emotional" than the sense of disjunction and mismatch (of letters with colors, and so on) displayed in paintings like Watchman?
Does the "information" Johns speaks of relate to McCarthyite surveillance and the Cold War discourse of spying, as Roth thinks? Perhaps these notions are subliminally present. In a larger sense, however, the distinction is one between warm and cool, between the gestural expressivity of the second-generation New York painters and poets of the late 1950s, and the more ideational, philosophical, and distanced art that inevitably came into being (whether consciously or not) in response to the political climate of the sixties. For the autobiographical "imprint" found in such poems as "Joe's Jacket," Johns substitutes the rubber imprint of O'Hara's actual--but in the context, wholly anonymous--foot. Were it not for the title Memory Piece [Frank O'Hara], the viewer of Johns's box construction could not possibly identify this foot's owner. "The spy," remember, "designs himself to be overlooked." Thus, in the ambitious According to What, painted later in 1964, the self- portrait of Souvenir has been painted over and replaced by the work's title, even as the painting itself contains oblique references to all of Johns's earlier work, specifically, the leg and chair, hinged canvas, sign letters, color chart, newspaper, coat hanger and spoon, the primary color abstraction and tonal scale. 31
Accordingly, when Johns becomes the director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1965, he "designs" scenery that involves no painting or drawing on his part at all, but is, on the contrary, a conceptual set based on Duchamp's Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Bachelors, Even). It consists of the seven components of the Glass as Duchamp had designated them in his diagrams: The Bride, Milky Way, Nine Malic Molds, Glider and Water Mill Wheel, Chocolate Grinder, Oculist Witnesses, and Sieves or Parasols. 32 In an interview with James Klosty, Johns explains how, having obtained Duchamp's approval, he painted the images on plastic in a friend's Canal Street loft, and then transcribed them onto seven vinyl boxes of varying shapes and sizes. 33
The resulting dance piece, Walkaround Time , was not entirely successful and is infrequently performed, probably because, as Merce Cunningham recalls, "the seven objects of the Glass . . . limited very much what one could do in the space; it meant that all of your traffic had to be lateral from one wing to the other." 34 But despite its choreographic problems, Walkaround Time is a brilliant conceptual work, testifying to the role intertextuality can play in the process of "stationing [one]self to observe the watchman." In a 1967 page of Johns's sketchbook we read:
Distinguishing one thing from another
(Duchamps "2 like objects")Making distinctions where
{ none has existed
{ none has been said to exist
{ none has been made
How does the (eye) make such distinctions
?
Linguistically, perhaps, the verb is important.
But what about such a case in painting?
[WSI 61]
Making distinctions: Johns may well be alluding to the following lines from O'Hara's "Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul":
and Joe has a cold and is not coming to Kenneth's
although he is coming to lunch with Norman
I suspect he is making a distinction
well, who isn't
[CP 328]
But O'Hara's good humored and self-deprecating gesture of tolerance becomes, in Johns's own writing, a pressing metaphysical question. And such questions, themselves inevitably political in their implications, proved central to the "new art" and "new poetry" of the sixties and to their legacy to the increasingly pervasive Conceptualism of the nineties. 35 As Cage put it:
There are various ways to improve one's chess game. One is to take back a move when it becomes clear that it was a bad one. Another is to accept the consequences, devastating as they are. Johns chooses the latter even when the former is offered. Say he has a disagreement with others; he examines the situation and comes to a moral decision. He then proceeds, if to an impasse, to an impasse. When all else fails (and he has taken the precaution of being prepared in case it does), he makes a work of art devoid of complaint. [YM 74]
A work of art devoid of complaint. "A painting," as Cage interprets Johns, "is not a record of what was said and what the replies were but the thick presence all at once of a naked self-obscuring body of history" (YM 79). The personal now becomes inseparable from the political. "The spy," let's remember, "must be ready to 'move,' must be aware of his entrances & exits." In this way, what was perceived by contemporaries as indifference can now be understood as an oblique but necessary form of intervention. In Johns's words, "Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it" (WSI 54).
Marjorie Perloff's most recent books are Wittgenstein's Ladder and Poetry On and Off the Page . She is completing a book for the Blackwell Manifesto series called Twenty-First Century Modernism. She is Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita in the English Department at Stanford University.
1. John Cage, "Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas," A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 77; hereafter abbreviated YM.
2. The sketchbook notes are reproduced in Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe, compiled by Christel Hollevoet (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997), 26-77, including 21 plates. re 1 reproduces "Book A, p. 55, 1964"; hereafter abbreviated WSI.
3. Francis M. Naumann, Jasper Johns: According to What & Watchman (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 21 January-14 March 1992), 16-7; hereafter abbreviated AWW.
4. Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns (1977; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 49.
5. Gertrude Stein, "A Transatlantic Interview 1946," in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1976), 15.
6. Frank O'Hara, "Jackson Pollock," in Art Chronicles 1954-1966 (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1975), 30.
7. Leo Steinberg, "Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art," in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford, 1972), 51.
8. See Lillian Tone, "Chronology," in Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 195. "Before Johns paints Fool's House," Tone records, "David Hayes introduced him to the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He reads the Philosophical Investigations and borrows the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus from Hayes. He will later read all of Wittgenstein's published writings, as well as a number of books about the philosopher." Cf. Roberta Bernstein, Jasper Johns's Paintings and Sculptures 1954-1974: "The Changing Focus of the Eye" (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1985), 92; see also Rosalind Krauss, "Jasper Johns" Lugano Review 1, no. 2 : 84-113.
9. Moira Roth, "The Aesthetic of Indifference," Artforum 16 (November 1977): 46-53; rpt. in Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (Amsterdam: G & B Arts International, 1998), 33-47; hereafter abbreviated D/I.